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n this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, we dive into the entrepreneurial journey of Summer Craig, founder of Craig Group, a strategic consulting firm. Summer shares how a vacation epiphany led her to start a business while caring for a newborn. Her firm now partners with private equity-backed companies, helping middle-market businesses transition from startups to structured entities ready for expansion. We explore the early challenges of entrepreneurship, including securing initial revenue from clients like Gulf States Toyota. Summer discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly fueled growth in the middle market and healthcare sectors. She emphasizes the importance of building high-quality teams through strategic hiring, focusing on complementary skills and an ownership mentality. Craig Group stands out with its hands-on approach and a patent-pending software platform for sales and marketing forecasting. Summer highlights the significance of creating a flexible work environment that prioritizes excellence and authentic client relationships. Her innovative approach to consulting demonstrates how companies can adapt and thrive in challenging business landscapes. The conversation reveals the delicate balance of cost-saving strategies and necessary investments. Summer shares insights into maintaining a remote work culture built on trust and continuous improvement. We learn about the power of problem-solving, client feedback, and the determination required to transform business challenges into opportunities. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Summer Craig, founder of Craig Group, shares her entrepreneurial journey that started with an epiphany during a vacation while caring for her newborn. Craig Group focuses on strategic consulting for private equity-backed middle-market companies, helping them transition from successful startups to structured entities. The early days of the business involved securing foundational clients like Gulf States Toyota, with initial revenues critical for startup success. Summer discusses the positive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business growth, particularly in the middle market and healthcare sectors. Strategic hiring decisions and fostering a company culture of complementary skills and flexible work environments are highlighted as key to building high-quality teams. Craig Group differentiates itself with a hands-on, results-driven approach and a patent-pending software platform that enhances sales and marketing forecasting. Building trust with elite clients through effective communication and personal interactions is emphasized as crucial for maintaining successful business relationships. The episode underscores the importance of collecting client feedback to ensure service excellence and continuous improvement. Summer uses her passion for mountain climbing as a metaphor for her entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the determination and vision required to navigate business challenges. The conversation concludes with reflections on the importance of strategic growth consulting and the ongoing journey of team building and client success. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Craig Group GUESTS Summer CraigAbout Summer TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Summer Craig, founder and CEO of Craig Group. Summer's passion for excellence has helped fuel her company's growth, and she and her team's authentic approach to delivering for clients has formed relationships built on trust. Summer, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to come on the podcast. Summer: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Chris: So I know there's a lot for us to talk about. I want to start with giving you the opportunity to tell the audience who your company is and what are you known for. Summer: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I love your podcast. I love what you're doing, telling people's stories, so I'm glad to be here. Chris: Thank you. Summer: Yeah, my story is a unique one, very interesting. It actually started with an actual epiphany that I had. I had a true, you know, entrepreneurial lightning strike moment. That that moment was sitting in Frisco, colorado, on vacation, while rocking my three month old third child, which is never the time that you should start a company. But I but that was my I had an epiphany, and the epiphany really was this that I was always going to work very hard, I was going to outwork the people around me, I was going to outwork my peers and I was in a fantastic role, fantastic job. But I had the epiphany that if I was going to always work that hard, no matter what, I could create more value for myself and for the economy by starting my own firm. And I knew that I needed to start my own firm because of that that, if I'm going to always do this, why not build something instead of working for someone else and creating value for somebody else? So that was the epiphany, and it was a true anxiety ridden, sweat inducing moment when I knew that I was going to start a company, you know, despite having a newborn third child. But fast forward. And you know, we're five and a half years later, and you know, we have a firm of 32 people and it turns out the Epiphany was the right way to go for me, that's a really unique story. Chris: And I'm sure your husband thought it was part of brain fog, but you proved him wrong. Summer: Yeah, actually he's been nothing. I think he said okay, sure, you know a little bit, maybe a little more, thinking like oh, we'll see what, we'll see what actually happens here. Chris: Okay, so. So it sounds like the inspiration for you was I want to do this for myself and build something that's mine. Tell us what it is that you've built. Summer: Yeah, absolutely. So what we've built is we built a strategic consulting firm. So we consult with sponsor-backed typically private equity-backed portfolio companies. We really focus on the middle market, lower middle market. What we do with those companies is we come in at different phases in the hold period even pre, even in LOI and we support top line organic growth. So we've built a system of tools and a system of really smart people and a platform that creates a formulaic way to streamline processes, streamline people, streamline technology for growth in these companies. The solution is really right size for companies that have been really successful but haven't really worked on their operations and growth. So they're selling whatever they're selling widgets, whatever it is but have they truly really looked and said is there anybody else I could sell to? Could I be doing something better? Could I be faster, could I do this more cheaply? They haven't really had to do that, but when the PE sponsors come in, you definitely do have to do that and what we're finding is that in a lot of in-house and PE there is a trend of hiring operating partners, which is a newer trend. So some have expertise on top line growth, but for the most part, that expertise is not in-house. So the PE firms need to go outside of their doors to get support to help these firms grow. Chris: So it sounds like you take a company that's almost been successful, despite themselves. That's right and help them systemize that that's right, so that they can maybe leverage it for more success. Summer: Well, yeah, and I mean I hope some of my clients are listening, but many are in Texas and I'll say it's so impressive, a lot of industrial manufacturing it unbelievably successful, either family businesses or entrepreneur-led businesses. But you're right, they haven't really had to. I'm using, you know, using air quotes here, but try that hard because they've had a great product right they've had a great story. the entrepreneur, the founder, had a really great connected network right, so that gets you to a certain amount of growth. But then when you have, you know, pe dollars coming in who are betting on you, there's a growth mandate and the growth mandate that that activity to grow is not the same as what it takes to start a business, so growth is harder and it takes more structure, and that's exactly right. We come in and say, man, this is awesome, how can we take what's awesome, do more of what's awesome, and let's try to reduce some of the risk that you have in the business, probably because nothing's repeatable, nothing's written down, maybe there's no technology supporting system, so we help them build that structure. Chris: And it helps them go to scale. Summer: That's exactly right. Chris: So let me take you back to the beginning, right after the epiphany. What were some of the first things you remember doing to kind of start the business? And, as you said, you build this thing of your own. What were some of those basic building blocks and things you did? Summer: Yeah, Well, for me personally, it was. The first thing was, you know, pray, look for guidance and then talk to people. So I spoke to a lot of people in my network just saying, hey, I've got this crazy idea, I want to build a firm. And the initial idea, while still very similar to what we do, was really around looking at sales and marketing and being able to tie the two together and prove ROI. So that's the crux of what we do right is show your work, show that this works. And I have a long career of traditional marketing. Marketing and marketing has always struggled to tie themselves to results. And that was really, you know, the core idea, you know, back when I originally founded it. But at the time I was working for Gulf States Toyota best people in the world and I'll never work for another company again. That was the, I think I topped out working for them and being, you know, affiliated with the Friedkin family. They are just salt of the earth. So I was very lucky. At the time when I had my epiphany, I said, well, wouldn't this be great if I built my business plan and I started my company but I already had a client? Wouldn't that just make me feel better? Chris: For those of you listening, it's the ideal thing to do. Summer: It really is the ideal and I think, as an entrepreneur especially somebody that I wanted to do something, but it does mitigate some risk when you first file that paperwork and you know you've got some revenue coming in. So I was lucky enough to have Gulf States Toyota before I actually quit my job, they had agreed to hire my firm, which at the time was me, and we had a great relationship and we ended up entering into a contract where I was consulting with them and I was able to do that the day I officially opened, you know, opened Craig Group and opened my doors, and I think that gave me just a little bit of peace, knowing that there was revenue coming in while I was building all the structure that you have to do, which, honestly, is quite painful. Chris: Right, it's very painful. It's always more work than you even can think. Right, absolutely. Summer: And if you've not done it before, which? Who has? That's something, that's a skill set that you know. I mean, I guess you know lawyers do it all the time. You probably do it all the time, right, setting up entities. But if you I just had this, I you know, probably should have advised, got more advice, but I definitely was able to say, oh well, I can do this, I can. And what state do you incorporate and why, and what do you do, and who do you bring in, and is it all those questions? As an entrepreneur, you have to just do it. Chris: We advise on those issues all the time. I was in a conversation yesterday with someone on the same issues and always tell people look, because as the entrepreneur, the other thing you're doing at the very beginning is trying to save every penny you can, and people will maybe try to do it themselves on the legal side, and I try to counsel people. It's an investment in your business, not an expense, and but try, you have to keep it manageable you're exactly right, exactly right. Summer: And luckily I was at that juncture. It was a small enough entity where I was able to get by with it. I don't cannot today with. I have, you know, a wonderful legal team, but that time, you know, just as an entrepreneur, it's really a pain, it's overwhelming, just to figure out how do I, how do I get you know, a wonderful legal team. But that time, you know, just as an entrepreneur, it's really a pain, it's overwhelming, just to figure out how do I, how do I get you know, get started. But again, I was lucky that I had a client and so I had revenue coming in. It really enabled me to get a lot of things done because you didn't have to worry so much about that. And I remember thinking my first goal was, oh, you know, back half of the year, six months, if I could just, you know, make my salary back right, thinking like, oh, I'll just replace my income. Well, that I quickly got client two, client three, and that I blew past that goal. It was amazing. It was a little bit of a you know it, who you know. I really talked to people and got advice and those ended up being some of my clients eventually, when people that I was asking for advice. So that was great. But it was such a funny little goal, which was okay, because if I can do that, then it's like, okay, I've done something that hasn't been a detriment to my family. I'm adding to the family kitty. Well, we realized like, oh wait, now I can. There's more here. Chris: So I was just thinking as you were answering that question. You said it's been just over five years. Summer: So, given the calendar, that means you started in 2019 and then the world went upside down. Chris: So let's talk about, I mean, every business that starts out. It's going to face some headwinds and obviously this was a pretty big one. But just walk us through some of the challenges you faced and how you managed through that, given that you just had this new business. Summer: Absolutely Well, of course, like you know we. Business. Absolutely Well, of course, like you know we. I was just looking at right before COVID so COVID was in March and February I was just looking at expanding and getting some more office space because I'm hiring people. I was looking at leases. So that was hilarious, right, because the minute COVID hit, you know you don't sign the you don't sign the lease, which was great that we hadn't signed it yet, so that was just a fortuitous that was a God thing, but I will say there's a few good things that came out of COVID. In general, COVID was very good for Craig Group and here's why it was good for Craig Group. I think that middle market businesses that I was working with and we also work with healthcare companies as well, especially healthcare technology, B2B and B2C healthcare I think that what COVID brought to us was that people always did, but then they had to go and find your business online Right, and probably on their phone Right. So if you were not ready with a digital presence and for sales and marketing, so if somebody could not seamlessly buy something from you online or if they couldn't research your product online, you were toast in COVID. Chris: Very true yeah. Summer: And even B2B industrial manufacturing businesses that never cared a day in their life about their website. All of a sudden they need their spec sheets to be posted online because they can't drive over and drop them off in person right? They're not going to trade shows, right? So website, but not just the website, really the content, the interaction. And then how good is your email response? How good is your team on the phone? How good are they at working those leads that just got spotlighted? And on the healthcare side, as you can imagine, about COVID, people are scared to death. At that time, telehealth was nascent. Chris: Right. Summer: Pretty terrible still, kind of, and they realized we have to invest here. Patients don't know how to get in touch with us. Everybody's scared. People aren't coming into the doctor's office or the hospital because everyone's afraid that they're going to get COVID. So the messaging opportunity for what we do, which is growth, really about growth. We no longer had to convince our clients you need to take action, because before pre-COVID, and even either at the same time of COVID, there was also this shift with the markets too. Around PE also said oh wait, this has been like really good times and I actually need to start building organic growth instead of just buying another company and doing roll-ups. So this happened very right after COVID. So those two things we did not. We stopped having to tell people. People would ask us why are you doing growth support? We don't need that, right, and nobody says that now, right, no, there's no argument. So COVID, plus what was happening in kind of the deal-making PE market, which we can, that's another. That was another big change for us, but it just helped people say, oh my gosh, we need help. We need help right now. And that was a huge. It was a huge growth time for us. So we grew significantly in 2020 and 2021. Chris: Stars aligned, it sounds like. Summer: Stars aligned and again, it was just one of those who would have. There would have been no way to know. Chris: Forecast, foresee or plan no way. Summer: The only way that I was able to do is I said we were able to kind of make hay, which was okay. We have a door here, so how can I be really good about scaling in a smart way? So I didn't hire tons of people, I hired slowly. I never wanted to have layoff right, so I was able to say I have an opportunity, let's scale slowly. Due to that growth, we're also bootstrapped. So we were able to fund our whole company out of revenue which, especially at that time, I wasn't going to go fundraise. It was just so we were just. We're really lucky that we were able to build something, grow, but grow in a. We weren't growing too fast that we were getting out over our skis. We were able to service our clients, grow, you know, as needed. Then it ended up being a good time for us to kind of get our feet under us about who we are as a firm. Chris: It's a great segue when you talk about the growth you were seeing from the client revenue side forced you to start building your team. Yes, so let's talk about how you went about. One setting the strategy of not growing too fast, because you can fail when you do that, but really focusing on making sure you're making the right hires and adding to your team in the right way. Summer: Yeah Well, I'll say I don't always make the right hires and I've made so many mistakes. If you said that, we'd know you're lying, yeah if there was a thing that I think I could always do better at, it was being even better at hiring. I mean, to me it's the hardest thing that I think we do as business leaders, as CEOs and entrepreneurs. So that is something that I think you just get better at, but you still fail. So that's hard. I have no secret. I have a few things I've learned on that side, but I will say, on the growth side too. Before that, as a person, I'm just a fiscally conservative person in general, so I think some entrepreneurs can get especially more kind of visionary and I think I for sure hold the vision, but I'm very conservative. But that helped us. I think I've had to almost pull myself off of that, so I almost can be too conservative, right. So that's something that I've had to learn about myself, which is I need a counterweight to say you know, do this. But at that time it worked. It was a good way to scale. So I am conservative there, but I did realize in terms of people, if I was really going to grow and we have this value prop about growing with sponsored backed businesses. I myself while I am married to somebody that works in PE and I know a lot about PE. I never myself worked inside the doors of PE and I really had to have that in my firm in order to just have that credibility, you know, just to. Okay got it right and so I did decide very early on. We're growing, we're having a lot of success. I knew that I had to have somebody else at a partnership level that was going to be able to move us to the next level, and it had to be somebody that did not have my skills. Chris: Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Summer: So I needed somebody that was very, you know, has a different background than me, had a different skill set than me, and so that was, you know, really a game-changing hire. So we brought on at that time Libby Covington. And again, she comes out of private equity, she was in-house at Cap street but also worked at law firms and then had also operated in-house with the Doggett family, so we had a lot in common in that sense. But I knew what she brought and what I brought were going to be complimentary to the market and that was ended up being true. You know that that was. But it was hard right, deciding to bring in, you know, somebody. It's really hard. Chris: You make it sound really easy. Summer: It's not. Chris: Because a lot of people entrepreneurs, maybe just humans in general we tend, you know people that we're like, so you tend to hire people like you Absolutely. Instead of doing. What you should be doing is what you did. And how do you hire someone that fills you out right the other side of the skill sets that you don't have to make the strong team. So you know, kudos to you for seeing that, and I know of Libby from her days at Cap Street. So so then you bring Libby on and there's 30 other people you've hired in a few years. Summer: That's right, that's right. Well, I have, you know, tricia Eaton. She started with me. She was actually my first employee, trisha Eaton, she started with me, she was actually my first employee. She now is in an operations role for me. She's been with me since day one. You can do anything. She's the person that can do anything. You just give her a problem and she just goes and solves it. So she has just been my right-hand woman and I couldn't do this without her. So we had her, we had Libby and then, quickly, we had to hire some subject matter experts. So me and Libby cannot keep delivering all the work. Patricia can't deliver all the work. So we really had to go and fill out the teams and I focused on hiring high-margin employees. So where could I bill and where could I charge for their expertise? Sure, right. And then if there was employees where we didn't really use them that much or it was really low margin, we would usually go with consultants. So I had a bench of 1099s. And we still do. We've less. So now we still do. And again, that was another way where we scaled more slowly. So it didn't, you know, have to get ahead of ourselves on building. When was it the right to have the full-time versus the part-time. That was also a benefit of COVID. So I think COVID and I'm seeing this today too it really, I think, enabled people to work the way that was better for them, like there was a new definition of work. Chris: For sure. Yeah, and it's being talked about every day. Summer: Of course, and especially in your industry too, in law firms with a very kind of traditional track, and I think there's people that say I want to work and do really good work, but I can't work in this way, and whether it was in the office or not, but even if it was maybe I want to do great work, but I need to do it 30 hours a week because I'm taking care of my aging mother or I want this lifestyle. I will make less money, but I need to work this much time from this location. So we leaned in hard on that Huge value prop for us. So I think that was one of my successes of being able to hire really great talent, because I was able to align with the times, because it was what it was but also to truly say I want your best work. I don't care if you need to live in Miami, right, I don't care. If you're telling me I really have to work 30 hours a week because I have personal responsibilities, I'm like great, give me your best 30 hours a week. To me that's better than any you know 40 plus hours a week person. That isn't maybe the best. Chris: Sure. Summer: Right. So I, we scaled that, we scaled through that way, we also would. We have a and we still do this today. We bring people on and we do a 60 day trial, and so and it's written, it's papered up and it says if this isn't a fit fit, we're going to separate fast. Chris: Yeah, there's a lot of value in that and it does help the saying of hire slow, fire fast, absolutely. So you get a test run at it. Summer: That's right, and sometimes you can't hire slow. Sometimes I wish I could. I've got I don't know four roles we're hiring right now and I need them to be filled yesterday. Chris: Right. Summer: But at least we've learned that we do have to have a trial period and we have to be eyes wide open about it. You know we're and I. Just part of our culture and it's part of our values is we do excellent work. So excellence is part of our culture. But also, if you can't meet that excellence, you will be let go, like we fire people, and it's not a scary thing, it's just. You know we're, we just have no tolerance. You know, and what we talked about we something we say in houses we don't have. Just you know we're, we just have no tolerance. You know, and what we talked about we something we say in house is we don't have middle managers. You know we don't have that. You're, you're, everyone's in the spotlight. It's that ownership mentality that's right and everybody's like that, so everyone's in the spotlight. There's no middle, you know. So you years, I mean there's been lots of not home runs you know, it's been you know there's hills and valleys there with hiring. Chris: Well, that's good for people to hear. Right, You're not always going to get it right. There's ups and downs, just like in life. But if you're, if you have a mission, like like Craig group does and like our firm does, then you know what your why is. And if something veers off from that, then you stay true to the why and then make those hard decisions. Summer: Yeah, and it always is. It's always hard. It's the hardest thing we do. Chris: No doubt. I want to talk a little bit about innovation, because clearly what your company's doing is innovative and for PE firms. But just in your space, how do you go about fostering innovation amongst your team and encouraging it within the company? Summer: Yeah, I mean, I think that it is who we are. Honestly, it has to do with every single person that we hire. Again, even going back to that, we don't have any middle managers mindset, which is there's no medium, there's no mediocrity, we're always how could you have done better? How could we have done something faster? Wait, what tools did we not use this time? So those questions are asked. Every engagement we have, I'll say we're doing something pretty different. We do have a few competitors out there not very many, but we do something unique. I mean, we are consultants, we do consult, but we're certainly not a consulting firm typically. You know, we're not an Accenture right, because? Why? Because our people actually get in and then they actually do the work, Not that we don't do at Accenture, but that's our model, it is what we do. So we're boots on the ground, so we actually do the work. So we're not an agency, but we do some agency work right. So and then on the technology side, we have a software platform. It's patent pending. It's all about forecasting and how do we get better at forecasting sales and marketing? And if we can forecast better, we can then make action and take action more quickly. And so those are the three things we do. And again, we have some competitors, but what we do as a company inherently is pretty innovative, Like we're doing something a little different, Like the skill set is a little different. We move faster, you know. We have a different, you know. So we are doing something different. I think everybody at the firm knows that and they're aware of it, it's just ingrained in your culture, it's just who they are. Chris: They know it, and I've been to your website so I'll tell you it absolutely comes across from your website, which I know is part of the thought that went into design of the website. Right, you show up different Yep, so it seems like that's part of when you're hiring these people you're looking for someone that can fit that. Summer: That's exactly right that DNA that innovative mindset. It's right and something that Libby and I talk about all the time and again, I fail on it. Sometimes I succeed, but we hire and we've really landed on this for Craig Group is we have to hire for people that just figure it out? They just get it done. It's like I don't really care what they're, you know exactly what they know or what they've done. It's like can you solve this problem? Just you know, almost like if you just did a business school case and put it in front of them and said solve it. Chris: Well, I'm curious because I've been reading a lot about this lately and we have some internal debate about it in our recruiting process. Summer: Do you do any kind of role play as part of your process to put them in the position or challenge them to see how they problem solve. You know, we don't do it formally and I think maybe we also thought about doing it formally like a formal case. We do it in an informal way, which is here's a situation that we're in Usually, it's a real, it's a real client situation and we say hey, what do you think about this? And let them, you know, talk it through. Right so we do it as part of our interview process, but we certainly don't have it formalized and I think maybe we should. Chris: I feel like there's a lot of value in it. I've heard people a lot smarter than me talk on it, and you know the question is and it is the question of does that scare a candidate away? And my answer that is well, if it does, and maybe we learned something early on we should have won't find out till a year later. Absolutely. I'm kind of at a mindset. It seems like a good idea. Summer: I think it's great. I would agree wholeheartedly. If somebody's scared of any kind of testing, then that's probably not a good. It's probably not a good choice. Chris: It was not going to be the person that says let me prove to you I can do this, I'll figure this out, right. So just interesting. You know people's mindsets on that so that always leads me, maybe, into the culture of Craig Group. How would you describe it and what are some of the things that you believe you're doing that help foster and allow it to grow? Summer: yeah, yeah, I'd say that our culture again, we you know excellence in our work is really the number one pillar. We have a thing on our on our mission also. This is no bs. What we mean by that is we show up authentically. We're real, we're real people, we're real humans. We have, you know, everybody that I work with either is caretaking for somebody else in their family, whether it be aging parents, children. They're passionate about volunteering and they're doing that. So we are whole humans and whole people and so I believe in like I don't want to if somebody shows up in an inauthentic way, it's like I'm fine, everything's fine, and I have no tolerance. So we have this real culture of authenticity, excellence, absolute excellence in client delivery. So everybody shows up with that. It's our culture, because we talk about it in hiring, we talk about it in our all-hands monthly meetings, we talk about it in the way we behave, which is we meet people where they are today. So it's okay in Craig group to be very authentically who you are. So that's just how I am, that's how I run the company, so, so we have an authentic culture. But what that also means is everyone at the company we're on, we're remote. We do have a lot of people in Houston, but we are remote. But that does require people to communicate with each other, which is are you okay, all right, picking up the phone and saying because you, if we're all going to have no bs and we're going to work hard, you have to know what your team how, what is your team okay? Chris: what's going on in their life? Summer: yeah, might impact their ability to deliver excellence 100, which is like tell me, do you need help? Chris: my follow-up question was going to be you sounded like a remote company. So, yeah, creating the, the connectivity of that culture, especially at that level that you're trying to achieve, has got to be challenging because you're not in person. Summer: It's so hard, it's so hard and again, I think it's. You know, we have a cameras on culture, you know, and everyone's cameras are on. I mean, I spend, we are all on. You know, video calls all day. Which pros and cons. Chris: Right. Summer: But I think that everyone's leaned into that. There know we can't be grumpy about that. We're not, you know, and everyone's also required to do really good work. But part from a training standpoint, and I think we're getting better at this, I think we can keep getting better. We're not perfect, but working asynchronously, which is what remote work is Right. Not everybody knows how to do that. Like you can't assume that everybody just knows how to work asynchronously. It's a skill set. Knowing when to do async work versus when do you need to have an in-person meeting, knowing when those workflows that is not something that I think you can just know. Chris: Sure. Summer: And so we definitely have an expectation that everyone works really efficiently asynchronously, and I love asynchronous work. Personally, I think it's way more efficient than getting in a big meeting full of people all at the same time and wasting everybody's time. But there is also this time to get everybody in the meeting and you know, sit together. But we are doing better at training people about asynchronous expectations. So we use you know, very technology heavy, very tool heavy. So we use a tool. There's a tool called Loom. It's a video tool. Basically, you can explain something really quickly on your own time and then send it to people so then they can go figure out what you're trying to explain to them. even if you couldn't meet in person. We use project management software. Basecamp is the one we use. Other people use Asana, so we use Basecamp, and all of our work is asynchronously matched. And so I think that culture though one thing that does it, we move really fast. So the culture is again with the excellence and you can move fast with async work. Sometimes it slows you down, sure, because you need to just pick up the phone Instead of you know, so you can. And that's a lot of times where I get into things Is, hey, let's stop doing this Call like call each other, you know somebody's not understanding, right, but our culture is really, we move really fast. Our clients have extremely, extremely high expectations. I mean our clients are you know? PE firms. They're, you know, there's no tolerance. Chris: And they're worried about the ROI and they want the growth yesterday. Yes. Summer: Yesterday and they, you know. So we work under that pressure with all of our clients high intensity, high growth. So we're high intensity, high. You know that we match our clients. We're yeah, that's what, that's who we are, and I think it works really well with a remote team. I think we've been able to hire people that want that, that high intensity work. If you don't want it, you can tell and it doesn't work with that. Chris: It shows up real quick, it shows up. Yeah, so you were talking about, you know, your base clients, the PE firms. Let's talk about what are some of the things you found to be successful for you and your company to kind of build and maintain those relationships so that you keep them and you get more. Summer: Yeah, absolutely so. I think it's challenging to, I think, sell anything which we're selling a service, right, but I think it's challenging to sell into. I don't want to put them all in the same basket. So not all PE or independent sponsors are sponsored, because they're not all created equal, right, so that's. I can say that but it is a tight group of people. It's a it's tight knit. It's a small group. I think it's an it's elite. Most people that have those roles are very well educated. They have great experience. I think you really have to be trustworthy, like they are not going to pull in a partner that has not been vetted. You know that, had that, that hasn't really been like. You know this is the real deal. So those relationships are really hard-earned. You know those are not easy to come by. I will say me and Libby both have our own sets of networks. That was enabled, sort of the catalyst. But the only reason why that's been able, we've had success, is because we've had to prove it. And when we prove it, you know, we then can build onto the next one and the next one. And I mean our model would be that we become a partner with the firm and that they bring us in on multiple portfolio companies and that's what happens, right. But it's hard. It's not something that you don't. You know we're not selling. You know something that's not high value, high stakes, and we really are a partner. We're not a, you know, a vendor and that takes a lot of trust. We have to spend a lot of time. Chris: Yeah, it's funny because I can totally relate. Our mindset here at the firm is the same. We want to be as we say this all the time the legal partner to our clients, an extension of the C-suite, not a vendor, not a commodity, but an actual value-added partner. Summer: Yes, that's exactly right. And it's hard to get there. You don't just say that and you know you're like oh, I want to be your growth partner. I want to be a member of your management team. It's like OK, prove it. Chris: Right. Summer: Right, and so I think that we do that. I think our team consistently delivers best in class results and best in class work. We're also right sized for the lower middle market and middle market, and I think that's what needs to happen. We can't you know it's not Bain, right? No, and they can't, they couldn't, they can't do it anyways Right, but we're also not, you know, your sister's brother that's going to help you with sales and marketing. That you know out of their garage. So I think we're right size and for our size, like for where we are in the market, I think we're an absolute best in class option and we've had to prove it and prove it and that's also why we have best in class talent, because we've proven it and proven it. But it's definitely been. You know it's a hard fought. It's hard fought. Chris: You know every single win is a hard you're only as good as the last one, that's right. Summer: I mean it's dig and ditches hard. You know, it's like we have to say. I mean we're making sure that every time we deliver the work product, the trust and then also the ability to immediately implement our plan, and that's one of we really stake our hats on that, like we don't just give you a here's some really great ideas that you can't implement, nor do you have the money to go hire the team to do it. So we really just hang our hat on, let's roll, let's go, and it's like ready to go, and so that's hard, it's hard work. You know this is tough and so that's exactly right We've got. You know we need that to be so good that the firm, the CEO of the port co and the firm are going to say man, that was really worth it. What would we do without that team? How would we, where would we be right now without that team? Chris: Where else can we use them? Summer: And that's what they. You know it's like we can't. We have to. You know, we have to keep. I think we can always get better. Chris: The results would suggest that. But to your point, the last word you just said right was if you don't have the mindset of continuing to, how can we improve? You're going to get left behind. Summer: That's right, and I think, a lot of my core team. You know one of my senior strategists, Macy Allen. I think every time she works on something, she comes up with another innovative idea about. You know what, if we would have done this or wait this tool, can we try out this tool? We're really leaned into that technology and AI in our work, but I think that what works so well is the answer is yes. Bring it in, let's try it, let's test it no-transcript and just your leadership style. Chris: How would you describe that and how do you think it's evolved since you started this five years ago? Summer: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it definitely has evolved, you know, I think that also going from having you know two people to this very large team. We're very flat organization so we don't have lots of hierarchy. So most people directly report to me probably too many, which is something we're working on. But I think I've got a very straightforward management style so there's really not a lot of dancing around things. There's not a lot of confusion. If I'm telling you something, it's probably going to be very clear. I also give feedback continuously. I believe in spot feedback so we don't wait and write it down and wait for the quarter end to go back and like report. I think that's just tiresome. So everyone is encouraged to give spot feedback both you know, positive and negative and do it in that moment. Sometimes I will do it in our project management tool and say spot feedback and just put it. And that way if it's written. Sometimes they can have some time to react. Chris: Right. Summer: As opposed to kind of. Chris: I like how you signpost it though. Yeah, I say spot feedback. Summer: Like prepare thyself. You are getting feedback. Yeah, and I put it and I just say it, and I think that I lead with kindness, always, always. I think that truth without kindness is cruelty and that's a direct quote from my husband, jason Craig, one of his themes and I think that being kind to people, even when you're frustrated and is, is the only way to be. So lead with kindness, but also tell the truth, which is this you know this went well, this didn't go well, you know, but it's not. It's not about you as a human. You know this isn't a. You know we're not making a personal judgment about you, but this work product, you know, wasn't what it needed to be or whatever it is. But I tend to give feedback. You know, again, it's rapid, it's in this, it's like I lead. You know, very, you know, crisply in the moment I've had to get even more efficient with that, with a lot of people you know, and I don't see all the things, and so I definitely try to speak to every a lot of people to get you know other people's opinions on work product. So I talked to a lot of people. I talked to clients ask for feedback and then go and manage my employees. That are what I heard from clients. So yeah, I think I'm a management style again. I think I get a lot of feedback, a lot information, but crisp, kind, but really Christmas and some compassion right, always, always. Chris: So that's something you mentioned. I don't think a lot of people think to do or they think to. They think about it but they're scared to do it, and that's get feedback from your clients. Summer: Yeah. Chris: Right, it's the most valuable feedback you can get because you're really trying to serve the clients. But if you're not delivering what they want in the way they want it, you're missing the mark. Right, you can work hard and you can believe it's excellent, but if they don't believe it's excellent, hard and you can believe it's excellent, but if they don't believe it's excellent. So anything you do this kind of systemize that, or is that just you know periodic check-ins with your clients, or I don't like that. Summer: You know people will disagree with me on that and there's a whole theory in marketing around, you know, net promoter scores, which is it's just a survey, essentially that we're just not big enough for that. Like I need to be able to call all my CEOs which I do and can, and I get feedback and write it down. I mean, you know, and I talked to all of my CEOs at least every other week and I asked them all every time, you know, and sometimes they would say I don't even know, go talk to the other team and I do which is great, because if the CEO doesn't know if if anything's good or bad, that's great. Chris: That means there's no problem excellent. Summer: But no, I do it continuously. I see that as really one of my roles in sort of steering the ship is talking and saying you know what's, you know and I want everything. I want silly stuff, little bitty, you know things. I got some of that last week. It was a really super small thing, but that you know it matters. That's right. You know I don't, you know I want all the things. So I just try to have a relationship that's very trustworthy. It's informal in the sense that we can talk. I want that kind of relationship. I don't need it to be something that's this big thing. Chris: You don't need an email saying click the button and fail the survey. Summer: I really hate it. I really do I mean again somebody's going to quote me on that in a few years when we do that and send the email but I just no thanks, We'll ask directly? Chris: I don't. I'm not in favor of them either, and I don't know that you get the most authentic feedback. Yeah, right now, at some point, if you're so big, maybe you don't have a choice. Summer: But yeah never lose the personal yeah, that's right, that's right. Chris: Summer, this has been such a fun conversation. I want to just end on a few lighter notes. Okay, what was your first job growing up? Summer: oh, lifeguard, life lifeguard. Out at pecan grove, country club, out in richmond texas, which might have been my most favorite job I've ever had. I still like love it taught because you had to wear. Chris: You got to wear a bathing suit. You were the most tan you ever did. I was the most tan. Summer: I also love to swim. I love teaching swim lessons and I was a swimmer, and it was just it was great very good. Native texan native texan born in odessa, texas. Yeah, native native Texan Lived in Oklahoma, lived in Illinois, but I'm back in Texas. Chris: Okay, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Summer: Tex-Mex, all right yeah. Chris: I usually ask people this question, but you have three young kids so I don't know. But if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where'd you go and what'd you do? Summer: Yeah, my husband and I, even though we live in the flattest part of Texas I think that's under sea level we really love to mountain climb. So we're hikers and climbers. We try to take a pretty big trip every year or so if we can. We did a really big trip this summer. It would be a no-brainer. I mean we would go and climb a really big mountain. Aconcagua in South America has been on his list. I can't quite get it on mine because it's a 30-day trip and I can't. I've got a 11-year-old, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old and I can't quite do that. But if I could wave a magic wand and I could be gone for 30 days, I would go climb Aconcagua and spend time in South America. Chris: How cool. That's a good one. Well, thanks again for taking the time. Love your story. Congratulations on the success that you've already achieved and that I know that's in your future. Summer: Thanks, Chris, appreciate having me on. Special Guest: Summer Craig.

Rachel is a professor, an author, and a VBAC mom who is here to share her story from a traumatic C-section birth through a VBAC. This episode really dives deep into how picking the right provider is key to improving your chances for a VBAC. They give practical questions to ask your providers, more than just yes or no, to really get to know their birth philosophy and what qualifications and experiences your provider might have that would make them a better fit for VBAC chances. Rachel and Meagan also give a lot of validation and advice on how to start the process of overcoming birth trauma; it's reality and to not be ashamed of it. You're not alone. Through the many important messages of this episode, they both mention many times to trust your intuition. If something feels off, listen to that. And if a change in provider is necessary…it is never ever too late to change. Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean SectionHow to Naturally Induce LaborHow to Turn Prodromal Labor into Active LaborMembrane Sweeps for VBACHow to VBAC: The Ultimate Prep Course for ParentsFull Transcript under Episode Details Meagan: Hello everybody! Welcome to the show! I am so honored to have Rachel Somerstein on with us today. She is a friend of ours from New York. She is a writer and an associate professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz. She is an author of Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section.  And her writing has also appeared in the Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Women's Health. She lives in Hudson Valley, NY with her husband and her two children and is here to share her stories with you today. Rachel had an unplanned Xesarean section with her first child and the experience was anything but routine. I know that there are many of us who have been through this journey and on this podcast, maybe listening today, that also had an unexpected experience and it may have left us with trauma, or doubt, or fear, or all the feelings, right? And so she is going to be talking to us today about her experiences, but then also we're going to talk about some guidance on how to find peace and to offer ourselves grace and to set ourselves up for a much better experience next time. We do have a review of the week, so I want to get into that and I'm going to turn the time over to Rachel.This review is by Deserie Jacobsen. The review title is “Thank You.” She actually emailed this in and it says, “This podcast and parents course is amazing. I am not a VBAC mom, but I have been listening since 2020. I binge listen near the end of every pregnancy to remind me of everything I need to remember in birth and process through my previous births. This time around I felt more prepared than ever before, having plans in place just in case. We were able to have a quick birth of my 5th baby. I love the education, passion, and love this podcast gives. I recommend it to everyone I know, and I have learned so much from it. I am so grateful for this podcast, thank you.”Thank you so much Deserie for your review! Seriously you guys, I just love hearing that people are finding the information that they need, they're finding community, they're finding that they can do this too. Just like them, and all these reviewers and all the people that have shared their stories and all these reviewers you guys can too. This birth, VBAC, is possible too. Better experience is possible. A healing CBAC; it's possible. You guys, all it takes is getting the information, the prep, finding the provider, to have a better experience.Meagan: Alright Ms. Rachel, welcome to the show and thank you again so much for being here with us. I kind of talked about this a little bit before we started recording about how I think your episode is going to be so powerful and deep and raw too. You've got these feelings and these words. I love it. I love reading your book and I can't wait to hear it from your own mouth. Which speaking of book, can we talk about that a little bit? What kind of just inspired you, jumpstarted you into writing a book about this?Rachel: Well, I'm a writer. And I wrote an essay about my birth about two years after I had my baby, my first birth, my C-section. And I realized I had a lot more to say and also I heard from a lot of moms when that came out and that made me start thinking that I think there was a bigger project. Meagan: Absolutely. And an amazing project that you completed.Rachel: Yes.Meagan: And remind everybody before we get into your stories where they can find your book. I actually have it here in my hands. It's Invisible Labor. So where all can they find that? And we'll make sure that we link it. Rachel: Sure, thank you! Yeah, so it's Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of The Cesarean Section. And you can get it on Amazon, you can get it from Barnes and Noble, you can get it from your local bookstore, you can get it as an audiobook? Or you can also get it as an ebook.Meagan: For the audiobook, did you record it?Rachel: I did not. The narrator is Xe Sands and she did a great, great job. It sounds excellent. Meagan: Awesome. We'll be sure to link that. I think it's definitely a book that everyone should check out. There's a lot of power in that book.Rachel: Thank you.Meagan: And it's not even just your story. I mean there's a ton. Like if you go through the note section there's a ton of research in there, and history and studies, and so many really great things. Well okay, let's hear about the story that started the inspiration and behind this amazing book.Rachel: Sure! Thank you. So like so many moms, I had an unplanned C-section that I was completely unprepared for, which is another reason I wanted to write this book because I think a lot of people go into pregnancy just assuming they're going to have a vaginal birth and like me, I didn't even read the parts of the books about C-sections, I skipped them. Because I was not going to have a C-section. Which is whatever, hindsight is everything, right? But I had a totally textbook pregnancy. I switched to a different group of midwives and OB's about halfway through because I just didn't have a connection I felt with the providers in the first one. And frankly, I didn't have a connection with the providers in the second one either, but by that point, I was like well whatever, it's fine. Which I think is actually, if I could go back and do it again I would have changed that. But you kind of are like, I don't want to, could I possibly change again? And I think that for people who are VBACing, yes you can and sometimes you actually really need to, even like late on in your pregnancy, people will switch groups or providers even late in the third trimester, so. Meagan: Even if you're changed already, you can do it multiple times.Rachel: Exactly.Meagan: It's not a bad thing to find the right provider for you. It's not. Rachel: It's not. And It's hard. And you can feel like, Oh my god. Am I really going to send all my records over? It can feel like so much effort and it can really be worth it. I just wanted to say that as someone who switched once and then was like, Okay, I'm done, and wished I'd switched again. So anyways, it was late in week 39 I went into prodromal labor but I didn't know that prodromal labor even existed because nobody told me about it.  And it was my first baby. So I was like is this labor? I think I'm having contractions, these are not Braxton Hicks. And in the end, we talked to the doula I was working with, and in the end they ended up petering out. And at that, I think that that for me marked the beginning of, this is not going to look like the way I had expected it to look. And again, hindsight is everything. What I wish I had known at the time– and I think this is really relevant to some VBAC moms is that sometimes prodromal labor means that your baby is not in the best position for having a vaginal birth. And I can't exactly say oh I would have done this or that differently if I'd known it, but it would have helped me understand what I was going into with the labor and the birth. So anyway, I eventually went into labor in the middle of the night. It was exactly my due date and I knew it was different. I could just feel this is labor. And I was really eager to get it going quickly. And again, I wish someone would have said, “Rachel, rest. It's early. You're going to need your strength. You're going to need your energy however your baby is born.” And instead I quite literally was running up and down the stairs of my house to try to push labor along. Which is, I have compassion for myself, I understand why I was doing that. What I really needed to do was get in the bath, or I don't know, lay over the birth ball. Watch a silly movie, right? The feelings I was having were real pain and I was scared. But you kind of can't run through this, especially a first labor as we all know, those take a long time, right?Meagan: Yeah. And if we were having prodromal labor, our body may be kicking into labor, but still might need some time to help that baby rotate and change positions. Rachel: Exactly, exactly. And this is the kind of education that is so missing from birth classes. And that is one reason why this kind of podcast is so helpful because that's how I learned about these different things. I didn't ever learn about them from a provider being like, “Let's talk about what will happen in your birth, and let's talk about why you had prodromal labor.”So anyway, we went to the doctors office where we met a midwife and my doula for a labor check. And I was hardly dilated, I was at a 2 but I was in extreme pain. And I have to say, I have a very, very high pain tolerance and I now know I was having back labor. Meagan: Baby's position.Rachel: Exactly. And the contractions were like boom boom boom boom. They were not, I didn't have any rest in between them. Which again, I think my baby was like I gotta get in the right position, this isn't working out, I'm freaking out, ah! Plus my mom is running around, ah! Right?Meagan: Yeah. Rachel: So we went to the hospital and I was checked in and the midwife who checked me in was like, “Oh you're actually not even 2 centimeters, you're just 1 centimeter dilated.” And they checked me because I was in so much pain I think. And I don't know that that was necessarily wrong,  but again, no one was sort of explaining, “Here's what we think is going on.” And it's partly because I believe those providers thought I was exaggerating what I was experiencing physically. They didn't know me. Well, they didn't know that I'm usually pretty stoic. They didn't know that I'm not a squeaky wheel. And I wasn't like screaming or crying or pounding. I was like quiet and I was like I'm in a lot of pain.Meagan: An intense quiet.Rachel: Intense quiet. Exactly. But that doesn't look like what we think pain looks like to people. And the fact is that people are very individual and how they express pain especially during labor where you're already kind of like leaving the regular plane of reality.Meagan: Yes. Rachel: So an important takeaway is like, even experienced providers cannot read your mind and make mistakes in assessing what's truly going on with you. And this comes up later in my second birth, but my husband now does a much better job of saying, “You might look at Rachel right now and think she looks like she's doing great, but this is what's really going on with her.” And he does that in a way that's not like he's speaking for me in a way that's annoying, but it's like I actually can't advocate for myself, I can't express this. So anyways, I asked for an epidural. They said that the anesthesiologist was busy. Which may have been true, but may have been they were trying to put me off because I was hardly dilated. And they told me to get in the birth tub. And I remember hanging over the side of the tub and staring at the clock on the wall and being like, I actually don't know if I'm going to survive this hour. I was just in so much pain. Incredible pain from back labor that was incessant. Eventually he showed up. They hooked me up to all the monitors. At that point, one of the nurses was like, “Oh, you are having monster contractions.” Like the contractions that were being measured were so intense they were going each time to the edge of what was measurable. And now that the computer said it it was like oh…Meagan: You're validated now. Rachel: Exactly. Right. And the anesthesiologist, it took him three tries to get the epidural working properly which would echo problems to come. But he did, and it took away the pain. And then I was just in the bed and kind of left there. And the nurses and the midwife did not use a peanut ball, they didn't move me around. And obviously, listen, I'm attached to the monitors. You know you cannot really move that well, the belt slips, and that increases the chances you'll have a C-section. And there are still things that can be done. It's not like you're a loaf of bread, you just lay in a bed. But they didn't do that stuff and I wasn't dilating. The nurse and doula eventually basically were like, “Well, we're going to go out for dinner and we'll be back in a few hours and we're going to give you this thing to sleep and if you haven't dilated by the time we get back you're going to have a C-section.” And at that point I was exhausted. It's evening now, I've been up since the middle of the night. I'm totally like, what is happening with this birth? No preparation; I took birth classes, I read books, no preparation suggested that this series of events could take place. I felt completely abandoned by my providers, including my doula who I was paying out of pocket. And one thing that came up at this time also was I had this colposcopy in college, like scraping of cervical cells. I didn't hide it from anybody, I was open. And the midwife said well maybe that's why you're not dilating is because of this colposcopy.Meagan: Do you think you got scar tissue?Rachel: That's what she said. And I remember at the time being like why are we only talking about this now? Why has nobody brought this up in any of the prenatal visits that I've done? And I felt blamed. This thing about your body is defective. After a few hours when the midwife and the doula came back and I rested and it was quiet, I had dilated to a 9. And I think what that's about is that I had been in too much pain to dilate. I was so frozen up and tense and also extremely scared.At this point people are like, “Oh wow.” And finally my water broke,y water hadn't broken. So you know, things are kind of continuing and I am starting to actually feel even more fear and my room is getting really crowded with people. And the midwife asks me to start pushing. And I was afraid and I was excited. They turned on the baby warmer, and they were like, “Okay, your baby is going to come out.” And I started to push but I couldn't feel what I was doing. I had no idea. And the midwife was like, “Do you have an urge to push?” And I was like, “No.” The epidural that hadn't gone well from the beginning had then come down with a very heavy hammer and I felt total numbness. It was not helpful. I needed someone to have turned it off or something, or turned it down so I could feel an urge to push and feel how to push, where to push, what muscles to use. And at a certain point I could tell something was going not right and it turned out that my baby was having heart rate decelerations. So just to sketch the scene. At this point it's 1 o'clock in the morning, I've been awake for 24 hours. I'm exhausted. My husband is exhausted. Neither of us has any idea that things could have gone like this. The midwife says I think it's time to do a C-section. And I don't disagree with her. I don't even know what to think at that point. I'm also feeling tremendous fear. I was like I'm afraid I'm going to die, I'm afraid my baby's going to die. And the overall sense in the room…and people were like, “Oh no, you're going to be fine”. And the sense in the room was that I was hysterical and I was not in my right mind. Which I wasn't in my right mind; I had been awake for a long time, I'd been trying to have this baby, nobody really told me what was going on and I felt totally unsupported. Actually, my response was completely reasonable given the circumstances and nobody really attended to that and saw that and recognized that as completely valid. Plus, I don't have evidence to stack this up absolutely, but I have since come to find out that there is a medication that some laboring women are given to help them rest and one of the side effects is an impending sense of doom. And I have a friend who had a baby at this same hospital and had the same response after having been given something to rest during her labor. I could go back and look at my records and I may do that but I'm like, well that would explain also why I had the response I did. Meagan: Mhmm.Rachel: Anyway, we go to the OR. I hunch my back for the spinal that the anesthesiologist has to do a couple of times to get it right. I'm still contracting at this point. My body is still like, Come on, let's get this baby out. Let's get this baby out. And I'm so uncomfortable. And you know that advice to not lay down flat on your back when you're pregnant, but that's what you have to do when you're in the OR. The whole thing felt like I was going to choke under my stomach and very exposed like you are in the operating room. Meagan: Yeah, it's cold and it's bright and you're very exposed. And you can't move your body normally, especially if you've had a spinal. Rachel: And also in retrospect, again I'm like I cannot believe that the first time I learned what happened in a C-section was in my C-section. I really should have at least learned about this even though it would have still been scary and I still would have been surprised. So when the OB goes to operate, he starts his incision and I say, “I felt that.” And he says, “You'll feel pressure.” And I say, “I felt that.” And he continues operating and I was not numb. I felt the operation. And according to his notes..parts of this I don't remember…but he wrote it down and my husband has also told me that I was screaming, my legs were kicking. There's no question that I was in tremendous pain. And I was moaning and it was horrible. And it was horrible for the people in the room too by the way.Meagan: I'm sure. Rachel: Right? Like it's really important to say that. My OB didn't listen to me. That is a super common thing that happens in healthcare, especially for women. Especially for pregnant women. He's not a sociopath. He didn't want to be evil, but he didn't listen and the consequences were so steep and so dire. And I think that it was traumatizing to him and I know it was traumatizing to some of the other providers in that room, the nurses to watch this. He kept going and when the baby was born, which I don't remember, apparently they held her up to my face and they put me under general anesthesia and sent my baby and my husband away and stitched me up. Then I woke up in recovery. The doula and the midwife had gotten the baby to latch while I was unconscious and were talking about me without knowing that I was awake about her latch which really, really bothered me because it just underscored how it felt like I was just a body. And even people who were supposed to be there to take care of me and be tender and advocates, I felt they disregarded me. And under other circumstances I really would have wanted to breastfeed my baby like right away. But I wasn't even there to say yes I want to do this or no I don't want to do this. It was a terrible birth and I would not wish it on anybody. Meagan: And I think, kind of talking about what you were just talking about with breastfeeding and stuff, these people in their hearts and in their minds were probably like this is what she would have wanted. We're trying to help. But in whole other frame of mind over here, I'm not present. I haven't said those things. And I know you're trying to help and I know that's where your heart is, but I'm not okay with this. Rachel: Totally.Meagan: And I think sometimes as doulas, as birth workers, as any one of you listening, remember that words matter. Actions matter. These moms' feelings matter and it's sometimes in our minds we're trying to do what's best, but it might not be. Rachel: Totally. Absolutely. Yes and I again, it's so important to point out. Yes they were coming from a good place. They really were coming from a good place. But it wasn't the way that I felt it or experienced it. Meagan: And it left you with trauma and angst and heartache. Rachel: Absolutely. Totally. Yeah. Meagan: Well that definitely sounds like a really rough birth. And it's so crazy because it's like you went from not progressing to baby in a poor position, to getting an epidural. I love that you talked about that. That can be an amazing tool. A lot of people are very against epidurals, and there are pros and cons with epidurals. We've talked about those. Fetal heart decels is one of them. I don't think, maybe in this situation it sounds like a lot of other things happened; baby's position being one of the biggest ones. But that can really be a tool that helps you just relax and be more present and have less trauma. We talk about this in my doula practice of where there's a difference between pain and suffering. And pain, progressive positive pain that's bringing our baby to us that's one thing. But when we're suffering and we're so tense that our body's not even able to try; that epidural could come into great play. But again, we're not that loaf of bread in a bed and it is important to move and rotate. And it doesn't have to be drastic. It doesn't have to be crazy big movements. Just subtle movements to change the dynamics of the pelvis and to encourage our baby to keep coming down. So there were so many things that just went poorly but also went well, and then poorly again and then well and then real poorly there at the end. Rachel: And I think like to your point, I went into my birth I should say, I was planning on having an unmedicated vaginal birth. I was like I'm not going to have an epidural. And I think that if my providers had different skills I would have, I may have been able to have that baby vaginally. And I say that based on what happened in my second birth. So it's not just like wishful thinking, right? And I'm really glad I had that epidural. I really needed that. I was suffering. The pain I was experiencing was not productive pain. And an epidural can help you with suffering, alleviate your suffering. But it can't and doesn't substitute for emotional support. And I think that's what was missing for me, throughout that first birth. Even if I had gone on to have ok fine, a cesarean, or even a vaginal birth, I still think I would have been like that wasn't a good birth because I didn't feel emotionally supported. And an epidural can't do that. Meagan: Yeah. No an epidural cannot do that. And I, for anyone listening who supports birth, or even who are going for a birth you kind of mentioned it. You're in this other land and sometimes it's hard to advocate and open. You might be thinking something and you might so badly want to say it. It's right here, coming out. And you can't say it for whatever reason. It's a weird thing, it doesn't make sense sometimes but it can happen. But really being heard, validated, understood; which are so many things you weren't. Right? And when we're not heard and when we don't feel safe, and we don't feel supported, those things leave us with PTSD. In fact there was, in your book, I'm just going to read it. It says, “2022 study by anesthesiology and obstetrics professor Joanna and colleagues found that what's important about women who feel pain during childbirth is how mothers feel about their pain. And how their providers communicate with them overall…”You were communicating, and no one was communicating to you. “...feeling positively about pain and heard by providers protects a mother from developing PTSD.” And I mean it goes on which is why you need to get the book so you can read more about it. Rachel: Yep. Meagan: But really, feeling heard. Rachel: It's not just crunchy whoo-hoo feels good, feels right, sounds good. It really matters. And I have to say that I'm participating in and helping to work with providers on designing some studies about providing different pain options for moms during C-sections. We literally had a conversation about this yesterday. And one of things we were talking about is it's not just the pain. It's not just pain relief. It's also being listened to. Because there will be people who are like, I might say I'm in pain, but that doesn't mean I need an epidural or want an epidural. But I'm feeling pain and I want to be heard and I want somebody to…even if you can't express this. You can't even express it because you're the one having labor. What you're needing is someone to see you and look you in the eye and be like you're going to be okay. And I think as mothers we totally are experienced with that all the time. When your child is hurt or sick, part of your job obviously is to get them the help they need, but it's also to assure them this nosebleed is going to end. You're not going to have a bloody nose for the rest of your life. Which, when you're going through something really hard you can sometimes forget, right? And you're pointing out from the studies this helps to prevent people in birth, in labor, from developing PTSD. The stakes are really high. They matter so much. Meagan: When you were just talking, I don't know if you saw my eyes kind of well up a little, but I connected a lot with my first birth when I was clinging to a bed, literally clinging. And I was looking at my husband and I'm like, “Do something!” I had a baby in a poor position. I was being jacked full of pitocin. My water had broken, there was a lot of discomfort going on. I had told him I didn't want an epidural and he's like what do you want me to do? And I was like I don't know, I just need something! And I was terrified and desperate. And he was just like… It wasn't fair for me to put him in that position either but at the same time he was like I don't know, I don't know what to do, right? And the nurses were just like we'll just get you an epidural. And I was like no, I don't want an epidural. And then it just was like epidural, just went down from there. And I wish so badly that there was something else. Let's get you out of the bed. Let's get you in the shower. Let's give you some nitrous. There was so much more that I could have had, but wasn't even offered. And I think too, I needed someone to tell me that nosebleed was going to end. Rachel: Yes. Meagan: And it was going to end and it was going to come back every five minutes and it was going to end again and I was going to be okay. And I was going to survive that. And just hearing you talk about that, why my eyes got all welly, is that I don't know if I realized how much that impacted me until just barely. And here I am, my daughter is almost 13.Rachel: Just like how powerful these things that, I don't know, this is part of why we have these conversations. They shed different corners of light on our experiences that it's like oh my gosh, I didn't even know I knew that. And that's so why we, even though I'm not postpartum immediately, it's valuable for me to talk about it too; to hear what you're saying, you know?Meagan: Yeah. Ah, so after a not-so-amazing experience, going into that postpartum, you've talked a little bit about that in your book. Well, not a little bit, you've talked about that a lot. Tell us about that journey and then what led you to deciding on VBAC and ultimately going and having a VBAC. Rachel: So I should say, I was really…Talk about not realizing things right away. It took me a long time to figure out how traumatized I had been by that birth. And I was about two years postpartum and I was having a procedure for something else and I just completely, I had a panic attack. I had never had a panic attack before, I didn't know what it was and couldn't have explained what was happening. And when the anesthesiologist who did this procedure was like have you ever had any issues with anesthesia, which is exactly the question that should be asked, and I had said what had happened he was so taken aback. He was shocked and didn't know what to say and walked out of the room.Not in the way of, I'm abandoning my patient, but just like from his perspective here's this kind of routine thing. This patient is crying and shaking and talking about this very traumatic incident which I had not talked about. I didn't go to therapy. I had talked about it with friends and my family, it wasn't a secret, but I felt a lot of shame. I felt like I must have been this total freak of a person that this had happened to me. And after that I remember saying to my husband, I just don't know if I'm ever going to be able to get over this trauma enough to have another baby. And I didn't even know if I wanted another baby, like separate from the trauma. In therapy I started to see that I felt very stuck in my life and that included how and whether to grow my family. And that was actually because of the traumatic birth. It just like made this big block. I think one thing that's important to think about for those who have had a traumatic birth is that sometimes that can show up in your life in ways that you don't expect. Meagan: Yes. Rachel: And so to be compassionate with yourself about that and also to be open to that. We're in the era of warnings and trigger warnings and those are important, but sometimes for a traumatized person the things that are triggering or activating are not what you would think. Like for me, I couldn't watch a scene of a hospital birth even if it was happy without getting very uncomfortable and having to walk away and there wouldn't be a content warning on that. So it's just to say be patient with yourself. Accept that…don't, I guess if you've had a traumatizing birth you don't have to struggle against these things. As horrible as they might feel, as uncomfortable as they might feel it's normal and it's ok and it shows up differently for everybody. Rachel: Yeah so I had this big question and then I was like ok, it took awhile for me to be like I do want to have another baby. But I wasn't ready emotionally. And so I waited. And then about, let's see, October of 2019, I was like I think that I'm ready to try to have another baby. And we had met this midwife who lived in our community, who my daughter actually made friends with her niece at our public pool which is so beautiful. I ran into her one night while she was walking her dog. She was like your husband shared a little bit with me, if you ever want to talk. And this, I feel like, I could not be more grateful that this person came into my life. She just is, her skills are phenomenal. Just as a clinician in terms of trauma-informed care, and I've felt safe enough going to her for prenatal care to decide that I was ready to get pregnant. My joke is that I should tour high schools and be like it only takes once to have unprotected sex to become a parent. And I was really lucky that I got pregnant right away and at that point I was 37. So I should say I had my first baby at 33 and I got pregnant again at 37. And that's not always the case for people. Obviously it can take a long time and especially after a C-section, secondary infertility is real. Meagan: It is. Rachel: Yeah. Not talked about enough. Really not talked about enough. Meagan: There's a lot of things, right, about C-sections that is not discussed about. For personal, for the mom, for the individual, the infertility, adhesions, all those things. Just the emotional and the physical. Then even the baby. There's risks for the baby, the allergies, the microbiome getting messed up. All the risks, it's just not discussed. Rachel: No, it's really not. And you kind of only find out later if you've had a C-section and you've had a problem down the road that you're like, maybe that's because of my C-section. It's ridiculous.So we got pregnant and I was not sure if I wanted to have a VBAC, but I started thinking about it from the beginning. And I also was like, if I don't have a VBAC how am I ever going to get myself into an OR, I just don't know. And I really think that VBAC is the under-discussed pain point for moms. And I'm preaching to the choir here but we're talking about half a million moms every year have to make this decision, if it's even available to them. Meagan: I was going to say, if it's even offered. Rachel: If it's even offered. Which is totally not a given. But theoretically, they do have this decision and I really have not…I should say, in the course of writing this book, but also just being a mom who had a bad C-section and then had a VBAC, I hear from people a lot about their journeys just like on the playground. Every person I've talked to, they agonize over it. No matter what they choose, no matter what. Why is that not talked about more? I mean that part of what this podcast is doing that's so important, but I still can't believe how under the radar it is, yet it's such a big deal when you're going through it. So anyway, I told myself I did not have to decide right away about a VBAC or a C-section. My midwife was like you can totally have a VBAC, you can totally have a C-section. Even if you have a C-section you can keep seeing me. I was worried like oh would I get bumped out of midwifery care. One of the things I'm really fortunate about and that I think is really good about that practice is that she has a very close relationship with one of the OB's there. Like they kind of share patients, I should say that. And that's because she's worked with him for a long time and he really respects her clinical skills and vice versa. The other thing about her that's unique and that I didn't know how important it is she's a Certified Nurse Midwife, so she attends births in the hospital. But she previously had been a homebirth practice and at a birth center as a CNM. So her skills are, like I said are phenomenal. A C-section is truly like we have to do this. I've run out of my bag of skills or like the baby or mom's health suggests that like we need to do this now. She worked with me to work with the scheduler so that I saw her for every visit which helped me to learn how to trust her and she didn't pressure me. Either way she was completely open. She also worked with me to make sure that I could see her for virtually every visit so that way she earned my trust. And I got to show her who I am. She got to understand me which was really important to the birth. Meagan: Yes, which I want to point out. There are a lot of providers these days that are working in groups. And I understand why they're working in groups. They're overworked, definitely not rested. There's reasons why, both midwives and OBGYNs are working in these big practices. But the thing is it's really nice to have that established relationship but for some reason specially for VBAC it's so important to have that one-on-one relationship. So if you can, during your search for finding providers, if you can find a provider that is going to be like Rachel's midwife where she's just like I want to get to know you, I want to establish this relationship. Yes, we have this OB over here but I want to be your person. I definitely think it's impactful.Rachel: I totally agree with you and I didn't even know that was possible. And she works for a big group and even so she told the schedulers, hey make sure you schedule her with me. She didn't just do that with me by the way, it wasn't just a special favor for this traumatized patient. And frankly it's better for the providers too because they're not coming in cold. Like ok who's this person, and she's saying this. And what's her prenatal care like? What's her pregnancy like? Of course they're looking at the notes, but it's not the same. Meagan: It isn't. And I love that she said that. But I also want to point out that you can request that. If you're in a group and you can connect whole-heartedly with someone and you feel it's definitely who you need, it's ok to ask hey. I know that I am supposed to meet Sarah Jane and Sally, but can I stay with whoever. And maybe you might not get every visit, but if you can get more visits than only that one? It's worth asking. Rachel: Totally. And also then you know their style. So like she was not an alarmist. Let's say I was over 35; I had to see a MFM just because of my age. That went fine, but if something had come up, like let's say I had a short cervix or there was something I found in an appointment with an MFM specialist I would know her well enough to take that to her to be like, put it to me straight. How worried should I be about this? As opposed to maybe this one's an alarmist, this one is more like ahh let me put this in…And the only way you're going to learn about that is from meeting with them again and again. And for VBAC that's so so important. Meagan: It is. It kind of reminds me of dating. It's weird. I had said this with my provider when I didn't switch. I was like, I feel like I'm breaking up with him. Like he's my second boyfriend, it's just weird. It's not really boyfriend but you know what I mean. But it is, we're dating them. And anyone, in my opinion, can come off really great for that first date because they're wanting to make that impression. They're wanting you to like them. But the more you get to know them, the more they may show their true colors. And you also may realize, I don't think I'm the right person for you. My desires aren't something that aligns with you and so I don't want to put you in this situation. And so if we date our providers, “date our providers,” a little bit more than just one time it really will help us know. And like you said, if something were to come up you could have that trusted person in your corner, which is so important for VBAC, that you can go to. Rachel: Totally. Yeah. So yeah, so pregnancy went well. And then right as I entered my third trimester it started to be COVID. Meagan: Mhmmm. The joys. Rachel: Nobody saw that coming. And then you know, things for the entire society obviously went completely off the rails. Obviously something like COVID is, we hope, not even once in a generation. Once in a hundred years experience. But given all the stuff that was up in the air, boy was I glad that there was one provider who I trusted. Who I could be like ok what do I do, what do I do. And I have to tell you that she and my daughter's pediatrician…I'm a professor. So I should say I'm in the classroom with young people who, you get sick a lot anyways. They're living in dorms, like they're not taking the best care of themselves. So COVID was circulating, and we live right outside New York City, COVID was circulating early here and I have a lot of colleagues that ended up getting it. And both my midwife and my child's pediatrician told me early you need to stop going in person, it's too dangerous for you. And I trust my daughter's pediatrician a lot, you know we have a nice relationship and I really trusted my midwife. Right? So I followed that advice and was really fortunate because boy. You know what you don't want while pregnant? COVID. And you know what you really didn't want? COVID in 2020 when you were pregnant and nobody knew anything, you know?Meagan: Right? Rachel: So, the blessing in disguise was that I was able to work from home. And it was super stressful because I had my daughter and my husband was here and you know, my husband is a photographer…I mean the funny thing is that I ended up, not my head but my body, being in these different photos he ended up taking and my belly was getting bigger and bigger and we kind of had to hide it. I'd be holding a book, or cleaning something. It was an absurd, crazy, isolating, scary, and also funny time. You know the blessing in disguise was that I wasn't on my feet as much and I think that that was really good for me as a pregnant person. There is also data that preterm birth went down during the lockdowns because people got to stay home and they don't necessarily get to do that leading up to birth, which tells us a lot about what we need and the rest we need and aren't getting. So anyway, at first everything went virtual and then when I started going in again for my appointments I had met the OB who works closely with my midwife. And we talked about what would happen if I went over 40 weeks. And he was like well, we're not going to automatically schedule a C-section, we would talk about potentially waiting or induction. And I really appreciated having that conversation with him because I understood where he was coming from and it wasn't again like we're going to schedule a C-section right now. So we know if you get to 40+3 and you haven't had the baby, bing bang boom. And that was very important information about his risk tolerance and his stance. Just like with my first birth I went into prodromal labor a few days before my due date. I had had a membrane sweep with my midwife. My in-laws came to stay with my daughter and we went to the hospital on a Saturday night. I didn't know this but my father-in-law told my husband I think she's getting ahead of her skis. And he was right in the end. So we get to the hospital and my contractions stop. And I'm like oh no. And my midwife was like, they put me on the monitor to get a strip which is like you know, what happens. Meagan: Normal.Rachel: And my midwife was like listen, your baby, he's not looking that good on the monitor. I want you to rest for a little bit and let's see. So I'll check back in with you in like half an hour. And I was so upset. I remember being like I can totally see where this is going to go and I had learned about VBAC in terms of like what could increase the chance of rupture or not and I was like I'm going to end up with another C-section and I'm going to be caught in the net. I didn't even have a shot, is what I felt. And then she came back half an hour later and she was like, “He looks great. I think he was just sleeping, and if you want to go home you can go home.”  And it was like 1 o'clock in the morning. And I was like, “I think we should go home.” I just felt like he's not ready. He's not ready to be born.  And remember, I trusted her so much. She would not tell me this if she thought that there was something…Meagan: If there was something wrong. Rachel: Exactly. She wasn't trying to be my friend. She was my provider. And so it felt really weird to leave and come home and not have a baby. And I thought was this the wrong thing to do, because I live like half an hour from the hospital, and was like no this is it.And then everything was quiet for a few days. And then just like my first labor, my daughter, I went into labor in the middle of the night and I had intense back labor, and I knew like this is the real deal, here we are. And this time I tried to rest. I did like cat/cow and just like anything, child's pose, just anything to feel more comfortable. And I called my midwife at 7 in the morning and she was like, “Okay, I want you to come in and be prepared to go into the hospital from this appointment.” So we did that and at that appointment, I had a headache, I had higher blood pressure, I was dilated to a 6, and she said to me, “Listen. Just so you know, they're not going to let you go home. You're going to the hospital, no matter what if your contractions stop or not whatever. This is what's happening because of how dilated you are, the fact that you have this headache, this BP readings, whatever.” And I was like that's completely reasonable, I felt that way too. You know what I mean? But I really appreciated she communicated that with me so clearly and explained why. So I planned initially to try to have an unmedicated, vaginal birth. My midwife and I had discussed these saline boluses you can have in your, by your, what's it called. Like the triangular bone in your back? I'm totally blanking. Meagan: Your sacrum?Rachel: The sacrum. Yeah, that that can alleviate some pain. And very quickly the pain was, I found it to be unbearable. And I asked for an epidural. And the anaesthesiologist came right away and did a very good job. And the nurses and the midwife who were at the hospital were using a peanut ball and helping me move and really supportive emotionally. And I was still really scared, right? Because I had had this terrible birth before, I thought something would happen to me. And nobody treated me like I was exaggerating or you know like, unreasonable. And that mattered a lot. And I think what's important is you shouldn't have to have gone through a bad birth for people then to take you at face value. With your first birth, it should be the standard for everybody. Meagan: Such a powerful saying right there. Rachel: And they were wonderful, truly, clinically and beside.Meagan: Good.Rachel: And then my midwife surprised me by showing up. She was not on call, she came in at like 9 o'clock, no she came in at like 5 o'clock, like once she'd seen her patients and I was just like oh my god,  so moved to see her. And you know, I was pretty far along at that point and she kind of helped me get into different positions and then it was like okay, it was time to push. And they had managed that epidural so I could feel when it was time to push, and I could feel how she and the nurse were telling me to like push here, right? Like use this, make this go. The pain was really intense but it wasn't suffering, like okay, I'm getting instruction. And as I was pushing I could feel that it wasn't going to work. I was like he's not, his head…I could just feel it. Apparently he was kind of coming and kind of going back up, like his head forward and back. And my midwife was like do I have permission from you to try and move his head? I think his head is not in the best position. And I said yes, and she tried to do it and she couldn't. Her fingers weren't strong enough and then she went to the OB and she told me this later.She said to him can you come and move his head? He'd been trained by midwives in the military, by the way, which is one reason his clinical skills are so amazing.Meagan: That's awesome. Okay.Rachel: Awesome. And at first he apparently was like, oh she's a VBAC, like I can't believe you're asking me to do this. And my midwife, again they trust each other right, and she was like the baby's doing great and the mom's doing great. I really think this is going to work. And he was like okay. So he came in, asked my permission, I said yes and he moved my son's head. My water had not broken again, right? So it's like the same thing as the first one. And once he got in position and I started pushing my water broke in an explosion all over my midwife. That's why they wear goggles, now I know. And she went and changed her clothes. I pushed for 45 minutes and then he came out.Meagan: Oh my gosh. Rachel: It was amazing and I felt so proud and I was completely depleted. I was so high and also so low. And I think what's amazing to me is that it was almost the same labor as my daughter, which just tells me that's how my body tends to do.Meagan: Your pelvis. And some babies need to enter posterior or even in a weird position to actually get down. So that can happen. Rachel: Thank you. And also my water didn't break until the very end so there was buoyancy to be moved, right? And again who knows what would have happened if I had been with this provider the first time. Like maybe these decels really meant that my daughter had to come out like then. That is possible. And that first team did not have the skills of the second team. None of this was even brought up, wasn't even a possibility. And I should say that first birth, I didn't even mention this. The OB that gave me that C-section, later told me that my daughter's head was kind of cocked when he took her out. Which suggests that it was just like my son. And how I'm grateful for my epidural. I'm grateful for, you know, all the things that technological kept me safe, but it was these skills of facilitating vaginal birth that made the difference for me to have that VBAC. Meagan: Absolutely. And the hardest thing for me is seeing that these skills are being lost. Rachel: Yes.Meagan: Or maybe it's not that they're being lost, they're being ignored. And I don't know which one it is. I really don't know because I see people using them. So I feel like it's got to be there. But then I go to other births and I'm like, wait what? You're not going to do anything to help her right here? Or you know, it probably could have been a vaginal birth if we had a provider come in and be like we have  a little asynclitic head, why don't we change into this position and let me see if I can just ever so slightly help this baby's head turn. It just isn't even offered. Rachel: Yes. Meagan: And that's something that I think needs to be added to questions for your provider. In the event that my baby is really low and coming vaginally, but is in a wonky position, what do you do to help my babys' position change to help me have a vaginal birth. And then even further what steps do you take past then if it doesn't work and my baby's so slow. Do we do assisted delivery? What do we do, let's have this conversation. So if it does come up, you're aware. Rachel: I love that. Meagan: I was going to say if your provider says, I don't know/I don't really help, then maybe that's not your right provider. Rachel: And I think what's so smart about that framing is that it's not putting the provider on the defensive of like, what's your training, right? Then it's like, what is your problem? But you're actually asking about their skills and you're asking about their approach, without coming from a place of seeming doubt. Just like, I'm just curious. Meagan: Yeah. Like what could I expect if this were to happen, especially if in the past. Say your C-section was failure to descend, mostly based off on position, we know that this is a big thing. But if your past cesarean was failure to descend, ask those questions to your provider. What steps can you take? What steps can we do together, you and I, to help this baby come out vaginally? Rachel: Totally. And I think also, that way, let's say the VBAC doesn't work out, you won't then be looking back over your shoulder and being like I should of/could of/why didn't I/if only. And you know, what do you want out of your birth experience? Well a lot, but part of it is a sense of peace. Right? That I did the best that I could. That my team did the best that they could.Meagan: Yes. Yeah and really interviewing your provider. Again, dating your provider and asking them the questions, learning more about them and what they do and their view. Taking out the yes and no questions and really trying to get to know this provider and letting them get to know you. I think it's just so impactful. I also, kind of like what you were saying with your first birth, also learning the other types of birth that could happen, you know learning about assisted birth. This is a new thing. Learning if assisted birth trumps a cesarean for you. Would you rather go for an assisted birth, even if it may end in cesarean, would you rather attempt that? Or would you just rather skip that and go right to the cesarean. Really educating yourself and trying not to push off the scary even though it can be scary. Rachel: Yes, yes. I love that you're saying this and I was just thinking about this and talking about this with a friend; there's stuff we hope doesn't happen. But not talking about it or thinking about it isn't going to protect us from it happening, it's just going to mean you're not prepared. Meagan: Yeah.Rachel: If it does happen. And yeah. Meagan: It's a disservice to ourselves. And it's weird. And it's hard to hear those stories. It's hard to hear the CBAC stories, it's hard to hear the uterine rupture stories that we do share on this podcast. Kind of what you're talking about the trigger warnings earlier, yeah it might be a trigger. It really might. But if we know all the signs of uterine rupture leading up to, we can be aware. And it's not something to hyperfocus on. We don't want it to be like oh my gosh I have this weird pain, right now, I don't know. It's not to make you scared, it really isn't. It's to just help you feel educated. Kind of what you were saying too. I don't know what a C-section looked like until I was in my own C-section. Rachel: Yeah. I've been talking about this recently with an anesthesiologist, some anti-anxiety medicine which you might get during a C-section, can cause memory loss. That's a side effect. So the time to decide…Let's say you're not planning on having a C-section. And then you're having a C-section and you're really anxious, really reasonable. The time to decide whether to take that anti-anxiety medicine which might cause memory loss; you should have an opportunity to reflect on that and talk about that  and think about that not only in the moment when you're scared and should I take it right now or not. Meagan: Yeah.Rachel: It's just like that's not a good way to make a decision, you know?Meagan: Yeah. And also learning about alternatives. Okay, these are the side effects of this medication, and I don't think I'm willing to accept that. So let's talk about other medications and those side effects so we can see if we can switch it up.  They have a whole bunch of things in their toolbox when it comes to medication. Rachel: Exactly. Meagan: For nausea. You know I had a medication and it affected my chest. It went all the way into my chest and I had to consciously focus on my chest moving. It was the weirdest feeling. Rachel: Terrifying, yeah. Meagan: I wish I would have known the alternatives to that. Right? So having these educated discussions, learning as much as you can. It's hard and it's scary and it's intimidating to not learn what you don't want. It's understandable, too.Rachel: Completely, completely. But that's informed consent, right? The risks, the benefits, the alternatives. And to go back to the anti-anxiety thing. You might be like okay, what could you do for me non-pharmacologically? Let's say I have a C-section and I'm feeling really anxious. Can I have a doula with me there who's giving me a massage? Can I have a doula there who's maybe put some lavender essence on a washcloth to hold to my nose. Can the anesthesiologist hold my hand and tell me it's going to be okay? And then you start actually opening up real options. Like wow I can have a doula with me?Meagan: Yes. That is something that I am very passionate about. We need to get doulas in the OR way more than we are. And I understand that it's like oh we don't have PPE, or oh it's an extra body, and oh it's a very big surgery, like I understand that. But I have been in the OR a good handful of times. And I understand my position in that room. I understand and respect my position in that room. And I always let an anesthesiologist know, if at any point something happens where I need to leave this room you just tell me. I will leave. No questions asked. But please let me be here with my client. Please let me stroke her hair. Please let me talk to her when dad goes over to baby so she's not alone. When you were put under general anesthesia to be there by your side, whether or not you were waking up in the OR. Because sometimes you could wake up sooner, or waking up in post-operative. Let's get these people here. Let's play music. Let's talk to them. Let's communicate the birth.I mean with my first C-section, they were complaining about the storm outside, they weren't even talking to me, right? And it would have impacted my birth in such a more positive light if I would have been talked to. And I wouldn't have felt like, what's going on. You know and all those things, you talked about it in your book. This drape that is separating us from our birth, it's just wild. So one of the questions we ask when you sign up to be on the podcast is topics of discussion that you would like to share, and one of those things is you said, why it's important to balance preparation for VBAC with an understanding of the systemic forces that promote C-sections. We're kind of talking about that, but do you have anything else to say on that? Rachel: I think that there is so much self-blame for having a C-section, when you wanted to have a vaginal birth. And go back to pain and suffering, that causes suffering. And it's heartbreaking to see that and to feel that. And when I think about it, I think what's important to keep in mind is like there are the particulars of your experience, right? Like your providers had the skills or didn't. They listened or they didn't. Your baby had decels or didn't. Like all that is real. And you're not the first or only person any of that is happening to. So why are we hooked up to electronic fetal monitoring, EFM, as soon as we walk into the hospital? Well that is because of how technology reigns supreme right now in every aspect of our society, but medicine too. And also that like it's an efficient system and medical birth, medicalized birth is all about efficiency and making as much money as possible frankly. Meagan: And there's even deeper history, we talk about that in our VBAC course, about why that was happening around cerebral palsy and what it actually did for cerebral palsy rates. All of these things. It's pretty fascinating when you get into it and understand one, why they do it and does it work? Does it make sense? They do it and just became practice and norm, but it did it actually impact the things that, okay how do I say this. Does it impact the things that they were originally creating it to impact? Rachel: Right. Totally. And it's actually the opposite; it was supposed to bring down the number of C-section rates, or the number of C-sections, when the number was like 4.5% in the early seventies and it's just gone in the opposite direction.There's so much evidence that you use it and it makes you more likely to have a C-section. And so yeah, okay, not your fault. That's the system. And I don't mean it in this way like, that's the system, give up, lay down, don't try to make your own feet, but also just to accept that that's what you're operating in and that's what your providers are operating in too. Right? Use it as a way to let go of the guilt and the shame and the, I messed up. My body messed up. Meagan: Yeah. Because there's so many of us that feel that. Rachel: Yes. Meagan: And it goes into the next topic they were saying that I think really can help us walk away with less of, I messed up. My body messed up. My baby failed me. You know whatever it may be. And doing effective research about the hospitals and their employment patterns and the chances of you even having a VBAC. That does kind of go into the balls in our court where we have to get the education and understand. But even when we do that, even when we don't have the best experience, in the end we're still going to look back at it as we did, WE did, the best we could. Right? And it takes less of that blame on us in a way because we know we did everything we could. Rachel: Yes.Meagan: And sometimes it just still happens. Even if you have the doula. Take the VBAC course. Read all the VBAC books, listen to all the podcasts, understand all the risks. Sometimes it still happens. Rachel: Totally. And I mean I think about in my case, like let's say my midwife hadn't come in for me and my OB hadn't been the one who had been attending that night, maybe I would have had a C-section. Because maybe the people there wouldn't have known how to effectively move my son's head. Even though I like did my best and that's okay. It has to be okay because you can't kind of change it. And again, not to be defeat-ist. But to find peace, just to find peace. Meagan: Yeah. I wish that for our VBAC community is finding peace and giving ourselves grace along our journeys. Because we've had 100's of podcast stories and there are so many of us who are still searching for peace. And still not offering ourselves grace, and putting that blame on us, or whatever, right? Everyone's so different and again, we talked about this earlier, it's just different. But I would love to see our community offering themselves more grace and finding more peace with their experiences along the way. And I don't exactly know what that healing looks like and how that peace is found. Do you have any suggestions on ways you have found peace with a very very very traumatic experience that not only led to trauma in that experience, but even in future procedures, in future experiences you know. Do you have any tips on just, guidance on finding peace? Rachel: I mean, I struggle with this still. And it sounds counterintuitive, but I think like not pushing away your feelings. And in the sense of not wallowing, but also not like struggling against them, trying to quiet them, make them be like ugh I hate this. Ugh I hate that I feel this way. Ugh if only I could get over it. So I'll say like, when I go to the doctor now, I get really scared especially if it's a new person and my blood pressure goes up and sometimes my heart rate goes up and it just sort of happens. And I hate it. And there are times when I'm like ugh I hate this part of me. I just hate it.But then when I'm kind of more accepting and it's like, this is how my body responds. It's understandable that this is how my body responds. And I take a Xanax actually. I say that to really take away the stigma I think that still exists around medical trauma and taking medication to manage your symptoms. I take a low dose Xanax before I go to see a provider and it helps me with my suffering. And also just like accepting. Because also there's this saying, if you struggle against the feelings of suffering, then you kind of suffer twice over. Right?Meagan: You do. Rachel: So I would say that, and then specifically for people who feel they had a traumatic experience, I've found EMDR treatment to be very effective, to deal with stuff in the body. That was pioneered more to deal with people who've been in like combat trauma, but it's very effective for traumatic birth. Tapping is another thing that can be very effective. And you can find that online, like there are different…Meagan: I was gonna say, you can go to YouTube and google trauma tapping or anything like that, and you can actually find some pretty great videos for free on how to do that. And it's pretty wild actually how well it works. Rachel: It really is. Meagan: Sometimes it's like wait, how is this working? It really does work. Rachel: Totally. And also I would say like in terms of again, peace, I think it's really important to speak openly about what has happened to you. And to the extent possible, we're conditioned to be like I'm just going to tie this up with a bow and it's okay. Someone says to you, you've expressed something hard, and they're like oh I'm so sorry and you're like it's okay, I'm going to be okay. Like you don't have to worry so much about reassuring your listener. You can be like yeah I had this C-section, and I'm still kind of upset about it. And yeah, that's how I feel. You don't have to self-qualify that. You know, but my baby is healthy. But I'm okay. But I love my baby. We do that; there's a lot of pressure to do that. And it's okay not to do that. It's okay to be like these are my feelings. And two things can be true at the same time. You can love your baby, and you can also be like I'm not that thrilled with the birth. Meagan: Awe yes. Julie and I have talked about that for years. They don't have to be separate. They can go together. You can love your baby and feel connected to your baby and really not like your birth experience. And you can also, we have found that people prep and then they have a vaginal birth and they're like I actually didn't really like that either. So you know, they don't have to just always be separate. You can be really happy and really be upset at the same time. It's okay to have those feelings, right? I have had things in my life where I've done something and I'm like dang. I really like how it turned out, but I hated the journey to getting there. And that's okay. So I love that you pointed that out. Rachel: Yes. or if you think about how you feel on your children's birthdays. So like I have very different feelings on my daughter's birthdays then my son's birthday. I had a good birth with my son. And it was good not because it was a VBAC, but because I was respected and I felt safe. That's what made that a good birth. Right? Just to be totally clear. I'm really glad I had a VBAC, I'm happy I got what

The Journey of Being a Dad Fatherhood is a journey filled with joy, challenges, and continuous growth. On the latest episode of the Dads with Daughters podcast, we sit down with Damien Moore, a dedicated father and founder of Dad's Daily Digest. Through their engaging conversation, Damien shares heartfelt experiences, invaluable insights, and practical advice for fathers striving to raise resilient and compassionate children. Preparing for the Unexpected The Impact of COVID-19 on Fatherhood Damien Moore's journey into fatherhood coincided with an unprecedented global event—the COVID-19 pandemic. His daughter was born just six weeks before the world shut down. As a budding freelance professional, Damien faced the harsh reality of job loss while also navigating the new terrain of fatherhood amidst a pandemic. The absence of his family in the crucial initial months underscored the emotional strain many new parents faced during this period. "There's no parenting tips or books that tell you how to parent during a pandemic," Damien states, highlighting the uncertainty that clouded the early days of his fatherhood journey. Despite these challenges, Damien found solace and support in technology, enabling constant communication with his family through virtual platforms. This adaptability and reliance on a support network became a cornerstone of his approach to parenting during these trying times. Addressing Mental Health: A Family Affair Understanding and Managing Anxiety Both Damien and his wife come from families with a history of mental health challenges, making them acutely aware of the importance of mental well-being. Recognizing early signs of anxiety in their daughter, they took proactive steps to understand and address her needs. From withholding toileting behaviors to being easily startled, these manifestations of anxiety required a sensitive and informed approach. "We adapt as parents based on our kids' personalities," shares Damien, emphasizing the need for a tailored parenting approach that considers individual differences. Damien's candidness about his own mental health struggles and his decision to seek therapy underline the importance of self-awareness and the willingness to seek help. By sharing these experiences, he sets a powerful example for other fathers, encouraging them to prioritize their mental health for the benefit of their families. Building a Supportive Community The Birth of Dad's Daily Digest Inspired by personal experiences and a desire to support other fathers, Damien launched Dad's Daily Digest—a platform aimed at providing advice, sharing stories, and fostering a supportive community among fathers. The alarming rise in suicide rates during the pandemic, particularly among men, motivated Damien to create a space where fathers could find solace, encouragement, and practical tips on navigating the complexities of parenthood. "If I just touch one person and inspire one individual... that's all that matters to me." Through this platform, Damien hopes to tackle the stigma around mental health and provide a lifeline to fathers who might be struggling in silence. His unwavering commitment to making a positive impact, even if it's one person at a time, speaks volumes about his dedication to this cause. Lessons in Empathy and Compassion A Beautiful Gesture In a touching anecdote shared on the podcast, Damien recounts a moment with his daughter that encapsulates the essence of the lessons he strives to impart. While at a McDonald's drive-thru, his daughter's simple yet profound act of kindness towards a homeless individual demonstrated the values of empathy and generosity that Damien and his wife instill in her. "Her gesture was just so beautiful… it nearly brought me to tears." These moments of heartfelt connection not only reinforce the principles Damien values but also highlight the significant impact that nurturing a compassionate environment can have on a child's development. Looking Towards the Future Hopes and Aspirations As Damien continues to build Dad's Daily Digest, his ultimate aspiration is to become a motivational speaker, sharing his journey and insights on a larger scale. By doing so, he hopes to inspire and support more fathers in their quest to raise strong, compassionate daughters while also navigating their own personal challenges. In concluding his conversation with Dr. Christopher Lewis, Damien leaves listeners with a powerful piece of advice: put life into perspective, recognize your blessings, and approach each day with gratitude. These principles not only shape his parenting philosophy but also serve as a guiding light for fathers everywhere striving to be the best they can be. This comprehensive blog post captures the essence of the podcast episode, featuring key anecdotes and insights shared by Damien Moore, ultimately providing valuable guidance and motivation for fathers navigating the beautiful yet challenging journey of parenthood.     TRANSCRIPT (Unedited transcript created using CASTMAGIC) Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:05]: Welcome to Dads with Daughters. In this show, we spotlight dads, resources, and more to help you be the best dad you can be. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:16]: Welcome back to the Dance with Daughters podcast where we bring you guests to be active participants in your daughters' lives, raising them to be strong, independent women. Really excited to have you back again this week. And every week, I love being able to sit down, talk to you, work with you as you are trying to be the best dad that you wanna be. And as you are trying to raise your daughters into those strong independent women that all of us want for our kids. And I so appreciate that you come back every week to be able to learn, to grow, to be willing to hear the stories of others, and to be able to take those stories and be able to turn them into action. Because it is important. It's important to be able to be willing to listen and to learn and to know that none of us have all the answers. None of us are perfect ads, and nobody has the handbook in regard to what it means and what it takes to be the perfect dad. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:16]: There's lots of different ways to father, lots of different ways to be a dad. And you can learn along the way if you're open to it and you're willing to listen and learn from others. That's why this podcast exists. Every week, I bring you different people, different dads, different individuals with resources that can help you to be that dad that you wanna be. And today, we got another great guest with us. Damian Moore is with us. And Damien is a father and also is has has a resource out there called Dad's Daily Digest. So we're gonna be talking about both of those aspects, getting to know him a little bit more, and I'm really excited to have him here. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:53]: Damien, thanks so much for being here today. Damien Moore [00:01:54]: Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:56]: Well, I'm really excited to have you here today. And I always start these episodes with an opportunity to turn the clock back in time. I'd love to go back. I know your daughter is 4 and a half, and I would love to go back and might be 4 and a half years, could be 5a half years. But I wanna go back to the very first moment that you found that you were going to be a dad to a daughter. What was going through your head? Damien Moore [00:02:18]: Yeah. So I was actually in the UK at the time. I found out the gender. My wife called me. I was visiting family. I'm originally from the UK and France, and I got the call. And it was just ecstatic. I mean, it's you know, I think as a guy, I I always thought, you know, I'd like to have a little boy. Damien Moore [00:02:35]: But I've always friends of mine who have actually many of my friends had daughters before me. And they, you know, told me just how precious it was and how special it was to have that kind of daddy daughter bond. So, I mean, I was absolutely ecstatic to find out that news. And, yeah, to this day, it's just the greatest feeling, and bond is so true, and I've just loved every minute so far. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:55]: Now I talked to a lot of dads, and and a lot of dads and daughters talk to me about the fact that walking into fatherhood can be scary in general, just being a father, because we don't know always what we're getting into. But being a father of a daughter sometimes brings its own fears. What would you say has been your biggest fear in raising a daughter? Damien Moore [00:03:14]: I think, as you say, I obviously t to raise a confident, independent girl, one that kind of can can take on the world in her own way. Take on the world in her own way. I don't wanna, you know, control her too much. I wanna her to understand that the world is is a fluid and flexible place that you can kind of embrace in many different ways. And I think being raised by a a very kind of strong mother, you know, she instilled kind of positivity in me every day and just to kind of really embrace the world ahead of us and challenges and and opportunities. And I think I just wanna give her that opportunity every day that life is a beautiful thing and it's embrace every day with kind of open arms. There will be challenges. There will be tough times, and it's how you best prepare them for those moments in life when they one day leave the nest. Damien Moore [00:03:56]: You know, we have a role as parents to be there for their whole lives until we die, but when they're here at home with us, when we're raising them, we have a responsibility to kind of, you know, keep them safe and make sure that they understand and and teach them in in a in a in a way that's not too I wouldn't say too controlling, but in a way that kind of allows them to understand the world up, you know, outside of the house and be best prepared as possible. Because life can be tough. You know? Life throws all sorts of challenges. And for me particularly, you know, I had my daughter 6 weeks before COVID closed down the world and went through a really personal tough time during that moment because my own family couldn't visit my daughter. Basically, 16 months. They didn't meet her until she was 16 months old, and as a new dad, particularly wanted to celebrate this moment. This was like something you dream of. You celebrate the birth of your first child with your parents, with your your siblings, and it was really tough. Damien Moore [00:04:44]: They they were 1 week away from coming to America, and then the borders closed, and it was kind of a there's no, like, parenting tips or books that tell you how to parent during a pandemic. It's like, that doesn't exist. So, you know, my wife and I kind of went through the motions of, like, wow, this is actually happening. The world's shutting down. We have a 6 week 6 week old daughter. I was actually freelancing at the time and lost my job as well. So it all happened at a very, very stressful moment, like and it was, like, gonna be this most beautiful thing ever, and it was. Like, you know, the first few weeks was, like, incredible. Damien Moore [00:05:14]: You know, we've got dogs at home. It's like the dogs are super happy to have this new baby at home, but then the world shut down, and we had to kind of really adjust and figure life out as new parents during a COVID pandemic. And I think those life learnings for me just reiterate how we can best prepare our kids for the unexpected and for, you know, just to be best prepared for the real world. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:05:34]: Definitely a challenging time, and COVID threw us all through a loop in many different ways. But being able to have a child right at the beginning and not being able to allow for your family and others to be able to interact. How did you have to pivot, especially losing a job, having a new child, just a couple of stressors in that situation during that pandemic? How did you pivot to be able to make the most of what you had, but also be able to move forward with being a father and moving into a new job and and other things as well. Damien Moore [00:06:12]: Yes. I mean, thankfully, even now during COVID and and now, my wife's family is very close to us. So thankfully, we had her support network. So we had her mom, her brothers, and other wider family members around us. So we had that support, which was very needed at the time. Now for me, personally, I I did struggle not having my mom, my dad available right next door. So we're blessed today to have great technology, so FaceTime was critical. You know, we did a lot of FaceTiming, and it's amazing how, you know, from just an early age, how much these children pick up and learn and they recognize faces. Damien Moore [00:06:45]: So the first time my daughter met my mom when she was 16 months old, she wasn't a complete stranger because she she did recognize her through the FaceTime interaction. So we're lucky today to have that type of technology to stay in touch with members of our family despite the distances. I mean, moving to America, I always knew, you know, building a life here and having a family here would always be different than what I was raised with because I was raised with family members very close to me in the UK. But I knew I was kind of giving, you know, distance between me and my family, so I always knew that my parents always have a different relationship with my daughter than my my brother's daughters who live in the UK. And I was okay with that because I know technology is great today to kind of stay in touch. I mean, from a professional standpoint, on the job side, it was a rough few months. I personally am very I'm kind of an extrovert. I love being around people. Damien Moore [00:07:30]: I love socializing. So COVID was tough on that side of my own kind of mental challenges. I I was obviously locked at home a lot, so I decided to actually become a waiter during that time. I done waiting very early on in my in my teens, but I decided to become a waiter to kinda get myself out of the house so I could put my mental being in a better place. So at home, I wasn't so stressed and anxious and cooped up in the house. Being a waiter allowed me to get out of the house, socialize with people, it just gave me a better, like, headspace for myself. So I did that for about 8 months. As well as, obviously, it provided some sort of revenue for the family. Damien Moore [00:08:03]: Not not obviously huge, but it gave me something to kind of keep going. So, I mean, that's how I pivoted during those times. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:09]: You went through some challenging times at the very beginning. You moved into where you are today. Throughout your time in raising your daughter. It's not always going to be positive moments or easy moments. There's definitely challenges along the way. What's been the hardest part in being a father to a daughter? Damien Moore [00:08:27]: So I think it's adapting to their personalities. They're, you know, they're little unique humans, and I got parented one way. My wife got parented another way. So for me, even those cultural differences from America and the UK, vastly different the way we were parented. So I've had to just adapt. And I've actually embraced the way my wife's parenting style, which is very, I would say, kind of open door policy, very family orientated. It's not to say that I wasn't brought up family orientated, but it's it's just a different style here, and I've actually really embraced it the way we've kind of oriented our child. Both on my wife's side and my and my side, we've kind of come from families with that suffer from depression and and anxiety, and we know this is hereditary. Damien Moore [00:09:06]: So we we're kind of aware and very conscious about that with our daughter, what kind of traits will she pick up from that, and she is a very anxious toddler. From a very young age, she would withhold, and withholding is when children obviously don't have much control over anything is when they withhold going to the toilet. So withholding their poo, so it's that can be quite stressful for a toddler, you know. They go 2 or 3 days without going to the toilet. And as a parent, we have to start, you know, pivoting and taking care of this because it can get quite serious if there's not she doesn't relieve herself. So we noticed these traits very early on and we kind of read up about it and it's it's typical anxiety within toddlers. And to this day, there's traits we see today. She's very easily startled, for example. Damien Moore [00:09:44]: So growing up and even like when she was 2, 3 years old, I work in the basement here at home sometimes. And if I just come up through the basement door, she'd easily be startled terrified, absolutely terrified, running, like screaming because a noise startled her. So we've had to really adjust the kind of how we parent her in a way that's kind of, I'd say, really conscious to that to her anxiety, and we make sure that she feels as safe as possible and that we're here. We're here for her. We're here to talk to her. We're here to listen to her. Just to understand those fears and kinda parent her in a way that's, not as I said earlier, not too controlling on her because she needs that control. She's like anxious, so she wants to control situations and she wants to kind of get through them in in her way and and manage it in her way. Damien Moore [00:10:24]: And I think, you know, we have to learn from our kids as well. Even from a very early age, we adapt as parents based on our kids' personalities. And while she has these anxious moments, she's also just an absolutely beautiful soul. I mean, she's just a delight to be around. She's a lot of fun as well. She likes to dance and giggle and all that. So it's just managing those different personality traits very early on. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:10:44]: So talk to me a little bit about mental health and some of the things that you just were talking about. The fact that, you know, you come from a family that has battled mental health issues. Your wife has as well. You're dealing with your own things that you are working through, whether it's things that you have had that you've brought with you through your own upbringing and your familial ties or the own your own issues that you're dealing with, and you're starting to see those things in your own child. Talk to me about what you've had to do thus far as you've worked with your own child to work through some of these? And what are some of the things that you think that you're going to have to do based on what you're seeing now and what you think may happen, seeing that she's only 4a half at this point? Damien Moore [00:11:33]: Both my wife and I, we both have, as I said, family history in in kind of depression and anxiety. And I was raised around that as a as a young child, and, my parents got divorced when I was about 6 years old. And, you know, as a child, you're not really aware of what's happening at that age. But as an adult, I've kind of really started questioning it and talking to my dad who suffers from depression to get his side of the story. I wanna understand from him what he went through at literally my age now. You know, he went through a divorce. He had 3 boys. And I was just I wanted to understand the stresses and pressures that he was under because when I went through COVID, as I said, a new dad lost my job. Damien Moore [00:12:07]: I had my own kind of battles at that time. So he was a great resource for me to talk to. He really kind of helped just explain things to me in certain ways that I was challenging my own self. So he was great to kind of be a a kind of a a person of of resource for me personally during some really difficult times. I think, you know, for our daughter, there are obviously child therapists out there that we, you know, we wanna potentially engage with at some point soon. We've noticed some of these behaviors have died down a little bit, like the the the startling doesn't happen as much now as it used to when she's 2 or 3 years old because some of the things that she just gets used to, her her surroundings and her environment. But we're aware that you know, we constantly talk, my wife and I, about these you know, about the kind of our upbringings and and how this may influence our daughter and and just very conscious and aware of her behaviors. And we're just lucky today, I think. Damien Moore [00:12:54]: You know, mental health is so much more prominent and so much more spoken. There's more visibility around it today than there was when my parents were growing up. When I spoke to my dad, I remember him saying to me, if he was having a down day, people would just say nip it in the bud, get on with your day kind of thing. That was the attitude. But today, people are so much more conscious about it. You know, companies have better kind of mental health, kind of resources available. So we're definitely lucky in that instance that we can have that access to great resources. I myself have actually personally started therapy for the first time in the last couple of months. Damien Moore [00:13:23]: I've never had therapy. I've never kind of felt the need of therapy. My wife's had therapy her entire life. So I've just wanted to kind of explore that for myself as an avenue just to kind of speak to someone else, speak to an independent individual that's not kind of part of, you know, my network of family and friends and not my wife's network of family and friends. And I've always just, you know, from the first session or 2, I've actually found it quite liberating just sharing stuff with someone I don't really know. And as I said, I've never done it before, so I'm kinda learning my own ways through therapy. And, you know, we'll tackle that with our daughter when we feel like we need to. We've got, obviously, her doctor we talk to a lot about. Damien Moore [00:13:56]: We ask her a lot of questions about certain things that, you know, we've noticed, and she gives us great advice already. So, yes, we take it day by day for now. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:14:03]: And it's all you can do. And I know that with all of those experiences, you got motivated. You got motivated to try to start having these conversations with other men, with other fathers, to be able to help individuals through a new venture called Dad's Daily Digest, the blog TikTok that you're trying to engage people to talk to people inspire people in different ways. Talk to me about Dad's Daily Digest Outside of what I just said, what were some of the impetuses for why you wanted to move in this way to be able to engage with other men in this way? Damien Moore [00:14:39]: The real motivation, my uncle committed suicide when I was probably my early twenties. I've had a friend commit suicide as well through alcohol abuse. Again, I was in my mid twenties when that happened. So I've been exposed to suicide, and I know the effects it hap it has on families. And when COVID hit, I started seeing the suicide rates going up. You know, you read about it in the news, you see it, and it disproportionately affects men. And I think last year, I think it was about 50,000 people commit suicides in the US alone last year. I think 80% of those were men. Damien Moore [00:15:10]: Now these statistics are alarming. And, you know, having gone through it with my uncle and knowing, you know, the pain and and it causes families is I wanted to create a platform of of sorts to, I guess, inspire people and also just maybe give tips and advice on life, having been through these experiences myself and knowing what it does to families. So I've started this, as you say, Dad's Daily Digest, where I wanted to share some of my own struggles I've gone through from my professional career to my personal life. And I said to myself, even if I just touch one person and inspire one individual from potential changing their mind on the way they go in life, that's all that matters to me. I'm not here to, like, change the whole world, but it's like I wanna make a little dent in that space. I wanna inspire men and be a resource of some sort of resource and maybe give tips and advice through that platform, and just to show that life is tough. I mean, we go through struggles, but you can persevere and you can really kind of rely on others. And I am very lucky. Damien Moore [00:16:10]: I know I'm very lucky that I've got a great network around me. I've really got a supportive family. I've got a supportive wife, and I've got her family that support me. So I know I'm blessed to have that, and I know some people don't have that necessarily. So if they just reach out through a platform and just wanna get ask a question or have a concern, I wanna be someone there potentially to help them. I just you know, as I said, even just touching one person's life would be would mean a lot to me. I've just started creating this platform just to kinda get content out there and be a bit more of a voice in that space to hopefully inspire other men. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:16:41]: Now you've just started this platform. You're starting to get words out there. What are you finding thus far in the conversations that you're having with people that you're interacting with? Damien Moore [00:16:49]: It's been actually quite lovely. I've actually came to a few dads who have similar TikTok channels, and I think it's just relatable. We you know, obviously, each family is unique in the way they bring their their children, but there's so much we can relate to, so many similar funny situations, stressful situations that you go through being a parent. So it's nice to know that there's a community of us out there in that space, giving this kind of motivation, inspiration for others. So it's nice to know that you're not alone out there, kind of, trying to do this. There are other people out there. I mean, even yesterday, I posted a video. My daughter did this really touching thing, and I just had to share it in the moment. Damien Moore [00:17:24]: I was taking her through to a Happy Meal at McDonald's, and we got approached by a homeless person at the window. Now I could see he really needed help, and he was actually you know, he didn't come too close to my window. He saw I had a young child, but he slowed a certain distance, and then he said, you know, I don't want money, I just want food. So I said, absolutely. What would you like me to get you? I'm putting the order in. He goes, just a burger and a bottle of water. So I said, absolutely. I'll get you a burger and a bottle of water. Damien Moore [00:17:46]: And my daughter reached over to give him a dollar bill because she likes to pay the person now at McDonald's money, she likes to do the kind of transaction. So she had this dollar bill in her hand, she gave it to him, and then he brought him to tears and then he brought me to tears because I was like, this gesture was just so beautiful, and even that post alone has kind of really reiterated that people just how beautiful these little moments. I mean, these children are so innocent, and it's just you know, I then had a whole conversation with her about homeless people because she wasn't you know, she was like, who is that person, daddy? Like, what what is he doing? And, you know, she wasn't used to this interaction with with a homeless person. So I come out to explain to her that homeless people are unfortunate individuals that don't have a home. We and I said, we're really lucky. We go to a home. We have a warm bed to sleep in. We can shower. Damien Moore [00:18:30]: And she even asked me, she goes, how does he shower? So, you know, she was really inquisitive about this individual. So I had to kind of, you know, explain to her, unfortunately, there are people out there that don't have homes and don't have families, and it's, you know, really tough on them. So and that's why I said to her. I said, your generosity was just so beautiful, Jessa, and it was so beautiful, and I just thanked her for that moment because I just, yeah, it got it nearly nearly brought me to tears. So I think, you know, and just seeing the the reaction to that video alone was just really nice, People kinda really sharing, like, their positivity around kind of that parenting and positivity around the child's behavior, and it's just great to see that there is this community out there for for people that that may need it. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:19:07]: It definitely warms your heart when you can see that and be able to be have that renewed sense of humanity that sometimes gets lost along the way. And sometimes we get lost in our own lives that it takes a child in the pure way that they see the world to be able to make us take a step back and say, Oh, yeah, you're right. I lost that along the way. And I got a good reminder today. Damien Moore [00:19:38]: Exactly. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:19:39]: So as you look at what you're doing right now, what you're putting out into the world, what you're trying to create, as you think about the future, where do you want this to go? Damien Moore [00:19:48]: For now, if I just touch a few individuals' lives, that would mean the world to me. You know, I think from from a personal standpoint, I'd like to have a stronger voice in that community. And, I mean, I think the ultimate goal one day, I would love to become a a motivational speaker. As I said, I'm an extrovert. I love being around people. I love, you know, trying to share my positivity and energy. I I kind of absorb other people's energy, and I would like to, you know, hopefully one day turn that into me being out there and being a strong voice and just helping people on more of a larger scale than just, you know, kind of a small platform for now. So, yeah, that's essentially where I'd like to go one day. Damien Moore [00:20:22]: Yeah. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:20:23]: I love it. It. Now we always finish our interviews with what I like to call our fatherhood 5, where I ask you 5 more questions to delve deeper into you as a dad. Are you ready? Damien Moore [00:20:31]: Sure. Yeah. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:20:32]: In one word, what is fatherhood? Damien Moore [00:20:34]: Beautiful. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:20:34]: Now I know your daughter's only 4 and a half, but I'm gonna still ask this question. When was the time that you finally felt that you succeeded at being a father to a daughter? Damien Moore [00:20:42]: I mean, even yesterday's moment was very touching. I guess when I see her sheer generosity and empathy and compassionate to other people. I've been a strong believer in actually raising my daughter around animals because of what that actually teaches children from a very young age. It teaches them responsibility, teaches them compassionate, empathy. Fortunately, it also teaches them about about death because we've had a couple of dogs die since she's been born and kind of explains to her what death is. But I think just seeing this beautiful girl through her life learnings and just seeing it kind of come out into the world to other people is a joy to see. So I think I take that as a success every day. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:21:19]: Now if I was to ask your daughter, how would she describe you as a dad? Damien Moore [00:21:22]: Probably say I'm quite silly. I like to do a lot of silly dancing with her. Ever since she was young, I I personally quite like my EDM music, and I like to get her into my DJs, so she's always kind of danced along to me. But I think also she probably I'm the one that's the slightly firmer one when it comes to consequences in the house. I think, you know, we all experience tantrums. We all experience that kind of naughty behavior. From about 3a half, 4 years old, she's been kinda testing the waters in terms of retaliation and testing, like, how far she can test her parents. So I probably am the firmer one compared to my wife. Damien Moore [00:21:56]: I like to give more consequences if I if I have to. So I don't know if I should use that, but I hopefully I think it should lead with silliness and fun because, personally, I had a good upbringing, but I wasn't necessarily raised by a dad who was silly and very fine and engaging. I was raised by great parents, but I don't recall my childhood memories as being silly and, like, just goofing around a lot. So I've wanted to instill that a lot in my parenting as my own you know, being a dad to my daughter. I just want it to be, like, lots of silliness and embrace that. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:27]: And if you think about this in, let's say, 15 years, what do you want her to say then? Damien Moore [00:22:32]: I hope she says that I've prepared her as best as pop as possible for the world. You know, I want her obviously to look up to me as as an inspiring figure in her life. I want her to feel that I've given her the most I possibly can in life. I've given her safety. I've given her a good upbringing. So, yeah, that they would be the things I'll dream of in terms of her saying to me. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:22:51]: Who inspires you to be a better dad? Damien Moore [00:22:53]: I have to say my mom. Because just knowing some of the upbringings that my family members have been through, I've always kind of just really pushed myself to be a better person. And I think she's always been there as my person that I go to whenever I reach my lowest moments. I always call her. She's my, you know, she's kind of carried me through many, many struggling moments in life, and she will still ahead in the future. And she's just my go to person for that. And she's definitely been my inspiration in life and inspired me to be a better dad, for sure. Damien Moore [00:23:23]: Now you've given a lot of piece of advice today, things for people to think about, things to ponder, for people to consider for their own mental health and being able to do what they have to do. As you think about any father, no matter what their situation, what's one piece of advice that you'd want to give to every dad? Damien Moore [00:23:42]: For me, personally, I've always liked to put things into perspective. I know we have to recognize our individual life and the stresses we deal with and not to ignore them. But at the same time, put things into perspective and just say to yourself, things could be so much worse. There's so much happening out there in the world where there are errands going through a lot harder things than you may be yourself. And I think it's important just to take a moment sometimes and just pause in that moment and say, do you know what? I'm blessed to have what I have right now. Like, I'm so thankful and share that gratitude and love to the people around you. And just know that it it can be so much tougher on other people in life. And I think just recognizing that and trying to instill that into your daily life a little bit, it's something I've always tried to live by just growing up. And I definitely share that kind of as my one kind of piece of advice to people. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:24:33]: Well, Damian, I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for sharing your own journey today, for sharing what you have gone through thus far, for sharing the resource that you're putting together. If people wanna find out more about you, where should they go? Damien Moore [00:24:46]: Yeah. So the the Dads Daily Digest website is is dadsdailydigest.co. And there's, yeah, there's a way you can reach out to me there. And there's also a TikTok channel if you wanna engage through TikTok. And also, I mean, I have a LinkedIn as well. So you can type my name in Damien Moore Evans, and you'll find me on LinkedIn as well. So happy to people if they choose to. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:04]: Well, Damien, thank you for being here today, and I wish you all the best. Damien Moore [00:25:07]: Thank you so much, Christopher. I appreciate it. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:25:09]: If you've enjoyed today's episode of the Dads with Daughters podcast, we invite you to check out the Fatherhood Insider. The fatherhood insider is the essential resource for any dad that wants to be the best dad that he can be. We know that no child comes with an instruction manual and most dads are figuring it out as they go along, and the fatherhood insider is full of resources and information that will up your game on fatherhood. Through our extensive course library, interactive forum, step by step roadmaps, and more, you will engage and learn with experts, but more importantly, dads like you. So check it out atfatheringtogether.org. If you are a father of a daughter and have not yet joined the dads with daughters Facebook community, there's a link in the notes today. Dads with daughters is a program of fathering together. We look forward to having you back for another great guest next week all geared to helping you raise strong and power daughters and be the best dad that you can be. Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:26:07]: We're all in the same boat And it's full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time. We give the lessons. We make the meals. We buy them presents and bring your AK. Because those kids are growing fast. The time goes by just like a dynamite blast. Calling astronauts and firemen, carpenters, and musclemen, get out and be the world to them. You're the best dad you can be. You're the best dad you can be.

Cooler temperatures are expected in Pennsylvania soon, and that means another season of respiratory illnesses. The CDC is recommending the updated 2024-25 COVID-19 vaccines and the updated 2024-25 flu vaccines to protect against severe COVID-19 and flu this fall and winter. Dr. John Goldman, UPMC Infectious Disease Specialist seconds the vaccine recommendations from the CDC. "So you can definitely get the Covid shot and the flu shot at the same time? Because all of these shots have side effects, I tend to try to have people space them out by a week or two apart. But one of the things that I really want to stress is the most important part isn't the timing. The most important part is getting the shot here. So if you have the choice, spaced them out a little bit because you might have fewer side effects. But but if you think, well, I'm not going to come to the pharmacy next week, my doctor's office isn't going to be able to get them next week and get them at the same time." There's currently a new COVID-19 vaccine called Novavax and it's a standard DNA vaccine. If you already gad the vaccine, Dr. Goldman recommends getting a booster shot.  "This virus mutates so rapidly that if you had Covid a couple of years ago, or you had a vaccine a couple of years ago, you were vaccinated against older strains, the so-called legacy strains, the ones that came out originally. And this virus of value, has evolved a lot since then. And so the newer vaccines are tailored to the to be much closer to the variants that are currently circulating and will provide you with a lot better protection and, natural infection and vaccination, just for whatever reason, tend to fade out with time." Covid is a virus, and being vaccinated will protect against severe disease and hospitalization.  "Covid is a virus. So Covid in most people you have you're going to fight it off. You're going to be cured of it because it will leave your system. There are a lot of people who have long Covid, so they will have side effects of Covid, but we think those side effects are more damage that the virus did before it left in damage, possibly from your immune response to the virus than the virus still being in your body. In addition, there are things mono, for example, that you get once and you never get again. Covid because it mutates so rapidly. You clearly. And because your immunity fades out, you can clearly get multiple times. Now, the vaccines, provide probably about 50% protection about from getting any Covid. Meaning if you get Covid, if you get the vaccine, your chances of getting any infection go down by roughly half. But they provide, great protection against severe disease and hospitalization."  Support WITF: https://www.witf.org/support/give-now/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Parenthood is often described as a roller coaster ride, filled with ups, downs, and unexpected turns. For many fathers, this journey involves a continual process of learning, growth, and adaptation. In this week's Dads with Daughters podcast, we spoke with Thomas Batchelor, an operations and maintenance electrician for Shell Energy Australia and the father of two sons. The conversation touched on various aspects of fatherhood, from the initial challenges to the changing gender roles and the importance of self-care and support. The Long Marathon: Early Challenges in Fatherhood When Thomas Batchelor first discovered he was going to be a father, he approached the situation with confidence. However, reality quickly set in. "I thought I'd have it all under control," Batchelor reflected. "But it was far from the truth." Like many new parents, Thomas faced significant hurdles, including a newborn who had difficulty sleeping. The initial months were a humbling experience that forced him to adjust his expectations and learn on the go. "I learned pretty quickly that it's not a sprint. It's going to be a marathon-type process," Batchelor said. "Settle in because the life that you knew before has changed, and you have to adjust to the new life that you've got now." This early period was characterized by significant personal growth, teaching Batchelor to look inward and adopt a more grounded approach in both his personal life and in fatherhood. Shifting Gender Roles and the Importance of Teamwork Batchelor highlighted how traditional gender roles have shifted in contemporary parenting. He took a year off work to stay at home and support his wife's career aspirations, showcasing the importance of teamwork in managing family responsibilities. Initially, he struggled to comprehend the "mental load" that his wife carried daily. This refers to the myriad of small, yet significant, tasks that ensure a household runs smoothly. "About 2 or 3 months in, I thought I was doing a great job, but my wife said I needed to start thinking for myself now," Batchelor explained. It was a steep learning curve that took almost a year to fully grasp. Understanding and acknowledging these unseen aspects of parental responsibility not only strengthened his relationship with his wife but also allowed him to contribute more effectively at home. Building a Support Network One of Batchelor's key points was the importance of seeking and having a support network. Fatherhood can be a lonely journey, often described as the "lone wolf syndrome." He strongly believes that vulnerability and asking for help are crucial for personal well-being. Batchelor participated in a retreat called the Good Blokes Society, which acted as an "adult rite of passage" and enabled him to share his struggles with like-minded men.  "Without that, that was the start of my journey. And then I sat with it, and it was really raw and tough for me to do, but I left there and continued to gain momentum."  His experience illustrates that community and mutual support are essential in navigating the complexities of fatherhood. Self-Care and Sustainable Fatherhood Adopting an effective self-care routine emerged as another critical piece of Batchelor's journey. From regular exercise and a balanced diet to seeking professional psychological help, Batchelor emphasizes that self-care enables him to be a better father. "I've got to make sure that I'm getting to bed at a decent time, eating a pretty good diet, exercising regularly, and speaking to a psychologist," he said. "If I do that, then I feel like I'm in the place where I need to be." By managing his well-being, Batchelor ensures that he can fully engage with and support his family. Thomas Batchelor's story is a resonant example of modern fatherhood's challenges and triumphs. His journey offers essential insights into the importance of adaptability, shifting gender roles, and self-care. Batchelor underscores that vulnerability and a strong support network are indispensable elements for any father striving to be the best they can be. As society continues to evolve, his experiences will undoubtedly inspire other dads to navigate their unique journeys with resilience and empathy. For more on Thomas Batchelor's journey and other inspiring stories, tune into the Dads with Daughters podcast. Fathers seeking support can also explore resources offered by Fathering Together.   TRANSCRIPT Christopher Lewis [00:00:05]: Welcome to dads with daughters. In this show, we spotlight dads, resources, and more to help you be the best dad you can be. Christopher Lewis [00:00:16]: Welcome back to the Dads with Daughters podcast, where we bring you guests to be active participants in your daughter's lives, raising them to be strong, independent women. Every week. I love being able to talk to you, to walk with you, to be here in solidarity, together, talking about fatherhood, working through the journey that we're both on in raising our kids. And I say it's a journey because it truly is a journey. It is a journey that each of us goes on every day and we are going to be learning something every day, learning something about ourselves, learning something about the, the person that we are, the person that we're becoming, but also learning about our kids, what they're becoming. And we then have to pivot. We have to adjust. We have to learn to be able to be the best dads that we wanna be. Christopher Lewis [00:01:06]: And that's important. And that's why this podcast exists. This podcast exists to be able to be that resource for you, to help you along that journey. And I'll be honest, as I've gone through this with you, I've learned so much from all of you, but I've also learned so much from all the guests that we've had on the show. And that's why every week I love being able to bring you different guests, different dads that have had different experiences, that can share those experiences with you so that you can learn, you can grow, and you can be able to take things from their own experience, put it into your own toolbox, and help you along the way. This week, we've got another great guest with us. Thomas Batchelor is with us. And Thomas is a operations and maintenance electrician for Shell Energy Australia, but he's also, more importantly, a father of 2. Christopher Lewis [00:01:55]: We're going to be talking about his own journey in being a father to his sons, but also some of the things that he went through in this journey to be able to be present, be engaged, and be there for his sons as they were growing and also some of the things that he learned along the way. So I'm really excited to have him here and for him to share his journey with you. Thomas, thanks so much for being here today. Thomas Batchelor [00:02:20]: Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. Christopher Lewis [00:02:21]: It is my pleasure. I love being able to talk to different dads with different experiences. And first 1st and foremost, one of the things that I love being able to do in our conversations is turn the clock back in time and you've got 2 sons. So I want to go all the way back. Go back to that first moment when you found out that you were going to be a father to a son. What was going through your head? Thomas Batchelor [00:02:40]: I thought I'd have it all under control. I thought, yeah, I've got my head around this and my kid will fit into my life, but it was far from the truth. And I learned pretty quickly that it's not a sprint. It's going to be a marathon type process and settle in because the life that you knew before has changed and you have to adjust to the new life that you've got now. And I think I did struggle with that. Christopher Lewis [00:03:04]: So talk to me a little bit about that because as you said, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon and you have to kind of learn along the way. And you've got 2 sons now, so there's definite learning that goes on there from child 1 to child 2. So So what were some of the first things that you really had to learn for yourself that really helped you to start that journey, but also to be able to transcend those first moments of being, let's say, a little bit trepidatious, a little bit concerned, and be able to get into the groove of fatherhood for yourself. Thomas Batchelor [00:03:37]: Yeah. I think going into it, I probably thought I had a sense of arrogance that I was I was across it all, and I wasn't gonna be any different to any of the other parents who were, you know, I'm gonna do it on my terms. And that didn't happen. We had a child who didn't wanna sleep. He was a challenging baby. Didn't wanna sleep. It was a real challenge, and it's been very humbling. And I'd say that the man I've become today and continue to keep growing is because of the challenges of having, I think, a difficult child. I think it's really helped me to just become more grounded and look more inwardly. And I've had such growth because of the challenges. I'm happy for that. Christopher Lewis [00:04:14]: You know, all of us go through challenges in different ways. Some of it goes into the type of child that you have and the the things that they push you into, but then there are challenges at times when internally you have to fight your own demons of the way that you were raised into figuring out the way that you wanna raise your own children. So each of us fights those pressures and that connection and that dichotomy that happens when you become a parent. So talk to me about that challenge for yourself and what you had to do to to be able to transcend and move beyond the initial challenge. And let's say it is the nonsleeping. I remember that. I had a child just like that. You, especially after, you know, 6 months, a year of that happening, you're walking around like a zombie and you you don't know which end is up and it impacts your relationships. Christopher Lewis [00:05:03]: It impacts everything. So talk to me about going through that, but also transcending that to be able to push through it, but to be able to also learn from it to help you to be the dad that you wanted to be now. Thomas Batchelor [00:05:16]: So I sort of just got my head down really. I thought to myself, if I can try and do as much as I can so I would try and do as much as I could to try and support my wife with the wake ups so she could have a better day. I had Oscar at home as my oldest boy. And I just continued to keep putting my head down. But then I was also trying to mesh in this social life as well. So I thought I could still go out with my mates. I thought I could still go and do all these things that I wanted to do, but still be able to be this supportive husband and the father that I wanted to be and I couldn't do it all. And that became quite an overwhelming thing and I had to really I'm a people pleaser and I had to really make sure that I now I probably only just got to the grips in the last couple of years that, you know, you have to say no to things and you have to make sacrifices because you have to get your priorities straight. Thomas Batchelor [00:06:06]: And I did bottom out, I'd say about 3 years ago. So I just ran out of steam really and the kids would have never have known. I was just doing what I had to do to get through but I wasn't enjoying the process. I wasn't present. I was making sure that I was doing the things I had to do as a father, but I wasn't enjoying it. It just wasn't an enjoyable experience. And I bottomed out, and I started becoming involved in groups of of particularly men who I would who I went away with. It was almost like an adult rite of passage. Thomas Batchelor [00:06:36]: I would go away and I'll speak about some of the challenges, obviously, throughout the course of my life and then obviously how it's impacting me as a father now and just really unpacking that. Just having more people to talk to, you know, more people to speak to who are also going through different struggles and just getting it out there. And that really helped me to put things into perspective and and know that I'm not alone. I don't know if you've heard the term the lone wolf syndrome. So that was something I idea. I just got my head down and I would go to the beach at 5 AM in the morning in winter and and run on the beach. I really hammered exercise to a point where it was unhealthy. And just to try and feel something, to try and, you know, get up before the kids got up. Thomas Batchelor [00:07:16]: I just burnt out. I just couldn't do anymore. And I feel like there's just been different phases of my life where I've had to lean into certain things by slowing things down and then speeding things up at time to try and get to where I need to be. And I feel like I'm really there now. I'm in a really good spot now. I'm actually starting to enjoy my time with my boys. And I'm really grateful for that because, I mean, I don't know how long I could have gone on for. I mean, I didn't wanna get to when the kids were 10, 11, 12 and go far out the whole time. Thomas Batchelor [00:07:44]: I've just been a servant, you know, and I haven't enjoyed the process. This is more it's about being a parent. So I'm grateful for where I am now. And it's it's a lot of hard work, but grateful for where I am now. So Christopher Lewis [00:07:55]: let's rewind a little bit because this process that you went through and this journey that you were on, it sounds like a roller coaster in regards to the highs and the lows and what you were pushing yourself to try to accomplish, but you weren't accomplishing. So you've gotten to a point now where you feel like you're in a good spot, but you had to have gone through some healing in some aspect. You had to have gone through some aspect to challenge yourself, to push you in a different direction. What did you have to do to be able to get off of that roller coaster? What did you have to do to be able to get on this new path that you were on? Because there are going to be dads that are listening right now that are on that roller coaster. They hear they heard what you just said and said, I feel that way right now, but I don't know how to get off. I don't know how to start on this different journey. Thomas Batchelor [00:08:47]: I think just submitting to where you're at and then asking for help. I think asking for help is the biggest thing. So getting the right people around you who can support you. And if that's not your close circle of friends because you're not there yet, I wasn't there yet. So you think about the people that you went to school with, the people that you work with, your family, you might not feel comfortable going to these people. And I do think that comes back to an upbringing thing and I raise my kids now to speak about their emotions and if they're feeling a certain way we really unpack it. I don't feel that was ever there for me as a child. So I feel like my child's emotional intelligence was actually better or as good as mine as a person who was in their mid thirties. Thomas Batchelor [00:09:30]: My boy at the time was 5, and his emotional intelligence is is really good. He can tell me how he's he's feeling, and, I mean, I couldn't do that as an adult. So I think you have to put your ego aside. You have to really be vulnerable. Vulnerable is probably the biggest word. And then you have to lean into there's plenty of support groups out there. So I went on a retreat with a guy called Mike Dyson, and he ran a retreat called the Good Blokes Retreat. So it was a bunch of like minded men, and we went away for a weekend. Thomas Batchelor [00:09:58]: It was all facilitated, catered for. It was in a beautiful part of Western Australia down the south region, and it was winter, and we just had real conversations. So I just get tingles running through my body now speaking about it because without that, that was the start of my journey. And then I sat with it, and it was really raw and it was tough for me to do, but I left there and I'm like, you know what? It just continued to gain momentum. And from that point on then I leant into other circles. So I spoke to my work colleagues. I spoke to my family. I spoke to the guys I went to school with and played sport with. Thomas Batchelor [00:10:35]: And then from that point on it was all out there and I basically said I can't and don't want to do this all on my own. You know, I want to be able to have the support of my friends and family to enjoy this process as much as possible. And the more that I lean into vulnerability, the more I look at my wife and my kids and feel that connection and that love because it works. It simply works. Yes. I don't know really what more to add to that, but it's been a journey and I'm happy that I'm here now. Christopher Lewis [00:11:03]: Now you and I were connected through Sarah McConachay, who Sarah wrote a book that you were a part of, that you contributed a chapter to. And in that chapter, you talk about a number of the things that you've already talked about already. And I think one of the things that I found really interesting was you talked a little bit about the fact that you mentioned in what you wrote that following instructions and helping out wasn't enough to handle the mental load at home. Can you elaborate on what you meant by the mental load and how you came to understand its impact on you and on your family dynamics? Thomas Batchelor [00:11:42]: Yeah. So I'd probably just take it back a little bit. During probably my lowest time, it was sort of when COVID hit. My wife was really busy at work and she's always thinking 2 steps ahead. You know, what's for dinner tonight? What's for dinner tomorrow night? Putting on washing. Just constantly thinking, kids' birthday parties. There's constantly things that I feel like in my relationship that the mom and the working mom has to think about so many more things. I don't know whether it's a male default setting because evolution has brought us to this point. Thomas Batchelor [00:12:11]: I do think that men are probably having to do more outside of their comfort zone now than ever, and maybe that's an to sit with our evolution for a little bit so our kids can see it, and then we can then take on some of that more of that mental load of all the things that the women talk about. So COVID came along. It was really tough for me, but my wife obviously continued to work and continued to do the home stuff. And I would do the home stuff. Don't get me wrong. I would I would help out and do as much as I could. After COVID, we said, right. We need we need to sort of slow things down here. Thomas Batchelor [00:12:41]: So my wife took a year off of study break. She went back and and studied her master's. And then she said, look, I'm going to start applying for jobs. And if I land a job as a in an executive position, then, you know, maybe I'll wind back at work and I'll have the year off to adjust. And then from that point on, we'll assess it. And I felt like I was a lot more comfortable being at home with the pace of home than sort of going to work and then having to adjust back to the pace of home. So I said, alright. So my wife ended up landing this position at at a at her work or she she applied for this position and got it. Thomas Batchelor [00:13:18]: And then I asked my work if I could have 12 months off work, and and they said yes, which was which was amazing. And then it was a steep learning curve. So this is where the mental load comes in. So the 1st 2 or 3 months, I remember thinking I was going along okay. And I went out for dinner with my wife about 2 or 3 months in. I said, look, how am I going? And she sort of looked at me and she was a bit reluctant to give me an answer. And I sort of said, what do you mean? She said, look, I just need you to start thinking for yourself now. You need to start thinking about what needs to be done versus what I tell you that needs to be done. Thomas Batchelor [00:13:51]: And so obviously it was a bit of a shock, but looking back now, she was correct. And it really took the full year, I think by about the 9 month mark, where I was like really gaining some steam then. I was thinking about, again, it was not for dinner tonight but for the next night, putting a load of washing on, making sure that things are away, just small things. So that's when I think I really became a benefit at home is when I could actually start to remove some of the mental load that my wife had. And I do think there's a lot of other women out there who have similar experiences. But it's I don't think it's a I didn't do it on purpose, but I'm a base now compared to where I was a year ago in regards to how I go about things at home. Christopher Lewis [00:14:36]: So as you think back to that and you think at the future, so you were talking about gender roles and how those changed in that period of time for you and your family. So how have gender roles and expectations evolved for you in your parenting? And how did you and your wife navigate them beyond that period? And how do you navigate them now? And what advice would you give to other families that are trying to find that balance? Thomas Batchelor [00:15:01]: I've always been a big supporter of my wife. So I've been with my partner since I was 16. We were both going to school together, and I've always been a big supporter of her. And she's very smart, and I've always thought that some of my life's work would be really supporting her in in being the best that she can be. I mean, I really thrive in seeing people that I love around me do well in life. I celebrate other people's victories, and my wife's one of them. So I think going into it, I was probably going into it with a bit of, I'll just I'm going to support my wife, but I really didn't think about all of the things that had to be done at at home and it was a challenge. And I'd say you just have to keep communicating with your partner and just gotta keep communicating and making sure that you're on the same page and you're both pulling in the same direction. Thomas Batchelor [00:15:48]: And the more, like anything with any job or any type of task, the more that you do it, the better that you become at it. And then the more that you can then focus on other things that you want to in life. Christopher Lewis [00:15:58]: In raising 2 sons, especially now in what you've learned yourself about gender roles, about the changing gender roles in family dynamics right now, how does that adjust the way that you think as a father? How does that adjust the way that you parent your sons as they grow into a world that will be even more different as they get into adulthood? Thomas Batchelor [00:16:24]: I've never really thought about the stereotypes as such that man does this, woman does that. I've never been that type of person. I think it'll be great to see in the future my boys of how they probably view it. It will be interesting. I think we're probably at this biggest change in a gender equality or gender stereotype roles more than ever. I do think that it will become the norm, I think, over the next 10, 20, 30 years. I think the numbers are still low. I think the numbers are still very low of men that stay stay home, but it is gaining traction. Thomas Batchelor [00:16:57]: But it's a hard job at home. It is a challenging job, but I think it's going to be great to see that, yeah, mom and dad are both capable of doing whatever they want in life. Christopher Lewis [00:17:05]: Now you mentioned the fact that you had an employer that was supportive of this journey that you went on to be able to be engaged at home and also support your partner in the new endeavors that she was endeavoring on. And not every business has done that or will do that. How important do you think it is for workplace policies and support systems to be put into place for families, for fathers, for parents in general to allow for them to have that work life balance that you talked about? Thomas Batchelor [00:17:42]: Very important. That year off really helped me to adjust. I think if I did it in a part time capacity, I think it would have been a real struggle for me. I think I need that year off to be able to, fully commit to the role, and then now I've adjusted back to 2 days a week. But, I mean, I was there for 12 years before I went on that year. So I've got a a wealth of knowledge, at the power station where I work, and I think it would be not wise to let a lot of that knowledge go. I mean, I feel like I fit really well in with my team and I'm a good team player. I'll help as much as I can where I can, but I do feel like leading into that year, I was having quite a lot of personal leave in regards to this appointment, that appointment. Thomas Batchelor [00:18:24]: And so now I'm back 2 days a week, work Monday Tuesday, and then a lot of those appointments are scheduled for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So I think for the employer, I think it's actually a really good idea because now I'm not impacting the business as much with some of the commitments that I have to with my kids. And I do feel like women probably get a roar end of the deal when it comes to this part time type scenario. My wife tried to work a part time, but it's it's full time work. I mean, they're having to jam a full time job into a part time capacity. I think we've got a long way to go there in regards to the working mum. And I still feel like there's probably with the men, it seems more attractive that a man would stay home and and have the time off, whether I think the women probably get held back a little bit more. I I do think it's we have to do more to support, I think, working mums in the workplace who work in a part time capacity. Thomas Batchelor [00:19:16]: So I feel like a lot of the stories out there out here is that the moms are having to do a full time load in a part time case, which is I don't think is fair. Christopher Lewis [00:19:24]: Now a number of the things that you talked about really revolve around that you've gotten to a point where you've identified for yourself the things that you need to be able to do to take care of yourself, but also your family. So I saw this in the piece that you wrote, but also in what you've said that there is a importance that you've placed on self care and communication that seems to be following you now and into the future. Could you share an example for me of how you've incorporated the self care now for yourself in this next phase of your journey of fatherhood and how you hope that that will help you to be able to be an even better father in the future? Thomas Batchelor [00:20:05]: Again, just getting my priorities straight. So making sure that I'm not saying yes to things that aren't serving me. I don't go out as much as I like to go out for a beer now and again, but I don't push it. So I'm not the guy who who comes home. I haven't got anything against people who want to come home late or they can do these things. If they can fit it all in, they can do it. I just can't do it. So I've got to make sure that I'm getting to bed at a decent time. Thomas Batchelor [00:20:28]: I'm eating a pretty good diet. I'm exercising regularly. I'm speaking to a psychologist. Just reaching out. I mean, just doing things. I mean, I'm helping in my community. I'll say no to certain things, but I'll say yes to other things, you know, other things that align with my values. And I mean, my priority is my family. Thomas Batchelor [00:20:47]: And if anything outside of that impact my role as a dad at home, then I have to say, I still struggle to say no. I'm a person that does like to please and does like to say yes. So I've got to keep working at that. And if I do that, then I feel like I'm in the place where I need to be. Christopher Lewis [00:21:03]: Now I always finish our interviews with what I like to call our fatherhood 5, where I ask you 5 more questions to delve deeper into you as a dad. Are you ready? Thomas Batchelor [00:21:10]: Yep. Ready. Christopher Lewis [00:21:10]: In one word, what is fatherhood? Thomas Batchelor [00:21:12]: Growth. Christopher Lewis [00:21:13]: Now when was the time that you felt like you finally succeeded at being a father? Thomas Batchelor [00:21:18]: When I started getting full night sleeps. Christopher Lewis [00:21:21]: I remember those times. Now, if I was to talk to your boys, how would they describe you as a dad? Thomas Batchelor [00:21:26]: I would like to say that they think I'm funny, that I'm active, that I'm very supportive of their journey, that they feel safe. I do feel the love and affection from my boys. So I'd like to think that they would think I'm doing a okay job. Christopher Lewis [00:21:41]: 10 years from now, what do you want them to say? Thomas Batchelor [00:21:43]: I want them to be able to come to me if they have something going on in their life and say, dad, I need help. And if it's not from me, it has to be from another good man. I do feel like my role as a father is to shepherd them through life and to try and open up as many doors as I can. And if some of those doors they don't want to explore, that's fine. But I really do want to feel like that they can, when they have those bumps along their journey, that they can either speak to me or men like me. Christopher Lewis [00:22:12]: Now who inspires you to be a better dad? Thomas Batchelor [00:22:14]: Other dads. I say just other dads. Other dads who are going through the same things that I'm going through. I walk through the school grounds and I see the way that dads interact with their kids and that inspires me. I really like seeing that. Christopher Lewis [00:22:26]: Now you've given a lot of pieces of advice today, things for people to definitely consider and think about and see how they can incorporate that into their lives. As we finish up today, what's one piece of advice you'd want to give to every dad? Thomas Batchelor [00:22:38]: Just be vulnerable. Speak about the challenges. Just try and be vulnerable. And that's all I can really say. Just be vulnerable. If you can be vulnerable and open and honest about where you're at, then I think most things will flow there. Christopher Lewis [00:22:51]: Now, Thomas, I mentioned that you are a part of Sarah McConachie's book. We'll put a link in the notes today so people can read your story and check that out. If people want to find out any more about you, is there a best place for them to go? Thomas Batchelor [00:23:02]: I suppose you could go to LinkedIn or I have got a Facebook account. I'm quite new to all this, so I've enjoyed it. So I don't really have anything else. I'd say probably just reach out to me, and if you want any more of my journey or any of the support groups or just to chat, then I'm always welcome to have a chat with someone who's struggling or just needs a ear to listen. Christopher Lewis [00:23:24]: Well, Thomas, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey, the highs and the lows, and I truly wish you all the best. Thomas Batchelor [00:23:31]: Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it. Christopher Lewis [00:23:32]: If you've enjoyed today's episode of the dads with daughters podcast, we invite you to check out the fatherhood insider. The fatherhood insider is the essential source for any dad that wants to be the best dad that he can be. We know that no child comes with an instruction manual and most dads are figuring it out as they go along, and the fatherhood insider is full of resources and information that will up your game on fatherhood. Through our extensive course library, interactive forum, step by step roadmaps, and more, you will engage and learn with experts, but more importantly, dads like you. So check it out at fatheringtogether.org. If you are a father of a daughter and have not yet joined the dads with daughters Facebook community, there's a link in the notes today. Dads with daughters is a program of fathering together. We look forward to having you back for another great guest next week. All geared to helping you raise strong and powered daughters and be the best dad that you can be. Christopher Lewis [00:24:31]: We're all in the same boat, and it's full of tiny screaming passengers. We spend the time, We give the lessons. We make the meals. We buy them presents and bring your a game. Because those kids are growing fast. The time goes by just like a dynamite blast. The world. Choose them. Be the best dad you can be. You're the best dad you can be.

