Podcasts about so pete

Today former Seattle mayor and Executive Director of America Walks Mike McGinn joins Crystal  to dissect the most recent finance numbers in the mayor's race and break down what they mean, and discuss how Seattle mayoral candidates are seeking to position themselves in this year's race. Then tea is spilled about how Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes doomed the SPD consent decree from the start, how his challenger, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, looks to be qualifying for Democracy Vouchers sooner than him, and how that race might unfold.  As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Find the host, Crystal Fincher on Twitter at @finchfrii, and find today's co-host, Mike McGinn, at @mayormcginn. More info is available atofficialhacksandwonks.com.   Resources “Effort to Expand Hotel Shelters Has Broad Support, Recycled Statements Replace False Endorsement Claims on Compassion Seattle Website” from Publicola:https://publicola.com/2021/06/09/effort-to-expand-hotel-shelters-has-broad-support-recycled-statements-replace-false-endorsement-claims-on-compassion-seattle-website/ “Police Make Mass Arrests at Protest Against Oil Pipeline” by Hiroko Tabuchi, Matt Furber, and Coral Davenport: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-protest-native-americans.html Campaign finance reports from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission: http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/elections/campaigns.aspx?cycle=2021&type=campaign&IDNum=749&leftmenu=collapsed “Democracy vouchers play crucial role as candidates compete for cash in Seattle mayoral race” by Daniel Beekman and Jim Brunner:https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/democracy-vouchers-play-crucial-role-as-candidates-compete-for-cash-in-seattle-mayoral-race/ “Pete Holmes to seek fourth term as Seattle City Attorney” by David Kroman:https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/02/pete-holmes-seek-fourth-term-seattle-city-attorney “Abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kenney Announces Last-Minute Run for City Attorney” by Mark Van Streefkerk: https://southseattleemerald.com/2021/06/10/abolitionist-nicole-thomas-kennedy-announces-last-minute-run-for-city-attorney/ “Seattle police funding debate turns to flawed officer behavior system” by David Kroman:https://crosscut.com/news/2021/05/seattle-police-funding-debate-turns-flawed-officer-behavior-system “Can the Seattle Police Department Consent Decree Be Fixed?” by Paul Kiefer:https://publicola.com/2021/06/03/can-the-the-seattle-police-department-consent-decree-be-fixed/ “Court Monitor Bobb Helped Create Seattle's Police Reform Mess” by Doug Trumm:https://www.theurbanist.org/2020/09/14/court-monitor-bobb-helped-create-seattles-police-reform-mess/ “Seattle police had a chance to prove abolitionists wrong. They didn't.” by Shaun Scott:https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/05/seattle-police-had-chance-prove-abolitionists-wrong-they-didnt   Transcript Crystal Fincher: [00:00:00] Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with Policy Wonks and Political Hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work, with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes.  Today, we're continuing our Friday almost-live shows where we review the news of the week with a cohost. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show, former mayor of Seattle, and today's co-host: activist, community leader, and current Executive Director of America Walks, the excellent Mike McGinn. Mike McGinn: [00:00:57] I always enjoy being here Crystal and I am a subscriber to Hacks & Wonks on the podcast platform of my choice. So go to the podcast platform of your choice and subscribe and support Crystal and KVRU.  Crystal Fincher: [00:01:14] Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you. And we always get a lot of comments whenever you're on the show, because you kind of bring the heat when it comes to context and history of like - okay, lots of people moved to Seattle in the past 10 years. I mean, we've had a population explosion - so a lot of people listening today and here in the City were actually not here when you were mayor, and don't have the memory of what happened, and are missing the context of a lot of what happened. How did we get into this Consent Decree situation? What initially happened back when Jenny Durkan was a federal prosecutor and Pete Holmes was running for office, and how did we get into the situation we find ourselves in today? You have a lot of that context, so we appreciate it.  Speaking of that context, we have some - a lot of news this week. Looking over - just lots of items have happened this week - Compassion Seattle having to take down its webpage listing false endorsements, we got tax documents on billionaires. Big items this week with - the Olga Park encampment sweep by the City,  Durkan vs. Seattle Public Schools on the encampment in Bitter Lake, hybrid work models coming back with Amazon, the state reinstating around a 100,000 driver's license and halting the practice of revoking licenses for non-payment of traffic fines, three pipeline protests - the Line 3 pipeline protests, Keystone XL pipeline finally dead - which is great and awesome.  But we'll start out with - we just got new fundraising numbers in the mayoral race. Well, in all of the Seattle races, but I guess we can start with the mayoral race and just for the breakdown - where we are currently at. The top six mayoral candidates right now, in terms of contributions - Colleen Echohawk and Andrew Grant Houston are right neck-and-neck at $399,987 and $[399,]978 respectively. There is a $400,000 cap initially on the ability to accept Democracy Vouchers, and so they are at that cap and can't cash in anything beyond that cap. Following that, Bruce Harrell at $308,000, Lorena González at $299,000, Jessyn Farrell $134,000, and Casey Sixkiller at $43,000.  So, you know, Colleen Echohawk and Andrew Grant Houston are just - they're just getting more cash than they know what to do with. And I think both of them - certainly Andrew Grant Houston has reported a significant amount of vouchers, basically in waiting, that he has banked if and when the cap on those expenditures gets raised. So I guess, how are you looking at this? Just on that number - the contributions and what they're doing, Mike. Mike McGinn: [00:04:15] I think it's very, it's really interesting. You know one of - there's a few things that are interesting. One, it is worth noting that there is a $400,000 cap on expenditures for those that are in the Democracy Voucher program, and if an opponent or if an independent expenditure campaign tips the balance over $400,000, then Ethics and Elections can give permission to people to do more. I think what really jumps out at me though, is that the two people in the race that are not office holders seem to have had the most success just collecting vouchers. Now Andrew Grant Houston hired people to do it, and they're out there canvassing and collecting them. And so that's one technique. I think Colleen Echohawk - they've just been coming in.  And it's kind of surprising because you'd expect that the people that had held office before - Jessyn Farrell, Bruce Harrell, Lorena González - they all have, should have substantial mailing lists. They should all have a substantial base of donors who are used to giving them money for their campaigns. They both, all three of them, have run multiple times and - but none of them have maxed out. None of them have hit the cap. Theoretically, they have a more sophisticated campaign operation, including the database and donors, to hit that first. So if these numbers are affirming what some of the polling that we've seen has shown, which is that there's a sentiment out there that the City's on the wrong track - the right track, wrong track numbers are very much leaning towards wrong track from multiple sources. And so that's favoring outsiders. And I - in 2009 when I ran, I was an outsider and it ended up - and I was running against an incumbent, Greg Nickels. There was another outsider in the race, Joe Mallahan - he was a businessman who put in his own money. And everybody always looked at fundraising, and I didn't fundraise that much compared to the others, but I fundraised enough. But the incumbent had the most money. Another candidate in the race was a long-time City Councilmember, Jan Drago, and they both finished out of the - neither of them made the top two out of the primary. So in a lot of ways, honestly, this feels to me like 2009 in that political dynamic of the outsider is going to do better.  I had to wait for the votes to actually show that there was public sentiment for me. The use of the Democracy Vouchers is a measure of public sentiment. And it's kind of fascinating to me 'cause political types, before Democracy Vouchers, just were meticulous at looking at who donated to who, and how much money they had - and they would use that as a metric for success. Now that Democracy Vouchers are out there, they're like, "Ah, money doesn't really matter anymore." Well, hold it. The outsiders are maxing out with regular people handing over the vouchers, and the insiders with all of their political apparatus are struggling to get to the finish line. Something's going on out there - that's what this is telling me.  Crystal Fincher: [00:07:35] Yeah, it is really interesting to see this dynamic. And as you point out, it is not the people who you would think have very established mailing lists and contacts and donor bases from the campaigns that they ran to get elected in the first place. And this may be a measure of insider money versus outsider or regular people who typically aren't intimately involved, particularly early in campaigns and this process. So it is really interesting just to see the effect that Democracy Vouchers have had. And as you point out, it really is a measure of, "Hey, where are regular people at" - that you have to actually interact with the residents, in some form with your campaign, to get these Democracy Vouchers. And my goodness, they have gotten a lot more of them than their opponents at this point in time.  