Podcasts about so keith

Michele Hansen  00:00Welcome back to Software Social. This episode is sponsored by the website monitoring tool, Oh Dear. We use Oh Dear to keep track of SSL certificates. If an SSL certificate is about to expire, we get an alert beforehand. We have automated processes to renew them, so we use Oh Dear as an extra level of peace of mind. You can sign up for a ten day free trial with no credit card required at OhDear.app. Michele Hansen  00:28Hey, welcome back to Software Social. So today we're doing something kind of fun. We're leaning on the social part of Software Social, and we have invited our friend, Sean Fioritto, to join us today.Sean Fioritto  00:44Hey guys. Thanks for having me.  Colleen Schnettler  00:47Hi Sean. Thanks for being here. Michele Hansen  00:48So, and the reason why we asked Sean, in addition to being a great person, is that Sean wrote a book called Sketching With CSS, and as you all know, I am writing a book and figuring it out. And there is a lot of stuff I haven't figured out, especially when it comes to, like, actually selling the book. Like, I feel like that, I feel like the, writing the book is, like, I feel like I kind of got a handle on that. The whole selling the book thing, like, not so much. Um, so we thought it would be kind of helpful to have Sean come on, since like, he's done this successfully. Colleen Schnettler  021:36So Sean, I would love to start with a little bit of your background with the book. What inspired you to write it? How did you get started? Where did that idea come from?  Sean Fioritto  01:50Yeah, so I wanted to quit my job.  Colleen Schnettler  01:53Don't we all? Michele Hansen  01:55Honest goal. Sean Fioritto  01:56I always wanted to go on my own, be independent, run my own business. That's been a goal for a very long time. So, I tried various things, you know, in my spare time, with limited to no success for years and years before that, and I was just getting sick of, the plan was, you know, I'm like, okay, I have this job. And in my spare time, I'm gonna get something going and then, and that just wasn't working. So I was getting impatient. Anyway, I ended up signing up with Amy Hoy's 30x500 class. This was seven or eight years ago. So, I signed up for that class. Actually, wait, I'm getting my timeline a little mixed up. So, I started reading stuff by Amy Hoy. It's funny, I'd actually bought another book that she wrote, and she used her sort of process for that book. And I bought that for my, for my job earlier. And I was like, oh, this Amy Hoy person is interesting. And so I started reading her blog, and then she has these things she writes called ebombs. You guys are probably familiar with that term. But they're basically content that, it's educational content directed at her target, you know, customer, which she would call her audience. So I was just, she, at that point, she had started 30x500. I think it was actually called a Year of Hustle at that point. And so she had all this content, and I was just devouring it, because I was like, she gets me. She knows my problem, and this is awesome. So I was just reading everything that she could write, that she wrote, and, you know, finding any resource that she'd ever written about, like, what's her process, because she was talking about this mysterious process that she has, she, she would talk about it. And I was able to sort of reverse engineer part of her course, the main thing called Sales Safari. So I'm not, I'm at my job, coasting, doing a half-assed job, spending a lot of time doing Sales Safari, trying to figure out what, what product I should do. Not product, but that's not the way to think about it with Sales Safari, but trying to figure out like, what, who, what audience should I focus on? And what problems do they have, and what's the juiciest problem that makes sense for me to tackle? And then, and she would call them pains, by the way, not, not problems. So what's the juiciest pain that they have, for me, that was like, be the easiest for me to peel off, and, and work on. So I started digging, and it was like, alright, well, what audience makes sense for me? This is kind of the process, and it was like, you know, like web designers, web developers, because I was a web developer. And so like, what are the, you know, audiences that are close to audiences that I'm in is kind of ideal. So I started there, and then I just read and read and read. I probably put like, 80 hours of research time into that process.  Colleen Schnettler  05:05Wow. Michele Hansen  05:06That's a lot. Sean Fioritto  05:06Of just reading and reading and reading and reading, and taking notes. And really understanding and whittling down and figuring out my audience, and figuring out, so the thinking, the benefit of that amount of time spent deliberately going through a process like that is that at some point, I became so in-tune with the audience that I could identify, and this is gonna pay off for you, Michele, this, this little story, because this feeds into like, how do you sell it. At some point, it meant that I could tell when a thing that I was, like a piece of content marketing that I was working on, was going to resonate very strongly with my audience and be worth the effort, if that makes sense. And it didn't really take much. Like, after I got done with that much amount of research, it was sort of, like, pretty trivial for me to come up with ideas for content that I could write that I knew people were gonna just eat up. And so that's, that's how I started building my, building my mailing list. And then that's how I eventually, Colleen, to your question, I came up with Sketching With CSS, which it was a solution to a pain point that I'd identified in my audience, which at that point was web designers. Colleen Schnettler  06:37How big did your mailing list grow? Sean Fioritto  06:39I have 20,000 people on my mail list. Colleen Schnettler  06:4120,000? Michele Hansen  06:42Holy guacamole.  Sean Fioritto  06:46Yeah. So like I said, I got really good. No, no, no. Michele Hansen  06:51I've got like, 200 people on my mailing list, or like, 220. And like, for context, that's like, 200 more people than I ever expected to have on the mailing list, and hearing, like, 20,000 feels very far from, from 200. Sean Fioritto  07:10Yeah, well, let me say something that will hopefully be more reassuring. The, Amy and Alex, for example, they've been running 30x500, for years, and I think their mailing list is just now approximating, like 20,000 or so. And like, the, they have been making so much money with that course with a significantly smaller mailing list. And that's a really, like, high value product, too. So anyway, if it makes you feel any better, I really think they only have like, a couple 1000 people on their mailing list for a long time. And then, for me, I launched pre-sales of my book, at that point, my, I think I only had, boy, I used to, I used to have this memorized. But like, it's been so long now. But I think I only had like, it was less than 2000 I think. I think. So, and even then, I don't think you need that. I know people that have launched with much smaller lists than that, and, and it was fine. Because the people that are on your list now guarantee it, your, will be very interested in, in buying the book. You know, that'd be like a low, low barrier to entry, assuming like, your mailing list is one of the ways that you're thinking of selling the book. Michele Hansen  08:26Yeah, I guess. That's not a good answer. But like, I, I, I actually, I admit, I'm a little bit like, wary to kind of hit it too hard. Like, I would probably send out like, like, if I did a pre-sale, which I guess I should. Actually, I had someone a couple days ago, who has been reading the drafts, who actually I think is also a 30x500 student in the past, say that they wanted to, like, pre-buy the book and asked me how to do it. And I was like, that's a great question. I will figure that out. And like, so maybe do that, and then maybe one more when, like, the book comes out? Um, yeah, cuz, so I've been thinking about the newsletter as a way to draft the book because I find writing an email to be a lot easier than, like, staring at a blank cursor just, you know, blinking at me. And I guess I haven't really, like, and like, people signed up for it to read the draft of the book, so I guess I almost feel bad like, using it for sales too much. Like you know, I want to let people know that the book exists, but like, I don't want to. I don't know, does that. Sean Fioritto  09:45So, it's very considerate of you to think about that. Michele Hansen  09:52Another way of saying that another, also a way to not make any money off of this. Sean Fioritto  09:57Well, yeah, that, but also, it's kind of inconsiderate of you to not be thinking about all the people that really, really, really want to buy it and also would like to read anything that you're writing right now. Like, you're just completely leaving them out there to dry. And there are definitely people like that on your mailing list. So, they're like, there's like, some people on your mailing list are not going to be interested in your content if you're sending it too much, or, or just in general, really lightly interested in what you're writing about, or mistakenly signed up for your mailing list, which at this point, you probably don't have that problem. So like, to some extent, that's always the case, and it used to bother me a lot. I would send an email, and sales emails especially would result in bigger unsubscribes after every email, because you know, your little email tool tells you like, can, you know, so nice of it to tell you like, this many people unsubscribed after you sent this email. And it's always a big jump after like, a sales email. That used to bother me a lot. But then I started, kind of watching even my own behavior, and you probably do the same, and you probably like, look forward to some emails from some people that hit your inbox from some newsletters that you're looking forward to, and you'd very much like them to send you more. And then there's other people where you're like, well, I signed up for that, like, a couple years ago, and I just am not thinking about that anymore. And I need, like, to like, whittle down my content. So you unsubscribe. So then you become that unsubscribe number on the other end of the person sending the email, but like, you weren't annoyed, you didn't mind. It was just like, time to move on. And that's usually the case. So I think people can just unsubscribe as long as it's easy. I would literally put it at the top of my emails. So like, because I would send emails very infrequently. I was not disciplined about that. And I still don't think that that's a problem. But the, but because I sent them infrequently I put at the top like, hey, you know, you signed up for this, because you probably read this thing I wrote. You weren't interested in the book, whatever, if this is not for you anymore, just unsubscribe, like, first thing. So that always made me feel better about sending emails. And also, I don't know, I think that's the right thing to do so people just know, like upfront, that you know, oh, okay, there's the easy to find unsubscribe button when they're done. And then that's fine. Michele Hansen  12:26We did that for Geocodio once, like, I want to say it was like a year or two ago, and our lists had been like, super disorganized. And like I think we had, we were sending stuff like, we send like one or two marketing emails a year from MailChimp. And then we also had Intercom, and those things didn't sync up. And so like, sometimes people would unsubscribe in intercom and then like, not be unsubscribed in MailChimp, or like vice versa. And then, since we didn't send a lot of email, we used MailChimp's pay as you go. And then they just like, shut down their page and go option a couple of years ago, even though we had a ton of credit, which was a little annoying. And, and then, so like, the next time, and I think we migrated over to Mailcoach. And so the next time we send out an email, we actually like for some reason, we were like, there's probably a lot of people on this who have meant to unsubscribe. And so at the very top of the next email, we put an unsubscribe link and we also put a link to delete their account. And like, a bunch of people did it, but then our number of people who were unsubscribing later on like, went like, way down. So it was like, ripping off the band aid basically. Sean Fioritto  13:36Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think like, I don't know, when people unsubscribe from Geocodio, at this point, it doesn't like, break your heart anymore, I'm guessing. Right?  Michele Hansen  13:45No, I mean, we're like, we're kind of like jumping into something that has been very much on my mind, but I hadn't been wanting to admit that it was there and just trying to like, pretend that it's not there, which is all the dealing with rejection around either, you know, people being mad that they were being sold to or negative reviews. And I like, you know, it sounds like you kind of have a process for, like, accepting those feelings.  Sean Fioritto  14:19It used to bother me a lot.  Michele Hansen  14:22Like, yeah. Sean Fioritto  14:24Yeah, it used to bother me a lot. There are two things that I hated. I hated frontpage Hacker News, and I hated getting angry emails.  Michele Hansen  14:33Oh.  Sean Fioritto  14:35I also got creepy, tons of creepy emails. Once you get, like, past a certain threshold and the number of subscribers you have, the creepiness factor increases. Yeah. Yeah. But the, but I got used to all of that. I just realized, like, there's just some percentage of people that are just angry right now or whatever, like, whatever they're going through. And I know that, like, I am very carefully crafting things such that the most, most of my content is not self-serving, most of it is directly a result of research that tells me that this is a problem that people are having, and now I'm helping you. So I'm like, I never feel bad about those, and then even the sales emails, I started to not feel bad about those, too, because I'm like, this is also a thing that's helping you. But that took a while to get to. I mean, honestly, it did. And it got worse when it became my only source of income, which added extra, extra feelings. But yeah, there's a lot of feelings to like, get through. And now I have just developed more of a thick skin, you know. Like, I'm not terrified of having a super popular article anymore, or, you know, stuff like that. That doesn't, that doesn't bother me anymore. I think it just came with time, just like with you and Geocodio. I mean, I'm sure you are used to like, some fluctuations of revenue, which probably bothered you a lot at the beginning, but now, not so much. I mean, I'm just, I'm guessing, but that seems, you know, I'm sure there's some things they're that you've got a thick skin about now. Michele Hansen  16:12Oh, my gosh. I mean, for years, every time a plan downgrade came through, like every time it was like a punch in the gut. Like, and yeah, I think now that I, I guess I trust the revenue more, I'm not as impacted by it. It's more like, oh, I wonder, like, why that was. Like, did their project end, or like, you know, like, what happened? But yeah, in the beginning, especially when it was first our like, when it, when it became my, like, full time income. I mean, as, as you said, like, that is really painful. Like, I'm curious, like, so you,  so like, when did you start writing the book? Sean Fioritto  1705Let me think, like, like the year, or a timing, like, in terms of the timeline?  Michele Hansen  17:12Whichever one you want to go with.  Sean Fioritto  17:15Yeah, I can't remember the year cuz it was a while ago. It was like, eight years ago.  Michele Hansen  17:19Oh, wow. Okay. So you started, Sean Fioritto  17:22I think it was 2013 is when I started. Yeah. Michele Hansen  17:24You did the, sounds like you did 30x500 first, right? Sean Fioritto  17:30Yeah, I had the, I had started writing the book before 30x500. But like I said, I was ,I was following her process already at sort of reverse engineered it. And then I felt like I just owed her the money for the, for the course. So, plus I wanted to meet her, so. Michele Hansen  17:44Yeah, so you started like, the research process basically, like, like 30x500 like, was only one part of your, like, research. Like, cuz you said you had sort of, you had figured out what her process was based on the blog posts and whatnot before you took the course. Yeah. Sean Fioritto  18:00Yeah.  Michele Hansen  18:01Okay. Sean Fioritto  18:02Yeah, and at that point, I had already generated the research I needed to see, to choose Sketching With CSS as a, as a product. I pretty much had, I think I had a landing page. I hadn't done pre-sales yet, but I was, I was gearing up for that. Michele Hansen  18:17You are so organized. Colleen Schnettler  18:19Michele, do you have a landing page?  Michele Hansen  18:22There is a website.  Colleen Schnettler  18:24Okay, I didn't know. Michele Hansen  18:26I haven't told anyone about it because I talk about,  Colleen Schnettler  18:29Your secret website. Michele Hansen  18:30I actually have two. I thought of the domain name, or like, the name for it in the shower, and then I like, immediately like, ran for the computer to see if it was available. And I actually bought two, and then I think we put, like, a book, oh my god, I just typed it wrong. Colleen Schnettler  18:55This is the part where you tell us what it is.  Michele Hansen  18:57There's nothing on it, and actually, if I say it now then we have to have something on it by, Colleen Schnettler  19:01Well, there's no way to pressurize a situation than to tell us right now. Michele Hansen  19:06So okay, it is DeployEmpathy.com. Okay, okay, crap, now I have it out. I don't even know how I'm going to sell it. Okay. So um, and I think I have another one, too. But yeah, we have like, a very basic like, WordPress template on it. Like, it's not, it's not, okay. While I was trying to figure it, so like, people keep asking me like, oh, like, when's your book coming out? And I'm like, I have no idea. I have never done this before. I don't know what steps are ahead of me. So, okay, so you started writing the book while you were doing research concurrently, and then how, and you were also, Sean Fioritto  19:48Oh, sorry, there's two types of research.  Michele Hansen  19:50Okay. Sean Fioritto  19:51So, we could clarify that. There was my audience research and understanding the pain that I was solving, and then there's the research about the book. I didn't have to do as much research about the book. I mean, I already, like, the type of book I ended up writing, I already had, you know, the expertise I needed to write that book. So yeah, I was, audience research was already done by the time I was writing Sketching With CSS. So I wasn't doing research like that while writing the book. Michele Hansen  20:16Okay. And then you also had the landing page up, and you started building your list while you were doing this research and writing phase. Okay, so how long did it take you from, like, the time that you had the idea for the book to when people could, like, buy and download the book, like, just like, the big picture? Like, how long did that process take you? Sean Fioritto  20:45Well, I mean, keep in mind, that ton of the work was while I was still full time working, in theory. Michele Hansen  20:56I mean, I guess I am, too, right? Like, this is not my full time thing. Sean Fioritto  21:00Yeah, but I think like, from, from, from research to launch, like, book is done, it was like, in the four to six month range. Michele Hansen  21:14Okay. Okay. So I think I started at like, the end of February with the newsletter, and it's May, so that's like, yeah. I do feel like I'm doing a little bit of, I think what we have termed Colleen does, of putzing in the code garden, rather than selling things or doing marketing or whatnot. And I am totally doing that with my manuscript, I guess you could call it. Sounds so fancy. And just like, moving commas around and like, totally procrastinating on making images for it, like totally, totally procrastinating on that. Okay, so it took you like, four to six months to get to that point.  Sean Fioritto  21:59Yeah, there was a, there was a launch in between there. Michele Hansen  22:02So when was the like, so was your pre-sale your launch? Or like, how does that work?  Sean Fioritto  22:08You could do lots of launches.  Michele Hansen  22:11This is like, the part that is like, just sort of like, you know, in my head, it's like step one, write book, like, step two of question, question question, and step three, profit. Like that's sort of where I am right now. Sean Fioritto  22:24I feel like you're already doing most of the things that I would do. The, the one thing, so alright. So you're, you're working in public, so you're getting interest via Twitter. You're writing to your mailing list. You're doing the right thing, which is writing content for your book that, you know, is also useful to your mailing list, like, independently. Like, like getting double bang for your buck is smart when you're doing this kind of business. So you're keeping your list warm enough. People are, you're building anticipation, people are telling you you're building anticipation, because they're like, hey, when do I get to buy this book? So, you know, you're basically doing all the things. As, you know, from from my perspective, looking in, it seems like you're just accidentally or intuitively doing the right, doing the right stuff. The thing that's missing between like, what you are doing and what I did is probably, I would press pause on book writing and do specific content marketing things just to build my mailing list. Michele Hansen  23:37But I love putzing in the code garden.  Sean Fioritto  23:39And I'm not, I'm not, sorry, I didn't mean to say that as like, you should do that. That's what I would, as in like, I was doing that. And I don't know, Michele Hansen  23:48And you wrote, like, a successful book and sold it, and it was your full time job for a period of time. So you're kind of here because you're good at this and because I need to be told these things. Sean Fioritto  23:59Right. Well, I'm just saying what I did. But it's, it's really ultimately you get to pick and choose what you do. The, you know, I actually happen to very much enjoy the process of coming up with content that I knew would be popular and writing it and sharing it everywhere and doing all that stuff. And also, I knew I needed to because I was going to try and make this my full time living, so I'm like, I need more people on my mailing list. So that was pretty important to me based on the goals I was trying to achieve. The, the other thing is though, like, even with a small mailing list, your book as the, a lot of book sales are gonna come from word of mouth. Like, I sort of forced the book onto the scene. But like, it's not a, the Sketching With CSS is not like a, while the marketing theme is, like, the marketing message at the time, it doesn't connect anymore because  the world has moved on from that phase of web development. But like, while people could read the marketing, the landing page and connect really strongly, and, you know, be interested in the book, the book didn't really lend itself well to word of mouth, because it's not like, it was not like a, oh, you should read this, like, it's this lightweight, like reading recommendation. It's got to be, you've got to be like, ready to commit to learning a bunch of code. So it's like, there's like, a smaller group of people at any given time that are like, at that point, does that make sense? Versus your book, it's, it seems like, it's like a higher level of value, like, it's a more abstract, then like, here are the, learn this code. Here's how to type in Git commands, here's how to do that. You know, like, I was really like, down at the, like, here's what you're gonna be doing day to day in your job. And you're giving them the same message, but like, in a way that can be, that is at like, a higher level, it's maybe easier to read, you know, in your spare time. It's like a business book, has the same qualities of, like, successful business books. So, I think that you may not have to do any of the content marketing stuff that I was doing is what I'm getting at, because, like, I can already tell, I'm ready to read your book, and I'm ready to recommend it to people, because it does it solve, like, a question that people have all the time, and a problem people have, and they're like, oh, I wish I knew how to, you know, talk to my customers more effectively, or understand, you know, the types of customers that are gonna be interested my products, or what problems they're having, etc, etc, right? Customer research, that kind of thing. That is a topic of conversation that comes up a lot in my communities that I hang out in, and so, you know, your book’s gonna be like, at-hand for me to recommend. That's, that's what I suspect. That's my, that's my theory for your book. Michele Hansen  27:00Yeah, I guess, I mean, there's parts of it, definitely.  Sean Fioritto  27:02It's also got a catchy name.  Michele Hansen  27:04Hey, I thought of it in the shower, and then I ran to register the domain, which is exactly what you are supposed to do when you have a good idea for something right? Like, this is the process. Colleen Schnettler  27:13Definitely. Michele Hansen  27:13Like,  Sean Fioritto  27:14You already had a book though, so it's different. You're like, I'm gonna write this book called Deploying Empathy. And you already, like, wrote it. So I think you're good to go. Michele Hansen  27:20Yeah, actually I didn't have a name for a while. Okay, so, so something else I have, like, a question on, which you kind of just sort of touched on with that about, like, super practical elements. So some, some of it is you can, you can definitely sit down and, and you could probably read it in a sitting or two. But then there's, there's the stuff that's more like a toolbox with all of the different scripts, which, by the way earlier, when you were saying like finding the type of content that people are really hungry for like, that, like, those scripts are the thing that people are the most excited about. The problem is, there's only like, so many sort of general scenarios. So I've basically written the main ones, but, so something I noticed with your site, which is SketchingWithCSS.com, just for everybody's reference, so you have the book plus code, which is like, your basic option for $39. And then you have one with the video package for 99. And then you have another one with more stuff for 249. And then there's one with like, all the things for your team for 499. And so, something that people have asked me for is like, like, there's the book piece, and then there's also, people want to be able to easily replicate the scripts so that they can then like, use them to build their own scripts off of it, and like, modify them and whatnot. So people have said, like, well, that could be like a Notion Template, like, bundle that it's sold with, or Google Docs or, or whatever. And so I've been like, kind of like, how do you sell the book with this like, other bundle? And like, can you also do that, like if you sell like a physical book to like, if I did it through Amazon, like, could I also sell a Notion Template bundle or something? Like, I just, I'm kind of, that sort of like, something that's on my mind is like, I'm not really sure how to approach that. And I'm wondering if you could kind of like, talk through your approach to creating like, different tiers, and what you provided at those different tears.  Sean Fioritto  29:33Mm hmm. Right. So, at the time, I know, I have a more sophisticated thought process about it now, but the, when I did the initial set of tiers, it was because Nathan Barry told me that I should have three tears because it tripled his revenue. So I was like, oh, okay.  Michele Hansen  29:53I mean, that's a good reason.  Sean Fioritto  29:55Like, we just happened to be at the bacon biz. That was the other person that I was, I bought his book. So here's the thing I always do, I would buy people's books that way I could email them. Michele Hansen  30:08Is that a thing? Like, if you buy someone's book, like, do you have a license to email them? Sean Fioritto  30:13Well, you get one. You get one email. And as long as it's, you know, not creepy. That's, that's the main thing. But yeah. So we had a bake in this conference in real life, and then, yeah, that's what he, that's what, he told me that I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. I think Patrick McKenzie was there, too, and he said something similar. So I was like, oh, because they did a landing page tear down for me at that conference. That's right.  Michele Hansen  30:36Wow. Nice. Sean Fioritto  30:37Yeah. So anyway, so I did the, I did that, because somebody told me to. And in fact, it's true. Like, if I hadn't done that, you could just see like, the way the purchases ended up that like, that absolutely almost tripled my revenue. So,  Michele Hansen  30:53Oh, wow. Yeah. Sean Fioritto  30:54Which is a big deal for books, because it's not like, yeah, anyway. The, the, the way, the way you were talking about it, though, because there's another way to think about it. I was thinking about in tiers with the book, but another way to think about it is in terms of a product funnel. So your, your book could be super cheap, and it is the entry point into your product, your little product universe. Because like, you're, what you're doing is naturally, because you're literally writing a book about this, listening to your customers and understanding that they have other like, you're really understanding what their, their pain is, and you see that there's different ways that you could solve it for them, right? Those things as a product. So you could bundle that stuff into your book, you could create tiers, like I did. And maybe it does make sense, we talk about this more, but like there's, there's, there's different ways to do tiers with books that, that makes sense, that aren't exactly what I did. But also, like what you're describing is basically different courses. So let's, so, like, people that run these info product businesses, like, what you end up with is like, you've got this world of courses, and you've got this world of content. And people come in from like, search, you know, or whatever channel that you've worked on, usually it's like an SEO channel, like through your content. And then they enter your automated marketing system. And then the first thing they do is buy probably your cheapest thing, your book, and then you're moving them on to the next level into your email marketing system to get them to start looking at, you know, your course, which is like a more in-depth version of the book, or whatever. So anyway, I'm just sort of sketching out, like how, how these content marketing businesses tend to work. So you kind of end up in their little universe and then you just get bounced around all their various email automation. If you've been in anybody's like, any internet famous person's little, like, email world, you'd probably notice eventually, if you're there for long enough, like, I already got that email. And so anyway, so let's there's like a different way of looking at it. You don't have to do tiers. You could just sell your book, you know, digital version, here's the hardback version, you make it cheap, and then, you know, lots of people, lots of people read it. And then you, turns out that this is still really interesting to you, you still like solving people's problems and you're like, you know what, like, I should release like, some recordings of customer interviews as like, examples or whatever, you know, and then you peel that off into a different product and you sell that, and slowly you build up this machine, basically. Also the guy to talk to would be Keith Perhac, who's in our group, too. Michele Hansen  33:51Oh, yeah, I should totally talk to Keith.  Colleen Schnettler  33:53Did he write a book? Sean Fioritto  33:55Yeah, he did but also his, his job before running SegMetrics was with the internet famous person that you guys know of that ran these huge content marketing programs and had this whole product funnel thing and all this stuff that I was talking about. So Keith is like, expert on that topic. Michele Hansen  34:15I guess I don't know if I want to go that direction just now because I do, you know, I do have a job. Um, so I'm, yeah.  Sean Fioritto  34:28You could just be like Amy.  Michele Hansen  34:33So, I, yeah, so I guess I have to think about that, and thinking about like, like, where to price it and those bundles and whatnot. Actually, I have another super like, mechanical question. So, between the time you announced the pre-order, and when you, like, people could actually like, to like, first of all, like, what was the incentive for somebody to pre-order? And then, what was the time from like, when you announced the pre-order to when you like, people could actually get it? Like, how far in advance do you do a pre-order? And what do you like, do you have to give people something? Sean Fioritto  35:10Yeah, I can't, I actually can't remember. I can't remember, what did I do? I did a pre-order. I can't even remember if I gave him the book or not. I don't think you have to. Some people just buy it ready to go. I think I, I probably did give ‘em like, here's everything I got so far, and it's gonna change, but, you know, here's that. Here's what I've got. And, you know, whatever version, like, people don't care if it's like, not even formatted or, you know, give me everything you got. Because the people that are going to do that are ready to just devour it. And then also, some of them might be like, I'm not wanting to, I don't want it right now, but I had a discount, right? So there's like, the pre-order, it's like a little bit cheaper to buy it now. Because I knew I was going to be selling it at like, as, like, a $40 product. So the discount, I think I sold it initially for pre-orders for like, 29 bucks, or maybe less even. Yeah, maybe like 20 bucks or something like that. Michele Hansen  36:08Okay, and it's 30 now. Colleen Schnettler  36:11Yeah, it probably makes sense for you, as someone who, I'm using it and referencing it, even though it's not done, because those scripts, like you were saying, are so valuable to people.  Michele Hansen  36:20Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess I sort of like, feel like everybody already has everything. I mean, reality like, they, they don't because everything has been changed so much. But I guess I need to like, set it up, too. Like, I need to decide on a platform to use to actually sell it.  Sean Fioritto  36:42Oh, I didn't do that at first.  Michele Hansen  36:45Okay. So did you just use Stripe? Sean Fioritto  36:47I think I used PayPal. I was literally like, here's my email, send PayPal money there. And then I sent it to ‘em. Michele Hansen  36:55How did you deal with that and sales tax and stuff?  Sean Fioritto  36:57I don't think that existed. But also I would have just ignored it. Michele Hansen  37:03Okay, yeah, I guess I'm in the EU, so I kind of can't. Sean Fioritto  37:08It's the wild west out here. Michele Hansen  37:12'Murica. Sean Fioritto  37:15No, I had a really bad tax bill the first year because I ignored all of that stuff.  Michele Hansen  37:19Oh, okay, so you're not advising. This is not financial advice.  Sean Fioritto  37:26I'm just saying what I did. I'm not saying you should do that.  Michele Hansen  37:30This may or may not be good advice, what you are hearing, just so you know. All of this may be bad advice. Okay, so I basically, Sean Fioritto  37:39I got audited, too, actually. I forgot about that. So don't, yeah, definitely don't do that. Being audited is not as bad as it sounds, it turns out but that's, anyway, that's a different story. Michele Hansen  38:55I was, I feel like I should do a, like a talk hear, hear, and be like, well, on that massive disappointment, thank you and good evening. Um, so okay. So you know, I feel, see, I feel like I look at you and you're like, you, like, have your stuff together about selling a book. And the fact that you had all like, you had these fears about, like, getting rejected by it, and like, put all this into it, and you did it without having done it before. And, you know, made mistakes, looking back, that you are now helping me not replicate. Um, I feel, I feel a little, I feel a little better about this. And also, I guess I have a deadline now, which is five days from now to have the website functional. So, that's fun.  Colleen Schnettler  38:51You're welcome. I'm here for you, Michele. Just push you over the cliff. Michele Hansen  38:56Like, copy paste content into it, right? Um, I noticed actually that Sean, like, your site has a ton of testimonials, and that's something I have been sort of tepidly starting to collect. Like, I guess I'm a little bit afraid to, like, ask people for testimonials. But I've gotten a couple. Sean Fioritto  39:17So what you do is you write them the testimonial, then you email them and you say can I use this as your testimonial? And then they say yes, and then you put it on your page. Michele Hansen  39:25That's lower friction than what I've been asking for. Um, but, but that makes sense. Sean Fioritto  39:32I mean, I would also peel out, so they said something good in an email and I'd copy it and then change it so it sounded better, and then, can I use this as a testimonial?  Michele Hansen  39:39Yeah. Yeah.  Sean Fioritto  39:42I mean, when I say sounds better, I mean, just like copy edit, right? Michele Hansen  39:45I mean, I guess, like, we do that with Geocodio. And I think, like, Colleen and I have talked about this how, I guess I've like, gotten over all of these fears with Geocodio, and I'm so much more confident with it. And maybe it's because it doesn't have my name, like, directly on it, or it's just been around for like seven and a half years now. Versus this, I'm like, I'm so much more unsure. Like,  Sean Fioritto  40:07You haven't done this in a long time.  Michele Hansen  40:08I never have written a book. Sean Fioritto  40:12Well, whatever. Like, you haven't done a launch. Because you can launch anything. You could have launched Geocodio. Michele Hansen  40:18Yeah. Sean Fioritto  40:18You could've launched it this way, too. But you just haven't done that before. And it's weird, launch is weird because launch is like, everybody, pay attention to me now.  Michele Hansen  40:29Yeah, I'm just super uncomfortable with that.  Sean Fioritto  40:33Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's what it feels like. But then when I realized it was, if you're doing it, right, it's not that. It feels like it, but you're not actually making it about you. It's about them. And then for like, a couple days, you know, you gotta be like, here's the product, you can buy it, and you got to be like sending more emails than you normally. Lots of people will unsubscribe. But like I said, those people are not subscribing. Some of them probably hate you, but you know, most of them are probably just unsubscribing because like, they're, turns out, they weren't interested now that they actually see what it is. They're like, oh, no, that's not what I was thinking it was, or whatever. You get used to it, like, you definitely get used to it. I did it for a couple products. And over time, I just didn't care anymore. Like, I absolutely felt like I was doing a good for people. And I know that I was because I didn't get nearly as much. I think that some of my friends who were in that space would tell me that I needed to go harder, you know, like a little more salesy than I was. But anyway, the point is, Michele Hansen  41:39The thing is, like, I'm not like, I'm not averse to marketing, I think, I mean, this is something that like, we were actually talking about the other day, like people, like technical people being averse to like, sales and marketing and like, like, I have written the book with this in mind that like, hopefully, like, people will recommend it, like, like an audience of the book is like product leaders and marketing leaders who need to teach their teams how to do this. And so like, that's an audience I'm writing for because if they then they have like, buy the book for like five people, and then if they get a new job, or promotion, or whatever, in two years, and they need to teach the team like their new team how to do it again. Um, and so like, that is like, comfortable for me. But yeah, I guess as you were saying, like, hitting the sales hard is, is a little bit uncomfortable. And I guess I will just have to deal with a couple of days of like, that being awkward and like, doing the whole, like, you know, I don't know, like home shopping network style, like, and here's this book, and you can have it for the low, low price of $29. Plus, all of these bundles. Like, Sean Fioritto  42:43So, the thing that, okay, maybe this will help you, but they would help, it helped me, is I just focus on, on the, on the people that are, on your audience, and like your copy and everything is about them. It's about you. You're using, I know you're doing this, right, so you're gonna use the word you in your copy. Like, you never use the word I in your copy, right? So everything is about them. You've done all this research, you know, them, you know, you know, the problems they're facing, you know the pains they're having. And so you could just keep talking about that, talking about that. Launch, then, is then just like, more of those types of emails, like, a higher cadence than you're used to, which is still just about them. And then you're hitting them with like, okay, and now it's here. Like, you're, the whole time you're telling them it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And then now it's here, here's what's in it, and you're gonna have these emails that just say, here's everything that's in it, and then here's questions that people might have, email that follows up, and then hey, this is gonna end in like a certain amount of time, follow up and then you got one hour left, you know, email. So you do these, you do this sequence of emails, but like, you have to remember when you're sending those that are the most uncomfortable that some people are really, really excited, and if you don't send them that stuff, they won't buy it and they'll, they'll regret it. Like, there's some people that genuinely are very excited and super thrilled to get those emails. Michele Hansen  44:03Can I run a, I have like, a tagline, or not like, a headline I have been throwing around in my head. Can I run it past you?  Sean Fioritto  44:12Yeah. For an article?  Michele Hansen  44:13No, for the book, but like, so like, this would be the like, main headline on the site. Sean Fioritto  44:18Yeah, yeah.  Michele Hansen  44:21Your time is too valuable to spend it building things people don't want.  Sean Fioritto  44:27Perfect. I mean, it's a little wordy, but yeah, like, the concept is perfect. Michele Hansen  44:32I will work on the wordiness. Sean Fioritto  44:36I mean, it's really, it's good, though. That's perfect.  Michele Hansen  44:38It's good. I guess it's good enough, right? It's good enough for me to slap a site together in the next, checks watch, five days, and, and get that going. Sean Fioritto  44:50Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like, you could roll with that as an H2 on a landing page. Easy. Yeah. That would be fine the way it is. Michele Hansen  44:57Cool. Second image of the book. All right. There's all this stuff I'll have to do, but I guess I'll just be working away at this. Sean Fioritto  45:04You know what would be fun for you? I have an archived version of like, my old initial website, if you go to, oh, it doesn't work anymore. Michele Hansen  45:15Can I look it up on Internet Archive? Or it's like, Sean Fioritto  45:19Probably you can, yeah. Yeah, it doesn't. I used to have it just up so that I could, you could go to the URL. But yeah, so you'd have to go through the Internet Archive. But I had, and I did a, I did a write up on the landing page tear down and discussed screenshots from the, from the old version. It was truly, truly awful. But I sold $7,000 worth of book through it. So, Michele Hansen  45:40Can I ask you how much you sold overall? Do you reveal that? Sean Fioritto  45:44Yeah, yeah, of course. So it's actually hard to know because the, well, because as I've revealed I'm not fantastic about keeping track of my finances, or I wasn't then, but the, the book, through its lifespan, has made about $150,000.  Michele Hansen  46:06Whoa.  Sean Fioritto  46:07And most of that was the first two years because I was really, really actively pushing it. And then it just sort of, like, continued to make sales in dribs and drabs, and now it makes, probably, I don't know, I think I sold $1,000 worth of it last year, which makes sense, because it's pretty out of date at this point. Michele Hansen  46:28That'd be interesting to know why people are still buying it. Sean Fioritto  46:32Well, because the concept of designing in a browser is still something that people, you know, talk about from time to time. Should designers write code, or should they be using Figma, or at the time, you know, Sketch or Photoshop, I think all my copy is about Photoshop. So, you know, so like, I think that that concept is still valid. My copy is a little dated, the, the tech inside the book is a little, little dated at this point, though, still useful. So yeah, I think that is just the, so that was one of the things that I learned for content marketing was the, so if you want something to be really like, a really big hit, and to sort of like, make the rounds on the internet, you know, just those articles, it's sometimes just like, everybody's reading. The key to those is there has to be, well, there's like three rules. But like, one of the rules is, it has to be something everybody's talking about right now. And so at the time, everyone was talking about should we design in the browser? That was a big point of conversation. I would say now, like a similar level of conversation would be people talking about how much they hate single page apps, like in the Ruby on Rails community and trying to like, get off of that, right. So like, if you wrote a book about building single page app equivalents in Hotwire or something like that, that would probably resonate really, really well with that community right now. And you'd get a lot of free buzz when it's, people are already talking about it. So that's the problem. I think that that's why, like, hardly anybody's buying it now. But still, people are talking about that. So you get like, a little bit. And then also, I have all these marketing automated things that are still running. So like, I have some content that I accidentally wrote that has a lot of Google traffic, right? Like, I didn't accidentally write it, but I accidentally, like, did some search engine optimization on it. And so I get quite a bit of traffic from those pages, and then they end up signing up for, like, my tutorial things. And then they're in my little email automation thing that I set up, and eventually they get a pitch and then they, and then they buy. So there's some trickle down of that. Michele Hansen  48:50That makes sense. So, I guess, and this will be my last question. Um, is there anything else I should know about selling a book? Sean Fioritto  49:02Yeah, you don't have to do any of the things that I said, like. Like, well I think, I think you're already like doing all the right things. I was pushing really hard to make it my business. And so that, and frankly, once it got to the point where it was my business, that was a distraction for me. It made it hard, harder for me to stay relaxed and focused on doing the things that were the best for my customers, like, once money became this, like concern. So to me, you have this advantage of like, you don't have to, you don't have to worry about that. Like, each one of the things that I did, like it feels like you should bone up a little bit on how to do a launch, though that's not too difficult. You don't have to do like, the greatest job ever, and you maybe even already know how to do that to some extent. But other than that, I don't know, like 200 people on the mailing list, probably enough already. And you'll get more as people are more and more interested. And, you know, do you have an email subscribe on any of your content at all that you've written? Michele Hansen  50:16So it's all in review, so I think it all has a subscribe link at the bottom.  Sean Fioritto  50:22Perfect. Michele Hansen  50:23I think I have one on Twitter, like, on my pinned tweet is a subscription to the newsletter. Sean Fioritto  50:30Yeah, yeah. Cuz like, by the time I was doing it full time, I mean, the number of, I was doing so many other things that we didn't even talk about, for marketing, which it's like, we don't, we don't even need to go there. Because you don't, you don't need to do any of that stuff. I think you're doing everything right. And I would think carefully about, like, what your goals are with the book, and, for both you, you and for your customers, and then kind of size it right size it accordingly. And don't feel guilty about not doing all the right marketing things, because the right marketing things, just as long as you're focused on your audience and the people that are going to be reading your book, you're doing the right thing. Michele Hansen  51:13Hmm. Well, thank you for that, like, boost of encouragement.  Sean Fioritto  51:19You're welcome.  Michele Hansen  51:21I guess to wrap up, we should mention, by the way, that you have your own show. And you're actually getting something off the ground right now. Do you want to talk about that for a second? Sean Fioritto  51:34Yeah. So my friend Aaron Francis and I, we have a company called Hammerstone, that's at Hammerstone.dev. Our podcast is, is linked to there on the home page. We have, like you guys, it's kind of like a ride along podcast, and we just do our weekly check in we record it as a, as a podcast. And what we're working on is a drop in component for Laravel. The component allows you, allows your users to build, dynamically build queries, which they can, you could then use to display reports, etc. to them. Yeah, so that's, that's our new thing that we're working on. That's a new thing for me. I should probably have a whole other podcast and invite you on, ask you about how I should be marketing my software business. Michele Hansen  52:30So by the way, so, the podcast is really good. We finished it on a road trip a couple of months ago, and you should totally start at the beginning because, like so, so yes, like, the software part is interesting. But there's this whole other element that Aaron's wife is pregnant with multiples. And the podcast started in like, December, right?  Sean Fioritto  52:52Yeah.  Michele Hansen  52:53So, and she was due in April. And so there's this like, whole, like, tension of it of like, oh, my god, like, are they gonna get to launch stuff before, like, Aaron goes from being not a parent to the parent of multiple children overnight? Like, is it like, is it gonna happen? And I found myself as I was listening, I was like, oh, my god, like, like, it really added this element of suspense that I have not felt while listening to another podcast, and it made it very enjoyable. Sean Fioritto  53:24You know what's frustrating. I just realized your audience actually overlaps with the audience of my product. And I just did a horrible job of pitching it. I was like, I could just sort of half-ass explain it here. But, Michele Hansen  53:34All you Laravel people, like, just check it out.  Sean Fioritto  53:37Yeah, that's good.  Michele Hansen  53:40Just take my word for it. This has been really fun, Sean. Thank you so much for coming on.  Sean Fioritto  53:50You're welcome.  Michele Hansen  53:51I really appreciate all of your advice. And I, I don't know what you call the, the anti-advice. You know, don't ignore taxes. And encouragement and perspective, that really means a lot to me.  Sean Fioritto  54:08You're welcome. Thanks for having me on.  Michele Hansen  54:11This is awesome. So if you guys liked this episode, please leave us a review on iTunes. Or let us know that you listened on Twitter, and we'll talk to you next week.

