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Want to quickly provision your autonomous database? Then look no further than Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless, one of the two deployment choices offered by Oracle Autonomous Database.   Autonomous Database Serverless delegates all operational decisions to Oracle, providing you with a completely autonomous experience.   Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Oracle Database experts, as they discuss how serverless infrastructure eliminates the need to configure any hardware or install any software because Autonomous Database handles provisioning the database, backing it up, patching and upgrading it, and growing or shrinking it for you.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   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, Rajeev Grover, 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 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! We hope you've been enjoying these last few weeks as we've been revisiting our most popular episodes of the year.  Lois: Today's episode is the last one in this series and is a throwback to a conversation on Autonomous Databases on Serverless Infrastructure with three experts in the field: Hannah Nguyen, Sean Stacey, and Kay Malcolm. Hannah is a Staff Cloud Engineer, Sean is the Director of Platform Technology Solutions, and Kay is Vice President of Database Product Management. For this episode, we'll be sharing portions of our conversations with them.  01:14 Nikita: We began by asking Hannah how Oracle Cloud handles the process of provisioning an  Autonomous Database. So, let's jump right in! Hannah: The Oracle Cloud automates the process of provisioning an Autonomous Database, and it automatically provisions for you a highly scalable, highly secure, and a highly available database very simply out of the box. 01:35 Lois: Hannah, what are the components and architecture involved when provisioning an Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud? Hannah: Provisioning the database involves very few steps. But it's important to understand the components that are part of the provisioned environment. When provisioning a database, the number of CPUs in increments of 1 for serverless, storage in increments of 1 terabyte, and backup are automatically provisioned and enabled in the database. In the background, an Oracle 19c pluggable database is being added to the container database that manages all the user's Autonomous Databases. Because this Autonomous Database runs on Exadata systems, Real Application Clusters is also provisioned in the background to support the on-demand CPU scalability of the service. This is transparent to the user and administrator of the service. But be aware it is there. 02:28 Nikita: Ok…So, what sort of flexibility does the Autonomous Database provide when it comes to managing resource usage and costs, you know… especially in terms of starting, stopping, and scaling instances? Hannah: The Autonomous Database allows you to start your instance very rapidly on demand. It also allows you to stop your instance on demand as well to conserve resources and to pause billing. Do be aware that when you do pause billing, you will not be charged for any CPU cycles because your instance will be stopped. However, you'll still be incurring charges for your monthly billing for your storage. In addition to allowing you to start and stop your instance on demand, it's also possible to scale your database instance on demand as well. All of this can be done very easily using the Database Cloud Console. 03:15 Lois: What about scaling in the Autonomous Database? Hannah: So you can scale up your OCPUs without touching your storage and scale it back down, and you can do the same with your storage. In addition to that, you can also set up autoscaling. So the database, whenever it detects the need, will automatically scale up to three times the base level number of OCPUs that you have allocated or provisioned for the Autonomous Database. 03:38 Nikita: Is autoscaling available for all tiers?  Hannah: Autoscaling is not available for an always free database, but it is enabled by default for other tiered environments. Changing the setting does not require downtime. So this can also be set dynamically. One of the advantages of autoscaling is cost because you're billed based on the average number of OCPUs consumed during an hour. 04:01 Lois: Thanks, Hannah! Now, let's bring Sean into the conversation. Hey Sean, I want to talk about moving an autonomous database resource. When or why would I need to move an autonomous database resource from one compartment to another? Sean: There may be a business requirement where you need to move an autonomous database resource, serverless resource, from one compartment to another. Perhaps, there's a different subnet that you would like to move that autonomous database to, or perhaps there's some business applications that are within or accessible or available in that other compartment that you wish to move your autonomous database to take advantage of. 04:36 Nikita: And how simple is this process of moving an autonomous database from one compartment to another? What happens to the backups during this transition? Sean: The way you can do this is simply to take an autonomous database and move it from compartment A to compartment B. And when you do so, the backups, or the automatic backups that are associated with that autonomous database, will be moved with that autonomous database as well. 05:00 Lois: Is there anything that I need to keep in mind when I'm moving an autonomous database between compartments?  Sean: A couple of things to be aware of when doing this is, first of all, you must have the appropriate privileges in that compartment in order to move that autonomous database both from the source compartment to the target compartment. In addition to that, once the autonomous database is moved to this new compartment, any policies or anything that's defined in that compartment to govern the authorization and privileges of that said user in that compartment will be applied immediately to that new autonomous database that has been moved into that new compartment. 05:38 Nikita: Sean, I want to ask you about cloning in Autonomous Database. What are the different types of clones that can be created?  Sean: It's possible to create a new Autonomous Database as a clone of an existing Autonomous Database. This can be done as a full copy of that existing Autonomous Database, or it can be done as a metadata copy, where the objects and tables are cloned, but they are empty. So there's no rows in the tables. And this clone can be taken from a live running Autonomous Database or even from a backup. So you can take a backup and clone that to a completely new database. 06:13 Lois: But why would you clone in the first place? What are the benefits of this?  Sean: When cloning or when creating this clone, it can be created in a completely new compartment from where the source Autonomous Database was originally located. So it's a nice way of moving one database to another compartment to allow developers or another community of users to have access to that environment. 06:36 Nikita: I know that along with having a full clone, you can also have a refreshable clone. Can you tell us more about that? Who is responsible for this? Sean: It's possible to create a refreshable clone from an Autonomous Database. And this is one that would be synced with that source database up to so many days. The task of keeping that refreshable clone in sync with that source database rests upon the shoulders of the administrator. The administrator is the person who is responsible for performing that sync operation. Now, actually performing the operation is very simple, it's point and click. And it's an automated process from the database console. And also be aware that refreshable clones can trail the source database or source Autonomous Database up to seven days. After that period of time, the refreshable clone, if it has not been refreshed or kept in sync with that source database, it will become a standalone, read-only copy of that original source database. 07:38 Nikita: Ok Sean, so if you had to give us the key takeaways on cloning an Autonomous Database, what would they be?  Sean: It's very easy and a lot of flexibility when it comes to cloning an Autonomous Database. We have different models that you can take from a live running database instance with zero impact on your workload or from a backup. It can be a full copy, or it can be a metadata copy, as well as a refreshable, read-only clone of a source database. 08:12 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 of which is available free to subscribers. So, get going! Pick a course of your choice, get certified, join the Oracle University Learning Community, and network with your peers. If you're already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to begin your journey. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  08:50 Nikita: Welcome back! Thank you, Sean, and hi Kay! I want to ask you about events and notifications in Autonomous Database. Where do they really come in handy?  Kay: Events can be used for a variety of notifications, including admin password expiration, ADB services going down, and wallet expiration warnings. There's this service, and it's called the notifications service. It's part of OCI. And this service provides you with the ability to broadcast messages to distributed components using a publish and subscribe model. These notifications can be used to notify you when event rules or alarms are triggered or simply to directly publish a message. In addition to this, there's also something that's called a topic. This is a communication channel for sending messages to subscribers in the topic. You can manage these topics and their subscriptions really easy. It's not hard to do at all. 09:52 Lois: Kay, I want to ask you about backing up Autonomous Databases. How does Autonomous Database handle backups? Kay: Autonomous Database automatically backs up your database for you. The retention period for backups is 60 days. You can restore and recover your database to any point in time during this retention period. You can initiate recovery for your Autonomous Database by using the cloud console or an API call. Autonomous Database automatically restores and recovers your database to the point in time that you specify. In addition to a point in time recovery, we can also perform a restore from a specific backup set.  10:37 Lois: Kay, you spoke about automatic backups, but what about manual backups?  Kay: You can do manual backups using the cloud console, for example, if you want to take a backup say before a major change to make restoring and recovery faster. These manual backups are put in your cloud object storage bucket. 10:58 Nikita: Are there any special instructions that we need to follow when configuring a manual backup? Kay: The manual backup configuration tasks are a one-time operation. Once this is configured, you can go ahead, trigger your manual backup any time you wish after that. When creating the object storage bucket for the manual backups, it is really important-- so I don't want you to forget-- that the name format for the bucket and the object storage follows this naming convention. It should be backup underscore database name. And it's not the display name here when I say database name. In addition to that, the object name has to be all lowercase. So three rules. Backup underscore database name, and the specific database name is not the display name. It has to be in lowercase. Once you've created your object storage bucket to meet these rules, you then go ahead and set a database property. Default_backup_bucket. This points to the object storage URL and it's using the Swift protocol. Once you've got your object storage bucket mapped and you've created your mapping to the object storage location, you then need to go ahead and create a database credential inside your database. You may have already had this in place for other purposes, like maybe you were loading data, you were using Data Pump, et cetera. If you don't, you would need to create this specifically for your manual backups. Once you've done so, you can then go ahead and set your property to that default credential that you created. So once you follow these steps as I pointed out, you only have to do it one time. Once it's configured, you can go ahead and use it from now on for your manual backups. 13:00 Lois: Kay, the last topic I want to talk about before we let you go is Autonomous Data Guard. Can you tell us about it? Kay: Autonomous Data Guard monitors the primary database, in other words, the database that you're using right now.  13:14 Lois: So, if ADB goes down… Kay: Then the standby instance will automatically become the primary instance. There's no manual intervention required. So failover from the primary database to that standby database I mentioned, it's completely seamless and it doesn't require any additional wallets to be downloaded or any new URLs to access APEX or Oracle Machine Learning. Even Oracle REST Data Services. All the URLs and all the wallets, everything that you need to authenticate, to connect to your database, they all remain the same for you if you have to failover to your standby database. 13:58 Lois: And what happens after a failover occurs? Kay: After performing a failover, a new standby for your primary will automatically be provisioned. So in other words, in performing a failover your standby does become your new primary. Any new standby is made for that primary. I know, it's kind of interesting. So currently, the standby database is created in the same region as the primary database. For better resilience, if your database is provisioned, it would be available on AD1 or Availability Domain 1. My secondary, or my standby, would be provisioned on a different availability domain. 14:49 Nikita: But there's also the possibility of manual failover, right? What are the differences between automatic and manual failover scenarios? When would you recommend using each? Kay: So in the case of the automatic failover scenario following a disastrous situation, if the primary ADB becomes completely unavailable, the switchover button will turn to a failover button. Because remember, this is a disaster. Automatic failover is automatically triggered. There's no user action required. So if you're asleep and something happens, you're protected. There's no user action required, but automatic failover is allowed to succeed only when no data loss will occur. For manual failover scenarios in the rare case when an automatic failover is unsuccessful, the switchover button will become a failover button and the user can trigger a manual failover should they wish to do so. The system automatically recovers as much data as possible, minimizing any potential data loss. But you can see anywhere from a few seconds or minutes of data loss. Now, you should only perform a manual failover in a true disaster scenario, expecting the fact that a few minutes of potential data loss could occur, to ensure that your database is back online as soon as possible.  16:23 Lois: We hope you've enjoyed revisiting some of our most popular episodes over these past few weeks. We always appreciate your feedback and suggestions so remember to take that quick survey we've put out. You'll find it in the show notes for today's episode. Thanks a lot for your support. We're taking a break for the next two weeks and will be back with a brand-new season of the Oracle University Podcast in January. Happy holidays, everyone! Nikita: Happy holidays! Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 16:56 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.

On this episode, my guest is Sean P. Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Much of his research has focused on the relationship between social media and tourism, and how colonial histories shape today's ideologies and visual cultures of travel. The inequalities that result from many forms of tourism development, he argues, are intimately linked with how tourists create content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and the ways tourists frame themselves in landscapes and alongside local residents often replay colonial hierarchies.Show Notes: Why Study Instagram?The Pre-tour Narrative (Edward Bruner, Raul Salazar)The Habitus of Tourism (or How We Got Here)The Promontory Witness (or that photo)The Logic of InfluenceEmptying the Landscape (John Urry)The Techno-Generational DivideMedia EcologyOther Horizons in OmanHomework:Sean P. Smith - Tilburg UniversitySean P. Smith: Twitter / X | Instagram | Google Scholar (Articles)Transcript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Sean, to the pod. Thank you so much for being willing to join us to speak about your work. Sean: Thanks very much for having me. Chris: My pleasure. I'm curious, Sean where you're speaking from today and, and how the world is, how the world might be housing you there. Sean: Well, it's very rainy and dark. I'm in the Southern Netherlands, an area called North Brebant, where I just moved less than a month ago.So, in many places of moving around, if so, getting used to this one. Chris: Sean, I found out about your work from one of the pod's listeners who sent in a link to one of your academic articles entitled, Instagram Abroad, Performance, Consumption, and Colonial Narrative in Tourism. Now, I've been ruminating on the effect that social media has on tourism, spectacle, surveillance, and cultures of disposability for a long time now.So I'm really excited to speak with you today. And [00:01:00] likewise parts of the podcast are shared via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, so there's always this sense of kind of feeding the machine. unaware and perhaps more aware each time. And so first then, I'm curious why focus on Instagram in the context of critical tourism studies? What makes it different from say Facebook or Twitter?Sean: Yeah, that's a really good question Chris. I think with Instagram, in many contexts around the world, certainly not universally, but it's the social media platform that is most readily identified with not just tourism, but the way that people represent themselves engaging in tourism. It's very image driven.Of course, people do write captions, they do engage in other forms of storytelling, but nowadays it's mostly pictures and especially reels, arguably in the last few years. And for a long time, this [00:02:00] has been could almost say the dream work of tourism going back 200, maybe longer years. So even though today, I think you can find forms of tourism well represented TikTok to varying degrees on Facebook.Instagram, at least in many of the places where I've conducted research, is the place that one goes to both learn about places to travel and also to show how oneself travels.Chris: And I'm kind of imagining that we're more or less in the same age range, but I'm curious if on your travels, you mentioned just briefly that you had also spent time backpacking as a younger person and I'm curious if Instagram existed at the time and also if this dream work was evident to you in your travels.Sean: It was. I think I was relatively young when I got my first [00:03:00] smartphone, but certainly not as young as people nowadays. I must have been maybe 22 or 23. So I did have some years of traveling before I think Instagram really reshaped the way that tourism is done, not just for people that actually use this app, but regardless of whether or not anyone's ever downloaded it on their phone, I think Instagram has had a significant impact on the way that tourism is done. So when I first got a smartphone, I was in a period of my life where I was able to travel quite frequently and that was something that I was really pursuing at the time. And Instagram was a way that I was able to engage in a long running interest in photography, but also kind of a diary of where I had been, but certainly one that was legible and sort of visible to other people.And it was through that, you could say "performance" of travel that began to think a bit more critically about this app and other social media [00:04:00] platforms as well. And the way that it was reshaping tourism destinations. Chris: Mm. Mm. Yeah, you mention in your work this notion of the pre tour narrative.And I'm wondering if we could unpack that a little bit for our listeners and what part Instagram plays in this pre tour narrative. Sean: Yeah, I'm very happy to point that out, because I think this is, this is an important way to think about tourism, and that particular phrase I'm drawing on the work of Edward Bruner, who was an American anthropologist.And that's also been picked up in other realms to be identified as what other people have called tourism imaginaries, such as in the work of Raúl Salazar. So what this concept of the pre-tour narrative describes is that before people travel to a particular destination, they are exposed to [00:05:00] various forms of representation.And oftentimes this is very image based or narrative based. So we would see this maybe thinking back in the era before social media, images encountered in magazines and films, perhaps novels, other forms of storytelling, such as just talking with people who have been to places that one wants to travel.However, in social media, as it's become more integral to the way that people conduct their everyday lives, let alone traveling. It's become the dominant engine for the way that the pre tour narrative is formed. Many people who use Instagram as a space to learn about places to travel, they will encounter images of these of these places on this app or and not just sort of the way that it's portrayed, but what people do in these spaces, the people that live [00:06:00] in the places they're going to visit. So, this process of the formation of a pre tour narrative has really always been a part of tourism. But I think it perhaps it's if not accelerated, then certainly taken a bit of a different form with the advent of social media.Chris: So on some level, it's not just the question of what you're going to go see, but also how you're going to see it, how you're going to stand in front of that tower or restaurant and see, experience, what's there. Sean: Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Chris: And I know it's a little early in the interview, but I'd like to jump into the heart of the matter and your critiques, if we can. You know, you wrote this incredible article Landscapes for Likes, capitalizing on travel with Instagram. And, in that article, you wrote that, deep breath, "Instagram's networked architecture and affordances produce three [00:07:00] outcomes that circulate and magnify utterances about travel to a degree impossible in pre-networked media.One, a mediated travel habitus hegemonically informs prevailing aesthetic norms. Two, the scalability of embodied performances entrench the motif's narrative underpinnings. And three, the monetizable market of Instagram encourages neoliberal notions of the branded self." Now that's a beautiful mouthful. And so I'm wondering, if you might be willing and able to flesh out these three outcomes for our listeners. Sean: No, that's brilliant. And it's nice to talk about these things, perhaps when they're written that can be quite a bit denser.So maybe we can start with the first idea, this mediated travel habitus. And with the word habitus, I'm trying on the work of [00:08:00] the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorizes he's talking about class and culture and ways that people display their belonging within a particular class.And the reason that I'm looking to Bordeaux here is tourism and travel, really, it's important to look at this as a practice that has been connected to what Bordeaux might call the pursuit of distinction, to the search for an acquisition of cultural goods. You know, we might think of cultural goods as being a painting or a taste and a particular kind of music, clothes, certain way of speaking even. And when one amasses certain, certain cultural goods, and they're recognized as being part of the upper classes, being marks of somebody who is [00:09:00] sophisticated, somebody who is typically from a fairly privileged financial background, these cultural goods are desirable.So, this background I think is important because tourism from its modern beginnings in the 18th century has been obtaining these experiences and often physical artifacts that can be a way of claiming a certain social status. So, maybe you've discussed this in other podcasts already, but, when the Grand Tour began in the 1600s, but really took off in the 1700s there was this process in which the aristocratic men, young men, were sent on a tour around Europe, and they would go to capitals like Paris, later Vienna, and then especially places like Rome, and, where they could encounter the remnants of the Roman Empire and classical learning. [00:10:00] And this was meant to do a few things in the first sense. It was meant to introduce them other parts of the world, to certain historical understandings. They could refine their Latin. They could get better at French and then they could go home and be recognized as a sophisticated member of the aristocracy. And this practice really became quite popular up until about the turn of the 19th century, when it stopped briefly because of wars on the European continent, and then after the Napoleonic Wars ended, it basically exploded. So when we think about over tourism now in 2023, this was, you know, 1815, 1820s, and this was a period where all of a sudden there were more tourists than ever before.And what that meant is this practice, which had only been done [00:11:00] by the wealthiest classes, was now something that the middle classes could engage in and that produced a kind of anxiety, where how was one able to become a distinguished or sophisticated traveller. How was one able to obtain the cultural goods provided by travel if everyone was doing it?So, the habitus of tourism, the kind of implicitly learned practices and sensibilities that developed during the Grand Tour experienced this period of challenge where people had to look for a way to find distinction by other means. And I think this beginning led to this friction where now you see people who are trying to go places that no other tourists go, trying to take pictures that no other tourists have taken, trying to be the only person in a picture of a [00:12:00] famous place. So this way of understanding how to be a tourist has become enshrined in the kinds of images that we see in a space like, like Instagram to the extent where I think these images are circulating the ideologies of tourism. The scalability refers to, in social media studies, the way in which a single image can achieve a degree of circulation that is not really possible in pre-networked media. So, by networked media, we can think of platforms like Instagram. We can think of Twitter, anything where the possibility of likes and retweets or reposts achieves a degree of visibility what we might call going viral.So what I was writing about in that article was this particular composition called the "promontory witness" where you have typically one [00:13:00] person who's standing on a promontory or we can say the edge of a cliff the top of a building, in front of a waterfall and they're looking really, really small as compared to the vast scale of nature.And people see these images and they understand through the mediation, the widespread circulation of these images, that this means something important about travel. This is what I mean by the mediated habitus of travel, that taking an image like this and being a person in a promontory witness image has a particular value. It is a way of claiming distinction, again, in Rodrigo's terms. And by taking a promontory witness image, one is able to circulate that image on Instagram in a very different way than before the social media platform existed. So, you know, we think about images circulated in tourism before Instagram.It would either be, say, in a family photo album. That people used to have projectors. [00:14:00] People used to maybe send holiday pictures to family and friends, basically whoever they could, you know, show it to, but this is a really, really small circulation, unless somebody was able to get an image in a magazine or some sort of formal publication. But what really shifts with scalable social media is that somebody can take an image and there really is the potential to go viral.I think in Instagram, the potential to have an image seen by a really significant number of people is less than on a platform like Tik Tok. But there remains the possibility if I post a promontory witness image and I put a geo tag in a place that is particularly trendy at this, at this moment and I put the right hashtags that thousands of people can witness this image and because of that possibility, I think there's a degree of enlistment, a degree of interest in [00:15:00] participating in this trend because taking a promontory witness picture is going to have much more possibility of going viral of leveraging these architectures, these scalable architectures.Much more so than if it just take, if I take another image that isn't so popular on a platform like Instagram. Chris: Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot in there I'm going to come back to in just a little bit. But I wanted to just finish off this one last part because you kind of, you know, mentioned it a little bit.The monetizable market of Instagram that encourages neoliberal notions of the brand itself. And, you know, I pulled this, this other sentence from one of your articles where you write that "as a banal mediator of travel and tourism, Instagram can encourage tourists to imagine themselves as a capital generating brand." Sean: It's really a comment on the attention economy structure of social media platforms, [00:16:00] where I want people to see my pictures and I want to get likes.And I say that very much as being somebody who continues to study social media and tourism from a critical angle. When I post something I'm always aware of how it's going to be received. Some part of me, even when I'm very aware of the issues with thinking this way potentially is I always want it to gain more visibility.If I post something and it has less likes than something I posted previously, this will likely incur some degree of thinking, what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? You know, maybe I'm just produced such interesting content. And what I think is really taking place there is that we're constantly thinking about ways to achieve visibility in a way that is not dissimilar to the kind of negotiation that celebrities and [00:17:00] other public figures have to go through when managing their, what we might in today's terms, call their brand, where because there is always this metric of how popular one is or how visible one is in the form of likes or in the form of reposts or retweets or what have you it's means that we develop a way of always orienting towards this possible public. We're always thinking about the people that are going to see whatever kind of thing we say online, and we, I think much of the time, are hoping that it's going to be received.If not, you know, people are going to like it, if it is going to maybe change the way that people think about something, if it's going to influence them in some way. And Instagram, of course, is like other social media platforms, is monetizable in the sense that when one gets a lot of followers, you know, if I continually create fantastic travel content and I get tens of thousands or more followers, then [00:18:00] that means that I am able to start making money from it. I'm going to be paid by different companies to come and stay at a resort or go on some sort of guided tour and take an image or make a reel of this experience and post it on Instagram, talk about how great it was, and then tag the company.And that's a way of them bringing in business. This is how advertising works. So, people become advertisers. But even before that influencer level, I think those of us who are not influencers, and I am certainly not, there's a degree to which we are participating in this logic because even if we don't have any designs of becoming influencers, we still want our posts to be liked and this ultimately influences not just posts we make, but the kind of traveling we do and the kind of relationship we have with the places to which we travel.Hmm. Chris: Well [00:19:00] contentious at the very least. But thank you for that, Sean, for being able to flesh that out for us. And I'd like to return back to this notion of the promontory witness, and you know, because even before Instagram I remember seeing in my backpacking years, these same photos, right?The photo of the person, of their back to the camera facing the open horizon, you know, whether it be a cliff face or a desert or whatever it is, and spreading their hands or arms and, just this kind of emanating freedom, I guess.But you also mentioned that this kind of perspective, if you want to call it that, manufactures emptiness because there's nobody else in the photo, and this is so much a part of the kind of sometimes they're Instagram reels, or sometimes they're photos of people, what it looks like when people are at tourist destinations, actually taking the [00:20:00] photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or the Great Wall, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or whatever, and there's actually hundreds.And thousands of people taking the same photo or trying to, and everyone wants to have that photo without anyone else in it. And so, just a little preamble to the question again, in Landscapes for Likes, you write that "this manufacturing of emptiness privileges tourists as the sole consumers of a landscape, and with its residents hidden from view, a landscape is voided of its human and temporal context. Thus abstracted, place is relevant as little but a visual commodity." And then just another quote that I think brings a little something else to the picture is that "the promontory witness motif scrubs the landscape of the tourist destination of any sign of human habitation, but that of the tourist, singularly pictured in a position of mastery that confers [00:21:00] possession over the destination." And so there seems to be a kind of shared understanding in critical tourism studies that modern and especially social media based travel photography emphasizes empty spaces, of course, minus the Instagram user, the person photographing question. And so I'm curious, why is identifying the emptying of the landscape so important for our understanding?What does it do to us as photo viewers? Sean: Yeah, that's an excellent question and I think I'm very, I'm very interested in this composition, which the lone tourist and the landscape, which, mean, other people before me have pointed to, and at least John Urry.And I think there are two things happening here. For one, it's the kind of picture that's due to the mediation of what we can think of as a travel habitus, due to the way that [00:22:00] people have learned about how to do tourism and to represent themselves doing tourism and the most sophisticated way or in the way that is the most likely to gain them social distinction. They take these images because they've seen these images before and they're attractive images as well. Maybe they're attractive because we have, through seeing so many pictures like them, we've been taught or sort of subconsciously imbibed the aesthetics as being something that we value and are attracted to.One degree of what's of what's taking place. And to another extent, when it comes to this notion of possessing something of being the only person that that goes there, this kind of image of the tourist being the only person in a landscape or in front of some sort of cultural monument is , a way of [00:23:00] claiming a symbolic status, which links back to this ideology of getting off the beaten track. So, I imagine if you're experience backpacking and my own there's a real interest in getting off the beaten path, of going to places that aren't touristy, of being a traveler and not a tourist. And part of the way that the success in getting off the beaten track is signified is being the only person in a photograph.You know, we as backpackers or tourists don't want to be associated with other tourists. And there's very little better way to represent not being another tourist than being the only person in a particular image.Chris: Yeah, it [00:24:00] makes you wonder. And putting together the research for this episode, I came to this, this kind of possibility, question, consternation, And it arose in this way. And so the, the next question, which kind of relates to the last one is, do you think there might be, or is a connection here between the emptying of the photo of humans or locals and the emptying of places of humans and locals, and that is in the context of the gentrification of local people and culture in tourist destinations. Sean: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a very good point. I think especially because gentrification is aesthetically produced through a kind of emptiness or a kind of minimalism. And this gentrified neighborhood is not something that is crowded. It is not some place that there are a lot of wayward signs, [00:25:00] wayward, quote unquote.It is a space which is typically designed according to what might be understood as a globalized regime of clean lines and interesting fonts and a lot of white space. So thinking about the way that that works and everything from upmarket coffee shops to designing neighborhoods that are meant to attract capital on upper middle class consumers and residents.I think that does link quite persuasively with this desire to be the only person within this landscape. I mean, what ultimately is taking place in both processes is that, no matter where somebody is going and taking a promontory witness picture, there are people who live there. There's people who've always lived there and been a part, in many ways, of the land that is being made into a landscape.And by not including [00:26:00] them, within these pictures or in processes of gentrification, actually through state-sanctioned programs or other forms of state-sanctioned investment, local residents are being pushed out to make way for different people, the tourist in this case. There is a process of erasure and, and often what can be conceived as really a very colonial process of taking over, taking over a space and privileging the owners of capital, who in this case, typically are tourists.And of course, it's a little bit different when you're taking a picture versus when you're taking a picture in a place that is not considered part of the Global North. But tourists typically have a lot more privilege and financial resources than local residents.And when they're not in these images, but the places in which they are are included, then at least when we're seeing pictures of it, how [00:27:00] do we imagine who, who controls the space? How do we imagine who has a right to this space? It would be the person in the photograph, the tourist, rather than the people who actually live, work, and, and shape these landscapes.Okay. Chris: Since Instagram tends to be the go to medium for these images and for images in general, as far as social media is concerned, do you think that Instagram then is a tool and driver of gentrification? Could we say that with a sense of coherence? Sean: I think it's as much a tool as, as many other tools and it is very easily leveraged to that end by actors who are seeking to mobilize processes of gentrification. And then I think this is pretty well documented for instance, in Yoo Jung oh's article Instagaze, Aesthetic Representation and Contested Transformation of Woljeong, South Korea.Well, she was [00:28:00] writing about Jeju Island in South Korea, and how once tourists started to take particular forms of images often of being one person in a beach, then different interests were able to move in and realize the value of this image and find ways to capitalize on all of the tourists that wanted to come and take that same image. So what that led to was the beach front where, this is largely a fishing community and other sort of small scale, more artisanal economies, was remade into cafes and restaurants and guest houses in a process that.I think it can be widely recognized in tourism development around the world. But what the author, Yu Jung Oh, is saying, is showing there, is that this was largely motivated by the ability to take this image, that [00:29:00] a tourist could go and purchase a coffee or something, and they would be able to take that image for their Instagram. So there's a really clear linkage there and I think that linkage can be made in many other places as well. But I think in that sense, Instagram and social media is, is can be leveraged for gentrification as, as many other tools can be and are being.Chris: Thank you, Sean. And so, know, for the rest of our time together, I'd like to kind of lean on you a little bit for your personal opinion. I know that sometimes working in and living in academic worlds that's kind of something to be left the doorstep before you walk in. But you know, you mentioned this notion of networked media and pre networked media and kind of social media falling into this wider term of networked media and since these mediums have only come to exist, in terms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, [00:30:00] we're talking 15 years at the most, and then the extension or prototypes of those existing in the previous 10. So about 25 years, maybe. And I'm curious in this regard you know, I imagine that you're about my age, maybe a little bit younger so I'm curious if you have a lived memory of how things were before social media and perhaps even before the internet, what do you think we might be losing by virtue of not being able to remember the world without social media Sean: yeah, great question. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, very good question. Very, of course, fraught. So I guess for context, I was born in 1988. And. So I, got a cell phone at 16, and again, I got a smartphone and Instagram and WhatsApp. So I'm really in two minds about this. And in the first sense, I think it's important to be aware of [00:31:00] how with any new technology there's a great deal of anxiety and resistance and what might be called panic. And this isn't just social media or it's not just television, but we can go all the way back to radio, to novels.People were worried about that, to the written word back in the ancient Greek era. People were concerned that when we start writing things down, this is going to make it very difficult to remember things, and we're going to be less successful orators and our reasoning will be diluted because we start writing things down.So there's always this kind of fear of new technology, and part of me wants to recognize that this is just another one of those periods in which some sort of transformative technology comes along and many of [00:32:00] the generation who can remember what it was like beforehand is going to feel varying degrees of nostalgia for that period.That said, it's also difficult to not, at the same time, say that something really significant has, has, has happened, to not feel, I mean, honestly, I do certainly feel nostalgia for periods before social media. Some of the things which I think have been changed is the interest in finding ways to represent oneself, traveling. And this isn't to say that whenever one goes somewhere, one is always sort of seeing it as if from the viewfinder or, well, it wouldn't really be a viewfinder of a camera so much as, you know, one's phone screen.But that leads to. In being very interested in taking images that would be successful within the attention economies of a platform like Instagram, it can be difficult to [00:33:00] not see the world as if from the perspective of what would make a good picture for Instagram. There's a lot of different people who've come up with critiques of this process.I mean, if you think about it in terms of spectacle, you know, like Guy DuBord's idea that we're no longer, and he was writing in the 60s, you know, that we are seeing relationships, not between people, but between people and images. And so some sort of fundamental human connection is being lost because all we're doing is just relating to images and using images to relate to other people.I'm not so sure about universalizing that idea, but the ubiquity of social media and the Challenges to not somehow be on one of these platforms, in some even practical way does mean, I think, that there are significant influences in tourism as much as anything. Chris: Yeah, my my phone died the other day, abruptly. [00:34:00] And you know, I still have this computer that thankfully allows me to have this interview with you. And I can still access Facebook and Twitter, but for whatever reason, I can't access Instagram. And you know, it's been a few days and I'm really loving it.And then this morning I realized that I had planned to upload a post for the podcast. And then I was just like, okay, well, my best recourse of action is to just stay calm and wait, right? Yeah, and it's a big question, and I think it's something that, I wonder if young people, say people born, you know, 2000 or after would be able to answer with, with any, without having lived in a time without social media, for example. And so this kind of like brings us a little bit towards the towards theme of media ecology, which, you know, we talked about just very briefly before we started our interview here and I had taken Andrew McLuhan's Understanding Media [00:35:00] Intensive last year.He was also on the pod in the, in season three and just generally speaking for our listeners media ecology, within media ecology, the focus is on the medium and not just the message. It's a way of taking to task the context of our technology and not just the content.And so this manufacturing of emptiness of people and places as brands and I'm curious, isn't this to a large extent, also contingent on our tools, on the limits and architecture of the camera, for example? You know, do we stop with Instagram or do we look at all social media and later all tools? Because these media exist within each other, right?Instagram is a medium within the internet, I suppose, and then the internet is a medium within the phone. Maybe you could make that argument. It's not to say, if we didn't have these things, if we didn't have Instagram, if we didn't have [00:36:00] social media, would the promontory witness just disappear? I don't think it's as easy as that. But Would it be as intensely magnified in our time? Sean: So yes, I think the question of magnification is really what sits at the heart of social media because if we're looking at the medium of Instagram, then we have to think about photography and which was invented in the 1840s.And then if we think about photography, we have to think about painting the way that landscape has been represented in many different cultures, both in painting in the Western, Chinese and many other traditions, but then also in poetry and literature. So with all of these things, there's a precedent.And I think if you look at something like the Promontory Witness, this composition and this the visual formation of having one person immersed within a landscape or standing at some edge of a cliff, that's been around for [00:37:00] 200 years at least. You can see some in the later 1700s that look like this, but then the desire to be the only person in a particular place to have gotten off of the beaten track and be the distinguished traveler, that's also been around for, for a very long time. So that's why I think I'm hesitant to sort of pin the blame on Instagram.And I think my thinking around this has taken a bit of it, not exactly a turn, but it's changed a bit. So I think there's a real tendency to look at platforms like Instagram as only being spaces in which processes of gentrification can gain momentum, or only be spaces where one is almost disciplined into being a neoliberal subject who, is working sort of subconsciously thinking about how to brand oneself all the time, specifically in places of tourism, you know, that it's a way that people [00:38:00] only think about the pictures. They only want to go take a picture in these places. They don't actually want to have any experiences in this place or relationships with the people there. And I think that really exists. That is absolutely one dimension of what takes place with social media platforms. But as many people I've spoken to say, social media is a double edged sword. And where that's really been driven home to me has been where I've been conducting research for the past almost two years now. Sometimes they're in person, other times digitally, in Oman, a country in the Arabian peninsula where I was interested initially because it was becoming more popular as an international tourism destination. So, I went there after the pandemic expecting to meet all these people who were experiencing the problematics of international tourism as we know well, I think from your podcast among other, among other spaces.And there's some of that, absolutely. But what I also found was that, in the past few [00:39:00] years, people who are living in Oman, and this is both Omanis, people who have citizenship and then also residents, so there's about 40 percent of the country is made up of people who don't have citizenship in Oman, like many other Gulf countries.And in the past few years, I mean, we're talking five years, maximum ten years, there's been this surge of interest in nature, or we can say is the non human or even the more than human environment and what's can be understood as domestic nature tourism, I think, like many places around the world, domestic nature tourism in Oman became was very popularized during the pandemic when people could not travel abroad. But what this meant is that people saw these images on Instagram and Instagram is really most popular app in Oman, next to WhatsApp, and that introduced them to parts of the country that they'd never [00:40:00] interacted with before.And Oman is this incredibly various and fascinating environment where there's mountains that are, you know, over 3, 000 meters higher, what is that 10, 000 feet you know, all of this coastline and with coral reefs and these waddies or slot canyons. And people began to engage with the environments in a very different way to go on hiking trips, to go on canyoning trips and social media was this massive part of that. You know, this is where people learned about this possibility, this is where people met people to introduce them, to take them safely into these spaces. They'd never been on a hike before. You know, Instagram is where they're going to meet somebody to go out into nature with.And it's not to say that this doesn't have problems associated with it, and everything I suppose related with tourism does, but I think it also represents a case where Instagram, in this sense, was a way that people are actively connecting to nature, and in a place [00:41:00] where, you know, Instagram existed and was widely used before nature tourism was a thing.And I think this kind of flips the narrative a bit where in Western Europe, where I'm sitting right now, for instance, there's been this long time practice of nature tourism, you know, going back to, again, the 1900s. You know, people started climbing Alps in the 1850s and so forth. And then Instagram comes along and everybody's saying, oh, people just want to climb the mountain to take a picture. you know, they don't actually care about nature. Well, in Oman, people weren't really, not that many people were climbing mountains, before the ability to take a picture existed. So, there's a bit of a different trajectory in which people began to relate to a particular space and to the kinds of experiences that one can have engaging in nature tourism.So in that sense to go back to your to your question about what do we essentially do with this platform? [00:42:00] And how do we address the problematics? I don't think that I mean, I think that Instagram will not be the most popular platform forever, certainly, but social media, or this kind of connected media, barring some kind of unforeseen complication. I mean, looking at you, AI. But this sort of communication is here to stay probably. So, can we find ways in which this space is can be generative of community could be generative of care and ethical forms of travel? What might that look like? And what kind of imagery might be associated with it?Chris: I'm curious in that regard, Oman to me is someone who's never been and probably, you know extremely ignorant to any of the nation's culture or history. I imagine modernity to be something of a recent arrival in that place, relatively speaking, correct me if I'm wrong, of course. And I guess what I'm curious about in the context of your research and most [00:43:00] recent research is if you've seen the conflicts that might arise in terms of traditional hospitality? What it means to be in a place, as opposed to a landscape, what it means to be a host, as opposed to, I guess a landlord, in the Airbnb sense of the word and perhaps also what it means to be a traveler as opposed to a tourist within the context of these new economic dynamics in Oman and if Instagram has anything to do with that? Sean: No, that's, that's a wonderful question. It's one I really appreciate as I continue to work there and spend time with people who've been incredibly generous showing me around and introducing me to what their life is like as people who participate in tourism. I mean, the first thing I would say is the Oman, the Arabian peninsula and really Arabic speaking cultures generally is hospitality is one of the most fundamentally [00:44:00] important things in social relationships. In what it means to be a part of this culture, one is hospitable to guests, to friends, to family members. It's almost difficult to understate how integral this is. I mean, it is, in many cultures, hospitality is big, but it's very big in this space.And so I think it's a particularly well suited question to, you know, how is tourism and how is social media impacting this code of conduct and, you know this really wonderful practice that I think, you know, the rest of the world can stand to learn a lot from.So, to your question about sort of where my mind sits in this span of development. Oil was discovered in the 1960s and kind of transformative effect as it has everywhere. And in this time, there was a great degree of urbanization. People could get services rather than relying on culture, trading, which comes from a pre oil economy.[00:45:00] Now, you see, I think, a couple things. For one thing, cultures of hospitality, I think, were already being disturbed by the way that neoliberal capitalism tends to work, not just in Oman, but anywhere around the world. It encourages people to find ways to profit themselves and to think as individual agents rather than as being part of a community, having responsibilities to the humans, but also nonhumans to the land as well as to one's family.So that process is already in it's already taking place before tourism began to take root. And I think there are some spaces in which tourism is developing in such a way that it's very profit oriented. And where people are incentivized to privilege [00:46:00] their own gains over those of others.However, there are other ways I think in which people who, say we're living in the city, are meeting people who live in fairly remote areas, under the auspices of tourism. Because they're engaging in tourism, they're meeting people who are living in these spaces and often chatting with them or sharing a meal or sharing coffee or something like this.Sometimes these people who are living in places that are becoming tourism destinations are part of the industry and sometimes people are not, but as it stands now, it seems as very much a preservation of hospitality within this, this particular context. As with anything, I think the question of tourism is to what extent this will become commodified or not, like how do we make money off of this culture of hospitality?How do we turn it into a tourist product? You know, we can sell Oman as being it's hospitable, come meet the locals. But in the way that people continue [00:47:00] to practice it, both people who are living in Oman and being domestic tourists and also people who are seeing tourists come to where they live in ways that they haven't before. To me, it still seems like it's very robustly in place.Chris: Good to hear. And I very much look forward to the publication of your research. Hopefully it'll see the light of day soon, perhaps. Sean: I hope so. Yeah. Things are in process for sure. Chris: Okay. Well, I'd like to thank you, Sean, on behalf of our listeners for joining us today. And you know, this leads me of course, to the question of how might they be able to get in touch with you or follow your work. And if that includes an Instagram handle. Sean: Yeah, that's, that's fine. So I I recently started another Instagram account. I had my own account and stopped posting about 2019.And then I got interested in it again. I opened a new account, which is sort of more research facing. So yeah, if people wanna check that [00:48:00] out, it's @SPSMITHS, so S-P-S-M-I-T-H-S or email spSmith@tilburguniversity.edu. So always pleased to hear ideas and of course things that I've missed because of course I have so much to learn in this space.So I would really look forward to feedback and ideas. Hmm. Chris: Well, I'll make sure all of that's on the End of Tourism website and the podcast page when the interview launches and as well as the other authors, researchers and works that you mentioned earlier on. So once again, it's been amazing, Sean, thank you so much for being able to really flesh these complex ideas out for us and we'll see what happens, right?Sean: Absolutely. Thanks very much for the invitation. And as always, I'll look forward to continue listening. This is such an excellent project. Chris: Thank you, Sean.This episode and others like it are created and made possible by the generosity of Substack subcribers like yourself. Similarly, I have subsidized the work of the pod with my own time and money. This is a labour of love and lineage that requires the support of others. Please consider offering a gift in return, whether that include upgrading to paid subscription, making a one-time donation, sharing the podcast among your people or being willing to reach out and assist in production (as others have). Thank you. Bless. Peace. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes it's just a pleasure to sit back and listen.  This is one of those moments - for me, certainly, but hopefully for you too.  I had the pleasure of sitting and chatting with two icons of the industry - Sean Conboy and the inimatable nonagenarian, Stuart Clark who is not only still shooting at the age of 97 but is a considerable racontour (you can hear me and Sean laughing in the background throughout!) Stuart started his career in 1941, so his stories are not only entertaining but are fascinating as they cover every photography development from glass plate through to the state of the art digital wizardry we're facing today. This interview is worth listening to every one of its 90 or so minutes! Enjoy!   Cheers P. If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode. PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think! If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk.    Transcript [00:00:00] Paul: So there are so, so many things I love about being in this industry, the things we get to do, and in particular, this podcast, and one of the many things is having these moments that you're about to hear, where I get to sit and chat with someone I've known for a very long time, Sean Conboy, fantastic photographer, and just a wonderful human being. [00:00:20] And someone he introduced me to, a guy called Stuart Clark.  [00:00:23] Now Stuart is 98 years old in July this year. Self proclaimed as one of the oldest working photographers in the country, and I'm not sure that anyone's going to argue with that. He started training as a photographer in 1940. That makes this, he's been working as a photographer for 84 years. [00:00:46] And the whole of this interview is taking place in what was, his photography studio in a little town just outside Leeds. It's his front living room, but it's huge. It's got a high ceiling and you can imagine how the lighting would have been hot, continuous lights and families just having the best time with someone who I learned very quickly, is a storyteller and a raconteur, uh, just a wonderful, a wonderful human being. There are lots of things to listen out for in the following interview, and let me draw your attention to just a few. Uh, listen out for the flash powder story. It's very funny. Uh, the story of, uh, People retouching, lots of retouching stories from the 1940s and billiard ball complexions. [00:01:31] . Doing multiple jobs in a day. He used to do three or four jobs in a day, and have the timing so accurate that could include photographing a wedding. He learned his craft. He's great. [00:01:42] He's spent time creating images for press, looking for alternative, alternative images and looking for PR images that no matter how much a sub editor crops them, the brand or at least the story is still very much intact. He talks about the utter love of the job and appreciating what a privileged position photographers like ourselves are in every day of the week. [00:02:07] He talks a little about the role of agencies and how they now manage messages from companies in a way that probably they never did. He talks about relationships and he talks about being positive and persistence. He also talks about the role of the Institute. [00:02:24] Finally, he talks a little bit about photographers always being the fag end of everything, but in the end, what he talks about really, It's the love of his job and the love of his clients.  [00:02:35] Why am I telling you all of this upfront? Well, this is a long interview, but the sound of Stuart's voice and the history that it represents, as well as the fact that he's more current than an awful lot of photographers who I know right now who are much younger, uh, but just, there's something in his, his entire manner that is captivating and enthralling, informative and useful. And so, although it's a long interview, I thought I'd just explain a little bit about why I found it so appealing and why I've left the edit almost entirely intact. I've removed a few lumps and bumps where we all managed to hit a microphone as we're gesticulating. [00:03:16] So picture the scene, there's myself, Sean and Stuart sitting, in armchairs and on couches. [00:03:27] And if you're wondering why it took me quite so long, this interview is actually, it goes back to February of this year, and why it took me quite so long to get it out, it was partly because there was a lot of of lumps to remove and partly because it was this trip, this interview, this podcast that I was returning home from when the Land Rover blew up. [00:03:46] And frankly, I think there's a little bit of trauma there with a six and a half thousand pound bill to re, to replace and repair piston number two. I think my heart just, I needed a minute just to not recall it every single time I try to edit this particular podcast down. It's a wonderful interview. Please enjoy. [00:04:06] I know it's quite long, um, but what an absolute legend. I'm Paul and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast.  [00:04:32] So, firstly, Stuart, thank you for welcoming us into your home. We've driven quite a long way, uh, to come and see you. Sean, uh, recommended we speak to you, because the number of stories you have make even his collection of stories look Insignificant. [00:04:48] And as we all know, Sean, The Footnote Conboy has more stories than any man I've ever met up until probably this, this moment in time. So to kick the conversation off, how did you become a photographer? [00:05:05] Stuart: It was an unfortunate or fortunate chain of events because, um, I was at the Leeds College of Art in 1940, 41, and I had the desire and intention of being a commercial artist, which is now referred as graphic designer and at that time, being wartime, there was little advertising being done, and so, uh, perhaps I was not sufficiently talented, but I finished up working for a firm who were essentially photoengravers, but they had a commercial photography studio as well, and they were short of somebody to join them, and I went in there and became virtually an apprentice photographer. This was very interesting because at that time, again, there was very little commercial photography advertising being done, and so all our efforts, or most of our efforts, were centred on war work, which involved going round the factories and, uh, Photographing for record purposes, the input of the particular company. And in those days, I can tell you that that was not a very comfortable proposition because we were on total blackout, and therefore, all the fumes in the factory, whatever they were, had very little chance of escaping, so you've got the fumes and the heat, and then of course we were only Illuminating scenes with flash powder, which was an added hazard, and, and so Photography outside in the factories was not very pleasant, but inside the factory, or in the studio, we were also doing war work, and that was to photograph silhouettes, scale models of all aircraft of both the enemy and, uh, and, uh, Home, uh, Aircraft for identification purposes, so that the air gunners were not shooting our own planes down in action. And another very interesting thing which I have always remembered was that the four, or the eight cannons In the Spitfire, that was four in each wing, were harmonized to converge at a point away from the Spitfire so that the Fire, the maximum fire point was when those two lots of cannons converged. [00:08:34] The only reference that the pilots had was a silhouette which we had photographed, so that he could visualize that silhouette in the, aiming sight of his  [00:08:50] guns.  [00:08:51] Paul: a very early heads up display.  [00:08:53] Stuart: Indeed.  [00:08:54] Paul: Yeah. [00:08:55] Stuart: And, so, that was quite an important element, I think, of our war work for the Air Ministry. [00:09:03] The main factory was engraving the, conical, rangefinder cones for 25 pound howitzers. [00:09:14] Paul: Right. [00:09:15] Stuart: And at the time of leaving school, everybody had to be doing war work.  [00:09:21] And so I went to the company on the pretext of doing war work of that nature, rather than going round snapping. [00:09:31] Paul: Right. [00:09:32] Sean: Stuart, could you also, um, I mean you've told me many great tales about your time actually in the, uh, armed services film unit, i think that might be quite interesting,  [00:09:42] Stuart: Well, I was called up and because of my interest in mechanical things and gadgetry and so forth, I finished up in the Royal Army Service Corps. But a friend of my mother's husband suggested that I applied for a trade test in photography. And one day I was called up to the orderly room and they said, We've got the movement order here for you. Um, to go to Pinewood Studios, of all places. I don't know what this is about, but anyway, here's your movement order. So, I went down to Pinewood, and we had a trade test, and I think I finished up, uh, top of the, the, uh, examination. But then I was returned to unit at Catterick, and I was up there for another few months, and then I was posted. And eventually, after about six weeks of the posting, I got another movement order to go back to Pinewood Studios, where I started my course in cinephotography, [00:11:06] and still photography. Now, this was the last course. before Pinewood closed down and the unit closed down. I'm talking about Pinewood closing down, Pinewood was the headquarters of the Army Film and Photographic Unit from when it was formed in October 41. [00:11:35] The course included preparation for action photography, essentially. when the course started, the war was still on in Central Europe. but before the course finished, it, uh, the war finished. [00:11:58] And The Japanese War was still going on until September of the same year, which was 45. But we were still being trained, and when the course finished, we had very little to do but just wait to see what happened. And so from September to, um, December of that year, we were just hanging about in the studios. [00:12:30] We were then posted to the Far East, in fact to Malaya, where the No. 9 unit was formed. Having been moved by Batten's headquarters, Mountbatten's headquarters, from Ceylon to Singapore, thought that it would be probably much more congenial there than in Ceylon, India. [00:12:57] So number nine was there and it's interesting to note that right at this moment an exhibition is being produced for the photographer's gallery on Bert Hardy's life and Bert Hardy at the time that I there was, in fact, the stills captain in charge of all the still photography in Malay Command. Or the, not Malay Command, the Far East Command, because we had outstations in Java and Hong Kong, and even, uh, one guy, uh, was in, um, in Hiroshima. So that was the formation of the, the, uh, Far East, Southeast Asia Command photographic, uh, outfit. until it closed down, uh, in September, August September of 46, and we are then dispersed Some went to the Imperial War Museum, the Imperial, uh, war, graves Commission, et cetera, and six of us went back to Vienna, where we joined number 9, Public Relations, because unit had been disbanded completely. So, there in, uh, in Austria, we were doing what they call Local Boy Stories, and we made a couple of films on the Irish regiments and also the East Yorkshire, not the East Yorkshire, the Yorkshire regiments who were guarding and on guard duties at the palace, Shurnbran Palace, which everybody has heard of, and um, and so that carried on until, uh, the Until I was demobbed in 1947, December. came home and went back to the company I originally started with because they were compelled to take people for 12 months. And at the end of that time, I decided to leave I had a bit of a a difference of opinion with the studio manager, who was RAF, and I was Army, and I was a sergeant as well, and I don't think he was quite that when he was in the RAF photographic section, but there was a resentment anyway. [00:16:02] of my presence.  [00:16:03] So, I went to the firm called C. R. H. Pickards, who were one of the finest industrial, uh, and leading industrial photographic units, companies, in the north of England. [00:16:24] It was there, then, that I began to learn industrial photography. And we photographed all sorts of various things, from factory engineering, factories, products and so forth, lathes, milling machines, railway engines, all manner of things. And that's where I cut my teeth on industrial photography. [00:16:56] Sean: And, and Stuart, what sort of, um, equipment would you be using in those days? not  [00:17:01] Stuart: so ha!  [00:17:02] Sean: but how  [00:17:03] would you be lighting these spaces in those days  [00:17:05] Stuart: um The equipment that we were using was always, almost always, whole plate, six a half, eight by, eight and a half, six a half, uh, folding field cameras. when I started, we [00:17:29] were on glass plates. But then the advent of film came in. And this was obviously much lighter stuff to carry around. And every, exposure had to count. Now in today's terms, where you press the button and pick the best out of however many, all we used to do was a duplicate at the most. So we used to There was a variation in the exposure or the aperture setting, and that was the only difference the two exposures. [00:18:19] So what we used to do was develop one side of the, uh, the double dark slides, see what they were like, if they wanted a little bit more or a bit less development, that was applied to second side. And, don't know whether you've ever heard of the expression of, um, developing by, uh, vision. But we used to have a very dim green light, and the sensitive film. [00:18:59] was not, uh, sensitive to the green light.  [00:19:03] Paul: All right.  [00:19:04] Stuart: But you had to be in the darkroom for ten minutes for your eyes to become adjusted, and you could then see absolutely every detail of the, the development process. And when the highlights started to you, to, To show a dark mark through the back of the antihalation backing, then the development was just about right, if but if you wanted a little bit more contrast, then you just pushed it on. If it had been a dull day, a dull, miserable day, then you pushed the development on a little bit further. [00:19:49] Sean: And  [00:19:49] Stuart: you've asked  [00:19:50] Sean: be, how would you be lighting some of these scenes? I'm very intrigued at that  [00:19:53] Stuart: I  [00:19:53] Sean: that  [00:19:53] Stuart: about to say that. [00:19:54] Um, for big areas, we used to use flash powder. And a little bit of flash powder goes a long way, believe me. But it was pretty dangerous stuff. And um, I remember we photographed a wedding on one occasion at the Majestic Hotel Harrogate. And there were 450 people. at the reception and they wanted a photograph to show as many of the people as possible. So we put the whole plate camera on a table stood up there with tray into which I poured flash powder. [00:20:38] Now then, this was actuated. with a percussion cap, like we used to have in little [00:20:46] hand pistols for toys. and when you pulled the release catch, that ignited the cap, [00:20:56] that ignited the flash powder. [00:21:00] So, the exposure was only going to be once. One exposure. [00:21:07] And so, the photographer I was with, he said, right everybody. Look this way, and I want to be making sure that everybody keeps still. [00:21:21] I'm going to count five for you, but don't move until I've finished counting. [00:21:29] So the idea was to take the sheath out of the slide. With having put a cap over the lens, shutter, just an open lens with a cap or a lid on the front. [00:21:46] And the technique was to take the cap off hold it in front of the lens, so that that allowed the vibration or any vibration in the camera to settle down and then take the exposure. the idea was count 1, 2, 3, 4, then take the cup off. And on four I ignited the flash gun and then the cup went on and the guy that I was worth put the sheath back and said, right, let's get out of here quick. The reason for that was that you got the brightness, got the, the buildup of the available lights. then it's just topped off, illuminated with the flash, not a very big one, I hasten to add. But the significance of flash powder was that there was a flame which simply went upwards.  [00:23:00] And that was it, that was all there was to be seen. But, it produced smoke, which used to go into, onto the ceiling, and it would roll across the ceiling, carrying with it the grains of the flash powder, which had obviously changed colour from [00:23:24] silver [00:23:25] To yellow, that was okay. But when the waiters came to move the, uh, soup plates, what they found was a white circle on a yellow  [00:23:47] cloth. [00:23:51] And you can also visualize the fact that a lot of people had a lot of. Little flash powder grains in their hair  [00:24:01] as well. well. By the time that [00:24:04] By the time that this happened, we were halfway back to Leeds.  [00:24:08] Sean: Very good.  [00:24:09] Stuart: But this this was the scourge of flash powder because you could only take one shot. Because the place used to, the whole of the place, the factory, if you using a large amount of powder, made a lot of smoke, and it just collected on the ceiling and it obscured it, the vision. So, we used to use photo floods, these were overrun pearl lamps, we used to have six on a button. And if the subject was still, we could go around on a long lead and paint scene with light. And that was, and that became established, So flash balder started to go, [00:25:08] Paul: Right. [00:25:10] Stuart: but you see, at this time, flash bulbs hadn't really got going. [00:25:17] The GEC flash bulbs, which were foil filled, were about the only thing that was available. Um, in this, in this country. And they were sympathetic. [00:25:31] And the GEC Warehouse in Leeds on one occasion, uh, a consignment of, um, bulbs came, [00:25:43] Uh, [00:25:44] in a, in a case, and, uh, one of the attendants decided that he would test them to see whether they were all alright. [00:25:54] So [00:25:54] he fired one. [00:25:57] and 50 flashbulbs, because [00:26:01] they had to be in contact with each other. If they were separate, it didn't work, but when you put them side by side, they were sympathetic. [00:26:11] Paul: What [00:26:11] happens?  [00:26:13] Stuart: Well, the whole lot  [00:26:14] went  [00:26:14] off. A whole box full of, um, flashbulbs, and they weren't cheap at that time.  [00:26:22] So  [00:26:23] really,  [00:26:23] that was, that was the basic equipment which we used to [00:26:29] use. [00:26:31] And [00:26:32] it was all, [00:26:33] it [00:26:34] was all, uh, 8x6. [00:26:37] Sometimes it was 10x8. [00:26:41] The, uh, the railway engines, which we used to photograph for the Hunsley's Engine Company [00:26:47] and hudderswell Clark's in Leeds, we always used to use 10x8 for those. Now it was interesting there because we used to have a particular date for going to photograph them. And [00:27:04] they were all finished up in black, white and grey paint. Because that served the cost of retouching the finished print. [00:27:15] There was very little photography done at that time. Apart from views and so forth. But anything that meant a machine, a lathe the, or whatever, it always had to go to the process retoucher who airbrushed the reflections or put one or two, put a shadow in or whatever it is. It was a highly skilled, uh, process. Uh, process, retoucher with white lines and so forth. But the interesting thing about these two railway engine companies was. that they only painted them on one side, the side that was being photographed. [00:27:59] Paul: And [00:28:01] Stuart: we used to go back to the studio, develop them straight away, yes, the negatives are alright, as soon as that happened, then they would strip all the black, white, and grey paint off and finish up in the customer's required, required colours. [00:28:23] Paul: Wow. [00:28:25] So, so the bit that strikes me is retouching has been part of this art  [00:28:30] Sean: a long time. Well,  [00:28:33] Paul: I mean, think about [00:28:33] it, right? Because we, there's a lot of debate about retouching and post production. That rages. Even now, but when you think about a manufacturer only painting one side of a train, they're painting it colours that repro well, and then it's being handed on to a retoucher, retouching's been going on for a very long time.  [00:28:51] Stuart: Well of course, everything at that time was, was, um, retouched, and most portraits finish up with complexions like billiard balls. There were no shadows, etc.  [00:29:03] Paul: haha, It's like nothing's changed!  [00:29:07] Stuart: Indeed. Indeed, and, and when people speak now in condemnation of, oh well you can see the retouching and so forth, well the only thing that you have to do now is to make sure that it doesn't show. But, it was, really when Photoshop and the like came in on the scene, this was manna from heaven. [00:29:32] Paul: Yeah. [00:29:33] Stuart: Because it cut out the need to do the work on the actual print. To retouch transparencies was a rather different process altogether. [00:29:48] And it was  [00:29:49] Sean: difficult process to be [00:29:50] Stuart: Oh yes, and very highly skilled. And the firm that I worked for, Giltrous Brothers, who were the photo engravers, they used to retouch twenty, twenty [00:30:02] four, twenty glass plates. Whereby, when you talk about printing today, and I think the, uh, top of the range, uh, Epson, Uh, printer works in, uh, we're printing 11 colors, but the, limited edition photolitho, uh, illustrations were, uh, certainly on, on 13 colors [00:30:36] And from 13 separate plates. All of which were retouched. [00:30:42] Paul: So [00:30:42] the plates were retouched separately?  [00:30:45] Stuart: correct?  [00:30:45] Oh yes.  [00:30:46] Paul: Wow. [00:30:48] Stuart: So [00:30:48] Paul: each of these plates is a black and [00:30:49] white plate that's going to take one color ink? [00:30:52] Sean: Correct. I understood the [00:30:52] Paul: the process right? [00:30:53] Sean: Yeah.  [00:30:54] Stuart: process, right? Retouches were earning more than photographers at any time.  [00:31:01] Sean: It's most interesting to hear this, Stuart, because you come into my era when I was learning photography and the discipline of the transparency, the 4x5 and 8 inch transparency, and of course there, retouching was an anathema because if we retouched the transparency, we started to lose some quality. [00:31:17] Stuart: Yes. we to, it was a period of photography, I think, more than ever, when we had to get everything right in the camera because the client demanded the transparency. Whereas the processes you were using enabled this retouching method, which is very, very interesting. [00:31:29] There are certain elements, as you well know, with your, even with your skills, whereby there are elements which cannot be lit out or exposed out or  [00:31:43] whatever. And there has to be some artwork, or whatever you call it, retouching done. And at the end of the day, most of the photography which, which I was taking and involved with, was going to be reproduced. And so if it was retouched at source, before it got to the retouchers on the reproduction, uh, side. [00:32:11] of the plate making, then that was, it was as we wanted it rather than what they thought it should be.  [00:32:20] Paul: As ever photographers being control freaks.  [00:32:24] Stuart: Well, after something like two to three years at Picards, by which time I got a fair amount of idea of what's going on.  [00:32:37] Um, I decided that, um, I ought to seek pastures new and became a staff photographer for the 600 Group Of Companies just on the west side of Leeds. And there I photographed secondhand machinery, which they used to recondition and I photographed the, lathes and milling machines, drilling machines and that sort of thing, and they were then printed on and they, all these were taken on the half plate camera, which is half the size of a whole plate camera, obviously, um, and, um. they were made on 6x4 glossy prints, and these were distributed by the appropriate department to potential buyers. And I was there for three and a half years. But I'd got to the stage where I'd photographed everything that didn't move, and I was becoming rather dissatisfied with life. So I  [00:33:49] Paul: Do you mind if I ask how old are you at this point? [00:33:53] Stuart: this point? Well, let me see, I would be about, twenty, twenty four, twenty, what, twenty five. Right. Twenty five, six.  [00:34:03] Paul: Right. [00:34:04] Stuart: I was dissatisfied because I didn't think I was getting anywhere. [00:34:09] Sean: So you were, you were ambitious, really, to take your photography on to another level and, and have more control, would you say, over what you were doing [00:34:16] Stuart: you could say that, yes. just say to work for yourself, Stuart?  [00:34:20] Sean: The Thing is that the, the company that I worked for. was part of the A. H. Leach corporate, uh, company at Brighouse, which was, uh, a very big organization with studios in Cambridge, Manchester, Glasgow. Um, and the prospects of moving to any one of those places was stalemate because they were well staffed was no flexibility for moving, and so I thought, well the only way to see whether I am a capable photographer was to make it on my own, see if I could make it on my own. And in fact started the business in some premises now occupied by the local library. down at the bottom end of the village. [00:35:19] Stuart: But this was going on for some time, two or three years, and then the question of getting married. [00:35:27] came into the reckoning, and this house in which we're sitting now became available, and very suitable because the front room lounge in which we now sit became my portrait studio. [00:35:46] And across the top of the window, which is facing opposite you, was a bank of Kodak, um, lighting with five, four 500 watt lamps in each for general illumination. [00:36:04] And So then I had a spotlight which is, was behind you for lighting the hair and then a fill in light on this side. And by this time, we'd moved on to two and a quarter square, real film cameras, 12 on 120. [00:36:22] I hadn't really at that stage got into, back into the industrial scene because I was doing social photography, weddings and portraits, to build up a reserve of capital to move on to buying more advanced equipment. [00:36:44] And the changes at that time were considerable. 5x4 were on the, on the fringe. At the time that I'm speaking of, German 9x12 plate cameras were still being used for press photography. And there they were, on the touchline at Heddingley, these, the local press photographers, with box of 9x12 single shot plates freezing to death, and um, and that's it, one off shots. [00:37:26] But I missed the point earlier on, I think, of saying that uh, every shot had to count. And, over the years, that has influenced me considerably, because I've always made sure that everything was right before I took the exposure. [00:37:48] And whatever the, whatever the occasion was, whether it was an industrial scene or a social scene, you look at the subject before you, to begin with, and then start looking round and see what's happening in the background. Because, if you do that, it saves retouching, and that's an absolute classical instance of today, where people, when Photoshop came, what about so and so? [00:38:22] Oh, don't bother about that, I'll take it out. I can take it out in Photoshop, and I've heard speakers come to the Institute and talk about, Oh, I do this and do that, and I've said, well, how long does it take you to do that? Oh, well, a couple of hours or so, like that. It could have all been addressed in the taking, and that would have been eliminated. [00:38:51] And when you talk about 2 or 3 hours retouching, well how much do you charge for, oh well I'll throw it all in. [00:39:00] And the number of people who I've heard say that, oh well I'll just include it. I think they've got a bit wise to it now because Uh, any extramural activities are chargeable by the hour, and, uh, and it's certainly in need of that, but what I would say to any in, up and coming photographer, they need to sure of what it is that they're taking to avoid having to retouch it afterwards, albeit that in today's terms, [00:39:40] With the relaxation of dress and disciplines and so forth, Um, I don't think it quite matters. And so, I think as far as today is concerned, I would find it difficult to go back to being a photographer in today's terms. Because, I can sit in a restaurant or in a room, somebody's room or whatever, and I'm looking at the, the vertical lines of the structure to, to see whether that line lines up with that, and it's surprising how often I can see lines that are out, even buildings. [00:40:27] I could see buildings that, that were not, um, vertical. completely vertical and line up with the I sit there looking at the streets and doors and windows and it's very, it's very difficult to get out of that discipline into the much more free and relaxed attitude towards photography today. [00:40:56] I don't know whether I, whether you would agree with that or not. [00:41:00] Sean: Stuart, I would agree with what you're saying and it's like the photographer's eye, your whole life has been trained by your eye viewing scenes and viewing situations and it's quite impossible to turn that off really. [00:41:10] That's part of you and how you see things, so no, I couldn't agree with you more. So Stuart, tell me, you obviously, the room we're in now was your studio, and you're in here, you're now married, you're doing more social photography, as you said, and obviously starting to make money. Where did the business go from there? [00:41:29] What was your sort of next stage really? Because I believe you had another studio then in the village, is that correct?  [00:41:35] Stuart: The children grew up and we were running out of room space, [00:41:40] So an opportunity came in the main street down the road to take over a building, um, which I was able to use the ground floor and turn it into a studio, a reception studio and darkroom. And, uh, during that time, I was doing, um, mainly social photography, but also, I had got associated with the local newspaper which circulated in this area, and I virtually, without being on the strength, I virtually became the staff photographer for the whole of the circulation area. [00:42:32] So on a Saturday in the summer, it was not unknown for me to do perhaps 11 cover 11 eventualities such as garden parties, a flower show, etc. and also fit in a complete wedding. So, [00:43:00] Paul: So,  [00:43:00] Stuart: so [00:43:01] my time, my, my mind used to work like a, like [00:43:07] a clock, uh, a precision clock, because it was, it was timed to the nth degree. Um, what time is the, uh, what time is the wedding? How long will the service be? Where's the reception? And I had a mental, uh, mental, uh, memo of the distance from here to there, and the length of time it takes to get from, from there to there. [00:43:36] And, as far as the, as the newspaper is concerned, I tried to take a different picture. at each occasion, so that we don't want the same picture of women serving tea, uh, for the WI, the church of this and that and the other. Um, I tried to make a different picture. So that training and experience fitted me in good stead for when the industrial scene tailed off. [00:44:15] Sean: I've just, uh, I've just, um, picked a photograph up here. [00:44:18] Stuart's got quite a number of his photographs in the room with us here. It's a very nice PR, press type shot here of Harry Ramsden's Fish and Chips shop, and it's got a very 1980s mobile phone and the world famous in this part of the world, Nora Batty which some of you may know from a famous last of the summer wine tv show and i think this is to do with the flotation of Harry Ramsden because it became quite a successful company didn't it so talk a little bit about this photograph Stuart it's very captivating and i think very very well executed [00:44:50] Stuart: Well, the story as you've already identified, I'm surprised that you have, because that was when they went public. And, uh, the, story was the Harry Ramsden fish restaurant, which, it was the center of all activities, just on the outskirts of Leeds, and they, as you said, they got Nora Batty there, who was a very leading personality at the time, and, of course, telephones, you can see the size of that, that mobile telephone, which is about the size of a half of a brick. Um, this was the, um, the story. And the essential thing was to locate the seed of the picture with the name of the, the company. across the top of the, the print or the format. [00:45:46] Sean: And if I could just butt in there Stuart just to say sorry to do this but I think it's important to get this across that I've just picked this image up and the story has come straight across to me. We've got the mobile phone. You've got the Financial Times, which is holding the fish and chips. You've got the sort of banker type chap behind her. [00:46:02] It just shows the skill that's gone into that picture, that an image is telling that story to me all these years later. Because I presume this photograph is 30 or 40 years old, Stuart. Am I correct there?  [00:46:12] Stuart: It's quite a long time. And the essential thing about that picture, uh, Sean, is that however much a sub editor chops it down. There was always be something of the story there, because the nearest or the furthest down that they could chop it would be across the top of the bloke's head, but it would still say Harry on the left hand side. [00:46:42] And, and, that was the, the art of, at that time, of getting the story across for public relations. Include the company's name or the brand in the background somewhere so that it had to be seen and it couldn't be taken out.  [00:47:03] Paul: I ask you a question? Have you always loved being a [00:47:06] Stuart: being a photographer? Oh, absolutely.  [00:47:09] I wouldn't do anything else. Um, had a very enjoyable life in every aspect of it. And I'll tell you one thing about it, and Sean will agree with me on this. Photography, photographers are in a very privileged position, and they don't realize how much so. Because so often, they are in, at the ground floor of activity. A conference, a confidential conference projecting the aims of the company. [00:47:46] I was in a company when I was in the conference actually, when the whole of the regional bank managers were in a conference at Harrogate, and they were told then, that we were going to dispose of the buildings, our assets, and I photographed several banks which were up for sale and they were simply being sold off. The managers didn't know. What's the photograph for? Oh, it's just for the estate. I knew what they were, why they were selling it. It was going on the market. [00:48:25] You know all these little convenience grocery shops and so on, on filling stations, I was in the conference there for all the ESSO managers in the region, when the the project was put to them that we're going to put these little kiosks, or whatever it is, and, and, and there I was. Um, and we were privy to information that was light years ahead of the actual official announcement. [00:48:59] Paul: Yeah. [00:48:59] Stuart: Metahall, for instance, um, I was in the conference when they were talking about what their footprint was needed to be to make that viable. And there are several instances such as that. And you do get it to a more personal level, where we've got, uh, injuries, personal injuries to photograph. [00:49:26] Oh well, what about Snow? [00:49:29] Well, [00:49:29] And you just can't get involved with passing that or repeating that information. [00:49:35] Paul: Yeah. [00:49:36] Stuart: It's confidential. And as I said, photographers are so often right in the heart of things. And I'm sure, Sean, that in today's terms, you'll be more exposed to it than I was with them. [00:49:51] Sean: Well, very much so Stuart. [00:49:52] Very much so. Yeah. I mean, it's, I can't tell you how many NDAs I've signed in my career, so, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.  [00:50:00] So Stuart, so you've now got the studio, the, the biggest studio now on in the, in the, in the village here. And you're obviously doing your social, your weddings, you're obviously doing a lot of PR. [00:50:11] Did you start to do, did the industrial photography come back a little bit more as well? [00:50:15] Stuart: Yes But I was, I was extremely fortunate and the odd thing about it was that the connection came through the, uh, the work of the local paper because three miles from here was the control room for the Central Electricity Generating Board and they were having an open night and the local paper was invited to to cover the, the event. So I went along and took a few photographs of whatever was going on and had a bit of a look around the place and subsequently then I was approached by their, their public relations department for the northeast region. Would I take a photograph of something else?  [00:51:13] From that stemmed the work, which really became the mainstay of my activities with the Central Electricity Generating Board. [00:51:26] Again, I wasn't on the staff, but I was vir, virtually became the staff photographer for the Northeast Region. And the amazing thing is that here I was, photographing power stations, the grand openings of power stations, starting with Thorpe Marsh, which was the, down in Doncaster, which had two 400 megawatt sets, which were the f The Forerunner, they Thorpe Marsh was really the testbed for the, um, the 400 megawatt stations which followed. [00:52:13] And there again, this was being in on the ground floor whenever there was a fault down there or whatever. or a problem, um, I was called in to, to, to take the photographs.  [00:52:27] Sean: So [00:52:28] Stuart, would you say that, um, he's very interesting listening to this about how your business built. Would you say that networking was a great part of building your business? [00:52:37] Stuart: Networking, well they call it networking now, and it's, it's contacts really. And I think, I'm sure that you'll agree that being in the right place at the right time, and that really applies to anything, the theatrical world, et cetera, and, not necessarily knowing the people, the right people, but getting on with them, and being able to mix with people, and behave in a way that people expect you to. So  [00:53:10] Sean: Would you have any sort of advice or tips for a young photographer or somebodnew breaking into photography and how to. build a business? Have you anything to add there at all?  [00:53:22] Stuart: I think that in today's terms, it is extremely difficult for photographers. And I'll tell you why, because I think that the opportunities which I just mentioned are remote, probably remote in the extreme. Social photography is something else, and the, the website, and all the various media opportunities, with which I am unfamiliar and have no knowledge of because I've not had the need to do it. But I am aware because I look at what people are doing. And that's another instance of success. Of keeping an eye on what other people are doing. If you admire anybody's particular work, then that sets the example and the criteria to work to. But as far as going back to contact is concerned, I have the distinct impression now that not only photography, but everything now stems from public Relations and I don't know whether you've noticed it or not, but if there's, if there are any problems, on the one hand, of people's behavior or their activities, or whatever it may be, adversely or favorably, and the promotion of brands and industries and business, it all seems to stem now very much from the agencies.  [00:55:12] If you read question of the so and so company are going to introduce this product or [00:55:22] service or whatever it is, or they've taken over a business. the [00:55:27] statements attributed to the managing director or chief executive or accountant or whatever it is, right across the board, a great many of the people that are being quoted, I would suggest, are not capable of speaking and thinking the way that the statement appears in print. And it raises sometimes, a lot of suspicion as to just what is behind this thing. This business with the post office. It's full of it. And so the point that I'm making is that advertising agencies, that's another one, the advertising agencies are in direct contact with the, um, with the brand or the company. [00:56:24] And so the opportunities of the photographers, in my judgment, are minimized because of the hold. that the advertising agencies have on the job.  [00:56:43] And  [00:56:43] they,  [00:56:45] they will say who they want and who should be employed. They may think them best or otherwise. And it also then comes down to, rights, and I bet you are right in the thick of this, that, uh, you are the, the favorite bloke on the, on the block, and whilst ever that person is engaged in that company, your situation is secure. But suddenly, if he goes to pastures new, and they've already got their established photographers, as far as you're concerned, you've lost that company. [00:57:28] Sean: Very  [00:57:28] Stuart: company.  [00:57:29] Sean: very true. Yeah, yeah.  [00:57:30] Stuart: Is it true? [00:57:31] Paul: But there's always opportunities with these things, I mean, in the end, there are more photographs being created today than ever historically, I think you're right about the structures of advertising agencies, though this isn't my world, when someone moves on, there's an opportunity, and there's always the opportunity to stay as well, there is risk, of course there's risk, but equally, you could be the guy he takes with you. [00:57:54] So how do you make that happen? [00:57:56] Sean: Well, I think it's very apt because I've had two or three key clients in my career that have moved numerous times, you know, seriously big companies and they've taken me with them, yeah. And not only that, in some cases, they've taken me to their new company. And it's gone well. They've then moved on to another company and taken me with them, but the company they've left still retains me. [00:58:19] So there's a benefit that way. But I think it's really, I greatly believe in the, in the networking, keeping in touch with people, making an effort at all times. And I think, I know we've got today's digital world and there's lots of advantages to that, but also personal contact I think is still really, really important. [00:58:38] Relationships and personal contact. [00:58:40] Stuart: What you are saying is, is correct. And I remember an uncle of mine who was a milkman and, had a, a big dairy, and he once said to my mum, oh, well, it's so and so, he's come again, a rep has come. It's been three times, so really it deserves an order. [00:59:03] There's a  [00:59:04] lot  [00:59:05] Paul: in [00:59:05] Stuart: a lot in [00:59:06] truth in that, backs and it backs up what you were just saying, of keeping in contact, and, of course as far as advertising is concerned, or mail shots. the first one they take no notice of and throw away. The second one, oh well, there's another one from this so and so. The third one, it is usually reckoned that the person will be activated by that And so, as you said, keeping in contact is very important. [00:59:42] But I'm bound to say that breaking in a lot of it is by accident, but certainly the persistence of contact is very important. [00:59:56] And when you consider, you see, over the years we have thought of Only the Institute, or I have, and I've done, I've put a lot of time and work into it, as other people have, without which we might have been a lot more better off or a lot wealthier than we in fact are. [01:00:20] Sean: Stuart, did, did, when we say the institute, it's the British Institute Professional Photography we're talking about here. And I, I'm a member too, and that's how I met Stuart through the institute. Through your long career as a photographer, how important did you find the, The Institute and the ability to mix and talk and, and, and work, you know, get information from other photographers, I suppose. [01:00:41] How important did you find that  [01:00:44] Stuart: Photographers, um, are, as you know, very, very much individualists. they work a lot on their own, and when you consider that there are probably 7 or 10, 000 practicing photographers in this country, and so few of them belong to anything.  [01:01:10] It makes you wonder how all those people survive. but, it really comes back to, to, uh, what we were saying earlier, of contact, those people must be in contact with other people. [01:01:29] Their reputation goes before them, obviously, and when you consider the situation with the Royals, for instance, who, from time to time, have official photographs taken, um, by names that I've never heard of, where you would perhaps expect that they are members of the, this organization, the Royal Photographic Society, as a case in point. Um, these people are not members of them and so how they I'm not talking about the Litchfields, I'm talking about the other people who officially, officially photograph, uh, in recent times, the, um, William and Kate's family, the, their birthday or whatever anniversary it was. So, those people, um, are plowing their own furrow. [01:02:33] But going back to the the meaning of the institute, whereby people are individual, the opportunity over the past years was for all these individuals to rub shoulders with each other and the networking that went on then. For instance, you go to a meeting and you're chatting away, and a couple of blokes have a common, common interest, uh, uh, or they're equal practitioners, but suddenly, one of them comes up with a problem that he can't answer, and so he's able to phone this guy in Nottingham, or wherever, because he is not in competition down the street. He can't ask the guy down the street how to tackle the question, but the man in Nottingham will willingly bare his soul for you, and keeping in contact with, um, with other people to solve problems where they have them is incredibly useful, in my judgment.    NOTE: to see the rest of the transcript, head over to https://masteringportraitphotography.com (it exceed the normal limit for podcast texts!)