But also, related to this conversation, and you talk about in your campaign - you didn't raise as much money as the other candidates, but you certainly had enough to execute your plan. Yeah, and get your message out. And so having the cash-on-hand in order to do that is important. And so - one, is just looking at the contributions, but really what a lot of people are looking at in politics is, "Okay. But how much money do you have - meaning you try and keep your expenditures on other items down, because the more you can spend directly communicating with residents and voters in the City, the better you are when it comes - to be able to turn out that vote. The cash-on-hand story is actually a very different story. Colleen Echohawk actually has not spent much on the race - she has spent $83,000. Her cash-on-hand is $316,000 - so that's in the bank still able to be spent. Andrew Grant Houston has actually spent the most so far out of the top six candidates in the race. And so even though he's raised $400,000, his cash-on-hand $134,000, which is less than the next two people in terms of fundraising. Bruce Harrell has $220,000 in cash-on-hand. Lorena González has $149,000 in cash-on-hand, then Jessyn Farrell with $58,000, and Casey Sixkiller with $26,000 on-hand. So that's a very different story than just that top line of fundraising, and really impacts how many people you can communicate with outside of free media models like news - in the paper and online - and communicating with people that way. What do you see when you look at that?  Mike McGinn: [00:10:20] Well, you're right.  Obviously cash-on-hand is the metric that matters. And the fundraising from Democracy Vouchers and from donors is some measure both of the degree to which you have support from some base of supporters, as well as the degree to which you have support from people that are used to giving money. So it's a little bit of an indicator as well.  So that's - so what's interesting to me when I look at that and you see the two bottom people - Casey Sixkiller doesn't appear to be a very serious candidate right now. Like if he was a credible challenger from - so I'll back up a little bit - we've spoken about this before. You know, there's generally a right lane and a left lane in Seattle politics. There's an assumption here that Casey is in the right lane - looking for more support from the business communities, a former - he is the deputy mayor to the incumbent. Well, whether it's the business community or the public, it doesn't appear that people think that a current deputy mayor to Jenny Durkan is a really good investment of their Democracy Voucher or their hard-earned dollars, either one. So not looking like he's getting much traction there for people who are - who might be more sophisticated about who to back. I think that Jessyn Farrell is down at this low level - kind of says the same thing. I mean, she's run multiple times in Seattle. She had a mayoral race four years ago, in which she ran a credible race, and she's just not kind of getting the support. And something else jumped out at me - and it was listening to your podcast, Crystal - is that she's a backer of the Compassion Seattle measure, which is starting to become a real indicator of what lane are you in. And when she says that she supports the Compassion Seattle - tells me that she wants to run in the right lane. And actually we spoke about this at length in a podcast a while ago. I said, she's not running in the left lane.  Crystal Fincher: [00:12:27] You called it first.  Mike McGinn: [00:12:28] I called it first - right! She's working the right lane because the Compassion Seattle is very much backed by the business community as their solution. And what we see is that Echohawk and Houston and Lorena are opposed to it and so they're over there in the left lane. And Harrell and Farrell and Sixkiller are for it, so that's the right lane. Well, it just kind of speaks a little bit to the fact that Jessyn can't quite figure out her lane. And I could talk more about this concept too, but that's just really fascinating to me. And I think there's another thing - that's if you'll permit me just to do a little bit of analysis.  Crystal Fincher: [00:13:04] Have at it!  Mike McGinn: [00:13:05] I'll just do a little more analysis here that comes to mind. You know, when I was working within the Sierra Club and endorsing candidates, what really became clear to me was that there was a - there were kind of two sources of candidates as well that don't map exactly with the left lane-right lane, but mostly. And the Chamber of Commerce and the downtown business community was one source of dollars in support for a candidate, and labor as a whole was another source. So in 2001, it was Nickels versus Sidran, and that was a classic business candidate versus a labor candidate. Every other constituency in town kind of has to decide who - where do we go with that? And social services tends to go with labor, and environmentalists go with labor, but sometimes there's a business candidate they like. The neighborhood people - where are they going to go. But all of those other constituencies or communities, and it might be immigrant and refugee communities, or the Black community - they don't necessarily run their own candidates. They tend to have to line up behind the business candidate or the labor candidate. Now when I ran, Greg, at that point - Nickels had been in office for eight years, and he pretty much had both. That's one of the things that an incumbent can do, right? What'll happen is - everybody's getting just enough out of the incumbent that they don't want to take a risk on a challenger. So he had the Chamber of Commerce, which I think was a little shaky on Greg Nickels. He wasn't their guy from the beginning and he had a big chunk of the unions, and I was coming in without either of those. And so was Joe, but then he got business, and I got a little bit of labor in the general.  By the time we got to 2013, we saw a really interesting phenomenon, which was a traditional Democrat in Ed Murray. He had the Chamber support and he had a bunch of labor support. I had some too, but we split labor. And now we, all of a sudden, we saw this business-labor alliance in '13 anoint Ed Murray as the candidate. And this was worked out by the kingmakers and the power elites of the city, right. And I know that sounds a little exaggerated, but trust me - there are specific people who sit down and pick who their candidate is. Same thing happened with Jenny Durkan, who was the named candidate. She picked up the Labor Council endorsement, the Construction Trades - which like highways and other things, backed her. The police officer's union was part of that at the time. So for two cycles in a row, we got these coalitions of labor-business candidates.  And now in this race, all of a sudden, we have a very clear labor candidate in Lorena González and a pretty clear business candidate in Bruce Harrell. And going back to Jessyn, I think she was running as if she could be one of those business-labor hybrid candidates of the last two cycles, but that coalition has broken apart. Now it's a straight business and a straight labor. But what's fascinating is that in the years, the same forces that have now - give us two different candidates, right. But business and labor can't find common ground now - that's too much inequality, too much issues around taxes and homelessness - for them to be able to find a candidate to bridge that. And I, again, I think Jessyn was trying to run as that candidate. They can't do it, but the same forces that produce that dynamic also means that candidates that are outside of those two bases are credible.  So, if you look at the - if you look at the citywide City Council race, we kind of have the same dynamic. We have a business candidate in Sara Nelson, we have the labor candidate in Brianna Thomas, and then you have the neither-of-the-above candidate, Nikkita Oliver, who's coming with a base of support that's completely outside of those two usual centers of gravity and power in the City. So that's kind of the question in this race - is does Colleen Echohawk come from her background as a social services provider, Native American woman? Does Andrew Grant Houston somehow or another slingshot off of the urbanist base. And again, neither of them are going to get very many endorsements from labor, business or a lot of the other traditional players, because everybody's kind of used to - you got to go with one of those. I didn't get any of those in the primary in '09 and I won, right? So it's a very interesting dynamic this year and I think Democracy Vouchers really pushes that even more. And there's no room left for somebody who's trying to be like progressive enough for progressives, but a dealmaker enough for the conservatives. There's no room for that candidate in this cycle - anybody's trying to run that way is like - there's no base for them.  Crystal Fincher: [00:18:30] Well, and as you've mentioned before and mentioned earlier today, what were you polling at before you won the primary, like six weeks out?  Mike McGinn: [00:18:38] Yeah, no, this is really important stuff - like people see the polls, and the fact that what it shows right now - and these are candidate polls, so take it with a grain of salt. But it kind of shows that Bruce and Lorena are doing better than others, but they're also better known than others. About five to six weeks out before the primary, maybe three weeks out before ballots dropped - and I was at 7% in 2009 in the primary, Greg Nickels was at 23% or something like that, Joe Mallahan was at 7%, and a former City Councilwoman Jan Drago - or current City Councilwoman at the time, Jan Drago - was like at 15% or 16% or something like that. But when Election Day came around, Mallahan and I were - I was first, he was second, and Greg was third and he hadn't moved.  