Intro: tracking the weather, gardening, unhelpful aphorisms.Let Me Run This By You: memoryInterview: We talk to Paul Holmquist about making a difference through teaching, learning Laban Movement Analysis, and making career moves in theatre. Plus, a truly horrifying story.  FULL TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1: (00:08)I'm Jen Bosworth from me this and I'm Gina Polizzi. We went to theater school together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand it. 20 years later, we're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all. We survived theater school and you will too. Are we famous yet? How are you? Speaker 2: (00:32)Good. How are you? I'm pretty good. I mean, yeah. I'm I'm the Midwest is going snow. Are you getting snow today? Oh, don't. Oh God. Don't tell me good Lord above. Oh, hell Jesus. Um, I mean, I can not let me put it out into the universe. I cannot handle that. I cannot. Yeah, we're just going to put it out there. Nope, Nope. Nope. It's a big part path. I feel, I feel, um, I feel interested. I'm interested in that. You can, you can be. Yes. You can have a curiosity, curiosity, but I'm not, but I don't want it for the East coast, but just the Midwest, like a lot of stuff. I don't know, like wintery mix is how they put it. Speaker 2: (01:33)Okay. You keep tabs on the weather in Chicago. Yeah, because I'm, I'm really, I have to like really pump myself up that I moved. Like, it helps me to feel like I made the right choice. That's interesting. And um, my people in my family do that people in my family, like every once in a while, every once in a while my mom would call and she'll be like, she'll tell me, she'll say like, is it snowing there? And I'm like, what? She, yeah, every morning my family is obsessed with the weather. Yes I can. My cousin Roxie, she gets all the radars and she's tracking and she knows exactly what's coming this way. I mean, she should be a meteorologist frankly. She totally should have her own show on YouTube. She's a she's. So on top of the weather and my whole family is like that. Speaker 2: (02:23)I think it might be. I mean, it makes sense like that, that would have been handed down if, if it were from farmers, you know, like that would, it wouldn't be a big deal to like being to the weather. I that's like my favorite. Um, the only thing, well, not the only thing, but there was, when I went to, after my dad died, I went to the partial hospitalization program, um, in Highland park hospital. And um, in that time I had a bunch of therapists and some of them were horrible. And what, but one this one young and now looking Speaker 3: (03:00)Back, they were young as hell. There were young therapists and they were probably like, what? In the, uh, anyway, this one therapist said it was a gloomy day. It was a spring gloom or like summer gloomy day. And everyone was like, Oh, this weather. And he said, you know, I just have this story. You know, whenever I, whenever I have the glooms and I feel like, and at the time I thought he was a P an idiot, but he said, when it's I had planned to go to the beach today after our therapy. Right. But now I can't go to the beach and I was just thinking, it reminds me like somewhere I'm, I'm off and depressed and somewhere there's a farmer. That's rejoicing because his life is saved. Oh, Speaker 2: (03:44)Wow. Oh, wow. And Speaker 3: (03:46)I was like, it's great Speaker 2: (03:48)Perspective later. Speaker 3: (03:51)I was like, Oh my God, that is so deep. And this farmer is like dancing because his farm is saved. And I'm like, but you know, and it's not to diminish anyone's pain, but it's also just perspective. Like you said, like perspective somewhere, someone is happy and falling in love for the first time or somewhere, you know, like, Speaker 2: (04:10)Absolutely. And for some reason that also just reminds me of maybe just because talking about Chicago when I was an intern, social work school intern at Northwestern, inpatient, psychiatric, the thick people who worked that, I mean, people who work in psych hospitals are so interesting. Especially if they've been working there for a really long time and this, uh, OT, occupational therapist, guy, Fred Mahaffey. If you're out there, Fred, I love you. You taught me so much. Um, he, he's the person who introduced me to DBT. Um, and I was sitting in his group and he came in and he said, I just got a very upsetting, or I got a very troubling phone call, but I couldn't get into it because I have this group. And so right now, the thing I'm going to practice is, I can't know until I know Speaker 3: (05:06)Fred, you're amazing. Speaker 2: (05:08)Right? I mean, I think about that all the time. You can't know until, you know, which is really so much about worry and anxiety. It's all this worry about the things that we don't know. And sometimes that's appropriate sometimes. Yeah. You should be worried because something terrible is going to happen. And other times you just waste all of the in-between and then it turns out to be nothing. And you've just been tied up in knots for no reason. Speaker 3: (05:32)I am. The more, the older I get, the more I'm I sort of, um, am drawn to, um, Tibetan, Buddhism. And I am reading, I read it every couple years. I read Pema childrens when things fall apart, heart advice for hard times or difficult times. It's brilliant. It's it's saving me in terms of, it goes beyond just don't strangle your hustle. It goes beyond that into life. Has you licked life when life has you licked when you're licked, there is no hope. And that is truly where the new beginning begins. Oh, wow. I can get on board with that because when I, it reminds me of, and they talk a lot about, uh, she talks, Pema talks a lot about, and I'm sure she's not the only one, obviously in Buddhism. Groundlessness how we are. We are grasping for the ground at all times. And there is no ground. Speaker 3: (06:33)Now look, if you're in acute psychiatric distress, this is not a helpful book because it is, I'm not saying that, but if you have some perspective, like we're saying, if you have like, I have, I'm not in acute psychiatric distress, praise God. Um, but once, once you can get stepped back a little bit and see, Oh my, my addiction to hope my addiction to things are going to get better is actually, might not actually be helping me as much as I think that it is. Um, when I'm licked in my life, when I, when life has nailed me is true. And I can admit it is truly when I begin to settle in and good things happen in my life. It's just every time. Wow. Which is why 12 step programs work. Absolutely. Yeah. That's Speaker 4: (07:28)Notion of like clinging always to hope. That's very interesting. I remember this patient. I encountered also when I was in training, I think it was also at Northwestern. I think looking back, she had like low IQ, you know, if you have low IQ and personality disorder, that's a tough combo because a lot of the what's necessary for healing personality disorders, like a great understanding of what you're doing and how she's just so sweet in a way she'd come in. And she had all these aphorisms, she was, and I just got to keep the hope alive and I just got it. And I just got it's tomorrow's another day. And you know, and I w I always pictured her like a leaky bucket. Cause she'd get all filled up, you know, in this group with everything she needed. And then it's like, the minute she passed the threshold of the door, it all just leaked. Right. Speaker 3: (08:28)Oh my God. Speaker 4: (08:29)And I remember thinking like, maybe all these positive messages are actually really not helping her. Cause it's, it's, it's giving a, I don't want to say it's a false hope, but it's like, and I hate this and I've said this on the podcast before. So I apologize for repeating myself, but I hate the good vibes. Only no bad days crew, because it's so unrealistic. And it makes people paradoxically so much more. Speaker 3: (08:57)And I think it makes them enraged. So I think the under for me, what usually yeah, under and under rage is extreme for me is extreme sadness and hopelessness. And, but the rage that comes up w with, you know, life is good. Crew is like, when people don't jive with it, because it's like, if life is good, then dot, dot, dot, wired children murdered. If life is good, then why are police killing? You know, like what are you talking about? And I think that's a spiritual bypass people do. Speaker 4: (09:32)So if I'm going to make an inspirational mug, mine is going to say, life is good dot, dot dot sometimes because it is good sometimes. And then on the other side, life is bad dot, dot, dot. Sometimes like the point is you take the good, when you can get it, Speaker 3: (09:51)[inaudible] burn out. I loved that show. My God loved it. Speaker 4: (10:02)2d on roller skates. I lived and died by T I w I roller skated because her, Speaker 3: (10:08)I was going to say, is that part of your cause you're a roller skater. Yeah. Uh, I was a big Joe fan, Speaker 4: (10:14)Joe. Aha. Yeah, she was cool. She was cool. Hated Blair. Of course, Speaker 3: (10:17)Most people did, Natalie. I felt bad for her Speaker 4: (10:22)For Natalie too. I kind of felt like she wanted her to get off. Speaker 3: (10:27)She was a trope. You know, she was a sad, sad truck. Well, I have been accepted as, uh, an official member of the Myrtle tree climate action team. [inaudible] Speaker 4: (10:41)The name of the group that does your CSA or your, whatever, your Speaker 3: (10:45)It's, the Myrtle tree cafe. They that's where they used to meet before COVID Myrtle. I think put, forgive me. If I say this wrong, a Myrtle tree cafe, climate action team. It's amazing. We're superheroes. That's a crazy, like I'm an official member. So I get a key and an orientation Wednesday, I'm telling you that gardening has really changed and changed my life in terms of my health and, and feeling like I'm doing something for the planet, both it's crazy. It's just gardening. It's not like I'm, you know, Speaker 4: (11:24)But that's what they say. Little acts are revolutionary. Like just being responsible for like learn, learn, even just learning where all your food comes from. And like, that's, that's a smaller Speaker 3: (11:36)Food came from. McDonald's like, I literally thought that that McDonald's was the food source, you know, or Jack in the box. That's not actually what it is. I was going to ask you, what are you going to grow? That's my question for you. Uh, we have Speaker 4: (11:54)Some debates about the things to grow. And mostly I was doing this. I was picking things out with my oldest son and he, he was actually being quite logical about it. He, I wanted to get kale and co and he was like, mom, nobody likes kale, including you, which is really true. And you're the only person who likes Brussels sprouts. And you're the only person who likes cauliflower. Let's get broccoli and bell pepper. And he loves hot things. So we got some jalapenos. And so we got a broccoli, a jalapeno, a bell pepper. And then we have, um, uh, my daughter has, she was really into the seeds thing. She got like a lunch and I don't feel, I feel like none of them are gonna work out, but she got some flowers and Speaker 3: (12:50)Some flowers might they're super hearty. Some flowers might come up and last for about 45 years. So just sunflowers are hurting. Speaker 4: (13:00)You have a great spot for sunflower. So that'd be great. So anyway, so we're just starting like easy peasy because you know, we don't, we've never done it before and we're not sure how it's going to go. So that is one to invest a bunch of money in something Speaker 3: (13:12)We'll do that. And if you have pests that are non, uh, this is so interesting to me when you have like aphids or inch worms or stuff like that. A lot of times, not all the times, I'm learning a lot of times, it means that your soil health is in jeopardy, not the actual plant. This is crazy. So a lot of times pest the TAC plants that aren't doing so well. Anyway, it's so crazy. I never knew that. I thought, Oh, they attack it because they're. Well, no, they might be, there might be an occasional inchworm, you know, like a Trump worm. But, but, but a lot of times pest can tell when the plant, the soil, Speaker 4: (13:55)I'm carrying around a semi with a bit to pay or whatever, Speaker 3: (14:02)There's our chick there's McDonald's McFlurry in one hand. Um, there's our kids show right there. Let me run this by you. Speaker 4: (14:23)I have a thing to talk to you about that is, um, it's kind of a bummer and I'm feeling good. I'm not sure if I should bring it up, but maybe I'll try to have a new perspective about it. Okay. I've had a couple memory slips that have been troubling. Speaker 3: (14:42)Oh, tell me all about, it Speaker 4: (14:45)Was one moment. I just couldn't remember my passcode to my phone. Okay. It came to me a couple of hours later. Okay. But I thought it was this one thing, and then it was Aaron had my phone and he's like, what's your passcode? And I, and I give him this passcode that doesn't work in it. And I'm like, Oh, well, maybe it's. And then all of a sudden it just like vanished. And I really started freaking out, like, yes, I freaked freaking out because, and I think, I think this might be something I inherited from my mother is very concerned about losing her memory. This is like her biggest fear. So whenever she forgets something, she panics and to the point that I feel she doesn't allow for any just normal forgetting of things, which I haven't had that problem berating myself for the normal forgetting things. Speaker 4: (15:44)But that passcode thing freaking like, it just, it just was gone. It was there. And then it was gone. That was one. And the other thing I'm probably going to have a hard time remembering. Um, no, I think actually there, isn't another thing like that. It's just more that I, it's just more that I, you know, because kids have great memories and my kids are constantly telling me, remember when we, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, ah, thankfully I really did. We, did we do that? Is that normal? Or should I start my Gingko biloba? I do so many, a word puzzle. I should have good brains. Speaker 3: (16:19)So what, the first thing that comes to mind is that I know, okay, this podcast right. Is bringing up a lot of memories for people, for us and for people. Okay. I believe that sometimes trauma stored when it comes out or even, even, even all this we're, we're taking in other people's trauma too. Right. That's true. So your mind can only hold so much. So I'm wondering if that also is a response to an overload of other your, and you do all the editing. You do every, you listen and listen. So you're taking it in over and over again. And the, and people were traumatized, you know, not everybody, but a lot of people that we talked to have been traumatized by their experience. So, uh, in college and so, and subsequent and what it meant and all that. So I'm wondering if you're partially it is just a trauma re a response to a lot of information going into your brain. Um, Speaker 4: (17:32)It could be, and as a, as a mother, I do have to remember so many. I mean, honestly, the landscape of what I have to remember is it's astounding. Um, and, and people do say that there's like a fog of motherhood that, you know, you never, you never get it back, but you have an excellent memory. You have an excellent short-term memory. Well, your long-term though. You've struggled to remember things about Speaker 3: (17:59)I never, no, I also never remember your birthday to save my life. Now I have it in my phone. Like, it's just so weird. And it's not just your birthday. I don't remember people. People will tell me my birthday is September 22nd. And I'm like, no, no, it's not. I went so no. So my memory, my memory, I also don't have children, but also, um, I know that, okay. So when my, when my father was dying in the hospital, my memory, I couldn't remember where I parked ever. When I would go visit him at the hospital, I would be sobbing, wandering around the parking lot until one came to pick me up in a little cart and drove me. And he said, the guy said it happens all the time with people visiting loved ones in the hospital, because they're so traumatized. They never remember where they parked, even though I would re I would like, I didn't even write it down, you know? Cause I was so wigged out, but I would say C 14, C four, or whatever it is and no memory after I would visit my father in the ICU. So I just think trauma and, um, or just Speaker 4: (19:10)Even upsetting feelings can Speaker 3: (19:13)Overload, um, listening to other people's stuff. It's it's our brains are not that big. If you think about it's like we have a super, I mean, you know, there's a lot there's and we only use, they say part of it, but I would venture to say, we use more than they say. Um, Speaker 4: (19:28)Yes. I recently read that that's a myth. It's not true that we use 10% of our abuse, all of our brains. I mean, which is not to say that you can, I think what that myth comes from is like, you can expand your, you can flex your muscle, your, the muscle of your brain, you can strengthen it or weaken it. Um, which is why I'm like addicted to doing all these little puzzles. Speaker 3: (19:51)Yeah. I mean, I know that it's scary. So then it's scary. So I had a similar thing where when we came back from, I would have sworn that my code to the locker was we have a locker that has stores are male. It's like, it's really great package lacquer. And I just couldn't for the mine was more like, I just knew in my head it was a number. And so I kept entering it and it was like, no, no, no. And I was like, well, something must be wrong with this machine. I had the wrong number the whole time, but I was convinced that it was this one number. And I'm like, and anyway, I was dumbfounded when I found out it was really this other number. I was like, Speaker 4: (20:29)Yeah. I mean, I, I, now that we're talking about it, I, I do think it's normal, but it's also about aging. It's really hard to separate out. Oh, hang on. My phone is ringing. It's really hard to separate out the things that we should be worried versus the things that are normal. Right. Speaker 3: (20:50)Bought it with my ticker. I'm like, Oh my gosh. You know? And my, my cardiologist is not that worried, but then I get worried. It's just, um, you hit, this is what my in the hospital, what they told me, you hit 40, between 40 and 50. And the check engine light comes on 90% more than it ever does. And you're like, what is happening in what? And, and really what, we're, what I'm asking. Anyway, when I ask these questions of doctors and things is when am I going to die? Am I going to die? Is this going to kill me? And it's not, I'm not like we talk about, I'm not petrified of death. What I'm petrified of is losing control. Right? So I'm really asking, is this going to be something I have no control over? And like at any moment is some weird stuff going to happen to me. And the answer is maybe they don't know, but they, they know more than we do use because of all the schooling and the, and the research. But they, no one can tell you exactly when you're going to die. Speaker 4: (21:50)Dare I say, we can't know until we know always looking to land that plane right back and forth today, Speaker 3: (22:03)I'll tell you about my poop in the backyard story. All right. I was a latchkey kid, as a lot of us were. And my mom was a working mom who, who was very, very type a at times and mean at times. And, uh, woes talks about that. And Lee left my key, lost my key or left it at school or something came home. No key, no way. I was going to walk to my mom's office, which was only eight blocks away because I was petrified because I left my key. I was just going to wait until someone got home. Pretend I had just walked home. It was a whole orchestrated thing app. But then I had to go to the bathroom number two. And I was like, Oh no, what do you do? So a normal person might go to the neighbor's house. Who might, by the way, might've had a key and said, can I use your bathroom? Speaker 3: (22:56)But I was so embarrassed that I had to poop that I didn't. So then I'm waiting and I'm like, I got poop. So then I tried to break in the house by pulling screens out of the basement and I break a window and I'm like, Oh my God. Gosh. So it just, anyway, I ended up pooping in the backyard. Okay. This is rough pooping in the backyard doing my business. It was a whole situation. Uh, and then someone came home and I, I, my, I did my plan as a plan. Right. And did your scene, did my scene? It worked out, people were received really convinced. Don't ask me any of the technical stuff about the pooping, but anyway, so the point not that you were going to, but the, the, the point is then in the middle we're we're having, uh, a fine evening. And then I hear my mom's screaming in the basement. Oh no. She's like someone tried to break in and I don't say anything. This is the thing about fear and shame. I say nothing. They call the police. Speaker 4: (24:03)No. Oh dear. Uh, Oh, this is not good. Speaker 3: (24:07)He's come. And they're like, and I'm petrified. They're going to dust for prints. And then match as only a child who was obsessed with true crime. This was right around the time of America's most wanted and uncle mysteries. And I'm like, Oh my God, how do I get off my fingerprints? I didn't go down that road. I didn't cut myself or hurt myself in any way. Other than my pride and shame, the police are like, well, it, yeah, it looks like someone may have tried to break in, but so then, but they left, but then it didn't end there in the middle of the night, I set my alarm and I went down into the basement and I took the glass, the remaining glass, and I walked three blocks and put it in someone else's garbage so that they could never find my prints again. Speaker 3: (25:03)So I was telling this to a friend and they were like, Whoa, we were unpacking it. And I guess the thing is, I was so ashamed. It was so I was so ashamed of the mom thing, but it manifested in the poop thing. And like, just ashamed that I had needs of any kind or that I would make a mistake or forget something that I went to such lengths to cover it up. And I just, I think we do these things and it just reminds me of like, you know what we always say on this podcast, which is like, you know, it's better to just own up, but when you're a kid and you feel like you're going to die or something terrible is going to happen to you, if you, if you own up to your mistake, you go through such lengths. And I just am not willing to go through those lengths anymore. I just can't do it. I just, it's not worth it. And one of the things Speaker 4: (25:56)Is that we've learned from the people who have almost come on the podcast, but then ultimately said, I can't, it's too painful. Um, we've often had the experience that those people seemed perfectly happy, go lucky, et cetera. So, so, so we, as humans are constantly berating ourselves, like you say, for having needs, for having bad experiences, to the point that we won't share with anybody that we're having a bad experience, which of course makes us feel worse, more lonely, more isolated, more helpless, more hopeless. Um, so that, Speaker 3: (26:37)You know, it's almost like Speaker 4: (26:39)The dam, the dam breaks you, you, you can only shove or, or the image of the closet. You can only shove so many things in the closet. And one day you open up the closet and it just can't take it anymore. And it all comes spilling out. And it's understandable. I'm not saying that people should, you know, I'm not saying that it should be any other way than it is. I'm just saying, I guess what I'm really saying is if you're 25 and listening to this, and you're a person who's hiding all of your things, just ask yourself, what is it, what am I hiding? What am I really afraid of? And like, try to tease it out. Is this something you should really be ashamed about or afraid of sharing with other people? Because it's probably not that big of a deal. Speaker 3: (27:24)No, it's not worth it. It's not, usually it's not worth it now. I don't know. You know, for me, it has not been worth it. So I was thinking about that story, just the gymnastics. I went through the physical gymnastics. The, I could have cut myself on the glass, like what in the, but it just, it's a deep thing. And I was telling a friend that, and she was like, Whoa, this is so deep. So is it that you're Speaker 4: (27:49)Thinking because your mom is type a or you thinking she's, she's the kind of person who's definitely going to try to get to the bottom of this and would, would raise, would get to the point where she would be asking somebody to dust for fingerprints. Speaker 3: (28:06)It was more like, it was more like trying to put that floating Molly bolt shelf into the wall that, and the whole, it just, the story of my childhood was whenever I was doing the best I could. But whenever I, I would try to keep it all together. The whole would get bigger and bigger and no one would help me out of the hole. I think that's the other part is that I had to do everything by myself and that my mother would ultimately say, what is wrong with you? You should have X, Y, and Z. So instead of facing that shame, I just tried to do it on my own and it never worked ever, ever, never, ever. So I think, yeah, I think it's the fact of I was alone and I just kept making things worse because I didn't know. I couldn't, I didn't feel like I could share with anybody. So it's like at some point you got to step back from the hole in the wall and say, I'm licked. This has got me. I need to ask for a mechanic. A handy has, I don't even know a handyman to help, not a mechanic. Speaker 4: (29:12)The thing that also that, that tends to do in people, um, when they feel like they can never ask anybody for help is they can never develop intimate relationships with people because you, you, if you can never trust that. So when were you first in your life, was it with miles that you were first able to have real intimacy that you would just be yeah. Trust him too. Speaker 3: (29:34)Yeah. That needs to not go away to not leave, to not be like, Oh my God, you forgot your key. I'm never talking to you. You know, whatever it is. That was really, so I, that was, I was 30. I mean, come on. I mean, 30 years old, 30 years of not trusting. So it's really interesting. That takes a toll on your ticker. I'm telling you right now, you take a toll on your ticker. Um, yeah. So just, just a little, a light, poop story to wrap it up today. It's all, it's all, frankly, it's all poop stories. It's all food stories, right? At the end of the day, it's all, it's all shame Speaker 5: (30:19)Today on the podcast, we talk with Paul Holmquist Paul home quiz. We went to school with back in the day and after we graduated, he continued to be a theater actor for many years, and then transitioned into directing for the stage. At a couple of years ago, he felt he really wanted to make a difference. And he decided to become a high school English teacher, which is what he does now, in addition to being an artist he's thoughtful and kind his stories really were moving. And I'm so grateful that he decided to speak with us. So please enjoy our conversation with Paul home quit. This is my second year. I just joined the profile. Very new. You just became a teacher two years ago. Speaker 3: (31:06)Oh, that's cool. Where do you teach? Speaker 6: (31:08)Yeah, I teach at a South side, Chicago vocational high school called shop, uh, Chicago vocational career Academy. It's down by the Skyway. Like if you're driving down the Skyway, there's a giant, looks like a Batman villain, hideout. That's Chicago vocational. Speaker 3: (31:25)And so did you, um, how come you made that career shift? Yeah. Tell us all about it. Tell us all about it Speaker 6: (31:34)Is it's okay to talk politics. Sure. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, uh, you know, when Trump got elected, I was like, I gotta do something different and I don't quite know what it is, but maybe I could teach high school English because I have a background in theater, but it just seemed like maybe I need to do something because I was working a really great day job for like 15 years that had benefits in it, fairly decent salary, allowing me to do theater and stuff. But once the election hit, it was just felt like something I needed to change something. I was not very satisfied with. Um, you know, there was like no growth at my day job. What was that job? Uh, admin administrative assistant position at, at, uh, Columbia college. So I was still kind of close to the artistic community while I was working there. Speaker 6: (32:23)But, um, I had kind of a neurotic boss and I was there for 15 years and there was no, like, there was no growth. I'd kind of plateaued there. Um, and I wasn't making a difference anywhere, so it felt like I needed to do something. So I was like, I'm going to become a high school English teacher. Wow. Uh, so I went back to DePaul. I became a double demon and I that's what they call it. That's what they call it. Um, so I went to the college of education and got a master's, uh, there Speaker 2: (32:54)That's so great. Uh, education is a fantastic way to make a difference. Speaker 6: (33:00)Yeah. It's um, and it's, uh, a good segue from the, uh, from the theater work. I mean, there's, there's a lot of parallels Speaker 2: (33:09)Say, uh, beans. Didn't say her usual opening. Congratulations, Paul Holmquist you survived theater school. Speaker 6: (33:17)I'm still here to tell the tale. Speaker 2: (33:18)I want to be a double demon. I love this phrase. I think we should use it all ways. Even if you didn't get two degrees from DePaul, I feel I'm a double demon because I spent so much time talking about school. Speaker 6: (33:31)Right? You got a master's degree in the theater school after going to the funeral, Speaker 2: (33:35)By the way, I have masters in processing your theater school education. Speaker 6: (33:40)My I've been listening to your podcast now. And I had, I actually had to take a break before for the last week or else I'd be too neurotic about what I was going to say too, but I really find this podcast to be so personally helpful. Like I find it's like, it feels like a, like a group therapy kind of process, but protracted where Rouge taking turns, but hearing other alum, just talk about what they experienced. I was like, Holy cow, I'm not alone. I had similar experiences and wow. Wow. Speaker 2: (34:14)What's, what's an example of something that really resonated with you. Speaker 6: (34:18)Hm. Well, I guess I, I thought this is coming off of hearing, uh, interviews from, from friends like Bradley Walker and Eric Slater is I thought those upperclassmen guys had it all together. You know, Lee, Lee, Kirk, I thought these guys were like, just had just knew what they were going for and knew what they were doing. They just seemed so successful. And I was felt like, you know, like I was flailing along, trying to find my way. It's so great to hear that, um, to hear, uh, Bradley talk about his, uh, coin tricks with, with such despair, like as if it, but on my end, I thought he was the coolest dude. Like he had this cool thing and Slater was so awesome. Like, I didn't know he was insecure. Like all, I've just, all of that stuff is really, really great. Speaker 2: (35:10)I, I think that's, I mean, obviously that's part of why, why I think we do it is, is, is to, um, facilitate some kind of, if not healing, cause that's a kind of lofty word, but some kind of let's not go there, but, but, um, understanding or comradery in the fact that we all, um, went through this thing, it's true. And most people felt like an outsider. Most people. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I want to be like, if you're, if you're in theater score right now, spoiler alert, everybody look around you, the person on your right and bruise on your left. They also feel the same way you do. Uh, but unfortunately we cannot say that at the time because we're busy, like trying to seem like we have it all together. That's, that's a common thing. And there is also a little bit of like, you don't want to admit weakness in theater school, except at the exact moment you need to access it for a scene that you're in. Speaker 6: (36:10)Well, I, and it really it's. It strikes for me the difference between being an MFA and being a BFA is coming in as an adolescent. Like you're still in developmental processes that haven't resolved while you're going through this, you know, self-reflective, um, w all the body stuff, uh, that comes up, and that was so fascinating to hear that it came up for other people too. Like all of that stuff is part of while we're in the process of personality development to have to be under fire from these artists, from the seventies who have different politics and strange ideas, Bob Dylan taught us. Speaker 2: (36:52)Yeah, exactly. So, but when you were doing your day job, um, that you left work, you were doing theater at night. Is that what, Speaker 6: (37:02)Yeah. Um, I mean, for the past, like 20 years, I've, I've directed and acted in shows, um, pretty regularly. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2: (37:12)And w um, did you have like a, a place where you mostly hung out a theater company that you were a part of, Speaker 6: (37:18)Right? Yeah. So right after college, um, I didn't really hook up with a theater company, but that seemed to be the, the way for Chicago actors to go after graduation was to like either link up together or link up with another theater company to start. And I, I remember because the timeline was so new then, um, and I did a show with them, like their second show that Barry Burnett directed. And, um, and I had a feeling in my, I had like this investment in my heart, like, okay, I'm going to be a timeline guy regret. I'm going to join up with PJ. And, and we're, I'm going to be a part of that Juliet and be a part of that group. And it didn't pan out that way. I ended up, um, kind of gravitating up into Andersonville, working with the Griffin theater where another, uh, DePaul alumni and Rick Barletta was, uh, artistic director. Speaker 6: (38:11)Um, he was a good minimal director, Goodman train director. Um, so I still stuck with some DePaul people, um, kind of grew up with the Griffin theater. And then, uh, in 2006, I joined lifeline theater, which is up here in Rogers park, uh, where I live. So it comes through from where I live and I've been there since we do literary adaptations, um, all original plays. And, uh, so I've had the pleasure of directing amazing stuff, like the count of Monte Cristo and Frankenstein and the Island of Dr. Moreau and, um, you know, British murder mysteries and a wide range of really cool. Speaker 2: (38:49)Fantastic. How did you go? So you started directing then. So how did you bridge that situation? Speaker 6: (38:55)I, I, yeah, I kind of, well through my, a little bit of set up here. So through my day job, I got, um, trained in Laban's movement analysis, which is a movement theatrical, physical expressional, expressionistic movement, modality. It's kinda like, um, I don't know if you remember, Patrice did stuff with us about, uh, punch and float, like dad, that kind of stuff. So, um, through the department I was working for, I was able to get a graduate certificate in this modality for free, and I wanted to apply it to my own acting. And so I, I was doing, I was playing a cat in a, uh, in a, in a young adult show called Angus thongs. And full-frontal, snogging at, uh, at Griffin theater. I played, I played Angus. I had no lines, but I was a cat and I was doing all this physical stuff. Speaker 6: (39:53)And I was getting to know through that production, um, a lot of the, uh, uh, main players that lifeline, because they were doing a lot of the design on this show and kind of getting to know them and having a good rapport with them. They're designers not, um, are not, uh, acting, directing people. Um, but I've developed a good rapport with them. And that kind of started to introduce me to the people at lifeline. And eventually they invited me to direct a kid's show, um, just as an experiment. And I tried directing, uh, Ricky ticky TAVI, and that became a great success. Um, and then after that, my first, actually my first main stage show was, uh, the Island of Dr. Moreau, which was a 90 minute immersive, violent horror piece. So I like, I right away jumped into something that was really bizarre and, uh, unusual. And since then, it's been just a blast. I mean, I get to get a lot of creative freedom. Speaker 2: (40:51)I have to ask you a question. I recently have heard this term all over the place immersive. And I don't, if I knew what it was previously, I, it, it didn't drop in because when I think of immersive, I think like you go to a haunted house, Speaker 6: (41:09)Right? No. Right, right. I guess I think of immersive as be like a full sensory experience, as much as possible. And, um, you know, in storefront theaters, especially places like lifeline, where you can have entrances surround the audience, you can really have the sense of like an actor's right next to you that, and they're acting like an animal breathing in your ear and it creates a sort of sense of tension. I'm going back 20 years. And I'm thinking about this show, but that's what I think of an immersive theater. People might think of it as like you're wandering around from room to room. You're more interactive like that, I guess. Speaker 2: (41:47)Yeah. It's I saw cats on Broadway in the eighties. It was him. Cats came right next to me. So that was immersive. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that because, uh, I, I thought it was one of those things, like I felt it was, it was too dumb to ask about. Okay. So where you, Speaker 6: (42:06)Uh, I'm from upstate New York. I'm from the Rochester New York area, a little suburb called Webster. Speaker 2: (42:12)Okay. And, um, but you have not ever returned there after school. You stayed in Chicago. You've been in Chicago, stayed in Chicago. Okay. Yeah. Did you grow up acting? Speaker 6: (42:22)Uh, yeah, I thought of this, of course. Like, I think it was around fourth grade that I was in my first school play and it felt like, um, uh, people liked what I was doing and it was, it was one of those, like I'm coming into my own. I'm like 10 years old, starting to figure out, you know, think about who I might want to be identity wise. And that seemed to, um, to work for me now, then when I changed schools in seventh grade, I was shy. I was never really athletic or, um, I picked up the trumpet, but I wasn't a great musician, you know, but I got a lot of great response when I did theater work. And that just kind of, uh, that's what grew, you know, you gravitate towards those things where you get the positive feedback Speaker 2: (43:12)That is. Did you have, did you have one of those intense, uh, like high school drama? I know you said you've listened to some of the podcasts. You've probably heard tell if some character, uh, teachers from high school. Speaker 6: (43:25)I had a wonderful drama person who was not, we had no drama classes. We did not take any acting classes or have any, any sort of immersion like that. We just did two shows a year, a play and a musical. And, um, uh, so you just hung out at the club and, and picked up what you picked up. But my drama teacher, she knew that I was serious and there was a, uh, a guy who's a year ahead of me in college who ended up going to Tisch, um, a year ahead of me in high school. I ended up going and he and I were, we did a two man show called the greater tuna. Can I show you something real quick? Hold on. I was like, tuna is hilarious. That's from greater China. So this is Mark and I in costume playing all of our different characters in high school. Speaker 2: (44:21)Amazing. Wow. That's some production value. Speaker 6: (44:28)So that's a high school. It's a two man show. Uh, multicharacter, it's kind of like mystery of Irma VEP where, you know, you run off stage and you change costume real quick and come back on. So Mark and I, we took, uh, our acting kind of seriously. We took ourselves somewhat seriously as actors. Um, and, uh, Tish was definitely on my list when I was looking for colleges. Speaker 2: (44:51)Well, yeah. How'd you end up at DePaul. I love the, the choosing stories or how they choose. Speaker 6: (44:57)Um, yeah, totally. So, uh, Tish, uh, I was accepted at Tisch and I even got a little money at Tisch, but they accepted me into the experimental theater wing and I had no idea what that was and it didn't seem like me. I mean, I had grown up in kind of a cul-de-sac of a suburb, you know, with very limited exposure to what experimental theater might even be. So, but DePaul just felt like so nice. I came to DePaul after, uh, visiting New York city and then auditioning there. And, um, so I auditioned at DePaul in the theater school building with Dave [inaudible]. He wouldn't remember that he was in my audition group, but I remember him in his cutoff jeans and his Janice chocolate. T-shirt very well. I was so enamored with him because he seemed so, um, organic. Whereas I was at wearing a black mock turtleneck and black jeans and slicked back hair, and I was trying to be very artistic. I was also in the middle of playing Tevya in a Fiddler on the roof in high school, the most Arion Tevya Speaker 2: (46:10)Well, you probably didn't have any Jews in your high school Speaker 6: (46:14)If I, yeah. I don't know if we did. They probably weren't involved in the theater department as much as I want. Yeah. So it was like, uh, I was coming in there trying to be a serious artist and I saw David, um, and I didn't know him, you know, at all. I was just seeing him for the first time. And I was like, this is wild. This is what I want to get into. So part of what inspired me was John Jenkins leading the, uh, audition, which I thought he was just a brilliant guy and watching David and the audition made me feel like I want to be there. Speaker 2: (46:46)Does he know that now? You we'll have to tell him to listen to this one. You just remind, I guess we haven't really ever talked boss, correct me if I'm wrong. Have we ever talked about the fact that we did part of the audition all together in the same room? Is that what you're talking about? Like the thing, Speaker 6: (47:07)So John, I remember this so vividly, uh, John had us doing a scenario where we were, um, a Hunter in a forest and we were going to like walk along one side of the wall and the animal that we're hunting does a diagonal cross across the room. And we chase after it and halfway through crossing the room, we leak like the animal is supposed to mimic the animals. And part of the crossing, like the hunting, we were supposed to step on rocks in a stream or something like that to cross it. And I was just like, Oh, you know, I had everything planned out. I remember overthinking it very much, but also like being in line, waiting your turn, you're observing how other people are doing it. And this is, this is where David really comes in because when he left like that animal, he seemed to take air in the room, uh, because he was Unbound by his own, you know, insecurity or at least that's the way I interpret it. Wow. I'm really, do you find David kind of funny? Speaker 2: (48:05)That's okay. It's okay. So you said taking yourself seriously and overthinking ding, ding, ding. These are things I really relate to. These are near and dear to my heart. What is your journey then of taking yourself seriously? And, you know, like, has there been any Speaker 6: (48:22)Evolution or moving on that, like, you're going to think I'm nuts for saying this, but I swear that the show has helped in a little way. So I feel like I'm still in a process of recognizing what my expectations were, you know, for myself and my career. How did those change was and how w how was I influenced to change my ideas about that? And where am I now? Like, what do I want for myself now as an artist? And then how has that shifted, uh, that, so I've done a lot of processing on those because I am in therapy and I have been for a while, but also your show has really helped also turn some pages for me. So, thanks. Speaker 2: (49:01)So welcome believably. Wonderful. Thank you. That's very touching. I just want it. So in terms of taking yourself seriously, I feel like there that's a way to go. I took myself. It was like, I had such self-centered fear that I didn't take myself seriously, but I took my fear really seriously, of the, of, of being at school. You know, it was different. I wish I had taken myself seriously as an artist, but really what I did was just dive right into my shame and feeling. I just really did a deep dive into that. And so I'm wondering, how did you learn to take you're like, I know we're saying like, taking ourselves seriously can be kind of a, it can be, um, an Achilles heel, but also like, did you just, were you just born with like, yes, I'm an artist and here I am at school? Speaker 6: (49:52)No. I mean, I think that what started up school was using alcohol and drugs to keep myself from feeling that kind of fear and insecurity. So, um, you know, going at school, going to classes with kind of a boldness and an energy while also fighting a little bit of a hangover, or maybe still maybe, maybe coming to class a little high, you know, that helped a lot. Now, there you go. That makes, and then, and it all fit in with taking myself seriously as an artist because artists drink get high all the time. You would talk about apartment, what was it through your car? And like, you know, we're going to get high and we're going to do space out there at work. Like I'm a serious artist, you know, I can really feel the weight of my space objects when I am stone. Speaker 2: (50:47)You guys, do you ever wonder, like, is that, do you think that's still part of the college? I guess it probably is. It's probably still very much a part of the college experience, Speaker 6: (50:57)Right? Yeah. I don't think drugs will ever stop being or anything that's illegal is going to stop. Speaker 2: (51:03)It's just that we T we talked to somebody last week who is at the theater school now he's graduating this year and I didn't ask him, but I wanted to know, like, so, like, what's the, I mean, he's talked very wonderfully about the experience of, of being an actor at the school, but I also kind of wanted you to like, what's the whole social scene. I want it to be like, where you like me drinking Mickey's forties, big mouth and peeing on school property, but I didn't ask him, but I did not ask that because I thought, yeah, he probably, he might not have wanted to say in any case in it. Speaker 6: (51:41)Well, um, my wife is on faculty there now, so she teaches, she teaches movement there now. And I've been back a couple of times that directed an intro there, and I've done some guest lecturing there. So I've been back in the new building and the old building before it was torn down. So I've kind of maintained some ties to the theater school over the years. Um, and I don't think, I think the students, the student experience has changed just because the times have changed so much, you know, and the, the, um, but, and I think they're a little bit more savvy than perhaps we were, they don't do the God squad parties, but I think they still probably have some form of God squad, but it's not the like, Speaker 2: (52:26)Right. That's probably for the best, you know, I was going to say the person we interviewed that is at the theater school, talked about your wife and said that one of the reasons that he loved the audition process was, or when he went, he took, I think, a movement class with her and, and that he talked about her. So anyway, we're coming full circle here. It's real crazy. Speaker 6: (52:47)That's great. And it's so fun to hear these stories too, and to talk about them with Christina, because she's working with Phyllis and Patrice, uh, she worked with John, she worked with John Bridges. She's, you know, she knows these people, so they're, and so that history is still living, you know, sensory still. Yes. Speaker 2: (53:03)So what did you, so you got this movement training and Oh, and you with it, you taught that's, that's Speaker 6: (53:10)A little bit of teaching that way. Okay. Speaker 2: (53:12)Sorry. Did you say where you were teaching that Speaker 6: (53:15)Columbia at Columbia college, Chicago, but not in the theater department. It was through this other, uh, graduate, uh, arts therapy department that I was working. Oh, okay. Speaker 2: (53:26)So now that there's no more cuts system there, isn't this a direct connection between the theater school and Columbia, because yeah. Speaker 6: (53:35)You don't have a feeder college going into going into the code base. Right. Speaker 2: (53:38)Is it still a very robust acting program there? Speaker 6: (53:41)Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And, um, and still has that sort of scrappy energy, um, you know, Sheldon, I think really established, uh, um, um, uh, pathos around that place around that building and that program that still continues. Speaker 2: (53:59)Um, I was going to ask you while you were at the, the good old theater school, I remember you as being a musical theater guy. Am I making that up? Were you a big movie musical theater guy? Speaker 6: (54:11)I, yeah. I loved love to sing. Absolutely. And yeah, and Vanessa was more of the singer, but she and I would do, um, we were in that, uh, Michael Maggio, Keith redeem musical, the perpetual patient then Clemente was the lead in that, um, was that your final year? Maybe that was, yeah, it was after you got, Speaker 2: (54:34)But I was there. I remember. Yeah. Okay. So perpetual paste, that was a musical. Did you say Michael Maggio wrote it? Speaker 6: (54:41)Uh, Keith redeem wrote it. It was an adaptation of the imaginary invalid. So it was an adaptation of whole year made into a musical that, um, uh, um, Oh my gosh, Mike [inaudible], um, Mark Elliott Elliott wrote the music for Mark Elliot with the music for Keith redeem, did the script and the lyrics and Maggio directed. So Keith came to, uh, some of our rehearsals, um, because Keith and Michael had a relationship. So I got a lot of scripts autographed that day. Speaker 2: (55:16)How cool. So what are, what are some other roles that you loved or didn't Speaker 6: (55:24)Right, right. Um, well, working with Michael, I think were the two roles that really helped me understand myself as a character actor, I, where I did a missile Alliance, which Eric spoke about. Um, and I provided you one of the pictures of me, all the pictures of me have a mustache attached to them seem to be my go-to, but yeah, being, uh, being in an Ms Alliance and playing a character role in that with a kind of a goofy dialect and silly physicality and extreme stakes and working with like Tim Gregory and, uh, you know, Louise Rosette and Eric and all these Ellen and all these great people. Like I was, I was a junior and it was my, it was the fall of my junior year and I was on the main stage. And I remember that being like, that was pretty prestigious. That was pretty cool. Um, yeah, I'll, I'll probably forget that show so that one, and I would say perpetual patient were both really big for me in regards to embracing my character actor stuff. Speaker 2: (56:32)Anything, anything that you weren't so pleased about? Speaker 6: (56:37)Um, gosh, I mean, going, even going back to intros, I tried to, you know, you try to make the most out of everything, even when I had like, um, a, like a walk-on role in something you try to, you ever hear the story about, um, Betsy Hamilton said the story about Don Elko and she saw him on stage once he was the third speared carrier to the left. And she, that he was so memorable in that role with no minds. And I remember her saying this, like, you can make anything out of, you know, if you working with the director. So I always try to make something out of the roles I was in. I remember Jenkins saying to me, after we did bombing Gilliad as an intro, and he had Joseph Cora and I flipped roles halfway through the play where Joe played the lead, the first half of the play. And then I played a double lead, like seconds before he got shot. And like, it was so hard to get into that role and to like, try and feel like I'm that character in the moment that I know I'm about to die. And like, that was really hard. And John apologized for that, but that was, that's the only regret. Speaker 2: (57:46)Did he do that? Because it made sense for the player. He was just trying to get people more staged. Speaker 6: (57:52)Yeah. I think that's the, you know, the sort of unspoken rule of the intros. It's like, you want to give everyone some kind of equal some sort of equal, but I was happy playing the role of the coffee shop owner in the first half in the first act. I would've stuck with that. That was fine with me. Speaker 2: (58:12)What about, did you have, uh, or do you have, now I know you are very interested in movement, but like other tendencies then, or now writing, um, I guess directing, you've done some of w are there other areas of the craft that maybe you wish you could have explored more than? Speaker 6: (58:34)Yeah. So voiceover is something that I, I was interested in since I was an adolescent, since I was young. I really love voiceover. Do you remember when I was in college and we had a voiceover instructor, she was like a friend of Susan leaves who came in for a quarter. She said to me, uh, the age of radio is over. You don't really have a place in this business. She was, she was all about the kind of a raspy, vocal fry, female voice that was popular at the time. So she was really promoting those female voices and was basically like, you need to take a back seat. I'm sorry. The age of radio is over. You're not going to have a place in this business. And I took seriously because I was 19. I was like, Oh. And so since then, I, I have experienced the, uh, repercussions of that, even though I'm looking intellectually aware of it, like trying to get into the voiceover business, I'm hobbled. Like I can't push through the difficult first months of trying to establish something. I can't get through that point. So I, I just kinda gave up on that. I liked the sound of my voice. Speaker 2: (59:52)Oh, I'm so surprised. You're not a voiceover actor that I, in fact, back in my mind, I think I assumed that you did voiceover, but wait, what are you, I'm trying to understand what you're saying. You're saying that you, when you try to establish yourself, you find yourself like undoing it or, or, or you feel that the hurdles are insurmountable. Speaker 6: (01:00:13)Well, I, I w whenever I've tried to get started, I feel like there's, and this is the thing with being a white guy, I think is like, there's way too many of me. I don't think that I have that much uniqueness to offer, to upset the business and become something that I, you know, to add something to the community. So at this point, I feel like now at first I was hobbled with the age of radio was over. And now I feel like I'm feeling a little like, well, I guess I don't really have anything new to bring to voiceover. I would just be really impersonating the guys that came before me. Um, so maybe that's believing some of what was told to me when I was an adolescent a little bit, and also kind of reckoning with, you know, just where we're at as a society right now. And as a culture right now, maybe it's a mix of both, but it's really nice. Speaker 2: (01:01:07)So the age of radio has never been over. Right. Cause then, right. Speaker 2: (01:01:16)It's also not true. So, so what I, what, what sticks out to me is that when we're 19 and these people in power say things like that, the repercussions hear me. Now, if you are an instructor of some kind, they ripple out until you are 45 years old, and you are still dealing with them. Now, I'm not saying they did it on purpose. Maybe some people did, but it's harmful. And so I think, I think it's. And I also think that I want you to meet my voiceover agent. And I also think that, that I, um, I just didn't shocked at what we say. And Gina and I talk about this because Gina has kids. I don't, but just that what we say matters to people and you have kids, and what we say matters to people, um, more than we could ever know, it drives me insane when I hear stuff like that. Um, because I've heard it too stuff, and it's not fair. And we were 19 and you have a fantastic voice and you're kind, that's the other thing it's like, you can hear the kindness in your voice, and I'm so serious, and we need that in this industry. So that's all I'll say on that. Get off my box. But man, Speaker 6: (01:02:28)Thanks for saying that. But I want to say something too, about what you were saying with the messages. There was something that I'll say his name. You can edit it out later, said to me in his office one day and I'm surprised, I bet there's a lot of stories. Speaker 2: (01:02:42)Oh yes. We believe his name on the regular. Speaker 6: (01:02:47)So he had me in his office. Uh, I think it was like sophomore year, like second year and he's, and I was sitting in his office and he said, all right, get up. Mike stood up. And he said, turn around. I turned around in a circle and said, no, turn your back to me. I turned my back to him. He was still sitting down and I was standing and he slapped me on the, both cheeks. He said, this is getting too big, sit down. And I sat down. He said, if you're going to get anywhere, you have to lose some weight. Your is getting too big. Speaker 2: (01:03:24)Oh my God, I'm sorry. That happened to you. Speaker 6: (01:03:32)Well, you know what I feel like at that time, and I've talked about this story a lot, but after listening to your show, I've been thinking about it more. Like, I feel like what he was trying to do. I think what he was trying to do, if I assume the best is he thought that that was the form that I needed to fit in order to be successful. You know? Like, and I, and when I was looking at my headshot and said, that's your, uh, can I come move your casting couch for your headshot? I was like, yeah, awesome. This is cool. I'm going to be the sexy young guy. Right. Um, but that wasn't me. And I didn't know that that wasn't me. I wanted it to be me. Speaker 2: (01:04:13)Sure. Of course you did. You want it to be liked and loved and picked and worked and feel Speaker 6: (01:04:17)And sexy and cool and stuff, you know? So I want it to fit those molds. I want it to lose the weight. I want it to be the casting couch guy. I wanted to be, you know, I wore a leather jacket with the collar, pop to my hair, you know, the sideburns and the Urim and stuff. And I did the whole thing. Um, and I went to LA and I went to meetings, but my personality isn't that. So I didn't follow through on the expectation. Speaker 2: (01:04:45)You didn't know who you were because people were helping you to say, this is who you should be. And it really, probably somewhere inside you were like, no, no, I can't just like, if you're not. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. How can you show up at 21 or 22 at meetings with adult people that are trying to, that want you to sell certain things? And in your core, something about your being is like, this isn't, this isn't me. It's going to not work out. Speaker 6: (01:05:12)I spent money on a really slim fitting, nice suit, you know, good sunglasses walked into the meeting trying to feel like, yeah, I'm this, I'm the sexy guy. That's gonna solve all your Hollywood PR problems. But I couldn't hold a conversation because I didn't have the confidence, you know, despite the cost, Speaker 2: (01:05:30)I wouldn't even know why, how could you have confidence when people are telling you you're too fat, you need to do this and you're, or, or you're you're yes. You're headed in the right. Speaker 6: (01:05:39)Right. Speaker 2: (01:05:40)You guys, I just feel so sick to my stomach about that story. And I, I, part of what makes it, so, um, sickening is that, I mean, he touched it, but he also, he made you turn around something about that is like, it just really is hitting me right in the center of my chest, because how dare you? How dare you. Speaker 6: (01:06:03)It was so vulnerable. You know, it was a really vulnerable moment. And I feel like we, we put ourselves in vulnerability with our, with our teachers in that, in that Mel you right in the conservatory program, um, whatever, the modality of art that you're studying, you're in a really vulnerable place for experiments. And you're putting stuff out there that represents you. Speaker 2: (01:06:26)That's right. And, and, and so like for anybody in college, probably the experiences, uh, that child has had pretty much the same set of people, their whole life, reflecting back to them who they are. And then you don't know this, but part of why you go to college is to have other people reflect back to you who you are, so that you can figure it out and decide which one, and which is why we all do that. So many. And in high school too, like trying on personalities and trying to see what's going to fit. And then in theater, it's like, you're trying to do that. You are receiving messages from people about how you're perceived, but then you're also being asked to be open, to be anything new. It's just so tricky and dangerous. And, and, and there are so many billions of ways that, that self-image can be, uh, splintered, right? Some of them might be good, but a lot of them are really not Speaker 6: (01:07:29)Well in the highest value that we bring into the classroom is our vulnerability, right. Being, being as open and open, open, open, open, open, and neutral as possible, right. Ego lifts is try to be as equal as possible. So we're so receptive Speaker 2: (01:07:45)Were so receptive and were so fragile. You know, people are fragile. We're also fragile. It's like, I just, I I'm just always shocked at how quickly someone will, someone can, um, crumple a child. [inaudible] the episode that era's today is the one with Erica who mentioned you she's she's actually, when, when we interviewed her, she said, have you talked to Paul? Yeah. And also she's the reason that week. I think I called your email. You sorry, later that day. Um, but Oh my God, I just lost my train of thought something Erica said maybe about, about the theater school. She said a lot. Oh no. We were talking in today's episode in the first part about, Oh, victim impact statements. That's what it was. We were talking about victim impact statement. Ooh, we should w maybe we can't do it in real life, but we could write a play where students gave their victim impact statements to their teachers. Speaker 2: (01:08:47)Right? Like you had the opportunity kind of like in defending your life, you have this long, it's not really like fighting in life, but you have, you get this kind of council of teachers. And then everybody who was their student, if a toxic teachers can come in and say, this is what you did, probably you didn't mean to probably no teacher would say what I really wanted Paul to do was, uh, never consider voiceover, even though that's what he totally wanted to do. She wouldn't have said, she thought she was doing, you're such a favor. Speaker 6: (01:09:18)Right, right. You'll waste your time. Speaker 2: (01:09:21)That's what it is. They think they're saving you from the humiliation that then they're reflecting on the moment that they're second. They think they're saving you. And really they're, they're slowly killing you. I mean, like it's real in a way it's real. Speaker 6: (01:09:36)Hmm. This feels like a non-sequitur, but I want to follow it. So, Gina, I know that you directed under milkweed. Uh, I also directed under milk. Um, we, we rehearsed at the theater building in the courtyard and so really had a strong connection to production of that play in school so much so that I really wanted to recreate that experience for another audience. Was that your experience too? Yes. Yeah. So he can't all be the devil because that play was so beautiful that it touched me. I mean, it moved me for the rest of my life, you know, and that came from him and his heart. So there was something about like, I really trusted him because he was so earnest and passionate about the capital T truth. So I fed, I thought that I totally bought into that. And I believe that he believed it. Speaker 2: (01:10:35)Dude, if we could interview him, he would probably have stories that would, you know, make your hair stand on, end about what people said to him or what people did to him. I mean, that's what we find. Right. And then his teacher would say, they literally beat me on the side of the head when I did something wrong. It's just this thing. It's just like what the, the traumatization is almost like an absolute value. Hopefully, hopefully not forever. Um, just the onl