Mark Oreschnick, a MedTech industry leader and the founder of Evolve Engineering, shares his journey of nearly 30 years in engineering and leadership, starting in aerospace before landing in the medical device industry. With a passion for mentoring and helping startups, Mark discusses the importance of right-sizing staff and systems for success. This conversation not only showcases the human side of technology, but also highlights the power of networking and building relationships for personal and professional growth. Guest links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-oreschnick-82367a8/ | marko@evolve-engr.com | www.evolve-engr.com | https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14248328/ Charity supported: Feeding America Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at podcast@velentium.com.  PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Lindsey Dinneen Editing: Marketing Wise Producer: Velentium   EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode 032 - Mark Oreschnick [00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world. [00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them. [00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives. [00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives. [00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives. [00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference. [00:00:50] Welcome back to another episode of The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey and I am so excited to introduce you to my guest today, Mark Oreschnick. Mark is the founder, owner, and president of Evolve Engineering, LLC. With over 25 years working in and leading engineering and operations in small, such as four employees, to large, such as 15,000 plus employees, companies, he has gained valuable experience he will use to complete your project as efficiently as possible. Mark's career has focused on developing products, processes, people, and businesses. Mark, thank you so much for being here. I cannot wait to talk with you all about what you're doing and your background. So thanks for joining today. [00:01:36] Mark Oreschnick: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. [00:01:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Wonderful. Well, I would love if you wouldn't mind starting off by sharing just a little bit about yourself and your background and maybe what led you to MedTech. [00:01:47] Mark Oreschnick: Okay. I've been an engineer and leader for nearly 30 years. I started in the aerospace industry in college, and while I was an intern, I was offered a full time position to work as an engineer for my last year of college. So I did full time school and work, which I think very much set me up for my life in startups because I was sleeping about two and a half hours a night. [00:02:15] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh my word. [00:02:16] Mark Oreschnick: So, after that, I just kept having bosses challenge me with a variety of different projects. I've designed and built buildings for two different companies, automated. Equipment doing 16 million packages in four months, shipping out of a company, totally different industry and 20 years ago, coming this Valentine's day, I started the medical device industry. So, I'm coming out of my 20th anniversary right now. And within the medical device industry, I've been in really large and really small companies, both on the operations and manufacturing side and the R&D side. And I'm currently working with my seventh startup. So that's, like I said, the world of startups I've really enjoyed. [00:03:02] And now I've moved into consulting full time, and I'm working with startups as a fractional CTO. So I'll put together their technology roadmap, help build their R&D team, work with the founder on what I've learned from my experience. What are the good things to do? What are the bad things to do? And how to right size your staff and your systems to be successful. [00:03:26] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, that's incredible. Well, thank you for sharing about that. It's so much fun to see how little bits of threads throughout your career kind of interweave, and then all of a sudden they've produced this really cool thing. And that's now you doing this on your own and consulting. And I just love hearing about that. Several things just stood out to me and I'm curious. Okay. So, so you said you sort of set yourself up for success by being like full time college student, full time working at the same time. And then yes-- so can you start by: where did this drive in this passion come from, because clearly your work ethic is astronomical and wonderful, so maybe start there. [00:04:11] Mark Oreschnick: I would say it comes from my parents. Definitely did not grow up on the rich side. So everything that we had in our lives, we worked hard for. And I learned that if I wanted something, I needed to go out and get it. So, I think that was a good attitude that my parents put into me. And then they also, I won't say over expected things from us, but it was more, if you say you're going to do it, you're going to do it, figure out how to get it done. Just live up to what you say you're going to do. And that I think automatically put a drive behind me to just, all right, and you offered me a full time job. I'll be successful at it, but I'm graduating. So I got to be successful there and I'll just figure out how to make it happen. [00:04:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. And then you alluded to the two and a half hours of sleep a night. I hope that's still not the case moving forward. [00:05:08] Mark Oreschnick: No, it's better than that now, but I've had 24 hour days as things come up throughout a career, and it's, you do what you need to at that point for your company and to get things done or you're having a team work extra hard. You get in there, you work with them, make sure that they're getting the support they need and they know you're there for them. So, sometimes it's insane. Other times you get to relax a little bit, but that's also, like I said, the life of a startup, you have your big pushes and then you get to relax for a little while and then you hit your next push. [00:05:47] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, so true. It seems like you have quite a passion for helping startups in particular, and you obviously also have your own entrepreneurial bent and endeavors. And so where did the interest in helping startups in particular come about? Because I know that's a, can be a different skillset in terms of you often wear a lot of different hats and you end up pitching in so many different ways. So, so tell me about your heart with startups and entrepreneurship. [00:06:17] Mark Oreschnick: Someone who has now become one of my best friends, we, my very first medical device job, I worked with him and when I left to go to another company, we looked for a position for him to join me. There wasn't a good fit, but a couple of years later, he went to a startup, which he had already been in startups previously, and asked me to come over and work with him there. And I came in, I saw that I could do a lot of things to help people. And that's kind of been my career also is how can I help people do things easier, better, just make their life easier. So if I saw a gap where there wasn't someone to jump in, I just jumped in and filled it. And that's what you do in a startup and it just really worked with my attitude of, I get to help a lot of people because, today I'll work on documentation with the quality side, next week I'll go build a fixture for production and whatever was needed at that moment. It let me get that joy of helping people. [00:07:23] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh [00:07:23] Mark Oreschnick: And that's ... If you get joy out of everything you do in work, it makes going to work really nice. [00:07:29] Lindsey Dinneen: That is so true. I love that. That is so true. And so, you know, then you also have the skill sets to be able to help in lots and lots of different ways. And one common theme as I've been doing some of these interviews is that it seems like having that generalist background-- I mean, obviously you're highly specialized as an engineer. You're incredibly incredibly gifted and talented in that way. And you've built that skillset, but then you also have the opportunity to draw from multiple different industries that you've been a part of. So how has those various other kinds of influences in your life maybe contributed to your success now? [00:08:13] Mark Oreschnick: I would say one of the ways that definitely benefited me a lot was getting into a non technical industry. The industry where I did the packaging automation and built my first building is called Consumer Fulfillment. Literally at that time, you were getting in buckets of mail, manually sorting it, data entering information into a computer, typing in UPC codes, like not technical, not anything like that. But it made me look at that world in a big picture format. And how could I help the process and make things flow from department to department much easier. And I just had to step back and kind of, all right. By making this process easier, I'm helping on the finance side. By making this less labor intensive, we have less workman comp. [00:09:14] And it was just, what affects each piece of it? And as you kept digging deeper and deeper, you got to learn what the IT group did and how they could change the software to make it better. You'd figure out what the shipping companies are doing. We actually figured out how to load semis and make sure that the addresses were in the order of the post offices that they were going to. So the last bag onto the mail truck was the first bag that they took off. And we built that into our computer system so the trucks could drive direct and never have to backtrack or unload extra things. So it's just, you have to start looking at that big picture and you got to learn about every department to see how they all work together and make sure everyone's efficient, not just your little group. [00:10:05] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well, and I love that approach. Being able to look beyond maybe what you feel like is the daily task or the task most important at hand and have that zoomed out view of, okay, this isn't just important for the success of this one department. It affects everybody else. And I love that. So now in your current role and in your current business with Evolve Engineering, you get to have that more eagle eye perspective again. Is that true? So when you're coming in, you're able to help? [00:10:36] Mark Oreschnick: At the beginning, yes, if it's a new founder, and there tend to be two new founders that I've met lots of. They've, almost all of them have never been in a startup before. So that's a common theme. And they either come from not within the medical device industry or from a very large company within the medical device industry. So changing the mindset and getting real expectations and real realistic goals and budgets is where you kind of start with that. So I work with them to talk about, here's how much you can expect to spend on this project. Here's how long it's really going to take. [00:11:21] If you're from a big company and you're still having five different computer systems that are managing your inventory and your sales and everything else, we're going to be running on QuickBooks and Excel, and that's what we're going to live by. Because if you want to put those systems in, you're going to hire 20 people to manage those systems rather than 10 people to get the product out the door. And get this design finished. So it's teaching them to just have a total different mindset about everything. And still knowing how all those systems have to work together. But trying to get it down onto the micro, basic scale, rather than going on to buying a great enterprise system, but we're not actually going to sell anything for five years, so we don't really need it. [00:12:15] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing a little bit about the two different types of these startup leaders that you're encountering. And I'm wondering, so part of your role, it sounds like, is not just getting into the very specific nitty gritty details of the actual company operations and technology and whatnot, but it's also having a little bit of this even broader range of, how do I help you as the leader develop the skills and priorities that you need to. So it sounds like you're in a, you're in a very Diverse mentorship kind of role in addition to like, let's get down to the nitty gritties, but you're also helping them develop those skill sets. Yeah? [00:13:00] Mark Oreschnick: Yep. That's my goal is to help them become a good leader of a startup and understand what it takes. And I met with a doctor who had found me on LinkedIn about his company. And I wasn't sure exactly what he wanted, but as we were talking through things, I told him, "if you plan on being the CEO, we are going to figure out what day you fire yourself from that position." I said, we will do it to save money in the beginning, but you're a doctor. Be a doctor. Let's bring in a professional CEO when we get to the point where you stop saving the company money and possibly cost us money." And, he didn't want to be the CEO. [00:13:43] So it wasn't a conversation that had to be had, but trying to put the mindset of, you're a great inventor, kick me out of my job, become the company CTO, drive development once we get to that point. I'm totally fine with that because it's the best for the company and it'll get us to the sale of the company or commercialization spending the least amount of money and getting there as quickly as we can. So being part of it's, be open, have those conversations with people and do that type of mentorship in the beginning. And if somebody said, "no, I'm going to run this thing until the end, I'm going to be the greatest CEO." I probably know from the beginning, I'm not the one to work with them. [00:14:29] Lindsey Dinneen: Sure. Yeah. [00:14:33] Mark Oreschnick: We probably won't gel in the end. [00:14:36] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And do you find that it's partly because perhaps the idea of, the things that got you to where you are not the same skill sets that are going to get you to the next level? Is it partially just because usually that somebody who comes up with this great idea and has the passion and the vision for the company can really get it off the ground and maybe get those first rounds of investment, but then they might not possess the skill sets to get them to continue growing and scaling. Is that part of it? [00:15:10] Mark Oreschnick: That's 100%. [00:15:11] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. [00:15:12] Mark Oreschnick: What normally it is and truly that passion in the beginning as the CEO gets your team driven. You get a lot done. It is a wonderful thing. But once you start to look at the commercialization and how do you grow a business, that creativity and passion don't directly translate. Now it's getting into nuts and bolts, black and white, a little more ruthless and you have to do what's right to make the company commercial. [00:15:43] And the, I think it's lots of times not even ego of the founder. It's the passion. It's their baby, and they don't want to give up control and worry that somebody is going to ruin it. But that's why if you move yourself out, but stay within the leadership role in a different way, you're hand in hand with the CEO and you can move the company forward together rather than having a board kick you out because you're not doing your job and then you've lost all connection to your company. [00:16:20] Lindsey Dinneen: Right. [00:16:21] Mark Oreschnick: So I look at it as a, here's a way you can grow and you can learn from that CEO so the next time you do this, maybe you are the person who can take it another step, bring in the new CEO, one step farther down and finally you'll get to be that person who runs the company from start to finish, but you got to learn it. You got to live through it and protect your baby by moving into a different seat. [00:16:46] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh my goodness. Yeah. What a challenging thing to overcome. So it's helpful that's your perspective from the start so you can help people prepare for that and that this is actually a wonderful thing. It's a growth thing. It's not a demotion. It is not a, you are any less important. You aren't. You're as still as important, but you're just moving into a role that suits you and suits what the company needs. Yeah. That's really interesting. [00:17:13] Mark Oreschnick: And there are some investors who, if they hear that day one, that you know you're the one to bring it up to a certain point and then you will transfer it that will give them more faith in you because they know that you understand where your skills are and that you need the commercialization person to move the company to sale and they're going to appreciate that. [00:17:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. And so with your consultancy now, can you tell me a little bit about how that came about? And then I'd also love to hear, because I know that you've started, or co-founded, a very successful networking group in Medical Alley. And I would love, if you wouldn't mind sharing just a little bit about that, because that's a really cool opportunity for people in the area. But I would just love to hear a little bit about your origin story as well. [00:18:04] Mark Oreschnick: So my origin actually started about eight years ago. [00:18:07] Lindsey Dinneen: Aha. [00:18:09] Mark Oreschnick: And the gentleman that I talked about who brought me into my first startup, we were at two different startups and he asked me if I could do a side project for him for his company to help it out. So I started Evolve Engineering. [00:18:24] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. [00:18:25] Mark Oreschnick: And they brought me into interview to see if I was the right guy to do this project for them. And they liked my overall skill set and offered me a permanent position. So I wound up not consulting. [00:18:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Sure. [00:18:40] Mark Oreschnick: But it was something that I'd always thought, yeah, someday I'll get into this because one of the things great about startups is doing lots of short term projects. Even if your company lasts for seven years that you're there, you've jumped around a lot in it because that's what the company needed. So the idea of consulting and knowing that I'm going to be jumping around is exciting because you're always doing something new. So that got me hooked. [00:19:07] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. [00:19:09] Mark Oreschnick: And then I was with a startup and I was looking for, what do I want to do next. I knew it was time to be moving out of that startup. And I started researching consulting and got myself connected with a bunch of people. And then another company offered me a permanent position. [00:19:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. [00:19:29] Mark Oreschnick: So that postponed me for about another 16 months. And then in late 2022, I made the decision that "No, it's really my passion. I want to get back helping as many startups as I can." And I just dove into it. One of my former employees became my first client. And then another group called me up of a bunch of employees that I used to work with at a different startup, and I started working with them. And then, like I'd mentioned, a doctor called me up, so I have a deal going with that company. And it's all these little pieces just coming together. And right now, I have two different companies that are submitting me for projects that they're just waiting on funding for. And someone that I connected with through this networking group. He called me up and said, "Hey Mark, in, in February, I'm going to need your help on one of my projects." So he used to be the founder of a startup. Now he's doing the exact same thing I'm doing and he's my competitor. And he called me up and said, "I want you to work with me." [00:20:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Phenomenal. [00:20:39] Mark Oreschnick: Yeah, it's good competition and those are the people that I still have around me are people I've worked with in the past or met in the past. We don't look at each other as competitors. It's, "You're going to be better at this one than me. So you take it and you'll tell me about one that I'm better at than you." So, so that's got me kind of up to today. And you had mentioned my networking group, which is called The Twin Cities Medical Device Networking Group. I was in a group pre COVID that actually died before COVID. So COVID wasn't the killer, but it made starting a new networking group a real challenge during COVID. I tried bringing the old group back. We had one event and then a new spike, and it died again. [00:21:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:21:33] Mark Oreschnick: So working with one of the startup accelerators that I'm involved with, I went to a medical presentation that they were having a showcase about all of their startups that they were working with, and met a gentleman named Kris Bauerschmidt. And he and I actually already had a call scheduled for the next day through a different networking group and we just happened to run into each other in person. So we started off, we did the call the next day, and I toured his company a couple weeks later. And I brought up, "Hey, I'm thinking about starting a networking group." And he said, "Oh, I'd love to be a part of that, can I help you?" And that was on Thursday, so April 29th, which was a Saturday, I started the group. And it took about 16 days to get up to 100 people. [00:22:24] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. [00:22:26] Mark Oreschnick: About another month to get to 200. And then it started slowing down a little bit. So now we're at eight and a half months since we started it, and we have almost 850 people. [00:22:38] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. [00:22:39] Mark Oreschnick: So it's growing basically a hundred a month. [00:22:42] Lindsey Dinneen: That's amazing. Congrats. [00:22:45] Mark Oreschnick: So each month we just post on LinkedIn, "Hey, we're doing a happy hour at this brewery." People come out, get together. We normally have around 70 people show up to each of our events and people sit around and you talk a little bit of business, you know, "Hey, what do you do for a living? What cool projects are you working on?" that type of stuff. And many of these people have now got to the point of, "So how's your son's basketball game last night?" And we've become friends and we're building relationships. Business is going to come out of that naturally because now we've actually built trust in 70 other people that we meet, and really it's probably about 150 people rotate through our events, but there's always around 70 that show up. So this 150 out of 850 is getting to be a tighter network every month. [00:23:40] Lindsey Dinneen: That's incredible. [00:23:42] Mark Oreschnick: And out of that, we wound up doing a presentation at startup week, Kris and I, for other people, we did a panel discussion on Networking 101. [00:23:50] Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. [00:23:52] Mark Oreschnick: A college brought out their entrepreneur program and we had 20 plus students from that, and it was a total of, like, 80 people showed up to hear us talking about networking. [00:24:03] Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. [00:24:04] Mark Oreschnick: And that's one of the keys in the med device industry, or actually in any industry, network, know the people you're working with. If you ever get laid off, fired, you're in transition, you instantly have a group of people to go talk to. But the big thing that we've seen in our group, lots of the people are there really just to help. [00:24:26] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:24:27] Mark Oreschnick: Much less about, "What can I get out of this," and it's, "What can I do for you?" So, it's really nice that, you know, people are saying, "Hey, let me introduce you to this recruiter. Hey, let me introduce you to this person. They might be able to help with your project." And it's much more of the giving side of things. And it gets kind of funny when you have two people who are both givers, who have are meeting for the first time and trying to talk about something, and both of them are trying to give and neither wants to receive. [00:24:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. [00:24:59] Mark Oreschnick: So eventually somebody has to just step out of the zone that they're in and say, "This person's honest and trying to be helpful. I need to accept that." [00:25:10] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:25:11] Mark Oreschnick: It's quite funny when you start to see these interactions of people who really network on a regular basis and are out there just to meet and help people. [00:25:21] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that's incredible. And I love that. I love that that's the spirit of the group because I think a lot of times where networking groups can get challenging is it seems to be kind of the opposite. And it's sort of "what can I get from this group" versus "how can I give and contribute," but that's, that's such a part of who you are. In fact, you've recommended a couple of books to me that I have thoroughly enjoyed. And I wonder if you wouldn't mind telling a little bit about maybe how that philosophy has impacted even your own life and the way that you've approached your entrepreneurial endeavors and your networking endeavors. Would you like to share about that? [00:26:02] Mark Oreschnick: Sure. So, similar to the words that I was just saying. [00:26:06] Lindsey Dinneen: Yup. [00:26:07] Mark Oreschnick: I know the book she's talking about right off the bat and that is " The Go Giver" and it's tells the story of how somebody is out there trying to get sales and bugging everyone trying to get leads, trying to just close the deal, worrying about the end of the quarter. And eventually he meets a series of people who talk about being in things for the right reason, and you can't sell something to someone, someone has to want to buy from you. So you have to give them value, and then they will choose to purchase from you, because you cannot force a sale. You can't make somebody sign on that dotted line. [00:26:54] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:26:56] Mark Oreschnick: So it's all about: connect with people, meet them, figure out how you can help them. Karma's going to come back, help you in the end. And I have definitely seen that in my career, you know, like I'd mentioned earlier, somebody who is a direct competitor of me calling me up and saying, "I want you to work on my project." I was trying to help him find investors at his last company. And I didn't have any stake in the game in that, but he seemed like a really good person doing a good thing. So I wanted to help him. [00:27:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah! [00:27:30] Mark Oreschnick: The thing that for me about "The Go-Giver," I read it and I went, "Okay, this reinforces what I've been doing. And here's a few ways I can do it a little bit better and a little more intentionally." So I highly recommend, read the book. The guy who I founded the networking group with, I gave him a copy. He absolutely loved it. He now recommends it out on LinkedIn. The author wound up seeing that we had been recommending it to people and connected with us and commented. So, and I'm actually in another group that has about 230 people, and the first time you meet with the founders of that group, they're going to say, "You need to go by "The Go Giver" and read it." So right off the bat, that's just their first conversation. It's kind of, "If you go forward with this attitude, your business will be successful." [00:28:22] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:28:22] Mark Oreschnick: And then the other book, it's from the same authors and it's called, I believe, it's "The Go Giver Guide to Marriage." [00:28:28] Lindsey Dinneen: Huh. [00:28:29] Mark Oreschnick: And I actually read it while I was on my 10th anniversary with my wife in Napa. And it was again about intention. You can tell your spouse that you love them, you can tell them they're beautiful, all these things, but why are you doing that and making sure you do it with reason and not just because I should say I love you every time I walk out the door. [00:28:53] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Right. [00:28:55] Mark Oreschnick: And there are lots of really good tips in it that is just kind of, okay, I'm doing things good, but I can do it better. Here's a way to do it better. And it's the reminder of why you're in your relationship, why you love the other person. And it was a fun book to read. And the fact that I chose to do it on our anniversary weekend was a really good thing. [00:29:15] Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. [00:29:17] Mark Oreschnick: It was the right time to reinforce everything. [00:29:19] Lindsey Dinneen: There you go, folks. Life and business advice all wrapped up into one. It is a great series of books. I recently finished "The Go Giver Leader" too and that's another brilliant book. I was listening to it on audio book and I kept having to rewind so that I could take notes because I was like, there are too many amazing quotable quotes in this book. It's, [00:29:43] Mark Oreschnick: Yes. [00:29:43] Lindsey Dinneen: Highly recommend. Yeah. So just out of curiosity, looking back over your life, do you think six year old Mark could have ever imagined being where you are now? Or is this engineering and business and creativity? Has this always been a thread of your life or has this evolved over time? [00:30:07] Mark Oreschnick: So engineering and creativity, yes. The business side, no. If you would have asked six year old Mark, what he was going to be doing, I actually know the answer from my parents and I was going to be a garbage man. [00:30:20] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes! Coolest job ever! You get to hang on! [00:30:25] Mark Oreschnick: I love trucks. I loved big equipment and that part of me has never changed. I am a mechanic. I have two cars in my garage, one up on the lift, one underneath it. I'm always working on something mechanical. And that mechanical side of me, along with the creative side of me has helped me design different devices and keep that vision. And I know how things work on the inside, and now I can design something because I know the different pieces, and I can put them to use for a different reason. So one of my products was an upper arm orthotic that helped people eat and drink and do activities of daily living when they had upper limb weakness from muscular dystrophy. So I was able to watch a lady who couldn't put her, push her glasses up. She put our device on and held a bottle of water for three minutes. [00:31:19] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh. [00:31:19] Mark Oreschnick: Another lady went back to painting. [00:31:22] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh. [00:31:24] Mark Oreschnick: And she hadn't painted in five years since her injury. So, but it was a completely mechanical nut and bolt type system, my side of it that I worked on, and my brain just knew how to make that stuff work. [00:31:38] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. I love it! [00:31:41] Mark Oreschnick: That's from when I was a little kid building with Legos and working on lawn mowers and mini bikes, and it's never stopped. [00:31:49] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Sure. [00:31:52] Mark Oreschnick: The business side of things, I think it still fits with my analytical brain and, you know, you can have things in columns, things have a right way of doing it. There's a process to everything that just, so that aspect of it fits me, but no, I would have never thought of that when I was a kid. [00:32:10] Lindsey Dinneen: Sure. [00:32:10] Mark Oreschnick: It doesn't sound like fun to a six year old. [00:32:13] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. Well, I have to nerd out for just a minute because as a, I think I was maybe a little older than six years old, but for one of my early birthdays, it would have had to have been like seven or eight, or actually for Christmas, I asked for a bunch of office supplies, because I am that nerd and so I was like setting myself up to play office ever since I was six or seven. And I would have, I had my little fake phone and my little fake receipt thing. I, it was a blast. So yeah, I, I... [00:32:48] Mark Oreschnick: And your organization skills have led through to this day. [00:32:52] Lindsey Dinneen: I know. Yeah. Yeah. All the hard play worked out in the end. It's really paid off. So anyway, you've actually shared a couple of very touching moments, even those last two stories that you shared were really sweet. And I'm wondering if there are any moments like those that kind of stand out to you as reinforcing the idea that, "Hey, you're in the right industry doing the right thing at the right time." [00:33:18] Mark Oreschnick: Yeah, they're definitely, I remember the first time that I had that moment. I had always thought once I got into medical device that I was in the right field. It fit me really well. It worked with how my brain worked. We have to do all these steps to prove everything because it's a human. We need to do the right stuff because we're dealing with people and we want to save lives, not hurt lives. But the first startup that I was in, we had a whole bunch of patient videos of interviews of patients that had used our, had our device used on them and how it affected their life. [00:33:54] And the one that I always remember, there was an older gentleman who had bad circulation in his leg and a doctor told him he needed to have a below knee amputation. And he was going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Luckily he didn't like his diagnosis and he got referred to a doctor who is using our product, and the doctor was able to go in and clear out the blockages in this gentleman's leg and get blood flowing to his foot again. So all of his sores healed, all of the swelling went away. His foot became normal again. And in a very short period of time, he went out, and golfed nine holes, pulling his bag. He walked for nine holes. [00:34:44] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh. [00:34:44] Mark Oreschnick: So he went from, "I'm going to have my leg chopped off and be in a wheelchair" to going back to the sport that he loved. And being able to actually walk, not even have to ride a cart. [00:34:56] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. [00:34:57] Mark Oreschnick: That was that moment that's kind of, "Yep, I'm where I belong." [00:35:02] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's a powerful story and what an amazing testament to the power of medtech and being able to be a part, even play a small part, in those developments and realize that you're impacting lives. Like there's, you hear these incredible stories of, you know, even if it's just one person, which it never just is, but even if it's just one person, you change their life. That's incredible. Yeah, nothing more rewarding. [00:35:36] Mark Oreschnick: Yeah, I said, that story, I'm never going to forget. I can still picture the guy and this is 14, 15 years ago. So. [00:35:46] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. Well, so, so amazing and pivoting completely for fun. Very different. Okay. Imagine you were to be offered the opportunity to teach a masterclass on any subject you want. It can be in your industry. It doesn't have to be, but you're going to get paid a million dollars to do so. What would you choose to teach and why? [00:36:11] Mark Oreschnick: So it's actually what we've already talked about and it would be networking. My experience with networking is it can have a huge effect on your career from day one. And luckily I've always liked talking to people. So I've been networking as long as I can remember, but people always say, "it's not what, you know, it's who you know." There is a, I'm going to say that should not be a truth. And if you actually live that way, there's a little problem there, because you should get the job because of what you know, and you should not take a job because it's just who you know and you're not qualified. But as long as you are qualified for that position, the who you know is going to introduce you to so many more opportunities, and if you go into all of those relationships trying to figure out how you can help others, people are naturally going to help you. [00:37:10] But as a student, you know, one of the things from our networking one on one class, we had the student saying, "what do I have to give to people when I'm networking? I'm still in school. I just, I'm about to graduate." During the conversation, ask them the type of people they want to meet at that event. And when you're walking around talking to others, if you meet that person, bring them over and introduce them. You can be their ears and talk to more people for them. You always have something to give no matter what. [00:37:46] Maybe they have a kid who's thinking about going to school and you could talk to their kid about what school you went to. You always have something. So going out, having that attitude, but every job I have gotten throughout my career, someone has introduced me to that position. My first internship was one of my lab partners in college. " I'm doing an internship. Would you like to meet my boss?" So yeah, I wasn't networking to do that, but we were friends from a class, so it was the who I knew. [00:38:24] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:38:25] Mark Oreschnick: And every, like I said, every job has been that way. The doctors that found me on LinkedIn, they found me because of my posts about networking. [00:38:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. [00:38:38] Mark Oreschnick: So direct indirect, my networking had me meet those doctors and turned into a client. [00:38:46] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. [00:38:47] Mark Oreschnick: So it's just, it always happens. Go out, meet people, talk to them, learn how to do things out of the goodness of your heart, and it will take you a very long way in your career. And when I think of people you and I both know that we've worked with, how many relationships have those people made throughout their lives that have now become business? It's just always happening. And so, yeah, that would be my courses to, especially with young engineers, young anyone, teach them, "You're getting into industries, start networking, learn the people in your company, learn the people at your suppliers, build your network, be good." And it will help you. [00:39:34] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. And be a go giver. I love it. Yeah. I love that. That's a great idea for a masterclass and it does not surprise me at all that's what you chose. [00:39:44] Mark Oreschnick: Yeah. So during startup week, I did two classes. It was the networking and "Key Considerations When Starting a Medical Device Company." [00:39:54] Lindsey Dinneen: Nice. Yeah. That seems accurate. Phenomenal. Phenomenal. [00:40:00] Mark Oreschnick: Go to your strengths. [00:40:01] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Okay. How do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world? [00:40:10] Mark Oreschnick: Definitely want to be known as someone who took care of his family because family is obviously important, but within my career, I was the guy that helped. Whatever it was, I figured out a way to help people. [00:40:25] Lindsey Dinneen: I love that. [00:40:26] Mark Oreschnick: So. [00:40:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes. Absolutely. Okay. And final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it? [00:40:36] Mark Oreschnick: My daughter. [00:40:38] Lindsey Dinneen: Aww. [00:40:39] Mark Oreschnick: So, that's an easy one. I have a 17 year old daughter. And I'm the first person to have a female in my family. I'm one of three brothers. My brothers have three sons and then I have the daughter who's the youngest of all of us. So I'm thinking, "Okay, I'm Mr. Mechanical. I love working on things. I love nuts and bolts and stuff." When she was two, she grabbed a screwdriver when I was working on the refrigerator and put it on the screw. So it's kind of, okay, there's my kid. She's definitely mine. And as I've watched her growing up, she has the same analytical mind as me, likes to divide things into even sections, things must be uniform, must be organized. But as she's growing up into a young woman, she is now a member of our church's youth group and she is a mentor to all of the other students. So she goes out and works with other kids and helps them at camp and does confirmation and she's just become a really good person. So looking at her, always smile. [00:41:57] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, that's so special. Yes, and you're her up for massive success and sounds like she's just a lovely human, so. [00:42:06] Mark Oreschnick: She is. [00:42:08] Lindsey Dinneen: That's incredible. Well, this has been so much fun, Mark. I am so thankful for you and your time today. And, you know, we are so honored to be making a donation on your behalf today to Feeding America, which works to end hunger in the United States by partnering with food banks, food pantries, and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger. And also they advocate for policies that create long term solutions to hunger. So thank you so much for choosing that charity to support and... [00:42:40] Mark Oreschnick: Thank you. [00:42:41] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Well, and thank you so much for everything that you're doing. I just wish you such continued success with your business, with your networking group as you work to change lives for a better world. [00:42:54] Mark Oreschnick: Thank you very much for having me on. I enjoyed this. [00:42:57] Lindsey Dinneen: Excellent. And thank you so much to our listeners for tuning in. And if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two and we will catch you next time. [00:43:10] Ben Trombold: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Shownotes and Transcript Ivor Cummins, maybe better known to many of us as The Fat Emperor, has challenged the Covid narrative from the very beginning.   He joins us today to discuss a new tyranny happening not only in Ireland but across the whole of Europe. Compelled speech.  Ireland's new "Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences" Bill has been waiting for approval in the Senate since the summer.  This biggest curtailment of free speech was set to quickly pass until scrutiny from free speech champions stalled it.  Ivor goes through the bill and the expected consequences.  Ivor Cummins BE(Chem) CEng MIEI  completed a Biochemical Engineering degree in 1990. He has since spent 30 years in corporate technical leadership positions. His career specialty has been leading large worldwide teams in complex problem-solving activity.   Since 2012 Ivor has been intensively researching the root causes of modern chronic disease. A particular focus has been on cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity. He shares his research insights at public speaking engagements around the world, revealing the key nutritional and lifestyle interventions which will deliver excellent health and personal productivity. He has recently presented at the British Association of Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation (BACPR) and also at the Irish National Institute of Preventative Cardiology (NIPC) annual conferences.  Ivor's 2018 book “Eat Rich, Live Long” (co-authored with preventative medicine expert Jeffry Gerber MD, FAAFP), details the conclusions of their shared research: https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Rich-Live-Long-Mastering/dp/1628602732/ Interview recorded 12.12.23  Connect with Ivor... X                           https://x.com/FatEmperor?s=20 WEBSITE              https://thefatemperor.com/ PODCASTS          https://thefatemperor.com/podcasts/ Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE              https://heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS          https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA    https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ TRANSCRIPTS    https://heartsofoak.substack.com/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts....  SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/  *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Today, I'm delighted to have Ivor Cummins with us, The Fat Emperor. Ivor, thanks so much for your time today. (Ivor Cummins) No worries, Peter. Always good to chat about real truth and accuracy and avoid misinformation, shall we say. Which is fast and thick and furious and being thrown at us from every angle. I have thoroughly enjoyed watching your different videos. I know recently you've done Dr Pierre Kory, who we had on, you've obviously been on TNT Radio, I saw I think recently with Darren Denslow who's been on with us quite a number of times and I think your title on that was Technical Manager, Biochemical Engineer and Technologist and obviously you've got your background in biochemical engineering and probably over the last couple of years you've been very vocal on pushing back against the COVID tyranny and then it's much wider. I think from 2012 you've been researching the root causes of modern chronic disease, focusing on cardiovascular and I'm sure that over the last three years a lot has been added to that, that you weren't expecting. But maybe you just take a moment and introduce yourself before we get on to what is happening in Ireland and the criminalization of speech. Yeah absolutely, so briefly I did biochemical engineering, I graduated in 1990, I spent five years in medical device and development of dialysis units and all that kind of stuff. So I got a lot of medical exposure there at the time, but then the next 20 years, plus I was on the high volume kind of, uh, electro fluidic devices. And it was great because it's extremely complex when you have around 10 sites around the whole world, making products, uh, billions, ultimately of complex devices, the slightest problem or the most subtle problems, it can become huge, you can lose millions of dollars overnight. So I was the master problem solver. Ultimately, I ran large teams on the most complex problems, multi factor. And I did that for 10 or 15 years, 20 years. And I was also a manager as well of teams of up to 20 engineers, directly people managing them, that was great experience. So, I just got this vast experience in complex problem solving and people management and essentially a form of politics, corporate politics, which was also very useful. And what we're seeing since COVID started, coming ultimately from Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the 50s, right through Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission, Council of Foreign Relations, UN, the EU, I'm beginning to view those as a complex problem solver as almost synonymous. So they're all so interconnected and countless NGOs and corporates and the World Economic Forum that people find it hard to believe. Well, how could this be orchestrated? Who could possibly organize it? And it's actually quite simple. It's a long game plan for a global governance structure. And it's funded by the people at the top and the most powerful political people and the US State Department has an interest. And they're all working for around half century or more since the Second World War towards a very tight, well-controlled global government. And yeah, it's not that hard to orchestrate, because all the right people are doing it. And they're doing it like we did things, corporate style. It's very structured. It's full of lovely language. It's got lovely goals that sound great. It's obviously highly sinister under the hood. But yeah, it's not that complex. But most people don't have the corporate experience to be able to decode something like this, find all the players and just see the whole picture. And that's the problem. Just like people have no knowledge of virology or epidemiology, you know, or immunology. So you can fool the people with ease. And that's the challenge we've been seeing. And that's what I jumped into in March, 2020, because I could see pretty quickly, I have five children, I could see where it was going, it wasn't hard. And I just knew that this is kind of the battle of our generation, there's no question about that. And if we lose, we'll have a China-style society in the West, and that's pretty much the outcome. Yeah, and I respect those views. I think Naomi Wolf actually mentioned that from day one, whenever it was announced shutting down Broadway, then her and her husband left New York immediately. Others has taken a little bit longer to see through. You're hoping for the best in institutions, in society, in media. I think we've realized there is no best there. But what has been then your last three and a half year because that's a world away from a background in the biochemistry, the research. What you're doing now is so different. So I mean let us know that change and what that has been like for you personally. Yes, it's certainly been interesting, but you live in interesting times. So 2012, 13 up to 2020, when COVID hit, I was deeply involved in biomedical and metabolic research, and I was going all over the world speaking. A wealthy Irish entrepreneur was funding me to travel all over the world to conferences, medical and nutritional, and to explain to people how what caused heart disease, Alzheimer's, most of the solid tumour cancers that cause the most death, and all of these modern chronic diseases go back to the devil's triad. So very simple, I named it that. It's sugar, refined grains, refined carbohydrates, and vegetable oils, seed oils. And that's what makes up most processed foods, which is around 60% of everyone's calories. So essentially, were poisoning the population for nearly a century now. So I was lecturing on all of that and on insulin resistance, which is the big thing you measure, because that's the target you have to get down low, and then you're pretty much okay. But then when COVID hit, I had been so involved in the corruption of the statin kind of industry, the cholesterol-lowering nonsense. I'd been involved in a lot of drug corruption, and also back in the 90s, I'd actually been directly involved, not personally doing things, but older engineers were doing things completely against the rules. And it was common practice, you know, in biomedical manufacture. And I'm sure that never changed. So I had all this experience in the corporate corruption. I had all the experience in my own corporate roles in the last 15 years, again, in the corporate politics and corruption. And I had all the medical and biomedical knowledge now and metabolic. So when COVID hit, I was on stage in Denver, big room and giving a talk and then I came down and Trump was shutting down the country and I said what the hell is going on? And my wife had said previously, she had said should we get masks? Now she's a first class honours engineer and she's aware of a lot of my work but she assumed COVID was a big deal and I just smiled and this was early March I think and I said not at all sure. I saw the Diamond Princess data and you could see from who died and who didn't that it was going to be a bad flu equivalent. I mean, there's no question about that. The ship had shared AC. They were crammed together. They got 25% positivity. It was an extreme maximiser of infection. So you see the end result. And a few people in their late 70s and late 80s passed away. That was it. So we knew. But when they shut the airports, I said okay they're gonna pull a swine flu and they're gonna pull a big swine flu, a scam. And got back to Ireland and after that I just started interviewing immunologists, virologists, epidemiologist because when I will call something constantly I check with my massive network and my massive network of specialist in all the medical fields grew rapidly because a lot of people out there who are seeing that this is crazy. And so within a few months, I knew not only everything you needed to know about COVID, the mortality impact, the lockdown ineffectiveness, mask ineffectiveness, seasonality, I cracked the whole lot with the help of my network. And I began to explain it in layperson's terms. And that's when I began to get smashed, put in the newspapers, and censored. Even though I didn't talk any anti-vax, any crazy stuff, everything I said was referenced to government data. I was very careful. But in September, my viral video shot up to millions of views, half an hour, just me with slides, just explaining all the factors in COVID, just what it was. And the New York Times did a half-page article on me. It's like, whoa, a half-page hit piece on an Irish engineer. But at that stage, I knew that this was a total orchestrated scam. There was no question. So it didn't actually surprise me that the New York Times devoted half a page to an Irish engineer because the system and the media particularly were owned. And my video had corporate CEOs. They actually said it in the article. A leader in the COVID scam in the US, I forget his name, said, I have people from major companies, CEOs, coming to me asking, is this Irish guy right? So it shocked them. Just truth. Just truth. That's all it was. Well I think we learned people are hungry for information and that information is becoming, can be more difficult to access. But I want to go, I mean, I'd love to pick you up on that, on the. Fascinating. I know your book, Eat Rich Live Long, is available. Links are in the description and people can get a hold of that. And that health is a hot topic, but I want to talk to you about Ireland and the restrictions on speech. I mean Ireland has had incitement to hatred, hate speech laws for I think it was 89 or 90 was introduced, the UK has had it across Europe, but what is happening in Ireland at the moment with this new piece of legislation has really woken a lot of people up. I mean I saw an article in Newsweek magazine a couple of days ago and they were saying this cannot go ahead, this is Orwellian hate speech. Do you want to just let us know what exactly has been proposed in Ireland? Yeah, well, for sure, you're absolutely right, Peter, to refer to the 1989 Hate Speech Act, because that was actually very good legislation. It is still 100% perfect legislation for what they claim may be a problem, because it is quite powerful. It's been used, I believe, 50 times plus. And if you go out and make hate speech that could cause injury or cause hatred towards people or minorities, yada, yada, yada, they can go after you. No problem. So the law is there. It's perfectly functional. Needs no upgrade. What they brought out, it seems to be, I don't know, a Soros, an NGO coming down from the UN, maybe using Ireland as a test case for the most extreme madness that they're willing to try out in the test bed of Ireland. But what's in it is just lunatic. Now, people listening, they know it's terrible and it's great to hear Newsweek featured it. And it is, of course, Orwellian. But the extent to which it's insane, I can't even believe the bad guys want this or wrote this. So essentially, there's layers of madness. One is that they don't define hate speech really at all. And Michael McDowell, the former Attorney General in Ireland, was fantastic in the Irish Parliament questioning the Justice Minister on this point, it's not defined. And he said, I've heard the reason discussed for not defining hate speech was it could make it more difficult to convict people. And he said, that's the point. It should be difficult to convict in these kinds of matters, so it should be defined, so you get the right guy. So that's one point, It's not defined. There's around 10 groups, arbitrary, that they've listed out, like traveling people, and trans, and sexual, and gender, all this nonsense, none of whom has a problem anymore with hate speech. There is no far right in Ireland worth a toss. None of these groups have any real issue, right? So that's the other layer, not defining. And the other thing is that they've put in that a single guard, based on someone whispering in his ear, can get a local, very low-level court warrant and come into your house and take everything, anything and everything. It's like, wow. It can be diaries, it can be phones, it can be computers. They could take them for weeks, I would guess. And if you don't give a PIN number, that's also listed as an offence. If you say, I don't know the PIN for that, it's an old phone, that's an offence with six months in prison potentially and a big fine. That's another insanity. And when they take it, if they find anything under the undefined hate speech kind of thing, right, they can say, well, okay, that's private. You wrote this down. You could write a diary and you could say, oh, I hate this group and I don't like that group and I think they should be thrown out. Whatever you want, which you're entitled to. Of course, you're entitled to write that stuff. I wouldn't agree with it, but if you believe that, go ahead. Keep it to yourself. It is up to you to prove to a judge that you would never in the future have shared that. So it's guilty until proven innocent has been put in this. It is thought crime. It is 1984. It is minority report. Remember the movie with Tom Cruise? They see that you will commit a crime in the future using futuristic technology and they come and arrest you. It's like that but much worse because your private writings, memes, God knows what's on your computer from stuff you've downloaded or had sent to you. You have to prove you would not in the future share that. I mean, it is just beyond notes, hopefully, you know, well, you know already. It's just insane. I keep using the word insane for this because I'm blown away, even me after three years of COVID. People need to understand that. It is insane. There's no other word. Has this come in, I mean, the UK have obviously got the online safety bill. That's another issue. And then the EU passed a bill, proposed a bill, which now passed just days later. But this, you're right, it's difficult to understand when legislation exists to tackle a so-called crime or injustice. And that's already there and everyone says that can be used and there's no issue with it being used. And then something else is brought in place, supposedly to correct a problem that isn't addressed and yet it is. And it is this confusion, I guess, and of course, we don't have the media reporting this or asking why. It's simply, well, are you for hate? I'm not for hate, therefore you want this bill. I mean, talk to us about the pushback on this and has it been scrutinized at all? Yeah, there's no scrutiny at all. I mean, basically, we know now, and it's not even controversial, I think, recently a TD or an MEP, an Irish MEP was asked, oh, what do you think of coming back to Ireland, back to Irish politics and the Dáil? And he said, well, no, and he casually let a cat out of the bag. And he said in the interview on record, he said people don't realize that over 70% of legislation comes from Europe, down to Ireland. So he said, to be honest, I'm better off over here, because that's where the control is. He didn't say control, but he said the first piece. And that's it. So essentially, I would say this is the simple way to view it now. Over the last couple of decades, increasingly, and now it's largely complete, when people go into politics, first of all, people got to remember the skill that brings you into politics is the opposite of technical, mathematical, logical. You go in there with so-called people skills. You know the type, right? So they go in there and they're kind of useless technically. Anyone can fool them, even though they're cunning. Anyone can fool them technically. And with legal matters, will fool them. So the people that go into politics now, especially in Ireland, we're like a vassal state of EU, UN, WEF. You know, we're really bad. That's why we had the longest lockdown in Europe. So they go in anyway and they quickly find out, political people find out where the power is. Like a lady said years ago about Washington, when you go into the Senate in Washington, an old guy said to her, you got to lean to the green. And he didn't mean environmentalism, he meant the dollar, you got to lean to the big guys, the money, the lobbyists, if you want to be successful. So in Ireland, they go in, they quickly find out it's all about the EU and keeping the big boys happy, and the UN and the WEF. And if you get invited to Davos, oh my God, that's the pinnacle of Irish political success. So you get the idea. So when it came to the Dáil, this legislation, they all just said, oh yeah, yeah, great. Oh, hate, love. Oh, we're all lovey-dovey. Oh, trans, you know, Ukraine, all this stuff. So all the politicians just signed it off. Didn't even read it. If they read page 10 and 11 and they had a brain, they'd say, oh my god, but they didn't. You know they didn't read it. They were all told it's great and they all signed it. And then when it was coming up to the Senate and then it would go to the President, then people began to get wind of it and began to talk about it. And then it became a problem. And then Elon Musk began to talk about it and said, what the hell's going on in Ireland? And then they started and saying, oh, he's right wing, he's an anti-Semite. There are politicians judging Elon Musk. It's like an ant judging God. It's just crazy. So also, I think it was someone connected to Trump, not Trump himself, made comments on how crazy it was. And then he did a big article, oh, Trump. Trump doesn't want it, because they know people think Trump's bad. It was propaganda to the power of 10, because they wanted it true and the media wanted it true. You know, the media all wanted it true. So luckily the Senate actually, it didn't go past and it got delayed. You know, that's all they could do. They delayed it. And then shockingly based on the stabbings of some poor children, actually migrant children, I believe. They used the anger in the public from the gross, excessive, uncontrolled migration in the last year or two. There's anger. 75% of Irish people or more in a Red Sea official poll said immigration has gone way too far, uncontrolled. It needs to be pulled back in control. So the majority in the country believes that. But the anger that's there in the country, smaller percentage of people are very angry. and a bunch of hoodlums caused a riot. They smashed windows, burned buses. They didn't beat anyone up and they didn't go after any migrants. They did a smash and grab spree on the back of public sentiment. And with the children being stabbed, it was an opportunity, it's happened before. Nothing to do with far right, nothing to do with political ideology. It was opportunistic from a bunch of hoodlums in hoodies. And the video showed that. and the government actually used that problem that they caused, right? They then tried to flip truth upside down and use the problem to ram the insane law through. You couldn't make it up unless you knew how loathsome, low-life's our politicians are and how utterly controlled they are from the NGOs and all the other groups up top. It is just shocking, right? Well, I want to go down the Irish politics side, but you need a catalyst in the UK, the catalyst for the online safety bill was the stabbing and murder of David Amess MP and that immediately everyone came out and said we need this online safety bill. Even with that individual was possibly radicalised in his local mosque but that's a conversation you weren't allowed to have so we'll just focus on. We've seen the issue there in Ireland and the government have not wasted the opportunity to jump on that. I was even looking at that and thinking, is this contrived? I mean, governments need a catalyst to push forward. And if something happens, they can point and say, look, we told you so. This is why it's needed. And everyone comes together. I mean, what were your thoughts on how that happened? And has that been the main catalyst or have other things happened to push it forward? Yeah, there was talk of, you know, there's always talk of kind of false flag and don't get me wrong, there's a ton of false flag and there's a ton of Hegelian kind of mechanisms that have been used since all of human history, problem, reaction, solution. You create a problem, essentially, you then use propaganda to get a big reaction to it. And then you come in with your pre ordained solution and everyone goes, yeah, we'll take it. So COVID's a classic example of that. A lab created gain-of-function virus. It comes out. They see that it's got a little bit of pathology to it or pathological effect. It's going to kill older people mainly. And they big it up. And then they say they have a solution, the vaccine. So there's a lot of that. This one here, I really think, because I'm a logic and data guy and I go on probabilities. That's the centre of my universe. The overwhelming probability, I would say, that guy has not worked, I believe, in 20 years since he came here, the person who did the stabbing, and probably has all kinds of issues. And I think they've even referred in some articles to some of that indirectly. They don't want to identify him. I think that was just a happening. And we saw it earlier, a girl was stabbed by, again, a migrant who had issues. And even locally in my area, a similar thing occurred a few years ago, a very tragic case with a family. So these things happen, you know, when migrants come to places, sometimes they're under pressure, they don't have the language, they develop issues. So I think that just did kind of happen. But the exploiting of it, well, like I said, is just criminal. And the reason it blew up, if that was a very rare occurrence and it just happened, and it wasn't after a year or two of increasing public discomfort, like the poll said, they know that the towns around Ireland, little towns, are getting stuffed with migrants. And they can see they're young males mainly. They're not women and children from Ukraine, come on. I mean, down in South East Wexford, there was a nursing home being built for a community of 1,200. And a couple of weeks ago, it transpired that suddenly it's not being built. It's being built in a different direction for 170 young male migrants, young male migrants, unmarried. And they're looking at bringing it up to 400 over time. Now, a thousand people marched and of course the media all sniffed and sneered at them like they're far right. It's their community. It's insane. I mean, the numbers that came in in the last six or 12 months is like 100k and the graph of the numbers coming in went through the roof. And O'Gorman, I think the minister last year, he did this, it's on the record, sent out a tweet, not in Ukrainian. In Ukrainian, Georgian, and African languages. And he basically said, Ireland's open. You'll have a house within four months. We get you a phone. We get you loads of money. Whatever. I don't know what was in it. But it was translated into all African languages and everything. So he's on the record. They want to flood the zone. And the reasons for that go back to the Pan-European Union in the 30s and speeches in 2009, I think, by, who was that CEO of Goldman Sachs who became a big UN guy, not Robinson, forget his name, an Irish guy originally. He gave a huge speech and he said it outright. We have to destroy nationalism. We have to destroy sovereignty in the EU countries. We have to break it down. And the mechanism, the best mechanism for that, besides pouring US junk television in, right? And phones, you know, the best thing is flood in very different people, ideally young males, and blend the country into a blob so we can get a big blob in Europe without any national identities. So they're actually destroying diversity because we had all these countries that you could freely travel to and see their culture. and then you come back home and you talk about it, that's actually diversity. They're all peaceful, all lovely, but they want to end diversity. They just want to make a blob because a blob can easily be translated into a super state or a China-style society. Very hard to do it when you've got identifiable nationalities in Europe. It's so simple, isn't it? This is a hundred-year-old brainstorm strategy that's clearly being deployed recently. Big scale. That's it, no racism. In fact, last thing I'll say, sorry I'm on a rant here, it's morning time, but Peter, the last thing I'd say, and this is so important for people to know and understand, The people who are using minorities from other countries as cattle, literally using them as pawns in their chess game to get their globalist Europe and globalist West, they are the ultimate racists because they have absolute scorn and contempt for poor people from all over the world that they're forcing into countries and creating difficult situations where there may be, you know, certain amounts of racism stoked and provoked, you know, like a hornet's nest, keep shoving in people, they don't have accommodation, our homeless can't get accommodation, they've ignored them for decades, and now they're shoving in hundreds of thousands with, we already have an accommodation problem, what's going to happen? But the people driving this, they are the racists. I am the opposite of racist, my record is clear, they'd love to call me one, but they can't because I have a full record on social media and forever. Absolutely the opposite. In fact, I've often shared anti-racial movies and films on my Twitter, like Kenneth Branagh, 2001 conspiracy, it's called, about Wannsee in Germany in 1942 or three. I'm clearly an anti-racist. They hate that. But that said, I know racists when I see them and the people driving the policy are racists. And of course there's nothing you can say or push back if you're called names which is this legislation about offending and finding offense and if someone has been offended you cannot prove that in a court that, you cannot prove your feelings in court and of course when someone calls you whatever, racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, the list goes on, you can argue and you can push back but it's already been decided by whatever individual has said. They have decided and therefore you are because they have spoken. And that declaration of speech, you know, truth goes out the window. It's the issue on pronouns. If someone wants to use a pronoun then they define that person who is a man, is a woman and that must be true. And that kind of removal of truth, not only in this legislation but I guess across Europe for all the hate speech which is simply if someone finds offense then it is decided that a crime has been committed. It's beyond absurdity but also it's very malign and clever. So the people I refer to are driving this as a geopolitical crucial strategy this is not small stuff, that's why it's getting so much funding and backing. it's very important for broader globalist. Kind of government desires and to make ultimately, we won't get into detail, the intention is to translate the UN into the world government or for the West. The UN is being built and built and built and we can see the insanity coming from Guterres, the head of the UN. We're now global boiling. We're no longer warming, all nonsense. The UN is being teed up. So there's a lot put into this thing and hate speech because it is important because free speech increasingly could cause a real problem for basically plans that have been grown beautifully for 70 or 80 years since post-World War II. So, you know, too big to fail. They can't let all of the plans of geopolitical, you know, structure and infrastructure that have been built for a half century, they can't let it fail because people all start becoming aware of it and talking about it, that's why there's this extreme kind of insane zeal to get in the laws, because they're important, and people need to realize that. And you say you can call. Yeah, once you call someone a racist, the judge is going to roll over. That's the sick thing. We saw in COVID, several people brought very good cases, and they assigned a lower-level judge to check if the cases were appropriate to bring forward in the system. I didn't realize they could do this. They did. So there were mask challenges and other challenges. This judge, she went in and looked at everyone. No, I don't think that's, no, that's not required. One judge threw them all out before they even got in the system. So you know what will happen. If the government don't like someone, they'll try to nail them on this law, and the judge will be in the pocket. The judges now are no longer really independent. We saw that in COVID. They know where the wind's blowing, and they do their job. A lot of them are appointed. So that's institutional corruption gone crazy. And another one I just thought when you were talking, Peter, there was a communist activist, a very significant person. I can't remember his name, but back in America before the McCarthy era, when America was big, there were a lot of activists who wanted America to go communisto or fascististo. And one of them was caught with, not emails at that time, but circulars to all their activists. And he said to them, and he was right, very clever. he said always call our detractors, our opponents, always call them a fascist. Now he said be careful, don't call someone a fascist if it can blow back on you. In other words, don't always do it, but whenever you can, call them a fascist. And he said if we keep repeating this on an individual, after a while the people will largely just come to believe it's true. And he said, it's the most dirty word and the dirty label you can put in someone right now. So use it. And you can see now that that advice was excellent, but it turned out it all failed in America until recently. Now they've got Biden and all the rest. They're getting, they're getting to communism. But yeah, exactly that. They know that racism is powerful. if you can make it even stick a bit and get your media to keep repeating it, people will assume, well that's the racist guy. I mean, it's shocking, it's criminal, but this is the game they play. Yeah, you talked about the 70 year. I mean, I'm still blown away having grown up in Dublin, Limerick, first like nine years of my life. It was rough, but actually it was conservative as a country. You had Fianna Gael, Fianna Fáil, polar opposites in theory. Now they're all together, the union party. Has this been sped up simply with the bailout after the financial crash, with Europe then calling the shots? Because if you look at Italy and Greece, they've kind of held on to their identity. And Ireland has always been known for a strong identity. That seems to have gone out the window. Obviously, COVID has sped things up, and that's part of it. But is it the crash? Is it that Ireland is now beholden to Europe because of that or talk to us about that because the collapse in Irish society has been unbelievable. Yeah, I think it's not so much the bailout more as the symptom of the problem. I mean the fact that Ireland kowtowed and the EU, the EU flooded the zone with money. They told Ireland flood the zone and the little Irish went off and they flooded the zone for the EU overlords and it suited them because there's money everywhere and everyone was happy. And then the piper came to be paid, and they went with cap in hand, and they gave away all our money to the bondholders. So I think Ireland back then was just a biatch, really. It wasn't that they got them then, they'd already got them. So I think it's been many decades, Ireland, maybe partially because of the history of the British rule, the Irish became culturally doff the cap to the big man. They might grumble, but they doff the cap. So Ireland, over the last 30 or 40 years, we saw it with all the referendums. They were rammed through or run several times to get through. The Irish intelligentsia, politicos, Europe was the big boy. And they dropped to their knees for Europe all the way. And then they took in the corporations, did the double dutch, the tax thing. They're allowing them to get away with 1% effective tax rate. So they played the kind of beggar to the American corporations. And I think over 50% of our GDP now is biotech and pharma. So we're just kind of biatches for the pharma sector. So you can see Ireland has made itself into a kind of a rent boy on the global market. Let's be honest. It's sad, but that's the way it is. But people are waking up to that and begin to realize, my God, our whole echelon of politicians are actually, by definition, essentially traitors. Because we're voting for them and they're immediately giving their allegiance straight up the chain to forces outside the country. So they're actually technically traitors. So I think that's kind of what happened to Ireland and it showed in the longest lockdown in Europe, it shows in the hate speech laws, a test bed for this craziness. It shows in every interview when you see these goons we have up the top. It's just disgusting, like, right? And was that the total question about why Ireland? Did I miss something there?  No, it's just, I find it curious, having grown up there, first nine, ten years of my life, and just seeing that collapse, and you kind of think, that's not the Ireland that I knew growing up, and then you realise it's not. It's changed beyond all recognition, with no media pushback, no political pushback, And then if you don't have Fine Gael or Fianna fail, you've got Sinn Féin, you're thinking, hmm, could this thing get worse? Okay, I'll tell you something about Sinn Féin. I mean, Sinn Féin during COVID, the government did the most insane, crazy-ass, unscientific, damaging, nonsensical measures, the worst in Europe almost. And Sinn Féin were screaming at them to do more. I mean, I'm not joking. They were literally screaming at the government, saying, you're not keeping us safe. And it was the same in all the issues. So Sinn Féin are an unmitigated disaster. They're the opposite of opposition. So they play this pantomime. And I think there's a hashtag, politics is panto. And it's so true nowadays. It's a fricking pantomime. And Sinn Féin go up and argue with the government, and the government argue back with Sinn Féin. It's all a joke. It's all a club. At the end of the day, they are all aligned with each other, really, at the Dáil bar and behind the scenes. And the reason that they're all aligned, this is the important thing, I've said it already, they all understand there's big power structures in the world, and we kow tow to them. Therefore, there's no point arguing amongst each other except as a pantomime for our voters. That's it. I mean, it sounds kind of conspiracy theory. It's basic geopolitics. Now that we have a world structure of World Economic Forum, UN, EU, and I mean, recently Professor Werner, who invented quantitative easing in 95, I interviewed him. He's an expert in central banking and all the political. He worked for the Japanese government during their financial challenges as a direct advisor, chief advisor. Learned Japanese, fluent German, fluent English, master's, PhDs from Oxford. Brilliant man. But he told me something that I actually didn't realize. He said, you know the European Parliament has no real power. It's a talk shop. The European Commission decides the laws, the Commission. And the Commission are essentially not elected. And he said, you know what other region in the last 100 years had that exact structure, and they've almost taken it from them? Soviet Union. They have a parliament, people aren't too aware, and they have a Politburo, a commission, and it's the same structure. The parliament, you let them all talk and pretend that they've got some control, but the party decides. He said, essentially, and he said, one or two or a couple of Russian historians, have noted this in the early 2000s, academically, that fascinatingly, Europe is recreating the Soviet model. And people don't know that. And of course, under that model, the EU Commission, who are diplomatic immunity, no army or police can enter their grounds under any condition, a bit like central banks, they decide, the parliament then, And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, everyone, blah, blah, gets very high salaries, tax-free. All the people from the countries go over there and suck on the teat of Europe. They have a great time, meals for everyone, best of steaks. And they go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's that. And then the countries, of course, they just doff the cap increasingly. You look at Hungary, they say, we don't want to do this. And if you go against Europe, they take the whole European media, and they feckin' bury you. They bury you in accusations of far-right, nationalistic. They take away all the EU money. They cause you pain. So this is what we have. We have a new Soviet structure that wants to become a Chinese social credit-style full totalitarian structure. It's just what it wants. The organism of the geopolitical top strata in Europe, they want the full power. It's just natural, it's in the DNA now of the whole structure, it's not any one individual or one bad guy. Yeah, it's driven primarily from the late 50s by Rockefeller Brothers Fund and all the other bad guys and NGOs and CFR and all these groups and the Club of Rome, they're all pushing one way and that's it, it's simple guys, it's not a big conspiracy theory, it's just geopolitics has gone the wrong way for us. And a lot of bad guys have ended at the top. That's all. Happened in Rome. Jesus!  Yeah, and you see pushback across Europe with the rise of populist parties. Ireland and the UK sadly are sitting on their backsides with now, but that's a whole lot. I just want to just finish off on where you think this, the bill will go. It's been, what my understanding was, been in the Senate since maybe July, so and it was passed up. It's been sitting there now with more scrutiny. Where does it go? Because the police obviously will have to be sent out to police all these tweets which I thought they could do under the legislation but this is darker. Is there a way of turning it around so we just accuse everyone on the left of hurtful comments and the police must investigate? I mean is there requirement for an investigation. I'm just thinking of how you push back because this is going to pass through. I can't see any way it stopped. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure, Peter. Yes, they say we need a true by Christmas and all this talk, but they're not divulging what's actually happening. So I'm not sure what's actually happening on the ground mind you a very senior politician secretly met with me and a team of doctors, surgeons and businessmen back in September 2020. Very senior I obviously won't name in private and pretty much told us that most the politicians knew most of what I was sharing about COVID but he said, no everyone knows you don't talk about it and you support the narrative. So there's that level of institutional corruption, and I'm sure now there's similar stuff going on. A lot of the senators will have found out from their bloody daughters from social media how insane this is, but they'll know, shit, this is important. It comes from the big boys up top. We can't let them down. So I don't know exactly what's going on. I'm still hoping absolutely that with the focus on it, that they'll have to hold back their nonsense about these riots being a reason to bring in this insane law. I presume they're thinking, hmm, that's not washing. So I hope it's not inevitable. If it does happen, we got a massive problem. There's no question about that, because once it's in, it is a tool for tyranny waiting there like a nuclear weapon. sitting there on the statute of books with no place there, a criminal law, criminal in its very drafting. Criminal in its drafting, that's how bad it is. It's bad, but I guess, yeah, possibly be able to use it against itself. But you know, the judiciary and all of these bent politicians will be striving to throw out any cases involving it for leftists or nut jobs. And they'll be hyper trying to influence judges and police to use it on the people the government doesn't like. God, it's very sinister, isn't it? It's literally a tool of government to suppress people who don't agree with the government, which is treason in my mind. I mean, it might not be the exact definition. I don't care. It's treason. Well, we're all following this closely and praying and hoping that actually it is stopped. Ivor, great to have you on. Obviously, people can find you @FatEmperor on Twitter and thefatemperor.com. They can see all the videos, interviews up there on the website. Really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much, Peter. And if people are wondering, I'm down south in an undisclosed location, but that's me fox there. I picked it up. It's from an old country estate in Wexford that was stripped. Guy had it for 10 years, got it for 200 euro. Beautiful case, probably 100 years old plus. So anyway, bit of trivia.  That's probably a hate crime against foxes. But anyway, we'll leave it there. Thanks, Ivor. Good luck, Peter. Bye now.

An infection becomes endemic in a population when it is constantly maintained at a baseline level. That happens when the circulation of the virus is taken under control and therefore becomes easier to monitor. A disease may be endemic in some areas and not in others, as in the case of malaria, for example. Other endemic diseases reappear in waves in certain seasons, as the flu does in winter. Covid-19 for example will likely return in waves. We have already developed effective vaccines against severe forms, and those will have to be adapted to new variants as is the case with the flu. At some point, new treatments will likely be developed, enabling Covid-19 patients to receive care similar to that administered in the case of other respiratory viral infections. So Covid-19 will become a disease like any other? Is it really wise to drop restrictions so quickly? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here: Should I be cleaning my belly button? What do you get better at with age? Why has astrology come back into fashion? A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. In partnership with upday UK. First broadcast: 28/02/22 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brett Trainor (00:01.163)Hi Emma, welcome to the podcast.Emma Terrazas (00:03.702)Hey there, thanks for having me.Brett Trainor (00:05.323)No, no, it's definitely my pleasure. And, you know, one thing on this podcast, we talk a lot about, you know, the Gen Z what's your next, and it's almost all about the business, right? Which is important, right? What do we do with the revenue streams? Where are those things that come? But I don't talk nearly enough about the, what I would guess, the personal side of it, the wellbeing side of this. And so who better to have on the podcast than you to, to kind of help us rethink or.think differently about how we approach the health and wellness now that we're on our own and nobody's telling us what to do anymore. So anyway, with that intro, maybe to start just let the audience know a little bit about who you're working with and the type of work that you do with them and then we'll get intoEmma Terrazas (00:38.455)HeheheEmma Terrazas (00:49.322)Yeah. So hello, my name is Emma Terazas. I'm a health and life coach for entrepreneurs, CEOs or high level execs who really wanna take control back over their health and have maybe put their health on the back burner because life has just happened, which we all can attest to, especially after COVID and during COVID. That was a really rough time for all of us. And what I really helped them do is createand reframe what health could look like for them through routine creation, mindset shifts around how to eat, more education about food and nutrition, and ultimately really just solidifying how you want to show up every day and then taking actions to make sure that you're eating right, working out, and again, in a way that is sustainable and fits your lifestyle, not what...you know, your neighbor did, or your best friend's sister, how she lost weight is gonna work for you. Like, it's all personalized, so that you can truly show up powerfully in your life as you.Brett Trainor (01:58.099)Yeah, I like that. I think that's, it's so important because too often we see just, you know, lift heavy weights, don't worry about cardio or do cardio. Don't put heavy weights, eat all eat the Mediterranean diet. No eat nothing, but, um, no carbs, those types of things. And you're doing the research on you. You take more of a holistic approach to all of it, right? It's just not one thing. And I think that's, you know, where.Again, I've spent a lot of time trying to amateur sleuthing into this, but so maybe, maybe take us, what are some of the common things your, your clients that are coming to you, what have they recognized and said, Hey, I'm doing this wrong or I'm not doing it. Um, to get to, you know, obviously they're, they've realized something, but I'm guessing the vast majority of us don't realize we're doing something wrong that makes sense.Emma Terrazas (02:46.238)Yeah, yeah. It really, it depends on the person. And a lot of people do know what they're doing wrong, but it's just so hard to stop and change. And like you said, like doing research and trying to change, it takes up a lot of time and energy when you're already stressed with family life, work life. So it's like, of course, things just kind of get put on the back burner. And it's, I just want people to know that it's okay. Because I thinkwe really judge ourselves and people feel really guilty and that just doesn't help, right? You're not helping yourself. So instead I really try to invite people to look like, okay, let's just take a breath and see what's actually going on, right? Like, can we look at your day and say, okay, this is exactly what I'm doing. This is what I'm eating. But anyway, so back to your question, kind of scrambled for a second, but.what people in this day and age are coming to me with is that COVID really kicked them to the ground, right? And again, I want to, I think people forget that this was a huge event and it's not like we can just snap our fingers and everything's back to normal. So I wouldn't, I'm not surprised that everyone is in, and some people are different, right? But we're still trying to move through this and some of my clients now have gained 50.pounds plus a little less, a little more, depending on the person during COVID. And they're just really trying to get back to feeling like themselves, feeling healthier, eating more consistently. That's something else I see is a lot of people skip breakfast and then they get home at the end of the day or they're done working and they're exhausted because they haven't eaten all day. And then how do you give time and space to your family if you don't feel good? So it's really...The nutrition, I would say, is a huge part of the work that we do together.Brett Trainor (04:45.083)Okay. Now it's awesome. And you're right. It was, you know, kid got two ways. I like to be outside. So COVID didn't necessarily hurt it too much. But just getting out of that routine. And, you know, one of the things that I found when I left corporate was structured in a sense, right, you know, the days were this and you could build a workout in before or try to get at lunch or after or not at all, right, and those types of things. But one of the things that I found when I transitioned into working for myself was you do have aa whole lot more free time. So you're thinking perfect, right? I'm going to get in the best shape of my life. I'm going to eat well, all these other things, but yet it tends to either. We just focus on the business or we never get to the actual health, you know, and the fitness piece of it. So, so how do we, how do we fix that? Is there a way to fix that?Emma Terrazas (05:34.754)Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me too. I was in a nine to five coaching lacrosse at the school and then I still worked in their office while I was growing this business. And I thought the exact same thing. Okay, I was a former athlete. I know exactly what to do to work out and like eat better and I'm gonna have all this time. And then it's like business, business. And the next thing you know, you're like, oh my gosh, I don't feel good. Like I really don't like the way I look in the mirror that much, my pants don't fit, my clothes don't fit.Brett Trainor (06:00.844)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (06:04.598)And you never think it's gonna happen to you, but it inevitably does, exactly. And think about it, like our lifestyle just changes so much and it makes sense that you have to go back to the drawing board with your health and your routines, right, if you're living two completely different lives at this point. So it's all an experiment is something I really invite my clients to think about when...Brett Trainor (06:07.893)until it does.Emma Terrazas (06:34.802)And in this case, your audience, you're changing again, lifestyles, like, because going back to like the pressure and feeling guilty, if you're not perfect, and it's like, if it's an experiment, then you don't have any really judgment, you're just simply seeing what's going to happen. And then you taking action is what's going to lead to more motivation. And what I love to think about too, is a lot of people feel like they failed their diets, or theyThey fall off the wagon really easily. But a good thing about these particular experiences is that you now have more data to show what works for you, what doesn't work for you. So that you can, again, pivot. It's all about pivoting. For example, one of my clients, we have gotten her to 6,000 steps a day. She was at under 2,000 when we first worked together. And...Brett Trainor (07:18.752)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (07:30.962)Now she's at 6,000 and her mindset is every single day I'm getting 6,000 no matter what. But right now it's a tax, mini tax season for her. She owns her own corporate tax accounting firm. So she is like so busy constantly on the computer and now what she says is again like we just focused on what she needed to do and just continued on from there.It's an experiment.Brett Trainor (08:02.235)Yeah, no, I like that. And again, it took me probably three plus years to figure out to what you said. So I'm hoping with today's episode, we can shortcut it for folks to get to get started, then you can start to tweak because, you know, I found again, if you don't, for me, if I don't track it, right, then I don't, it doesn't change it. So I started tracking sleep.Brett Trainor (08:32.229)enough protein for what I was working out now that I shifted so I don't look at calories anymore but I'm making sure I get the you know the 150 grams of protein a day and that's completely shift I'm like damn why didn't I do this forever but to your point once I started tracking I could see what was working and what's not working and so hopefully for everybody's out there that's thinking about hey I need to make change you know that's what Emma's gonna help us do is you know jump startEmma Terrazas (08:42.763)Mm-hmm.Brett Trainor (09:02.029)you're going right, it's got kind of that 80 20 rule, right? If we can just get the 20% rate, you're gonna get 80% of the benefits and then we can start tweaking. So so I do like I said, the full approach, the mental, the nutrition, the fitness, so we're in block one, somebody's coming to you today, you don't have to give away all your trade secrets, but just say, hey, if you want to do this yourself, here's, here's how I would the framework for you to get everything.to get started. I mean, is that too overly simplified or can we do that?Emma Terrazas (09:32.222)Yes. No. So, what I usually do with people is first, I am an investigator of their lives. I'm asking all these questions so I could get a better well-rounded idea of what's going on with you. And that's what I want you to ask yourself too. And James Clear says this, the author of Atomic Habits is you have to look at your habits now. You had to take inventory because you can't change what you don't know is broken. Right?And again, you're not broken, like everything's changeable. But the first thing is, is I would really just go through your day to day. And it's really nice to have another set of eyes on this process, because we're such on autopilot these days, right? You just get up and you move through the day. But when you really, again, sit down, you're like, okay, what do I do? So that's the first thing. And also really take a look at what you're eating. I would track.or even just write down in a diary, every single thing that you eat in a day. And something I like to think about is, if you don't know what you're eating in the week for lunch and dinner and stuff, you're kind of unprepared. I hate to say that. And that's just another decision that you have to make that is causing decision fatigue. And especially if you are ready to take that leap, as we all know it is,Brett Trainor (10:44.77)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (10:56.95)Brett, you know, you too, you have taken the leap to working for yourself, that confidence and energy is imperative for you to feel like confident and good that you can do this, right? Because think about fueling yourself with the right foods and 20% of your calorie intake during the day, every day is to your brain. So if you were barely eating,be able to be productive and focused and be the leader that you know you are. So it's really that concept of take care of yourself so you can then give your energy to others. So tracking I think is great. I love that. One of my clients even just sends me photos of everything she eats and she says it and everyone's different. Sometimes I have people do that. Other times we're tracking our macros or just our protein. That is huge. And I, for anyone who's wanting to justBrett Trainor (11:37.783)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (11:57.258)do that as a start is try for one pound. No, wait, I can never say this right. One one gram of protein per body pound. So I'm 130 pounds, I'm gonna have 130 pounds, 130 grams of protein. Or if you're if you feel like, again, maybe you have gained some weight and you can't eat likeBrett Trainor (12:06.956)HahahaEmma Terrazas (12:25.514)you know, 170, 200 grams of protein, you can do 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight, if that makes sense too. So that's a great start.Brett Trainor (12:34.067)Yeah, no, and it's so true. I've just, it's amazing to me that nobody talks about the protein as much. And I'm sure there's counter arguments, but going to your tracking, right? I think you go through, you know, before I started losing the weight, I'm like, I know what I eat in a day. I'm not eating that much. But then when you write it down, you're like, holy shit, it all adds up. And you know, it's as we get older.Emma Terrazas (12:55.127)Yeah.like.Brett Trainor (12:59.583)you can't eat as much. And so it's the unfortunate truth, you can work out but the end of the day, I know you lead with nutrition and I'm with you can't what's that old saying you can't out exercise calories, right? It's just there's something like that. So yeah, I love that tip. So just track what you're eating in high level, you'll be shocked atEmma Terrazas (13:11.994)diet. Yep.Brett Trainor (13:19.679)you know, maybe the snacking or the other things. And, you know, again, going back to the protein, I think, I think that makes a lot of sense. And the other thing you mentioned that I really like is the accountability partner, right? Just even if it's there, you know, Hey, I've got to send these pictures. Maybe I'm not going to eat that, um, as part of it. So, so, okay. So this is good. So nutrition, just start with where you're at up the protein.Emma Terrazas (13:22.881)Right.Emma Terrazas (13:31.697)Mm-hmm.Emma Terrazas (13:37.326)Great.Emma Terrazas (13:45.748)Mm-hmm.Brett Trainor (13:46.291)First step is what just reduce the number of calories or what you're eating or how it was so alright So now I've tracked it. I've seen some areas that I can prove You know, is there you know a specific diet you prefer or again as a customized? I don't put words in your mouth. So tell me alright, so I've tracked it. I found some areas. What do we do next?Emma Terrazas (13:51.607)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (14:03.99)Yeah.Right, right. So again, depending on your goals and also what I see a lot too, it's not always just about, or like defaulting to I'm eating too much. It's almost a lot of times I see you're not eating enough. And that's very kind of counterintuitive to what we think about with the diet culture and what we think and what we've been taught to lose weight is just cut your calories, cut your carbs. But in reality,Brett Trainor (14:22.307)interesting.Emma Terrazas (14:34.87)All these things are very important. Carbs are our number one source of energy. So if you just completely cut carbs, maybe you're doing the keto diet. And I don't believe in any one single diet for anybody. It just depends on your lifestyle, your needs, your wants, everything. And I think anything can really work. So.Emma Terrazas (15:03.958)You've tracked it, now what? You've increased your protein. If you are eating, I would say for anybody really, under 1200 calories a day, that is not good. That is not good at all. So this is a way to think about this too. It's like thinking about a fire, right? You add more wood to the fire and it gets bigger and bigger. That's what happens to our metabolism too. When you actually add more fuel to the fire, the right kind of fuel.Brett Trainor (15:17.5)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (15:32.206)And going back to your question, like what kind of foods, thinking of 80-20, you mentioned this already, but there's another 80-20 when it comes to food intake, 80% of what you're eating is from the earth, nutrient-dense food. So if your ancestors ate it, you could eat it. They're not, you know, they're not going through boxes. They're not putting stuff in the microwave. So think of that, 80%, whole nutrient-dense food in your diet. The other 20% can be really anything you want.So that's another good rule of thumb. So making sure that looking at your list and being like, dang, and just being truthful. Like you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, what is actually happening?Brett Trainor (16:15.191)Great.Yeah. If it's, it's not going to work. If you're not honest with yourself, you have to be honest with yourself or yeah. And I, I do love that too, with the, uh, if you, you know, if it wasn't, or if the food wasn't around a hundred years ago, it's probably not good for you. It's I mean, it's biology, right? I mean, that's what we ate. And I a hundred percent agree with that. The other thing that I've really tried to, um, eliminate is sugar. I mean, my reading, and again, you can confirm or deny that sugar may beEmma Terrazas (16:21.995)Right.Brett Trainor (16:47.941)thing that we could we could put into our bodies but just curious where your stance is on that.Emma Terrazas (16:54.09)Yeah, I agree. I mean, if it's processed sugar, added sugar, definitely take a look at the back of the ingredients labels. If it says added sugar, anything more than like three grams, five grams, you gotta watch out for that. And something that's super interesting, going back to my client who, we raised her steps and we also completely just focused in on food.She's not going to the gym. She's not working out. All we've done is changed her food, her mindset around food and her steps. And she's lost 42 pounds in four months. She's not even tracking. Like I said, she's sending me photos, right? This is insane because something else that has happened now is that she, because she's been so focused on whole nutrient dense food, she can have anything she wants to eat, right? We know this. There's never a time where I'm like, you can't eat this. You can't eat that.Go for it, you know, as long as you have your other nutrients in set in the books, fine. So she goes back now to treats that she used to really enjoy and she can't even finish them because they taste like fake to her. And that is really the beauty of this process and the lifestyle change because you genuinely change your palette and your taste buds to prefer the natural.Brett Trainor (18:07.487)Yeah, that's awesome.Emma Terrazas (18:20.714)stuff because she's eating strawberries, she's eating blueberries. And it's like that's so much sweeter and more delicious to her than that like ice cream, whatever she was having before.Brett Trainor (18:31.539)Yeah, no, I love that. And you're right, it is. It's a lifestyle change. People like, well, I don't want to live my life like that. Well, you won't be living as long, right? If you choose to go that path. And again, you just reemphasize that, you know, weight loss is the kitchen, not the gym. And for the non-workout people, they're probably like, okay, tell them this is good. So, all right, so we've got a good, we've got to start on the diet and we know we need to flip it. And again, at the end of the day, go back to the 820.Emma Terrazas (18:41.083)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (18:48.833)Mm-hmm.Emma Terrazas (18:52.445)HeheheBrett Trainor (18:59.139)calories in calories out, right? I don't think there's any super diet that changes it. And again, get the fundamentals right. So, all right, so now again, we've got time to work out and maybe we didn't before. How do we approach or how do you get people, let's say that maybe they used to work out or didn't and now we wanna get back into it. How do we think about getting back into or starting for the first time exercise?Emma Terrazas (19:24.886)Yeah, super good question. What I see a lot is, you know, our brains are stronger than our bodies. And we're like, oh, I used to be able to lift this weight. Let me just pop right back to that. No, if you hear that phrase in your brain, remember this conversation and just take a step back because it is so important to start slow, meet yourself where you're at.This is not a race. You don't, there's not a time limit, right? That's another thing about my client. One of my clients that she's loving is like, she doesn't feel rushed for once in her life to lose weight and like fit in her clothes. Just like, she just feels so much lighter about the process. And so if you're like, all right, I'm gonna start going to the gym and like whatever. A lot of times I see people just, I wanna run. I'm gonna start to run, especially the Chicago Marathon just ended.People are very inspired, which is great, but if you haven't done any activity or very little and you just start to run, you're going to end up hurting yourself and then you're going to be set back even more. So, oh, and another thing that just kind of makes me laugh a little bit is that people are like, I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to sign up for a marathon. And I'm like, okay, cool, like that's amazing. I'm not a runner, so I see these runners. I'm like, good for you. But then what happens next?Brett Trainor (20:28.359)Right.Emma Terrazas (20:48.31)What's after that? The marathon's over and then what do you do? Right? Okay, so anyways, so you're gonna go work out to the gym. I have loved yoga. And I think that is so important for people of all ages because think of, again, the lifestyles that we're living. We're sitting, we're hunched over. Even 20 minutes, 10 minutes a day, as soon as you wake up is something I love to teach.Brett Trainor (20:53.033)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (21:16.238)As soon as your feet hit the floor, you're doing some stretches. Maybe it's, like literally just follow what your body is feeling if you don't know what to do. I would even go to YouTube and type in 10 minute morning yoga routine, right? There's so many free resources out there. That is really going to start your day off right. And then again, you're just like feeling loose and in the flow and then.the rest of your day and your brain kind of follow suits in my experience and with the experience of my clients. Also just start with body weight stuff if you want to, like doing pushups, doing assisted pull-ups. That mobility again, and why I love yoga so much is so important because you can't expect to like do squats and lunges and add weight if your body's not ready for that, right? It's just asking too much. And I like to also think about and what people kind of forget.is that our bodies are our best friends. Like they want us to succeed. They love us so much, no matter how much stress and pain we put on them, physically, emotionally, mentally, we, you know, talk down on ourselves. And I get emotional about this because it's so sad. So sad, it's like they do everything for us. And we just constantly abuse it.Brett Trainor (22:37.132)Yeah.Brett Trainor (22:43.123)Yeah, no, you're right. I don't know if it's always intentionally that we do, but, but you're right. And, you know, just to, um, bullet point your, your example, or I'll, I'm the example because I was running, I was doing these other things, doing some weightlifting, you know, the shoulder hurt, my knee was in pain. And again, a couple of years ago, I shut it down, started walking and did just the body weights, right? Pull ups at the park dips at the park. And that was it, you know, three or four times a week walking.Emma Terrazas (22:44.522)Yeah. Mm-hmm.Emma Terrazas (23:10.872)Yes.Brett Trainor (23:11.991)And over time, now I've started to add in some weights and do, you know, a high intensity. There's a place by is called hot works, which is like you, you do high intensity in a sauna for 15 minutes. It sounds awful to people, but when you get to be my age and you got that heat, it just, it's really good for the muscles. So to your point, this is, I flipped it from, how do I get in really good shape right now to, all right, if this is going to be the next 20 years, how do I build the blocks?Emma Terrazas (23:24.578)Yeah, yeah.Brett Trainor (23:40.751)And again, if I would have known this, I should have had this conversation with you four years ago because you would have saved me a couple of years of time. But yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm with you. There was the walking. Now I've built in a little bit of, you know, short, short burst running back in, but my body's actually hasn't felt this good in 10 plus years. SoEmma Terrazas (24:00.002)Congrats, that's amazing.Brett Trainor (24:00.095)Um, just, just an example for your, uh, your point that I, you know, it does, it works. It again, you have to have the patience cause you're right. We want instant gratification. I'm going to cut 2000 calories out of my diet. I'm going to work out for four hours a day. One, you get hurt, you get burned out and then you're right back to, to where you were. So, um, yeah, so maybe that's, oh, go ahead. Sorry.Emma Terrazas (24:18.478)Yeah. I think that was something that can help you show up to, even if it's 10 minutes, even if it's just a walk around the block or, not gonna lie, this morning I did not wanna get out of bed and go to yoga and work out as much as I love it, right? It's just, we're humans and we're gonna try to talk ourselves out of the things that we need the most. Think of it as time for you. And this is kind of like where the mental,Brett Trainor (24:39.362)Yeah.Emma Terrazas (24:47.862)component comes in. Because again, you're working so hard, you're always have to be on during work. These mini breaks, really just try to be present and think of it as you time. And maybe it's you're not going to feel the benefit today, but it will compound over time. And then and then the next thing you know, you start craving that movement, you start craving the foods that are good for you. And that'sreally the key to sustainable health and longevity and happiness, in my opinion.Brett Trainor (25:23.135)Yeah, you're right. It's, uh, the one tagline I use all the time still, and people get tired. Here is get outside every day. I don't care. Right. I we're both in the Chicago area and it's, it's not easy in January, but if I don't get outside, I try to do it twice early in the morning and then once at the end of the day, cause if I'm in the office all day, I need that to get outside and it makes you just walk, take a call out there. It's, it's now become up to your point. A part of the right routine versus, Oh God, I got to go do this again.Emma Terrazas (25:32.34)Yeah.Mm-hmm.Brett Trainor (25:53.169)type of thing. So, and I think that was a perfect transition because we into the mental side because I think that and I so agree and again wish I would have known earlier is to take care of yourself is going to help your business. It's going to help your relationships, going to help everything else but we've always been taught no it's got to be work you know burn the candle at both ends you get your business going don't worry about yourself but I think we're seeingand even research, right? I'm sure you see it all the time. If you take care of yourself, you're going to perform better, you know, in all the other areas, right?Emma Terrazas (26:27.786)Yep, absolutely. And at the end of the day, you have to decide what's important to you, right? Like, it's funny, I don't know, sometimes I'll just like have these deep thoughts to myself. Like the end of the day, you know, you close your computer, you're with your family, you're like, you're going to the gym, whatever it is, and you're just with yourself. Like everything that has happened doesn't really matter.So going back to like your body as your best friend, like you, if you don't have you and you don't feel like yourself and you're just kind of like, you know, something's missing, that's worth your time, in my opinion. Again, like you have to decide if that's important to you and it's work to figure it out, but it's always worth it.Brett Trainor (27:10.338)Yeah.Brett Trainor (27:18.219)Yeah, no, it makes sense. And I'm looking back at a couple of, I don't call them taglines, but you know, the next version of you, which is perfect, right? What is he, what do you want that next version to be? And, and, and the other thing is live life without limits. Right? So we're building these businesses, we're getting out of the rat race. And, but yet we're not building, you know, a life without limits, right? Cause we're slowing down or knee hurts or we're overweight. We can't move around. Kind of defeats the purpose of, of what we're doing. So.Emma Terrazas (27:44.674)Yeah.Brett Trainor (27:48.433)So from a mental standpoint, how do you encourage folks to start thinking? I mean, I love the analogy, your body is your best friend. If you don't have it, you're going to have challenges. So how do you help people reframe the mental approach to this? Is it more of a embrace the lifestyle change, small changes, or what works? Maybe there's probably no one size fits all, but how do we reframe this?Emma Terrazas (28:14.864)Yeah. I love that question.Emma Terrazas (28:20.586)I really think taking it day by day and really trying your best to become aware of the thoughts that you have that are on autopilot. And, cause there's gonna be hard days and there's gonna be easier days. Again, I'm always encouraging people to get like eight to 10,000 steps a day. And sometimes I look down on my watch and I'm like, okay, I had 3000 steps today. But it's...Brett Trainor (28:47.71)It's okay.Emma Terrazas (28:49.866)What am I gonna do differently tomorrow to make sure that I'm then kind of getting back to the person that I wanna be? Cause that's just life. So I think day by day, constantly adjusting the plan to what you need is super important.Brett Trainor (29:11.179)Yeah. And again, what's what helped me over time was moving away from that short term, you know, goal to, you know, it's a week on vacation and it's something where we're not going to be able to be active or we eat too much. It's okay. Right. It just, you slip back into the lifestyle. Cause again, I think we're building towards, I think we were just conditioned for way too many years to fit in this box, right? You know, you're working, I'm going to keep hammering the corporate side of it, but you're really limited. You're sitting behind.desk, even with the pandemic, we were able to work from home. And I think people got a taste of, huh, there is balance in life. And how do I figure it out? And, you know, I really love your message of, you know, your body is your best friend. And how often do we actually take care of ourself first?Rarely, right? And so I think reframing it and re-prioritizing that as you're going through this process is definitely going to help. So, and it's not easy, right? It's there's going to have good days, bad days, but in the end of that, it's, you're just going to be that much better off. And I'm guessing a lot of your clients are, we had the one that lost 40 pounds without really changing exercises. That's phenomenal, right? I think it's, that's again, we may not all be looking for that goal, but how do we feel a little better?How do we have more energy? How do we take advantage of the days that we have, et cetera? So what else are we missing? Anything else big? I know we're hitting the 80-20 version of this, but I think it's so important for people to just start to think about this versus putting it off.Emma Terrazas (30:32.278)Yes.Emma Terrazas (30:45.026)Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'd say also remember to try to have fun with it. Like, again, it's all an experiment. Don't be so rigid on yourself. It's all just, hey, how is this? How do I feel? How am I going to feel after I do this? And yeah, I think the key to doing that, too, is really just watching that processed food is.is really big.Brett Trainor (31:14.611)Yeah. So at the end of the day, the bottom line is you don't have to reinvent everything. It's just taking little steps and, you know, focusing on it versus I'll get to that tomorrow or I'll do that next week and no time like the present. Like I tell folks. So.Emma Terrazas (31:29.41)Yep.Brett Trainor (31:31.143)Interesting. All right. Well, I want to definitely be respectful of your time. And again, it's been, it's been too long since I've had somebody come out and talking about the other at the personal side of, you know, solo businesses and corporate escapees. So I do want to try, and I told you offline, I'm going to try something new for the podcast that I think I want to start incorporating. So I'm going to, I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you, Emma, what's, what's your next.Emma Terrazas (31:58.334)Yes, so I am so excited because ever since I started my business about five years ago, I've always wanted to live and work remote. That was a huge goal of mine. And, you know, COVID kind of put a little stop to that. And now next month, I'll be spending the month in Costa Rica.Brett Trainor (32:17.927)Oh, awesome. That's the beauty of it. And I know we talked a little bit offline that we may have a second episode coming out of this where we talk about blending your passions because one of your lines also is a multi-passionate resume. I'm like, yes, I love that, right? I mean, too often we're told to, you can only focus on one thing, right? Go all in, 100% do this. And what I'm finding is it's okay to have a number of smaller things that you're working on.Emma Terrazas (32:33.223)Mm-hmm.Brett Trainor (32:47.881)is close to your core right you can'tyou know, start a pet shop and then do coaching for fitness. I mean, you could, but that's just really hard. Everything you're talking about makes, makes sense. And I think people need to do that. And it goes back to, you know, one of the things I encourage folks all the time is define what success looks like for you, right? What do you really want? You know, I, and I use myself as an example, when I left corporate, it was, Hey, I just want to make more money or at least make the same amount of money and more money and do that. And then I said over this four years, it's become.much more rounded right how do i get the health and the wellness piece out of it i want to be active till you know 100 not just live to 100 but be active to 100 and then what do we do from business standpoints it's you know i've got these expertise you know how do i start to leverage and make a number of smaller bets what i'd like to do so took this off track you made a couple of really good points i just wanted to re-emphasize was what do you want and don't be stuck to one thing it'sAnd you're not, are you going to relocate there? Or are you thinking more of a nomad type of lifestyle?Emma Terrazas (33:55.646)Yeah, I'll be there for a month and I'm coming back and back to being, you know, having experiments in your life. Like, I don't know if I'm going to like this nomadic lifestyle as I've told myself for the past five years. So the only way that I'm going to know is if I do it. And that's just like with this process too, and anything you don't know until you jump in, you have to like, you know, believe that the net is there before you jump. And, um, I just, I love your audience because it does.Brett Trainor (34:11.115)Right.Emma Terrazas (34:24.362)It takes so much guts and like courage to leave corporate and go for what you truly want, your dreams. But if you bet on yourself, if you take care of yourself, like there's no way you're going to fail and you're only gonna fail as if you stop.Brett Trainor (34:44.691)Yes. No, I love that. And for some of us, it was better late than never that we've discovered it. But what's that old saying, you know, the best time to start would have been yesterday, but the next best is today. Right. So use this as your marker. If you're listening to this podcast and you're, you're not where you want to be in these areas, this is your challenge to, you know, 30 days, see if you can't figure out what you want and start moving towards, towards that challenge. So Emma, thank, oh yeah, please.Emma Terrazas (34:54.911)Right. Yeah.Emma Terrazas (35:08.49)Yeah. There's one more thing I wanna say. So really quick back to like that multi- passionate life. When you are transitioning into a new identity as a business owner, as like a healthy person, right? It's okay to feel sad a bit and it's gonna be hard. And because you're kind of like killing off an old version of you that you have just held on to for so long.So also allow yourself to change your identity and just be okay with that. And it's an experiment, right? Like, where can I go with this? Where's life gonna take me? Get excited about it, about the changes you're making. And yeah, you're gonna do great.Brett Trainor (35:51.519)Yeah, no, I love that. I think it's, it's true. And I know we're going to keep going on tangents, but that's okay. Because, you know, I refer back to, you know, Gen X and we were growing up. It was. Right. We came, I was latchkey kid, right. That came home by fourth grade. I was coming home to an empty house. Sometimes, you know, mom was home from work to have dinner ready. If not, you know, we had to figure it out. Our summers were literally, we, we joke about it and overgeneralized, but it was. You're out all day, you know, bottom lines just don't get seriously hurt.Emma Terrazas (35:56.622)Thanks.Brett Trainor (36:21.433)want to find you at the hospital and don't get into trouble. But short of that, we had to figure out everything else. And then we spend the next 30 plus years in corporate and it's, you know, you start off with all these great ideas and then just kind of, it rewards you to stay in, in the box or incremental changes. And again, it's okay. I learned a ton in corporate. So I think a lot of it is if you, you're old enough, you're going back to kind of the way you grew up and it seems scary at first, but then once you get out here,Oh my God, why didn't I do this before? So long-winded exclamation point to what you said, but I'm with you. Exactly. So I know you're big on Instagram, so if folks wanna learn more, connect with you, what's the best way for them to find you?Emma Terrazas (36:54.466)Yes. Yeah, we can talk forever, I'm sure.Emma Terrazas (37:09.482)Yeah, I'm on Instagram and LinkedIn. It's Emma underscore Terrazas. T E R A Z A S.Brett Trainor (37:17.727)And we'll definitely put that in the show notes, but I highly encourage you to check it out. And again, as you're thinking, like I said, Emma, what I loved about your approach, it's, it's whole, right? It's not super hardcore into one specific area and kind of that's what we need. Let's get the 80 20. Then we can tweak and refine and do all these other things. So, so thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it. And you know, we'll, we'll catch up with you here in that to distant future.Emma Terrazas (37:42.346)Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me and see you later.Brett Trainor (37:46.458)Have a great rest of your day.

I'm continuing to talk about my experience with COVID. I have something like 6 autoimmune disease from Sjogren's to Polymyositis. The most threatening with COVID is having Pulmonary Fibrosis (related to antisynthetase syndrome). This lung disease means that my lungs are progressively turning themselves into scar tissue. Contracting COVID was scary. Therefore, it is miraculous that I came through it. On about the 2nd day, having been in contact with my doctors, I got on antivirals. However, because of some of the pain meds I take, and because of my blood thinners, I could not take Paxlovid. I got put on Molnupiravir. Less effective than Paxlovid, Monupiravir is still saving lives. When I am at my most sick, I prioritize my medications. Monupiavir was 4 capsules 2x/day. I take 33 pills per day and when feeling nauseated, or feeling my crappiest, I prioritize my highest value meds and take out some of the things I can live without for a couple of days and swallow a fewer pills for a couple of days. At this point my dry cough had given away to wet cough and found that Sudafed was helpful. My oxygen saturation was dropping and the danger zone is when you get below 88%. Thankfully, I have an oxygen concentrator and liquid oxygen available at home. After the first few days the vomiting stopped but the nausea and intestinal symptoms continued. The pain in my body felt a lot like a fibromyalgia flare. What's dangerous about having a serious illness (an accident, times of great stress) is that our autoimmune conditions are likely to start relapsing. So COVID becomes dangerous on these other fronts. Also, ALL of my chronic illnesses began with an EBV infection so I know that I'm prone to post-viral infections. I always assumed that I'd be a candidate for long COVID. I'll talk more about my experiences in coming days and weeks about my COVID experiences. How about you -- have you had COVID? Avoided it? Had it more than once? How has it interacted with/impacted your other illnesses? Please comment! I'm Annette Leonard, speaker, coach, and sick person who believes that my illnesses do not define me. If health is the absence of disease and wellness is the presence of wholeness, then no matter what your disease status, we can work toward your wellness, your wholeness. Whether or not you are ever "healthy" on paper, you can be well. Join me and others on the path back to wholeness at AnnetteLeonard.com. Whether you are a person experiencing chronic illness or are someone who loves or serves people with chronic illness I have great resources here on this channel or on my website for you.

New York City real estate has distinctions and quirks that you'll find almost nowhere else in the world. Is it unreal estate? This includes: super skyscrapers, air rights, apartments with doormen, co-ops, pencil buildings, and rent control. Can you actually make money in NYC real estate? Incredibly, the national or world capital of all these are in NYC: banking, finance, communication, advertising, law, accountancy, fashion, arts, architecture, media, and more. 1 in 18 Americans live in the NYC metro area. The population is growing.  Guest Beth Clifford joins us.  She has an impressive set of experiences, including on Wall Street, with startups, and as an international real estate developer. Beth is a former NYC resident. Beth describes: how “air rights” are really development rights, pencil buildings, which apartments have doormen, and more. There's a short-term rental arbitrage strategy in NYC where you could make money. But is it legal?  Join Thursday, Feb. 23rd's GRE Live Event for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Baltimore properties. Ask me questions live. It's free. Register now at: GREwebinars.com. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/437 Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Memphis property that cash flows from Day 1: www.MidSouthHomeBuyers.com Find cash-flowing Jacksonville property at: www.JWBrealestate.com/GRE Book recommendation: Economics in One Lesson Find NYC apartments: StreetEasy.com I'd be grateful if you search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review” and do this for the show. Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free—text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Welcome to GRE! I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. New York City real estate is just absurd. It's also really interesting and has distinctions and quirks that you'll find almost nowhere else in the world.    We're talking about air rights, skyscrapers, apartments with doormen, co-ops, rent control, and how do you actually make money in NYC real estate? Today, on Get Rich Education.   Welcome to GRE! From Jamaica, Queens to Lower Manhattan. Across New York City and 188 world nations, this is Get Rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold.   As we're talking about NYC real estate today, I think it can be regarded as exotic and Manhattan is the CENTER of American urban excitement from Times Square to the Statue of Liberty to the address “One World Trade Center” and more.    It wasn't always this way.   As the story goes, in 1626 - about 400 years ago - Indigenous inhabitants sold off the entire island of Manhattan to the Dutch for a tiny sum: just $24 worth of beads and "trinkets."   At that time, it wasn't known as New York. It was called “New Amsterdam”.    Today, NYC is the national or the WORLD capital of: banking, finance, communication, advertising, law, accountancy, fashion, arts, architecture, media, and more.   How could so much be in one place? Well, all this attracts a lot of people.   In fact, the NYC metro area population last year was almost 19 million, that's up just about one-quarter of 1% from the previous year. So COVID hasn't killed it.   This means that more than 1 in 18 Americans live in the NYC Metro.   Now, of the 5 boroughs, we're really focusing on Manhattan today, since that's where space is at a premium, hence that's why the tall skyscrapers are there.   In fact, I have counted 17 skyscrapers that are all more than 1,000 feet tall - that's almost one-fifth of a mile tall.   Now, Manhattan is crammed with such high density - and it isn't just commercial space. Of course, residents live on Manhattan too.   But it is so crammed for space in Manhattan - and even in places of the four outlying boroughs, that it can kind of obscure your vision such that you don't have the - I guess - wherewithal that you would elsewhere.   Here's what I mean. Just last month I met a guy that has lived all of his life in NYC - part of his life in Brooklyn and part of his life in the Bronx.   He did not realize that when he lived in Brooklyn, he was living on an island. I don't know how long he lived in Brooklyn, but I found a gentle way to tell him, without making him feel unintelligent - that yes, Brooklyn and Queens are both on LI.   That's why you have all those bridges in NYC, like Brooklyn Bridge. They connect the islands.   Now, when it comes to rental property there, New York State has had the longest history of rent control in the United States, since 1943. The majority of those units are in NYC.   I have never seen one piece of evidence that rent control works long-term. If you have, please share that resource with us at GetRichEducation.com/Contact   When you put a ceiling on the amount of rent that can be charged like this, what tends to happen is that landlords have zero incentive to improve the property when they can't charge more rent… or else soon, LLs would be losing money.   In many cases, soon properties and entire areas can become dilapidated because they haven't been improved, and in bad cases, tenants don't want to move out. They'd like to keep the cheap rent even if they need to tolerate increasingly squalid conditions in these neglected properties.   A classic economics book really outlines the rent control problem wonderfully. Though the author isn't that well-known, Henry Hazlitt's “Economics in One Lesson” really breaks down the problems with rent control terrifically.   That entire book basically outlines how programs like rent control only benefit a small group of people for a short period of time… like, oh, let's give these people a break & be nice so that they can afford to pay the rent.   At the same time, you're NOT playing nice to the property owner. And how benefits to a small group of people in the short-term harms everybody long-term. Many will tell you that's the case with… rent control.   Shortly, I'll talk with an experienced developer, knowledgable about NYC development, she also used to live in NYC.   Wait until you discover some of the complexities of getting things build there. I expect her to share that.   She'll tell us about things that you would never think of, like how… whether or not there are windows on the side of the a building indicates whether or not there's a development opportunity there.   I'll have her describe what “Air rights” are. Property “air rights” are not what you think they are. You'll need to listen closely to that part as I expect explaining “air rights” involves somet math.   You'll learn about what “skinny skyscrapers” are and why they don't they build those wider.   NYC has coops - cooperatives. They're different from a condo. In a co-op, you buy shares in a corporation that gives you certain occupancy rights.    So rather than having fee simple title, you're the shareholder of a corporation rather than having a title like you do with condos.    And you've got to give the co-op board your income & taxes… because the corp wants to be sure you'll be able to pay. And if the co-op board doesn't like you dog or like you for whatever other reason, maybe they won't let you join.   If you're perusing apartments to rent in NYC - esp. Manhattan - some have a doorman and some don't have a doorman. Why might it be desirable to have a doorman, when that's not even offering in a place like, say Minneapolis or Houston?   I'll ask our guest, “Is there any way you can make some real estate cash flow here.”   So, I'm often the one doing the teaching here on the show. But in just a few minutes, I expect to get some learning myself as we discuss the unique and unusual nuances of NYC real estate.   First, how long have you been listening to the GRE Podcast?   Well, that was a recent question in our Instagram Poll.    Now, the sample size wasn't that huge and the our average Instagram follower might be a more avid podcast fan that the average.   But with the question asked, “How long have you been listening to the GRE Podcast?” The results were:         Under 1 Year = 11% of respondents have been listening for that length of time.       1-3 Years = 32% of you        3+ Years = 43% of you have been listening for that length of time.        And EVERY SINGLE episode since 2014, yes, that is all 437 episodes. That comprises 14% of you.   So that's about 1 in 7 listeners - at least in this poll - have listened to every single show. I'm really grateful for that. To shout out a sampling of those that have listened to every episode, that includes Kirby, Jacob, and Stacio.   I'm deeply grateful for that. I still of new people that find the show here today & then want to go back and listen to every single episode.   That is humbling indeed.    NYC Real Estate is absurd. That's next. I'm Keith Weinhold. This is Get Rich Education. ______________   Yeah, great stuff from Beth there… and hey, a good investment to the global elite might be different than what you perceive as a good investment.   If you've got $250M to place and you don't need the cash flow, you just want RE for the proven inflation hedge that it is, then drop it all into a Manhattan skinny skyscraper and leave it vacant. Some people can afford to do that. It was good to learn that the term “air rights” is misleading. It's really about “development rights”. That's probably a better way to remember it. Now, when it comes to real estate in the northeast, Boston, NYC, and Washington DC real estate and their outlying areas really aren't known as what we'd call “cash flow” markets. But three other cities in the region are - Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. Our Mid-Atlantic provider even sees properties where the price is around 100 months' rent. Yes, the property price is just 100X the monthly rent amount. That is impressive. That means that with just a 20% down payment, you can expect your monthly rent income to often exceed all the monthly expenses, even your mortgage payment. Well, I'm going to discuss this at a live event on Thursday night, just 3 days from now. That is Thursday, February 23rd at 9 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific. Yes, this live event is your opportunity to ask us questions live, and that it will be the first time ever that our in-house Investment Coach, Naresh, & I are both there, together, to help you, along with the provider in these mid-Atlantic markets. Again, it will be in just three days, Thursday, February 23rd at 9:00 PM Eastern. It is completely free. Sign up now at GREwebinars.com The nation's capitol, Washington DC, has a strong influence beyond the Mid-Atlantic region. The Baltimore metro area is slowly merging with the DC metro. Droves of Americans work in DC and live in Baltimore. It's a short commute and offers more space and affordability.   And then, with Pennsylvania being my home state, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and have similar advantages. We're talking about… Diverse economies Advantageous geographies Reasonable cost of living And substantially more landlord-friendly to you than NYC   Yes, GRE is hosting a live show on these markets. And typically on these action-oriented live events, we have a few real property addresses of freshly-rehabbed properties with tenants already placed, PM already in-place if you so choose and more. We'll make it real with real, actual addresses. You could reserve a few if you so choose.   Tune and don't miss: The Professional Turnkey Provider Introduction We'll have market talk on Philly, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh And look at that active inventory. Hey, special thanks to the extraordinary knowledgeable Beth Clifford today. Now, unless you have $250M to sink into skinny Manhattan skyscrapers, then… I hope & am looking forward to seeing you on Thursday night for some of the best ratios - rental properties with a high rent income in proportion to a low purchase price. Rather than $250M, it'll take as little as $30K for a down payment and closing costs on some of these properties at Thursday's live event. Amidst this continued scarce supply of inventory in America, we've pulled some strings and found a good selection for you in Baltimore, Philly, and Pittsburgh. This GRE live event takes place Thursday February 23rd at 9:00pm ET. I'll see you there. It's free. It's interesting and it promises to be lucrative for you. Sign up now while it's on your mind at GREwebinars.com Until then, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't Quit Your Daydream.

Today it's time to check in with tech-focused TV news–specifically, the senior field producer for CNBC in San Francisco, Laura Batchelor. In today's episode, you'll hear all about Laura's career, including how she got to San Francisco and first became a television producer. Also, Laura shares what it was like to broadcast news during quarantine, how comms pros should think about pitching stories for TV, versus print, and what it's really like to manage live TV shots when things sometimes (often?) go awry.Join technology comms pros Becky Buckman and Keyana Corliss as they cut to the heart of today's tech-news cycle and the general craziness that is high-tech corporate communications right now. With a short, not-too-serious take on the industry - with plenty of humor and irony thrown in - they'll bring you the best in the biz, across comms and media together, for one-of-a-kind insights and perspectives you won't hear anywhere else!Jump straight into:00:52 - Becoming a very senior film producer: Laura's fascinating professional journey - “So I got to work with Corey Johnson and Emily Chang and kind of really learn about the companies that are here, like the big ones, you know. Google and Facebook and Amazon.” 3:56 - Covering tech - “I mean right now it is. It is wild. I mean, there are like huge events. You know, the future of free speech could be like changed forever with Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter.”7:23 - Broadcasting news during Covid times - “So Covid was wild because being in broadcast news, like you're all always here in the studio, in the, in the control room.”11:57 - The unforgettable experiences in Laura's career - “You know, this whole collapse of FTX has been, wild to watch and trying to get a better understanding from other CEOs of crypto exchanges.”16:18 - A little news you can use: How to pitch a broadcast - “Keep it super short. TV is so quick and snappy. So like, I always think like Keyana, when you would pitch me, it would be. Three sentences max, maybe just like a few keywords. And it was so great because I was like, oooh, I'm intrigued.”21:23 - What working live TV is like - “They had Stewart Butterfield on a live interview happening on tv, and Jared Leto decided to walk up and interrupt our live interview just to say hi to Mr. Stewart Butterfield because he was an investor and wanted to say hi.”Episode resources:Laura Bachelor Twitter and Linkedin

Listen to Caribbean-American Lauren W. of Queens, New York—whose parents are from the island of Jamaica—share about going to school in Washington D.C. during the Covid-19 pandemic. She talks about moving back home in the spring of 2020 during her sophomore year of university. She did her junior year online from her home in New York and she returned to D.C. for her senior year in 2022. On distance-learning during the pandemic:“I think I learned more in person. I think the interesting part was like, I guess was the will to learn, because I feel like for me like I could pass my classes and do well in my classes. But, then am I retaining any of the information past the end of the class? So, I feel like that was harder in zoom-era, because it was just like, okay, I have to do this. I'm taking this class from my bed. So let me just finish this. Where, like in school…everyone around you is, is working towards the same goal as you. So, it's kind of like a—it's kind of like a community push, like ‘Oh, we're all learning,' I guess…Yeah. I think in school it was definitely—not definitely—but it was more so, learning the goal was ‘Oh, I'm interested in this, so I want to learn more about this.' Where in zoom-school it was more ‘I want my degree now'…” “I had a couple of friends who did, like, really hands on work, like, labs and stuff. So they got sent lab kits with, like… I know there was a dissection lab and people were sent, like, vacuum sealed animals…” On returning to in-person classes at college:“Senior year was interesting…We had a lot of like Covid outbreaks all the time…Because I think like a lot of people didn't wear masks and then the classrooms were still very much regular classrooms and it was still elbow-to-elbow still, which was interesting…” “So Covid happened a lot. I think I caught it once. I know a couple of people that had it twice. Or even three times.” On studying abroad during the pandemic:“I was supposed to study abroad summer of 2020…or…yes… Summer of my sophomore year. Either summer of my sophomore year or my junior year and I was supposed to go to London for the summer and do, like, an internship program. Um, but then they had the restrictions where if we went we would have to be under lockdown for like a while and, yeah, I think I realized that I wasn't gonna go after I had paid $400 to get my passport expedited…Because I think it was like a crazy number to go to London and be in isolation, and so I said that I was not gonna go, and then for some reason they said that because I said I'm not gonna go too late, I guess, I'm still gonna have to pay back the entire amount of the trip…So I'm still paying for a trip to London that I never went on.” On January 6th 2021:“GW dorms are on the same…block as The White House. If you just walk down you're in front of The White House…I think GW sent out a message saying, like, ‘lock your doors, stay inside.'…I remember being home…I know that people were on campus, because I remember getting the GW, like, broadcast text message telling people to like barricade themselves inside… I was in New York.”

