Podcasts about so i'll

Here are the notes I read this episode from:People keep acting like I'm different, that they have to balance things that I don't when acting on the environment.So I'll share a recent decision I made. People I tell have sounded intrigued and delighted to hear it so I'll share with you.First sensed hairline retreating at 19.Not much for maybe a decade following, I don't remember.Maybe 10 years ago started using minoxidil.Don't know if works or not, but used as insurance. Not insanely expensive.Tested on thinning in back, so even less sure if it works.Over the past few years noticed it becoming my greatest plastic consumption.Thought more about stopping.Even stopping flying was reversible. Never decided to stop forever, just kept finding that it improved my life not to fly. Constraints breed creativity.Stopping minoxidil not reversible. Might not do anything. Might go bald. I don't want to go bald. I like my hair.But I'm pitting purely my vanity against reducing plastic pollution.Last bottle of last 3 month supply was running low. Kept thinking about it. Risk balding, but maybe no difference.Last American president elected bald was Eisenhower. Have to beat Hitler to get elected. Women complain they get judged by appearance, but men do too.Felt helpless, yet also recognize the alternative is simply to live with my genes. What chemical shitstorm is in that stuff anyway?But the bottom line was every time I've chosen to live by my environmental values, it's improved my life. I used to have faith, but faith is belief without evidence. Between avoiding packaged food, avoiding flying, picking up garbage daily, plogging, all of which I thought would worsen my life, they've all improved it.So I made a deal with myself to flip a coin. Heads I'd keep it. If every 3 months I flipped, eventually I'd have to end.I started making deals with myself -- just get to 50 years old. It's so little plastic compared to everyone else. Just one more time. I found out you can buy the raw ingredients on Alibaba. What if I found a great price? Rite Aid had almost half off online. Another place even lower prices, but then more packaging.So I flipped the coin. Tails on the first try. I made a rule only flip a coin when I can't decide any other way, then never reverse that decision or it undoes the value of coin toss's decisiveness. Still I started bargaining with myself.Are you getting how hard I found this decision? I was deciding in the moment a choice to affect me possibly for the remaining several decades of my life.I didn't refill. I still went to Rite Aid intending to buy another box, against the coin toss, but the low price was only online. I was going to break my rule, but didn't because of circumstance.Within a day I could feel new breeze on my forehead. Maybe coincidence, but maybe I'll end up bald in a few months. Maybe it will recede a bit and stop. Who knows?I don't see a path to this choice improving my life, but I'm going with it. Talk about your first-world problems, right? But everyone goes through similar decisions too. Should I buy the coffee on the way to work in the disposable cup? Should I take a subway or shared ride?We all do mental gymnastics to rationalize behavior we know is against our principles. I do. My difference today versus me years ago is that I've moved my balance toward stewardship. Each time I do, I find it improves my life. Before long I find role models beyond where I am. I learn from them, for example Bea Johnson, whose family of four produces collectively less trash than I do.The world will see the results.Some relevant posts of mine:Choose easier by visualizing choices, part IChoose easier by visualizing choices, part IIWhy are decisions hard?How to ChooseHow to decide among close options See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Meet two people with diabetes making a difference in very different ways. We're talking to dietitian and strength coach Ben Tzeell & teen author Morgan Panzirer.  First, if you've sort of fallen off the nutrition and exercise wagon in the last few months, you’re not alone. But getting back in the game doesn’t mean going to extremes. Ben has advice about starting small and making changes that stick. Morgan was diagnosed with T1D at age 6. She's now 19 and just wrote a book about her life – so far – with diabetes. It's called Actually I Can. Ben's Blood Sugar Boss program Megan's Book (Amazon) This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcription  Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes, and by Dexcom, take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   This week, I talked to two people with type one making a difference in very different ways. First, if you've sort of fallen off the nutrition exercise wagon in the last few months, you're not alone. But getting back in the game doesn't mean going to extremes.   Ben Tzeel  0:37 Life is too short to not enjoy food like that. And the last thing you want is you're constantly eating air quotes healthy, and now you're feeling deprived when you see all your friends eating these other things.   Stacey Simms  0:47 That's dietician and strength coach Ben Tzeel. He's got more advice about starting small and making changes that stick in Tell me something good. I'm talking to Morgan Panzirer diagnosed at age six. She's now 19 and just wrote a book about her life so far with diabetes.   Morgan Panzirer  1:05 And I vividly remember being in the car driving to New York City The following day, and saying to my parents, everything will be fine as long as I don't need a shot.   Stacey Simms  1:15 The book is called, actually I can, and after talking to Morgan, I can tell you better believe she can. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of Diabetes Connections. I am so glad to have you along. Welcome if you're brand new, we aim to educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. My son was diagnosed right before he turned two. He is now 15 and a half. My husband lives with type two diabetes. I don't have diabetes. I have a background in broadcasting. And that is how you get the podcast. I have been so busy the last week mostly because for whatever reason, sometimes podcast interviews seem to come in clumps. So I had a lot of interviews to do and a lot of production I take care of a lot of it before I send it over to my editor who I've mentioned before, but also I've been busy with my Friends for Life presentation, Friends for Life is the biggest family conference all about diabetes in the US, possibly the world. And instead of having an in person conference this year, like everybody else, they're having a virtual conference. And so I decided, and boy, I thought this was a good idea that I would do my usual game show I usually do a game show presentation as one of my talks for them. But I would do Hollywood Squares because boy zoom just lends itself to Hollywood Squares, doesn't it? That's what I at least what I think of and I gotta tell you, I'm thrilled with how it came out. But I also got to tell you, I'm not sure I'll ever do it again. We had to get eight people I was the ninth you need like a tic tac toe board right for for the Hollywood Squares. The FFL-Wood squares excuse me, that's Friends for Life, FFL. So FFL-Wood squares and I decided to go big and I got people from all over the world, different time zones. Day here night here. Early morning here, it was amazing. So huge credit to my cast of characters. Thank you to the contestants. I cannot wait to share it with you. The conference itself is mid month. If you've signed up for that you'll see it then. And then we'll drop it as a video in a podcast episode. Shortly after that. That's one of the really fun things that I get to do, right. I mean, you have an idea you get to try it. You see if it's a disaster, you see if it's fun, but you know, it's it's never boring, that's for sure. Okay, interviews coming up in just a moment with Ben Tzeel and Morgan Panzirer, but first Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop. One Drop is diabetes management for the 21st century. One Drop was designed by people with diabetes for people with diabetes. One Drops glucose meter looks nothing like a medical device. It's sleek, compact, and seamlessly integrates with the award winning One Drop mobile app, sync all your other health apps to One Drop to keep track of the big picture and easily see health trends. And with a One Drop subscription you get unlimited test strips and lancets delivered right to your door every One Drop plan. Also in access to your own certified diabetes coach have questions but don't feel like waiting for your next doctor visit your personal coach is always there to help go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the One Drop logo to learn more. Unusual show this week and that I have two guests two separate interviews. And if you're here only for one or the other, that is fine. I can tell you that Morgan's interview starts about 22 minutes from now, so you won't hurt my feelings if you skip ahead. But I really think you'll like my first guest, Ben Tzeel. we first talked to him last year. He's a dietician, he's a strength coach. And Ben says eating and living with diabetes should not be boring or feel like punishment. We had a fun conversation about what that really means good intentions about eating well, and exercising and quarantine and more. Here's my talk with Ben Tzeel. Hey, Ben, it's good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on.   Ben Tzeel  4:53 I'm just so thankful to be here. And it's so awesome. It's just amazing. Thank you.   Stacey Simms  4:58 You're really well. We'll see about But   Ben Tzeel  5:02 it's human. It's human interaction right now we don't have much of that these days do it.   Stacey Simms  5:06 Well, let's start talking about that. I mean, how have you been living since the stay at home orders? What's your life been like?   Ben Tzeel  5:13 I just don't go anywhere. I've been living in Florida, not nothing against Florida, but I feel like the cases go down and then the cases go up. And that's just what you hear about everywhere. And I just figure it's just not something I'd rather really want to deal with if that makes any sense. Do you live alone? I actually live with my girlfriend and fortunately for me, she's willing to do a lot of the grocery shopping and a lot of the day to day stuff at the pharmacy but honestly, we just don't go anywhere because she works in the ICU as a pharmacist and she sees all this stuff firsthand. Wow.   Stacey Simms  5:44 That's gonna be interesting job to have right now.   Unknown Speaker  5:47 Oh, yes.   Stacey Simms  5:49 Assuming that you've been doing this since mid March, yo, how's your health? How are you keeping up because you're pretty intense person when it comes to fitness?   Ben Tzeel  5:58 Yeah, I definitely like to thanks. So it's something where I've had to get creative. I've had to step outside of my comfort zone and really look at what I have and say, Okay, what can I do with what I currently have? And slowly, you can assemble a little mini gym at home and things like that. But I've really, really taken time and effort to focus on what can I do instead of, well, this is out of my control, I guess my fitness is gonna go away. I guess all of my other habits that I've worked so hard to develop are gonna just fall by the wayside?   Stacey Simms  6:26 Well, I think for some of us, those things, the second part, those things have happened, right? Because it is hard to maintain a routine It is hard to, you know, especially when, and I'm gonna get personal here for people like me, you know, you're a strength and conditioning coach, you know, this is what you do. I'm a suburban mom who walks her dog and goes to the gym a couple of days a week. And it's been really easy for me to fall out of those good habits over the last couple of months. You know, do you have any advice? If people are listening and thinking, Well, I haven't kept up so it's too late now.   Ben Tzeel  6:56 Well, it's first one of those things is to your point where you mentioned It's too late. Now, it's never too late to actually start and say, I'm gonna look back and say, This is what I did before, this is what I was doing. And maybe I won't be at that same point right now, because I have let myself fall off because I have fallen out of this routine. But what is something I can do today that small to just build a little bit of momentum. And as you build that you take another baby step, another baby step, and suddenly, you're taking strides to get back to where you were. So if you start from that mindset, and that point, just make that tiny little shift, you end up in a situation where suddenly three, four weeks from now, you're thinking, wow, I'm already almost back to where I was. Because your muscle does have a memory, it is going to remember where you were. And as long as you put in those same habits you previously had, you should be totally fine.   Stacey Simms  7:45 It's funny when you talk about, you know, getting back into routine because I think at the beginning of this, I don't know if this happened to you, me and my daughter, and I think a lot of people and my daughter came home from college, and we said All right, we're going to do yoga on YouTube. We're going to walk the dog like five miles every day, and we're gonna get really, you know, in great shape, we have a stationary bike, and we're going to do all these bikes and all these rides and, and we really haven't done much of it at all after those first couple of weeks, and I've seen some really funny parody videos on that and a lot of people who have felt this way, but I want to flip that around and say you have taken as you said, You've gotten creative in your house, can you tell us a little bit of some of the things you've done to make your your home gym, I'm assuming that you didn't run out and buy a whole bunch of, you know, gym radio equipment?   Ben Tzeel  8:29 No, I was fortunate that I my parents don't live too far away. And I had a bunch of dumbbells and a bunch of things from my youth that I was able to pick up. But beyond that, I mean, I was pretty much in the same situation that everybody else was where I had a few resistance bands and a few dumbbells and a few little things and had to start realizing. All right, well, I want to keep my insulin sensitivity good. I want to stay on this track of that I've been working so hard to be on what can I do. And so maybe that requires you sitting down and saying Alright, I'm going to restructure my workouts, I'm going to tell myself maybe I was doing four days a week before an upper body and lower body, you can still do that. But you may have to adapt. Instead of using a cable, you may have to use a band instead of using like a barbell or instead of using a heavier weight, you might have to go more reps at a lighter weight, or incorporate pauses or incorporate other bodyweight movements that can be just as challenging. And honestly, the first few weeks of the quarantine, stay at home, whatever you want to call it. I actually felt like I was more sore than when I was in the gym because I had to push harder.   Stacey Simms  9:34 You've mentioned your blood sugar several times you've lived with type one you were diagnosed when you were a kid. I've heard two schools of thought here over the last couple of months. One is you know, my blood sugar's are all over the place. I'm stressed out I'm so worried and you know, things are crazy. And then the other side of the coin is my blood sugar's have never been steadier. You know, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not eating restaurant food, where do you fall in on that?   Ben Tzeel  9:56 I would probably fall. That's it. I mean, I'll Honestly, it's a good question because I see it a lot from the first perspective. So I feel like I then kind of translate that to me. But it's actually my numbers have been in better control since this all began. Because there haven't been as many extraneous factors. I'm not going places. There's lots of unknown variables introduced. But I just I feel for a lot of the people that are in the first situation because there is that lack of routine and that lack of structure. And while everybody says, Oh, I, I wish I could be home more, I wish I didn't go to my job. Taking that structure out of the picture can really make it difficult to stick to that exercise program really stick to the food and the nutrition that's been making you feel good with good blood sugars, and you ultimately fall off that path. And when you do your blood sugar's kind of take over everything else. And during a time where there are no sports, there's not lots of distractions, there's no big gatherings, there's no concerts, your blood sugar's can literally become the one thing that you hone in on and focus on way too hard.   Stacey Simms  10:55 That's funny because I thought you were gonna say there at the end that you can really you can focus on And really make a great difference. But you said you focus on and you know, it can it can not be a great thing. Can you expand on that last thought?   Ben Tzeel  11:08 Sure. And I mean, of course, I can tell you it, there's ways to get around it. But a lot of people what will happen is, I mean, think about it like because there aren't tons of social things to be doing. And there's not tons of activities and tons of distractions, you start to look at the few distractions you have in your life. And one of them would be, I wouldn't call diabetes, a distraction, but it's one of the big prominent parts of your life if you have it. And it just starts to become a bigger and bigger and bigger thing that you just the more you focus on it, the more it expands and the bigger role it can take in your life. So I've watched a lot of people people I've worked with people I've interacted with on social media, that they end up in a situation where their blood sugar's just take over their entire existence where they're looking at their decks calm every five minutes, wondering what's going to happen and sometimes that leads to great results, but other times, it just drives people crazy. He drives up their stress level and they get into this loop of frustration. Oh, my blood sugar's high. Oh, I'm a failure and they go down the spiral that is very counterproductive in terms of living like a really as free of a life as possible to do right now.   Stacey Simms  12:14 Yeah, I would also echo that for parents as you were listening. I think it's super easy. And I found myself doing this too, with Benny home a lot more. It's easy to focus on our kids blood sugar's more, right? They're not going anywhere. They're not go to the movies, they're not hanging out with friends. And it's easier to make that a bigger focus than it needs to be. So I'm kind of listening to this and taking it to heart. But you know, one of the things you're really known for in social media is these these crazy foods, right? We talked about this last time when you were on, you know, giant donut, big meals and stuff. And I'm curious if there's, you know, we often figure especially newly diagnosed, we often find out that we love restaurant food because it's full of hidden fats and sugars and you know, salt and butter and all those delicious things that We love and that's what makes restaurant food so good. But it's kind of hard to bolus for that stuff. Are you finding it easier? I mean anything on that in terms of home cooking, which I'm so sick of Ben, I am so tired of cooking. And my husband helps if he cooks too, so I'm just sick of it.   Ben Tzeel  13:13 Well, I can't blame you for being sick of home cooking because it gets to a point where I'm probably three months or so from having had something from the outside. And it's I'm just craving something   Stacey Simms  13:26 brought in a meal. You haven't brought anything in.   Ben Tzeel  13:28 I just maybe I'm paranoid, but I just I just would rather be like, you know what, at least I know, I'm dealing with the prep and I'm dealing with everything else. And when this starts to settle down, then I'll start to venture out and have all of the fun food again. Not that I haven't had fun. Trust me. You can make many fun things at your house. I know what you're making.   Stacey Simms  13:45 Yeah, no, I have friends who haven't brought any food in. I mean, we're not in that camp, obviously. But I know a few people who've done that   Ben Tzeel  13:51 Emilio wants me to really bad so we're working on it. We're in a negotiation right now. But to your point, I would say when you know All of the factors within what you're eating. So of course, you know that you've prepped it, you know, what you've put into it, you know, everything and everything. And there's no variables, there's no question marks. And we're not talking about the COVID part, but just about the actual composition of the food itself, then it's a lot easier to bolus for because you have all the answers. You have all the math right there when someone else creates something, even if it's something that, you know, Oh, I know, this is a bacon double cheeseburger, and I know I've had them before. And this is what happens. There's some sort of variability because that part of it is out of your control. And that lack of control can be difficult to account for granted. There's ways to take it in to consideration and be able to say, all right, this is what I'm going to do based on experience based on other knowledge, like put numbers and experience together and make a very educated decision and dose and do amazing with it. But just that little factor of there's other stuff in here there is that hidden fat you were describing. There's sometimes things are cooked in, in oils we don't know about there's sugar that might got thrown in there that you don't know. And then you end up eating some foods like that and you get frustrated you you have chicken alfredo and your blood sugar goes up to 320 for the next seven hours, no matter what you do no matter what you dose and you're just full of frustration the whole time.   Stacey Simms  15:14 So you work with a lot of people with type one and your background is nutrition. You have a master's degree, you're registered dietitian. I'm curious what the first change you urge people to make when they come to I know not everybody's the same. But you know, one of the questions maybe that you ask,   Ben Tzeel  15:30 I guess, coming from me, the first things I want to know is where people are starting out right now. Like, what are you eating? and kind of just getting you aware of what are you eating because as evidenced during this time, and this time, please put a magnifying glass on it more than anything else. But people kind of just go through the motions. They don't pay as much attention to, oh, I'm eating X, Y and Z. They just say oh, I'm gonna make whatever I can grab and I'm just gonna go for it and eat and then continue and a lot of people can't tell you what they ate for lunch yesterday. So my first goal is get them really aware, what are you eating? Start to kind of get a sense of it and then get them understanding. Are you making the meals complete? Are you getting your proteins, your fiber, your veggies? Are you getting them to the point where you're getting the nutrients that you need for both the body composition that you want, but also for the blood sugar control, because once you have the blood sugars and control, the body comes a lot faster, whether you want to lose weight or get strong. And once the blood sugars are controlled, you can do all the things in life that you really want to be doing.   Stacey Simms  16:30 I'm always worried about talking about diets, right? Because people want to lose weight, they go on a diet, people try all sorts of different things. We've talked about this in the past to me low carb, high carb, whatever it is, what do you find works overall, in general, for the people that you work with.   Ben Tzeel  16:45 For the people that I work with. I've had people on 400 grams of carbs, I've had people on 40 grams of carbs. The most important factors that I've noticed are getting enough protein into your life and I know a lot of people are concerned Oh protein is going to Your kidneys. But all the research, if you dig into it has shown that a higher protein diet is actually advantageous to the kidneys. I'm not saying you need to eat like five chickens a day, but at the same time, a substantial amount of protein. I would also say making sure you do get the fiber. That's why I tried to hit on those big three the protein, the fiber than the veggies, the fiber is going to be important whether you get that from veggies and fruit or whether you do get that from some grains. Some people do well on a decent amount of carbs. Again, it's that carb side of it is preference and everyone in diabetes is so fixated on it, when I can't stress enough where people that I've worked with are super successful on all levels of carbs, but having the protein, having the fiber, having enough of the veggies, those three things and then the other thing would be the 9010 rule. And that would be something where I would I don't know if it's actually a rule I may have made it up but it's 90% of the time you're eating on point you know what you're doing, you're making quality choices and that other 10% of the time you're enjoying the sunset You're enjoying the desserts, you're enjoying the finer things that life has to offer. Because life is too short to not enjoy food like that. And the last thing you want is you're constantly eating air quotes healthy. And now you're feeling deprived when you see all your friends eating these other things. And as long as you have a strategy on how to dose for it, so your blood sugar is going to be ultimately good. There's no reason to deprive yourself of having that and so many people are living limited in that scope of I can't have that because I have diabetes, that food scares me. This is awful. Like, I wish I could have that and you can have that. But allowing yourself that wiggle room of 10% that is usually enough to say hey, I'm gonna get the results I'm putting into a effort 90% of the time to get the blood sugar's get the body but then the other time I can enjoy everything.   Unknown Speaker  18:50 What's your big favorite 10% fool?   Ben Tzeel  18:53 That's Oh, that's a loaded question. I was gonna say there's a restaurant here called dance and dance. And Tampa has these loaded nachos that are so good. They're like a once every six month kind of thing, but they've got like the cheese and the pulled pork, and they've got the beans and they've got the ground beef and honestly, it's actually not a terrible meal in general but there's just so it's so calorie dense. That would be one cookie dough for sure would be one. The edible cookie dough not like cookie dough. That's raw eggs. And then Honestly, I have to say this but have you had cookie butter before? I have not had cookie pokey buttered so I love cookie. What is it cookie butter? It's I don't even know how to describe it. There's like this. I know the first time I had it was from Trader Joe's and then they have some everywhere apparently I didn't know it was a big thing. But it's literally like the butter form of cookie. It's like imagine peanut butter consistency but it tastes like a cookie and it's basically straight fat and straight sugar. But it's so good. Oh my God. That is my guilty pleasure. I will not lie. That's It's so good. That Great,   Stacey Simms  20:00 okay, he's got some advice. We've You know, we've gotten some insight into how you operate. I know you have a new program that you're working on, tell us what this is all about. How can people take part?   Ben Tzeel  20:11 Absolutely. So I have a program called blood sugar boss, because everybody wants to be a blood sugar boss, you want to be in control of your blood sugars and in control of your life, getting the body that you want, and literally living life without any kind of limits. And so the premise is, you're going through and restaurants become no big deal. You can walk into a restaurant by the end of this and point out what you want on the menu and say I want that and know how you're gonna dose for what your game plan is going to be. No questions asked, like the on the exercise side of things with respect to blood sugars going low constantly, that part's eliminated. You know, you go and exercise no matter what you're doing. We're eliminating the lows. we're eliminating the highest you can truly do what you want to do without having any concerns and actually focus on The exercise instead of Oh my god, what is my blood sugar going to do? Then of course talking about the food side of things to make sure that you know what choices need to go into that 90% what choices need to go to that 10% and when you do go in that 10% How to dose so you're not concerned? Oh, man, I'm going to be 300 for the next six hours. I know exactly what to do for that. I mean, we're going into travel when travels the thing again, you know, we're making sure that you go on a trip, you're like, Okay, instead of vacation being stressful, this is no big deal. We're hitting everything on all different kinds of angles. And by the end of it, you can walk away from it saying, I am in control, no situation will faze me and this is literally everything I need to know about diabetes, and I forgot one of the other big things were kick starting your metabolism up. So you're going to be able to be prepared to get stronger and lose weight. At the same time. I'm curious you you share a lot as I mentioned on inside on social media, and the other day, I saw you share a post where you were over 300 for a while, you know, you had I think it was at a Ben canula or something like that. Are you concerned that when you share something like that, right? Do you get feedback from people saying, how could you that's so dangerous? Or, you know, how could you let that happen? I'm curious what kind of feedback you get when you are that transparent, because, you know, we all know that's gonna happen, right? And I think if there's a lot of people out there that go on social media, and they act a certain type of way, and they say, Well, my blood sugar's are great all the time. And my numbers are always the decks combined, it's flat, and everything's awesome. And that's cool. You can share that. But that's just sharing the highlight reel of life. People are almost afraid to show the authentic side of the side of them that shows I'm human that I get that annulus to these things do happen. And so I feel like by showing that, it's like, Look, I'm not perfect, I've never been perfect, and there are people out there who I'm sure have had that situation happened to them. And if anything, I think it makes you more relatable. And it's okay to put yourself out and say, Hey, this does happen to everybody. Oh, my goodness, you can eat the same thing at the same time every single day and get a slightly different result. So, in that situation, it's part of life. Everybody goes through it.   Stacey Simms  23:15 Before I really let you go, I had to laugh when you said blood sugar boss. Because when Benny was was little, I mean, he was diagnosed before he was two. So we had to use all these, like really kid friendly ways of talking to him about diabetes. And I remember when he was about four or five years old, we started talking to him about like, being the boss of diabetes, you know, and little kids like to boss stuff around. Little kids have no control over anything, right? Everybody tells them what to do and where to sit and when to wake up, or when to go to bed and what to eat. So they have no choices, and sort of get to be the boss of something was really cool for him. And then the flip side of that was I had to say to him, Look, if you were if you're not the boss of diabetes, it's going to become the boss of you. And it really worked for a long time to help us teach him and but it's so funny. I forgot all about that. Until you mentioned The name of your program. So thanks for bringing that memory back up. It wasn't something that I had remembered. But it's so important because if you don't take control over it, you mean, you have no choice, it will take control of you.   Ben Tzeel  24:11 Absolutely. And that's, that's the whole goal here is like you said, you have to be the one that's saying, I am going to actively take control over this because otherwise your life is run by diabetes, whether you allow it because you allow it to you don't take back the power from it, and you don't say, this is my life, this is what I want to do. And if you don't actively make that decision, it's gonna make it for you. And you don't want someone else or something else. In this case, diabetes making that decision for you want to live life on your terms. So you need to make sure that you are a blood sugar boss.   Stacey Simms  24:43 I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for sharing the program all the best with it.   Ben Tzeel  24:47 Oh, thank you so much. I'm just glad to be able to help more people in our community and I'm just thankful for the opportunity to chat with you as always, that's always an awesome time on here.   Unknown Speaker  25:01 You're listening to diabetes connections   Unknown Speaker  25:03 with Stacey Simms   Stacey Simms  25:06 more information about Ben's program blood sugar boss in the show notes and I'll link up his Instagram account as well now I'm gonna have to go back and look now because I do get a kick out of the bonkers food that he posts like these big portions and you know wild desserts and things once in a while, but I'm thinking now he said that they had been eating at home and creating their own stuff since the stay at home order. And now I really want to take a look and see what they've been making because we've been cooking a ton I think just like everybody, right? But I haven't been baking or making desserts. My daughter I have an 18 year old daughter and she likes to bake and she's been making cookies and brownies and stuff like that, but I'm not getting creative when it comes to desserts. I like to eat desserts, but I'm not making at this point. I am barely making dinner. I am so sick of Okay. All right. Well, you know good problems to have, I suppose. The author of the book actually I can is our Tell me something good this week, but first Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. And we've been using the Dexcom G6 since it came out two years ago now, and it's amazing. The G6 is now FDA permitted for no finger sticks for calibration and diabetes treatment decisions. You do that to our warmup and the number just pops up. I know it sounds funny if you're newer to Dexcom but we've been using it for seven years now. And when you're used to calibrating you know, and not getting that number automatically, it really does. It just seems so different. The G6 has longer sensor we're now 10 days and the new sensor applicator is so easy to use, but he does it all himself. Of course we love the alerts and alarms and we can set them however we want. If your glucose alerts and readings from the G6 do not match symptoms or expectations, use a blood glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. To learn more, go to Diabetes, Connections comm and click on the Dexcom logo.   Morgan Panzirer is our Tell me something good this week she was diagnosed With type one when she was six years old, that's obviously not the good part. She is now 19, a college student who would like to become a pediatric endocrinologist. Now her sister also lives with type one. Morgan started writing the book that we're going to talk about here in middle school. It's called actually I can, Morgan was great to talk to you. She was very patient with my questions and my ignorance about equestrian sports. Here's my interview with Morgan Panzirer. Morgan, thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me. I'm really excited to hear the stories behind the book. Thanks for coming on.   Unknown Speaker  27:32 Yeah, of course. I'm so happy to be here.   Unknown Speaker  27:34 What gave you the idea to write this book?   Unknown Speaker  27:37 I started writing it in seventh grade for two main reasons. The first was I was fed up with all the misconceptions that people with type 1 diabetes hear every day, for example, Oh, you got diabetes, because you ate too much sugar things along those lines. So I decided that maybe if I could tell my story, I would be able to kind of change the way the general public views this disease. The second reason I wrote it was because I really wanted to empower others living with Type One Diabetes and show them. That doesn't have to be something that holds you back. Rather, you can use it as an opportunity to do whatever you want to do. So   Unknown Speaker  28:14 you started writing in middle school, but you were diagnosed at age six, much younger than that. Do you remember your day? Your diagnosis story?   Morgan Panzirer  28:21 Yes, I'll never forget. It is so clear in my mind. I had been drinking and peeing a lot. So my mom knew the signs of Type One Diabetes because she was a nutritionist. Yeah, so my mom knew the sign. So she decided to ask my pediatrician to test me just to humor her. She was sure it was nothing but she said, just test it anyway. So she did and a couple days later, my pediatrician called us I'll never forget exactly where we were in the car. And she said to my mom, I'm so sorry to tell you this, but Morgan does have type one diabetes, and my mom just immediately started crying. We were all shocked. We went to the Naomi berry Diabetes Center at Columbia the following day. And from there, it was just, let's get through this.   Stacey Simms  29:07 So your mother was a little bit familiar with it, but in being a nutritionist, but I can't imagine you knew at all who you're in for, and especially at age six,   Morgan Panzirer  29:15 no, I had no idea. And I vividly remember being in the car driving to New York City The following day, and saying to my parents, everything will be fine. As long as I don't need a shot. Little did I know, every day of my life, I was gonna have multiple needles among the finger sticks and other things. So my parents didn't really know how to explain it to me, and it was definitely a rude awakening for the next few days to come. When you started writing, did you share it with anybody else? Was it just for you at the time? Yes, it was just for me at the time. No one. I didn't really tell anyone about it. No one really knew that I was doing it at all. I was very private about it. But as the years went on, I eventually decided to tell my parents and they were like, you are What? So it was kind of fun. It was. It was a long process. But yeah, the beginning it was definitely just a very personal thing for me. And then your younger sister was diagnosed as well. What was that? Like? How old was she? How old were you at the time. So she was 13 when she was diagnosed, she's now 16. So I was 16 when she was diagnosed, and that just broke my heart because I had had diabetes at that point for 10 years. So I totally knew what it was like, and it made me think I would not wish it on anyone, especially someone in my own family. So to see her kind of struggle with it, and because she was diagnosed a lot older, I think it was hard for her to kind of get through it because she knew and remembered and understood what life was like prior. And now the fact that you have to make put so much thought into eating an apple, I think really kind of threw her for a loop, but I was really happy that I was there and could kind of show her the ropes and show her that this doesn't have to be the end It won't stop her. She doesn't want it too.   Stacey Simms  31:02 It sounds like you have a really good relationship with your sister. But you know, it's gotta be hard to you know your sister. So I don't want to make it like it was a perfect relationship, but due to diabetes in some way for you closer, I mean, I kind of hate that because it's a cliche, but you to share it and experience that nobody else in your family could really understand in the way you were going through it.   Morgan Panzirer  31:21 Yeah, it did. I would definitely say that it brought us closer. I mean, we always had a great relationship growing up. I mean, she was the only other girl in the house besides my mom. So we did everything together anyway. And we did have a really good relationship. But this definitely was something that I could share with her and I couldn't really relate to something like that with anyone else. So I think we, I mean, we don't talk about it a ton, but it is something that if I'm having a terrible day, I'm like, Oh, this stays the worst. And she's like, Yeah, I know what you mean. So I think in that way, it definitely makes it easier for sure.   Unknown Speaker  31:57 Okay, so you grew up in a household where After your diagnosis, your parents jumped in with both feet for advocacy. And they jumped in in a way that is unique because your dad is a trustee of the Helmsley trust, which is a as you listen, if you're not familiar, just an unbelievable funder of so much Diabetes Research and so many diabetes advocacy causes and effect. We had your dad on the show last year, but he is a very passionate person, as you know, Morgan, where he was really talking about the need for better education when people get great diabetes devices. And you know, trying to help in that respect. What was it like to know that what happened to you affected what your parents did with their lives? I mean, there's put so much time and energy into this cause,   Morgan Panzirer  32:39 oh my gosh, yeah, it was unbelievable. I mean, my dad became a trustee shortly after my diagnosis. So again, at six years old, I had no idea what that meant. But as I grew up and saw the impact he's having on this community and everyone with this disease, I'm so grateful that he went this way because I really do believe that he's making enormous differences in this community. I've already seen tons of new technologies that have come out, in part, thanks to his funding. So I'm so grateful. And my mom actually has she's a big runner. So she's run numerous half marathons and marathons with jdrf to raise money. So the fact that they're just all in for me and my sister is, there's no words to describe it. It's unbelievable. You've been able to do a lot of things yourself. You were a children's Congress with jdrf. That was in 2009. So how old were you when you did children's Congress? I was eight when I when was that something that was meaningful to you? Yeah, it was a really monumental event, I think because it really marked the beginning of my advocacy. And especially being that little I didn't really understand that I could make a difference prior to this. But when I got there and saw oh my gosh, all these kids are going through the same thing I'm going through and look at this difference we're making on a national level, I think it really showed me that I did have the ability to make a change if I wanted to, and if I set my mind to it. So it was definitely a big step for me and understanding that I had the ability to make a big change for everyone with this disease. And it definitely marks the beginning of my advocacy, as I mentioned prior.   Unknown Speaker  34:19 So tell me about advocacy for an eight year old. I know because I just people listening are kind of thinking like, well, what else? You know, there's children's Congress vote what really can an eight year old do?   Morgan Panzirer  34:27 It was crazy because we're at Children's Congress. We're talking to our senators. I didn't even know what a senator was. I was like, Who are you? Like, you seem really important, but I don't know what you do. Um, but it was really just a place for me to learn and understand and it opened a bunch of doors for not necessarily when I was eight years old still, but when I was older, it really just allowed me to understand, okay, I can do this and I can make a change and talk to these super important scary people. If I want to so I wouldn't say necessarily started my advocacy at eight years old, but it definitely opened that door and set that path or the years coming up.   Stacey Simms  35:10 So in the book, actually, I can you mentioned, you know, sugar and misconceptions.   Morgan Panzirer  35:15 Are there actually, as I say, actually, are there questions that that really have followed you that you would answer? Actually, I can. Oh, there's so many. It's funny, you should say that. Because one of the chapters towards the end of the book actually has a bunch of things that I've heard people say prior about this. And my answer to each of them is actually I can so that's really funny. You should bring that up. So yeah, it's all surrounding kind of the sugar aspect. And that always drove me crazy. Like, oh, you Sorry, you can't have this ice pop. It's not sugar free. And to that, I would say, Actually, I can. So it's really funny that you should bring that up.   Stacey Simms  35:53 Well, I mean, it's something that I think many people with diabetes experience over and over again to the point where you have to decide Are you going to be annoyed and be sarcastic? Or say nothing? Or am I going to be annoyed and continue to educate? Right and that second one, even just as a parent of a child with type one, I try to choose the second one as often as I can, but it really does wear on you. So when I saw the name of your book, I was like, totally can relate.   Morgan Panzirer  36:19 Yeah.   Unknown Speaker  36:20 And you ride correct. That's your sport is, is I'm gonna say it incorrectly as horseback riding.   Morgan Panzirer  36:26 Yes, that is my sport. How do I say that? What's the real sport? equestrian sports? Thank you,   Unknown Speaker  36:33 bro.   Unknown Speaker  36:35 I've not talked to somebody with type one who is you know, involved in equestrian sports. Can you tell us a little bit about how you go about doing that? I mean, because obviously, there's got to be equipment, requirements of the sport and concerns about a pump and a CGM. So   Morgan Panzirer  36:50 what do you do? Absolutely. So I started writing actually right after my diagnosis, and at the beginning, it was fairly easy to manage my blood sugar's Because I was young and just doing beginner things, but as I got older and obviously I started wearing a CGM a little later I got a little more difficult because I was riding for longer I was doing more difficult things. So it became a game of trial and error to kind of find the balance of Okay, I need to cut back my Bazell this this much time prior to getting on and then afterwards, I should sip on a Gatorade. So it was a big game of trial and error that definitely got frustrating at times. But then the whole other battle was at horse shows because when you horse show, you're not allowed to have a phone or any sort of electronic device on you. So I'll never forget there was this one show I was competing in and I go in and I do my course. So I do the jumpers for anyone that knows. So I go in, I jump my course and I come out and the judge walkie talkie over to the end gate where you enter the ring and said she has to be disqualified because she has a phone on her and I was like I don't Promise you like, I'll show it to you. It's not a phone. So they ended up being understanding but after that I had to really be conscientious about prior to stepping in the ring, having the person that was managing the in gate radio over to the judge and say she's that does not have a phone. She's wearing an insulin pump. So that was something I found really interesting. Um, but yeah, it was it's definitely an interesting sport to have type one and do for sure. Well,   Stacey Simms  38:28 you know, and obviously, you had to educate them and now hopefully the next time somebody comes through that way, they would know that a pump isn't a phone, but I'm curious too, you know, obviously writing horse is not driving a car, but it is one of the few sports where you're, you're not alone, right you have to stretch but work with me here. In a way you're you know, you're controlling the horse you're in charge, you have to be in your you have to have good enough diabetes control, that you know, if you're going low, you can Have you could have an accident you could get seriously injured for sure. Yeah. I mean, that's got to be something that I know your parents would be worried about. But as an athlete, it's it's a little bit more consequential in a way than like my son. He's played every kind of sport but if he goes low and basketball, he's probably you know, he's just gonna get himself off the court. He's he's not taking a horse   Morgan Panzirer  39:21 Yeah, it's, it's interesting because there have definitely been times where I'm so invested in riding and what I'm doing that I don't even realize how low I am. So I really have to be careful and always be watching I wear my Apple Watch which is a huge help because I just clicked the Dexcom app and my blood sugar pops right up. So that's made it a lot easier but as you said, there's definitely an added component of stress because if something happens to me, I'm either a gonna fall off and get seriously hurt or be by horses going to be running around loose in the ring. So   aren't really ideal circumstances. For sure,   Stacey Simms  40:00 my apologies to you and anyone listening who is familiar with equestrian sports hearing me painfully make my way through trying to describe. But I appreciate it. Obviously, your parents have read the book, and they must be so proud of you. But was there anything in there that you thought? I don't know if I want my parents to read this? Are you? I mean, I know it's nothing terrible. But you know, in terms of, I think sometimes the people I've talked to with type one, are worried that they're going to make their parents worry more, even as adults, they just don't want their parents to worry. And I was curious if that went through your head at all, as you were releasing this book?   Morgan Panzirer  40:35 Yeah, I mean, there's one chapter in particular that comes to mind where I'm just very raw about my emotions. And at home, I'm not someone who's like that. I'm very quiet. And if something's bothering me, I'll go to my room and deal with it there. So I think putting that all out on paper and having that kind of out to the world and then have my parents read it. I don't want to say I was hesitant, but it was it was interesting because I didn't really know how they were going to react to me being like, Oh, I broke down into tears because they don't usually see me do that very often. So I was, I was a little scared as to what they would think like, Oh, no, is she like crazy at our room? Like what is she doing all the time, but I think they just they were very understanding like, if this is how you want to deal with it, this is how you deal with it. You do whatever you need to do.   Stacey Simms  41:25 When I was looking it up on Amazon earlier, I laughed because you know, Amazon has that if you bought this, you might buy that or, you know, bought and there was my book, there was the world's worst diabetes mom and a bunch of other great diabetes books too. But I laughed because I guess with the teenager in the parenting, maybe they put it together. You know, the world's worst diabetes mom is not about really being a terrible parent. It's about the insecurities that we as parents have when we make mistakes with our kids. I'm curious for you. It sounds like your parents gave you an awful lot of independence and had a lot of confidence in you and I Assume your sister as well. Any message for parents of kids with type one who think we're just messing up and we're the worst?   Morgan Panzirer  42:07 You're not the worst, I can start by saying that. I think I would say try to give your child as much independence as possible without making it unsafe. My parents, as you said, gave me a ton of independence. And I think it worked really well for me, but it's also really different. So what works for me may not work for my sister. So you kind of have to be willing to cater to your child's needs and what you think will suit them best. But independence for me was key.   Stacey Simms  42:36 And then I'll flip it around and say, okay, you're you're a college student. Now you're you're not you know, you're not quite done with being a teenager, but the high school experience is behind you. Any advice for teenagers? type one?   Morgan Panzirer  42:47 Yeah, I would say teenage years are tough just because your peers are naturally a lot more judgmental than they are when they're adults. Do what you do. Don't hide anything. If they want to be jerks about it. Let them be jerks about it. That's their problem. And just don't let them get the best of you because I was bullied by freshman year of high school for wearing a CGM on my leg and was shorts on and things like that. So I would just say, don't let the haters hate who cares, they can do what they want.   Unknown Speaker  43:18 And for you now, what are you studying? Did I read you want to be an endocrinologist?   Morgan Panzirer  43:22 Yes, I am studying biology in Spanish on a pre med track. And I'm hoping to go to medical school for pediatric endocrinology. Did you have an endocrinologist growing up that inspired you? When did you realize you want to do something like this? It's funny, it was kind of the opposite. Hopefully, he's not listening right now. He wasn't bad by any means. But I just thought it would be really cool if I had an endocrinologist who also has type one who can relate to what I'm going through and make me feel like I'm not alone. So if I want that from my endocrinologist, I want to be able to give that to others. So I'm hoping that eventually, if I make it through med school, I'll be able to give that experience to younger children who are also fighting type one. That's great. And then someday you could do the next book, which is actually you can Exactly.   Stacey Simms  44:18 Work it. Thank you so much for talking with me. often don't hear about those teen years and growing up with type one until people are adults, so I can't thank you enough for sharing your story. I really wish you the very best with this.   Morgan Panzirer  44:28 Of course, thank you so much for having me.   Stacey Simms  44:33 I will link up more information about Morgan's book, just go to Diabetes connections.com click on the episode homepage. As usual, there's also a episode transcription. I started doing that in January of 2020 of this year, we're slowly going back the catalog I'll probably put the transcripts in for past shows as well. But you know, there's a lot of shows we're up to episode This is 310 if you're keeping track so I'm doing the best I can with transcriptions but 2020 and going forward getting great feedback on that. And thank you, I really appreciate hearing from you. If there's something that you really like or don't like with the show, and the transcriptions have been a big hit, people listen to the show people read the show, and some people listen while they read the show. However, I can serve you That is what I'm here for. And I'm kind of laughing. But really, that's one of the reasons why I wanted to add the transcriptions. I think there's some excellent information. It's not about me, it's about the information and if you can read it, I know some people just prefer that. So very cool. Thanks again. And, you know, when you go to Amazon, and you see, it just makes me laugh, right? The you see Morgan's book with my book. I don't know why it makes me laugh. I mean, I'm a serious author now. But I do get a kick out of serious author (laughs). I do get a kick out of seeing people I know or have met, along with my book. It's just really a lot of fun. I don't know. Maybe it's silly, but I really get a kick out of it. All right, great month of shows coming up. I'm very excited about July because we're going to be talking about selecting an insulin pump, not which pump is best, but how do you select one that's like the number one Question all these Facebook groups? What pumps should I get? What pumps Should I get my kid? We're also gonna be talking about pancreas transplant. I've wanted to talk to somebody who had a pancreas transplant for years and years because you hear you know how difficult it is or how does it even happen. And so we've done that and I'm really thrilled to share that interview with you in the coming weeks. And of course, the fiscal would squares. That chaotic show will be out soon as well. So lots of good stuff coming up. More on the way. Thank you to my editor, chunky tennis solutions. And thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, kind to yourself.   Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media. All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Zach sits down with activist Tema Okun, author of "The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race And Racism To People Who Don't Want To Know," to have a chat geared around white supremacy culture at work. She and Zach take a deep dive into a piece she wrote on the subject, dissecting several of the named characteristics present in the document. Check out the show notes to reference the piece and to find out more about her work!Connect with Tema on Twitter.Read her "White Supremacy Culture" piece by clicking here.Interested in her book, "The Emperor Has No Clothes?" Check it out on Amazon.Donate to the Justice for Breonna Taylor GoFundMe by clicking here.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Check out our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and, you know, we continue to live in really extraordinary times for some people. Frankly, these times have been this way for a while for many of us, but we have this, like, seemingly [?] to awareness and consciousness, and so I want to respect that. I want to respect where we are. And, you know, we've actually shifted up our interview schedule, and we're having more and more pointed conversations about the reality of white supremacy. So you've probably noticed a few episodes, and we're gonna continue to do that. You know, I shared on Twitter a couple days ago that, like, I think my baseline is just much angrier these days, and I'm at peace with that. And so with that all being said, you know, we have conversations on Living Corporate that center marginalized voices at work. We do that by engaging thought leaders from across the spectrum to really have just authentic discussions. Today we have a phenomenal guest, just like we do every single week, but it makes no less true that we have a great guest today, Dr. Tema Okun. Tema has spent many years working for the social justice community. For over 10 of those years she worked in partnership with the late and beloved Kenneth Jones as part of the Change [?] Training Group and now facilitates long-term anti-racism, anti-oppression work as a member of The DR Works Collaborative. She is a skilled [?] facilitator, bringing both an anti-racist lens and commitment to supporting personal growth and development within the context of institutional and community mission. She holds a BA from Oberland College, a Masters in Adult Education from NC State University, a doctorate at NC Greensboro, and is on the faculty of the educational leadership department at the National Louis University in Chicago. She is active in Middle East peace and justice work with Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions USA. Dr. Okun, how are you?Tema: I'm great, and I want to apologize upfront because some of those biographical facts are no longer true. I left the faculty of NLU several years ago, and I'm now active with the Jewish [Voice?] for Peace. Just to update everybody so that they don't think you or I are lying about [?].Zach: Thank you for correcting me, I appreciate that. So, you know, you've been in this work for quite a while. Like, we talked some months ago actually before my daughter was born, and--Tema: Oh, you have a beautiful daughter.Zach: Thank you very much. Yes, yes, you've seen her. Yeah, she looks great, and she's getting bigger every day. It's just so cool that she's changing all the time. What I'd like to know though is if you've ever seen anti-racist, anti-state-sanctioned violence protests like this in your lifetime in terms of just scale and scope?Tema: You know, you gave me that question ahead of time, and I want to say both yes and no, and I want to say yes because [?] during the Vietnam War protest time period and I lived during the AIDS protest time and the growth of the LGBTQ movement, and I do want to acknowledge that the grief and rage and resistance that we're seeing today is part of a longer legacy of people who have been full of grief and rage and resistance before us so that we don't isolate ourselves and we also take credit for this particular moment, which is unique in the sense of the reach, the brilliance, the clarity about the demands, and I'm very excited about, you know, the defund the police direction that this is taking, and so it's a yes and no answer. I'm so excited to be alive in this moment, and I feel like I was honored to live through those other moments as well.Zach: And, you know, it's interesting because it's easy to kind of forget about the history of protest or the history of, like, anti-racism work, and so then, like, things kind of come in cycles, and so, you know, new voices come up in new generations and it's almost as if these conversations have never been had before, but, like, I'd like to get your perspective on really, like, just these concepts, the concept of whiteness and then also, like, the concept of anti-racism. And I know those are big questions. I'ma give you space, but I'd love just to hear you talk about that.Tema: Well, I think part of what's really unique about this moment is that these concepts are more broadly understood within the resistance movement that we're seeing now than they ever have been in my lifetime, so that part is definitely true. When I started doing this work a gazillion years ago, [?] years ago or so, you know, a lot of people--there was not what I would call... I don't want to use the word sophisticated, so the deep understanding about what whiteness is, how white supremacy operates, how white supremacy is the culture that we're swimming in, how it informs who we are although it doesn't define who we are. There was not that clarity, and I feel like I've been a part of the generation of people who helped think about, develop, and--and I'm not taking credit for it. I mean, I'm part of the wave of people who sort of understood that it was important to ground us in understanding that, understanding the ways that white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, all of these symptoms of oppression have really shaped who we are, and we need to understand how they operate if we're gonna do something different and have a different vision. So what I'll say is I think--and this might be one of the questions you're gonna ask later, but I think that the thing that we need to be careful about is that white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy are very, very ingenious, and what we've seen happen in every movement that has ever occurred historically in our country is that they get diverted from a justice focus to an access focus and that capitalism and white supremacy know how to lure us just enough to say, "We're gonna let you have power of a certain extent in our institution. We're going to let you have access. We're going to say good things about you. But don't rock the boat too much." Leaders going, "Defund the police? It's too vague. You don't have a plan." You know, when we talk about access to healthcare, people don't demand [?]. It's like, "Yes, we have a vision. We have a vision of communities where the billions of dollars that are spent on militarized police are spent on schools and community centers and making sure people have enough food to eat." That's the vision that we have [?] defund the police, and that's what we're gonna do and not get distracted by--so part of the backlash is gonna be fierce and hateful and violent, but the more dangerous part of the backlash is gonna be accomodation.Zach: It's interesting, to your point around, like, respectability, right, and so how people, like, use the concept of civility, like, as a cudgel, right, to really stymie progression. You know, we had Dr. Robin DiAngelo on Living Corporate a few months ago, and we talked about her work in studying white fragility, and, you know, and--and, not but... not but, but I've listened to perspectives on how white fragility is not necessarily, you know, anti-racist work. Can you share your perspective on that?Tema: Sure. One of the dangers of our movement--and, you know, I love our movement, and I love many things about it. One of the dangers of our movement though is that we can get really [?] about what being in the movement or what activism is, and so my feeling is--so I'm 68 years old. I've been around a long time, and [?] point in my life is that we need it all. We need it all. This is not a competition about, you know, who's doing it right and who's doing it best and where the focus needs to be. So our frame, the way--The DR Works Collaborative has also been closed for about three or four years. All of our materials are on our website, which we can share the address later, but what we--our frame is that typically racism shows up on three levels, on the personal level, the ways that we are with each other and ourselves, on the cultura level, the beliefs and values and standards and norms of the groups of people that we're operating within, including sort of white supremacy culture overall, and then our institutional policies and procedures and practices, and one of our racial equity principles is that you have to work on all three levels. And so what I hear Robin saying, and I think it's really important, is that those of us are white who work pretty consistently on our conditioning, [?] the invitation that we are extended to join whiteness and, in joining whiteness, to both disconnect from people of color, disconnect from other white people and disconnect from ourselves, because that's what the invitation is. An example of white fragility is if you are angry, if you are in full grief about what's happening and my fragility says, "Well, you need to tone it down, because I can only accept your [?] if it comes to me in a certain kind of package," then I'm completely disconnected. I'm disconnected from you, and I'm disconnected from myself because I'm not allowing myself to feel my own grief and rage, right, because I'm so scared of yours I'm certainly not gonna feel my own. So I think what you're speaking to, you know, there's a thing that people say about white people and navelgazing and that we just like to navel gaze, and what I like to--you know, we like to agonize, and Maurice Mitchell talks about how his liberation or the liberation of black people, of people of color, is not tied up with my anxiety as a white person about getting it right. So I think that there's this balance between [?] our personal work, because all of us have invitations extended to us by white supremacy in some form or another. So all of us doing work on our internalized self and then continuing to be in the world and relationships and figuring out what our role in this resistance movement is. So it's not an either or. It's very much to me a both and, because if we don't do our personal work, then the way that we're gonna show up is just gonna replicate all of the [BLEEP] dynamics and clinging to power [?] and not understanding who we're accountable to and posturing and, you know, just things that aren't helpful, and fear of our fear and all of those things. I think it's a both and, right?Zach: I appreciate that, and I agree, right? I think one, white fragility is just so real, and it creates so many barriers and, frankly, causes so much harm in ways that we don't even consider, like, literally every single day, and because white supremacy is such a reality, white fragility impacts behavior of black and brown folks even when white people aren't around. So to make sure that those who are in power are examining and interrogating themselves, like, that's critical. That doesn't mean it's the only thing, but it's important to do.Tema: Yes. I think that living in white skin in a white supremacy culture obviously confers power and privilege, but not to everyone, and not in the same way, right? And so I think that it's really important, for me--'cause I'm speaking for myself--to understand how many white people are caught up in the same crapola of white supremacy and the ways that racism targets people of color, are caught up in that without [?] seeing it clearly. And I'm not saying that racism targets white people, I'm saying white people who are working class and poor or white people who have had no opportunity to understand how whiteness operates are swimming around in ways that are completely not in their self-interest, and, you know, are continually encouraged, for example, to look to middle class wealthy white people as their community when in fact their community are other people in the same economic and social situation that they're in. So, you know, I'd like to make sure we understand how many white people are hoodwinked by this whole thing as well and invited to participate in ways that make no sense [?].Zach: I think that's a really good point. One piece of literature that has really gotten, frankly, over the years consistent attention, but at this time it continues to get attention, is "White Supremacy Culture." It's something that you wrote, and we'll put the link in the show notes for everybody, but we're gonna walk through this research, this document. But before we do that, can you talk to us a little bit about how you arrived at the points that you made within the work that you wrote?Tema: Sure. So I've only written one book, and it's called "The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don't Want to Know," and it basically was a chance for me to sit down and write all the things I and other colleagues have learned about teaching about race and racism to people. So that's what that book is, and White Supremacy Culture was written before the book, and I wrote it in either [?] or [?], so a long time ago. Kenneth and I were doing a lot of work on the West Coast, and I had just come from a People's Institute for Survival and Beyond workshop with Ron Chisholm and Daniel Buford and probably a few other people, and The People's Institute is based in New Orleans and is sort of, in my view, the grand daddy of people doing anti-racist education and training in my lifetime and so were our mentors and, you know, people that were doing the work that we were doing, so I was full of their wisdom when I wrote the piece, and I also had--and I can't remember the meaning, but I had just come from a meeting of predominantly white people where pretty much every dynamic in that sheet of paper, in that article, showed up, and I was frustrated beyond belief, and people say this, and this is my only experience of this phenomena, which is that "it wrote itself." Like, I didn't--I sat down at the computer and it wrote itself. Just sort of "This behavior, this behavior, this behavior, this behavior." It was like I was in a fury, and then I showed it to my mentor [?] Martinez, who was running a challenging white supremacy workshop at the time in the Bay Area, and she said, "You can't just list the terrible behaviors. You have to list antidotes. You have to talk about what to do," and so that was such good advice, and so I added those into it, and I will say--so it was written a long time ago. It was written without a class lens, which it needs, and it [?] things out, and it didn't--so I'm actually, in this moment, my project is creating a website rather than another article, but rather a website based on the article so that it can be more flexible. Lots of people have used it and adapted, and all the ways that people have used it and adapted it I'm gonna add a class lens, tell some stories, give examples. So that's my current project.Zach: Can we talk about, like--because in this document you essentially have these different characteristics. I'd like to walk through the characteristics that you list and then really just have you talk about each of them, because again, there are a lot of people that I respect, and I'm gonna shout-out Dr. Oni Blackstock because she's one of the most recent people who I saw tweeting about this and talking about this, but it's all over YouTube. Like, I don't know if you know this, but I just saw a video where somebody put this document up on a video and then, like, slow-scrolled it and talked about it, but I caught myself reading it and I said, "This is exactly like every work culture I've ever been a part of." So let's do this. Let's do each characteristic, and then you just kind of explain, you know, how these attitudes and behavior, you know, reinforce or drive white supremacy at work. Can we do that?Tema: Sure.Zach: So you start off with perfectionism. That's your first one.Tema: Mm-hmm. I started with that one I think probably because that's the one I'm the most guilty of myself. So, you know, I talk about how white supremacy culture is--the purpose of white supremacy is to disconnect us from each other [?] so that a few people can exert their control, cultural control, in ways that allow them to profit at our expense, and so perfectionism is this [idea?], it's very connected to professionalism, and it's this idea that there is a perfect way to do something, which is completely nonsense, and that there's somebody or some group of people who can determine what that is and encourage you to aspire to it. And then we internalize that, and I don't think I know a single person who actually feels completely comfortable with who they are and how they show up and how they're doing things, because the culture is so [?] I feel like we're continually falling short, and if we're continually falling short, then we have to buy products to make ourselves look better and feel better, and it's just a vicious cycle. And another thing I'll say about this list is that these things aren't just used to perpetuate racism and white supremacy and to target people of color in different ways at different times. They impact everybody, and they're toxic. There's nothing good about them at all at any time unless you're the one trying to control other people, and then you're so disconnected from yourself it's not even--Trump is a very good example of someone who's completely disconnected from anything. So I think that perfectionism is used as a tool of professionalism and as a tool to keep people from positions of power and also to keep people off balance about who they are and their worth and their value.Zach: You know, it's interesting. One of the things you say in here is, "Little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing, appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway."Tema: Mm-hmm, yeah, exactly. And then the way that we internalize that, even when we're fighting hard not to. You know, I was talking to a friend yesterday who was applying for a position at a foundation. It's completely, completely clear to me, and I think to her, that she is not only qualified for the job, she is over-qualified for the job, and my guess is they won't hire her because it's clear to them too, you know? And it's so pernicious, the way that that works, where a lot of white people here who are not called to account for our lack of understanding about how racism and white supremacy works because it's not ever part of our job qualifications. No one is evaluating us based on our ability to understand how that works, and we're about to invite somebody in who does understand, and that makes us really uncomfortable, so maybe [?] somebody who's gonna not make us feel uncomfortable all the time. That's part of how that works.Zach: And so it's interesting. So I was about to move to sense of urgency, but to your point, in the recommended antidotes for racism you have "develop a culture of appreciation where the organization takes time to make sure the people's work and efforts are appreciated. Develop a learning organization where it's expected that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer an opportunity for learning." It's interesting, even in organizations where they'll say things like, "Oh, it's okay to make mistakes," I've noticed that--and this is a common experience for most black folks at work, black and brown people to be clear, we don't have the same grace to make mistakes. It's interesting because--and I've had this conversation already with a colleague, but there was a time at work I put a PowerPoint together, and one I just think PowerPoints overall have to be one of the biggest examples of, like, subjectivity to the max, because what you think is a good PowerPoint or nice design I may genuinely think is abhorrent. I may really not like the design of your PowerPoint, right? Like, I might hate it. But anyway, I did a PowerPoint. Someone didn't like it, and so then that PowerPoint and then me, in their eyes, not doing well on a PowerPoint, was then a justification for me to blocked from [a multitude] of opportunities in very public ways, right? And so it's like, what does it look like to really create objective, safe, equitable spaces for everybody?Tema: Right. And what does it look like for that particular person to admit to themselves that they may not have the corner on how something needs to be done? I mean, I remember--each one of these, there's so much that's also interconnected, and two things come to mind. I remember Kenneth--so Kenneth was my mentor and my colleague for 12 years, and he died way too early in 2004, but as we were working together I remembered saying to him... 'cause my style, we were both about the same age, and my [?] style is sometimes to say or admit I've made a mistake or to show some vulnerability, and I said to Kenneth, "You never do that, you never show any vulnerability." "Tema, I can't afford to do that. People are watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake. So even if I make one, I'm not gonna say that I did because people are ready to pounce all over me for it." You know, and again, just another example of how long it took me to learn that, he had to sort of say that out loud to me [?]. So yeah, I think there's that part of it, and I had another thought, but I'm sure it will come to me as we keep talking. So here's the other story, which was that I seemed to be the details-oriented person, and sometimes I'd get really frustrated because I felt like he wasn't paying attention to, like, air fare or flights or when we had to be somewhere, and so I started to develop a little bit of an attitude about how I was doing so much more than he was, more important [?], and we were having a discussion and he said something to me like, "I talked to So-and-so the other day," and I said, "So-and-so? They were in our training a year ago," and he went, "Yeah, yeah." I said, "You're talking to them now?" "Oh, yeah, yeah," and then he proceeded to tell me that he was fostering relationships with most people in almost all the trainings over time and that that's what he did, and it just was such a lightbulb moment for me. I'm like, "Oh, my God. This man," who was a brilliant trainer, there was no question about that, "is leading and offering things that I've never even dreamt of being able to lead or offer that makes such a difference in this work, while I'm sitting here feeling all superior because I know how to schedule a plane flight." It was just like... so many of us, and so many white people in particular, but so many of us are walking around thinking that we know how things should work when we don't know at all, [?] open to how other ways of doing might actually offer so much more. So yeah.Zach: I appreciate that, and that resonates with me too because I think about, especially if you have, like, these majority white organizations, you know, again, people attract, or they're attracted, to people that are like them, right? And that's not just in appearance, but also in, like, ways of thinking and doing, and so, like, if you're in this space, the majority are really good at tasks or really good at [?] things off a box, if there's someone who can do those things but that's just not their wiring, then that person's automatically seen as a problem or as inferior in some way. In reality it's like, "Okay, I don't need--there's eight of y'all who tick off boxes and who are very, like, transactional. Is it possible for me to be different and at the same time be just as good if not add more value than you do perhaps?" I think, for me transparently, one of the biggest mistakes I think I've made in my career is that I think I've been too transparent and vulnerable about me wanting to learn and grow, 'cause I say "Hey, I'd like to learn this. I don't know this," but I've learned, in the spirit of perfectionism, when you communicate that you don't know something or you're new to something, I've just learned that we don't know, black and marginalized people, just don't have the grace to communicate that they don't know. They don't have the grace to grow. They just don't.Tema: Yeah, and it's infuriating. It's completely infuriating, and it's a complete loss. I think the thing that I would like to get across with my audience, my commitment to working with other white people, is for those of us listening to this to understand the deep violence in that, you know? In working side-by-side with people who feel like they are not allowed to offer their vulnerability or their desire to grow and learn because--my God, it's intense.Zach: So you have a lot of terms here, and you know, we might have to do a part two, but I want to see how many of these we can get through so I'm gonna back up and let you talk more. Sense of urgency.Tema: I think that, again, the point of urgency--so every organization I've ever worked with operates with a huge sense of urgency and everything is so critically important right this minute, and it completely perpetuates racism because--the example I'll give is we were doing work with an organization of mostly lawyers that do very good work on a state-wide level, and they had just sort of unpacked all the ways in which [?] of color on the staff and in the community that they served were not feeling heard, were not included in decision making, their ideas were shut down, sort of what we were just talking about, and then an emergency came up, and I think there might have been an arrest, but something urgent happened within the community, and the white leadership, the white lawyers, felt like they had to respond right this minute and if they didn't the organization would be at stake, and right in front of our eyes all of the dynamics were playing out in front of us, and the two of us who were facilitating the workshop tried to suggest to them, "This is happening right in front of our eyes. We know that this is urgent, and we suggest that you sit down and you take a breath and you understand there are other people in the community who are handling it in this moment and that what you all need to do is really sit and take a breath and see how you can approach this differently," and so they just repeated the--you know, you could see it. The white people were circled around, making all these decisions, and the people of color were [?] them on the outside, trying to listen in and then getting disgusted and walking away, and it was just--when things are urgent, if we're not paying attention and we haven't set up the relationships and we haven't set up the procedures to say when things get literally urgent this is what we're gonna do, when things feel urgent but they aren't this is what we're gonna do. Is this really as urgent as we think it is? Because it's urgent we need to take a breath, we need to take a breath and make sure that we're all in this together rather than walking all over each other in our attempt to prove something, which is to prove that, like, we're the organization that's gonna respond like that, even if the way that we respond, you know, tramples over people. And then I think a lot of us internalize urgency. A lot of white people feel like, "If we don't act right now, if I don't fix this right now, then I'm not gonna be able to prove that I'm a good white person," so then we go in and fix something and we make it worse because we haven't stopped to take a breath to consult with other people, to see if our intuition, our impulse is actually the right one. I've seen that happen over and over and over again.Zach: Let's talk about quantity over quality.Tema: Well, you know, we live in a capitalistic society, and we love to measure things, and we love to believe that value has to do with amounts of things, usually money. And again, so I see some of the [thunder patterns?], all of the thunder patterns that I've seen in my lifetime and work, is thunders trying to get people to prove that they're effective by the numbers of things. "How many people did you impact?" Not the quality of things, not the depth of things, not the sustainability of things but, you know, the number of things, which is such a limited measure of how we're doing, and the research I've done on culture shift shows that it's actually not a numbers game. We don't need a majority of people to shift culture. We need deep relationships, we need generational change, we need clusters of people coming to new beliefs simultaneously, but they don't have to be a majority. So I just think it's good to be able to have a sense of what we think progress is, but often we aim towards--I do a lot of work in schools, and the story I often tell--so I'm sorry if anyone's heard this before--is how our schools often, if not always, have a story that what they're trying to do is prepare students for success, and what they mean by that is "We want students to stay in school, get good grades, graduate, get a job, and go shopping, and if we can measure that we've done that it doesn't matter if our students are leading meaningful lives. We're not measuring that. We're not measuring if students know how to find themselves. We're not measuring if students have gotten in touch with their spiritual side or their artistic side. We're not measuring whether students know how to be in a relationship with themselves and with each other. We're not measuring the things that matter, you know? We just don't know how to measure those things. We're obsessed with graduation rates and, you know, how much money people are making.Zach: You have another one here about worship of the written word.Tema: Mm-hmm. So I'll give an example if you'll give an example, but this is our history, sort of the theft of indigenous land, the theft of land from Mexico, the broken treaties, the enslavement of people, it's all built on worship of the written word and the whole, you know, all of our Southwest and Midwest states that became US property after the Mexican-American War and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, all of that theft of land was made possible because Congress passed all kinds of legislation requiring people to [?], and most people lived in a culture where that's not how people [?] that they owned land. So that's just one example, and just the ways that we hide behind "If it's not written down, then it doesn't exist." "It's only wisdom if it's written down," and then only if it's written down by certain people. What comes to mind for you?Zach: So here's where I found the application interesting. So there's a way that I believe those in power and in the majority will essentially place the burden on the oppressed to have evidence, like, tangible, documented evidence, but then in the instances where that evidence is undeniable, then at best it simply just saves that oppressed person from being harmed, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee justice for that oppressed person.Tema: Yeah, or they'll say it's not written right or the form was not filled out correctly or--Zach: Right, or "We still don't have all the facts," or "What about the other person's side?" And so there's still this--it's such a jig, because you're gonna lose, but the question is "While this may have saved you from getting fired, it's not actually going to absolve your name completely after all. These other people said something." Right?Tema: I think about when Bhagat Singh Thind sued the Supreme Court for citizenship, and he was from India, and he was suing based on how science classified people from India as Caucasoids, and the year before a Japanese person who had done the same thing lost the case because people from Japan were classified as mongoloids, so they were not white, but the Supreme Court said, "Well, it's true science classifies you as Caucasoids, but you're not seen as white by the common white man, therefore you're not white." So it's the written word, but also the word is, as you said, controlled and considered by those in power, and whose written words will be paid attention to and whose won't?Zach: Yeah. I think about Breonna Taylor. We know that she was murdered by the state in her own bed, but then when you go back and you look at the report it's completely blank, right? And so, like, anybody with good sense should be able to understand that Breonna Taylor's bullet-ridden body and that piece of paper are not congruent. So one of those [?] is lying. Breonna's own blood testifies that she is not lying, so why are Breonna Taylor's murderers still free? It's the worship of the written word.Tema: Yeah. Sandra Bland, all of that, yeah.Zach: Yeah, Sandra Bland as well, right? And countless others. Tony McDade. And it's frustrating, but I think about that. I think about how manipulative and--you used the word pernicious, it's a really appropriate word in that, you know, documentation really matters until it doesn't. I always tell marginalized people to document everything, because again, while documentation might not ever hold any accountable, it at the very least can make sure that you don't get fired, or it can delay you getting fired because you have something, hard evidence, that if someone says something, you're like, "Well, what you're saying is clearly not true." Okay, so paternalism was another characteristic that you had in your research.Tema: Yeah. I'm gonna bow here to a man named Paul Kibble, who does a lot of writing on Christian hegemony. It's just the way in which--and so many of these intersect, and I'm adding one called "qualified." I don't know if that's on the list explicitly there, but it's the way in which white people assume that, because we're white, we are qualified to act and make decisions that are outside our lived experience, and I think about--when I taught it, when I wasn't on the faculty in educational leadership, when I taught undergraduate students in education, you know, most of them are young, white women who were coming into teaching because they loved to--and please know I admire teachers beyond belief because they work so hard for so little, and yet they come in, these young white women come in very idealistic and very hopeful, and they have no experience, most of them, working with people of color and very little preparation for doing that, and yet have not internalized that they're not at all qualified to do the job, and the education system hasn't internalized that either, and so just the ways in which we've got almost every [?] institution is operating out of a sense of paternalism. Like, "We know what's better for you without consulting you or asking you about your lived experience." And I think about doing work with the department of social services where it's about a woman who, in order to make it through her week, had to visit 11 different offices in the Department of Social Services to account for herself, you know? And it's the way in which--if we look at Congress. Banks are completely involved in writing policies having to do with banks. Poor people and working people have no say in policies that impact their lives, and the laws that impact their lives are written by people who think that they need to be punished for being working class and poor or who think that they need to be exploited or, you know, who have absolutely no care or concern or lived experience, for the most part, of what it means to be black, brown, working class poor, and paternalism is just this idea that "We know better than you," and it can be very deeply embedded in religious thinking, in Christian thinking, and [?]--it's just sort of the idea that "We know best. We're going to convert you to our ways," and that's white supremacy is all about. The goal here [?] is "Act like us if we can exploit you more that way." Assimilation, and if not assimilation exploitation and violence, you know? It's just all based on this idea that we know better, and one of the things that we know better is that [class?] is more important than people.Zach: I think that's true. I think it comes down to a lot of power and control. So, you know, one of my larger concerns right now, even as corporations and larger organizations are looking at Black Lives Matter and people are taking these statements and stances, and organizations are mobilizing their employee resource groups and different things to have these conversations and do real talk and all this kind of stuff, and how much of this is about really hearing and including their marginalized employees, and how much of this is about, like, really making sure that you're retooling, reshaping your organization to be equitable and inclusive, or how much of this is really about you just trying to put some gates and borders around this to maintain control, right? That's my biggest concern.Tema: So I think there's two parts to this. So I think there can be conscious paternalism and there can be unconscious paternalism, and probably lots of gray [?] in between, and so I for one completely hate the terms diversity and [?] because I don't think that they--it's about window-dressing or table-dressing or whatever term you want to use. It doesn't ask the question, "What are we including people into?" Because if we were to ask that question, we would have to admit that a lot of what we're inviting people into is toxic. So it's not about including people. It's about reshaping everything, and I think that's what I was talking about in terms of what we need to be wary of, that some of the backlash is going to be very direct and hateful. Now, a lot of it is gonna be about accommodation, and forget about justice, let's just accommodate, accommodate, accommodate. And paternalism really plays a role there, and we can see it reflected in older leaders often, people who have been around a long time, who are scared they're gonna lose power by these young people who are coming up full of fervor and demanding justice, and some of us have accommodated for so long in order to just often survive that we've forgotten what the goal is, and some of the paternalism is--I'll speak for myself--is internalized entitlement, the internalized belief that I'm qualified to do things I'm not qualified to do, and it didn't require any intent on my part. And I tell a story on the website, and it might be in the book I can't remember, of essentially pushing my black colleague aside in an environment where I knew absolutely everything. This was a different colleague, a colleague named Kamayu [sp] [?], an incredible organizer, and he was in [?], the room was packed full of African-American people living in the [?], economically poor, culturally incredibly genius and rich, and, you know, I didn't think he was doing a good job, so I walked up to the front and I pushed him aside, and I didn't know anything about [?] in the [?], right? But I had this instinct in my body that he wasn't doing it and I needed to fix it. It was--so there's that, the way I internalized this paternalism and this idea that I know how to do things. We just cause so much harm, and again, it's a complete tribute to Kamayu that we're still friends. He actually didn't say anything to me for years, and finally I started to think about it and I'm like, "Kamayu, what about that day?" And he went, "Oh, I figured you'd figure it out sooner or later." You know? So there were, like, five years in there where Kamayu was not--I was not in a genuine relationship with him because he was waiting for me to figure it out, you know?Zach: To your example, I think about it in ways that, like--so it's interesting, you have these cultures that are very racist, right? Like, you have these organizations that have harmed black people for a while, but it just so happens that there's a certain confluence of events that are forcing organizations that have been historically harmful to black and brown people, now they're having to do things differently. But what's challenging, what's interesting, is that some of the people who just six months ago were very harmful are now self-appointing themselves as leaders to have these conversations, right? And, like, there's a certain--of course that's emotionally inauthentic, but I think there's also a certain level of entitlement and paternalism in that.Tema: Yeah, totally. And again, I think--so this is my job, it's not your job, but as someone who identifies as white, who is white, who lives a white life and thinks a lot about what it means to be in relationships with other white people, part of [my job?] is to encourage myself and other white people to think about, "What are we doing here?" And what is the cost to you of this posturing, and what would it be like for you to actually authentically sit down with yourself and go, "Okay, what am I afraid of? What kind of help do I need? What are the things I really need to change?" And I think all of us need to develop a much better practice of what I would call radical honesty with ourselves about why we want to live in a world where we actually are able to have authentic relationships with other people and ourselves and live in a world where people are well-cared for and people can thrive and we don't have to be so afraid of [?] and all these other things. So yeah.Zach: So I'ma pick one last one. Fear of open conflict.Tema: Yeah, that goes back to perfectionism and some of the other things that we talked about. The story I'll tell is that--well, it's a common story, which is that some racism is happening, and rather than deal with the racism that's happening we will label or target the person who's naming it, and sometimes that happens to white people too because we're so afraid of the truth-telling that's gonna happen of how racism is happening. So it's just this--we're too afraid to talk about things that are real and are gonna have emotion attached to them and might lead us, as white people, to feel like we've done something wrong or that we may even essentially be bad in some kind of way, so let's not talk about it. Let's blame the person who's trying to make us uncomfortable. This is attached to "right to comfort." Let's blame the people who are calling us in and say that there's something wrong with them so we don't have to feel our feelings, we don't have to be uncomfortable, we don't have to look at ourselves. We can stay in what feels like control, and it's such a--again, it does such harm, to other people and also to ourselves. The ability to sort of say, "Bring it on. Okay, tell me more. Tell me more. That was so racist? Okay, tell me more. I want to know. Tell me more." It's such a different energy. It's opening. Or "You're racist." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." "No, I'm not." There's nowhere--it's, like, you're building conflict and you're not--it's like, "So tell me. How am I racist? Yeah, I want to know, because I think I probably am. So tell me." There's so much more fruit there, even if you end up not agreeing with what they say it's like there's more fruit, more juice, more ability to--it's like, "We can handle this. We can sit in this discomfort, and in fact, if we don't learn to do that we're not gonna get anywhere."Zach: But see, I think that in the context of, like, a business, like, the fear with that is that if I admit that I'm racist, if I admit that I've harmed you, then that gives you byway to pursue the company, right? And so there's this fear of creating risk or opening your company up, opening yourself up to risk by admitting your faults, you know?Tema: So people just need to figure out a way to deal with that.Zach: [laughs] I love how you just dismiss that.Tema: Oh, come on. I don't--you know, legalese and laws and policies [?] in service of connection and not in service of fear and abuse, right? It's like Trump saying you can only come to the thing if you're not gonna sue me if you get the coronavirus. Like, no. And I would also say, for me, one of the racial equity principles [?], you'll see this list of characteristics, and you'll also see our racial equity principles, and one of the ones I love the most is called Organizing Mind, and what we mean by that is you start with the chorus. People go, "Oh, you're preaching to the chorus," and I go yes, because our chorus is very out of tune, so let's get in tune, and then we can start preaching to people outside the chorus and bring them into the chorus. So it's, like, start with the people who want you want, and figure out what your power is, figure out the risk that you're willing to take, and from there each one reach one teach one, as Sharon Martinez would say. So in a corporate environment it's, like, figuring out what are the roadblocks that we need to get rid of so we can actually do this, or whwere are we willing to have authentic conversations regardless of the risk and can we start doing that? So figure out what's within your power to do and do it. Don't wait for permission. Don't wait for--you know, there are lots of things that we can do and build our power that way without people giving us permission to do it, as we are witnessing across the country and across the globe, right? All these beautiful people, many young people, not waiting for permission. Bringing down statues, [?], and it's a beautiful thing to see right now.Zach: It's brought me joy, frankly, to see. Dr. Okun, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I just want to thank you so much for being a guest. I want to make sure that everybody knows that the document that we were walking through and that I picked a few characteristics out of for our guest to beautifully expand upon is gonna be in the show notes, and we're going to also be promoting it--you'll see it this week on social media and things of that nature, so make sure that you check it out. This has been Living Corporate. You know, we do this every single week. We're having conversations, real talk in a corporate world, that center and amplify marginalized voices at work. We'll make sure to catch you all next time. In the meantime between now and next time, we're all over Beyonce's internet. You just type in Living Corporate, we'll pop up. Catch us on Instagram at LivingCorporate, and man, if you have anything you want to talk to us about, just contact us through the website, living-corporate.com. Please say the dash--living dash corporate dot com. 'Til next time, y'all, this has been Zach, and you've been listening to Dr. Tema Okun, activist, educator, speaker, organizer. Peace.

EP:22 The $45 Million Medical Debt with Victor Martinez Welcome to Debt-Proof Living with Mary Hunt. Today's episode is brought to you by Mvelopes. That's M, like Mary, v-e-l-o-p-e-s. Mvelopes uses the tried and true envelope budget system. All in one easy app. Give every dollar a purpose. Mvelopes.com.  And now, here's Mary.    Mary Hunt: [00:00:28] Hi, and welcome to another episode of Debt-Proof Living. I am so happy that you joined me again today, and guess what we're going to talk about? Debt. Yeah, that's really what we talk about a lot. How to get out of debt, how to stay out of debt and live a life where you are not bound by all of the trappings that happen so we get into debt. So, um, many of you have, have read Debt-Proof Living. You've been with me for many, many years. So I just want to do a little bit of a review talking about debt and what it does to our lives. You know, basically it takes away our options and the deeper in debt we become, the fewer options we have. That's really, really scary, but the good news is that you can get out of debt. You know, my story, you know, that I got out of an awful lot of debt. I am,  I'm just so struck by the fact that these days debt is so easy to get into, and I'm not talking about emergency kinds of debt. I'm talking about credit card debt, you know, I just don't have the money today. I'm sure I'll have it next week. So I'll just put it on a credit card. That's probably the most, most dangerous because it's so easy to get into. Society has, our culture has really put a stamp of approval on it. But then there's other kinds of debt. There's a student loans, student loan debt, which has become very, very popular. And, and then there's, you know, buying a new home and then you've got the home debt and then you've got all kinds of things. You know, I hear from people all the time who are having trouble paying their property taxes. So they put that on payment and then they put their, their, uh, federal income taxes that they owe on payments. Cause they just don't have haven't and pretty soon it just, it builds. It's crazy how debt can take over our lives. And for a lot of people, when they're in this kind of situation, there's things called medical emergencies. That's what we're going to talk about today is medical debt. How does that affect their lives? You know, statistically, I can tell you this. If you look it up, if you Google it, you're going to find out that medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in our country. Well, you can kind of figure that out because if people are already in debt, boy, getting hit with a big 30, $40,000 medical debt, and really be the straw that tips over and puts you into that horrible, horrible situation of, of bankruptcy having to make those kinds of choices. Um, one estimate is that more than one in four Americans have trouble paying a recent medical bill. I can understand that. Um, And, and sometimes those medical bills get pushed because not paying them is not going to give you a consequence as great is not paying your rent or not paying your car payment. And some research says 32% of American workers have medical debt. And over half have defaulted on it. That's not good for a medical industry in this country to having people default and having to go through all of that kind of thing. So the last stats statistic I'm going to tell you is that among Americans with medical debt, 15% owed $10,000 or more. That is a huge heavy, heavy burden. I've got the most exciting news to tell you about a great, great story. I read about this in the paper. I did, and it hit the news big time and the headline was a church, a church paid off medical debt of many of their parishoners. It hit, it hit every news station and it was just fantastic. I read about it and I was so,  I was so excited because I wanted to know more, you know, all the questions. How did the church choose who got to have their paid off? How did that happen? I mean, did you have a lot of new members all of a sudden? So here's the exciting part. I don't have to wonder. And you don't either, because today my very special guest, from Cincinnati, Ohio is Victor Martinez. He is on staff and the Community Development Director for Crossroads Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. And I have a feeling you're just going to love hearing from him. Welcome, welcome Victor! So glad to have you today on my podcast.    Victor Martinez: [00:04:55] Thank you. Very excited to be here with you today.    Mary Hunt: [00:04:58] Um, I just want to set this up and then you're going to tell us all about it, but I've got a million questions. I'll, I'll try to control myself, Crossroads received some BIG media coverage in February. I just told you about that. I loved it. Crossroads Church was able to work in their community to get more than $45 million of medical debt forgiven in their area. I want you to tell me all about it. Can you just set this up for us a little bit? How this came to be, how you got involved, how you happen to be on staff there and all of that. We want to know all of it, Victor.    Victor Martinez: [00:05:40] Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, I'll, I'll start with a little bit of the background of, um, how did I come about to be in this team? So, um, I'm not a pastor, I'm not a social worker by trade. I went to school for engineering. So I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree and I worked several years in the corporate worldand as an engineer, making diapers and making also cleaning products like, like Swiffer, um, and that kind of stuff for a company called Proctor&Gamble. And about a year and a half ago, I moved to actually work on staff full time at Crossroads Church. And at that point, then my job became  looking for opportunities in which we can be part of helping our city with different things. And medical debt is something that is not only affecting our city. Like you share some of these statistics. It's actually affecting our entire nation. And it's unfortunate, because for most of the debt, and I'll say maybe all of the medical debt. We don't choose to get sick, it's just happens to us. So it's just very difficult situation. And, um, we heard of a church in Indiana. Actually, we saw it on the news. that they wiped out $4 million of medical debt. And we actually thought, well, how much debt does the people in Cincinnati do people in Cincinnati, half. And we found out that actually $65 million of medical debt and just the city of Cincinnati alone. And we felt we needed to do something about it. So we talked with our senior leaders, our Senior Pastor Brian Tome. He was super excited. He wanted to make this happen very quickly. So we got to work on it.  Alright, this    Mary Hunt: [00:07:19] brings me to a big question here. The church helped to pay off medical debt to the tune of $45 million. Does that mean that Crossroads Church has a bank account with that much extra money in it. And you just wrote out checks to all these people's debtors.    Victor Martinez: [00:07:38] Yeah, absolutely not. No. Like most churches our pockets are not super deep. There's a few things that happened here. So one is, uh, we partnered with an organization called RIP Medical Debt and they have been working with a lot of organizations on paying off medical debt for individuals that, um, many of them are not able to pay it off. And they are able to purchase , and so acquire debt for a ratio about one for every hundred dollars of debt, they, they're able to purchase it for $1. So 1:100 is, is the ratio. So that's one aspect. That we don't have to invest $46 million to get rid of $46 million of medical debt. And then the other, the other aspect is that really, um, we didn't usethe budget of the church for doing this. This was really the people in our community that stepped up to give of their money, to come alongside  folks that are, we're not able to pay their debt, to pay it off. And I think that's really the, the thing to highlight in the story is the generosity of, of people. Um, when, when we know that there are people that need help, that are hurting our community really just, just rallied around them. So it was very beautiful to see that.    Mary Hunt: [00:08:56] That's amazing. So you were able to, in essence, I suppose, just putting it simply to negotiate the debt for these people. So if they owed a thousand dollars, the hospital or the doctors were willing to accept $100 to pay that off, is that, is that what you're saying?   Victor Martinez: [00:09:19] Yeah. And that's typically how there's this industry works in terms of, um, when hospitals or places find out that people are not able to pay the debt. They will go and sell this to a collections agency. Um, so if we're in debt, we probably have seen a letter in our mail or two that say, Hey, you owe this debt. This is how much you have to pay. It affects your credit and all that kind of stuff that, you know, I'm pretty sure that, you know, a lot about. So in a similar way, this organization, RIP is able to purchase this debt, but instead of going after people to ask them to pay for it, they go after people that actually can pay it for other people. And that's what we did.  Mary Hunt: [00:10:00] I imagine it was Christians helping to with the Bible tells us where to bear one burdens. So that is a beautiful thing. Can you imagine if our whole health system was based on that, that those who are healthy, I guess technically that's how insurance works, the healthy, uh, cover the costs of those who are sick. But that's truly amazing.   Julie Emerson: [00:10:26] Let's take a quick break for just a minute. Hi, I'm Julie producer of Debt-Proof Living with Mary Hunt. You know, many of us have the experience in our lives of living paycheck to paycheck and many people. I know it well, have a difficult time following a budget. But not managing our money as a leading cause of stress in our lives.That's why Mvelopes created a simple, affordable envelope budgeting program that just works. Mvelopes helps you take control of your future by giving every dollar a purpose, every dollar, a purpose, people who use Mvelopes see monthly savings of 10% of their spending within six weeks of getting started and they report less anxiety. Now, currently Mvelopes is extending their free trial to 60 days for all of their subscriptions. So there's never been a better time to start on a new path. Just click the link in the show notes and sign up today. Risk-free .Okay. Now let's get back to our conversation.    Mary Hunt: [00:11:32] Now I've got some other questions for you. Alright. I'm sitting in a service and I know that Crossroads Church is huge. You have multiple campuses and a big organization. So here I'm just picturing myself sitting in this beautiful big auditorium. Personally way down by my debt situation. And I read in the, in the bulletin or in the program, or I hear someone from the platform say that we're going into this campaign or this event where others are, we're going to reach out and we're going to bear one another's burdens and we're going to help pay off medical debt. My ears would perk up and Whoa, that would be so amazing. So how did you decide who would be qualified or who would be eligible for this program or was it open ended and anyone who had debt? It would be paid off. I don't quite understand that part.   Victor Martinez: [00:12:40] Yeah, absolutely multiple things here. One, uh, I think to answer the bulk of the question, which is how to, how do we know who we're going to bless? Um, we, we didn't know who, who was going to receive a blessing. So this information is confidential and we didn't have access to it. We just knew that there was an amount of money that was outstanding in debt out there. This is where our partner RIP Medical Debt comes in and they handle all that portion. And. So we, we, we determine, Hey, we have different campuses in different location. We want to see what's in debt around these locations. And we're just going to see how much we fundraise and how much they were able to pay off. And that's how it was. So, um, In the case of that, there were somebody who had medical debt, for example, in our community, that said, Hey, can I, can I be a part of this? Which had happened. Which it happened. Um, We were not in a position to necessarily, like, purchase their debt just the way this program works. So what we did is we many years ago, Uh, we started a, um, place in Cincinnati called the City Link Center and it was with the intent of helping people get out of poverty, specifically, uh, fight generational poverty. Uh, so we have a lot of resources for folks that are going through different hardships to, to get some access to tools and help. So for those folks that were not able to be blessed through, through that program. We had an opportunity for, to come alongside them. And I think many times some of this debt leads to other challenges. So really the purpose of City Link there was to just partner with them, be there with them, for them to meet, uh, to help them with their needs.   Mary Hunt: [00:14:27] That is just wonderful. Part of my Debt-Proof Living program and what I've taught people and have led people out of debt. The absolute essence are these five elements of Debt-Proof Living and one of them is giving., How important it is that we all learn to give because that's what kills greed in our lives. And previous podcasts, my listeners know, if you've listened to The Seven Money Rules Series, part of everything you bring into your life, everything is handed to you. All of your income. Part of it needs to be given away. And that, that is amazing to me. That's the way one of the ways to stay out of debt is also in a way to get out of debt. And so, um, when I think of Crossroads Church teaching stewardship, that we should be givers. How important is that to your whole program at the church?    Victor Martinez: [00:15:24] Yeah, I, it's very important. Um, it's a big biblical principle. Uh, you know, the, the Bible is full of wisdom. There's just a lot of different topics that you could pick and you can, you can just get some good insights into, and for those of us that are believers, these, these wisdoms become principles of life and how we want to live. So one of them is. giving, to your point. Um, and we talk a lot about the principle of tithing, which builds discipline. You know, it's not just a faith thing, it's also a math thing. You know, it builds discipline in terms of how can, can we do this? Um, what also is you alluded to this it's this concept of us giving away the things that we have because ultimately eventually actually either we will give them more or when we kick the bucket, you know, they, they go away, you know, they go out to somebody else. So we, I say this is something that is true for. I will say that from my understanding of the Christian world. But even I see this in other faith expressions, how the importance of, of giving money out to other people and not even knowing what happens. And that was actually the context of this initiative. We were, we were talking about money. We spent six weeks talking about money in a church, which is it. We don't do often, as you can imagine, is a. It's a very interesting topic to have in the church setting. In that weekend in particular, where we announced that we were going to, to try to see how much money we could come up with. We were talking about the power of multiplication and how, when we give the blessings that we receive, when God, um, uh, from, from God specifically, When we give away, we have no expectation on what's coming back. When we do it for the, from the depths of our heart. And not because we think we're going to receive something, but just because, um, that's what we're called to do. We're called to serve the least of these. And, and I, and I think that's probably one of the things I've made this so impactful is that our folks really genuinely, from the core of their heart, they had a desire to bless other people because they know that they are blessed.    Mary Hunt: [00:17:38] My producer and I were talking before we started the show. And she told me that, um, well, first of all, I absolutely believe that it's impossible to out-give God. Giving is, is one of those things in our lives that we can't really explain how in giving we receive. But I know that proven it over and over and over again.  But she mentioned that that your pastor and the pastoral staff kind of put out there a very unusual money back guarantee.   Victor Martinez: [00:18:07] Yeah.    Mary Hunt: [00:18:07] Can you tell us about that?   Victor Martinez: [00:18:11] Yeah, absolutely. It is. Um, it is an interesting and different concept for sure. But, um, yes, we did that also within the context of that series that we were talking, actually, it was inspired from a, from a book called The Blessed Life. And, um, we were inviting people to really explore the concept of tithing. Tithing is counter-cultural and the concept of giving, giving money. And we are going to receive more blessings sounds, counter intuitive. Like we are told in our, in our American culture that we just need to accumulate money. That's, you know, that's what it's designed for. So we just put it out there for folks to say, Hey, if, if really you're afraid that, um, this is not gonna work out. Then we want to make sure that you get to experience it first hand. So what we said is that if you want to explore tithing for three months, and at the end of three months, you see that there are no changes to your life. Some of them could be financial, but others things that are a little bit harder to measure, like maybe relationships improve, or maybe other things. If you don't see any of that, there's no need for, for us keeping your money. We will return it. And I will say that I am not maybe we, we returned money to one person out of the hundreds of people that tried it. Because people were experiencing life transformation when they step into that space   Mary Hunt: [00:19:33] God keeps His promises. He says I will bless you,    Victor Martinez: [00:19:37] Absolutely!   Mary Hunt: [00:19:38] So anyway, I want to stand up and share, this is the best story ever. I just absolutely love that. So Victor, tell me, um, did you and your team at Crossroads, uh, the size of your church alone tells me that you are very influential in that city.  And how, how does Crossroads reach beyond their campus to affect, to bless the community?    Victor Martinez: [00:20:03] Yeah, absolutely. Well, this COVID situation has been really interesting in the fact that we have been blessed in being able to share our what we know of, of the, you know, of our faith through mediums like social media or TV. So, um, we almost, we might today, who knows, be at over 500,000 followers on Facebook, for example.  When this all started we're maybe at 30,000., Which is, that it's, that in itself is just crazy. And a lot of those folks are people from all over the nation. In fact, that is a lot of people, the world that are just being able to, to see that. So, um, W we, we think we are, you know, we are giving the opportunity to really, um, bring good news and really share with, um, what does really following Jesus looks like, because with the same token, there, there are other things out there that are, unfortunately, not, that are positive that are, that are going on.  But that is let us one thing that it's one way that we're communicating across multiple people. But also since very early in our, in the foundation of the Crossroads, our Crossroads Church, we have always been looking at how can we bless people in other places. So we, we started a hospice in South Africa. It was the biggest at the time, for example, many years ago. And we, you know, our community put in a lot of money to make that happen. We still today, we invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in helping fight sex trafficking in India. And we have efforts in other countries,  Nicaragua, Bolivia. Uh, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing others. Puerto Rico. Where we're, we're really trying to make our resources available for, for those people to be able to, um, solve other basic needs, but also get to hear the good news. So. Yeah, that that's something that we're, we try very intentional beyond the, the United States, but also within the city, we have this example of medical debt. During COVID. Our community again contributed over $230,000 that were used for supporting medical professionals in our city so they have access to childcare, uh, at the beginning of this pandemic, when everything was being closed. Food for people that needed that. And I could go on and on. There's different examples. And every single time it has been our people saying yes to giving for the benefit of other people that they might not even know.    Mary Hunt: [00:22:35] Wonderful. It's just fabulous. And I think that that is carrying out what Jesus told us to do. Care for each other. Share the gospel. To care for those in poverty. The  widows, especially.  I'm thinking about he people who were so blessed having this amount just removed from the shoulders. Does, does Crossroads then have a program, a plan? I suppose many, many churches do have. um, where you're helping people learn to get out of debt and to stay out. Because debt is a horrible thief. You know the Bible says that the lender becomes the master of the borrower. That's a horrible position to be in. So can you tell us, I mean, you just didn't. I hope he just didn't leave the people here. They probably still come to your church and it wasn't a wonderful opportunity. It must be to help them then learn to manage money.   Victor Martinez: [00:23:34] Yeah, we have definitely programs to talk about finances and how to help people with their finances. Um, we're also, um, talk about it through the lens of, um, our faith. Also, we, we, we bring that to that conversation, like you said, you know, um, That is, it's a form of bondage. And in fact, one of the reasons why we're so attracted to doing this is because when we gave out the money, we didn't know who this was going to, the person that received the letter in the mail, um, they didn't know who paid this debt. And in a way we feel this is exact same thing that Jesus,did for us, even before we knew who he was, he paid our debt. And so we thought what a great opportunity to have really. Share what that, what that looks like in a physical, tangible way today. And that's what we tried doing. So, yeah.    Mary Hunt: [00:24:27] Fantastic. You know, I've, I've, um, been to Cincinnati a couple of times, myself. Usually it was a speaking tour too, or something like that. I don't really know anybody who lives here,    Victor Martinez: [00:24:38] well, I was goining to say... now you know me. So when you're around, uh, now you can claim that, you know, somebody,    Mary Hunt: [00:24:44] But, I'll tell you something. I know something very, very special about  your city...chili!   Victor Martinez: [00:24:50] Well, you put me in a tough spot in terms of that chili. This is a controversial topic. Um, yes, Chili is an important part of our city. I wouldn't say it's the highlight, but again, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Um, my concept of chili was different. so, you know, some people love it and some people don't, um, I've got, I've grown to like it at this point. So.   Mary Hunt: [00:25:13] That's good, that's good. Well, when I was there, that the host of the in fact I spoke at a, another church. It wasn't Crossroads, but Vineyard Church. And they took me out for, for a meal after the service. And they wanted me, to show, to show me, Cincinnati's s best. And so they, they preface this by, we're going to take you someplace and we want you to try something. You may not like it. That's okay if you don't like it. We just want you to know that we're really crazy about what they call Cincinnati chili, or I guess it's really Skyline Chili, which has become known as Cincinnati chili. I, I sat there and I, it looked fabulous. You know how it, how they serve at Victor. It's just, it's amazing. And my listeners, just  Google, Cincinnati chili. You'll know what I'm talking about. So I take a bite, because it looks all the world like spaghetti with meat sauce. It's served over noodles. And so I take a bite, you know, you want to be kind with your host and all.I'm in a public place. You take a bite at this, and it was such a shock because it was nothing what I expected, ever. I thought how can I get out of it? How could I not swallow? And how can I get out of this place fast? But the most remarkable thing happened. I took a second bite. I needed a second bite and I mean, by the third or fourth bite, well, you've got, gotta try Cincinnati chili. It's just absolutely amazing. I could not finish what was for the lunch. So I actually took it in a  to-go container and took it back to my hotel room, which was kind of silly because I don't believe I've ever eaten anything  I had left over in a hotel room. I mean, just honestly, the middle of the night I woke up and my salivary glands were going crazy and I got up and I reheated that in the microwave. And to this day, I tell you what. I love that stuff and I've learned. I ended out in the way I live in Colorado. We don't have skyline chili here, but I've learned how to make it myself...yes, because people, can we come over and ask, can we come over and have Cincinnati chili?  I don't give my secrets that I buy the spice packet online. So yes. Wonderful church. Well, at least two that I know of now many.   Victor Martinez: [00:27:35] Yeah. Many wonderful people. I think more importantly. And yes, a good chili. So we'll, I'll give you that.    Mary Hunt: [00:27:42] Next time I'm there, we're going out for chili.  Okay, Victor?    Victor Martinez: [00:27:45] Yes, we are.   Mary Hunt: [00:27:46] One last question for all of us. Where does, where does Crossroads go from here? What is on your radar? Where, where are you and where are you headed?    Victor Martinez: [00:27:56] Yeah. Yeah, that, that's a great, that's a great question. You know, our, our mission is a connecting seekers to a community of Christ followers that are changing the world. And, um, and that's what we want to do. We really want to change the world and, um, There are certain areas that we know we're called to right now. But we also, there's a bunch that will be going into, that we have no idea today. Um, we are, one of the things that I, I think, uh, you know, we will see soon is we're very committed to racial reconciliation. That's, um, that's an important topic, uh, today in our country and we are. We're increasing our investment in that area of bringing more people together to have a conversation, um, that hopefully leads to some healing.So that's one area for sure that we see. I don't think we're done with medical debt. So stay tuned for that. Uh, maybe you'll come back and talk again about what part two will look like. I don't know. I can't make a commitment on behalf of Crossroads at this point, but I see that. And I say, we, we will continue to invest in some of these places that I share abroad, fighting sex trafficking in India and locally, um, and other things. So, uh, we'll see what, what we'll bring. But one thing is for sure is that we will continue going. We will continue being the church, um, and we won't stop until we're done.    Mary Hunt: [00:29:23] I just thank you so much for being with me today. This has been wonderful. And I would just like to close with this . God's word tells us, tells us, if you will just trust me and that's the problem. I think that's why we're so hesitant to give. God says, trust me. Trust me and see if I will not open up the windows of heaven. He'll pour a blessing on you is that you cannot even handle. It will be so great. I think that, that you, Victor, your team and all the people, that church, that amazing church in Cincinnati, Crossroads Community Church, I think that you are testimony to God keeping his promise. It looks like a blessing has been poured out on you. And with that blessing comes responsibility and we just can't wait to see what comes out of this. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for following the Lord and for being such a wonderful instrument of his grace and mercy. Thank you, Victor.    Victor Martinez: [00:30:26] Thank you,  Mary.  Julie Emerson: [00:30:30] Debt-Proof Living with Mary Hunt was created and hosted by, Mary Hunt. Produced by Julie Emerson, with Harold Hunt, Executive Producer. Save time. Save money. Every Day.  Make it easy on yourself! Become part of the community and subscribe for free at www.everydaycheapskate.com. That's where you will find all the ways you can follow Mary, Everyday Cheapskate, and Debt-Proof Living. Thanks for listening! 

EP:21 The $5 Dollar Dinner Mom, guest Erin Chase Julie Emerson: [00:00:00] Welcome to Debt-Proof Living with Mary Hunt. Today's episode is brought to you by Mvelopes.  That's M, like Mary, v-e-l-o-p-e-s. Mvelopes uses the tried and true envelope budget system all in one easy app. Give every dollar a purpose! Mvelopes.com. And now, Here's Mary!    Mary Hunt: [00:00:27]Hello, Everybody! I'm so happy  you're with me today. This is Debt-Proof Living with Mary Hunt. And this is very, very exciting because guess what? We have a guest . I'm so thrilled that Erin Chase is the $5 dinner mom is going to join us today. Welcome Erin!    Erin Chase: [00:00:47]Hello. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to chat today.   Mary Hunt: [00:00:53]This is great. I have followed you for so long. You won't believe it. But first I want to, I want to let my readers, my listeners know more about  Erin.  Erin Chase, she's known as the $5 Dinner Mom is -  I know, nobody can believe it. We're going to have to get into that with her. She says that she has a little problem. She cannot make a meal that costs more than $5. Even if she tries her brain just will no longer allow it. Through her websites and classes, $5dinners.com, $5mealplan, Grocery Budget Makeover, My Freeze Easy, My Efficient Kitchen, Electric Pressure Cooking 101. Erin now is on a mission to help us spend a whole lot less of our hard earned money on groceries. Erin is a Texas native graduate of Texas Christian University. You know, the TCU Horned Frogs. A few short months after graduation, she found herself-Whoa- in the Dominican Republic as a missionary and a high school teacher. She learned all she needed to know about meal planning and grocery shopping on a budget. All in a third world country using foreign currency. Back in the late summer of 2008, Aaron began couponing loving the challenge of coming up with meals that costs under $5, $5 for the entire meal. That's just not per person. And one night as she was cleaning up the dishes from dinner, she thought of this phrase $5 dinners. The first website was born. Now she and her husband and their four boys live in Texas. And when she's not couponing, grocery shopping or blogging. Erin enjoys date nights, training for and running half marathons, hanging out outside, reading and hanging out with her girlfriends. I'm so happy you're here, Erin. I can't wait to learn more. First. I have a little story to tell. I was sitting at my computer. I can almost tell you about the year. I'm not gonna, I might be a little bit off. But I was getting a lot of email, a lot of things popping up and there was this [00:03:00] TV chef named Rachel Ray, who popped up on my screen. I don't know why, but she had a guest on her show. And it was this amazing woman. Young girl actually looks just not the same as you look today. Exactly. She had her on her show and it was just the most amazing thing that she was confident that she could make dinners for $5, not just per person. And you blew Rachel Ray and her audience away. Now tell me, had you been doing this for a long time or was this kind of new for you?    Erin Chase: [00:03:40]Well, when I, first of all, I love that you caught that segment. They- I've been on Rachel's show twice. And the first time was in April of 2009 and I started $5 dinners in August of 2008. So it wasn't that long after. And they featured me in that first segment in a People Who Were Saving Money Across America. It was just, you know, random people. I just happened to have a blog that went with it and really how I ended up there is I just, she and, Whoopi Goldberg was a guest on her show. We're talking, you know, around the same time I started the blog, they were talking about, like a fat tax ,or something like that. Like insurance companies were going to charge people if they didn't lose weight. And like, this was, you know, 2008 and they were talking about how eating healthy was too expensive. And I was like, excuse me, I have a few things to say about that. So I wrote in on there, like. On their website, just like wrote into the, like, have me on your show. I wasn't, I mean, I maybe wanted to be on the show, but I didn't really know. And. Six months after. So that was, that would have been August. So it was not long.  I, we taped and it aired very quickly. So probably March, they called me and were like, Hey, we'd like what you have to say to me, like what you're doing, we're going to send a crew to your house. And I was like, wait, what? So yeah, there I was. And then I went back again to share some recipes from one of my cookbooks, a couple of years later when those were published.   Mary Hunt: [00:05:13]Well, that helped to launch your career. Definitely. But I'll tell you something, Erin, I have followed you. I am so excited that we may be able to do things together in the future for my audience, because you fill a niche that nobody else does. But now listen, I mean, you've got to be absolutely truthful with me here. You have four sons and a husband. Okay. Five male eaters and yourself, $5 for a dinner. Tell us what, what does that mean? Does that mean $5 for just, a one dish or is that, is that the meal? Explain that to us.    Erin Chase: [00:05:57]So I think that it's more of a different way of thinking about your groceries and a different way of thinking about how much you're spending on a  meal. So when I started $5 dinners, it was in 2008 and I had two very young boys. now those boys are teenagers. And they, you know, it was a little bit different now I would say I'm making six, seven, maybe $8 dinners. It just cause I need more protein to feed these people. But the idea is don't get hung up on the $5, but I want you to hang up on and I want you to dial in on is how much are you spending per meal and what can you do to reduce the overall meal costs? Right? So when $5dinners very first started, and I still try to go for these price points, but it really we'll get into this in a little bit, but the protein cost is really the most important cause that's generally the most expensive part of any meal. So $5 a breakdown of a $5 meal would be 2.50 a person for protein. A $1.50ish for veggies or fruit, and then $1ish [00:07:00] for starch and starch is generally whatever the carbs are. Let's say, if you're doing a, you know, kind of a food plate balanced meal, so starches are super cheap. I mean, you can do rice for four people for 20 cents, right? Like, or less even. So it really, if you're just keeping it very simple and that's what I want you to think about. I want you to think about. What can I do to reduce costs kind of around your plate, if you will? And the easiest to start with is the meat, the meat, because, and that's also the most expensive. So I think it's the most important to start with. And I think that's what I want you to do. I want you to say, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to think about my meals. I'm not going to spend more than maybe you need to do $10. Maybe it's $8. Like for me right now, it's eight, the max, but I try to get it closer to five or six. we, you know, it, I think it's all about balance too. So if you do have like a more expensive meal, we really love salmon. that's just one of, that's probably our favorite seafood across the [00:08:00] entire family. And so if I'm going to put salmon on the menu one week, then I'm also gonna do like a big old rice and beans that week as well. Does that make sense? So it kind of balances out that way too.    Mary Hunt: [00:08:17] I love this. And I have enough questions to ask you for a thousand more podcasts. I mean, my brain is just overflowing because not only do I have my own questions and what I want you to tell my audience, I have my email inbox that is just loaded with people who are hungry, no pun intended to learn how they can do better with their money.  And so I want them to know you want them to find you. We're going to do everything we can in our power going forward to make sure that they can do that. So I just have a couple of really fun questions for you. maybe not so fun, but they'll be fun for us. Tell us the details. Do you shop like once every year and get everything all at once or do you do it every day or every week? Do you have a plan? Do you go to many, many stores? Those are the, I'll stop it there.    Erin Chase: [00:09:18]I think you have to find the right cadence for yourself. And I don't want to say you have to do it this way. Cause I don't, there's lots of personalities and lots of scenarios. Some people live in the country and really can only get to a good store once a month kind of deal my personal shopping M.O. and it has been this way for almost the entire time of my $5 dinners  life is weekly shopping with one warehouse run. Which I've, I think, I have been a warehouse store member for maybe seven, eight, eight years now. One of those about every six weeks. So I'll go to the warehouse store every six weeks, maybe five. It kind of depends on this during this pandemic time, it's been a little bit more frequently, but then I'm getting less at the grocery store. I've kind of shifted it around a little bit with the whole stocking up sort of scenario that we're currently in. And, but typically I prefer to get groceries once a week, get the fresh produce.  Meat most of the time comes from a warehouse store, but then I'll sometimes mix it in from the grocery store. It really kinda depends on what's on sale and you know, how I'm doing freezer meals is what it really comes down to for me is when that, when it's happening. So really it's a, for me, it's a cycle of weekly meal planning mixed in with kind of a freezer meal set up once-ish a month. Every five, six weeks, depending on when I'm doing my warehouse store run. And so that's been my cadence because that works really well for me. Both my personality with my schedule with, the sales cycles and all of those things just kind of fit to that particular cadence. other, you know, depending on your situation, I we've heard a lot from people that the going once a week is not enough. And so we also recommend doing [00:11:00] like every four-ish days, every three to four days, so maybe twice a week shopping. and in that case, You would want to be really a lot more granular with what you're buying so that you don't start overbuying. Does that make sense? And so you just have to be really mindful about when you do make a change like this in the way that you're shopping for food, being mindful that it's, it's working for you and you're not overspending. And it's kinda not working against you, if you will. And you know, we, I personally experienced that this last couple of months with having to shift. both budget dollars and the way I shop with the whole stocking up thing and not going out to eat anymore. And all those different things that's kind of shifted around, but it was very mindful of that shift happening. And I'm very mindful that that shifts it's already shifting back to my typical cadence. And so, I really think you've just got to consider those different factors and make your food dollars and your time shopping, whether that's planning and putting in a grocery pickup order, or you're getting into the store and buzzing through it, as fast as you can, you know, with your mask on and your sanitizer in hand, you know, like whatever it is but just being very mindful of the way that you are spending your food dollars.    Julie Emerson:  [00:12:36]Let's take a quick break for just a minute. Okay. Hi, I'm Julie. Producer a Debt Proof Living with Mary Hunt. You know, many of us have the experience in our lives of living paycheck to paycheck. Many people. I know it well, have a difficult time following a budget. But not managing our money as a leading cause of stress in our lives.  That's why Mvelopes created a simple, affordable envelope budgeting program that just works. Mvelopes helps you take control of your future by giving every dollar a purpose, every dollar. A purpose. People who use envelope, see monthly savings of 10% of their spending within six weeks of getting started and they report less anxiety.  And currently Mvelopes is extending their free trial to 60 days for all of their subscriptions. So there's never been a better time to start on a new path. Just click the link in the show notes and sign up today. Risk-free. Okay. Now let's get back to our conversation.     Mary Hunt: [00:13:41] You know, you mentioned that the pandemic and. it, it has changed our lives, in, in lots of ways. And I know that you lost your father recently. you've been through a lot. You had, I think you had some housing issues, right? Didn't your house flood or something, you know, it's, it's, it's easy to stick to all these plans when life goes, as we plan. But I'm just thinking how wonderful it is. And I, I want to ask you the impact that your, that this whole thing, where you have your money in control and you're doing all that. Did, Did that make things easier? I mean, I just want to know how, how do you get to really, really tough times without just throwing it all up in there as that can't do this anymore, you know? I can't stand this budgeting thing anymore. I mean, how have you gotten through this?    Erin Chase:[00:14:36] Well, what, Oh, goodness. Then where were we? How long do we have? yeah, we have had a very rough six months. our house flooded, well, six months ago this week, and then I lost my dad unexpectedly a couple months after that. And then the pandemic hit the following month. And so it was, it's just been a very, grief-ridden on multiple levels. You know, the loss, we didn't lose anything in our house per se, but just the loss of routine and the loss of Just being, we had to move into a rental home. So being somewhere else, you know, that's that. And then of course, grief from losing my dad. Has just it's, that's still obviously going on and then of course the grief of just losing our, our lives, everybody, what, what, however it, the pandemic affected you, everybody was affected in some way. And I think that, in some ways, you know, the very first thing that I did when the whole pandemic thing hit was what are we not spending money on now? That's the very first thing I wrote down. Like maybe the first weekend or so. And I finally cued in of, like how things are changing. Things are changing very fast. What are we not spending money on? We're not going out to eat. We're not buzzing through drive-throughs we're not picking up, a snack at the gas station, like all these different things. I wasn't going to the gym. And so that was the first thing, that I did. And I think that what ultimately it comes down to, you know, both on the, on the money level and on the, just like get me through the day level. really is two things is, is grabbing the silver lining, whatever that may be. So with our house, the silver lining was, I got a pretty much a whole new house. mostly covered by insurance. We did a couple of new upgrades, but it was very clear to me very quickly that despite there was water everywhere and like rugs were soaked and gross. I could still see that we would be getting a new house out of this, you know, and I, with, with, with my dad, Restored not restored. There were never any bad relationships, but just renewed friendships and relationships with my siblings and family members. Such a gift. Even despite all of the, the grief in, in the, it was very dramatic and traumatic, the way that it all happened so quickly and unexpectedly. So I think that even in the midst of the trial, let's say there’s— you've got to, you've got to grab the silver linings and so, you know, pandemic it's. Okay, now I have more time to spend with my kids. Like we have two teenagers, you know, teenagers got it. They get a bad rap, but it's been such a gift getting to spend time with them in a way that I, that, that even just actually not long ago, I thought, okay, we are going to have a driver soon. And I remember as soon as I started driving, I was like, BYE!  I got places to go and people to see. Right? And so I just kept thinking, I've only got a couple months. Left with this kid before he's really setting into that independence business. And so I think that, you know, I, I sit in the feelings and I sit in the grief a lot. There's a lot of resting. There's a lot of stillness that happens. but I think that in all of that, being able to focus on the positive and be able to grab onto the, the things that I'm really grateful for. And being able to see the positives, even in the night. Oh, there were many times where I wanted to throw my hands up, but the kids having to do school at home and you know, all the trying to work. And, but I saw this is an opportunity that I need to redefine my work schedule and I re redefined my entire work week. I've never worked weekends. Ever. No, thank you. I'm good. I don't want to work the weekends. I have worked every single weekend since spring break week. Well, since the pandemic started, but that's because I wasn't working in the mornings and I have shifted around.  And so I think it's being able to recognize and be willing to adapt and change quickly. And then of course, kind of grabbing it and focusing onto the silver lining. So I don't know that that has a whole lot to do with money. But I think that it, when we're in a hard time, when we're in an emergency situation, right, we just moved back into her house. There was a hailstorm five days after we moved into our house. We have to get another new roof. We just got a new roof four years ago. So it's just like, okay, alright. But there's, you know, other plans that we had with, with our house and with our finances. Hold! Hold, please. We got to get a new roof first.  And so, you know, you just, you just have to be, I don't know, kinda gotta go with the punches and got to make tough decisions and got to wait on things. and also grateful for, you know, our contingency fund, and grateful for, you know, my husband and I both work from home on the internet. I've been affected a little bit, but grateful to not have had a job loss. I'm grateful to my husband's in business. He lost a few in person events and classes, but really, he's been able to just shift his focus too. To the other kind of side of his business that wasn't, you know, dealing with live in person. So it's, it's really, yeah. I guess all of that,    Mary Hunt: [00:20:33]I couldn't agree with you more Erin, and, and while maybe, you know, your, your face, you teach about food and budgeting and all that kind of thing. And I'm kind of similar, you know, the whole thing about money. I have come to believe that money is so important to us because it's very important to God. I think it's absolutely true that he that's how God cares for us. He doesn't drop the clothes out of sky and you know, the food doesn't show up on the front step.  I mean, the conduit is God. He sends money into our lives, and asks us to be good stewards of it. And. For what you have gone through is, is horrific. But I think that because you know how to plan and that you are prepared and, and you haven't spent every single nickel and face the pandemic just out of despair. That it's coming through. But, and I think for all of us, I think everyone listening to me, we've all gone through this. And I think that it's very much like mourning. I have not faced in the past few weeks, which you are, but I think there are stages of grief. And for myself, I know I was, I was devastated when they shut everything down and my grandkids could go to school anymore. And it was so sad. I mean, I wept tears of just sobbing. What has happened? And then, and then I go through, you know, I'm sorry to say, but I think it's part of it. I've gone to a real angry stage as well.    Julie Emerson: [00:22:07] Now I have a quick question for you, Erin. One of the things that the quarantine has given us is a lot more time with our family and a lot more time to do projects with each other and to really spend time together. [00:20:38] And if we could just talk a little bit about what's coming up for you and what moms and grandmas and dads and grandpas or aunts and uncles can do with their kids in the kitchen that would be— a we'd love to hear it. So can you tell us more?      Erin Chase: [00:22:35] Yeah. So the week of spring break, March 9th, 10th, 11, I don't know, somewhere in there. when the  whole, you know, quarantine was being talked about and hadn't really started yet, I was at the gym and I kept thinking. If school gets canceled, what am I going to do with my boys? That's I mean, I was on the treadmill for half an hour and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And right towards the end of my run, I was like-kids cooking show live on Facebook. And I was like, okay. So I get home and I am actually leaving to go with my friend to their. ranch, river house, for the weekend of spring break.  We've done that for many years and I was like, I better put something about this on Facebook. So, you know, because we're going to start on Monday because by that point in the afternoon, our school had just announced that they were canceled. So I put it on Facebook. Fun fact. There's no wifi or cell service at the ranch. So I had no idea what was going to happen. So I put it, I put the recipe list. I had written it down on a piece of paper. My husband is driving. I'm making a Canva image on  my phone and I posted it right before we lost, like cell service. And so the next afternoon, my friend and I walked down to the neighbors where they have wifi and I checked in and I was like, Oh, okay, we're going to have a couple of people with us on Monday. So then I posted like an ingredient list real quick. And I'm like, Texting Lauren, like Help! We got to get this out! Like, go, go, go. So anyways, the kids and I did cooking lessons, we did four weeks of 20 lessons, plus the freezer cooking session over in March and then into the end of April and really, you know, It was just such a gift to us. And it's been such a gift to other people. Like I haven't cooked lunch since then. Nothing they're home all the time. They make their own lunches. Most of the time make their own breakfast. Sometimes I jump in there cause it's fun to be all together there in the morning in the kitchen. And really, you know, it's taught them so much. And it's been, you know, I love to cook. I'm a food blogger. I'm here to, I am here for it! but it's also nice to equip them and to kind of work myself out of a job. So we did all of those lessons and decided probably about halfway through,  that I wanted this to be longer than just through this, this quarantine. I wanted it to be longer. So I, I changed it from, you know, school cancellation kids, cooking lessons to whisk kid, which is a play on whisk and whiz. So I want you to be, I want your kids to be whizzes in the kitchen and I want to help them cultivate kind of a lifelong love of cooking and feeding themselves and really just starting with. Recipes that are, both kid-friendly and budget friendly and simple to make, but also have kind of cooking strategies that would apply to other types of recipes, you know, like a skillet meal, when you know how to make a pasta skillet meal, which is kind of like a homemade sort of Hamburger Helper, you  can make dozens, hundreds of different things with just that strategy. So that's, that's what I want to do. So we turn that into a curriculum in a, in a workbook and a guidebook. That we have with stickers, which I'm super excited for the stickers! I know I'm such a nerd and certificates for completion. And so really, you know, it's got everything you need recipes, the guided videos, the shopping lists, and the videos are essentially I'm teaching my boys in my kitchen in the same way as if you I'm also teaching your child in your kitchen.  It's, it's filmed and taught in that way. So all you gotta do is get the ingredients, which you probably have a lot of them already. And then just let, let me teach them, you know, while you're kind of watching from the corner. So that's the idea behind WhizKid, which I'm super excited about. It has been, I'm actually going to have my boys. They only, I worked with one boy at a time. And so they learned certain things with me and I'm going to have them go through this summer, the other things that they didn't learn yet. So they'll get their whole complete go at it with everything. And, you know, it's still very unknown. At least the time of we're recording this, what school's going to look like in the fall. And so it's this isn't. You know, this is meant to be a tool that can help you any time of year, not just the summer, not just in a quarantine, not just when school's canceled. but it is, it is something that, you know, will enrich your kids in your life, with, with, doing the lessons.   Julie Emerson: [00:27:15]Yeah. We're looking forward to it.   Mary Hunt: [00:27:18]I’m so thankful that you shared that with us. And, and again, our hearts go out to you for what you have been through, but oh my goodness. The growth and the fact that you've got four young men and a husband there with you and, what God is going to do in their lives is just fantastic. So I know that we've just barely scratched the surface. We've talked about the big picture things. I hope we can do this again. And as I said, I hope that we can do a lot of things. I [00:26:00] want my listeners to know that Erin has a prolific, wealth, I guess it would be called a, I don't know a bank of intellectual, one wonderfulness, where she teaches at her recipes. Oh my goodness. If we could all just learn to cook as well, and to spend as little, it would just impact our lives so much, especially going forward. Because I'm not going to hide the fact that I truly believe we are headed for some, some time, years of inflation. I mean, now, that you can't print the kind of money our company, our country has printed that had to help us get through all of this without that having a longterm effect. So. We are blessed to know ahead of time. We've got to learn to be frugal. We got to learn how to do everything for less to cook at home. And the queen of this is, is Erin Chase, the $5 dinner mom. So thank you so much, Erin. We're going to put into the show notes below all of her contacts, how you can learn more about Erin, how you can start doing so much better. Stick with me. Stick close because we're all in this together and we're going to save time and money every single day.    Erin Chase:[00:28:56] Thank you for having me. It's a joy to get to share with you guys. And I look forward to more.    Mary Hunt: [00:29:01]Thank you, Erin.    Julie Emerson: [00:29:05] Debt-Proof Living with Mary Hunt was created and hosted by, Mary Hunt. Produced by Julie Emerson, with Harold Hunt, Executive Producer. Save time. Save money. Every Day.  Make it easy on yourself! Become part of the community and subscribe for free at www.everydaycheapskate.com. That's where you will find all the ways you can follow Mary, Everyday Cheapskate, and Debt-Proof Living. Thanks for listening!   