Failure happens to everyone; we will experience it at some point in our lives. Despite our sacrifices and hard work, we may not achieve what we set out to do. It is, however, important to approach failure not as the end of a journey but as a crucial lesson. And it doesn’t matter how many times you fail—physical, emotional and mental resilience will take us one step forward towards our eventual success and victory.  Laura Penhaul joins us in this episode to share the story of her expedition across the Pacific Ocean. She describes the preparations she undertook, from planning the expedition to gaining financial support. Laura also talks about the importance of breaking down the journey and being clear with team dynamics in the expedition’s success.   If you want to know more about the makings of strength and mental resilience in a person, then this episode is for you.   Get Customised Guidance for Your Genetic Make-Up For our epigenetics health programme all about optimising your fitness, lifestyle, nutrition and mind performance to your particular genes, go to  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/epigenetics-and-health-coaching/.   Customised Online Coaching for Runners CUSTOMISED RUN COACHING PLANS — How to Run Faster, Be Stronger, Run Longer  Without Burnout & Injuries Have you struggled to fit in training in your busy life? Maybe you don't know where to start, or perhaps you have done a few races but keep having motivation or injury troubles? Do you want to beat last year’s time or finish at the front of the pack? Want to run your first 5-km or run a 100-miler? ​​Do you want a holistic programme that is personalised & customised to your ability, your goals and your lifestyle?  Go to www.runninghotcoaching.com for our online run training coaching.   Health Optimisation and Life Coaching If you are struggling with a health issue and need people who look outside the square and are connected to some of the greatest science and health minds in the world, then reach out to us at support@lisatamati.com, we can jump on a call to see if we are a good fit for you. If you have a big challenge ahead, are dealing with adversity or are wanting to take your performance to the next level and want to learn how to increase your mental toughness, emotional resilience, foundational health and more, then contact us at support@lisatamati.com.   Order My Books My latest book Relentless chronicles the inspiring journey about how my mother and I defied the odds after an aneurysm left my mum Isobel with massive brain damage at age 74. The medical professionals told me there was absolutely no hope of any quality of life again, but I used every mindset tool, years of research and incredible tenacity to prove them wrong and bring my mother back to full health within 3 years. Get your copy here: https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books/products/relentless. For my other two best-selling books Running Hot and Running to Extremes chronicling my ultrarunning adventures and expeditions all around the world, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/books.   Lisa’s Anti-Ageing and Longevity Supplements  NMN: Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, a NAD+ precursor Feel Healthier and Younger* Researchers have found that Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide or NAD+, a master regulator of metabolism and a molecule essential for the functionality of all human cells, is being dramatically decreased over time. What is NMN? NMN Bio offers a cutting edge Vitamin B3 derivative named NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) that is capable of boosting the levels of NAD+ in muscle tissue and liver. Take charge of your energy levels, focus, metabolism and overall health so you can live a happy, fulfilling life. Founded by scientists, NMN Bio offers supplements that are of highest purity and rigorously tested by an independent, third party lab. Start your cellular rejuvenation journey today. Support Your Healthy Ageing We offer powerful, third party tested, NAD+ boosting supplements so you can start your healthy ageing journey today. Shop now: https://nmnbio.nz/collections/all NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 capsules NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 250mg | 30 Capsules 6 Bottles | NMN (beta Nicotinamide Mononucleotide) 500mg | 30 Capsules Quality You Can Trust — NMN Our premium range of anti-ageing nutraceuticals (supplements that combine Mother Nature with cutting edge science) combat the effects of aging, while designed to boost NAD+ levels. Manufactured in an ISO9001 certified facility Boost Your NAD+ Levels — Healthy Ageing: Redefined Cellular Health Energy & Focus Bone Density Skin Elasticity DNA Repair Cardiovascular Health Brain Health  Metabolic Health   My  ‘Fierce’ Sports Jewellery Collection For my gorgeous and inspiring sports jewellery collection ‘Fierce’, go to https://shop.lisatamati.com/collections/lisa-tamati-bespoke-jewellery-collection.   Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Gain valuable insights through Laura’s journey and expedition across the Pacific Ocean. Learn about mental resilience and adaptability in dealing with failure.   Discover the importance of team dynamics in the success of Laura’s expedition.   Resources Gain exclusive access to premium podcast content and bonuses! Become a Pushing the Limits Patron now! Support healthy ageing through the NAD+ boosting supplement, NMN! Visit NMN Bio for more information.  Watch Losing Sight of Shore, a documentary about four brave women rowing across the Pacific Ocean, from America to Australia. The strength of adaptability: achieving the impossible, Laura Penhaul on TEDxTruro What it takes for a team to survive 9 months at sea, Laura Penhaul on TEDxClapham Endurance podcast with Mark Beaumont and Laura Penhaul Endurance: How to Cycle Further by Mark Beaumont Connect with Laura: Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn   Episode Highlights [05:12] Laura’s Background Laura worked in elite sport for the Olympics and Paralympics for more than 14 years. As a physical therapist, she was able to see people through their journeys as athletes.  In the face of adversity, Laura found two types of people: those who bounced back from it and those who gave up because of it.  She was inspired by those who wanted to thrive and make the most out of life.  She never experienced rowing before, but she was searching for a challenge. Ocean rowing was something she found ideal.  The expedition gave her a lot of learnings.  [12:58] Gaining Confidence Reach out to those who have done what you want to do or to those who have expertise.  Laura had to break down the journey and prepare for it: planning the possibility of the route, gaining logistical and structural support, planning out the time frame and preparing the team.  She expected to finish in a year but didn’t. It took four years of planning before they could carry out the expedition.  She had to learn from her failures, figure out her blind spots and reach out to other people for help.  [16:12] Gathering Financial Support and Sponsorships At first, Laura could not ask for money to support her journey. She reached out to people who worked in business and sponsorship. They helped her shape her deck, brand and business model.  She also reached out to Mark Beaumont, an elite expedition athlete. She learned from his experience and failures.  With Mark’s help, Laura could have a structure for the timeline, budget and sponsorship.  [20:06] Physical, Emotional and Mental Resilience  Optimise your own elite performance.  Break down the journey and plan everything. Being prepared makes you feel confident when dealing with the unknown.  Have the courage to step away from comfort and the norms.  Push outside of your comfort bubble to reach your full potential.  [25:40] Going Beyond Your Comfort Zone Laura considers herself a calculated risk-taker.  She does not leap blindly and makes sure not to leave any stone unturned.  It’s not a failure if you learn from it.  Have the physical, emotional and mental resilience and robustness to bounce back and ask where and why you went wrong.  [29:36] Dealing with Failure You can prepare everything and still fail. There are things you can’t control. Be adaptable and flexible in your performance. During difficult times, the strength of Laura’s team was able to support a struggling individual. Different perspectives help you see things you can and cannot control. It can prevent you from being ill or injured. [34:42] Team Dynamics Compared to individual sports, being in a team is difficult.  Expeditions bring out the best and worst in people. You won’t know unless you are in the situation.  Laura wanted her team to be cohesive and transparent. She always confronts an issue and steps forward to speak about it.  A performance psychologist helped them understand the differences in each other's personalities, which helped make their journey a success. [44:05] Keeping Mindfulness in Moments of Struggle Leveraging each member’s strengths and differences can end up holding the team together rather than pulling it apart. When you are struggling, you may show a part of yourself that is cynical and selfish.  Remember: we are all working on our character.  In extreme circumstances, the bad side of ourselves could come out. Dealing with it is part of resilience and teamwork.   7 Powerful Quotes ‘There's people that can go through the same type of thing. And yet one person wakes up, being so thankful that they're alive’ they're now going to make the most of life. And then somebody else that wakes up and they're like, they wish they didn't wake up’. ‘How can I put myself in a situation which is completely unknown, that's kind of gonna make me want to give up? And I want to understand what it is we draw on when we can't give up [and] we've only got one option’. ‘It's all about perspective, isn't it? And it's all about the context that you're in. And this is the thing that I get really passionate about is, I want to optimise people's own elite performance’. ‘It is not a failure unless you don’t learn from it. And leaping sometimes is exactly what you need to do, and it's just not being scared to fall, like just knowing that, you know what, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's got you one step further. And one step closer to finding what the next thing might be’. ‘You kind of just got to crack on and then there's no going back, you can't row backwards, sort of, it's only about having the confidence to step into taking on the Pacific’. ‘You've got to understand that there are things you can't control. So you've done everything you can control. And now the rest is up to the gods, basically. And you're going to have to be able to be adaptable and flexible’. ‘The girls hated confrontation. They weren't used to giving and receiving feedback. That was always felt like a personal threat. I just had to put myself in the barrier first. I be like, “Right, cool, okay, if you're not going to give it and you're going to say everything's rosy when it's not, I’ll pull it out”’.   About Laura Laura Penhaul is one of the world's most respected physiotherapists. She helps train many of the top athletes in Olympic sailing and the Paralympics.  Laura is known for her nine-month, 9000-mile crossing of the Pacific in a rowboat. She managed a team of four women known as the Coxless Crew; she was the expedition's team leader and organiser. The expedition is featured in a documentary called Losing Sight of Shore. Connect with Laura through Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.   Enjoyed This Podcast? If you did, be sure to subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, then leave us a review. You can also share this with your family and friends so they can learn more about stories of strength and mental resilience. Have any questions? You can contact me through email (support@lisatamati.com) or find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. For more episode updates, visit my website. You may also tune in on Apple Podcasts. To pushing the limits, Lisa    Full Transcript Of The Podcast!  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. Lisa Tamati: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits once again. Today, I have another world-leading, actually world-record-holding, superwoman. Now, this lady is Laura Penhaul from England, and Laura is one of the world's most respected physiotherapists. She helps train many of the top athletes in Olympic sailing and in Paralympics with people with disabilities. She's done an awful lot in high-performance sport. But what Laura is really known for is that Laura did a 9,000-mile crossing of the Pacific in a rowboat, you heard that right. Right across the Pacific. Nine months it took and she was the team leader and organiser of this whole expedition. She got four women together to do this epic event. And there is a documentary out called Losing Sight of Shore. And today we discuss this mammoth expedition that Laura undertook. The funny thing is that Laura hadn't even been a rower before she took this on. But because she had worked so much with high-performance athletes, people pushing the limits of endurance, and people with disabilities doing crazy things. She wanted to understand what is it that makes some people so resilient and strong, and other ones want to give up when they're faced with a trauma. And she thought, 'I don't need to wait until something drastic happens in my life, and my health has taken off me or my mobility, or I have an accident or I have something to wake up. I can actually take on some mammoth task so that I can start to understand what it actually takes and what resilience and strength is all about'. And she felt like she didn't have the right to be leading and guiding other people if she didn't have that experience herself. So she set off on a mission, what she thought would take them a year to do for a status to organise this expedition across the Pacific. And they knew that taking it four years of preparation, we go into the, all the details of putting together such a high-performance team, it's a fantastic interview. She really is a superwoman. I'm in awe over here, I can't imagine being in a 29-foot boat for anything more than about two hours, I reckon, before I'd start going nuts, so she's pretty impressive, this lady. And before we head over to the show, just want to remind you, we've launched now, our patron program for the podcast. So if you want to become a premium member of our podcast tribe, if you like, we'd love you to come and join us here on over to patron.lisatamati.com. And we'd love to see you over, the, it's all about keeping the show going. We've been doing it now for five and a half years each and every episode takes me a long time to put together to chase these world-leading experts, to do the research that I need to do, especially when it's dealing with scientific topics, and a test takes an awful amount of time. And to keep it going we need your help. And we wanted to give you lots of benefits too so people who do get in behind the podcast and help us provide this super valuable content to everybody get a whole lot of exclusive member benefits. So we'd love you to check it out. Go to patron.lisatamati.com for more information on that. And on that note before we just hit over to Laura, I just want to remind you about my new longevity and anti-ageing supplement NMN Nicotinamide Mononucleotide. You would have heard a couple of times in the podcast I had Dr Elena Seranova and we're going to have her on more often. She's a molecular biologist and tells us all about the ways that we can help with anti-ageing. And one of those things is by taking Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, which is a very, very powerful supplement. It's an NAD precursor that helps up-regulate the sirtuin genes, helps provide a bigger pool of NAD to every cell in the body and helps on a very, very deep level. The ageing working against the ageing process and who doesn't want to know about them if you want to find out all about it and all the science behind it, please go to nmnbio.nz. Right, now over to the show with Laura Penhaul. Lisa: Well, hi everyone, and welcome to Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super excited. I have an amazing, amazing guest for you. I really do find the most incredible people and this lady is a superwoman. So welcome to the show. It's really, really nice to have you Laura. Laura Penhaul is sitting in Cornwall in England. Laura, how's your day going? Well, you're not going. Laura Penhaul: Oh I was gonna say yeah no, it's been great. Do it. Yeah, it's now eight o'clock in the evening. So yeah, no, it's all good. It's been a beautiful sunny day. Lisa: Oh lovely, lovely. So Laura is an amazing person who does expeditions and as a physio, Laura, can you give us a little bit of background? I want you to tell your story in your words, give us a bit of a synopsis about what you do and what the critical things. I mean I've done a bit in the intro so, but I really want your words, if you like. Laura: Yeah, no props well, firstly, yes. Thanks, Lisa for having me on the show. It's been an honour because I think you're a superwoman more than me. Lisa: Hell no. Laura: But no I mean yeah, my background is I worked in elite sport, in Olympic and Paralympic sport for over 14 years. Sort of went to Vancouver, London, Rio, Tokyo cycles. And yeah during that kind of journey, and that was as lead physio in different sports, whether that was downhill skiing, whether it was with British Athletics Paralympic team. And more recently, I was with the British sailing team. And during that sort of journey as a physio like, the role that we have, as physios, physical therapists are very much kind of, you know, you're seeing somebody through a journey. And like when I worked with them and we've worked with patients in trauma, worked versus kind of, you know, in spinal cord injuries, and then straight to Paralympic sport, I've been surrounded by people that have been faced with significant adversity. And it's sort of, it's always along my journey of my career, have I been fascinated by understanding the person in front of me and kind of going, there's usually two types of people when they've been thrown a massive curveball, like an RTA or road traffic accident, or something horrendous, that is completely changed their life for the rest of their life. Those two, there's people that can go through the same type of thing. And yet one person wakes up, being so thankful that they're alive, they're now going to make the most of life. And then somebody else that wakes up and they're like, they wish they didn't wake up. And as a physio dealing with those two people, you've got to have a very different approach. And in the, kind of—to me, understanding that person that wants to give up and actually being able to change their mindset and facilitate, go shoulder to shoulder with them is really powerful. And then those people that do wake up and want to thrive, like they're the ones that have inspired me to do more stuff, because I'm like, why do we wait for adversity? Why do we wait for something to be a curveball before we then, like, start to go, ‘Oh, my God, I need to make the most of life like I’m fit. And I'm healthy. I need to make the most of life because clearly stuff could happen in an hour’s time. Lisa: At any time. Laura: Exactly. So that's kind of what then drove me to start to do more and more personally, and kind of a bit of exploratory expedition space. And then the real, so that led me to ride the Pacific Ocean, which is kind of you know what, we're talking about. Lisa: You said it again, you just rode the Pacific Ocean is, I just dropped it as a, to yeah, and then I rode the Pacific Ocean. So you were into sailing and into rowing and into all of that sport, as prior, this was your thing? Laura: No. Well, that's the thing, no wasn't in all honesty. I was, I'm kind of a jack of all trades like I love anybody, any athletes, anybody that I work with, I want to understand them. And I want to understand the sport, the environment that they're in. So when I was working with skiers, I went off and did a ski season. I learned to ski when I, and I'm somebody that, yeah, I love to do different sports and outdoors, the sort of outdoor environments. And if I was working with marathon runners, I was like, I can't fully treat them if I don't understand, if I haven't run a marathon like, to me, I need to experience what they've experienced, even in a small way to kind of get a glimpse of the environment. So I would run a marathon, same with triathletes, and, you know, not to the extent of your, sort of did a half Ironman, and then the point was the Paralympic cohort when I was working with them. I was like, this is an area that I can't untap you know, yeah. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: I can do it, but I can't understand what it is to be a Paralympian. Lisa: Yep. Laura: However, how can I put myself in a situation which is completely unknown, that's kind of gonna make me want to give up. And I want to understand what it is we draw on when we can't give up you know, we've only got one option. Lisa: Yep. Laura: So I kind of, that's what I was searching for, for a couple of years of searching for something that was going to be out of my comfort zone completely and was going to be a challenge on multiple levels. Lisa: Sure must have been. Laura: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I guess at the time, I was doing, sort of, triathlons. I was enjoying them. But anything that was cycling, running, swimming, I felt like this would be expected and I kind of would already be a bit familiar with it. So when I suddenly heard about ocean rowing, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is ideal'. I've always wanted to row but never did it. Then never got a chance to, so I'd never rode before. I've never lost sight of shore. Like, you know, I've never been out at sea properly, never sailed or any of that stuff. Well, a bar like going on a few trips. But yeah, not a sailor by anyway, shape or form.  So it was, I was, and that just connected, you know, when something, an opportunity comes up and you're like, ‘This is exactly what I've been looking for'. And it was a proper light bulb moment. And the thing for me, it's the one time in my whole life that I've been so focused, like, ‘I have to make this happen'. Because I know, in my heart of hearts, I know what I'm going to get out of this is going to be huge. Lisa: Wow. Laura: And that basically is why starting point with it, it was kind of, I didn't know how to row, I went from being a marathon weight of like, something stupid, like 58 kilos up to, I had to go up to 72 kilos to grow on mass, you know, to be not skinny, because we lose a lot of weight out there. I had to put a team together, whereas, in my personal sport, I was doing quite individual sports. So, you know, I had to work out the team cohesion, the whole team dynamics, and recruitment. I had to figure out what the boat was, get it built, like then set up this as a business, you know, so. So yeah, so the whole journey it was, I mean, now on reflection, there's so many learnings from it. But I absolutely thrive from the self-awareness piece, how much I've learned about myself, and the different perspectives. And you know, approaching that row, my approach is very much like, this is all brand spanking new. So if I can approach it with a blank canvas, if I can have a real adaptive mindset, and if I surround, if I've now gone on the other side of the table, rather than surrounding athletes, if I surround myself with the relevant expertise, how far can I get? And how far can I really experience that athlete? Lisa: Yeah, sorry, just my brother's just come in the middle of the podcast it’s all right. There. Come on Mitch, get around the other side. Yeah, this is podcast life for you. Didn't tell your brother you’re recording. There was so much here that I wanted to unpack. Because there was like, you just skipped over a ton of stuff. Number one, you had no idea. So what gave you the confidence, what was the little voice inside you saying, ‘I can do this’, when you're in a completely unknown sport? Like what was it that made you think, ‘Oh, yeah, I can ride across the Pacific on a row across the Pacific, you know, for nine months, and that all worked out well'. You know, how did you even come up with a concept for something so audacious? Laura: Well, I mean, it's all about small pieces, isn't it, and kind of reaching out to those that have done stuff and those that you respect and have the expertise. So it was basically breaking it, breaking the journey down. First of all, one is that route even possible? So initially, somebody had asked me to be part of the Indian Ocean, and they were putting a team together and then I evolved it into the Pacific. And then somebody, I was like, well, actually, originally, it might have been the new ocean wave race, which just goes from San Fran to Hawaii. And I was like, well, that's not the Pacific. That's a third of it, like so if I'm going to say I'm going to row the Pacific. I want to row, can I row all of it? Yeah. So it was then reaching out to somebody from a logistical point of view and a support structure point of view saying, ‘Is this even feasible? And what would it look like?’ And when they said, 'Yes'. I was like, right, okay. So that's route can get involved, this is what it's going to look like. We're going to need to start, we're going to need to replenish, but it's doable. But it's going to take this time frame. And then it was kind of like right, in order for me to get prepped and the team to get prepped, what's the time frame that it's going to take to do that? Let's be realistic. And I wasn't realistic. I was naive, I thought it would only take us about a year to get to the start line. And hell no. It took four years to get to start, like four years. Lisa: Four years. That’s massive. Laura: Yeah, so it was. But interestingly, there's so many parallels, you know, like working in Olympic sport, everything's in four-year cycles for the Olympic cycle. And so there's so much that I learned through that process of, I thought I was only going to go in a year's time. That didn't happen. We didn't have the funding. I didn't got the team, the boat wasn't finished, you know, it was like, right, I need to go again. I need to reset. I need to sort of keep the ball rolling. But I need to learn from what failures have had here. And how do I overcome them? Lisa: Wow. Laura: The second year, I didn’t quite have to win I thought it was but it's all that sort of stuff. You go, yeah, you can give up why it's such a clear vision with it. And the question in my head was, ‘There's going to be an all-female team that is going to do this at some point. Like, why can't it be me? And I'm sure that will happen in my lifetime'. So what am I missing? What are the things that I can't see? That's in my blind spots. And that's where I started to reach out, to pull in different people to say, right, ‘This is the problem I've got, how can you help me’? How can you see and it was that reaching out for help with the right expertise that got us to the start line? It wasn't me. It was the collective bigger support team around us. Lisa: How did you even, like the resources and the money in the financial and the sponsorship, when you didn't have a—I mean, you had a backstory as a high-performance expert, and helping other people in training and so on. But, you know you didn't have, you weren't—there were no huge amount of resources behind you. How did you—I know what I had to go through to get to the races that I did. And that was probably a heck of a lot less than what you had to go through. How did you face that? And what did you learn on the business side of the journey, the marketing, all of that sort of stuff? Laura: Yeah, I mean– Lisa: Selling the idea to people. Laura: Yeah, the money. It kind of—it’s exactly that. I think it's showing the belief, like the absolute dogged determinedness, that this is going to happen, and you know, like, I put in my own swag to it. I paid for the boat built in the first place. So I'm like, I'm gonna do this, like, do you want to be part of it or not? But I want to do this regardless. Yeah. Lisa: So basically, how I did too. Laura: This is not my approach. But you know, I mean, I say that, but let's face it, I was useless at kind of asking for money, like, you know, it's great, you're doing it for charities. But to ask to support me, and like our journey. I was crap. You know, I'm a physio, I like to help people. I don't like asking for help. You know, at the time, I was very much in that poor sort of leadership style. And that's a big, that was a big learning point. But then reaching out to people that do work in business and do work in sponsorship. And they were the people that then helped me to shape sort of your sponsorship deck and how you need to brand it, what's your, you know, the colours, the language, all of that type of stuff. Lisa: Wow. Laura: And I loved it because I mean, I love learning. So suddenly, I was entering a snippet of a different world that I knew nothing about previously. Same with like the PR side of it, I had no idea but that was great fun, and, and the business model itself, like yeah became a business and I thought it was all about the physical and that was totally not it was 10% of like the project. And then yeah, so like you say, setting up a business no Scooby-Doo about and so simplicity was reaching out to people that had been successful had done it before. And the likes of, you know, Mark Beaumont, that we've talked about before like Mark. Mark is somebody that's an elite athlete, expedition athlete, he'd actually at the time rode the Atlantic, and unfortunately, they nearly died at sea. So I'd reached out to him to learn from his experiences from the actual failures, more, I don't want necessarily the successes, but, and he then was great at providing me with a bit more of the structure for you know, the timeline, the budget that this, that in the other room. Lisa: Wow. Laura: How you sort of need to get the sponsorship. And yeah, so I think to me, it's about as you know, if you hold, if this is a new space and you hold an ego thinking you're going to, then you're never gonna get anywhere. Lisa: You’re gonna get your ass kicked. Laura: Yeah, basically, just whereas for me, yeah, well, I don't mind. I don't mind saying I don't know something. I'm happy to ask why and how and who can help… Lisa: You can be very humble, we can tell that five minutes of talking to you, you know. Laura: Thank you very much. Lisa: And how did you get a team together? Because you get four ladies, you rode the Pacific and people were talking like nine months and a rowboat unsupported, like from California to Cairns, wasn’t it? It's great. Yeah. There's a documentary out on it. If people want to find out we'll work out with it with the link sir. And how they can get hold of it perhaps afterwards. Four ladies in a rowboat, rowing across the lake. I mean, to the average person who doesn't know anything about rowing? It sounds absolutely insane. And I, like, I said to my husband, I was interviewing this morning and I said I couldn't last 24 hours in a rowboat. I probably couldn't last four hours in a rowboat. How do you comprehend nine months like that for me? Is, I mean, I've never done anything on that scale, of that long. You know, like, the longest thing I ever did was run through New Zealand which was a sustained effort over 42 days. And that well nearly bloody killed me, you know. But that's not nine months, you know, little logistics and all that. Wow. Laura: Yeah, but you know what, I've been, flipping heck, you know. 40 odd days that you're running the lengths of New Zealand, like that is insane. So you could have... Lisa: That’s a hell lot easier than rowing. Laura: It’s not though! I mean, it's all about perspective, isn't it? And it's all about the context that you're in. And this is the thing that I get really passionate about is, I want to optimise people's own elite performance, like, not comparative to anybody else, like, what's your—so what you're really is your achievement of like, 42 days and everything else you've achieved is huge. Whereas somebody else's 42 days of running, will be running a marathon like that will be—it's about that gap analysis, like, where you'd got yourself to, to then be able to take on the 42-day sort of challenge. Like that was a big old leap, but you're already like, sort of—your experiences, and you'd prepped yourself for that. Lisa: Yes, years and years. Laura: Yeah, and where is somebody who's on a couch, but then is setting their sights of running a marathon. That's their 42 days, like, that's their elite performance for them. And the row for us? Yeah, it was a big old leap, but it was fundamentally, it was broken down. Like I think sometimes you must have found this with the run, you're talking about there and everything else. You've got to break it down, like you certainly in the preparation phase, you've got to plan every inch and every sort of crook of it within its life so that you don't leave any stone left unturned. You feel like you're best prepared, that gives you confidence, to then have capacity to deal with the unknown when you're faced with it. So to me, that sort of, I always wanted to leave, like, at least 30% of capacity in my headspace to make sure I can react to when I need to. Lisa: You can handle it. Laura: Exactly, and deal with the unknown. If I mean, if we'd gone on that row in that first year, Jesus Christ, like most of it was unknown, like that. I was so naive, it was ridiculous. But by the time you know, it's four years down the line, I felt so confident in actually we've trialed the boat, we've done 72 hours, we've done a couple of weeks. We've done team testing, we've done routines, we've done steep depot, we've done the training, we've done the site support, you know, all of those, every aspect of it. I feel like we took out and then it was a case of right, well, then we just need to do this on a day and day out. And then however long that's gonna last for it's just sticking to routines, which you know, the same in whatever you do. Lisa: The more you do the more it becomes normal. Laura: Exactly. And then it's kind of like, Well, actually, once you lose sight of shore, whether you're out there for five days, five weeks, five months, actually doesn't make much difference. Lisa: You’re in this shit anyway. Too far from home anyway, you've lost sight of shore! Laura: Yeah, you kind of just got to crack on and then, you know, there's no going back, you can't row backwards, sort of, it's only about, you know, having the confidence to step into taking on the Pacific. And for us, you know, yes, we rowed the Pacific literally, but to me, it was the essence of everybody's got their own Pacifics to cross like... Lisa: Yes.  Laura: ...our film’s called Losing Sight of Shore because it's about having the courage to lose sight of shore, like, have that sort of courage to just step away from the comfort, step away from the knowns. And like, Oh, my God, you know, that's where life just opens up and expose. Lisa: Because you know, I had Paul Taylor, who's a neuroscientist, and ex-British Navy guy, and exercise physiologist on the show last week, and he's talking about the small bubble where you can live in or the big bubble. And the big bubble is where we all want to be, you know, where we’re reaching our potential and we are filling and where are all these amazing things that we could do. We know that that bubble was there. But we're all scared living in this little comfort zone. And how do you push outside because that outside is risk of failure, and in your case risk of dying. You know, there was so much that you put on the line physically, mentally, financially, emotionally, relationships, you know. You name it, you put it on the line for this one thing, and that is living in that big bubble and scaring the crap out of yourself and doing it anyway. Most people have this tendency to want to be comfortable in and I see this as a massive problem in our society today is that we are all cozy and comfortable and sitting on the couch watching Netflix and we are warm and we don't push ourselves for the gloom we don't push yourself. And this leads to disaster when it comes to resilience and being able to cope because you're been through this amazing adventure and expedition and you've risked everything, you must have an inner confidence that is just—and I know that you won't have it in all areas of life because this is certainly specific. And I know how that works because I'm really good and some things and really crap in others and I'm still working on my mindset in this area and that area or whatever, we're work in progress but you when you've lifted up your horizons to that big, nothing must daunt you in a way. Like he must be like, ‘Okay, whatever is coming at me, I can probably handle it'. Because you know, inside you have that resilience, which is so important. Laura: Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. It's about context, isn't it? Like I—you know, I'm a risk-taker, but I'm a really calculated risk-taker, right. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: Exactly. So kind of the Pacific seems like it's ridiculous, and it's life threatening. I mean, I didn't leave any stone left unturned. I had military guys helping us to make sure we'd sort of not left stuff unturned. We went through survival practice. We, I mean, there was everything and the amount of sort of, you know, routines we had on the boat, leashes, and kind of safety equipment was next to none. Because I was like, the risk we've got is getting separated from the boat. So I'm risk-aware, really risk-aware. And, and kind of, and make sure that sort of don't leave any stone unturned so then I feel confident to go forwards. I wouldn't just leap into it like blindly. Lisa: Yep, you shouldn’t. Laura: Yeah exactly. Lisa: Because you will die. Laura: Yeah. But I mean, it's no different if you watch, I don't think like, you know, you watch Alex Honnold, climbing free solo, you know, the El Cap, sort of the climb, if anybody’s seen that film. I mean, it's phenomenal. And anybody would, you know, you watch it. You're like, ‘Oh, my God, that's insane. He’s free climbing that like, what if he just slipped’? What if this? What if that? But look at his meticulous approach to it. Lisa: Yeah, one hand wrong. Laura: Exactly. But then his meticulous approach, he hasn't just woken up that day one, right. So I'm going to climb up, you know, sort of freestyle at this thing. He's like, he's been off top-roping with it, he is kind of lead climbed it. He's, kind of, known every single holding place he's written it, he’s drawn it, he’s visualising it. And he's only done it when he feels completely ready, prepped. And that actually, there's no move in that that is going to be a risk. So, therefore, he's a calculated risk-taker. And it is extreme when you watch it, but the preparedness is totally there. Lisa: I couldn't do it. I didn't put the parachute on as I'm halfway down. You know, you do learn from that, you know. I remember going out into the race in Niger, which was 353Ks across one of the most dangerous landscapes in you know, places on Earth, countries on Earth. And we were meant to have food come from France, and it didn't arrive. And I wasn't prepared. I didn't have my own stash, I didn't, my husband at the time, my ex-husband there. He did, you know, like, and when you're doing things like that, and you end up with food poisoning, and you're, you know, vomiting and shitting your way across the Sahara. And you realise, you know, you could have avoided that. That’s sort of a big lesson and do your preparation better, you know. Don't be so cavalier with your, ‘I am going to go and, you know, run 100 miles, and I haven't even trained for a marathon yet'. No, no, you know, and I had to learn those things the hard way because I had a tendency just to dive in. And this is all exciting. And let's do it. Laura: But then you learned that didn’t you? Lisa: Yeah, but it's not a good way to learn in the middle of the Sahara. It’s better to learn previously. Laura: Yeah, that is sure. But yeah, I mean, you still but you learn and I think that's one of the biggest takeaways, of whenever we talk about failure and stuff. It is not a failure, if you, unless you don’t learn from it. And leaping sometimes is exactly what you need to do, and it's just not being scared to fall, like just knowing that, you know what, if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's got you one step further. And one step closer to finding what the next thing might be. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: So yeah, just it's having that like you say, that the sort of the robustness, the resilience or whatever it is to bounce back to kind of jump back up to ask the questions. ‘Well, why didn't that work? And let's try it a different way', or learn from it and do something. Lisa: Yeah, like you said, You reached out to Mark and he'd had, you know, nearly died and had actually failed in that particular expedition, done lots of other crazy stuff, but you know, and that one and it is those things like you are risking failure and you have to understand it from the outset. That you can take care of all the things you can prepare. You can get everything and you're still risking because, if this was easy, everyone would be doing it. And you have to be okay with the—this is something I try and get my athletes to understand. When you're actually done the work, you've done the boulder, you've done the—all the hard stuff that you knew now standing at the start line, that's actually to have time to celebrate and go, you know, ‘I've done the hard work. Now it's up to whatever's going to come my way'. And like you say, being able to adapt and to have the flexibility to take whatever's coming at you, which isn't always easy, but you have to sort of give up those—I think the consequences of what if, what if, what if, because if you’re constantly asking yourself, for ‘What if I don't make that time?’ You know, say you're running a marathon, or I want to do it in under three and a half hours, or whatever the case may be, and then you're so like, ‘Oh, no’, and then it takes you three hours and thirty-two and you know, ‘I'm a failure’, you know, like, hang on a minute, no, hang on. That's not how it works. Laura: Yeah. Lisa: Yeah, you've got to understand that there are things you can't control. So you've done everything you can control. And now the rest is up to the gods, basically. And you're going to have to be able to be adaptable and flexible. And that was one of the things in your website, talking about adaptive, being adaptive in your performance. And I think that's a really good thing because we cannot control like… You can be having a bad day at the office and get up and you feel sick and your immune system’s down and you've got your period and you've, you know, whatever the case may be. And you weren't bargaining with that, you know, so you have to be able to work, ‘I need to still go because there's no way back. How do I deal with it’? You know? Laura: Yeah, and I think it's a really valid point. Because I mean, even in the row halfway through, and it's in the films, it's not kind of confidential stuff. One of the girls, like, she just completely changed her personality, right, because that was exactly the problem. She thought she could control the boat. She thought, you know, she was a rower. Out of all of us, she was somebody that actually had rowed since she was a kid and stuff. She thought ocean rowing was, you know. She didn't want to lose the passion. Unfortunately, yeah, it killed her passion. She didn't know then, she lost the sense of identity, all of that stuff. Lisa: Oh yeah, real tough. Laura: Yeah, awful. And, but because she was trying to control the boat, you know, like, the current, the wind was against us, like, those are things you cannot control. It’s a one ton boat, not one person is going to be able to control moving that in the direction you want it to go in. And so, but it was the collective of the team that enabled us to be able to rally around and understand, first of all, recognise the change in personality, it was a behaviour, it was yeah, there was something underlying. It was not her—well, it was, but there was something emotional that she couldn't verbalise straightaway. So hence, she just changed her personality type. Lisa: Wow. Laura: And then it was like the strength of the team to be able to rally together to support that. So kind of come at it from the right approach that she was able to share it, to then collectively go, we just need to see a different perspective on this stuff. And I think that's where, you know, a vast dynamic sort of team, you know, a diverse team sorry is what I meant, has got so much strength in it, because you know, what, when you see it through your own lens, there's only sort of one way. Whereas if you've got some diversity there, I just think it brings a different perspective. And suddenly, you're able to see, you can't control the uncontrollable, you know, you can only control the controllables. You can't control what's out of control. And those things are the weather that is, you know, yes will prevent being ill or injured. But that might well happen. That, you know, is what it is. And if the boat sort of fails, but you whatever, then those are only three things that are going to be out of our control. And if anything happened there, then I wouldn't be. I would have been upset, I would be upset, but I wouldn't be throwing my toys out the pram because it isn't something we could control. And if the row didn't happen, we didn't finish because one of those three things, that is what it is. Lisa: Yeah, it is what it is. And you've done your utmost. And I mean, I've failed on different expeditions and things that I’ve done, like really fallen on my face, you know, with, you know, documentary crews there have captured all on film as you just absolutely completely faceplant. And, you know, and it takes a long time to get up again, and it knocks the crap out of you. And, you know, but it's part of that, okay, well, this is the game wherein, you know, we’re pushing the limits, and sometimes, you know, you are human and you don't have the resources or one of the things that I find really, really I'd love to and I think this probably needs its own podcast is the whole team dynamic thing. I mean, it's one thing to be a solo athlete that does things, you know, but it's a—couple of times when I've had to be in a team situation. I find it really, really tough because you were reliant... I did one in the Himalayas, and we're trying to do the world's highest marathon ever done. And I was with a guy who was a mountaineer and used to altitude and very at home in that space. And I wasn't. And I don't—I've done a couple of things at altitude and sort of survive by the skin of my teeth. I'm an asthamtic and I don't really do well on the mountains. So take on, you know, the world's highest mountain. Good idea. And we'd be in shape. And I got sick. I got altitude sickness, and I couldn't even start my body. I couldn't even tie my shoelaces.  But the worst thing was that he changed. The person that he was down here was not the person that he was up there, and, it ended up being quite nasty, and quite, detrimental. And he's not here to defend himself. So I'm not gonna say anything too much. But it wasn't a nice situation to be in — I did not trust that if I was in the shutout there, that we would work together as a team to get through it. I felt like, now, he wouldn't do that.  And then so now I'm like, very, very always aware of if I'm teaming up with people like we've got at the moment, this weekend in my hometown, that Oxfam 100, it's 100-kilometre event where lots of just normal everyday people are doing 100Ks, which is like amazing, walking, and they're doing it in, you know, teams of four, and the staff are going to go through... And there'll be people that are, you know, expeditions bring out the worst and bring out the best in people. And you don't know until you're in the situation with them, which way are they going to go, and which way you're going to go. I mean, I can become, I've been a really horrible person on some of my, you know, with my crew on different occasions where I've just lost my shit because I'm in so much pain, sleep deprivation, motions are up the wazoo. And you just, you know, you're snappy, irritable, you know, just horrible. Afterwards, I’m heading to go and say, ‘I'm very sorry'. You know? So how did you deal with that over nine months like that on steroids? Like the dynamic—four women—everybody's having their highs and lows at different points in there. How did you cope with that? I mean, you're obviously,  you've mentioned the one person and how you helped pull together, it takes incredible leadership to keep a team like that together for nine months, no matter how wonderful you all are. Laura: Yeah, that I mean, don't get me wrong, you still have arguments and stuff, but it was all in the preparation. And it was, we knew I mean, so it is a 29th version rowing boat, right. So it's kind of the size of Greg Rutherford's, it's got the world record for the long jump, right? So it is, kind of, his long jump is the size of our boat. So it's a really small space. And then when you're cramped into the cabin, there's two of you. And if it's stormy, then all four of you are either in that or two in each cabin. So it's a tight, confined space. So it was really clear from the outset that this team had to be, we had to be cohesive, we had to be really transparent. And something I was particularly pedantic about was, I never want to leave a permanent issue. Like if there's an issue, we need to confront it, we will have to step forward into it. We can't, I don't want any bitchiness like, there was, that was always been, sort of my approach to most things. Like, I can't stand the whole talking to other people, rather than talking to the individual that you've got an issue with. You just need to step into that as much as it might feel uncomfortable. And I guess, working in a performance context, we're scrutinised on a daily basis, you know. We're kind of everybody's asking you why what are you doing, you know, type stuff, you've got to justify, you feel like you're under a spotlight all the time. So you start to feel this kind of separation, you know, look kind of right. No, this is they're asking me that because of the person in front of us or the, you know, the end goal, that's what it's about. It's got nothing to do with me personally. We're just trying to optimise what we need to do. So when, my, I pulled this, the sort of the team came together, a lot of it, I was like, how do we stress test this, like, we have to stress test it because– Lisa: Hell yeah. Laura: –exactly. And that's where I, you know, I started working with Keith, the performance psychologist. I reached out to him so I was like, there's got to be more depth to this, you know, we need tools we need to I need to know what I'm going to draw on when I'm wanting to give up like, what's going to be my go-to’s, I'm going to, I need to know how I can respond and react to different personalities and stuff and how they're going to react to each other. So Keith was the absolute rock to the success of our journey, in all honesty. I worked with him for four years and I still worked with him. I still work with him, sorry, to this day. And Keith, sort o—he enabled us to sort of understand the differences in our personalities from the basics of just doing psychometrics and stuff, but pretty in-depth ones. And then analyzing that a little bit more and playing it out in different scenarios, and then really forcing us to kind of do the round table. Yeah, because—and the girls hated confrontation. They weren't used to giving and receiving feedback. That was always felt like a personal threat. Yeah. So I just had to put myself in the barrier first. So I be like, ‘Right, cool, okay, if you're not going to give it and you're going to say everything's rosy when it's not, I’ll pull it out'. ‘So this is what's not going so well. And this is not going so well. Right now give it back to me, hit me’, like because then as soon as I've given it they're happy to give it back to me because I think I'm being—yeah exactly. That's fine. And then I would show them that I was learning from it because I was. And there was— I— they would call me, I would have Laura number one, Laura number two, my personalities. And they—I didn't realise that until sort of, you know, going through the row and they're like, ‘Oh my god, it's Laura number two'. And Laura number two is somebody that when she starts getting, like, tired, hungry, all of that gubbins and, and sort of just a bit over it, I start getting really assertive. I'm very tunnel vision, and my empathy just goes. Whereas normal time, like I've got heaps of the empathy, until it gets to a point… Lisa: Yeah, yeah. So like me. Laura: And so they’d be like, all right, Laura number two. Because we then had a language that was a little bit disconnected to the personal and it made a bit of fun of it, then we sort of were able to sort of take a pause, hear it and stuff. But we had loads of loads of methodologies that we built, we'd worked on to try and get to that point. And that was sort of to the point with there, though, is that is not to say we didn't have any arguments, because we did like, I mean Nat and I, in particular, completely different personalities. She is like a, she's a beautiful character. She is Miss Mindful, she is in the moment, and she is just totally there. She's talking about the sky and the sea and the colours. Whereas I'm Miss Planner. Like I'm already in Cannes, I'm thinking about fear, I’m planning, and what do we need to do, what do we need to sort out? So, you know, when we did the team testing before, this was during selection of the team. I remember when I met Nat, I was like, ‘Oh, god, no, we are poles apart. There's just no way', you know because I was trying to see it through. I was only seeing it through my own lens of who I was getting a rapport with. But I brought her onto the team testing weekend, which was, I'd gone to some ex-military guys. And I said, ‘Look, we need to be tested. I need to see what we're like when we're cold, we’re hungry, really sore, in pain. You need to physically push us. You need to mentally push us'. Well. And so we did like a 72-hour sleep depot type thing, you know, in the Brackens in Wales, yeah. On reflection that was like, yeah, that was it was great fun and obviously hated it during. I remember, like during it, sort of Nat in particular, as a personality that stood miles out because when she came on to it, I was thinking oh she can come along. But she's, I don't think that I’m going to be selecting her. And then Nat was the one that, you know, she might not have been the fittest. But even when she was struggling, and she was in pain, she had a sense of humour. When I was starting to struggle, she made me laugh. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, there's not many people that can do that while I'm in that space'. Lisa: Yeah. Laura:  And I'm like, this isn't just about me. But for the comfort of the team, like we need that. Because otherwise, I will make this too serious. I will. When it gets into it, it will be too boring and serious. I need a sense of humour in this. And she is, she's got it in abundance. And she kept us at the moment. Lisa: Wow, yep. Laura: As well. Like, I needed that mindfulness when we're out to sea because otherwise, I wouldn't have remembered half the things that went on and I wouldn't have recognised and seen it. Lisa: Isn't that amazing? So looking at the strengths and differences can actually end up being the thing that holds you together rather than pulls you apart. Laura: A hundred percent. Lisa: And I just think in this space I have to connect you with Paul Taylor, he will love you. He's a resilience expert that I was mentioning before and yeah, I think it when you have characters and I've started to do this just with for myself even now I have these different characters, you know, there's the good me and there's bad me and the good means like Wonder Woman, she can do anything and she's amazing.  And he has all these character traits that you know I aspire to and want to have and that side of me and then the other side's a real bitch, you know, she's a horrible, cynical, selfish person and those are both of me. And I know when you put this on—Paul talks about doing like cartoon characters and putting speech bubbles on them and actually giving them life and because it puts you outside of these characters that are fighting in your head, and you're trying to be that good one you want to be, but when you're hungry and cold and freezing, and you haven't slept in three days, and you're struggling somewhere, and God knows where. And you just want to go home and cry and hide under the covers and get mummy to give you a chicken soup. Well, you—it puts it outside of you, and it helps you see what you're doing.  And even in daily things like, you know, I've been rehabilitating my mum now for five years, seven days a week. And you know, beginning first three years, it was like eight hours a day. So it was just, it was full, full-on. And then even longer than that in the first year. And I catch myself sometimes being so short and irritable because I'm like trying to multitask and trying to run my businesses and she's waiting for me and you know, like, you just find yourself snapping at somebody when you just feel like, you know, that asshole is sure is present, you know, and you're just like listening to yourself going, ‘How the hell do I get a grip on this?’ We're all human. And we're all working on this. And, you know, I go to my mum and I put her in bed at night time and a cuddle. And tell her, I say, 'You know, I'm sorry for being a bitch today, Ma. I’m sorry for snapping at you'. And she's so lovely. She's like, 'Oh, that's all right'. Like, you know. But we have moments where we're just not nice, and when you're in these extreme circumstances fad, the ones that come out, and this is a part of the dynamic thing that I find really, really fascinating in that whole resilience and teamwork, and how do you bring it all together? So, you know, we're going to have to wrap up this one, because I've really enjoyed talking to you, Laura. But I really would like to have you on a couple of times, because I think there's much more to this actual story because we haven't even got to talking about well, what was it actually like to row? How did you, you know, do, what did you actually do on a daily basis? And how do you plan for such a thing? And how do you have such a big project and deal with it? And so I'm really glad that we've made this connection, and I'm very, very keen to have you on the show again, if you, because we've really just been part one, I think. Laura: Let's see… No, I’ll be honoured to come back on. There’s so much I think we connect with in, and we can talk about for sure, especially in that headspace how we can be… What we've both learned from the experiences that we faced and continue to learn, I think is always an exciting journey. Lisa: Yeah. Laura: Yeah, I'd be honoured to come back on it. It’s been great. Lisa: That would be fantastic because I think also the work that you've done with Paralympians and, you know, people that have worked with disabilities and trauma, we haven't even unpacked that either. Because I think that, you know, we can learn a heck of a lot from people that have gone through, you know, all these dramas and so on, me, I learn every day from Mum, like, her mindset is just like, incredibly strong, resilient. And so I'd like to unpack some of that stuff as well. So Laura, thank you very much for your time today. I think you're a rock star, where can people find you? And where can they get involved in what you're doing? And, you know, do whatever you got available? Because you've got some really good lessons to share with people. So tell us where we can find you. Laura: Yeah, I mean, on usual social media, sort of, the Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn, just @laurapenhaul. And that sort of, you know, P-E-N-H-A-U-L is my surname. So yeah, reach out to that we've also got our endurance book. So where we've sort of added science behind, kind of some of the endurance sort of focus is on GCN, which is a Global Cycling Network website, or our podcast is Endurance as well, which is where's Mark Beaumont, which I co-author on. Lisa: So I'm very keen to meet and hopefully get on the show as well. Yeah, hook me up there. Laura: Yeah, Keith will get you on that as well. I think you've got a lot to add and share their experiences for sure. Lisa: I'd love to. That would be an absolute honor. Laura, you're one hell of a strong woman. I can't wait to see where you go and in the future in what you know, what you take on. God forbid is probably going to be big, and thank you for sharing. I think you have such great knowledge to share with people and you have a duty to get that information out there because this is the sort of stuff that helps people. So thank you very much for your time today Laura. That's it this week for Pushing the Limits. Be sure to rate, review, and share with your friends and head over and visit Lisa and her team at lisatamati.com.      