Episode SummaryIn this livecast episode, we welcome back Dr. Zain Chagla, Dr. Stefan Baral, and Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti to address some of the issues we've seen throughout the pandemic, new variants and what to expect with future variants, discussing what we've done well over the past few years, misinformation, the effect of social media and the messaging on Twitter, the role media plays and the influence of experts on policy, public health agencies, booster shots to combat new variants and who actually needs them, where we are at with public trust, and much more!SHOW SPONSORBETTERHELPBetterHelp is the largest online counselling platform worldwide. They change the way people get help with facing life's challenges by providing convenient, discreet and affordable access to a licensed therapist. BetterHelp makes professional counselling available anytime, anywhere, through a computer, tablet or smartphone.Sign up today: http://betterhelp.com/solvinghealthcare and use Discount code “solvinghealthcare"Thanks for reading Solving Healthcare with Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Thank you for reading Solving Healthcare with Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng. This post is public so feel free to share it.Transcript:KK: Welcome to ‘Solving Healthcare' I'm Kwadwo Kyeremanteng. I'm an ICU and palliative care physicianhere in Ottawa and the founder of ‘Resource Optimization Network' we are on a mission to transformhealthcare in Canada. I'm going to talk with physicians, nurses, administrators, patients and theirfamilies because inefficiencies, overwork and overcrowding affects us all. I believe it's time for a betterhealth care system that's more cost effective, dignified, and just for everyone involved.KK: All right, folks, listen. This is the first live cast that we have done in a very long time, probably a year.Regarding COVID, we're gonna call it a swan song, folks, because I think this is it. I'm gonna be bold andsay, this is it, my friends. I think what motivated us to get together today was, we want to learn, wewant to make sure we learned from what's gone on in the last almost three years, we want to learn that,in a sense that moving forward the next pandemic, we don't repeat mistakes. We once again, kind ofelevate the voices of reason and balance, and so on. So, before we get started, I do want to give acouple of instructions for those that are online. If you press NL into the chat box, you will be able to getthis. This recording video and audio sent to you via email. It'll be part of our newsletter. It's ballin, you'll,you'll get the last one the last hurrah or the last dance, you know I'm saying second, secondly, I want togive a quick plug to our new initiative. Our new newsletters now on Substack. Everything is on therenow our podcasts our newsletter. So, all the updates you'll be able to get through there. I'm just goingto put a link in the chat box. Once I find it. Bam, bam, bam. Okay, there we go. There we go. That's itright there, folks. So, I feel like the crew here needs no introduction. We're gonna do it. Anyway, we gotDr. Zain Chagla, we got Dr. Stef Baral, we got Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti back in full effect. Once again, like Isaid, we were we chat a lot. We were on a on a chat group together. We were saying how like, we justneed to close this out, we need to address some of the issues that we've seen during the pandemic. Talkabout how we need to learn and deal with some of the more topical issues du jour. So, I think what we'llstart with, well get Sumon to enter the building. If you're on Twitter, you're gonna get a lot of mixedmessages on why you should be fearful of it or why not you should be fearful of it. So, from an IDperspective, Sumon what's your what's your viewpoint on? B 115?SC: Yeah, so, first of all, great to be with you guys. I agree, I love doing this as a as a swan song to kind ofmove to the next stage that doesn't involve us talking about COVID all the time. But so yeah, I think thatwe've had a bit of an alphabet soup in the last year with all these variants. And you know, the most oneof the newest ones that we're hearing about recently are BQ 1, xBB. I think that what I talked aboutwhen I was messaging on the news was taking a step back and looking at what's happened in the last 14months. What that is showing us is that we've had Omicron For this entire time, which suggests a levelof genomic stability in the virus, if you remember, variants at the very beginning, you know, that wassynonymous with oh, man, we're going to have an explosion of cases. Especially with alpha for the GTAdelta for the rest of, of Ontario, and I'm just talking about my local area. We saw massive increases inhospitalizations, health care resources, of patients having been sent all over the province. So, it was itwas awful, right. But you know, I think that was a bit of PTSD because now after anybody heard theword variant, that's what you remember. As time has gone on, you can see that the number ofhospitalizations has reduced, the number of deaths has reduced. Now when omicron came yeah, therewas an explosion of cases. But you know, when you look at the actual rate of people getting extremely illfrom it, it's much, much, much less. That was something that, you know, many of us were secretlythinking, Man, this is great when this happened. So now where we are is we're in January 2023, we'vehad nothing but Omicron, since what was in late November 2020, or 21? Maybe a bit later than that.And x BB, if you remember, be a 2x BB is an offshoot of BH two. Okay. Yeah, if you're noticing all thesenew variants are their immune evasive, they tend to be not as they're not as visually as, I see this in myown practice, like all of us do here. You know, they are, well, I'm kind of piecemeal evolution of thevirus. Now, there's not one variant that's gonna blow all the other ones out of the water, like Oh, microndid or delta. Right. I think this is a good thing. This is showing that we're reaching a different stage of thepandemic, which we've been in for almost a year now. I think that every time we hear a new one, itdoesn't mean that we're back to square one. I think that this is what viruses naturally do. And I thinkputting that into perspective, was very important.KK: Absolutely. Zain just to pick your brain to like, I got this question the other day about, like, what toexpect what future variants like, obviously, is there's no crystal ball, but someone alluded to the ideathat this is what we're to expect. You feel the same?ZC: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, because we have not studied a Coronavirus this much, you know, inhistory, right. Even though we've lived with coronaviruses, there probably was a plague ofcoronaviruses. What was the Russian flu is probably the emergence of one of our coronaviruses areseasonal coronaviruses. You know, I think we had some assumptions that Coronavirus is when mutate,but then as we look to SARS, cov two and then we look back to see some of the other Coronavirus has,they've also mutated quite a bit too, we just haven't, you know, put names or other expressions tothem. This is part of RNA replication of the virus is going to incorporate some mutations and survival ofthe fittest, the difference between 2020, 2021, 2022, and now 2023 is the only pathway for this virus tokeep circulating is to become more immune evasive. This is what we're seeing is more immune evasion,we're seeing a variant with a couple more mutations where antibodies may bind a little bit less. But Ithink that the big difference here is that that protection, that severe disease, right, like the COVID, thatwe saw in 2020/2021, you know, that terrible ICU itis, from the COVID, you know, for the level ofantibody T cell function, non-neutralizing antibody functioning mate cell function, all of that that's builtinto, you know, humanity now through infection, vaccine are both really, you know, the virus can evolveto evade some of the immunity to cause repeat infections and, you know, get into your mucosa andreplicate a bit, the ability for the virus to kind of, you know, cause deep tissue infection lead to ARDSlead to all of these complications is getting harder and harder and harder. That's us evolving with thevirus and that's, you know, how many of these viruses as they emerge in the population really have kindof led to stability more than anything else? So, yes, we're going to see more variants. Yes, you know, thisis probably what what the future is, there will be some more cases and there may be a slight tick inhospitalizations associated with them. But again, you know, the difference between 2020/2021/2022/2023 is a syrup prevalence of nearly 100%. One way or another, and that really does define how thisdisease goes moving forward.KK: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe Stef we could pipe it a bit on, the idea that, first of all, I just want toreinforce like as an ICU doc in Ottawa with a population of over a million we really have seen very littleCOVID pneumonia since February 2022. Very minimal and it just goes to show know exactly whatSumon and Zain were alluding to less virulent with the immunity that we've established in thecommunity, all reassuring science. One question I want to throw towards Stef, before getting into it. Youdid an interview with Mike Hart. As you were doing this interview, I was going beast mode. I was hearingStef throw down. I don't know if you were, a bit testy that day, or whatever. There was the raw motionof reflecting on the pandemic, and how we responded and far we've gone away from public healthprinciples, was just like this motivator to say, we cannot have this happen again. I gotta tell you, boys,like after hearing that episode, I was like ‘Yeah, let's do this'. Let's get on. Let's go on another, doanother show. I'm gonna leave this fairly open Stef. What has been some of the keyways we'veapproached this pandemic that has really triggered you?SB: Yeah, I mean, so I guess what I'd say is, in some ways, I wish there was nobody listening to this rightnow. I wish there was like, I don't know what the audience is. I don't know if it's 10 people or underpeople, but I think it's like, I wish nobody cared anymore. I want Public Health to care. I want doctors tocare, we're going to keep talking because you know, Kwadwo, you've had folks in the ICU we we'vewe've seen cases in the shelters, we have outbreaks, like public health is always going to care aboutCOVID, as it cares about influenza cares about RSV, and other viruses, because it needs to respond tooutbreaks among vulnerable folks. That will never stop COVID, it was just clear very early, that COVID isgoing to be with us forever. So that means tragically, people will die of COVID people. I think that, youknow, there's that that's a reality, it's sometimes it's very close to home for those of us who areproviders, as it has for me in the last week. So COVID never ends. I think the issue is that like when doesCOVID And as a matter of worthy of discussion for like the average person? The answer is a long timeago. I mean, I think for the folks that I've spoken to, and the way that we've lived our lives as a family isto focus on the things that like bring folks joy, and to kind of continue moving along, while also ensuringthat the right services are in place for folks who are experiencing who are at risk for COVID and seriousconsequences of COVID. Also just thinking about sort of broader systems issues that I think continue toput folks at risk. So, one: I think it's amazing, like how little of the systematic issues we've changed,we've not improved healthcare capacity at all. Amazingly, we've not really changed any of the structuresthat put our leg limitations on the on the pressures on the health system, none of that has changed. Allof it has been sort of offset and downloaded and just like talking about masks and endless boosterswhen we've never really gotten to any of the meaty stuff. As you said three years into it, andeverybody's like, well, it's an emergency. I'm like, it was an emergency and fine. We did whatever wasneeded, even if I didn't agree with it at the time. But irrespective of that, whatever that was done wasdone. But now it's amazing that like the federal money expires for COVID In next few months, and allwell have shown for this switch health guys got became millionaires like a bunch of people, I don't mindnaming and I don't care anymore. These folks, these Grifters went out and grabbed endless amounts ofmoney. These cash grabs that arrival, the ArriveCan app with, like these mystery contractors that theycan't track down millions of dollars. So it's like all these folks like grabbed, you know, huge amounts ofmoney. And I think there's a real question at the end of it of like, what are we as a country? Or youknow, across countries? What do you have to show for it? How are you going to better respond? Andthe answer right now is like very little, like we have very little to show for all this all these resources thathave been invested, all this work that has been done. That I think should be the conversation. That tome needs to be this next phase of it is like billions and billions and billions of dollars trillion or whatever,like 10s of billions of dollars were spent on what? and what was achieved? And what do we want to donext time? And what do we have to show for it? that, to me feels like the meat of the conversationrather than like silly names for these new variants that do nothing but scare people in a way that isn'thelpful. It does not advance health. It doesn't you know, make the response any more helpful. It justscares people in a way that I think only detracts them from seeking the care that we want them to beseeking.KK: Yeah, I think you brought up a point to about or alluded to how some of this was the distraction.That was one of the points that really stuck home is that we, we didn't really dive into the core s**t, thecore issues. This is why at the end of it all, are we that much more ready for the next pandemic that wellsee, you know, and so like maybe Sumon, what do you think in terms of another tough one, are weready for the next pandemic? Do you think we've done enough? do we think are in terms of what we'veinvested in, how we've communicated to the public. The messaging to the public. Are we learning? Is myquestion, I guess.SC: I'm a clinician and I don't work with the public health and the policy aspect as closely as Stefan does.But I will say that, obviously, I've been in this realm for quite a long time, since in ID, I think that, youknow, what that's important to remember is that for SARS 1 we actually had this document thatoutlined all of this, you know, masking, social distancing, what to do with funding and all that kind ofstuff. Basically, I was actually interviewed about this, I remember back way back in 2020, and half of itwas basically just thrown out the window. I think that a lot of what happened is that fear came indecisions were made from emotion, which is, by the way, understandable, especially in April 2020. I'veshared with you guys before that, in February 2020, I was waking up at night, like nervous, that I wasgonna die. I that that's where I was thinking I it was, it was terrible. I completely understand makingthose decisions. I think as time went on, I wish that, you know, there's a bit more of public healthprinciples. You know, making sure that we're dealing with things without, you know, stepping onpeople's bodily autonomy, for example, you know, doing things in an equitable way, where you, youknow, we all know that every intervention that you do is squeezing a balloon, you must remember theunintended consequences, I think that we did. So, kind of putting that all together. I think, right now, aswe stand in Canada if we do have another pandemic. I fear that a lot of these same mistakes are goingto be made again, I should say, a disruptive pandemic of this because it's not forgotten H1N1, thepandemic it that was a pandemic, right. It wasn't nearly as disruptive as COVID was, but I do think thatinquiry and like you mentioned at the beginning, Kwadwo was talking about what we did, well, we didn'tdo well, and making sure the good stuff happens, and the bad stuff doesn't happen again, because this islikely not the last pandemic, in the information age in our lifetimes.KK: Zain, was there anything that stuck out for you? In terms of what you'd really want to see usimprove? Or whether it is messaging, whether it is public health principles, does any of those stick out inyour mind?ZC: Yeah, I mean, I think the one unique thing about this pandemic that is a lesson moving forward andfor us to kind of deal with I think we talked about messaging. This was the first major pandemic thatoccurred with social media and the social media era, right, and where, information, misinformation,disinformation, all the things that were all over the place, you know, we're flying, right, and there doesneed to be some reconciliation of what's been we have to have some reconciliation of some of thebenefits of the social media era in pandemic management, but also the significant harms the people,you know, we're scared that people got messaging that may not have been completely accurate, thatpeople had their biases as they were out there. I will say even that social media component penetratedinto the media. This is also the first time that I think we saw experts you know, including myself andSuman and all of us you know, that you know, could be at home and do a news interview on NationalNews in five minutes and be able to deliver their opinion to a large audience very quickly. So, you know,I think all of that does need a bit of a reconciliation in terms of what worked, what doesn't how youvalidate you know, good medical knowledge versus knowledge that comes from biases how we evaluatepsi comm and people you know, using it as a platform for good but may in fact be using it you know,when or incorporating their own biases to use it for more, more disinformation and misinformationeven if they feel like they have good intentions with it. I you know, I think this is a, you know, for thesociologists and the communications professionals out there, you know, really interesting case exampleand unfortunately, I don't think we came out the other side. Social media being a positive tool, it mayhave been a positive tool, I think in the beginnings, but, you know, I think I'm finding, it's nice tocommunicate with folks, but I'm finding more harm and more dichotomy and division from social mediathese days is compared to the beginnings of the pandemics where, you know, I think, again, there's justbeen so much bias, so much misinformation so much people's clouds and careers that have been, youknow, staked on social media that it's really become much, much harder to figure out what's real andwhat's not real in that sense.KK: Absolutely, I fully agree Zain. At the beginning, in some ways, I'll tell you, ICU management, thatwhole movement for us to delay intubation, as opposed to intubation early, I really think it was pushedby in social media. So, I think it saved lives, right. But then, as we got through more and more thepandemic, wow, like it, like the amount of just straight up medieval gangster s**t that was going on thatin that circle, in that avenue was crazy. Then just like, I mean, this might be controversial to say, I don'tknow, but news agencies got lazy, they would use Twitter quotes in their articles as, evidence, or asproof of an argument. It's like, what is happening? It? Honestly, when you think about it, it was it wascrazy. It still is crazy.ZC: Yeah. And I think expertise was another issue. Right. And, you know, unfortunately, we know of, youknow, certain experts that were not experts that weren't certified that weren't frontlines and a varietyof opinions and various standpoints and epidemiology, public health, intensive care, infectious diseases,whatever is important. But, you know, there were individuals out there that had zero experience thatwere reading papers and interpreting them from a lens of someone that really didn't have medicalexperience or epidemiologic experience, that chased their clout that made money and, we know someexamples that people that eventually had the downfall from it, but you know, at the end of the day,those people were on social media, and it penetrated into real media, and then that is a real lesson forus is that validation of expertise is going to be important. You know, as much as we allow for anyone tohave an opinion, you know, as they get into kind of real media, they really have to be validated that thatopinion comes from a place that's evidence based and scientific and based on a significant amount oftraining rather than just regurgitating or applying one small skill set and being an expert in many otherthings.KK: SumonSC: So we're just gonna add really quickly is that, in addition to what Zain saying. When this stuff bledover from social media to media, the thing that I mean, at least what it seemed like is he was actuallyinfluencing policy. That's, I think that's the important thing is, so you can have 10 people 20 peopleyelling, it doesn't matter if they're extreme minority, if it's influencing policy that affects all of us, right.So, I think that's important.KK: I'll be honest with you, like, I got to the point where I really hated Twitter, I still kind of hate Twitter.Okay. It was conversation. I remember Sumon that you and I had I don't remember it was we weretexting. I think we talked about this. But the fact that policy could be impacted by what we're throwingdown the facts or the messages that we were doing on media that this can impact policy, you had tolike, especially when there was some badness happening, we had to step up. We had to be a voice oflogic, whether it was mandates, whether it was you know, lockdown school closures, whatever it mighthave been like, the politicians, we heard about this politicians looking at this, the mainstream medialooking at this, and for us not to say anything at this point, like we had, we had to do something Sorry,Stef, you're gonna jump in?SB: Yeah, I think I think what was interesting to me to see and I think a clear difference between H1N1was that in a lot of places, and including in Ontario, across the US, where this sort of emergence of theselike the science tables, these task forces, these whatever you want to call them, it was like a new bodyof people often whom had never spent a day in a public health agency. Often academics that you know,are probably good with numbers, but really don't have a lot of experience delivering services, you know,all of a sudden making decisions. So I think there's a real interesting dynamic that when you compare,for example, Ontario and British Columbia, one has this science table one does not, and just howdifferent things played out, I mean, given it's a, you know, an end of have to, or no one in each camp,but I think what you see is like, there's a place there where like public health or you know, let's say,Sweden, you know, as a public health agency that didn't strike up its own taskforce that used itstraditional public health agency. I think was in a place to make more like reasoned and measureddecisions, and just was better connected, like the relationships exist between the local healthauthorities and the provincial health authorities and the national ones. I think when you set up these,the one thing that I hope we never do, again, is that something like the science table never happensagain. That's not to sort of disparage most of the people. Actually, most of the folks on the science tableI like, and I respect, say many of them, maybe not most, but many of them, I like and respect, but it isthe case that there was it was they weren't the right group of people. They weren't representativeOntarians he was like, ten guys and two women, I think, I don't know many of them white, they weren'trepresentative socio economically, racially diverse, anything. They didn't have the right expertise onthere. I would have liked to see some like frontline nurses on there to say ‘listen, this stuff is silly' orsome frontline, whoever just some frontline folks to be say ‘listen, none of the stuff that you're sayingmakes any sense whatsoever'. And luckily, there was some reason, voices on there, but they were theminority. But luckily, they prevailed, or we would have had outdoor masking and even tougherlockdowns. I don't know how folks really; it was really close. I think we fortunately had thatrepresentation, but that should have never even happened, we should have had public health Ontario,being its agency and making recommendations to the ministry and to the government. There shouldhave never been a science table. Then second thing, I just want to say I've we've talked about thisforever and I do think we should talk about this more, not in the context of like this, this podcast, but isalso just absolutely the role of the media. I do want to say that, like historically, media had to do a lot ofwork, they had to go to universities or hospitals and ask for the right expert, and then the media orcomms team, ‘you should really talk to Zain Chagla' Because he has good example, you know, it givesgood expertise on this or you start to like, I don't know, like Dr. so and so for this or that, and they puttogether the right person, they organize the time and then they talk. Now you know that it was reallylike the story I think was more organically developed on based on what the experts had to say. Nowyou've got reporters, for people who are not from Ontario, there's a sports reporter in the city ofToronto that I looked historically, I can't see that they've ever done anything in public health suddenlybecame like the COVID reporter in the city of Toronto, for a major newspaper. It's like this person hasnot a clue of what they're talking about, just like has no clue they've never trained in. I don't disparagetheir sports reporter like why should they? but they became the voice of like public health for like theaverage person. It just it set us up where that person just had a story and then just found whateverpeople on Twitter that they could to like back up their story irrespective to drive controversy, to driveanger towards the government based on sort of political leanings. Even if maybe my political leaningsare aligned with that person, it's a relevant because it's not about politics, it's about public health. So Ithink the media, we have to think about, like, how do we manage the media's need for clicks and profit,you know, during this time, in with, like, their role as like, the responsible are an important part of like,you know, social functioning, in terms of the free press. So, I, there's no easy answers to that. But I'll justsay, I think there was a fundamentally important role that the media played here. And I have to say, itdidn't play out positively, in most places.KK: I gotta say, like, this is gonna be naive talk. But we're in a pandemic, there had to be so many of ushad a sense of duty, like, I was surprised at the lack of sense of duty, to be honest with you. Even if youare about your cliques, ask yourself, is this is this about the greater good here? Is this really gonna get usfurther ahead? I've said this a few times on my platform, I would have a balance of a mess. The balancedmessage on was usually one specific network that would bail on the interview. They would literally bailon the interview because my message might not be as fearful. What the actual f you know what I mean?Like it's crazy.(?) I will say there were some good reporters. I don't want to say that that you know, there were someincredible folks. I was talking to someone the other day, I won't mention who but I think the mark of thegood reporter was, you know, they have a story, they want to talk about it. They contacted us. And theysaid, what time can we talk this week, right? They didn't say I need to get this filed in three hours. If yousay you need to get this filed in three hours, the expert you're gonna go to is the one that's available inthe next three hours, right? They wanted to hear an opinion, they wanted to get multiple opinions onthe table, but they would carve out the time so that everyone could give their story or, what theiropinion was or what evidence they presented. They made sure it rotated around the experts rather thanthe story rotating around being filed. I think it's important and, you know, you can get a sense of certainthings that are on the need to be filed this day, or even on the 24/7 news cycle, where they may not beas well researched, they're they're a single opinion. They're quoting a Twitter tweet. Now, I think insome of these media platforms, you can just embed that Twitter tweet, you don't even have to, youknow, quote it in that sense, you just basically take a screenshot of it basically. Versus again, thosearticles where I think there was there more thought, and I think there were some great reporters inCanada, that really did go above and beyond. Health reporters, particularly that really did try to presenta picture that was well researched, and evidence based, you know, with what's available, but therecertainly are these issues and it's not a COVID specific issue, but with media ad reporting, in that sense.Yeah, it's and it's important to say like, it's not actually just the reporter, it's the editors, its editorialteams, like I had said, OTR discussions with reporters very early on, I've tried to stay away from themedia, because I think the folks who have done it, I've done it well. But it was interesting, because BobSargent, who sadly passed away, an internal medicine physician, and an amazing mentor to manyclinicians in Toronto. Put me in touch with a couple of reporters. He's like, you know, you're a publichealth person, you should really talk to these reports. We had this; can we talk to you privately? It wasso weird. This was summer of 2020. So, we had a very private discussion where I said ‘Listen, I haveconcerns about lockdowns for like, these reasons' I think it's reasoned, because it's not it, I've got noconspiracy to drive, like, I've got no, there's no angle in any of it. So, but it was just fascinating. So, theywere like we might be able to come back to you, and maybe we'll try to do a story around it. Then theycame back and said, we're not going to be able to pursue it. I said that's fine. It's no problem. It just sortof showed that I think, similar as academics, and clinicians, and all of us have been under pressure basedon everything from like CPSO complaints, the complaints to our employers, to whatever to just saw, youknow, the standard attacks on Twitter. I think there was also a lot of pressure on reporters based on thiswhole structure, and of it. So I think, I don't mean to disparage anybody, but I do think the point thatyou made is really important one is. I'll just say, in our own house, you know, my wife and I both werelike talking at the beginning of this and being like, what do we want to know that we did during thistime? So, my wife worked in person, as a clinician alter her practice all throughout her pregnancy? Shenever didn't go, you know, she did call she did all of that, obviously, I have done the work I've done interms of both clinically and vaccine related testing. But this just idea of like, what do you want toremember about the time that you would like what you did when s**t hit the fan? And, you know,because first, it'll happen again, but just also, I think it's important to sort of, to be able to reflect andthink positively about what you did. Anyways,KK: I hear you both, part of it, too, for me, I'll just straight up honesty. In some ways, I'm just pissed, I'mpissed that a lot of the efforts that were that a lot of people put into to try and get a good message outthere. The backlash. Now people reflecting saying, ‘Oh, I guess you did, you know, many of you do tohad a good point about lockdowns not working out'. I know it may be childish in some way, but it's just,you know, a lot of us have gone through a lot to just try and create a balanced approach. I think therewas a little bit of edge in this voice, but I think it comes with a bit of a bit of reason to have a bit of edge.I think in terms of the next couple questions here are areas to focus on. A lot of people in terms of like,decisions regarding mandates, boosters, and so forth, like we talk a lot about it on public health, it's thedata that helps drive decisions, right. That's really what you would think it should be all about. So, one ofthe many questions that were thrown to us, when we announced that this was happening was, the needfor like, almost like universal boosters, and Sumon, I'll put you on the spot there, at this stage in thepandemic, where I'm gonna timestamp this for people on audio, we're on January 10th, 2023. There aresome questions that we get, who really needs to push through to we all need boosters? What's yourthoughts on that?SC: So, I think that one of the things that I said this, as Zain makes fun of me throughout the pandemic, Icame up with catchphrases, and my one for immunity is the way that we've conceptualized immunity inNorth America. I think a lot of this has to do with an actual graphic from the CDC, which likens immunityto an iPhone or a battery, iPhone battery. So, iPhone immunity, where you have to constantly berecharging and updating. I think that has kind of bled into the messaging. That's what we think of it. Iremember back in I think it was October of 2021, where they were also starting to talk about the thirddose. The third dose, I think that at that time, we knew that for the higher risk people, it was probablythe people who would benefit the most from it. We had Ontario data from it was I think, was ISIS.There's vaccine efficacy against hospitalization, over 96% in Ontario in health care workers 99%, if you'reless than seventy-seven years of age, yet this went out, and everybody felt like they had to get thebooster. So, I think that the first thing that bothered me about that is that there wasn't a kind ofstratified look at the risk level and who needs it? So now we're in 2023. I think that one of the big thingsapart from what I said, you know, who's at higher risk, there's still this problem where people think thatevery six months, I need to recharge my immunity, which certainly isn't true. There wasn't a recognitionthat being exposed to COVID itself is providing you a very robust immunity against severe disease, whichis kind of it's coming out now. We've been we've all been talking about it for a long time. And you know,the other thing is that the disease itself has changed. I think that I heard this awesome expression, thefirst pass effect. So, when the COVID first came through a completely immune naive population, ofcourse, we saw death and morbidity, we saw all the other bad stuff, the rare stuff that COVIDencephalitis COVID GB GBS tons of ECMO, like 40-year old's dying. With each subsequent wave asimmunity started to accrue in the population, that didn't happen. Now we're at a different variant. Andthe thing is, do we even need to be doing widespread vaccination when you're with current variant, andyou can't be thinking about what we saw in 2021. So, putting that now, all together, we have as Zanementioned, seroprevalence, about almost 100%, you have people that are well protected against severedisease, most of the population, you have a variant that absolutely can make people sick. And yes, it cankill people. But for those of us who work on the front line, that looks very different on the on the frontlines. So, I really think that we should take a step back and say, number one: I don't think that thebooster is needed for everybody. I think number two: there are under a certain age, probably 55 andhealthy, who probably don't need any further vaccination, or at least until we have more data. Numberthree: before we make a widespread recommendation for the population. We have time now we're notin the emergency phase anymore. I really hope that we get more RCT data over the long term to seewho is it that needs the vaccine, if at all. And you know, who benefits from it. And let's continue toaccrue this data with time.KK: Thanks Sumon. Zain, are you on the along the same lines assume on in terms of who needs boostersand who doesn't?ZC: Yeah, I mean, I think number one: is the recognition that prior infection and hybrid immunityprobably are incredibly adequate. Again, people like Paul Offit, and we're not just talking about youknow, experts like us. These are people that are sitting on the FDA Advisory Committee, a man thatactually made vaccines in the United States, you know, that talks about the limitations of boosters andprobably three doses being you know, The peak of the series for most people, and even then, you know,two plus infection probably is enough is three or even one plus infection, the data may suggest maybe isas high as three. Yeah, I think, again, this is one of these things that gets diluted as it starts going downthe chain, if you actually look at the Nazi guidance for, you know, bi-Vaillant vaccines, it's actuallyincorporates a ‘should' and a ‘can consider' in all of this, so they talked about vulnerable individuals,elderly individuals should get a booster where there may be some benefits in that population, the restof the population can consider a booster in that sense, right. And I think as the boosters came out, andagain, you know, people started jumping on them, it came to everyone needs their booster. Andunfortunately, the messaging in the United States is perpetuated that quite a bit with this iPhonecharging thing, Biden tweeting that everyone over the age of six months needs a booster. Again, wereally do have to reflect on the population that we're going at. Ultimately, again, if you start pressing theissue too much in the wrong populations, you know, the uptake is, is showing itself, right, the peoplewho wanted their bi-Vaillant vaccine got it. Thankfully the right populations are being incentivized,especially in the elderly, and the very elderly, and the high risk. Uptake in most other populations hasbeen relatively low. So, people are making their decisions based on based on what they know. Again,they feel that that hesitation and what is this going to benefit me? and I think as Sumon said, theconfidence is going to be restored when we have better data. We're in a phase now where we can docluster randomized RCTs in low-risk populations and show it If you want the vaccine, you enter into acluster randomized RCT, if you're in a low-risk population, match you one to one with placebo. You wecan tell you if you got, you know, what your prognosis was at the end of the day, and that information isgoing to be important for us. I don't think that policy of boosting twice a year, or once a year is gonnaget people on the bus, every booster seems like people are getting off the bus more and more. So, wereally do have to have compelling information. Now, as we're bringing these out to start saying, youknow, is this a necessity? especially in low-risk populations? How much of a necessity is that? How muchdo you quantify it in that sense? And again, recognizing that, that people are being infected? Now, thatadds another twist in that sense.KK: Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit about public trust in a bit here. But Stef, you were among someauthors that did an essay on the booster mandates for university students. As we've both alluded toZain, and Sumon there's this need to be stratified. From an RCT booster point of view that we're not wellestablished here. When Stef's group looked at university mandates and potential harm, when we'redoing an actual cost benefit ratio there, their conclusion was that there's more room for harm thanbenefits. So, Stef I want you to speak to that paper a bit.SB: Sure. So, I will say this, I don't actually have much to add other than what Zain and Sumon said. Runa vaccine program we are offering, you know, doses as it makes sense for folks who are particularlyimmunocompromised, multiple comorbidities and remain at risk for serious consequences related toCOVID-19. We'll continue doing that. And that will, you know, get integrated, by the way into like, sortof a vaccine preventable disease program, so offering, shingles, Pneumovax, influenza COVID. And alsowe want to do a broader in terms of other hepatitis vaccines, etc. That aside, so this, this isn't about, youknow, that it was really interesting being called antivax by folks who have never gotten close to avaccine, other than being pricked by one. Having delivered literally 1000s of doses of vaccine, so it'salmost it's a joke, right? but it's an effective thing of like shutting down conversation. That aside, I thinkthere's a few things at play one as it related to that paper. I find it really interesting, particularly foryoung people, when people are like, listen, yes, they had a little bit of like, inflammation of their heart,but it's self-resolving and self-limiting, and they're gonna be fine. You don't know that. Maybe sure we'llsee what happens with these folks twenty years later. The reality is for younger men, particularly, thishappens to be a very gender dynamic. For younger men, particularly, there seems to be a dynamicwhere they are at risk of myocarditis. I don't know whether that's a controversy in any other era for anyother disease, this would not be a controversy would just be more of a factual statement, the data wereclearer in I'd say, probably April, May 2021. I think there's lots of things we could have done, we couldhave done one dose series for people who had been previously infected, we could have stopped at two.There are a million different versions of what we could have done, none of which we actually did. In thecontext of mandating boosters now for young people, including at my institution, you were mandated toget a booster, or you would no longer be working. So obviously, I got one. There's a real dynamic ofwhat is it your goal at that point? because probably about 1011 months into the vaccine programbecame increasingly clear. You can still get COVID. Nobody's surprised by that. That was clear even fromthe data. By the way, wasn't even studied. I mean, Pfizer, the way if you just look at the Pfizer, Moderna,trials, none and look to see whether you got COVID or not, they were just looking at symptomaticdisease. That aside, I think that it just became this clear thing where for younger men, one or two doseswas plenty and it seems to be that as you accumulate doses for those folks, particularly, it's alsoimportant, if somebody had a bad myocarditis, they're not even getting a third dose. So, you're alreadyselecting out, you know, some of these folks, but you are starting to see increased levels of harm, as itrelated to hospitalization. That what we basically did, there was a very simple analysis of looking ataverted hospitalization, either way, many people say that's the wrong metric. You can pick whatevermetric you want. That's the metric we picked when terms of hospitalization related to side effects of thevaccine versus benefits. What it just showed was that for people under the age of 30, you just don't seea benefit at that point, as compared to harm that's totally in fundamentally different. We weren't talkingabout the primary series, and we weren't talking about older folks. So indeed, I think, you know, thatwas that was I don't know why it was it was particularly controversial. We it was a follow up piece tomandates in general. I'll just say like, I've been running this vaccine program, I don't think mandateshave made my life easier at all. I know, there's like this common narrative of like mandates, you know,mandates work mandates work. I think at some point, and I'll just say our own study of this is like we'rereally going to have to ask two questions. One: what it mandates really get us in terms of a burdenCOVID-19, morbidity, mortality? and two: this is an important one for me. What if we caught ourselvesin terms of how much pressure we put on people, as it relates to vaccines right now, in general? Thevery common narrative that I'm getting is they're like, oh, the anti Vax is the anti Vax folks are winning.And people don't want their standard vaccines, and we're getting less uptake of like, MMR andstandard, you know, kind of childhood vaccines, I have a different opinion. I really do at least I believesome proportion of this, I don't know what proportion, it's some proportion, it's just like people beingpushed so hard, about COVID-19 vaccines that they literally don't want to be approached about anyvaccine in general. So, I just think that with in public health, there's always a cost. Part of the decisionmaking in public health as it relates to clinical medicine too. It's like you give a medication, theadvantage and then you know, the disadvantages, side effects of that medication. In public health, thereare side effects of our decisions that are sometimes anticipated and sometimes avoidable, sometimescan't be anticipated and sometimes can't be avoided. You have to kind of really give thought to each ofthem before you enact this policy or you might cost more health outcomes, then then you're actuallygaining by implementing it.KK: Yeah, number one: What was spooky to me is like even mentioning, I was afraid even to use a termmyocarditis at times. The worst part is, as you said, stuff, it's young folk that were alluding to, and for usto not be able to say, let's look at the harm and benefit in a group that's low risk was baffling. It reallywas baffling that and I'm glad we're at least more open to that now. Certainly, that's why I thought thatthe paper that you guys put together was so important because it's in the medical literature that we'reshowing, objectively what the cost benefit of some of these approaches are. Sumon: when you think ofmandates and public trust, that Stef was kind of alluding to like, every decision that we madethroughout this thing. Also has a downside, also has a cost, as Stef was mentioning. Where do you thinkwe are? In terms of the public trust? Talking about how the childhood vaccines are lower. I don't knowwhat influenza vaccine rates are like now, I wouldn't be surprised if they're the same standard, but whoknows them where they're at, currently. Based on your perspective, what do you think the public trust isright now?SC: Yeah, as physicians, we obviously still do have a lot of trust in the people we take care of. People arestill coming to see us. I wish they didn't have to because everyone was healthy but that's not the case. Ido think that over the last two and a half, we're coming up on three years, I guess right now, that peoplethat we have burned a lot of trust, I think that mandates were part of it. I do think that some of it wasunavoidable. It's just that there's a lot of uncertainty. There was back and forth. I think that one thingthat were that concern me on social media was that a lot of professionals are airing their dirty laundry tothe public. You could see these in fights, that doesn't, that's not really a good thing. We saw peoplebeing very derisive towards people who were not listening to the public health rules. You know what Imean? There's a lot of that kind of talk of othering. Yeah, I think that that certainly overtime, erodedpublic trust, that will take a long time to get back, if we do get it back. I think that the bottom line is that,I get that there are times that we have to do certain things, when you have a unknown pathogen comingat you, when you don't really know much about it. I do think that you want to do the greatest good forthe, for the population or again, you always must remember as Stefan alludes to the cost of what you'redoing. I do think that we could have done that much early on. For example, Ontario, we were lockeddown in some areas, Ontario, GTA, we were locked down in some regard for almost a year and a half. Ifyou guys remember, there was that debate on opening bars and restaurants before schools. It's just like,I remember shaking my head is, look, I get it, I know you guys are talking about people are going to beeating a burger before kids can go to school, that might ruin everything. But the problem is, is that youmust remember that restaurant is owned by someone that small gym is someone's livelihood, you'remoralizing over what this is, but in the end, it's the way somebody puts food on the table. For a yearand a half, we didn't let especially small businesses do that. I'm no economist, but I had many familymembers and friends who are impacted by this. Two of my friends unfortunately, committed suicideover this. So, you know, we had a lot of impact outside of the of the things that we did that hurt people,and certainly the trust will have to be regained over the long term.KK: It's gonna take work. I think, for me, honestly, it's, it's just about being transparent. I honestly, I putmyself in some in the shoes of the public and I just want to hear the truth. If we're not sure aboutsomething, that's okay. We're gonna weigh the evidence and this is our suggestion. This is why we'resaying this, could we be wrong? Yes, we could be wrong but this is what we think is the best pathforward, and people could get behind that. I honestly feel like people could get behind that showing alittle bit of vulnerability and saying ‘you know, we're not know it alls here' but this is what our beststrategy is based on our viewpoint on the best strategy based on the data that we have in front of usand just be open. Allowing for open dialogue and not squash it not have that dichotomous thinking ofyou're on one side, you're on the other. You're anti vax, you're pro vax, stop with the labels. You know,it's just it got crazy, and just was not a safe environment for dialogue. And how are you supposed to he'ssupposed to advance.SB: Yeah, I do want to say something given this this is this idea of our swan song. I think there was thissort of feeling like, you know, people were like ‘you gotta act hard, you gotta move fast' So I thinkeverybody on this, you guys all know I travel a lot. I like to think of myself as a traveler. In the early2020's I did like a COVID tour, I was in Japan in February, then I was in Thailand, and everywhere Ilanded, there were like, COVID here, COVID here, COVID here. Then finally, I like got home at the end ofFebruary, and I was supposed to be home for like four days, and then take off. Obviously things got shutdown. It was like obvious like COVID was the whole world had COVID by, February, there may have beena time to shut down this pandemic in September 2019. Do you know what I mean? by November 2019,we had cases. They've already seen some and Canadian Blood Services done some showing someserological evidence already at that time. There was no shutting it down. This thing's gonna suck. Thereality is promising that you can eliminate this thing by like, enacting these really like arbitrary that canonly be described as arbitrary. Shutting the border to voluntary travel, but not to truckers. Everythingfelt so arbitrary. So, when you talk about trust, if you can't explain it, if you're a good person do it. If youdon't do it, your white supremacist. Kwadwo you were part of a group that was called ‘Urgency ofNormal' you are a white supremacist. It's so ridiculous. You know what I mean? It creates this dynamicwhere you can't have any meaningful conversation. So, I really worry, unless we can start having somereally meaningful conversations, not just with folks that we agree with. Obviously, I deeply respect whateach of you have done throughout this pandemic, not just actually about what you say, but really whatyou've done. Put yourselves out there with your families in front of this thing. That aside, if we can't dothat, we will be no better off. We will go right back. People will be like ‘Oh, next pandemic, well, let'sjust get ready to lock down' but did we accomplish anything in our lock downs? I actually don't think wedid. I really don't think we got anything positive out our lock downs, and I might be alone in that. I mightbe wrong, butut that said it needs to be investigated and in a really meaningful way to answer that,before it becomes assume that acting hard and acting fast and all these b******t slogans are the truthand they'd become the truth and they become fact. All without any really meaningful evidencesupporting them.KK: I gotta say, I'll get you Sumon next here, but I gotta say the idea of abandoning logic, I think that'sthat's a key point there. Think about what we're doing in restaurants, folks. Okay, you would literallywear your mask to sit down, take off that bloody thing. Eat, chat, smooch even, I mean, and then put itback on and go in the bathroom and think this is meaningful. Where's the logic there? You're on a plane,you're gonna drink something, you're on a six hour flight, you know what I'm saying.(?) During the lockdown, by the way, you're sending like 20 Uber drivers to stand point. If you ever wentand picked up food, you would see these folks. It'd be like crowding the busy restaurants all like standingin there, like arguing which orders theirs, you know what I mean? then like people waiting for the foodto show up.KK: I mean, that's the other point. The part that people forget with the lockdowns, tons of people willwork. I'm in Ottawa, where 70% are, could stay home, right? That's a unique city. That's why we werevery sheltered from this bad boy.(?) Aren't they still fighting going back to the office?KK: Oh, my God. Folks, I'm sorry. Yeah, it's like 70% could stay home, but you're in GTA your area. That'sa lot of essential workers. You don't have that option. So, how's this lockdown? Really looking at the bigpicture? Anyway, sorry. Sumon you're gonna hit it up.SC: We just wanted to add one anecdote. I just think it kind of talks about all this is that, you know therewas a time when this thing started going to 2020. Stefan, I think you and I met online around that time.You put a couple of seeds after I was reading stuff, like you know about the idea of, you know, risktransfer risk being downloaded to other people. That's sort of kind of think of a you know, what, like,you know, a people that are working in the manufacturing industry, you're not going to receive them alot unless you live in a place like Brampton or northwest Toronto, where the manufacturing hub of, ofOntario and in many cases, central eastern Canada is right. So, I remember in, I was already starting touse this doing anything. And when I was in, I guess it would have been the second wave when it was itwas pretty bad one, I just kept seeing factory worker after factory worker, but then the thing that stuckout was tons of Amazon workers. So, I asked one of them, tell me something like, why are there so manyAmazon workers? Like are you guys? Is there a lot of sick people working that kind of thing? Inretrospect, it was very naive question. What that one woman told me that her face is burned into mymemory, she told me she goes, ‘Look, you know, every time a lockdown is called, or something happenslike that, what ends up happening is that the orders triple. So, then we end up working double and tripleshifts, and we all get COVID' That was just a light went off. I was like, excuse my language, guys, but holys**t, we're basically taking all this risk for people that can like what was it called a ‘laptop class' that canstay home and order all this stuff. Meanwhile, all that risk was going down to all these people, and I wasseeing it one, after another, after another, after another. I'm not sure if you guys saw that much, but Iwas in Mississauga, that's the hardest, Peele where the manufacturing industry is every single peanutfactory, the sheet metal, I just saw all of them. That I think was the kind of thing that turned me andrealize that we what we'll be doing. I'll shut up.ZC: Yeah, I would say I mean, I think Stefan and Sumon make great points. You know, I think that thatwas very apparent at the beginning. The other thing I would say is 2021 to 2022. Things like vaccinationand public health measures fell along political lines. That was a huge mistake. It was devastating. Iremember back to the first snap election in 2021. Initially great video of all the political partiesencouraging vaccination and putting their differences aside. Then all of a sudden, it became mudslingingabout how much public health measure you're willing to do, how much you're willing to invest in, andit's not a Canadian phenomenon. We saw this in the United States with the Biden and Trump campaignsand the contrast between the two, and then really aligning public health views to political views, andthen, you know, really making it very uncomfortable for certain people to then express counter viewswithout being considered an alternative party. It's something we need to reflect on I think we havepublic health and public health messengers and people that are agnostic to political views but are reallythere to support the health of their populations, from a health from a societal from an emotional fromthe aspects of good health in that sense. You really can't involve politics into that, because all of asudden, then you start getting counter current messaging, and you start getting people being pushed,and you start new aligning values to views and you start saying, right and left based on what peopleconsider, where again, the science doesn't necessarily follow political direction. It was a really bigmistake, and it still is pervasive. We saw every election that happened between 2021 to 2022 is publichealth and public health messaging was embedded in each one of those and it caused more harm thangood. I think it's a big lesson from this, this is that you can be proactive for effective public healthinterventions as an individual in that society that has a role, but you can't stick it on campaigns. It reallymakes it hard to deescalate measures at that point when your campaign and your identity is tied tocertain public health measures in that sense.KK: Amen. I am cognizant of the time and so I'm gonna try to rapid fire a little bit? I think, there's only acouple points that people hit up on that we haven't touched on. There was a push for mass mandates inthe last couple months because of of RSV and influenza that was happening. It still is happening in,especially in our extreme ages, really young and really old. Any viewpoint on that, I'll leave it open toalmost to throw down.(?) I think mass mandates have been useless. I don't expect to ever folks to agree with me, it's like it's aninteresting dynamic, right? When you go and you saw folks who were on the buses, I take the bus to theairport. Our subway in Toronto just for folks only starts at like, 5:50am. So, before that, you gotta jumpon buses. So the construction workers on the bus who were wearing masks during the when the maskmandates were on taking this what's called, it's like the construction line, because it goes down Bloorare basically and takes all the construction workers from Scarborough, before the subway line, get todowntown to do all the construction and build all the stuff that you know, is being built right now.Everyone is wearing this useless cloth mask. It's like probably the one thing that the anti-maskers who Ithink I probably am one at this point. The pro-maskers and all maskers can agree on is that cloth masksare useless. That's what 100% of these folks are wearing. They're wearing these reusable cloth masksthat are like barely on their face often blow their nose. So, to me, it's not so much about like, what couldthis intervention achieve, if done perfectly like saying the study you were involved with the help lead,it's like everybody's like, but all of them got COVID outside of the health care system, they didn't get itwhen they're wearing their N95. That's like, but that's the point, like public health interventions live ordie or succeed or fail in the real world. I was seeing the real world, I would love to take a photo but Idon't think these folks have been friendly to me taking a photo of them, but it was 100%, cloth masks ofall these folks in the morning all crowded, like we're literally like person to person on this bus. It's like aperfect, you know, vehicle for massive transmission. I just I just sort of put that forward of like, that'swhat a mask mandate does to me. I think to the person sitting at home calling for them, they are justimagining, they're like ‘Oh but the government should do this'. But they didn't. The government shouldbe handing out in N95's. How are you going to police them wearing a N95's and how are you gettingthem? It would be so hard to make a massive program work. I would say it's like if you gave me millionsand millions and millions of dollars, for me to design a mass program, I don't know, maybe I could pull itoff you really with an endless budget. But for what? So, I just think that like as these programs went outin the real world, I think they did nothing but burn people's energy. You know because some people itjust turns out don't like wearing a mask. Shocking to other folks. They just don't like wearing a mask.Last thing I'll say is that just as they play it out in the real world, I think we're functionally useless, otherthan burning people's energy. I'm a fervent anti masker at this point because it's just an insult to publichealth. To me everything I've trained in and everything I've worked towards, just saying these two wordsmask mandate, as the fix. That is an insult to the very thing that I want to spend my life doing .ZC: Yeah, I mean, three points, one: you know, masks are still important in clinical settings. I think we allunderstand that. We've been doing them before we've been continuing to do them. So I you know,that's one piece. Second: I mean, to go with the point that was raised here, you know, the best study wehave is Bangladesh, right? 10% relative risk reduction. It's interesting when you read the Bangladeshstudy, because with community kind of people that pump up masking that are really trying to educateand probably are also there to mask compliance. Mask's compliance people, you get to 54% compliance,when those people leave compliance drops significantly. Right. You know, I think you have to just lookaround and see what happened in this last few months, regardless of the messaging. Maybe it's thecommunities I'm in, but I didn't see mass compliance change significantly, maybe about 5%. In thecontext of the last couple of months. You must understand the value of this public health intervention,Bangladesh has actually a nice insight, not only into what we think the community based optimalmasking efficacy is, but also the fact that you really have to continue to enforce, enforce, enforce,enforce, in order to get to that even 10%. Without that enforcement, you're not getting anywhere inthat sense. That probably spells that it's probably a very poor long term public health intervention in thecontext that you really must pump it week by week by week by week in order to actually get compliancethat may actually then give you the effects that you see in a cluster randomized control trial. Again, youknow, the world we live in is showing that people don't want to mask normally. Some people can, i

After repeatedly being frustrated with the current offerings for residential home cleaning services, three friends decide to take matters into their own hands and set up an innovative marketplace boasting living wages and top notch quality cleaners.  Thank you for listening to the Leaders, Innovators and Big Ideas podcast, supported by Rainforest Alberta. The podcast that highlights those people who are contributing to and/or supporting the innovation ecosystem in Alberta. Host: Al Del Degan I have been involved in software development for more than 25 years. I have started companies, lead companies and worked for companies - doing many different things. I am honored to be considered a leader in Alberta's innovation ecosystem, and I give back as much, and often as I can. When I am not working or podcasting, you will find me pursuing my passions of photography, crypto investing, and wood working along with the occasional round of golf. Guest: Yeonsil Kang, MSW, helps manage the mission and vision of Home Spritz and their relationships with cleaners, clients, and investors. She ensures the company is growing and maintaining the core vision of the company. From an education and social work background she focuses on the social vision while managing a for-profit company in a challenging environment. She has been through the Alberta Accelerator by Global 500 and The Alberta Revenue Accelerator by GrowthX both powered by Alberta Innovates. She manages a team of over 40 cleaners, admin, and developers. Please be sure to share this episode with everyone you know. If you are interested in being either a host, a guest, or a sponsor of the show, please reach out. We are published in Google Podcasts and the iTunes store for Apple Podcasts We would be grateful if you could give us a rating as it helps spread the word about the show. Show Links: Home Spritz Alberta Innovates Show Quotes: "So I remember we had about six different cleaners within the time period of two or three months. And I just simply wasn't comfortable cuz they all knew our door code into our house and their quality wasn't consistent."    "So Covid was quite hard for many people and a lot of industries. But for cleaning a lot of residential cleaning companies went out of business because of that issue." Credits... This Episode Sponsored By: Home Spritz Episode Music: Tony Del Degan Creator & Producer: Al Del Degan  

So Covid is over, right? Right?! No? *sigh* This week Devo gets a booster with Evan Wecksell and hits the town with Mawaan Rizwan. Meanwhile yours truly pays homage to our favorite Supernatural brothers, the Winchesters. Don't forget to grab your FREE download of the FuMP's Best of 2022 compilation available at TheFuMP.com! 1. "My Fifth Booster" by Evan Wecksell 2. "Are You Checking Me Out or Are You Just a Racist" by Mawaan Rizwan 3. News of the Stupid! 4. "Sam and Dean" by 2 Sleeps Evan Wecksell is at FunnyEvan.com Mawaan Rizwan can be found on YouTube 2 Sleeps can also be found on YouTube Thank you to our Patreon backers for making this show possible!!!

In Episode 57 of The Healthcare Leadership Experience, Jim Cagliostro is joined by Board-Certified Nurse Coach Alexcie Sanchez BSN, RN, CEN, NC-BC to discuss the impact of her role on nursing and the community.    Episode Introduction    In this episode, Jim Cagliostro, VIE Healthcare's Clinical Operations Performance Improvement Expert, interviewed Alexcie Sanchez to learn more about nurse coaches. Topics include, taking a more holistic approach to health and wellbeing, the growing need for nurse coaches, the positive impact of nurse coaching on burnout, and why nurse coaches are a ‘'shining light'' in healthcare.      Show Topics   What is a nurse coach?  Exploring available options for nurse coaches  Partnering with a nurse coach is a powerful experience Covid-19 – a tipping point in self-care Coping with burnout during a crisis Utilizing nurse coaches in a hospital benefits everyone     02:14 What is a nurse coach?    Alexcie explained that a nurse coach works with any individual who wants to improve their health and wellbeing.    ‘'….simply put, a nurse coach is a registered nurse who has specialized training in the art of coaching. We're trained to use a holistic approach, so I love to use the phrase a whole person approach. We really look at the individual's life when it comes to caring for an individual. So their lifestyle, their daily activities, their food intake, sleep habits, everything when it comes to caring for an individual, and I always want to make it clear right off the bat too, because we're called nurse coaches, we don't actually just work with nurses. It just means that we're nurses that are specialized in coaching. So nurse coaches work with anybody and everybody that has any desire to make a change.''     03:28 Exploring available options for nurse coaches Alexcie shared the options open to nurse coaches, from hospitals to private companies, emphasizing that working with a nurse coach not a one-time encounter.    ‘'I have my own private practices as a nurse coach. So I work virtually with individuals. If they're local, I'll work with them. If they want to meet in person, I can do that. But basically, nurse coaches can have their own private practice. They're hired by insurance companies to help patients manage chronic or new acute illnesses, especially if it's like a terminal illness. They can provide that emotional support to them and their families. Nurse coaches can be hired by organizations and companies to promote just overall health and wellbeing, which helps not just the employees but the organization in general. And then nurse coaches can also work for hospitals where they not only help the patients while using that holistic approach, but also helping the staff and the employees of the hospital as well. So nurse coaches can really work in any sort of environment. They can work at clinics in doctor's offices, they can work for themselves. It's just really a matter of who they desire to work with and what sort of environment they'd like to work in…..It normally wouldn't be a one time encounter, it will be an encounter that lasts over weeks to months depending on the person's desires.''     12:15 Partnering with a nurse coach is a powerful experience Alexcie said our minds can dictate our behavior. Nurse coaches encourage accountability and offer reassurance.    ‘'…anyone that is desiring to make any change in their life can reach out to a nurse coach. Whether it is health or disease related or not. We're really also trained in that mindset modification. Our minds, our thoughts really dictate a lot of our behaviors. So I know we often feel like we can do things on our own, but with a partner, whether it's for accountability reasons, reassurance advice, sharing your journey with a nurse coach can be a really powerful experience. And many nurse coaches specialize in certain niches. So for example, maybe you're a med-surge nurse or a PCU nurse and you're really well versed in type 2 diabetes and you love that education. There's nurse coaches out there that specialize in just working with individuals with type 2 diabetes to help them manage or reverse their disease. There's nurse coaches out there that have OB and maternity experience, so they just work with pregnant women or postpartum nurse coaching. So there's literally so many different niches within the nurse coach community that you can seek a nurse coach that is specializing in whatever you're looking for.''     15:31 Covid-19 – a tipping point in self-care Alexcie commented that Covid raised awareness of the importance of taking care of ourselves.    ‘'I think it's really about health awareness at this point, not just the nurse world. And I'll start with this example. So Covid comes in and I think a lot of people, or at least I especially witnessed that our pre-existing conditions, our comorbidities are playing a substantial role in how covid is managed, treated and recovered from. So my hope is that we can continue to become more aware of how we take care of ourselves and how every aspect of our life plays a factor. What we eat, how we sleep, how we move, how we think, how stress plays a role in our overall wellbeing. So all of these things are exactly what a nurse coach can help with. So I'm hoping that as health awareness increases the ability, the desire for someone to want to make change in asking for help, and that's where a nurse coach can really come into play.''     17:15 Coping with burnout during a crisis Alexcie said that she worked with her own nurse coach to help her work through fatigue and burnout.    ‘'…I came to realize that these things were not going to happen overnight. Our system is potentially broken, but nothing's going to change tomorrow. So that's when I started really looking within myself and figuring out, "Okay, how can I cope with this today? Because I don't want to leave the emergency department." I loved where I was, I wasn't ready to leave. So how do I manage it better? How do I deal with the fact that I can't change what's going on around me, but I can change how I deal with it? And that's when I really started looking within and seeked my own coach that I've worked with in the past to really work with me in those moments to figure out, okay, how do I get through this frustration, this fatigue? And it really came down to just self-care in those moments. How do I take care of myself? How do I take care of me right now while this stress and overworking and fear of the unknown is going on?''     20:03 Utilizing nurse coaches in a hospital benefits everyone  Alexcie said leadership, nurses and patients all thrive when hospitals use nurse coaches.    ‘'So utilizing nurse coaches in a hospital setting literally is a win for everybody, right? When preceptors and management are trained in holistic nurse coaching, they'll first learn how to develop a truer sense of themselves. Because if they go through this training, it's really about finding within their strengths and how they can capitalize on becoming better mentors and leaders, which is a win for the nurses and the overall staff when we have management that is taking care of themselves holistically. When the staff has strong understanding, compassionate leadership, they will ultimately thrive. And when the nurses thrive, the patients will thrive, retention will improve, nurse shortages will diminish and appropriate nurse to patient ratios will follow. It's literally a win for every single person in the hospital.''     Connect with Lisa Miller on LinkedIn Connect with Jim Cagliostro on LinkedIn Connect with Alexcie Sanchez on LinkedIn   Check out VIE Healthcare and SpendMend    You'll Also Hear:   A journey to nurse coaching working in ER during the pandemic: how Alexcie's nursing career evolved into a more holistic approach to care. ‘'My mom really raised my brother and I in a more Eastern philosophy manner. So I've always taken that approach when it came to healing and then being an ER nurse, it's two different worlds in a sense.''   The importance of the mind-body connection and how to become a nurse coach.  ‘'You must be a registered nurse with at least two years of working experience and you have to complete at least 60 continuing nursing education hours in holistic nursing. And then you also need 60 mentored or supervised coaching hours. I personally used what's called the Nurse Coach Collective''.   Raising the profile: why education and raising awareness of nurse coaching is vital to the healthcare sector and patient care.    How Alexcie helps nurses rediscover their power and true potential. ‘'Right now, my mission is really to help nurses…..I love to go really deep with these individuals to figure out how to create happiness.''   Shining a light on a broken system: How the pandemic highlighted the flaws in the healthcare system. ‘'… unfortunately along with the patients, the nurses were at the center of it all. We were in the middle of chaos in a sense. Unknown fear, I think a lot of fear also comes to play. I can share personally, it was scary.''   Why nurse coaches are a ‘'shining light'' in the lives of individuals.      What To Do Next:   Subscribe to The Cost Advantage for Healthcare Leaders and receive a special report on 15 Effective Cost Savings Strategies. Learn more about the simple 3 step process to work with us. If you are interested in learning more, the quickest way to get your questions answered is to speak with one of our margin improvement experts. Schedule a call with our team here.  

Beyond 120 is a program housed at the University of Florida. Our guest on this episode, Brittany Grubbs-Hodges is a part of this program designed to help college students look beyond the minimum of 120 units of college credits required to graduate. Brittany helps students look at their possible career choices and helps them learn more than they ever thought they could discover about what really goes into whatever they are looking to do with their lives.   Brittany is clearly a teacher at heart. As you will learn, even an immune disability does not stop her.   You will learn how Brittany is advancing her own life goals as she moves toward securing a PHD and how she wishes to continue to help students expand their horizons. Brittany is by any definition unstoppable. I am sure you will enjoy what she has to say and that you will be inspired by her.   About the Guest: Brittany Grubbs-Hodges works at the University of Florida as part of the Beyond120 program. She assists undergraduate students by connecting them to internships and other experiential learning activities. Brittany also works as an adjunct professor in the UF College of Journalism and is graduating with her PhD in December of this year. In her spare time, Brittany enjoys spending time with family and friends, and she is looking forward to adopting her new puppy in the next few weeks!       About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:20 Hi, and welcome back once again to unstoppable mindset. Glad to have you with us wherever you may be. And however you're listening to us. Brittany Grubbs Hodges as our guest this week. We have lots of fun things to talk about. We've been spending the last few minutes kind of reacquainting ourselves after chatting and also talking about all the things we could talk about. She is getting a PhD in higher education. She has a master's degree in journalism. But she wouldn't even let me talk about fake news. I don't know What's all that about. But anyway. But we we can talk about everything. And as people on this podcast know, I'm an equal opportunity political abuser, so it doesn't matter. And so there's real news too. And I haven't seen much of that lately, because it's all fake news, as everybody tells us right away. Brittany, welcome to unstoppable mindset.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  02:12 Thank you so much, Michael, thank you for having me today.   Michael Hingson  02:15 And now that we've picked on fake news, we can get to more real stuff. You just got back, you said from DC. How was it up there?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  02:21 It was great. Yeah, I just got back I took about 20 students. I'm a professor at UF. And I think about 20 undergraduate students to DC mainly to just expose them to the world of work. You know, they like to say the real world but the students are in the world or, but I just want them to get an idea of the world of work. Specifically, I work for a department it's called Beyond 120. At the University of Florida, it's our experiential learning program. So we encouraged them to get outside of the classroom through things like internships through mentorship through excursions or study abroad. So this was one of our career excursions, we took them to various places around DC, USA Today, the Capitol building all kinds of places, and hopefully, you know, some of those opportunities will really come to fruition. I know a couple of my students have interviews already. So I'm excited to see what comes from that. And   Michael Hingson  03:15 how did they come up with the name beyond 120?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  03:18 So that's a great question. So 120 is the number of academic credits needed to graduate with a baccalaureate degree. So it's kind of a metaphorical and that we're not asking you to take more credits. We're just asking you to go beyond what's required by really exploring outside of the classroom.   Michael Hingson  03:35 Yeah, that is so much fun and important. I remember being in college years ago, getting a master's degree in physics, and there was no real discussion of either extracurricular activities, although there were a number of things available and so on. But there weren't programs like a beyond 120, I did end up getting very involved on campus at the campus radio station, and I got involved in being in a consumer group of blind people, the National Federation of the Blind, in my senior year, and then continued with it ever since. But it makes a lot of sense to get people to really explore additional sorts of things. And if you will, as you said, look at a little bit of the real world, doesn't it?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  04:17 Yeah, absolutely. And especially in the world of COVID, everything has really changed. You know, you have hybrid workforce, you know, offices now, and that people only come in on Tuesdays or you know, every other day, some some folks we were working with, they have teams so Team A will come in one day, and then Team B will come in the next day. So it's really certainly changed since we last took our excursion. So we've, we've taken four excursions this semester, but prior to that, we our last excursion was February of 2020. So it's been a full two years and a lot of students have had their experiences canceled. A lot of their internships went virtual, a lot of study abroad experiences were canceled. So we're really trying to kind of make up for that and try and get some Students access and exposure to some of the jobs and some of the just the industries out there.   Michael Hingson  05:05 Not trying to be political or anything, but what was it like COVID wise up in DC was masking encouraged or, you know, what are the kinds of things did you see?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  05:15 Yeah, so it really depends on the individual place. So we went to Georgetown University to get our students who are interested in graduate school wanted to get them some exposure to what law school was like in graduate school, and they have a mandate, not only for the vaccine, but also for the booster, and of course masks as well. And then some folks, which, of course, private companies, it's up to them, it's up their discretion. But I did have to have the students bring their COVID cards, because for some of the entities, they were not allowed in without it. So it certainly was not a University of Florida regulation. But it was up to the individual and to T that was hosting us. And they all had very different regulations, depending on, you know, how many people were visiting with social distancing versus masking versus vaccinations, all that fun stuff?   Michael Hingson  06:05 Did you go to Congress or the White House or any of those at all?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  06:09 So we went to the Capitol building, which was a blast, we went to our local Congresswoman, and she took us around, I believe were with her for about two hours. She took us around and showed us a few of the different offices in different areas of the Capitol building, we weren't able to go in because Congress was in session. We weren't able to go in and actually see in the main room there. But we did see some of the areas on the outskirts of those rooms, who was your congressperson? Cat Kammok   Michael Hingson  06:42 haven't met her. I spent a fair amount of time in DC over the years dealing with Congress, I went with the National Federation of blind a number of times, to invade Congress and talk all about the issues regarding blind people, and so on. And I've been there some other times as well. So I've met a number of people that don't think I've met her.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  07:02 So she is our local representative. But we also met with Congressman, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz, she's also a US alumni. So we made sure to meet with a variety of folks throughout the trip on both sides of the aisle.   Michael Hingson  07:18 And I and I have met her and she has sponsored legislation. So she's a cool lady as well.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  07:24 Yes, it's always great to meet us alums that can share their stories with students and really mentor some of the students   Michael Hingson  07:30 makes perfect sense and go into Washington is an experience that I would encourage anyone to do. But of course, there's so much history there. It makes perfect sense to do.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  07:42 Yes, absolutely. And I wanted the students to get some in history, as well as we gave them some free time, one of the days to go and explore all the museums nearby some of the Smithsonian's that are now open. So they were able to see most of those and really get some time exploring to see their history.   Michael Hingson  07:58 Have you been there before?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  08:00 I have, we did a excursion there in 2019. That was actually our pilot excursion. So beyond 120 was not created until 2018. So myself and one of my co workers are one of the first hired in, in the department. And we kind of met and said, Okay, what is it that we want to do what's going to help students out and so we did an excursion to DC with eight students in 2019, just to see if this would work if it's a good concept at all. And it did, it worked well. So we were able to go to DC and 2019. And then in London in February of 2020. And funny story there. We were at the economist, the Thursday, before the play shut down, they shut down on a Friday. So we were there the day before they shut down. So we've just barely got out of the UK. And thankfully, no one tested positive it was we just made it by the skin of our teeth.   Michael Hingson  08:57 I escaped from New York in March of 2020. On the day they shut down the city, I knew that it was coming because they were talking about it. And I had had a flight later in the day. I decided I better get out of here. And so I was able to and I put it that way escape, before it was all shut down. And I understand why and it made perfect sense to do but it's just so unfortunate that all this is going on and we got to deal with it though it is part of life now.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  09:28 Absolutely.   Michael Hingson  09:29 Well tell me a little bit about you, where you you came from and how you got into the University of Florida and ended up in the programs that you did.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  09:39 Yes, absolutely. So when it comes to my story, I had a very non traditional journey. And so I'd love to go over with you later on in this podcast. Some of the folks that really influenced me, but I had a non traditional journey I actually had an immune deficiency. Whenever I you know, well it is a genetic thing. but I'll say it really made a huge impact on my career and my college trajectory. Because I eventually going into adulthood, I had to have plasma infusions twice a week. So I spent my first two years local, and my second two years, about two hours away at the University of Central Florida. But every weekend, I had to come back and get a plasma infusion twice a week. And it definitely altered my career trajectory. And it altered the opportunities that were available. But I will say while I was there, my first semester at UCF, which was the first semester of my junior year, I said, you know, I've kind of missed out on the first two years, but I need to make up for that, how can I do that. And there was an office of experiential learning to UCF. And I was able to find an internship really saw the power of internships ended up working, it was at a hospital system called Orlando health. And I worked there for about two and a half years, before switching over to the education side. And I initially switched to a K through 12. So I taught grades six through 12 at a private school, but found that that wasn't really my my niche, I love teaching. But that particular age group wasn't really my niche. So I switched to higher education, worked in admissions for about five years, working with students in that college transition. But then when the opportunity came to join beyond 120, I remembered my days as an intern and thought this is going to be perfect for me, I'm so excited to be able to kind of pay it forward to have future students connected with internships and job opportunities, because my internship was so influential for me. So that's kind of how I got into higher education.   Michael Hingson  11:48 I was teaching lower grades different or how did you find them different than teaching upper grades and getting into juniors and seniors in high school and I asked that, in part because my wife was a teacher for many years and loved teaching younger grades more than older grades, because she felt she had a little bit more of an opportunity to help shape the way behave. They behave later, because by the time they were in high school, they were a lot more fixed in less interested in and exploring a lot of things that maybe they should have.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  12:20 Mm hmm. Well, I guess for me, I mean, I was raised on a on a ranch, and I had a very strict upbringing. And so whenever I went to, to teach, a lot of my students did not have that strict upbringing. And I would hear them say things like, he's touching me, he's looking at me weird. He's breathing on me. He's, and it was just, it drove me absolutely crazy. Sounds terrible. But, um, but no, I just, I was definitely wanting to be able to see, I'm not even quite sure the best way to say it, but be able to see the difference that I was making. And that, you know, with a student that I was able to admit, at least with admissions with a student, I was able to admit into college, I can see that transition. And a lot of times those students would come back to me and say, Hey, this is what I've done while I'm here and moving towards beyond 120. I can see, for example, one of the students that I've been working with, for several semesters, we were able to get her an interview at NASA last week, and she said, Oh, my gosh, all of my efforts that I've done, have paid off, she's taken my classes she did the excursion, she's doing the internship. And now the full time job and so to to know that I've had a part in that is incredibly rewarding. And I'm just humbled and honored by the fact that I can be a part of students journeys, and really, truly have an impact and where they go in life. And I'm so thankful and grateful for that.   Michael Hingson  13:47 So it sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that you're helping to teach people that and students that life is an adventure, which is something that conceptually is probably a little bit easier for them to think about and assimilate in later grades, because how do you tell a kindergartener that life's an adventure?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  14:08 Well, and even sometimes students who let's just say a student has a degree in philosophy, the student will come to me and say, What do I What can I do with a degree in philosophy? And my answer is anything you want to do with a degree in philosophy? Let's see. What do you love doing? What are you passionate about? What do you enjoy, you know, and just trying to figure out and really dig deeper into what that student may or may not realize they even want to do and kind of expose them to all these different opportunities out there to see what resonates. So yeah, I love thing. Life is an adventure. Let's explore that together and see, you know, what's going to be the best fit for you. And even if they   Michael Hingson  14:47 start on a career, or they decide to go down one road, you never know when you might have to change and being flexible, being a little bit more broader and thinking really can help people We deal with things that come along and may change their pathways over time.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  15:04 Absolutely. And that's one of the biggest lessons that we teach students is that career paths are not linear. You know, they might be for some students who have a degree in accounting, they might want to be an accountant. And you know, that's that's a linear thing. But for a lot of our students, their journeys aren't linear. And I know my journey in particular was not linear. But But yeah, we're super excited to be able to impact those students. And you know, even my non traditional students love that love that love that we have a program called the University of Florida online program, which is fully 100% online degrees. And a lot of my non traditional students are still enrolled in my classes and take the excursions and do the internships. So, you know, that's oftentimes even more rewarding. I know I had a student about a year ago, who had an immune deficiency, just like I did, and she, because of her condition, she was homebound and she could not leave to participate in some of our activities. And so I said, You know what, let's, let's see what you can participate in. And we were able to organize a few virtual internships for her. So it's certainly very rewarding and love seeing the impact on students.   Michael Hingson  16:12 So in your case, what happened in terms of the immune situation, you were taking transfusions, I gather that has been able to be stopped?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  16:23 Yes. Oh, we're so thankful. So thankful, um, I took plasma infusions for about five years. And thankfully, my body reacted to the infusions and was able to develop immunity on its own. So very thankful to my immunologist for all of his hard work. And it certainly took a while for us to figure out, you know, the dosage and whatnot, there were times that I had six needles in me at one time trying to infuse all of this plasma, because it was done subcutaneously instead of intravenously. So there was there were several obstacles. And I certainly got discouraged at some points. And that's why I want to help to make those impacts on students because I see them often getting discouraged, not necessarily because of a physical condition like mine, but because, you know, they might have financial obstacles, they might have had students who, because of COVID, became homeless, you know, so trying to say, okay, what can we do to make your situation better?   Michael Hingson  17:21 So in your case, though, as you, as you pointed out, you got discouraged, and so on. How did you move past that? How did you pump yourself up, if you will, to keep going?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  17:31 Well, I think my family had a big part in that. My mother, she was with me through every single infusion. And I think she could see how challenging it was at 20 years old to have to come home every single weekend for two years straight, to have to do infusions. And so she truly encouraged me, but also the the power of prayer, me personally, I'm a very strong believer in Christ. And that was, that was my thing. And I know, not everyone has a particular face or a person to lean on. But for me, that was instrumental in my journey,   Michael Hingson  18:05 but there is merit to leaning on something, whoever you are, as, as long as it's a positive thing, and you can use it to help yourself move forward, right. And   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  18:15 I want to be that that person that helps motivate my students in whatever capacity I want to be that that person that is their biggest cheerleader, you know, to try and get students wherever it is that they're looking to go.   Michael Hingson  18:27 So you were able to get beyond that. Do you need to do anything still to kind of monitor your immune system to make sure it doesn't repeat? Or are we beyond that now?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  18:36 Well, I actually had an appointment with my immunologist a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I are hoping to start a family soon. And I said, well, will this impact my child and my immunologist said probably not. But you know what, let's just monitor it. We'll take it day by day, and kind of go from there. So as of now I'm doing good. Very thankful. But yeah, doing doing okay, so far.   Michael Hingson  18:59 Well, jumping forward a little bit. Also, I understand that you're about to get a new addition, you're adopting a puppy. I am I'm very excited to tell us about the puppy.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  19:10 So so this is a mix between a Rhodesian Ridgeback and a lab. We basically got this dog from our my parents set groomers and so we're excited about getting this dog but I mentioned that I grew up on a on a ranch and we had cows and horses and turkeys and you know, all of the the animals and so this will be my first time since my parents sold our farm. About seven years ago. This will be my first time getting a dog and other dogs so I'm very excited about it.   Michael Hingson  19:42 Wow, Rhodesian Ridgeback and lab so it will probably be a fairly good sized puppy dog by the time it's full grown.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  19:50 Oh, yes, absolutely. But if you can take care of a horse, you can take care of anything.   Michael Hingson  19:53 Well, yeah, I wasn't so concerned about that. It'll be a big dog. And are we going to allow it on the bed? probably a good idea.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  20:04 Probably not it, but we'll see, well, we'll cross that bridge. And when we come to it will probably be another four to six weeks before the puppies weaned. But But yeah, I've done that discussion. My husband and I,   Michael Hingson  20:15 my wife always wants to let our dogs on the bed. Right now the only dog we have is Alamo who is my guide dog, a black lab, and I will not let him get on the bed because I know if that happens once it's all over. Yeah. Once it happens one time, he's going to stay on the bed. And it's kind of one of those things that you you do have to monitor. On the other hand, she had a dog that was a breeder for Guide Dogs for the Blind that became her service dog. She's in a wheelchair, she's used to chair her whole life. And this dog who is very intelligent, picked up providing services for her like fetching things, which she had originally not been trained to do. But Karen always would encourage her to be on the bed. And as I love to tell people, Fantasia always took her half out of the middle of the bed. So I can think that it would be tough with a dog that will most likely be even larger than a lab.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  21:13 Yes, yes. But fingers crossed, she'll have a good personality and we're excited.   Michael Hingson  21:20 Yeah, that's the thing. Well, you'll have some control over that, unless it's just a very strange dog. Dogs oftentimes do take on some of the personality of of their people, as long as the people are working really hard to make the home a good one and establish a good relationship. So my money is on you to be able to deal with that.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  21:41 Thank you. I'm, I'm going to try my hardest. You'll have   Michael Hingson  21:44 to keep us posted. We'll do. So you, you were able to deal with the immune deficiency and you're able to then graduate. So did you go to UCS for for the rest of your undergraduate career or what?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  22:00 Yeah, so I went to a community college called SSC je in Jacksonville, Florida for my first two years, went to UCF for my last two years, and I continued on doing plasma infusions until I was probably about a year post graduation. And I had them I mean, because they have to be refrigerated. Most plasmas have to be refrigerated, they delivered it to my work, I had a refrigerator there, and they just kind of made some accommodations for me. But yeah, I went all the way through graduation, with those plasma infusions and continued on into the workforce. And ironically enough, I worked at a hospital for my internship and part of my first job, so it didn't weird anyone out whenever I was getting plasma delivered to me.   Michael Hingson  22:51 How did that work when you were getting infusions, at work, and so on? Did Did someone actually do the infusions? Or was it something you could do?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  23:00 Yeah, actually, every single infusion that I ever had passed, the first three weeks were all me. And it because it's done subcutaneously, you end up getting, I don't know the best way to say it, I guess it's like little fat pockets. Where your stomach is, or your legs are, wherever it is that you're getting your infusions, because you're putting essentially liquid right underneath the skin. And so it would kind of be bloated, I guess, wherever that earring is. And so I would just have to wear loose fitting clothing. And I had, because the infusions took anywhere from one to two hours to do and so whenever I graduated, and there were times when I had to have an extra infusion, so I do that at work. And I would just kind of take my little carrying case with me and people would see tubes kind of going inside my clothes. And I would just say, Oh, I'm having a plasma infusion. No one really felt comfortable asking, like more details. I did have a friend of mine who I worked with who who knew what was going on. And so if there was any emergency, she was able to call someone but thankfully that never happened. Everything was okay. And you know, I was I was comfortable. Eventually just kind of living a couple hours away from home and not going back on weekends after I graduated from college and just kind of doing that myself. But I do have a funny story. We kind of got tired of having the infusions done in the stomach, it began to hurt really, really bad once you do it over and over. And so one of the sites that you can do a plasma infusion is in the back of your arm and like the fatty part of your arm. And so my dad had to do those because I couldn't reach you could reach Yeah, you couldn't reach correctly. So so my dad had do those. And I mentioned I grew up on a on a ranch and my dad is used to giving our cows like you know the vaccinations, right so or their annual shots or whatever it is. And of course the cowhide is extremely thick and so he would jam that Have needle into the cows. And so then it wouldn't came time for me. You pretty much do the same motion. And I remember screaming so hard. You don't need to do it that hard, because he would jam that thing in cowhide. I was like tad. No. And so I never let him do that again. I learned my lesson.   Michael Hingson  25:19 My fourth guide dog Lynnae was a yellow lab and contracted glomerular nephritis, which is a kidney disease, it actually was a morphing of limes disease. But what happened is that the kidney would let out the good stuff, in addition to the waist, so it wasn't really doing the filter that it was supposed to do. But one of the things that we needed to do with her was to give her subcutaneous fluids every other day, and had to put a liter of lactated ringers, saline solution in her just to really keep her very hydrated. So very familiar with the process. And we did that usually on her back right up near her shoulder. So there was always this big bump. She didn't mind, mostly for her it was at least she got attention. And it worked out really well.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  26:12 Well, I'm glad that it helps at least for a little while. Yeah, did for   Michael Hingson  26:15 a while. And eventually she? Well, she lived three more years after the diagnosis. She guided for three years and then live for three more years with us. So we we had her company for quite a while, which was really good. Yeah. So you went off and you graduated, and then you started doing the things that you're doing now. So what exactly do you do you do now? And how are your studies going and all that?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  26:38 Well, I, I've been told that you are not supposed to do your PhD topic on your work, but I completely disregarded that role. So doing my dissertation on what I'm doing at work, because it is a little challenging to kind of juggle everything. So I'm just kind of had to pray that it all worked out. And thankfully it has but what I'm doing now I created a course it's called Industry Insights. And this is a variable 123 credit class. And I basically connect with various UF alumni in different industries. And we co teach a class together. And at the end of that class, the students while some of the students those that want to an internship or a full time position, they will let our alumni co instructor know and potentially interview for a full time position or internship, as of I believe, screen 21 Spring 2021, which is when we piloted the class, there was a student who got a full time position in Dubai. enlistees fall of 2021, there are two new different students who received positions, spring of 2022, there were three students. So so far, it's been pretty consistent, say the top two to four students each semester are getting internships or jobs. But honestly, in some cases, this has done the opposite. And that students think, oh, I want to work in marketing, or I want to go to law school or whatever the case may be. And after they take this class, they say, Oh, my goodness, I don't want anything to do with law school, or I don't want anything to do with this. Which in my case, I think it's just as valuable for people to kind of cross things off the list. And to say, this is what I want to do, because I can say, in my own experience, my internship helped me solidify what I wanted to do. But I also had a second internship. And I won't say where, because it was not a great experience. But I had a second internship that was very closely related to my major, I thought I wanted to work in news broadcasting. And so I did an internship at a station. And it was the worst experience, it was absolutely terrible. And it helped me solidify that this is not what I want to do. And so I tell students, you know, you don't want to get to law school, spend 200 grand getting into debt and getting your law degree to justify it out. You really don't want to be a lawyer or practice any type of law. So in my experience, I think it's just as valuable for students to just be exposed to the industry, and be able to cross something off the list as to be exposed to it and realize that this is what they want to do. So whether it's yes or no, I think it's pretty valuable.   Michael Hingson  29:18 The station you worked at was that TV or radio? It was television, television. So yeah, I'll bet it was awfully political. And there are a lot of challenges. And in doing that,   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  29:29 well hey, this is it wasn't something that I was willing to do at the time that there's there you have to work your way up in, in news and in broadcasting, you start off, you know, as an editor reporter or whatnot, and you have the graveyard shift. And there's just other politics that kind of go into it. And it was just some things that I just wasn't willing to do. And I you know, I really love the corporate side of it, being able to market our hospital services. It's a it's a place that I was working at, and I was like, this is really it. This is what I want to do. And to be honest, I would have been Been there for, oh my goodness, I don't even know how many years if it weren't for the fact that Medicaid reimbursement hit, and my entire department was eliminated. And so it kind of forced me into education. But I found out that I really love teaching. And it ended up being just as great of a fit. And   Michael Hingson  30:17 I was just about to ask what got you from all of that into education. On the other hand, your marketing background, certainly would have a positive effect on you, and education and teaching and so on, because you learned how to communicate with people.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  30:34 I did, I did. And I'll say, when you're initially growing a department, it's crucial to have some of those marketing materials, things like your flyers, your website that and I've had some web design skills, so I was able to design our website. So there were a lot of those skills that I learned throughout my time and communications, that really helps me build beyond 120, along with my other co workers.   Michael Hingson  30:59 So in dealing originally in marketing, and then going on into education, and even some dealing in news and so on, off the off the wall sub question, did anything ever come up in terms of making sure that the information that you produced or the things that you were doing, or now, even with 120, or classes at University of Florida, anything ever come up with making sure that that sort of stuff is accessible for people with disabilities?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  31:26 So, yeah, yes, and no. So I was, at least for my first five years, I worked in the office of admissions, like I mentioned, undergraduate admissions, so I was actually the disability coordinator for the Office of Admissions. And I had anywhere between probably three to 500 students every year, who would apply for disability consideration. And so I worked really closely with the Disability Resource Center at UF, I worked really closely with them to make sure that our students received the disability accommodation that they requested. And so that I mean, you know, of course, we talked about my own disability. And so that really gave me a sense of empathy. And I wanted to make sure that the students were getting what they needed. So So then moving into beyond 120, that was already at the forethought of forethought of what I was doing and saying I want to make this accessible for everyone. So COVID, kind of, in a way forced us to be accessible. However, we already kind of weren't accessible in some senses. So it really, if anything, it just made us be even more conscious about that. And so, for example, we have a class I teach a class called strategic self marketing, I developed the class myself based on some of my own experiences, and some of the things that that students are facing right now things like, you know, the Great Recession and Generation Z needs, and you just some of the things that students are facing. And so I said, How are we going to make this accessible to everyone? Because like I mentioned, I had a student who, you know, had an immune deficiency could not leave. And you know, there are students who are non traditional, perhaps they're a single parent trying to take classes, perhaps they're, they're working a full time job trying to take care of, of their own parents, right. So how do we make this accessible, so we had what's called hybrid classes, so students have the option of either coming in person to learn because I know students tend to who have like ADHD have a tendency to do better based on research in person classes. So we had in person section and at the same time, we would live stream that class. So for those who were at home and couldn't leave, or you know, we're experiencing some type of hardship and whatever case that might be, both sections at the same time could learn and we could all interact with one another and learn from one another. So we didn't necessarily have hybrid classes before zoom, we had a synchronous online classes for our UF Online folks. And then we had traditional sections for our residential folks. But through COVID, it kind of gave us the technology needed to have these hybrid classes. And that's something that I still continue to this day, and I have plans to continue until I leave the University of Florida. So So yes, and no, we did meet with some students who needed accommodations, any specific accommodations? And so we met with them individually and said, what are some things that we can do to make this more accessible for you? So as a department, we kind of worked with all populations myself, as the internship coordinator, I worked with all populations and you know, so so it's, it's been an interesting journey, trying to create a more accessible options. Is there more that we could do? Absolutely. And my goal is to eventually have someone that we can hire or to work with more non traditional populations. And that's kind of been in the works. But But yeah, ultimately just trying to make sure that we're listening to you to everyone and trying to be as accessible as possible.   Michael Hingson  35:10 Access gets to be quite a challenge. Whether it's a hybrid class and virtual class or totally online, for example, professors may create a lot of graphs and images, or professors may write on a board or do something that is visual, not verbalizing it. And the result is that anyone who's in the class who happens to be blind or low vision, won't get that information. And that's one of the access areas, I think, especially in colleges, but not just colleges, where there is a lot of challenge, and sometimes the requirement for a lot of advocacy because the information isn't made available. And it isn't something that technology in and of itself is gonna fix. It's an attitudinal choice that one has to make.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  36:00 Right? I agree with that 100%. And I will say it does get easier with technology. So So for example, I will make sure that closed captioning is on all of the videos that I record. So if anybody, you know needs closed captioning services, we have those available now at no charge. And then we have also transcripts that come along with our zoom recordings. So if a student needs a transcript, to be able to use with one of the services that Disability Resource Center offers, to be able to read those transcripts out to the students, we have those as well. So there certainly have been improvements, but it's up to the individual faculty on whether or not to utilize them. So I agree, it's certainly an attitude thing, as well, trying to make sure everybody's on board. I mean, I can't speak to anybody else. But I'm hoping that my classes are accessible as possible.   Michael Hingson  36:52 Well, here's another, here's another example. So you create a video, or let's say you, you create some sort of video where there's music, or there are a lot of images that are put on the video, what kind of audio description do you create, in order to make sure that a person who can see the images in the video part of it is able to access it and and that's the kind of thing that I'm talking about that we're a lot less a well, I'm able to run word, but we're a lot less likely to include those things, even though they may be just as important to be able to do or you create a document or you scan a document and create a PDF of it. The problem is that's a graphic. And so it is totally unavailable to a person who uses a screen reader to verbalize or to to be able to interpret the document, unless the optical character recognition process is doable. And again, it is a result of becomes inaccessible. And those are the kinds of things that we haven't done a lot with yet. And it's not something that you can easily automate. It is a process that somebody has to put time into one of my favorite things that I that I love to complain about, I love to complain about it, but that I complain about is television advertising, how many ads today just have music, or just have sound but no verbalizations So that unless you can see it, you have no clue what's going on. And the reality is, what you what you do by not having words is leave out not only people who are blind or who can't see it, but you're missing the opportunity to market to all those people who get up during commercials and go do something else, like get a snack or a beer or whatever. Because all they hear is music, and they don't hear anything that helps the commercial continue to keep their focus on the product.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  38:52 Right. Great. No, that makes total sense. I mean, I try and think you know, based on the materials that I teach, whether it be closed captioning service for those who are who are hearing impaired, or whatever the case may be, you kind of try and think of those things. But you're right. There's some things that I've never even thought about that I hope I would be empathetic to if a student needed those. Those that assistance, but yeah, it's it is certainly there's a lot of barriers there.   Michael Hingson  39:21 Well, here's the other part of it. It isn't just the student who may come in and need it. You archive classes.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  39:28 The student, yes, the students do you have access to previous classes? Right, but you have to be enrolled in the class in order to the material. Yeah,   Michael Hingson  39:37 but if that's the case, then without having that information accessible in the archive classes, they're just as unavailable as anything because they weren't made accessible from the outset. So it is a it's a process. I know it's not inexpensive. But if we truly are dealing with accessibility, that is kind of one of the things that we need to explore and maybe the day We'll come when there are better ways to automate a lot of that it's not here yet. I don't know whether you checked out excessive be the company that I work for and help. But it is begun the process of, in part, at least creating an automated process to make websites accessible by analyzing the content of the websites with an artificial, intelligent widget. And it can do a lot to make websites more accessible. But it won't be able to do everything. It's it's amazing what it can do. Because you can oftentimes using the widget, analyze an image and get a description of it. Like on my website, if you go to Michael henson.com, there is a picture of me hugging my guide dog Roselle, the dog who was with me in the World Trade Center, when the image was first encountered by excessive B, before we did anything with it. It analyzed the image and embedded a description that said, Man and black suit hugging yellow Labrador retriever, which is incredible in of itself. But the reality is it doesn't do what we really wanted it to do was to say, which is to say, Michael Hinkson, hugging Roselle. So we embedded code and excessive B, we'll leave it alone. But already we're seeing the the machine process, do a lot to analyze images. And over time, it will get better. But we can't automate videos and put in video or audio descriptions yet and things like that. And maybe the time will come to do it. But in the short term, it means that that people have to make the effort to do that. Right and should make the effort to do that. Absolutely. It's a process. And you know, we're not there. And a lot of people don't think about you mentioned that COVID was something that helped bring a lot of this to the forefront. And it did but not always in a positive way. Like the Kaiser Health Foundation did a survey in 2020 of COVID-19 websites for registering to get when it started vaccines, but before then to get tests and get tested. And out of the 94 websites that the Foundation research 10 had made some effort to include accessibility and the reality is most hadn't, which is unfortunate. It is a process and I only bring it all up. It's it's interesting to discuss it. But hopefully it will help people think about more accessibility kinds of things in the future as we go forward.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  42:30 Absolutely, absolutely. I was hoping. I mean, there's little things that I've learned over the years things like you know, when it comes to folks who need certain services, I don't remember exactly which which disability this was. But there was one particular condition where folks, it was hard for them to read color, it was easier if it was 100%, black and white versus on a grayscale. So So, so yeah, I made sure okay, this is in black instead of in a gray or blue or whatever. Because at University of Florida, our colors or colors are orange and blue. And so a lot of the stuff that I was making was in orange and blue. However, somebody was like, you know, it's actually really hard for me to be able to see this I'm visually impaired and having you know, I again, I don't remember what condition it was. But it was easier for her to to read in black and white. And I was like, Sure, absolutely. Let's do this. So hopefully, I mean, it's the more that we learn and more we're exposed to different things, the more accessible hopefully that we can make the material.   Michael Hingson  43:31 And when we're talking about vision impairments, the reality is what you just described is a lot easier to do today than it used to be because so much is stored electronically, you can quickly go in and change the colors and reprint or whatever. And even the student might be able to do that. But the fact is that you can do it. And that really helps a great deal. Yeah,   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  43:51 I'm absolutely I'm hoping that as as time goes on, of course, I'll be exposed to different things and be able to make those accommodations for my students, but hoping that, you know, everyone around the country will be able to recognize some of the things that we can do as a population to be able to make things more accessible.   Michael Hingson  44:09 Yeah, we need to become a lot more inclusive than we tend to be today. And we're working on it. Diversity doesn't tend to include disabilities, but you can't very well leave us out of inclusion. Otherwise you're not inclusive rights. It's it's a it's a challenge. But you know, we're working on it collectively as a society and I am sure that we will eventually get there. But it is an effort and it's always about awareness to get people to think about it. Well, so you have had a lot of experiences and they're doing a lot of fun things. So what are you going to do in your future? What are your future goals?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  44:48 So, my goal is to keep on building beyond 120 and hopefully to scale. We have had in like I said beyond 120 was just launched in 2018, we had two years where we were just completely cut off in certain areas. But at least in excursions, we've had about 250 students participate in excursions, but our college serves 11,000 students. So I want to be able to scale that up. We want to give more scholarships to students in various populations. I know one of my students, I won't say her name, but she is absolutely precious. She's a single mom, her child is about two or three, I believe now, she started off in her freshman year in one of my classes, we were able to get her a scholarship to participate in an internship and that scholarship went to babysitting costs, you know, because a lot of times those non traditional populations have different challenges than our traditional 1822 population. So I would love to provide more scholarships to students of any population. And we would love to, to really help students get to where they need to go. So I mean, we're actually our excursion is entirely donor funded. And so we're just reaching out to various UF alumni and saying, Hey, come give back. And whatever capacity you can, whether that's money, whether it's time, investing in a student simply through giving them a mentorship consultation, so I would love to be able to reach a larger population within our college and make an impact. And I ultimately, I can only impact this the folks that are here at the University of Florida, however, I would love to share what we've done with other universities, and and really encourage other universities to, to support students in those non traditional ways through experiential learning. I presented at a Duke University online pedagogy conference last Wednesday, and was able to share that with a few people. So any impact that we can make on any other schools, I would certainly love to be able to see that happen.   Michael Hingson  46:57 That is exciting. It'd be great if you could do something with all 11,000 students at University of Florida what?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  47:05 Well, 11,000 students times $2,000 per scholarship is a lot of money. We have a long way to go.   Michael Hingson  47:13 Yeah, well, that's okay. It's, it's something that's still doable. I've seen colleges receive a whole lot larger donations, but it is a process. So once you get your PhD, what will you do? Are you to continue to work at University of Florida? Well, you have the opportunity to do that, or what Yes,   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  47:31 I mean, my, well, I'll say this, my husband is in the Air Force. He is a surgical resident right now at UF and which is why I'm able to stay here, and it will be here for the next six years. And then kind of depending on where he goes, I will be following him and the University of Florida is expect expressed interest in keeping me here in more of a remote position if the if the situation calls for it. So potentially just kind of traveling to help facilitate some of these opportunities. But I would really love to scale the program up and be able to share with other universities, the impact of this program. And of course, to continue impacting students would be my ultimate goal in the future,   Michael Hingson  48:16 interesting idea to figure out a way to expand it to other universities, and whether you do it through the University of Florida, or there's a way to start a company to do beyond 120. Worldwide right beyond beyond when 20 Inc.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  48:32 Yes, exactly. I will say, though, that I will do I have marketing and communication skills, I do not have as much business skill. So I would need somebody to help me with that. I   Michael Hingson  48:42 bet you could find someone at UF to help with that.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  48:46 Yes. Well, I'm excited. I'm excited. Well, we'll see what happens. But But no, it's a great start. We're excited to see now that COVID We've gotten a bit of a handle on it, I certainly have a long way to go with that. But certainly happy to see now that things have kind of calmed down a little bit what opportunities are going to be open for us in the future. I'll say I'm presenting at the National Association of Colleges and Employers next month to share our model with other schools. So hopefully that will go well and we'll be able to to impact other universities there.   Michael Hingson  49:21 That's exciting too. You'll be able to do that. And of course, that's the kind of teaching but you're going to continue to teach.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  49:27 Oh, absolutely. That's the bread and butter of our program. We have the coolest classes of course I have to brag on Brent Industry Insights because that's my class that I created but we have other really cool courses we have a course called The Art of adulting you know, kind of teach students what does it mean to be an adult you know, and just have that interesting? open discussion. We have a Global Pathways course we have a professional pathways just expose students to various industries and particularly the skills correlation to say you know, If you're going to be a lawyer, great, but what are the skills that go into being a lawyer? What do you need things like problem solving, critical thinking, communications, teamwork, all of those skills that go into any profession. And we laugh, we provide students in the internship course what's called the SDS assessment. And it will basically ask you a bunch of questions and then tell you based on your skills, some of the top career choices that align with those particular skills, and it cracks the students up a lot of time, I know it cracked me up, because one of my top job matches was a tattoo artist, and I'm going what on earth? I cannot draw for anything in the world. But but we just kind of had to dig deeper and say, you know, what are the skills that I have, that perhaps a tattoo artists would have, or a marketing manager would have or whatever. So, you know, really teaching the students the value of having some of those transferable skills that you can have in any any job.   Michael Hingson  51:03 You mentioned earlier about people who had an influence on your life, I gather, you have some people that that really have made a great impact on you would love to hear about that?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  51:13 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So well, Isaac, I don't know if if she'll ever hear this, but she was the internship coordinator who, you know, I walked into her office, and I had a rainbow colored resume, it literally had every color in the rainbow on it. And she looked at me and said, Brittany, what on earth is this, you do not need a rainbow colored resume. And so we kind of work together over the course of this semester. And she was the one that that got me the job at Orlando health that got me that internship that launched the rest of my career. And so I want to be the hula Isaac for for all of my students, so she was definitely an influence. My immunologist was a huge influence. He's the one that worked with me in the midst of having an immune deficiency. And I'll say, I didn't mention this earlier, but I've had four very significant surgeries, three of which were open heart surgeries. So you know, he's, he's been there in the midst of all of that, and just my family to you know, as, as my husband, and I talk about starting our own family saying, you know, what type of influence do I want to be on my kids, just as I am on my students, so that that's kind of my goal is to really make a positive impact on others through their various capacities.   Michael Hingson  52:35 Well, and you're certainly working toward it by any standard. And that's, that's as good as it gets, you know, you're making every effort that you can. So in 10 years, you're going to be doing the same thing.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  52:48 Hopefully, I'll have more of a leadership role. And we'll be able to have grown, I mean, hey, let's say we get 1,000,010 million 100 million dollar donation for the program, hopefully, we'll be able to hire lots of me, and not literally, but lots of people in my role, and be able to scale up and influence 1000s of more students. And ultimately, I would love to travel and be able to share with other colleges, some of the things that we've learned and see how we can help impact those students as well. I mean, you see, me even even going along the employer side, you see a lot of employers saying, Oh, we're going to pay our interns $8 an hour, or we're going to pay our interns nine or $10 an hour. And the reality is Amazon and, you know, Starbucks, and a lot of other employees, they're saying, hey, we'll pay you $15 an hour. And so students don't feel as much of a need to do internships anymore, because they can go work at a part time position for a lot more money. And so we're encouraging employers listen, you want to make sure that you are offering our students a competitive rates, because we want to make sure the students are getting access to internships and for especially for our students who have significant financial barriers, this is something that we strongly encourage employers listen, you need to meet that growing rate, because we want students to have access to whatever it is that you're teaching them, because they're so so so valuable. And I know, the federal folks up in DC are just starting to pay interns. So encouraging employers, encouraging students and really making those those connections. So yeah, so eventually kind of be doing the same thing. I hope it's at a broader scale, though.   Michael Hingson  54:33 Well, hope you can hopefully you can work with companies to get them to fund the internships and pay appropriate wages and so on. And, you know, maybe it would be to their interest because some of those people then will join those companies and move forward but as far as having lots of you doing it, you know, we're not cloning people and that's a good thing. So it's you, but it is really exciting what you're doing I mean, if people want to learn more about it or reach out to you, how can they do that?   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  55:05 So I find that the easiest way and I tell this to my students as well, the easiest way is just to Google UFL beyond 120. And, and that'll bring you to our websites. And it's actually held through the Academic Advising Center. So when students go to get their advising services, a lot of times they'll Fordham to us. If they're saying, Hey, I'm not quite sure what classes to take based on my career interest, or hey, I want to participate in internship, I don't know where to go. So we're held within the Academic Advising Center. So if you see academic advising, you're in the right place. So hear us beyond 120. And then I can certainly send my my email to you as well. It's Brittnay Grubbs@ufl.edu. And so happy to chat with anybody who's interested and you know, replicating the program for their own college or, or maybe donating some time to helping the students we certainly appreciate that.   Michael Hingson  56:01 So do the email one more time and spell it if you would? Absolutely. It's   56:05 B r i t t a y G r u b b s@ufl.edu, UFL for University of Florida. edu for education.   Michael Hingson  56:15 There you go. So people who are interested, maybe you'll hear from some other schools and colleges and universities, or companies that might be willing to contribute to the program. We're certainly willing to advocate so anything we can do to help them hopefully this will raise awareness and that some people will reach out to you and I would love to hear what you what you encounter as you're going forward.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  56:38 I would love that. I would love that it went regardless of what anyone has to know today, whether it's money time or anything else that people are interested in. We are certainly appreciative of anything that people have to offer.   56:50 Well, Brittany, thanks very much for being here. With unstoppable mindset this hour has gone by in a hurry hasn't absolutely having me which is why this is always fun. As always, any of you listening, I'd love to hear what you think. Please reach out to us you can reach me Michaelhi  m i c h a e l h i  at accessibe  A C C E S S I B E.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can also go to our podcast page, which is www dot Michael hingson.com m i  c h a e l  h i n g s o n.com/podcast. Wherever you go, wherever you're listening to this podcast, please give us a five star rating. We really appreciate that a lot. I do want to hear your comments. If you know of other people and Britney you as well. If you know of other people who ought to be guests on unstoppable mindset, please let us know we're always open to hearing about more people. And I appreciate those of you who even over the last week have emailed us about that or reached out. Anytime people want to talk to us about guests or just thoughts about the podcast. We want to hear them and we will respond. So again, Brittany, thanks very much for being here.   Brittany Grubbs Hodges  58:06 Thank you, Michael. Really appreciate it.   Michael Hingson  58:08 And we look forward to all of you joining us next time on unstoppable mindset.  You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com. accessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

In today's episode, Nick and Matt chat through Barna's Hybrid Ministry ebook, they discuss the ins and outs of pillar pages, and how that could be used for your church to reach Millennials and Gen Z attenders, as well as inspect some of the fascinating church attendance trends founds in the Barna Study! SHOW NOTES BARNA E-BOOK BEING REFERENCED https://shop.barna.com/products/6-questions-about-the-future-of-the-hybrid-church-experience PILLAR PAGE EXAMPLE https://www.typeform.com/blog/guides/brand-awareness/ CROSSROADS ONLINE PLATFORM https://www.crossroads.net/watch/ //BARNA EBOOK FINDINGS 51% of All US adults did not watch an online church service during COVID 18% of Practicing Christians did not 67% of churched adults now have an online option when their church didn't have one before 90% primarily engaged with the same church they were committed to before COVID 78% of church dropouts are waiting until services go back to normal before they return Churched Adults (36%) and Home with kids under 18 (41%) struggle to focus during online church //DO YOU USE THE INTERNET FOR FAITH PURPOSES? Practicing Christians - 66% Churched Adults - 56% Dropouts - 36% Churched Gen Z - 67% Churched Millennials 64% Churched Gen X 58% Churched Boomers 42% //AFTER COVID WILL CHURCH GATHERINGS FIT YOUR LIFE? Churched Gen Z 37% say both 13% say primarily digital 41% say physical 40% say both 13% say primarily digital 42% say primarily physical TIMECODES 00:00-1:43 - Intro 01:43-02:57 - Findings from Barna Study on Hybrid 02:57-07:30 - 51% of US adults didnt' watch service online during COVID 07:30-12:36 - 67% of churched adults now have an online option 12:36-21:16 - How to set up a pillar page 21:16-23:08 - People stayed committed to their church during COVID 23:08-24:38 - 78% of dropouts are waiting until it's normal to return to church 24:38-28:08 - It's hard to remain focued while watching online 28:08-30:35 - Using the internet for Faith Purposes 30:35-32:46 - Post COVID church attendance survey data 32:46-34:35- Outro TRANSCRIPT Matt Johnson (00:01): For young, I wanna be for forever young. Matt Johnson (00:08): Hey Nick Clason (00:11): Well, good morning. And hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the hybrid ministry podcast. I am your host, Nick Clason alongside my great friend cohort. Compadre, Matt Johnson. How you doing this morning, Matt? Matt Johnson (00:27): Doing great, man. I'm a little tired, you know, have a newborn in another room. So that's been, uh, exciting, but you know, I'm, uh, worn out but you know, it's beautiful and it's a great thing. So Nick Clason (00:40): You're worn out. So let's talk about digital ministry to just reinvigorate you. Matt Johnson (00:47): I'm in Nick Clason (00:48): Let's, uh, real quick, like what are like the, like, what's the number one, most surprising thing about a newborn for you? Matt Johnson (00:56): Oh man. You know, the most surprising thing is how fulfilled I am. Um, you know, I, the second I've met her, I cried and you know, there's been multiple times I've been holding her and I just start crying. I'm like, this is really weird. Never thought fatherhood would hit me this way. And I think it just goes, you know, I lost my dad a few years ago. So like just layers of like who I am to this little thing that I'm holding, you know, that doesn't even have any idea what's going on in the world. Nick Clason (01:23): yeah. Yeah. That's that's awesome, man. Well, we're super happy for you, but obviously everybody wanted you back because, uh, you know, they missed, they, they missed you. Laughs. And they had just listened to me and that was boring so well, yeah. That's amazing, dude. So super happy for you. Um, today, uh, you know, Barna recently came out with a, an ebook, um, on the, I don't remember the exact title of it, but we'll link it in the show notes, but the findings in this new world of hybrid ministry and I dude, I promise you, right. We had this name before we knew about their ebook. Matt Johnson (02:06): So yes, Nick Clason (02:07): , we're technically not stealing from them, but they did release before us because, uh, we didn't have our crap together enough to get this thing up and off the ground. Matt Johnson (02:16): Nick Clason (02:17): So , so it looks like we're stealing from them, but we promise we're not. So I was reading through that, uh, just the other day and there were just some statistics that kinda, um, I found interesting and I just wanted to share them and then us just kind of go back and forth and talk through 'em a little bit. So, um, you know, you and I were obviously promoting this idea of digital and physical ministry calling it hybrid. Uh, and so there are a couple of things that I found interesting that feel like maybe they're not, um, leaning towards hybrid or digital ministry being a good strategy. The first one is this 51% of all us adults did not watch an online church service during COVID. Um, and 18% of practicing Christians did not. So COVID hit a practicing Christian, almost 20% of them never even tuned into an online service. So those statistics right there, Matt, is there anything concerning with that? Like as you and I are like pushing for this idea of hybrid ministry, are, are we like, well, yeah, but people don't even really want it. That's, that's kind of how I would read that statistic. Matt Johnson (03:31): Yeah. I, uh, personally I'm not concerned mostly just cuz of the demographic and the ages that this did. I mean, it's not just, you know, millennials that they're pulling out in this stat, it's all adults. So you're gonna have boomers, gen X all in there too. And we know historically that they don't want to really tune in online. Um, I will say, I mean, if only 20, if 20% of practicing Christians did not tune in, I mean that means 80% did tune in at some point, which I mean that excites me. Um, cuz that means majority of people are trying to tune in. Um, and I also do, uh, if all us adults and 51% did not attend a church service of like everyone in the us, I, I mean might be the optimist I me, but that, that tells me 49% of people at least, you know, checked out a service at some point. So that's exciting. Uh, yeah. Which, you know, that's kind of correlates with the numbers that we have seen and you know, practicing religion anyway. So, um, I Nick Clason (04:31): Mean you can paint them as negative. Right. But there's also the other side too, which is there, there is positivity in it such depends, I guess how you wanna look at it. Matt Johnson (04:40): Yeah. And I would just say like, don't get discouraged just cuz 20, you know, about 20% of practicing Christians did not because I would say, you know, that's probably the 20% of people that regardless never will. Nick Clason (04:52): Yeah. Well and one of the, I mean, gosh, one of the things we've noticed in our church is that, um, COVID hit and we lost contact with just a lot of people. And so mm-hmm, , that's probably a nationwide phenomenon as well. Um, especially depending on the size of church, you know, you and I obviously work at a pretty large church and so it's, it's harder for us to have contact with every single one, uh, of the people, you know, that, Matt Johnson (05:16): That least, yeah. Something else that I would ask, seeing the number start to cut you off. Nick is no, Nick Clason (05:21): You're good. Matt Johnson (05:22): Um, how were, were these churches that these 20%, 18% did not get practice online? Is that because they weren't communicated well to, um, were the, were things not implemented quick enough for them? So, you know, they were like, you know, they get out their habit habit of I'm gonna go attend church, which I think that could definitely be part of that factor too. I mean, I think in my grandpa's church who, you know, runs a small Methodist church of 20 people and they try to do online and it was him in his kitchen, but you know, his congregation is primarily 60 to 80 years old, so they're not gonna really go on Facebook to watch. Nick Clason (05:58): So yeah. I also think that, um, what you and I are proposing and talking about in the life of this podcast is not an online church service. No like that it be an element to it and it could be an element to it. But I think we're trying to actually create a more dynamic and robust, um, framework for hybrid ministry. Exactly. Because I do exactly that people do like the, the X factor of the church is the fact that we gather together and we create real authentic community. Like, yeah, that's what sets us apart. We're not just a content machine. And so the con the converse of that is that if the church is just a content machine, like if we're not doing it well, or, um, like if we feel like we should have to compete with the world, we may lose out on that, unless we have something that's uniquely different and we do, and that's Jesus and that's community, but so how do we take those things that uniquely set us apart as the church and create something hybrid in that? Nick Clason (07:08): And so while some of these stats may look, you know, cryptic or whatever, for what we're proposing, I would argue that we're saying, yeah, stream your service, but also, like don't only stream your service and call that your digital presence. There's so much more to a digital presence, just go back and exactly all the things we've, we've talked about in the week, the episodes before, so, okay. Yeah. So then, uh, 67%, um, of church adults now have an online option and when their church didn't have one before. So if anything, what we've seen now is that COVID has ushered the church, you know, into this new, this new phenomenon. I think in my dad's church, not the one he's at now, but the one that he was at when COVID was going on. And, uh, they, they did have a live stream, but dude, like I think that their live stream was someone setting their iPhone up in the balcony. Nick Clason (08:06): And like, that was how they live stream, you know, and they're not super produced even now, but they did, like, they did grab a couple of, you know, elements to, to boost their live stream. And so they now do like lower thirds instead of just like just putting the phone up and hoping that people can see the screen and, um, like stuff like that, you know, to make themselves a little bit more, uh, online savvy. And so I think a lot of churches went through some sort of online iteration. And so now that you have the hardware and the software, and maybe even some of the soft skills, like the know how and how to set this thing up, it now gives the ma you know, the overwhelming majority of churched adults, an online option that they didn't have before. And so yes, stream your service, but also what are different ways, Matt, that you could even see them packaging that, um, that content, that audio, that video to create hybrid, you know, elements throughout their week. Matt Johnson (09:08): Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could, um, package it, but what are the best ways right now I'd say is to just get some of that short form content out of that live message. Um, we've talked a lot about that, especially if you're trying to hit the millennial gen Z. Um, there actually was just another study that came out that said the best way to reach that. Um, millennials in general is video that's under 60 seconds long. So, um, if you could figure out a good way to like package, I don't know, 62nd clip with a, um, let's say a 200 word blog or 200 word write up about it. And you could package that as a, Hey, our weekly recap or whatever. Oh yeah. I don't know if you watch baseball at all. Um, but, uh, one of my favorite things about baseball right now is like, if you tune into a game late, especially on specifically on YouTube TV, it gives you a six inning recap of, or like whatever inning you're coming in of all the plays you've missed, which I, uh, that's something I personally love, cuz I can catch up on my baseball games really quickly. Matt Johnson (10:09): But so do that for your sermon. Like do a, Hey here's our sermon recap for the week you give it in content short form. Um, and let me know what's going on with, uh, whatever you got going on in, at your church that week. Uh, that's the probably gonna be the best way to reach millennial and gen Z right now. Nick Clason (10:27): And do you think Matt that like obviously, well, first of all, baseball's boring. If you can catch up on a game in 60 seconds, that's my take on it, but uh, would you suggest that the best way to do that would be through, um, like maybe TikTok or Instagram, but are you saying like throw that on like a mobile friendly, um, website or like a page on your website? That's like maybe a blog page that's dynamic, that's moving, that's being updated. Um, and then that, is that the way to do it, send it out via email, like what would be your distribution? Like that's a great concept. I love that. I don't even know if there's churches really doing that in the iteration that you're explaining, but how would you, uh, suggest a church if you know, we hired you as our marketing manager, how would you suggest a church set that up technically on the backside? Does that make sense? Matt Johnson (11:16): Yeah. No, all of the above are great options. Um, the big thing, so here, well, let's go through all the avenues. So Instagram TikTok, you're gonna have broader reach. So if that's what you're trying to get, go for that email, you're gonna have your best reach. So, uh, Seth goin always talks about how your email list is like your gold. Um, if you get really good people on your email list and they're engaged, like that's your cream of your crop, they're gonna be hot no matter what. So, um, that's a great way to distribute, distribute it, but we also know it can be a challenge to get emails. So, um, if that's not, you know, uh, something that you have built, you don't have a CRM or anything built on the back end or a data management system. I would, okay. Let's all right. What's next website, which this could easily be a pillar page or a cluster topic of like, Hey, you're serving recaps and all that SEO is gonna drive your website. The video content is gonna weigh higher on Google and you can just continue adding stuff to that page of like here's our sermon recap page. And that page will just be built out more and more. And if you can just imagine this page, that scrolls forever, and you have a nice little table of content at the top that you can like jump around and stuff. That's gonna weigh very high on SEO. So, um, so which we are actually seeing currently with Google, Nick Clason (12:36): So let's get super nerdy on a pillar page. So I know what that is. Cuz you told me what it is, but I didn't know what it was till you told me what it was a couple of months ago. So first of all, what is a pillar page? Matt Johnson (12:47): So a pillar page is just a fancy term of like, okay, you've pick a topic. So let's, let's uh, let's talk about small groups. Small groups is always a great, uh, no let's do youth ministry since you're a youth leader. You knows. There we go. Let's now we're talking the finals, let's go into the world that we know. Yeah. so let's say we created a pillar page. That was everything you need to know about, uh, youth ministry in 2022. Um, so we titled that page specifically to be some of those search terms that you're gonna have. And then that pillar page should just be built out of like the who, what, when, where, why, how so, but blogs, curated content. And when I talk about curated content, I think that confuses a lot of people cuz they think, oh, we're just gonna, um, take content that we have or whatever, and just re put it on there. Matt Johnson (13:31): You can do that. But when I'm seeing curated content, I'm talking about other people's content and doing back links for them too. Mm-hmm um, that helps you weigh higher on SEO. Um, and also on this page should be, uh, you know, copy about like, okay, this is everything you need to know about youth ministry. And then on there you could have your video tutorials, you could have, um, white pages ebook. So it's everything that you're gonna release about a topic on one page. So the Google term of it is a content cluster, which it's like a cluster of all the content you have. The pillar page is what the marketing term is that you're gonna hear a lot for it. Um, so if you created, uh, let's say life, church recap page, and on that recap page, it's just everything that life church has done, you know, over the last year. And it's a recap of all their sermons. It's a play by play or whatever. You're gonna weigh higher on SEO when people are searching for like, okay, I'm looking for, how do I deal with anxiety? And if you had a sermon about anxiety, that's gonna weigh higher on that page for you. Nick Clason (14:40): That's great, man. So here's my question then as someone who's a novice, as it comes to like internet, uh, website development and all that stuff, obviously if I pay for developer, I'm gonna gonna get this done. Right. But let's pretend I don't have the money to do that. Or I might just, you know, waiting into this now for the very first time, uh, how, like, can you set up a pillar page? Like, is there like a pillar page for dummies? Is there like a couple of things that they can do through like a basic square space, Wix or WordPress site that will get them at least on the right path? Cuz maybe, you know, someone's listening to this and they're not the senior leader. They don't have the authorization to spend the money, but they believe in it. And so they want to take it on as a pet project, but they need to prove to their upper level leadership or their senior pastor that this is valuable. Can you give someone in that boat, any sort of like tips on how to get some of that stuff up and rolling? Matt Johnson (15:31): Yeah, definitely. You can a hundred percent create a pillar page through, you know, WICS or Squarespace or something. Um, you're just gonna be limited by, uh, the fact that you're in a template, which is okay. So I want to be very clear about that. Like that is okay. Um, it's just gonna be laid out how Squarespace really wants it laid out or Wix wants it laid out. Um, Nick Clason (15:50): As opposed to the custom, like I want it, I want this feature, like you can't ne maybe necessarily accommodate that. You're just stuck in the template. Matt Johnson (15:59): Yeah, exactly. So if you're like, Hey, I don't like how this jumps to there. You're not gonna really be able to finesse around that, but that's okay if you're just getting started through pillar page, cuz really a pillar page is meant to just be a really long content cluster. So just start adding everything you have on there and just lay it out in a logical sense. So don't uh, just throw stuff willy-nilly on it. Like don't go from like what this is about to, this is how you do it then to the why, like you need to start with like, you know, why and the what, and then go to the how, like, just like a story you don't just go straight to the climax of it Nick Clason (16:38): And, and let, let's throw like a couple pillar page examples, you know, in the show notes so that people can go check those out. Yeah, Matt Johnson (16:44): Absolutely. Nick Clason (16:45): See some of them what we're talking about. Yeah. But can you think of off top of your head or do we need to stop recording and then you, you comb your brain for some good pillar page Matt Johnson (16:54): Exams? No, there's a, there's a great pillar page that Typeform has, um, that I would love to, uh, that we can add into, um, the show notes and really the pillar page is all about uh, um, gosh, I can't remember. Give one second think Nick Clason (17:14): this is, uh, Matt Johnson (17:15): Brand awareness that thought it's about yeah, it's it's about brand awareness. Um, they did a whole pillar page about how you can build brand awareness, uh, Typeform data. And that's just been, uh, perfectly laid out. Actually I will even put it in our notes here. So you have it, love it. Um, and you can take a look at it, but this is really what Hillary pages should look like gives you how much, uh, time it would read. Uh, there's usually a table of content at the top and then you can jump through and find what you wanna read about. So, um, Nick Clason (17:49): I will link to that. You guys can see it. Yeah. Matt Johnson (17:51): Pick it out. And it's a perfect example of a pillar page and I need, I wanna reiterate pillar pages are big. So this pillar page is a 44 minute read and it's meant to build SEO. Like that's what it's meant for. So when I, uh, we were building a pillar page at a church now and you guys came to me about it and I was talking through with like the kids director and stuff. I was like, I need, let's Nick Clason (18:10): Be clear. You came up with the idea first. And then I said, we should do this and Matt Johnson (18:15): Then got Nick Clason (18:15): The kids director on board. Matt Johnson (18:17): So yes. Yeah. And I was sitting down with her and she's like, is that enough content? I was like, no, I need about 30,000 words. and I could see her go what? And I was like, okay, maybe not 30,000, but I need about 3000 words. Like I would need a lot of con copy for a pillar page to work. So it's something you constantly build. It's not just something that day one, you have 200 words and it's a blog post. Like a pillar page is not bigger than a blog post. Nick Clason (18:42): Does it take on like, like, okay, cuz I guess the way I'm looking at it, let's pretend it's like Instagram. So Instagram, if you're scrolling, it'll keep loading be beneath you and it'll just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll until like, never like you can probably never really find the bottom of Instagram. Yep. However, like Google, right? Like it's, it's got a billion options, but at when you get to the bottom of your page, it'll be like go to page two. Yeah. Can it go either of those directions or is there one way that is better than the other Matt Johnson (19:14): Scroll scroll? Does that make sense? Scroll. Yeah, I would do scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. Okay. And then if you wanna link to other stuff outside of it, that's totally fine. So like, Hey, go check out this blog. That's fine. And what that gives you is back links and you want back links and we back links. You have the higher websites weighted. It's all this weird stuff on the back. End of Google. Nick Clason (19:34): Yeah. Okay. Great. Love it. No, that's listen, dude. That's the type of stuff that I'm in idiot about, but uh, I know it's good. So I'm trying to learn. Matt Johnson (19:41): Yeah, no I'm here. Nick Clason (19:43): So yeah, pillar pages. Um, we took a little detour there, but that's, we're gonna, that's what this is episode is about. Like how do you build it? What are they, how are they advantageous? And so we can do with our 67% church adults who now have an online option, we can take some of that and use that to add to the pillar page mm-hmm . And so could you make it where it's like one week it's, uh, 62nd sermon recap with like the downloadable notes or something. And instead of them being downloadable, you're saying just type all those words into there, Matt Johnson (20:13): So that a hundred percent Nick Clason (20:14): It can be found. And then could you add to it next week, week two of the love sermon series and the 62nd recap clip and uh, the sermon notes or something like that. Matt Johnson (20:24): Exactly. Yeah. And you would be shocked on, I, I guarantee if someone, you little churches go out there and do that, you'll be weighed high on Google. Um, like do a, how to love, how to be loving as a Christian series. Um, cuz most places are not doing this most churches aren't doing this. And then secondly, uh, if they have done this it's so long ago that like, like you'll start to outweigh Google cuz you were creating new content for it. Nick Clason (20:51): So, uh, would you recommend like someone typing up a sermon recap or would you recommend just copy and pasting the pastor's manuscript notes? Matt Johnson (21:01): Uh, both. So the best solution would be to do a recap, but if you don't have time to do a recap, then just do the sermon notes right now. Like okay. Do the recap as like that's all right. I'm gonna make this better than do the recap. Nick Clason (21:16): Gotcha. Great. All right. So a couple other of stats I wanted to look into from the barn of study, 90% of people primarily engaged with the same church that they were committed to before. COVID and I think that that's a really, uh, hopefully a really helpful stat for us as pastors, because we feel like maybe this idea of all of us going online is they're gonna find something better and then they're gonna switch. Yeah. And they're not gonna wanna go to our church anymore. And our church isn't as good as elevation. They have verdict and they have band that makes music that's on Spotify. But 90% of, of churchgoers, primarily engaged with the same church, which communicates to me that most Christians are comm or are connected or committed right to their local body. They're not, they're not looking for something else. They, they have what they want. They have the community that they're, they're looking for. And so as a church, you putting your content out there, you may be, you know, so I've heard people say like, I don't wanna steal other people from other churches. Like that's that's that wouldn't be the goal. Right? The goal is to help nurture and disciple the people that are already going to your church. Matt Johnson (22:30): Exactly. Your online church should not be like, oh, I'm gonna steal someone. Else's congregation like this isn't some nefarious thing we're doing. It should be, Hey, we're here to nurture our 90% of people that are still engaged with our church, which that tells me, like you were just saying, they bought into your community that you built there. So yeah. Nurture them. give them stuff that makes them keep wanting to come back period. Nick Clason (22:57): Yeah. Well, not even keep wanting to come back, but like learn during the week. Matt Johnson (23:01): Exactly. Yeah. That's what I mean by that. Nick Clason (23:04): Yeah. Yeah. Not just, not just come to our church on Sunday. Yeah. Nick Clason (23:08): Uh, 78% of church dropouts are saying that they're waiting until services go back to normal before they return. I think that would be a lot of pastor's arguments of, well, see, see, we gotta go back to in person, we gotta go back to in person. And I don't, I don't think any of us are arguing that we shouldn't be back in person. Yeah. Uh, but I that's, I, I would be curious about that percentage of that stat. Hum. Those people are using that as an excuse as their church, uh, attendance patterns and disciplines have just completely faded away. Um, and they're just saying, oh yeah, I'm just waiting for it to go back to normal. Realizing that COVID has never really ended being normal. Like we're just still in this weird like world with it. And there is, I don't know if normal will ever come back the way it was. Cuz it's been two and a half freaking years. Matt Johnson (23:56): yeah, no, this is the new normal. And I would just like you were saying, I, my guess is that's probably us excuse for most people now. Um, mm-hmm they got out of the habit, which you know, we've we saw that in our own numbers and that's okay. Like go find the next seeds to sell. Nick Clason (24:13): Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. And again, we're not proposing like, well yeah, you should stream your service. Like if you can, you should. But we're also saying that there's this there's more to just hybrid. It's not just take your Sunday morning experience and post it on Facebook live. Yeah. There we're, we're trying to make this much more dynamic than Matt Johnson (24:33): That. Exactly. Nick Clason (24:35): All right. A couple other quick, quick hitters here. Um, but one thing I found really interesting was 36% of church adults, um, that were at home and people with kids under the age of 18, which is like 41% say that they struggle to focus during online church. And again, I think that's another potentially like negative stat towards, towards digital. So what would you say if someone's like? Yeah, I mean I, online church is great and all, but like I got young kids, like I, I can't, it's hard to pay attention the whole time or it's hard to keep them, you know, from being too rowdy or whatever during church. Matt Johnson (25:11): Yeah. No, the data tells us that if you're just streaming your exact service online, you're gonna have Nick Clason (25:18): It's an hour and 15 minute Matt Johnson (25:20): Service. Yeah. You're gonna have more drop off. Um, just cuz that attention span on an hour and 15 minutes on anything screen related, that's not an action movie drops off. So, um, yeah, if they, they probably will just tune into the sermon and that's okay. Or some just tune into the worship. That's my mom, she loves the worship and then she likes listening to the sermon, um, when she's driving to work the next day, which is, yeah, that's an okay option too, but you're giving them the avenue. So I get that. You're gonna struggle to focus during online. Um, that's gonna happen, especially if you have kids, uh, as you know, and I'm learning so Nick Clason (25:58): Well, I'll tell you what, what we would do during COVID is we would watch like older people church upstairs, and then we would send our kids to the basement to watch, uh, like their kid service. Well, their kid service was over in like 12 minutes Matt Johnson (26:13): Nick Clason (26:14): And so they come up at the end of worship. Yeah. And we're like, well, well, Hey, like go, Hey, let's watch, let's watch last week's again. And we, it was really hard, man. It was really hard. So it was hard to, it was hard to simulate church. Yep. Um, because it wasn't, I don't think it's meant to be that per se. No it's. And so I would, I would, as a, as a dad of kids under the age of five, I would agree with that stat wholeheartedly. Yep. Honestly, Easter 20, 20 Amanda and I watched church at like 10:30 PM when the kids are in bed. Matt Johnson (26:49): Yeah. Nick Clason (26:49): Like, because we are like, that's when we can in this, when we're unencumbered by them. Yeah. You know, Matt Johnson (26:54): So, and I think what we're landing on is like, it's okay to have these different avenues to consume the media. And also if you're like, Hey, I wanna, I wanna make our church service more, uh, more engaging for these people. Like then go solve that problem. Like go more power to you. Yeah, Nick Clason (27:15): Yeah, yeah, exactly. But to just overlay what you're doing in person on top of online, like that's, I don't know. I mean, dare I say it's a little lazy. Yeah. Like, and, and if you don't have the manpower for it, I get it. So we're not proposing that you reinvent the wheel, like crossroads in Cincinnati has a completely like custom hybrid online experience. Yep. And that's amazing. Right. I'll link I'll link theirs in the show notes too. I got somebody thinks to link in the show notes, but um, like the like yeah. So that's amazing, but they have the main power to do it. And you're probably again sitting here thinking like I barely have the main power to like do all the things I need to do. Um, and so we're not proposing that we're saying think, think about this as a side of the box, offer church streaming adjacent options. Not just only church streaming options. Exactly. Nick Clason (28:06): So, yeah. All right. A couple other real quick things. Um, this was interesting to me, I'll throw all these stats and stuff in the show notes, but so do you use the internet for faith purposes? So I'm just gonna read 'em and we'll kind of digest it. Practicing Christians set 66% of practicing. Christians said that they use the internet for faith purposes. 56% of church adults said that they use the internet for faith purposes. 36% of dropouts say that they use the internet for faith purposes, church, gen Z 67%, church millennials, 64% church, gen X, 58% church boomers, 42%. So I think a couple things that are interesting, obviously when you start with gen Z, it's the highest and it drops down as it gets to boomers. But one thing I notice is that even the gen Xers and the boomers still say almost 50% say that they use the internet for faith purposes. Mm-hmm . So if the argument is my church is old and this isn't for them, I, that categorically is untrue. Matt Johnson (29:08): Yep. Yeah, no, absolutely. And the only way to get younger is if you do it, so stats. I mean, that's what the stats are saying too. So if you're like, Hey, we wanna get younger, but we don't wanna, you know, kill our older, uh, congregation. Like they're gonna, they're all gonna be okay with it. Nick Clason (29:29): Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, a, a church boomer will read a recap email. Like they, they respond email. My grandma reads email. In fact, my grandma couldn't connect to the internet the other day and was convinced that someone was trying to hack her bank account. And so I had to, I had to turn her wifi off and turn it back on and get her connected. And she thought that I am the number one, it director in the world. Matt Johnson (29:55): my grandpa, my grandpa, all the D coffee. TV's not working. Can you fix me? Like, did you unplug it? You're genius. Nick Clason (30:07): Yeah, but they'll read it. They'll read the emails, man. She, and dude, I was at my grandma's and she's like, can you help me unsubscribe from some emails? And I'm like, sure. So I'm like getting her set up with an UNS subscription service. And I was like, how about JC Penn? She's like, no, I like that one. . How about, how about your green bay Packers newsletter. Now I need to know what's going on. Withs green bay. Packer's newsletter. . How about this now? I, I need that gram. You don't actually wanna be in subscribe Matt Johnson (30:30): For anything Nope. Oh, that's fine. Nick Clason (30:34): All right. A couple another one that was interesting after C will church gatherings fit your life church, gen Z 37% said that both digital and physical would fit their lifestyle. 13% say that primary digital would fit their lifestyle. And 41% say physical will fit their lifestyle. So this is church gen Z. So I think one thing that stood out to me about this statistic, cuz that only 13% said that primarily primarily digital would be, uh, their preference for, uh, attending church post COVID mm-hmm . And so right. We continue to say gen Z, gen Z. And we, we are kind of pegging a lot of this on them and them as the future, but they still want in person, they're not looking for only digital. Exactly. We're looking for hybrid, which is what we're trying to find that, that sticky in between, between the two things. Nick Clason (31:29): Exactly. So, and same with millennials. Millennials are, uh, I think slightly higher, uh, 40% say that both online in person, 13% say primarily digital, which is the same as gen Z and then 42% say primarily physical. So they're right on the same track there as, as gen Zers. But they're saying that, um, basically the both that's hybrid man. Yep. Like that's what we're trying to say. Yep. They wanna come in person, but they also want to have access to it when they can't make it or for whatever reason, they're not able to be at church. They want to consume something online. Yep. So, so that's, that's it any other like kind of lasting thoughts that you had just through some of these statistics, like we'll, we'll link to the Barna, uh, ebook and so you can grab a copy of it yourself, but there are, uh, there's just a, there's a lot of really good and really interesting stuff in there. So any other thing that you are like, did you miss this? You should have highlighted this or just, or parting thoughts based on some of this data? Matt Johnson (32:30): No, I, I mean my biggest parting thought is like the, the data staying that hybrid is an avenue that we need to be exploring. So continue, um, exploring this avenue , I mean, don't, don't get discouraged, the data supports it. Nick Clason (32:45): Yeah. And get, and, and, you know, getting into hybrid, um, and getting into some of those digital platforms. Like it can be, it can be laborious and it can be cumbersome and setting up your account and then setting up your group and then setting up your payments, like all that stuff. Like, and it can get confusing because all those companies are trying to sell you things. Yeah. And they're all the best company and that's at least what they're telling you. And so you gotta, you gotta kind of slug slug through some of those things, like setting up email marketing, you know, uh, things or setting up, you know, CHMS things or just, it it's worth it, you know, but it can get, it can feel overwhelming at times. Yep. So stick with it. It's worth it. Find something that works. There's a lot of, um, free or light versions out there. Nick Clason (33:35): And probably for most of us that that will suffice at least for a while. Yeah. Until it gets to a spot where it needs to be, you know, super, super, uh, hefty as far as the payment is so sweet. Hey, uh, that's it for us on episode five? Um, maybe six. I actually can't really remember because, um, I think this was supposed to be episode five, but then I did one last week by myself. Yep. And so this may actually be episode six. I think it is, but yeah. Glad to have you guys, uh, subscribe, uh, follow us on Twitter at hybrid ministry. Also check out our website hybrid ministry.xyz. Uh, give us a rating. Pull open your purple podcast app search hybrid ministry. We're right there. We're number one. If you search that word and give us a little rating, that'd be awesome. I love it. And until next time see you guys later. Thanks guys. Was Matt Johnson (34:28): That just had some nasty bug on.