- Jason Seiden That meant that I would gladly, if I could be the last person ever lose a child. I would I would take that on, if I could, to say it like that's how horrible it is that I don't ever want anybody else to feel it. And so other folks actually telling me that they're happy and that they're like, I think they would feel like I would feel worse, like rubbing it in.   - Jason Seiden But actually, no, you know, that's it's the opposite. Like live your life. And tell me you've opened up your eyes and you're stepping into it and you're aware of the discomfort and you're aware about the hard choices you're making and you're doing it and you're celebrating those wins because they're so few and far between. Those were, the those were the best things.   INTRO   Jason Seiden is joining me today to talk about his daughter Elle.  Elle was passionate about social justice causes, possessed of a sardonic humor.  She was insightful and creative…and she is dead.  She committed suicide after suffering from debilitating pain due to CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome) diagnosis and committed suicide at fifteen years old.    What does it mean to honor her legacy, to remember her in all her fullness?  What does it mean as a father to live a life that encompasses such a profound loss but is not ultimately defined by that pain?  Jason is articulate, reflective, and honest in this powerful conversation.    Before we begin, I’d like to thank our sponsors.  First, we are sponsored by FullStack PEO.  Providing full-service solutions for entrepreneurs and small business, FullStack manages the details so you can get back to doing what you do best, running your business.  We are also sponsored by Handle with Care HR Solutions, with engaging, interactive training ans coaching sessions, we empower you to give meaningful support to your people as they go through disruptive life events.    Back to our conversation.  First, as a sidenote, Jason was sitting outside during the first part of our conversation due to water damage and clean up crews in his house…and you might hear the birds singing under some of his thoughts.   In the months after my daughter, Mercy, died, someone reflected that there wasn’t a word in the English language for a parent who has a child die.  If your spouse dies, you are a widow.  If your parent dies, you are an orphan.  It is almost like the death of a child feels so against the nature of things that language itself can’t encompass the loss.    Jason and I began our conversation talking about the difficulty of talking about the death of a child.  Jason has founded and sold businesses, he is a gifted teacher, trainer and communicator.  He recalled putting together a presentation on the fly.   So. Yeah. So I a 19 and a half minute clip. And I lost the teleprompter halfway through. And still in one take was done in less than 20 minutes.   - Jason Seiden And then my partner at the time spent three hours trying to record the same 20 minute clip. Yep. This is hard. They said this is this is you know, I'm speaking from a much different place and I'm surprised at how difficult it is.   - Liesel Mertes One person's journey is not anyone else's. But I remember specifically in that the aftermath of my daughter Mercy dying. It felt so in. I mean, there's so many things that make it feel de-centered. And but for me, like if there's anything that I traffic in and feel comfortable in the world, it's words like it's it's been able to communicate. Similarly, you know, I have my own stories of like know what? Like I feel adept in that realm.   - Liesel Mertes And to come to a place where it's like I. I feel. It just feels different. And it felt it felt like it it have done a skill set, that it was like I'm normally so comfortable doing this.   - Liesel Mertes How could even this feel altered? Well, you're aspects of that.   - Jason Seiden And I know you well, I want to talk about the journey since losing Elle. But I think this is this is actually a great opener because it's it's true. I've journaled my entire life. I've written my entire life. I've written books. I have novel length stories that you'll never see the light of day written. And when when I wrote after her passing, I went back to read some of those journals. And some of them are very clear, like, this is a man who's in pain and who's articulate about it.   - Jason Seiden And then there's other journal entries that are just noise. It's you read those you like. Oh, that's what it looks like. It's unintelligible. It's it's it's complete. It's just you. These are not sentences. These are not phrases. That makes sense. These are, this is raw stuff. And it's remarkable. And you kind of say to yourself, I'm good with words. I lived with a thesaurus, I'm specific with them. And if I'm struggling to find just even the basics, how is everybody else going to do?   - Jason Seiden Right. You know, we don't we don't step into things that are hard. We tend to avoid things that are hard. And this is this is the hardest. So I think most people avoid grief when possible. Certainly the kind of grief that we've had. And that just means, they're completely unprepared. I was entirely unprepared for what happened. And trust me, if I could have avoided it, I would have. It's a hell of a journey to be to find yourself in particular for the first time.   - Jason Seiden And then also you are surrounded by people who are equally as inarticulate to help.   - Liesel Mertes And that's you know, that gets to also the profoundly isolating nature of grief because to to communicate where you are, like it's hard enough to just know, like, you feel like you're throwing words against a wall. But to be able to be understood by another person and that can just feel so daunting. Like, I don't even know how I'm feeling. And now I've got to find some words to have, you know, what I'm feeling.   - Liesel Mertes And maybe it's just better to be alone. You know, it can be that retreat. And to just I don't even know.   - Jason Seiden Yeah, well, I think there's a, I think there's a lot of truth to that. If I go back, I still default. I bridge that problem with something that I started defaulting to the week Elle passed. So I lost my daughter a year and a half ago. Coming up on two years, actually. And she, she died of suicide. She had been very sick prior to that. And she was in intense pain. She had a condition called CRPS. complex regional pain syndrome.   - Jason Seiden And it's it's just it's nerve pain. And it's always on. It never stops. Nerve pain, like when the dentist hits the nerve in your tooth and you hit the ceiling. And she had it in both her legs treatments for years. Nothing was was helping. It was getting worse in certain circles. It's actually known as the suicide disease because it doesn't have the decency to kill you. But, yeah, it's it's close. You know, it's terminal.   - Jason Seiden Who can live with that pain or that amount of time? So there's others, too. It sounds awful, but there's this one benefit that I got, which was despite having lost her to suicide. I don't I don't wonder. Could I have done more? Was there you write like that. Mental health is invisible. And it's real, but it's invisible and it's it's difficult as a human to accept things you don't see without wondering, could I have had some sort of control over that?   - Jason Seiden And when it's physical and you can see it, it's a little bit easier to go. I couldn't control that. That was a thing. And it was a whole conversation we could have around mental health and how it needs to be in the same category. But for, for this, what I wanted to say was in those early days, the words that it was that were most easy for people to find were were those around how Elle died, what she died of, what her condition was prior.   - Jason Seiden And I very quickly found myself initially trapped by that. It put me in the past. It put me you know, I had, had this journey of trying to help her and in all kinds of stuff was going on. You can imagine the complexity of the dynamics of dealing with, by the way, not only a crippling disease, but the most misdiagnosed disease out there. Right. It just was so I didn't want to be in that space. And it kind of struck me one day to a lot of thinking and metaphors.   - Jason Seiden And I couldn't find the words myself, but I had this metaphor that sort of hit me. I'm talking about Elle in terms of CRPS would be like talking about MLK, Martin Luther King, in terms of gun rights, you know, or Anwar Sadat in terms of gun rights. It's like, yeah, these guys were assassinated. That's true. But they stood for something else. They lived for something else. What they lived for what they died of were totally different.   - Jason Seiden To make MLK the poster child of gun rights would be to lose his legacy as a civil rights leader. What a shame. You know, you kind of you know, you'd have to kind of look at him and go, OK, technically true, but we're not going to use him for that. Like, we're not gonna make him. And I don't mean to use him. Right. But we're not going to. That's just not going to be his legacy.   - Jason Seiden And with Elle, sorry, it was just it was the same thing. You know, she was a social warrior. She lived for stuff that she didn't die of. And so I found those words and I found it. Redirecting people really helped me control my narrative. And I still do that. I still use that today.   - Liesel Mertes And tell me a little bit more about her, about some of the things that made her distinctly her and those causes. And particularly if, you know, she's she's a she's a fully fledged person behind the memory I'd love to hear more.   - Jason Seiden Yeah, absolutely. And so very early on before she was born, I just had a feeling about Elle. And I've got I've got two daughters there and I've learned first on Elle. And it's just proven true with my other daughter as well, that as a parent, my job was just to get the stuff off the high shelf.   - Jason Seiden You know, these kids coming up, they're fully formed. They're they're, a bit like flowers. Right? Do they have to for all. They have to blossom. But the flowers in there.   - Jason Seiden Nothing I could do to change the raw material. And and, you know, so Elle was very special. She, she had a wicked sense of humor. Like, just even from a very, very like an impossibly young age. Understood sarcasm. I don't know if your grandparents on your side. I mean, she couldn't because she couldn't have been like more than a year old. And my grandparents would come and babysit her for more than once. She's understanding sarcasm. Yeah.   - Jason Seiden I changed the tone of my voice. And she doesn't laugh. I flip the words around. She looked like she only laughs when it's a deadpan opposite, you know? The description is deadpan and opposite of what's true. She is following sarcasm. And it just, it was why she was always very tapped in. She she just you know, she came to this world with knowledge that you look at her and. There's no way that that knowledge came from five years of existence on this planet.   - Jason Seiden It's just kind be living proof of something bigger.   - Jason Seiden  And she had a way of getting noticed. I'll tell you one story, which is just one of our segments. When the girls were maybe 7 years old, I took to sort of overnight count drops kids leave families rent cabins, and then have a dozen families in those camps all up in Sweetwater, skier No.12 things. They did a talent show and one girl after another is getting up and doing cartwheels and walkovers.   - Jason Seiden And they're up there for ten seconds. Let me run off the stage, get going.  Elle gets up there and start a cappella singing. Don't stop believing.   That's awesome.   - Jason Seiden And the camp director stops her, runs up to the stage. Wait, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And I'll think something's. She turns on all the equipment plugs in her iPod, iPod, and let's Elle do the full five, five and a half minute song scene over Steve Perry. We're all downloading on our phones. The lighter apps are holding them up like a concert.   - Jason Seiden And that was Elle, you know, just just being able to put your finger on the gestalt start of the moment and own it. And it is remarkable. And so you're kind of one of the reasons why I don't like thinking of her when she was sick was all of that power. It's not just that it went away. It never went away. So, you know, somebody with that much kind of cosmic ability gets sick, real sick. It's just it's so wrong and so far away from what she works for, what she stood for.   - Jason Seiden She was always so zoned in. So you wanted this story. This is actually relevant to her legacy. So I do a lot of communications work at my house up with certain companies and also internal internal comms. Well, politics has a role in that. And there's an immediate negative connotation to politics that people have. And so to break it out, I would give people this moral dilemma. And, you know, I just let them sit with it where they realize, OK, I may not like politics, but they're real.   - Jason Seiden I can't escape this question. Damned if I do or damned if I don't. It's one of those kinds of things. And I posed it to Elle. She's 10 years old. And Liesel, I'm telling you. Maybe two adults out of hundreds. I posed this question to and Elle heard the question and she said, well, you know, the only way to win is to not play you both these actions. Horrible. It's just a you're just choosing which value you want to violate and which value you want to maintain.   - Jason Seiden That can't be true to yourself with either. You know, I think the outcomes once you're in that position. Like, oh, my God, she's 10. And she understood that. And here so, you know, so it's, it just it felt. It has always felt important to honor, you said, who she was. Things that made her unique.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah. Those are some remarkable memories of who she was and, yeah, what she brought the color and dynamics.   - Liesel Mertes I want to talk about, yeah, the journey after her death.   - Liesel Mertes I'm, I'm struck that even as you are carrying her legacy, you, you are also shaped by who you needed to become in the midst of watching her be sick.   - Liesel Mertes What were some of the things that you noted in yourself as a parent, at that time, that shaped you?   - Jason Seiden The things that I noted as a person and same things and as a person of. Life has to be lived and risks have to be taken. The only way to not make a mistake is to not play the game. And that's so you're just not safe as a as a parent. I'd always cited my job as kind of two parts, one part keeping my kids safe and two parts helping them unlock who they are and, you know, make the most of this world. And, you know, my daughter's gone. So a very, very fundamental way, I did not keep her safe.   - Jason Seiden We can have a very intellectual conversation, Did I control her getting ill. And, of course, like, you know what? No, of course not. But it's like you're never going to tell me. I will never be able to feel that as a parent because she's gone. I. So this the game, whatever, whatever that's I was making whatever balance I was trying to strike between keeping you safe in the world or the game with her. It was frozen.   - Jason Seiden Right. It's it's lockdown. There is no no more time on the clock. There's no hope. There's no tomorrow. There's nothing's going to change. And so they're validating that recognition that there is no safe there. There is no harm.   - Jason Seiden By the way, not only do you have to play the game and not only your mistakes be made, but there's consequences for those mistakes. People will be hurt when you make a mistake. I've had to I've had to come to grips with that both as a parent and as a human.   - Jason Seiden And it's, it's, you start to see the world a different way.   - Liesel Mertes What, what does, I'm struck by how profound and. Yeah. Awful. That feeling is because so much of what we get to do living in like a wealthy, affluent, you know, society is we don't have to feel unsafe in so many areas of life. And and to feel it at such a visceral level is horrible. When you say, you know, I've had to come to grips with that. What has that looked like for you?   - Jason Seiden I don't know. That's a powerful question. I'm not sure what it looks like, but I'll tell you, it feels like things. It feels like my life before was it's just been pulled to the extremes. And I'm not dealing with any emotions that were foreign to me. I'm just dealing with a lot more of them. So it's funny, I actually said, you know, here's this girl who introduced me to stretch my capacity for joy in one direction. And then the passion stretched my capacity for sorrowing another.   - Jason Seiden On some level, like how do you just not feel gratitude for somebody who gives you more life to live? And. It shows like that.   MUSICAL TRANSITION   - Jason Seiden You're constantly playing other people's emotions at life events and realities. You have to live your life. If you live boldly, you will. Other people will be hurt. And you have to be OK with that. I'm not saying you should be indiscriminate or not care. I'm just saying to be simultaneously OK, moving in the light, doing your best, try and take care of people and understanding you can't save everybody. In fact, the act of saving one person might cause somebody else to be hurt.   - Jason Seiden Yeah. And you feel it if it goes through an intellectual concept to something, you feel very deeply and constantly.   - Liesel Mertes Elle died. And you said it's been a year and a half.   - Jason Seiden Yeah. A little more coming up on two years.   - Liesel Mertes Okay. Still, when something horrible happens like that and even, you know, the. The journey of walking with an often misdiagnosed disease. All of those things. What were you finding that you, what were people offering you in the way of, like comfort or presence in that, you know, messy aftermath? That was really meaningful to you? Or even now, just things that you'd say, "Man like these people did it really well. They came alongside me and it mattered?"   - Jason Seiden It's for windchimes. So that's, that's Elle. They went off the top of our call and I just heard them.   - Jason Seiden Yeah. So. For so long, surprised at how much. I'm not somebody who asks for a lot of emotional support. Probably not dissimilar from a lot of men that way. But I was surprised at how much I actually needed it.  They were largely, I was really struck in the immediate aftermath at how supportive people were. It was absolutely incredible.   - Jason Seiden My professional colleagues are scattered all over the country, all over the world. And without my without my engagement, a few of them, Mark Stelzner, Lori Rudiment. Susan Strier.   - Jason Seiden I had friends who, you know, without without my help. I put up a page and tribute to Elle. She she died a couple of weeks before my birthday day. They promoted it for my birthday, a tribute to Elle and I just watched, I watched for  for twenty five thousand dollars get raised in a day in honor of my daughter for a small handful of charities. The Human Rights Campaign, chief amongst them. The United Colors Foundation, which helps LGBTQ homeless youth and Burning Land, which is a CRPS foundation. And it was it was absolutely incredible.   - Jason Seiden The next thing I know, the CRPS Foundation has a grant in its name that had been funded. HRC flew a flag in my daughter's honor, which I now have. It's it was astounding. So, in the immediate aftermath, how important, it was incredible,   - Jason Seiden As you can imagine. You know, as time goes on, everyone goes back to their lives. I've had a handful of people have continued to reach out. And it's so helpful. On the homefront. Everybody here has been incredibly helpful.   - Liesel Mertes What has that continuing to reach out looked like?   - Jason Seiden Literally just a check in and a thinking of you. That is all it takes.   - Liesel Mertes I think sometimes people fear that because they think out of the person doesn't want to talk. Or what if it brings up bad memories? Maybe I just won't do that. From your experience, how would you speak into like that, that cycle of second guessing that people can have as they should. I reach out and I'm out. What if they don't want to talk   - Jason Seiden I'd go back to what I was saying before? You have to live your life. You might make mistakes. Go make the damn mistake. Engage and you know. OK. So I'll tell you, the waffling shows up. And from my perspective, as the one going through this, It shows up and I can see it a mile away and I end up in a position then of having to take care of the people who are reaching out to me. Sure. I know it's fairly common. And, you know, and you do a great sweat.   - Jason Seiden I mean, like, this is such a horrible thing. I get it. We don't spend time with this if we don't have to. I'll assume it happens to you or something you're close to. You don't have to. Yes. So the, the, the fact that people are unprepared for it, I'm not surprised. The most helpful thing, we just when people reach out.   - Jason Seiden Actually, the most helpful thing is when people would reach out and say, I'm thinking of you. I just had a lovely time with my family. Oh, great day. And I was thinking of you and I was thinking about. And I gave my kids an extra hug and I made sure I didn't take it for granted. That made me happy.   - Jason Seiden And it's, it's so funny with these people would reach out and, I can't imagine what you're going through. And I always look at them and be like, why would you take one moment of your life and try to imagine what I'm going through? But yet we all know it's horrible. Don't waste your time. Just write like it's horrible. Check the box pass, you know. You know, it's a kids with, you know. This is gross. Taste it. No, no, no. Not to me.   - Jason Seiden Yeah. It's like that. Except with consequence, you know. No. Right.   - Jason Seiden I actually loved when people would tell me that, you know, they were thinking of me and they weren't taking the life for granted as a result because that meant that Elle counted.   - Jason Seiden That meant that I would gladly, if I could be the last person ever lose a child. I would I would take that on, if I could, to say it like that's how horrible it is that I don't ever want anybody else to feel it. And so other folks actually telling me that they're happy and that they're like, I think they would feel like I would feel worse, like rubbing it in.   - Jason Seiden But actually, no, you know, that's it's the opposite. Like live your life. And tell me you've opened up your eyes and you're stepping into it and you're aware of the discomfort and you're aware about the hard choices you're making and you're doing it and you're celebrating those wins because they're so few and far between. Those were, the those were the best things. Yeah.   - Jason Seiden I mean, I will say because it's relevant. I mean, we we. We tend to think of our personal life happening in one area, in our professional life happening in another. And they don't. A decade ago, I actually coined a term, "profersonal" for, you know, this notion of the bleed over. You know, we spend a lot of time working. And so what was really surprising was how difficult that transition was without the folks on the work front doing some of that, acknowledging as well.   - Jason Seiden Not just my friends. But, you know, this is where I'm spending my time. It really helps when, when professional colleagues check in as well. Otherwise, your your work starts to feel like just this void where it's like I have to go put on a, you know, put on a mask for the majority of my day.   - Jason Seiden You know, I I think this notion of. The notion of grief at work is not trivial. It's a huge part of people's days. And, you know, I'll say I worked at it at an organization when this went down. You know, the organization I was with great culture, phenomenal culture. But this was a this was a blindspot. And it showed, and it it had an impact, like the journey could have been different.   - Jason Seiden And. What I, what I could  have done quicker or more of, I think would have been. It would have been. I could've done more. Yeah, I couldn't move through some of this faster. And. And at the end of the day, I think there's a real. You know, I I'm getting through it. I will get through it. But I think the organization lost something. And when you kind of look at large organizations with hundreds or thousands of people, here we are in COVID, and the loss is real.  People are losing people.   - Jason Seiden And there there's complicated grief happening out because they're they're unable to be with the ones they love. Now is the time to actually step into this and to have that compassion. The benefits are are substantial. They're. And they're there at multiple levels. The economic benefit, the just, the benefit to us as humans. I think it's important that our organizations step into this breach and start recognizing grief is something that we all have a responsibility for helping people through.   MUSICAL TRANSITION   - Jason Seiden You know what it is? I'll preface this by saying I don't blame anybody. It's not an area. We haven't quite evolved to this yet. I think we're on the front edge. I think people such as yourself are on the cutting edge of bringing awareness to the business environment, of the importance of dealing with grief effectively. So, you know, we're we're getting out.   - Jason Seiden We're getting a handle on DNI. And I think in that same bucket. This is this is their belonging. When you start thinking about belonging as a as a goal for DNI. Well, belonging. If you're dealing with something that nobody else is dealing with, whatever that thing is, that's your your barrier to belonging. So hopefully as we kind of move in this area, the will all get better. But, you know, it's little things. It's.   - Jason Seiden First of all, texts and messages from people are super helpful. Doesn't take much. It's just like, hey, just checking in. How you doing? The gap is experienced when you don't get those more, when the only time you do get them is on the front end of a call where you're talking about other stuff. Because, you know, I would get that from my manager. Looking back, I think the only times there were check-ins were back at the top of a call.   - Jason Seiden I'd be like, hey, how you doing? OK, great. So here's like the five things that we've got to go through today, right?   - Liesel Mertes It feels like. Yeah. Just like, hey, are you are you ready? I'm with tasks because I certainly am.    - Jason Seiden And so in, you know, like, OK, great. And so it's it doesn't count, you know. And it creates this problem with the other person thinks, I'm checking in. And you're like, no, no. You're just making sure that I'm ready to go through your agenda. That's not a check-in.   - Jason Seiden That's like.   - Jason Seiden It's like, you know, is your you know. Can you can you mute the background noise? It's it's administrative at that point.   - Liesel Mertes Different than having, a specific time that is not encumbered by any other aspects of an agenda that would, you know, crowd it out. Yeah.   - Liesel Mertes Sometimes people say ill conceived, offensive, stupid things to people who are grieving.  What were some of the least helpful things that you heard? That you say, you'd say, you know, you can do all kinds of things, there's a margin of error, but don't do this. Let me do you a favor. Don't do this.   So I'll give you so I'll give you three answers. Number one, there's always some people who are close to you who are surprising in their lack of support And so I had two of those two people who just AWOL, like shockingly AWOL. Oh, my gosh. Right. So that's. The lack of saying something is saying something. There are, then there are people who make it about themselves.   - Jason Seiden So when I was getting married, I remember the people who were in the inner circle. Right. You're a close friend. We'll get married and you find that the venue was small and you'd call and be like, dude, totally get it wherever you need to see this, totally fine as long as I'm in the venue. You do what you gotta do because you're going to have some issues here with your seating chart so you can see it coming.   - Jason Seiden I mean, it was the bubble. People like the people who were barely they barely made the cut. They're the ones who would be pissed that they weren't in the bridal party, too. They're like, dude, this is so backwards. Same thing in reverse. You know, my best friend like that. You know, Lori and Mark and Susan putting that thing together. That is so incredible. The people who showed up and who were part of it.   - Jason Seiden Amazing. And then, you know, there are the like the one or two people who who are like I was just I was appreciative that they showed up. And then I find out later they were angry that I didn't include them in the planning. And I'm like, they are so far out. They had no idea; I had nothing to do with the planning. But this was all you have a group coming together for me, like this wasn't me orchestrating.   - Jason Seiden I wasn't using Elle to. This is happening in support of her.   - Jason Seiden Right. And so that that's been that's been disappointing. You know, again, there's nothing that gets said. You just hear about that stuff sort of second hand. Right.   - Jason Seiden Then then the third part is just people who don't know what to say and you know, and they try. And I actually appreciate these people. It's it's hard for everybody. I can't tell you how many people asked me, how are you feeling today? And I'm like, you know what?   - Jason Seiden Good. Right. OK. Awesome. Like you went digging. You found the Sheryl Sandberg Plan B. Quote. And Granny read the headline and you're giving that to me. When you start getting the same question over and over again, it's it's hard. You know, I like you. You wish people would kind of real deeper or maybe find another avenue or, you know, kind of go, OK. But everybody else is saying this. So can I find the next thing?   - Jason Seiden Can I can I have the conversation to the second sentence? And so I don't want to. I want to discourage people cause it's so important to get started. I think it's just also really important to be thoughtful and to not stop at the first perceived solution. So it's not that those people said anything bad, it's that the ones who go beyond stand out that much more.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah, I hear that I'm struck. So I am reading there has been a book that that has just been published. I think it's it's called Meaning, The Sixth Stage of Grief. I'm going to check that for sure. But it's, it's a researcher who had worked with the Elizabeth Kubler Ross Foundation and after the death of his son said, you know, I feel like although these five stages that were described, they're not linear. They were never meant to be that way.   - Liesel Mertes But that the fact that an important stage for a number of people is actually the meaning that they are able to make in the aftermath of loss. Not that we. And he says there's a diversity of ways that can be another. The death in and of itself is meaningful. But there are different ways of making meaning from this and how the people who live beyond that integrate a loss or grief into their lives   - Jason Seiden Kessler.   - Liesel Mertes Yes. Yes. Have you read his book?   - Jason Seiden I have not read it yet. It's on the list.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah, I've heard him on an interview.   - Liesel Mertes It's I've appreciated it so far. It strikes me that making meaning has been an important aspect for you. Tell me what making meaning has looked like for you.   - Jason Seiden Yeah, it's some. I hadn't really thought about it until I kind of heard the concept and realized, yes. This is true. Life is really random. Right. So here's, here's something that that death does. It brings a finality to a relationship that cannot be undone. And it leaves you, you know, it's like the other side of the game. A tug of war drops the rope and you're just and you're left in this you're flying backwards stage.   - Jason Seiden Except there's no there's no hard ground to land on. There is no other person to laugh that they let go of the rope like you are now potentially flying forever in the wrong direction. And finding meaning is really for me. It's been around, you know planting my feet under me and just bringing that momentum to a stop and recognizing I can't honor Elle if I'm crumpled in a ball on the floor. I can't honor Elle if I'm in the past, you know, grieving her illness or thinking of her sick.   - Jason Seiden I can't honor Elle if I'm in the future, if I'm anxious about will this happen again and like this happen to somebody else and what if and what if I hurt somebody? And what if I'm responsible?   - Jason Seiden What if I did? None of that helps. And so for me, finding meaning has been around what Elle stand for. How can I honor her? What should I do? What can I do today that she would be proud of? And really, that's about grounding myself in the present and finding a way to conduct myself. That starts just getting through my day. Right. It's like, OK, I can't honor her if I'm crumpled on the floor.   - Jason Seiden So what does that mean? It means I have to choose to be happy. I have to choose to live like I have to choose to get up. I have to have to choose to try. So that looks like putting my feet on the floor. Getting out of bed, making the bed, making coffee, certain, basic stuff. And as and as I kind of got that underway, then it was like, OK, well, what am I doing?   - Jason Seiden What should I go do today? Well, I should be healthy. I should go for a run. You know, the CRPS attacked your legs. I'm going to go run. And I'm I'm I'm go use that part of my body that she couldn't. Because if I were you know, it's like if I want people to tell me that they're happy and they're not taking their families for granted, I have to assume she'd want the same. And so I'm going to do that.   - Jason Seiden And, and right then it cascades up from kind of the basic stuff to what am I doing, like, on a higher level and my leaving the world a better place. Am I taking care of the people around me? But at the end of the day, finding meaning has been around grounding myself in the present so that I can honor her in a way that also allows me to move forward.   - Liesel Mertes I think that there are some people who would hear something like that, you know, they would this, Elle want me to live fully and be happy and I'm purposing to do that, that for some people that can morph into, I'm, I'm just not going to think about these unpleasant feelings anymore. When they come up, it could be its own form of avoidance and pushing those things away. How do you, how do you live into that meaning without just ignoring the painful feelings that can crop up unexpectedly?   - Liesel Mertes How do you still acknowledge and honor some of that sadness and emotion?   - Jason Seiden Easier said than done. I can't say that I do that perfectly. This is, this is not a topic that I speak easily about and I actually don't speak a lot about because it is hard to step into those feelings without kind of getting lost. But.   - Jason Seiden I think. For me. If I'm totally candid there are parts of it that could feel sacrilegious. There are times where moving forward actually feels like it's gonna be disrespectful like that, the respectful thing to do would be to sit and cry and grieve and be a mess and that the way to honor her would be show her how important she was by showing her how incapable I am of moving forward without her.   - Jason Seiden And at those moments, it's a hard choice and the hard choice is to remember, we are all individual people on this planet and me doing that, me, quote unquote, honoring her in that way would be to lose two lives. So that doesn't work.   - Jason Seiden And then you get. Right. So that's, that's sort of one path. And so I just I allowed the emotions and the thoughts to kind of carry me to get to that point. And I'm like, OK, I can't do this.   - Jason Seiden It doesn't work. So even though the other side, even though moving forward doesn't feel right, I just proved to myself that sitting here in a bar wallowing doesn't work. So I'm going to go make that choice. That doesn't feel right, not because I'm drawn to it, but because I am repelled by this other thing.   - Jason Seiden And then, and then there's another part too, which is there's a piece of it that's like, well, to honor her feels like picking up her torch. And carrying that and becoming the social worker, becoming her, doing the things that. And I run into the same problem. We're different people. He, you know, I can support her causes and I am. But I'm I'm taking my time because, this happened to me. It could very easily be the thing that defines me.   - Jason Seiden And I've spent my entire life to defining myself to be something else. I'm not ready to just let this become the thing. You know, there's the guy lost. That's not who I am. What I want to be is the guy who shows people how to continue to be themselves. Even when something like this happens.   - Liesel Mertes Yeah.   - Jason Seiden And so, you know, so there's a it's it's hard, you know. What does it look like and how does it feel? Sometimes it feels sacrilegious. Other times it feels like I get selfish.   - Liesel Mertes We are drawing near the close of our time. But I'm struck in that last thing you said, you know, you are you are not just a man who has had his daughter die.   - Liesel Mertes What are some interesting things that you like about yourself that make you you?   - Jason Seiden You know, it's a surprisingly hard question.   - Liesel Mertes Sometimes it can be. I have a friend who would do that to people on their birthdays. He would be like, you need to tell all of us three things you like about yourself. I felt kind of awkward.   - Jason Seiden I live out loud. I, I, I make my mistakes. My my dad used to say, my dad says, own your mistakes. They're the only things other than your name that other people won't try and take credit for.   - Liesel Mertes And it's a great line.   - Jason Seiden It is. And in this day and age of of digital piracy, your name's not even safe. So, like, literally, my mistakes are the only things I can. So I make them and I do my best to make new ones all the time. I try not to repeat. So I live my life. I learn. I still am learning. I am still open to learn. I don't.   - Jason Seiden I know what I know. And I. I've earned my gray hair once, I don't have to earn it twice like I know when I'm in a situation where I actually have an expertise, but I am well aware that it's a great big world. And, you know, I have like, this tiny speck of knowledge within it.   - Jason Seiden So, I appreciate the fact that at my age I can still look at the world with a certain amount of wonder and to sort of get lost in it and want to know how things work.   - Jason Seiden And. I. You know, I and I'm stronger than I realized. I have a certain amount of resiliency that I'm. This has not been an easy journey, but I'm I'm surrounded by people in this club that I don't want to be in.  But,  those of us who are able to persevere and make something positive of it. I, I see the people who aren't able to do that. And I can I can recognize that I'm I mean, about I have something to offer because the boat I mean, it's the boat of people who are able to move forward. And I'm proud of that.   MUSICAL TRANSITION   Here are three reflections from my conversation with Jason.   Even if you aren’t sure of what to do or say, move towards people in their grief.In his words, “Live your life, make the damn mistake,”.  You won’t be perfect and you don’t have to be but your support matters. If you are in a workplace setting with a parent that has lost a child, especially as a manager, make time to actually check-in with them, not just as an entrée to a meeting, ticking a box so you can get on with an agenda item.This might mean scheduling a call or a meeting that isn’t about a to-do list but only about hearing from them about their how they are doing.  Navigating life after the loss of a child is hard.Jason expresses the complex, internal challenge of moving forward, of not letting himself be singularly defined by Elle’s death.  Sometimes it can feel sacrilegious or selfish as he leans into life beyond his daughter, struggling to be and become himself even after tragedy.  If you are struggling in this journey, perhaps you find camaraderie in Jason’s reflections.  And if you know someone who has lost a child, perhaps this gives you additional insight.     OUTRO

How did two cybersecurity experts build a top 50 podcast? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Hacker Valley Studio podcast co-host Chris Cochran shares how he and his co-host Ron Eddings have used authenticity to build a loyal fanbase and grow Hacker Valley Studio into what is now a top 50 podcast From his early career in the Marine Corps to working in threat intelligence at Netflix, Chris was never trained as a marketer but says the key to his success has been sharing his authentic self and being a keen observer of people. Check out the full episode to hear Chris's story. Resources from this episode: Check out Hacker Valley Studio Connect with Chris on LinkedIn   Chris and Kathleen recording this episode Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Chris Cochran. Who Chris, I have to introduce, you normally introduce people by their titles, but I have to introduce you by your LinkedIn headline because it describes so perfectly why you're here. Security engineering by day producer and host of the top 50 podcast, Hacker Valley Studio by night. Chris is officially the director of security engineering at Marqeta, as well as of course, the podcast host and producer at Hacker Valley Studio and a program advisor at Heavybit Industries. Chris, you have such an awesome resume. Welcome to the podcast. Chris (01:07): I'm excited to be here. Kathleen (01:13): I'm excited to have you, especially because you know, I'm about 150 episodes into this podcast. And I'm at that point where I've really begun to see some kind of trends emerging about what makes for a top performing marketer. And interestingly, one of the trends is that a lot of the top performing marketers, I interview are not actually marketers either by trade or by training. Right. And you are one of those people. And, you know, I, I started working in the cyber security industry within the last year. And and so I've gotten this really interesting exposure to all kinds of new non marketers who are doing really great work at marketing. So with that as an intro, could you please tell my audience a little bit about yourself and what you do and about the podcast and what it is? Chris (01:58): Yeah, so I started my career in the Marine Corps. I was in the Marine Corps for five years doing Marine intelligence. And that's what really kind of pushed me down the path of cybersecurity. I got out and I was at cyber command as a contractor for about five years or so. And that's when we were doing like really threat intelligence focused things. I had my own company for a little bit, you know, standing up threat intelligence capabilities and ultimately did the consulting route. I was at Booz for a little bit. I was at Mandiant but ultimately I ended up at Netflix on the West coast and that's when everything kind of started for me. I had largely been silent when it comes to content marketing and things like that. But when I got over to Netflix, I had a post that went viral on LinkedIn. Chris (02:49): It was so what ha this is interesting story to tell. So, you know, on LinkedIn you can, you know, when you change jobs, usually it tells everybody, Oh, Chris just changed jobs to this and you wait for the applause. And everyone says, Oh, congratulations, you're doing so good. That didn't happen. So I changed jobs and I waited the whole day. And then I came back and I had like zero messages. And I was like, what? A tree that fell in the forest though? Is it here? And I was like, what is going on? And I was like, Oh, I had the thing that says, do not share when I changed jobs selected. And so I was like, you know what, I'm just going to put up a little post, you know? I'm missing my fanfare, but I'm just going to throw something up. Chris (03:32): So there was a picture of me pointing at the Netflix sign. And I just said something to the effect of Hey, just started in my role at Netflix. If this, you know, you know, Jarhead Marine can do it, anyone can. And a couple hours later it had like 40,000 views. And I was like, Whoa, what, is this thing broken? The next day, it had like maybe a hundred thousand. And then ultimately it got up to almost a million views, like 10,000 impressions and things like that. And that really started the whole process. I was like, wow, there's something here, right? Because you can't go viral on purpose. I think that's really a hard thing to do unless you're like this marketing whiz. But that really got everything rolling. I was like, you know, I'm going to use this platform to start producing. Chris (04:21): And so that's when the podcast came and my cohost, Ron Eddings, and I, we just jumped on mics and started having conversations. And what I did was, I carried that, that authenticity, that from that post, because I mean, I wasn't like braggadocious, like ha ha ha. I'm on Netflix and you're not. It was more of like, Hey, you know, I'm just, I'm just a regular guy, Marine. If I can do it, a lot of people can do it. And I just carried that with me through the podcast. We're just Hacker Valley Studio. And we focus on the human element of cybersecurity which I think is, is a, is a great thing to focus on. Kathleen (04:55): So tell me a little bit more about the podcast and the traction it's gotten and the growth it's had. Chris (05:09): Yes, it's been tremendous. So we started June of last year. I think it was June of last year, maybe it was April. And of course when you're first starting a podcast, there's no traction, but slowly but surely we started getting more impressions and more shares than a lot of the other podcasts, big podcasts out there with a much bigger following. And I think it's because of how Ron and I engaged with our audience. We, I would say it really picked up at the beginning of this year, around the January timeframe. But honestly, we're, we saw the most traction actually against conventional wisdom is we actually doubled production during COVID. One of the things we were focused on is, you know, what, what is a way that we can support people that are out there, they're sitting at home, they're not able to do much. We could double our production and that's counterintuitive because there are less people driving in cars. Chris (06:08): So there are less people listening to the podcast, but we thought that this was a time to invest sweat equity into the podcast and also produce for the people that are our loyal fans. Right. And so we give them two episodes a week to listen to. And it's so funny because if you look at our stats, our, our trajectory is like this, then COVID happened and there was a little dip and then it just shot through the roof as soon as things started to open back up. But it's just been a phenomenal ride and I couldn't be happier with the traction it's been getting. Kathleen (06:39): That's amazing. I just love that story because it speaks to something again that I think I've seen with some of the best marketers that have come on this podcast. And another example of that is somebody named Marcus Sheridan, who is a, who has in the past been a mentor of mine. I've worked with him. He started out as a guy that owned an in ground swimming pool company. And he's now like a huge marketing influencer. He's written books on marketing. He is on the speaking circuit. And I've always thought about him, kind of the same thing that I'm hearing from you, which is that he is a successful marketer because he innately understands human beings and how they communicate and how they make decisions. And, and it's the same thing I think with that initial post you did on Netflix, as well as the approach you're taking your podcast. Kathleen (07:28): Like you're just a guy who understands other human beings and, and that comes naturally to you, which makes you an amazing marketer, even if you haven't like gone and gotten the marketing degree. So when you and I first spoke, one of the things that you talked about and you're really passionate about is this notion of authenticity and that really being the driving factor behind the podcast's success. So I think it's, a lot of people use that word gratuitously. Right. And it's kind of like a, a fun buzz word that marketers, like, we all have to be authentic. What does that really mean? So, so I'd like to dive deeper into that with you. For you, how does that manifest? What does it really mean for you to be authentic? Chris (08:18): For me being authentic is showing as much of yourself as, as possible. Whether it's in audio, video, whether it's in prose, writing, anything like that. It's showing us as much of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings as possible that you can relate to other people. Because I think humans are unbelievably amazing at detecting when someone is inauthentic. So if someone's like a used car salesman or they're trying to like sell you a bill of goods that you don't need, people are going to pick up on that, unless you're like this, like unbelievably suave used car salesman. Right. But I think that for the most part, I'd say 90% of the time people can tell when someone is putting on a show or putting on a face. And I think that the more authentic you can be, the higher likelihood you're going to develop a connection with that person. Chris (09:17): Because if you come on and like, so take, for instance, our podcast. I can't tell you how many times people have been like, you guys are so laid back on the podcast, you know, this, that, and the other. And at first I kind of thought, I almost took it as like an insult. It was like, no, you guys just don't care. But no, it's actually, yeah, but what people really appreciate is that we don't over polish it. Like I don't try to speak in a, you know, radio voice. And there, there's a place for that. But for our podcast, because we want to be conversational, when we bring somebody on to the podcast, we want to have a genuinely deep conversation. Because a lot of times people come on and talk about cybersecurity, but then we end up talking about like their, their childhood. We end up talking about, you know, their relationship with their father. We end up talking about how much they love their kids, or we talk about their insecurities. You know, we talk about all these different things and you don't get to those topics unless you're authentic, friendly, and warm and willing to, to bring someone else's guard down. Kathleen (10:22): Now you talked about sharing as much of yourself as you can. And there's, I think that can show up in different ways. So you mentioned being like informal for lack of a better word. But then there's the other side of sharing as much of yourself as you can, which is opening, opening up and sharing things that you might not normally say in a professional setting or, or talking about topics that might be uncomfortable or controversial. Like what's your approach to that? Chris (10:52): Yeah. So I share that stuff whenever there's a greater good to be had. So if, if I'm sharing a failure of mine, its because I think that other people can learn from that failure. And that, and the message is stronger than my vulnerability, if that makes any sense. So if I'm sharing something, like for instance, I did a talk for SANS and the first five minutes or so is talking about how I, I quote unquote, failed at Netflix, because it's such a unique company when I got there. And I had to rethink how I did my entire tradecraft for the work that I do. And so by telling people that I know that there are other people that have gone into their organization or tried to build something and it just didn't work, and it had to go back to ground zero and that's, and I was letting people know that that's okay. But if I, if I share something that that might be vulnerable, but it doesn't impact anybody, and it's just me venting, I think that that could have diminishing returns. So like, whenever you, whenever I share, I try to make it so that I either help somebody and help somebody know that they're not alone in whatever situation they're in or give them some nugget of wisdom that they can take with them. Kathleen (12:07): What about talking about difficult subjects? I feel like, especially in the world we live in right now, there are a lot of those, and there's a lot of people, this is a big conversation happening in marketing. There's a lot, there's people on different sides of this issue. Like, do we go there or do we not go there? When is it appropriate to go there, what's the best way to do it? Like, how do you, how do you approach that? Chris (12:30): Yeah. So, and I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. I think that when companies want to say something and they want to show where they are on a certain situation, I think as long as you are authentic, I think you're always going to be on the right side. I feel like if a company tries to capitalize on a movement or tries to just show face, just so they don't lose customers, I think it's going to show through. It's going to show through and their marketing is going to show through on their, their, their copy on their website. I think people will be able to see it. But I do think that, like I said, whenever you're, you're vulnerable for a reason, you think that you're going to enact change in either someone or in a situation and you're vulnerable in that state, then I think that's, that's a good thing to do. Kathleen (13:24): That's good advice. Now, being as authentic as you guys have been, do you get any haters? Chris (13:33): Not, not so much anymore. I, we, we got haters in the very beginning. I think our first two reviews on Apple podcasts was like a negative. Chris (13:45): I think it was because we talk about the fringes of cybersecurity. So we talk about things like fitness and mindfulness. And we talk about leadership. Like we don't just talk about tech subjects. And so in the beginning, I think that kind of put people on a spin, like, well, why, why are these guys talking about this stuff? But now I think people get it. I think people are starting to get like, Oh, okay. This. So they're focused on the whole cybersecurity professional. Like what are all the things that can make them better? And, and so now we just get nothing, nothing but praise, at least, at least to our face. I mean, I don't know about closed doors, but yeah, it's been, it's been a phenomenal response so far. Kathleen (14:27): You know, you just made me think of something really interesting, which is that working in cyber, it's definitely a, it's an industry that, that by nature is not known for opening up and sharing, you know? You're trained not to share information. And it also tends to be an industry that is a bit more you know, I would say at the corporate level, at least kind of formal and, and, you know, stiff, if you will. I come out of marketing, the world of marketing to marketers, and that's a much more informal, fun kind of kind of industry. And I think there's a lot of industries out there like cybersecurity, you know, you could think about like banking and finance or you know, tech in general, insurance, a lot of those industries, you hear people say, well, I can't, I can't open up. I can't be informal. I can't talk about these things because it doesn't fit with my industry. How would you respond to that? Chris (15:32): That's actually a really, really tough one. Because I, I was listening to Gary V and they were talking about, there was, I think there was like a mortician in the audience and they were talking about like, I have, I talk, my business is a really serious business. Like how do I, you know, show color and things like that. In some cases you can't, I mean, really, depending on what your industry is there, there's just some things that aren't going to fit, but there are you know, 10 other ways that you can be authentic in whatever that business is. So like, if you're, if you are doing like, say cybersecurity and you're protecting against like really, really like serious threats, like maybe advanced persistent threat level things, I mean, you can, you can, you can have a little bit of comedy but if, if like you're doing something like, like you're a mortician or you are supporting, you know disenfranchised children or you know, people across the world that just are underrepresented, there might be some tact that you might have to have when you are sharing authentically. Maybe you go to a different emotion. Maybe you, you, you share the emotion of, of how passionate you are about this, a particular arena, because there are ways to be authentic without being weird Kathleen (16:55): Or callous. Yeah. Yeah. Authenticity doesn't always have to be humor. It's just right. It's, it's sharing emotion and making an emotional connection, really. So, so what are some examples of conversations you've had in the podcast or topics you've covered that have really, I think, showcased this, if you will. Chris (17:16): Yeah. So like I was kind of alluding to before we had a guy on, Daniel Mead, and he came on just kind of talk a little bit about his company and the things that they were doing. And, you know, it just in the middle of the conversation, he started talking about his dad because I, I think what kind of put us down that path is where does his authenticity come from? Because one thing that I've really appreciated about him is he's a sales guy, right. And he's, he's a sales guy. And every interaction I had with him was like a funny interaction. It really was generally funny. And I said, you know, where did that come from? Because that's, that's a rare thing to number one, have the confidence to try to be funny in every interaction, but then all the, also to actually nail it right. Chris (18:03): There has to, there's something that happened in his childhood. And so I kind of poked him on it. I was like, where, where does that come from? And he started talking about his dad and it just completely changed the trajectory of the conversation. But those are, are my favorite favorite conversations. We also had a conversation with a guy named Wilson who was also in the Marine Corps. A leader. He was a pianist for the Marine Corps, which is really hard to do. Ended up in cybersecurity, started his own company, wrote a book that did all these amazing things. And so we started kind of going down the rabbit hole with him and he told us about a time that he was with a leader that was really, really hard on him, like in a, in a completely terrible way. But, and we just went so deep into that reaction and how he felt during that time and, and the positive outcome that came from it and almost got it, got too deep from the standpoint of like, we, you know, we try to be as positive and uplifting as we can on the podcast, but it went deep and we didn't want to end it there. Chris (19:13): And so my buddy Ron is like, Hey, should we, should we just keep going? Just that. I was like, no, this is completely fine because he brought it all the way back around to how he used that, that negative situation into a positive. So yeah. I love those conversations Kathleen (19:30): Going back to kind of the story of the podcast. You started out and it was you and Ron having conversations and they were different kinds of conversations than people were used to hearing in cybersecurity. How did you guys build the audience for your podcast? Chris (19:44): Yeah, so I I'd say the other thing that really makes us stand out is that I know that, so some people use you know, other like platforms to kind of like, you know, push their, their stuff out there. You know, they, they use the automation, they use, they pay for, you know, advertising and things like that. And, and that's good, you know, especially if you have like a product that needs to get put in front of a lot of people, but fortunately for us, we, we didn't have to do that because I think as we've grown, like, I'd say we've grown fast comparatively to like a lot of podcasts, but in some podcasts, like we've grown really slowly. But the people that do come on to like the family of, of Hacker Valley Studio, that the fans of Hacker Valley Studio, they come and they stay. There is a, Jack Rhysider, he put out an article about how can you tell that the interaction between you and, and your, your, your basically your listeners. Chris (20:45): And one thing is he, I can't remember what the app was, but if you took the app again, I think it was representative of 2% of like all podcast listeners, but the math still checks out. It's the ratio. So if you look at how many listens you have on that platform, compared to how many subscribers you have on that platform, you can tell how many episodes those people are actually going through. And he was saying like a good number is like eight. So that means like if someone listens to your podcast, they listen to a minimum of eight or an average of eight. On our podcast, it was over 11. So if you come to our podcast, people listen to like around 11 episodes. I think, you know, some of the greats, like Joe Rogan, I think it's about 20. And so like that tells us that we are on the right path and we're putting out good content that people enjoy. And that's why we get so much interaction on, on things like LinkedIn, because everything, everything we put out, it seems like it speaks to people on, on one level or another. Kathleen (21:52): And what, how do you, podcast metrics are notoriously difficult to track. So how do you get that data? What platform are you using to get that? Chris (22:00): So I, on that one, that was a specific podcast platform. I can't remember if it was Podcast Addict or one of the other ones, but the ones that we use is Chartable. Chartable is a pretty good one, they have pretty good data. And then also our, our main hosting site which is Pod Bean. Kathleen (22:19): Got it. And, and is there anything, well, let me back up to, what do you attribute your growth in listenership? In other words, is it mostly organic? Is it somebody telling somebody else about it? Is it a certain promotion strategy you're using? Chris (22:33): Yeah, it's mostly organic. We just put out as much free content as we can. We used to do the micro content with the videos, but that, that just got crazy because we started doing two episodes a week. But now that we've scaled back down to one episode a week, I think we're going to bring the micro content back. We're also going to be doing some like live shows and things like that on LinkedIn, but it's all been word of mouth and organic. We haven't done any promotions. I think we're going to do our first promotion on the other side of this move. Cause I actually just moved to Texas. There's like boxes all over. Kathleen (23:08): Which probably makes for great acoustics, all that insulation and cardboard. Chris (23:12): Yeah. So there, there were no boxes in here and saw I checked the mic. I was like, Oh no, this is terrible. So then I brought all these empty boxes in to help with the acoustics a little bit, still an echo, but not, not as bad, but yeah, I think we're going to do our first promotion here next in the next month or so. And I'll let you know how that goes, but everything else has been organic and word of mouth. Kathleen (23:34): I love it. So in terms of the future of the podcast are you planning on just continuing with the same format or anything else you're thinking of changing other than the, you know, doing the promotion or where do you see it going? Chris (23:46): Yeah, so, you know, it's funny you bring that up because I'd say about a month ago Ron and I, we, we had like a, an existential crisis. We were like, do we change the format of the show, like completely and almost do like a NPR, this American lifestyle? Like, you know, because then you can have additional control over the story. You can have additional control over the show. And maybe, maybe if someone, if you interview someone and they're closed off defensive and they don't share a lot, then you don't get to the story is as easily as you can. I do take responsibility for every show. Like it's on the host to make the show good. Right. But sometimes you do get those people that maybe are, they're a little shy and they don't want to share. And we wanted to look at ways to be able to, to share those stories and still make it enjoyable and entertaining and, and, you know, educational for everybody. And we were thinking about going that way and we said, you know what? Let's just stick to what we know, stick to what we're good at because I think what Ron and I really have is chemistry with each other. And we're able to actually bring those conversations to life with our guests. And I think if we did the NPR style, we would lose a little bit of that magic. So I think we're going to keep, keep with the secret sauce and just keep getting better. Kathleen (25:04): Nice. When we first started talking, you mentioned that the, the post that kicked all of this off was you saying, if I can do it, anyone can. Paraphrasing. And along those lines, you are not a marketer, but you have become a pretty successful podcaster. So if somebody is listening and they are not a marketer and they're like, man, I've always thought about doing a podcast, but I've been too intimidated. Can you just share, like, as, as a non marketer, how did you teach yourself to podcast? Are there certain resources or certain things that you would recommend that person do? Chris (25:40): Yeah, so I would say, just keep trying. Like, be yourself and just keep trying. And I think if you do those two things, you're going to get to as good as you're going to be. Maybe, you know, do some education, read some books. I didn't read any marketing books or anything like that, but I'm sure there were some really good ones out there. Obviously, listening to your podcast would be a good resource for people to listen to. But I think just trying, just trying things. So I'll give you a quick story. There was a time, I think this was like two years ago where I was, I was really heavy. I was at my, at my heaviest, I think I was like almost 300 pounds or so. I was like, Oh, I gotta make a change. And I was like, what, what do I need to do to get my butt into gear? And so I hired a film crew to do like one video a week, and this is all on my Instagram. One video a week. And what they did is, they followed me through this like entire fitness journey. And of course its really vulnerable, like being that heavy, working out, showing yourself running. Terrible angles. Kathleen (26:44): I was just going to say, Oh my God, it's like my nightmare come true to have anybody film me doing any kind of exercise. Chris (26:53): It was, it was rough. But I was like, I'm just going to keep doing it. I'm going to keep putting out content. And you would think this would be like this amazing you know, triumph story. I lost the weight, but the traction was not there. There, there were people that were, you know, watching that my friends and family are all, wow, that's so amazing, great videos, but I didn't, I didn't, you know, blow up on, on Instagram or anything like that. But what happened was, I, I did learn every time I did a post, every time I did a post, I looked at what I was putting out like, you know, what resonates with people and, and, and is it authentic to who I am as a person? And so all of those learnings from trying that thing on, on Instagram translated to everything that I'm doing on Twitter, on LinkedIn. And so it's not going to come overnight, it's it? It could take a long time, but you just put in the work and I think you'll get there, Kathleen (27:49): Man. Talk about walking the walk and being authentic. Having somebody come and film you while you do that, that is brave. So kudos to you. Well shifting gears for a minute there's two questions. I always ask all of my guests on the podcast and I'm really curious what you have to say, especially cause you're kind of outside of the marketing industry. You know, the podcast is all about inbound marketing. And so I always like to ask people, is there a particular company or individual that you've come across that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Chris (28:22): That's a good question. I'm gonna, this might be a newbie answer, but as an individual, I think, and I guess as a company as well, Gary V is doing amazing. And the content that he produces, the way he puts out his content and the bite size pieces, that was really, you know, the blueprint we copied in the beginning with Hacker Valley Studio. I, I think he, he pulls just so many people and people just like to, to hear him talk about any, anything. He has so much life advice and career advice. And I think just by knowing who Gary V is like, you're more likely to do business with him because he puts out so much stuff for free. A company, and in full disclosure, this company is a sponsor of our podcast, but I like what they do in the sense that they're called Thinx. Chris (29:12): And what they do is they do canaries, which are these little canaries in a coal mine for if your network gets attacked and this thing gets taken, then it notifies you. Right. What I like about what they do is they also don't do like the big marketing thing. What they do is they actually put out free tech for people to use on a, on, you know, just for free. And they can actually use that tech to secure their, their network, that can help secure their home, everything. And they put a lot of work into that. And I was just like, what, why wouldn't you charge for this? Because this is such a, an amazing thing that you're doing. And they just said, they, they just want, they, they want to put out free stuff of value to people. And that's what it is about. And you know, the stuff that we're doing with a podcast and stuff, the Gary V does, the stuff that thinks does is they're putting out valuable things for free, but they also have products that are on the books. Okay. And so when you meet with that, that free, that valuable thing, you're like, Oh, wow. If they're doing this for free, can I get from them if I actually give them my money and build a relationship with them? Kathleen (30:23): Yeah. It's a real pay it forward mentality. And you definitely captured, that's really at the heart of what inbound marketing is. I liked that you mentioned Gary V because he is also not trained as a marketer. Right. so we have an awesome theme going here. Also somebody who just innately understands human beings and has tapped into that. So there's something there. Now I should say, because I have a lot of marketers in my audience, this is not to say that you shouldn't go get a marketing degree or it's not going to have one, or you're not a good marketer. If you're trained as a marketer, it's just that the best marketers, even those who were educated as marketers, still need to be people who are, who very much want to and are dedicated to understanding people and what drives people. So just wanted to make that clear. So Chris, the second question is, most of the marketers I know, the biggest challenge they face is that digital marketing changes so quickly and there's so much to keep up with. And you know, you're a podcaster and stuff is changing in the world of podcasting pretty quickly. Like how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated on things? Chris (31:30): To be honest, I watch people. I watch people. I see what people are doing well, I'm really good at seeing the tradecraft in a post or seeing the tradecraft in a, in the video. I'm really good at picking out like, Oh, I see what they did there. And that's really intelligent. So really just keeping my eyes out in a broad perspective on, on Twitter, LinkedIn would have you YouTube. So really just keeping an eye on what people are doing really well. And then if you're smart, you steal it, right? Kathleen (32:04): Yeah. Shamelessly copying. Yeah. Well, I think that's the perfect answer. Given the conversation we just had. So if somebody is listening and they want to check out the podcast or they want to learn more about you or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that? Chris (32:20): Yeah. My favorite place to be is on LinkedIn. So you can find me there pretty easily. And then the podcast is Hacker Valley Studio. That's the website. Just go to it, check us out, and let us know what you think. Kathleen (32:33): Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me this week, Chris, this was really fun. If you're listening and you liked what you heard today, or you learned something new, of course I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star reviews so that other people could find out about awesome episodes like this one with Chris. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks again, Chris. Chris (33:02): Thank you so much.

Passengers and Cargo questions answered! Day 211 Coffee with Kenny! Again from California today, using this amazing background because how many times am I going to be able to do that?! On to the topic today..Question came in about giving rides, and tours and rides and cargo and dropping people off and a part 91 and 135. So I'll go into that just briefly so you can do your research from there. Leave your comments down below, we love your experiences!

In this interview Lisa and Dr Wayne delve deep into  what Prolotherapy is and how it can be used with joint, tendon and ligament problems, what Prolozone is, what Ozone therapy is,  it's mechanisms of actions and much more.   With nearly 30 years experience Dr McCarthy has used these therapies on thousands of patients and teachers other doctors and medical specialists in these therapies.  You can find out more at https://waipunaturalhealth.co.nz/   Prolotherapy & Prolozone therapy Prolotherapy is a non-invasive, cost-effective solution to many problems associated with the wear and tear of joints and back problems.    Especially effective with knee and shoulder damage and lower back issues. An injection of dextrose and lidocaine are used to perform prolotherapy.  The injection is given into damaged tissue (ligaments and tendons) which causes it to inflame and then heal.  In the healing process more strength is added to bony connections.   Ligaments hold joints firmly so they move in correct alignment.  Tendons attach muscles to bones. Tearing of ligaments and tendons off bones causes sloppy joint movement and pain. Prolozone involves injecting ozone into the painful or inflamed areas, similar to prolotherapy. Once repaired non-surgically with prolotherapy, muscles can then strengthen around the joint.  Once the joint is strong, it remains so unless another accidental injury occurs. Prolotherapy increases circulation and nutrients that help tissue repair itself.  This collagen strengthening technique can be used for all joint injuries, old or new.   Ozone Therapy  What might it do for you? Essentially ozone restores oxygen saturation to the body's tissues. With any form of illness the oxygen levels drop and if they get depressed 40% below normal cancer is encouraged to grow. Low oxygen signals fatigue, usually becoming chronic. The oxidative (Life Force) power of the body is reduced and metabolism goes down to a less efficient level. Conversely, when the oxygen saturation is returned to normal there is a strong chance of recovery of normal physiological function i.e.: A return to better health. Ozone therapy is unsurpassed as a method of oxygenation and is a cousin of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Six treatments are required to receive the ozone effect and as metabolism improves vastly resulting benefits are very long lasting.   Using the body's own inherent self-healing properties to regenerate tissue in the body. Ancient systems of medicine such as acupuncture and manipulative medicine have tapped into this capability to varying degrees by enhancing blood flow, nerve conduction and oxygenation to areas that need to be healed. As our understanding of the body's own mechanisms for healing has matured, we have developed new techniques with a more robust healing potential. In the field of Musculoskeletal Medicine, Prolotherapy, using a concentrated Dextrose (corn sugar) solution injected at the area requiring regeneration, can initiate the healing response. The first phase of healing is inflammation, where the blood flow to the area is increased bringing white blood cells to clean up the area and platelets with growth factors to stimulate stem cells to regenerate tissue. The next evolution of Prolotherapy involves isolating the growth factors found in platelets and white blood cells in the blood and injecting them directly into the area to be healed. This is called Platelet Rich Plasma. Platelet Rich Plasma can be used to stimulate regeneration of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage, and it can also be used for a variety of aesthetic conditions like hair regrowth, facial regeneration and scars. Dr.Wayne McCarthy N.D. is a Naturopathic Physician. Wayne's background is as a practicing Naturopath in New Zealand until moving to the U.S.A in 1989, where he furthered his education and training by going to a private medical school in Oregon called National College of Naturopathic Medicine. After graduation Wayne was licensed as a primary care physician in Hawaii where he practiced for 15 years. Wayne is registered with NZNMA, and certified by Natural Health Practitioners of New Zealand in Naturopathy, Nutrition and Herbal Medicine. Email Wayne, Waipu Clinic: 09 432 1325 Websites https://waipunaturalhealth.co.nz/ and https://nehc.co.nz/   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com   For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/running/ Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body.   Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics/ measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home   For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/page/mindsetu-mindset-university/   Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ for more Information   ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option.   Here's What NY Times Best Selling author and Nobel Prize Winner Author says of The Book: "There is nothing more powerful than overcoming physical illness when doctors don't have answers and the odds are stacked against you. This is a fiercely inspiring journey of a mother and daughter that never give up. It's a powerful example for all of us." —Dr. Bill Andrews, Nobel Prize Winner, author of Curing Aging and Telomere Lengthening. "A hero is someone that refuses to let anything stand in her way, and Lisa Tamati is such an individual. Faced with the insurmountable challenge of bringing her ailing mother back to health, Lisa harnessed a deeper strength to overcome impossible odds. Her story is gritty, genuine and raw, but ultimately uplifting and endearing. If you want to harness the power of hope and conviction to overcome the obstacles in your life, Lisa's inspiring story will show you the path." —Dean Karnazes, New York Times best selling author and Extreme Endurance Athlete.   We are happy to announce that Pushing The Limits rated as one of the top 200 podcast shows globally for Health and fitness.  **If you like this week's podcast, we would love you to give us a rating and review if you could. That really, really helps to show get more exposure on iTunes**   Transcript of the Podcast:   Speaker 1: (00:01) Welcome to pushing the limits. The show that helps you reach your full potential with your host. Lisa Tamati brought to you by Lisatamati.com Speaker 2: (00:13) Today, I have the wonderful Dr Wayne McCarthy, who is a Naturopathic physician primary care physician up in Whangarei in New Zealand and works at the Waipu health center. He is a specialist once again, in ozone therapy. We've done a couple of episodes on ozone, but Dr. Mccarthy uses ozone in a couple of different ways, as well as the standard practices. And he shares today a little bit about Prolozone. He also talks about prolotherapy, which is all about fixing a joint and ligament and tendon damage. So if you're struggling with an injury that you can't fix, you want to tune into this episode. We also talk about his approach to natural health and how long he's been doing ozone therapy, all the things that he's studied around the world. So a really great episode, especially off the back of last week with dr. Speaker 2: (01:10) Tim Ewer, who I head on another integrative medical specialists. And you know, I think between the two of them, these two doctors both in New Zealand are absolutely fantastic people to be listening to and finding out about more. So I hope you enjoy this interview with dr. Wayne McCarthy. Who's given up a Sunday morning to do this with us. So I was very, very lucky. Before we hit over to dr. Wayne just want to remind you, my book relentless is now out and available. It's available in bookstores throughout New Zealand. It's also available internationally on Amazon, on audio books or the audio book platforms as a Kindle, as an ebook, pretty much you name it, it's out there. You can find it on my website at lisatamati.com. Also. It's yeah, it's been out there for a few weeks and now that we were at a COVID, if you want to just pop into your local bookstore or store, if you're in New Zealand, you can do that. Speaker 2: (02:04) And just a reminder, too, that every couple of weeks we're holding a live webinar about epigenetics health program. This is all about utilizing your genes and understanding your genes and how to optimize your genes for your, for your optimum health, from nutrition, right through to your social environment, your work environment. This is absolutely powerful wellness program that we're using in the corporate setting. It's also very good for individuals, for athletes wanting optimum performance, as it covers off every area from your nutrition, your exercise, right through to your how your brain works, your dominant hormones and neurotransmitters, your it's, everything, everything is covered covered on this. It's a really a amazing program that we're delighted to be able to deliver your, you you can join us for that live webinar, which we're holding pretty much every second week the moment you can find out when the next one is at epigenetics.lisatamati.com. Okay. EPIGENETICS.Lisatamati.com if you want to find out anymore. Speaker 2: (03:12) Let me know. And as always, if you enjoy the show, please give us a rating and review because that really helps the show get exposure. And on that point, I just want to thank you all for those who have listened to have done ratings or have done reviews, because we're now ranked as one of the top 200 podcasts globally for in the health and fitness genre. So I'm really, really appreciative. It's a combination of five years of hard work, and we're really, really stoked to be in that top 200. So thank you to everyone who has done a rating and review or share this with your friends and made that happen. Now over to the show with Dr. Wayne McCarthy. Speaker 3: (03:54) Well, hi everyone. Lisa Tamati here at pushing the limits. Fantastic to have you back again. I am sitting with a lovely day, Dr. Wayne McCarthy, who is sitting up near Whangarei who is the a founder of the Waipu natural health, and also is a doctorate, the natural environmental health clinic. Welcome to the show dr. Wayne. Speaker 4: (04:19) Good morning, Lisa. Nice to be here with you. Speaker 3: (04:22) It's fantastic. I've Sunday morning, no less cutting into your family time. So I really, really appreciate you coming on the show today, but we had a fantastic discussion yesterday. So I've been really, really excited to talk to dr. Wayne today and to share some of his insights and some of the work that he's doing in his clinics. Dr. Wayne, Can you give us a little bit of a background on, on who you are and what you do? Speaker 4: (04:49) I'm in New Zealand, I started life as a natural path osteopath. I went to Speaker 3: (04:58) The Speaker 4: (04:59) Natural therapies college in Ellis Lee, and then after five years in practice, I went to America and got an opportunity to go to national college of naturopathic medicine in Portland, Oregon, where I trained and studied and also taught. And then I got licensed as a naturopathic doctor in state of Hawaii where I practiced for 15 years. Wow. so in America we call primary care doctors, but we're working as a GP would work here in New Zealand. Speaker 3: (05:35) hmm. Speaker 4: (05:36) During that study at a national college of naturopathic medicine. I met James Hutton who was a year ahead of me as a student, but he was the understudy of dr. William Tesco. Now William Tesco was a naturopathic medical doctor. One of the first doctors to come to America from Germany. He was an ozone doctor. He wrote the first papers on bio oxidation. And I think of bio oxidation as the life force, if you want to sort of give it a lay term. And he was the understudy of Dr. Tesco. So he was telling me about ozone while I was at medical school. And then when I graduated, he taught me how to do ozone therapy. From that time forward, ozone therapy became my main therapy and I just, it's what I do with every person I treat. And that's how I got the name, dr. Ozone back then, 25 years later, I got an opportunity to go and train with in Russia. Speaker 4: (06:39) Initially Novgorod 500 K's East of Moscow with professor oly and professor Claudia of consortia Kovar, the mother and father of those own therapy and Russia. Now, the important thing about Russia is that they've been using ozone for decades in their hospital system, across all their medical specialties, oncology, gynecology, obstetrics, neurology, dermatology, pain, medicine, burns, and many other areas, neurology. So they've had the, they've done the most research of any country in the, in the world. And I trained with them for two weeks. It was one on one and I had a, a Russian lady Eugenia, Shasta Kober. Who's my interpreter. And I'm still in touch with her. We communicate regularly. She sends me information on Russian research. I collaborate with then two years ago, I went and trained with dr. Adriana Schwarz in Honduras, but she also works out in Madrid. She's the president of the international medical ozone Federation and the secretary for the international scientific committee on ozone therapy of which I'm a member. And our mandate is to improve and update the Madrid declaration, which is the world standard on how to use ozone medically. Speaker 3: (08:12) Fantastic. Okay. So ozone therapy my listeners have heard a little bit about ozone therapy at all, but you are, you know, dr. Ozone, as you say, in New Zealand, you've been practicing this for over 30 years. Speaker 4: (08:27) I've been practicing for 27 years since 1993 Speaker 3: (08:33) In the law. I want to go into some of the therapies that you use and what's actually happening with the ozone. Like I know that you said to me yesterday, you're trying to get it into the mainstream and New Zealand. How, how has that looking Speaker 4: (08:48) It's already starting to happen because we have GPS around the country starting to pick up train with us and use ozone therapy because I'm, I'm in Amer the Australasian integrated medicines association. And basically these are like-minded doctors, GPS mostly, but there are natural paths in there as well. So we're really having to greater the medical and the naturopathic through this association. And there's a lot of holistic medical doctors. And so this is sort of my clan. And if you will pick up my only naturopathic doctor in New Zealand, there might be some others, but really, I think I'm the only one just by the mere fact that nobody else has gone and trained in America where I did. Yep, exactly. Okay. So this is great because it means ozone. It is it's hopefully going to be accepted into the mainstream soon because in 12 countries where ozone has been regularized, and we believe we have all the documentation to go to our ministry of health and say, here's a new therapy. Speaker 4: (10:00) We want you to regulate it. They would look at all the work we've done and they'd go, well, you haven't left much for us to do this already. Self-Regulated, you've done a really good job. We know, yeah, you've really done the race. Now we can start to train other people. So I've trained two natural cats that now work with me. But they've upgraded to be ozone experts. All the ozone therapies are done intravenously or by injection. So it's always needles, but it's a feel good therapy. It leaves people with an overwhelming sense of wellbeing. And the primary function of it is to saturate the body with oxygen. This will do several things. It will improve athletic performance by giving the athlete the five to 8% endurance advantage, which means that it prolongs the time of maximum anaerobic output before you hit the wall and I've worked with triathletes and the iron man in Hawaii, and I've worked with many other athletes would chop those canoeists Walker, armor, paddlers people who are doing tennis, some of our out Ines players and New Zealand and swimmers. Speaker 4: (11:29) And of course you work with every form of illness that comes our way. We do see quite a few people that have various forms of cancers and the primary cause of cancer, doctor Otto Warburg won two Nobel prizes. And he proved that the primary cause of cancer is a lack of oxygen. The tissues, wow. Though, the respiratory enzymes have been toxified and therefore the body cannot process oxygen. So what we do is we saturate the body with oxygen, removing the prime cause of all cancers. So that's all I really want to say about that. That's the rationale we don't, we don't actually treat diseases. You support health. We treat people when we treat people and we're just pushing them toward greater health by restoring their bio oxidate of capacity in the body. As you know, the main cause of a lot of underlying the underlying cause of most chronic diseases is a chronic inflammation, which is free radical damage, ozone reverses, free, radical damage. Speaker 4: (12:51) Wow. So that's the key point of it. And it also, so it's oxygen is three and it's we talked briefly yesterday about it being a relation of hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which is also increasing the amount of oxygen getting to tissues. That's right. So hyperbaric oxygen, H202, which is hydrogen peroxide, vitamin C therapy, high dose intravenous and ozone therapy, intravenous they're all in a family called bio oxidate of therapies and hyperbaric oxygen. We use it it, that is better for central nervous system injuries, brain damaged spinal cord ozone is better on infection and improving circulation. So they have some overlap. I've chosen to do exclusively ozone therapy for the fact that it's cheaper to administer. It's a lot more readily available and it's a lot more versatile because I can treat the blood with it, but I can also inject it into joints or I can inject it into pain and pain is shortage of oxygen in the body. Speaker 4: (14:10) What we've learned as ozone therapists, where we inject those own pain will go really. So I can just sort of go into a little bit of that on the sports or athletics side, I feel like we'll sort of go, well, I'll start with the ozone therapy. So where does pain in the muscles? We can inject those zone and saturate those tissues with oxygen that will remove the lactic acid. And the athletes will have a faster recovery from their training and we saturate the blood and the body so that the is processing oxygen much more efficiently, which gives us a higher prolong, physical energy output during sports, the international Olympic committee. I have read their documentation on blood doping and, and how we can't cheat. You know, we're not, we're not supposed to cheat. So their ruling basically is ozone could be used for a medical purpose with an athlete during times when they're training. Speaker 4: (15:24) Yes, that's legal to treat an athlete, just cry to a competition would be considered cheating a bit. Not that you could really pick it up, cause I don't think it's terrible in the body. However, they could see that the the saturation of oxygen and their blood would be very high. It would be a bit like a altitude training. Yes. Blood doping or altitude training. It has a very similar effect, which is athletes could do ozone therapy and their training periods to recover from training. But we just wouldn't do it within sort of three or four days before an athletic event. And no one can hear enough. Okay. So how does it increase? Like what is the mechanism by which it increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the red blood cells. Now I understand from the Realogy, Oh, the red blood cell increases the, what would you call it? The pivot, the flexibility of, of the red blood cell is that correct? Speaker 4: (16:33) Makes the red cells more pliable, more slippery, more flexible. So they can squeeze through the small cappelary and get to even the hardest to reach tissues. So if you've got damaged or inflamed tissues yeah, that's right. Any kind of injury where you've got inflammation, swelling, pain. Mmm. We save limbs from amputation with those own. Wow. Because we restore a good blood flow. Also the red cell, we increase a enzyme on the red cell called two, three di phospho glycerides two to three DPG. We call it what that does is it weakens the bond between hemoglobin and oxygen. What this means is blood flowing through the lungs will still pick up at school compliment of oxygen, but it will release it to the tissues a lot more easily. It's like a, it's like a wind that's blowing into the tissues rather than having to pull the oxygen off the red cell with osmosis, trying to use energy to tug it off. Speaker 4: (17:48) The blood's just good sort of way more freely. And in this way we saturate the body with oxygen. I believe it's the only way of doing it. Unless you have a hyperbaric chamber and this would be a really powerful combination I can see. So it's, it's pushing, it's basically pushing the oxygen into the tissues as opposed to it having to be pulled. Now, like as someone like that, I'm an athlete. Mmm. I've had problems constantly with anemia and not enough red blood cells. Mmm. And getting enough oxygen carrying capacity to work the muscles. Does it help with that? Or is that, it's just that that's an independent thing because number of blood cells, no, I'll speak to that issue, Lisa, because we see people that are me anemic often kicks, you know, they're wasting away. Yep. They've got bone marrow suppression, not producing enough red cells or white cells or just whatever it might be. Speaker 4: (18:46) But when we treat with the, when we treat the blood where those zone, where rejuvenating the bone marrow. Wow. And so the bone marrow starts to produce, what's called super gifted red cells. And that's actually the scientific term, super gifted. So real knife gifted, dr. Bilio Bachi Theo CCI. He wrote the book ozone, a new medical drug. And I work with dr. Adriana Schwarz, who was Dr. Bachi Sort of Lieutenant right hand person, you know, his protege really. And she's now leading the charge around the world, promoting ozone therapy, God gives excellent courses. Where was I going with this? You were talking about the Realogy and the, the, the really bad cells, the red blood cells coming out of the bone marrow are called super gifted, which means they're more resistant to oxidative stress and they're better at delivering oxygen around the body. Speaker 4: (19:53) So even when we've stopped and ozone, even though we've done a course of, let's say six to eight ozone therapies, let's say we're treating a person for a condition after six to eight ozone therapies. We've usually established a healthy bone marrow production of red cells overcome anemia. Wow. And the person is starting to feel a lot more energetic and the overnights will last for six months in the body. So they just have to realize ozone is a very reactive molecule. So when we're treating blood, the ozone has reacted with the red cell within nanoseconds, it's gone, it's undetectable and it becomes a nose annoyed. It becomes a nose denied, which is a weaker form of ozone. Or we have a it's more durable and they last six months, wow. Are there for after we finished the course of those own therapy, the patient basically to put it sort of bluntly gets their money's worth during the six to eight treatments. Cause they feel great. And their blood work's usually improving. However, over the next six months, they will be continued improvements even though we've stopped the treatment because the theology of the body has improved. We've blown all the cobwebs out of the bio oxidate of pathways or the hundreds of enzymatic pathways in the body, such that the biochemistry is now working perfectly or optimally. And remember oxygen is the primary, primary nutrients for optimum health. Absolutely. Speaker 4: (21:42) It's used at every step of every chemical reaction in the body. And we see that the underlying reason for chronic illness is the body is not processing oxygen. Speaker 3: (21:56) It's just what you see. And this isn't, Oh, well, I'll just take a big, deep breath of air. And then there I go, I've got my oxygen back. It's a little bit more complicated than that. Isn't it? Speaker 4: (22:06) No, not really. I'd say that people breathe easier. They feel normal again, and they've recovered a healthy metabolism. Speaker 3: (22:14) But when I say like we don't take my SPO two sets here at senior level, I'm at 98, 99%. So I'm like, Oh, well my oxygen's okay. I don't need extra oxygen support, but I know with like with hyperbaric, I can get a heck of a lot more like up to 12 times the amount of oxygen and the right and the right. Speaker 4: (22:37) Yeah. So what's happening there. Lisa is, you're measuring the SPO2 of the blood. You're measuring the oxygen saturation of the red cells and the blood. And they may be 98 or 99%. However, when we treat somebody we'll often see that 98 or 99% straight after the treatment has dropped down to 95 or 93%, where's all the oxygen gone. We've just poured it into the blood. Where's it gone? Speaker 4: (23:11) Well, it's absorbed into the tissues of the body that were desperate for it. And that were low in oxygen. And it's this way that we saturate then very quickly that oxygen level return back up to 99. We know the course of ozone treatment is complete. When a patient comes in they're 98 or 99%, we treat them and the blood is still 98 or 99 cent. It didn't drop. Therefore that tells us the body is saturated. Blood is saturated. They now have what we call the effect and they will stay self saturated at a very optimal level for a very long time. Speaker 3: (23:53) Wow. So if, if I want to, you know, like I'm definitely coming to see you, doc, Dwayne, I'm going to bring my mum. Then we're going to get some treatments as soon as I can get up to away. It's a long way away. But w H w over what period of time would, would, it would a person who's traveling to see you? How many, like the six to eight is required? How many do they need sort of back the team they get back to back. Speaker 4: (24:19) So over a period, what we do, people that come from South Ireland or Australia or Singapore or overseas, we get people from everywhere. We ask them to come and stay in the Waipu area, and then we'll treat them nearly every day for about a week. Wow. Okay, great. Yup. And we see a lot of chronic conditions where everything else basically is filed. And so therefore we treat people every day. We start with a very low dose of ozone because we're working in millions of a gram. We work between zero and 80 micrograms, which is zero to 80 millions of a gram of Bozon middle of, of oxygen ozone and the syringe. So we're working with micro dosages, but we've got equipment that we can dial up. Yep. 1000000Th of a gram. Speaker 3: (25:15) Yup. Speaker 4: (25:16) And so we can do one or two or three or up to 80. So we start with very low concentrations. And over the course of the treatment, we build it up to a maximum. So we might go up to maximum for us would be 80 micrograms. And then we drop it off again, the last several treatments back down to about 20 micrograms. So we vary the concentration and the dose in this way, we will, we will be constantly building up the antioxidant capacity or the antioxidant reserve capacity in the body so that that body can now tolerate a higher level of ozone. And so we can build the dose up like that. And that's how we, that's how we pull people up very quickly because we keep increasing their antioxidant capacity. As we increase the dose of those zones, then we drop down at the end, but we leave them with a seriously improved antioxidant capacity, which means we leave them with a permanent or very longterm ability to overcome chronic oxidative stress and or free radical damage. Speaker 3: (26:26) Okay. So then, then if you wanted to stick, say other oxidative therapies or vitamin C infusions or other things that would have more of an effect, or even even supplementation with antioxidants or good food would have a better effect on the body. Speaker 4: (26:40) So we do do that at Northland environmental health Center where I work with Damien Wojciech and we do high dose vitamin C therapy there, he goes up to 200 grams. Wow. And he does culation therapy and high dose vitamin C therapy as well as being a general practitioner. So collation therapy, some patients come in and they have, you know, vitamin C one day ozone the next vitamin C ozone like that. Wow. Yup. Yup. That's a very good protocol. Fantastic. And he does collation therapy, which is heavy metal detox thing. So I'm hoping I can get him on the podcast as well. That would be fabulous. He's a, that's an area that I think a lot of us need to understand as well. The heavy metal detoxing. Yeah. Dr. Wayne. I wanted to pivot a little bit and go into prolotherapy. We discussed prolotherapy and I was really excited to hear about this yesterday. Speaker 4: (27:42) There's something I haven't really being aware of. Can you explain what prolotherapy is? Okay. So we're leaving ozone therapy. Now ozone is for general health improved performance of our bodies. And just before we do leave ozone, go back to it a little bit, but we leave the topic and we're going to prolotherapy, which is proliferance therapy. This is now musculoskeletal. We look, we're talking now about injuries, physical injuries to the joints. Fabulous. What were you gonna say? I was just going to say with the ozone, cause we, we haven't touched on the, the they at home remedies, but we have talked about them in the past. I'd like to address this issue because it's an important one. Two years ago, we formed the ozone therapy association of New Zealand and we're taking applications now. And mostly for doctors we have some nurses, some natural paths. Speaker 4: (28:53) But we've also opened it up because we know that there's a lot of people in New Zealand who are practicing those own using what we call lay methods. You use that term it's respectfully used and they're doing all kinds of variations. There can be insufflation of the colon, vaginal insufflation air, insufflation cupping, limb bagging, whole body bagging. There's the hocket, which is the ozone steam sauna. Hmm. Which is actually a very good treatment. And ozone can be used in facial treatments and for beauty therapy with beauty therapists. So what we're looking to do is to regularize the practice of ozone and New Zealand so that these can all have access to a professional body, guide them on safe and effective methods to use at whatever level they're trained. We're inclusive, include everyone that's doing ozone. So that patients, athletes, the interested people who want those zone, I can get it throughout New Zealand, just depending on what their needs might be. Speaker 4: (30:09) So quite often what will happen is people will come to us. We'll do the intravenous methods. And then where do you live? Right. You're in Palmerston North. Okay. So let's see, who do we have in Palmerston North? Well, we have people using cockpit, which is the ozone steam cabinet, and we have people doing installations. And so on where the ozone gas is put either into the rectum or the colon very simple, safe, easy to use method or vaginally or other topical way, or you should make ozone oil for rubbing on the skin for dermatological conditions. You can make those, the naked water. You can breathe it. Yep. We also use ozone generators that we get from Kim sex and violence. Speaker 4: (30:57) She provides really nice equipment that we can use for ozonating the clinic meeting, any building remove smells or toxic odors and that sort of thing. And so when we were gearing up for the recent epidemic, yes, we were. Ozonating our doctors and nurses and our staff. I was receiving intravenous vitamin C. This is for our protection. And the clinics were being ozonated every morning at 3:00 AM automatically. Yep. With Kim's can Sexton's machines. Fantastic. And therefore we knew we were coming into a sanitized environment and then we treated one suspect that COVID patient. And then we saturated that room with those own immediately afterwards, it was off clinic. It was outside in the carport, the old sauna room. And so we knew that room was now sanitized. So if we had another COVID patient, we'd be able to go into that room, be sanitized. We were safe wearing our PPE, but we can deliver the treatment. Speaker 4: (32:03) Fantastic. And we will get up for that. So, and this has been like, just to briefly touch on the Corona situation. There is now proven studies coming out of Spain. The ozone is affecting the client of ours. Yes. There have been clinical trials in China and Spain and the conclusion at the moment. It hasn't all been gone into print yet. I don't think we ever, because we're working with doc date around and Schwartz, she was on the front lines and Spain treating COVID and the reports coming back, or that ozone was effective phenomenally. And what that meant was patients were recovering within 24 to 48 hours after one to two ozone treatments, they were fully recovering. And I think 98% of the patients that were in serious enough conditions that they were going to be put on ventilators. 98% of them did not need to have ventilation. Speaker 4: (33:06) Wow. Which is a good thing because nine out of 10 people who get ventilated die. Yeah. It's not really an effective therapy for COVID, but ozone proved to be very effective. We know this because we've been treating all viral conditions since since day one, really a hundred years with it's a hundred years with research and ozone. Now I have to say, it's not the only thing that will do that. High dose vitamin C will do that. I've heard an India homeopathy was very effective. And if you read the journal of the New Zealand journal of natural medicine, I don't know if you know of that, but the New Zealand journal of natural medicine, there's lots of articles in there on other useful natural therapies. And they all work pretty good. So actually there's a plethora of effective treatments that we can use against this horrible thing. That's why we weren't afraid to treat people because we knew we were safe. Speaker 3: (34:13) Yup. Yup. And I had dr. Rob dr. Rowan on last week and it's talking about Ebola and his getting shut down, unfortunately. But Speaker 4: (34:26) That's right. He went to him and Howard Robbins stopped. The Rowans went to Sierra Leoni and they were invited there by the minister of health. They treated doctors that had got Ebola. Some of them opted for the ozone, all the ones that are all the ones that said yes to ozone therapy, survive all the ones that denied it and said, no, I don't want it. They all died. Speaker 3: (34:53) And then he was shut down. Unfortunately, Speaker 4: (34:55) When he got shot down, you can't be using effective therapy. Speaker 3: (34:58) No, it might mitigate the drug sales. We can't have that comment. Right. Moving right along. Let's talk about therapies, prolotherapy. Cause this is a very, Speaker 4: (35:14) Yeah. Sorry. I don't want to confuse everyone. So everyone on the side. Yup. We're on a different topic. We're now looking at joint pain. I'm very excited about Prolotherapy because it will effectively treat all musculoskeletal injuries. It will, it is an effective treatment for all sporting injuries. And it's permanent. This is amazing when you've done product therapy, you'll no longer have knee pain, back pain. Retruding disc pain, low back pain, ankle, elbow, rotator cuff, you know, anything like that, anything where the ligaments tendons are involved in the is involved. That's right. So let's just talk about knees. Cause we see a lot of those. So what we do is somebody comes in, they've had a knee injury, the body is healed, but the injury doesn't go away. It keeps flaring up when we strain that joint. And it's because the ligaments and all the tendons or the cartilage have thinned, you know, if you could imagine stretching a thick, rubber band over a rock and then just tapping it with something sharp or happen, then that rubber will just split. Speaker 4: (36:36) It'll still be in tech, but not as strong. Think of your ligaments like that. Now you've got a little bit of a slop in the joint and that's what causes pain. And it's what grinds away the cartilage. So what we can do now is we can do prolotherapy, which is proliferant therapy. And we inject a thick solution of dextrose. So it's a sugar, but it's hypertonic, which means it's extra thick, especially compared to the body fluids. So when we inject that into a ligament, it will stimulate the fibroblasts to create more ligament. Yep. What that means is we thicken and then shorten and tighten that ligament that returns the joint back into its normal alignment. Cause that's what the ligaments do. They hold the joints in the alignment for the movement that joint has to me. Yep. And so we had this week or Lex ligaments, they've stretched, they've torn off the bone partially and it's always easy to find. Speaker 4: (37:47) You can just poke on them. They do it. And people jump you inject bet spot. And what will happen is new ligament will grow over a three week period and return 50 to 80% of the strength. Wow. Then we need to repeat it a month later. Again, you'll get 50 to 80% improvement. So after generally two or three treatments, we've got a hundred percent improvement. Wow. At that point it's permanent and you'd no longer have that injury. You no longer have a weakness there. Your mind can let go of the doubt of your ability to use that learning in a maximum athletic, competitive sort of attitude. So you get your confidence back and your athletic performance is not hindered by chronic injuries. And so we treat a lot of athletes and we keep the top people in the game and young, young athletes sometimes in their teens, cause we work with some calm, competitive swimmers and they, you know, they pushing their bodies to the max, pushing the limits. As you say, they get these tears. Now that would, that would slow the down their training. And of course, if you have a week off training, it takes three weeks to get back to where you were, where you had the injury. So you lose five or six weeks really out of your, out of your schedule with product therapy, we can keep those athletes performing without pain. And this is something so simple as, as dextrose. Speaker 3: (39:30) This is so is this like reconstructive therapy? I had a, Speaker 4: (39:34) Yeah, yeah. It's called injection reconstruction therapy. Cause I had a, Speaker 3: (39:41) A boyfriend back in my early twenties who had a very bad ankle injury and he had to go to America for, we construct a therapy. It was called Speaker 4: (39:50) Yes. Will be injection reconstruction therapy probably mean it is an American technique. Yep, yep. I did learn it there. Yup. Speaker 3: (40:00) And the body's own reaction and info. This is where information is so interesting. Isn't it? Because inflammation, when we, when we cause an injury to the site we've deliberately actually causing and introducing something that's gonna irritate and cause injury. And it sends the body's a body starts to send fiber blast to actually make it stronger. So we're using a game just like with the ozone and with hyperbaric, we're using the body's own resources at the end of this. Right. Speaker 4: (40:27) Which is where natural path. So we're, we're always working with the body's own natural healing abilities. And with those own and product therapy, we feel like we can get maximum advantage there. Yup. So we also get a lot of patients often in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, even eighties and nineties who have health conditions and the generative joints it's often called osteoarthritis, which I believe most people think if they're told they have osteoarthritis, they get this idea in their mind that it's something to do with their bones. Yes. Is that your take on that? Yeah. I would say it's inflammation. Speaker 4: (41:19) Yeah. Most people would say it's bones. They think it's bones and we think we're bones as well. It's my bones, they're old and they're down and so on and nothing really too much you can do for bones. Well, we, we don't take that point of view. We see osteoarthritis as joint inflammation, so it'll always be the soft tissue, the ligaments, the cartilage and the tin. And we can repair all of those now. Yeah. So by injecting product therapy into a knee joint, for example, we can reconstitute the cartilage. And so we take people with bone on bone. Wow. And we can, we can thicken that Cartlidge enough that it takes the pain away and on x-ray we'll see an increase in the lower back, you know, like a lot of us, me included, I've got like four different set of basically go on by nonbinary, very close to being bone on bone. Speaker 4: (42:17) Okay. So I'll come at this from two angles. Number one, where you've got a bulging disc, the surgeons have told us, and we've known this since the 1950s, is that the ligaments on the posterior aspect of the vertebra or the vertebrae, you mind those posterial ligaments, the inter spinus and supraspinous ligament, usually a weak and stretched. And so one of the vertebra has moved forward slightly and it's put pressure on the disc and pushed it out, all that space in between the, when a disc protrudes, the chances are that it might impinge on one of the major nerves coming out of your back and going either down your bottom or to your internal organs. So what we do there is we prolotherapy the ligaments on the backbone that we'll tighten those up and it'll pull that vertebra back into its correct alignment, thereby taking pressure off the bulging disc. Speaker 4: (43:31) Wow. Then we have two ways that we can treat that bulging disc. We can either inject those zone down the spine in the muscles, running down the spine as close to the disc, as we did go and inject ozone, it only takes a few minutes. It's 98% effective for joints for bulging disc 98% effective. That's where you expect to win with bulging discs every time it's insane. And sometimes we can go in through the quarter, which is a little opening at the base of the sacrum. And it allows us to go into the spinal cord. I know this sounds risky, but actually it's a very safe procedure and we can inject those own into the quarter Aquinas. Which thing goes, the ozone travels up the spine to about thoracic that are bred number 10. Speaker 3: (44:35) Yup. Speaker 4: (44:36) Mmm. Which means it travels all the way up the lumbar spine and into the first few discs of the thoracic spine is where the ribs start and 98% effective for reducing bulging discs. So we prevent a lot of surgeries. Speaker 3: (44:55) This is what I mean, this is what, Speaker 4: (44:58) Mmm. Speaker 3: (44:59) Surprises me that, you know, this isn't more known and it isn't out there. And I did know of this 20, like I said, 20, 30 years ago, but this was an option and I've never seen it come back or, you know, proliferate and then people know about prolotherapy and certainly not Prolozone this is good. This is definitely going to help people avoid having to have surgery. And, and, and you'd think this would be well, let's try this first. It would be a great approach. Why isn't this right throughout everywhere? Why, why isn't every doctor offering this or is it a very specialized difficult thing? Speaker 4: (45:36) You know, I can only relate to it in terms of my own personal history. You know, I went and trained in Oregon and I learned things that are not taught here in New Zealand. One of them was the other one product therapy and actually put product therapy in its basic form was actually taught to me by a osteopathic surgeon. I'm just trying to think of his name now. I'll dr. Wilson. I think it was, he was a Harley street physician. He was doing it back in the day. And so we learned some of that often in, there was a famous New Zealand doctor called dr. Only who went and did product therapy and he was doing it in Mexico. So a lot of Americans would go down to Mexico. A lot of Gridiron athletes would get prolotherapy injections. So I heard about him and it turns out he was in New Zealand. Then when I came back 14 years ago to New Zealand, I trained with dr. Ken or Speaker 4: (46:45) Which he dr. Ken or at that time was I think, 92 years old, gosh, and still practicing and Remuera. Wow. And and I still liaise with Fraser Berlin, who was his nephew and doctor, or he was sort of a phrase, a Burling was dr. All's sort of protege if you will. And so he treats a phrase that treats a lot of people that have, and I always get this name wrong, but yeah. Disease, which is a, I think I've pronounced that. Right. It's an odd one. So sometimes I mispronounce it. Anyway that's a generalized disease where ligaments just sort of dissolve. So it's a serious condition. There's about eight or 900 people in New Zealand. Well, he's treating all of them with prolotherapy and it's the best thing they've ever had. So he's another doctor, great work there with prolotherapy. He uses stronger prolotherapy agents than I do. Speaker 4: (47:55) He uses if the NOLA mean and Tetra or sulfate, I believe which is a stronger tightening agent, but you know, we're natural paths. We like to stay with the more natural methods I have used other substances like fish oils, sodium moral weights. You can use those in eyes, blood, you can use vitamin B 12, you can do strong ozone and do the prolotherapy with strong ozone. That's what they call pro Prolozone. But I use dextrose, I use dextrose and I treat the ligaments and then we inject those own around them. And we usually put ozone into the, into the joint. Wow, this is this is incredible. And I think you probably going to be inundated with people wanting to come and see you because it got to be I didn't have a life outside of, and so, you know, I had to train other people. Speaker 4: (48:57) Yeah. I could have time to smell the roses or, and buy things. Exactly. Cause yeah, I mean, you're obviously very, very passionate about helping people and getting the most out of your time. And I mean like just, just you giving up your Sunday morning and spending an hour with me yesterday too on the phone, just so's what sort of a person I had dedicated you are to, to this. And I think that that's just absolutely fantastic. And to have someone with this sort of knowledge and background, a very different approach to what we're perhaps used to seeing here is exciting for me because I can see this is great changes happening. And Amer I think is going to be the, the association for integrative medicine, I think is going to be a fantastic thing. I'm, I'm trying to I want him to become a member. Speaker 4: (49:53) I think it's a, that's the things that are coming down the line now. Pretty exciting aren't they? Oh, they are. And what's happening is doctors and therapists sort of the lines of demarcation are breaking down. Yes. Because it becomes more, not about the doctor. Well, the practitioner it's really about the patient and what are we going to do to help the patient. Yep. And that's because we're all coming from that angle. Yep. We just always looking to, with people of conscience and we're doing the best work we can to recover the health of our population. We use all methods that we think can work and ozone and prolotherapy have enough scientific research behind them. We, we, we can explain in detail exactly why they do work. Yep. And this is, this is just brilliant. And so critics of which, you know, usually I just people that don't know, they just don't know about it. Speaker 4: (50:54) We've been, we've had critics. Mmm. Yeah. We've had mid safe and ministry of health. Everyone's investigated us. And yeah, we provided them with dr. Work, you know, we've provided the scientific literature. Yup. That proves what we're doing is safe, efficient, effective. And and this isn't like, this is really become a family is critical and many of them become active supporters. So we can turn a critic into an active supporter just through education. Gosh, that would be great because I do, I do find in the, you know, the, the straight laced allopathic medicine is still so blinkered. Certainly in my experience and I can say this cause I'm a non-licensed nonmedical professional. It has been very, very frustrating in my own, you know, with my own family's health with my mom's journey, for example. And, and I, and this is one of the reasons why I do the show because I want to create change in movement. And it's not all about pharma pharmacology. It's not all about just surgery. Those are great. And let's look at those, but let's look at the other sides of the coin in trying to connect fantastic people and share this education worth the public. I mean, last week I had Dr. Tim Ewer. Speaker 4: (52:23) I know he's fantastic. And he was on the show last week. And again, he too has had, you know, I know issues okay. The, the, the approaches that he takes, I mean, there's a reason why there's such a mess of waiting lists. And so many people wanting to see people like you because it's not being offered. Unfortunately, you know, dr. Terms down, down South, you're way up North, it's hard for a lot of people. If this was this sort of thing was available. And every time we'd have a lot less people, we would, and we'd save our country, billions in healthcare costs, but really you'd have a happier population being able to work to their full potential rather than have their abilities curtailed because of pain. Really. you asked me why aren't more doctors doing it. I think what's happened is ligaments and tendons have really just basically, I'm going to use the word overlooked. Speaker 4: (53:24) I think doctors are really just overlooked. They'll treat organs and muscles and such but ligaments, well, what, what are you going to do for ligaments? Well, we don't, you can't do anything for ligaments. So we won't put too much attention there cause we can't do anything for it. Yup. Yup. Well, the gap that is the gap in the system where we've come in with product therapy, that's our specialty. We treat ligaments, but all chronic injuries are ligament based. And so our typical patient has been to acupuncturist, osteopath, chiropractor, orthopedic surgeon, GP, soft tissue therapists, CMA, if they've done everything. And when we start to hear that history, it confirms for us, this is great. It's telling us it's a ligament problem. Or yep. Then when we investigate, by the way, all those therapies are very helpful. But if they don't resolve the issue, we know it's a ligament problem. Speaker 4: (54:26) So then we do our injections and the pain goes away. People recover the function of their alum and they ask, how come I never heard about this before? How come no one's ever told me about this? And I said, but we have told you about it. And now we've treated you, what's the issue. You know, people find things when they look for them, but this is, I just wish it was, you know, and this is why the show's important. And this will have a small portion of people that were here at, and hopefully the people that go come to you will also share their experiences, but it's a very slow process to get it out to the, the 98% of other people who are unfortunately unaware of it. I mean, yeah, deep into all of this sort of stuff. Zealand, we only have what, two degrees of separation here. Speaker 4: (55:18) So the work that I'm doing, I know is sprayed right throughout New Zealand, because lots and lots and lots of people have now heard about it. So I've been doing it for 14 years here. And so within New Zealand, most people that have these types of problems, my, my past patients usually we'll tell them to come and they have at least have a look at this therapy. And so I think we have New Zealand pretty well covered. Yeah. This show maybe more people might even think about prolotherapy is that yes, it's needles. Yes. It's injections, but you know what? It only takes a minute or two. But when I start working on a joint within a minute or three, I'm usually completely finished with that area. Fantastic. And then they've got lifelong strength back and it's, you know, $300. Yeah. As opposed to a surgery or continual care that costs over years, many thousands of dollars and especially avoidance surgeries, which can be very expensive. Speaker 4: (56:31) We prevent a lot of knee replacements. We get people that have had knee replacements or joint replacements where it hasn't worked perfectly. They're still in pain. So, you know, you hear, you do hear a lot of horror stories, but I also hear a lot of people that have had joint replacement that they're very happy with. So I'm not sort of a critical of it, but if you've had a joint replacement, you're still in pain consider product therapy because he taught me. And so the doctor can, or that we can do product therapy around a joint replacement and it still works very, very well surprisingly, but it does. Speaker 3: (57:12) Yep. Fantastic. I mean, I, it makes sense to me. You know, so I think, you know, dr. Wayne we've covered quite a lot of territory today. We we've done, I was on therapy, a little bit of the background, what it's doing now, how it works, we've gone into prolotherapy and even into Prolozone therapy. Speaker 4: (57:32) Yeah. Prolozone is doing prolotherapy, but just using strong ozone irritating and you just inject the gas. Cause I was owns always a guest. We inject strong ozone into the ligament using the product therapy, needling technique. Mmm. Because just the needle itself going in and out through the ligament creates the ligament, the bikings use fish phones and they would just prolotherapy a ligament with fishbone. Oh, sounds terrific. Shot. And it would create new ligament by us doing a little injection at the end of it. We of course maximize the effect. Mmm. Speaker 3: (58:13) Well, if you think about it, anything that causes a rotation, the body seems more stuff there to fix it. Speaker 4: (58:19) Mmm. You know, Speaker 3: (58:21) So dr. Wayne, I want to say thank you very, very much for your time today. I really appreciate it on a Sunday morning. We can people find you and we're, you know, where's the best place to connect with you and come and see you. Speaker 4: (58:34) You can look up waipu natural health, waipu natural health. So we're in Northland or they can look up dr. Ozone doc, T O R O Z one, So doctorozone1@gmail.com contact the Northland environmental health center in camo. And we do all these therapies there. Speaker 3: (59:05) Fantastic. And I would love an introduction to dr. Damien Wojciech at some stage. That would be really fantastic. Speaker 4: (59:13) I'll share with them that while I did this podcast. Yeah. And I can put you in touch with them. Speaker 3: (59:18) Sounds brilliant. Dr. Wayne, thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate the work, the passion, the education that you've invested in all of this and bringing this to New Zealand that's really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for the opportunity of sharing it with our people. Oh, it's fantastic. Speaker 1: (59:36) That's it. This week for pushing the limits, be sure to write review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.