In this episode I tell about my 4th laundromat, where I’m placing it, and what my plan is going forward. The heads of a military base approached me, told me they like my laundromat model, and wanted me to take over their laundromat space on the base. Because it’s government property, there are a lot of differences between this one and the other 3. The space for the machines is pretty small and the amount it brings in is smaller as well, but my only expenses are sharing a portion of the revenue with the base. I can make 50% of my original cost back within a year on this baby, which is amazing compared to the kind of returns you’d typically see in the stock market. My 4th laundromat 3:07What it makes every month 9:06My expense structure 11:20What it cost to get into this 15:51“‘So Keith what did it cost you to get into this? What was your total spend on equipment and getting the place built out and turned back into a laundromat?’ You’re making $36,000 a year at plan. Let’s assume that’s the way it really works. $36,000 a year, my capital investment: $77,000.” 15:52Reach Out To Keith, Get Help and Resources: https://dincpie.com/

Seahawk Fans, Thanks for joining us for the latest edition of the Seahawks Playbook Podcast. Your Hosts Bill Alvstad and Keith Myers are here each week to talk Seahawks football! This week unfortunately marks the exit for the 2020 football season for the team as they fall to the Los Angeles Rams in the Wild Card round of the NFC Playoffs. In addition, as we finished recording our main session, word came down that Offensive Coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and the Seahawks decided to mutually part ways citing "Philosophical differences" between Pete Carroll's direction and vision, and where the former coordinator felt the team should go. So Keith and I got back on together and recorded a short 15 minute segment and we put that at the front of today's podcast. After we finish that segment, the regular show recording begins. Of course, in the main show, we had plenty to talk about, including the asking for the firing of Schottenheimer. There are many more topics within our discussion so we hope you will stick around as we try to wrap our brains around this season and they way it came crashing down in the final game. Join us next week as we will be doing a roster evaluation show with an early look at Seattle's players under contract for 2021 and beyond as well as some of our own players that are hitting free agency this year. Who do we try and retain? Who are we better off trying to upgrade? Go Hawks!

Seahawk Fans, Thanks for joining us for the latest edition of the Seahawks Playbook Podcast. Your Hosts Bill Alvstad and Keith Myers are here each week to talk Seahawks football! This week unfortunately marks the exit for the 2020 football season for the team as they fall to the Los Angeles Rams in the Wild Card round of the NFC Playoffs. In addition, as we finished recording our main session, word came down that Offensive Coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and the Seahawks decided to mutually part ways citing "Philosophical differences" between Pete Carroll's direction and vision, and where the former coordinator felt the team should go. So Keith and I got back on together and recorded a short 15 minute segment and we put that at the front of today's podcast. After we finish that segment, the regular show recording begins. Of course, in the main show, we had plenty to talk about, including the asking for the firing of Schottenheimer. There are many more topics within our discussion so we hope you will stick around as we try to wrap our brains around this season and they way it came crashing down in the final game. Join us next week as we will be doing a roster evaluation show with an early look at Seattle's players under contract for 2021 and beyond as well as some of our own players that are hitting free agency this year. Who do we try and retain? Who are we better off trying to upgrade? Go Hawks!

Keith and Hudson are "Talkin Nets" and NBA news during the global pandemic. Are we getting closer to the restart or the end? This week the guys talk more about The Last Dance, the Nets quick appearance, and Keith's attempt to get Kerry Kittles on the show. KD's return is officially not happening - officially again. So Keith would like to not hear from KD on the NBA's return. Spencer Dinwiddie tweets his thoughts about COVID-19. Kyrie is doing a lot of chattin about destroying guys and now says he wants that matchup with Kemba Walker that he ducked twice last year. That and much more on this new ep. Tell a friend to tell a friend we're Talkin' Nets! Subscribe, rate 5 stars, and leave us a review! https://twitter.com/talkinnets https://twitter.com/Keith_McPherson https://twitter.com/HudsonFlynn_ https://www.instagram.com/talkinnets/ https://www.instagram.com/keithmcpherson/ https://www.instagram.com/hudsonflynn_/