Want to quickly provision your autonomous database? Then look no further than Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless, one of the two deployment choices offered by Oracle Autonomous Database.   Autonomous Database Serverless delegates all operational decisions to Oracle, providing you with a completely autonomous experience.   Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Oracle Database experts, as they discuss how serverless infrastructure eliminates the need to configure any hardware or install any software because Autonomous Database handles provisioning the database, backing it up, patching and upgrading it, and growing or shrinking it for you.   Oracle Autonomous Database Episode: https://oracleuniversitypodcast.libsyn.com/oracle-autonomous-database 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, Rajeev Grover, 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 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Welcome back to a new season of the Oracle University Podcast. This time, our focus is going to be on Oracle Autonomous Database. We've got a jam-packed season planned with some very special guests joining us. 00:52 Lois: If you're a regular listener of the podcast, you'll remember that we'd spoken a bit about Autonomous Database last year. That was a really good introductory episode so if you missed it, you might want to check it out.  Nikita: Yeah, we'll post a link to the episode in today's show notes so you can find it easily. 01:07 Lois: Right, Niki. So, for today's episode, we wanted to focus on Autonomous Database on Serverless Infrastructure and we reached out to three experts in the field: Hannah Nguyen,  Sean Stacey, and Kay Malcolm. Hannah is an Associate Cloud Engineer, Sean, a Director of Platform Technology Solutions, and Kay, who's been on the podcast before, is Senior Director of Database Product Management. For this episode, we'll be sharing portions of our conversations with them. So, let's get started. 01:38 Nikita: Hi Hannah! How does Oracle Cloud handle the process of provisioning an Autonomous Database?   Hannah: The Oracle Cloud automates the process of provisioning an Autonomous Database, and it automatically provisions for you a highly scalable, highly secure, and a highly available database very simply out of the box. 01:56 Lois: Hannah, what are the components and architecture involved when provisioning an Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud? Hannah: Provisioning the database involves very few steps. But it's important to understand the components that are part of the provisioned environment. When provisioning a database, the number of CPUs in increments of 1 for serverless, storage in increments of 1 terabyte, and backup are automatically provisioned and enabled in the database. In the background, an Oracle 19c pluggable database is being added to the container database that manages all the user's Autonomous Databases. Because this Autonomous Database runs on Exadata systems, Real Application Clusters is also provisioned in the background to support the on-demand CPU scalability of the service. This is transparent to the user and administrator of the service. But be aware it is there. 02:49 Nikita: Ok…So, what sort of flexibility does the Autonomous Database provide when it comes to managing resource usage and costs, you know… especially in terms of starting, stopping, and scaling instances? Hannah: The Autonomous Database allows you to start your instance very rapidly on demand. It also allows you to stop your instance on demand as well to conserve resources and to pause billing. Do be aware that when you do pause billing, you will not be charged for any CPU cycles because your instance will be stopped. However, you'll still be incurring charges for your monthly billing for your storage. In addition to allowing you to start and stop your instance on demand, it's also possible to scale your database instance on demand as well. All of this can be done very easily using the Database Cloud Console. 03:36 Lois: What about scaling in the Autonomous Database? Hannah: So you can scale up your OCPUs without touching your storage and scale it back down, and you can do the same with your storage. In addition to that, you can also set up autoscaling. So the database, whenever it detects the need, will automatically scale up to three times the base level number of OCPUs that you have allocated or provisioned for the Autonomous Database. 04:00 Nikita: Is autoscaling available for all tiers?  Hannah: Autoscaling is not available for an always free database, but it is enabled by default for other tiered environments. Changing the setting does not require downtime. So this can also be set dynamically. One of the advantages of autoscaling is cost because you're billed based on the average number of OCPUs consumed during an hour. 04:23 Lois: Thanks, Hannah! Now, let's bring Sean into the conversation. Hey Sean, I want to talk about moving an autonomous database resource. When or why would I need to move an autonomous database resource from one compartment to another? Sean: There may be a business requirement where you need to move an autonomous database resource, serverless resource, from one compartment to another. Perhaps, there's a different subnet that you would like to move that autonomous database to, or perhaps there's some business applications that are within or accessible or available in that other compartment that you wish to move your autonomous database to take advantage of. 04:58 Nikita: And how simple is this process of moving an autonomous database from one compartment to another? What happens to the backups during this transition? Sean: The way you can do this is simply to take an autonomous database and move it from compartment A to compartment B. And when you do so, the backups, or the automatic backups that are associated with that autonomous database, will be moved with that autonomous database as well. 05:21 Lois: Is there anything that I need to keep in mind when I'm moving an autonomous database between compartments?  Sean: A couple of things to be aware of when doing this is, first of all, you must have the appropriate privileges in that compartment in order to move that autonomous database both from the source compartment to the target compartment. In addition to that, once the autonomous database is moved to this new compartment, any policies or anything that's defined in that compartment to govern the authorization and privileges of that said user in that compartment will be applied immediately to that new autonomous database that has been moved into that new compartment. 05:59 Nikita: Sean, I want to ask you about cloning in Autonomous Database. What are the different types of clones that can be created?  Sean: It's possible to create a new Autonomous Database as a clone of an existing Autonomous Database. This can be done as a full copy of that existing Autonomous Database, or it can be done as a metadata copy, where the objects and tables are cloned, but they are empty. So there's no rows in the tables. And this clone can be taken from a live running Autonomous Database or even from a backup. So you can take a backup and clone that to a completely new database. 06:35 Lois: But why would you clone in the first place? What are the benefits of this?  Sean: When cloning or when creating this clone, it can be created in a completely new compartment from where the source Autonomous Database was originally located. So it's a nice way of moving one database to another compartment to allow developers or another community of users to have access to that environment. 06:58 Nikita: I know that along with having a full clone, you can also have a refreshable clone. Can you tell us more about that? Who is responsible for this? Sean: It's possible to create a refreshable clone from an Autonomous Database. And this is one that would be synced with that source database up to so many days. The task of keeping that refreshable clone in sync with that source database rests upon the shoulders of the administrator. The administrator is the person who is responsible for performing that sync operation. Now, actually performing the operation is very simple, it's point and click. And it's an automated process from the database console. And also be aware that refreshable clones can trail the source database or source Autonomous Database up to seven days. After that period of time, the refreshable clone, if it has not been refreshed or kept in sync with that source database, it will become a standalone, read-only copy of that original source database. 08:00 Nikita: Ok Sean, so if you had to give us the key takeaways on cloning an Autonomous Database, what would they be?  Sean: It's very easy and a lot of flexibility when it comes to cloning an Autonomous Database. We have different models that you can take from a live running database instance with zero impact on your workload or from a backup. It can be a full copy, or it can be a metadata copy, as well as a refreshable, read-only clone of a source database. 08:33 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 of which is available free to subscribers. So, get going! Pick a course of your choice, get certified, join the Oracle University Learning Community, and network with your peers. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to begin your journey. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  09:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Thank you, Sean, and hi Kay! I want to ask you about events and notifications in Autonomous Database. Where do they really come in handy?  Kay: Events can be used for a variety of notifications, including admin password expiration, ADB services going down, and wallet expiration warnings. There's this service, and it's called the notifications service. It's part of OCI. And this service provides you with the ability to broadcast messages to distributed components using a publish and subscribe model. These notifications can be used to notify you when event rules or alarms are triggered or simply to directly publish a message. In addition to this, there's also something that's called a topic. This is a communication channel for sending messages to subscribers in the topic. You can manage these topics and their subscriptions really easy. It's not hard to do at all. 10:14 Lois: Kay, I want to ask you about backing up Autonomous Databases. How does Autonomous Database handle backups? Kay: Autonomous Database automatically backs up your database for you. The retention period for backups is 60 days. You can restore and recover your database to any point in time during this retention period. You can initiate recovery for your Autonomous Database by using the cloud console or an API call. Autonomous Database automatically restores and recovers your database to the point in time that you specify. In addition to a point in time recovery, we can also perform a restore from a specific backup set.  10:59 Lois: Kay, you spoke about automatic backups, but what about manual backups?  Kay: You can do manual backups using the cloud console, for example, if you want to take a backup say before a major change to make restoring and recovery faster. These manual backups are put in your cloud object storage bucket. 11:20 Nikita: Are there any special instructions that we need to follow when configuring a manual backup? Kay: The manual backup configuration tasks are a one-time operation. Once this is configured, you can go ahead, trigger your manual backup any time you wish after that. When creating the object storage bucket for the manual backups, it is really important-- so I don't want you to forget-- that the name format for the bucket and the object storage follows this naming convention. It should be backup underscore database name. And it's not the display name here when I say database name. 12:00 Kay: In addition to that, the object name has to be all lowercase. So three rules. Backup underscore database name, and the specific database name is not the display name. It has to be in lowercase. Once you've created your object storage bucket to meet these rules, you then go ahead and set a database property. Default_backup_bucket. This points to the object storage URL and it's using the Swift protocol. Once you've got your object storage bucket mapped and you've created your mapping to the object storage location, you then need to go ahead and create a database credential inside your database. You may have already had this in place for other purposes, like maybe you were loading data, you were using Data Pump, et cetera. If you don't, you would need to create this specifically for your manual backups. Once you've done so, you can then go ahead and set your property to that default credential that you created. So once you follow these steps as I pointed out, you only have to do it one time. Once it's configured, you can go ahead and use it from now on for your manual backups. 13:21 Lois: Kay, the last topic I want to talk about before we let you go is Autonomous Data Guard. Can you tell us about it? Kay: Autonomous Data Guard monitors the primary database, in other words, the database that you're using right now.  Lois: So, if ADB goes down… Kay: Then the standby instance will automatically become the primary instance. There's no manual intervention required. So failover from the primary database to that standby database I mentioned, it's completely seamless and it doesn't require any additional wallets to be downloaded or any new URLs to access APEX or Oracle Machine Learning. Even Oracle REST Data Services. All the URLs and all the wallets, everything that you need to authenticate, to connect to your database, they all remain the same for you if you have to failover to your standby database. 14:19 Lois: And what happens after a failover occurs? Kay: After performing a failover, a new standby for your primary will automatically be provisioned. So in other words, in performing a failover your standby does become your new primary. Any new standby is made for that primary. I know, it's kind of interesting. So currently, the standby database is created in the same region as the primary database. For better resilience, if your database is provisioned, it would be available on AD1 or Availability Domain 1. My secondary, or my standby, would be provisioned on a different availability domain. 15:10 Nikita: But there's also the possibility of manual failover, right? What are the differences between automatic and manual failover scenarios? When would you recommend using each? Kay: So in the case of the automatic failover scenario following a disastrous situation, if the primary ADB becomes completely unavailable, the switchover button will turn to a failover button. Because remember, this is a disaster. Automatic failover is automatically triggered. There's no user action required. So if you're asleep and something happens, you're protected. There's no user action required, but automatic failover is allowed to succeed only when no data loss will occur.   15:57 Nikita: For manual failover scenarios in the rare case when an automatic failover is unsuccessful, the switchover button will become a failover button and the user can trigger a manual failover should they wish to do so. The system automatically recovers as much data as possible, minimizing any potential data loss. But you can see anywhere from a few seconds or minutes of data loss. Now, you should only perform a manual failover in a true disaster scenario, expecting the fact that a few minutes of potential data loss could occur, to ensure that your database is back online as soon as possible.  16:44 Lois: Thank you so much, Kay. This conversation has been so educational for us. And thank you once again to Hannah and Sean. To learn more about Autonomous Database, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Autonomous Database Administration Workshop. Nikita: Thanks for joining us today. In our next episode, we will discuss Autonomous Database on Dedicated Infrastructure. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: …and Lois Houston signing off. 17:12 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.

The fruit of humility is the emergence of discernment. For beginners, it is a true knowledge of themselves. For intermediate souls, it is a spiritual sense that distinguishes what is truly good from what is of nature or opposed to it. For the perfect it is knowledge that one comes by through divine illumination. God illuminates the darkness within by his grace.  St. John begins to define for us the nature of this gift. However, what follows is quite different from how we in modern times think of discernment. So often it does not rise above private judgment or the natural virtue of distinguishing between the nature of things in accord with our intellect. Yet, as mentioned, discernment is a divine gift for which one prepares to receive through the grace of God and the ascetic life.  We must seek to remove every impediment to our having a well formed conscience. Furthermore, we must avoid the traps that the evil one sets for us to draw us back in darkness. We must continue toiling in this fashion until the very fire of God enters the sanctuary of the human heart and renders our proclivity for sin powerless and consumes every fever of lust and movement of passion within us. Knowing that the demons seek to extinguish this light, we must constantly press on in the struggle. We must not believe ourselves incapable of engaging in the spiritual battle but always trust in the action of God‘s grace.  Once St. John defined discernment for us, he begins to lay out the path of education in the spiritual life that is needed. He warns us not to stop with the beginner's lessons but rather to press on and strive to advance in our understanding. What we must come to value above all things is the science of sciences and the art of arts – that is the wisdom of the fathers. In comparison to our worldly formation, how deeply do we penetrate the treasure of their teachings? --- Text of chat during the group: 00:08:59 FrDavid Abernethy: Step 26 page 190   00:09:18 FrDavid Abernethy: On discernment of thoughts, passions and virtues   00:14:54 Sean: Isaac's awesome.   00:15:02 Art: Isaac the Syrian or Life of Repentance and Purity   00:15:32 Vanessa: Replying to "Isaac's awesome."   Agreed!   00:16:19 Sean: Replying to "Isaac's awesome."   I'm reading it a second time right now, slowly and listening to the old podcast.   00:25:21 Sean: #4. Why would one fall into disbelief upon seeing the supernatural? I would think it would lead one to believe in something more than oneself.   00:25:46 Vanessa: Reacted to "I'm reading it a sec..." with

Sean: What can we do to encourage empathy in our people? What can we do to teach them about empathy and how they can practice it in their lives and in their work and in their community? Because that's how we're going to change the world. Minter: One is that it needs to be realistic. So you're not trying to save the world because you can't save the world. That is a one way ticket to being depressed because you're disappointed in your inability to save the world. The second thing is associate yourself with something that's good and you. So what I mean by that is it's very easy to get wound up by any of these big causes. Hashtag Ukraine, hashtag BLM, hashtag save the world, hashtag empathy. The issue is or the question is how is this truly relevant to you? At a deep level, the number of people that have hashtag Ukraine on their webpage or Twitter profile or whatever and have never been to Ukraine, don't speak the language. Their name isn't Shevchenko. They have a normal name, never been there, don't speak Ukrainian or Russian. And they still put on this hashtag. So I'm not going to poopoo. Of course, it's a tremendously important situation, but think deeply about who you are and why you're going to connect to this cause. So this is sort of an injunction to the younger folks like your 22 to 30 year olds. You get attached to a cause. Yay! Sure. Yet do the work and figure out how it's deeply important to you. Not at some sort of do good. Put it on Instagram and show the world. But within you, why does it resonate with you deeply and how is that going to construct your identity in a positive way for you and the world? And I think a lot of people are not doing enough work on figuring out who they truly are and making that connection so that everything sounds great. We got to do all these things. We're going to pressure our bosses to do all these things, and they don't even have empathy for the bosses either, because reality is, bosses need to make decisions. Sometimes they're tough and help their bosses. Why not in formulating crafting a more meaningful cause that will do well for them? We'll do well for the business and everybody grows together. Sean:  It's so easy to say, but a lot of younger people still are, right? You know, you're nodding your head. You're raising your eyebrows. Where do you start with that? Minter? Not everyone is blessed to just have that kind of internal map within themselves. Minter: 100%. And so true. And the reality is I didn't know myself when I was younger. Took a while. So you need to experience things. I guess the point here is we'll keep experimenting and checking things out and maybe you're going to a job hop. That's okay. But if you can, little by little, start to craft what's truly important for you. I call it finding your North by experimenting with different things. What are the things that resonate on a deeper level that are realistic and are true to your core? And the more you, sort of, filter down and carve out what that means, the better you're going to feel. So go out, explore the world. But think about it along the way without necessarily knowing who you are, but along the way of experimenting, well, that was really something that was really cool, really deep. And hopefully that'll help you even to find out more about yourself. - - - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Website: https://leadershipstack.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack Leadership Stack Merch: https://leadershipstack.com/shop/ - - - Minter Dial Website: https://www.minterdial.com/ Book: https://minterdial.com/books/heartificial-empathy  