Hey gang! So Covid's gotten both of us so we're just going to take a break. Hope to return Aug 9th. See you guys later.

Kia Ora! So Covid sucks huh? But at least I learnt a new skill: Miniature Painting! Also we're back with more Tales of Equestria as we finally leave the Twisting Tunnels and head into the Dragons Horde. Thanks to my Gems listening out there: James, Jason, Barry, Lieran, Ezequiel, KP, Joey, Dusty, Karl and BJ. Become a Gem by visiting https://www.patreon.com/jewelsfromnz Extra thanks to my call ins from Joey of Hindsightless, Karl of GMologist Presents, Pink Phantom, and Jason of Nerds RPG Variety Cast Find me under @JulzfromNZ on Instagram, Facebook and @julzburgisser on Twitter as well! Aroha nui. Ka kite anō. Xx --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/jewelsfromnz/message

So Covid came back to hang out with me for a bit. This time around was definitely more harsh than the first, let me tell ya. Take a listen to how it began this time and if you have any, get in touch with me on Instagram/ Snapchat and tell me about your covid stories. @cortezeveryday Lastly, listener support is finally active. If you've found this show to be helpful and or entertaining consider supporting the show with a monthly donation at https://anchor.fm/theeverydayma/support --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/theeverydayma/support

Everything You Need to Know About Long-Haul COVID and other Latent Infections  with Dr. Marie Matheson Dr. Marie is a Naturopathic Doctor and co-founder of BioHeal Ottawa. One can say that she is a health detective for chronic illnesses and diseases. In this episode, we discuss the dangers of long-haul COVID and other latent infections, and how they can be treated effectively through naturopathic treatments.   Dr. Marie dives deep into the chronic illnesses and diseases that can transpire after having COVID. There are many things one can do in order to reverse and prevent this from happening. These viruses can be detrimental to our immune system, so much so that they can wake up a certain illness one has had years, even decades before. We also discuss the controversial topic of the COVID vaccine and its effectiveness in long-haul COVID.   Overall, Dr. Marie makes it clear that it is immensely important to inform ourselves of studies and cases in order to make responsible decisions for ourselves and our children. No one is safe from these infectious diseases so we take the necessary steps in order to prevent or eradicate these viruses as timely and effectively as we can. In Dr. Marie's experience dealing with over 800 patients with long-haul COVID, naturopathic medicine and treatments are the way to go! KEY TAKEAWAYS:  [9:12] How Marie became involved in the world of infectious disease and chronic illnesses [10:21] How many patients Marie has treated for long-haul COVID [11:02] What long-haul COVID actually is [18:47] Latent viral infections can transpire after SARS-COV-2 [22:53] Long-haul patients were getting recommended to stay at home and get better but that was not happening [24:44] Patients who are immune-compromised benefit greatly from naturopathic treatments [33:52] Correlation between Lyme disease and COVID [35:49] What is a biofilm [39:29] Are vaccinated patients protected from long-haul COVID [44:15] What other strategic things to be mindful of to prevent long-haul COVID or other infectious diseases WHERE TO FIND MARIE:  Bioheal Website & Free Guide: the 5 mistakes that increase your risk of Lyme disease BioHeal's 14-Day Science-Based Detox - use coupon code VIP50 for 50% off   MEMORABLE QUOTES: “I used my roots, my rooted roots of naturopathic medicine, and treated the individual and not the disease.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “At this point, I have already treated 800 patients, so that's quite a bit.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson  “Long-haul COVID is persistent symptoms, so to speak, long after these “infections” should have passed. And so these patients persist on with chronic symptoms. The number one chronic symptom would be chronic fatigue.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “Something you had in 1983 could come back and haunt you . So COVID really does cause such an immune dysregulation that it does kick open the doors for these latent viruses that could bring up symptoms that I haven't had in 20 years.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “Most patients, they were just told that there was nothing to do to help them, and that they should just go home and rest and they'll eventually get better. That has not been the case.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “30% of patients who have gotten COVID end up getting long-haul COVID as well.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “This is a push to my profession but I really urge all you to seek out a naturopathic doctor to help you if you are sick because there is hope to get you better.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “Could it be that SARS-COV-2 actually gets untreated and then goes into a second phase of this long-haul COVID, of this untreated virus, just like lyme disease?” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “It affects every one of us. So whether you're vaccinated or unvaccinated, we see these breakthroughs, if you will, infections of SARS-COV-2 in patients that have been vaccinated and you see just as much long-haul COVID in unvaccinated.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson   “I'm not convinced that the vaccine can protect you against long-haul; we just don't have enough research.” ~Dr. Marie Matheson

Sarah Lyndsay is a Self-Portrait & Landscape Photographer based in the beautiful Canadian Rockies. She specialises in ethereal self-portrait work, putting herself in the landscapes she photographs no matter the season or weather. Rain or shine, she will walk out in that lake in a flowing gown. She is widely known for her breathtaking long exposure work and her signature yellow dress.    Link to images mentioned on the podcast - https://www.sarahlyndsayphotography.com/Portfolio-/Self-portraits/   If you want to learn more about Sarah's work, you can find it here:   • Website - www.sarahlyndsayphotography.com • Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC73iAchNebceqyF3I0qskiA • Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sarahlyndsayphotography/ • Twitter - https://twitter.com/sarahlyndsay_ • NFTs - https://opensea.io/sarahlyndsay   Other ways to listen and subscribe to the podcast: • Spotify - http://bit.ly/twhspotify   • Apple Podcast - https://bit.ly/Theartofphotography   • Google Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheArtOfPhotographyWithStanleyAr   • Website: https://podcast.thewickedhunt.com      • Tune In (Alexa) - https://bit.ly/TuneInTheArtOfPhotographyPodcastWithStanleyAr     For those of you who want to learn more about The Wicked Hunt Photography by Stanley Aryanto: • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewickedhunt/      • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewickedhunt/ • Masterclass: https://www.TheWickedHuntPhotography.com      • Photo print: https://www.TheWickedHunt.com/    Don't forget to leave a review on the podcast if you enjoy this conversation. It would help us to get found and help to inspire other photographers.  ----------------------------- Transcription: Sarah Lyndsay  0:00   So when you hit that rock bottom moment, I think you, it doesn't matter if it's with your career or your relationships or whatever, you're at rock bottom, and you're at this place where you just feel like you have no one, you're completely alone. And you're just faced with yourself, like you're faced with all those inner demons that you have. And we all have them. And I feel like this is the defining moment of where people either blossom into this amazing person or they go down even further and they go down the wrong path. And I think when you're when you're at the rock bottom, you have to make like a choice there. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  0:40   Hey, weekenders Welcome back to The Art of Photography podcast, where we talk to other photographers and share their journey and how photography have given them hope, purpose and happiness. And today, we have somebody from the Canadian Rockies, someone who's really good at taking self portrait. Sarah, how are you doing, sir? Sarah Lyndsay  1:00   I'm good. How are you? Thank you for having me come and do this. I'm really excited to be here. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  1:06   Very excited to have you. And I've been following your work, you know, ever since I got into the NFT world, and it's it's incredible that you know, your your, your art is just great. And I love the commitment that you put in to get those self portraits. Yeah, I'm so glad to have you here. Now, before we get started, can you give us a short introduction of who Sarah is? Sarah Lyndsay  1:29   Okay, yes, I can do that. So in this current moment, this year, we will say, I am a self portrait and landscape photographer. I've been a photographer for 12 years. But the self portrait part has definitely just been in the last few years. And I do pretty much photography, or at least I have done it. All right now what I'm doing for work is I do photo tours and FTS YouTube, that's a big one as well. And just focusing on those with my photography and just trying to grow it and working at it every single day. And that's pretty much me in a nutshell. And how Wait, how could I forget this? You may see me around in a yellow dress. Yes, pretty important part. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  2:13   You call yourself the bananas? It's It's hilarious. It's great. Sarah Lyndsay  2:19   That started in the NFT space. That's where that came from. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  2:23   So how did that come about? What's why the bananas? I'm not Sarah Lyndsay  2:27   sure I just everybody was talking about you. I think you know like what the apes the board apes because the banana was a thing with them as well. And I just saw everybody talking about a banana. And I was like, Well, I can I am a banana on all the time. And then it just took off from there. So now everyone pretty much refers to me as the banana. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  2:46   That's hilarious. Yeah, it's really funny when it when they come out. And it's just so funny. And so what, what makes you what makes you love photography? Why are you doing? You've been doing this for 12 years, you say, right, yes. And you're still here. And you know, you've done a lot of different stuff. And I know you know, like doing YouTube and you know, getting all this thing happening is not easy. So what makes you what makes you fall in love with photography and what makes you stay as a photographer? Sarah Lyndsay  3:17   That's a good question. Okay, so Paul, I have like it's the same answer to both of those questions why I love it is that I was just actually out shooting the other evening and it was a really great reminder of why I love it. Just when I was done shooting the feeling that I had of just creating something was so good. And like I noticed when I was shooting and I was so you know invested in my camera and the process of creating the image I was thinking about nothing but that moment and creating and that's why I love it and that's why I keep doing it because it's a when you're doing it you're out there in the field creating things you're in a mindful space that no problems can enter no people can enter it's just the camera and you and you're focused on something that is that that's why that's why I love it that's why I'm gonna continue doing it. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  4:07   It's as simple as that a like yes what did they call it the whole meditation of being a photographer being there with the nature so do you get this feeling when you like do a different type of photography as well because you say like you have done few different genres as well. Does does that give you the same feeling or is is the the landscape and self portrait are the one that gives you the most and that's why you're doing it Sarah Lyndsay  4:31   that's a tough question to answer I'm because okay, I've have photographed everything like I have worked in all of the genres. I think just creating no matter what gives me that feeling like it honestly doesn't matter if it's a landscape or if I was shooting weddings, well wedding is a lot more work so but when I'm creating images for them, I'm pretty excited about it. I think it can can be anything and I'll feel pretty happy creating it but I just gravitate towards like landscape with the self portraits because that feels like that's my heart. You And a best represents, like who I am and what I want to build. But yeah, I could probably be shooting anything and have a good time. It's just the creation, like the whole process of creating something is what keeps me there. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  5:12   That's awesome. That's fantastic. Yeah, I think, I don't know many people that can say the same thing, you know, enjoying the whole genre, but it's good that you're enjoying the whole thing. And I, you know, I, myself have tried a whole bunch of different things. And I don't think I could say I enjoy everything. So that's good on you. Sarah Lyndsay  5:32   Whatever I'm photographing, like I used, I do it in my style. So like, just thinking back, I used to photograph family shoots. And I remember just I loved like, I mean, there's the whole point of customer service. That's not always the fun part. But like, even just bringing back their images to edit and creating something really special. I just loved it. I loved being absorbed in that. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  5:53   That's awesome. And so do you have like, a certain moment that you can pinpoint that makes you like that, that reminds you of how you started photography in the first place? Like, what was that one moment that make you pick up a camera? Like, for me, the first thing that made me follow my passion was when I went to Europe. And you know, it was a five weeks trip. And you know, it was a great trip. But I was so disappointed when I came back, you know, with my photos. So do you have a moment like that, that makes you say, You know what, this thing is awesome. And I want to do more of Sarah Lyndsay  6:29   it. Yes. So this goes back to when I started photography, like when it all began the whole journey. It's kind of funny because it's backwards. Like I didn't pick up a camera first. I actually found Photoshop first, which not many people do. I know. Oh, so I was on a this was such a long time ago, I think I was 22 or 23. And I was on a date. And I remember we were just sitting on his couch. We were having some drinks, just hanging out listening to music. And he brought out a quote, he brought up Photoshop. So he was a photographer. But just like a hobbyist photographer, not he didn't do it professionally, but he liked to make album covers so he would go and photograph like Barnes and I don't know just anything and then he would come into Photoshop and you know, layer it and put textures on. And I just loved watching this process of him creating something so I asked him I was like, Oh, could you help me get this programme from my computer? So I got Photoshop, I didn't have a plan to be a photographer. I just wanted to play around like I'm a little bit computer nerdy. So yeah, I got Photoshop. And then I was like, Well, what am I going to do from here? I need to, I need something to work on. So I found my parents like old vacation point and shoot in the cupboard. And I was like, okay, and I just went outside and I started taking photos of things like everything, even jewellery, I would photographic jewellery. I love to like, I love playing around with depth of field, I first picked up the camera Anyways, that was Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  7:52   on f 2.8. I would Sarah Lyndsay  7:56   I can't remember what the point and shoot like what it would go down to or what Yeah, I don't know. But I just I just remembered I picked up the camera. And again, it was that feeling of I'm creating something, because I think like my backstory, and I was coming out with something that was quite, I guess traumatic in a way. And then when you latch on to something, when you're feeling so alone, it's like, the camera gave me purpose again. And I will forever like I am forever grateful for that moment, because it breathes like life back into me and then put me on this path that and now I'm here. Like, it's amazing. The whole journey is really, really incredible. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  8:35   That's incredible. And, you know, I think, you know, not only me, but a lot of other photographer are the same thing, right? Photography have kind of something that, you know, for the public, like, basically help them to give them a new purpose, a new direction in life. And it looks like I get you know, we see the same thing and you and what was what was that like, like, you know, like, you know, from your, you know, the experience that you said it was difficult, and then you know, moving through and then being where you are today. I know that like, you know, the transition, especially it's never easy. So would you be able to share a little bit about that and maybe, perhaps give some inspiration to our listeners? Sarah Lyndsay  9:17   Yeah, so I mean, I come from because this is pretty, like a pretty big part of my story. And I do share it quite a bit. So I come from, like a family of abuse there was it just wasn't a childhood to grow up in and like I'm in I'm in a lot of therapy now, which is amazing. It really, really helps me. But I what I've learned is that, you know, if you're not coming from a stable home, you don't really know what to do you you don't know what path to go on. It really really messes with you. And I guess I just didn't I didn't ever know who I was and I was so like, I was into relationships way too early on in life, you know, way too invested with men and it just wasn't good. So I didn't I didn't Know Who Sarah was. So when that moment when I picked up like the camera and I just kept doing it, honestly, it was like, it was just this moment of okay, this is me, this is who I am. This is Sarah and then it like the camera alongside of my own growth, like it plays a really big part in who I am today. It's it's wild to see that and because of the because of my past, I just, I don't know, I feel like I latched on to photography, because it was finally something that was mine. No one else is not my parents, not my not a boyfriend. It was just me and the camera. And yeah, it's an amazing feeling. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  10:39   That is such a inspiring story. You know, like, I think it a lot of people don't know where you know who they are, and where to go. And you know, you're coming from a past that's quite difficult like yours. It's just incredible that how you're able to turn that around. So, you know, made massive congratulations to you. And you know, massive kudos to you for making that happen. That is very inspiring. So if I were to just, you know, hypothetically, if you can no longer touch a camera, how would life be? Sarah Lyndsay  11:14   Oh, man, obviously, that could become a reality for anybody. Really? I mean, I'd accept it, it would definitely suck. But I would I would have to obviously change career paths, which I probably don't what I would already want to do. It would really suck. I just, I feel like I could handle it for a little bit. But I feel like I would start really missing it. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  11:35   That's yeah, it's fun. You're on? Yeah, how the camera something that is so simple that basically capture lights and shapes can can really change your life and can really give us new identity. Newhall? Yes. Yeah. So I am so glad that you share that. You know, I think that, that that is someone that, you know, that is something that people kind of maybe aware, but not exactly latch on to. So one of the things that I find most people, most people kind of never follow through with photography, right? Is because they kind of buy a camera, they start taking a photo with their phone, he's like, this is awesome. And then they're like, they buy a camera. And and after a while, it's like, you know what, this is too hard. It's not working out, you know, I can't I'm not good enough. I can take photos like all these great people do. And looks like you have pushed through that, that, that time or stage and get to where you are right now, which is you know, incredible. You know, 12 years of being a photographer is just absolutely incredible. And there's so much commitment to it. So what are Do you ever go through some struggles? While you you know, like, while you're learning and you know, carving your path into this photography world? And how, how do you keep track of it like, so how do you stay on track and keep going to where you are today? Sarah Lyndsay  13:02   Yes, I definitely go through struggles, I go through struggles with how much obviously things change like it. It's kind of like you learn you learn social media, you learn how to operate the camera, you learn how to create art, you learn all these things, and then you're kind of like, okay, yeah, I'm set. I'm good. Now you, you just want to keep doing that. But it just seems like that. There's always something new, there's always a new thing to learn. And I find that that I really struggle with that because I since I've been a photographer for 12 years, you can get really stuck in your ways that you shoot, like I, I still shoot the same way that I did say, five, six years ago. So I often feel like I'm behind the times. And actually a lot with editing, I feel like I'm behind the times because I like to stay with the way that I do it. But I think that can be bad. If you don't evolve, I really, really do. So I struggle with that. Just like I want to stay on my one path of how I know how to do things. Yet I know it's important to keep learning and evolving and change with the times and new cameras coming out. That's what I struggle with. And I do I just I mean, you have to look at it almost like work, right? Well, it is work for me. But you, you, you got to show up even when it's not fun even when you don't want to learn those things. And then I think honestly, I think that's where a lot of photographers start to fall off the waggon of like turning it into a career because they don't understand it's a lot of hard work to do this and not just one time hard work every day hard work and constantly learning. That's my struggle, but I just know mentally, like you just have to show up and you have to push yourself to learn and keep evolving. You really really do. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  14:37   That is such a great advice you know, I think it's it's funny that a lot of the things that kind of happen in whether in our head or you know, it's usually doesn't it's not going to happen in real life right and it looks like you have guarded your mind and your mindset really well and just push through with whatever you know. You no doubt struggle was with a change of platform change of technology and everything. My question is, how do you do that? Like, what do you do? You know, because because the mind is very powerful, right? When you believe you can, and you can, and when you believe you cannot, then you cannot, it's as simple as that. But what do you do to guard that, to have that positive outlook to keep pushing through even the hardest time to you know, all these changes and so forth? Sarah Lyndsay  15:29   So well? Since this is a tough question to answer, because I do photography as a career, so I know that and like, I know, a lot of hobbyists, you know, listen in on a lot of these things, and, and people that do it as a career, so I'm doing this for a living. And it's not just like, it's not just my passion. So I think this is important. So I did started as a hobby, I did not, I did not jump into photography as a career until like, probably eight years in. So for a long, long, it was simply because I lacked calm, I obviously lacked confidence, and just the knowledge of how to run a business. Those are the two main things that hold people back. So eventually, it got to the point because I was just working as a server, well, I was hobbyist photographer. And you know, I, as I get older, you know, you got to the point where it's like, okay, I need to do something with career wise with my life. So it's either I turn this photography obsession into a career, or I go off and go to school, and I actually have this crossroads, I almost went almost quit photography, and almost became a police officer. And it was because I was doubting that, like photography would pay the bills, basically. So I know many people end up in this position. So I mean, you know, at that time, when I was at that crossroads, I was making some income from photography, but it wasn't like I, you know, wouldn't sustain me for the year. So I just kept plugging away at it. And obviously, I noticed, like, I didn't go off and do these other jobs, you know, I kept going out and taking photos, and it was around 2017 2018 2019. Slowly, the business just kept, like evolving for me by word of mouth, because obviously, I got better. So it started to look like okay, I could really do this. But I can, I was so afraid to honestly take that plunge. And this is the important part of the story. Because I really was afraid I needed like a major catalyst in my life to push me to go full time into photography. So COVID was obviously one of those things, even though COVID took away all the work in the first place. It's kind of weird, it took everything away, but pushed me to go at it full time, if that makes sense. Because it it just took away everything. And I also went through a divorce at the same time. So I had these, these two major things happen in my life. And if you like those things change you. And I do a lot of like, why I wasn't doing photography as a career, and actually why I got divorce was was because of me. So I had to become very self aware. And I did that and I became like mentally strong with a different mindset by I put myself in therapy, and I knew I just needed to learn and keep learning and learning and learning and learning. That's how I changed my mindset. Honestly, if it wasn't for those two major moments in my life, I probably wouldn't have like this strong of a mindset because it all changed the way I see photography. And I, I now am at this point where like anybody is capable of doing this. Anybody is but like you have to understand what is involved to do it. And like, you really got to humble yourself to eat. If you take pretty pictures, that simply is just not enough. And your mind needs to understand that. And if you can get to that point, and you are patient, you can you can do anything. Honestly, anything with photography. There's my answer. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  18:50   Inspiring. Yeah, that's that's crazy, right? Like, sometimes we need that push right in life, to to put us at rock bottom so that we can Yeah, we have a good foundation to blast off. That's that's what I usually say. Right? And so how did you I mean, you kind of, you know, scraped through that whole experience. But what is it? That makes a big difference when you turn that around? Because, you know, when when people go through that kind of thing? I think most people would get discouraged instead of encourage. Sarah Lyndsay  19:20   Wait, you have to ask that again because it froze. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  19:23   Ah, sorry. So when when people go through that kind of experience when it's going through a difficult experience, many people would get discouraged, not encouraged, right. But you turn this really tough time into something that you can strive in your life and actually doing something that you are passionate about that you love, you know as as your main way of living as your lifestyle. So how does that mindset shift change and what is it that makes a big difference? What is it that make you encourage instead of discourage? Sarah Lyndsay  19:58   I love this question. Okay, so when you hit that rock bottom moment, I think you, it doesn't matter if it's with your career or your relationships or whatever, you're at rock bottom, and you're at this place where you just feel like you have no one, you're completely alone. And you're just faced with yourself, like you're faced with all those inner demons that you have. And we all have them. And I feel like this is the defining moment of where people either blossom into this amazing person, or they go down even further, and they go down the wrong path. And I think when you're, when you're at the rock bottom, you have to make, like a choice there. So how I saw it was it was like, okay, my career wasn't really taking off, I'll be like, my marriage failed, everything just seemed like it was failing. And I'm a big believer in being self aware, and that we actually create a lot of our own homes no matter what it is. So I just thought to myself, I was like, All right, I can keep doing what I was doing before. Because that clearly drove me to the bottom like it did, all of the steps that I was doing did not help me at all. Or I could take a step back, and try to properly learn how to do this and do the right steps and start listening to people who know a lot more than I do. And really, really, like, follow those proper mentors and those healthy people. And that's what I decided to do, because I felt like I had no choice. It was either it's gonna get worse, or you can turn this around and start doing things differently. And it'll get better, and it got better. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  21:27   That is great. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the biggest thing that I got from Loyola, your answer is they're like, if you, regardless where you are in your your life, or your struggle, you never really lose that belief in yourself, you know, you decided to go back and build, you know, build, build it over again, start over again. And that's, that's amazing. You know, I'm, I'm so inspired just by listening to this. Sarah Lyndsay  21:52   We're all capable. Totally in the mind, and it but like, the thing is, is it took these really hard moments to get there's eight like, flips a switch almost. So I'm grateful, not well, not grateful for the bad things, but I wouldn't be who I am without them. Surely, yeah. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  22:11   Yeah. For now, for sure. You know, the hard times is the things that define who we are today. Right? So that's yeah, that is such a great answer. So thanks for sharing that. And what, so for people out there, you say that like, anyone want to pursue this full time, or you know, want to pursue this passion and make it your lifestyle, you can do it. But you also mentioned that, you just need to make sure that you have you understand that it's not a path to heaven, or so they're like, there, it's not gonna be as smooth sailing. So it goes through your experience as a professional photographer, and some of the things that some of the challenges that you came across, and how can people learn from this journey so that if they do decide to pursue their passion full time, they it kind of, you know, it makes things easier for them? What, what would that be that you would share to these people? Sarah Lyndsay  23:11   Well, I think I'll start off with like, the struggles. So we're talking we're debt, we're talking about it like as a professional career at this at this point, right. Okay. So the struggles are, okay, you definitely have to recognise the struggles first, because it helps it helps understand, Okay, well, this is hard. Why is it hard? So it's not really the being a professional photographer. It's not like, you don't really go to school for this, you don't, there's not really like a road map laid out. And a lot of other photographers are very, very private, and you can hire mentors, you can do mentoring sessions. But there's not really like this laid out step by step plan for photographers, and most people will always kind of drill it in your mind. Career, like a lot of people look at it, and it's like, oh, okay, that's not, you know, photography is I have a fancy camera, I can just do it, right. Like, there's this, this whole stigma around it, that it's very challenging to do as a career, which it is not gonna lie, but I think the reason why it's so challenging is because you are a business owner. Like there's no really other way to do photography as a career other than running your own photography show. I'm sure you could get some jobs in big cities with other people, but you're running a business and not everybody is a business owner. So there's all these skills that you have to learn and you don't really have anywhere to look other than YouTube or trying to read about it online. So you feel you don't really have like that support. It's not like you're going to university, you have all your classmates with you you have a teacher that is kind of accountable for you, right it's it's just different. So your end because you're alone. Like there's just no one to turn to. So those those are the struggles and I find it with photography and doing photography as a career. It's very like you have to mentally understand what it's it's the mindset like you just have to be aware of these things. But know that there still is a way forward. And if you can keep pushing and keep learning and keep growing, and change your perspective about it, like you will succeed. So how I do this is, I mean, I constantly feel like I'm learning, always, always learning, but I look at it like, Okay, I've chosen this as a career. Let's say I chose to be a nurse, you know, that's for five years of university. Why is my photography, learning and my photography, career business growing any different, you know, give myself a few years to do it, right. And you kind of have to like it just as if you're deciding to go to school to be a nurse, you know, you have to figure out your your finances to be able to go back to school, right? Your you got to sort out your living situation, look at photography the exact same way, and just be patient and give yourself that time to actually properly grow a business. Most business owners fail in the first year. They do. And that's okay, though. Because how do you learn you learn from every mistake that you make? So those were the struggles, but with the right mindset, it's totally doable. Anything is doable? It all is. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  26:09   I love how you say that. Because I have I gone through this phase, exactly the same thing where I thought by the first year, everything would just be right. And you know, I go the first year, and then the second year, and then I was like, Huh, you know, it hasn't happened the way I want it yet. And then I had exactly that exact thinking, like, you know, I was an engineer, and it took me four years to become an engineer. And I expect that this thing will happen in a year. Right. So that is such a great thing for you to say and mentioned. I think that really grounded us. Right? Yeah. Because like, so give Sarah Lyndsay  26:48   yourself time. That's all like, it's simple. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  26:51   And like, I get it, like, you know, like Instagram and stuff. Like, you know, some people are really made it overnight and stuff. Okay, you know that that's their path. And you know, for most case, there are a lot of things that kind of line up with that. And also, this, the reason why I made this podcast is that most people that look like it's an overnight success, actually, and put a lot of work behind it. And you just see that change. And you're like, Well, he was like this yesterday, and then he's like this today, but why they didn't see is this all these years and months and weeks of, you know, being depressed being struggle being having that. Yeah, yeah. So that's yeah, that's, that is such a great thing for you to share. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. So you, like you know, like, recently, the NFT world can come in, and you jump ahead in first and you just get in there and you know, put yourself in there. So tell me, what is it that make you make make NFT intrigued you that make you want to be part of the NFT community as well as the NFT movement in the web? 3.0. Sarah Lyndsay  28:02   I, this NFT thing has been such a wild ride, I definitely did not think I would be there, like here in the NFT space. Like last year, at the same time, I didn't even have a clue. So I'm think I'm like everybody else. All other photographers that were curious, you know, you just come in and start listening and see what's going on. And then by how it's like everybody's supporting each other and the community building, which is great and amazing. But I do think that there's a lot of negative stuff in the NFT space around this community around the community stuff. So yeah, I just kept listening and kept showing up every day. And then I was like, Okay, well try to start building something here and seeing like, where it can go. And I just kept I just noticed, I kept showing up every day. So obviously I had an interest in it. And then you know, you get to your first collection that you put out and then something happens there that's like oh yes, I can keep doing this. And then your your second collection and you keep going on and on and on. Now I'm about four months in and I would say I'm pretty invested into this NFT world and like how I see it now is like this is we are I truthfully believe we are on like the edge of that this change. And especially for like web three and all of that. I believe it's the future. And then I thought to myself, I was like, Okay, well what if it's not? And what if all this fails? If it fails, it's okay, because I can always go back and do something else, right? I can go to other one other income arm of photography and start investing in that and take this year of failure, whatever. It's not that big of a deal. But if I don't give it a shot, and let's say it does take off, right? If I invest in it and it just skyrockets while I'm here and I'm ready for it. So that's that's where I say that what the NFT space right now is I do believe it's the future. And if it's not going to be the future, I've accepted like I'm okay with that loss, and that I can fall back and go and do something else. Like I'm okay with the failure if it fails, but I don't believe it's going to fail. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  29:59   You Wow, that's, that's great. Thanks for the insights. And, you know, you mentioned there, there are a lot of positive and negative and, you know, having been in this space for quite some time, what are some of the positive things that you have seen from this NFT space and make you kind of think that this is a great way for artists to be recognised, to be able to sell their art, as well as to be, you know, to authenticate there are? Sarah Lyndsay  30:27   Well, it's so funny, I don't know if you are the same, but I will probably say a lot of photographers before, if they're in the energy space before they came in the NFT. Space, they likely didn't see their work as art. So there's that that's, that's definitely changed my perspective with photography is I now am like, Okay, this totally photography fits into the art world. I mean, photography is a medium of art. So it's changed my perspective on how I see my own photography, definitely. But there still is a difference between like wedding photography, and your fine art landscape prints there there is, so I don't really consider you know, going to shoot a wedding and delivering them 1100 image images aren't like what maybe it is, but in my mind, it isn't. So there's that it's definitely changed my perspective on how I view photography. And now I'm more so looking at like, an artist path because an artist path is actually a lot different than a photographer path. But photography is just the medium. So that's really important to note, if you do decide to come into the NFT space, like you're, you're turning yourself into like an artist basically. And then you're great, there's a different way to like build your brand as an artist. And it's been fascinating, the learning journey of the NFT space. And like what I noticed, like the positives again, so obviously the community building, how we do all want to succeed, and we do all want to support each other, it is very, very connecting. The only thing I will say with the community building and a little bit of the negative is that we're all still human. And we still have those other sides of human emotions, like jealousy and anger, like just because we're community building doesn't mean everything else goes away. And I don't like I think people you can't be naive when you come in there use it's not all sunshine and roses. It's like anything else in life. So that's, that's the negative that I don't think people really realise when they come in. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  32:25   Yeah, no, I think I think you're absolutely right. You know, people kind of see this, actually, you know, before I go through this, I would like to ask you, what are some of the negative thoughts that people you know, if you ever have people come across to you, and you know, say like, you know, like, what are you doing this? Like, you know, an SD is a scam or whatever it is? Do you have any objection? Or any doubts from people about NFT? And what are those negative thoughts that people think NFT is, it's not here to stay? Sarah Lyndsay  33:00   Well, I haven't like other than negative comments, I haven't come across like a negative conversation with someone, I've definitely seen some of their comments on like my Youtube, Instagram, or they'll send a message, like in response to a story I post about NFCs. Right now, I choose not to respond simply because a lot of it is about the environmental impacts that NF T's are causing, but I just look, I know that that subject is a lot bigger than what I know. So a that's why I don't engage in that conversation. And I think for the person, the people who are constantly complaining about the impacts it has, I don't even think that they have the knowledge to understand it right now. And let's just say if it you know, if it is bad, whatever, it's clearly being worked on, and it's evolving, like it's innovating, it's not always going to be this negative way that they think. So that and that's usually the thing they try to kind of counter you with is the negative impacts on the environment. I believe that if people are being negative about it, it's not it's not going to be for everybody, and that's okay. But if they are constantly being negative about it, it's simply it's because they're afraid they don't understand. And that's our reaction when we don't understand is to be negative. So if I know it's going to turn into a battle, honestly, I don't respond. And I just I just let it go. Because I also feel that like the NF T space is going to prove itself over time. Yeah, Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  34:24   absolutely. And, you know, I love that how you say that because it's funny, like people will come to me and say, you know, like, oh NFT world is this and that and this and that. And you know, and I would ask them, it's like, okay, you say all this, right? You know, where, where do you know this? Or there is this article and this article, and it's like, okay, well, do you own an NFT? It's like, no, do you know how they work? No, it's like okay, if you're not in it, then how do you know that it is all these bad things? Right? It's it's like it's like when you when you when you're running a business versus you're looking at business from the outside. We we could look at this Does that look like it's striving but it's it's struggling, you know, and about to go bankrupt. And it could be the other way around. It looks like it's struggling, but it's actually building a foundation and it's suddenly take off, right? Tesla was a good example where, you know, many, many hedge fund was betting against them because they think it's not the future. But Elon, just keep investing on on the on the company to build that foundation. And now it takes off like there's no tomorrow. So it's really funny when when I heard people have this negative comment, and one of the things that I would always say is like, well, you maybe try to be in it, immerse yourself in it, and then judge it, right? Read the whole book before you judge it by its cover. And with the environmental bed is, you know, everything every change, go through struggle, every change, there's always gonna be pain when you go when you go through change. So it's the same with electric cars, electric cars, you know, was disposable when there is any small changes or any small problems? They need to buy a whole new one? So? Yeah, I'm so glad that you share that. I think, you know, I'm a big advocate on the NFT. Yeah, just because I know, the potential that the technology has, right, because people think NFT is this like, way of selling, but it's actually a tool? And you know, the utility is just absolutely, we haven't even come across like 9% of it. Yeah, it's just like, just the tip, the very tip of the iceberg. So, and I'm a big advocate to help other artists to be able to use this medium, because I know it's so yeah, I'm glad that, that you share that and going back to your photography. What are some of your most memorable moments in photography? And and why? Like, you know, the photo that if there is one photo that you could pick, which one would it be, and you know why it is so memorable? Sarah Lyndsay  37:09   I want to say, Okay, well, this, this will probably change in about a year. But like looking back, the fondest memories that I had was actually right before COVID, shut down the world, I went to New Zealand, and at the time, I was dating this fella, and he's from Australia. So me and him went to New Zealand together for two weeks. And he is not a professional photographer. He's a hobbyist. And that's all we did the whole two weeks was photography, but for ourselves, and we just like toured around the South Island. And I remember just not even being on my phone. Nothing. We just toured New Zealand and took photos. Like, it does not get any better than that. But sadly after that, though, COVID obviously came with her as soon as I got back home to Canada, and he was in Australia. And we were separated for two years. Because of because of Australia, Australia is tough. And yeah, so it's like, I have so many fond memories of that trip, but also a little bit of sadness, too, because it was probably the last time like, I've ever fully felt content actually in my whole life. So yeah, fine, but sad memories at the same time. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  38:20   Oh, that's great. You know, like, I guess, you know, the big thing is like, you know, be thankful that it happened, right? Yes. Because it ends. So I'm glad that you had that experience, because I think it's really important. You know, what you say there earlier is that you create for yourself? And I think that's when we really happy as photography photographer, isn't it? So? Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's definitely something to learn there. Yeah, that's, that's awesome. And so, with, going back with, you know, like, now that you have your NFT you have all this means of you know, being a professional photographer. When it comes to, like, you know, life in general, right, like being photography and being everything that you're supposed to be in as a person, it's very difficult. How do you find that time? How do you find that, that balance that, you know, between spending time with your friends and families between going out shooting between hustling and grinding between you know, social media and so forth? What what are some of your advice to, to face that? Well, Sarah Lyndsay  39:34   I feel like when you run a business, you're obviously you have you have flexibility, which is good, like you can you can schedule all your own things in but I just feel like naturally I'm, I'm constantly always working on it. But if I want to go out with like my friends, or I want to go do something that is not photography related, which is actually very rare, like my life is photography, because even my friends are all photographers. I just schedule it in like I don't I honestly don't worry about it. But the thing with me and this is probably important to note is that I don't have kids. I don't have like, I'm not married. So I don't even have family around me. So I'm fully able right now at this stage of my life, to invest in photography. But if I want to go on a trip, or I want to, again, go out for dinner or something or go for coffee, I just do it. And that's kind of the the good thing about being a business owner is you don't have to ask for permission to have time off. Because it's like I and then I figure it out. Like it's getting to the point though, where I would say I probably can't just take off as much as I want, especially with the NFT space because of how important right now in these early stages we are in with the NF T space to brand build. So I've right now I've kind of made this choice, you know, to like, keep myself very grounded at home and not go off and do too many things, because I'm focusing on the brand building, but I know that that will lift and then I'll be able to incorporate more back into my life. I feel like for people who have kids, though, it's very tough. Like, it's you've definitely got to work on your balance and schedules and roof. Yeah. So I'm fortunate in a way that I'm alone, and I have all this opportunity to put into Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  41:14   it. It's funny how you say, you know, like the work never ends, because every time my friend asked me, it's like, so it was like How was your day you finish your work? So like, well, it kind of never ends. Sarah Lyndsay  41:25   It never ends. Like, there's always something that I always something to work on with your brand building. Yeah, it's either it's things that people don't really understand is work. Yeah, updating your website, your website always needs to kind of be like worked on. There's endless things, endless things, collections, videos, YouTube, like the I'm always working on something, I think it's really the one thing I'm bad at, because I'm a bit of a, I'm a scattered person, like, I'm just because of my upbringing, I feel like, I'm a little bit quirky, the kind of weird, I guess, I'm not very good at creating my own structure, I actually work much better under someone else. Well as in like, they will keep me on task. But if I'm given the brute like freedom to myself, it's hard to create a routine for yourself. So I'm actually also in therapy for business and to get help with all of this stuff as well, because it is challenging to grow. And I know I need a little bit of guidance. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  42:24   So that's great. You know, I'm glad that you say that, because I think many people are either not humble enough or don't have or don't think that, you know, asking for help is important. And it was an eye opener for me as well. Like, you know, like, I was like, I think I need to like learn this thing. And you know, I could learn it myself and go through, you know, all these years of trial and error. Or I could just go to someone who already know what they're doing and try to model them. Right. And of course, you have to, you know, fit it to your life and your, your business and everything. But at the end of the day, you have most of the answer there that you can, you know, try trial and error instead of trial and error during the trial and errors. Make sense? Sarah Lyndsay  43:07   Yes, yes, yes. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  43:10   That's amazing is there and, you know, we come to our mark, and it's been such a great conversation, you have dropped so many wisdom and advice it is and it's just been so inspiring to Italy to to learn your journey. And you know, how you turn a lot of that struggle into your strength. And that is that is something that most people doesn't do enough that usually if there is a struggle, there are strength that you could turn it into. So that's fantastic. So one of the things that I always ask my guests is that if there is one advice that you can give to, you know, either photographers or even just people in general that you know, might have come come across the journey that you are in today, what is that one advice that you would give them. Sarah Lyndsay  44:01   Honestly, give yourself a lot of patience, no matter what you're doing. If you want to be a photographer, you want to be anything else, give yourself patience to grow it and to show like show up for it every day. Even if it like even if you show up and put 30 minutes of work into it every day, it will still grow. Probably not going to grow as fast as someone putting eight hours a day in, but just showing up and doing something for you. Let's just say photography, your photography each day, it will grow and it will keep growing. And then also to give yourself that patience and have integrity. So if you're going to fall if you're going to do something, follow through with it. And that speaks volumes. actions always speak louder than words. So like yeah, that would be my voice patients and just show up. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  44:44   Fantastic. Well, Sarah, it's been a pleasure to have you here. You know, do you want to like let us know how can the listener you know, learn more about you or connect with you and get to know you better? Yes, Sarah Lyndsay  44:59   so All probably right now the best way to learn about me and get to know me as a person is my YouTube, which is Sarah Lindsay. Next would be Instagram. Again, that is Sarah Lindsey photography, I'm assuming we'll have links somewhere as well. Okay. And then Twitter if you want. I think this is important for in people wanting to get into the NFT space because I offer a lot of help there. So if you want to learn about NF TS or any of that stuff, come find me on Twitter with the same handle. And then of course, my website, I have my website, which is Sarah, Lindsey photography.com. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  45:33   Fantastic. I will include all that in, in the link on the description. So you could literally just go to the description and find those link. And don't forget to say hi, I see is such an amazing person as you already listened to. And just so grounded, so chill. Very approachable. So yeah, it's been such a pleasure, pleasure. Hopefully, I get a chance to go back to Canadian Rockies and spend money on COVID. Again, it's, it's fun, you know, because I was there for two and a half years and, and then I left. And I got into the NFT space. And I was like, man, there's so many ographers there and like, how come I never come across them. So it's it's funny how that works. Sarah Lyndsay  46:16   I just moved here. I just moved to the Rockies. So I'm past your time. But yes, there is. I do not care. I live here now. But I will say a lot of people do kind of stick within their own little groups. I noticed that. Yeah. But when Oh, well, that's okay. It's hard to meet people as an adult very hard. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  46:32   That's true, especially when everyone else in the mountain and the mountain is so bad. Sarah Lyndsay  46:36   Yes, yes. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  46:41   All right. Well, is there thank you very much for being here for sharing your journey for, you know, sharing all those wisdom with us. There's a lot of inspiration to be taken from that. Sarah Lyndsay  46:52   Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I always love chatting. Stanley Aryanto - The Wicked Hunt  46:56   While we get into this, thank you very much for tuning in. If you haven't already subscribed, do hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss out on the next chat we have. And don't forget to give Sarah a visit. Give her a shout out. You know, whatever you do, and check out her work per banana work. It's work. Yes. You know, with that being said, thank you very much for tuning in. And I'll catch you guys next week.

Why are some republicans advocating for all out war against Russia to “protect” Ukraine ?1:50 in with Tucker Carlson introduces RINO  rep Maria Salazar from the McConnel open borders wing of the republican party , he asked ‘ You called for war to Russia , How do you think that war would play out ? Why are we super quick to protect another countries border but not protect our own borders against the record surge of illegal immigrants in the last year HERE!?Why are even the conservative media parroting war mongering propaganda, is this apart of a greater context for a master agenda, perhaps a NWO ?So COVID is over and we still got a lot of unanswered questions about that , but know everyone has blue and yellow flags in there window we are unified , but do we know what we are supporting? Or we just advocating the I support the current thing “ narrative …cucktive Support the Show.

On this week's 51%, we finally get out of the house. We speak with travel agent Jean Gagnon about how to plan ahead this vacation season; cyclist and self-proclaimed “worldwide nomad” Rachel Yaseen discusses the drive behind her adventures; and Dr. Sharon Ufberg interviews Amanda Black, founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network. Guests: Jean Gagnon, president of Plaza Travel Center in Latham, New York; Rachel Yaseen; Amanda Black, founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It's produced by Jesse King. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is "Lolita" by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue. Follow Along You're listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women's issues and stories. Thanks for joining us, I'm Jesse King.  I have been sitting on this episode for a long time. I'm very much a homebody, but if there's one thing the coronavirus pandemic made me daydream of, it's travel - because, of course, COVID-19 pretty much stopped it. For the past two years or so, we've all been staying closer to home - for good reason, I might add - but now that states are relaxing their COVID-19 restrictions, and the omicron variant appears to be on a decline, more and more people are feeling optimistic about dusting off their suitcase. Overall, travel in the U.S. is bouncing back. So if you're looking for advice on your spring and summer vacations, some travel motivation, or just an excuse to daydream about the trips you would take if it weren't for COVID-19 - today, we've got you covered.  Jean Gagnon is a veteran vacation planner and president of Plaza Travel Center in Latham, New York. She says the pandemic decimated every corner of her industry, but slowly, the calls are coming in.  "We do a lot of international travel here, so we are very affected by the testing requirement that is still in place by the U.S. government, that you have to test [negative for COVID-19] 24 hours before you return to the U.S.,” Gagnon explains. “As soon as that gets pulled, which we're hoping will be fairly soon, then travel will really get blown out of the water.” When people are planning for their travels, what things should they be keeping in mind, still? OK, they still have to book really, really far in advance. That is the number one way to save money. People say, “Oh, I'll wait, because maybe the fares will go down.” Airfares don't go down. Once in a while a hotel offers a last-minute deal, but it's usually not any place that you get an airfare to. So you really, really should plan in advance. I will give you an idea: so you have not only the two year pent-up travel demand, but then you have the people who normally would have traveled this year. You know, you've got three years worth of people trying to travel. I had a family trying to go to Hawaii in July. Now you would think, “Oh, July, that's four months away,” but I could not find what they were looking for. People have to be flexible. They have to book far in advance. And they should try to plan to travel on the off times for their destination. So for example, Hawaii is a huge family destination, so July and August are very busy – fares are going to be up. You go in May, you're gonna save a lot of money, if you're flexible. Same thing with Europe: July and August, very, very expensive. Go in September or October, if you can, or again in May. The Caribbean actually goes down in the summer, because it's so hot. They're more popular in the winter, when it's cold here. So if you want to go to the Caribbean, go like in June or September – you'll still have beautiful weather, but you'll pay a lot less money. So if you want to try to save money and have less crowded areas, you want to travel when it's not the peak time. What's hot right now, where are people going? The National Parks are still very, very hot. People are trying to stay within the U.S., the majority of people, because they are concerned about doing the testing before they return to the U.S. So everywhere in the United States is very, very hot. Florida is always busy, and it's even busier this year. Hawaii is very, very big this year. I've seen more people book Hawaii this year than ever before, because it's still a very foreign-feeling place, and yet it's considered a domestic flight. The Caribbean is starting to come back, cruises are starting to come back, and Europe as well. It's funny, because people think trips or vacations are like, on a shelf, and I can just pick theirs off the shelf – all trips have to be built. Even if there's a package at the hotel, you have to build it with the flights. And if you go on a weekend, it might be more than during the middle of the week. So every trip, you have to sort of see what is out there. And also, people say, “Well, how much is an average hotel?” And it's like asking, “How much is an average car?” You know what I mean? I mean, do you want an old car, a little two-door economy? Or are you looking at a Mercedes Benz? So there's no cookie cutter thing. We have to talk to people to find out what they want to do, and how long do they have. If you only have four days, you're probably not going to go to Hawaii. If you have three weeks, that's enough time to go to Australia, New Zealand, or Africa. So your parameters guide us into what we would suggest for you. When you're doing the actual planning, what's the first thing you book is? Always air. First we need people to determine what dates they want to go, so we can book the air. Because of that, you really have to decide the itinerary first. So for example, if you're going to Europe, if you're going to Italy, are you going to fly into Rome and fly home from Venice? Which is a great itinerary. That's fine, but let's book those flights first. Then we fill it in with how many nights in each place, so we can book the hotels. Then once we have that booked, we book the transportation – are you going to take the train between the two of them, are you going to drive a car. And then the last thing that we fill in is usually like any kind of sightseeing. Like, if you're going to be in Rome, you want to get a reservation to see the Vatican. But we usually do that after the rest of the stuff is in place. What are the ways that you're seeing people traveling? What are the reasons they travel? That's a very interesting question. Um, I believe that different people travel for different reasons. Some people just want to get away from their everyday life. They want to relax. They want to lay on a beach. That's what they enjoy doing their vacation – they want to do almost as little as possible. There are other people that want to do a combination of activities. You know, I want to kayak, I want to hike, and I want to lay on the beach. So there's a certain destination that fits them. And then there are people – I, for one, just love to see new places. I love different food, I love seeing different cultures, I love the history. And for them, that's a different vacation. I mean, yes, you can go to Aruba, because there's sunshine 365 days of the year, but you're not going to see seven days' worth of culture and history. It's a small island. So someone like that might want to go to Europe, or they might want to go to South America. What I enjoy doing in the morning, which would be walking around a new city and going to the local market – somebody else might want to sleep in bed until 11, and then have a light lunch by the pool. So you really have to find out why that person is travelling, so you can determine what destination is best for them. My travel partner is probably the type of person who would want to lay in bed until like 11 o'clock or noon, and I'm the person who would want to get up and explore. If you're trying to travel with somebody, but also mitigate those differences, do you have any tips for that? Well, yeah, you have to then say, “Well, what is the most important?” Do you still want to travel together? Are you willing to compromise? If the case is yes, you want to go somewhere [where] you can get up, feel comfortable leaving the hotel by yourself, and going and doing something while the other person, you know, lays in bed. Which is fine. So if you went to Paris, you could get up in the morning, go get a croissant, walk around the small little villages, and then come back at 11 o'clock. I don't know if it's because I've traveled so much, or if it's just my nature, but I would probably tend to be more on the fearless side. Whereas I feel that people say, “Well, I heard that there's a lot of crime in London.” Well, yeah, but depending upon where you are, there can be a lot of crime in Albany. So you have to know where to go and where not to go. I think women traveling alone have to equip themselves with the knowledge of “What can I do? What shouldn't I do?” You know, walking around at three o'clock in the morning is not a good idea no matter where you are, if you're by yourself. Traveling in pairs and numbers is always good. During the day, though, it's usually not a problem, because people are living, people are working. Perceived danger is sometimes just that – it's a perception. You talked a little bit earlier about booking early to save money. Are there places that would match a smaller budget? Or do you have general tips to travel on a budget? Because a lot of us are broke. Well, the first thing if you're traveling on a budget is you do want to plan as far as possible ahead of time, OK? Because there are smaller hotels or Airbnb's that might be less expensive – but if they're good, and they're less expensive, they're going to be popular. People are going to know about them. Driving is always an alternative. And there are fabulous places just to go in our area for great vacations that you could drive to. There's a wonderful website, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with it – it's called “Only in New York,” and they have them in each state. There's an “Only in Massachusetts.” And you can go on there, and they talk about interesting things to do in your state. And a lot of them are free. State parks that you may have never heard of, a lot of state parks have cabins. So you could go to a state park on Cape Cod, and stay in a cabin on the beach for a ridiculously low price. But you may have to book it two years ahead of time, because it's going to be popular. Lastly, are there any underrated places that you think people should be going to see more? Portugal is an incredible small country. It's easy to get around, some of the cheapest prices you'll find anywhere in Europe. I mean, ridiculously low prices. Friendly, friendly people. Incredible history – Portugal, at one time, was a huge naval power. But I think Portugal is one of those places that is really, really underrated. I actually spoke with our next guest toward the end of last summer, during a pitstop on her massive cycling tour from New England to Chicago. Rachel Yaseen is many things: a posture alignment therapist, life coach, public speaker. But at 45-years-old, she gave just about all of it up to pursue her own adventure as a “worldwide nomad.” The 836 miles between her sister's home in Rhinebeck, New York, and Chicago, Illinois, seemed like quite an ambitious trek to me - but it's nothing compared to the 30,000-mile worldwide cycling tour she wrapped in Australia shortly before our conversation. Her journey may not be for everybody, but as she cycles from city to city, Yaseen says her goal is to encourage others to be their authentic selves and pursue their dreams — no matter what those dreams might be.  “I really wanted to share my stories and experiences and inspire other people to pursue their own adventures here in America,” says Yaseen. “And when I show up in communities on my fully-loaded bicycle, and I'm like, ‘Yeah, I just came from 70 miles away,' people can really get it into their heads. Like ‘Oh, that's how this is working.'” Let's go back to the beginning, and how you got started doing this. You've been going around the world for the past three years? What prompted the decision to do that? So I spent about 25 years of my adult life living in Tucson, Arizona, and I did a lot of different entrepreneurial things. But it came to a time where I felt like I just knew that I needed something else. You know, when I was in my early 20s, I really had these dreams about living nomadically and traveling the world. But I fell in love, and I married a man that didn't really have those dreams. And so I decided to go to Spain and walk the Camino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage in northern Spain. It's about five weeks, it's about 500 miles. While I was doing it, it was fantastic, and I really found out how strong I was. And then at the end, I had been walking with some people, and I was in the office where you get the certificate where it says, “Congratulations, you've completed this.” And the person that I was with wrote “traveler” as their profession. I don't know why, but you had to write your profession. And I was just totally, like, struck. And I actually started crying. Because I said, “I want to be a traveler.” That seemed very difficult. I had a family. And when I came back to America, it just seemed really clear to me that that life that I had dreamed about in my 20s was really what I needed to pursue, and that I couldn't really be the person that I was, when I was loving that other life. Quickly, when I got back to America, I just realized that I needed to make a big change. And, yeah, it was a transition. But at some point, I decided that I had to live. I had to be a different sort of mom than other moms. I had an eight year old. And I had to just show him – and myself – that you're the best person when you pursue what you're passionate about, even when it's not popular with the people around you. What was it like, having to make that decision? How did your friends and family react? It was horribly uncomfortable. You know, it was funny, because someone might think, “You're going to give away all your things and start living nomadically, how scary!” But that was easy. That was natural. That's what I feel like I was supposed to be doing all along. But yeah…I think to most people, I was living a model-perfect life, and to disrupt everything was very upsetting to family and friends. And especially for me, it wasn't clear what direction this was going. I didn't have a plan. That makes it even harder for people, and you kind of have to sit in that discomfort and be willing to be uncomfortable with yourself, knowing that, in my heart, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Has the response gotten better, over the past few years? Yeah, absolutely. While it isn't what any of my family members would choose for their own life, and sometimes I think that they wish that I would be normal, I do feel a lot of support from the people around me. Absolutely. That's good. So let's talk about some of the places you've been. Do you mostly bike, or do you hike? What's your preferred mode of traveling? So in the beginning, it was really unclear. I wasn't really sure what format that it was going to take. And so it took a little while to really start to realize that “OK, I would like to make this a cycling trip around the world.” It originally started with my new partner in Denmark, and I road to Croatia with him. And it was really like, “OK, this is interesting.” And we already had a ticket booked to Thailand. So that was like, “Alright, we'll officially start the trip in Thailand,” and then just started riding in Thailand. And I really wanted to set up challenges, because, for me, I feel like growth happens when you set up challenges for yourself – purposefully. Not all of a sudden, like, you get divorced, or a pandemic happens, or there's a tsunami, but where you really set up challenges for yourself and accomplish them – or maybe fail, and that's OK, too. I've done that. But I think you find out who you are, and you find out how strong you are. In the beginning, I said, “OK, we'll start in Thailand. Now I want to go to southern Myanmar.” And no one goes to southern Myanmar, because there's very few places you're allowed to stay, and you have to cycle great distances, and there's really no infrastructure for tourism. But I thought, “OK, this sounds interesting.” The three blog posts I read, none of the people were successful. So I thought, “Yeah, now I really want to try this.” And we did, and it was incredible. We made it. And then we continued cycling through Southern Thailand – you cut back into Thailand from Southern Myanmar – and then down through Malaysia, and Singapore, and then stopped at the different Indonesian islands. And then we got to Timor Leste and hoped to be able to get a sailboat to Australia, because the whole concept was to be human-powered, and not fly. But it was the middle of cyclone season, and it just wasn't possible. So we flew to Darwin, which is in the northern part of Australia. And then it was COVID, and we spent the last year and a half in Australia. Before we get to what it's like travelling in COVID, I thought I'd ask – how do you go about making these plans and decisions? Do you have a certain destination in mind, where it's like, “I know I'm gonna stay here.” Or is it more like, “OK, I'm gonna bike to this city, and then hope to find a place to stay.” So there's the larger scope, which is, “How is this gonna look over like the next six months?” And then there's like, “Where am I going to go tonight?” So typically, I'm really just looking at the map and identifying where there's places to stay. If I'm in the middle of nowhere, like in Australia, there might not be a choice – I'm loading a whole bunch of food and water on my bicycle, and I'm just wild camping. So when I'm done for the day, I'll literally pull off the road find a spot to camp in the middle of nowhere. There's no humans, there's kangaroos and some birds. If there's towns, then sometimes we'll stay in a hotel. If there's somewhere that we know it's like a school holiday, then sometimes I'll plan ahead. But not usually – I like the flexibility, because you don't know where you're going to end up each day. And I like not knowing. How much stuff do you have on your bike? How much are you bringing with you? These are such good questions. So the more you carry, the more you have to pull with you. And I am a minimalist, thank goodness, because it's heavy. I like to carry a couple different changes of clothes for cycling. Maybe like a little dress, and depending how cold it is, maybe some SmartWool top and bottom and some kind of like heavy coat. I've got a sleeping bag, my tent, a stove for cooking. Everything is super lightweight. You saw my bike, it's pretty minimally loaded. When I show up to places, people are usually surprised. How do you keep in shape for this? I did not necessarily prepare for this. It wasn't like I thought, “OK, I'm going to train for it.” I think the training happens while you're doing it. That said, it's a lot of repetitive motion all the time. I mean, we're all doing some kind of repetitive motion all the time, whether we're sitting around a bicycle, or even professional athletes are doing their motion. And so as a posture therapist, that is a big deal for me. I am constantly advocating for doing the posture exercises, and I do them every single morning. I take like 30 minutes to do them. So let's talk a little bit about what it was like traveling during COVID. How did that whole experience happen for you? Oh, it was super interesting because I got in to Australia literally within hours of it closing to foreigners. And so then I was locked down for three months in Cannes, Australia – which couldn't have been a better place to be locked down, it was absolutely beautiful. When we were released – and I say released because all of a sudden there was an announcement that we could leave – then we made sure that we didn't go to areas where there was COVID. So COVID was really isolated to the Melbourne and Sydney area, and we just skipped that whole area. So I cycled about 15,000 miles over the course of a year throughout Australia, but just skipped the COVID. Traveling was just about making sure that I was in the right area at the right time. OK, so you're going to Chicago now. Why? Really, the northeast all the way to Chicago is completely foreign to me. I'm much more comfortable in Europe and Asia and Australia than I am here, I was actually really intimidated by the ticks, and then I heard about the black bears. And so I'm really not as familiar with this area. And really, the whole reason that I'm doing this is to connect with as many people as possible. So as I'm cycling along, I'm giving talks and workshops. The talks are meant to inspire people to pursue their own adventures, because I believe that everyone has an adventure in them that's calling to them. Sometimes we don't do them because we're scared. We don't know that we can do it. We're scared that if we can do it, the people around us might not be supportive. We might not have the imagination to even like know what [it is] – we know there's something, but not exactly sure what it is. And sometimes we just don't want to disappoint people. It's very easy to come up with all kinds of things about why you can't do something. I noticed it for myself, I am constantly coming up with reasons why I can't do something. And the truth is that, until you come to a point in your life where you feel like you just need to do something, you're probably not going to challenge yourself. But when you do, and you start to really realize the reward of it, then it's nearly addicting, and it actually makes you such a stronger person, and you really get to know yourself so much better. And when you do that, you show up better for other people. One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is – you know your headphones, and how they get tangled up? And how you can't just like pull them, you have to carefully, like, undo them? For me, I think that's what moving through the world and cycling is. I think we get all tangled up, and moving and cycling is this slow way for me to untangle and to really see myself. As someone who has seen way more of the world than I have, what are some of your favorite places? You know, it's funny, because in Australia, people wanted to know where my favorite place in Australia was – because I think I saw more of Australia than most Australians see. So they're curious, like, where should they go? And my favorite was the middle of the Outback, where there was nobody. And the stars…It could almost bring me to tears. The stars are like, you can't even imagine it, because there's no light pollution. And the sunrise and the sunset, and just hearing the birds. The magic of just being out there is absolutely incredible. Our last guest today is the founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network, a community of more than 500,000 women travelers — or aspiring travelers — online. Members frequently share photos on Facebook from their adventures, solicit advice on everything from flight planning to homesickness, and occasionally connect on meetup tours organized by the network. Founder Amanda Black says it all started as a way to empower women and help them feel safer on their travels. She spoke with Dr. Sharon Ufberg, co-founder of the California-based personal development and wellness company, Borrowed Wisdom, for her 51% segment, “Force of Nature.” Dr. Ufberg: How did this group get started? Black: I had been traveling solo for many years, and as a woman alone in certain parts of the world, I found myself, once in a while, in a situation where I felt a little vulnerable. And I could have used some support from people like me. My last straw was when I was in Mexico, and I had just gotten there. And I went out for a beer and a taco around the corner – and while I was gone, for those few minutes, somebody had broken into my room and stolen everything. Literally everything except my dirty clothes, and thankfully, my passport. But I remember standing in the streets of Cancun, knowing no one, and thinking, “OK, what do I do now?” And I knew that there would be plenty of people around me who would be willing to help me out, but I didn't have a way to connect with them. So as soon as I got home, and as soon as I replaced my computer, I started a Facebook group. And it was meant originally for my travel friends and their travel friends to have a place to turn for everything in situations like this – for travel advice, for inspiration. And then a few years into having the group, we decided we wanted to travel together, and we started operating organized tours. Dr. Ufberg: I had that experience myself as a traveler, so I totally can relate to that. So this travel network has now been going on for about five years. What would you say you've learned about what women want from travel? Black: I started out really just trying to provide what I really want from travel, and what my most rewarding moments encompassed. That's first of all, community. It's difficult to make friends as an adult, no matter who you are – and especially when you're doing something a little bit off the beaten path, like traveling to different parts of the world by yourself. So being able to connect with women who understand you, and women who have maybe found themselves in similar situations, is our number one value. Second of all, we really believe in empowering women: empowering women to chase their dreams, to say yes to themselves, to discover who they are. And I believe that the best way to do that is through travel. And when you travel, it teaches you things like gratitude, and humility. Those are two things that I've really learned from travel and have changed me as a person. And so our travel experiences aim to give women the time and the space and the experiences to feel all of those things: empowered, grateful, humble and connected. Dr. Ufberg: Amanda, can you give us a story that might illustrate how your network has accomplished this goal of helping individual women within a community? Like you were so needing in that moment in Cancun not too long ago? Black: Yeah, so there are so many examples of this. If you get into our Facebook community, which is free for everyone, and just scroll, you'll see lots of examples. But one of my favorite, most powerful examples happened a few years ago. There was a woman who had met her partner, her boyfriend, somewhere in her travels. And she decided to go home with him. He lived in Turkey. So she went home with him. And she had been traveling with him for a little while – and he turned abusive. After a big blow up, she locked herself in the bathroom at his apartment, and she had her phone with her. And she had tried to call the police. He was banging on the door trying to get in. She felt really threatened. She had been trying to call the police, and they wouldn't come. So she posted in our community explaining what happened. And she got thousands of comments – so many that we had to shut it down. We were all overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and love and wanting to know if she was OK with what happened. But we had a handful of members who lived in Turkey, and even lived in the town that she was in. So ultimately, we had members from all over the world calling the police in Turkey – and most helpful, we had women who spoke the language calling the police. And once the police came, and they got her out safely, the women from our community were there to greet her and to help her on her journey back home. Dr. Ufberg: That is really fantastic. I would love to hear what's next for you, and how people can find you. Black: The best place to start if you want to join our community is to just find us on Facebook. We also have a free community off of Facebook that you can find on our website, which is sofetravel.com. Our team is working hard to create more destinations. We have a volunteer program that we're working on, currently, to supply some more direct help to these organizations that we visit on our tours. And we have some big picture projects around aiding the end of sex trafficking and gender violence – we're currently looking for a perfect fit and a partner for one of those causes. So anyone is welcome to contact me directly. My email is Amanda@sofetravel.com. We look forward to welcoming anyone who wants to join our community. 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It's produced by Jesse King. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is "Lolita" by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue.

On this week's 51%, we finally get out of the house. We speak with travel agent Jean Gagnon about how to plan ahead this vacation season; cyclist and self-proclaimed “worldwide nomad” Rachel Yaseen discusses the drive behind her adventures; and Dr. Sharon Ufberg interviews Amanda Black, founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network. Guests: Jean Gagnon, president of Plaza Travel Center in Latham, New York; Rachel Yaseen; Amanda Black, founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It's produced by Jesse King. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is "Lolita" by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue. Follow Along You're listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women's issues and stories. Thanks for joining us, I'm Jesse King.  I have been sitting on this episode for a long time. I'm very much a homebody, but if there's one thing the coronavirus pandemic made me daydream of, it's travel - because, of course, COVID-19 pretty much stopped it. For the past two years or so, we've all been staying closer to home - for good reason, I might add - but now that states are relaxing their COVID-19 restrictions, and the omicron variant appears to be on a decline, more and more people are feeling optimistic about dusting off their suitcase. Overall, travel in the U.S. is bouncing back. So if you're looking for advice on your spring and summer vacations, some travel motivation, or just an excuse to daydream about the trips you would take if it weren't for COVID-19 - today, we've got you covered.  Jean Gagnon is a veteran vacation planner and president of Plaza Travel Center in Latham, New York. She says the pandemic decimated every corner of her industry, but slowly, the calls are coming in.  "We do a lot of international travel here, so we are very affected by the testing requirement that is still in place by the U.S. government, that you have to test [negative for COVID-19] 24 hours before you return to the U.S.,” Gagnon explains. “As soon as that gets pulled, which we're hoping will be fairly soon, then travel will really get blown out of the water.” When people are planning for their travels, what things should they be keeping in mind, still? OK, they still have to book really, really far in advance. That is the number one way to save money. People say, “Oh, I'll wait, because maybe the fares will go down.” Airfares don't go down. Once in a while a hotel offers a last-minute deal, but it's usually not any place that you get an airfare to. So you really, really should plan in advance. I will give you an idea: so you have not only the two year pent-up travel demand, but then you have the people who normally would have traveled this year. You know, you've got three years worth of people trying to travel. I had a family trying to go to Hawaii in July. Now you would think, “Oh, July, that's four months away,” but I could not find what they were looking for. People have to be flexible. They have to book far in advance. And they should try to plan to travel on the off times for their destination. So for example, Hawaii is a huge family destination, so July and August are very busy – fares are going to be up. You go in May, you're gonna save a lot of money, if you're flexible. Same thing with Europe: July and August, very, very expensive. Go in September or October, if you can, or again in May. The Caribbean actually goes down in the summer, because it's so hot. They're more popular in the winter, when it's cold here. So if you want to go to the Caribbean, go like in June or September – you'll still have beautiful weather, but you'll pay a lot less money. So if you want to try to save money and have less crowded areas, you want to travel when it's not the peak time. What's hot right now, where are people going? The National Parks are still very, very hot. People are trying to stay within the U.S., the majority of people, because they are concerned about doing the testing before they return to the U.S. So everywhere in the United States is very, very hot. Florida is always busy, and it's even busier this year. Hawaii is very, very big this year. I've seen more people book Hawaii this year than ever before, because it's still a very foreign-feeling place, and yet it's considered a domestic flight. The Caribbean is starting to come back, cruises are starting to come back, and Europe as well. It's funny, because people think trips or vacations are like, on a shelf, and I can just pick theirs off the shelf – all trips have to be built. Even if there's a package at the hotel, you have to build it with the flights. And if you go on a weekend, it might be more than during the middle of the week. So every trip, you have to sort of see what is out there. And also, people say, “Well, how much is an average hotel?” And it's like asking, “How much is an average car?” You know what I mean? I mean, do you want an old car, a little two-door economy? Or are you looking at a Mercedes Benz? So there's no cookie cutter thing. We have to talk to people to find out what they want to do, and how long do they have. If you only have four days, you're probably not going to go to Hawaii. If you have three weeks, that's enough time to go to Australia, New Zealand, or Africa. So your parameters guide us into what we would suggest for you. When you're doing the actual planning, what's the first thing you book is? Always air. First we need people to determine what dates they want to go, so we can book the air. Because of that, you really have to decide the itinerary first. So for example, if you're going to Europe, if you're going to Italy, are you going to fly into Rome and fly home from Venice? Which is a great itinerary. That's fine, but let's book those flights first. Then we fill it in with how many nights in each place, so we can book the hotels. Then once we have that booked, we book the transportation – are you going to take the train between the two of them, are you going to drive a car. And then the last thing that we fill in is usually like any kind of sightseeing. Like, if you're going to be in Rome, you want to get a reservation to see the Vatican. But we usually do that after the rest of the stuff is in place. What are the ways that you're seeing people traveling? What are the reasons they travel? That's a very interesting question. Um, I believe that different people travel for different reasons. Some people just want to get away from their everyday life. They want to relax. They want to lay on a beach. That's what they enjoy doing their vacation – they want to do almost as little as possible. There are other people that want to do a combination of activities. You know, I want to kayak, I want to hike, and I want to lay on the beach. So there's a certain destination that fits them. And then there are people – I, for one, just love to see new places. I love different food, I love seeing different cultures, I love the history. And for them, that's a different vacation. I mean, yes, you can go to Aruba, because there's sunshine 365 days of the year, but you're not going to see seven days' worth of culture and history. It's a small island. So someone like that might want to go to Europe, or they might want to go to South America. What I enjoy doing in the morning, which would be walking around a new city and going to the local market – somebody else might want to sleep in bed until 11, and then have a light lunch by the pool. So you really have to find out why that person is travelling, so you can determine what destination is best for them. My travel partner is probably the type of person who would want to lay in bed until like 11 o'clock or noon, and I'm the person who would want to get up and explore. If you're trying to travel with somebody, but also mitigate those differences, do you have any tips for that? Well, yeah, you have to then say, “Well, what is the most important?” Do you still want to travel together? Are you willing to compromise? If the case is yes, you want to go somewhere [where] you can get up, feel comfortable leaving the hotel by yourself, and going and doing something while the other person, you know, lays in bed. Which is fine. So if you went to Paris, you could get up in the morning, go get a croissant, walk around the small little villages, and then come back at 11 o'clock. I don't know if it's because I've traveled so much, or if it's just my nature, but I would probably tend to be more on the fearless side. Whereas I feel that people say, “Well, I heard that there's a lot of crime in London.” Well, yeah, but depending upon where you are, there can be a lot of crime in Albany. So you have to know where to go and where not to go. I think women traveling alone have to equip themselves with the knowledge of “What can I do? What shouldn't I do?” You know, walking around at three o'clock in the morning is not a good idea no matter where you are, if you're by yourself. Traveling in pairs and numbers is always good. During the day, though, it's usually not a problem, because people are living, people are working. Perceived danger is sometimes just that – it's a perception. You talked a little bit earlier about booking early to save money. Are there places that would match a smaller budget? Or do you have general tips to travel on a budget? Because a lot of us are broke. Well, the first thing if you're traveling on a budget is you do want to plan as far as possible ahead of time, OK? Because there are smaller hotels or Airbnb's that might be less expensive – but if they're good, and they're less expensive, they're going to be popular. People are going to know about them. Driving is always an alternative. And there are fabulous places just to go in our area for great vacations that you could drive to. There's a wonderful website, I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with it – it's called “Only in New York,” and they have them in each state. There's an “Only in Massachusetts.” And you can go on there, and they talk about interesting things to do in your state. And a lot of them are free. State parks that you may have never heard of, a lot of state parks have cabins. So you could go to a state park on Cape Cod, and stay in a cabin on the beach for a ridiculously low price. But you may have to book it two years ahead of time, because it's going to be popular. Lastly, are there any underrated places that you think people should be going to see more? Portugal is an incredible small country. It's easy to get around, some of the cheapest prices you'll find anywhere in Europe. I mean, ridiculously low prices. Friendly, friendly people. Incredible history – Portugal, at one time, was a huge naval power. But I think Portugal is one of those places that is really, really underrated. I actually spoke with our next guest toward the end of last summer, during a pitstop on her massive cycling tour from New England to Chicago. Rachel Yaseen is many things: a posture alignment therapist, life coach, public speaker. But at 45-years-old, she gave just about all of it up to pursue her own adventure as a “worldwide nomad.” The 836 miles between her sister's home in Rhinebeck, New York, and Chicago, Illinois, seemed like quite an ambitious trek to me - but it's nothing compared to the 30,000-mile worldwide cycling tour she wrapped in Australia shortly before our conversation. Her journey may not be for everybody, but as she cycles from city to city, Yaseen says her goal is to encourage others to be their authentic selves and pursue their dreams — no matter what those dreams might be.  “I really wanted to share my stories and experiences and inspire other people to pursue their own adventures here in America,” says Yaseen. “And when I show up in communities on my fully-loaded bicycle, and I'm like, ‘Yeah, I just came from 70 miles away,' people can really get it into their heads. Like ‘Oh, that's how this is working.'” Let's go back to the beginning, and how you got started doing this. You've been going around the world for the past three years? What prompted the decision to do that? So I spent about 25 years of my adult life living in Tucson, Arizona, and I did a lot of different entrepreneurial things. But it came to a time where I felt like I just knew that I needed something else. You know, when I was in my early 20s, I really had these dreams about living nomadically and traveling the world. But I fell in love, and I married a man that didn't really have those dreams. And so I decided to go to Spain and walk the Camino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage in northern Spain. It's about five weeks, it's about 500 miles. While I was doing it, it was fantastic, and I really found out how strong I was. And then at the end, I had been walking with some people, and I was in the office where you get the certificate where it says, “Congratulations, you've completed this.” And the person that I was with wrote “traveler” as their profession. I don't know why, but you had to write your profession. And I was just totally, like, struck. And I actually started crying. Because I said, “I want to be a traveler.” That seemed very difficult. I had a family. And when I came back to America, it just seemed really clear to me that that life that I had dreamed about in my 20s was really what I needed to pursue, and that I couldn't really be the person that I was, when I was loving that other life. Quickly, when I got back to America, I just realized that I needed to make a big change. And, yeah, it was a transition. But at some point, I decided that I had to live. I had to be a different sort of mom than other moms. I had an eight year old. And I had to just show him – and myself – that you're the best person when you pursue what you're passionate about, even when it's not popular with the people around you. What was it like, having to make that decision? How did your friends and family react? It was horribly uncomfortable. You know, it was funny, because someone might think, “You're going to give away all your things and start living nomadically, how scary!” But that was easy. That was natural. That's what I feel like I was supposed to be doing all along. But yeah…I think to most people, I was living a model-perfect life, and to disrupt everything was very upsetting to family and friends. And especially for me, it wasn't clear what direction this was going. I didn't have a plan. That makes it even harder for people, and you kind of have to sit in that discomfort and be willing to be uncomfortable with yourself, knowing that, in my heart, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Has the response gotten better, over the past few years? Yeah, absolutely. While it isn't what any of my family members would choose for their own life, and sometimes I think that they wish that I would be normal, I do feel a lot of support from the people around me. Absolutely. That's good. So let's talk about some of the places you've been. Do you mostly bike, or do you hike? What's your preferred mode of traveling? So in the beginning, it was really unclear. I wasn't really sure what format that it was going to take. And so it took a little while to really start to realize that “OK, I would like to make this a cycling trip around the world.” It originally started with my new partner in Denmark, and I road to Croatia with him. And it was really like, “OK, this is interesting.” And we already had a ticket booked to Thailand. So that was like, “Alright, we'll officially start the trip in Thailand,” and then just started riding in Thailand. And I really wanted to set up challenges, because, for me, I feel like growth happens when you set up challenges for yourself – purposefully. Not all of a sudden, like, you get divorced, or a pandemic happens, or there's a tsunami, but where you really set up challenges for yourself and accomplish them – or maybe fail, and that's OK, too. I've done that. But I think you find out who you are, and you find out how strong you are. In the beginning, I said, “OK, we'll start in Thailand. Now I want to go to southern Myanmar.” And no one goes to southern Myanmar, because there's very few places you're allowed to stay, and you have to cycle great distances, and there's really no infrastructure for tourism. But I thought, “OK, this sounds interesting.” The three blog posts I read, none of the people were successful. So I thought, “Yeah, now I really want to try this.” And we did, and it was incredible. We made it. And then we continued cycling through Southern Thailand – you cut back into Thailand from Southern Myanmar – and then down through Malaysia, and Singapore, and then stopped at the different Indonesian islands. And then we got to Timor Leste and hoped to be able to get a sailboat to Australia, because the whole concept was to be human-powered, and not fly. But it was the middle of cyclone season, and it just wasn't possible. So we flew to Darwin, which is in the northern part of Australia. And then it was COVID, and we spent the last year and a half in Australia. Before we get to what it's like travelling in COVID, I thought I'd ask – how do you go about making these plans and decisions? Do you have a certain destination in mind, where it's like, “I know I'm gonna stay here.” Or is it more like, “OK, I'm gonna bike to this city, and then hope to find a place to stay.” So there's the larger scope, which is, “How is this gonna look over like the next six months?” And then there's like, “Where am I going to go tonight?” So typically, I'm really just looking at the map and identifying where there's places to stay. If I'm in the middle of nowhere, like in Australia, there might not be a choice – I'm loading a whole bunch of food and water on my bicycle, and I'm just wild camping. So when I'm done for the day, I'll literally pull off the road find a spot to camp in the middle of nowhere. There's no humans, there's kangaroos and some birds. If there's towns, then sometimes we'll stay in a hotel. If there's somewhere that we know it's like a school holiday, then sometimes I'll plan ahead. But not usually – I like the flexibility, because you don't know where you're going to end up each day. And I like not knowing. How much stuff do you have on your bike? How much are you bringing with you? These are such good questions. So the more you carry, the more you have to pull with you. And I am a minimalist, thank goodness, because it's heavy. I like to carry a couple different changes of clothes for cycling. Maybe like a little dress, and depending how cold it is, maybe some SmartWool top and bottom and some kind of like heavy coat. I've got a sleeping bag, my tent, a stove for cooking. Everything is super lightweight. You saw my bike, it's pretty minimally loaded. When I show up to places, people are usually surprised. How do you keep in shape for this? I did not necessarily prepare for this. It wasn't like I thought, “OK, I'm going to train for it.” I think the training happens while you're doing it. That said, it's a lot of repetitive motion all the time. I mean, we're all doing some kind of repetitive motion all the time, whether we're sitting around a bicycle, or even professional athletes are doing their motion. And so as a posture therapist, that is a big deal for me. I am constantly advocating for doing the posture exercises, and I do them every single morning. I take like 30 minutes to do them. So let's talk a little bit about what it was like traveling during COVID. How did that whole experience happen for you? Oh, it was super interesting because I got in to Australia literally within hours of it closing to foreigners. And so then I was locked down for three months in Cannes, Australia – which couldn't have been a better place to be locked down, it was absolutely beautiful. When we were released – and I say released because all of a sudden there was an announcement that we could leave – then we made sure that we didn't go to areas where there was COVID. So COVID was really isolated to the Melbourne and Sydney area, and we just skipped that whole area. So I cycled about 15,000 miles over the course of a year throughout Australia, but just skipped the COVID. Traveling was just about making sure that I was in the right area at the right time. OK, so you're going to Chicago now. Why? Really, the northeast all the way to Chicago is completely foreign to me. I'm much more comfortable in Europe and Asia and Australia than I am here, I was actually really intimidated by the ticks, and then I heard about the black bears. And so I'm really not as familiar with this area. And really, the whole reason that I'm doing this is to connect with as many people as possible. So as I'm cycling along, I'm giving talks and workshops. The talks are meant to inspire people to pursue their own adventures, because I believe that everyone has an adventure in them that's calling to them. Sometimes we don't do them because we're scared. We don't know that we can do it. We're scared that if we can do it, the people around us might not be supportive. We might not have the imagination to even like know what [it is] – we know there's something, but not exactly sure what it is. And sometimes we just don't want to disappoint people. It's very easy to come up with all kinds of things about why you can't do something. I noticed it for myself, I am constantly coming up with reasons why I can't do something. And the truth is that, until you come to a point in your life where you feel like you just need to do something, you're probably not going to challenge yourself. But when you do, and you start to really realize the reward of it, then it's nearly addicting, and it actually makes you such a stronger person, and you really get to know yourself so much better. And when you do that, you show up better for other people. One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is – you know your headphones, and how they get tangled up? And how you can't just like pull them, you have to carefully, like, undo them? For me, I think that's what moving through the world and cycling is. I think we get all tangled up, and moving and cycling is this slow way for me to untangle and to really see myself. As someone who has seen way more of the world than I have, what are some of your favorite places? You know, it's funny, because in Australia, people wanted to know where my favorite place in Australia was – because I think I saw more of Australia than most Australians see. So they're curious, like, where should they go? And my favorite was the middle of the Outback, where there was nobody. And the stars…It could almost bring me to tears. The stars are like, you can't even imagine it, because there's no light pollution. And the sunrise and the sunset, and just hearing the birds. The magic of just being out there is absolutely incredible. Our last guest today is the founder of the Solo Female Traveler Network, a community of more than 500,000 women travelers — or aspiring travelers — online. Members frequently share photos on Facebook from their adventures, solicit advice on everything from flight planning to homesickness, and occasionally connect on meetup tours organized by the network. Founder Amanda Black says it all started as a way to empower women and help them feel safer on their travels. She spoke with Dr. Sharon Ufberg, co-founder of the California-based personal development and wellness company, Borrowed Wisdom, for her 51% segment, “Force of Nature.” Dr. Ufberg: How did this group get started? Black: I had been traveling solo for many years, and as a woman alone in certain parts of the world, I found myself, once in a while, in a situation where I felt a little vulnerable. And I could have used some support from people like me. My last straw was when I was in Mexico, and I had just gotten there. And I went out for a beer and a taco around the corner – and while I was gone, for those few minutes, somebody had broken into my room and stolen everything. Literally everything except my dirty clothes, and thankfully, my passport. But I remember standing in the streets of Cancun, knowing no one, and thinking, “OK, what do I do now?” And I knew that there would be plenty of people around me who would be willing to help me out, but I didn't have a way to connect with them. So as soon as I got home, and as soon as I replaced my computer, I started a Facebook group. And it was meant originally for my travel friends and their travel friends to have a place to turn for everything in situations like this – for travel advice, for inspiration. And then a few years into having the group, we decided we wanted to travel together, and we started operating organized tours. Dr. Ufberg: I had that experience myself as a traveler, so I totally can relate to that. So this travel network has now been going on for about five years. What would you say you've learned about what women want from travel? Black: I started out really just trying to provide what I really want from travel, and what my most rewarding moments encompassed. That's first of all, community. It's difficult to make friends as an adult, no matter who you are – and especially when you're doing something a little bit off the beaten path, like traveling to different parts of the world by yourself. So being able to connect with women who understand you, and women who have maybe found themselves in similar situations, is our number one value. Second of all, we really believe in empowering women: empowering women to chase their dreams, to say yes to themselves, to discover who they are. And I believe that the best way to do that is through travel. And when you travel, it teaches you things like gratitude, and humility. Those are two things that I've really learned from travel and have changed me as a person. And so our travel experiences aim to give women the time and the space and the experiences to feel all of those things: empowered, grateful, humble and connected. Dr. Ufberg: Amanda, can you give us a story that might illustrate how your network has accomplished this goal of helping individual women within a community? Like you were so needing in that moment in Cancun not too long ago? Black: Yeah, so there are so many examples of this. If you get into our Facebook community, which is free for everyone, and just scroll, you'll see lots of examples. But one of my favorite, most powerful examples happened a few years ago. There was a woman who had met her partner, her boyfriend, somewhere in her travels. And she decided to go home with him. He lived in Turkey. So she went home with him. And she had been traveling with him for a little while – and he turned abusive. After a big blow up, she locked herself in the bathroom at his apartment, and she had her phone with her. And she had tried to call the police. He was banging on the door trying to get in. She felt really threatened. She had been trying to call the police, and they wouldn't come. So she posted in our community explaining what happened. And she got thousands of comments – so many that we had to shut it down. We were all overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and love and wanting to know if she was OK with what happened. But we had a handful of members who lived in Turkey, and even lived in the town that she was in. So ultimately, we had members from all over the world calling the police in Turkey – and most helpful, we had women who spoke the language calling the police. And once the police came, and they got her out safely, the women from our community were there to greet her and to help her on her journey back home. Dr. Ufberg: That is really fantastic. I would love to hear what's next for you, and how people can find you. Black: The best place to start if you want to join our community is to just find us on Facebook. We also have a free community off of Facebook that you can find on our website, which is sofetravel.com. Our team is working hard to create more destinations. We have a volunteer program that we're working on, currently, to supply some more direct help to these organizations that we visit on our tours. And we have some big picture projects around aiding the end of sex trafficking and gender violence – we're currently looking for a perfect fit and a partner for one of those causes. So anyone is welcome to contact me directly. My email is Amanda@sofetravel.com. We look forward to welcoming anyone who wants to join our community. 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It's produced by Jesse King. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is "Lolita" by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue.

Lauren Cohen is a returning guest, an International lawyer, realtor and cross-border expert. Also a bestselling author and global speaker. She launched her podcast “Investing Across Borders in late 2020”. Lauren believes in overcoming obstacles and navigating global expansion for business owners and Real Estate investors offering access to unique passive income options   In this episode we talked about:   Lauren`s Background in Real Estate Space Canadian Investment in the US Navigating Investment Decisions with Clients Passive and Active Real Estate Investment Visa and Green Card Status The Best Time for Engagement with clients Deal Structuring  Investors Influx in the US     Useful links: Previous episode with Lauren: https://workingcapitalpodcast.com/real-estate-investing-across-borders-with-lauren-cohenep50/ https://asklaurenesq.com https://www.investingacrossborders.net Transcriptions: Jesse (0s): Welcome to the working capital real estate podcast. My name is Jesper galley. And on this show, we discuss all things real estate with investors and experts in a variety of industries that impact real estate. Whether you're looking at your first investment or raising your first fund, join me and let's build that portfolio one square foot at a time. All right, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jesper galley. We have a returning guest on the podcast today. Lauren Cohen, Lauren, how you doing today? Good. How are you Jesse? I'm doing fantastic.   Lauren is an international lawyer, realtor and cross-border expert originally from Toronto. And now in south Florida. Lauren is also a best selling author and sought after speaker and she launched her podcast investing across borders in late 20, 20 Lauren and her turnkey team believe in overcoming obstacles and navigating global expansion for business owners and real estate investors while offering access to unique, passive income options, everything we like here, Lauren, how you doing today?   Lauren (59s): I'm doing really well. How are you   Jesse (1m 0s): Doing? I'm doing fantastic. So we talked a little bit before the show. You are a returning guest and you are now in Florida. Is that a, is that where you're a recording from?   Lauren (1m 11s): I am in Florida in my home in Boca Raton. Yes, I am   Jesse (1m 15s): Beautiful. How's the weather there   Lauren (1m 17s): Different than their,   Jesse (1m 19s): What do you mean? We have a balmy three degrees today,   Lauren (1m 23s): Probably more like 83 south a Fahrenheit Celsius. That would be really hot. We'll maybe what about 25 or so?   Jesse (1m 31s): Hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. W we were just chatting. I was just in Orlando a few, a few weeks ago. So I'm really excited seeing what's going on. We have a lot of clients that are now pivoting to investing in Florida all over Florida, to be honest. So I mentioned before we had a, you know, we had a number of listeners either emailing me directly or messaged me on Instagram, about investing from Canada in the U S and you know, in the same breath, talked about us investors investing in Canada for listeners that didn't hear that first podcast.   Maybe you could give a little bit of a background on your career and what has got you to the point that you're at today.   Lauren (2m 13s): Sure. So thank you so much for having me back. So I'm originally from Toronto. So I've been here in Florida over 20 years. Haven't helped me. I just celebrated my 21st anniversary, I think, last month. So I specialize in helping mainly Canadians investing into the U S but also people from all over the world. My newest clients are actually Chilean and we help them. My tagline is navigating your path to invest, live, work, and play across borders.   And I started doing this after my then husband. Now ex-husband was deported on the way back from our honeymoon. And when that happened, I thought, well, if this can happen to me, it can happen to anybody. So let's figure out a way to stop it from happening and create a clear and easy path for people to not only invest, but also immigrate and in the past. Oh, wow. Since Thanksgiving, since us Thanksgiving around November, it has been unbelievably busy with people that are interested, not only in investing, but also in finding their way, especially to Florida.   I happened to be in the right place at the right time. And so the fact of the matter is that there's just so much opportunity in the U S you know, you've got 10 times the fault population, 10 times the number of opportunities. Everything is basically 10 times, not 10 times the size, because of course, Canada is a larger country, but 10 times pretty much mostly everything else, 10 times the problems too. But at the end of the day, there is a wide wide range of opportunities down here at all different price points that just doesn't exist in Canada with cap rates that are much higher with short-term rentals.   Like you said, Orlando is the ha the king of short-term rentals in the world. You know, if there's no place like it, there are communities in Orlando where they only allow short-term rentals. I don't think that exists elsewhere. So it's just a crazy time to be investing in real estate. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't go the other way, people investing into Canada, especially because of course the dollar goes further and the real estate in Canada may not have the great cap rates, but the upside, the, you know, the ROI when you sell your property is huge, especially in the GTA, you make an investment, you know, the next day it's going to go up.   So it's all a matter of just deciding what it is that you want to do with your money and how you want to invest it and what your goals are with it.   Jesse (4m 46s): So we could kind of take a stab at this in a number of ways. I thought what we could do is talk a little bit about the actual structuring of investments that you see, and maybe, maybe it could be from the perspective of having someone say Canadian investing in the U S you know, what is the first couple things that, you know, you would recommend, or you basically consult them to do aside from hire you?   Lauren (5m 13s): So it's not just about me, it's about the team. It's about making sure that you have a strategy in place and not just haphazardly deciding to do, you know, to invest because the price seems right, or looking at a property without doing your due diligence or not sending up the right structure and making the investment or not speaking to that cross border tax advisor, whichever border that might be, it's really important to have a holistic approach to it, and also to work with qualified real estate professionals, wherever it is that you're investing referred by other qualified real estate professionals like Jesse and myself, and, and just having that structure in place to help protect you.   Because at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is invest and give all your money to either the CRA or the IRS, the kind of defeats the purpose. Right. And you want to make sure that you have a short and long-term strategy in place so that you can create goals, create paths to achieve your goals related to those strategies.   Jesse (6m 11s): Yeah. Fair enough. So when, when you have individuals that do invest or work with you, I'm, I'm sure goals are, you know, that's the key aspect of, of what they're doing. Are you trying to acquire a lot of land? Are you trying, like we talked in our last conversation, are you trying to, to work in, in the states or live in the states, or is this a passive investment? How do you navigate those decisions or those goals with clients and give them a framework to better understand that investment that they are making?   Lauren (6m 42s): Well, I, we have a lot of resources available, both with my podcast and my YouTube channel, and a lot of downloads, a lot of really great downloads that help clients understand. For example, I have one that talks about the 10 steps to successful real estate investing in the U S that has nothing to do with getting a visa. It just has to do with investing, and there are 10 steps. Okay. And so then if they're interested in a visa, then we go to the next level and to the next level and to the next level. And it's a matter of really being available to clients, to hold their hands and figure out that strategy, do an initial consult call.   I mean, client, I, you know, I've had clients that thought they wanted X and they ended up wanting Y through, or even after a week or two, they realized that they need to rethink their, their posture. I've had clients that say they want to do immigrate through real estate, which is my signature program. And we ended up buying them a franchise because it's an easier path. I've had clients that thought franchises were the worst thing in the world and ended up falling in love with the concept. I've had clients that think that they are, you know, ready to buy 20 units of real estate.   And yet they're really not because they're, they don't have the, the pre-qualification letters with the financing in place or whatever. So what did, what I think is really important in all of this is having the team and the, the, the professionals available, making sure that you have a financing partner, a currency exchange partner, you know, legal partners in different states. For example, I have a new client that's investing in Utah. So I have partners that set up entities and structures in Utah.   You know, it's making sure that you have the team and the relationships that are necessary to be able to serve whatever your client's needs may be, because they're going to change from time to time. And that cross border tax advisor, I don't do anything without one of those speaking to my clients at any time, because I'm not a tax advisor, I'm not a tax expert. That's why I pay the IRS or the CRA or whatever, just like everybody else. Right. So, and that's why I hired them. So I, if I'm going to, I need my clients to do the same.   Jesse (8m 54s): Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. So, in terms of, if anybody's interested in those 10 steps, we went through them on the last podcast episode 50, you can just type in Lauren Cohen's name and you'll find that on our website, working capital podcast.com, just, just because I know we went into some more detail on those. I had a number of people reach out after that episode that were interested in the aspect of actually moving to the states. And I think maybe as a case study, you know, we can talk about maybe three different scenarios.   One is, this is the individual that's, you know, buying a rental property or buying one vacation property that maybe that they're, they've thought about renting it out for a portion of the year. Secondly, I think if we go into the larger say, 50 unit, a hundred unit apartment buildings, commercial, commercial, real estate, and then the third, which, which I'd like to get into right now is the individual that says, Hey, Lauren, you know, I I'm open to buying real estate. I'm open to potentially buying a franchise. But the goal for me is to move to the states or have that be a part of that process.   So, you know, what is somebody like that, you know, what are they looking at?   Lauren (10m 7s): I mean, in terms of amounts or   Jesse (10m 10s): In terms of the process. So for those individuals that, you know, those 10 steps that we talked about last time, I assume that those were specifically talking about investing in, in the states from Canada. But then if you, we're talking about individuals that want to get a visa, you know, w at what point does that approach differ?   Lauren (10m 30s): Yeah. So it differs at, from the get-go really because your, your investments are going to be potentially different. If you're investing in that large apartment building and building a business that potentially can qualify for a visa. If you're investing in a syndication that will never qualify for a visa, unless you are the developer of the syndication, because it has to be a business. So our super power rests in transitioning a prospective client from a passive real estate investor to an active real estate business owner.   And if they're an active real estate business owner, they can potentially qualify. Now why we like franchises is because for the more passive real estate investor, a franchise can allow them to have this active business that doesn't, that doesn't disqualify their real estate investing. And as a matter of fact, maybe augmented like a property management company, an inspection company, a home improvement company, an alarm company, a maid service, okay. And those are easy turnkey businesses that immigration likes.   So what we try to do is make your process as painless as possible because at the end of the day, moving is a big deal. People think Canada and the U S are the same, and they're not, they're just not. And so there are many ways skin the same cat and make your life easier in the process. So what we try to do is make sure that that process is as easy as possible so that you can accomplish your goals. And you can include real estate investing as part of your business plan, but perhaps your visa application is not dependent on it.   So one is not necessarily tied to the other. So you don't have to feel pressured to buy the real estate prior to applying for the visa. You can wait maybe until we find what you're looking for, you know, and the visa is not dependent on the real estate. So if you happen to sell it, suddenly your visa isn't compromised. Okay. So that's why we like to have a complimentary business that allows you to qualify for the visa and yet still accomplish your investing goals.   Okay.   Jesse (12m 46s): Could you talk a little bit about this differentiation between passive and active real estate investors? Because correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe Canada has exactly the equivalent aspects of   Lauren (12m 57s): In Canada. They flipping is considered an active business in the U S it is not. So you, we need to be very careful to make sure that the business here in the U S whatever it is that you're doing is a truly active business that you are, that you need to run it. So if you're, if you're flipping a hundred homes a month, then that could probably qualify, but if you're flipping one or two, that's not going to work because that's passive and you don't need a visa to do that.   So we need to figure out a reason for you to need your boots on the ground is the term that we use. Why do you need to be in the us running this business? So we need to tell that story and make it very clear. And we need to draw the line in the sand between what is passive. Like, you know, most people invest in real estate because it's passive, right. But if you're doing the burn method over and over, that's not passive. You're actively running a business. If you're running many Airbnbs, that's not generally passive, maybe one or two, but if you're doing European, you know, daily or weekly rentals, that is probably, probably not positive.   Now, on the other hand, when you look at somewhere like Orlando, or you hire a property management company to manage, then it becomes turnkey. So again, then it becomes potentially passive. Maybe you want to be the property manager. Maybe you want to be involved in that. And then suddenly that changes the dynamic again. So each business is going to be different, and there's not like one size fits all about what makes it qualify or not qualify.   Jesse (14m 33s): Was there a, I'm trying to remember, I don't know if it was a conversation with you or something that I read, but an acid test for what makes you, and I don't know if it's a, the U S legal term, a real estate professional. And I don't mean that I don't mean an agent. I mean, that, you're a, you're a full-time real estate professional. That there's a certain amount of hours. If the year that debt are dedicated to real estate investments. Is that something that's, that's taken into consideration or is that so, so your, it really is something that is case by case that   Lauren (15m 4s): Very case by case, and on top of that, Jessie, the other part of it is that it's not just about you, right? It's about a business. So you have to hire people. You have to show that your business is not marginal to replace your income. And you have to show that your business has an economic impact. That means hiring people and impacting the community, impacting whatever. Okay. So it's all kinds of different considerations. So if, even if you're a real estate professional, right, I am a solo preneur.   All of my staff is, are independent contractors. I wouldn't qualify for a visa. I'd have to transition them to employees in order to qualify for a visa. So it's a very big, it's a very big deal to us to know that that that's a business, right? So solo preneurs generally won't get visas because they aren't, aren't impacting the society. They aren't hiring people. It's got to be a business. So we, and it's not 10 employees like for a green card.   It's a few. So what does that mean? Well, generally we like to see between two and four over a five-year business plan. And if it's less than that, it's going to be marginal. And we also want to see that the numbers can support not only the business, but also support, you know, support you, your family, the employees. And there's a return because we want to see that you're generating income. So all of those factors come into play.   Jesse (16m 37s): So it seems the IRS likes business, her money-making businesses, just like the CRA of course   Lauren (16m 43s): They want their money, right?   Jesse (16m 44s): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So in, if we were to have a kind of ideal investment from a real estate point of view, so say you bought a large commercial property, say multi-racial property that was bringing in a million a year in terms of gross rent. And the reason I use this number just for simplicity and say, you're, you're paying a property manager 6%, so $60,000 a year. So from that perspective, you can you be creative of, you know, instead of paying a company, we create, we create our own active company, the property management company.   So that would be approach you would take.   Lauren (17m 24s): Yeah, exactly. In that, in that if there's a million dollars in income coming in a year, then we would bring in our own in-house property manager, potentially, maybe agenda a janitor, or, you know, a groundskeeper, maybe somebody to do logistics, managing all of the rents and everything, and I'll, you know, and all of those. So we help to figure out which employees make the most sense. Now, obviously we are not in your business. So even though we write the business plans, it's your business.   And at the end of the day, you're the one that goes to the government and has the interview and defends whatever your business is or presents, whatever your business is, not us. So some people say, well, I thought you were writing the business plan. Yes. But it's still your business. We are putting, we are reducing it to paper and putting it in a concise, presentable manner, but it's your business and they're your numbers. So it's really important. We can help, we can guide, but we aren't going to develop the business for you.   Jesse (18m 27s): Yeah. Understood. So I have a, a friend of mine, I think I mentioned before the show that I purchased a townhouse first, first purchase in the U S for me in, in Southern, in Orlando or just south of downtown. So my friend, who's a realtor. He's, he's been in Florida for eight or nine years. And I know for a fact he doesn't have a visa. So I assume that he is just, he's working for a company he's Canadian, doesn't   Lauren (18m 55s): Have a visa. And he has a real estate   Jesse (18m 57s): License. Does, has a, I'm sorry. He doesn't have a green card. I believe he has a visa. So he's yeah. Sorry, my mistake now, why would somebody like I I'm D well, first of all, do you deal with individuals that want to eventually get their green card as well? Okay. What makes that, what do you, what do you find is the, usually the, the thrust of that decision, when some individuals are, are comfortable having a visa and are able to do what they want to do in terms of investments and, you know, being in the states for the majority of the year, what's that differentiation that you find that people say, no, I want it   Lauren (19m 35s): Definitely permanent. Some, some people, if they're high net worth, they don't want a green card because then they become us residents for tax purposes. So that's one issue. Some people want the green card right away. So there is a path to that. My newest clients, the Chilean clients, that's what they're doing. They don't, they just want the green card right away. And when you do an E two, there is not a direct path to an AB five or to a green card, I should say, but there is a way to transition.   So it really depends. Each, each individual case is different. Some if they come in, depending on the visa, they come in on, they can be sponsored for a green card. The spouse can be sponsored for a green card. They can increase their investment amount and their employee count and qualify for a green card through , which is a direct green card path. So there are ways to transition, but there's no direct path from an investor visa to a green card at the moment.   Jesse (20m 39s): So if we pivot to investors that are just purely looking for investments across borders, so, you know, they're not interested in a visa, they're not in a green card. So for those individuals. So for instance, maybe using even my investment as a, as a kind of jump-off point, you know, it's a townhouse in, in Orlando, it's going to be, I think the completion of the construction is going to be in June, July this year. Now I'm going to have a couple of decisions to make what I want to put that investment in what structure I want to have for that investment personal or otherwise.   And from that standpoint, when do you find is the best time to start engaging with the client? And what do you see as a, is a typical path?   Lauren (21m 23s): Yeah, ideally, however, most of the time, especially if you're pre-construction, you can change a sign, the contract to an entity after the fact. Now there is no one size fits all. And I would say probably 30% of my clients these days are just investing. So we have a real estate investment pre-investment package that can come in post-investment as well. And generally, most Canadians, if they're staying in Canada, we'll do a limited partnership slash limited liability company structure because LLCs limited liability companies are disregarded entities by the CRA.   Now this is going to depend on your tax bracket in Canada, which again is why nothing happens without Mike cross-border tax guy. And like right now, actually he's talking to a client of mine. The outcome of that will determine what entities we set up for the client. Okay. And they already there they're closing in two weeks. So it's really about looking at your particular circumstances. If do you have an entity in Canada? Are you an investor in Canada? Do you have other investments in the us? You do not understand, but those are all considerations that come into play.   And are you investing in multiple states? Do you need multiple LPs and LLCs? What's the cost? How does that all look? So we do that quite often. We have a quick little package that we offer. And if the client decides to eventually apply for a visa, it's not going to be detrimental to have that in place. Having the LPL LLC will never hurt you.   Jesse (22m 56s): So this is a question that comes up a lot. And I know we talked about it last time that, you know, Canadians just assume LLCs. That's what I, my, my, sorry, my building should be in which, like you said, it's a disregarded entity. I believe that the default position from CRA's, they treated as a Canadian corporation for tax. So it, it, it is a problem. So in the scenario that you are describing, let's just use that. Let's say you're in the highest tax bracket in Canada. It's your first, it's your only property in the us now is the structure of that LLC.   And that, sorry, that LP, which, which I assume would have a general partner. And then I assume as the LLC, and then would have a limited partner,   Lauren (23m 40s): Necessarily general partner might be the Canadian company.   Jesse (23m 43s): Okay. So, so in that, in that let's say it's the Canadian company. The reason I said LLC first is because a lot of the documents we see that we use that we'll have the GP being 0.0 1.001% ownership and true or false part of the reason that might, that would be an advantage in structuring that way for tax purposes is the double taxation aspect of   Lauren (24m 7s): I'm not going to answer it if it's true or false, because I'm not a tax expert, but I will tell you that the whole reason of structuring things and making sure that the tax Kite's involved is to avoid double taxation. Because with disregarded entities, you can end up paying double taxes. And w why would you do that? That kind of doesn't make sense. So there's a cost involved, but it's, you know, you set up the structure right from the get-go, and then you're not going to end up paying CRA every year, which you would do otherwise.   So I, I think that it's really important. You know, we, our approach is holistic. And even though I may know the answer, I'm not going to give the answer because I'm not a tax expert. And so I like to make sure that my clients understand that nothing happens without going through the steps. And actually the steps that we you're referencing are, are actually different steps. So I, my original program was called 10 steps to immigrate through real estate, which is basically what put me on the map more recently, because I have so many people that are just investing in real estate like yourself and not planning to get a visa.   I created a, a slide that I will share with you about 10 steps to successful us real estate investing. So it has nothing to do with the immigration piece, but it has to do with all of these elements, like getting your tax ID, setting up your entity, getting your bank account, all of those things are included. Whereas in the 10 steps, it's a broader 10 steps because there's an immigration piece attached to it. So I'll share that with you so you can share it with your audience, but I just wanted to make that clear because it's really about investing.   And a lot of people don't even know if they want to get a visa right now, and that's fine, but they want to invest and they want to take advantage of the market. And so we give them that those tools,   Jesse (26m 4s): Lauren, is there, is there one or a few, you know, things that stand out to you that are under appreciated aspects of this, of this process, that people, you know, they're, they're surprised by that, that keeps coming up, you know, again and again, when you're doing this stuff,   Lauren (26m 20s): A lot of people, as you mentioned, just go ahead and set up LLCs and think that's the way to go. They go online and they say, oh, it's 500 bucks. I'm done. They don't get the right advice from any professionals. They don't work with realtors. They don't do their due diligence on the properties, into which they're investing. They just run before they walk. They under-capitalized, and don't use other people's money or find the right financing. No, I have some great financing partners specifically for Canadians investing in non-owner occupied us real estate.   So that's not readily available necessarily if you don't have the right connections, also, you know, just exchanging money at the bank rather than going to one of the preferred currency exchange and paying like, you know, one or two points more there, it's just a matter of really, or working with a us coach on us real estate investment coach that has no regard for what that means for Canada. And these are very important factors because you know, these big companies that are helping you invest in us real estate don't really care how that impacts you when you're filing your can, your Canadian tax return, but you care.   So it's important that you, that you really speak with cross border people that really understand what it means to cross borders, not just I'm investing in Indianapolis. What does that mean? No, but what does that mean? If I live in, you know, Windsor? Okay. How does that affect me? That's what's important. And when you're dealing with cross border, either way or investing into Costa Rica or Mexico, or believes you need a structure and a strategy in place, or you're going to end up getting a lot, hitting a lot of roadblocks that could be avoided.   Jesse (28m 10s): Yeah. It sounds like, you know, we, we, we get comfortable in the relationship that we have between Canada and the U S and we just see it as a similar thing. Oh, you know, Buffalo's two hours, Detroit's five hours. Yeah. So these   Lauren (28m 24s): Borders now they're not so easy. Right?   Jesse (28m 27s): Yeah. Fair enough. In terms of, I hear from other investors, you know, one of their apprehensions, at least on the smaller scale is currency exchange rates, you know, is that something that you strategize with your team or kind of prepare them, or is it something that, you know, it's just a function of the market? How do you,   Lauren (28m 48s): I have an amazing currency exchange partner I will share with you. And they are actually out of London and they, they, they have bettered every single rate that has been presented to them by my clients so far. So that's my strategy, you know, obviously it's about timing, but man saving a point on a million or half a million bucks is, is significant.   Jesse (29m 18s): So we're just coming close to the end of the show here. Before I, I wrap up with one or two questions, I just want to make sure I get to, wanted to talk a little bit about creating as a Canadian or even as a us individual in Canada. But you know, this conversation is centered around Canadians investing in the U S so when it comes to developing an identity, for lack of a better word, so that when you do buy future assets, that you can actually get financing. And you, you know, you're looked at from the bank as not just a complete anomaly, like, is there a, is there a process that you recommend to develop that, to build credit in the U S or is that always going to be a challenge for us?   Lauren (30m 1s): I was going to be a challenge until you can partner with, I mean, if you build a lot, if you do a lot of transactions, you're going to build credit. Okay. But if you don't have a social security number, the credit is going to be attached to your companies. Now you also build relationships, which helps you build credit. Right. But it, but again, most of the time in the U S the social security number is the, is the decisive factor. So that's one of the driving forces for people getting bees as, as well, because then they can build us credit.   So, in the meantime, you, you need to like partnering with, well with joint venture partners that have those relationships that have that credit history, or that are in the U S or are us residents is, is always going to be positive for you in, from that perspective. And just making sure that you always have access to ongoing capital and resources available to you to make sure that you have that   Jesse (31m 2s): Well, I mean, it's relationship, business and real estate. It seems like that that does not no borders, no. In terms of what has been happening over the last few months, I think it's almost been a year. I think we spoke last in April. You mentioned that there was a pretty big influx of investors in the states. Maybe you could chat a little bit about that. W you know, w what has been the driving force of that, and, you know, where are you seeing people invest in your world?   Lauren (31m 30s): So I think the driving force for people that are planning to move is locked down and frustration with circumstances. Winter definitely helped for sure. So, and I think that people just want change and freedom. And, you know, to be honest with you, it's been a pleasure to be here without having to deal with winter, even in spite of all of the stuff that's going on.   So that's a big factor. And I also think people are more open to investing across borders because they realize that the world is small. I think that they're also open to investing remotely, which was not really available as much before COVID. So COVID has opened a lot of doors. The demand from Florida is not just from Canadians. It's from everybody. It's just unbelievable. What's going on here. I mean, you saw an Orlando. Orlando is insane.   South Florida is crazy, but people want a place to go, and they want a place to go where they don't have to with all the rules and where they don't have to deal with the cold. And that's really what it comes down to. But that doesn't mean it's just Florida. I mean, we've got Texas and Arizona and Alabama and Arkansas, and Tennessee is a big, big one, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, you know, not, not California, but   Jesse (32m 58s): Most of those seem pretty landlord friendly state, all   Lauren (33m 1s): Landlord friendly places. That's where people want to invest. Ontario is not a landlord friendly place. It never has been, it never will be it's 10 and friendly. So it makes a difference. So people are, are frustrated and want to get doors in places where they can actually have some control. And I can understand.   Jesse (33m 19s): Yeah, I think, you know, it's complete anecdote, but even the last time was in Orlando. It's just funny that every time I spoke with an Uber driver, it seemed like this guy's from Jersey. This guy's from New York and, you know, all of them had moved, you know, when you're talking to them within the last year or two. Yeah. So Lauren, I will, if you can, if you, we have that a 10 step, we'll put that in, in the show notes. Where can people, you know, aside from a simple Google search, where should people reach out to you?   Lauren (33m 46s): Well, one place that's great. And it's just launched is our brand new chat bot, which is ask Lauren esq.com. So I'll put that in the chat as well, but you can find us there. Everything that we're doing right now is basically branded around the investing across borders brand. But the chat bot is, as I say, ask Lauren Esq. You can reach out there and ask any questions that you have. And it's a pretty cool thing. And if we can't ask them, if we can't answer them there, we will answer them directly.   Or you can set up a consult with me. I'm investing across borders.net real estate, across borders.com. You can find me everywhere. My podcast is investing across borders and I'm pretty easy to find. Also our general kind of general generic email is investing across borders. one@gmail.com. We set that up before we had the URL. So investing across borders, the number one at Gmail,   Jesse (34m 44s): My returning guest today has been Lauren Cohen, Lauren, thanks for being part of working capital.   Lauren (34m 48s): It's always a pleasure take care. I'll see you soon.   Jesse (34m 59s): Thank you so much for listening to working capital the real estate podcast. I'm your host, Jesse, for galley. If you liked the episode, head on to iTunes and leave us a five star review and share on social media, it really helps us out. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, Jesse for galley, F R a G a L E, have a good one. Take care.