On June 18, 2020, the ACEC Research Institute held the first of a series of panel discussions on the future of engineering.  The topic covered by the panelists was the "Impact of Technology on Engineering."  Panelists included:• Jose Luis Blanco, Partner, McKinsey & Company• Mike Haley, Vice President of Research, Autodesk, Inc.• Chris Luebkeman, Director for Strategic Foresight, Office of the President, ETH Zurich• Heather Wishart-Smith, SVP Technology and Innovation, Jacobs• Moderator: Joseph Bates, ACEC Research InstituteA full video of the roundtable can be viewed here. Transcript:Daphne Bryant :Behalf of the ACEC Research Institute's, board of directors. Welcome to our first round table and the series, the future of engineering, a big thank you to our donors who have made this session possible. We have a great group of thought leaders, as you can see here today that will share their insights and expertise with us on the impact of technology on engineering without further ado. It's my pleasure to introduce two of my colleagues from the ACEC research Institute, Joe Bates, who will serve as our moderator today and Kevin McMahon, who will be monitoring the chat box and fielding your questions during the session, Joe, it's all yours.Joseph Bates:Thanks very much Daphne, and thank you everybody for joining today's round table. Before we get started with our questions, I'd like to introduce each of our panelists for the webinar. Today. First we have Jose Luis Blanco. He's a partner at McKinsey & Company Jose leads, McKinsey's engineering, construction, building materials and construction technology work in North America. And as a leader of its retail real estate practice, he brings deep expertise in optimizing performance and unlocking value through embedding digital capabilities and deploying and scaling up new technologies. We also have Mike Haley, vice president of research at Autodesk. Mike leads a team of researchers, engineers, and specialists to explore the future of how people design and make things. A primary focus of his team, is automation and leveraging technologies and disciplines that include machine learning, robotics, human, computer interaction, geometry, and visible visualization. Next, we have Chris Luebkeman. He's the director of strategic foresight at office of the president with ETH Zurich.Joseph Bates:Chris has a multidisciplinary education, including geology, civil engineering, structural engineering, entrepreneurship, and a doctorate in architecture. And he is deeply passionate about curating, constructive dialogue, insatiably curious. He relishes the opportunity to discover the opportunities which will be created by change, and perhaps most importantly, to evolve position solutions to the profound positive solutions to the profound challenges we face today. And last but not least, we have Heather Wishart-Smith. She's SVP of technology and innovation at Jacobs. Heather is a registered professional engineer and certified project management professional with proven, experience managing large design programs and developing, managing, and turning around troubled offices and the architectural engineering professional services market. And also Heather is a fellow of S A M E and she is currently the president elect for the 2020, 2021 Centennial year. Thank you all of our panelists for joining us today. I'd first like to start out with a question fairly broad one for each of you to start out with, and I'm going to ask Mike to start us with this based on your individual perspectives, as you look at the engineering industry, what are the one or two biggest impacts that technology will have on the industry in the future, say in the next five to seven years, for instance, will, will things be going faster? We'll be doing things in a different place,uwhat what's going to happen, Mike?Mike Haley:Thanks, Joe. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it is a broad question. There's two things, main things that come to mind for me. So the first one relates to systems and, you know, I think as we all know engineering anything in the world today and especially buildings is all about resolving the various forces that are acting between the systems and systems might be the relationship between the architecture of the building, the structure of the building NDP systems. It could be the relationship between the materials and the methods of production of the building and the sustainability of the environment. It could be the relationship between the people that are ultimately going to be in the building. And today in most practices, we don't have a way of resolving all of those tensions all the time because systems are inherently very complex and they're always changing. So the industries rely on rules of thumb, established practices, standards, these kinds of things.Mike Haley:And I can see that changing in the future. We're beginning to have the ability to automate the understanding of systems and be able to bring those insights and that guidance to engineers and designers in that process. So that's my one aspect that then leads to the second one, Joe, which is that with all of this automation and your question about, you know, you know, do, do we, are we going to need more engineers or are we going to need less engineers? What's the nature of the job market? I actually believe we're going to need more. And the reason I believe you're going to need more is I actually think we're opening up the world to greater possibilities right now with these tools. And that is going to lead to the next, my second point, which relates to knowledge and education. And I think as we build automation systems that understand and learn the patterns, we don't just use that knowledge to automate and make the machine do things, but we can use that knowledge to upskill people. We can train people more easily in using tools and using techniques. We can raise the sea level for lots of people at the same time with technology. So I see that as a sort of a commencement great trend that we're going to see in the coming years.Joseph Bates:Great. let's, let's go over to Chris. Chris, what do you think?Chris Luebkeman:So I, I totally agree with everything Mike just said, and I want to amplify a couple of points. I think there's three things. We're going to see expansion, acceleration and consolidation. As Mike said, an expansion of what we can do and expansion of toolsets and expansion of knowhow and expansion of what we're going to be asked to do. I think there's the acceleration, there's going to be, we're, we're suffering from this already when we like to complain about not enough time to even think anymore, we just have to do do do, and frankly, that's not going to stop. And so therefore these tools are going to help us. I hope and these techniques and our, and our teaming will help us deal with that acceleration. And the last is consolidation. I think we've seen over the past 10, 20 years, an industry wide consolidation, especially in the built environment.Chris Luebkeman:And I believe frankly, that will continue, but I also believe we come back to the first one, it's going to lead to an expansion because as we have the consolidation and either, so this core, core, core core, all of a sudden, there's going to be the realization. We need these new typepology, these specialists who can really focus on, for example, getting our, our third world infrastructure back up to what it needs to be in order to to regain our, our, you know, a position of pride and the other parts of this sort of this other is a consolidation of knowledge. I really think that we're going to be able to acquire and that it's not consolidation by what's there, but how we get it. Right. So we're going to be able to in a much easier way, consolidate know how consolidate knowledge in a much more rapid way. So those are my three words. Great. Jose, what about you?Jose Luis Blanco:Like how Chris frame it in three specific like you know, sentences or, or, or, or things? Let me try to do the same. I think that for me, the three things that I believe what I would love to see going forward, given what we see in technology is more transparency first. Second, being more output outcome driven. And the third one is actually much more collaborative environment. Let me try to just give you 15 seconds for me to one the transparency of think it's clear, but I think it's, I think right now we're capturing data. Not only we capturing data, we're storing data in a much more way that is going to be, we're going to be able to actually analyze that data and provide like, you know, transparencies and some traditional issues we always have a, in the construction industry and Jane construction English, okay.Jose Luis Blanco:Who made that change? What happened? What was the implication? So I think that that's going to be a huge unlock for us, and we wouldn't have a lot of noise that is always around our industry and to move forward. The second one is outcome driven. It's also tied to the first one. I think if we have more data, we have more transparency and then we're going to be able to actually you know, our designs are going to be much more outcome driven is going to be able to provide better service to our owners. I mean, I'm sure Mike and his team are working on Gera design, like crazy these days. And that for me is critical because it's going to be able to fully actually capture what the client needs and actually tell them, like, here are the choices for you, depending on the outcomes you're trying to achieve.Jose Luis Blanco:And the third one, which is the collaborative point, I think is much more than just breaking silos because we're going to have much more transparency. It's like for me, going back to Chris' point about knowledge, is really unleashing like the potential talent of fully the potential of like a group of engineers working together, right. Removing all the constraints that we need to do right now being tying like the King of silos and many other things. So these three things : transparency, outcome driven and collaborations is the things I expect and hope to see in the future there.Joseph Bates:Heather why don't you round us out here with your thoughts on this subject.Heather Wishart-Smith:Sure, so I think that my thoughts on this are really quite frankly, complimentary to what the gentlemen have mentioned. The first really that I would focus on is the interconnectivity of systems. So I've mentioned since, but that interconnectivity and disciplines, and then also the technical workforce. With regard to the interconnectivity of systems, you look at the interconnectivity of society we're coming out of the pandemic, the future of cities the urbanization, everything is going to need to rely on techno technology to really meet that exponential growth and the exponential growth of mega cities. So as was mentioned earlier, this will provide more opportunities for engineers to get involved, to leverage that kind of technology. And, you know, Jose mentioned silos. With that, I mean, I really think that those who are most successful in the technology enabled world will be those who are able to break down those silos and cut across disciplines.Heather Wishart-Smith:So much of what we do in innovation is rather than just say creating something in one discipline and then kind of throwing it over the transom for the next discipline and the next discipline; cutting across, and co-creating across disciplines in order to increase that speed to market. But then the workforce is that second aspect. You know, of course there's so many statistics out there about the U.S. In particular, not graduating enough STEM graduates, and of course it's about more than just graduating them. We need to retain them once they come into the workforce in order to remain competitive. But we also need to recognize the value of the trades, particularly as the trades become increasingly complex, as we bring IOT into operations and maintenance and all of that. So I think sometimes it's tempting to view technology as kind of a way out of not graduating enough STEM graduates, but it's, it's, it's really going to cause the need for even more of those graduates.Heather Wishart-Smith:They need to, you know, they need to have the skillset to design a program that operates and maintain all the technologies that we think will help, you know, get us out of, out of the, the brain drain if you will. But that, that workforce, it needs to be nimble, adaptable needs to be committed to lifelong learning. And finally, I think it's critically important that that workforce be inclusive and diverse. It's not just the right thing to do. It's been proven by study after study that inclusive and diverse companies and organizations perform better. It allows us as an industry to just really cast the widest net to draw the widest possible pool of candidates, to get as many STEM professionals as we can. And it's really once you that critical mass of diversity, that's when you can get the most benefit from diversity of thought.Joseph Bates:So, Heather, I think you've provided a great segue into the next section of questions here that I wanted to ask about. And that's about the increasing speed of design and how that impacts projects and delivery. And in particular, are there generational issues that we need to consider here are our younger people that are graduating more adept with the technology that is out there, or, you know, what, what are your thoughts on this?Heather Wishart-Smith:So because the people who are graduating today are digital natives. I think it's, you know, very often tempting to fall into that unconscious bias that people who are have more time in their career might not be as willing or able to change. But I have found and worked with so many people who were at the latter end of their career, who really do fully embrace that technology and innovation. So I mentioned earlier being nimble, being adaptable, having that commitment to lifelong learning, it's really about that mindset. And I think it's also important to be open, to taking on say a reverse mentor. Yes, we absolutely need to be learning from, from younger people. We need to provide better pathways to promotion and success. We, we shouldn't in any way be writing off due to our unconscious bias, any kind of you know, whole groups of people, right.Heather Wishart-Smith:I, I'd also add that, you know, not all technologies innovation, not all innovation involves technology. Some of the best innovations we have are those that have nothing to do with technology. It's really innovation in my mind is about how you approach problem solving, constantly asking what is the problem that we're trying to solve. So automation, of course, you know, we all know it should be harnessed to reduce repetitive tasks. And oftentimes also more higher risk operations to get people out of harm's way we should be using it for rapid auctioneering. We all know about, you know, generating just infinite possibilities, filtering them down to make sure that we're presenting to our clients what's best for them. Gone are the days where we show up at the [inaudible] with just, you know, possibilities. So we have a lot more to offer it's design attitude approach rather than the decision attitude approach, because you know, of course, decision attitude is assuming that all the, you know, the good options are out there. It's just a matter of deciding which one is best, but as we move into more automation, I really think it's important to take the design attitude approach to come up with the best alternatives. And then after that, the decision will be much easier.Mike Haley:Yeah. I'll answer that a little bit. What had I say that, you know, what, what we've found with the, with the newer generations, the digital natives, as you put it, Heather, is that there's a different expectation about the time to productivity you know, the traditional tools, certainly that we've been building were things that required a long time to become proficient. You had to study them, you had to learn them, you to learn the features you had to, there was a period of learning that was required. And there's, there's a level of expectation now about digital natives that they can pick up a tool and be productive immediately. So there's this relationship between learning and being productive, I think, is going to change. It is we're not ever going to have a world where you learn first and after I think, period, the time you become productive, the two are going to be much more intertwined.Kevin McMahon:I've got a question from the audience, one of the audience members wants to know in the future because of the varied nature and multidisciplinary skills that are going to be needed, that all the panels have mentioned, will, graduates be coming out of school with a more varied skillset - majors in civil, but perhaps minors in mechanical and electrical, for instance.Heather Wishart-Smith:Yeah. So I'll address that. I would even great question and I would even take it one step further, not just minors in mechanical and electrical, but in programming, in robotics, in all kinds of different disciplines that might not have been considered as related say to civil engineering as in the past. But the challenge for us in the industry is to make use of them. I think the risk is really there where you get the bright eyed, bushy tail, new graduates, and they come in and you're really attracted to them because they have the programming skills, they have the robotics background, they've done all kinds of three D printing. And then we sit them behind a computer and tell them to design things the same way that we've been doing it for decades. And we run the risk of burning them out of just really disenfranchising them. So we can't just be attracted to them. We need to recognize that we need to continue to foster that and cycle them through different opportunities and then listen to them when they come up with a way to challenge the status quo.Jose Luis Blanco:I think what Heather just said is super important. And I think that there's, if I may add one, another point is I think there's a very thin balance between and technology needs to help us with that between actually ensuring the that we maintain the knowhow that has been billed by the, I will call the older generation so to speak. I mean, we know that 30 or 40% of the workforce is going to retire over the next 10 to 15 years. So I think technology needs to allows us to capture that kind of knowhow making institutional and at the same time, without the same time, you know, and now we're allowing or empowering the new generation to do new things and doing them right. Right. So for me, that's a little bit of like [inaudible] out the new generation to do things differently, not the same way I've been down before that, for me, it's like what you actually make magic happen.Chris Luebkeman:So excuse me, I'd like to build on that as well. Yes. And first to the graduates, and then to what Jose was just saying, I think the question Kevin was a little bit in my mind too limited. Saying gonna major in civil and mechanical, I would much rather say, well, how about civil and philosophy or civil and biomedical or bio or, or, or some earth sciences or something that's actually, I think what we're hoping to see is actually a mix of the hard - the decision sciences with the natural sciences, because the challenges which we require, I think as a society are not just those who are trained how to make a decision, but as Heather was saying, the profound impact of a systems understanding and the need for us to understand more and more about how the elements within their systems sometimes need to be sub-optimized so that the system is optimized. And I think this is one thing. And the second point to build on what Jose was saying is I, totally agree with that. And we have to figure out how to make real lifelong learning, not just continuing education credits, which you go to some lunchtime lecture, which we all do and get a stamp and say, Oh boy, that was good. Thank you very much. But actually to real meaningful, lifelong learning and how I, and I, frankly, I don't know exactly what that means at this point, but I do know we're all recognizing that due to the, due to the rate of change, both professional, informational knowledge, that we need to find better ways to foster, to empower and encourage real lifelong learning and lifelong curiosity to learn. And I think that those are the two aspects there, which are not hand in hand, but in North self evident, but very, very critical for us.Kevin McMahon:Joe, we have one very interesting question then I'll let you ask the next question to the panelists. The question is with the super evolvement of technology to the panel is see that where most of the work is still procured locally and performed locally. Do they see a future where the local office, where the client is maybe just a small nub or collaboration, and then the bulk overwhelming bulk of the work is done around the globe or, or outside that core local office. Do they see that future happening in the next five to seven years?Mike Haley:I will. I'll say we're, we're beginning to see that happening already. I don't think it's a, I think it's, it's a growing trend. You know, technology is enabled and enabler of it. So as the economy, so it's society, right? All at the same time, we're seeing the shift of cloud adoption. People storing the data in centralized locations that can access it from everywhere. The days of having it on the server, inside your company, and only being able to use it. They're pretty long gone for a lot of companies. I think the gig economy, the notion of being able to hold down multiple contract jobs at the same time, switch between things, manage your workload, manage your life is a reality for a larger, larger number of people year over year. And then I, I just think that the borders are breaking down in terms of how we think about the world. And I think just because you live in another side of the world, you can think about problems elsewhere in the world, quite easily. You have access to that information.Heather Wishart-Smith:And I'll add to that. We've actually been doing this for years. It started out, I looked back in my career when I was, you know, managing programs. It started to become of course necessary when you needed to bring in a specialist who you wouldn't expect to have in the local office, but it really has evolved to the point where it's just a normal part of how we do things these days. And I think it will just continue to evolve. And that's a little bit different. I come from a very large firm,uand the smaller firms probably it's not as necessary, but it it's absolutely being done. And in addition to the technology and adoption of cloud, as Mike said, also,uvirtual and augmented reality has helped to facilitate that as well. And it also means,uless travel for some of our staff. So that's better from a work life balance perspective.Chris Luebkeman:To me, I agree with both, both of those, again, strange, but to me it's all about access. Now, at the end of the day, you used to not have access to first-class knowledge unless you were in a center. Now we right now are in two different continents at seven different time zones, and yet we're all accessing each other at this moment and the other, almost 300 people. And so it's it's access. And so it's access to knowledge, but it's also access to the marketplace. So I've been for the past five, 10 years, really, really encouraging the integration of small local offices, because at the end of the day, we know with the global move towards segregation. So national segregation and regional segregation, this is, this is going to continue. And so the local offices are going to become key to be networked and to create a new kind of network, which is trans-regional as, as the, you know, globalization screeches to a halt. I think this is, this is going to be a new reality, which we have to really look at. How can we make sure that the small local office can really provide the most excellent world-class delivery. And I, and I think that at the same time, we will still be, the big firms will still work globally and the Jacobs, the ARUPS, and all these they'll be able to flip work around the, around the world and continue doing that.Joseph Bates:Great. So I want to move on to the next section and I'm going to have Jose - I'd like to direct you then to start out with you on this one. There's a lot of buzzwords today in technology such as digital twins, data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. I'd like to talk about, first of all, what are the terms actually mean? And secondly, how will they actually affect the industry in the future? So maybe Jose, if you want to start out with one of these areas and kick us off.Jose Luis Blanco:Yeah. So a couple of reactions here. I think there's definitely a lot of buzzwords going on. And I think that I would like to separate the reason for that is because I think people sometimes actually confuse you know, technologies that aren't available or venture capitalists sounding, right, or that money is flowing to actually develop reinvestigate versus technologies that are really being adopted, whereas having mass adoption. So we'll make that distinction in the beginning of it. Right. So it's just been, you know, two or three or four, what you say is like, really, if I think about technologists, for instance, that are already impacting the way we work, obviously there's analytics that actually are being applied or advanced analytics are being applied on the field for early flags for projects. How do you explain, or the main factors that explain what a project can turn profitable non-profitable so you can, you can do a reduction analysis to actually do that, and even just forecast that you can definitely do it, you know, analysis of bidding and bidding factors, or even you can apply it to other electronic design for instance, right.Jose Luis Blanco:Which is starting to be widely used. Right. So there's things that are already happened, right. When you think about some of the things that may happen in the future, or maybe starting to happen, but not fully implemented, that's when you start entering like a world of lack of potential digital twinning, construction, or potential, like, you know, artificial intelligence where we actually fully explain, I don't think we're doing artificial intelligence in construction, per se right now, I think we're starting to do machine learning. And actually my, my actually disagree with that. I'm not, but actually that is a little bit like how we see. So I think the big, important thing for me is like all these technologies we're exploring and what should we be talking about all of that. Right. And, you know, venture capital is funding as soon as you get amount of them. And we're seeing a lot of them, the ones that actually read being adopted, I wouldn't say that at scale, they started to be adopted as a sizable pattern actually are much limited. I mean, they made it to analytics and we made it too, obviously maybe generated the design, some machine learning applications from project planning in advance.Jose Luis Blanco:[Inaudible] ....some Of that is implemented. I just want to hold on. When you say digital twin, the sec for various specific kind of use cases or a specific like areas who still are like ha a little bit like far away from a fully functioning digital twin, we understand in aeronautics to where we understand, you know, their industrial processes. Anyway, that's my perspective.Mike Haley:Yeah. I, I think Jose I makes a great point about, you know, I think of it as the hype cycle, right? And the reality is all technology goes through a hype cycle and terms like artificial intelligence, machine learning are, are hype terms. Now we deeply believe in artificial intelligence and machine learning and digital twins, but they have to be ready to Joe's point. One of the things I would add is I, you know, I think the things that are real today, like you said, are our analytics computational methods. You mentioned that Heather as well, the ability to explore alternatives, I think that's becoming a fairly robust capability today. When we start coming back to that systems aspect of things that we were talking about earlier, that's where it starts becoming complicated. And I think this is a big role where machine learning can actually play.Mike Haley:If we are to build - digital twins, I've also been around for actually quite a long time. And as you said in other industries too, but the difference is the future to have to understand the system. If they don't understand the systems, they're not correctly reflecting the situation and you're not going to be able to optimize your solutions correctly. The only way I believe you're going to be able to make correctly representative digital twins in the future is through sampling. The world is through measuring the data, learning from that data, generalizing those patterns, and then placing them within that digital twin. And then you, then you leverage that digital twin to optimize your designs and look for alternatives. But that's a pot. That's a path we're on. We're not there yet today.Chris Luebkeman:I think one of the interesting things with all of those is, as you said, Joe there's, there are buzzwords and there are many different interpretations. We can look at them with starry eyes and say, you know, I can't wait to do a digital twin and others get terrified of the thinking of the matrix coming down upon us. But as you've asked, I think it's, as we're talking. It's really critical that every firm, it makes the effort to learn about them. Both the potential as is implied by the technology tool makers, but also from those like Jose or Heather, or my other colleagues about what we're seeing is little small implementations that are showing success. So some of the data analytics for mobility and how that's able to really begin through the digital twinning of mobile networks and, and train systems of our airline systems actually to say, ah, okay, well maybe that works there.Chris Luebkeman:Maybe I could work on our proposals for this project, if we could try something. You know, I think so for me, the key with the buzzword is that our firms are prototyping a little bit and they're having a person or two who they give a freedom. What say one degree of one degree of freedom to try this. So that when the, when the client, the project, the tools are all right, that we're ready and it doesn't take yet another three years of ramping up to figure out what the heck it is. And I think that's, that's my 2 cents on that.Heather Wishart-Smith:Yeah. Joe, I can give a couple of very specific applications if you're interested. Yeah, yeah, sure. So starting with digital twins on water treatment and industrial water plants. So we've got a tool called replica that allows us to optimize those systems to prevent overflows in the event of emergency response, do a lot of scenario and what if training? And it also allows us to optimize the design and optimist and operations and maintenance. Another example for data analytics is for NASA at their Langley site in Virginia, we have about 120,000 sensors that are all around that campus. That measure things like vibration temperature, humidity, and we use predictive analytics and machine learning to be able to anticipate when something might break, which then leads to benefits like improved safety. You don't have to send somebody out to just regularly change a fan belt or whatnot improve reliability.Heather Wishart-Smith:That is a huge aspect of it. A site like NASA, they really do need to keep their site going and not have these unexpected outages also financial benefits, money money that saved and energy efficiency. And that we've had - we didn't start with 120. We started with, you know, you know, I think it was a few thousand or something like that, but it's been going on for about four years. And it just goes to show that there are a lot of opportunities in the built environment to be able to harness these technologies. I think we probably, you know, as far as specific discussion about artificial intelligence, but when, you know, when you marry that with automated design, we've been able to automate the design of you know, replicate some some very re repetitive sorts of components, say of rail or other things that, that are used quite frequently. But then bringing that and taking the learning again, starting small. So I mentioned starting smaller with Langley, starting smaller with some other things, learn from that and then be able to use it to scale even larger.Kevin McMahon:Joe, we have a pretty interesting question following up with what the panel just talked about from the audience. And it's with the ongoing industry evolution of technology is all for the panels of describe and the new graduate backgrounds that are not necessarily all engineering, traditionally related vertical integration of team, perhaps some of those team members being around the world. What impact does the panel see relative to professional engineering licensor requirements? Also coupled with the political issue today of making sure that America stays strong in engineering and doesn't outsource all the talent, like the manufacturing issue that we're well aware of.Joseph Bates:Good question. Anybody want to bite that one?Chris Luebkeman:So I I'm perhaps not the right person to answer this one. And I put that up front because I'm no longer licensed. So I really probably don't have the right to answer that question. I think what is critical is there, look at what the responsibilities are and who carries the responsibility because to me, a professional engineer in Switzerland, you don't need to have us go through a special, another licensing exam because the education is supposed to prepare you for that. But at the end of the day, it's who carries the responsibility. And what do you want to trust? Do you want to just, you want to trust a degree or do you want to trust actually that someone has proven their capability to make the right decisions. So I think it's that trust and I hope I've given Heather enough time.Heather Wishart-Smith:True friend, Chris, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a, that is a great point. I am still licensed. But I think it's, yes, it is trust. I think it's important to recognize despite the fact that there are many forces out there in various States trying to diminish the value of the license and great organizations like ACEC, like NSPE had been working hard to show that value. So despite those forces of trying to diminish the value of it at the end of the day, I think we need to remember that technology is a tool. So the tools have evolved. It used to be that professional engineers just worked at the drafting table. Then we shifted to computer aided design, you know, and then we've, we've evolved. We've got, you know, all kinds of different tools, but the technology is just a tool we still need to, as Chris said, trust the people who are applying the tool and that's for the professional engineering, licensure comes in.Chris Luebkeman:Good job Heather, thank you.Joseph Bates:So in the interest of time, I'm going to go ahead and move on to the next question that we have here. Okay. We could, we could probably have a round table on each one of these questions. This next one. I'd like to direct it at Heather and, and Chris as well, actually. How is, and you all have talked a little bit about this already, so maybe dive a bit more into this, but how will the technology affect the culture and the collaboration environment of engineering firms? You know, we talked a little bit about will, and there was a question about, will it work different places around the world, but in terms of the culture, how is that going to be impacted by technology?Heather Wishart-Smith:Yes. Would you like to start, or should I start and give you some time to think...Chris Luebkeman:You're on the edge of your seat and ready? So go for it.Heather Wishart-Smith:Okay. so we've already talked about that. I think there's going to be - several of us have said that we think that there will be a greater focus on cross disciplinary work. Innovation, pretty much demands it. And we, we can't just complete our work in silos. We need to have these multi-disciplined teams and these multi-disciplined teams, can't just be the disciplines they need to include the business model. So the HR piece, the finance and all the rest, that should be part of the development of new solutions. I think a key way of doing this is, you know, at least in my role is by embracing innovation within the workforce that we have and that's by promoting collaboration.Heather Wishart-Smith:So we need to teach people across the business to be able to collaborate, to be able to network so that when that real work does happen, they have that muscle memory of the collaboration of the innovation. And I mean, you know, in our industry, it's so difficult because we're built on a billable hours culture, it's been this way, you know, for eternity. And there's also a performance unit kind of mentality to the engineering industry where you know, it's, whether it doesn't matter how your company is structured, whether you're structured in it by geography or by discipline or by market, there's still silos. And so we need to find ways to promote and, and sustain the breaking down of the silos. Many firms are, are, are structured to promote and sustain them, but we need to find ways to break them down. They're hard to break down. But I really do think that the firms that endure and those that will be successful are the ones that are successful in doing that on breaking down those silos.Chris Luebkeman:So I agree with fully Heather and I want to bring up two more aspects. One is cooperation, we are going to be in an increasingly cooperative and competitive environment. And I think many firms already, and many of us already understand how you can compete and still be friends. And this is one of the things I always enjoyed. When I was got to travel, go down to Australia and watch a sort of Australian rugby game or rugby, you know, and people would literally like without pads, try to beat the blank out of each other, but nobody really did anything where they couldn't go have a beer afterwards and they would respect each other from, you know, the grit and their cleverness and how they played the game. But you never played dirty. Cause if you played dirty, you know, you couldn't have that had that beer.Chris Luebkeman:And this is something which I would like to hope that we can also aspires - not necessarily Australian rules, rugby. It's a crazy game, all due respect, Mike, it's crazy. But this idea that just because we're competitors does not mean we can't always be good friends and I truly believe we need to work more on the second part. I think we're very good at the first part. So I think so culture is actually a manifestation of both the written and unwritten rules and how one treats each other. And it's the written and the unwritten rules. And part of your question there, Joe is about culture change. So part of the question that has to be, as we look at ourselves and our firms, what is our culture? And do we actually understand what the written and unwritten rules are of our firm? And if you haven't asked yourself that, and not just what you think as a principal, what the culture is and you say, well, our culture is openness and you walk into the office.Chris Luebkeman:And as soon as you walk in, everybody puts their head down and they're afraid of you, but you can say it's open, but the reality might be a very different thing. So to actually have a real conversation about the culture that we need in order to be successful in the new economy, in the digital transformation and one and one more thing, Jose, and it's all you said. So for me, the most important thing that we could say with this is, and I support Heather is it's not just a technology, but it's actually having a real conversation about our firm's culture and what we wanted to be slash needed to be.Jose Luis Blanco:Yes, just 10 seconds of this. I think that there's clear, there's a very clear link between performance and health, right? Health critical part of that is culture. And I think that over the past three months with COVID, I think we shift towards a working remote environment and we all will be surprised how fast we've been able to adapt to that. Right. but I think that some of the challenges of the issues will culture are going to start to appear in the coming months. And it's my belief that you can sustain. You can potentially sustain our existing, strong cultural, remotely. I don't think you can build the cultural remotely, or you can rebuild a culture remotely. So that's something that firms will need to, you know, when we're talking about what we're hearing about are they working from home, you know, half of my staff working from home and things like that. I think the implications of cultural implications of that I get to be seen, and we just need to pay attention to that.Kevin McMahon:With lifelong learning, that a lot of the parents have mentioned, and the ability for more experienced engineers to learn new tools and skills, maybe it's more from Mike's first answer, or are the tools keeping pace with the expectation of learning curve of designers to shorten or eliminate the learning curve to use these tools?Mike Haley:No, I wouldn't say they are. I think there's a it's, it's, it's a very, it's a, it's a difficult problem because I don't think it's well understood today. I mean, we, we still live in a world with traditional educational cycles, traditional university college, whatever it may be, get your, get your certification, do that. But those are the cycles we live in. So those are the models we have today. There isn't many models that, that, that, that have this sort of rapid learning world that I referred to for. I mean, some of the only models today are actually newer technology applications. Things you might get on an iPad that people are learning supervised there's there's ideas. There's these hints. I think all over the place as to what these are, I would hesitate to think of a single really, really good example that exists in the world of technology today.Mike Haley:I can tell you, in our research group, this is a very large part of our research objective. And it's precisely for this reason is that we don't actually know the right ways to do this. We are doing experiments in our software. We were introducing features that help people understand how they're learning the software, how they compare to others who are learning it, what are their patterns of progression through the software? And as we do this, we are gradually introducing more tools, but we're also learning at the same time. So I'm not quite sure what that looks like yet, but we don't have an option. That's the point though, we have to do this. We have to make this, the nature - tools cannot just be about taking what you do today and automating it away. Tools have to be about making you more effective and making the combination of human and machine better at the end of the day.Chris Luebkeman:No, I think that's great. The other thing I think so fascinating, it was Kevin with that question is the micro-learning. And I have two 20 something year olds one's graduated. One's just about to, and you know, they, they do micro-learning if they need to learn how to do something, they take and look on YouTube and they find a little burst on how to do it. And then all of a sudden they know how to do it. And I just, it's hard for me of a different generation to think that way. I'd rather call up Mike and have Mike explain it to me and say, hey, you know, and talk to him. And my son, George would just rather just look at YouTube, look it up. And he actually doesn't care what language it's in, because if it's a tool, he can just watch the strokes. And sometimes he'll look at something in different languages, because it's just interesting to see how someone's designed something slightly differently. It just kind of blows my mind, you know?Joseph Bates:So I, again, I just want to keep us moving here. I apologize for cutting off these great conversations. I want to this one's just for Mike, and then we're going to, we're gonna move to the last questions here, but Mike, how, how are people going to pay for this? You know, are certain firms going to have an advantage, the big firms, because they can afford to pay for the technology and the education and the taking the non billable hours to learn it, what's going to happen there and how will the small firms catch up?Mike Haley:Right. So, I mean, you know we're seeing a lot of new business models around how people pay for software, right? So, I mean, we've, we've moved to subscription models which make billing more consistent. And over time, we're also seeing the emergence of capacity based models. And, you know, there was a time not too long in the past where there were, there were products and tools that we make at Autodesk that very few firms, unless you are a massive firm could actually afford, you know, you would, you would only use those tools if you're a certain size that doesn't actually make sense in a capacity based world. So if you're paying for capacity, if I'm a small, if I'm a small firm and I need to run say three structural simulations a week, if I pay per structural simulation and don't have to pay an enormous amount of money for the software upfront, then it doesn't matter that I'm a small firm versus a big firms.Mike Haley:So I think we were seeing these more flexible models that, of course they relate to the cloud, they relate to those sorts of things. And I think, I think there's an interesting difference between large firms and small firms. I think large firms have an inertia that, that, that they have to overcome, but they also have, they have the capital, they have the assets, they have the money, they have the ability to do some of these things only. So the firms lack what Heather were saying. Firms that have been doing this for awhile, actually have a massive advantage because they are there. They are able to act on it. On the flip side, the small firms are nimble, right? They are flexible. They starting up. In fact, their secret sauce will be adopting these very kinds of technologies that we're talking about right now, data in the cloud work from anywhere, flexible learning, bring the data together. Use, use generative design, use, use digital twins, use insights, use these things. And those will be the folks that will win better. But I do believe in the sort of flexible business models that allow everybody to leverage all of the technology.Joseph Bates:Okay, great. So I'm going to ask the final question for each of you, and then we may have time for a couple of questions. Kevin Jose, I want to start out with you. I know you have to log off just a couple of minutes before the rest of us. So the big final question is what is, what is the firm of 2040 look like? You know, put you put on your thinking, cap, your wizardry, whatever you want to call it, your crystal ball. What is the firm of 2040 look like Jose? He might be gone. Oh. Did we already lose them? Okay, well sorry about that. I thought we were going to have him for another five minutes, but so let's just go ahead and throw that one over to Heather.Heather Wishart-Smith:Sure. So I think that we're going to see very few of the traditional A & E's in place. I think that line between technology and design it's, it's already been blurred. I think it will become increasingly blurred. Some examples. We all know about Sidewalk Labs and their smart city project in Toronto. And, you know, yes, I know it's, you know, that project has been terminated, but it they're going to come back in a different city with a different model, with more privacy controls and all the we've seen it with Elon Musk, the Boring Company, and Hyperloop pretty much with no past performance, they've won large scale tunneling projects. You see it with tech companies with autonomous vehicles. Just what was it two weeks ago with space spaceX just launched America's first private company to do so here in America. So that line is really becoming increasingly blurred.Heather Wishart-Smith:So it's really going to result in the increase in the skill set of firms. So tech companies, I think, are going to start acquiring more traditional skill sets, maybe by buying some of these more traditional A & E companies, especially as the owners age out and traditional companies are going to be acquiring the tech skills. That's maybe not as much through acquisition, but through training, by hiring different people. It's funny at Chris, I love your term of coopertition in, I have a colleague at Jacobs who refers to it as competitive-ates. These are where sometimes you compete and sometimes you collaborate together. Taking what Chris said earlier a little bit further. I always try to remember that today's competitor could be tomorrow's client because this is such a small industry. We all have competitors who have since become a clients but, you know, with these competitive-ates, cooper-ates competition, it's really about collaborating together to address these new market opportunities because alone, we're probably not going to be able to get there. So it comes back to your behavior, your home, we talked about earlier, your mindset, not being risk averse, being open to new ideas. And if you want to endure, do not get too comfortable in your silo.Joseph Bates:Great. It looks like we have Jose back Jose. I wanted to ask you before you have to jump off, what does the firm of 2040 look like?Jose Luis Blanco:Well just kinda like very, very interesting question. I mean, I wish I had a crystal ball to actually explain all that, but I think that, I think in my mind, if I just summarize what I see the firm of 2044 as like having a very different demographics in terms of like the roles that we have and have been there for 34 years I'm very doubtful that we're going to be there. Right? [inaudible] The projects that we have right now, many different type type of led professions in there and professions that don't even exist as of today. Right. I expect us probably hopefully it'd be again, probably much more remote, but also with some sort of physical presence because in the end physical presence, local presence, because in the end, I think that the work that we do is not only even the built environment is an enabler for many of the things and we need to listen locally to be able to deliver globally.Jose Luis Blanco:Right. So that's something that also, I think the firm needs to have. And I hopefully I hopefully like you by 2040 as is like in a few years time, which is time you know, infrastructure and the brother engineering space is being seen as a critical part of how people, you know, how will you enable how people live, work and play. So hopefully we will see engineering to be playing even a more integral part in people's lives than it even paying today. So maybe I'm being too optimistic, but those are the things that I would personally see. I see all these revolutions that are happening is also like almost like an opportunity to put the engineers back at the center of so many different things that we can do to improve our society going forward. So again, maybe I'm a little bit of like an optimistic, maybe I'm just like a little bit optimistic, but those are some of the things that I would expect to see in digging the farmer to 40, like diversity from backgrounds, diversity in terms of likely for him elements being much more at the core of how we work, play and live. And and those are some of the traits that I expect.Joseph Bates:Great. Thanks Jose. Mike, what about you? And then we're going to add, go to Chris.Mike Haley:So I, since we're a group of optimists here, so I'm, I'm I'm an optimist as well. When for me, a lot of it comes back to the competition thing that Heather and Chris have both talked about, but looking at it at a knowledge level I think there's an enormous amount of knowledge that exists across the engineering architect of the entire building industry that is mostly common, but it's not always shared or is really shared. And I think by 2040, I see there being a strata of, of knowledge be a digitally represented, hopefully that is then is available to everyone. It, again, I used the term, you know, raising the sea, raising all boats, right? All boats are naturally floating at a higher level, which allows the competition then to actually happen at a higher level. The difference between firms is no longer at this lower level that everybody is benefiting from the shared observations, perhaps it's the performance of certain buildings or performance of certain decisions or materials or processes or whatever it is. So I really do see a more collaborative world centered around knowledge sharing.Chris Luebkeman:So for me, well, the first thing that I do whenever I asked a question like that, Joe, is I think of, I go 20 years back. So if we go back to two year, 2000 and think, where are we as a practice, as a world, they're all freaking out because we thought our computers were going to blow up, right? And the world was a, I would argue a very, very different place 20 years ago. So I'll then go forward and think 20 years, what's the context going to be of the firm 20 years from now. And so we will have massive water stress globally. We're already seeing that in the United States, North America. So we will see mass migration. We're going to have a political stress due to migration, which we have not in our lifetimes yet even begun to experience.Chris Luebkeman:And so therefore we're going to be called upon to solve problems, which are not just technical, but have a social dimension in a way which is quite profound. And I'm not quite sure if we're going to be up for the, up for that yet right now, the firms aren't. But I think by then we will be, I think there by 2040, we are always going to be designing and full artificial reality. And we'll be using virtual reality in construction sites as an absolute norm. It's gonna be like, duh, can you believe that we actually did this once without it just in the same way. Now we can hardly imagine using a slide rule, which I think I was the last class at Cornell to actually use, you know, and I think, and so this is going to be a new, so let's means then if you're doing in VR/AR or that means you don't have to be co located in any way, shape or form.Chris Luebkeman:So all of us can be in a design meeting right now and actually really interacting with haptics so we can push and pull and really feel that I think by 2040, we will have climate legislation, which has been a long time coming, which will then have a different paradigm shift on how we, and what we designed to. So the makeup of our firms will also be very different and what's going to be needed in order to, for us to design for things which will be fit for purpose because the purpose will be not just engineering specification. And I think that's so, and then if I think about economically, we will have gone through two recessions. We're about to hit one and we will at least go through another two within 20 years. And I think we'll go through to identity crises as a profession. We're kind of in one right now, we're doing, what's our role.Chris Luebkeman:I think we'll go through a couple more as these new tools and these new challenges come. And so, and the last one, I'll say, no, politically there will be a new ballgame. There'll be a new empire, not quite sure which one will rise stronger, but you know, our rocket is kind of kicking over. We've seen peak Americas. And so, and then the question becomes, what will it look like in this new environment for consultants that we already have a lack of sand. We have a lack of, you know, so it's gonna be very interesting in how we design in a constrained physically constrained world. So these are gonna be new challenges, which I think is super exciting for us. And we have to be walk into this with our head up, right? Not looking backwards, but to walk with that with our head up and shoulders back saying, okay, it's, it's a new, it's a new game. It's a new quarter. Let's get the team out there and let's play ball.Joseph Bates:Great. Great, Chris, thanks for closing this out there. Daphne, I'm going to throw it back to you for a few final comments.Daphne Bryant :Thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you to our panelists for all your wonderful insights to our donors for making this session possible. We do have a short evaluation that we will send you this afternoon. So please share your experience with us and be sure to join us next week for our second session, the buildings we live and work in, that'll be on June 25th at 3:00 PM. Eastern. Thank you. Have a great afternoon and please stay safe.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course LI Recommended Audience Sizes MS Quarterly Release Ep 287 of LinkedInformed Podcast Bidding Budgeting Episode Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: How big should your LinkedIn Ads audiences be? Hearing conflicting advice? Let's clear that up right now. 0:15 Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:23 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. There's a lot of conflicting advice out there about audience sizes for your LinkedIn ads. And I get questions about it all the time. So I figured we'd go ahead and clear that up. We've tested about every which way you can think and we've come up with our own strategy for what types of audience sizes work best. So let's definitely get into it. First off the news. This week, Microsoft had their quarterly earnings release. And this was super interesting to me. I actually heard about this from the LinkedInformed podcast by the great Mark Williams if you're not already subscribed to that podcast, it goes over the organic side of LinkedIn. And it's absolutely brilliant. In Episode 287, he goes over this in his new section. And even though LinkedIn isn't actually publishing these stats, Microsoft is. So Microsoft says that LinkedIn's revenue growth is up by 21%, which is fantastic. And they also mentioned something really cool and really key. Sessions are up 26%. Oh, I love this. These aren't stats that LinkedIn is sharing too often. But if Microsoft will share them, I'll take them. He also mentioned in this episode that an unnamed source, let this news outlet know that conversations on LinkedIn are up 55% in March, and comments in the newsfeed are up 272%. So similar to what we've talked about in previous weeks with cool COVID news happening. I know nothing's really cool about COVID, but there have been some cool things coming from it. I wanted to highlight a few of the reviews that you guys have left. Betsy Hindman in Nashville, who's a good friend Betsy, thanks so much for listening. She says "AJ is the real deal. Great podcast. Super guy. Very knowledgeable." Thanks so much for leaving that. Then Robinhfr from France says "really helpful. I love this content, so much value in this podcast". Robin thanks so much for leaving that it means the world to me. Maria Cole mentions "the most knowledgeable LinkedIn Ads experts out there. AJ knows more about LinkedIn than anybody I know. His podcast is full of amazing insights and knowledge. Often I find myself agreeing with him out loud while listening". Oh, I love this. I hope all of you are kind of nodding along if if we're striking a chord and touching on things that you found through experimentation, Oh, I love to be geeking out with you. Go to whatever podcast player you're on. And leave us a review. I would love to help feature you. Okay, with that being said, let's hit it. When I was very first getting started running my very first LinkedIn Ads back in 2011. I read the recommendation that LinkedIn recommended 300,000 in an audience. And this was back when the only ad format we had was text ads. And text ads, as you know, average somewhere around a .025%. click through rate, which is incredibly low. Then in 2014, LinkedIn came out with the sponsored content ad format. And I was absolutely certain that these recommendations were going to change because text ads had a .025%, click through rate and sponsored content had 12 times the engagement. But sure enough, for years and years afterward, I still see LinkedIn recommending 300,000 for an audience size. I definitely think that there was a good reason to have 300,000 as the audience size recommendation, but now that the ads can literally spend 12 times or more, I think there's a lot more opportunity to tighten up our audiences. So we'll go into how I use smaller audiences and why. But it's important to understand the history here. And then adding to that the minimum audience size on LinkedIn used to be 1000. But then back in 2017, in April 2017, LinkedIn came out with matched audiences the retargeting product. And at that point, the minimum audience shrunk from 1000 down to 300. And I'm so grateful, thank goodness this happened, because the tighter we can make our audiences the better. Now I checked out LinkedIn's Help section on this and link to that is in the show notes. They say for sponsored content and sponsored messaging, we suggest a minimum of 300,000 audience size. For text ads, we suggest that you target between 60,000 and 400,000. Okay, so that's LinkedIn's recommendations. For some reason text ads are recommended to be a smaller audience than sponsored content, something there I'm not understanding. My recommendations are if you're using sponsored content, try to stick between about 20,000 to 80,000. If you're using text ads, try 20,000 to 80,000. Hey, how about dynamic ads? 20,000 to 80,000. Oh, AJ, I understand where you're coming from. How about sponsored messaging? Oh, AJ, I understand where you're coming from, you're gonna tell us 20,000 to 80,000? No, I'm gonna change the script on you a little bit. For sponsored messaging. I love to start with ultra tight audiences because they are able to spend so much more. But when in doubt, stick between 20,000 to 80,000. And you'll be pretty safe. Okay, so why are our recommendations so different? Why would you listen to LinkedIn versus our advice? Are you getting such differing opinions? It's important to understand where LinkedIn's motivation is, because to LinkedIn, it is a significantly larger risk for a new advertiser or a less sophisticated one to come and test out the platform come and try things out. And then not spend any money and then leave and go tell their friends that the LinkedIn Ads Form didn't work, they didn't get any traffic. So they would much rather that you had a large audience size. So you were pretty much guaranteed to spend your whole budget. To me though I have a very different motivation here. To me, it's all about getting the best performance, the highest efficiency, and the best data out of an account. And so I use these tightly themed audiences. They act like little silent focus groups, which I'll tell you all about here in just a little bit. So certainly, if you don't have the expertise on the platform, and if you're listening to this, I'm guessing that's not you. But then you'll want to follow LinkedIn's advice for audience sizes. It's pretty much foolproof at getting you to spend your budget without expertise. You may not spend very efficiently, but certainly all of those dollars got allocated. If you do have the expertise and attention to manage smaller campaigns, then you will get so much more control and insights out of your account, and you'll get a tighter ability to optimize and find efficiencies. that you shouldn't, quote unquote be able to do realize that as we're talking about audience sizes here, audience sizes are totally subjective. I can't just tell you that an audience size of 30,000 is a good thing or a bad thing, because that's totally dependent on number one, how active that audience is on LinkedIn. And number two, how often people are clicking on your ads. Because if you had a minimum sized audience of 1000 people, but you have 100% click through rate, you could probably still spend a healthy budget. Of course, that's probably not going to happen, but you get my drift. Even a small audience that's very active, can spend more than a large audience that's largely inactive. There are certainly risks with both styles of campaigns here, you can have campaigns that are too small and there are definite risks there. And then you can have campaigns that are too large, and that has its own set of risks. So first of all, if your campaigns are too small, there's a really good chance that you won't spend enough, you don't have enough people in those audiences, and all else held equal, small audiences won't spend as much as large audiences. Maybe if you are dedicating the time to build these audiences, but they don't spend very much, maybe that wasn't worth your time, maybe you see that as a waste. And then maybe you've got these small audience sizes, which means you're not going to spend very much, which means you're not going to generate a large quantity of leads. So maybe you have internal pressure in the company that not only do you have to spend this budget, but you also have to hit a lead goal. And then finally, if data is accumulating slowly, it means that we can't make optimization decisions because we're dealing with these small data sample sizes. Well, hang on, because I've got a cool solution for you that I'll cover here in just a few minutes about rolling data. And all of these risks are totally mitigated by yes, we build small audiences, but we build lots of them. So together they act like large audiences. Separately, we still get data. So hang on, I'll break that one down. I know that gets a little bit ethereal. But what about having campaigns that are too large? If you're taking LinkedIn's recommendations, which we don't recommend, I think the risks are even higher. So number one, you can have too many different people in there. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you had a campaign where you had both finance and operations professionals in the same campaign. Well, let's say finance professionals do amazingly well. But operations folks are terrible. If you're looking at the results from that campaign, it might just look average, it might be okay. And you missed out on the fact that if you would have split those out into two separate audiences, you would have found that wow, finance professionals are killing it for us. So you're missing learnings about your audience, you're losing that ability to understand more about what they care about, and really who your ideal target audience really should be. Also, audience that are too large, they spend budget too fast. So if you have a small budget, let's say you're running something at the minimum of $10 per day per campaign, if you have a large audience, chances are you're going to blow all of your money in the middle of the night before your audience even gets into work. So really, it shouldn't be about what your budget is, on a per campaign basis, it should be finding the right budget per audience. And of course, listen back on episode six, where we go in deep on bidding and budgeting to find out more about that. Okay, I'm going to give you an example. And this is a real world example of the type of targeting that we would build. A client comes to us and they say, our target audience, our marketing decision makers, at companies with more than 500 employees. So I go and build this campaign in LinkedIn. And I see a target audience size of 360,000. And this is in the US. According to LinkedIn recommendations, yeah, an audience size of 360,000 is fantastic. But I looked at that and went, man, having everyone from manager all the way up to cmo represented in a single campaign. That doesn't tell me anything. So what I did is I broke that out into four separate campaigns. One that is marketing job function with manager seniority, at companies with more than 500 people, of course, I did the same thing, but instead of managers, it's directors. And then the same thing instead of directors, it's VPS. And then finally, I have one just for the the chief marketing officers. There are 160,000 managers, 160,000, directors, 58,000 VPS, and then only 26,000 CMOS. So breaking these into their own campaign, your LinkedIn rep will definitely tell you, ah, these audiences are too small. You should really make them larger. But what I've done is taken the same two ads and put them in all four of these different campaigns. And notice, I'm still targeting the same size of audience. It's still 360,000 total senior marketers, no one made it in that audience that wasn't supposed to be there that wouldn't have been there from the beginning, I'm still able to spend all of my budget. But now I actually have information, I have data about which levels of seniority, engage with my ads, and how and even how they convert. And I can keep following them all the way through the sales process, and learn more about what it takes to get a CMO to a sales qualified lead status, versus someone who's a, let's say, a marketing manager. Okay, we're gonna take a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the Goldilocks zone for audience sizes, and actually how to create them. 12:44 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 12:53 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn largest accounts, and are the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. And of course, performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2linked.com to get in touch, and we'd absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. 13:17 Alright, let's jump into where the rubber actually hits the road with these tighter audiences. So we've talked about audiences that are too large, and some that are too small. Let's talk about the Goldilocks zone of those that are just right. And if you remember, last episode, we talked about the Goldilocks zone with spending enough on ad creative to get statistically significant data. The same principle applies here with the audiences as well. We're constantly looking for the right mix between learnings and spend. We want audiences that are small enough that you can actually still learn something valuable about what makes up that audience. And we also want them large enough that you can actually spend enough budget to tell and get any of these learnings. So let's say you have these large audiences and you want to break them up so you can learn more. So how should you break them up? Well, I want you to break them up by whatever you want to learn about my go to is to break them up by seniority, like that example I use with marketers, I broke them up manager, director, VP, and C level. And this is really good because it helps with content creation. If we're performing really poorly with the C suite, like with CMOS in this case, we can then go to the client and say, Hey, your content is not resonating with CMOS, you should change the content. Here's what they seem to like. That's data we can pass. You can also break up by geography, because we know that different cultures are going to respond differently. So for instance, I wouldn't want the US and Europe in the same campaign if I could help it. Of course, if campaigns are, if these two audiences are so small, and I have to combine them in order for them to run then sure, I'll do it. But I know that the cultures are different. And so I would much rather keep them separate and learn about those cultures. I really like to break them up by company sizes as well. Even if you know that any one company size 500 and above is a good fit for your product, even breaking them up by let's say 500 to 1000, and then 1000 to 5000. And then 5000 and above can be a great way of learning "do we work very well in mid market in enterprise in giant companies, even fortune 500" can be a cool way to do this. I also like to break up audiences by job function. Like that example I shared before with finance and operations in the same campaign, I would always want to keep them separate because they're going to care about vastly different things. In short, cut your audiences by whatever meaningful segments that you want to learn about. And these tend to be very broad things. I wouldn't cut my audience by let's say something like job titles or skills or other things that might be too narrow. I want these to be very broad categories. And then if you have a large audience size, don't just cut it for the sake of cutting it. Like, for instance, saying, hey, this audience is twice as large as it should be, I'm going to create two different segments, one targeting just male and one targeting just female. If that insight about how men and how women interact with your content and offers wouldn't actually be a meaningful insight to you, then don't do it. I've seen people break things up by interest, or by a college degree, or something else that they didn't really care about. They were just going for an arbitrary audience size. Yeah, don't do that. It's just not worth the effort. Okay, so here's the gold here, how do you make use of audiences that are micro segmented? Well, this is the B2Linked strategy. This is where I'm about to drop some real value bombs on you. If I take an audience of senior marketers. And I break them up into their levels of seniority and timezone. So we're talking some altra tiny audiences here. If I do that each single campaign may be getting results really slowly, it might be spending $5, $10, $15, $20 a day or something like that. If I'm looking at these individual campaigns, I'm probably going to get impatient. Or I might not be able to make optimizations because these data sample sizes are too small. Ah, but here's what I can do. I can start rolling these campaigns, their performance together with other like campaigns and start to learn things about it. With a single pivot table in Excel. I now have enough data for understanding performance by timezone and I also have an understanding of performance by level of seniority. So each individual audience Yeah, it's too small to care about, but when I roll them up to all other campaigns with a similar trait, and I compare These things in aggregate, now I actually get some really valuable information and insights. We recently did this with a client where we've got about 200 campaigns in this account. And they are defined by targeting type, seniority, geography, and company size. Now, granted, they're a large spender, but I was able to build a model that shows what our cost per sales qualified lead is by each type of targeting by each level of seniority, by their geography, by company size. Do you know how valuable that is? As the account scales up, we know exactly which campaigns to bid up and get aggressive with, to maintain extreme account efficiency as we go up. I'm sure many of you know that you really get a choice between scale and efficiency. If you're going to scale up, you're going to lose efficiency along the way. Well, we've got a great way and how we don't actually lose efficiency as we scale and that is because As of this, this microsegmentation, giving us tight controls over every little aspect of an account. And conversely, if the client came to us and said, we have to cut budget, we know exactly which campaigns to cut out first. Maybe they're okay. They're not total losers. But if I have to cut budget, I'm going to cut the worst performers first, for sure. And that means as we scale back, we actually get also more efficient. So many of you may be listening and going, Oh, man, it feels like a lot of work to manage an account with 200 campaigns. Is it worth it? Absolutely it is. If I managing an account with 200 campaigns, versus what it might be at maybe 20, otherwise. The level of control that I have over efficiency, as well as the learnings and insights I can get about every variation of their target audience. I absolutely guarantee that that is worth the extra time you have to spend creating ads, and I also guarantee your competitors aren't going through this much trouble. for managing the account, you will get a leg up on them. Okay, so should you force audience sizes? No. If the audience is larger than my 20,000 to 80,000 recommendation, but there just isn't an intelligent way to slice it. Leave it alone. Don't just aim for arbitrary audience sizes. There are some benefits to larger audience sizes, like you can actually get lower cost per click sometimes, because you have a higher probability of being able to bid the absolute minimum or lower and still spend your budget. And conversely, if your audience is smaller than our recommendation, should you add irrelevant people to the audience to make it larger just to fit this mold? No, absolutely not. LinkedIn is way too expensive of a channel to ever spend a dime on someone who isn't your ideal, perfect audience. What about if it's too small? Should you just not run the campaign? Is it not worth your time? Well, ultimately, I'm going to leave that up to you. I still think it's valuable. If you have an audience size of 300 people who are Perfect for what you do. Yeah, sure that campaign may never really spend a lot of money. But boy, any money that that does spend, or any lead that it generates will be well well worth your time. So ultimately your audience sizes will have to be what makes sense for you. Don't let someone else tell you what size your campaigns need to be, especially if what you're doing is working. But hopefully that at least provides a guide for you. Okay, I've got episode resources coming up for you right after the break. So stick around. 21:35 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 21:43 Okay, here in the show notes, check out the LinkedIn recommended audience sizes in their help section I've linked right to it. You can at least see what they recommend and why. And in the new section I told you about Microsoft's quarterly update report. The links there, go ahead and check that out. See what Microsoft says. about LinkedIn performance. Also, I mentioned Mark Williams, the LinkedInformed podcast, there's a link there to his Episode 287, where you can hear his commentary on it as well. If you're just getting started in LinkedIn Ads, check out the course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's only $25 if you're not a premium subscriber to LinkedIn, and free if you are, and it covers the same stuff that in a one on one training, I would be charging $500 an hour for. This could be also really good. If you're trying to train coworkers or new recruits in on LinkedIn Ads to help support you then check out this course it's fantastic. Whatever podcast player you're on, look down right now and make sure that you are subscribed. And then please review the podcast I would absolutely love to share your review with everyone and give you a shout out. Any ideas for the show any thing you'd like us to cover, reach out at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Summary: On this episode of COMMERCE NOW, you will hear from Diebold Nixdorf CMO Devon Watson, who recently was a guest on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Devon spoke with Joe Saul-Sehy, and was on their Friday FinTech segment, where they discussed the hottest new tech hitting your wallet, and the merchants you'll someday shop with again.   Resources: COMMERCE NOW Podcast Diebold Nixdorf Devon Watson Stacking Benjamins Podcast Joe Saul-Sehy Transcription: Speaker 1:                           00:15                     On this episode of COMMERCE NOW, you will hear from Diebold Nixdorf CMO Devon Watson, who recently was a guest on the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Devon spoke with Joe Saul-Sehy, and was on their Friday FinTech segment. We hope you enjoy this special segment of Commerce Now, as we come together with the Stacking Benjamins podcast. Doug:                                    00:42                     Live, from Joe's mom's basement, it's The Stacking Benjamin Show.                                                                                 I'm Joe's mom's neighbor Doug. Hey there Stackers. On our Friday FinTech segment, we'll talk to a guy sitting at the backbone of some of the hottest new tech hitting your wallet, and the merchants you'll someday shop with again from Diebold Nixdorf, It's Devon Watson. And now the guy that can blah, blah, blah, all this away, except now with a mask, it's Joe Saul-Sehy. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   01:27                     It's amazing. When I was seven, I always wanted to wear a mask and now I get to do it. It only took me a few more years, but sadly we are at that point. Hey everybody. Welcome to another quarantined edition of The Stacking Benjamins Show. I'm Joe Saul-Sehy. Average Joe Money on Twitter. So I'm so happy today that we're going to hello to Devon Watson. How are you, man? Devon Watson:                 01:46                     Fantastic. Glad to be here. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   01:49                     I'm so happy you could talk Friday FinTech with us. You guys, I think different than a lot of the FinTech companies, Devon, that we talked to, you guys are a little more in the background. We are more consumer facing where I think you guys, I think of you as more B2B, but you're really right at the intersection of a lot of these solutions that we talk about every week. Tell me about what you guys do so we can kind of bring everybody up to speed. Devon Watson:                 02:15                     Sure. So you can really think of us as B2B to C. Diebold Nixdorf is a top 10 global financial company. We're in about a hundred countries worldwide, about four and a half billion in revenue. We're really the software, the services and the devices behind many of the, every day banking and shopping channels that people use. So, from the digital experience, you might have banking or shopping on the go to the self checkout that you're using at the grocery store, to the ATM that you're using outside the branch. Even the point of sale device that you interact with at maybe one of your favorite retailers, we provide those solutions. In the branch, in the store or online with your mobile, we're there automating and digitizing the way people bank and shop. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   03:07                     It's actually funny Devon. I think about you guys the same way that I think about Cisco for the internet, like you're everywhere. We just don't really, you know, as a customer, we don't see you a ton. Every once in a while we'll see the name Diebold but not that often. Devon Watson:                 03:20                     Yeah, exactly. And you know, if you start looking for it, you'll see it all over the place. When you're not looking forward, it's one of those seamless things that just keeps running and keeps powering the way you bank and shop. Over 2 million ATM and checkout devices globally, if you look hard enough, you'll see us about a third of the time. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   03:40                     Well, I want to start out with banking. I want to talk about two different things. Let's talk banking first and then let's talk commerce second, but pain points, as you know, better than I do Devon. Every day, you've got bank branches closing down, right? Making it harder for people to do face to face banking, which means that we're relying on devices even more than ATM's. Tell me kind of what you guys are working on there. What are the big pain points you guys are trying to solve for customers now? Devon Watson:                 04:07                     Sure. So in the banking sector, innovation these days is really about digitizing the user experience. You know, as you rightfully observed, there is a reformatting of the bank branch networks globally. That's a global phenomenon. They're not always just closing, they're reformatting, they're making smaller ones or opening different ones in new locations. And I'd say right-sizing, but you know, more than anything, the bank brands have to compete for consumer's attention. It's a global war for the attention of a consumer, and that applies to every participant in the ecosystem. So for a bank, they've been focused for the last several years on this vision of omni-channel, which for many bank brands meant taking their branch experience, their online experience, their mobile experience, and making those things cohesive. That's been helpful, right? That's I'd say step one of the journey, but when you kind of look at what that did, it made it a better journey for a very small piece of what somebody might be trying to do.                                                                                 So the example I use is, Joe, if you decide that you want to have Joe's Famous Donut Shop, and you can go to your bank to open up a small business loan, the technology trend over the past several years around omni-channel would say, let's make sure that that loan origination process for Joe is pretty seamless, no matter what channel he uses. But that's not enough to really compete for Joe's business, because to Joe, opening up the small business loan is only a small piece of your journey to being a small business owner. You got to figure out where's the best place to put a donut shop? How am I going to run my checkout? What's the merchant acquiring I'm going to do so I can swipe a credit card when somebody comes in and tries to pay with their Amex? Where am I going to get my equipment for the back office? Do I need insurance? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.                                                                                 The brands that can help you and can address the larger journey that you actually have, are going to be the ones that win. The vision that we have for our bank clients is to really engage that larger consumer journey, use API ecosystems in order to work with other players, that can bring value to Joe is he's on his small business, opening a process and compete for that. If you look at what's happening in the retail world, that's already playing out. So I'll use the quick example of Amazon. They follow me every single place I go, whether it's at home with an Alexa device in the living room, I got an Echo Dot in my little gym area, I've got their app on my phone. They're absolutely following everything I do so that whatever the need is, they can be there to try to fulfill it. That's what the leading brands are doing, and the banking industry is quickly learning from that and trying to figure out how do we also compete along all those steps of the journey to own that customer relationship. So that's the big idea. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   07:21                     It's funny you mentioned Alexa because Gertrude, our social media manager had a joke online recently about, she told her husband a joke and she laughed, Alexa, laugh, Google laughed. Like everybody's listening to you. It seems like Devon, there's a fine line between being helpful and feeling a little big brotherish. I bet That's got to be difficult for institutions to navigate those waters. Devon Watson:                 07:45                     So that's a key backlash. I actually use a tweet, a screen capture of that exact joke in a talk I give to banks. And I think that's something that the bank brands have learned from. There's in all technologies, there's this helpful versus creepy line that you don't want to cross. There's definitely a little bit of a pushback on the retailing side of this. You're starting to see consumers take their privacy more seriously. We have GDPR in Europe, which is, I think the right move for protecting consumer privacy's online. Bank brands are very cautious about how they experiment with whatever the technology might be. Whether it's banking by voice, things like that, not crossing that line. But at the same time, if you don't experiment with these new technologies, whether it's biometrics, whether it's voice banking, et cetera, you're going to be left out. So the trick is to learn from some of those mistakes, to be very, very smart about how you're handling consumer privacy and security, especially, but still innovate. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   08:57                     It sounds like what you're talking about, Devon, is still much, much, much, much more than having a more robust banking app. You're talking about something many, many degrees larger. Devon Watson:                 09:07                     Exactly. And you know, this is something that we see as a longterm trend towards this kind of vision of connected commerce. A more robust banking app would be certainly just a small piece of that. The end to end orchestration is how I would think of it, that's really the game changer. Just doing one step along the way really well, isn't going to be enough. And I'll give you another example. You know, right now we have a lot of pretty interesting challenger banks, online, pure plays, kind of reminiscent of what we saw in the early days of the.com boom popping up. Europe in particular has a lot of these. There's this interesting experiment being run on pure play digital. And one of the best examples of that is Ant Financial. Ant Financial, which is associated with the Alibaba Group is as deep pocketed and capable a digital organization as there is on planet earth.                                                                                 A little over 12 months ago, they made a bid to buy Money Gram, which is a international remittance company. On the surface of that, you would say, okay, they're trying to get into the remittance business, that's smart. But if you dig a little bit deeper, I never really thought that was a compelling explanation because from a technology perspective, they can whip up the anti money laundering rule systems and all of that software that they need to conduct a remittance business. What would they have gotten if they actually were successful in acquiring Money Gram? They would have gotten a few hundred thousand over the counter location and a few tens of thousands of kiosk locations around the world. That gives you the biggest physical distribution network for banking services ever seen. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   10:54                     Game changing. Devon Watson:                 10:55                     Absolutely. The kind of aha moment that I talked to our clients about what that is, that's a pure play digital and one of the most sophisticated ones in the world, making a very bold move to get into physical distribution. So this intersection of physical and digital channels, and being able to traverse the two and compete very, very effectively in either, I think that's really what the best brands of the future are going to be doing. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   11:24                     I think that's exciting and fascinating, making digital more human and human, a little, a little more digital. Devon Watson:                 11:30                     It's a great way to put it. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   11:31                     Let's go over to the commerce side. I was listening to your podcast Commerce Now, which for people that are geeks in this industry, I think I can highly recommend that. They're short and fun and kind of a view of the future. But the people on the show, were talking about your shopping cart, and how physically going down the aisle at whether its a grocery store, convenience store, wherever, that the shopping cart is, is changing. Tell me about that because I found this technology really fascinating Devon. Devon Watson:                 12:02                     So when you're thinking about retail, and it doesn't matter if it's grocery, whether it's fashion, whether it's fuel and convenience stores, all of these retail formats are in a race to digitize their physical shopping experience. Just like we were talking about before in the banking world, this intersection of physical and digital, super, super important. What's the one advantage that an online retailer has over a physical retailer? It's data. As soon as you go onto a online web front, to go shopping, I know everything you're doing Joe, right? If you go onto my website, I can see that Joe went to this page, then this page, then this page, and then he put this in the cart and then he took it out and he put this other thing in instead. And then he backed up and then he actually got three quarters of the way through the purchase decision, and then he added this other thing.                                                                                 As I see that data stream, that payload of information if you will, gives me the chance to influence it. So I can suggest extra things, I can put smart advertisements around your shopping experience on my website, and some of the greatest minds of the last generation have fundamentally been spent, trying to figure out how to get us to buy an extra pair of socks online. I say that somewhat jokingly, but quite seriously. The Manhattan Project of my generation since college has been driving digital shopping.                                                                                 Now with that advantage of the online folks, what is it that a physical retailers want to do? They want to be able to have that data payload. And if you just wait until the person shows up at your checkout lane, it's too late. So as one of our very smart industry pundits, Richard Crone says, check in is the new checkout.                                                                                 Starting that shopping data payload early is something you can do through technology. That can be done with some of the innovations in shopping carts. That can be done with some of the innovations in self scanning. Many grocery stores you're going to start to see, if you haven't already, when you walk in, there'll be this rack of self scanners, and you pick one up off the rack. You associate it to your payment card and account, you wander around the grocery store scanning things, as you go on your merry way, you drop them in the cart. And instead of having to go through the checkout lane, take everything out of your cart, put everything back into your cart, you just walk out of the store. It's great. And what that does, besides the fact that made the queue shorter for you, made things easier for the retailer, now they actually have in technology terms, a user session for the whole time you're in the store. They can recommend things that can influence what you're buying. It's a real game changer. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   15:05                     Everybody wins their Devon. I mean, on my end, I get rid of the pain point of having to stand there in line to buy the stuff that I've already decided 20 minutes ago, maybe half an hour ago that I wanted to buy. And on your end, you're getting data on me. I don't really want to be followed, but I also don't want to stand in line. So I'm willing to make that trade. Devon Watson:                 15:24                     Absolutely. It really is a win, win. I think at least for me, as a shopper myself, I think the innovations in in store shopping that's digitally enabled just makes life easier. Right? Joe Saul-Sehy:                   15:36                     Yeah.I also think though, as a consumer, the store of the future, I got to be even more mindful of my pocket book, and maybe use those online tools better because it's going to be awful easy Devon, for you to put stuff in my cart and walk away with that purchase that I might not have, before that technology hits. Devon Watson:                 15:57                     At the same time, if you're Christmas shopping, hopefully you won't give the kids a toy that you don't have the batteries for. So there's an upside as well. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   16:09                     That is very true. You're going to have a much better holiday season because he got all the accessories. Devon, how can people reach you guys if they've got more questions for you? Devon Watson:                 16:19                     Sure. So www dot Diebold Nixdorf.com. That's the webpage. You can also search for us. Our podcast is COMMERCE NOW, or look us up on YouTube Diebold Nixdorf. We got a lot of content, podcasts, videos up there, great way to follow us. Or at Diebold Nixdorf on Twitter. Joe Saul-Sehy:                   16:38                     Well, thanks for hanging out and talking about the future of banking and commerce with me. I really appreciate it. Devon Watson:                 16:43                     You betcha. Thanks for having me, Joe.  

Dr. Jason Luke, associate professor and the director of the Cancer Immunotherapeutics Center at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, discusses new advances in immunotherapy that were discussed at the #ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program.   TRANSCRIPT ASCO Daily News: Welcome to the ASCO Daily News podcast. I'm Geraldine Carroll, a reporter for the ASCO Daily News. Joining me today is Dr. Jason Luke, associate professor and director of the Cancer Immunotherapeutics Center, at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center.   His clinical focus is on immunotherapy for advanced solid tumors, as well as cutaneous malignancies and melanoma. Dr. Luke will discuss key abstracts in the immunotherapy field that were featured at the ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program, including Abstract 3004, the study of an agent called MGD013, which Dr. Luke presented during the meeting. Dr. Luke, it's great to have you on the podcast today.   Dr. Jason Luke: Thank you very much.   ASCO Daily News: Do you have any conflicts of interest to disclose that are relevant to the issues we'll discuss in this podcast?   Dr. Jason Luke: Thanks. I would like to disclose a few things. I'll note that as a phase I clinical trialist, I try to work with every company in the field. But relevant to the abstracts, I have been a consultant to most of the big pharmas that have advanced these. So specifically, EMD Serono, Genentech, EMS, Merck, and some others.   ASCO Daily News: Dr. Luke, are there any advancements in the immunotherapy field that will likely support new standards of care?   Dr. Jason Luke: So thank you. Yes. In fact, this was a big year for immunotherapy. I think ranging from abstracts with a high immediate impact on the standard of care all the way to -- or earlier truly -- research studies that I think we'll look back on and realize this was the year when that technology started to mature.   So when thinking about abstracts-- presentations that are going to have an immediate impact on the standard of care, there are really two that I would highlight. One of them was called the JAVELIN Bladder 100 trial (Abstract LBA1). And the second one was a clinical trial called KEYNOTE 177 (Abstract LBA4). So I'll talk about them individually at first. And I think they introduce ideas about using immunotherapy you should be cognizant of to inform your practice.   So for the first one, the JAVELIN Bladder 100 trial, is a clinical trial in advanced urothelial cancer, in which patients were treated in the frontline setting, albeit for that first treatment and the standard of care setting, with cisplatin-based chemotherapy. And as they completed their cisplatin-based chemotherapy, they were randomized to either get the anti-PD-L1 antibody, avelumab in a maintenance sort of approach, or waiting until they had progression and going on to standard therapy with second line chemotherapy, as would be commonly done.   So the clinical trial showed an overall survival advantage to the maintenance approach of giving avelumab or anti-PD-L1 in that setting. And this is a pretty big deal because this is really the first maintenance approach that really has been associated with an overall survival advantage in solid tumors in general, but specifically a bladder cancer.   Now obviously the context for such an approval is the activity of PD-1 or PD-L1 blocking agents in urothelial cancer. And probably everyone who is listening is aware that multiple checkpoint inhibitors are approved for second line usage in bladder cancer. And all of you listening are probably also aware that there's been a lot of discussion in the field of urothelial cancer about moving checkpoint inhibitors into the frontline setting.   And the FDA had to release a guidance that that should not be done without the obvious presence of PD-L1 positivity. So a very interesting thing from the JAVELIN Bladder Trial was that the benefit to maintenance avelumab appeared to be independent of PD-L1 status. So in other words, everyone, or the total population of patients, benefited from getting that chemotherapy and then going on to get avelumab, whether PD-L1 positive or negative.   So I think that's a big deal. So based on these data my read of it and the conversations that I've had with other experts in the field of GU malignancies aren't to suggest that this is a new standard of care, that patients should after completing initial chemotherapy go on to get a PD-1 or PD-L1 agent.   Now that being said, it isn't without some controversy. These maintenance approaches have been criticized over time about cherry picking patients and discontinuing chemotherapy that might otherwise be active. One can't really know here how many patients would have done well without the avelumab for a long time.   It's also obviously the case that patients could go on to get second line PD-1 or PD-L1 agents on label. So again pembro, nivo, atezo, durva, avelumab, these are all approved for second line therapy. And in this clinical trial, because it was done ex-US, only about 40% of the patients who were on the placebo-matched arm actually went on to second line PD-1.   So this trial definitely did not test the question of maintenance PD-1, PD-L1 versus giving it in the second line after an initial progression event in the front line. And that is obviously a criticism of these data. Now that being said, all of you who have treated patients with urothelial cancer realize what an aggressive malignancy this can be and how these patients can sometimes be rather frail.   And what we can run into is that at the time of progression after frontline chemotherapy performance statuses just dwindle very rapidly, such that you can't really, fully give them a shot to get the second line PD-1 immunotherapy. So here, though, by giving the therapy immediately after the initial chemotherapy without waiting for progression, we make sure that all patients get access to that therapy.   So despite the controversy around subsequent lines of therapy, et cetera, I think most people who view this data really do find it to be practice changing. And moving forward we really should be considering immediate initiation of anti PD-L1, or PD-1 I suppose, after chemotherapy. So that was the first abstract to highlight in that space, the JAVELIN Bladder 100 study.   The second study was the KEYNOTE 177 study (Abstract LBA4). This was a randomized phase III trial in the frontline setting for MSI-- or MicroSatellite Instable-- colorectal cancer for the use of immunotherapy with pembrolizumab, as opposed to chemotherapy. And so again oncologists listening will be very well aware that MSI status has become an important biomarker in our field, selecting out patients, especially with colorectal cancer but actually any cancer type, who if they have MSI status can be treated in this integrative care setting with the anti-PD-1 or pembrolizumab.   One of the questions that has been looming and seemed like had an obvious answer, and, in fact, this trial supports, was whether that biomarker would be strong enough to move that immunotherapy into a prechemotherapy setting. So to date the use of the MSI biomarker has been to select patients after they failed standard therapies to go on to get immunotherapy.   So in colorectal cancer, patients would get FOLFOX/FOLFIRI as per standard. And if they were MSI, they would be treated thereafter with pembrolizumab. So in this study, they moved that biomarker selection into the frontline, looking at MSI high patients and randomizing them to either get pembrolizumab or standard chemotherapy.   And the answer here, as was expected, was that patients who are MSI high in their tumor who got immunotherapy in the frontline, in fact, did better than those patients who got chemotherapy in the frontline. And so I think that's an important clinical practice changing algorithm. So we should be testing all our patients upfront for MSI with colorectal cancer, and one might even argue actually other tumor types, because we find that the patients who have that phenotype, their rates of response approach 50%.   And those responses tend to be very durable with the median not being reached in these kinds of trials. So that quality of immunotherapy response, I personally think that's the thing that we all really like about immunotherapy, is that for the small patients where they get that benefit from immunotherapy, it can sometimes be long lasting-- and even life lasting-- kind of benefit. I think these data are very important, again, to move this biomarker selection of patients for colorectal cancer by MSI high status into the front line and give them immunotherapy if we find that.   These data don't come as much of a surprise given that we know in the adjuvant setting, in fact, the MSI high patients do worse with chemotherapy in the stage two setting. So again, these data don't come as a big surprise. But they do support a change in practice to move immunotherapy into that frontline setting.   And I would say as a sort of forward-looking discussion point, given the broad approval across cancer types for MSI high tumors to get pembrolizumab, one wonders whether or not this phenomenon will begin to come forward and other tumor types where we know MSI could be present, such as gynecological cancers and some others. We'll watch the field. But I think that that's something to be excited about for immunotherapy coming forward and potentially displacing chemotherapy in the front line for different cancer types.   ASCO Daily News: Dr. Luke, what are the other studies that really stood out for you this year?   Dr. Jason Luke: There were three other big trials I think that generated a lot of buzz that I think I should be highlighted. They don't quite change standard of care at this time. But they do influence standard of care.   And so there are three of them. One of them was the CHECKMATE-9LA study of lung cancer (Abstract 9501). There was a second phase 2 study called the CITYSCAPE study (Abstract 9503), also in lung cancer. And a third study in bladder cancer called the IMvigor010 (Abstract 5000) or 10 study.   So just to discuss them-- so CHECKMATE-9LA in fact did lead to an FDA approval of the combination of nivolumab and ipilibumab or PD-1 CTLA-4 in combination with chemotherapy for the frontline management of non small cell lung cancer. So this regimen is somewhat different than the chemo I-O combo that people will be cognizant of right now. So the standard of care now, there's an approval for chemotherapy with platinum-based chemotherapy and a second agent, such as pemetrexed, with pembrolizumab in the front line.   This trial took a different tact. And they randomized patients to either get regular chemotherapy, platinum-based chemotherapy, or they would get the combination of ipi and nivo with two cycles only of platinum-based chemo. So you could refer to this as some sort of platinum sparing approach. And the rationale for this was that perhaps because patients with lung cancer can have a very aggressive course, having that immunotherapy onboard up front might allow a space for immunotherapy then to kick in and have a longer term benefit.   So this trial is a positive Phase III clinical trial. And actually just before the ASCO virtual meeting, the FDA approved this regimen for the use in patients with lung cancer. Now you might be listening and thinking, well, wait a minute. You just told me about their new standards of care. And you're telling me this is approved. So what's the deal?   And so what the deal is is that it's not completely clear at this time that this sort of an approach would be better than using the chemo pembro combination that's already approved. And the toxicity profile using doublet checkpoint blockade with PD-1 and CTLA-4 is not insignificant. Sorry for the double negative there. But in other words, you're generating a lot of immune-related side effects for patients by giving them ipi/nivo and chemotherapy.   So the question then becomes, so which patients then should you give chemo pembro to versus giving chemo ipi/nivo to? And unfortunately at this time, we don't really know the answer to that question. So that then sets us up with a tough spot to sit in, that we don't really know how to use these regimens either way. And we know one of them causes more side effects.   So what I would say right now is that it's not clear that this advances the field in terms of changing the standard of care. But I'll be very interested to see the long-term outlays in terms of overall survival in this clinical trial. So the trial we would want to see would be chemo pembro versus chemo plus ipi/nivo.   But these trials were done chronologically at similar times. And the standard of care had not switched to chemo pembro yet when they had started this trial. So certainly that's a future trial we would look forward to. I think it is possible that the chemo ipi/nivo trial might have the potential to have better overall survival over a long period of time, relative to chemo pembro.   And the reason I say that is we can see that in melanoma where giving ipi and nivo does appear to give better longer overall survival, but you don't see that effect until about two to three years after you start ipi/nivo relative to starting nivo monotherapy. So we're not really going to know whether or not the long term survival of this quadruplet regimen of platinum doublet plus ipi/nivo is actually better than the triplet of platinum doublet plus pembro.   We're not really going to know that in a head-to-head trial for a long time. And even just comparing two trials head-to-head, we're not really going to know that again for at least a couple of years. So I don't know whether or not that trial really changes practice yet. But it'll be very interesting to watch it over time.   The second trial I wanted to talk about that really stood out was the CITYSCAPE trial (Abstract 9503). And so this is a nice name for a clinical trial. Essentially what it is is looking at a combination immunotherapy in the PD-L1 high subset of non small cell lung cancer. So in patients with greater than 50% TPS In lung cancer, the molecule, the PD-L1 antibody atezolizumab, was combined with an anti-tigit antibody in that population and randomized against atezolizumab plus a placebo.   And the idea here would be to look for a second combination checkpoint that's not CTLA-4 and see if that could have more activity relative to a PD-1 PD-L1 monotherapy in that PD-L1 high population. So again, all of you are aware that PD-1 monotherapy is approved in that setting. PD-1 and PD-L1 are both approved for PD-L1 high patients in frontline lung cancer.   And what they observed in this CITYSCAPE study was an improvement in the response rate for the combination immunotherapy relative to the PD-L1 plus placebo. And that was statistically significant. And it was of substantial interest.   So I think that's very interesting. And based on those data, in fact, the company advancing this tigit antibody that makes atezolizumab has rushed forward into a series of randomized Phase III clinical trials, where they're combining atezolizumab with this tigit antibody across a number of diseases. The first two trials will be a non small cell lung cancer as well as small cell lung cancer with the idea that this new PD-L1 plus tigit regiment essentially is going to replace a PD-1 or PD-L1 monotherapy either as-- oh, sorry, either as monotherapy or in combination with chemotherapy and various different indications.   So this is really interesting because the toxicity profile of this combination regimen was quite modest and in fact look mostly like a PD-1 PD-L1 monotherapy. So this wouldn't be the addition of a second checkpoint that actually doesn't increase the toxicity, but might amplify the benefit. And so why would that be the case?   Well the checkpoint tigit we know from basic biology is also associated with the T cell activation state in the tumor microenvironment. And it may very well be that this is yet another checkpoint that's important in the tumor, that by blocking it we might not increase the overall toxicity because where the tumor is where the action is at. And it might increase the benefit.   And that would be different than CTLA-4 or ipi, where the effect is broadly throughout the whole body and not localized in the tumor microenvironment. So that's a very interesting molecule, this tigit molecule to keep your eyes on, because I think there will be a number of Phase III trials coming forward the next few years It'll be very interesting to see if we can find other combination immunotherapies.   The third abstract that I wanted to dwell on quickly that stood out-- again, doesn't change practice, but it's important to be cognizant-- was IMvigor 10 or 010 (Abstract 5000). And this was a bladder cancer randomized Phase III adjuvant clinical trial. And the idea was high risk patients with bladder cancer are randomized to either get atezolizumab or to get placebo in the adjuvant setting.   And really as, I have to say, a shock to most of the people in the field, there was no difference in rates of relapse or overall survival in high risk urothelial cancer for patients who got adjuvant PD-L1 relative to those who got placebo. And this is one of those things where don't count your checks before they're cashed, or don't count your eggs before they're cracked, or whatever the euphemism goes. Everyone assumed this would be a positive clinical trial.   In melanoma when we moved PD-1 antibodies from the metastatic setting into the stage three setting, it was a slam dunk. It was fabulous, unbelievable-- hazard ratio of 0.5. Yet here we see in another disease, which is responsive to immunotherapy in the refractory disease setting, we see no difference in the adjuvant setting. So I think that's really an eye opener and, again, just suggests why we have to do these trials.   My dad used to like to say, that's why they play the games. Let's talk about sporting events with atypical outcomes, things you didn't expect. So that's again what we saw here. So adjuvant PD-1 or PD-L1 is not a standard in bladder cancer. There are some other clinical trials that are ongoing to look at other PD-1 agents that have slightly different designs. And we'll be very interested to see what the results of those kinds of clinical trials look like over time.   ASCO Daily News: Are there any other clinical trials that our listeners should be aware of?   Dr. Jason Luke: Yes, so there are also a whole handful of trials that I think are worth quickly pointing out because I think they give us indications around better using agents that we already have. So in melanoma there were a couple of abstracts presented that looked at the use of CTLA-4 with a PD-1 in second-line melanoma. So in patients who got a frontline PD-1 an open question is, should you give them ipi as the second line, so PD-1 followed by CTLA-4? Or what about the idea of continuing the PD-1 and adding the CTLA-4 antibody on top of it?   And so there were two abstracts. There was a prospective open label Phase II study, in fact, that I designed. It was our study (Abstract 10004). And what that showed was that where we would expect a response rate of about 13% to ipilimumab in the second line as a monotherapy, in our Phase II study of 70 patients, we got a 27% response rate. And that trial was augmented by another abstract from the Melanoma Institute of Australia, who aggregated their experience of what they had done in their standard practice in the second line.   And in the patients who had gotten ipilimumab plus nivolumab after a PD-1 (Abstract 10003), they observed a 32% response rate. So if you put these two studies together, you're now up about 250 patients between both series. And you get a response rate between both of them around 30%. And that looks to be about a doubling of what we would expect in standard care setting of just getting ipi monotherapy after PD-1.   So I think that's a really interesting thing to be aware of. In my practice I tend to give that combination regimen after initial PD-1. And I think we'll look forward to a study from SWOG, which is actually randomized patients to get ipi/nivo versus just ipi after a frontline PD-1. So I think that's a really important abstract to be aware of.   The other study that I'll be-- but I'll just share, however, was that in contrast to that, there was a series of studies presented in renal cell carcinoma, where this paradigm did not appear to be true. So there was an abstract called the FRACTION study in renal cell carcinoma (Abstract 5007), as well as the Hoosier Oncology Group GU16-260 (Abstract 5006). In both of those studies, there did not appear to be a big benefit to adding ipi after a patient had progressed on PD-1.   And that was interesting because in the FRACTION study (Abstract 5007), they used ipi/nivo. And they got responses in the second line. But in the Hoosier study, it was less clear. And so I think the renal guys feel like if you're going to use ipi/nivo, you need to do it right away upfront. And you shouldn't do the sequential approach of giving a PD-1 and then adding on ipi later.   And it's interesting to contrast those two things because that's a difference between tumor types, where we think there might be more benefit to giving that combination or waiting for the combination of melanoma, whereas in renal, if you're going to use it, you should really come in guns blazing both checkpoints at the same time.   One other study I want to do just highlight quickly was also in melanoma, where the group from Sloan Kettering did a study looking at two doses of ipi/nivo versus four doses of ipi/nivo. And not to dwell on it too long, but what they observed was essentially all of the benefit and all of the toxicity appeared to be associated with just the first two doses of ipi/nivo.   In other words, when they looked at an early CT scan to look for responders, all the responding patients had already basically had their benefit after the first two doses. And none of the patients who hadn't already benefited by two doses actually went on to benefit at four. So this was a pretty small study. It was upwards about 25 or 30 patients. But I think this really deserves further follow up.   And I think it emphasizes, however, that in clinical practice, there is no need to really push the envelope in giving more ipi/nivo, especially if patients have toxicity. So if patients get a couple of doses and they get toxicity, you do not need to go back to pushing them to get more doses. We'll be very excited to look for future data to really look into this so we can really optimize the use of combination immunotherapy in the broader population.   ASCO Daily News: Dr. Luke, are there new treatment approaches or agents in development that you are particularly excited about this year?   Dr. Jason Luke: Yes, so there were, as I mentioned, a couple of abstracts around adoptive cell therapies in solid tumors that I think we're going to look back on this year's ASCO and say, wow, this is the year when these things really started coming to the forefront. And there were three of them that I'll highlight quickly.   One of them is a drug called lifileucel. In fact, that is a tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte product. And in melanoma, an updated data series was presented on a group of about 70 patients who had undergone tumor excision and then harvesting of TIL. And then a TIL product was made. Patients were given lymphodepleting chemotherapy and were reinfused their TIL . (Abstract 10006)   And what was exciting about it was the stability of these results over time. So in these patients, a response rate in 70 patients was observed at 36%. And realize that these are patients who already had PD-1. They had CTLA-4. They had BRAF. These were refractory patients. So a 36% response rate-- quite impressive.   The other thing that was very interesting to be observe was that the duration of those responses in the refractory disease setting was not reached. So in other words, the patients who responded did very well. And then the final thing on that one to be aware of was it looked like patients who would benefit from that therapy were disproportionately those who had not benefited from previous PD-1 therapy.   And certainly, that's a big unmet need in melanoma. And in the melanoma field, we're fairly confident that this therapy is going to be approved by the FDA either later this year or next year. So being cognizant of cell therapy for solid tumors, at least in terms of TIL for melanoma, is going to be important.   The other two abstracts I'm going to put together quickly. One of them was about SPEAR MAGE-A4 TCR transduced T cells (Abstract 102), as well as a second abstract about HPV E6/E7 TCR transduced T cells (Abstract 101). So what are TCR transduced T cells, you might ask?   What this is, is taking a patient's own lymphocytes and then ex vivo transducing them with a lentiviral vector most commonly to express a T cell receptor that's been identified from a different patient. So that T cell receptor can be specific for a certain antigen. So you'll have heard-- I mentioned MAGE-A4-- as well as HPV E6/E7.   So these are antigens that we know can be expressed to certain degrees in certain tumor types. For example, MAGE-A4 is highly expressed in sarcomas as well as some esophageal cancers. And HPV is obviously highly expressed in HPV-associated cancers, such as cervical cancer and others-- head and neck, et cetera. And so these studies were very interesting because obviously this is a somewhat complicated process, sort of like the TILs I told you about before, but it adds an extra layer of genetically modifying the product.   But, again, they saw high levels of response in tumor types that had these antigens. And those responses tended to be durable over time. So there are randomized trials coming forward now to look at these agents. And I'm very excited that over the next couple of years, we're really going to see a movement of cell therapies to the prime time and maybe even in the standard of care setting for patients with multiple solid tumors.   ASCO Daily News: Absolutely. Can you tell us about new agents that will likely move the field forward or have already done so?   Dr. Jason Luke: Yes, so there were a handful of abstracts here. But I think there are two conceptual things that I'm going to highlight. It isn't so much the individual agents, I would say, but rather the concepts around them. I'll give you the names of the agents so you can look them up.   But one of them was an agent called MGD013 (Abstract 3004). But the reason it's of interest is that it's a bispecific antibody. So disclosure, I was the presenter of this abstract. But I think it's very interesting because what it gets at is a future of using antibody engineering technology to bring forward novel agents. So MGD013 is a bispecific PD-1 and LAG-3 inhibitor.   So those are two immune checkpoints that are being investigated separately with monoclonal antibodies. But here we have one drug that can hit both of those. And so what was interesting was the drug was safe. And the response was seen across a host of different diseases.   But perhaps most interestingly in the trial, we combined MGD013 with the HER-2 antibody margetuximab. And margetuximab is an FC-modified and optimized HER-2 antibody. And in patients who had refractory HER-2-positive tumors that were PD-L1 and LAG-3 low, the combination of MGD013 with margetuximab generated more than 40% treatment responses.   So this really fits the paradigm of what we were hoping to do. And you may have heard of this-- "turning cold tumors hot" is how we sometimes talk about this. In other words, we can identify a biomarker, target that with the margetuximab in HER-2, and then come in with immunotherapy. And because the first therapy was successful, it makes the second therapy likely to be successful as well.   So I would be aware of these bispecific approaches. Some of them have come forward from leukemias already. And I think in solid tumors, it will be interesting as well.   And the final one I'll note were the combinations of VEGF or VEGFR inhibitors with PD-1s or PD-L1s. And in fact there were so many of these combinations presented that I don't really have time to go over all of them. The listenership will be cognizant that the standard of care has changed in kidney cancer and recently in hepatocellular carcinoma in the front line to include these kinds of combinations.   But there were data presented for endometrial cancer (Abstract 6083), mucosal melanoma (Abstract 10040), colorectal (Abstract 4019), bladder (Abstract 5013), prostate (Abstract 5564), lung (Abstract 9610), more, that these combinations look to be quite active in the PD-1 progressed setting. And in fact clinical trials are now starting to move these combinations into earlier lines of therapy as well. So I think this combination of VEGF blockade with PD-1 is really going to be something to be on the lookout for because I think this is going to expand the horizon of immunotherapy within and across multiple solid tumors.   ASCO Daily News: Excellent. Thank you, Dr. Luke. So I'd like to let our listeners know that the abstract numbers relating to all of the studies Dr. Luke discussed today are on the transcript, which is published with this episode. Dr. Luke, thanks again for your insights on these incredible developments in the immunotherapy field.   Dr. Jason Luke: Thank you very much for having me, Geraldine.   ASCO Daily News: Thanks to our listeners for joining us today. If you're enjoying the content on the podcast, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.   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.      

Welcome back to the fuel your legacy podcast each week we expose the faulty foundational mindsets of the past and rebuild the newer, stronger foundation essential in creating your meaningful legacy. We've got a lot of work to do. So let's get started. As much as you like this podcast, I'm certain that you're going to love the book that I just released on Amazon, fuel your legacy, the nine pillars to build a meaningful legacy. I wrote this to share with you the experiences that I had while I was identifying my identity, how I began to create my meaningful legacy and how you can create yours. You're gonna find this book on Kindle, Amazon and as always on my website, samknickerbocker.comWelcome back to fuel your legacy. And today we have another incredible guest I love bringing on people from all different walks of life, people who have accomplished different things and are really focused On, on different aspects, they're bringing their light their love to the world in different ways fulfilling and sharing with other people. Billy Bross is someone you're gonna want to go follow him on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, these places, but he, he loves just helping online education companies and course creators break through the noise and fill their programs with committed high quality content and students students, right so part of its getting the students in part it's making sure their contents ready for that. He left a really great career honestly in renewable energy industry to go full time into his side hustle, his heart, his hobbies and ultimately his passion. So that's what I love about the people that I'm bringing on is that they've made that transition, and they're able to give us a light and knowledge as far as how we can make that transition in our own mind. He also runs a home and online home beer brewing school, so if you've ever wondered how to make Your own bruise and go check him out, he's awesome. Okay, so with that, I'm going to turn the time over to him, but I want him to be able to share his story and why he made the transition, how he made it, and how did he know when it was the right time to take that leap, quit his promising career and jump in full time to what he loves doing. So. Billy, thank you for being on here. I'm excited to hear your thoughts and and what we can do to become are following your footsteps. Awesome. Hey, thanks for having me, Samuel. And yeah, if anyone needs a good beer brewing recipe, then I'm your guy hit me up. Are you a craft beer fan?I actually don't drink alcohol at all. But I have family members who do and I know a lot of people who do.It wasn't a we'll talk about the business. It was a lot of fun, although it wasn't the healthiest business to run.Yeah, so thanks for having me again. And yeah, so you know, I I'm not the typical entrepreneur Am I very much like school, and a lot of entrepreneurs you hear dropped out of high school, or they kind of bash college and say, just get out there and start selling stuff and growing businesses. I actually liked learning and that's a theme that you're gonna hear from me. I love education. I'm very curious. I've always loved learning new topics. I remember in fifth grade, I was really into reading Popular Science Magazine. I would only read two parts, I would read the very front and the very back. And the front, they always had the section called what's new, and it's about all the cool new typical technology fields. And then in the back, it was always a classified section. And they're always like these really like kind of interesting, quirky ads. And I was I was like, wow, that's, that's kind of cool. You can build a helicopter, and then you can fly around. You can like buy a DIY kit on how to do that. That's really interesting. So I've always been interested in both science and art. So in business and creating new ventures, so I went through, went through all of high school, went through college, and then I went to grad school and got my MBA. So I took the very traditional path. But when I got that first job, which was a great career, I'll go into that. When I sat down the very first day at that desk after that, my boss remember, he gave me a tour of the office and everything and then finally sat me down and I was like, Okay, now this is assuming I don't do anything. And I just say the past, this is my life. I'm gonna be at this desk an awful lot. And I was excited to be there. But at the same time, I said to myself, this ain't gonna last too long. And so it wasn't too long after that, that I started on the side because I had this free time during nights and weekends, I started a beer brewing blog. So got really into brewing craft beer in college, really geeked out on like I do with a lot of things and decided to start writing about it and posting homebrewing tips and videos and things like that. So eventually, that was what allowed me to this was six years later jumpship when I was finally ready to leave that job and that career, I had this side hustle going, as you mentioned, and that was what enabled me to really forge my own path.That's awesome. So I'm curious. Because I mean, I know you say you're a proponent of education, and, and schooling, where would you I mean, do you feel like there's a line between schooling and education?Is there well, you can certainly have education without depends on what type of schooling you're talking about. And I think there certainly is a place for traditional education. But I think the whole I know the whole industry is getting disrupted right now. And I and I work with because I I work with online educators now online experts, teachers, teacher entrepreneurs, who are working in these areas. Well, for example, I have one on my school I'm working with and they teach artists. So digital artists, mainly people who do concept art for movies and video games. And traditionally, they would have to go to a university to get these skills and pay $100,000. And then they're not guaranteed anything afterwards, not guaranteed income or jobs. And now you have this online school, who I'm helping, and they help these artists they do it through $500,000. Sometimes a little bit higher price courses are still premium price for online but much cheaper than $100,000 for a traditional University. And the best part is these course creators are practitioners in their field. So they're in the trenches, they're, they're working in this area, and so they can tell their students how to succeed not just in their craft, but in the business side of their craft, which is so important. And now they're even starting to pass on jobs to their students as well. So, you know, there's certain there's certainly, there are places for traditional education. I mean, you wanna become a lawyer, you want to become a doctor certain fields like that engineering, but for, for some of these other fields, that's not necessarily the best path.And I think I think, for my cuz of how you caviar, like oh, I'm not one of those entrepreneurs that bags on it. I think that most for my experience, I all I do pretty much is an interview entrepreneurs of some sort CEOs, people who are successful in business or on the other side, mother's father, and just like, I guess I do interview a wide range of people. But I think most of the entrepreneurs that I interview there, although I would consider myself in this category, I bagged on traditional education, to a degree, but only to the extent of, I think that you could go get the same or better education from an online course. With somebody who is still practicing in the industry, and has some real life experience over going to a college, where that may or may not be the case, as far as crack practicing, and as you said, you pay now you walk away with $100,000 either spent money or debt with no guarantee of a job. And so, I think that's where, at least from my experience of talking to people, that's where most of the if you want to call it animosity comes from in that conversation. It's not that they think that to become a doctor, you shouldn't go have somebody practice and teach you that. But even even with that, being a doctor, being a lawyer, I hope not true, but I would say even with that, there's a lot of people who have gone through all of that education, formal education to get their degrees and in the process, they found that they actually are better able to serve clients or patients by you. Using methods that aren't necessarily taught in school, but to be able to use those methods, they have to have the credentials. And then they end up going off and doing functional medicine, which they could have done. They just want to have the licenses to do so without the formal education. So it's an interesting balance. I think education is everywhere. I don't think you should go fail.I shouldn't. How do I say that?I think failure is essential. Okay. I think we should be willing to fail, but fail different than the people in the past. Like if you're going through and you're making all the same mistakes that everybody else made. You didn't learn anything. Yeah, you know, guys like my point you need to go and create your own.Like, take and this is what this is one good thing that I think I gained from public like from my college years that I don't, I don't Where I would have got this otherwise, sure there's places, but how to conduct effective research is a very, like, if there's nothing else you learn. That's a pretty dang good thing to learn. So you can actually read medical journals and say, Okay, what exactly like how are these samples done? What's it? How are they using statistics? How are they doctoring statistics, not just medically, but business wise, if you're walking into a business and they lie, whereas $4 million company and you're like, Okay, and you have $10,000 extra every month, because your operating costs are like you're barely surviving doesn't matter that you're making $4 million of revenue, if 3,000,900 you know, whatever, if it's all going out in expenses. You're, you're struggling, right, one bad month and you guys full, that's different than somebody who's netting $4 million every year, you know, so, being able to read, statistics read and be able to research stuff i think is important. In in that so something I feel like I'd be Effective from there when you're helping somebody build effective content. What does that look like?Well, the important thing is to always start with the audience. So a lot of this is a trap that a lot of and I fell into this trap, too, that a lot of experts and people are just subject matter experts, people who know a lot about their topic. They become obsessed with the topic, and obsessed with the content. But it's that whole set hole, if you build it, they will come thing not being true. When it comes to selling education online. A lot of people think it is though. So you want to start you want to find products and content for your audience, not customers or an audience for your content. And there's a big difference there. So the most important thing is to focus on what is the problem to be solved, or what is the thing that they want, and then try to in as few steps as possible. That's a big mistake, too. You don't want to over people are overwhelmed with information. You don't want to just dump a bunch of insight PDFs on their lap. So you want to get them from really our noun to that endpoint and as a efficient manner as possible.I agree. And so with that, just because you're you have helped over 500 companies accomplish this. How do you address it? I guess if it's online, when you're doing online courses, how what percentage of these online courses have an active teacher, somebody who's involves teaching in it, and how much what percentage is just recorded content, like an online course is recorded, and they're gonna buy it and pay whatever and it was made once intellectual property and they resell it multiple times without updating? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. So so it's shifted over the years. So it's very different than how it was when I first got started in 2009 2010, where it was a lot more self paced, more on demand more of a separation between the teacher and the students. And now what we're seeing is The model that we like that we see working in that we teach is more so that other end of the spectrum, or more closely resembles a true college class or college semester, where you're taking people in, you're taking them through as a group, we often call it call it a cohort, kind of nerdy term, as we call it. And, and it can be 100% live teaching, it can be pre recorded, plus maybe some office hours or some support calls. But usually, there is some, I think, going forward, the way of the future is there's got to be some kind of support some kind of live interaction, because if not, I mean, the, the, the numbers right there. I mean, the lesson is right there in the data, and that only one to 3% of people actually complete online courses as just as terrible. It's terrible all the way around. It's terrible for the students. It's terrible for the teachers as well, any entrepreneurs because, you know, most of a business's revenue should be coming from repeat customers. Because the most expensive thing you can do Doing a business's get a new customer. So if they're not if they're failing at that initial product, initial product is not working for them. What are the chances that they come back for more?I agree. Have you add sure you have in this space heard of lightspeed, VT said again? Have you heard of lightspeed vt it rings a bell I'm not too familiar with it though. Brad Lea is the creator CEO of the of the service, I would highly recommend looking it up his his service what I like about his service, and this is not necessarily a plug for him, but why not? You're listening. You want to create an online course, why not plug for guy he's awesome. Um, but it's a very interactive so unlike a typical video course where it's like, you use watch it hope they watch the help they got out of it inside of the video. There's a lot of interactive things, you can click on. And it's like building a sales funnel. But in video course form, so like, I could be having this conversation and then say and what's what level was your income? I'm, I'm fine. And so that makes sense, right? What level is your income 50,000, whatever. So they're gonna have three options they pop up after me and based on which button they push, then they're going to hear different content from me based on where their level of knowledge is at, or it's going to relocate them back to where they need to hear, hear what I just said. So they can so we can contest comprehension contest, make sure that the people are getting what they need because you may have somebody who's taking an elective class or taking a course just because like they need the basics but they already understand half of the what the content and most courses and make you go through the same like the same path. And so they're they're only getting, like everybody's getting the same cookie cutter information rather than saying okay, I want to buy this course on so Media, for lack of a better word, right? There's people who don't even know that on social media, you should have all of your profile pictures be the same across social media, you should have all of your banner pictures be basically identical, you should have all of your your descriptions about who you are like there's, that's like step one, before you get started on marketing before we get started I that have uniformity, like that's important. So that person, maybe that's where they're at? Well, the other person may already have all that done already have been paying for ads for a while, but just needs to know how to write more effective copy, right. And so for that person, they can go through and get the first half of the course done, still get credit for whatever, but they get the first half of the course done super fast, because they have advanced through that they already know it. And then they can move on to the part that they actually want to do faster versus having a course where they're bored for the first half of the semester lose interest before they actually get the content that they wanted and then they don't complete it. So anyways, it's a personalized learning paths. No, those are excellent. Yeah, and it's a, it's one of the cool things you can do with online education technology. And it's a great way to increase results. So I love that. I'll check that out.Yeah, he's said he would be actually a good. He's super, super cool. If you reach out to him on Instagram. He's in. He's in Vegas. And he doesn't do interviews unless you come to his office. So that's a thing there, but he would be a great person, I think, for you to be on his podcast.Cool. Yeah. That was my mom go to Vegas. Yeah.Yeah, no, it's uh, and he's super chill. And he also I shouldn't say loves beer, but he drinks beer. So you'd have to be able to contact or like, my kind of guy.Yeah. Um, anyways, so So let's talk about this. When did you I mean, you got out of your working your corporate gig. You've got out of beer, I mean, creation, I guess craft beer education. So was that really That the transition from like, how did you transition from your corporate job to teaching people how to create educational, like content?Yeah, good question. Yeah. So so I left the full time job in the, in the renewable energy industry to run this beer website. And so fortunately, you know, again, I'm not the traditional entrepreneur, a lot of entrepreneurs were just like, jumped ship, I wanted to have money in my savings account, I want to have a decent amount of consistent income coming from that website. So I got to that point where I felt really confident that I could cut the cord with a full time job and have a viable business. And unfortunately, that happened, but it was really more of a springboard that website into where I am now. My intention really wasn't to be the beer guy my whole life. That was just a cool project that I was working on and I want to be experienced doing it and of course, wanting to use it to leave my job. But I really missed working with with other things. People on teams and collaborators, really smart people like I was doing. I didn't, I didn't have that anymore when I was running the beer website. So So I started joining these online forums and communities and meeting other people like myself in all different niches. And even though a lot of them were beyond me, they still I can still notice things in their business gaps, especially in their marketing, where I would say, hey, if you just move this thing over here, or just do this or get this page up, it could really explode your growth. And so more and more of them start to reach out and I started doing some consulting on the side. And that eventually became my main passion, helping people like myself who had the subject matter expertise, but didn't have the the business expertise or the marketing expertise to get it out there. And because I had learned that and I had this traditional business background, that combination of skills, put me in a good position to help them grow their business, and that's what led me to where I am today. So I sold the the beer website actually a few years ago. So that's now in someone else's hands. But but he's doing a good job with it. We're still in communication.Good hopefully hopefully turned to pretty penny that Scott. That's awesome building websites, I didn't know how like that I don't have anything that gets a ton of traffic. But you can just like go by URLs and or domain names. And if you put something on there and get a little bit of traffic and like build up the name on Google like you can that's a way that's a form of investing right there it's kind of interesting business model but it's it's cool to see like how much what I paid for my my domains and then how much they've increased in value since I've put content on their websites and add things pushed to them create a connection. So it's a cool it's a cool thing to see. So I'm curious. I liked the way you said this, I guess is you had a bigger goal and so many people they think, Oh, I'm I'm in this business. For me. I work in finance, right? My objective is not it is my objective. is financial but I'm in finance because of the the bigger goal, right? The bigger goal for me being in finance is to help people with well, as they understand how money works, then they it decreases statistically decreases causes of depression, anxiety, suicide, domestic violence, malnutrition. And those instances decrease when there's higher income, or at least understanding how money works in a home. And so although I work in finance, that's not my main gig, my main gig is what it produces. At the end. I think that's important for people to understand, especially when they're trying to identify well, do I jump ship? Do I go do my own thing? Or what is it exactly that you're jumping ship from and to? I think that's a huge, huge, huge question to be answered. Before you quit your day job before you go anywhere. What exactly are you jumping to? And as Billy said he wasn't jumping to the beer company to become the beer guy. That wasn't as objective. He saw that as a project as a current way of expressing himself in, in other forms of creation. And I think that's important because so many people will get fixated on a certain thing. And they'll say, Well, I don't know anything. I only know how to be a mom, I only know how to garden. I only know how to create videos, I only know how to make beer, right? And so they don't see their value outside of the task that they're doing. And this holds people back. So many people back even in their corporate jobs, because they think I'm only good for what I'm being paid for. Instead of recognizing that the value that they're adding to that company is so much more than the tasks that they're fulfilling. And if they were just to go market, just the value that they're adding, personally, they could probably increase your income, even if they didn't want to change what they're doing. They could take that out of a corporate And go perform those tasks by themselves and be able to create the same or more income more regularly and be in more control of their income. So that's a huge thing. And then understanding that this happens. I would say this happened to me as well, especially with this podcast. Like just kind of the the germination of this podcast is I was doing Facebook videos about different topics. Facebook Lives, I did them every day for I think a month did a month of Facebook lies every day. And what I found was people were reaching out to me and saying, Man, I would love to listen to all of your content, but I can't leave Facebook on all the time. You should turn it into a podcast. I was like, Oh, I never think about that. But I'll turn into a podcast then. And so so so many times, think about what are you complimented on the most? What What do people compliment you on? What do you think? What do people say? And if I Just think like that. Or if I could just do that, what is the most common thing that people say about you in that context? And then reach out to Billy and say, Hey, Billy, how do I turn this into a course? Yeah, I turn this into an online course. Because clearly if there's enough people who recognize my gift, even though I don't recognize my guests, how do I make this gift? able to reach more people? And how do I monetize it? Right? How many times does that happen to you, where you have somebody who comes to you who wants to create a course isn't quite sure exactly how to do it. They know their audience, they know what they what they're trying to teach, but they just have no idea how to monetize it, how to make it effective for their end consumer.Oh, it happens all the time. Yeah, it happens all the time. And and I'll tell you what I tell them because the wrong way to go about it is to go disappear into your basement for nine months and go record some amazing video course. It's been a ton of fun. On software and lighting and microphones and all that stuff, editing, distribution, and just to find out that no one really wants the topic, no one really wants what's being offered. So, this is good news. This is good news because you don't need to put so much pressure on yourself to have something completely polished and dialed in. The way to do it, especially now going going forward is to take that audience first approach, like I talked about, start to build a following get in the trenches with your audience, hop on the phone with them even I've talked to dozens of my customers and email subscribers when I was running that beer brewing website, not selling anything, just hopping on the phone and just asking questions. And look, I was part of my market. I was brewing up a storm. So I but I still my mind was blown all the time. And I was surprised by the things that people would say and what their problems were. So don't fall into that curse of knowledge. You know, where you think that you know it all. The market will tell you and you'll often be surprised. And then just get something out there. Just get something out there. Take an iterative approach. And this is really my approach to to life, you know, and the value that I provide. And like what you were asking earlier. I mean, I see myself in a really strong point of leverage for two reasons. One is I think personal growth is the most important thing in the world. And one of the ways that we can solve a lot of the problems that we have in the world, yes, there are a lot of problems with society and the economy and all that. But if everyone really focused on themselves, and focused on if I focused on making myself better tomorrow than I am today, and I did that consistently, every single day, if everyone did that, we'd be in a really, really good position. And one of the ways to do that is through education, through online learning online courses, and it doesn't matter what niche you're in. What tends to happen if a person is improving in one area, even if it's something sort of like insignificant by most standards, like brewing beer, people don't think that's entirely a life changing thing. But it is and I would see how my students would come in and they would fall in love with this hobby. And that passion would exist. from them, and it would spread to their family, their wife, their kids, they would all see it. And next thing you know, everything in the household is uplifted. Right. So that's one leverage point working directly with them. But I took a step back and said, Okay, let me work with the entrepreneurs and the teachers, the teacher entrepreneurs who serve them. And now we get into, so now I'm able to help them reach more people. So improve this collective personal growth going on throughout the world. And also, I'm a big believer in small businesses, they really are the engine of the economy. So that's I love working with entrepreneurs. Now, they're the innovators, they're the job providers are the ones paying a whole lot of our tax dollars. So that's what gives me a lot of fulfillment. I see myself really in a great place of leverage and aligns with my values. The main one being personal growth.Yeah. And I think that that's the key is identifying what isyour personal value and how are you aligning yourself with your personal value, I think once so I have a I have a my journal, a journal that I created. But it's called the nine pillars to build a meaningful legacy. And the focus is identifying who why why would it be important for you to actually exceed or succeed in life in general. And it's part of a grander process of identifying your identity. And as you said, your your values for me my core values are candor, integrity, and gratitude. Those are like more important than just about anything else. And when I really analyze who I am, without any fear of judgment for not saying God or saying family or whatever, without any fear of judgment of anybody else, what am I personally internally committed to more than anything else in my life, and it's those three those three values and so I built my business I built everything I do in my life down to my marriage, my children, my everything, based on those three values and all of these need to be present in everything I do. I'm not interested. And when you're looking at jumping ship or going something new again, Be aware of what you're leaving and what and where you're going. Because I'm sure I want you to tell me some failure stories of people who have done this what I'm about to describe, hopefully, some, if you don't, that's amazing, but I think you probably will, but people who they, they were doing this, I decided to create this course or education, out of desperation, because rather than running towards what they were passionate about, and running towards what they love doing, they were running away from what they didn't like doing. And that distinction is huge. just choosing to try it, try and create as, as you would say, try and create a product that you can sell just because you don't like what you're doing right now. Your current, your current work. That is not the way to move forward. It's not I think it has a short lifespan. You're not going to be a long lasting educator or innovator anything but if you are passionate about something and you're running towards what you like, you're gonna have different results. So tell me a story of where you've had Somebody who is running from something rather than towards something.Yeah,well, I can give you my own example. Sure, sure.Yeah. So when I, when I made that transition from running the beer site to doing consulting full time, I was doing some service provider work. So I wasn't just consulting, I was also helping people build and maintain their Facebook ad campaigns and the natural path. And so I eventually pulled back from that because the natural path if you start doing that is to grow an agency. You know, so you start to look at Okay, how can I get more clients? How can I do a better job with this and you're just gonna wind up in that agency playground. Turns out I didn't really didn't want to run an agency. It just, it doesn't align with what I enjoy doing. It's not me, much more of a strategist, much more of an architect. I don't want a big team or anything like that. It just didn't match up with the lifestyle that I wanted. And I always start with the lifestyle and reverse engineer that So I started to go down that path, but then quickly pulled back because I had that feeling like and yeah, I can deliver value here. But this isn't, this isn't my zone of genius. So a lot of my life has been like that testing different things, seeing how it feels. Sometimes you just have to write like, I didn't know what that that day to day was like, it looked good on paper, running an agency getting a lot of clients. But when I was actually in the trenches of it, I said, No, I don't feel so hot. Let me go back this other direction.Yeah, I think that's that's huge. Being able to dig, like to determine and decipher between that What are you running from something you write to something and making sure you're running to something that you love and that you're going to bring the light and Joy to the world not just from what you don't like because it's just barely I haven't seen it pan out very well for many people. And it's good that you were able to recognize that before you got too deep into something you hated and decided to. You never know happens honestly. So I'm curious when you did make the jump though. What was your? Did you Who are your biggest naysayers saying no, don't do that. Why give? Why are you giving up this great job? Tell us the story of your biggest naysayers and how you overcame them.I have been really fortunate in that I've always had a tremendous support system. I really can't think of one person I'm close to. I can't even think of one person who said, You're dumb. Don't do that. Don't leave that full time job. It's great. Everyone was just like a really great cheerleader. Just Hell yeah. Billy, go for it. So I've never had anyone say that, fortunately. But I have had haters, you know, running. You wouldn't believe that running a beer website. You get haters, like, I remember I was. I was, uh, I did some videos about a beer cocktail and some British one. And I guess they're very strict about how they make these beer, beer cocktails where you mix two beers together a beer and some other kind of a silly thing. But people will get on YouTube get really upset and passionate about pretty trivial things. So I'll get flamed in the comments if I made the recipe wrong or something And then and then I would have people just generally upset that I would sell information. A lot of people just see that as a big No, no. How could you possibly sell this, especially in a niche, like an enthusiast niche? You know, the beer market? People are a little bit touchy about that. So, so yeah, I certainly had my fair share of haters, but but no one no one saying, hey, you shouldn't be doing that as a career or a business fortunately.Right? So how so? How did you overcome that? Because there's people who, maybe they have support in their career, but when they see those comments online, when they see that the haters, they're like, Oh, no, am I doing something wrong? Maybe I should adjust my my approach my market like maybe, maybe I should change maybe I get doing whatever I'm doing. So how did you learn to just let that roll off of you or not give it any credence? Like how did you move past that and say, Look, I'm doing me you do you and you don't want to do it, whatever. If you want to post crappy things, that's fine, too. Whatever.Yeah. So a big Part of it was looking to mentors. So looking to people who either mentors I knew personally or mentors from a distance I just followed online, who were a few steps ahead of me, or many steps ahead of me and had way more haters than me and seeing them talk about it. I remember I think it was a roommate safety, if you know who he is heard of him? Yeah. And he had his own version of Have you seen mean tweets against what he's called Jimmy Fallon, one of those late nights? Yeah. President Obama will be on there reading all the mean tweets about him and he makes it funny. So Remi did something like that, I think was him and maybe James altucher. And they're reading all the tweets. It was like this funny, they're sitting around the fireplace drinking whiskey or something, and reading some of the hit the April comments on their YouTube videos. So I've Oh, I'm a big fan of humor. So I used humor to approach it and just kind of have to laugh at them. You know, it's silly, right? And I don't take it personally. And I realized that they only see they only see a sliver of me and my personality. Right, like they saw maybe just the first three minutes of that YouTube video and that's all they know about me. Right? So I have a lot of empathy.I think I love that. I think that and that's really the whole purpose of my book or one of the major purposes of my book is exactly that. How do you like gain perspective of what's really happening? So often in our world today, we get sucked into like, Oh, this is such a big deal on Facebook. It's like no, like, literally in two days, nobody's gonna remember this thread even happened. We've got it got to keep in perspective there, how much they know about you. It's not an attack on you. It's an attack on their perception of, of what's happening, which is entirely different than on you. So I love that what would you say your your secret? If you have like a specific habit, mindset or behavior that you have participated in regularly to build your legacy? What would you say that is and how could we adopt that into our lives?Yeah, so it's really I'm a big fan of positive habits. So having a strict morning routine. Having a strict nighttime routine? And then and then self reflection. Am I improving? Going back to what I said earlier? Am I a better person than I was yesterday? Am I smarter than I was yesterday? Am I more skilled in this area than I was yesterday? And if you just do that day in and day out, I forgot the exact numbers are. But I think if you if you improve 1% each day after 70 days, then you're twice as good as you were before. That's been the biggest thing for me again, personal growth.Yeah, no, I love that. It's awesome. So how could we support you if we wanted to get in touch with you? Let's say we have a course that we want to create. Or we'd like to maybe take part and see what see what courses you helped to create and just take part in some of those that you've already helped create for other people. Do you have a list of all the companies you've worked with? And so we'd go cruising back. Oh, yeah, he's helped dessert. I'd like that type, of course. And where do we get in touch with that and how do we get more involved with what you're doing?Yeah. So nice and simple, best ways to get around. My website Billy bras calm b i ll y VR OSS calm. And yeah, there's a bunch of case studies on there. And you can see a lot of the courses that I've worked with and a lot of the niches that I've worked in, you can hop on my email newsletter, I send out a almost daily email newsletter. I'm a huge fan of email marketing as a channel. I just think it's the most intimate, personal way to communicate but I do it very differently than how most people do it. So So yeah, that's that's a very popular.Okay, cool. So here's the here's the last two sections on my podcast are some of my favorite. So this this second last section is called legacy on rapid fire kind of like a game show. But there's, there's no right or wrong answers. But there's five questions. And we're looking for one word, one sentence answers. I may ask you to clarify any one answer at any given time.Fair enough. Let's do it.Awesome. So legacy on rapidfire number one, what do you believe is holding you back from reaching the new Next level of your legacy.Hmm.sorting the great opportunities from the good opportunities. That's the constant challenge.That is and what have you found to help you in that endeavor?There's actually I actually have a really tactical thing that I use. It's a formula that I've discovered by Brendon Burchard. And I can't remember the little complicated, but you essentially look at everything that goes into an opportunity, the resources, the time, the money, the sanity, that you need to invest into it, and see if the payoff. So the financial payoff, the doors that it opens and how it fits into your lifestyle, how those balance out, it's kind of like a scale. So it's not perfect, but it's a good framework to use to evaluate opportunities highly recommended. No, that's awesome. I agree that you have tohave some formula of determining how You spend your time and where you spend your time. And I talked about it from a perspective of, you've got to become the CEO of your own life. And that's the CEOs job to determine like, hey, which contracts we're getting in? How are we increasing the value to our shareholders, if it doesn't weigh in the favor of increasing the value to our shareholders, now worth my time, and, and being able to hold that standard to yourself and for others, it's a nice school concept. I love it. It'll be a book one day, but like that might be a course before it becomes a book. I'll see. So what do you think the hardest thing you've ever accomplished has been to this point,running a marathon?I haven't done that. So I will, that I would tend toseegoes to the head and then like 10 or 11 years old, and had no not no intention of running this half marathon. On, but my, we were all showing up. We all showed up to support my family and my older sister who had been training while she was warming up that day, she pulled a muscle or something so she couldn't run. And so she's like, Well, does anybody else want to and I was like, I have two or three other brothers who are running. So I, you know, like sketcher Skechers. The shoes had like a leather, almost like nice, classy leather. Skechers shoes. That's what I had on. And I was like, y'all run? Why not? So I ended up running this half marathon in Skechers shoes. I was like 10 or 11. I was like, That will never happen again. So I haven't ever thought to brave another half marathon and