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Sean teaches Margaret about brewing alcohol. They talk about fermentation in general and then walk though how to make beer and cider. Guest Info Sean (he/him) can be found at https://seanvansickel.com/ Host Info Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Sean on Brewing Margaret: Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. This week we're talking about fermentation. We're talking about little things that eat things and then poop out alcohol. I actually don't really know because I'm the one who's going to be asking these questions and I record these introductions before I actually do the interview. So, I'm going to be learning more about fermentation and we're gonna be talking about alcohol, but we're also gonna be talking about all kinds of other stuff too. And I think you'll get a lot out of it. And first, we're a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on the network. La la la, la la la la [Margaret making musical melody sounds] Margaret: Okay, we're back. And so if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then I guess like a little bit about how you got into fermentation? Sean: So my name is Sean. Pronouns are he/him. Well, I actually started with, with cider and mead because I had a harder time finding commercially available cider and mead that wasn't just kind of like a novelty product or obscenely expensive, you know, imported from like Basque country or whatever. So that's, that was kind of where I got my, my kickoff on fermentation. I worked in commercial fermentation doing sour beer production as well as like conventional clean, you know, canned beer, and then actually worked in sales and distribution with beer for a while. Margaret:Okay, so this is really exciting because I've always kind of wanted to get into this. Well, I've kind of wanted to get into everything, which is the whole reason I started this podcast, so I could ask people about how to do things. But fermentation...so you can format things and it makes them different? What is fermentation? Sean: So fermentation basically is either yeast or bacteria breaking down almost always some form of sugar or carbohydrate. The main thing that is being produced by that is co2. But a nice little side effect that is often produced is alcohol, right, or lactic acid is often produced especially in the presence of bacteria, specifically in the presence of lactic acid producing bacteria. We call them you know, LAB is the abbreviation that's used. So, fermentation is happening generally-when people are referring to it--they're referring to yeast fermentation. So the most common yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, right, beer yeast. It's the same. It's called beer yeast. But that's the same yeast that's used to ferment wine. It's used to ferment like a sour mash, if you're, you know, making whiskey in a legal distillation situation as opposed to you know, the other distillation situation. It is illegal to distill alcohol for home use in the US. So, yeah, you have to be very careful you don't do that. On Accident. Margaret:Yeah, we won't cover that for a while. Sean: Yeah, right. Margaret: Okay, wait, is this the same yeast as like sourdough and all of that? Sean: It's very, very close. So sourdough is--especially if you make like a if you'd like a sourdough starter capture right from the air... I have not done this. It's something I've wanted to do. I've captured wild yeast for brewing from the air but never for baking. But they are a similar blend of airborne yeast, so you'll have wild yeast. You'll have wild Saccharomyces cerevisiae as well as wild other yeasts, Brettanomyces. Yeast strains are very common in air. And then you'll also have lactic acid bacteria in the air. So these are those rod shaped bacteria that are active in the absence of oxygen. They're anaerobic bacteria. So, they will continue to acidify things, even when there is no oxygen present to like kind of fuel or catalyze that reaction in a way that regular beer yeast, or even bread yeast, baking yeast, right, won't necessarily be able to do. Margaret: I'm really not used to the idea of thinking about bacteria as a positive thing. Sean: Right. No. So they are extremely a positive thing, Lactic acid bacteria, because they drop the pH as well. And lower pH means you don't have to worry about like botulism, for example. You know, so that's definitely a benefit. Most spoilage...So one number I'm going to be saying probably a few times is 4.2. 4.2 is like the pH level, below which you have a greater degree of protection because of the acidity, right. Margaret: Okay. Cause botulism doesn't like hanging out in there? Sean: Botulism is...I'm not 100% sure if it's the pH, the alcohol, or both. But botulism does not like low pH, nor does it like high ABV. So these are, these are both good ways of protecting yourself from that. Margaret: So it's that kind of...so fermentation probably comes originally, basically...Well, probably by accident. But originally probably comes from people just basically desperately trying to figure out how to make sure food doesn't go bad. And this is and fermentation is like, one of the many ways that humans have developed to keep food from going bad? Is that a? Sean: My theory is that's why fermentation stuck around. I think it showed up eventually because human... ancient, you know, human beings, proto humans even, you know, proto hominids realized they could get fucked up with it. Margaret:Yeah. That's fair. Sean: I think that's the key point. Like human nature hasn't changed that much. That will always be the driving influence on novelty, I think. Margaret: So, what are some of the things--I'm going to ask you about some of the specifics about how to do this a little bit--but what are some of the things that you can ferment? I know, you can make sauerkraut and you can make pickles? Nope, that's not fermentation. Sean: No, lacto fermented pickles, absolutely. That's frementation. Margaret: Oh, yeah. No, I totally knew that. That's definitely why I said it. Sean: Not like quick pickling with vinegar in the fridge. That's not an active fermentation process. And I do that too, like quick pickled red onions are like...those go well on everything. But no, like actual, like long term pickling. Hot sauces are a big one. You know, I did a batch of...I grew a bunch of jalapeno peppers. And then I went to like a restaurant supply type grocery store and they had like three or four pound bags of jalapenos for like, you know, they were starting to go off, right, I got them for like, under $1. So I fermented about 40 pounds of jalapenos in a five gallon bucket. And you just make a make of salt brine. Right. Like you can you can look up the levels. I think I did a 3.5% or 4%. saline brine in there. Margaret: I'll ask you the more specifics about how to do it in a bit. Sean: But yeah, so peppers you can do. You can do any kind of...anything that has an naturally occurring sugar usually can be fermented and emits....And when you have high levels of naturally occurring sugar, like the classic example is grapes, you usually are, you know, suspending that sugar and solution, water. Right. And you're making a beverage. Like that's the most classic example. That's, you know, wine, that's beer, that's, you know, fruit wines. You know, there's a lot of rural cultures throughout the world. There's, you know, non-grape wines, right, it's very common mead is another one, right, and probably the oldest. You know, we talked about the, you know, anthropological aspects of fermentation earlier. And, yeah, that's almost certainly we've, you know, a lot of evidence suggests mead, Margaret: Okay. So, when you ferment stuff, how long? What kind of shelf life are you able to get on something like hot sauce or sauerkraut or pickles and things like that? The like food stuff. Sean: Yeah. So you've definitely there are two dates at play here, which is the this is going to, you know, this still tastes really good and this is still a safe source of macronutrients and, you know, and things like that. I've had no decline in flavor with fermented hot sauce. And I usually package the fermented hot sauce in beer bottles with like a beer cap over the top or in a, like, sometimes mason jars as well. But in that packaging, I've not really seen any kind of degradation over like a two year time period, as far as flavor is concerned. It's probably foodsafe not indefinitely but probably at least 10 years. But it is going to depend on your process. It's going to depend on how much oxygen is introduced at packaging It's going to depend on the amount of salt that you have, you know, because salt is usually part of, you know, fermented food preservation and salt is a preservative. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of little factors that are going to affect that aspect of that. Margaret: Okay, but if you if you do it right, you can probably make bottles of stuff and leave them in your basement for like 10 years if you need to? Sean: Yeah, absolutely. Margaret: Fuck yeah. Sean: And that applies to especially lactic acid bacteria fermented alcohol. You know, whether that's like a French or Basque style cider or a sour beer. Those things we're talking, you know, probably a 20 year lifespan. Margaret: Oh, interesting. Okay, as compared to so that's the bacterially fermented? Sean: So the food is bacterially fermented as well. Margaret: But I mean, as compared to regular beer, right? Sean:Yeah. Yeah. Margaret How long does regular beer last? Sean Very high alcohol beer can last just as long because alcohol is a preservative just like salt, you know, the effects that some of these bacteria create. Bacteria and wild yeast like Brettanomyces is oxygen scavenging, right. So when you when it referments, if you re-...it's called bottle conditioning, right, it's where you add a small amount of fermentable sugar to a bottle and then cap it and then it referments in the bottle, you get a tiny layer a yeast at the bottom and it carbonates in the bottle. It's not done as often professionally because it produces pretty inconsistent results. But it is going to increase the lifespan of your beverage exponentially because as part of that like reproductive cycle, oxygen is scavenged and where there's less oxygen there's less spoilage. Margaret: So it's like putting the little oxygen absorber in with your like Mylar bag food only it's... Sean: Except it actually works. Yeah. [Laughing] It's far more effective because it literally is pulling every, almost every last, you know, unit of oxygen out of there and using it to fuel, you know, its own cellular reproduction. So it's not just being like absorbed and held--as much as it can be absorbed and held inert--it's like being used. Margaret: That's cool. Alright, so let's say I want to ferment because I kind of do. Let's start with...I think probably the average listener is probably thinking about how they're going to make beer or wine or things like that. Sean: Ciders probably the easiest. Margaret: Okay, so yeah, I want to make cider. What what do I do? Like what what do I need? How do I get started? Sean: You are in like actual apple country. If I understand correctly. So you have some options that most people don't. Where I am like getting getting really quality fresh pressed apple juice, apple cider, unfermented, right, is is a little bit of a challenge. But the easiest way to do it is to just go to a grocery store, you know, any place where you can get like the half gallon or gallon sized jugs of apple juice. You know, get them when they're on sale, get them in bulk. Use frozen apple juice concentrate if you want. It doesn't really matter. You are going to put that in a five gallon bucket, HDPE, high density polyethylene, plastic, right. It's a food-safe bucket. But like in food service, you see, you see these buckets used for pickles, you see them use for frosting at you know bakeries and things like that. If you want to do some dumpster diving, you can find yourself some of these real easy or if you just have a you know, a friend or member of your community that's, you know, involved or, you know, is working in food service they can probably hook you up with these as well. Worst case scenario, you.... Margaret: I'm looking it up, it's number two on the bottom of a? Like, plastic usually has a recycling symbol. Is it number two? Sean: HDPE? Margaret:Yeah. Sean: I don't remember if that's denoted with a number two, but it's HDPE plastic. Margaret: I just looked it up. Sean:Yeah. And it'll usually be specified as food grade or, you know, if it was used to hold food in the sense of the, you know, recycling and reusing from, you know, food service and like commercial kitchens and things like that, obviously, you know, you're taken care of in that respect. Margaret: I'm trying to look up to see whether like the Lowe's buckets are HDPE or not. Sean: There's two different types. Lowe's did have food grade ones. But the like, kind of universal blue bucket one, I believe it is HDPE but it is not certified food grade. So there might be contaminants in there. So, you would be maybe rolling the dice on that one a little bit. In a survival type situation or something like that, I think that would be fine. But, if you have other options, you know, maybe err on the side of caution. Margaret: Okay, that's good to know. I have a lot of these buckets for a lot of different purposes. Sean: Me too. Yeah. They get a lot of use in the garden. Margaret:Yeah, exactly. Now I'm like oh, are they not food safe. Should I not be growing tomatoes in them? And then I'm like, this is probably over thinking it. Sean: Depending you know, some something that like roots are touching not necessarily that food are touching versus something that you have in acidic and micro biologically active thing churning around that you are then going to drink in large quantities, like you know... Margaret: Okay. No, okay, fair enough. And this has been an aside Okay, so I've gone and gotten some apple juice, or if I'm really lucky I press some apples. And I've got a five gallon bucket and I fill the bucket with apple juice I assume? Sean: So, about four gallons of apple juice. Yeah, you gotta leave yourself some head space because you are going to, you know, have some activity in motion with the yeast. Then you're going to be pitching in yeast. For apple juice for cider you can use champagne yeast, right? That's, a very, very common one. It is a like a specialty product that you need to order online or get from like a homebrew store or a brewing supply store, something like that. You can use just regular like baking yeast, like breadmaker's yeast like Fleischmanns or whatever. It will work. You will get a few like...you're more likely to develop some off flavors, maybe some sulfur type, aromas. Things like that. And then you also might have a less healthy fermentation. So the fermentation might take longer and your final gravity right, the amount of residual sugar left by the fermentation will be higher and the amount of alcohol produced will be a little bit lower. Okay, so that's that's using like bread or baking yeast. If you're using a champagne yeast, you know, wine yeast, beer yeast even you are going to get a faster and much more complete fermentation. Less likely that contamination, if there is any present, will will take hold. Right? Margaret: Okay, what about um, like, let's say the supply chains are all fucked, right and I can't go get yeast. My two questions is one...okay well three questions. Can I use wild yeast? Second question, when you've already made this stuff, can you like reuse pieces of it as the yeast? Like in the same way as you like can with like sourdough or something? And then third question is, can you use a sourdough starter? That one so I'm expecting no. Sean: The answer to all of those is yes, actually. Margaret: Oh, interesting. Sean: And I'll go through one at a time. So your first, if there are supply chain issues, you don't have, or you just in general you don't have access, or you don't want to Margaret: Or you're in a jail cell and making it in the toilet or whatever. Sean: Yeah, right. that's gonna that's gonna have its own very special considerations. But yeah, you can absolutely use wild capture yeast. So the...what I would do with with the equipment that I have, I would get a cake pan and I would put...I would fill it maybe between a quarter inch and a half an inch high full of fermentable liquid, in this case apple juice. I put it outside, ideally on a spring or a fall day when there's no danger of a hard frost, right, either before or after, depending on which shoulder season you're in. But fairly close to that date is when you're going to get the best results. You're going to want to have some kind of a mesh over the top, maybe like a window screen or door screen, you know, screen door type mesh. Margaret: Keep bugs out? Sean: Yep, exactly. Keep bugs out. You want the microscopic bugs not the ones that we can see flying around in there, you know? So leave that out overnight on a cool night. If you have fruit trees, especially vines, any grape vines, anything like that, right under there is ideal. If you don't, just anywhere where there is some, you know, greenery growing. In the wild and you kind of have--not in the wild but you know, outside--in a non sterile, you know, non-contained environment, you're gonna have less luck trying to do this inside or, you know, in like a warehouse building or something like that. Yeah, this is actually, once you have that, you know, you've had it left overnight, decant it into maybe a mason jar or something like that with an airlock. I use like an Erlenmeyer flask just because I have them for other fermentation stuff. And you can with an Erlenmeyer flask, you can drop a magnetic bar in there, put it on a stir plate, and you know, knock the whole process out, you know, 10 times as fast. Obviously not necessary. But, it's a fun little shortcut if you want to, you know, drop $40 or $50 on a stir plate. Margaret: Is that just like a basically like, a magnet? Inside the flask that moves because of a magnet on the plate? Sean: Yep, that's it. Exactly. Margaret: That's Brilliant. Sean: Yeah, so you have like a little bar magnet. It's like coated in like a food safe plastic, right, so it's not gonna scratch anything up. And then you just drop that in, you turn on the plate, it usually has a like potentiometer, like little knob that you can control the speed on. Sometimes if you get the speed up too far, it will throw the magnet and then you've got to recenter it and get it all there. But that's great for, you know, doing your own yeast and bacteria captures. It speeds that up. Margaret: So it's speeding it up because you need to stir it. To go back to the I've just done this without a flask. I've put it in a mason jar. Sean: Yeah, just give it a swirl a couple times a day, give it a couple swirls. It is going to be, you know, working the same way just on a slower timeline. Margaret: And this is a sealed jar? Sean: Sealed, but with an airlock because again, anytime you have fermentation you have CO2 production, it you don't have an air lock, you've just made an improvised explosive device sitting on your kitchen counter. So you don't want that Margaret: Right. Usually not. Okay. So that's the little thing that you see sticking out of carboys where it's a little glass thing with some water in it. The thing goes through where the air bubbles go. Sean: Yeah, it's usually plastic. The most common ones are, it's like an S bend, right? The same kind of thing that you've seen, like sink and toilet plumbing to keep the stinky gas away. The function works the same way that gas can pass through in one direction. Margaret: So basically, you've captured some wild yeast and you've put it in a mason jar with an airlock and then it it...you're feeding it...it feeds off of that for a while and that's how you get your starter? Is that? Sean: Yeah, so that is your yeast. That is your inoculant, your starter? Yeah, but you do need to do a couple things to confirm that that is--because you know, wild captured isn't going to work every single time perfectly. It's why we've you know... Margaret: Why you can go buy champange yeast at a store. Sean: Yeah, everyone uses that. So what you need to do is you need to confirm that the pH is below 4.2. Okay, all right. So... Margaret: It's that magic number. Sean: Yeah, that's the big number for...I think that's what Douglas Adams was talking about, actually, he just probably pulled the decimal point. But no, so you need to make sure it's below 4.2 ph. You can do this with pH testing strips. Litmus paper. You can just, you know, put a drop of it on there and you know, see what color it is. I would advise against using the full pH range like the 0 to 14 ones just because since it is such a wide range, it can be kind of like "Is that greenish brown or is that brownish green?" like that's that's a whole point on the pH scale. The pH scale is logarithmic. So the difference between brownish green and greenish brown is a factor of 10. So like, you know, have a more narrow range. Litmus paper is ideal or a pH meter. They've gotten a lot better in the last five or ten years and a lot cheaper, like we're talking under $20. So those are really...if you're going to be doing fermentation, I would recommend using both just in case there's like a, you know, a calibration error or anything like that. It's just a good way to confirm. Margaret: Okay. Alright, so you've got to now, you know, the pH is under 4.2. What else are we checking? Sean: Yeah, we're also going to just use our olfactory sense. So get your nose in there. And if it smells like rotten eggs and sewage like toss that shit out. There are other bacteria at play that we that we don't want playing in our in our happy little colony here. So that needs to go and instead just, you know, do another capture. You want like fruity aromas, aromas that maybe have some spice or piquancy to them are fine. Like alcohol aromas are really good too, you know, things like that. These are all indicating fermentation production of, you know, of alcohol production of CO2 as well. You want to see that. That's another really good indicator is that and that's why I like those S-bend airlocks as opposed to they also make like a three piece one that just kind of percolates through. The S-bend one is really nice because you can see the CO2 coming through, right, you can see it coming through in bubbles. So you have a visual and audible indicator, right? Like you can hear that there are, you know, 10 or 15 bubbles coming through a minute, right. So you know that there is cellular reproduction happening and fermentation happening. Margaret: This whole thing...I recently recorded an episode about yeast, about sourdough, this is why I keep referencing sourdough. Yeah. And the whole thing is like hard for me to believe is real. Once I start doing it, I'll believe it but wild capture...Like sure the invisible alcohol makers in the sky are just going to turn it...like of course they are. Sean: It feels like some like biohacking, like bio-punk speculative fiction. Yeah. Like it totally does. Margaret:Yeah. But I love...I mean, when I start doing this, I'm gonna go out and buy yeast, right. But I'm much more interested in hobbies that I know that like, I know how I will do without buying chemicals if I have to, you know? Okay, so wild capture and then you said that you can also use... Sean: You can inoculate with stuff that you've already made. Margaret: Yeah. Sean: I think your second question, right. So the example I'll use for this is sour beer, right? I can go out and pick up a bottle of sour beer. I can drink the sour beer and leave just the dregs at bottom. I can swirl that up and I can pitch that into a fermenter and I've just inoculated it. That's it. Margaret: And so it can't be pasteurized, right? Sean: No, no, you don't want to pasteurize. But again, remember, we were talking about bottle conditioning, right. It's a bottle conditioned to beer. So, because it has sugar added to the bottle and it's naturally re fermented in the bottle, you know, built up co2 and nice, pleasant effervescent bubbles in the bottle that means that it is it is fully bioactive. That's great, too, because that...much higher levels of like vitamin B and things like that, as well as a full culture of yeast and bacteria, which are really good for your gut biome, which is also important. So that's why I'm a big fan. Pasteurization definitely helps for like safe transportation and breweries not getting sued when their bottles explode and leave glass in people's hands and things like that. Margaret: And so for anyone listening, pasteurization is where you treat it so that everything's dead inside, right? Sean: With heat. Margaret: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sean: Yeah, exactly. They slowly increase the pressure in increments that you don't notice until you find that everything is completely dead. Margaret:Yeah. Okay. Cool. And safe for capitalism. Sean: And safe for capitalism. Absolutely. Yep. [laughing] Margaret: Cool. All right. So once we've domesticize, the bottles of beer...okay, anyway. Sean: Yeah, so we want to avoid pasteurization unless absolutely necessary because then the product is less healthy for us and it's less useful for us in the future. We can't use it to inoculate other other batches. If I were going to be doing that, I would--I mean, again, going back to that stir plate, I'm talking about an ideal situation--I would add some of that to unfermented beer or cider on the stir plate and let that go because that's going to get my yeast and bacteria cell count up very, very high. That's going to ensure the fermentation and acidification start quick and finish strong. Margaret: Okay. And so is there any like...Is it just a taste difference if you were to like....if I were to go get sour beer and then dump it, you know, do everything you just said, and then dump it in as my starter for some cider, would it just be like weird? Or would it be fine? Or like. Like mixing flavors and mediums or whatever it would be called? Sean: Oh, so like fermentables. Like a mix of apples and malt for example. Margaret: Well, so it's like if I'm using...if the yeast I have access to is I drank a sour beer and I have what's left, right. But what I have access to to ferment is apple juice. Can I use that to ferment the apple juice? Sean: Absolutely. Margaret: And will it taste really wild and different? Or is it just kind of yeast is yeast? Sean: Not especially. Sour beers is yeast and bacteria. So you have yeast and bacteria at play. Margaret: Can I make make sour cider? Sean: Yeah. Because there's already both malic acid and lactic acid naturally present in apple juice, using lactic acid producing bacteria doesn't make it seem as sour as like sour beer, right? Because it's already, there's already these natural acids at play. In beer, like the pH of non-sour beer, it's lower than like water, but it's not low enough that our brains register as sour. So, when you apply those bacteria to a, you know, fermented malt liquid, it's such a huge gulf between non-sour bees and sour beer. Non-sour cider and sour cider are kind of adjacent more. There is one other little factor though, that ties into what you brought up, which is that yeast and bacteria over time are going to adapt to perform ideally in the fermentable that they have reproduced in. So, if you are reusing like a culture, and I'm going to use the word culture rather than yeast or bacteria because it's almost always a combination of bacteria and multiple yeast, right? If your culture has optimized itself to reproduce and to, you know, churn through the fermentables in beer, right, you have a lot of longer chain carbohydrates in beer than you do in fruit juice whether that's apple or grape, right? So they're going to evolve to deal with those and, you know, when you switch from one to the other, your first fermentation might be a little bit sluggish. Still perfectly viable. Margaret: So, okay, so to go back to where we're at in the stage. I really actually like...I think probably most of this episode will be just literally us walking through the steps of making some cider, but we're gonna learn so much along the way. I'm really excited about it. Sean: I'm here for it. I'm here for it. Margaret: Yeah. So okay, so you've gotten your apple juice, you've gotten your starter yeast. Ideally, you went and got champagne yeast, but maybe it's the end of the world and you wild captured or maybe you just don't want to do that. My plan is to start the easy way and then try the hard way later. Sean: Yep. Good. It's good to....You're more likely to keep going if your first endeavor is successful. Margaret: If I succeed. Yeah, that's my theory. Okay, now I've got my five gallon bucket. I've added yeast. I'm closing it and putting a little S... Sean: Airlock. And it doesn't...again going back, like if you don't have access to a homebrew store or the internet or whatever and you can't get an airlock, like you're not completely screwed here. All you need is a piece of hose or tubing in a cork or bung or something like that and stick the other end in liquid, you know. Maybe water with a with a few drops of bleach in it, sanitizing solution, vinegar, alcohol, whatever. Right? Because then it's just you know, the CO2 is blowing out of that tube and just bubbling out of thing. Like an airlock is cleaner, takes up less space, and is more optimized, but yeah, improvisation works fine. Margaret: Okay. How long am I leaving this? Does it have to be in a cool dark place? Like can I do this on the... Sean: You don't want direct sunlight. Alright, so you don't want direct sunlight and you don't want light from you know, you don't want Margaret: Grow lights, or UV, or whatever. Sean: Yeah, grow light or UV or anything like that. If you just got like, you know, ambient room light hitting hitting it, especially if it's in a bucket, you're probably okay. Beer is more of a concern because beer has hops, and hops are photosensitive, and your beer will taste like Heineken at a summer picnic, you'll get that like kind of skunky thing that you get in green glass bottles. Margaret: Yeah. Which I weirdly, I have positive associations with just from... Sean: A lot of people do. A lot of people do. It's like...What you like isn't isn't wrong. Like, it is what it is. It's an unfavorable characteristic to some people, but, you know, there's a lot of traditional German beers that are described as having a sulfur character. And it's like, I don't like that though, but it's correct. Margaret: I drink a lot of Grolsch. And like, yeah, yeah, I drank a lot of green-bottled Grolsch when I lived in the Netherlands. And it was not...Yep. I'm not trying to relive my cheap beer phase. But like, Grolsch was a good middle of the road, cheap beer, you know. Sean: I like the bottles because they're almost infinitely reusable. You've got to replace those little plastic... Grolsch bottles are the ones that have that swing top with a little cage that clicks down. So those are...I still have a few of them that I use that I have been reusing for almost a decade now. Margaret: That's amazing. Okay, now so we've got the bucket, you're keeping it out of the sun because you don't want Heineken and especially with hops. Margaret: Oh, I would assume gravity is about alcohol. Sean: It's less of an issue with with cider. But you're going to, depending on how finicky you want to be, you can test the original gravity, right? Original gravity is the original measurement of the liquid's specific gravity, basically how much sugar is in solution? Sean: No, gravity is sugar in solution. Margaret: So that's how you find out your relative...Go ahead, please explain it. Sean: Yeah, you look at how much sugar you started with and how much sugar you ended up with and subtract the difference. Yeah, because yeah, yeah, no, it's...there's a couple ways of measuring original gravity. Margaret: Yeah, how do you do that? Sean: The easiest, cheapest, and most like durable over like a long term survival situation is going to be the use of a hydrometer. So that is like a little glass. It almost looks like an old school mercury thermometer with a bunch of weights on one end and like a glass bubble. And that floats in solution. You can float it in like a little like a tall cylinder so you don't waste very much alcohol. You can also float it directly in the bucket. Right? And it's got little lines. It'll tell you like 1.050 Like, that's like the standard standard gravity for most beer and cider. Right? It's around, you know, 1.050 and that when it's fermented fully... Margaret: Is it measuring the buoyancy of the water? Sean: Basically, yeah. Margaret: Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, sorry, please continue. Sean: So that is how a hydrometer works. And then you'll measure it again. If you're doing it in a bucket, you don't need a cylinder, you just need to sanitize that hydrometer and then stick it in, measure the original gravity, the gravity reading before you add yeast, and then after--in the case of cider, I would say, you know, three or four weeks I would start checking it again. The other really nice thing about a hydrometer is you can hold off on packaging until you get consistent readings, right? So if you check your...you know, you've let it ferment for three weeks. You check your gravity on Monday and then you write it down, you know: 1.015. Then you check it on Wednesday: 1.014. Okay, well, maybe check it again on Friday: 1.013. No, it's still going down. Like we need to, we need to let this continue to ferment. Margaret: Okay, so you're basically letting it eat as much sugar as it can. Sean: Yeah, yeah, it'll...it's got its own limit. It's got its own limit. And once there are no more digestible, you know, saccharides then you're safe to package. If you package while the yeast is still actively fermenting, you've got two problems. One of them is the.... Margaret: Exploding bottles. Sean: You know, exploding bottles, as mentioned earlier. The other is that, you know, our cultures are generally pretty considerate in that they clean up after themselves, right? They metabolize the most easily available sugars first and then there are some compounds leftover. A lot of them have unpleasant, you know, tastes or aromas, maybe like a really bitter, pithy, green apple thing. Sulfur is very common, right. But these compounds, the yeast is going to turn to when it runs...and bacteria are going to turn to when they run out of very, you know, junk food, basically. Very easily digestible monosaccharides. Margaret: Is there something called young beer where it hasn't eaten at all? Am I completely wrong? I just have this in my head somewhere. Sean: Like it's like a historical thing, right? Like in English brewing maybe? Margaret: I don't know. Some concept where people intentionally drink beer that still has the sugar or something? [Sounding unsure] I'm probably wrong. Sean: No, semi-fermented beer is very much a thing. And I know in some brewing traditions, I think there's some in Africa that use like cassava and things like that where you're drinking it like 12 hours into the fermentation and it's like kind of like a communal thing. Like, you know, people, you know, make a big batch and everybody drinks it at once so that you know, you can get it right when it's super fresh. Tepachi as well, like the fermented pineapple drink in South America, it's kind of a similar thing. There's the pineapple and then there's brown sugar added as well and you want to start drinking it when about half of the sugar is fermented so it's still really sweet. It's almost like a semi-alcoholic, like bucha tiki drink sort of thing. Margaret: Okay. Before we get to packaging, my other question is, is beer just white sugar? Is that the thing that's added? Like, what is the yeast? What is it? What is the...or is it eating the carbohydrates instead of the sugar? Sean: The carbohydrates. Beer uses beer uses malted barley. So malting is a process by which you take you take your grains of barley, you get it slightly damp and you just keep turning it over. And the kernels will like begin to germinate. But before they like crack open and you get like a little shoot or something like that, the process of germination, basically you get a lot of these very difficult to digest carbohydrates converted into simple carbohydrates so that the emerging plant has a rapid source of fuel. Kind of similar to an egg in the survival strategy, sort of. Yeah, right. Once it once it's malted, right, once that has has taken place, they kiln it, right. So, they hit it with heat. And that kills the sprouting grain. So, it's not like the malt is going to like mold or, you know, go to seed or, you know, start growing or anything like that. That would be inconvenient. You want this stuff to be able to stay shelf stable for a couple years. So, they treat it with heat, right. And there are there are all kinds of ways of doing it. It is a very involved process. I have never malted my own grains. I've thought about doing it, but it's like very labor intensive and really only economical at pretty large scale. Margaret: Is this why people didn't fuck with beer until after they were fucking with cider and meat and all that shit? Sean: I think so. But, the first beers were actually made from bread not malt. So. Margaret: Because it's simple? Sean: Exactly. Same process, right? It's easier to make bread than it is to commercially, you know, kiln, you know, bags and bags of barley. And also, you know, bread has its own shelf life. So, if you're getting towards the end of it.... Margaret: Oh, yeah, then you turn it into booze. Sean: Exactly. And that's a thing in Russia too. Kvass, K-V-A-S-S, it's a it's made with, like rye, rye bread. And it's usually around 2% or 3% alcohol, but it's literally like a thing that you know, people... Margaret: I love low-alcohol beer. Sean: Yeah, me too. Oh, man. Like a 2.5% alcohol pale ale. Yeah, just a little bit of hops. That is like my sweet spot. Margaret: Yeah, absolutely. Because it's like, oh, I want to drink a beer, but I don't want to get drunk all the time. Like, you know, it's like I love a beer on the nice afternoon, but I hate the after afternoon nap that you could get stuck taking if you drink an 8% beear. Like what the fuck. Sean: Yeah, no, it just like the day's plans have all of a sudden have changed. Margaret: Okay, because the reason I asked about the sugar thing is the first time I ever helped someone ferment. They made dandelion wine. And ever since then I've been like this is all bullshit because dandelion wine--at least as this person made it--I was like, this is just cane sugar wine. It's just cane sugar wine with some dandelion flavor. And I was like really upset by this. Because I--and maybe this is bullshit--but it's like, which of these alcohols are mostly just cane sugar? And which ones can you actually ferment? Sean: Dandelion wine for sure is because there's virtually no fermentable sugars in dandelion, but there are a lot of very strong botanical flavors. Like dandelion wine...like the dandelions are more equivalent to like hops in beer than they are to malt in beer. Margaret: Because the hops are flavor? Sean: Yeah, they're adding they're adding flavor. They're adding aroma. They're adding like all of these botanical, you know, aspects to it, but they are not the source of the alcohol. They are not the source of the sugar or anything like that. Margaret: Okay, can you make dandelion wine with like, with actual...I mean, I know cane sugar does come from a plant, but it's still...I feel betrayed. Sean: Yeah. You could make dandelion...you could add dandelions to cider. I haven't done it but I've noticed people doing it. You can use, you know, any kind of like a reconstituted fruit juice and do like a fruit type wine. I think the reason...and I think the one of the more interesting ways of doing the dandelion wine thing is doing a dandelion mead. I've had a few of those that are really good. Margaret: Oh, that sounds nice. That sounds very like cycle of life, you know, like, honey and the flowers. Sean: It's a lot of closed loops, right? No, I think the reason that cane sugar became a convention for that is, you know, economic. Like cane sugar was fairly cheap. It was the cheapest, you know, fermentable available to rural people in the Dust Bowl era. Margaret: That makes sense. Yeah. Sean: I mean, artificially so, right. Yeah. I think that's where that came from. Margaret: Okay, so you mentioned doing all this in a bucket. I still want to get to the putting it in the bottles and stuff. But, is there an advantage...Like, do...Should I get a carboy if I have the money to spend. I'm under the impression that a carboy are a big glass bottle that looks like one of those five gallon jugs you put in your office cooler, only it's for making alcohol. Is that better? Sean: That's pretty much it. I don't...I don't like carboys. I've used them. I use them for bulk aging of sour beer. I use them for primary fermentation of clean beer and cider. I got rid of all of mine. Margaret: So you use buckets and stuff? Sean: I use buckets or I use converted kegs or converted stainless steel kettles if I'm doing a larger batch. It's just I have a like...for like all the sour beer I have like a 15 and a half gallon stainless steel kettle with a like a bulkhead. Like a like a valve on the bottom. And that allows me to like do pass throughs. So I keep that as like my acidifying chamber. It's called a Solera. I actually wrote a Kindle digital single about like building and maintaining these. It's almost exclusively useful for sour beer, you know, bacterially fermented cider or vinegar making. But, if you're doing any of that kind of thing, especially, you know, small scale, but you know, wanting to provide for a bunch of people like a club or community or anything like that, it's really the most efficient way to do it. Margaret: Why don't you like carboys? Sean: I don't like glass. I don't like glass because there's just a real risk of injury. When...if you've got a seven gallon carboy full of liquid, we're talking 70 or 80 pounds in a glass bottle. Margaret: Yeah, okay. I see where you're going. Sean: Things can go Bad real quick. When I use them, I had some that fit in milk crates so I could just pick up the milk crates. That helped out a lot. They also make, they call them I think just carboys straps, it's like a like a four piece harness with handles that you can use. But when I when I've seen them break, it's almost always when someone's setting them down, right? Anytime you're setting down something heavy, you know, unless you're very strong and have a great deal of control, right, that last little bit you can sometimes kind of crack it down. And again, we're talking 70 or 80 pounds in a glass bottle. And you don't have to crack it down very hard for the whole bottom to go out and that's a mess. Margaret: Yeah. Because then you got blood in your beer. And that's just... Sean: Yeah, right. It gets very Klingon on very quickly. And it's Yeah. But the other aspect I don't like is they're completely light permeable too, right cause they're just clear glass. Margaret: Yeah. That always seemed weird. You have to keep them in a closet with a towel on them or whatever. Sean: Yeah, yeah. It's just I think, again, it was...so homebrewing only became legal in the United States under Jimmy Carter. Right. It had been illegal from prohibition to Jimmy Carter. Yeah. Margaret: Holy shit. Yeah. Does that mean we'll eventually get home moonshining? I can't wait. Sean: I feel like if we were going to get it, it would have happened already. And I don't think the trends politically are towards individual deregulation anytime soon for that kind of thing. But you know, it is legal to make you know, like fuel alcohol. Some people make fuel alcohol and then lose it in barrels and things like that. Margaret: Yeah, it's not worth it for me. I always figure I shouldn't do anything that brings the Eye of Sauron anywhere near me. So I'm just not gonna make it. Sean: Oh totally. And, there have always been people who are going to do it, you know, illegally, but it's not worth the hassle. It can be like...I know we've been talking about fermentation on the side of, you know, consumption and food and beverage and all that, but I do know, people who have stills that use them to produce like fuel alcohol, you know, for backpacking and things like that. And that is valid. And you can, you can, you can produce, you know, fuel alcohol very cheaply, if that's the thing that you use for, you know, kind of off grid type stuff that can really be a useful a useful toolkit, but kind of outside of what we're talking about today. Margaret: Yeah, I'll have you on...have you or someone else on at some point for that. Yeah. Okay. So you've made your alcohol, this was all simpler than I thought. So now you have a bucket full of alcohol, and you don't want to just pass out straws. What do you do? Sean: Yeah, passing out straws is an option, but you need to, you know, make sure there are enough people in your in your group to get through five gallons all at once, I guess. No, so you're the two main options available are bottling and kegging. Right? So bottling is usually, you know, when we're talking about it as an alternative to kegging, rather than, you know, bottling from a keg, which is a totally different thing. If we're going to bottle it, we're probably going to bottle conditioned it. So, we're going to add a small amount of sugar back. What's that? Margaret: But why? Sean: Bottle condition? Margaret Yeah. Sean Bottle condition for the oxygen scavenging effects of Brettanomyces yeast. Margaret To make it as safe as possible. because we don't have commercial... Sean And shelf stable as possible. Margaret Right? Okay. If we had like a big commercial thing then there would be a way of bottling it where no air gets in, but because we're doing a DIY some air will get in so that's why we want to bottle condition to clean up our mess? Sean Well, even in commercial systems you are going to have oxygen ingress, but it's going to be significantly less than than what you have at home. Okay. So yeah, that's going to help with that. So we got longer shelf life both for like a quality flavor product and a, you know, safe to consume product. Both of those are extended. That also adds carbonation, which a lot of people really enjoy, you know, having the nice fizzy bubbles. Margaret Oh, it's flat until this point? Sean Yeah, yeah. Totally flat. Because it's only going to pressurize in a sealed environment. It's only going to carbonate in a sealed environment. Margaret No, that makes sense. Sean You got to blow off tube. So all your co2 is, is going away. Margaret Does that mean people don't bottle condition their wine because otherwise you make champagne? Sean You wouldn't want to add sugar to wine that you are bottling unless you are trying to make sparkling wine. But of course it wouldn't be champagne unless it came from Champagne, France. Margaret I'm glad we have the same bullshit cultural reference. 90s...whatever. Sean Oh, man. That one is, like... Margaret I love Wayne's World. Sean ...hilarious too just in their own right. Margaret Okay, so, okay, so, back to our cider. We're bottling it. Oh, but that actually...cider is not normally carbonated. Is DIY Are you kind of stuck? Does bottle conditioning always carbonate it? Sean You can, if you want if you want still cider, just don't add sugar. Margaret How are you bottle conditioning then? Sean It's just not bottle conditioning, it's just bottled. It still has yeast in there, it still has all of that in there because you haven't pasteurized it, right? So, it still has those those health effects. Shelf life might be a little bit lower. I haven't seen any significant studies on comparing, you know, home produced still versus, you know, carbonated, you know, via bottle conditioning insider. But I would like to. Like that would be really...that'd be some really useful data if somebody wants to get on that. But you still are probably going to have a good few years of preservation. And again, the higher the alcohol you get the longer it's going to be shelf stable, right? You have fortified your cider with say brown sugar, right? That's a very common one that people will do. You add brown sugar and maybe some cinnamon or vanilla, right, especially for kind of like a winter drink. You can very easily make a cider that's 11% or 12% alcohol and ferment almost as quickly and that is going to stick around just fine. And it tastes really good. Margaret You know I want this. I don't even drink very much. But yeah, this is making me...I'm on...like, I barely drink anymore, but I'm like, I just want to make this stuff. Sean It is a lot of fun. And I've always really gravitated towards like the kind of like sensory aspects of beverage. Yeah, like, just the, I don't know, I love a head change. Don't get me wrong. Yeah. You know, there's a reason that humans, that we've been covergently evolving with alcohol for as many millennia as we have. But there are flavors that only really come out through, like for fermentation, specifically through lactic acid fermentation, and I'm talking flavors in beverages and food. You can get you get these, you know, different compounds from all different aspects of the process that you just can't get anywhere else. Margaret Okay, but we're, we're coming up towards an hour and I want to get to the point where my cider is in bottles. Sean Where we have drinkable alcohol? Margaret How do I get it? How do I get it into the bottles? So am I like siphoning it like you're stealing alcohol? Like when you're stealing gas? Sean Yeah, you can people do that. But they also make what's called an auto siphon, which is just like a little racking cane kind of arm that you just put the tubing on. And that like, let's it starts the siphon for you. It automatically starts to siphon for you. So you don't get your bacterial mouth on tubing. Margaret Yeah, that makes sense. Sean Yeah, you know, in a survival situation, you know, switch with some vodka and do it and call it good, but in an ideal situation, a sanitized, racking cane is ideal. Even more ideal, I think a lot of people do especially with cider because it doesn't produce nearly as much yeast sediment, just ferment in a bucket that has a little valve or bulkhead on it. Margaret Oh, down at the bottom? Sean Yep. All you got to do is take your bucket, sit it up on your counter, you add in you know a little bit of sugar. It's usually around like four ounces of sugar, you dissolve it in boiling water and then add the sugar solution. Stir it gently. And then you just use that valve to fill the bottles. And then you use a bottle cap or you can either use like a bench capper that like sits on a bench and has like a little lever arm like this. That's a lot more ergonomic. They also have these they call them wing cappers. There's two handles and you just kind of set it on top of the cap and then you know, push down. I have definitely broken bottlenecks with the wing cappers before. Yeah, not broken any with a bench capper. So I would definitely recommend a bench capper. Margaret Or, drink Grolsch. Sean Yeah, drink Grolsch. Yeah. And any kind of you can, you can save those. It's not just Grolsch bottles, but those are probably the most common ones. They have like a little swing cap cage, a little ceramic cap with a rubber grommet. You have some kind of siliconized grommet. Yeah. And that just sits there and then clicks it in place. And yeah, those sometimes you have to replace the little rubber part after every six or eight uses of the bottle. But yeah, that's a hell of a lot better than replacing the whole thing. Okay, once you have bottled, though, you are going to need to leave them alone for two or three weeks because the bottle conditioning needs to occur. So, it's refermentation in the bottle. So in order to get that CO2 built up and those those nice lovely bubbles, you're gonna have to leave that alone. Margaret But if it's cider, we can drink it right away because cider isn't conditioned. Sean Yeah, cider or wine. I like bottle conditioning cider. I like to carbonated cider. But if you're, if you're leaving it still, you know, that's kind of like the English tradition. I think you generally see more like carbonated cider, though. Margaret I'm...yeah, now that I realize I do....Cider does have carbonation. Great. I totally know what I'm saying. Sean Some don't and like a lot of...like, I was relating to like Basque cider. And you know, from like the France and Spain kind of border area you have like this huge range of carbonation. There you have some that are like champagne levels, like over carbonated like, you know, almost burns your nose when you drink it. And you have some that are completely still and then you have some that are, "Oh, yeah, I guess there are bubbles in here. I guess this is technically carbonated." Yeah, pétillant is the industry term. But so there is like a huge range on that. Margaret Okay, so the stuff I need is I need a fermentable, I need yeast. I need a not carboy but a bucket or whatever. I need a water lock...airlock. Sean Airlock or a blow off tube. Yeah. Margaret Yeah, and I need a way...either a spigot or a auto siphon. And I need bottles, bottle caps and a capper. Sean Yep. The other thing that I would say you need is, you need some kind of a sanitizer. If we're going with convenience, the easiest one is like a brewery specific sanitizer Star San or Quat, things like that. They're no-rinse sanitizers. So you don't...They sanitize and they leave a little bit of foam in place. And you don't need to rinse them. They will be broken down by the process of fermentation and they are soluble in alcohol and they are completely food safe. Yeah. So you generally buy these in like a concentrated form, like a 32oz or 64oz bottle with a little like dispenser, you know, thing at the top, and half an ounce of this concentrate will make...one ounce of the concentrate will make five gallons of sanitizing solution. So if you have one of these around... Margaret Jesus, so that's enough for a long time. Sean Yeah, I know, I've replaced my at some point, but I can't remember when the last time it was. Like, you don't go through it very quickly. It's definitely worth investing. You can, again in a pinch, you can use, you know, water diluted with bleach and then just rinse it with like water that's been boiled. Yeah, you can use you can use alcohol, right? You can you can use... Margaret If you have that still that we of course won't have...Once the apocalypse comes and we all make stills. Sean Yeah. Right, then in that situation, and obviously, you can use that to spray it down. You can even put, you know, in our in our current, you know, situation, you can you can put pop off vodka in a fucking Dollar Tree spray bottle and yeah, do it that way. You know, like there are options for that purpose. You know, like, you know, industry specific beverage and brewing no-rinse sanitizers are the easiest. And again, like we were talking about. Margaret Yeah, if you're planning it out. Sean If your first endeavor, if it goes well, right, and everything works easily, you're more likely to keep doing that. So, I definitely recommend using those, if possible, but again, certainly not necessary. Once you you've got that, the only other bit of material that we talked about, and it is optional, is the hydrometer. Margaret Oh, yeah, that's right. Because then you know when it's done. Sean You can also use a refractometer, which is a different piece of technology I mentioned. I meant to mention this earlier, but I didn't. A refractometer is...it almost looks like a little Kaleidoscope that you put up to your eye, but it's got like a like screen and then a piece of plastic that clips on top that lays flat on top of the screen. You put a couple of drops of your liquid on the screen and then put your plastic on there and you look through it. And it shows you on a line what your specific gravity is based on its refractometary index. Margaret Is the reason people homebrew is because they want to feel like mad scientists? And they want alcohol. Sean A lot of people I'm sure. Yeah. Margaret I mean, this is some mad Scientist shit. Now you use the kaleidoscope to find out how much alcohol there is. Sean I feel like yeah, you should have some Jacob's Ladders and Tesla coils behind you as you're doing it. Margaret That's how you sanitize is you make the ozone with it. Anyway. Sean Oh, you just lightening flash the ozone. Yeah, I can't believe I haven't heard about this. Yeah, no. The nice thing about the refractometer is we're talking like half a cc of liquid being used. So it is a really, really efficient way to measure it. It will not measure accurately in the presence of alcohol. There are like equations that can like compensate for this a little bit. Margaret Wait, then what good does it do? Sean It tells you how much is there originally. So if, like for me, I know to what degree like my house culture of yeast and bacteria ferments. It ferments down to like .002 or even just 1.0. The same lack of sugar in solution as water, basically. Right? So if I know that, I don't need to measure it at the end if it always winds up at the same place. Right? If I was selling it, I would need to, but if it's just for personal consumption, and I always know where it's finishing, I just need to know where it's starting and I know what the alcohol is. Margaret Okay. But then you can't tell if it's done except for the fact that you've done this enough that you're like the bubbles have stopped. It's been a week. I'm used to this. It's done. Or whatever. Sean Yeah, yeah. So, for Starting off, I definitely recommend the hydrometer. It's just more effective. And if you're doing all of your fermentation in a bucket anyway, it's real nice because you can, you can just put it in, you don't have to pull some out, put it in a sample, pour it, you know, put it in a tall cylinder and then toss that, you know, eight ounces of beverage down the drain or whatever. Margaret Yeah. Well, I think that's it. I think that we're out of time and we didn't even get to the food stuff. So, I'm gonna have to have you back on if that's alright some time. Sean Yeah, that's absolutely fine by me. I've enjoyed myself thoroughly. Margaret Fuck yeah. Is there anything that you want to plug? Like, for example, you have a book that people can buy about how to do some of this stuff? Maybe if more than one? I don't know. Like, you wanna? Yeah. Sean So "The Self-sufficient Solera" is the name of the book. I just did it is a Kindle single on Amazon. So you can you can get it there. If you don't, if you don't want to go through there, my website Seanvansickel.com. And yeah, there's contact info there too. You know, if anybody has any questions about any of this stuff, I love to share that and all of my writing is collected there. So, I've published an article on like, composting spent grains and like, you know, reducing waste from home brewing. I published that with Zymurgy Magazine recently. And, you know, that's all on there and original fiction and all that good stuff, too. Margaret Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much. And I look forward to talking to you more about this soon. Sean Sounds good. Have a good one. Margaret Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed that episode then go get drunk. I don't know, maybe don't go get drunk. If you don't drink, we will be talking about fermentation that doesn't have to do with alcohol at some point in the future. And tell people about the show. We're weekly now. And you can be like, "Holy shit, this shows weekly," and people be like, "I've never heard what you're talking about." And you can be like, "I can't believe you've never heard of Live Like the World is Dying, what the fuck is wrong with you?" Or, instead of gatekeeping, you could just tell them that they can find it wherever they listen to podcasts. And if they're like, "I don't listen to podcasts," you can be like, "That's fair. Everyone gets information in different ways." I mean, you can be like, "No, you should absolutely listen podcasts. It's the only reasonable thing to do." You can also support us by supporting us on Patreon. Our Patreon is patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is an anarchist media collective that puts out, you'll be shocked to know this, it puts out podcasts like this one, and Anarcho Geek Power Hour and Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And we also put out zines and we put out books, including my most recent book "Escape from Incel Island." So you should support us if you want. It allows us to pay for transcriptions and audio editing and makes all of this possible. And in particular, I would like to thank top of all--I can't say Hoss the Dog is the best dog because Rintrah's the best dog. I'm sorry Hoss the Dog. I know every dog is the best dog to their individual people that they hang out with. But Rintrah is the best dog. But close runner up, just like close runner up on also Anderson, but close runner up is Hoss the Dog. And I'd also like to thank the following people who are presumably humans. Michiahah, Chris, Sam, Kirk, Eleanor, Jenipher, Staro, Cat J., Chelsea, Dana, David, Nicole, Mikki, Paige, SJ, Shawn, Hunter, theo, Boise Mutual Aid, Milica, paparouna, Aly, Paige, Janice, Oxalis, and Jans. Y'all make it possible. As for everyone else, y'all are also great because we're all going to try and get through this really, really nasty shit together. And we're doing it. We're so here. We will continue to be here. That's the plan. All right. Oh, goodbye. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

(01:15) The role of luck in success (04:25) Time in the game matters (08:45) Worst things we've done as a business (09:30) Sean- It got legal (10:50) Matt - Shut it down (16:15) Two hero products confuse pixels (20:00) Jason - Driving garbage traffic (25:00) HexClad product diversification (27:30) Homepage takeovers suck (30:30) Advertising diminishing returns (33:50) Facebook scammers (38:15) Facbook - BOF, MOF or TOF (46:19) Amazon advertising inefficiencies (01:05:21) Mike - Worst business bets In the world of eCommerce, a legendary WhatsApp group is rumoured to hold the secrets to unimaginable success. The catch? You must have nine figures in revenue to gain entry. The worlds biggest brands have denied its existence for years, until now. Three titans known as "Operators" are leaking the secret contents in an effort to share its wealth of knowledge with people like you. Powered By Northbeam.https://www.northbeam.io/ Each of the 9 figure operators use Northbeam to measure everything and scale everywhere. Visit Our Website: https://www.9operators.com/ Follow us on Twitter: Sean (Host) https://twitter.com/SeanEcom Jason (Host) https://twitter.com/JasonPanzer Matt (Host) https://twitter.com/mbertulli Mike (Host) https://twitter.com/mikebeckhamsm Finn (Producer) https://twitter.com/finn_radfordNorthbeam (Partner) https://twitter.com/northbeam We Rise Together --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/9operators/message