  Today's guest Dr. Daniel Keown is an author (The Uncharted Body and The Spark In The Machine), licensed acupuncturist, and a registered medical doctor (trained and specialising in emergency medicine). In this fascinating conversation, Tahnee and Daniel discuss the problem with western medicine (and its lack of predictive power), the subtlety of acupuncture, Qi in the body, The TCM Channel system (Jing Luo), Fascia, understanding how the body works, and the all-pervading spark that is electricity.   Daniel's brilliant mind and extensive education allows him to illuminate the distinctions and integral components of traditional Chinese medicine and western allopathic medicine with a simplicity that seems effortless. This conversation is a beautifully comprehensive scope into the organising life force of the body (Qi) and the Jing Luo channel system that allows us to reimagine the body as a landscape with folds, creases, hollows, and structures, all connected by a system of energetic intelligence.    "Those guys who wrote all those classics must be like, 'Oh, could we have made it any more simple?' They must be thinking. 'We literally said, it's like water. Over and over again, Qi is like water'. And now everyone's like, 'Oh, what's it like?' It's like water. What does water do? Water goes from high pressure to low pressure; it flows in a current in channels and generates energy as it moves. But the only thing I would say, is it's not water, it's electricity".    - Dr. Daniel Keown     Tahnee and Dan discuss: Qi is Spirit. The Triple Burner. Movement and electricity. Pregnancy and Jing essence. How Qi operates in the organs. The TCM channel system (Jing Luo). Hypertension and low blood volume. The Lymphatic system and Gaul bladder. How Qi, Jing and Shen operate in the body. The predictive power of traditional Chinese medicine. The subtleness of acupuncture in emergency medicine. Why movement is so important to the flow of Qi in the body. The damaging effects of Western pharmaceuticals on the body.    Who is Daniel Keown? Dr. Daniel Keown MD MCEM Lic Ac became interested in Chinese medicine when hearing from his octogenarian grandmother about her traveling around China. In 1998 he qualified in medicine from Manchester University, England, and then obtained a degree in Acupuncture from The College of Integrated Chinese Medicine in 2008. He continues to practice Western medicine having passed the membership exams of the College of Emergency Medicine (MCEM) in 2014. His enduring aim is to re-establish acupuncture and Qi at the forefront of medicine in the West. To this aim, he published The Spark In The Machine in 2014, which shows how the principles of Chinese medicine can be fully explained with a deeper understanding of how the human body works, an understanding that necessitates a semi-mystical force at work ie Qi. He lives in Kent, England, with his wife and two children, and still searches for the elusive perfect wave.   CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST    Resources: Dr. Daniel's website The House Of God book. The Uncharted Body- Dr. Daniel Keown The Spark In The Machine- Dr. Daniel Keown   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast? A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We'd also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or check us out on Stitcher, CastBox, iHeart RADIO:)! Plus we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Tahnee: (00:02) Yeah, I'm really excited to have you. I just wanted to give you a quick intro to what we do, so you have some context.   Tahnee: (00:08) So we have a Taoist tonic herb company here, my husband and I. My background is a little bit more... I've studied with someone called Mantak Chia, so I've done a fair bit of Taoist healing work. And we've both studied herbalism, but we have a lot of practitioners, a lot of people who are really interested in healing, listening to our podcast. It goes around the world. We've ranked in lots of countries, which is weird to us. But mostly our audience is in the Western countries, but we do have... Strangely, we're very popular sometimes in Korea and other places, which is very odd to me.   Tahnee: (00:44) But yeah. So, we tend to just talk about topics related to health and wellness through the lens of the Eastern medicine practice, but also open to all sorts of things.   Tahnee: (00:55) I'm also a Yin Yoga teacher, like I said, so I got introduced to your work a long time ago by my teacher. And yeah, so that's all that stuff around fascia and the more modern research around what might be going on in the body that starts to validate the Eastern model is really exciting to me.   Tahnee: (01:12) So that's the framework of what we do. We try to stay away from pathology. We're really interested in how people can take healing into their own hands. So that lens of education. But we do have a lot of practitioners, so I'm quite excited. I saw you've got some more courses coming up as well soon. So I'm excited to promote your work.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:33) Well. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Tahnee. What I didn't understand was how Qi operated in the organs. And so then I sat down and wrote The Uncharted Body. And when I started writing that book, I didn't actually know... Oh, wow. You've got it.   Tahnee: (01:49) We've got a couple of copies actually. We were going to do a giveaway. We've got a few of The Spark as well, but yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:55) Oh, great. Yeah.   Tahnee: (01:56) Hopefully to someone who will understand it. Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:59) Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. So that's what I'm turning into a course at the moment. Effectively, what I'm going to do is just turn that into animations.   Tahnee: (02:12) Mm. Yeah. The visualisations you do. Yeah, they're really good. And I remember years ago, you had some Vimeo videos as well that were addressing Qi and a few things.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (02:22) Yeah.   Tahnee: (02:23) This is probably five or six years ago from memory.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (02:27) Yeah.   Tahnee: (02:27) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (02:28) Yeah. That's right. Yeah. They're all still valid those videos, but I think what's happened is I've got much more sophisticated in my understanding of what's going on. So especially with regard to how simple it is, it's all very simple. That's one of the things I try and impress upon people. I mean, that book you just picked up, effectively, that takes you beyond university PhD level embryology.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (03:00) I bumped into an anatomy professor and I was talking about the coelomic epithelium, which forms the [inaudible 00:03:07] channel. And he'd never had a conversation like that with anyone ever before. And he was like, "Well, I'll have to actually check some of this stuff."   Dr. Daniel Keown: (03:17) So, even though that book looks dense and it looks thick, that is a complete anatomy, embryology, physiology, and medicine book. So it is actually not as onerous as it seems, because if you can understand that book, you basically understand medicine at a level that's beyond Western medicine at the moment.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (03:41) And the main thing is, it's just a translation. It didn't come out of my brain. The translation came out of my brain, but it's a translation of Chinese medicine into a form that the Western mind can appreciate and understand.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (03:57) And the key thing is that in order to really understand how the body operates, you've got to get into this concept of it's running on energy. It's definitely 100% without a shadow of doubt, running on energy. It's ridiculous to... To me, it's just like, how can anybody have thought it wasn't running on energy?   Tahnee: (04:18) Yeah. Especially when you are looking at healing and medicine. I've actually heard you say in another podcast, like a doctor just augmenting healing and the arrogance that we think that we're in any way in control, really, of the kind of healing mechanisms. It's really about removing those blockages to Qi and creating the capacity for that to just do the magic.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (04:43) Yeah.   Tahnee: (04:44) Yeah. It's something we've really missed in [crosstalk 00:04:46].   Dr. Daniel Keown: (04:46) The body wants to be well. Everyone's body wants to be well. There's nobody out there... Well actually, there's a few. Because people have perverse incentives to stay unwell, that's a societal issue. But generally people want to be well, and if you can bypass those societal issues, like sick benefits for instance, it is a perverse incentive to stay unwell. But yeah, people do generally want to be well. And so if you can just remind the body how to be well, then it tends to fall back into that pattern of wellness.   Tahnee: (05:30) Yeah. And I guess that's what I love about acupuncture, is it's just re-inviting that harmony and that movement toward wellness, instead of chopping out chunks or trying to take something away, or burn something or delete something in some way.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (05:48) One of my favourite books on medicine is called, The House Of God.   Tahnee: (05:54) I don't know that.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (05:54) Which is interesting. Because my first book was called, What God Forgot To Tell Surgeons. The House Of God is this classic book from the '60s, that was about a doctor who went through the medical system and realised how bankrupt it was. And he just about got through at the end. But he has these laws of the house of God, which are basically laws about how to operate within the Western medical system. And the first law is the art of medicine is doing as much nothing as possible.   Tahnee: (06:27) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (06:27) And I operate that law in emergency medicine. In emergency medicine, I try to do as much nothing as possible the entire time. In other words, you're like, "Whoa, we're dealing with this really delicate balance here, that's a bit effed up. And we don't want to suddenly move in there and mess things up even more, we want to be really gentle and just move things in the right direction." And generally, whenever I saw other people fuck up in emergency medicine, it's because they did that. They basically went in there with sledge hammers and fucked things up. But acupuncture is effectively as close as you could get to doing nothing, as you can get. I mean, literally it's like the very next thing to doing nothing.   Tahnee: (07:24) Well, it's so subtle.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (07:25) It's like I'm almost doing nothing, but I'm just going to do this tiny little thing. I'm going to take this tiny invisible needle, and it's actually so small I can barely even get it into your skin. That's a skill in itself, getting it through. And then I'm just going to move this energy. And then you're going to miraculously feel better. It's doing as much nothing as possible.   Tahnee: (07:48) I really like that. That's such a great way to describe it. Because it is, it's so subtle and yet it attunes to this really... Well I think, it doesn't stress the body or create more stress, so there's not that extra layer to deal with. I think about a lot of what happens in hospitals and it's like, first of all, the environment is quite challenging. And then, there can be a lot of intervention and that just creates more stress. And so the body's not really in a place to heal. It's, if anything in a survival response.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (08:23) The only Western medicine that works, and this is backed up by studies, is emergency medicine.   Tahnee: (08:30) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (08:30) None of the other Western medicine works. None of it works. If you actually look at the evidence to show Western medicine works, there's only evidence to show 15% of Western medicine works. From the study, this was a letter in the BMJ years ago, I think 15% of medicine, there's good evidence to show it works. 8% of medicine there's actually evidence to show it does harm. And the rest of it, there's no evidence either way. All of the surgery, there's no evidence to show it works. Yeah? And basically, because you can't do the studies. There's evidence to show it works.   Tahnee: (09:10) Don't chop that person, but do chop that person. Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (09:17) There's not the evidence that you would... They certainly use to discredit alternative medicine. There's certainly nowhere near that level of evidence to show it works. And when they do do studies into, for instance, surgery, where they can do studies, they are often very surprising. They show that placebo surgery is as efficacious as surgery. And so, the emperor has no clothes, as far as I'm concerned. However, emergency medicine, I'm an emergency doctor, still am, want to go back into it one day, I'm not going to argue with anyone who wants to say that emergency medicine works. It does work in my opinion. But when doctors go on strike, mortality drops every single time.   Tahnee: (09:59) Interesting.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (10:00) [crosstalk 00:10:00] going. Yeah. Yeah. It always drops. And that's because almost all of Western medicine, like the non-emergency stuff doesn't work.   Tahnee: (10:12) My husband and I always say that though. We're grateful it exists for car accidents and even broken bones and things. It's great to be able to go somewhere and have that treatment. But yeah, for chronic stuff, all the things we're seeing, and that's really the stuff we get, is a lot of people that have been through Western medicine and they're so disillusioned, they've been, basically... And it's things like autoimmune conditions, cancers, genetic stuff, these kind of long term chronic things that we don't have a system or a model in Western medicine that addresses it.   Tahnee: (10:46) And I've heard you speak to this, the sort of mind, body, spirit aspect, like that Jing, Qi, Shen, which is something we talk about so much in our work. And it just is seeing completely from the Western model. It's like, "Oh, cool. You've got a tumour. We can cut it out or we can radiate you or chemo you. But that's pretty much it."   Dr. Daniel Keown: (11:06) Yeah.   Tahnee: (11:06) It's like, well why does this person have this thing? It's not like it's dropped in from out of space or something. Where did it come from? So I think that's a really interesting topic, and I don't hear it addressed a lot. I guess there's pockets in Western medicine where people are interested in it, but not so much in large.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (11:27) Well, the fundamental problem with Western medicine, aside from emergency medicine, which is great and works. And I'll extrapolate that into any specialty that effectively does emergency. So emergency obstetrics is great. Emergency eye surgery is great. The reason I think that emergency Western medicine is so good, because effectively in an emergency you get down to a reductionist level of, "My eye is about to lose all sight because there's been a bleed in the back of my eye," for instance. "And if I get a laser in there and cauterise the blood vessel that's bleeding, it will stop bleeding." Yeah? "And that will possibly save my eye." Now, why is that eye bleeding? Western medicine is very useless at, because that's a much more holistic question. But when it comes down to pure reductionism, it works very well, Western medicine.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (12:21) And the fundamental problem at the core of the Western medical model, is there's no concept of Qi, there's no concept of spirit, which... Qi and spirit are the same thing, by the way, I don't know if you know that. But the origin of-   Tahnee: (12:35) You talk about it in your book.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (12:38) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.   Tahnee: (12:41) Well, I'd love if you could drill down on that a bit, because Qi was always... You Google it I guess, and people would get Qi is energy. And I think that's such a vague definition for people.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (12:53) Yeah.   Tahnee: (12:54) Do you have a working definition at the moment, that you are really loving? Or is there something...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (13:00) Yeah, I would call Qi the organising force of the body, best seen in the embryo. That's my working definition when it comes to sticking needles into people. It's kind of like a semi-mystical God-like quality. It's the life force, it's the same as the force in Star Wars.   Tahnee: (13:21) We use that analogy a lot too. The force. I just want to stop on that quickly. So when you say it's best seen in the embryo, because this is something I think is a really interesting and important thing, is like, embryologically we're unfolding along the lines of this blueprint, which is quite magical really, when you think about the fact that a sperm and egg become a baby, becomes a human. How does that know how to be that? And so that's the Qi factor, is the capacity to know what to become. Are you agreeing with me?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (14:02) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's reasonable. I don't see the Qi as having... It's able to take the instructions in the genetic code, and-   Tahnee: (14:16) So do you see that coming from Jing? Or are you...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (14:19) Yeah, it's more Jing. Yeah.   Tahnee: (14:20) Yeah. Okay.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (14:21) Yeah. Yeah. What you become is more Jing, definitely. So, the Qi is the energy that organises things.   Tahnee: (14:28) The activating force to decode that Jing blueprint, I suppose.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (14:35) Yeah, that's right. Yeah.   Tahnee: (14:36) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (14:37) Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's the thing, you've got to have Qi, Jing and Shen, in order for a person to exist. You can't have Qi without Jing and Shen, and you can't have Shen without Jing and Qi. You've got to have all three of those things to create a person. So, it's kind of difficult to describe one without the other two. Equally, Qi I see, it's the energy, it's the organising force, the organising energy that takes the Jing, the blueprint, and manifests that into matter. So, one of the best descriptions I heard was from Twitter. [crosstalk 00:15:22].   Tahnee: (15:22) The wise place of Twitter.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (15:24) Exactly, yeah. It's like the group consciousness, isn't it?   Tahnee: (15:30) The best and the worst of humanity.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (15:34) And somebody's came back and said, "Qi is the..." Now, I've got to get this right. And I didn't get it right last time either.   Tahnee: (15:45) Oh, it's high pressures. Deep breath.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (15:50) "It's the energy by which matter manifests into form." I haven't quite got this right. He put it so brilliantly and I haven't quite got it right. But basically, what he was saying is that matter... Life is a great example. You start off with a single cell and then suddenly, as you're going to find out, nine months later, and it's not even months, even by 12 weeks...   Tahnee: (16:15) I'm 22 weeks. And there's a human in there.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (16:19) Well, there we are.   Tahnee: (16:19) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (16:20) Well, basically, yeah. Yeah. Basically, a sperm and an egg combined, and then bang, you have a cell. And then somehow, magically over the next 12 to 22 weeks, that cell just multiplied, multiplied and made a baby. And it was the thing that allowed it to make that baby was organisation, and that force was Qi, that's what Qi is. But it had to have the Jing of the genetic code, in order to have the instruction manual to make the baby. And if it had a different genetic instruction manual it would make a baby mouse or baby [inaudible 00:17:00] or a baby whale or something like that.   Tahnee: (17:02) It's still a possibility. We never know. Talk to me in a few months.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (17:06) That would be pretty amazing. It's the same thing. It's the same Qi in a whale embryo as in a... I really see it like some kind of electricity. Qi's an analagist to electricity, but it's a life force electricity.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (17:25) I mean, it's interesting, in Star Wars, when the emperor tries to kill Luke Skywalker, it's electricity that comes out. I'm not saying Star Wars is [inaudible 00:17:37] Chinese medicine is based, I'm saying that Star Wars was stolen from a Japanese film, I think it was, that was based on-   Tahnee: (17:47) Yeah. Chinese medicine structure.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (17:48) Yeah, exactly.   Tahnee: (17:50) Yeah. The Taoist worldview.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (17:51) Yeah.   Tahnee: (17:52) Yeah. Because I think that's the idea... You speak about it in Spark, I'm pretty sure. I don't know. There's a man called Dr. Motoyama who my teachers are very interested in, and he was trying to measure Qi. And what he found was, it was a very, very low current, hard to measure electricity. And he got poo pooed by everybody because he had to invent a machine that was subtle enough to actually detect this stuff. And his work has not been widely accepted, but it's interesting because he's got this machine that actually measures all the meridians, and measures the flow of Qi in the body. And you speak about the DC current and AC current, and the sense that the Qi or the sort of regenerative force in the body is this more consistent flow. Is there any detail you have on that? Or is it still a bit out there?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (18:48) Yeah. No. But firstly, I'd never used the word meridians. I always say channels. Yeah. Yeah.   Tahnee: (18:55) Channels. I know. And I've been told off about that a thousand times. It doesn't actually translate.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (19:00) Yes. Exactly. That's the prime issue. It's a poor translation. So it's a Jing Luo, which is the channel network.   Tahnee: (19:12) And also, I think I always love the poetry of the Taoist...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (19:16) One second. There's some super bass going on in the background with my kids.   Tahnee: (19:22) I love it. I actually can't hear it.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (19:25) Oh, can you not hear it?   Tahnee: (19:25) No.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (19:25) Okay, fine.   Tahnee: (19:27) You're probably vibrating, but it's not coming through.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (19:32) Yeah. It's like, they're clearly playing some game with explosions. Okay. So yeah. So it's really important to get rid of... Oh, that's really loud. It's annoying me. Give me one second.   Tahnee: (19:43) Yeah. Go. Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (19:44) Hey, kids.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (20:07) Yeah. So channels. So the words were Jing Luo, and they were channels. In fact, they translate perfectly. If you look at the characters, I was just doing a video today about this. Because I keep saying this over and over and over again, and it never seems to get through. Well, it gets through, but very slowly. Because these things are [inaudible 00:20:27]. And so, it's clearly the connective tissue network, that's what they're describing. Fascia. And the best translation is channel. So this is really important, because you can have a conversation with lay people or especially doctors that goes like this. "Oh, well there's Qi in the body. It's like an energy, that's a kind of electricity that flows through the body and it flows through meridians." "What's a Meridian?" "Well, it's structures in the body that allow Qi to flow." "Okay. Has anyone ever shown these meridians?" "No." Kind of thing. Yeah?   Tahnee: (21:09) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (21:09) And you can have this conversation with any doctor. The conversation can go very differently. It can go something like this. And bear in mind, meridians is a terrible translation. It's not a good translation. It's not a valid translation of Jing Luo.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (21:25) And it goes something like this. "Well, the body runs on energy, electricity. You can see it for instance in the heart. But actually, every cell, every organ, every muscle runs on electricity, and that electricity has got information attached to it. And that's what Qi is." And they go, "Okay. So, how does this flow around the body?" "Well, it flows in channels in the body." And it's like, "Channels in the body? I don't know of any channels in the body." "Well, no, there's loads of channels in the body. Every time a surgeon operates, he basically moves through channels. And for instance, you've got the peritoneal channel. It's called a peritoneal cavity, but it's actually a channel in the body and that's the liver channel." "Oh. No, surely there's nothing flow..." And the doctor will say, "There's nothing flowing in that peritoneal cavity in the channel." "Yeah. There is. There's fluid flowing in the peritoneal channel. In fact, every single potential space in your body, and there's loads of them, there's an infinite number of them, has fluid flowing in them. And that fluid is flowing and that's a channel."   Dr. Daniel Keown: (22:23) And then, that conversation ends at that point. Their scepticism just evaporates because there's nowhere for them to go. That's why it's so important. That's why language is so important.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (22:36) And so, that's why I hate the word Meridian. For two reasons. Firstly, it's just an awful translation that the Jing Luo didn't have a neat translation to put it into for [inaudible 00:22:49]. So he put it into this word because someone said, "Oh, sounds a bit like that." And secondly, because it's such a bad translation, then you just go down this blind alley. Where basically, you are digging yourself a hole to put yourself into when you say that word. So that's why.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (23:12) So, to go back to your original question. Sorry, you touched a nerve there.   Tahnee: (23:17) No. Look, I really appreciate it. And I always think from the Taoist perspective of, everything is so poetic, and the body as landscapes and structures. And it's like, of course it's a channel or like a river, or even like the English Channel. It's a natural body, instead of this like an arbitrary kind of human construct of a Meridian or a lay line or something. So yeah, I totally hear you on that. And I think-   Dr. Daniel Keown: (23:43) Well, that's exactly it. Because a Meridian is a human construct.   Tahnee: (23:46) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (23:47) It's exactly that.   Tahnee: (23:48) And it doesn't actually mirror what's happening. And I think this idea...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (23:52) No. It's underground rivers. The character for Jing is drawn as underground rivers, carrying a mystical substance, which is obviously Qi. And it's like, okay. Well, yeah. I mean, nobody's going to dispute that on the earth there's underground rivers. There's 100% guaranteed, there's one-   Tahnee: (24:13) Keeping us alive. Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (24:16) [crosstalk 00:24:16]. And then it's like, okay, that's what the character's actually drawn as. It's drawn as underground rivers, which are enveloped by... Well, the character is sea, which people have translated as silk. But actually, it is very clear that it's not necessarily silk. It can be any material. In other words, it's fascia. So it's fascia carrying underground rivers. That's what Jing translates as. And Luo translates as a collagenous net.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (24:45) Now, where did, where did the M word come from in that? If you're going to translate it into one word, it's channels. But even channels doesn't really do that justice.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (24:58) And so, the key thing to understand about the Western and Eastern appreciation of the body, is the west is really obsessed with things. We're always obsessed with things in the west. It's fine. I quite like having a cup for you to drink your cup of tea out of.   Tahnee: (25:21) Useful, yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (25:22) But the cup is only useful because of the space within it. And so, the east is more thinking about the space within things. And the west is saying, "Ah." So the west was always like, "Where are these meridians?" And obviously-   Tahnee: (25:37) "Why can't I cut them out of a dead body?"   Dr. Daniel Keown: (25:40) Yeah. And it's like, "No, it's channels. It's spaces within the body." And so, within that space, travels this organising force that enables your body to stay connected. It has to stay connected. All the cells have to stay connected, otherwise you get things like cancer developing. Worst case scenario it's cancer, best case scenario, the cells just die if they're not connected anymore. And that energy that's travelling in the channels is basically a form of electricity. And it can be measured and it can be seen as well. There was a guy called Becker who measured it in amphibians, who have very powerful-   Tahnee: (26:24) [inaudible 00:26:24] frog head guy.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (26:26) Ah. Yeah, close. That was Spemann. That was a German embryologist. He didn't actually measure the currents, but he discovered that you can have parts of the embryo that control growth.   Tahnee: (26:41) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (26:43) Yeah.   Tahnee: (26:44) So these smaller animals, because you talk about this in Spark, the lower animals. But you talk about how that divergence to what a bigger brain we lose that regenerative capacity, the smaller, less developed animals.   Tahnee: (27:00) I remember as a kid, this is a horrible story, but I used to pull the tail off lizards and then keep them as pets. Because the tail would grow back. I thought it was really cool. Those poor lizards.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (27:12) It is cool.   Tahnee: (27:13) Yeah. It is really cool. And they always grew back slightly different.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (27:16) Do they bleed when you pull them off?   Tahnee: (27:19) No. They wriggled a lot though. I don't think they were happy. But yeah, say if they were-   Dr. Daniel Keown: (27:24) [crosstalk 00:27:24]. So hang on. You pulled them... I know this is displaying your inner psychopath.   Tahnee: (27:24) I know. Hopefully my inner scientist and not my inner psychopath. Yeah. I would have been maybe six or seven. But my house had a really big white wall. It was really hot and we'd always get these little lizards. I don't even know the species, but they were quite tiny. And if you stressed them or held their tails, they would try and run away and drop their tail as a survival mechanism.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (27:57) So you didn't pull them off. You basically just-   Tahnee: (27:59) Well yeah, they let them go, but I would hold them and-   Dr. Daniel Keown: (28:02) You encouraged them.   Tahnee: (28:06) I've got to say, I'm sounding like a psychopath. And then we would like look after them and try and keep them alive whilst they grew back.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (28:13) And they regrew.   Tahnee: (28:14) Yeah. So, say they were brown originally, they might grow back a funny lighter brown colour or something. And there'd be a little seam. It was always a little bit wonky.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (28:27) Yeah.   Tahnee: (28:27) But yeah. It was like, "Wow. This is cool." And so, when I read your book about how humans can grow back fingertips and things when they're babies. And I was like, "Oh, great." Haven't tried on my child.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (28:40) Yeah.   Tahnee: (28:40) Chopping off fingers or anything. But it is such an interesting... I think about Qigong and all of these practises that are designed to help us cultivate Qi. My teacher's 76 and he still looks about 50. He's just had children. He's got many children now. He had a kid a couple years ago. He's really defying what we would term ageing. And you can see, well, this practise is doing something to him where he's actually still holding onto that regenerative capacity for Qi.   Tahnee: (29:11) So I think it's a really interesting and under acknowledged area, I suppose, in our culture. Especially with health and healing, I just think if it's as simple as breathing practises, meditating, eating well, looking after ourselves mentally, why aren't we encouraging this more as a baseline human practice? So, yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (29:33) Yeah. Well, it's because there's not-   Tahnee: (29:38) Lots of shit going down.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (29:39) Yeah. It's difficult to mass produce that and profit from it effectively. It's not that there's no profit in it, there's definitely profit in it, but it's difficult to mass produce that and make profit from it. That's why, I think.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (30:01) Because yeah, that's kind of my mission at the moment actually, is to create a model of acupuncture that can be effectively mass produced, and people can practise... My ambition at the moment is to raise... So it has taken me 20 years to get to a point where basically, pretty much everyone I treat at the moment gets better. Which I find astounding. I'm amazed by that. Because as a Western doctor, I see people and I'm just like... If I didn't understand what I was doing, then I'd be like, that's just beyond medical comprehension. But it isn't, because basically you understand what Qi is. But it's taken me 20 years to get there.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (30:52) And my ambition is that I can create a teaching programme effectively, that can get you there in five years.   Tahnee: (30:59) Yeah. Fast-track that.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (31:03) And I would say where I am is generally where it takes you to get, if you're good, 40 years to get to. So in China, they say you're not mature until you're about 65. And I reckon I probably got there at age 47. But that's just because I've spent my entire life in medicine, effectively. And I've written a couple of books on it, and I've spent a lot of time studying. And I've had the advantage of a lot of information and...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (31:33) Yeah. But if we can get people there in five years, so if you're 20, you can get there ar 25, you can get to the point where it took me 15 years to get to, and then you've got another 40 years, 50 years, 60 years of practice, of getting people well. So that could be really revolutionary, in terms of where medicine goes. And that's my ambition at the moment.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (31:58) Because this stuff is so simple. It's unbelievably simple. My criteria for the videos I'm producing at the moment, is I'm going to show them to my 10 year old son. And if he doesn't understand them, then I'm like, that's-   Tahnee: (32:13) You're not doing your job.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (32:14) Yeah.   Tahnee: (32:15) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (32:15) Yeah. The whole thing's just so crazily simple. Even the function of the liver and stuff, it's just so simple. It dredges, drains and regulates. If you understand what those three words are, and bear in mind, I had to look up the word dredge to check exactly what it meant. And then I was like, "Holy shit. That's exactly what the liver's doing. It's dredging." It's dredging, to clear a waterway, especially of debris. That's what the definition is.   Tahnee: (32:47) Mm. They do it to... What are they called? Bays where boats go.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (32:53) Yeah.   Tahnee: (32:53) Yes.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (32:54) Yeah. That's it. And that's what the liver... The liver basically clears all the food that comes out of your digestive system.   Tahnee: (33:00) So are you talking about this... Because I had an acupuncturist who's unfortunately moved, but he was probably the first person who I started to drop in on how simple... I think before that it always seemed a little bit complicated and mysterious. And he got me looking into [inaudible 00:33:19] because he said the Chinese model's a little bit messed up. I think you call it cookbook acupuncture, which I really like. He's like, "There's a recipe, da, da, da." It's like, "No, you go straight to the [inaudible 00:33:32]. Symptoms are like a guidepost, but you can't always trust what the person's saying, da da, da."   Tahnee: (33:40) But I guess I often, coming from having learned a lot of this stuff, the kind of rote learn, like multiple choice, da, da, da, that sort of way of, the liver governs wood and it's spring. I've learned to think of it more like, "Okay, the liver, it's not the liver per se, but it's like the energy of every cell operating on that liver Qi level is the ability of the cell to dredge itself. The ability of..." Is this making sense? I hope this-   Dr. Daniel Keown: (34:14) It definitely works in that kind of aspect as well. Every cell within your body has respires and creates proteins, which is a liver function. Respiration is a lung function [crosstalk 00:34:28]-   Tahnee: (34:28) Lung function, yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (34:30) So it's got grey in the nucleus, which is also like the heart as well. And it's got little vesicles which are like stomachs, and it's got a membrane, which is like skin. So it is fractal in nature, the body. The heart will also effectively do functions of the liver as well, which is why if you get heart damage, some of the enzymes that are released are liver enzymes. And in the olden days, when I was a junior doctor, they used to check they didn't have something called troponins. And they used to do enzymes that were also produced by the liver. And there would be a bit of confusion about, has this person maybe just got a liver problem or is it a heart problem?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (35:12) So all of the cells within your body are kind of a microcosm of your body. Equally however, there are definitely six planes, six confirmations within your body that are the six systems I talk about in The Uncharted Body that are clear... In terms of practical medicine, they are as clear as the liver is within Western medicine, as the heart is within medicines. These six divisions are-   Tahnee: (35:44) So the [inaudible 00:35:45] Yang and all Tao Yin and all that sort of stuff.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (35:48) Yeah. That's it. And you can definitely think about them as... When you say about the liver, and you started to get, with all due respect, a little bit airy fairy about it-   Tahnee: (36:00) Yeah. Go for it.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (36:04) And that's kind of true. But actually the liver, the way to see it is the liver is like the biggest concentration of energy and cellular material within this division called [inaudible 00:36:17], this division has concentrated its energy and power, certainly in the lower aspect, within the liver, to perform this function that it has to perform within the body. But the layer is performing that function. And so, all the cells within that layer, which also include the peritoneal channel and also part of the venous system as well, will be performing that same function as well. It's just the body has concentrated that power within the liver itself, in the same way that in the United Kingdom, in a way everyone is performing a political system and even political function, and even within our town there'd be politicians of sorts, minor politicians. But the country has concentrated that political system within Westminster. Like burn the fuckers down, as far as I'm concerned.   Tahnee: (37:20) Don't burn your liver down.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (37:21) As long as no one's to blame. But yeah. And in the same way... I'm trying to think of another system that's not-   Tahnee: (37:33) Well, you were speaking on your blog about COVID and how you are seeing that sort of... I think it was the Tao Yin level, I could be wrong. It was the lung and spleen level.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (37:45) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So COVID affects the lungs and pancreas. And pancreas is part of-   Tahnee: (37:53) Yes. Pancreas. You're calling the spleen.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (37:56) Pancreas, yeah.   Tahnee: (37:57) Yep.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (37:59) Yeah. So, this is the amazing thing about this six division model of the body. So one of the big problems, Western medicine's got no predictive power. For me as a scientist, that's a massive problem. If you've got a scientific model or theory that has zero predictive power, that model's bunk. It's useless.   Tahnee: (38:15) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Dr. Daniel Keown: (38:15) Yeah? It's absolutely useless. And Western medicine does not have a model of how the body works, in my opinion. It's got little parts that work in isolation, but in the big picture, it doesn't have a model. In other words, it's not holistic. It cannot explain really how health is maintained. It just says, if you look at the WHO definition of health, it's just an absence of disease.   Tahnee: (38:40) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Dr. Daniel Keown: (38:41) I would say, no. Health is a smooth flow of Qi, effectively. You also need good Jing, and good Shen as well. But effectively, presuming your Jing, in other words, the body you were born with, and your Shen, in other words, your spirit and your soul, they're in good shape, then health is a smooth flow of Qi. If you've got a smooth flow of Qi, you'll have health. And then you can define what Qi is. But in Western medicine there's no model whatsoever of... And that's a big problem.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (39:13) Now within the six divisions, that has predictive power. So if you get a disease process occurring within one aspect of this division, it will also affect the other aspects of that division as well. So within COVID, COVID is a disease that really seems to affect the lung, especially. So then you say, "Okay, that's also going to affect everything else within Tao Yin, which is pancreas, spleen." I bet coronavirus will accumulate in the spleen. It's well known to cause diarrhoea. That's part of Tao Yin. And I bet you it's going to cause thyroid problems as well, long term. Things like Hashimoto's.   Tahnee: (39:53) Which is part of the lung...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (39:56) It's 100% part of the lung. Yeah.   Tahnee: (39:58) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (39:58) It's the messenger of the lung.   Tahnee: (40:00) And so, what I was being taught by this acupuncturist before he abandoned me, was that if that is allowed to stay in the body, that pathogenic factor, it will descend down. That's where you get the heart fire and these kind of problems, I guess, with COVID that are... When it actually gets really bad in people. Is that an accurate... I'm not going to say-   Dr. Daniel Keown: (40:21) Yeah.   Tahnee: (40:23) [crosstalk 00:40:23] Across the pathology.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (40:24) Yeah. The heart.   Tahnee: (40:26) Because the heart is the most, deepest layer of these six layers. So if it's getting there, it's bad.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (40:35) As befits the body, it's complex.   Tahnee: (40:44) Okay.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (40:44) This is what it's like to have to keep things simple. Yeah. Well you have to keep things simple. This is why I'm always like, "Look, let's just keep things as simple as possible." Because it fucking gets complicated. Guaranteed. Because every single person is different. So you have to keep this thing really simple. But yeah, the six divisions, bizarrely, the deepest level is Xue Yin, which is liver and peritoneum. However, the heart is also the emperor and is protected by everything. So it's the equivalent of the king on the chess board. Apparently fairly weak, but everything has to move around it to protect the king. You shouldn't ever really move the king in chess if you can get away with it.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (41:24) So it's the same. In a way, the heart as the emperor is the deepest, but in another way, it isn't. Within the six divisions, it's actually not the deepest. And this, I'm still trying to get my head around exactly what that means.   Tahnee: (41:43) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Dr. Daniel Keown: (41:44) Yeah. If it sounds a bit confusing it's because it [crosstalk 00:41:50]. I mean, this is really simple medicine compared to Western medicine, but we're still dealing with an organism that's unbelievably complex. And the body is just unbelievably complex.   Tahnee: (42:05) Well, like you said, with pathology too, you're treating individuals who are showing up with their own constitutional patterns, and all the unknown factors of what a human gets up to day-to-day.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (42:18) Yeah.   Tahnee: (42:18) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (42:19) Exactly. They pop up into your clinic after 47 years of existence, and just go, "I've got pain here." Somehow unravel that 47 years of existence and find out what's causing that pain there. And that's when you just have to go, "Man, I can't have too much information at this point because it's going to really fry my brain." So, you just have to kind of keep things as simple as possible.   Tahnee: (42:49) And you're listening to the pulse. You're kind of working through on that level. I had a guy the other day on the podcast, who's an acupuncturist. And he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said, "When I needle stomach 34, I don't actually think I'm needling the organ." And I was like, "Well, what do you think you're doing?" And he sort of... I didn't feel like we got anywhere with the answer. And I'm like, this is interesting that someone who practises this medicine doesn't really believe... And I'm not trying to poo poo him.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (43:23) I completely disagree. When I needle stomach 36...   Tahnee: (43:28) That's the one, yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (43:30) I've never needled stomach 34.   Tahnee: (43:32) No, it was 36. I'm pregnant and [inaudible 00:43:34].   Dr. Daniel Keown: (43:35) But that needle, the way I feel that needle going into a plane within the body, a tissue plane, like a fault line within the body that is then directly connecting to the entire gastrointestinal tracts and especially the stomach, but it's the entire... So no, for me, it's the opposite. When I needle these points, I'm like, this is connecting to that organ. As far as I'm concerned, there's no contradiction between Western and Eastern about how the body operates, apart from one important thing. And that is that Western medicine is a primitive model of the body, that's not particularly helpful and actually fits in underneath the Chinese medicinal model of the body, as a kind of useful adjunct in emergency situations. That actually, because it has no model of health, because it has no model of how the body operates, and because effectively, the way it's been organised is back to front.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (44:41) So, what Western medicine has done is, it didn't start off with a model of how the body operates, and instead has used a microscope to look closer and closer into the body, and then-   Tahnee: (44:53) Rebuild.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (44:54) [crosstalk 00:44:54] the body. Yeah. So, the equivalent I explain to people is, imagine if you didn't have an idea of the phylogenetic tree of life. Yeah? I don't know if you know what that means. It's like the idea that we all came from jellyfish and jellyfish... Which we did actually, thankfully from my [inaudible 00:45:11]. But there's another story behind that as well, actually, that I might tell you another time. But imagine instead of that phylogenetic tree of life, where we came from jellyfish and jellyfish then turned into... I don't know, molluscs and snails and whatever. And then they developed into vertebrates, and they developed into-   Tahnee: (45:32) Higher mammals and things, yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (45:34) Higher mammals. You've got it. Yeah. Imagine if you were just looking right at the top, and you saw all of these different animals, and you have no idea of the phylogenetic tree, which is the equivalent of embryology. And you started to categorise all those different animals according to what they did and how they behaved. And you went, "I'll tell you what. Why don't we put all flying creatures into the same bracket? Because they appear to all be behaving in the same way. So we'll put bats and birds and... What else flies? Flying squirrels. We'll put all of those. They're all flying animals, so they must be related. And everything walking on two legs must be related as well. So we'll put chimpanzees and humans and ostriches and..."   Tahnee: (46:20) Kangaroos.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (46:22) "Kangaroos. Yeah. They're all related as well. So they're all related. They're all related." That is what Western medicine's done with the body. It's basically taken all of these things and grouped them together, into systems that don't make embryological sense.   Tahnee: (46:37) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (46:37) And you really have to have a good grasp of medicine and the body to understand exactly what I'm talking about at this point. But that's what they've done.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (46:48) Now, what the six division model is, is an embryological model that builds from the bottom upwards. So, the original three divisions were endoderm, exoderm and mesoderm. Which, anyone who studied any medicine probably knows. And that's the end of their embryology. And what happens, the endoderm and the exoderm become Tae Yin and Tae Yang, which stay as consistent division or layers within the body. And the middle division, the mesoderm splits into four, and that forms then things like the heart, kidney and vascular system, the arterial system, which will become Shao Yin.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (47:27) Now, if you have this model of the body, you can make predictions about how each of these divisions are going to behave. And the fact that a pathogen or even a drug that affects one of the aspects of this division will affect all of the other aspects.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (47:43) So for instance, my favourite one is with hypertension is always a problem of Shao Yin. It's always a problem with a lack of blood effectively, to the body and the body then responds by increasing the pressures, as you would in any fluid system.   Tahnee: (47:59) Blood [crosstalk 00:48:00].   Dr. Daniel Keown: (48:00) Yeah, exactly. You would increase pressure. And so that's what hypertension is. It's the body that has perceived a lack of blood for whatever reasons. And therefore, that is always a problem with Shao Yin, of the heart, kidney, or the blood vessels themselves, the arterial system. And every single anti hypertensive known to man, with one exception, acts on that-   Tahnee: (48:22) On that level.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (48:23) On either the heart, the kidney or the blood vessels. And the same with COVID. So COVID has got a particular propensity for attacking the Tae Yin system, which is all about dampness and the phlegm. And that's why it attacks the pancreas, that's why it attacks the lung, that's why it gives you diarrhoea. And it will, like I said, it almost certainly is going to give you thyroid problems. And also it will have a propensity to hang around in the spleen, which is why hydroxychloroquine works so well as well.   Tahnee: (48:52) Mm-hmm (affirmative). And that's making me think around that Wei Qi level as well. If you're talking embryologically, that surface protective level, sort of this making sense that we're going to have this really deep... Because you were saying before, the liver is right in the middle there, it's that very, very centre of the egg, I suppose. Is that what you were talking about before? I'm just trying to build this puzzle out in my mind.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (49:28) Yeah, the six divisions though, I like to think... Yeah, yeah. In a way in the middle it's a bit like...   Tahnee: (49:38) Yeah, I know it's not accurate to say the middle, but I think it's Deadman's model. There's layers, like the surfboard layers, and they kind of...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (49:48) It's like Russian dolls.   Tahnee: (49:50) Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (49:51) So the skin in the Tai Yang, the skin is your outer layer of the Russian doll. And then right in the middle is your Xue Yin, your liver right in the middle. That innermost... Now, the interesting thing is, that obviously the inner and the outer have to connect. Yeah?   Tahnee: (50:10) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Dr. Daniel Keown: (50:11) Things have to always flow. Things always have to flow. And there is actually a connection between, effectively, your Xue Yin and your skin, and in women that's through your uterus and vagina.   Tahnee: (50:26) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Dr. Daniel Keown: (50:26) So when the sperm, it actually swims in through the skin, effectively through that little hole in your skin, called the vagina, and it swims into the uterus, which is actually in the peritoneal channel, which is Xue Yin.   Tahnee: (50:48) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (50:50) So, it is, you're right. The liver is your innermost layer. But connects to the outside, through the uterus. And then that connection is the rebirth of new life.   Tahnee: (51:04) And I guess, is that then pointing to that blood layer being... Because again, through my understanding of being a patient really is, being needled on that blood layer, it's very deep, quite painful. Because the liver's responsible for storing the blood and all of that sort of stuff, are we looking... Because I think about the uterus as well, the sea of blood, it's like this kind of idea of that deep substance of women being blood and for men, it's more Qi. So do you guys have a different connection between the Tae Yang?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (51:36) Yeah. Between Xue Yin and Tae Yang. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm just speaking...   Tahnee: (51:47) Theoretically?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (51:47) Yeah, because the interesting thing about our sperm is, it kind of effectively at an embryological level comes out of your Tae Yang, your kidneys, bladder.   Tahnee: (52:06) Well that's where the Jing element comes in, I guess. Yeah?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (52:12) Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely a different kind of embryological process going on.   Tahnee: (52:19) Interesting. Children.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (52:23) Yeah. I was trying to work out what it is. Yeah.   Tahnee: (52:26) I want to jump back to electricity because we were talking about that when we got wonderfully distracted. But yeah, I think that's an interesting... It seems really logical to me that we're governed by this electric force, but it's not really that...   Dr. Daniel Keown: (52:42) One second.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (52:42) Kids. What's up? Right. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen. It's simple, yeah. You can either stop crying and watch telly and enjoy yourself, or [inaudible 00:53:11] it's time for bed.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (53:25) Okay. Might just take a pause for a bit.   Tahnee: (53:29) Yeah, that's fine.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (53:31) Yeah. I'll just try and...   Tahnee: (53:33) That's my future.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (53:36) It's time for bed. Right, bedtime. Come on, bedtime. Well you have to stop crying immediately. Immediately. Okay. Now [inaudible 00:53:54]. Okay. Right. This is going back in the freezer because you're only allowed one. How come you have two? All right. Listen, listen. If you start crying again, it's fine, it'll be bedtime. Okay? So pull yourself together.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (54:20) Okay.   Tahnee: (54:29) We can make this very short.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (54:32) Negotiation. Yeah. It's always negotiation.   Tahnee: (54:38) Little ones.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (54:40) I'll just mute it because...   Tahnee: (54:43) Yeah, no stress.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (54:45) I'm just going... Yeah.   Tahnee: (54:46) Negotiate. Good luck.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (56:15) Yeah. Harry's my oldest. He's 11. And he's worked it out. He's basically worked out that, so long as he does what I ask him to do, which I like to think I'm fairly reasonable, he can do what he likes outside of that. Whereas Cora's a bit more likes her drama a little bit more.   Tahnee: (56:33) How old is your daughter?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (56:35) That was me saying basically you can have your drama, but then it's game over.   Tahnee: (56:40) Yeah. How old is your daughter?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (56:43) She's seven.   Tahnee: (56:44) Seven. Okay. Yeah. I have a five year old, so I'm gearing up for siblings.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (56:52) Five year old girl or boy?   Tahnee: (56:53) I have a girl. Yeah. She's got a tendency for theatrics sometimes as well. I think it's just kids. Yeah, I won't keep you too much longer because I know it's the witching hour with little kids. But yeah. If you're happy to jump back into the electricity conversation.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (57:14) Yeah, sure.   Tahnee: (57:14) And then we can start to wrap it up. Yeah.   Tahnee: (57:17) So yeah, I guess we got very pleasantly distracted, but I want to bring it back to the electricity conversation, because I think I've always... I guess, especially since discovering fascia and the research around [inaudible 00:57:32] electricity and all this stuff, I was like, "Okay, so this makes a lot of sense to me." I've always felt a bit like a glow stick. If I move it's like I light up. I don't know if that makes sense. But like cracking all of my bits makes me feel really alive. And so that made a lot of sense to me. And you speak about that in The Spark, around these electric currents. So if there's any elaboration you can give on that, or how you see that.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (57:56) Yeah. This all links into the triple burner and fascia, and this concept of... So, collagen is something like 30% of our body protein.   Tahnee: (58:07) Mm. Really high.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (58:10) And then the water within our body is 60% of our body, of which... No, I think it's higher than 60%. I haven't checked this recently, but something like 40%.   Tahnee: (58:19) [inaudible 00:58:19].   Dr. Daniel Keown: (58:19) Yeah. And something like 40% of your body water is extracellular. Yeah? So in other words, 30% of your body protein is collagen, which is extracellular, and 40% of your body water is extracellular. And Western medicine just pretends that those two things don't exist. There's no organ for either of them. There's no concept of when you replace fluids in the body, it's really blood that you're trying to replace when you give intravascular. So effectively, Chinese medicine goes, "No, no, no, no, they're two organs." They're triple burner, and what we call lymph is effectively gallbladder. And gallbladder is an interesting one. The gallbladder definitely does control lymph. It keeps it clean, because the most important thing in lymph is your fat content. It's fat that basically will bind up lymph and stop it moving correctly.   Tahnee: (59:25) Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Dr. Daniel Keown: (59:27) And the gallbladder is critical in making sure your fat's emulsified, which is why-   Tahnee: (59:33) That makes so much sense when you think about where the fat deposits and then the lymph, and just the aesthetic of that. Yeah. Makes so much sense. And then that being associated with [inaudible 00:59:44] Yang.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (59:48) Yeah. You can really [crosstalk 00:59:50]. When you're feeling like all stiff and groggy and phlegmy, you can imagine that fluid within you is actually also just full of gunk.   Tahnee: (01:00:01) Mm.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:00:02) I mean, it is. When people come to me and say, "I feel like I've got brain fog." I'm like, "Well, you have. You've got gunk in your brain. You're not imagining it. It's not like you've woken up in the morning going, 'Mm. I think I'm going to imagine I've got gunk in my brain.' Brain fog. Yeah."   Tahnee: (01:00:27) That was one of the most mind blowing things for me. I remember about 10 years ago, they were like, "The brain has lymph." And I'm like, "Are we really just accepting that?" I think before that they always were like, "No, no." It's like, "Of course it does."   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:00:41) Yeah. I know.   Tahnee: (01:00:43) Yeah. But was only I think 10 years ago, they discovered the [inaudible 01:00:45], I guess, that did that, or whatever it was.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:00:48) Yeah. So the triple burner. So all of this collagen that makes the fascia, that makes the connective tissue, and actually even gets down into the bones themselves and makes the bones themselves that everyone thinks of them as hard minerals, but really they are collagen. And I actually did this myself because I didn't believe it. But if you take a chicken bone and pour it into a bowl of vinegar, it will dissolve all of the mineral, and you'll be left with this collagenous bone that is unbelievably strong. You will not break this thing. You can flex it because it's just made out of collagen. The crystals of hydroxyapatite are there to keep the bone stiff, so that you can resist gravity effectively. Because fish don't need this, because they don't need to resist gravity, but we do.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:01:45) But that's the only reason there, but the collagen is still there and it's unbelievably strong. You will not break this. And this creates a three-dimensional web within your body, that's an organ. There's no doubt about it in my mind. That is definitely an organ. In fact, it's probably as important as all of the other organs in your body. And this is the triple burner.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:02:13) And one of the interesting things about the triple burner is the burner part of it. Why is it called a burner? And the reason is... There's a few reasons, but one of the main reasons is this thing creates electricity as you move. It creates energy as you move. In the same way that when you click a cigarette lighter, it makes a little spark of electricity. This is also doing that through piezoelectricity. And this is why, if you sit at a desk, especially in a slightly cold room for a few hours, you get up and you suddenly feel really cold, and it's a deep cold that goes to your bones, because this network does go to your bones, and why you have to... If you get moving for a bit, you start warming up. And then everyone thinks, "Oh, it's because you get the blood pumping, and you've metabolically increased your rate." But actually it's really because you're moving your triple burner. You're moving your-   Tahnee: (01:03:09) [inaudible 01:03:09] system, effectively.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:03:10) Yeah. And that's creating electricity, and that's really what's warming you up. I mean, the other two things are probably important, your blood pumping and also metabolically warming you up. But I think they're less important than actually the fact that you are making your triple burner, your fascial network, wake up, warm up.   Tahnee: (01:03:29) Because some definitions of fascia include the blood vessels, because of that sort of structure, I suppose they have. Do you include that in your definition?   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:03:38) No. Because I'm now completely six divisions.   Tahnee: (01:03:42) Yeah. Okay. And yeah, that Chinese model. Yeah.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:03:48) Blood vessels are interesting, because they actually sit within two divisions. And this is backed up by embryology. So your arterial system is part of Shao Yin, and that's linked into kidney and heart, whereas your venous system is actually Xue Yin. And they do emerge embryologically from two different areas. I mean, they're in a similar starting position because they're both mesoderm, but then they branch off.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:04:17) And interestingly, the venous system shares more embryologically with the lymphatic system, than with the arterial system. Which fits perfectly because the venous system sits within Xue Yin, which is paired with Shao Yang, and Shao Yang is lymphatic system, which takes us back to the triple burner. And the lymphatic system and the triple burner, are basically the yin and yang of that aspect because the triple burner provides the structure for the lymphatic system to flow through.   Tahnee: (01:04:49) Mm-hmm (affirmative). So you are not just, because I've heard some people define the triple burner as those three pleural cavities, like the fascial sort of-   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:05:00) Yeah. Yeah. That's part of it. Yeah. That's part of it.   Tahnee: (01:05:03) But yeah. You are taking a broader, whole body definition, I suppose, where it's really every fascial connection through the body.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:05:15) It's exactly like you were saying before with the liver. And about how the liver is the densest concentration of energy, the Westminster of the political system in the United Kingdom. And the triple burner, the most powerful manifestation of this ability for fascia to divide up the body, manifests in these three burners, which are basically the pleura pericardium, or the chest, the peritoneum, or the abdomen, and the retroperitoneum, or the pelvis. The pelvis, abdomen, chest are the triple burners. But really the triple burner is this ability for fascia to divide up the body.   Tahnee: (01:06:01) Mm-hmm (affirmative). So all of these compartments and sacks that we find within the body. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I think for people, because I guess a lot of acupuncturists throw away the triple burner, the [inaudible 01:06:17]. I think if you think about what Mao Zedong and that sort of legacy of Chinese medicine, we end up with the triple burner being almost clinically irrelevant. But just what you are explaining sounds incredibly important.   Dr. Daniel Keown: (01:06:32) Oh, gosh, yeah. I love the t

Do you want to sell your agency in the future? What strategic relationships can help you grow and possibly sell your agency? Roy Chong was working in the music industry for many years before deciding to make a drastic change and start over in digital marketing. Now with Noodle Wave Media he helps companies in the healthcare space thrive by developing meaningful strategies and tactics that move their marketing efforts towards success. In this interview with Jason, Roy discusses the most important decisions he made for his business, how he always envisioned a strategic partnership for the future of his agency, and why you should always take your passion wherever you go. 3 Golden Nuggets The most important decisions for his business. Roy never really saw a reason to rent an office space he could not afford at the time, so very early on he invested in having a remote working model with a team that could work from anywhere in the country. It shaped the way his agency works and its culture because he acknowledges that not everyone likes or can work remotely. Finding those types of people that shared this vision really helped build their culture. The second biggest decision was niching down to focus on the healthcare vertical, where the agency really found its footing and scaled to the point where he could sell the agency. Making the decision to sell. Roy always envisioned a strategic partnership for his agency. He knew it was in his future but just needed to figure out how it would work and what would be the right time to pursue it. Jason helped him by pointing out some things he needed to work on, which provided some time to add another layer of value for clients. He also had time to consider what he didn't want to lose with the deal, and the type of relationship he expected from this partnership. All of this ultimately led him back to Jason and to the partnership that would enable him to still be in charge of day-to-day operations. Taking your passion wherever you go. If you ever have to start again from scratch remember to take your passion with you. Passion is commonly depicted as what we do, “that isn't necessarily true,” Roy says, “It's who you are.” At one point in his career, he made the transition from the music industry to digital marketing. There is seemingly no correlation between both, but Roy argues what made the difference and helped him succeed in a new industry was taking a passion for helping people with him. Sponsors and Resources E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design and development agency that has provided white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM Finding a Strategic Relationship That Fits Your Agency Growth Goals {These transcripts have been auto-generated. While largely accurate, they may contain some errors.} Jason: [00:00:00] Hey, Roy, welcome to the show. Roy: [00:00:04] Hey! Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: [00:00:06] I'm excited to have you on the show. So, uh, for the ones that have not heard of you yet, tell us who you are and what do you do? Roy: [00:00:13] Yeah, so I'm the CEO and founder of Noodle Wave Media. We're a full-stack digital marketing agency focused on the healthcare vertical. I've been doing that for 11 years. Prior to that, I was in the music industry as a music producer, and I've got kind of that entrepreneurial spirit so I flipped a couple of the businesses along the way. Father of two amazing boys and a passionate creative and marketer. Jason: [00:00:44] And how did you get started and how long ago did you start your agency? Roy: [00:00:49] Yeah, so I started it probably in 2000, around 2010. I had just kind of rotated out of the music industry and I'd spent 10 years there writing music for artists and I got signed to a production deal in New York and I was running the artists for my idols, and then I did a stint in Korea. And then I decided, you know what, I'm kind of done with this it's time to start something new. And I realized at that time I'd been in the content game for 10 years. I thought, boy, combine that with using ability to create content and find a thread that resonates with people and tie that to helping small businesses, cause I had a marketing education and experience already, that could be something. And so I started that 10 years ago with that exact premise of leveraging content to help brand build brand equity for clients. But at that time, like, and you'll know this, Jason, like that wasn't a thing, really. Large brands we're doing that, leveraging YouTube and all kinds of other platforms, but the small business owner didn't really have access cause they just didn't know how to do it. So I started it at that time with that premise in mind. And I just remember people thought, yeah, but like who's going to search for a content marketing agency like that just seems offbeat and really way off the normal path, because you know, their traditional brick and mortar agency was the way to go. I don't know, but I think it's going to be something. And of course, we all know that content marketing became the thing and we've been on a steady increase in incline from there, leveraging that idea that kind of the small to medium-sized business owner doesn't realize that the biggest piece of equity that they have is the knowledge in between their ears and the experience that they have. So we just provided them the platform and support to do that. And here we are 2021 and... 22 geez 22. I lost the year. I think we all lost a couple of years there. Jason: [00:02:43] We all did lose a couple of years. What was the biggest deal that happened to your agency or what's the most exciting thing to you and why when you were growing your agency? Roy: [00:02:56] I definitely would have to say that I built the agency on the remote working model or distributed model, however you want to call it. And I did it really out of just trying to solve problems. You know, I couldn't afford office space. Like I just didn't have the cashflow, but then also at the same time, I was like, does it really even make sense for me to have an office? Because it's just going to eat into my margins. This is just the way that I thought at that time that well why can't I just hire a bunch of people who live wherever, but are super talented and have them work on these projects with me. It ended up of course, being very prescient and not until COVID hit that everybody else got it. But of course, leading up to that, that trend was already there, right? So COVID obviously the big pull ahead, but I would be championing this whole remote working lifestyle and people just didn't get it. Like it was another thing that people thought I was crazy. Like, well, you need an office, right? Cause you need to have clients come and see you. I was like, I don't think so. I don't think I need that. And for us, that ended up probably being the single most important decision that we made as an agency, just to keep that. And my vision was always, can I scale this? Could it be like from one man band man show to like 10 staff, then how about 20? How about 30 then? How about a hundred? How about 300? Keep going from there. And that's just kind of, what's continued to happen today. And of course, when COVID hit people are like, oh, okay. I get it. That makes total sense. And now at a global scale where we're doing this thing. Jason: [00:04:22] I love the remote thing because you know, you can recruit way out far, you know, all over the world rather than just driving distance. And then also too your team works a hell of a lot harder because they're not in a commute. I remember when I had an agency in Atlanta, I had some people that were in a car for two hours a day that could have been doing other things, having fun, relaxing, working on the business, maybe. Roy: [00:04:50] Yeah, totally. Yeah. And that was the real value proposition. And actually, I don't know if a lot of people realize this though, maybe now they do, but at that time have... being in a remote working model, only certain people would thrive under that environment. Like you and I would probably both know like people that just, they need to be around people. They need to be in an office. And that works for certain people and that doesn't work for other people. So, um, it ended up becoming a pretty cool automatic filter for developing a culture of people who worked the same way, who thought the same way who had the same kind of time management skills and critical thinking skills. So just again, like when I say that that was the single most important decision, not only from an operational standpoint but like from a culture standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, like you mentioned, it had a lot of trickle-down effects, you know, making that choice. Jason: [00:05:41] Other than, you know, doing the remote, working and figuring that out. What's the most important thing that you learned running your agency the past years? Roy: [00:05:50] Uh, for sure. The other thing would be probably niching down in this specific vertical that's super key. I always knew that at some point that I would want to either exit the business or develop a strategic partnership. I knew we didn't have the, necessarily the resources or the kind of client base to be a bigger agency. And our, my strategy was always to be part of a bigger agency. So I just thought about like, what would make us attractive to an agency that already has, and does everything? And for us that would just be to let's find a specialty, let's niche down. And it kind of just organically happened. Like I didn't set out to build a company that like provided marketing services to the oral health care space. It's not something that you like set out to do necessarily. It was just through relationships. And as I kind of saw that continuing to grow in our reputation as, okay, we've got to double down on this vertical. So by niching down two things happened. One, yes, we prepared ourselves for an eventual exit where we gained domain expertise in this one vertical. But it also, from an implementation standpoint, when we ran campaigns, it was just so much easier. Like there was no learning curve. Over the years, we developed expertise in orthodontic, dental care, pediatric dentistry. All these different verticals. So we knew that our target audience. We knew what the client did. We knew what the value propositions were in general at all we had to kind of do was hunt for the nuance of that specific client in that specific geographic area. We compress the discovery process time to really short period of time because we know the industry, right? So that was the other kind of key thing for us. Jason: [00:07:32] Awesome. And eventually, you sold the agency. So why did you decide to sell? And kind of walk us through that process as well. Roy: [00:07:41] Well, it's funny because my own personal journey was thinking about, you know, when is it time to kick in the strategic partnership that I always envisioned would need to happen? What time does that look like and when does that need to happen? And as I was going through that journey of searching, I found you through that journey, which was so funny. And, uh, you know, kudos to you and your funnels and your content and having stuff out there that allowed other agency owners to discover that. And I learned a lot just from reading some of your content about what I needed to do to prepare but also engaged you in a conversation at that time. You were gracious enough to entertain just a quick chat and let me know that there's some things that maybe I need to work on. And so, I think for me personally it was just knowing that it was time for me to add another layer of value to the clients. But also being real with myself in terms of what I wanted out of my lifestyle. There's kind of a, like, I could easily say I could grow this business and then exit, you know, in the next five years if I wanted to, but what's the cost, right? Like what am I giving up in terms of my lifestyle in order to do that? I think when we get into leadership conferences or we talk with other entrepreneurs, we talk about the KPIs and the metrics and the sales figures and all that stuff. But oftentimes we don't talk necessarily about what's the livestock cost. What is the other side of that coin? And I think for me, it just wasn't worth it to do it alone. And that was the point when I said, okay, it's time to find a strategic partnership. And that's what sent me on that journey. And it's funny because it didn't happen for two years, right? Like I started it and I thought about it and I marinated on it. I think at the time you were like, Hey, there's some things you work on. And then two years later, I was like, hey, I worked on these things. What do you think? And then the conversation continued from there. Jason: [00:09:31] Are you looking for a reliable partner to increase your agency's bandwidth so you can take on more projects? You know, our partner at E2M wants to help you grow your revenue, your profit margins without increasing your overhead costs. Now, they're a white label, web design and development agency that's been providing white label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Their team is over 120 experienced, skilled digital experts that's highly motivated to help you get more done in less time. Now they can help you in all kinds of digital areas, including web design development, e-commerce, SEO, copywriting, content marketing, and a lot more. If you're not sure whether E2M is the right fit for your agency, I want you to check out their flexible and transparent pricing model. Go to  e2msolutions.com/smartagency. For a limited time, they're offering my smart agency listeners 10% off for the first three months of service. That's e2msolutions.com/smartagency. Jason: Yeah, I always, I tell agencies the ones that have visions for possibly selling because too, like if you get to a certain point and you may not want to sell. It's not right for everyone. And sometimes Thomas and everybody at Republix gets mad at me cause I'll talk people out of it sometimes. But like you shouldn't sell, you got everything you want. And then sometimes the other people were like, no, I want to take chips off the table. I want to sell, I want to do other things. I want to have a life after selling the agency. And I'm like, okay, cool. And I'm glad that you came back because I always tell people, start relationships with the people now that you think could buy you later on. And right? Like we talked two years prior and then we were able to, you know, strike up a deal, and I'm so excited that we were able to do that. And too many people think about, well, I'll sell when things are bad. I'm like, no, no, no. You're not going to get what you want. You're not going to be happy afterward. Cause it has to work for both parties. Sell when things are really good. Roy: [00:11:42] Yeah, totally. Yeah. And it was interesting, I liked what you said about relationships because I did explore, you know, going the broker route and people had approached me over the years with that, uh, let me just entertain some of these conversations, but there wasn't that like relationship aspect, it was very transactional in a sense. And at that point, I was like, wait a second. I got to reach back to Jason. Cause we had a conversation about this before. Like I actually kinda forgot because I, you know, there's all these other opportunities coming down the pipeline and then it just so happened that it was the relationship-based connection that ended up working out, right? Jason: [00:12:16] Yeah. I mean, that's what I tell everybody is like your net worth is what your network is. You know, and the people that you know, and you hang out that you trust and they trust you. I mean, that's why we've been doing the mastermind for so long. It's about getting the right people around so you can create those relationships over time. What surprised you going through the acquisition? Was there anything that surprised you? Roy: [00:12:43] Oh, for sure. Yeah. It was a lot more challenging than I thought it was going to be, right? Like, I know you had prepared me with a couple of kind of points about this is going to be a lot of cows. And of course, Thomas and the team at Republix, they've been through it a million times and so they knew what was going to happen. Like they're preparing me, like it's going to get busy, but it's very challenging to switch the hat between all of these corporate finance and other aspects of your business that perhaps, I mean, some industry leaders and agency owners might know that stuff really well, some don't and they leave it to their bookkeeping and accounting team. I think it's wise to have a breadth of knowledge across all of those disciplines, right? But to the extent of like doing the deal, managing lawyers, managing accountants, and then in a very active way, more so than you would normally running your business. And then on top of that, running your business, right? It became pretty challenging. So it was, I knew that it was going to be weighty, I mean, it's such a deeply personal decision that you make. So there's that, that's the other component like there's this emotional attachment to going through this process and then you're like doubting yourself or like is this the right time? Should I be doing this and that? And then there's negotiating aspects. This is all these emotions that are happening, right? Jason: [00:14:05] It's my baby. How can I sell my baby? Roy: [00:14:09] It's my baby, how can I…? And then you have people saying you shouldn't sell this and other people be like, oh, you should totally do it, that's amazing, right? So I think what I wasn't prepared for was the emotional rollercoaster that I was going to go through with that. But in the end, what happened was, you know, luckily that it was a, I could see it through like this, this, this storm and on the other side of this storm is the breakthrough and the completion, and then it kind of winds down. So I think for any agency owner, that's thinking about selling, there is that storm you're going to, it's going to get tougher. It's going to get busy. You're going to go through the storm and then you will eventually come out that other side. Even if you don't sell the business, you learn a ton of about your business along the way. Jason: [00:14:48] Why tell people…? Cause there's lots of people that reach out and be like, oh, we want to buy you. And then they right they're, they're scumbags. But I say like for legit people, you should go through the process because like you said, Roy, you're going to learn a ton. And then you're going to really know, because I went through it a couple times before we actually sold in order to learn more about like, what do they need? So then when we finally did go through it for real, we had everything like, here it is, here it is. Boom, boom, boom. There is still that emotional roller coaster. I think I flipped a coin to decide if I was going to do it or not. Like, literally it was like 50, 50. It all worked out really well. What was the turning point for you? Because you know, you're going ups and down. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. What was the turning point for you when you were like, all right, I'll do it? And how close was it to the close? Was it like the night before? Roy: [00:15:44] Yeah. Like if you talk to Thomas, he'll say, yeah, this is one of the, the more messy negotiations that we had gone through because there was just so much back and forth and, you know, I was really fighting to have peace with the deal. So I was fighting for things that I wasn't necessarily happy with upfront, but, you know, I prayed through it. I'm a man of faith and that was one thing that Thomas and I really connected on was, you know, that spiritual component, but praying through it a lot was really important for me. But I think at the same time, the turning point was some of the things that were happening in the periphery of my life at that time. And in the periphery, like the business metrics made sense, everything lined up. I love the guys at Republix. I was really connecting with them. All of those things lined up and I have kind of like a laundry list of things that I think any person that's selling their business should check off in doing any deal. But the real pivot for me was things that were happening around me. Like, my son, more of it, but a good friend and his brother passed suddenly, you know, like that was huge. Like, again, I'll go back to the things like cost, and this is just my own experience around, like, what was the cost? What is the cost? Cause everything has a cost. There's a, there's an upside, but there's a cost to getting that. And so for me, it was really like those periphery things that had me say, okay, you know what? I think life is pointing me in this direction to do this because I want to free up myself to be more present as a father, more present as a husband, kickstart some things that I, uh, ventures that I've wanted to do just haven't had time to do. So all those like soft lifestyle components really had an impact. I think it's just important to consider that iike for me anyways, it was one of the biggest transactions I'd ever have to do from a business perspective. It's not just about the money, you know? It's what are you gaining from this? And if it's equitable on both sides, then it makes sense. It should make sense, right? Because if you just think about the money part of it, you might make a decision that you regret later, right? You have to really be happy with the deal at the end of the day. And I think for people that are chasing the money, they might be unhappy because they'll sacrifice like working with a buyer who you don't really like, but they gave you the best offer. And that's not always the best decision to make when you're doing the deal. You got to really like the people you're going to work with because you're going to continue, hopefully, to work with them. So it's just those kinds of factors that kept it in my decision-making process. Jason: [00:18:07] What's life like now? Roy: [00:18:09] You know what? Nothing's really changed other than I just feel more at peace with everything. You can relate to this, like being in leadership, being an owner of a business and in leadership position is a pretty isolating lonely place because, I mean, even your spouse may not be able to understand truly what you're going through unless they were, uh, agency leader or owner before. And so I think for me, I needed that sense of community and I needed a team of people to bounce these agency's specific leadership, specific ideas off of, and being a part of our Republix has provided that. I still run the business on a day-to-day. That was really key, I think, for our communication to clients and the staff that I still be at the helm, and that's still part of the plan. So at least from a day-to-day, it hasn't really changed, but the weightiness of full ownership has lifted. And that's actually freed me up to be more open and be more inspired. And you think even bigger than before, you know, like we're now joint, doing joint pitches with other agencies to bigger clients that we didn't have access to before, on one hand. And even clients that we did have access to do have access to, we can pitch better ideas. So that's, for me, such a huge accomplishment, not only in building a business from nothing to where it is today, where, like you say, most businesses think about selling when they're on the downspout and then they go bankrupt, right? Like 80% of businesses fail. So we're in that small margin of businesses that have been successful. So that's a huge accomplishment for me. And I'm kind of walking around with a little extra pep in my step, having achieved that and now scaling the team and growing the business in a way that I feel really confident that we can set it up for the next 10 years of growth. Jason: [00:20:03] Yeah. And when you have that pressure off, you're not really worrying about money anymore. You can make decisions based on just what you feel rather than, oh, I need to take this deal. And what people don't realize is when you actually start making that switch… If you did that in the very beginning, you would have grown five times as fast, and everybody always thinks they're were like, you guys have money. So it's easy for you guys to say that, but you know, looking back, if I could tell myself again on that, I'd be like, dude, start with that from day one. And you know, in the very beginning it might be a little tougher, but later on, it'd be that much. Roy: [00:20:45] Yeah. You know, like, I, I, at least for us, like we have pre, we have pretty good margins for the last 10 years. Like w like, as a corporation, we'd never had real money issues, like we didn't have debt. We operated in, you know, with a 45, 50% margin. So decision making around money for the business was never an issue. I think for me personally as well, it wasn't necessarily the money that makes me, cause you know, when you get a liquidity event like that, you have all kinds of other problems after that, right? Like, so… Jason: [00:21:14] Lots of cousins coming out of the woodworks. Roy: [00:21:16] Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah. Ray Ray from way back in the day who you haven't talked to in 20 years or, you know, like, or just managing it at all, it poses other situations. But I think it's, you know, there's something unique about calling yourself, the singular owner, where every decision comes down to you. And again, nothing's changed. I'm still making every decision. Like Republic's is really great that way in the sense that they really want you to work autonomously, but at the same time have be part of this bigger vision. So I'm still managing the business, but there's just this underlying weight of that's been lifted because you feel like you have support, right? There's other people who have been through this a million times that know what you're going through, as opposed to like, boy, I feel like I'm really just kind of going through this on my own and no one really understands. And so that part of it was really huge for me. Jason: [00:22:09] Awesome. Last question, if you had a billboard and you could put anything on it, what would it be? What would it say? Roy: [00:22:18] Oh, that's great. That's great. I love that question. Uh, it would be this: Take your passions with you. Jason: [00:22:25] I like that. Roy: [00:22:26] What I mean by that is a lot of people get caught up in thinking, I gotta find my passion, I gotta find my passion. And passion often gets related to what do you do? Which isn't necessarily what your passion is. It's who you are. And that thing can be taken with you to whatever it is you're doing in the moment. Whether that's, you're a problem solver, whether that's your, you want to make a human connection, whether you want to give to people, whether you want to build people up, whether you want to, it doesn't matter what it is. Just know that you can take it with you wherever you go. I took what I do in the music industry to digital marketing to help orthodontists and dentists, you know, like it's just, there's nothing correlated other than what my passion is to solve problems. And that was my billboard. That's what it would it be. Jason: [00:23:18] I love it. I love it. What's the website people go and check out the agency outside of Republix? Roy: [00:23:24] Sure. Yeah. It's noodlewavemedia.com. Noodle like as a bowl of noodles, wave, wave media.com. I would say that. Jason: [00:23:32] Awesome, man. Well, Roy, thanks so much for coming on the show. And if you guys enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe, make sure you comment. And, uh, if you want to be around other amazing agency owners where we can see the things that you might not be able to see, because just like Roy was saying, like it's very isolating making your own decisions and maybe you wanted some help with that. I'd love to invite all of you to go check out digitalagencyelite.com. This is our exclusive mastermind for very experienced agency owners. Go there now, and until next time have a Swenk day.

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-the-sooner-woke-dom-dies-the-better/20220211.htmCanadian Premier Justin Trudeau is hiding “in an undisclosed location” after a huge convoy of truckers demanding relief from Covid mandates, joined by farmers with their combine harvesters and other heavy equipment, made steady progress towards the Canadian capital. Poor man, he now has caught Covid, too.New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who boasts one of the strictest zero-Covid regimes in the world, is under fire for refusing to allow pregnant citizens living abroad to return home, under some quota called MIQ (Managed Isolation and Quarantining). She herself had to cancel her wedding, poor thing.British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on the verge of losing his job: being impeached or whatever the Brits do to unpopular PMs, because it has come to light that he partied several times at his official residence in violation of strict Covid quarantine rules in his country.US President Joe Biden now has some of the worst approval ratings of any POTUS in history, and faces the certainty of a drubbing for his party in the midterm elections late this year, mostly because of poor handling of the Covid pandemic, as well as high inflation resulting from the generous printing of money in an ineffective economic band-aid. He is now beating the war drums and may drag the US into an unnecessary war in Ukraine.Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.What do all these have in common? First, Covid, and second, the Anglosphere, which is reeling. And, third, they are darlings of the Woke Left crowd, especially Ardern and Biden. I’m reminded of the old song, “Video killed the Radio Star”. So Covid is killing the Woke left star?In a sign that we are living in Internet Time, time scales are being accelerated. In the old days, centuries used to mean something, like a hundred years at least. But ‘centuries’ are getting awfully short these days. Consider:The European Century of domination was over 200 years, from the Industrial Revolution to World War II. The American Century was only about 60 years, from World War II to the Financial Meltdown.The Chinese Century is going to be about 30 years, from WTO Accession till… well, we are yet to see how their empire will end, one hopes, as TS Eliot said, “not with a bang, but a whimper”. Chances are Xi will not go gentle into that good night.The Woke Century began with the Biden accession to the throne (some, including me, think it was tainted with irregularities) and the celebration of the Millennium, as it were, by the luminaries of Wokeness. That was just a year ago, although it feels like it was much longer, given the endless debacles. Afghanistan. Build Back Better. The Fauci-Daszak-Collins circus re Gain of Function research. And coming soon to a TV screen near you, war! Rejoice, Deep State! Let’s ignore the $80 billion worth of weapons abandoned in Afghanistan, a good bit possibly in Chinese hands now. And the signal of US fecklessness that the retreat broadcast. There’s a word for it: degringolade. No, it has nothing to do with gringos.Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.What has (I hope fatally) damaged Wokeism? In the ponderous tones of op-ed writers, it is collapsing under the “weight of its own contradictions”. Wokeism has brought us unedifying spectacles: the cancellation of those whom you don’t like (see Joe Rogan over on Spotify), the ascent of (white) privileged Karens, the relentless rebranding of propaganda as Science(™).Wokes are into “defund the police” and high tolerance to theft, mugging, drug abuse and squatters defecating on the street, which has effectively erased my beloved San Francisco. Wokes pretend not to understand that China has deindustrialized the West, and that their supply chains can be turned off at a moment’s notice. As far as Hindus are concerned, the eclipse of Wokeism cannot come soon enough. There is a determined assault on Hindus (there are frequent conferences on Dismantling Global Hindutva, and the California State university system has just included caste as a marker of discrimination, like race). This means that, like Jews earlier, Hindus are being made scapegoats in the West: declared mad dogs, and then shot. This project has gathered momentum in global media. The full-throated baying in the NYTimes, FT, Economist, NPR, Reuters, etc. has been going on for some time: they want regime-change. TL;DR: The Mudi sud rejine. Their latest target is Netaji Subhas Bose. He is a complex and flawed hero. There is a lot to decode about him, as I wrote in 2016 in The abuse of Indian history. But a recent series of Twitter exchanges by ex-Reuters journalist Myra Macdonald, ex-Financial Times India stringer Edward Luce, and others, was instructive: according to these Woke types, Bose is guilty by association with Hitler, but Churchill is blameless in the Bengal genocide, and is not a war criminal. And oh, according to Luce, Indian business schools teach Mein Kampf. That must be in some alternative Woke universe.This is what Woke-dom is all about: the willing suspension of disbelief. The sooner it dies off, the better. It has already infected some Indians, for instance those who ‘took the knee’ for Black Lives Matter. They should abandon this silly Woke-ness and aping of the West. Just as India, correctly, abstained from the UN Security Council vote over Ukraine, a fight in which we have no dog. 880 words, 1 Feb 2022 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com

During the past two years, employers have been forced to go beyond merely "checking the box" in training and developing the people on their teams. How has COVID and the "The Great Resignation" woken up employers to seeing the value of investing in their people and changing the way they lead? "I think what ended up happening through the COVID is, it accelerated where business was going inevitably," said Rico Peña, founder of Peña Global president at Peña Global and author of the new book, It's Not Business It's Personal: Strategic Conversations for the Next Gen Leader, "Due to the consumers change on being more friendly to being home, and employees, especially the next generation, wanting to work from home. So COVID accelerated what would've happened maybe five or six years from now." Peña has over 25 years of experience working with individuals, businesses, and Fortune 500 companies around the world. He is dynamic bilingual consultant, facilitator, author, and business development specialist. He works with executives to define, hire, train, and develop high-performing teams and high-net-worth business models. "Smart companies, when COVID happened and the (great) resignation, not even the resignation yet, just having to work from home and having that level of uncertainty, is what really started transforming the value of people to business," he added. "It was no longer transactional. It became relational and across all fronts because it happened to everyone at the same time around the globe." A former Marine and a bestselling author for his first book, The Client Nation Their Perception, Their Profits, Rico has trained, facilitated, and presented on 6 continents and to over 100,000 people in the last 23 years. Rico's latest book will give you the tools and insights you need to begin your journey as a new leader, on how to understand your team and how to communicate with them effectively. You will start to get a clearer picture of yourself and your natural leadership style. You will see how you are perceived and what to do to connect with anyone on your team with confidence. But best of all you will learn to build trust, motivation, and the resilience of a high-performing team. This is an excerpt of our full conversation, which you can find here: https://www.freedommedianetwork.com/post/how-smart-companies-went-from-transactional-to-relational-leadership

In this episode physical therapist and podcast cohost, Dr. Jenna Kantor talks about the highs, the lows, and everything in-between from the past year.  We talk about:  The effects of Covid-19 on life and the practice of physical therapy  Online bullying in the physical therapy world  Realizing the importance of friendship  The mental shifts we experienced over the past year  What we are looking forward to in 2022 And much more!    More about Dr. Jenna Kantor:  Jenna Kantor, PT, DPT, is a bubbly and energetic woman who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. She trained intensively at Petaluma City Ballet, Houston Ballet, BalletMet, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, Regional Dance America Choreography Conference, and Regional Dance America. Over time, the injuries added up and she knew she would not have a lasting career in ballet. This lead her to the University of California, Irvine, where she discovered a passion for musical theatre.  Upon graduating, Jenna Kantor worked professionally in musical theatre for 15+ years then found herself ready to move onto a new chapter in her life. Jenna was teaching ballet to kids ages 4 through 17 and group fitness classes to adults. Through teaching, she discovered she had a deep interest in the human body and a desire to help others on a higher level. She was fortunate to get accepted into the DPT program at Columbia. During her education, she co-founded Fairytale Physical Therapy which brings musical theatre shows to children in hospitals, started a podcast titled Physiotherapy Performance Perspectives, was the NYPTA SSIG Advocacy Chair, was part of the NYC Conclave 2017 committee, and co-founded the NYPTA SSIG. In 2017, Jenna was the NYPTA Public Policy Student Liaison, a candidate for the APTASA Communications Chair, won the APTA PPS Business Concept Contest, and made the top 40 List for an Up and Coming Physical Therapy with UpDoc Media. ​Jenna Kantor currently holds the position of the NYPTA Social Media Committee, APTA PPS Key Contact, and NYPTA Legislative Task Force. She provides complimentary, regularly online content that advocates for the physical therapy profession. Jenna runs her own private practice, Jenna Kantor Physical Therapy, PLLC, and an online course for performing artists called Powerful Performer that will launch late 2019. To learn more, follow Jenna at:  Website: https://www.jennakantorpt.com/ Facebook Instagram Twitter Fairytale Physical Therapy   Subscribe to Healthy, Wealthy & Smart: Website:                      https://podcast.healthywealthysmart.com Apple Podcasts:          https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/healthy-wealthy-smart/id532717264 Spotify:                        https://open.spotify.com/show/6ELmKwE4mSZXBB8TiQvp73 SoundCloud:               https://soundcloud.com/healthywealthysmart Stitcher:                       https://www.stitcher.com/show/healthy-wealthy-smart iHeart Radio:                https://www.iheart.com/podcast/263-healthy-wealthy-smart-27628927   Read the Full Transcript Here 00:00 Hey. Hey, Jenna, welcome back to the podcast for our annual year and Roundup, if you will. And I want to thank you for being a great addition to the podcast and for pumping out really amazing podcast episodes, you're great hosts, the energy is fantastic. And the podcast episodes are always great. So I want to thank you for that.   00:27 Oh, my God, you're so sweet. I like I was definitely not as much of a podcaster this year, I acknowledge that. But hey, listen, we've all been adjusting this year to pandemic and now pandemics still happening, but also recovery. And I'm just grateful to still be a part of this podcast in any manner to be in this interview right now. Because I really, you and I are very much on the same page regarding remaining evidence based and speaking to people that we respect in this industry, and also people that we want to see just rise and have great success. So I'm just grateful to be honestly, I am humbled to still be in the room here with you.   01:11 Thank you. That's so nice. So kind. Now, let's talk about this past year. So 2021, obviously dominated by the ups and downs of COVID, which is still going on as we speak. We're we're both in the northeast, so we're experiencing an incredibly high surge at the moment. So COVID is obviously a big story. And I think part of the COVID journey that isn't being talked about as much. But I think general public, certainly the mainstream media, are people now living with long COVID. It is just something that seems to be skimmed over. And we know that at least at least the bare minimum is 10% of people diagnosed with COVID will go on to have symptoms of long COVID. And instead of some of the studies that I have read recently, those percentages are much, much higher. So what I guess, what is your take on all of that? And what do you think we as physical therapists can do to keep this in the in the forefront of people's minds.   02:23 We discussed this before, but I think there's going to be bias within this. So I want to acknowledge that we all have our biases. That being said, I think we need to first acknowledge there was a phase where there was a part of the world that did not think COVID was real. So based on the research that is out there, and personal experience of a lot of people getting it, as well as personal friends very close personal friends working in hospitals in New York, specifically COVID is real. So I want to say that first. I'm not going to differ from that I really wish there I'm I think we're past that in the world. I think there was never a clear cut of like, Oh, I got it, I see that it's real. I was wrong. I would have liked that moment, because that hurt people in the process. But I just want to say that first. So COVID is real. Okay. Now, let's not belittle it. And I think in regards to the patient care. I think this, the reality of long COVID needs to be just as respected. Just like when you have a patient that comes in the door and says they're in pain, and you don't believe them. We need to stop that. So we need to believe them and their symptoms, and what they have and what it's from and treat it accordingly. Because if we go in the door to help out these individuals who are struggling with this, they're not going to get better. What are your thoughts?   03:59 No, I agree. I agree. And I've heard from people living with long COVID that people don't believe them even their own family members, people in who work in medicine, they don't believe them. So I think that's a huge takeaway that if as clinicians we can do one thing sit down Listen, believe because the symptoms that they're having are real. We did a couple of episodes on long COVID thing was back in August and spoke with three amazing therapists and they're all involved with long COVID physios so if anyone out there wants more information on living with long COVID I would definitely steer you to long COVID physio on Twitter and and their website as well. Because they're a wealth of knowledge. These are people living with long COVID their allies, they are researchers and I think they're putting out some amazing information that can help not just you as the clinician, but if you know someone that maybe you're not doing directly treating maybe it's a family member living with long COVID I think the more information you have, the more power you can kind of take back to yourself.   05:10 I love that. I love that. It's the biopsychosocial model. I mean to that I from working because I work specifically more with performers, the psychosocial component, my my patients, my people I call my people, my people would not be getting the results they're getting if I didn't have to deal with that, with them standing by their side, holding their hands helping them through and out of their pain. There's symptoms every day and this that goes for anything.   05:41 Yeah. And and we now know, speaking of performers that a lot of Broadway shows are being sort of cancelled, and then restarted and canceled and restarted because of COVID outbreaks within the cast. So this may be something people might think, Oh, I work with performers. I don't have to worry about long COVID Well, maybe you do.   06:01 Yeah. Yeah. And for them, it's the, from the performance that I'm in contact with on Broadway that, you know, it's I'm, I'm, I'm very connected. I've been in the musical theater industry for a very long time. So for the people who are on Broadway, the individuals I spoken to, they're doing okay, which I'm really, really grateful for. It is a requirement for the performers to be triple vaccinated, and now they're getting triple vaccinated. I know one performer on Broadway, who was about to get her booster shot, and then ended up getting COVID, which was quite unfortunate. She's doing okay, though. Grateful, no signs of long COVID Right now, but for the performers, you're talking about dance, there's endurance and breathing that is necessary. If the singers even if they're, they're not dancing, they still dance, they're still asked to do things, they still have out of breath, emotional moments, were breathing is challenged. So I'm just bringing up one component with long COVID. But that's, that's a big standout for performers specifically, that need, it needs to be kept out for them. I remember one time during, oh, goodness, during 2020. And it was the latter portion of the year. And I was doing virtual readings with performers. That's how I was staying connected with my my friends and people in the industry. And it was our way of being creative. In the meantime, while we're waiting for things to open back up. And one individual is she what I just cast her to read as the lead in the show, and she was so good. It was my first time hearing her perform first time meeting her. She was Outstanding, outstanding. And at the end of it, we were going around checking in with each other how we were doing and she started to cry and opened up about losses and her family due to COVID. And that she didn't think she would be able to sing like that again, because she had been dealing with her breathing problems for so long. And so then we all get emotional with her. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. So yeah, it's it's a it's a real thing. We didn't have the vaccination then. So I'm interested to see statistically where we are at with long COVID with having the antibodies in our systems. Obviously, everybody is different, but I'm hoping that there's less of it because of the vaccine.   08:25 Yeah, time will tell right? Yeah, we have we need those data points. So aside from obviously COVID being, I think the biggest story of the year, certainly within healthcare and even within our field of physical therapy. What else have you seen over 2021? Or maybe it was in an interview you did or a paper you read that really stuck out for you as as a big part of the year you know, it made it's made it it made its mark for you.   08:58 Oh, I'm going to focus just on the PT community. And I want to emphasize with community I see our community at really, we've always butted heads there's always things that we butted heads on. But I'll just give the instance that really made me go whoa, I was in a room with a bunch of intelligent wonderful human beings and discussing something I said a term that I thought was really common especially because in the musical theatre industry. We are fighting for dei diversity, equity inclusion all the time. Like if this is a topic of conversation all the time. It is a huge thing in regards to casting what is visually out there the most at like the highest level and, and bipoc the phrase bipoc was unrecognized by a good portion of physical therapists in this room and I was disappointed Did I was it said so much it doesn't. It's not saying that a person is evil for not knowing no. And that is not my point. But it is a problem that it's not being discussed to the level where these common extremely common thing phrases are not just known. That just says a lot to me, because it's in regards to people getting in the door access and being reached, in lesser, lesser affluent areas, that to me, it shows that it's not being discussed, it's not being addressed. If it was, then bipoc would be, and this is just one instance. But I thought that was very eye opening. Because it's just like saying, I'm going to eat today, someone saying, I'm not going what you're not eating, I don't know. And that was a bad example. But just something that is or you wake up you breathe, that is how known the phrase bipoc. Same thing with LGBTQIA. Plus, in my community, like, for me to go into another room and for things to need to be defined. I know we all have different worlds. But I think as physical therapists, there, there's a disconnect, unfortunately, depending on wherever we are from, and we need to fix that. Because I can't live everywhere. I can't treat everyone in the world, I can't treat all the performers in the world, I don't want to I like having my niche practice and treating select individuals, and boom, my people do very well. And if it gets to a point that it starts to grow, I'm going to be passing them along because I don't want I don't want that I don't want it to be huge like that. And with that in mind, I need more people who know and therefore are our allies. To me, it's a lack of ally ship, of just not knowing the basic language. And I and I apologize to anyone who's listening on my intention is not to sound like a white savior at all. It's not. But with my limited knowledge at this point, I'm already seeing something that is really, really lacking amongst each other and we need to fix it. I don't know if it's books or I don't know, I don't I don't know the answer to that. But I'm just addressing that was that was the biggest standout thing for me this year.   12:27 And it for those of you who maybe are not familiar with the American Physical Therapy Association, they have what's called House of Delegates. So they had a meeting in September of this year during the APTA centennial celebration. And in that they did pass a resolution that the APTA would be an anti racist organization. Now, were you in the room when that passed? Jenna?   12:54 No, I was not in the room, I was actually there at the House of Delegates a bit discouraged this year, I know. i The fact that they were able to figure out any manner to put it on is is a feat to be had after 2020 20. However, the in person when you go and if you are not a delegate, which I was not this year, you can usually sit in the room, and just be in the back and listen, because the because of the space that they got in the way it was set up, there were chairs in the back of the room, but there weren't that many and it filled up. So they already preemptively set up another room where you could watch what was happening on a TV, which did not sit well with me. Because I could have stayed home instead of flying in for that. So I was definitely not in the room. I definitely was less present this year. Because of that I was I was bitter, I was bitter. I was bitter. I felt like I I already know you it's through elected and know who you know, to become a delegate, but I really felt disrespected and unimportant. Being in a separate room, watching from a TV rather than actually getting to be in the room because there are ways that they hold the meeting where you can stand up to say a point of order to speak on some points from the from the back of the room. And I just wasn't even going to wait to see how they figured that out. I just felt like not a not an important voice. So I wasn't present for that. But I do know about that. I think it's wonderful to get that on the docket. But the same thing when we voted in dei unanimously. How?   14:41 What comes next? You mean? Yeah, well, yeah.   14:45 What is the game plan? Because for me, I can say a sentence like that. But then what are the actual actions and that's where it's like, is that going to happen? Two years down the road three years. What are we at what are we actually doing? What are the measuring points and take action? and not meetings on it, not being hesitant on making mistakes. Let's make mistakes. Let's just go for it. That's the only way we're gonna learn. There's no such thing as a graceful change, no matter how hard you try,   15:11 right? Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think like you said, what comes next is? Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see what are the action steps they're going to take in order to create that and, and live up to the, the words of being an anti racist organization? Because it was passed overwhelmingly.   15:32 Right? And then I'm sure they applauded for it, you know, like, this is great. But to me, I think it's, I it's just like, okay, you know, like, what, but now what? Because from DJI and the I heard that they're trying in the battle in this behind the scenes, trying to move forward, but I have not seen action there. And maybe I'm missing something, you know, feel free to call me out Call me whatever. Like, I'm, I would love to be wrong.   16:07 Yeah, these big organizations are slow ships to steer. That's not any excuse whatsoever. But I understand there's a lot of layers that one has to go through to make things happen. As you know, you've been volunteering for the APTA for a long time. So you understand that, but I think a lot of people who don't don't, so that's why I just wanted to kind of bring that up and saying, like, yeah, it takes it takes a long effing time to get stuff done, you know?   16:33 Yeah. And I mean, you can hear it, I'm frustrated by I'm not, I'm not happy about it. And but it's, it's because of my friends, the conversations I have, and I, I'm, I'm lucky, I'm a sis white, stereotypical female. So like, the way the world has been made, and the way it caters to humans. It fits me, but it doesn't fit everyone and I'd like I can't imagine what it would be like to just be left out of a lot of things in everyday life. I think that's horrible.   17:05 Yeah, agreed. What else? What else do you think was a big something that you saw within the profession? Or even trends in health and fitness that might have really changed over this past year? For better or for worse? I can think of one I think and this is just my opinion that the the communication via social media has gotten a little too aggressive. Is that a nice way of saying it? Like I don't understand it, I don't get it. I took like a little break because I was Oh, can't say I was bullied because I feel like bullying. It's that sort of like you know someone is having like a sustained go at you. So I don't know   18:01 it's bullying is bullying. Yeah, bullying is bullying. That's the thing is that we have a lot of bullying that happens but then they gaslight you about their bullying. It's like Whoa, it's next. It's almost like a strategy. Like they're playing a game of Monopoly, and they have down how to win. Like, yeah, people barely there is a lot of bullying.   18:20 Yeah, a lot of bullying. A lot of threatening, like, I get like threatening DMS or people threatening me, you know, on their Instagram stories or whatever. For I can't imagine I look back at that interactions. And I'm like, I don't get it.   18:38 Yeah, I don't get it. Yeah.   18:41 So I and my first reaction was to like, when people will do this and be so aggressive as to send like a Taylor Swift GIF. Of her song, you need to calm down. And then I have to take a step back and be like, that's not gonna help the situation any. Right, right. Right. Don't do it. I just sort of back off. But I think because of that, bullying or threatening behavior, I've   19:05 really like I'll say it bullying continue. I've,   19:09 I've just like, for the past couple of months, I've really taken a backseat to any kind of social media just to like, give myself like a mental health break, you know, like meeting I don't comment on things. I might post some things here and there, but I don't really make any comments, unless it's to. And that's mainly and I'm going to say this because from what I can tell it's true, is it happens to be men in the profession who are a little more aggressive than the women, like women can seem to have a bit of a nicer conversation around whether it's a question or, you know, something, but when a lot of the men it's just become so like ego driven, that there's no resolution, and it's just mean. Mm hmm. And so I was like I need to take a break. So I saw a lot more of that this year. I don't know if it's because of lockdowns and because of a heightened sense of what's the word? Stress to begin with? And then yeah, or something else on top of it? I don't know. But I, I saw that this year, definitely for the worse, because I just think, gosh, if people outside the profession are looking in and watching these exchanges, what are they thinking?   20:28 Yeah, yeah, I've definitely seen it in sis males specifically.   20:33 Yeah, yeah.   20:34 I'm not it honestly. doesn't it's not a specific color of skin. But specifically sis males.   20:43 Yeah, I would I would agree with that. Yeah.   20:46 I have. I have experienced a little not not to the level, but I've definitely experienced that. And it's for 2021. And it's not okay. No, it's not okay. However, I ever look at it as a blessing. And this is where I get I love looking at it like this. Yes, please, please, thank you. Thank you for identifying that you have no space in my room, my shelf my space at all. I will not take advice from you in the future. And I will not heed any, any value to what you have to say, because of your willingness to chop me down. Thank you for identifying yourself. I'm now in the debate of blocking you from my mental health. And that's it. And that includes in person. That's it. That's it. And I really don't look as blocking as like, wow, for me, I'm going like, No, I don't want to know you. I don't want to know you. And my life is so much better because of it when I was at the PPS conference, because of just going No to the to the people I don't want to know and just saying like, just straight up like I like I don't need you, I don't need you. I want to be a service to people who need physical therapy period. So people are going to just, you know, find ways of you know, and spend their time writing some angry thing. Have that that's on them that's on them. Like I'm like, like, and if it and honestly I will likely block you.   22:18 I love that I love like you're you're it's not just that you're blocking the person. You're blocking the energy blocking the energy they're bringing into you and draining you down. So then you're not at your best well, or with your friends or loved ones patients, even with yourself. Yeah, you know, if you have to ruminate on these people. I love that. Yeah, it's not it's not just blocking you from social media, it's blocking the energy that you the the bad vibes, if you will, that you're Brown. And that affects you that affects your mental health that affects you emotionally. And it can carry through to a lot of other parts of your life and who needs that? Yeah,   22:59 and, and for anybody who's trying to saying like, I can a bully did it or like it. Okay, let's, let's look at it this way, when you're messaging an individual something, first of all, we all know this. When you write in text, everybody's going to interpret it with different tone. So as soon as you write in text, we all know this, and we're taking advantage of that fact. So that way, you can later go, oh, I said it in a nice tone, Bs when you're typing it, it can be in whatever freakin tone and you know what you're doing. Also, when you're not talking to a person, the only time you show up is to say something negative. Yeah, that's you're not your voice is not important. And you know, your voice isn't important.   23:39 It's so true. What I've actually seen is a lot of these, these kinds of people, they're not getting the attention they used to get. Mm hmm. Do you know cuz I think more people are of the mindset of like, I don't need this anymore. Like this was maybe this was funny. Maybe this was cute a couple years ago. Ah, not anymore.   24:01 And also I love I don't like having down moments, but we all have our down moments in our career and in our life. But I what I do love about the down moments in the career in life, the people who are around at that time, those are your friends, those are the people you want to know. So I love my moments in the PT world. When I'm in a down moment because the people who want to talk to me then those are the people I want to know. Whereas when I'm you know, can candidate for the private practice section, you know, which is awesome. And then people want to actually talk to me then. Oh, wait, I'm gonna wait and see when you know, I'm not that. Am I still someone you want to speak to? That is those are the people I want to invest time in. Those are the people I want to invest time in. I want to see you you do well and vice versa. I want to be able to get to know you as a human more and more and more. I just want the children Relationships, it doesn't mean I'm going to have time or you know, we're gonna have time to talk every day. But I want those true relationships. So for me, those downtimes, when I might not look the most graceful, I might be messing up or maybe not messing up. Maybe I'm actually making a change here speaking on something or getting people to think differently ever thought of that, you know? Awesome. Like, are you gonna be here to chop me down? Or just be here to have a conversation and having a conversation? Set up a phone call? If you really care? Like if you really could you don't? People don't care that Oh, reaching out, they don't care about you cannot be when they're reaching out to give feedback. Let's have a comfort. No, they just want to get into an attack mode. No, we No, no, don't try to decorate it. We know that's what's happening. And yeah, that were to town. There's enough going on.   25:52 Yeah, there's enough going on. And you know, this conversation really made me reflect on the past year, and I think what's been a good thing has been the deepening of good relationships. So like, nobody has time for that other, like bad stuff anymore. Like there's enough bad stuff happening. I don't have time for that. But what you do have time for is the relationships that are two sided, you know, a nice bilateral relationship that you're willing to invest in, and allow that relationship to come deeper and grow. And I feel like, you know, and like, you don't have to be friends with 1000 people, you know, you can be friends with a handful you can be friends with one person. And if that person, it's it's real and deep and meaningful, then isn't that wonderful? And I think years ago, I used to think, oh, the more   26:46 people you know, the better. Me too. Me too.   26:49 And now I think because of the upheaval of the last couple of years now, I'm really finding like, you know, I need like couple of good people that I can count on to have my back to, like you said, lift you up when you need to, and maybe to like, give you the honest truth when you need it as well. Right? Exactly. So I've been really, really happy that over the past year, I've made some really nice deeper connections with people than the physical therapy World Sports Medicine world. And I'm really, really happy about that. So I think that's been a real positive for me,   27:26 I totally agree with you, I mean, that our relationship is naturally growing over time, which I appreciate and, and I really do I completely on the same page completely on the same page. And and for me, when I go to conferences, like I'm really isolating more and more, who are the two are the people that like I must spend time with? And and then if other people want to join sure, you know, absolutely. But I I'm not overwhelming myself, oh, I need to be friends with that. No, I don't need to. And you know what, like, that became very apparent when I seen people speak, even at PPS, where the goodness, they were showing slideshows with their friends, and it was like, literally all people who are elected in the higher positions are all best friends with each other. It is it's true, you can't deny it. If you're up there. If you're one of those people. It's true. And you know what, I look at it like this, my friends may go up there to that, mate. That's not why I'm friends with you, though, you know, in friendship through because I like you as a person. So I'm gonna let that lay and not even explain and go into more depth and let people interpret that how they want and the right people will stay in   28:44 my life. Exactly. So what are they? What are they? Let's, let's sort of wrap this up on a positive note. What are their positive things came to you this year, whether it be professionally, personally,   28:59 oh, I think being more comfortable in my skin at conferences. So I had the I mean, absolute honor. Like I was really overwhelmed with happiness at the private practice conference this year. It was just so cool to be nominated. And I felt so much more comfortable in my own skin going up there. I you know, there there are a couple naysayers not realizing there'll be naysayers that, you know that I had to deal with but going up and it was a small moment. But we had you have this rehearsal. I don't know if it's done the same way. For the nominees where they go, you practice when your name is called going behind the podium and then walking down the stairs so you know what to do when you're asked to go out there and give your speech. And I went out there and I did a great vine to my spot. And I mean, I was so happy I did that because I was feeling it and that's what I would do. I did a great fine. And I know that silly, nobody else paid attention to me honestly probably knew that I was doing it. And some were probably like, Oh, but I didn't care. I was like I am on this freakin stage right now, this is the coolest thing. And to be at that place of like more self acceptance, because I know I don't have the stereotypical personality and energy, you know, that that is normally accepted amongst the vast community. So to be more me in that moment, I felt very proud. I felt very proud of myself. And that was really cool. I'm really, really happy about that. And then I like Dan, you know, sat down and ate some more bacon, it was great.   30:46 Well, and you know, being comfortable in your own skin that then comes across to the people who are in front of you. So when the speech actually came about, I'm sure people picked up on that picked up on the fact that you're now more comfortable in your skin that you're more comfortable, perhaps as a physical therapist, and because you found you're not that you've, you've already had this niche, but you sort of found your niche. You know, what, you what you're in the physical therapy world to do. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.   31:19 Absolutely. Absolutely. And I got a little bit picked on for being too perfect with my speech and everything. And I was like, I you know, in reflection on that, I was like, they just haven't fully accepted my energy. That's okay. Don't get there. Okay. That's it. Don't get there. I'm like, I'm a performer. So it's gonna happen. You know, do you want to join a British company dialect? That's,   31:47 that's a weird comment. That's a weird criticism. Yeah, but yeah, you know,   31:53 but I felt I felt I felt like I had to reflect to go No, I actually felt really good, because I've definitely put it on before. No, I practiced it to be to deliver it. Me as me. And now it's so fun. So fun. Oh, my God. Yeah, I was just that that was a big, positive. Awesome, awesome feeling. I work with so many people who are in the PT industry, who want to be dance physical therapist or physical therapist assistants and imposter syndrome is super real. And so I like that I'm practicing what I preach and self love. And and it's awesome. How are you doing all that this year?   32:36 I'm better. I mean, imposter syndrome, I think, for me is always there, like always kind of underlying the surface, if you will. But I think that's pretty normal. You know, the more and more I listen, or I read about, like, these famous people who are up on stages and in movies, and you know, people who think oh, they have no, they must be like, amazing. And no, they it's the same thing. So I think for me, accepting that it's normal has actually helped decrease it a little bit. Instead of feeling like, oh, boy, everyone else here is like, amazing. And I'm like the loser trying to keep up. And then I think, no, that's pretty normal, because I think everyone else feels that way as well. Yes. And then once once I was able to accept that it makes going up on stage, like, I don't get as nervous as I used to, and it's been. It's been much, much better for me even speaking. Like I was joking, I could say I now I shared the stage with FLOTUS, because at the future physical therapy summit, I spoke for literally a minute and 45 seconds as a spokesperson for the brand Waterpik. So Waterpik has these wonderful showerheads. And they sponsored the future physical therapy Summit in Washington, DC back in September. And so the sponsors got to go up and say a little something. So you have literally less than two minutes, and I had to get all their talking points in. But I also like, decided to make it funny. So I was just saying things off the cuff. And afterwards, everyone's like, that was a great bit. I love that bit about your parents. I'm like, I didn't think of it as a bit. But okay. But then the good news was afterwards, people came up to the table, the Waterpik table, you know, in the, in the hall area, and like the one guy was like, I wasn't gonna come up, but then after that talk, I had to come up and see what you guys are all about. I needed to find out what you were doing and hey, can you do this? And so, for me, I felt as nervous as I was to go up and speak be mainly because it wasn't about me, it was about Waterpik. So I wanted to do them proud, you know, and afterwards, they got so much great feedback and possible partnerships selling through clinics with 700 locations? And can we do a study with Waterpik? On wound care? Can we do a study with Waterpik on people living with CRPS and using these, like, and that's exactly what they were looking for. So that made me feel like much better and gave me a little bit more confidence. And it was also fun to be able to do such things kind of off the cuff. You know,   35:25 that's so cool. Yeah, I love that. You should definitely be proud. That's so cool.   35:29 So that was really fun. And then the next speaker, it was it. The next speaker a two speakers after me was the First Lady of the United States Dr. Joe Biden. So yeah, there you go. No big deal. No big deal. Yeah. FLOTUS. So that was really fun. And was that yeah, for me, I think that was a big highlight of of the year for me, I guess professionally, which was really cool. is cool. That is so cool. It was it was cool. Anything else that for you? Did we miss anything that you wanted to get in?   36:02 Yes. For the Yes, yes. Yes. Okay. I now live in Pittsburgh and and was visiting New York had a great time. I got to see Karen at one of my favorite salad places, although I didn't get my normal favorite salad, which now I'm in regret until I go back again, to get my favorite salad from Sweet greens. It's the kale salad. It's so good. Caesar kale salad. I highly recommend it if you're going and you want to save some money because I love to be cheap in New York. Okay. said that. Now I'm not sponsored by sweet green. I just love sweet green. Okay,   36:31 I know we're dropping. We're dropping a lot of like,   36:33 I know. Like suede. And also get Levine's cookies. Okay, yeah. When you go, I never have gone to the tourist areas. I avoid it. But I spent a lot of time in Times Square because I was going to see Broadway shows. And it's also one of the few Disney Stores that still is open. So I had to go in there. I got a wreath I didn't need but I needed you know, and Okay. Rockefeller Center. So I go there to meet Stephanie. Why rock as you and I didn't have enough time with your Stephanie. But while we were waiting, there's a whole show of lights. A GG know that you knew this that like it's with music and everything like Disney. I had no idea. What's the store that darkness said yes Avenue, Saks Fifth Avenue. And it's like castle and lighting. It was I was just joking. If you don't know, I love Disney. I love Disney so much. And this was a Disney experience. And I just we weren't waiting in the cold. I'm like, all bitter. You know, I just I'm not happy in the cold. So I'm like, and then the light show on Japan?   37:45 Yeah, it's spectacular. It was   37:47 so great. I had no idea and it goes up like every few minutes. It's quite regular. So if you like oh, we miss it. You're fine. Just wait a few minutes. It'll start again. i Oh, go see it. Go see it. Don't stand in Time Square for New Year's. But go see that that was such a wonderful, positive, beautiful moment. And, and just great. It was great. Also, there are a lot of great photographers in New York. So if you're visiting New York, and you want to get stuff for social media, that is the spot to get it. There are so many talented photographers you can get reasonable prices and and build your social media real fast. All right, that's it.   38:26 Perfect. Well, before we wrap up the year, where can people find you if they want more information about you in any of your programs? And also let us know what you have coming up in 2022?   38:38 Okay, well, most immediately, you're going to find me at Disney Land in February this year in 2022. Because I'm going to be there my birthday. If you go there on the 16th of February. Just let me know. And we'll like meet up with you. But no, I'm going to be eating junk food all day. So if you're expecting me to be held a healthy influence, I will not be alright. For me, I'm going to be continuing with my private practice, working with performers and continuing with helping people live their lives as dance PTS helping you on the business and treatment side with my dance PT program. But most importantly, because I'm always like I'm a performer and physical therapist. I'm doing all this work right now. I am getting back into performing which I'm really happy about so I'll be submitting a lot more which I'm just super stoked. I feel like all my work stuff is is being is much more easier to handle now I've got it down. And the systems are in place if you will get to audition more than I'll be a movie star just like that because it's so easy. It'll be great, but I'm really excited about that. What about you Karen?   39:55 Oh, that's exciting. Gosh, I'm not gonna be a movie star. Anything So what do I have coming up? Let's see, um, this past year I finished the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business program, highly recommend anyone to apply to because it's really amazing. How many more plugs can we drop in this episode? And so I'm going to this year, I'm looking to hire another PT for my practice, right? Mm hmm. Which is very fun. Exactly, it grows, but   40:31 you're like, I'm not going to take all the patients. It's gross,   40:34 but time to bring on someone else. Right. And then continuing to work with just a couple of people. With business coaching, I like take four people at a time for me that I get it handle, it's good enough for me, I'm happy to do it. So that will open back up again. Maybe end of January of 2022. Because like you said, when you know what you can handle and you know that you can help the people who want to be helped, then it becomes so much easier. So now I feel like I've got this under control. I know how to split up my time and manage my time. And so I'm really looking forward to that in 2022 and we'll see what happens.   41:24 I love that. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, are so cool. I love what you do.   41:30 Where can people find you? Oh,   41:33 yeah, so I have the dance physical therapists Facebook group. So that's one specifically for PT so you will find me in their active conversations once talking about performing arts research all that stuff. You can find me at CSM Oh yeah, social media, dance physical therapists on Instagram. I am also musical theater doc on there. But I really associate people more regarding musical theater, not other pts. So dance physical therapist, is that and then on Facebook, Jenna cantor. And yeah, pretty much Jenna Cantor from Twitter and Jenna cantor. Yeah, your website. Jenna cancer, PT, calm.   42:18 Perfect. Perfect. Excellent. Well, Jenna, thank you so much for coming on and wrapping up 2022. And for all of your help and friendship throughout the year. I really appreciate it. And appreciate so   42:31 much. I have to just say that joke that keeps coming to my head every time you keep saying wrapping up. I feel like I should be wrapping a present. I just it's a stupid joke. But I just need to put that in there. Thank you. I said it.   42:43 Tis the season when in Rome, right? Yes. All right. Well, thank you again, so much. And everyone. Thank you so much. On behalf of myself and Jenna, for listening to the podcast all year and for supporting it. And you know if anyone has any suggestions on anyone they'd like either one of us to interview please let us know. You can find us on social media. I'm on Twitter at Karen Litzy. NYC and Instagram at Karen Litzy. You can email me Karen at Karen Litzy. Calm it couldn't be any easier. Or you can find me at Karen Litzy calm. We're super easy over here. So let us let us know if there's any topics or people that you're like man, I really want to hear from this person. We'll be more than happy to see if we can get it done. So thanks again. Everyone have a very, very happy new year and a healthy 2022 And of course stay healthy, wealthy and smart.

Carl states, "Covid is not your problem," then what is? Check out this episode of #70secondCEO. A quick daily hit with Carl Gould to achieve a lifetime of results.  Read full transcript: Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results. Here's your challenge among all the other challenges, your clientele is thinking that for the last 13 months you have been sitting back strategizing Thomas Edison trying you know to figure out and invent the next best way for customer service. The next best way to get them a product, the next best way to fix your supply chain. They are thinking that when the world fully opens back up and the supply chain is out there and we all can get together again, they're gonna think that you have been sitting around, strategizing and the entire--and planning the entire time. So COVID as I mention all it did was put a magnifying glass on what you do, COVID is not your problem, think like a restaurant, COVID is not your problem. Your problem is, your bigger problem is meeting the spike in demand when the world is fully back open for you. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more. My name is Carl Gould and this has been your #70secondCEO.

"Invention and ideas really come out of necessity, or desperation. So COVID hit, and I was just desperate to sweat..." (Brooke Pancratz - FIT)Listen as I talk to local fitness instructors about what their classes are like, and why they enjoy hosting events at the House of Sport. Becca Kelly is a former SEC soccer player from Knoxville, who has years of professional training experience to share with our athletes. Her company is BK X-Training, and it has really taken off over the past year.   Brooke Pancratz played college basketball, and also worked for the UT Men's basketball team for a few years. She recently created FIT virtual training classes, and they've been wildly popular, especially in east TN. Joe Hogan joins the show to talk about what sets the fitness department at Dick's House of Sport apart from other similar stores. Also, listen as I give a coupon code that can be used for 20% off of ANY experience at DICK'S House of Sport.   Follow us on Facebook and Instagram @dickshouseofsportknx and check out the full events calendar at www.dicks.com/houseofsportknx DICK'S House of Sport - KnoxvilleDICK'S Sporting Goods

Dr Jeffrey Magee is a Chief Culture and Learning Officer, Editor in Chief at Professional Performance Magazine, author of 31 books, he's also a speaker and board adviser. In this really inspiring show you can learn about: The importance of investing into Human Capital How to become part of the Top 1% high achievers Why settling for a “B” grade will stimulate mediocrity How to find your X Factor and trajectory Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services Find out more about Jeffrey below: Jeffrey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjeffspeaks/ Jeffrey Magee Website: https://www.jeffreymagee.com Professional Performance Magazine: https://professionalperformancemagazine.com Jeffrey on Twitter: https://twitter.com/drjeffspeaks   Full Transcript Below ----more----   Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker. Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you Dr. Jeffrey McGee is a special guest on today's show. He's a human capital developer and chief culture and learning officer. He's also a multiple author and editor-in-chief at Professional Performance Magazine. But before we get a chance to meet with Jeff, it's The Leadership Hacker News. The Leadership Hacker News Steve Rush: In years in the news today, we explore some research completed by Boyden, a premier leadership and talent advisory firm, who's completed the study on talent led transformation in a post pandemic world. The global study explores the business outlook among CEOs, boards and other senior leaders, talent trends, priorities, and investment in the wake of the pandemic throughout 2022. Studies finding show that while seventy-seven percentage of respondents are extremely confident or confident in their organizations, growth potential just forty-seven percentage are extremely confident or confident in having the right talent to align to that strategy. Half of all respondents describe their business approach in 2022 as one of growth or expansion. And just over a quarter twenty-six percentage as a learning or transformation opportunity, this bullish approach versus a lack of talent alignment, jeopardizes post pandemic growth. And this lack of alignment goes up to board level with fifty-two percentage respondents saying that the different mix of skills is needed at the board. And despite this only thirty-eight percentage of respondents are likely to conduct a board assessment or review over the next two years. The findings do show that respondents are reinventing talent. Seventy-four percentage are extremely likely or likely to invest in leadership development for high potential employees, sixty-six percentage to hire new leadership talent and six five percentage to redeploy or retrain existing people. The research shows a number of trends that are looking at talent, and it reveals a lack of alignment across the leadership team, particularly around things like diversity, only forty-seven percentage of HR leaders think that it's extremely likely that their organization will hire talent into diversity roles. Sustainability, forty-two percentage of marketing leaders think is extremely likely or likely that their organization will hire talent into sustainability roles compared to thirty-one percentage of CEOs and supply chain. Thirty-seven percentage of finance leaders think is extremely likely their organization will hire talent into supply chain roles compared to twenty percentage of CEOs. In submarine attracting talent respondents consider the two top drivers to be a strong overall company's reputation, fifty-seven percentage and a purpose driven organization fifty-two percentage. Followed by the workplace of the future with a hybrid working arrangements come in at thirty-eight percentage. And the leadership lesson here is, however big organizational team is. There's never a wrong time to start reassessing how you go about nurturing and growing your talent. It's our future. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, news or stories? Get in touch. Start of Podcast   Steve Rush: Dr. Jeffrey McGee is a special guest on today's show. He's chief culture and learning officer, editor-in-chief at Professional Performance Magazine. He's the author of 31 books, a speaker, and a board advisor. Jeff, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time, Steven. Steve Rush: No worries. Listen, let's get into it, but before we do, it'd be really great for you to give a bit of a sense to our audience about your backstory and how you've arrived at being a multiple author and as well as a speaker and a board advisor. just give us that backstory if you could? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question, dangerous question. We could go on forever. So, I'll try to make it really concise. I grew up in the Midwest USA on a farm. Went to college on an athletic scholarship and journalism scholarships. Running and running, I've always been passions. And after college I spent some time in Midwest USA as a journalist doing broadcast news and print and kind of fixated in the area of business and found that to be fascinating area. But very quickly also became discouraged with the state of journalism in the eighties and nineties as a very negative caustic and toxic industry. It's obviously not that way today at all. And that caused me to kind of leave that the industry. And as I tell people in my audiences and just in conversations, if you're ever discouraged with what you're doing professionally or you're unemployed, there's always a job anywhere in the world, but especially in America. And it's called the sales job. Now, if you're not good at sales, you may not keep it, but there's always a hunger for the person who generates the revenue for an organization. So that took me into sales very quickly and in a trajectory, I had not planned on. And I had the opportunity to spend a little time with a fortune 100 company in the United States in sales. They introduced me to adult learning, which I didn't know existed as an industry where you would go, you know. To advance training or education at the college level or business development programs at a local hotel that might be a day or two-day long program. And I was doing that after hours and found that to be fascinating. To jump forward over the past thirty years, that evolved me into training and development, which led me into management roles and leadership roles into owning a business. And along the way, I started writing some books. Those books caught traction here in the U.S. and globally became a couple of bestsellers. And that led me to designing and creating a training and development company. While I worked with business leaders around the world from Berlin to Vermont wherever. Helping them to basically leverage their human capital as I have come to learn and even you and your business, I would believe you would agree. You can get a building, I can get a building, you can get equipment, I can get equipment, you can buy vehicles, I can buy vehicles. But the one thing that really makes us different at the day is the human equation. The people that work for you don't work for me and vice versa. And that's what led me to where I am today in terms of working with business owners and leaders, to accelerate their growth and success through leveraging their human capital and creating a culture and environment by which great want to come and be a part of you and stay with you. Steve Rush: Awesome. Now the interesting thing here, right, is the whole notion of human capital. It's something that's been recently reintroduced into our vernacular almost, but from your perspective, having worked with organizations where they are investing in their people, their human teams, is there a real return on investment to be had in your experience? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It's a great question. So, one of the training companies, I was a part of for many years and sold my stake in here in the U.S. at least for our global listeners today, if you're a CPA in the financial accounting world, or you're an attorney in the legal world, you have to have ongoing educational credits every year to keep your license and certificate, to be able to professionally do your practice. And in that space, I started learning many years ago that we spent a tremendous amount of time in every business. White collar, blue collar, labor intense, automation, doesn't matter. Training and investing money into equipment and assets and tangibles and buildings where we typically say, okay, what's the ROI on that going to be? And then we do a lot of technician training, you know. How to work the machines? Or et cetera. And a lot of, you know. Return on that investment through efficiencies and productivity and profitability. One of the elements I have been using, even at the title on my business card for decades, even though you just made comment, it's come back and it's fashionable today, but people like you and I have known it for many years, and that is human capital. So, one, what is human capital? We spend a tremendous amount of time talking about that. Two, how do you develop that human capital on talent pathways, career expectations, market needs, business needs? And is there then an ROI on that? Absolutely yes. And I believe there's a greater and a more lasting ROI on human capital than any other capital you can have because almost any other measurement of capital, which is around tangibles depreciates very quickly. You buy a new car soon as you drive it off the lot there in London, or you drive it off the lot here in Las Vegas. It depreciates tremendously, as soon as you leave the parking lot. Human capital depreciates, if you don't challenge it. It depreciates if you don't hold it accountable. It depreciates if you're not growing and developing and feeding what individuals goals needs and purposes are. But if you can align all of that, the ROI is massive. Steve Rush: And you can see on the balance sheet as well, can't you? So, if you look at the organizations who do invest in their people and have strong engagement scores, low attrition, holding onto that talent, then there's a direct correlation of those businesses returns in real sense, too, isn't there? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely, you can see from the, you know. The boardroom conversations to the executive suite, to frontline, you know. Leads supervisors, managers, directors, whatever the title is that an organization may have for its first level, and then, you know. Sending upward of leadership, absolutely. And, individuals, you know. They come to an organization where they see an organization best in their people and provide multiple for development and growth and development of those people, not just in the job, but development of them in terms of promotability, sustainability, longevity, absolute, it's a massive recruitment tool as well as a retention tool. And then again, think about the turnover. There's a hard HR statistic that's used globally, and you can debate the number, but even if you debated it, doesn't change the output. And it says, basically, let's take an administrative job and a business, a white-collar job. I hate the labels, but it gives us some point of reference. And they talk about the amount of financial attached to the turnover. Let's say Steve's working in our business and an administrative role, white collar role, the amount of money attached to losing you, advertising, promoting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding someone to get them up to baseline functionality of what Steven was doing is any work between one point five and three times what your annual paycheck was. So, it's very expensive. And then you add on additional, such as again, what are the relationships that Steve had before he left? And if those were good, both with vendors, suppliers, coworkers, colleagues, employees. It could take a long time to rebuild those relationships. So, can you start to put some numbers to it? Absolutely. The institutional knowledge that someone has to know how to finesse relationships or situations to be more productive and profitable, if I'm in a client relationship role, development role, again. Knowing how to cross sell, upsell. Knowing what a client's long-term goals are and how we can align those with our own organizational goals? Yeah, the conversations can just go on endlessly, but the finances attached to it are staggering. Steve Rush: Yes, there are some big numbers there, aren't there? And if you think, even small organizations, that's a massive number relative to the operating cycle of a business. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: Yeah, so you develop the principle and notion of Talentification, which is also you wrote book about, so what is Talentification? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question, so looking at the concept of talent, and you can finish that statement for our listeners today, a lot of ways, whether you call it talent management, talent development, talent acquisition, and I started recognizing working in this space over the last thirty years, both with fortune 100 global clients to individual industry, rockstar businesses that the common person on the street would never know the name of that business, unless you're in that space, whether it's agriculture or manufacturing or high-tech, or what have you. So, to me, Talentification that concept in the word deals with what I've identified to be the eleven elements to execution and achievement. I used the word achievement as capital letters. There's, you know? Those letters stand for each of the eleven phases of what talent life cycles are about. So, it's eleven elements of execution and achievement of the talent management model that I've identified for basically healthy and sustained and engage organizations. And how do you create that culture where everyone, not just the leaders, not just the talent management team understands what their role in stake is in health and wealth of an organization? Again, if you're my supervisor or you're my peer, you're my subordinate, doesn't matter. All of us have to understand when it comes to talent, what really are all those key aspects we're talking about? So that's what the book deals with, those eleven phases. It talks a little bit strategically, tactically about what each looks like from anyone in organizations perspective. And we can look at high growth organizations, again, just as you said, whether they're a small family business, a sole proprietor, or whether there are mid-size or large going concern, you know? Those eleven phases are critically important. And as you get people engaged at their capacities, eleven different areas, it also becomes a massive retention tool. Your entrepreneurial energy becomes organic to some of the questions you and I were just visiting around. Steve Rush: So, if I was a leader, listening to the eleven phases and thinking about my talent and my talent strategy, is there a, maybe a golden starting place or a golden end, is there maybe one place that you think that has to be part of my talent strategy? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. So, you know? In the human relations world, HR Management. There are different models that are used. One of the models that kind of has grabbed the globe in the last decade is, using stars as a metaphor for your employees. And so, to answer that, let me share, teach a model real quickly, because I think it absolutely is explosive in answering your question. It also answers the questions of how you can guard against making sure you don't have a toxic cancerous person in your team that's going to be working actively or passive aggressively against you and take you down. So, to me, there's different sort of stars. You have a rock star in your company, rockstars are from an aptitude and a level very high on the scale and from an attitudinal level, very high on the scale. So, they're, you know? They know what they're doing. They're your subject matter experts, are always looking to grow and develop themselves, but they're always willing to push and achieve more. So, you have your rock stars, then you have developing stars. These are people that have good attitudes. They need knowledge and attitudinal growth, which could take time. And some people are not patient for the amount of time it may take to grow their brain in any sort of a job or vocation. You have, you know? Emerging stars, these are people that that know how to do the job, but they've got a chip on their shoulder, or they're not as motivated or they're somewhat discouraged. We have to know how to engage them. You have your problem players, which I call those, your crashing stars. You have employees that maybe you don't know very much about. Those would be your unknown stars. And then you've just got your work horses. You know? Basically, you're contributing stars. And lot of times contributing stars want to be a part of organization, but they don't really want to ascend upward into, you know? Any sort of job role with this lot of spotlights. They don't want to be a leader, a boss. So, you need the whole mix's. To answer your question. What I've recognized, you know? In working with global talents. also from my media company, Performance Professional Performance Magazine. Interviewing phenomenal people all over the planet, is that the real secret to your question is the rock star population, that rockstar demographic, knowing that if I've got a rock star at any job, sit down and do some character analysis and say, okay, what are the quantifiable that makes Stephen my rock star at job ABC? And when I can start to write down those characteristics of Stephen as a rockstar in his job, I now have a benchmark template. I can use the interview to find another rock star. I could use it and kind of put it up on a wall for anyone else who wants to become a rock star like Stephen and said, okay, these are the traits or characteristics or skills or behaviors or actions that you need to exhibit or master. And I think that's how you start to answer your question is to clearly focus on the rockstars. See the reason I go off on that tirade is that what we've done for the last twenty to thirty years, and we were not paying attention on the planet is, we actually started lowering the performance bar where mediocrity is actually seen as rock stars today in most places on the planet that I go.   Steve Rush: Right. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: And if mediocrity, as soon as the rock star, then you can see how pathetic and how bad it gets real quick. Here in the United States, Gallup Organization did a massive research project right before COVID. And so, it got lost in the noise. The challenge to the research project model, Steve is, I think the numbers are worse today than what they said before, but basically said this. They surveyed thousands of American and global businesses based in U.S. And they found that fifty-six percentage of the respondents. So, thousands of businesses mean tens, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals participated in the survey, but fifty-six percentage of responders said they're disengaged or complacent in the workplace, so fifty-six percentage basically saying, hey, I'm going through the motions. I realized I don't have to kill myself. So, it's kind of like, you know? If I'm doing some tough love here, what's the minimum I have to do for maximum paycheck? Then fifteen percentage identified as actively disengaged. These are people that wake up every morning, look for something new to complain about, which leaves you mathematically with twenty-nine percentage leftover that are engaged. So, let's call those engaged, you know? Some of the rock stars or developing stars or emerging stars. And that's what you realize. If you want to have a successful business, you build it around the star metaphor, but you build it around rock stars, because if Steven's a rock star and you hire me, then I know where the performance bar is set and I'm going to step up. And as consumers, you and I, and the listeners today can validate what I've just shared as consumers is, look at the places you go and ask yourself, are you really getting rockstar level service, or are you really getting mediocre service that people are calling rockstar level? And so that's a series of answers to your powerful question, Steve Rush: That's a great response too, and it's interesting that the whole mediocrity can be really cancerous in an organization, can't it? Because if you allow your average to be sub average, than your average, occasionally we'll just continue the slit versus your average should be your rock stars of now. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: It should be your average is in the future, right? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Yeah, I coach people that if you have, again, we can call them whatever you want. So, I don't want anybody to get hung up on labels here, but as a reference point, if you have a job description or a job profile that says I'm hiring Geoffrey McGee to do job ABC, I'm going to hire Steven to do job XYZ. So obviously we're both going to ask our boss the same question, which is, okay, great. What's this job responsible for? What do I do? What are the expectations? So, when you start to identify the work product and then how does it need to be accomplished or how often, or how much? We have clarity to our job and everything's built around it. But with that, what I coach is, if someone is doing one hundred percentage of the job you've hired them to do so, first thing I just said is 100 hundred percentage of the job you've been hired to do, then that means they're meeting expectations. Meeting expectations would be like, you're going to school and you're getting grades. And again, we use different scorecards around the globe. So, in the United States, if you're going to kindergarten to high school and into college. The grading system we use is A, B, C, D F. Well, I always tell people, if you want to get clarity, get rid of letter B for boy and get rid of letter D for dog. And all you should have is either an F, C, or an A, you're doing a hundred percent of the job expected. Then that's a C, you're meeting expectations, you're average, but that scares people. Therefore, any part of your job description, you're not doing, you have to get an F. I mean, we're not going to give any wiggle rooms for B's and D's. So, someone says, well, how do I get to be an A? Then I say go right back to your job description. And in any one of those areas that you exceed, that I, as the organization amount, obligated to give you an A in that area. So, if you take that metaphor and you use it to any sort of a job we have, I mean, everything has been degraded down. I mean, if you're a rock star player and you wake up tomorrow morning and you're not motivated, and you're just, you know? Not highly excited, we've all had those days. I tell people and ask people, well, what do you bring to the office? Do you bring you're A game and your B? Well, most of the answer is B. Well, if you go home within that day and reflect on, I brought my B game to the office and I'm still a rock star by a mile. Well, what do you bring back on the subsequent day? You can bring back you're A, or do you calibrate down to B? And most of us, we calibrate young to B, and then someday in the future, you wake up, not motivated. Do you bring your, A, B or C? Well, we know A is not in the game anymore. So, you bring your C and that's how we've done things, we make an exception. We elect people that are mediocre, and then we make excuses when they're pathetic. We hire people that are mediocre, and then we make excuses when they're pathetic. And that's, what's sad about the model, instead of all of us trying to be the best we can be and raised the bar, we've actually made it globally convenient to lower the bar. Steve Rush: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Spot on. I love the concept that you've applied to the kind of ACF, because it removes the opportunity to sit in some middle ground, doesn't it? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You hit it dead center, and that's the element. I mean, if I am going to traditional college that are traditional age, we have all those wiggle grades, and it's amazing how we, our faculty, our parents, we justify those wiggled grades. But now, if you and I are business people, as we are here today and majority of our listeners, and you were paying out of your own pocket to go to a developmental program to get more education, so you can become better. It's amazing, we're paying it. We don't want the wiggle grade. We want the best grade possible. Well, imagine if the B and a Ds off the table, it either is your understanding the topic, so that's C. There's nothing wrong with that, where you're not understanding it. So, we're not going to pass you. You're going to get an F. I mean, you go in for brain surgery. Do you want your surgeon to be an F, an D, an C or an B surgeon for med school? Would you prefer they be an A? Steve Rush: Exactly, you don't want your brain surgeons to be a B on any type of surgery, do you? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Your parents, you're taking your child for heart surgery, I changed the model, and I say, a parent, you're taking your child and you want your surgeon to be an F, D, C or B or an A? I mean, so if you change the dynamic, everyone kind of like raised their eyebrows. Like it's obvious A, but then in other professions, we accept C's and D's and F's all day long. Steve Rush: And did this thinking set you on your trajectory? I'm going to use the word Jeff, to when you wrote your Trajectory Code. So, this is a book that you wrote around how to change your decisions, actions, and directions, and to become part of that top one percentage of high achievers, right? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: So, you've got within that, your mental DNA, just tell us a little bit about what that is and how we could get into that top one percent? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question. So, a couple of models, it's a really easy book. I tell people it's not going to be difficult. I spent two years in first grade as a child. So, nothing I do is hard. It's pretty simple, but what I identified of the thirty-one books, I've written, twenty-one languages, four bestsellers, and four graduate management textbooks. Your Trajectory Code is the only book, so people can buy it online, or they can buy the audio book. The only book I've written, it's about personal success. And it primarily draws upon one business model I've used for years called the trajectory code, the trajectory code models, like a letter V for victory. And that that diagram helps us to recognize what actions, behaviors, and mindsets take you to derailment and failure. And what are the actions, mindset, and behaviors that take us to success. Within that, there's a concept called your mental DNA, and it plays off of a formula. So, it's chapter five in the book that talks about your player capability index. And so, I'm a formula kind of a person. So, what I recognize, if I look at Stephen and Stephen comes to Jeff Magee and said, I like you to be my performance coach and helped me to accelerate my successes. Here's the goal of where I want to go. Well, I'm going to have to do some diagnostics, whether it's an online platform or just you and I are visiting via video call. Because I prefer video calls versus to telephone that way, we can see each other. Because a lot of visual communication takes place. It's very insightful. But what I've recognized in that formula, Stephen, is that there's very specific variables that make up a human being such as knowledge.   So that's one of the letters in the formula. So, whether it's formal or informal education, technical, non-technical, certification, non-certification. Another part of it, it's going to be our life experiences. How does one life experience build and set the stage for the next? And how do we leverage those to be better? You know, the next time we do something. How about the culture we were raised in, or the cultures we've been a part of or, you know? Ebbed and flowed in and out of. That influences how our thinking styles and belief systems and confidential, we lack thereof. So, there's a lot more to the formula and it's very easy to read and understand, but that becomes the DNA. So, if I want to grow someone in, let's say between today and in the future, we don't know what the future date is, to be the new CEO of a business. Family owned a global international business, a local mom and pop shop. Then I would first, okay. So, to be a great executive, I use the same DNA model and you and I, or whoever the appropriate stakeholders would be, we would sit down and say okay. For us to have a great CEO, what would we like them to possess in terms of knowledge or skills or education or degrees or certifications? You know, some, none, what are they? What sort of attitude, mindsets? What sort of passion? What sort of experiences do we want them to have? What sort of a relationships? People that we want them to have interacted with, grown with? Network with or known? So, this formula also gives us a great DNA chart to scope out how do you build a great leader. Leader of nations, leader of communities, leaders of business, leaders of our ourselves. So, the DNA concept has multiple applications, personal development, career development of someone, creating, you know? Job descriptions that client says, hey, I need something, listen to what the client says they need. They'll tell you exactly where you need to go. But the last way of answering your question is that part of this model, Steve is very objective and that's the real power behind it. It gives you the objective template to assess yourself or someone else and pull all of the emotion and ego and personalization out of it to see exactly what we need to do to be smart at the end of the day, Steve Rush: Laser focus. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You got it. Steve Rush: Yeah, and in the book also, you talk about having the opportunity to understand your X factor when you're on your trajectory. Does that form part of this? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It is exactly. So, the X factor is the first side of this equation. I know I'm talking to a global audience here and we have, you know? fortyish percent of your listeners are in the U.S. and forty to forty five percent might be in the UK and the others are global. So, this X factor concept is not like the entertainment show from the great British businessman, Simon Cowell.   Steve Rush: He has a lot of answer for X-Factor now, doesn't he? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Exactly, so I've been using my X-Factor longer than he as, of course, he's richer than both of us, bam, he wins. Steve Rush: Exactly. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: But the X-Factor represents any thing you're measuring is what X represents in this formula. So, if we're measuring, you know? How fast can you run? That's an X-Factor or how fast can you compute some mathematical questions? That's an X-Factor, you know? How good are you at wood crafting? I mean, so whatever it is you're measuring, that's X. So, to answer, let me use this example. So, let's say we go on to any school campus around the world of, you know? Kindergarten, to primary, to high school grade. And you were to say on that campus, there's a range of athletic sports that are offered. Well, the varsity sport, the highest level of proficiency that high school, I'd say. Of a hundred percent of the kids on that campus. If we're measuring athletics as our X-Factor, of a hundred percent of the kids on any campus, X percent would actually be good enough to make the varsity team of any sport. So, if you ask that question to a group of people, it's always going to be a small number. Of a hundred percent of kids on the campus. You might hear someone say twenty percent, or ten percent or five percent, then I said, okay, so let's track it two more times. Of a hundred percent, then of those high school, varsity athletes, X percent would be good enough to go play it at a collegiate level, at a college level. Get a scholarship to go to the advanced level, what percent? And it's always a smaller number that migrates and said, okay, so final question. So, we started with a hundred percent mass at a high school, and we saw that how many kids are were good enough to be on the varsity sport at a high school level, smaller number, go play at the college collegiate level, smaller number. So, what percentage would be drafted from a college level to go play at the professional ranks? Whether it's, you know? Football, rugby, whether it's, you know? Basketball, football, hockey, whatever, it's always a really small number. So, get people to recognize whatever you're tracking is an X-Factor and whatever that smallest finite number you just came up with using athletics is what we tracked. We're all professionals, so if you really want to see where you should be focusing your energy or how to grow and develop yourself, what are you really proficient in as an X-Factor? So, let's do the math. Let's say high school is twenty percent, would be at the high school team. How many go to college? Let's say it's five percent. How many go on and play at the pros? Point zero, zero, zero, whatever percent. Oh, okay. So that point zero, zero, zero, that's you and I, as professionals, we're not competing on a planet about the twenty percentiles, because this is not high school.   Real life is not high school. It's not college, it's pros. So, if you really want to be successful, then you've got to identify, what is your X-Factor. For me, growing up in primary school from kindergarten to high school, I was not a great writer. I thought I was, I mean, teachers were very critical of my writing. Well, maybe it's because I wanted to be a writer and they were giving me additional attention. I didn't really like to read books in high school or college. So, it's fascinating, you know? Forty years later, I love to read, I love to write, I love to do research. And all of that forms a basis of my ability to coach executives and businesses to be in hyper-growth faster, quicker And sustained. Steve Rush: It's a really, yeah, lovely way of thinking about it, this whole kind of one percent or zero, zero, zero, point one percent of professionals. I wonder how many people actually can even associate that in their profession today, they're already there? And that's a lot to do with mindset, I suspect. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely, you know? It is. And there's actually some quantifiable ways to answer that because you've posed a great question. Someone says, okay, how do I know if I'm in the top percentage of my industry? Or how do I know if I'm starting to rest on my morals and accomplishments? Or how do I push myself? So, I always tell people, in your job and your profession, is there another formal educational degree you could achieve? And if yes, then you're not at the top of the list, pull yourself down at least one notch on any scale, because there's something there you can quantify that you could go after that you're not, or are there certifications in your industry? And if that's a yes and you don't have them, then bring yourself down another notch, you know? Have you written any papers or are you asked to speak on this? Are you asked to be the trainer in your business on these topics? So that's a great question. You've posed for our listeners. How do you know when you're at the top of the game? There are ways of knowing it. And if you study another way of looking at this one percent factors, I've interviewed, you know? World leaders from your country, Tony Blair, to Richard Branson, Richard Branson, I've written three books together, whatever you look at incredibly successful people. What you'll recognize is that they associate with and typically hang out with, from their view, their vision, other phenomenally successful people, whether it's in their industry or not, you don't see a great athlete typically hanging out with losers. I mean, there might be, you know? A phenomenal singer. It might be a phenomenal artist and maybe a phenomenal business leader. You know? So again, successful people typically associate with other successful people. Because that's one of the ways they benchmark themselves to always be being pushed because great successful people in any capacity can call you out on whether or not you're truly working or you're coasting.   Steve Rush: It's interesting, as you were saying that Jeff, I was thinking about sports people. Perhaps are easy to quantify because they've got measures, personal bests, they've got fastest times, greatest passes. All of those things are quantifiable, but in business they're perhaps around us yet we don't spend as much time quantifying it. And I think that's a really key message for me. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Huge, you just said something massive for the listeners, thank you. A pro athletes live for quantifiable performance feedback in real time when they're practicing, they have videotapes. They can go back and study. They have coaches and sub coaches that are always, you know? Measuring them, pushing them, tracking them. And so, it's interesting in what I call the real business world where you and I live, it's amazing how the mindset of most people is, we resist performance feedbacks. We resist performance reviews. We don't like quantifiable data. Because sometimes, you know? It's misused against this instead of being used to help to grow us, we need to create that pro athlete mindset around performance execution, and then we'll become much more successful in any capacity. Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely so. So, in your experience Jeff, has human capital, the world of talent management changed over the last couple of craziest through COVID? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It has, you know? And it's interesting. I find myself posing the question just this recent weekend. I was here in Las Vegas on the strip speaking to a large convention. And, I posed a question that, if you and I were sitting in a large business audience conference, whatever topic, doesn't matter, and it was January of 2020, and the person in front was asking the audience questions like how many of you have a business plan, a game plan for 2020, almost every hand would go up. You know? How many of you are optimistic for 2020? Everyone's hands probably would go up. From a sales standpoint, maybe the more specific question then. How many of you have a sales plan or strategy for 2020? Almost every hand would go up. What about your talent management, your human capital, you looking at your key employees in your organization? You feel comfortable with that team? A lot of hands would go up. Are you looking to hire hands would go up? Have you thought about flight risk and anyone leaving you? Probably hands wouldn't go up. No one thought that way. If we would have posed the last question in January, 2020 to a large business audience, you know? What about letting a lot of your employees work remotely or virtually, you know? How many of you are open to that idea? Very few hands would have went up, but if we would have had that same conversation in June, just three or four months into COVID. In June of 2020, I said, well, you know? How many of you are working remotely or have a lot of your employees working remotely or, you know, virtual? Tons of hands would have went up. So, we jumped into 2021. We're recording this here in, in August, September of 2021. And what I'm finding is that a massive number of businesses that have had to make massive changes in 2020 to stay sustainable, or that have actually been in thriving mode, have embraced looking at how they do their businesses differently. So COVID has pushed our business models easily ten years into the future, just in the past year. They've pushed businesses to actually operate the way that we were only considering a year ago. And so, from a human capital standpoint, it's also pushed us to recognize where are some of our hidden jewels that maybe we were smothering and didn't realize we had phenomenal talent before COVID that is actually stood up in shined. And it's caused us to recognize how do we keep people engaged? How do we maintain our culture? When we have pockets of people working together and some are distant. And how do we grow and develop our people to keep them at peak performance? So, has it changed in some ways? Absolutely, no. Because how to be successful in a position? A lot of similarities. The other way of answering it, has it changed? Absolutely, yes. I think, looking at how we are more mindful of our people equation, our human capital has really become more front and center today than where it was a year ago. So yes and no to that question Steve Rush: And many different rockstars now than perhaps two years ago. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: But equally as important of course, is to make sure that rewriting that DNA of what the rock star is today in today's world, right? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Exactly right. A hundred percent correct. Steve Rush: Love it. So, this is part of the show now where we get to flip the leadership lens on you. I'm going to hack into your great years of experience of leadership development and leading others. And ask you to try and distill down, if you can, your top three leadership hacks, what would they be Jeff? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: I think one, that we have actually touched on and that is to player capability and next model. Really recognizing what's the unique talent that you can possess, that I can possess that can allow me to be competitive with the market space of today and tomorrow. Anticipate where the market's going, so I can be not just competitive, but I can set the bar of what competition looks like. That's one, two is accountability. I've really have learned that people fall into very distinct camps when it comes to accountability and reliability and trustworthiness and integrity. And so, number two is not a very, a fashionable conversation. Going to make people feel uncomfortable, but the reality is, there are a lot of disingenuous people on the planet and you just have to be conscious of that and put your big, you know? Your big adult armor on. So, they don't penetrate you and kill you because everyone has an agenda and that'll be the third answer. And once you recognize everyone has an agenda and it's not necessarily right or wrong, just everyone has an agenda. Then the real mastery is to find ways to align your agenda, personally, your agenda professionally with others agendas. And when you can find places of alignment, then great success can happen forever everybody.   Steve Rush: Alignment is just massive, isn't it? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: Yeah, and it's really interesting. The whole accountability thing in my experience as a coach, when you use just simply use the word accountability, you can almost see people think that means I have to deliver on something. Yes, that's right. And that's no different, isn't it? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: It is. Steve Rush: To any other day of the week, but by just simply raising its awareness. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: And that's what scares people. And again, if an organization supports its people to be the best, they can be. Then within that are going to be layers of accountability, whether there, you know? Obvious or not obvious. And again, if people want to be the best they can be, then there's going to be accountability. And their businesses around the globe that really demonstrate, you know? Accountability. And so, when I look at successful businesses, I've identified accountability happens on five levels. And so, here's another teaching moment for our listeners and business leaders. You know? First of all, the way, you know? You have a truly engaged workforce organization that is going to be in survival mode on its worst day. And there'll be in thriving mode on almost every day, is accountability level one is self. People hold themselves accountable. So, if I'm looking to interview or hire someone, I should incorporate accountability questions to vet and find out, is this person hold themselves accountable? Yes or no. And again, you can still hire someone if they fail the first question, at least now, you know what you're in for. Accountability starts with self. Then it goes to number two is going to be systems, what systems or processes or checklists, or, you know? What do we have out there that we can put our arms around, they help to hold us accountable so that we can go back to default number one? So, one is self, two systems. Three is going to be peer. Do we have peer to peer accountability? Do we work in an environment where no one's trying to play I gotcha? No, one's trying to toss you under the bus. But it's, you know? We're all here because we all have skin in the game. We all want to help each other to be vessels or peer accountability. And then four is going to be an essence customer. If that's an external constituent, what mechanisms do we have in place? Our customers can give us feedback, help us to be more successful every day. And so, they hold us accountable. And if we ask for customer feedback, we really listened to it. And do we really respond to it? Or is it just a game we're playing? And you have these layers of accountability. So again, one is self, two is system, three is peer, fours is customer. You'll five is going to be boss. You know? Whatever you define boss to be. Supervisor, leader, executive team, ownership, the board of directors, mom, and dad at home. You know? The boss should always be last. So, in any organization where you have the paradigm flip, the other direction, where you have accountability, it's driven by bosses first. You're never going to have a culture that's going to allow people to be truly successful because there's going to be questions of, does the organization trust me? Do they believe in me? Do they support me? Will they empower me? If the boss is always having to be there with their thumb on everything? So, accountability is scary. And that's problem we have in the world, I mean, I grew up to be a journalist and I love to write articles on successful people in organizations and share that story. So, people could replicate success, but here in the us, I mean, those articles are settlement ever written. And that's why I love your podcast because it's always about success. Just like my magazine, Professional Performance Magazine. It's always evergreen content, and it's about success from other people's lenses. Steve Rush: Right. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: But journalism is, should be holding all political people accountable. Don't have an agenda in A and B playing favorites. Don't be a journalist and like one political party over the other because you're not doing your job of accountability. And that's what we see happening on the planet is, all of these mechanisms for accountability have been bastardized, polluted, degraded or just imploded. And that's why, you know? Sometimes when we find a great person or a business that blows our brain up. Because, oh my gosh, that's what success looks like. Steve Rush: Yeah. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: That should be norm. Steve Rush: Yeah, it's a great, great reframe, love it. So, the next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. So typically, this is where something in your life or your work hasn't worked out well, but as a result, you've got some learning from it. And you now use it as a positive in what you do, what would be your Hack to Attack? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Woo, there's a loaded question. So, I merged my business years ago with another business. It doesn't need to be named. And what I learned is that when you work with someone for a number of years and you decide to align yourself with them and go into business, it's a completely different mindset you take in that relationship. Then if Stephen and I, you're in the UK, I'm in United States of America, we know of each other. We don't really know each other. We've never really worked with each other. If you and I were to merge our businesses, we would ask a lot of forensic questions, not to be mean and rude and disrespectful. We'd ask a lot of forensic questions to make sure that this merger of human capital and minds and product and deliver and businesses make sense. And if it does, we would have a great relationship. So, what I learned is that whenever you're you go to work with someone, you need to look at it from an objective lens as if you've never met them and really do the discovery questions. So, it's like when I worked with an organization, if I have any prior knowledge of them. I've learned to not bring that to the table in the beginning, backup and ask all of the questions you should be asking if you didn't know them to really vet and find out, are you in alignment? Are you both being transparent? Does the data add up? Make sure you're not about to get scammed. And that probably has been my number one lesson learned for the past decade plus. Matter of fact, I wrote an executive article on it with thirteen questions I didn't know to ask that I learned afterwards and it was saved me a lot of pain so that the hack that really has caused me more success. And sometimes I'm still guilty of violating it because when you're romanced in your head and you like someone, or you like the thought of doing something, you sometimes are not as objective as you could be a need to be. So, I go back to those thirteen questions in an article I wrote years ago. So, it really is be more objective and you will have more success. Steve Rush: And I love that because most people, whether they own a business or whether they work for an organization often just have too much emotion in the game. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely. Steve Rush: And therefore, won't allow themselves to be as objective as they could be. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You got it. Steve Rush: So that forensic look, I think it's really key. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: That's the way I lived. Steve Rush: Yeah. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Absolutely, it will save and your listeners, a lot of pain, grief and that loss of money. Let's say it that way. Steve Rush: Indeed. So that last bit the show Jeff, were we get to give you a chance to do some time travel and bump into yourself at twenty-one, toe to toe and give them some advice. What would your advice Jeff be at twenty-one? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question. And you have stolen a page right from me, Steve. I use that same question when I get a chance to interview phenomenal people for my magazine. So, I love that question. It's fair turnaround, right? Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You know? At age fifty-seven today, I don't see myself at fifty-seven. I always thought that was an older person's number. Now that I'm there, it's like, oh my gosh, it's pretty doggone young. So, the question, if I went back to twenty-one, I would think I would share a couple of pieces of information. Number one, I might've shared, get serious and focused faster and find a way to do a career that twenty to twenty-five years from age twenty-one. You could retire out of and have a base income, base benefits to rest on for the rest of your life and use that first career to gain and learn as much as you can, that you could then leverage in your second career in your mid-forties to go on and have a phenomenal life. And I say that because as I look over the horizon and see people that have done just that, you know? The ability to be in your fifties and sixties and have a base retirement paycheck for the rest of your life and a base, you know? Health benefits to have for the rest of your life. It twenty-one, you don't understand the magnitude of what that means, but at fifty-seven, looking at that as massive, because now you could do your second career in a lot of ways and not have the stress of, I've got to make a paycheck, I have to, and you finish that have to in a zillion way. And one is, I would say get serious. I see a lot of successful people today. They're successful because they have that base set up. If you're in your mid-forties and you've changed jobs, many times, as a lot of your listeners have, and maybe you've not doubled down and really got a lot of good advanced education because you started your family and had jobs that you just didn't make the time happen. You really find yourself in a challenged position of having to work really hard next twenty years, if not the rest of your life. And that's the norm on the planet today. And that's also the norm I see with a lot of young people today in their twenties that are not hearing this advice that I'd give back to myself for your question you've posed. And they're setting themselves up thinking that they're magically going to be wealthy, whatever that means and not have to work the rest of their life, whatever that means. And I think they're setting themselves up for a massively rude awakening. Steve Rush: Yeah, here, here, I agreed. So, Jeff, listen, I always love chatting to you. You create some great content, both verbally through your talks and speeches, but also through your written work. How can we make sure our listeners can keep connected with you? Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Great question, I appreciate it. There's three ways that we can stay connected. One, we should definitely be connected on LinkedIn. So go LinkedIn, again Jeffrey Magee, Dr. Jeff speaks, we need to be connected, follow me. I don't sell anything on LinkedIn, but in the spirit and thing of what we've just been visiting with here, I post on LinkedIn every day, some sort of mental piece of information, whether it's a quote, whether it's an article, whether it's a video, whether it's a blog to cause people to think at a higher, deeper, faster level. So that's one, if you want to find out more about, you know? Products, deliverables, how I do what I do, then obviously you can go to jeffreymagee.com, that's my website, jeffreymagee.com. It's J-E-F-F-R-E-Y. So, it's the non-British spelling and McGee is M-A-G-G-E and then my media company is professionalperformancemagazine.com. So those would be the three places, professional performance magazine.com, jeffreymagee.com or go to LinkedIn, and then we can stay connected and keep the brain going. Steve Rush: And we'll shoot those links into our show notes as well. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: You're awesome. Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you very much opportunity to share information ideas with your listeners and anything I can do for you and them, just let me know. Steve Rush: Jeff, it's been amazing to talk, take care of yourself and thanks being part of The Leadership Hacker community. Dr. Jeffrey McGee: Thank you so much. Closing Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers. Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handle there: @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.      