Melissa and Kevin Lee played an important role in what we know now as NightScout and the DIY movement.  Their interest was initially sparked because they wanted to have children. Melissa lives with type 1 and Kevin has an engineering background. They jumped in with many other "hackers" to create what we know now as Nightscout and other DIY systems. By the way, the Lee's children are now ten and eight! Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! In Tell Me Something Good, wedding bells for a T1D couple – which spark some fun stories from others in the community.. and an update on a change my son made after our last episode. Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Sign up for our newsletter here Listen to our "Steel Magnolias" episode about pregnancy, type 1 diabetes and community featuring Melissa Lee, Kerri Sparling & Kyrra Richards here. Find all of the "We Are Not Waiting" episodes of the podcast here #Wearenotwaiting ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcription: Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes. By Real Good Foods, real food you feel good about eating and by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:19 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:25 This week, Melissa and Kevin Lee played an important role in what we now know is Nightscout and the DIY movement. It's kind of hard to remember but those early days very different. Melissa remembers what it was like the first time Kevin for husband followed her numbers and acknowledged what a hard day she'd had.   Melissa Lee  0:45 And I didn't realize I just looked at him and he said, this is how every day is, isn't it? And like I still get chills thinking about it. They say it was the first time that anybody outside of me or another person with diabetes looked at I said I see you. This is hard.   Stacey Simms  1:02 Melissa and Kevin were interested initially in the DIY movement because they wanted to have children. Their kids are now 10 and eight. We have a lot to talk about. And tell me something good wedding bells for a couple who live with type one. And that sparked some fun stories from others in the community. plus an update on a change my son made after our last episode. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of Diabetes Connections. I'm so glad to have you here. I'm your host Stacey Simms we educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. And this is a story of connection. Melissa and Kevin have so many wonderful anecdotes to share about finding the DIY community about those early exciting days about the projects they worked on. And we talked about what it's like as a married couple to go from not sharing any information. about diabetes to being some of the first people to be able to see CGM information, you know, how does that change your relationship? How do you talk about it? And we'll get to that in just a couple of minutes. It was great to talk to them. I wanted to bring you up to speed first, though, on something that I mentioned. Well, Benny mentioned it when I spoke to him last week. So Benny is my son, if you're new, he was diagnosed right before he turned two. He is now 15 and a half. And we talked last week about changing a bit of our routine, he has been taking a long acting insulin called Tresiba for almost two years along with using an insulin pump. It's a method called untethered, I'm not going to rehash the whole thing. I've talked about it many times. But if you are new, that will link up more information in the show notes and you can go back to listen to last week or previous episodes with Benny about why we did that. bottom line he was using so much insulin because of puberty and maybe some other issues genetics who knows that it was very, very helpful to add an additional basal source that took the pressure off the pump inset, but Over the last month, his insulin use has gone way down. And that is because of three factors. He's probably coming out of puberty, he has lost a lot of weight. And we are using the control IQ system, which we noticed right away meant we were doing far fewer big corrections and we just used it so much less insulin on it. So during the show that the last endocrinology appointment, Dr. V, had said it was fine to go off the Tresiba, no problem, do it when you want if you want, and Benny said that he did want to do that. So as I'm taping this, it's probably about eight days since we made this switch. It takes about two to three days everybody's a little different to get Tresiba out of your system. It works a little differently than some other long acting so it takes longer to get out of your system. We did have a rocky three days but we were used to that we knew that was coming and just as I had hoped control IQ the software system with the tandem pump and the Dexcom just has worked even better than it did before and I don't talk about specific numbers with my son. That's not how we Roll, but just to give you some perspective has been about 70% in range, you know, it goes up, it goes down very happy with that number. He has been 80% in range, I think 82% in range for the last seven days as an average and two days where he was like 98% in range. It's crazy. So I don't think that'll continue because that's how diabetes works. Right? Don't you find sometimes it like lulls you, when you make a switch, it always starts out great, and like a week or two later floor like the rug just pulled out from under you. So we'll see. I want to get to Melissa and Kevin. But at the end of the show, I'm going to talk a little bit more about some changes we've made recently, in addition to Tresiba, we have changed how we use sleep mode. So stay tuned at the very end. I'm going to talk about that. But I know not everybody uses control IQ. So standby Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Real Good Foods. It's really easy to compare and see what we love about Real Good Foods. If you put them side by side to other products, I mean their breakfast sandwiches, six grams of carbs, 18 grams of protein compared to like, you know 2636 grams of carbs in other products and a lot less protein and a lot more junk. If you look at their cauliflower crust pizza, you It's amazing. Not every cauliflower crust pizza is actually low in carbs, you know this you got to read the labels. So Real Good Foods, nine grams of carbs in there cauliflower crust pizza. Some of the other ones have 3540 grams of carbs. I know everybody eats low carb, but you know, you want to know what you're getting. You want to really be able to see, well if I'm eating a cauliflower crust pizza, you might as well eat you know, a bread crust if you want 40 carbs per serving. Real Good Foods is just that they are made with real ingredients, you know stuff you can pronounce. It's so easy to find. They have that locator on their website, it's in our grocery store. It's in our Walmart, and you can order everything online, find out more, go to Diabetes, Connections comm and click on the Real Good Foods logo.   My guests this week are part of the history of the diabetes DIY movement. longtime listeners know that I am fascinated by the we are not Waiting crowd. And I can't say enough about what they have done for our community. In fact, I'm actually trying to put together an oral history. And we've talked to a lot of people since 2015. When I started the show about this movement. The big problem is a lot of these wonderful engineering and tech types are a little spotlight adverse. You know who you are, but I'll get there. I did reach out to Kevin and Melissa, because, you know, I've talked to Melissa a few times about pregnancy and type one and other issues. I think that the show we did as a panel with other guests about pregnancy in type one and Steel Magnolias is frankly, one of the top 10 episodes, not because of me, but the guests are so amazing. And that night gets so much praise on that episode, people, you know, women pass it around. I'll link that up in the show notes. But you know, I hadn't heard Melissa and Kevin's story, and their names always come up when we hear about the early days of the DIY builders. So our talk today is about much more than the technology it's also about marriage and kids and diabetes and sharing data. You know how that affects your life. Quick note, Kevin now works for Big Foot biomedical and Melissa works for tide pool. If those names don't mean anything to you, if you don't know what those are, or you know what they do, might be a little bit of a confusing interview. There's some presumed knowledge here, I will put some links in the show notes, you may want to go back and listen to previous episodes about the we're not waiting movement or just check out the links. Also, it is really hard to get people to acknowledge the difference they've made. These are all very modest people. God loves them, but I do try. So here's my interview with Kevin and Melissa Lee, Melissa and Kevin, I am so excited to talk to you two together. Thanks for making time to do this. I know how busy you both are.   Melissa Lee  7:43 Thank you for having us on. This is a fun thing to get to do.   Stacey Simms  7:47 I don't know if Kevin's gonna think it's that fun. We'll see. And I say that because in the small way that I know you you don't seem like you're quite as conversational and chatty is as we Melissa, well, we'll see how it goes. Kevin, thanks for joining us and putting up with me already.   Melissa Lee  8:04 Well, you know, he actually is until you stick a microphone in front of his face. Oh, okay. You know, beyond that, yeah.   Stacey Simms  8:12 Well, let's start when when you guys started, and Melissa, I will ask you first How did you meet?   Melissa Lee  8:17 Oh, this is a story I love to tell. And Kevin's gonna already be like, why did I agree to do this? So this was like 2006 and I spent a couple of years doing internet dating. And you know, I'm very extroverted and and like a go getter. And I had just been on, like, 40 bad days, basically, on the internet. Basically, I was broke from spending money on lots of different dating sites, and I found a free one. But during that one, it turns out that this guy was on it because one, it was free. And two, he liked their matching algorithm that tells you a little bit about why you needed so we met online and then What a year and a half later, we were married. Wow. So yeah, we were married in late 2007. At the time, I was a music teacher. And Kevin, how would you describe what you did in the world? Kevin: I was working at Burlington, Northern Santa Fe, just deploying web applications as a contractor to IBM. And then in our early years, you worked for capital, one bank doing infrastructure architecture, and then later for American Airlines doing their instructor architecture. So we like to say, you know, we've been in finance he's been in travel is been in transport. He's been in lots of different fields doing that same thing that I just said infrastructure architecture, which I will not explain.   Stacey Simms  9:44 So, Kevin, when did you go from checking out the algorithm of the dating app, to noticing that perhaps the diabetes technology that your girlfriend and fiancé and wife was using, when did you notice that it really could be done better. And then you could do it   Kevin Lee  10:02 became a little bit later. And it first I kind of just let her her do her own thing. She managed it. She managed it well. And then as we started to progress, and we both wanted kids,   Melissa Lee  10:16 yes, we got back from the honeymoon and I had babies on the brain and two of my bridesmaids were pregnant. And then I have this whole, you know, in our pregnancy podcasts that we did together, I had babies on the brain, but I had this diabetes hanging over me. And I think that that was a huge motivator for both of us. So like mid 2008, my insulin pump was out of warranty. Kevin Lee And so that's that's whenever I really started to encourage her and I started getting involved and saying, hey, let's let's go experiment. Let's find what's what's right. Let's look at what else what other options exist and didn't find too many other options but no, we I did switch I switched insulin pump brands and we started talking about this new thing that was going to be coming to market called the CGM. Melissa Lee So I got my first CGM within the next year. And Kevin immediately started trying to figure out how it works. So this was the freestyle navigator. And this was like 2009. I think I was maybe already pregnant or about to be pregnant. And Kevin was trying to hack this device.   Stacey Simms  11:25 So what does that mean? When you said you started to figure it out? What did you do?   Kevin Lee  11:29 Well, it bugged me that the acceptable solution was the we had this little device that had a range of measured in the 10s of feet. That was it. And I had a commute. At the time, I was working at American Airlines and my commute was 45 miles one day daily, and she was pregnant, and I just wanted some sort of assurance that she was safe and there was no way to get that and I just wanted to be able to You know, it was obvious that this center was sending the data that I wanted on the available through an internet connection. How do I get that? Ultimately, that effort was unsuccessful. And that's when we started going to friends for life. And there, that's where we saw I guess Ed Damiano’s connected solution where there's remote monitoring, and we saw the Dexcom. And that's whenever I thought, hey, if that's an option, and so we started looking into the Dexcom and switched over.   Stacey Simms  12:39 I'm gonna jump in because I'm a little confused. When you said you said Damiano’s connected set up, I thought that he was showing off what is now called the iLet and the new the bio hormonal insulin pump. What was the Dexcom component to that that you hadn't seen before?   Kevin Lee  12:54 So it was just a simple remote monitoring, you know, he needed to be able to as part His research to be able to remotely monitor the patients that were well,   Melissa Lee  13:05 specifically, he had an early version of the bionic pancreas had a Dexcom that was cabled to a phone. Oh, and so if you look back at like, 2012 And so like he I remember Kevin holding the setup in his hand and looking at it and being like, you know, this is fascinating. Like, I have an idea.   Stacey Simms  13:30 Because at the time and I'll find a picture of it, but it was cable to a phone. And there were at least two insects from the pump. So you had to have the the CGM inset and then you had to have two pumping sets and then the phone cable for the bionic pancreas at that time. Am I thinking of the right picture?   Kevin Lee  13:45 No, I really should   see all of that.   Melissa Lee  13:49 You know, like we're so old at this point.   Like, like eight years ago now I wasn't realizing because how have my children are but this You know, I want to say that this was even before we'd have to go back and back with them.   Kevin Lee  14:05 Yeah. And that was just the moment that hey, okay, this is another alternative. And we were, we were actually looking to switch at the time because I think that's when the note and I switched.   Melissa Lee  14:17 Okay, we had to switch because navigator went off the market in 2011. So this is right around the time, we just switch to that.   Unknown Speaker  14:24 So what did you do with the Dexcom ,   Kevin Lee  14:26 whenever we noticed that there was a little port that was also used for, for charging and for data, I connected to it and started reverse engineering it sending data and seeing what we got back and trying to get that data off. It was first connected to my little Mac MacBook Pro. And I just had a goal over Thanksgiving to be able to get that data out of the CGM. And it took three or four days and I was able to get basic data out of the system. In premiere, it was just as simple as uploading it, and then visualizing it.   Stacey Simms  15:06 So for perspective, and I want to be careful here because I know there were a lot of people working on a lot of different things. I'll be honest with you. I'm not looking for who was first or when did that happen? Exactly. But just for perspective, is this basically the same thing that we then saw, like john Costik, put up on Twitter when he said he got it like on the laptop? Or, like, what would we have seen if we had been sitting in your house that day?   Right back to Kevin and Melissa, but first, you know, it is so nice to find a diabetes product that not only does what you need, but also fits in perfectly with your life. One drop is just that it is the sleekest looking and most modern meter I family's ever used. And it's not just about their modern meter setup. You can also send your readings to the mobile app automatically and review your data anytime. Instantly share blood glucose reports with your healthcare team. It also works With your Dexcom Fitbit or your Apple Watch, and not to mention, they have that awesome test strip subscription plan, pick as many test strips as you need, and they'll deliver them to your door. One drop diabetes care delivered, learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the one drop logo. Now back to Kevin answering my question about what does it look like when he figured out how to reverse engineering the free the Dexcom data.   Kevin Lee  16:30 Absolutely that we would you would have seen a little text flying by saying this is the the glucose number. Yeah, on the on the computer. It wouldn't have been very exciting to most. And from there, Melissa tweeted out saying hey, we have the data available from our Mac and I guess that's where Joyce Lee picked up on it and wanted some more information.   Stacey Simms  16:55 All right. So Melissa, take it from there.   Melissa Lee  16:56 Yeah, you know, Joyce has been a real champion as those early days. Why date and so I remember her reaching out to me and saying this is this is really interesting. I want to know more. And in this was the same year that Dana and Scott were bringing their thing to life with what was then DIY APS. This is around the same time, same era in history that, that john Costik was doing his great stuff and with Lane Desborough and the early days of Nightscout, so all of these things were happening in these little pockets, and we were just another little pocket at the time. One of the things that concerned us was whether we were doing something that was going to be shut down really quickly, like there's something that you find knowingly or unknowingly, it's kind of like when you agree to the terms on iTunes. So when you use these devices, there's something called an EULA and End User License Agreement. And these eu la say, you're not going to reverse engineer this product. And so we were a little cautious about what we wanted to diseminate in terms of like your take this and run with it, but that culture was still developing. And so at the end of that year was the big d-data event at the diabetes mine summit, where there were a few really key DIY influencers sort of in the room. This is where Lane first coined the we are not waiting and, and the next day I was at that summit, and I was hearing Howard Look speak about what had happened at the d-data summit the day before. And I was like, Oh, my God, Kevin has to plug into this. So we want to help this initiative. Like we want to be a part of this. We have so much to offer we this whole remote monitoring setup that he had built for me. And at the time, like by then I think one of the biggest things we have done is Kevin has developed do you want to talk about glass.   Kevin Lee  18:51 Yeah, it was just a another way to visualize the data. So Google Glass, I don't know if you remember that. It was a kind of a connection eyeglass. Yeah, in some ways, it was ahead of its time in other ways. It was just a really interesting idea. I got a pair, and I was able to have it alert me when she crossed the simple threshold. And I was able to see historically three hours or 12 hours or whatever it was without having to pull up a web page. It was just kind of always there and on available for me if and when I needed it. So it was just kind of an ambient thing in the background that I didn't feel like a I had to worry about.   Stacey Simms  19:38 Interesting. Kevin, I'm curious in those early days, so if I could just jump in. You know, you you don't have type one. You care very much about someone with type one and you're doing this because you care about her and want to make sure she's safe. When you started meeting other people who were doing the same thing. What was that like for you? I know it's chancy to ask an engineer about how they feel but it had to have been nice to get kinship with these other people who basically spoke your language and also understood the importance behind what was going on.   Kevin Lee  20:07 Yeah, so that was actually really kind of interesting whenever we first started sharing that we wanted to share it just with a small group of people. And I think it was Manny Hernandez that introduced me directly to Wayne and Howard and a few other Brian Maslisch.   Melissa Lee  20:28 yeah, so I like to tell the story that I chased Howard Look down in the hallway after that, and was like, you have to connect with my husband. And then that didn't seem to work. So that's when Manny was like Manny Hernandez, who was the founder of Diabetes Hands Foundation. He is a good friend of ours and he was like, No, I have to connect you to these guys.   Kevin Lee  21:15 And so there's this pivotal email thread from January of 2014, where we started exchanging The well, here's the project that I've done and Lane says, Well, here's a project that that we've been working on and we call it Nightscout. And so we, we kind of exchange notes. And then it was a little bit later that Lane, well, maybe not lane. Exactly. But that's when the the whole CGM in the cloud and the Nightscout. Early foundations started to show up on on Facebook. I think that's whenever another engineer had published the code on GitHub, and started to set appears. Here's how you set it up. Well, there weren't many in my situation, you know, one of the engineers was a parent. And I think we actually made a really great mix. And I think that that's part of what made the successful so one of the engineers working on the project was A father of a type one I represented the spouse and some of the other engineers were personally affected by by type one, and definitely added a different level increase the camaraderie between us. Those are early days we were were on the phone almost nightly. As soon as I get off my my day job, I'd go home and work on the evening job of trying to get the next set of features out or to fix some new fixes. I love to describe this day because throughout 2014 he would walk in the door and he was already on the phone with the other devs from night out. And if I walked in the room where he was working on the computer, I would be like, Hey, Kevin, and then I'd be like, hey, Ross Hey Jason, because I assumed that they were on the phone. Hey, Ben.   Melissa Lee  22:56 Like it was staying up all night long. They didn't sleep. They did this all day long. Kevin talk a little bit about the pieces you brought in tonight that from our system that we created, and then we like I, I have two producing diabetes data. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna claim a lot of that. But I was just plugged into it. If people are familiar today with Nightscout, which many listeners may be like, what piece did they hold in their hands? That was yours.   Kevin Lee  23:26 So the the piece that I was so connected with was the what we refer to as the uploader. It was just a piece of extracted the data from the CGM and then uploaded it to the Nightscout website. The early days. I don't know if you remember it was the little 3d printed case with a phone that you got that happened to have a data plan and a wire connected to the the CGM. Right whenever Nightscout first came out, I was I was hesitant to start I mean, this was like the first few months I was hesitant to contribute. I wanted to see What I could do, but as it started to pick up be there, it was obvious that the pace of development that I was doing on my own was not going to equal what the rest of the community could be doing. But then he and I had these other features, which I'll go into in a moment here that I felt the community could benefit from. So we started having early conversations with Ben and others. How do we fold in functionality that I had into the current uploader, that functionality was essentially the early ability to follow on a native phone app, it was decreasing the size of the packet and uploading more so using less data. It was an Android watch, being able to get the latest data on an Android watch. It was used in camping mode. I don't know if you're familiar with that. But the early days of knights count we had the pebbles that We're kind of Bluetooth connected smartwatch, that use the little EEG displays. Those required you to be connected to the internet. And one of the devs Jason Calabrese had said, I'm going camping next week. And I'm not going to have internet connectivity. And I sure wish that that I could. So I thought about it for a minute. And were able to quickly reconfigure it the existing code to be able to get that data on the watch without an internet connection. So   Stacey Simms  25:32 camping mode literally came from a camping trip. Yes.   Kevin Lee  25:37 Jason Calibrese’s  says camping trip.   Melissa Lee  25:40 So well, and then the code that became xdrip which like thousands of people use today.   Kevin Lee  25:46 So that's, that's a great thing about open source community, whatever ideas reverberating off of each other and become more pronounced and it essentially becomes the sum is greater than the whole.   Unknown Speaker  25:59 Let me ask about xdrip, though, was it originally called Dexdrip? was that one of the first times Dexcom got involved and said No thank you, or did I miss remember that,   Melissa Lee  26:10 that was all part of Emma Black’s history. Emma took the code that Kevin and created and, and created built on top of that to create Dexdrip. And Dexcom did say you can't use our name and became accept yeah that you're remembering correctly. It was a very friendly discussion. And so it was renamed to xdrip. But you bring up an important point about how industry was reacting to all of us in late 2014. The team at Medtronic actually invited many of the community members who were working on that into sort of the belly of the beast, and to come in and talk to them about the why and the challenges and the what could industry do and and What are we not hearing and just sort of like a meeting of the minds. But what was so cool about this is this is the first time that many of us had met one another in person. So here, people have been working on this for a year or two. And now suddenly, it's a table with Dana Lewis and Scott Lybrand with john Costik with Ben west with me with Kevin, with Jason Calabrese, like we're sitting around a table for the first time and talking with industry as this United Community. So it felt a little less, to me, at least as someone who's been really involved in fostering community, right? It felt to me like there's the start of something here. And that was a really exciting meeting. We like to joke that nothing came of it. I was gonna ask about that. But to me like that was exciting. It was this energy of like, we all came to the table and said like, these are the needs of the community. This is why we need remote monitoring. And this is what we're gonna do next. And you can either help us or understand we'll do it anyway. And so that was that we are not waiting spirit.   Stacey Simms  28:08 Well, and that was a very pivotal time. And, Melissa, let me just continue with that thought if I could, it was such a pivotal time, because you all could have said, we are not going to continue without you. Right? We need this. But it seemed to me and again, it's hard to for me, you know, it's funny that it's so long ago now. But it's only four. It's like, it's only five or six years ago, really? The seeds of that community. And you can see it just in the Facebook group with CGM in the cloud and everything else. There's 10s of thousands of people now who are part of this community. You know, did you saw the seeds if it Then did you ever imagine it was gonna get as big as it is now?   Unknown Speaker  28:48 Is it crazy to say yeah?   Kevin Lee  28:54 to directly answer the question. Yes. And that's where we were actually Faced with a another really tough decision of how do we continue to solve these problems? And we started to see the scalability problem that what we viewed as a scalability problem within the community. How do we continue to support it? And how do we deliver this safely to masses? It was a choice that we had to make of if we're doing the industry and we, we try to do it this way. I don't know there, there isn't really one right or wrong way to do it, but it was just a another way. And we believe that by joining the industry that we could deliver something simple, easy, and we could make it scalable and supportable for the masses.   Melissa Lee  29:44 I think those things like those meetings with Medtronic or, or Dexcom, early on. I mean, I remember sitting in Kevin Sayers office at Dexcom and I was there for a completely other reason. I was there on behalf of Diabetes Hands Foundation said and I just like went off about night prayer. But those conversations gave us a really like I want to recognize my privilege in that to be able to be in a position to go sit with leadership at these big diabetes device companies. But let us see that there was a way to bring the change we were doing outside. I don't want to use the word infiltrate because that sounds   to infuse what industry was trying to do with community perspective and patient perspective and and the change that we knew was possible. And that resulted in both of us for huge career changes.   Stacey Simms  30:43 And we will get to that for sure. Because it's fascinating when you mentioned and you know, we're doing a lot of name dropping here. And if you're if you're new to this and you've listened this far, I promise. I will be putting a lot of notes on the episode homepage and you can go back and listen to other episodes, but there's a lot of names that have Gone By. And a lot of names that you mentioned are people who either founded or were instrumental in the founding of newer independent companies that came out of at least as I see it, this DIY wave that happened in the mid 2010, that you all are talking about. And now you both, you know, you work with these companies and for these companies, but I want to continue this the scalability, as you mentioned, because it's remarkable that even as all those companies, I mean, Big Foot tide pool, you know, even as these companies came out of this, you're still servicing all these, and I'll call us lay people. I mean, I, you know, most of the people who were early adopters of Nightscout or things like that seem to have some kind of engineering background or something that helps software makes sense. But then the floodgates opened, and it was just easy for people or easier than it seemed for people to do that. Kevin, was there a point that you kind of remember looking at this and thinking, you don't have to be an engineer.   Kevin Lee  31:59 That's actually part of the reason why I continue to contribute with Nightscout and in the early days, we decided we were going to go ahead and launch on the Play Store. So we set up an account. And you know, instead of having to go out download the source code, compile it, we distributed it is via the channel that users were used to receiving their their app from. Another thing that we introduced was the barcode scanning. So what we found out was set up of the app was a little more complex than it needed to be. And so we introduced the the concept of barcode scanning to set that up,   Melissa Lee  32:42 which now exists in the commercial like every time you start a new transmitter on a Dexcom system today, you scan a barcode on the side of the box. Kevin did that. I remember, I'm not claiming but next time did not develop that on their own. I am just claiming Hey, we.. yes.   Unknown Speaker  32:59 out Yeah.   Stacey Simms  33:02 Yeah, that's wild. I did. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Because now that's, of course, that's how we do it. And Melissa, I know I'm kind of jumping around here, but I have so many questions. I wanted to ask you earlier. What was it like for you? At this time? You said, Well, I just provided the data. I mean, what was it like for you during this time other than, you know, just popping in and saying, Hey, honey, how were the phone calls going? It had just been exciting and a little nerve racking for you. What was it like,   Melissa Lee  33:30 by my count, and again, Not that it matters? I think I was the first spouse to be followed.   Sounds creepy, doesn't it? I was the first CGM stocks 4000. Now, um, but one of the things, it did a few things for me, and I'll never forget one day I was in the kitchen and I've got babies and toddler and lay like it had just been a day right when you're a young mom, and you've got Little ones and it has just been a day and Kevin walks in and he said, and you've had a really hard day and I just looked at him like, Are you an idiot? Yes.   And I was like, What are you talking about? And he was like your numbers. Oh, and I just looked at him and I didn't realize I just looked at him and he said, this is how every day is, isn't it? And like I still get chills thinking about it Stacey I like it was the first time that anybody outside of me or another person with diabetes looked at me and said, I see you this is hard. And I didn't even know like I probably said yes, you idiot I've had a hard day   Unknown Speaker  34:46 I doubt it.   Kevin Lee  34:48 I had worked on some some code to make Nightscout available via personal assistance. Think the Alexa and Google Home and, and other things. And while I was experimenting and testing it, it became very clear that I was not allowed to ask what what those values were.   Melissa Lee  35:14 He was like, it’ll will be so handy. And if you're in the middle of cooking and you've got like, you know, stuff on your hands, you can just ask it. But like, what you don't do is you know, your wife snaps at you. And you say, Alexa, what's her blood sugar right now? Like, that is not what you do. So now the story I was going to tell Oh, Stacey, you're gonna love this one. So this is like early 2015. And I am the Interim Executive of a nonprofit and I'm representing patients at this endocrinologist a meeting, and I'm alone in a hotel, and I had been out with all these endocrinologists and we've had tacos at a bar and I have no idea what my glucose was, but I had calibrated my CGM with probably tacos all over my hands. I go to bed. Well, this poor man, I'm in Nashville. He's in Dallas. This poor man is getting   Kevin Lee  36:09 the blood sugar was reading his 39. Yes, for those who don't know, is the world. The CGM can read anything below that he registered   Melissa Lee  36:19 as low. I have my phone on silent because I've been out with all these professionals. So he had called me 18 times. It didn't go through Sunday night disturb so far in two hours reading, like a 39. So hotel security burst into my room. Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Lee, are you okay? Do we need to call an ambulance, this string of expletives that came out of my mouth? I will not repeat on this good family show. But I was so mad and you know, I'm calling him and I'm like, I'm like 130 right now. Fine. by that same token, I have lots of like really lovely stories where You know, I'm alone in a hotel in New Jersey, and he wakes me up in the middle of the night to say, you know, wake up and eat something, honey. So, yes, there is a good story, but I must prefer the story where he had security break into my room. Oh, my God over over what nights? That was it. So, you know, but to your question, we really were on the very bleeding edge of understanding things that you actually already deal with, with your son today and that people deal with today in terms of how will we actually establish boundaries on how much of my data you get to react to and for all the times that it is a benefit? Where are the times where it's like, no, I actually have to cut you off. We're now like seven years into him following my data. And so in some ways, I think we both see where people will get to when following data is the norm you know, should it ever scale by Live in terms of now, he doesn't look at my data all the time. Now he knows when to respond when it weren't so good. But it made me feel understood. It also made me feel a lot safer to know that just have somebody else watching my own back. I'll be celebrating 30 years with type one this year and celebrating is, you know, you've been   away there. But like to know that like somebody else is just there to pick up a little bit of slack you have for someone like where you are, it can be hard because I know when teams don't always appreciate or show their appreciation in the same way. But there is an appreciation for the fact that that you're there to pick up a little bit of slack just as much as there is resentment and issues with boundaries. And in times when they really need to just shut your assets off. And so I feel like we're just a little bit further down that road in some ways, you know, we'll let you know when we have it all figured out. But Exactly.   And what's right for us as a couple is not necessarily going to be right. For every couple, you know, there are couples that really feel like, no, my data is mine. And I don't trust you not to react to it in a way that's going to make diabetes any harder for me. And I think that that's what we 100% have, that I'm very fortunate to have is that I trust Kevin, to react to my data, the way that I'm comfortable with him reacting to my data.   Stacey Simms  39:33 So both of you, through this process wound up not only having two kids, but you made big job changes. And you now both work in the diabetes sphere. And I hope you don't mind I'd really like to talk about that a little bit. Because I mean, you mentioned the beginning. Listen, you're a music teacher. And you're right, your background, your music professional. You are Bigfoot for a couple years and now you are a tight pool and you're basically I'm going to get a But you're helping tide pool so that they can better train people and kind of explain to healthcare professionals and the public to kind of I look at that as translating, is that sort of what you're doing there?   Melissa Lee  40:12 Yes or no. So for instance, I know your family has just started with a new piece of diabetes technology. There were certain training modules that were there to support you. There's certain learning materials that were provided to your child's doctor so that they understood what they were prescribing. There's a user guide that comes with the stuff that you use in your family today, if you're buying things from companies off the shelf, and what the DIY community when we're talking about scalability, and how important that is to each of us having a knee accessibility, scalability availability like these important, how do we bring this to people in a way that they will actually be able to access tide pool announced about a year ago that they were going to take one of the DIY, automated insulin dosing systems and actually bring it through FDA review. Part of that is it has to have the kind of onboarding and support materials that your insulin pump he buys a medical pump and has today. So I am leading the development of all of those materials for both the clinics and the doctors, as well as for the end user to learn the system.   Stacey Simms  41:30 And Kevin, you're still a big foot. So you're a principal engineer there. What excites you about what you're doing there? Is it again about the accessibility because I know you know, Bigfoot is not yet to market but people are very excited about it.   Kevin Lee  41:41 Yeah. Accessibility is one of the large parts and reliability going through the DIY stuff. It's happening at an incredible pace change is happening there and things break things don't always go the way that you intended. There has to be balance there somewhere? Well, you have to have services. I mean, look at what happened recently with server outages and different companies, you have to be prepared for how am I going to support this time, I'm going to keep it running, you know, whatever the it is, it's that the reliability, we're all we're all human, that's humans behind the scenes, making the the changes and improvements that we rely on. So how do we do that safely and effectively as possible to minimize the impact and continue to increase the value to the user?   Stacey Simms  42:37 This might be a very dumb question. But Kevin, let me ask you, Melissa mentioned the the new software that we're using, and she's talking about control IQ from tandem, which is the software that we've got now. And there are other commercial quote solutions. There's other commercial systems coming out when you look back at all the stuff that the DIY community did, and is continuing to do. Do you feel like you guys really, really pushed it along? I mean, I gotta tell you and I know nothing. And I never even used Nightscout and people laugh at me. But I think we would never be close to where we are commercially. Does that add up to you?   Kevin Lee  43:12 Yeah, it adds up. It's not for everyone. You know, it is bleeding edge, the community, in a lot of ways drives industry.   Stacey Simms  43:21 You I'm not asking you to say specifically without this wouldn't have that. But it just seems to me that we would have gotten there eventually. But I don't know that the people behind Knight Scott and so much of the other things you've mentioned, really either got into industry and help push things along or helps with the FDA. You know, is it as kind of an outsider on this. Can you speak to whether that's true?   Kevin Lee  43:44 Yeah, absolutely. I think that it had you I mean, that's the nature of competition. There was an unmet need in the community and the unmet need was was fulfilled.   Melissa Lee  43:55 Well, what I would say is industry needs to see that something viability as an idea and so, I firmly believe that many of these things were floating around in companies as potential developments in the pipeline. What the community did with our DIY efforts is say, we are so desperate to this thing, we will just build it ourselves if you can't deliver. And so I think it helps prioritize like I've seen almost every company in the industry actually skip over other things that were in their pipeline to get to these things and reprioritize their own product roadmap to try to deliver. And I don't think it's, I it's not in a Oh, we better get this or the community is going to do it themselves way. It's a, okay, this is a real need, and we should, we should focus our resources on this. A lot of ways it's a playground for industry to concepts, live and die much more quickly in the DIY community than they do and it allows you to to iterate faster and find out what does and doesn't work, open source communities have existed outside of diabetes, obviously, it's a and throughout the last few decades, we've seen what happens in the open source world actually drive change in the industries to which they're associated. And so I think there are analogies to this in terms of like, what happens in the software industry, with personal computing with consumer electronics, so I don't, I don't find it at all odd or ridiculous to say that the DIY community and diabetes has actually resulted in change within industry. I mean, if only if, like you pointed out so many of those names, but we, you know, we're dropping them because we want to see people recognized for their extraordinary contributions, right. But all of those people, many of them have gone on to found companies, invent new things, join other companies. What's your Modeling about open source communities, regardless of field or genre or whatever is that you see that you see new people roll in with new ideas and lay new work on the foundations of code that were left behind and innovate and continue to innovate. And so we will see the DIY community around forever, they will continue to innovate. And we will also see many of those innovators move on into the industries in which they're working. This is a personal choice that they have to make them they'll go through the same decisions that we did. And not everybody. Well, I mean, Dana lewis is not associated with the company. We're not saying that that's an inevitability, right? But it's pretty common. You have to be pretty geeky probably to know of other open source communities. And I'm, you know, Kevin is way more well versed to speak about that, but in the way of fan   Stacey Simms  46:56 before I let you go, this all started because you wanted have kids, right? This this is the timeline that you set out from your weight the beginning here, and your kids now they're both in grade school, your daughter's 10, your son is eight. I'm curious, do they know their part in this story? Because it's not an exaggeration to say, and I'll say for you, it's not an exaggeration to say that you wanting to have kids sparked action in Kevin, that, frankly, has helped thousands of people. I know you didn't do it alone. I know. I know. I know. But your kids know the part that they played   Melissa Lee  47:31 to a degree like they know that we help people with diabetes. And they take that really seriously. As a matter of fact, when I was changing roles from my role at Bigfoot to my role at tide pool, my daughter's first question was like, but you'll still be helping people with diabetes, like will Bigfoot still be able to help people with diabetes like yes, it's all it's all good. We're all good. We're all still helping people with diabetes and they've grown up with these things in the sense that we love to tell the story of when our son was about three years old and he would hear the Nightscout song that would was basically the alert that would play. And he knew that when I was low, there was a bag of sour ball candy on the top shelf of the pantry that came down. So he would hear that sound that Nightscout song and that song was sour balls to him and he was “sour balls sour balls!” he  was all in or maybe like two I mean, he was little It was too and so like it became the sour balls song, right? You know, the other day he heard the Nightscout will song play and he said mom who undid that song and I posted something to Facebook. Well basically lane desborough and better that song or found it. I wrote something about like I just set my son down. I said, let me tell you the story of our people and how we came to the valley of silicon you know, which is of course not the way I said it to an eight year old but as you know amusing myself But essentially, you know, there is some of these folks that they literally do talk about uncle lane and Uncle Manny and Uncle Ben and like my daughter thinks she has a lot of uncles. But, you know, so they know that we've helped a great many people. And as they as they get older, and we can sort of expound on that, then I think, well, let's be honest, they won't care.   For a while, right? teenagers will be like we shut up about, oh, they'll care.   Unknown Speaker  49:30 They just want to know they care.   Melissa Lee  49:34 Someday, they'll appreciate it, and a different way, but that's what they know. Now,   Stacey Simms  49:40 Kevin, you also said this was about your commute, making sure Melissa was safe. Knowing that Melissa is a very strong and independent woman. Do you feel like she's safe? Did that check that box for you all this hard work?   Kevin Lee  49:53 Yeah, absolutely. This is kind of something that she went into earlier, but I really view the monitor. That I've done and the work that I've done is really just augmenting and trying to simplify and make her life easier. We first started dating, I actually told her that you will never find somebody work harder at being lazy than than me. And, you know, that was just the testament of I wanted to automate all the things that are just repetitive and predictable and easily managed to try to get that out of the way. And that comes from the background of operations and managing online sites. Being able to automate those those aspects have helped me feel like it's more safe. And then you know, other times like with with monitoring, it's great to be able to just see that you know, she's about to go out for a walk and then I happened to look over at Nightscout see how much insulin she has on board and where she is and say, you might want to run a temp basal. So it's just there. To try to augment and help her navigate it. And so yeah, it does give me a sense that she's safer because of this. Melissa Yeah, that's right. I got really mad at him the other day, he was right. I was like, whatever. And I left the house and I went massively low. I was walking the kids to school. I was like, Yeah, well, fine. So you know, there's that two parents completely unfamiliar to you. And   Stacey Simms  51:21 it sounds more like my marriage actually diabetes or not. That's just a component of marriage. Yeah, she was right again. Oh, oh, well, you know, thank you so much for spending so much time with me. I love your story. I just think that there are just amazing people that I hate have diabetes. But I'm glad if you had to that you've done so much for so many others who have it as well. And I really appreciate you spending some time to tell us these things from years ago now because they're really are important as we move forward. So thanks for being with me.   Melissa Lee  51:56 Thank you so much for being interested in the story and for help. Others here are cranky, Stan.   Unknown Speaker  52:08 You're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  52:14 Much More information at Diabetes connections.com you can always click on the episode page and find out more transcript is there as well. I just adore them. I know the interview went longer than usual, but I couldn't help myself. And as I said in Episode 300, when I looked back on 300 episodes, Melissa really helped change my place in the diabetes community by inviting me to speak at master lab in 2015. That really did change how I felt about where I want it to be helped me find and focus my voice. I really can't overstate that enough. So thanks Melissa, for doing that. And again, lots of information went by very quickly let them name dropping there in a good way. And I promise I will keep on the Nightscout crew. I may ask some of you as you listen to lean on your friends, I'm not going to mention any names here. But people that I have reached out to, and they're the usual suspects. If you search, we are not waiting, or Nightscout on the website, you'll see some big omissions. So I'll talk more about that on social media, we'll get them as a community. Maybe it's just me, you know, who's fascinated by this. But I do think it's a very important part of our history that we need to document because in a few more years, many of the solutions that people like Kevin were working on are going to be all commercial and all FDA approved. And isn't that wonderful, but I don't want to forget what happened. And I think it'll be great to look back. Okay, enough about that. I got Tell me something good coming up in just a moment. And then stay tuned. Later, I'm going to tell you another change we made to how we use control IQ with Benny, but first diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. And it is really hard to think of something that has changed our diabetes management as much as the Dexcom share and follow apps. I mean, what really amazed me we started it when Benny was about nine years old, the decks calm and we got shareable. little less than two years later, and the most immediate change was how it helped us talk less about diabetes. And boy did that come just in time for us because that's the wonderful thing about share and follow as a caregiver, parent, spouse, whatever, you can help the person with diabetes managed in the way that works for your individual situation, and going into those tween and teen years. It sounds counterintuitive, but being able to talk about diabetes less what's your number? Did you check what's your number? You know, so helpful. Internet connectivity is required to access Dexcom follow separate follow app required learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Dexcom logo.   I am cheating a little bit this week for Tell me something good because while I usually read you listener submissions, I saw this on beyond type ones Facebook page, and I just had to share they did a whole post about people with type one getting married and they wanted Hear the wedding stories. So they started out with a a big Congrats, by the way to Kelsey, her husband Derek, and this adorable picture of them. They're both low at their wedding and they're sipping some juice boxes. And Kelsey is part of the beyond type one Leadership Council. So congratulations to you both. It's a really adorable picture. I'm gonna link up the whole Facebook thread because people share stories like you know, I had my pump tucked into my bra and I didn't think I needed during the wedding or I was a bridesmaid and I had it there and I had to reach in, um, you know, other people who went low trying on wedding dresses. I mean, I remember this. So this person writes, I went low in David's bridal trying on wedding dresses. It's a lot more physical than you think getting in and out of dresses and slips, hot lights and just emotions. My mom had to run across the street and grab a Snickers. I was standing in the doorway of the fitting room and inhaling a Snickers, praying I didn't get any on the clothes, which just added an extra level of stress. I remember a Polish ties into the employee helping me and he was like I don't even worry about it. And he stayed with me to make sure I was okay. Another woman writes my mom came up to me right before we were set to walk into the reception. She told me she had hidden a juice under our sweetheart table in case I went low. I've been diabetic 30 years and my mom still carry snacks for me in her purse. Sure enough, right after dinner, I ended up needing it. And the last one here, being excited, nervous and unable to sit still. I did a long and intense bike ride prior to my evening wedding. Luckily we had a chocolate fountain at our reception and I spent a large chunk of the night at or near it, and this goes on and on. So what a wonderful thread congratulations to everybody who is talking about their weddings and their their wonderful stories of support. And the humor that's on display here is amazing. So I will link that up. You can go and read there's there's dozens of comments. If you've got a story like this Hey, that's what Tell me something good is for send me your your stories, your milestones, your diversities, your good stuff, you know anything from the healthcare heroes in our community. With cute who put his first inset in to a person celebrating 70 years with type one I post on social media just look for those threads. Or you can always email me Stacey at Diabetes connections.com. Before I let you go, I had promised to share the other change we made to control IQ. In addition to eliminating the long acting basal that we had used, you know, untethered for almost two years, we decided recently to completely turn off sleep mode. I know a lot of you enjoy sleep mode 24 seven, as we said back in our episode, gosh, in late December, when control IQ was approved in the studies, they called you folks sleeping beauties, because you enjoy that 24 seven sleep mode. But I found that since school has ended, and we're trying to figure out what to do with Benny for the summer, there is nothing really that's keeping him on a regular sleep schedule, and it's gotten to the point where he is now so nocturnal, and I'm hearing this about a lot of my friends with teenagers. Maybe I sound like a tear. Parents go to bed at like four or five, six o'clock in the morning. I walked into his room at eight o'clock in the morning the other day, I wanted to ask him a question. I was like, I gotta wake him up and he was awake can come to sleep yet. You know, it boggles my mind. It's all topsy turvy. And we'll get back into a routine at some point, but I'm not really willing to make a big fuss about it. He's key is keeping busy overnight. I guess his friends are up, I don't know. But anyway, the point is, he's eating it really weird hours. And when he was in sleep mode, we noticed that it wasn't helping as much right because it doesn't bolus you in sleep mode. It only adjusts Faisal. So if you under bolus for his you know, Pad Thai at two in the morning, it wasn't helping out and true story. I asked him about that. Like, what's this line? And what happened overnight here, were you sleeping He's like, No, I was in the kitchen eating leftover Thai food. So we decided that his numbers during the the quote, day when he was sleeping, we're hovering right around 90, maybe a 110. I mean, it was very in range, right? No need to mess with that. So I didn't think we needed to add sleep mode. And I did want to predict when he would actually be sleeping. So we just turned it off. And that has made a big difference too. So I guess the bottom line is figure out what works for you for your individual situation, the weirdo wacko situation, if it's us, but you know, use this technology to benefit you, whatever way that is, if it's sleep mode right now, 24 seven, if it's no sleep mode, it's exercise mood all the time. And it'll be so fascinating to see. And this ties back into the DIY movement, right? It'll be great to see the flexibility that we will get in the next couple of years because, you know, Medtronic had a tie a higher target range, because they were first with the hybrid closed loop. tandem has a lower one Omni pod, we'll have a more flexible target, you can set your own target when they come out with horizon and of course, tandem and everybody else is going to be moving to that direction as well. And it just keeps getting better. But it gets better because people like Melissa and Kevin Lee pushed and pushed and without these folks, and there's so many of them, of course, right who said we can do it better, we would not be where we are. I truly believe that technology companies would be five or six years behind and if you're new To the show new to the community and you're excited about, you know, control IQ or horizon or whatever you're using. Or maybe you're using, you know, loop off label with Omni pod, I would urge you to go back and check out our earlier episodes from 2015 and 2016. And learn about the really early days of the community, obviously, by 2015. We're talking about things that happened in the early 2000s. You know, I don't want you to misunderstand that. That happened in 2015. But you know what I mean, okay, obligatory book commercial. And if you've listened this long, you maybe you own a copy of the world's worst diabetes mom, if you own it and love it, do me a favor post about it. The best way to word of mouth about the podcast and the book is always if you could tell a friend post in a diabetes group post on your own Facebook page, you know, I love this book. It's on Amazon, highly recommend it. If you've read it, and you don't like it. Forget that, you know, you know, just recycle the book. It's thanks as always, to my editor, john Buchanan's from audio editing solutions. And thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourself.   Unknown Speaker  1:01:09 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media.   Unknown Speaker  1:01:13 All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged

James:  Hey, audience, and listeners this is James Kandasamy with Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing podcast. Today I have an awesome guest and we're going to be flying very high with this guest. His name is Lane Beene; Lane is an F16 pilot who has been doing multifamily syndication and recently has been doing development. He owns almost 700 units in DFW area and also there's another, like out of that, another 200 plus units in the Longview, Texas which is a tertiary market. So we're going to go a bit more detailed into that as well. He has been recently working on a hot development project near Austin almost 300 units with a $15 million equity raise and a total valuation of the project of almost $52 million. Hey Lane, welcome to the show. Lane: Thank you so much, James, for having me on the show this afternoon, I'm excited to share with your audience and share with other up and coming real estate investors on what I've learned so that they can become a better millionaire and they can get to their financial goals safer and more quickly than I was able to do. James: Yeah. Yeah. We always want to share. I mean, real estate investors are really interesting people. This is one profession where people like to share how they come up in their business. I'm not sure why or maybe we are just within the circle of people who like to share. Maybe there are a lot of people who don't share but in general, I've seen like a lot of my friends in my circle we like to share, and we have all these podcasts, which gives all that information. So it's very, very, very interesting just investment asset class. So tell me about; you are doing, I mean F16 is for me from I can see from the ground, it flies very fast. It's super sophisticated. Do you know the rough estimate of a cost of a F16? Lane: It's a lot; we'll see syndication for sure. James: Does it go to billions or still in the millions? Lane: Me and you and our whole network of investors would probably have to get a good debt, we would have to get a good financing to make it right. I think James, I think that the basic model is right around $40 million and then the the luxury apartment F16 is probably $45 million or more so that's for one and you've got to have about 24 units of that. So 24, times 30 is a pretty big tax liability. So that's kind of what it is. James: So to fly a plane, I presume to fly a plane, I wouldn't say simple. I mean, it's already complicated; to apply an F16 must be more complicated and so like in general, how many knobs do you have to turn to make it fly? How many controls do you have? Lane: Tough question there to answer James... James: Or is it all automatic? Lane: But I'd say it's like this, imagine you're doing brain surgery while you're juggling four bowling pins. That's sometimes what it's like and then other times it's like, imagine watching your kid play the violin at a recital, it's so boring and you're just trying to keep yourself awake. Then other times it's almost impossible brain surgery while juggling bowling pins. So between those two extremes, the number of buttons and the number of switches and the number of displays you have to watch varies greatly. James: You are still flying right now. I mean, you're not a retired person, you're still flying. I mean, is it because you enjoy it flying? Lane: James, I've got the best job ever. And flying is like riding, and some of your audience I know is going to love this and some will probably will hate it, but it's like riding a roller coaster with no rails. I grew up in Fort worth in North Texas, and there's a big amusement park here in the area where I live and it's called six flags and I know a lot of people have probably been to six flags before, but I remember as a kid, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade there was a roller coaster that we would ride and it took four or five minutes to ride and then they'd let you off. On certain times of the summer, when it was like a day week there was no line. So you could sprint from the exit back around through the line and then get back in line and it would take you about two minutes to race from the exit of the roller coaster back to the end and I think I rode it 42 times without not stopping. It's so much fun. James: That's very interesting analogy. Lane: So now flying an F16 is like an adult roller coaster, but there are no rails and there is no line.  James: And it can fly because no one is up there. I mean, you probably have some, you say it's a wide sky and open sky and you can fly, it's very interesting. Throughout your career, I mean, throughout your life, you became an F16 pilot, at what point did this aha moment of the real estate come in at what point from real estate to multifamily came in? Lane: James, that's a great question. Here is a short story or a short answer to a very long story. I was in the air force and I was in our squadron lounge drinking coffee on September 11th and somebody said, well, is an accident. And we went in to watch television and there was; that was when the first aircraft hit the world trade centers and then not too long after that, the second aircraft hit the world trade centers. I remember thinking what was going on here? No one really knew at the time and one of the senior pilots that was a pilot for American Airlines was right beside me and he said, that's it and I looked at him and I said, what do you mean that's it? And he said, the economy, the airlines, the travel industry is over. James: I mean, even after the first plane hit? Lane: Almost immediately and I think it was 10:30 here and about 11 o'clock he said, that's it. And I said, well, what do you mean that's it? That's not it because maybe you don't understand, but Lane Bean is going to become a commercial airline pilot and make a half million dollars in work one time a year. So you can't just stop that. That was my goal. And he's like, no, that's it and sure enough, that was, the economy changed forever. So I went into a period of what I was trying to do was totally gone. I was going to be, my career was going to transition from the air force pilot to commercial aviation, to be an American Airlines, Delta pilot, or United pilot that didn't work out because for the next 10 years, those companies stopped hiring pilots. So I went into a tailspin thinking, what am I going to do now? So what I did was I was always very interested in making repairs. I liked doing house, I liked doing carpentry work, working with wood, working with my projects on my own house and improving them. So in my neighborhood, and this is right around 2000, so 20 years ago; and so in my neighborhood, there was a vacant house that had been vacant for six or eight months and I thought, well, if I can improve my own house and make it better, why don't I try to buy this one and rent it out and make it better? And so I did.  After learning that process, I thought, well, this isn't that hard, bought another one, bought another one, bought another one, bought another one, bought another one and eventually I had 10 single family properties buy, rent, renovate, improve it and then hold it. But then 2008 came where you could no longer continually advantageously finance these houses because I had too many. and they said, well, now you have to either one, put a very large, you can't get favorable financing on single families at this rate, or you have to go to commercial and so that's when I went and transitioned to commercial, which is for your audience. I know they know, but that is multifamily, five plus units and that's what started my career in multifamily.  James: Very interesting because I did the same, I went up like 10 properties and I bought one more 11 and I was thinking, I have to go to commercial loan because they didn't want to do it and that's where I have to jump the multifamily. Because he just very hard to do a single families in terms of scaling up and all that. So cool. I mean, and how did you build up this 700 units in DFW and Longview? Can you quickly tell us what's your timeline in terms of moving from 10 single families, what was your first purchase in multifamily and going to 700? Lane: Some really great lessons here to share with your audience if they are in the process of maybe operating or syndicating their own deals. I had this mentality and I was pretty good at single family, I had 10 of them and they were all doing really well and I didn't need to sell them or anything, but I had the attitude of DIY because as a single family operator, you have to DIY, do it yourself. That's what you have to do because there's just not that much revenue to hire professionals; you can, but it's more difficult. I took this attitude of DIY, I'm going to find it, find a multifamily property. I'm going to finance it myself, or very little of partners. I'm going to acquire it. I'm going to manage it myself. And let me tell you for everybody listening, listen very carefully to what I'm about to say, DIY doesn't work in multifamily. You have to partner with a good team.  Now, the question you asked me was not DIY, the question you asked me was how did I get started on my timeline? I'm mentioning that I had a do it yourself mentality and I took that mentality into multifamily syndication or operations for two straight years. It was a complete discouragement because I had no results or progress whatsoever because I wasn't reaching out to other professionals and utilizing their skill sets. I was trying to develop my own skillset. And so for two years, I made no progress whatsoever. Then I finally learned that in the multifamily community, because the projects are bigger, you have to develop a team. Once I developed that team, I was able to accelerate and get properties and acquire assets and manage them correctly and safe and securely much more quickly and much more efficiently and productive. So that's the timeline. Two years of complete strikeout, and then starting at month 24, when I changed and stopped trying to do it myself and started trying to partner with other professionals and experts in the field, my results sky rocketed. James: What was the first person that you think was the team member that you wanted and who the other person that you think is the most crucial team member? Lane: Somebody just like James or somebody, that's has Achieved Investment coaching. Somebody that can hold your hand or can just be there to help you. I tell this to everybody, I say, when you hire someone smarter than you, you show that you're smarter than them. And so my advice is not to egotistically brag, is to surround yourself with very smart people and the very first person you need is a coach or a mentor or an advisor that's already successfully walked that path. They don't have to be a hundred years of experience, but they need to have some experience where they can say, hey, Lane, James, hey, don't do that. I would recommend you direct your efforts here. Let me connect you with my friend who is a broker, let me connect you with my friend who's a commercial insurance specialist. And then that's how you start building these networks. That's how you build your team. But the answer to your question clearly is find an advisor or coach or mentor or partner that has experience. That's who I would put on my team first.  James: It's very surprising, not say surprising, it's sometimes when you are coming from a different world, like you came from the airline industry and I'm sure it's a very complicated world. I came from being an engineer and it's complicated world, but we are all within our own world. Sometimes we think this is the world. This is how everybody should be reacting. This is the best that everyone can do. But suddenly when you go out of your network and meet another person, which come from completely different circle and you start talking to them and they tell you things that you have never heard before, then you realize, okay, your circle is too small. So, I think that's very important for you to go and listen to other people who are, as you say, that was smarter, who has done it is very important because people who have more than thousand units for them buying 50 units is not a big deal. They already done it, they can tell you all the shortcuts and commercial is no joke. It's not like single family. You can make mistake and get away with it, commercial is multi-million dollar deals. If you're syndicating it's worst because now you have a lot of passive investors money in it too. You don't want to make mistakes.  So you're absolutely right, just find people who are willing to share as we start in this podcast in the beginning, real estate is an area of investment where people are willing to share. If you go to biggerpockets.com, you open a free account and you ask one question, that's like a hundred people answering you. So can you do that in stocks? I mean, first of all, stocks is very hard to do because you don't have control itself. No one knows what's happening in the management. If Elon Musk smokes weed then the share goes down. You can't ask question, will the price go down if Elon Musk smokes weed. No one knows. . But in real estate you can be more predictable. Same thing with bonds. I mean, it's an investment asset class, but not many people knows about it. For me, it's very highly  secretive investment method. It sounds very simple, but it's a much bigger than that, bonds is huge. I mean, even same thing with Bitcoin and crypto, all that is you buy by chance. You do not know what's happening behind it. They say there's some server running behind it and all that, but real estate is like, you can make sense out of it. I say, there's a lot of people who are willing to share for free. Go to Facebook groups, go to meet ups.  The problem I see is people really do not want to take action to do it. So that's good. It's very interesting on how did you find out and how did you move towards that stage and you have 700 units right now and you're going to tell them, but before we go into development and the details of that. So you own three or 500 units, maybe four to 500 units in DFW area, which is a major core city, it a business hub, it's a city by itself and you have like 242 units in Longview, Texas. So that's more of a tertiary market. Can you describe, why did you invest in a tertiary market compared to currently focusing on DFW and what are the differences you see between this primary market and the tertiary market, or I mean the city market and the tertiary market? Lane: Well, for your audience, James, I know they're looking probably in different States and areas and regions and you have a national representation and so market selection, I have a four pillar funnel and I call these the four principles of real estate investing. This funnel real quickly is the very first one is strategy; so you have to have a clearly defined strategy. The second is a team; you have to have a professional team. The third of funnel and this is sequential, is market selection. Then the fourth is property identification or criteria. A lot of people revert or invert that funnel and they begin to immediately look at property and then they maybe jumped to strategy and then they jump around and I believe that's wrong way. I believe you have to start in the order and the sequence that I talked about. So before I ever looked at any property, whether it's a good or bad property, or how big or small it is, you want to make sure you evaluate the market. So what you asked me was, you said, why would you want to go to a secondary or tertiary market or non-primary market? Why is that better or worse or advantageous or disadvantageous?  The reason is because in the area where I invest and I'm familiar with the primary markets were getting overheated, and what do I mean by that? They were being priced to perfection. In other words, they were being priced so highly, there was no margin for error, or there was no attraction in the return because the markets and the amount of money that was going into these was driving the competition to the point where it had to literally be perfect. And the pricing was priced to perfection is what I turned to termed it. There was really very little return to be had in this market with any level of risk mitigation. In other words, if the rents didn't just accelerate like a rocket ship, you weren't going to be able to make the return that you expected; or if expenses didn't flat line like you want them to, or taxes or insurance went up, which it did substantially then your perfect pricing model was in jeopardy. That is exactly what you are seeing now in the primary markets, because expenses have continued to rise, but because of COVID the revenues and the revenue increase has flat lined. So a lot of these assets that are in primary markets that has suffered from perfect pricing, they're going to be in trouble because they will not make their rent growth projections. So the answer to your question, let me summarize in ten seconds is this, the secondary markets and the tertiary markets have not suffered as greatly from what I coin perfect pricing as the primary markets have in Texas. James: Oh, okay. That's interesting because I didn't talk to anyone recently about tertiary market and secondary market and how is it? What you're seeing is that market seems to be performing better compared to the primary market, because primary market is basically everybody overpaid, I guess, because it's just so much competition and the brokers are more advanced and there are so many betas and best and final, and you end up paying the highest price end of the day and you're right, you're basically depending on around growth and usually the County are more aggressive as well in terms of a tax appraisals. So, okay, very interesting. Very interesting. So let's go; I can't hear you Lane. Lane: I would add to that. So you do have to understand though, there are differences in the secondary market and there are differences in the tertiary market and that's why I said first strategy, because you may not be able to execute the same strategy in the Austin downtown area that you would execute in the outer lying areas of Austin, even though it's the same market, the sub-market may be different. So it's just important that you understand and remember I said that funnel, or the four pillars have a strategy,  have a team that can execute the strategy and then identify what market would be the best or sub-market and then at the very end of that notice, that's when I said project specific. This is a 1985, 200 units, garden style but I've already answered the top three questions and that's given me an 80% green light, yellow light or red light. If it's red, don't even worry about looking there for projects and if it's yellow, that's where you may have a little bit of consulting with your coach or consulting with your advisor, mentor. Should I pursue this, is the opportunity right? And in the East Texas market, the one that you're describing, we found a yellow light with a good project, and we were able to execute correctly. James: So is turning around a multifamily investment deal more complicated than F16? The more complicated part of the F16 or...? Lane: The real estate part is easy but the personal part is harder. James: Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. So let's go to your development. So why did you start, I mean, after you have this 700 units you started working on this 300 units development in Austin, mainly Austin. So why did you take that decision and can you walk or the rational?  Lane: Sure. And so James, your audience is listening today for one primary reason, as we span back and ask, what value can I add to your audience? What value can you add? Why are they really listening? I believe that most of them would say we're listening because we want to use the vehicle of multifamily real estate to reach our financial goals. And so the underlying question is I want to become, I want to reach my financial goals, that's pretty much what people want to do. They want to do that and then they feel like multifamily investing or working with James and his group is going to be the best, safest way. So I believe that's what everybody is trying to do. I feel the same way. So the very first thing is, like I already mentioned strategy and as we were looking in 2018 and mispricing to execute our strategy became so thin that we realized, I don't think I can really do this strategy anymore because I can't find a good acquisition price that gives me enough margin for error and at the same time an attractive investment that I can execute a value add strategy, which was what I was trying to do. We looked at at about that same time, the tax incentive job tax bill of 2017 came out and it really advantaged redeployment or recapitalization of capital gains and that was the opportunity. It created opportunity zones.  So if you were to reinvest capital gains into an opportunity zone project, it was extremely tax advantaged. And so we looked and we thought, boy, this is a great idea. It's kind of like a super 1031 exchange for your investors or your audience that don't know about that and I can explain that more detail if you'd like, but I said, let's look at all the opportunities zones and how can we pair opportunities on investment projects with what we do multifamily investing real estate and put those two things together because the two principles of key worth of building net worth are this one efficiently place your capital in a cash producing asset. So I'll say that again, because this is important to hear, efficiently place capital in a cash producing asset. Number two principle is execute that transaction in a tax advantaged event, if possible. So how could we do those together, development project with an opportunity zone? It's a one, two punch for success. James: So opportunity zone is crazy. I mean, I did cover opportunity zone with Scott Hendricks maybe three to four months ago, which is fascinating on how much a tax advantage that they would get. Did you get people trying to do a 10, I mean, not 1031, trying to move the capital gain from real estate only, or was it from stocks as well? Lane: Most of the people were already associated with real estate investing. And so it was an easy transition for them. However, that is not necessarily a requirement of opportunity zone. When you 1031 exchange, which I know your audience is familiar with, that's a like kind exchange. So real estate for real estate, business equipment for business equipment, you cannot sell your tractor at the farm and invest in real estate. You can't sell your art collection with a capital gain and invest that money into real estate. However, opportunities zones not required, it's a capital gain. So you can still Google stock at a capital gain, reinvest that capital gain into an opportunity zone and have tremendous tax advantages. James: Yeah, it's very interesting. So let's talk about how did you select this 300 unit development place. I mean, can you walk us through what was the process? So you decided I wanted to development, I want to do opportunity zone development. So how did you choose this side or did you look at nationwide and how did you come to this particular 300 unit site development? Lane: Yeah. So, James, again, what you're asking me is how do you select market? What adds value to a real estate market? And that's number three. I mean, that's one of the very first things you want to be able to identify. So there are three things, in my opinion, that establish consistent value in a real estate market. Number one, is demographic changes; are more people moving into that area or are more people moving out? An example, California, as you've read and you may be familiar with more than I am, a lot of people are exiting California because of taxes and other things, job loss and other areas. There are other parts of the country where they're experiencing an out migration of population. So that's a long established trend that doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen by this afternoon. That's a trend that is established over a long period of time. Some markets are having an inflow of people moving to the area. So we can get into all detailed analysis and data. But let me tell you this one example that anybody can understand, and this example last year had 21 million data points, 21 million. So that's a pretty big number. It's the number one way U-haul rentals. What city in the United States has the number one, is the top choice of one way rentals to this city, Houston, Texas and that area around that. So more people are moving to Houston, Texas, or that area around Texas, wherever than any other place in the country, according to U-haul truck rentals.  So the number one thing is demographics. Where are people moving? That's going to create a demand for housing, number two, job growth. Where are the jobs being developed? A lot of jobs are being lost in areas and in cities and in governments that are not favorable for government or job growth. California's one of them, high taxes, a lot of government regulation in Texas, low taxes and very favorable job regulations. So number two, job growth. Then number three is the supply and demand of housing in any one market or sub market. So those three things are the way I chose the market. I looked at the entire map of opportunity zone areas and they are identified by census tracks and then I said of all of these areas, which one has the most favorable of those three conditions and it's the Texas triangle, it's North, Texas, South westbound San Antonio and then eastbound to Houston and then back to North. So that triangle, or what I refer to as a Texas triangle, that area contains 85% of the Texas population and it contains the majority of jobs and anything invested in that area as all those three things that I've mentioned. James: Yeah. I mean, for the audience, if you guys want to know about what Lane is talking about, just Google, Texaplex there is a documentary which shows the Texas triangle and how much growth is happening in this triangle. I mean, if you look at when Texas had 50% of the job growth from 2009 to 2000 at that time I was 15,19, 18 by now. So job growth after the last crash happened in Texas. I think Texas is going to continue to grow, even though now we're in Covid and it's just so favorable. If you look at everywhere that Covid has affected, nothing is wrong with where it is being affected, it's just there is are some vulnerability to that market and Texas is one of the first state to open up. So we open up, we open for business.  So yeah, I mean that Texaplex area is really, really powerful. But how many sites did you see before choosing this one particular site in Austin? Lane: We looked at a lot, James and a lot of the opportunities zones, the federal government gave the authority to governors to say, here's the criteria you identify, whatever it is you want and a lot of those governors across the whole 50 States delegated that responsibility to state mayors or regional governor officials and some of them did a really good job of identifying areas that needed to redevelop and then some of them, I think, turn their homework in the last hour and they didn't do a very good job. So a lot of the opportunities zones that have been developed they don't have any financial or investment fundamentals that would make anybody want to invest there. So they're very challenged. A lot of the other ones were more creative in what they were trying to do, realizing that as you stimulate this one part of the city, the other parts of the city may benefit from that even though they may not be the most in need at this time and so we looked at a lot and we concluded that almost 80% were areas that had zero financial incentive or investment incentives. You just have to recognize that and then just move on. So we found ones that we had those three qualifying characteristics. James: So let's talk about the loan that you get in this development deal because I believe it's a hard loan. So tell us what the loan that you get in this double meaning, what are the advantages that you're seeing, or even a disadvantages that you've seen in this hard loan compared to your normal buying already built apartment complexes. Lane: So a development project has a lot more risk than just buying an existing project because if you buy an existing project and a management, the property management messes up, well, maybe you can fire them six months later and you can just rehire them in within a matter of month or two, they may be able to correct what was a problem and get you back on track. But if you hire a development where it is just dirt and they mess the foundation up, or they mess up something, they blow the budget. Six months later, you may have spent a whole lot of money and you have nothing to show for it. There is no income because there's nothing to rent. So it's a lot riskier and there's a lot more risk involved. Therefore the funding and the development costs, you're incurring a greater risk. Well, obviously the government recognizes the fact that we have to develop new housing for our growing population and we have to replace existing stock. The government through the HOD program, Housing Over Development has created some very financial terms and financing conditions to encourage guys like you, James, your audience members, and myself, to develop this new property, to meet the future needs of our country. The program that that we're under is called HUD221-D4. It's the development of new multifamily housing and it's the gold standard. It's the Cadillac of financing. We just closed our loan and it's a 40 year fully amortized loan fixed permanent and we got a 3.35% interest rate fixed for 40 years and it's permanent. So I'd never have to worry about it. So that's the advantage, the terms are almost impossible to beat.  James: What about the prepayment penalty?  Lane: So it's a 10 year prepayment penalty and this escalated down. So at 10 years it can be paid off, it's fully assumable and the the difficult part is it's just very difficult to get. There are a lot of qualifications for the sponsorship team, for the market, for the strategy for the project itself. There's a tremendous amount of oversight. And so it's very rigorous in that regard, but it has very, very advantageous benefits if it meets your strategy team, market and property and business model. James: So having, I think you're still in the early stage of development right? I don't think they even break ground yet, but would you do this again? Development compared to buying a deal that is reasonably priced, that's already building? Lane: Yes. And the reason that I would say yes to that, even though we're going to have two years of development, that is not cash flowing. The reason is because when you pair the right development opportunity with the tax advantages of an opportunity zone is what I call boom shakalaka. It's the one, two punch. So let me kind of give you some general ideas of the cost. Our project 320 units, we're building it at about the same price we can buy an existing class A project. So we're building and the price to purchase existing is roughly the same. Now in some markets that doesn't work because the cost to build is a lot more than the cost to buy. So you have to understand your financial model. Then now when I put that in, combine that with the opportunity zone tax benefits, we're expecting a three, or we're actually expecting a four X equity multiple. That means that for every dollar you give me at the end of this project, I'm going to give you back $4. So if you were to do that with an existing project that was not opportunities zone, you would pay a 20% capital gain on those $4 or whatever your tax bracket was. But for simplicity sake, let's say you were to pay 20%, this opportunity zone, if I give you back $4, you're cash is taxed $0. So immediately, without any appreciation or any change, the benefits of that appreciation have a 20% tax benefit because it's an opportunity zone. The opportunity zone does have requirements. You have to hold it 10 years and so the hold period is a little bit longer, but couple that with the right financing, which was a HOD221-D4, which is a 10 year hold, is the perfect match for our business model and it's the perfect financing structure for development project, with opportunity zone tax advantages. James: Also the loan, as you're talking before the show is like, you had it from beginning, from now until the end, until you own it for 40 years, there's no refinancing in between, you don't have a change loans at all? So very interesting.  Lane: That's correct and so the same that developers get, let's say you're a fantastic developer, and you're the best there is. And you develop a project and you say, hey, this project is going to take me three years to build and so I need a construction loan and you get a three year construction loan and you nail it, at the end of 24 months, you've perfected, you've been under budget. It's the perfect model. COVID happens, now the value of your construction and your development, you nailed it. But the market took a 20 or 30% decrease. Well, guess what? Your loan doesn't care. You have to pay this loan off in nine or seven or eight months. You just finished construction. Nobody's renting because of COVID-19, it's stay at home or that. And so that's how it developers go bankrupt. It's not that they necessarily blew their project. It's just the financing lined up with a horrible market condition that they may, I mean, who could have predicted that? No one, but there's going to be developers that are fantastic developers that unfortunately got wrapped up in a very unfavorable market condition. Our loan, we have 40 years to pay it off. So right now it's 2020. This loan does not come due until 2060. So we're going to be able to ride a couple of cycles out even if it does turn back cold.  James: Yeah, that's very interesting, because usually construction, that's the biggest risk once you're doing the beginning and you just start construction and suddenly the construction guy said, okay, everything frozen up, we are not giving you money. Or your LTV goes down. Now you bring more money. But in this case, your loan is different and couple that with the opportunities zone tax advantage. So did you have any normal investors who didn't want to take advantage of the opportunity zone tax advantage? Was there anyone who just invested in this who brought in cash rather than a capital gain or 1031 money into this? Lane: Absolutely. So James, I think, and again, this is so important to emphasize, the keys to building your net worth are number one, invest your money efficiently in a cash producing asset. Number two, if you can, make that transaction tax advantage event, there were investors who recognize the value of Austin, Texas, recognized the value of what we were doing. And they said, this is a good deal with or without the tax advantages. Real estate in general is very tax advantage and so there were plenty. In fact, probably half of our investors did not use the right type of capital that would benefit from opportunity zones. The other half did, and both halves, both sides are equally pleased with the project. The ones that didn't use the right capital they're still going to get a great return. They're just going to have to utilize the taxes in a slightly less advantageous way. James: Yeah, very interesting. So let's talk about yourself. I know the loan is 40 years from now, but I'm not, I don't know what's your plan with that, but where do you see you going from now? From F16 pilot, you're still flying and you're doing all this multifamily syndication, and now you're doing development, where do see you moving forward from here? Lane: Well, James, that's another great question. So you're asking a lot about my goals and I love real estate. I love to help other people and the reason that I love to do that is because this is my purpose and that's to help you, James, help James' audience to become a better millionaire. That's what really gets me charged up and why do I say that? Because you have a passion in your life, maybe it's real estate, maybe it's a hobby. Maybe it's your community. Maybe it's your church, whatever it is, your family, travel, whatever. That's great. But sometimes we're so engaged with our nine to five vocation that we can't spend our talents and our passions where we really desire. So the vehicle of real estate allows passive investment and it allows you the financial wherewithal so that you can hopefully break away from that employment and you can get more free time. So now you can spend your talents your times and your treasures, where you really get the most satisfaction. I hope that you use those for the altruistic good of mankind. Maybe it's the boy Scouts of America. Maybe it's your community. Maybe it's your church organization. Maybe it's your travel or other things.  But if you're working 50 to 60 to 70 hours a week, which a lot of us are out there doing, it's very difficult for you to have extra time, money or resources to really leave the impact or the influence that your life passion could. So you asked me a question and I wanted to back it up with that color, the ask, what gives me a kick? It gives me a kick when I can help James become a better millionaire or I can help James' audience become a better millionaire. The vehicle I'm going to drive us there, is multifamily investing and I'm driving the bus, get on the bus, let's become better millionaires and then when we get there, you get off the bus and you say, I'm going to do this. And I'm going to make the world better through my community involvement or through my, whatever your passion in life is.  James: So that's awesome. One question I have for you is, was there any moment in your life where you think that I was really proud of what I did in your real estate business? That moment you can never forget it until the end. Can you describe that moment? Lane: Well, there are certainly moments like that all the time. I'm very, I get a big charge out of real estate. I love to talk about it and I would say the, to answer your question, most clearly was one of my properties. The very first property I bought. I didn't know very much, and I didn't have a lot of the experience that I have now. And I was swinging, like I said, I had been doing real estate, single family for 10 years and then I transitioned to multifamily and I did, I was just killing myself with effort and I made no progress, zero results. And then finally somebody gave me some good advice. I went underneath the council of good counsel and I was able to acquire property, it was in my hometown here in Fort worth and it was a value add reposition of an actual vintage asset and we basically did a really nice job. I teamed with smart people, we executed a plan and that property, the very first property, this was a 25 unit property in Fort worth and it competed for property of the year for the apartment associate Tarrant County and won. This is a 25 unit property competing against all assets, less than built prior to 2000. And so that was 1500 properties in Taron County and it was number one and so I'm really proud of that fact. As much of it as this is lager or whatever you want to say [48:08inaudible]. James: No, no, no. I would never say it's a luck. I mean, when I won the property of the year for San Antonio, it was very surprising itself because I'm sure you went to this gala, the dinner gala, that apartment association have, where they have two, three tables of 10 people each from each company. Capstone, Greystone, all kinds of stone there and every time their people won the award they get a big clap and the whole room becomes very loud. I'm not sure what they do that in Fort worth, but in San Antonio, they did that. And when I won, it was surprising because I was the only one standing and going because it was a snowy day and no one else came and I'm not a big management company. But when we won, I was going alone. Did you have that same experience where you're walking alone where everybody's wondering, who is this guy? Lane: Well, like I said, the properties that were in competition, they were run by professionals and a long established, I mean, it was pretty much like a high school team beating the Dallas Cowboys. They were not expecting a 22 year old, 1965 property to win. And it was like I was Rudy from Notre Dame and so everybody gave me the golf clap and I'm sure that under their voice, they were like, who's this guy? James: Yeah. I know I had that. I had like a very quiet, everybody was quiet because they didn't know who's this guy, which company he is, which stone is this guy. But they clapped at the end, but it was like just some of proud moments that we have in our life. Where we able to beat all these big guys out there. This is not the IRO of the year award. This is property of the year. IRO of the year you compete within the IROs. It's not many IROs anyway, but property of the year you compete with all the big guns out there. All the class A's, all the top notch property management company, it just complete different. So awesome, Lane. So tell audience how to get hold of you. Lane: Yeah, I'd love to. And like I said, my goal and I get a charge out of helping other people invest and get better. I want you to get there faster and safer than I did. And if there's anything I can do to help you, James, or your audience, I love to help out. I love talking about this. It helps me when I talk about it with you and understand what your goals needs and desires are to sharpen my own skill and sharpen my own skull. I try to educate people and try to train people and I have basically, I link all of my videos and education series onto my Facebook and LinkedIn page. So you can find me on LinkedIn at Lane Beene, you can find me on Facebook, two places. One is pilot legacy private equity group and that's where we post all of our training and video education or you can also find me on my website page, which is pilot-legacy.com, or you can email me directly and talk to me about anything, like I said, I'd love to talk to and help you, James, or your audience or any market studies or anything I can do, certainly do that or you can email me the lane.beene@pilot-legacy.com. James: Awesome. All right. Thank you very much for coming on, I'm sure all of us obtained lot of value out of your knowledge and the discussion itself. Thank you. Lane: Thank you, James. And your audience. Good luck to you.

Back by popular demand, Engineering Influence welcomes the Chief Economist with Dodge Data and Analytics, Richard Branch, to discuss the economic outlook for the nation and the engineering industry.  Transcript:Host:Welcome to another edition of Engineering Influence, a podcast from the American Council of Engineering Companies. Today. We're very pleased to welcome back to the program Richard Branch, Chief Economist with Dodge Data and Analytics to talk about the economy. Richard was on last month, and it was a very popular show talking about the macroeconomic situation in America, and given the fact that we're into June, and it seems like every month seems to be a different year in 2020, we wanted to have him back on. Richard, thank you again for coming back on the show.Richard Branch :A pleasure to be here. Thanks again. It was great to hear that people found hearing from an economist and in this day and age a positive thing. So, so that's certainly a good news.Host:Yeah, it's not exactly the dismal science anymore this time. More people want to know what's happening and I really want to start out the conversation because, you know, we're recording this on Friday, the 5th of June and today, the Labor Department came out with some surprising numbers. They found that the unemployment rate actually decreased a slight bit. We actually had job creation of 2.5 million jobs in May, which outperformed a recent survey by economists at Dow Jones who actually anticipated a drop in employment by 8.3 million jobs. So we have a 13.3% not wonderful unemployment rate, but it's better than we expected. Then we have other news, the airlines are starting to expand capacity. The theme parks in Florida, for example, Universal is opening. Disney's going to be opening. It seems like we're turning a corner. Is that, is that too much wishful thinking or what are you seeing right now?Richard Branch :Okay. I think when we look back on this crisis, May will have turned out to be the low point. And I think today's numbers are just an indication that we're now in the recovery phase. It happened a little bit earlier than we had anticipated. We had figured that job creation would start again in June. But as you mentioned, the main numbers coming in at plus 2.5 million, a huge upside surprise, and as state and local areas continue to reopen and loosen those rules on, on business activity and whatnot hiring we'll certainly keep moving forward. But not to be a wet blanket on today's number. But you know, between March and April, we lost well over 21 million jobs. So today's addition, certainly a positive step, particularly in the construction industry, the construction industry added back 464,000 jobs this morning following a million job loss in April. So you know, that that recovery though is going to be a very long and slow process and it just fraught with pitfalls. You know, the easy lifting will come first with, with those huge negative numbers in April that the big changes will come early. But once we get we continue to think that once we get into the back half of this year, that that growth will continue to move forward, but at a pretty slow pace.Host:Yeah. And it's interesting because we just recently launched a research Institute, which was a separate arm of ACEC, and they've been doing some business impact surveys since really the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic....tracking different indicators. And our most recent survey came back end of last week. And it showed that one fourth of our firms that were surveyed roughly 22% of respondents reported having business areas that are outperforming now, which is a significant increase from April. And they've seen some growth in the COVID-19 area of business, healthcare and the like, it seems like it's turning that corner. But as you mentioned, you know, at large recovering from this is not going to be an overnight kind of thing. It's gonna be a building process. Do you think that it's extending know a little bit further into 2021? Or do you think that we might be able to see a little bit of a, you know, recouping some of our losses before the end of the calendar year?Richard Branch :I think overall for the economy I think obviously the economy will contract this year. You know, we're still looking at a potentially 20 plus percent decline in GDP in the second quarter. That will be difficult to make up in the second half of the year. In terms of employment, you know, it's probably not going to be until mid to late 21 or possibly into early 20, 22, when we start seeing all the jobs that we've lost in March and April added back. In terms of construction, I think it's, it's, it's a mixed bag. I think there will be some sectors that will absolutely outperform and surprise on the upside and, and potentially getting back to by the end of the year, getting back to levels that we've seen prior to the crisis. But, you know, I continue to think that this will be, you know, one of the big questions is, is what's the shape of recovery, you know, and it's what letter of the alphabet are you going to choose to define that shape? The L the w the V a I think a V shape recovery here, even with today's job numbers is still asking a lot. I think that's, that's a big uptick,Host:Maybe a W....Richard Branch :Could be potentially a w - the one that I've heard recently that I enjoyed was the Nike swoosh.Richard Branch :That, you know, the slope would be fairly sharp on the upside, you know, where we are now adding those jobs back quickly, but, but then as time goes on, that curve starts to flat now, and all of this is of course pending any future fiscal stimulus. So in our forecast, we we've included no future fiscal stimulus programs, even though they're likely to come. It, it just, you know, we need to see something that has a pretty good chance of passing through the House, the Senate and, and receiving presidential approval. So should there be fiscal stimulus, you know, a phase four phase five of five, six, that could certainly alter that trajectory in that shape of recovery, but barring fiscal stimulus, further fiscal stimulus that, that recovery in the second half of the year will be slow.Host:And I think that what you just said kind of reflects the thinking of our membership, because one of the questions that we asked in that survey was essentially, you know, what sector do you think is going to recover first? And it was really a, it was a split decision. I mean, there there's, there's no agreement on whether the private sector, the public sector, when it, when it comes to engineering, design, construction is going to recover. You know, we had essentially... yeah, roughly, you know, it was kind of 50 50. Is there anything in, in, in your research that would indicate one sector recovering earlier than the other? Does it, is it still too early to tell? I know that, you know, Congress has something to say about this, about exactly what's going to be in that next if we do have one phase four stimulus you know, what are your thoughts on, on who's going to get there first?Richard Branch :I think it's, that's a very nuanced conversation because I don't think it's broad based that public will do better than private or private will do better than public over the next several months. I do think that certain areas of private construction have the ability to bounce back quicker than others. You know, single fam is certainly outperforming expectations warehouse construction especially those big eCommerce fulfillment sites, I think have a potential significant upside data centers, but other sides of public or private construction, or are going to suffer. Retail. Hotels. And then even the office sector, the speculative side of the office sector, it seems the trend now that we're a month or two into this crisis the trend towards working from home seems to be continuing in terms of, you know, I just within the past couple weeks, Facebook and Twitter have essentially announced plans that they're going to incentivize workers to stay at home..Host:And Facebook is going to index salary to the areas where the people live. Exactly. Which is even more interesting because, you know, then that way that'll keep some people in those higher - those more expensive areas. Yeah. I guess this is the kind of thing that's going to be fueling academic papers for a while.Richard Branch :Yes.Host:I, I doubt that there was a handle and, and, and, and on exactly how much of an impact and how lasting an impact the shift to remote work and just the way that people are going to be interacting with the built environment. It's really hard to write policy now for something that we just don't know what the impacts are going to be. And I would imagine from the, financial analytical side, and then also from just the economic side, it's hard to get a handle on exactly what that impact's going to be long term.Richard Branch :Absolutely. You know, that the office market has gone through such undulations over time. You know, from, from everybody back in the old days, you know, everybody having their own office too, be more open space environments and, and the beginning of the gig economy and people working from home more and telecommuting and whatnot to now this, I think, well, that is a potential downside. I do think there's, there's some upside there as well in terms of design elements and improving office design and air circulation and air handling and whatnot. So you know, I think even in that downturn, or even in that systemic shift in an office market, I still think there is incredible potential there for construction.Host:For the industry right now, you know, Congress is in the midst of handling a number of issues, but one of the things that continues to move at least in the Senate and now in the house, cause this week Chairman DeFazio released his concept - his surface transportation bill and any set a date, he said, July is when he wants to have a floor vote, which would be very wishful. You know, fast-tracked kind of wishful thinking because you're just given schedule, but how important would getting a surface bill, a longterm surface bill be to the industry you know, what kind of impact do you think that would, would have either speculative just kind of injecting some confidence back into the economy and then just the real dollars and cents project work.Richard Branch :It's critical. It provides not only the clarity to state and local areas in terms of future funding, but of course there's just a huge positive force in terms of injecting dollars into the system. I was just this morning reading a report that ARTBA but put out the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, and their research found that in fiscal year 2018, they estimate that States were able to take 30 point $8 billion in federal highway funding and translate that into $66 billion in actual highway improvements.Richard Branch :So taking some federal money, lumping it with the States. And so there's a huge multiplier there. So that might be limited in the cycle, just with the pressure that state and local areas are feeling in terms of revenues and whatnot in this crisis. But it just goes to show that that getting that low hanging fruit of the reauthorization of the FAST Act through as quickly as possible is a necessity yeah. In terms of the construction industry.Host:Yeah. And as we mentioned yet, I think last time we kind of talked about the whole concept of shovel ready and, and how that, you know, the approach - It appears the Congress is taking now what you know is more thoughtful and longterm than looking at the immediate payoff of saying, okay, well, we're going to put X amount of money of stimulus and we're going to create, you know, these immediate jobs. The longterm infrastructure investment would create that sustained job growth and kind of extend that multiplier. And, you know, I guess for any of the policy people out there who listen to our podcast, we try to get them to listen by sending it to them as much as possible, what message would you give to them as they put together kind of a proposal for a longterm infrastructure bill?Richard Branch :Think big. This is not a time in our opinion to quibble over dollars and cents even with today's job numbers, even with the positive trend in initial claims you know, this is, this is a time to, to dig in with the construction industry and get projects moving. And you know, there, there will be issues of course, over the longer terms in terms of debt and whatnot with the U S economy, but people are out of work. The construction industry is, is a great litmus to get that economy moving again, especially as state and local areas that are suffering and, and so think big and get it done sooner rather than later.Host:Absolutely. Well, is there anything else going on from your world, from your perspective that, that are listeners should know about now? Or is it, is it just kind of pay attention to the news and keep abreast on what's what's going on?Richard Branch :Sure. Well, I think when we spoke last and I can't recall if we had released our April construction starts data yeah. At that point. But our April data for construction activity was as suspected. It was pretty weak in total construction starts, fell close to 25% from March to April, it does look like as we look at the May data and we're still cycling through that, the quality control aspect of it. But it does look like the May data we'll show a slight increase in nonresidential building construction activity from April to May. So again, another sign that the potential that the bottom of this cycle was probably in May, and just this morning, we released our leading indicator of construction, the Dodge Momentum Index, which was essentially flat compared to April. So these are projects when they first enter the very earliest stages of planning for nonresidential building. It was essentially flat in mid April. So I'll take that as a good sign. You know, back in the recession, the Great Recession, I guess we have to call it just to differentiate it. Back in the Great Recession, the DMI fell sharply and over a long period of time. Yeah. So far over the last couple of months, the DMI is only down by about 10 or 12%.Richard Branch :So it shows us that there are still a lot of projects early in the pipeline for a nonresidential building. So again, a positive note that as the economy starts to reopen and as rules on construction are relaxed that there are a lot of projects in the pipeline ready to move forward.Host:Yeah. And that's good. And that, again, for any of our members listening for anyone listening, you can access those indices and the reports at construction.com and the really good detailed information to have if you're a business leader or you're someone interested in the sector the data that you have up on that site and that Dodge produces is extremely useful. So I encourage people to go and check that out.Host:Well, I do appreciate you coming back on the show, Richard, because it's always good to do a, do a check in, especially when you see all these, you know, these numbers flying around and you get an unexpected jobs figures in the midst of a pandemic and everything else going on to kind of get an update and see where things are. And I do hope to have you on again, in a couple of in a couple of weeks to see if anything's changed.Richard Branch :You're right. This, this was after so many months of, of talking to our clients and the press and, and about bad news. It's good to finally see a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel. So always happy to be here and a pleasure talking to you. And I hope you stay safe and healthy.Host:You as well, stay safe, stay healthy. And again, thank you. That's Richard Branch, he's the Chief Economist for Dodge Data and Analytics - www.construction.com is where to find him. And this has been Engineering Influence from ACEC.

How can marketers use MRI data and neurolinguistics to develop strategies and campaigns that get better marketing results? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Hackstone founder and CEO Dan Hack talks about the process his team uses to incorporate lessons learned from FMRI scans in crafting impactful stories that really resonate with audiences. Dan breaks down what he calls the "three brain framework" and shares a formula for using it to create messaging, campaigns, stories and videos that help viewers convince themselves to make a purchase. Highlights from my conversation with Dan include: Hackstone is a video production company that acts as an outsourced creative team for agencies. Dan and the team at Hackstone use neuroscience research from FMRI scans to determine what taps into peoples' emotions, and they use that to develop marketing campaigns. Dan says most marketers make the mistake of leading with facts, when in reality, buyers are driven by emotion, and then look for the facts to back up their emotional decision. The three brain framework can be used to apply these principles. It segments the brain into three parts - the emotional brain, the logical brain, and the survival brain. The survival brain decides what information the brain will actually take in based on what is needed for survival. The emotional brain is where connections and associations are made, and where memories are stored and relationships are developed. It is what triggers the desire to purchase something. The logical brain is all about facts, and is used to justify the purchases that the emotional brain wants. FMRI data is used to determine what really resonates with people, and what they really want - as opposed to what they say they might want. The most important thing in developing marketing messages and campaigns is to determine what your customers want, but unfortunately most marketers start by identifying what they want to tell customers. Dan calls this selfish marketing. Resources from this episode: Visit the Hackstone website Follow Hackstone on Instagram Check out some of the sources Dan relies on for neuroscience data: CXL NMSBA Journal of Consumer Research Journal of Advertising Research Listen to the podcast to learn how to incorporate neuroscience into the development of your marketing strategies. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Dan Hack who is the founder and creative director of Hackstone. Welcome Dan. Dan Hack (Guest): Thanks. Dan and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode. Kathleen: I'm happy to have you here and I am excited to talk about some of the things that you're working on which are really, really kind of cool and scientific. About Dan and Hackstone Kathleen: Before we get into that, for those who are listening and might not be familiar with you or Hackstone, can you talk a little bit about your story and who you are and what you do and also what Hackstone is? Dan: Yeah, sure. So Hackstone started out as a video production company. I started Hackstone like 12 years ago I think now. We've kind of developed into sort of an arm of an agency and it's been a lot of fun because we get to do the creative things we get to, we get to do different... our clients are all over the place, big and small. And we get to do a lot of kind of the creative part and work with agencies to come up with the creative, to recommend the creative to their clients and also to our clients. And then we do a lot of testing. We do a lot of like, is this going to work, you know, testing storyboards and the creative and then also doing the, you know, we call them postmortems, you know, we're afterwards you go and see why something worked and why why it didn't work. Right? So we're kind of a production company on steroids we've been called. So it's a lot of fun. We really like what we do. What does MRI data have to do with marketing? Kathleen: That's awesome. One of the things that drew me to talking with you and having this conversation is that I learned that you guys are using actually MRI data and neurolinguistics to figure out more effective ways of tapping into emotions and developing narratives. I will be the first to say, I'm a huge marketing nerd. And I think while many people think of marketing as this creative discipline, I'm always naturally drawn to the side of it that's a little bit more scientific, which is why I was like, Oh, I totally want to talk about this. So tell me, what does MRI data have to do with marketing? Dan: So nothing and everything all at the same time. So basically what we're doing, and it's funny because you develop instincts, right? About what's going to work and not work. And there's always the chase of how do we know this is going to work and why did something work and why did something not work, right? Like way back when, the reason I got into this whole thing was because I was young, I was creative. I had two projects that fell into my lap. They were really successful and creative people have a huge ego. And I had a ginormous ego, right? I became so arrogant when I first started this. I wanted to be a director, I wanted to affect the world with my product, right? And then, you get to projects that don't work at all, right? That are just flops. And the thing about a big ego is that they're incredibly fragile as well. Right? And then you become crushed and everything you thought you believed about yourself is wrong essentially. So that's when I really got into the world of like, I wanted to find out why were these two projects after I've had this success, why did these projects not work? Right? Because clients give you their money when they give you their money, they give you their trust as well. They're like, Hey, we trust that you're going to make something that's going to blow the lid off of our KPI. You know? And, and that's a lot of responsibility and that's a lot of pressure as well. So I was exposed to the world of testing pretty early on in my in my career and, and it just started with just asking people like, do you like this? Do you, how did we do? Like, do you think this is something you would buy? Is this a good product? Like, how did you resonate with it? What annoyed you? But there are a lot of problems with that and you find that, that people respond and oftentimes tell you they're really nice. People inherently are good, right? And they tell you what they think you want to hear. So the information you get back from them is not entirely accurate all the time. So you go deeper, right? You go into like, okay, well we're going to use eye tracking technology, right, to figure out like where they're looking. And then you go even deeper. You were going to use EEG to see how their brain is firing, which is, which are the like the probes you put on the head. Then you measure sweat glands and you measure pulse. And basically stop asking them questions. It's like, Hey, we're not going to ask you any more. We're just going to see how you respond to whatever stimuli we put in front of you. Kathleen: It's like a lie detector. Dan: Kind of, exactly. Only less pressure for them. You don't go to jail afterwards hopefully. But so then you get into all the way up to FMRI data, which is essentially putting somebody into an FMRI machine. And FMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. And what that does is it looks at your brain and tells you real time, with a few second delay, how your brain is firing or responding or what parts of your brain are using the most blood right? The most fuel based on what you're showing somebody. And it's like a light bulb. It's super cool. Like you can show somebody a commercial and you can tell right away based on what parts of their brains are firing, whether they like it or not. Right? Apple develops their products in FMRI machines where they show the different cases of the different screens of the different iPhones. And they can tell right away like, okay, well this part of the brain is firing and that means they like it or they don't like it or they're responding negatively or positively or whatever. And really we've taken that, so trying to kind of sum it up here, they've taken that, we've taken that and sort of put that into a framework that we call the three brain framework. That tells you certain things like we know from FMRI data that people don't respond to facts, right? But people don't buy cars because of the safety features, they don't buy cars because they have the radar you know, the radar cruise control on the highway or the leather seats or whatever. It's all about emotion, right? And that's why we always go back to how should it make you feel? Right? That's how we start every single project. We have two steps. Number one, how should it make you feel? Number two, support that with facts, right? A lot of people get that backwards. And that's what we know from FMRI data is that when you're selling facts, you're selling to a part of the brain whose only job it is to support the emotional decision that you've already made. Kathleen: Right. It's to reverse justify what we like. First we figure out what we want and then we figure out how to justify it. Dan: Right? Exactly. Exactly. But here's the thing, like we don't even know we're doing it right? Like there's, one of my favorite studies is a smoking study back from the nineties. I think it was early nineties. The biggest FMRI study ever done where it was when the surgeon general started putting the warning on the packs of cigarettes, right? And researchers wanted to find out like, well, people are still smoking, but people are saying, right, we're doing these focus groups. And people are saying like, yeah it's making me not smoke. Right? And they were like, okay, we need to put these people into FMRI machines and figure out what's going on. So first they asked them, they said, do you think the Surgeon General's warning on the pack of, you know, any tobacco product makes you less likely to smoke or makes you smoke less? And they were like, yeah, I think so. And then they put them in FMRI machines and they watched their brains as these people, number one smoked, and number two, were exposed to the Surgeon General's warning, right? And what they found is super cool. They found that when people smoke, their brains have the same reaction as, it's the reward center lights up, it just explodes, as when they see the Surgeon General's warning. It's the power of associations, right? So because when people smoke, what they usually do is they stop working, they walk down the hallway, they link up with coworkers, they have a conversation. And the last thing they see before they light a cigarette before this release of dopamine is they see the Surgeon General's warning, right? Kathleen: Pavlov's dog, right? Dan: And so they create that association, right? It really is. Yeah, exactly. So in neuromarketing, what you're doing is you're trying to figure out how the brain works and you're trying to, you don't always have the budget to test every single project, but you're trying to figure out, you're trying to make an educated guess on how people are going to respond to certain things, right? Kathleen: Sorry to interrupt you, but it's so interesting listening to you talk about this because I'm actually fascinated by the neuroscience behind all the anti-smoking campaigns. And I had done some research on this as well. And a corollary, kind of additional story to the one you just told, which I think is so interesting is you know, for many years, depending upon how old you are, if you're listening, you may or may not remember for many years, the government used these campaigns that were these very scary images of like black lungs. And, it's interesting, they're starting to do this again now. What they found, the primary focus of a lot of the antismoking campaigns was on teenagers because that's like, if you can prevent somebody from starting to smoke in the first place, it's a much better approach than trying to get somebody who's already smoking to stop. Dan: Right? Kathleen: And so they used to use those scare tactics and like, you know, just like the eggs and this is your brain on drugs kind of thing. And those did not work well. It wasn't until they had something called the Truth Campaign where they started to see some success. What the Truth Campaign did, which you may recall seeing, is it scrapped all of those fear tactics. What they did was they figured out, they really thought about like, why do people smoke? Right? Why do teenagers start to smoke in the first place? Is it because they don't understand it's bad for them? No, it's because they are rebelling against their parents. And that is a form of rebellion. And so what the Truth Campaign did was it looked at, well, if we want to tap into that feeling of rebellion, how can we leverage rebellion to get them to not smoke in the first place? So the messaging and the Truth Campaign was all around big tobacco wants to control you and has you in their pocket. So it was like rebel against big tobacco and don't fall for it essentially. And that got a much, much better outcome than all the fear tactics. And I feel like that's kind of like the same thing that you're talking about. All of these campaigns, you can pour a ton of money into them. But if you don't really understand at the very core what is that emotion that somebody is driven by, then you're not going to be successful. Dan: Right. Kathleen: So that was a long tangent, but I'm fascinated by this and there's so much interesting work being done in behavioral health that I think can inform marketing. Dan: Yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, and the problem I think is that it's still kind of expensive, right? Like there are research groups and there are subscription services and we subscribe to those where when researchers do this research to find out what campaign was the most successful in this last super bowl, right? And they do the FMRI studies and they're funded. You can subscribe to that data and get that data and then use that data to kind of inform what you do. In a perfect world, yeah, we would have, you know, when we do a car campaign, you know, put people in an FMRI machine to see like, Hey, are they most stimulated by the color? Are they, is that a red car? Is it a white car? Is that a black car? So, those are all the nitty gritty things that you get into. But I think at the heart of it is exactly like what you said. You need to figure out who your audience is. You need to figure out what they want, and then give it to them. It sounds really simple and it kind of is, right? And then all these tools, this neuromarketing is essentially, we use that to try to figure out what it is, what exactly is it that your audience wants and how do you give it to them? Because a lot of clients come to us and they say here's what we want to say. Or, when you ask them questions like what causes a campaign to not perform well? And usually it goes back to selfish marketing, right? You approach that campaign with what is it that we want to say, right? We want to tell our story. Like, the word story, I'm an oppositionist. I get that. But, the word story drives me up the wall. It drives me insane because it's become this catchall, right? And it's all like, tell your story has become this romantic replacement to messaging, right? Or information or get your message out there. What does that mean? Right? So this is really a sort of a way to figure out what is the right story. There are a million stories. Like, nobody cares who started the company, right? Nobody cares why even necessarily you started the company, right? People care about other things. And this is really trying to find out what those things are and then giving them those things essentially. Kathleen: So I have so many questions for you. Dan: I'll just go and go. What is the Three Brain Framework? Kathleen: No, no, no. I warned you, I'm a huge nerd. And so like you've already seen through the smoking stuff, you and I could go for hours on this topic. But I want to break it down a little bit. So first of all, you mentioned you have this Three brain approach. Can you define for me exactly what that, like what are the three brains? Dan: Sure. So obviously, there are more than three parts of the brain, but for our purposes, for this marketing purpose we divide the brain into three parts. We have the survival brain, you have the emotional brain, and then you have the logical brain, right? And we look at it as kind of a funnel. All three parts of those brains has its own purpose. So you look at the survival brain, sort of like a club bouncer, right? He stands in the front with his arms crossed and he decides what gets in and what gets out, right? The brain is cognitive miser, right? So the brain tries to save calories. He's the guy who decides number one, is this important to my survival? Do I need to know this information? Is this going to save my life? And then he also decides, is this new information? Do I already know this information or can we just radically summarize that? So to put it on the shelf, and a good example of that is like your lawn, right? Nobody knows how many blades of grass they have in their front yard right now. It's not looking good for my yard. I have room for a lot. I've only had four like blades of grass or nursing them and, but everybody knows that you have that you have a lawn, right? You see a lawn. That's an example of something being radically summarized and then you know, and then put on a shelf. So you have that. Then if you do get through that, you have the emotional brain, right? And the emotional brain is the, we call it the mother, right? It's the mammal brain, if you will. You know, some people call it that. And basically that's where you create associations, right? Like, Hey, last time when I touched that, it burned me and that hurt. And that's important to my survival. And it does other things like memory. That's where your relationships are built, right? Like where do you fit in, in your tribe? And how do you advance, you know, in your tribe and, and you know, again, important for your survival. And also you have some really cool things that happen in here, like synesthesia for example, which is like, which is where... Kathleen: Is that where you see colors as emotions? Dan: Yeah. Kind of. But it's like when you're watching a commercial. We use this in food commercials, right? When you're watching a commercial and you do a really good job in filming that and getting that across, the viewer will actually taste what they're seeing, right? It's essentially you have these neuro pathways for like vision and for taste and for smell and whatever. And sometimes when they're really powerful, when you have a train, there's a train outside. So that made me think of it. When you have a train like hurling down this neuro pathway, sometimes it'll jump the track onto another pathway. Right? Kathleen: I feel like I totally know what you're talking about because when I go to the movies, my chain of cinemas locally, in the intro kind of footage that leads up to every movie, they always have the sound of the can of Coke popping open. And then the pouring into the glass with the ice and the fizzy sound combined with the ice clinking and the Coke filling. And I'm like sitting there going, Oh my God, I need a Coke. And I can taste it right now. Dan: I want that. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what it is. So that's the part of the brain where those kinds of things happen, right? And those are the kinds of things we want to do. And that's why you make food. Like your goal is to make the viewer taste the food, right? Pizza. Really close shots of the cheese pulls and those kinds of things. Right? Super important. So anyway, the emotional brain is where we do most of our decision making, right? Then you have the logical brain and the logical brain is sort of like, it's like, it reminds me of my dad, right? He's the accountant and he's the guy who basically, he's like the legal department, right? He's the guy who who ruins the fun essentially, you know, like, like you say... Kathleen: We call that "the fun sponge". Dan: Yeah, exactly. It's the higher processing. Dan: And this part of the brain either supports what your emotional brain has already decided when it comes to purchasing or it overrides that decision, right? So you can go and sit in a Ferrari and you smell that new smell of the Ferrari and you really want it and you feel that emotional connection to the car in that red and that tan leather, you know, or whatever. And then the logical brain comes in and says like, Hey, 2,500 bucks a month. Like that's more than your mortgage. There's no way. We're not doing that. And really, that's the way it works. So the emotional brain is where you should be selling, right? When you create something, you should create it for the emotional brain and then create facts to support the logical brain in helping support the emotional brain in making that decision. So that's why facts should come second. Yet most of our marketing aims directly for that logical brain, yet that's not where we make decisions. Kathleen: Yeah, that makes total sense. Cause I totally know that myself, how I buy. It's like I see something I like and I'm like, I really want that. How can I justify it? It's the old saying buy the dress and then find the party. Where to find neuroscience data Kathleen: So for somebody who's listening, I think if they understand this conceptually, you know, if it were me, my next question would be like, great, now how do I find this data to help me figure out what emotions to tap into? And you were mentioning there's ways you can subscribe to information about FMRI data. So can you get into a little bit if somebody wants to learn more about this, get tapped into to that kind of data, where can they find it? Dan: Sure. So I can send you some links afterwards if you want to put those in the show notes there on some of the places where you can subscribe to that. Publications, you can subscribe to even industry standard or industry specific data, you know, that apply directly to your industry. But a lot of this stuff is really, it's not new information, right? You have to beat it into your brain to kind of remember that. So, for example, the principle of the three brains, right? The fact that our minds look for contrast. There's this framework. Your mind looks for contrast, right? It's got to get into your mind first without being filtered out. And then you have certain principles that are kind of spread out. They're all over. And I think you have to make a decision. So that's why you have neuro marketing firms who put that together for you if you don't want to think about it. But I think it's important to become familiar with that. And then to put everything you do marketing wise, messaging wise through a framework like that. Does that make sense? How to apply neuroscience to B2B marketing Kathleen: Yeah, it does. And, in my head I'm thinking I can see so clearly how you would use this. You used the example of a Ferrari. If you're selling a Ferrari or you're selling a food product or you know, clothing or some things that are more consumer facing, maybe more optional products if you will. But my question is when it comes to, for example, like what somebody might consider to be a boring B2B purchase, like accounting software or you know, like I'm in cybersecurity. Walk me through how you think about developing an emotional tug for something that most people look at as a pretty boring thing. Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing before we even get to that emotional tug, we have to remember, get through the bouncer, right? So one of the things, and I had this super cool example, hold on, I might have it written down here, that that I pulled. Now maybe I don't. You get these emails where people use industry jargon a lot, right? You first have to think about how do you get through the bouncer. So you have to make it easy to understand. You have to, you have to understand that you're super close to your industry. The person you're talking to might not be super close to your industry. So understand that your brain immediately asks, do we even let this information in? Whether it's an email, whether it's a marketing video, whether it's a commercial, like whatever it is, whether it's a billboard even. Should we let this information in? And you have to then go to the emotional connection of how do you make that emotional connection. So when we say emotional connection, you have to emote. What we mean is you have to think about how should this messaging make you feel. So some questions to ask are, should this make the person feel like I'm an authority? Should this person feel afraid that you know, that somebody is going to hack their system or steal ransomware, viruses, those kinds of things. Should they feel funny? Or should your messaging feel funny? Should they be amused? So you go back to that. How should it make you feel? And then you take that information and that information should support that. Does that make sense at all? Examples of marketing campaigns that have been developed using MRI data Kathleen: Yeah, it does. It totally does. So let's get into some examples because you guys have done work with some really interesting companies and I feel like this is especially one of those topics where you can talk about it conceptually and still not understand it. But when you dive into actual examples, it starts to become much more clear. So can you maybe talk about how you've used these principles with some of the companies you've worked with to get really great results? Dan: Sure. Exactly. So car ads. So I'll take a local first. So we work with a local brand. It was a Ford dealership and they had done celebrity commercials in the past where they had an athlete say like, Hey, here's where I'm shopping. And when we look at data, FMRI data, even with the, with the latest COVID, there's a lot of data coming out from COVID PSAs where they're saying a lot of these pieces are falling flat, right? A lot of this messaging from COVID 19 is falling flat, even with celebrities in it. Why is that? Right? And then you get into like, it's not just a matter of getting celebrity, you have to put that celebrity in a, in a situation where it's authentic. And what's authenticity? That depends on your brand. So, a while back, we put an athlete into a set of Ford commercials. And the problem was that athletes can't act. Not only can't they act, athletes don't want to act right. And it was almost like, you know, having this athlete is working. It's okay, but we're doing it because we've done it in years past and it's sort of like people expect that from our brands. How do we ramp that up? So what we did was we came in and we said okay, the athlete can't act, he doesn't want to act. He shouldn't act if he doesn't want to, so you don't have to. What does the audience want? So we created this campaign where we took this athlete, made fun of the fact that he's in a commercial where he's being asked to act and he doesn't want to act. And it was phenomenal, right? It went all the way up the chain to like, what are you guys doing? This is awesome. This is like the best campaign ever. The athlete had a lot more fun doing the commercial. The client had a much better response from that. And that trickles down to now you have fundraisers with the athlete where now you have a better response to that. You sell more cars. People are talking about your brand more and most importantly, people remember your brand more. Because ultimately it's about attention and it's about keeping the attention. And then, how were you remembered by the people who maybe aren't ready to buy now but are ready to buy in 90 days? Wherever they are in their cycle and their buying cycle. And how do you stay top of mind for that? Pizza, same thing. You know, in the celebrity line, we work with a pizza brand every year where they have an athlete who works with them to not only sell pizzas but also to raise money for a charity. A certain amount of your sales goes to whatever the charity is. And they had typically had this green screen and put the celebrity up. The celebrity image, let that just do the work. And people didn't respond to that. So we went back and said, okay, who is the audience here? Who are we really trying to attract? And it's fans of this athlete, right? So you look at the basic framework. You don't have to FMRI study this to kind of get that framework. We look at that information and we say okay, they want to be entertained. And the best way to entertain them, and we know this from FMRI data, it's the associations, right? So if you were to put a puppy on the screen, and then put the brand at the end, if that's the emotion you want to be linked to, you are already 75% of the way there, right? When it comes to commercials then you put in your messaging and you make it even better. And we found in the past that when you take a product and you integrate it into a piece of entertainment, you maintain that audience attention. It's the sense parts of an advertisement. So when I say ad, I mean like a video, even a video on Facebook for example. And you're trying to get a lead or you're trying to sell mattresses or whatever it is you're trying to sell, it's about keeping the attention, and especially how long a viewer stays in a video matters because that's how you retarget, right? That's how you recognize how interested they are. We have a three minute video. They made it all the way to the end, they're super interested, right? So it becomes like this capturing the attention and then maintaining the attention. So what we did with the pizza brand is we created a short film and we put this character, the athlete, which was Alex Ovechkin, into this pizza commercial where he was in these absurd scenarios. Like he initially moved here from Russia where pizza was the reason he moved, not hockey. He stumbled upon hockey when he was delivering pizzas, right? And it was this absurd storyline that was just fun and entertaining. And you saw this athlete in a situation he's not normally in. When you're selling, you're always asking people for their attention. When they're seeking you out, that's when it's okay to just give them the information, like on an iPhone, right? But when you're asking them, when you're interrupting their lives and you're asking them for their attention, you're saying like, Hey, we want you to buy our pizza. Because when you buy our pizza, a portion of your proceeds go to whatever the charity is, you have to make it worth their while. And we saw a a phenomenal capture rate. Not only that, but the average, I'm trying to think of like what it is now. So the average completion rates for any video for a long form video is about 15%. We were hitting 86, 87% completion rates because when somebody starts the video, they watch all the way to the very end to the logo and to the offer. Which is phenomenal. And those are the kinds of things, more than just views, you can say Oh yeah, this got 2 million impressions, you know, which is great. You can buy impressions. Impressions don't really mean a lot. Are they meaningful impressions? Ultimately that's what you're trying to get to with FMRI, or with any neuro marketing, you're trying to get to the bottom of, is this meaningful to our audience? You're getting their attention. You're hopefully keeping their attention by creating a meaningful experience that is worth their time, which is ultimately the most valuable thing I think we have. How to get started with neurolinguistics and MRI data Kathleen: That's so interesting. Throughout this conversation, you've sprinkled in things that are a good guide for somebody if they're thinking okay, I want to do this. Can you kind of summarize, if you were meeting with somebody for the first time and you needed to tell them, here's how you're going to go ahead and use this concept for your own marketing, what are the steps they should go through? Where do they get started? Dan: Sure. So we've got a framework, I can pull it up here real quick just just as a reference. We've got a campaign worksheet that we use for these when we go in that's based on our three brains. So for example, we always ask, what's the purpose of your video? What's the primary goal of your campaign? And that's just the background information. So you say who's your customer? And then how are you going to measure success? I think it's super important to figure out how are we even going to gauge if this thing is working or if it's successful or not? You'd be amazed how many people don't know. A lot of times, especially with video, we find that a lot of people come to us and say like, Hey, the CEO wants a video. We don't really know what the purpose is, but can you just get it off my plate? We call those box checker videos and then we're like that nerdy kid in class who's like, but we still want an A, right? So we'll get the A for you. So again, we start out with contrast. So we say like, who are your competitors? And you take inventory of what your competitors are doing. And again, through this neuro research, we know that it is better to be different than it is to be better. It's very difficult to quantify better. Like, what is better to some people, right? So, for example, banks might say, and this is a common thing, when a customer comes into our bank, we know their name. We know them, we have that personal relationship. To me that's not better. I love being anonymous. When I walk into a branch and they say, good morning, Mr. Hack, I'm like, Oh cool, I need to find a new bank. They know my name. That's not good. I don't like that. So that's something that doesn't work for everybody. So then you say how many competitors, what are your competitors doing? How do you not do what your competitors are doing? Because we know through the tests we do repeatedly that when you put a series of car commercials that all say the same thing, when you watch the Today Show in the morning and you see the lawyer commercials one right after the other that say, we're fighting for you, we're here for you, we're the tough guys. You know, people don't remember that. People will watch that. We watch people watch those. It's commercials where we'll put like five or six of those in a row. We'll watch people watch them. We'll see them interact with them. Yet at the end of that run of commercials, they don't remember anything. They don't remember any of the brands. Because again, the bouncer, right? The survival brain has decided like, Hey, you don't need to know this information. Even if you're in the market for that, you don't need to know this information. It's going to use too many calories to process it. I'm going to put it all together for you, put it in a basket and put it on the shelf. You don't need to worry about it. People don't remember what they saw. They don't remember brands. They don't even remember the storylines at the end of that. So the first thing we do is try to figure out, okay, what do we do that's different? We put that into our framework. The next thing is simplicity. And this again is the survival brain. So for a long form video, you might decide what are the three points we want to make really well? Where for a commercial you may decide what's the one point we know, through testing? When you try to make three points in a 32 second commercial, people remember generally nothing. It's like 0.5 when you average it out, right? When you put one point in a commercial, when you try to make one point, people tend to remember mostly that one point that you're making. So you have to ask yourself, okay, like we want to get these 15 things across in our messaging or in our video. Is this the place for that? Where are you in the buying cycle? And right now when you're top of funnel, is this the place where you want to try to educate customers on your product? Usually, no. So because it's just too much to remember at that point, what do you need to prove to your customer to convince them to buy? So that's how you appeal to the logic part, because the logic part is going to ultimately support the emotional part. How should you deliver that information? And then we look at the reward. The final thing is the reward. Why should your viewer keep watching? And when we test a long form piece, like with the Ovechkin piece for example, it looks fun and it looks interesting and it looks entertaining, but it's very thought out. We went through and figured that in a piece like this, you have somebody's attention for maybe seven, eight seconds before their mind starts wandering. What can we put in there at the seven, eight second mark that is going to recapture their attention, draw them in? So you have to do that throughout your video. And when you watch I don't know, like the Purple Mattress for example, is a really good campaign. That was done to repeatedly bring you back in those really good long form, like Dollar Shave. Kathleen: I was just going to say that first Dollar Shave Club video that made them go viral, you couldn't stop watching because the pace was so perfect and you knew there was something more fantastic that was coming. Dan: Yeah. So, and you have to remember that what's interesting to you is likely not interesting to your customer. And that's what we talk about as selfish marketing. What do they want to hear versus what do I want to say? Yup. Kathleen: I love it. Well, okay, so any chance that I could share a link to that campaign framework in the show notes because that sounds like a super valuable document for people to have. Dan: And then it's got other things too, which is super cool. What does your customer want? What's their internal problem? Then you get into internal versus external problems and those kinds of things. What's keeping them from having what they want and how do you solve that problem? But ultimately, people remember how they felt when they watched your stuff or when they're exposed to your brand much more. And again, FMRI data or not FMRI data, it comes down to the fact that people remember how they felt. They don't remember what you said. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: This is so interesting and it's been so much fun to talk about. I want to ask you two questions and then I want to get into how somebody can follow up and learn more. So my two questions that I always ask everybody, the first one is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. I'm curious, is there a particular company or individual that you think is really setting the standard for doing inbound marketing right now? Dan: Yeah, I do. I think there's so many of them. Most of the national long form ads that you're seeing on Facebook now are really well done. For example, Purple Mattresses, really well done. They have the bears, right? I think Geico, the Martin agency, Geico does a phenomenal job. And I also think that Dollar Shave Club really was the kind of the groundbreaking long format that changed how long form ads work. Even though you had that data, there's a disconnect between people know what the right thing to do is versus them actually doing those things. Kathleen: I love those examples. And then the other thing, most marketers I talk to say they suffer from this problem of what I call drinking through a fire hose. Digital marketing changes so quickly. It's really hard to keep up with best practices and new technology and all that. So how do you personally keep yourself educated? Dan: So you know, there's certain people, certain things I follow. Some people follow Gary V - Gary Vaynerchuk. So people like that. You take those sources. I have a ton of those sources that I use. And then in the morning I sit down and go through them to see what's happening. And then you decide what you remember and what you don't remember. I can send you some of those links. Kathleen: Who are your top three sources? How about that? Dan: Top three sources? I'd have to say, so I use a lot of the curated stuff like IAB, the newsletters. I use a lot of those. We use CXL. We use a lot of Harvard Business Review. And then just staying in touch with people. I've got a lot of colleagues in the industry where we talk about what's happening, who's doing what? What worked for your clients, what didn't work, what did you find out? Did you hear about a new study that just came out? You know, those kinds of things. How to connect with Dan Kathleen: Awesome. Well, if somebody is listening to this and they want to learn more about what we talked about or they just want to learn more about you or Hackstone, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Dan: Hackstone.com. That's our website. We're on social as well. We try to make our social a little more entertaining than the website. The team is a lot less ADD and a lot less all over the place than I am. So they typically will do the talking. So if you're lucky, you won't have to actually talk to me. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Alright, well I think talking to you is fascinating. So if you are listening to this podcast and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I mean, I know I did this time for sure. This was so interesting. Head to Apple Podcasts and please consider leaving the podcast a five star review because that is how we get found by new listeners. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, and I would love to have them as my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Dan. This was a really fun conversation. Thanks.  

When Congress (finally) returned from their COVIDcation, experts in medicine, vaccine development, law, and business testified under oath. In this episode, hear the highlights from 17 hours of that expert testimony during which you'll learn about a concerning new vaccine development policy, Mitch McConnell's dangerous demands for the next COVID-19 response law, and how Republicans and Democrats failed for the last two decades to secure the nation's medical mask supply.  Thank you to all Congressional Dish producers who make the independence of this podcast possible. Enjoy your show!  Please Support Congressional Dish – Quick Links Click here to contribute monthly or a lump sum via PayPal Click here to support Congressional Dish for each episode via Patreon Send Zelle payments to: Donation@congressionaldish.com Send Venmo payments to: @Jennifer-Briney Send Cash App payments to: $CongressionalDish or Donation@congressionaldish.com Use your bank’s online bill pay function to mail contributions to: 5753 Hwy 85 North, Number 4576, Crestview, FL 32536 Please make checks payable to Congressional Dish Thank you for supporting truly independent media! Articles/Documents Article: Scientists Worldwide Are Questioning A Massive Study That Raised Concerns About The Malaria Drug Hyped As A COVID-19 Treatment By Stephanie M. Lee, Buzz Feed News, May 30, 2020 Article: CORPORATE IMMUNITY, MITCH MCCONNELL’S PRIORITY FOR CORONAVIRUS RELIEF, IS A LONGTIME FOCUS OF THE CONSERVATIVE RIGHT By Akela Lacy, The Intercept, May 26, 2020 Press Release: Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed Accelerates AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine to be Available Beginning in October, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, May 21, 2020 Article: Social Distancing Is Not Enough By Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, May 22, 2020 Article: Federal agency finds 'reasonable grounds to believe' Rick Bright's whistleblower claims: NYT By Eric Sagonowsky, Fierce Pharma, May 8, 2020 Article: McConnell’s coronavirus business liability pledge sparks lobbying frenzy By Jennifer Haberkorn, Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2020 Article: FDA cautions against use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 outside of the hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems, U.S. Food & Drug Administration, April 24, 2020 Article: As workers face virus risks, employers seek liability limits By Emily Kopp, Roll Call, April 17, 2020 Article: Hydroxychloroquine: how an unproven drug became Trump’s coronavirus 'miracle cure' By Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian, April 17, 2020 Article: Sunlight exposure increased Covid-19 recovery rates: A study in the central pandemic area of Indonesia By Al Asyary and Merita Veruswati, ScienceDirect, Elsevier, 10 April 2020 Resources Tweet @JenBriney, Jennifer Briney, Twitter, May 27, 2020 Sound Clip Sources News Alert: Trump says he's taking hydroxychloroquine despite FDA warnings, Axios, Fox News, May 18, 2020 Interview: McConnell says next stimulus must have coronavirus liability protections, By Noah Manskar, The New York Post, Fox News, May 15, 2020 Hearing: Protecting Scientific Integrity in the COVID-19 Response, United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, May 14, 2020 Watch on Youtube Watch on CSPAN Witnesses: Dr. Richard Bright - Former Director of BARDA, current Senior Advisor at the National Institutes of Health Mike Bowen - Executive Vice President of Prestige Ameritech Transcript: 51:40 Rep. Ana Eshoo (CA): Was there a failure to respond with the needed urgency when you correctly pushed to ramp up production of masks, respirators, syringes, swabs. Dr. Rick Bright: Congresswoman, we've known for quite some time that our stockpile is insufficient and having those critical personal protective equipment. So once this virus began spreading and became known to be a threat, I did feel quite concerned that we didn't have those supplies. I began pushing urgently in January along with some industry colleagues as well. And those urges, those alarms were not responded to with action. 52:15 Rep. Ana Eshoo (CA): Was there a failure to take immediate action when you correctly push to acquire additional doses of the drug Remdesivir, which is the only drug so far that has appeared to be at least mildly effective, thank God, for treating people with COVID-19? Dr. Rick Bright: There was no action taken on the urgency to come up with a plan per acquisition of limited doses that Remdesivir nor to distribute those limited doses of Remdesivir once we had the scientific data to support their use for people infected with this virus. 1:04:00 Rep. Frank Pallone (NJ): My concern is, I'm very critical administration in terms of their I call it incompetence, with the supply chain, with lack of testing. I'm afraid the same thing is going to happen with vaccines and once it's in the distribution. I mean, should I be concerned based on your experience? Dr. Rick Bright: Absolutely, sir. We're already seeing those challenges with limited doses of Remdesivir with data that we're getting that Remdesivir has some benefit in people. And we have limited doses and we haven't scaled up production and we don't have a plan and how to fairly and equitably distribute that drug. If you can imagine this scenario, this fall or winter, maybe even early next spring, when vaccine becomes available. There's no one company that can produce enough for our country or for the world. It's gonna be limited supplies. We need to have a strategy and plan in place now to make sure that we can not only feel that vaccine, make it, distribute it, but administer it in a fair and equitable plan. And that's not the case at all. We don't have that yet and it is a significant concern. 1:11:50 Dr. Rick Bright: Normally it takes up to 10 years to make a vaccine. We've done it faster in emergency situations. But from when we had starting material in the freezer for Ebola, but for a novel virus is actually haven't been done yet that quickly. So a lot of optimism is swirling around a 12 to 18 month timeframe. If everything goes perfectly - we've never seen everything go perfectly. My concern is if we rush too quickly and considered cutting out critical steps, we may not have a full assessment of the safety of that vaccine. So it's still going to take some time. I still think 12 to 18 months is an aggressive schedule. And I think it's going to take longer than that to do so. Rep. Eliott Engel (NY): 12 to 18 months from now, or 12 to 18 months from when this all started at the beginning of the year? Dr. Rick Bright: It will be 12 to 18 months from when the particular manufacturers has first received the material or information that they need to start developing that vaccine. It's critical to note when we say 12 to 18 months. That doesn't mean for an FDA approved vaccine. That means to have sufficient data and information on the safety and immunogenicity if not efficacy, to be able to use on an emergency basis. And that is a consideration that we have in mind when we talk about an accelerated timeline. 1:14:20 Dr. Rick Bright: Congressmen our concern's centered around the potential use of chloriquine in people who are infected with this Coronavirus. There are data, the effective use and safe use of chloriquine in malaria patients and other patients and other indications. We also knew that there are potential safety risks with chloriquine they cause irregular heart rhythms, and even in some cases death. So our concern was with limited information and knowledge, especially of its use in COVID-19 infected patients and the potential for those risks, then we should make sure that any studies with that drug are done in a carefully controlled clinical study and a close watchful eye of a physician so they could respond to a patient if they did experience one of those adverse events. There wasn't sufficient data at that time to support use of this drug in patients with COVID-19 without close physician supervision. Rep. Eliott Engel (NY): And when you raised that issue of chloriquine use in Coronavirus patients with HHS leadership. What happened to you you removed as a director of BARDA. Is that not true? Dr. Rick Bright: I believe part of that removal process for me was initiated because of a push back that I forgave when they asked me to put in place an expanded access protocol that would make chloriquine more freely available to Americans that were not under the close supervision of a physician and may not even be confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus. The sciences, FDA, BARDA, NIH and CDC worked hard to switch that to a emergency use authorization with strict guardrails that the patients would be in a hospital confirmed to be infected with this virus under close supervision of a doctor and who could not otherwise participate in a randomized controlled study. My concerns were alleviated somewhat by being able to lock that in the stockpile with those conditions. However, my concerns were escalated when I learned that leadership in the department health and human services were pushing to make that drug available outside of this emergency use authorization to flood New York, New Jersey with this drug, regardless of the EUA and when I spoke outside of our government and shared my concerns for the American public, that I believe was the straw that broke the camel's back and escalated my removal. 1:47:15 Rep. Kathy Castor (FL): Dr. Bright you understood that America would face a shortage of respirators in January? Is that right? Dr. Rick Bright: We understood America would face a shortage of N95 respirators for a pandemic response in 2007. And we have exercise and known and evaluated that number almost every year since 2007. It was exercised even as late as early as 2019, August in Crimson contagion, that we would need 3.5 billion in 95 respirators in our stockpile to protect our healthcare workers from a pandemic response. Rep. Kathy Castor (FL): And you sounded the alarm repeatedly. But were ignored by the senior leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services. Please explain what steps you took and the responsibilities you received. Dr. Rick Bright: We knew going into this pandemic that critical medical equipment would be in short supply. I began getting alerts from industry colleagues in mid and late January, telling me that from an outside view, from the industry view that the supply chain was diminishing rapidly telling me that other countries that we relied on to supply many of these masks were blocking export and stopping transfer of those masks to the United States. I learned that China was trying to buy the equipment from the United States producers to have it shipped to China so they could make more. In each of these alerts, and there were dozens of these alerts, I pushed those forward to our leadership and asked for Dr. Cadillac and his senior leadership team. I pushed those warnings to our critical infrastructure protection team. I pushed those warnings to our Strategic National Stockpile team who has the responsibility of procuring those medical supplies for our stockpile. In each of those. I was met with indifference, saying they were either too busy they didn't have a plan. They didn't know who was responsible for procuring those. In some cases they had a sick child and we'll get back to it later in the week. A number of excuses, but never any action. It was weeks after my pushing that finally a survey was sent out to manufacturers or producers of those masks. A five page survey asking producers or companies if they actually made those masks. Rep. Kathy Castor (FL): In your whistleblower filing you discuss a February 7th meeting of the department leadership group, but which you urge the department to focus on securing and 95 masks. Can you describe what happened at that meeting? Dr. Rick Bright: They informed me that they did not say believe there was a critical urgency to procure mass. They conducted some surveys, talked to a few hospitals and some companies and they didn't yet see a critical shortage. And I indicated that we know there will be a critical shortage of these supplies. We need to do something to ramp up production. They indicated if we notice there is a shortage that we will simply change the CDC guidelines to better inform people who should not be wearing those masks. So that would save those masks for healthcare workers. My response was, I cannot believe you can sit and say that with a straight face. That was an absurd. Rep. Kathy Castor (FL): In fact, it took three months from your initial warnings - until mid April for the federal government to invoke its authority under the Defense Production Act, to require the production of millions of more N-95 masks. And even then, the administration required the production of only 39 million masks which is far fewer than you and other experts said that we would need. What was the consequence of this three month delay and inadequate response. Were lives in danger? Dr. Rick Bright: Lives were in danger and I believe lives were lost. And not only that, we were forced to procure the supplies from other countries without the right quality standards. So even our doctors and nurses in the hospitals today are wearing N-95 Mark masks from other countries that are not providing the sufficient protection that a US standard N-95 mask would provide them. Some of those masks are only 30% effective. Therefore, nurses are rushing in the hospitals thinking they're protected and they're not. 2:15:50 Dr. Rick Bright: I believe there's a lot of work that we still need to do. And I think we need still, I don't think I know, we need still a comprehensive plan and everyone across the government and everyone in America needs to know what that plan is and what role they play. There are critical steps that we need to do to prepare for that fall, for that winter coming. We do not still have enough personal protective equipment to manage our healthcare workers and protect them from influenza and COVID-19. We still do not have the supply chains ramped up for the drugs and vaccines and we still don't have plans in place on how we distribute those drugs and vaccines. And we still do not have a comprehensive testing strategy. So Americans know which tests do what, what to do with that information. And we know how to find this virus and trap it and kill it. There's a lot of work we still have to do. 3:40:15 Dr. Rick Bright: I think what's really interesting about the testing story that gets lost in the narrative sometimes is the confusion about the different types of tests. There's an antigen test that tells you if you have the virus in you, there's a PCR test, it says it may the fragments of the virus and there's antibody tests, it looks at your antibody titer to try to tell you you've been exposed already maybe immune to that the virus. There's a lot of confusion, I think the first thing HHS needs to do is determine which of those tests is most important to achieve which objective. If the antigen test is was needed, because it's faster and lower cost, and more readily available, in some cases, what does it tell Americans? What does it tell employers? What does it tell schools about the potential for an individual who has a positive or negative on that test and their potential to have different results the next day or later that day? There's a lot of confusion about these tests. So I think the first thing that HHS should do is determine the type of test and how that test would be used effectively. And then make sure that we have enough of those types of tests and they're in the right place and the people using them know what the data tells them and how to use it effectively. I think there's a lot of confusion there and they need leadership in HHS to distinguish those challenges and clarify that for the American public. 3:41:30 Rep. Blunt Rochester (DE): Why do you think that our nation has struggled with ramping up the testing capacity, unlike other countries, and were there contingencies in place or a backup, in light of this situation we're in now. Dr. Rick Bright: I think part of the struggle is waiting too late to think about it and to get it started. When we've had conversations with some manufacturers, they've been very creative and how they can ramp up. Another part of the challenge is, we have allowed many of these capabilities to be offshore. And so we have much more capability of expanding domestic capacity when it's in our country, and we can ramp up and bring innovation to those companies in the US. But if the supply chain is offshore, and there's a global need and competition for that supply chain, that also significantly impairs our ability to ramp up. 3:47:30 Dr. Rick Bright: We need to have a strategy that everyone follows, the same strategy, to test for the word the viruses who's infected with this virus. And then we have to appropriately isolate that person in quarantine so they don't infect others. And we rapidly need to trace their contacts to understand who they may have been exposed to, and be able to test to those individuals. And if they've been infected as well, we need to be able to isolate those. Through a concerted coordinated effort across the country, we can be able to identify where that virus is who's been exposed, give those people proper treatment and isolation and can slow the spread of this virus significantly. But that has to be in a coordinated way. We have to have the right tests and enough of those tests. It's not something we do once and we're done. It's something we have to continually do in the community. So it's not just that we need one test for every person in America. We need multiple tests and the right types of tests. We need the right types of individuals and professionals who know how to use those tests to trace the individual contacts and to isolate that virus and stop it from spreading. 4:11:00 Mike Bowen: Until 2004, 90% of all surgical masks worn and I'm including surgical respirators, were domestically made. That year, or about around that year. All of the major domestic mask sellers switched from selling domestically made masks to selling imported masks. Prestige Ameritech was founded in 2005 recognized this as a security issue in 2006. We thought that once America's hospitals learned that their mask supplies were subject to diversion by foreign governments, during pandemics, they would switch back to U.S. made masks. We were wrong. In November of 2007, we received a phone call from BARDA asking for a tour of our mask factory. BARDA was acting on George W. Bush's Presidental Directive 21, the purpose of which was to review America's disaster plans. Brenda Hayden with BARDA gave a presentation which showed that BARDA was concerned about the foreign controlled mask supply. We were thrilled that BARDA had discovered the issue until Brenda said that BARDA was only charged with studying the problem. We were disappointed but we took consolation in the fact that finally, a federal agency knew that the mask supply was in danger. We were very happy to have an ally. Two years later, I received a call from Brenda Hayden. She started the conversation by saying, we have a situation. Her serious tone caused me to ask her if she was talking about a pandemic. And she said, Yes. She asked if we could ramp up production, and I said yes. We built more machines bought an abandoned Kimberly Clark mask factory and tripled and tripled our workforce. America's hospitals needed us and we rose to the occasion. We told them about the high cost of ramping up. And they said they would stay with us. Unfortunately most returned to buying cheaper foreign made masks when they became available. The company survived by laying off 150 people who helped save the US mask supply by taking pay cuts. And by taking on more investors. The H1N1 pandemic, this is 2009 2010, wasn't severe enough to cause the foreign health officials to cut off mask shipments to America. So our predictions didn't come true...yet. In a weakened state, but undaunted, Prestige Ameritech continued saying that the US mask supply was headed for failure. We just didn't know when. In 2004 to give my security story more issue, I formed the Secure Mask Supply Association. You can find it at securemasksupply.org. Paraphrasing Ben Franklin, I told three competing domestic mask makers that if we didn't hang together, we would hang separately, as China was poised to put all of us out of business and put the country at even greater risk, Crosstex, Gerson, and Medecom all with domestic mask making factories agreed and joined the SMSA. Unfortunately, the Secure Mask Supply Associations warnings were also unheeded. During my quest to secure the US mask supply, I had the privilege of working with three BARDA directors, Dr. Robin Robinson, Dr. Richard Hatchet, and Dr. Rick Bright. They were helpful and they encouraged me to go continue warning people about the mask supply. I'll say a little bit more about that. After years of doing this, I quit many times. And the only reason I kept doing it is because of the directors of BARDA. They would encourage me and asked me not to not to quit. They said that they would express their concerns about the masks supply to anyone that I could get to call them. Anyone except reporters. They weren't allowed to talk to reporters, which was very frustrating to me. They also weren't allowed to endorse the Secure Mask Supply Association. Dr. Robinson was going to do so until HHS attorneys told him that it could cost him his job. He called me personally on vacation to tell me that I can confirm that the emails and Dr. Bright's complaint are mine. They are merely the latest of 13 years of emails I sent to BARDA in an effort to get HHS to understand that the US mask supply was destined for failure, Robinson, Hatchet and Bright all wanted to remedy the problem. In my opinion, they didn't have enough authority. Their hearts were in the right places. America was told after 911 that governmental silos had been torn down so that different federal federal agencies could work together for national securities. But I didn't see any of that. The DOD, the VA, the CDC and HHS could have worked together to secure America's mask supply. I suggested this to BARDA and to the CDC on several occasions. 4:23:00 Rep. Greg Walden (OR): This is your email to Dr. Bright and to Laura wolf. It says and I quote, "my government strategy is to help the US government if and only if the VA and DOD become my customers after this thing is over. Mike Bowen: Yes, sir. Rep. Greg Walden (OR): So Madam Chair, I'd like to submit the mail for the record. We'll send you an electronic copy as per our agreements here. Now, Mr. Cohen, I'm sorry. You said you want to help the U.S. government, you want to help Americans get the masks. Yet it appears that there seems to be a condition here. I assume that's because in the past, you ramped up, things went away, people bought from other manufacturers. And so here you're saying, and I have it here in the email, 'My strategy is to help my existing customers and bring on new customers who are willing to sign a long term contract. My government strategy is to help the US government if and only if the VA and DOD become my customers after this thing is over.' And here we were in a crisis is masks are going overseas now. The US government's not your only purchaser, right? Mike Bowen: The U.S. government has never bought from me except during a pandemic, sir. Rep. Greg Walden (OR): Okay. And so... Mike Bowen: In that email, and that statement, was basically saying that I don't want the government to only call me in a pandemic. Give me business during peacetime so that I can survive to help you during a pandemic. Rep. Greg Walden (OR): Did you ever ask for a sole source contract? Mike Bowen: I have. I have been on the DOD and the VA business. And I continually lose to masks that are made in Mexico, because the DOD does not obey the Berry Amendment. They buy foreign masks made in Mexico, because Mexico is a friend of ours and is called a TAA compliant country. Made the decision based on price... Rep. Greg Walden (OR): How long...Sir, if I may, can I reclaim my time? How long, you said you couldn't turn on these lines of manufacturing very quickly. How long? If you got a big order from the government today, would it take you to produce masks? Mike Bowen: Three or four months and the government wants to do that right now. HHS is asking me to do that. Rep. Greg Walden (OR): And it will take three to four months? Mike Bowen: Yes, I'm told. I told him it's going to take three or four months. They only want masks to the end of the year. So I would have to hire 100 people to train 100 people and then fire them at the end of the program. I'm not going to do that. Again. I don't want the government to only deal with me when... Rep. Greg Walden (OR): My time is expired. Madam Chair, I yield back. 4:29:45: *Mike Bowen:** Let me say this: China sells a box of masks for $1. I don't think anybody's making any profit doing that, because I sell them for about $5. So if their prices are so cheap that they've captured most of the world's mass market. Rep. Elliot Engel (NY): Does the government subsidize the Chinese government, the Beijing government? Mike Bowen: I don't know that. I don't know. All I know is their masks cost less than than materials. If I take my labor costs totally out, I'm still nowhere near the cost of their products. 4:30:30 Rep. Elliot Engel (NY): What steps can the federal government take to incentivize more medical manufacturing of critical equipment like surgical face masks in the United States? Mike Bowen: Well as in a letter that I sent to President Obama, I don't think it requires money. I think it requires the government saying and it's a national security problem. It requires the CDC telling America's hospitals, they are too dependent on foreign aid masks, and put them in legal liability. They have to protect their patients and staff. If in a public forum like this, you say, this is a national security issue, then those hospitals' attorneys are probably going to get on the ball and tell their hospitals to buy American made products. And they don't cost that much. The whole market is only a couple of hundred million dollars. This whole problem, this is a $30 million problem, folks, just for people trying to save pennies across the whole United States. It's not some multibillion dollar problem. 4:36:20 Rep. Brett Guthrie (KY): Mike Bowen: You thought it was necessary to go through Dr. Bright. You couldn't get anybody else to listen to them and Dr. Bright under No, no, no, you got it all wrong. First of all I wasn't looking for I'm just trying to find the information. Oh yeah. I wasn't looking for business. I opened my email. I don't need your business. My phones are ringing off the wall. I'm just I thought of BARDA - Dr. Robinson, Dr. hatchet and Dr. Bright. I thought of them as brothers in arms, and who they couldn't buy my products. I knew that. But they were the only people who believed it. I would like everybody to go to YouTube, put in Michael Burgess and Prestige Ameritech you'll see Mr. Burgess talking at our factory 10 years ago. You'll see him say that only 10% of the mask supplies are made in the United States. I talked to Michael Burgess. Ron Wright. Joe Barton. Patrick Leahy. My associate Matt Conlin talked to Chuck Schumer. I wrote Barack Obama letters, wrote President Trump and everybody in his early administration, Defense Secretary Mattis, General Jeffrey Clark, Nicole Lurie and Anita Patel with CDC, National Academies of Science. Greg Burrell, hundreds of hospitals, hospital purchasing groups, the hospital risk Managers Association. The hospital risk managers Association. Told them the mask supply is going to collapse, this is a risk. Nobody listened. Association of Operating Nurses, the Defense Department, the Veterans Department, Texas Governor Rick Perry. State Texas Rep. Bill Zedler, by the way, Bill Zedler got in dozens of reporters. I've been in every news show. I've done this for 13 years. Nobody listened. And my conscience is clean, Mr. Guthrie. I've been working on this damn issue for 13 years trying to save lives. Nobody listened. And now, I'm not going to take any of this. 4:46:20 Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): We can't guarantee you a contract. I think everybody agrees we've got to have more made in America. Why not ramp up with the understanding that the policy is likely to change? I think it will change because I think we don't, whether it be masks or other PPE or drug supply, we're going to have to have a significant portion of these items made in the United States going forward. Knowing that, and your phone's ringing off the hook, why not ramp up those four lines? Mike Bowen: Because one day, the pandemics gonna end and the the usage will go down to the basement again, where it was there'll be 10 times less usage. And I'll have all these machines and people and these materials and have nothing to do with them. That's what happened to us before. It was a very difficult thing to ramp up. And let me say this again, let me remind you that we have ramped up. We've gone from making 75,000 respirators I'm going to about four... In 40 days, we'll be ramped up to making 4 million respirator per month. So don't concentrate on these four Chinese machines that we really don't know much about and would be a total pain to get going on top of... I'm trying not to kill my business partner who is in charge of getting all this stuff done. He's working 20 hours a day now with all the projects we've already got now, to dump this on top for some business that may or may not come? Absolutely not. 4:48:40 Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): Okay, after H1N1 did you continue to produce masks for purposes of restocking the Strategic National Stockpile? Mike Bowen: I can't do that without the Strategic National Stockpile wanting to buy them. Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA):Did you have conversations with BARDA, SNS and HHS at that time about supplying the masks for the National Stockpile? Mike Bowen: I have talked to Greg Burrell on many occasions, sir. I've also offered those machines to him. And I've offered those machines to the Department of Defense. Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): You're just gonna give the machines or you're gonna give them the production? Mike Bowen: No, listen to this. Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted CDC and VA and DOD to get together I had four machines, that very little money and that could make a whole bunch of masks and for years, and I got 13 years worth of emails, I can document all this stuff. I said to the CDC Hey, we can fix, we can make sure that the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration always has masks. I got these four machines sitting here doing nothing. Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): You were willing to give them the production, but not the machines. Mike Bowen: Let me finish. Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): I'm just trying to sort it out. Mike Bowen: Well here's what I was gonna say. We must use one machine, you'll make your whole annual usage for one machine, and we'll let three of them sit there in our factory just ready to go. When you need them, we can turn those things on and I couldn't get anybody interested in Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): Were you going to give them to them or lease them? Mike Bowen: Didn't matter. I didn't have any money in them. I said give me your peacetime military hospital business and we'll give you these machines. I'll just sit there. Now we would have if we would have had had some kind of a plan, you know, to get materials and things like that. But I was basically saying we've got a warm base operation is not going to cost you guys anything. I made that offer to several agencies. Rep. Morgan Griffith (VA): I see my time is up. I yield back, Madam Chair. Mike Bowen: And by the way, let me Forgive me for being angry. I'm angry because I've done this for so, so long. And I've been ignored for so long. And I apologize. Rep. Ana Eshoo (CA): Well, Mr. Bowen, I don't think you need to apologize. At least that's my view. I think shame on us. I think shame on all of us that we've allowed this to happen. 4:58:30 Mike Bowen: America has a weakness for low prices. And I think Chinese prices are so low. A few years ago, I decided to go buy a 12 things from Lowe's Lowe's Home Improvement center, and I decided I was going to pay whatever it took to buy American. I couldn't make that decision. That decision was taken away from me. I bought one item, it was a plunger. A toilet plunger was the only thing I could find it was made in America. And it is what it is. It's the people like the Lowe's and Home Depot and the Walmarts and the medical companies that the way they want to make money is to lower their costs to where they lower their cost to go to China. The line is long and wide for people going to China, and that's why we're dependent on them for everything. I mean, go out and look in your closet. Look at your tools, look at everything. It's all from China. And the stuff that's in Mexico... When I say this, half of the US mask supply's in Mexico, it's got reservations to go to China. Mexico is not cheap enough. And hospitals are cash strapped and they're they're bidding out things. If this hadn't happened, Mexico would have lost their business and everything... China would have been five years China would have made all masks and respirators like they do the gowns. 5:35:40 Mike Bowen: I've dealt with this thing for so long and it's been so illogical. And I've tried to figure it out and who's at fault who's at fault. And so people ask me that, who's to blame? And I got to the point where it's human nature. It's all of us. I couldn't convince doctors. I couldn't. Listen to this. I had three directors of BARDA said that, Mike, if you get somebody to call me, I will verify that what you're saying is true. I'll tell them it was true. Mr. Schrader, I couldn't get him to call. I couldn't get hospitals to make that call. I don't think they wanted to hear it. They're programmed to save money. They're not programmed to say, I want to make sure my masks are gonna be here. It didn't compute. I was speaking Greek everyone. So to look at this story, and look back and blame everybody, I'm not even going to do that. I'm looking at this pandemic. There's a silver lining, the silver lining is - told everybody there's a big problem. And we can fix this problem and never go through this again. 5:50:00 Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): I'm still confused about your current capabilities. You said you've got four lines that are just sitting dormant sitting in the right now, is that correct? Mike Bowen: We have four idle respirator manufacturing lines. Yes, sir. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): And they're just, I mean, they're not being used right now. Mike Bowen: Yes. But...go ahead, finish your question. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): Yes, they are not being used, right. Correct? So you said you've already gotten machines for those lines. You don't have to procure them. The only thing you're going to have to do is to get staff in order to use those lines. Mike Bowen: No, now there's three things we need to hire 100 people, we need to train 100 people. We need to get all the materials for that and we need to get NIOSH approval. We bought those systems from a defunct Vermont mask company seven years ago, we really don't even know how to use those machines. They're kind of a last resort. And if you'll go back and look at my email to Dr. Bright, I said this would be a basically a pain to do but they're here. And if we need this for infrastructure, let's talk about it. But what we've done in the meantime, is we've gone from making 75,000 respirators a month. Think of that number 75,000 to 2 million, and then in another 40 days, we'll be at 4 million from 75,000. So that's thousands and thousands of percent. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): You said you bought those you bought them for a purpose. You bought them to use them, right? Mike Bowen: No. Thank you for asking that question. No, they came as part of an acquisition we bought. We bought a defunct a medical company and those machines came as part of the acquisition. And made in China. But go ahead. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): Did you say earlier that you phones ringing off the hook you got orders coming out of the yazoo? Mike Bowen: Yeah, okay, but I can't go on a suicide mission. I can't ramp up, hire all these people for something that I don't know how it's going to end or how long it's going to last. And we did this. You gotta remember, we almost went out of business doing this before. We ramped up and we spent money and got a bigger factory, hired 150 people, built more machines. And then one day, the business not only went away, it went smaller than it was. And we had to raise a million dollars. We had to take pay cuts, and we had to fire 150 people. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): So what you're saying, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I'm saying I'm not gonna use them, you're not gonna fire them up unless you get a long term contract from the government. Mike Bowen: I'm not going on a suicide mission. Absolutely. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): So that's yes, you're not going to use them unless you get a long term contract... Mike Bowen: Unless I get a customer who is going to commit to use those machines so I don't have to fire 100 people. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): So that means that you'd have to have a long term contract from the government in order to do it. Mike Bowen: Yeah. Listen, we've gone from one shift to 3. 80 people to 200. We're making four times the products we made. We're making over a million masks a day, don't you look at me, and act like I'm sitting on my ass and not firing up four machines. It's not like just turning on a switch. It's putting people's lives... It's gonna, I'm not sure...Listen...let me tell you this. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): I understand. I'm a businessman. And I understand what it takes Mike Bowen: I watched my business partner cry when he had to lay those people off. We're not doing that again. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): So in order so it's gonna have to be a long term contract from the government, though, that that's my point. Mike Bowen: From somebody. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): And I get it from somebody Mike Bowen: I can't hire 100 people based on a maybe based on a when's it gonna end who knows? Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): None of us can whether we're in the private sector or the public sector, we can't do that. We all understand that. Mike Bowen: You don't. You're not risking your livelihood and your... Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): I risked my livelihood for 30 years. As an independent retail pharmacist, I never had long... Mike Bowen: You want to buy machines or hire 100 people, I'll tell you what, I'll give you my machines if you want to hire 100 people, Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): But but the point is, is that you're here saying that I'm not gonna do it unless I get a long term contract from the government. Mike Bowen: I'm just gonna wait, no, no, no, go back to the context. The context of that was in those emails in hey, here's four machines. Let's... they're here, but I can't turn them on unless it's a long term deal. I'm not just going to flip them on and have you flip them off and leave me hanging like everybody did last time. And let me tell you what happened last time, the government sits around doesn't buy American made products, comes to me in a pandemic buys millions of masks. In 2010, you know what they do for those masks, they stored them for 10 years, then they auction them to some knucklehead who put them on eBay and sold them for 10 times what they were worth. So not only did I... have I not seen the government in 10 years, I got to compete with my own masks. And I gotta have thousands of phone calls to me from people who bought that 10 year old masks of mine on eBay for 10 times the price yelling at me, and I had nothing to do with it because the government waited and sold this stuff. I've been hit from every side on this thing. We have bled for this country. We have created jobs, we put our factory in Texas when everybody else had already left the country. So don't don't sit here and judge me for four machines that aren't running that I'd have to hire and fire 100 people for. I'm not going to do it. Rep. Buddy Carter (GA): Not unless you have a long term government contract. Rep. Anna Eshoo, Chairwoman: The gentleman's time has expired. Hearing: Corporate Liability During the Coronavirus Pandemic, United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, May 12, 2020 Watch on CSPAN Witnesses Kevin Smartt - CEO of Kwik Chek Convenience Stores Anthony “Marc” Perrone - International President of United Food and Commercial Workers International Rebecca Dixon - Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project Leroy Tyner - General Counsel for Texas Christian University Professor David Vladeck - A.B. Chettle Chair in Civil Prodecure at * Georgetown University Law Center Helen Hill - CEO of Explore Charleston Transcript: 13:15 Professor David Vladeck: My name is David Vladek. I teach at Georgetown Law School mostly litigation related courses. And I spent more than 40 years as a litigator, mostly in state and federal court. Like all Americans, I am anxious to get the nation back on its feet. I applaud the committee for exploring ways to facilitate that process. And I can only imagine the heavy burden that weighs on your shoulders. As my testimony makes clear, businesses like Mr. Smarts that act reasonably to safeguard employees, and the public are already protected from liability. But as all of the panelists have said, We urgently need science-based COVID-19 enforceable guidelines from our public health agencies. Those guidelines not only safeguard the public, but at the same time, they provide the standards of liability that Mr. Tyner was just talking about compliance with those guidelines will eliminate any liability risk. On the other hand, it would be counterproductive for Congress to take the unprecedented act of bestowing immunity on companies that act irresponsibly. Workers and consumers are going to open this economy, not government sponsored immunity. We all know that large segments of the public are still justifiably fearful about reopening. Granting immunity would only feed those fears. Immunity sends the message that precautions to control the spread of virus is not a priority. Even worse, immunity signals to workers and consumers that they go back to work or they go to the grocery store at their peril. Why? Because the Congress has given employers and businesses a free pass the short change safety. 16:30 Professor David Vladeck: The line between unreasonable or negligent misconduct, and gross misconduct is murky, context based, and fact dependent. Any tort claim can constitute gross negligence, depending on the wrongdoer state of mind. Second, differentiating between the two tiers of liability turn on intent, questions of intent, questions of intent are factual questions for a jury, not a judge to resolve and conduct is labeled negligent or grossly negligent only at the end of a case, not at the outset. In other words, we don't know for sure whether conduct is grossly negligent until the jury says so. And third, and most importantly, the difference is utterly meaningless if we care about containing the spread of the virus. Irresponsible acts spread the virus just as easily, just as effectively as reckless acts. 17:45 Professor David Vladeck: Legislation that simply displaces state liability laws is not only unprecedented, it is likely unconstitutional. 30:40 Sen. Diane Feinstein (CA): ...how the corona virus spreads? How could a customer of... Well, given how it spreads, nobody really knows how, could a customer of a particular business prove they were infected at a particular business? If professor Vladeck could respond, I believe he's our legal counsel here. Professor David Vladeck: Yes. So the answer is they can't. See are the viruses so transmissible, that it's very difficult unless you have a situation like you've had in the meatpacking plant to know where the virus comes from. In New York, one of the findings was that even people who had been housebound for a long time contracted the virus, even though they hadn't gone out. And so part of the reason why there have been almost no tort cases, about COVID-19 people have bandied about figures, but the truth is, they're been almost none of these cases and they're likely to be very few, because in order to plead a case in court, you have to be able to establish causation. And if someone who's been out and about walking on the streets, visiting the grocery store, visiting another shop, contracts virus, there's no way in the world they're going to be able to say, it's Mr. Smith's fault. 43:45 Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT): Some people are talking about this wave of COVID-19 litigation as the justification for corporate immunity. Actually about 6% of the COVID-19 related lawsuits are tort related, constantly seeking immunity for 6%. And moreover, the corporation's claiming they need this immunity are often the ones that subjected the employees to mandatory arbitration clause, we know those almost always favor the employer. So, can you tell us how the prevalence of mandatory arbitration clauses actually within or across key industries impacts the likelihood of a so called wave litigation? Rebecca Dixon: Yes, Senator, I would say that the wave of litigation is actually mostly businesses suing other businesses and businesses trying to enforce insurance contracts related to the pandemic. So that's one important thing to put out there. And when you have forced arbitration, you must go through a secret process with an arbitrator. So you are barred from going to court. And we know that employees are being coerced into signing these if they don't sign those, they don't get the job. Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT): So the additional shield against losses would pretty much be done with, is that correct? Rebecca Dixon: Correct. Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT): Thank you. 1:25:15 Rebecca Dixon: For workers in particular, right now, they don't really have any enforceable recourse if their employer is not following the guidelines because they're not enforceable. And if they are injured because of it, they have the workers compensation system or they can file an OSHA complaint, but they're pretty much locked out other than that, so that's going to make it really risky for workers to when they're making a choice between wages and their health to choose to come back to the workplace. 1:36:00 Sen. Chris Coons (DE): Let's just clear the deck on this one. Mr. Smart, Professor, excuse me, President if I could Perrone, do you believe the federal government has set clear, consistent science based enforceable standards for what's expected of employers to protect the safety of their workers during a pandemic? Kevin Smartt: I do not believe so. No. Sen. Chris Coons (DE): Mr. President? Anthony “Marc” Perrone: Senator, I don't think that they've done that for the employees or the customers. 2:08:04 Sen. Kamala Harris (CA): In 49 states employers are required to carry workers compensation insurance. Is that correct? Rebecca Dixon: Yes, that's correct. Sen. Kamala Harris (CA): And is it correct that by and large businesses that carry workers compensation cannot be sued by their workers for negligence? Rebecca Dixon: That's also correct. Sen. Kamala Harris (CA): And is it also correct that forced arbitration agreements also prohibit workers from seeking justice in courtrooms? Rebecca Dixon: That's also correct. Hearing: COVID-19: Safely Getting Back to Work and Back to School, United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, May 12, 2020 Watch on CSPAN Witnesses Anthony Fauci - Director National of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health Robert Redfield - Director of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Admiral Brett Giroir - Assistant Secretary For Health at the United States Department of Health and Human Services Stephen Hahn - Commissioner of Food and Drugs at the United States Food and Drug Administration Transcript: 46:45 Sen. Lamar Alexander (TN): Let's look down the road three months, there'll be about 5,000 campuses across the country trying to welcome 20 million college students. 100,000 Public Schools welcoming 50 million students. What would you say to the Chancellor of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, or the principal of a public school about how to persuade parents and students to return to school in August? Let's start with treatments and vaccines first, Dr. Fauci, and if you can save about half of my five minutes for Admiral Giroir's testing I would appreciate it. Anthony Fauci: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Well, I would be very realistic with the chancellor and tell him that when we're thinking in terms. Sen. Lamar Alexander (TN): It's a her in this case. Anthony Fauci: I would tell her, I'm sorry, sir, that in this case, that the idea of having treatments available or a vaccine to facilitate the re-entry of students into the fall term would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far. 48:30 Anthony Fauci: But we're really not talking about necessarily treating a student who gets ill, but how the student will feel safe in going back to school. If this were a situation where we had a vaccine, that would really be the end of that issue in a positive way, but as I mentioned in my opening remarks, even at the top speed we're going, we don't see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals to get back to school this term. 52:50 Anthony Fauci: What we have worked out is a guideline framework of how to safely open America again. And there are several checkpoints in that with a gateway first of showing, depending on the dynamics of an outbreak in a particular region, state, city or area that would really determine the speed and the pace with which one does re enter or reopen. So my word has been, and I've been very consistent in this, that I get concerned, if you have a situation with a dynamics of an outbreak in an area such that you are not seeing that gradual over 14 days decrease that would allow you to go to phase one. And then if you pass the checkpoints of phase one, go to phase two and phase three. What I've expressed then and again, is my concern that if some areas city states or what have you jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely opened up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently. My concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks. 54:30 Anthony Fauci: But this is something that I think we also should pay attention to, that states, even if they're doing it at an appropriate pace, which many of them are and will, namely a pace that's commensurate with the dynamics of the outbreak, that they have in place already The capability that when there will be cases, there is no doubt, even under the best of circumstances. When you pull back on mitigation, you will see some cases appear. It's the ability and the capability of responding to those cases, with good identification, isolation and contact tracing will determine whether you can continue to go forward as you try to reopen America. 1:05:40 Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT): The official statistic, Dr. Fauci is that 80,000 Americans have died from the pandemic. There are some epidemiologists who suggests the number may be 50% higher than that. What do you think? Anthony Fauci: I'm not sure, Senator Sanders if it's gonna be 50% higher, but most of us feel that the number of deaths are likely higher than that number, because given the situation, particularly in New York City, when they were really strapped with a very serious challenge to their healthcare system, that there may have been people who died at home, who did have COVID, who are not counted as COVID because they never really got to the hospital. So the direct answer to your question, I think you are correct, that the number is likely higher. I don't know exactly what percent higher, but almost certainly, it's higher. 1:26:30 Sen. Rand Paul (KY): You've stated publicly that you'd bet at all that survivors of Coronavirus have some form of immunity. Can you help set the record straight that the scientific record as is as being accumulated is supportive? That infection with Coronavirus likely leads to some form of immunity. Dr. Fauci? Anthony Fauci: Yeah, thank you for the question, Senator Paul. Yes, you're correct. That I have said that, given what we know about the recovery from viruses, such as Corona viruses in general, or even any infectious disease, with very few exceptions, that when you have antibody present is very likely indicates a degree of protection. I think it's in the semantics of how this is expressed. When you say has it been formally proven by long term Natural History studies, which is the only way that you can prove one is it protective, which I said and would repeat is likely that it is, but also what is the degree or titer of antibody that gives you that critical level of protection. And what is the durability, as I've often said, and again, repeat, you can make a reasonable assumption that it would be protective. But Natural History studies over a period of months to years will then tell you definitively if that's the case. 1:31:30 Anthony Fauci: You don't know everything about this virus. And we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children. Because the more and more we learn, we're seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn't see from the studies in China or in Europe. For example, right now, children presenting with COVID-19, who actually have a very strange inflammatory syndrome, very similar to Kawasaki syndrome. I think we've got to be careful if we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects. So again, you're right in the numbers that children in general do much, much better than adults and the elderly, and particularly those with underlying conditions. But I am very careful, and hopefully humble in knowing that I don't know everything about this disease, and that's why I'm very reserved in making broad predictions. 2:30:15 Anthony Fauci: We do the testing on these vaccines, we are going to make production risk, which means we will start putting hundreds of millions of dollars of federal government money into the development and production of vaccine doses before we even know it works. So that when we do and I hope we will and have cautious optimism that we will ultimately get an effective and safe vaccine that we will have doses available to everyone who needs it in the United States, and even contribute to the needs globally because we are partnering with a number of other countries. 2:49:00 Sen. Mitt Romney (UT): Given our history with vaccine creation for other coronaviruses, how likely is it? I mean, is it extremely likely we're going to get a vaccine within a year or two? Is it just more likely than not? Or is it kind of a long shot? Anthony Fauci: It's definitely not a long shot, Senator Romney, the I would think that it is more likely than not that we will, because this is a virus that induces an immune response and people recover. The overwhelming majority of people recover from this virus, although there is good morbidity and mortality at a level in certain populations. The very fact that the body is capable of spontaneously clearing the virus tells me that at least from a conceptual standpoint, we can stimulate the body with a vaccine that would induce a similar response. So although there's no guarantee, I think it's clearly much more likely than not that somewhere within that timeframe, we will get a vaccine for this virus. 3:06:50 Sen. Jacky Rosen (NV): Can you talk about PPE for the general public? Anthony Fauci: Well, you know, the best PPE for the general public, if possible right now is to maintain the physical and social distancing. But as we've said, and I think all of us would agree, there are certain circumstances in which it is beyond your control, when you need to do necessary things. Like go to the drugstore and get the occasion, go to the grocery store and get your food that in fact, you need some supplementation to just physical distancing. That's the reason why some time ago, recommendation was made, I believe it was Dr. Redfield at the CDC, who first said that about getting some sort of a covering we don't want to call it a mask because back then we were concerned, we would be taking masks away from the health care providers with some sort of mask like facial covering, I think for the time being, should be a very regular part of how we prevent the spread of infection. And in fact, the more as you go outside right here and where I'm sitting in Washington DC, you can see many people out there with masks on, which gives me some degree of comfort that people are taking this very seriously. 3:20:00 Sen. Lamar Alexander (TN): You didn't say you shouldn't go back to school because we won't have a vaccine? Anthony Fauci: No, absolutely not. Mr. Chairman, what I was referring to, is that going back to school would be more in the realm of knowing the landscape of infection with regard to testing. And as Admiral Giroir said, it would depend on the dynamics of the outbreak in the region where the school is, but I did not mean to imply at all any relationship between the availability of a vaccine and treatment and our ability to go back to school. Addressing the Senate: McConnell: Americans on the Front Lines Need Action, Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, May 12, 2020 Hearing: Shark Tank: New Tests for COVID-19, United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, May 7, 2020 Watch on Youtube Watch on CSPAN Witnesses: Francis Collins, MD, PhD - Director of the National Institutes of Health Gary Disbrow, PhD.- Acting Director, Biomedical Advanced Research And Development Authority, Office Of The Assistant Secretary For Preparedness And Response at the Department of Health and Human Services Transcript: 1:36:20 Gary Disbrow: We do know that Coronavirus, the COVID-19, is one the immune system recognizes and eradicate the virus, we do know that people recover from it. And after a while you can't recover the virus anymore. That's good. That tells you the immune system knows what to do with this. It's not like HIV. At the same time, we do know that this virus can mutate. We've already been able to observe that it's an RNA virus. Fortunately, it doesn't mutate the way influenza does. So we don't think it will have this sort of very rapid seasonal change that we have to deal with with influenza, which means last year's vaccine is maybe not the one you want this year. We really don't know the answer, though to a lot of your questions, and they're fundamentally important. Can you get reinfected with this? There have been a few cases of that they're not incredibly convincing. If you do develop immunity, how long does it last? We do not have a good reason... Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA): Can I ask you though there is evidence both from rhesus monkeys that this antibody is protective it and there's also from SARS1 if you will, somebody writes about immunity being for 18 years. So it does seem If the scientific evidence is pointing in that direction, Gary Disbrow: It's pointing in that direction. You're absolutely right. And we're counting on that to be the answer here. But until we know, we will need to know. Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA): Now, let me ask you though what is defined as knowing because knowing may not be for one or two years, and yet we have to make policy decisions, hopefully before then, Gary Disbrow: Indeed, and I think at the present time to be able to evaluate the meaning of a positive antibody test, one should be quite cautious, I think it's going to help a lot to see if there anybody who has such an antibody test, it turns out to get infected again, in the next six months or so because a virus is going to be around, we'll start to get an early warning sign there. But we won't know whether it's three years or five years or 10 years. Sen. Bill Cassidy (LA): So you suggested to me that not only should we test but we should be tracking who is positive so that we can follow them longitudinally to see whether or not they develop once more. Gary Disbrow: With their appropriate consent of course, and this is where the All of Us program that you and I have talked about which is enrolled now 300,000 Americans who are pre consented for exactly this kind of follow up is going to be very useful to track and see what happens. 2:16:00 Sen. Mitt Romney (UT): I was in a hearing yesterday with the Homeland Security Committee. And the suggestion was between 50 and 90% of the people that get COVID-19 have no symptoms. If that's the case, should we let this run its course to the population and not try and test every person. I'm saying that a bit as a straw man, but I'm interested in your perspective. Gary Disbrow: I appreciate you're putting it forward as a straw man, because while it is true, that lots of people seem to get this virus without any symptoms at all. And the estimates are that maybe 60% of new cases are transmitted by such people. It's still the case that 74,000 people have died from this disease. And so the people who are out there infected who may not themselves be suffering or passing this on becoming a vector to others who are vulnerable with chronic illnesses or in the older age group. And sometimes young people too. Let's not say that they're immune. There are certainly plenty of sad circumstances of young people who really you would not have thought would be hard hit by this, who have gotten very little or even died. So I think it is extremely unusual to have a virus like this that is so capable of infecting people without symptoms, but having them then spread it on, we just haven't encountered something like that before. But it doesn't mean that it's not a terribly dangerous virus for those people who aren't so lucky and who get very sick and end up in the ICU and perhaps lose their lives. The only way we're really going to put a stop to that is to know who the people are who are infected, even if they have no symptoms, get them quarantine, follow their contacts. It's just good solid shoe leather public health, and we've learned it over the decades and it applies here too. 2:31:45 Gary Disbrow: In terms of the need to track people to see what happens, and particularly as was brought up earlier, is the presence of antibody actually something you can say makes you immune. I think maybe our best chance at this is this program that Congress has funded, and it's part of 21st Century Cures Act. So I'll have to specifically give a shout out to this committee about that to the chairman. And that is this program called All of Us, which is tracking when we get there a million people over time, we're already up to over 300,000 that have signed up. And those individuals answer lots of questions. Their electronic health records are available for researchers to look at after they've been anonymized. They get blood samples over the course of time, so you can track and see, oh, it didn't have the antibody, then oh, now it does have the antibody, what happened there? We should be able to utilize that for this and many other purposes to try to get some of those answers. And I totally agree. We need those. Hearing: COVID-19 Response, United States House Committee on Appropriations, May 6, 2020 Watch on Youtube Watch on CSPAN Witnesses: Dr. Tom Frieden - President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, and former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Caitlin Rivers - Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Transcript: 47:00 Dr. Caitlin Rivers: You heard from Dr. Frieden that contact tracing is really a key component, a key approach that will allow us to reopen safely. One thing that I don't hear a lot about about contact tracing, though that I want to bring to your attention is that it's also a key source of data that we badly need. We currently have very little understanding about where people are getting infected, our most new cases in long term care facilities or correctional facilities, which we know are high risk settings. But we don't have a good sense of whether 99% of our cases originate in those special settings or whether it's a small fraction. We don't know whether people who are essential workers still performing duties in the community are getting infected, or we don't know whether most infections are happening at home. Getting a better understanding of what that looks like will help us to guide better interventions. If it is special settings.