And the point is that polls right now - the voters aren't paying attention yet. And all of the materials, all of that money we were talking about - hasn't been spent on campaign communications yet. The messages have not been delivered, right? Like the articles about who should I vote for, the conversations that are just going to start occurring around town of who you're for and why - none of that's really happened yet. And when that happens, that changes those numbers dramatically. And that's why, you can try to crystal ball it and say - no pun intended - but you can try and crystal ball this and say, "Well, here's what I think is going to happen." And we've been doing a little bit of that here saying, "Oh, it's an outsider year, right?" Like that's what the hints are telling us, but it's - this is really an up-in-the-air election, I would say. And having polling at 20% right now, or 15%, if you're a relatively well-known politician in town - that may be your lid. That may be as high as you can go, and your numbers might go lower once they hear about another candidate. Crystal Fincher: [00:20:37] Yeah, and it's an interesting dynamic - you certainly raise a lot of very relevant and helpful issues for context in how to think about this race. When I look at these numbers, I think about what you mentioned earlier in terms of the right track-wrong track polling, and for me, how insufficient it is just to ask that question and make an assumption on that answer. Because right now people ask about the right track-wrong track and the media, I think, has created a popular impression that the City's actions are those of the City Council. But actually when you look at the City Council and Jenny Durkan, both of whom can be characterized as the City - those are two very different viewpoints, two very different philosophies and stances on issues. The City Council has vetoed what Durkan has done, so there's polarization there. And so when someone says things are on the right track, the thing that I see a lot of people doing is concluding - "Well, therefore it means that real people want the issues and the stances that I personally agree with, and this is the proof because people say things are wrong and bad right now."  But looking at - if we're using these fundraising numbers and others, especially with Democracy Vouchers from real people as a - some kind of indicator as to where people are really at. The people, as you talked about, if we're using Compassion Seattle as kind of the most visible proxy for which lanes people are in, those that are not supporting are just dominating in terms of fundraising and Democracy Vouchers. So in terms of the wrong track that the City is taking - is it that some of the inaction and opposition to being able to execute the direction that the City Council has given - is that the frustration? Like, "Hey, at least do something instead of just vetoing stuff and saying stuff is unacceptable, but not doing that much about it." Or is it that people are unhappy with the direction of the Council - looking at the available polling, and to be clear - undecided is the top vote-getter right now in every single poll that's been written, internal and otherwise. So to your point, lots of movement yet to come. But with that, it would suggest that people aren't that unhappy with the Council, as some media narratives suggest, with Lorena making it into the top two, but also not being tied to an insider or wanting to go further to the left if you look at Andrew Grant Houston, or even some of Colleen Echohawk, stances. So it's to be determined where people are at in ultimately deciding what they prefer the direction of the City to be. But I don't think it can be gleaned from a right track-wrong track number. I think that's probably a poor indicator. Mike McGinn: [00:23:40] Yeah.I think that there's a few things in there. One is the - I think for people that are more involved in politics, there's very definitely a Council-versus-the-mayor dynamic that's been going on for the last number of years. And for people who side with the Council in that fight, and for the most part - for the most part, almost everything - I do. That matters in the race. But there's a lot of other people who can't parse that, who don't really feel like they're in a position to figure out who's really right or wrong in that discussion. And I think that's one of the challenges then if you are a current City Councilmember, or even a former one in Bruce's case, right? He was in office in the years in which homelessness went up - and to say, "I'm the person who can come in and fix it." - that's going to be a challenge.  And Lorena will have the same challenge. Having said that, she's probably and is drawing support in particular from labor - unions - for the things that she has delivered for them. Like she has stood up on issues that have led for labor to support her. So it is a mixed bag. I guess I would - speaking from personal experience, I wish that the public had taken a closer look at what was the underlying issues between the City Council and me at the time I was mayor, but I have to say, I know a lot of voters didn't. And a lot of those were just like, "You know what. It seems like the mayor and the Council aren't getting along. We need to get someone new in there." And not only did they - not only did I lose a close race to somebody who said, "I'm going to do everything McGinn did, except I'll do it better." Both of them were false - you'll grant me the opportunity to say that opinion. But, uh - but that was -  Crystal Fincher: [00:25:35] I agree.  Mike McGinn: [00:25:35] - that was his pitch - no ideological issues. "I'm just gonna, I'll just be better at doing it." But they also delivered districts - elections - which was a repudiation of the City Council in the same election. So when the mayor and the Council are fighting, the pox on both your houses thing is real and strong. And so the last point I'll make is - these right track-wrong numbers I've been seeing are really high. They were far higher than they were in 2009 when I ran. And again, an incumbent lost then - and right then the right track-wrong track weren't that far apart then. So these are very - these are historically high right track-wrong track if these polls are accurate. And I think we'll  see more polls that will show it to be that. Which is why I think it's an outsider election, but I also know it's also wide open. And I think the candidates know that too, right now. If you're a mayor watcher, everybody's going to be trying to figure out how do I grab my votes out of that pool of undecided voters? What do I have to do to get some votes? And I think you're going to see candidates working harder to stand out in the next few weeks.  Crystal Fincher: [00:26:47] All right. So we have covered the conversation about the mayor's race in more detail than we thought we were going to get into, but I definitely also want to make sure to talk about the City Attorney race. And so how are you looking at this - with Pete Holmes currently there, but with his challenger, Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, at this point actually qualifying for Democracy Vouchers. Even though she entered the race much later than he did, she's qualifying for Democracy Vouchers before Pete Holmes. Why do you think that is? Mike McGinn: [00:27:22] Well, I think this is really fascinating. I mean, it's pretty clear from her own words that Nicole Thomas-Kennedy got into the race pretty much at the last minute, because she thought it was really important to raise issues, about police reform in particular. And like candidates have discovered before - they get into the race just because they feel they need to carry a conversation, then all of a sudden they discover that maybe there's some momentum behind that. I think that was true with Kshama Sawant against Richard Conlin - I think she got into that race the first time she was elected to the City Council to make sure there was a debate and discovered she had momentum. I think that happened to Bernie Sanders when he entered the race against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic primary and all of a sudden he discovered he had momentum. And I think the same thing has happened to Nicole Thomas-Kennedy.  We were talking about insider or outsider - Pete's been in office for 12 years. And, you know, he, he came in as a progressive reformer on a variety of issues, very much supported by the nightclub industry at the time, because of the way the Nickel's administration was harsh to nightclub establishments. But he came into office - it's been 12 years and it looks like the public is ready for someone different, if the voucher numbers are to be believed. Now I'm not saying that that's how this race is going to turn out, but that there was more support for a challenger than probably Pete anticipated or Nicole Thomas-Kennedy anticipated.  Crystal Fincher: [00:28:54] And a lot of people in the public anticipated. Why do you think there is seemingly this much of an appetite, even an early appetite - looking at early endorsements and meetings and how those are going among insiders. Even those are turning out to be tougher for Pete Holmes than I think a lot of people anticipated. What's going on? Mike McGinn: [00:29:16] Well, you know, I think Pete's found himself in a - well, if you want to try to pin it down - he's been in office 12 years. And I was thinking about this the other day - I think since I signed the Consent Decree in 2012, that there've been 5 mayors, if you count a couple of interims. I think there've been 5 police chiefs, counting interims. Several City Council presidents, we've even had two Monitors - but during that entire 12 years, we've only had one City Attorney and that's Pete Holmes. And he positions himself as a reformer, and essential to reform. In fact, I've heard him say, "You can't ask me to leave now because we have to finish the job of reform." Well, we've been told - we were being told for years by the Monitor and mayors - that reform was on track and Pete was joining that chorus. And what we saw with the protests, and the police behavior, and tear-gassing the public - leading to a federal court order against it. What we see is that reform failed. And Pete says he was at the helm of that, but now he has to be there to help fix it. And I think that from the progressive side, they see that he's not really solving the problems that he says he's for. And I had my own experiences with Pete, obviously, but he has been throughout this entire process, a big supporter - he basically chose the Monitor we ended up with. I wanted a different Monitor. He got 5 members of the City Council to vote for Merrick Bobb - this is the Monitor who brought us this software system, which everybody says costs millions of dollars, and it's completely ineffective, but we have to keep using it - it's useless. In fact, when he proposed that and I objected to it - and Pete supported it in front of the judge. And helped bring it - that was in the monitoring plan. That software - people don't know this - that software was not in the Consent Decree. That software was brought up by the Monitor, put into a monitoring plan, objected to, but Pete said, "No, that's my monitor, and that's his plan and we have to support it." So Pete needs to take responsibility for that waste of money too.  