So Covid finally caught up to me and I'm getting through it as I recorded this episode. The President sent out a mandate on businesses over 100 employees and I respond to that. I also talk about hiring and what is working and what is not working in this climate!

Dr. Franchell HamiltonShe recognized that many of her patients needed a more personalized plan to help them maintain their weight loss goals. By addressing the mental, behavioral, medical, and environmental factors that kept them from a meaningful transformation, her patients began to regain control in these areas.Ari Gronich: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow I am your host or Ari Gronich and today I have with me Dr. Franchell Hamilton. She is a bariatric surgeon with not only several years of medical and surgical training, but chemistry psychology as well, who's now kind of grown a little tired of the system, as it is, and is looking to help support patients in a more holistic way. So I want I wanted to have her on here because she truly is part of who's making medicine, good for tomorrow, helping them activate their vision for a better world through medicine. So wanted to bring her on Dr. Franchell, thank you so much for coming on. Franchell Hamilton: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Ari Gronich: Absolutely. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background? And what made you go from traditional medicine towards some more holistic approach?Franchell Hamilton: Sure. So I was traditionally trained MD, medicine, went through residency, general surgery, and then I did extra training and bariatric or weight loss surgery, and was in private practice for about 10 years. And it wasn't until I was in private practice, actually, kind of with my own patients doing the things the way I want it. To do that I started realizing the system that I've been trained all this time wasn't really effective. And I have three clinics, right. So we had a pretty large practice. We're in a big Metropolitan Dallas Fort Worth area. And I was probably one of the top geriatric surgeons as far as volume, what I started noticing probably about seven years in actually, that I was doing a lot more revision surgeries, which means they've already had a bariatric surgery, gastric bypass, sleeve, lap band, whatever it is, and they were coming back to get a revision surgery. And I noticed that several years in the practice changed from doing predominantly first time, weight loss, whatever, surgery, medication wellness, I do a lot of things in my clinic that I saw a lot of repeat customers that regained. And I had to ask myself, what am I doing here, like I did all the checkboxes that I was taught to do. All the patients had to go see a nutritionist, they had to go see a psychologist, they had to get their heart checked out. They did all the checkboxes that was required by insurance. And that was required from my training. But patients weren't getting better. They were requiring revisions. And even the ones that were doing just the medical weight loss, they just weren't progressing the way I thought they should be. And I didn't go into medicine just to be busy. Just to be a busy surgeon, I actually wanted to make a difference. I have a heart for people with a lot of medical problems and complicated obesity. And I really wanted them to not just treat their medical problems, but to resolve them. I wanted them to go away. And I felt like in that moment, we I wasn't doing the right thing for them. So I really had to kind of rethink what I was doing revamp and I actually got more education and almost like what we call Eastern medicine or holistic medicine during those years because I was getting burned out with traditional medicine because I felt like I was not helping my patients because they didn't get better. Like I was trained bariatric surgery will not only help them lose weight, but their diabetes and hypertension, cholesterol, all this stuff will resolve. Right. And it did for a brief moment in time. And then the majority of patients were regaining. So that was my turning point for me.Ari Gronich: Awesome. Thank you so much for that and your dedication in general to wanting to find the best results for your patients. Because we all know that that's not happening so much in the industry right now. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you is what's been your, you know, the pushback from the system or from your colleagues, and so forth? Or what's been the adaptation from them where they've said, Oh, yeah, I've seen this too. And I also want to do what's best. So how can I get on board with what you're doing? So how have you seen on both sides of that?Franchell Hamilton: So, believe it or not, I felt like and still feel like I'm almost like a sore thumb in my industry because I will tell you, especially in the surgical industry, a lot of us are them. They're not there yet. Like they just they operate the and to be honest, I don't even know if it's their fault, like we were trained as a surgeon, we see a problem, we fix the problem or take out the problem. And then we move on to the next thing before I started my own private practice, I was with a group that was very much like that I was employed. And I immediately got out of that, because I was like, this is definitely not the way I want to practice medicine. And the only way that I felt like I can even come close was by starting my own practice. So that's kind of how I ended up in my own private practice. But I will tell you, in my own private practice, it was a struggle, like, I felt like I got pushback from all sides, I got pushback from the insurance companies, I got pushback from a lot of my own colleagues, when I surgical colleagues, when I brought up the idea that patients have to do other things to help them with their weight, diabetes, when I talked about positive affirmations, or maybe including meditation or yoga, I got pushed back all the way around to the point where I had said, almost like leave those I'm not a part of a lot of those organizations. And from the insurance standpoint, they did not pay for any of the more holistic things that I wanted to do that I saw worked, I saw this work. And I even wrote a letter saying this is medical necessity, I think they need this, this and this. And it was denied left and right. And I often found patients were almost mad at me or my office because we couldn't get this approved. And I'm like insurance companies will pay for their blood pressure medication. But if I want it to treat their blood pressure in another way that I know would actually benefit them by helping them reduce stress, change their environment, whatever the case, I got pushback, I wasn't paid, the insurance company didn't pay. And a lot of my surgical colleagues thought I was actually kind of crazy. So I literally had to shut everything down and almost start over the way I felt like with my own vision, the way I felt like things that should be it almost gave me an aha moment. On the way healthcare was practice, like everything it was it was almost like a brief down moment for me, because I've been in this system for so long. And I didn't even recognize this was happening until my patients weren't progressing. And then if I was in fight with the insurance to get stuff covered, I felt like my voice really wasn't being heard. On the other side, some of my medical colleagues, medical non-surgical, were very open to that idea. So I had to shift almost to the more holistic or integrative community, where they got it, lifestyle medicine, doctors, integrative medicine, functional medicine, meditation therapist, yoga therapist, so I almost shifted into that community. And that's kind of where I felt more welcomed, because in my traditionally trained community, a lot of us, some of us are jumping over, but a lot of us are still with the typical mindset when it comes to how we should treat health care.Ari Gronich: Right. So, you know, part of this show has always been a lot about the health care industry, because that's where I started. And, you know, I know from my own medical history, having a brain tumor that I was told, I'd be basically gaining weight until I was dead. And I was 342 pounds at one point where I'm just going okay, so I went on to a cleanse, I went on to another cleanse after that I did a 40 day fast, and I did a 10-day water fast. I mean, it was like one after another of just Something's got to give. And but, you know, misdiagnosed and mistreated my entire childhood. It's kind of why I'm in the business to begin with. What I what I saw was that results never seemed to matter. It was procedures and the incentive system is to do more procedures rather than to actually get the good results for the patients. And so, one of this is like the audience here. A lot of them obviously hear me a lot, but to the people that are in what they would say mainstream, I'm considered maybe woo woo because I don't have a doctor degree other than my doctor of metaphysics, right. So, I would be discredited, you know, because of that. So, you're a medical doctor who's in this industry, right? And so how do we get that system to start shifting itself to more of a results-oriented system?Franchell Hamilton: Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the reasons I got into, particularly obesity medicine was because of the labels like I was labeled as a kid, I didn't have the best childhood. And I had all this kind of like negative labels slapped on me. And so, when I got into medicine, I knew I wanted to be in a field, where people felt like either they were defeated, or they're, you know what I'm saying they just have this negative connotation. So that's what drew me to obesity medicine in general, because there's all this negativity around it, that most of it is not true, which a lot of it I also felt growing up. And so I want it to be that kind of voice for my patients and be that advocate truly be that advocate. And that's one of the things when I got into medicine, where over time, I felt like I'm not advocating for them, kind of like what you were saying. It's a procedural driven society. I mean, we can talk about what happened in COVID, when elective surgeries got shut down, like there's so much stuff in the hospitals that got shut down, I think the way to change it is to do stuff like what you're already doing, talking to more people getting the word out what me and you are both doing try to promote, I still have my practice, it's completely changed now. But a lot of my work now is to get the word out on the way this healthcare system is having practiced in it for a decade before my eyes were open. And realizing like this is not the way it needs to be practiced. There are actually several communities of physicians now who also believe this, which is helpful, we are partnering with a lot of people like you like yoga therapists, like other people who years ago, they're just like, oh, they don't know what they're talking about. Yes, they do, because they're also seeing results. So it's a matter of like getting the word out there that these other modalities exist. And I think it has to be a combination of patients, patients now are also getting frustrated with their results, they're getting frustrated, for paying these high insurance premiums, and not having anything covered, and not getting the treatments that they feel like are going to resolve their medical problems. So I think it took everybody being frustrated and wanting to make a change in the system it's starting. And I think it's just the combination of us getting the word out joining together and getting a change in this area.Ari Gronich: Yeah, so one of my questions, then is being that you're in the unique position that you're in, of being in that medical side, and now bridging the gaps. You know, to the western side, my question would be, how do we get some of those organizations that are individual like IFM, FMU, a forum, right? Those are all individual organizations to kind of come together and literally create the next kind of healthcare system. Because, you know, the way I look at it, the battle that we've been having has been about who pays the insurance company bills, right? Whether it's the government paying or whether it's the insurance paying, it's still who's paying, but there's been no talk about how do we make the system more effective so that people are healthier so that it costs us less money in general? And so that's kind of one of the conversations I like to have is, how do we come together in a way that honors and respects all aspects of medicine, minus, of course, the fraud and deceit and all that shit. But that honors the risk and respects all the good that medicine is mixed with all the good that the holistic side has to offer, and come and create a new system that just is outperforming the old system.Franchell Hamilton: I agree. And that's a loaded question. Because as you and I both know, that's going to take a lot. That's going to take a lot of manpower. On all ends, physicians, support staff like you other health care workers like you and patients to kind of come in and say we want this change, I can tell you, I have stayed one of the reasons I've stayed with my foot in medicine, like clinical practice is so I can help dictate and start being the change. There's so many other opportunities, I've had to completely leave medicine and kind of and maybe at some point, I will do that. But right now, I am trying to bridge the gap. There are several people that are trying to bridge the gap with their patients and these organizations. So I sit on a lot of committees on a lot of these organizations that do not see it this way. yet. One of the reasons I started They'll stay on these committees. So I can almost be a voice inside that committee to help create the change that I think is needed. I'm, I still sit on my Council Committee for American College of Surgeons and so I'm over all of North Texas as a bariatric surgeon, I represent that one of the reasons I still stay there is so I can voice some of the changes that need to be made, I think it's going to take people higher up honestly, in these organizations to say something, and then to start kind of weaving, which we already had, we met each other. I've met several people who are on the same playing field, but I would have never met until I kind of started this whole thing. I think there needs to be a movement. That's what I'm talking about on my podcast and shows. That's what you're talking about. There's a lot a lot of us that are talking about it and we need to all come together, believe it or not, we are making some headwing. CMS which is Medicare, Medicaid, they the government insurance is considering at least looking at functional and integrative medicine, as far as coverage, which is huge. I know, it doesn't seem like a lot. But that is a huge thing that in general, we've been trying to push just like coverage for bariatric surgery, right? Like there's a lot of issues with that. There's a lot of these like grass roots going on in these organizations. I'm part of AMA, which is an American Medical Association. We're trying to in these organizations, I know there are several of them. And yes, we need to come together more, but we're trying to get stuff passed. So integrative and functional medicine has gotten a bill to Congress saying this is what needs to happen in order to help treat patients better, they've actually looked at it and are considering approving it. Once Medicare and Medicaid approves the coverage of functional and integrative medicine, which is currently not approved, that will be a ripple effect, and all other insurances will follow. So I think it's steps like that that's like big, it's hard for like the lay person to see it who's not working. And it takes years, it takes years. Like it took about six years for even that to get to Congress, you know what I'm saying? It just takes a long time for this stuff to happen.Ari Gronich: So because it takes a long time, when it's us industry, people that are not lobbyists? What is the thing that we can do with our patients? Like what are what are the things that patients can do to accelerate it within their groups? Because I'll tell you, I look at all of the Facebook groups and you know, people, some complaining and some promoting and some other things, but all of them is like it's disconnected. And it's what I would consider to be frantic, complaining or gathering to complain instead of collaborating to succeed. So, my question is both for the patients and the physicians who are starting to work with their holistic counterparts, right? How can they combine together to create more power in that movement.Franchell Hamilton:  So I think in kind of what we're doing, and this has also already started, where we're forming networks, right, and networks among our area, or region. And I think from a patient standpoint, they need to complain to their insurance company for coverage, which a lot of my patients when I was accepting insurance and alert or accept it, but when I was accepting insurance, I was like, you need to talk to your insurance and ask to get a coverage, believe it or not, when you're an insurance physician or practitioner of any sort, there are several people that's not a physician that takes insurance, there's only so much that we can do, believe it or not, insurance don't want to pay us but as the patient and I'm a patient too, you're paying into the system. So the patient has more power when it comes to their insurance than the physician or the provider does. So those complaints need to be directed towards their insurance companies demanding coverage or demand to leave. There's so many other options out there. If everybody pulled away from the insurance companies and just decided to that that's not that's not working from them, they have to make changes, right. This is what happened and financial infant structures. You almost like wherever the money is going. So in my community, we've formed networks with everybody massage therapist, physical therapist, nutritionist where you can either do like a subscription, which a lot of people are doing now, and you pay into this network, a subscription and it will cover whatever visits almost like an insurance But you're cutting out the insurance, you're cutting out the middleman, this is getting provided directly to whatever group that you're with, or you because a lot of us physicians, we just want to treat the patient, most providers just want to treat the patient. And so we will make something that's reasonable, and that they can afford a lot. And I can speak on physicians, and a lot of these holistic practices are no longer or don't accept insurance, and they're doing their own models, but we have to network and collaborate. Because if I can't offer something, I need to be able to refer that patient to other services that are in our cash pay, holistic integrative network that they can go see. And a lot of patients, believe it or not, are leaving insurance companies and only getting what they need in the event of traumatic or event. Yeah, exactly. And they're paying the doctors and the providers that are providing care for a lot cheaper than paying these high premiums in these high deductibles. So I think that's what needs to be done all over. And that movement has already started.Ari Gronich: That's awesome to hear. I'm so glad to hear that that is going on. And we'll have to make sure that people know how to connect into networks like that, when they listen to the show, so we'll have links and stuff for that as well. So here is a, an off the cuff. Right? So let's say you're not taking insurance, right? I'm taking insurance, you're not taking insurance, you're getting results, I'm not getting results. Alright, so we're just taking a scenario that I think happens quite a lot. So we're going in for weight loss, counseling, weight loss care, right? How much is the difference in cost for say, bariatric surgery compared to a functional medicine approach? And, you know, an average cost, right? So a bariatric surgery costs, how much and then the average approach for functional medicine costs How much?Franchell Hamilton: Well, in the other question, I guess we have to ask is the results, right? So okay. So the first part, so average bariatric surgery probably costs about 20 grand between the hospital and the doctor. And usually the doctor's offices provide all the pre care and a lot of the post care. So about $20,000 functional medicine, typical subscription cost, cost about 100 and 100 to 150 a month. And so let's say 13,000, right? Are there I'm sorry, yeah, sorry, 13 100 a month. So 1300 for the year versus $20,000, for bariatric surgery. So that's a huge cost difference.Ari Gronich: Okay, so now we're going to go to vote who results on both sides. Since you were talking earlier about how many people come back, let's just do that how many people come back after bariatric surgery versus how many people do average, see come back, meeting more care or knowledge or whatever, after going through a functional medicine program.Franchell Hamilton: So with the functional medicine program, it's kind of ongoing, which it's a lot of support. And so people may not come back because they have recurrence of their disease, it's more just maintenance, right? So that's a little so we're not adding money into the system, because we're not treating anything per se anymore. We're just maintenance, right? So that taking into account, my bariatric patient population. For me, I felt like it was at least 50% that needed a revision, which is high considering the cost of a bariatric surgery. So I felt like there was a piece missing there.Ari Gronich: So, is the cost of the revision about the same as the cost of the original?Franchell Hamilton: No, it's significantly higher, significantly higher, because it's more complicated. Anytime you have to go and this is not this is all surgery. Anytime you have to do a revision, your complications increase dramatically. And so the length of stay in the hospital increases dramatically. Like your postdoc, potential complications are higher, like everything is more expensive in a revision surgery.Ari Gronich: Okay. Cost of ongoing care for functional medicine since there really isn't any revisions. But what's the ongoing cost? Oh, it's just the 13. Franchell Hamilton: Yes, your monthly fee. Yeah. Ari Gronich: So on top of the monthly fee, for instance, whatever that is, so they're, you know, they're all programs are different costs, right. So then there's obviously supplement costs, food cost, so people are freaking out. Let's gonna cost me so much money to get healthy. So let's talk about those costs a little bit, how they go high and how they go low, comparatively to what other people are doing. So in bariatric surgery, typically there's medicine medications that they're taking, which have a cost, right? What's the average cost of the medications of maintenance for somebody who's going through the surgical route.Franchell Hamilton: So bariatric surgery, you have to have supplements, they all have to have supplements. And there are specific variadic supplements that most bariatric surgeons or nutritionist, or baria-nutritions provide in the office because that's what the ASMBS, the people kind of write the rules say they need this supplement. And so there's an approval process. And so those supplements are usually about $60 a month for your basic supplements, let alone if you actually have some deficiencies, and then you start adding on and those supplements can range up to 60 to $100 additional a month, not to mention before surgery, there's protein drinks and supplements that you have to do. And after surgery for the first six to eight weeks, there's also protein supplements that people have to stay on to make sure they're getting all the protein that they need. And let me also mention to stay healthy. There are certain foods the bariatric patients have to eat, they eat less, but almost the same healthy foods to stay healthy that people in a maintenance program will need. So that's the bariatric cost, functional medicine cost. They don't have some way, if you don't have bariatric surgery, you don't necessarily have some of the deficiencies that bariatric patients get. So you don't necessarily need all of the supplements. Some people do, right? But very extra patients require us because of the way we rerouted you, you are 100% going to have these deficiencies because of the way the surgery was made. Other functional medicine patients that didn't have the surgery may or may not have those deficiencies, but everybody should be on a basic supplemental regimen that could cost anywhere from 40 to $60 a month. Ari Gronich: So what's the cost of obesity without any intervention at all? Do you know about those what those numbers are the statistics for those numbers.Franchell Hamilton: So because obesity, so let me tell you what obesity cost big picture, because they've looked at different sectors. So obesity caused, apparently 40% of less workdays, obesity in general, because you're obese, you have all of these other chronic problems that come about that people don't even realize that they will get you're sicker. So COVID, for example. I mean, there's so many studies showing obesity alone is reason why there was high death and high hospitalizations with a ventilator. Okay, so outside of that, though, people your immune system is down, you have more missed workdays, or missed work days, which is costing the economy money, you have a higher propensity for diabetes, and all of those medications, hypertension, high cholesterol, depression, anxiety, we don't even care enough to get into the emotional and mental side of what obesity can cause. So overall, they were in this was probably several years ago, when that I saw these numbers, the cost of obesity was taking up about 56% of our total healthcare, that's just for obesity, because of all of the other sub-quella that it has with obesity and this, I use that number because that's the number I used back in the day to try to get bariatric surgery covered because it wasn't covered as readily. It's better, but we still have coverage issues. Ari Gronich: Alright, so, I want to do the numbers because I want people to kind of grasp the gravity, not just of the obesity, just of the cost of bad results, right? You think that it's costing you a lot to go into a physician, a doctor who actually gets the job done? Who is not taking maybe insurance, but is really about caring for you and your patients? Right? And then you go, but I can't afford you. I have to go to where the insurances and then you have to go to 15 people, you have streamlet high expenses. I find it fascinating that somebody can go in for an MRI without insurance and it costs $200 and they go in with insurance and it costs 1600 or 2000, or however much they decide to charge because the whole idea of insurance at the very beginning is we all pay into it. Cool, so that they negotiate better rates for us, right so that they are taking care of those kinds of things. And I think that people are in such a cognitive dissonance about what is really happening in the world around them like, well, they wouldn't, you know, choose money over, over my health, right? They wouldn't allow the system of medicine to be about that. And so there's this disbelief, even though we see after we see after we see the evidence that something is shifty is going on, right.Franchell Hamilton: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And just to kind of piggyback on that, a lot of people think that they're there, it's almost like insurance for them as a security blanket of some sort, when it's actually not doing anything for you. I mean, I get it, I was in that boat too, for a while, like, Oh, we have to have just in case just in case, in, we're pouring 1000s of dollars a month into insurance. And over time, it's changed right now, everybody not only has their high monthly premiums, but they have this huge deductible that they have to pay out. So they're paying high monthly premiums. And then when you come see me or whatever, Doctor, you owe me your deductible, so your insurance is not even covering that they don't kick in until after your deductible is met. Even when I had insurance, I got rid of it myself. You're right, that same scenario happened to me, I needed an MRI, because of my neck. And so I was gonna go and pay insurance. And I had to pay my deductible. They're like, Oh, you need to pay a $2500 deductible. And I was like, pin. And then my therapist, my chiropractor, he ordered it. He was like, you know, I just I know a cash place, go pay cash, and don't tell him you have insurance. And I went there those 350. And I'm like, why when I had insurance, I was gonna have to pay $2500 out of pocket with insurance. I go to another place and say no, I don't have insurance. And I paid 350. Like, what is wrong with this picture, we're actually paying more into the system with insurance than without insurance the same way with physicians, my rate to see me is the same rate that insurance charged for a deductible plan. And so they're not only paying me that, that they're paying, they're also paying their monthly fee, you know, so it's, it's crazy.Ari Gronich: Yeah, it's, it's intriguing to me, but it also intrigues me to the level at which I guess our industry just doesn't even pay attention or explain it or talk about it. Because to me, it's so obvious, right? If the only thing you did, as a scientist, as a medical scientist was look at the numbers of diabetes, of rates of autism, of rates of obesity, of rates of heart disease, right? You would say, Well, shit, we have all this new technology. But the results that we're getting are like 10 times worse than we were getting before we had all this technology. So you'd think that there'd be some cognitive awareness of this? So my question is, how do we bring back the cognitive awareness to people in their own profession? I mean, in their own world, so that it's not incumbent on the patients alone, to have to fight for their right to feel good?Franchell Hamilton: Yeah, yeah, I agree. And that was the problem. And I was a part of this, where I was completely clueless. I was completely clueless, because they didn't teach this to me in school. And I don't know if they taught it at the school you went to but believe it or not, in most healthcare, professional fools, they're not talking about this. And why would they talk about this, because, you know, this could potentially bring down insurance companies or whatever, I was just looking while you were talking, the gross domestic product for our first quarter was $22 trillion. And that's for to 2020. It has gone up, but it's gone up every year. And this was my kind of aha moment. So when I was giving you those numbers, this was probably back in 2018, or 19, when it was a little bit less, but it was still in the trillions. And so if you think 56% of OB takes 56% of that obesity takes up this $18 trillion number, how much we are spending because of obesity, and we're not doing anything. I mean, that was kind of my big thing. Like this person just paid $20,000 for the bariatric surgery, and they're back in here two years later, and now it's going to cost them 35 you know, because they have to have an extra hospital stay because now it's more complicated and the insurance are willing to dish this out. But when I requested that they see counseling or therapy or food addicts? You know, they denied that like, this does not make sense to me why as a country are we willing to spend money on stuff that may only band aid the problem, but we're not willing to spend money on things that will actually resolve the problem? I can't answer that, because I was blind to it also, because I didn't see it. And I don't even know what kind of the only reason why it was brought is because I want it better for my patients. Not everybody is like that some people are just happy going to work collecting, they're checking going home. And if that's the mentality, that they we will always have that system where our head is kind of down. And our blinders are on, because they're going to work the collecting their check, regardless of the healthcare profession. And they're not seeing this bigger picture. I think what helped me is because I was in private practice, I wasn't employed. But a lot of this, if you're in a hospital setting, or an employed setting, honestly, in the defensive providers, it's hard to see, because you have a patient who comes in with diabetes, you have 30 minutes to talk about their nutrition, prescribe some type of medication, and your hospital, or your clinic has already scheduled the next patient for you. So they've got to go. And that's all you see. And so awareness has to come from the people that are doing this, but only if they want to, like me and you talking about it can only help hopefully that helps people kind of think twice, especially providers that have been there in those employees conditions where their employer doesn't see this, they may not see this, you know,Ari Gronich: Right, I just, you know, I look back on this last year, and I go, what an amazing amount of opportunity got lost, because we weren't allowed to talk about building your immune system versus treating a disease, right, we weren't allowed to talk about the ways in which we develop a system that is immune to these kinds of things, because we're so healthy, and our healthy immune system takes care of this stuff like, Good, right. And so I'd like what a missed opportunity we had this last year. The positive, I think is that we've gotten the opportunity a little bit to recognize and to start building the numbers for what you were saying a little earlier, which is look at all the medical intervention that did not happen this year. And the deaths by medicine toll, how much that's dropped. And we'll we might if somebody is actually interested in doing this be able to figure out what really is the cost and the toll death toll wise and cost toll of medical intervention that's unnecessary. what's the overages of what we're doing that we should not be doing? And, and so I'm looking forward to seeing if that gets any play in the community, you know?Franchell Hamilton: Yeah, and I think it will. So I and that's one of the things like in my practice, I never did research. And I'm getting physicians, because I'm like, we need the data, the only way that we're going to be able to beat this thing is the data like in bariatric surgery, which is where I was for so many years, we have data on how bariatric surgery causes a decrease in diabetes, a decrease in hypertension, and how this is saving money, how much obesity is costing America and how we treat this right. So we have those numbers. But then that's it, it drops off, it doesn't talk about or show the aftermath, right? We hadn't even and I think part of it is because people don't want to, we did so much to kind of get it approved. And even my own community is not showing the data afterwards. Because once they get the surgery, that's it. There's no prevention, there's no once their diabetes has resolved. And that's what we're missing the boat. And part of that, believe it or not, is insurance, you're healthy, wanna pay for your one wellness visit a year in your lab work, and that's it. And then patients are left having to what do I do now as they're like medical problems and everything else is slowly increasing. We need data on what prevention does in the big picture. But what we do have data on and this is kind of what I'm trying to educate other physicians about is that every medical disease has increased since the beginning of time since 2000. Diabetes has increased, hypertension and cardiovascular disease has increased obesity has increased, yet, we're supposed to have some of the best health care in America. And we have all these technologies and all these great meds that have come out right these $1,000 meds that are treating epilepsy in cancer and heart disease. But yet the incidence is not going down. The incidence is not going down people because we're not doing prevention, because the focus is not on prevention. This is why the incidence is not going down. And I don't understand why anybody else is not seeing this. They do offer grants, which mean one of the companies that I'm working with digital health company, to increase access to kind of ask these questions, I will tell you what the pandemic I think, like you were alluding to help with open eyes, we had way more deaths than we should have, because of the pandemic because people were not healthy. And if we have the best expensive meds that everybody's paying for in the best health care of all these technologies, why do we have so many deaths, we have more deaths than some other underserved countries. So what, like what's going on there? So we need to start focusing on prevention. And I think, as the whole people are starting to see that now, I've seen more of a shift, kind of towards the end of this pandemic than I've seen before. So I think all of us like you like me, all of us who are like advocates of prevention, now is our time to try to make changes, policy changes come together, educate our other so I'm educating as many physicians as I can I host webinars, you know, conferences, I'm speaking at conferences, in order to cut these to get the word out conferences where it normally wasn't spoken about before. I think at this point, we as a medical society, all providers have to look at this and look at what happened this past year, and start scratching our head like something is not right. It shouldn't make everybody open their eyes this past year. Ari Gronich: Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree. Here's goes to the system, but it goes towards the fear side. So, yes, there are a lot of physicians like you who were blinded for a lot of years. But there's also a lot of physicians who have felt threatened. Right. So I'll give two examples. One is just there's approximately 70 plus holistic health practitioners who have been found, murdered, suicide, whatever, in like a very short period of time, it was like in a three year period of time, there was like 70, some odd, holistic health practitioners, many of them working on vaccine stuff, like the research and in vaccines, kind of interesting, because that ended right before COVID. And I didn't actually put that together until just now, but it's just a thing. So that and then the amount of like, we had a gynecologist in Orlando, who I met at a functional medicine training. And she had gotten, basically, her business completely shut down, she had gotten investigated by the AMA, she had gotten shut down by insurance companies, because what they consider to be the standard of care is if you're going into a gynecologist, you have four sessions that you could go in, where you either have to be prescribed a medicine or a procedure, if one of those two things is not done in four sessions, all of a sudden, you're not practicing in the standard of care. And she did that with a lot of her patients, because she was actually treating them holistically for whatever the ailments were that they were having. And so she had to, I mean, lose her entire practice. And so the fear factor, the only way, in my opinion, to alleviate fear is to become bigger than the bully. And the only way to become bigger than the bully is to get loud. And to bring a crowd. That's kind of where I'm looking at what you're wanting to do what I'm wanting to do a little bit. And so I want to talk to you about that. What do you say to those doctors who are doing frontier medicine, that are on the fringes of, of the new frontier? Really, it's frontier medicine for reason. They're doing the things that are getting the results that are currently not in the standard of care,they're afraid. What do you what do we tell them?Franchell Hamilton: So, you know, it's really unfortunate that this is happening. And that has happened to me, I've been under investigation, because I didn't want to practice the way other people were practicing. So I've been through it. And I think one of the things is you have to, from a physician standpoint, data will help you a provider standpoint. So if you can show data that it's working, that will help you in a courtroom, for example, the other thing is, in every provider knows this a consent and making sure your patients understand. So I've gotten sued, and I've gotten investigated, and I've gotten dissolved, like dismissed because I have consents, and I tell them, this is the way we're practicing. And honestly, at this point, I even tell them, if you don't like this practice, you know, there's other people that are practicing other ways. But this is the way we're going to do it in order to get you to your surgery, or in order to get you to your weight loss goal, because this is what I found has worked. And it's not your typical medicine. And so I make sure they all my patients sign a consent. And I have data. So I didn't put it in a research form. But my EMR tracks, right, you can track the bloodwork, you can track the weight, you can track there's so many different ways to track it without doing an official study. And so I didn't do a study. And that's why I'm encouraging my doctors that I kind of talked to, let's all put data together that shows and then publish it. We need to put data together and we need to publish it. And believe it or not, this is the way medicine used to be practiced. You experimented, you experimented. And that's how breakthroughs came. And now stuff is so regulated in the United States. I go to these international conferences, and some of these European countries are so far ahead of us, because it needs to be regulated. Let me not like take that away. But I mean, come on, you know, how do you think polio was discovered the vaccine for polio? I mean, some of these things were through experiments, and as long as you explain to the patient whoever you're treating, this is the way I'm going to do things, you have data showing their cholesterol numbers are going down. Because this I'm treating with tumeric. And I don't want to treat them with a static drug, you know what I'm saying. But I'm still getting the same results as your stat and drug by doing the things that I've, they do yoga twice a week, meditate every day for 10 minutes, and I'm giving them tumeric. And this is their cholesterol numbers, right? That will hold up in any investigation or suit as long as you can keep that data. So that's what I would tell to the doctors who are going through this, or providers, because I've been through it and I had that I had my data, I had consent. And I'm not giving up. If this is something that you're passionate about, then what you need to do is start bringing people in with you grabbing people that you know, that's also practicing this because as he stated, you stated, I mean, we're bigger in numbers. So now, a lot of my colleagues are no longer unfortunately, my surgical colleagues, but they're my colleagues that are practicing very similar to what I do. So guess what, when one of them gets investigated, they're gonna call me or their lawyer can call me as a witness or one of us, and I will write letters on their behalf, I will witness to them on behalf, we are much stronger, like you said, and numbers. That's the only way. I don't even know if we can do it with money, because I know this is completely off the topic, but that whole COVID vaccine thing. There was definitely money involved. I don't Bill Gates, I mean, all of a sudden, you know that some of that stuff seemed a little questionable, to be honest. Um, I there was money involved. We don't A lot of us don't have Bill Gates money, you know what I'm saying? So the only way we can kind of start defeating This is by speaking up, don't feel like don't let investigators, lawyers states, like, close your voice down. Because if you're doing things the right way, they can't do it. I mean, it's frustrating. And it's depressing during the time because I went through it. But if you're doing things the right way, you're getting your consents, you're slogging your data, they can't shut you down. I mean, they can't.Ari Gronich: Yeah, I've never been investigated. But I'm, I'm not a physician. Franchell Hamilton: It's higher among us because, you know, physicians, everybody's like, oh..Ari Gronich: There's more scrutiny, which is part of why I want to talk to that side of medicine, because, you know, I watch Zeedog MD, for instance. And he talks a lot about the moral dilemma that physicians are having, because they're being told to practice in a way that is not equivalent to the reason why they got into business, right, why they got into the industry. And I don't remember the exact term that he calls it the moral, something moral injury, it's moral injury. And knowing that he feels that way, he and I disagree, obviously, on a lot of the vaccine things and what he considers science and what I consider to be clinical evidence are very different. But I like the fact that he's willing to have the conversations and so like, I would want to have a conversation with him. And you. And then maybe Dave Asprey, you know, who knows, like somebody who's completely on the other side of the pie, and has his own science to back up what he's saying. And I'd love to have these kinds of discussions regularly with it, like within view of the world, right, so that people can see the differences, how much more similar they really are than differences, and then how we get to a kind of a consensus for practicing medicine in a way that actually gets the results that we want. Because really, that's at the end of the day, the only thing that matters, right?Franchell Hamilton: Yeah, I agree. And, and to talk about his moral injury, I mean, everybody talks about a kind of in the medical field, burnout, right? Like burnout is all of a sudden, significantly higher than perhaps 20, 30 years ago, you didn't really hear about it that much. I never heard about burnout in med school, like you know, or other people getting burned out. And that is why burnout is so high, because there's this mismatch on what a lot of providers or healthcare workers want to do. And what's happening even in nurses and you've probably talked to some nurses too, like I have worked with so many nurses who are just burnt out. And the reason they're burned out, most nurses are hospital employed, or for some type of facility employed, and that's not what they want it to do. That's not the way they wanted to practice. They truly want to help people. You know what I'm saying? And then you start to see like, we're not getting the results. We're not doing what I wanted to do, and that's where the burnout come, I got burned out because there was this mismatch in what I want it to do and what was happening. And boy did it hit hard. And so that's the reason so many healthcare workers are getting burned out is because we all live in a system where they're saying healthcare is this, and a lot of us are waking up and realizing, but that's not helping, you know. And so if there needs to be a revolution in healthcare, and I'll be the first to talk to whoever will hear me talk about this revolution, because we're not getting the job done. Our medical problems are increasing,and we're not doing anything about them.Ari Gronich: And so for me, I feel like right now we're on a 19, or like an 1890s 1800, steam train. Right, and we're going Chug, chug, chug. And what I'm wanting to see is Ilan Musk's mag train going through the boring tunnels, right? And so bridging the gaps, I'm going to go really far back to where we were at the beginning of that conversation, bridging the gaps between the speed at which change looks like it wants to happen, because of the powers that be, and the possibility of what can happen if we have the movement with a leader that is like an Elan Musk, that is like, somebody who's there going, Okay, we're about to do this thing. Let's go, there's no option no stop in us, you know, like Kennedy saying, we're going to the moon by the end of the decade. There's no question, like, make that happen. Right. So if we were to do that, what do you see the steps are to making that happen faster? If you could, like, if you could imagine a sped-up version of what you thought was gonna happen? And then we could kind of plan that out? What would that look like?Franchell Hamilton: So kind of, like you said, We need somebody who's already well known, already well recognized, to be an ear. And, and to also identify and be on the same page as what this movement is about. And to be honest, I think I think we have a couple candidates. And Amazon, for example, they announced a couple years ago, they're over the way the healthcare is being practiced, and they want it to do their own health care, you model, you know, and so these big corporations, I just saw thing about JP Morgan, they want to do, you need to find these companies, we all need to find these companies who want these big changes and who get it right. And then we need them to help us because they already have the clout, they already have the ear of America, to kind of say, this is what needs to happen. Oprah would be a great person, I'm still working on that, I'm gonna get up, I'm still working on that. So somebody like that, who's like, this is the way we need to change the way healthcare is done. And then she will have this movement of people who was already on board. So I think that's what we need to kind of bridge the gap, somebody who has the power in that can be a listening ear to all of these, our voices to say, and they don't even have to do it, right. There's enough of us on the ground level that can take it where it needs to go. But we need somebody who's going to listen and help kind of drive this force, because right now, you have the providers and all the providers and we're a big force if we work together, but we need somebody bigger, honestly, to be able to kind of compete, because once we do that, and when we do this, we're competing with the big pharma companies. We're competing with insurance companies, we're competing with a lot of Congress and Senate, people who honestly, they all have nice pockets, and they don't want things to change, to be honest. So you have to have somebody who has as much power with the crowd who can come back that because right now we have work competing with pharma, and insurance come billion and trillion dollar companies who likes everything to stand or wraps. If I publish an article or almost like some of those healthcare workers you were talking about, there's people more powerful than us, that can make things disappear. You know, so we need someone or a group of powerful people who understand the way healthcare is who have nothing to lose, and they can compete with those bigger companies. So that's what we need. I'm actively working on getting bigger companies involved when the digital company that I'm working with is talking to Walmart. I just got an email a couple days ago saying JP Morgan is looking for a change. So when we get This is part of the digital health arena, because this is also how we can reach more people, right? So once we see these us on this level need to jump on that, and how do we get at least in the door with their whoever their health and wellness coordinator is right, every major company has one of those, you have to start with that and then maybe move your way up.Ari Gronich: Unfortunately, not every single major company has one of those. You know, that's kind of my part of my bailiwick, like I was 18, starting three of the first corporate wellness programs in the country, because my school backed up to Intel, Nike and Tektronix, in Beaverton, Oregon, and I was like, Oh, well, we need to bring people to our clinic. So let's just bring our clinic to them. I've done a lot of corporate wellness programs, a lot of consulting with companies. And unfortunately, the majority still do not have a corporate wellness program, what they have what they consider to be that is, they have a health fair twice a year, or they have a few booths with vendors, and then they give flu shots. And maybe they have an on-call psychologist, you know, where you call in to psychology department or something. But yeah, the creating a complete culture of wellness and accompany is definitely one of my bailiwick's that I wish I had more companies that would say, yes, easily to that possibility. But I do agree that the company's you know, here's the thing, following the money are the companies tied to the insurance companies in any way other than that, and typically they are through investment. And because the investment is from the insurance companies, it's really hard for them to do anything that's really going to get their employees well, so they could do a lot of treatment stuff, a lot of educational stuff, not a lot of policies in place to make it happen. And that's definitely an area where I would like to see shifted and changed. You know, we were talking a little bit earlier, you said, you know how burnout is I remember going into good Samaritan Hospital back in the late 90s, and early 2000s. And they still were on 30 something hour shifts. So they, you know, if you got a surgery at the 28th hour, and it was a 15 hour surgery, you were on for 40 something hours, I mean, some of the most unhealthy people I ever met. And it was a shame, because there's some of the kindest, most loving, giving people, get treated really poorly. And so that's part of the thing is, if we made the system a little bit better, and people were less sick, then the health care workers would have less moral injury, because they'd be doing the thing that they signed up for. And people would be treating them? Well, because they're not the what I would call the sounding board for the administration, for the insurance companies, they're, you know, like, the physicians, the providers have been the sounding board for all the complaints of their patients instead of who's really at fault, or who's really, you know, at cause. So let's, let's wrap up with, I want some positives in this as well, as far as like, I want, you know, things that the audience can do immediately if, especially if they're physicians, but if they're not, that they could do immediately to shift the way that they're getting health care. And some of those behaviors and mindset more to prevention versus, you know, reaction.Franchell Hamilton: Yeah. And, you know, I'll piggyback to and I'll make sure I answer that, because we are kind of like this digital health company that I'm working with. And I have a couple of investments in a couple of them. And there have been some leeway on that area, because a lot of them want kind of digital health. And they have the way we're pitching it to them. Kind of like what I started earlier is if your employees are healthier, they can give you more work days, they don't have to have as much time off from work they don't have so it's benefits you to kind of implement these wellness programs. And so like I said, we have entered into Walmart which surprisingly their chief health officer is very open to the idea of integrative changes. We're still Working with we're working with them. And then other companies such as share-care, which are kind of in a lot of there are people in there are people making, we're making some leeway. But you're right about the train, right, it's Chugga chugga. But I will say at least it's not stopped, like, we're, we're moving, we're moving along slowly, I think it needs to get implemented much quicker. But because of a lot of the regulations, and the pocket, the insurance has such deep roots with so many companies like you just did it, like they're investing in other companies. And that kind of keeps everything at bay and kind of this vicious cycle. It's gonna take some time, but I think a lot of people's eyes kind of got opened after this pandemic. One of the things for physicians, I would say, in order to shift this mindset, if you feel like remember the reason why you went into medicine, first of all, and if you feel like when you see your patients on a regular basis, they're not improving, you have to consider why what other factors maybe the reasons for them not improving, and honestly, you'll give my information out. But this is kind of one of the things that I do now I help physicians kind of help figure this out, because they're all getting frustrated. And so it's like, let's take a look at how the way your practice is set up. And your assessment as a physician, we need to ask patients more questions, right? Like we I'm over the, what's your chief complaint, family history, medical history? Do you smoke? Like, that's fine, we'll get all that. But we need to truly ask our patients, how are they doing? Like, how are you doing? Like, we need to get a feel of where they are at emotionally, mentally. And to be honest, that takes up a lot of time. So physicians that are employed may not want to do that, then create an assessment that does it create a questionnaire that acts that you'd be surprised if you're seeing diabetic patients. When I switched up my questions the way I asked the questions instead of just prescribing them a regimen. Let's take diabetes, for example. They come in and I'm like, oh, you're diabetic? Here is a med or insulin. And here is your nutrition or diet that you're supposed to be on? I'll see you in two to three weeks, right? You need to start asking, Can they even afford that? To be honest? What do they normally like to eat, you almost need to cater more to the patient and work with them as a partner, not as like a doctor kind of throwing out orders and then you expect them to do it. One of the reasons why our healthcare is not working is because we're putting demands on patients. And then we expect them to do that. And then when they come back the expectations aren't there. And then we were like, Well, why is your numbers not down? or Why didn't you exercise? or Why? And we didn't even ask them? How are they doing? How do can even do what we're asking them to do? That needs to be your question, if you're going to prescribe them some type of treatment plan, and it doesn't even have to be a medication you need to ask your patient, do you think you can do this? What do you think you can do to help bridge the gap? This is my goal for you. And this is where you are. So here are some options as the physician, what are some things that you think you can do for us to help bridge the gap? That needs to be the question you ask not just medical history, here is what the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association says. And I'll see you in three weeks. So that is what I want to offer to providers in general, nutritionist, therapists, chiropractors, I mean, there's several people, we're all in this trying to defeat this together, show them help them understand they have to understand so many patients don't even understand go to their doctor, and then they don't even know why they're started on this or what medical problem they have. That was always so frustrating for me. Make sure your patient understands what they have. I mean, come on, you know, that's number one, and then make sure they understand what your goal is for them. Right as the physician or provider, what is your goal, and then you guys have to work together to meet in the middle. That's number one. Number two for the patient. Patients need to demand more, you need to demand better. And I have told my patients to like what do you want x? What do you want patient just like the same way physicians need to provide Why did I Why am I in medicine, if it's to collect a check, you're in the wrong field, go to admin. If you're doing patient care, you need to meet in the middle with your patient and for my patients. They're so quick to just go in, get their meds or get their refills and then leave and I'm like you need to demand more. This is your health. This is your body. This is your mind, body soul. What do you want for your mind, body and soul, I always tell my patients health is not absence of disease, you need to be whole healthy whole socially, mentally and in the body. So when you think of you need to think of health that way. And if you feel like you are not getting what you need, you need to start looking for ways to get what you need. So much stuff is done virtually now. So even if your primary care doctor, they provide her meds or whatever, but they're not, but you feel like you're not getting some of the other things that you need. Go online. There's a whole host of integrative you can use integrative medicine, lifestyle, medicine, functional medicine, you can use those terms and find people that you can treat virtually the pandemic has helped people like me treat people all over. So we're not limited now to just I'm not limited to just Dallas Fort Worth, I can treat people all over, you know what I'm saying. And so for patients, if you feel like when you're leaving your physician office, and you're not getting what you want out of that you need to find another physician, you're not married to that physician, and you need to consider if your insurance won't cover it, paying out of pocket long term to pay for your health, your health is an investment, it is the most important investment you will ever make. It is more important than your house, your car, what other people spend on money, your health is more important. So spending an extra 100 or 200 a month is nothing that's groceries or half of groceries for most people, you know what I'm saying? So you need to take time and invest in your health, that's the most important investment. You cannot have joy, peace, happiness, and all these other things that we strive to have or even help others if your health is compromised. So spend the investment. So those were kind of the closing points that I would tell both those patients and physicians.Ari Gronich: One last closing point is what would you say to the system as it is? As it's going away?Franchell Hamilton: That's a good question. Um, I would say that for sure the current system, we, we need to make changes we need what we're doing is not working. And I would be happy to see a transformation in our healthcare system to something that's going to resolve medical problems. So I am happy to see it go away in order to revolutionize healthcare and heal our patients in America. So that's and I feel like our current medical system is actually preventing us from being able to actually heal, not just treat that heal and resolve medical problems and make people truly healthy the definition of health.Ari Gronich: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I am so glad to have you on. And I know that the audience has gotten a lot out of this conversation, hopefully enough that they'll start acting upon it. We can all create a new tomorrow and activate our vision for a better world. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you having me. Thank you. Got it. Thank you so much. Audience I appreciate you listening in. This is our garage and it&#

I misspoke in yesterday's podcast when saying there's been, “126 cumulative COVID-19 deaths in children.” There's actually been 378 cumulative deaths in children, as of August 12, 2021 in the USA. Very sorry about that. This brings the case death rate down to 0.01%. (And 0% in some states as not every state has recorded a C*19 death in a child yet.) The estimated number of children under the age of 19 in the USA is estimated to be around ~ 75,000,000. Interestingly, during this same time period over 540,918 children have died from other causes. (As of August 12th, 2021.) So COVID-19 represents 0.07% of all childhood deaths. Sorry for the confusion. Here's a link to the podcast and data source: https://bit.ly/3k4QxGO  

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of-sasha-chapins   I. Substack blogger Sasha Chapin writes that COVID-19 Took My Sense Of Smell, LSD Brought It Back. He got coronavirus, and like many people lost his sense of smell (medical term: dysosmia or anosmia). Ten days after recovery, he still couldn't smell anything. He looked on Twitter and found some anecdotal reports that psychedelics had helped with this, so he took LSD and tried to smell some stuff while tripping. He says it “totally worked. Fully and near-instantaneously. Like a light switch turning on.” The details: My idea was that I'd do some scent training while on LSD, to—hand-wavey lay neuroscience incoming—stimulate whatever olfactory neurogenesis might occur. Before tripping, I laid out my fragrance collection, along with a few ingredients from the pantry. All-in-all, there were about fifty things to smell, and, as the LSD started kicking in, I started making my way through the selection. At that moment, my sense of smell was still somewhat there but mostly not. However, something odd was happening; I could detect some of the fragrances' nuances that I couldn't pick up earlier that day, and what I detected shifted from moment to moment.  It was like I was listening to a piece of music with random instruments dropping in and out of the mix. This was still a kind of anosmia, but a different kind, and it almost felt as if my olfaction was re-negotiating reality in real time. And then another weird thing happened. For a couple of hours, I got acute short-term parosmia (distorted smell.) My nose felt dry, and a weird puke-y smell filled my mind. According to some research I'd done, in anosmic patients parosmia sometimes precedes recovery, so, though this was quite unpleasant, I felt hopeful that this was some part of the regeneration process. I cleaned the house, my wife took me shopping, we went to Home Depot, and then had dinner. We got home soon after, about seven hours after my trip began, and I returned to my fragrance collection. Cue triumphant music: all of them were now smellable, in high-definition. My anosmia was gone. Moreover, some were more pleasant than before; iris was more palatable to me than it ever had been. This was a moment I won't soon forget. Some fragrances—especially Dzing!—gave me full-body chills. The next day, my sense of smell was still there, but it fluctuated; it was partial in the morning, then full in the evening. Since then, it's been back basically 100%. (And the improved understanding of iris has persisted.) The number one explanation for incredible Internet medical stories is always “placebo effect”. Number two is “coincidence”, number three is “they made it up”. All of these top the list for Sasha's experience too. Still, enough people have said something like this that I think it's worth trying to figure out if there's any plausible mechanism. II. Anosmia sucks worse than you would expect. For one thing, smell is linked to taste, so most things taste bad or weird or neutral. For another, it's correlated with much higher risk of depression, and some preliminary work suggests this could be causal (possible mechanism: the brain is getting fewer forms of stimulation?) Some studies find that exposing rats to very strong scents makes them less depressed; it would be funny if this was how aromatherapy worked in humans. So COVID induced anosmia is actually a serious problem. According to annoying people who refuse to provide useful information, between 3% and 98% of people who get coronavirus lose some sense of smell. A meta-analysis that pools all these studies gives a best estimate of around 40%. Lots of respiratory viruses cause some smell loss when they infect your nasal passages, but coronavirus is worse than usual. Milder cases cause more olfactory problems than more severe cases, suggesting that the immune response is at least as involved as the virus itself. The coronavirus cannot infect neurons directly, but might infect other cells in the nose, including cells which support neurons and help regenerate the olfactory epithelium. About half of COVID patients recover their smell in a few weeks, but some cases linger for up to a year. By the end of a year 95%+ have recovered; given that between 3% - 12% of people have random smell disturbances at any given time anyway, I interpret this latter figure less as “some people never recover” and more as “we reach the point where it's impossible to distinguish from background problems”. Sasha says he was only ten days in when he took LSD, so this is well inside the window where we would expect him to eventually recover anyway. But it still doesn't make sense that he recovered within the space of a few hours, or that he felt his smell was stronger than before.  

Coronavirus was patented 73 times between 2008 and 2019! So Covid 19 is in no way novel or unique. venmo.com/AngeliaKay

https://youtu.be/y0EyHdntjMI Mfon Akpan is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Methodist University. He's also the author of ten books and three audiobooks on business, technology, and innovation. We talk about virtual reality's influence on today's businesses, why social media is crucial for business success, and the Eisenberg Earned Media Value Index.    --- Build Your Social Capital with Mfon Akpan Our guest is Mfon Akpan. Normally I have entrepreneurs, but today I have a college professor who's got some really interesting stuff for us. So, his name Mfon Akpan. He is also the author of 10 books and 3 audio books on business, innovation, technology, including the Hitchhiker's Guide to Virtual Reality. So, without further ado, welcome to the show, Mfon. I'm excited to be here, Steve. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to have you. It's great to have you. You've got lots of good information for us, so let's dive in, so tell me a little bit about your journey. I mean, how did you become a college professor and how did you end up writing books and on technology and business? Tell me about your binding road. Okay, great. Well, I'll start with the professor part and that's a great question. I took the non-traditional route to becoming a professor. I spent about nine years working in finance. And then I taught classes part-time as an adjunct. And then I moved into becoming a full-time business faculty back home in Chicago. Then I moved to another university, Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. And now I'm here at home at Methodist University in North Carolina. The second part is, I think you mentioned about the books and really a lot of that is, I say my wife and COVID, my wife and COVID. And the reason I say that is initially around the time when I had the manuscript for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I mean, to virtual reality, I'm calling it the movie, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Virtual Reality. Initially, my strategy to market the book was what they call a one-to-one or one-to-many. And what I mean by that is at that time, I had just given my first TEDx talk on virtual reality, was getting a lot of calls to do speaking, to do public speaking and different events. And the book was going to be there as a one-to-oneor one-to-many.In other words, I could sell the book while I'm giving talks. Or as part of the agreement for me to come there, they purchased books of that nature, so it was one-to-one, one-to-many, and COVID hit. You know, COVID-19. So, we had lockdown. So, on these in-person events, they came to a halt. And I was talking to my wife and she knew I had a colleague, a former colleague in Chicago who had a, he started a published company, Biograph LLC. He's like, well, why don't you send it to Aaron and have him look at it, see what he thinks about the manuscript. So, I did that. Aaron loved it. I was like, hey, let's publish it, let's put it out, so then there was a pivot from that one-to-one to one-to-many, now moving into actually publishing, moving into audio books, moving into selling e-books, and more of an online presence. So, actually it was really falling up. So COVID-19 helped in that sense because I was thinking about just selling a few thousand books here and there where I'm traveling. And then now it's moved into another level of things where it's global. So, selling online, went in, making deals, publishing, also releasing audio books and it's really grown. So, it's been a great, great process. Awesome. So COVID was a disruptor in your life and it pushed you to a higher level. Yes. It's very typical. And I've seen a lot of companies who actually improved, grew, they broke through last year and this year because of COVID. So, what are your books about? I know that one of them is the Hitchhiker's Guide to Virtual Reality, which we're going to dig in in a minute. But what are the other books about? Really, the common thread,

Dr. Ben Corn, professor of Oncology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem Medical School, and deputy director of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center, discusses his current research with NRG Oncology and SWOG on the study of the science of hope, and it's role as a mediator in well-being and health care improvement. Dr. Corn is co-founder and CEO of the NGO, Life's Door, which teaches health professionals, patients and others strategies for hope, meaning and well-being throughout illness and at the end-of-life.   Transcript ASCO Daily News: Welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. I'm Geraldine Carroll, a reporter for the ASCO Daily News. Our guest today is Dr. Benjamin Corn, a professor of oncology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Medical School and deputy director of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. Dr. Corn is the co-founder and chairman of the nonprofit organization Life's Door, which teaches health professionals, patients, and caregivers strategies for hope, meaning, and well-being throughout illness and at the end of life. Dr. Corn was honored with the 2021 ASCO Humanitarian Award and joins me to discuss his work, including his current research on the study of the science of hope and its role as a mediator in well-being and health care improvement. Dr. Corn's full disclosures are available in our show notes, and transcripts for all episodes are available at asco.org/podcasts. Dr. Corn, it's great to have you on the podcast. Dr. Benjamin Corn: It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you very much, Geraldine. ASCO Daily News: Dr. Corn, can you tell us about the experiences early on in your personal life and then your medical training that prompted your interest in helping patients find hope and meaning while navigating cancer treatment? Dr. Benjamin Corn: Sure. I think everyone has a story that sent them on their way for a career in medicine, which for many of us is not a job. It's not a career. It's a mission. My personal story had to do with losing a parent, my dad, at a very young age. He died of prostate cancer, left behind three young children and a lovely widow, who was my mom. And I was quite disappointed with the way the system tried to cope with the reality that was now forced upon us. There were no viable options for somebody with metastatic prostate cancer then. But yet, there was not a cognizance of some of the psychological trauma that we would all have in trying to navigate our daily lives. And I was very surprised also the way my dad's death was communicated to the family. And I've spoken about this in a variety of podcast settings and written a piece for the JCO narrative section about 10 years ago on that, some of what I found to be harshness, coldness of telling us that our dad was not going to make it and how the bad news was conveyed (PMID: 24733795). And so, with that, I was an 11-year-old child, and I very much was intent on curing this thing called prostate cancer to make sure other middle-aged men wouldn't suffer from it, and their families wouldn't have to pick up the pieces. And I went to medical school. I entered my residency in oncology at University of Pennsylvania, thinking that that was my destiny. And when I got to the wards, I was quite disillusioned because I saw a variety of scenarios that told me things hadn't changed drastically in 7 or 8 years since losing my dad and initiating my medical studies. I saw many cases of senior attending physicians, who were fantastic scientists, brilliant researchers, and yet didn't seem to pay enough attention to the subtleties of making sure that a family was whole, bringing in other resources. This was right before what I would call a palliative care revolution. We didn't have the Tamil paper, the Zimmermann paper, the Bakitas paper. And we didn't really know the value of early interventions with teams that included not only oncologists but also nurses and psychologists, chaplains, who could help navigate such a difficult period for patients and for the people in the concentric circles around those patients. So it was very important for me to begin to explore those issues. I never found it to be a conflict for pursuing an academic career that asks bread-and-butter questions about disease, areas of interest. I published a lot in gynecologic malignancy, in prostate cancer itself, and in central nervous system tumors. But by the same token, I thought it was very important to be looking at the psychosocial dynamics that are involved. And that's pretty much the genesis of how I got interested in this area. ASCO Daily News: Well, your work integrating hopefulness into cancer care has had an important impact even on communities beyond the medical setting. Can you tell us about this work, about the hope enhancement model, and how you've used this approach to train medical professionals, patients, and caregivers? Dr. Benjamin Corn: Well, first of all, I want to say that, in many ways, even though I've been blessed with having terrific education at outstanding institutions of higher learning, my greatest teachers have really been the patients, and I'll bet you most colleagues would say the same thing. And I noticed there was a subset of patients who were very intuitively aware of what was important to them, patients for whom the prognosis was very bleak and yet managed to maintain hopefulness. And I saw that the common thread for these patients was that, even though they couldn't be hopeful for cure, they could still find other goals, other objectives that they could pursue. And that sent me on a quest of sorts to see if anybody had formally tried teaching people how to become more hopeful. And with not too much effort, I found literature of Professor Rick Snyder from University of Kansas. It basically modeled this notion of hope theory. And without turning this into a lecture, very briefly, Snyder said that there are three conditions that will allow hopefulness to thrive. The first is defining a goal. And by that, he meant some kind of an objective that was not only plausible but also that could provide meaning in one's life. So it would be a good goal in hope theory if I said my goal is to win the lottery tomorrow because that's really not anything I can have an impact on, so it's not really statistically plausible. But likewise, if I took a goal that was just very mundane and didn't add that much purpose to my life, it would be out there, and I'd be interested in pursuing it. But I probably wouldn't have the same degree of motivation if I thought about something that, without too much effort, could really make my day or make the day of the people around me. So, the first thing was the goals that have these two criteria--plausibility and meaning. The second is a pathway to get to the goal. And when Snyder discusses pathways of thinking, he's supposedly speaking to a mature audience and saying none of us were born yesterday. We all realize that on almost every path that we travel on during our lifetimes, we see that there are obstacles. The question is, how do we manage and circumvent those obstacles, or how do we dance with those obstacles if, in fact, it's something very much within me, an obstacle such as anger, an obstacle such as jealousy? How do I deal with those particular factors? A hopeful person is a creative person, is a resourceful person, who finds a way to sally forth even when these obstacles are out there. So we have goals. We have pathways. And finally, the other secret sauce that I mentioned before is motivation. The word that Snyder used for motivation is called "agency." Agentic thinking, like almost an agent that might represent an NBA basketball player or a Hollywood movie star. That agent will do everything on behalf of his or her colleague so that they'll succeed. And so to the person who has an agentic way of seeing the world is going to be an activist, is going to want to set out on those trails, those pathways, to reach those goals. So those are the three components. And what we found is that--and this is based on some work that was done by one of Snyder's proteges, Dr. David Feldman, who's at Santa Clara University--one could actually construct workshops that are very palatable, that take less than 2 hours to conduct, in which a tool called hope mapping is used. Hope maps are basically dependent on those three components. So you can actually sit there in dyads, buddying up with people in this workshop, people who you know before the workshop, or people who you meet in the workshop, because there's a similarity, a selection for those who attend such workshops. People want to work together. And it's a wonderful energy, because let's say, as I said before, I have a goal, and I have a pathway. But there's a big, bad obstacle there, and I don't know how to get around it. What could be that my buddy in the workshop is going to say, "You know what, Ben? Here's a great way. You might not have thought about this. Why don't we contemplate creating a workaround?" And they're very, very instructive. And we've done some of these workshops now, both in Israel, where I practice, as you mentioned at the opening, and with colleagues at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore with really thought leaders in hopefulness--Tom Smith, who has for many years written the ASCO guidelines on palliative care, and Anna Ferguson, who is the coordinator of the hope enhancement program at Hopkins. And together, we've proven, especially in a population of women suffering from stage IV breast cancer, that we really can invest 2 hours or less and make them much more hopeful. Now, you mentioned in your question that some of this has an impact on communities beyond the medical setting, and that's exactly what's been happening. As the word has trickled out, especially during the COVID pandemic, we've been approached by a variety of communities on the international level--communities in London, communities in Athens, communities in South Africa, communities in the Pacific Rim--who are very interested in bringing together different strata within those communities, perhaps people who have recently become married or people who have recently become parents, who have a similar set of struggles, and to help us help them become more hopeful, especially when you add on to that a little something called COVID-19. So I'm an oncologist. I think there's tremendous upside for this in the setting of cancer care for patients and for the health care professionals who have the privilege of treating these patients. But the spillover phenomenon has really been marvelous to behold, especially during 2020. ASCO Daily News: Well, you're also collaborating with the National Cancer Institute groups of NRG Oncology and the Southwest Oncology Group to study the science of hope and its role as a mediator in well-being and health care improvement. Can you tell us about this research? Dr. Benjamin Corn: Sure. So in the context of NRG Oncology, there are two protocols. One is called CC003 (NCT02635009). That's a protocol for patients with small cell lung cancer. And another one is a protocol called BN005, which is a protocol for individuals with, I guess, what we want to call low-grade gliomas, to look at neuroanatomic loci that could constitute a source for hopefulness (NCT03180502). I'll just give you one example, which is from the small cell lung cancer study I mentioned before. So in years past, at least, it's been a standard of care to provide prophylactic cranial irradiation--that is, prevention with radiation--where there's a tumor, small cell lung cancer, that has a proclivity to spread to the brain. And so one of the hot areas that has emerged in radiation research over the last decade is hippocampal avoidance. It seems trivial, but it took us a while to understand how to protect concentric circles, such as, let's say, the spinal cord when treating the vertebral body or to protect the hippocampus when treating the whole brain. So in prophylactic cranial irradiation, we typically treat the whole brain. And a randomized trial was developed by NRG investigators, where the randomization was between prophylactic cranial irradiation itself to 25 Gray in 10 fractions versus that same regimen with hippocampal avoidance. Now, when I saw that study design, I actually put forward the idea that this could be a wonderful model to study the neuroanatomic correlative hopefulness because there are several candidate anatomic structures in the brain, which are thought to be associated with hopefulness. No one, by the way, is saying that the circuitry is so primitive that all of hopefulness resides in one structure. But if I had to say that there's a lead candidate that's been identified in the literature, it's exactly the hippocampus. So the proposal to the NRG committee and to the PI of the protocol, Dr. Vinai Gondi, and the head of the brain tumor committee, Dr. Minesh Mehta, was, could we very simply administer one of the validated scales for hopefulness that was built by Snyder. It has all of 12 questions. It takes about 5 minutes to complete. Give that to a patient at baseline, then have them randomly assigned to either prophylactic cranial irradiation of the whole brain or the same treatment wherein the hippocampus is protected. Re-challenge the patients 6 months after the irradiation is completed, and see if there is less of a decrement in hopefulness on these validated scales among the group that had the hippocampus protected. When you compare the hopefulness among the groups that didn't have the hippocampus protected, that would offer some interesting, at least circumstantial, evidence that the hippocampus is implicated in the hope pathways. And so this has been very interesting to NRG Oncology. We've enrolled now over 250 patients en route to 300 patients. We have very meticulous quality assurance, where the co-investigators sit down once a month and make sure that the hippocampus was properly contoured and protected. And in the other study, we're looking at particular dosimetric analyses in case someone thinks that 25 Gray might be, for instance, below the threshold of hippocampal tolerance. There, we'll look at a variety of doses to see where we might see the correlation with hippocampal toxicity and decrements in hopefulness. So those are two variations of ideas that are on burners in NRG Oncology. SWOG has taken a different tack. And here, I want to truly applaud SWOG leadership, the group chair of SWOG, Dr. Charles Blanke, as well as the leaders in the palliative care movement at SWOG, including Mark O'Rourke, Marie Bakitas, and Ishwaria Subbiah, who have said, "Look, we know that you've got some preliminary pilot data on the impact of a hope workshop for patients with cancer. Can we, first of all, look at this now among the SWOG investigators?" That had never been done before. In other words, we talk all the time about levels of burnout among health care providers who are treating a patient with cancer. It's very gratifying on the one hand, but it's very challenging on the other hand. It can even be demoralizing for some, and as you know, there are very high rates of burnout. So they've been very interested, first of all, in meticulously establishing levels of hopefulness at baseline and correlating that with levels of burnout among SWOG investigators. So by "investigators," I'm talking about physicians, nursing professionals, even patient advocates. And we have some data that were just recently published in JCO Oncology Practice (DOI: 10.1200/OP.20.00990). In addition, we've been very interested in offering now these hope enhancement workshops that I told you about before to the SWOG investigators. So in the month of May, we got together every Monday night--at least for me, it was Monday night at midnight, I have to say, which was about 5:00 PM Eastern time. And we did these 2-hour workshops every week for about a dozen SWOG investigators. And we actually have some data right now that we just submitted to the ASCO Quality Conference, showing the feedback we got from the SWOG investigators. And to me, the most encouraging part was that these investigators were so enamored of these techniques and found them to be so useful that they--almost all wanted to find ways to bring them into their own clinical environment to share them with their patients, wanted to learn how to become facilitators of such workshops to also help prophylax burnout and increase hopefulness among their colleagues. So SWOG has taken the tack of using this intervention to help providers. We're soon going to be trying to do it among the patients and roll it on to our protocols. And there, what we want to do is take meaty, challenging questions. Let's say the question of adherence, a situation where perhaps women who need endocrine therapy are somewhat--want to take the endocrine therapy but are somewhat reluctant to be adherent to the regimen because of all the hormonal side effects. So we want to see if we can use our workshop to align this value of a patient and this motivation with the patient to help them, in fact, become very adherent, because as I'm sure you know, upwards of 40% of these patients just don't want to take these therapies. So we're interested in using this for adherence. And we're also interested in using it as a tool for medical decision making. We give a lot of lip service to the idea of shared decision making between provider and patient, but most of us haven't really been trained in how to have a robust experience that helps me as a provider understanding what my patient wants. When I counsel patients with prostate cancer, it's almost impossible for me to do such a consultation in less than 90 minutes because there's such a range of options. And before I can really get to understanding which of those options might be most appropriate for a patient, I have to really know the patient. I have to know, in the case of prostate cancer, what makes him tick. And so I think there's going to be tremendous upside for these hope enhancement techniques, not just using it for hope's sake but also for these other epiphenomenon in medicine, like adherence and like decision making, that we speak about all the time, but I wonder to what extent we're really committed to doing a better job on those parameters. ASCO Daily News: Right. Do you see a role for technology to grow hope enhancement workshops, to make them accessible to more people in other parts of the world, in other medical settings? How do you think technology has changed the way people confront the experience of illness? And what role do you think you can play in this? Dr. Benjamin Corn: Yeah. Well, I guess all of us were brought in very rapidly, sometimes kicking and screaming, into this new era. And health care providers are smart, and they're resourceful, and they've figured out a way to ride this challenging wave that COVID has brought into our lives, this tsunami, if you will. So COVID has pushed us all into digital health. My organization, Life's Door, which developed an application, a smartphone app, called Hopetimize--kind of a  play on the words "hope" and "optimize"--in other words, the idea is to optimize your life with using these hope techniques I described before. So we had a game plan to get to digital work in the year 2022. That was a strategy that we basically developed about 5 years ago. When COVID came along, we realized that we had this wonderful product called hope enhancement workshops that we thought could really help oncologists who we thought could help their patients. But we couldn't get people together because of the new criteria for social distancing. So what was once a tailor-made concept for intimate settings with 15 people, I can tell you that even in our IRB-approved protocol--and people can see this on nih.gov, clinicaltrials.gov--our protocol specifies the kind of environment one has to have to conduct these workshops when you're doing it face to face. But that just couldn't happen for a full year, maybe a little bit more than that. So we very quickly developed the smartphone app, and we found a way to move our entire workshop to a Zoom platform. And we'll have some data that we'll be sharing that basically says that we can do it just as well with the Zoom platform as doing it face to face. And what's more, it gives more people access to the technology. It allows for more sustainability because we're not only using Zoom, we're using different social media outlets. Most of the literature on hope enhancement--it's sometimes called hope augmentation--can demonstrate a spike in hopefulness after such an intervention. But the challenge then becomes how to sustain that hopefulness, and that's not easy. Well, by creating these digital communities of hopefulness, with the aid of different social media, we think that maybe this is exactly how we can deal with the sustainability question. And finally, this kind of technology gives us scalability. I mentioned before that we've been approached by groups around the world, throughout Europe, now throughout Asia, parts of Africa, not to mention North America. Haven't heard much from South America and Antarctica now that I'm thinking about it, so we're waiting for you guys. But we could never--all of us--I'm a busy physician as well. So there's a limit to how many times my colleagues would have to cover me when I say, "Oh, I'm off on another trip, teaching these hope techniques to people." But once we have it on Zoom platform, and we can bring, let's say, 15 to 20 people into the experience by bringing them into a Zoom room, I don't have to go anywhere. I can do it right from my living room, just like they're in their living room. And it sounds very simple, but I don't think anybody would have really imagined that we could be on our way like this if you sat down to contemplate this upside of 2019. ASCO Daily News: Right. And do you feel the response from the oncology community, from your peers across the world, has been quite positive? Scientists are sometimes skeptical about things such as hope enhancement techniques. Or have you found that not to be the case? Dr. Benjamin Corn: Yeah. That--so there's another example. I think that a barrier is the working assumptions of, let's say, my colleagues--let's say, me myself before I got into it. I mean, we're trained in a truly biological, scientific model. We talk about a biopsychosocial model, sometimes a biopsychosocial narrative model, but at its core, we pride ourselves as being scientists, and this kind of an idea was very off-putting to a lot of people. When we started publishing on this and the word got out that there were actually reproducible results showing that we can enhance hopefulness, people said, "Wait a second. I'm having a problem myself with patients who are just not hopeful." "Wait a second. I'm having a problem myself with my own burnout and my own compassion fatigue." And these colleagues have been seeking this out now in droves. And what our challenge has been right now is to be training facilitators so that we can really fan out and make sure that we answer this need of people saying, "I want to learn these techniques." Again, not just hope for hope's sake--I mean, I'm for hope. But for all the other upsides that we mentioned before--anti-burnout, increased adherence, probably bettered medical decision making--I think these are the motivators for people as opposed to just saying, "Make me more hopeful." So whatever gets you to the workshop, I couldn't care less. Everybody comes with their own reasons. That's always quite fascinating to hear why somebody decided to enroll in one of our workshops. But once people are there, most of them find that they really benefited from it. Typically, if we do a workshop with 20 people, the next day, we'll get a third to 40% of the participants saying, "You know what? I love this so much. I took these techniques, and I called in my children after dinner, and we talked about their goals and what struggles they're having in trying to reach the goals." So to me, that's very touching. And to get through your earlier question about the impact of this thing in communities outside of medicine, I think we're really on the cusp of forming what I like to describe as communities of hopefulness. And I think, again, we saw that in the COVID era. There was, in particular, a community in London that was very interested and brought us in also for a series of four workshops. And one of the things that we're working on right now in a hospital setting is what we call the seal of hopefulness. And that's based on, when I was growing up, this notion of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Well, we want to be able to approach hospitals and to say, "Just like you like to go through the accreditation process, perhaps you want to go through this process of making your staff more hopeful." Patients pick up on these things. So imagine, Geraldine, a world in which the physicians were taking care of you and the people you love, the nurses, the orderlies who bring them down to CT scans and the MRI. There's a lot of time that a patient in a hospital spends outside his or her bed. Imagine if en route to having a study, which you're very anxious about, you have somebody who's been trained and knows how to speak to you about your goals and your value. I think that would be the kind of environment I'd want to be taken care of in. I mean, of course I want to know that the knowledge base is top shelf. But could you imagine if there was this hope seal on the door that said, "People here really give a damn. They care about you, not just your tumor, and that is their commitment." I think that can be very reassuring. And we've begun to pitch that idea to hospital administrators, both in Israel, where I'm based, and in large-scale hospitals both on the community level and the academic level in the U.S. and Canada. ASCO Daily News: Excellent. Thank you so much, Dr. Corn, for telling us about your innovative work today. You really seem to be having a great impact. And I thank you very much for taking the time today. Dr. Benjamin Corn: Thank you. It was a pleasure. ASCO Daily News: And thank you to our listeners for your time today. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   Disclosures: Dr. Ben Corn: None disclosed.  Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Emma Zack is the founder of Berriez, a curated online vintage shop that celebrates curves, colors and fruit. Although they launched in Brooklyn in 2018, the seed was planted when Emma was just a teenager, frustrated by the challenge of finding fun and stylish clothes that fit her curvy body. Emma turn to secondhand shopping as a way to find what made her feel good in her skin. Berriez brings the fruits of Emma's satorial eye to others. Accessibility and representation are the core of Berriez. Like fruit, Emma wants every Berriez' customer to remember that they're uniquely vibrant, sweet and desirable at any size and shape. Learn more about Emma. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and today we're talking with Emma Zack, the founder of Berriez, a curated online vintage shop that celebrates curves, colors and fruit. Although they launched in Brooklyn in 2018, the seed was planted when Emma was just a teenager, frustrated by the challenge of finding fun and stylish clothes that fit her curvy body. Emma turn to secondhand shopping as a way to find what made her feel good in her skin. Berriez brings the fruits of Emma's sartorial eye to others. Accessibility and representation are the core of Berriez. Like fruit, Emma wants every Berriez' customer to remember that they're uniquely vibrant, sweet and desirable at any size and shape. So please welcome to the show Emma Zack. What's the one thing you're most passionate about? Emma: Well, if you had asked me that just a few years ago, my answer would not be what it is today. But, today, it would be making fashion accessible to everyone. Passionistas: So how does that translate into what you do? Emma: Berriez, I source vintage clothing over size, I would say, about medium and which surprisingly not many other vintage shops do the vintage world. Like the fashion industry in general is... primarily caters toward straight sized people, which is about like sizes double zero to six, eight source plus size vintage, which is actually pretty difficult to find. But, I try my hardest to find it lately. I've been working with independent designers on expanding their size ranges, so I can also sell small sustainable brands in sizes XL to 5s. I understand there's people who are double zero out there. But what I don't understand is that it's more, you can more readily find a size 00, then you kind of size, XL where, where like over 60 or 70% of the population is over a size, XL. So something really isn't adding up. So I've been trying to, you know, confront that. Passionistas: When did this first become something that you were aware of and something that evolved into this passion for you? Emma: It became something I was aware of since I was like 10 years old for really going back because as I was a kid, I was also considered plus size quote unquote and You know, I always tell the story of shopping for my Bat Mitzvah dress. And I was, you know, 13, I was plus-sized, but I wasn't like, you know, above a size 12 women's 12, you know, and I, for the life of me could not find a dress. You know, I couldn't find anything in the teenager section. My mom and I went to all these stores. I remember sobbing in the dressing room. And that's when I kind of let fashion, let me down. And I was like, I'm not, I just can't find anything in my size. You know? And then it wasn't until a few years ago that I was so fed up with it, that I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna, I'm sick of this. I love fashion. And I'm sick of never finding anything in my size. It's just absurd. Passionistas: So you mentioned your childhood, tell us where you grew up and what your childhood was like. Emma: I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. It's just a suburb right outside of Boston. And I had a good childhood love my parents shout out to them and, but my sister and I were both always plus-sized. So it was something that, or weight and body image and clothing was always something that we discussed in our house, whether it be positively or most of the time negatively, because even what, 20 years ago, it was not like it is today. It was very much like you're going to fat camp because you're a size 14. But yeah, I mean, I was always the fat one in my friend group, which always left me feeling really shitty.  And but I always loved clothing. Like I can I've loved clothing since I was, since I, I can't even remember, but my mom says that I always dressed myself and I would play dress up in her clothes and my grandma's clothes. But yeah, I, I. I've been thinking a lot about my childhood and how that has influenced what I'm doing today. And there's an, a connection that so strong and so powerful that, you know, I didn't even realize how much it has impacted me until now. Passionistas: Who were some of your positive fashion influences when you were a kid? Emma: I genuinely can't tell you any one, except for My grandma. I never met her, but my mom I was named after her and my mom swears that I am her reincarnated. She was also a fashion-y stuff and she was also considered plus-size back in the 1940s, fifties. So she was like a size probably today. 10, maybe 10, 12. But you know, I grew up looking at her clothing and wearing her clothing. And other than that, I mean, it's sad, but I never saw anyone who looked like me in the media. So I didn't really have anyone to look towards. Passionistas: Your mother was a role model for you as far as starting businesses. Right? So tell us about that.  Emma: She started her own business when she was I actually don't know how old she was, but it was a long time ago. And she started her own business, founded her own company that she still has to this day. She actually just stepped down as. CEO after 30 plus years of that role. But, you know, I grew up with her and she was always working so hard and like, I just remember going. On vacations or like on the weekend she'd be responding to emails and I never understood, you know, why does she need to respond to this email right now? And now I'm like, oh my gosh, she was just so passionate about what she was doing. And that I'm the same way I always have to, you know, I'm always doing my job, you know, even if there's a day off, but. It's just because you love it so much, but that's what I grew up with. And you know, she has such a great work ethic and she is so kind, she treats everyone with so much respect and love. So that's kind of how I've been approaching my business. And you know, it's, it's just really hard to run a business, which is what I'm learning now. Passionistas: What was the business that she started? Emma: My mom, her company is called Houseworks and it's an elder care business. So she helps seniors stay at home and she actually started it after her parents both died. And that, that whole experience really took a toll on her. And she was just like, I'm going to devote my life to this. And she sure did. And now she's has one of the best elder care companies in the country. Passionistas: What made you decide to leave Massachusetts and come out to California to study at Occidental College. And what did you study there? Emma: I knew I wanted to go to a small school and, just cause I like more like individualized learning. And and I saw all the small schools on the east coast and I just wasn't really vibing with them. And then I saw Occidental and I was like, oh, is just perfect. Loved the energy there. My cousins all live around there. So I decided to go out to California. My parents were not thrilled because it was so far. But I actually went to college and in my freshman year of college, I took this class called the prison industrial complex about the United States prison system and race in America. I learned about the prison system and I. I thought it was the most, a horror. It was such, it was just atrocious. And I did an internship with the ACL of Southern California's jails project, and that's when I decided that I wanted to go into criminology and work in criminal justice. So that's what I studied in college. Passionistas: That's a pretty far away field from fashion. So how long did you work in that area and how did you make that transition after college? Emma: I moved back to Boston and I got a job at the CPCs innocence program, which is part of the public defender's office in Massachusetts that helps get innocent people out of prison. So I worked there for about two years and then got. Another job in the field at the Innocence Project in New York City, which is like the head organization. So I moved to New York City for that job for, it was four and a half years ago. And I actually only left that job in December. Passionistas: And what did you do there? What was that work like? Emma: [It was very difficult. So when I first started, I was more of a paralegal and I'd have, I would answer all the calls. So I'd be on the phone with all of our clients all day. And it was just very mentally draining and difficult, but I learned so much. And then I became a case analyst. So I would analyze all the cases that came into. The project and decide if it was a case that we should pursue or not. Then that road became just so draining because I was literally reading about rape and murder all day, every day. So I moved into our communications department where I was a writer. So I wrote all of our annual reports and yeah, I worked on publications and I, I enjoyed that a lot. Passionistas: In your spare time where you starting the fashion company? Emma: About two years into my job at the Innocence Project, my friend and I were just at my house and I was like, and that's how I'm going to start selling vintage clothing online. And she was like, okay, cool. So we just inventoried a few pieces that I already had and made an Instagram. And just started from there. And then, yeah, so it was really, it's funny. It was totally just, I wasn't thinking of it as a business or anything. Excuse me. I was just thinking of it as like a side hobby that would get me kind of distracted in a way from my day job, which was so mentally draining. Passionistas: Did you start by looking for pieces for yourself, and then you'd found you just had enough that you wanted to sell? Like, how did that happen? Emma: So I was really into vintage. And at the time, I don't know if you know about the like Instagram vintage scene, but a few years ago people or businesses started using Instagram as a selling platform to sell vintage clothing, home decor. So I was really into this world because I love sustainable fashion. And obviously I love vintage, but I was never, ever, ever able to find anything in my size. And at the time I was like a 12, 14, so that's wild. So I would buy pieces from these other sellers and, you know, they would have, they would model the pieces on Models that were like size four and something that size for that looks oversize on that model. I would get it and it wouldn't even go over my arm. So to make a long story short, I just kept buying this, you know, really hoping that one day I'd find some stuff that fit me. And most of it didn't. And so that was where my. First batch of shit came from. And then obviously I started to have to go and get more, but it, yeah, it really came out of just like stuff doesn't fit me. I have so much of it. And also, I didn't see anyone on the internet on Instagram. Selling clothes for vintage for plus size people. So I was like, I'm going to just do this myself. This is it's out there. You know, it's not like plus-size people didn't exist back in the day. Passionistas: Once you started selling on Instagram, were you surprised by how many people were connecting to what you were doing? Emma: I'm trying to remember how it grew so quickly, but it did. But honestly people would, and I still to this day, get all these messages that are like, oh my God, I'm so happy. I found you. There's no one else doing this. This is so necessary and, and stuff, but So it wasn't really surprising because I was like, I know I'm not the only plus size person. And again, I'm old at the time. I was only a 12, 14. Now I'm a solid 16. But like at the time I should not have been like 12, 14 and not fitting into literally anyone. So I wasn't surprised to be honest, but I was surprised at how quickly it picked up. I was not expecting what's going on now. I was not expecting that. Passionistas: So, is that why you quit your job because Berriez became a full-time job for you? Emma: Yes. A few reasons. I think that the work, I think I was very burnt out from the Innocence Project or not even just the Innocence Project, but that work cause I had been doing it at that point for 10 years and it was so draining. I'm an empath. So. I'm really sensitive to emotion. So I like I take on so many emotions and it was just, I couldn't disconnect, you know? So that was a big part of it just burn out. But also I couldn't juggle both anymore. Cause you know, it was 40 hours a week for innocence project and then another 40 hours a week for Berriez because I was doing Berriez on all evenings mornings, starting at like 6:00 AM and then all weekend. So I never. For about like a year. I just didn't take a break. Really. Passionistas: So besides wanting people to have pretty clothes, is there like an emotional mission that you have with the company? Emma: Of course. I mean, I think it's so much more about pretty clothes it's about being able to go somewhere and not feeling defeated and like someone doesn't care about you because I, even two weeks ago, my I went and visited my mom. My mom was a size eight. I would say we went to the mall for the first time in about like, what two years here, whatever. And we literally couldn't go into any stores because nothing, there was not a store in the, in the mall that had anything of my size. And it's like, that's so disheartening and frustrating. It's like, I don't want other people to feel excluded. It's just not a good feeling. And I grew up with it and have felt it over and over and over and over again that I want people to come in and be like, oh my God, wait. Stuff fits me. And, oh my gosh, I feel good about myself because feeling good about yourself is what's gonna help you. Do you know, your day-to-day tasks, whether that be working criminal justice or, you know, working at a bakery or whatever you're you're doing. I think clothes are so much more than just. How, you know, they look and I've really been getting in touch with that, especially during quarantine. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Emma Zack. To check out her “Curated for Curves” store visit ShopBerriez.com. Save the Dates for the 2021 Passionistas Project Women's Equality Summit, being held virtually this year on August 20 through August 22. For details go to The Passionistas Project dot com/2021Summit. Now here's more of our interview with Emma. So they're a form of self-expression. How do you use fashion as self-expression? Emma: I love to express myself through fashion. I wear a lot of bright pop patterns and bold prints. I wear a lot of like novelty, sweaters and shirts that. Are funny and that don't that just show that Fasten doesn't need to be taken so seriously. I think there's and I experienced this as I'm in the fashion world, there's so much of it that is so exclusive. And so like, oh, well, if you don't look this a certain way, or if you don't wear this, this and this, you're not actually in the industry. Well, that's B S you know what I mean? So I try and just wear whatever I want to wear right now. I'm wearing lime green shorts, this really weird top in this big flower necklace. And yeah. I just encourage people to not listen to the quote unquote rules and fashion. Just if you like a shirt that's really bright, but you're, you know, bigger where it, who cares, you know, if it's quote unquote flattering. Passionistas: How has COVID  affected your business? Emma: It's been weird because before COVID, I was able to do pop-ups every weekend to make money. And during COVID, I obviously had to switch to like a a hundred percent e-com platform. So now I'm back. I'm like doing this a hundred percent e-com excuse me. And now of course, as I finally figured it out, popups are happening again. So but business, honestly, hasn't, it it's been, I've been growing, but I've been learning how much it takes and costs to grow and sustain a business. And that's been probably the hardest part for me. And some, it just gets me so frustrated every time I think about it, which is every day. But Yeah. So COVID has not been great for business, but it's also at the, at, on the flip side, it has been great because my company has grown. Passionistas: So now what are your future plans for Berriez? Emma: So I've so many. This is my biggest problem is that I have so many ideas, but I also have, truthfully, I have ADHD. So my ideas are literally everywhere. I cannot sit still or focus, but my goal, all right, now, one of them is I've been, like I said earlier, working with independent women designers who are extending their size line for Berriez and these designers, the clothing is a bit more expensive than I usually sell, but that's just because all the designers are sustainable and the fabrics are all just like really beautiful fabrics and everything is just hand dyed or whatever. It may be. Everything is material meticulously crafted. And on top of that, I mean, I'm making sure that for each garment that I put out, I fit it on plus size people before it goes into production. So that we're not just grading up from small sizes to plus sizes. It's like, we're actually going to fit this garment on a plus body. So that it's actually true to size where it's not that problem of like, Okay. Size 16 fits like a size 10. You know what I mean? Which I'm so sick of designers these days doing that because so many are like, we're a size inclusive and then their size 16 won't even go on my foot, you know? So that's one and then two, I've been thinking a lot about, you know, I just got a studio space because I'm also. All of my stuff was in my basement and, February. So I finally moved it out of my basement. But I think that it would be really great to have a storefront because as a plus size person, it is so important to try on clothing before I buy them. And also back to the experience part where, you know, if you're a plus size person, you'd be able to walk into the store and be, find everything that fits you. You know what I mean? And not just like maybe one thing that's really stressed. Passionistas: And I would imagine have a sales person who was supportive and understood, stood your normal trepidation about going into a store to shop for clothing. Emma: Absolutely. I mean, probably a plus size sales person who knows, you know, who's got gone through this experience themselves and knows how to like fit the clothing on our to our  Passionistas: Do you have any desire to design your own clothes? Emma: Yeah. And so that was another thing that we're working on is my employee Eilee Lichtenstein, who is a brilliant creative genius. Have you ever heard of the designer, Michael Simon? He made those like novelty sweaters in the late eighties and the nineties. So he's one of my all time here. I was, I think he, his mind is like, so genius to me. So what we've been doing is we wanted to make our own novelty sweaters, but we didn't want to produce anything new. So we've been sourcing vintage sweaters and hand felting over onto the vintage sweater. So we've been making these novelty sweaters, but that are still sustainable on vintage sweaters. So that's been a really fun idea. Our first collection sold out in 10 minutes, which has never happened in the history of anything. He will want the sweaters. So we're working on a batch of actually like knit tanks and sweater vest for the summer. So those will be ready and hopefully three weeks or so. And then I would love to like, start producing those in a larger scale. And then also with vintage shirts, of course. And then also using like vintage shapes that I've found, you know, and patterning those to make new stuff, but out of sustainable or dead stock materials. So I've been trying to keep the business the sustainability model. Passionistas: So you've talked about the frustration that you felt with the fashion industry, not representing plus size people. Do you think it's changed at all? Is it getting any better? Emma: It absolutely is. It's even the past year. There's so many brands popping up that are like actually trying, I mean I have to shout out this one brand called Wray W-R-A-Y. And she is just so brilliant because she is making, she just started extended her size range up to 6X, but the clothing is not like, you know how a lot of no offense plus size clothing is not cute. So. She is making plus-size clothing. That's like actually wearable art. You know what I mean? So that's great. And then, yeah, there's so many brands, not so many, but there's a lot of brands popping up and doing that at the same time though. There are still so many that aren't doing it. Or doing it so wrong, like being like, were we sell a size XXL and the execs outfits, like a large and another thing is, is that media it's, the fashion media itself is changing in that like brands are hiring plus size models. Like, I don't know if you've seen athletes just extended their sizes target. Big companies are finally getting hip to it. You know, Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman who wants to follow her passions like you have? Emma: I would say to take the risk, but I didn't take that risk until I had fully thought everything through. And organize everything. So I think that was really important. And that was because of my parents. They were like, you want to quit your job, quit your job. How are you going to live? But, you know, it's a huge, it's a huge risk, but you're not going to find out if it works until you do it right. And if it doesn't work, then this is a whole long life ahead of you. So take the risk. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to our interview with Emma Zack. To check out her “Curated for Curves” store visit ShopBerriez.com. Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women-owned businesses and female artisans to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for a one-year subscription and get a FREE Mystery Box worth $40. Save the Dates for the 2021 Passionistas Project Women's Equality Summit, being held virtually this year on August 20 through August 22. For details go to ThePassionistasProject.com/2021Summit. And subscribe to the Passionistas Project Podcast so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests. Until next time, stay well and stay passionate.

About OwenOwen Rogers wears many hats at 451 Research; he’s research director of cloud transformation and digital economics and head of the quantum computing centre of excellence. Prior to these positions, Owen was a doctoral researcher in cloud computing at the University of Bristol, completing his PhD thesis in 2013; a product portfolio manager at Claranet; and an independent product management and cloud computing consultant, among other positions.Join Corey and Owen as they talk about what it’s like when two cloud economists meet at an event but only one has a PhD, what exactly an industry analyst does, how 451 Research found that 53% of companies increased cloud spend during the pandemic and what resources they’re investing in, the Law of Cloud Entropy and why Owen believes the cloud will only get more disordered in the future, why it’s easy for cloud costs to spiral out of control, how organizations are trying to rein in cloud spend despite using more cloud services, why Owen doesn’t believe we’ll reach cloud commoditization anytime soon, and more.Links: 451 Research: https://451research.com/ Cloud Price Index: https://451research.com/services/price-indexing-benchmarking/cloud-price-index Twitter: https://twitter.com/owenrog TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn’t translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that’s not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. I’m joined this week by Owen Rogers, who’s a research director of cloud and managed services transformation, at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Owen, thank you for tolerating my slings and arrows.Owen: Lovely to be here, and I look forward to them.Corey: So, you got your PhD back in 2013, in cloud economics. And I know this because when we first met at a cloud economics event, I called myself a cloud economist and you lit up like a Christmas tree. “Oh, my God. Someone else does what I do.” And I just gave myself the title because I thought it was something I’d invented, whereas you actually got a PhD in it, and you made the understandable assumption that I knew what I was talking about.And I knew I had two directions I could go in. The first was, to be honest and come clean, and the other was to basically string you along until we co-publish a book. It comes out in two weeks, and its title is—I’m kidding. I’m kidding. But thank you for being as gracious about me stomping on your credentials back then, as you were.Owen: No, I was relieved, actually, that someone else was looking into this because I thought I was just on my own and I’d made this big gamble by coming up with this PhD and taking a bit of a risk. And when I saw you at that event, I was like, “Thank God it’s not just me. Thank God, this actually might be a thing to pay attention to.” So, thanks for being there.Corey: No, by all means, it turns out that there’s a very narrow subset of people who care about these things, and that tends to be a somewhat insular circle. So, it was nice to finally meet someone who was a bit outside of the nuts and bolts of lowering bills and looking at the broader implications across the market. But we’ll get there. You’re an industry analyst. What does that mean?Owen: So essentially, we are the intermediary party between buyers and sellers. So, we help sellers of services and goods work out who to sell to, how to sell, and we help buyers work out what product is best for them. And we do this by conducting market research across buyers and sellers, pretty much. So, my specialism is cloud economics, so it’s my job to help solve a lot of this complexity that’s going on in cloud pricing for enterprises, and to help service providers and tech vendors sell and price appropriately.Corey: Well, let’s define terms as well. One of the hardest ones is ‘cloud.’ In fact, the reason I called myself a cloud economist is because it was two words that no one could accurately define in almost any context. Cloud generally meant a bunch of people’s computers that weren’t yours, and economists generally meant someone who claimed to know everything about money but dressed like a disaster victim. And put the two together and no one had any idea what the hell I did, and in many cases, they still don’t, which is kind of ideal from my perspective.But when you say cloud, what does that mean? Are we talking Infrastructure as a Service? Are we moving up the stack into SaaS? Are we taking a Microsoft-ian definition and including LinkedIn revenue as part of their cloud unit for some godforsaken reason? What is it? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Owen: I mean, when we both started looking at cloud economics, it was all about the infrastructure because people wanted virtual machines and storage, and there was a huge amount of complexity there. But I think as the market has become more mature, increasingly we’re seeing people want to use all these other services, up to the platform level and the software level. So, I’m interested primarily in infrastructure and platform, but the thing about cloud providers nowadays is, there doesn’t seem to be any barriers to where they want to go. And I think you and I and others who are in this field are going to have to broaden our horizons and start thinking about everything because cloud is becoming the center of all IT, really.Corey: What I find strange is that as the further I go afield from my core competency in this space, which is looking at the AWS side, Infrastructure as a Service spend—which is not small in most companies and not getting any smaller—as soon as you start diverging from there, the requests that I start seeing from customers are all over the map. Some of them are trying to work on their Microsoft licensing. Others are trying to optimize some random SaaS tool’s billing because that’s top of mind at some point. It immediately shatters into 1000 different niches. But the common thread that I’ve always found was the AWS bill. And let me be very clear: that’s a function of who I talk to in my market in which I live, here in San Francisco. That does not mean that AWS is in every type of company of every profile; just the ones I started talking to and figured out that I could help.Owen: Yeah. That would make sense to me. I think COVID particularly, has made companies realize that cloud is an option. So, even though not everybody was using the cloud hyperscalers one or two years ago, I think over the past year, even if you weren’t dabbling in the cloud, perhaps you’ve started to play around. And even though optimization might be the first thing you think of when you start using the cloud, as time goes on and things start getting carried away, then that’s when this optimization is going to become more important.So, for example, we found 53% of enterprises we surveyed are using more cloud services as a result of the pandemic because they’ve had to change things. And even though they’ve probably spun it up really quickly because they’ve needed to grab hold of it quickly and take hold of the opportunity as soon as they could, in years to come there’s going to be so much complexity, and they’re all going to have different requirements—as you said—because they’re all using things in different ways to address their different needs as the pandemic has gone on.Corey: Talk to me a little bit about the COVID spike that you’re seeing. Is that people spinning up a bunch of new VMs? Is it people leveraging different video conferencing services, like Zoom or—God forbid—WebEx? Is it something else entirely?Owen: I think there’s two areas, and pretty much what you said. So, there’s some companies who are scaling their existing cloud resources. So, those who have built scalable applications, they’re just adding more and more virtual machines or auto-scaling so that they can keep up with demand. And as you said, that could be something like video conferencing, authentication, VDI, anything like that. But then there’s also companies who have had to really rapidly change business model because a year ago, they weren’t selling things online, they weren’t able to deliver, everything was bought in a shop.And now they’ve had to rapidly get access to cloud resources and rebuild their businesses, almost. And I think there’s lots of new cloud users as a result of the pandemic who thought, “How are we going to suddenly get this infrastructure? Or we’re going to have to go to whenever hyperscalers to get used to it, get hold of it right now.”Corey: One of the things that caught me by surprise, in the early days of the pandemic was a number of different companies whose business models weren’t really extending to online things in the same way. They were all based around real-world, physical commerce, for lack of a better term, saw their user traffic and their e-commerce traffic fall off a cliff, but their infrastructure spend remained relatively stable. At which point we realize, “Oh, interesting, when everyone talks about being able to auto-scale, they just mean up.” And that makes sense on some visceral level because if you don’t scale up, you drop customers on the floor. If you don’t scale down, well, it just costs a little bit of extra money and that’s not the end of the world, comparatively. And suddenly seeing people in somewhat dire straits, in a company context, and having to renegotiate their commits with different providers was something of an eye-opener.Owen: Yeah, yeah. And I identified this term, which is ‘cloud entropy.’ And I came up with a term called the ‘Law of Cloud Entropy.’ And what that essentially means is, cloud is only likely to get more disordered over time because most enterprises, as you said, would rather just leave things running, would rather scale up than risk scaling down because if they scale up, it means their applications can still continue to run, they’re not going to be shot in the foot by a server going down, but if they’re scaling down too quickly, then they’ve got a lot to lose that only a tiny cost saving to make. So, it’s almost like the cloud model is inherently risky, in terms of costs running away with it because things can happen automatically and there’s so much to lose by getting it wrong.Corey: Absolutely. After your cost-saving exercise winds up causing an outage, you’re generally not allowed to save money anymore.Owen: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Like, why risk saving a few cents, when it could bring your business down? But that’s the thing. I mean, it's not just a few cents anymore, is it? Because over time, people consume more and more resources, things aren’t being managed correctly; it’s really easy for those costs to spiral out of control.And that is not just a few cents. It’s thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. And there is a point where you think, “Well, actually, I am going to have to do this now because costs are spiraling, and it is time to take that step into optimizing and cutting my costs.”Corey: I’ve got a level with you, it does not stop at tens of thousands of dollars. Many of my clients wish it did. “Sure, we can eat that no problem.” It becomes something so much deeper, and it grows without any bounds on it. If you spin up an instance with the idea that you’ll just experiment on something and then turn it off in a couple of days. If you don’t proactively turn it off yourself, you’re going to retire before that instance does. It’ll sit there costing you, every hour of the day.Owen: Well, I’ve done that, as I’m sure you have. I’ve sped up a virtual machine, played around, and then six months later, I’ve been like, “Oh, this is surprisingly expensive.” And then I’m like, “Oh, well. I’m not going to be able to expense this, am I?” It’s only going to get worse.So, 49% of enterprises we survey say that cost savings are going to be a greater priority since COVID. So ironically, even though people are using more cloud, and perhaps these costs are spiraling out of control a bit, the fact of the matter is, they’ve never been under more pressure to try and quell it.Corey: Oh, yeah. And it doesn’t get any easier when people look at these things in their own right. And it doesn’t lend itself to easy analysis, especially as you start getting into large swings, you have seasonal cycles, you have people buying reserved instances, or savings plans, or whatever the other provider equivalent is in bulk at certain times of the year. And it’s very difficult to do accurate projections, especially when you don’t know the answer to a number of very pressing business questions. It almost becomes, in my case, marriage counseling between Finance and engineering.Owen: That’s such a shrewd observation because I think there is this huge disjoint between IT and Finance. And I can’t really see that being solved anytime soon because they’re both—it’s Finance’s job is to save money, but IT is to keep things ticking over and to innovate. And unfortunately, it’s a compromise. But to get a compromise when neither party really understands each other’s field is really tricky.Corey: Absolutely. If AWS were to somehow wave a magic wand and fix their billing—and, my God, I wish they would—I still have a business here. I still have credibility when talking to a customer about, “Is this the right level of spend? The right level of commit?” That you’re never going to have when your email address ends in the same domain as the vendor’s. And the ability to help them negotiate what those commits look like with that vendor is one of those business models that never goes out of style.Owen: Yeah, there’s always going to be that negotiation. Although I think it’s not as big as it used to be. So, when it was, like, server hardware 20 years ago, the list price was nothing like the price that you’d actually pay. Whereas in cloud, I think, I don’t know if you agree, but the variation seems far smaller to me. It almost seems 10 to 15% rather than the 50 to 60% it might have been 20 years ago.Corey: At certain points of scale, that no longer holds true.Owen: Interesting. Interesting.Corey: Not to name names, or specify numbers. Again, confidentiality matters. But at some point, when you wind up being a significant portion of a given service’s revenue, again, no one is paying retail, or anything even close to retail, at a certain point.Owen: And things are only going to get more complicated. So, we track all the things for sale from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and every week, we scan, now, 2 million individual line items for sale from those cloud providers. So, even if there was some kind of standardization list price with everything, that’s not going to apply to all of those different line items. So, I think for people like Duckbill, a lot of the need is to look at this whole bill, look at everything that’s being used for opportunities to optimize and negotiate, not just on the handful of services, which most enterprises are using.Corey: When you say that you can consume all of those pieces of information in a single week, that tells me you’re doing some definite data crunching and big number processing, largely because it’s impossible to get that much clarity within a week. Do you find that the cloud providers themselves change pricing—other than on things like preemptible instances or the spot market—without an announcement?Owen: Interesting. So, the Cloud Price Index, which I manage, essentially, every week we look at the websites of all these cloud providers, we go through their APIs, and we look at every price item they have and we compare it to the week before. And sometimes prices just go up and down just like a blip. It’s almost something’s gone wrong on the website or the API. But in 2020, we saw 4000 significant price cuts.So, a significant price cut is one that is greater than 10%. So, sometimes prices go down over time and the cloud providers don’t make a big song-and-dance about it anymore. But other times prices do go up, and those prices seem to go up, in particular, when a product goes from almost a beta into general availability. And different cloud providers do it in different ways. But yeah, I think prices are almost continually changing, and it’s almost like a sea of prices rather than thinking, “Oh, well, everything’s going down, or some things are going up.”Things going up and down all the time and it’s tricky to really know what’s going on. I think this is why cost optimization is going to be needed on an ongoing basis. Because it’s not just a one-off thing anymore, or where you go and buy a bunch of reserved instances. You need to be constantly reassessing this all the time. And, like, we were talking about the synergy between IT and Finance, you need to work out what the company is going to be doing in a year’s time so if it’s worthwhile investing in something to make those savings.Corey: When you say that they’re thousands of price changes, generally decreases, are they often correlated—in other words, if, “We’re going to be reducing the cost of the X instance family. The end.” But then there’s thousands of SKUs on some cases because they’re in all of the different regions, they have all the different pricing for the committed price, the reserve price, et cetera, et cetera, or are they making large-scale cuts and just not mentioning it? Because there was a time on the AWS side, which is where I live, where they would trumpet every minor cost reduction in some far-flung region for some service that basically no one used.Owen: You’re right. A lot of those cuts are because of a family, or a particular region, or a generation. And obviously, one cut translates to thousands of individual line items, which again, shows the complexity for companies to deal with because they’ve got to understand that one change can affect a whole range of different things. It’s not just one change anymore; it’s tens of thousands.Corey: What I hope is that, at some point, we’re going to start seeing something approaching commoditization in the space, but the price that has never materially changed—well, that’s unfair. The price that has generally never materially changed has been the egress fee for data transfer.Owen: See, I don’t think we’re going to reach commoditization for a long time yet. And I think of it as a gas station analogy. So, if there’s a bunch of gas stations all on the same road, we all know that the cheapest gas station will be the one that probably gets most of the business because people are only buying gas. But the reality is, people go to gas stations for loads of different things. They go because one might have a nice restaurant; one might sell different chocolates and candy.So, it’s not really about the commoditized offering of the gas. There’s loads of other things that would drive why you might choose one gas station over another. And I think that is the same with cloud providers. That yeah, they all might get similar prices for virtual machines at some point. But still, there’s going to be a reason why you might choose AWS, or Google, or Microsoft, or Oracle, or IBM, or Alibaba, or any of these folks. It’s going to be because of their whole portfolios and everything else they offer in trust and reliability, and regional access, and not just that single commodity price point which is their core business.Corey: Part of the problem is, at least in my experience, when I look at the customer profile that I tend to engage with, they have the bulk of their expenses, across a very small number of services, almost always EC2, RDS, S3, Elastic Block Store, and data transfer. And everything else is, sort of, a bit of a rounding error. There are always going to be exceptions on this, but what that tells me is that despite all the high-level services that get trumpeted, and despite the flashy abilities, and capabilities, and savings opportunities, et cetera, et cetera, that get trotted out, during all the provider keynotes, people are still largely using this to run virtual machines and store data. Is that a fair assessment from what you’re seeing?Owen: I would strongly agree with you. And it’s because people know how to build applications on servers. There’s different skills, but people have got the skills already to some degree. Whereas if you want to use serverless, or these new analytics tools, or IoT, or machine learning, that’s a whole new skill set. I’m with you; I think the bulk of it is still the basic infrastructure items.Corey: It really seems to be. And I can’t shake the feeling that as much as they want to give attention to the new stuff, it’s not a massive driver of people who are debating adopting the cloud. I really don’t think that it’s going to change anytime soon. If we take a look at AWS that has an annualized $51 billion run rate, and revenue at this point, which is just astonishing, it’s pretty clear that the next $51 billion is not going to come from the same customer profile. If anything, it’s going to come from what looks an awful lot like blue-chip companies, some of whom are in manufacturing, some of whom are in logistics, et cetera, et cetera.They’re not web properties; they’re not Netflix-style companies. And to meet those people where they are, they have to embrace the edge a lot more closely, they have to tell a story where you can manage the data center and the cloud environment similarly. And if anything, it’s going to increase that trend, not decrease it.Owen: How do you feel about multi-cloud, mate?Corey: I was hoping we would get there.Owen: [laugh].Corey: I have thoughts on the matter, but I will do you the service of letting you start.Owen: So, [laugh]. So, 59% of enterprises we talk to are pursuing a hybrid approach to IT. So, what that means in our language is, essentially enterprises want to make sure they can use different cloud providers. And the top reason they want to do that is because they want to choose which is the best expertise from each individual cloud provider. So yeah, they might want a cloud provider A because they’ve got really cheap infrastructure, yadda, yadda, yadda.But they still want to have the freedom to use cloud provider B because they’ve got these cool, sexy new analytics and stuff. And for me, I think the hyperscalers almost have to have these newer sexier services, not necessarily because lots of companies are going to use them and it’s going to erode all the commodity business, but more because if they don’t have them, it almost appears like a bit of a weakness because their competitors all have the same thing. And considering enterprises are so willing to consider multiple cloud environments, I think that more appropriately shows that you have to have these things because companies will look elsewhere if you don’t.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you’ve built anything from serverless, you know that if there’s one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it’s that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You’ve created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: I’m not going to disagree with what you’re saying because I’m not sure of the direction it’s going to go in, yet. I’ve often been mischaracterized when I rant about multi-cloud being a worst practice that I’m saying that you should absolutely pick one provider and go all in. Full stop. And that’s never been what I intended to say. For example, personally, all my infrastructure lives on AWS, give or take a few things that are hosted WordPress, for example.But my Git repositories live on GitHub because code commit is a funny joke that people just haven’t realized as a joke yet. And I use G Suite for email and the rest because work mail and work docs are services that even now, you’re not sure I’m not making up. And that’s the way that I tend to view the multi-cloud story: different workloads in different places. And that tends to be fine because in this case, there’s not a whole lot of interaction between those things. The dumb version of multi-cloud, to my world—and I think you called it hybrid in some respects—is the idea of, “I’m going to take a workload that can seamlessly go to any different cloud provider at any time.” And in practice, it never does that, and it also winds up trading off a lot of the benefit of going to public cloud in the first place.Owen: Yeah. That makes sense to me. And actually, in our data, that’s exactly what we found. So, it’s something like the average number of clouds used by the enterprises we survey is 2.2 on average, but 80% of their workloads are deployed in one cloud.So, I think you’re right; it is almost an aspiration. It’s just keeping your option open. Having the ability to move workloads between clouds constantly, we don’t see it either. It’s more about just having the ability to if you really needed to. Do you think some of that is because people are just scared of that lock-in, in your experience? Is it more of a psychological worry, than actual—a worry in reality?Corey: Partially that. It’s also that there’s a vendor ecosystem where if you’re selling a shared control plane that can speak to all three of the primary tier-one cloud providers, and people aren’t using multiple cloud providers, you suddenly have nothing left to sell them. It’s also being sold, in many respects, by cloud providers who are painfully aware that if you go all-in on one cloud, it will not be theirs.Owen: Mmm. Yeah, makes sense. But it’s been interesting over the past year or so how the hyperscalers have started talking mature about hybrid and multi-cloud. So, five years ago, I didn’t think AWS would ever have something like Outposts. And also their competitors. So Google, have Anthos where you can move workloads, Microsoft came out with Arc. So, it’s surprising to me that they’re all embracing this concept so readily.Corey: Well, I do want to call out that there is a distinct difference in my mind, between using multiple cloud providers and having a hybrid structure where you have a data center and a cloud provider because everyone goes through a migration process there. In fact, a failed cloud migration is called, “We’re hybrid now,” because it turns out midway through, it’s super hard to move something so you give up and declare victory. No one generally sets out to live permanently with a foot in each world. What invariably happens then is they improve their data center at the expense of their cloud environment. And they really tend to treat the cloud more or less as an incredibly expensive place just to run a bunch of virtual machines, compared to what they would get economically on-prem. Now, that said, the raw infrastructure cost is only a small part of the story.Owen: Yeah because you’ve got the labor cost of running it yourself as well, right?Corey: Which is always more expensive, than the infrastructure. It’s an incredible rarity when we see the AWS bill costing more than payroll.Owen: Then again, I think, you know, it’s not just the cost savings of having some of your cloud stuff on-prem, though, is it? I mean, the world is a complex place at the moment, pandemic, politics. I think some buyers like to have their data somewhere where they know, in a country they understand the compliance and the sovereignty. I mean, even though cloud is an easily accessible place, you still don’t have ownership of it all. There’s some things you just want to keep close to home. And that is a lot of the driver we see for the hybrid model. The public cloud gives the flexibility but the on-prem cloud lets you still have some flexibility, but keep it all controlled and in your own arms.Corey: To be very clear, I’m also speaking in the very general case. When I talk to individual clients who have made a different decision, my default assumption there is that they’ve thought through these things and have a reason for things being the way that they are. My problem—and why I started making noise about this topic—is that, in my experience, no one else was saying it, which means that if you don’t really know what’s going on and you listen to just the vendor hype, then you would think that, “Oh, I absolutely must build everything that I’m doing in the cloud to work on multiple providers on day one.” And that’s just not the case.Owen: I see what you mean. Yes, that’s not the case. Just because people are using multiple venues doesn’t mean they’re all necessarily working together in any sensible way.Corey: Exactly. This is part of the reason I have no partnerships with any vendor in this space. It’s the reason I don’t charge percentages of things. It never goes well. I wind up charging fixed-fee to my clients and then I tell them to do what I would do in their position. And I’ll explain my logic as I go, and everyone’s generally pretty happy with that.Owen: Mmm. Makes sense.Corey: For better or worse, it seems to solve the problem that folks have. But it’s a growing market; I’m never going to be able to talk to more than a very small percentage of it, and this problem has to be solved, on some level, systemically. Because if we look at cloud spend as an unbounded growth problem, well, first, it means that in the cloud business is a great place to be if you’re one of the ones that’s making money at it. But it also means that at some point, there’s going to be some kind of a reckoning where people need to go back and play cloud environment archaeologist. And this isn’t just a big company problem.I’m the only person that was in most of our early accounts here at The Duckbill Group and I have to figure out what that idiot moron known as my past self was thinking when he tried to build some of this nonsense. And the short answer is, he had no idea, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.Owen: I totally love that: ‘cloud bill archaeologist’ and I will be stealing that for a future reference. And I think you’re right, even during the pandemic, I bet loads of people have scaled up straightaway, thinking, “Well, we’ve got to capture the opportunity now, or we’re going to risk losing business.” And no one’s really planned it or looked at it for a year because, quite understandably, they’ve had bigger things to worry about. And in five years’ time, no one’s going to know what’s going on, what workload is tied to what specific application, who owns it. And the thought of even understanding it is challenging, let alone trying to optimize it.And I was having a debate with my colleague, Jean Atelsek, today, and she was asking me if I thought one day, this could all be automated away. And I don’t think it can be automated away because there still needs to be someone who understands the business, to understand scaling, to understand if something’s worth an investment, to understand if you should scale up or down in response to a specific demand or project. So, I always think there’s going to be some kind of human intervention, just because humans will understand the needs of the business and relate them to how the cloud has to change.Corey: The only other approach as I see it, than my own are, “Oh, we’re going to build some tools that will solve all of this for you.” And they just don’t work. That’s terrific to wind up finding specific things, absolutely, but there’s no context to them. There’s no idea of, “Should I optimize for this cluster for the long haul, or should I instead wind up focusing on it as this thing that I should immediately ignore?” As soon as you start getting three or four terrible recommendations in a row, you wind up in a space of not trusting the tool at all. Bad recommendations are worse than no recommendations.Owen: So, why do you think that is? Why do you think the tools—I suppose the tools can predict the future so they don’t know the context of what needs to be done. Are there any other reasons to see those tools has not been able to adapt? Why do you not think tools will have a longer-term impact.Corey: Because in many cases, there’s no way to tell from a programmatic perspective. “Those idle instances that are sitting there? I’m going to recommend that they get turned off.” Well, a little more digging shows that they’re the DR site and you need three seconds of warning or so before they’re going to be under load. You can’t turn them off.Whereas, buy a bunch of reserved instances on that particular cluster that someone just spun up for a one-week experiment and then they’re turning it off, doesn’t make a lot of sense, either. And as you step down this path, it becomes nuanced. There are times where that is this tiny little test environment, so no one is going to look at it or care. Except that that tiny little test environment is about to go hyperscale once the business deal gets signed, so now is absolutely the time to optimize stuff like that. There’s the idea of well, this data could be migrated to infrequent access one zone, and it winds up costing less money. Cool. That’s true, but if that data goes away, it winds up effectively destroying aspects of the business.So, in that case, you should spend more money on backing that data up securely, in many cases, to another cloud provider. That’s the level of nuance. There’s a whole bunch of different things that a naive approach would suggest would be a good idea. But a deeper dive into what the business is actually doing and the model that they’re working under, make it the wrong direction to go.Owen: I strongly agree.Corey: And it gets worse than that because there’s this false narrative that companies care tremendously about saving money on the bill; that’s the thing that drives them. And it is just not true. Because it’s an inversion of monetary philosophy that people take on a personal level. If I offer you the opportunity, you can either make another $1,000, or save $1,000, you’re typically going to say you’d rather save the money because, well, you can cut Netflix out, you can stop eating out, and that works out well, whereas having to go ahead and make more money, that means you have to ask your boss for a raise and start doing odd jobs and update your resume, and it’s just a pain. Companies, on the other hand, are structured to drive revenue. There’s a theoretical cap of whatever they’re spending on cloud in total, that they’ll ever be able to cut off, but they can make multiples of that by launching the right feature to the right market at the right time.Owen: I wonder if cost optimization is perhaps the wrong word and it should be something along the lines of value optimization because obviously, I don’t want any company reducing their virtual machines to save money because as you said, it’s going to reduce their opportunities to gain new revenue if it’s their web applications. Really, it’s about, “Well, this is where you should be putting your money, and this is where you’re wasting it.” It’s about optimizing their value, not saving them their costs.Corey: Precisely. It comes down to what’s right for them, given the constraints that they’re working under. And again, it’s easy to go ahead and play, more or less, Wild West architecture, where you look at what they’re doing and say, “Oh, yeah. This is all wrong, you should be doing it this way.” And you sketch out a beautiful architecture on a whiteboard—also known as a lie—and, yeah, in theory, it’s great.In practice, they have existing business, it’s driving revenue, and you’re not going to be allowed to turn everything off for 18 months while you rebuild it. The money that you save doesn’t matter if you’re not in business by the time you’re in a position to realize those savings.Owen: And perhaps after COVID, there will be loads of these servers and virtual machines and objects on object storage which are left there, just because it’s not really worth removing them. Because nobody knows what they are, it might bring down the whole business. Better just leave them there for the time being.Corey: Well, that does bring up the last topic I wanted to bounce off of you. What is the outcome of all of this COVID stuff, once it is all past? What is the lasting after effect, if any, of COVID on cloud?Owen: I think COVID will be a catalyst for cloud adoption. Some companies have changed their business models; they’ve aged collaboration; they’ve been able to change their businesses in a matter of weeks. And that’s been enabled because of the rapid scalability of cloud because they’ve been able to get a third-party to do physical server management and because they’ve been able to concentrate on changing and evolving their businesses instead of worrying about infrastructure. I think those who have succeeded by doing that are likely to keep doing that because it puts them in good stead during the past challenging eight months. And those who hadn’t done that will now think, “Well, perhaps we should have done that.” And again, they’ll look at the cloud as a way of moving forward. So COVID, although horrifically terrible for so many people, will probably be a catalyst for cloud adoption, and has demonstrated to the industry that cloud is a suitable venue for many, many workloads.Corey: Owen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and suffer my, I guess, less educated slash informed opinions on cloud economics. If people want to hear more about what you have to say, where can they find you?Owen: So, you can find me on 451Research.com, or on Twitter; I’m @owenrog.Corey: And we will of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:33:43]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Owen: No, thank you very much.Corey: Owen Rogers, research director, and cloud economist at 451, Division of S&P Global. 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 listing all 4000 prices that changed.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.