Promises, Promises - John 14:15-21: This is a great weekend for the church. Not because we're able to meet together via our online services, but because it's Pentecost weekend! It's a weekend we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the church and the dramatic transformation that occurred in people's lives. We may not have another Pentecost event, but we can have the Pentecost effect in our lives as we seek him and surrender to him. We'll also gather around the Lord's Table, which is always a fantastic privilege. So I'll see you on the weekend. Be safe, be blessed and find some time outside — if you can! Blessings, Ian

Creating Awesome Teams with Zoe Routh Josh: All right everyone, we've got a fantastic guest. We've got Zoe Routh here who's going to be able to talk to you all about how to better your business. You might be in a position where you're worried about possibly a looming recession, or maybe you're not, maybe you are. Some businesses we have been working with have gone from 30 to 50 employees down to three to five so it's scary times. But Zoe is an expert when it comes to building relationships and making sure the relationships you have with your teams and with yourself are on point. So Zoe, tell me a bit about what you do. Get more tips on how to better your business at dorksdelivered.com.au Zoe: Hey, Josh, welcome. Thank you. Welcome to your show. I'll welcome myself to your show. What I do is the people stuff in leadership. So as you said that story, some people have gone from 50 people down to three. I'm like, wow, that's very scary. So the kind of work I do is to help leaders manage that kind of process for their people. Not necessarily the massive business decisions around cutting expenses and stuff, but how you actually manage the effect on your people, those who stay and those who go. I'm obsessed with helping people enjoy their work and where they do it and who they do it with. And I'm kind of like a navigator, if you like. I believe that leadership is like a wilderness and that you can learn to read the map. So my job is to give you the tools and resources to help you read the people's stuff and the leadership landscape, so you can get to where you want to go faster, easier, and quicker. Josh: Cool. That sounds like all the things people need to know, obviously. The big things I guess in business is that your mindset plays a huge part in it. And as you said, people changing from having a 50 person business to a three person business is huge and that can definitely change around the way the relationships and the ecosystem that you would have created over the organic growth or even accelerated growth of a huge team. So would you say there is something in particular you should focus on more than other elements as a priority? Zoe: In that particular scenario you mean? If you're downsizing? Josh: Yeah. If you're forced to have relationships with four dozen people, not forced to have relationships, that sounds terrible. But you've got relationships with four dozen people and you have to make the decision of who's staying and who's going and making sure you're pulling the ship in the right direction and making sure you're doing the people's stuff right. How can you make sure that you're not stepping over your toes and collapsing into a heap? Zoe: Well, there's lots of, I guess, to do. I mean, first of all, its terrible news for the business owner and for the people. Especially if you didn't have a plan necessarily to do that, like it wasn't part of your strategic intent and circumstances are dictating that you have to let people go because of financial constraints. That's pretty shocking. So I think a lot of, first of all, a lot self management around that and a lot of stress management techniques will have to come into play so that you can show up as a leader, calm, cool, and centred and compassionate. I think that's the really big piece. So no leader wants to tell their staff they don't have a job anymore. Because we feel for the impact on the people that we work with and the knock on effect it'll have on their families. So showing up with care and compassion is the first thing, first of all, for self, and then also for the person that you need to sit down and talk to. I think the next thing to keep in mind is from a mindset point of view, is that as leaders, we always have a responsibility to people, not necessarily for them. Now, this comes with lots of little caveats around it. As employers, obviously we have responsibility to provide a safe workplace, to treat people with respect and consideration, to follow all our duties and responsibilities and legal obligations. And yet we can never know the impact of such an event on somebody and we tend to catastrophise that it'll be the worst thing ever. Whereas it's interesting, is that oftentimes these kinds of events can be a trigger for something amazing for that person. We just don't know. In any case, we are not responsible for how they receive the information and the event and what they do with it. We are responsible for how we deliver the message, how we look after them, how we set them up for success in the longterm. Do we offer them counseling? Do we offer them a platform so they can get their CV up and going? Do we offer them career coaching to help them transition? There's a lot of things that we can do to support and do well by people. I think the other important thing that people often get wrong is that in a crisis, sometimes we just tend to batten down on the information and don't want to let any of the information leak out because we're afraid of large spread panic. This is kind of what happened in China around the coronavirus. Its like, "Don't tell anybody anything, we just got to control this thing." And it was the wrong thing to do because the whole thing morphed anyway. And I think when signs of economic downturn are threatening, I think one of the things that's important to do is communicate, communicate, communicate. And that applies across the board in any context, whether it's crisis or whether it's general business as usual. As leaders, we can never communicate enough. I think people always fill in gaps in information with their own made up stories. And the more we can do to downplay that, I think the better. So that's a hand full of things. So self-manage, show up with compassion, be supportive around your people, and don't take ownership necessarily for how they're going to react because that's the part you definitely don't have control of. Josh: Yeah. And everyone's not on necessarily the same wavelength or underneath the same stresses or seeing the other side. They might just be looking at it as, "Why did you choose to get rid of me instead of someone else?" As opposed to a, "This is the only thing that can be done." There's different businesses and different people that we've had on the show about recession proofing your business, some people are talking about, "There is absolutely no chance of a recession." And then other people are saying, "It is absolutely going to happen, it's just when." And then other people are saying, "We're already in it now." So people that are not affected currently, if you've got a team and you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing by them in staying productive and making sure you're having the right relationships or the hard conversations, what would you say is the best way to change your round the ecosystem that you've got that might've been working and it might've grown too quickly for you to manage that or something has changed? It could be a life circumstance has changed, your relationships. Zoe: I've always been on the edge of leadership in difficult circumstances for a long time. Even when I first started working at summer camp in Canada and I was a summer camp counsellor, I just turned 17 during staff training. So I was young and tasked with a lot of responsibilities. Composure really is all about being fully present in the moment and it's about experiencing emotions without having them drive your reactions. So I liken it to putting your emotions in the passenger seat, so we're reactive when we let our emotions drive the show. So I think composure and that capacity for composure is the ability to have emotions, to experience them and not let them choose the direction in which we go, not choose our reactions. So we may be like the fellow whose whole personal world is crumbling around him. We don't disconnect from that necessarily, we learn how to feel things fully. This isn't an awareness thing, it's a focus thing. So what I mean by feel things fully is that you pay attention to where you're experiencing this drama in your body. And if it's stress, some people experience it differently. It might be in their chest, might be in their throat, might be in their stomach. It could be a sense of volcanic overwhelm and so on. And no matter how much we meditate, how much we do mindfulness, all of us will have an emotional response or reaction to the situations around us. It's how we actually process it and metabolise it. So the first technique is deep self-management. Deep connection to self is like, okay, this group is hitting the twirly thing. Things are not going well. I'm experiencing a rise of stress, breathe through it, connect to the body and just purge your body of the energy of that emotion. So that's the first technique, if you like. And taking a leaf out of Brené Brown's book, it's to acknowledge what's there in the room. When you do that deep self-mastery piece first where you sit and process and breathe and acknowledge, you can show up to your team and say, "I've got some challenging things in my personal world at the moment that are quite distracting. And at the same time, this is what we need to focus on." So I think you can acknowledge the stuff going on, acknowledge that it's having an impact and say, "We're still in charge. We can still move on this thing." So I think that is a way to present chaos to your group while staying centred. If you as a leader are broadcasting stress, anxiety, and chaos, people are going to have that as a major ripple effect and it can really derail the people around you. So deep self-mastery in terms of awareness of your emotions, breathing through it, purging the energy of that emotion and then naming the emotion. Actually, without saying, "I am stressed," you change your language a little bit and say, "I am experiencing stress." It sounds like such an easy tweak and such a simple thing, but it's incredibly powerful. It gives us a little space between the emotion and the nature of our reality so that we can say, "I'm a human being. I'm bigger than my emotions and this is the one I'm experiencing right now. I'm experiencing frustration. Josh: I was going to say everyone has all the emotions at some stage in their life and understanding it, acknowledging it, and then making a decision to take that onboard and then moving away from it, I guess. Zoe: Yeah. I love that. So putting it in the past tense is a nice way of trying to unplug from it, I guess. Josh: Yeah. Zoe: So getting it out by receding to the passenger seat. And something that you can observe. Now it's like, there's this thing that happened and I'm a witness to it, as opposed to a victim of it. Let's not be pollyanna about this, sometimes you do have to make really tough decisions, like cutting your staff by multiples. And I think to help people with that, because they're all going to go into survival mode, is you can bandy them together and start to lead strategy. And before you have to make the final cut, I think you can incorporate people into the decision making process around that. And regardless, sometimes we have these very unplanned crises that are short term and some of them are very big unplanned crises that are longterm and it's possibly the coronavirus is one of them, possibly the recession is one of them. What I encourage my leaders to do is to not just be optimistic saying, "Yeah, it'd be right." Is to do some scenario planning around this and that is okay. Let's look at some of the variables that are at play here. What are some possible drivers that could create different potential worlds? So, okay, let's do one. One scenario is coronavirus takes over the world. Josh: Yeah. Zoe: One extreme. Other one is coronavirus extinguishes quickly. And so you have this pole and then you have another one that might be the recession. So recession accelerates, recession retreats. And so you map out these different worlds based on that. And then you ask yourself, okay, which is the most likely, which are possible, probable? Which ones do we want? But to be realistic, what's likely? What's possible? And then you create action steps you can do right now that can either prevent the fallout of those particular effects or it can mitigate it. So that no matter if scenario coronavirus accelerates and takes over the world and recession accelerates, which is kind of like we would call that world pandemic disaster or something then what are we going to do? Armageddon, thank you. So we have Armageddon. As a team, what are we doing now to look ahead for that? And I know you've written a white paper about some of the things that people can do around that, if Armageddon comes up and that make sure your cash flow is really done, minimise expenses and so on. Those are some examples of some of the things you can do as a team to mitigate this. And then you go, okay, if this, then that. So if we reach this threshold, this is what we're going to do. These are the things we're going to put in play. And then we can also ask the question, what's the opportunity in this? What's likely to happen if businesses shut down. So like in my case, in my business, doing leadership training. So what's the opportunity in that? Well, the opportunity might be we pivot a little bit and we start offering support for how to deal with a crisis, how to do leadership in a crisis, as opposed to the deeper work that we do on how to lead change, how to lead culture and so on. Then we just focus on that one particular piece and we're in service to our clients in that particular mode in that moment. So I think that's how we can be Pollyanna ask in terms of there's a silver lining to any crisis, but we have to be proactive with that as opposed to reactive. It comes back to the emotional self mastery piece too. We don't want to be reactive in our emotions. We don't want to be reactive in our businesses either as much as possible so that we have enough resources and resilience to handle what gets thrown at us, whether it's a fire in the kitchen or a meltdown on your mobile phone or whatever. You have redundancy built into your systems. Josh: Yeah. Couldn't agree more with that. The ability to pivot and look at the opportunity in a crisis before the crisis, or at least build out scenarios is very sensible. We had a look and thought, okay, when the fires were happening. So what can we do to help businesses out? I mean, it's all we've got. A lot of automation with the way that our business is set up and we thought we'd be able to supply a service that other IT companies can't. And it would cost us a 10th of the price. And we thought, well, any business that's affected by the fires, we'll jump in and help them out. And I thought that that's helping them out, pivoting the mindset and it's creating a feel good story as opposed to just a standard boring generic, which no one should ever have marketing. One of the big things that we're huge advocates for is automation in your business to improve productivity. So look at the processes. If there's any element of repetition, I say that twice, if there's any element of repetition, if I say it a third time, I'm going to get it on the recording because I don't want to say it again. And that's how it works. If you have to say it more than twice, or you have to do it more than twice, there should be a standard operating procedure. There should be something there so that your staff and the team are following it in the way that we want you to have that process works and, or it's automated with software. Having productive teams means that the quality of the work that your team is doing is much more beneficial to the business and that in turn I found means that there is a downturn. All the grunt work that can be automated, has been automated. And you've just got a very, very lean machine with the employees that would be very, very difficult to get rid of because they're all core parts of the business. How can you make sure that they are happy and willing to embrace change and go in that direction? Zoe: I love this question because it's the big juicy one. And it's a lot of what my clients are struggling with. Because they know that they have to make these big changes to respond to all these massive environmental factors and systems factors and global factors that are creating a demand for a new direction. And I think a couple of things we need to keep in mind is that uncertainty is one of the things that puts people into unproductive defensive survival modes. And so anything we can do when we're leading change to mitigate uncertainty is really, really important. So even if you don't know what the future is going to be, you tell them what you do know. You explain it over and over again with the communicate approach. So uncertainty is a big thing to mitigate. Sense of belonging is another piece to ensure to help people feel like they are safe. So we're tribal animals and our contemporary tribe is the organisations in which we work. And so anything that you can do to maintain the sense of belonging. So the tribal rituals, which also helps reinforce a sense of certainty. The things that you do on a regular basis that identify the sense of tribe is really important. Other factors to look out for if you're leading change is make sure that you are aware if the change is being imposed on them. Because again, that will put them into unhelpful survival threat and you need to communicate as much as possible the rationale behind the decision. Incorporate them into the decision as much as possible. I think when it comes to leading productive teams, whether it's through a change process or not, there's five things that you need to really take care of as fundamentals. One is purpose and having a clear line of sight to the purpose of your particular role and the organization's role and contribution to the world is really important because that will help guide you through whatever structural assistance change you want to introduce. It's like, this is what we're here to do in the world. This is why it's meaningful to all of us. And unless you have that resonating, it doesn't matter. People are going to get disconnect from whatever message you tell them. And the other framing part of this. So there's five parts. There's a front wheel and the back wheel. The front wheel is purpose, the back wheel is results and being really super clear on the results that you and your team are producing in the business. So what are the things that are going to happen for your clients and your customers and the business as a whole once you do the magic process of your work and being really clear about that and measuring those, because those are your key outcomes and that's how you track whether or not you're being successful. So those are the two, front wheel and back wheel. The gear is in the middle. There's three of them and you alluded to one of them. And it's part of the big gear in the middle. It's structure. So when you have really solid structures, including cleaning up redundancies and processes like that, including who reports to whom, which helps downplay some of the tension you might have around fairness and ego and all that kind of stuff, how decisions are made. Clarity on feedback and how you can raise issues. All those kinds of structural things are really important gear in the middle of your productive bicycle. Another gear is skills. Do you and your team have the skills to have difficult conversations? Can you give each other robust feedback in a way that's supportive collaborative, where the relationship is never in question but the ideas can be challenged and the two are separate. And in fact, when you do challenge ideas or situations that you know that the relationship is never threatened. In fact, they can strengthen. So the skills and communication and interaction are really, really critical. And then the fifth piece, which is the third cog is understanding and valuing and leveraging the strengths of a team member. So if somebody is really good at data analysis and process, put them on the job related to the change. If someone's really good at communication and enthusiasm, put them on the job of communicating what you're coming up with. If someone's really good at risk mitigation, put them on the job so that you don't have to rely on yourself to do the whole thing but you leverage those pieces of the puzzle. So that's the overarching strategy I would use to make sure that your team is humming and thriving, whether it's going through a change process or not. Josh: Once you've got a humming thriving team, I guess one of the key metrics that you to be able to do is, which you brought up there was making sure that you know what their core skills are, and I guess where their interests lie. And would you do that through profiling Myers-Briggs type settings to better understand the best way to communicate a certain problem to them or a certain situation to them? Or what would you- Zoe: I love that you've raised this because there's any number of instruments that you can use, profiling instruments that help unpack different patterns of interaction in humans. And I use a number of them. DiSC is a really easy one. So that looks at behaviour preferences, how people like to operate at work. And it's simple to understand, simple to explain and easy to put people through that profile. And you can see what the strengths and challenges are of the team and it highlights culture as well. So that's one. Any of those resources are really useful and there's an important quote by a gentleman whose name I forget, and he said, "All models are useful, some are flawed." Josh: Yeah. Zoe: That means no model is perfect. Any map that you use to map the territory of humans is going to be helpful. And we've just got to remember that none of it is didactic exact representation of the human beings in flesh and blood in front of you. We are all very complex. And yet some of those map reading tools help us make sense of each other and helped us to see patterns of interaction that can help unplug some of the people's stuff, tensions that happen when you bring humans together and they get a little bit messy. For example, this week, I'm doing a work with a group of eight professionals and they're all quite strong personalities, and they've got a lot of tension in their team. And I know one of the key things that they've got going on apart from having different strengths is that they don't have their structures in place for their team. So we're going to do some of that middle gears of the bicycle work with them. We're going to look at the structure of their team. We're going to refer to their strengths and look at what's happening there and where the conflicts are happening and then we're going to do some work on skills. How do we actually raise issues with each other without feeling like we're stabbing each other in the eye? I think it's really important for teams to help understand each other a little bit more. Josh: From my understanding, you're shooting up to Brisbane very shortly, and you're doing a bit of a tour around with some of the stuff that you're doing. Zoe: Yeah. So I'll be in Brisbane. I'm talking on the future of leadership and I'm looking to launch my amplifiers program in Brisbane. So I'm looking to build a cohort of leaders from across sectors who are interested in the changing world and how we need to respond differently as leaders to manage things differently. So we can't continue to operate the way we have been doing as leaders if we're going to contend with all this crazy complexity. So yeah, that's what I'm heading up to Brisbane for. And I'm working on my fourth book as well. So that's kind of a big project over the next couple of months. So yeah, those are the main things I'm looking forward to meeting you in person in Brizzy. Josh: Yeah. I'm very excited. What's your book about? Zoe: Yeah. Kind of dropped that as little seed, didn't I? My fourth book is about people's stuff; you, them, us. An advanced handbook for the tough stuff of leadership. So that's my current subtitle I'm working with, but yeah, it's about people's stuff and it's about how we engage with each other and how we see each other and ourselves and the world in order to deal with the complexity that we're finding ourselves in. So yeah, it's a bit of a fun, little book that's on its way. So I send out the first chapter this week to my editor. So yeah, a bit of activity now behind the scenes getting that stuff done. Josh: Oh, I know. When writing a white paper and then finding references to it, it's nothing like writing a book and then the love and enjoyment you get for reading a book after you've written one is completely different, isn't it? Zoe: Yeah. You know what, I have not read any of my books once they come out in book. Like, I'm done. So much work has gone into that. I don't sit down and read it. I might pull out a few pieces, but I'm like, "I don't want to sit down and read it from beginning to end." I don't know if other authors are the same, but I definitely couldn't sit down and read it. Josh: Do you have any other questions you'd like to ask me before we jump off? Zoe: Yeah, sure. Since you threw the tables back over to me. Josh: Let's do it. Zoe: What are you most excited about? Josh: I'll do a plug here. As per the book “Composure”, I was looking and thinking, what is my 10 year plan and what would be the word that would encompass that for me? And that would be completion. And it's not that I don't complete things, it's that I manage to do a lot of things all at once. And instead of having 100 things completed 1% a week, I'd like to complete 100% of things every two weeks. My personal life, I would like to have less of those interruptions that are completely out of my control. Did I answer your question? Zoe: Yeah, mate, it does. And I recommend if you haven't read it already, Cal Newport's book Deep Work. Josh: Okay. I have not. So Deep Work, I have to pick it up. Zoe: Yeah. It's all about rigorous focus on the things that matter. Josh: Cool. Well, I've written a page of 680 different things that I know need to be done in the business and I've prioritised the list of prioritise those items. They create money. They save time. They save money. Then any of them that have a higher value then man, I think, okay, these are now in the ... they've made the touch list and then I prioritise those into categories of who can fix them, who can't. So I've probably spent about three and a half years writing a list. It wasn't that long, but it was definitely more time than, I guess, what normal people would put into a list that I know exactly the direction in that regard, but I'd definitely be interested. Zoe: Yeah, it's a good one. You'll enjoy it. Josh: Cool. Well, anyone that would love to hear more from Zoe go to Zoerouth.com and you can probably check in an inquiry there, say, hey, check out some of the cool stuff. Grab a couple of books. There are very good reads and very light reads I found. It wasn't one of these books that was difficult to turn the page. I'm not just saying it because she's listening. It was quite good and relaxing. There's something that I was getting a bit out of. It had the emotional ups and downs which I wasn't expecting. It was good. I thank you for coming on the show. Anyone that would love to leave any feedback, jump across to iTunes, leave us a review, give us some love. Zoe: Hey, thanks Josh. It was a real pleasure. And I mean that genuinely. Josh: Thank you very much. I'll talk to you soon. Stay good.

Show Resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript: The absolute lowest cost way to generate leads using LinkedIn Ads. This is it. Stay tuned. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:19 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, because of LinkedIn's higher costs, most of our clients are interested in any performance increases we can find. And one of the most common ways of getting cost per lead down is by using LinkedIn lead generation form ads. About 60% of our clients use these exclusively so there's definitely something to them. So we're going to go into a lot of detail about them. Let's hit it. 0:44 I wanted to highlight some of the reviews that you as listeners have been leaving on the podcast pages, so please keep those coming. Lucamelie, or Lucamelie in the UK says "super valuable information. I've been following AJ on YouTube and LinkedIn for over for a year now. He consistently provides excellent value and I'm so pleased he's doing this podcast. AJ, if you're reading this thanks a million for being so generous with your knowledge." Luca, thank you. I am reading it. Thanks for leaving it. And that totally makes my day. All right, Richie Norton in the US just simply says "genius". You want to know who's a genius, Richie Norton. He is the modern day Stephen Covey, call him a friend and his show is absolutely epic. So check out his show. It's all about leadership and life and goals. And he's got a really interesting model where he'll do three episodes per week. One is an interview. One is kind of like an after review and then one is a solo cast from him talking about that particular topic and and expanding. So really, really cool if you're into leadership. Okay, NN1292 in the US, says the podcast "I've been waiting for. First off your podcast is great, and I've already benefited from the information you provide along with your insight. I look forward to listening to additional episodes in the future. You seem to have a lot of experience and it would be amazing if you could share some real world solutions and strategies that have aided you in the past. As a marketer growing in the field of this sort of content, it'd be super helpful, especially since it's not easy to find content specific for B2B. Again, thanks for doing the great work. And I'll definitely be tuning again in again soon". Thanks for the glowing review, as well as the suggestion on what we can do. I'm gleaning from this that in the future, we should do more of applicability, more case study type stuff. This is why we did this and this was the effect. So definitely gonna be baking that into the future content. I'll try to bake it in as we go as well. So I do want to feature you please do go and leave reviews. And I'll give you a shout out as well. 2:48 Okay, so let's jump into what is the lead gen form ad to start out with? Well, the way I describe it, this is like when someone interacts with your ad, rather than sending them to a landing page on your website or just off of LinkedIn, a drawer will slide down from the ad itself containing a form, a native form from LinkedIn. And it gives someone the opportunity to convert without even leaving the LinkedIn experience, which is fantastic for a lot of ways. The chief have, which is that it's the highest converting way of getting someone because it takes away so much of the friction. When we implement these, we see an average increase of conversion rates of 10 to 50%. So this is literally like you could take whatever you're doing now and get 10 to 50% more leads for exactly the same money. That's really how it works. And quite often, actually, we'll see double or sometimes even tripling of conversion rates. In pretty much every type of offer every situation, using lead gen form ads is going to be the cheapest way to capture someone's information/ Prospects who are interacting with these forms have a much higher level of trust because they don't have to leave the LinkedIn experience. It's familiar to them. And plus any information that LinkedIn knows about this individual is going to be prefilled. So if you ask for information, like their job title, or their industry or company size, LinkedIn will just automatically fill that out. So all the prospect has to do especially on mobile device where entering extra information is extra cumbersome, LinkedIn is going to make that super easy so all someone has to do is just hit the send button. You can use these for most of the ad formats. So any sort of sponsored content, whether that single image, carousel, video, maybe even if there's going to be future versions of sponsored content, surely, the lead gen form ad is going to be supported by it. Also, any sort of sponsored messaging, so that includes message ads, plus the new conversation ads. Now are these a silver bullet for advertisers? Well, they can be, but not always. There are some limitations and there are some potential warnings to keep in mind about them. So first complaint that you may hear about them is that they lead to poor lead quality. Your sales team may reach out to someone and they might say something like, ah, I don't remember filling out a form. I don't think I contacted you guys. Now, don't be worried this isn't fake form fills that are happening. This is just that LinkedIn made it so easy for someone to convert that if they waited long enough, they're going to forget that they actually filled out the form, it didn't make a strong enough impression on them because it was so easy and so quick. It required less effort. And traditionally, the more effort you require from someone, the more of their attention you're going to get. It's also less of a special experience for the user visually, because they're used to seeing things on LinkedIn and they're used to seeing things move quickly like scrolling through a feed, whereas if they land on a landing page, they will see your brand front and center. They'll have the opportunity to click around and read more about your team and see what you are offer. So that's a lot of freedom that you're not going to get if you're just going to stay within the LinkedIn experience. And you'll hear exactly the same complaints about this from advertisers who've used Facebook's version, what they call lead ads. And it's exactly the same reason. It's just making it so easy that people may not remember doing it. So make sure you are following up on these quickly so that you get fewer people who forgot that you exist. The next is you actually do need some additional systems in place to make use of them. So once the lead is submitted, it goes into the LinkedIn ads platform. And it's really cumbersome to go in. You go into account assets. And lead generation forms. And then you click on the lead generation form that you're using. And then you can download a CSV. I guarantee everyone listening to this right now is paid way too much to make this your job to go in and download a CSV every single day. So you'll definitely want to get these leads out with I'm sort of partner integration. So we'll go into that here soon. But you also need to reach out to them with email software, whether that's marketing automation, or CRM, to actually fulfill on what you gave them. Because if someone fills out one of these forms, and then you follow up 24 hours later and say, "Hey, here's that piece of content you requested", chances are, so many more of them are going to forget that they ever did that or change their mind. So you want this to be fast, you'll want to use an email software system to immediately follow up with them. Another complaint that you'll hear from other advertisers is "Ah, my sales team only likes emails that are professional, but all the G mails and the Yahoo's those personal emails are worth less to us". And quite honestly, I like the personal emails, because if I get a list of personal emails, that's going to match at a really high rate on both LinkedIn and Facebook and Google and Twitter if I'm doing these custom audience retargeting, so from a nurture perspective, I really like, but I realize a lot of sales teams will kind of frown on personal emails, and you absolutely will get more of these. You can't track lead gen form ads nearly as well as you can track a landing page visit. So I'll illustrate this by showing both pathways. If you send to a landing page, you can have a form on that landing page that captures all of their UTM and tracking parameters from the URL and passes it right into your CRM. And then you can run reports later on, grab those parameters, and you can marry them up with your LinkedIn reporting to get a cost per every stage of the funnel. It's beautiful. You can tie every piece of performance all the way back to the exact ad, the exact audience that sent it. Now consider if you're using lead gen form ads, someone's going to fill out the form on LinkedIn. There's no sort of dynamic tracking available here. LinkedIn will tell you very accurately all the way down to the time where someone fills out the form, but they won't pass anything further. So if you wanted to go really, really specific and track every ad all the way down to the ad level, you would need a separate lead gen form on LinkedIn for every single ad that you publish. And smaller accounts, you can make this work, but larger accounts, oh, this is cumbersome to do, and we've done it. The other big challenge here is you can't retarget the traffic. So if you send traffic to your landing page, you can then pick that traffic up with your Google retargeting, your Facebook retargeting, and stay in front of these people to stay top of mind. And it creates an awesome audience for nurture. But because this traffic never hit your landing page and never hit your website, LinkedIn has all of the data about them and they're not sharing it with you. And then LinkedIn won't let you retarget this that's as of the time of recording yet, but they are working on engagement retargeting that I'm told should be out somewhere between July and October of 2020. At that point we'll be able to retarget users. So something like if someone opened the lead form but didn't actually fill it out or didn't submit it, then we can retarget them and show them a different offer or show them the same offer until they do convert. So I'll be excited for engagement retargeting to come out, so we can start retargeting these lead gen form ads traffic. 10:23 Okay, so how do you actually create these? Well, first you go to account assets right from your ads account and click on lead generation forms. Then you'll create a new form right there. And what I would recommend you do lose the super in depth tracking here. But for every offer, I would recommend one single lead generation form, and then send all of your ads that are going to that offer to the same form. So you'll have maybe 15, 20, 50 different ads all leading towards or all attached to the same form. Next, you either go to a campaign that already has the lead generation objective or you create one. And you'll go through the normal process of defining who your audience is and writing your ad. But then as soon as you're done writing the ad, it will ask you which form you want to attach it to. Now, if you haven't already created your form through account assets, lead generation forms, it will let you create one from right within the campaign build itself, but certainly that's a little bit more cumbersome. Keep in mind that these ads do require a privacy policy on your website, or just written into the the form itself. So be prepared, make sure you do have your privacy policy all ready. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll dive into how to make the best use of your lead gen formats. 11:44 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 11:53 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked, the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and are the only media buying agency to become official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. So fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch, and we'd love to help you absolutely demolish your goals. 12:17 Alright, let's jump into what you do with your leads once they come in, and what options you'll get to include. I mentioned earlier that you'll want to make sure that you're using an integration partner to get your leads out. There are three different ways of doing that. The first is the manual download. Booooo, don't do it. It's not worth anyone's time. I mean, seriously, don't even hire a VA for this. The next though is you use one of their partner services. So some of these partner services are things like HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce, there are quite a few, but they also tend to be pretty enterprise level software. So if you happen to be running a small account where maybe you don't own any of these enterprise level softwares, then you'll want third option here which is Zapier.com. And on their $20 a month plan, you can get all of these leads exported to pretty much whatever you want. So if you want these leads sent to your email and sent to a sales rep's Google sheet that they keep actively updated and then sent right into like a MailChimp or something, you can do that kind of logic with the Zapier $20 per month plan. There are some very cool strategic ways that you can use these lead gen formats. So I want to talk about two of those first. One of my favorite ways to use these is to actually test your landing pages. So in this case, you're not using lead gen form ads at all. You're sending a right to a form on your website somewhere and you know what your conversion rate is. So let's say you're seeing a low conversion rate, maybe you're only converting at 8%. What you can do is go and take that exact same ad the exact same offer and Create that as a lead gen form ad. And then you start measuring the cost per conversion and your conversion rate, especially conversion rate. And what you'll find is, on average, you'll see a 10 to a 50% increase in conversion rate, so expect that. But if it's larger than that, then this might be a good way for you to go, "oh, this makes sense, my landing page is hindering conversion somehow". And that can be the start of you saying, "hey, I'm going to start testing things on my landing page". Or "I'm going to go and make a case to my boss that we need to bring someone in to create a better landing page experience". So this can be good data for you. If you can find out that the same offer the same ad converts better as a lead gen form, then that signals there's probably something wrong with the website or at least something that can be improved. The next cool strategic use of these lead gen formats is to test the difference in your lead quality between your lead generation ads and your landing pages. If you are running these in parallel long enough, what you'll find is, yeah, sure these lead gen form ads will increase conversion rates, but your lead quality will also on average decrease. So if you can balance these out, if you've gotten, let's say 50% more leads, and your lead quality only decreased by about 30%, you still have a net increase of 20%. And it totally makes sense to use these lead gen formats. However, if that's reversed, if your conversion rate increases by 30%, but your lead quality decreases by 50%, you are still much better to send to a landing page. Now my bias is if it's even close, I mean, if I'm getting a similar cost per qualified lead, let's say from lead gen formats as I am from my own landing page, I want to use my own landing page 100% of the time, because then I can track it with Google analytics or whatever tracking I'm doing down to a very granular level. And I can also retarget that traffic with every network out there, LinkedIn included. So there's so much more freedom you get by having traffic that you own on your own website. But certainly, if it's better in your favor, you're getting a cheaper cost per lead, or cheaper cost per sales qualified lead from your lead gen form ads, then absolutely pursue that 100%. Okay, option wise, the prefilled fields that LinkedIn has, they have most that are prefilled, but some that someone will actually have to fill in themselves. And the way it works is if LinkedIn has it, they will pre-fill it. And if they don't have it, then they'll leave it blank and the prospect will have to go in and write it themselves. The standard fields that I generally recommend are first name, last name, and email. And if you take all three of those fields, it should convert at the highest rate. You're asking for very little and the email address that it fills out is going to be most likely. I mean, it's their profile email, which is most likely a Gmail or a personal email of some kind. If you want to ask more for that, or if you need to ask more from them, then you can ask for their city, their country, their phone number, their zip code, or postal code, their state province. And you can ask them for their work email, but there's no validation to make sure that it actually is a work email so they can just, it's a blank field so they could just write their profile email in, you'll probably still get quite a few of these personal emails as well. You can ask for work phone number. Obviously, anytime you ask for a phone number, people are expecting a phone call and it's going to scare them away. You will see a lower conversion rate if you're using those. You can ask for their job title, their job function, which is their department, their level of seniority, their company name, their industry company size, and on the education side, you can also ask for their degree, their field of study, their graduation date, their start date And the school that they went to or graduated from. You can also ask for their gender, which will not be prefilled. Because if you remember from our targeting episode, gender is an inferred characteristic based off of their first name. And so it's not always accurate. LinkedIn doesn't want to assume here where the user will actually see what LinkedIn considers them to be. There's a new addition here, though, which is one of my favorite, you can insert their LinkedIn profile URL. The reason I love this is it's so low friction, of course, someone filling it out is going to say, "oh, well, my LinkedIn profile is public anyway so I don't care". That's not a high friction kind of field. But if you have a link to someone's LinkedIn profile, you also know immediately what company they work at. And you can follow that to see what size of company and what industry and you can look at. You can find out so much that you don't have to actually ask for this information in the field. Because if you're asking for five, seven, eight pieces of information, you're going to scare a lot of people away because you're asking so very much. So if I have my way with it, I'm going to ask for first name, last name, email, and LinkedIn profile URL. You can also include some custom questions. These can be a single line or a multiple choice. And you can also attach a checkbox, a custom checkbox. You can decide whether or not that is required. Everything else is required. But this custom checkbox can be not required. And then you do have hidden fields you can insert if you need UTM parameters in the traffic as it comes from the lead generation form to the thank you page or whatever experience you're sending them to after. You can have those come through. But like we talked about earlier, this is at the form level. And so if LinkedIn is listening, I would absolutely love in the future if we could put dynamic parameters in here. So if we could maybe dynamically insert the campaign Id or the ad ID or both, or maybe some other parameter from the campaign, the campaign name, something. This would be super helpful. And then we wouldn't have to create an individual form for every single ad if we wanted to track much deeper into our CRM. Okay, stepping off my soapbox there. 20:19 Tracking these can be an issue. So let's talk through that one. Tracking down to the cost per lead is totally flawless. You don't have to worry about tracking pixels. You don't have to worry about them clearing or making sure that they are associated to the campaign. There's none of that. You just launch a lead gen form ad and immediately you're getting conversion information. But if you need to go deeper than cost per lead, or lead conversion rate, now that's going to be a problem. The most sophisticated advertisers are using this solution right now where they create one whole form for every single ad. And that may be worth it for tracking, but boy is that cumbersome to actually administer. And again, I think everyone listening to this is probably, it's way below your paygrade to do that kind of work. But it is possible if you want to get your tracking on point. Depending on the partner you're using, it can actually pass your campaign ID and your ad ID. So you might be able to capture those and pass those somehow into your CRM so that you can match the individual ad back with like a V lookup from a LinkedIn report. So you may be able to do something like this. I haven't fully explored it yet. I think it's possible. But you may be stuck with the one form per ad if you don't want to do all of that technical juggling. And then for retargeting, since the traffic doesn't actually hit your website, you can't retarget them. So LinkedIn, like we mentioned, is going to have engagement retargeting sometime in Q3, but it also means if you're using these, you can't do your retargeting with Google and Facebook, which is such a valuable thing right now. As a quick recap, LinkedIn lead gen formats are they cheapest way to get your ideal prospects into your database for nurturing. They are fantastic if you just need to show results fast, or show the value of the channel to prove it out, you should start seeing leads come in very quickly. And pretty much no matter what your offer is, these will convert higher than if you sent them to your landing page. However, if you want meaningful interactions with a very, very important VIP kind of audience, I would still suggest sending to a landing page. Or if you require that you have the retargeting or tracking abilities that you would only get from sending to a landing page, then absolutely, same deal. When you're thinking lead gen form ads think that this is quantity over quality. So if your goal is quality, time, and attention from a very important prospect, definitely send to landing page. But if your goal is to get the cheapest cost per on your ideal audience, get them into your database for nurturing and so you can start doing some outreach Yeah, lead gen formats are going to be by far and away the best way to do that. Okay, I've got some episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. 23:15 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 23:24 If this is the first one you're listening to make sure you hit that subscribe button in your podcast player. And definitely do a rate and review I would love to shout you out and feature you in the review section. So whatever podcast player you're on, go and review there. I would love to hear, especially any feedback. But of course, I'd love to know that this is making a difference in your own professional careers and lives. If you're new to LinkedIn advertising, definitely check out the LinkedIn advertising course on LinkedIn learning, that I partnered with LinkedIn to do. It's incredibly inexpensive and it's a great from beginning to maybe slightly intermediate type of course, so check that out. And if you're a LinkedIn pro subscriber, then you should have LinkedIn Learning for free. So it should be a just totally free course. If not, I think it's only $25, so definitely worth checking them out. If you have any feedback for the show, or any topics you'd like to have us cover, reach out at Podcast@B2Linked.com. I'll see you back here next week cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Welcome!   Finally, the lockdown is starting to abide. With more and more people working from home there has been a run on VPNs but they are not all they are cracked up to be --  So sit back enjoy the fresh air and listen in.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig Peterson: Hey everybody. Hello. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. Welcome, welcome, welcome. [00:00:10] Hey, if you missed the first hour,  you can catch it online. I podcast this whole show every week on your favorite podcasting application or website. Just look for me, Craig Peterson, or visit Craig peterson.com cause I have them all there as well. [00:00:30] And you did miss a lot of, you missed that first hour because we talked about the new website attacks that are underway that are hurting you and me as well as businesses that are just set up websites recently. It is a bad state of affairs. We talked about company identity-related breaches that are happening, the coming disruption to college and what Google Chrome is doing to stop some of these. [00:00:57] Resource draining. Ads that are actually rather, well, I wouldn't say the malicious, but they are stealing from you. They're using your computer to mine for Bitcoin. For them. I suspect this is actually going to get a lot worse. Maybe that's why Google's finally taking action with the Chrome browser, but the reason I think that this is really going to start taking off is that the Bitcoin value is about to be halved. [00:01:26] And what happens at that point? Normally in the marketplace, if a stock's worth, let's say a hundred dollars and they have it, so it's worth $50 there's a lot of pressure for that stock value to increase back up to the pre-split amount. So back up to the hundred dollars point. And it will work its way back up there usually. [00:01:47] Well, what the problem is when it comes to these cryptocurrencies is yes, indeed, they can go ahead and split it and say it's worth half of what it used to be worth. But now the people that are mining for the Bitcoins are in for a whole different world. And the different world is, Hey, I can barely break even right now. [00:02:09] In fact, in most places, like here in the Northeast, electricity is so expensive that it costs you more to mine for Bitcoin, cost you more than electricity. Then the Bitcoin is worth it. So once they have the value, now all of a sudden it's just not worth mining anymore. So that's going to be an interest rate trusting result. [00:02:30] And that's another really interesting analysis too, of Bitcoin this week and this kind of view shaped factor that had, has based on the key sizes. And that's a little too geeky to get into here. This is not a Bitcoin show. But it is a show about your security, what you can do, and what you should do. Just this week, we installed some network equipment, a whole new set of network equipment for a lady named Sue down in mass, and we were talking with Sue about it. [00:03:03] We had. Preconfigured everything, shipped it out, helped her with it. She was having some problems trying to figure out, okay, so what plugs into what? I think next time maybe we'll just make sure everything's all plugged in before we ship it out, but we had one of our guys go by, he only lives about 20 minutes away from SU there and he went in five minutes later, everything was done. [00:03:25] And, you know, it gets kind of confusing. But while he was there installing this whole new network for Sue's company, there was an interesting conversation that ensued because Sue told him that I was anti VPN. As well as a couple of other things that I was against. And the truth is, yeah, I, I'm anti these commercial VPN services that they keep trying to sell. [00:03:53] You and I read a summary this week from a respected place, and they must have people writing articles now that don't know what they're doing. I've certainly seen that, you know, people in third world countries, second world countries that don't know what they're doing, but they're cheap for, to hire as a writer. [00:04:12] And so they hire them as writers and off they go with their cheapness, not really understanding things. And this article said, Hey, yeah, you should use a VPN because it's going to keep your data safe. It keeps it encrypted. It's great. Great, great. And. I, of course, just rolled my eyes and lost respect for them. [00:04:30] VPNs have a use, but it's a very limited use and that's what Sue had caught on when she attended one of my webinars. Talking about VPNs and how you can best use them because they are useful. They were invented. They came about in order to help businesses. With their data and keep their data safe, connect offices together, et cetera. [00:04:55] They are not great for just going to your bank website. In fact, you could be in more of a security problem area if you use a VPN for your bank than if you don't use a VPN for your bank. So I'll just, you know, keep that all straight. And I figured. Now's a good time to talk about this. And there's a great article in dark reading this week that I put up on my website as well. [00:05:20] You can find it there. And this article is talking about challenges that exist with VPNs. And this is really kind of a big deal. You know, a VPN can be a step in the right direction, and if someone's trying to use a VPN, they're probably trying to do the right thing, but it's really not a be-all and end-all All. And when it comes to security, not only does it fall short in many ways, but as I've explained in my webinars, and it takes a lot longer to explain, well, actually to show you that it does, that I have time for right now than it does just quickly say. That if you want to catch a criminal, you go to where the criminals are. [00:06:02] If you want to find people that are trying to keep their information secret or quiet, you go to where the VPN exit points are. And that's exactly what's been happening. And it just, it isn't just the five eyes or the nine eyes or the 14 eyes, it's organized crime. It's just all over the place. So. Be very, very careful. [00:06:23] But in March of 2020, all of a sudden everything changed. Everything shifted. We saw a huge shift in people starting to work from home. Some of these businesses had to stay open. They didn't necessarily have to have the employees right there in the office and according to a Gardner survey that just happened here with Chief financial officers, Gardner's reporting that 74% of organizations will move at least 5% of their previously onsite workforce to permanently remote positions following the pandemic. That is pretty good, right? Three-quarters of all businesses. Are going to move, you know, give or take one 20th of their onsite workers to offsite. [00:07:10] Now it's going to have a major impact on everything on real estate and obviously the technology side too. But let's talk a little bit about VPNs right now and, and what are they good for? What are they not good for? So point number one. VPNs. Now, remember I said the great for businesses point to point, they replaced the leased lines. [00:07:33] That's what they were invented for initially. But typical traditional VPNs have a device that's at the business office. And that piece, that device, that piece of hardware can usually only handle a certain number of users. That's also true with the data line that's coming into your office. If you don't have enough bandwidth to support all of these. [00:07:59] People accessing their desktops, or in some cases, I know businesses that have a database running at the main office, and then there are clients there. There's software on people's remote workstations that make hundreds if not thousands of requests against this database. That's not the best way to do it, by the way, and if you're interested, maybe we can talk about that sometime. [00:08:25] I'll put something up in a, in one of the webinars, but. Here's, here's the problem with that. The VPN and the data lines can only handle just so much data and many businesses came up with the specs for their VPN appliances.  Pre-COVID 19 right. Pre pandemic and how many people were actually using it. Then, for instance, we have a client, an auto dealer, and the only time they use the VPN was when the comptroller was out of training or something. [00:09:02] That might happen during the weekend and one of the supervisors would have to hop on. Well, that's a lot different than once a pandemic starts. And now there are all of a sudden focused on their websites and their online sales and everything else that's going on. So it's a huge, huge difference. So that surge and teleworking that occurred really made these VPNs fail. [00:09:26] And companies struggling to figure out how to scale to support so many users. So that's part of what had been helping him, helping businesses with the, you know, there's a lot of creative approaches going on, such as limiting VPN use to certain workers. There have been businesses that have been taking the shifts and kind of moving them around. [00:09:47] So there's a shift that starts at eight and another one that starts at 10 and another one that starts at noon, so that there are fewer people on the VPN, and maybe they're only on the VPN for a certain number of hours, but frankly, those are not longterm viable. Strategies. VPNs are also failing to balance productivity and security because many tell you productivity and security has been. [00:10:14] Had at loggerheads with each other for a very long time. And VPNs don't fix this problem. In fact, they make it worse because now not only are you overloading the VPN, all of the gateways and the firewalls, which is slowing down everybody's productivity, but these home users on their home networks with home computers that are infected are now connecting to the network. [00:10:41] And that infection's getting transferred. And unfortunately, that transfer is to the main office. Hey, a VPN ain't gonna help with that. Mobile devices, you know, the VPNs are encrypted. Then the encryption that they use is very, very complex and it causes problems on our devices. Our mobile devices just were not made to handle that, and they have to. [00:11:11] Continually update their, their keys. They're sharing the public keys and their session keys, it, they just can't handle it. And frankly, VPNs are not built for the modern workforce, and there are so many ways this really should be done and unfortunately is not being done so. VPNs. They are not a panacea. When we come back, let's talk about our remote teams. [00:11:38] We've had months, time to relaunch. You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN and online@craigpeterson.com. Stick around. I'll be right back. --- More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Mansoor Ghori, what is the BIGGEST RISK?   Mansoor Ghori  32:55   So I'll kind of dress this from a PACE perspective because I think from For more of a higher level perspective in terms of the economy, etc. I don't necessarily see a downturn in the economy as a risk to the PACE in which you actually think that is an opportunity. Because all the rest of the money in the capital is going to get tighter. And PACE will provide an opportunity for them to help them get projects done even in a downturn. I think from a PACE perspective, the thing that I worry about most is that we have to make sure that the way that PACE deals are being done that are being done with with diligence underwriting they're being done in a way where these things can get rated, securitized and sold to investors. If there are people that come in and don't do it correctly, I worry that there could become issues in the pace industry or it could be deals up below. up, you know, if you think about PACE in general historically, there has hasn't been any major blocks and PACE in commercial pace. And since the history of PACE, right, that's on the commercial side. I'm not saying that. So on the residential side, but on the commercial side, they're being underwritten, like normal commercial loans. And so they're being that they're a lot safer from from that perspective. Our worry is that people are going to come into the space as it becomes more active and starts growing, and they do it incorrectly. So we've tried to find ways to mitigate that. So we created something called a C PACE Alliance, which is an industry group of pretty much every major commercial pace lender, the service providers that are working on that are part of the PACE, the commercial space area. And what we're doing is we're creating templates templates on how to underwrite templates on how to administer templates on what the statute for these programs should look like in each new state, so that there is a box that everyone can play inside and not go outside the box. That makes sense?

Dr. Nat Strand is an anesthesiologist who lives with type 1 and a mom of two young children. She just contributed to a paper all about pain management guidelines in this difficult time, when many people can’t see their doctors to face to face. You also may know her as the winner The Amazing Race in 2010. Of course we also talk about having T1D and that crazy travel show! Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! In Tell Me Something Good: virtual events, fire fighters and a lego master Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Sign up for our newsletter here Have a diabetes product or something to promote to the community? Check out Stacey's new Book to Clinic program. She's looking for sponsors - this program fits just about any budget. ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcription:  Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes by Real Good Foods real food you feel good about eating and by Dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom.   Announcer  0:20 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:25 This week, Dr. Natalie Strand is an anesthesiologist who was diagnosed with type one as a teen. And she says people who live with chronic pain and people who live with diabetes have a lot in common.   Dr. Nat Strand  0:39 and we may think the person who lives with it is thinking about all day long with every activity you know before they go to bed when they wake up in the morning, but the people around them even loved ones, you know and household. kind of forget because you look healthy.   Stacey Simms  0:53 Dr. Strand just contributed to a paper all about pain management guidelines in this difficult time when many people Can't see their doctors face to face. You may also know her as the winner of The Amazing Race in 2010. Of course, we talked about having type one and that crazy travel Show. I'm a huge fan By the way. In Tell me something good: virtual events, firefighters and a Lego master. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of the show. I'm so glad to have you along. I know Stacey Simms. We aim to educate and inspire about type 1 diabetes by sharing stories of connection. And I am so excited to finally talk to Nat Strand. I can't believe that we haven't crossed paths before. I'm a huge fan of the amazing races. I mentioned I started watching it in 2001 when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I actually remember the commercials when it was like coming soon. And then of course September 11 happened and how are they going to be able to do this they thought the show might not have a second Season. So, gosh, that was such a long time ago. But it is amazing to see that even with COVID-19, which stopped the show again, they're going to be continuing that in the future. But that's neither here nor there. I mean, we're talking to Dr. Strand about pain management her life with type one. And of course, we'll talk about the amazing race as well, but she wanted with her partner and fellow doctor in 2010. So taking a look back, I want to bring you up to date before we get to the interview about something new that I just announced really a couple of days ago on social media, and that is my book to clinic program. Of course, the book is the world's worst diabetes mom. And one of the things that I have found really fascinating is that although I am obviously a lay person who wrote an advice book for parents of kids with Type One Diabetes, I've been really fascinated by two things. One is that adults with type one are buying and reading the book and then giving it to their parents to talk about, you know, their childhood if they were diagnosed as a kid or wants to learn Learn more about the parent perspective, which I thought was fascinating. But I'm also hearing from diabetes educators and endocrinologists who have told me and I know I sound surprised here and this is genuine. I'm not trying to make this silly. They have told me that they have learned things from the book. And you know, when you think about it, it really isn't a surprise, because it's the layperson perspective. These are things you do not learn in medical school, right? These are things you learn when you mess up diabetes, when you're at the beach, you're in the car. It's the middle of the night, you're macgyvering stuff together. This is stuff you've learned when you live with type one. And to that end, a few clinics reached out and said, Can we have copies of the book to give away and so I started a new program, it is called book to clinic. Bottom line, I'm looking for sponsors to pay for these books, so we can get them to people who need them. It's very reasonable. It's a very easy system. I will put more in the show notes and there's a video that's on social media you can see the whole thing and how it works. big thank you to my first two sponsors because the books have already gone to clinic. Thanks to T one d 3d year, and Big thanks to frio so you know I really appreciate the faith that they have shown and if you have a product or a blog or another podcast and you're looking for some very reasonable advertising that is targeted to an audience that is looking for you, please let me know and you can reach out to Stacey at Diabetes connections.com. I’m really excited about it. It's one of those things that you just don't expect to happen. But you know what, we'll see where it goes. Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Real Good Foods, and they have already new ice cream flavors. We love their ice cream and they're kind of hard to get right now. they've they've silted up a couple of flavors. But man they are so yummy. I cannot wait to try the mocha Java chip ice cream. I'm a huge fan of coffee and chocolate and their original flavors that we tried way back when beginning of March. I think we did that Facebook Live where Benny and I tried the ice creams. They were so delicious. We really liked them in chocolate chip, everybody in my household Loved the peanut butter chocolate chip ice cream or big peanut butter people. The new flavor sound amazing. I mentioned the mocha Java chip, the cake better ice cream. My kids love that. And something called super premium almond charcoal ice cream. That sounds amazing. So let me know what you think if you've sampled the new flavors, we haven't been able to try them yet, but I'm really excited and of course Real Good Foods has real good food. They have a whole line of high protein, low carb grain free gluten free. Good for a keto diet if that's your thing. Everything from cauliflower crust pizza to stuffed chicken and breakfast sandwiches, find out more Just go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Real Good Foods logo. If you've already heard of my guest this week, chances are you're a big fan of The Amazing Race TV show. Dr. Nat Strand won the whole thing in 2010, part of the first all female team to cross the finish line first, along with her friend and race partner, Dr. Cat Chang. Dr. Strand is also the first winner with diabetes and she might really think We'll be the only contestant to compete with type one. I started watching The Amazing Race. As I mentioned when I was pregnant with my daughter and I have been meaning to talk to that for a long time. I'm so thrilled we finally worked it out. She's an anesthesiologist and a pain medicine specialist working at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. Recently, she contributed to a paper on caring for patients with pain. During the COVID-19 pandemic. She was diagnosed with type one at age 12. So we have a lot to talk about. Here is my interview with Dr. Nat Strand. Dr. Strand, thank you so much for joining me. I am excited to learn from you and to hear your story. I followed you for years on social media. So thanks for coming on.   Dr. Nat Strand  6:42 Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure,   Stacey Simms  6:45 so much to talk about. We will get to the stories and living with diabetes and your diagnosis story. I want to start out and just jump right in with what caught my eye recently, which is a study to what you contributed about caring for Patients with pain during this pandemic. I don't know that you can really share too much about the study. But I'm curious like, you know, your anesthesiologist, let me start with asking you what are you seeing right now? What's going on in your world,   Dr. Nat Strand  7:14 where I'm located in Phoenix, Arizona, we are thankfully not experiencing the surge that we thought we were going to have. So four to six weeks ago, there was a lot of work as far as preparing on a community level. All the hospitals governor mandates to increase capacity of hospital beds, things of that nature. So we were certainly preparing for a surge. But I think a lot of people in our community have made personal sacrifices with the social distancing and the stay at home. And I think that that has helped us flatten the curve, as I say, not quite bend the curve because we're still increasing cases here but flattened the curves. Right now. What I do is practice pain medicine, we largely transition to telemedicine to avoid face to face visits and allow patients to access health care. While they stayed safe at home, so predominantly in the last few weeks, I have been treating my patients with telemedicine.   Stacey Simms  8:08 And how does that work? Because I would imagine that pain management is already a very delicate balance. You know, we hear about, Oh, you don't want to take too much of this medication or you can get addicted. And then when people are concerned about not seeing their doctor face to face, you've got to be worried about well, are they even managing their pain? Or are they suffering? Can you share a little bit about how it's been going?   Unknown Speaker  8:27 You know, I think for the most part, it's been excellent. With two way real time, audio and visual, I think you can get a good sense of how patients are doing. And as far as managing medications, you know, certainly the opioid crisis was there before we call the pandemic that the word crisis is still there during the COVID pandemic. So, you know, it's not the answer isn't just to prescribe a bunch of opioids. Now, some people benefit from it, but a lot of people can do manage with other texts. Consider that the anti inflammatories, neuropathic pain medications, lifestyle alterations, weight loss therapy and even with you know, the social distancing and stay at home, there's a lot of physical therapy that you can do from home too. So I think this challenge in medicine is really forcing our hand taking advantage of telemedicine and taking advantage of remote care and certainly providing access without being face to face now we are now open for elective procedures in Arizona so we are able to keep patients face to face but for a period of time there we really were forced to jump on the telemedicine bandwagon, maybe a little sooner than most of us were prepared to do that. I've been very pleased with the ability to offer access to patients, especially patients who are at higher risk, whether that be due to health concerns or age or even for patients that have to travel long distances to see a physician. So I think easing the burden on those patients and their situations to allow a little bit lower barrier to entry. healthcare access has   Stacey Simms  10:01 pardon my ignorance on this question, but when I think of seeing a doctor for pain management, and fortunately, I haven't had to have a lot of that in my life. So again, I'm ignorant on this. I don't think of an anesthesiologist. Right as the person that I would see I think of you all in the operating room.   Dr. Nat Strand  10:18 You're not alone. You know, when you do a residency in anesthesiology, you basically spend three years after your internship focusing on ICU level care, operative care, regional anesthesia, select nerve boss, epidural catheters, those kinds of things. So you become an expert at acute pain management, both with medication bandwidth intervention, so there's a fellowship option afterwards. And one of those planners either you can go into ob anesthesia, you can go into cardiac anesthesia, you can go into intensive care, you can also go into interventional pain medicine, so you kind of utilize that and there's a small skill set you developed during the anesthesia residency to further hone that Then focus on mega spinal injections, radiofrequency ablation of the spine or large joints, implantation of spinal cord stimulators or implantable pain pumps. So, you know, it doesn't seem like a natural progression at first glance, definitely. But when we kind of think about what we do in the bar and how that can translate to an office setting for chronic pain patients who kind of come to the bridge to the specialty,   Stacey Simms  11:27 yeah, yeah, of course, that makes sense. So tell me about this study. Because this is all about caring for patients with pain during the pandemic, not necessarily patients with COVID-19. This is something that is more of a guide for physicians,   Dr. Nat Strand  11:42 who's our recommendation, we worked with the American Society of we China presenting medicine to put out recommendations and then we also the paper you're referencing with that International Paper with the European society, of regional anesthesia also, and we just kind of want a different side provides some guidance during this pandemic early on, know how to handle urgent procedures, semi urgent procedures, you know, what was the risk of using steroids? You know, what can we do to manage our patients that were on chronic opioid therapy. So they really was sort of a set of guidelines after discussion of a panel of international pain medicine experts.   Stacey Simms  12:22 It does seem that chronic pain as I read through a little bit of the study, you know, just the introduction, things like that. It seems like chronic pain is so debilitating, especially for older people. I know we're a diabetes podcast, we're going to talk about diabetes in just a moment.   Unknown Speaker  12:37 But is there   Stacey Simms  12:38 you know, any advice that you would give someone who is suffering who feels like I don't think there's something for me? I've had this pain for so long. I'm afraid of being addicted. You know, we hear all those stories. Any reassurance?   Dr. Nat Strand  12:48 Absolutely. And one thing I want to say, You reminded me we talked about the food diary podcast. I think we're a lot of similarities between living with chronic pain and dealing with diabetes. I mean, they're totally different disease states. But if you talk about an invisible disease, that the person who lives with it is thinking about all day long with every activity, you know, before they go to bed when they wake up in the morning, but the people around them even loved ones, you know, a thing household, kind of forget because you look healthy or you look okay, you know, so yeah, that experience of living with diabetes is very similar to the experience of living with chronic pain.   Stacey Simms  13:27 That's really interesting, especially and even to my question of people are almost afraid to speak out because they're afraid they won't be taken seriously, or they'll be blamed. I didn't even think about that.   Dr. Nat Strand  13:38 Yeah, I mean, and, you know, you don't want to be a complainer or you want to put on a happy face. You feel like it's not interesting to other people, because it's the same thing it was yesterday and so, you know, I think living with diabetes myself, I bring a lot of that to counseling people who live with chronic pain because I get it, you know, and a lot of times they feel really, you can tell they can feel like, Oh my God, that's the first time anybody's really related to me on that way, you know more than just diagnosing the underlying cause of their pain, but actually, what it means to them to live with a condition like that. So I think that actually me having my experience of living with diabetes helps me relate to patients who live with chronic pain.   Stacey Simms  14:16 So let's talk about type one. Let's talk about your experiences. You were diagnosed as a young teenager, really, pre teenage 12 to remember your diagnosis story.   Right back in just a moment and telling your story there, but first, diabetes Connections is brought to you by One Drop, and I spoke to the people at One Drop, and I was really impressed how much they get diabetes. It really does make sense their CEO, Jeff was diagnosed with type one as an adult. In fact, I just talked to him last week about something else. It's always so good to talk to him because he gets it. He knows what this is like. Right? One Drop is for people with diabetes by people with diabetes. The people at One Drop work relentlessly. To remove all barriers between you and the care you need get 24 seven coaching support in your app and unlimited supplies delivered. No prescriptions or insurance required. Their beautiful sleek meter fits in perfectly with the rest of your life. They'll also send you test strips with a strip plan that actually makes sense for how much you actually check. One Drop diabetes care delivered, learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the One Drop logo. Now back to Nat and I had asked her if she remembered her diagnosis story.   Dr. Nat Strand  15:34 Do I remember that summer being really annoying and my family's road trips I remember going up to Northern Arizona and having to stop use the restroom all the time and it's a short like two hour drive. So I do remember my parents saying we'll stop drinking so much. You know of course now we know that the opposite. And then I went to like a three day sleepaway camp and at camp I was getting some notoriety for how many cans of soda I was drinking, I was going to the vending machine. And I was drinking so much that point I'd like built a pyramid of all the cans. I think, obviously I was going into either some decay or you know, just hypoglycemic diarrhea. So, I came home, my dad is a radiologist, he started to suspect that I might have diabetes. And I think he brought home some like urine ketone strips or something and tested them. And I remember it was like black. So he actually took me into the hospital. And I remember him telling me I was going to the hospital. And I had this bag of gummy bears in my room. And I vividly remember looking at those gummy bears. And you know, in a typical kid, that was what I was sad about was like, Oh, I'm not going to believe me. There's I had no idea what the rest of the diagnosis meant. But at that time, you know, you were admitted. I think I stayed in the hospital for 10 or 12 days and learned how to give myself injections and carb counts and there you have it. That was kind of my guide. It was truly not traumatic in a way. I mean, I didn't have some big bad events that veiled the diagnosis. It was kind of suspicion. Then that was the summer before I went into middle school. So I got to carry a purse everywhere. So the diabetes supplies I thought that was pretty cool.   Stacey Simms  17:17 Did you know you wanted to go into a medical field when you were that age?   Dr. Nat Strand  17:20 No, I don't think so. I had dreams of being like an oceanographer or a National Geographic photographer, kind of more creative, worldly, growing, no roots type of careers. But it wasn't until later. I think I had an interest in medicine through diabetes and my you know, you get a lot of exposure to physicians and hospitals at a young age. But it wasn't until I was in college that I really solidified my desire to go into medicine.   Stacey Simms  17:46 And what made you choose anesthesiology? Do you remember having a process   Dr. Nat Strand  17:49 for that? Well, it's certainly you know, matters a lot about what rotations you get. And if you have a great attending on a certain rotation that makes you know just kind of lights it up for you and that kind It happened to me for anesthesiology, bad reputation as a third year medical student and I just had a series of phenomenal attending physician to let me you know, place IVs Let me place lines, I intubated patients, I was in on some bigger cases. And I remember at the time, which of course you you changed your mind on this as you get older, but at the time, I wanted to be, you know, really where the emergencies happened. I wanted to be, you know, a first responder I wanted to be someone went down and had an emergency, I wanted to be there to be part of it, you know, traumatic, and now that I'm older, I kind of like No, I'd like something with Office Hours. You know, nobody needs you in the morning. But at the time, I wanted to be right in the heart of the action and there's nowhere better for that than being you know, in an operating room every single day and you get to help people. That's often the most terrifying thing they've ever done. And you have just moments for them to establish trust with you. Even if it was pediatric cases or you know, even on babies, you know, a parent literally can do their baby. And then you take it down the hallway. And so there's this intense trust that needs to develop over a very short period of time. And I always felt like that was something I really helped sacred as that amount of trust that someone had any for their loved one or for themselves.   Stacey Simms  19:22 We have had to have, you know, anesthesiologists, we've had surgery, both of my children over the years, and I always in the consultations, or when they come in, I always say to the anesthesiologist, you are the most important person in this room. And I try to say it when the search is not around, but I don't care. Because to me, that's the one and I, you know, it is such a huge responsibility. And I have such respect almost all and when you said, you know, you take your child down the hallway, if you've been there like I have, you know, your heart is in your throat for the entire time, and it must be such intense, not only the training, but just the experiences that you go through. Do you all Good, this is kind of a personal question, do you will have a community? Do you help each other out? Do you think there's Okay, mental health among anesthesiologists, because that's gonna be so difficult. So that's a huge weight to bear.   Dr. Nat Strand  20:11 It's a huge weight to bear. And I think, you know, I don't want to pretend like I'm on the frontlines right now, because again, I do outpatient pain medicine for the majority of my practice, but especially some of the anesthesiologists that have been called to intensive care units, and that are on COVID airway teams. And some of my best friends from training are in hospitals that are saturated with cases and other states. And so I think that mental health is a huge issue, the amount of stress, the amount of burnout, the amount of anxiety, the amount of fear even about you know, PBE and that kind of thing, especially in the beginning, when some of the supply chains weren't, you know, as mature again, I'm not talking about my personal experience, but people at other hospitals. So, you know, I think in general, it's an issue and I think acutely, it's even a bigger issue. I do see resources. I think people do In the pandemic are very aware, I even read a story about a physician suicide in New York for an emergency medicine physician, you know, so people are aware, and I think there are resources available now, especially that are free for physicians. But in general, I think mental health is unfortunately still kind of has a stigma where in medicine, I think self care is often last care. You know, people go to work when they're sick. For the most part, people go to work when they're tired. People work long hours overnight, you know, into the next morning, so I think mental health kind of goes along with physical health and, you know, you just kind of do what needs to be done and the needs of the patient come first. And so for a lot of physicians and all specialties, I think self care, including mental health really is a challenge.   Stacey Simms  21:42 I have to ask well, I have an anesthesiologist who also has type one and I mentioned you know, my kids, one has type one and one does not have both had surgeries where they required hospitalization and anesthesia. Are there any best practices or any bits of advice that you can share with the diabetes community to help us make the hospital stays, you know, we're not talking about COVID-19, obviously, but you know more routine stuff. Is there anything that we can do or better prepare, so that when we go to the hospital, if it's an adult or child with type one, that we can kind of help the healthcare teams take better care of us.   Dr. Nat Strand  22:16 So I think one of the things is to try to speak with your anesthesiologist ahead of time if possible. So if you're having a plan surgery, and you know who the group is going to be, you may find people within that group that have a little bit more experience and interest in managing type one, that would be number one is to really see if you can identify someone, even if there's not someone who has specialized experience just so you can come up with a plan. I would definitely suggest having a plan with your endocrinologist written out that can be given to the anesthesiologists. You know, I'm thinking of when I've had surgery or when I you know, had my C sections with my kiddos. I think that having the endocrinologist involved so they can, you know, give their support and of course, the You're going to do what they're comfortable with and what they know how to do. And sometimes that's changing, you know, insulin pump to IV insulin. And you also have to balance that with if someone's not familiar with it, and they don't have trust in it, they have to administer the care that they have trusted. So there might be some education involved. Of course, it depends on you what the case is the length of the case, the intensity of the case, those kinds of things. So I think if you're able to, if it's a short case, if the anesthesiologist is comfortable with the plan, I would love to always keep my insulin pump on and my guests come on, but I do know that sometimes, that's just not possible and you have to switch to, you know, other types of influence. So it's kind of uncomfortable for everybody. But I think if you can communicate ahead of time and create a plan that's most comfortable for everybody involved. That's important. And of course, you know, whatever is going to keep anybody safe. You know, avoiding any hypoglycemia, avoiding any severe hyperglycemia. And of course, just getting you to the other side when you can take over management yourself again.   Stacey Simms  23:59 Yeah, what We did the last time but he had surgery because the first the first time he had surgery, he was teeny tiny, I think had been diagnosed for, I think he was seven or eight months in. So he was about he was still two. And he had no, he had no decks. And he did have an insulin pump when this was like 13 years ago. So everybody was all excited to see the pump. It was very interesting. But he did great. And then this last time, he needed surgery, he had knee surgery late last year, and they were amazing. But we decided that it would be easier for the anesthesiologist to just look at his Dexcom numbers on his pump, not his phone, because the pump you unlock 123 right, the tandem pump is super simple. We figured the phone could lose signal, the phone could be harder to unlock, you know, just he's got like an, you know, a six digit code, and why would I remote monitor from the waiting room? What the heck was I gonna do? You know, they would know, they would know I had faith. They were great, and it really worked out well. So it was a really positive experience. And interestingly in the 1213 years that had come by that hospital Steph was really well educated about pumps and CGM, which was a really pleasant surprise for us. So that was good.   Dr. Nat Strand  25:06 Yeah, that's awesome.   Stacey Simms  25:08 All right. So I think I'm not alone in that the way many of us were introduced to you was on national television was on The Amazing Race, which is, it is the best reality show. It's my favorite of all time. I started watching it. I looked this up the other day that I couldn't believe it. I started watching it in 2001, because I was pregnant with my daughter and I couldn't sleep. And I used to watch it all the time. And I adored it.   Unknown Speaker  25:31 And you guys   Unknown Speaker  25:32 want it?   Stacey Simms  25:34 I know a lot has been said a lot has been written over the years about this. What was that? Like? I mean, what do you most remember about it?   Dr. Nat Strand  25:41 Yeah, that was 10 years ago now it's really crazy. But you know, there's there's the experience of doing amazing race of traveling around the world was nothing. I mean, you have a backpack but you know, you're going to the Arctic Circle, you know, you're going to go to sub Saharan Africa, you know, you're going to go we we didn't know exactly where we're going. Go back, watch the show myself enough time to know I'd be really cold, really hot, really dirty. But you have a backpack, you have no money, you have no maps, you have no cell phone, you have nothing. And so just being stripped down to sort of your just immediate resources to figure things out like that, because that was as interesting as it was to see the world. I mean, I had never been so stripped down of things I had access to, you know, being a study or I would have references for everything I kind of just get thrown into the world and open a clue and say, make your way to Stonehenge, you know what I mean? It's not like you get direction. So it was while that I did it with one of my very best friends, who's another anesthesiologist, Dr. Catching and we we had a blast. We went around the entire globe and I think it took us 21 days total. And then I came home and slept for like six. And after that, you know, the show starts airing in the fall and it airs. I think it aired from September to December or did at the time. So what sticking it was a whole nother like phase two.   Unknown Speaker  27:03 Oh yeah, with all the   Dr. Nat Strand  27:04 editing and the production that they do to their production, what the other teams were doing, you know, you see a lot of backstory or parallel stories that you didn't see at the time, right? Because you were just with your team, so very interesting to watch it after having lived it. And then I think phase three of it is getting to be like a C list celebrity for a year or two, which was also very weird. So there's like three phases of The Amazing Race that totally kind of changed my life. But overall, I was so positive, I have nothing but fond memories of doing it and the people that I met and, and I also remember thinking the world is a lot safer and friendlier than I would have thought, you know, if you just drop off to Bangladesh for 48 hours, with no plans, you know, people just kind of help and you and you're frenetic and you're tired and you're racing and you run up to strangers and you asked them questions really quick and, you know, now I would never go to Bangladesh for the weekend. You know what I mean? Like work to go somewhere for a weekend. But it was worth it, you know, you You definitely got to see things and get a taste of it. So afterwards I tried to tell myself, you know, even if you don't have a huge chunk of time to go somewhere still go, if you can, and, you know, to see the world and everybody was friendly, I don't think I had one time where I felt like somebody that's, you know, rude or aggressive or unwelcoming. And I think that was a very wonderful experience too. Because sometimes I think we can kind of become afraid of going places or being with other cultures and being there in person in so many different cultures. And having everybody be so warm was was phenomenal.   Stacey Simms  28:34 Did you learn anything at that time about managing diabetes? Because you you I mean, I know you're stripped down, but you had your diabetes supplies, but I saw the show you're testing while you're driving. I mean, you know, to some extent, you don't have all the stuff you know, you don't you're not sleeping, right, you're not eating right. And I'm just curious, I think sometimes with my son, he'll go and forget something and muddle through when he learns from that. And even though we have all this wonderful technology, he kind of has learned that he can make it work. You can always MacGyver something. I'm curious if you had that experience.   Dr. Nat Strand  29:03 That's the word I was just thinking. I mean, any type one becomes, you know, kind of a MacGyver where you're learning how to, if you need to draw and slip out of an old reservoir for a new wine or you're learning how to reuse parts of an infusion set because one part ripped off if you don't have enough to replace the whole thing, or you're learning how to keep insulin cold or you're learning how to package things. They don't take as much room by taking them out of their packaging and putting them in a Ziploc, you know, all together, I think, you know, I remember even the test strips, you know, opening the test strip bottles and filling one bottle with two bottles worth of strips just to save space. So, you know, you kind of by force have to get very creative with faith and efficiency and also problem solving. So yeah, I learned a lot about traveling with diabetes. And you know, one of the things I did was I typed out a letter that said I have type 1 diabetes. In case of emergency please help me get sugar or please You know, I'm getting 200,000 to a hospital and I printed that out in several languages. So, you know, if I found myself in Russia, for example, and didn't know how to say what I needed, you know, I would have that kind of to give. So I think, you know, just learning how to prepare, you know, anticipate what problems you might have, or where you're going, and then, you know, trying to bring the selections with you as possible. That was definitely a skill set that was honed,   Stacey Simms  30:24 that's a great point. We were in Israel A while back. And, you know, we were on a guided tour, and everyone spoke English. But at one point, a guy wanted to take my son's medical bag to examine it, and he didn't speak English and then he figured out what was going on your tour guide kind of spoke to him and he was like, Oh, you know, kind of funny exasperated, like, come on, make this simple for me. And he wrote out this is a medical bag in Hebrew, and attached it to our bag. He was like, here Now you won't have any other problems like what's wrong with you people? Why couldn't you just do that to me? He was very funny back to us, like, you know, nicely exasperated with us, but I think in the future, that's Something that is just very helpful. You know, this is a medical bagger. I have type one diabetes in different languages. That's great advice. So I mentioned you have two children. Now you have I was gonna say toddlers, but you have preschoolers, right, five and four years old. You mentioned c sections. I'm not going to get all personal about type one pregnancies and that sort of thing. But when you were diagnosed at 12, I doubt you were thinking about children at the time. But you know, as you were getting older with the diabetes diagnosis, did you think about children? Was this something that you thought might be difficult or not possible with type one, or was it always in the plan?   Dr. Nat Strand  31:32 You know, I actually, again, sitting with my adventurous plan for life. I wasn't one of those girls that really thought I would have kids. I never really thought about being a mom and stuff like that. I kind of was more thinking about how I was gonna travel the world. And so, I mean, we had all seen Steel Magnolias. And so I think, you know, I had this awareness but at the time, you know, I think it was more of an awareness that that movie was wrong. I think I thought it would be fine. If I had wanted Kids. And then once I got a little older, I met my husband, we got married and I started, my switch flipped and I was like, I need children. And then I was like, Okay, I started getting into the details of, you know, diabetes and what the control needed to be and what the risks really were. And, you know, that I think was overwhelming. I think, you know, type one pregnancies, it's definitely a full time job. It's not regular diabetes management is like, very, very intensive diabetes management. So I knew that people would type one could have kids, I just didn't know if I could do what it would take to be that strict for that long. You know, so I think I, I pleasantly surprised myself that I could, you know, I think when the stakes are there, you do your best. But you know, I think there are different personalities, obviously, that have type one and my brother also has type one, he was diagnosed in his 30s and he's very mathematical. He's got an engineering mind and I think Not that anybody is well suited for diabetes, but if someone was to be well suited personality wise, he is, you know, he is regimented. He charts everything. He stacks his thing. You know, he's like that, and I'm the opposite. I became like him when I was pregnant.   Stacey Simms  33:14 So speaking of your kids, though, you you know, you've said you've been doing mostly at home consoles for your work. I assume that for the last couple of weeks, at least you've been home with your kids, maybe more than usual. How's that going?   Dr. Nat Strand  33:28 Well, you know, I think that everybody will look back on this time with different different experiences. Some people are bored and they've organized every room in their house and they make all these new recipes and I will look back on this time and remember what I had a three to five year old, who didn't have anywhere to go and any preschool or any day until my house apart all day long every day. My couch cushions haven't stayed in place for more than 20 minutes of full time. I mean, it's just crazy, but it's gonna be exhausting. I mean, they're like feral animal. But it's been cool to see them develop their relationship. You know, they're they're playing together from sunup to sundown. They're imagining things. They're making no jungle. So it's been nice to see them spend some time together, but certainly be at home with two young kids and nowhere to go. That's not for the faint of heart.   Stacey Simms  34:26 I salute you. Before I let you go. I know as you've said, you you're not in the ICU right now you're, you know, you're not seeing patients with COVID-19. But as a person with type one, I assume you're trying to stay on top of the medical literature and, you know, seeing what this may mean for people with type one who who get it who catch it who are at risk. Can you talk a little bit just either you know, your thoughts for yourself advice for the community? I'm just curious what's going through your mind on   Unknown Speaker  34:52 this these days?   Dr. Nat Strand  34:54 Well, you know, when they when it first kind of came out, I was reading a lot about what had happened in China. And also in Italy. And when I thought it was I kind of assumed it was type two diabetes, you know, because we were seeing a lot of age related and comorbidities. But you know, we've now seen with position statements from like the a DA and the jdrf, you know that they're not really differentiating type one and type two. So, you know, I know for me that my risk of catching this is not hired because of the diabetes, but my risk of a more negative outcome definitely is higher because I live with diabetes. So, you know, the way I look at that is I'm doing all you know, the recommended social distancing, masking thing at home, those kinds of things. And at the same time, I'm using this as an opportunity to really focus on all other aspects of wellness. You know, I'm kind of re engaging to bring my diabetes control into a tighter range because I know that's helpful. Now, as far as like rest, nutrition, exercise, all of those things are sort of, you know, you can think of it as like prehab instead of rehab, you know, what you can do before you deal with something to make you as resilient as possible. Physically. So I would just say, we know our risk of getting it's not higher, but our risk of complications if we get it is higher. And that's something that I think we should not let us talk on a topic from a place of fear, but rather from a place of preparation, and using that knowledge to just, you know, get our diabetes under the best control possible. Whether that means, you know, changing to a pump, or getting a CGM, or just re engaging with your endocrinologist or CDE. And then I think making sure you consider all other aspects of wellness to this to make you more resilient, which is, you know, nutrition, rest, stress management and exercise. So, I think we can use this knowledge to just put ourselves in the best position possible. A great defensive is really the best offense in this case.   Stacey Simms  36:42 Well, thank you so much for talking to me for sharing your story. And for just giving us a little bit of an insight into the medical community these days. I really appreciate it.   Dr. Nat Strand  36:53 Oh, and thank you so much for having me. I mean, like you said, I followed you on social media for so many years, and it's just an honor to be included on your project. Cast and thanks for everything that you do for our community. We all appreciate it very, very much.   Unknown Speaker  37:10 You're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  37:16 That was so nice of her to say that at the end, it's funny, isn't it? The diabetes community, you know, we all kind of know each other from social media, or, you know, we've maybe we've met at a conference, but there's a lot of mutual admiration out there. It's always nice when people say that, but you know, as you listen, it makes me think if for some reason you feel like you're not really a part of this community, you know, maybe you listen or you're lurking in the group, and you've never reached out you're wondering if you know, what's it like, it's great. definitely reach out, definitely jump in. I mean, if you if you're fine, and you just want to listen, that's awesome. But we're doing a lot of really fun stuff in the Facebook group with zoom calls and surveys, and I'd really love to see you there and I really want you to know as you listen that your voice is really important too. So I'll link up more about Dr. Strand and her study and other information that we talked about in the show notes there's also always a transcript there at Diabetes connections.com And up next is tell me something good which is all from the Facebook group this week love it. But first diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dexcom. Now we have been using the Dexcom g six I looked this up it is two years now. We did a goofball video two years ago a little bit over Actually, it was the night that Avengers Infinity War came out and that's the night that we slept on the G six for the first time and we did a facebook live in for Benny wanted to do it but he was also really reluctant because he wasn't sure if it would hurt. So I will link up that video but I will tell you when I looked it up where to start because it's like an agonizing 10 minutes before he does it. But you know, the Dexcom g six FDA permitted for no finger six for calibration and diabetes treatment decisions. You do that to our warm up, the number just pops up. And after so many years of the previous dex comes we had to calibrate a couple of times a day you know you wouldn't get any blood sugar readings till you did so. It's amazing. We have been using the Dexcom for almost seven years now and it just keeps getting better. The G six has longer sensor were now 10 days and the new sensor applicator is really easy to use. You'll see on the video he was shocked, you know no pain. Of course we still love the alerts and alarms that we can set how we want. If your glucose alerts and readings from the G six do not match symptoms or expectations. Use a blood glucose meter to make diabetes treatment decisions. To learn more, go to Diabetes connections.com and click on the Dexcom logo.   Tell me something good this week a bunch of great I'll call them little stories from our Facebook group. Last week I talked with these big athletic accomplishments, right, the Appalachian Trail marathons, but this week was a little different and I think these are worth celebrating as well. James said AP exams were easy on accommodations this time simply allowing students with type one, double the time so they could test treat etc during what was already A weird testing cycle. That is good news. Samantha says we sent out birthday cards to any kid among our friends that had a birthday this month since they can't have a party. And that was really fun. Her husband and her son are training for the new virtual jdrf ride. And they all just signed up for the Disney run again in January. She also wrote we are all alive. I see you, Samantha, that sense of humor. And speaking of the ride, Elizabeth wrote in that the reimagine jdrf my ride is good news. And she'd like to see me talk about the new program with one of the managers we have that in the works. I'm going to be talking about that. So the jdrf rides in person for the fall, unfortunately, were canceled, which I think was the right thing to do. But you know, there were a lot of people who really enjoy that and we're banking on it, and we're already fundraising. So jdrf my ride is a way for people to participate, even though they can't travel to these locations. I will put more in the show notes on this, but I will also be doing hopefully, a whole podcast on it soon. You're off Emil Altman, who is part of the Facebook group wrote in I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I will be hitting 39 years of pumping the second week in June, and I hit 23 years of CGM use in March, he will mark 59 years with type one in November. I had him on the show a while back. He was an early adopter of diabetes technology. In fact, he worked in the industry for a while. So really great stories from him. Perry who lives with type two and is in the group. I'm always happy to see him. He said that his dad survived heart surgery that he is needed since March and finally had the valve repair last week, which would have been early May. Perry works with the fire department in South Carolina and he says good news. My crew has not liked masks gloves or hand sanitizer. And I gotta say, this is my favorite of the week. My dear friend and Sutton who is also the Outreach Manager for our jdrf is so creative, trying to keep people connected online. And she created two events for children who you know aren't able to meet up right now because we do a lot of that in our area. So she created And this isn't just for girls. And it isn't just for boys, anybody could go to anything. She created a tea party, a virtual Tea Party, and she created a virtual Lego build. And I'm going to share the photo of one of the kids built a meter out of Legos. And it's unbelievable. It looks so good. So I'll be sharing that and I hope you check it out really good and creative stuff. Do you have a Tell me something good story it can be. I think this is a great example of what I would call you know, these smaller stories, but still big accomplishments. Good news in our community. I mean, if you running a marathon or you're celebrating 59 years with type one, we want to share that too. But I just love this segment because it gives us a glimpse into the good stuff that's happening. You can share it in the Facebook group or you can ping me Stacey at Diabetes connections.com and tell me something good.   Before I let you go tell you a story about something bananas that happened in my house recently and I think this might be the first chapter in my novel Next, The World’s Worst Diabetes Mombecause that book stops really right in the middle of middle school. And it's not as though we haven't continued to make mistakes. So I will tell you the punch line first in that everything is fine. Benny is fine. It's all good. But what happened was, he had had a day, just one of those Perfect Storm days where the decks calm had expired, I accidentally left his pump off. And of course, a few hours later, he was a very, very high now I since COVID-19, and we've been around each other so much. I've actually been less on him than I think I have been any time in recent memory. his bedroom in our new house is upstairs. Mine is downstairs, which is totally new for us. We have control IQ with the tanta pump, which has been a dream and he's doing really really well. But you know, things happen. So it's about six or seven o'clock at night. He realizes he's having the pump issue. Of course he didn't have the decks calm. So you know, we didn't know that there was an issue for a lot Longer than we would have otherwise, we did a blood sugar check and it just gives you that high, you know, there's no number associated with it. And, of course, we did all the protocol you're supposed to do. Huge shot, you know, gave him the correction by injection, change the pump inset slapped on the dex calm, drank a ton of water and checked for ketones. And I went downstairs because Ben he never has large ketones. I mean, in all of his years, he's had medium once I'm not would not get anything I can get. But you know, he's been high for a sustained amount of time through illness or just wackiness or you know, dumb stuff with diabetes, and he's never had large ketones, but we still do check because I just don't want to get lulled into complacency, right, people change things go I just I don't want it to slip. So he texted me and he said, Mom, the keto stick is black, which we've never seen before. So of course, I run upstairs and they look at it and it is it's super dark purple. So I'm like, Alright, well, you just had the injection because it's a urine stick. It's probably a couple hours behind. Drink a ton of water. We'll monitor From here, if in two hours, we still get a really dark, large ketone reading, we'll call the endo and he'll walk us through what to do next. Okay, so I'm freaking out, right? I'm thinking to myself, why don't I have a blood ketone meter? What's wrong with me? I'm the worst. Why don't I have so I'm online, I'm looking for blood ketone meters, you know, like, How fast can I get one and we just, you know, we, we've never had the need, so don't yell at me. Then two hours later, blood sugar is coming down nicely, he's feeling a little bit better, right? Things are gonna be fine. And I sit in his room and he goes to the bathroom and it comes out and he's like, wow, it's still really dark. And I look at the strip   Unknown Speaker  45:33 and I noticed it looks really weird. We use the regular old keto sticks that have little square at the end, and it just has one square.   Unknown Speaker  45:41 this stick   Unknown Speaker  45:42 has two squares, and one is dark purple, and one is light pink. I thought   Unknown Speaker  45:47 to myself, what   Stacey Simms  45:48 the heck is this? So I look at the bottle. And if you know you've already know what happened, I had purchased diagnostics. These are sticks that measure glucose and ketones and The dark purple was the glucose hidden of large ketones. He had small ketones, maybe medium, maybe. So for, you know, big sigh of relief, and that was it. But oh my gosh, I was flipping out before that. So now we know now we have to be more careful. But that's the next chapter. I've already got The World’s Worst Diabetes Momstuff ready to go? Never a dull moment. All right, a big thank you to my editor john Lucas from audio editing solutions as always, for helping make sense of a lot of my nonsense. Thank you to you so much for listening. Don't forget about the book to clinic program. If you want to jump in on that or you know, a clinic that would like to get on the list to receive books. I'd love to hear from you as well. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourself.   Unknown Speaker  46:52 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media.   Unknown Speaker  46:56 All rights reserved. All wrongs avenged   Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

What up Errrrrbody!! Coming back at you with what could of been called a WestCoast Mix if it wasn't for the 2nd track.... So I'll just drop it on WestCoast Wednesday!!! Just in time for Memorial Weekend coming up. Throw this mix on, crack open your favorite drank and fire up the BBQ. This is that kind of mix! Shout out to all my fellow Lowriders, you will wanna bump this in the ride for the Summer! Keep staying safe out there, wash those hands and Enjoy........ ~X~

Michelle Oates: A promise tomorrow is worth a lot less than trying today. I am Michelle Oates, and I'm a Tri Cities influencer. Paul Casey: The love of comfort is the enemy of greatness. Okay, you can choose one or the other. You can't choose greatness and comfort. You have to choose one or the other. Speaker 3: Raising the water level of leadership and the Tri Cities of Eastern Washington, it's The Tri Cities Influencer Podcast. Welcome to the TCI Podcast, where local leadership and self leadership expert, Paul Casey, interviews local CEOs, entrepreneurs and nonprofit executives to hear how they lead themselves and their teams, so we can all benefit from their wisdom and experience. Here's your host, Paul Casey of Growing Forward Services, coaching and equipping individuals and teams to spark breakthrough success. Paul Casey: Thanks for joining me for today's episode with Lance Kenmore. He is owner of the Kenmore Team. And I'm going to let him tell you his fun fact that he even asked his wife and assistant about. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. So that was a great question that you said, something quirky about me. And I don't know if it's all the years of going in different people's houses or what, but I do not like lingering food smells in the office. I mean, if someone goes to Bruchi's or something, or Burger King, leaves some fries in the office, I will take the garbage out myself to get rid of it. And so the office is always laughing at me, and whenever we hire somebody new, they always tell them, "Watch yourself with the food you put in the garbage," and so- Paul Casey: That's your onboarding thing to remember. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. So I'm slightly OCD about that. And there was talk that it might be more than slightly. Paul Casey: Well, thanks. That's one of the best ones yet. Lance Kenmore: Okay, well, good. It smells great in your studio, so I'm not concerned about it. Paul Casey: No distractions. Lance Kenmore: Yes. Paul Casey: We'll dive in after checking with our Tri City Influencer Sponsor. The C12 Group is a national organization focused on spiritual and professional development of Christian CEOs and business owners. Members participate in professionally facilitated monthly meetings, during which 12 experienced Christian CEOs exchange ideas to solve business issues Biblically. Additionally, members receive a 90 minute personal coaching session each month. Information is available from Tom Walther at 715-459-9611 or online at c12easternwa.com. Thank you for your support of leadership development in the Tri Cities. Well, welcome, Lance. I have heard so much about you, and it's great to meet you here today. And glad you could be on the podcast. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. Absolutely. I'm excited to be here. I'm not used to being on this side of the question asking, so hopefully I can stammer through it. Paul Casey: That's right. You've got your own show, right? Lance Kenmore: Yeah. I do a weekly radio show, and we have some guests on occasionally, so it's kind of fun to be nervous again. I'm used to doing this every week, and the last day or two, my wife is like, "You're actually prepared and you seem nervous." So thanks for putting me in an uncomfortable position. Paul Casey: We're stretching you. Lance Kenmore: Absolutely. Paul Casey: Yes. Well, so our Tri City Influencers can get to know you, take us through your past positions that led up to what you're doing now. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. So before real estate, I mean, I'm a local Tri City guy, so born at Lourdes. I don't even think you can be born there anymore, but I was. And grew up on a farm north of Pasco, and then ended up going up through the school system, Richland School District, and graduated Richland High. And so past positions, I guess growing up, I always ... I was in farming and ag, but I ran a lawn care business in high school, and I just happened to live across the street from the owners of what used to be the Prudential Real Estate franchise here in town, Jeff and Paul Presby. And so growing up, I would mow the lawns of the move outs and the vacant houses, and kind of got to know real estate from that front. And off to college, and to make extra money during college, I was a Nordstrom's shoe salesman. And so I think that's where I started to really learn sales, great organization, lots of training. I love how they handle customers and customer service, so got to know the business through them. Lance Kenmore: And then got back from college, worked on the family farming business for a couple years. And then just knowing that broker and seeing how he built his business through real estate, he just kind of took me under his wing and trained me up in the business. He said ... I can remember the day when I had gotten back from college. I was still mowing lawns on nights and weekends between farming, for some extra money. And he walked out in the parking lot one day and he said, "Didn't you get a college degree?" I said, "Yeah, I did." And he said, "When you finish mowing the lawn, come into that office, and we need to have a talk." And so he was just like, "I'm going to teach you how to sell real estate. I think you're going to be a lot happier." So yeah, I had a really good mentor early. And that's kind of what let me into the real estate path. Paul Casey: So is the Nordstrom's mystique a real deal? Lance Kenmore: You know, it really is, although my wife claims that, that in four years made me extremely high maintenance. And so because I mean, you do get into their culture. And you get deeply embedded in their culture and what they stand for. And it is the same, I mean, you can in the right instances ... The old stories are that you could return anything there, and there's folklore that a guy returned a set of tires. Paul Casey: They don't even sell tires. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. But that's really the case, is that all of their training preached early on, employee autonomy and the ability to let the employees make their own decisions based upon what was right for the company. And so yeah, it's really true. But like I said, we go to a mall or something, and I still shop there to this day. And my wife says I am worse than she is because of that four years. But it was great, it taught me a lot about how we run our customer service. Paul Casey: Wow. That's so cool. So in your work, what are you really good at? What are your talents? What are your strengths? And how do you use those to help those around you be successful? Lance Kenmore: I think the biggest thing is, and being in real estate and negotiating deals for people, is I'm really good at playing devil's advocate. I can look at a situation and see what the other side is thinking. I want to know what they're thinking more than I'm thinking. And so I'm good at looking at those situations and saying, "What are they trying to accomplish? What are they expecting us to do? When should they do it? And how are we going to respond to it?" So I really like to analyze the other side's position and then go to work for my clients to how we can have a mutually acceptable outcome and accomplish our goals, and help them get through. But doing it through the lens of: What's the other side thinking? Paul Casey: That's probably one of the best negotiation principles that a person could have. Right? I could see how that would be great for staff, be great for customer service, even in your own family. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. Absolutely. I try to apply this to my kids. I don't always get it right, but that's one of the things that in fact to the point where sometimes people will be slightly annoyed by it because they'll be like, "I'm trying to figure out what you're thinking. I don't want to tell you what I'm thinking." But yeah, that's a big for me is seeing how we can make the other side and our side come to mutually acceptable terms. And maybe that's just the real estate contract in me. But I like to figure out how we can get a win for both parties. Paul Casey: Yeah, yeah. So on the flip side, what's one of your biggest liabilities? And how do you mitigate that weakness so it doesn't limit your influence? Lance Kenmore: Oh, man. I think that I really like big picture planning, and I know what we want to do. And sometimes I assume that other parties are going to work just like I do. So I'll set something up or put a plan in motion, and then maybe not have a great accountability followup plan, to where I think it's going to be done in two weeks, and so two weeks come, and then I assume it did get done. And I don't double check on that. And so I have to set up systems of accountability because I tend to forget that part. And so a reminder to double check. Who's responsible for double checking? Those details can bite you because once I start, I just assume that it's going to be done. And I know that's not always the case, and then people get busy. And sometimes I'll give them too many tasks, so they couldn't accomplish the first one, and it's really my fault. But having that system of accountability, knowing what the check in is, that's how we've had to fix that liability. Paul Casey: How important is accountability just as a business owner yourself, and just in life, success principle of accountability? Lance Kenmore: So I'm a huge, huge proponent of accountability. I think it is one of the most important parts. And so I still do weekly coaching. I started it in my business, I think we're going on 12 years ago. And I never stopped, and so I have a weekly accountability coaching call. And they expect, my coach expects certain things to be done, and so that, my deadline is Wednesday morning at 8:30. That's my call with my coach. And sometimes Tuesday, the night before, is really, really productive. And it's crazy that after 12 years that I would still find that productive. But it's amazing, just having that call on Wednesday morning, I know that there's certain things that have to be done. So I think it's probably one of the biggest indicators of our success. Paul Casey: As a coach myself, I find out many of my clients getting things done that day before, or that night before, but I say, "It's okay. You got it done." And just having to report here without your tail between your legs going into it is worth it. Lance Kenmore: Yeah, totally. And I coach people also and coach other sales people and coach our team, and even that being the case, that's usually something people are surprised by, that I still have a coach myself. And I'm not just doing it, I believe in that, I believe in that process big time. Paul Casey: Michael Jordan had a coach. LeBron James has a coach. Right? Lance Kenmore: Absolutely. 100%. Paul Casey: All high performers have coaches. Lance Kenmore: Yes, they do. Paul Casey: That's a little plug there. So in your opinion, what's the most difficult part of business leadership, leading teams? And why would you say that? Lance Kenmore: Well, I think the difficult part is being careful, and maybe this is just a personal thing to how I am, but being careful not to take on everyone's problems as your own. I'm great with accepting the fate of the organization and the results that come with that. But I think at times, you can have compassion and understanding, but you can't always solve all the problems or the situations. And I tend to take that really personally, so I think you have to separate and get comfortable with the fact that you've done the best you can, and now the team has to make certain decisions themselves to thrive. And sometimes that's going to work perfectly, and other times it's not. And just really monitoring your own positivity when those failures happen, that they're not always your own. Paul Casey: Yeah. It's sort of the difference between sympathy and empathy. Right? Sympathy, you're taking on the emotions of others. And now you're in the pit with them. Lance Kenmore: Absolutely. Yeah. And you have to be careful not to do that because sometimes, as a good friend once told me, because I was struggling with this concept, and I said to them, we met, I think it was on a Friday. And we met just for a recap on the week. And I said ... He said to me, "How was your week?" And I said, "Well, it was terrible. All I heard about was everyone's problems." And he goes, "Well, congratulations." And I said, "Well, I don't know what that means. Congratulations." He said, "That's how it's supposed to work." He's like, "You should only be dealing with the biggest issues in your company, and that means all the other parts are working correctly." And it was a big mind shift, mindset shift for me because I said, "Okay. So I can deal with the problems, but not take them on myself." And once I made that adjustment, it got a lot better. Paul Casey: Yeah, I think the word compassion means to suffer with. Lance Kenmore: Yes, exactly. Paul Casey: But we all have to stay on our sides of the street. One therapist locally says, "It's the sides of the street principle." This is on your side. You're responsible for it over there. This is my side of the street. I'm only responsible up to this level. When I start crossing over ... I think she said, "When I'm weeding in somebody else's lawn when my house is on fire, that's a problem." Lance Kenmore: That's a problem. Yes, 100%. And I didn't get that early on when I was younger and starting out in that role. And so it took a while to get there. Paul Casey: Good lesson. Well, your people don't know how much you know until they know how much you care, as the old adage goes. So how do you show people, your people, whether that's a team, whether that's your clients, that you value them as people? Lance Kenmore: I think it's just about slowing down and taking time to talk to people. So I personally, I have a hard time doing that. I can be task driven. I do personality testing, and they call it a driver. And so there's tasks that I just want to get done. So for me personally, sometimes I have to come in a couple times a week, one to two hours early, when the phones aren't ringing, no one else is there, and get my tasks out of the way, so that when everyone else gets to the office, I can take some time to just slow down and talk to them. I mean, someone's on our team or in our organization because I saw something great in them, and they do a great job. And I want to know what's going on in their life and what's important to them. That is communication and talking to people. Lance Kenmore: And so a younger version of myself messed that up. I would just blow by, not say hi, limit interaction with coworkers because I was task oriented. And that worked great in the beginning of my career for a while, but it was a horrible concept for running a team. And so I think slowing down and talking to people is just, it seems so simple. I wish there was a better answer or magic pill. But that 10 minute conversation about what happened over the weekend and what their kids are doing just is gold. Those are the type of people I want to be around and hear about. Paul Casey: I love how you've come up with a system because you are a driver, you want to be who you are. So you're coming in early, you're going to take care of that stuff first because it's all about your to do list, getting it done, action oriented. I know what the driver's like. Right? Lance Kenmore: Yes, absolutely. Paul Casey: So then you've got the peace of mind to go out and be fully available without thinking about I got this to do list I still have to do, which people can pick that up from you. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. If you're not in the moment talking and listening, you're going to mess that up. Paul Casey: Just walking through the hallways and leaning on doorframes, as they say. One manager said there's three questions he asks. How are you? And then adds the word really because how are you is just like hello in American. What are you working on? And that's the accountability piece with the leaders. And then: How can I help? Because leaders always need that how can I help mentality. And that's just a great check in. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. Absolutely. And we do this thing. I took it off of a radio station. I think it was Ryan Seacrest, I think, on his show, does this thing called tell me something good, and so where people just call in on the radio and say what was good in their life. So we make sure we start our weekly staff meetings and team meetings with tell me something good. And so you've got 28 people going around telling them something good. And from that one little piece of information, we always pick up something about their life that they thought was good, and then it's amazing the conversations after the meetings that happen about that. So tell me something good is an important thing to be doing. Paul Casey: Love that principle, and 28 people, just to take the time to do that. That's an investment in relationship building on your team. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. I mean, it's a portion of our meeting. But I would argue that it could actually be the most important part of that team meeting every week. Paul Casey: Yes. Well, before we head into our next question of some of Lance's life hacks, let's check in with our sponsors.  If you could trade one day each month for targeted application of Biblical business practices, purposeful accountability, and Godly pure counsel, would you consider it a wise investment? The C12 Group is a national organization focused on spiritual and professional development of Christian CEOs and business owners. Members participate in professionally facilitated monthly meetings, where 12 experienced Christian CEOs exchange ideas to solve business issues Biblically. Information is available from Tom Walther at 715-459-9611 or online at c12easternwa.com.   So, Lance, what are a few of your life hacks that help you be successful on a daily basis? Lance Kenmore: There's a number of books I've read over the years, some that come to mind like Eat That Frog. Paul Casey: Love Eat That Frog. Lance Kenmore: Or The Power of Focus, Jack Canfield. There's some good things, but the strategy that comes out of that, or what it's morphed into for me, is what I call the big three for the day. So you have to start each day with a big three. And the big three is that no matter what gets thrown at you, no matter what happens, these three things are going to get done today. And so for me, that just is a nonnegotiable, that once it goes on that list, if it's late, or emergencies have popped up, before we go home and end the day, I have to double check that big three and make sure. Did I get it done? And once it's a nonnegotiable, it's funny, I find that a lot of times, those things get done in the first ... When you set it up that way, they get done in the first hour of your day. Paul Casey: The rest is gravy then. Lance Kenmore: The rest is gravy then, and you can handle what life throws at you. But without that, you're just reacting. I think having a big three, you're being proactive to what you want to get done. Paul Casey: I totally concur with that. That is the number one time management principle when I teach it. And I love Eat That Frog. And for listeners that don't know what that means, it was a book by Brian Tracy. And if you have to eat a raw frog today, wouldn't it be better to eat that frog early in the morning and get it over with because it's disgusting, than to dread it all day and think about it? Yes, it would be better to get it. So what's the biggest, hairiest task? Your big three, the big rocks for the day, get those banged out. And it's amazing how much it just puts you in this productivity snowball in a good way to getting all these other little things done too. Lance Kenmore: Yeah, you get it knocked out, and yeah, and then you are just rolling right along. That's a big life hack for us. And then recently, I've been into a whole system called habit stacking. And so that is taking your existing habits and routines and finding a way to put a new habit on top of it. So if you're a runner or a hiker and you want to read 30 books this year, well, then you go to Audible. So you're listening to a book while you're running. You're listening to a book while you're hiking. Your significant other and you want to spend more time together, but you also want to work out, so you're working out and spending time, or hiking together. So finding habit stacks that you can put in place is essentially doubling up your time, so that's another one that we use a lot. Paul Casey: Love that one. If you want to start flossing, you're already brushing, just tack it on. Lance Kenmore: Yes. Paul Casey: Tack it on. Lance Kenmore: That's exactly right. Paul Casey: Did you get that from The Power of Habit? Have you read that book? Lance Kenmore: Yeah. Paul Casey: There's some good stuff in that book. Lance Kenmore: Yeah, there's some good stuff. That was the basis for it. That was the first one I had read with a lot about that. And then a newer one recently that is literally called Habit Stacking. Paul Casey: Nice. Well, as a business owner, you have to make important decisions. And what process do you think through before making that important decision? Lance Kenmore: So I'm really fortunate that I work with my wife in our companies and the other businesses that we own, and so I have a sounding board for those ideas. And so we're able to talk to each other about what we think. And how does the decision we're going to make affect others around us? And so that's where we generally start with that. And then her and I, we always laugh because we teach Junior Achievement also. And in Junior Achievement, in the second grade levels, they teach this thing called a decision tree. And it's the old draw a line down the center of your paper, and it's pros on one side and cons on the other. Paul Casey: Second grade. Lance Kenmore: And she and I laugh because we'll make massive real estate decisions based upon the decision tree. And so when you write it out and you start to look at pros and cons, and one side of the paper starts to fill up, it's amazing how it can simplify that decision. So the really important ones is having somebody to poke holes in your theory, play devil's advocate with you. So bouncing that off either a business partner or a mentor is huge, and then taking the time to write out the pros and cons in a decision tree style is a huge help for us. Paul Casey: Yeah. It sounds so basic, but it is so true. And defining the problem even before the decision tree, if you can put it in one sentence, just to make sure we're trying to solve the right problem here, and then you do the pros and cons. And at the end, these are the decisions and why, because you're going to have to defend the why probably to somebody, someone on your team, or even that sounding board person. Lance Kenmore: Absolutely. Paul Casey: You want to be able to defend your results. But I love how you said a mentor, you've got to have a coach, a mentor, a mastermind group, your spouse. Lance Kenmore: Yeah. And that's a big thing is that you mentioned that mastermind group, and that's huge for us. And I'm part of a group that basically acts as a board of directors for our company. It's not as formalized as a national company with a board of directors. But we meet once a month with six other business owners in our local area that are all part of different industries, whether that be the gasoline business, the car business, all the way to insurance, real estate, we're all part of a different industry. And when we have a big decision like that, we present that to the board of directors, that group, and we talk through that. So getting that feedback and a different perspective helps us feel good about being on the right path. Paul Casey: Isolated people do not make the best decisions. Lance Kenmore: Absolutely. Paul Casey: So it's good to have that group. Lance Kenmore: Absolutely. Paul Casey: Well, who influences you, Lance? Who do you surround yourself with, either that's from afar or live, to keep growing yourself? Lance Kenmore: We go to about three times a year, we get out of the Tri Cities. We go to another state in general, and we hit a big educational conference or a learning conference. And sometimes it's business related, real estate. Sometimes it's about health. And sometimes it's even about other business industries that are not necessarily real estate. So sometimes we'll pick an industry that's opposite and maybe technology and somewhere like Austin, whether we go to South by Southwest and see what's going on down there. Or we go to Tony Robbins who is a big coach and influencer. So we pick three a year, get out of town, and just spend some time with people that are trying to get better and learn new concepts. Lance Kenmore: And then we also have a really good group of similar real estate owners and team leads around the country in different markets. And so we like to spend time at each other's offices. So we'll go to somebody else's business, see how they run things, and then they'll come back to Tri Cities for couple days and spend time at our business. So those are the big ones. I mean, I think early on, I read a lot of business books. I'm big into brand building, so Richard Branson with Virgin, the Virgin Airlines brand. And so had read a lot of his books early on, all the way back to real estate influences like Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. So in that realm, those were some very big impactful books on us early on. Lance Kenmore: And then locally, I'm super, super fortunate Tri Cities has a ton of talent. So there is a turnaround CEO in town. His name's Chris Britton. He's a great guy. And so he's been a big mentor to our business the last six years, and so we spend a lot of time with him and being coached by him. And since he was a turnaround CEO, he would go into companies, fix them, clean them up. I'm hoping he prevents us from ever getting to that part, so he makes a great mentor. Plus, when there's problems, he knows how to deal with them. Paul Casey: That's cool. Do you take all 28 people to those conferences? Or do you go by yourself? Lance Kenmore: We don't. That's just myself. We do encourage our team members to go, and a lot of times, at least once a year if they can. So a lot of our team members, our paid employees, we'll send to, I think the last one was in South Carolina. Or they'll go to San Diego. They usually don't complain about those nice trips. But we like them to also see what other companies are doing, see what other people in your position are doing. And they always come back with a new idea for us to implement. Paul Casey: Absolutely. When people go together to conferences too, they can play off each other, remember different things, come back with this passion to share with the rest of the team. Lance Kenmore: And I wouldn't have gotten ... I mean, we've gotten to do some cool things. I mean, through that network and going to those conferences is how we ended up getting hooked up with Barbara Corcoran from the Shark Tank. And then she just plugs into a whole other network. So we met a guy in radio that we were doing radio, and so we liked radio. And then we met a guy in TV, and then that guy ends up inviting her to a conference. And then the next thing you know, a bunch of us agents are banding together, and she's starting to film commercials for us. And so yeah, I never thought that we would get to that level even 10 years ago. Paul Casey: Very cool. I've seen those commercials. Lance Kenmore: Well, I'm glad you have. It was ironic because a friend of ours in town, when Karen joined me in the business, in real estate, gave Barbara Corcoran's book to my wife. And that was the first real estate book she ever read. So then 10 years later, to be filming with her was really just kind of unbelievably full circle. But I don't think it would've happened if we wouldn't have read that book. And so I just don't think it would've been the same. Paul Casey: When you've lived your life, Lance, and you think back on your influence, how do you want to be remembered? Lance Kenmore: First and foremost, a father and a husband. I mean, I've got two amazing kids, and we spend a lot of time together. We have great relationships and they are pursuing their passions and following their dreams. And so I definitely want to be remembered as supporting and enabling that. And then as a husband, the same way. I'm super, super fortunate that Karen and I work very well together, so we get to spend an amazing amount of time together building something together, which is not normal. It's my normal, but it really is fantastic because, like we say, we get to spend all day with our best friend, and then build something together. Lance Kenmore: So that's huge for me, and then I always say I want to coach and mentor my team and their families to their best life possible. So the team members and friends that surround us with, I want to have been a part of making their life as best as possible. And then beyond that, we get to community and the communities we live in. And I want to be a positive contributing member to our community, especially Tri Cities. It's given us a ton of ... It's given us an amazing life, and so I want to contribute back to that community. Paul Casey: Love the Tri. Lance Kenmore: Love the Tri. Thank you, Mike Denslow. Paul Casey: Finally, what advice would you give to new leaders or anyone who wants to keep growing and gaining more influence? Lance Kenmore: I think there's a lot to be said for pioneers, and they are a special breed, I will give it to them. But in general, I think when people are starting out and leaders are starting out, find someone that you love what they're doing, and that's what you want to be like. And sometimes that can be wrapped up in two or three people and sometimes 10. But in general, someone has done what you want to do, and they've done it better than you can. That's my feeling, and so search that person out. Find out what network they're in. Find out what clubs they're in. What contributed to their success? And then do everything you can to put yourself in those positions or as close to that as possible. Lance Kenmore: And I think a lot of times, people find there's a lot of people out there that want to give back and that have had success. And agents will call me all the time, and I've never had a call where I've told somebody, "No, I won't talk to you," or, "No, I won't tell you that." It's a matter of helping someone else get to that level. And once people are at what leaders consider a high level, you know how important it is to have more leaders and new leaders do the same things. So I would just say getting yourself into the environment that you want to, where you've seen the success and that you want to have is absolutely huge. Lance Kenmore: And then just read more. One of the best ways to get close to that access is to read about it. And that's what starts, plants the seed, starts the thought, so read as much as you possibly can. Chemically, I'm not a scientist. I'm sure you've had those guests on the show. Something changes in your brain when you're reading that and changes your mindset. So if you can't be physically in the same room and talking to that person, read about it, and I think it's the next best thing. Paul Casey: Fantastic advice. So Lance, how can our listeners best connect with you? Lance Kenmore: Probably the best way is kenmoreteam.com is our website. There's a contact form there. We get contacts all the time through that, whether it be job inquiries or home inquiries and real estate. But that's a great way to just hit the button, contact us and shoot me a message. And we would be glad to help with any of your questions. Paul Casey: Well, thanks again for all you do to make the Tri Cities a great place, and keep leading well. Let me wrap up our podcast today with a leadership resource to recommend. It's another podcast. Michael Hyatt has one called Lead to Win. And this podcast is filled with great leadership information. They're all relevant topics, every one I listen to, either for your personal growth and self leadership, or leading a team. Again, Michael Hyatt, Lead to Win Podcast. Paul Casey: Again, this is Paul Casey, and I want to thank my guest, Lance Kenmore, for being here today on the Tri Cities Influencer Podcast. And we also want to thank our Tri City Influencer sponsors and invite you to support them. We appreciate you making this possible so we can collaborate to help inspire leaders in our community. Finally, one more leadership tidbit for the road to help you make a difference in your circle of influence, it's Lester Pearson. He says, "Failures are made only by those who fail to dare, not by those who dare to fail." Until next time, KGF, keep growing forward. Speaker 3: Thank you to our listeners for tuning into today's show. Paul Casey is on a mission to add value to leaders by providing practical tools and strategies that reduce stress in their lives and on their teams so that they can enjoy life and leadership and experience their key desired results. If you'd like more help from Paul in your leadership development, connect with him at growingforward@paulcasey.org, for a consultation that can help you move past your current challenges and create a strategy for growing your life or your team forward. Speaker 3: Paul would also like to help you restore sanity to your crazy schedule and get your priorities done every day by offering you his free Control My Calendar checklist. Go to www.takebackmycalendar.com for that productivity tool. Or open a text message to 72000 and type the word growing. Paul Casey: The Tri Cities Influencer Podcast was recorded at Fuse SPC by Bill Wagner of Safe Strategies.