In this final episode of Season three, Siobhan Kiernan from the class of 2021 speaks with Sean O'Connor from the class of 1992. As a fundraiser and member of the Holy Cross Annual Fund Team, Siobhan talks with Sean about his accomplished career in fundraising. Today, he continues to make a difference as the Chief Development Officer at the National Audubon Society. Their conversation gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to support the nonprofit organizations that we love. The Holy Cross mission of serving others is central to the work that they do. As people foreign with others, their careers modeled the idea of doing well while doing good. Interview originally recorded in August 2022. --- Sean: When I'm being reflective of the relationship between the effort and the work that I've applied my daily profession to the outcome, it completely aligns with my worldview of actually helping other people and helping organizations and helping the world. Whether it's through art, or healthcare or science or human rights or conservation, I feel pretty good about that. Maura: Welcome to Mission Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney, from the class of 2007, Director of Alumni Career Development at Holy Cross. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's show. In this final episode of Season three, Siobhan Kiernan from the class of 2021 speaks with Sean O'Connor from the class of 1992. As a fundraiser and member of the Holy Cross Annual Fund Team, Siobhan talks with Sean about his accomplished career in fundraising. After a year in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, Sean accepted a role raising funds for a small Catholic school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Thanks to the support and encouragement of some Holy Cross alumni, he accepted a position with CCS fundraising, which brought his fundraising overseas and greatly expanded the scope of his work. Today, he continues to make a difference as the Chief Development Officer at the National Audubon Society. Their conversation gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to support the nonprofit organizations that we love. The Holy Cross mission of serving others is central to the work that they do. As people foreign with others, their careers modeled the idea of doing well while doing good. Siobhan: Hello everyone. My name is Siobhan Kiernan and I am a 2021 Holy Cross grad, and current member of the Holy Cross Fund Team. And I'm joined here with Sean O'Connor. Hello, how are you? Sean: Hi Siobhan. Good to see you again. Siobhan: Yeah, you too. Where are you zooming from? Sean: I'm zooming from Goldens Bridge, New York, which is Northern Westchester County near Bedford and North Salem. Siobhan: Nice. Oh my gosh. I'm zooming from New York City, so... Sean: Oh wow. Whereabouts? Siobhan: In like little... I'm on the Upper East Side right now. It's where I grew up. Sean: Oh, that's right. I grew... For a while. I lived on 83rd and third when I did all this. Siobhan: Oh yes, we talked about this. Sean: Yeah, right. Siobhan: Oh, that's awesome. Are you from New York? Sean: No, I actually grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts where there's a school called Holy Cross, is there I think. And I in that way was born at St. Vincent Hospital and then grew up really in Holden, Massachusetts, which is just north of Worcester. And I went to Wachusett Regional High School. And I know your next question is why I don't have an accent, but for some reason I dropped the Worcester accent. When I went to Holy Cross, actually, ironically, I think my accent started to go away. Siobhan: They ironed it out of you. Sean: They must have ironed it out of me, yes. I could put on the Worcester accent, but only under severe pressure. Siobhan: That's so funny. I've been told that I don't have a New York accent either. Sean: No, you don't. Siobhan: So I guess there's something about Holy Cross and taking out accents. So you kind of really just started this, I guess, but why Holy Cross? I mean, I know you're from Worcester, but some people I know probably wouldn't have wanted to go to a school in their hometown. So why did you stay, and what about Holy Cross made you want to go there? Sean: It is a family school. For me, my grandfather was class of '31 and my father was class of '66. My uncle was class of '62. I think even have one of my other father's relatives went there. And so I always had heard about Holy Cross. And I lived on campus, I didn't commute even though I was about 10 miles away from Worcester, or from home rather. But it was obviously one of the most important decisions I made as a young person. And then probably, in truth, is probably the best school I got into when I was applying for colleges. That was another part as well. Siobhan: No, but that worked out. The one thing I love about Holy Cross is that you can feel very much away even if you are local. Sean: Right. Siobhan: I have friends who lived off campus and I remember I always lived on campus and my thought process was, you have your whole life to live outside the gates of Mt. St. James. Why would you want to go now? Sean: Right, for sure. But I enjoyed it. It was great. Siobhan: Yeah. So what was your time on campus? What did you do? What did you major in? What activities did you like to do? Sean: I was a history major, and I took my academics semi-seriously, I think. I'm a lifelong reader and I probably am still interested in history and read a lot of William Durant history surveys when I'm on the plane on a tarmac or something like that. So I still enjoy learning, but I spent a lot of time on extracurricular activities. I didn't play sports, and maybe once in a while would play a soccer pickup game if one existed. But I was involved in the radio station, I was the station manager for a year. Siobhan: Oh cool. Sean: And a DJ. And then I was involved, I think in one of the campus activity boards, I think my senior year. Is it called SS or something? I'm trying to remember then what the acronym was. Siobhan: Or is it CAB? I mean, today I think it's probably the equivalent. Sean: Something like that. I would put on concerts at Hogan. I did one concert. I think I almost got kicked off campus because I did not go through the proper channels of getting permits and things like that. So I learned a lot at college about doing things like that. We had a band called The Mighty, Mighty Boss Tones playing in the basement, which was a fun, legendary show. And then when I was at the station, radio station, we did a kind of benefit concert for the Worcester Coalition for the Homeless in Worcester. There was a band named Fugazi that we brought up to Worcester and did a show, which is fun. So we did some fun stuff connecting Worcester where I grew up to Holy Cross. I was also a resident assistant in the Mulledy basement. So yeah, it was a fun four years. Siobhan: Wow. So you mentioned you were a history major. I'm always curious, because I did economics, why history? And did you have a favorite class? Sean: I kind of go back and forth between really US history and European history or world history. And I did take an African history class, which is pretty influential. Professor David O'Brien was my advisor and he's kind of a labor and Catholic historian. And I still am interested in labor history. I can get really geeky I suppose, about history. I just really do enjoy it in terms of understanding patterns and issues and big issues that we're facing now as a country, and what are the historical analogs, and what has happened in the past that informs where you are right now. And all my family were English majors or our English majors. I think my daughter is an English, is going to become an English major, not a history major. My son was a poly sci major at Bucknell and a film major. But history is, I just enjoy it. And I go back and forth. I probably read more non-US history these days, but it's an escapism too for me. Dealing with everything else, it's kind of fun to read about the Age of Enlightenment or something like that, and just learn about different thinkers and different parts of history that you weren't aware of. And then if you get really excited, you can go deep on those things and get really geeky. Siobhan: I took one history class in Holy Cross, and I found that I almost felt like an investigator, like a detective, which as an economics major it is... That's a different way of thinking. So actually I have a lot of respect for the history department. Cause you very much have to tell a story, and really unpack documents and things. And I think that's... Sean: Yeah, for sure. Siobhan: And you mentioned your professor. I always love to hear about, because the school is so small and the community is so great. Is there anyone that comes to mind who had a meaningful impact on you at Hogan? Sean: Academically, David Chu, who is my accounting professor, and I just didn't do as well in accounting, but that taught me a lot about the importance of studying, actually. There was a professor Whall when I took my early survey class in history, which kind of awakened me to academic writing in a different way. And I lifeguarded at the pool, so got to hang out with the late Barry Parenteau who just passed away. And that was fun times there. And then some of the student life people, I think Dean Simon, I'm trying to remember his name, but he was the one that I worked with a little bit in my senior year. He was the Student Life Dean, if I remember correctly, out of Hogan. And then actually career advisors towards the end. I think one of the more influential people in my career, if we segue into that section, is this John Winters, who is there as a career advisor who really got me on the pathway of where I am right now. Siobhan: Oh, fabulous. Actually, that was a great segue. That was actually my next question was going to be, could you just take me through from commencement to where you are? Sean: Sure. Siobhan: Your journey. I did look into your bio a little bit and you had a very vast career so far, but I want to hear about it from you, your whole journey. Sean: So when I got out of school, I remember second semester, senior year, gosh knows what you're going to do. But I think I interviewed, think at some advertising agency, Leo Burnett, that has historically hired Holy Cross grads and did not get the interview. But I was able to go to Chicago for that all day interview, which was kind of fun. Get to stay in the fancy hotel for the first time. And then when I got out of school I ended up going to Jesuit Volunteer Corps. So I did the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in the northwest and was stationed, or placed, I guess is the language in Auburn, Washington, which is between Seattle and Tacoma. And my placement, or my job, the volunteer job was working at a residential youth shelter for physically and sexually abused kids. And I was doing that for a year. And so my job was to take to care of them, drive them to school, make them dinner, take them on field trips, and then talk to them. And then, learning what it meant to be a social worker and would write about my day and my interactions to help the therapists and the psychologists who are helping them connect the dots about what issues they were facing. They were typically there for a couple of weeks. It was transitional short term, before they might have been between foster placements or they might have been just removed from the home. And the state was trying to figure out what to do with them. So it was a very eye-opening experience, making $20 a week living in a community in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. But that moment I was actually really interested in understanding how nonprofits were financed. I was like, all right, so how did they actually get the money to do the work? How does it actually work? So I was able to understand a little bit about the particular organization I was volunteering at. It was called Auburn Youth Resources. And they would receive a lot of money from the King County, which is the local county outside of Seattle. But the philanthropy piece, that people would give them money was relatively small. And anyways, it was, it's an opportunity for me to think about that. I wanted to do good but also do well. And I think a lot of this has to do with Holy Cross, but also that my parents or both teachers. My brother's a teacher, my sister's a teacher, my other sister who went to Holy Cross works in nonprofits as well, she was class of '95. So I think that, my family upbringing and combined with Holy Cross in terms of its ethos of men and women for others, I think really kind of pushed me into this career, which wasn't really a career back then. I don't know if you want me to keep going, but when I got back from the year of volunteer work and I came back to the East Coast, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I lived in Worcester, outside of Worcester. I thought I wanted to move to Boston where, because I was nearby that was a big city, or move to Washington DC where a lot of my roommates were and friends. But John Winter in the Career Center said, did you ever think about development? And I said, what's development? And we talked more about it, what that actually meant. And he connected me with a guy named Pat Cunningham, who I think is class of '85. And Pat Cunningham worked in New York City, and at the time he worked for the Archdiocese of New York. And the program there was that they were trying to help small Catholic parochial schools become sustainable. So small Catholic schools in New York City were always a big deal for helping teach kids and families who didn't have a lot of money, but get a good education. The outcomes were terrific. Typically, a lot of the kids went on to college. But the financial model was becoming challenging, because the religious communities who would tend to teach at those schools was diminishing. So they would have to hire lay teachers, you don't have to pay a Sister as much as you have to pay a layperson. So I think that caused like, oh my goodness, tuition is not covering the cost. And so they were trying to figure out a way could they raise money? Like private high schools, like St. John's in Shrewsbury or St. John's in Danvers, as BC High or Notre Dame Academy, they tend to raise money from their alums or parents. Pat Cunningham's job was to figure that out with some parochial schools in New York. There was a philanthropist who just passed away a couple of years ago, a guy named Richard Gilder, who was a Jewish, who founded a company Gilder, Gagnon, & Howe. Anyways, he believed in Catholic education and funded a lot of these schools. He believed in the outcomes and giving back in the community. And so he was essentially underwriting director and development positions. So the salary that a director of development would require. So there was an opportunity for me to work at a school called St. Columba Elementary School, which is on 25th between eighth and ninth without any experience at 23 years old. Siobhan: Is it still there? Sean: It is still there. But unfortunately, the school is closed and is now probably a private or a charter school. It Is the school... Had a couple famous alums, Whoopi Goldberg, graduated from... it's the school Whoopi Goldberg graduated from St. Columba, and as well as a singer from the sixties and seventies, Tony Orlando went to St. Colo. He's a guy who sang Tie A Yellow Ribbon and Knock Three Times. You ever hear those songs? No. Knock three times on the ceiling. Siobhan: Maybe. Sean: Yeah. I don't want to sing it. So what I had to do is work with the sisters and figure out a way to help raise money. And I learned a ton. It was fun. I started talking to some of the colleagues who were doing the similar work in the city, and we created a consortium of colleagues, I think we called it ourselves development, gosh, I forgot what we called it. Ourselves like Development Resources, Development Resource Group, I think DRG maybe. In any case, we would meet and just try to do some brainstorming and figure out how to solve problems. And we actually got some funding to actually help our little mini consortium. And I was there for about a year. It was fun. Siobhan: And then I know that you also did some foundation work, correct? Sean: Yeah. So after what? So I was doing that for a year, and then I had heard about this big company called CCS Fundraising and it's called... At the time it was called Community Counseling Service. And it's still around. It's a big, big fundraising company. And at the time, back when I was there, it's probably quadrupled since I was working there. Any case, we didn't have any money at St. Columba for professional development. So there was this big conference in New York called Fundraising Day in New York. And it is held every, it's the third Friday of June every year. So it's like a one day, it's one of the biggest fundraising conferences in New York. But to go to it, you know, it's like $600 or something like that. And we didn't have any money at St. Columba to do that. And so there was a scholarship opportunity. So if I wrote an essay to the committee that they would send scholarships out. So I wrote an essay to the committee and they underwrote my admission. So I was able to go to the event. And at the event I ran into an executive at CCS Fundraising and talked to him. He encouraged me to apply to CCS, which I did. And then I got a job with CCS Fundraising, which really did change my career for the good. And they sent me all around the world and helped train me in fundraising. And it was great. I was there for a long, long time. And that's where I did do some foundation work. So to continue on that, so when I got to CCS, I went to Yorkshire, England to do some work for the Diocese of Leeds and raise money there. So essentially CCS as a company that would get hired by nonprofits to actually help them raise money. Siobhan: Like a consultant. Sean: A hundred percent like a consultant. And it's weird because you'd be 24 years old or 25 years old and you're a consultant. And I remember a lot of my family friends is like, what do you know? You're just a kid. And there was a lot of truth in that, because I didn't know what I was doing. But the way the model worked at CCS was that they would train you, and there was actually different levels of consulting. And actually modern consulting firms like McKinsey have a similar model where you have the partners who are the thought leaders, and the business development people who actually find the clients. And they just need people to do the work. And those are the directors, the associate directors who essentially just took direction from the leadership. And in the case of going to the Diocese of Leeds, my charge was to work with parishes and coordinate, manage, design and execute what I would call mini-campaigns for each of those parishes. So I would go to the priest, I would orient the priest on the plan, we'd recruit a leadership team and go out and raise money. It was a very, very difficult assignment, but I learned a lot about resilience and persuasion and problem-solving and persistence and all that stuff, because it was a very intense five or six months. But it was fun. Get to live in Yorkshire in the middle of the winter when you're 24, 25 years old. That was great. Siobhan: I was going to say, that also just sounds really cool because you kind of get to dabble in so many different types of advancement. I know in development, I remember when I first learned about it, I was like, oh, that's like for schools. And I'm like, wait, no. There's fundraising for hospitals and political campaigns and nature organizations, which I want to get to eventually. Sean: And human rights organizations or arts and cultural groups. I think that that's a really good point, Siobhan, because where I got really lucky was that I, and it really serves me well right now at this stage in my career that I have a very diverse set of experiences and what we call multi-sector kind of experience. I'm not just a higher ed fundraiser, I've done every single type of nonprofit fundraising. And when you do that, you get to see where the commonalities are, and what the challenges are. Everything from a museum on Japanese sculptor named Isamu Noguchi, or to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, with Dr. Watson, who just basically discovered DNA. So I've been very blessed with having been exposed, and working with very different kinds of organizations. And I know that at this point in my life, there's not a lot of people who have that kind of experience. And so that kind of becomes my professional marker, I guess. So the person who's done a lot of big complex organizations, but also a lot of small organizations too. Siobhan: So I have two questions on that. The first is, it's a soft question. In all of those different types of fundraising, which was your favorite, I guess what kind of fundraising was most enjoyable for you? Sean: I do the arts and cultural world because I find the board and the people to be very interesting and fun to work with. It is perhaps the hardest sector to work on because a lot of what we do is 400 billion is given away by people and corporations and foundations every year. And the top sector, it's religion, is probably the largest recipient of philanthropy, healthcare and education come in pretty close after that. So you're going to get a lot, it's not saying it's easier to raise money in higher ed, in healthcare, but in some ways it is because in healthcare it typically centers around solving a problem or the so-called grateful patient. "Dr X saved my life, I'm going to give him all my money or a lot of my money" and higher education is "professor Y saved my life and got me on the right path, so I'm going to give money there." Arts and cultural tends to be not necessarily the top priority people. It could be second or third or maybe sometimes fourth. And so it's harder sometimes, but I find it to be more interesting. And then in terms of my most enjoyable experience, probably when I worked in London again in 2000, when I got to do some work with the International Accounting Standards Board, which sounds very boring, but the job was very exciting because what the job was, was to raise money for an organization that was trying to harmonize accounting standards around the world. Siobhan: Oh, cool. Sean: I got to travel around Europe to actually interview executives on their willingness to support this cause, this kind of new plan. And it was just fun working on that kind of scale. One of the great things about this, that I've enjoyed about my career is that I have to learn about every kind of thing. I'm not an expert on accounting, but I have to be able to have a conversation about it. I'm not an expert on art museums, but I have to be able to at least have a conversation about it. And here at Audubon, I'm not an ornithologist, but I have to be able to talk about climate change and the importance of eelgrass in San Francisco Bay. Because what I'm doing is representing these organizations, and serving as the middle person between philanthropy and good causes. And that's on thing I think my profession's about. It's not about asking for money, in a weird way. It's really about creating an environment where you create opportunities for people who have money, who want to give away money, to do it in a way that they feel comfortable doing it. Siobhan: No, I feel the same way, especially in connecting with alums. It's not about asking them for money. It's about what did you love about Holy Cross and how can you support that again? Sean: Exactly. Siobhan: But you mentioned Audubon. And I just, so again, with advancement just being so vast, if I'm being honest, I didn't know that such an organization existed. When I saw that that's where you work, I was like, oh my God, of course that would exist. Sean: I'm going to have to do more work then, Siobhan to make sure you hear about this. Siobhan: But it makes sense. Birds are so important, and the environment is such, no pun intended, but a hot topic right now. But how did you, I guess, find that organization and what brought you there? Sean: Yeah. Siobhan: Is that one of your passions too? Is the environment something that strikes... Sean: It is, I think certainly climate change and birds over time. The truth is that they found me and reached out to me. And then, right now at this stage of my career, I think when I was a little younger... And I have some advice about careers too, but, and this is what I share with people, is that you really do want to go to a place where the people, you kind of vibe with the people that you're going to work with. I think mission is very important, but as you're building a career, it's very important to find people that believe in you, give you the resources to be successful in where you can learn. At Audubon, at this stage of my career, because I have a leadership role, I can control some of those things. I can control the type of culture I'm trying to create with my team, and which I think is very, very important for fundraisers. For fundraisers to stay, is actually understanding what makes motivates fundraisers and what motivates development. Because I think a lot of this is, there's some similar aspects I think to a really good fundraising personality. But Audubon, I think the reason why I'm here is because they wanted to grow. And one of the things I've learned about my career recently is that there's some people who are comfortable in a status quo environment. And then there's some people who just like to build things. And I'm certainly in the ladder, and part of this is because of my consulting background. I like to solve problems, and figure out a way to grow. I know that sounds like every organization wants to do that, but not necessarily. Because I think in order to do that, there has to be an alignment between the board and the leadership of the organization, and actually a really good case of why growth is needed. And then of course they need to invest. So you need to spend money to raise money. All those elements were in place when I was talking to Audubon about five and a half years ago with leadership. So if I see alignment between the Chair of the Board and the CEO, and if they kind of align with the Chief Development Officer or the person who's in charge of raising money, that's when really great things can happen. Because this is never, in my view, a money issue. There's plenty of money in this world right now. This is always a strategy problem. How are we getting the money? How are we telling our story? Do we have the mechanical pieces in place? Do we have the right people? Are they trained? Do we have the right leadership in place? Those are the things that staff ultimately control. And if they are in the right spot, and doing it the right way, the money should come. It's very difficult to get all that stuff figured out. And that's really, at the end of the day, that's what the work is. Is that I think good fundraisers have a vision for what the word will look like or feel like. At any given day, I know what kind of meeting I'm trying to design between a board member and my CEO, and I know what I want them to say and I know who I want in the room. So I'm always trying to get to that point. Not as easy as it sounds, because it just takes time to get all those things in place, and to make sure that the conversation's happening. And making sure you have answers to all the questions that funders want. So for instance, at Audubon we're... Bezos gives a wait a lot of money for climate, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make that approach happen the right way. I don't want need to digress, but that's a lot of it how I think of it. Siobhan: No, and that's awesome. Actually, so I have a few questions that are going in different directions, so I'll see if I can loop them all together. So the first one is, I guess, what keeps you in this work? What drives your day? What kept your passion in the work that you're doing? Sean: Well, yeah, there were times, I remember in 2000, 2001 during the first dot com boom, I remember I would've been about 30 or so, there was a lot of people in my peer group trying to go to dotcom and early in internet stage companies. And I did talk to some people, this is after I got back from London. And I remember talking to some, what I would call philtech. Phil, P H I L technology, so philanthropy technology companies that were starting at that time and ultimately did not pursue them. And then on occasion, during the late two thousands or before the 2008 recession, could I parlay this experience into some kind of for-profit thing? I think ultimately, what kept me is, which is what you hear when you hear people give career advice when you're younger is, and I think there's a lot of truth to this, is if you actually like what you do and eventually you become good at it, then everything else takes care of itself. So I really do like what I'm doing, and I've become pretty good at it. And so then everything else takes care of itself. And being intentional about the different moves you make. And because designing a career is... I'm not saying it's a full-time job, but you cannot approach that casually. You have to be attainable about it. And what I mean by that is that whenever you go to an organization, and it doesn't really matter what sector we're talking about, but certainly in the fundraising sector, you want to understand not only how you're going to be successful there, but what will it lead to? What if you're successful at XYZ organization, will it give you an opportunity to grow within the organization or maybe even go to another organization, that type of thing. Depending on what you ultimately want to do. You don't have to become a Chief Development Officer. You can become the best frontline fundraiser in an area that you really, really love. And that's the great thing about this sector is that there's a lot of different diverse job functions. You have the development operations side, which is very much oriented towards tech people and people who are data-driven. The foundation relations kind of world, which really solid writers do well in that sector or that section of the work. And then frontline fundraisers are really usually a kind of sales salesperson orientation. Siobhan: I was going to say, as someone who is on the soliciting end of things, I feel like I'm a salesperson for Holy Cross, which I love because as someone, and you get this as someone who benefited from the product, it almost makes the job easy. But I was curious, so as someone, you weren't on both ends of the spectrum, so the soliciting side, which we've said isn't all about asking for money, but sometimes it comes down to, okay, here's my wallet. And then also the giving away of money. How would you, I guess, compare those roles? Because right now, as someone who's just starting out, I find the idea of grant giving and the other side of the work to be intriguing. Sean: It is intriguing. So my experience and foundations, I did some work with the MacArthur Foundation and the Gates Foundation, both those opportunities, I got to obviously work closely with them to understand more how they work. And over my career, I've got to work closely with some foundations. And over my career, I've probably felt the same thing that you're feeling, oh, it would be fun to get away money. But it's funny, they kind of have the same challenges in some ways because they... And I think that that actually helps you become a good fundraiser with foundations. To kind of boil this down, everyone has a job and everyone has to do things. So if you're a foundation officer, you have to do things, you have to give away money. And it is hard to give away money, because you're going to be evaluated on how the partnerships that you developed, did you squander the money or did you give the money away smartly? And if you gave the money away, did you do a good job following up in a and actually evaluating their efficacy? And that is hard. And there's a lot of pressure. And so if you orient yourself as a, now I'm going on the solicitor side, if you orient yourself to, I'm going to make this person's life easier, then you're talking to them like a person and you're creating a partnership. How can I help you with your job, or what you have to do? We're a good organization, we're going to communicate with you, we're going to spend your money the right way. Then it's a great thing. So you're not really asking them for money, you're really creating a partnership. And I think that that makes all the things in the world. But then if you think about designing strategies for a billionaire who wants to, some billionaire from Holy Cross calls you Siobhan and said, Siobhan, I want you to run a foundation for me and figure out... I want to give away money to human rights organizations and arts organizations in South America, and I'm going to give you a budget and you figure it out. So what would you do? You would probably start creating a network. You would go travel and see some, understand the issue. Go to South America, go visit museums, create a network of people, and then start to give away money. Yes, that would be fun. That would be really fun. But going to a big foundation and running a program, you do have to be a subject matter expert. Oftentimes, not all the time, because now there are a lot of foundations out there that I've been encountering that will hire a friend, someone they trust to actually help them with their foundation. I met this foundation recently where, all of a sudden they found themselves with a whole lot of money and they wanted to create this foundation because that's what the estate had directed them to do. And they're going to find the person that they trust. And so sometimes that person's not a subject matter expert, but they're a trusted advisor to the family. But if you're a subject matter expert in human rights, you're coming at it from a different direction. You're an academic that goes into a foundation. But I do think it's a growing, obviously a growing field as the wealth inequality continues to increase. I'll just give you a little tidbit on, this is one of my favorite facts. When I started in the business, mid-nineties, I would always go to the Hudson News in Grand Central and buy the Forbes 400, which would come out, I guess it would come on the fall. I'm trying to remember when it did. But I always loved that because I would go home on the train and just read it, and learn about the families who had wealth. And I quickly learned that not everybody, wealth and philanthropy are not the same thing. People with money and people who are philanthropic, there's like a Venn diagram in the middle. But to be the four hundredth, wealthiest person on that list, right back in the mid-nineties, the net worth was 400 million or something like that. It's a lot of money. What do you think it is today? Siobhan: It's more. Because I feel like... I was going to say, I feel like, because nowadays, and maybe it's because I work in fundraising, a million dollars doesn't seem like that much money anymore. Sean: Something like 1.7 billion. Siobhan: I was going to say at least a billion dollars. Sean: So why that's extraordinary. Not only how much it's gone up. Might be 1.4, but I know it's something like that. There's a whole lot of people below that. We don't even know who those people are. Siobhan: Wow. Sean: They're not necessarily publicly known. So the amount of people... It used to be rather, you used to be able to understand where the wealth was. And now I think you just don't, A very interesting world we live in now in terms of the relationship between wealth, philanthropy, and our business. There's a lot of new philanthropists coming on board that are coming out of the nowhere, partly because they're just not as well known. It's just more. There's more opportunity. That's why we're not really at a wealthy, it's not about money, it's about strategy. Siobhan: I was also going to say, I find... At least I can relate to least the capacity because sometimes, you use all the data that you have and you assume that someone has this profile, but you could either be over assuming, but then you could also be easily under assuming too. There are probably people that you don't think they would give maybe over a thousand dollars. But if you go about it, as you were saying, strategy, if you talk to them, if they're into music and you talk to them about the new performing arts center, you might inspire their generosity more than if you're talking to them about a new basketball court. Sean: I think that that's a hundred percent right. And I think, that's why I think it sounds a little old school. I think research can be a little overdone. I love research by the way. I think that my research team, they call me an, I'm an honorary researcher because on occasion, if I'm sitting in front of the TV or something like that, I'll go deep on some name and I just love finding these little nuggets of information. I'll send our director of prospect research these random emails. I said, look into this, look into that. Because at least at Audubon, I'm looking into people who care about climate, who care about birds, who care about... Siobhan: Again, that is so unique. Sean: Well, there's one, if you look on... Here's one of the cool things about birds besides the fact they're cool. If you go to... The Fish and Wildlife Service did a report on one of the most common outdoor activity, obviously gardening is actually probably the top. Birding is actually second or so. They estimate over 40 million people at one point in their life have gone out and watched birds, whether it's in their backyard or something like that. It's an awful lot of people. Siobhan: It is a lot of people. That's a fun fact. Sean: Yeah, it drives our work for sure. And we're doing this cool thing. This is kind of a little bit out of sequence, but we have this thing called Bird Song, which is this project we're doing. In fact, you can look on Spotify, and this has been in the New York Times. A music supervisor, a guy named Randall Poster who works with Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese approached Audubon, and he got the bird bug over the pandemic because he was at home and listening to birds. He approached all of his musician friends, people like Jarvis Cocker and Yo-Yo Ma and Yoko Ono and Karen O and Beck to do songs inspired by Bird Song. And so he has 180 tracks. He's also asked his actor friends like Liam Neeson and Matthew McConaughey and Adrien Brody to read poems that are about birds, including a bird poem written by another Holy Cross alum, Billy Collins, who is a poet who wrote a poem about sandhill cranes in Nebraska. He has Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes reading that poem. Anyways, there's going to be a big album, a box set release, and all the money's going to go to Audubon. Siobhan: That's awesome. Sean: Birds are having a moment. Siobhan: Birds are having a moment. It's a bird's world and we're just living in it. Sean: It is. That's a good way of putting it, I'm going to borrow that. Siobhan: You can totally, as long as you give me copyright credit. Sean: I'll absolutely give you copyright, and all the royalties. Siobhan: Exactly. And I do want to just be cognizant of time, but as the podcast is about Holy Cross's mission and how it influenced your life, and I know you did talk about this a little bit at the beginning. I just wanted to hear more about how Holy Cross impacted your life and your work, and maybe Holy Cross' mission in addition to being men and women for others. Sean: I found a profession that I think in the beginning it might not have made sense, but I have to tell you now, at my age, there's a lot of people, a lot of friends who went to all lacrosse and other places are some ways jealous of this career because... So I have this ability to do well and do good. Use persuasion techniques or skills that could be implied to advertising or banking or some other sales job. But when I'm being reflective of the relationship between the effort and the work that I've applied my daily profession to the outcome, it completely aligns with my worldview of actually helping other people and helping organizations and helping the world, whether it's through art or healthcare or science or human rights or conservation. I feel pretty good about that. And I also feel very fortunate because I don't think I'd be in this profession if it wasn't for Holy Cross, partly because combined with how I was raised and also Holy Cross reinforcing some of those values and elevating them. And then, really the specific moment when Jonathan Winters actually said, hey, you should look into this job. And really made the connection between me as a recent alum and an opportunity with another Holy Cross person. So if Pat Cunningham's listening to this podcast, and I reach out to him once in a while, was a very influential person in terms of where I'm at right now, and I'm very grateful for that. So it's a fun profession. I encourage, I do a lot of connecting with other Holy Cross grads that have helped people. And there's a lot of Holy Cross people that I've met who are in this business, and you try to get together. Because I think there's a really interesting theme here in terms of what we do. And a lot of us are doing, in pretty good organizations, doing really, really good work. So celebrating that as a profession would be fun to do. I actually, Danita Wickwire, who is class of '94 joined my team recently. Which is incredible, because I told her, she reminds me a little bit of why I'm in this profession. Because if you go into this world of fundraising, it's hard to keep up with everything. But then, because she's here and because of our common history at Holy Cross, it's nice to have her because we were able to align around that a lot. And I think she participated in one of these podcasts as well. And she's a really, really influential and important leader in this space as well. Siobhan: Oh, that's awesome. She is an outstanding volunteer and name in our office. So our office is a big fan of Danita, she's great. Also, what I really like too that you said is, I don't know, I find that the job doesn't really feel like work and it's comforting to hear that doesn't change. Sean: It doesn't really. No, it doesn't change. I mean, listen, it's not saying it's easy all the time, but it's certainly fun. Siobhan: And then I guess you kind of touched upon this, but for someone starting out in this work, what is some advice you would give? And then I guess also, looking back on your journey that got you here, is there anything that you would've done differently? Sean: I don't think I have any regrets about choices I've made, also philosophically don't believe in that because I don't think it's helpful. But I think in terms of advice, I do think, and I know this sounds slightly cynical, so I soften this a little bit, but I really do feel it's important to go to a place where your boss and your colleagues believe and align with how you think about this work. I think often, sometimes I see folks make a mistake going to an organization for the mission only, and then what ends up happening sometimes, not all the time, is that the expectations aren't there. And then it can really be a hard place to be. One of the hardest things about this business is... It's a very optimistic, enthusiastic person, but I also know how hard this is and things can go wrong, and you might not have control over certain things. And so educating non-fundraisers, or orienting them about how this work actually unfolds happens with experience. So I'm able to do that with a little bit more ease than I did when I was younger. But be very intentional about your career. If you have a lot of the elements in place, that's great. If you're able to grow, that's great. Don't go for the money, so to speak, or for the mission, make sure everything else is in place. That's my advice. Siobhan: That's very deep. I think that's applicable to anything too. Sean: It is. But I remember, I give a lot of career advice and sometimes I see people, it looks really good, but you got to ask all the right questions, make sure you're asking the questions so you have it all figured out. Siobhan: Yeah. Then I guess, is there any type of organization that you haven't worked with yet that you'd want to? You said you've worked with most of them, but is there anything that maybe in your journey that you've seen... Sean: I was in Columbia last week, the country, because we do a lot of work hemispherically, so I was in Bogota and Cali. I really enjoy, where I think this is headed, and maybe it would be fun, is like this orientation about raising money in other parts of the world. I've done it before, I've done it in England, and it's different in every country and it's evolving and this cultural barriers of this and all that stuff. But I like the way the globalization in terms of how we're thinking about the NGO, bottom up. And also the importance of diversifying our space. Our profession has to be more intentional about how to do that and create space and opportunities for people of color and other backgrounds because there's a lot of history and reasons why it is what it is. And we have to continue to try to figure out ways to open up doors and opportunities that are just not going to happen naturally. You have to be forceful about that. So any place that is in that space. You know what, the weird thing about this space, and I talked to Ron Lawson about this, who's a Chief Operating Officer of a coalition, homeless coalition in New York. It's in a weird way, it's really hard to raise private philanthropy for some social justice issues like homelessness and hunger. Hunger, not as much as it used to be. But I'm always curious about why that is. And there are some organizations that kind of outperform. There's so much money that's given away and there's some sectors that are just not there yet. And that would be fun to understand more why that's happening and help with that too. Siobhan: Cool. I just wanted to see where you were headed next. Sean: I don't know. Siobhan: Nonprofit. Sean: Yeah, it's fun. I'm glad you're in this space and you should keep in touch, Siobhan, it'd be fun to see where your career's going to take you. Siobhan: I was going to say, I'll have you on speed dial. Sean: Good. Awesome. Siobhan: Awesome. And before I let you go, I just wanted to end on a fun little speed Holy Cross round. Sean: Sure. Siobhan: Very quick. Okay. What was your freshman dorm? Sean: Mulledy Siobhan: What was your hardest class? Sean: That economics class with Professor Chu. No, actually accounting class with Professor Chu. Yeah. Siobhan: Nice. Best professor you've ever had? Sean: Probably Professor Chu Siobhan: I see him sometimes, so I'll be sure to let him know. Sean: I think he just retired actually. I thought I just saw that he's retiring soon. Siobhan: He is, but he has his little research. Sean: Yeah, you can tell him that. Tell him, gave him a shout-out. I think I was, it might have been... That was his first year he got here, I think. Siobhan: Oh, that's so funny. Senior dorm? Sean: Carlin. Siobhan: Oh, nice. Sean: Yeah, Carlin Siobhan: Favorite spot on campus? Sean: I guess I liked the radio station. That was a great place to escape. Siobhan: Oh, cute. First meal you think of when you think of Kimball. Sean: Ah, that's good. Probably just like chicken fingers, I guess. They actually existed, I think that they did. Or that Turkey. There's like some kind of Turkey meal that was good there. Siobhan: Oh my goodness. The Thanksgiving Turkey dinner slaps. Best restaurant in Worcester. This is good because you're a local. Sean: Yeah, well the best restaurant right now that I was just like, wow, this is a pretty good restaurant. There's that sushi place on Park Avenue is really, really good actually. And then when I was there, I guess Arturo's was a great Italian place, but that's not, I think that's closed now. Best Breakfast place is probably Lou Roc's on West Boylston Street, which is a really, really good diner. Siobhan: Good to know. Everyone always talks about Miss Worcester's, I'll have to... Sean: Miss Worcester's is good, but Lou Roc's is a little further out, but it's excellent, excellent. Yeah. Siobhan: Oh, fabulous. All right. Your go-to study spot? Sean: The Library right side, as you're walking on the right side. Yeah, not the left side. Siobhan: Okay. And if you were going to campus right now, where are you going first? Sean: I am going to check out this new performing arts center which is the coolest looking building in Worcester, I think. Siobhan: Right? It kind of looks like an airport, but in a good way. Sean: It's a very cool, it's one of the coolest architecture buildings I've seen. And it's certainly one of the coolest things in Worcester. I think it's awesome. I want to go inside it. Siobhan: And then last question, your fondest Holy Cross memory. Sean: Fondest Holy Cross memory? Oh, I don't know. I really enjoy fall at Holy Cross. That's what I enjoyed the most. Yeah, and I like fall in Worcester. Yeah, for sure. Siobhan: That's a good answer. Sean: Yeah. Siobhan: Especially fall at Holy Cross is beautiful. Sean: Yeah, like a football game in the fall. That's probably it. Siobhan: Nice. Wow. Thank you so much for chatting with me. Sean: Thanks Siobhan. Siobhan: Taking the time out of your today. Sean: That was great, thanks. Thanks for the opportunity. Maura Sweeney: That's our show. I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be people for and with others. A special thanks to today's guests and everyone at Holy Cross who has contributed to making this podcast a reality. If you or someone would like to be featured on this podcast, then please send us an email at alumnicareers.holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review. This podcast is brought to you by the Office of Alumni Relations at the College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcast. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney, and this is Mission-Driven. In the words of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, "Now go forth and set the world on fire." Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.

News with Sean (in for Shelley) 3-13-2023 …It is twice the size of the U.S. and headed right for Florida News with Sean …It is twice the size of the U.S. and headed right for Florida

Tier 1 contractor Balfour Beatty is transforming its operations by taking advantage of new equipment and technology. And this is reflected in its recently rebranded Asset and Solutions Division, which is already changing the future delivery of the 500+ project sites it mobilises every year. To find out what the future looks like, Peter Haddock talks to Sean Scarah, Plant and Logistics Director for Balfour Beatty Asset and Solutions Division, for the latest edition of our Think Tank Series, supported by 3D Machine Control and Surveying specialist Leica Geosystems. Think Tank is all about how we should think about getting the most out of the fuel in the Tank. So this episode is all about understanding the complexities of running complex job sites from one of the most experienced professionals in the business. And there are numerous insights that Sean shares with Peter in this episode. Sean: "It's not all about diggers anymore... it's about a whole connected site where 3D machine control and, in the future autonomous plant help to deliver a project and help us on our journey to Net Zero. And to succeed, we all must work more collaboratively together with industry solution and equipment providers as well as supply chain partners, IT specialists and, of course, clients." Thanks for listening to this episode of our Think Tank series, supported by Leica Geosystems, the 3D machine control and surveying specialist. If you like this one, please listen to our other podcast episodes and check out our video interviews from sites and events on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/contentwithmedia. To follow Peter Haddock, visit his profile on Linkedin here https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterhaddock --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/contentwithmedia/message

“‘Why you?' is the multi-million dollar question,” Sean Paulseth, SVP Partnerships at WedgeHR, says about getting your company noticed in a sea of other, often bigger, competitors. Incentive programs can pay off big time and this is an area where you can get creative with offers, including schwag, referral rewards, contests, and paid-for trips. Of course, deciding this depends on several factors like, knowing the market segment you're targeting, and the size of the enterprise. Larger companies love their own “ecosystems” Sean explains, and will prioritize their established partner programs and keep the promotion on-brand.  A huge component of this, and of getting a business off the ground in general, is facetime. Sean emphasizes the importance of in-person events, networking with both investors and customers. Even in the tech space, the business world is still very relationship driven. When there are several similar products, often the one who gets chosen is the one with the most memorable person attached to it. On this episode of Billion Dollar Tech, how to be strategic networking, why storytelling is crucial particularly in small business sales, and why reading is an underrated pastime for sales people. Quotes: “Within the tech landscape, and in SaaS generally, partnerships seem to be crucial, particularly from a customer-centric capability, you're going to have to do the best of the breed. (3:42-3:56 | Sean) “It's the smaller markets where you have to get a lot more creative on how to budge them.” (15:07-15:13 | Sean) “Starting with the most relevant channel partners and/or your integrated partners that you may need just to get your feet on the ground is going to be super important.”(24:06-24:20 | Sean) “Having a general sense of curiosity is crucial in sales.”(37:47-37:51 | Sean) “A top-down approach is always going to be important, particularly if you're smaller. But if they're not budging…what's going to be the best incentives for their teams at the end of the day.”(13:03-13:33 | Sean)   Connect with Brendan Dell: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendandell/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanDell Instagram: @thebrendandellTikTok: @brendandell39 Buy a copy of Brendan's Book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780578210926    Connect with Sean Paulseth:Website: WedgeHR: https://www.wedgehr.com/LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/sean-paulseth Check out Sean's top recommended books:Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316478526 The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101912379 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:  https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679728757 Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to Billion Dollar Tech on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts! Use code Brendan30 for 30% off your annual membership with RiverSide.fm  Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Sean: And Vince, now that you're into personal finance, I wonder, can we do a little role play? A little role play just for fun. So let's just say I'm a business owner and I'm new. I'm a new business owner. I've been doing this for like a year. I've had some success. And now I'm thinking, Hey. I think I need to take out a $500,000 loan because I want to expand my manufacturing plant and I manufacture pots and pans for for cooking. Right. And I need to hire more people. Got to invest in new machinery from China. I've got to ship it all the way here. What do you think about that? Vince: Yeah, I think every business is different, right? It's all about risk, right? Or I might be more risk adverse. Somebody else might be, 'hey, let's go for it. We'll roll the dice and maybe they win. Maybe I win.' It doesn't matter, but it comes down to somebody's risk. So the first thing I talk to people is if you do this, Sean, can you sleep at night? Sean: It's going to be pretty hard because the interest rate is at 7% here in the Philippines. And I got to pay that. You know, I got to cut down on some things that I spend on my lifestyle right now. And I've got to live more frugally for sure. Not sure if I could stick with that. But, you know, I try my best to sleep well at night. Vince: And are there things you could do, people you could talk to, conversation you can have that can make you more certain of that potential? We're never going to 100%. But are there people that that you can chat with about that maybe it's a current client where you can get a preorder or something like that, would make that more of a idea based on facts instead of your hope for the future. First place I'll start to say, talk to those people and see, and I want to make sure you're making the right decision for yourself. There's no right or wrong answer to say what's going to make sense for you. If we can figure out, 'Hey, when that returns come in,' if you can sleep at night with taking on that debt. The other area that's I think, a big area for you and a lot of business owners is intermingling their personal finances into their business. Do you have very accurate business finances that are separate from your personal finances or are you drawing off that business account? What does that look like for you? - - - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack Leadership Stack Merch: https://leadershipstack.com/shop/

Sean: We have a question from Michelle, how can one overcome shiny object syndrome in learning something that's beyond your current role? Oh, good question. That's a good question. Jeff: In learning, how can one overcome the shiny object syndrome in learning something that is beyond your current role? I'm not too familiar, Sean, with the shiny object syndrome. Sean: It's like "Ooh, I want to learn that" even if it's not too relevant to what they're doing. Jeff: Oh, yeah. And I think this is a lot of the candidates even direct reports I had in the past have experienced having this one. Even here in Zagana to a certain extent, you would want to try this out, probably this one is good for me, and so on. And you mentioned, that coaching really helps them with this one. The coaching sessions - this is what I would also advocate for leaders in the organization to have is the coaching skills, you have to have that kind of interaction or engagement with your employees where you would as thought-provoking questions that would raise awareness, that would challenge their thoughts so that it would always align to what they want to achieve in life, rather than what you mentioned, the shiny object. "Oh, this is this looks nice. This looks like it's something that's interesting." And then all of a sudden you've spent one whole year accomplishing nothing. I think the coaching part would help your employees figure out for themselves, not you telling them that this is something that aligns with what they want to be in the future, and that would help them avoid this kind of scenario as well. Sean: You know I'm sure you're going to lose it someday when you're growing older, you're going to lose that. So we all are going to lose that, right? We come to a certain age where we just want to get comfortable in our ways. That's why there's a saying that goes, "you can't teach an old dog, new tricks." Jeff: I refuse to refuse to believe that, Sean. And I got to be an old dog. Sean: We all know you're not that old, you know, shiny object syndrome. It's more because you haven't found your burning 'why' in life? Because if you find that burning 'why' and what I mean by burning 'why'. It's you find out the reason why you're born, you find out the reason why you're put on this earth. It's because of that one burning purpose when you find that out. And it could be like two or three things right? Like, for me, it's running my business for the glory of God. And it's also making sure that I give to others, and I give to God, and I give to the church. It's also making sure that along the way I share God's kingdom with other people, such as what I'm doing now. The reason why I'm able to do this podcast is that I have a business that can actually pay for the show and the editors and everything, right? So those are a lot of burning 'whys' for me. And so that's why it could be more than one thing, but if you find it, then all those shiny objects suddenly fade away, right? Because, you know, these are the things that are super important for me. Or it could be one. This is the thing. This is the thing and I've found it. It's my burning 'why' I'm going to focus on this. Suddenly they all lose their shininess or their luster, and you're not going to be after them anymore. You're only going to be after anything that's related to your burning 'why.' - - - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

HIGHLIGHTSCreate and preserve wealth with tax planningA favorable experience enriches your client relationshipsSelling virtually is fundamentally the same as selling traditionally Ask the right questions that engage fully and impart value QUOTESSean: "What I discovered is it's okay to call the client. Just say, hey, how you doing? You need anything from us? Because, if he does, I know about it. I can take care of it. If there's an issue, I can get right on it."Sean: "I think it's perfectly fine if there's a touching moment or a moment that makes you human. There's nothing stronger than that. I think, as a salesperson, you should be good enough or have enough confidence to be a little vulnerable."Sean: "If you continue to do the right thing, there's nothing more powerful than somebody telling somebody else that they know, like, and trust, they even love, about what you do or whatever. That's who I want to do business with."John: "Everything has to start with a what, how, when, where, and then follow up with a why because you got to establish a little bit of pain. You know when you know that you're getting the sale is when the client starts asking questions back with what, where, when, why, how because that essentially means that they're wanting you to add layers of context to the explanation."Sean: "It's about being with someone, figuring out how to communicate with them, to have a productive talk with them, and then from there just navigating the conversation to keeping in mind benefit, client, help."Connect with Sean in the following links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanrscope/Website: http://www.tspfamilyoffice.com/Follow Club Colors and reach out to John in the links below: Website: https://www.clubcolors.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%E2%98%98%EF%B8%8Fjohn-morris%E2%98%98%EF%B8%8F-96148716/

Sean: What are important things to consider if you are planning to start your own tech business? Edwin: I mean, that's a great question, Pam. I mean, I would have to - that's a whole can of worms. I'd be asking you, Pam, like, what's the tech business? Do you know? Are you a tech founder or are you looking to partner with a tech founder? I guess depending on those answers, you know, understanding where you're fitting this technology in, you know what the pain points are, how did you find those pain points? Where were you connecting with? Edwin: At the end of the day, whether it's a tech business, a service business, you got to know that there's a need for it and you're filling a gap, because all of us have a billion ideas and whether it's technology or service or whatnot. And we got to make sure that it works well. The challenge, if you're not tech, is finding a partner or someone to help you develop your MVP. Having said that is, if you want to build out an MVP, you don't need to know code anymore. Sean: Really good stuff. Like Edwin, it has to boil down to what kind of tech business you are planning to start. It's hard to answer this question with just an open-ended, vague assumption that is any tech business because there are just so many tech businesses that you can start today. So many problems you can solve. Sean: It's going to have to be number one, can you be the best in something in that tech startup that you're going to try to get into? So what is going to be your number one-shot or number one feature if you want to try and go head to head with these other startups because it is a global business, when you start a tech startup, if it's a software as a service business, it is on a global scale and platform, and you're going to have to compete on a global scale. Sean: And competing globally is very, very tough. A lot of players don't play fair, they don't play nice. I've had the experience of starting a SAS business - Qeryz. It's still up, it's still running. We still use it and a lot of our clients use it as well. And my experience in running that, there's just so many dirty players that you're going to have to go up against. And I'm sure Edwin you've experienced your fair share of that with Slingshot VOIP. So that's something that I would strongly consider. Like, what can be the best? Like who's your target market? Are they startups? Are they scale-ups? Or are they at the big enterprise level? And what will these features fit very well with them? Sean: So there are so many factors we could go on and on, and Edwin mentioned is a can of worms that you're going to be opening. Yeah, that's true. So qualifying the question further would help a lot. If you're still in discord, you might want to qualify it further so we can help you out better. But otherwise, for me, it's going to be like, what's that one thing you can be the best at when you're starting your tech startup? Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Sean: What are the best ways to grow organically, especially when your startup is still in the early stages? Sean: The best way to actually generate a lot of words is word of mouth about your business, about your product, about your service because that's free. And that is very, very effective in the sense that when you get referred by someone to another person who might want to get your product or service. That is a very powerful referral right there. And I know because my clients who are loyal to SEO Hacker and what we do and who have reaped the benefits of our work have been referring us left and right, and I'm so pleased and happy whenever I am personally tagged in Facebook groups, whenever there are people looking for SEO makes me so happy. Sean: It's word of mouth, right? Can't beat it. And one of the other things that I used to grow my business organically, SEO Hacker, is to do content marketing, and I was writing, so it was free for me. That was organic-free growth for me. When I was blogging about SEO, everything I was learning, I made sure that people could subscribe and tune in whenever I had news about the SEO industry or new strategies out there about the SEO industry. And we still blog about new strategies and updated strategies. Sean: We were able to publish earlier about SEO copywriting, by the way, for those of you who subscribe to the SEO Hacker newsletter, sorry for the double send. The first send was completely broken and we were testing things out I really am really sorry about that, but we were able to fix it. And now, if you want to go ahead and read the SEO copywriting article - How to do copywriting right? Then just go ahead and tune in to SEO-hacker.com, you will be able to find it. So, yeah, definitely content marketing. Write the content yourself. If you're a thought leader like myself during the early days of SEO Hacker, that is one big way for us to do it, and word of mouth marketing is generated when you have a word of mouth marketing strategy. Sean: And for SEO-Hacker, we follow the Purple Cow principle, which is to make your product or service so good and so great. Go the extra mile that people can't help but talk about you. That is the strategy I use for SEO Hacker, and it worked mighty well. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Sean: Now, how does one create the prosperity mindset when you don't have enough money or are just living off your savings? Toni: How do you create the prosperity mindset, Sean? Sean: It came from the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, that changed my perspective. So Robert Kiyosaki stated in the book, 'the world is rich. It actually is very, very rich.' If you look at the GDP of the US, for example, how many trillion dollars per year they produce in business and you look at the Philippines, how many billions of dollars in our own GDP, right? We're not on the trillions, but we're still like on a billion-dollar scale, that's what we produce as a country. Sean: And so I thought, that's a lot of money, you know, that's a lot of money. How come people keep thinking that, 'life is difficult, earning money is difficult, working is hard, there's not enough money.' Those are the things that I usually hear. I didn't grow up in a rich family. Actually, we're like, you know, we had enough to get by, and I would often hear that I'd often hear that from my parents that "life is hard, earning money is really difficult." And then when I read Robert Kiyosaki's book, I thought about, 'Where does the billion-dollar GDP of the Philippines really go? How can I also get into that GDP?' Right? And what you have to do is really add value to yourself, so you can add value to other people. And that's what the world will pay you for. That's my take on that. Toni: OK. So speaking of books, the book that changed my entire perspective about money is the 'Secrets of the Millionaire Mind' by T. Harv Eker, and I always promote this book, even though I am not paid to say this. But that was the very first book that, as you said before I didn't really have - I did have a stable job, but I couldn't save, and I couldn't even save five percent of my annual income back then. Because I would always think that it's okay when I finish all the money I have because I know next month I'd be able to get it again.' Toni: So I realized the error of my ways when I read that book and I learned how you should change your money script. So you know how sometimes whenever we see, let's say someone riding a sports car, we would always have that negative mindset or would usually think that "he or she's boastful." That's how we view people who had the money back then, and sometimes we tell ourselves, 'Oh, I'll never be able to afford that. So if you keep thinking this way or if you maintain this perspective, then you will feel as if you'll never be as successful as your wealthy friends, and this is basically an example of having a negative money script. So your money script will shape the way you view money. And that's why another part of having a good money script is to have a direction for your money. So your money needs to have direction, and that's why, as financial advisors, we do financial planning because it's important when you have a plan for your money so that at least you'll be able to shift your direction, you'll know your biggest "why" about why you're saving and why you're investing. So even if you don't have enough savings, thinking that you have these certain goals, you want to be financially free, you want to be able to work at the job that you love without worrying about money, then you will be more motivated or you'll shift your mindset to abundance when you have a direction for your goals. So that's my take on it. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

The Elixir Outlaws now have a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5332239). If you're enjoying the show then please consider throwing a few bucks our way to help us pay for the costs for the show. On today's episode of the Elixir Outlaws, Sean Cribbs and Amos King are going to talk about Sports of Sorts. Amos shares some driving wisdom and his fondness for silent thoughts. Sean and Amos will share some random and interesting experiences. Episode Highlights: Amos reveals how he developed his creativity and problem-solving skills from driving. Sean has recently resigned from his job, and he is about to join a new company after 12 days. As per Sean, one spends a lot of your time sleeping because their dreams help them to work through problems Amos loves jogging around the river next to the hotel early in the morning when nobody is up. For him, it is nice and quiet. Brittany Matthews is a co-owner of the women's soccer team. She has been big in promoting women's sports in Kansas City, but especially soccer, and Patrick and Brittany broke ground on a new training center earlier this year. Then, three or four weeks ago, they revealed their new team name. The stadium is first of its kind for the women's soccer team, which is huge because this team has only been here a year. They just announced that they were going to have a team this January 2021. For those not in Kansas City, the streetcar is absolutely free , which is really awesome with all the buses because buses are free too. So you can go anywhere for free in Kansas City. We have one of the best women soccer players in Samuels who has been on the national team. An Incredible midfielder, dynamic player, and she is going be exciting to watch, says Sean. While talking about the new company where Sean is going to join. He explains that the company is doing motion graphics or motion design. People really want the ability to collaborate to provide feedback on designs, work on different iterations, compare them, and build out a portfolio for you, says Sean. There are multiple companies out there called Fable, so if you want to go look it up, it is Fable, not Fable dot IO, not fable com. It is the Fable Dot app. It is one of those easy, easy ones to find. Amos says he doesn't know how possible it would be, but it would be interesting if, two designers could work on the same like image or animation at the same time, doing the same kind of ideas of passing changes back and forth. Part of the reason why Sean's friend wanted to hire him is because he has distributed systems experience, where all the bodies are buried, where all the problems are gonna be like what if we want to have real time collaboration or like something like Miro where people are dragging things around on the on the project at the same time. What always kills me on the front end in the browser, or even if you are compiling and making things faster, is that you really have zero control over the quality of the computer it is running on and the problems like the interactions between the things, says Amos. Sean says that they are going to write C+ code because it was mostly C code, but using the C ++compiler and very few features of C and like the Windows API and like working with it directly to build a 2D kind of Zelda light game. Sean says that the JavaScript community is huge. You have a lot of people experience in JavaScript. It doesn't take that many of them to make a good customization. Amos shares that his first editor for code other than the QBasic editor was Emacs and that was 22 years ago. Amos says that his first experience with C not running everywhere was in an AI class and they had to write a chess engine and then they all played the developed chess engines against each other. Sean says there is a bytecode format that you can take from running on a Intel being VM and run it on an ARM beam VM or on some other processor that is running your nerves project. 3 Key Points Those of you who don't know anything about Kansas City, but Patrick Mahomes is a big deal here quarterback for the Chiefs and his fiance Brittany Matthews is kind of influential in her own. Sean says that Figma has changed the way people do collaborate on static web design, this is going to be collaboration on motion design. Motion design would include things like just regular animations you might see on the web. It could include things like advertisements, logo, animations. There are a lot of different ways that we could do collaborate. Another area that he talked about us wanting to do is so a lot of this is like you do in the browser, You draw your shapes, you animate them you set the keyframes, you know you set all that stuff up. But that only produces us a level of quality that the browser can produce. But if you want to do 4K video of this animation that you just created, you are not going to produce that with your browser, says Sean. Tweetable Quotes “I am a big fan of silent thoughts” – Sean “When they introduce the team that the players that are going to start for the match. They had some incredible motion designs on the video board.“- Sean “It is not movies, it is more about the animation than about video editing. It is like making an animated logo.” - Sean “There are some pretty interesting problems how to isolate yourself from these, they are doing something very quick and then suddenly they open another program on their desktop, but that hangup.” – Amos “90% of your life was spent formatting exactly how that professor wanted it formatted, which is like a huge waste of time.” - Amos Resources Mentioned: Podcast Editing Elixir Outlaws: Website

Sean: From Niño, I'm 19 years old. I currently have three businesses – affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and local business. Wow, congratulations. Toni: Wow. Sean: It somehow hit a plateau. I'm in analysis paralysis. What do you recommend? I'm not sure why and how you hit a plateau, but I think it's about marketing. When your business hits a plateau, usually it's about marketing or product or service. Those three things are the major things that I look at. Is the product or the service being saturated already in the market that the demand is low and supply is high? If that's the problem, you have to innovate a new product, a new service, or on top of your product, or on top of your service, some value adds. If it's a marketing problem, it could overlap. The product and service saturation could also be a marketing problem at the same time. So usually it is a marketing problem. You're not marketing well enough and smart enough. I'm not sure what your business is, but the first thing I'd look at is search. My business is SEO. I manipulate search results for a living. So what I look at is what people search for in that industry. I use aquascape.ph. We had a lot of questions last time. Aquascape.ph is a website I set up just last year because of my aquascaping hobby. We're selling almost every day, aquatic plants and livestock. Now I'm going to look at what people are searching for, like what plants are being searched for the most. And you can look at it on Google trends or you can use SEMrush. We're affiliated, so you could use my link. Go to from.seo-hacker.com/semrush. They have a free tier, so you could use their software for free actually. And you can check what people are searching for. How much volume does that search term have a month? So people are looking for blue shrimp, a hundred a month. Did it grow to 200 this month? Did it grow to 300 this month? So you can check that data and see, do I still have a really good market? How many competitors do I have sprouting up? What are they doing? You could also take a look at that if you're not so innovative, because there are people who lack imagination. They are not that innovative. So what you could do is you check out what competition is doing, either from here or competition that's not really your competition because they're from abroad. You could also look at the internet. Use the internet. That's what I'm going to be doing. Check the market, check your marketing, check your product and check your service and see where you could create a new niche market that you can serve.

Any advice to people who are starting a startup?   Toni: Sean's the perfect person to ask. Sean: The most important thing is cash flow. Make sure your revenue is greater than expenses. Don't let other people tell you otherwise that passion is the most important thing, sleepless nights' the most important thing. It's not. It's cash flow. As long as your revenue is greater than your expense, you're doing well. If expenses are greater than revenue, you're screwing it up and you're bleeding out and you have to stop that. So anything to make sure your cash flow is good, keep on doing that. If you have to sacrifice your own lifestyle, to make sure cash flow is positive, do it because I did it. If you need to sacrifice sleep for it, do it because I did it. You have to sacrifice a lot. That's why they say your startup is like a baby, it needs you. It needs a lot of nutrition. It cries, you know, it brats out. Toni: Attention. Sean: It needs a lot of attention. There you go. So you have to sacrifice a lot for it. The word sacrifice. That's why they say passion is also important because passion, the Latin word is pati, which means sacrifice. If you're not passionate about your startup, you're not going to sacrifice for it. But that doesn't mean if you're passionate about it, it's a good business. If cash flow is negative, no matter how passionate you may be about it, it's not a good business for you during that time. So, yeah, that's my advice. You really have to save. Sacrifice. You're going to go through a lot, but here's the great thing about it, you learn a lot. You learn a lot, not just about business, but about life and you learn a lot about other people. That's your tuition fee. The tuition fees are your sacrifices, the tuition fees are your effort, and if you lose money, that's also part of the tuition fee. I know people who started up and lost money in their first few startups. Now it's a blessing for me, I didn't have to go through that. My first startup SEO Hacker is already doing good, but I still had to pay the price by learning a lot from the wrong people I got in the company during the first years. So yeah, maybe that's the second advice I'm going to give you, make sure you hire the right people. Prolong the hiring process. Take your time in hiring them and hire ahead. Don't hire when you need them, because you're just going to hire whoever comes along because you need them. So hire ahead. If not, you're going to be a hostage. And if you hired the wrong person, they're going to burn up your company, your startup. They're going to burn your baby. And since it's a baby, it's very vulnerable. So yeah, I hope that helps. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