Molecular Biologist Dr. Keith Booher talks about the Horvath epigenetic clock and the why and how behind finding out your biological age. Keith Booher received his PhD from the University of California, Irvine in 2011 where he conducted research in the field of cancer cell metabolism. He then began work at Zymo Research Corporation developing methods and assays for the investigation of epigenetics. Along with colleagues, he contributed to a high impact study evaluating methods for DNA methylation validation in 2016. Keith continues to study epigenetics in his current position as Application Scientist at The myDNAge company or Epimorphy, LLC, in Southern California where his research is focused on healthy aging and longevity. In his free time, you can find Keith either on the dance floor, at the local library, or spending time with his family. "The world population is aging, especially in the West and the industrialized countries of Asia. In fact, the percentage of the population over the age of 65 is expected to more than double by the year 2050. An aging population presents many societal challenges as advanced age is the number one contributor to chronic ailments such as heart disease, cancer, neurological disorders, and more. It is imperative that meaningful and effective anti-aging interventions are identified and deployed in order to ease the transition from a younger to a gradually older population. Epigenetics involves the modification of gene expression without changing the underlying DNA sequence. Importantly, many recent scientific studies demonstrate the connection between epigenetics, especially DNA methylation, and aging. To date, analyzing changing DNA methylation patterns at key genes is the most accurate way to quantify the aging process. Understanding the connection between epigenetics and the aging process allows us to gain deeper insight into the mechanisms that cause aging, with the ultimate hope of devising interventions that will potentially lead to better health and longevity.    Dr. Booher highlights the use cases for this new type of testing and it's used for those individuals or teams wanting to understand what protocols, training regimes, food plans, supplement regimes etc impact their own aging and how you can maybe even turn back the clock ticking on us all.   Get yourself tested and find out your biological age at: https://www.mydnage.com/ Use the code 'LISA15" to get a 15% discount on the cost of the test   Watch Dr. Keith's Ted Talk  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeT1RcwsDMc     We would like to thank our sponsors for this show:   www.vielight.com   Makers of Photobiomodulation devices that stimulate the brains mitocondria, the power houses of your brains energy, through infrared light to optimise your brain function.  To get 10% off your order use the code: TAMATI at www.vielight.com     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/runningpage/ 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/ Get The User Manual For Your Specific Genes Which foods should you eat, and which ones should you avoid? When, and how often should you be eating? What type of exercise does your body respond best to, and when is it best to exercise? Discover the social interactions that will energize you and uncover your natural gifts and talents. These are just some of the questions you'll uncover the answers to in the Lisa Tamati Epigenetics Testing Program along with many others. There's a good reason why epigenetics is being hailed as the "future of personalized health", as it unlocks the user manual you'll wish you'd been born with!  No more guesswork. The program, developed by an international team of independent doctors, researchers, and technology programmers for over 15 years, uses a powerful epigenetics analysis platform informed by 100% evidenced-based medical research. The platform uses over 500 algorithms and 10,000 data points per user, to analyze body 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/mindsetuniversity/ Develop mental strength, emotional resilience, leadership skills and a never quit mentality - Helping you to reach your full potential and break free of those limiting beliefs.    For Lisa's free weekly Podcast "Pushing the Limits" subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or visit the website  https://www.lisatamati.com/page/podcast/     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 welcome to pushing the limits. Speaker 2: (00:12) Let's see everyone. Thanks for joining me again today. I have a scientist to guest on the show, Dr. Keith Booher. Now, Dr. Keith is a molecular biologist and he works for a company called mydnage.com. Now this is a company that uses Dr. Steve Horvath's epigenetic clock. This tells us our biological age. So we have a very interesting conversation around the difference between your biological age your, your chronological age, and also the method of telling how old you are based on your DNA. So we're looking at DNA methylation as opposed to some of the other processes that look at biological aging from other factors. And we get to into a deep dive about looking at your biological age. Now this is really interesting from a perspective from coaching, from I'm trying to draw a line in the sand to see where you are now. Speaker 2: (01:08) And I can see this having benefits. We are looking at it for our mastermind program where we're thinking about having this as our baseline to start from where we can actually see what your biological age is at one point in time when you start. And then using that as we go through our program to see how you come out at the other end. And hopefully you would have lost a number of years off your life as far as your biological ages going. So this was a very interesting deep dive into this topic. So I hope you enjoy the show. And just before we go over to Dr Keith just like to remind you that I have my book relentless coming out in just a couple of weeks time or four weeks time and it's on the 11th of March and launches, it's available for preorder now you can jump on my website, hit the shop button and preorder it. Speaker 2: (01:57) And at moment you'll get access to my mindset Academy mindsetu for free. If you join or buy the book in the preorder stage, you'll also get a discount. It'll normally be retailing for $35. You'll get it for $29 plus you get access to mindset, you a value of $275. So really good idea to go on and jump and now and get it. And that helps me get the book rolling, get it out into the world. It's been a two year long process. So really excited to see that baby launch. As always, reach out to me if you've got any questions on this episode or on any of the other episodes that we've recorded. And I really appreciate your help with ratings and reviews on iTunes that really helps the show get exposure and of course sharing it with your friends and family if you got value out of it. So thanks and now over to Dr. Keith Booher from mydnage.com. Speaker 3: (02:49) Well, hello everyone. Lisa Tamati speaking and here I'm pushing the limits. I thank you once again for joining me today. I have a wonderful guest, Dr. Keith Booher who is a biochemist. Is that correct case? Speaker 4: (03:02) Yes, that's correctly. So thank you for having me. Speaker 3: (03:04) Yeah, it's wonderful to have you. So Keith is going to talk to us today about the biological clock. He works for a company called mydnage which does testing of the biological age as opposed to your chronological age. And this is a very interesting area we in our company through it continued existing without athletes and clients. So this is something that I'm very interested in finding out more about in cases coined the agreed to come on the show and talk to us about it. So. Okay. Can you give us a little bit of background about who you are and where you come from and, and the work that you're doing? Speaker 4: (03:46) Yes, certainly. So, so my name is Keith Booher. I'm a scientist. I worked for the company epi Morphe that offers the mydnage test. This isn't a epigenetic, a base test to quantify aging or biological age. And my background I got a PhD in biological chemistry. I'm from the university of California, Irvine here in Southern California right now. They've worked and where the company's headquartered. I then joined a research companies. I'm a research, Oh, also in California when I started doing epigenetics research in an industrial setting and then transitioned to a, working with the epi Murphy and offering the mydnage test. Speaker 3: (04:28) Wonderful. So can you tell us a little bit, well, for the listener, what is epigenetics and the area of study of epigenetics and what is on those a biological clock? Speaker 4: (04:39) Yeah, so I think, so the scientific, no definition of epi genetics, so it's a biological term. So simply refers to any changes in gene expression that occur without altering the primary DNA sequence. So what that sort of means in lay context is any, any instance where our genetics interacts with the environment. So sort of nature versus nurture a concept. So what epigenetics then does at the molecular level is to help control gene expression or to help turn genes on or off, or how strongly genes are expressed in the cell. I think an analogy that I've heard before, which is it's not perfect, but I think gives you the idea would be that our genes, our genetics, it'd be the hardware with which we operate. And epigenetics would be the software or instructions that tells that hardware what to do. Speaker 3: (05:33) Wow. Okay. So, so in other words, our environment, what we eat they, the, the, the, the toxins in our environment. Eric's the size, whether we do any or not, all of these things will have an effect on how our genes express themselves. So we've gone as sort of DNA code, which we can't really change. Yeah. What genes are turned on and off can be affected by environment. That, correct. Speaker 4: (05:58) Yeah, that's absolutely correct. So there's lots of studies looking at how epigenetics change in response to environment. So this, you know, in the past decade, decade and a half, there's been a lot of progress made by the scientific community. So we know that you know, people that go on a controlled exercise regimen you know, when they start versus a, when they stop after six months and compared to control group. So there are genetic changes that, that occur in a skeletal muscle. So we know that people have also looked at adipose or the fat tissue and also seeing epigenetic changes in response to certain exercise programs. We also know that smokers have a different epigenetic, I'm marks highly correlative with smoking. Mmm. That these epigenetic marks behind people in certain occupations where they're exposed to a lot of environmental pollutants such as coal miners, a certain factory workers also have pronounced epigenetic changes compared to those that aren't occupied in such fields. Speaker 4: (07:04) I think another, sorry, maybe another example just to really, it would be easy to understand is if you look at twins. So twins are genetically identical individuals. However, through the course of their lives. So we know what, you know, when they're young, we can take it classmates in grade school with some twins. I mean, you couldn't tell them apart. Right. But if we think of older twins, you know, throw the course of their lives, you know, they maybe move to different places there obviously the families that they no start you know, they have different sort of traditions, different diets perhaps they like to eat, you know, brought in from their own partners and all these different influences impact their epigenetics. Right? So these still genetically identical individuals but the epigenetics change based on their environment and their lifestyle and when they're older, they actually don't resemble each other as much as they did when they were. Yeah, sure. Speaker 3: (07:59) That's really good example of, of, of the, the power of epigenetics isn't it? I saw a photo of a pair of twins that I think were on the Oprah Winfrey show years ago. And two ladies, one very, very overweight one, one not and the identical twins. It's a really, it's an easy way to understand how much your environment fix your epigenetics of fakes your and how you end up. So in other words, we can't just blame mum and dad and our ancestors for what we've got. We have some responsibility for how we tune out. Is that right? Speaker 4: (08:37) Yeah, that's right. And I think it's it's actually allows us to take control and you know, kind of dictate where we want to be so we can, we're not destined for some, you know, fate just based on our, our genetics. We, we can actually influence what those genetics do. Speaker 3: (08:55) Yeah. So is this so I'm, I, I've read a lot of Dr. Bruce Lipton's work and books. And you know, I have found this whole area really, really fascinating and it's pretty new, isn't it? In the scientific world, like we're talking what the last 30, 40 years or Mmm. Oh, that, that scientists have really understood that the, it's not just your DNA that makes you who you are. Is it pretty new field? Speaker 4: (09:22) Yes and no. So I think we're all familiar with the Charles Darwin and in his theories on evolution. He's one of the preeminent scientists, the modern world. Actually before Darwin, there's a French, a scientist and philosopher, a Lamarck who, you know, he actually predicted that the, you know, wow. What are our, our parents or the mother and father the type of lifestyle they live. Okay. Their environment will impact. Mmm. The children. So it's actually a heritable trait passed on just based on, so he said that if you were, if your parents, did you follow with a blacksmith, you know, all the hard work that makes them strong will then be passed onto to his children. Mmm. And like a giraffe that you know, needs to a stretch to reach the the leaves from on the tallest branches of the tree will, you'll get a longer neck and then that'll be passed down for the next generation. Speaker 4: (10:17) And this is, this is a way that, okay. Drafts have evolved. Mmm. Once Darwin's theories came out and were tested you know, Mendell then proved how genes, I kind of demonstrated how James can, can, can behave. A lot of the marks, theories were just you know, kind of put in the, the dustbin of history and he was sort of left off, you know, these were, these were sort of thought as ridiculous principles, but a sure enough, as you, as you just mentioned, Lisa, in the past several decades, actually, the Mark's original theories have been proven to be a, have a lot of Yeah. He was before his time. And we know this to be true. I mean, the, the biology is clear that and then we're learning more about it all the time. And even in I think 2014 as these studies were coming out more and more showing the power epigenetics you know, a portrait of what Mark was on the cover of nature magazine and they kind of featured and, you know, paid homage to his, his original theories. Speaker 3: (11:15) Wow. What a shame. He wasn't around to say that a bit. That would have been the kinds of a lot of things. So in other words, so when we're talking evolution here or intergenerational . I, I read some way that, for example, when a mother smokes and the baby's in the, in the womb, that that can affect the baby's DNA and then it can affect also who children's DNA. Is that correct? The intergenerational nature, or is that a Zeta? It's not, is it epigenetics or is that more genetic changes? Speaker 4: (11:54) Oh, well, so any genetic change that's altered in a, what we call the germline. Oh, you know, the the male gametes are the chemo sites. That's certainly genetically heritable changes that occur in our you know, the scan for example, know if we know examples that give rise to cancer or something don't. So those wouldn't be heritable. Right. So like if something like skin cancer epigenetics, then, so, so for it to be heritable, it has to occur in the germline so that that would be the same for genetics or, right. Yeah. So we, so certainly genetic change is hard. I mean, that's, that's very clear. Epigenetic is it seems to also be true. There's lots of circumstantial evidence. It's very difficult to do these studies in humans for obvious reasons. Hmm. Other studies and other types of model organisms, the biologists often used to study different phenomenon indicates that indeed epigenetic inheritance inheritance is, is a observed phenomenon. I think it's very strong evidence in plants. I mean, these, these, these traits are, I mean, they persist for it. Dozens of generations in mammals, you know, maybe more temporal. So two to three or even four generations, but not not, not that stable, but it appears that they are here. Speaker 3: (13:16) Wow. Okay. So so we can affect our whole, yeah, the intergenerational aspect of it is quite interesting, but if we, if we just back up a little bit now and go into the dr Steve Horvath's work in the Horvath clock and I believe that is the basis of the work that has his work is the basis of, of the testing that you do. Can you explain what dr Horvath discovered and what that means for biological age and what, you know, how, how, how we can use it perhaps? Speaker 4: (13:50) Yeah. So this biological aging or epigenetic aging clock. So dr Horvath I think is the worldwide leader in this research. So he originally published a study in 2013. There was actually another study that came out actually a little before his that did something very similar. So I should mention too, it, he's, dr Horvath is a professor at UCLA. Oh. Petitioning biologists, computational biologists. So what both these research groups did, so her about that UCLA and then another group led by Hannah at a UC San Diego. So both in Southern California. So what they did was they looked at the epigenetic, a data for thousands of individuals and the applied some complex statistical mathematical algorithms. And what they found was that there were patterns of a change, epigenetic change that occurs with age. And so by of tapping into these different patterns, they could develop a model that would predict [inaudible] predict age based on epigenetic information. So, so that's where the clock came from. So basically, depending on what your epi genetics show, you can then assign a biological age Speaker 3: (15:05) Without any information. On the individual yourself. If you can take just a drop of blood, you can actually say with, with pretty, hi Jackness call it 98, the single thing. How well would that individual is based on the work from dr Hova? So most people fall into this, this Linea Patton that would say, well, this person has these markers on the DNA before that person is the Savage, is that how it works? Speaker 4: (15:42) That's correct. That's correct. So I think there's one. So it's not, it's not just that you want to predict an age, but it's actually a signing up biological age. Yes. So I think that's a key kind of thing to keep in mind. So no, we talked about the twins earlier, you know, a few moments ago and we can see that some based on, you know, one was overweight and the other was more fit based on their lifestyle choices. So the did the choices that we make in our lives. So whether we exercise or eat a healthy diet other things, Mmm. Influencer epigenetics, which can turn in turn influence our aging. So we can actually have and accelerated aging compared to an average person or actually a slower rate of aging compared to someone else. So the Horvath clock measures that, that biology based on the epigenetics. So, you know, you may be 10 years younger biologically than your chronological age, which would be indicative of, you know, good health or good cause I've stopped choices you've made. Speaker 3: (16:45) Do you see big swings in the like, you know, 10 years or is it mostly that most people are in the, you know, within a year or two off via at their actual chronological age. Speaker 4: (16:56) So most people will be within a year or two. That's, that's Mmm, that's what you know, Horvath and others have shown. And that's what we see in our data. However you do see outliers. And I think every time we see a case where someone is okay, we do see 10 or, or greater years difference. Wow. It, it seems to be associated with, I mean, it almost in every case, there's some reason why. So some known this person may be suffering from a genetic disease or I think one thing common in, and you know, people we've looked at is, Oh, they've been treated with chemotherapy. So these are very powerful drugs that you know, obviously to, to treat cancer, but I have very strong side effects. I mean, this is very well known. These, you know, some are just not tolerated well at all. And we know these, these type of people have actually accelerated aging, very rapid aging compared to an average person. Mmm. Speaker 3: (17:53) Do you see the other way like, people who have lived a, you know, extremely good, healthy lifestyle with good food, good exercise not too much stress you know, 18 or more years younger than there a chronological edge. Speaker 4: (18:08) So I don't think just for lifestyle choices, I don't think we've seen a huge effect in that regard. But there we have seen some strong effect. I think for certain people are doing certain targeted interventions, it's a little more and just trying to eat more vegetables or run a little further. These are taking drugs. So I think Metformin Speaker 3: (18:32) hmmm Speaker 4: (18:33) There's one that's looked at very seriously for some of these anti-aging effects and we do see a pretty consistent, strong effect towards a slower aging. Yeah. Speaker 3: (18:44) [Inaudible] Is a, is an interesting one because it doesn't let up think though negatively the, the mitochondria. And, but, but it was a little bit confusing when I looked into just some surface level research on Metformin thinking, gosh, this sounds interesting. I want to have that. It, it produces more longevity, but it can damage the mitochondria. How would that work? Because your mitochondria, your rap part of this whole metabolic pertussis, I mean, it's probably too deeper questions to ask you, you know, but do you know why? Speaker 4: (19:20) Well, that's, that's a very good question, huh? The short answer is no one knows why. So, so yeah, there's sort of a antagonistic effects on or seemingly that would, that would associated with adverse health outcomes. But the data showed, we know it has been prescribed for type two diabetics years and has very good outcomes. And it seems to be off target prescribed for other melodies as well. You know, that the side effects are, are small. I mean, that's just based on you know, lots of people taking the drug. It seems that small side effects and clearly the benefits in most cases outweigh the whatever side effects may occur. Mmm. As to the reason why, I mean, it may be that the positive affects to regulate glucose metabolism, insulin, Speaker 3: (20:16) Yup. Speaker 4: (20:18) Maybe more important than the damage it causes or we have you know, just backup systems to deal with mitochondrial damage or stress that we don't have as robust. I mean, just as you know, living human beings that we don't have for when our glucose metabolism goes awry. Speaker 3: (20:35) So you know, that would be especially the case for, you know, people with diabetes or prediabetes. It has the same effect then on the healthy, you know the healthy person who doesn't have insulin resistance or any glucose Speaker 4: (20:49) Problems. So, yeah. So we get this, I get this question a lot. I would be very careful about just taking any drugs, you know, getting home from certain websites for example, I would, I would consult a physician for that. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I know your listeners are probably very interested on what types of things they can do to, to help them. Speaker 3: (21:15) Nobody don't go out there and do anything solid, not advocating this. We definitely won't. But, but it's interesting to look at the data. I know that there was a study done just a couple of years ago, I think by dr Horvath where they were able to reverse the, the epigenetics Speaker 4: (21:33) Clock Speaker 3: (21:34) In a small clinical study by giving people growth hormone and to diabetic medications, I believe. One. Mmm. And they took two and a half years off the year. Speaker 4: (21:49) Mmm. Speaker 3: (21:49) I'll say biological Speaker 4: (21:51) Age. Speaker 3: (21:53) That's, that's pretty exciting to actually be able to reverse. I mean, I know this was a small clinical trial and, and certainly not a big one. And obviously it's a very difficult area to do big blocks studies end, but a w would suggest that we're going to be able to in future reverse the aging process, which is super exciting rather than just slowing it down. Speaker 4: (22:17) Yeah. So this was the study you mentioned was a, that was a big one. So there's a lot of I don't know a lot, but there's a, there's a decent amount of studies you know, the Horvath and others have been involved in showing on ways to slow the rate of aging. But I was at a, a, a conference actually I gave a presentation along with the, dr Horvath was a keynote speaker and there was another, a surgeon Jim Watson. No. And Jim Watson said, you know, we think that we will be able to reverse actually reverse the clock. And Horvath was, this was January, 2018. He was pretty, he pushed back pretty hard on that idea. He said, you know, there's, there's nothing we found that can actually reverse aging clock. I, there's nothing in the data that shows that, you know, Jim Watson, he's a, he's a prominent Sergeant, you know, he works with patients and you know, from his medical person, he's like, well, I respectfully disagree. Yeah. And if you look at the authors on the paper, you mentioned Steve Horvath, but actually Jim Watson is, I think he's a senior author on that. Mmm. They ended up collaborating after this, you know, and [inaudible] looking into ideas from the medical side and then from, you know, dr horvath, you know, using this, these, these epigenetic aging clocks. And sure enough just as you mentioned, the study showed it was small, but it showed clearly that the aging was reversed to these individuals Speaker 3: (23:39) In a, in a very short space of time too, which is exciting to think what would happen if these interventions were, you know, extrapolated over a longer period of time. Mmm. Speaker 4: (23:52) Yeah. That's, that's right. I, you know, if you look at the, the intervention in that case, it was a drug cocktail. It was a two, two hormones, DTA I think human growth Speaker 3: (24:05) Yeah. Speaker 4: (24:06) And then I met foreman again was a drug they use to kind of help regulate some of the hormonal side effects of those drugs. And it was this three drug cocktail. Mmm. The the original goal of that study was to help reverse some of the immune decline. It had been well documented. We know our immune system starts to decline and as we grow older and the famous of course this organ that it functions in immune, you know, healthy immune function tends to get weaker and shrink. And so that's what the, the study was originally designed to just boost thymus function in the immune system. And okay. The authors showed clearly with, yeah, with, with clinical measurements, famous enemy and functions were restored and it was then shown, that's when Horvath came in and looked at the the epigenetics to show that actually reversed in these people who had responded well to the treatment. So Speaker 3: (25:04) Yeah, that's a short time frame as you mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. Very exciting. There's hope for us who are aging that we bought. So hurry up. You guys get started in so with the, the Magii and H test which people, you know, the public can go and get the SKUs. So if you wanting to actually, after listening to this episode want to go and just what your biological ages, I'll give you the address. It's just my, my DNA h.com. So DNA G a.com and you can order a test the and have the stun, which I, I'm, I'm finding fascinating from a coaching perspective and from an athlete's perspective to be able to draw a line in the sand and say, well, this is where we started from. And then we, you know, instigate L a epigenetic program for example, and our training regimes and nutrition and so on. Speaker 3: (26:00) And then perhaps in six to 12 months time retest to see what the I need a fake was. So I'm, I'm excited to be able to hopefully incorporate this into some of our, of our programs. And one of the reasons I reached out you today when we, let me go to the, look at the the testing that you do. So you're looking at the DNA methylation, is that right? Mmm. Can you explain what the United w what exactly that you're looking there with the, when you're looking at the methylation marks on DNA? Speaker 4: (26:36) Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we're looking at DNA methylation. So know anyone who wants to use our test, I might, do you need Speaker 3: (26:44) To test? Speaker 4: (26:45) We would send them a kit. Mmm. We would it comes with you know, slow land so we can take a blood drop. Mmm. That's put into a, you know, a special preservation stage or buffer solution. Speaker 3: (26:57) [Inaudible] Speaker 4: (26:57) Your preserve the integrity of the sample and then it can just be mailed back at room temperature. So it doesn't need to be frozen or cold or anything. I think also send a urine sample as well. So it's, it's, it's up to the it's each individual if they feel comfortable with, Mmm. That's sent back to us from the blood or urine sample. We will extract the DNA and then perform some fancy chemistry to quantify DNA methylation levels at a panel of genes that are known to be highly associated or highly informative of aging. Speaker 3: (27:32) Huh. Speaker 4: (27:33) Based on those values, we can then plug it into a mathematical model to predict the biological age. And again, this is, this is based off of a, you know, Horvath and others of the based on original publications. We sort of make it a economic one available too. And Speaker 3: (27:54) Sorry, Carry on. Speaker 4: (27:58) So we can make that that technology, which would otherwise not be accessible to non scientists. The general public, we can make it accessible to them. So they can, they can get their own biological age assessment. Speaker 3: (28:10) Yeah. It's really, really exciting. So, so you're looking at around 2000 different James. Mmm how do you, how do you express it? He was signs on there. They had assigned basically there was damage here. So you're looking at damage, Marcus. Speaker 4: (28:30) It's not, it's not famous markers per se. So specifically it's, it's DNA methylation. So a methyl group is a, you know, if you think from your organic chemistry, this is the most the oxidized form of carbon. A ch three is added to DNA and basis known as cytosines any basis on the cytosines. And when it's added biologically, what's going on at the molecular level is it's influencing gene expression. So helping genes turn on or off, on or off. Mmm. And these levels change over the course of our lives and it's this change that can then be related to, to, to the Speaker 3: (29:12) Marcus. Okay. I get that. Yeah. So does it take into consideration things like inflammation or cardiovascular health or kidney and liver function or metabolic metabolic state as well? Or is that readable from the DNA? Speaker 4: (29:32) Not with, not with the mighty age test. So if there's something specific like that, again, I'm in consultation with a physician. If you're worried about your Speaker 5: (29:41) Kidney health, metabolic health, Mmm. Then, right. You know, there's more specific tests to directly look at. Right, right. I think as a pan health indicator it gives you some information. Right. Cause I know that there is you know, other companies that do biological age tests that are based not on the Horvath clock, but on, I'm looking at these are the tops of biomarkers, like your inflammation, inflammation, they've always been your, your cardiovascular health. And I was trying to understand what is the difference in the, in the approach, you know, in the approaches and which one is, Mmm. Well going to give us some more exact calculation if you like. Do you know of the other ones and the difference between, well I mean, so there's, there's a lot, you know, people have been using like in a doctor's office, just a grip, the grip test, your vape. Speaker 5: (30:39) How will you walk? Yeah. The way you walk. But you know, there's a really broad era for those, for people you know, between the ages of teen until some point in your, your older years. Mmm. It's just not very, not very good. It's very precise, very precise. There's other molecular tests. Even if you look at DNA methylation or epigenetic tests, they may focus on a single gene or just a few genes having a, a more focused, you lose a lot of robustness so they can be more susceptible to small changes or small, Mmm. Environmental insults that may actually not have a big impact. So by incorporating thousands of sites into the tests, which, or my teenage test does, it's more robust to small changes. So overall picture. Yeah, that would be it. You know, cause when I heard about things like grip strength and stuff, I was like, well, if I got into the gym a lot, obviously I'm going to have a lot more grip strength. Speaker 5: (31:39) It doesn't necessarily, I'm biologically younger. Right, right. Yeah. Basically you say, I have a normal or we're better than average. Right. Or it's not good. Right? I mean that's, you get kind of a yes or no kind of a yes, yes. But it's not, it's difficult to say, you know, you know, you're looking at the also your body type, you know, like, and with your, you're a muscular person or you're a someone who is more of a flexible person, you know, there's, there's just too much. Okay. Wavering in the air. I mean things like inflammation markers of course. Can you look at the state of your health but perhaps notch the actual, you know, whether it's having damage, you mean you can have inflammation markers because you've got a cold as well, which would be skew the data satisfied. and a bad week. Speaker 5: (32:35) Yeah. And this wouldn't happen with the, with us taste. So how w I know you've done a Ted talk that I listened to that was very interesting thing and wants to look that up. We can put that in the show notes as well. We've got an aging world population and we have huge problems all around the world without, but their health care system. I think we probably can all agree with that. We're heading into times where chronic disease is going to be costing economically, governments in, in, in, you know, a lot of suffering around the world and a lot of resources. Mmm. So increasing health span is, is a very important piece of being able to lower the costs involved with chronic disease. Would you see that as being one of the areas where this this theory or science is really, really key and an important from a, from an economic standpoint as well as from the personal suffering standpoint? Speaker 5: (33:39) Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Right, right. I think the potential to benefit society is really there's a, there's a lot a DNA aging test, epigenetic aging tests can, can provide. So it is clearly the best tool, two, assess, aging accurate and precise way. Mmm. And so by using this tool, I mean, whether it's, you know, our company and our researchers doing, you know, in their own labs are their own ways. Mmm. Those interventions which will have the greatest benefit can be more rapidly identified and no, very okay track to be very cheap. I'm an actress. So this, I think this is, you know, beyond just individual testing, which I think is important. And, you know, very interesting people empower themselves by getting some information here, but broader for the broader impact it can have on society. It can be really profound. Yeah. And I know you've, you've done a little bit of work with you mentioned the, in your, in your talk you know, looking at things like sporting H, you know, like how if kids are really in the right age group or people who don't have documents working out how old they are. Speaker 5: (34:56) When they coming into countries perhaps as, as refugees without, without any paperwork and things like that. There's a, there's a, there's a whole lot of areas that this could be utilized and couldn't it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the the youth age testing I think that's, there's sort of a, the, the, the consequences are not as, as grave as like, you know, that aging population in Europe, you know, to some extent, North America and Asia. But but I, it just goes to show the potential applications for something like that. And I actually just learned that, you know, I did some work with [inaudible] law enforcement in Germany a couple of years ago for some for forensics application of using this aging. You can sort of the gauge person of interest in different law enforcement investigations. And in part thanks that work actually I just found out that lie in Germany changed December Oh about 2019. Speaker 5: (36:01) Sort of allow this scientific approach, you too well know wow. To work out someone's is being adopted in a lot of different areas. And I mean, Oh yeah. And, and for me I think in working in the, in the health as a health professional and, and training people and so on, it's just going to give us another, I'm wiping the Nantucket toolkit to get people motivated and moving and having a benchmark is really important I think for us to, well, this is where we started from and hopefully through different health interventions, we can see other results. Is there any way that we can, is there any of those things that are quantified, like what, what people are, you know, that are doing your tests perhaps and then doing different interventions, obviously not as a clinical study, but are you gathering any of the data of the interventions that people are undertaking to change the biological age? Speaker 5: (37:01) Let's see. What has it effect? So I mean, we have to be sort of careful about this, right? So that, I mean, the personal information of ours customers is yes. Obviously I can only do so much, right? I mean we're not, we're not trying to but so what I can say, we work with clinics, certain clinics doctors. So the doctors are incorporating this test into part of their medical practice and whether they're advising certain, you know, dietary interventions or different exercise programs or they can use this for their medical practically, I mentioned Metformin earlier. We are working with the group by testing this. So that's something that we, yeah, we can say has had a, yeah, a two. The rate of aging in these, in the samples, the subjects that we've examined. Mmm, yeah. Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. So that's got an interesting future too. I mean, what, what are you think, so are there any interventions which have been proven besides a Metformin and growth hormone? Mmm. To actually slow down the aging or to pervasive stop the aging process? Mmm, well that have been proven to be beneficial as it, you know, like lifestyle interventions. So yes, yes, there are. So, but I, I needed qualify that. So this has been clearly shown to occur in laboratory animals, so model research organisms and a lot of these, Speaker 4: (38:34) These pathways a Speaker 4: (38:35) Evolutionarily shared all the way from, you know, simple East to or complex organisms like fruit flies and more recently into mammals like mice lab, mice rats or even nonhuman primates. So there's clearly potential. Mmm. You know some of these interventions are related to altering metabolic pathways, insulin response. Mmm. Mmm. I think one that's gained a lot of interest in you know, the broader news media is this compound resveratrol. Yes. Resveratrol found in a grapes in higher concentrations, in certain nuts. I'm certain it's been shown to activate certain pathways related to protecting our DNA or protecting our genes and genomes and also influencing that metabolism in certain ways. So in laboratory animals, there's clear evidence to show that aging can be slow to reverse. In humans it's not as clear. So again, it's more difficult to do these types of studies. Speaker 4: (39:39) Okay. Ethical and logistical reasons. Yeah. But the Metformin is a hot candidate drug especially because it is well tolerated. So, so this may be something that can be easily prescribed. And individuals we mentioned the study that came out last last fall where the the growth hormone and Metformin combination reverse the aging in this was in a small court of men from the ages of 52 late sixties, I think. Years of age. Mmm. In terms of those are for reversing the aging clock. There's also evidence showing that the clock can be slowed from simple lifestyle changes. So if you think about diet, so it appears that, you know eating more plants plant based foods, so fruits and vegetables. So right carotinoids levels in the blood. You know, indicators of the. Speaker 4: (40:37) Okay. Metabolism are associated with slower rates of aging. Interestingly, a fish, actually, those who consume more fish, it seems to have the greatest impact on a slowing the rate of aging. Well, okay. That's interesting, huh? Yeah. Even greater than the vegetarian diets. That's what the data indicates at this time, at least. Right. Also you know, we can look at things that accelerate the aging clock. Mmm. So certain corn oil certain insulin levels a triglyceride levels you know, elevated or, or, or levels that are out of whack or associated with an accelerated aging. So these are indicators of a poor diet. Yup. I think one that's a, everyone's sort of interested to hear or happy to hear is that actually moderate alcohol consumption. It's associated with a slower Speaker 3: (41:34) Rate of eating. So, so we have an all glass of red wine with berry in it, Speaker 4: (41:40) I think. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. But this has been a also shown to have beneficial effects on heart health. So it's interesting to see that the studies our agreement, you know, coming back, coming at it from different angles, but, you know, finding beneficial health, mental health. Speaker 3: (41:55) So the, the things that we sort of intuitively know that exercise lots of fruit and veggies and you know, that type of thing. It can definitely slow down the aging clock. It's an exercise aspect of it as Sierra, any sort of data or omit, it's how much and what types of exercise or anything like that. Speaker 4: (42:22) So not that I'm aware of. So not that I'm aware of. But that's, but that's interesting. What you say is, you know, people hear this and they say, okay, great, eat more vegetables. You know, I already knew that. Right. But it's interesting the study, but I think you can see, right. So, okay, yes, vegetables are associated with slow rates of aging. So increase that. So it gives, we can show that in the data, but but what's really interesting about the clock of the state, but if you want, if there was one thing you could pick to slow your rate of aging, actually it's fish, right? So it's, it's a it kinda shows you you know, we can kind of rank these. So what's the most important thing? So, you know, vegetables are important, but actually according to the data fishes is even more important. Mmm. And you knew, and also people that die. While I've been doing vegetables, I've been actively trying to do better in, and so I've already incorporated that, but, well, what else is there that that might be, it might be missing. Oh, so a olive oil seems to be also beneficial. A dietary component. It can be incorporated absolute rate of aging. So, so what the clock does is it's able to quantify these and really pinpoint with some precision what, Speaker 3: (43:33) Yeah, yeah. Rather than just one out a feeling as and what we've, you know, at the top, some studies have seen what about ketones and the key she turned on us. Any, any data there on MCT oils or ketone esters or anything like that? Speaker 4: (43:52) Again, I'm not familiar with those studies. We haven't conducted any and we're not working with anyone specifically looking at this sort of thing that I'm aware of some. Again, you know, a lot of institutes and clinics are incorporating different things. We don't necessarily know what they're doing. I mean, it could be very well be that, you know, some of these changes are being prescribed or administered in certain way. I simply don't know the answer to that. Speaker 3: (44:16) Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, fair enough. So this is, you know, to actually get the data to get some concrete data is actually really, really helpful. And strengthening the arguments for reaching the goals and cutting out the, the donuts and the, the the biscuits in the sugar and so on. And, and the more data we have behind that, the beta what I had dr Andrew go Andrews on, on the podcast. We all would go, I'm looking at telling me and like something and NTA aging. Is there any sort of crossover between those sort of areas, like in the anti aging sciences in do you look at it telling me length is or anything like that in these biological tests or are they completely different area of science? Speaker 4: (45:11) It is different. It is different. So Tila mirrors have been I think before Horvath and Hanham's studies a few years ago came out showing the power of epigenetic aging assessments tumors were probably the most popular, well, I color test to look at this since then. You know, clearly that these DNA methylation clocks are by far the most accurate, most precise and robust to measure biological aging. Horvath and others tried to kind of assess how this interaction between Tealium or Lang and you know, epigenetic change and they found that they're not measuring the same thing. So they in the biology is they're looking at different things. And you know, I, I think for, you know, telomeres, you know, I just, in my opinion, I, I think they've been Sur surpassed by the power of the, you know, yeah. Speaker 4: (46:07) Inherent robustness of looking at epigenetics to assess aging. I think, you know, concrete example of this is so the telomere length, so the longer the telomeres, sort of the slower aging or more youthful, that's, that's the basic idea. And as those shrink, it indicates increased age or advanced age. That's, that's the basic idea. We find that this, you know, completely breaks down. When you look at something like cancer where a hallmark is the ability to increase the length of telomeres to kind of okay. You know, maintain the integrity of cancer cells or tumor size. And if you knew, if you look at it from that perspective, they would look biologically young. If you look at the same type. Okay. Tissue cancer tissue according to the epigenetic clock. I mean, these show very accelerated aging. So it's, it's clear indication of it for health. The telomere tests wouldn't be able to show that at all. You were so good. Sorry. Okay. Speaker 3: (46:59) Thats Really you know, emerging area of science that that's, I'm going to be interesting in the next few years to watch. Mmm. Keith, thank you so much for your time today. Is it, I, I think we've, we've, we've covered quite a lot of ground. Do you think there's anything we've missed out that, that people should hear about? In regards to doing, you know, like doing mydnage test can you actually, because we're sitting in New Zealand and obviously a lot of my lessons are in Zealand and Australia. Can you do the test from that far away when you're going to be seeding it in the post? Speaker 4: (47:33) Yes. So the test, so I think we're just trying to get the but just logistics, business-wise, just the paperwork in order too. We've gotten a lot of demand in Australia, New Zealand, you know, it should be a broadly. Yeah. Currently we're only offering and North America, Mmm. In Europe. Mmm. Canada, U S and . But we're trying to get to a New Zealand, Austria. That should be soon. So any listeners in New Zealand or thereabouts, that should be available very soon. Technically there's no issue. So the once the kids arrive the blood or urine sample can be mixed with the preservative solution. This is preservation. Yeah. Shipped back to our labs in California at room temperature with no problems. Speaker 3: (48:22) Nice. So we should be through that. Still already the tastes, even though you haven't got the laboratories and stuff down here, we came can already, you know, through that and seen it. But look, thank you so much for your time today. I think this is a really interesting area of science. And I'm encouraged people to think about doing these tastes because, you know, I will give you a line in the same tree to motivate you. I think a lot of 'em, you know motivation is a big key to being successful in your, in demons to be better and stronger and be there and plaster and normalize going to good things and tuning the, we're slowing down the clock with tuning back even. So having tastes like this that are available to the public, the weekly is exciting. You know, I think it gives us another thing that we can do that we can then use to help better our lives, you know, as we, as we move forward. Speaker 4: (49:20) Yeah. That's the mission of you know, making this test available to the broader, the broader public, Speaker 3: (49:25) The more things that are available direct to the public, the there or my opinion, it's not dangerous and you know, but being a bit of a biohacker, obviously I have a bit of a, a boss towards having your own power and making your own decisions. But I think this one is a, you know, it's a no brainer. It costs so obviously, but apart from that, if you you want to try this out I'll have the links in the show notes and case thank you so much for your time today. I wish you well with all your studies and with loved side contact and yeah, very, very interesting conversation today. Speaker 4: (50:03) Oh my pleasure. Lisa. It was great to, to speak with you. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: (50:07) If your brain is not functioning at its best in checkout, what the team at vielight.com Do now being like producers, photo biomodulation devices, your brain function, the pin's largely on the health of the energy sources of the brain cells. In other words, the mitochondria and research has shown that your brain with near infrared light revitalizes mitochondria. I use these devices daily for both my own optimal brain function and also for other age-related decline issues and also for my mom's brain rehabilitation after her aneurism and stroke. So check out what the team do vielight.com. That's V I E L I G H T .com. And use the code "TAMATI" and checkout to get 10% of any of their devices. Speaker 1: (50:58) 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 this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Keats Snideman on the show to discuss the non-traditional path to physical therapy school.  Keats Snideman is a results-driven Rehab and fitness professional with over 20 years in the Fitness/Athletic Performance and bodywork industry and most recently the field of physical therapy. In this episode, we discuss: -How Keats’ background in health and wellness enhanced his learning in PT school -The personal and professional pros and cons of being a non-traditional PT student -The benefits of diversity within a PT cohort -Time and resource management to avoid burnout -And so much more!   Resources: Keats Snideman Twitter Keats Snideman Instagram Keats Snideman Facebook Reality Based Fitness Website Email: ksnideman@gmail.com   For more information on Keats: Hello, my name is Keats Snideman and I am a results-driven Rehab and fitness professional with over 20 years in the Fitness/Athletic Performance and bodywork industry and most recently the field of physical therapy. My educational background includes a doctorate in physical therapy from Northern Arizona University (PHX Biomedical campus) and a B.Sc in Kinesiology from Arizona State University. Other certifications and titles held include: Certified Strength & Conditioning Coach (CSCS), Certified Orthopedic Manual Therapist (COMT, through OPTIM Manual Therapy), a Strong First Gyra (SFG) Level 1 Kettlebell instructor, a certified Kettlebell Functional Movement Screen Specialist (CK-FMS), a certified neuromuscular therapist (CNMT), and a licensed massage therapist (LMT) in the state of Arizona.   Read the full transcript below: Karen Litzy:                   00:01                Hi Keats, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to have you on. So today we're going to be talking about the non traditional path to physical therapy school. And the way we're kind of defining this nontraditional path would be you didn't graduate from high school, go to undergrad and right into physical therapy school. So there was some time off in which you had a completely different career. Well, yeah, a different career and then decided to go into physical therapy school a little later in life. And I use that in quotes when I say that. So what I would love for you to do Keats is can you kind of tell your story to the audience so they get to know you a little bit more? Keats Snideman:           00:45                Yeah, absolutely. So like a lot of PTs, I have a fitness background, I ran some college track, got into working out and decided to become a personal trainer. This was like mid nineties, so quite, quite a long time ago. And that sort of led me down a little bit into the sort of functional fitness was kind of becoming a thing kind of in the 90s. And people who are beginning to use that word function a lot.  I have a twin brother also in the fitness world and we got exposed to a gentleman named Paul Chek. He's the guy who kind of popularized the Swiss ball, the physio ball doing the weight training on it, standing on it, doing all that crazy stuff. This was in like 97 to 99. And Paul Chek was also very rehab oriented, not a physical therapist himself, but started opening my eyes to sort of the world of sort of biomechanics and you know, it's sort of high level physiology, and started reading, you know, more technical sort of physical therapy type books and it really interested me and I was like, wow, there's more there than just being a personal trainer. Keats Snideman:           02:00                So I sort of made a decision at that point that I wanted to go on and get, I think it was a masters degree. Most of the programs at that time.  But then life happens. Got married, had our first child. I had my own business and eventually I went back to school to finish my bachelor's degree at Arizona state university. And really had the idea of going kind of into PT school pretty quickly after that. Had another child, open up a different location for my business. And time just goes by, you know, very, very quickly. And the next thing I knew it was 2012, 13. I was like, if I don't go to school now, I'm never gonna do it. But all the time through that I ended up getting a massage certification or I got in the early two thousands. Keats Snideman:           02:47                So I started putting my hands on clients who needed it. I started getting some soft tissue clients and basically really trying to find out, you know, what's the best way to use that tool? Cause I wasn't really like a massage person per se. I kind of came into the sort of the manual therapy body work world as more of a fitness person. How could I get somebody out of pain is pretty much the number one thing why people were seeing me so that I could get them more active to get them more mobile, that really fits in to what a lot of physical therapy does. Sort of our modern understanding of pain as it's changing that the therapy is just sort of a, you know, like a brief reset to try to then help, you know, we get that window of opportunity to try to make a change. Keats Snideman:           03:43                And so that, you know, that finally allowed me to make the decision to go to school because I want to be able to do more than just what a massage therapist can do. And more, you know, I wanted to be able to do, if I want to do a joint mobilization or manipulation like a chiropractor could do, you can't do that as a massage therapist. And so that was the final decision. I closed up my shop, I went back to school, I bit the bullet. It was a very challenging road, but even with the family and everything and I got through it, finished a few years ago and here I am. Karen Litzy:                   04:18                And I mean that's quite a story and we'll get into some of your words of wisdom and advice for other people who might be in the situation where they have a family, they have children, they don't know if they can do this because it is very time consuming. But before we get to that, I would love to know if you could name a couple of your top struggles during PT school that you were obviously able to overcome. Cause you did graduate, you're now a physical therapist. So give us some of your struggles and what you did to help get over them. Keats Snideman:           04:53                Absolutely. So I would say the first thing that was really, really the hardest for me and my program was at Northern Arizona university. And we were the first class to be sort of accelerated instead of a three year program. It was a two and a half year program. So we didn't get really a lot of breaks. So the coursework I think was condensed a little bit more. And so that meant a little bit higher level of information that we were obtaining. So that first semester was a bit like hazing for me. I've constantly been learning and taking continuing education courses my whole career as a massage therapist, personal trainer, strength coach. But I wasn't quite prepared for the onslaught, sort of the drinking from a fire hose type of thing, if you will, that that first semester did. Keats Snideman:           05:42                And I end up getting a C I think in pathophysiology, which was, it was like in memorizing a thousand PowerPoint slides and two every two weeks. It was brutal. And that put me in academic probation. You can't get a C in PT school. I mean, are you going to get many of them C B’s and above? And so that was, you know, I was worried, I thought, man, am I gonna flunk out? You know, I just started after all this, you know, what am I going to tell my family? This is terrible, but I got through it. The rest of my grades were actually quite good after that. But if you haven't been sort of in the academic setting for a while, you've really got to kind of give yourself a little bit of an adjustment time and not be so hard on yourself to the expectations for like getting these great grades needs to be tempered because it's intense. Keats Snideman:           06:35                Obviously you went through it. The amount of information that a physical therapy student will be exposed to is pretty insane. I know medical doctors get a tremendously crazy amount of sort of, you're sort of a general as first, but I think PTs have gotta be some of the broadest sort of scope practitioners out there and me, it was sort of like med school light, you know, a lot of our classes are actually with PAs because we were actually kind of getting sort of the university of Arizona medical curriculum that was given to the PAs at NAU and we were sort of teamed up there with them and some of the occupational therapists as well. So that was my biggest struggle was just the amount of information was just overwhelming. But once I kinda settled in and really focused more on comprehension and learning instead of just getting good grades, I've never been a grade person. I couldn't really care less, unfortunately you need to get good enough grades to pass and then not get kicked out of the program. But I've always been about, I want to understand. So I think if someone who hasn't been in school in awhile, kind of a non traditional student like myself, you've gotta be easy on yourself and you've got to give yourself time to adapt and to adjust to that, just that amazing, wildly overwhelming amount of information that you can get, especially in that first semester, that first year. Karen Litzy:                   08:07                And how did you balance the amount of information, the studying the comprehension. And I liked the fact that you said you're there to learn and comprehend, not just memorize, but that was in PowerPoint slides which I think is great advice for anyone. But how did you balance this with a wife and two kids? Keats Snideman:           08:27                It wasn't easy. I wouldn't really say that you can, it's not balanced and you know, the family has to be on board. Obviously my kids are a little bit older. My wife obviously she knew how much this meant to me, so she was very supportive. I wasn't able to be as involved with my kids and their sports and stuff. So there's definitely sacrifices. You can't pass PT school. Even if you're just a single younger person who doesn't have any problems, your life will not be balanced if you are in any doctoral program, especially one like physical therapy. So I wouldn't say I really balanced it, but when I had the time and I needed, because you can't just study, study, study, study, you will literally burn yourself out and there comes to a point, kind of like a sponge that's just saturated with water. Keats Snideman:           09:15                It won't take any more. It just doesn't work. So you have to give yourself little breaks more frequently. And for me, you know, I grew up sort of this ADD never got diagnosed until I was an adult. That's even more important cause I think my executive functioning skills burn out very, very quickly. So I do very well with like the Pomodoro technique where I do like 25 minutes and then take a five minute break or maybe that's 15 minutes, right? Things like that where you do like little mini sprints rather than a marathon of learning. So you give yourself time to get into what's called like a diffuse mode of sort of learning where you have the focus mode, where you're really putting a lot of effort, but then you gotta just walk away, go for a walk, juggle play ping pong. We played a lot of ping pong. If you have a ping pong table and you're like, that really got me through school. I love ping pong. I love it. I have a thing on the table in my house. And just doing something completely different. I'm very much into exercise activities, sprinting, little mini workouts, little mini resets. I feel that helped get me through it. You can't just sit there for hours upon hours and hours. You will just literally just be wasted time. Karen Litzy:                   10:35                Yeah, that is wonderful advice and I think that carries over nicely even when you start working as a therapist as well. Great advice. Now let's talk about some of the positives of going back to school as a nontraditional student. Keats Snideman:           10:58                Yeah. Well for me, there's a lot of positives because I had already been working with people for so long as a personal trainer, a strength coach and a massage therapist and sort of a hybrid of all those kind of at the same time that I've been dealing with people for so long. And a lot of these young millennials that are just, you know, like you talked about more traditional which is definitely a good way to do it. Don't get me wrong, I kind of wish I had done that, but they don't have sort of the life experience and the ability to deal, I think with a lot of the psychological and more of the interpersonal issues that will come up when you're dealing with people in pain and dealing. Like once you lived a little bit longer, I feel like you just get it a little bit more. A lot of people in PT, at least sort of in traditional outpatient or even acute, they're a little bit older and I feel like you can relate to them a little bit better. Keats Snideman:           11:51                And it helps me to think about something like soft skills that the professors would talk about and I'd be like, wow, I guess I'm kind of lucky in that respect because I'm older. I kind of already have had to develop those over the years. Those interpersonal communication skills and they would tell, you know, my classmates, these younger sort of millennials that it doesn't really matter what you get. Like, yeah, you got to pass the boards, you gotta pass this, you gotta be smart. But you know, being first in your class, like it doesn't mean you're necessarily gonna be the best therapist. And nobody's going to ask you, Hey, Karen, you know, can you tell me what you got on your NPT boards, et cetera? Oh no, that's too low. I want to work with this person over here. Keats Snideman:           12:36                Or Hey, what'd you get in your patho though? First? Because it doesn't matter, right? You've got to get through it. You can always, you don't need to memorize everything, just you need to know it enough to pass the test. But the most important thing in physical therapy is your ability to empathize, to be empathetic and to deal with another human being that you're dealing with. And I felt like as an older student that was something I kind of already had. So that was like a big plus I think. And when I'm working with my a little bit older clients and patients, I think that helps. So that's a big plus that you can't really get except through time and going through all those different sort of client and patient interactions over the years that will sort of, you know, cause you have these fits sometimes with clients, they don't work well. You don't always buttheads so you develop a certain amount of grit that I think as a bit of an older student you don't have to develop as much as the newer, younger ones. Karen Litzy:                   13:45                I think that’s a huge positive. I mean experience counts. Experience counts. What other positives did you find even maybe as you were going through the program or looking back on it now? Keats Snideman:           14:03                Well for me with my background and there were other students in there that were like in their thirties. There was one other guy in his forties, you know, it was like the real grandpa. He, you know, he was a little younger than me. But my background was in fitness and in massage. So I had already kind of educated myself a lot on anatomy and physiology. Since we had this sort of medical curriculum. We spent like six weeks or something on the organs and the guts and I didn't really know that too well, so that was pretty hard. But the rest of this stuff sort of with my background wasn't too hard in terms of it's like I felt like I had already prepared myself for that. Contrary to popular belief, you go to PT school more to learn about differential diagnosis and how to not really hurt somebody, you know, it's more like med school light than it is about, like, I'm going to become sort of a mild personal trainer. Like you don't spend a ton of time on the ins and outs of exercises. Keats Snideman:           14:57                They sort of say, well you're going to get that in your rotations. So a lot of people who are more non traditional that had come maybe from like insurance or a different world, they didn't have a much of an exercise background as me. They were really looking for that in school and we didn't get that as much. It's not really what it's about. You get that more on your rotation. So I felt like my previous background had made up for that gap that we weren't going to get in school. I had already sort of gone through the sort of the painstaking self studied it just really sort of figure out like you know, which exercises are appropriate for all the different muscle groups and movements and doing sort of like a needs analysis for the sport or the activity. Keats Snideman:           15:52                Cause that's not really what you're getting in PT school. And I think people don't always understand that they think they're going to learn like everything about exercise. And that's kind of not what it's about. It's more like I keep saying sort of like this being sort of a primary care provider light. You know, and now most States have direct access. So, you know, like taking blood pressures, understanding cardiovascular concerns, understanding pharmacology and like the basics of like protecting, these are real things that are very important that that's what I got out of PT school the most was sort of that thing being sort of, I'm trying marry care provider and the exercise stuff is sort of secondary. Karen Litzy:                   16:40                Yeah. So because you had had this other career before you came into PT school, you were able to kind of be on top of your game I guess. And like you said, you were able to fill in some of those gaps in PT school with what'd you already knew. So that is obviously a huge positive. Any other positives that maybe if someone out there is thinking, Hmm, maybe I want to go into PT school, but I'm like over 40 or I'm over 30 or 35, you know, or I'm married, I have kids. Were there any other positives that maybe not even related to physical therapy but maybe spilled over into your home life or your personal life? Keats Snideman:           17:19                Well I think it was good for my teenage boys to see that even as an older adult that, you know, the amount of effort they saw, how much I was putting into it, how much it meant to me to just to show them that if you put in the work at any age, like you can still do some pretty cool things. And, you know, you can teach an old dog new tricks. I mean, I think the younger brain learns a little quicker. I don't think there's a lot of debate about that. You can still do it. So for me, I think the positive was it gave me a sense of belief that if I'm really determined that I can find a way. So gave me like a new level of confidence in myself that I have the grit that I have, that I had to take the GRE three times. Keats Snideman:           18:09                And for those who don't know, that's the graduate record examination that's put on by the people who create the SAT. So it's sort of a SAT for college grads and I hadn't done like high school math, since like 80s and early nineties. So, you know, I did well on those other parts, but I just couldn't remember like basic stuff. I had to get the book. So it gave me sort of a new level of confidence that, you know what, even when things are really tough and you feel like you can't get through, like you can and you know, and you just got to kind of plow through it, like the time will go by anyway. And you just gotta figure it out. How can you work with yourself? To try to, you know, accomplish the goal as challenging as PT school at any age. Keats Snideman:           18:54                It's challenging but definitely harder if you have a family you've been out of sort of that test taking mode. I used a lot of like some of these other like apps where it sort of makes you keep doing the ones that you're not good at. Cause you do have to memorize some stuff for the test. Let's face it. But if you take the time and you're just, you don't be so hard on yourself, you can get through it, you will get through it. Karen Litzy:                   19:25                Absolutely. And now again, the question I ask everyone on the show is, and I feel like you kind of just answered it, but I'm going to ask the question anyway because maybe you have a different answer, but what advice would you give to yourself, your pre PT self knowing where you are now in your life and in your business and in your work? What advice would you give to your pre physical therapy school self? Keats Snideman:           19:54                Well I think I was very hard on myself for like initially doing poorly in that first semester especially in that pathophysiology class. But I really thought that I could get through it easier. You know, I just thought like, Oh, this, you know, this is going to be good. I've already sort of learned a lot on my own. I sort of underestimated. So I scheduled my sort of personal training and my sort of my whole clientele in a way that was not realistic. So, you know, working I think is good if you can do it, but giving yourself sort of the permission to say no to certain things that this is an important commitment. And that, you know, not to beat myself up that I'm not earning as much as I could potentially earn by working more because this is an important goal and I need to focus, you need to get it done. Keats Snideman:           20:56                There'll be plenty of time to work after, but I did work throughout my whole schooling. I was trying to bring in a couple thousand dollars a month, you know, for my own clientele. And I did, but that was about probably about a third of what I had originally sort of thought I could do. So I did have to take out a little more loans than I wanted to, but once I sort of realized that it's okay, that sort of like lowered that stress levels for myself, that just is a huge commitment that I've put on myself that I can do, I could commit to all these different elements. And there's only so much time in a day. Like, you know, there's only so much energy you have, you know, sort of like money in a bank. You don't have the, we call it like units of energy. Keats Snideman:           21:40                I don't have a hundred units of energy for school and a hundred units of energy for my family and a hundred and some energy for my clients. I have a hundred units total and that's what I sort of figured out. So I would give myself the advice then manage your units, you know, manage your physical and emotional capital because there's only so much and you just have to be realistic. And I just, I was not realistic with myself with what I thought I could do versus the reality. And once I sort of kind of had that sort of come to Jesus moment, I was better cause I was okay with it. Karen Litzy:                   22:13                Well I think that's great advice. So giving yourself permission to prioritize things in your life and doing it all to 100 percent. Excellent advice. Now is there anything else that you wanted to let the listeners know before we sign off about being that nontraditional student in physical therapy school? Keats Snideman:           22:34                I think we need more non traditional students. I mean I think it only helps the programs. I think if any of my classmates that are listening to this, hopefully they are, they can agree. I think a lot of people appreciated me in the class because I would ask the questions. I find if I didn't, interesting kind of being with sort of this younger generation, it's like they're just programmed and it's kind of like robots that just like get the information, figure out how to you know, memorize it, regurgitate it on a test, move on. And it's more about like passing and getting to the next level than it is about mastery and comprehension and not a lot like questions are asked about things that I thought maybe that the teachers explained that were confusing. So I would ask the questions, I'd be like, well what about this and what about that? Keats Snideman:           23:32                And because I'd been in the real world for longer. So I think having that older student and maybe some people thought it was a little bit annoying and that's okay. I'm okay. To me, I’m that guy, because I think it was helpful for the betterment of the class. And when you have somebody who's lived a little bit longer, like you just don't care as much. You just, if something's important to ask, it's important. Like you don't have to go, Oh, I'm not going to ask cause I don't want to like offend anybody or you know what I'm saying? So like having those little more seasoned, non traditional students, I think it spices things up a little bit. And I felt that I kind of provided that for my class and it really sort of, it kinda helps sort of broaden the curriculum by bringing in more real life experience of working with people. Keats Snideman:           24:25                Not that I was a physical therapist, but I was working with people in pain, working with people who had weakness and you know, fitness issues, which is what we do a lot in PT regardless of your setting. So that's my advice is that if you’re really, really passionate about helping people in that domain, that we need more nontraditional, a little bit older students in these programs because it really helps to just sort of broaden the scope because of what we can bring with our experience as everybody else in the class. Everyone has their own experiences. Even, I mean young, middle age, older, it's all good. Like to have a variety instead of just everybody being the same. Like I'm all about diversity and I think we should just embrace more diversity. And like I saw something on the news, I think it was the other week on CBS or something and it was some guy like he was like a car mechanic and he went back to school like in his late fifties and he got his medical degree that just like, I love it. That's stuff just like juices me up and he's bringing all his experience to that program. That must have been really neat for the other students. Karen Litzy:                   25:37                Yeah, I could not agree with you more. And now where can people find you if they want to chat about your experiences or if they have any questions for you? Keats Snideman:           25:47                Yeah, I'm a pretty Googleable guy. I've got a couple of websites that are sort of in shambles right now, but if you just Google my name, Keats Snideman, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I think it's a @coachKeats and then I think it's Keith Snideman is what I'm on for Instagram. I'm trying to figure out this whole social media thing. For my own business. I do a combination of PR and work and then just my own, I'm too much of an entrepreneur to work full time for anybody else. But if anybody wants to email me, it's ksnideman@gmail.com. I love helping people who are non traditional to sort of, you know, make the decision. I mean it's not for everybody, but if you're on the fence, I talked to people frequently who sort of find out about me and I would love to talk to you about it. Karen Litzy:                   26:43                Awesome. Absolutely, all of that information will be in the show notes for this episode at podcast.healthywealthysmart.com so that people can one click and get to you in any way possible. Perfect. We'll have it all there. So Keith, thank you so much for taking the time out while you're here in New York, dropping your son off at NYU. Keats Snideman:           27:01                I know. Crazy. Yeah, it's been a blast. I'm so glad we got to meet up today. I've always wanted to, you know, talk to some other PTs when I come out here and I'm just, yeah, I'm very, very glad that I was able to get on your show. I've been a big time fan of your podcast when I was a student. I'd share it with my fellow classmates. Your doing an amazing job of just getting amazing people and concepts out into the world. Karen Litzy:                   27:26                Well, thank you very much. And, I again, thank you for taking the time today and everyone else have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy and smart.   Thanks for listening and subscribing to the podcast! Make sure to connect with me on twitter, instagram  and facebook to stay updated on all of the latest!  Show your support for the show by leaving a rating and review on iTunes!