He delayed, for years, the adoption of the accountability legislation, because he had to put his hand in to deal with the Community Police Commission's recommendations. And he never had good relationships with the Community Police Commission.  And here - I'll share news with you that probably no one knows 'cause I don't know that I've ever shared it before. Breaking news. When we mediated - when I mediated the Consent Decree with the Office of Civil Rights, the mediator kept two people out of the mediation. Nobody had to ask her, she just chose to do it. There were two people not allowed in that mediation. One was Jenny Durkan. The other was Pete Holmes.  Crystal Fincher: [00:32:26] Oh what! Okay - Mike McGinn: [00:32:28] Yes. Yes! He signed the agreement, but he did not negotiate the agreement. And it was really interesting because the mediator - I had visited in DC, I'd met with the head of the Office of Civil Rights, Tom Perez. I had to go to DC and meet with him to try to get the negotiations on track because at that time, Jenny Durkan was refusing to negotiate with us. Well -  Crystal Fincher: [00:32:55] As the US attorney at the time.  Mike McGinn: [00:32:56] As the US attorney at the time, while simultaneously sending letters saying that we weren't agreeing to things fast enough. But there wasn't a real give and take. There wasn't a real dialogue about how to settle the case and how to come up with a good productive Consent Decree. So I went to DC, met with Tom Perez, we agreed to re-open negotiations with their office taking more leadership in it. And we ended up with a mediator. The mediator came and visited me and said, "Look, here's the problem. We need the principals in the room. We're going to get the chief litigator from the Office of Civil Rights and you - both need to be in the mediation so that we have the people with the authority to make a deal."  And I said, "Okay, that makes sense. I understand that." I was a lawyer in private practice. And then I said, "What about - hold it, what about Pete Holmes?"  And she said, "Nope, Pete Holmes is not invited. And by the way, neither is Jenny Durkan." So the mediator, from her own decision-making, had already decided how it was going to run. And we had someone from the City Attorney's office there. The mediator would talk to Pete periodically to keep him updated, but the very clear intent was that we needed to keep them - both of them - a little bit away from the negotiation so it could have a chance of success. The two of them were, just honestly, just politicizing the hell out of it at the time. My opinion. And so -  Crystal Fincher: [00:34:21] I agree.  Mike McGinn: [00:34:22] Yeah, no - it was a really challenging environment and we managed to hold a mediation without the leaks to the press about what was being discussed on a daily basis. I'm sure the press would have loved more information about what was going on on a daily basis, but it provided the type of environment in which we could come up with an agreement that everyone could sign. As soon as the agreement was signed, next step was the discussion about who the Monitor would be - critically important decision. And that was the point at which Pete insisted on Merrick Bobb, and did everything in his power to block the people I would have supported, and to get the Council to line up behind Merrick Bobb. I ultimately would have to give way, and we ended up with Merrick Bobb - and Merrick Bobb didn't get along with the Police Commission, wasted money on the software, said everything was going great and it wasn't. And Pete was backing him the whole time. So Pete - you had 12 years to do police reform, maybe it's time to give somebody else a shot. Crystal Fincher: [00:35:22] Well, I think a lot of certainly insiders, at this point as it looks, and the regular public is going to have an opportunity to hear the conversation and to hear that maybe it's time for another choice. So I certainly appreciate all of the background. See, the wonderful thing about having you on is that you come with receipts from way back when, and there certainly is a lot that I remember from, certainly, working with you at the time. But you just have all of the detail and all of the intricacies from what happened.  Mike McGinn: [00:35:57] A lot of years ago, now. The years are adding up, Crystal.  Crystal Fincher: [00:36:00] Well, the years are definitely adding up, but I appreciate the context, and the time, and just being able to go back. Because also - it is so - like now, having a progressive Council to people is normal. It so was not this. It so was - Tim Burgess and Bruce Harrell and Richard Conlin and it was a conservative Council who was mad - who was salty on a daily basis, with the support of the Seattle Times on a daily basis - at this outsider, loony, progressive, McSchwinn mayor. Was coming in and trying to do all these crazy things like trying to do Road Diets, and things that now have been - that are viewed as normal and not controversial. But at the time, when I tell you that, like the whole War on Cars discourse that started for you and during you, that was - it was hyperbolic. It was just - it was extreme. So we're at a very different place today than we were then, but we still have people who were intimately involved and aligned with that conservative Council, like Jenny Durkan, who were very instrumental in setting things up to land exactly where they are right now - which is frustrating for some of us looking at like - this was predictable, that this wasn't the progressive champion that a lot of people thought when they were running. But of course we have the benefit of doing stuff like this for a living and having the time to know when to dive into this. And a lot of people just don't have access to that information.  Mike McGinn: [00:37:43] Well, it's really, and this is a really a good example of that. Like the way in which police reform can be politicized and was politicized. I mentioned the selection of the Monitor. I remember Bruce Harrell like, "Mayor McGinn is anti-police reform because he won't support Merrick Bobb." We had three candidates we supported, that we submitted to the judge, for a monitor. We - I signed a - negotiated a Consent Decree that called for a Monitor, but we were in this place where it was very easy to say who was for and against reform at the time.  And that process of reform - it's so fascinating to watch now a decade later, right? Almost 10 years later - to see that we now have this bizarre situation really where the Council doesn't have authority to change the police budget because the judge wants something different. They don't have the authority to get rid of a software program that doesn't work. Where the Community Police Commission - they warned the Council not to vote for the police contract, and they did vote for the police contract that wiped out the accountability procedures. And all of that was being overseen by the judge. Like the judge is saying, "Who gets to decide what the accountability procedures are? It's me, I'm the judge."  So what started as an attempt to engage the community in a dialogue with the City and the police department about what reform looks like - with the belief that it should be homegrown because it's more likely - let's listen to community - has now turned into this very, very top-down thing, being run by a judge, in which so much of the local control has disappeared. And who's the one person who could go into court on behalf of the City and say to the judge, "No, the Consent Decree called for the Community Police Commission to have power. Not for the judge to have all the power, right? It called for the City Council to be able to pass accountability reforms without having to check with the judge." That is what the - that is basically what the decree provided. But you need a City Attorney who would have the guts to actually go into a federal judge and say, "You don't have all the authority in this instance." And so since there was never any pushback on the judge - now the ability of the community as a whole to influence police reform has been taken away and resides in the judge. And there's really only one place that - there's only one person under the City Charter who had the authority to go in on behalf of the City and say, "Do something different." And that was Pete Holmes. And he never was willing to challenge the Monitor, never willing to challenge the judge, never willing to stand up for the community in that way. So Pete, you've been at this - I go back to - been in there 12 years, said he's necessary to police reform. He has to take some accountability for how he's not gotten it done overall. Crystal Fincher: [00:40:49] And the point that you're making now is a point that he couldn't make enough, 10 years ago, while challenging you with his authority that he was claiming under the Charter - for the Monitor, for taking a different stance than you were in the negotiation. And at that time saying, "Well, you know, it is my duty and responsibility. I have this ability, I'm an independently elected official. I am not just simply operating at the will of the mayor. I am my own entity, and I can and should." So he is claiming this authority, and at that time to challenge you with the support of the conservative Council, and that's why it was so striking to me and I commented a number of times during this past year. During the protests, seeing everything that SPD was doing, all of these challenges that we're having with the judge, all of the challenges that we're having in who can order what between Durkan and the police chief and that, the subpoena-ing of media records and video on behalf of the police. I am just sitting here going - how is Pete Holmes standing silent? This is consent to this - because he made a point of telling everyone he had the power to challenge things like that a decade ago. And now he's just quiet as a little mouse and escaping the accountability that is - that Jenny Durkan was encountering, that the Council, that the police chief - everyone was under the microscope, except Pete Holmes, just quiet in the corner over here. And it's like, if there was one person who could change this, it is Pete Holmes. Just a little frustrating. But, you know, we've talked about that before.  