Sean McCabe is the founder and CEO of seanwes media, and Daily Content Machine. Sean is a prolific and successful creator, author, and influencer. His course, Learn Lettering, made $80,000 in the first 24 hours. For nearly a decade his podcast, blog, and courses have helped creators grow their brands, content, and skill sets.Sean's website is a treasure trove of courses and resources for anyone looking for business knowledge and creative support. Sean's book, Overlap, shows creators how to turn their passion into a successful business while working a full-time job. His podcast includes almost 500 episodes on content creation and entrepreneurship. His latest venture, Daily Content Machine, turns creators' best content into clippable moments they can share across their social media accounts.I talk with Sean about what it's like being a successful creator. We talk about growing your audience and connecting with them. We cover how to learn new skills fast, and about developing a growth mindset. We also talk about managing stress as a founder, how to handle burnout, and much more.In this episode, you'll learn: Why good writing is the foundation of great content How to connect better with your audience Leveraging short-form content to grow your brand Pricing at full value without feeling guilty How to avoid burnout, and what to do if you're already there Links & Resources Sean McCabe on The Nathan Barry Show episode 003 Craft + Commerce conference ConvertKit Enough Ryan Holiday James Clear Marie Forleo Ramit Sethi Sean McCabe's Links Follow Sean on Twitter Check out Sean on Instagram Sean's website Daily Content Machine Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Sean:If you are a founder, you should be in therapy. Full-stop. You need a therapist. I thought I didn't. I had a great upbringing. I'm all good. Everything's healthy. I don't have any problems. The problem was I didn't know the problems that I had. I didn't realize what I was stuffing down. I didn't realize what I was avoiding.There is so much to unpack that you don't know you need to unpack.[00:00:30] Nathan:In this episode I talk to my friend, Sean McCabe. We've known each other for seven years now. It's been a long time. We've been in a mastermind group together. He's actually been on the show before. Sean is a wildly talented designer. He got his start hand-lettering.I think last time he was on the show, years ago, we were talking about that aspect of his business and how he built this substantial course business. Selling courses on hand-lettering, on marketing, on writing. He's spoken at our conference Craft + Commerce, all kinds of things. Sean is one of the most prolific creators that I've ever known.It's also super fun that he's a friend and lives right here in town. We just have a great conversation. We talk about how you create content, which is one of those things that it's not even how you create content, it's why. Where that comes from. The internal drive in what you use. Where you choose to have as a source of fuel and energy to put into that creative output.How some sources are really good and productive, and others can be kind of like a house of cards, and it can be harmful. We also talk about scaling teams as a creator. How do you know when to build out a team around your business? He's done that two different ways. So I get to ask him about some of the things he's learned and applied differently.I'm going to stop there. There's a lot of good stuff. So with that, let's dive in.Sean. Welcome to the show.[00:01:59] Sean:Hey, Nathan, just saw you recently. We were playing volleyball, or something.[00:02:03] Nathan:Or something, like two days ago. You moved to my city. It's kind of…[00:02:08] Sean:Yeah. It's horrible. It's a terrible place. Boise. Don't move to Idaho.[00:02:15] Nathan:You mean Iowa? Boise, Iowa.[00:02:17] Sean:Iowa. Yeah. Don't, yeah. Did I do okay?[00:02:21] Nathan:Yeah. That's exactly what you're supposed to say. If you Google something about Boise, Google has the accordion of extra questions, or things you might want to know. One of them is, “Does Boise smell?” and it's just like auto complaints in there.And I was like, what is up with that? I clicked on it, and it's this satirical article that has 12 reasons you shouldn't move to Boise. One of them is the city dump is right in the middle of the city. Another one is like that the Ebola outbreak hasn't been fully contained yet.So it's not really safe. I think there was something about lava. Anyway, it's just an article about all the reasons to not move to Boise. So I think you're right in line.[00:03:08] Sean:Stay, away. That's what they tell me to say.[00:03:11] Nathan:Yes, but if someone were to ignore that and move to Boise, they could come to our weekly volleyball game on Wednesday nights.[00:03:19] Sean:It's casual. It's open.[00:03:21] Nathan:Let's try it. Yeah. It's been so fun having you and Laci here. It's also been fun because you started a new company. Your company is producing and editing and creating all the clips for this podcast. So, connections on so many levels.[00:03:37] Sean:Yeah. We produce this show, like the video show, the audio show, and then find clips and make those clips for social media. It's been great. We love this show. Our team's favorite content. So, I'm a little biased, but it's fun to be on. Because my team's going to work on this.[00:03:58] Nathan:Yeah, exactly. I made sure to spell your name correctly in the setup, and I know they'll get it all.I wanted to ask what sparked—like maybe first give a summary of Daily Content Machine, since that's what you're spending nearly all of your time on. More than a normal amount of time on. So, what sparked it, and what is it?[00:04:19] Sean:Fun fact. This is not the first time I've been on the show. The last time was episode three, 2,624 days ago.[00:04:30] Nathan:Give or take[00:04:32] Sean:I was doing different stuff then. It's been a crazy journey. Right now the newest iteration is an agency.We produce video clips. We turn long form video shows. If you have a video podcast or other kind of long form video content, we found that the hardest part is finding all the good moments in there, and turning those into short clips. That's what we do. I designed it for myself, really.I wanted it to be where you just show up, you record, and, everything just happens? What is your experience, Nathan, with having a video and audio podcasts made, and clips and all that published? What do you, what's your involvement.[00:05:14] Nathan:Yeah. So I think about who I want on the show, I email them and say, will you come on the show? And then I talked to them for an hour, and then I read no, either way. I don't even do that. Yep. That's my full involvement. And what happens is then really what I see is when the show comes out, which I don't touch anything from that moment on. I actually probably notice the show coming out like, oh yeah, that's the episode that we post this week. Cause we have a three week delay on our, production schedule. And so I noticed like, oh yeah, I had a David Perell on the show when I get the Twitter notification of like, David, Perell just retweeted you.And I'm like, oh, what did oh, right. Yeah. Because his episode came out and then every, I mean, David was especially generous. Right. But every clip that week seven in a row, he retweeted and posted to his, you know, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Right. Cause it makes him look really good. It's clips of him delivering these, you know, soundbites of genius, perfectly format.And he's like great retweet share with my audience. I think that one, I picked up like hundreds of new Twitter followers, just, you know, maybe more just from, from, that. So it's a, it's a great experience. The side that I haven't done as much with that I really want to. and you and I talked about this a lot when we. Like early days of Daily Content Machine and what could it be? And, and then, getting my show set up on it is the transcripts in the show notes that you all do. cause first you found the most interesting points of the show and then second there's text versions of all of that. And then they're all like neatly edited and, and everything.And so,[00:07:01] Sean:A lot of re-purposing options.[00:07:04] Nathan:Yeah, so like if you ask the same question or a similar question, like, Hey, how'd you grow from a thousand subscribers to 10,000. Tell me about that process. If you ask that consistently, which I'm not great about asking the same questions consistently, but then over the course of 20, 30 episodes, you have this great library of answers to that question and you could make like compile it all, write some narrative and it's like, oh, there's an ebook that would be 15 pages long and could be a free lead magnet or a giveaway or anything else. It's just a total by-product of the podcast and Daily Content Machine. So I'm a huge fan. That's my experience.[00:07:42] Sean:Well, it's great to hear. yeah, we wanted to make it, I wanted to make it, so I just show up. I record myself doing a podcast with the camera on, and then I walk away. Like I don't have to, the footage sinks. It goes to the team. They produce it. They made me look good. They make me sound good. They find all of the best things. I said, things my guests said, they think about my target audience. What are their struggles? What are their goals? What do they want, what do they need? How would they search for it? How would they say it themselves? And they work together to come up with good titles for them, then produce it, flawless captions, you know, do the research, how's the guests build their name.How does their company name capitalize? Like make sure it's, it's all polished and then publish it everywhere. So I just show up once a week for an hour and record, and then I get to be everywhere every day. That's that's at least the goal. And I'm hearing you say like one of the benefits, but one of the benefits of finding clips out of your long form shows to post on social media is you give your guests something to share.And there's kind of two, two ways of approaching podcasts. And one is kind of the old school way, you know, People used to blog and the used to subscribe to RSS feeds and like, you know, that's how they consumed their content. And definitely you still want to build your own platform, have a website, have a blog, you know, definitely have an email newsletter on ConvertKit but now we're, we're posting Twitter threads. We're posting more content natively and people are consuming more natively on the platforms. So there's the old idea of, I have a podcast, here's a link, go listen to my podcast, go watch my podcast, go watch my video shifting from that to, Hey, why don't we deliver the best moments of the show?Because people are consuming short form content, and that's how they're evaluating whether they want to subscribe, whether they want to spend an hour listening in depth to that interview. We're giving them all of these entrance points and just providing value natively on the platform. Instead of asking them to go off the platform and interrupt their experience, it's here you go.Here's some value here's where you can get more.And, and that that's such a great way to. Bring new listeners on as well as to give the guests something to share, because think about the experience between a guest, being told like, Hey, your episodes out, will you, will you share a link to it? And they're like, Hey, I was on a show, go listen to the show.It's such a great interview. You know, we, we do it. We want to help out that, that person with the podcast. But imagine if the best moments that, where you said that the smartest things with all of your filler words remove and your tangents remove was tweeted, and there's a video right there. All you have to do is hit retweet.It's free content for you. It looks good. But then also for you as the show host, it promotes your show and gives you a new awesome.[00:10:28] Nathan:The other thing in it, like the retweet is fantastic, but a lot of people want that as original content on their social channel. And so having like the, the deliverable that I get from you all is, is. Yeah, it just shows up in Dropbox of here's all the videos for all the platforms and everything, you know, from my archives and all that.And I've sent those on to the guests when they're like, Hey, can I post this? Not every tweet. Like I want to post it with my own, title or tweaks on that. And so I can just share that whole Dropbox folder and they'll, they'll go find the exact thing they want to share and, and use it in their own softens.Like, yes, absolutely. Because the pre-roll or like the, or the post roll on that video is like, go subscribe to item newsletters. It's like, yes, please.[00:11:14] Sean:And it's not like Nathan, that you would have trouble getting guests, but if one had trouble getting guests for their show, or you want to get someone that's like really big, really busy, they get all kinds of requests all the time. Well, imagine if they're evaluating between these different shows, you know what, what's the audience size?What am I going to get out of it? You know, especially if you don't have millions of downloads on your podcast. Well, if you're providing these additional assets, like, Hey, we're going to make clips of this. You're going to get content out of this. It can help people make that decision to come onto your show as opposed to maybe another.[00:11:46] Nathan:Yeah, totally. I want to go, so somebody different directions. This is, we talked about an agency and the business that you're starting. I have a question that I've kind of asked you one-on-one sometimes. And I want to know why build a business with a team and like build this X scale of business rather than go the indie creative route.Right? Because if we want to, if you wanted to say independent, no team, you could probably make a business doing $250,000 a year. Work on it, maybe 20 hours a week, something like that, you know, hanging out in the studio, you'd still have your podcast. You could sit down and like, you're one of the most prolific writers I've ever met. so you could do a bunch of those, those things. And yet you keep trying to do and succeeding in doing these much harder businesses of building a team. And I have to know why.[00:12:39] Sean:Nathan, I don't know. I don't know why. I kind of know why, uh it's it's like it's going to get deep. I mean, it, it probably really goes back to childhood and being, being the oldest of 13 kids feeling like. I don't know if my parents are watching, but like, I felt this, this pressure to be successful, to be a good example, to be, to be a leader, you know, like to be productive.And, you know, I'm working through a lot of that stuff in therapy, like learning, like where did my motivations come from? And like, you know, it is this healthy because, you know, you know, my, my background of extreme workaholism for like 10 years, like, Nope, no joke. It was really bad. Like 16 hour days, seven days a week for 10 years, like all I did was work and like that's, that's my tendency.And I think something beautiful came out of that, which is this sabbaticals idea where since 2014 now I've taken off every seventh week as a sabbatical. So I work six weeks and I, I take off a week and we do that with our team and all of our team members. I paid them to take off sabbaticals and it's just been beautiful.The heartbeat of the company. And like, it's been really good for me as well in terms of, you know, burnout prevention and just unlocking my best ideas, but that's, that's my tendency. And, you know, th there's, there's all kinds of reasons. And, you know, there there's messages that we hear that maybe were said or implicit, you know, growing up that we internalize.And so I think, honestly, Nathan it's, it's probably just like chasing, like, I'm going to be dead honest, like, like it's, it's just like, I think of your post that post that you titled about enough, you know, and, you know, thinking through it, like, like if I were to just think of a number, you know, it's like, no, that's not enough, you know, and I know that's not healthy.So like, yeah, I could totally, I could totally do the solo thing. I could totally make 600. Work part-time, have less stress and maybe I should, you know, maybe I will eventually, but there's something in me that wants to build something bigger, but at the same time, it's just so much fun. Get it, like, I just love processes and systems and like, you know, building things that can scale.And so, yeah, it's.[00:15:08] Nathan:Well, let's lean into it more because I have the same thing on two different sides. Like I made the same leap from a solar creator to having a team. and there's sometimes I miss aspects of the solo creator thing. Like there's a level of simplicity and like, I look at somebody's product launch or something, and it does $25,000 or $50,000.And I'm like, oh, I remember when that amount of money was substantial in that it moved the needle for the business and like, and drove real profits. Now, like 25 or $50,000 gets eaten up by that much of expenses, like immediately, you know, cause the, the machine is just so much, so much bigger. And so I have the same thing of, of pushing for more and trying to figure out what. Like, what is that balance? And, and, yeah, I guess, how do you think about the balance between gratitude and enough and drive and ambition?[00:16:08] Sean:Yeah, that is a great question. It is. It is a balance. And as someone who has a tendency towards all or nothing thinking like, I'm, I just get obsessed. Like if I'm, if I'm about something like, I'm just all in, or I don't care at all. Like I'm really not in between. And that I think is a double-edged sword.Like it's a reason for my success, but it's also a reason for all of my downfalls and like, you know, going years without exercising and losing relationships and friendships, because I was so consumed by what I was building, you know, it is very much a double-edged sword. And so I think the answer is balance, you know, in what you're saying, w what do you, what do I think about the balance?I think it is a balance. It has to be, you have to be operating from a place of enough and then have things that are pulling you forward. You know, something that you're working towards having goals I think is healthy. You know, it's. Something that gets you out of bed in the morning. You're excited about what you're doing.You have this vision for where you're going, but it's operating from a healthy place of, I'm not doing this to fill a void in my soul. Right? Like I'm not doing this because I believe I'm not enough because I believe I'm not worthy of something. But, but because I know, yes, I matter I'm worthy. I'm important.And I'm excited. Like, I think that's the, I'm not saying I'm even there. I just think that's the balance to strike[00:17:34] Nathan:Yeah. I think you're right in this. It's interesting of the things that you can do in your, I guess, life, maybe the creative Dr.. I think there's a tendency of using that insecurity to drive creative success that can work really, really well for an amount of time. Like if you need to finish a book, grow your audience to a thousand subscribers, you know, like accomplish some specific goal.And he used the chip on your shoulder and the feeling of like, this person doesn't believe in me and that like triggers those deep insecurities on one hand, it's wildly effective and on the other, it can be super destructive and it's such a weird balance and place to sit in.[00:18:21] Sean:Yeah, a double-edged sword, for sure. Like it can, it can be what helps you succeed? And it can be your downfall. So you have to wield it wisely. unintentional illiteration you ha you have to be careful with that because it's so easy to just get consumed by it, to drown in it, to let this, you know, whatever it is, this, this, this drive, this motivation, the chip on the shoulder, whatever it is to let it take you to a place where you're just like, along for the ride, you know, on a wave, going somewhere on a, on a, you know, a tube floating down the river, right.You're just being taken somewhere, but are you being taken where you wanna go?[00:19:05] Nathan:Well, yeah. And then realizing, like, it might feel like you are up into a point, but then I guess if you're not aware of it and you're not in control of it, then you'll get to the point where the thing that you were trying to succeed, that the book launch, you know, hitting $10,000 in sales or whatever else, like that's not going to have any of the satisfaction and.[00:19:25] Sean:If I can take an opportunity here just to speak very directly to a point. If you are a founder, you should be in therapy. Full-stop like you, you need a therapist. I thought I didn't. I was like, I had a great upbringing. I'm all good. You know, everything's healthy. I don't have any problems. The problem was, I didn't know the problems that I had.I didn't realize what I was stuffing down. I didn't realize what I was avoiding. There's so much stress, you know, being a founder or even any, any C level executive in a company, like there's just so much going on, and you're responsible for so many things it affects your personal life. It affects your relationships.It affects how you see yourself. There is so much to unpack that you don't know, you need to unpack. And there's probably also stuff that, you know, you need to unpack. and Maybe you don't want to, but I went my entire life until the past year. Never going into therapy, never went to therapy. I'm like, yeah, that's great.You know, if you have some serious problems or a really bad childhood or whatever, like yeah. That's, you know, I support, it like positive, you know, like golf clap and I'm like, oh my gosh since I've been going on. I'm like I didn't know why I was doing the things I was doing, what my reasons were, what my motivations were, the ways that it was unhealthy to me, the way that it was affecting my relationships.So I just want to encourage everyone to go to therapy. I promise it's going to be beneficial[00:20:53] Nathan:Yeah.I cannot echo that enough. I've had the same experience and just having someone to talk through whatever's going on in your life, whatever, like even just interesting observations. When someone said this, I reacted like that. And that doesn't quite add up. Like, can we spend some time digging into that kind of, you know, and you realize that like, oh, that wasn't, that wasn't a normal, like healthy reaction.And it had nothing to do with what the person said or who they are or anything like that. I had to do it. This other thing, the other thing that I think is interesting about therapy is when you're following people online, you're partially following them for the advice and what they can do for you and all of that.But I think the most interesting creators to follow are the ones who are on a journey and they bring their audience, their fans, along that journey with them. And a lot of people are on a really shallow journey or at least what they put out online is a really shallow journey of like a, I'm trying to grow a business from X to Y I'm trying to accomplish this thing.And it's like, Like, I'm happy for you. There's like tips and tactics that you use along the way. And that's moderately interesting, but I think if you're willing to dive in on therapy and why you do, or you make the decisions that you do and what really drives things, it makes for as much deeper journey, that's a lot more interesting to follow. And all of a sudden the person that you followed for like learning how to do Facebook ads is talking about not only that, but the sense of gratitude that they were able to find in the accomplishments that they made or how they help people in this way or other things that's like a really authentic connection.And I think that, even though like growing a more successful business is not the goal of therapy and, and all of that. Like, it has that as a by-product.[00:22:42] Sean:It does. It definitely does. Although I'm, I definitely look at things the way that you're saying, which is like, what is. Productive output of doing this thing. And it's like, yeah, that's why I need to be in therapy to understand why I apply that lens to absolutely everything. but I I've found it immensely helpful.I would say I would echo what you're saying. in terms of sharing your journey, both the ups and the downs. I think that the highs of your journey are only as high as the lowest that you share, because otherwise it's just kind of it's, it's flat, you know, there's nothing to compare to like th th in the hero's-journey-sense you know, we we're rooting for the underdog who is going through challenges, and then we're celebrating with them when they have the wins.If you know, if you're not sharing the, the, the low points, it's not as relatable. Now that doesn't mean you have to share everything you're going through. You don't, you know, you can keep some things, you can keep everything personal. I'm just saying, if you have the courage to share what you're going to find is that you're not alone.You're not the only person going through these things. You're not the only person feeling these things. And sometimes the biggest failures or, or the things that, that hurt the most or the most difficult to go through when you share those, those can actually resonate the most. That can be where your, your community really steps up.And you, you feel that, more than any other time.[00:24:07] Nathan:Yeah. I think that, like I wrote this article a few years ago, titled endure long enough to get noticed, and it was just actually wrote it, it was off the cuff. I was on a plane just like needed to get something out that week. And it was an idea about serum on my head and I wrote, wrote it out, send it off.And, just the replies from it, because it took a more personal angle and it was talking about some of the struggles and a bunch of the replies were like, oh, that's exactly what I needed in this moment. Like, I was about ready to give up on this thing, you know? And, and that was that bit of encouragement. It ends up being this thing that feeds both ways. If you're able to take care of your audience and then if you let them, your audience can take care of you of saying like, oh, that that was really, really, meaningful.[00:24:49] Sean:Can I turn it around on you for just a second and, and ask, I, I know Nathan, you've been writing recently, you're on a bit of a streak and for those. Following your journey for a long time. They know you've, you've gone on streaks for periods of time. You made an app to log those things. We're talking about this recently.And I was just curious, what, what made you start writing again? And it may be, if you can touch on like the identity piece that you were sharing with me.[00:25:17] Nathan:Yeah.So most good things that have come in my business. Many of them, at least for a whole period of time, he came from writing. I wrote a thousand words a day for over 600 days in a row. And like, that was. Multiple books, a 20,000 subscriber audience, like just a whole bunch of things so I can work it from and everything else. And I've, I've tried to restart that habit a handful of times since then. And yeah, you were asking the other day, I'm trying to think, where are we out of the brewery? Maybe? I don't know.[00:25:51] Sean:Yeah. Something like.[00:25:51] Nathan:Well, I've all something. And you're just asking like, Hey, you're restarting that what what's driving that. And the thing that came to, I actually came to it in a coaching therapy conversation was like, I'm a writer. That's who I am. You know, it's part of my identity and yes, I'm also a, a creator and a startup founder and CEO and whatever else, but like, realizing that. I'm most at home when I'm writing, that's not what I'm doing. Writing is my full-time thing. And like, here's the cadence that I put out books, you know, obvious thing of like Ryan holiday, he's super prolific, like a book or two a year, you know?I'm not a writer in that way, but I, I have things to say and, words have an impact on people in the act of writing has such an impact on me that I realized that I feel somewhat of this void if I don't exercise that muscle and stay consistent of not just like teaching and sharing, but also taking these unformed thoughts that bounce around in my head and it, and like being forced to put them out in an essay that is actually coherent and backs up its points and like, Yeah, it makes it clear.So anyway, that's the, that's why I'm writing again. And so far it's been quite enjoyable. I'm only on, I think, 20 days in a row of writing, writing every day, but it's coming along now. I have to look. 21 today will be 22.[00:27:19] Sean:Nice. Yeah. Right. Writing is so great for clarifying thinking. And I love the, the identity piece. It's like, I'm a writer, you know, that's what I do. And I think it's interesting to think about whether it's kind of chicken and the egg, right. Maybe, maybe James clear would, would disagree, but like, does it start with a belief that you're a writer and therefore you write, or is it the act of writing that makes you a writer?And if you, if you aren't writing, then you're not.[00:27:50] Nathan:Yeah. I wrote something recently and maybe it's a quote from somebody of, if you want to be the noun and you have to do the verb, you know, and so we're looking for, how do I become a writer? How do I become a painter? How do I become a musician An artist, any of these things? And it's like, if you want to be a writer?Yyou have to write, you know, like, and I think we, we get so caught up in the end state that we start to lose track of the, the verb, the thing of like writers, write painters, paint, photographers, take photos, you know? And so if you're not seeing progress in that area, then it's like, well, are you actually doing the verb?And yeah, that plays a lot into identity and, and everything else.[00:28:37] Sean:I like what James, James clear says about like casting a vote for the person you want to[00:28:43] Nathan:Yeah, I think I referenced James on. So it's the, I reference you probably every fourth episode. And then James, maybe at like, just on alternating ones.So the thing that I quote you on all the time is the show up every day for two years, like I always had create every day as a poster on my wall, and I really liked the for two years, angle. And so I I'd love for you to share where does the for two years part come from and why, why that long? Why not for two months or two decades or something else?[00:29:16] Sean:Right. It really, the whole show up every day for two years, idea came from me, drawing letters, hand lettering. You know, you think of the Coca-Cola logo. That's not a font. That's, you know, customer. That's what I would do is draw letters. Like, like what you have behind your head, that type of style of lettering.And I just enjoyed doing that and I, it wasn't a job or anything, and I really didn't pursue it seriously for a long time, even though I enjoyed it as a kid, because I thought I could never make a living at this, you know? And it's that like productivity filter again, what can I be successful at? You know, as opposed to like, Hey, what do I enjoy?You know? And, it took an artist telling me, Hey, if you enjoy it, just create. because cause you enjoy doing it. Just create. I was like, yeah, I don't know why I needed that permission, but I did. And I just started creating and I was creating for me, like, because I loved it. And I was sharing on Instagram and Twitter and places like that, the drawings I was making, but nobody really cared or noticed for the first two years.And it, it, it, that was okay with me because I was doing it for myself. I loved the process. I love the act of. But somewhere right around two years, it was just this inflection point. It's kinda like you say, you know, like do it until you're noticed, right. And people started asking for custom commissions, do you have posters?Do you have t-shirts? And the reason I recommend that people show up every day for two years is it's not going to happen overnight. You know, hopefully in that time you find the reason for yourself that you're showing up. and the two years part is arbitrary for some people within eight months, they're on the map and people notice their work and maybe they could quit their job or, or whatever.Right. But two years is really just to give people a mark, you know, to, to work towards. by that time they figure out like, oh, it's not actually about two years. It's about showing up every day.[00:31:16] Nathan:Yeah. And a lot of what I like about two years is it since your time horizon correctly. and it helps you measure your like past efforts. I think about, you know, if you've thought about starting a, like learning a musical instrument or starting a blog or any of those things, you're like, eh, I tried that before, you know, and you're like, yeah, I showed up most days kind of for two months, maybe, you know, like when you look back and you analyze it, you're like, oh, I didn't show up every day for two years. And there's also sort of this implicit, I guess conversation you have with yourself of like, if I do this, will I get the results that I want? And cause the, the most frustrating thing would be to put in the effort and to not get the results and how the outcome you're. Like, I tried it for so long and I didn't get there. And so I believe that if you're doing something like creating consistently showing up every day, writing every day for two years and you're publishing it and you're learning from what you, you know, the results you try and consistently to get better, you almost can't lose. Like, I don't know of examples of people.Like no one has come to me. I actually emailed this to my whole list and said, like, what is something that you've done every day for two years, that didn't work. And people came back to me with story after story of things that they thought would be that. And then it like started working a year or year and a half in, or at some point in there because it's really hard to fail when you're willing to show up consistently for a long period of time.[00:32:54] Sean:And I think there's a point of clarification there kind of a nuanced discussion where some people might say, well, you know, where where's, where's the other end of the spectrum, where you're just continually doing a thing that doesn't work, you know, doing the same thing and expecting different results.And I don't think that's what we're talking about here. Like when we say show up every day, Showing up everyday to your craft, you know, for yourself to better yourself, whether that's writing or drawing or working on your business. This doesn't mean never course-correcting, this doesn't mean adapting or adjusting to find product market fit.We're talking about showing up for yourself. This doesn't mean even posting every day. It's not, it's really not for others. Like share what you want. If you want to tweet every day, if you want to blog or post your art every day, go for it. I actually tried that and, you know, it was pretty exhausting and that's part of why I made Daily Content Machine.I was like, how about I show up one hour a week and you turn that into Daily Content for me. but still on all the other days, I want to show up for myself. And, and often for me, it starts with writing as well. I think it all starts with writing, whether it's a business idea or a course or a book or content like writing is just the seed of all of that.So I like writing, not because I. It was born a rider or anything. I just see results from it. So for me, it's showing up in writing, even if I'm not posting that, or I'm not posting it now, you know, it's just for me.[00:34:19] Nathan:Yeah. And that's an important point because a lot of the time my writing is just chipping away at some bigger thing. Like some of the long essays that I've written have been written over the course of three or four months, you know, it's not like I got it together and like published it and it was ready to go.It was like an ongoing thing.What, like, what are some of your other writing habits? Because you're someone who has written a ton, I've seen you consistently write like 4,000 words a day for an entire month and stuff like that. yeah. When someone asks you, how do I become a better writer? How do I write consistently any of that? What are some of your tips?[00:34:55] Sean:Yeah. I'll tell you how not to do it, which is how I've done it, which is back to our earlier discussion. Just kind of all or nothing. my first book I wrote in 14 days, 75, 80,000 words, and my, my second book, which I still haven't edited and published. I was like, I want to show people that things take, as long as the amount of time you give them, how long does it take to write a book a year, 10 years a month?You know, two weeks, I was like, I'm going to try and write a hundred thousand words in a single day. So I live streamed it, and my idea was to speak it and have it dictated, right. Have it transcribed. I made it to 55,000 words. And these are like, it's, it's all you, you can find it. it's, it's coherent words like this.Isn't just feel like, like the book was in my head. I made it to 55,000. My voice was going and I'm like, I think I've got most of the book. I'm not going to kill my voice. And that's, as far as I made it. So I failed on the goal, but still got 55,000 words. But then for the next, like three, three or six months or something I hardly wrote.Cause I was just like, oh yeah, you know, look what I did. You know, I wrote all those words and it's like, no, that's not the right way to do it. Like I actually, I think there was a point to what I was doing and it was, it was a fun stunt or whatever, but I kind of regret that, you know, I wish I just stuck to, you know, you had that, that idea of like write a thousand words a day and this is something I would share with people as like an idea for starting out, Hey, try and read a thousand words a day.And I found out people would get stuck on that. They'd be like, I wrote 830, 2 words. I'm a failure. I'm just gonna give up and wait until the weekend when I have more time. And it's like, no, that's not the point. The point is to just show up and, and put some words there. So maybe for you, it's a time like write for 20 minutes, write for 15 minutes, write three sentence.And maybe you keep going, you know, but like put in the reps, show up, you know, put on the running shoes and go out the front door. If you don't run the five miles, that's fine. You know, walk around the block, but show up. And so I I've done it both ways and I don't prefer the stunt way where I write 50,000 words in a day.I prefer the, the, the ones where I write 400 words every single day, that week[00:37:06] Nathan:Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I've, I've, had that a lot of times where I was like, oh, I can't write today because I, I wouldn't have time to hit 500 or a thousand words. And so that's something I'm doing differently this time around of like, look even a hundred or 200 is a, is a success, any amount of, of doing the reps as good.[00:37:26] Sean:I want to lean in on that idea of defining success as less. What I mean by defining success as less is, and this is especially helpful. If you're going through a hard time, if you're feeling burned out, if you're feeling depressed, w with remote work, growing and growing, you know, w we're commuting less, we have more time.We have more flexibility in our day, but we, we tend to fill that time with just more and more work. And it's really easy to get to the point where you feel overloaded. And you, you go into your day just too ambitious thinking. You can get too many things done and ending with disappointment. Like I didn't get all the things done, you know, and you're just on this perpetual cycle of disappointment every day, setting yourself up for disappointment, trying to do too much.And instead of defining success as less. And so if you're, if you're feeling depressed, I mean, this gets as small as today as a success. If you brush your teeth, like today's a success. If you shower, today's a success. If you walk around just your block, that's it not run a mile, you know, not come up with a new business plan or outline a whole course or something.Less defined success is less, when I would do podcasts, I, you know, a podcast is what an hour, maybe two hours or something like that. But it takes a lot of energy. If you've never been on a podcast, you know, it takes energy to record. And I would feel bad after I record a podcast, not getting as much done afterward, you know, like, oh, I didn't get that much done.I mean, I recorded a podcast, but then I was supposed to have this and this and this, and just beat myself up. And I realized like, Hey, that, that podcast I recorded, that's going to be heard by thousands of people. That's really high leverage work. And I brought my best self and I really showed up and I really delivered.And that was good work. And you know what, on days where I have a podcast, I'm going to define that day as a success. If I show up and record that podcast, anything else is a bonus. And, and you just make that smaller and smaller and smaller until it's accessible to you until it's attainable for you. So maybe it's like write three sentences.If you show up at all to your writing app and write three sentences, the days of success. And what you'll find is more often than. You'll keep going.[00:39:34] Nathan:I think that's so important in, and I imagine most creators have been in that position of no motivation feeling depressed. And then you beat yourself up because you didn't get anything done, like deriving yourself worth. This kind of goes back to the earlier conversation, driving your self worth from what you create can both be very powerful in that it can feed itself really well.And then it is also incredibly fragile. And I've gotten to that point where if you end up in the downward spiral version of that, then like not creating, not accomplishing something. Leads you to feel more upset and depressed and so on. And it like when it works, it works well. And when it stops working, it fails spectacularly.And I think you're right. That the only way out of it is to lower that bar of success to something crazy low that you can't consistently. And then, you know, gradually you're way out of it from there.[00:40:34] Sean:Yeah, you, you are more than what you do. You are more than what you create. You are more than what you produce. You are more than your job. You are not your company. You're not the money in the bank. You're not how much you make each month. You're not the decline in revenue from this month compared to last month.Like you're none of those things. You're a person you're a human outside of that with independent work. And that's such a hard thing to internalize, but, but if you can, I mean, you, you, you just become impervious to all the things that can come against you. You know, you just become unstoppable. Nothing's going to phase you.Like you can embrace the highs and embrace the lows and just ride the rollercoaster. And I'm just describing all the things that I don't know how to do, but I'm working.[00:41:20] Nathan:Yeah. It's all the things that we're trying to, like lean in on and remind ourselves of, in those, in those tough times, I have a friend who has his game, that he played his, a few little kids, and his sort of a little game that he plays with them over time. And he like in a playful, joking voice, he asked them like, oh, what do you need to do to be worthy of love? And it's like turned into the thing for they, like, they're like nothing, you know? And he's very purposefully trying to counteract this idea of like, oh, I need to earn worthiness. I need to earn love. If, if I like show up for my parents in this way, if I take care of my family in that way, if I'm not a burden on other people, then like, Then I'll be okay and I'll be worthy of love and all of that.And so he's just playing it, like making it a playful thing with his kids from a very young age to basically instill this idea of like, you are a complete whole person and you can't, like earn worthiness of love and you also can't lose it.[00:42:19] Sean:I'm just thinking of the titles for this episode, that my team's going to come up with, like how to be a founder worthy of love.[00:42:26] Nathan:Yes, exactly.[00:42:28] Sean:Don't use that title.[00:42:31] Nathan:Okay. But I want to go, you've built a, a team twice, for first for Sean West, as a business, you know, of the course and content, community business. And then now for Daily Content, I want to get into, like what you like, how you built the team differently between those two times and what you learned. but before we do that, let's talk about as a solo creator. When you're thinking about making that leap to something where you need a team to build it to the next level, maybe you're at a hundred thousand dollars a year in sales, and you're looking at maybe the roommate's eighties and the Marie Forleo's of the world where like a few, rungs above you on the same ladder.And you're like, okay, that would require a team. What are some of the things that you think people should consider in that leap?[00:43:22] Sean:My biggest mistake was applying the right advice at the wrong time.Like I'm not a, I'm not a reckless person. Like I'm going to do my research and learn and like get all the smart people's advice. And so every, every big mistake I've made was as a result of applying great advice from smart people at the wrong time.And so it's, and, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone really, really talk about this. There's a lot of people slinging advice who should really be asking questions, but at the same time, you can't even blame them. Cause like Twitter, there's no room for nuance. Like you tweet fortune cookie tweets, you know, with, with advice and like, hope that people apply it at the right time.Like, that's just kind of how it goes. But like, you know, to, to your point of like looking to other people and what they've built and like, oh, that's what I would need and stuff, you know, I, I heard things. Delegate, you know, you don't want superhero syndrome. Like you need to empower other people and delegate the things you're not good at delegate the things you don't like to do, delegate the things you're good at.And you like to do, but you shouldn't do because you're the founder and you need the vision, you know, like, so it's like delegate, delegate. And so, okay. All right. Hire. This is going to sound really stupid, but no one told me that you need to make sure the thing that you're doing is working before you hire, because hiring is scaling, which means to make something bigger.And if you've got a bucket at the beach and the bucket has holes in it, and you scale that bucket, you have a bigger bucket with holes. Like th th that's not better. That's like, do you, do you like the stressful problems you have now? How would you like problems with another zero on that? Like you have $30,000 problems.Do you want $300,000 a month problems? Like, you know, it's not fun. so nobody's told me that and looking back, it's like, it's so dumb. Like, do you think making this big. Automatically makes it better. It's just going to automatically make the problems go away. No, you need to, you need to scale. What's working, do more of what works and, and, and slow down and hold off and make sure the thing you have is working before you grow it.I don't know if I answered the question, but I'm just speaking to my past self.[00:45:32] Nathan:You totally did. So what are the things that, like, how does that play out as you're building Daily Content Machine, versus the previous team?[00:45:40] Sean:The difference here is my, my previous business required me to function and I hired people around me, you know, to support me. So I wasn't doing all the work, but I had to show up. I had to, you know, whatever I had to write, I, you know, come up with an email or blog or. Or live stream or podcast or whatever.It was like, it was built around me and there's nothing wrong with that. Like, that's totally fine. You can build a business where you do what you love and you're supported by your team. I just found that you can, you can do something that you love and burnout, like after you do that for years and years and years, it's not even that I don't like podcasting or I don't like writing cause I actually do what it ultimately came down to is that I don't like having to do it.And if I don't, if I don't, then everything falls apart. And so with this new business, the agency, it was like, okay, like the first thing I want to build from is this can't require me to function. It has to be built in a way that the team can run things where it's like, I don't have to be on the strategy call.I don't have to do the marketing. Like my face isn't necessarily the reason people are coming to. and that, that really shifted how we build things.[00:47:01] Nathan:Yeah. I mean, that, that's a huge thing. And like, I imagine you defining all of these roles and early on, you might be doing a bunch of them to test if it works and to build out the systems, but none of them are like defined by your own unique skillset. Like you actually I've loved watching your systems and the, as you've shown me behind the scenes, because you're breaking it down and you don't need one person who is a fantastic video editor and copywriter and project manager talking about that, actually, because I think so often we're trying to find the employee or the team member. That's like the, the unicorn perfect fit. And you've made a system that doesn't require.[00:47:42] Sean:Exactly. And we did start out that way, where, when, when I was initially hiring for, you know, this Daily Content Machine service that we have, what's involved in that process and we talked. Clients and prospects all the time that like the Mo one of the most common things they try to do is either build a team in-house that can find all the best moments scrubbed through the long form content, edit it.Well, you know, titles, research, all of that, the build that team in house, or hire a freelancer and the problems with either of those is like what I've identified as it comes down to the person doing, doing content repurposing well requires nine key skills among them like copywriting and marketing and design and animation and rendering, and like, you know, SEO and all of that stuff.And I'm not saying there's, there's no one out there with all those skills, but, but those people are doing their own thing most of the time,[00:48:38] Nathan:I think I'm a pretty good Jack of all trades. And I think if we get to five of those, probably maybe on a[00:48:45] Sean:You could probably do most, I can do most too, but I don't scale, you know, so I'm trying to, I'm trying to scale me. and the first thing I tried to do was hire someone who could do all the things like, okay, you need to be able to, and that very quickly was not the way that was not going to work.So we realized we need specialists. We need people who are really good writers. We need people who are really good animators. People who are good editors, people who are a good quality assurance, reviewers, people who are good project managers, you know, all of that. And that's, that's what probably sets us apart.You know, the most unique thing is like, we learn about your audience and we find all of the moments and like teaching people, I've talked to people who have their own teams, or they're trying to build teams for doing this. And that's the hardest part is how do you teach someone how to find those moments?Like video editing is commoditized. You can find a video editor anywhere, but what happens when you try and get a freelancer who can just chop up clips and animate it and put a slap a title on it? Yeah. Th they're not, they don't care about the quality. They're not capitalizing the book titles and the company names and spelling the guests.Right. You know, and the titles of the clips, that's like half of it, you know, like half of it is the title, because that's going to determine whether someone sticks around and clicks or watches or whatever, and they're not thinking the right way, or they're not finding the right moments. And so the person who's outsourcing, they're trying to go from, I've been doing this myself.I've been editing my own video. I've been scrubbing through my own long form content to now, okay, you have got this freelancer, but now you're a project manager and a quality assurance reviewer because their work isn't up to par. And so I have people asking me like, how do you teach people how to do this?Well, how to find those moments, what's going to provide value to the audience. How do you title it all? and that part, I'm not giving away because that's, that's our home.[00:50:33] Nathan:Yeah. And that, that makes sense. So you described Daily Content Machine as an agency and it is, but I was like, great. You're an agency. Here's my other idea for a show where. Like a dream it up and produce it. Or actually we build my website for me, like your, your designers on all that.Right. And your answer would be like a flattened and I think that's really important for the business. So can you talk about the difference between the agency that you're running in productized services and how you think about making that scale versus like a, an agency of, Hey, this is our hourly rate.These are the projects we're best at, but we'll kind of take on anything.[00:51:11] Sean:So maybe I'll I'll I'll title the clip of this moment, how here's, how you will try it like this. Here's how you create a six figure agency. And for. It is by saying no to almost everything and getting really specific about what you offer and to whom. So my previous, the previous iteration of my business, I was out of a scale of one to ten I was working at a level 11 effort, you know, to bring in six figures with this version of the business. It's like a one or two in terms of, you know, getting people to give you vast amounts of money. And the difference is in what you're providing and, and to whom. So you've kind of got this, this matrix of products or services that either make money for your clients, or they're just nice to have.And then on the people side, you have, it's a generalization, but people who have money and people who don't, and I was always playing on hard mode, you know, I was trying to sell like kind of more premium stuff to people who didn't have money. And I'm like, you know, feeling bad about not being able to give stuff to the people who don't have money.And it's like, you know, what a really great way to do this would be to provide premium services that make money for people who have. So I decided I'm going to start with six to seven figure business owners. What is it that they need? And what is it that, that I'm good at, you know, core competencies. And that's where we came up with this idea.And the hardest part has been not giving into shiny object syndrome. All of the things that we could do, all of the services that I want to build. And it's like, no, there's so much more juice in this one thing. If we just stick to this and just become the best at finding, identifying, and producing and distributing clips from long form content and just be really, really good at that.There's enough complexity in that, you know, and just see that as the game, like, how can we get really good at this? How can we sell this better? How can we deliver it better? How can we increase the quality and just getting really focused and aligning what you offer the value of that to the people you're offering it to within four weeks with just a page and a form.This was a six figure book.[00:53:16] Nathan:When I think about the price of the offering. So I think I have. for what I pay for and Daily Content Machine paying about $5,000 a month. Is that right? I think somewhere in there.[00:53:28] Sean:So, what we didn't say is you, you kind of talked me into, adding another service, which is, we also do the video and audio show notes, transcript, like podcast production piece. So like, we'll produce the full thing. You just show up and record sync the footage to us. We'll produce the show and we'll make the clips.That's actually been a really nice bundle, but I'm like, okay, that's it, that's it. You know? So you kind of have some extra services in there.[00:53:53] Nathan:Yeah.To be clear, you don't want to let your friends, even if they live in the same town, as you convince you to like change your agency,[00:54:00] Sean:Nathan's very convincing.[00:54:03] Nathan:I distinctly remember. I even invited you over for dinner and convinced you of it,[00:54:07] Sean:How am I supposed to say no,[00:54:08] Nathan:Exactly.[00:54:10] Sean:You made an offer. I couldn't refuse.[00:54:13] Nathan:But in that, so you're talking about like what you're selling to someone who might not be able to afford it, or like you might make a course that you charge $5,000 for that is absolutely worth every bit of that when in the right person's hand and apply it in the right way. But you're going to have a bunch of people trying to buy it, who like, aren't that person who's going to get the leverage to make it a clear 10 X value or something like that. And so you might have in this position where someone's like, oh, $5,000 is expensive. Should I buy it? I don't know. And you're like, honestly for you, I don't know if you should buy it.Like you're not in the target market and that's, that's $5,000 one time in the case of this. And this agency, this productized service, I guess, $5,000 a month. And so actually two of those clients, and you've got a six figure a year agency business. And it's just interesting. The thing that you said made me really drove home the point of, there's not necessarily a correlation between effort and income and, and effort and output. And so you found a model and kept, kept tweaking until you found one where it was like, look, there's a ton of work that goes into this, obviously. And there's a bunch of really smart people working on editing and transcribing and captioning and everything in the show. but like, it, it doesn't have to be crazy complicated, whereas some of the other business models that you and I have both tried have been way more effort for way less.[00:55:40] Sean:Yeah. And what can really hold you back is not realizing who you're trying to market to. And. getting Talked down in your prices by accidentally catering to the wrong people. So like people who can't afford your services, you could get on call consultation calls with them. And they're just like, I just don't have this much money and can you do discounts?And you, you almost start to feel bad. Like, you know, how can I charge this much? I must be charging way too much. And it's like, or maybe you're serving the wrong customers. Like, you know, when you talk to the right people, that may actually be really cheap. I remember when I started designing logos, this is like a decade ago.My first logo, I charged like 150 And then, once I sold that I got enough confidence to charge 300. And then I was like, I, you know what, instead of doubling again, I'm going to charge $750[00:56:30] Nathan:Ooh.[00:56:31] Sean:I did that. And you know, I'm like slowly building on my portfolio and I got up to like, $1,500 and clients were paying that and right around there, you start to get people resisting.Now you've got a price with a comma and it gives people. pause And they're like, can you come down? Can you do a little bit cheaper? And it's so tempting. You, you want to do that because you want the job. You, you want them to be happy. It could be a good portfolio item. And I remember just kind of fast forwarding through this, but like, you know, just mindset shifts and stuff.Eventually I got to the point where there was this startup out of San Francisco they wanted a logo. And I was like, this would be really valuable for this company, you know? And I somehow mustered up the courage to charge $4,000. And I found out later from a friend of a friend, you know, from someone that worked there that they thought I was like super cheap because someone else they knew or some other agency was going to charge $25,000 And I was like, wow, like I'm over here. Just like feeling bad about my prices, thinking I'm going so big. And really I'm. I was just serving the wrong code.[00:57:34] Nathan:Yeah. And it's so interesting because the person who's only able to pay $500 or only thinks the logo is worth $500. It's not that they're wrong or they're devaluing your service or something like that. It's that maybe it's for a side project or it's for a business that just got off the ground or any of that. And so it's not worth getting offended over or something like that. It's like, we just don't have product market fit, like product customer fit. It's not a thing here, you know, and my services are better for, you know, bigger, more established companies. So the saying no to, to, services, occasionally getting talked into specific services by your somewhat annoying local friends. but then where does it go from here as far as what are you looking to, to, to add more clients and, and keep scaling and growing?[00:58:30] Sean:Yeah. That's what we're trying to figure out right now is it's always tricky. It's a blessing and a curse when you have an audience, because it can kind of create false product market fit. Like you, you think you have something and then you exhaust your audience and then you're like, oh, like I kinda need to figure this out.You know, that's like, we're experiencing that right now because like, I was getting like 40% close rates on consultation calls on sales calls, and now we're not, and it's. Oh, no, like what's happening. And it's like, well, I think those people probably knew me for several years, you know? And then like, there's just all this trust and still Nathan we're a year in and we don't have, like, we don't have a proper website for, for the agency.It's like a page with a form. That's it? There's no, there's no examples. There's no case studies. There's no portfolio item and we've made it this far. but you know, when people don't know you, they need that social proof and they want the examples and they're looking for past versions of success. And like the sales cycle is a little bit longer.And so that's where we're at right now is like figuring out kind of like Mar marketing channel fit. And I know well enough to know, like it's better to, and back to right advice, wrong time. it's a good idea to be everywhere if you can, you know, cause different people consume on different platforms.Even if you don't use Instagram. Other people do, even if you don't use YouTube, other people do it's. Beyond LinkedIn, even if you don't, you know, that like there's, there's some, there's some sound reasoning to that at the same time. You don't want to try to do all of that all at once, you know, and, and spread yourself too thin, like pick one channel, do one channel.Well, and when you've got that down and it's easy and you have systems and it's not taking too much time, then expand to another channel with the goal of like, ultimately diversifying kind of like investments. You don't want to just diversify all at once. You know, like, like try some things out, you know, focus on one thing at a time, see what works for us.I, at least I know that much. And so it's like, okay, I'm not trying to do every version of marketing, you know, like, oh, do we do affiliates? Do we do ads? You know, do we do content? Do we do cold outreach? You know? I'm trying not to do everything at once. So we're kind of dabbling in one thing at a time and seeing what fits.[01:00:48] Nathan:So how many clients do you have now for the agency that are the consistent tenders?[01:00:53] Sean:Not a lot. It's still very small. And we've had like, I it's under a dozen cause like some, we had like several accounts, like not renew and stuff. So it's still very small. And for three or four months, I stopped marketing and sales completely because I did not want to break this thing with scale because I notice things in operation that were the operations that were not going well.I'm like, this is going to be really bad. Like if we just sign more clients, it's going to be really bad. So, I had clients pay upfront for like six months or 12 months of service, which kind of gave us time to focus on operations. And now everything's humming along smoothly. Like the systems we've built can support like dozens or hundreds of accounts, even like, we don't need it right now, but it'll support where we want to go.But it's still a very, it's actually very small, like again done, like almost no marketing a year end, still don't have a website. Like it's pretty much just been all internal focused.[01:01:52] N

Sean: It's a matter of awareness. Here's the thing for a leader like me, for example, to be aware, you're the CEO, you're the president, you're the founder. Here's the problem. Not a lot of people will say to your face that, "Hey Sean, this is the problem with you." And sometimes we could be blindsided to it. Totally unaware that we have that problem. The problem is people don't want to speak up to you because you're the founder and CEO. How do you get over that? What's the solution for that? Jason: [00:04:43] That's the question that I get asked a lot in my coaching with leaders. One of the things that people say is that, how do I get more self-awareness if nobody speaks up? Right? So the idea of speaking up is the idea of safety. It's actually boiling it down is it's really safety. When you get safety, you get transparency. You get, "Hey, Sean, that really sucked what you just did." You know, you get somebody who can actually say that to you because they know that tomorrow they won't get fired. So the idea of safety, and how do you create that safety is actually through the first conversation you had with that person, the very first conversation, and it builds on that. So for example, if you, if they ask a question. So, let's say they say, "Sean, I think you are a bit, you are reacting too fast," right? "You're a bit rational. That I think we should think about this," that first response that they have gives them the historical records of: What should I do in the future? And if you say something like "you don't know anything," oh, if you say something like "I'm the boss," then that is a historical record in his mind to say that, you know what, then that's true and I will behave differently after that. And slowly the voice gets quieter and quieter. So for a leader, one of the most important things is that - anyway, when I go through organizations, I know whether that organization has safety. They call it psychological safety. You can call it relational safety. But If people are asking questions and they're able to actually question you back, "why do you say that?" I know that the organization has safety. If nobody's speaking. Because all, when they think back or when they hear historical records or we can call it "gossip" or so, historical records of other people, "you know what you, you spoke to Sean, I'll tell you what, you know, James, you spoke to Sean two years ago. Yeah. Where's he now he's not here. Yeah, he's gone, I don't think so be careful." So any kind of data we want to build on it and every one of us. There's a ton of historical data. It's very ingrained and we call that culture. So what you want to do is that you want to start to be very careful at very small things, because you can change the thing about history is that you can start writing a new one. So the next time somebody asks you a question, Sean, in front of people, for example, use that as a way of demonstrating the, "Hey, you know what? That's a great question. There is no stupid question. That's a really great question. I appreciate you sharing with me that. Yes, I'm rash. A lot of times I'm rash about this and you know what I appreciate you, and I hope that you can carry on to share me these things. Because as a leader, I need information. The more information I have, the more data I have, the more I can make better decisions. If you say it that way, you will see a change in the historical records and you'll get more and more of these questions coming to you. And when you have that, you have more data points coming in. And when we have more data points you higher self-awareness. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