So Keith had to cancel last minute. Our guest had to cancel last minute. Josh and Bill did the best they could. Thanks for sticking through this clunker. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Religious communities sometimes have a fraught relationship with technology in general and the internet, smartphones, and "screens" in particular. On the one hand, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc see the power these technologies have to build, grow, and maintain contact with the community and "spread the word". On the other, technology is often perceived as a cesspool of evil inclinations and a scourge that is destroying families and minds. As IT professionals within our religious communities, we're often asked to address, and even "fix", those issues. Last week, Josh Biggley, Keith Townsend, and Leon Adato discussed what was good about being "geeks in the pew". In this week's installment, we'll explore the challenging side of this situation and look at some solutions. Listen or read the transcript below... Destiny: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion I started last week with Josh Biggley and Keith Townsend on the topic of being ambassadors of it within our religious community. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 00:37 All right, so we've talked about some of the good, we've talked about some of the opportunities that being a technologist in our faith community presents us, but what can go wrong? What is wrong with being a person of technology in a land of faith? Josh: 00:55 Really, I don't think there's anything wrong with being a person of technology in a land of faith. I think that it's the use of technology. So I like to tell people I'm a recovering video game addict and I love video games. I really struggle with the want to play video games. And by the way, most video games today are crap. It's just the way that it is. Sorry kids. They are. But the biggest innovations in video games - things like 3D and VR and augmented reality - they come from the porn industry.So Mormonism, they've embraced technology. So one of the earliest embraces of Technology was broadcasting what we call general conference, which is a biannual conference. It takes place in Salt Lake City in April and October. And so broadcasting that conference around the world, like when I grew up, our church had one of those monstrous satellite dishes outside, you know, the kind that you're, the kid in the neighborhood. His Dad used to, you know, get the free porn on. Well, we had one in our church's yard and we got broadcast from Salt Lake City sent to us. So I think that the challenge with technology isn't so much that it is technology, the challenge is: what are we willing to accept it being used for in our lives. Leon: 02:26 Okay. So that's an interesting take. I guess what I was thinking about is the things that being the technology person, like what goes wrong with that scenario when we enter our church or synagogue or mosque or are our temple. And one of the first things, and this isn't the worst of it, but one of them is that sometimes we are asked to stand and answer for technology. So, people come up and say, "Twitter's just for, you know, porn and shit posting, that's all you ever do." And you know, I'm stuck there saying, "Well no it's not." But I'm also in my head saying, "Well yeah, it kinda is sometimes" Josh: 03:08 I thought Instagram and Reddit were for porn. Right? Leon: 03:12 Well, okay, everything could be, but you know, the point is, is that I'm being asked to stand and answer these challenges and that can be, you know, it's never fun to be on that kind of firing line. Keith: 03:23 Well, you know, it's kind of like being a politician. There's no good politician. One politician has to answer for all politicians. Or you know what we, we all have faiths that have controversies associated with those faiths. So you know, you're the Christian and you have to answer for 2000 years of the atrocities of Christianity. It's the same thing in technology. "You know what, Keith, you, you help maintain the internet in some ways. So you are a contributor to these problems." You know, the fact that the FBI can't unencrypt this porn traffickers phone is your fault. Leon: 04:05 Right? I also find that we're often put in a position where we have to be the bearer of bad news. Josh: 04:11 Like "the wifi is down"? Leon: 04:11 No worse than that. I've been asked to go help somebody with their computer, only to have to tell them that their spouse is doing... Whatever it is, Speaker 4: 04:22 At work, if you've ever did any type of enterprise stuff at work and you find something illegal like child porn... it's your responsibility. You are now legally obligated to bring that up. And then for our various faiths.... I had a guy bring me his laptop and said, "you know, what, can you fix this?" And what was wrong with it was they had a bunch of spyware on it. And there's one surefire way to get spyware on your laptop. And he was a friend, so I had to have a difficult conversation with him. And this is not something that, if he would have took it to best buy or wherever - and he probably does now - but if he would have taken it to Best Buy or the Geek Squad, he would not have been confronted with a difficult conversation. So it puts us in a really tough situation sometimes. Leon: 05:20 It can be, yeah, it can be hard. And that doesn't even consider having to be the bearer of bad news that, you know, "you're just not good at this." Like "you broke it. You really..." Like, "why would you think that doing this...", you know, I mean those, those kinds of things too. I also find that there's a potential, and I think we're going to dig into this a little bit more later in the episode, but it can create dependency relationships that are not good for us and they're not good for the people that we're helping. You know that there's a feeling of a burden on our part and there's a feeling of beholden-ness on their part that can develop that is not friendly sometimes. Keith: 06:05 Yeah. I sold the guy, the laptop, so... Leon: 06:10 oh man. Keith: 06:11 So... and I think that gets to your point, there's this obligation and this is not unique to technology. We deal with this. I think the religious part of the relationship, the faith based part of the relationship, makes it that much more difficult because people can either abuse that, or you can feel personally obligated because this person is a fellow member of your congregation, mosque, or whatever, that you're obligated at a spiritual level to help maintain the system that you gave to them out of the abundance of your, kind of, blessing. You know, how many of us have... like, I literally have a laptop that's worth a couple of hundred bucks at least that, but that could do some good. And I'm challenged with what do I do with this thing? I can't give it away because if I give it away, I've got to support it. Leon: 07:03 It's your... Right, right. Hey, look, you pass within five feet of a computer and you know, it's your responsibility now. I mean, you just give it a second glance and... Yeah, that's, that's exactly it. Josh: 07:15 So have either one of you had this experience: You walk into your congregation and someone corners you and says, "You know, I'm thinking about buying..." And then fill in whatever technology. A new mesh wireless system, a new laptop, an Ipod for my kid. "Which one do you recommend?" Keith: 07:36 Oh, yeah, I've, I've had that and I almost always regretted getting it. Josh: 07:41 Agreed. Good. I'm glad I'm not the only one who regrets that advice. My goto now is, "uh, I'm sorry, I don't fix computers. I can't help. I just don't know." Leon: 07:52 Worse for me, worse than that is that I'm walking in on Shabbat, on the Sabbath. Remember how I said we can't touch anything, and sabbath is a day for, you know, no work and really focusing on on the holy, on the elevated and things like that. And there's still a couple of people who either want to talk about 'that really crazy thing that they did at work' or they hit you up with, "hey, my iPhone is doing this." Now that holding the iPhone, they're not. But what do you think that is? "Oh, I'll just jump on the psychic friends network now and.." You know, like you are describing an iPhone for the... and again, I go for that, like "it's Shabbat, I'm not talking about this." But it happens. The thing that's most wrong about being the technology person is what it does to us, to us ourselves. Because we're there. I mean, the whole reason we chose that space and the whole reason that we chose that community is because we wanted to make that our religious home away from home. We wanted to worship, we wanted to pray, we wanted to connect to the spirit, you know, however, however you want to phrase it. And the problem is that sometimes when we're doing that work, it's not happy work, it's uncomfortable work. It's work where we are really digging deeply and thinking about our behavior or our attitudes. And that's something that we're not always really excited to do, but it's necessary. And having a distraction, having somebody come up to you and say, "Hey Leon, I know that that you're in the middle of davening (or whatever), but hey, can you just... you know, the Wifi is down. Can you just, you know, kick it in a minute?" And you're like, "Yes! Please! Give me any reason not to have this conversation with God right now, cause I'm really not up for that. I really don't want to have it." I think that that's the biggest disservice that we do to ourselves. I don't know if you've run into that. Keith: 09:48 Yeah, I don't, I don't limit this just to technology. We don't have a whole lot of people on staff in my congregation, we give a good portion of what we would probably spend on staffing to missions, contributions, etc. So we're very volunteer driven, which is great and it works for the most part, but it is a awesome excuse for those who look to be doing well spiritually, to step away from the work of staying well spiritually. So whether you're doing sound, you're doing childcare, you're doing ushering, or counting the contribution, or even the book ministry, it is a good excuse to just not do the work of your faith. And the work of your face is faith is not necessarily running the church or the congregation or the mosque. The work of your faith is developing your relationship with God. And that, I think as technologists, we make that excuse. I remember early on my faith at bringing my pager in because I'd be on call and it would you go off and like, "Oh wow, this is a good reason to step away" knowing that whatever it was could wait. You know, it is a risk that does not limited to technology. Josh: 11:08 I think this is a challenge and I'm glad to hear you say that Keith, that is transcendent of religious belief. Within Mormonism, all local clergy is lay clergy. So those individuals hold full time jobs in addition to being called as a member of clergy. In fact, all positions in the church are unpaid. And I've watched without fail... And even when I acted as a member of clergy, without fail, those members who are in those positions, they stop attending Sunday school. They stop attending their meetings on Sundays aside from the meeting in which they have to preside over because they're, they're caught up in being the thing they've been asked to be. And it's everyone though, right? Because everything is volunteer driven. It's the person who fixes the boilers. It's the person who does the AV work. It's the person who is responsible for stocking the supplies for the janitor. It's everyone and there always seems to be a reason for people to be away from worship. And I don't know how to break that cycle. Honestly. I don't. I've seen it for 20 years and I'm stuck. Keith: 12:22 So, we haven't talked about, maybe it's a great topic for another day, but we have this hero syndrome in IT and this is just another way to feed that disfunction of, "yeah, I'm the hero that saved the day and my job is so important within worship that I have to do" it or that it takes away from my own worship. Leon: 12:48 Right? So you feed the martyr syndrome and you feed the importance and that really negative feedback loop, like you said of the mouse that gets the cookie. But it's doing the wrong thing. Like all those things fed into it. And the other thing is that you get the positive-negative loop of feeling put upon. "Ugh, can't anyone fix the AV this time? I'm always the one who has to do that!" But also the self importance, but also the "look, no one else can do it. I really am the hero." And meanwhile other people are feeling... You're possibly leading other people to feel jealousy or resentment towards you, which you should never be that stumbling block in front of somebody else. So it just can lead to all these horrible outcomes. And I think we've been dancing around it, but where I'd like to wrap up, where I want to go next and finish out with is "how do we manage those boundaries?" So the first thing is, you were both very clear. This is not just for it folks. This is for anybody who is doing any sort of volunteer job within our faith organization. You know, childcare is a great example, Keith, that you brought up that "I would love to be praying but baby's got to get changed. You know, someone's got to watch the kids and I never get to pray or maybe once all everyone goes and picks up their babies. Now I can have a few minutes in a quiet room by myself."Bbut do I take it for myself? Is that really the right way? Is that... So that's the first thing is it's not just for it people. But the other thing Keith, you brought up before we started recording was that it's not just for faith groups. Keith: 14:31 Yeah. This is something that any organization, there's a volunteer driven that doesn't have enough x, will lean on a resource as much as possible because the organization needs the resources cause they're resource limited. So we can be United way or and girls club. My wife worked for boys and Girls Club for a couple of years, and the amount of just extra they get out of those - even the employees and volunteers. It was to the point, and we're going to get to this, it was to the point where you wore those resources out, that they stopped contributing their talents to that organization. Leon: 15:15 Got It. Okay. So Keith, as CTO advisor, as somebody who does this professionally, I am going to lean on your expertise just a little bit - hopefully not abusively and ask what, what are your thoughts on how we can set proper boundaries? And we'll keep it with our faith community, but we understand that I will say right now I am horrible at setting boundaries in general. Josh is nodding. So if you don't know, we have video going along with this that we don't record, but so we can see each other's faces. And as I'm saying, "I'm horrible at setting boundaries." Josh, he's just nodding so much that the camera's blurring as he's doing it. So Keith, what is some of your suggestions on ways that we can both give back to our faith communities, but not so much that it becomes these negatives? Keith: 16:08 So this is one of those things that, when we all look at the basis of our faith, all our faith are based on love. So that's a given. And then there's other commonalities across our faith, which is 1) to have faith. And oddly enough, this is the area that we don't recognize that we're allowed to be challenged on. There's always always going to be too much in our face. If we're not relying on God, then something is wrong somewhere. You know, if, if, if we're the only one that can do it or solve it, then there's, you know, we're putting faith in the wrong place. So there's, you know, kind of that fundamental piece of our individual relationships with God. Whatever higher being you have in your faith is that we have to give... in Christianity we are always saying "we have to give God something to bless." Well, if we're doing it all, how are we giving God something to bless? So that's where I started. So if the babies have to be changed, if the food has to be prepped, the Wifi has to be fixed - but you're putting all of that in front of your own personal relationship with God, your families relationship with God, or you're... whatever priority your faith dictates you give to your, uh, "big boss" who ultimately I call "God". Then that's where you know your boundaries is kind of out of whack. You have to, again, in a Christianity focus, you have to put God to the test, allow things to go haywire as you go for prayer. Maybe during that period of time, other people realize, "Oh wow, I didn't know... I didn't even realize that that was a problem." When I advise people in the secular world, and just my regular job, if senior management... if you never allow senior management to know that there's a problem, you don't give them the opportunity to fix the problem. So if you're always trying to mask and hide the problem with any fish and band aids, you know what? You're going to get a result that's not what you want, Leon: 18:36 You're not giving someone else a chance to step up if you're constantly rushing in there. I ike that a lot because, if you think you're the one who's doing it all, there's a attitude adjustment - or in a slightly different context in Judaism, you're commanded to give tzdedakah, which people translate as "charity." It really means "justice", literally means justice, and you're commanded... It's one of things you're commanded to do. But the texts are very clear. Like, "you think *you're* giving that money? Oh, is that what you think? No, no. See THAT? I gave you that money to give, right? Yeah. Please do not think that you are supporting this person, that you are helping this person. You are doing nothing. I will make sure they're okay. I'm just letting you participate so you can feel good about it." And the same thing, you know, "you think that's your skills, that it's all on your shoulders? No, no, no. I'm so sorry. But you know, it's going to be there long after you're gone and someone else will be doing it. It's okay." To that end, I get pulled into a lot at my synagogue, doing some tech work, and I've started refusing to just do the work unless there's somebody else who was assigned as a project manager on an activity. I don't necessarily need one, but I need someone else to be the "one face." I need somebody else to gather the requirements, to just say, "yes, do that now." I'll give them, "here's, here's the five things that need to get done. Here's my time estimate that it will take me to do it." But you're going to have to be the one who gets approval, who deals with people who say, "I don't like that color. I want it to be more green" or whatever. And the result is that the person who's project managing me right now actually is learning to be a web designer. And he started to do some of it on his own. And so now there's two of us. And so that's okay. So I'm kind of proud of myself. I have done that. Josh: 20:39 I'm just worried that there's two Leon's in the world now. Leon: 20:41 No, no, that would be that. That's not a good thing. Josh: 20:44 Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah. Keith: 20:45 Technically my middle name is Leon, so there's that. Leon: 20:48 oh well, gee, I didn't even know that. Wow. So only special people can have that name. So what else, what are some other ways that we can set boundaries in our communities so that we can be a whole person? Josh: 21:05 You know, I liked the idea of listening to the people that love us. Whether that's your spouse, your significant other, your children, your parents, your friends. Look to them, the people who are authentic in their love for you. And this keys off of what you were talking about, Keith, our expression of our faith, our expression of our beliefs is really about love. People will not take advantage of us if they truly love us. And if they see us being taken advantage of, they will help us to establish boundaries. My wife is really good at coming down in my work and saying, "Hey, look, you need to make sure you come upstairs for lunch." Or "you need to come upstairs at the end of your workday and not push that eight to half, nine hour day into a nine and a half, 10, 11, 12 hour day." She can set those same boundaries when it comes to me in my faith community, right? "Hey, it's okay that you volunteered x number of hours this week in our faith community, but we still need you to be present as spouse, as father, as you know, whether they view me as patriarch or someday, when my older and my children have children, as grandparents, which I know both of you have that privilege. We just need to listen to our families and I think that that will help us set those boundaries because we're listening. Keith: 22:29 Yeah. I tweeted something out earlier today. You want to give some perspective on this. If you have young kids, have someone ask them what do they think daddy's or mommy's priority is? Not just in general but when you're in church or in service, like what's their priority in service, like what's important to them? And kids are extremely observant and they will let you know if the priority is, "oh, he's really, really into the audio-visual. Like if the answer is anything other than being active and participating in service, then that's great... And Joshua, the other thing I'd like to piggyback on a comment you made is my wife is very good at protecting my boundaries. She has got the, well, this is probably why I don't get asked to do AV stuff, uh, tech stuff anymore by people. She just tells people "No. You'll never get it back. Like if you give him your laptop, you'll be there for six, seven months, but you will not... he just doesn't have the time to do it. So let's protect the friendship and do not get him your technology." Speaker 2: 23:37 That's fantastic. I, uh, I've said for a long time as a parent and even as a grandparent, one of the best techniques you use is to walk slowly. Meaning if you hear your kids in the other room and they were arguing over who gets to sit on that chair or who gets to change the channel or whatever, the slower you walk, the more likely they are to figure it out before you get there. And any problem they can solve for themselves (without violence) is a better situation than you solving it for them. And I think the same thing with as a technologist that when people say, "hey, can't you come over and help me, you know, fix my router," or whatever you can say, "yeah, I, I'll probably get there in... I don't know, three, four weeks? I think I can carve out some time. It's just really busy at the office now..." And then "oh no, I need, I need a little faster than that." So walking slowly, I think, works in both cases. And in your case, Keith, it sounds like your wife has helped you to walk slower than you might otherwise. Keith: 24:33 Looking back, I'm like, "oh, that explains a lot." Leon: 24:36 So that's why she is Mrs CTOAdviser. Keith: 24:38 That is why she's Mrs CTOAdvisor. Doug: 24:40 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 24:54 A Jew, a Christian, and a Mormon, walk into a mosque Keith: 24:57 and none of them knew how to fix the router.  

Mom puts a filter on the router, and daughter Mary installs a VPN. Dad sets up cell phone monitoring software, and son Donny learns how to soft-boot Android to remove it. For households that strongly ascribe to a specific religious, moral, or ethical outlook, the standards for what is appropriate can be even more strict, and send those cat and mouse games spiraling to new levels. Unless Mom or Dad happen to work in tech. Then things get a whole lot more interesting. In this podcast, Leon, Josh, and guest Keith Townsend of CTO Advisor talk about parenting with a bible in one hand and a packet sniffer in the other. Listen or read the transcript below: Leon: 00:25 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Josh: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:48 Mom puts a filter on the router, and daughter Mary installs a VPN. Dad sets up a cell phone monitoring software and Donnie learns how to soft boot android into safe mode to remove it. Keith: 00:57 The game of parental cat and mouse seems never ending for households that strongly ascribe to specific religious, moral, or ethical outlook. The standards for what is appropriate, can be even more strict and send those cat and mouse game spiraling to new levels. Josh: 01:15 Unless mom and dad happened to work in tech. Then things get all whole lot more interesting. In today's podcast we're going to talk about exactly that situation. IT professionals with a Bible in one hand at a packet sniffer in the other and what it means to the kids who have to live with us. Joining in the conversation today and telling us the age of the kids in their house are Leon Adato Leon: 01:41 Hello everyone. Okay, so I have a 27 and 24 year old daughter and then I have a 19 year old and 16 year old son and we also have my 27 year old daughter's two kids, so my grandkids, who are three and two. Josh: 01:55 All right, perfect. And Keith Townsend of CTO advisor. Keith: 01:58 All right. I have a 31 year old daughter who has an 11 year old granddaughter that visits us every day after school. I have a 28 year old son, any 25 year old son, Josh: 02:11 And I'm Josh Biggley, and in my house I've got kids ranging from the ages of 16 to 25 and everything in between, it feels like. Leon: 02:19 All right. So the first thing in this podcast that I would like to clarify is that we're not talking about VPNs, or that you should have a good password manager, or any of that stuff. That that's all important, and we will definitely do a podcast episode about that later. But what we're talking about is the fact that we as religious, moral, ethical parents have already decided that there's things that we need to keep our kids away from. And that's part of our job as a parent. So this is all about how we as IT professionals keep our kids away from the "nasty stuff." So I think the first part of the conversation for the three of us is what's the nasty stuff? Josh: 03:00 Okay, "warez"? Do we know what...? Oh, I'm old, aren't I. Warez? Pirated software? Sorry? Right? You know, I can't... "ware-ez"? Aw man, I might be only one. Leon: 03:15 Yes. Yes. You're that old. We are all that old. Keith: 03:17 Yeah. We're all that old that we, the seeing that we have all have grandkids. Leon: 03:25 Yeah, exactly. Um, okay, so warez, okay, so let, let's extend that to let's see. Napster? No, no, that's still old. Uh, BitTorrent. Josh: 03:37 Limewire? Leon: 03:40 Fine. Okay. So we're talking about, uh, illegally acquired stuff. Keith: 03:47 That was very controversial in my home. The other thing is a porn. So we are in the US so, you know, we really hate, as religious folks, we hate porn. Leon: 03:59 It's challenging and I think we're going to get into why it's challenging in a minute. So how about specific types of music or a specific type? Not, not things that are flat out pornographic, but things that are in some way just the content is objectionable to us. So, whether that's music with particular lyrics or movies with particular themes or things like that, is that, does that fit into the topic? Keith: 04:25 I think that does. Leon: 04:26 Okay. Um, one of the things that I was talk about because it's actually not an issue for myself and especially in my kids, but what we call "metal on metal" violence. So you know, like Transformers, which we might consider that movie to be offensive artistically or in terms of the canon of the Transformers that we may have grown up with, but the idea that it's violence, but it's so clearly animated or non human violence that maybe we give that one a pass. I don't know how you folks feel about it. Keith: 04:59 Yeah. We, we had a rule in my family that you can play first shooter if it wasn't people shooting people. Leon: 05:06 Okay. So like doom where you're shooting zombies and stuff. Keith: 05:10 That was a little bit too, you know, the whole demon thing was a little bit too much for me. So you could do like robot shooting similar transformers or robots shooting other robots, etc. Leon: 05:21 Okay. Or duck hunting or hunting. Okay. Got It. All right. Josh: 05:25 Those poor defenseless ducks! Leon: 05:28 Right! Except the thing, some versions of the ducks were armed too. But anyway, we're off track as we do. How about like mature themes? Like what would we consider, what are we talking about when we say mature themes? Keith: 05:42 So you don't, we're a getting in an area that, uh, you know, so, we're in the US... So the concept of a same sex marriage is obviously a right that as Americans we respect, but as Christians or religious people in general, you know what, that's, that's a gray area. And what, what age do you want expose your child to. It is a pretty interesting debate these days. Leon: 06:09 So when do you want to have the conversation about how, you know, Sally has a girlfriend or a Bobby has a boyfriend or stuff like that, whether or not as individuals and as adults we are okay with that idea. But to explain it to our kids, we might find that it's difficult within the context, again of a religious conversation. "But wait a minute in Sunday school I just learned Xyz," you know, we want to have a consistent message. I can see that in fact our last episode was specifically about how our religions are approaching same sex relationships and things like that. So it's interesting that it comes up as a theme that we might still want to filter in the house. Josh: 06:55 As a Canadian, right? Politics in some contexts can be touchy. Right? I'd really love to ban a certain individual from being able to be seen in my house. But you know, I think when it comes to... Leon: 07:15 So... from the south. Government from the south is what you're talking about like American, as a Canadian having to deal with American politics... Josh: 07:20 That's no way to talk about South America. Leon, you leave South America out of this. Leon: 07:26 I wasn't talking about Argentinian politics. Not for a second. Keith: 07:29 Okay. I don't know. I want to blog, but race is also a really tough conversation at a young age. And how much, you know, do you want to say, "This is the reality of what's in the world, that even at a young age you may run into, but I still want to protect your ideal of what a wholesome relationship with other humans will look like." Leon: 07:54 So I think what we're getting at here is that we're not blocking things because necessarily we find it objectionable. It's that we're concerned that the viewer may not have the maturity to understand the context and therefore it's going to cause them more confusion or frustration, than it's going to... Than the material, whether it's a song or a movie or a comic book or whatever is going to open their eyes to. Josh: 08:20 Yeah. And you know, I love that you just mentioned comic books because I grew up in an era in the eighties and being being formerly Mormon I remember being counseled quite explicitly, "do not watch R-rated movies." But that advice was given in the 80s. Well what was an R-rated movie in the 80s is maybe PG today, PG 13 if you really want to stretch it. So what does that mean? Does that mean that we need to - and I remember having this thought - if I'm going to sit down and watch a movie and it's PG today, do I need to consider what it would have been rated in 1984? Or is it okay that I just accept it? And then I would then I would turn around and I would look at my comic book collection as like, you know, 12 or 13 or 14 year old a kid and I'd be like, "Oh, these comic books are rather racy. And the movie I just watched looked like, you know, it was Walt Disney." So yes, today we're arguing about, "oh, you know, the Internet gives our kids access to," but now are we going to filter what they also can get from the library? I mean, I met read some racy books as a kid from the library. And my parents were like, "Yeah, go to the library, have a grand old time. It's books. What could possibly go wrong?" Oh my goodness, mom and dad. Leon: 09:46 Right. And the interesting part there is that they expected the library to do a certain task, to fill a certain role of filtering that, you weren't going to be able to get pornographic - true pornographic - magazines from, but there was a lot of material that was at the very least titillating and certainly challenging from a political, again, Keith, to your point, racial social view. There's a lot of things like that. So you're right. It's, I think two points. One is that a parent's role hasn't changed in the sense that we still need to be communicating with our kids and talking about what they're consuming. However they're consuming the internet just adds a particular modality. It doesn't change the nature of our job. But I think also that what is objectionable really rests on our shoulders because it's based on family values, religious community values, and also what we know about our kid. Some things that I would allow my 16 year old who has a much more solid footing in terms of, you know, "this is just beyond the pale and I don't even want to deal with it", aren't things that I'm comfortable with my 19 year old seeing because his impulse control is a lot less strong. So you have to know your kid too. Josh: 11:06 Yeah. And that's a great point, right? Because there are some things that we want to shelter our kids from and things that we would have sheltered one child from that we're not going to shelter another child from. For example I have a similar scenario. My youngest has a fairly broad scope of what we're willing to allow him to watch. Now when it comes to music, he's not allowed to listen to music on his portable speaker that has vulgar language and whatnot because I just don't want to hear it. If I'm going to sit down, also rap, you're not allowed to listen to, to filthy rap on your speaker. But if he wants to listen to what I was headphones, I'm giving him that latitude. Now. Part of that is my transition away from Mormonism over the last year, admittedly. But those views have been very much formed by having older children and watching how they struggled or didn't struggle with certain things. And realizing that sometimes when I set the boundaries too close to the, or I guess too far away from the edge of "I want to approach this mom and dad", that it really entices them to go forward. Versus, "Hey, you know what, look, this stuff is out there. I really don't think that you should look at it. I don't you should listen to it, read it, whatever. But if you do come and ask, let's have a discussion about it." And that's the way we chose to approach it. When we get to talk about the security tips, I have a funny story, and I'll bring it up later, but let's just say sometimes your very best efforts as an IT professional parent are undermined by the most wily of children. Keith: 12:46 Yeah. Josh: 12:47 I'm going to put the, I to put it off to the side. We'll, we'll talk about that. Keith: 12:50 Yeah. it's a really interesting delta between my kids. Some of them, a couple of them embraced boundaries and, the oldest just... Boundaries were explicit signs to, "yes, I must go there. There's a boundary there. Then there's obviously something good behind that door!" Leon: 13:13 Right? Sometimes the worst thing you can do is tell your child "you may never...", and the sad part is when you figure it out and you try to tell your child, "you may never eat broccoli! Never!!" They figure that out real fast. So I, I think it's worth asking why, what are we objecting to and why? I mean, we've talked about the topics, the categories, but you know, this stuff is in the world and are we doing our kids a disservice? This is, as an Orthodox Jew, I hear this a lot in conversations around the water cooler at work. "Are you really doing your kids a disservice by sheltering them from information so that when they finally get to it either it's so enticing, they can't stop themselves because they didn't learn early?" And the other part of it is, are we not serving them because we're making them so naive that they don't know how to deal with things later. That's at least those are things I've heard. So why are we objecting to this? Like what, what's going on here? Speaker 3: 14:15 So I have an interesting view on this. We all are older so we have the benefit of experience. So one of the things I'm morphed from was trying to always protect the oldest of the kids from seeing stuff, to saying, "You know what, our house (and we've extended this to the granddaughter now) our house is a Godly home. And in our home we want to maintain a Spirit. You're going to see stuff out in the world that I can't protect you against. But our home is where we make kind of a hedge around the world and we respect our religious views." You know, kind of the whole Joshua "As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord" type of perspective. So the thing I can control is the spirit of my house. I can't control the spirit of the world. Leon: 15:14 Nice. Josh: 15:15 I like it. And I also approve of the use of Joshua. You know, a good prophet name. Leon: 15:22 You might be a little biased. Josh: 15:24 I may be a little biased. You know, I think that this question is, this is a tough question, right? So the people who might say to us, "Hey, you should really let your child see X because your blocking them from understanding Y scenarios," those discussions get really complicated. It's like, and this is, this is really a straw man argument, but it's like saying to somebody, "Hey, you should let your children watch child pornography because if not, they're not going to know it when they see it." Or "You should let your children watch a racially charged hate rant by somebody because you want them to have those discussions with them" or "hey you should smoke weed or do crack or..." You know, like those things are, are really challenging. And I think Keith, I love your idea of "hey, I'm going to make my house a place where people can be comfortable coming in, where they can feel the spirit of my home. They can feel the spirit of my family. That this is a sanctuary for my family. You come in, it's just the rules of the household." When my when my youngest has his friends over, we tell them like, look, I don't care what you do outside. I don't care what you do in your own, your own home. But when you come into our house and these are the rules, we expect you to abide by the rules. You're a guest in our home. You're welcome in our home anytime, but don't break the rules. Keith: 16:59 Yeah. One quick point on that whole household thing and our friend, our kids obviously are going to have friends that don't share the same morals. So, you know, for those of you don't know, I'm Black and I grew up in the inner city and for period of time, my family lived in the inner city, but our house was a gathering point for all of the young men, all of the boys to come and play basketball and hang out. And for me to mentor, and I had this one rule for when you played basketball - no one could curse. And if anyone cursed the game's over, "We'll see you guys. Please come back tomorrow, the next day." And that was a very difficult thing for the kids to initially grasp. But over a period of a couple of weeks, they, they get it. And our home was, they came and they drank Gatorade. They cookies, they played basketball. They didn't curse even if they did it at school. Leon: 17:56 On a completely separate point, one of my friends is Lee Unkrich. He's one of the directors, or was until just recently one of the directors at Pixar, he directed 'Toy Story 3'. He's been around since almost the very beginning. And I was talking with him one day about 'Finding Nemo'. It had been out for a while. And I said, "What do your kids think about it?" And he says, "They're actually not allowed to watch it." Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's Finding Nemo. I mean, like, this is the quintessential Disney G-rated perfectly wholesome... Like, why would you not let your kids watch it? He said "They get too wrapped up in it. They are at that age where they identify with the characters so much that when the shark is chasing the dad, they're terrified because they can't disassociate their emotions of what's happening to them and what's happening to the character on the screen. So I can't let them watch it until I know that they're able to watch the movie, get excited about the themes or the ideas or the scene that's going on there, but at the same time that they, they don't feel actual terror." And I thought that was an interesting perspective for a parent to have about their child. And I think it lends itself to hear that we have to understand the ability of our kids to... Keith, to your point, to understand that, "yep, my friends swear at school and, you know, but that's not something that we do in our house." And my kids knew they could code switch. They knew exactly what words were okay in the house and what words weren't okay in the house. And we knew that they used other words, other places. And I think that as parents, we have to recognize when they have that sophistication and when they don't. And that also goes into our decisions about what to filter, whether again, it's library books or Internet and what we don't Josh: 19:55 Got down, sat on a bentch, cheese and rice, Leon! Leon: 20:01 Shut the front door! Right? Josh: 20:06 Yeah, those are, those are the interesting batteries that I don't think we can control. Um, I'm really interested because, and this is a perfect time for me to tell my story. So my oldest son has autism. And one of his, one of the things he loves most in all the world is to watch movies, but he doesn't like to watch movies like you and I like to watch movies. He likes to watch movies and then pause them and rewind them and then pause them and then go forward frame by frame. And of course, you know, youtube is just an awful thing for him because it allows him to indulge in those stimulations. So we tried to block it and I spent hours and hours trying to configure this blocking software without blocking the rest of my family because I wanted them to be able to use the computer. And I was like, "oh my goodness, this is, I think I've got it." And we said, okay, come and sit down. And he came, he must've been, I don't know, 14 or 15 at the time. And he came and he sat down. I thought, "okay, great clicking, wonderful..." I turned around and walked away. Came back and there he was on the internet watching Youtube. And I'm like, "Are you kidding? You just undid like hours of effort." And I still don't know what he did. I don't know where he figured out how to turn it off. So I'm interested as an IT pro parent who quite honestly, I've really struggled with the best security practices for my family and myself, aside from, "Hey, I'm just taking away your Internet access." What can I do? How do I handle this? And, you know, what are my options for "Oh my goodness I'm cutting the the cable from the house to the Internet." And I'm like literally cutting it... to "All right. You know, you can have access to some things." What can I do here guys? Leon: 21:47 Right. So before we go into that, I think it's important that our listeners, and we, as parents, have to answer one question, which you started to get at, which is "what is it that you're trying to accomplish?" And, and that's an IT question, that's not a religious or moral or ethical or a parenting question because if you're trying to block 'oopsies' - you know, once upon a time, my daughter was eight years old and she misspelled play House Disney, she got an eyeful, and that was at the time when there were popups and pop unders and it was, it was festive and she was eight. So she didn't really know what she was seeing, but she knew it wasn't what she wanted. Are we blocking that? Are we blocking momentary weakness? You know, it's 10:30 at night and no one's looking and you're thinking, you know, and, and whoever it is at the computers, just thinking, "Why don't I just check that out?" Are we blocking? And Josh said it like, "I just don't want to hear that. I just, that does not need to be in my brain." Or are we blocking, like, like you said, "I have a determined person in my house who is, you know, going full guns to go find this thing" and so I think that's the first thing is that you need to define what you're doing. Having said that, I don't think we can answer that for all of our listeners right now, but I just want to be clear. You have to know what you're trying to accomplish or else you're going to get the wrong technology. Keith: 23:17 So I tried a ton of things. Well my case when I was raising kids and I had this specific problem, MySpace was all the rage. So that dates me and my kids, and I tried a ton of things - going into the cache of my sons Windows XP thing. And he ended up finding a way to install shadow profiles, so I wouldn't go under his profile to look at the cash. He got really good. So what I had to basically... for it to end - and I think this is specifically for teenagers - I had to basically lay down the law. Like, "You know, I am the god of the Internet when it leaves this house." So I installed a key logger on his laptop. And I told him, "There's nothing you can do on the Internet that I don't know." He said, "That's, that's not possible." I said, "You know what? I know you're your MySpace password." He said, "no you don't." I said, "Yeah, it is. It's 'monkeybutt1234'." "What?!? How'd you know that?" And so as you know, when his peers came over, they, he like, "No, no, no, don't do anything. Because my dad, I'm telling you, I don't know what he does in that room of his, but he can tell anything. He can, he even knew my, my space password." Right. So for teenagers, you know, the fear that there's nothing you can do that I can't discover, kind of killed the cat and mouse in my house, my household. Leon: 24:47 But that's, that's almost like security by obscurity, right? Like we've, instilled the fear of our technical prowess and until they're much more sophisticated, they don't get it. In terms of like things that people would, you know, can do today. Uh, I think one of the things that I use a lot is OpenDNS or any basically any DNS redirector. I think that's a really powerful tool in a parent's arsenal because not only does it block whole sites, but it also blocks the popups, the sidebars, the ads, you know, it may be fine the site that they're on, but that site may be repeating ads that we would really prefer don't show up both for ourselves and for others. There's actually a Raspberry Pi How-to that is not about blocking things for your kids. It's about speeding up your internet overall. Because what they do is they use an in-house DNS redirector. And so all those ads don't take time to load because they all are redirected to 127.0.0.1 and that speeds up your browsing immensely. So there's a secondary benefit. SO OpenDNS is one. What else do we got? Keith: 26:00 So I use these Arrow Mesh network Wifi routers and you could subscribe to kind of the security plus and the security plus is also that basically OpenDSN type of a DNS protections. But also, you know, one of the practical - it's not keeping my granddaughter away from bad stuff. She just won't get off her iPad at 11 o'clock at night. So being able to control, by Mac address, who can access, creating these profiles, you know, I want my wife to be able to watch Game of Thrones at 11 o'clock, but I don't want my granddaughter to be able to surf disney.com at 11 o'clock. She should be asleep. Leon: 26:51 Right, right. Okay. So I'm same thing. I use a ubiquity. I like their gear. Now it's considered prosumer. But it gives you a really high degree of control over the same thing, the Mac addresses, and the granularity that you can control devices. You can see devices, you can also see the other wifi systems that are around you to make sure that your kids aren't hopping onto the neighbor's Wifi and just completely busting out of the system. So you can see that going on as well. And the other thing that ubiquity gives is netflow insight, which is really good because it's not just that my son's laptop or his whatever is using 277 Gig per second of bandwidth. But this is the breakdown of where it's going. So netflow by itself, however you get it. But also, again, Ubiquiti gear is the same thing as Arrow mesh. It's that pro-sumer it gives you that deck granularity. Josh: 27:54 So I'm really curious and I hope that our listeners will weigh in and let us know how many parents out there are getting the netflow, S-flow J-flow data off of their network gear and logging it. Like, I get it, you know, we're geeks. That might be something that we're going to do, but is anyone else out there doing this? Is Leon the only one? I don't know. I think this is great. You know, hey, we can install this pro-sumer gear. Even OpenDNS for people who don't practice or live in the IT world might seem a little daunting. Is there something that they can do that is straight-forward or are they just going to have to do the Keith Townsend parenting methodology, put the fear of God into them and be like, "If you, if you don't, you know, I'm going to..." Leon: 28:44 It's a good question. So for the Orthodox community in Cleveland, myself, and there's another association that actually will do some of this stuff for families. So, you know, I'll do it for some of the people that are in my circle is to set up OpenDNS and I'll manage their exceptions and things like that. That doesn't scale particularly well. But there are a lot of services like that, that will help you out. And I think that for the nontechnical parent, that's one of the things. One of the other things, one of the other technologies that I use is much more manageable for, I would say the mere mortal Qustodio, which is spelled with a Q - Qustodio is something that goes on both phones and also compute devices. So laptops, I think it goes on raspberry Pi, things like that. It blocks both applications and also browsing, and it has very specific controls for social media. But as a parent it's much easier to manage than some of those pro-sumer tools that that are usable. And so there's really... This market is a fantastic market right now because they really are reaching out to the less technical. The fact is you're going to have to be somewhat technical. You're going to have to be somewhat savvy in the same way that, you know, when, when rap and that really hard rap was just coming out. Parents were like, "But I don't listen to my kids' music." Well, you're going to need to start, you know, or you're going to need to throw your hands up and say, what am I supposed to do? Like listening to your kids. Music is not the biggest challenge on earth, but you can't say, "I don't like what they're listening to, but I refuse to actually listen with them in some way." And to that point, I think that going back to netflow, it isn't something that you need to have the "eye of prophecy" upon you to be able to do. There are some wonderful tools that will make netflow easy to install, easy to digest, and will even set up alerts so that you don't have any traffic going to limewire or whatever, but if something starts, you'll get an alert when that happens. You know, there's stuff like that. And so I just want, again, even the non-technical parents to know netflow is one of those technologies that can give you a high degree of control. Keith: 31:06 And then there's some are like consumer grade, like friendly. I don't know how well they are because I don't have kids that young that I would install it. But you know, they have Disney. Disney has bought a, I think some companies or web protection companies and make it kind of disney-easy. I was trying to find the guy's name. He does, "This Week in Tech" with Leo LaPorte sometimes, Larry.. I want to say it's Magid, or... I can't pronounce, I can't remember the exact last name. I've tried to Google him and he runs something to the effect SafeKids.com. And he gives a lot of great tips on just protecting your kids online from, you know, kind of a kid friendly social media, to tools like this is, that's how I remembered the Disney tool. Because if, and when I give my granddaughter a phone, which, you know, I'm kind of, you know, this, this conversation station scares me. The fact what happened is when she just has naked LTE and I, you know, I'm trying to protect her from naked LTE. How do I do that exactly. And that name and product kind of stood up in my mind. Leon: 32:20 Got It. Yeah. And that's a good point is when you control the Internet, it's a simpler time, but once they have that cell phone in their hand and that cell phone can act as a hotspot or whatever, that was why I discovered Custodio honestly. And, and the person who turned me onto it was actually Destiny Bertucci, one of the other Technically Religious speakers. Because that works on the device regardless of where the Internet is coming from and you have control of it. Like, I literally, when my son is two states away, I can see that he's on a site I don't want and I can push a button and that site is no longer available to him. Period. End of sentence. Keith: 33:02 So what happens, uh, going into a little bit more technical, so if your child does a VPN somewhere, is that an automatic conversation? Like how do we protect against that? Josh: 33:13 Oh, you know, I'm just sitting here listening because I honestly have no sweet clue. I follow, I really, I honestly follow the Keith Townsend parenting model. I tell my kids, "Look, don't do that. If you do I might have to sell you." And so far so good. Keith: 33:32 Yeah, know, I think that's the thing. Once they get to that age, it becomes a conversation of... You guys, we have older kids, so you know, our kids have made life decisions sometimes that we don't necessarily agree with and learning to balance between, okay, I'm a father that's giving great advice, to I'm a father that's trying to nag my child to live their life the way that I want them to live. There's a balance and you know, once you get to that age that they can figure out VPN, they're actively going after this stuff. And that's a different conversation. You know, this People-Process-Technology... this is a people and process problem versus a technology problem. Leon: 34:11 I 100% degree. That doesn't mean that we necessarily throw our hands up because you know, one of the first things that my son went on youtube to find after we put Qustodio on was "how do you disable Qustodio" and the tutorials are all over the place and he was not particularly old or sophisticated. It was just, "you told me the name of the thing and I want to get rid of the thing and so I'm going to go find the...", but it was a conversation like, "Look it, you can get rid of this, you can probably find a way to work around it. And I will know sooner or later I'm going to find out. And at that point, you know, I'm going to have to fix the problem some other way." So Keith, to your question, I think that once your kids are starting to actively work around it, you're right, you may not be Johnny on the spot. You won't know it instantaneously. They're going to say, "Well, you know, I have a window of hours or days or weeks before mom and dad are going to notice." But I think that we have to impress upon them. We're gonna notice. And at that point we're going to have a really hard conversation about what that means. And my 19 year old who's, you know, in school with younger kids, you know, and those kids have burner phones to get around these particular things and stuff like that. And he's like, "You can do that, but they're going to find out - your teacher's going to find out and they're going to tell your parents... Like, it's not going to last that long. You're not, you haven't really fooled them. You've bought yourself maybe a day or two." And then a world of hurt comes after that, not to mention loss of trust. Keith: 35:46 And I think the key part is that world of hurt has to come. If the world of hurt doesn't come then. Leon: 35:53 Right, and not to say that it has to be punitive. I think that when your kids are at the age where they can install a VPN, unless they're really, really sophisticated at young age, but it's not about punitive, it's about "now we're going to talk about how you've broken my trust. Now we're going to talk about the interpersonal consequences of what that means. That that was a grownup choice and there's a grownup consequences about that." New Speaker: 36:20 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 36:32 Did you click on a link for Geeks gone wild last night? Keith: 36:35 And don't lie to me because I've already checked the log files!