Dream investment or real estate nightmare? On this episode, we have Bryan Bailey on to talk about his experience with the vacation rental investment strategy. We cover motives, returns, reserves, startup costs and everything else you need to consider to be successful with a vacation rental.   --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On this episode we're talking about Vacation Rentals with Bryan Bailey. Bryan is a vacation rental veteran. And he's going to talk about how he started his portfolio, some of the costs all that good stuff. Alright, let's get into it.   Tom: Bryan Bailey, welcome to the remote real estate investor. Before we get into the topic today, why don't you give listeners a little bit about your background?   Bryan Yeah Tom thanks, I'm really happy to be here. Well, well, let's just stick to the real estate portion. I've had a very eclectic background. But you know, I got into real estate, like most people listening to podcasts reading, you know, the, all the books about how to get rich quick, you know, and it got enamored with that. But essentially, you know, out of college, I started in commercial real estate on the west coast. I loved it. I was doing structure finance, working on some big deals, and San Francisco and LA and Portland up and down the West Coast and absolutely loved it.   And, you know, I wasn't looking to get into SFR. But through a series of circumstances, yeah, I took a job at a small company that was buying single family homes at that time that that company was Waypoint homes. And in 2011, when I started there, we maybe had 300. In total, you were the first employee there, I believe, Tom and I was right after you. And you know, we grew that company to over 15,000 homes from 300. You know, it took the company public and eventually sold the firm. And as some of the listeners may know, the former waypoint is now part of invitation homes. So you know, that was a great run. And now I've been at roof stock for three years as a co head of investment services. And, you know, we're doing great things over here.   You know, I would just say, I feel like I've been a pioneer in the institutional, single family rental space, the past 10 years has been unbelievable, but when you see what's happening right now, with all the attention that the industry is getting all the institutions, even a lot of individual investors are getting more excited about the space, I think the next 10 years will be even better than the last.   Tom: And something that just kind of sticks out is you know, working at those companies are growing really quickly, you end up wearing a ton of different hats. And I thought one of the roles you had was so neat is whenever this company that was buying a bunch of houses would open a new market, Bryan would be the tip of the spear and basically, you know, work with some of the local pros and get the growth in these as we would open up Dallas as we would open up Atlanta, Bryan was the the road dog in opening up those new markets.   Bryan: So I was a road dog and the high school and college too. Just so you know.   Michael: I'm sure you've been called the worst things.   Bryan: And yeah, when we were running on empty is like, Yeah, I was a road dog. But yeah, to your point, Tom, I've worn many different hats and SFR like you have and it's just been awesome experience, you know, of a lifetime.   Really, you know, like you said, when we open up new markets, there really wasn't a playbook. There was no industry. So it wasn't a commodity business. Like it's starting to get now on these platforms. And so you just kind of have to figure it out. And I remember many times, as you were saying, whether it be you know, a Dallas or a phoenix or in Atlanta, you would go there and sit in a Starbucks with your first employee and just start mapping things out. So yeah, from there to heres is a lot of fun memories. We drink the entrepreneurial, gritty Kool Aid they have. Yeah, the stable is awesome.   Tom: So very awesome back ground professionally, but you also dabble as an investor as well, correct?   Bryan: I do. I do. You know, I have, you know, SFR my portfolio and today we'll get into it, but I do own vacation rental and thinking about adding to that portfolio. So have not only, you know, experience from you know, working in the industry, but like hands on personal experience in the space.   Tom: Awesome.   Michael: Awesome. Well, I'm super curious to learn how you ended up getting into that vacation rental. Tom, do you want to wait to talk about or should we jump right in?   Tom: Perfect segue, Michael, you're nailing the segue. Let's let's get into it. Go ahead.   Michael: Awesome. So I think a lot of people end up in Vacation Rentals as accidental landlords, you know, primary residence and move out of it and they could turn into a second vacation home. Was your approach similar? Or was it more targeted? And you thought, Okay, I'm gonna buy this as a vacation rental.   Bryan: I mean, I wish I could say something like super cool and awesome, where the audience would just say, like, Man, what a strategy but let me just back up for a second and I'll get into there but first thing that I had to do was get off the couch with my first rental property, just straight rental property. And I think like a lot of folks get into analysis paralysis. And you know, you read a bunch of podcasts and books and like looking for the right opportunity and you just, I couldn't just get off the couch. It literally took me like four or five years.   Once I made decision that I wanted to invest by the time I invested. I wish I had all that time back. So I want to say that first.   So, regarding the vacation rental, you know, as Tom, you alluded to, I had this job at waypoint homes where I was traveling the country and open up all these markets. And one of the places I love going to was Phoenix, like, you know, eight, nine o'clock at night, it's 90 degrees. Like, I just loved it. I mean, who doesn't like the desert, you know, and then   Tom: Spring training!   Bryan: Spring training, I mean, just fell in love with it. And you know, at the time I was a runner, I used to run a lot, yes, I just fell in love with it. And I not only what I go there for work, I would also, you know, vacation there, you know, a couple times a year ago for a week and hang out. And one year, some buddies of mine, we went on a golf trip, instead of getting hotels, we rented a house and you know, fairly nice house, but not like over the top. And I couldn't believe what we were paying for. And but then when you compare it to a hotel, it was cheaper than a hotel. And then that just, you know, the light bulb went off on like, I got to get in the game.   And so I bought a home there. And it's been tremendous. Now we'll go into different facets of it. And as you know, the podcast goes along, but it's it's been one of the better investments in my portfolio.   Michael: Did Did you have a conversation with any of the people you were sharing a house with about that idea? Or did you anybody, there's other people invest? Or did the light bulb click for them as well, were you like, off in a corner somewhere being like, holy crap, I just had this lightbulb moment.   Bryan: The guys I went with are in real estate as well. And they've dabbled, I didn't necessarily tell them at the time, like, Hey, we should all you know, go in together, or you should do it. And I should do it. It's just something that just kind of marinated a little bit. And I'd say within two or three months after that trip, you know, I hired a local agent that I'd already known from, you know, my business days. And I'd said, Hey, we need to start looking. And so you know, the trick is to find the right spot. So that's also took like another two or three months.   But now it wasn't long after that, that trip that I knew that that's what I wanted to do.   Michael: Right on. And so that first property you bought was was out there in Phoenix as well.   Bryan: Yes. Just outside of Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona.   Michael: Okay, and what year was this?   Bryan: This was in 2015.   Michael: Okay, so Bryan, I'm so curious to know if we can dig into the details a little bit more on this house. So I dabble in Vacation Rentals as well. But I really am curious to know, how are you managing it? And what kind of rents are you seeing on average on a monthly basis?   Byan: Yeah, that's a great question. So I bought it for 450,000. I'll tell your listeners, you know, even really need to understand the marketplace and some of the barriers to entry and limitations and potential issues that you might run into.   So the key in a place like Arizona, especially the valley and Phoenix, like there's HOAs is everywhere. And so there's a lot of limitations. I get short term rentals. A lot of Hoa is even today because of noise and traffic. They just don't want it in their neighborhood. So they're they're putting in riders in the HOA, I think that's why you would you would refer to it as that minimum stays 30 days, things like that.   So yeah, the first thing that we had to do was like, there would be a great property, but then it's like, okay, is it an HOA? We had to read the CC&RS in the HOA, that was the first thing that we went through. So the filtration…   Michael: And these are single family homes that have these HOAs.   Bryan: That's right, that's right, single family homes that have the HOA and so each market is going to be different, whether you're buying in the mountains, or on the beach, or what have you. But like, people go to go to the desert, they like, you know, they like to hang out the pool, they like to barbecue in the backyard, like, obviously plenty of space inside for recreation. So that was another thing. So it needed to have a pool, because I use it for personal use. We'll talk about that later, it needed to have a hot tub. You know, and so I had big time criteria, but when we finally got to it as 450,004 bedroom home, you can't get a couple of families in there easily.   Michael: Okay, so 450? And what kind of rents are you bringing in? And then we'll talk about how you went about managing it or setting up management?   Bryan: Yeah, so there's a lot of things I didn't realize before I bought a vacation rental just like in any investment. So obviously you got a huge startup cost at the furnish the whole thing. So I knew that we'd have to do some things to it, but you're basically furnishing a home that you're not living in. So if you can think about all the costs associated with that. So you know, 1000s and 1000s of dollars,   Tom: This is a pretty high price point, I would assume the rent just kind of based on the price, like you know, you need the furnishings to match, you know.   Bryan: You definitely do and I think the problem that a lot of novice investors get into is you'll read a blog or like, listen to a podcast and I'll tell you like, Okay, well, the tenant will should just have streaming service. So all you need to do is just maybe have a television or there's like a lot of dogma out there. And the way that I look at it is that maybe you'll catch me once and I'll stay in it. But once I realized that, like I can't watch you Sports Center at night or whatever that I want to do, like, I'm not coming back.   And so like, I really had to set up the house as if like, I wanted to be in there, you know, for me to be really comfortable. So there was a ton of startup costs, like I said, you know, the furniture that you're comfortable in sitting in, you know, like looking at on the walls, you need to have like a good coffee maker, you know, hotel type amenities like hair dryers, all that good China. And it just, it really just starts to add up.   And then the rents, I had to answer your question, Michael, so the rents throughout the year, I average about 5500 a month for 12 months,   Michael: Holy crap.   Bryan: But in this one in particular, during the high season, I'm at eight or 9000 a month, and then in you know, in the shoulder season, I get, you know, somewhere around three.   Michael: Dude, killing it. That's amazing.   Bryan: Well, it's all relative, right? So like, if you think of all the startup costs that I had, yeah, and then the expenses just go through the roof, right? So in the desert, it's hot, obviously. So water is more expensive. So water bills through the roof, your electric is through the roof, because like you're running, I mean, AC is on all day long. You got more pool maintenance, you know, you have more cleaning fees, and various things. So my expense ratio is over 50% pretty consistently on it.   And so the rents are high, but obviously the the expenses go up. And as we know, people can choose whether or not they want to vacation, they can't really choose whether or not they want a place to live. So that makes regular SFR you know, single family rental more predictable, whereas vacation rental? Yeah, you know, I have these great months, but you need to keep putting money into reserves for you know, the rainy days or the early days of COVID. like nobody stayed for like literally two or three months.   Tom: On the furniture Brian and the furnishing of the property. Was that all something you did yourself? Or did you have a professional manager or stager company help you do that? I did it myself with a designer friend of mine. So it's kind of one in the same. But you know, I had some ideas of what I wanted. Cuz really, if you're in the mountains and you have a homeless of vacation rental, you probably want to make it..   Tom: Critters or bears. You got to pick one.   Bryan: You got a woodland critters or bears? That's exactly it. I was trying to think of the term but that's perfect. So the desert, I was like…   Michael: Snakes or scorpions in the desert. Yeah, snakes or scorpions?   Bryan: Well, almost right? If so, you know, it's a desert theme. And then I got some, some artwork that really pops and pictures. So I got to stand out amongst everybody else on Airbnb, and VBR Oh, and booking.com, which I'm on all those sites, I'm on like 30 different sites. So I had to get somebody else with a better eye than myself. But I had an idea of what it should be like.   Tom: And I didn't know I never thought about those startup costs related to furniture because I use Airbnb pretty regularly and those type of sites and all filter like man, it's got to be like a 4.8 or above or like a really high rating. And you know, if you try to be cheap, and you know, go to the back of IKEA, just take whatever furniture they're throwing out, like for that just type of strategy you got to be make sure that stuff is high on the up and up.   Bryan: That's just it, Tom. And I think there's a lot of bad information out there. You know, obviously, I have my own experience, and I'm talking about it, but leading up to this call. It's like, Oh, well, I'll just kind of, you know, read some blogs and and listen to some podcasts just to see what people are getting in like this idea of skimping is not a good one. Like I said, like, you might be able to sneak one pass the goalie once but they're not going to come back to you. Now that I've been doing this almost six years, I have people that through property manager, I hear about it. It's like every year they come down and they stay for two weeks, you know, so I've got a handful of those repeat customers. And yeah.   Tom: A couple of questions on assumptions around financials. What do you see typically as like an occupancy percentage, like let's say you were to evaluate another home, and in that same area now, like what would you pencil in for occupancy? And then my second part of this is property management, like those type of fees. And that's probably a whole nother little subsection to talk about. But let's start with occupancy.   Bryan: I'm around 60%. And I feel that's pretty good. So I can only speak to the desert, but between, let's say, you know, Labor Day and the end of April, that's the majority of the time is full, I'd say my occupancy during that time is 80%. Right.   And then so in the summer when is 190 degrees out, not a whole lot of people want to vacation in the desert, but what you do get are people who maybe live across town and they just want to change the scenery. So I get a lot of that stuff in the summertime.   So the occupancy isn't as high maybe it's, you know, 30 40% in summertime, but it's a different crowd during the winter season. In the desert. You get a lot out of towners, you know everybody's heard the term snowbirds, so you got a lot of Canadians and people from Michigan coming down, paying premiums for real estate or to stay in your home and then during the summertime it's more locals.   And then from a management standpoint, it is quite expensive. So here's the other thing too. So everybody says the same thing, man, you're killing it on the rents. And it's like, well, my expenses are like through the roof and management, I pay 15%.   Tom: That's not too bad. I mean, that's a lot. It was a, you know, a year long tenant, but for what I've seen for rental, just because there's just a lot more overhead as a property manager for a rental unit 15%, it doesn't seem that bad at all. Did you look at many other rates of other managers? Or did you like find that the pm manager that you wanted right away? Or what was that process like?   Bryan: I looked at a couple of different property managers? Initially, I was like, well, I'll do it myself. Because as we, you know, we're talking earlier on the calls, like you and I have been doing this for years along with Michael, it's like, I probably know more than the next guy. Right? So there's a little bit of hubris there. After about 10 minutes, I knew that no way.   So I dated a couple property management firms, and I found the right one for me. And I can't stress that enough, like how a good property manager can like really change your life, you know, whether it's single family rental, or vacation rental, the group that I'm with, now, they're really good. They understand pricing dynamics, it's not like, okay, it's between these four months, we're going to charge this rate, you know, they're just, they're constantly looking at all the data, and keeping my average daily rate as high as possible, and my occupancy as high as possible.   And, you know, expenses with all property managers, there's going to be some areas where you might question but they're pretty good.   Tom: So circling back on the cost aspects, so you pay your property manager 15%. And there's no like, I guess, no leasing fee, because there isn't really much of a leasing. But is there any other type of fees that they're taking on, on top of the 15% of the gross amount that the person is paying just to kind of undead all the different costs?   Bryan: Obviously, there's a cleaning expenses. And so the property manager has the cleaning company, so I'm sure you know what they're charging me. It's not cost, right. So they're making a margin off of me. They're, they're not making a margin off of any of the maintenance, at least that I'm aware of, I'm sure, maybe there's some, you know, some deals going down behind my back. I'm not sure but just in any industry, but I would say the things that most people don't think about are like little things like welcome packages, right?   So we come stay somewhere, right? You want to have like some soap you want to have like, maybe you leave like a couple of cups of coffee for him to get started. You have like toilet paper and paper towels and things like that. And so I have a pretty nice welcome package that I've worked with my property manager on creating, and that's like 20 bucks a pop, you know, and so if you're, you know, let's say 60% occupied call 200 days a year for easy math. And the average day is four or five days, it's a lot of welcome packages. So there's just I mean, little things like that, that you wouldn't even think about in your costs.   I want to get back to the startup costs really quick, because like that goes into your basis of the home, right? And so like when you do your internal rate of return calculation, like you got to factor in, you know, 20,000 bucks, at least I did, and startup costs. And so it's like, you need a lot of excess rent over time to make up for that. So if I'm holding on to the property, I think it will continue to bear fruit average daily rates continue to go up. And obviously that service goes down. And you know, it'll more and more of that equity wedge I'll be able to take and higher cash flow. But I'd say it's performing as well as some of my best single family rentals. Even though I'm getting a lot of rent.   Tom: How would you compare the ongoing repairs and maintenance? I guess there's not really any term cost because it's like always a turn. How would you compare that to the multifamily and the SFR? in your portfolio?   Bryan: It's really, you know, it's a crapshoot, right. So you can't discriminate. Obviously, there's fair housing, but you know, you get the right tenant in the single family rental, you know, your long term rental, and you get a good one man, that is like gold. Yeah, it really is gold. And so you know, your expense ratio is really low on long term rental, when you're running to like, more and more people, you know, in these four and five day clips throughout the year, it's just inevitable that you're going to get a bunch of people coming down the party or, you know, a bunch of little kids that might take a crayon to the wall or whatever. So I just find that little nickel and dime maintenance has gone up. Yeah, I mean, your towels get stolen, you know, I mean, they do believe me, even in a vacation home, obviously, you want to have really nice bedding. And so there's a lot of turn there. So we're constantly buying you know, new bedding and furniture and things like that. And so you know, the China gets broken various things and then the pool is getting used more often. And so I have pool maintenance a two to three times a month whereas if if I was renting that out to somebody long term, it would be once a month. So is starts to add up.   Michael: But so on that kind of nickel and dime maintenance and repair costs, Brian and then also on the cleaning stuff, aren't you able to pass those expenses on to the renters in terms of cleaning fees or security deposit to cover those types of damages and repairs?   Bryan: Some of it, the way that I'm set up is, you know, I absorb those costs. So the cleaning fees and what have you, then I also I feel like I'm getting a little bit better rate. So okay, the only thing I passed through really is are things that are blatant months ago, I had somebody stay, and they broke a table. So you got to pay for the table. And so the property manager, you know, they have really robust language and the the tenant agreement, and they have a credit card on file and like high reserve, or deposit, if you will. And so I feel that I'm protected.   I mean, if they stole the house, we've collected the 1000 bucks, 1500 bucks before from people who have stayed and just treated that like,   Michael: Like a frat house?   Bryan: There you go.   Michael: And so Okay, good to know. I'm curious. On the expense side, I know you were talking about some of those nickel and diming expenses are going to creep up. But are there any expenses that you just don't have at all in traditional single family long term rental versus you do in short term rental, like, if we're going down line by line, then you've got insurance, you've got taxes, you've got property management, you got repair, maintenance, capex, all that kind of stuff. But are there any things that are unique to short term rentals exclusively?   Bryan: I would just say, you know, I alluded to it briefly in the beginning, like just little things like you know, amenity cost, that wouldn't be in normal operating costs, right. And, you know, taxes, insurance, maintenance, management, utilities, right? I mean, those are some of the basics for long term rental, but, you know, like cable TV, it's a couple 100 bucks a month, I pay for that, you know, whether somebody is there or not. So when the tenant is ready, they open the door, it's like, they can relax from their flight, turn on sports center, you know, do all that. So I don't leave anything to chance so that cable and internet are actually a pretty big expense, it's over 200 a month, that's $24/25500 a year. And like I said that, you know, these welcome packages, that one may not factor into their underwriting. I mean, that gets upwards to $1,000 a year, just little things like buying these, like, like I said, laundry detergent, you know, k cups and various things So, and then your utilities are getting used more. So, yep.   Tom: Now, super great points to other kind of categories of questions I want to get with before we jump off the call today. So COVID in personal use. So I would do COVID. First, I'd love to hear kind of the how the pandemic has affected your vacation rental portfolio. I mean, it seems kind of like it like a tale of two, two halves. I guess I'd love to hear that. How that has impacted your vacation rental portfolio.   Bryan: Well, I don't want to sound like I like I'm definitely concerned like the next person regarding COVID. But I'll tell you, it's been a tale of two cities, I guess. That's the right term. In the beginning, like, people got spooked. And I had a ton of cancellations. And this was like, right at the tail end of winter, if we can recall last year when you know, the shutdown started to happen. So, you know, once COVID hit and March spring training was canceled. And like nobody came down and stayed. And then, you know, the Barrett Jackson, you know, Auto Show, which is a big deal in Scottsdale. And so March and April and getting into May, like nobody stayed. So I was like, okay, the good thing is like a good real estate investor, I have a lot of reserves, I'm not over levered, you know, I keep my leverage low. And I have a lot of cash reserves.   So I was planning on 2020 being almost like, I wouldn't say goose egg, but just very minimal revenue coming in. And then all of a sudden, it was like, everybody kind of got COVID fatigue, if you will. It's like I don't want to be in my house anymore. I want to go somewhere else. So the flip side of that is once that kind of clicked in for folks, it's been unbelievable. Like, my wife and I, you know, would go to three times a year, and we're having a hard time finding like a window for us to like sneak in and use my own house in the desert.   It was booked up for six months straight up until like a few weeks ago. But again, it wasn't so much people from you know, like Michigan coming down, but it was like California. It's like, Man, I'm just tired of like being on zoom meetings all day in San Francisco, California. Like let's go do ever want to do this. Let's do it in the desert. So just tons of that over the last year and like I hope we all get back to normal soon. But like if this continues I foresee 2021 being the exact same my bookings are already like really solid so far for the next couple of months. I'm usually about 60 days out I can I can see how the calendar is lining up. And I yeah, it's been great. So I imagine more and more people continue to get out of Texas go to the desert or you know, what have you.   Tom: As that occupancy is just become so tight, you know, like no availabilities. You talking about with your property manager, they automatically adjusting the rent rate up? And if so like, I don't know, what can you quantify, like the percentage of like rent increase? And like how that's changed through it?   Bryan: Absolutely, absolutely. I would just say in general, right, because like, there's a lot of again, there's a lot two rules of thumb and lots of dogma in real estate investing. I think you just, you know, take the knowledge in, but then you just have to, like, think about your particular situation.   So I'll answer the question this way. If the Super Bowls in town, change your rate, yeah, charge more. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, it's like a no brainer. And so because we're seeing more and more occupancy, it's like, okay, let's see if we can't get more. And so I won't get into specific details, but my property manager and I, and we also use a third party, you know, maybe I'm cheating, because I have a lot of SFR experience. But you know, we're using a firm that could also help us with like pricing dynamics. And so we're trying to get that incremental dollar, you know, so it's like, okay, during spring training, there's nothing out there in Scottsdale, I'll talk to my property manager once a week. And they'll say, Hey, I think we can start bumping this up 23 bucks a day, and your occupancy won't change.   So we just kind of play with it that way. And I'm not saying that's for everybody, like, you know, your typical investor isn't going to be as involved as maybe I will, you know, I'm already paying 15%. Like, I want to be hands off, but this is my hobby, too. So it's like, I just kind of geek out on it. So that's what we do.   Michael: That's awesome. I got two totally unrelated questions. Bryan, before we let you go. The first one is, what kind of research platforms utilize to get an idea of you know, what type of occupancy or rates you could expect to get before you made your purchase. So if people are interested in investing in the short term rental market, you know, what resources are available to them? And then, once we talk about that, I'm curious to know how you've got this place insured? Because I want to geek out on that for just a hot minute.   Tom: Great question, Michael.   Bryan: Okay, those are great questions. There wasn't a whole lot of sophistication before I went in, it was more just kind of like gut feel. Like I said, it's just, you know, my personal experience was we were more than happy to pay the rate that we were paying for a long weekend. And then like, wow, this is pretty incredible. Now I did, I just started reading, there wasn't any like, particular search that I did, or data source that I look to, I just started doing a lot of reading.   And I would go on to Airbnb and vrbo and places like that. And just to see, like, other properties that I thought were going to be comparable to the one once that I was thinking of buying and just seeing how they leased up and what kind of rates that they were getting. And so I just kind of backed into it that way. And then as I was saying, you know, the property manager, you know, once I was before I bought the property, I was engaging them already. And they were giving me good ideas of, you know, what I could expect from a rent standpoint.   Michael: Okay. Awesome. Super, super simple and repeatable.   Bryan: Yeah, I think so. Okay.   Michael: And then now, shifting gears entirely insurance is this insured as a second home as a investment property as something in between? So I know that there are companies that underwrite specifically short term rentals. But talk to us a little bit about that.   Bryan: Initially, I purchased it as a vacation rental second home, so I was insured that way for a while. But, you know, because I'd show the rental income on my taxes, I seem to be a target for audits, like it's just everything, like, even though nobody's going to check my insurance. It's just everything is as it states. So if I'm calling, you know, a vacation rental, then I get vacation rental insurance, and it is a little bit higher. I mean, because I do have the pool, and there obviously, there's more people going in and out. So you know, higher liability and things like.   Michael: Sure. And so as you were talking to an insurance agent, is that synonymous with an investment property policy? Or is it tailored specifically to short term rentals and Vacation Rentals?   Bryan: It's pretty much like any other type of rental policy, like I said, like you're paying more of a premium for liability, because I mean, there's just more opportunities for people to have slip and fall or what have you. So that went up again, you know, because of certain amenities within the house. You know, I do have a pool, like I said, so that's a big red flag for a lot of insurers, like you know, just all the people coming in and out of there. So that jacked it up quite a bit too. And I would say from an insurance standpoint, on the whole versus like just a regular long term rental, vacation rental paying about 50% more than I would on a long term rental.   Michael: Okay.   Bryan: As much as I'd like to claim it as a long term rental, the real estate Gods wouldn't like it if I did.   Michael: You probably get smited for that one. Yeah, we've also got all of your personal property, you've now got to insure in that because you furnished it versus long term rental, unless you're furnishing that I mean, it's next to nothing minus the appliances, if you even own those.   Bryan: That's exactly right. So that's a really great point. So I've got a personal property, that's part of the policy as well. And then another thing just kind of outsides insurance but more from a liability standpoint, I have all of my real estate and LLC is not just one LLC. And so this one is in an LLC, for you, no extra protection.   Michael: Awesome.   Tom: Do you mess with home warranties within your vacation rentals?   Bryan: No, you know, I saw some sure that stuff, you know, obviously, and I think because of my own experience, maybe I'm in a different position than somebody else, but I know what to look for either be a roof, a water heater, and hv AC system appliances. And so you know, I just kind of make my own judgment, you know, is it worth 800 to 1000 bucks a year for a home warranty, or why go ahead and just like essentially self insure, when these things break, I'll just have to take care of so that's what I've chosen to do. But I mean, I don't blame anybody for wanting to do that. It's peace of mind. I have home warranties on other properties that I own. And it's makes me feel better at night.   Micheal: For anybody listening who's not familiar with self insuring what that is, is basically Brian keeping the would be paid premium. So in that case, 802,000 bucks a year, and just putting that in his pocket as a reserve for paying whatever bills come up. And after three years, you know, he's got three grand set aside, as opposed to paying those in premium so he could afford to make 3000 and repairs.   Bryan: That's right.   Tom: I like framing it that way. I'm gonna start framing it that way. Cuz I I'm in a similar camp, I self insure my utilities. So last question for you, Bryan.   Bryan: I got all the time for you guys, whenever you need.   Tom: All right, good, good, good. Using your rental property. So you see you men.., you alluded to it a little bit earlier. What does that look like?   Michael: And how can we come with you? When are we going?   Bryan: Yeah, that's the real question. Yeah, we're going for three weeks in April, if you want to join. Yeah, you know, I didn't coined the phrase, it's really, you know, lifestyle investing. I mean, as the world is changing, you know, it's like, I want to be in the desert, like I told you, even before I bought it, like I was going down there, you know, golf trips with my friends that I told you about. And then, you know, I would vacation there two or three times a year. So it's like, why not get the best of both worlds? Right.   And so not only this property, but I'm thinking more and more about vacation rental for my portfolio, because I also like going to the mountains. And I also like the beach, I'm originally from the Midwest, I do have long term rental properties in the Midwest, but why not just have a vacation rental in the Midwest as well.   So point being, it's like I go to these places every year as it is, is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too. And so from a utilization standpoint, the property in the desert, I mean, I want somebody else paying me rent, right? And so I don't go there when I know somebody else, oh, well book it, but there are times during the year where it's like, I'm just going to enjoy it.   So I probably spend in total a month in the desert. But again, that's during that those off times I told you, you know, maybe 60% occupancy so I just utilize the 40% of my advantage and like if pencils like so I basically don't pay for my vacation time in the desert and then like I said, I'm going to try to replicate this model in the mountains in the beach and what have you there's never enough SFR in your portfolio but like I want to diversify a little bit and like I think I understand vacation rental enough now from like, we're mentioning dislike all the hidden costs and the nuance of it and startup costs and some of these associated expenses. I can do it also.   Michael: So you're not lying awake at night in your vacation on being like Dang, what if I had gotten the last minute booking? I could be baking cement right now!   Bryan: No what normally happens, I lay out stay awake at night saying Dang, I should have bought Bitcoin at a buck.   Tom: Oh Man.   Michael: Another problem entirely.   Bryan: Yeah, you can have the vacation rental. I just wish you know, I should have taken my salary in Bitcoin.   Michael: Tom, you were gonna say something?   Tom: Just Yeah, I got distracted with Bitcoin. I totally lost.   I think you kind of answered this. So you're thinking you're probably your next investment continue along the lines of vacation rentals?   Bryan: Well, I was telling Michael before the show, I'm actually in contract now for on a long term rental in the Atlanta area, and I'm doing another real estate investment with a friend of mine. So I've got those two things going. But right after that, I think it's I'll buy one or two more vacation rooms.   Tom: Jump back in the beach or the pool.   Bryan: I tell you, Tom, I mean, I know you're a new father, right? It's like you're not going to Europe anytime soon. So you might as well get that place in the mountains or on the beach, you know, within a two to three hour drive.   Tom: Totally subsidize your vacation trip. That's love it.   Bryan: There you go.   Michael: Tom, you were talking about that. Up North right up in outside of Tahoe and we chatted about that.   Tom: I know but like home renovations kind of kick getting, slowing me down a little bit, but uh, yeah, not too not too distant future.   Michael: Right on, Bryan. Last question, I promise and then we'll let you out of here. How are short term rentals taxed? We understand you're not a tax professional or a CPA, but is there any difference versus long term rental, like short term capital gains or long term capital gains?   Bryan: I've talked to my accountant and it's basically it shows up on my schedule e on my taxes, you know, on my real estate owned and it's just like any other rental, it's like, here's the revenue here are the expenses here's the you know, the mortgage interest I paid and we'll write off what we can and you know, wish for the best.   Michael: Right on and are you finding that the depreciation on the purchase covers most of the income? Are you are you ended up paying any kind of tax?   Bryan: Yes, it does. But, you know, to each their own, my tax situation might be different than the next guy. But yes, to answer your question in general.   Michael: Right on, have you ever looked to do a cost segregation study?   Bryan: No. You know, if I ever get to that point, then I will have arrived.   Michael: Yeah, it's a promised land.   Michael: Awesome.   Tom: Awesome, Bryan. Well, thank you so much for coming on and letting us pick your brain on your vacation rentals and lifted up the rug a little bit on your portfolio, super enjoyable and educational.   Michael: We'll have to have you back on after that other property closes on the east coast.   Bryan: Anytime, guys. It's really a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks, Brian. Take care man.   Tom: Thanks again to Brian for jumping on the episode. And as always, if you liked the episode, please subscribe please like us. All that good stuff, give us a rating. And if you're interested in the coaching aspect, Brian is actually one of the coaches at Roofstock Academy so it's Vacation Rentals is something that you're interested. Check out Roofstock Academy. It is the all in one program on demand lectures, one on one coaching, group coaching all of that good stuff, so check out roofstockacademy.com happy investing

So…COVID isn't going anywhere (at least not for now.) BUT, with the vaccine making its rounds, many have had questions about how we'll handle events for this year.Good news! I have all the answers! Well, not all of them, but at least the ones I can answer regarding how I and Motor City HDJ will handle events moving forward.Tune in for my answers to your questions about wedding venues, guest lists, travel, healthy, safety, and how it all fits together in this (hopefully) vaccinated worldThis episode is sponsored by E2iDesign. Find them on their website or on social media @e2idesign. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob WieremaThe Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/Connect with Brian FergusonBrian Ferguson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-ferguson-arena-labs/Arena Labs WebsiteBrian Ferguson: You're at a level one trauma center in Washington, DC. We're in there on a Saturday night at one o'clock in the morning. This is typically when, because of people being out of bars et cetera, you get a lot of trauma. And one time there were two people in there screaming and another person moaning. Just hearing that as I was standing there, I thought ‘it's insane what this does to the human emotion and cortisol levels.' And what's crazy is if you were to observe that and you think about this whole body of knowledge that's come out of the military in the last 15, 20 years about post-traumatic stress and about the implications of people who are in very high stressed emotional environments, either combat or otherwise, we've put a massive amount of resources into helping those people. And yet we ask these trauma nurses and ICU nurses and physicians to go home and have dinner with their families. And no one thinks twice about it because they're not deployed. So, we think about this as the environment is different. You might not be deploying overseas to Afghanistan or Iraq, but you are doing consequential, heavily emotional work that has a chronic element of stress. And when you look at the implications of chronic stress on human beings, that leads to higher levels of cortisol over time, not being able to focus, not being able to sleep. There's a second and third order, long-term impact that has. Michael Moore: Today on The Climb we are joined by Brian Ferguson, founder and CEO of Arena Labs.I'm excited about this one. I don't know Brian as well as some of our other guests, but we were introduced towards the end of last year, both being Gen Next members and got a chance to get on the phone with them for about an hour. And I don't know, 30 seconds in, I thought, dang, dang, dang. We got to get this guy on the podcast. What an interesting background. He'll talk more about Arena Labs, but I think it's an interesting time to have him on because of the passion of what Arena Labs does, and the work that it's doing for our frontline [00:02:00] workers right now, which is so important.Brian, welcome to The Climb. We're excited to have you. Brian Ferguson: Thanks fellas. I appreciate it. Bob Wierema: I can't believe he agreed to come on after talking with you for the only 30 minutes. I mean, that was some, you must have a lot of faith, right?Brian Ferguson: Yeah. We actually need it. Well, I certainly do, but we should also give a shout out to our friend Janeel Alonzo and Michael Davidson. Michael's one of your previous guests and is one of my dear friends and been a huge part of my life. And then Janeel who works with Michael is who I think set this up. So super grateful to her.Michael Moore: Yeah, Bob as they say down in Texas, ‘even the sun shines on a dog's ass every once in a while', I was on that day. My bullshit was flowing, and we had a great conversation.Brian Ferguson: Michael sound cooler in a Texas accent, by the way. If I said it, it wouldn't sound as cool. Michael Moore: We try. So, Brian, before we jump in, I got a little taste of this, but just give us the background. I mean, who is Brian? What shaped you? How have you gotten to where you are today?Brian Ferguson: This is a random way to answer that question. But I have over the course of probably the last 20 years tried to refine an annual process where I just review the last year, think about the year ahead. And then I come back to what I call my life plan, which is really just my best efforts to aggregate everything I've learned in my life in the past and where I want to go in the future. The front of that document – I don't let myself go beyond one page – but the title of that first page is ‘who am I?' And it's my best effort to get outside of a resume or  the way that we often introduce ourselves in these kinds of conversations to remind myself of who I am, but it's interesting, I'm coming to you guys from Cleveland, Ohio. before we started recording, we were talking a bit about that, but I grew up in the Midwest, which I think at this chapter of life, because I'm [00:04:00] back here, I spent the last 20 years away from the Midwest living in Cleveland, Ohio where I think a lot of the things I value in life come out of having been raised in this blue collar community outside of Cleveland, Ohio. And I was super fortunate. I had this amazing upbringing and community;  my family and I grew up with the town that I grew up in.When we moved there, there was just starting to be this push into the suburbs of Cleveland where we were, but I had this idyllic youth. Our house was right on woods and my brother and I grew up in the woods outside all the time. And then, my mom was a nurse, my dad worked in the energy business, and I just had this amazing youth in the sense of the neighbors, the community, my friends, and I was a product of a public school system. That was extraordinary. I think my mom being a nurse, I never appreciated how much that ideal of service was seeded in me from a young age and my brother and I both were always drawn to service in ways that just were natural to me. But now in retrospect, I think are more prominent.And then, beyond growing up in that town, I went to college in Ohio and then I'm pretty fortunate to bounce around. I lived in Washington DC for a while. And the first part of my life was in public service, mainly in national security. So, defense and intelligence diplomacy – that realm.And that was right after 9/11. So, I was an intern actually. I had a really crazy sequence of events. I ended up as an intern in the white house right after 9/11. And that was an insane way to see the world through the lens of ‘how do we think about the future of America after a consequential event like that?' And I stayed in that realm for quite a bit, lived in London for grad school. And then later in life, I went into the military and spent seven years in the military. And that was all part of what I consider that chapter in the national security public service arena, and in the course of that I just increasingly had this desire to build something. [00:06:00] When I do any type of psychometric or character test, I tend to register high on creativity, autonomy, and I was really ready to leave the public service life and go build. And that led me to my current chapter, which is Arena Labs. But I think in all of that, the really important elements in my life, like any of us, the things that matter: I've got a daughter who's two years old now, so I'm experiencing life through her eyes, which is beyond rich, and Lindsey, my wife – we've actually known each other since sixth grade. That's a whole another story, but that's a super powerful subtext for me of being connected back to where I came from. It just feels super grateful. I think increasingly the mission we have in healthcare of helping frontline workers to understand how to navigate stress and pressure and prevent burnout is one that has been elevated in ways we couldn't have imagined.So, it's a fun time to be building. Bob Wierema: That was a good start. You got a lot of questions for us to go down, but I got to start with my knock a little bit, just because you're in Cleveland and the last time I was there, the Cubs won the world series. That's my only knowing in Cleveland. Brian Ferguson: And I think Clevelanders have a weird respect for that just given the drought the Cubs were in at the time. Clevelanders appreciate the suffering that comes with being a perennial fan of a team that never wins. Yeah, the Indians, the 97-world series. You guys remember? I don't know if you remember the loss to the Florida Marlins was soul crushing.And so, the losing of the Cubs was a tough one, but I feel like the city respects Chicago in that way. I'll say the other weird thing. Cleveland sorta has a chip on its shoulder I think for a number of reasons, people talking about the river catching on fire in the seventies, but the Browns are in the playoffs for the first time, since 2002. So, you're 18-years-old as a Cleveland Browns fan and this is the first time the Browns have been in the playoffs and a big part of that is because we have an extraordinary young head coach in Kevin Stefanski who we found out yesterday has COVID [00:08:00] and can't coach in the playoff games.Oh man.I have vivid memories of my dad. A lot of people in Cleveland, the only disposable income they have goes to Browns tickets – t's very much a football town. My dad had season tickets growing up, but some of the losses in the late eighties deer in his binder fumble like vivid memories of just emotional trauma.Michael Moore: You know, Bob, with this being our 15th episode, one of the things we talked about is that there would be a neat culmination of all this as we get up on a year and a podcast alumni group. I think we need to get Brian and Bret Kaufman hooked up together. A lot of similarities and overlap there for sure.So, Brian, to Bob's point, you gave us so many rabbit holes to go down, first and foremost that maybe it was shaped by your mom and her background as a nurse with that service mindset. Was it the events around 9/11 and your time in DC and seeing it through that lens that led you to the Navy? Talk to us about that.Brian Ferguson: You guys may have gone through this, you're going through it, or you will, but I  suspect that all of us have this natural arc of our own evolution where we then are more curious about where we came from, and there's the people who get into genealogy and family heritage. Maybe it's because my daughter's now two and I want to be able to explain to her more.I also had loss in my family. My father passed this spring, and he was the last of my family. And so, there's this legacy element of really wanting to know that legacy or the longer story there. And so, as a result, I've been digging in on this. And I think to your question, Michael, part of it was my mom, for sure, and seeing her in the service mindset, but my brother and I were very fortunate. Our [00:10:00] grandfather, we were very close to my dad's dad, and he served in World War II as a Naval officer on the USS Dayton. And then my mom's dad, we never met, he passed before I was born, but this is crazy. I just found this out.So, I always knew growing up that he had been a fighter pilot. He had flown the P 51 Mustang. But what I didn't know is that he actually was this very rare mission set, which was long range reconnaissance. So, he would fly from Iwo Jima and escort bombers to mainland Japan. And these were eight-hour missions at sometimes negative 60 degrees in the cockpits. These guys that have three layers of long underwear on, they couldn't move when they got back because their bodies were cramping so badly. So, my grandfather had this insane, really rare mission set. And so that whole story was part of the lore of our family.But it wasn't talked about in detail. It was just that my grandpa flew planes in World War II, and then three of my uncles, my mom's brothers – my mom was one of nine – three of my uncles were in Vietnam. And two of them were, one in particular was in very heavy combat in [inaudible]. And so again, that was just a big part of the story, we were close to our families, our cousins.So, I think all of that in the aggregate was what led me there. It's funny, I was just in the spirit of going through a lot of my dad's belongings. I found a bunch of newspapers that I had saved as a kid. And I saved a whole series from, if you guys remember, the coast of a war in 1998. And I remember at high school, I think I was a senior just being fascinated by statecraft and geopolitics and decisions of consequence like this war happening in what seemed to me to be a part of the world and understand. So, all of that stuff led me to college where I was very fortunate to have some professors who kind of stoked that flame a little bit.And so, by the time I got to that internship at the white house, I was just mesmerized [00:12:00] by the complexity and magnitude of decisions that had to be made for a nation or a set of nations and that kind of environment. And then I think to maybe finish that thought, if I'm being honest, I was drawn into service. My brother went into the army and my brother had a very illustrious career in the army. And I had looked at West Point when I was in high school. And I had the foresight to recognize that military academy was not for me, but because I saw what was happening in 9/11 and then I worked in the white house and the Pentagon in that era, I had always thought that was going to [inaudible] my desire to serve, but I always felt like I was in an air conditioned building, safe while my peers and my brother were out actually deployed. And there's a powerful story about a stranger who said to me, “Brian, if that's something you want to do until you go do it, you'll be inherently dissatisfied with the rest of your life.”I would say the best advice I've gotten in my life has been from strangers and that notion of being inherently dissatisfied because I didn't get to where the nation's cloth was something I knew I couldn't live with. So, I was 28 when I was about as late as you can be to join. Bob Wierema: So was that what made that turning point to make you go join? Was it that conversation with that stranger, as you mentioned? Brian Ferguson: It was a big part of it. I had the short version intern in the white house that turned into my first job which was incredibly fortunate, but I just didn't care for politics in that intense sense. And I was really lucky to go over to the Pentagon where there's still politics, but at the end of the day, the thing I love about national security in the military is that there really is a higher order of good that people attempt to pursue, whether you agree with it or not, it's more pragmatic. And I really enjoyed that environment. And so, a lot of those people I worked around at that time became either people who were mentors for me, that I looked up to and took their advice. I think if I'm being honest, I didn't have the courage to let go of that career and take the risk of going into the military. And so that [00:14:00] stranger just being totally clear with me and telling me what I needed to hear was probably the final straw where I was coming out of grad school, I was looking at going into investment banking, and I realized that anything I go do, I'm going to continue to come back to this desire. So, yeah, that was probably the final straw. Michael Moore: So then from that moment, Brian, into being in the Navy, with your brother being in the army, how did you go about making that decision or did the Navy find you? Brian Ferguson: I actually, I was incredibly fortunate because I was working in the Pentagon, so I had access to just about all the information, advice, and resources you'd want. I was very close to joining the Marine Corps. At that point in my life, I'd seen enough where I knew I wanted to be able to deploy in – the term is used as combat arms. So, you can go into the military and maybe go work in space or in intelligence, I wanted to be able to deploy potentially in a combat environment. And so, the Marine Corps was the fastest way to do that. The Marine Corps played a massive role in the conflict over the last 20 years. And at the time you can go in very quickly that the Marine Corps is very good at getting people in quickly.The army, on the other hand, part of what I wanted to do in the military, in the army, it would have taken me a lot longer to get there. And then frankly, I've always been drawn to the . My hometown is on Lake Erie and I just loved the maritime element. And because I'd been in the Pentagon, I saw the strategic thinking of senior Navy leaders.A friend of mine always talks anecdotally about this. If  you're a commander of a ship in the Navy, you're out at sea in this little piece of real estate you're responsible for that has real strategic capability globally. So, you have to learn to think strategically. And I just saw that in Naval leaders and so culturally, I was drawn to the Navy and then the part of the military I wanted to go into, I loved the idea of doing that in a maritime environment. And so, it was,  probably a three-year Odyssey of getting there. I looked at the air force. I was kind of all over the map, but really close to joining the Marine Corps.And then [00:16:00] got lucky and got into the Navy. Michael Moore: And so, if you're willing to share, seven years is a long time. Can you tell us about some of the defining moments in the Navy and things that you were a part of and witnessed? Brian Ferguson: Yeah. It's interesting because it's funny for me to hear you say that Michael, because seven years in the context of the military is often short.You get guys and gals who will do 30 years, and that's not uncommon and some of my good friends now that I work with or people who did 25 or 30, but it was definitely, I would say unequivocally, it was the most consequential and formative period of my life. Of everything, from character to understanding myself and potential.I think I was really fortunate to serve in the special operations community. And if you think about that moment in time, post seven(?), the role that community played in the conflicts overseas in Afghanistan, Iraq, I sort of walked into this culture where I was literally standing on the shoulders of giants because that reputation that special operations has benefited from, all of these guys who preceded me had built.And so, I came in in 2008, 2009, and that reputation has really been solidified and there was this amazing community. So, I always felt really humbled and privileged. It is without a doubt in terms of character, in terms of the type of people you're proud to be around, I will never be in a richer environment that way and wanting to be better pushing oneself. But I think if you go into the military any capacity, but I found particularly the training environment I was in, I would say the first part of that is being in training. You learn that if you believe in something bigger for the right reasons, you can transcend what you're capable of, and most of us don't realize that in our lives.And so, when you're exposed to that in a raw way, when someone forces you to see, my friend uses the term, ‘what's at the bottom of your own well', it's the most powerful, liberating part of the human experience [00:18:00] that a lot of people don't push, and you don't have to do it in the military. You can do it in a whole bunch of other realms, but that for me – another friend and teammate of mine always says that when you go through that type of training, you're a completely different person and the same person all at once. And it's so true because from a character and a personality perspective, you're the same, but you've suddenly seen what you're capable of in the world. And it's hard to live any differently once you've been exposed to that.  And then from a deployment perspective, I had two deployments and both of them were relatively, I would say, low key compared to what most people know, or a lot of my buddies experienced in special operations. And the time that I came in and ended up deploying 2012, 2014, things were really calming down at that point. We were no longer in Iraq. And so, it was an interesting time where this community that had been so postured for very intense operational tempo was moving back into an almost non-war posture. But any person I meet who's thinking about the military, if that's on your mind, there's just nothing like it in terms of experiences, skillsets, and just the things you're exposed to.Bob Wierema: I was going to ask for some of our listeners, when you made that transition, and obviously it was a big decision for you to go and do that, there's folks out there thinking about doing it. How would you, if you look back, how would you educate or guide them on making that decision of, do you go or do you not go?Brian Ferguson: It's interesting because these things, if I think about myself, I don't make decisions. I wouldn't say I was a person who knew this idea of making decision from the heart. I'm probably overly analytical, tend to over intellectualize things. That one for me, because it was something I felt in my gut for so long, it was just being honest with myself. And there's this simple question of, ‘if I didn't do this, what would that mean?' And I had seen enough people who didn't [00:20:00] do it, that I knew I couldn't live the life I wanted to, without at least committing. And interestingly there's a book called The Alchemist by a guy named Paulo Coelho.I just read that at that moment in time. And it was one of those books that spoke to me, almost. I keep a running list of my favorite quotes and I've got like three or four long passages from that book that are so profound because it almost sounds cliche and trite, but in life, it comes down to follow your heart. I mean, stay true to a value system and a North star and it's not about just being a hedonist and doing what you want, but one of my favorite authors Ayn Rand too – wrote the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged – one of her quotes is, “why is it that we tell people it's bad to do what we want because there really is nothing harder, truly harder than doing what we truly want in life?”It's not the thing that is just the easy, today I feel like going out and drinking rather than fulfilling some responsibility, but like the deeper, what is my life meaning? Can I go pursue that? It's actually really hard. And so, The Alchemist for me opened up that if you don't at least pursue this journey, your heart is always going to wonder. And that was powerful for me. Bob Wierema: It's so funny because I think it goes within anything you do, right? The comfortable or easy decision would have been for you to stay and do what you were doing. Right. I think a lot of people don't follow their heart because it's more comfortable not to, it's easier not to. And I think  you made the comment earlier on, if you believe in something bigger, you can transcend what you think you're capable of, and to have that type of mindset – that's just incredible to get that because I think we miss out on a lot of opportunity in our lives if we're not thinking big, if we're not trying to push to that next level. I always say to my fiancé, I don't want to live a life of mediocrity. I can't have that. [00:22:00] That's not going to give me the fulfillment I'm looking for in life.Michael Moore: I was just going to say to that point, because I completely agree. Back to this advice that you were given by this stranger that literally changed the path of the life you were on,  growing up were told not to talk to strangers, but I think at a certain point you gained so much raw truth.I'm the guy that is going to talk to you on the airplane. You find when you don't know somebody, the advice that you get is raw and true because they have no preconceived notions of who you are or what you would want the answer to be because they know you really well. So, thank you for that insight.I think this can help us transition to the business side, the point you made on seven years not being long in the military. You're exactly right. I think being in the business world like Bob and I are, seven years – especially for the generation below us – is a lifetime in any type of industry. So, you have a lot of different jobs in seven years to ultimately get you to where you want to be. And so, before we jump into Arena Labs, if you guys are good transitioning, there were a lot of steps after the military to get you to Arena Labs in this passion mission that you're on.Can you dive into that for us?Brian Ferguson: Absolutely. I want to just quickly put a period, Bob, on your talking earlier of the notion of how do we make those hard decisions? And one of the things I've learned is that like anything, that's a muscle to be exercised, the ability to lean into something uncomfortable. I'm amazed even now. It's something I have to really be aware of when I'm resisting something, or I know something's the right move. And I think living authentically, I really believe it's the hardest thing to do in the world. To be honest with yourself and your [00:24:00] relationships. But it's a muscle to be exercised.I think it's something we think about intentionally with raising our daughter now, but in society, when you get comfortable and in particular from perception perspective, if things are good, it's really hard to leave that from an ego aspect. So, there's a whole separate discussion there, but it's been on my mind a lot lately.Michael, to your question, so when I left the military, one of the things I was really privileged with was I worked with this leader who was an extraordinary leader in special operations. And I was in Hawaii in a unit that focused mainly underwater and when you decide to leave, you tend to have a 12-month glide slope where you're no longer operational and guys who've been in for 30 years really need to use that time to figure out how am I going to acclimate to the world and the other side of this?And that's called military transition. There's an entire, fortunately, body and ecosystem of organizations that have sprung up in the last 15 years to support people who are leaving and their families. But because I had been a civilian before and had a life and came in later, I knew roughly I was going to go out and I wanted to work in the human performance, human potential space.So I used that last year to focus on building an innovation cell that was looking at how we bring emerging technology into special operations, and how do we do that particularly to amplify human performance? And in the course of that, I was in touch with a whole bunch of unlikely partners. Some of them in the private sector, some in national laboratories, DARPA. But being from Cleveland, Ohio, I was back in home in Cleveland, just visiting for the holidays. And I was put in touch with the heart surgeon, and the Cleveland Clinic heart and vascular institute has been ranked number one in the world for 26 years in a row now, when it comes to heart care. Doing anything at number one in the world for 26 years is doing something right. And even growing up in Cleveland, when the city was struggling, that was sort of the shining star. So, I reached out to this heart surgeon and I sent him an email.I went on [00:26:00] the list of 15 heart surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic. And I just got lucky. I reached out to this guy named Doug and he invited me in and so I said, “hey, here's the stuff I'm working on. I would love to know what you guys think. Interestingly, heart surgery is very similar to special operations. You have a group of eight to 12 people working in a life and death, high pressure, time constrained environment. And there's a lot of technology and that team has to come together around the mission and technology”, and I wanted to see how they were thinking about it. So, I reached out to Doug. He has me in for breakfast. We have a really fascinating conversation about teams and culture and technology. He brings me into his operating room. I watched him do a couple of heart surgeries. And on one hand I would say I was blown away by the technological advancement of the number one institution in the world in heart care. But on the other hand, I was astounded that there was no conversation at the individual or the team level about pressure, stress, burnout. How do you perform and communicate in a crisis when things go wrong? What do you do? All of these things that you could be in any part of the military, they're almost 101 and that are also very prominent and prevalent in sport and the creative arts, they just were missing.And so that really was this epiphany moment for me. There's a great opportunity here, and this is a really cool area that needs help. And that was the seed that began a sequence of events, Michael, that eventually led to founding Arena Labs. Michael Moore: So, what's it like going in cold and seeing a heart surgery like that?Brian Ferguson: I think different people have different reactions. I'm always very humble about my own background. I've never been to medical school. I'll never have to go to nursing school. I always find being in the operating room humbling number one, to just see the advancement of human beings – we can put someone to sleep for eight hours and open up their chest and do surgery on their heart or their brain or their leg. It's just, that's fascinating. Again, you realize how advanced we are as a society. And then I personally, I find heart surgery to be almost a divine [00:28:00] experience, to see the human heart beating or up close and to see someone operating on it and saving a life. It's just a very sacred thing.So, it's never lost on me whenever I have the privilege of being in the operating room. It's really powerful. Bob Wierema: Do you still go in the operating room then today?Brian Ferguson: So the way that we built the company is around that whole concept I just told you about, which was, “hey, there's this Delta that exists, what if we were to bring the tools, training, and technology that other high pressure disciplines use – whether that's from the military, from sport or the creative arts – what if we brought that body of knowledge into healthcare?”That became the basis of our company, and we call that high performance medicine. The first part of the business was a services business, where we brought people who had those backgrounds, and we would embed them alongside medical teams in the operating room. And so, we would watch surgery and then we'd interview people.And of course, we're not looking at the technical side of surgery, like, “how well are you performing here?” We're looking at what happens before, when things go wrong, what does that culture look like? What happens afterward? What are the rituals, the protocols, the team dynamics? And we would aggregate that into a set of observations that then we would use to help hospitals build what we called surgical performance programs.And so, if you're running a hospital, generally right now one of the biggest issues you're dealing with is burnout. So, people who are stressed, who are overworked, who don't understand how to navigate this really difficult career. And you're also trying to figure out – you've probably mastered the technical skill if you're a place like the Cleveland Clinic – but no one's really thought about human factors and how do you help people actually lead teams and serve on teams that are high pressure? And so surgical performance programs bring all of that knowledge and help hospitals implement it. Bob Wierema: I guess I've never thought about it like that. You're talking and my head's going, “yeah, that team has to be such a high functioning [00:30:00] team working together. There can't be  nuances between team members or someone pulling the team down because if there's a little slip up – here in my world, right? The slip up here, it's not life-changing. Yours, in that world, could be. There's a ton of pressure that comes with that.Brian Ferguson: And what's interesting, Bob is that the world I came out of, and special operations as an example, usually at a minimum you're with the same team for two years. And in that two-year 24 months cycle, roughly 18 months are spent training together, understanding. And so, when you're on night vision, there you go, you can tell someone just by their silhouette, how they walk, you get to know people in a very intimate way. What's amazing about medicine, even at a place like the Cleveland Clinic, is it's not uncommon for a surgeon to get in the room and never have met someone on his team for that day. So there's a whole separate challenge, and that's that isn't changing in medicine anytime soon. And so, the question becomes, if you're going to serve on any team, how do you control for culture so that when people show up, they may have never worked together, but they're all on the same page about what's the standard of performance? How do we cultivate trust quickly?How do we get people to understand back to this idea of transcending what you're capable of? This is why it's so important to believe in something bigger, because people then want to serve. They want to do their best to serve that mission, and a lot of times that's lost in healthcare and those are some of the things that we start to help hospitals think about.Michael Moore: You know, Brian, we talk leading up to this podcast when we're getting to know each other, and unfortunately, I have a little bit of experience in trauma centers in ICUs just with my mom and my wife's mom. And to your point, you've got situations and decisions that have to be made in a split second that either create longevity [00:32:00] or wind things up and then that, for whatever reason, always seems to happen in the middle of the night. And then you've got this super stressed out family that's just looking for answers and has been thrown into this and doesn't understand. So, the pressure on those frontline workers from the surgeon all the way down to the person just coming to buy and reading a chart is just a level of stress that most people don't understand. And so, give us some more insight into how Arena Labs works. What's the DNA and how does it deliver results? Brian Ferguson: You're keying in on  the things that we think are most important. One is if each year, Time magazine does a person of the year, you may have seen that, and last month they had the three finalists for the person of the year, one of which was frontline medical workers. And the proposed cover of that magazine was this amazing set of images of all of these frontline staff. You guys have seen I'm sure some of these pictures – because they're wearing personal protective equipment for so long, it's literally imprinting these marks on their face and they just look exhausted. It's just powerful imagery. And so, you think about that in the context of dealing with COVID and all of the emotional challenges you've heard about, of people having to say goodbye on Zoom and a nurse holding up a phone in the room. It's super intense stuff. And you think about, as you're bringing up Michael, the ICU or trauma, and when our team was observing, we were at a level one trauma center in Washington, DC, but we were in there on a Saturday night at one o'clock in the morning. And this is typically when you have, because of people being out of bars, et cetera, you get a lot of trauma. And at one time there were two people in there screaming and another person moaning. And just hearing that, as I was standing there, I thought ‘it's insane what this does to the human emotion and cortisol levels'. And what's crazy is if you were to observe that and you think about this whole body of knowledge that's come out of the [00:34:00] military in the last 15, 20 years about post-traumatic stress and about the implications of people who are in very high stressed, emotional environments, either combat or otherwise, we've put a massive amount of resources into helping those people. And yet we ask these trauma nurses and ICU nurses and physicians to go home and have dinner with their families. And no one thinks twice about it because they're not deployed. So, we think about this as the environment is different. You might not be deploying overseas to Afghanistan or Iraq, but you are doing consequential heavily emotional work that has a chronic element of stress.And when you look at the implications of chronic stress on human beings, that leads to higher levels of cortisol over time, not being able to focus, not being able to sleep. There's a second and third order, long-term impact that has, so to answer your question, what do we do? When we initially were building the business, the first three years were what I just described as we were running a services business. We were embedding in hospitals and we are helping those hospitals build not only a program around performance in these human factors. Things like, it's one thing to say that we want our operating rooms to run on time. It's another to think about what's the leadership structure in place here? How are we training the leaders who have to run those operating rooms so that they can make decisions and be clear and connect that into a culture? And so, it's implementing all of these elements that allow that human system to do what it does best and then focus on the individual, giving that individual tools around, what does it mean to get good sleep? What does it mean to recover after a stressful day? How do I decompress on the weekend? What we were finding is that as you guys well know, in the services businesses, it's really important for human touch, but it's not scalable and it can be daunting. And I don't think starting with scale is ever the right approach for a startup. But what we started to realize is we weren't reaching enough people and in the dynamic nature of healthcare, it's tough to get in front of people in the right way. So COVID completely killed our business in March, our services business literally evaporated [00:36:00] because we could no longer go into hospitals alongside frontline medical teams. Most hospitals still, if you're not essential personnel, you can't go in.And so that was a blessing for us because classically, we had to say, “okay, we know there's a demand signal for what we're doing here. And actually, it's heightened because of COVID”. And we took three-and-a-half years of learning and we created a content and a data business. So, what we've built is a platform that takes all of the learnings and teachings of our team and our performance ambassadors and it's now built into a series of three pillars. A pillar around the individual, learning about how to be a high performer in healthcare, how to manage sleep and stress, how to optimize interactions with your teammates. And then there's a second pillar on how do you serve on a team that's high pressure in a life and death environment? And the third then is how do I lead and manage in that environment? And so that's all offered digitally, but while you're on our platform, we have a partnership with a company called Whoop, and so you have a wearable sensor that's gathering biometric data on your sleep, on your stress, in your recovery.And so, the things we're teaching you, you're actually getting personalized feedback on that topic. And you're starting to learn how to not only understand yourself in terms of these critical biomarkers, but what that means in the context of recovering and flourishing over the course of a career. And then we take all of that data and most importantly, we now give that to hospital leaders and surgical leaders so that they can for the first time actually see what their team looks like in terms of stress and recovery and be smarter about how they allocate human capital train and let people recover. Bob Wierema: Brian, I want to go back to the Whoop piece. Because I was thinking, are they wearing that throughout the day? And then you're actually taking  not only monitoring sleep and things like that, but also how they are in a surgery or a certain environment within the hospital?Brian Ferguson: Exactly. So, any of these devices is on 24/7. One of the things that we know, we [00:38:00] want to understand acute events, meaning if something really goes wrong in surgery and it's super stressful, the reality is that those events, particularly for veterans of medicine, are not as common as you'd think. If you or I go into the operating room, it feels stressful, but that's become fairly normal, they have acclimatized to that.What we're trying to understand is the chronic implications of being in a high stress environment over time. And so, it's equally important to understand what does the weekend look like? One of the things we learned early on is if you have a really stressful week, your weekend isn't relaxed. There's a residual effect of that stress on your weekend. And that bleeds into interactions with your family. Interestingly, when I was in the special operations community, we were going through this massive Renaissance that was the same thing, because what we realized was that guys were deploying at very high operational tempos on reverse circadian rhythms.So, they were operating at night, awake during the day. They weren't getting enough sleep. They were in high stress environments. So, their cortisol levels were spiked. And with all of that, then they'd come home and try to reintegrate into this family environment. And it was creating this real challenge. And so, a whole sequence of events happens from the stuff we're doing around educating things like sleep, how to optimize your actual sleep hygiene and your environment you sleep in,  all the way down to how does your family understand this so that your family is aware of the realities of your job and how best to maximize recovery time. That over the course of a decade then led to this very sophisticated organization. So, what we're looking to do in healthcare is that same phenomena.Let's start with the basics of getting people educated and increasingly give them tools so they can be smarter and feel more empowered and more agency. Michael Moore: Brian, with the crossroad and defining moment that occurred when COVID hit and business as normal did not exist because you couldn't go in there and you pivot, it hadn't been a lot of times since that happened, right? That was March. [00:40:00] But in that time, what KPIs and ROIs, what has come out of that now that you're implementing it in a different way? What are you seeing?Brian Ferguson: Number one - I think even this gets into Bob's point earlier – the things about we get comfortable and we know something isn't working, we need to change. If I'm being honest, we have built a reasonably comfortable business. It was a services business, but number one, I was increasingly unhappy because I was on a plane all the time, I was in hospitals. And more importantly, I was like, “we're not getting the data we need here. What I'm realizing is that on one hand, people leaders in healthcare are saying their number one issue is burnout, and yet the only way burnout is measured is self-reported surveys. So that's super problematic. We don't actually have data to understand what does burnout mean? How do we recognize it early?” So, the first set of KPIs, Michael, is we for the first time actually have data at scale on teams and medicine. You could go to most hospitals in the United States right now and ask them, “what is the overall state of health? How rested is your team?” They would have no idea, but if you go to the Cleveland Brown, you go to an NFL team, you go to a Cirque de Soleil, there are elite performing artists. This is stuff that's seen as essential. If you want those people to last and flourish and be around, and it's not a big investment, it's just saying this is a priority. So, for us, what happened is for the first time we started getting data on heart rate and what's someone's HRV? HRV ends up being this amazing predictor of how stressed someone is. Just from feedback and qualitative surveys we're for the first time starting to get data around how does a critical event, how is that perceived across the team? And then how does that correlate to the biomarkers in that team? Did they not sleep as well? So, we're starting to get a data picture that we can use to correlate this massive [00:42:00] endemic problem in healthcare which is burnout, and give hospitals a proactive posture, rather than just saying, “this is a huge problem. What do we do?” Bob Wierema: Brian, when you say that, so I'm going through this a little bit right now. And I'm in just the business world, right? I'm in sales and one of the things I've been spending a lot of my time on lately. So, my fiancé's a professional ballerina – going back to your sports analogy – I was talking to her and she obviously has to be in phenomenal shape and do all these certain things and COVID put a damper on that. So, what can she do to stay in shape so that when things do come back, she can be at optical for performance. And then we were talking one night, and I said, "if I think of myself as an athlete, my business, what are the things that I can focus on? All I have is my mind, and then what can I drive most in my mind to keep me good? There's the stresses of business and all of these different things. How do we exercise? What's my heart rate? What's my sleep? All these things you're talking about. And I've already noticed as I'm learning this and trying new things, the little upticks in performance, or how sharp I feel that day from those little things. And it's amazing when you tell me that about a medical community, someone that we rely on to save our lives and they're not spending all that time in that area, because there's probably so many other places they can put their resources towards. And to me it seems like from talking to you that you should be spending a lot more time there to get optimal. You said amplify human performance, that's exactly where we should be spending our time with those people right?Brian Ferguson: Yeah. Michael Moore: Is that stigmatism around because medicine and trying to help – people have been born and died since the beginning of humankind. So, and you've had medical people along the way trying to figure that out. Is it because it's occurred for so long? And the expectation is that [00:44:00] especially if you're a trauma surgeon, it's going to be stressful that this key ingredient was just missing.Brian Ferguson: Yeah. I actually – see personally I've thought about this lot. I think the phenomenon is just for three reasons. But before I get into that, let me say it's really important that I foot stomp this – we are not in any way advocating that choosing a life, whether that's on the front lines of medicine or in the military, those jobs are not for everyone. Resilience and the willingness to do hard things – that's a precursor to make sure that someone can perform when it counts. So, we are never suggesting that these organizations should soften in a way that  takes care of everyone. It doesn't account for the fact that this was just a stressful career and that's part of the society. People have to do hard things. However, when I look at the state of the landscape of medicine, there's really, again, there's three avenues that I find interesting around what culture has happened.So, one is just in the modern world. Technology has advanced in a way that allows hospitals to do more with less. So, it's like the same amount of people were asking you to do more operations, just like we see in businesses, right? People are being asked to do more because technology is an amplifier, but just like we see in business, there's a toll that takes on a human system.And so, when we start to intersect human systems with advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and big data and predictive algorithms like that, that has an impact. The second is that culturally people – it's very similar to how it is on special operations. So, in the seal community, you go through something called hell week and hell week is a week period where it's the crucible.It's sort of the defining moment in early seal training. And you are awake from Sunday evening until Friday morning. So, for five days, you're awake. You take two naps in there and those naps are critical just for the brain to essentially stay functional. But otherwise, you spend five days in a state of motion and physical activity.The purpose of that is, [00:46:00] as I said on the front end, is to show you what's at the bottom of the well. What you're actually capable of beyond what you think you're capable of. And it is an incredibly liberating experience for people who get through it. The problem then is people are falsely tricked into thinking they don't need sleep, when the reality is that sleep is the single most important performance drug we all have access to. So, then the community has to think, you have to get people to realize if you truly want to pursue mastery and be a special operator at the top of your game, taking care of yourself is paramount and you're responsible for that. And here's the tools to do it. Now that doesn't suggest that sometimes you might actually be deployed and you're not going to have the ability to sleep eight hours a night, you're gonna get two hours. And so how do you maximize that? That same cultural challenge exists in medicine. They just never addressed it. Never addressed it. I kid around that people revere hell week as this crazy crucible and it certainly is, but people who are surgical residents in medicine, these people sleep three to four hours a night for six years at a time. It's madness how hard being a surgical resident is, and what's expected of you, and how under rested you are.So, they come out of that thinking, “I don't need to sleep, sleep is for the weak. If I sleep, I'm not going to be good”. And so culturally it becomes commonplace in medicine that not taking care of yourself, not resting is seen as a sign of strength, and that has not been broken yet. It's starting to break a little more with a younger population, but the most important one, Michael, the third reason – you see this across medicine, I saw it in public service, people who are service minded, who want to give to the world, who want to do hard things and save lives, they will give of themselves and give of themselves to a fault. And they will sacrifice their own health in the process. If you don't have leaders who see that and know how to protect those people from their better angels, what it leads to is a massive human toll of people being burned [00:48:00] out. We see this in the military, you look at what was asked of young soldiers, men and women over the last two decades who were willing to give of themselves. And this is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about leadership, because if you don't think about these things, you don't think about the implications of asking people to go to war or go to the front lines of an ICU day in and day out, what you see is a human toll that you can't reverse. Michael Moore: Brian I want to ask a summary question just because you've seen it from so many angles. You've seen it from the military side. Your time in DC now, your time as a CEO and founder of a company that truly is making a difference. We thank you for that. As you look back on this last year with all the politics that we've endured, with the hit of COVID, with the beginnings of the rollout of a vaccine, from your vantage point, how do you feel about it? Score that for us. Brian Ferguson: I go in and out of this one, Michael, because I – on a personal level – I feel incredibly fortunate that number one, we've been able to navigate this and for the most part are not suffering in the way that I know a lot of people are. when you're asked a question like that, it's hard not to recognize that and just say, from a humble human perspective, whatever one thinks of this scenario, a lot of people have died, a lot of people are suffering economically. Our nation is really in a state of pain right now. When I move myself into a higher level of thinking, or I shouldn't say that – I'll zoom out. The thing that I see in all these sectors is, and I saw this in the military, there's a real tension. If you think about the organizations, the [00:50:00] institutions that govern our lives, that we rely on, that we learn in – education, the military, medicine, they're legacy structures of the 19th and 20th century, and they're not equipped for the 21st century. And that tension is only accelerating.And so, what we see is the reason I personally think that having worked in government and in politics and in the military, those organizations have a beautiful legacy that we're all proud of, but they don't work in the 21st century. They can't move fast enough. You see it in election cycles, you see it in defense deployments. One day we're worried about viruses in a lab in China. The next day, we're worried about a threat from the cyber realm in Russia, and the speed of the change, our institutions can't keep up. And so, in a weird way, I've always felt like everything going on in the world is symptomatic of that creative destruction that needs to happen.I am an optimist in that I think we are as a human society, in a collective society, are going to have to evolve into new structures. I would be lying if I figured out what those are, but I'm not someone who's a post-nationalist who believes in this sort of global environment, nation states are still going to need to exist. I just don't know what the structures are that are gonna allow us to flourish? But I think right now we're seeing a breakdown that is a natural product of Moore's law (?), technological advancement, and all of the complexity that creates. And the last thing I'll say is the beauty in all of it is that it's forcing us to return to the very human side of ourselves. I could sound almost cliché, but think about what the last 10 months has done for all of us. It's pushed us into a state of appreciating the human experience in the most basic way. My Christmas this year was just my wife and daughter and I, and we had nowhere to go. No obligations, no rushing around. I didn't even care about presents. And there was this presence in that existence [00:52:00] that I think is beautiful and that's where the moment in time, that goes way back. I do think that that is the blessing in all of this. Bob Wierema: Brian, do you think that – because we've talked about the social media presence and some of this and do you think there's also the other side? I think there's also the other side of our society that's so caught up in the media and social media and this isolation, I think there's going to be so many challenges with that as well. You're looking at it from the optimist view. What do you think about that flip side of the view?Brian Ferguson: It's a great point. And I would agree. Actually, I was talking to a really impressive woman who's a young cardiac surgeon and having this discussion, and she was saying that we still don't really have data on what social media does to the brain and to the human experience, the longitudinal. There's that the movie you guys may have seen called The Social Dilemma, which talks a bit about the neuroscience of social media. I will tell you what I've said from day one is look, first and foremost I am not in government right now, and it's always easy. It's why my company is called Arena Labs and the namesake of our business comes from the Teddy Roosevelt quote that is commonly known as the ‘man in the arena' quote, but it comes from a speech he gave in 1910 called Citizenship and Republic. Roosevelt is talking to a group of leaders in France. And he's saying, “look, you are accomplished successful leaders, but you have an obligation to stay involved in society. Because it's not the critic who counts, but the man or woman in the arena marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great victories of success, the great failures of defeat”.And the idea is that in life, it's easy to be on the sidelines and be a critic, but it's about people doing hard shit that really advances the world. So, I say that as a precursor, I'm not having to make hard decisions right now, but from the start, my biggest gripe in all of this has been in what one could argue is the biggest domestic crisis we faced in our lifetime, [00:54:00] full of stress. We have asked people to stay inside and in doing so they're consuming news. They're getting more stressed. They're not active, they're drinking more. And we're seeing higher rates of depression, and the psychosomatic impact of asking people to sit inside for a year of their lives and not interact with human beings – I'm seeing that play out in close friends, family. I think we have undervalued the implications of that from the beginning of this. I recognize there's not an easy solution, but that has been my biggest concern from the start. Michael Moore: That's a great point. I guess probably just because it was leading up to the end of the year and people are reflecting, you just heard it over and over again. “I'm so glad 2020 is going to be in the rear-view mirror”. Unfortunately, this isn't just a 2020 problem. Bob and I have talked a lot on this podcast about 2020 being such a defining moment of the old economy and the new economy, and what is that really going to look like? So, I think we would really appreciate the opportunity maybe towards the end of 2021 to bring you back on and just get another rear-view mirror look from where you're seeing things and what your company and technology and the frontline workers are going through because it's not going away, but it's people like you that are passionate about it coming up with out of the box ideas that are certainly gonna get that back headed in the right direction.So, both of us really appreciate what you're doing. Brian Ferguson: Well, that means a lot. I will quote another person I looked up to when I was little, which is the great Arnold Schwartzenegger who when asked, said, he's a self-made man. He's like, I'm the furthest thing from being self-made. And I'll tell you, the reason I feel so fortunate, guys like Michael Davidson, these people who've been massively influential on my journey in our team right now at Arena. [00:56:00] The amount of people who are involved in this mission, I just feel super humbled. So, it's always awkward coming on a podcast representing myself, but definitely part of a way bigger mission, which I'm super grateful for.Michael Moore: Well, we like to ask a question and it kind of ties in with – we may have to ask you if we can borrow it, I love that visual of seeing what's at the bottom of your own well. So, the question really is going to be what's at the bottom of your well? But the way that we have asked it historically has been, there's that saying of, it's not what you know, it's who you know, and then we turn it around and say, it's not who you know, it's who knows you.So, using this podcast as a medium, whether it's future business for Arena Labs, whether it's your daughter and wife, what do you want people to know about Brian Ferguson? Brian Ferguson: I think at the end of the day, it's a very sincere life dedicated to being authentic around the things I believe in. And I work really hard for the person I am publicly to be the person I am privately.And I don't think that's always easy in today's world. It's often convenient to have two different archetypes. When I was young, a senior in high school, I got in trouble. I was on one hand a leader in my class and my community, and I got in trouble for this big party. And my mom was very wise about it. She's like, “right now you're two different people and at some point, you need to make a decision on who you want to be”. And three years later, when I was graduating college, my grandmother gave me a list of her favorite quotes. The top of which was “character is what you are in the dark”. And so, for me, I really want to live a life of virtue and be someone who contributes to society and serves and is a phenomenal mentor and role model for my daughter.That, I believe, starts with being the person I say I am as much publicly as I am privately. And so, for me that I always bucket [00:58:00] into authenticity, and I just want to be authentic in how I engage with my friends, people I work with, the ideas in the world, and that is actually really difficult because it requires a lot of work. It requires having to let go of a lot of things and make hard decisions. So it is humbly being authentic, or humbly pursuing authenticity. Michael Moore: I love that. It's all of it. It's career, it's family, it's what we're deciding. I lost my dad about a month ago, and 15 days after he passed away I got a letter in the mail that he had instructed his wife to send me.And it was just an amazing way of him communicating from the other side and saying I'm still going to be here. Because I was looking for that spiritually, before I was going to bed at night or tucking my daughters in and saying prayers, I was looking for “Dad, how are we going to communicate and continue? Because I've still got a lot to learn from you. And in that letter, he said, you are transitioning from being old in the young part of your life to being young in the old part of your life. I think that's what we're all going through right now is that we've done a lot of cool things. We've accomplished a lot or successful in life and love and business, but what are we going to do with that now? And so, your story today defines that. It's why Bob and I are so passionate about this podcast and just thank you for sharing. Bob Wierema: Yeah. Thank you, Brian. It's been awesome. I've learned a ton from you today, so I appreciate it.Brian Ferguson: Yeah. Again, it's humbling when guys like you ask me to come have a conversation, you're never quite sure what you might add, but I really appreciate it. Michael, I appreciate you sharing that story. Just as a closing thought here, when you deploy in the [01:00:00] military, you often you write a letter before you leave in the event you don't come back. But the idea of doing that proactively for one's kids and survive, I just love that. It's something, I just speak volumes about your own DNA and where you come from, but that it's going to take to talk to the back of my mind. And it's just such an awesome way to, to think about your own life and passing something on.No, I love that, man. I appreciate you sharing that. Michael Moore: Yeah. I mean, if the whole notion is, you know, put others before yourself, I mean, here he is battling ALS. He knows it's terminal. He knows he's got a certain amount of time and he's got the wherewithal to dictate a letter to me and my brother and my stepsister for that very purpose. It's just talking about defining moments. That's the kind of person I certainly want to be and the daughters I certainly want to raise. So again, thank you for your time and sharing. And this has been fantastic. Bob Wierema: We're going to have you back next year. Around the same time, we appreciate it. This was definitely a super enjoyable conversation.  Brian Ferguson: It was great to meet you. Michael Moore: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of The Climb. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider subscribing. And if you know someone who you would think would enjoy the podcast, feel free to share this with them. Thanks again, and we'll see you on the next episode. 

Everyday people around the world step on to a scale to see what they weigh, but is this really the most effective tool for measuring our health? Michael Fedewa and Mike Esco, lifelong health and fitness researchers, co-founders of MADE Health and Fitness, and Cade Prize finalists tell us why cutting edge technology on our smartphones may be the best tool for managing our health. By simply downloading an app and taking a photo we can gain an accurate assessment of our health, body fat % included, that is as accurate as what we could get from a high-tech lab. TRANSCRIPT: Speaker 1: 0:01 Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to radio Cade and podcast from the cave museum for creativity and invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Speaker 2: 0:39 Welcome to radio Cade . I’m your host, James de Virgilio. And here’s something for you to think about as you’re beginning to listen to this podcast, why are you measuring weight loss? Should you even measure weight loss when you got on the scale this morning, this week, last week, a month ago, is that number relevant? And is it telling you what you want to know about your health? My guests today, both co-founders of the made health and fitness app, Michael FITO and Mike ESCO, joining the program to tell us about maybe why we’re not reading our scale correctly, Michael and Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us. Thank you for having us . All right . So you told me pre-show that we’re going to call Michael FITA his last name, and then we’re going to call Mike ESCO to keep things simple for our listeners. So we have FITO and ESCO and de Virgilio three last names that are great for a podcast. Let’s start talking about this then right away, weight loss, something that obviously is very, very important, perhaps even more important in light of COVID now, but here we are teasing out the beginning saying maybe your scale, isn’t the primary thing you should be using to measure whether or not you are getting more or less healthy. That’s right. I’m curious. Tell me why. That’s the case. That’s the primary way in which people will evaluate progress on a weight loss program? I mean, after all, they want to lose weight, but the question becomes, where is that weight loss coming from? We have fat mass, which is the culprit of poor health. And then we have lean mass with muscle involved in that. And we’re just based in our progress on weight loss in general, there’s no way of really knowing how much fat mass was lost versus fat free mass or muscle mass as lost research shows that through most weight loss programs, there is muscle that is lost through that. And then the question becomes how much. So imagine we’re starting out and someone says to you, I’d like to lose some weight. I’m just going to eat less calories or exercise more. And we could spend hours discussing that in a podcast, but I want to lose more weight. Of course the response would be, well, you really are saying you want to lose fat and you want to maintain your muscle and what you are suggesting. And I think science is definitively telling us is that if I lose 10 pounds, what matters to me is where did those pounds come from, right? How much was fat and how much was muscle and the scale is not going to tell me that. Correct? Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You know, in our research we have pretty good evidence. We kind of use a three quarters rule. So if you a pound of weight, Speaker 3: 3:00 Most of that is coming off as fat mass. And it’s probably about 75%, about 25% ish somewhere around that is going to be fat free mass. And so some of that weight is going to be muscle, but that also depends on how early you are in your weight loss program in the earlier weeks, or whether you kind of progressed into the later months. It depends on if you’re a highly trained athlete or if you’re just kind of a general weekend warrior like ESCO and I are so that 75% rule that doesn’t always hold true. And so I think with our app, we’re trying to shift the focus away from how much weight can I lose and smaller and skinnier is always better. We would actually like to completely shift the focus and say, well , stop actually tracking weight loss. What if we just walked away from that and said like, how much muscle can I add or how much stronger it can we get you and , and actually focus on building stronger and healthier bodies rather than just trying to be smaller and thinner. Speaker 2: 3:51 And that works both ways. As you mentioned, if I want to gain 10 pounds and I say, I’d like to gain as much of that as muscle. And all I use is a scale. Again, I have no way to see how much is muscle and how much is fat. So this brings us to the point now where if you’re a listener and you’ve done anything like this, you’re aware of measuring body fat. You’re thinking, well, wait a minute, there’s calipers out there. If you’re near a university or you’ve been a high level athlete, you’ve probably sat in the egg, so to speak, potentially you’ve gone under water, right? All these different ways to manage your body fat. So why do we need something else? Speaker 3: 4:22 So the majority of those techniques, and there’s a lot of techniques out there, there are laboratory techniques that we have that we do research with. And those are very sophisticated and they’re very accurate. But the problem with those is they’re limited to laboratory settings and they’re costly. They require somebody that knows how to run that equipment, to perform the measures. And then there are field tools like skinfold calipers or the handheld or the specialized bioimpedance scales or whatnot. And those have a cost associated with it as well. And usually those are found in gym settings. They oftentimes can carry a range of air that’s pretty wide too. And a person that would want to have those measurements performed would need to go into a fitness facility or a clinical facility or a laboratory, and have someone else perform that measure the system that we have takes that away, puts the power, so to speak in the user’s hands, where they do not have to have a professional perform the measure, which is for a lot of people is pretty intimidating to have someone pinch their body part, right, or perform a measure where they’re required to know what their body weight is. And that’s been private and personal information for people. And that can pose as a barrier for them getting assessed and therefore getting going on an appropriate weight loss or exercise or lifestyle program. Speaker 2: 5:33 Here’s something that that’s obviously interesting if you’re an elite athlete or if you’re me and you happen to get to live in a university town and think that you were an elite athlete, even though you really weren’t, you found a way to get yourself into the bod pod as they called it right. Or the egg. And I had used calipers my whole life. I love nutrition. I love fitness. And I thought, here’s my body fat level. And I go in there and it was at least three percentage points higher than what I had ever measured. And it was really interesting because as you mentioned, they also told me all about how they have to fine tune that machine for really each athlete. Like every person is different. You can’t just fire it up for one person and fire it up for someone else. You get a different result. At the time they told the story of Tim Tebow, he’s a different calculation requirement. Then one of the cornerbacks is, and if you put the same calculations in there, you get wildly different and actually inaccurate results. So it’s a complicated thing. It’s really important. But when I saw what you did, first of all, it seems like a no brainer . It seems incredible. But how were you able to put something onto an app that can be accurate? It seems like if it’s so difficult to get the bod pod to work, which is this really expensive, complicated piece of machinery, how can my cell phone accurately tell me what my body fat percentages , Speaker 4: 6:41 That’s actually a good point. So when we start comparing across different methods, there’s a few percentage points different. When we go from skinfolds to underwater, weighing to the bod pod, to bioimpedance to DEXA. So we started cycling through, and if we’re trying to track changes, we want to make sure that the person is being measured with the same technique. Every time we can’t just use those interchangeably and assume that one measure taken on one machine is going to be the same as something we would get from a different method. So we started looking at that and some of the assumptions that you mentioned, people are all different. And so there’s changes in muscle mass that come naturally, as we age there’s changes in body fat, that happened because of the normal aging process there’s differences between men and women and muscle mass and fat mass there’s differences in bone density and the density of fat free mass. Maybe if we look at different racial and ethnic groups and children versus adolescents. And so these are all things that ASCO and I deal with almost on a daily basis, as part of our research is trying to figure out how to more accurately measure what someone has made of accounting for all these external factors. We work a lot with underwater weighing or with the egg, like the bod pod, like you mentioned. And we figured out that we can measure how big someone is based on the amount of space that they take up in a picture. So just like the underwater weighing tank is measuring fluid displacement or water displacement, and the bod pod is measuring air displacement. We figured out that we could actually measure somebody’s size or body volume with about 99.8% accuracy from a picture just by looking at how many pixels they displaced or how much space they take up in the image. And from there, we can take that volume measure and estimate density based on how heavy they are, and then convert that to fat, using some pretty standard lab techniques that we have. And then boom, we get numbers that are right in line with what we would get with the egg or with the bod pod or with underwater weighing or skin folds. And the data that it was all based off of at the sample that we had collected were adults 18 up into their eighties. We had a pretty good representation of men and women. We had different race and ethnic groups. And so we had data that we had collected that was pretty representative of the general population. We had a couple athletes in there. And so we knew that we were onto something and we’ve kind of refined the algorithm a few times to account for differences in age and sex and race and fitness level. And I think we actually have a product that we can use it in a research setting to get comparable values to what we get from our lab based techniques. But the benefit like you kind of already mentioned is that it’s portable and it does exist on a smartphone. And the measurements that we can get are so quick and so accurate that a coach could take this and they could scan their entire team one right after another boom, boom, boom, boom. And you could go through the entire basketball team or the entire football team in minutes where it would take hours, days or weeks to go through an entire series of data collection on a big athletics team like that. Speaker 2: 9:25 That’s obviously tremendously exciting. So it sounds to me like we obviously have proof of concept. Has there been any challenge in the industry to say, Hey, I don’t really think that’s going to work, or there’s an issue with their methodology or so far proof of concept is sound no challenges, no issues. Speaker 3: 9:42 We’re so new to this. I mean, our product has just been released and the feedback we received from the research community that we’re acquainted with and professional community had been positive. I’m sure that there are going to be some challenges along the way. But the good thing about the creators of this device are also the ones that are involved in the lab and doing research. And we’re going to work continuously to make our processes even more accurate. There are a few areas in which we’re planning to do the research in already and continue to advance our process. I wanted to mention too, that one of the reasons why some of those techniques that you mentioned have to be modified to count for a certain individual or different individuals is because body composition itself and what optimal body composition may be. That’s individualized as well. In other words, what’s optimal for me is not what’s optimal for everyone else. And sometimes it’s with a mentality of the drive for thinness. We get this stall that, well, everyone should be this certain body weight or this certain size or this certain look, that’s not necessarily the case. It’s individualized. And now we have this device that we’ve created will given the ability for people to measure and take the personal measures to where they better understand what their body composition is and they can make the right decisions. Speaker 4: 10:50 Actually, James, you mentioned something about the skepticism that we’ve gotten from the industry or from the potential users that we’re trying to hook up with. And I appreciate the skepticism. If somebody came and told me that you could measure how much muscle I had from a picture, I think that I would be pretty doubtful that that was actually possible to , and some of the people who doubted that it was even possible. I think it actually turned into some of our bigger advocates because we have the data and we’ve gone and talked to different gyms and different fitness centers on a couple of universities. And we’ve had people come in and go, yeah, man, I almost actually ignored your email when you contacted us about partnering and using the app or our fitness assessments, but then downloaded it. And sure enough, the number that came back with the app was just about where I thought I was. And it’s just about what we got from our bioimpedance device that we already have. And so, yeah, I believe that. And one of the things that we do too, we have our research conference abstracts that we send right along with our emails and we posted them all on social media. So people can have the data. We’ve got our research articles out there to Apple, believe it or not to give them kind of a shout out for the app store when we submitted everything to the app store so that it could go live and people could start downloading it. They actually flagged us. And they said, you can’t do that from a phone man , get outta here. And so they actually required us to submit all of our research data and publications and everything that we had supporting it, which they expected us to come back and be really upset with that . It was dragging out the approval process. But on our end, I appreciate that because that means that somebody can’t come in behind us and say like, no, we have an app that can do that from a picture, too guys, check this out and not have any research or data to back it up. So we actually appreciated that skepticism and we appreciate the hesitation to jump two feet into using the app too . Cause we’d be doubtful. Also Speaker 3: 12:33 The biggest critics that we’ve had have been ourselves when we first started this, we were blown away at the simplicity of it. And we had to continue to analyze the data over and over again, to verify what we were seeing because we’ve been doing this sort of stuff and validating different body composition techniques for years and to have come to this has been remarkable and we were blown away. Speaker 4: 12:52 Good that I made a mistake. Actually, when we were analyzing the data, I sent him a screenshot and I said, Hey man, this correlation is really hot, but I don’t think that I did this right. This can’t actually be true. Speaker 2: 13:03 Right. And in correlation obviously indicating that the relationship is close, this is moving in tandem. And then that’s an important finding your data’s there. The app is here before we dive into the app because I wanted to set the context for how exciting this is. And if you’re a listener who loves nutrition, you’re probably already really excited in . You’re thinking I’m going to download the app right now. And if you’re new to it, we’re going to talk about why this is really exciting. Even if you haven’t ever thought about your body that way. But first, why don’t you both give us a quick background of what you did before this, because you’re coming at this from a scientific angle. This isn’t like you left your profession as a pilot to discover a body fat eater. Tell us about your backgrounds. Speaker 3: 13:38 My personal background is I’ve been doing research in body composition and really addressing the question of how we accurately predict or measure the different parameters of physical fitness. So body composition is one over then. We also have aerobic and muscular fitness and flexibility and all the things that really make what comprises a fit person. So I’ve spent the majority of that and body composition, where we validated different techniques for different people, from athletes to clinical populations to really bring them what we do in the lab and put it in the hands of practitioners and consumers. Most of that is involved. Other techniques like skinfold or circumference measures or different prediction equations with body mass index and have a certain level of accuracy to them. But this has been the most accurate, actually that I’ve come across. Speaker 4: 14:23 When I was in high school, I was about 300 pounds and lost a good chunk of that weight through diet and exercise. And the struggle that I had through high school and through college through undergrad was weight loss, wasn’t linear. And so there were plateaus and there were setbacks. And if I knew what I knew now, back then, I would have been much more successful in the way it would have come off much more quickly. And I think for a long time, the research that I wanted to get into was what are the health risks cause of obesity and having higher body. And then how do we use exercise and a healthy eating strategy to help lose that weight? And so before I got to Alabama, that was a , where a lot of my research was, was the health risks associated with having higher body fat. And then how do we help lower that risk with exercise and then ESCO. And I teamed up about five years ago with our research and really started figuring out how do we measure these changes more accurately? Because the barriers that we kept running into, like he mentioned, where we have this research study, we have one unit on campus. Like we have one decks and machine that we have access to, or we have one underwater weighing tank. And so the logistics of having one machine that’s shared space that all of the researchers are using that every participant would have to go through it . Then we have to schedule a time out. It’s a tremendous time burden. It’s a transportation burden. It’s a cost burden like for our DEXA machine, there’s a radiation safety concern that presents another barrier. And so we were like, there has to be a way to work around this. And so we jokingly agreed a few years ago that we were going to try to move the entire exercise fizz lab into a phone. And so this is kind of our first step. And we had tried to validate other methods and had done research, comparing the accuracy on other techniques. And like you mentioned, this is the one that we feel the most confident about. And we have the strongest data to support. You can move from the lab out into the field without sacrificing too much accuracy. And you can do it compared to DEXA for about 50 to $80,000 cheaper. So that’s a win too. Speaker 2: 16:15 So that brings us to where we are now. Right? You have a long background in this you’re experts in the fields. You’ve discovered something, you’ve proved a concept. You have the research to back it up. And I think we approached this podcast, or at least I wanted to this way to overcome the natural skepticism that is there. But in reality, as you guys both mentioned, I think if you’re starting something new, you really would rather have a lot of skepticism because that means you are truly innovating something brand new, because it’s almost unbelievable. So with that, let’s talk about how this actually works. So if I go download this app on my phone, which I think right now it’s only available on the iPhone. Is that correct Speaker 4: 16:50 Platforms? You can get it on Apple and Android. Speaker 2: 16:52 That’s good because I have an Android and I was going to say, don’t , don’t leave me Nicole . Speaker 4: 16:57 Again , we’re optimized for tablets too, so you can get it on an iPad. Speaker 2: 17:00 I love it. So I go and I download this and you can look right now, I’m looking on my phone. I see it on the app store right now. And it’s right there. I see my Android and I see it on the internet, on the Apple app store. And it’s called me with a blue logo, made health and fitness. And now what happens? I download it. Let’s walk me through it. What do I need to do? How does it work? What’s going on? Yes. Speaker 4: 17:17 We download the app with the download. You get a free scan to try it out right now. So you get to go in and actually test to see if these numbers look like what you’re expecting to. Cause we debated. Did we just have people like trust us and download this and pay for it and then decide to go? Or should we give them the proof like watch this actually does what we’re claiming it does. So download the app is free trial. You can get a scan, check it out to track your data. Long-term , there’s an upgrade for that. So it is a paid app. When you go in, you set up your user profile, we ask you to enter your age and your sex and your race, your height and weight. And then we have just a couple of basic fitness questions that we have you answer also. So how many days a week do you typically exercise? And then how many push-ups can you do to be kind of a crude marker of muscular fitness? Now , from there, your profile set up that all the program actually takes as a single image taken from the front view. So if you turn your camera to selfie mode and take a total body selfie from head to toe , we have an automated image analysis program that scans your image, filters out the backgrounds and identifies all the landmarks that we need on the body. And once we’ve identified those landmarks and kind of pinpointed them, it takes about 20 seconds for us to actually calculate body fat percentage. And then because you’ve told us your weight, when you set up your user profile and we can back calculate and figure out how much of your percent body weight is fat mass in , in raw pounds and then fat free mass in raw pounds. And the cool thing about the app too, is that we can also tell where most of that fat you can have it where you’re storing it. So we can tell whether it’s being stored kind of around your midsection. So in the Android region, like belly fat, we can also tell the users if it’s being stored kind of around their hips and thighs. So kind of gyno weight in the lower body, Speaker 2: 18:56 Which is just remarkable, like hearing you describe this, you’re thinking that’s incredibly right now, my process is I go grab my caliper. I do a couple of skinfold measurements. I look at the table, I find my age. I get a range that works right every week you do that. And it certainly works enough. It’s a benchmark as you’re mentioning, but with this, I can take one photo. I presume each week I could take one photo and I can watch my progress. So let’s just take a hypothetical male and say that male weighs 200 pounds and they’re 15% body fat. So they weigh 170 is lean muscle mass and 30 pounds is fat and they want to lose some weight. Obviously, if they’re going to lose weight and maintain their muscle, they’re going to see that their body fat number drop as they lose the weight, but their fat free muscle mass, as you’re mentioning, stay roughly the same. And that is now worth full circle. That’s the benefit of not just looking at the scale is if they go from 200 to one 90, but they’ve maintained most of their muscle mass they’ve actually changed their overall body composition. And they’re watching it in real time with an app that is going to track their progress. It becomes a record keeper. Speaker 4: 19:55 Absolutely. The cool thing about the app too, when you’re taking those pictures to track changes over time, the device doesn’t store the app, doesn’t store the images. So when we’re analyzing those images, the app doesn’t see them like a person never actually sees the picture that you take. So it’s not stored. And we did that for privacy reasons. We didn’t want images getting out or to be a hack or something happened to where everybody’s personal health information. And in these images of people are floating around the internet. So we decided to just completely walk away from that. And so we take the image, it goes up to the cloud, it’s analyzed. And then the only place that had ever exists is on your phone. And so if you don’t have it stored to your camera roll, it goes away completely, which we did again, very, very kind of strategically and changes over time. We’ve been have been really cool to look at. Obviously we just finished Thanksgiving and we’re kind of going into the holiday season and we were tracking changes in our body, composition the holidays in our group message. Cause I think you have Thanksgiving and everybody goes, Oh my gosh, I gained like seven pounds this week. This is crazy. And you take a scan and you realize that 95% of that is waterway . And so it’s not that big of a deal because the app is sensitive enough to capture those changes to where the scale may have increased. And so you are heavier, but most of that is being tracked as fat free mass. Cause you haven’t gotten any bigger in a week to where they would cause significant changes in body fat. So that is one of the cool things about the app is that we’re sensitive enough to detect those really small changes. And we can pinpoint which part of you is changing fat mass or fat free mass with really good accuracy, Speaker 2: 21:24 Which again is just remarkable. As you just mentioned, right? For anyone who’s been in the fitness world, maybe you tried to lose some weight you’ve done. So for a while you start eating again, you get some surplus calories and you see the scale shoot up four pounds and you’re thinking what is going on, right? And of course, that’s that water weight that you’re mentioning, but this alleviates the fluctuation of the scale. A lot of people step on the scale every day and it moves a lot and they overreact or under-react. And what you just said in reality is often the most important takeaway that number is not that important. What’s important is what’s happening with my fat free muscle mass, what’s happening with my lean weight, et cetera. And I think this is really exciting for someone like myself who loves nutrition, because this does have the opportunity to really change everyone. Like you mentioned, if you’re an elite athlete here at university of Florida, what happened during COVID? The players were not on campus. They weren’t near the coaches. They were having to work out on their own. The nutritionist had no idea what was happening with their progress. They had no way to measure it. Same thing at the university you’re at. So this is such an interesting application because you can think of this applying to everyone, whether you’re 75 or you’re 18, or you’re again, a lead athlete, we can warrior all across the spectrum, knowing what your lean body mass is, is such an important thing. But for a long time, it seems like really only maybe the bodybuilding community or the elite athletes or those would ever view their body that way. Speaker 4: 22:39 That’s absolutely correct. A person doesn’t have to wait months down the line to get a DEXA scan or an underwater weighing measure or any other more invasive body composition techniques. They can take it right onto their phone and do it routinely and make decisions earlier on to make some changes. If they see increases in fat mass decreases in fat free mass, when they’re running the opposite, they can detect those changes much earlier. Yeah, I think COVID has really brought a lot to the forefront. Like a lot of the limitations and things that we were doing in the industry in athletics and in the fitness industry, it really brought them forefront. And I think we’ve done a good job of pivoting hard, right? So COVID hit last spring, everyone got sent home, all the athletes were released and we were like, okay, well how are we going to keep them training? And like on their plans, working out the way they’re supposed to, how do we track progress? So teams were sending wearable devices to track workouts. They were videotaping workouts, but the one thing they couldn’t capture was actual changes in muscle mass and fat mass. And so now we have that, you could send the athlete home in the off season and put them through a workout program and have them do weekly check-ins with the app. And you can measure at least to make sure that they’re maintaining muscle mass and not seeing big shifts in fat master in the off season and from the fitness industry. From that perspective, I think this has really opened up a lot of opportunity for online coaching. So we have a number of people that we’re working with that do personal training or do group fitness classes, they’re zooming or streaming them for their members, but they don’t have access to their facilities. So they can’t come in in person to do check-ins or fitness assessments. They don’t have those same luxuries that we used to. So they’re teaching online, they’re doing personal training online, and now they can track online also because with the app, a person can take a picture from their home that you can be working with a client and they can take a picture at home on their own device and then share the results directly with their trainers. So we can export that via text message or through email, and you can send your results to your trainer every time you step on the scale, you can snap another image and send them a real time , updated live body composition number. And you can do that weekly. You can do a biweekly , you can check in as often as you want to. So now we’ve eliminated that barrier and we’ve also eliminated the barrier of time when people eventually do go back to the gyms and when they do get back in person, we don’t need to spend an entire session now meeting with somebody for a fitness assessment and to spend 45 minutes getting ready for an underwater weighing we’re going through all of our skinfold tests. You can have somebody scan at home and send the results before they get in for their fitness assessment and then be ready to talk about the results when they get there. And so I think this has really opened up a lot of opportunities for us. Speaker 2: 25:11 Yeah. Again, it’s one of those things and , and I’ve done obviously a lot of podcasts here at the Cade with people doing amazing things. And this one is maybe one of the most immediately useful and societal changing right now. I think you have less than a couple hundred downloads. You just released the app. But if you look at other fitness apps, they have tens of millions of downloads. And obviously again, I think yours has the potential to go beyond that. So if you’re looking to get on the ground floor of something as , Hey, I was in on this app early, maybe this is the one to download and try it out. Let’s ask the tough question then here at the end. So the investor side of me always wants to know, look, this sounds so good. This seems so useful. It actually lines up with something I do in my own life. Everything about it seems too good to be true. What are some potential hurdles that would prevent this from working three or four years from now, we look back and say, you know, this just didn’t work. What are those hurdles? Or are there none Speaker 3: 25:58 When we’re doing the research on it to come up with the algorithms and then research going forward, we’re really good at controlling how the picture was taken, the lighting, the clothing, but now the app is in the user’s hands. So it’s up to them to make sure that that everything in the image is appropriate, where we see an accuracies or where our process doesn’t work is if the body is not in the right position or if the lighting is inappropriate or if they’re wearing baggy clothes or if there’s too much noise in the background. So it’s very important that the user follows the instructions that are on the app. And once all those assumptions are met, then our accuracy is as good as, or better than any of the other techniques that are on the market and much simpler. Yeah . Speaker 4: 26:35 And ASCO. And I were very careful when we were planning like what we want the app to be and what we want the company to be. And so we had really hard meetings about, we saw our growth kind of strategically and where we wanted to be in five years. And I think we’ve heard this phrase, like stay in your own lane. We don’t want to be in a position where we’re delivering fitness advice or exercise prescriptions or programming within the app. We envision this as being just a measurement tool. And so we want this to be the go-to first option for body composition now, but then every other test that you can do in the lab, aerobic fitness, or muscular strength or endurance or power, whatever you want to measure in the lab, we want this to be also a part of the app. So we have plans to expand to the research side of things and develop additional features, but we don’t want to try to edge out personal trainers or the group fitness staff, or we don’t want to try to edge out and try to be the next Fitbit. We actually want to partner with the next Fitbit. And we don’t want to edge out and try to muscle in on my fitness pal. Right? Cause those are probably the two giants right now. We’ve got a few 30 million and 20 million active users on those two platforms. We don’t want to try to edge those folks out. We want to have people use this in addition to them. So if you have a fitness program or you have an app that’s already tracking your workouts, or if you have something that’s established and it’s working, we want to be the go-to for measuring your progress in every aspect. And so I think where this goes wrong is if we get away from that and start trying to be things that we’re not our research is in validating this device for tracking changes, but not causing the changes through the exercise or through the diet or through whatever workout program you’re on. It’s a great point. We want to show that what a person may be following that exercise or diet program that it’s actually working and doing what they want it to do. We’ve talked to, we teach our students this in class. We say, look, your prescription has to be individualized. Like you can’t train everyone the exact same way. You wouldn’t put everybody on the exact same deal planet . Everyone is different. And so we wouldn’t assume that we could just box up a workout program within the app and give it to everybody and expect to get the same results. And so we really believe since we’re teaching our students that , and since we believe that medicine and your exercise program should be individualized, keep working with the experts that are giving you the individualized program, like keep working with your strength and conditioning coaches. Absolutely. And keep going out and working with registered dieticians and personal trainers. Absolutely just use us to track the changes. And I think that’s the one piece that all of these other programs and these other apps are missing is that they’re great at the programming piece, but we want to be the ones that are tracking the changes. Speaker 2: 29:08 And that’s what makes it is so important in life. Pretty much, no matter what you’re doing, you have to have an accurate way to evaluate your progress. And that’s what you’re talking about. And in fact, I love in a world of free ideas and free exchange that if you’re really good at what you do, you’re going to have proof behind that. And now if you’re a strength trainer, you can tell the prospective client, let me show you how good I am at having my clients gain muscle over time and then change their body. And their body composition here is the data, right? And pulls out a sheet and it’s tracked everything. That’s happened with a thousand people that they’ve used on this app. Here’s their body composition changes in the first six months. I work with them. Speaker 3: 29:45 How many trainers take before? And after pictures, now we can quantify what the picture is showing. Yeah. Speaker 2: 29:49 And you can see it. You can show it to a person that’s so long. It takes here’s what the experience is. Here’s someone in your similar range and that’s obviously very powerful and that’s accurate. As you’re saying accurate data is what allows us to get better, be more precise, do things more efficiently, really exciting stuff, right? Let’s end the show with something that we always do here at decayed . And of course you were a Cade finalist for the Cade prize this year. And it’s important for you guys to pass on some words of wisdom. So I imagine once upon a time, neither of you probably dreamt of being an entrepreneur per se, but yet you both find yourself now in that boat, give us some tips for those who maybe don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs or those who are going through it right now. What are some words of wisdom? Speaker 4: 30:27 I got one actually right here. So looking back over the past five or six years, the best things that have happened to me and for this project and for the business are the breaks that didn’t end up panning out. Every roadblock that we ran into. So we try to recruit PhD students. They decide to go somewhere else. We apply for grant funding. We don’t end up getting it. It goes to someone else, right? So if one of those breaks would have happened over the past five or six years. So I do get the student that decided to go to another school, or I did get a grant that took my research in a different direction. The app wouldn’t be here, right? Because I’d be working on something else. Like my research agenda when I first started in Alabama was different than it is now. And so now five or six years later, and we have a startup , we haven’t had we’re on a podcast, like look at how different this is , ended up based on where we started. And when you keep running into these roadblocks and people keep telling you no, and you keep getting rejected and rejected and rejected, those could end up being the biggest breaks that you will ever get is thank you for telling me know so that I will end up being where I’m supposed to be. I mean, man, if you think about that, I’m getting goosebumps right now. But I mean, that is really like the best piece of advice. If you keep getting rejected, that is probably a good thing. Because if you believe in what you’re doing, like the next opportunity is right there. Speaker 3: 31:44 That’s a great point. And along those lines, just go, just move, just keep going forward and keep pushing forward. When we started this, we had no idea. And we were professors we’re in a lab, we’re in a classroom. We’ve had a little bit of practical experience, but not near as much as academics. We were reluctant to even get started. But we went forward and the barriers that we thought were there were not even there in the first place. We had tremendous support. I mean, support came out all over from our Dean and our administrators at the university of Alabama partners showed up and we surround ourselves with a great team and we’re continuing to build our team and learn along the way and just trust the process and everything will work out. It gets stressful, but we grow through stress and we just keep pushing through, keep moving our Dean. Speaker 4: 32:26 You use the phrase when we pitched this to our Dean, he said, man, that sounds crazy. It sounds great. You guys do your thing, whatever you need from us just goes , zoom, zoom. So we started laughing. We were like, who says that in a meeting? But he’s like, yeah, you guys just go zoom, zoom and let me know. Or I can. And so we went at zoom, zoom, and everybody, we kept turning around and saying like, Hey, we have this idea and they go, man, nobody’s done that before. So I don’t even know where we can help you out, but go for it. And so I think that energy is contagious. And so we went zoom, zoom, and that’s our running joke now is keep going forward. And that energy is like, people will see that. And they’ll be like, man, I want to be a part of what those guys are doing over there. Even though we have no idea what we’re doing, because nobody, nobody certainly that we know has been where we are. And we’ve never even imagined that we would be here either. So yeah, it goes, zoom, zoom, man, everybody will catch on and they’ll want to help point to bring up quickly. We’re passionate about this. This is our life. This is what we spend our time doing. This is what we enjoy doing. And that passion that’s what drives our energy. And that’s what really makes us want to continue to go to, and we know that we have a bright product and we know we have a great vision for the future. And those things are very important. Speaker 2: 33:32 Yeah. Great idea. And the execution of it is often the intersection of thousands of life experiences and learning points before it, that culminate into where you are. And then you have to have the optimistic view of the future to overcome setbacks, hurdles, things that seem bad and turn them into things that can work out to your good. And both of you have definitely echoed that. Well, my guest today, Michael fetal and Mike ESCO, the co-founders of made health and fitness app that tracks of course, body fat, amongst many other things. This could potentially be the next big thing. And you heard it here first on Radio Cade. Thanks for joining us both today. It was a great discussion for Radio Cade. James Di Virgilio Speaker 1: 34:13 Radio Cade is produced by the Cate museum for creativity and invention located in Gainesville, Florida. This podcast episodes host was James Di Virgilio and Ellie, Tom coordinates, inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at hardwood , soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

Hey U guys whats up! Happy New Year to everyone. I do hope ur holiday was awesome under the circumstances. I decided to combine two segments in one so there is commentary from January 3rd and January 6th combined. What's new? So Covid has two new super strains

Five times more US children are food insecure now than before the COVID-19 pandemic. This podcast is part of a series focused on the far-reaching impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the food system. Today we're looking at how responses to the pandemic have affected food availability and nutrition for one of America's most vulnerable populations – young children. Joining me is Eleni Towns, the Associate Director of the No Kid Hungry Campaign at Share Our Strength. Interview Summary Eleni, before we dive into questions about COVID-19 and children, could you help our listeners understand better the work of the No Kid Hungry Campaign overall? Sure. The No Kid Hungry Campaign is a campaign of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit. And we're working to ensure that kids in the country have the food they need. We do a lot of work through access to the federal nutrition programs because we know there's significant barriers between families and the programs that can help them. And we work to make sure they have access to the support they need so that they can have the nutrition and the health that they deserve. We believe that hunger is a solvable problem in America. So that's our guiding principle and mission of the campaign. So COVID-19 is not just a health crisis, but it's really ripped a hole in the American economy. So what impacts that had on children? Unfortunately, childhood hunger was a problem long before this crisis, but we've seen that exacerbated the need and also made it far more visible. You know, last year our country saw the lowest food insecurity rate since before the Great Recession. And then the pandemic hit and really undid a decade's worth of progress in child food insecurity. And the scale of that change is astronomical. Previous numbers from a few months ago showed that as many as 14 million children in the U.S. are missing meals and not getting enough to eat. That's five times higher than the numbers reported this time last year. So numbers are continuing to come in, but we know that this is still a crisis today. We also know that this is a problem that won't easily go away on its own. As communities open and then close back again, as industries face the long-standing impacts of this economic crisis, we're seeing millions of lost jobs and lower wages. We have families that are facing both poverty and hunger for the first time and having to navigate the federal nutrition programs and support systems. And then we're also seeing those families that were already facing poverty and food insecurity fall into greater hardship and even farther behind.   Five times the rates of food insecurity - and that's just taken place in less than a year - is really a pretty striking number. So of course with the economy in such tough shape and given the numbers that you just talked about, many families are having a very tough time affording food, and of course food banks are there to help, but are there other programs that can be helpful as well? Yes, even in this crisis, we still believe childhood hunger is a solvable problem, and that's because we can leverage this federal safety net and support system to help families and kids get the nutrition that they need. We think of the federal response more of a sort of network of supports that can meet different needs of a family depending on their dynamic, and can really ensure that no kid, no individual, slips through the cracks. I think of two programs I'd love to mention because they're so critical in this response is SNAP and P-EBT. They both are great examples of how the programs work together effectively. As you may know, SNAP is the Nutritional Assistance Program and it provides families with the grocery benefit they can use to purchase food for themselves or their families. Pandemic EBT was developed in response to this crisis to provide a benefit to replace some of the meals children would have received from school, like their breakfast or lunch program if they were in school. So the programs work together to provide families that blended support that is needed. School meals is another critical resource for families during this crisis. These programs work together to support households depending on their makeup and the needs that they've been facing during this hard times. And does it go without saying that additional support for these programs is very important? Yes, it's really critical. The need isn't going away. As we get further along in this crisis, food insecurity rates are not decreasing and in some places only increasing, and to the scale that I said before really requires a federal response. So we have been advocating for additional benefits for the SNAP program. We advocated successfully for the continuation of the Pandemic EBT program. And so really thrilled to see that extension through the end of this school year. If you could say there's one thing that you wish more people knew about the issue of hunger in the U.S. what would that be? I wish especially that our political leaders and local decision makers understood that food insecurity is more than a single instance of feeling hunger, right? We've all felt hunger in our lives. We know that sensation, it's not an enjoyable one. And we know some of those impacts it can have on our day to day. But food insecurity is a much more lasting and harmful situation. And research really backs that up, especially among kids. Those that face insecurity can have long-term impact. Kid has trouble learning, paying attention in school. Insecurity and worry about where your next meal can come from can have emotional and traumatic instances for a kid about their feelings of safety and security. And we know from our health experts, that food insecurity is associated with poor health outcomes that exists not only in childhood, but beyond. Food insecurity is an immediate problem, but it's one that if we don't solve can have long lasting impacts. Let's speak a moment about school meals. You know, it's such an important resource for kids in need, but with so many schools now going to virtual or hybrid schedules, how are kids getting these meals? School meals are incredibly important. They always have been. It's been a key piece of our work here at the No Kid Hungry Campaign, and with the increased need and the uncertainty that the school year has brought, we think it's more important than ever. It's been a real challenge, and I think the school districts and the new school nutrition departments that have been running these programs in new ways since school's closed in March, are the unsung heroes of this pandemic. They have done phenomenal work working through a health and an economic crisis to meet families with the meals that they need. And they face a lot of challenges this fall as school has returned. We know that school meals are important for kids to learn, and so that's important whether they're in the building or if they're learning remotely. And so many school districts have these hybrid or these complicated models of some kids being in school at different hours, different days, some being at home. And so that's really required school districts to come up with innovative solutions, which often requires more staff time, different technology, transportation systems. School districts are offering grab and go meals for families to drive by and pick up. They are developing really robust transportation systems using their busing to work in reverse and send to meals from the school out to communities for families. So much of school meal programming is focused around a cafeteria, which in many schools does not align with social distancing needs. School nutrition departments have had to get really creative and thoughtful about how do you take meals outside of the cafeteria? How do you serve meals in the classroom? How do you make sure you have the labor and the food safety concerns in mind when you bring meals outside of the cafeteria and deliver into the classroom? So a lot of changing dynamics, a lot of additional barriers and challenges for them, but they're doing phenomenal work to reach those kids. Are there other things that No Kid Hungry is doing to make sure that kids are fed? Yes, I think the school meals, as I mentioned, is a key piece of the response. Also charitable support is critical. Since March, we have granted to over 1,200 organizations to help with their response. We distributed 32 million in funding that went to schools, to food banks, to other community-based organizations. And we're actually going to be providing an additional 29 million before the end of the school year. And really the granting system is to help schools or community organizations buy the equipment that they need, the safety resources, the transportation, whatever is needed to really make sure they keep their staff and the communities they are aiming to serve healthy and meeting them where they're at. But in addition to funds, we're working across the whole spectrum of the federal response. So how can we both advocate for federal programs and the changes that might be needed during this time, as well as provide technical assistance to providers so that they can do everything in their power in this changing dynamic to support their communities. So we engage elected officials about what they can do to support families facing food insecurity, raising awareness among the public about the problem and the need to take action, getting information and resources out to families so they know where they can get the support that they need. It's a critical problem, it's all hands on deck. All the work is going on with policies and practices at the federal and local levels is really very impressive. Let me ask about next steps. So what do you think are the best next steps that the nation can take to better safeguard children against hunger and malnutrition? For all of us, I think there's a piece about raising awareness. We often don't think of hunger as an issue in America because we have such plenty here, but in terms of the federal response, what we've been really working towards and support moving forward is making sure we have robust programs. So I've mentioned the SNAP program is a really critical response, but we believe more benefits are needed for families during this time. So in urging Congress to take action, to support an additional stimulus bill so that families have the benefits and resources they need, as well as other key programs, the WIC program, we talked about school meals, really making sure that these systems are able to expand in a moment of crisis, which we are in, is critical. Bio: Eleni Towns is an Associate Director of the No Kid Hungry Campaign at Share Our Strength. The campaign was launched in 2010 and aims to end child hunger by increasing participation in federal nutrition programs. In this capacity, Eleni manages a portfolio on No Kid Hungry state campaigns and has most recently led the organization's work in Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama, and Pennsylvania, working with state agencies, school districts, and nonprofit partners. Prior to Share Our Strength, Eleni has worked as a policy analyst at Feeding America and Center for American Progress.   

What's next? Our part in the election is done, there's nothing left to do or argue on that front. So COVID 2: The Sequel? The Holidays? Dealing with the kids? The eternal darkness now that daylight saving time is over? What's right in front of you now? And how do we handle it? Join Dr. Kim Lannon on Your Daily Game Face as we face our post-election night fears and talk about her great new project, The Human Baton! Get the details here and check out the website at www.thb.rocks!