About SeanSean Kilgore is an Architect at Twilio, where he draws boxes, lighthouses and soapboxes. In Sean's spare time, he enjoys reading, walking, gaming, and a well-made drink.Links: Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/ Silvia Botros's Twitter: https://twitter.com/dbsmasher Sean's Twitter: https://twitter.com/log1kal 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: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: Up next we've got the latest hits from Veem. Its climbing charts everywhere and soon its going to climb right into your heart. Here it is!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Sean Kilgore who's an architect at a small company called Twilio. Sean, welcome to the show.Sean: Corey, it's a pleasure to be here.Corey: It really is. You're one of those fun people that I always mean to catch up with and really do a deep dive in, but we keep passing like ships in the night. And in fact, I want to go back to more or less what is pretty damn close to your first real job in technology. You were a network administrator at Lutheran High School in Orange, California.Sean: I was.Corey: And at that same time, I was a network administrator down the street at Chapman University, also in Orange, California. And despite that, we have traveled in many of the same circles since, but we have never met in person despite copious opportunities to do so.Sean: That is amazing.Corey: Talking to you is like looking into a funhouse mirror of what would it have been like if I could, you know, hold down a job, and was actually good at things. It's really fun. Apparently, I'd be able to grow a better beard.Sean: I don't know about that. My beard is pretty patchy.Corey: Yeah, I look like an angry 14-year-old trying to prove a point to Mommy and Daddy. But that's not really the direction that we need to take this in today. And you've done a lot of stuff that aligns with things that are near and dear to my heart. For the last—what is it now?—six years and change? Seven years and change? You've been at SendGrid, then Twilio through acquisition?Sean: Mm-hm.Corey: And you have done basically every operations-looking job at that company. You've had a bunch of titles. You wound up going from DevOps engineer to a team lead, then to a senior DevOps engineer again, and you call—you voluntarily move back to an individual contributor role. Let's start there. What was management like?Sean: The management was interesting. My first go at that, I had no idea what I was doing, and so I didn't know how to ask for the help that I needed. And so my wife and I refer to that time as the time that I played a lot of video games. Just, I wasn't prepared for the emotional outlay that managing humans costs. And so I would end up spending my nights just playing video games trying to unwind and unpack from all that.I've managed twice, now. The second time was—it went much better. I knew more of what I was doing, I had more support. The manager of the team that had left, I had worked with that team very closely in the past, I'd been part of it. And so my whole purpose there was to make sure that we didn't lose anybody after that until we found a new manager.And that actually worked out pretty well. I had to have some really difficult conversations with some people along the way, but they all stayed, they all told me that they really enjoyed me managing them. And I've had people ask me to manage them again after that, which was super bonkers.Corey: It's always flattering when you have an impact as a manager and people seek you out to work with you again. I dabbled in management as well; no one ever asked me to do it twice, and I have effectively avoided managing people here at The Duckbill Group, just because my belief of what a good manager is—and I think it aligns with what you've already said—requires a certain selflessness and ability to focus on others and grow them, whereas my role here is very much as face of the company, and it's about me. That's not a recipe for a successful outcome for managing people and not having them rage-quit.Sean: Definitely.Corey: One thing that I find is interesting about management, the higher you rise in an organization, it's counterintuitive but the more responsibility you get, but the less you can directly affect yourself. Your entire world becomes about effectively delegating work to others and about influence. In your case now, you are an architect, which means different things at different companies. So, I'm not entirely sure I know what it means at Twilio. So first, what is an architect at Twilio? And where does your responsibility start and stop, I guess is where I want to go, there?Sean: So, architecture at Twilio is kind of different. Some of the architects that I've worked with in the past is the ‘I design everything, and then engineers go and build the thing that I designed.'Corey: Oh, yes. The enterprise architect approach where I'm going to sit in my ivory tower and dispatch, effectively, winged monkeys to implement things that I don't fully understand, but I have the flashy title. You're saying that's not what it is?Sean: There's a fine distinction here because I think that some of the people I work with would definitely say that I am up in my ivory tower. It is more about—if I'm looking five years out—what capabilities my teams need to be able to provide to execute against a business strategy. That landscape is going to change immensely along the way, and so my job isn't to say, “We're going to use Kubernetes because that's what we need to do five years out.” It happens to be what I'm saying right now, and I'm sure we're going to go into that, Corey, but it's less about this is how each of these things should be strung together to achieve that goal and more direction setting. So, I worked on something that I call the ‘Lighthouse,' and it's a vision of the future of where we want to go but the caveat is that if you actually go to the Lighthouse, it means you hit the rocks.It's describing what I call the ‘Bay of Appropriate Futures,' and you want to land somewhere in that Bay, but it's not going to be the thing I wrote down five years before we get there. And so it's much more of a technical leadership position, trying to help other technologists make good technology decisions. And so it's more about making sure that all of the right questions get asked, not having all the right answers. That's the difference between some architects that I've worked with in the past.Corey: And one of the challenges in that role is that you're not managing people directly. So, what that means is, you are, on some level, not doing a lot of the hands-on keyboard implementation work yourself and, unless I dramatically misunderstand your corporate culture, you're not empowered to unilaterally fire people, which means that you can only really lead via example and influence. Tell me about that.Sean: When people ask me if they want to be architects, I ask them if they can influence without authority, or if that's even interesting to them. That is definitely the thing. And so when it comes down to, “Man, I really wish I could fire this person.” A, that never happens. But, B, it's definitely about modeling behaviors. And there's a bit of management here in that making expectations clear of senior engineers is part of my job, and helping them also be examples for other engineers is definitely a thing I get graded on.Corey: Influence without authority is sort of the definitional characteristic of being a consultant. It turns out, you can't even force anything; it has to be the strength of your ideas combined, in some shops, and I admit I have a bit of a somewhat cynical view on this, but also the ability for the client to commit to their sunk-cost fallacy of, “Well, we paid a lot of money to hear this advice, we should probably do something with it.” And there's always a story of making sure that you're serving the organization with which you work, well. But when you can only influence rather than direct, it becomes a much more nuanced thing, and I feel like the single differentiator between success and failure in that role is, fundamentally, empathy. Am I wrong on that?Sean: Not at all. When I'm working with a very in-the-code engineer who comes to me and is trying to convince their team that they should do something, one of the things that's a stumbling block for them is that they don't realize that other people need to be influenced in ways that might be different than the way that they're influenced. So, as an example, I work with a team of very senior people; I know that some people will respond well, if I site Accelerate, for example. And some people want to hear, “Well, Google does this, so it's obvious that we should do that.” And trying to thread that needle with everyone in a way that gets everyone on board in the best way for all of us, when you can do that, you can be an architect.Corey: Some weeks, I feel like I'm closer to architect than I do others. It seems that the idea now—solutions architect being a job role that a lot of companies have they hurl out into the universe—is in many ways vastly misunderstood. You want to talk about some kind of architecture story, where I'm going to go ahead and design an architecture that solves some business problem on a whiteboard. That's not hard to do.The hard part is then controlling for constraints such as, “Yeah, we already have a thing that doesn't look anything like that, and we want to get it to that point. And oh, by the way, 18 months of downtime while we do that is not acceptable.” Nothing is ever truly greenfield. And adapting to constraints, and making compromises, and being realistic seems to separate the folks who are good at that from the folks who are playacting.Sean: There's another thing in there where people who've worked on the same thing for a long time sometimes have a problem seeing where you could go. And so the constraints there can be really useful in designing things. A lot of people think that greenfield is awesome, but greenfield just means the possible outcomes are the entire universe. I like working in constraints, essentially.Corey: So, I want to talk to you a little bit about your tenure at Twilio, where you started off at SendGrid and then there was an acquisition, and everyone I know got super-quiet for a while because it turns out when there's a pending acquisition, talking to people about it is frowned upon, and that goes doubly so in the context of someone who basically shitposts for a living. And I get that; I respect confidentiality, but I also don't want people to jeopardize their own positions. So, it's one of those, “Yeah, whatever you're comfortable telling me, or not, is fine.” So, we didn't talk for a while. And then the acquisition happened, and now you're there. And you've been there at Twilio for a couple of years or so and haven't rage-quit, so apparently, it's worked. What was the transition like?Sean: The transition was really interesting. A lot of people were telling me that acquisitions were universally horrible. And that's not how it worked. This is the first acquisition I've been through, so I have no context. People I trust told me that this one went well.So, in my role as architect, this acquisition was kind of interesting because SendGrid had a very robust, and we've done architecture for years. And Twilio's architecture was a little bit different. It was more like, “There are some really, really senior people at Twilio who have seen some things, and you should probably ask them their opinion on stuff.” But there wasn't really, like, an architecture review process. There was definitely, “A you need to write down a bunch of stuff and get some people to look at it,” but it wasn't a, you need to get approved by your local architect or a group of architects.Part of that is to provide visibility across the org so that we're not duplicating work and stuff. But Twilio basically adopted SendGrid's architecture process, but it grew 10x. So, at SendGrid, we had, I think, six architects. At Twilio, we have, like, 40 now, so not quite 10x. But trying to copy and paste that process was kind of rough.We're still, kind of, making that better. And then there were a couple things—as the acquired company, you kind of expect, I don't know, maybe some housecleaning to happen. And that isn't what happened. We saw a lot of like really senior leaders move into positions at Twilio of leadership. So, on day one, I think SendGrid's sales leader became the sales leader for all of Twilio.And that sounded—I haven't done this before, but it sounded like that's not normal. And that's happened in a couple different spots. It's been pretty neat. And when I think about the acquisition, not just of acquiring another channel for Twilio, but kind of doing an acqui-hire of a bunch of key positions, that was a pretty valuable one.Corey: Let's talk about one aspect of working at Twilio that I profoundly envy you for, which is working with one of the greatest people in the world: Silvia. Let's talk about Silvia.Sean: She interviewed me at SendGrid. She's been here almost a year longer than I have, and it's been such a joy to work with her. Not just because everything gets Botros'ed around her, and so we have our own built-in chaos monkeys, but also, there's no one that cares more about making sure that what teams are building won't come back and bite the team later. She's worked with, I think, maybe a 10th of the company now—and at Twilio, that's a lot of teams—trying to just help them do better and make sure that the stuff that they're building is not going to page them all the time, is actually going to serve the customer in ways that isn't surprising to the customer. I can probably talk for half an hour about my appreciation for Silvia.Corey: Well, she was a great guest in the early days of this podcast. Silvia Botros is phenomenal. She has the Twitter handle of @dbsmasher so she's my default go-to on misusing things as databases. And she also was just one of the most genuinely kind people I know.She also has an aura effect, where she is basically a walking EMP, and every time someone tries to show her a piece of technology, it explodes in novel and interesting ways, which, frankly, as an acceptance gate for technology is a terrific skill set to have. Does it cause problems in the office?Sean: Not normally. It causes more problems in the office when we are actually in an office together because Silvia, maybe predictively, is also a giant klutz. And so the joke is that she also EMPs herself. In the office, she does break things, but it's never in an intended way. Or it's just like a fun, “Oh, man, the WiFi's down. It must be Silvia.”Corey: Exactly. It's always nice to have someone you can blame for these things.Sean: It's SOP.Corey: Yeah, oh, absolutely. At some point do you ever wind up missing things such as, “Oh, it's probably just Silvia. No, it was actually a problem somewhere?”Sean: So, we actually determine that Silvia's EMP works at a distance. She flew somewhere close to one of our hardware data centers, and at the time that she passed it, we had an outage. Like, the data center went dark, kind of thing. And so it still happens even if she's not around. We're pretty sure it's not a local phenomenon.Corey: So, the thing that I know is probably going to sound completely boring and ridiculous to half the audience while the other half the audience sits and listens raptly; before I started this place, I never stayed anywhere for longer than two years, because as previously disclosed in multiple directions, I am a terrible employee. First, why did you stay at the same place for as long as you have, and what's it like? And I'm really hoping you have an answer that isn't just, “Oh, I have a complete lack of ambition,” because I won't believe that for a second. But it is a tempting cop-out so let me just shut that down now.Sean: No, it's more I've been here for almost eight years now, and I've never done the same thing. The fun fact that I tell people when they onboard or I'm interviewing them is, I think I've had more titles than anyone at Twilio. I'm up to 11, I think. And so 11 titles in eight years? It hasn't been the same company.When I started, I was employee number 150. There were 80 of us when I started at SendGrid. I work at a company with 4500 people now and going through that growth, the company that I work for today, and even pre-acquisition, you would not recognize from the day I started at SendGrid. And so if I had been doing the same thing all the time, I wouldn't still be here. There was a point before we started architecture at SendGrid, I was definitely in a spot kind of a rut, like, “Cool. I can continue to do the same thing over and over,” but I felt like there wasn't a lot of growth to do.I needed to go see something else, kind of thing. I knew really well how to do our mail stuff, and I felt like I needed to broaden my horizons a bit, or I needed to level up. And at the time, the only place to go up was to management. And then we brought in a chief architect, J.R. Jasperson, and I I remember very clearly, it was like his third day or something, we had an all-company meeting—like a lunch thing—and I walked up to him and said, “You don't know this yet, but you're my new mentor because it seems like what you're talking about is really interesting to me.” And he didn't know it but the subtext there was like, “And if you don't, I'm out.”And since then, the work that I do day-to-day is completely different. Like, I work for a platform org. This platform org is 130 people right now; it spans everything from building EC2 instances to, recently, it was, like, Twilio API Edge. There's such a breadth in there that I never do the same thing every day.Corey: I really love installing, upgrading, and fixing security agents in my cloud estate! Why do I say that? Because I sell things, because I sell things for a company that deploys an agent, there's no other reason. Because let's face it. Agents can be a real headache. Well, now Orca Security gives you a single tool that detects basically every risk in your cloud environment -- and that's as easy to install and maintain as a smartphone app. It is agentless, or my intro would've gotten me into trouble here, but  it can still see deep into your AWS workloads, while guaranteeing 100% coverage. With Orca Security, there are no overlooked assets, no DevOps headaches, and believe me you will hear from those people if you cause them headaches. and no performance hits on live environments. Connect your first cloud account in minutes and see for yourself at orca.security. Thats “Orca” as in whale, “dot” security as in that things you company claims to care about but doesn't until right after it really should have.Corey: That's functionally, I think, the problem that I had in working in environments as a DevOps type because for the first three months in a job where I'm the first ops person, “Great everything's on fire.”—I'm an adrenaline junkie in that sense—“Cool. Oh wow, all these problems that I know how to fix.” And then it gets to a reasonable level of working and now it's just care and feeding of same. Okay, now I'm getting slightly bored, so let me look for other problems in other parts of the org.And that doesn't go super well when you're not welcome in those parts of the org which leads to a whole bunch of challenges I've had in my career. This is incidentally why being a consultant aligns so well with me and the way I approach things. It's cool. I'm going to come in; I'm going to fix things, and then I get to leave. On day one, we know this is a time-bound engagement and that's okay.Instead of going down the path of the lies everyone tells themselves where average tenure in this space is 18 to 24 months, but magically we're all going to lie and pretend in the interview that this is their forever job and suddenly you're going to stay here for 25 years and get a pension and a gold watch when you retire. And it's, oh wow that's amazing it sounds like everybody having these conversations wearing old-timey stovepipe hats. There's just so much that isn't realistic in those conversations. So, I talk to people who've been down those paths who've been at the same company for a decade or two, and the common failure mode there is that they have a year or so of experience that they repeat 10 or 20 times. And that's sad; people get stuck. What you say absolutely resonates with me in that every year is a different thing that you're working on. You're not doing the same thing twice. I get antsy when too many days look the same, one to the next.Sean: I definitely hear that. If my every day was, come in join a stand-up, talk about the problem that I had last week and still have today, it wouldn't work for me. I feel lucky that I work for an organization where outside input is actually requested and honored, so if I go to a team and just happened to have noticed something and say, “Hey, this right here you might want to take a look at. And I have some opinions here if you'd like to hear them.” I normally get asked for that opinion, and it normally turns out pretty good.There's definitely times where it's been, like, “No, Sean. You don't know what you're talking about.” And normally they're right. It's definitely not the same. People say you should be at a company for 18 to 24 months. And that's true if your company is totally shortchanging you. When I ask my peers at other companies about, have I gotten stiffed by staying at the same place for this long? It's definitely not. And if that wasn't true, if Twilio was holding back my compensation, maybe this would have gone a different way, but it's not what's happened.Corey: Oh, true and to be clear that is very often the biggest criticism I have of people who stay at one company for a long time. They don't realize what market rate is anymore and they find themselves in a scenario where, “Wow, I could go somewhere else and triple my salary,” which is not an exaggeration and an unpleasant discovery when people realize that they've been taken advantage of. And credit where due, I have had conversations with people at Twilio who have been there a long time. And I have never gotten the impression that that is what's going on there. Your compensation is fair. I want to be very clear here. This is not one of those, “Oh, yeah, I'm just trying to be polite because someone's being taken advantage of and doesn't even know it.” No. They're doing right by their employees. The fact that I have to call them out explicitly as an example of a rarity of a company doing right by its employees, is monstrous.Sean: It is. We've hired a few people recently where I found out that I think their pay was close to doubled just by coming here, and I just wish that it was more okay to call out their prior employees publicly and be like, “Cool. If you work for this company will probably pay you a ton more.”Corey: And that's the other side of it, too, which I did early on in my career. It's, “Oh, I'm leaving this company and screw you all.” “Well, why are you leaving?” “Oh, because I'm getting a 5% raise to change jobs.” I'm not saying that money should not factor into it, but at some point, when all is said and done at that scale, it works out to be 100 bucks a paycheck, or so, is it really worth changing for that? Maybe.If there are things you don't like about the environment, please don't let me dissuade people from interviewing for jobs. You always should be doing that, on some level, just so what the market looks like. But I'm also a big believer in, you don't need to be as mercenary as I was early on in my career. A lot of it was shaped by environments—not Chapman, I want to be clear—that were not particularly kind to staff. And that I felt taken advantage of because I was. And as a result, “Oh, screw me? Screw you.” And it became a very mercenary approach that didn't serve me well. That is now a baked-in aspect of how I view careers in some respects, and that is something of a problem that I wrestle with.Sean: The mercenary thing?Corey: Yeah. I wrestle with the mercenary thing just because when I talk to someone who's having a challenge at work, or something, my default instinctive gut reaction that I've learned to suppress is, “Oh, screw ‘em. Quit and find another job.”Sean: Ah, gotcha.Corey: That's not the most constructive way to work in the context of a company where you're building a career trajectory, and a reputation, and you've been there for five years, and maybe rage-quitting because you didn't wind up getting to pick the title of that presentation isn't the best answer. I can be remarkably petty, for the reasons I'll leave a company. But that's not constructive, and I try very hard to avoid giving that advice unnecessarily to people.Sean: It's definitely just, like, incidents, right? It's never a root cause; it's a contributing factor, and pay is just one contributing factor. I find that a lot of people, even if they're being taken advantage of compensation-wise, they won't leave unless there's something else wrong.Corey: Yeah, compensation is absolutely a symptom, and in most cases, that's not the real reason people are going to leave. I assure you, people who work at The Duckbill Group could make more money, objectively, somewhere else. But there's a question of what people value. We pay people well, but we don't offer FAANG money, with the equity upside and the rest. We're not trying to pull the Netflix and pay absolute top-of-market in all cases to all people.I would love to be able to do that; our margins don't yet support that. Thanks to our sponsors, we're going to continue to ratchet those prices way up. I kid. I kid. But there are business reasons why things are the way they are. What we do offer instead is things that contribute to a workplace we want to work at. More of us are parents than aren't.We don't expect people to work outside of business hours in almost any scenario, short of, you know, re:Invent or something. There's a very human approach to it. We're not VC-backed at all, so we don't ever have to worry about trying to sprint to hit milestones over debt as a company. We have this insane secret approach called ‘revenue' and ‘profitability' that means we can continue to iterate month to month, and as long as the trend line continues, we're happy.Sean: That kind of sustainability is awesome, and is a really good indicator that a company is going to be successful, to me. Especially smaller companies; the decision to not take VC money. And to chase sustainable revenue growth, I know everyone wants to chase the hockey sticks, but at what cost?Corey: Yeah. And I think that people put this on job-seekers way too much. I have been confronted, at one point—I will not name the company—when I was interviewing years ago, and I was asked by the hiring manager, “Well, it seems like you've done a fair bit of job-hopping in the course of your career. What's up with that?” And they pulled up my LinkedIn profile and went through it, and I said, “You realize most of those were contract gigs?” “Well, I don't kno—oh, yeah. I guess it was. Oh, that was—huh. I guess so.”So, it was a failed attempt to call bullshit on my job history. And because I don't take things like that well, I turned it around right back on him, and I said, “No, I appreciate that. Thank you for clarifying.” That's a warning sign is when I thank you for insulting me because what's coming next is always going to sting. But while we're on the topic of turnover, “Your team has lost 80% of its members in the last six months. What's going on with that? Is there a problem here that I should be aware of?” And suddenly, the back-peddling was phenomenal. I did get an offer from that company; I did not accept it.Sean: Good.Corey: You can tell a lot about a company by how they buy their people. And if you're actively being insulted or hazed in the job interview process, no. I want people who I choose not to hire, to come away from the experience feeling respected and that they enjoyed the experience to the point where they would say nice things about us if asked, or even evangelize us without ever even having to be asked. And so far, we've done that because we're very intentional on how we approach things. And man, am I tired of people doing this badly.Sean: When I interview someone, I want them to leave, and then if they don't take the job, I want it to be because it wasn't the right job for them. Or, like, the team wasn't the right fit, not because anything happened in the interview process that was a red flag. That's the worst. I want Twilio to be a spot where there are no red flags. That would be ideal.Corey: Absolutely. I think that so many folks get it wrong, where there's this idea of, “Oh, I'm going to interview you. And oh, you're an ops person. Great. I want you to implement Quicksort on the whiteboard.” And it's, “Question one: do you do that a lot here? And two: no, of course you don't because I've seen your services list. There's no rhyme or reason to the order it appears in. Maybe someone should implement Quicksort in production.”And then there's the other side, too, of, “Oh, great. There's this broad skill set across the entire space. I'm going to figure out where you're weak and then needle you on those.” I don't like hiring for absence of weakness; I like hiring for, you're really good at things we need here and you're acceptable at the things that are non-negotiable, and able to improve in areas where it becomes helpful.Sean: Yeah. The best interview process I ever had, they flew me up to San Francisco, I worked with them for a day on a real problem that they had, like, pair programming. They offered me the job—it didn't work out because I didn't want to move to San Francisco, it turned out—but that interview process was super valuable to me as the candidate because I found out exactly how a day at that job would work; what it would look like.Corey: I had a very similar experience once and the cherry on the top was they paid me a nominal contracting rate for the day—Sean: Same.Corey: —because it was touching things that they were doing. And I think that that's another anti-pattern of, that was a thing that also just happens to be a thing we're going to use in production, but we're not going to tell you that we're not going to compensate you for it. I'll work on toy problems; not production in an interview context.Sean: I wanted to circle back to one thing about leaving a company, like, rage-quitting. It's essentially—if you rage-quit because of a problem, like, a small thing, you're missing an opportunity to grow. And especially if I had one superpower, I would say that it's probably managing up. Part of this is just, I have a lot of privilege that lets me do that, but it is definitely a skill that I wish more people had for their own careers.Corey: I really do, too. We spent all this time practicing how to be a candidate in a job interview, and almost no time training people how to be a good interviewer, and what you're looking for. And you wind up with terrible things like, “I had this problem once in production that I thought was super clever, so I'm going to set it up for you and see how you would solve that problem. And if you don't follow the exact same path that I did, then we're going to go ahead and just keep shooting down anything else you suggest.” No, stop it.Sean: I do a lot of interviewing, and so I love when I learn something from a candidate because I can ask them questions that are like, “How did you figure this out? How did you even notice that this was a problem?”s and you get to go really deep in something they know, the way they know it. We used to do the, like, “Build us an LRU cache in the best big-O notation time.” And if you didn't get it, you didn't get the job, if you did it in slower than optimum time.And I remember leaving one of the interviews and doing the recap, and it was like, if anyone came to work and did this, I would be upset at them for wasting time. This is part of the standard library of all the things that we do. Why are we asking this question? I know for a while we stopped asking the question, which is great. I don't do a lot of code interviews at Twilio, so I don't know if we do something similar there, yet. I should go find out.Corey: I do not know either way, to be clear. None of the stories I'm talking about involved Twilio. Though I will say, I went on an interview years ago at SendGrid in Anaheim, and I don't know if I ever got a formal rejection or not afterwards, but regardless, they did not opt to hire me. In hindsight, good decision.Sean: I wonder if we were in the office at the same time.Corey: It would have been 2006, so I think it might have been a bit before your time.Sean: That was before my time.Corey: And very much, credit where due, I started my career in large-scale email systems, so SendGrid was one of those. Oh, I could probably apply the skill set there. The problem, of course, was that it became pretty apparent, even in those days that eventually there weren't going to be that many companies that needed that skillset. The days of an email admin in every company were drawn to a close, and it was time to evolve or die.Sean: You're welcome.Corey: Of course. And again SendGrid today, under the hood—deep under the hood—does still power Last Week in AWS. You folks send emails and get them where they need to go, for which I thank you, and the rest of the world probably does not most weeks.Sean: [laugh]. Yeah.Corey: Ugh. So, we've covered a lot of wide-ranging topics. If people want to hear more about who you are, and what you have to say, where can they find you?Sean: I'm on Twitter at @log1kal with a one and a K because I hate people who want to find me, apparently. But that's @log1kal. Twitter's probably the only thing.Corey: Excellent. We'll, of course, put a link to that in the [show notes 00:30:39]. Sean, thank you so much for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it.Sean: Thank you so much, Corey. I love having these kinds of conversations. I love that there is no plan; we're just going to have a conversation and record it. I love listening to these kinds of podcasts.Corey: Well, I like creating these kinds of podcasts because the other ones take way too much work.Sean: [laugh].Corey: Sean Kilgore, architect at Twilio. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and 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 comment explaining how it is almost certainly the fault of Silvia Botros's aura.Sean: [laugh].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.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Sean Swarner Interesting Facts - Learn how Sean not only beat cancer twice but went on to summit Mt. Everest and the remaining 6 summits and the north and south poles. He now brings hope to all who have cancer and those who have survived cancer with his organization CancerClimber.org. I loved, loved, loved this conversation with Sean and my hope is next July 2022, I will join him to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and add the names of my own loved ones, who have had to deal with cancer and either survived or lost their battle with this awful disease. Thanks so much for listening! Joe Sean Swarner Speaker | Author | Performance Coach Adventurer | World Record Holder Author of: Keep Climbing: How I Beat Cancer and Reached the Top of the World Website: https://www.seanswarner.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanswarner/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sean.swarner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanswarner/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/seanswarner Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Ok, today, my guest is Shawn Swarner. Sean is an incredible human being, you're not going to believe the things that he has done already in his life. And I am so excited for this interview. As I was talking to Sean offline, I was explaining how the whole thought of summiting Everest is just in itself amazing. And then the way that it's been accomplished by Shaun and the adversity that he had to deal with growing up and just to to be this person that he is. So this is exciting, not just at a sports level or at a level of just doing all these amazing feats, but just just the human drive that this person has. So, Shawn, welcome to the show. Man, I am so excited to have.   Sean: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to do the.   Joe: So I like to start and people that listen to my podcast hear me say this one hundred times that I like to start from the beginning. And I know you probably told the story a million times already, but I like to set a foundation of pollution is where you came from, how you grew up, the main health factors that happen early on, how you got over that and then become who you are today. So if you don't mind, if you could at least give us as much of the back on the floor is yours so as much of the back story that you want to give? I welcome it all.   Sean: I appreciate that and I'm going through my mind, and one of the things that got me through was a sense of humor, which we'll get to, but I'm assuming you probably don't want to go back. Forty six years with my mom and dad got together, then nine months later.   Joe: Yeah, that's got no so that we could start right there. That's what.   Sean: So I came into the world crying and screaming and kicking. And   Joe: There we go,   Sean: I remember it like it was yesterday.   Joe: Right.   Sean: No, I. Well, I guess my I was born and raised in Ohio, just a normal Midwest kid. I remember back in the day before toilet paper was hard to find. We would TPE the coach's house and across country in the house. And then he installed a motion sensor lights. So we had to be a little bit more careful. And I just I learned to. Do things I wasn't supposed to, but I never got caught because I learned how to not get caught. So I was a kind of a studious growing up. But everything was it was completely normal until I was in eighth grade. And I was actually I was going up for a layup and basketball things and I came down and something snapped my neck and it sounded like like, say, for Thanksgiving, you grab the chicken bone and you're pulling on the leg like the ripping the tendons in the ligaments and everything. That's that's kind of what my knee sounded like when I was hobbling over to the stage that to sit down my whole body the next day swallowed up so much. My my mom and dad couldn't even recognize their own son. So they stuck in the local hospital. Willard, Ohio, population was five thousand, I think is maybe five thousand three now. So it's not much just change. Maybe eight stoplights or something like that, but they stuck in the hospital, they started treating me for pneumonia and it's very it's very difficult to cure cancer by sucking on a nebulizer. So I wasn't getting any better. But at 13, I was thinking, well, you know, I'm going to soak up all this attention. I got the cheerleaders coming in. I got my friends coming out of balloons all over my room.   Joe: The.   Sean: It was fantastic. But I didn't know what was going on in my body, which was advanced stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma. And I remember my parents didn't tell me that I had cancer. They told me that I had Hodgkin's. And I can only imagine what they were going through when the doctor told them that I had three months to live. The doctors approach to my my parents said your first born son now has an expiration date. And no one wants to hear that, and I've heard that one of the greatest pains, pains that you can have is outliving your your son or your daughter. So I didn't want that to ever happen to my mom and dad. And I remember very vividly where I was on the bottom of the on my hands and knees in the shower three or four months into treatment. And because of the treatment, I was bald from head to toe. I was on my hands and knees sobbing, just absolutely weeping, pulling chunks of hair out of the drain so the water could go down. And I was also thinking because I was getting ready for school that day, and that's when my hair came up all in that one time in the shower. And I was thinking about what my friends may have been doing at the same time, getting ready for school the same time I was.   Sean: And they were probably worried about the latest hairstyles being popular. If things that in my mind, looking back at it now, were trivial, it meant nothing because there were nights I went to bed not knowing if I was going to wake up the next morning. I mean, can you imagine what it feels like being terrified to close your eyes and fall asleep because you don't know if you're going to wake up. And that's that's what I had to deal with as the 13 year old. So I grew up with a completely different perspective. And thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, family support, prayer just in a will to move forward. I guess if I walked out of the hospital, a hairless, happy, bloated young man and I, I went back into being a quote unquote normal teenager, I guess if there is anything that's that you can say normal for a teenager. But the remission was short lived because I was going in for a checkup for the first cancer when they found a second cancer completely unrelated to the first one. And in fact, on the apparently I'm the only person to ever had Hodgkin's and ask start. And the chances of surviving both of those illnesses is roughly the same as winning the lottery four times in a row with the same numbers.   Joe: Radical Krutch.   Sean: So I think I'm a living, breathing, walking miracle, without a doubt, and. I remember going in for a check for that first cancer in one day, they found a tumor on an X-ray. They did a needle biopsy. They removed a lymph node, put in a hip and catheter. They cracked open my ribs, took out the tumor, are put in danger and started chemotherapy less and less than one day. And they diagnosed me with a type of cancer called ASCAN sarcoma. And that's basically they gave me 14 days to live.   Joe: And this is at age 60.   Sean: 16, so 13, the first cancer, 60   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: Percent cancer, cancer, my my whole teenage years were just they were taken from me, from the cancer.   Joe: He's trying to just picture this in my brain of what happens during those years of like those prom, there's sports and it sound like you were active before 13 when you were first diagnosed. So you are definitely you look like someone that would be athletic. So you're missing all of that.   Sean: It's a green, it just makes me look like I'm.   Joe: No,   Sean: I   Joe: But.   Sean: Was I was I was incredibly athletic, and I, I think I because I was a swimmer, I started competitive swimming at maybe five or six years old. And I think I still have some records from the 11, 12 age group.   Joe: Still hold it.   Sean: Still   Joe: Wow, that is so cool.   Sean: Undefeated in the summer league, went to Nationals numerous times. I loved it, but I also think that's one of the reasons why I'm still alive, is because I looked at things differently from a competitive angle, and I pushed myself not to be the best, but I always pushed myself to be my best. And that's what I did, was going through the treatments, I I knew that when I was going through the cancer that I was going to have bad days. And I also knew I was going to have good days. So if today was a bad day, then I just I focused on tomorrow or the next day when I was going to have a good day. And I when I had those good days, I was I was truly living and learning how to be in the present moment.   Joe: Yeah, that's definitely one of the gifts that would come out of what you went through, which people struggle their whole life to eliminate the noise around them and to be present. Right. Because you literally only have this moment right now. So many people worry about what's on the schedule for tomorrow or the future or all of that. And some people even and I'm totally guilty dwell on the past. So I should have done that different. Where would I be today if I had gone left instead of right? So it's it's really hard to bring that in to be present and figure out how to do that. And I would assume that's a that's at least a good outcome of what you went through, is that it forced you to live every day the most that you could, knowing that this just this who knows what tomorrow will bring, if anything. Right.   Sean: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I do every morning before I even get out of bed, the instant I open my eyes in the morning, I don't I don't I never hit the snooze, because if you constantly hit the snooze over and over and over again, you're telling yourself subconsciously, I'm excited about the day. The day can wait. But if you turn it off and I actually have a smartwatch and just vibrate so it doesn't wake up my wife. So I turn I turn the alarm off and I lay there and I tell myself the past is done. There's nothing I can do about it. Tomorrow may never come, so no matter what happens today, today is the best day ever. And I have a choice, we all have a choice to make that day turn out however we want it to, and it starts with that morning intention.   Joe: Also, I don't want to get too far because I had so many questions. This is exciting. Like I said, I'm not going to let you go. So 16. So you're you were diagnosed and you're going through all of these treatments. When do you become and for lack of a better term, quote, normal where they say, OK, we've we've clobbered this thing, you're you're in remission and your hair is growing back. You're starting to feel like average every day. 16 year old, our seventh year, however long it took for you to become being normal.   Sean: That's a great question, and I was I was thinking, while you're talking and I honestly want to say that the answer is never.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Because no one's ever had these cancers before. No one no one knows what's going to happen to me.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: I go in once a year for a checkup and they obviously for the past 20, 30 years now, it's come back clean. So I literally see every time I go into to get my blood work done at my annual checkup, I see it as I have another year left. And I try to accomplish as much as I can in that year, so I don't think because of the way I'm looking at it, I don't think I'll ever have a normal life.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: This is my new normal. And I've just adapted to I think because of everything I've been through, I'm comfortable with being uncomfortable. So when when things are going well for me, I'm like, oh, something's going to happen.   Joe: Yeah, so that was I was going to ask you that I just turned fifty nine and I don't envy having that fact for lack of a better term, that cloud hanging over my head, knowing that I went through something, I beat it.   Sean: The.   Joe: But there's always the chance that it'll rear its ugly head. And so people that have to live with that   Sean: And.   Joe: Sort of pressure on them, that has to take its toll. I would I would assume it has to take its toll depending on how you deal with it. Right. And with everything. When you wake up, you have the choice of saying this is going to be a great day. It's going to be a bad day. And for some reason and you can help me with this and hopefully the listeners will really heed your advice on this is why do we always choose the negative part? Like everyone, people just love to complain about how their job sucks so they don't have enough money or whatever the case might be. And if they and I listen, I've gone through my whole life having sort of this always this negative thing, like, why didn't I ever reach this goal or that goal or this accomplishment? And I'm hard on myself about it. And I also know I didn't do the work to potentially get to some of those goals. So I'm starting at this ripe old age admitting to myself, OK, you just didn't put in the time. But now I'm only in the past few months I've really shifted my frame of mind to say I literally have everything that I need know. I love my life. I I love the person that I live with. Joellen, my life partner I love. I have everything that I need. And why would I just complain all the time of all the things that I don't have? And our mutual friend David Meltzer says you literally have to get out of your own way and let the universe deliver to you the abundance that's there. And we actually get in the way of making that happen. So why don't people choose the negative? That's what I want to know.   Sean: Absolutely, and I honestly, I was thinking of a couple of things, one. We do have we have we do have a choice, and when people start to get anxious, when people start to worry about things, it's because of of two words. What if. What if this happens, what if that happens? What if this happens? What if I get cancer again? But you learn to to realize that for me, it was a it was a house of letters. It was a six letter word that that I was allowed to have power over me. So. And recently, it's funny you mention that recently you were thinking of this, that with because I'm doing the same thing recently, I'm realizing that this word cancer. Had so much control and power over me because I allowed that to happen. And then I realized, why am I freaking out over a word? I mean, don't get me wrong, I completely respect cancer and it can be deadly and it oftentimes is. But it's the word that's making me freak out when I go in for my annual checkups. It used to be smelling sailin that would make me think of all these traumatic things that happened in my past. But it doesn't mean it's going to happen again. So when I realize I'm asking myself, what if. I'm projecting into the future and I'm giving my brain permission to go crazy, to come up with any any cockamamie imaginary thing that I can come up with. So when I when I think of my my treatments or what I think of my annual checkup and I constantly, constantly ask myself, what if I realized, well, what if I get cancer, but what if I don't?   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: Perfect example.   Joe: Yep.   Sean: So I realized that the word itself means nothing. It's what I'm actually placing on that word and how I react to it. So when people hear cancer, they're like, oh, wow. But if this is what I did, I spared myself in the mirror and I said cancer about 50 times over and over and over again. And slowly it lost its power over me. And around thirty five or forty times I looked at myself laughing, what the hell this is? This is crazy. But it's lessened its power over and over and over. You just can't cancel. The more you hear about it, the more you get rid of it, you know, the less power it has over you.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: And then why people are focused on on the negative so much. I think it's because unconsciously, people are allowing their brains to be programmed by outside sources. If you look at it, most people probably I would say 80 to 90 percent of the world, the first thing they do when they wake up, they grab their phone, they check their emails, they go on social media, whatever it might be. Either they do it before they go to the bathroom or while they're going to the bathroom. It's one of the. And what happens is if you're not paying attention to what you're consuming, because there's that old saying of you are what you eat, but in all honesty, it is you are what you consume.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: So if people are constantly consuming this, this this false information from the media and with the media, let me turn on the news. You don't have to watch it for more than 30 seconds to realize it's going to be depressing   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: Because it's the same stuff all over and over and over again. You have to wait through, what, 60 different stories to see one positive story that takes a point zero five percent of the hour long program. So what people are doing is they're allowing their brains to be programmed by outsiders, outside sources. That outside source is just constantly bombarding their brain with negativity. However you can you have a choice to, like, wake up in the morning and have a positive affirmation, today is the best day ever. I write down my, my, my daily affirmation and I write down three things that I'm going to do and three things I'm going to try to do or and then at the end of the day, as opposed to turning on the news, I get my journal and write down five things I'm grateful for. So I'm essentially bookending my day on a positive note as opposed to, I would say, most of the world they book in their day on the negative note.   Joe: Yep.   Sean: So if you're constantly being bombarded in allowing negative thoughts into your brain, how do you think it's even possible to be positive?   Joe: Yeah, it's I don't know if you hit it on the head and it's just it's it's letting all of that stuff come in from the outside. You have a different perspective for what you went through. And and I think people just take for granted that they're alive and healthy and have a roof over their head and all of the simple things that we just don't we don't think about. And it's important to take a step back and look at that. And instead you take what if and you say, what if all of this stuff went away?   Sean: Now.   Joe: Where would I be right? Or what if all of this stuff tripled and double that? I had even more abundance because of this, this and this. But it seems like what you wish for, what you think about when people concentrate on the negative things, more of that stuff, it's just   Sean: Mike.   Joe: It's just naturally happens. And I was doing it for so long. And now that I've shifted, it's just completely changed. And it's I don't know if it's because it's so hard to understand that you can do that with your own brain and your own inner power to shift your mindset. And people, though, that's all that fufu stuff. And it's not. It's and I think that's why it's so hard to explain. It's so hard to get people to just give it a try. Just 30 days. Just think towards the most positive thing you can think of. And every day just try to eliminate as much negativity in your life will change. And   Sean: Right.   Joe: It's just really hard for people to understand, I think.   Sean: And I think that I mean, there are some there are a large percent of the population who think they're still positive when they're actually being negative to the brain and they don't even realize it. So a perfect example. You're walking down the street and you're telling yourself, don't trip, don't trip. You're going to fall on your face, but if you turn it around it from a different perspective and you tell yourself, stand tall, stand tall, walk strong. When entrepreneurs when people go into the stock market, whatever it might be, I guarantee you they don't think, oh, I don't want to lose money. No, that's state. That's that. People are thinking, I'm being positive. No, they want to make money to focus on what they want. And that's exactly what happened when I was in the hospital. The story of that 13 year old who was 60 pounds overweight in the bottom of the shower floor. Like I mentioned before, I didn't I didn't focus on not dying. I focused on living. I mean, can you imagine how it would have turned out if I kept telling myself, oh, don't die, don't die, don't die or climbing Everest. Hey, don't fall, don't fall, don't fall, don't don't stop. And same thing for runners and people doing anything athletic. I guarantee you people who are so don't stop, don't stop as opposed to make it to that spot. And then when you make it there, make it to the next spot. Same thing in life. People are saying never quit, don't quit your brain, just quit   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: As opposed to make it to that milestone, make it to the next milestone, make it to the next day. Make it to the next day. Keep pushing forward.   Joe: Yeah, that's a great point, and that's what I think really people should take away from this section of what we're talking about is that even when they talk about visualization, right, it's like you're you your body, your brain does not know whether or not you've accomplished something or not. Right. So why not tell it the best story you can write? Why not say that? I, I, I'm like, visualize you're on top of Everest. Like just visualize it until it happens. Right. It's just so you have to tell your own, your own body the best story possible. And I think that's this portion of what we're talking about should be a lesson to say your your body, your brain and your body is listening. So make sure you tell the right story. So can you take us back to your 16? You're going through all this. What's the next phase in your life?   Sean: A wild and crazy college life   Joe: Ok, where was that?   Sean: That was in Westminster College, and I think looking back at it, because my my teen years and my high school years were taken from me, have   Joe: You're going   Sean: You   Joe: To make up for   Sean: Have you ever seen a movie Animal   Joe: The   Sean: House?   Joe: Absolute.   Sean: There you go. And I was Bellucci. I had a wonderful time   Joe: Nice.   Sean: And I wouldn't change a thing. And I started off molecular bio thinking I was going to cure cancer by splicing genes. And I took organic chemistry and immunology. And it's it's pretty difficult to pass those classes when you don't open a book and study. So. So I actually switched to psychology because I was taking a an introductory psych course while I was going through the immunology class. And I really found it fascinating. And I started thinking, oh, well, maybe there's something here where I can help cancer patients and cancer survivors move on with their lives because it's not an individual disease. It affects everybody in the family thinking, OK, well, I have this great insight. Took the GRE, went to Jacksonville, Florida, to go to work on my master's and my doctorate. And then some things happen. I was working for different jobs, trying to go through my doctorate, which is just ridiculous. I mean, just to focus on education. Wow. So at some point I decided that I hadn't dealt with my own issues. Because of what I went through, I never even considered what cancer did to me and how I wanted to quit on the other end, because in college I just I left it behind. I didn't even bring it up. I mean, there I dated some girls and I was thinking, OK, well, how do I bring up that? I'm a survivor. It's not like, you know, dinner conversation. Oh, you know, how how how's your wife and how is your dinner? Oh, I had cancer. You know, he just   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Can't do that.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: So I was so worried about I didn't know what to do. I just I just I forgot about it. So then in grad school is thousands of miles away from Ohio. And it was the first time I actually stopped and looked myself in the mirror and ask myself those deep questions, you know, who are you? What do you want from life? What's your purpose? So I just did some deep, deep understanding of who I was, and then I realized, OK, I had been given a tremendous gift of the mind body connection, and I wanted to help and give back to cancer patients in the cancer world. And that's what I did, more research and more research and kept getting bigger and bigger and thinking higher and higher and like, OK, well, how about we use the biggest platform of the highest platform in the world to scream? Hope the guy. Great. Let's let's go climb Everest. Moved to Colorado just because, like the highest point in Florida is the top of the for the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami.   Joe: And   Sean: So I moved to Colorado, Rocky Mountains   Joe: I love.   Sean: Because I know I don't know too many mountaineers who live in Florida.   Joe: No, no, but it's also.   Sean: So I moved to Colorado and I trained in and literally nine months later flew over to Kathmandu, Nepal, and headed up Everest as the first cancer survivor to some of the highest mountain in the world.   Joe: So what year was this and how old were you?   Sean: Well, that was that was 2002, I actually submitted May 16th at nine thirty two in the morning. So night again almost 20 years ago, 19 years ago. I was twenty seven at the time. That's right.   Joe: And   Sean: Twenty   Joe: You   Sean: Seven.   Joe: Did this with nine months of training.   Sean: Nine months of training and when I first. Well, when I first moved to Colorado, I didn't even have any support. My brother came with me. We lived out the back of my Honda Civic and we camped in Estes Park for two months before we even got a sponsorship.   Joe: Oh, my gosh.   Sean: So we were I remember one morning we woke up, we were going to go climb, I think it's one of the Twin Peaks in Estes Park and we got about two feet of snow in August. And I was thinking to myself, because we're living in the car, that camping, it's like, the hell am I doing here?   Joe: Josh.   Sean: What did I get myself into? My my office was the library and a pay phone bank. So I was calling corporations like Ghatak and Karvelas in the Northeast saying, hey, I'm a two time cancer survivor with one lung and I'm going to go climb Mount Everest in 10 months and I need your help. Ninety nine doors closed in my face.   Joe: Really, that's   Sean: At.   Joe: So surprising that your story is so unique that that one that triggered people to say yes more often.   Sean: But they didn't think it was even possible.   Joe: I guess,   Sean: They thought   Joe: Wow.   Sean: It was physiologically impossible to do that with half your lung capacity, so they like, like I said, nine out of 10 people. I mean, hey, you know, this is my story. Click And I thought it was a joke. So   Joe: What?   Sean: I. I actually have both lungs, but there's so much scar tissue from the radiation treatment, there's really no oxygen transfer. Yeah. So   Joe: So   Sean: It's   Joe: There wasn't removed, it was just   Sean: Like.   Joe: It's just collapsed or   Sean: Now.   Joe: If that's the right term, but   Sean: That's   Joe: The scar tissue,   Sean: A perfect term,   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Ok, and this that was from the age 16 to one. A lot of the chemo and radiation was done. That's when it happened.   Sean: Exactly.   Joe: Did you have it? Did you also have chemo and radiation at 13?   Sean: I had chemo the first time and chemo radiation the second time.   Joe: Ok, and so it just affected the one long in the sense that it just created just the scar tissue over   Sean: Correct,   Joe: It where it wasn't. So   Sean: Correct.   Joe: It doesn't really work at all.   Sean: Not not really. In fact, in January, I had a little scare, they think it's a long term side effect from the radiation where I had some spots in my back removed and now I have another another starless by about six inches long where they had to go remove that. But if that's all I have to do, the first cancer, the second cancer is 16, 17, and the now 46 year old. Cut it out. I'm good.   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Ok, so we are. You said what was the date again,   Sean: May 16th.   Joe: May 16th of two thousand and two,   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: And you were twenty seven years old, OK? And so you trained nine months before you decided you said, I'm going to go do this. So you you set aside nine months to get ready for this.   Sean: Correct.   Joe: Ok, so does the training. Is the training the stuff that I saw in some of the videos where you're you're pulling a sheet behind you and and whatever, your pull tire's up a hill and like, how did you figure out how to train for such as that?   Sean: So that was actually when I when I went to the North Pole a couple of years ago, but for training going up to up Everest, there's lungs Long's peak, which is 18 miles round trip, and it's it's fourteen thousand two hundred and fifty six feet. And I eventually worked my way up to climbing that peak once a week with 100 pounds of rocks in my backpack. So I would train myself and I'll go up onto that peak and into the Rocky Mountain National Park in a bad day, thinking that a bad day on Long's peak was probably better than a good day on Everest. And what I do a training for, for anything like the North Pole, the Hawaii Ironman, I did that. I train harder than I think the event actually event is going to be for two reasons. I get my body in shape, my mind in shape, but also I'm thankful I don't have to train more and I'm more excited about the actual event.   Joe: Right. That's crazy. So what is a normal when you're when you're training for something like that? What what would be a normal day in Sean's life? What time do you get up? What kind of stuff do you like? I can't even fathom something like this. I just   Sean: Well.   Joe: Got done skiing and snowboarding in Utah. I got home last night. I went with the old my oldest friend. We went from elementary and junior high and high school. And   Sean: Now.   Joe: Our families were friends and his father was my dentist. And so he said, I'm going to snowboard spring skiing. I haven't been skiing in twenty five plus years.   Sean: Now.   Joe: Like, come on, let's go. And I was a good skier a long time ago and yeah, I just can't imagine what it would take. My legs were shot. So what does it take. What's Seans the day in the life of of what you do.   Sean: Well, I'm going to challenge you again, then, what are you doing July twenty, Fourth to August seven?   Joe: I saw that and I was like, God, I want to do that. So   Sean: So.   Joe: Explain. So since you're talking about. Explain what that is before we talk about your daily routine. So   Sean: Well,   Joe: Explain.   Sean: Yeah, that would lead into it, because I everybody every year I take a group of Kilimanjaro as   Joe: That's.   Sean: A fundraiser for cancer charity, and what we do is we actually we pay for a survivors trip. And then it's the responsibility of that survivor to raise funds for next year's survivor, kind   Joe: Oh,   Sean: Of   Joe: Wow.   Sean: Paying it forward. Anyone can go. We just fund the survivors trip. And this year we actually have enough funds to send to survivors. So I'm hoping with those two survivors, there isn't. They raise enough funds to take three and twenty twenty two and then maybe five and twenty, twenty three and so forth up to. I'd love to take 15 people, 15 survivors for free every year at   Joe: Wow, that's   Sean: All   Joe: Incredible.   Sean: Costs. But for Kilimanjaro, let's say I would, I would wake up and about four miles from here we have a set of stairs that are pretty steep and there are two hundred and I live at I want to say sixty, sixty four, sixty five hundred feet. So I'm already an altitude which helps a lot.   Joe: Is   Sean: I   Joe: It?   Sean: Wake up in the morning before sunrise and eventually I will do that. That set of stairs 10 to 15 times with about 70 or 80 pounds of rocks in my backpack. So you're talking what, two thousand, maybe, maybe three, four thousand steps up and down in how many stairs are there? The Empire State Building. I think there's one thousand something so   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Less than I did.   Joe: Right. Wow.   Sean: Then come back, wake my wife up, will do some yoga, eat breakfast, come here to do some work on my laptop, and then I'll probably either do it depending on the day, either rowing, lifting or running, and then on the weekends go out and do a 14 or something like that and a 14 year, a fourteen thousand foot peak. But I also have a sponsorship through a company called Hypoxic Go   Joe: Check.   Sean: Where there's this machine. I call it Arcudi to like R-2 because it's tiny and it actually filters out oxygen to simulate altitude. So I'll I'll do the yoga, I'll do the rowing machine or and I'm doing this because it's a mask of   Joe: For those of you who are listening, he's putting his hand over his face.   Sean: Just randomly. That's that's what I do. And I work out, I,   Joe: That's right.   Sean: I, I'll do those workouts at home on a mask that's connected to this machine and I'll end up doing these workouts at nineteen thousand feet. So what I'm doing is I'm pretty acclimatizing my body because I have to make up for the lack of my right lung because when you get into altitude there's less oxygen, you know, it's spread out, spread out further. And when you get to like if we left, if we went from here to the top of Everest, we'd be dead in five minutes just because of the lack of oxygen. So I treat it and I try to pre acclimatize myself. And when we go to Kilimanjaro, I tell people my training schedule and like, I could never do that. Well, remember, you're training for yourself. I'm training for me and ten other people.   Joe: Right.   Sean: So   Joe: Right.   Sean: This if you're interested, this would be my 21st summit of Kilimanjaro.   Joe: That's incredible in regards to what you eat, are you like a very strict like is everything that you do? Very strict and regimented.   Sean: Not not everything, I mean, I give myself some leniency sugar during the week, I don't do on the weekends   Joe: Ok.   Sean: On Easter. Yeah, I have those little malt balls, you know, the Easter Mother's Day. But for the most part, I mean, no sugar. See, what did I have just for lunch? My wife made a salad. We had some chick like a chicken, homemade chicken salad. We're very conscious of what we eat. We stay away from the sugars. No. And that means no white pasta, no white bread. I love I've always loved broccoli. I just eat healthy.   Joe: Right.   Sean: Every once in a while I'll have a burger or steak, but, you know, maybe once a month.   Joe: Beer, a glass of wine, no.   Sean: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I   Joe: Ok,   Sean: Like I actually I brew beer at home too.   Joe: Ok, OK,   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: It's great because when I travel you know, I make the beer, I come back two weeks later I'm like, oh beer.   Joe: There you go. OK, cool.   Sean: Oh.   Joe: So were you afraid going Tavaris like, I can't I can't even imagine I'm telling you to sit here and talk with you about this. I I've watched like we've talked about before, we actually started recording, watched the shows, the different movies or documentaries about it and the getting frostbite and people getting pneumonia and their sister, their body shutting down. And they're having to have the tip of like my nose is red right now from being sunburned and windburn from Snover. And I'm like, I don't I can't even fathom all the things that must go through your brain. And then watching where you cross over on that, I don't even know what it's called. You think I know after   Sean: Remasters   Joe: Watching.   Sean: Have.   Joe: Yeah. The with the ones with the ladders. Right. I don't know how many of those you have to cross and I just I don't know. And then the spots where I don't even know if this is something people point out on the way up or on the way down. But that's where we had to leave so and so like at the all those things go into your brain and you don't want to be the weak link in the chain. Something happens to you and then all of a sudden other people have to descend, like, I don't even know how that works. So, I mean, arriving at base camp must have been just like incredible and scary as hell. I've been like, oh, my gosh, there's no turning back here. It is base camp. And I'm and I said, I'm going to do this.   Sean: I think for me, I obviously was focused on the summit, I wanted to get to the top like everybody else who goes over there, but I think I was more focused on enjoying the whole process because literally when I got to base camp, every step outside of base camp was my personal record for altitude. I had never been any higher than base camp. But so every step was higher than I'd ever been, so   Joe: What   Sean: I   Joe: Is   Sean: Am.   Joe: What is base camp at?   Sean: Seventeen thousand six hundred feet.   Joe: Ok, and you and you're saying this machine you use change you at nineteen thousand.   Sean: But I didn't I didn't have that machine before   Joe: Oh,   Sean: I.   Joe: Wow.   Sean: So the highest I have ever been was just around just below fourteen thousand five hundred feet, which is the highest mountain here in Colorado.   Joe: That's correct.   Sean: Albert.   Joe: Wow.   Sean: And when I got to the summit of Everest, I mean, it was double the whatever, the highest point I'd ever been. But I knew that I was so focused on, you know, you asked me about being afraid, there were times that those little. Negative seeds got planted in my brain, but I didn't want them. I didn't let them grow and I was very mindful and very aware of when those thoughts came in my brain, because looking back at the same analogy of that young boy on the shower floor, I focused on living as opposed to not dying. And when I when I was crossing the ladders on on the glass across the crevasses, I wasn't focused on, hey, don't fall in the crevasse. I was focused on making it to the next side. And when we passed the dead bodies, I stepped over a number of dead bodies. I just I tried to not ask myself the question, I did this when I got back down. Why did he die? Why would nine? And what's the difference, like, why would I why would I be worthy and he wouldn't be. But it's it's like anything in life where you just don't know sometimes. Why did I get cancer? I don't know. It's a whole question. Why me? Why me? Well, the fact of the matter is, it was me. So deal with it. Why not me?   Joe: Yeah, I've had this conversation with other people on the podcast who have gone through some adversity. I you know, I feel like that adversity has been given, fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, because the outcomes of things that you've learned through what you've gone through have created this person, this mental strength, and someone who is very happy day to day or other people, just no matter, they could be having the most amazing life and they still complain. But I feel like, you know, the adversity has been given to people with strength, and I'm not sure if that's true. It's something I made up of my own brain because I think I'm such a wimp that I cut my finger. I start like I don't know how I would deal with what you've gone through, what other people around me have gone through. So that's what's my own little story, I tell myself. So you just didn't choose me because he knew I couldn't handle it, so.   Sean: But but you never know what you can handle until you're put in that situation.   Joe: Right.   Sean: And people always say say things like that all the time, I don't. My God, I have no idea what I would do if I was ever in your situation. You don't know.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: And you'd be amazed at how much you can actually handle when you are in that situation.   Joe: Yeah, that's incredible. OK, so you're at base camp and how many are you in? I don't know how you travel if there's 12 or 15 or whatever the number is. How many are there with you going up?   Sean: So, as you probably know, a normal Everest expedition could I mean, it could be 20, 30 people.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: A number of sardars Sherpas, you name it, and clients. I had my brother at base camp, a cook at base camp, two Sherpas and me, and that was it. We were I say I was we were on a shoestring budget, but we didn't even have shoelaces. So we.   Joe: Did   Sean: It   Joe: You end   Sean: Was.   Joe: Up ever getting sponsorship before you left?   Sean: I did in   Joe: Ok,   Sean: One of   Joe: Good.   Sean: Them was Ghatak, one was Capello's, and   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Believe it or not, I didn't even have a summit suit a week before I was supposed to go up for the top. And just my crazy luck. And I know it's not like it was by the big guy upstairs, but the north face came in with my my summit suit and it actually said Shantz Warner Everest base camp on the box. And it got to.   Joe: Wow, that's crazy.   Sean: It's like two or three days before I was supposed to go up in the sun at my summit suit came in.   Joe: That is nuts. Wow. All right, so when you start out, how long does it. How long should it take you or how long is like the most that you can spend up that high? Like, is there a period of time that you have the summit? And I know it's due to weather, too, right. You have to sometimes   Sean: At.   Joe: Just go. We can't make the attempt today. The weather is just not good enough. So what did it end up taking you from base camp to summoning Everest?   Sean: So a lot of people don't understand that when you get there, you don't go from base camp and go up to Camp One, spend a couple of days there, go up to camp to spend a couple of days there, three, four. Same thing from the south side. We actually there are four camps and then with base camp there.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: So we arrived at base camp April 8th and I summited May 16. So almost a month and a half. The whole time we're going from base camp up higher, establishing different camps and then coming back down so that that does two things, we go up with a full back, a pack drop off stuff and then go back with an empty backpack, go back up with a full pack your stuff and go back down. So, like I said, does two things. It actually transports the gear and material that we need to each camp, food, gear, whatever. But it also is getting our body adjusted to the altitude.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: So then we would go up and down, up and down, up and down after we established three and then four when when you get to camp for your before you get to Camp four, you pay attention to the weather. And there's a weather window because everybody has seen that that quintessential picture of Everest with the snow plume   Joe: Yep,   Sean: Blowing off the top.   Joe: Yep.   Sean: That's because that's because the sun is puncturing the jetstream, the just   Joe: Uh.   Sean: Tunnels, the summit, two   Joe: Huh?   Sean: Hundred three hundred miles an hour. So it's impossible to climb on that. So what happens is pre monsoon season, there's a high pressure system that pushes the jet stream north. And that's when people sneak up on top of Everest and come back down. So you see on I guess you don't look on a map, but meteorologists know and they give you a weather window like it's usually mid-May. For us, it was supposed to be May 15th where the weather window was good. But for whatever reason, that may on May 14th, we were supposed to move to May 15th and go up for the summit. I was at camp three and I was suffering a mild form of cerebral edema, which is altitude induced swelling of the brain. And I couldn't move. So every single other expedition who was on the same schedules, us went from Camp three, moved to Camp four and went to the summit that night. The next morning, the winds were howling. They came down the aisle retreat, and they lost their opportunity to climb. I slept on an oxygen that day. The next morning we went up to camp for summited on May 16th, a day later, and there was just a slight breeze in the top. We spent about 30 minutes up there to forty five minutes, which is unheard of.   Joe: Who's medically trained to tell you what's wrong with you or do you just have to know, like there's no one is like in your own little group, it's you just have to know what's right or wrong with you and how to fix it.   Sean: In my group, yeah, I mean, in other expeditions are expedition doctors, you know, everybody there were we made friends with some people from Brown University who were doing a study up there. And it was it's actually really funny. They're doing a study on how the altitude affects the brain. And they gave me this book and I became a volunteer to help with the study. And I was at Camp three when I was acclimatizing and not going up for the summit, but just sleeping at Camp three is going to come back down the mountain like a little Rolodex thing. It's like the size of an index card and you flip it back and on the front of it, you're supposed to pick out which object was was different, which which one didn't belong. And it was like a small triangle, a large triangle, a medium sized triangle and a Pentagon or something like that. Right.   Joe: So.   Sean: And so and each each are different. So big, medium, small square in a circle you pick out the circle. But it was funny. So I get up to camp three and I'm radioing down to them. All right. You guys ready to go? Yeah, we're good. So I flip it over and I'm thinking I'm going to have some fun with this.   Joe: All right.   Sean: So I go page one, the Penguin Page to the House, page three, the dog. And keep in mind, they're all geometric shapes. So   Joe: All   Sean: I think.   Joe: Right, to the naming of animals, as they say, oh, for.   Sean: It's like I take my thumb off the microphone and there's a long silence.   Joe: It's not.   Sean: And all of a sudden, Sean, are you feeling OK?   Joe: Right.   Sean: Like, yeah, why, what's going on? There are no animals.   Joe: That is so funny. Oh, my gosh, they were probably like, oh, we got to get a helicopter up there.   Sean: They were thinking, we need to get emergency up there and get him down off the mountain.   Joe: That is so funny. Oh, my gosh. So is it true that it gets backed up up there when people are trying to summit during a certain season?   Sean: It is now when I was there, it wasn't as bad   Joe: Check.   Sean: And also. A few years ago, there was a big earthquake and there used to be a section called the Hillary Step,   Joe: Yep, I   Sean: And   Joe: Remember hearing.   Sean: So it used to be a chunk of rock that used to hang out. And literally, if you took six inches off to your left side, you would plummet a mile and a half straight down. And there was that section where only one person could go up or one person could go down at a time, and that's where the bottleneck usually was. So with the earthquake, what I've heard is that there's no longer a Hillary step. It's more like a Hillary slope now because that giant rock has been dislodged. But from the obviously you saw a picture from a couple of years ago that just that long queue of people, apparently it's getting a little out of control.   Joe: And that's crazy. Would you ever do it again? Do you ever care about doing it again?   Sean: Well, as is my family or my wife going to hear this this time, I don't know if it calms down and it becomes less popular, I honestly would I would like to attempt it again without oxygen to see if it's possible to climb Everest with one lung and no no supplemental oxygen.   Joe: Who was the guy that did it with no, nothing.   Sean: Reinhold Messner, he's climbed, yeah, and then there's also a guy named Viscose who climbed the 8000 meter peaks. So it's been it's been done numerous times, but the first person who did it was Mesner. I believe.   Joe: No oxygen, it just all right. Yeah, I don't want to get you in trouble with your wife, so we'll just, well, not talk about it anymore, OK? I'm telling you, I can sit here and talk to you forever, and I want to respect your time. I don't want to run too far over. So besides everything you've done every day, the tallest peak on every continent at this point, is that true?   Sean: Correct. Still the seven summits,   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Yep.   Joe: Ok, and then along with that, you have this series of books that you're doing. Can you explain what that's about, what people find when they give each one of those books?   Sean: Oh, sure, yeah, it's actually it's in the infant stages right now, but it's called the Seven Summits to Success. And I just signed an agreement with a publishing company. We're producing we're publishing the first one which is conquering your Everest, where it helps people bring them kind of into my life and understand how I've done what I've done, not just what I've done, what I've done, not what I've done I've done, not what I've done, but how I've done what I've done.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: And it's also it's very similar to what I just I put together called the Summit Challenge, which is an online series of individual modules, seven different modules walking people through. Utilizing their own personal core values to accomplish things like self actualization, and at the end they essentially find their purpose and it came from the concept and the idea where after a keynote presentation, so many people would come up and say, that's a great story, but a handful would say, that's a great story. And then followed up with a question, but how did you do it? And then looking at Kilimanjaro again, the average success rate on the mountain is roughly forty eight percent, meaning fifty two people out of 100 don't even make it to the top. And like I said, this this July with my twenty first summit with groups and our groups are at 98 percent success rate, double that of the average. So I was thinking, OK, well what's what's the difference? And the difference is I've been subconsciously imparting what I've learned going through the cancer because my first goal was to crawl eight feet from a hospital bed to the bathroom, and then I ended up climbing twenty nine thousand feet to the top of the world. So all those little things, those little insights that I've learned, I've been imparting on people in my groups. So we do something every day that's different to help people get up there. In the main, the main understanding that they get is understanding what their personal core values are. Because once you hold fast to your personal core values and you have an understanding of a deeper purpose, nothing is going to get in your way.   Joe: So in that kind of brings us back to when you left college and you decided that you're you're camping with your brother and then you decide you're going to do this thing to Everest. Right. Was that the beginning of this this portion of Shawn's life where you're going to do these things? But now there's an underlying what's the word I'm looking for this an underlying mission, which is you're you're doing this, I guess, because you like to challenge yourself. Obviously, you just want to you're so happy with the fact that you have been given this chats with   Sean: Right.   Joe: With what happened to you. You're going to make the most of it. So here I am, Sean Zwirner. I am so grateful that I went through two different types of cancer that easily either one of them could have killed me. One of them ruined one of my lungs. I'm still living. Not only that, but I'm going to make the most of every day. So you go to Everest, you do this, you accomplish that, and then you say, OK, that that's that's it. You went for the biggest thing on your first run. You would start out small. You just like, screw it, I'm going to Everest. And then after that, all these other things would be cakewalks, and I'm sure they're not. But then you did all seven summits. And now, though, is it the underlying mission is that you are you are the voice of cancer survivors and and what you do and I don't want to put any words in your mouth, so stop me at any moment. But is it like you're doing this to to to provide hope for them to say, listen, I not only did it twice, but I am living at the highest level of accomplishment and and I don't know what there's so many words I can think of that you just you want them to all think the same way, just keep pushing forward, get the most out of life. And I'm here to support you. And look at me. I've done it. I'm not just spewing words from a stage. I've literally gone out and done this. So I want you to be on this journey with me, both mentally, physically, if you can. Does that make sense or that I just destroy it?   Sean: No, absolutely, I I wouldn't I wouldn't personally profess that I am the voice of survivors if others want to think that that that's great. But I wouldn't I wouldn't declare myself that. But I have found a deeper purpose. And it did start with Everest, because when I made it to the summit, I had a flag that had names that people touched by cancer on it.   Joe: Yeah, I saw that, yep.   Sean: And that was always folded up in my chest pocket, close to my heart as a constant reminder of my goals in my inspiration, and I planted a flag on the top of Everest. I planted a flag on the seven summits, the highest on every continent. And I also planted a flag at the South Pole and most recently at the North Pole. And I think it initially started. With the concept of I don't want to say infiltrating the cancer community, but getting there and showing them exactly what you said, you know, being up on stage and saying, hey, I'm not just talking the talk, I'm walking it as well. I know what it's like being in your situation. I know what it's like to have no hope. But I also know what it's like on the other side. And I also know what it's like to scream from the rooftops that there's there's a tremendous life after after cancer and it can be a beautiful life. So a lot of people who and like I said, it started off with cancer, but now it's it's reached out to anybody who's going through anything traumatic, which is with the state of the world, is it's everybody now. So with with any uncertainty, you can use that, especially with my cancer. It wasn't the end. It was the beginning. So what the world is going through right now, it's not necessarily the end. It's not uncertainty. How we come out of this on the other side is entirely up to us. And it's our choice. And we can use all the trials and tribulations and turn that into triumph of success if we want. It is all based on our own perspectives.   Joe: So you come off of Everest and then there's your life now become this person who is going to continue to push themselves for because you obviously want to live this amazing life and you don't you just do love the adventure. You love the thrill of the accomplishment. I'm sure all of that stuff that any of us would love, like I went skiing for three days of twenty five years. I'm glad I'm still alive. Sit and talk   Sean: They.   Joe: Because trust me, I wasn't the guy you were talking about walking down the sidewalk and say, don't trip down. I was like, you're fifty nine. You break a bone now you're screwed, you're breakable. And I'm going over. These moguls go, oh my gosh, why am I here? How did you survive? How does someone like that survive financially? How do you survive financially that you now did that? Does that start to bring in sponsorships and endorsements and book deals and speaking deals, or is it just the snowball that happens? And how do you decide that this is the path your life is going to take?   Sean: You would think so, and I've been approached by numerous corporations where the conversation went, something like me telling them, well, I really can't use your product up in the mountains and doing what I do. They say, OK, we'll just take the money we're going to give you by which you really use but endorse our product. So if I went if I went down that path, absolutely, I would be living the high life.   Joe: Right.   Sean: But because I'm a moral and ethical person, I think.   Joe: So.   Sean: It's not nearly what you probably think it is, I don't have people banging down my door for a movie. I don't have people banging down my door for a book. And I think it's because most of the media that we see on television is is paid for media. And every time I reach out to a production company or a marketing company or a PR company, they're usually the first question is what? What's your budget? OK, well, how about the story? How about helping people? Because like I said, every morning I write an affirmation down, in fact, or was it just yesterday was I will give more than I receive. I will create more than I consume. And I think most people who don't understand that think that you're living in a state of lack. And maybe I am. But I'm also incredibly grateful for everything we have. And do I want my story out there? Absolutely. But I don't need to make millions and millions of dollars on it. And what I what I want to do is take those millions and millions of dollars and take cancer survivors up Kilimanjaro every year. I'd love to do that three or four times a year. So I'm always looking for people who can who can jump in here and help me out and share my story with others to give back to help people and help them believe in themselves and help them find their purpose, their their inner drive, their inner.   Joe: Is this is going to sound so stupid, so forgive me, so when you do this, this trek up Kilimanjaro, you do it in July, right?   Sean: Yeah, yeah,   Joe: It.   Sean: People should arrive at Kilimanjaro International Airport July 20 for.   Joe: Ok, is it cold up there?   Sean: It depends. That's a it's not a stupid question,   Joe: Really,   Sean: But   Joe: I   Sean: That's   Joe: Thought   Sean: Like   Joe: You were going to   Sean: Asking.   Joe: Be like, yeah, it's it's it's however many thousand   Sean: Oh.   Joe: Feet. What do you think, Joe?   Sean: But that would be like me asking you, hey, what's it like in snowboarding? What's it going to be like in snowboarding? July? Twenty Fourth. Twenty twenty three. I mean, you have a rough estimate.   Joe: I.   Sean: So in going up Kilimanjaro, it's one of the most beautiful mountains I've been on because you go through so many different climactic zones getting up that you start off in an African rainforest where it can be a torrential downpour. It's always green, but it could be a torrential downpour or it can be sunny and the sun kind of filters through the canopy and you'll see these little streams of light coming to the camp, which is beautiful. And then the next day, it's it could be sunny or rainy, but it goes through so many different zones. You just have to be prepared for each one summit night. However, yes, it's tremendously cold. It can be zero degrees or maybe even minus 10. But with the right gear, you're going to be fine. I mean, there's there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad year.   Joe: Well, here's a good question, and if someone was to go on this is how do they get that gear that they have to buy all that stuff?   Sean: You can you can purchase it or you can rent it over there. I've used the same group of people for the past 18 months, and if you're if you're never going to use a zero degree sleeping bag again in your life, just rent it for 30 bucks. You don't spend three hundred four hundred dollars to buy one. Or if you do buy one and you're never going to use again, give it to my friends, the Sherpas of who use it all the time.   Joe: Right, so basically somebody's going on this could, when they arrive there, get everything they need to make it happen.   Sean: Well, except for your boots and your underwear, you probably don't want to rent me underwear.   Joe: The point well taken. OK, go. So I want to ask you about the Big Hill challenge.   Sean: So great, the big Hill challenge is actually an abridged version of the summit challenge, so some challenges this really in-depth twenty one week program where you take micro challenges and utilize something that you learn and just incorporate into your daily life. The Big Hill challenge is going to be a three week challenge where I take a group of one hundred people at a time and work them through three weeks of little micro challenges to help them along.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: And they're both based on understanding and utilizing your personal core values.   Joe: Perfect. And these can be found on your website.   Sean: Yeah, you can go to the summit challenge dotcom event eventually, you can go to the Big Hill challenge dotcom,   Joe: Ok,   Sean: But every   Joe: Ok,   Sean: One or dotcom.   Joe: Ok, great, because I'll put all of this in the show, notes and everything else, I wrote this question down because I wanted to make it clear that besides your website, Shawn   Sean: Like.   Joe: Swane or Dotcom, you have the cancer Climategate.   Sean: Correct.   Joe: Can you explain can you explain that site to me and what the goal of that site is?   Sean: So cancer climber, cancer climate Doug is actually the organization my brother and I founded that funds trips for cancer survivors to kill javu.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: And actually, if we raise, my goal is to raise about two million dollars to have a mobile camp for kids with cancer.   Joe: Wow. That's   Sean: Because   Joe: Incredible.   Sean: You there are camps all over the country, all over the world, but oftentimes you can't get the survive or you can't get the patient to the camp because of the compromised immune system. So I thought, well, what if there's a semi truck that brings the camp to the kids?   Joe: Hmm, that's interesting. That's a really cool. And the reason I ask about coming on being cold is because Joel in my my better half of 20 some years survived breast cancer. It was lymph node sort of stuff. So taken out and be like God. But she hates the cold like she I would be so cold to do something like this with her. She just literally I mean, I don't know if she would go the last section to the summit because her cold do not mix. She's so happy here in Arizona and she never complains about the heat. So   Sean: My.   Joe: That's the only reason I ask that. So.   Sean: My wife was born and raised in Puerto Rico,   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Forty forty years of her life, and she went with me.   Joe: She.   Sean: She did. She hated the last night, but she's so happy she didn't.   Joe: So it's really just the one night that's the   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Coldest. So it's one night out. How long does it take to get from where you started out in the rainforest to the.   Sean: So the whole trip itself is a seven day trip up and down the mountain summit on the morning of the 6th, we leave the evening of the 6th, and then after we come off the mountain, we actually go we fly into the Serengeti and do a four day safari to the Serengeti.   Joe: And when you're staying on the way up to the summit, or is it just like caps right   Sean: But   Joe: There? Oh, so that's it. There it is.   Sean: The.   Joe: That's right. So the people that are listening to this on the podcast, you'll have to look at the YouTube video later. But he's showing me the actual   Sean: The.   Joe: Tents and. And is everybody carrying their own tent?   Sean: No, I actually, because I've been there so many times, we pay two porters per person to haul your gear up and all you have to worry about is your day pack some water, snacks, showers, your camera, sunscreen, hat, stuff like that. I don't want anybody carrying anything more than, say, twenty five thirty pounds up the mountain, but the sort of porters will actually give them the leave. After we leave camp, they'll pass us on the way.