Show resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course Benchmarks video from SME Easy jpg reference to keep around for quick comparison Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: How are your LinkedIn Ads performing? Good? Bad? How do you know? It's benchmarking time. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:20 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics! I get asked all the time from advertisers if they're doing well or not. And imagine that people wanting to know if their efforts are paying off. So today we're diving into all the benchmarks so you can know how your efforts are stacking up. We'll cover the ad format averages, as well as what you should be paying and seeing with engagement and your conversion rates as well. Also, if you want to share this topic with someone who doesn't listen to podcasts, check out the video in the show notes that I did with Social Media Examiner. Okay, let's hit it. 0:53 In the news, the most interesting thing that I've heard is that LinkedIn Learning has seen a 3x in people taking their courses. And so this is recorded in COVID isolation right now, which was so interesting to see that people are taking advantage of the time when they're home alone, and maybe even laid off from work, and they're using this time to better themselves and improve. I thought that was great. That's one of those feel good statistics. I wanted to share a few of the reviews that you guys have left in your podcast players or on the podcast network. So Leonardo Bellini says "Ichiba, it means number one in Japanese. I think AJ is a fantastic trainer about LinkedIn Ads. Nobody knows LinkedIn Ads better than this guy". Oh, that is so awesome. Leonardo, I know him, he's from Italy. So Leonardo, shout out to you. Thanks so much for leaving such a kind review. Someone with the username Wolf STGT from Germany says excellent, valid information and hands on tips, keep rocking. Oh, thanks so much, Wolf. I appreciate that. Then there's Billy Boy UK in Great Britain says "great as always, consistently great, useful info from AJ". So thank you so much. And absolutely to anyone else listening, I want to feature you. So leave a review. Even if you don't rate me all the way up. I'd still love to feature you. So shout it out, put it on whatever podcast player you're going for. And I'm dying to hear your feedback on the show. 2:23 Okay, so now as we get into the benchmarking, first of all, LinkedIn does not publish their information about benchmarks, about averages. So it's really hard to actually tell if you're doing well or not. So if LinkedIn is not publishing this, that means someone else has to. Someone has to work from their limited data set. Well, we've managed hundreds of LinkedIn Ads accounts across every ad format, and about every industry that we can think through. So certainly 400 accounts as compared to the 10s of thousands that LinkedIn has. It's a small data sample size, but what we find is our benchmarks that we've found from our own clients. All of the accounts we've managed, overseen, even consulted on tend to be pretty accurate. So I wanted to share those with you, even if they are not a 100% representative. And I do wish that LinkedIn would publish their benchmarks, I would be happy if they came and smashed all of our data apart and proved it wrong. Since their data set is 100% complete, I would much rather be accurate than praised. So our limited data set seems to be more complete than anything we've seen out there. So I'm eager to share and a note on just the importance of benchmarking. If you don't know how you're doing, you won't be able to improve. And my biggest fear is that marketers who aren't in the know could be blindsided. There could be a situation where a marketer is complacent, thinking everything's fine. And then the account gets audited by someone where they point out a whole bunch of flaws or inefficiencies, and it could make the marketer look bad. So I think there's a need to gauge and be aware And be educated about the best things that you can do for your account for protection. So you can make sure that you don't get blindsided. It protects your job protects your reputation. And I also think because of that this is the most important episode for the show that we've come out with yet. 4:17 The metrics we're going to be benchmarking are going to be things like your click through rate, your cost per click, and your conversion rate. Those tend to be the unifying metrics that we see. Now, as we talk about each one of these, certainly each one individually is not the end all be all. For instance, when we report click through rate to clients, we constantly hear, okay, that's great and everything how often people are clicking on our ads, but that's not our goal. It doesn't tell us whether we're doing a good job or not. And certainly that is the case. Click through rate does not necessarily mean anything to our clients. But, it does mean something to us because it has a profound effect on the costs that you're going to get. If you're being smart on LinkedIn where you're bidding by the click, your click through rate really doesn't dictate much, because you're only paying when someone clicks anyway. So as long as you're spending your budget, everything should be fine. But when you're trying to improve when you realize that getting a higher click through rate can significantly lower your cost per click, then all of a sudden it starts to matter a lot. And conversion rates, this one's really important. But, certainly if you're not paying very much per click, then even if you had a low conversion rate, you might still be happy with your overall cost per conversion. Your conversion rate will vary depending on the level of perceived friction, and the level of perceived value in what you're asking someone to do. So if you're asking a lot of someone or asking something big from a cold audience, you're going to see a low conversion rate. And if you're offering something with a lot of perceived value, and it's perceived as being free, then you'll probably have a very high conversion. rate. So we'll go over the types of things that affect those. Like we talked about your cost per click will increase if your click through rates are bad. But we know that your cost per click is also going to be higher if you're going after extremely small audiences, or more competitive audiences. So these very much go hand in hand. If you have a low click through rate, you will be punished with really high cost per click, I get asked a lot about industry specific benchmarks and audience specific benchmarks. And what we've found is these benchmarks that we've defined, really don't change very much by industry, or really by audience. So if you're worried about your specific industry or your specific audience, don't worry, go ahead and take these benchmarks the same way they should still be pretty indicative. One of my early observations when I was using LinkedIn Ads was I had a campaign targeting manager level, another targeting director level, another targeting VP, and my last campaign targeting C level people. And in my mind, I hypothesized, well, of course, I'm going to pay more per click to reach the C level person than I would at the manager level. And what was so interesting is their cost per click, we're actually within about 30 cents of each other. And to add to the complexity here, the cost per click of the C level was 30 cents less than reaching the manager audience. So what this goes to show is your cost per click really doesn't change very much across personas, across industries. You're probably going to pay an average right now of about $8 to $11 per click, regardless of who it is. Now, this changes a little bit, because if you're going after the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, yeah, you're probably going to pay $15 or $20 per click. But in general, for audiences that aren't super, super tight and super in demand, you'll pay about the same Conversion rates and click through rates also tend to be quite similar in the same way. We do find elevated costs when we're trying to bid on enterprise sized companies. And that makes sense. They're quite a bit more competitive. When evaluating ad performance, I'm imagining two hurdles that our ads have to get over. The first hurdle is when we put up an ad, we need someone to click on it. And then once they've clicked on it, the second hurdle is we need them to convert. And based off of the efficiency metrics about how people are getting over the first and second hurdle, it lets us know what needs to be improved specifically. So we'll go over those efficiency metrics and how to actually audit your account here in a little bit. 8:44 First off definitions. We're going to be talking about, click through rates, which is the number of times people took action on your ad out of the number of times that people saw them. This will probably sound very elementary to many of you, but there's a reason that I'm going over the definitions because it's going to be important as we talk about sponsored messaging ads. 9:08 We're also going to be talking about conversion rates, which is the number of conversions out of the number of times that people took action and clicked on your ads. This usually is a form fill, but sometimes people have different definitions for what a conversion is. Okay, our two hurdles. So if you're having a hard time getting people to click on your ads, you will know because your click through rate will be low. And then if you're getting a lot of clicks, but you're just not seeing the leads or conversions happening, you'll know this because your conversion rate will be low. So figure out which of those two hurdles you're stumbling over. And then here at the end, we'll go over the actions that you can actually take to fix and rectify these. 9:50 Let's go over how to actually check out your performance. So you're logged into LinkedIn's campaign manager where you can see all of your different campaigns or maybe you're even at the ad level, you can see it there as well. Right above the list of campaigns, you'll see an option for columns. And if it's already selected with performance, then you're in a great place to see your click through rate and your cost per click. If you want to view your conversion rate, you have to select that columns and drop it down to where you can see leads and conversions. It's difficult because we can't customize the columns so we can see all of this on one page. So you will need to toggle back and forth as you're analyzing. It's very important for you to understand that when we talk about click through rate and cost per click, those metrics will be meaningful for every single type of ad, just as they're written in the ad platform. Except if you're using sponsored messaging, if you're using sponsored messaging, these metrics are lying to you, and you'll have to figure out a different way. We'll go over all that. But the reason why this is is because there's an extra step in the advertising process, when you're using sponsored messaging ads. We still have impressions, which is someone seeing the ad. But on sponsored messaging ads, that's a send, that means it was sent to someone, but not necessarily viewed. So we're departing from our definitions a little bit. The first action someone can take is opening it. And so LinkedIn calls an "open" a "click". And the average open rate of a sponsored messaging ad is like 50%. So if you're believing these metrics, as you're looking at them, sponsored messaging ads look really good. They're gonna have a 50% click through rate, looking at the dashboard. And your cost per click is also going to look really low because half of the people open it. LinkedIn is reporting to you that that's a click. So your cost per click quote, unquote, is usually just about twice the cost of your cost per send. So these look really good if you don't know the metrics you're looking at. You'll look at it going, "wow, we're paying less than $1 per click, and our click through rate is 50%". That's incredible. So keep in mind, these are definitely lying to you, the real click that you want to care about is in a different column. So we'll come to that as we covered sponsored messaging specifically. 12:19 But as of right now, let's talk a little bit about conversion rates, because these are quite a bit more unified. So there are two different types of conversions that we can have on LinkedIn Ads. If you are sending someone to a landing page that you own, there are a few steps. And the conversions that occur here are going to be called conversions in the ad platform. In order to get these conversions reporting, it takes four different steps. So the first is you have to take your insight tag, which is this little piece of tracking JavaScript from your account and install it on at least your homepage, your landing page, and your thank you page. Ideally, you have this on every page of the website, but just minimum of those three so that it will function. Next is you have to go into account assets and conversions, and actually set this conversion up. You have to tell LinkedIn, when someone lands on page x, that's called a conversion. And you let them know anytime this tag fires on that page, then yes, you now have a conversion. But it's not enough just to have it set up. Now you have to go and actually associate that conversion to the campaigns you're running. You can do that as you're setting up the conversion and just check every campaign in the account. Or you can go into your campaign settings and right at the very bottom of that campaign, you'll see an option to install conversion tracking. There are two different ways that you can track your conversions. You can either have someone land on a thank you page, so they fill out the form, you then redirect them to a separate page that says something like, thanks for giving us your info, we'll be in touch soon. Or here's a link to download that PDF that we were telling you about. And this is by far the easiest way to track your conversions. When you tell your webmaster that you need a separate URL thank you page, they're probably going to look at you like you were making a request from the 80s. This is a very old school way of doing it. But it is by far the best, it's the most reliable, and it's the most simple. Even without any coding knowledge, I can still troubleshoot issues on a thank you page. The other way though, is through an event tracking pixel. And this takes some pretty advanced understanding of JavaScript in order to do so as soon as we get into event tracking issues. I'm out I have to get our web developer involved. But this involves going on usually a button and then you set an event where as soon as someone clicks on the button to submit the form, then that's going to fire a piece of code back to LinkedIn. And they'll call that a conversion. Your web developer will understand this very well. But if it's you, as a marketer trying to set this up, you will likely do very, very well to just send it to a separate thank you page, because this event tracking solution is much more technical. Okay, so let's say you have this set up and you're driving conversions. If you go and look at LinkedIn's conversions column, that number is going to be wrong. It's going to be lying to you a little bit. The conversions column, which is the default column, that everything on LinkedIn uses, is actually a combination of two different things. There's something called click conversions, which is what we care about. And then there's also something called view through conversions. Now, a view through conversion feels like a lie to me, because all a view through conversion is is one of your ads had to show up as an impression to someone, and then they ended up converting because of a different channel. So I'll outline this for a situation that could have occurred. So a LinkedIn member is scrolling through their newsfeed, they scroll very quickly past an ad, they don't even see it. They don't even acknowledge it. And then they end up looking for a solution on Google, they click one of the PPC ads on Google end up converting. And now LinkedIn is going to report that as a conversion inside of LinkedIn ads. So if you are comfortable with slightly over reporting on the platform, then yeah, go ahead and use the conversions column. But we only report based off of click conversions, because that sure seems a lot more honest. Now there is a different kind of conversion altogether on LinkedIn. And that is when you're using lead generation forms. So one of the next episodes is all going to be about lead generation form ads. So stick around for that one. 12:19 But let's talk about what type of conversion you'll see come through. When you are running lead gen form ads, the native forms right within your ads, you won't see any metrics show up in the conversions columns, but there will be a column for leads. And there's also another column for lead form opens. The nice thing about lead generation forms is you don't actually have to set up anything for this. Because the conversion occurs on LinkedIn and LinkedIn understands it. They will just do all of the conversion tracking for you. There's no setting up pixels, there's no really anything you could do wrong to screw it up. Of course, the hard part with lead generation forms is you have to figure out how to get those leads out of LinkedIn by using an integration partner. 17:44 Okay, let's talk specifically about each ad format and what you can expect benchmarking wise. So starting with sponsored content, which is by far my favorite ad format, this encapsulates single image ads as well as carousel as well as video ads. The click through rate that we normally see, and LinkedIn actually even shares this information if you ask your rep. They see about a .4% click through rate on average. When we launch ads, according to our own conventions and strategies, we generally average between .8 and 1.2. So it's not difficult to outperform the average. But as long as you're over .4%, you're at least beating the average. If you're underperforming there, absolutely we'll talk about the things you can change. For costs per click, we expect sponsored content to land anywhere between about $8 to $11. If you're paying under that you're doing fantastic. If you're paying over about $11 a click, unless you are targeting a super small audience, or a really, really important enterprise level, like account based marketing list, you're probably bidding too high or bidding incorrectly. Then we get to the issue of conversion rates. I abbreviate this CVR. There's a little bit of a departure here based on what you're asking someone to do. So I split this into low friction offers and high friction offers. Low friction offers would be an example of like, here's a free piece of content that's really valuable, really interesting to you. And in exchange, all we're asking for is your contact info. If you're offering a low friction offer like that, we usually see between about 10 to 15% conversion rate, and anything over 15%, we call rockstar content and we want to go all in on that and generate as many conversions as we can while it's hot. But then you have high friction offers, like, hey, talk to our sales rep or buy something or take a demo or try a free trial of something. This is where of a cold audience, you're asking too much too soon. And because of that, people aren't going to be willing, or at least not as many people are going to be willing to take that actyion. So they'll click because they're interested or curious, but they will only convert between about 1.5% to 4%. Mostly on the lower end of that though, unless you're a big brand. 20:12 Okay, onto sponsored messaging. This includes both message ads, which used to be called sponsored in mail, and the new conversation ads. Like we talked about before, we have to add an extra metric in here. So we're going to talk about open rate. LinkedIn will call this click through rate, but that is absolutely not accurate. The average open rate is probably going to be about 50%. So if you have a 60% or a 70%, open rate, you know your subject line is rocking it. But then once someone opens, the next thing that you're going to want them to do is actually take action on something and click internally. Now click through rates are only between about three to 4% on average, and so if you have 7, 8, 9%, you have an amazing offer with great copy. If you do the math here with a 50%, open rate, a 3 to 4% click through rate and you're probably going to end up paying on a cost per send basis, anywhere between about 20 cents and 70 cents depending on how competitive that audiences. Your average cost per click is going to land somewhere between about $23 to $56. Now that is cost per click, remember I just told you that sponsored content, you'll average between $8 to $11. So what is sponsored messaging doing for you that it would be worth three to eight times as much. So yes, sponsored messaging is on average, the most expensive ad format on LinkedIn and because of that, you need to be really careful and really strategic about how you approach it. Since the costs are so high on average, we don't even recommend it to our average client. We only even suggest it to our clients when we think we can get 70% open rates, and 7% click through rates. That requires a very special type of offer. And certainly not everyone has it, it has to be a very personal type of offer. But if you can get this 70%, open rates and 7% click through rates, that will get your overall cost per click somewhere between about $4 and $14, depending on how much you paid. If your audience is uncompetitive, and you're paying 20 cents per send, it's around the $4 mark per click, which is great. That's half of what we would pay using sponsored content. But if you're paying 70 cents on the high side, then that turns out to be about a $14 cost per click. And if you want any more information on these ad formats, check out Episode 13 where we went really deep into those. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the rest of the ad formats coming right up. 22:56 The LinkedIn Ads show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 23:05 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be too linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage LinkedIn's largest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkedIn partners. And performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. 23:29 Okay, let's jump into the other ad formats. So next coming up is text ads. Now most people who run text ads think that they're doing a bad job because the metrics look really bad, especially click through rate, but these are a hard ad to over perform or even underperform. So the average click through rate on these is .025%. So that's two and a half clicks out of every 10,000 impressions. Because these are only shown on desktop, and they're in the right rail, and they obviously look like ads, most people tend to be pretty banner blind to them, they ignore them. So if you have a click through rate over about .03%, you're doing amazing. Your ads are rock star level, keep it up. And this is LinkedIn's cheapest ad format. You can bid all the way to the floor of $2 if you want, but most of the time we see people paying between about $3 to $5 per click. So significantly cheaper than even sponsored content. But it's also really hard to drive a lot of this traffic unless you have a massive audience. If you're bidding higher, yeah, you can pay all the way up into like the $13 to $15 a click for these, but I probably wouldn't suggest it. You're really burning dollars at that point. 24:51 Okay, and then conversion rate. This totally depends on the offer. If you have a low friction or a high friction offer your conversion rate is going to vary significantly. But what we find is text ads because they come from people who are on a desktop, they have a full use of the keyboard, you can generally get higher quality leads here, you can generally get a slightly higher conversion rate, because they don't feel as bad about typing more fields that they might feel bad about on a mobile device, doing lots of thumb typing. And you can usually get them to fill out more fields. So text ads conversions we love. Then you've got dynamic ads. Now one ad unit of dynamic ads takes up the space of three text ads. Because of that, you'll see click through rates that are equal to about three times the average click through rate of text ads. So if you're performing over a .06 percent click through rate, you're doing great. We oftentimes see .08, .09, even as high as .1 in some cases. Now your cost per click here, it used to be that you'd pay $13 to $18 per click on these, but LinkedIn had a recent price reduction, like we've talked about in Episode 13. And because of that, the cost per click now is usually between about $6 to $8 per click. Because the click through rate is low like text ads. Again, this is an ad format that's really hard to get a lot of traffic from. So fight the temptation to bid so high that you're paying over about the $8 mark, because you can probably pay $8 per click on sponsored content and capture a lot more traffic. Just like text ads, your conversion rate on dynamic ads totally depends on the perceived value and the perceived friction of that offer. Okay, so you're saying to yourself, I found some areas, identified some metrics that are not as good as they should be. So if my performance sucks, how do I go and fix it? Let's focus first on your click through rate. So if your click through rate is below the benchmarks that I've laid out here, it's probably one of four things. The first is maybe your ad copy isn't showing the value of your offer properly. Number two is maybe your image is not contrast enough to get people to stop scrolling. Remember, your images job is just to be a thumb stopper. Don't try to convert someone from the image. That's the job of your ad copy. So on to the point three here, your ad copy might not be pressing on your pain point hard enough. You might be saying, here's what you can get, but maybe you're not telling them, "hey, you have a problem. This is going to solve it". And your fourth is, and this is usually my last resort, it could be that your offer simply isn't interesting. And there's no amount of ad copy rewriting you can do to make your offer seem interesting enough to get over that first hurdle, which is getting someone to click. So if you're under these, click through rate benchmarks, try refreshing your ad copy, try saying it in a different way, try selling that offer a little bit better and see if you can get that up. We'll get you sailing over hurdle number one, and then getting towards hurdle number two. Okay, but what if you're paying too much? What if your costs per click are significantly higher than what I've laid out here? If you go back to Episode 6 where we talked about bidding and budgeting, the first reason the biggest reason why people are paying too much, it's because they're bidding too high, or they're bidding wrong. So don't take LinkedIn's advice on how to bid here, definitely use the strategy I laid out in Episode 6. The next reason why you might be paying so much though, is maybe you have bad click through rates, which we just went over. So improve those things. If you can get your click through rate higher, your cost per click will come down. The third reason your cost per click might be too high is really something you can't do very much about and it's if competition is just so high. If you're in an area where competition is ridiculous, and you're paying like $13, $15 a click and you just can't get traffic at less than that, what you'll want to do is play with different offers and play with different ad creative. Because if you can get your click through rate up significantly, that will get your cost per click down. And all you have to do is outperform your competitors in the auction by getting a higher click through rate, awarding you a higher relevancy score, and then LinkedIn will let you start getting traffic at lower bids. 29:26 Okay, and finally, conversion rate, this is the second hurdle. So you're getting a lot of traffic, you're getting people clicking, but you're not seeing a lot of conversions. There are lots of things that can affect your conversion rate. Let's go through each of those. Very first off, most of the time, it's your offer. If you're telling someone give us your personal information. If someone's going to be willing to give you that information, that better be good, it better be worth their time and potentially opening themselves up to getting spam. So don't try to give them a product brochure. Don't try to offer them something like a white paper from eight years ago. It has to be interpreted as valuable, otherwise they're not going to convert. Okay, so assuming you have an offer that people actually would care about that is exciting is perceived as valuable. If you're still not converting, maybe it's because your ad didn't prep them well enough when they got to that form. So if the ad is telling them, here's the pain point, here's the value that you're going to get by moving forward here. And then they get to the landing page. It could be that your ad didn't prep them well enough to convert. So maybe the landing page itself is saying fill out this form, and we'll give you this but maybe the ad didn't tell them that there was going to be a form on the other side. Maybe the ad didn't give them a call to action. It just said, "hey, you've got this problem, click here to solve it". And then when they get to the page, they're disappointed because it's asking for their information and it feels like a bait and switch to them. Then there are lots of things about the landing page that could be wrong here. So maybe your landing page doesn't instill trust. You could have all of the right stuff on your landing page, it could look good, but if for some reason someone is looking at it going, oh, I've never heard of this company before, this could be shady, you could have all the right elements, but your conversion rate would be next to nothing and you wouldn't know why. So make sure you concentrate on those trust signals. Put badges and here are the customers we've worked with. And here's where we've been featured. That type of information will help instill that trust and get people to move forward. Sometimes the landing page doesn't have all the right stuff, and maybe it's hindering your conversion. Imagine what happens when someone goes to click on your ad. And then your page takes three, four or five seconds to come up and load. You're not sticking around and neither is your prospect. So sometimes here it's a page load speed issue. So make sure your landing pages are loading fast. So you don't lose people before they even get there. Maybe your form comes first, but you didn't actually sell the offer well enough. There's no text telling them here's the value, here's the benefit to you. So make sure that you lead with the value. By reading this PDF, you will learn X, Y, and Z, you will be able to do A. The three things that we really want to see on a landing page. Number one, we want the form to be front and center. So as soon as the page loads, people are in the mindset, you're going to be asking something of me and I'm in that mindset. Number two, you want the text telling them here's the value, here's the benefits to you. Third, you want these trust signals. You want something telling them instilling that trust. And if you have all three of those things, but you're still not converting, chances are you're asking too much. Your offer isn't actually valuable, which hurts to hear, but maybe you are just not providing as much value as you thought you were. Or maybe the offer is pretty good. But your landing page is asking for too much stuff. If you're asking for more than like four, maybe five fields, people are going to look at that. And even if they are interested, they're going to say, they're asking for my social security number and a license to my firstborn. I, this just isn't worth it, and they'll leave. So try to keep your form fields down to preferably first name, last name, email converts the highest, you may have to ask for phone number. So one cool little hack here is, as of recently, LinkedIn allowed the lead gen form ads to pass someone's profile URL from a field. And what's so cool about this is if you have access to their profile URL, you don't need to ask them things like what their job title is, or what company they work for, or what industry they're in, or what their company size is. You don't have to ask that because It's all available on their public LinkedIn profile. So as my little hack here, if I'm using lead gen forms, I will ask for first name, last name, email, and profile URL. People tend to convert nicely on this because you asked them for a profile URL and they say, well, it's public knowledge Anyway, why do I care, but it has all of the other information that you want to extract and your sales team is going to appreciate a very quick way to look them up and see how to approach them. So your job now, I want you to go take a look at all of your different ad formats and their performance, compare them to the benchmarks, and then figure out are you having trouble over hurdle one, two, maybe even both, or maybe you're looking at this going oh, I'm having trouble over no hurdles. And that's great. I hope that you are just killing it and slaying it. But, if you are stumbling over one of those hurdles, I do hope this information has been super helpful for you. I do want to add just one little thing based off of the conversion rate factors. There is a cool way that you can actually test your landing pages to see if your landing page is hindering the conversion or if it's the offer. So if I'm running traffic to a landing page, and I'm having a low conversion rate, but I feel like my offers good, what I will do is run exactly the same ad to the exact same audience. But instead, I'm going to test it through a lead generation form. And the difference here is that a lead gen form is filled out right on LinkedIn, where all the trust signals are already there, and the speed is there. So if you're seeing a 2% conversion rate from your landing page, but you see a 15% conversion rate from your lead gen forms for exactly the same thing, that is a screaming signal that wow, your landing page is hindering conversions and you need to fix that landing page, whether it's speed, whether it's the right elements, whether it's selling the asset better on it, something's wrong with that landing page. But, if you do this test, and maybe you had a 2% conversion rate on the landing page, but a 5% conversion rate from your lead gen form, then you know it's probably the offer. People just aren't willing to download what it is that you're offering them. So that's time to do some more work on the offer. Okay, with that being said, I've got all the episode resources for you coming right up, so stick around. 36:26 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 36:36 Okay, I mentioned at the beginning about the benchmarks video that I did with Social Media Examiner. It's on YouTube so hit that link in your show notes. This is an 11 minute video that goes over a very condensed version of what we've talked about here. So if someone is not a podcast listener, but you need them to understand benchmarks, send them that video. They'll watch it and go, "oh, great. You're right. We should change our landing page" or whatever you're trying to get them to do. Use that as a tool to help convince. The next is when I present on LinkedIn Ads, I have a slide all about benchmarks. And so I'm going to put that as a JPEG that you can just click on and download it, you can use this as an easy reference. Just print it off, put it up in your office, or I don't know, make it your desktop background or something. But this will help you have a reference guide. So you don't have to go back and listen to this and take notes. If you are new, or if you have an employee who is new to LinkedIn Ads, have them check out the course link. This is the LinkedIn Learning course that I did with LinkedIn Learning. And it covers about the first hour and a half of what I train, when teams bring me in. I charge $500 an hour for consulting. And this course is only $25 if you have to buy it, or if you have LinkedIn premium of any kind, you'll have access to it for free. So a very, very good deal for anyone who wants to learn more about LinkedIn Ads. It takes you from absolutely nothing to all the basics. Open up your podcast player right now and hit the subscribe button whichever podcast player you're using, I want you to subscribe. I hope I've provided enough value that you'll want to keep listening. I have so many cool plans for episodes coming up. So I want you to be ready for those. And then please, if you do like what you're listening to, please hit a review, give it a rating and leave us a review. I'd love to shout you out in the review segment. And then finally, if you have any ideas for what you would like us to cover here on the podcast, or if you have questions, feel free to reach out to Podcast@B2Linked.com and we will help you out as fast as possible. Okay, see you back here next week. And we are cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Week six of quarantine and now we're dreaming about long nights driving aimlessly around Los Angeles with our friends, pinballing from place to place and feeling the sense of aliveness you get just from being in cars, showing up to parties, leaving, heading somewhere else, to the club, always moving & never going anywhere, detached from time until the night turns to morning. "Popularity" is our favorite song from our favorite Sparks album (1983's "In Outer Space")—a perfect ode to being a vapid LA person going everywhere at once, and to the simple satisfaction of being around other people and feeling popular. By the time we get back out into the world we'll have forgotten what our favorite places are called too. This whole album is perfect and nails a balance of reckless energy and deep loneliness that feels very appropriate to our moment. Lyrics I like you and you like me a lot And we do those things that can make us feel hot Then we join some friends, all of them are all right And we talk a while, then we climb in our cars What a night, we all drive into town Where we'll park our cars, and meet the rest of our friends At a place that's called, I forget what it's called But it's really great, and all our friends will be there Popularity I like you and you like me a lot And it's nice to be all alone with you too But it's also nice being out with our friends Cause they're all all right, maybe that's why we're friends Popularity I feel great, but it's getting real late So I'll drive you home and you'll slide up real close I'm so glad we met, and I like you so much And I'm also glad that I got all those friends Popularity Credits Released April 23, 2020 Recorded, performed, produced, and mixed by YACHT Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk

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

A 16 year old male is being seen in the ER for cellulitis and a skin abscess. He has already undergone I & D of the abscess and he's waiting to be discharged. You order a shot of Clindamycin, 600mg to be given IM prior to his discharge. Five minutes later, you're called back into the room and you see the patient is in respiratory distress and having very labored breathing. His face is puffy and his voice sounds muffled. As you consider what to do next, you are struck with a very important question. What type of hypersensitivity reaction is this again? Is it the one with IgE, type 1, type 2, I can't quite remember. Okay, not really that's really not the most important thing at the moment, you know its anaphylaxis, you know that you need to give him Epi; so you draw up 0.5mg and you give it IM, probably saving this guy's life. So I'll admit maybe the type of hypersensitivity reaction isn't the most clinically relevant information in a crisis situation, but I will say hypersensitivity reactions are high-yield in terms of board review, and they also shed light on the pathophysiology behind many common diseases. Today on the Medgeeks podcast we discuss hypersensitivity reactions. - Do you have a question you'd like for us to answer? Submit your question here (it's free) and we'll answer on our next podcast episode: https://www.askmedgeeks.com - Stay up to date with our monthly audio program; In the Know. Get a free trial: https://www.medgeek.co/in-the-know-order-form-free - Follow us on Instagram here: https://www.Instagram.com/medgeeksinc - Check out our free resources here: https://medgeeks.co/start-here - This podcast should not be used in any legal capacity whatsoever, including but not limited to establishing standard of care in a legal sense or as a basis for expert witness testimony. No guarantee is given regarding the accuracy of any statements or opinions made on the podcast, video, or blog.

See the traffic methods I never share in public: https://profitcopilot.com/traffic This free traffic app will send targeted visitors to your website FAST. You're going to learn how to use Telegram, the popular messaging app, for traffic generation. But there's a problem. Telegram doesn't make groups easy to find. So I'll show you two ways to find large niche-specific channels and groups that you can join. Use this to network, share you content, or build an audience.

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

BE SURE TO SEE THE SHOWNOTES AND LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE. Eve: [00:00:08] Thanks so much for joining me today for the latest episode of Impact Real Estate Investing.   Eve: [00:00:14] My guest today is Jim Kumon who heads the Incremental Development Alliance, which is based in Minneapolis. The Alliance began in 2015 as a collaboration between two small-scale developers who found that people kept asking them the same question: how do I build a small building in the place I love? They joined with Jim to create an organization with the goal of resurrecting the small developer. And they built a suite of classroom-based coaching tools and scaled them across the region and the country. In the first year they did big camps in Portland, Dallas, Providence, Fayetteville, Washington, D.C. and Detroit.   Eve: [00:01:12] Be sure to go to evepicker.com to find out more about Jim Kumon on the show notes page for this episode. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter so you can access information about impact real estate investing and get the latest news about the exciting projects on my crowdfunding platform, Small Change.   Eve: [00:01:42] Hello, Jim. I'm really happy to have you on my show today.   Jim: [00:01:45] It's great to be here and actually to see a little bit of Spring coming around the corner here in Minnesota, so it's actually where I'm at, so it's good to actually get out to the world and see some things. So, glad we can connect here and talk about stuff since I haven't been able to leave the house much currently.   Eve: [00:02:04] Right, we're all kind of stuck. But, you know, I've been really fascinated by your organization, the Incremental Development Alliance for a few years now and your work is pretty squarely focused on small-scale projects and small-scale developers, which I really love. So I wanted you to start by telling me a little about why the Incremental Development Alliance exists.   Jim: [00:02:29] Yeah, well, we're coming up in about five years now of our work as a nonprofit organization. We work nationally to support implementers of small-scale real estate development projects and the ability for local places to have those kind of real estate projects happening in their communities. And so we exist in large part to be able to essentially re-enable and re-share the information that we used to have as a society. All real estate development was largely small-scale development for, you know, really centuries up until really post-World War 2, for the most part, and we did some things in the skyscraper era, you know, the early nineteen hundreds, but for the most part, small-scale, small-lot development was the traditional development pattern. And so, one of the major reasons we exist is essentially trying to re-learn and re-share information that we used to know across a broad spectrum of our society. And it's now been complicated by the fact that we have had 50 or 70 years of real estate development that has largely become specialized and become highly, highly tuned to scale and largely to scale finance. The kinds of developments that we see in this country are in large part due to the financial mechanisms we have. We see the things we have because they're easy to finance. And so the traditional pattern that we've had up until that point in time in the mid century nineteen hundreds is, is actually the unusual thing now. We can build big box stores and subdivisions and office parks and industrial parks, but the idea of putting a duplex on a 50 foot wide lot is actually pretty foreign in most places. And so we're trying to help put the knowledge back together within the 2020 framework and not the 1920 framework of what you have to do to follow rules and to get things financed, to make real estate transactions happen. And so we do so.   Eve: [00:04:38] Why is it important?   Jim: [00:04:40] It's important largely because it's a lost art. People think it's, especially when we first started out, in large part people think it's almost impossible. Like, well, how can we not do this? How can we not be able to do this for so long now? Large part is a) people really hadn't tried or if they looked into it, they gave up because there were so many barriers. And secondarily, there are places that really want to see this kind of development happen, but they're missing the know-how within their human resource, their human capacity of a community that's both public, private and nonprofit sectors. And so really, our organization started as a network of doers who were comparing notes and a couple of my co-founders in particular who were essentially mentoring people on the side. And it got to the point where you couldn't have that many one-on-one phone calls and still do your job, to make major money. And so, you know, we essentially bound together to help essentially take that wisdom that's sort of hard earned from the field, in-practice wisdom, and put it into a format that can be shared more widely and both in sort of beginners terms, as well as more advanced work that we have to do, either in markets that are disinvested or in markets that are too hot, they're over-invested. And so we see the conditions across the US in one or the other. And how you get real estate products done differs greatly, obviously, depending on if you're in a hotter market or a colder market.   Eve: [00:06:16] How do you help like small-scale developers or places that want to introduce interstitial small projects into their urban fabric?   Jim: [00:06:26] When we started the training work out, we realized that the two biggest issues were: one, the process. Being a small developer was sort of unknown. You had lots of people who are involved in the development industry, people who are contractors or real estate agents or architects. People, sort of, a known kind of related industries to real estate. And so those folks who were in an industry, you know, largely had a sense of the process, but really just knew they're one stop along the way. And so, many people may have some of the skill sets to put a real estate transaction together, but didn't have a complete working set, right. And no-one knows everything about each aspect of a development project, there's too much to know. But you have to know a little bit about each part of the process and know how to find other people who can help you with the things you're weak at. And so, the ability for us to help, essentially teach people, what is the process and how does it work and particularly how does it work for small scale projects? And we define those projects, you know, 1 to 20 units of housing - they could be mixed use residential or commercial and usually under 15,000 square feet, that's sort of the max-sized project and really...   Eve: [00:07:40] I fit squarely into that group.   Jim: [00:07:42] Yeah, and we're usually more talking about buildings between, you know, 500 and 5000 square feet, you know in reality. And so, those buildings are the ones that are overlooked and kind of caught in the the seams, in the cracks and crevices of our regulatory system and our financial system, because the rules change. So one of the things that we teach people is how to line up the financial regulatory system and banking system, how to line up the land use system that actually controls what you can put where and the building codes. And so, the thing is, is for larger projects, most projects fall under the same set of rules. Like there's certain zones of a city, there's the international building code, which is basically everything over three units of housing and largely commercial buildings. And the, you know, the financial mechanism of the commercial mortgage, right. The rules are largely the same for big buildings. And what makes it hard for small projects is they straddle an intersection of all three of those elements where the rules shift, right? One in two family zones are different from three and up in zoning land. There's a completely different building code that regulates one to two family buildings from from how you build a building in its construction. And then we have a financial mechanism for residential buildings that allows for one to four unit buildings. And you have to make sure that you know how those pieces intersect, because otherwise you find out, usually at the most inopportune time, that you've got a discongruent operating requirements, right. Hey, I didn't know that when I went from a duplex to a triplex I need a sprinkler system now. And that's not the kind of thing you want to find out on accident because sprinkler systems are not cheap. And so that's kind of how we got people.   Eve: [00:09:40] I've had this sort of experience myself when I built a small, it was supposed to be a four residential unit building in downtown Pittsburgh, and I got all the approvals, everything, permits, everything, started building. And one day on-site, the building inspector said, hold on a second, you can't do four units without an elevator. Because one has to be handicapped accessible. So we had to really on the fly completely redesign a couple of the units because it's a tiny little site and we could not put an elevator in. So, it seems to me that not even the city kind of really understands how difficult they are for small buildings.   Jim: [00:10:23] Well, and the question, in large part, probably was who is the last person before you tried to build a new construction four unit building? Probably a long time. Yeah. And a lot of folks who are alumni are exactly that person that you were. Right. They're the first person broaching these subjects within their building departments and zoning departments and with their local officials and their neighbors.   Eve: [00:10:47] This could be my entire career in development that you describing.   Jim: [00:10:54] Right, you did it all the hard way, didn't you Eve, yeah?   Eve: [00:10:55] Damn, it was fun.   Jim: [00:10:57] Yeah, well, and that's a part of this shared wisdom that we're trying to...We don't have enough time with, especially in the housing sector, we've got a lot of housing to build in this country and we don't really have time for everyone to make the mistakes and to to go through the vagaries that that you went through yourself and others who are faculty members went through, right, to find all this stuff out the hard way.   Eve: [00:11:21] Small-scale development could be perfectly efficient and make developers money except for all of this. Like when you have a banker telling you, oh no one's going to live downtown and they just won't give you a loan because you happen to be the first to the loft development in a downtown, that's a problem even beyond the written regulations that we're talking about. That's now a cultural issue that you've got to also break through, right?   Jim: [00:11:47] It's much harder, actually, the part between the between the ears is a way more difficult issue, especially given that even though if we were talking about the US, while we're one country we're many subcultures. And so, the way that different parts of this country and different real estate markets in different parts of the country behave, and the way that people believe that their communities should be, is vastly different. Tinkering with your zoning code is pretty straightforward, it's mostly numbers and a couple of pictures, if you're lucky, I can sit down with someone's zoning code and help them remove things that are barriers fairly quickly. But, you know, banks, neighbors, even people in the construction industry. I was, we were, there were some small houses that one of our faculty was looking at some small houses with one of our alumni in, in Tennessee. And the local building culture in that city basically was like: two by six construction, well, we don't do that. That's gonna cost more, I mean, if we gottta take this one stud off the truck and it's a different size than what used to, that's just gonna cost way more than putting in a two by four, I mean, obviously, you know. And you're just like, what?   Eve: [00:13:04] I had a really bizarre issue in Pittsburgh, when I was building a tiny house here and, when a lot of people left and houses were abandoned, people just sort of collapsed them into the basements, so you end up with land that's pretty unbuildable. And I was talking to Jonathan Tate in New Orleans and he said, well, we just have these little trucks with pile drivers that drive around and drive piles past all of this stuff, right, which is brilliant. But not in Pittsburgh. I couldn't find a small pile driver. It would have been a very large rig that would have been deployed for a tiny little project. So, from region to region you have like these weird issues popping up.   Jim: [00:13:48] Basements, no basements, right. You don't put a basement in Louisiana, right, cause you'd be...   Eve: [00:13:53] You had to do something with the ground, so it was like...   Jim: [00:13:58] Years ago I worked in, in a city in, outside of New Orleans, it's further out, further afield in the state and so a little bit swampier land of the states. And so, there was a local joke about some infrastructure projects was, you know, "my daddy used it to fish for crawfish in your basement" which, of course, there was no basement. Which is to say you built your house in the low ground. You shouldn't wonder why it's flooded over and over and over again.And so these, these kind of, you know, climate and regional issues is what is another thing that kind of makes our approach different than most real estate training and technical assistance is that our our commitment to urbanism, our commitment to neighborhoods, and that's really where we operate, the neighborhood scale, all of our cities and towns in this country are really just increments of neighborhoods.   Jim: [00:14:54] And so what's important from our perspective is there's both small scale as well as incrementalism. Those two things go hand-in-hand, but they're really separate. And one of the things that ties them together is the idea of time and scale. And so, you can be thinking through how something, a process, works in a place for how you build a building. But you have to think through the ways that those technical elements fit together and what's, how it's really going to work when you, when you set out. So for us, thinking through a housing project for a small building, you have to really take it into its parts and you can't strip out the financial piece from the physical piece. And so, most of the real estate training that I took and other people took that are involved with our organization, they were so strictly focused on the financial pro forma. If you can make the numbers work, somebody else would figure out how to make a vertical three-dimensional building out of that spreadsheet later, right. If we could just get these rents and the costs isn't over this, it'll be fine. And it's like, no, actually, you know, what goes in that building matters. If you build the building, that, as you found out, unfortunately requires an elevator, that's not, that's not an inconsequential thought process. So our belief that the built environment and its regulatory framework has to be front and center and iterative in the process, along with the financials, along with the the most usually forgotten part, which is the humans, right? Who is the occupant of this building and how is this building achieving needs of humans? And, as I was an architecture student as an undergrad, I always kind of thought that, and in my time when I was in school, I was looking at inspirations like the rural studio. People who were actually going out there and trying to build things and think about the humans, you know, part and parcel and the economic conditions that they were a part of, in that part of the country. And so, to be able to actually look at these things and say, know what? we can't separate this idea of the financial part of this building from the people and the actual built edifice, we have to think of them together.   Jim: [00:17:23] And small scale buildings are so critical because it's not, it's a jewel-box, right. I mean, our buildings, our built environment, is largely an aggregation of many, many, many small buildings. The big building is actually the outlier, the exception in the built environment we have. And so, one of the challenges we have in this country today is that we forgot how to build neighborhoods. We know how to build complexes. We know how to build parks right, of.. the office parks and industrial parks. But the idea that fine-grained elements that differ in use and size can fit together, that's a skill we lost post-World War Two, in planning, design and construction. And so, being able to teach people how to use that part of their brain, how to use that part of the thought process, is the critical missing piece in implementation, right. We have the ideas, we have desire. We were missing the actual how to. And that's why we created the Alliance was to sort of fill in that void.   Eve: [00:18:23] Really, what I'm hearing is, and I know this to be true, that small-scale is incredibly challenging, is, you're sort of up against, you know, the same issues as a large scale development, but maybe even more because of cultural beliefs, because of the way the banks like to lend, because of zoning codes that aren't really geared towards small. So it can be a lot more challenging than something large and efficient.   Jim: [00:18:51] Yeah. And we like to say and this is one of the, one of the old analogies by one of my co-founders, John Anderson, who said that small developers operate on the economy of means, as opposed to large developments, which really are, as you say, the economy of scale and efficiency. And the economy of means is largely about relationships and time. There's a finite amount of people and resources that a small-scale developer has. And so, what is important to understand is that small-scale development isn't inherently hard, it's only hard within the context that our American society has built its habits and practices about how we finance, value and built. And so what is important and what were some of the ideas that we hang our had on about, you know, what can you do with a 30 year mortgage? That was a question that came out of the last recession, as I'm making the broad assumption here that we are already in a new recession. With the last recession,  is, was a question of what if commercial finance, as we know it doesn't come back? And so, John was one of the people who was staring, looking at this and saying, gosh, what could I do with a federally backed mortgage product? What does that allow for?   Jim: [00:20:15] And so being able to look at something very basic and very simple really shows what the power of that is. Because if you think about the millions upon millions of 30 year mortgages we have in this country today, it's a ubiquitous tool, except that there were features of that tool that were underutilized. And so really we were exploring and trying to cross-pollinate what could you do with 1 to 4 units if that was your framework? And so, one of the things that we've developed over the last three to four years and my colleague, Grayson Johnson, and co-founder, this is one of her big pieces and contributions to our work, is helping us catalog. And my background comes out of the built environment in architecture and I did housing in California in the boom years and saw all kinds of crazy things that were going on when you could build a courtyard apartment building, which has got 42 units, which is like 42 custom homes like stacked on top of each other and beside each other, all selling for, you know, six hundred thousand dollars. This is sort of the the rarified air of Southern California real estate in 2007, right? And you get down to this, you know, like, wow, this is an amazing building type that no one's done in 40 years, 50 years. And you realize, gosh, these are all these different ways we could do this. And so that idea of a building type from something very complex, like a courtyard apartment building, multifamily house to something as simple as a duplex or a triple decker as we have in the Northeast or all the various kinds of cottages you find in the south where you're trying to spread out and keep air between buildings, right, and battle humidity. All these different building types that are from a climate perspective and a local culture perspective akin to a place.   Jim: [00:22:11] And really because we're a national organization, we gathered up all these different types that largely had a start in a local place and have, you know, regional sort of preferences or regional sort of ability to, you find them often, right. And we said, look, well, how can we use these building types in many places? And so we created this idea called Step Buildings, which would be a way to help people organize through these important thresholds of finance, building code and zoning code and Step Buildings is an important idea, largely because we're having to reintroduce things that are in plain sight in many places in this country, but we don't recognize what they are. And the term STEP is also an acronym. It stands for Small-scale, Time-enhanced, Entrepreneurial and Purposeful. And really, the ability for us to understand what these buildings are, and having spent time in Pittsburgh, I love, especially in the working class neighborhoods, the just sheer variety of sizes of building, right, and attachments and additions and that incrementalism of, before we had the 30 year mortgage, we only built as much housing as we could afford, which was not very much. And if we have kids or a family or parents, you know, we made these little additions and, you know, cultivated up a structure. And so as humans, we had all kinds of ways to house ourselves. They just didn't fit into the model we started doing after World War 2, which was a single family house stamped out in great scale and volume in, sort of, cookie cutter tranches of financial thresholds, right? Like, well, this subdivision is going to be for houses that will cost between two hundred and ten and two hundred twenty five thousand dollars and we'll build a hundred of them. And then get another plot of land next door and build one hundred that are between three hundred and three hundred ten thousand dollars, right. Somehow we went from this fine-grained ability to house people at different points of their life cycle to, you have to pick up and move yourself to a new hunk of land every 10 years in order for, you know, your housing type, that need that you have, to happen. And so, we're trying to catalog all the different ways that you can mix and match buildings together and be able to explain them to people who may not realize that they live in a place that has all these things.   Eve: [00:24:44] Can you share an example of a project or a place or a developer that you helped through the alliance that you are proud of, or you think is particularly interesting?   Jim: [00:24:55] Well, there's a couple different conditions by which we end up coming to a place, Now, first of all, we don't just show up in a town and do a training class. We only go places that invite us and our sponsoring spills through their hustle and through their financial support. So we go to places that want us and want this type of work. If you don't want this type of work, it doesn't get anywhere. And we've been to a couple of places who said they really wanted this and then when we got there, they weren't really all that serious, right. They were checking a box, they were, you know, throwing something, throwing a bone to a neighborhood that's been overlooked. And they weren't really serious. There were some people on the ground there who really cared about their place. But the people who brought us, or maybe who paid the bill, not so serious. And so people ask me a different version of the question you just asked me, which is, you know, who's, what is success or what happens when someone makes it? And the challenges right now is that there's a lot of people who want to get something going, and for some of things I've already mentioned, can't, right. There are some deal-breaking issues that stop people from getting going. And so, one of the things that's important, and why we do work that's both for the individual as well as for the city, is that they need each other. right. Cities, we talk to people in government all the time like, gosh, I would love to make sure that we can legalize cottage courts and then sometimes they go off and do it. And then, like Jim, so we went changed our zoning code and tinkered with a couple of local practices for our infrastructure and, gosh, you know, cottage courts should just be no problem. And I'm like, does anyone know how to build them? And so. Like, has anybody had the idea of putting five small single-family houses together in one lot? Does anyone understand how that fits? Don't like hah, no, I guess not. Well, that could be why no one's building them.   Jim: [00:26:43] So, we're at an interesting point in time where there is now, you know, especially compared to five years ago, a much larger acceptance of a lot of great ideas that could happen and could happen in your place. And so, we're working through trying to figure out what's the path of least resistance. And so I can describe a couple of those examples of people who are are finding that first step in their place.And we have a couple of longer-term relationships with places, which I think is where our best examples come from, from alumni. We have a bunch of, up on our Web site, we have incrementaldevelopment.org, we have a bunch of little alumni stories about people and projects. So I'll just cherry-pick a few of those. But it is a project, a couple places that we're working that we have some really exciting products going on, one of which is South Bend, Indiana. And we've been working on and off there now for a little over two years, specifically on the northwestern and western parts of the city. We are brought in typically for two reasons to a place. One, because there is uncontrolled or unhealthy growth, right, which is to say the place is a little too hot, that the real estate market is too hot. People are being either displaced or threatened to be displaced. Or we have the opposite. The place maybe got the wrong end of a bulldozer for a few decades. And the question is now what? How do we piece this back together? And so, interestingly enough, the tools by which we bring to the table are the same, but the the math in many cases is the part that's really different.   Jim: [00:28:25] So in South Bend, you've been brought there by, we were originally brought there by the private sector, a gentleman who really used, he's a retired professor and really just cared about the area adjacent to where he lived. And he was kind of right a the cusp between two neighborhoods and, sort of, a typical, especially Mid-western legacy of segregation, you know, the white neighborhood and the black neighborhood, he lived kind of right on the edge of it and was like, why is it that right across the, sort of, main street here that I live next to, there are, you know, half the houses are torn down and gone. And on my side of the street, you know, largely the neighborhood's intact. And so, when you have a neighborhood that is, you know, economically in a down cycle, you know, the first thing you have to do is start the rehab project. And so he came to one of our early training classes and began to understand that, well, rehab is where I have to start.   Jim: [00:29:19] But he originally said, well, I don't really want to own and lease buildings. I just want to fix some things up and sell it off to somebody else and have them be able to gain wealth. But then he realized that the math problem of when you fix up a building, sometimes it doesn't appraise for the amount that you've now put into it, to buy it and to fix it up. And he realized he couldn't sell it and couldn't finance it. You know, he had to kind of hold it for a while and lease it and try to kind of nurse it back into financial health. And this is true of both a couple of residential products and a couple of commercial buildings that he and a few partners bought. And so, the thing that was different about him and is different about the approach that we espouse, was that, while there are a lot of really difficult physical things to overcome - most of the houses in this neighborhood were over 100 years old, many of them were beset with typical issues of neighborhoods of that age where you have a lot of lead paint or other environmental things - and so, you know, these are definite headwinds to doing even rehabilitation of buildings, you know, cheap ones. Not even getting too fancy, but just enough to make it a decent place to to live. And so, I think the story there was that he began to build friends, not only people who were doing work alongside him, but folks who might want to move to that neighborhood, who might want to rent in that neighborhood, people who want to start businesses in cheap commercial spaces that have been largely left vacant.   Jim: [00:30:42] And so, when all else fails with math and with the physical rules, relationships are the thing that bind us together, that helps us overcome when we have issues with rules. And so he's been slowly building a group of people in the neighborhood to begin to help him. He didn't want to be the hero. I don't want to buy up every lot in the neighborhood. And then I have to be responsible for everything that happens. He wanted to have many people share in that work and to support each other. And so, I think His name's Mike Keane. Mike is one of the success stories, not only of getting a couple of projects off the ground, rehabbing a few things and now he's working on, probably will be one of the first few non-subsidized, deeply-subsidized new construction buildings in the neighborhood in probably 50 years. And so, you know, but none of that work would be possible unless he'd started with picking up trash in the neighborhood and building relationships with his neighbors and buying a couple of buildings for cheap and fixing them up and finding a few people who would be in them to bring life to those buildings. That's, that's one of the places that we are starting to see that the compounding effects of many people like Mike, who are now working there, both in the private and nonprofit sectors.   Eve: [00:32:03] So just generally, how do you, how do you think we need to think about our cities and neighborhoods so that we build better places for everyone?   Jim: [00:32:12] Well, first of all, neighborhoods are living organisms. They're not static things. And that's one of the key aha moments that we have to have with government officials and particularly planning and economic development and housing department folks. They're largely in place to disperse funds and make sure people follow the rules. We like to reframe their job descriptions as: you are stewards of resources and you're responsible for creating a productive tax base because, you know, that's really what our public sector has to do for us. Our public sector has to create a ability for services we want to provide as a place and we have to have a tax base for that,  we have to have a productive economy and a local productive economy, not one that's relying on state or federal subsidies to make it's ends meet. And so, one of the ways that we need to do that is that we have to make sure that our place is constantly evolving and it's wherever it's at now, there's another place that it can go to to be either economically or socially more welcoming and more accessible. And so, the building types and the Step Building thought process is we actually have little cards we've built that essentially have a picture on the front and on the back explain, hey, this building is in the, this building code type and, is largely found in these kinds of zoning codes or have these kind of attributes. These buildings require sprinklers, these ones don't. These buildings are financeable by a 30 year mortgage or they, or they're not. And it gives people a sense also for what's possible, right. An owner-occupied duplex is like one of the most accessible building types you can put in any neighborhood. And yet, you know, most of those types you're going to find are buildings that are over 100 years old. We don't have a mechanism that is widespread in this country that takes advantage of the fact that you can build a building that has someone living into it through the wall for maybe you as the owner that's helping pay the mortgage and also allows us to have a finer-grain control over what rents are charged in a neighborhood. And, because we're not looking, you know, you, as an owner occupant probably have a day job. And, you know, you're using this as income or maybe as a long term retirement strategy, right. And so, you don't need the top-level rents over time. Now, you probably need decent rents upfront, though, because our financial system, unless you're independently wealthy and can build a duplex out of your own pocket via cash, requires certain amounts of money upfront and requires a certain amount of, of conservative cost estimating.   Eve: [00:34:57] Well, this is something that you and I need to talk about because you've been fixing on a 30 year mortgage. But while you've been building the Incremental Development Alliance, equity crowdfunding has been [indeed] gathering steam. I really believe that we're going to see different types of financing available more readily for projects like this. And I don't know if you've been thinking about that at all.   Jim: [00:35:24] Well, I think there is a fantastic role to get into a little bit of of wonkishness for folks who maybe have not, don't have any background in how a general real estate transaction works but typically, whether you're building a new building or an old one, you have two components, right? You have debts, right, if you are going to buy a building and finance it, you have the loan, you're doing it from the bank and you have what we call equity, which is essentially your skin in the game that you or someone who is investing with you provide to basically have a stake in the game. And that is sort of, you know, that the bank security, that somebody has the financial wherewithal to be supporting this project.   Jim: [00:36:09] And so I think where there is a great opportunity for crowdfunding and small dollar funding in terms of aggregation, isn't that equity piece because, you know, people typically show up and when they come to our class before they go through it and we disabuse them, this idea is that, gosh, I don't have enough money to be a developer.Well, do you have enough plywood to become a developer and build a building? Well, what do you mean? Well, you say you don't have enough money. Well, do you have enough plywood? Do you have enough screws? Do you have enough, you know, do you have all the things necessary upfront? No, you don't go out and buy a truckload of plywood just to have it on hand, right. When you need plywood, you go to a lumber yard and you buy it. That's the same way loans work. The trick is to get a loan, you need to bring money with you. And so that is the case, right? You do need to have some money, but people have money.   Jim: [00:37:07] What we lack in small development, and this is what our one day workshop, which is sort of our flagship training is focusing on, is actually teaching people A, there's a process B, this is how the process works and C, one of the biggest things that we lack to make small scale products happen is someone who knows how to put together the "if I could, would you?" proposition, largely in writing? If I had 20 percent down of whatever cost it would take to build or to buy a building, could I get a loan at this rate at this..so much. And so, what we lack is people who actually know how to put the transaction together. We can find people who have money and it may come through one deep-pocketed investor. But it also may come through 10 or 20 neighbors pitching in, you know, five hundred or fifty or five thousand dollars a piece. Now, what's tricky about that is this little thing called a loan guarantee. This is, this is a tip I can, listen to, leave with your listeners today. If this is the first time you're hearing about real estate transactions and how they work and why we don't see the things that we think you should see, one of the tricks about figuring out good ways for us to be able to use small dollar capital is this problem we have that banks want somebody on the hook if something goes wrong, just want a kind of a loan guarantee. And so somebody who has enough net worth to functionally backstop, you know, all of a sudden all your tenants not paying rent or something else going out bad financially. And so, small-dollar capital, while we might be able to amass the capital necessary, unless you are the person who has the balance sheet necessary to backstop a large loan, we need other mechanisms to be able to make that loan guarantee work.   Eve: [00:38:52] Yes, but small-dollar equity can help a developer like Mike Keen do, want a project or another. He may have the balance sheet. He just may not enough to get it going.   Jim: [00:39:01] Indeed. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, it is, it is absolutely way more accessible to normal people with normal jobs. My wife and I, we know we have two incomes. We don't either of us make a ton of money, you know, we just, you know, we have a regular, you know, two regular, you know, white collar jobs. But yet, you know, we would be, we would have enough, between some retirement savings that we have, we don't have very much debt, which is important, especially for qualifying for a 30 year mortgage out the backside is having a low amount of debt and we don't really have any but the house we own. And so, you know, that's enough to get a fourplex going, you know? So for most of these buildings you would finance for a 30 year mortgage, you don't need really that much and there are people you can find who have it if you don't. And you can just pay for that purpose as well.   Jim: [00:39:52] We're also finding if you, if you're working in a neighborhood that is maybe disinvested, though, that's one of the great places that we're working to try to get local governments, foundations and institutions, whether they're hospitals, universities or corporations who are civically minded, to be a part of that because if, and we're working on a project in Memphis that is sort of structured this way, we're essentially creating a consortium, kind of an umbrella for, as sort of a master developer who sort of say, hey, you know what, we're gonna create an ecosystem by which many small developers, of which we've trained through the Alliance, can actually have the backstop where they don't need to go get, you know, a huge loan guarantee, right, where, there's going to be capital and we're going to be able to know that when we're going to build five or 10 or 20 buildings at a small area, because there's a bunch of empty lots and they're controlled by property owners, we can use one at a time, help each other build up the value in those buildings so that they do regain their value. The first one's going to be difficult to get the right appraisal for. The second one, less difficult. The third one less. And hopefully by the fourth or fifth or sixth that are all on the same block or nearby to each other, we overcome some of those structural problems that we have in disinvested neighborhoods.   Jim: [00:41:09] And so, I think the biggest thing that we stress when we come to a place and we talk to people in both public, private and then sometimes nonprofit sectors, is that you're all gonna have to come to the table and think a little bit differently, right. We can band together as neighborhoods and as neighbors and put together enough capital to have the downpayment to buy that house on the corner that Miss Mary used to live in but, you know, she passed and the house got boarded up because people were breaking into it and now it's sitting vacant but what a great house that was. But, there's a couple of things we have to overcome and so, being able to have a have a community dialogue about how do we help a bank make a loan in a neighborhood it's supposed to be making a loan in anyways, but banks are regulated. We have to make sure that banks can check their boxes, too. Well, how do we do that? So community resources being able to bring together different aspects. Governments don't want to be responsible for buildings, right. But they can provide balance sheets. They can provide downpayment assistance. They can provide facade grants. So if everybody comes together and understands the process, they can figure out how to work it out.   Eve: [00:42:20] Yeah, they could provide relationships with banks and banks to the table. They could provide a lot of things. This has been really fascinating but I want to ask you one wrap-up question before we finish for today. Or actually two, I have to say, and that's what's next for you and what's next for the Alliance?   Jim: [00:42:37] Well, two things. Myself, personally, my wife and I have a small development company called Heirloom Properties. So, we have been evaluating both opportunities we have on our own lot, we have a single family house on a lot that at one point in time, in the past before we bought it, had a garage on it. And so as rules in Minneapolis have changed over the past couple of years, you know, we were looking into an accessory dwelling unit, a backyard cottage. And then, and now with the new rules we're contemplating, hey, why just stop with a backyard college? Why not a backyard duplex? And so we started thinking about that. But in the meantime, as that happened, we were saving some money up to work on a project like that. There was another vacant lot in our neighborhood that we are pursuing to build a small multiplex. And so, my wife works in affordable housing and so she does project management for big projects. But even, even affordable housing these days is not what it used to be. And so she's spending a lot of her time trying to figure out how to provide housing for folks who are not at the lowest of low income levels, because at this point, most of our federal and state subsidies are going toward the lowest of low income levels. And that's great. And that's desperately needed. But the challenge is, is that's not enough to house the rest of the folks need to house. And so both her projects at her day job, they're a bit larger, maybe 60, 70, 80 unit buildings and then some of the products that we're looking at that are 2 or 6 or 12 units that we're looking at personally in our in our neighborhood are kind of getting at that in-between scale that we luckily now, as a city, have come to a conclusion that we're actually going to allow again, we're actually going to make sure that it's possible to put more than a single family house on, you know, 60 or 70 percent of the land in our city that was previously allowed to only have one unit on it.   Jim: [00:44:31] So we're seeing in the last five years that the Alliance has been around, we're seeing places start to get some of those pieces of the puzzle right. And we're happy to have been a part both politically as well as from a technical perspective of some of those changes here in Minneapolis. But the work is is large. There are a lot of lot of places that need both cultural and technical changes to the way that they look at real estate, especially at the small scale of buildings, and so the Alliance is kind of doing a couple of things moving forward. We are expanding our services to support governments and non-profits and institutions, many of which have neighborhoods directly, either target neighborhoods if they're a city or if they are an institution where they have a neighborhood adjacent to the place that they maybe have their campus or facilities. And so, largely those places are trying to help jumpstart a real estate process and/or if you're, if they're in a hotter market, provide housing. If you're a hospital and you employ a massive cross-section of humanity in terms of income levels and household sizes and you're trying to make sure your workforce is nearby and doesn't have to commute an hour one way, there's probably a lack of housing of some type. And so we're trying to help those places create or recreate a viable housing market in the neighborhood. We're also helping to make sure that there are neighborhood services. So just because you have housing doesn't mean you have all the services you need that make it desirable to live there. And so, we're doing mixed use buildings, especially older ones that you can rehab, which is its own sort of trick in itself. How do you help those pieces come together and in assisting in that way? So, sort of, master developers as well as we continue to expand our services both electronically as well as in person to help cities get their rules right and get their processes to re-legalize, in many cases, the developments they already have, the neighborhoods they already have which have 30 and 40 and 50 foot wide lots and small buildings that don't quite conform to the rules that were created after those buildings were built. And so we're unwinding a lot of things, but we're also starting to create really fun new things. And one of the projects that we're gonna be working on here this Spring, especially as we have a little downtime, as many of our in-person events have been postponed, is working on getting some of these technical tools to all line up, to have the right financing tool box, to have the right building and zoning recommendations and policies, to be able to use the tool Step Buildings to help people envision the kinds of buildings they want, not just the buildings that someone has figured out maybe they can make some money at doing and we'll just keep doing it over and over and over. But to say, hey, you know, we want these kind of buildings in our neighborhood. How do we make those happen, and how do we join together as neighbors to maybe do it ourselves if no-one's going to come for us to do it? And that's largely the case. No one's coming to your neighborhood to do the real estate development you want to see, most likely. If they were, they'd be there already. And so we're trying to help democratize the information so that people can use their relationships and create the local systems to encourage the kind of things and to make them happen, actually just to make them happen. You know, we're here. We can run around the country and as an organization and just train people all day or give them advice. That's not what we're here to do. Our goal is really here to actually help people learn the skills, but to use those skills to actually make the buildings happen, to rehab them, to make, to build them new. That's that's what we're here to do. We're not here just to talk about this. We got plenty of advocacy and policy organizations. And so we hope that those of you who may be listening to this hearing about us for the first time. If you're waiting for someone to come, that person you're waiting for might be you and your neighbor. And so, think about what your role could be as a small developer and even if that's not your role, we need champions for many of the changes we need to re-legalize our places, to make them vibrant, to make them, and especially in the wake of our current crisis, ant-fragile. To be able to grow in strength through adversity, not just survive. So we think small-scale development is probably the way forward, once we get over the near-term humanitarian crisis of warding off a virus. We're still going to have the very same housing challenges, the very same economic challenges that we did six weeks ago. And so how do we deal with that as a country and as our neighborhoods?   Eve: [00:49:11] Well, this has been really, really fabulous. And I think that in the next five years, we're going to see a whole lot more incremental developments. So thank you very much for your time. and I'm sure we're gonna be talking again.   Jim: [00:49:22] Appreciate the opportunity, Eve. Thank you so much.   Eve: [00:49:27] Bye.   Eve: [00:49:27] That was Jim Kumon who leads the Incremental Development Alliance. The alliance is focused on helping locals strengthen their neighborhoods through small-scale real estate projects. They provide training and technical assistance to anyone interested in tackling projects that you are probably all familiar with. Housing, retail and mixed uses projects on main streets and in neighborhoods. Projects typically range from one to 20 units. These were once everyday development exercises, but have been pushed aside in favor of larger, more efficient projects of scale. Today, it's a challenge navigating zoning codes and financial institutions to get projects like this built. And that's what the alliance focuses on.   Eve: [00:50:34] You can find out more about impact real estate investing and access the show notes for today's episode at my website evepicker.com. While you're there, sign up for my newsletter to find out more about how to make money in real estate while building better cities.   Eve: [00:50:51] Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. And thank you, Jim, for sharing your thoughts. We'll talk again soon. But for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

This week at In The Past Lane, the American History podcast, we take a look at the original March on Washington. “Coxey’s Army” was a group of 500 men who amidst a terrible economic depression in 1894, marched from Ohio to the nation’s capital to demand that Congress provide employment through public works projects. They were turned away, but many of the Populist ideas that inspired them were enacted into law in the coming decades.    Feature Story: “Coxey’s Army” Arrives in Washington, DC On April 30, 1894 a man named Jacob Coxey arrived in Washington, DC at the head of a group of about 500 men. By then the whole nation knew them as “Coxey’s Army.” They had set out weeks earlier from Coxey’s hometown of Massillon, Ohio in what was the first ever March On Washington. So what was the fuss all about? The immediate answer was that in the spring of 1894 the United States was in the midst of the most severe economic depression in its history. It was triggered one year earlier by the financial Panic of 1893 which caused tens of thousands of businesses and farms to fail, and the unemployment rate to soar to 20% - and often. Double that in big cities like Chicago and New York. The US had seen its share of economic depressions in the 19th century – the panic of 1837, the panic of 1857, the panic of 1873, just to name a few. In each of these previous cases, political leaders agreed that the best policy was: do nothing. Depressions, the reasoning went, were like bad weather or an illness. Wait long enough, and the good times would return. The most dangerous thing the government could do was provide assistance to the people because, so the logic went, that would only foster dependence and lead the US down the path to socialism. Here’s how President Grover Cleveland put it in his second inaugural address, in March 1893. “The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned,” said Cleveland, “and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people.” But despite proclamations such as these, there was growing support among many Americans in this period known as the Gilded Age for the government to take a more active role in the economy to protect the vulnerable from exploitation and promote the greatest possible amount of opportunity for all. They argued that laissez-faire might have made sense back in the late-18th century when the US took form. But not anymore in an age of industry, wage work, mass immigration, huge cities, and giant corporations. That was the view that inspired Jacob Coxey. He was no radical, at least compared to the socialists, communists, and anarchists of the day. He was a successful farmer who also bred horses for sale and owned a sand quarry business. But as a farmer in the 1880s, he’d gotten involved in the burgeoning protest movement among farmers that came to be called Populism. Its leaders argued that the only way to effectively battle the power of the monopolies and trusts was to create a political movement that would elect farmers or pro-farmer politicians to office, so they could use political power to curb the power of banks, railroads, and brokers and save the honest American farmer from ruin. And in 1892 they established a new national party called the People’s Party that called for a wide range of new government policies, everything from taking over the railroads and telegraphs, to the adoption of a graduated income tax that would make the rich pay their fair share. Its candidate for president that year polled a million votes and won four states. It was no joke. So his embrace of Populism explains Jacob Coxey’s motivation behind his protest march. He advocated that, given the severity of the depression, the federal government must abandon its traditional commitment to laissez-faire and provide funding to states to create public works projects such as road building to alleviate mass unemployment and stimulate the economy. Now, if this sounds familiar, it’s because Coxey was advocating an approach to economic crisis that 40 years later would be embraced by Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression. And succeeding administrations, of course, have turned to varying forms of “stimulus packages” to boost the economy and help workers in times of economic crisis. To draw attention to this idea, Coxey organized his march to Washington, D.C. He actually got the idea from a fellow activist named Carl Browne who was more of a true blue radical. He not only came up with the idea of a march, but also the group’s official name, the “Commonweal of Christ,” which was intended to evoke both the ideals of the common good and Christianity. About 120 men gathered in Massillon, OH and on Easter Sunday 1894 they set off for the nation’s capital. As the press picked up the story, the group acquired a new name, “Coxey’s Army.” It was meant on the one hand to evoke ridicule and on the other to stoke fears of radicalism and civil unrest. The press alternately dismissed them as a bunch of delusional cranks, or a dangerous group of losers who wanted handouts and a socialist revolution. But Coxey dismissed this talk and declared that his army’s campaign was one to save the republic and honest capitalism from the clutches of corporate trusts and the politicians they controlled. Despite the negative press, as they marched, more men joined the ranks, including some African American men. Coxey had hoped to assemble an "army" of 100,000 men. But he had to settle for a peak of 500. In some places they were met by hostile townspeople and policemen who threatened arrest if they set up camp. But in many places Coxey and his growing number of followers were greeted by enthusiastic supporters who offered money, food, clothing, and shoes, as well as words of support. Finally, after walking 400 miles in 35 days, Coxey’s Army arrived in Washington on April 30, 1894. As this was the first ever protest march on Washington, apprehension was in the air as the men set up a makeshift camp. Hundreds of police and 1,500 soldiers stood by, ready for a confrontation. The next day, May 1, Coxey tried to enter the US Capitol to deliver a speech before Congress, but security guards turned him away. So, Coxey tried the next best thing: delivering the speech in front of the Capitol. But before he started speaking, police arrested him and took him off to jail.  He was charged with “disturbing the peace,” but the charges were eventually reduced and he was convicted only for walking on the lawn of the Capitol grounds. Had he spoken, Jacob Coxey would have said, in part: “We stand here to-day in behalf of millions of toilers whose petitions have been buried in committee rooms, whose prayers have been unresponded to, and whose opportunities for honest, remunerative, productive labor have been taken from them by unjust legislation, which protects idlers, speculators, and gamblers.” While Jacob Coxey did not get what he came for in Washington DC, the larger Populist movement to which he belonged did influence a generation of reformers who, in what we now call the Progressive Era, achieved notable successes in enacting many of the Populist Party demands, and so much more, ranging from regulations on trusts to measures to improve working conditions, public health, and political reform. And then there’s this - 50 years later to the day after he was arrested for trying to give a speech on the steps of the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, a 90-year old Jacob Coxey was allowed to deliver that speech. On May 1, 1944, he stood on the Capitol steps and said what had been on his mind back in 1894. But by then, in the wake of the New Deal and its vast array of government programs to alleviate suffering during the Great Depression, Coxey’s speech seemed hardly radical at all. What a difference half a century makes. So what else of note happened this week in US history? April 28, 1967 heavyweight champion boxer Muhammad Ali defies the draft and refuses to be inducted into the US military to fight in Vietnam. Ali argued that his religious beliefs prohibited him from participating in a war against the poor, nonwhite people of Vietnam. He was widely condemned for his stand, and subsequently stripped of his boxing title and sentenced to five years in prison. “I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs,” said Ali. “So I'll go to jail, so what? We've been in jail for 400 years.” The sentence was later overturned. April 30, 1789 The first presidential inauguration took place in New York City. George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall on Wall St before a crowd of thousands. April 30, 1975 South Vietnam fell to the forces of North Vietnam, marking the unofficial end of the Vietnam War. For Americans, this moment is captured in the photograph of people boarding a helicopter on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. If you want to learn more about the Vietnam War, check out ITPL episode 39 featuring my interview with Ken Burns about his documentary on the war. And what notable people were born this week in American history?   April 27, 1822 – Union Army general and 18th POTUS, Ulysses S. Grant April 28, 1758 – 5th POTUS James Monroe April 29, 1899 - composer and jazz orchestra leader Duke Ellington May 2, 1903 - Dr Benjamin Spock, author of the best selling book on baby care May 3, 1919 – folk singer and social justice activist Pete Seeger The Last Word Let’s give it to Jacob Coxey, who 126 years ago this week arrived at the head of the first march on Washington. Here’s a passage from the speech he hoped to deliver that day from the steps of the US Capitol. “We stand here to declare by our march of over 400 miles through difficulties and distress…that we are law-abiding citizens, and as men our actions speak louder than words. We are here to petition for legislation which will furnish employment for every man able and willing to work; for legislation which will bring universal prosperity and emancipate our beloved country from financial bondage to the descendants of King George. We have come to the only source which is competent to aid the people in their day of dire distress. We are here to tell our Representatives, who hold their seats by grace of our ballots, that the struggle for existence has become too fierce and relentless. We come and throw up our defenseless hands, and say, help, or we and our loved ones must perish. We are engaged in a bitter and cruel war with the enemies of all mankind—a war with hunger, wretchedness, and despair, and we ask Congress to heed our petitions and issue for the nation’s good a sufficient volume of the same kind of money which carried the country through one awful war and saved the life of the nation. … we appeal to every peace-loving citizen, every liberty-loving man or woman, every one in whose breast the fires of patriotism and love of country have not died out, to assist us in our efforts toward better laws and general benefits.” For more information about the In The Past Lane podcast, head to our website, www.InThePastLane.com  Music for This Episode Jay Graham, ITPL Intro (JayGMusic.com) The Joy Drops, “Track 23,” Not Drunk (Free Music Archive) Sergey Cheremisinov, “Gray Drops” (Free Music Archive) Pictures of the Flow, “Horses” (Free Music Archive) Ondrosik, “Tribute to Louis Braille” (Free Music Archive) Alex Mason, “Cast Away” (Free Music Archive) Squire Tuck, “Nuthin’ Without You” (Free Music Archive) Ketsa, “Multiverse” (Free Music Archive) Ketsa, “Memories Renewed” (Free Music Archive) Dana Boule, “Collective Calm” (Free Music Archive) Borrtex, “Motion” (Free Music Archive) Blue Dot Sessions, "Pat Dog" (Free Music Archive) Jon Luc Hefferman, “Winter Trek” (Free Music Archive) The Bell, “I Am History” (Free Music Archive) Production Credits Executive Producer: Lulu Spencer Graphic Designer: Maggie Cellucci Website by: ERI Design Legal services: Tippecanoe and Tyler Too Social Media management: The Pony Express Risk Assessment: Little Big Horn Associates Growth strategies: 54 40 or Fight © In The Past Lane, 2020 Recommended History Podcasts Ben Franklin’s World with Liz Covart @LizCovart The Age of Jackson Podcast @AgeofJacksonPod Backstory podcast – the history behind today’s headlines @BackstoryRadio Past Present podcast with Nicole Hemmer, Neil J. Young, and Natalia Petrzela @PastPresentPod 99 Percent Invisible with Roman Mars @99piorg Slow Burn podcast about Watergate with @leoncrawl The Memory Palace – with Nate DiMeo, story teller extraordinaire @thememorypalace The Conspirators – creepy true crime stories from the American past @Conspiratorcast The History Chicks podcast @Thehistorychix My History Can Beat Up Your Politics @myhist Professor Buzzkill podcast – Prof B takes on myths about the past @buzzkillprof Footnoting History podcast @HistoryFootnote The History Author Show podcast @HistoryDean More Perfect podcast - the history of key US Supreme Court cases @Radiolab Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell @Gladwell Radio Diaries with Joe Richman @RadioDiaries DIG history podcast @dig_history The Story Behind – the hidden histories of everyday things @StoryBehindPod Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen – specifically its American Icons series @Studio360show Uncivil podcast – fascinating takes on the legacy of the Civil War in contemporary US @uncivilshow Stuff You Missed in History Class @MissedinHistory The Whiskey Rebellion – two historians discuss topics from today’s news @WhiskeyRebelPod American History Tellers ‏@ahtellers The Way of Improvement Leads Home with historian John Fea @JohnFea1 The Bowery Boys podcast – all things NYC history @BoweryBoys Ridiculous History @RidiculousHSW The Rogue Historian podcast with historian @MKeithHarris The Road To Now podcast @Road_To_Now Retropod with @mikerosenwald © In The Past Lane 2020

Longtime podcaster, full-cast audio pioneer and independent filmmaker, and author of 30 books, J. Daniel Sawyer hosts the daily writers podcast The Every Day Novelist dedicated to creativity, process, writerly discipline, and cultivating a fertile mental life.TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLESHOW LINKS:Subscribe to my YouTube Channel: youtube.com/c/KevinTumlinsonWordslinger Podcast on YouTube: youtube.com/c/wordslingerpodcastAuthor.Email: author.emailIndie Author Blueprint: indieauthorblueprint.comGUEST LINKS:Website:: http://www.jdsawyer.netAmazon Author Page:: https://www.amazon.com/J-Daniel-Sawyer/e/B003L9JM92Twitter:: @dsawyerFacebook:: https://www.facebook.com/jdaniel.sawyerHow can people join your mailing list?: http://jdsawyer.net/about/mailing-list-signup/SPONSORS:DRAFT2DIGITAL: Convert, publish, and distribute your book worldwide, with support the whole way. https://draft2digital.com/wordslingerACORNS: Start an Acorns account today and get FREE MONEY! kevintumlinson.com/acornsAUDIBLE.COM: Get a FREE 30-day trial of Audible and listen to any audiobook in their vast library, when you go to http://audibletrial.com/wordslingerTRANSCRIPT:SUMMARY KEYWORDSbook, people, podcast, nanowrimo, pandemic, years, worldview, everyday, talking, novelist, life, interesting, grew, read, thought, recorded, held, listen, writing, questionsSPEAKERSKevin Tumlinson, J Daniel SawyerKevin Tumlinson 00:01Hey everybody, thank you for tuning in for sticking through the intro. I'm not even sure what I said in the intro, but I promise I will, I can guarantee at least I was interested in it. So thanks for tuning in and playing along. So today we're talking to Jay Daniel Sawyer. Now I'm going to read his bio here because it's it's got some great details for you but longtime podcaster full cast, audio pioneer, and independent filmmaker and author of 30 books. Jay saw your hosts the daily writers podcast, the everyday novelist, dedicated credit to creativity, process, and writerly discipline, and cultivating a fertile mental life. That's the part I wanted to get to in your bio. I like the idea of a fertile mental life. How's that? How's that shake out? And welcome to the show.J Daniel Sawyer 00:52Hi, Doug diggin Kevin. Yeah, you were on everyday novelist. What about it? But two years ago, I thinkKevin Tumlinson 00:58Yeah, a little bit. Doesn't seem like that long.J Daniel Sawyer 01:01I guys been crazy packed two years and like, every sense. Yeah,Kevin Tumlinson 01:06yeah. I feel like I've done a billion podcasts and webinars and live stream since then. And that's just this week. Oh, no. Yes. And I, you know, and I told you this before we started and I'm, I'm going to apologize to the rest of the world. Because if I sounded all frazzled, or off my game, it's because we've had so there's that on top of a pandemic, and I don't know when you're listening to this, it's probably a little bit in the future for sure. Maybe things turned out all right. And if so, thank you world for playing along. But uh, you know, things have been a little crazy. In terms of stuff we're doing with DDD, we got these spotlights, we're doing like every day, and then my buddy here pops in and I for some reason, I thought it was one of my author consults. So So I'm off base. I'm off kilter man. We're gonna get back on trackJ Daniel Sawyer 02:04so I think we'll do fine.Kevin Tumlinson 02:06How is everything in the James J Daniel Sawyer world man Tell me a little bit about what you're doing right now.J Daniel Sawyer 02:12Oh well right now I'm stuck up in the backwoods I moved up to the backwoods of New England for a week in order to help my parents relocate a year ago It turned out that their their retirement house needed some renovations. So Oh, got stuck here. And just as we were getting ready to leave the quarantine comes down. So I might be stuck here another year. So there's a lot of interesting refactoring going on.Kevin Tumlinson 02:36But that seems to be the way that works out. I mean, we we were we moved out of our apartment and moved into our in laws place for a few days, quote, unquote, and then 14 hit and we're like, well, they're gonna hunker down anyway. Go ahead.J Daniel Sawyer 02:54Yeah. But yeah, it's it's good. It's, you know, we're on we've got 50 acres to play with. So there's a Lots of good time for outside notice and using the opportunity to resurrect my fiction podcast and get some work ahead done on the homestead we're building on the other side of the country. Right? So it's, it's gonna work outKevin Tumlinson 03:15what kind of work ahead can you do if it's on the other side of the country?J Daniel Sawyer 03:18There's a lot of design stuff. Yeah design, designing and costing sourcing stuff for the first buildings figuring out order of operations for at what stage we do the well when we do the catchment, what's the priority of how much electrical build out because where we are, it's a quarter mile beyond the last electrical pole. So it's 20 odd thousand just to bring power in. It's actually a lot cheaper. Even though we're in an iffy climate zone. It's actually a lot cheaper to go solar. So, right. Yes, that's a whole new set of things I've been learning about andKevin Tumlinson 03:53Oh, man. Yeah, you're talking to the right guy. Cool. This is I have to so you know, You know that we're getting into an RV full time again? Yeah. So the the two biggest problems, the three big problems. One, the two are bigger than the third. But internet is the biggest challenge. You know, power isn't such a big challenge unless it's going to be hot. And then we have Eric. Right. So, yeah, so solar power and generators and alternative energy are all in my mind. I'm thinking about installing something on the wheels of the camper that as we rolling in generates power.J Daniel Sawyer 04:36I've been studying doing that kind of stuff. It should be pretty, pretty simple.Kevin Tumlinson 04:40Yeah, man. Yeah. by simple, you know, that's a relative term.J Daniel Sawyer 04:44Well, it's a relative term. But the question is, would it be more efficient than just putting a bigger alternator in the truck? Yeah. And then, and then routing it to the chargeback.Kevin Tumlinson 04:55That's something else I I've considered. Well, yeah, whatever. This has been alternate energy talk everyone.J Daniel Sawyer 05:03So, well, you know, we were talking about a fertile mental life. Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the one of the things about creativity is it's nonlinear, you can't reason your way into what you have to do is you have to create a broad, a broad base of knowledge and experience and interests to pull from. And so, you know, one of the ways that I keep myself Spry is by picking interesting stuff that's not related to anything else I'm doing and finding a way to get interested in it because I always get story ideas out of it.Kevin Tumlinson 05:35Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's interesting. And that and so that's what you mean by by fertile mental life?J Daniel Sawyer 05:42Well, partly, I've just finished a book called The autodidact Bible, which should be coming out. I think we've set the publication date for early July. Yeah. Which is a basically a comprehensive toolkit for teaching yourself how to self educate, eat, whether you're self educated. With philosophy or with carpentry, and everything in between,Kevin Tumlinson 06:04man, I gotta tell you, though, hmm, you should call it a fertile mental life. The other didactics Bible. Thank you.J Daniel Sawyer 06:11I've been looking for a good title for it because the working title is a bit wonky. Yeah, so I'll write that down.Kevin Tumlinson 06:20I think that's gonna work. I would buy that book. All right, I wouldn't buy the first one.J Daniel Sawyer 06:25right because it sounds really technical. ItKevin Tumlinson 06:27sounds like it's gonna Yeah, like, I'm gonna have to read this with like one of those clear rulers. Oh,06:35I lost I lost your lightingKevin Tumlinson 06:36just went away. Yeah, well, good thing nobody everyone listening is doesn't know that.J Daniel Sawyer 06:41Yeah, speaking of off grid power,Kevin Tumlinson 06:44no joke. Now, I'm not really sure why that happened. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna let that charge up while I'm on with you. Okay,J Daniel Sawyer 06:52both backlit, so it's sort of fair. Exactly.Kevin Tumlinson 06:57Things things like this are always happening to me lately. I don't What's going on? Um, so yeah, we'll get off that see this one talking about some I get off track justJ Daniel Sawyer 07:09because I'll just chase whatever and that's okay. you stumble ontoKevin Tumlinson 07:12you know, I studied improv and you know, you roll with whatever is gonna come at you. Yeah,J Daniel Sawyer 07:17yes, yeah, yes and or no but but never Yeah.Kevin Tumlinson 07:20So, uh, I, let's talk a little bit about your well wouldn't talk about your book. Do you want to talk a little about your book? I was gonna get off on your podcastsJ Daniel Sawyer 07:32there. Let's get off on the podcast. They're related. They'reKevin Tumlinson 07:35related, okay, who partly out of the other. So tell me. How did the show get started? Like what made you decide to do itJ Daniel Sawyer 07:41back in? I think it was 2006 Yeah, 2005 or 2006. I went to a write in for NaNoWriMo at Central Park in Berkeley. And Chris, whatever his name is the guy that started NaNoWriMo was there and so I got to talk to you too. Like, why'd you know why did he do this? I'd never done it before. It always seemed kind of silly to me. And he said, Well, I wanted to be a writer and I couldn't motivate myself. So I decided to pick the most difficult month in the year and intentionally write a book there to prove to myself I could do it. Yeah, I thought that was kind of a cool idea. So I wanted to trying to do NaNoWriMo that year and I completely failed. But the the lit the minor features of the conversation like going in the direction of greatest difficulty in order to build up your writing chops, really sunk in made a big difference to me as a writer to my productivity and to my general approach to all things writerly. So, I had in mind always want especially once I started podcasting, I always thought it would be fun to do sort of a walkthrough of NaNoWriMo for the newbie who'd never written a book before. Okay, and about 2016 I had the free time. So I sat and did it. And I got to the end of this 30 day walkthrough, which has since evolved into my book becoming an everyday novelist. And I started getting emails from people saying, Please don't end it here. We've become dependent on it. And so I, I went on pod and I read a couple of these. And I said, Okay, so look, here's the problem. It took me, God, you know, God knows how many untold hours to work out the program for this 30 day walkthrough to put things in the right place to write the copy that whole bit. So if you want me to keep this going, you've got to make it easy for me send me questions or something. Yeah. And I thought that was gonna be the end of it. But they sent questions. And they kept sending questions, and they kept sending questions, and it's now four plus years on and we're just creeping up on 1000 episodes now, and they're still sending questions. Occasionally, a question will spin off and I'll do a special series or or I'll have a guest on every once in a while. Then about about two and a half years ago, I wrote a I cracked the formula for hemlines juvenile books. And so I wrote a Heinlein juvenile and did a walkthrough of how to write a headline juvenile interesting and you know, some other stuff like that. But as the years have gone on, the questions have gotten more and more interesting. We get into history in psychology and philosophy in general auto didacticism and mental health management and physical health management. And the reading list that I refer people to keeps growing and growing and growing.Kevin Tumlinson 10:41Yeah, was what puts you though, on that specific course like you are? Well, I guess more the more important question is like how are you answering those questions like where are the answers come from?J Daniel Sawyer 10:55Well, I read the questions when they come in and then about one second Good enough to do a block I record 15 to 30 episodes in a day. Yeah. And do it all off the top of my head. Okay, I'm, I'm Constance I grew up in I literally grew up in academia, both grandfathers are cattle ranchers and then my father is a theology professor. So I grew up idolizing my blue collar grandparents and hanging out in the college where my father taught. So I was like, auditing classes when I was six, seven years old. Just Yeah, I thought it was cool. Not realizing I was picking up useful stuff. Right. And I've just always loved learning and hated school. So I've become the I quit. I dropped out of school at 15. I started working full time and going to college on the sly. And just read, read, read, experiment, learn, do a bunch of different stuff. I've, I've run a courier company. I've run a couple of publishing companies. I've been in the tech world. I've run a music company. or not, that was music services company like MC live sound mixing and doing videos, that sort of thing. And over the years, I've built up this toolkit for how to navigate any situation and come out of it. Come out of it, learning a lot about it. That's crazy and how to cross apply those things to other areas so that you can bootstrap on multiple fronts at once. Yeah. So when someone comes in and asks a question, and I'm really I'm always really careful to separate my opinion from the state of the art in a given field and what the state of my knowledge is, and then, if it's something that's, you know, socially controversial, or that's fraught in the field, I refer to sources that contra counterbalance each other and when it's when it's something more historical, I just didn't refer to a couple of good books that are they give more depth on this. subject that I'm able to give. We've done deep dives on the history and background of the writing of certain influential books, you know, that kind of stuff.Kevin Tumlinson 13:09Yeah. And you're cataloging all this somewhere so that people can can access Yeah,J Daniel Sawyer 13:14yeah, there's a there's a on the website at everyday novelist calm there's a reading list of basically every book we've ever recommended on the cast. Do you album,Kevin Tumlinson 13:25are you monetizing that somehow? Are you you know, people got paid?J Daniel Sawyer 13:30Yes. No, no, well, it's, it's free. Listen, I've got Patreon subscribe star and the gumroad subscription feed all currently doesn't bring in very much but yes, for me, it's kind of a pay it forward thing I need to figure out how to monetize it a little better, because that's taken ungodly amount of time.Kevin Tumlinson 13:46That's always a challenge too. Because, you know, you like me. I mean, I I've lost track of how much I've put out there. that's meant to help the community but you know, at some point you do have to make a living. Luckily, my books make money. Living. So that's great. But he put in all this time and energy, you feel like there should be some sort of monetary reward.J Daniel Sawyer 14:09Well, people who listen to this, if you come over and listen to the cast kick $1 in here and there or buy the books through the Yeah, the site that really helps out a lot. One of the lovely things and you'll know, that's one of the lovely things about being sort of off the beaten track, whether you're in an RV or going or we were in an RV for a couple years or going off to the middle of the woods, is you have the freedom to live on quite a lot less than everybody else does. Right? So it doesn't take a whole lot to meet your monthly bills. So you know, we don't make a lot it really does help with the budget, but genuinely, every dollar helps us both nice and a little bit of a downer.Kevin Tumlinson 14:49Yeah, well, but I guess if you really think about it, that's just gonna be true no matter what I mean, you. Yeah, I mean for most people, for like, we'll say 90% of people. That's probably going to be the truth.J Daniel Sawyer 15:01It's got interesting. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting watching what kind of long term effects this whole. This whole endemic pandemic adventure has on people's determination to work from home and other things over the long term that could seriously change the shape of the way things work.Kevin Tumlinson 15:18I predict that I honestly think we're, we've just we just witnessed, like a leap forward in the evolution of a civilization. As you know, everything we understood has come to an end. And we're now going to reinvent ourselves.J Daniel Sawyer 15:35That's a lot more true than you might realize. Because it's not just the social changes that this is forcing. But there is another set of social changes that was waiting in the wings for coming to three years from now when the boomers hit mass retirement that this has accelerated. Yeah. And that is that because of the global demography, the demand driven economic expansion that started With the Black Death just ended, right just ended. Right? That's 500 years of political, social, and economic and ethical systems all premised on the notion that things would continue to grow at a moderate rate forever. They don't work anymore. Right? I'm planning on editing an anthology later this year dealing with potential new ways to do things where growth is not an embedded obligation of the system. Figure science fiction needs to get back to hardcore speculation. SoKevin Tumlinson 16:32I think we also just witnessed the opening of a whole new door when it comes to intellectual property and the way culture reacts with it.J Daniel Sawyer 16:42Yeah. Very interesting.Kevin Tumlinson 16:44Yeah. I'm real curious to see what happens. Because you know, you think about everything we've seen of late like all the little sessions where people do like, you know, oh, sorry about that. No problem. You got to clean anything up. You Good.J Daniel Sawyer 17:00No, no, I just wasn't my reflector wasn't backed by a strong enough, strong enough Wait,Kevin Tumlinson 17:05all right. You know those all those videos and everything that have popped up like nurses and doctors singing or high school kids singing something and performing something, you know, all that stuff is out there, it's getting a lot of attention. And some of it is easily even sort of inadvertently monetized. And but nobody is having to secure the rights to that stuff right now. SoJ Daniel Sawyer 17:30I'm curious to see what happened has to be some there's gonna have to be a new new compulsory licensing scheme, like happened in the 20th is when radio came in?Kevin Tumlinson 17:39Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know that there's a whole thing going on with this has been in discussion for years really, because this is why the Creative Commons first kind of came on the scene, but, you know, can you really truly own an idea and is it beneficial to society for you to own the idea Yeah, and we need to make a living as content creators. But do we, you know, how far does that extend in terms of ownership? So, you know, I'm, I kind of am on in that boat of, you know, ideas want to be free, like the guy who created Yep. Was it Oracle? No, it was a Linux, creator of Linux. Yes. But at the same time I make my living from my ideas. So.J Daniel Sawyer 18:30Oh, no, it was, it was it was it was a bill, what's his name from Sun Microsystems said that.Kevin Tumlinson 18:34Okay. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. No, no, probably. Yeah. No, IJ Daniel Sawyer 18:39yeah. No, I'm the same way. I've quite a lot of my stuff is creative commons license. And I you know, I've interviewed Cory Doctorow years ago and yeah, and, and the greatest The greatest enemy of any new artist is obscurity and not piracy, all that sort of stuff. Yep. totally on board with that. And on the other hand, the yeah The rationale for copyright law is that the for the civilization to benefit from the culture, people have to be incentivized to make it. And when everything was expensive to publish, that was very easy to that was a very easy line to draw, but it's not anymore and we've delayed rethinking that seriously. years and nobody has put Yeah, I think you're right, that dam just broke.Kevin Tumlinson 19:27Yeah, I absolutely think it has. And, you know, of course, one of the things that's that's been happening since since the pandemic started almost hesitate to talk about the pandemic at all honestly, because by the time this episode airs we should hopefully be out ofJ Daniel Sawyer 19:45don't bet on it. I'm expecting that I'm expecting that there'll be a sawtooth quarantine forKevin Tumlinson 19:50we'll see we'll see if you're right if this good when this goes live, we'll see if that things change. I don't know what but whateverJ Daniel Sawyer 19:57I'll on record. So if my prediction everyone laughKevin Tumlinson 20:00at me gonna be a transcript and everything, man. Absolutely. So I think, you know, right now I know from, from my experience with drafter digital and in my own personal experience that ebooks, ebook sales have been just going through the roof. You know? And I mean, we've we've seen, like a 45% increase across retailers, but like 175% increase with libraries. So people are out there. IJ Daniel Sawyer 20:27got my book library sales have also gone way up. Yeah. Yeah. It's, so I seem to have the greatest penetration in libraries with my audiobooks. SoKevin Tumlinson 20:37that's interesting, though. That's interesting. Because most of the time when I think about audio books, I'm thinking like people are getting them to listen to while they drive into work or something. I would think so too, butJ Daniel Sawyer 20:49that maybe, you know, while there would be out everybody taking walks or Yeah, or cleaning the house, and if you're living in the house, you have to clean a lot more often.Kevin Tumlinson 20:59So how are you Balancing the podcasting and everything else you're doing with the writing, like how you keep on track.J Daniel Sawyer 21:08I tend to batch a lot, current. So like right now, it is called the everyday novelist because I usually write everyday but the last few months, because things have been so weird, it's been a little bit different. So I've currently got four books that I'm redlining. And the podcast is actually as much time as it takes sexual easy because I can batch it. So I'll just say okay, at the end of the recorded buffer is coming up, like when we're recording this, I've got another recording session tonight, because my buffer just ran out. I say at the end of the recorded buffers coming up, take one night to record them all. Then take a day to edit them all and post them and then that's that and but I do a lot of stuff with batch work. So I let you know enough of a pile pile up that I can do it as a project because With the exception of getting in a groove and writing every day, almost everything else I either get bored of or get. It starts to grind on me if it's a chronic thing, but if I have projects I can get through, then that Jazz's me up. SoKevin Tumlinson 22:16yeah, so that's it, you know, are you how much production goes into each of your podcast episodes?J Daniel Sawyer 22:25For the everyday novelist it's about a it's about a two and a half to one timewise. As you can tell, as we're talking here, I have a bit of a scatter shot. I tend to circle a topic before before angling in on it and sometimes there's a lot of stumbling associated with that right right. I like what I'm doing the everyday novelist because it's all improv I like to to narrow the stumbling down as much as possible. So right, it takes about twice as long to cut every episode as the final Listening length winds up being. Okay. So overall, I met including the recording time at about two or three to one production ratio.Kevin Tumlinson 23:10Alright, well alright, that's that makes sense. That's about what it what it takes for me so that I feel a little more comfortable. I am actually because I've been doing some other stuff recently live I'm actually considering shifting the model of this show to being a live format, essentially producing it on the fly. Yeah, it can be fun. It's a little tougher to get certain guests on. But you get the benefit of you know, the production is is done that day.J Daniel Sawyer 23:42Yeah, absolutely dead set out. And I really, I dig doing interview shows that way. When I'm, when I'm doing monologues. I like to massage the timing a lot because that that really helps with the delivery. Yeah, when you've got a conversation going on. The timing emerges from the interaction so you can avoid the editing if you want to.Kevin Tumlinson 24:03Yeah, that's exactly yeah, I like that part where everything is done for me automatically.J Daniel Sawyer 24:10Oh yeah.Kevin Tumlinson 24:12I started my I started this thing called the Kevin show. I don't know if you've seen any of those and they're ridiculous I haven't seen that yet. They're not right.J Daniel Sawyer 24:20They were your YouTube channel. Yeah, yeah. So I started I've got a tab open, but I haven't watched any of them yet.Kevin Tumlinson 24:26Yeah, well, I'm just gonna warn you in advance don't go there hoping for writing wisdom.J Daniel Sawyer 24:34But I figured it's us so it's probably gonna be like RV weird DIY stuff. And strange. There's gonna be all kinds of stuff.Kevin Tumlinson 24:41Yeah. So it started literally that show. So yeah, okay, I'm gonna bring us back around to what we're discussing here. But that show started as me and Nick factor. I said to Nick, you know, when I was so stressed out from the moving from the pandemic from, you know, just being inundated with things So you know, what I would love to do is just do something stupid fun, no agenda, no plan and call it I could call it the Kevin show, because that's ridiculous. And just put it out there live and have fun for 30 minutes, distract people. And he, he said I'd go on that. And so within an hour, I had designed that entire show, from the graphics to music to a video intro to booking my first guest. And the next day it went live. And I've done one every week since so that's dad said, to bring it back to the important thing of this interview, which is you that shows I think that process of the fertile mind, you know, the the fertile mental life that you are, that you are focused on, or would you would you disagree with that? kind of put you on the spot?J Daniel Sawyer 25:56No, no, I think that's a great example to the brain. branching out. It's Oh, I'm trying to think of something pithy to come back to that. But yeah, I think you've got it exactly.Kevin Tumlinson 26:07That's something.J Daniel Sawyer 26:09Life is chaotic, interesting and complicated. And it doesn't easily fit into any of the categories that anybody likes to impose on it. Yeah. And I can't remember who I ran into from it might have been, it might have been something out of one of two labs books. But I came across this idea of it's better to have strong opinions loosely held. Yeah, then then weak, then weak opinions strongly held. Most people have weak opinions strongly held. They have ideas that they like, they can't really support them in in the face of a monumental challenge, but they'll hold on to them for dear life because they're identified with them.Kevin Tumlinson 26:50Exactly. Sort of. Yeah,J Daniel Sawyer 26:52I like that core way. I prefer to be able to articulate what I'm thinking in a very useful strong way, right and be comfortable enough with my own level of ignorance that I can change my opinion when something challenges it and it doesn't, in my opinion doesn't stand up in the teeth of whatever I'm engaging with. As a result of course, I've had multiple interesting worldview shifts over my life. I've been all over the political spectrum. I've had three different religions. And but, but it's but the reason is that, that I'm more interested in figuring out what's actually going on and engaging with life in a in a deep way. And if that's my priority, then what's expendable has to be my determination to cling on to the things that might otherwise make me feel secure.Kevin Tumlinson 27:54Yeah, okay. That is I Exactly. I love the way you have Put that if that is an actual quote, I need to go find it about strong or strong opinions. Loosely held. Yeah, yeah, that's I feel like that's me. And I think I think the danger is people hear strong opinions and then decide. That's where you stand. And so the idea that you might change your mind from a strong opinion, and pivot to a new worldview is is completely foreign to some folks. But I think that's that's the right way to be personally, I like that.J Daniel Sawyer 28:30Yeah. And I do and I mean, one of the things you're, you're like me, you're, you're a little bit north of 30, at least. And one of the things by the time you hit your mid 30s, you realize that whether you want it to or not your worldviews gonna change. Yeah. Because the cumulative experience you build up, gradually goes out of sync with your ideology, whatever ideology that is, because ideologies are models that we build to deal with the world. They're not the world itself and any model is going to have holes in it. Yeah, and the. So when you're in your 20s, it's really easy to righteously hold on to everything because you are fighting for the good. But the older you get, the more that instead of that makes you look, instead of making you impassioned, and a person of great conviction, makes you look kind of stupid. Yeah, because you're not you look vapid and hollow? Well, yeah, because what's happening is while your practical worldview is changing, and you can always tell by the evidence of someone's behavior, rather than what they say, what you believe is reflected in what you do not in what you say. And as you get older, if you're holding on to those, to those early convictions that tightly, the gap between your behavior and your speech will grow. And if you look in the mirror, and all of us eventually do or at least most of us eventually do. You notice that disconnect and that's when you have the existential crisis, who,Kevin Tumlinson 30:02yeah, if you've ever read Carol Dwight's book about my called mindset, it talks about exactly you should tell you, that will probably end up on your list of recommended books, because it talks about that very idea. And it's the closed mindset versus the open mindset, you know, and we tend to look for things that become part of our identity when, especially when we're young, especially when we're vulnerable. Like we're, you know, the bullied high school kid, you know, can say, Well, people pick on me, but at least I'm really good at math. And so if you identify with that, and then you fail a math test,30:40you're crushed, suddenly, yep.Kevin Tumlinson 30:42Your whole identity was just taken for you were murdered, you know, in your, in your own mind. And so you start to think if I don't have that, what am I? Who am I? So anyway, um, so, unfortunately, we are we're closing in on our timeJ Daniel Sawyer 30:58on the end,Kevin Tumlinson 30:59which was is really unfortunate man I always I dig talking to you we know when am I coming back on your show man? I knowJ Daniel Sawyer 31:13whenever it's good for you let me know I would love to have you back on especially now you're working with Jeff to digital. I'd like to Yeah,Kevin Tumlinson 31:19cuz i don't think i was last time wasJ Daniel Sawyer 31:21last time you were last time you wereKevin Tumlinson 31:25completely independent.J Daniel Sawyer 31:26You You were just leaving your first stint at draft to digital I think it wasKevin Tumlinson 31:31no it would have been because I was still Oh yeah, so I was working for DDD, but IJ Daniel Sawyer 31:36stayed with a different position. Oh yeah, I was.Kevin Tumlinson 31:39I was getting on the road though. That's the only guy that would have been. So okay, yeah, so I still fresh it D to D Really? Because that happened like right after. Okay, there we go. That's the you haveJ Daniel Sawyer 31:50this. this. Yeah, the stuff you guys are doing over there, especially now that marks on the team and whatnot has gotten a lot more interesting. I keep signing up for the meetings and then not making them because Everything else in the world that's there recorded I really want.Kevin Tumlinson 32:04I'm gonna have to look back through from my recorded pop into your YouTube channel. Okay, which is officially youtube.com slash c slash draft to digital everyone. And while you're there, look for Kevin Tumlinson and you can tune into the Kevin show xo into plugs but tell everybody the more important URL is where can people find you online?J Daniel Sawyer 32:30You can find me at everyday novelist calm that's for the daily podcast. You can find a whole bunch of my other stuff audio books, full cast audio fiction podcasts, my rather scattered and sometimes very dark musings on the universe on my blog, and a complete list of the books that are available for purchase at the moment as well as my autodidacts reading list at WWW dot JDC. All your.net and I just want a very, very dark take on some of the stuff we were talking about earlier about the changeover and ages. Check out my blog post. The Abyss stares back.Kevin Tumlinson 33:12Yes. Excellent. All right. Well, you heard him everybody. Make sure you check that stuff out, buy his books, go see his stuff. Listen to his podcast. There's a lot you can do to keep him going throw a buck or two his way on Patreon. Let's let's make sure we're taking care of our own here, man. So Jay Daniel Sawyer, sir, thank you so much for being a part of the word slinger podcast.J Daniel Sawyer 33:34Thanks for having me on. It is a delight.Kevin Tumlinson 33:37Everybody else right now. Right now you're probably hearing the groovy bridge music. You may dance in place it will and if you stick around, I am sure to say something profound on the other side, and if I don't make fun of me, see you next time.