Mike McGinn: [00:42:37] Well, and it is - we have talked about that before - and yeah, something like subpoena-ing records of the media. Like how did that become City policy and how could Pete go and defend that as an action, as if SPD was not a part of the City? And so -  Crystal Fincher: [00:42:53] Yeah. As if the media is just an investigative arm of SPD that they can use at their will - it doesn't work. Democracy doesn't work that way, the City Charter doesn't work that - like, that's not how things work.  Mike McGinn: [00:43:07] And, you know, I think the same issue, honestly, can be raised with respect to homelessness. Now, I'm not saying a City Attorney can solve homelessness alone. It's something that will take the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch - a lot of the issues for homeless people have to do with dealing with compliance with the laws about being outside, and people ending up being prosecuted, and ending up in Municipal Court. So I don't want to say that Pete can solve homelessness, but a City Attorney is at a really unique and central position on the homelessness issue, because they are standing - 'cause they are in relationship to the City Council, the mayor, the judicial system, and the police department, specifically in a very unique way. And interacting also with the County Prosecutor as well. And to me, it's just noticeable that in 12 years of being at that central point, we really haven't seen - what's the leadership to solving homelessness. He has certainly leaned in on specific things - like I will not prosecute this, or I'll change the penalty for that - and those are oftentimes the right direction to go. But in terms of demonstrating some type of leadership in that space and helping us solve the problems, it's just like you were saying with the other issues - he doesn't want to put himself into that position of being associated with the homeless response. And it's just really hard to do that if you're not going to - it's really hard to have a homelessness response when somebody in that position isn't going to be a really strong collaborator in the solutions.  Crystal Fincher: [00:45:03] Yeah, I agree. I appreciate the time that you've spent with us today. This is probably the longest episode that we've ever had. But like this is - just for people listening - a lot of times there's a conversation before the show, there's a conversation after the show. So this just captures more of some of the types of conversations we have on the sides. And we just decided to keep, to keep rolling.  Mike McGinn: [00:45:28] Just kept rolling, we just kept going. We couldn't help ourselves, Crystal.  Crystal Fincher: [00:45:31] Couldn't help it. And you provide just so much valuable insight and context, so I appreciate it. Well, thanks for taking this time with us today.  Mike McGinn: [00:45:41] Anytime.  Crystal Fincher: [00:45:41] So I appreciate and thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on KVRU 105.7 FM this Friday, June 11th, 2021. Our chief audio engineer at KVRU is Maurice Jones Jr. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Lisl Stadler. And our insightful co-host today was activist, former Seattle mayor Mike McGinn. You can find Mike on Twitter - it's a fire Twitter feed, by the way - @MayorMcGinn. You can find me on Twitter @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. And now you can follow Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts, just type "Hacks & Wonks" into the search bar, be sure to subscribe to get full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the podcast episode notes. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time.

Episode 31: ZonesThis episode is about Zones in Active Shooter Response and how they help us communicate the threat picture.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast, my name is Bill Godfrey. I'm your host of the podcast. I've got with me three of the other instructors from C3 Pathways, Ron Otterbacher, retired from law enforcement. Ron, thanks for coming in, I know it's been a while since we've had you on the podcast.Ron Otterbacher:Thanks for having me.Bill Godfrey:Good to have you back. And of course we have Bruce Scott, a familiar voice to those. Bruce, how're you doing?Bruce Scott:I am very blessed Bill and yourself?Bill Godfrey:I'm doing well. And we're thankful to have back Pete Kelting in the house, also with law enforcement. Pete still is not retired, still active duty. How long have you got left Pete?Pete Kelting:About seven months Bill, but thank you for having me.Bill Godfrey:Thanks for being here. So folks today's subject, we are going to talk about zones in an active shooter response. So we're talking about the hot zone, the warm zone, the cold zone and some other terminology as well. It's a serious topic and one that's there to try to help us understand the threat picture that we're walking into and to operate a little bit better with each other. And I think we want to start with the hot zone. So Pete, why don't you lead us off in talking about that first arriving officer, how we establish that initial hot zone which is also, we're going to come back to this, but also called the direct threat care zone. Can you start us off?Pete Kelting:Yeah, absolutely Bill. I mean, obviously the incident's dispatched and our arriving officers are en route, and they're having to make a decision once they arrive on scene. What they're going to declare as the hot zone, either the entire venue or maybe an area that they may have vetted intelligence where the shooting had taken place or that's going to be where they're concentrating their first arriving officer. So it's really important to get that hot zone identified and communicated to follow on officers and dispatch so that everyone knows where they're coming at first.Bill Godfrey:So Ron, I mean, one of the things that we teach in the ASIM program, we say to those first arriving officers frequently, "Look, if you're not really sure just go big, make the whole area the hot zone and we'll narrow it down a little bit later." Can you talk about why and what's the thinking behind that?Ron Otterbacher:Again, we're trying to identify the zones of operation that lets us know how big the threat may be or how we anticipate the threat from the information we receive, whether it'll be visually, audible, so we're trying to determine what it is. It's easier to shrink down an operational zone than it is to expand it after you've already put people in that area. So we're looking after to say, we are trying to identify safe areas to travel or be as safe as we can and let people know that we may not have a safe area to travel, so they've got to be more cautious as they move into the situation.Bill Godfrey:So obviously, and we'll talk about this a little bit more on the fire/EMS side, we don't really want to go wandering into a hot zone, but that is an area where law enforcement is expected to work. How important, Pete, Ron, how important is it for that initial assessment, that initial size up, that initial report to be relayed to the other officers that are coming in right behind them so that they know. Is that important for them to know exactly where that hot zone is and when to be prepared, to have their guard up? How does that work?Ron Otterbacher:Absolutely Bill, I think the additional following officers need to have a clear understanding of what that hot zone is and where the first contact team has decided to work and where the second and third contact teams or individual responding officers are going to link up to where the area of responsibility is to stop that threat, because that is still our first priority at that point in time, it's stopping that threat based upon the driving force and the stimulus that we see, hear or are told.Pete Kelting:In my mind it's critical. As the first arriving officer gets on the scene, there's only one person that knows what's going on and that's them. It's critical they convey it back to the follow-on responders so they understand that I've still got active shooting, it seems to be limited to this area but I can't call everything clear, but if they don't put that information out, everyone else would right, actually, walk into a zone that could be like shooting ducks in the park.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So hot zone, and we want to talk a little bit about terminology for the audience, so hot zone, warm zone, cold zone is the most common three zones that we hear discussed when we're talking about active shooter events. And that terminology largely got adopted out of the hazardous materials response in the fireside of life with the hot zone, the warm zone and the cold zone and normally a nice little concentric circle that you draw a ring around. And we're going to talk a little bit more about how that is not the reality in an active shooter events. But before we leave that, let's talk a little bit about some of the other names that are sometimes heard.Bill Godfrey:So in tactical emergency casualty care, TECC, they call that the direct threat zone, which I don't really know that you would need an explanation of that, direct threat can't be much more obvious than that, it's a direct threat, you go there and you're going to be exposed to a direct threat from a shooting, stabbing, bombing, whatever the case may be. Ron, Pete, what are the other terms that you've heard in law enforcement that have referred to the hot zone? That might mean the same thing, but some agencies may call it different.Ron Otterbacher:You got the kill zone, pretty simple, self-Explanatory, you've got the funnel of death. There's all kinds of things they talk about and they're all bad, so it's trying to get everyone in their mindset that if I go in this place, I'm probably going to get hurt if not killed. And then again, it gets back to the criticality of these zones and identifying them so people know how to move around in an operation so that they're not as exposed to the threat as they could have been.Bill Godfrey:And Pete, have you heard any others?Pete Kelting:Generically I have heard folks refer to it as the danger area or danger zone depending on their local response and what they're used to training in. But as Ron said, the point is that you want your first following officers to know that you're still in an area that has a great propensity for violence, either from gunfire or some other type of threat that is facing those first responders.Bill Godfrey:Okay. Bruce, how about you, have you heard it referred either in or out of the fire side of things, called anything else?Bruce Scott:No, not really, I mean, we've trained in the fire service so long, as hot, warm and cold. It's easily understandable to our partners in the fire service and fire and EMS folks, and since we preach so much integrated response, it's going to mean the same thing to a firefighter if you say this is a red zone, that they know that that's probably not where they need to be. We don't want to be in that red zone and sharing that information early on so those dispatchers can give it to those responding units, the fire/EMS units, to make sure that they don't get into that red zone. So for example, if you say the whole entire campus is a red zone, then we need to set up our initial staging areas outside of that campus area, so that's hugely important.