GUEST BIO: Keith is currently a member of the Platform Team at Okta working on Identity and Authentication APIs. Previously he was an early Developer Evangelist at Twilio and before that he worked on the Ultimate Geek Question at the Library of Congress.  Keith’s underlying goal is to get good technology into the hands of good people to do great things. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Phil’s guest on today’s show is Keith Casey. For nearly two decades, he has been working in the IT industry.  During that time, he has worked as a systems developer, IT architect, technology officer, principal advisor and senior developer evangelist. He is now working for Okta as a member of their Platform Team, specifically on Identity and Authentication APIs. Keith is also a well-known public speaker. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (00.57) – So Keith, can you expand on that brief introduction and tell us a little bit more about yourself? Keith explains that his first job, after leaving college, was working at the Library of Congress, helping them to digitize everything. The lengths they go to capture every element of a piece of information is amazing. So, when people ask him how much data is held in the Library of Congress, he finds it impossible to give an accurate answer. Naturally, at this point, Phil asks him for the figure. Keith’s response is to explain, that when he got started there were no blogs, iTunes or any of the platforms that churn out a huge amount of information every day. Yet, it was estimated that the librarians would have had to catalog around 200 terabytes a day to have been able to keep pace with what was being produced, even back then. (2.28) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Keith’s top tip is to treat your career as an investment. Think about the long term, in the same way you would if you were investing in shares. So, when deciding if it is worth learning how to use a tool, think about how it will help you in both the short and the long term. By all means learn the tools you need to be able to do the job you are doing right now. But, make sure that you also pick up skills that you will be able to use for the next 5 to 10 years. (3.23) Phil agrees. He thinks there is too much short-termism, especially when it comes to learning programming languages. People tend to just learn what they need to get by on their current projects. But, fail to learn and understand the underlying principles.  (3.59) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. For Keith that was when he accidentally corrupted a huge news article database while working on an App for Associated Press, about 15 years ago. Fortunately, there was a backup. Unfortunately, it was 8 hours old. News happens continuously. So, even after the restoration, there were around 64,000 updates still missing. This was a tough way to learn not to do development work in production. (5.50) – What was your best career moment? For Keith that happened when he was working as a developer evangelist at Twilio developing the SMS API. As an evangelist, one of his key roles was to get out there and show that their stuff worked. Whenever possible, Keith and his colleagues would do a 5-minute demo in front of an audience. They would open an empty Vim file and build an application right there and then. Then use it to allow the people in the room to send them a text straight away. This demonstrated that their stuff really worked and was super quick and easy to use. For Keith these presentations gave him a huge lift. Seeing so many people’s eyes light up was amazing.  (7.38) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? The pervasiveness of today’s tech is something that Keith finds exciting. It is everywhere and touches every aspect of our lives. No matter what your passion is, you can get involved in tech. For example, if you are interested in farming, there are self-driving tractors, data analysis, drones and all kinds of other things. Working in tech no longer means sitting behind a screen most of the time. You can go out and touch the real world and see how what you are doing affects everyone.  (8.39) – What drew you to a career in IT? For Keith it was the fact that it is a great way to pay the bills. Interestingly, his desire to succeed in tech was also partly driven by the fact that he is a theatre geek. He really enjoyed the fact that IT opened up new ways for him to get things done in the theatre. (9.01) – Can you give us an example of how you used your IT skills in the theatre? Keith explained that using basic trigonometry they were able to set up microphone arrays along the edge of the stage. This enabled them to get the lighting rig to figure out where an actor was on stage and automatically follow them with a spotlight. (9.29) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? Keith says that has to be – “Help good people around you.” Do it without expecting anything back. Just help them because they are fantastic. Doing that has led to some really great things for Keith. Through this habit, he has developed several important personal and business relationships.  (10.02) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Keith says that he would probably go deeper into security, especially now that IoT is so big. For this to succeed, better security is essential. (10.32) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Actually, that is connected to what he was saying earlier about building up people around you.  He is currently working with an international startup accelerator program called TechStars. (11.00) – So, what sort of projects are involved in that? Keith explains it could be anything. But, he particularly likes getting involved with the ones that are for industries where the use of tech is still a fairly new thing. His focus tends to be on product market fit, especially for more technical products. (11.51) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Being able to get up on stage and explain a concept from beginning to end has proved to be very useful. If you can do that, you will win 80% of all conversations, simply because most other people cannot explain in such an effective way. Plus the fact that you are a public speaker means that you automatically get a certain level of respect. Interestingly, Keith learned his presentation skills largely as a result of being a theatre geek. (12.25) – Is that a skill that has evolved and developed over time? Keith explains that he still actively works at it. In particular, he studies the old school comics like Richard Pryor and Steve Martin. They do the same thing again and again, yet still manage to keep their audiences engaged. (13.09) – Phil asks Keith to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. Keith’s advice is not to be afraid to experiment. You do not necessarily have to restrict yourself to only learning things for which there is a pressing need.  Also, Keith says it is a good idea to learn through other people’s experience. BEST MOMENTS: (2.43) KEITH - "Treat your career as an investment." (3.25) PHIL –“I think there can be too much short-termism in terms of what people look out." (8.26) KEITH - "You don't have to just be behind a screen 24 seven, figuring how to build things.” (9.37) KEITH – “Help good people around you. You'll cross paths with fantastic people.” (13.33) KEITH - "Just go and learn things you will never be hurt by knowing more.” CONTACT KEITH: Twitter: https://twitter.com/caseysoftware LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseysoftware/

Why Dave Decided to talk to Chef Keith Snow: Chef Keith Snow rose through the ranks to become Executive Chef at one of Colorado's premier ski resorts and now has his own Harvest Eating Youtube Channel that focuses on teaching people how to make local and seasonal cooking a way of life. He authored the best selling cookbook: The Harvest Eating Cookbook, and also runs The Harvest Eating Podcast. Keith talks about funnels, how he used his experiences and passion to create several online learning cooking courses, and discusses ways online culinary learning can change your life. His online learning platform, Tasty Education, uses video to provide detailed and niche-focuses instruction for people. Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business: Using Free Plus Shipping Offer As A Funnel Method (4:28) Creating A Continuity Offer Sales Model (11:15) Funnel Stacking For Profits (17:57) Quotable Moments: "If I can get them into more peoples' hands without losing too much money by doing this free plus shipping offer, I'm going to be creating a lot more customers too." "You have to go into this at the very beginning saying, am I trying to get customers or am I trying to get buyers?" "A lot of people just always feel like they have to start with the lead magnet. There's nothing better than starting with someone actually paying you money. So start with that." Other Tidbits: Chef Keith Snow discusses how he utilizes Click Funnels in his business model and he gives quality tips and tricks based off his own personal experiences. He talks about the specifics behind his online course and discusses the importance of food storage and culinary learning. He prides himself in getting people to understand their pantry should be filled with food! Links: FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar ---Transcript--- Speaker 1:     00:00         Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward. Everybody. Welcome back this day Speaker 2:     00:18         Woodward, I'm your host. This is funnel hacker radio and you guys are in for a real treat today. I have the op team having Keith snow, chef Keith snow on the show today and Keith is a guy, has been crushing it as a chef for years and years and he's had his own TV show. He's got his own products and everything else, but he's been just trying to figure out the best way of getting things online as far as or as far as ingredients and spices and everything else, and I talk to you about this funnel he's got that's going crazy, but most importantly some of the cool stuff that you're going to learn not only about funnels, but also about building your own survival pantry and some of the other cool stuff that he's doing in his business. So Keith, welcome to the show. Speaker 3:     00:58         Hey Dave. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2:     01:00         I'm so happy. So happy to have you write a little bit of an issue last time on the record is we're gonna make sure this one works. So what I want to do, if you don't mind, is tell people a little bit about this whole idea as far as harvest eating. What is it that, what's this whole harvest eating thing you've got? What is your funnel? How's it work? Speaker 3:     01:17         Sure. Well, harvest. Anything was a brand that I started back in 2005 and that was right when the farm to table movement started happening. Everybody was still eating some low carb food. Then Atkins Diet and all that. But I was on the forefront with slow food international and doing um, farm to table cuisine. So I put up a website I just left. I'm a big job out in Colorado as executive chef of a ski resort. So I started researching and cooking and doing a lot of stuff in regards to the farm to table movement. I was a little ahead of time because it didn't really start to hit until about 2009. But throughout that period, like you mentioned, that had, um, tv shows and eventually I had my own cookbook still on Amazon. It's the harvest ddn cookbook. During that time I got into selling some products, some spices and sauces. And it's, uh, it's been just a lot of fun since that. Okay. Speaker 2:     02:18         What has been on your own site? You've got a shopify store. I think we're on a, in fact one of our buddies over at Amazon selling machine or I guess amazing selling machine now. A correct things there. Uh, did a podcast interview with you awhile back and recommended you guys. You take a look at click funnels. So you've only been on the platform here for just about a month, six weeks or so. I want to tell people a little bit about where you were before and what's happened in the last six weeks. Speaker 3:     02:45         Sure. Well, I didn't want to take my products into traditional retail where they've always been in the past and I had hooked up with, you know, consultants and a guy who helps people with Amazon stores Speaker 3:     02:59         and we, we were talking back in 2015 and he helped me get into Amazon and then he asked me recently to come on the show again and I did and he mentioned something that I guess was pretty profound. He's like, have you ever heard free plus shipping offer? And of course I'd never heard of a free plus shipping offer. It No. Didn't know what he was talking about. And then, um, he said, yeah, it gives people a chance to try your product to get a new customer. Um, you know, you have to give the product away, but they cover the shipping, shipping and handling. It's a great way to build your list because my product cells, the repeat sales and the lifetime value of the customer is very, very strong. So you said you need to get on click funnels. And of course I'd never heard of click funnels either. Speaker 3:     03:43         Um, I thought a funnel was something you used to put oil in the car, but he said no, it's a, it's an internet thing and you can sell stuff and it works really well and it's different from a website. So anyway, while I was on the call with them, they promised to help me set it up and I'm, they said a visit click funnels and it took me, I don't know, week or so to um, I got the free trial, quick funnels and started messing around and they helped me with some of the steps inside. Um, but through that time I realized that you guys have just amazing support. I use all kinds of software as a service programs from autoresponders to web hosts, shopify, all these different things that I use. Okay. Kill you when you have a problem. It takes a day or so to get any a help. Speaker 3:     04:28         But with quick funnels, even though it can be a touch complicated in the beginning, there's such amazing support and I'm talking to support no two, three times a week and those guys are amazing. Creating videos for me and helping me. And I launched the first funnel and it was this free plus shipping offer and it's sitting right now@awebsitecalledtryharvesteating.com and people can get a sample of one of our best selling spices and just pay for shipping. And then I had built a, a, an upsell offer for six jars, put it out there and just sent an email to my customer list and Whammo it started that day and that was like a mid June and I've been getting sales ever since. And what I'm noticing is that even though I give away the, the free jar, I'm getting a lot of people taking the upgrade. I've made a couple of hundred new customers since then and just the average ticket bigger then what I see it on shopify, like people will go there and they'll buy one or two jars. But I'm, I'm getting people, I'm buying the one and then buying six and then coming back and going right back to the bottle and taking another sample and buying six. So it's been a pretty cool Speaker 2:     05:46         good. I appreciate you sending me the spices. We've tried them over the weekend. Absolutely amazing. These are probably the best biases I've ever tasted. I can see why you've got such a, I think you told me last time you in like the 90, 92, 93 percent reorder rate, some crazy number like that. Yeah. Speaker 3:     06:04         It's insane. And people, people through the years, I've had customers since 2017, um, that are buying these in. They do not want to be without them and they just, Ah, they just love him. So that's why I thought, you know what, um, if I can get them into more peoples' hands without losing too much money by doing this free plus shipping offer, Speaker 3:     06:25         I'm going to be creating a lot more customers too. Market to, and to stay in touch with and uh, so far. Okay. It just works, you know, when you're, when you're doing it on Amazon, like I was, I mean, I have no control over the customer. I really can't email the customer. I don't know. I'm not allowed to send them off the site. So controlling the, uh, the, you know, the sales process and using something like click funnels, it's just a smart way to go and, and the software is really easy to use when you're building pages. I mean there's so many templates and it's drag and drop and I've used a lot of different, you know, squarespace wordpress, I mean, you name it, I've used it, but this is very easy to get the job done. Speaker 2:     07:08         Well, I appreciate your kind words, your testimonial. I want to talk more about your funnel right now and that is to try harvest eating.com. Highly recommend you guys go get these for one. Spices are absolutely amazing. I think you should fit not only the three northern Italian spice that you get by the way you mentioned as far as why. Why Italian spice? Why is that the first one instead of one of your barbecue spices or other things? Speaker 3:     07:31         Well, you know what I mean, I first started with that one back on June twelfth and that one really great and then people were contacting me on. I may have been a lot of the same people who knows, but people were contacting me on facebook saying, we want to try your steak seasoning, we want to try your Montana steak seasoning. I have three or four steak seasoning. So I then created a situation where people could choose one of three and uh, so they could go in there, they get a free spice and they just pick the one that they want. And that was working well too. Speaker 2:     08:03         Okay. Speaker 3:     08:03         But to be completely honest with you, I, I'm going to start having Amazon fulfill the, the free plus offers for me. I'm connecting my shopify store so that way it's okay. Mean when you get 30 orders in a day, all of a sudden you realize, wow, you're, you're a, you're in the shipping business. I want to be like Trey Lewellen, but I don't want to be a having a bunch of people hired for shipping. So what I've just done is I sent in a bunch of inventory to Amazon and then once they actually just got an email, they're checking it in today. Once it's all checked in, change the funnel to where the products are already built, I'll change it so people can pick up the one they want. But um, they were all going, you know, pretty equally. A lot of people are very familiar with. They like mine. Speaker 2:     08:54         I love. So the cool thing is, again, it's to ship, it's the two step order form, shipping, address and information on the front end. You didn't go to your range and you pay for the shipping a payment. There's an order form bump. It's a real low order form bump. It's like what was three 99, four 99 for the, uh, the video, Speaker 3:     09:14         I think it's three 99 for a series of right now it's 10 videos and I've got more of them than I'm editing, showing people how to use the spices because people through the years emailed me countless time. How do I use them, how do I use them? And I just, you know, I've got three, four decades of. I started cooking when I was 14 in restaurant. I'm 51 now, so I've been at the game a long time and I just thought, I mean, you put the spices on, you cook it, what is it? What do you need a recipe for? Why do you need instructions? But okay, you know, that's just me being an idiot because people, people need help with that. So I said, all right, that'll be my order bump. And I shot eight videos, edited those [inaudible] I do a lot of videos and then I um, started putting those for the order bump and a ton of people that have been taking them. Speaker 2:     10:04         No, I think it's great. I'm noticing basically even your free plus shipping prices. Six 99 even you're going to find there's not much difference. Twenty six, 99 and 99. I'd probably increased that to seven 99. Get an extra buck on the front end. Also on the three 99 on the video, how to bundle. I would, I would totally split test out on a much higher price point. Your take rate, I think you said is way above 40 percent on the video, right? Speaker 3:     10:29         Yeah. I think it's like 42 percent. Speaker 2:     10:32         That's honestly I would see about increasing that price point split, test that and see if you can get that into the eight, nine, $10 range, especially if it's you're getting 10 different videos or stuff about the spices and just play around with that. The cool thing is you go from there to the order form after the order form bump, the Oto is six of the spices and your take rate on that was phenomenal and I think the main thing I want people, you guys are listening to this realize that it's all a matter of split testing these things. Every price point and dollars and things they change and realize. You have to kind of go into this the very beginning saying, am I trying to get customers or am I trying to get buyers? I'm sorry, I'm trying to get just people are looking lucky. Loser. I really want buyers. That's the best thing about free plus shipping offers. You get that first dollar and that first dollar is the most important dollar because once they get that, then they'll continue to spend more and more and more with you. Obviously, Keith, you been in that situation to where you're seeing people are spending repeat dollars. Do you have a continuity offer on this? Speaker 3:     11:32         No, I am thinking about creating a continuity offer. When we talk about my online course, we'll talk about some continuity, but yes, planning on. I'm moving over a lot of my content to click funnels and then creating membership as part of this and letting them take that as an order bump to because there's a lot of that I don't have published. Yes. Dozens and dozens and dozens of videos and recipes that are very popular. So I'll probably create a continuity offer hopper with that. Um, yeah, I mean it's exciting looking at, um, my upsell is about 18 to 20 percent, 45 and a half percent on the order bump, so I think people would, um, go into some continuity as well. Speaker 2:     12:16         No, I think it's fantastic. So again, we're listening to understand the importance of getting someone. There's a big difference. A lot of people just always feel like they have to start with the lead magnet. There's nothing better than starting with someone actually paying you money. So start with that. I love what you've done on this aspect here. I would definitely keep that. Would take a look as far as increasing your prices. Uh, you're a premium product anyways. People are going to have any problem paying a little bit more for that kind of stuff. And then what I want to talk to you now about it. So now you've got this taste, this flavor for clickfunnels. You've gone ahead and you've started off with the free plus shipping product. You now have moved into a membership site. Tell people about what you're doing on the membership side. Speaker 3:     12:52         Sure. Well, I've got a, um, an online course. It's called food storage storage.com. And people can go there and they get a seven day free trial and after that it's $97 a year. And what the course is, oh, there's a lot of people that store food for emergencies for whatever zombies coming, but there's millions of people that store rice, beans, wheat, oats, you can buy the stuff in bulk. And then there's tons of people that are looking to lower their grocery bill. So I created this course, food storage fees. And what it does is it helps people, first of all, understand why everybody's pantry should be filled with food. Particularly if you have children. There's really no excuse not having food in there in case you know there's a power outage, a snow storm and ice storm or hurricane, whatever it might be. Hopefully we don't see a 2008 again, but a job loss. It could be an injury or anything like that can cause people a lot of stress. And if you've got a pantry full of food, the number one thing mess up is taken care of. It's insurance that you can eat. So I, I take people through why they need to store food, which foods to store. And then to date there's close to 60 videos showing people how to cook. Speaker 3:     14:09         Amazing foods, amazing recipes with very inexpensive food like rice and beans and wheat and oats and that has been a very successful course for me. Um, and people go on there and I can see who logs in and they log in all the time and they're just using the recipes and it's just been a great ride of course, but it's always been over@teachable.com and that's a pretty good service. But there's not a lot of, you know, like I called them up and said, hey, uh, what if somebody, you know, a lot of people aren't going to just spend $97, but can I get their email address? And then they said, yeah, you can, you can go to Zapier and you can create a zap and input this and you got to put in custom css code and you've got to call someone checklist Slovakia to program it and you know, all this kind of garbage. And in the end, um, there was just no easy way to collect email addresses. And I just find a lot of limitations on the, um, on the platform as far as the selling side, delivering the course materials quite well. So this is why after I saw the spice funnel taking off and saw how easy it was, I knew that I needed to build the, um, the, the selling effort through click funnels. So now that Speaker 3:     15:25         the chorus is sitting there at food storage fees that come with the free trial and um, you know, that's continuity there. It's $97 a year and there is just an incredible amount of video material for people to use. And you know, this course was originally designed for, um, you know, preppers and homesteaders and folks that store who, but what we found through the last couple years is that a lot of folks like moms that are looking to save money and families, um, that want to get out of debt. The whole Dave Ramsey crowd, uh, they have found the course and they use it. And I mean, I'm telling you right now, your buddies, if you need an extra $500 a month sitting in your pantry right now and I can guarantee you that if you eat at home or if you eat out and you start cooking at home and using the foods that are in this course, you will save a lot of money. And I, and I witnessed it for myself and we didn't suffer. And that was the important thing is the family loved it, the kids loved it. And they're exciting foods that I have in there. I mean, there's a lot of them. Speaker 2:     16:28         Ethnic Speaker 3:     16:29         cuisine. I'm looking inside the course. Speaker 2:     16:33         I'm just going to give you a couple of things. I mean to interrupt you on this one. So I grew up is that I'm a member of the church. Jesus Christ, Latter Day saints frequently knows Mormons. And so I, we've always been counseled to safe store food, you know, your supply of food and all this kind of stuff. And I remember growing up and having like dried milk, powdered milk was like the worst thing in the world. It was like just terrible, terrible, and I remember seeing all this stuff and I've even, I've got tons of food we've restored and typically it's been this freeze dried stuff that we bought on this. I bought from some, some supplier online and we never ever use it and so I was going through this thing. I'm actually looking here. You've got spiced corn pudding, a Thai fried rice, potato cakes, Korean barbecue beef. Then it's in Chili with beans, salt, cod potato cakes. I'm going, I never had any of that kind of stuff at all when we're looking at. Speaker 3:     17:25         Right. Speaker 2:     17:26         And I can guarantee that freeze dried stuff doesn't taste even half as good as these pictures look. So I'm really kind of impressed as far as what you've done. But I want to find out from, from a, from a funnel standpoint, if a person comes in on the seven day free trial, how many of them are actually, uh, taking the $97 per your membership? Speaker 3:     17:46         Well, to be honest, I don't have a lot of data because I really just. I'm just put it up. I mean, it's only been up a day or so and I have not marketed to it yet, so I don't have a lot of data Speaker 2:     17:57         that's not a problem. I think the great thing about, and really what I hope people who are listening will take away his. You're doing what we refer to as far as funnel stacking, where you've found one funnel on the front end, which is your free plus shipping offer. You're getting customers and your clients over there. You're making money on, you're acquiring these customers really at a profit and then you're turning around and introduce them, how to actually consume what you just sent them, which is just a brilliant model and I think it's fantastic. It's so you take a look who's ever listened to realized that one of the best things to do to really enhance it from a funnel stack is whatever product you're offering on the front end, you try to find some product they can purchase. They will actually teach them how to consume what they just purchased. It's been great for us. If you take a look at click funnels, we did the exact same thing with funnel Fridays where we go ahead and our funnel Fridays every single week, Jim Edwards and Russell get on and basically teach people, build a funnel for people on exactly how to use click funnels. You're doing it and they're actually paying you for it. So congrats. I think that's awesome. Speaker 3:     18:59         Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more and I'm, I'm a person that, you know, when those guys told me about click funnels, I immediately went and got Russell's book and read through it and um, I wanted to see exactly how you guys run your funnels and I've got to click funnels. Tee shirts. Alright. A tee shirt. The other day I went to a party and I had on like quickly tee shirts and uh, yeah, I wasn't as in your net. Well you're not in Salt Lake City, Utah and Idaho, but I was up in Salt Lake City and this guy, I walked in and he goes, oh, you're a click funnel. What's that? It was pretty interesting, but that's neat how you guys, um, how you brand yourself. Okay. Yeah, Speaker 3:     19:41         yeah, I'm finding that with the spices this funnel is giving, giving me a lot more control over the customer and it's allowing me to suggest different things and kind of keeping them, I want them to say no before they leave and this is a great way to do it. So I've got a feeling that the food storage course is going to do real well here and if people go to food storage fees.com, they can get a good idea of what's in there because there's quite a few videos that are just on the sales page and those are full length videos they can watch. But it's interesting and this has been something that, uh, that the course has done really well, particularly when I do an interview. Like I've done some pretty big radio interviews and um, you know, it's really, it's really produced. So I'm very hopeful that I can build it up and I think this is the way to do it with. Speaker 2:     20:35         Well, I appreciate that. Well, we look forward to following up with you probably in a year or so. And Sienna, senior status. I love having people who are brand new to click funnels are just getting started and using this kind of case they will follow up in about a year, see kind of where things are, but for those you guys who are listening to understand, again, the whole idea here is make sure you, you realize the principal, you kind of funnel stack the great thing that keats been doing here as I mentioned earlier, as he's as one funnel, which is basically a free plus shipping offer, acquiring customers at a profit and then turning around and communicating directly with them and introducing them into way to consume their product through his a membership course. So take a look at, try harvest eating.com. The links will be down in the show notes and then also take a look@foodstoragefeast.com and take a look at that. You'll kind of see the funnels that he's using and how things are working for them and most importantly a applied to your own business. See how things are going there. Keith, as we get close to wrapping things up, any parting words? Speaker 3:     21:31         No, just um, I would advise people to, you know, if they have anything to sell, whether it be information or products, you know, stores are great, Amazon is great, but um, you know, if you're on Amazon and I know because I'm in the Amazon community, a lot of forums and facebook groups, they can drop you in a moment's notice and I know people that were $50,000 a month on Amazon one day, one day, the next day they have no income, so this is really smart way to do it and sure you can just do an online store, but this gives you a lot more control and your average ticket goes up. So I would definitely advise people to look into quick funnels and the cost of it and the support that you get it, you know, it's, it's a winter. So, Speaker 2:     22:16         so much. Keith, I appreciate it. Have a great day. Hey Dave, thanks a lot. Speaker 4:     22:21         Hey everybody. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to podcasts. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me where I'm trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over $650,000 and I just want to get the next few hundred thousand so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and and get this out to more people at the same time. If there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, by all means, just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and I'll be more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if people would like me to interview more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you. So again, go to Itunes, rate and review this, share this podcast with others and let me know how else I can improve this or what I can do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.

When DC Entertainment finally released details about their new streaming service -- dubbed DC Universe -- the Classics Crew was ready for it. Aside from the four shows announced, there was little news about which legacy content, if any, would be included. So Keith, Britney, and Nick got together to speculate about which Classic shows they'd like to see on the service. In addition to certain shows like Smallville, Batman 66, and Wonder Woman, the Crew would also like to see the return of the animated DC Nation block that used to appear on Cartoon Network, a "Turner Classic Movies" approach that features classic superhero films in the Warner Bros. catalog, and an option to view failed pilots that never aired. The Crew also makes a pitch for an in-studio version of the podcast! Find DC TV Classics on: Social Media: Facebook – @DCTVClassics – Instagram Subscribe: iTunes – Stitcher Radio – YouTube – DC TV Podcasts  – Google Play – iHeartRadio Contact: dctvclassics@gmail.com Support: TeePublic Store

Recently, Kevin Conroy jokingly suggested fans should start a campaign to get him cast as Bruce Wayne in a live action Batman Beyond movie. So Keith and Britney started brainstorming fan casts for said live action Batman Beyond! Tune in to find out the actors each host chose for their fantasy casts -- including Ryan Potter, Ross Butler, Zendaya, Yara Shahidi, Ethan Hawke, and Rosario Dawson -- and why Keith's live action Batman Beyond is basically Spider-Man: Homecoming. Find DC TV Classics on: Social Media: Facebook – @DCTVClassics – Instagram Subscribe: iTunes – Stitcher Radio – YouTube – DC TV Podcasts Contact: dctvclassics@gmail.com

So Keith and I went to Washington this weekend to see the Foo Fighters’ 20 Anniversary Sonic Highways 4th of July America Fuck Yeah Day festival and while we navel gaze somewhat more than usual this is a very special[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry... The post 9to5 Entertainment System 89: Fuck You New Dad appeared first on 9to5 (dot cc).