In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Sarah Maston, Senior Solution Architect at Microsoft, discusses the development of the animal conservation initiative, Project 15. Download Transcript Here 00:00 Pete Bernard: Welcome to the IoT Unicorn podcast. This is Pete Bernard from Microsoft, and this podcast is for anyone interested in the long-term technology trends in the IoT space and the journey from here to there. So let's get started.   [music]   00:21 PB: On this episode of the IoT unicorn, we talk to a very interesting person doing very interesting things, and that's Sarah Maston of Microsoft. We talk about Boston University where we both went to school, a little bit about nutrition and nutrition technology, but we spend quite a bit of time talking about Project 15, which is an open platform effort that her and her colleagues have been championing. It's an anti-poaching platform that's been adopted by a number of NGOs around the world, and we talk about that and the technology behind it. So please join us.   [music]   00:58 PB: Sarah, thanks for joining us. We've had a lot of different guests on the show from silicon partners to telecom, internal Microsoft, I think you kind of fall into the category of very interesting Microsoft people that are doing very interesting things, so I'm gonna tee that up. Maybe you can give us a little bit of an intro yourself and sort of some background.   01:18 Sarah Maston: Sure, it's funny, when I look at my cats, I don't know that I'm that, they think I'm that interesting, but thank you. [chuckle] I'm really happy to be here. Where did I come from? So I actually have a really long history in the database space. I started out making data warehouses before that was a thing, that kinda grew, and so I started out as a medical programmer, actually, at a company called Meditech in Massachusetts.   01:56 PB: I see. Oh, where in Massachusetts, by the way?   02:00 SM: Ah, they were in Natick, but I lived in Arlington, I went to BU.   02:04 PB: So interesting, interesting... Oh, you went to BU? Oh, I went to BU also.   02:08 SM: I did, once upon a time. Oh, yay!   02:10 PB: I was a BA/MA BU grad, isn't that weird?   02:12 SM: Go Terriers!   02:12 PB: No, I was gonna say... Yeah, go Terriers. I was gonna say I had, my first job out of college was in West Natick.   02:19 SM: Oh, interesting.   02:19 PB: There was a little shop called The Bit Bucket computer store, and my professor from BU, my assembly language professor actually ran the company, The Bit Bucket, and we built computers, branded computers, and I was his first engineering hire, and it was in West Natick. I didn't stay there that long, 'cause it was kind of like a weird job, but yeah, The Bit Bucket, I remember West Natick... Yeah, Natick's a nice area. That's cool.   02:49 SM: So I was gonna say did they have a lot of Twinkies, 'cause I believe that the Twinkie fact... I don't know. I think it's in Natick...   02:57 PB: Oh, the Twinkie was there?   02:58 SM: I'm unclear.   03:00 PB: I think that was it, I know there's Necco Wafers too was out there.   03:01 SM: Oh, delicious, delicious.   03:01 PB: I'm not sure where that is, yeah.   03:03 SM: Yeah, no, I actually have a degree in psychology and women's studies from BU.   03:08 PB: Fantastic.   03:09 SM: So, a little bit...   03:10 PB: Fantastic, okay. Go Terriers, yeah. Okay.   03:13 SM: Okay.   03:14 PB: There you go.   03:15 SM: Back to this.   03:15 PB: We should have cleared that up in the pre, in the preamble before we started recording, but that's okay, now we know, so that's good.   03:21 SM: Thank you. Yeah, so I did a lot of data warehouses, and I put myself actually in Harvard's night school to kind of get out of data and start learning more Java-ey, getting into more programming stuff, because I had a really weird side hobby then as well, where I had been really sick in my late 20s, and I started studying nutrition, and I ended up creating what was a graph database of food, and I wanted to go and put myself in Harvard 'cause it was easier to learn how to code it than to sort of explain it. And so that journey led me to... I actually invented that over at IBM a couple of years ago and working at IBM, I met a colleague there that had come to Microsoft and so how did you come to Microsoft? Well, I had a friend, and then I met the IoT group and they... It was funny because I hadn't, I was kind of the first person in the group that hadn't built a computer to be.   04:44 PB: Right, right.   04:45 SM: Wasn't a hardware person, and but when they brought me in to start talking about that bigger data conversation, so that's how I got here.   04:57 PB: Interesting. Yeah, cool, so obviously you've been here, I think a couple of years or two years or...   05:01 SM: I have.   05:02 PB: Just about that. That's exciting. Yeah, so that's an interesting path, I think a lot of people get to Microsoft through professional connections, personal connections, there's all sorts of different ways and so you were involved in nutrition and...   05:16 SM: I was.   05:16 PB: And kind of analyzing that. Is that still a big kind of passion of yours, personal nutrition and things?   05:22 SM: I, well yes, personal. Once I designed the graph with the team there, which was the connection of food to disease through phyto-chemicals and the reactions in your bios, kind of like a Facebook of food. I had spent so much... Honestly, I had spent so much time on that in my life that the IoT space and starting to learn more formally about that was so exciting, and a lot of my data colleagues in my circle, same thing, because sometimes you can be doing the same thing and database, database... What's new? And so this was actually really fun, and it was in the beginning of when I got here, my job was a lot of enablement. We were gonna teach people how to use Azure and how to use Azure IoT and etcetera. And that's my fault that I'm having a notification 'cause clearly I...   06:25 PB: That's okay.   06:26 SM: I could have turned that off.   [chuckle]   06:30 SM: But what's interesting is that I... This, it's kind of a strange story in the sense that I... It's not that strange, but I was outside and of my apartment and I saw a lot of smoke and I freaked out, and I ran into my building to save my cats and long story, very short, lots of stress, but the next day, I ended up designing a safety platform that could use IoT to speak differently in a crisis, and so that's really something that whenever I talk about my journey to Microsoft and learning something new is that it was so great to have the space to be like, "Hey, I have an idea." But anyway, that's another story. [chuckle]   07:26 PB: Fascinating. Yeah, I do actually, I use the... I'm kind of a Fitbit fan, and I use the food logging on Fitbit, and it gives me a macro-nutrient breakdown and stuff, and so I've been kind of on my own health journey in the past year or so and feeling good, feeling fit. And part of it is kind of analyzing what I ingest, and I feel like we're just sort of at the beginning of a lot of that science like I would love for the data I'm putting into the Fitbit system, which I guess is now Google, just to get even more analysis of that over time. So it's fascinating kind of measuring what you put into your body and how your body is working, and we had a Dr. David Rhew from Microsoft's chief medical officer on a few weeks ago, and talking about COVID of course, but also just more of the intersection of health and technology and very early stages of really taking advantage of that kind of combination, so...   08:24 SM: No, that's true. It's my work, it was... My work pretty much focused on just taking stuff we do with process, architecture and analysis, and then data, of course, but if I think back when my hair was much browner, I just thought what's breaking when it came to metabolic syndrome, and it was... Well, what happens when I do this and then how does your... And what does your intestinal villi do? And so basically connecting those dots to go through the process architecture of digestion and then to make sort of the data model of that. And to say, "Oh, when you eat oatmeal, the pectin and beta-glucan, pectin from apples and pears comes in, it absorbs bile salts." Basically, all those different processes and then how those can combine and really... Back in the day, I created what's called a food program, and that's also known as a diet, but a food program that would layer what foods to eat, how to change your internals to do what it needed to do. And I guess my own doctor took notice because I lowered my cholesterol 90 points in under three months, so...   09:48 PB: Wow.   09:49 SM: Then I made a system that did it, and so that was really... And I met a lot of really cool people in that journey. Then unfortunately, I got sick from stress, but when I came out of that, here I was, and then I invented some new stuff.   10:12 PB: Good, so let's talk about some new stuff. You've been sort of very, very busy, not only being a new... Fairly new Microsoft employee, but also building up something that is referred to as Project 15 for probably some of our listeners are probably familiar, but why don't you give us a little bit of a recap of the origin story around Project 15 and where that's at?   10:40 SM: Sure, I'd love to. I do a little project in the... Although it's a little bigger now, in my spare nights and in weekend hours with a few friends of mine here at Microsoft and... Alright, so the origin story, once upon a time, it really speaks back to that incident with the cat, and essentially, I made a safety system that could use IoT devices to speak to a community within an emergency. So if you thought about some of the stuff that was going on, you have to go to Twitter to find hashtag, you have to go... You don't really know what's going on. There are so many systems getting good data to first responders, but for us, we don't really know what's going on. So that project became known as Project Edison. And so it went for about a year, we built that with a partner, Insight, and we went on the IoT in Action global event tour and talked about it, and I talked about safety in every context you could imagine.   11:55 SM: I talked about safe retail, I talked about safe cities, I talked about safe schools, safe workplaces, safe buildings. And then, actually, I met a guy who does anti-poaching and his name was Eric and... Eric Dinerstein, and I realized in one of these very stereotypical, I was at the cafe with my colleague Daisuke, and I started drawing, and I said, "Anti-poaching, it's the same use case as a Project Edison safety case," and he looked at me and I said, "Well, it's a population that can't defend itself, and it's someone that you wanna stop or making it less impactful, using devices, and then people you need to talk to to get help. So maybe we can get other people that were like us to have this aha moment that scientists are remaking these wheels that we've already made in the commercial space." And so, that's how Project 15 started, which was like, what do we have in our world that we just don't know the use cases of the scientific world. And the second person I met was another professor, Wasser, Dr. Sam Wasser, and he was at U-Dub, and he also was involved with trying to prevent animal... The tracking of tusks and things, illegal trafficking, and I learned about a pangolin from one of his research fellows, which is a tiny, cute, little, scaly animal, and...   13:42 PB: Okay.   13:43 SM: I had never heard of a pangolin, so cute. And they're slow. And the problem is, is that their defense mechanism is that if you scare them, they turn into a ball.   13:55 PB: Okay.   13:56 SM: And if you are...   13:57 PB: Sounds fair.   13:58 SM: Right, I do the same thing.   14:00 PB: Yeah, I can relate to that.   14:01 SM: I'm just gonna be a little ball over here, but and that works for lions and tigers who are like, "Oh, that's a sharp little ball," but it doesn't work for, poachers will just make a noise, it curls up into a ball, they pick it up, they put it in a bag so.   14:21 PB: I see.   14:22 SM: That's our most poached animal on the planet, actually.   14:25 PB: Oh no.   14:26 SM: Anyway, but I thought, "Well, what's the difference between shoplifting a sweater at a store and shoplifting an animal?" And so that was really where this started was, can we just think about this?   14:44 PB: Right, right. Fantastic. And I think, and I did see you had a segment on a recent video, it was like a United Nations gathering of interested parties around the equator initiative, and I guess I was labeled on YouTube. But can you talk a little bit about that. I mean you're getting some pretty good NGO type of engagement off of project 15.   15:13 SM: Yes. So that was super exciting. I would be... I'll just, full disclosure, I was very nervous, but... And I was a little frustrated with the pandemic because I think I could have gone to the United Nations in another reality.   15:32 PB: Yeah I know.   15:33 SM: But virtually, was very fun and so what happened was, is so we put up a video because we had support from my CVP and my management tree, and pretty much everyone in the group that I was in was very supportive of Project 15 right in the beginning. And so we put up a little web page, and I used to call it the bat phone, because we wondered if anyone would call from the scientific realm, and we actually started meeting NGOs. We had... People used our web page to get in touch with us and two of the people, one of them is... That we started working with, is Red Panda Network, which is a fascinating, wonderful organization. Another one is called the Zambezi project, and the third was a woman who runs the small grants program at... The United Nations Development Program has different sections and small grants is a department that funds scientific projects and that are all very, very much sustainability focused.   16:55 SM: I could give a whole talk about... They're so fascinating. And I met her because she actually knew... Her husband was friends with Daisuke so it was like one of these things where somebody hears about what's... And, "Hey, that's really interesting. Let's see if that would work." And then six months later, I'm speaking at their conference. But what happened was, is that we kind of paired up together to see if we could bring our commercial processes that we do normally with my day job, IoT engagements, we're gonna do an architectural design session, we're gonna get to know those processes. And then she gave us... We piloted with three grantees and started to try to figure out, we have different worlds, but we do the same things, it's just different words to describe them.   18:01 SM: And so we had a few epiphanies during this process, and so the thing is, is that she... Her group funds thousands of NGO companies and projects, scientists that range from urban sustainability, so like smart city type stuff, all the way to biodiversity, which is where we kinda focused, and so how do you scale? And so we've been working with her and her group on scaling up and digitally transforming this area through not only Azure IoT, but how does that work with the research part, there's a lot of machine learning, there's a lot of CAMS, so connecting that into something like Teams, so it's bigger than Azure IoT specifically, as all IoT solutions are, and so...   19:05 PB: Exactly.   19:06 SM: So that... Yeah, so that I got invited to speak about our work.   19:09 PB: Yeah it's interesting. Who do we have on recently... Oh, we were talking to Cory Clarke from RXR, and he was talking about the smart building solutions that they're rolling out for office space and office space post-COVID, and how do you use AI and sensors to detect occupancy and distance from each other and a lot of the core tech around using AI, vision and other things and processing that data, it's all very similar. The core tech is similar, but now we have all these other ways of applying it, whether it's in healthcare or bio-diversity or whatever. And so that's an exciting thing about Microsoft, is a lot of the platform tech that we're doing here gets used in all these different directions. And so you've found a particular slice where obviously there's a super high need and folks should look up and learn more about the poaching problems that are happening in the world, but it's pretty significant.   20:11 PB: And to take some of the tech that has been used for more of the, I don't know, traditional digital transformation that we talk about, but actually using that tech in a really smart way out in the field and the real world to help a problem. That must be pretty satisfying for you as a Microsoft employee. And I guess one of my questions is, that must take up a pretty good chunk of your time, as it should. And so you're doing that and you're also working at Microsoft. And so how do you end up balancing all these things? Is this a... Is that... Give us a little more insight. How do you do that? [laughter]   20:49 SM: Well, I have a very supportive wife who feeds me and makes sure that I eat and...   20:56 PB: Yeah.   20:58 SM: So good question. So when we started to scale, and I clearly... Daisuke and I cannot meet with every NGO to do an... Etcetera. So COVID, in the beginning of this, we did have a very big partnering model. And so we have all these great IoT partners, they've got platforms and just connect these projects to them like we would a startup, a retail startup or something. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, and of course, as we know, it's all hands on deck to start landing our... Like you just mentioned, the return to work and employees safe. So Daisuke and I had another coffee talk, though virtual, and I said, "You know what? Why don't we use the company Hackathon and make an 80% solution for these folks?"   22:10 SM: That's an easier way. And so we actually got reached out to by a couple of colleagues, one of them was Pamela Cortez and Anders in my group. And they both said, "We'd love to join this because we know what you're doing and we need to figure out how to do the least amount of stuff to have a big impact. And to do that, we need to rely on existing enablement motions and partnerships within other groups. And if we could just build that, then we can roll that out, and off it goes just like anything else."   22:58 PB: Yeah. Well, Microsoft has a great partner network too. So that's the good thing, when we have developers, we have channel partners, we have solution providers, this huge force multiplying engine. It's one of the cool things also about Microsoft is just to get that great idea out there, partners picking it up and amplifying it and landing it locally. So it was good that you took advantage of it. I do wanna make sure people know the... So the aka.ms/project15, is that the go-to place to get the latest?   23:31 SM: That is the place. And then if it can... Down at the bottom there, we have a new link on that page that brings you to the open platform, if you wanna check that out.   23:41 PB: Wow, fantastic. So yeah, let me ask you too, another question. You mentioned COVID-19 and obviously we're all working through that in so many ways. And how has that affected some of your efforts around Project 15 in terms of... Has it been some acceleration in the adoption of technology? Has it slowed down some of these NGOs? Has it...   24:09 SM: This is a multi-faceted answer, so let me think about my words. Okay. So what happened, because now, in the past year, in my private time, and I'm just learning and meeting new people and learning about this space, 'cause I didn't know anything. So if you're somebody who's like me who always wanted to help but didn't think you could, so you just watched, that is not true. All of our skills are welcome and wanted, and a lot of these organizations are non-profits.   24:47 PB: Sure.   24:47 SM: And there's a lot of tech developer groups that you can code for good and get involved on the device level and the software side. So I just wanna put that out there. But what happened was, is that the places where these things are happening, you'll read news articles that poaching accelerated or the lack of tourism has caused some problems. So this space seems to be having the same problems that every other part of the world is having when it comes to learning to adapt to a pandemic world. We weren't exactly affected in terms of getting on the phone at 7 o'clock at night, Pacific Time, to meet with Sonam, who runs the Red Panda network, who's in Nepal, because we were always virtual. And actually, I would... The lack of social life [chuckle] being quarantined probably helped myself, and Daisuke, and Pamela, and Anders when we were cranking out the code and the plan for scale. And so the answer is no.   26:08 SM: One thing that's been... Is a little bit challenging is that I was used to meeting up with our partner architect friends, and we would draw on pieces of paper and we'd talk about smart factories, and then we'd talk about this. And so those kind of conversations got harder, but I did get involved with a Hackathon that came out of Hack-Star and where they were hacking on the OpenCollar project to build the smartest elephant. That's the goal, is to build the smartest elephant collar for Smart Parks. So I just wanted to mention that, is the partner ecosystem is out there, they're doing stuff in this area as well as all the areas. But so it didn't... I don't think it stopped. It's just, at least not...   27:03 PB: Yeah, changed it a little bit.   27:03 SM: For us sitting at the desk, yeah.   27:06 PB: Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. I've definitely missed some of the more serendipitous conversations I've had. Sometimes you... That's where you have the serendipitous meetings and conversations that connect things, and it's been a little more planful maybe in terms of conversations and time. But I know also that there's been a lot of tech acceleration by a lot of companies too, and the whole notion of remote and leveraging the cloud a lot more. So hopefully that does work in your favor. I was gonna mention the... We haven't talked about the tech behind Project 15 too much. You mentioned AI is obviously like big data sets. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention I think this sounds like a really exciting potential for 5G/LPWA tech in some form. I know that the... I don't think they've rolled out 5G yet in Nepal, but the idea of some sort of low frequency or low spectrum cellular connections that can blanket those areas is exciting. So that's a follow-on for me. I will actually take that as an action to circle back and see what we can do to help there.   28:20 SM: That's actually one of the... So when it comes to the spectrum of silicon to cloud, I fall squarely into process architecture and designing how you're gonna get this to there, and what are we gonna do and strategy on that. I also fall squarely on data because of my background. When it comes to connectivity, Pamela and Daisuke on the Project 15 meta team, they're really interested in that. But something I noticed is that my assumption that some place like the Himalayas wouldn't have any connectivity or something, that was just my own... I don't know if that's a pre-conception or just like a, "That's the woods and the mountains." However, when we looked into it, and we've been working with some groups in the Caribbean as well that go out into the ocean, it's all got coverage. It may be 2G. There's always a satellite, which then you're gonna bring in some edge, let's compute as much as possible over here at the camera or the gateway. But that was really surprising. So I'm really, I'm interested in... We'll loop back on your response because...   29:45 PB: Yeah, yeah. We'll have to loop back. There's some really interesting things happening, especially if you wanna have... You're designing for very low-bandwidth networks, like low-cost low-bandwidth networks. You actually need to do more processing on the edge, and then it's more of a metadata that's going to the cloud as opposed to the actual streams of video or camera images. So some really fascinating things going on there that I think would be really exciting, not only to land in low-bandwidth networks, but also that also enables some very low power endpoints. So imagine you wanna stick some sensors onto a tree out there somewhere, if you want it solar-powered, you need to keep that power profile really low. So projects like these, not only are they inherently just good, but they are also pushing the tech maybe more-so than the more business-oriented deployments that we have that maybe are a little "easier." These are hard deployments because of some of the different environmental factors. So it's always exciting to see the tech being pushed in that direction.   30:51 SM: I was gonna say, just to jump in. You actually raise... This is a really big deal. There's what we're doing with Project 15, but there's the bigger Microsoft sustainability mission. And so this year if you go out to the Microsoft sustainability web page, we just made a recent announcement about water. There was a really interesting announcement about the circular economy and waste. And so when you start to think about devices... So let's say you come from the more device side of the spectrum of our solutioning. I met a scientist who said something really that stuck with me. "We're trying to save the oceans from plastic using plastic." And so when you start to think about how we make devices. How do we make better batteries? How do we use solar? Like you said...   31:54 PB: Yeah, solar.   31:54 SM: That's when we just kind of was like... We also as a technical community should be thinking about that because it really wasn't purview a year ago. But oh, okay, that makes a lot of sense, I never really thought about that.   32:10 PB: Yeah. No. That's fascinating. I was gonna ask you about that before we... I don't know where we're at on time here, I have to check my clock. But I know we're not traveling any more, but I still stay in touch with BU through their various alumni programs and things. Do you stay in touch with any BU alums or any Boston related things these days? Or...   32:32 SM: Well, I do. I do.   32:33 PB: 'Cause we're pretty far from Boston. People don't know, we're actually in Redmond Washington. It's like the polar opposite of Boston.   32:40 SM: Three thousand miles away. I do, I have friends that I went there with, and I get the magazine. And I get...   32:49 PB: Oh yeah, the magazine.   32:50 SM: I was very proud of, what was it? One of the alums, she was in the Orange is the New Black and I was like, "Whoa, BU!" And of course on LinkedIn I see different things. Actually, speaking of COVID, I saw a really cool video that I thought was very edgy and he did a video about everybody wearing their masks and I was like, "Yes!" But yeah, no, I keep an eye on what's going on there.   33:24 PB: Good.   33:25 SM: So yeah.   33:27 PB: Yeah, no, it's fascinating to see all this stuff, how it's evolving and how we're all sort of connected, right? So now you and I are connected through Boston University, and we didn't even know that so that's fantastic.   33:36 SM: Who knew? T. Anthony's pizza.   33:36 PB: Who knew? T. Anthony's, yeah, I love that place, yeah. Although I don't eat cheese anymore but I still love pizza so... [chuckle] Cool. So any final thoughts Sarah? We... You kind of said that the URL people should go to. What's the call to action here? Where do you want people to go do now they've been sort of educated here?   34:00 SM: We love... When you think about it, if you go out and you get to the Project 15 open platform, for those of us who are very familiar, when you see the architecture you'll say, "Oh, this looks like everything else that is the components of an IoT solution." That is true. I've actually been using it with, met some startups and I said, "Well hey," doing my usual day job, which is, "How do I learn Azure IoT?" And, "Oh, go here, go here. Ask me questions if you have them." So people who are on the coding side of our world, feel free to bug bash that, and any feedback is absolutely welcome. It's really a passion project when you get down to it, which we hope is really useful, and if you do have people who are technical on the scientific side and it's interesting to them and we are building it through Pamela's work with community so that people will be able to get enabled on it. This speaks to the, "How do you do all of this?" Well, I have smart friends. And so yeah, so that really it's out there for you to use. Any feedback is welcome. And yeah, we hope it helps.   35:26 PB: Yeah, I encourage people to go to that website and learn more about it. And Sarah, I really appreciate the time today. I know you're really busy, so carving out a little time here, much appreciated. So hopefully we can actually meet each other in person at some point in the near future. So that'd be great.   35:47 SM: Soon. Soon.   35:48 PB: Soon.   35:48 SM: Wear your masks everybody.   35:51 PB: Exactly.   35:51 SM: Alright. Yeah, no, thank you so much. This has been fun.   35:53 PB: Sure. Okay, cool. Alright, thanks Sarah.   35:57 SM: Thank you.   35:57 PB: Bye bye.   36:00 SM: Bye.   36:00 PB: This is Pete Bernard. You've been listening to the IoT Unicorn Podcast, and thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode, and feel free to give us some feedback at TheIoTUnicorn@Microsoft.com. Thank you.   [music]  

So COVID had made it's way to the White House and the whole world is watching... I talk about this, new cases, video game updates and releases as well as the return of COPS?

So COVID-19 has you ready to get into the real estate game and wondering how to start house flipping? Within the Coronavirus thumping real estate markets nationwide, there are going to be some unusual investment opportunities in the months ahead. If you've been laid off or furloughed, now might be an opportune time to learn how to flip houses for a profit. The pandemic—and the recession it's causing—is going to get worse before it gets better. What does that mean for you? ABOUT THE PODCAST: This podcast is an audio feed of the website, CadeHildreth.com where you'll learn what you SHOULD'VE been taught in school. As an LGBTQ + entrepreneur, real estate investor, former USA Rugby Player, and fitness enthusiast, Cade will teach you what your parents and teachers should have taught you but didn't know themselves. You'll learn how to increase your income, negotiate a raise, buy real estate, invest for cash flow, lose 10 lbs fast, reveal 6-pack abs, and so much more. CONNECT WITH CADE: Website: CadeHildreth.com Instagram: Instagram.com/CadeHildreth Twitter: Twitter/CadeHildreth Facebook: Facebook.com/CadeHildreth Pinterest: Pinterest.com/CadeHildreth

Alan recently discussed immersive learning with his partner in life and business, Julie Smithson, on her sister podcast, XR for Learning. We thought it was a good episode, so this week, we're sharing it here for XR for Business listeners. Julie: Hi, my name is Julie Smithson. Alan: And I'm Alan Smithson. Julie: And this is the XR for Learning podcast. Alan: Well… which podcast are we on? Is it mine or yours? Julie: I think it's mine. Alan: Yours, so the XR for Learning podcast. Julie: Yeah. Alan: I'm going to interview you. Julie: Yes. Alan: OK, cool. Julie: Hi, my name is Julie Smithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. In all of my episodes, I talk about the way that we need to change the way that we learn and we teach, to adapt to the immersive technologies that are being implemented in enterprise and business today. So today, my guest — my special guest — is Alan Smithson. Alan: Hello. Julie: My partner and husband of almost 20 years. And we're going to talk about education. So welcome. Thanks for being on *my* podcast. Alan: Thank you so much for having me. I'm a little nervous, I'm not going to lie. This is an interesting podcast dynamic. Julie: It really is. We've never done this before. Alan: No, we have not. So I want to ask you questions, because you are the guru in immersive learning systems. So we'll hopefully kind of dig up where this lies, and what we have to do as a society to really push the needle forward. Julie: So what I like to do with all my podcasts is start with a baseline technology. Where are we today? Like, what's going on today? Which is really good question, because it's definitely different than it was six months ago. Alan: I would say, in the industry– I'm coming from the business side of things. What we've seen is there's been a hyper-acceleration of digitization. So in retail and e-com, it has been decimated. People couldn't go to a store physically, and so everything moved online. And in e-commerce, we're seeing shopping trends that would have existed in 2030 happen today. This is trickling down to everything, not only retail, but then also meetings. Everybody's meeting on Zoom these days. Everybody. There's just– we're moving to digital and we're moving to these things much faster than we had ever, ever hoped to do. Plans of digital transformation that would have taken five years are now happening today. So it's an interesting time to revisit and relook at what does education look like in an exponential world of digital transformation. Julie: And this is where the skillsets that are now needed — in enterprise, business, and organizations today to digitally transform — those skillsets are not being taught in the school system today. So COVID coming in and forcing people to virtually connect online, the education systems were forced to actually be online and rethink how they're teaching things. But the unfortunate thing is, is that we didn't get to the point of talking about what we were actually teaching. It was just more of a digital connection for the past six months. Alan: Well, I think since this thing has hit, it's been really just how do we make the technology work in a seamless way that is comfortable for both the teachers and the students? And to be honest, we're not quite there yet. My kids

Have you ever felt unaligned with your work? Or maybe simply that you're not making the impact you could...in your job or in the world? In this episode, one of Erin's clients tells her story of how she went from unseen and bored to confident and literally sitting in the board room in just six months (and during Covid!) Erin Hatzikostas interviews Tara Autrey, a Strategic Marketing Manager at Aetna, and a Board Member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Erin kicks off by asking Tara to talk about her situation towards the end of last year, and what challenges she was facing.  Tara talks about how she read one of Erin's articles and then was invited to her and Kaitlyn's "Your Richest Life" workshop. Tara took this as a sign from the universe that this is what she needed to break out of her rut. Erin asks Tara to talk through what she learned about herself and the result she's seen after taking this leap and participating in the workshop. Tara talks about what she learned about herself and how she evaluated her skills, passion, and her "ikigai". Tara discusses her uncle's suicide - how she felt she couldn't help him at the time, but has since dedicated much of her life to helping others, whether that be fundraising for charities, or sending simple messages to people who seem to be struggling, just so they know someone cares. Erin then asks Tara to explain some of the things that happened - tangible and intangible - since the conference. Tara talks about wanting to become a board member for the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention, and the steps she, successfully, took to get there. She explains that Covid has been a difficult time for so many people as it relates to mental health. However, she's found that mental health awareness as a whole has had a massive boost, with more and more people accepting the everyday realities of mental health. They both discuss the energy you need to do the things you want, how to change your mindset, how to network the right way, and how you might be surprised with how you feel afterwards. Tara explains how this confidence permeates all aspects of her life, from raising kids to going to the gym. The conversation moves on to mental health, the message Tara would like to get across about mental health: how to spot signs that someone might be struggling, how to react, and when to reach out. Erin and Tara end by talking about life decisions...that even the smallest of moments can have a huge impact on your life, and you may not even realize it until you look back. You can follow Tara @  LinkedIn: Twitter: TaraA_79   To get Erin's FREE video course, Unst*ck Yourself, go to  bauthenticinc.com/unstuck If you like jammin' with us on the podcast, b sure to join us for more fun and inspiration! Here are some options... Check out the b BRILLIANT career coaching program @   b Cause Podcast Facebook group @   We even sare more crazy stuff here (you probably thought that was impossible). Take our simple, fun and insightful "What Kind of Dog Are You At Work?" by going to   We have so much fun stuff going on...we wouldn't want you to miss out - join the authenticity movement and our community by adding your email just about anywhere @   Check out our blog for more of our no-BS career advice @   We have fun and inspiring t-shirts @ DISCLAIMER: This episode is not explicit, though contains mild swearing that may be unsustainable for younger audiences.  Tweetable Comments: "I just knew I had to get out of this rut." "At any given time you need to be doing one of two things: you either need to be inspired, or you need to inspire others." "Corporate America wants you to be a bold leader, but you can still be a leader, a quiet leader." "I always had that in the back of my mind, but I never thought about making a living or a profession out of it." "In this time, people are more isolated, and people who are not generally depressed feel it even more. So Covid is making mental health more at the forefront." "People who are doing things they love to do or are having success; it's not a fancy formula, it's simply that they persisted." "I felt like my energy shifted, and I was more confident in my abilities." "Sometimes I have undermined my own value, and I just didn't see it." "The small poofs of inspiration can make all the difference." "Suicide affects a lot more than one person, so if you reach out to that one person you are making a difference and caring for a lot more people's lives."   "Most people ask how you're doing, but they don't actually want to know." "Invest in yourself." "I think we're all ok and not ok at the very same time." "If you ever want to invest in yourself, take the chance."

Have you ever felt unaligned with your work? Or maybe simply that you're not making the impact you could...in your job or in the world? In this episode, one of Erin's clients tells her story of how she went from unseen and bored to confident and literally sitting in the board room in just six months (and during Covid!) Erin Hatzikostas interviews Tara Autrey, a Strategic Marketing Manager at Aetna, and a Board Member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Erin kicks off by asking Tara to talk about her situation towards the end of last year, and what challenges she was facing.  Tara talks about how she read one of Erin's articles and then was invited to her and Kaitlyn's "Your Richest Life" workshop. Tara took this as a sign from the universe that this is what she needed to break out of her rut. Erin asks Tara to talk through what she learned about herself and the result she's seen after taking this leap and participating in the workshop. Tara talks about what she learned about herself and how she evaluated her skills, passion, and her "ikigai". Tara discusses her uncle's suicide - how she felt she couldn't help him at the time, but has since dedicated much of her life to helping others, whether that be fundraising for charities, or sending simple messages to people who seem to be struggling, just so they know someone cares. Erin then asks Tara to explain some of the things that happened - tangible and intangible - since the conference. Tara talks about wanting to become a board member for the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention, and the steps she, successfully, took to get there. She explains that Covid has been a difficult time for so many people as it relates to mental health. However, she's found that mental health awareness as a whole has had a massive boost, with more and more people accepting the everyday realities of mental health. They both discuss the energy you need to do the things you want, how to change your mindset, how to network the right way, and how you might be surprised with how you feel afterwards. Tara explains how this confidence permeates all aspects of her life, from raising kids to going to the gym. The conversation moves on to mental health, the message Tara would like to get across about mental health: how to spot signs that someone might be struggling, how to react, and when to reach out. Erin and Tara end by talking about life decisions...that even the smallest of moments can have a huge impact on your life, and you may not even realize it until you look back. You can follow Tara @  LinkedIn: Twitter: TaraA_79   To get Erin's FREE video course, Unst*ck Yourself, go to  bauthenticinc.com/unstuck If you like jammin' with us on the podcast, b sure to join us for more fun and inspiration! Here are some options... Check out the b BRILLIANT career coaching program @   b Cause Podcast Facebook group @   We even sare more crazy stuff here (you probably thought that was impossible). Take our simple, fun and insightful "What Kind of Dog Are You At Work?" by going to   We have so much fun stuff going on...we wouldn't want you to miss out - join the authenticity movement and our community by adding your email just about anywhere @   Check out our blog for more of our no-BS career advice @   We have fun and inspiring t-shirts @ DISCLAIMER: This episode is not explicit, though contains mild swearing that may be unsustainable for younger audiences.  Tweetable Comments: "I just knew I had to get out of this rut." "At any given time you need to be doing one of two things: you either need to be inspired, or you need to inspire others." "Corporate America wants you to be a bold leader, but you can still be a leader, a quiet leader." "I always had that in the back of my mind, but I never thought about making a living or a profession out of it." "In this time, people are more isolated, and people who are not generally depressed feel it even more. So Covid is making mental health more at the forefront." "People who are doing things they love to do or are having success; it's not a fancy formula, it's simply that they persisted." "I felt like my energy shifted, and I was more confident in my abilities." "Sometimes I have undermined my own value, and I just didn't see it." "The small poofs of inspiration can make all the difference." "Suicide affects a lot more than one person, so if you reach out to that one person you are making a difference and caring for a lot more people's lives."   "Most people ask how you're doing, but they don't actually want to know." "Invest in yourself." "I think we're all ok and not ok at the very same time." "If you ever want to invest in yourself, take the chance."

There are a lot of ways to create characters, but one technique we've found that has not only fantastic results but also helps with character arcs is using Enneagram personality types! Wait. What are Enneagrams?   Discover just what the nine Enneagram types are and how you can use them for your characters is what this episode is all about. Well, that and we might just have a little bit of fun too!   To learn more about Enneagram personality types check out https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/type-descriptions   And, as we mention in the show, we cover this in much greater detail in our soon to be released book Plot Development: An Outlining Method for Fiction which you can pick up on preorder (and at a discount!) at https://books2read.com/Plot-Development    Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.   SUPPORT THE AM WRITING FANTASY PODCAST! Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review.   Join us at www.patreon.com/AmWritingFantasy. For as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the Am Writing Fantasy podcast going.   Read the full transcript below. (Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).   Narrator (2s): You're listening to the am. Writing fantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need a literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing. Join two best selling authors who have self published more than 20 books between them now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt, and Jesper Schmidt. Jesper (30s): Hello, I am Jesper Autumn (32s): and I'm Autumn. Jesper (34s): This is episode 82 of the M writing fantasy podcast. And when we wrote our upcoming guide on how to plot a novel, we also talked about character creation. And we mentioned before how important character creation really is having, we talked about that before autumn. Oh yes. We've. We've hinted that characters are kind of important to writing and especially to what readers love. So I don't think it's the first time listeners have no say that. Jesper (1m 5s): No, indeed. Yeah. And in the plodding book, we centered the process of creating characters around personality types. So we thought we would take you through the nine different personality types in today's episode here. And I don't know if I'm going to be successful, but I'm going to try to do my best to make it a bit entertaining. So it's not dry and boring. Let's see how it goes as well. I think we'll do our best. I mean, these are really fun personality types. And even just trying to think of characters from movies, I'm so bad at actress names and stuff, so I'm not going to do super well. Jesper (1m 44s): We can try to flip point out a few individuals, but it's the, you'll see so quickly why this is fascinating because not only do you get these nine wonderful types of people, but they have levels within them. So it's easy to work on your character arc and all these things. So it's a fantastic method. And of course that's why we use it. Yeah. Yeah. I think it works extremely well for, for how we laid it out in the plotting book. It all, it makes the couch arc so easy to deal with. Jesper (2m 17s): All of a sudden, you sort of have a bit of a template you can use. And of course you can modify it as much as you want, but, but it gives you a very good starting point. It doesn't, it's even, not even just heroes, but even your villain it's you can see little quirks and why they're going to act certain ways and you might not have even thought of. And I just think that is just fantastic and you can move them up and down the scale as well. So it gives you some great resources for creating some really dynamic characters. Jesper (2m 46s): Yeah. But before we get that fries is all well on your end, then autumn, how is, how are things? It is good. Of course we're recording this like way early, cause we're getting ahead for the summer, but where we're sitting currently in June, we're actually Autumn (3m 0s): In for I'm in Vermont. And it is actually been a really dry spring stream is dried up. We haven't had a significant rain, like over a half an inch in a month and a half. So I'm really hoping we get some rain soon, but I do think it's funny. I have a garden going and I'm my mom, my mom and my dad are both master gardeners. They're amazing gardeners. And I've always admired my mom's green thumb, but for ones, Oh my gosh, my garden looks so good. Autumn (3m 32s): I've had so many people come up to me like, wow, what are you doing? And I'm like watering it I've fertilized once every seven days because I'm basically growing stuff in gravel. When I did the soil test, it basically said, congratulations, you have gravel. No organic matter, no nitrogen, no phosphorus, no potassium. So despite this, I have like, my tomatoes are beautiful. My cucumbers are blooming. I have shard. Autumn (4m 2s): It's just, I've let us like we're eating salads every day. So it's amazing. So I feel very oddly proud of myself and I wish I had a better answer. People say, how are you doing? Because, Oh yes, that's my announcement. Or we need a little chime. My debut novel, born of water, just hit 300 reviews on Amazon. Jesper (4m 26s): I saw your post on Facebook. That's absolutely awesome Autumn (4m 29s): That also I am so pretty hungry lot. It is. And so at least when people ask me, how did you do that? I least have an answer. If you ask me how I'm managing to grow stuff. Oh, well I think I, maybe my mother's green thumb rubbed off on me. Otherwise I'm watering every day and feeding them once a week. Yeah. Jesper (4m 53s): But I, I guess if it's that dry and warm, is it also this kind of times where you have to watch out for forest fires and stuff like that, then Autumn (5m 3s): I think if it keeps up, it's going to go that way. There's been some fires North of us in Maine, and I'm really worried like Quebec and Ontario, I'm only a few hours from the Canadian border. I'm really worried about some bad fires on the East coast, much less the fires that are going to break out on the West coast this year. If we don't get some rain soon, the Arctic areas of Canada and stuff have already hit record highs. I think Siberia over the weekend hit 104 degrees. So beer. Yeah. This is not supposed to be 104 degrees. Autumn (5m 34s): So it's terrifying. So I, yeah, that could happen. How are things, hopefully you're not quite as warm as Siberia. How are things in Denmark? Jesper (5m 44s): At least forest fires is not something we have to worry about everybody over here that doesn't have it happen. Nobody it's good. This past weekend, I was out refereeing for the first time since Corona lockdown. Wow. That was awesome. That must have been awesome. Was it like a normal game? Was there something weird going on after the Corona virus? Well, it was yeah, more or less a normal game. I mean there, when you're, you're doing the Fairplay, you know, hello thingy, normally you do before, you know, everybody normally as the match starts, every, every player says a good match, have a good match to the referee and also to you to the opposing team. Jesper (6m 27s): And obviously we can't shake hands. So basically we just sort of walked past each other and say it rather than shaking hands. So that part is a bit different. And then on, on the pitch or the side of the pitch on both sides, there is a, these large drawn out boxes basically where the players have to stay within those boxes, which just to make sure that they don't get mingled with the crowd watching and spectators and stuff like that. So, so there's a few things that are slightly different, but in terms of the actual play, it's exactly the same as before. Jesper (7m 2s): So, so that was good. It was, it was a match just in the league that sits just below the semiprofessional level. So it was quite good because well, one of the teams have played at that level for a bit more than a year, whereas the other team just advanced, so this was their first match in this new league and for them and it, it really showed within 45 seconds, 45 seconds, it was a one to nail. So welcome to the big boys league. Jesper (7m 35s): It was like that. Right. So they, they got beat three to nothing. So it was, it was pretty that there was a big difference. That is a big difference, but yeah, especially not getting any points in, but you know, it wasn't something outrageous, you know, sometimes when the football in the U S you know, it was like 46 to one to seven or something it's spot. Yeah. Never happens in soccer. No, it's a little different. And then we went to visit some friends in the evening afterwards, and we were back home in bed, like 3:00 AM. Jesper (8m 7s): So thank God I don't drink alcohol because we had to get up at 8:00 AM. Or I had to get up at 8:00 AM, 8:00 AM the day after to take my youngest son to a soccer tournament. So yeah, I got like five, five hours of sleep. And if, if I was drinking alcohol, I would never have gotten up there, but thank God I don't do that. So I did take a nap yesterday afternoon. I didn't think that sounds like a well deserved yeah. Jesper (8m 38s): On the internet with the yam writing fantasy podcast. So I saw a very cool post in the amp writing fantasy Facebook group from Melanie. Oh yeah. Because yeah, because she discovered that Excel actually have a writing submission tracker template built in. Autumn (8m 57s): I did see that. And of course I don't, I use numbers over Excel, so I wasn't quite as excited, but that is pretty cool. Jesper (9m 5s): Yeah. I think it's cool in the sense that, I mean, of course it can help you keep track of stories and submissions and publications and stuff like that. But I just thought it was cool because I never knew that. Autumn (9m 17s): I just felt like that was very helpful to just Jesper (9m 20s): Point that out. I mean, it could be something you just discovered, you know, Oh, I found this, but the fact that she actually took it and posted it in the Facebook group to help everybody else, I thought that was very cool. So thank you for sharing that. Autumn (9m 34s): Yes. I did think, like I said, I saw that and I'm like, yeah, that is definitely such a cool feature that it's built right in. And now that people know all the group, people, members of the group and everyone we're telling today, that is fantastic because it's funny. I have been in the fantasy, the I'm writing fantasy Facebook group because it's been, Oh my gosh. So many people the last few days have been coming in. So I think we've all been pitching in to welcome folks. But I was looking at Mike's post recently, cause I said 42 comments just now. Autumn (10m 7s): And he was asking about anyone with main characters that are dysfunctional or disabled or autistic anxiety, OCD, something like that. And man, I know there's was one comment in there that listed like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, everything from game of Thrones, to some of the classics where there were characters that met those qualifications. I was like the hard man, this guy knows Sue has read a lot of books and could just organize it very quickly, but it is fantastic to see some of the questions out there. And like I said, 42 comments and they're still coming in on characters that have some kind of disability or dysfunction. Jesper (10m 45s): Yes. Probably more widespread than we think. Autumn (10m 48s): Yeah. It really was. When he, like I said, the one I would have to go back and find who came up with the one answer that was just listing off all of these different books. There were ones I had read that I hadn't thought of it. I just didn't come to mind when you, when it was asked. So I was like, wow, that is just fantastic. Jesper (11m 8s): Yeah. Yeah. So if you haven't joined us yet, just search for am writing fantasy in the group section of Facebook and you will Autumn (11m 18s): Find us. Yes. And that one poor person you beat me, but yes, there was some money. Somebody who actually messaged me on Facebook on how to join. So you can do that. And I'm sorry if it takes me a while to get back to you because sometimes Facebook hides my messages. I'm sorry. Yeah. So now we're okay today Jesper (11m 39s): Onto today's topic. Yeah. So, well, my, my wife is a certified, she certified in the end in a grand personality type. So I've had heard a lot about anagram types before we even started writing our guide on plodding. So it sort of made a lot of sense to find ways in which to use the anagram to develop fictional characters. Because I just, I liked the entire setup with these personality types because it, it just helps a lot. So, so that was sort of a starting point. Autumn (12m 12s): That's a good one. I mean, it's funny. Cause I had heard about the anagram cause I've taken some psychology classes and Adam has taken quite a few psychology classes. And so yeah, we'd both gone through them. We'd both taken the tests before. So it was kind of interesting to be like, Oh yeah, I gotta have the heart of this for characters, but this is so fantastic for characters. Jesper (12m 34s): It is absolutely. I think it is. And, but maybe before we sort of go any further, we should just probably be a bit helpful and clarify what this whole anagram deal is all about. Autumn (12m 46s): That's true. Yes. If you never heard of them before, you're like, this is a big word and I can't even smell it to figure out how to Google it. And that's just kind of mean of us, isn't it? Jesper (12m 59s): Yeah. So it's basically like a personality categorization system. So you have nine different personality types and each one of these personality types view the world different and has a different underlying motivation that drives their life and their feelings. So yeah, that's basically what it is. And I guess in a nutshell, if we boil it down Autumn (13m 27s): Yeah. I think that's a great explanation for an introduction to it. And just like, if someone is more familiar with the Myers Briggs personality type, that's a very common one in the United States. It's like that, but a lot more nuanced and structured. I think, I think it works very well. I get lost in Myers Briggs where this one is just kind of, you can read through it, grasp it and go like, Oh I got it. I like this one. Jesper (13m 55s): Yeah. And I guess I could, I could foresee somebody thinking at this point, but you said that there is nine personality types. Is that not like super limited to believe that there are only nine personality types in the world, but then I would say no, no, no, my friend, it is not like that because there are many different ways in which the personality types express themselves. So while the system has nine personality types, it's in fact just a bit more complicated than that. Autumn (14m 31s): That was another level below the nine as well. Jesper (14m 35s): Yeah. And they were there. There's a lot of, well, there's a lot of other things, but actually it's when it comes to fiction writing, we don't need all those other things. So there's things like triads and personality wings and all this kind of things that makes every of every one of those nine personality types different. So it's not like there is only nine, you have triumphs and wings and whatnot that makes you different. But the good news is that we don't need all that stuff for fiction writing. Jesper (15m 7s): So we are basically focusing on the nine types themselves and I'm thinking what we're going to do is we just going to go through all nine and explain what they are and I'll try to see if I can make it a bit entertaining. And then afterwards we can just talk a bit about how to use those, how to use them as character arcs as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I should probably also say that this is intended as some, a bit of fun here. Jesper (15m 45s): So I don't want it to come across as if I'm, you know, I'm passing judgment on any personality type. Autumn (15m 54s): No there's no. Yeah, definitely. There's no right or wrong answers here. There's nothing except for maybe being on the, one of the lower tiers of any of these is kind of a sad place to be, but there's nothing, nothing, none of them are, right. None of them are wrong numbers. None of them are better to be other than another one. I think it's, if you recognize as what do they say, if you recognize yourself, that's, that's fine. It's just a way of understanding yourself. It is not passing judgment. This is just, especially now we're talking about characters for your book. Autumn (16m 25s): So this is just about creating some really cool characters. Jesper (16m 30s): Yeah, indeed. So there is also, none of these are better than the others, so they all have their own strengths and weaknesses built in. So yeah, if you know something about the anagram and you think I'm stereotyping a bit too much or making too much fun of something, you know, just know that that's not the intention here. I'm just trying to make it a bit entertaining instead of reading out very dry personality type information. Because I think that that would be on the flip side, pretty boring. Jesper (17m 0s): So I do run the risk risk here of maybe offending somebody who feel like I'm a passing judgment, but just know that I'm not. Autumn (17m 8s): Yeah, that is fair enough. Jesper (17m 11s): So hopefully that, that disclaimer is out of the way here so we can, we can get started. And I think maybe as we go through this, perhaps we can think about which personality type you and I think we are ordering. And then afterwards we could just talk about that as well. I don't think we've ever talked about that before, to be honest. Autumn (17m 31s): I, and I actually, I prepared, I pulled out my old anagram. It's not that old a test to see which one I was. And it is funny because I almost had a triple tie. So I guess I am just complicated, but we can talk about that at the end. Jesper (17m 47s): Okay. So what I propose do with that, I'll go through all nine and then maybe once I'm done with each one, I'll just stop there just in case you have something to add or something that I missed or whatever, and then we'll do all nine and then afterward we can talk a bit about how to use these and, and, and which personality type we think we are ourselves. Sounds good. Jesper (18m 17s): Okay. So type number one is called the reformer. So this is the type of person who find it extremely important that things are done, right? So they want to basically make the world a better place and they do so by using principles. And when they're at their best, the reformer is actually a very amazing and passionate per person who excels at what they put their mind to. Jesper (18m 48s): But do you know the kind of person who can get extremely fixated on a very, very small, tiny detail? Autumn (18m 58s): She didn't. We just talk about that. I don't think I'm legally allowed to say yes, but I can say bride Zilla. I saw a bride who was getting ready for her wedding. Can, it starts worrying about, you know, the arrangements and the colors. And if you're off the shoulder dress versus on the shoulder, whether or not you wore a necklace and yeah, that's a total reformer type on the downside, the bedside. But I mean, that's a good side. This is someone who could go change the world. I mean, we could possibly look at some really big climate change activists. Autumn (19m 31s): They might be reformer types maybe. Yeah, Jesper (19m 34s): Yeah. Yeah. So when they're at the bedside, they have a tendency to focus on small details. That really doesn't matter that much. You know, they can be super obsessive about it and just cannot seem to relax. You know, they can be like, if there's a picture hanging there and is slightly crooked, they can get completely hung up on why it's crooked and it should be straightened. Or they could be like, let's say they come over to your house and they just park their car and they ring on the doorbell and you open the door and then they say something like, you know, I just couldn't help to notice as I entered here. Jesper (20m 12s): And I don't mean this the wrong way, but you guys quite dirty probably clean it, but don't use regular soap water. I found this environmental and specialized product that everyone should use. Honestly, I don't understand why you wouldn't use it. It's three times as expensive, but you will make the world a better place if you use it. So you can see that. So, and then the person would probably also go like here, I'll just text you an image of the product. You can go and buy it. You know, Autumn (20m 43s): I know a couple of these. Jesper (20m 45s): Yeah. This can be type number one is, did they have a tendency? As I said before, right? They, they view the world or they, they use principles to maneuver the world and try to make the world a better place that they mean well by it. But they do see the world very black or white that there is either right. Or there's wrong. There's very little in between for them. Autumn (21m 8s): Sounds fair. And yeah, I definitely can point out a few of those folks in the world, but yeah, I know. They mean, well at heart, they just might get a little tied up sometimes on the banalities of it. Jesper (21m 21s): Yeah. So that was a type number one. Anything more to add on that? Autumn (21m 25s): No, I think you covered it very well. Jesper (21m 29s): Okay. So let's move on to type number two, which is called the helper a and S it says in the title there, this person is someone who goes out of the, out of their way to help others. So when the helper is at their best, they are extremely generous and they care a lot for other people at their worst. Well, that's a different matter. So this purse person then at their worst, just doesn't know when to say no to others. Jesper (22m 5s): You know, they can be like neck deep in a million tasks. And then when their significant other comes home from work and ask if the helper will cook dinner, he or she will be like, Oh yeah, yeah, of course I will. Of course I'll get right on that. And then while the person is probably juggling laundry, cleaning and work, some sort of work assignment for the day job at the same time, you know, they will still want to get right on that cooking of dinner. And in the end, of course, because the helper takes on so many things, they will let somebody down in the end. Jesper (22m 41s): And that's where the unhealthy type number two will quickly resort to melodrama. So they'll be like, Oh my God, I have suffered and tortured myself for you. And you're not even grateful. And maybe you'll say, well, sorry, but you were the one who said that you were gonna turn that work assignment in today. And then they might be like, are you mad at me? I get the sense that you're really mad at me. No, I'm not mad. You can just complete your assignment tomorrow. Jesper (23m 12s): It's because I did something wrong. Isn't it? What is wrong with me? Autumn (23m 15s): Please tell me. So that's probably the unhealthy type too. Yes. That's a fun one. Oh my goodness. Okay. I'm going to have to try to be serious a little bit because I, on the good scale type two's helper, I admire them so much because they're warm and generous. I think the, the woman whose property I'm currently living in is definitely maybe a type two. She has the biggest heart and just never suspicious. Just always just the biggest brightest smile and so compassionate. Autumn (23m 49s): And I must be a little bit more jaded than that. I don't think I'm in helper, hint, hint, but I admire that. But the other side, the melodramatic side, I get that I don't get that at either that other one that's like, well, if you couldn't take it on, just say, no, don't sit there and complain that, you know what? I didn't want to let you down. Well, you didn't get it done anyway. So I'm still let down. Yeah. Yeah. Number two. Doesn't see it like that. It's just too difficult to say. No, it is. Autumn (24m 19s): And I do understand that idea of, you know, wanting to be the one who's there for people. And I think every child and every parent has that little bit of a helper somewhere in there where you don't want to let that other person down. So it's a really good type. Like I said, I admire them so much because there's, without them, the world would be not quite as happy and Brighton kind of place. Yeah. That's absolutely sure. Yup. Autumn (24m 49s): Okay. So I think we ready to move on to number three. Oh yes. And type number three is called the achiever. So at their best threes are genuine and confident personalities. So they want to feel valuable. Hence the name, the achiever. Yes. And if you've played a board game with a number three, you will know that they are not only competitive, but they are so to an annoyingly high degree, you know, they could be screaming. Autumn (25m 23s): Things like I'm like the best chess player that ever lived. You are the loser loser. I can't believe how great I am at this game. Number three, I don't think I want to play a board game. Was it achiever? And also three cannot stand to be wrong. And they will go out of their way to explain how, what they did was absolutely perfect. And it was flawless. And this also goes, as far as if they're unhealthy on the scale of three Eastern, it goes as fast to invent stuff about themselves and their own accomplishment as well. Autumn (26m 3s): So they could be saying things like, well, it's actually, so that when I was 15, I played in an official tournament against the best chess player in the world. And yes, I beat his ass, but he got it. Right. Cause it's no, no, no. Of course it was a secret batch that we only did. Yeah. Please don't Google it. Don't Google it. Put away your phone. And in the flight home, I also came up with the business idea for tick-tock. So I actually invented that. Autumn (26m 35s): Wow. That's so that'll be your unhealthy achiever. You kind of watch what they say. Cause you might not believe, but they're there, their belief of it can make you almost believe it. So that's a tough one. Jesper (26m 50s): Yeah. And it's it's it's yeah. They, they will just do anything to avoid admitting that they were wrong. So Autumn (26m 58s): I think I do know someone like that. Hmm. Yeah. A long time ago a coworker now I understand them better. Yeah. Jesper (27m 9s): Yeah. I know. I actually had a previous coworker like that as well. It was amazing. What kind of stories that come up with Jesus. He was like, you should almost believe he was an astronaut or something. Autumn (27m 21s): Huh? That would be, I do remember a joke once where I was on a cruise and we're like, we can be anything we want to be, they don't know who we are, but I don't think we went really forward with it, but that would have been fun. That would have been a total achiever thing to do to start just making up who you are when you're in a new place. This is somebody who does it every day. So I think a healthy achiever could be interesting as long as I tone it down. I don't know if I can tell, take yelling and having their greatness shoved in my face. Autumn (27m 51s): No. Jesper (27m 55s): Okay. So number four, number four, the number four is called the individualist. So when the individualist is at their best, they are very creative, emotionally honest and focused on the beauty of the world. Yeah. However, those who are not at their best can really, really struggle with any dissatisfaction in their life. So they always want to have something that they can't have. Jesper (28m 27s): So if you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, husband, or wife, who's a type four. They can be looking for like the perfect soulmate that probably doesn't exist at all. So they constantly desire everything that others have as well. So like a better house, a better car at a job. Anything can just make these people envious. And because they feel like they are never complete or whole as a person, it just makes them constantly searched for that missing piece of themselves. Jesper (29m 0s): And maybe also just to pull it down on an even like smaller scale too, could be like, so let's say the unhealthy number for you. You're having, you're having a burger with this person. So you're sitting both down in your chair and then number four will say, I just wish my burger tasted as good as good as yours. And you might say, it's the same way we are having the exact same burger. I know, but I feel like yours are still better than mine. I just wished that mine was as good as yours. Autumn (29m 33s): And I would be like, okay, let's switch. And they'd really know Mike was better. Right? Jesper (29m 37s): Yeah. Then they would be like, no, no, I don't want you on this. Mine was, Autumn (29m 43s): Oh yeah. Oh, you make the high level, you know, the one that's well-functioning creative and it sounds so beautiful. Like I would like to be this creative and inspiring person that just wants to express myself, inspires others to do the same thing. But the downside, I guess if you're having a bad year, bad life is just, I would be sick of myself so fast. So I couldn't do it. Autumn (30m 13s): I am, I am obviously not this one either. Cause I am hopelessly usually content with my situation, at least finding at least the bed, the best side of where I'm at. So I just couldn't imagine, just imagine that someone else's drink is better or that person who's always clicking the remote because they think there's something better on TV. I have physically taken the remote away from I'm an ex boyfriend actually. So yeah, I think I dated one of these. It didn't last. Autumn (30m 46s): No. Oh, okay. All right. Type five. Are you ready for one more? Yeah, let's go for five. Jesper (30m 54s): Number five. The investigator. So at their best type fives are insightful, curious and very perceptive. So because of their ability to research and understand rather complex matters, they also have the ability to see the world in innovative new ways. The downside is that the investigator hates feeling useless. So they often struggle with anything that makes them feel incompetent. Jesper (31m 27s): Oh, so if there's a topic that comes up that they don't really know that much about, then the investigator will be the one who rushes home, buys 15 books on the topic, Amazon what's 35 YouTube videos and they just absorb it all because God forbid the best. Anything that the type five doesn't know Autumn (31m 48s): Is that like that meme where you see the ones, like when did you become a brain surgeon? And the author's like last night, that's, that's an investigator. Awesome, indeed. Jesper (32m 0s): But of course, because of all of this then for type number five, life can also feel really demanding and type five often don't believe themselves that they have the needed energy to deal with everything that is strong, met them because every time they face something that they don't know, they need to know it. So they struggle with energies. And as a result, they often socially detest themselves. And also, because of all the things that they know, they also know that stuff that they don't know. Jesper (32m 33s): So they research even more because of that, Autumn (32m 37s): They see that gap. Yeah. They see gap and they don't Jesper (32m 40s): Focus on all the stuff that they do know. Instead they basically start doubting themselves a lot because the more they read, the more they become aware that there's other stuff that they don't know. So they will start doubting themselves even more so it's it's it can become a very vicious, Autumn (32m 58s): Oh, that's horrible. That does sound like a really tough one. So on the upside they're innovative and alert and perceptive and they can create some problem solved. I could imagine this is just a great problem solver. They see the world differently. Or as I definitely, we joke my husband and I, he doesn't, he doesn't see outside the box. He doesn't even see the box. So I definitely think he goes to the investigator side. There's no box for him. And he's just in another universe from the box. And he sees solutions that it's just like, Oh, actually there was a movie, it was a Cinderella movie. Autumn (33m 33s): And it had DaVinci in it for some reason, which is why I remember it because I loved Leonardo DaVinci. I was born on the same day. So he's one of my heroes and he comes up and he gets Cinderella out of a locked door by taking off the hinges. And they're like, Oh my gosh, you're amazing. You're a miracle. You figured out how to open this lock door. And he's like, yes, I will go down in history for opening a door. But again, it is because everyone else was looking at the lock. He looks at the other side and he takes off the hinges. Autumn (34m 3s): That's an investigator. Jesper (34m 5s): Indeed. Indeed. Yes. Okay. So we're up to number six. Yes. Are you ready for this one? I'm ready for this one. Okay. So number six is the loyalist. So this person is funny, compassionate, very reliable. So at their best they are fateful and self-sacrificing, it's a very productive person who looks towards the common. Good. Yeah. So that's good. Now get ready for the bad side. Autumn (34m 33s): I know. I'm going to say, just stop there. I want this person as my sidekick. I want, if I'm the hero, I want this person as my sidekick. Just slate that in. Make sure they're a high functioning loyalist. Cause what's Jesper (34m 44s): Just about to say then you don't want the, Autumn (34m 47s): Yeah. Let's the downside now. All right. What is it? Jesper (34m 51s): Yeah, because type six has a very deep need to feel secure. Oh. And that can evolve into crazy anxiety for them. I don't, you know, there'll be like, what is that? That dark cloud overhead there will suddenly throw a lightning bolt at me. The entire world is probably no, not probably most definitely against me so nobody can be trusted and a while they can act pretty decisively in a crisis situation. Jesper (35m 21s): Right. Afterward they will fall completely apart. Oh no. Yeah. And they will always look for the worst case scenario. So if you're going to go camping with this person, the type number six will probably create like a whole list of all the things that can go wrong and all the things you need to do to, Autumn (35m 41s): I was just going to say, I don't want to go camping with this person said, then you said camp. Oh my goodness. No. I'm thinking though, Sam from the Lord of the rings sounds totally like a loyalist even to the point. I mean being a Hobbit, he wants to sing know he wants to comfort as well. I mean, he, he goes up and down the scale. And so looking at that character, you can kind of see how the scale system works, where if you are tired, having a really bad day, you're going to fall down the scale. Autumn (36m 12s): And you're just going to sit there and talk about the rocks. You're going to fall down and you're going to be eaten by the giant spiders and Gandalf hates you today. And if you're having a good day, you're the one who's gonna rescue Frodo, which is awesome. So that's a really kind of a good example. Jesper (36m 28s): Yeah. I think Sam is actually excellent the same because there's also several times throughout a lot of the rings where he will start being concerned about mr. Frodo. I'm not sure this is a good idea. He does that several times. He becomes a very insecure. Yeah. Autumn (36m 44s): Yeah. So yeah, I still will take one a loyalist at a high functioning level preferably, but I, I will be there to support them on the bad days. That'd be a good sidekick. Jesper (36m 54s): Okay. All right. So type number seven is the Intuitionist all right. So as implied by the name, this person loves to share what he or she is excited about. So it's a very people oriented person who, who usually has a ton of friends. Oh, okay. So they are very fun to be around when they are at their best. Autumn (37m 20s): Of course. Yeah. Everyone likes a high functioning person. Jesper (37m 26s): Yeah. I mean, there's good and bad in all of these exactly. When they are not at their best, they are basically constantly looking to feel an emptiness that they feel inside. They feel inside of themselves. Autumn (37m 41s): That sounds so sad. Jesper (37m 43s): Yeah. Perhaps someday they'll feel contempt if they can just experience one more thing, you know, who says that you can't head off to climb Mount Everest next week. Yeah. We should certainly do that. And then perhaps on the way home we could run the New York marathon. Just that that's also a good idea. That would actually be great. And then I just need a pair of new running shoes and I'm going to visit the new shopping mall right now and find a new pair. Bye, bye. See you. Autumn (38m 12s): Oh no. So that I was gonna say, I think there's definitely, I'm on the lots of friends and so the enthusiasm and all of those things, that's probably my mom and my mom and I are about opposite types. So she's such an extrovert. So this is an extroverted go out, conquer the world, going to go do all this stuff. It sounds great. But boy, that's a tough one for me. If you're a quiet introvert, you're probably don't want to hang out with an enthusiast. Autumn (38m 44s): You're going to get stressed out, stressed out wrangle. Jesper (38m 49s): Basically the enthusiast is always looking for something else to do that they just can't settle down and relax for just a bit. You know, they always have to do something and they get bored very fast. And also, as you can imagine, sevens have a problem finishing anything. Cause they basically just jump from one thing to the next Autumn (39m 10s): All the time. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. So I think they would be an interesting character to throw into a book, but I think on a personal level, I would only be able to take small doses. Jesper (39m 25s): Yeah. Yeah. I follow you. If you're with them for one evening or something, it's probably going to be very entertaining, but living with them Autumn (39m 33s): Most exciting evenings of the year for me, because after that I'll be in a cave. Jesper (39m 40s): Yeah. Okay. So type number eight. We're almost to the end now. So type number eight is to challenge you. So H R when they are at their best, they are amazing friends and partners. So they can both assume a leader role, but they can also follow. So they are very, very resourceful people when they are not at their best. It's an entirely different methadone. Jesper (40m 11s): Yeah. So eights just hate to be controlled by others. And as a result, they tend to dominate their environment. Okay. So this is the only way that the eight believe that no one will be able to harm them is basically by dominating. Oh, that's interesting. If things go wrong it's of course never number eight fault. So the eight we'll see him or herself as pure and very, very honest person. Jesper (40m 42s): So because of that, it is inconceivable that such a person could have any kind of negative effect on others. Right. Right. So if they have to admit that they were wrong, I did something wrong. It takes away from their feeling of control and they don't like that. So they don't do it. So let's say that number eight, forgot to do the dishes. And you might ask, did you do the issues? And number eight, we'll say what? No, but we agreed that you would do that while I did the grocery shopping. Jesper (41m 15s): I don't think I was part of that planning. Oh, well we sat right here at this table and agreed. It was that when I was reading emails on my tablet. Yeah, exactly. So you do remember it. You shouldn't make agreements with me when I'm not paying attention. You need to talk to me at the right times. Autumn (41m 35s): Oh, that's definitely controlling. Jesper (41m 38s): Yeah. And it's not number eight's fault. Of course. Yes, absolutely. He or she has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he didn't, he or she didn't do the dishes that's cost. Of course the other person's fault that they made the arrangement or agreement in Iraq, Pronto. Autumn (41m 53s): Well, that could be, I could see definitely the bad side. This is someone who is controlling and could definitely be abusive to those around them as they age, they force other. Cause it's always someone else's problem. Always someone else's mistake that impinged on them. So that's a problem. But I love the idea of a strong, a, especially like as a leader, like this is like a perfect mentor, figure someone who to be a leader, but can also say it is your time to fly. I'm going to let you go first and I will follow you and support you in this. Autumn (42m 26s): I mean, that's just beautiful. This is who you want as a mentor. This is that person you want on the, on the team with you. But as long as around a good day, not a bad day, otherwise they might be telling you it's your fault, but they just led you into the Dragon's layer, which would be actually a really good con comedic moment. But if you want to write that one out, but Oh my God. So one more, one more line number nine, Jesper (42m 57s): The peacemaker. So the healthy number nine is very, very flexible and probably one of the best people in the world to sit down with for heartfelt conversation. Oh, that sounds nice. Yeah. So the peacemaker wants to feel like their present matters and that's why they are natural born mediators and they always search for peace and stability. Autumn (43m 27s): That sounds nice. I like that. Yeah. So good. So far. So COVID how can we screw this up? Jesper (43m 37s): Well, all of this then feeds into their basic fear, which is conflict. So they worry a lot about losing relationships and they will go out of their way to avoid any kind of conflict. That doesn't sound good. No. And this also goes as far as to basically neglecting their own feelings and priorities in order to avoid that conflict that they fear so much. So they can, because of all of this, they can be quite prone to anxiety and they will not finish anything. Jesper (44m 11s): They start. So if you've ever sort of experienced the person who talks about doing the laundry forever, but never do it well now, you know why? So it's sometimes it's the simple act of making a decision that can feel completely overwhelming when the number nine is at their worst. So it's hell when you simultaneously are trying to please yourself and others at the same time. So what if you are at the library and you want to take a book out, but then you start wondering, but what if somebody else also wants to read this book, then I can't take it. Jesper (44m 52s): No, no, I, but I really want to read this. I should take a note now, but I can't. So it's just, Autumn (44m 57s): You shouldn't making is horrible and tormenting to, this is like, what do you want for dinner? But what do you want? What we'll have whatever you want, but I want to know what you want. It just, she would never kid anywhere. That's horrible. Oh, I might know one or two of these in my life. I have to admit, I think they're on the mild side. Jesper (45m 19s): If, if we think enough about it, we probably most, we probably know most of these in somebody that we know. Yeah, Autumn (45m 25s): Absolutely. At least parts of them, Jesper (45m 28s): Of course. Throughout my nine examples. Yeah. I'm also exaggerating and put it sort of on edge right on purpose. But, but I think it, it, it shows quite well how they are all very different. Autumn (45m 41s): And I think that we, when it comes down to, for choosing one as a character, in a novel, you do have to kind of push it and emphasize it. That'd be, that's sort of all of our writing fantasy and fiction writing was we are, it's all ramped up a little bit. It's not real life you're were kind of pushing everyone to their limits constantly. So that's fair. I think our examples are very fair. Jesper (46m 4s): Right. So did any of these, some sort of stick out to you? Do you know which one you want? Autumn (46m 9s): Well, I know. And it's funny. Cause I do see, like I mentioned, when I took the test, I ranked almost all of mine are within points of each other. It's like one point difference for the top four. And I don't know if that's common, but they basically had to said, you know, you were probably one of these three. So I thought that was funny and I do on certain days and depending on it, cause I, I am left brain, right brain. So I am creative, but I'm also scientific at the same time. So I'm organized as well as chaos. Autumn (46m 41s): So I do, I do, depending on if I'm currently, like if I'm working on formatting, I'm definitely more one way. And if I'm doing something far more creative, like drawing, I'm more the other way. But my top one, which surprises me looking at it now, because I think I must have taken this when I was formatting something. Was it an achiever was my top one and it was achiever investigator were tied and then I was also a peacemaker. So I think those are valid, but I think I stream between all three of them possibly daily, but definitely weekly. Autumn (47m 17s): But yes, there are definitely times I see a little bit of myself in a lot of them. Jesper (47m 23s): Well, yeah, that's also, I mean, again, we don't need to get into for fiction writing about wings and whatnot, but quite normal that if you take the test that depending on the situation you're in right now, you might be sort of editing more to one of your wings rather than the one you actually are. So, so it depends, it depends on the situation you were in when you're taking the tests as well. Autumn (47m 46s): Absolutely. Yeah. Like I said, it, your mindset, there's so many things I've been going on your life and could be pushing you one way or another. And you're relying on one of those other traits that you have instead of, you've probably had to take it a few times and see which one kind of keeps popping up towards the top. Jesper (48m 3s): Yeah. I mean, in the end, the gram, the idea is that you are one of these, you're not several of them, but, but you can sort of borrow from one or the other times, depending on which life situation you were in. And some of them borrow more from others than, than then again than others do. So. Yeah. Autumn (48m 21s): Yeah. And I think, yeah, Jesper (48m 24s): A large portion of it that you can take the test to try to figure out which one you are. But a lot of it is also just about reading about the personality types of sort of feel within yourself. Which one do you feel most aligned with that will usually give you the best answer? Autumn (48m 41s): I think so too. And you'll get, and you'll see aspects of, like you said, with the wings and other things I would say, cause I like the peacemaker one, but I am far more decisive. So I know that it's definitely lower on the list. So the investigator, or maybe the achiever are probably pretty legit for me. How about you? What do you think you are? I'm number eight. You are yeah. A challenger that's isn't that what it was? Yes, that's correct. Autumn (49m 10s): Oh, I see. I guess that that's interesting. Now I must think about this for awhile. So that's very cool. Jesper (49m 24s): Yeah. So I think this whole Instagram stuff is very, very interesting. So we'll put a link in the show notes to the Instagram as a whole. So you can go to the website and read more about it. If you're interesting, even outside of fiction writing, I, I do find it very, very interesting. Autumn (49m 43s): It's so fascinating to wonder why people tick. I think all good writers, all people who get into character development end up being psychologists to some little degree, we kind of have this stuff and yes. And plus in the show notes too, we will put in a link to the plotting book, which we currently have on preorder where we go over, how to use these anagrams to create characters like we've been talking about today, Jesper (50m 8s): Correct? Yeah. And in the plotting bogus, well, we have actively listed out all the steps between the very healthy one and a very unhealthy one. And basically that's how you can use the, to develop the character arc. So you can sort of slide the couch in and say, okay, they are at this level. And then by the end of this book or the final book in the trilogy or whatever it may be, I want them at that level. And then of course you can slide them up or down depending on what you want them and what, where the story takes them. But by using those steps that we have listed in plotting book, it becomes very, very easy for you to understand how to slide them up and down, where will they end at the end of their arc from a personality point of view. Jesper (50m 50s): And yeah, you'll have to read it in the plotting book itself, but I can promise you some of the worst cases for some of these really, really, really bad, bad, you can definitely put some characters into some very dark places, which is great for an insane villain. Yeah. But also you can also stop the character out on a very low level and then move them upward. So that by the end of the series, they've become a much, much better version of themselves. So that's also cool. Very cool. Yeah. Jesper (51m 20s): So we'll add a link to that as well as autumn set in the show notes. It is on preorder when you're listening to this, but once we reached the 3rd of August and that's 2020, if you're listening to this later, but the 3rd of August, 2020, the price of that book will go up. In fact, it will double. So if you're interested, I recommend that you go and purchase the preorder right now, as long as you can get it for half price. So yeah, there is a link in the show notes there sounds good. Jesper (51m 53s): Okay. So we hope you enjoy today's episode next Monday. And if all goes well there, I will have a very interesting interview lined up for you. Narrator (52m 5s): If you like, what you just heard. There's a few things you can do to support the am writing fantasy podcast. Please tell a fellow author about the show and visit us at Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. You can also join autumn and Yesper on patrion.com/and writing fantasy for as little as a dollar a month, you'll get awesome rewards and keep the M writing fantasy podcast going, stay safe out there and see you next Monday.

Bron chats with Ali Moore (psychotherapist) about acceptance, resilience, and living with your disease. Recognising your feelings and being kind to yourself, acknowledging that there are always dark days alongside the brighter days are important steps to coping with the unpredictability of MS. “Acceptance can feel quite passive … but it's really powerful. Once you get to that point where you say, ‘I'm accountable' and ‘I'm responsible'”   TRANSCRIPT This is the MS show podcast, people with multiple sclerosis and their families who want information and inspiration. I'm Bron Webster. I've been living with Ms for over 20 years. I'll be sharing with you tips stories from ways to keep going through them and Hello, and today I'm really, really excited to be with my good friend Ali Moore and Ali is a behavioral therapist, a coach and author and she specializes in the science of self esteem and relationships. She's also a celebrant. So welcome, Allie. It's great to have you today. Thank you. Good to be here. So can you tell us a little bit just about your background First of all, and how you got into what it is that you're doing? Sure. So I like many people have Corporate background originally, and I started off many years ago in the world of HR, but I was always fascinated by people. And so I quickly moved into leadership development and training. And through that I qualified to be a coach. And when I was doing coaching, I absolutely loved it. And I was I was blessed to work for what was at the time quite small company. And you may have heard a bit called Amazon. And I joined them just as they came into the UK. So I was really blessed to have my career, grow with them, and be able to explore this interest in training, development and people. So qualifying as a coach was amazing. But I then went through some life experiences myself and I went through psychotherapy, and it made me realize that there was there was an added extra that I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to give people the support That the therapy process had had really given me. And it really enabled me to work through some of those experiences that I had been through myself. So I went on to train as a therapist, and through that I just really kept my love of people and their stories and what makes people tick. And that's kind of where my love of looking at relationships and self esteem came from. I just believe that if we nurture our self esteem, and we understand where that comes from, it just really underpins everything about the lives that we need and the relationships that that we have. So I've been really blessed to be able to set up my private practice. And I've been in private practice now for four and a half years and do a whole mixture do one to ones or do membership. Yeah, it's it's really varied and that's an absolute necessity. Smee great stuff. And obviously you're here and we're doing a podcast for the MS show. Now, you yourself don't live with Ms. But you know me, you see how I sort of experience Ms. And over your times have you encountered any health battles and challenges? For me personally? Um, um, yes. So I am, it isn't on the scale of of, of Ms. As you say I don't have MS myself, I encounter things in two ways. Firstly, I work with quite a few clients who've got long term health conditions, but personally, I have a condition called TMJ which is a nerve problem that kind of starts off around the jaw area but actually can be triggered once you have it by stress and you No and I had days when I really have to manage that it causes quite intense migraine headaches, pain and pain right down my left side. And this was originally caused by some surgery that I had a few years ago. And following that surgery, I spent six months with a walkingstick, which was really unexpected. And that was nothing to do with the actual surgery, but from the process that I went through. So whilst I don't have that experience of a condition like Ms, as I say, I see that with my clients, and I do have a condition that I've really had to kind of take note of and understand that I have my limitations. Brilliant. Yeah, not brilliant. It's not. It's not a great thing. But what it means is that you absolutely get the challenges that all of the listeners to this podcast, my 10 counter, you've been through that process of coming terms with having an unpredictable condition that just wipes you out. And I just thought right at the top of the conversation, I just think that is a really useful thing to put into context that not only do you help people with all this wonderful therapy that you offer, and all the work that you do about the reconnection movement that I know you're heavily involved in, but you have also personally got experience. So thanks for sharing that with us before we get into things. And so I know that you have been to the Tower of London and that you have had a really big stage talking about self esteem. Yes. So what sort of what sort of things have you been involved in on your self in self esteem in your relationships? Wow. Yes. So I was asked a couple of ago to be the lead speaker for historical palaces at the Tower of London. And they were celebrating 100 years of boats for women. And I work predominantly with women on their self esteem. So it was a real honor to go along and do the presentation and talk to the audience that was coming to the Tower of London about the concept of self esteem. I've also done various talks at different conferences. I have run my own empowerment days, where we talk to women about what that means to feel empowered, and also hosting a sort of day retreat that I run called find your role which is all about inviting women to come along and understand what it means to have a nurture that self esteem. So I've had loads of opportunities, as well as being a published author, which was a which was lovely thing to happen. And my book was published Just over 18 months ago, and what's the name of the book Ali? it's called reconnect your life. And it's, um, it's a mixture of client stories. It's a mixture of Theory and Applications and mindful living. And it's also a 30 day journaling process to help you to also get reconnected to who you are and help sort of lift that feeling of self esteem within. Okay, and then I've got a copy of that book. I haven't done the 30 day journaling. I will I'm a man. But, but there are some really, really important and useful sections in there that I've read. And something that I'm really keen on in terms of living with multiple sclerosis is the whole process that I've been through of grieving, and I happen to find myself Again, and reach that point of accepting my condition. And it's really difficult I find, to put acceptance to explain what it is and how it feels. And I just wonder, because I know you've got a whole section in your book about acceptance. I know with Ms. accepting that we've got ms or we've got a disability. It's not easy. And I just wondered if you could share your wisdom. I will, I will try. So the concept of acceptance has been huge for me in terms of understanding my own journey of personal development and dealing with the things that I've experienced. And also watching how my clients go through that process. And it forms one of the key tenants, I just feel that acceptance as as a concept is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle that people go through. So I can remember when I was first kind of bringing the concept of mindful living, which is a big part of how I work with clients into my practice alongside the traditional therapy, and talking therapy, and feeling like acceptance at the time, to me sounded a bit passive, it sounded as though we just kind of were expected to put up with something. And it was just how it was. And that felt to me a bit like you were being asked to give in, you know, and give up wrong and, you know, we talked about moving forward, don't wait, you know, and, and it was only when I started this and in the research that I've also done in terms of how people come to terms with relationships, and thing with their own sense of self discovery that acceptance is actually really powerful. So acceptance is all about understanding that what has happened has happened and it can't unhappen. But that because you've made that choice to say, this is where I am. And you've also started to take on board that you are accountable and responsible for yourself, as opposed to blaming everyone else or blaming the world, you know, carrying Angus through with you that once you get to that point that says, actually, I'm accountable, and I'm responsible, and this is where I am and this is what's happened. Suddenly, I saw clients starting to see possibilities. And it happens quite quietly. I've done talks on this where I've said, you know, I've never yet had a client walk into a The therapy room and go, Oh, my goodness, Sally, I've got it, you know, it's all become clear. And the process of acceptance has happened over a period of time. And it's just little things in the language where initially, there might be blame for something else. They might be blaming the situation, other people, the world. And all and they don't see that they've got any options. They don't see that they've got choice, or they don't feel like they're worthy, or they don't feel like they've got that ability. And then suddenly, they start to use phrases like, well, maybe. Well, maybe I could have a go. Well, you Yeah, that might be a good point. Well, I could look at it differently. Well, what if and I think when you see people moving into that space, you kind of realize that they're starting on that journey of acceptance, they're starting to see that they can choose now how they live with whatever it is going forward. Are you choosing how to live life going forward, did you know that I run a private Facebook group of people with multiple sclerosis and their families, it's called multiple sclerosis and UK help multiple success community. It's the perfect place to hang out and get more SMS inspiration and motivation. All you need to do is look in Facebook, multiple sclerosis and UK help multiple success communities. I'll see you back. Absolutely. And I think some of the people that I talk with whether it be online conversations, I really say to them Ultimately you are in a system where you are going to have a neurologist, and you're going to have an MS nurse, and you're going to have a group of people around you. But this is your disease, and this is your body. And actually, you don't need to wait for those people to come to you with any of the answers or any of the next steps. Try and it comes back to what you were just saying about not. It's not so much blaming other people, although I'm sure there's a lot of kinds of feelings of blame that go on. But I say to people, don't wait for these other people. They're not responsible for action, and they're not responsible for whatever's going to happen. So try and take a little bit of ownership and see what you can do for yourself. Yes. And so is that partway along the acceptance path when you start taking that responsibility, definitely because people can become quite passive and they can put themselves right in the hands of everyone else. And they can leave it up to other people to make their decisions for them, because perhaps they feel they don't have the knowledge themselves. They're not the expert, and it can feel as though things are being done to us. But as humans, we like to be in control. You know, I have never met a client as yet, who would completely like to hand over the reins to somebody else, there is always an element of wanting to be in control. And when you realize that, no, you may not be the expert in this particular disease, you know, from a medical perspective, but you are the expert in terms of how you feel and your body and you realize that actually, you can be the person who guides the people around and they stop being people who are doing things to you. And they start being people who are there to support you in the decisions you want to make. That that is, yeah, that is a huge part of seeing that people are moving into that sign of acceptance. And I think what you've just said about seeing them and working with them in a different way. Yeah, that is a really positive thing for people to take away. Because I do hear people say, you know, things ground to a halt or I wasn't being given all the information. And it's about creating a bit of a team spirit with your professionals, and keeping your own interests and your desires in mind. Yes, yeah. And also what happens With multiple sclerosis for many people, not everybody, you go through life you have a diagnosis and your diagnosis is this is one of my personal hobbyhorses. But your diagnosis is one where you are faced with a progressive neurological condition. Yeah. which in itself is a massive. They're really big words to hear. And dealing with that is huge. But the way that the disease progresses is different for everybody, but people will tend to think, oh, I've just got messed up, right. Okay, I know what's going on. And I know how to expect everything that's happening in my life and I know that my left sides really weak. So they make adjustments for that. But Ms being what it is. It just then for whatever reason, decides It's going to throw another curveball at you and hit you with another set of symptoms that you've never ever encountered. And so I've sort of come to the realization that with MS, we end up going through this process of grieving, not just at the point of diagnosis, but on an ongoing basis as things happen time and time again. Yeah. And I just wanted to sort of, I guess, kick that around a little bit with you to see how that fits into the whole landscape of our belief in ourselves and our connection with ourselves, etc. So, I think that I think that's a huge thing. And I know you and I have chatted about this before because we use this analogy of grief don't mean and I think there is a grieving for the person that you felt that you were before. The diagnosis or for many of my clients before the incident happened, you know, there was that me before. And then whatever it is happens. But in certain situations, the situation is now as it is and it doesn't change. So we hear this phrase used a lot, the new normal. And you can be in a situation where something awful has happened and you're grieving for that and you're grieving for the person you were. But you are now in a pretty stable landscape all by it, not one that you wanted to be in. But you are able to kind of come to terms and think what is this new normal, but with something like Ms. As you say that it's like you're standing on shifting sands, isn't it because you're always moving. And so that grief cycle that we talked about, in general terms of denial and anger, And acceptance, you know is included within that grief cycle is is not linear anyway, for most people, but certainly, this is something where you're constantly having to readjust who you are and you're constantly potentially feeling an impact on your sense of identity, your sense of self and I talk about self esteem as being a platform, you know, and it's held up by pillars like self worth, self confidence, how much you value yourself, your social identity, how other people see you. And when those are all lovely and solid and cemented into the ground, you have this wonderful platform on which to be the person that you that you want to be. But when they get knocked and chopped, and they become wobbly, we start to lose confidence in ourselves and we start to doubt yourself. And there is this complexity when you are faced with something thing which is forever changing, which suddenly comes out of the blue and knocks you for six again, about how do you ever find that stable footing? How do you ever find the identity of the person that you are now? Because it's it's constantly changing? And it's Yeah, it's it's a real challenge and and quite different, I think to people who have gone through an incident awful as it was, but are now faced with adjusting to life afterwards. So I think it's an extra, it makes it extra difficult, and I think anybody that lives with this sort of condition. I think it's just another reason that you can say to yourself, this is how bloody strong I am. Actually, yes, I'm doing this. And I'm dealing with this. And if you hit those new experiences, and those new Hard times, you know, from your past experience, I guess that you can get through this. Yes. It might be difficult. Yeah. What were you going to say? I think that's really important is to keep track of your achievements. And that might sound corny, but to keep track of those achievements so that when something new occurs, you do have that to fall back on. You can look back and say, Well, look, this happened. And I and I got through it this way. And then that happened. And I got through it this way, and start to build up that bank of tools that will allow you to think about how you're going to apply those tools. Almost I guess it acceptance comes into play again here. It's almost like the acceptance that something else is most likely going to happen. Right? Yeah. But if I'm okay in accepting that, then in a way I can prepare myself, so it's not constantly coming out of the blue. Yeah. And I think that's probably what I've reached. So hard as that new. I had a new symptom hit me that I'd never had. Yeah. And so it hit me and I went through the whole couple of days of, wow, what is this? How am I going to cope with this? But then, because I've lived with it for as long as I have, I've already built up the words that I used to talk to myself to say, but this is this is something that you know, can happen. Yeah. And that you are going to get through it. Yeah. So I think at the outset of the diagnosis, it might feel really difficult. Yeah, every time something comes, but as time progresses, you can build up that resilience Definitely, yeah, I think resilience is a really important element for people to bring into their lives when they've got Ms. Absolutely. And and we know now that resilience is something that, you know, not everybody has in bucket loads, you know, that due to lots of issues and challenges they may face, but it is something that you can grow. It is something that you can learn. So the fact that you haven't felt so resilient, perhaps previously, does not mean that you don't have the capacity to build that resilience. And I think that's a really important message that I talk with my clients a lot based on lots of situations, you know, you may, you've may have felt in the past that you didn't have that toolkit, but that doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to have it now. And for people that are thinking my resilience Actually, I'm All Out of response, I'm all out of their ability to be able to deal with this and they just want to shut themselves away. Do you? And do you come across people in your in your business in your sort of client list? Who are at that stage? And what would you say to them? And what advice would you give them as part of your conversations that you're having with them? Yeah, of course. The first thing is with the type of therapy that I practice, we're not looking to create a perfect life. We are looking to understand that to live well. There are dark times and there are happy times, there's lightness, dark, there's joy and there's sadness and understanding that you will have days when you feel like that and you're entitled to them. And there's nothing wrong in feeling like you want to shut yourself away and being able to say to yourself, okay, if I feel that way, and I want to do that Starting to ask yourself, what is it I need from this time? What is it that I want to reflect on? What is it that my brain My body is saying to me at this time? Is it that actually you you need rest? And you just need some space away from people? Is it that there's something that you need to work through? And, and it's about having that ability to question yourself as to why you're doing it. It is not about saying, I need to get over this as quickly as possible. And I should always be trying to look on the positive side, you know, that isn't how resilience works. Resilience is about being able to lean into those tough times and say, What am I going to gain? So I'm going to shut myself away, and I'm going to withdraw because I've just about had enough. What would I gain from doing that? What change will that make for me? And these are the kinds of questions that when you start getting into them having that conversation, you tend to find that you come up with something that allows you to take another step outside that door. And that might sound a little bit airy fairy, but this is not a there is not. As you know that there is not an exact science to this, you know, there is not a solution where I say, Oh, you feel that way. So do this, and then you'll feel better. And then you can just carry on, it is about just being able to recognize that it's about acknowledging that it's okay to be like that and to feel like that and we don't have to carry on regardless, and we can feel sorry for ourselves. And a lot of clients are surprised when I say that to them because we've we've had this movement of positive psychology, and it's got a bit misinterpreted and everyone thinks that they've got to be thinking positive all the time. And that isn't how it works, you know? So questioning yourself questioning why it's happening question What it's going to bring you and thinking about what you might do next, and being kind and compassionate to yourself. And accepting that these days will happen is a really good place to start in terms of coming out the other side. That's really, really good in terms of ideas. And I only wish that back in the day when I was stuck in my place that I was stuck in that I had known somebody like you. And that way we could have talked about such things. But I think they are really really useful tips. And that to know that actually, this is quite normal. And then on the other side, there are going to be a lot of people that were just getting on with life with Ms. And are celebrating and they are out there and they are running marathons or doing amazing things and that we really don't know Have to measure ourselves against anybody else? Absolutely not. I mean, we don't want to be comparing ourselves regardless, you know, that compare tinnitus is the thief of joy is one of my favorite sayings. And we all find ourselves at some point comparing ourselves to somebody else. I have regularly with clients to use, use an analogy that you and I spoke about. I don't even know if you remember talking to me about this, but you spoke to me about the fact that you can, you can live against your illness constantly trying to prove yourself constantly trying to prove that it's not going to affect you, and it's not going to impact you. And actually all that does is create more problems or you can live with your disease. And you can go into that place of acceptance, understand your limitations, but that's it then it doesn't have to define you if you feel like running away. marathon, run a marathon. But if you're like me, and you can barely run to the shops, and that is without ms, then that's okay as well, right? We are all at different places in our lives and in our journeys, and we live with what we have with us as a person rather than constantly feeling like, I got to do better. You know, we there's a lot of that going on in the world. And for a lot of people, and we need to stop trying to do all of this being your best you and all of that just be you just as well. And be you. Yeah. Yeah. You're good enough as you are. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I like that. I think we could chat for hours and hours and hours, about all sorts of things. But I think in terms of this episode, and really unpacking accepts Some resilience I think has been fantastic. And I really hope that is going to be of use to people and that people take some inspiration and some action. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Ali, when I get to the end of when I'm talking to people for the podcast, I always ask a totally unrelated question that gives us a little bit of an insight into you when your personality can that is thinking about you can be anywhere in the world. So COVID lockdown is no longer. Okay, be anywhere in the world. Yeah. And you're going to be drinking your favorites drink. It can be alcoholic, non alcoholic, whatever it might be. Oh, and we'd really like to know where you would be. Gosh, I would be for anywhere in the world. Actually, my favorite spot on planet Earth is the chalice well gardens in Glastonbury. And I would be sitting there in the sun in the meadow, I would be drinking my favorite tipple, which is, as most people know, a lovely glass of Prosecco, which I'd have in my lovely stylish hip flask that I carry with me, and plus properly my Nan's flask with some tea in it as well. And looking up the hill at the tool that sits on the hill in Glastonbury. Yeah, I think that's, I think if I could choose anywhere, that's where I would be and that's what I'd be drinking. Mm hmm. And would it be daytime? Would it be sunset time? Would it be warm weather? Oh, it'd be warm weather. Gotta be more than weather. Yeah, I'm not good in the cold. And, and it would be probably just after midday, actually, just after the one minute meditation silence that they hold there. And yeah, when it's and it's just got a really peaceful feel. And yeah, that that's where I would be lovely. That is great. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ali. You're welcome. It's been great to chat with you. Thanks so much for listening to today's ms show. Please subscribe rate and review this podcast. If you'd like to get more involved with the MS show. Why not join our Facebook community. Just search Facebook for the MS show. for another dose, Ms information and inspiration. You've been listening to the MS show podcast Copyright: Bron Webster 2020

The task force is acting in an advisory capacity to the governor and studies the causes of racial disparities in the impact of COVID-19 and recommends actions to immediately address such disparities and the historical and systemic inequities that underlie them.   There are two Spartans on the task force. Debra Furr-Holden is an epidemiologist and the associate dean for Public Health Integration at Michigan State University and the director of the Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions. Randy Rasch is professor and dean of the MSU College of Nursing.   “When we were looking at the coronavirus and the pandemic in Michigan, we recognized that African-Americans, who are 14 percent of our population, were overrepresented in terms of infection with the COVID-19 disease and deaths from it at about 40 percent,” says Rasch.  “The thing that I appreciate the most about the task force is, one, the work was already afoot,” adds Furr-Holden. “There was already work underway to deal with racial, ethnic, and other vulnerable and marginalized population disparities. We have a lot of groups and a lot of segments of our population in Michigan that are at excess risk for not getting basic primary care and preventive services.  “What we've seen during COVID-19 is an amplification effect. So COVID-19 was not the beginning of health disparities for Michigan or the nation. It unveiled some very important underlying both social and political determinants to health and has given us an opportunity to identity targets for intervention so we can have people experience health and access to healthcare as a right and not a privilege that's based on economics or race or ethnicity or any other type of status.”  “One of the things that the primary care work group is also looking at is who are those trusted members in the community who can work with an understanding of how people are actually living and think creatively how to do social distancing, how to do the hand-washing, and do all those things that we take for granted that are recommended by CDC that are a challenge for the folks who we're really trying to work with,” says Rasch. “We want to identify the trusted folks in a community who can also really get that message across,” Rasch says.   “We have an opportunity before us,” adds Furr-Holden. “I feel like as a nation and as a global community, we are at our most vulnerable right now. The virus has taken a toll on everybody independent of race, economics, gender, and gender identity. This has just made us all very vulnerable and in some respects, has allowed us to understand, see, process, and digest and almost be forced to confront the world that we live in. Fundamentally, we know that we don't live in a world where opportunity for health and growth and development is realized equally and equitably by all people.   “A lot of us have now had to confront that that is not actually the society that we live in either at a national level or at a global level. Some of us sort of knew this and have had different lived experiences that speak to it, but now it's become inescapable. So I really just encourage people to use this opportunity while we are in this period of modified operations and people are at home and almost forced to digest and consume media and other things that are happening not to be overwhelmed by it, but to really say, ‘Okay. If I didn't see it or understand it before, I can see it and understand it now. What can I do and who can I be as a champion for a world that really works for everybody?'   “For many of us on the front lines of healthcare, this has always been our mission. That health is something that people experience as a right and not as a privilege. In a nation as rich and as capable and innovative as ours, I think we should be global leaders in developing and implementing a world that works for everyone. I encourage people to stay safe and continue to practice all the protocols. I remind people we are in the middle of the pandemic. It is far from over. There is an opportunity before us to really just now confront some of our gaps in having health and healthcare be something that is a right and not a privilege.”   “I think the lesson that we can really learn while we, as Debra said, are sheltered in and have the time is to reflect on who we are as human beings and members of the human race and that we really are connected to each other,” says Rasch. And that when the most marginalized are doing well, we probably all do much better. We're connected in ways that are really important. I think this is a great time to revisit that. We've had two horrible things happen in our country in the last several weeks, and some of it has been very distressing. You can lose hope, but there are glimmers that should make us all feel hope for what's possible if we work collectively to address these issues.”   MSU Today airs Sunday mornings at 9:00 on 105.1 FM, AM 870, and your smart speaker and connected devices. 

Welcome, everyone. It is now time for COVID Episode 6.0. We have an incredible special guest this time, of course, I'm Eric Rieger with your host, Dr. Kenneth Brown. But today, we have Aubrey Levitt. She is the CEO of Postbiotics Plus. She's very much into research and an incredible entrepreneur certainly knows a lot of the people in the scientific community that have inspired Ken and I to dig deeper to look further. Without further ado, Ken would you like to say hello to Aubrey, and we'll get started.So you can imagine my excitement when I found somebody that was discussing postbiotics also. So Aubrey, thank you so much for coming in. Eric, do we have any...we need to shout out to our sponsors real quick? No, we don't have to do that. We just did that. You're all you're all here.So Aubrey Levitt. Oh my goodness. This is so cool. I felt like I was alone on an island discussing post biotics and then I have this little routine. I'm a very routine type person. I like to work out and go to the sauna. And I do a little mindfulness meditation. And then I just kind of scroll for the last little 10 minutes on podcasts and I just typed in postbiotics and I couldn't believe it. The CEO of postbiotics plus I'm like, not only does she know about it, she's an entrepreneur. She's smart. And she's got like, and then I went to your website, I'm like, she's got like six PhDs working for her like, holy cow, we have got to track this woman down. So I apologize that I stalked you. But thank you so much for coming on the show.No I was so happy about that. It's so nice to have somebody else on this island with me. Yeah, we put our stake in the ground like postbiotics and then echoes for a couple years, just looking back but no, it's very...So we're calling this COVID episode 6.0 because although we're gonna talk about the microbiome I want to let you in on something that you're doing. So congratulations to you and your desire to go through science first, hire these PhDs make something effective because you're going to change the world like I believe that we're helping to change the world. A article just came out this month, discussing the gut, the actual title is this gut microbiota and COVID-19 possible link and implications. And then another one just came out that said a comprehensive review on the effect of plant metabolites on Coronavirus. Plant metabolites means postbiotics and then somebody that we will get you in contact with is a PhD that we're working with her name is Silvia Molino, she did it to get her PhD. Her postdoctoral study is so cool. She actually looked at invitro digestion and fermentation of stable polyphenols. So she was able to do an in and of course, invitro means in a lab. So she was able to show the postbiotic effect once through digestion and then once the microbiome comes in contact with it. Absolutely brilliant and so cool. So COVID you're making a difference!Yeah. All across the board. No, yeah, I just want to say that one of the things that started this fascination for me was you just look at fermented foods, right, which are full of postbiotics and how much of a role they have played in every culture. And we may not have known why in the past, but when we're looking through the lens of the microbiome, we can see maybe a deeper into what's happening here. You know, I know people know probiotics and they know prebiotics of fiber. But when the probiotics eat the prebiotics, then this magic happens. And that's what's also happening in your gut, right if you have all those elements working.Yeah, totally.And I think why and what I've seen also why it directly relates to COVID is, you know, people are getting are at risk for secondary infections. And also people are getting antibiotics and whatnot. And that directly destroys the microbiome as we know, which leaves them vulnerable to being populated by whatever's there. And, and weakens them.If I'm knowing that kind of research and listening to the PhDs while y'all are constructing the studies, and or the clinical trials to find out what is actually going to work. What are some of the endpoint measures that you that some of your PhDs are examining? Is it because they're looking for what the bacteria will do with the things that you present like postbiotics, as you mentioned before, and how do you measure that, is it like short chain fatty acid stuff or what...We were looking specifically at one thing and just diversity overall, so we were looking at a point of injury. So the one because we wanted to kind of pare it down to. Okay, we know, we're researching the microbiome, and we're looking all these various things, but it's a complex ecosystem, right. And the one thing we do know is that when there is a lot of diversity that always correlates with health. And so we really pared it back to that of okay, but in our modern lifestyle, we have many, many things that affect that diversity and really, you know, strip it. So we looked at antibiotics first in our first study to say antibiotics is one of the harshest things that wipe out gut diversity and leave us susceptible in this window afterwards to either an opportunistic, you know, pathogen taking over or maybe just not recovering to the diversity that we had before. And so we did a study our initial study was to look at these antibiotics because think about it, also, people are coming in for maybe a sinusitis. So having their gut wiped out is a, you know, side effect that is not intended. It's a consequence that's not intended. So we gave them a fermented herbal product, which is full of postbiotics, because essentially, we put probiotic bacteria with the herbal components and it's breaking them down with we gave them that with some live probiotics as well. And we had a control group and we we took their stool samples to see if we are protecting their diversity. So right when they got the treatment, and then you know, all throughout the treatment and 10 days after, and we saw Yeah, so the endpoint was gut diversity is looking to see if the ecosystem was intact.I couldn't agree more and Brown we've talked about this in the past. And of course, we've seen this in the hospital. Oftentimes when people are given really powerful antibiotics and they come to the hospital. Unfortunately, the end result is often c diff, and it's exactly what it does. It goes through it wipes out all of the bacteria we and it tears down all c diff is all that's left in incredible diarrhea which persists forever so that you're certainly speaking I think that bringing up c diff is probably the most extreme version of lack of diversity because you wipe out everything but one particular bacteria that then populates so it's almost like having a neighborhood where only one family dominates and they decide what happens well c-diff kills people. It's very serious. I'm a huge as a, as a gastroenterologist, I reluctantly ever try to put anybody on antibiotics and I see So my research was in bacterial overgrowth SIBO, which is, which is a consequence of antibiotics all the time. My classic patient would be somebody that said, I got a sinusitis just like you said, five years ago, took this big round of antibiotics and I've never been right since. And that's that's the patient comes to me as a gastroenterologist.Yeah. And I was that patient because when I was a kid, I had antibiotics probably every week for years and then I had to go in and have two weeks straight of antibiotics, because I punctured a lung. And so they put you on IV antibiotics. And you know, ever since then it was just sort of this imbalance that couldn't get. I couldn't figure out how to right. And I didn't even know because that was sort of so early on. It was just this uphill battle that I wasn't aware of. So that was one of the things behind of like, you know, I could do everything perfect, but the moment too much stress would come on or whatever else would happen, I would fall back on my resiliency wasn't there, the normal resiliency that you would think you would have.So I could talk postbiotics all day, but now you just got me super intrigued about Aubrey Levitt. And how I built this, how does a woman this powerhouse CEO doing this? You just said you essentially had a very traumatic childhood, what was going on?Well, you know, it's a bit of a layered story, but it was I think it started also with this more, you know, trauma when I was a baby of someone had broken in and I actually had a memory of it, which is even weirder, you know, with a gun, but it put me on this hyper vigilant, very stressful response for years after where I was watching the window and the door couldn't sleep. And you know, this leads to an increase in illness where I was having strep throat probably every week. And I'm only putting these pieces together now actually looking backwards retrospectively, but you have these series of illnesses that which lead to pneumonia and then lead to puncturing a lung. And this is all pre second grade, you know, that happened in second grade. So you're on, you know, just a massive amounts of medication, and not compared to maybe some to what some other kids are having, but it was a lot for me at the time.I mean, I would argue that getting antibiotics that often could be one of the most traumatic things that somebody could do because you will never be able to rebuild this microbiome.Yeah, it becomes and then you only realize later how much it's really affecting you. It throws off your hormones, it throws off your immune system throws off, you know, all sorts of things that were just out of whack with without a real explanation. You know, you'd go to see these various doctors and they couldn't pinpoint what was the root cause.Wow, how are your parents through this whole process?You know, I don't think anybody thought anything of it at the time, right? They were actually very healthy and very conscious of all these things and did their best. But, you know, what are you going to do when your kid has 104 fever every other week? Right? I mean, you just don't really have a choice.Yeah. Wow. And that is wild. So I would, I would even couple that did on top of that. On top of the biodiversity that's being eliminated through long term antibiotics, you've also got, I mean, the stress of anxiety, which is obviously something that you're referencing, if you're staring at a door or window as a young kiddo, and it persists for days. I mean, the time to repair is constantly being thwarted by your body's vigilant state of trying to always be in fight or flight, there is no repair time. That's pretty wild.Yeah, and I don't think people realize how much stress wears on their, their immune system and their body and just like you're saying, it doesn't give you that rest and digest time to recover, which is very essential, you know, to bounce back. So. And I think also that got me very interested in like the gut brain response and how that vagus nerve talks between the two because you're just always reacting. Right?Okay, so we're both smiling because this is just right up Ken's ally. This is exactly whatI just think it's hilarious. This is the first time that we've actually talked. And you're literally mimicking everything that we say. We are a kindred spirit here. We've been on the same island...studying the same stuff.Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, even when we when I created this first product, I think one of the issues that I was finding is that okay, I would take these herbal remedies, I would, you know, eat these great foods, but I still wasn't able to digest them properly or really utilize them properly. And because I wasn't seeing the results I wanted and when I fermented these herbs, what what was very interesting is I actually even felt a focus and a mood difference right away, which is how I got into this post biotic work because I thought, wow, they're like, I think there's GABA or something in here that is different than what was in here when you started with the original product.So you felt it almost immediately.Yeah, I did, I did. And I felt the difference. And so then I went and tested and that there was GABA in it. And also too, if I was actually feeling that and because it was a small amount, I mean and I can't be sure that's just a assumption on my part, but that got me really interested. I started talking to these guys out of corp, you know, Ted Dinin, and they were studying this essentially how the gut communicates to the brain through the signaling molecules and these neurotransmitters that are released through this fermentation process, even if it's in your gut. And so I just went down this rabbit hole and ended up partnering with the scientists out of Memorial Sloan Kettering. Now he's at NYU, who, who was also interested in the same thing of these metabolites. And not only they also signal to the other bacteria in your gut, so there's just this constant communication going on between everything. Not not to get too in the weeds,No, totally because this perfect, this is the conversation I have with my patients all the time, is when pharmaceutical companies and I'm not putting them on blast, but when pharmaceutical companies try and do something they tend to focus on on a molecule that they can patent. And what we're learning is that the microbiome is way too complex, where we're at right now with our, with our research, so you can do these giant stool studies. And so I get all these people that come from functional medicine doctors with these, these gi DNA analysis, and they're like, Yeah, do something like that we can do the test, you don't really know how to manipulate 100 trillion bacteria. Exactly. And so what I tell everybody is, we do know that if you can diversify, they will figure it out. Meaning they when you have a proper diversification, a proper signaling mechanism where they will keep control of each other, and they send signals to your brain, we now know Eric and I did a whole episode just on the negative effects of short chain fatty acids, when they're out of proportion, meaning butyrate being real good. But yeah, if you have too much acetate, if you have too much propionic acid out of proportion, that crosses the blood brain barrier and creates that that gut brain situation. So it's all about just let your body let those microbiome, figure it out. We're not going to out think them.Yeah. And that's, that's also something that really excites me about this whole field is the ecosystem approach, I think is really an opportunity to look at medicine differently than how we've been looking in the at in the past, like this lock and key approach is doesn't work as you're saying. It's sort of the it's very complex, it requires more systems medicine approach of looking at how, if you touch this point, it affects this whole area around it. And I think it's also to me, the one area that's speaking to all different fields, you know, it's speaking to Western medicine, allopathic medicine, speaking to functional medicine, and it's kind of everybody because we don't know exactly what's happening here. But we all agree, it's important, and we all agree it matters. And that that hasn't really happened before. I mean, you guys are the you're the doctor, so maybe you could speak to that more but that's, that's what I see happening. And it's also saying we can't outsmart it. We have to work with it.Yeah. And that's where the whole, that's where I got really interested in the whole postbiotic thing because that's when I started doing. We started realizing that when, when you start decreasing the inflammatory response in the body by eating a different type of diet, I start asking why. And then that's when I started meeting scientists that said, Oh, it's because you're producing, urolithin or you're producing, you know, now a GABA. I didn't realize the GABA. So that's what's so fascinating. So I'm a doctor. And I imagine you've got what six or seven PhDs that you're in this postbiotic thing. What is how did you end up you were sick and then then you sort of jump forward and said, then I started this company. How did we get from there to here?Yeah, God, it's been a windy road. So I you know, I was a, how do I say this? So i i got obsessed with the science part because I always do have to measure and kind of look at...okay, starting with an idea of something that I may feel in myself or that matters to me, but I wanted to look at, okay, how can we measure this in a larger population? Like, it's not enough for me to I didn't want to go out there and just create a product and see what happens? And I guess Okay, so one step back, I do have a background in pharmaceutical advertising and marketing or whatnot. And so it started there. And I was working those jobs and I thought, okay, I, this is not what I'm going to look back 40 years from now and be happy with what I created. I wanted to go out there and solve a problem. And then once you create that solution, then I have to go back and measure and make sure it works. So that's what led me down the science path. And it just it wasn't necessarily the intention of starting a company. It was always coming from solving a problem and wanting to find the answer that didn't already exist. And if you're looking for an answer that doesn't already exist, then you have to test that answer multiple times before you go out there and offer it to somebody else. So, that's sort of the windy road there, I guess.Well, I'll tell you what that is, is that's you've when we you've said several times, allopathic and naturopathic boy, if there's ever anybody who I would not believe would somebody with a marketing background in pharmaceuticals that came up with a novel idea, usually its market first we'll worry about the science later. We're going to make cash on this thing. I've gotten a lot of flack for that. No, not flack at all. I'm giving you so much props you lead with science first. I mean, that is amazing. Especially because you come from a marketing background, holy cow.But to me the best marketing is truth and honesty. Right? And that speaks for itself. And so I was not interested in this...okay, you have this end product and you put a shiny package on it, and you hand it over somebody it's like how many of the layers can peel away so that you really have a clear understanding of where something starts and what the thought process is behind it and you and you just communicate that clearly at the end of it. And that's that's where I think things are going even on a marketing standpoint, but he you're just telling a clear story of why you did it and then what it is and why it works.I could not agree more I think the most stable marketing is knowing that your story is true, can be proven, can be reproducible. Generally, those who just flash in the pan the the charlatans are always revealed over time and then it's just it's just a trend or a fad that fades away but what you're doing is very much in line with what what drew me to work with Ken it's this is what I believe we'll figure out how to tell people about it later, but this is what's working and that made a lot of sense to me.And and even if it does, if it works the other way, do you is that something you really want to be a part of or like is that like I would lose interest over time. So doing it for me more than anything. And then I had to turn around and be like, okay, now how do I find a business story around that that other people get behind? Because I want to do the science for me, because that's what I need to move forward. So it really came from that place, read more than anything else. And to say, Okay, how do I get scientists that are smarter than me that are gonna think they're gonna challenge me? And then we're going to do the research around it and find some answers.There's so much similarity here. You being a CEO now, I had no business background, and now I'm in the throes of essentially, you know, I mean, it's a five year startup and I realized that Apple was a 20 year startup and Right, exactly 20 year startup and all this other stuff. So you you get that that side of it. I was super impressed with your team. I mean, you are just filled with PhDs and a couple MDs.Yeah, yeah, we got really lucky of and at this point, everybody's kind of donating their time. Like they've got on board out of passion. And that's what I think is even more exciting is that they believed in the process and we just kind of found scientists that were really obsessed with what they call this ecosystem science and looking at how these interactions happen in the microbiome. And I love the idea of ecosystem science that encompasses so much and it actually flies in the face of what Ken and I both kind of find challenging with, unfortunately, the pharmaceutical world which is just trying to find that one little bitty active molecule to try to solve all of the issues with that because it doesn't generally work that way. That being said, what are the goals with the company and utilizing ecosystem science? Where do y'all want to go? What what is what are some some pinnacle finish lines for y'all?Yeah, I mean, what's so there's two things that we have really exciting on the horizon and one we we are working now. We just talked to a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering and what the research they've done at Memorial Sloan Kettering is a cancer hospital. And they really looked at how diversity affects cancer patients. And that's been something that was, you know, a long term almost impossible thing for me and and the fact that we're actually pursuing being able to do that is exciting. And what they found is that so they did some FMT studies there. And they really found that if a patient comes in and they have higher diversity, then you know, when they go through their chemotherapy, and then their antibiotics and the most severe treatments, for the third, specifically working with bone marrow transplant patients, the patients who have the higher gut diversity do better. They surv...they're more likely to survive, it actually affects survival rate, and it reduces complications. And so this has sent them down the path of really looking into what can they do to protect the gut diversity and help these patients and so one of the questions they asked which I found fascinating is okay when you receive high doses of chemotherapy and antibiotics is there really anything you can do, or is your gut so destroyed at that point that it doesn't matter? And what they found was actually even a little bit helps these patients and helps their survival rate. And what that means is even if there's no intervention, so they may just happen to be someone who bounces back better than somebody else. And so, and they bounce back to a just slightly higher level than the other patients whose guts destroyed that slight increase in diversity, they do better. So that means even if they eat a better diet, they're potentially going to do better, which is to me huge because you can come in with something that is a more dietary or intervention and improve their outcomes. And so again...Very, very interesting and very congruent, Brown, with what, what you've been talking about even back to the inception of Atrantil. We, we have what we think are these incredible polyphenols this polyphenolic blend to feed bacteria. But, you know, the opposite needs to be true. Also, if if the correct bacteria aren't there to be fed in the right ratios, then we're just not going to have the byproducts, the postbiotics that we need for the body.Yeah. So Aubrey, so I'm sitting here listening to you, and I'm thinking, okay, so we talk about bio diversity and all this stuff. But the reality is, is that the bio diversity leads to this complex cascade of things that happen. Yes. And if I've got in my world, gastroenterology, I've got patients that have their colons taken out due to ulcerative colitis, due to cancer, due to different things. And we've actually talked, we've got one of my graduate students, actually, Angie will be very excited to know that you came on. I've got a graduate student that Eric and I work with carefully, and we started discussing this that well, what happens nobody's talking about If you don't have your microbiome, how can you make sure they have sufficient amounts of butyric acid? How can you make sure that there's urolithic come out there? How can you make sure that now Gaba and now we know that are they getting the appropriate amount of vitamin K, are they getting the glutathione things that we know that the bacteria break down, nobody's talking about that. And the ability to say, okay, during this acute process of getting chemotherapy, I would almost think that your particular product should be the protocol to ensure that there is something.Well, and that's what I think we got passionate about if there's nothing done to support the body to recover better when certain treatments or therapies are given and why not. So it's, you know, I mean, I think it brings me back a little bit to this COVID situation, what what's your best defense, your immune system, your own body, you know, and I think that no matter what you have, no matter what treatment you're given, your own body's going to be doing some of the legwork to get you back to where you want to be, or at least even to be able to handle the treatment better because a lot of these treatments are so harsh that they're also taking a toll on your own immune system or your own body in various ways. So, and we're not doing anything to help mitigate that or support the body as it's recovering. And that seems like an easy place to intervene and have because it's, it's gonna fall back on that on your body anyway.You know, I'm sitting there thinking about you as a young girl looking out the window, being hyper vigilant with the sympathetic nervous system, and then I'm thinking about a cancer patient that wakes up and goes, oh, shit, I have cancer. That thought sympathetic nervous system goes up. Exactly. Then a nurse comes in says, Remember you have chemo. Oh my God, I'm gonna have diarrhea, and nausea and vomiting. And I mean, you cannot think of a worse scenario, then and my, I mean, we've treated a ton of cancer, and the thought of the sympathetic nervous system going overboard the worries that are going on the financial stress, all this other stuff, it's very similar to the COVID situation. So similar,And that's our lifestyle these days, is this a high, heightened, stressful situation is we're constantly under stress. And so, and I think why, until you get something more severe, a lot of times, we're not thinking of what the effects of this are. But really the goal would be anytime you're sort of hitting a heightened stress, how do you balance that with also protecting yourself? And we're not really ingrained to think that way yet. You know, because it's having one round of antibiotics, we should be doing something to build ourselves back up to protect our gut microbiome. So that's why we looked into that in the study of like, how do you protect the diversity and make yourself and help yourself bounce back, right? Because that directly affects your immune system, which is suppressed during that medication and it's going to need to bounce back, you know, the microbiome helps with that. So that should be when you're in a stressful period when you get you know, because then we may not have it cascade into these larger problems, we start looking at it early. But then again, when you have the most extreme problem even then it helps you bounce back. And I, I just keep seeing this also vision in my head of the COVID situation of what happens when the whole world takes a break for a little bit. You saw how even like nature bounced back so quickly, right? Like the amount that we can all bounce back is actually incredible. If you just give a little bit of help...for a second.And I love how you're saying that because there's I have so many patients that when they they do something that let's say that they are...well, we've seen this. So Eric and I, we've we launched a program, Aubrey that we call the frontline program, because we believe so strongly that gut health, you cannot have a healthy immune system without a healthy gut. Because health begins there. And so we have launched a program where we're just giving away Atrantil because I know that it increases diversity. I know that it actually has anti pathogenic activity. I know this and we discussed it as a company, that we have a moral obligation to at least help the people that I'm with like I could, the thought that I could go to my hospital and find a nurse that maybe, you know, if somebody died, that maybe we could have just given them something to help, then that, that really that that drive starts getting me thinking about all the stuff that you're talking about, which is like, why can't we start doing protocols at a hospital that are essentially harmless, which is what you're talking about. There, the risk to benefit ratio, and it's insane the hurdles you have to go through. Like you had to find somebody at Memorial Sloan Kettering, you had to sit down, you had to go through meeting after meeting after meeting he had to then get passionate enough to go to the IRB to go to that. I mean, I've been there. And you're like, for God's sakes! Right. I mean, we're on the cardiac floor. The cardiac diet is pancakes and syrup and...Right, right. Yeah. I in and it's, it's kind of like Why not? You know, it's as you're saying it's why not do something that is going to do now it may help it may not in some situations, but why not?Yeah, we're going so far as we're giving away. I mean, we're losing a ton of money doing this just trying to make sure that if it does, if it can help, and we learned that it helps later, then I would look back at myself at this time and go you're a jerk for not at least trying to tell people. That's really great. That's really great.But it brings a question to my mind, Aubrey with your PhDs and we kind of set the stage here a little bit. So medicine in its early day was all it's all predicated. All the information we have is predicated on people doing experiments it's how we, we came to find everything and then ultimately which seemed like that we're at this intersection where innovation which might occur outside of, you know, the small little nucleus of companies or a handful of doctors is just summarily rejected until finally, over time, it's finally accepted because it happens to work for for someone else, or it's disproven and it doesn't work at all. But what inspires your PhDs to work with a company that's essentially helping challenge the status quo by using natural solutions? Because I know what works for Ken and I, it's because we see people smile and get real relief after trying for so long. So that's an easy one. But what is it about the PhD at that level who's like, you know what, I'm going to go to work today and keep challenging this because why?You know, that's great question. So I think a couple things I do think the microbiome has really opened the door to it's almost looking at it through the lens of the microbiome being complex, and not necessarily as much what the input is, because when you're looking at postbiotics, it kind of takes it one step away from like whether it starts as a natural product or not. I also think this next generation of scientists is they're very, the ones I'm meeting now are very interested in how can I make a difference? How can I not just stay in the lab? And how can I put something into the world and see that research be realized? And I think I happen to meet scientists that were passionate about, okay, this approach of taking the one missing bacteria, or this group of missing bacteria is not going to work. And they were willing to kind of stand on the edge and say that and my co founder who I work directly with, he did some research in Japan and you know, overseas, so I think it really opened up his eyes to hey, there are these things that have been studied for a long period of time that have been used with patients, but it just wasn't under a scientific rigor. So what happens if we look at that information and we start putting it under the lens that we look at other scientific remedies, what will we find? And it's more of just an openness to asking that question, and not really saying, okay, let's pick something more natural. It's more just like, okay, let's open our door to this wider range of things, whether it's natural or not. Let's look at what works.You know, I love how you say that. Let's open the door. Because what I've run into, which I'm sure you have run into, is what I I call cognitive dissonance. If somebody believes something, and they don't want to think about anything else, you described it as opening the door, just look outside and see and keep an open mind about that. That's really cool that you found people like that because when you get up a team, one thing that has been really neat about this whole COVID-19 issue is the collaboration of the scientists around the world. People are running with...people are just sharing data. And they're just saying, hey here, just what can you do with this? And this is, I think that the collaboration that's going on right now with you and your team is so cool, because this whole idea of opening the door and saying natural solutions and what is natural the most, you almost it has this implication that, oh, I'm going to try something unusual. And what you're saying is no, we're going to use our body and we're just going to feed it what it wants and allow the bacteria to do what they do, which is the most basic fundamental thing you can do for your health. I love that.And it's also not looking at the two extremes, right? I think, you know, just because something's natural doesn't mean it's healthy either. I think that's that's pretty clear as well, I you know, that there's, we can't jump to an extreme on either side of this. It's like okay, we can have a wider array of what we're looking at to support the body and then we test it and that's it. So what got the scientists I'm working with fully on board was our first study, we had a control group and we had results that were surprising to all of us because we went in saying, we don't know, maybe this could work. And then we got the results from the first study. So that's really what sealed the deal. Not not any kind of hope around it. Right?Yeah. Let me pin you down a little more. I know that Eric poked you a little bit here. But I'm going to take you one step further. So well, I want to know the because I'm, I'm much like you I'm into the science, but also own a company. And so I'm curious where Aubrey sees the business side of this. Where do you see that going? And you already said that science. You're correct. You're helping people. So morally, you're on the right place, but you also have to pay these six PhDs you also have and, and the beauty of having a successful company is that you can hire more people, more people can can can get insurance more people can, you know, there's nothing wrong with taking a beautiful scientific idea and turning it into a successful company.Yeah, yeah. And I and I tend to think of I prefer building a company where maybe there's a bigger hurdle upfront. And then hopefully, once you get over that, you're gonna have an easier time rather than sort of getting out the gate and meaning if you do the science, you get the credibility and you'll get people behind me and that could be your marketing that you go out the gate with. So what we're hoping is to get this next study done, which we hope we can get this study done with these cancer patients, which is more extreme scenario, right, and then we could put it as a medical food and that would be the hope and then you can also use it as an adjunct when these other medications are given because it's essentially 24% of medications affect your gut microbiome negatively, right. So really want to pay attention to when you're taking these medications, how do you protect it and I think also in these stressful situations, so the idea would be to get it as a medical food and then also take it when you take antibiotics and other things. And so it's not kind of it's when you need it right now like an ongoing every day sort of thing.Well, I see it as a not to have death by 1000 cuts, because I'm seeing going to my company, digestive health associates of Texas, I think that you have a relationship to Dr. Rogoff, one of my partners.Yep. Don't you?Yes, I do. He's a great guy. Yes.So we've got a Research Division that does pharmaceutical research. My background was in pharmaceutical research. That's how I went from that's how I discovered a a hole that they were missing and that a natural solution could fail. And that's very similar to what you did pharmaceutical marketing. Well, it would be really interesting that you got me thinking that I'm like, wow, we could easily do an inflammatory bowel disease study. And people that have had colectomies and see how they feel just a quality of life scale something super easy. Now you really got me thinking like, are they? Are they living their life with one hand tied behind their back? Because we took out their colons?Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that would be that would be very interesting to do. I would love to do that. And I think, you know, here's the other side of it if we find something really interesting in one of these studies too to be able to take a collection of metabolites to say to really look at what are what are the predominant ones that are sort of the this lever for the inflammatory or the immune response is is a way to go, you know, because I think we can dig even deeper into so my interest is not looking at okay, these bacteria are the ones that are responsible but which metabolites are responsible in which collection metabolites that can potentially trigger the system?Yeah, fascinating that you say that because I've met with scientists that are actually working for pharmaceutical companies trying to get the one metabolite. And they're trying to get the patent on that. And I just laugh because I'm like, so you get this so does it survive in the gastrointestinal tract? Does it is it the actual one that the bacteria can you have, like we talked about on our show, Eric, you can have too much of a good thing. Your everything has to be in balance. Eric frequently will hyperventilate when I work with him because he thinks that air is good for him, and he'll just do too much. He doesn't do that.One time I realized that shoes made my feet more comfortable. So I just I just covered myself in shoes. Really, really bizarre. Well, hey, I think that, undoubtedly and away from even just this, this, this COVID interview that it's obvious that we could find some synergy between efforts, but for everybody who's listening, anybody else who's interested in postbiotics plus, how can someone else become involved, get in touch with and possibly even help you find what your goals are as well?Yeah, I think the easiest way is the websites postbioticsplus.com and send an email through there and anybody that's interested in helping us move this research forward, that's that's sort of our biggest goal right now or yeah, that's that's the easiest way to do it. I think we're trying to do it in an organized way with a formal study and then we'll go from there, soWe will try our best to do that I have an ask of you though.What...oh noThere's gives and asks, I don't remember his name, but you've got some badass person at Baylor that's head of virology and micrology, microbiology on I saw that on your team on his page. I would love to get in touch...Oh Joseph. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah.You've got, I mean, from an academic standpoint, you've got a pretty heavy hitter page. That was a...We've got a good group.Yeah, I mean, like, I'm a I'm a nerd through and through. And so I was like, oh my gosh, look at this. Oh, yeah. And I start looking at the research. I'm like, oh my gosh.Yes, yes, we can. We can make that happen. We can make it, have you talk to him, so...Cool. Cool. That is awesome. Aubrey. For those of y'all who may not know she's the hardest working woman in postbiotics because we're talking on Memorial Day morning. So. Oh, yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. Yeah. Thank you so much for carving out time to visit with us. This was an incredible discovery of synergy between efforts and it's I mean, to me, it's just it's not only a relief, it's exciting to find somebody else who also realizes that there isn't just one solution and to find solutions, it takes a team effort and it's different thanNow we have a club. This is awesome. So so let's start a Facebook group and other things that clubs do I'm not much into social media, but okay, we'll try it. It'll just be awkward staring at each other. Secret handshake.How did this work again? Yeah. Awesome. Thank you guys for having me.I love the work you're doing. Thank you so much for everything Aubrey Levitt postbiotics plus. We're gonna try we're gonna stay in touch. We're going to collaborate like crazy. I've got some scientists you need to meet around the world, some crazy smart people doing very similar things. I'd like to meet some of your scientists, so on and so on. And I don't think that I think that maybe a collaboration between us could probably help out this crisis that we're going through right now eventually. Not in a not in an arrogant way. But yeah, I believe that you see it also that immunity starts in the gut. Yeah, can it can I say one last thing? I know we're, but there's a study. I mean, when you think of collaborating, there's a study. I think it's at Columbia right now that's looking at fiber and inulin, of how it can prevent secondary infections in this COVID thing, and I think there needs to be one in postbiotics of how we can look at.Well, the article that, that that that Sylvia did was really wild because she showed the increase in butyric acid, and it was tenfold. It was 100,000 fold, it was nuts, that I had no idea when you start looking at this where you can actually show this and then we start to I've got this, do you have a Mandalay account, the repository of literature? No.I'll hook you up with this. In fact, we probably team up I've got a I've got an enterprise level Mendeley account where you can just put literature, download literature and put it into files so that you you can search your what you want. So I could like go right now and type in postbiotic you know Sloan Kettering and your your stuff would pop up. It's really it's just it's just a way to collaborate with other scientists that I've really enjoyed so that we can do stuff like this.Great, great. Sounds good.Ladies and gentlemen, that's, that's COVID Episode 6.0 Aubrey Levitt postbioticsplus.com thank you so much for joining us and thanks to our sponsors atrantil.com of course ilovemytummy.com KBMD health and unrefinedbakery.com Aubrey, thank you so much. Ken-any last words?No, thank you so much for taking the time and and on Memorial Day you know not being out on a boat using proper social isolation taking the time to do a podcast. Thank you guys.Have a good one. Bye. Bye.Talk to you soon, bye.Oh, she she jumped out.