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So before we leave hot zone or the direct threat zone, I want to talk a little bit about the fire/EMS role in the hot zone. And that is to say that there really isn't one, they shouldn't be there, there's not really a circumstance, none that I can think of, where we would, for fire/EMS, we would deliberately have them go into a hot zone. So generally speaking, that's a no-go area for fire and EMS. That doesn't mean that at some point in time that they couldn't be in a warm zone and have it turned into a hot zone. So let's talk just a few minutes, if you're fire/EMS and you find yourself accidentally or just because of the nature of the threat... well, for whatever reason, you're suddenly in a hot zone with your security detail. What are the things that the fire and EMS folks should do? What are the things that the security detail should do to try to make the team safe? Who wants? Pete, you want to start off on this one?Pete Kelting:Well, I'll even start before that in the sense of local training that your fire and law are trained together and that you practiced your response into a scene and what you're going to do if you go from warm to hot. And there's different processes out there that different agencies use, but that's got to be trained so that if the shots ring out, then your security detail has certain ways to protect your fire and EMS that are in the RTF package. And if that's finding an immediate exit plan backwards or retreating, or into a hard point of cover in a hallway or diving into a room, those things have to be worked out ahead of time in training so that you respond quickly to that change in zone from warm to hot because of that immediate threat that has presented.Ron Otterbacher:The other thing is the security detail for that RTF or whatever it may be, whatever you may call it. Their sole responsibility is security for that team. We don't do other things, we never leave that team, we provide what security we can. The other key thing is if that happens, the folks from the fire side need to listen to what they say and react exactly like pizza, we should have talked about beforehand, we should have talked about it just before we deployed and then when it happens, it's not time to question, you do exactly what you're told by your security detail and understand that they're not going to leave your side and they're going to be there to protect you. That's their sole responsibility.Bill Godfrey:So guys, is it reasonable to say that it's a good possibility that the security team may elect to hold you into some room that they feel like they... rather than trying to move you out of the hot zone, is it a reasonable possibility that the security team is going to elect to just hold you where you're at or trying to find something close by where they feel like they can stand their ground and let the contact teams go deal with the threat? Or should we always expect to be moving out?Pete Kelting:I think it's the immediate assessment of how close that engagement is and that if you need to move to a point of hard cover and in a hallway or move into a defensible room, that's the decision on what you train locally. And it also depends upon the local build-out of the RTF. Is it a minimum of two officers and two fire/EMS, or do you have a heavy package of five law enforcement officers and three medics? It all depends a little bit of what you're training if you're going to make a decision to quickly be defensible and then move out after that, that's a decision for a local jurisdiction.Bill Godfrey:I understand that cover does just that, it provides you cover which stops, it minimizes the threat as opposed to move through an open area. If you have to move to an open area, I'm not going to take the package that direction, we're going to stay there, we're going to do everything we can to provide security as we're requesting other resource to come help us and get us out of that situation. We're not just sitting and waiting.Bruce Scott:And the other thing Bill that we have to consider is at what point the RTF is in play, are they in the midst of treating folks at a CCP and it becomes warm, and you have patients to consider in that sense too. Casualties that you're trying to treat and continue with your medical care down range, and how do you react to that if it went from warm to hot?Bill Godfrey:That makes sense. And I've shared in one of the previous podcasts, my experience, the very, very first time I went through a training session and I started trying to treat a patient in the middle of a T intersection in a hallway, and my security detail was telling me to get off the X, get off the X. And I'm like, "No, I got to treatment patient." And they said, "No, you need to get out of the hallway." And, "No, I need to treat my patient." And then I lost that and got dragged into the room and with my patient. And I'm like, "What's going on?" Well, if you're standing in the middle of a T intersection, there's four ways that people can shoot at you and any number of doors that they can pop out of. And there's somebody already laying there, which means somebody already got shot, which by the way is where the X is, is where the guy's laying that got shot.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So that wraps up, I think, pretty succinctly the hot zone and hot zone components. So now let's shift to our warm zone. And the there's a lot of different definitions out there for the warm zone. None of them are wrong, it's up to the local jurisdiction to decide what they want it to be. The one that we use is that there are security measures in place, and it is that simple. Security measures in place, what does that mean? It can mean a whole range of things from there's one cop that's got security there to it's been cleared and there's a detail and a cordon. But what it does mean is that law enforcement has done something to put some security measures in place, and that is now a warm zone or what TECC calls an indirect threat care zone.Bill Godfrey:And we obviously want to camp here a little bit on this topic and talk about it because it's a source of some discomfort and some controversy within the fire and EMS community, always appreciating and understanding that. So Ron, let me let you talk, lead us off in talking a little bit about how you would determine that an area is a warm zone, that you've got it to the point where you feel comfortable that a room or a wing of the building or whatever is a warm zone. Take us through that.Ron Otterbacher:I think the key is, there's security measures in place. We feel relatively sure that we've done enough searching in that area, moving through that area, that the bad guy's not just sitting there laying and waiting, but again, because it's not 100% certain, we're a little hesitant on calling it clear, but we feel relatively sure and we feel sure enough that we're willing to keep our resources in there and protect the fire resource that may come through there. And again, as we move through a warm zone with our fire resources, those people assigned to that particular security detail have no other mission at that time than to provide security for that detail that's moving through. And I don't know how to say, because if you say you stake your reputation on it, then your reputation may not be any good if something goes wrong, but we do everything we can to keep everyone safe in that area and we feel fairly sure as we move through it that we have the ability to keep you safe. There is no 100% certainty, it could still kick off and go back.Pete Kelting:So coming in and what Ron is saying, it's absolutely critical that when we make that transition from hot to warm, that the contact teams or officer's down range can really paint that picture back to our tactical command, because I see so often that, especially in multi jurisdiction response or even a different unit response to an event, that folks tend to not take charge, they're waiting for someone else to take charge of that particular area that they're operating in, trying to stop the threat and then change it to a warm zone, transition down to a warm zone and communicate that back because we've got to get those RTS down range as quickly as we can. We have to feel comfortable that we have enough security measures in place for that to take place, and then that starts the domino effect of making sure that we're choosing good CCP locations, that they're accessible, defensible and we move quicker into a warm zone. When we get held up down range and no one's taking charge to communicate that, you see that clock ticking and we don't have medical treatment being taken place down range.Bruce Scott:And I think that part of it is we're not moving into obscurity, we're moving to where another team's at, another team's taken ground. They feel like the avenue they told us to move through is ground they've already moved through and checked, and that gives us a little more assurance that we're going to the right place, plus they're there providing security as we're moving up. It's just not the security team that's with the RTF, you've got other people that are already out there that are providing security as you move up.Bill Godfrey:Okay guys, I think that's a great summary. So Bruce, I mentioned earlier the reference to the hazmat and the nice concentric circles, but that's not