Sean: What are your top investments during the pandemic? Marvin: Your top investments, pandemic, no pandemic, good economy, bad economy, should always be the same. That should not change because your skill set for it should be the same. good economy or bad economy. So what works for you when things are good should also be the ones that will work for you when things are bad. Because that's where you're used to. Sean: It was great, right? The one Marvin said, which is, same. What you're investing in, your top investments, pre-pandemic should be the same during the pandemic. Marvin: Yes. Because it didn't change, I'm still into stocks. It's just that, your style, JC is right, it's about pivoting. Are you familiar with Josiah Go? I think he's one of the best marketing minds in the country. He said the same, if you lose everything, you also start with what you're great at. Because it doesn't make sense to start something from zero, whereas, with the one you're doing right now, the only thing that's gone is the money. But your experience and skills are still there, unless your business is disrupted by the technology. Like if your business is an answering machine, something like that. Totally you have to really pivot off of that. That's it. That's my answer to it. I hope it was something.    JC: To add to what Marv said about pivoting, because the question was about your investment during the pandemic and how do you adjust. Somehow, I'm thinking that's the mindset. We tried to pivot our business in different aspects based on the different strengths that we had. Like what Marvin said, you focus on your strengths. And then we realized that we have to pivot but still within the core of your strengths. So we tried to assess, and it's still the same. We didn't change our market. So it's still about pivoting to your strengths and if you're going to invest in something, it should still be something that you know. It's not about you, starting from scratch just because facemask is a trend that you're going to invest in there. It doesn't work that way. So I still looked at the strength of our main core competency, which is food and all of that. And we focused there. So you're not just going to invest because it's the trend. That's also what I learned during this pandemic. Marvin: I was talking to Bo Sachez, I asked what his biggest mistake was in business. It's also like that. He started businesses that he didn't like and he was not good at. So he had failed businesses before. He opened up a fishball business, food cart business then he realized that it was not something he likes to do. So you will ultimately go back to what you like doing the most. I think that's how, it will always go back to what you like doing, what you're good at, and what makes you also happy. But it's true that you can also do things that do not make you happy, but in the second year, third year, and you're still not happy, then why are you still doing it? Right? For me, I'd rather earn less, doing something that I like, than earn more, doing something that I don't like. JC: Also in times of, during a pandemic, you know, what type of investments will you deviate to or pivot? For me, that's something that you are known for. So at the end of the day, it was not hard for us to penetrate corporate accounts because we know them. It's just a different product. So if it's about investing in the pandemic and things, it's like, you stick to your core if you're a business owner, and then you just try to see what are the different, new opportunities there. Because, definitely, there's another way to look at things. There's another market who will need your product. And there's something that you can offer that nobody else has. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/leadershipstack Join our community and ask questions here: from.sean.si/discord Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leadershipstack

For the 26th Episode of the Check Your Six - CY6 podcast, Craig and Tim brought in Sean Esler with Edge Consulting to talk all things tech related. Something that most small business owners need but few of us understand, unless you own an IT/Tech consulting business, and even fewer of us are able to navigate. Having a web presence is essential for small business in the current business climate and having the support for the technology is even more essential. Besides being a small business owner himself, Sean has had a lot of experience in a multitude of businesses, non-profits and community related programs. It is a wonder he has any hair left(small joke if you know Sean) #IT #smallbusniess #techsupport #checkyoursix #CY6 #grpstudios #vetsgrowth

Sean: It has been a tough time. Me and my organization, we had our revenue kind of rewind four or five years back. It's still more than when it started 10 years ago, but it's tough as the founder and CEO, I see my bottom line and think: Hey, you know, all that hard work just wiped out. Four to five years. I'm wondering, how is this time treating you? What are you doing to get out of it and just improve everything?  Keziah: We have been lucky in the US. Some people say we're lucky. Some people say we're not, but there were a lot of resources directed towards small businesses. That's been helpful for my clients as well as for myself. When they shut things down, there was a period of time in that March and April when I wasn't closing any clients. Also with my existing clients, a lot of them were on a monthly program with people. I do a six-month program upfront. And then we often do monthly work and a couple of them, business went to zero and they came up to me and were like, I'll take a pause. I just can't keep going forward. I went back and I was like, No. You are going to be infinitely more likely to be paying me full price in six months if we keep working together. So I did work with people on price. I started going out into the community and being more upfront about doing demo sessions? I was like if you bring me small problems, we'll work on it. Let me give you some tools. Going out to people that I knew and offering them that because I knew that that would just be enough to kind of get them up, get them moving and taking action. I do think that that attitude that you're expressing, which is that feeling, which is very intense that, oh my God, I've rolled back to where I was. You have to imagine the area under the curve. You still accumulated all of that money that you've spent on things and whatever, and then have the life that you want, and you also accumulated all of that knowledge, all of those contacts, all of that experience. So you're not back where you were. Four years ago, right? Your business has evolved quite a bit and you have evolved as a leader and as a business owner. What I am seeing is that for some people it's, Hey, you know, this business isn't really what I wanted to do. I started to get more clients after the first drop. People started coming in because they're realizing that the reason their business is suffering so much now is because they didn't plan for X or they didn't know why, or they're not very good. Like I said, my clients, we could negotiate and they're still paying me now. Some of those clients are paying me less. New clients are generally paying me full price, but like, I did have some negotiations, but they didn't leave me. They didn't fire me. We were able to work with that. I've seen that with the clients I've worked with for a longer time is often they were able to use this time to reset relationships. Go out if you're really looking at your business. Let's say, for example, you were a retail business and you had no eCommerce presence. You have had 20 years of Amazon coming at you. So you've been in denial about the fact that it works. I'm not saying your retail business can't survive, but what is the value to you? Why do I come to your store? It's because I like you as the shop owner and you're friendly and you help me. If that's what it is, then you need to start selling that virtually. But you can still keep me as a client or a customer if you know what you're providing me. There's a lot of stuff that is going on where people will be able to push through to the other side once they really understand what is the value they provide. I'm happy to talk offline about this because I know you've got a bunch of businesses. You're definitely not back four years, as much as it feels like that. Support the show (https://tribe.leadershipstack.com/)

The Great Reset Craig Phifer, PT and Sean Bagbey, PTA are co-owners of Rehabilitation & Performance Institute which puts the person first. They created the Private Practice Rebellion where they teach other business owners their model. Check those out here: · Rehabilitation & Performance Institute https://rehabilitationperformance.com/ · Private Practice Rebellion https://www.privatepracticerebellion.com/ Craig follows Dave Chase’s idea of what healthcare should look like and recommends the book “The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream.” In this book, Dave Chase discusses this period we are in today is “The Great Reset.” Craig gave us his equation on what the “great reset” is in patient care. Craig emphasizes not all parts of this equation are weighted the same in each patient interaction. · Value = patient experience + emotional experience + physical outcome / effort putting in + price their paying + risk taking. Sean shares a personal story about himself and his treating physical therapist. From his experience, he feels PTs are needed now more than ever as our skills are essential. Craig explains the patient perspective in physical therapy and if patients do value us to pay for our services. He describes this value is developed in the first 3-4 visits with the patient. Craig and Sean demonstrate that PTs need to have an existing relationship to build trust. How to build a relationship with your patient is different now compared to pre-COVID. QUOTES “If this is a reset, what is going to change and how are we going to adapt with it?” – CRAIG “Physical therapy needs to have a better place in our society.” – SEAN “We need to show our worth and this is our chance to start doing that.” – SEAN “It just reinforces to me what we can do in this profession.” – SEAN “If you want to seem interesting, be interested.” – JIMMY “That monster becomes bigger when you think it is under the bed.” – JIMMY “We are not the star of the show when we are treating someone.” – SEAN PARTING SHOT “The profession of physical therapy can be much better then what we currently live in.” – SEAN “We gotta get away from talking and we need to get to doing.” – SEAN “Make healthcare work really well for us.” – CRAIG It has been suggested by Dave Chase that this period of time may be defined "The Great Reset." I believe we're about to see much faster changes in opinion, lifestyle, and behavior then we normally would. What does that mean for the profession of physical therapy? We're doing so much right as a profession, but our service is generally not valued (5th choice for chronic MSK pain by primary care physicians, 6th-ranked choice for people who have LBP). Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to change that. * Understanding that while clinically, we're doing so much well, that doesn't mean that people value the service we provide on a macro level.* People significantly changed where and how they spent their money in the Great Recession,

The Great Reset Craig Phifer, PT and Sean Bagbey, PTA are co-owners of Rehabilitation & Performance Institute which puts the person first. They created the Private Practice Rebellion where they teach other business owners their model. Check those out here: ·        Rehabilitation & Performance Institute https://rehabilitationperformance.com/ ·        Private Practice Rebellion https://www.privatepracticerebellion.com/ Craig follows Dave Chase’s idea of what healthcare should look like and recommends the book “The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream.” In this book, Dave Chase discusses this period we are in today is “The Great Reset.” Craig gave us his equation on what the “great reset” is in patient care. Craig emphasizes not all parts of this equation are weighted the same in each patient interaction. ·        Value = patient experience + emotional experience + physical outcome / effort putting in + price their paying + risk taking. Sean shares a personal story about himself and his treating physical therapist. From his experience, he feels PTs are needed now more than ever as our skills are essential. Craig explains the patient perspective in physical therapy and if patients do value us to pay for our services. He describes this value is developed in the first 3-4 visits with the patient.   Craig and Sean demonstrate that PTs need to have an existing relationship to build trust. How to build a relationship with your patient is different now compared to pre-COVID. QUOTES “If this is a reset, what is going to change and how are we going to adapt with it?” – CRAIG “Physical therapy needs to have a better place in our society.” – SEAN “We need to show our worth and this is our chance to start doing that.” – SEAN “It just reinforces to me what we can do in this profession.” – SEAN “If you want to seem interesting, be interested.” – JIMMY “That monster becomes bigger when you think it is under the bed.” – JIMMY “We are not the star of the show when we are treating someone.” – SEAN PARTING SHOT “The profession of physical therapy can be much better then what we currently live in.” – SEAN “We gotta get away from talking and we need to get to doing.” – SEAN  “Make healthcare work really well for us.” – CRAIG  It has been suggested by Dave Chase that this period of time may be defined "The Great Reset." I believe we're about to see much faster changes in opinion, lifestyle, and behavior then we normally would. What does that mean for the profession of physical therapy? We're doing so much right as a profession, but our service is generally not valued (5th choice for chronic MSK pain by primary care physicians, 6th-ranked choice for people who have LBP). Right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to change that. Understanding that while clinically, we're doing so much well, that doesn't mean that people value the service we provide on a macro level.People significantly changed where and how they spent their money in the Great Recession, and we are very likely to see changes again.We can prepare PT to be at the forefront of this change, but we have to acknowledge and deliver what people want from our service - price transparency, highly individualized care, and trusting relationships with providers. People don't value PT the way it's currently being delivered (trying to offend as few people as possible). This is a business systems problem and not a clinical problem. As few as 10% of patients complete their prescribed care plan (WebPT 2018 State of Rehab Survey), and 78% of PTs reported that they thought this number was at least 50% of patients (16% not sure, only 6% of therapists indicated a number less than 50%). So, it's a problem therapists either don't know about or don't want to know about. What's worse, is that most of them are not put in a position to do anything about it. Now is a great opportunity to change that for the following reasons:  ...

Oliver and his brother started Kemweb in 1998, providing coding for other agencies and then livestreaming the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. Three years ago, frustrated with being a tech-supply company, they took their technical expertise and redefined their business as a full-service digital agency, . offering results-driven web design, online marketing, social media marketing, PR, consulting, podcasting, video production and hosting services. Today, Kemweb's 35 developers, art directors, social media experts, and performance team workshop with clients to discover their needs. Kemweb customers range from B2B small and medium sized companies to fast moving consumer goods suppliers. Oliver credits his agency's success to curiosity and agility, and a change in its approach to potential customers. A lot of companies will pitch what they can do for customers, without first finding out what the customers need, saying, “We can do this . . . and this . . . and this. What do you want?” Companies may think about “What are we offering? What kind of service?” – but fail to ask, “Why are we doing it? Why should our customers believe the things we're doing?”  Finding the answer to those last questions was pivotal in driving the Kemweb's approach to its own customers. Business consulting is rare in Germany . . . and it's one of the things that is an intrinsic part of today's Kemweb process. Oliver suggests that you have to drive a lot deeper than the “easy questions” to discover what actions will best serve a client's needs. Kemweb now begins a client business relationship with a workshop/consultation utilizing Strategyzer's Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas to map out a business's knowledge, unsnarl its inherent complexity, and structure a customer-centric solution, with a focus on communicate the messages their clients want to communicate.  Sean notes that there are cultural differences between businesses in Germany and those in the U.S. For instance: German business owners have greater fear of change and new ways of doing things. Legalities differ as well: Data protection laws are more stringent in the U.S. Sean explains that the linear career process in Germany also affects the way people think. After finishing a German citizens finish their education, they take an apprenticeship, then go to a company and move up the ladder within that company.  Oliver was supposed to serve as a mentor at South by Southwest 2020 in Austin, TX, but the COVID-19 pandemic changed all that. He believes that, “This is a special period in time (that) forces people to be more courageous and to try out new things.” He feels that it is important for businesses to work together – to help the customers with their businesses and to help them survive. “We have to take care of each other . . . worldwide,” he says Sean recommends looking at today's challenges as an opportunity to spend more time with family or to online to learn new skills – just use your time. He is using his time in quarantine to set up an English-language Kemweb landing page. Oliver and Sean can be reached on the social media channels or on the company's website at: www.kemweb.de. They have a German-American podcast, Robot Spaceship, at www.robotspaceship.com,. described as an industry-leading, European podcast network with a focus on technology, culture, innovation and living the digital lifestyle. (You may need to understand a little German.) Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Oliver Kemmann, Owner and Founder at Kemweb in Mainz, Germany, and also Sean Earley, the New Business Development Manager for the firm. Why don't you gentlemen start off by telling us about Kemweb and where Kemweb excels? SEAN: You go. OLIVER: Maybe I start. [laughs] I founded Kemweb together with my brother about 20 years ago, so 1998, in a time without smartphones, in a time without Facebook and YouTube. We were pretty much doing some coding for other agencies. We started also with livestreaming in the year 2000 for the Olympic Games in Sydney, so we were quite tech-related. As time passed by, we started to ask questions. How can we get away from being this tech supply company and how can we find our own customers? So we started to talk about digital communication and how we could help people out there to succeed in their special business by using modern digital technology. This is what we're doing today. We have about 35 people in the agency and we have developers and we have art directors and we have a social media team and a performance team. We do workshops and stuff to find out what the business is all about and how we can help, and then we set up the channels where we can communicate to the target groups of our customers. We think in stories and experience, talking about the stories our customer wants to get communicated, and we develop the experience on different channels and different devices. This is what we're doing. ROB: A lot of firms I think start off in that mode where they are taking downstream work from other agencies, other firms, but now it sounds like you have a better idea of who your direct customer is. What sort of company and perhaps focus or stage of company is that now? OLIVER: There's not one special kind of customer we are serving. We have a lot of B2B business. In Germany, we have a lot of small and medium sized companies. They're doing a lot of engineering stuff, or small producing companies. Usually they are not very familiar with classic marketing topics and how they could use digital communication to sell their products and services. But we also have, for example, fast moving consumer good customers and help them, for example, with social media campaigns. So it is very widespread, actually, the customers we are serving. It's quite exciting. What do you say, Sean? [laughs] SEAN: Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think from my point of view, I come from a background – it's a little bit different in Germany than it is in America. In Germany people have a linear process; they go to school, they do an apprenticeship, they go to a company, and they stay there in that skill range, and they just move up the ladder. In the States, as you all probably know, we work all kinds of jobs before we actually start our career. I've done all kinds of different things. I've worked in all kinds of different jobs. Lots of different agencies, consulted, tech, gaming. One of the things that I have seen is that there's always differences in everybody's needs as a business, but when it comes to marketing specifically, there's a lot of things that everybody needs. It really gets down to that value point, that use case that everybody needs, what is the problem that they have and how we can provide a solution. I think a lot of agencies particularly get a pitch and they go to a client and they say, “We can do all this stuff. What do you want?” When I started working with Kemweb, Ollie and I had a talk and it was like, that's exhausting. It's counterintuitive to what we want to do, and it's kind of counterintuitive to what the client needs because there are specific things that clients need. So we tried to refocus our strategy a little bit to work with clients to figure out exactly what they need first before we say “We'll take your 200,000 euro budget and we'll give you one or two or three things. What do you want?” We really try to focus in on the needs of the client and give them exactly what they need, and at the same time try to explore other areas to try to explore new places ourselves internally and externally so we can provide lots of services to clients. But at the same time, we really like to consult first and then give them what they need, and not just “here's your website, have fun with it.” Sometimes they say they want a website and they don't really need a website, so it's important to talk to people first. That's where the workshop and consulting come in. ROB: Got it. I think there's subtlety in the details there. You're not just talking about doing a bunch of discovery, if I'm hearing you correctly. You're actually talking about entering into a business relationship sooner with the client, where you have a process around a workshop, where you have a consulting arrangement rather than doing a bunch of unpaid discovery on an RFP. Is that what you're getting at? SEAN: Exactly. ROB: Very cool. What does a workshop look like for you? OLIVER: I'm a fan of a company called Strategyzer. It originated in Switzerland. These guys developed some canvas thing called the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas. I guess you're familiar with this. Our approach in the workshops is something Sean said. As a consultant, my job is to get the complexity out of the things. I'm taking all the knowledge the customer has and I'm structuring it in these canvases. This leads us to a very structured way, and at this point we start to look at our customer's customer, so it's very customer-centric. This leads us to exactly the customer pain we're addressing and what the customers are really looking for. Most of the time, it's the first time our customers have thought about their own purpose or why they're doing what they're doing. Most of them are coming from the “what?” – “What are we offering? What kind of service?” But not “Why are we doing it? Why should our customers believe the things we're doing?” This is what we do in the workshops. We try to get all the information from the customer and structure it down in canvases, and then we find the channels and we find the customer groups we should address first. ROB: That's probably been a part of your own journey as well. Business Model Canvas, anybody can google it. You'll find it, you'll pull it up. I feel like that tool flows from left to right, where it does flow into how everything leads in to the customer so you know what you're doing, but let's all tie that through to the customer. You probably had a little bit of your own journey on that as you transitioned from being a subcontractor coding shop to pursuing your own customers. What did that journey look like where you started to realize what the direct customers needed and you started to be able to pull away from taking parts of projects from other people? OLIVER: Good question, actually. Or the right question. When we started 2 or 3 years ago to find this way for ourselves, we always were communicating the “whats,” what we were doing. Websites, apps, firms. This is what every other agency is doing, too. They say what the output is. Then we started to dig deeper and find out, what are we good for? What has brought my brother and me to the point of founding a company or agency? Curiosity and agility are what's driving us. What we are doing now is we're very much curious about our customer's business. If we fully understand what the customer is doing and what the customer needs, then we can help. This was the turning point in our own company history, when we found out that. ROB: That seems like a neat intersection because you've not only found this curiosity for what they're doing, you're aligning this tool. You have a tool that actually facilitates your own curiosity that aligns the customer to where they're actually getting value out of the discovery process, unless they can pay you for it. You've aligned the customer and value for them with who you are in your own curiosity, it sounds like. OLIVER: Yeah. In Germany, at least, it's not very common that you do some kind of business consulting thing in a web project, for example. Most people, after the workshop, say, “This was a business consulting, what you're doing.” They start to look differently at their own business, at the company. In Germany, we're far behind you guys in the States where digital transformation is concerned. Most of the companies are very slow in changing things. The owner-driven companies really are shy to start changes, so they want someone who says, “Everything is okay. We have this web project, for example,” and you give them the money and it's ready by the 1st of June or so, and then you don't have to think about it. SEAN: I would just interject and say culturally, working in the States and in Germany, there's a lot of hyper-focusing on details here. There's also a lot of different rules when it comes to things like data protection, so there's a lot of hesitancy in a lot that goes on here as well. Especially with some sort of new and innovative tech project, a lot of people are like, “We can't even legally do that.” When it comes to things like sales funnels and where you store your customers' data, it's a whole other story over here, so it's not just – they're behind in their desire, but I think also they're behind because there's a hesitancy to want to try because sometimes it's difficult to make those steps. So I think it's a 50/50. There's innovation and there's also limitation. For us, we try to find a happy medium in there. Sometimes you have to talk a lot about that as well. ROB: In terms of adjustments, we were originally scheduled to have this conversation in person, in Austin, Texas at South by Southwest, and as we are in the midst of this global coronavirus pandemic, we're all doing this interview from home. I'm in a closet, to be candid. It's a different thing. But just for a moment, Oliver, you were invited to be there as a mentor. Is that something you've done before at South by Southwest? OLIVER: No, actually not. [laughs] I've been in Austin for the last 3 years, and last year I met some guy from Denmark and he was a mentor last year. He explained what he was doing there, and I thought it was interesting, so maybe I could help young people with my different perspective I bring as a German. Maybe I do look differently on things. On the other hand, I've been self-employed or an entrepreneur for more than 20 years. So maybe I can help some people. I just filled out the form and they picked me. [laughs] But I can't tell you what it's like because I didn't do this before. Maybe I will do it next year. SEAN: Ollie and I are both big music fans, and I actually played in a band at South by Southwest before. He was like, “Have you been to South by Southwest?” I was like, “Yeah, musically,” but the whole tech thing – and he was so excited. I was like, oh man. I felt so bad when they cancelled that. He was like, “What am I going to talk about now?” I was like, “You're a German guy there. You've got to talk about German topics.” I think that's stuff people want to know about. There's a whole different perspective there. It's not just tech in general. A lot of people talk general tech, but there's a lot of cultural differences in the tech industry here that I think he could really have provided. But I guess we have the internet now to communicate. ROB: Yes. People can reach out when they hear this and we can all talk in our closets. Or maybe we'll be out of our closets by the time we get this out there. Did they give you visibility into people signing up to talk to you and what they wanted to talk about? Or is it more so that you show up and people show up and go from there? How is that structured? OLIVER: I can't tell you. [laughs] We had a slot somewhere in a hotel for an hour I guess, or an hour and 50 minutes. I had 17 fans on the app, so 17 people were bookmarking me. Actually, I can tell. I guess you have to reserve a slot, but actually, I can't tell you if anybody already had the slot reserved. ROB: We're right here in the middle of March. At this juncture, as you are talking to your customers and potential customers and that sort of thing, how is the current state of things affecting both their mindset and maybe even how they do workshops? Are your workshops normally in person and you're planning for how to do them online? How is that changing your own business and your customer mindset? OLIVER: Wasn't it Macron, the French president, who said we are at war? [laughs] It's changing everything right now. We were well-prepared, actually. Sean, 2 weeks ago, said, “This is getting really bad, so we'd better be prepared.” We tried to get all our people home office ready 2 weeks ago when it just started to get really bad. But I have tons of customers who were not prepared for that. They're not even prepared to get their people in the home office, and they didn't think what they could do in this time. To be honest, I think this will not be a thing for 2 weeks or 3 weeks. I guess we're talking about months or years if this is getting better. We should for sure find very fast things we can change to have a workshop by Zoom or Teams and so on, but I can work with my customers even if they are not in the room. It's a little bit different, so I need my customers to be courageous enough to take such a step. I have a lot of customers who say, “Let's postpone the workshop and meet in 2 or 3 weeks. This can wait.” [laughs] I say, “Okay, go for it.” But on the other hand, there are a couple of people from the consulting business who were already setting up their remote setup. I can film the canvas and I can put the post-its there by myself. The important thing for me is to get all the information from my customers. They are driving this process, so I need all the information, and I can structure it at home in my closet. [laughs] My impression – maybe, Sean, you have your own opinion about this – I think people are getting aware. This is a special period in time, and not many people have experienced what we are experiencing right now. This forces people to be more courageous and to try out new things. This is my impression. SEAN: Yeah, I would just say that we were lucky to have enough time to try to be proactive and plan for it. Kemweb has a lot of experience in livestreaming and webinars as a core business, so it wasn't anything new to go remote. Since we do a lot of consulting for how to become more digital, it was not a scary concept for us. It was more about organization. We've noticed a lot of people who weren't ready, who are reaching out and trying to get an idea of what they can do to get ready, and I think it's also important for any business who does have any sort of strategic advantage – at this point, it's not about competition anymore. This is a global problem that nobody's ever dealt with, so I think we're just trying to take the opinion of let's try to be as helpful as we can. Let's be a resource for people. Let's do some consulting for people just so they can figure out what to do, much less take action on it. Everybody has different problems, but we have CEOs and managers, and everybody is quarantined in their house, worrying about their business. Some people are losing their business as we speak, and some people are like, “I need to figure out how to conduct business when we're here. How do we do this?” Luckily, we've just been in a position to be able to help people. For me, that's the most important thing. Just making sure businesses are running, people are being as successful as they can with the limitations, and hopefully when we get through this, everybody's going to be in a better place and not a much worse place. ROB: Right. That's an advantage I think you have in being strategic. I was talking to a client yesterday, an agency, and they have one client who's in travel, and they're very large, so that client is rightly putting a lot of initiatives on hold. But I think everybody has an inclination towards timidity in this moment. One of their clients was a beer company, and they said, “Should we cut back?” They said, “No, you can be bold right now.” SEAN: If you're not Corona. [laughter] ROB: Yes, for sure. I see it in my own feeds. People are talking about going out and buying beer right now. I think they look forward to it. So there are opportunities. OLIVER: That's what's different between Germans and Americans. Germans are buying toilet paper and noodles. [laughs] The French are hamstering red wine, and you guys go for beer. SEAN: The German term for prepping is hamstering, so there's a lot of hamster memes going on in Germany. [laughs] ROB: I had no idea. I've learned something there as well. Oliver, some people's agencies that we talk to are brand new, and some folks have been running them for a while. If you were in the U.S., we would probably talk about the 9/11 situation here. But you did navigate through the global financial crisis 13 years ago. What are some lessons that you may have encountered from that time that have helped you as you're looking at this new set of circumstances that is resetting global markets and making people worry a little bit? OLIVER: What we learned – our luck in this crisis 13 years ago was we had customers from all kinds of business areas. We were not only doing business with banks. So we survived it quite well, actually, but only because we had a widespread portfolio of customers. This is what we kept all the way from then to now. I guess this is also what maybe, or hopefully, will help us through this crisis too. We have also customers from the tourist business, so we're doing a lot of event stuff. Like Sean said, maybe now some livestreaming things. These companies are dying while we're talking. They're losing all the events, like South by, for example. All the catering people, our customers from catering. We have other customers from the public sector, for example, and we have customers from the hygienic field selling soaps. I think this is what we learned. Don't focus too much on one specific branch. 13 years ago, we were a much younger company. There were just a couple of people there. Actually, we were not flying high enough to be hit very strongly by the crisis 13 years ago, so it's hard for me to compare it this way. Sean, do you have a point here? SEAN: I wasn't with the company at the time, but I think just from experience and being in Germany at the time, it's similar in that there are companies that get financially hit and they're going to go down. There's nothing they can do. There's other companies that get hit hard, but they try to climb up. I think at this point, everybody is struggling and everybody is needing to be loud. Everybody is needing to communicate and reach out. Kemweb did video production, they did web production, so they had a rounded base of services that they could offer. If you have a diversified portfolio, then you can be agile with your approach to lots of clients. I think that's one of the reasons Kemweb has been able to be successful for so long through these ups and downs, at least in my opinion. Unless you know a secret I don't know. [laughs] That's just my outside opinion. OLIVER: Yeah, that's right. Maybe you know the new book by Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game. When I read this book, I didn't know up to the point I read the book we are in this infinite game. Since we are helping our customers, or trying to help our customers to succeed in a digital world – we did this for 20 years, actually, and every disruption or every crisis forces us to be inventive and to question our own work all the time. We did this for the last 20 years, and we came out stronger. So I guess he's right in his book. If you don't reach finite goals, to be the best in town or whatever, then you will find new approaches even for your customers, and you learn from every punch you get. You're learning. I think this is what we learned over the years. For example, when all the streaming was Flash – maybe your younger listeners remember, there was a software called Flash. Steven Jobs decided – all the streaming things we did were running on Flash from one day to the other. Nobody actually was using Flash, so our streaming business was down within a couple of months, for example. But you start finding workarounds and finding new solutions and stuff like this. If you get used to this, if you are not scared by disruptive changes – I guess such a crisis is a very, very disruptive change to everything. It's even a threat to your health, so this is a different problem. People are now really scared about their health, not only business-wise, but family and personal health-wise. So this is a different situation we have right now. ROB: That's a great point. With The Infinite Game, the objective, the point that Sinek makes is that this is not a chess game that you can win or lose. The goal is to keep playing the game. I think it could even be possible in this moment to take more encouragement. You mentioned Flash – Flash, for people who don't remember, was made by Adobe. It was Adobe's attempt to control the browser. SEAN: It was Macromedia and then it was Adobe, I think. ROB: Yeah. When Apple came out against Adobe, that was a specific headwind against Adobe, and a big part of their strategy and a big part of their business. They moved out of trying to control the browser into a bunch of other things. There's a lot of big companies that just take up space and are hard to admire, but Adobe, with having the primary paid enterprise for analytics up against Google Analytics, with the way they've managed to turn their creative suite into a subscription business, they really have figured out how to keep playing the game. I think anybody who's listening probably has even more of an advantage now because Adobe had a specific headwind; this is a headwind that we all have. Everyone's fighting this at the same time. So it's not just you. People are going to win here, and I think it can be Kemweb and it can be anyone else who's listening, if they figure out how to keep playing the game well. SEAN: Yeah. I'd look at this as an opportunity. You can look at it as negative as you want, you can get depressed about it and you can sit there and pout, or you can really try to think of the positive ends. For me, just being able to take time to spend more time with the kids when they're home, or to be able to teach them from home how I want to, or to be able to go online and spend my time with a course, learning something new – you've got to take this as positive as you can. You have to utilize your time. Everybody in the world is confined to their homes at this point, or almost, so do what you can do to benefit from that situation. I think that's really what you've got to do here. I think you will benefit in some way as long as you see it as a positive thing. OLIVER: I would like to bring up another point. It's actually about solidarity. We all have to take care of each other and the other companies. If our customers die, for example, we won't be able to do business after the crisis with them. So we also have to put up plans where we can help our customers not just on the business, but on the survival side of things. So maybe this will make people think about things they've done before or ways they saw things before. Right now we have to take care of each other worldwide, actually. ROB: Yeah, it has definitely taken that longer approach of, for people who are young, to say, “You may be young and you may not be likely to get sick, but what about someone else's parent, grandparent?” SEAN: We're getting up there. ROB: What about us on this call? Take care of us too. But really, how to think beyond yourself I hope is a lesson we can carry forward a little bit longer than just the memories of this unusual season. Oliver, Sean, when people want to track you guys down, when they want to find Kemweb, where should they go to find you? OLIVER: They should go to the internet, this new thing, you know? [laughs] ROB: That's all we got. That's all we got right now. OLIVER: You'll find us on the social media channels. We have our own podcast, actually, which is a German-American podcast form, and it's called Robot Spaceship. You need to understand a little German. I'm speaking German and Sean is speaking American English. But you'll find us on the web, www.kemweb.de. SEAN: Kemweb.de, and that's www.robotspaceship.com for the podcast. OLIVER: Sean is using his quarantine to set up an English landing page. [laughter] Isn't it, Sean? SEAN: It is. There's so much translation that happens. There's so much work. [laughs] I need to take a vacation from working because I've got so much work to do. [laughter] ROB: I think we'll all be looking to help the travel industry rebound in a little bit when we can all come out of our holes. Oliver, Sean, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing at this time. It's good to be able to connect over audio, at least, and share some of your learnings, lessons, and growth with the world. SEAN: Thank you. OLIVER: Thank you for the invitation. Great experience for us. ROB: Thank you so much. Maybe in Austin next year. SEAN: Definitely. OLIVER: For sure. ROB: Let's work that out. SEAN: Fingers crossed. OLIVER: On 6th Street. [laughs] ROB: All right, thanks, guys. Bye 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.

This week we have Shaylynn hosting a very special interview with... Sean? It's a quick look at how the tournament is going and how things are looking for the payers involved.