PHP Internals News: Episode 50: The RFC Process London, UK Thursday, April 23rd 2020, 09:13 BST In this episode of "PHP Internals News", Henrik Gemal (LinkedIn, Website) asks me about how PHP's RFC process works, and I try to answer all of his questions. The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode's MP3 file, and it's available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news Transcript Derick Rethans 0:16 Hi, I'm Derick. And this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 50. Today I'm talking with Henrik come out after he reached out with a question. You might know that at the end of every podcast, I ask: if you have any questions, feel free to email me. And Henrik was the first person to actually do so within a year and a half's time. For the fun, I'm thinking that instead of I'm asking the questions, I'm letting Henrik ask the questions today, because he suggested that we should do a podcast about how the RFC process actually works. Henrik, would you please introduce yourself? Henrik Gemal 0:52 Yeah, my name is Henrik Gemal. I live in Denmark. The CTO of dinner booking which does reservation systems for restaurants. I've been doing a PHP development for more than 10 years. But I'm not coding so much now. Now I'm managing a big team of PHP developers. And I also been involved in the the open source development of Mozilla Firefox. Derick Rethans 1:19 So usually I prepare the questions, but in this case, Henrik has prepared the questions. So I'll hand over to him to get started with them. And I'll try to do my best to answer the questions. Henrik Gemal 1:27 I heard a lot about these RFCs. And I was interested in the process of it. So I'm just starting right off here, who can actually do an RFC? Is it anybody on the internet? Derick Rethans 1:38 Yeah, pretty much. In order to be able to do an RFC, what you would need is you need to have an idea. And then you need access to our wiki system to be able to actually start writing that, well not to write them, to publish it. The RFC process is open for everybody. In the last year and a half or so, some of the podcasts that I've done have been with people that have been contributing to PHP for a long time. But in other cases, it's people like yourself that have an idea, come up, work together with somebody to work on a patch, and then create an RFC out of that. And that's then goes through the whole process. And sometimes they get accepted, and sometimes they don't. Henrik Gemal 2:16 How technical are the RFCs? Is it like coding? Or is it more like the idea in general? Derick Rethans 2:23 The idea needs to be there, it needs to be thought out. It needs to have a good reason for why we want to add or change something in PHP. The motivation is almost as important as what the change or addition actually is about. Now, that doesn't always get us here at variable. In my opinion, but that is an important thing. Now with the idea we need to talk about what changes it has on the rest of the ecosystem, whether they are backward compatible breaks in there, how it effects extensions, or sometimes how it effects OPCache. Sometimes considerations have to be taken for that because it's, it's something quite important in the PHP ecosystem. And it is recommended that it comes with a patch, because it's often a lot easier to talk about an implementation than to talk about the idea. But that is not a necessity. There have been quite some RFCs where the idea was there. But it wasn't a patch right away yet. It is less likely that these RFCs will get accepted, because in order to get something into PHP not only needs to be there a good idea, that also needs to be there a good implementation of it. If you have been a long term contributor to PHP, then you should know how to write a patch yourself. In other cases, you'll see people that have an idea try to find somebody else to do and work on the implementation together. But all RFCs, if they get accepted. It's always pending a good implementation. Henrik Gemal 3:52 How is an RFC actually done? Is that like a template you fill out or is it like a website or how does it work? Derick Rethans 3:59 Our Wiki, I will add a link to that in the show notes, has a template of how to create an RFC. It has a set set of sections. There's always an introduction that basically lays out what it is about or why this change is being made. Then there is often a proposal of what the change actually is. And then there's a few sections that are sometimes empty or sometimes are filled in such as, at least backwards incompatible changes, for which PHP version is been targeted, what the impact is to all the parts of the PHP ecosystem. But these things are not always necessary, because they don't always make sense to do right? If you want to add a new syntax to PHP, then that almost never influences existing extensions, but it will influence OPCache, for example. And then there's also often things like open issues, things we haven't quite thought through yet. A bit of a discussion, discussion bits will get filled in after people in the PHP internals list, which I'm sure we'll get to in a moment, come up with better ideas or alternatives sometimes, and then things like future scope will also be part of the template. We don't really require a very rigid approach to this, but we do appreciate if all the sections are filled in, or at least thought about in such a way that there's either information or not information. And then at the end, there's often a proposed voting choice. Everything at the moment needs to pass by two thirds majority before it gets accepted. So yeah, those are the things in the template itself. But the template is important. And you do need to fill it in, if you want to propose an RFC. Henrik Gemal 5:33 Are all RFCs public or do you have like private RFCs? Derick Rethans 5:38 All RFCs have to be public, otherwise they can't be voted on. But some RFCs start out of just a conversation with a few developers coming up with an idea. In the last few months, some more complicated RFC start out on a GIT repository. As a pull request, they never get merged anywhere. Because on GitHub, it makes it much easier to comment on specific sections for adopting feedback. Instead of having large discussions on the PHP internals mailing list, where sometimes comments might just get lost because there's too much text in there. Even though these RFC start out, while they're still sort of public, but nobody knows about them. In the end, they will always have to be public otherwise there won't be any voting, done on it, and it won't get accepted. Henrik Gemal 6:27 Where's the RFC sent to and who's kind of in charge of the RFC? Is the one that makes the RFC or is it like a RFC commander? Derick Rethans 6:37 The person that makes the RFC is responsible for guiding it through the whole process that we have. Once they are finished, there is a requirement for you emailing the PHP internals list with a specific prefix, which I think is RFC in square brackets. And then that starts a minimum discussion periods of two weeks. That discussion period might end up longer, in cases, lots of things to talk about or discuss or lots of disagreements, but the discussion period has to be a minimum of two weeks on the PHP internals mailing list. Henrik Gemal 7:09 I was wondering a little bit about the priority RFCs because I see RFCs as like, a little bit like feature requests. So wondering who actually decides on the priority of an RFC? Derick Rethans 7:23 Nobody really decides on the priority. Multiple RFCs can go through the process at the same time, you don't really have a priority of which one is more important than others. So yeah, there's nothing really there for it. Henrik Gemal 7:35 I was just wondering if it's done like a normal project, you know, there might be many RFCs at the same time. I'm wondering how many kind of RFCs are there at the moment, are we talking 10 or are talking thousands? Derick Rethans 7:50 This depends a bit on where in PHP's release cycle we are. PHP should get released at the end of November or the start of December. In all PHP seven releases that actually has happens. Usually the period between December and March, there will be like maybe one or two a week, which is great because that makes it possible for me to pick the right one to make an episode out for the podcast. At the moment, there are 10 outstanding RFCs. That means there are so many that I don't actually have enough time to talk about all of these on the podcast. However, they are often more just before we go to feature freeze, which happens at the end of June. So there's still two months to go. But you also see that over the last two years, there's a lot more smaller RFCs than there are big RFCs. So big RFCs like union types. They tend to be early in a release cycle, where smaller RFCs, as an example here, there's currently an RFC that there is no episode about, that suggests to do a stricter type checks for arithmetic or bitwise operators. Those are tiny, tiny changes. And in the last two years, there have been more and more smaller RFC than bigger RFCs because they tend to limit the amount of contention that people can disagree with and hence, often makes it easier to then get accepted. That is a change that I've been seeing over the years. But no, there are no thousands for each PHP version, I would say on average, there's about one a week, so about 50. Henrik Gemal 9:19 I want to get a little bit into the voting part, because that sounds kind of interesting, who can actually vote? Derick Rethans 9:28 After the two week minimum discussion period is over on the PHP internals mailing list, an RFC author can decide to put up the RFC for a vote. And that also requires you then to send an email to the PHP internals mailing list prefixing your subject with the word vote in capital letters. Now at this moment, you unfortunately see that people start paying attention to the RFC. Instead of doing that during the discussion period. At a moment of vote gets called you shouldn't really change RFC unless it's for like typos or like minor clarifications to things, you can't really change syntax in it for example. People can vote our people with a PHP commit access. And that includes internals developers, documentation contributors, and people that do things in the infrastructure. Everybody that has a PHP VCS account and VCS, version control system, that used to be CVS and now then SVN, and now GIT, as well as people that have proposed RFCs. So the group that technically could vote is over 1000 big, but the amount of people that vote is very much under 50 most of the time. We don't really have any criteria beyond you have to have an account to be able to vote in PHP RFCs. Henrik Gemal 10:43 How is the voting actual done? Derick Rethans 10:47 Since about last year, each RFC needs to be accepted, with a two thirds majority. On each RFC on the wiki, once a vote gets called you as an RC alter needs to include a small code snippets that then creates a poll. Very often do we want this? Or do we not want this? So it's a yes or no question. But sometimes there are optional votes, whether we want to do it a specific way, or another specific way. Sometimes that allows you to then select between different syntaxes. I don't think that is necessarily a good idea to have. I think the RFC author should be opinionated enough about picking a specific syntax. It is probably better to have a secondary vote as we call those. Those secondary votes don't to have two thirds majority is often which one of the options wins out of these. But the main RFC won't get accepted, unless there's a two thirds majority with a poll done on the wiki. Henrik Gemal 11:46 What happens after the vote? You know if it's both if it's Yes or no? Derick Rethans 11:53 I'll start with the easy case, the no case. If it's a no then the RFC gets rejected. That also means that sometimes an RFC fails for a very specific reason. Maybe some people didn't like the syntax, or it was like a one tweak where it would behave in a wrong way or something like that. But as a rule that says that you cannot put the same subject back up for discussion for six months, unless there are substantial changes. Now, this has happened with scalar type hints, for example, and a few other big ones. If an RFC gets accepted, then pending on whether there is an implementation, the implementation will get set up as a pull request to the PHP project on GitHub. And then the discussion about the implementation starts. If the implementation doesn't get to the point where it is actually good enough, or whether it can actually not be implemented in a way that it doesn't impact performance, it still might end up failing, or might not get merged. And in some cases, it means that a feature will get added at some point but it might not be necessarily in the PHP version that it got targeted for. I don't actually have an example for that now. If the implementation is already good and already discussed it can get merged pretty much instantly. And then it will be part of the next PHP version. Henrik Gemal 13:08 How many RFCs voted on every year? And what majority voted yes or no? Derick Rethans 13:16 I don't have the stats for that. But there is a website called RFC watch, where you can see which RFCs had been gone through and which one had been accepted or not, in a nice kind of graph way. I will add a link in the show notes for that. I would guess that during a year, about 50 RFCs are voted on. And I will think that about half of them are passing. But that's a guess I don't have the stats. Henrik Gemal 13:42 Thank you very much for the answers. It brought me closer to the whole process of the PHP development. You have any other things to add? Derick Rethans 13:52 I don't think so at the moment. I think what we she'd be a bit careful about is that although we're getting closer and closer to feature freeze at the end of June. We currently have just elected the new PHP eight zero release managers, but I keep the names secret, because this podcast is recorded in the past. They are going to be responsible now for doing all the organisatorical work for PHP eight zero. And that also means that feature freeze will happen at the end of June somewhere. And I expect to see a bunch of RFCs coming up with just enough time to make it into PHP eight zero, or not. So that's going to be interesting to see what comes up there. But other than that, I think we have explained most things in the RFC process now. And I thought it was a fun thing for once somebody else asking the questions and me giving the answers. And I think in the future, I think I would like to do like a Q&A session where I have multiple people asking questions about the PHP process. I also thought this was a good experiment and thanks for you taking the time to ask me all dthese questions today. Henrik Gemal 15:00 No problem. I love your podcast. I listen to it whenever I bike to work. It's nice to get some insights into the PHP development. Derick Rethans 15:10 Yeah, and that is exactly why I started it. Thank you Henrik for taking the time this morning to ask me the questions. And I hope you enjoyed it. Henrik Gemal 15:18 Thank you very much for having me on the show. Derick Rethans 15:22 Thanks for listening to this instalment of PHP internals news, the weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. I maintain a Patreon account for supporters of this podcast, as well as the Xdebug debugging tool. You can sign up for Patreon at https://drck.me/patreon. If you have comments or suggestions, feel free to email them to derick@phpinternals.news. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next week. Show Notes How to create an RFC List of RFCs php RFC Watch Credits Music: Chipper Doodle v2 — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

What happens when you're diagnosed with COVID-19 and you live with type 1 diabetes? It happened to Patric Ciervo in early March. Patric shares his story, including how his diabetes reacted, hospital issues with people who don’t really understand insulin pumps and how he’s doing now. In Tell Me Something Good, a familiar name in the diabetes community, recovering from COVID 19 and now donating plasma, we salute more health care heroes. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Check out Stacey's new book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone      Click here for Android Episode Transcription Stacey Simms  0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by one drop created for people with diabetes by people who have diabetes by real good foods, real food you feel good about eating and by dexcom take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with dexcom.   Announcer  0:21 This is diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  0:27 This week recovering from COVID-19 while living with Type One Diabetes, Patrick servo was diagnosed with the virus. In early March,   Patric Ciervo  0:36 my temperature started going down like a 101 to five times 5am it was about a 93 I woke up in a puddle of sweat, we call 911. Fearing that I was going into some type of shock   Stacey Simms  0:50 Patrick wound up in the emergency room with a committed he shares how diabetes was managed issues with people in the hospital who don't really get insulin pump And how he's doing now and tell me something good a familiar name in the diabetes community also recovering from COVID-19 and now donating plasma and we salute more healthcare heroes. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of diabetes connections so glad to have you along. I'm your host Stacey Simms, we aim to educate and inspire about type one diabetes by sharing stories of connection. My son was diagnosed with type one right before he turned two back in 2006. He is 15 now and a freshman in high school. My husband lives with type two diabetes. I don't have diabetes. I have a background in broadcasting and that is how you get the podcast I used to work in local radio and television news. Before I jump in with Patrick a little bit of housekeeping, we are fast approaching Episode 300 This is Episode 298. I have never made a big deal about numbering episodes because I don't know, it doesn't really matter what order you listen to the show in. I do number them internally just for organization, you know, keep track that way. And depending on what app you use, I know Apple podcasts will number them, you can see it right there in the app. Depending on what you use, it shows up or it doesn't. But we do have a very robust search engine on the website. And that does not rely on numbers. You just search by topic. And for me as I listen to podcasts, that's how I want to find previous shows, right? If I want to look something up, I'm gonna put the word into the search. I'm not gonna remember Oh, that was Episode 212, or whatever. I bring the numbers up though, because at 300 episodes, a lot of podcast apps start limiting what you see, when we get to 301 or you know, 350 or who knows 400 You're still only going to be able to see 300 episodes in the app. I'm not quite sure how many people are scrolling through to see everything. I am putting something new at the website you should be able to with one click to see all 300 episodes something unfortunately we don't have right now, because frankly, it just takes forever to load. But watch for that at diabetes, connections calm, they'll be a way to click and see all 300 episodes, if you're interested in kind of going back and scrolling through back to 2015. I should also mention if you subscribe on a podcast app like Apple podcasts, which is a really easy, easy way to listen to the show, if you listen through social media, that's fantastic. Listen, whatever, you know, whatever is easiest for you. But if you use a podcast app, and you subscribe, that 300 episode limit doesn't apply. you subscribe for free, I wish it was called something else. But when you subscribe to a podcast, it has nothing to do with buying a subscription or signing up for a subscription. You're literally saying to the app, give me all the episodes for free. So there you go. Gotta say a quick thank you for getting me to Episode 300. I'm so thrilled when we started I wasn't sure how long it would last. I certainly wasn't looking five years into the future. So thank you So much for listening for sharing these episodes and for frankly, becoming part of a community. We have an unbelievable Facebook group and I've connected so much with people over zoom and the chat over this time. I really appreciate it. So thank you for letting me continue to serve you. Diabetes Connections is brought to you by one drop. And I spoke to the people at one drop and you know, I was really impressed at how much they get diabetes. It makes sense because their CEO Jeff was diagnosed with type one as an adult. One drop is for people with diabetes by people with diabetes. The people at one drop work relentlessly to remove all barriers between you and the care you need. Get 24 seven coaching support in your app and unlimited supplies delivered no prescriptions or insurance required. Their beautiful sleek meter fits in perfectly with the rest of your life. They'll also send you test strips with a strip plan that actually makes sense for how much you actually check. Imagine that one drop diabetes care delivered, learn more, go to diabetes connections calm and click on the one Drop logo.   My guest this week was one of the first people in his community officially diagnosed with COVID-19. And Patrick servo was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes more than seven years ago. So like you I had a lot of questions about what it is like to live through Coronavirus, while also living with type one. Now, of course, keep in mind as we're speaking here, every case is different. Every case of Coronavirus of COVID-19 to be specific, presents a little differently, some very mild, some much more severe, a lot of asymptomatic cases we hear about and type one diabetes kind of goes without saying on this show. Everybody handles that differently as well. So please remember that this is about Patrick. We can extrapolate some information from here. Frankly, I find it very reassuring. But at the same time, please talk to your healthcare provider. Don't jump to conclusions and I will link up much more information at diabetes dash connections. Calm the episode homepage in the podcast show notes. So here's my interview with Patrick servo. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing? How are you feeling   Patric Ciervo  6:09 these days? I'm feeling well, thankfully, my symptoms have been gone for a while. And yeah, I've been feeling good.   Stacey Simms  6:19 Wow. All right. So from where I sit, not knowing anything really sad. It just seems so scary. So I appreciate you sharing your experience. Let's back up. How did this all start? You've been living with type one we should say for for seven, seven and a half years now. So you're not exactly new to type one. But what happened in terms of feeling ill a couple of weeks ago.   Patric Ciervo  6:40 So basically, early in March, I had a busy weekend and everything. There was a work event on Friday, about where we went out because there was someone's last day, but I was running around Friday and Saturday, Sunday night. I was at my girlfriend's apartment and we were just beat from the weekend she works with me. So we were just beat from the whole thing. And she noticed that my body temperature had started feeling hot. But because we were both rundown, we didn't really think too much of it. So, the next day I woke up, I felt good. I didn't really feel bad at all, like maybe a minor thing, but nothing to worry about. So I went to work Monday, but that night, my body temperature was hot again, and her roommates a nurse, so we had a thermometer, and my temperature was 103. So we went to the primary doctors on Tuesday, I was tested for the flu, which came back negative Faker really diagnosed me with anything. I didn't mention Coronavirus, but he didn't think it was that he tested me for the flu again with a more accurate test but the test will come back the next day. So in the meantime, he gave me an A biotic and Tamiflu and told me to take Motrin Tuesday night, my temperature started going down like a 1012. By the time was 5am. It was about a 93. I woke up in a, like puddle of sweat, we call 911 fairing vows going into some type of shock. And I was in the car since then.   Unknown Speaker  8:19 So when you guys called for an ambulance, were you thinking this is diabetes related? or What did you   Patric Ciervo  8:25 think? Well, she had looked up and everything that diabetics have more like more of a chance to go into a shock from fever or something like that. So she was kind of the one pushing the 911 call. So we did that. I didn't think too much of it until a little bit later on. When I was like in the ambulance, I still wasn't feeling well. By the time I got the ER, I was feeling good, and my temperature was normal.   Stacey Simms  8:53 It's so hard to be the person in that circumstance, right? You're not thinking exactly clearly the person that called you know, is trying to figure out What's going on? When do you remember? Do you remember when they said okay, this is gonna be COVID-19   Patric Ciervo  9:06 they didn't they test me again for the flu in the ER, they tested again twice, and that both of them came back negative. We got the call from our primary the second flu test that he did came back negative, but I was already like things were back to normal, my temperature was fine. So they tested me for COVID as a precautionary, and because they tested me, they put me in the ICU and my own room and they want me to be there until the test results came back, which they were told would be the next day. I didn't get it back till that Saturday. I was in there on a Wednesday. Wow. But the doctors that would come in saw me like I was immediately getting better and everything. My only symptoms before the diagnosis were the fever and a cough. I didn't have trouble breathing, but they thought I looked good enough that they didn't think It was COVID   Stacey Simms  10:01 That's amazing. So you start feeling better and that's when you find out that's what you had.   Patric Ciervo  10:05 Yeah, I know. So I'm thankful I can't like I was already on the mend when I found out and it was a little bit before like all the craziness started in the world and so I didn't go in in too much of a panic state. When I found out I was diagnosed with it. There was still like a shock like, oh God, like diabetic and I've been hearing these things aren't good, but I was getting better each day. So after like a deep breath and everything able to get back to a good mental state.   Stacey Simms  10:35 I know everybody wants to know about diabetes and you know what you now looking back what you think of that part of it, but I want to ask before we move on, How bad was that test for COVID-19 you hear like it's really far up the nose is that How bad was   Patric Ciervo  10:49 it? Yeah, it was. It was exactly that out the nose and everything as they did in both nostrils, two different ones at once. It was not fun at all. You know, it was something I could live with and everything.   Stacey Simms  11:04 I'm sorry to ask. I just you know, I think about what how they test you for strep. Yeah, right. It's always like you gotta gotta gotta get it far enough to gag a little bit. Uh huh. Your   Patric Ciervo  11:12 nose. Oh my god. Yeah, it was pretty much yeah, exactly like that only your nose and I was like, flinching and everything. But it was totally doable.   Stacey Simms  11:23 And I know it's worth it. Please don't send me nasty emails like, yeah, it's just one of those things that I don't want to ask about. But looking back, what about your diabetes during that time? I think people do get very concerned about you know, treatment and blood sugar's you didn't know you had it. So it was kind of difficult or different to think about managing that way. But looking back, anything stand out?   Patric Ciervo  11:45 Well, in the hospital, my blood sugar was higher than normal. For the most part. I'm not sure how much of that was the illness related. I was very stressed in the hospital and could not move at all. So I think that also had part to do with it. Because I didn't have a problem coming down from the highs, there was nothing with my diabetes to think like something's off. I need to get checked out the days leading up to it. I've been fairly decent you know for the most part   Unknown Speaker  12:14 so you didn't notice any like really wacky high blood sugars before the diagnosis. No, no treatment, right like that.   Patric Ciervo  12:21 No, no. Yeah, thankfully.   Stacey Simms  12:23 So when you got the test back at the hospital You said you were already kind of on the mend. How much longer did you stay there?   Patric Ciervo  12:28 They released me Friday, and I got the test back Saturday. So I was self isolating just to wait for the test result. And then that's when I got the call.   Stacey Simms  12:40 What do they tell you after you test positive what happens next even at home?   Patric Ciervo  12:44 Yeah, they had given me in the hospital what to do if it does come back positive. They gave me a worksheet like to do less than everything. Just basically everything we've been hearing, you know, self isolate for two weeks. I think it was something like 72 hours, but two ways you can be like out of the quarantine is for 72 hours, you can't have a fever and other symptoms have to be gone. And the other one was or you have to get tested again, it has to come back negative. And I didn't get tested again. When I was at home quarantine. I only had a fever one other time.   Stacey Simms  13:21 So you feel pretty confident your past.   Patric Ciervo  13:23 Yeah, I did develop a headache and the quarantine.   Stacey Simms  13:27 So again, back to diabetes. Did you ever sound like the mom now? But did you call your endocrinologist and loop them in? Right back to Patrick as he answers that question. But first diabetes Connections is brought to you by real good foods. high protein, low carb, grain free, gluten free and terrific. If you're trying to eat keto, their line of foods just keeps getting bigger. We've been talking about them for so long. Now. I think when I started they only had pizza. Right, but now they have stuffed chicken breakfast sandwiches, you can get the pizza, just the crust, so you can kind of make it whoever you want. They have entrees. They are of course available in the grocery store freezers, but they're also so easy to get to your door, their whole line can be delivered. And they have a lot of specials right now. There's free shipping specials, but also on their website. If you sign up, you can get all the coupons and promos delivered directly to your phone, make it very, very easy. Find out more go to diabetes, connections comm and click on the real good foods logo. Now back to Patrick and I was asking him if he caught his endo when he was admitted.   Patric Ciervo  14:44 You know what, I had an incident in the hospital where when I got there, they asked me if I had an insulin pump. And I told them I did and they asked me if I wanted to like you know, administrate my own insulin. I said yeah, and there was a bit of a next up with The nurse who was under the impression she was giving me insulin shots, but they weren't not taking the fact that I already had insulin on board. And that, like they would not be calculating that. And so the insulin they gave me and they seem to not want to give me any type of basal insulin, they just wanted to do like check every two or three hours. If I was Hi, give me a correction. I didn't call my personal endo, because they're kind of hard to get ahold of. But I have a, I go to this camp for athletes with Type One Diabetes called diabetes training camp and the endo that has that, that ended that runs it. I texted him about that initially. And every day since then, he had texted me or called checking in how I'm doing. I told him my blood sugar's were high. He told me don't try to get to like 100 to 120. Don't aim for perfect, just as long as you're able to get to 140 to 180. You should be fine. I have any problems.   Stacey Simms  16:01 And yeah, I mean, that's one of the worries that I always have in the hospital. I mean, I'm there with my son being crazy mom. So you know, they're not going to give him extra insulin, but it's so frightening for you if you're there by yourself, which you had to be clear that up. I mean, I'm envisioning this nurse trying to give you a shot and you holding up your pump, you know, you're trying to ward her off. Did you argue with them?   Patric Ciervo  16:24 Uh, yeah, I mean, I'm not like, I like I don't like conflict at all and everything. But this was like, there was no way I wasn't standing my ground this and everything because I had like, four or five units on board, because I was trying to come down from like a 260 or something. And I'm explaining it to them, and explained that the doctor said that eventually they understood what I was saying after a few minutes. They said, All right, they'll talk to the doctor. And about 15 minutes later, they called me saying that the doctor says fine.   Stacey Simms  16:56 No, thank goodness. Do you use a CGM as well? Yeah. And did they let you kind of use that in the hospital? Did they insist on doing finger sticks?   Patric Ciervo  17:04 They did do finger sticks for their own record, they said, but that's all my phone. I was just going off that the whole time.   Stacey Simms  17:11 All right, so have you followed up with your endo? I mean, it sounds like you're on the mend. Doesn't sound like you needed to check in with him. I'm not trying to mom you   Patric Ciervo  17:17 right? Yeah, chicken. I mean, he was texting. We were texting and calling back and forth when I was doing the two week quarantine as well as my primary. My primary had called and everything I told him I had a low grade fever the one night he said, You know, sometimes that happens, I won't be too worried about it unless it's kind of a stays. And it the was one night and I woke up the next morning fine.   Stacey Simms  17:44 Alright, so I'm gonna ask you some personal stuff you do not have to answer. All right. Here we go. One of the things that I that we see so often when people in the diabetes community are talking about the fears of Coronavirus is you know, you have to have quote good Control to come out of this in good health, you know, and that we've seen that people, especially with type two diabetes, and all those comorbidities don't do well, but COVID-19 and I hit I always hate asking people I actually I don't I don't ever ask anybody in the show with their agency. And I'm not going to ask you, but are you a perfect diabetic?   Patric Ciervo  18:18 I'd say a B plus student. I'm definitely not perfect, but I overall I pretty well control.   Stacey Simms  18:27 I just think it's important to ask because, you know, I think there's a lot of fear that if you're a one c isn't 5.9 or 6.1, you know, consistently that that illnesses are just going to knock you down. And it's just not the case. Obviously, you want to be in good health, in quote, good control. So you know, share as much as you'd like. I think that's important to hear. I have seen a video or two of your Oh, yeah. You should say your comedian. Yeah. And you know, I've seen some of your blood sugars. They're not all the time.   Unknown Speaker  18:56 Right, right. Yeah. Which videos are you talking about?   Stacey Simms  19:00 Seek specifically there. I was thinking of the drinking game. Okay. Yeah.   Patric Ciervo  19:05 So yeah, just along with this episode. Oh, cool. Yeah, I that was a few years ago. So I kind of forget what was going on that I did that about three years after I was diagnosed three or four years. And my whole thing was FM pi, it's fine. But as long as I like, come down, I'm not gonna stress about it. Because in the beginning, my educator introduced me to one of her, like interns one day or, and she goes, like after I've been a diabetic for a year. And she says, This is Patrick. He used to call us every time he was about 200. And well, because I was told I wasn't supposed to be 200. So like the first like, year and a half, I was kind of like, going like crazy, making sure I could blood sugars. But once I realized I could be a little higher, and I'll be fine. Just as long as I came down. I was happy.   Stacey Simms  19:56 Yeah, definitely. I think we all handle this in a different way. You I have long decided that perfection is not an option.   Unknown Speaker  20:03 Yeah,   Stacey Simms  20:04 exactly. So I think it's just important to, to just kind of spotlight that a little bit and I appreciate you sharing that. I'm not gonna make you the spokesperson, I promise for people with diabetes who have been through something like this, but having gone through it, you know, what is your advice for other people with type one? You know, is there anything that you would tell people to to concern themselves with more or less?   Patric Ciervo  20:27 I mean, I kind of feel like basically, I didn't have that too hard at that experience, which is, in some ways I kind of feel bad because you know, I would like to say that like I fought all genders everything, like in spite but and I know everyone's experiences not gonna be like that. So I feel very fortunate, but like, I think a lot of the things like me recover quickly, was that the second I got to the hospital, I got there like when symptoms were early, and I've shot up with like fluids early. I think that's the number During my quarantine, I was drinking water, like non stop and take and taking vitamins. I was just doing everything I could to make sure even though I was feeling better that I wasn't going to let this slit, if you had to be in the hospital, I'd say definitely advocate like the hell of your diabetes management and how you go about it. I think for nurses who like work great, otherwise, they kind of have misinformation about what to do. Yeah,   Stacey Simms  21:29 I'm curious too. Did you bring a bunch of supplies with you? I've seen some people recommend, you know, take up to two weeks, you know, if supplies if diabetes supplies to the hospital if you have to go?   Patric Ciervo  21:40 Yeah, I mean, I'm on the on the pod so I grabbed all that I grabbed strips, and my my Omni pod and I grabbed pumps. I had my girlfriend put like juices and gummies in her purse, and then my parents did come up and everything from South Korea. They would go to my apartment and they bought more stuff when I need it.   Stacey Simms  22:04 It's so interesting because you were in the hospital before much of the lockdown or I shouldn't call you know, the the states that decided to self quarantine whatever we're calling it stay at home shelter in place. This would be for most of that went into place, wasn't it?   Patric Ciervo  22:20 Yeah, I mean, my first day in the hospital was the day Tom Hanks was diagnosed. So that's then. So that's basically my buck marker for how early it was you in Telmex? Yeah, same day.   Unknown Speaker  22:34 Uh huh.   Stacey Simms  22:35 You were diagnosed as a young adult. were you diagnosed correctly right away because I keep hearing more misdiagnoses at that age.   Patric Ciervo  22:41 I was diagnosed correctly. I really like my primary from South Jersey. I was in Ireland for a week, the week before. And I was drinking water non stop. I was in Ireland with my family. And my mom noticed two days later, we had a surprise birthday for At the surprise party all our friends are saying I look super skinny. So about two or three days later actually one day after her birthday, her actual birthday, she made me go to the doctor she talked to me and I told him my symptoms and he looked at me and he told us nurse to get the stuff to test me with instead tell my patients I'm going to be a while And so yeah, so my blood sugar was like 500 something and he made arrangements for me to go to the hospital and all that and gave me his personal cell phone if I need him at all during the night or something like that. And thankfully I didn't but yeah,   Stacey Simms  23:38 and you mentioned the the camp and then in the athletes that you've been involved with and you know, you believe I've done a lot of bike rides. Haha, did you find all of that because that makes such a big difference once you find that community?   Patric Ciervo  23:49 Yeah, that's definitely been like my lifesaver and everything prior to the diagnosis, went against into cycling, and I wasn't spiking like that much but Now my friends went to bike. So I was looking for a group to bike with. So in the hospital, I googled cycling and diabetes. And I found that jdrf ride to cure. And I contacted one of the coaches, who is also a type one. And the endo that runs this camp is his personal endo. So he gave me his information. And I think going there since   Stacey Simms  24:23 Oh, that's great. Yeah, going forward. Now, have you been instructed to do anything different? Are you just kind of back to full health? Do they monitor you? Do you diabetes wise or otherwise have to think about anything else?   Patric Ciervo  24:34 No, I did get a call from the health department and and Hoboken where I'm living now and in South Jersey, where I'm from, but other than just kind of initially checking in on me. I haven't heard anything. We get a call from my primary doctors nurse. I got a call from her a few times, just checking in, but since I recovered, no one seems to be concerned about me. I guess I Have a lot on their plate. But I've been self isolating. I've been doing everything. Basically everything everyone else has been doing washing hands. What? If I go out to walk the dog? I'll wear a mask and everything. You know, I don't know what's what. So just kind of be precautious in any area I can.   Stacey Simms  25:18 And I meant to ask when you were isolated for those 14 days. Did you live with your girlfriend? Did you live with anybody else or was that difficult for you guys?   Patric Ciervo  25:26 When my test result came back Saturday, she had already thought she had it. But she got tested then after my test result, and she came back positive. So we don't live together. But I have a roommate up in North Jersey, and my sister has a house to herself. She said she would go to Mar parents beach house for those two weeks and that I could use her house. So I was there for like a few days by myself. But once my girlfriend was diagnosed and everything, she has two roommates as well and she didn't want to be around them. They would still be isolated. together   Stacey Simms  26:00 in the hospital or otherwise they didn't treat you with anything did they? It doesn't sound like you were you know ascribed anything special?   Patric Ciervo  26:06 No they basically they did give me an A biotic when I left. And I think I don't even remember they were giving me lots of fluids and everything. Maybe they did give me some type of tail or something. I don't even remember what that was.   Stacey Simms  26:18 Yeah, yeah. But nothing on an ongoing basis.   Unknown Speaker  26:21 No, no. Well, Patrick,   Stacey Simms  26:23 I'm so glad you're okay. And thank you so much for sharing your story with us. Yes. Posted if you get the call to I don't know, donate plasma, or whatever the heck they're doing. Haha. You know, let us know what where you go from here, but I really appreciate you sharing your story.   Patric Ciervo  26:37 Yeah, thank you for having me in everything.   Unknown Speaker  26:45 You're listening to diabetes connections with Stacey Simms.   Stacey Simms  26:51 More information at diabetes connections.com. I will link up more information about generally speaking, you know COVID-19 type one diabetes and other interviews with people with type one who have been admitted, diagnosed officially with COVID-19 and have recovered and are speaking about it. So I will I'll post all that information. I will also put the guest Patrick's blood glucose drinking game video that we mentioned, that's in the Facebook group. And I will post it in the show notes as well just go to diabetes, connections comm and click on the episode homepage. Patrick and I talked off the air briefly about the new policy or the provisional approval from the FDA to have CGM used in hospitals. And that would be hospitals would actually give the people admitted a continuous glucose monitoring system. dexcom is involved. Abbott is giving the Libra array. So it's very, very new. In fact, it was after Patrick was released from the hospital. I believe that the FDA approved that provisionally but what I'm trying to figure out still and maybe by the time this airs, we'll have the answer to this. I'm trying to figure out if that is Only for people who come in without their own system, right? mostly people with type two diabetes, as we had talked about in the conversation with dexcom CEO Kevin Sayer, or if you come in with type one diabetes, and they're more willing to use your own system, or if they give you one if you don't have one, so there's still a lot to figure out there. But as you heard, he still had to do a lot of educating. And that, to me is so difficult when you're the person who has type one and who is in need of medical care. I mean, not everybody is going to be as able, as Patrick was to describe the situation and say, you know, I've got this. So man, um, you know, we've got to keep advocating, we've got to keep educating, time for Tell me something good, which is usually a good segment for that. But first diabetes Connections is brought to you by dexcom. We started with dexcom back in the olden days before share, and I always meet people who have no idea that there was a thing before share, right that there was a time when you couldn't look at your kids blood sugar on your phone. So trust me when I say using share and follow up really made a big difference. Benny and I have always set parameters about when I'm going to text him, you know how long I'm going to wait, that kind of stuff. And it really does help us talk and worry about diabetes less. If he's asleep over if he's away on a trip. It gives me so much peace of mind. It really helps me if I need to troubleshoot with him, because you can see what's been happening over the last 24 hours and not make a decision based in just one moment in time. The alerts and alarms that we set also help us from keeping the highs from getting too high, and help us jump on lows before there were a big issue. Internet connectivity is required to access separate dexcom follow up to learn more, go to diabetes, connections comm and click on the dexcom logo.   Tell me something good. Recently, we have shifted to talking about healthcare heroes and stories of people with type one diabetes who are in healthcare fields. And I'm going to talk about one in just a moment. But first, I want to share a great story about a gentleman who doesn't Have Type One Diabetes doesn't have diabetes at all. But he is very much a part of a diabetes community. You may know Mike mangus, because I've talked about him here on the show. And I've certainly talked about his products. Stay put medical is not a sponsor, but I love them. After all these years of trying different products. I think about two, maybe three years ago, we finally started using stay put, and this is gonna sound like a commercial, but it's unbelievable for Benny, everybody's skin is so different. So it can take a while to figure out what's right for you. Here's the example I give last summer stay put kept his decks calm on the entire week of diabetes camp. And then for three and a half days at the beach. Yeah, we restarted the sensor. So they were in the water every day at diabetes camp. They were sweaty, they were gross. And then we went to the beach and did ocean swimming and all the gross stuff in the sand. So that thing is unbelievable. But I'm supposed to be doing a commercial for state but sorry, just kind of setting it up. But Mike who heads up state but he was diagnosed with COVID-19 In early March, and he spent four days in the hospital, he is also fully recovered. And he's able to donate plasma in the hopes of helping others. Plasma donation for COVID-19. I mentioned at the very end of the interview with Patrick, it's newly regulated, it's experimental. So it isn't widely available or used yet. But Mike was right in the front saying I want to do this. He was knocking on doors as soon as he recovered. I will link up more of his story. He's got some coverage in the media, especially in Florida, where he lives. So I just think that's a great news story. And we'll follow Mike and kind of see how that goes and see what happens with plasma donations that could be really interesting, and hopefully helpful. I also want to tell you about Amy She is an RN. She's a mom to Marcus Marcus is 16. He was diagnosed in June of 2016. And he was 12 at that time, so Amy is a nurse at a rural health clinic in Oregon. And she says finding the balance between the demands of work she does have reduced it hours now, but even so, managing medical costs and keeping her and her loved one safe these days is a big challenge. She says I'm a quilter. So I've been making fabric masks for my co workers, high risk patients and acquaintances to keep myself busy. These are crazy difficult times. But I firmly believe this world would be a better place having made it through until then she says I'm taking T one D mom life by the horns, and one day at a time. Amy, thank you so much for sending that in all the best to you tell Marcus we said hi. And if you have a Tell me something good story, please go ahead and share it. You can shoot me an email Stacey at diabetes, connections calm. You can post it in the Facebook group. However you want to get it to me, you can message me on social media. I would love to tell your good news stories. And of course we post them on social media every week as well. Hey, can you hear that? Benny is playing video games. And the kids you can call them video games anymore, but you know what I mean, he's on his Xbox or whatever. He's screaming soul. Right now that if I didn't know better, I would think he was being, you know, physically attacked. And I've talked to my friends, this is very typical of teenage boys. Oh my god, they're so loud. So I'm gonna go yell at him when I'm done taping, I think it's gonna be all good. And maybe I'll go secretly record him some time. Just you can hear it. Oh my god. But hey, that's one of his big social outlets right now. You know, he gets in the headphones and plays with his friends and they're all together. So I'm not gonna complain too much. I'm gonna go in there and tell them to knock it off. The big threaten my house these days is you better behavior. I'm changing the Wi Fi code, you know, fate worse than death right now. And we're all on the systems all day long. I don't want to look at my time on my screen time, right or the time on your phone. They all have those features. Now you can tell how much you've been on the phone. Oh, my goodness.   Well, this is the part of the show where I generally talk about where I'm going. And I have been going a lot of places online recently. Yeah, I mean, it's all virtual. But I only bring that up because I want to tell tell you about a discount that I'm doing for the world's first diabetes mom right now. Yes, of course, if you're new, this is my book. It's available on Amazon. There's an audio book, you can get the Kindle version, of course ebook. So I'll put the link. It's always in the show notes. But I bring it up because I was talking to groups this week online, and I did a special discount code for them. And I want to pass it along to you. As I am taping this, I am scheduled to talk to jdrf in Michigan, and I'll be doing a world worth D parent meetup, which will probably already have happened by the time this episode comes out. But I've got a promo code not for Amazon, you have to go to diabetes connections.com and order the book through my website to get the discount. And it's very simple. The discount code is worst, just the word worst w o r s t. And that promo code will be good. Until next week, April 28. Again, that promo code is worst. I believe it saves you five bucks off the cover price. Unfortunately, you still have to pay for shipping. I know a lot of people go to Amazon because of that, but this will actually still be less than it costs on Amazon. promo code again is worst. And I can't wait to get back on the road, not just to sell books, although that's a lot of fun too, but you know, to meet people and do these presentations in person. There's so much fun to still do, but it's a little weird to talk to my computer and not talk to a crowd of people. I like the people a lot better. Well, thank you as always to my editor john McKenna's from editing solutions. Thank you for listening. I so appreciate you being here every week. What a time we're living through. I'm Stacey Simms. I'll see you back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourself.   Unknown Speaker  35:48 Diabetes Connections is a production of Stacey Simms media. All rights reserved. All rounds avenged   Transcribed by https://otter.ai  

Hey, it's Jamie here and this is the third podcast in a series all about how I am beta launching my new course. Now I'm walking you through the entire process step by step, and if you've missed the last couple of episodes where I went through the big overview of how I'm doing this and then started breaking it down, you're going to definitely want to go back to episode 12. [00:00:24]In season two and start there because that's the overview where I give you the big picture. And in here today I'm going to talk about the second step, which is who exactly are you going to serve and why? That's so important to know, [00:00:38] I'm going to tell you about the process that I'm using to get really specific with that and the mistake that you need to avoid. To make sure that you don't end up with nobody signing up for your beta course, right? We want to actually get people in the door. So the key thing in this is that we want to get as absolutely specific as possible with who we want to serve so that we can speak to their needs. More clearly now I see a lot of new entrepreneurs coming into the online space saying, Oh gosh, well, I could help anybody. I shouldn't narrow it down because then I might turn people away. [00:01:28] And I see this with photographers too. In the photography industry, people are like, Oh, I can photograph anything, and they don't want to get specific. But when you're trying to talk to a CEO who needs a very formal headshot. And to a new mom who wants newborn photos all in the same website page. Your messaging has to be so generic and broad in order to speak to both of them that it's not really gonna resonate with either of them nearly as well as if you were saying. [00:01:57] Speaking to one very specifically, and so the more specific you can get here, the more effective you can be. Now, this is hard for me too, because I know that this new course that I'm bringing into the world that's going to help people create this. Devoted group of advocates that are basically in a market for them for free. [00:02:18]This could really benefit anybody who sells anything online or not. But I can't just sell it to any entrepreneur because then my messaging to get the word out there is not going to be very tight. [00:02:31] In fact, even just saying it like that here isn't very tight because honestly, messaging is the hardest part, and so I've had to spend some time thinking about who is the type of person that I want to serve super specifically, just because I can help. Anybody who's an entrepreneur do this doesn't mean that I should, and it doesn't mean that it's going to be the best result if I try and keep it that broad. [00:02:57] So the more you can narrow it down and become specific, the more effective your messaging is going to be, plus the more effective your course content is going to be in helping them get results. And you need to be getting people results in your beta course so that they can give you testimonials and stories so that you can launch this again. [00:03:16] And have a, you know, a lot of momentum on your side. Get more people in it the next time you do it. So what I've done is I kind of sat down and said, who would the most fun person to be to work with and to have in this course, like who is already perfectly situated and ready to go to get results from what I want to teach right away? [00:03:37] Those people are going to be the best people for my beta course because if they're. In the right place and they're ready to get results, and I don't have to do a bunch of prep work beforehand, then it becomes easy and it becomes fun. So for me, I'm not going to be going after people who are just starting out, who don't know what they're going to sell, or maybe even are, you know, beta launching their very first product. [00:04:02] So if you're listening here and you're beta launching something and you've never sold anything online before, this is probably not going to be the best fit for you. This is going to be better for people who are already established on entrepreneurs who already have a product that sells, that they can scale. [00:04:22] So it doesn't have to be online education, but it does have to be something that they can sell in mass quantities and not a service like photography where you can only work with a handful of people yourself like you don't need. In fact, you wouldn't want 10,000 clients in a year. For photography. That would be a nightmare for them unless they want to do a big agency and scale that way. [00:04:46] I'm talking about people who sell courses, people who sell products that you know they can sell to thousands and thousands of people. Anything that can really scale where you can grow a very large group. Of raving fans who are just excited to tell everybody about what you're selling. And yes, this would work for people who do services, but I'm going to focus on the people who can scale because frankly, it's easier for me to customize my content and get them results when I know that everybody's on the same page for that. [00:05:21] Now, the other thing is that they have to be the vision. And strategy person for their business. I had a friend asked me this who said, Hey, should I send my team member through it? Would it be valuable for them? Now, they might get some value from it, but the way that I'm going to be teaching this course is going to be talking about a higher level business strategy and it's going to help people get a lot of clarity around what they're already doing. [00:05:46] Because I found that once people hit a certain level in business, specifically around six figures or. You know, maybe 200 to $300,000 their businesses are kind of messy and they've been doing a lot of it themselves, and they really need to clarify what they're doing and simplify it so that it can multiply. [00:06:04] That's kind of the three words that I live by is clarify, simplify, multiply. And so I need somebody who can make those decisions at a high level. Without having to consult a ton of people and who can see the vision and the strategy behind what I teach and set up the processes to implement that. So I'm looking for, [00:06:25] preferably people who are in the six figures, not only because they're already profitable and have something that sells, but they have a different mindset than somebody who's just coming in at the bottom level. I'm also looking for people who take action fast. This is especially important for a beta course because a big part of why I'm doing the beta course. [00:06:47] Is to get feedback from the people who are in the course itself so that I can make it better if I teach it again in the future, and so that I can get success stories from them as they implement it so that I can use those to promote the course in the future. I also am looking specifically for people who value building a community. [00:07:08] If somebody is just looking to sell a product and doesn't actually care if there's a community of people built around it, they're not going to be a good fit for this because community and connection is a big part of what I teach and what I do. Frankly, I really don't want people who are just in it to make money. [00:07:25] I want people who genuinely care about the people they work with. And about getting their clients results. That's really important for the strategy that I teach. If they aren't getting results, they're not going to be these raving advocates, these amazing fans who are willing to market for you because people don't do word of mouth advertising if they haven't gotten amazing results themselves. [00:07:45] So that's key. Like if they aren't doing that. And they don't have a product that actually gets people results. This isn't going to be a good fit for them because they're going to have to restructure everything they do. They might even need to recreate products, and that's going to put them way behind, but I do need those action takers who are ready and willing to take action on what I teach them so that they can start seeing results faster as opposed to slower. [00:08:10]I also want to make sure that the people who join this have a deeper purpose behind their business that other people can get excited about. So, for example, Stu McLaren, you've heard me talk about him a loads in season one of the podcast. He's still a dear friend of mine. I'm still in his mastermind and think he's great. [00:08:28] He attracts impact-driven entrepreneurs who want to make a difference in this world, who, yes, they want to make a ton of money so that they can leverage that money and really make the world a better place. That's a deeper purpose that a lot of people can get behind. In fact, when I heard that in his marketing videos the very first time he launched the tribe course that he sells. [00:08:49] I was sold because there are so many people online who show photos of themselves, but you know, with a personal jet behind them, or bro marketers with their flashy cars and their, you know, like fraternity dreams, let's just, unless there's call it what it is, you know, and I just, those aren't my people. I don't want people who are just in it for the money in the status and the fancy stuff. [00:09:12] Now, there's nothing wrong with having any of that stuff. But if that's their sole driver and they don't really care. If they change people's lives for the better and they don't really care about making an impact in the world or having a deeper purpose for their business, they're not my people. They're not going to be a good fit for this. [00:09:29] Because another big part of this that I teach is having this deeper purpose that other people can also rally behind. And so thinking through how I teach my course and. What kinds of people would be most likely to get results fast from it? I've been able to narrow this down to a very specific kind of person. [00:09:52] Now I'm focusing on values. I'm focusing on some of the milestones that they've hit. I'm not focusing on specific niches so much because it that doesn't really matter. Like people in different niches can definitely get results as long as they have some of these values. And they have a product or a course that they know they can scale that is already selling. [00:10:17] So those are some of those key things that have helped me narrow it down. So now my, my question to you is, if you're thinking about beta launching, or even if you're not and you're just learning from me, how can you get really, really specific with the kinds of people that you're trying to reach and attract into your business? [00:10:37] Who would be most likely to get benefit from what you're doing? Right away without you having to teach them a bunch of extra information first. Right. And in that, who would you love working with the most? Like, I love all online entrepreneurs, but it's way more fun for me to talk to somebody who's been in it for awhile, who already gets results, who understands more of the struggles of scaling than somebody who's just starting out and trying to pick the right software and figure out what their offers should be and all of those things. [00:11:11] But you know, I haven't had to worry about, and a long time, you know, it's way more fun for me to be working with somebody who is like me than somebody who is well behind me. And I think that I can serve those people better as well. So who do you love working with? The boast. Definitely take that into account. [00:11:27] And how specific can you get with defining who they are in terms of values and in terms of who's most likely to get results from you fast. And that's where I would start in terms of narrowing things down and getting specific. Now the nice thing about that is it's easier to speak to them more specifically when you do market this, and so they're gonna, they're going to know more. [00:11:49]Clearly and faster if this is a good fit for them or not. If you're listening to this and you're like, Oh man, this is totally me. I've been doing online business for awhile. You know, I've, I've had a course that I've been selling, but I just feel like I'm not getting the momentum I need. This might end up being a great fit for you, but if you're listening to this and you're like, Oh yeah, I've never really made more than $20,000 in my business, you know, I have an offer. [00:12:13] I doesn't really sell really well. Not sure if it's the right thing to sell or I don't know the platforms or. You know any of these other things, like as I went through my list, if you're like, ah, no, that's not really me, it's probably not the best fit for you. see how going through something like this and defining it will either help you feel like, Hey, I should really think about this versus, Oh, I probably don't need it. [00:12:35] people can self select whether or not this is a good fit for them. When you can clearly communicate. Who it is that you're trying to attract and why this is a good thing for them. Now, this isn't a sales podcast, like I'm not trying to sell you on this. I'm just trying to use that as an example. [00:12:52] Honestly, my messaging in this is not written in such a way that I would write it if I was trying to sell you on this. we'll talk about messaging in a few episodes from now, cause that's the hardest part of, of doing. A brand new course with a new market, because you just haven't worked with people long enough to know exactly what's going to resonate with them in a big way. [00:13:12]and messaging is something that you always will be tweaking, but the more clear you can get on who you want to serve, the easier it's going to be to create this messaging in the future. So even though you can help everybody. Don't, don't go specific. When I went from trying to serve all photographers to serving only personal brand photographers or photographers who wanted to do personal brand photography because it didn't really exist before then I lost 85% of my audience. [00:13:46]only 15% were interested in doing personal brand photography. I check those metrics really closely, but my income doubled. In just two years. It was so fast because I was very specific. My messaging was very, very tuned to exactly what they needed, and so it was more relevant and far more effective than trying to speak to just any photographer who wanted to know how to grow some kind of business online. [00:14:13] So there is riches in the niches as they say it is true. And the more specific you can get, the more. Effective. Your messaging will be, your course will be, you'll get better results and you get better people in the course. So get as specific as you can. Don't stay generic. You can always open it up later, but start with a very clearly defined core. [00:14:36] And honestly, I could probably even get more specific with this. This is all still a work in progress, but this is kind of where I'm landing right now. And, don't, don't be tempted to try and keep it open to just whomever, because the more specific it is, the more the right people will hear about it and resonate with it and definitely want to be part of it. [00:14:56] And that's what we're going for is those uncommon commonalities. Those really tight, resonances where they're like, Oh, that's exactly who I am. I definitely want this. So that's what you need to do. It's hard. I get it. It's super hard. It feels super counterintuitive. But the better you can do that, the better it'll be for everyone. [00:15:13] All right, so in the next episode, I'm going to talk about step three, which is about the super painful problem that they have right now that's going to get them to pull out their credit card, because if you're not clear on that. Even if you have the right people around, it's going to be hard to get them to buy. [00:15:29] So I'll see you there. If you haven't subscribed yet, definitely do that so you don't miss an episode. And if you want to get the entire 12 step checklist from episode 10 of season two, which this was step two in the checklist where I went into depths on it, go to personal brand journey.com. Fill in your email address and I will send it over to you today. [00:15:47] If you know anyone else who needs to hear this podcast, please send it to them. I would appreciate that. And with that, I'll see you in the next episode.

Nobody and nothing is perfect. As a matter of fact, perfectionism is the lowest standard to set yourself because it does not exist. Perfectionism is unobtainable, so it does not exist. Besides, you do not need to do something perfectly because 90% of the time, it’s going to work anyway even if there are a few mistakes. The more that you can avoid paralysis by analysis, the more you can get things done and connect with your people.  In this episode, let us look at ways to do tasks better and faster so you can learn what works and what doesn't right away— rather than just sit there, wonder, hope, and be scared of submitting imperfect tasks. ----- Automated Transcript Below Dean Soto  0:00   Hey, this is Dean Soto founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com. And we're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast episode. Today's topic is this:   Dean Soto  0:21   Done is Always Better than Perfect. That and more, coming up.   Dean Soto  0:34   We're out again with the Luna Meister - hanging & chilling like villains. And today's a good day yet again. Another good day. Who would have imagined? It's another good day in Central California.   Dean Soto  0:48   We're running and walking around on the acreage. We have snakes now. Snakes are starting to show back up. Starting to show back up. Rattlesnakes, the good kind of snakes, and all of those buggers are starting to show up again.    Dean Soto  1:07   So yay... That's why we got some cats. We got more cats. We want more cats. Give me as many cats as possible to keep them snakes away. I want them gone.   Dean Soto  1:26   So a couple of things have been happening. So I've been lately doing a lot of LinkedIn marketing, and I have just been using it a lot more. I've been scheduling posts. I've been really trying to build my presence on LinkedIn and doing everything from automation to different types of automation tips, different types of scheduling, different types of things like that. All the way to reaching out to people and connecting or endorsing all this other stuff. And a lot of it is automated, as usual — per normal Freedom In Five Minutes and Pro Sulum fashion. Everything has a system, everything is automated, right?   Dean Soto  2:20   And so, one of the cool things about that is really just seeing that the more consistent you are, the more that you just put stuff out there. The more things happen. And this is something that a lot of people have had trouble in the past. So anyway, let me get to the story. I'm gonna get to the story. I'm not gonna just start to lecture.    Dean Soto  2:50   Alright, so there were a couple of different things. One, I got this content scheduling calendar, I've forgotten who the name was where I got it. It was called On Board or OnBoard Social Media or On-Board Social or something like that.    Dean Soto  3:09   I bet you if you were to Google that you'd be able to find it. But OnBoard Social is a cool little calendar that I got for 27 bucks. I found it off of an Instagram ad. And normally I don't.    Dean Soto  3:23   Normally I don't get stuff like that. I'm not a big social media type guy. All of my social media stuff in the past that has worked has been through one-on-one connections, where I knew somebody was gonna be somewhere. I reach out to them on social media. I go talk to them, meet them, and then now I can talk to him on social media from then on, right?    Dean Soto  3:45   Well, so I got this calendar, and it's pretty cool for basically the next three years. It gives you an idea of what to write and what to talk about during that day. And then I scatter in a couple of things. So what I do with social media is the first thing I do. So I use Hootsuite. Hootsuite is the major tool that I use just because I like that they have auto-scheduling,   Dean Soto  4:20   I am auto-scheduling it because you have Buffer...you can select what times you want things to be scheduled. They have a whole bunch of different – So, Buffer is a different app, I should say. You have Buffer, which is a different app.    Dean Soto  4:33   You have a whole bunch of different other apps that allow you to create a schedule. I don't want to create a schedule baby. I just want to press the button, let it schedule whatever for me and let me move on my way. That's what I want. I don't want any other funny business.    Dean Soto  4:34   Okay, just let me press the button. You figure out what the best time is and let's go So, I get that. So I have Hootsuite. I got that calendar.    Dean Soto  5:05   The cool thing about that calendar too is that it follows a system. It's called ACES that she created. So ACES. So A C E S it's an acronym. It stands for authority. So you have an authority post. The C means connection post. Something that connects people to you. An engagement post where you engage somebody else and you tag somebody else. And then a sizzle post. The sizzle post, I believe only comes after doing the first three a couple of times.    Dean Soto  5:42   So, I want to say it's like every six of the A, C, and E's. You then get the S which is sizzle. Which is talking about your sales — like different types of sales? Things like you know, discovery calls or something, getting somebody to come and opt-in for your email or sale that you have — things like that.    Dean Soto  6:03   And, and so you said that it comes only every once in a while. Okay. So the next thing that — so the cool thing about that is it really gives a really cool and systematic approach to at least having the idea of what I want this day to be around.    Dean Soto  6:34   And so on top of that, I'll have different posts from Mashable. I have different articles. I post different things from all of these different content sites. the Signal Versus Noise, blog, all these different places that I find very interesting posts from. I'll put that out there. Also, I do different quotes from people that are — but then I also do my own quotes. So I'll do my own quotes, which are things like, you know, that's one of the last things that I did was, if you think you're the only one that can do something, you're wrong. It's something in your business, you're wrong. And I believe that.    Dean Soto  7:13   I believe that I am not the only one that can even do these podcasts. That I can actually outsource these podcasts. And guess what I have in the past with the Online Empire Academy, I outsourced my entire podcast to a wonderful guy named Josh Woodward and he did a really fabulous job.    Dean Soto  7:29   Okay. So, I mean, the entire podcast and I'm not joking. The entire — everything from interviews to the podcast itself to the podcast processing. Everything. Okay. So, all of that can definitely be outsourced to somebody else.    Dean Soto  7:52   So, all that being said, one of the things that push when you have a system and you know, you're going to do consistently, the thing that what pushed me was to start putting a whole bunch of content out there. My own content, other people's content.    Dean Soto  8:10   And I actually had somebody who asked me, "Hey, do you actually have a training course on the stuff that you're talking about?"   Dean Soto  8:20   And so, I wrote back and I said, "Well, we usually get people hooked up with VSA's. But I do have a training course."    Dean Soto  8:28   And I gave them a link to the training course. And he started taking training courses. And this is somebody who, you know, he actually works for someone that's very popular — very, very well known. And a super nice guy, and it was awesome.    Dean Soto  8:42   And so he messaged. He actually started taking the course. And then he messaged me back on LinkedIn. Now, this is all just out of the blue. Just all from doing the content stuff. And doing the different types of automation and endorsing and reaching out to people and stuff. He emails me.    Dean Soto  9:00   So he messaged me back on LinkedIn and said, "Hey, your ClickFunnels affiliate badge is on by default."    Dean Soto  9:09   So what ClickFunnels does is, even though you've paid for ClickFunnels, they will put a little badge that pops up by default. It says, "Hey, this was made by ClickFunnels."   Dean Soto  9:23   And I mean, the good thing is that it gives you – and it's like a little affiliate badge so they'll give you credit if someone buys. I actually had someone purchase ClickFunnels and I get monthly revenue from that little badge. But I didn't realize. I actually did not realize that that badge was showing up on all of my course pages. And because it – just by default, you just don't think about it.    Dean Soto  9:47   You don't think of turning that thing off. You think of —, usually a software will be the opposite. It will be default off and you have to choose to have this affiliate badge on. But in this particular circumstance, it defaulted "On". Okay.    Dean Soto  10:06   And so I didn't think about it, I didn't even realize that it was on until he had messaged me. And the thing is that this training course has been up for months. And several people have gone through it.    Dean Soto  10:21   And so he would just say, you know, "It could be a little bit distracting and so on and so forth."   Dean Soto  10:27   And he's totally right. And so I had to go through six different pages and turn the whole thing off. And then I went through all the opt-ins that I had created, and they had the affiliate badge on, and so I turned all those off because it was a pain in the butt.    Dean Soto  10:47   Obviously, I don't want that showing up but it was a pain in the butt getting all that stuff done. But that's not the point. Okay, that's not the point. The point of this is that they were up. The pages were up, people were going through the course.    Dean Soto  11:06   Did he say, "Hey, the affiliate badge is on? I'm not going to go through this course. Because of that, I'm not going to listen to a word you say, you are done. You're a big dum dum. You had the affiliate badge thing up and you obviously are not perfect. So I'm not going to listen to you."    Dean Soto  11:29   Of course not. No. He's like – he basically was being super helpful and helped me to help.    Dean Soto  11:38   He just basically was like, "Hey, you know you have this on. You might want to turn this off because it can be a little distracting."   Dean Soto  11:47   And he just kept going on with the training course. That is awesome. But there are a lot of people, including myself at some point In time, that would have been like, "Well, you should have checked that out in the first place. Oh, you should never put anything out. Unless it's absolutely perfect. You don't have five quality control checks. I have 17 people look at the thing before it goes out."    Dean Soto  12:23   But here's the thing, whether it was perfect or not, the person is still listening to my training course. And still liking it. So I learned this from a mentor of mine named Jermaine Griggs, which I've mentioned several times in the podcast.    Dean Soto  12:42   He learned it from I believe his grandma, that done is better than perfect. Done is better than perfect. 90% of the time, when you complete something, it's gonna be fine. And if it's not, you know, like, just as in this example, what happened? Nothing, right? Nothing at all.    Dean Soto  13:10   There is nothing that came from this other than me, thanking Him and us continuing to connect even more. Right. And I'll give you one other example. This is an example from a client.    Dean Soto  13:27   So I always tell clients who have our Virtual Systems Architects, that when you're doing these videos, if something is going to be pretty important like it's going to go out to somebody, and you know you want to, you want to make it. You want to make it to where, you know it is going to be perfect most of the time, if not all the time. You know, because you're doing videos and the videos are the ones that you know, you're getting everything documented based on those videos.    Dean Soto  13:58   At the end of the video, you know, you spent five minutes creating that video, just at the end of the video, just say, "Hey, here's the quality control check for this test that you're doing. Every time you're done with this task, I want you to check these three things or check these five things. I want you to check here and here and make sure that everything is correct."   Dean Soto  14:22   And so I had this client who sent a rather than doing a video and creating a process. He sent an email to his Virtual Systems Architect. His VSA at $9.50 per hour — at least as of recording this. Oh, they will automate and systemize everything in your business for you.    Dean Soto  14:50   So he goes and sends this email that kind of outlines what needs to be done for this particular task. Well Because there was no quality control check and because it wasn't as clear as it could be. Because email is like one of the least clear ways of creating a process or a task. Because it was not as clear as it could be. The VSA ended up messing up. And it was essentially a "Thank you." to donors for this nonprofit. So pretty major companies who donated to the nonprofit — the event that they were having. And the email that went out there were these merge fields where it said "(Your Company), (First Name), and so on.    Dean Soto  15:54   So she did the first name. She did all of that, but she accidentally forgot (Your Company). The merge field for (Your Company) Right? So she accidentally forgot that merge field.    Dean Soto  16:10   And so the email went out and said, "Hey, you know, Tim, or whoever it was. Hey, Tim, thank you so much for supporting this nonprofit event. Bah, bah, bah, bah, we couldn't have done it without you, and the support of (Your Company). And it was obvious — it was in red. So it was an obvious merge field thing. Actually, I don't think it was red. I think the feedback back was in red from the person.    Dean Soto  16:45   But uh, so the guy writes back and says — No, so the client writes back to the VSA, copies me, copies the Account Manager and says "Hey, how can I communicate more clearly? What needs to be done here?"    Dean Soto  17:12   Good job my love. Oh, nice. Um, I think — sorry it's chores time. I think feeding Luna should be it. I'll handle the chickens. Yeah, that's it.    Dean Soto  17:36   Um so anyway, he said you know "How can I be more clear? But when he forwarded the email response from his donor... his donor said — because it also requested something from the donor, you know, "Hey, could you do bah bah, bah."   Dean Soto  18:14   The donor just simply said, "Hey, so and so yes. When would you like... when would you need this by?'    Dean Soto  18:22   That's it. The thing wasn't perfect, right? wasn't perfect. It had a merge field thing and still got the job done.    Dean Soto  18:34   The person was just like, "Okay, yeah, no problem. When do you need this?"    Dean Soto  18:38   Almost as if they didn't even notice it. Right. And that's the thing. Yeah, no. Things don't go well. Would it have been better had it been totally perfect? Yeah, of course. But a lot of times when we do stuff, the job still gets done. Right. Everything still gets done.    Dean Soto  18:59   I'm not saying to try and be accurate and perfect or anything like that. But a lot of times we get paralysis by analysis, right? And we don't want to not do something simply because we have 15 people checking it before it goes out.    Dean Soto  19:22   So by the time, it does go out, it's not even fun and valuable anymore. It's not even relevant anymore. And so the more that we are able to take that analysis by paralysis — that paralysis by analysis away we can get more content out there. More things out there. Connect more and reach out to more people. We can do it faster, we can do it better and actually learn what works and what doesn't, rather than just sit there and wonder and hope and be scared and have fear.    Dean Soto  20:05   So done is better than perfect, always. Done is always better than perfect. All right, this is Dean Soto. Freedom In Five Minutes. FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and I will see you in the next Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast episode.

What can startup founders learn from the marketing strategies of high growth, silicon valley tech companies? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Traction Hero founder Kate Walling talks about her experience helping VC-backed tech startups develop marketing and business strategies, and the specific things she recommends they focus on to achieve exponential growth. Highlights from my conversation with Kate include: Kate advises early stage tech companies on their marketing and business growth strategies. When she starts working with a new company, the first thing Kate looks at is the product and business model to determine whether there are opportunities to use product-led growth. After that, she evaluates the company's brand and positioning within the industry, and then focused on the sales team. One strategy that Kate has seen several companies use successfully to drive growth is community, and specifically building a community of their customers, users and fans and allowing that community to mostly self-moderate. To be successful, Kate says marketers need to be a part of the larger corporate strategy conversations around what the product is, how it will be positioned, what the tech stack is, and how sales will go to market. Another effective way to raise your brand profile is to work with industry influencers. Kate says that these do not always have to be paid relationships, and that its important for your marketing team to be aggressive in building relationships. If you have a small budget, one of the best ways to gain early traction as a founder is through a personal email newsletter. This is a strategy employed by many of the accelerators. Send it to friends, family, former colleagues, etc., but NOT clients, and share your journey as a startup founder. You can also use this to ask your audience for help and introductions. PR is another good way to get the word out at a low cost. While you can always hire a PR agency, there are plenty of opportunities for you to directly pitch yourself to local media, and you can subscribe to HARO and respond to those pitches at no cost. Tools like Canva are handy for making marketing collateral that looks like it was created by a designer but really uses templates to look professionally made. Kate's advice to founders is not to try and take on too many things. Find a few channels and platforms that are a good fit with your audience, do them well, test and iterate. Resources from this episode: Visit Kate's personal website Check out the Traction Hero site Email kate at kate[at]katewalling.com Following Kate on Twitter @katewalling Listen to the podcast to get specific strategies you can use as a startup founder (whether you have a big budget or a small one) to hit your growth goals. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and today my guest is Kate Walling, who's the founder and CEO of traction hero. Welcome Kate. Kate Walling (Guest): Hello Kathleen. I love your podcast. Kate and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Thank you. I'm excited to have you here. I am going to do a little bit of an announcement for my listeners before we dig in. Um, if you have listened to my last few episodes, you might've heard this, but it's late March, the coronavirus pandemic is happening. We are recording on Zoom and Zoom is having some bandwidth issues. So just saying, if you're listening, be patient with us. If the audio gets a little funky from time to time, we're going to do our best and hope that Zoom holds up for us as we go. But, these are interesting times we're living in. Lots of people working remotely, lots of people using video conferencing software. So it is what it is. But with that said, welcome Kate. Can you please tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and Traction Hero? About Kate Walling and Traction Hero Kate: Absolutely. So let me try to make this the short version of the story. I've been an entrepreneur since a really young age. I started my first startup at 23, which was a consumer facing startup. I've kind of been an entrepreneur since then, although I've had a corporate stint. I'm in the middle because at one point I realized that being an entrepreneur from a young age means that you don't understand corporate structure and you just hit some walls because you have a lack of understanding. So I've also worked in a public tech company here in Silicon Valley and now I'm back with Traction Hero, which is a marketing agency for startup companies where right now we provide a lot of tech companies with on demand services just as they need it. So basically they can email with a quick project they need done and we turn it around in a couple of hours. So it's really good for companies that have large budgets, but not enough team. Basically there's a lot of those. And then we're also slowly building out services that are really focused on the deliverable so that startups can say, "I need a market research study done" or "I need a new identity." Everything is focused toward what needs to happen to get that done. So as you know, when you're doing a lot of projects, you've got to have a writer, a designer, a printer, all these different people, and it's very stressful for marketers. There's not really been a solution so far where they can just cross that thing off the list and know that the whole thing is getting done. So that's what we're working toward, is really solutions that help marketers get stuff done as they need it.  Kathleen: I love that you personally have been a startup founder and that you've done a lot of work with startup founders because I'm personally passionate about that. I have been a business owner. I've started a couple of different businesses. Having walked in the shoes of the founder, I think you described it so well where there's so many things that need to get done. And that's just from a marketing standpoint, right? You're wearing all the hats when you're in a startup. You could be the owner, the chief salesperson and the marketer as well as other things. And in those early days it can be really hard to zero in on, what are the most important things I should be doing in order to gain traction? That is one of the reasons, FYI, that I love your company name. You stay focused without falling victim to shiny object syndrome or you know, working so much in the business and not on the business, et cetera. It's a challenging, challenging time. Kate: It is. And I think, you know, marketing's been already challenging for a number of years because the MarTech stack keeps getting larger and, and Silicon Valley, the budgets keep getting larger, but your team size doesn't. But marketing is getting more and more responsibility for profit and loss. So there's a lot of pressure and I think what I hear from clients is, what you're saying, is that this was a different style with Traction Hero. And that's because I've personally been through the technology accelerator programs. I am on my fourth startup. I really know what it's like. The interesting thing is that I started this agency model in Seattle. I built an agency in Seattle before I came down to Mountainview California and the model works so well, so it's called scrappy face and it was scrappy, right? And we just went in and we helped these funded tech companies and we just moved as fast as we could. And we had a great team. I closed the agency because I went through a divorce and growing a company really quickly in the middle of a divorce in a city that was always raining is brutal to say the least. But the model was so interesting and when I went into corporate tech, what I realized is that I kind of thought their needs would be different. What I saw was just maybe limited, but it really wasn't, it was pretty much the same concerns of "I've got money, I don't have enough people to spend it." You know, "I don't have enough hands." And then marketing has gotten so specialized that you can't possibly hire enough people to do all these things well, like they can't be experts at everything. So, you know, I'm a big proponent now of having smaller marketing teams, but knowing how to get more done quickly and having whatever workforce you need, that's really fluid. Kathleen: I love that.  should take a step back because this topic, when you talk about startups, I feel like it's a Rorschach test because the word "startup" can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And for some people, they hear "startup" and they think little, you know, two or three person company. And yes, of course every startup has to start somewhere. But then there are startups that are incredibly well funded, VC funded, that go from being one or two people to 20 to 30 people within a span of a month. When I think the conversation we're having, it's more around that high growth startup, not that little company that's gonna slog along for five years. We're talking about, you know, startups that have a lot of potential that need to move fast. I think that's really key here. That's the experience I've had working in startups, is that it's all about speed, especially if you're looking for investment. Because as soon as you bring on investors, there are high expectations. There are benchmarks you have to hit. There are thresholds that you need to get to. And all of that needs to happen really quickly. And you're right, you know, you couldn't possibly hire enough people to do that and you can't have a team that includes the world's best in everything, right? Because you'd need to segment out each little thing you do and hire a different person for it. So what's the best way to move ahead? And the other element of that that, I think, is so interesting is this need to balance brand with demand generation because those are two really important components. And especially if you're in a high growth startup, you absolutely need demand generation. There is no company that doesn't, but brand is really important these days. How early stage startups can quickly gain traction Kate: So like, yeah, how do you do all the things? It's so hard and I mean, you bring up a great point first. Defining "startup" is important. I think right now I do tend to concentrate on the tech startups that are scaling and have money. I also tend to help entrepreneurs that are somehow very well resourced and there's an opportunity that needs to move quickly. Those were the fun ones. That can be anywhere. It's like there's been a regulatory or legal change and so it's presented this opportunity and you've got to go fast to take advantage of that opportunity. So that looks different different ways, but it's typically those two categories in terms of entrepreneurs who are working on a smaller project or evolving it. There's so many tools now that they can use that would save them so much money that I think just having that right tool stack is a better situation. But back to your question about balancing brand and demand gen. It's super hard and I think what I used to do is go month by month, quarter by quarter in my corporate role and say "What are the business objectives here? And so what does what makes the most sense?" So if all of a sudden the sales team is growing from 40 to 90, right? I've got to get the demand gen up and going. I've got to get tools in place to deal with that. And that evolves into other things like what type of sellers are they? How are these tools going to work together? Whereas if the brand is newer or there's been a change in the industry or there's some kind of potential in terms of content or positioning, you go on the brand side. I think you just have to kind of reevaluate it every several weeks when you're, when you're at scale, when you're trying to work with scale. Kathleen: Yeah. It's funny that you say that because I think the last month or two have been the best example of why it's important to reevaluate every few weeks because I can speak for myself. I had a beautiful 90 day marketing strategy that I finished at the end of January. I'm a big believer in planning in quarters and adjusting in months. And so I had the strategy put together and I was starting along my merry way, implementing my strategy and then coronavirus hit and blew it all up. I feel like I, I, you know, I want to do air quotes, "go into work every week." You know, I'm not going anywhere. I'm working out of my house right now. And the priority is constantly changing based on the current fire. And I say that not meaning that like, the house is on fire and the company's in jeopardy. That's not our case. In fact, oddly we have an increase in demand because of what our product does. But, it's about pivoting and shifting and recognizing now it's all about remote work and you know, that sort of thing. And that's different than what I had planned out, but when things are moving fast, you gotta be able to go with it. Kate: You do. And I think, you know, in terms of the virus, it's the emotional roller coaster for us personally. It's the same with business. And I think it's that way with most parts of businesses, right? It's like, "Oh, I don't know if I have enough toilet paper. I don't know if I have enough this or the National Guard is moving in," you know? So it's like, every day, assessing where things are and what your needs are. And I'm seeing that with my clients. The first week was about "What should we be doing? Should we do a campaign?" So we do an email and alert people of what services we're changing. Now it's moved to, "Okay, competitively, what do we need to do? What's going on in the industry? What's the overall campaign, you know, with our overall strategy here?" And that strategy ends up being not just marketing, that's the whole business offering. We need to move products. But marketing from my observation right now, which is, you know, limited in the grand scheme of things, marketing is driving some of those business questions, right? Because you can't go to a marketer right now and say, "I need you to do something about this virus." The marketer has to say, "Well wait, what are we, what are we offering here?" You can't just throw together some kind of campaign or ad without meaning. I mean, this is not a, um, you know, "throw a graphic on it" type of problem. How do VC-backed startups approach marketing? Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. So let's put the pandemic aside for a minute because I feel like we could have an entire episode on that and I may need to do that at some point soon. My curiosity has been peaked by what you said about how you tend to work with these well-resourced, need-to-move quickly, but potentially bandwidth-constrained companies. I think what is really interesting about that is that a lot of marketers see those kinds of companies that do grow really fast and they think, "What are they doing? What is the secret sauce? What's happening behind the scenes that's enabling them to go so quickly?" Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect it's not that they're just throwing money at the problem. It has to be more of, yes, you need money, but what are you going to do with that money that supports a really high growth kind of scenario? So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and pull back the curtain on, if somebody does come to you and say, you know, we just got VC funding, we've got to triple the size of this company in a year. We've got the budget to do it. As a marketer, what kinds of things are you doing and looking at for them? Kate: The first thing I look at is, is there anything in their model that should be evaluated overall for marketing in terms of distribution or influence? For scalability, like you said, it's demand gen and brand. However, for a lot of things it's, is there something that needs to be built into the product from a marketing positioning standpoint or differentiation to make sure that that scale can happen with the brand and demand gen tools? That's one of my favorite parts and that's where your puzzles come in. So if you're a SaaS company, do you need to be offering some kind of certification program because you need more people using the software? What are the different channels? How is that working? I think getting a grasp on, is there something from a business model perspective that needs to happen? The other thing is, a lot of companies at that point have some juggernauts, right? Like, we're seeing churn is hitting here and it's too high, or we're seeing these little scenarios happen with customers, or our lifetime value is off. So we start trying to troubleshoot some of those things so that, that first step is really about marketing and the product and the operations of the business, and then also what needs to be worked out before you scale. There are usually some major learnings there. Once those kinks have been ironed out, we start looking at where are we positioned in the industry? Where is brand awareness? And then what is the plan with the sales team? So if you've got two sellers and you're going to hire maybe one more, that's a pretty basic stack because you don't want to build anything too complicated until you understand, are these relationship-based sellers, are these more tech savvy sellers? There's a difference in the tools required. So you can do something more basic in the meantime, just getting them basic collateral, making sure they have that stuff on the brand side. You start wanting to do more PR, more on positioning and really claiming your spot in the industry landscape. Then, as your sales team picks up, so when you start getting to like 20, 40, 50 up and up sellers, you're looking at a lot more sophisticated systems. You're usually looking at a change of how sales works. So if you have inside sales reps, how are they working, how are they using your marketing software? You get into really complex software decisions, and that's usually driven by marketing. How can startups use product-led growth? Kathleen: There's so much there. I have so many questions I want to ask you. Let's go back to one of the first things you said, which is that you actually begin in many cases by looking at product. So it sounds like what you're talking about is product led growth, and really going in and looking at what are the opportunities to bake something in -- the product that we have that can itself be a growth driver. I would love it if you could just talk a little bit more about that. Kate: It's both from a positioning standpoint, and distribution comes up. That comes up with SaaS companies a lot. And positioning can come up with B2C, right, of like what is this particular opportunity here? With direct to consumer you see it because you'll see, like, consumer products that are extremely well designed or they're really hip or something like that. So that's where you'll see that brand move play in really big. And, and usually with D2C, that's part of the initial product development. But sometimes that can come in as like, how do we do that? Sometimes it can be, with B2C, how do we build a community around the product, right? So some companies are doing a really good job of using Facebook groups. I think Facebook groups are amazing for marketers right now of, we're going to liberate our whole community and let them build with one another. But what are the rules of that? So I think there's just a lot there in terms of B2C, it depends. If it's a commodity-based business, it's harder. A lot harder, right? You're looking at, how do we feel different to the buyer? How do we provide a different experience? If we're not really offering something different, can we deliver it different? Is there really strong brand value that can go throughout the whole company and how would that be protected? So it really has a lot of different shapes. Think of channel partners or technology partners who are taking our API and installing it. But is there something more? Is there a way to even scale it bigger than that? Right? Like get like a whole group of individuals selling this thing for you. So I think it's really out of the box type thinking. And generally at this point, you know, the startup's been going for awhile, they've had some success, they're ready to, you know, commit, and they're ready to scale. They're leaning that way. So it's a really good time to do this work. How marketers can play a role in the broader business strategy? Kathleen: You're coming in as a marketing advisor. At the same time though, it goes to the core of the business strategy. It's not just a marketing strategy. If you're talking about putting an evangelist program in place or changing elements of the product or building a certification program, some of these are business strategies. So how do you navigate that conversation? Because I think often marketers are really challenged with, we're really comfortable staying in our marketing lane. But a lot of the times, when we get out of that lane -- and sometimes it manifests as, you know, we're starting to make recommendations about sales software, other times it's like the things you're talking about that can get rocky if you don't do it right -- how do you approach that? Kate: Yeah, that's a great statement. It's so true with this early stage stuff that I'm talking about. It's typically before a startup has hired a CFO or a senior level marketer. And so you're working directly with the CEO and they have some marketing resources. They'll have a small agency, they'll have a couple freelancers, right? Part of their problem is that they don't know who to hire. And most of the time what I tell them is you can't make that hiring decision yet. We don't know what the marketing is, so we don't know what type of marketer to hire, you know? So I'm a huge proponent of fractional CMOs because I think it's just too early and you don't want to get the wrong person. There's a lot at stake. And I think a lot of startups at that base, they've got revenue coming in, hire a CMO to come in four hours a week and figure this out slowly. And who realizes that you're going to hire for that position when you know what the direction is? So that's more early stage. And the company usually has maybe five to 10 employees, but marketing's not built out yet at all. Later on is where you get really more tricky. You've got someone in charge of sales and they have a particular way that they're hiring. Then as a marketer, you're supposed to bring in demand gen, right? And the demand gen you need to bring in is a different skillset than the sellers have. And the sellers were not aware of the software that you have to do. In my corporate role, it was a rollout plan. I started with HubSpot and got people used to this idea, this is what's going on and why. Then I moved into Marketo, which is super hard. Kathleen: I just went in the opposite direction. I went from a company with Marketo to a company with HubSpot and I'm like, "Thank God. It's so much easier." Kate: And then with Marketo, the sales team was growing. We had to do much more sophisticated type rules and stuff too, because all of a sudden you can have a sales team and you start bringing in all these leads and a sales team does not care. They don't care. And they're not gonna answer them. And you've got a cultural problem of you have to educate them toward how do you deal with these leads, what it means, their job and that it is, and you have to have support from the management team that this is going to be required. There's a whole lot and it just really depends on who you're working with and what their background is. You have to take it one step, one day at a time. So I think it just depends on the team. It depends on where people are. You have to be pretty fluid marketer. You have to be able to say, "This is what I need and it's going to be a process and I'm going to have to get buy in. And so how do I do that?" So you have to be patient. Kathleen: I think you raised something really important, which is, when you're coming into the job, you're at an advantage because you're working with a CEO. But just one thing I've learned is that when you, when you're in those hiring conversations, you have to, you have to have a conversation about that. I might be making some recommendations that are outside of what you might think of as marketing. How are you going to feel about that? Are you open to it? Are you willing to keep an open mind? You know, really, really figuring out that the personality type of the founder, the CEO, and whether they're willing to listen and, and consider other things I think is so important at that stage of a company. Kate: Critical. Specific strategies that startups can use to drive exponential growth Kathleen: Moving onto something else. You said you started talking about community and I love that topic. I could talk about it forever. And I guess this is, this is part of a bigger question I have, which is, I'd love it if you could share some examples of what you have seen work really well to fuel fast growth in some of the companies you've worked with. And maybe we could start with community because I came from a company a few jobs ago where we built a very large community and it was huge for us and it was a Facebook community. Through that experience I became really passionate about that. So that's just one example but, but there may be others. So, specific things that you have seen really deliver for the companies you've worked with. Kate: It's different for B2B and B2C. So I'll start with B2C because it's the easy, fun one. What I'm seeing right now that I love are these Facebook groups around certain products. This is not a client of mine, but it's actually a product I use. There was, what's it called, the meal delivery company that I was using for awhile when I had really busy days. It was all plant-based food and then they had this Facebook group and you could join it and people were just sitting there and they let people post whatever they want. They can sit there and post like "I really hate this smoothie. How am I going to get through this or am I supposed to do this later or not?" And it's super interesting to watch how that worked because the community moderated the community members for the brand. Brilliant. People will say, you know, "I did lose weight, I did not lose weight. This is really more about health." And so you start seeing these advocates come up and then they would use those advocates for their Instagram stories and other things. So that organic way of building a community that moderates itself is really interesting. Now initially, you have those questions about when do we step in and when do we not, and how do we moderate? I think if you can get by with moderating lightly, but you know, the feel of the brand is so positive, right? So that's a brand value that you have less of those issues but they're going to come up. But I think you have to have a very careful strategy about how to moderate that. The other thing that people are using a lot on B2B is obviously these micro influencers. There's some startups paying a lot of money for this and it's all over the place. Traction on that sort of slowed down the end of last year and now I'm starting to see clients pick back up on interest in that because everybody's at home and online, right? So we're starting to feel like there's opportunity there. I'd say if you can build your own organic community, that would be ideal, right? If you can't, you can use these micro influencers and that's great content as well. I talked to someone last week and their product's working and they're sold out, and they've gotten all this influencer marketing and that helped. But then all of a sudden years later, they don't have brand values. And so when you're needing to do more, you're needing to build content, you're needing to build demand and you're needing to build, you know, other parts of marketing, if you don't have those brand values built out, then all of a sudden you're like, well, who are we? We were using everyone else for the voice. So you'll run into that for B2B. It's true here. I think some of this comes to hiring. So what I've seen work really well is that you become friends with all the influencers in the industry and you sponsor their podcast and you appear on their podcasts and you go to their events and you just kind of make sure the team knows who the influencers are. And then you do everything you can to get involved with people at every level. You'll have local events and you'll bring the people in that you know, in that city and have them share their stories. And so it's a constant kind of industry networking. I've seen that work really, really well on the B2B side. But it's definitely different. Kathleen: It's so interesting that you say that because I've seen that work really well too, where people have formed strategic relationships with industry influencers and sometimes, not paid as you say. It doesn't always have to be paid. It could just be really showering them with love in the form of, you know, having them on your podcast or going on theirs or commenting and sharing and making introductions. I worked for a marketing agency for awhile and they did this exact thing and their way of forming those relationships was by offering to make personal branding websites for influencers. That was a great way to get to know them. Then you've done them a favor. So there are a lot of different ways that that that can be done. I think that's really smart. How to hit big growth goals on a small budget Kathleen: You work with well-resourced companies that are able to do a lot of these things. Any lessons learned or suggestions for companies that don't have those giant budgets? What are some things they can do in the early days? Kate: Oh yeah. I love the scrappy brands and helping startup founders. So I advise a lot of startup companies. I love this part of the work cause I obviously identify with it a lot. Being an entrepreneur for so long, I think, you know, when founders are trying to grow a brand unlimited budget, one thing I always bring up is never forget about email, because if you create an email list of your friends and family and colleagues and anyone that you meet with, those people become very loyal to your process. If you share with them where you are and what you're going through and what you need help with, they will help. It will absolutely help. I've seen that be really successful. Now your tone has to be right because nobody owes you anything and you want to be entertaining and kind of make them feel a part of it. And that's part of the email structure, right? Of like, "Here's what's happening and you know, these exciting things are happening, these challenges are happening. Here's how you can help." That is the basic format that does incredibly well. And that is one of the main marketing tricks that comes out of the Silicon Valley tech accelerators. They have all their founders do a weekly email and it works. I, on my own, I've had open rates of like 90% or higher, very high. Kathleen: I want to talk about that for a second because I'm fascinated by this. I also believe strongly in email. I also think that people think of email as this old, tired, dead strategy, but there's some really interesting things being done in the world of email right now. So you're talking about founders doing a weekly email. Can you peel the layers of that back a little bit for me? What does that look like? Who does it go to? Kate: Sure. So this is not client facing or customer facing. My personal list is maybe 200 people and it's my closest friends, my family members, colleagues I've worked with for years, people that I've met with on this journey. So it's people that know what you're up to and what you're striving for basically. But not clients. Clients and customers would get something different. They don't need to understand the process. So that email list is specific for friends and family colleagues. And what you do is, every time you send, you add more people that you've met along the way. I usually start it with like "Hi friends" or something like that. And then I usually say something seasonal about what's happening in the world and that I'm thinking about them because I am. All these people, they're cheering you on. And then I'll typically say, if you're new to the list, here's a link to the previous email, right? So that there's some sort of context in there drawn into the story correctly. And then I'll put some kind of update about where I am or what challenges are happening. And it's usually interesting stuff because when you're building a business, you hit all kinds of things in the world that are happening. So for example, with Traction Hero, there've been changes in California privacy law, changes in California employment law that have really changed the model. And that stuff is interesting. If you're not in it all day long, it's pretty interesting. So share the challenges you have. And then I usually say, "Here's the ways you can help. So if you just open your social accounts, we're now on Instagram. Would love if you would follow," and people will, they'll do it. Or "If you happen to know a friend who knows anything about X, Y, or Z, would you mind connecting me?" They will. This technique is straight from accelerator programs and it is a good one. Kathleen: Do you add these people to the list or do you ask them if they want to opt in? How does that work? Kate: I add them. I often will mention it to them. Like, "I'm going to add you to my newsletter. Let me know if it's okay." You're not doing it for a business so the rules are different. This is actually a question I'm curious to know. I mean I still send, so my recommendation is, I send it through MailChimp, their most basic template. And the reason why is people can unsubscribe. It does hurt your feelings a little bit more when someone does that you know. It's also interesting because if sometimes there'll be like a vendor or somebody and if they offer, I've actually had this happen, someone unsubscribed and I was like, then you're not interested enough in my story for me to pay you. Kathleen: Yeah. Right. Kate: Like, if you're not interested enough in this email because this is just basically what's happening with my business, if you're not interested in that, then I mean, I don't think that we'd be a good fit in terms of working together. I mean, I'm not bothering you. It's like once every six months, I mean slow, but I used to try to do them once a month. MailChimp's most basic template is perfect. And just text. I mean I throw in, maybe, you know, if I done a new logo design or something, throw it in. But keep it pretty simple. And that way people can unsubscribe. Kathleen: I'm a big fan of not overly designing emails. I mean these days, most people have the images in their emails turned off by default. And so if you've got a lot of design in there, it just doesn't get seen half the time anyway. And it looks crappy to have a lot of those image boxes. Like, "Turn your image on," you know, it just doesn't look good. So simpler is better all around with email in my opinion. Kate: Yeah, I know, I totally agree. And that MailChimp basic template's nice. The fonts big, it works well on mobile. It's, it's a nice one. These emails still take, I'm going to say it like if I'm fast, two hours. They still take time. You don't want to bother anybody and you want it to be entertaining and you want it to be, you know, uplifting, even if you're talking about your challenges. The most important thing is tone. I've seen some of these founder emails and if you use the wrong tone, people are like, "No thanks." Kathleen: So what is the right tone? Kate: I think it's friendly and I think it's engaging. You know, I don't think it's like, "Hi friends, hope you're enjoying this day. Please like my Facebook page, please sign up, please send me people who should be customers." It's not about a million asks. People have a lot going on in their lives. It's more of like, "Here's what's going on with building this startup right now. Here's what I'm trying to do. Here are the challenges I'm having. And that's interesting to people, because a lot of people haven't gone through it or want to go through it. And you know, entrepreneurship is never a straight line at all.  Kathleen: I love that idea. I mean, that's something that really any founder in any industry can do. I think for some it's going to put them in a place of discomfort because a lot of the founders I've met don't like talking about themselves that much, which is kind of funny because you're going to have to at some point as a founder.  But I think that's neat because that's something you can do that doesn't take really any money, that just takes your time. Kate: I'd say founders who have marketing backgrounds definitely have a hand up on this one. In tech accelerators, what would happen is I would send in mine first and then whoever in my batch would typically take mine and copy it. So people need examples of this. Email me and I'll send you one of my past ones because it does help to see some kind of, you know, formula that's worked for people and it's so much easier for marketers. Kathleen: I love that. So maybe we'll put Kate's email in the show notes and you can email her and say, Hey, I need your newsletter so you can see what it looks like. So you had, you said you had some other things to be on that and I took you on a tangent with that one.  Kate: So other things on my list. Definitely write industry articles on LinkedIn so that you're showing industry expertise and what you're learning. I think that's very important just to start showing industry expertise and that you're connected to the industry. The other thing I'll say is look for media stories where you might fit in and ping the journalists. So a quick side story, do we have time for that? Kathleen: Yeah, go for it. Kate: When I started my Seattle agency, I had just been through this issue of what's called domain front running, which is when you go in and you're buying a domain and before you can hit checkout, someone takes it from you. So they're capturing it on the domain register thing. Well, King Five, the big news station in Seattle ran a story about how these guys were making all this money on domain names and how it was such an innovative business. Well, I got the journalist name and I sent them an email and I said, "I totally disagree with you. This is really bad for entrepreneurs. It's, you know, it's not right. There's some negative things happening that are just unfair." So they came to the office and filmed me talking about the story about how someone stole my domain name and then sold it back to me for a lot more money than if I'd just been able to push the button. And that was a great opportunity. I've had a lot of luck. You know, my first startup was around printing cookbooks and I had a lot of luck just calling local news stations and cooking on air. Free PR. I've gotten a lot of clients placed, um, if you have a consumer based business, there are a lot of news stations that their lunchtime, they'll have like a third hour, they have a third hour. It's usually lifestyle and you can get pretty easily placed on it if you have some sort of presence and something to talk about. They need people for that lifestyle hour. So always look for PR and media opportunities. Kathleen: Yeah. And I would say a great resource for that also is help a reporter out -- HARO. I mean that's a no brainer. It doesn't cost anything. You subscribe to it, you get an email, however many times a day with reporters looking for sources for stories. It can be overwhelming, but it also is full of opportunity. Kate: Yeah, if you have gmail, you can put on a label and then go in and look when you have time. But yeah, that's an awesome recommendation. Podcast interviews are great. You find people like yourself and you have similar topics and interests. There are websites like Canva that make building marketing collateral so easy and you look like you know what you're doing design-wise and it doesn't cost you extra money. So by all means, make your decks, make your one pagers, make collateral for all these different use cases. Think about collateral. Kathleen: Oh my God, I have to stop you and just say, I am the biggest Canva fan girl on the planet. I am not a designer. I do not know how to use the Adobe suite to design anything. That's the one thing I've just realized. I'm not, I don't have the aptitude for it, but I can go into Canva and make the most beautiful things and I do it probably four times a day. I love it. Yes. It's amazing. Kate: Yeah. Canva, huge. When you get later on in your startup and you have to have brand differentiation and you know, you don't want to use simple stuff, that's different. Early on, use Canva, print this stuff, have leave behinds for customers. It doesn't cost that much money to just really work on your marketing collateral. I think also when you're on the topic of press, look at your local press opportunities, where can you talk at local events, whatever works locally. We'll end up working in different geographies and at larger scale. So learn locally first and that stuff is free. It just takes time. And also work on your industry. So look, so look at this stuff in terms of, are you being, are you B2B or B2C? So where does that fall in? Then look at your media, look at it local and look at an industry as well. And then you want to start growing your community in terms of media. I see entrepreneurs, it's kind of painful to see that they're trying to do all the platforms and it's terrible on all of them. Just choose the ones that are most relevant and a couple to start and just start figuring it out. There's some great tools. A lot of people are saying, "Well, I don't want Twitter because it's not working." Okay. But the thing about it, the people who are on Twitter right now are really passionate and they stay on it. They're a very, very, very passionate bunch. My favorite Twitter tool for growing a Twitter audience is called Jooicer, which is J. O. O. I. C. E. R. Have you seen it? It's awesome. It's like 30, 40 bucks and will grow your Twitter audience for you beautifully. So you know, find tools like that. And again, like we were saying with Canva, you can make beautiful social media posts in Canva since you now have to have more designed content. Use Canva for that.  Kathleen: Yeah, I love this and I will tell you right now as the head of marketing at a startup, I use Canva, I use helper a reporter out. I totally, totally agree with you on those suggestions. Those are great. Kate's advice for startup founders Kathleen: Well we are running low on time. So any last words of advice for startup founders out there who really want to take that fast path to growth? Kate: Yeah, I think the important thing is to try to not get overwhelmed. And so what I recommend doing is, do a list of 10 to 15 different things. You can try figure out a small test for that, that's feasible. Like, if it's an ad unit, put enough money so it's actually worth the test and go through and test them and concentrate on one thing, like one thing a week, step by step by step. If you try to do it all at one time, you get really overwhelmed and it ends up not diluting the quality of it. So, one foot in front of the other is what I always tell people. Kathleen: Yeah. That's good. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Now changing gears because I have two questions I always ask all of my guests. We're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. So when you think about inbound, is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really doing it well? Kate: The first thing that popped in my mind was not what you asked. It was a company that helps people do it well. I really like Unbounce for landing pages. I think you can get a very beautiful landing page up quickly. I would have to think on that. I think, sorry, I was not prepared for this one. Kathleen: That's okay. Unbounce is a good suggestion actually. I can just keep that. Kate: Okay. I'm a huge proponent of Unbounce. There are other cheaper tools, but I really like the quality of Unbounce. Kathleen: Yeah, they're a great company. Second question, the biggest pain point I hear from marketers is that they can't keep pace with all of the different ways that digital marketing is changing. So how do you personally stay up to date with all of it? Kate: Being an agency owner, I've spent a lot of time and resources going through MarTech tools and organizing them. If anybody wants these reports, just please email me. And that helped organize my brain a lot and help me understand if I was doing the right thing or not. So we've done reports where we analyze CRM tools. There's one on website development tools. We've got one on email marketing and one on marketing automation. What those reports did, because in my head I just couldn't keep it all straight, was say here are the solutions, here are all the features that they all have comparatively. And then here are the integrations they have. Because I think what's so hard about MarTech right now is it's not only like I like this product, so I've got 20 products I have to put together. And when you're going out to buy, it's, it's not a great way for marketers to have to spend time of like, which tool, and having to analyze this themselves. So one of my goals to help marketers is to say, here's some reports. Go through everything that you need to know and hopefully you can pick a tool or at least narrow it down to two or three that you should get a free trial on before you commit to it. So I think any website like that, save yourself time on evaluating tools. Find people who've done the research for you. I think that that is really overwhelming. Kathleen: That's so true. It is. It's a lot. There's so many MarTech tools now. How to connect with Kate Kathleen: All right, well we're just about out of time. So Kate, if somebody's listening and they want to learn more about you or traction hero or they want to reach out and ask a question, what's the best way for them to connect with you? Kate: Katewalling.com is my personal website and Tractionhero.com is for the agency. It's a very landing page type website. Right now we're kind of building, um, by doing the work first. You can always reach out to me on my email, which is kate[at]katewalling.com or Twitter, which my handle is @Katewalling. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right, fantastic. If you're listening and you liked what you've heard or you learned something new, please head to Apple podcasts and leave the podcasts a five star review so we can get in front of some more folks just like you. And of course, if you know anybody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Kate. Stay healthy. Kate: Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I need something to do in these days of self-isolation, so I may as well bring back the podcast!  And I've got lots of time to do it as I, er, um, have been temporarily laid off.So I'll tell you all about that.  In The Streaming Report, I binge every Herbie the Love Bug movie and tell you about it.  And that leads into a rant about the explosion of streaming services.So give it a listen, if you please! 

Download the Beta Launch Method Checklist here Transcript: [00:00:00] I'm about to beta launch a new course to a brand new market with zero audience and absolutely no content created for it yet. Most people spend weeks or months preparing to launch something. I prefer to do it in days. In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through the step-by-step beta launch method I developed that allows me to launch crazy fast to show you how easy it can be done if you just get out of your own [00:00:26]way. [00:00:26] [00:00:26] I've been a full time online entrepreneur since 2011 and I do things differently than most online entrepreneurs. I mean, I started doing it the way that everybody tells you to, where you create lots of valuable free content so that you can build an audience and an email list and then ask them what they really want and need. [00:01:00] Then you create a product that fills that need. You set up your sales funnel and then you offer it to people and you hope that they buy it. It can take months, if not years, to finally get your product service or course out on the market. And I know this because that's what happened to me. It took me, I think, a good solid two years to create my very first course and get everything ready to go so that I could launch it. [00:01:27] Now the problem with that method is that. There's no money coming in while you're doing all that. There's lots of money being spent and you're taking a ton of time creating free content and getting everything set up and paying for all the softwares, and honestly, it's really easy to start overthinking things and get caught in that fear of failure and not actually ever putting it out there. [00:01:51] When you finally launch it. You have no idea if all that time and money spent is going to be worth it. I mean, what if people don't buy? What if you spend two years getting something ready to go and making it perfect and then nobody buys it? Right? I used to do it that way, but it's so risky and there are so many unknowns. [00:02:13] Plus it just takes so long before you finally start making money. But two years ago I found a much better way and I basically do things backwards now. I start by selling the thing that I want to sell before I've created it before. I've done pretty much any of the other steps with very minimal audience building. [00:02:36] I know sounds crazy, but I'll explain how I do it in a bit. Then. I create it with the people who join and I listen to what they need as we go. It's really a cocreation process that's very interactive. Then I leveraged the money that I made by selling that beta course to build an audience faster and create a final, more polished version of the course. [00:03:01] After that beta courses done. And I use the success stories from the initial beta course to market and promote it in the future. So I really do things backwards and actually the first time I bade a launch like this was about two years ago when I pivoted my business from working with any kind of professional photographer to specifically helping people who wanted to pivot into personal brand photography. [00:03:24] It was honestly kind of accidental. I wasn't planning on doing it. But it totally changed how I launched. and I made . And when I did it that way, I made just over $70,000 in that very first beta launch, and I was able to hit seven figures with that course alone in less than 18 months because I was able to invest the money I made up front in that first beta course launch to grow much faster. [00:03:56] Now you can listen to all the details about that specific beta launch in here. All the reasons why I think beta launching is the only way to launch a new product in episodes 10 and 11 from season one of the podcast. But this upcoming beta launch I'm doing is a little bit different. Because this time I don't have an email list to leverage like I did in the last launch, and I'm offering it to a completely different audience and market. [00:04:23] It's a complete pivot with no overlap with what I've been doing. And so I've had to get really creative with how I'm going to market this and get it in front of people. Now I'm doing this because the coronavirus has cut my sales down in my photography education business over 80% and so they are way down from what they were. [00:04:45] Because frankly, if photographers can't be doing photography right now and so they're not spending money at the moment, so I'm choosing to see this time as the perfect time to launch something new and a completely different space instead of focusing on the fact that everything is failing right now in my regular business because people aren't spending money there. [00:05:05] I know that'll take off when they can get out and start working again. But in the meantime, it's kind of a beautiful gift to myself to be able to go after something new and try something that I've been wanting to do and teach for a long time, but haven't yet. So if you want to hear the whole story of how I came to this point, go back a few episodes to the start of season two and start listening from there as season two released right after the pandemic hit, and we are all starting to get the stay at home orders. [00:05:32]But in today's episode. I'm just going to give you the overview of the beta launch method that I'll be following to launch this new course in a brand new market. Then in the next few episodes, I'm going to take you behind the scenes and how I'm actually doing. Each step of the process so that you can do it too if you want to. [00:05:52] So this is really the big picture. I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing for each step here that's coming in the next few episodes. So definitely subscribe if you want to hear exactly how I'm going to do each of these steps in detail so that you don't miss them. I don't want you to miss a single step because they're really important. [00:06:10]So if you want to get a copy of this checklist that I'm going to go through today so you don't have to scribble notes really fast, or you know, if you're doing the dishes or something, you don't have to worry about stopping and taking notes I need to do is sign up via email for our weekly newsletter at personalbrandjourney.com and I'll send it right over to you. All right, so let's dive into the checklist that I'm doing in this beta launch method. [00:06:35] Okay. So number one, the very first thing I did, and this was really hard for me, was to get super aligned with what else I would do if I wasn't doing photography education, what's most true to me? what would I love to be known for? Now, I haven't asked myself this question in a few years, and so it was really hard for me to step away from what I've done in the past and think, okay. [00:07:02] What might I want to be known for if it's not personal brand photography or if it's not in the photography industry. If everything was opened up and I was starting from fresh, what would it be? So that's where I'm starting because I know that when we're most aligned with what we're doing and we are really excited about it and geek out about it in the craziest of ways, we will grow so much faster. [00:07:25] Next up. I wanted to get really clear on who this is for. Super specifically. A lot of people call this the ideal client avatar. There's lots of different ways to find this, but for me, I had to get very, very clear on exactly who I wanted to serve with this and who I could help most in this area of alignment that I wanted to be known for. [00:07:47] Step three was to identify the acute super painful problem that these people have that is going to get them to pull out their credit card now so that I can help them with the solution, which brings me to step four. Is identifying what wins are they going to get when they go through my beta course. Now I'm looking at both quick wins because people want to get some sort of result fast, but also what kind of longterm transformations are going to happen when they apply the method and the framework that I'm going to be teaching them. We need that quick win to keep that momentum going. Plus, that quick one really helps us with collecting success stories, which is super important when you're doing a beta launch. But you don't want to forget about how this all works long term. [00:08:38] So I like to have both of those. So I'll explain all of that when I talk through step four later in step five. And this one is really hard. You have to really sit down and say, what makes this new or different from what's already out there and not just better, better is not enough. Better is great, but it's really hard to sell better because if they've tried somebody else's course or method doing what you want to teach and they haven't gotten results with it, and yours is the same, it's just better. [00:09:10] You know? In your mind, are you trying to convince them that it's better. It doesn't matter because they're like, Oh yeah, I've already tried that. It didn't work. Even if I try it and do it better, I still don't think it's going to work. You have a lot more to overcome now when you have something new or slightly different from what other people are doing, it makes it so much easier for somebody to join because they haven't tried it before. [00:09:33] They're like, Oh, well, I tried part of it, but I've never tried it with this angle or this hook, and so having something new or different is really important . Step number six is getting really clear on what the exact offer is. What's the format going to look like? How much is it going to cost? [00:09:50]How am I going to deliver it? All of those things need to get outlined in very specific. Step seven is developing the content framework that I'm going to teach in this beta course. This honestly has been the most time consuming part for me because I am teaching something that I do naturally. I do this without even [00:10:12] Thinking and I have built it into my business in so many different ways, that having to extract it and putting it into frameworks that I can teach to others has definitely taken a lot of time, but it's also been the most fun thing I've done in a really long time. So I can't wait to share that with you and tell you a little bit more about the content that I'm going to be teaching when I get to the podcast. [00:10:33] On step seven. Step eight is really figuring out what messaging is going to resonate with people when I explain it to them. So they want to be part of the beta course. [00:10:45] This is super duper hard because I know that what I have to teach can help a ton of people. But it's different than what other people are teaching. And it's really hard to explain something that's new and different. So I'm going to talk with you all about how I'm going to message it and how I'm going to explain it to people so that it's clear and it shows them why they should join. [00:11:07] honestly messaging changes over time. As you're doing a beta course and as you are running your business and talking to your people and getting to know them, having conversations with them, it's going to shift and change. You're going to refine it. It's going to become more clear, but you've got to start somewhere. [00:11:25] And so that's all of what step eight is about, is trying to figure out how do I explain this? So people really want to have it now and are willing to try. A beta course with me before I've even proven that I can teach this effectively. Step nine is to really identify the barest essentials that I need to launch this, so what technical pieces do I need to have set up? [00:11:46] How am I going to communicate with people and what platforms am I going to use? All of that sort of stuff is what you figure out in step nine. Step 10 is about how I'm going to market this with the no audience. what am I going to do to get in front of the right people so I can start getting people into this beta course and get some momentum building. [00:12:09]Step 11 is getting really clear on how I want to build the audience, what platform I want to use. Am I going to use email? Am I going to use podcasting, etc. And where I'm going to grow this new audience. Step 12 is just the details of when I'm going to open my cart and what I'm going to do during the open cart phase to try and get more sales in to the. [00:12:34]Beta launch. [00:12:35]So that's the process that I'm using to beta launch something brand new and a new market where I have zero audience. [00:12:42] No, I'm totally going to share how the launch is going with you, and I'm going to tell you. All the behind the scenes stuff, as I'm doing it as much as I can so that you can stay caught up with me as I launch this brand new beta course. But in the meantime, if you haven't yet, please subscribe so that you don't miss any of the coming episodes that are going to talk through. [00:13:05]How I'm doing each and every step in detail. [00:13:08] And those are going to be coming right after this one. So subscribe now so you don't miss any of them. And if you want to get a copy of this checklist delivered right to your inbox, simply go to personal brand journey.com and sign up there and I will send it to you via email And finally, if you found any value in this, and if you know somebody else who's either moving into an online business after having run a brick and mortar business and is now shut down because of the pandemic and they really want to try launching something new, or if you know somebody and they're pivoting into something new and you think that they might find this useful. I would really appreciate it if you would take a moment to share this episode with them. [00:13:52]that would just be a really great way to. Say, thank you for the info you've learned here. [00:13:55] So that's it for today. Can't wait to see you in the next episode, or we're going to talk about step one, how to pick this new idea, this new course, and get super aligned with what you're going to be teaching so I'll see you there in the next episode right after this. [00:14:10]

1 (00:03): [Inaudible]. 1 (00:07): Thank you for joining me today. I'm your host Robert Delude. And this is none of your business podcast, a podcast where we bring you inspiring story telling from my heart and ask questions. That's no one's business. Thank you for joining me today. Now let the show begin. And in today's episode I've got Brandon on the founder of mastery talks and he teaches you how to be a public speaker. He has had on the way and we just talked about lots of stuff. So I'll keep this short and . Follow me. Hopefully share with someone. 1 (01:18): Alright, welcome to the none of your business podcast. Brandon. Brendan, right 1&2 (01:25): Brandon, I'm sorry. No worries about happy to be here. Right on. So who are you? What do you do? Yeah, for sure. So my name is Brendan. I'm the founder of master talk, which is a YouTube channel. I started to help the world master the art of public speaking. So let's be in a sentence. Okay. So how did you get into that? Yeah, for sure. So when I was in university, I used to do these things called business competitions. So think of it like trying out for a professional sports team, like the NFL or the NBA, but for nerds. So instead of spending two to three times a week with your coach doing sports drills or doing pushups or sit-ups, we would do the same thing in presentations. Okay. So basically, I know it's weird, but what it would happen is for three hours do, we'd crack a business problem, make slides, find a solution, and then present it back to a board of executives, judges at the end. 1&2 (02:18): It was really wonky. That sounds super interesting. Yeah. So basically I presented 500 times in three years. Oh wow. Yeah, it was insane. That's cool. But like, yeah, just repetition. So what are some things that you learned from that? Yeah, for sure. I would say the biggest one is repetition is excellence. Whether you want to be a professional sports athlete, whether you want to be an amazing podcast or whether you want to be a YouTuber like me. You always want to do more than what everyone else doesn't want to do. You know, for example, like my first thousand subscribers on YouTube, there's no magic formula. Like, Oh you need to research this term and these people. So it just individually messaged every single person in my friend group and I said, Hey thousand 500 people on Facebook, could you subscribe to my YouTube channel? Right. So it's repetition is excellence. Do what other people aren't willing to do.