really what warm zones are like in an active shooter event. Can you talk a little bit about that and explain that and let's go through that a little bit.Bruce Scott:Oh yeah, absolutely. And again, just get that out of your mind if you're thinking concentric circles, that's just not the case. We have to trust our law enforcement brothers and sisters as they identify those warm zones, whether it's a pathway into or an area that can be secured and we have that security element with us. That may look more like, I think you described it one time, Bill, is an amoeba. So it could have lots of different shapes and sizes, but again, it comes back to the training as Pete alluded to, and heck it comes back to the trust that Ron alluded to, that says that if I'm going down range with Pete and Ron, they're going to take care of me, they've identified this warm zone, they've got this ground that they can protect and it may be a narrow space into a larger space. And I just have to trust that my law enforcement brothers and sisters are going to take me through that warm zone so I can get in there and do what I need to do.Bruce Scott:I don't think it's any more complicated than that, and I also want to come back, just circle back around to, as a fire guy, as a firefighter and a paramedic for a really long time. If I know that I have to have a security element with me, I certainly want to be paying attention to what they say and move when they tell me to move and move where they tell me to move. Even if I've been assigned to a completely different mission, I think that's hugely important and the folks who listen to this podcasts are very probably tired of me saying this, but that's adopt what that policy looks like, get your administrators to adopt that policy, train everybody on that policy, practice that policy over and over again. And that's not just within your single agencies, with all your partner agencies, potentially your mutual aid agencies that may be responding, it's hugely important that we're all talking the same language.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a really, really important element that Bruce just hit on. And it's something that fire/EMS really has to understand, that the role of the rescue task force is medical, that's the mission, that's why they exist, that's why they're there. But the movement of that group, the movement of those people in that team is entirely controlled by law enforcement. And as fire/EMS, we don't get a veto, we don't get an override. They're like the safety officer on the fire ground. They say when we can go, where we can go, how we can go and when we can't go.Pete Kelting:We see this in our trainings all the time, Bill, we stress that RTS work for triage, they give us our mission, where we're going. But then that coordination that has to happen with the law enforcement element, again, they're going to tell us where to go and what they want us to do when we get there, but the law enforcement element and working through tactical to make sure those warm zones are set up, and then to protect us as we get there. And the movement that happens is just... unfortunately, so many times we end up figuring out the right way to do this on the day that those things, those bad things happen, and if we can take that off our list prior to, I think we're way ahead of the game.Bruce Scott:And again, it's done with critical coordination with the people down range, those that can actually see what's going on, they know what's going on. We don't do any movement until they say, "Yes, you can come up here, this is where we're at, this is exactly where we want you at and this is exactly the route we want you to take, because we're sure that it's a safe route to come in."Ron Otterbacher:And reasonably sure, right? And we talk about this all the time, statistically speaking as time goes on, active shooter incidents get more safe and which is not the way we were raised in the fire service and statistically speaking, the fire gets more dangerous so we have to understand the difference. Unfortunately, there are no absolutes in this business, I think Pete alluded to that, and the critical thinking that has to happen down range. But again, I think it really comes down to trust and understand that everybody has a role there.Bill Godfrey:You know Ron, you mentioned being close to the problem, the people downrange are close to the problem, and I think one of the other things that has to be really raised and it really beat the drum on it, for fire/EMS to a degree as well, but certainly on the fireside with our approach to command and ICS. In the fire service on a fire ground, it is a top-down driven affair. Now, we always say that command is built from the bottom up, that's what the ICS documentation says, we always teach that everybody sitting at this table teaches ICS and teaches that stuff. But in reality, the fire service doesn't build from the bottom up, we get that first unit that gets there and initiates it and then the rest of it is, the battalion chief shows up, takes over and it's a top-down driven affair.Bill Godfrey:And there's a lot of reasons why that's okay and why it works on a fire ground, not the least of which is the battalion chief can stand on the curb and see what's happening to the building in the fire and make some intelligent decisions. But that's not the case in an active shooter event. In fact, it's just the opposite. The guy on the curb has the least situational awareness about what's going on inside. You can't see the nature of the threat or the exact location or really even understand the lay of the land unless you've personally got familiarity with the building. And so one of the things that I think is really important to drive home on the fire/EMS side is that this is exactly the opposite of the fire where you have to trust the resources that are down range, you don't need to second guess them. If you don't think they're smart enough to make good decisions then don't send them down range.Ron Otterbacher:Or replace them.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. So that said, I want to talk a little a bit about something that's a sensitive topic here and we've seen it happen in a number of incidents where somebody calls for the rescue task forces and it gets overwritten in the command post. Oh, I'm not comfortable that we're ready.Pete Kelting:I'd like to talk about that for a minute.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, why don't you.Pete Kelting:I think, and I've had lots of conversations with fire chiefs over the years and I can tell you it's just their nature, they don't want to put people in harm's way till law enforcement tells them it is 100% clear. And I've had sheriffs, I've had police chiefs telling me and fire chiefs telling me, "You let us do our business, we'll make sure the threat is completely gone and then we will move those fire/EMS medical teams into place." And unfortunately, the person that's laying their shot, they don't have that time and we want to just change our organizational culture to say, "We are going to put people into harm's way, into that warm zone, if you will, with as much security and as much assurance as we can, but it's not going to be a hundred percent safe, but we do not have the time for you to completely clear a four story building that looks like three football fields, and folks are laying there bleeding to death."Pete Kelting:So we've potentially stopped the killing, but we haven't stopped the dying. That bullet is still in there causing damage and those folks are continuing to die. So we just have to change that mindset of our fire/EMS folks to say, "When we can make this as safe as possible, we need to put those fire and EMS folks into harm's way, into that warm zone, if you will, and begin treatment, coordinating the extraction of those folks and get them on the way to the hospital." I just can't make it any more clear than that, but it's changing hundreds of years of organizational culture that says, "Until you tell me it's completely clear, until my law enforcement brothers and sisters say it is 100% safe. We're not going to commit our resources." And it really is something we have to overcome.Bruce Scott:I've known each of you all for a long time, I would trust you if you told me you would do it, everything in your power to keep my grandchildren safe, and there's nothing more sacred than my grandchildren. And you told me you'd do everything in your power to keep them safe. I know that even if something went wrong, you did everything in your power to do everything to keep them safe.Bruce Scott:That's the relationship we've got to build between law enforcement and fire service is, we talked about it when we started teaching the command school, it's very easy for me to tell someone I don't know, "No, I can't do this." But if you've got a relationship and a trust built, and I tell you, "Look, I or my people are going to do everything I can to keep your people safe." Then you know that I've given must solemn vow to do everything. And if we've got a good relationship built, you know that I would never do anything to try and harm your people in any way or if I saw something that looked untoward, then we would stop and go a different direction. And I think that's what we have to do and that's part of what we do in this class, we build relationships. That's critical.Pete Kelting:Yeah. Bruce, obviously, you know I agree with you completely on that and I think you sum that up really well and stated it very clearly. The one thing that I would add that I would share, we've traveled all over this great country, doing this training for a long time now, over a decade, we've been doing it and met a lot of great people and a lot of police officers along the way. I've never met a single officer, ever, who left me with the impression that they didn't understand exactly what it meant when they were downrange and they said, "I'm ready for the rescue task forces," meaning send the unarmed paramedics to me, because I think it's safe and these people need help. I've never ever met a police officer that wanted an unarmed person added to their scene unless there was a really good damn reason to do it, and saving lives is a really good reason to do it.Pete Kelting:And I think that if the word trust has come up several times and it really is, but I think the other word is faith, because we don't always know the people