Join the Marriage After God movement today: https://marriageaftergod.com"Exposing how God is at work in the world reminds us of who God is and what can be done when we say yes to Him." - Marriage After GodPrayerDear Lord, Thank You for using ordinary people to do such extraordinary things in this world. It is only by Your power that we are able to say Yes with courage and do all that You ask us to do. We pray we would be quick to say yes to You and trust You to help us. No matter what You invite us to do, may we never forget or neglect to do the things You have already commanded us to do in Your Word. Help us to be faithful and obedient people. We pray our marriage would be used by You to make an impact in this world and to draw people’s hearts closer to Yours. We pray our marriage would be a gift to You, blessing Your name. We pray our marriage would reflect Your amazing love. We pray for an extraordinary marriage and we ask You to use us in extraordinary ways for Your names sake. May You be glorified through us. In Jesus’ name, amen!Read Transcript- [Aaron] Hey, we're Aaron and Jennifer Smith, with Marriage After God. - [Jennifer] Helping you cultivate an extraordinary marriage. - [Aaron] And today we're in part 14 of the Marriage After God series and we're gonna be talking with Sean and Katie Ferrell about having an extraordinary marriage. Welcome to the Marriage After God podcast where we believe that marriage was meant for more than just happily ever after. - [Jennifer] I'm Jennifer. Also known as Unveiled Wife. - [Aaron] And I'm Aaron. Also known as Husband Revolution. - [Jennifer] We have been married for over a decade. - [Aaron] And so far, we have four young children. - [Jennifer] We have been doing marriage ministry online for over seven years through blogging and social media. - [Aaron] With the desire to inspire couples to keep God at the center of their marriage encouraging them to walk in faith everyday. - [Jennifer] We believe that Christian marriage should be an extraordinary one. Full of life, - [Aaron] Love, - [Jennifer] And power - [Aaron] That could only be found by chasing after God - [Jennifer] Together. - [Aaron] Thank you for joining us in this journey as we chase boldly after God's will for our life together. - [Jennifer] This is Marriage After God. Hey, guys. Thanks so much joining us today. We just wanna take a minute to encourage you all to go leave us a review. It's super simple. You just scroll to the bottom of the app, hit that star rating, or leave a comment review. These encourage us so much but they also let other people know where to Marriage After God podcast so go take a minute and do that for us. - [Aaron] And also the reason we're doing this podcast is because of our new book coming out called Marriage After God and we'd love for you to get a copy. It supports this ministry. It supports what we do. And also, it supports your marriage. It's gonna encourage you. We wrote this book for you and your marriage to help you see what God has for you. You can go to shop.marriageaftergod.com and you can pick up a copy today. - [Jennifer] Okay, so today we have our friends, Sean and Katie Ferrell. We just wanna say, hi guys, thanks for joining us today. - Hey there. - Hey! We're super excited to be here. - [Jennifer] Awesome. Well, just to let everyone else know who's listening who you are, how many children you have, what you do, all of that awesome stuff. Go for it. - [Katie] So I'm Katie Ferrell. - [Sean] And I'm Sean Ferrell. - [Katie] And we were married for about 10 years. It will be 10 years this August. And we have one daughter, she's almost two. Her name is Madelaine. And we work together from home doing a website called Dashing Dish which is basically a ministry that really focuses on caring for our bodies God's way as well as nutritious recipes and workouts and all the good stuff that really hones in on living a healthy lifestyle God's way. - [Aaron] This is one of the reasons why we wanted to interview you guys is because you together do this and I know that Dashing Dish is mostly your face Katie but Sean you have a big part in this, right? - [Sean] Yeah, yeah. So I actually pretty much almost everyday working on the graphic side of Dashing Dish's marketing. So I spend my time doing blog post images, new website designs, new app designs, anything that she needs, I try to give to her right away so... - [Aaron] So you guys are a team it's awesome. And that's one of the things we love about you guys is because you do it together. We do what we do together and you just remind us a lot of us and we wanted to use your story today to help encourage those listening. - [Jennifer] Well actually, to clarify, we share you guys' story in this chapter of Marriage After God which we appreciate you guys sharing with us. We won't dive in too much into too much detail 'cause we want people to go read the book but we are gonna share some extra stuff today that will be inspiring and encouraging and I think we should start with the icebreaker. - [Aaron] Yeah. So the icebreaker question for you guys is... One second. So the icebreaker question is what is your favorite life hack? - [Katie] Oh it's so funny 'cause we were going back and forth and we're creating all kinds of funny answer for this and we're like well definitely our daughter's pacifier is a life hack because it saved us - Yes it is. - time and time again whenever we're in public. That's just a general life hack when you have one girl. No, but for real, honestly, we don't wanna sound like we're coming off fake or like, you know, we're just perfect people but truly our life hack is setting our alarm and waking up early and spending time with the Lord and I call it a life hack because - That's a good one. - we know that we would not be able to do anything that we're doing without that. I'm a morning person. Sean is not. So this was something that was definitely not natural for him but he realized pretty early on when we had a newborn that he had to set his alarm and he had to make that time because the day just gets away from you. So we wake up before, you know, while it's still dark out. We make coffee and we get right into the Word in our own separate rooms. - [Aaron] That's awesome. That's a good life hack. - [Jennifer] Yeah, it's practical but it's also... It feeds the spiritual sides of things which is what we need to be at. Like you said, to do the things that we need to do. So with God. - [Aaron] Yeah and just being at... Just normal, without children, we need to be able to walk in the spirit. But with kids, we definitely need to walk in the spirit. So activating that early in the morning is super important. What we're gonna do is this chapter that we're talking about... So we've been doing this series and every episode's been on every chapter in the book. So this chapter, we tell a bunch of stories from what we call ordinary people doing extraordinary things because there's really no extraordinary people in the world. There's just ordinary people that do extraordinary things that they say yes to God and God uses the things that he's given them. So we wanted to read a quote from that chapter and then we'll get into the questions with you guys. It's from chapter 14 and it says this. "Exposing how God is at work in the world "reminds us of who God is and what "can be done when we say yes to Him." - [Jennifer] So I love this quote and to me it's saying, you know, all of our yeses to God are really impactful and when we get the chance to share our story and share what he's done in us and through us that testimony inspires other people and encourages them so that was one of the reasons why we decided to share other people's stories in this chapter including your guys' and again, we just wanna say thank you for doing that. - [Aaron] Yeah. And then the other thing is, there's often this, and we can talk about this a little bit later but there's this sense that unless we are in some sort of specific ministry, unless we have this specific giftings or talents that we see other people have, we might feel like we're not, you know, useful to God. We might feel like we don't have anything special to be used or you know, we don't have these special gifts. Or we don't have this website or this ministry or this, you know, big audience, whatever thing we wanna compare ourselves to that might keep us from stepping into thing that God does have for us. Again, which is why we shared other people's stories, not just our own is because we believe that every single person of the body of Christ, every single marriage in the body of Christ God wants to use and must be used. It's a part of His body. Every part has been given a gift and has been given something to be done for Him. And so we wanted let everyone listening know that this means you also. So it's not just for Jennifer and I and it's not just for Sean and Katie. It's not for all the other people that we've done these interviews with only. It's for everyone. Just a precursor why we're doing this episode and why we wrote this chapter specifically. Jennifer, why don't you start with the first question. - [Jennifer] Okay, so how do you guys see the contrast of how the world defines what is extraordinary and how God sees extraordinary. - [Sean] Yeah, I think... We were going over this and I thought, you know, it was interesting that you phrased it like that because when I think of something that's extraordinary, I see the creation around us. I see, you know, all these amazing, you know, landscapes and sunrise and sunsets and just things that God created that's extraordinary to me but I started thinking more of like you know, the people around us were doing all the little things that God, you know, that they're saying yes to God. And I kept thinking, you know, what we're doing, sometimes it feels mundane and feels like everyday you're kinda doing the same thing maybe like Groundhog's Day but we know we're producing something hopefully that's extraordinary in someone else's life and hopefully, it's making an impact of a change in different ways and whether it's health or food or you know, getting free from wrong mindsets or-- - [Katie] And even just like-- - [Sean] Yeah, yeah, like that. - [Katie] And even just in being parents. I mean sometimes it can just feel like Sean said, like Groundhog's Day. You're doing the same thing, routine everyday. But just knowing that we're raising the next generation for kingdom of God and how powerful and extraordinary that is but we really believe that what God says it's extraordinary is people, relationships, and how he's created everyone of us so incredibly unique with a personal fingerprint that no one else has. And yet, you look around and what does the world says extraordinary. It's so different. They exalt fame. Status. - [Sean] Salary. - [Katie] You know, followers, money, all of that. And yet, that is just simply so shallow. I've been around and seen those things so up close and yet I see those people that don't know the Lord and it seems like they have everything and yet they truly are empty when you really get to talking with them and so just having a full life and really seeing the extraordinary things really is brought out by knowing the Lord and what his plan and purpose is for your individual life and walking that out. - [Aaron] Love that. Yeah, it makes me think of, you know, money. And I think in James when it talks about... When James is talking to the rich in the church, the wealthy. And he says, "remember that's your humiliation." And then he talks about the porn. He says, "you're gonna be exalted." And there's this oppositeness. This reverse economy that we see in God's kingdom. Not that it's bad to have wealth. It's all in where our hearts are at and whose is it. Is it ours or is it God's? Are stewarding it or are we owning it? - [Jennifer] And who gets the glory for it. - [Aaron] And who gets the glory for it. I love you mentioned the small things, Sean. We think there's small things. Especially in a world currently that is so anti-children. This is just one topic in the world's views. Anti-children. And the children are not just our future. You were a child once. And the way you were raised and that you guys gave your hearts to Christ and now God's using you to do that for others and for your own child and you know, we always say, we're building the kingdom. Our children were growing disciples. We're raising disciples and it may seem mundane but it's... Who else do you get to spend 18-20 years with? Teaching about the Lord and loving on them and showing them through example and through Word. God is. We don't get many of those relationships in this world but God blesses us with children to do that. - [Katie] That's true, that's true. - [Aaron] And that's not a small thing. The world says it's a small thing 'cause they get in the way of the big things, right. Just like the disciples were like, get the children away. Jesus is doing his ministry. And Jesus like, "Whoa, whoa, let the children come to me." - [Jennifer] So I just wanna add too just as an encouragement for all the people listening that perspective is a huge thing. If you see, you know, your day in and day out with your children mundane or your job or whatever it is that you do on daily basis. It will fill that way in your heart but if you have eyes too see it as an extraordinary thing. And this is our encouragement to you today, is if you see it as an extraordinary thing, then you'll be able to kind of receive and given those moments in a different way because your perspective is different. - [Katie] So true. - [Aaron] It makes me think of... Just while we're talking about our perspective. When we realized that everything we're doing is a spiritual thing. As the Bible says, "it's not a battle "against flesh and blood. "But against the principalities "and the spiritual realm." The things that we're doing no matter how ordinary or boring they think, they are spiritual things. So how we're raising our children. The things we say. The things we do, where we go. All of it, they're spiritual things. So when we recognize that. We're spiritual creatures doing spiritual things in this world. It makes those ordinary things much more extraordinary 'cause these are gonna have eternal impact. These things we do. - [Jennifer] There's purpose behind it. - [Aaron] Yeah, there's purpose behind it. And so it might not match what the world says is valuable or purposeful. You know like saving the planet, right. But we know what's gonna happen to the planet. How God's gonna change that. Doesn't mean we don't be good stewards of the planet but what the world says is extraordinary is temporary. - [Sean] Definitely. - [Aaron] And what God says extraordinary is eternal. - Amen. - You know. - [Jennifer] That's good. - [Aaron] So most often, God's love is shared through the simplest acts of us saying, "Yes, Lord." We will do that. What have been some of your favorite yeses to God in your own life? - [Katie] Well, I would say definitely Dashing Dish because when I started Dashing Dish... Well, I was working full time as a nurse. And I went to school five years to be a nurse and it was hard work to get my degree. So we were newly married. I just started my nursing job and Sean said, "Hey, let me create "a little website, you know, just to "a side hobby for you to, you know, "start sharing your recipes and "also your testimonies and devotionals." So I just it would be a side hobby and about a year in, I realized that God was calling me to something much greater than I thought it would ever be. When we made that decision, it was definitely a hard one to make because of the fact that I did, you know, I just got my first nursing job. I worked so hard to get there. And then I was saying goodbye to it and I was saying yes to God with Dashing Dish. As you can imagine, that was definitely a challenging decision to make. However, I believe that God gave us so many clear confirmations and so many words to, you know, push us in the direction and say, "I'm leading you here. "Don't be afraid." However, there still are natural fears that comes in. And when ever we've said yes to God in anything in our lives, we can always pull back to these big moments where we've said yes and we know that God has come through for us and that single act of obedience has paved the way for so many different times in the last 10 years that we've said, "Okay, look at that time that "we were obedient on what God has done." And now we can be sure that if we're obedient in these other decisions that has come along the way that God will continue to show himself faithful. And another one was actually with Maddy. I was having a hard time getting pregnant. One of the things that I knew that I knew in my spirit was that I had to slow down if I was gonna get pregnant. I was traveling so much. I was working so hard. I would wake up at six in the morning and work until really almost 'til we went to bed at that time. I never slowed down. And my doctor said, "Hey, you need to just take a vacation." But I knew deep down that God was speaking to my heart for quite some time to just slow down. And it wasn't until I rested and I started to say no to a lot of things and put clear boundaries up where I knew God was telling me to. And that wasn't easy because you know, I turned down a lot of great opportunities and they were all good things but I knew deep down that they weren't God. When I did that, when I started to just hold back on all of you know, the open doors and I really chose the ones that I knew were from God and said no to the others, that was when I got pregnant. That was just one other instance but gosh, there have been countless that we have made the hard choices to be obedient and some weren't hard. Some were a little bit easier. But we always knew that the first thing that we had to do was A, seek God and pray together in every decision. And B, follow peace and seek peace and pursue it. And so even if it's not easy in our natural minds, we always have this heart piece that comes over us when it is God and so anytime we've said yes to Him. Yeah. He has been so good to us. - [Sean] That's true. - [Jennifer] Amen. That was also encouraging. - [Aaron] Sounds a lot like our story even because it's funny how often, and we've seen this in many, many people's stories. It doesn't come out of a, hey, I'm gonna go start this big thing and I'm gonna go do this... It's usually a hey I'm gonna, you know, on the side, I'm gonna try and encourage some people over here. I wanna use this part of my life over here. All while working a full time job. And then all of a sudden, there's a choice that has to be made. Oh, I have to do this thing over here. Full time now. How God works that way. That was similar to ours where we started Unveiled Wife and it was a side thing. It was exactly the same reason. - [Jennifer] I would describe it as incremental invitations so like you say yes - Oh yeah, I like that. - and then He takes you a little bit further and you say yes and what happens is you build this trust with God like well, I've already said yes five time to Him in this direction and He's asking me to take one more step and I can trust Him. Kinda like you were saying Katie. So I just, I really was encouraged with everything you've shared. - [Aaron] And it's very similar to how the master goes to the servants and the faithful ones that brought an increase with the talents they were given. He says, "You were faithful with little. "Now, I'll put you over much." And those incremental invitations, it's God seeing if we're gonna be obedient. It's how we are with our children. You probably experienced this with Maddy. You give them little bits of room to see how they're gonna respond. Are they gonna honor you? Are they gonna listen to you? So that you can give them more and more over time. And you know, they make mistakes and we do too. Sometimes we don't... We don't say yes very well. I know that's been true in my life. - [Katie] Learning course. - [Aaron] But you know, God's got in his patience with us. And that's what's awesome. And that's what we wanna encourage those listening is it just takes one yes after another. It doesn't mean like tomorrow you're like, well I can't handle a huge whatever this kind of ministry or that. God's good. He doesn't do that. He's gonna allow you to do what you're capable of doing. When the spirit distributed gifts. It says it was distributed according to the abilities of those he gave it too. So it's not according to someone else's ability that he distributed a gift to you. He distributed according to your ability. I love that. Just the incremental. That was a good incremental invitation. - [Jennifer] So you guys, how long have you been doing Dashing Dish now? - 10 years. - Yeah, 10. - [Jennifer] Wow, that's awesome guys. So cool. Okay so can you explain just for those listening to encourage them in that decision of saying yes to God as God was moving you forward in. Working together on Dashing Dish, how did you two say yes to God? What were some of the elements you said that you prayed together. But can you walk us through what that look like in your marriage? - [Sean] Yeah. I look back and I remember it was an interesting time for me as well. I was doing design work on the side and then I was also, it's gonna sound completely random. I actually owned four franchises of the ice cream company called Dippin' Dots. - [Aaron] Nice. - [Sean] It's so funny looking back. It feels like a dream but... - [Katie] That was just preparing him then to be an entrepreneur. - [Sean] I looked back and there was a lot of steps in that process but ultimately was kinda like my school for business almost. It might learn a lot through that. But during that time I remember, I was at the mall 10 hours a day serving ice cream. Making logos while I didn't have any customers. I remember, me and Katie we talked about starting a website, starting Dashing Dish and at that same time, I felt like, she was obviously supposed to move on from that and so we prayed about that a lot and then it was almost like with the yasp it was almost like a no as well for me because I felt the Lord prompt in me to finally close the chapter on Dippin' Dots and move away from that and that's something... That was something I did for about seven years. - Wow. - And it was kind of like... It never made any, never made any money but it was like a comfort zone almost and it was really nerve raking for me to step out and so design full time and I remember when we did that, we said yes and we literally closed the door on the chapter and the next week, I had more projects. The next months I had more projects than I could have ever dreamed of. - [Katie] Because my first question of course, well if I leave my nursing job, how are we gonna make money? We did use a practical wisdom. We did seek wise counsel. My dad who is a CFO. We sought wise counsel. We also sat down and say, can we pay for our apartment rent. And could we eat still. We weren't like totally blind. But after we said yes, we can still eat and we can still have roof over our head, let's do it and God did. He came through big for us. Took care of us every single time we had needs, they were met. - [Sean] Yeah and as soon as you had quit your job, we obviously didn't make money with Dashing Dish right away, we didn't even have the game plan of how we were gonna monetize it and the Lord kept giving us this revelations that this website. I swear the day that you quit your job, I was able to get projects that made up for your income right away. - [Jennifer] That's so cool. - [Aaron] I just wanna highlight what you just said, the practical wisdom. One thing that we've seen that is detrimental in the believer's life is walking in foolishness. And saying, "Oh God told me to do this." And then they go. And there's no counsel. There's no wisdom. And failure comes. Really quick after that. Sometimes it's small failures. Sometimes it's big failure. And God, he's not a God of chaos. He loves counsel. He loves wisdom for us as believers. That's one of the gifts he's given to us and he says in James, "If you lack wisdom to ask for it. "And he'll give it to us." And in Proverbs it tells us, it says, "By wise counsel, one wages war." It talks about counsel and our plans being established. I just wanna highlight that. In saying yes to God, it's God's way that we get to say yes. Not our way. And his way is wisdom. He says I have this for you. And one of the ways we know that is for us is that he makes a way for it also. And we find wisdom in other believers that we trust and know that we see good fruit in and they say, hey yeah do this but make sure this is in order. Hey do this but make sure this is in order. So you're not losing a home or you know, losing cars, or not being able to eat or feed your children. - Right? - Right, right. - [Aaron] But you guys did that. You said yes but then the next step was well, let's figure out how this yes was gonna work. - [Sean] The biggest thing is you have to be you have to teachable. I did a long read through Proverbs. I started ticking out all the scriptures that talk about you know, receiving criticism. Receiving feedback. - Rebuking. - Receiving wisdom. Receiving counsel. Being teachable. That's so important because I think the bible calls you a fool if you're in love with your own opinion. God will give you the idea right away but there's obviously practical steps to get there. If you think this is the only way. I don't know if you're familiar with the show, Shark Tank. - [Aaron] Oh we love that show. - [Sean] Go on there and then they receive... I would say they don't receive it but they're told feedback and they just don't grasp it or they don't want to grasp it and a lot of the advice they give is amazing and obviously they've been there so sometimes you have to listen to those people. - [Katie] Yeah, and although we didn't have every step of the plan, we did have a business plan written out of where we had hoped it to take Dashing Dish in the next five years and what not. So we did go through and we did that practical step as well which I believe is wisdom. It's just having a plan. And then it won't always look the way of course that we plan it but it is smart to have a game plan and know how you're gonna pay for things and know how you're gonna, you know, still eat and put food on the table. - Yeah, totally. - Yeah. One more question on just this wisdom and saying yes to God. So you started Dashing Dish and Sean you were doing designs for it and Katie was writing the content and the videos and... Would you have kept doing it even if you weren't able to do it full time? Would you have kept being a nurse and Sean kept doing design work on the side and then done this at a different level- - [Jennifer] Or pace. - [Aaron] Or a different pace if that was what God had for you. Would you have kept doing it? - [Katie] If that's what God had for me, absolutely. And I believe that I would've had full and complete peace to do that. And that's really what was leading me was I had no peace. I'm talking none staying at my nursing job. I actually felt like I went from loving it and I mean it was my dream job. I was a labor and delivery nurse and that was what I dreamed of for so long and yet I felt all this sudden, almost felt like I was trapped in jail and I told John, "I feel like "I can't run out of there fast enough." Of course I did the practical thing and I gave them a notice and I did things right. But I felt in my heart like I just needed to run because I felt like this is not where God has me any longer. And I also felt this extreme pull on my heart to minister to these women that I was being connected with. And I just felt this overwhelming pull to say it's either gonna be this or this. And I knew that I didn't have time or resources or the grace to do both and so I knew that I knew that I had to make that decision of one way or another. However, like you mentioned, if God has given me the grace to do both, without a doubt, I believe that he would've given me peace and the ability to do both and so I don't think anybody should ever say I feel like God is calling me to do this and then just say, "Oh well that means I can't do this then." You have to know for you what the best plan is and what his plan is I should say because I actually do know a ton of women who are doing something similar to what I'm doing where they're creating recipes and they have a website but they're still working a full time job. In fact, I know a few of them that are nurses. And I think what an amazing thing that God has given them the grace to do all of that. But like I said, I just knew for us that that was where God is calling. - [Jennifer] So being able to work together on this for the last 10 years, how has it strengthen your marriage? What have you guys experienced or noticed from working together? - [Sean] I would say it's been obviously really amazing being able to work with my wife every single day. Does it have its challenges? For sure. Like there are certain things that we know that we just can't work as well maybe together on? I think that's probably the horrible way to put it. I think the best example is when we do video work or photo work, we both have two totally entirely different visions or styles or ways of working if you will. I take one shot of food and I'm like, "That's perfect." She sees something completely different. - [Katie] He's looking at the composition of the photo and I'm looking at the food. And I'm like "No, the food looks terrible." And he's like, "The composition is beautiful." And I'm like, "No one's looking at the composition but you." - [Sean] So we do definitely butt heads sometimes in that area and you know, that's just... Being creative and being my own boss kind of thing, obviously Kate is her own boss as well but you know, I think I'm not used to having someone else's vision all the time for something different so I have to take constructive feedback. - [Katie] It's definitely helped us both expand our communication. - Oh yeah. - Outed out. We have had to put up with like different just guidelines on how we approach each other and how we discuss things. Instead of just shooting things out and saying comments of that looks terrible or just putting things out there. Instead we say okay-- - [Sean] Well that doesn't work. - [Katie] Instead we'll say, "All right, you know what. "You take over here. "Let's talk about this later." And then we come back and we have a sit down conversation. Okay, I don't think this was a really a great plan for doing it this way. Instead, there have been certain things that we have literally said we're gonna hire somebody else in instead of working together or maybe you can do that yourself and then I'll do this myself so I've completely taken over pictures for example. I do them myself. And we used to do it together of the food. And then what I do is a great compromise or meet in the middle is I take the pictures. I'll take a hundred pictures of a recipe. I'll come to Sean after I'm done and I'll say, "You choose your favorite." So he still has a say in it but he's not standing over me and I'm not standing over him and so that's kinda how we've learned to work together. So sometimes it's not always easy and it's not always perfect and clean and seamless and I think sometimes people get that picture of oh, you're husband and wife team. It must be so... You guys must work together perfectly. And I'm like, "No. "We definitely had some rough edges "that we've had to smooth out." But on the same note, like I said, it really does help us to grow in so many ways. We have become such better listeners. We've had so much better like I said communication. And we have to. If we don't communicate effectively, we will not get anything done and we only have a short window I'm sure like you. Anyone with children really. You have short windows to work and so we don't have time to sit and go back and forth so we've learned to really just delegate, communicate, and also to meet in the middle where we can. - [Jennifer] Yeah, totally. Lots of practice. - Yeah. - Yeah. - [Jennifer] Practicing good communication. - [Aaron] Those that are listening and thinking like how can we do a ministry together. It starts now. Just in your marriage. Learning to communicate well. Learning to be a team well. In your parenting, in your work schedules, in how your home's organized. And then also how you minister your neighbors and your family and your church, you know, body. And so those things are important to learn now and ask God to teach us. To prepare us for what He has for us. I have one last, two last questions for you. The first one's this. So in this chapter, we talked about ordinary people doing impactful things for God. Do you know any ordinary couples that have impacted your marriage in an extraordinary way? How did it direct your hearts toward God. - Yeah. - Would love to hear that. - [Katie] Yeah, for sure. We have a few. There have been pastors over the years. Pastors and their wives that have poured in to us. We spend to a lot of marriage conferences. The husband and wife will both speak and really just poured wisdom into us over the years. And you know, that is really impacted our marriage. We've learned a lot from doing different marriage conferences and also you guys. Your book. Your website. You guys are just so full of wisdom that God has given you specifically in the area of marriage and so... We've benefited from your resources for sure and we also point people back to Unveiled Wife. - Oh, thank you. - We just... We're so blessed by what you guys are doing and we think it's so so crucial that if you are married that you are constantly, you know, filling your relationship with wisdom that comes from sound Amen. - [Katie] Because you know, the enemy is definitely attacking marriages and that's no surprise. But we, in order to stay on guard, we have to constantly filling our marriages with truth. That being said, we also have a few different couples in our lives. One being my older sister and brother-in-law who are so blessed by the Lord but they don't just live just blessed. They have poured out God's generosity in so many lives and one of which in so many lives and one of which is they have opened countless orphanages in India. They actually went on a missions trip there years ago and they found that there were children. Our children's age. Young kids. Walking the streets and they... My brother-in-law, Phil, said to the leader, "What are those kids doing over there? "Where's their home? "Or is there an orphanage? "Or anywhere for them to stay?" And they said no. There's nowhere. There's no orphanage, nothing. So they actually built and opened multiple orphanages where children can not only be you know, sheltered but also fed and taught the Word of God. So that's just one small example of how they have sown generosity. And so they encourage us so much to really look for ways that we can use not just our finances, but our time, our talents, our resources that God has given us. - [Aaron] Love that. - [Jennifer] To pour back out. Because you know, this isn't about us. And it's not all for us. God has given us gifts and just like you were saying Aaron. It may look to some, oh I don't have a platform. What gifts do I have? No, every single person has gift. If you're an encourager and you find that you love to encourage people, that's a gift that God has given you. Not everyone can do that. So you know, call someone. Write a letter and encourage them. You don't know how it could literally change a whole life. Whatever gift God has given you, seek it out and seek to sharpen it and to really hone in on that and pour back out into others using that gift. Also our time. It's a precious resource and we all have the same amount of time in a day yet it seems like it's getting thinner and thinner in our culture today. So really giving of our time is an offering to God. Also finances. Even if it's just in a small way. Really seek the Lord in ways that you can bless people in your community with what He's given you. So Sara and Phil are definitely a huge encouraging just resourcing and couple watching them how they are so generous with God, what God has given them. - [Aaron] That's an awesome testimony. - [Jennifer] Yeah, before Aaron ask the last question, I wanna challenge our listeners to consider the people in their lives who are ordinary people doing extraordinary things the way that those people have impacted their marriage. If you even wanna share with them how they've impacted your marriage, I really feel like it would bless them so. - That'd be awesome. - That's a little. Little side challenge for you listening. - [Aaron] So last question. In your own words, what is a marriage after God? - [Sean] Hmm. Well I think that the best way to demonstrate that is to you know, be a reflection of Christ to everyone around you. of Christ to everyone around you. I think we tried to-- - [Aaron] Amen. - [Sean] Show it to the world through social media but it's the people that are in your day to day to lives that see you know, your forgiveness, your humility or you know, encouragement. Just every single thing that you can do with your wife that would exalt God in some way is a marriage after God. I feel like, you know, me taking the time to speak Katie's love languages even though... I was gonna say this earlier. I didn't get a chance but our love language are completely flip flopped and-- - [Katie] Opposite. - [Jennifer] And if you don't know what love languages are, definitely check them out. It's a great little quiz to take. To find out how to speak love to yourselves. - [Sean] But I think just dreaming and vision. You know, doing vision planning and things for the future and really seeking each other's hearts and obviously chasing after God together is I mean that's my definition of marriage after God. - [Katie] Years ago in Hawaii, we went on a trip before we had Maddy. We wrote out a marriage, a vision statement for our marriage and the very first sentence is to reflect Christ to the world around us through and then we go through different ways to do that forgiveness, prayer, and just different things. - Honesty. - Honesty. That we specifically him pointed of ways that we wanted to reflect Christ and we don't do it perfectly. In fact, we work out a few days a week at a gym. It's like a group class. I said something so Sean. We're just having a personal conversation and then I must have hurt his feelings or disrespected him in some way that he thought. And I didn't even know I did. He ended up leaving our group 'cause we had a group of three people walking out, walking to a different group. And I thought, what just happened? And so we got in the car after. And I didn't say a word. And I said, "What happened there?" And he said, "You know, you made me feel terrible." And I said, "Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry." I said, "But you probably shouldn't "have left our group of three. "Everyone knows that we're Christians and" I said, "We need to reflect Christ." They all know that we're believers. And that's what really matters. And he said, "You're right." And so, you know, it doesn't mean we're perfect. It doesn't mean that we never fight or we never do things that are silly or outside of God's will but at the end of the day what really matter is that the world around us sees Christ in our day to day lives. And that even Goes for our children. So I think that that's really the most important thing to us. - [Jennifer] Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much and amen. That was, - Yeah. - an awesome wrap up to this interview. Thank you guys so much for sharing your wisdom and your story with us and just being willing to be transparent and encouraging. And you guys are doing some awesome work. Just again, let everyone know where they can find you guys. - [Katie] Yeah, you can head over to DashingDish.com. We also have an app in addition to our website so you can check that out in the App Store. - [Jennifer] Awesome and I just wanna encourage everyone to go check them out. And to follow along. They have some awesome resources like you mentioned earlier. Recipes and you have a whole workout system. You have all kinds of things that would benefit a couple. So go check them out and also, we also wrap up every episode with a prayer so we just would like to encourage everyone to join us. But thank you again, you guys, for coming on here today and sharing all this. - You guys have been a huge blessing. - Thank you. - Thank you for having us. - [Katie] Yeah, we feel the same about you and we were truly honored to be a part of your podcast today. Thank you so much for having us. - Thank you guys. - Awesome, okay. Go ahead and pray Aaron. - [Aaron] Dear Lord. Thank you for using ordinary people to do such extraordinary things in this world. It is only by your power that we are able to say yes with courage and do all that you ask us to do. We pray we would be quick to say yes to you and trust you to help us. No matter what you invite us to do, may we never forget or neglect to do the things you have already commanded us to do in your Word. Help us to be faithful and obedient people. We pray our marriages would be used to allow you to make an impact in this world and to draw people's hearts closer to yours. We pray our marriages would be a gift to you blessing your name. We pray our marriages would reflect your amazing love. We pray for an extraordinary marriage and we ask you to use us in extraordinary ways for your namesake. May you be glorified through us. In Jesus' name, amen. - [Jennifer] Amen. - Amen. - Amen. - [Aaron] All right guys, thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode. We have how many, three more? Two more episodes coming up. This is chapter 14. We have two more coming up. So stay tuned. And we're almost done with this. And if you have not yet done it, go pick up a copy of Marriage After God. Shop.MarriageAfterGod.com and that's where you'll get it. Thank you so much. See you next week. - [Man] Did you enjoy today's show? If you did, it would mean the world to us if you could leave us a review on iTunes. Also, if you're interested, you can find many more encouraging stories and resources at MarriageAfterGod.com. And let us help you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

In Episode 6, Jake talks with Sean Fahey about student voice, sharing student creations, FlipGrid & Wakelet amongst other things. Jake also talks about moving forward with tech integration and shares from the listeners about Blabberize. Educational Duct Tape FlipGrid Community - access at flipgrid.com/eduducttape or EduDuctTape.com. #EduDuctTape Twitter Contest - ends 1/31/19! Educational Duct Tape from FlipGrid: Dan Gallagher shares a word of caution about Blabberize Jake shares a Google Slides hack to replace ChatterPix & Blabberize Link to Jake’s hack: JakeMiller.net/google-slides-hack-chatterpix-blabberize Jake’s SoapBox “If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” ― Martin Luther King Jr. Today’s Guest: Sean Fahey - Sean Fahey is a former elementary and middle school teacher from Southern Indiana. Currently, he works as an Innovative Learning Specialist with Five-Star Technology Solutions. In this role, Sean collaborates with teachers and guides them as an eCoach to help integrate technology into classrooms and make awesome learning experiences for students. Contact Info: Twitter: @SEANJFAHEY  Email: sfahey@five-startech.com Flipgrid ebook - coauthored w/ Karly Moura bit.ly/flipgridebook3 An Impromptu “Newlywed Game” with Sean Wakelet ebook - bit.ly/wakeletebook Authors - Sean, Karly, Dr. Randall Sampson, Jen Saarinen, Scott Titmas, Claudio Zavala Jr., Paul West, John Bimmerle 2 Truths & 1 Lie Question #1: How can teachers show off Student Creations (or have the students show off their own creations)? Sean: “Make sure you are designing lessons to ensure students are creating.” Teacher created websites for showcasing exemplary work Google Sites - sites.google.com Weebly - education.weebly.com Sean: “Are we creating an environment that students feel confident in their creations and can share openly and get feedback. The students should know that the work they do adds value to others learning and understanding?” Students need to have opportunities and choices to create with freedom of expression. Google Drawings activity: Everyone follows the teacher’s spoken instructions (i.e., “use the line tool, now draw a rectangle”), then show how each student’s creation is unique. - drawings.google.com Sean: “It doesn’t mean they are wrong...but everyone is different and we all add value to the learning in my classroom.” Student Digital Portfolios Example of one of Jake’s old student digital portfolios - youtube.com/watch?v=MLtX04MMimI Jake: “It is important that portfolios aren’t just showing off the amazing work, they’re showing off the amazing growth.  And to do that, you have to say ‘This is the work that I started with and it’s not perfect and these are the things that are not great about it. This is the work that I’m doing now and this is the growth that I’ve seen.’” Question #2: How can educators ensure that all students get an opportunity to be heard and have the opportunity to share? BackChannelChat.com Yo! Teach - palms.polyu.edu.hk/educational-apps/yoteach Google Classroom Short Answer Questions - support.google.com/edu/classroom/answer/6020293?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en Collaborative Google Slides - slides.google.com Padlet - padlet.com Flipgrid - Learn about each of these at bit.ly/flipgridebook3 Video responses Upload a link to other work Guest mode so that parents or experts in the topic of study are hearing students and can interact GridPals to collaborate with others globally Wakelet - Learn about each of these at bit.ly/wakeletebook The new collaboration feature Students can add text, a  link, upload a photo, appsmash with flipgrid or screencastify to add a video. Closing - @SEANJFAHEY, sfahey@five-startech.com Flipgrid ebook coauthored w/ Karly Moura at bit.ly/flipgridebook3 Wakelet eBook coauthored with Karly, Dr. Randall Sampson, Jen Saarinen, Scott Titmas, Claudio Zavala Jr., Paul West, John Bimmerle at bit.ly/wakeletebook EduDuctTape.com - #EduDuctTape Jake Miller - @JakeMillerTech - JakeMiller.net

For the 49th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Sean D'Souza is here to talk about about the psychological tactics that get people to respond to your sales message. Kira and Rob go deep with Sean asking about how he started his business and what he wants from it today. Sean talks about: •  how he got into copywriting, then out, then back in. •  how a short presentation inspired by Jay Abraham inspired The Brain Audit •  the seven “red bags” of The Brain Audit and how they work together •  the questions he asks when creating a sales page •  the “x-ray vision” problem that books and courses suffer from •  why teaching is the best kind of selling •  how to establish yourself as an expert •  what kind of testimonials you should have on your sales pages (would you believe they should be 1500 words?) • and more... Perhaps most importantly for overworked copywriters, we asked Sean how he manages to take three months of vacation every year and how his morning routine helps him maintain his energy and effectiveness. These are ideas we need to try. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Leo Burnett Psychotactics Good to Great by Jim Collins Jay Abraham The Brain Audit 5000 BC Superman Article Writing Course Six questions for testimonials Mixergy interview Michael Phelps Bob Bowman The Three Month Vacation Podcast Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you could hangout with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for Episode 49 as we chat with author, speaker, cartoonist, and copywriter Sean D’Souza about psychological triggers that get customers to say yes, creating brand fanatics, how to become an expert in any field, and why he takes so much time off to recharge. Welcome, Sean. Thanks for joining us. Rob: Hey, Sean. Sean: It’s a pleasure to speak to both of you. Kira: Well, we’ve love to start with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter and a business owner? Sean: I always wanted to be a copywriter. When I was in university, that’s what I wanted to do. I had this goal, when I was going to be 30, I was going to be in this agency. I was going to be creative director of that agency. So it was very clear to me, which is why in university when I was studying accounting and stuff, my grades started to go down for the first time in my life. As soon as I left university, I went to Leo Burnett, which is the … I lived in Mumbai, India, and the kind of branch of Leo Burnett that was there. I went and spoke to the creative director, and she said, “You know you’re just a cartoonist. You’re not a copywriter.” I said, “Yes, I know that, but here’s what I’ll do. I’ll work with you a month and at the end of the month, you decide whether you want me to stay, and then you pay me. Or you know if I don’t like you after a month, then I’ll leave.” So it was pretty brash, but they took me on and that was the start of working with several advertising agencies. We’re going back now to 1995, I think, so it’s a long time ago. So I worked in a couple of agencies, and then, at some point, I started thinking, “Well, this is not what I want to do,” and I went back to cartooning. At that point, I was drawing cartoons for these magazines, but also for these organizations. What I found was their copy was really bad, and that my cartoons were getting kind of mutilated or defaced or ...

Key Takeaways (the TLDR Version): Start with the end in mind: What do you want to achieve with your show? How will you know if you've been successful after a year, or two years, or ten years? What are your goals? It helps to clearly define the answers to these questions before you start. When you start a podcast, you need to think about how you can provide something valuable to your listeners. Ask yourself, “What kind of person am I trying to reach, what are our common interests, and what am I going to give them? What do I want my show to do for them?” In order to start a podcast, you'll need: A overall topic or theme for your show, and a plan for the structure/format for your first few episodes A title, short description, and square cover art (3000x3000px jpg) for your show A way to record and edit audio so you can create MP3 audio files for your episodes (You'll want to use one microphone for each person, more on that later) Podcast hosting (an online hosting service (like Simplecast) for your audio files and an RSS feed so you can get your show into Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast apps & directories) While podcasting isn't a quick or easy way to make money, you can make money with a podcast by selling advertisments, getting sponsors or partners, asking people to support you directly through Patreon (or some other tipping service), selling services or products to your audience, and so on. While the majority of podcasts being produced currently do not make enough to provide a full-time living, that doesn't mean you can't make money with a podcast, and there are plenty of other valuable things that you'll get from podcasting, including personal development, new skills, friendships, and more. Podcasting is a great way to build an audience: You’ll become known as an authority in your field, you’ll learn more about what you podcast about, you’ll build new relationships and make new friends, and you’ll gain a better understanding of your audience and what they want. The most common podcasting mistakes are usually related to producing shows with poor audio quality, not clearly defining your goals for yourself or your audience, or expecting big results right away. Now that you've got the outline for what you'll need to do to start a podcast, all you need to do now is take action. Set aside some time for planning. Write out your goals and the topics for your first ten episodes. Set up your gear and record and edit a practice episode. It's easy to spend hours and hours reading tutorials and listening to other people talk about podcasting, but the best way to get better is to just start doing it yourself. For my backstory and more about why I'm starting this podcast, check out the trailer for this show. My guest for this first episode is Sean McCabe, who produces online courses for creative professionals at seanwes.com. Aaron: Let’s talk about how we met. It was at a Dribbble meetup in fall 2013. We got introduced and you said you wanted to start a podcast. I asked what it was going to be about, and you said design and creativity. Why did you want to start a podcast? Sean: I had a lot of experience with client work, especially in the design world, and I was starting up my own business, but I had a lot I wanted to share on client work and professionalism in general. The reason I hadn’t done it before that point was because I wanted to be out of client work before starting a podcast about it. I wanted to do a podcast where I talked about design, client work, and professionalism, all in the context of business and creativity. Aaron: At the time, I was very interested in learning about those things. When we started the podcast, you were—and still are—very focused on providing value to the listeners. I was still in learning mode. I was more interested in learning and I was less focused on providing value. I've learned that when you start a podcast, you need to think about providing something valuable to the people listening to you. Sean: Now, when you say providing value, what do you mean? What’s the alternative? Aaron: In a lot of podcasts, I see that they’re not focused on what they’re giving, it’s more like they’re just hoping for attention. They’re not thinking about what the audience is going to get out of listening. Sean: It’s kinda like, “We’re just gonna show up and we’re gonna talk,” but they’re not thinking about what they’re going to give the listeners in exchange for their time, or the reason they’re showing up and talking. Aaron: Exactly. You have to ask yourself: What is someone going to take away from this podcast? When you start with that question, it changes everything. Sean: For this episode, we’re talking about who you are, who I am, why we’re doing this, and how podcasts changed out lives. What people might not know is that you started with an outline. We’re starting off with who you are, how I fit into this, why someone should start a podcast, who is the show for, what topics you’re going to cover in future episodes, and at the end you have takeaways. So you’re coming into this asking yourself, “Why should someone listen to this? Who am I trying to reach, and what am I going to give them?” I like how you’re starting this. Most people just jump straight into the gear. “Oh, you want to start a podcast? Let’s talk about mics.” I like that you’re taking one step back even further than that, and asking, “Why are you doing this?” Good Reasons to Start a Podcast 1. You can build an audience Aaron: First, you can build an audience. You’ll become known as an expert in your field if you share what you’ve learned. We know Sean as an expert hand-letterer because he’s podcasted about it and written a whole course about how to make a living as a hand-letterer. I was doing a little reading yesterday in preparation for this show, and I came across an article about why you shouldn’t start a podcast. The post basically said, “Podcasts aren’t a very effective way to reach people.” A bunch of people left comments saying, “But we found and started trusting you because of your podcast.” So I do think podcasting is a very effective way to build trust with your listeners. Sean: It’s very intimate. I don’t know about you, I think you have pretty good mic technique, but I’m about three inches away from my microphone. How many people do you allow to be three inches from your ear? I’d think most of them are pretty close to you, so it does have this kind of intimacy. 2. You’ll learn more about whatever it is you’re starting a podcast about Sean: Hang on; I thought you had to be an expert to teach stuff on a podcast. Aaron: Would you call me an expert at podcasting? Sean: I think of you as one. Aaron: Right, but that’s mostly because I started a website about podcasting and you know I’ve worked on podcasts full time for over a year now. There are still so many things I don’t know about podcasting. There are so many more things I’m going to learn because I’m starting this podcast about podcasting. This applies to anything you start a podcast about: You’re going to learn more about it. How many episodes of the seanwes podcast have you done now, 160? Did you have any idea when you started of all the different topics you were going to cover? All the things you were going to learn about and share? Sean: No way. Not even close. I had a few topics prepared, but there was no way I had 160 episodes of information to share with people, all I did was start off with a commitment to show up and podcast. You don’t have to be an expert to start a podcast. Aaron: Knowing that you had to show up and podcast twice a week put you in a learning mindset; as you’re going through the week, you’re paying attention to things, you’re writing stuff down, and you’re thinking about what would be good to put in your podcast. Sean: It changes your mindset. I’m glad you brought up the learning thing. So many people think, “I shouldn’t start a podcast. I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not expert enough.” You’re saying start a podcast to learn. I’ve had my mindset changed because I started a podcast. Everything is an opportunity to teach something. You see the world in a different sense; this is something that I could teach. This is something I could bring to the show. 3. Starting a podcast will help you make new friends Aaron: Another great reason to start a podcast is you’ll make new friends. Sean and I met because he was interested in starting a podcast. It turned into a close relationship that has benefited me in so many ways. In fact, he built a whole online community around his podcast. Tell me a little bit about that. Sean: The Community is a group of people who are, essentially, entrepreneurs—people in various stages of wanting to forge their own path, starting their own business, do their own thing, freelance, sell products, or teach other people. Maybe they’re still in a day job, but they’re working towards that. The Community is a bunch of people who have similar mindsets of sticking with their values, professionalism, and encouragement. It’s a very positive atmosphere. We stream all of the shows on the seanwes network live to the Community. Every weekday we have a show, there’s a topic, and everyone comes together to discuss that topic. We also have the live chat and mobile app available 24/7, so there’s people constantly connecting and discussing things. Aaron: This all happened because you decided to start a podcast. I know you had Twitter and Instagram followers, and people who emailed you, and that’s all great, but think about how many people have met and become good friends because of your podcast. You’re one of my clients now, but I’ve met other Community members, including Adam Martin, that have become clients as well. I’ve met so many people just from this one podcast. If you think about providing value and you care about your listeners, even if you just have 20 listeners in the beginning, get to know them and open yourself up to growing those relationships. It can be life-changing. Sean: You were talking about number of downloads, or someone was saying that podcasting is not really effective; but podcasts are so engaging. It’s very intimate. If you have 20 listeners, that’s incredible. That’s 20 people that allowed you to come three inches from their ear. You probably don’t have that many people in your life that are willing to listen to you, so for the people just starting out, don’t get caught up in the numbers. I say show up every day for two years, and don’t expect to see any results in that time. I didn’t discover some of the best, and my favorite, podcasts and TV shows until at least two years into it. I didn’t listen or watch from the pilot episode, like maybe some people are doing with this show or TV shows. A lot of the ones that end up being my favorites have been around for a few years by the time I listen. I get excited and I go back and I binge listen or I binge watch all of the episodes and I’m really into it. Now, I’m engaged. I remember this one podcast, I went back and listened to all of it—I think it was 90 or 100 episodes. They had this community (this was before I had my own community) and I was ready to join. I was so on board with what they were talking about. By the time I caught up, he’d been doing it about two years, and he said, “We’re moving on. We’re going to be doing other things. We’re not going to be doing the podcast anymore, thanks for listening.” I was so disheartened. I felt so let down. I had just discovered it, it was so new to me. Of course for him, he’d been showing up for two years. It felt like he’d been doing it forever. That’s what it feels like when you’re a podcaster or you’re a blogger and you’re showing up and you’re not getting those downloads or you’re not getting those numbers. Even if it feels like you aren’t getting results or as many downloads as you'd like to have, keep going. Do it for the people that are going to discover you in two years. Aaron: Do it for the five people that are listening and really like what you’re saying. Sean: They’re your ambassadors! If you don’t care about those people because the numbers aren’t big enough, you’re never going to get there because those people are the ones that are going to spread the word. Aaron: That leads to a better understanding of the people in your audience. If you start a podcast with them in mind and engage with the people that are responding—having conversations and asking them questions—you’re going to start to learn what they’re struggling with, what they’re having a hard time with, what they like about your show, and maybe what they don’t like about it. If you’re open to that conversation, you can start to refine and tailor your content to the people giving you feedback. Sean, people think you read minds because they ask a question and then you actually listen. People in the chat go crazy and ask, “How’d you know I was thinking about that?” and you say, “Well, you asked the question yesterday.” The key to a successful podcast or blog is doing it for the reader, not just showing up and writing or talking about only what you want to write or talk about. Which makes total sense when you think about it; you’re not the one that’s going to be reading your blog posts, the other people are! You want to write or podcast about what they want to hear. Show Up for 2 Years and Don’t Expect Results Sean: I still have this mindset. We have hundreds of people in the Community, I have nearly a million downloads on the podcast, and I’m still expecting no results. To me, the seanwes podcast is just getting started—we’re only 18 months in. We haven’t even started yet. That’s where my mindset is. Are we scaring people away? Were we supposed to tell them to show up and do two episodes, not two years? Aaron: No, I think this is something people don’t think about. I’ll say that this is intimidating to me, showing up for two years. Even thinking about showing up every week for two years is intimidating. You start to doubt yourself, or at least I do. I think, “How am I going to come up with a great show every week?” You really just have to go for it. I’m going to do it; I’m going to spend the time to prepare, and show up and listen to the people that engage with me. If someone asks me a question in the chat, if someone sends me an email, I’m going to pay attention to that. I’m going to use that to fuel future episodes. I’m getting to know my audience, I’m building relationships. That’s why I’m podcasting. Sean: And if you don’t have the answer to a question, you’re going to go find out. You’re gonna learn. Aaron: That way, it benefits me, too. It’s a win/win situation, but it’s still scary. I know you’ve had struggles with showing up. You’ve shown up on a Tuesday and said, “Guys, this is hard today.” Sean: I don’t know what I’m talking about on tomorrow's show, but I’m gonna show up and figure it out. Aaron: The cool thing is that now you have this community of people, your audience, that you can go to. You can ask them, “What are you guys struggling with? What should I do a show about?” They’re gonna tell you, and you’ve got some options there. That’s way different than sitting alone in your room and wondering what you’re going to do a show about this week. It’s gotta be about the audience. It’s gotta be about providing value, and building relationships. Who Is This Show For? Aaron: This episode is titled How to Start a Podcast, but there are so many things to talk about and while I can't cover everything, I do want to give you an overview of what the process looks like, and what topics I’m going to cover in future episodes. This show is for anyone who wants to start a podcast, but also for people who already have a podcast and want to make their show better. There’s going to be some overlap for people who are interested in audio in general, because the skills I’ve learned from editing podcasts have helped me when making video, when recording interviews, bands, demos, etc. I’m going to be covering a lot of stuff like that, in addition to other things I think will be helpful to podcasters. Topics I’ll Cover On This Show 1. Gear You have to record yourself talking, so I’m going to be talking about microphones. Sean: I’m interested in hearing how you address that, because there’s always the interesting “quality vs cost” issue. Aaron: People should invest in great microphones, but I realize that’s not a reality for a lot of people, so I want to go over the options. Like, if you only have $100, here’s what you need to buy. 2. Recording I'll be convering how to set the levels right for your mic, what programs you can use, how to record interviews over Skype, etc. 3. Editing Aaron: How do you edit a show without making it sound all chopped up and unnatural? Should you edit at all? I know there are a lot of podcasters that don’t think you need to do much editing. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think you have to cut out every little bit of silence, or every filler word or mistake. People have a natural way of speaking, and that’s fine, but there are things that you can cut out. Editing is about respecting the listener—cutting out super long pauses, or things they don’t need to hear like coughs, etc. It’s about polishing. It’s saying to the listener, “I care about this enough to give you the listener the best version of this that I can.” Sean: A lot of people might think that edited podcasts are super highly produced and it doesn’t sound natural, but people often say they don’t even realize this show is edited, and you say that’s kind of the point. Aaron: If someone listens to something that I edited and they notice the edits, then I’m not doing a good job. Sean: How do you like that, Aaron? If you do your job well, no one knows you exist. Aaron: I’m good with that. I follow some of the Twitter accounts of the shows I edit, and nothing makes me happier than to see someone saying, “Oh my gosh, the Shoptalk Show sounds so good, they’re doing a great job.” They don’t ever mention me, but I know they’re talking about my work. They don’t know they’re talking about my work, but I know what the show sounded like before I did the editing, mixing and mastering, and it makes me happy. The point is to make your listeners happy. I’m going to be going into a lot of depth about editing content, mixing and mastering, plugins, etc. 4. Writing and Preparing Show Outlines Aaron: I’m also going to be doing some shows about writing and preparing show topics and outlines. I’d like to have Sean on the show to talk about that topic, because he does a lot of preparation for his shows. Sean, you said something a couple weeks ago: start with the takeaway in mind. That really resonated with me. What’s the takeaway? It could be anything from how to launch a WordPress blog to how to design a header image for your blog posts. When you start with a single idea—a takeaway—you can get a whole show out of that idea. Break it down, write a couple of headlines or bullet points, then expand on that. It turns into an outline, similar to what I have right now. Sean: We’ve gone pretty far off of this outline, had side discussions, and none of this is scripted. A lot of people don’t want to prepare their show because they think it’ll sound scripted. We’re not talking about writing every word, we’re just saying have a takeaway so it’s not just showing up, turning on the mic, and hoping we get something out of it. You actually have a purpose for being there, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have these little explorations and adventures along the way. Podcasting doesn’t have to be about being ridged and lifeless. Aaron: I love those side rails. It’s natural. You don’t have to stick to the script, this is a conversation. In some ways, it’s a live performance. We do it live and we’re streaming to people right now. You should be flexible, but you have to prepare beforehand. You have to know what you’re going to talking about, and what you’re going to be providing to the listeners. Sean: You want to have these little magical moments of spontaneity, but you can’t have spontaneity without structure, because then you have chaos, you have anarchy. Plan, not 100%, but plan a good amount of it, then within that structure you can have spontaneous moments. 5. Writing Great Episode Notes Aaron: I’m also going to do a show about writing episode notes, since they're great for a lot of reasons. 6. Sticking With It & Showing Up Aaron: I’m also going to be doing some episodes about showing up and sticking with it. It’s important to show up consistently. So just to recast: This is a show for people who want to do podcast, or have started a podcast and want to make their show even better, whether that’s gear, workflows, mindset, or motivation. Q&A Q: What’s the single most common mistake people make when starting a new podcast? Sean: I actually answered this in the chat earlier, but I wanted to know if you had another answer. I guessed that you would say, “Not preparing beforehand.” Was I right, or do you have a different answer? Aaron: You’re right, but I want to expand on that a little bit. It’s actually two things. You do need to prepare and plan out your show, but you also need to learn enough about recording audio to make something that sounds good, or at least something that sounds ok. When you start a podcast, you only have one shot to make a good first impression. Sean: We’ve got a couple of questions that are related to this. Cory asks, “Is it more important to just get started, and iterate, or to get started right?” Sarah asks, “What is the level of audio quality that you consider the minimum to start?” There’s this balance of getting started with whatever you have vs. having one chance to make a good first impression. Where do you fall on that spectrum? Aaron: You do need to prepare for the show. Write an outline and start with an idea. Even if it’s just 10 minutes. Whatever you feel comfortable with: If you can talk about a subject or explore some ideas and give some value to the person who is going to listen, that’s good. The audio quality minimum that you need to meet is you need to have some kind of microphone that is not the built-in microphone on your laptop or Apple ear buds. Also, make sure you record in a room that doesn’t have a lot of echo. You need to record in a quiet room that’s as “dead” as possible. Sean: If you’ve got a laptop, even a closet will work, because the clothes will absorb the echo. Aaron: You need to record in a quiet place without a lot of background noise. Make sure you don’t have AC running, fans, dogs barking, etc… Try to record in the quietest place possible. You'll need to learn about setting input levels. Some USB microphones have gain knobs, some don’t, and then if you have an XLR microphone (like the Shure SM7B mics that we’re using), you need to learn how to set the input gain levels right on whatever interface you’re using, so that your levels aren’t too hot or too quiet. That’s the starting point: Have an idea of what you’re going to talk about and then be able to record some audio that doesn’t sound terrible. Sean: That’s a decent answer without going super deep, which I’m sure you can and will dedicate entire shows to answering. Q: If you’re coming at podcasting from blogging, how do you adapt your mindset to the new medium? Aaron: If you’re coming to podcasting from blogging, you’re in a good spot. If you have a blog post, you can adapt that content to a podcast very easily. You can take the topic and turn it into a podcast epiosde. You could even just read the whole blog post like a script. Some people will enjoy hearing you read your blog post even more than reading it themselves. Different people like to consume content in different ways. Q: How long should my podcast be? Why are so many shows about an hour long? Can shorter or longer shows work and reach big audiences? Sean: There’s no golden rule that says you’ve got to hit 22 minutes, or you’ve got to go an hour and a half for anyone to care. It’s different for everyone, it’s different for every show. My answer—and this is the same for newsletters, blogs, landing pages, podcasts, etc.—is make it as long as it needs to be. Don’t force it to be 20 minutes if you have more valuable stuff to say, and don’t force it to be more than an hour because you think that’s what the more successful shows do. Share it with people, that’s why we invented to pause button—they can watch it, listen to it, or consume it whenever they want. They can stop at any point. Give it all to them and let them consume it the way they want to. If you have a lot to share, make it long and if you don’t, make it short, but don’t worry about it. If you have valuable information, don’t worry about going over some arbitrary threshold. Aaron: There have been a few podcasters that have asked me to cut an hour-long show down to 20 minutes. My first question is why? Why would you make this shorter if there’s good stuff? Why not focus instead on making it be the best show it can be; including everything that’s valuable and discarding or editing out the things that aren’t? Sean: I know that’s a rhetorical question, but I think the answer in people’s heads is, “Well, because so-and-so does it.” The successful shows they listen to are 20 minutes long, so they think that’s how long a show should be. The people that are thinking they need to make an hour long show are listening to hour long shows that are successful, and they don’t know about the ones that aren’t. It’s just a skewed confirmation bias; it comes as a result of looking to other people and trying to imitate their success when really, you should just be making the show you need to make, with whatever you have to offer to your audience. Aaron: I know that this first episode is going to be longer because you and I have a lot to talk about. But it’s a lot different when you are doing a solo show, or depending on who your co-host is. Either way, focus on making it good and make it only as long as it needs to be. Q: Should I have a co-host? Sean: Coby asks, “Is it more effective to get a dialog going by having a co-host or guests?” Aaron: It is easier. When you started the seanwes podcast, you were thinking about doing it solo. I said that I thought it’d be easier for you if I joined to ask questions and bounce ideas off you and have a conversation. What’s helped me (with starting a solo show) is thinking about what questions I’ve already been asked in emails. I started an email newsletter a few months ago. I started writing content for it, writing blog posts, and I asked people for their questions about podcasting. Some people responded, so I saved those questions, and made a note to do shows about them. That’s kind of a dialog, but I do think it’d be a little easier if I had a regular co-host. Sean: It definitely makes it easier. That’s not to say solo shows can’t do well. I think they can, but you can’t really beat a super good dynamic between people with complimentary personalities and perspectives. It’s so engaging, it’s so fun to listen to. It’s also kind of hard to create that magic. Like with Ben and I, if you go back and listen to the earlier episodes of the seanwes podcast, we didn’t have that magic. It takes time to develop that and to be able to riff off each other. It’s going to take practice, but it definitely helps having someone else on, and it helps to have a structure. Like we said, leave room for people to tell stories. You don’t have to script it all. Maybe have some planned questions, and some sort of conclusion in mind so it’s more cohesive. Aaron: You and I have complimentary personality types. You’re a little more introverted, thoughtful, and you plan ahead more. I’ve picked up some of these good habits you have, but I’m much more likely to speak before I think. When you’re choosing a co-host, I think it’s important to keep those things in mind. I’ve joked with my friend Cory Miller before about being the co-host on his new podcast, but I actually don’t think I’d be a good fit for him because our personality types are so similar. I think he’d be better paired with someone who’s a little bit more introverted. Sean: It’s like any kind of partner, whether it’s marital, business, or co-host. You have to think about that, and treat it kind of like a marriage. Q: Should I do my podcast in seasons? Aaron: Brent asks, “Showing up is very important, but what are your thoughts on podcasting in seasons? What if I’m interested in sharing content through audio, but don’t see myself becoming a full-time podcaster? Would audio snippets be a good medium? (e.g. a blog post in audio format?)” Aaron: I say do whatever you want and whatever makes sense for you, but... I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with my band about consistency. I’ve been trying to push them towards putting out content on a regular basis, because I’ve seen how well it works for podcasters, for people who do video, and for other bands. A typical release cycle for bands is an album once every couple of years, but I see that the bands that stick in people’s minds and have really engaged audiences are the ones that are putting out stuff on a regular basis. I would love to be in a band that puts out a song every week, like Jonathan Mann, who put out a song every day. How much attention does he get for that? I mean, we have the technology! There is nothing holding us back from recording a song every week. Sure, it may not be super high quality and it might not sound like it was recorded in a professional studio, but by doing something consistently and showing up and putting it out on a regular basis, you get better at doing that thing. If you want to grow an audience, if you care about making a name for yourself and a show that’s successful, then you need to show up every week. Sean: There’s nothing holding you back except your lack of commitment, and your planning to have pauses or seasons where you’re not committing. People think in weekly terms. Their life resets, they watch TV shows every week, it’s how they think. If you’ve got a show that’s every other Wednesday, or the second Wednesday of the month, that confuses people. You don’t want your audience to have to think. You have to simplify it for them. Wednesday: new show. Tuesday: new show. That way, they know what’s coming. People crave this. They want reliability and routine. They want to listen to their podcast or watch their show. Once they’re in, they’re in. They’re hooked. You’re three inches from their ear. You have an opportunity to speak a message to them and provide value. If you want to grow an audience, show up consistently. Instead of doing what’s cool, or what other people are doing, or doing what’s easy, or planning on not showing up, how about start with a commitment to show up consistently? That’s where your audience is going to come from. If you have a season, and you stop providing value, everything resets. Sure, you’re going to have some die-hards that discover you later, but it affects their perception of your brand and how committed you are. Next Steps: Now that you've got the outline for what you'll need to do to start a podcast, all you need to do now is take action. Set aside some time for planning. Write out your goals and the topics for your first ten episodes. Set up your gear and make a practice episode. It's easy to spend hours and hours reading tutorials and listening to other people talk about podcasting, but the best way to get better is to just start doing it yourself. If you have any questions or want to say hi, you can send an email to aaron@thepodcastdude.com or leave a voicemail at 817-381-8219. Feel free to ask questions or just say hi. I'll respond as soon as I have a free minute. Finally, there's a fantastic blog post series from Simplecast called Everything You Need to Start a Podcast. I'd highly recommend bookmarking that and referring back to it as often as you need it. And remember, no one gets everything right the first time. You're starting on a journey, so forward progress and taking action is pretty much always better than perfection. Good luck and happy podcasting. Cool Stuff to Check Out: Recommended Gear: https://kit.com/thepodcastdude Podcast: https://thepodcastdude.simplecast.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepodcastdude Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thepodcastdude Successful Podcasting: http://successfulpodcasting.com Simplecast Blog: http://blog.simplecast.com/

CIA: Cinematically Informed Americans is a show on the Lucid Geek Speak channel of podcasts. Today we look at movie news, Netflix recommendations, geek news, discuss early Batman movies, etc.Right Click HERE and select save link asNetflix/Hulu Recommendations for Instant Streaming:Jordan:1.Trailer Park Boys2. The Immaculate Conception of Little DizzleFredd:1. MadmenSean:1.Cash Back2. (Hulu) The Following Taylor:1. Killer Clowns From Outer Space---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Commodore Schmidlapps - The Penguins not-so-great disguise from Batman: the Movie---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sean: You can't honestly put that in your top 10.Fred: Yes, he can!Sean: Well, there's no penetration so I'm not watching it.Taylor: Well, that's something we could go in to.Sean: It is something we could go IN to, indeed.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Taylor: It's beautiful, It's inspiring!---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------"One of the most important roles to cast was that of young Forrest, who would help set the tone for the whole film based on his performance. To find the right actor, Robert Zemeckis put the word out that he was looking for "a young Tom Hanks with light eyes and a quirky disposition." A young Mississippi boy by the name of Michael Conner Humphreys showed up at an open casting call in Memphis, Tennessee and fit the bill perfectly. His talent and natural ease with the material charmed everyone. During Humphreys' screen test, according to Robert Zemeckis, "He jumped off the screen when we saw him because he had a very different type of delivery."Michael Humphreys' unique dialect turned out to be a major contributing factor to making Forrest Gump work. Before Humphreys was cast, Hanks had not settled on how Forrest would talk throughout the film. "Then Jessica Drake, my voice coach, and I heard Michael Humphreys, who played the young Forrest Gump," explained Hanks. "He was from Mississippi up by Tennessee and he had this great vocal cadence with very particular characteristics, with hard 'Gs' in the middle of things. Like he said, 'sing-ging'. I listened to Michael a lot, she made linguistic templates and then I read the entire script to her. It took the better part of three weeks and by the end I was doing it without having to think about it." Source---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Back to the Future images with Eric Stoltz So weird---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Signs was released in 2002.Quick, lock the door!Maybe they weren't aliens at all: Check out this theory which we will discuss on the next episodeClick here to read a possibly more accurate interpretation---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Best M. Night Movie!---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tremors 4: Balls With Legs---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Invention of Lying---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Taylor: We can all agree that Ghost Rider is the greatest thing made by humanity ever---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------So, so bad.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Shark Repellant---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Blew. Him. To. Pieces.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The joke Sean referenced was in fact not about Hitler, but about Lincoln being assassinated. The crowd, however, did act as if he made a Hitler joke.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Here's Johnny!