We are all facing scary and uncertain times right now and learning ways to mitigate fear and anxiety and tools to help reduce stress and help you make better decisions are really important right now. Mental toughness coach Lisa Tamati shares her insights on how to thrive in the tough times and how to keep control over your physiology.   We would like to thank our sponsors for this show: For more information on Lisa Tamati's programs, books and documentaries please visit www.lisatamati.com For Lisa's online run training coaching go to https://www.lisatamati.com/page/runni... Join hundreds of athletes from all over the world and all levels smashing their running goals while staying healthy in mind and body. Lisa's Epigenetics Testing Program https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epige... measurement and lifestyle stress data, that can all be captured from the comfort of your own home For Lisa's Mental Toughness online course visit: https://www.lisatamati.com/page/minds... Lisa's third book has just been released. It's titled "Relentless - How A Mother And Daughter Defied The Odds" Visit: https://relentlessbook.lisatamati.com/ for more Information ABOUT THE BOOK: When extreme endurance athlete, Lisa Tamati, was confronted with the hardest challenge of her life, she fought with everything she had. Her beloved mother, Isobel, had suffered a huge aneurysm and stroke and was left with massive brain damage; she was like a baby in a woman's body. The prognosis was dire. There was very little hope that she would ever have any quality of life again. But Lisa is a fighter and stubborn. She absolutely refused to accept the words of the medical fraternity and instead decided that she was going to get her mother back or die trying. This book tells of the horrors, despair, hope, love, and incredible experiences and insights of that journey. It shares the difficulties of going against a medical system that has major problems and limitations. Amongst the darkest times were moments of great laughter and joy. Relentless will not only take the reader on a journey from despair to hope and joy, but it also provides information on the treatments used, expert advice and key principles to overcoming obstacles and winning in all of life's challenges. It will inspire and guide anyone who wants to achieve their goals in life, overcome massive obstacles or limiting beliefs. It's for those who are facing terrible odds, for those who can't see light at the end of the tunnel. It's about courage, self-belief, and mental toughness. And it's also about vulnerability... it's real, raw, and genuine. This is not just a story about the love and dedication between a mother and a daughter. It is about beating the odds, never giving up hope, doing whatever it takes, and what it means to go 'all in'. Isobel's miraculous recovery is a true tale of what can be accomplished when love is the motivating factor and when being relentless is the only option. Here's What NY Times Best Selling author and Nobel Prize Winner Author says of The Book: "There is nothing more powerful than overcoming physical illness when doctors don't have answers and the odds are stacked against you. This is a fiercely inspiring journey of a mother and daughter that never give up. It's a powerful example for all of us." —Dr. Bill Andrews, Nobel Prize Winner, author of Curing Aging and Telomere Lengthening. "A hero is someone that refuses to let anything stand in her way, and Lisa Tamati is such an individual. Faced with the insurmountable challenge of bringing her ailing mother back to health, Lisa harnessed a deeper strength to overcome impossible odds. Her story is gritty, genuine and raw, but ultimately uplifting and endearing. If you want to harness the power of hope and conviction to overcome the obstacles in your life, Lisa's inspiring story will show you the path." —Dean Karnazes, New York Times best selling author and Extreme Endurance Athlete.   Transcript of the Podcast: Speaker 1: (00:01) Welcome to pushing the limits, the show that helps you reach your full potential with your host, Lisa Tamati, brought to you by LisaTamati.com. Speaker 2: (00:13) Lisa Tamati here at pushing the limits. Welcome back again, I hope you guys are okay during this coronavirus crisis. That's certainly a big change for us. And today because of that, I wanted to do a session on how to not meet fear, get the better of you all my tips and tricks for helping stay focused at this tough time and how you can stay on track. Um, before I go over to the actual interview, I wanted to, um, remind you that I've just released my book relentless. It is available on my website. Um, you can, I'll put it in the show notes, but you can just hit on over to lisatamati.com and under the shop button you'll find it, the F I'd love you to check it out. And it's actually really good book for this type of crisis because it's all about mindset and it's all about how to keep focus and how to deal with, you know, going up against great odds and really difficult and uncertain times. Speaker 2: (01:02) So you want to check that out. That's relentless how a mother and daughter defied the odds. Go over to my website and check that out. Also at running hot coaching, we've got a special going on at the moment for 12 weeks during this whole lockdown time and in the whole coronavirus wanted to be able to offer extra value and to make it, you know, really affordable for people because we have a whole, not only the running programs now we have a full live workout program that you can do and it's only $49 US dollars to join for the 12 weeks. So if we'd been sitting on the fence for awhile thinking about joining us now would be a perfect time to do that. Especially if you're in lockdown and you want your running training programs and at home workouts. All of it's in there right over to the show. Speaker 2: (01:46) Hi guys, just want me to do a session on not letting fear get the better of you. So about the mix of crosses with the coronavirus, we're probably feeling a lot of fear right now. There's a lot of uncertainty there. Jobs are in dangerous and some of us are incomes and so on. So I wanted to do some practical tips that you can do to control the fear response in your body. Because number one, if you have a fear response going on right now, your immune system is going to be compromised and that's not going to be good as if you're going to be fighting this far as which we hope you won't be. But if you are, you want to make sure your immune system is, is up and running. So the first thing that I want you to look into is done for medic breathing, deep dogmatic breathing. Speaker 2: (02:30) Every time you start to feel out of control, feel triggered, feel stress is to do some deep breathing in through the nose, holding for about four seconds out for four seconds and hold for four seconds. Now that is called box breathing. Now you can do it in a different rhythm. If you've got a really good set of lungs, you might get to seven or eight holding it for that long and doing this just I do this 10, 11 times a day. It's, it's my go to as soon as I'm feeling triggered, as soon as I'm starting to feel upset. Now what does deep do? Well, it stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system. You have to submit two nervous systems, your parasympathetic and sympathetic. You want to be stimulating it this time. And there's a lot of fear around a lot of anxiety. The parasympathetic. Now when you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, you are lowering the levels of cortisol and adrenaline that are being produced. Speaker 2: (03:23) Now these are hormones that are really for fight or flight. So back in the caveman days, which our body is still, you know, back there, we haven't evolved to being really where we are in our current world. So we still react to, uh, outside simulates some, you know, I was fear. So back in the day we might've been running away from a tiger, right? And so we needed this fight or flight response. So the amygdala, which is a part of your brain, deep in your brain, that's your limbic brain, that reptilian brain and its mediate responses to put up your heart, a heart rate, increase your breathing rate, uh, make you shit shallow breathe. It causes in your vision so that you have tunnel vision. Uh, it takes away blood from your prefrontal cortex and gives it all the blood into your muscles and so that you're ready to either fight off or run away. Speaker 2: (04:13) One of the two, the final fight syndrome, you'll know the SES. So that's all control where the medulla, now when you do this, you are taking away energy from your immune system, from your rest and recovery system. And you know, this was a great thing back in the day when we were had periodic stress was situations where we needed to run away from the line really fast. But in our day and age we are constantly bombarded with things like emails or problems with work or a phone call from your shitty boss or something that causes the same response. And it can get to the level where it's chronically your chronic amount of stress and you are constantly in this fight or flight state. So at this time when the coronavirus is here and you've got all this uncertainty, it's really, really important that we start to calm down the parasympathetic nervous system or stimulate, sorry, the parasympathetic nervous system and get things quiet and down. Speaker 2: (05:10) Stop the release of that cortisol and that adrenaline going full bore. And now you want those things at certain times but not constantly because you want your immune system to be operating well and you want to be thinking really clearly and there is a break in your decision making ability when you are in the stressed out state. So going back to the deep breathing now, this deep breathing technique will instantly, and I made really, really quickly start to calm the body down. Another great technique of course is meditation. And this doesn't have to be, you know, sitting on the floor, cross legged in an absolute silence that works for a lot of people and it's fantastic if you can quiet your brain down that way. But it also could just be going for a walk outside and we're all a little bit limited in what we're still at the moment allowed to go outside into get some fresh air. Speaker 2: (06:01) And that brings me to the next point. It's taking, you know, um, control of, of some of the things that you can and not focusing on the things that you can't control right now. Taking control of the basics, good hydration, good nutrition, good sleep habits. All of these things are going to help you to stay in control and make good decisions. Okay. And not focusing just on the negative. The next technique that I wanted to give you is visualization. Now I use this a lot with my athletes and I've certainly used it in my career as an athlete. Visualizing a positive outcome. Visualizing yourself as if it's in a, if it's an a running race, obviously envisaging the whole race and the more real you can make this visualization, the bidder in the cause that we are facing, visualize yourself being in control and being healthy. Speaker 2: (06:51) Visualize yourself and being able to adapt really quickly to this, to the situations at hand and you're getting on top of it and your business is going to be okay and your job is going to be all right. And when you visualize, your brain doesn't differentiate between what is real and what is imagined and okay, you can't control whether you're going to lose your job next week. You can't control movies outside variables, but you can stop your body going into this panic state because that isn't going to help anybody. What you want is your decision making ability on fire. So these visualization techniques can help you to start to regulate that into see a positive outcome. The next thing I want you to think about is the challenge versus threat scenario. So if we see something is a threat, and let's be honest, the crime viruses a bloody big threat right now to everything, to our health, to our loved ones, health to our society. Speaker 2: (07:50) But if we can start to really position they in their minds to see it more as an opportunity or a challenge, then that changes the way we perceive it and we are able to then coat a whole lot better. I'll give you an example from a noncurrent divorce situation, but again from my aesthetic Korea, okay, so if I'm looking at this massive race that I'm doing, it might be in death Valley, it might be in the [inaudible] and the Gobi desert or a Niger. Now, as I'm saying that as a threat and it's going to be terrifying and it's gonna be horrific, then guess what's going to happen? My body's going to shut down. I'm going to be in the fight or flight mode. I'm not going to be reacting really well. I'm not going to be coping when you, well, if I can reframe it in my mind to being an amazing opportunity to have this wonderful adventure and to have to turn it into a challenge in an a, an ability to be able to see this in a positive light. Speaker 2: (08:48) And I want you to think about this. Cisco rhino virus is going to give us some benefits. There are some good things that are going to come out of it for each and every one of us. It might be a complete pervert in your lives and you're going to end up doing another job and get out of that dead end job that you've been stuck in but too scared to leave and now you have to leave. So you're going to have to think and learn and redirect. Maybe that's going to be a good thing at the end of the day, none of us actually know. So they're good. They could be real positive things. Going back to a situation like with my mum and I've, you know, I've got my books here in the background. This the story is a really powerful one for the situation that we're going through. Speaker 2: (09:28) When I was faced with mom's aneurysm and that's the fact that she was probably not going to survive and if she did, she was going to have massive brain damage, which she did have and that she was never going to do anything again and I could've taken that prognosis. And just accepted it and taking no action and stayed on decided, no, I'm going to use this. These people telling me that there's no chance and there's no way I'm going to use that as motivation to prove them wrong and I'm going to make this the greatest comeback story and I'm going to get my mum back. And those were the thoughts that I feed into my mind so that I was able to take big, strong action and so that I was able to cope with the stresses that were come at us and it's been, you know, a four year long battle, don't get me wrong. Speaker 2: (10:12) There were times when I was on the ground balling my eyes out and not knowing which way to go forward. The thing is I did keep moving forward and I did keep looking for the next decision. I hate to make the next situation. The next opportunity and that attitude of going all in is one is lead to him miraculous recovery. This is a one in a million recovery, but it's not a one in a million because she was anything special or because I'm anything special. It was a one in a million recovery because we never even gave up and we kept fighting and we looked for the opportunities and we saw the beauty in this process, and this is why I've written the book, is because I want other people to have a blueprint for your mindset and what it takes to go all in on a challenge. Speaker 2: (10:57) And in this Corrado bar situation, we're going to have to go all in. Some of us, this is gonna be, you know, a threat to our incomes and our lifestyles and a massive of change. And we can either crawl up into a facial ball and start crying our eyes out and go, well I can't take any action or we could be warriors and we can stand up and go. Not a lot. I'm not going to take this line down. I'm going to go down sliding if I'm going to go down in going all in with this, with a situation with mum, I know that I could have done all of that and still failed and still lost here. That wasn't the point though. I had no option but to go all that because the alternative was certain days in certain loss. So I had a tiny chance and I took that tiny chance and when everybody told me it was impossible, I just kicked all moving and kept ignoring the people that told me it was bad. Speaker 2: (11:49) So right now what you also want to be doing is surrounding yourself with positive people. If you're listening to this, but you know this video, then you probably want of those people that is looking for a positive input and good messages. And that's fantastic because you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with. So if you are around positive people who have a direction, who are saying, right guys, this is the way we're going and this is why we're going to think this is the way forward. And you start listening to positive messages instead of the ones who are, Oh my God, the world is ending. It's apocalypse now and it's all going to be horrific. And you know, like we all have moments like there, don't get me wrong that I don't have those moments, but I keep them in check. Speaker 2: (12:34) And then I turned my mind around again and I tune it again and I tune it again. Every time those negative thoughts come up, I start to turn them around. So I wanted to now talk about, uh, exposure therapy. Now this is another therapy that can be really, really helpful if you are feeling a lot of fear. Now this is not exposure to the virus. We don't want that. But this is like when you are feeling fear for a certain situation or a certain thing that you have to do. And it might be like having to change your profession because you know someone's going to has to. Um, I want you to understand that the more you do something, the more it's going to be, the less you're going to be reacting to it. So I'll just give you a simple example of getting on phone calls. Speaker 2: (13:19) If you hate sales calls, which I used to hate doing sales calls. Now I've changed my perception of what that call is about in term repetition and doing it over and over and over again. It becomes actually a conversation with a friend if the coms nothing to be scared of and most of the things that we face in our life that we are scared of are actually not physical threats. Okay. The coronavirus could be a physical threat to you or your loved ones. I'm not mitigating them, but a lot of the fee is that we have running around in their tummy and then their minds at the moment that it's just going around and around like a hamster wheel is things that I'm never ever going to happen. I even say that the thoughts that we have in our head, the disasters scenarios that we're playing out are not going to happen, so why focus on it? Speaker 2: (14:07) Why not put your energies into focusing on how can I make this the best opportunity for me, for my business, for my profession? How can I help other people? How can I turn this into something that is good for me and my world and my business? I am using this as an opportunity to pivot, to change very quickly, to be adaptable. And I've lost my income. I'll be honest with you, at least six months, I don't have any income. Now I'm a speaker. That's what I do. I go around to conferences, well there are not conferences going on, but I'm not going to sit here and start crying about it. I'm gonna change my perception of what I can do. And then I'm going to pivot really quickly into doing other things and focusing on the positive and they don't get to be prepared also for when life comes back to normal. Speaker 2: (14:52) And we'll we go again. So it's your perception of things is controlling your thoughts. Now I want you, I'm also studying at the moment the functional genomics and this is the study of DNA and genes and how they affect the way everything in your body from methylation to mood and behavior to cardiovascular health, to um, detoxification. All of these areas. Okay. But I wanted to talk to you briefly about a couple of the genes that are in your head and I won't go on to the specifics. I'm going to be writing a couple of blog posts, uh, over the next few weeks and I'm still studying this area of science, but it's absolutely fascinating. There are a couple of genes that really, um, control or give you a predisposition to thinking a certain way and you can get yourself tested and DNA and all that sort of stuff later on when all this crosses over and you find out what you have a predisposition for, um, your edge or to being a gene for example, sample, which is y our adrenal, uh, Jane, if you like, the pains are which variation of the gene as to how long that adrenal and is going to be active on your sip as in your body. Speaker 2: (16:03) And if it's, if you've got the gene where it's going to be attached it to the recipients for a long time and active, you're going to have a harder time meeting golf things. You're going to have a harder time, you're going to have a stronger emotional and printer reaction to things. Um, then another person, another saying is that the brain derived neurotrophic neurotrophic factor, which I'm writing a blog post on now because this has to do with brain rehabilitation, but it also has to do with your mood and your behavior and the how, how susceptible you are to depression and a negative frame of mind. And if you have that, the hamster wheel brain that goes over and over and over. So what I want you to take away from this, without getting into the specifics of which Jane is to realize that every single person is different. Speaker 2: (16:49) Hey, do have a different set of genes. And so we all do experience things in a different way. So if you have someone in your most ho is very prone to panic, is very prone to having neurotic thoughts or the hamster wheel going over and over and getting stuck in a thought pattern and not being able to shift at least understanding some of the factors that are in play here and that their genes just may be predisposing them to doing that. And I'm going to share this blog post that I'm writing at the moment on BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor and what you can do to increase set, uh, in order to help elevate your mood. One of those things for example, is to uh, for the baby and is a example. This is to go and do exercise. Now if you're doing at least 30 to 45 minutes of exercise at 70 to 75% of your heart rate, you're going to increase the production of brain derived neurotrophic and that's going to elevate your mood. Speaker 2: (17:51) And this is why I run, let's get the run is high and I know all of us just enjoy running for the running site. Sometimes we don't even feel like going out there, but after half an hour out there, what happens? You mood elevates. What's that? There's some brain derived neurotrophic factor, inaction, other things that also stimulate that and what elevates your mode. Things like having a hot shower or hot bath or being in a hot warm environment or getting more sunlight to make more vitamin D, which will also help you produce more brain derived neurotrophic factor. All of these things are really important also in the brain rehab side, but I won't go into that right now, but just to understand, genetically speaking, we all have different ways of processing things in our brain and having some love and care and empathy for people who've, who don't see them. Speaker 2: (18:39) Some things the same way as you do, who react very differently and some people will have more a deeper emotional imprint. Then other people, some people will be able to get over things much easier because they have the right combination of genes and another person doesn't have that. That is not to be fatalistic and say, well, those people are babied, is to find out the what can you do? Like the saunas and the hot bows and the exercise and the right supplementation and all of that sort of stuff to help you if you are one of those people affected, increase or head of HIPAA. What resilience when it comes to your emotional wellbeing. So more about that later, but for today's podcast it just wants you to think about some of those things that I've covered off. So I want you to be stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system. Speaker 2: (19:31) That means calming your body down. That means stopping the stress and the adrenaline, the cortisol from pouring out all day, all day long. How are you going to do that? You're going to do that through meditation to that true connection to nature, which I've forgotten to mention. You know, like going outside, listening to the birds, looking at the beauty in the trees, looking at the flowers, standing and staring at the beach. If you're still allowed to do that, anything that will connect you and ground you to mother nature will calm your system down. Doing a exercise of course is also going to do there anything that's going to calm the system down. However one portion, don't go and do extremes, amounts of exercise because that will have the opposite effect. Don't overreach at this time. Firstly for your immune system and also for your, you don't want to upset your whole minds and get everything out of balance. Speaker 2: (20:23) Okay, so you want to be, um, a little bit conservative with your training at the moment. Just nice chain tool and doing things like working in and state of just working out. So not just the, you know, running and breathing and hard, hard work, but also aiding and the stretching, the, the yoga, the plankung. So things that are going to calm the body down, especially in the evening when you're wanting to get that slate. Because remember, sleep is absolute King, so doing these basics right and getting good sleep, if you can get it. I was sleep right now would be really gold. It'll help you emotionally cope with the situation and not fall off the DPN and be short tempered and doing all those crazy things. Now, just before I go, you have this thing in the, in the Brian like I said, called the amygdala, which is a very formative part of the brain that controls a lot of these trigger responses. Speaker 2: (21:16) And you know, in the past, I'll be honest with you, I've had a lot of problems with anger management. So I think I've got some warrior dreams from my, my Maori side, either that or the German or Irish sort of data. Um, and I've been triggered in the past and reacted in ways that I, you know, was not proud of afterwards. Um, and also learning to, to manage these reactions. Now a lot better. I wouldn't sound perfect, but I'm a lot bitter. The amygdala reacts before your, uh, your prefrontal cortex kicks into gear. It's very primitive. It's very lightning fast. So if you're feeling triggered right now, you know one of the things that I'm worried about in this crosses is the mystic piece going up is people doing things that they wouldn't normally do because they are stressed out and they're frightened and they're doing all these things and they were make deliver, starting to take control. Speaker 2: (22:07) So I want you to learn just a couple of trucks to keep it under control. One of them is that deep breathing, if you're feeling triggered, if you started to have fights in the family cause you're in close quarters, you've got the kid screaming, you don't know how you're going to pay the bills, your businesses going on the and you're fighting and you know this, this is all us. I think we are all feeling this type of stress right now. Then getting a controlling amygdala and not acting in a triggered state. You know, walking away, going to the other end of the house, doing some deep breathing, starting to tune your logical brain on the way I do this. And getting blood back to the logical brain. Cause the amygdala takes it away from the and helps you, makes you make bad decisions. The rang, I get a controller that as I start to do some logical problem solving things in my brain, like counting backwards from a hundred and lots of seven and I have to go, Oh, how much is that 193 and so on. Speaker 2: (23:04) And I have to actually think about it. And that makes me calm down again and gives me a chance to get on top of that adrenaline and cortisol that's come out and makes me want to have a scratch. Um, cause that's not good. And what you're doing when you get into this triggered state also in, in the anger response is you, uh, releasing the cortisol, which is, which is pumping out your blood sugars. So remember those begin angry and you're going to weight problems. You making things worse. You're going to put on more weight because you've increased your cortisol, you're going to leave the four have, have more, a whole warfare. Okay. So there's one, there's a really good reason not to get angry and to stay cool and calm. And this is one of the reasons why doing yoga and [inaudible] and all of those debriefing and all that actually helps you lose weight, which is not the topic of today's conversation, but it does say it because it's actually lowering the cortisol, the stress levels in the body. Speaker 2: (24:01) Interesting, isn't it? How we, uh, such complex characters and if we understand more about our physiology and our biology and how things actually interplay, then they can really, really help us in overcoming all these challenges that we're facing. So that's makes us very, guys, I hope this has been helpful to you or please decide that the, or if you want to reach out to me, please do. I'm, you know, this is what I, I'm begging to the mental game. I'm big into the mindset and mental toughness and leadership in, you know, um, some of the lessons that I've learned along in my now quite long nights, um, and sharing those insights with you. Not from a place of I know better because God knows I still have a hell of a lot of things to learn. But from applied, so via I've, I've experienced a few things, bring around the block a few times and wanting to share some of these insights. Speaker 2: (24:53) I do that also on my podcast, which is called pushing the limits. I would love you to go and subscribe to pushing the limits because I have some of the greatest minds. I don't know how I get some of these amazing people on the air, but I do, if you look back over the episodes that I've managed to record in the last four years, you've got Nobel prize winning scientists. You've got, you know, some of the top scientists actually in the world, some of the top doctors in the world, some of the top athletes in the world. And I'm not exaggerating, there's been some absolute legends on my show. Say, you know, I be a good way to spend a few of those nails we stuck at home. Um, uh, listening to the podcast is called pushing the limits. You can find it on iTunes, on Lipson, on Stitcher, or via my website, at least at [inaudible] dot com and while you're the gone grab one of my books, one of my friends, uh, especially running this right now is a super book for you to be reading, to strengthen your mind. And, um, really thank you for your time today. And we'll see you again soon. Speaker 1: (25:49) that's it this week for pushing the limits. Be sure to write, review and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com

Today’s podcast, as you guessed it, is a reflection on what’s been happening with COVID-19. The whiskey industry is going to see some big changes. We’ve seen legislation pass as it relates to shipping and delivery of alcohol because it’s deemed an essential part of living and our culture. How long will this trend stick around and will we see this continue when the pandemic is over? Do you want to see more relaxed liquor laws? Lets hear it in the comments. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Barrell Craft Spirits has won a few medals at some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there, but don’t take their word for it and find out for yourself. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about grains. Lots has changed since our last roundtable with COVID-19. Are people actually drinking more? Or are they just hoarding? Is distribution down with distilleries producing hand sanitizer? Will COVID-19 change consumer demand indefinitely with services for shipping and delivery? KY HB415 has passed. What could this mean for the greater United States? Should these large corporations that have donated 50k, 500k, or 1M be donating more? Billions in revenue vs a small donation amount in comparison. When this is all over, what’s the best thing that will come out of COVID-19? 0:00 Are you interested in preparing your expertise on the distilling process with key business knowledge such as finance, marketing and operations, then you need to check out the distilled spirits business certificate from the University of Louisville. It's an online program that can be completed in as little as six courses. The program is taught by both UVL business faculty and corporate fellows. So you are getting real experience from experts at the most renowned distilleries, companies and startups in the distilling industry. We're talking leaders from Brown Forman beam Suntory, jack daniels and more. get enrolled to this online program at U of l.me. Slash bourbon pursuit. So your meetings of the day are Andy, Donald Trump. 0:46 No wonder you drink Jesus. 1:01 This is Episode 249 of bourbon pursuit. And it's another week stuck at home. I don't know about you, but we're party hopping. We're going from the living room to the dining room, the kitchen, all just looking for some entertainment. And as you can guess the industry news has also been pretty slow. So you're in luck. We've got a short intro this week. We all know that restaurants and bars are feeling the pain right now. So one man in Tampa, Florida stepped up with a $40,000 cashier's check to purchase a bottle of the old Rip Van Winkle 25 year decanter that was listed for $20,000 to help save debts one of his favorite restaurants in the area. This bottle was only one of 710 that was released back in 2017. That had an MSRP of around 1800 dollars. In bourbon pursuit news. Our jack daniels barrel proof single barrel went on sale this week. And then it's sold out. Because of COVID-19. We've had to delete three of our barrel selections this year, and we're hoping we will have to reschedule anymore but I hope everyone can 2:00 Be grateful that we've got ourselves a few good bottles that get us through this process. And if you want to see all the barrel selections that we have scheduled, and the ones that we have for the rest of the year, go to patreon.com. Slash bourbon pursuit. During this time when you're hanging out with family or friends on zoom, they might be seeing you there sipping a bourbon neat. While they've got a cold, refreshing beer in their hands. Ask if they want to try some of your bourbon, fill up a sample bottle or to walk it over, drop it in their driveway, put it in their mailbox, take this opportunity to spread the good word of bourbon. And since they're stuck at home, tell them to check out your favorite bourbon podcast so they can binge and catch up as well. You'd be doing both of us a favor, and we'd really appreciate it. As you know, we're pushing out more content on live streams. So make sure that you're following our social media handles. And you may have even seen some bonus episodes this past week as well. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and make sure that you never miss those bonus episodes. today's podcast as you guessed it is a reflection on what's been happening with the Coronavirus 3:00 The whiskey industry is going to see some big changes. Because of this. We've seen an insurmountable push for legislation. And that's been passed because reflects the shipping and delivery of alcohol because it's now deemed an essential part of living in our culture. But how long will this trend stick around? Can we continue to see this as the pandemic is over? Hopefully, we get to see more relaxed laws continue to happen. And if you want to see more relax laws and what you'd like to see changed, let's hear it in the comments. Once again, enjoy this time inside with your family. Have a nice pour bourbon, and now you get to hear Joe from barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred minich, with above the char. 3:39 I'm Joe Beatrice, founder of barrel craft spirits. Our Bourbons have won a few medals, some of the most prestigious spirits competitions out there, but don't take their word for it. Find out for yourself. Use the store locator at barrel bourbon calm. 3:53 I'm Fred MiniK, and this is above the charm. This week's idea comes from an old email 4:00 Keith Norton wrote on March 3, sorry for the delay Keith wanted to know, what's the difference between bourbon rye bourbon, and a weighted bourbon from a taste perspective? is one sweeter than another? does one have a multi flavor? And, yeah, happy to approach that. It's actually a good good chunk of that information in my book bourbon curious that you can go to and it's a pretty good guide. Look, when it comes to breaking down the flavors of all whiskies, not just bourbon, but scotches. There's so much that goes into it. The mash bill is something that we tend to get 4:42 connected to because we understand it, we really start formulating thoughts about how one profile is different when in fact, a weeded bourbon has is historically going in at lower barrel entry proofs and I would argue that hey, maybe it's 5:00 Not the wheat that's causing it to have that real velvety structure and the deep caramel notes. Maybe it's the barrel entry proof. And then you have 5:10 the high rye Bourbons that tend to be extraordinarily spicy. I've had some of late that tend to be more floral than spicy. And where does that come from? Why it's a matter of fact, the yeast, but talking about the yeast is not necessarily as sexy as as the grain. Now there are definitely those that are more malt forward and heaven Hill is a kind of a like a classic example for me that they tend to a lot of their whiskies will have like a caramel malt flavor to it. Now where's that coming from? ag could very well be their distillation technique or the the way the barrels raging. But when it comes down to it, you do have some generalizations to how these whiskies will taste in nine times out of 10 the higher the right content, the more spicy 6:00 You will find okay so I'm talking about like pepper, cinnamon, cardamom all these like baking spices that you would like have in your your baking spice rack, you know you'll find a lot more of those and the higher right Bourbons, you'll also tend to find like a nugget of herbs from time to time. Now the weeded Bourbons will they tend to be a just a touch sweeter, just a touch softer and they don't have that same kind of vibrant finish on kind of a generalization. Now you give me a William LaRue Weller from the Buffalo Trace antique collection and you're gonna get your socks knocked off, you know, so I mean, it varies but Maker's Mark which is kind of like the everyday standard, you know, we did bourbon, you know, four or five years old we did. recipe, you know, a lot of people will taste that and says it's very wood forward has nothing to do with a wheat 7:00 So more more of the things that we taste in a nose out of whiskies, you know, grains only probably make up 20 to 30% of, of the, of the flavor. Most of it's coming from the barrel and the techniques, if you were really you need to lump the grains into like the fermentation techniques. So if you put that if you put the grains in the same kind of like soup as the fermentation and the yeast, you know, then I think that that 20 to 30% goes up to about 40% it's all about who you talk to, and you know what distillery prioritizes? How, you know how they make it. So is the grain important? Oh, God, absolutely. It all starts with the grain. But is it the end all be all for the taste and flavor that you get? No. But it sure is fun to talk about and it's easy to understand. So that's the 8:00 This week's above the char Hey, if you have an idea for above the char like Keith, why don't you write me an email you can go to my website Fred minik.com that's Fred minich comm click that contact button, and at the very least, maybe we can start a conversation about good bourbon. Until next week. Cheers 8:21 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon. This is the 43rd recording of the I know that sounds like a question. It is the 43rd recording of the bourbon Community Roundtable actually to have the second guess myself because it's so many times but Fred Ryan, good to see you all again on this glorious quarantine evening. How are you all? Great. I feel like I see you all more on quarantine virtually in real life. 8:51 No, it's Oh, it's always just good to hang out with my with my fellows. It's good to see you guys. Well, I would say that I'm I'm getting 9:00 Getting a little stir crazy, like I'm ready for this stuff to end. It's that or I'm also getting to the point now where I have to get on like zoom meetings for my daughter, because she has like virtual soccer practice or like classrooms and stuff. And it's killing me because I've been using zoom for three years now. And I know how to press the damn mute button, and you log on and it's just chaos. There's just sound coming from everywhere. 9:26 Well imagine what it's like to be a teacher. You know, I mean, this whole thing has made me realize that we don't pay our teachers enough in and whatever we can do to increase their salaries. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah, we can pay their salaries. 9:43 Exactly. I'm all about it. I'm all about it. So we've got it. We've got a good lineup of stuff to talk about tonight. But let's go ahead, we'll go around the horn. And you know, because a lot actually changed since we're here at the Ross roundtable with COVID-19 but I was able to just do the regular introductions. 10:00 So we'll start off with Blake Blake, just kind of tell people where you blog at. And, you know, if if you know, where do you think or how do you think Carol Baskins actually killed her husband? 10:11 Yeah. So I'm Blake from bourbon er. You probably know me as the Cal Ripken roundtable still undefeated on the roundtable that you know, if you're undefeated by just showing up that's how that's what I kind of W in this in this world. But no, always fun to be here. So thanks again. Yeah, everyone who watched Tiger King, go back and listen to the podcast. I feel like that's the new debate. It's like, well, was the movie better? Was the book better? You know, our generations debate was was the podcast better? Or was the documentary better on Netflix? So check that out. Definitely more entertaining. So I'll go out and check the podcasts. We actually ended up watching last night the the kind of like after, whatever it is with Joel McHale. And so it kind of talked about, it was just like a one hour series of just you know, interviewing pretty much everybody 11:00 Except the tiger king himself, so it was, it was pretty good. Yeah, check that on Netflix if you haven't yet. Officially on Netflix, I saw everybody complaining on Twitter that Joel was basically just making fun of everyone. 11:14 He made fun of himself too. So, okay, that's what makes a good host. Yeah, he was also tied in so we me and Joel McHale something in common. 11:26 Yeah, just go ahead and just dm each other on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, but the glory days. 11:33 All right, Jordan, what do you think was did she feed into the Tigers are buried in a septic tank? Oh 100% the Tigers quick, easy. They were hungry. Why not? So this is Jordan from breaking bourbon calm and catch us on the socials at breaking bourbon. Make sure to visit this site for our near daily Release Calendar updates. Awesome. And Brian, what are your thoughts? Do you think Carol did it or you think you think you think maybe she's she's clean on this one. 12:00 I mean, you are the wall here. Well, I'm gonna throw you for a loop on this. I haven't seen it. I don't have Netflix. I'm also the person who avoided seeing Titanic and Avatar, so I try not to do those things. Yeah, I'm really exciting like that. Yeah. 12:17 Titanic was it because you like you already knew what the end was gonna have. It was well is knew what was gonna happen and it was it people were too far into it. Well, it was too big. I guess I was contrarians on that. 12:29 But I can't so I can't. I mean, I know from Twitter what's going on, but I'm clueless when it comes to it. 12:36 But if so, if you want boring stuff that's not up to date. Come see Brian here, right. sipping corn mostly on Twitter, sipping corn calm and bourbon justice, calm. Thanks for having me on again, guys. As always, man, always happy to have you here. So I guess the one thing we want to start talking about is because a lot has happened since the last time we talked, I remember it was what three weeks ago 13:00 Go. And it was maybe actually it's probably four weeks ago things were like just starting to snowball, right? Just a little bit. I know Jordan in Pennsylvania like there was talk of like some things happening but they hadn't closed down all the liquor stores yet. And now they now they like reopen them up somewhat like online like a hot mess. Yeah. So yeah, so for those at home that don't know about PA, it's a state run system. And it's beyond sloppily managed on a good day, right? Oh, 13:33 they shut down the liquor stores. But before they did that, they announced that they're gonna shut it down. There is of course, a mad rush and ever ignored social distancing. And they also shut down online delivery. And then they've opened up online delivery maybe like a week or two ago, but I have yet to talk to one person who has figured out a way to get in. And it was really funny. So they did an article, like basically saying the came out touting the success of the online liquor. 14:00 Store and how well it's going right? They basically measured it by saying, Well, on a normal day we get, we processed four orders an hour, but now we're up to like 50 orders an hour. Right? And you think about that, and that's an entire state, right. So like any other private business would go out of business long time ago. And somehow pa spins out for a wind. So it's been a hot mess, the good news, local distilleries around pa or shipping. You know, we've seen a lot of uptick in supporting local, which is great. And I'm a huge advocate, especially during this time supporting local for all businesses. So we've seen a huge influx of people around the state buying from their local distilleries or trying out new distilleries around the state, which is really nice, but point at the state just dropped the ball on this one. And I guess that kind of goes into really like the first subjects when we look at the way that consumer demand has really changed from COVID-19. I mean, let's let's not beat around the bush like we've been touting this for a long time. And you know, Blake's been on the forefront with opening sealed box and trying to get shipping happening in and making that happen. 15:00 And then all of a sudden you see drizzly and instacart and Bart and all these different kind of services like they're gonna meet like five or six x three annual projections now, and you now are also seeing every single liquor store every single restaurant scrambling to get their, their, their online or basically get their store online. And not only that, I mean, we'll talk about how 15 Hospital for 15 and a little bit, but I mean, do we see that after this thing starts ending like after it's over? Are we going to see some of these services start going like back to normal? Or do you think this is this is gonna be the new normal? thing, Pandora's Box been open when it comes to liquor delivery, that's for sure. So, you know, other businesses aside, I think consumers now are realizing Well, we should be able to everything else. When we get to our doorstep, we should, you know, be able to get liquor to our doorstep to and the convenience is just there, right. I mean, if you can avoid a trip to the store, they don't have it in stock, all that stuff. Sure. And I think people are once they once they get used to it. They're going to continue to 16:00 expect that afterwards and I don't blame them. And it's not going to take along the east to this. I mean, if we can get drive up cocktails made ahead of us for the from the restaurant and get that and if we can get curbside service or delivery service from the liquor store. I mean, it's the trains leaving the station already. I hope that's I hope this lasts. One thing that I noticed that after after I wrote that Forbes story, and 16:26 I can't remember what the title was, was something to do with like a pandemic, you know, bring a war between the distillers and wholesalers. I got a lot of feedback from distillers thanking me for this the one thing that I have realized in this in this current state is that the distilleries really really want shipping. I mean, they want they want shipping, probably more than anything that's out there. And 16:55 you know, they don't all come out talking about it, but they all really want it 17:00 Because it's another revenue driver for them. And this has shown that this is where the consumer populace wants to live moving forward because we're not. I don't know where when you know, when we're going to go back to normal. I mean, everyone wants to talk about, you know, when that's going to be a nobody got a crystal ball, but everybody needs a drink. And that drive thru is nice. That delivery is really freakin nice. And so let's I want to talk to the guy a little bit that that actually could show us a graph of sales like Blake, what have you seen in regards of like, just your online sales? I mean, have they increased at all? Or is it kind of status quo? It definitely has, um, it's a little hard because it is a newer company. So like saying that it's up, you know, 90% over last year's is a little bit of a, you know, a false sense of what's actually happening because I don't have a ton of historical data but in general, you know, you have what they call OMD. So October 18:00 November, December, then it slumps. And we still haven't seen that slump yet. You know, it's it's been jumping right up. And, you know, it's funny, you can kind of see as some of these states, certain states in particular will, they'll call for a lockdown, and we'll see an increase in traffic from those states. So it is a really interesting thing because I think a lot of these government officials are having to think about this for the first time whereas before they just had a lobbyist or whoever was saying, nope, we can't do that. It's not safe. And it's like hold on with all this. It's like, what Why is this not safe again, like it's not safe for people to go to a liquor store. So explain to me why it's not safe for them to have it delivered to their home. So you know, you don't want to say like something good comes out of this where we get this push through because it is so minor compared to what we're facing, but it it has a lot of people rethinking it and, you know, just on the steelbook side, we've seen a giant increase in in sales and people interested 19:00 from other states that we can't ship to, and it's like, hey, why can't you ship to me in New York? We're, you know, we're locked down and I'm like, I'd love to, but your state says we can't. So. 19:11 Yeah, a fear I have 19:14 is then that they're going to be so busy trying to rebuild their states and do deal with so much more important issues that's gonna get put on the back burner even more. And so like, I don't know, it's every day It seems like Andy gets at contended our governor gets asked like, so why are liquor stores essential? You know, and like, it's so you know, there's still people trying to like prod that there. You know, because we have some inch, we have an interesting demographic in our state. Well, I think I think we might have talked about that last time picking back on that though, Ryan, so I know. Right? And that's what was surprising for a lot of people in Pennsylvania because there is you know, I've read a lot of articles from just doctors and nurses have the same thing as much as we don't want admit it right like alcohol. 20:00 abuse is a large issue for a large amount of the population and if you don't give them access to alcohol then they're the ones clogging up the hospitals oh yeah right no doubt so and but I think that also should show you like it should be eye opening for a lot of people yeah for sure no doubt i mean i i totally agree and this is kind of broke down that barrier like that distributors could say Oh, it's not safe but now they're like we need this to keep sales going. So it's like you know it's a it's pretty funny but yeah, I hope it all continues on because I mean, it's it's fantastic. We tried the drizzly app and got stuff shipped to our house and now I got all my neighbors doing it for party mark here and like they're like loving it. It's it's pretty sweet. 20:42 You know, there's a there's been another wrinkle that's come up from this and you know, while the the shipping stuff and everything is Come on, I you You always hear me talk about this. But the anti alcohol people have started coming on saying that this is 20:59 they're looking 21:00 To try and ban alcohol and every single state right now. So they're they're taking advantage of this pandemic in a very different way. They're saying that this is going to lead to more abuse in the homes there's going to be more domestic abuse, there's going to be more alcohol related problems, there's going to be more liver failures and stuff. So they're taking this as an opportunity to say, hey, look at all these sales, you know, our country we're going to be hurting from this we need to ban all liquor sales. I mean, that that's some of the stuff that that's also going going on right now back door, and I just with legislators, I feel like we should make an amendment to the Constitution then if that's what it's gonna be to 21:36 try that. 21:40 Yeah, Brian, you're not busy, right? 21:43 Let's do that. Round two. I know there's a surge in sales, but it's more of like a stocking up thing. Like I just don't see it continuing down this path. Like if things kind of slow. Well, I go back open and so like, is this stocking up or have you guys seen those videos of people going on and 22:00 Dog filming their neighbors recycle bins 17 bottles of wine Yeah. And and bourbon bottles all over the place. Yes. I don't know if it's stocking up, you know, in full transparency my my consumption is definitely up because I don't know everyday feels like a Friday and a Saturday kind of so it's like Alright, well it is five o'clock I can go ahead and have a drink and then some days like alright, it's three o'clock I'm not doing anything the rest of the day. You know, I'm not getting drunk or hammered any of the times, but it's definitely more than I normally would during the week. 22:37 So you know that that adds up over time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. My consumptions way up it actually yesterday. I was like, I'm taking a day off yesterday. Yeah, fires me. And I still haven't had a drink yet. And I'm like, I was like, I haven't not drank ever since since it started it. You know, I would usually drink take like three or four days off a week. But now it's like you 23:00 You just do 234 every night because you get off at five o'clock with Andy. And then he cut in President Trump's lawn and then you have dinner. 23:08 And then you put your you have dinner with your kids and you turn on a movie, then you have more drinks. And then next thing you know you're in bed and you wake up, repeat. So so your meetings of the day are Andy, Donald Trump. 23:24 No wonder you, Dre. Jeez. 23:28 I might be the only one like, I feel like I'm still like my, like normal scale like myself. I'm right there with you, Kenny. Yeah, I was like, I don't really think anything's really changed in that regard. However, there were a lot of stats that came out. I mentioned them. I believe last week on the opening of the podcast, talking about really like there has been a spike in alcohol sales like it's there's, there's no you know, there's no hiding it like there has been a surge. But then there was another great article that came out an opinion article by Steve Coombs last week that kind of talks about like are people actually doing 24:00 making more or are they just hoarding? Because if you look at the actual sales of things that are happening, it's a lot of like 1.75 and one liters of stuff. And so that equates to a lot of unfortunately Tito's, but there's also a lot of 1.7 fives of Maker's Mark and other types of, you know, basically bulk whiskey that people are actually purchasing rather than going out and you know, getting this little 750 here or anything like that people actually making these big bulk purchases. However, I think most of us here have enough bourbon in their library or their 24:36 choose any random choose any random closet in your house that could defeat the most general populace out there. So I tell you, I've been doing these nightly tastings and I've been trying to be creative with the stuff I taste and, and 24:52 and that's when you I found that that's, that's the one the one way to like determine how much I really care about a bottle because I'm finding myself 25:00 been very reluctant to go into my stash of like 1930s the 1950s stuff. And 25:09 and I'm like, I, I know it's I know people want to see me drink that, but I can't do it. I can't open it up yet. I don't want to open it up for that I want to open up for something else. So maybe it'll we'll get there. But what I have noticed is that yes, well we have a lot of stuff. It's very interesting to see what I am drinking. Because, you know, when I'm that, you know, live streaming or something, I'm drinking something very different. And it's not stuff that I would know that I wouldn't think I would be drinking. So just Evan Williams bottled and bond 25:41 it's nothing like that. It's mainlining it it's funny you say that phrase because I think you know, mean economic have talked about this a few times. We've almost taken like the opposite approach. In fact, Eric did an opinion piece on the site not too long ago where, you know, the more we The more we know, people are getting impacted especially from economic and being in New York. I think 26:00 Almost switched our mindset to be like you have a special bottles we're holding on to maybe we'll start cracking one or two more of those more often just because you never know. Right? So I think it's interesting you say that and it'll be even more interesting to see how your mentality changes the longer the actual lockdown goes down. Right? Yeah, that'll be truly interesting. Yeah, it's definitely a psychological thing and it's not really it's, it's I'm definitely still drinking the good stuff Don't get me wrong, but I mean, I've got some of those really, really rare bottles that I hunted for worked hard to get and, and, you know, I was looking forward to like cracking them open with friends and like, our night or something nothing and it's like when the hell am I ever going to be around people? Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, I'd like to look at the see that that hopefully the lies at the end of the tunnel, but man, I just something tells me it's not though. I really want this to be over soon. But today was pretty. It's pretty grim. So yeah, yeah. How do we how do how do we get to it? 27:00 point where we're not. We talk about it, but not like in the depressing sense. It's like, Oh, yeah, so make sure you wear your new mask out there, by the way, the weather is going to be 55 and sunny today. You know, it's only when you become used to it, and no one no one's bracing for that. Yep. It's a maybe a poor analogy, right. But in terms of so think when the smog index came out, and you know, you go to a polluted city or pluta country stuff like that, and used to be home in the smog, like off the chart now. It's just like, you know, la or, you know, if I go to India or anything like that, it's like, here's a smog for the day. Gonna be bad for your health. Moving on. That's it, and you're like, Oh, okay. normal part of life now. All right. It's just gonna be kind of like that, like, viruses are breaking out. Just be extra productive today. All right. Great. Thanks. So the trash cans, employees, please don't. But it's a good question that came in from Brian here. And he's wondering if, if the distribution from distilleries distributors is way down right now, especially with hand sanitizer production going on. Along with folks being quarantine. I mean, what 28:00 What do you think is the the short term and the long term outcome of what we're going to see here? So I actually talked with a couple people about this from the distributor aspect. And they were saying that basically, their sales numbers were about pretty close to dead on what they were in prior months. And that's 100% because of off premise. So they lost all of the on premise. And we're able to make up the majority of it with off premise sales. 28:29 Now for other distilleries who rely heavily on their tasting room or that's even you know, they lost that part which really hurts but as far as like the big guys go, I don't know that they're that affected because the demand through distribution has been so strong because retail has been so strong. 28:48 So I don't know it'll be interesting to see how that all I think the hand sanitizer thing is great for their, for them just kind of giving back, but it's not really making up 29:00 A huge part of their revenue. And ultimately, I think it's the smaller guys who are going to be affected who, who have a bigger, you know, tasting room and all that kind of all those kind of sales going on. Yeah, I mean, anybody who geared up for tourism is just looking at this scared and glammed up scared, kind of want to get, you know, Brian or Jordans kind of thoughts if we see any kind of short or long term effects of these distilleries haven't been shut down or producing sanitizer. Yeah. So, sanitizer. I think it's great. I'll address that first. I think it's awesome. I think it's great. I have yet to see some hit areas or at least even be available online. I think it's going to first responders, which is the right thing, so that's even better. But I was thinking about this the other day as I was going for a run on the treadmill, right? So all these distilleries the last two years have just dumped money and expanding their visitor centers right Woodford just opened up their new one right buffalo trail. 30:00 was doing a huge expansion. Everyone's that was the whole the whole shtick, right? let's dump more money, let's think big thing, right? But those who have put all this money in there, it's almost a shame because I don't know if it's ever going to go back to the way of having just a crush of people line up at a bar right thing of going to a Woodford for a Buffalo Trace on a Saturday, right, with all the tourists. Everyone's just lined up getting shots and tasting your samples and stuff like that. And that may never go back to the way it was. And, you know, they might be regretting that that influx of cash, they just put in that this your experience now. I mean, I think it'll come back to at least some extent, but that's never where they're making their money. I mean, they have to get the people there in the first place. And there are a lot more people who are drinking Woodford than ever that ever make it to that tour or to any other distilleries. So they've they've got plenty of bourbon that they've distilled in the last few years socked away, that'll still come to the market. 31:00 They just need to find a new way to market it. And instead of trying to bring people to the distillery, which I think is a small percent, I mean, it's a growing percentage, but it's a smaller percentage. So we're taking a hit on the old bourbon trail, as far as that marketing goes, but there's, I think there's plenty more to do and they can recover from that. Yeah, and humans forget things. I mean, it's, yeah, we're I mean, it's easy now to say all we can but it's like even like after the last recession, you know, like and people got in trouble with you know, loans and mortgages or whatever and like a year later, they're doing the exact same damn thing. Yeah, we're still giving like no proof mortgages in like, you know, I AR, whatever you call it, but just alarms and all that. Yeah, arms. Yeah. We just need like two more tweets that says whiskey kills the virus and it'll open. 31:56 Start just spreading the rumors now might as well 32:00 So I guess that kind of makes me want to go into sort of like the next segment here. And that's looking at House Bill 415. So I know that a lot of us have been kind of following this for for quite some time in regards of what this means. And there's this, this great PDF that got sent out by some of the people that were for the bill and making it happen. So just to kind of like digest this down. What this really means is that, and hopefully what this means is a potential domino effect of what we could see for the rest of the United States to hopefully latch on to. And this is the giving the ability for distilleries to now ship direct to consumers, completely bypassing a distributor and bypassing and actually, I guess they function as the retailer in this point, right. And that's what I know that there was a lot of 32:52 commotion, I guess, you could say from distributors and everything like that and retailers that didn't want this. I mean, of course, you don't want this right. I mean, 33:00 Kinda like it pokes a hole in your whole business model. But the the other side of this is that this is now putting spirits and putting Kentucky as one of the first states to now have the same exact law as around what is it like 40 or 42 other states that allows shipping of wine, right i mean shipping and wine from California or anywhere else like that's pretty, pretty standard. 33:25 However, this is now starting to allow this to happen for for greedy spirits. So looking at this now, I'm all for it. I think this is something that we've been offered for a while Blake, I know is he's over the moon for it. But I kind of want to think is there because I know Fred, we had brought this up before and this that you know you you had talked about the warning signs of saying like, well, all it's gonna take is for like, you know, one kid intercept something and then this could all all go under. Has this bill passed like sort of change your mind and regarding 34:00 of of potentially like the shift we're starting to see in in the legal side of things 34:10 What do you get if you mix Seattle craft, Texas heritage and Scottish know how that's to bar spirits to our spirits traces its roots to a ranch in rural Texas run by the founder, Nathan Kaiser his family for six generations. Nathan grew up on the ranch with stories of relatives bootlegging moonshine, and after moving into Seattle, he wanted to keep the family tradition alive and he opened to bar spirits in 2012. They're very traditional distillery making everything from scratch and each day starts by milling 1000 pounds of grain. Their entire product lineup consists of only two whiskies, their moonshine, and the only bourbon made in Seattle. Both bottles are being featured in rack house whiskey clubs next box. rack house whiskey club is a whiskey the Month Club, and they're on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer racquel 35:00 out to have the feature distilleries finest bottles, along with some cool merchandise in a box delivered to your door every two months, go to a rack house whisky club.com to check it out and try some to bar for yourself. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box 35:19 you had talked about the warning signs of saying like, well, all it's gonna take is for like, you know, one kid intercept something and then this could all all go under. Has this bill passed, like sort of change your mind in regards of of potentially like the, the shift we're starting to see in in the legal side of things. Well, first of all, I've always been for you know, some type of shipping. I've always thought that you know if wine can do it, you know, whiskey should have that same, right. I've always just taken the side of like, taking the kind of devil's advocate side of like, I know like how the wholesalers think and as soon as this bill was passed, they came out against it. 36:00 very heavily. And basically said it was a shame that Kentucky took advantage of a, of a pandemic to get this thing passed. And they called the they called the KDA. And a bunch of people who push for quote bad actors. I they use that a lot in their press releases. I still don't understand what that means. Well, still hasn't like approved or vetoed it right. He's hasn't even like, right. Didn't auto into Milan? Yeah, but not until like June or July, I believe. So there's a 90 day period before it become goes into law. But it's like it was but by him not signing it or vetoing it, it basically passed and that was just the weird provision to it. So it's, it's good. But yeah, I think from a from, 36:50 from an overall perspective of like, people have kind of swung to this pendulum of like, as long as someone is checking the ID 37:00 And oh, by the way, the wholesalers, they own a little piece of a company called drizzly. So they're okay with delivery as long as they are getting, you know, it's as it seems as long as they are, have like a guaranteed structure of someone, you know, being 21. And someone texted me today and said, The wholesalers are okay, as long as they're getting their cut. That's what I was gonna say. I was like, making sure that we're getting there. 25% that's what I was making sure that that's what they're gonna say. And and that's a, I get that. But, look, if wineries can do it distillers should be able to that's it. You just sound like a bad actor. That's all it is. 37:41 But I mean, I mean with this, it's still only two like six reciprocating states, right. So it's, it's more than that. It's like 12, I believe. Yeah, it's a handful. But yeah, it's a handful and it's in that it's in that release. 37:56 But the some of the big wind states are on there. So 38:00 California is not on there. But you know, Rhode Island. What are we going to get from Rhode Island or Hawaii? I mean, hold on the islands get some decent distilleries. How do they do it? 38:11 Alright, so here are the states. Alaska. 38:15 Arizona. I you know what? No, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island and Washington DC giddy up. I mean, when I look at this, though, I try to think picture it from. And I think this is one of the things that Chris, one of the people that helped draft this and lobby for it kind of looked at this as really the first domino to fall, right. I mean, this is this is a radical change in consumer demand and the way that laws have to now adapt to what we're going through. I mean, I think john Henderson said it in the YouTube channel, but earlier, like, it only took a global pandemic, for us to finally move the industry forward. Right and 39:00 And if you look at that, I think we are moving in the right direction. Now it's a move in the right direction, but you need you need a legit state to jump on board with this to make it matter. And I think we're the first logistic unit. Well, the thing is the the list of states you just listed off there nothing in the record, you mean like a large long Nabila? gorgeou, Florida, you're nice. No, I like that. And that's when it's gonna make the most difference, like because the no offense the other states, but they're, they're peanuts compared to those and like, I just have a feeling to those states are gonna iron fisted, you know, to keep it in their states as well. So is that right move in the right direction, but it's not there yet. Well, I mean, do you look at this as a move for that? Or is it a move to actually help distilleries? Right, this is this is another another way that we can look at putting more money back into the pocket of the distillers. We've, I don't know how many times we've talked about this on the show that the three tier system has been a problem. 40:00 That's why the secondary market exists because, you know, they it goes off to the distributor and distributor goes, Well, I don't know, like it goes to whatever kind of algorithm that they want to however they want to do it. This now puts a little more power to the distilleries, if they want to do it. Yeah, they are. But they still have to have the distributor to process the tax payments and stuff. So the distributor is going to charge something and get a little bit but it does, it's definitely great for the distiller because they're gonna keep more revenue, but the distributors have, because I doubt each distillery is gonna have their own, you know, maybe they will, but I don't see enough. I just don't see enough shipping demand with those states to justify having a dedicated team to deal with the tax implications of you know, shipping and cutting out the distributor as the current level, not just attacks the right building out three commerce capabilities, building out the team, that shipping everything dealing with the customer experience online and all that stuff. It's it's harder than people realize to just snap your fingers and do those things. I think Transcribed by https://otter.ai

I call it "flow state" - the time I spend working on things that move the needle. When I'm in flow state, I can get 4 days worth of work done in 4 hours... and it's because I'm working on things that MATTER! So I'll teach you in this podcast how to stop running full speed on a treadmill, tiring yourself out but going nowhere... and how to treat your life like a ladder instead that takes you to your next level!

Most entrepreneurs do everything themselves and they end up becoming their own bottlenecks in business.   These entrepreneurs have worked long and hard to remove themselves from being the bottleneck but what happens if another staff member becomes the bottleneck instead? How do you remove bottlenecks when the business is booming because of great staff members? The solution to this problem and more, in today’s Freedom In Five Minutes. ----- Automated Transcript Below Dean Soto  0:00   Hey, this is Dean Soto — founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com. We're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode. Today's topic is this: "You May not be the Bottleneck. But are You Creating More Bottlenecks in Your Business?" That and more coming up.    Dean Soto  0:30   Well good morning! We are here once again with the Luna Meister. Luna is having a blast sniffing some — not other dogs. We only have Luna for now. We will get some other dogs soon. But for now, she's just enjoying her doggie day running around the acreage.    Dean Soto  0:53   So, today I woke up to very Interesting happenings. So we have one customer who was absolutely amazing in what they do. They create a ton of videos. So there iss a ton of processes and it's a design company.    Dean Soto  1:11   It's a design company that does design work for a lot of other big-named companies. And the emails that were flying around were basically that their VSA was bedridden in the hospital. And so, the Virtual Systems Architect — if you don't know go to FreedomInFiveMinutes.com or ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com — but he was bedridden in the hospital.    Dean Soto  1:12   At first, when I saw the emails, I'm like, "Oh, man. Okay, well, he's just out." Well, the guy. The VSA. The Virtual Systems Architect did not want to stop working. So he just kept on working, working, working, working.    Dean Soto  2:05   And it was actually one of my general managers who were like, "Dude, you need to stop or else you're not going to get better."   Dean Soto  2:13   And so, we reached out to the client saying, "Hey, you know, I got him to stop, and he'll be back either tomorrow or the next day. But he needs to rest."    Dean Soto  2:27   The client was like, "Well, we don't know who's going to do his work."    Dean Soto  2:37   And then we asked — my guy actually suggested, "Hey, well, we can put somebody else in there temporarily, and just work off the process documents."    Dean Soto  2:48   And the customer responded, "Well, it's not as easy as that. There's a lot of things that he's become familiar with that requires some thinking."   Dean Soto  3:04   And so, as far as for today and for tomorrow, it sounds like the client is going to actually end up having to do the work.    Dean Soto  3:41   All right. So what happened is, originally, this client was the bottleneck. And now, he has made a bottleneck out of somebody else.    Dean Soto  3:52   This is a habit that a lot of people have. It's normal, right? It's normal to not want to do the hard-easy things before they become the easy-hard things. Meaning the hard-easy things means creating very, very detailed process documents that anybody, anybody can follow. Anybody can follow. Right? Because you can even have a process document that says, if somebody is out, the first thing you're gonna do if you're taking their place, is you're going to introduce yourself to the customer and say, "Hey, just letting you know, I'm going to be handling some things while so and so is out. And bear with me..." It could be something as simple as that. Right? But we tend not to do that. We tend to allow our business to get stuck in other people's heads. Right. So now they become the bottleneck.   Dean Soto  4:53   We can't live without Kevin. We can't live without Jana. We can't live without James. We can't live without any of these people because they know how to work with this guy, and they know how to work with that guy, right?    Dean Soto  5:08   We recently had another customer who didn't have a process of bringing a new person totally on board. Like, getting all their accounts set up and everything like that. So, they got a new person and guess who was doing all the work? It was the owner of the business, right?    Dean Soto  5:31   That should not happen. Jeff Bezos does not say "Oh, we got a new client. We have a new customer in the Amazon FBA warehouse. Okay, well, I'll stop everything. And I'll go train that guy up."    Dean Soto  5:43   In Plus he, you know, people they know, they know what needs to be this.    Dean Soto  5:49   "There are some people who know what needs to be done. So I'll need their help." No.    Dean Soto  5:54   They have managers and the managers handle the whole entire process.   Dean Soto  6:02   That is something very hard to do for a lot of people at the very beginning of the business. However, once you get out of that habit of feeling like you have to do everything— that you just have to do everything but then you bring somebody in who they're the only ones who know how to do anything. That's where the problem becomes very apparent. It becomes very apparent.   Dean Soto  6:44   So, all that being said, I want to stress that the more that you can create processes in documentation and systems that are so detailed that anyone can do them. And yes, they could do it, even if it means talking with clients, you can make things so detailed that you very rarely get put in that situation where it's, "Oh, well, this person knows this thing or that thing. Right?"    Dean Soto  7:28   "This person knows this or that, and I can't live without them." That is putting yourself in a very vulnerable situation.    Dean Soto  7:36   You know, this guy, the owner had plans for today, right? He had plans and all those plans went to crap because the process documents were not as detailed as they possibly could be. Right? And so because he could not quickly put someone else in that situation as a temporary, he had to change all of his plans. And that's what we want to avoid.    Dean Soto  8:08   When we are in business, we want to avoid that type of stuff. We want it to be where it is a no brainer, no brainer. No brainer. That when somebody can pop in and take over, at least on a certain percentage of things, right.    Dean Soto  8:37   So, all that being said, Why is this important? We tend to do that. I even do that with my kids sometimes. Well, Allison knows how to do this. So I'm just gonna have her be the person who does it. Or any of my other kids know how to do it. Oh, and they could be the kind of lead person. Well, there should be a process. Even in my house. I have process documents for all of our time. Areas. All of our zones. And everybody knows what to do because we all have our zones, right?    Dean Soto  9:08   So my challenge to you this week is to figure out where you are the bottleneck or where you've put somebody else as a bottleneck, and switch it up. Switch it up and make it make something that allows nobody to be the bottleneck. Anybody can go in there, anybody can do it. Anyone can make all of this, make whatever it is happen, despite knowing in their head and being familiar with it. Right.    Dean Soto  9:45   Familiarity breeds contempt, right? We don't want familiarity, we want processes. So all that being said, this is Dean Soto with Freedom In Five Minutes. Well, today was a rough one. I'm kind of feeling a little run down Actually, I might go to the hospital and tell Gel to force me not to work. But anyway, I'll catch you later in the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode.

Today we're going to be talking about the four big considerations you need to think about before creating and launching a membership. So if you've been thinking about putting a membership out there, this is going to be a really juicy episode for you. What is a membership? It is where you have people in a group program and they need to make a recurring payment in order to stay in the program. For example, you might have a course where people make a payment and then they’re in the course until it's finished, and then they're done, or they’re in the course evergreen so they can stay in the course for as long as it exists. A membership requires that people pay a membership fee in order to stay inside that program. So in my business, the Heart-Centred Business Academy is a membership. It has a monthly fee people can pay by the year or pay by the month. But when they stop paying and their membership expires, they then leave that membership. Creating a membership can be a really sexy way to get into leverage and add more leverage in your business. It's a way where you can be paid on a recurring payment, and you don't have to re-market to the existing members in order for them to decide they want to stay in. Now, that isn't always 100% true, because you do want to ensure that you are encouraging people to stay in the membership as much as possible. But you don't have to go out and sell membership spots every month to be making money every month from your business, because if there's a value proposition for people to stay and keep paying membership, they will. So it can be a really juicy model, and it can sound very appealing to create and launch a membership program. But as with any business strategy and model, you know that I like you to go in with your eyes open, knowing exactly what you're getting yourself in for. I think memberships are sexy, I have one. I'm not saying don't create a membership. But I do want to give you four things to consider before you just jump straight in, so that you can keep your eyes open and know that you're making the right decision for your business, for you, and for your clients. It’s the right fit. First and foremost, make sure that it is the right business fit for you. And don't assume that because it has recurring income that it's going to fix all recurring income problems that you have in your business. It's not the only solution to good baseline income in your business. I have a number of clients who thought the only way they would be able to fix their recurring income issues and their cash flow issue issues in their business was to create a membership, when instead what we've done is put their existing course or program on evergreen and created evergreen sales funnels. For example, with the Heart-Centred Business Academy, the current rate is $196 a month. But the current price of the TakeOff program is $2,000, or thereabouts. So if I want to create $2,000 in recurring monthly income in my business, I can sell one spot of the TakeOff program every month, or I can sell 10 spaces in the Heart-Centred Business Academy and have those 10 members stay in. And that's where the sexy part is for a lot of people.  They think, “Well, once I get someone in, they're definitely going to keep paying me and so therefore that's going to be way better for the long term baseline income of my business.” But I tell you, it is easier for me to sell one spot on TakeOff than it is to sell 10 spots in the Heart-Centred Business Academy. And also, for me in particular, selling 10 spots in the Academy takes a lot more work because there are certain things that people need to have ticked off before they're really ready for the Heart Centred Business Academy. Additionally, the workload that's required to keep people in the Academy at $196 a month means that when they join, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be with me for a long time. So for some people, the cash flow solution that they're looking for is to put their course on evergreen and create funnels for it. For other people, the cash flow solution that they're looking for is actually to get a couple of VIP clients on monthly payment plans that are going for the next 10 to 12 months. The delivery model, and the work that's involved, and the marketing that’s involved in them getting a couple more VIP clients is way less than the workload, marketing, and delivery required for holding space for 50 people in a membership at $50, $100, or even $200 a month. So just make sure that when you are looking at bringing a membership into your business model, you are making it for the right reasons and you're not making assumptions about it being the best or only way to fix the issues that you're currently facing. You’re ready for it. Number two is to make sure that you're ready for it and that your business is ready for it as well. I actually have already done an entire podcast episode on this - it was episode number 189. Here is a link to episode number 189 so that you can go and watch that one in detail. What I will say about readiness for selling a membership is, first and foremost: Do you actually have a solid audience that you can launch to? Secondly, do you have clarity around your value proposition? Are you good at messaging to the outcomes that you deliver already? And thirdly, can you cope with the loss in cash flow? Now this third thing is actually my point for today as well. So I'll be talking about that one in a bit more detail. You’re clear on the membership type and value proposition. Number three is being clear on what type of membership that you are selling, and also the value proposition of that particular model. There are two main types of membership. (There are actually three but the third one is a really bad one and I'll tell you about what that one is so that you can avoid it!) The two main types of membership that I recommend to people are: Plug and play memberships and Process driven memberships. Plug and Play Memberships The Heart-Centred Business Academy is a plug and play membership. It has modules in it that people can grab and implement when they feel ready for that thing or they're looking for that particular piece of advice. Because it is a business strategy membership, there are modules on how to create great welcoming onboarding sequences for your business, how to grow your list, strategies on running webinars about how to scale up the rates of those webinars, how to run a five day challenge, and how to launch an online course or program. People grab the modules that they need when they are ready to use them. So it's a plug and play, not a sequenced process that you need to go through.  And even though we've got different stages of business, it's plug and play. If you're already creating automated funnels, you can jump into the Heart-Centred Business Academy and there are modules on creating funnels, so you don't have to go through the Academy modules in any particular order. A plug and play style membership fits where what you're teaching is something where people can grab and choose bits that they need. Other examples might be if you're doing meal planning, people can grab certain meal plans for certain seasons, or certain meal plans based on the types of foods that they like, or dietary requirements, or what they've got in their cupboards at that point in time, whatever it might be. If it's really valuable for people, they'll pay to continually have access to this plug and play library, and then that could be a good model for you. Now with my membership, it also includes live access to one on one conversations with me through our group coaching calls, because often people don't know which module they need to plug and play at that point in time. That's a huge value proposition of the Heart-Centred Business Academy.  It’s not just the information that they have access to, but it's actually the transformation it will facilitate in their business because we're talking about where they're at in their business, what the right strategy move is for them, and then there's modules that they can go and watch to implement that particular strategy. They also then get to come back and have conversations with me about what they've made decisions about and whether they've got questions on things and where they've got stuck on things. So the value proposition isn't just the modules, it's actually making sure they're accessing the right information at the right time for their particular needs. Process Driven Membership The other style of membership is a process driven membership, in which people come in to learn a specific process of yours, but the value proposition of staying in the membership is continuously improving and refining that implementation. So let's say you have a six step manifesting process where people can manifest an income goal. Why would people continue to pay to be part of that membership? Well, it's not just to learn the six steps and then they leave and get on with their lives. It's because when you're implementing those six steps, you usually have self sabotage, barriers, questions, all sorts of things that come up for you. So you're paying to stay and practice that process. It also works really well for things like productivity or where people are learning to embed habits or skills that they may not necessarily have learned before. But it's not just the learning that they're there for - they are there to continuously practice in a supported environment. Information Driven Membership Now, the third type of membership, which I do not recommend, is an information driven membership, one where you jump in and you're drip-fed different pieces of information as you go, and there's no direction for a plug and play, nor support for a process driven membership. Memberships that are driven only by information generally are the ones that have high dropout rates and low conversion rates.  This is because information is available to us freely, and the value proposition of joining your membership is not the information you get access to - it's the transformation that it facilitates. Yes, that curated information may assist with the transformation process, but if it's only information driven, then chances are you will fall into the industry averages, which are three month dropout rates and less than 1% conversion. So that model of membership is low profitability, it requires a high level of marketing because you've got a lot of churn, and in a lot of cases it doesn't have the ongoing loyalty that other styles of memberships will deliver. It also isn't necessarily the right fit for your ideal clients, and it's not particularly valuable to them, because information is freely available everywhere. What they want is to achieve some kind of change, some kind of outcome. And if you're not facilitating that change in your membership, are you really serving your customers and clients effectively? So you need to be clear on what type of membership it is that you are facilitating. Are you ready for launching? Launching a membership can sometimes result in a significant drop in your income in the short term. When you're launching a course or program or membership for an extended period of time, you're focused on promoting your lead magnet, which is free. And in most launches, you have two periods of lead magnet promotion. So there are two extended periods of time where you're focused on promoting free things. Then you have your cart open and cart close, your early bird, your full price, whatever it is that you're doing, but if you're selling a membership, and most people are buying by the month, then the return and the influx of income that you would normally get when you're launching a course, for example, may not be there because it's actually growing your ongoing income. If you're launching a membership program for a month, and you normally charge $2,000 for your VIP services and $1,000 for a course, and you're charging $100 a month for your membership, and you get 400 people signed up to your webinar with a good conversion rate - let's say a 5% conversion rate, which means five people for every hundred - so that's 20 people who join your membership, and you make $2,000 for the month. Now, think about your likelihood of having that high conversion rate on your first launch, of having that many people sign up to a webinar on your first launch. Are you really going to make enough money to get through that launch process? That's not even taking into consideration the ad-spend. Whereas if you were able to launch your course, and you got 20 people converting at 5% - 400 people - that's $20,000, if they're paying you $1,000 for your course. So you can see that the short term cash results from launching a membership can sometimes be a dip.  There are strategies to overcome this and dampen the impact on your cash flow when you're launching a membership. Something that I do recommend to my clients is - when you first launch your membership, have your first lead magnet sell people into buying a year upfront only. Do it at a lovely no brainer price, but in a way that's going to give you the cash flow that you need in the short term from your early bird. And then in your second lead magnet, open up paying by the month.  That way, you're going to have the best of both worlds - you're going to have an income injection, and you're going to have that ongoing income coming in through the people who are paying by the month as well. So yes, there are some ways that you can get around it, but you just want to go in with your eyes open. Ok?  Aunty Tash wants to make sure that you aren't going to completely derail your business and get into the huge mindset wobbles and downward spirals because you didn't think about these things going in, and you were sold this idea of an information product. It's not about your knowledge. It's about facilitating transformations. If you are ready to jump into launching a membership, I have a juicy free resource for you as well. It's almost two hours long, but it's a free training and it is very valuable. It's called Create And Launch Your Online Course. Now, I know it says "online course." But most of the lessons in this particular training also apply for memberships, so long as you bring together the information I just gave you in this podcast episode with that free training. Where I talk about courses in the training, you just slot in memberships, you have a think about those particular considerations that I've posed to you today. You have everything that you need to know, and exactly what you need to do, to not only create but also launch your online course or membership.     Questions about this episode? Comments? Continue the conversation in the Facebook Group using the hashtag #podcastaha and the episode number. Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.  

On the twenty-fourth entry of The Link Up with Latesha, our incredible host Latesha Byrd, founder of Byrd Career Consulting, addresses a pressing concern - whether or not to continue applying for a job during the COVID-19 pandemic. She emphasizes that not all hope is lost and shares a handful of effective tips to help you set yourself apart from other candidates during this trying time. She also talks about her newly-launched Career Chasers Members Club - check the show notes for more information!Interested in Latesha's Career Chasers Members Club? Click here for all the info.Stop by LateshaByrd.com! Click here to check out Latesha's shop, and don't forget the 60% discount code GETTHECOINS.Find out more about Latesha on the BCC website or connect with her through LinkedIn, IG, Twitter, and FB.Check out Latesha's YouTube channel.Connect with Byrd Career Consulting via LinkedIn, IG, Twitter, and FB.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTLatesha: Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to another episode of The Link Up with Latesha. Happy Saturday. Happy Saturday. I know that all of our days may feel the same, but I encourage you to find something of joy to do today or to do over the weekend. What I want to talk about today, which is a recurring conversation that I've been having with clients, that I've been having with some friends in media that reached out for interviews, is "Should I stop applying to jobs? Should I halt my job search fully?" And that's what we are going to be talking about today. I don't think that we should put a halt or a stop on applying. I don't think we should slow down. However, with this pandemic a lot of things have changed. Companies have went on hiring freezes. And I'll be honest with you, I want to speak from a place of conversations that I've been having with my clients and what they're currently facing, and in full transparency, as a career coach, it has been really hard to, you know, process what is happening here, you know? Before this pandemic hit, the job market was boom-ing. Like, booming, you know? My clients were applying and interviewing and at these networking events and just kind of killing it, and they're still going to kill it, and if you listening to this podcast are applying for jobs and seeking to make a change you will too, but this has definitely put a wrench into, you know, the job search. There is no doubt about that. And so today I am really just speaking from a place of authenticity. I don't have a lot of notes planned, but this has been wearing and tearing just on my heart, because I feel for all of you that may be seeking employment or that are facing doubt and uncertainty right now, and if you are in need of any, you know, positivity and light and some, you know, awakening, listen to this podcast, because I want to give you some advice on just being real about the situation but also being proactive about the situation as well. I do not think all hope is lost, and that's one thing I want to make sure that you all know. I don't think all hope is lost, but I do think that you will want to be much more strategic and intentional in your efforts, in your outreach efforts, but really truly in dealing with your emotional wellbeing, with your emotional health. That should come first. That should come before, you know, any of these job applications that you're submitting or before you are hopping into an interview or a networking conversation, you know? Take care of you. Living Corporate has released some great episodes on just how to really manage your stress at this time and manage your emotional wellbeing, so I encourage you to listen to those episodes. So before I hop into the reason why I say yes, you should keep applying and looking, I want to share something with you on a good note [laughs] that I recently launched, my Career Chasers Members Club. It is an online community for women of color that are seeking just to hit new heights, you know, in their careers that are on the brink of really chasing and striving for career greatness, that are searching for not just any opportunity, not just any job, but for a career. So if you are on the path of chasing a career, shameless plug, I will drop the link in the show notes. And we have--so excited--over 80 women that have signed up for this members club in a matter of 10 days. I am so proud and honored to be able to work with each and every one of these women. What else does this membership bring you? There's a monthly workshop. Well, there's a monthly theme, but with each monthly theme there will be a live workshop with me, or webinar. Our first one is this upcoming Monday on job searching during a pandemic. So like I said, I'll drop the deets in the show notes. There's a digital workbook that comes with each workshop that we have to help you to strategize and plan for your future. Outside of that, there is an online community. So if you are really feeling alone in your pursuit, you know, you're in need of that support, that encouragement, that accountability, that clarity and that strategy, I want you to join my members club. Now, the membership did close on the 10th, but I want to keep it open until Sunday night. So for any ladies who are listening out here and you feel like this is for you and this is your time and you need that tribe, you need that community of women that are really looking to achieve their career goals, I want you to sign up, all right? So enough of that. Super excited to get started with that and very thankful for everyone that has signed up. So, with that being said, you should still be out here applying pressure on your job search, and I want you all to go back to an older episode that I recorded for The Link Up with Latesha for establishing or building a career toolkit. It has all the things that you need as you prepare to launch or relaunch your job search. Saying that to say that there's a lot of preparation that goes into searching for a position. You know, people have asked me before, "Should I start looking for a job," or "Should I go get a new job," and I want to make sure that, you know, you know that there are multiple steps and procedures that go into actually landing a new job. It's not like walking into a car dealership like, "Okay, I'm gonna buy a car today. Do I want this Escalade? Do I want this Beamer? Do I want a Honda?" You know, picking out colors and leather and cloth interior, whatever, and you walk out with a--or not walk out [laughs,] you're driving out of the dealership in your new car. That's not how getting a job works, you know? You don't walk into a job dealership and you're like, "Hm, do I want to work this job? Do I want this one? Okay, yep. Boom. Mm-hmm," negotiate your salary and you're out. That's not how it works. There is the networking that goes into it, then applying, first round interviews, phone screenings with recruiters, second round interviews, panel interviews, you know, group interviews, dinners--well, we're not doing dinners no more, but some companies used to have dinners, lunches. We're not doing none of that, but there's still an interview process that you have to go through. So you interview, you're negotiating your salary, you get a job offer, then you gotta get onboarded, and there's so many things that go into it, so I want you all to not just ask yourself, "Is this time for me to get a job?" but "Am I going to be fully committed to doing what it takes for me to get a new job? Am I going to be fully committed to this process?" And that is going to give you your answer. Now, I want to go back to the conversations that I've been having with my clients over the past week or two. A lot of companies are putting their hiring freezes going on or they've gone back to the drawing board and said, "Okay, what are our most critical roles that we still need to make sure we are hiring for?" There are some companies that have started to lay off some of their staff. There are some companies that are cutting out benefits. They're not doing any promotions, they're not doing any raises, you know, they're not doing any bonuses. Saying that though, you should still make sure you are managing your performance and always asking for feedback, 'cause this thing is not going to last forever. But with that being said, companies are taking the precautionary measures to make sure that 1. they can either keep their lights on or they can still keep their staff employed, and for some it has not been working out, you know, as well as others. Looking at this from a place of being super just real, it's going to be harder to get a job now for sure, and I know you all probably know that, but it's not impossible. It's definitely not impossible. I have many clients that are still interviewing today. Even this past week, I have clients that have accepted job offers. They may not be starting right away, but they do have new jobs. So going back to the original topic, "Should you be applying to jobs?" Yes, but there are other things that I want to make sure that you all are doing in tandem with applying to jobs. Yes, companies aren't hiring, you know, maybe as aggressive as they were at one point. Of course it depends on the company, it depends on the industry, but that means that you want to make sure that you are putting your best foot forward, that you're really setting yourself apart from the competition. And I want to really just dive into a few tips that will help you to do that. The first thing is to network online. Network online. There are no more networking events, so we really have to rely heavily on social media. Facebook groups, you know? I've had clients that tell me, "I don't have a Facebook." Well, you know, hey, you want to make sure you're getting plugged in. I just joined a few groups on Facebook about job opportunities in Charlotte since I am based in Charlotte and about, you know, 20% of my clients are here locally. So there are some groups on Facebook that you might want to join. LinkedIn as well. Networking on LinkedIn is huge. Join LinkedIn groups. We don't emphasize that enough, but there are groups dedicated out there solely for, you know, they can split it up by industry, you know, they split it up by where you're living or by interest. I want you to start joining those industry-focused groups on LinkedIn. We overlook those, but that is a great opportunity to really connect with people in a more genuine way versus just cold reaching out to someone. When you are in a shared group with someone on LinkedIn, you want to start engaging. You want to start posting, sharing things, and then from there it might be easier for you to reach out to a member in that group and then introduce yourself. Now, I don't want to say that cold reaching out never works, because trust me, it does. I've done it before even when I was searching for job opportunities, and it's gotten me some interviews. So definitely start reaching out to people on LinkedIn and reaching out to see if you can set up a phone call. One of my clients said she's doing some virtual coffee chats. So you could reach out to someone you admire, someone in the industry, and say, "Hey, I want to sponsor a coffee for you." Send them, you know, $5--I'm not saying you gotta bribe people, let me not say that, but someone has done that to me and it actually worked. [laughs] So ask people if you can do a virtual coffee chat, you know? 15 minutes and that's it, all right? Now, when you do reach out to people on LinkedIn, there's a few different ways or methods you can do this to increase your chances of getting a response back. First thing is go through your first connections. Filter it by companies that they work for or by industry or by job title. Sift through your connections. You'd be surprised to see who you are connected with who might be that person that will help to get you in the door. Sift through your connections. Start with your first connections. Go through your second connections, and if you have mutual connections, ask a first connection to introduce to that second connection. Y'all know the networking game. Y'all know how it goes. Your probability of getting on the phone with that person or getting in a meeting with that person is always going to be hire if someone else vouched for you and they said, "Oh, can I introduce you to Latesha? I think she'd be a great person just for you to connect with. You guys have similar interests. You're in the same industries, you do the same work. I really think you would benefit from having a conversation with this person." Because not only are they committed to--I don't want to say committed to you, but if that other person introduces you to them and they hold that person in high regard, that facilitates that introduction. Not only will they be more prone to connect with you, they will also kind of feel accountable, you know, to that person that facilitated the introduction. So make sure that you are networking. Don't ever lose sight of that. Your resume and LinkedIn. We don't spend enough time on the preparation end. We just go straight into applying and that's it. This is a wonderful time to really just take a step back and start to beef up your resume. Again, your application needs to be super tight. It does need to be super tight right now, so make sure you're adding numbers, you're quantifying your results. Make sure you have a summary that clearly aligns with what they're looking for, making sure that they are able to read your resume and understand how what you've done is directly related to how you can add value in that particular role. Start working on that resume. Take a step back and really go through it line by line and word by word. Come up with examples. I call these your "hero examples," these hero stories, stories in your experience where you have really set the bar high, where you have solved a problem, you have created an initiative and implemented something new. Just think about those things that you're really proud of, where you solved a problem, you helped the company, you added value. You want to come up with your hero stories so that when you do get into this interview and they're asking you, "What are you most proud of in your career?" or those behavioral questions, "Tell me about a time where you had a difficult co-worker, difficult boss, you had to think quickly, you were under a tight deadline. How did you handle that?" You already have those hero stories or examples that you can speak to. Get your LinkedIn complete. I'm tired of getting up here and preaching about LinkedIn. [laughs] Do the things that are going to get you noticed and that's going to set you apart. Being that your networking has shifted to 100% online, having a great LinkedIn profile, you can never, ever, ever go wrong with that. Again, when you apply, I encourage you, for every job to apply to, to have a referral. Have a referral. So don't just apply, but have a referral, someone at that company that is vouching for you on the inside. And the last thing that I want to say here is it's easy to get frustrated. It's easy to want to give up, but all hope is not lost. I cannot emphasize that enough. You will find that next opportunity. You will come out of this on top. So you want to make sure you're giving yourself some grace and taking days off. If you feel really frustrated about your job search or if you are just completely burnt out from networking and doing all the chats and the virtual happy hours, then take some time off and get back on it, but just don't give up. If you feel like you're on the brink of giving up, that means that you just need to rest and take a break and get back to it. So I'll just end it with that. The last thing that I'll say is that the reason why you want to continue to apply is because this thing is not going to last forever. Companies are going to be back hiring once this is lifted, and so if you are already right now in the process of building those relationships, of networking online, I want to make sure that you are top of mind when these job opportunities do present themselves or when these companies are ready to make an offer. So again, keep applying, but also network, network, network. Manage your contacts. I use Trello to keep up with--even for me--to keep up with my client leads. I have hot, warm, and cold leads, and so I'm really on top of my hot and warm leads. My cold leads not as much. You can have different frequency touchpoints for each of those categories, but again, you want to stay top of mind. So, you know, continue to put yourself out there, but also make sure that you are engaged, showcasing your skill set by, you know, posting status updates, posting articles, just staying engaged and staying visible even online is going to be key. So when the company releases their hiring or comes up off their hiring freeze and they are have job opportunities that you would be perfectly aligned for, you want them to say, "Oh, my gosh. I remember Latesha. I just talked to her a month ago and she was looking. Let me check in and see if she's still looking for an opportunity, because now we're ready to hire again." I've seen miracles. I've seen miracles when it comes to getting a job, so I believe in it. I know you deserve it, and I want you to keep pushing. I hope this was helpful, and I'll talk to y'all again soon.

As we’ve seen with the impacts of COVID-19, it’s now become necessary for the spirits industry to adopt technology and delivery services to stay alive. Cory Rellas, the CEO of Drizly, was on the forefront of this years ago. This podcast dives into their business model and how they are helping stores build a digital infrastructure to sell their goods online and get it into the hands of consumers faster. We hit on all kinds of topics such as their competitors in the market, what shipping laws could mean for Drizly, and if there is an opportunity to extend this business model into cannabis. Show Partners: The University of Louisville has an online Distilled Spirits Business Certificate that focuses on the business side of the spirits industry. Learn more at uofl.me/bourbonpursuit. Barrell Craft Spirits works with distilleries from all over the world to source and blend the best ingredients into America’s most curious cask strength whiskies. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. Show Notes: This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about the power of packaging. What is Drizly? How did you come up with this idea? What's the timeline? What was the state of the industry when you got started? What were the challenges? Why did you go through New York early on? What is your big selling point to retail locations? Any pricing restrictions to prevent gouging? Talk about pricing transparency. How are you using the data you are acquiring? Are you sharing the data? Do you have a CRM? How are the products delivered to the consumer? How are you dealing with competition? Are you all interested in getting bought out? What's the end game? What happens if shipping laws change? What is your best selling bourbon? What are the top 5 selling spirit categories? What's your favorite bourbon? How do you work with brands? What needs to change to get more people buy alcohol online? Are you lobbying at all? Is there an opportunity with cannabis? What would the perfect alcohol market look like? What's the latest trend? 0:00 To be the best, you have to learn from the best. Louisville and the surrounding regions are home to many of the most storied companies and innovative startups in the distilled spirits industry. And there's no better place to learn the business of the distilled spirits industry than from a university located in its epicenter. The University of Louisville has partnered with industry experts to offer the distilled spirits business certificate, a six course program designed to accelerate your success in this booming industry. Oh, it's all online. get signed up to make your next career move at U of l.me slash bourbon pursuit. 0:36 I'd go with vodka. I'd actually go with bourbon, rum, tequila, although I think our tequila selection has been incredibly high end and what we're actually selling which is kind of interesting. And then I'll check for you here in a second on a fifth. I don't think I know the fifth off the top of my head. 0:54 You said it wrong. It goes bourbon bourbon, bourbon, bourbon bourbon 0:58 right brown, brown, brown brown. At 1:01 least that's what we want to hear. 1:03 I heard there the his mic cut out there when he said another word I don't. 1:21 What's going on everybody? It's Episode 248 of bourbon pursuit. I'm one of your hosts Kenny. We just got just a little bit of news to run through. And as you can guess most of it relates to COVID-19. Pennsylvania State run liquor stores are reopening, but only with online and shipped to home orders. Until further notice. Customers can purchase up to six bottles per transaction from a reduced catalog from thousand top selling wines and spirits from the website. All orders must be shipped to home or non store addresses, and only one order per address will be fulfilled per day. This is possibly in reaction to the losses now being seen by the government in an article Hosted by Trib live.com. For the two weeks of not operating, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board has lost an estimated $91 million in revenue, or around six and a half million dollars per day. quite staggering numbers. And the Virginia ABC has announced that for a limited period of time Virginia distilleries are authorized to ship their spirits to consumers and licensees in Virginia. Now, there's some legal mumbo jumbo about addendums to these distillery store agreements, but it's another big win for consumers and for these distilleries to help everyone get through this period, you can get more information on shipping, including a full list of all 45 Virginia distilleries on the Virginia ABC website. figures released by data analysts IWA ASR have found that for the week ending in March 22 of 2020, that total beverage alcohol sales grew by 40% in value and 33% volume compared to the same period in 2019. And this is to account for the stockpiling that we've seen during COVID-19 Spirits available in one liter one and a half and 1.75 formats have outpaced smaller variants, and the Ws are noted that the larger size formats and value brands tend to benefit from panic buying, as people look to stock their home with as much as possible in the light of a lockdown. According to IWC, or whiskey brands like wild turkey Crown Royal jack daniels bullet and Maker's Mark have been the ones that have seen this most increased purchasing. Alright, now on to something not about the Coronavirus Buffalo Trace distillery continues its exploration into oak tree varietals with the release of its old charter oak Tinker PIN code. This species of oak is native to the Midwest United States. These large Chica Pin Oak trees are often found in parks and larger States after the Chica pin barrels were filled with Buffalo Trace mash number one they were then aged for nine years before being bottled at 93 proof of a suggested retail price is going to be a $70 MSRP and like all other releases in this series, supplies will be limited. And the chicken folk bourbon will be available in limited quantities starting in April. Now today's episode is one that I'm personally really excited about. I'm like a broken record on here preaching how the spirits industry needs a digital revolution. As we've seen with the impacts of COVID-19, it's now become a necessity for this industry to even stay alive. And Cory rellis, the CEO of drizzly, he was on the forefront of this years ago. And this podcast dives into how he even thought of the idea into their business model and how they're how they're actually helping stores build a digital infrastructure to sell their goods online, and get it into the hands of consumers faster. We hit on all kinds of topics such as their competitors in the market, what shipping laws could actually mean for drizzly. And is there an opportunity to even extend this business model into cannabis. Now if you haven't noticed yet, we are doing lots of impromptu live streams that help give you some more entertainment during this time. We've done virtual happy hours with our patrons Our community, late night blind tastings and more. So make sure that you're subscribed to our YouTube channel to get the notifications and also, consider joining Patreon. We're doing zoom meetings to help connect our community. And we'd love to have you there. Check it out. patreon.com slash bourbon pursuit. Also, don't forget to catch Fred MiniK on his live streams every single day at one o'clock and nine o'clock pm eastern time. They've been highly entertaining and educational. enjoy today's episode. Stay safe. Stay inside. Here's Joe from barrel bourbon. And then you've got Fred minich with above the char. 5:36 Hey everyone, Joe here again. We work with distilleries from all over the world to source and blend the best ingredients into America's most curious cask strength whiskies. lift your spirits with barrel bourbon. 5:50 I'm Fred minich. And this is above the char this past week. I'm just telling you, my brain has been suffering. I've been working so hard on I've been doing two live streams a day on YouTube. I've been writing a lot for Forbes, I've been blogging as much as I possibly can. And I hit a wall I hit a wall where I had no ideas left me none in the tank. And I want to thank every single one of you who responded to my query on Twitter, where I simply asked Can you please give me some ideas for above the char? I got so many great ones. I'm going to start with this one from the whiskey stop. It's at the whiskey stop on Twitter. And he wants me to talk about the power of packaging. A unique shape of the bottle. Does it have a twist top a synthetic cork, maybe natural cork a great or unusual label? Did it influence your purchase was a good did it suck? Did the packaging work? its magic on you. What a brilliant question and what a time Hundred like truth is that packaging matters. Oh my God does packaging matter. And let me tell you if you overthink packaging, you will fail and that is where you fail. Most of all when it comes to packaging, what I have noticed is is that many people try to target women and they do it with like a like a fluffy pink or they've got some kind of like special dressing on there and they have like rainbow colors, and women rejected every single time. Another one is when someone tries to be overly fancy, they get like a crystal, a major crystal top, a really fancy label, and then they fill it with like two year old MGP whiskey 7:49 adds a big fail. 7:51 So the packaging always has to match what's inside the bottle and the packaging cannot overstate Something so the overselling is the case of a brand that went too far with trying to attract women. And the whiskey not matching would be the decanter or the bottle that had shit whiskey in it. And the bottle was just stunning. And I've always believed that to me, you can measure a bottle by what is fascinating it or the closure. I am such a fan of natural cork you can read my cover story and bourbon plus magazine to get an idea of like, what goes into making court but I am really connected to the earth and I love I love the sustainability aspect of cork. And when I hear that pop when I pull the bottle next to my ears and I go that is an undeniable sound that makes my mouth water and makes me want a sip. A screw top doesn't do that. Lot of the synthetic corks are like stuck in there like they don't make that same sound. And the glass tops that are starting to become more popular. I could never get those things off. I have to pry them off with the damn, you know, butter knife. To me it all starts with with a good cork on the top. Now people can argue all day long of the merits of cork, but I'm just here to tell you I know what I like. And I like hearing this sound every time I open a bottle. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, listen, I'm bound to continue to run out of ideas with this Coronavirus stuff going on. Because I'm not stopping. I am driving content every single day. So hit me up on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or YouTube and give me some ideas for above the char I'll select my favorite and read it in the next episode. Next week, cheers. 10:05 Welcome back to another episode of bourbon pursuit, the official podcast of bourbon, Kenny Ryan and Fred in our virtual hangout space. And today we are talking about a topic that we know far or should say, we know all too well, you know, when we talked about this on the roundtables, we talked about it, you know, with distributors, we talked about what is the future consumption and delivery of alcohol really going to look like for the the mass market and we look at, you know, coming from a tech industry myself, we try to figure out, like, how can we get, you know, our product into the hands of consumers faster than anyone else. And what we're gonna be talking about today is really talking to a company that's on the forefront of all this. And when we look at this, it's not only just being able to get in the hands of consumers, but you can get it in less than an hour sometimes. So I think it's gonna be a really cool conversation of how we really dive into this. So Fred, and Ryan I mean, you know, we've we've talked about shipping before, but have you all have y'all ever had a service delivered bottles to you yet? 11:08 No, not yet. But I'm super excited to learn about it. I'm fortunate I live like a half mile from a liquor store so we can get it pretty easy. But yeah, I mean, the liquor industry moves at a snail's pace. So you know, there's a lot of friction points and getting bottles delivered to your house and I've had plenty of bottles delivered to my house just not legally. But I would like to make it legal so yeah, I'm really excited to talk to them about this today. 11:36 Yeah, I've had I've had quite a bit sent to me I also you know, being being a personality on the spirits network, they regularly send me stuff and they you know, that's part of their, their whole thing is that you join and you get to be become a Club member, and they ship barrel pics and stuff to you. 11:56 And so let's go ahead introduce our guests today. So today, we Have Cory rellis Cory is the CEO of drizzly, you might have seen him or the app, you've seen probably their logo and a lot of liquor stores are the ones that deliver bottles from liquor stores to your doorstep. So Cory, welcome to the show. 12:15 Thanks for having me, guys. 12:16 So was that a decent elevator pitch? Or do you have a better one? That's usually us. 12:21 It's a common misconception. So I would actually like to give you my elevator pitch. 12:25 Please do please do. Yes. 12:27 Yeah. So So actually, drizzly was formed a lot with a lot of knowledge around the regulations that you guys have been discussing. I know we're going to talk about that further. So I'll put that in the back for a minute now, but the model is actually different than people think we don't do delivery. And really what drizzly prides itself on is digitizing the inventory of local liquor stores, so that a consumer can come online, shop across their stores and find a larger selection, comparison pricing and ultimately get that delivered to them. But the delivery is done by either the retailer themselves or Third parties, that door dashes Postmates shifts to the world. And so we're really a tech middleman empowering the three tiers, but not necessarily changing the status quo. 13:10 Cool. So it's kind of like a an Open Table kind of concept for liquor stores, maybe you're kind of looking at what's available and can then kind of pick and choose that way. 13:20 Yeah, that's not a bad comparison. And Ryan, you were saying you live next to a liquor store. And I think that's really drizzly, his opportunity is not necessarily to replace the liquor store, but to provide an experience you couldn't get by going to any one liquor store. And that goes again, back to selection, to transparency of pricing to the surface and multiple stores being able to get to you when and where you want it. 13:40 And so I kind of want to roll back the hands of time here and kind of learn more about you so kind of talk us through, you know, where did Where did spirits become or is this just like an idea you had and you said, like, Hey, this is fun. Like, this is a this is an opportunity that's, that's basically ripe for disruption. Like, what What got to the point of like you getting here and saying like, okay, cool, like this is gonna be a good venture to kind of go through. 14:07 Yeah, it's a it's a less sexy story than you might imagine. And it started with regulation. So going all the way back to my cousin Nick, Nick rellis, and then co founder, Justin Robinson. And it was born out of trying to figure out why alcohol was only 2% online, or even one and a half percent online. When you saw grocery, when you saw a restaurant, we saw electronics and clothing, all these other verticals are coming online at a rapid rate. And we started to think about why that is with alcohol. And regulation became the clear component of this whole piece. And so we started digging into the legal code. I mean, truthfully, looking not only at the repeal and the prohibition, but also state by state liquor codes and trying to understand how does this model need to work for alcohol? How can a tech platform both empower the industry but not be a part of the industry and still be an unlicensed entity within it? And then the third piece is, how do you carve your moat? How do you be more than deliberate because you know, when we start projecting the 10 years down the road, that's a commodity at the end of the day and so we need to be better than going to the liquor store and elevate the status or I'm sorry, elevate the physical liquor stores to do something that couldn't do in the physical world. 15:11 Alright, so I don't know if he really answered my question there because I really want to figure out more about you right like Matt 15:17 Boyd. All of those Kenny. 15:19 Bad we want to get to know a little about you, right? I mean, like, like, we're like so where'd you go to school? Like Where'd it Where'd this really kind of like, really spawn from? 15:27 sure my road was a little bit sideways. I grew up in Texas. And I would say that I'm a big bourbon fan for that reason grew up loving bourbon actually, but was a soccer player at Notre Dame spent five years there had a fifth year for soccer and wanted to play professionally after school. But a couple ACLs later, had to give up that dream and ultimately had done an internship after my first injury, kind of preparing just in case it didn't work out in the long run, and took a job out here in Boston at Bain Capital. They're credited affiliates, sanctity advisors. And that's when I started to get to know businesses a little bit better. I started to get to know regulated industries incredibly well, I was dealing with coal and steel and some pretty, pretty old industries at the end of the day. And then the three of us that I was mentioning, started just kicking around ideas. And so this was a big jump for me, I was in, you know, kind of the standard finance track at that point, thinking about what the next couple of years looked like, whether it be business school, or continuing doing what I was doing. And it felt like the right time to jump it felt like the right collection of folks to try something new with and a little bit of naivete got us to the final to the finish line and push us over the edge 16:40 to like your own little incubator, if you will. 16:43 We had a bunch of ideas. They were all terrible. So 16:47 we struck out on a few. This one became, I mean, really, the passion of the other two guys is what got me to believe and then the more we dug in, the more we really peel back the onion, the more we knew something was here, not just as a small thing. company but something that could really turn into something as a larger platform. 17:03 Give us a timeline behind this what was you know, when when did the light bulb light bulb go off? 17:10 Yeah, so 2012 the light bulb was starting to go off with the text of why can't you get alcohol delivered? And the response was you can you idiot. And so that started down the rabbit hole of when you get called out to some extent, what do you have to do? You have to take the next step and figure it out. And so that's when we started researching the liquor code. And it's funny how things work in Boston being a good microcosm of this project. One question you get and put in touch with the next guy who you can then ask the next question to and it starts to unfold unto itself. And it's not necessarily we saw some grand vision of what alcohol e commerce would look like and what drizzly has now become, but the next step was always apparent if you're willing to take the time. So 2012 was the idea. 2013 was the very first iteration and we've evolved since then. But bringing one liquor store online. Learning about consumers and what they're looking for what e commerce was. And then in the last three years, our models really accelerated. 18:07 So walk us through like the state of the industry, then when you guys are getting like what it were liquor stores doing as far as inventory or trying to do online sales, what was kind of the State of the Union when you guys got it started? 18:19 I wouldn't say it's too different now. We're moving it forward, but begrudgingly, I'd say for some of them. So what was fascinating about the current landscape delivery did happen, but it didn't happen in the paradigm in which we have now moved it towards which you could call liquor store. You didn't necessarily know it was on their shelves, but you could say, you know, I'm having 10 people over for a party, I'd like to place a $500 order split between a couple things, can you make some recommendations, so there wasn't transparency into what you could buy nor the price behind it. And you had to have big orders at the store is going to take the time, but delivery did happen to some extent. On the other side. Ecommerce within this space was just like not even on the radar for regulators or legislators. So you're talking about prohibition being repealed, that is still a lot of the framework and the intent behind the laws that are written. And so there was nothing to comment on e commerce at that point. And one of the first things we did I mean, this is the time of Uber, right? The cars are moving around you at the touch of a button, the world's changing because you have a phone in your pocket. And we're sitting here thinking, Okay, well, how does it need to look for alcohol? And unlike Uber, we couldn't just get into a city try to stoke up consumer demand, and then ask the regulations to be changed. That's just not the way this industry works. We had to go the other way. And so one of the first things we did was go to New York State, the Liquor Authority, they're the SLS. And we asked for a declaratory ruling relative to our model to basically say, not only we elite, not only are we legal, but we're three tier compliant, and we're doing things so aboveboard, that the SLA is willing to bless our model going forward and so that was actually the first moment where became not just a hobby, but very real and something that we thought we could then Take a run with. 20:01 So you you kind of said, All right, we need to sit down, look at the laws and figure out how we can sort of navigate these choppy waters. I would imagine when we've we've talked about all the time, anytime you try to put any kind of disruption into this marketplace that there is you're going to be hit hard with a lot of people that are lobbying against you. What were some of those like early conversations, you remember having people that are like this will never work like you're not going to get it to fly. 20:29 I have a hard time remembering ones that weren't like that, to be honest. So I can speak to the other side easier. Most of it was doubt that this is a very slow industry to change. And you have pretty significant entities that control pieces of the supply chain, and if they're not on board, you're not going to have success on a macro scale and other slices of it. That can work. You could do direct to consumer wine, you could do shipping, there's different pieces of it. But on a macro scale of trying to bring the physical footprint of alcohol online. We needed a few things to go right one was New York. And Funny enough, the the woman, Jackie flute, who blessed our model, as the general counsel for the New York State Liquor Authority is now on our team. And she was kind of the veteran in the space when she put her stamp of approval that meant a lot to the industry. The second one was the wholesalers, the wine and spirits, wholesalers of America and powerful group of people and in terms of their lobbying prowess in their space within the industry, and we got them on board as a three tier compliant model that can move forward the consumer experience in a way that they could get behind. So that was that was a big piece of it as well. 21:33 So you talked about being going above and beyond what the authorities there were, what were some of those things that kind of helps sell New Yorker where they were like gave you that that blessing? 21:44 Well, I think transparency is the first thing and not only transparency, communication, but transparency of the supply chain and what consumers purchasing what bottles from what retailer and if you can track all of that which obviously tech can do and can really enable that process. That is a leg up for many Anything that's happening in delivery today, connect. The second one was, we came with an offering for ID verification through delivery. That was again, not only transparent, but did it in such a way that they could have confidence that under age was not going to be a problem within this business model. And then I think the third part was just being very descriptive on how the flow of funds work. And then also what drizzly is and what just isn't, I think there's a line that needs to get drawn as to what is a retailer's job and competencies. And when you encroach on those too far, you start to erode the license that they have worked hard and in need to live up to, relative to what a software platform is doing on the other side. So it was more just a lot of learning and explaining who we are and how we do it. 22:45 So I know that the liquor laws are they're different everywhere. I mean, every state is different. You've got to navigate that everywhere you're trying to launch. And so when I think of New York, one of the things that I know of at least in New York, and who knows if at least There's plenty of stores that actually have websites in New York. And they can deliver within New York as well, like they can run through UPS, FedEx or whatever it is. So what was the idea of going through something like New York first, that might already have some sort of system set up like this versus something like Texas, right, which is a huge market, but has a lot more regulation versus something like DC, which is really like the Wild West? 23:26 Yeah, there's a few things to pick apart there. So we actually got off the ground in terms of our model in Boston. And then we went to New York to get the model blessed one because of their size and then to the regulatory credibility when they put their stamp on something. But what was unique about Massachusetts in one of those fortuitous things that happens. It is a an incredibly regulatory driven market for alcohol. So if you're compliant here, you've almost kind of fit the lowest common denominator for the rest of the states. And you can roll it out from there. So I think that was a big fortuitous bounce in our direction at the beginning. The second thing We learned from a consumer side of things, every state is so different, and how consumers buy alcohol. Because of the regulations in New York, as you're mentioning, you have a wine and spirits store and a beer store, you have a license cap so that you don't have chains. But you have a ton of independence, which is obviously very different than Texas or California, where you have a bevmo or some of these larger chains out there. So the consumer experience really needed to adapt on where you are, and who you're going to be working with on the retail side, the East Coast was set up pretty pretty darn effectively for us because we could work with independence, learn how to bring on a smaller shop make a real difference in their business. And then as we rolled out to larger cities and states, we were more ready. We were more ready to have conversations with some of the bigger retailers. 24:45 Yeah, I think that's one of the things that we should most most people that are in the retail market should really start looking at is how do you become a little bit more competitive in today's market and just being on the corner and relying on your neighbors to kind of keep you in business might not be able to thing that's gonna keep you floating for much longer. So when you go and you have these conversations, or at least in the very beginning, I'm sure you have a whole team that have these conversations now with liquor stores around the country, what's your what's your big selling point to them to say like, hey, like we can bring your inventory online? Do you integrate with like their existing POS? Or does it say like, Hey, you need to have a new POS system that that we we run and manage, like, how does all that work? 25:28 There's a lot to it. But you appeal to them first as a consumer, and you start to think about other industries and how they've come online. And where do you buy airline tickets? Where do you buy hotels? How do you buy or how do you shop? for clothes online aggregator model and starting to get them thinking about this is going to happen in the space. It's not a matter of if it's a matter of when and so you appeal to them on a consumer level to start. The next thing you're really dealing with is fear. You're dealing with fear of competition, you're dealing with fear of transparency of pricing, and that's how far back this industry goes. As you know, they still believe That people can't get their prices if they wanted to walk in, it gets a little irrational. But then you can speak to them around numbers now. And this is obviously changed over seven years. But you can talk to him about incremental consumers that they wouldn't have been able to serve otherwise. And we have data behind that. You can talk to him about how a marketplace actually elevates to the experience to the point where multiple stores are able to succeed at a level that if you were the only one doing delivery in this area, we wouldn't be able to get those consumers to not only come and check out the site, but also come back and shop from you in the future. And then the last thing is, is we need to be more than just the consumer marketplace. And so when you're talking about point of sale systems, we need to be to elevate and help them generate more profit from their in store business, that things there's things like the catalog and the accuracy of what's on their shelves and how they actually think about that there's data on consumer trends and what they want to put on their shelves at what price at what time. So there's a lot of things as a tech company that we have access to the can really elevate their entire business and it's a whole package that when you work with drizzly makes you a better retailer. 27:01 So you brought up up pricing. One thing that we've noticed a trend in liquor retailers is there's a lot of price gouging. Do you have any restrictions or anything like that with the retailers you work with that you set them within like a 27:18 close to the MSRP or anything like that? 27:21 And it's a good question. So in some states, the price in store is legally mandated to be the price online. And I could give it's a couple states, it's not the majority by any means. So that one takes care of itself. But our job is really to bring their in store experience online and the way they want to do it. Our approach to price gouging is not necessarily to give them mandates on what to price it or to keep it in certain things is to insert competition. It's to have a marketplace to keep them honest to the point where if you are going to try to price things 40 50% up because they're rare and Other people that have that same item, they're obviously not going to purchase yours. And so it really just gets back to an efficient marketplace idea and making sure that consumers are the arbiter of what's successful and not regulations or drizzly or someone else. 28:14 And so to kind of like tackle or shall I say, like, tack onto that one a little bit. When we think about pricing, we've actually had KL we've had a spirits on the show, because we kind of talked about like, what does it look like to be in an online first kind of market? Right? Like, like, that's gonna be the new consumer drive. That's the new demand. If If Amazon's next whatever's coming next, if it's drizzly next, whatever, it's going to be like that online marketplaces really where people are going to go for. And so the other thing about the pricing aspect is this is like when you put your prices online, you're creating this level transparency, because you know exactly like what somebody's charging for a 750 ml in early times versus what somebody else is charging. Does that ever like Upset any retailers? And they're like, Wait a second, like, how are they able to charge less than I can like, what's their? What's their distributor? charging them versus what they're charging me? Do you get caught any of those kind of situations? 29:12 There's definitely yes, I mean, transparency introduces more knowledge into the marketplace for sure. Are we introduced to that conversation? Not necessarily. But I'll tell you one of the biggest learnings from early days it drizzly from switching from a single store experience. I am shopping from the store across the street, who I've been brought online through drizzly to a marketplace where I'm shopping by brand first and then drizzle is telling you the best way to access that product, whether it be selection, you can only get it at one place, price delivery, all those different things. And so what's come out of that though, one store may price something as a margin builder. Another one actually may price price it as a loss leader, and the various strategies within those retailers really come to fruition when you break down those physical barriers and put all of those things on one page together, so it's not necessarily that, hey, I'm getting a worse deal from my distributor. But it starts to highlight what someone does in store online in a much, much more transparent way. And you compete a little differently online. And so it started to me an education of this is how I went in store helped me win online. And there's usually an avenue to do that. That's the bigger conversation more so than I'm getting gouged by my distributor. 30:24 Yeah, that was 30:25 actually going to be my question how, as a liquor store, do you compete online, it kind of reminds me of the car business, you know, like the car industry used to have to rely on a salesman and try to whittle them down and beat them down to get the you know, the most fair price but now everybody knows the price What can a store do to compete? You know, if if you guys are and what parameters are you kind of determining that makes a store better or worse for someone? 30:50 Sure. And it's one of those things when you when you come on a jersey you're going to see a bunch of information and that's really where where I think we can win in the long run. Is asymmetric access to information and that includes price. That includes delivery times, that includes your selection, whether it be longtail wines, or high end and rare Bourbons. And so highlighting that is a big piece of it. And then you start to think about other people that are starting to focus in this industry. I mean, grocery, for example, is starting to come online for alcohol in a bigger way, total wine is being very aggressive. They are feeling independence or feeling that distinctly in the cities that we're seeing that, but there are advantages to being an independent liquor store location, for example, you have access to consumers within 2030 or 40 minutes that a total one could never get to in that timeframe. Not necessarily selling private label. Private Label online is a little bit more difficult. And so what of your selection, do you want to highlight? What are your higher margin products? And how do we highlight those to the consumers you're willing to speak to, and then also providing them tools. Again, going back to this data conversation, there's not a whole lot informing what they put on their shelves except for that stuff. salesmen walking in drizzly can bring transparency to that as well. What are consumers in this area buying? What are the trends? How should you think about pricing it? And how do you build that into an overall larger strategy to have a successful business and in a rapidly changing environment, which we're seeing, depending on which city different rates, but it's happening. 32:17 So you brought up data, you bring in a datum, and we are in the age of big data where we are dominated by it. Tell talk, walk us through, like how you use that data? Do you sell it to the to the suppliers? Do you feed it into like a market research hub? How are you using the data you're acquiring at point of sale? 32:40 Almost all of the data we acquire, we are using to inform our own offering. And so it's simply commerce things like how do we construct a better flow to increase conversion your likelihood to hit checkout? How do we start moving shelves around in what is effectively a digital liquor store to be more personalized to you So that the next time you come back in, we're more apt to show you the right product at the right time at the right price. That's really what we use the data for. Going back to retailers and brands, we can aggregate it and anonymize it and give them larger trends that could be cut down by geography, but never anything that's highlighting a particular store or a particular consumer more. So just highlighting a different slice of the market. And one of the interesting things about the alcohol industry is you have your Nielsen's and your IR eyes and some of the bigger data providers who have a interesting offering within the alcohol space. But they're big gaps, the independent liquor store market where you don't have receipt data, or you don't have consistency of point of sale systems. Those are not places so New York has an entire market. Those are not places that people have great insight to and drizzly through its 350 retailers that we partner with in New York City can start to really build transparency into a market that is otherwise been only aggregated into depletion data. So Other things. So there's an aggregated view for the external partners. For us internally, it's how do we create a better ecommerce experience? 34:06 Because that thread can be 34:07 actually, you know, it's fascinating. 34:09 There's a lot to take in, right. 34:11 I used to cover retail, I used to be the tech writer for the National Retail Federation's magazine stores, and I felt myself going back to the old days. Listen to you talk there. And follow up on that data is that, you know, we don't really a lot of the a lot of the numbers that are that are out there that are public. They kind of like you're saying, like the Nielsen numbers. They're not really complete. So my question to you is like, why don't you guys release these numbers? Why don't you make them public? Since you probably do have the best database of sales numbers of anybody out there? 34:54 There are more craft distilleries popping up around the country now, more than ever before. So how do you find The best stories and the best flavors will rack house whiskey club is a whiskey of the Month Club and they're on a mission to uncover the best flavors and stories that craft distilleries across the US have to offer rack houses box ship out every two months to 39 states across the US and rack houses April box, they're featuring a distillery that makes us Seattle craft, Texas heritage and Scottish know how rack house whiskey club is shipping out to whiskies from two bar spirits located near downtown Seattle, including their straight bourbon, go to rack house whiskey club calm to check it out and try some for yourself. Use code pursuit for $25 off your first box. 35:42 My question to you is like, why don't you guys release these numbers? Why don't you make them public and you probably do have the best database of sales numbers of anybody out there. 35:53 You're hitting on a great thing. And we actually do believe in the democratization of our data just because we think it's going to make all of us Better, including the consumer experience. So we released something a long time ago called the data distillery. We are thinking about how to do this in a larger way, not only for trend data, but again, how do we create something that becomes a backbone for the industry so that we are sharing data? Not because I think some people think you by holding on to it, you're more valuable. Our view is by using it to make the industry more effective, the consumers will win, which is ultimately what we're all about. One, one quick anecdote. I mean, we see trends earlier, our average consumer is millennial, older millennial 30 to 34 years old, 5050, male, female, and these are folks who are trendsetters. These are social people. And so, Rosie a couple of years ago, I mean, seltzer took off about eight months online before it did on, you know, in the physical world. So it's just one of those things where we can really inform based on the trendsetters that purchase on our platform brands and how they should be thinking about the world and then a larger play as to what you're saying Fred around, using data to benefit the industry. 36:59 Fred, you Actually, you know, and you kind of cover my question, but I guess as a liquor store owner, do I have, you know, do I have the same access to that data? Is every single store within your system? Or is it store specific or regional specific? And like, from a CR is do you have a CRM base as well with drizzly for the retailer? 37:20 We do we do. So if you're a drizzly retailer, we have a tool that's actually just culturally retailer and that gives you access to all of your sales data, all of the customers that are purchasing from you. And then also an aggregated view on some of these consumer trends and thoughts around the inventory, you should be stocking. So that is absolutely part of being a partner with drizzly and a CRM side. We're obviously aggregating eyeballs on our site. We're aggregating consumers and want to speak to them in an intelligent way. A piece of what we're doing in 2020 is starting to take our technology and utilizing that to allow retailers to do this themselves. So you can imagine white labeled websites that Allow them to merchandise their own products more effectively and almost have control of their own website by utilizing drizzly assets. And you can start to see where that would go in terms of CRM capability, the ability to talk to their consumers in a more discreet way versus the aggregator marketplace that is drizzly. So there's a lot within that, but yes, I can see us more and more powering some of their ecommerce needs, not only to benefit us, but I think it's a necessity for the market to benefit consumers. 38:26 I also think it's a necessity to because of course it for me, it always comes back to tech. And, you know, you go and you look at some websites, and I mean, some of them are just they're just archaic, right? You know, a lot of liquor stores, these mom and pop shops that try to build a website, there's a flash banner on it, you know, whatever it is. And, you know, that's why, you know, at least not in this particular segment, but this is why a lot of people that are creating their own businesses, they look at things like Shopify because it makes their you know their system a lot easier. I mean, or is that like one of the big selling points that you have for just lead a lot of these retailers is like, let's Let's take you at least to the 2020. Now, 39:03 yeah, that's a great point. So it wasn't when we started, to be honest, we thought more about how to aggregate consumer demand in our marketplace. And so that's a little bit different. That's almost like the Amazon side of things of will collect the eyeballs, we'll build the technology. And we're going to utilize your physical shelf space. On the other side, the selling point there is just incremental consumers incremental profit, so that that works. On the other side, there's so much we can do to look like Shopify to be a platform, which is an entirely different business model, but one that we really think we can enable the hundred thousand independent retailers out there to serve customers, and I keep saying customers because despite everything else that goes on within our business, we talk a lot about internally, the reason for our existence, our purpose behind everything is to to be there for the moments that matter and the people who create them and yes, we sell alcohol and help people transact online. But we're there to actually provide a better consumer experience and allow them the time and the freedom and To find that right bottle at the right price, I mean, we all know how cool that can be. So, it all comes back to democratizing what we do to the benefit of the end consumer. 40:10 Well, first off, hats off for trying to make change, positive change in this world. That's always outdated. That's we know, it's we know, it's insanely difficult to actually do. But I think there's one aspect that you know, we kind of want to touch on as well because it is a it is a part of the drizzly system and no, it's not just you know, basically creating the catalog for for what the consumer sees, but there there is a component of actually how it is delivered to the end consumer. So kind of touched on a little bit about you know, you said the post mates the, that sort of model of like, how does it once once a transaction happens online, at what point is drizzly done with it, and it's either on the retailer, it's on whomever, to get that into the hands of the consumer. 40:57 So when someone hits check out What we have done is send that order through a gateway to the merchant of record, which is the retailer itself. So just one data point there. If you're shopping from ABC liquors, that is the merchant of record on your credit card drizzly is not within that flow of funds at any point. What we do do on the other side is build the technology so that if the retailer wants to do the delivery, they have the ability to do that it almost is like the Uber driver app to some extent for this space. And that's about 92% of our orders. So most of this is retailer delivery using our technology, and we are providing the customer support throughout the entire experience until the bottle has received at its location. The third parties are interesting just because delivery is such a inexpensive piece of this whole thing and they've added scale and efficiency in a way that you almost need multiple categories, multiple verticals to do and you can imagine a mom and pop getting frustrated on a seven 7pm Friday. Too many orders coming from drizzly too many people internally It would be nice to be able to have a courier of some sort. So that's what we built in. They're all tech based, we have full visibility into when it reaches the consumers hands inclusive of ID verification. So we're always a part of it. And at the same time, we're not the ones physically handing the bottle off. 42:16 So you're like a almost like a marketplace, right? As for getting those together? I mean, is I mean, is it really like you're popping out? And it's like saying, like, okay, like Uber Eats, post mates doordash, like, whoever is going to answer this, like, come and pick this thing up. 42:29 We don't put it out to bid per se but we do work with most of the partners you just said. But that was also an idea to be honest. And there's people who have created that, we found that having one option per store is a little bit better just because you get used to who they are and do things in a in a bit simpler way. 42:44 And so I guess a another question that I kind of want to actually go ahead and because it's I'm sure it's a the business side of this. So go ahead and answer it is 42:51 actually a business side. So you talked about how you kind of laid the framework for this whole really, for what is an is an new category that's kind of changing the space and now you got competition. You got all kinds of people coming on board, minibar and a few others. So how do you? How do you how do you deal with that? How do you, you you have to compete with him at individual retailers? Do you guys share retailers? How does that work with your competition? 43:21 Well, Fred, I mean, going back to 2013 when we Magneto got back in the stone age's. Exactly. I felt like I got some grit. Now, that was pretty good. In 2013, when we kind of announced the model, there were about 50 meters out there, minibar absolutely being one of them and have a lot of respect for what they've done. That phase isn't necessarily over at any time, but the big boys are now here. And so we're actually thinking about competition, not necessarily for just alcohol specific, but the logistics firms. I mean, Uber Eats has tried to do alcohol delivery. 10 different times instacart has prioritized alcohol and e commerce. Why Walmart and grocers are starting to think about how to do this in a bigger way, total wine. So you can imagine that there's, we almost need to find a way to succeed. And this is what we talked about a lot internally. In 567 years, every bottle on every shelf could be transacted online and sent to a consumer, whether it be delivery pickup or shipping. And in that world, how does your business model succeed? And that's really where it just has been built for. Not necessarily the me twos today that are, you know, predominantly just about delivery and convenience, within that 44:32 value proposition. At what point do you stop, you know, you're talking about some pretty big names and they're trying to get in the space? what point do you stop competing and just start? You can't beat them join them in that regard, is that the end goal? Seems like with most tech companies, they want to get absorbed or bought out, you know, at some point have an exit strategy. 44:51 Yeah, I mean, there's always there's always thoughts on the next strategy, but to be honest, we're being built for the long haul and alcohol is a bit a bit you I mean, there is a moat, from regulation that comes from embracing them, rather than trying to knock down these laws. Now, if tomorrow, the Three cheers went away, and it looked a lot more like selling electronics online, I might have a different tune as to about where we fit in the long run. But I do think we can stick out a place here for the long term. And a lot of that comes back to kind of this underpinning of how do you take regulation and code that into your technology? And then also, how do you take a mom and pop an entirely fragmented retail base, and then aggregate that in such a way using your catalog, your tech that we know where every bottle is in the country, its price and how to get it to a consumer, what you build on top of that within your product experience? Just kind of opens up the world to you and I just think that's something entirely differentiated and difficult to replicate. All that being said, not looking to sell by any means today, but it's obviously something you sit up a little straighter when Amazon gets into your space. 45:58 Yeah, I would imagine so. Yeah, I mean, I think I think Amazon might have been one of the big names that, you know, people are gonna recognize and you know, they're they're definitely trying to get into the space as well. And so, you know, another question that that kind of follows along with that is the when we start looking at, you know, Amazon, you start looking at instacart, and all these different kinds of companies that are trying to get into it. And if you kind of said something like, if the three tier system is goes down tomorrow, like what what would that really mean for you all? And if basically, this gets democratized to the point that it is just like, buying and you know, buying an electronic off Amazon like, What? What is that? Is that truly like gaming or a game over? I mean, are you really reliant on the three tier system to to make this happen? 46:47 At this point? No, but I think two things become obvious. Right now brands are about as far away that you can be from a consumer when you're a big CPG right. So they are unbelievable storytellers and brand builders from The awareness message side of things. But it's not like Procter and Gamble and Walmart, where you have co located offices and you're trying to figure out where to put things on shelves and incentive basis. And you know, you're buying shelf space and tap space and the rest. That doesn't happen well, at least not legally, at least today. And if that goes away, then the way brands work with retailers changes overnight. And drizzly has a value proposition there, but it does need to shift pretty significantly. The other side of the coin though, is we almost need to plan for the three tiers to go away because drizzly successful, when the product experience, the consumer experience is so good that they no longer need to go to the store. And that goes back to not just the selection and the availability and the transparency of price, but then packaging it in such a way that again, almost guided shopping or personalization to where you almost feel like you're missing out if you're not going to Jersey because you've learned so much about your product. There's a crazy stat we just learned that you know 40 45% of our consumers Unless you're using Drupal as a discovery tool, and not necessarily transacting on the platform, I think that's fascinating. I think that's something that we can really lean into to drive value for the consumers at the end of the day. And again, I think that's one of those unique things that regulation be damned, we can do better than anyone else. 48:16 And how does your game change if shipping laws are broken down? Now, let's say the three tier system still there, and it's great. However, now that you know, New York and shipped to California, Wisconsin, you can go to Florida, and liquor stores can now compete, you know, across state lines, like what is that? What does that do for your business? 48:37 I think it'd be a little bit of the Wild West to start, I think you're going to start to see the macro or the larger chains, assert price dominance because they can then start to think of their business on a national scale versus distributor, distributor and state by state. I think we could really take advantage of that world to be honest again, I keep beating on the same point but if we know what's in 40,000 stores We should be able to surface all of the items at the best price possible for you almost kind of this notion of tell us what you want, we'll figure out the best way for you to get it. And I think that's one in which we would really succeed. Shipping is not a huge piece of our business today. But that speaks to the use case, we're going after more so than the consumer demand inherent within shipping. So I think we could really take advantage of it. It would, it would require a little bit of adaptation and how we do things. 49:24 All right, I want to jump back into some data stuff. This is I think this is some fun. This will be fun for you. What is your best selling bourbon based on your data? 49:36 It's a little different than you might think. It's a brand that we've done a lot of work with, to try to figure out how it resonates with the millennial consumer but bullet bourbon was our largest brand in 2019. 49:48 Bigger than it's a 49:49 popular brand, 49:50 but it's you know, it's not it's not necessarily makers, or Jim are some of these other ones. So yeah, 49:55 still a top 10 bourbon from a sales perspective. Now what are The top five selling spirits so like from a categorical perspective 50:06 category spirits are the spirit themselves. 50:09 The so the know the category spirits so like tequila ROM bourbon like what what's your top five there? 50:16 I might get this wrong but we'll see here I'd go with vodka. I'd actually go with bourbon, rum, tequila, although I think our tequila selections been incredibly high end and what we're actually selling which is kind of interesting. And then I'll check for you here in a second on a fifth. I don't think I know the fifth off the top of my head. 50:37 You said it wrong. It's goes bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, bourbon, 50:41 right. brown brown, brown brown. 50:44 At least that's what we want to hear. 50:45 Well, I didn't I heard there the his mic cut out there when he said another word I don't 50:53 bleep me out but it's funny I've I've sworn on this and I didn't hear any negative reaction. Now I say anything other than bourbon. And there we go. 51:00 Yeah you get around Fred that's that's the type of banter you're gonna get out of it and so you know as we kind of want to like ask a question because we really didn't ask it in the very top of this because you said you were a bourbon fan like what's what's what's kind of like your go to you got some favorites cuz I see behind you you got a Coors Light came behind there I figured figured we could I mean you're in the you're in the spirits business like let's let's get some bourbon on those shelves back there. 51:25 Oh don't worry we do have that this is just one of the rooms 51:29 well so I like to play nice because we work with a bunch of different brands in their businesses. I'm a big Booker's fan I love 100 proof Booker's over a glass device when I go home. I'd say that's more of a Friday night drink than anything else. But that's probably my go to if I'm if I'm opening something on the regular. 51:47 What do you mean by by working with brands? Like what is what does that mean to you? Well, 51:52 I think there's two things. The first would be on the data side. So these are folks who are looking to learn about consumer trends, figure out how their business brands are resonating with consumers. And it's less even about the online spend. It's taking those learnings and apply it to the offline. And again, massive media budgets and trying to make them even 1% more efficient by learning about the online consumer in depth. That's a big piece of it. The second piece is, shirtsleeves, the fastest growing company in the fastest growing channel for alcohol. So to that extent, they are trying to figure out how they're going to win online. Knowing that in five years 10 12% of all alcohol is going to be sold online. So drizzly can be almost a test and learn area for them. You can speak to consumers in a personalized way. You could sell advertising, we haven't done much of that to date. But all of these things are basically a lab for them to figure out how their brands can come online, and either keep or grow their market share versus the physical world. 52:49 So what was that you say? 10 to 12% is what it's going to be in the future. 52:53 Yeah, if you look at some of the larger data providers, they're projecting 13 $14 billion in 2023. Slightly less ambitious than that. But you're seeing this industry come online at 40 50% year over year, which is significant, we do think it's gonna be the fastest growing CPG over the next three to five years. 53:11 So what what do you all need to do to try to position yourselves to say like, we can grow this beyond 10 to 12%? Like how, how do we change the minds of the consumer to say, like, Oh, we can we can get this to 20 to 25%? Like, what do you think has to change in the culture to try and get people to start buying more online? 53:32 I think you're actually hitting at it pretty good there, which is awareness. Not many people know that you're allowed to buy alcohol online. And even if you do, there hasn't been a way to do so that should take away from going to the local liquor store. I mean, that's, that's a behavior that's worked for decades and decades. And so to break that behavior, you need to build something that is not one or two times more effective than going to the store but 10 X and really, that's where the product offering needs. to elevate the purchasing to where I don't need to leave my home, or if I did, I need to at least see what's online to really inform my experience in a way that I could never get on store. So it's a combination of awareness, and then a product offering that is just so superior going to the store, that they're going to order it online. Again, utilizing that store, though, 54:18 for sure. And I don't know, I mean, I guess there is there is also something about, you know, being a consumer going to the store, looking at it holding in your hand. And maybe, maybe that'll just become a thing of the past. Like, what do you what do you try to do to try to like counteract, like, some arguments like that? I mean, but then again, there's also like, Alright, well, you know, people used to love to have the feel of holding a newspaper in their hand, but nobody really does that a lot anymore, either. Can I still read the newspaper? I gotta be honest, physical core. You're killing me, man. Like you're young. You're young and hip, man. You shouldn't be reading a newspaper. 54:54 no and no one I know we call me hip, but that's all right. I wrote for newspapers for a long time. DDS. to bash on them, I mean, for God's sake, 55:03 there isn't. There's a key word in there that was it was wrong. 55:08 Yeah, but to your to your larger point, I don't want to necessarily be in a world where you can't feel a physical bottle where you can't go look at it, I want to lean into that. And so while the physical store might need to change, I hope it still exists. And I do think it should exist, but in a little bit different format. Instead of trying to have 5000 or 10,000 items on your shelves, and trying to have that inventory in that working capital and play that game. I'd love to see a world where you can almost have a retailer that has an e commerce DNA from day one. And then they have the experiential side of going in being able to taste products being an elevated experience knowing that on the back end, you can get any of those products delivered to you shipped to you or walk away with them from a warehouse around the corner. So they almost become showrooms informed by the DNA of e commerce versus having to compete in the current way of doing things today. 56:00 So So drizzly has been very active on the, you know, on the on the trade front. Where what do you do from a legislative perspective? Dr. You do you guys have a lobby firm that you're spending time in DC Do you do lobby in every state that you're in? Talk us through that particular process from the government perspective. 56:23 It's a core competency of ours. It's really what we were built on. So we have an internal team composed of General Counsel who has industry affairs experience, and then also the woman I mentioned Jackie fluke, who was on the New York State Liquor Authority, and they're really quarterbacking state by state, both almost legal protection side of things, and then an advocacy side for what we believe to be the best way to bring this industry online. We have lobbyists in every state that there is legislation moving we're in those rooms and our real thesis here is the engagement is important because I mean, we spend all day thinking about content tumors and the intersection of their needs and desires with a controlled and regulated substance. We want to be a part of that. And we think we can actually help doing so. So that actually speaks to something else we're doing, which is taking our platform into the cannabis world in the near future as well. 57:16 Oh, that's I think you hit on a pretty good topic there because we've we've actually covered on the podcast before what's the effect of cannabis and the, the, you know, this the distilled spirits market? What do you kind of see is the cannabis market kind of being an opportunity? 57:30 Well, I think it's a massive opportunity. And we started, you know, talking about market size. Alcohol is 130 billion dollars sold off premise each year 2% online. So you can do that math. We think cannabis is going to be a 30, maybe $35 billion legal market within five to seven years. But you're talking 40%, maybe even 50% online. It's a different consumer behavior, and there's no ingrained I know how to go to a store and there's no kind of behavior you need to break off, there's actually a stigma from going to a store. So all of that coming together, we think is a great opportunity. We do think it needs to be informed by alcohol legislation and the know how behind bringing alcohol online, it's just it needs to be treated with respect as a category. And that's one of the things we think we can really bring to that conversation. 58:22 Okay, so I have a request for your cannabis stuff, your delivery, you need to have guys on with backpacks on bicycles. Doing the deliveries through through town. 58:35 You mean like the movie half 58:36 but yeah, exactly. 58:40 Yeah, that's not gonna. 58:43 That wouldn't make it right. A legal team. 58:45 Yeah, no, you definitely wouldn't. But you could absolutely work beside me because I come up with these ideas all day long and get shot down. So it's good. I mean, it 58:54 is another thing that you know, even with the cannabis market, I mean, if you're, if you're always engrained in these legal discussions. Do you find it like fascinating that the legalization of cannabis and the l