that we're working with, but we have to have faith in each other and in the professionalism. And when there's an officer that says I'm ready for the unarmed paramedics to come down here and start saving lives, I've got to take that on faith and on face value, that that officer who spent six months, eight months going through probation or going through the Academy, another six months on FTO duty, I mean, he's got at least a year of training and before he gets turned. That officer understands exactly what he's saying when he says, "Send me the unarmed paramedics down here." Even though they're coming with security, he knows what that means.Pete Kelting:And I think it is ridiculous that someone with rank or a command position would presume from the curb, and quite likely the cold zone area of safety, say, "Oh, no, no, no. I don't think that's quite right." Now, the one exception would be tactical. If the tactical group supervisor, who's running this for law enforcement says to that officer, "I understand your request, but we're not ready to send the teams in, we've got something else going on." That's a different story. But for fire/EMS to override that from the command coast, because they don't have a warm fuzzy, I can't get with that.Ron Otterbacher:Unfortunately by the time they get warm fuzzies, more people have died. And I will share with you, in some of the after action reports we've read, law enforcement gets so frustrated by not being able to get those RTS in there and get those folks out that they start dragging them out themselves, potentially putting in them police cars and taking them to the hospital, which has just screwed up our warm zone too. If we start losing that law enforcement element down range that are protecting and turning that into a warm zone, and they start having to do patient movement completely out of the building, and loading them in their patrol cars and taking them to taking them to the hospital.Ron Otterbacher:That's a whole nother series of domino effect problems that potentially comes up by us losing some of our security element that may be downrange, and we've seen that time and time again and some of the after actions, you just read them, they just get frustrated that, "Hey, I need these folks in here and I need them in here now." And the hesitancy that happens for one reason or another, whether it's not having the warm, fuzzy at the command level or it is not having done staging right and they have no law enforcement element there to put with their rescue task forces that move them down range.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. I think we could do a whole nother podcast on that. In fact, we just recently did one on staging where that came up. Before we leave the warm zone, I want to talk for a moment about cordons and the idea of what a cordon is, if you could explain it to the audience, so we make sure everybody understands. And when it fits, when it's a really good idea and it's helpful, and when it doesn't always make sense. Pete?Pete Kelting:I'll add to that, and it touches on some of the things we just were talking about. And I'd like to say that I think we're also seeing a lot of progress in the training relationships in building trust and faith, as you're talking about, and I'll share an experience just recently in a local jurisdiction where I was an evaluator, and a newly promoted battalion chief came on scene and was designated as the triage officer and immediately came up to where the tactical officer was at. And as we preach here the importance of co-location between tactical and triage, they were able to communicate that information, although they knew each other and they'd trained together, they are able to communicate that information that built that faith and that trust of where they can operate. And one of the first words out of the battalion chief's mouth was, "Have you identified the warm areas that my RTF teams can operate in, and what are our casualties looking like?"Pete Kelting:So they already knew they were on the right track in that sense, and then they talked about resources and is there safety measures in place? And so they looked at the map together and the tactical command pointed out pretty much on the map and the footprint that they were looking at, is here's what we've got in place. So it's a visual that this battalion chief is looking at and that's making them feel even more comfortable that his RTF teams are going to be able to work down range really effectively. Then they talked about getting them from staging to the location that they're being sent to, and then the safety cordons and the resources of law enforcement being in place for those RTS going down range and then after that, predicting and leaning forward that there's going to be an ambulance exchange point set up and that those safety measures are in place with cordons and overwatch.Pete Kelting:So those are important things to make that faith and trust come together between the fire/EMS and the tactical, putting that plan together to get everybody down range. And you ask what is a cordon? It's simply that it is law enforcement in place and the way I've seen it done many times is, it's got a line of sight, and you know that you've got enough resources in place, either on the ground or in an overwatch capacity, that you have this warm area that's protected by law enforcement should another threat present itself, that immediate action can take place, but in the sense we're still going to bring RTS down range, although they're coming with security measures, and then we can bring ambulances down range.Pete Kelting:So they're extremely important if the resources are available and not tasked and purposed to something else that we can get those in place, that's the best outcome possible for security measures. Now, when they're not so effective is basically if you're trying to set one up without enough resources, because it's almost like a perimeter where you don't have that line of sight and you got holes and you got weaknesses. It's almost more unsafe if you're not sure you've got that in line. There, you have to determine if you're going to use what resource sources are down range to put in temporary safety cordons for an ambulance exchange point bubbling out to make sure that that ambulance is able to come in and maybe escorting that ambulance down with law enforcement.Bill Godfrey:Okay. Ron, how about you? You got any examples of when it really works and when it's not such a great fit?Ron Otterbacher:Again, like Pete said, if you get the resources to do it, then it works out well, it provides you a secure avenue of travel. And whether it be to move the RTF up to the contact teams where they are and we want to make sure we don't want to just say, "Okay, we got a warm zone for you to land in over here, but as you try to get towards the battle zone. So we've got to tell them the direction they can travel, we've got to tell them, "It's okay to come this way, we've got it secure, but it's not okay to come this way because we're still receiving aggressive fire from this direction." So we got to make sure they know their lanes of operation, we got to make sure our people down range know that they're coming to those lanes of operations, because we don't want to have a blue on blue situation, either a blue on blue and red situation. We've just got to make sure everyone knows where it's safe to operate and how to best operate in those areas, and we're prepared for it.Bill Godfrey:I think that does summarize it, I would observe that both of you mentioned the idea of having enough resources. With time, you'll have enough resources, the question is how long? And to me, that's one of the things that jumps up. I think cordons are great when you can do them, because it makes it so much easier to operate. You've still got your rescue task forces, but all of a sudden now you can build them up to a very large teams with a very, very low security footprint because you've got these cordon set up. But if you're operating in a large campus environment or a commercial environment or a big commercial building, multiple floors, you could be so spread out that it's difficult to cover that, Pete, like you said, you've got gaps in the line of sight and things like that. So the question is, how long does it take before you can get those resources in?Bill Godfrey:And I think that that's one of those decisions that has to be made at the time, on the spot, given the circumstances, and it's the job of the tactical officer or the tactical group supervisor to make that call and say, "Here's where we're going to go, here's what we're going to do." In conjunction, I think, right Pete? With the conversation with the triage group supervisor, the two of them are working together and they have a conversation. "Hey, can we do cordons?" "Well yeah, it's going to take this long." "Okay, well let's maybe put one or two RTFs down range, work on the cordons and see if we can get both of them in motion at the same time."Pete Kelting:It also comes down to priority of operation. You've got to determine what's the most important thing. You may have to forego putting your outer perimeter up so you've got to set cordon for travel and then follow up and put your outer perimeter up. So you've got to make those command decision, that's why it's so important and that's what we teach in this class is, this class is active shooter incident management. It's your job to manage the incident. It's your job to make the most sound decisions for what you're facing at that time and you may say, "It's more important that I have a cordon right now, than maybe have some other part of the operation that's important." But it's not as critical as saving lives at that time, so we create that.Bruce Scott:And I can't stress enough that it boils down the situational awareness from tactical command of what you've got going on down range, and to either continue the strategy and the priorities that's been set for the incident or make those minor adjustments with your resources to do exactly what Ron's talking about.Pete Kelting:And I think he brought up a good point about it, I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you, is that you can minimize that risk, right? So let's get one rescue task force in, let's get two in and we'd talk about the same thing as moving the ambulances to the ambulance exchange point, right? Let's not bunch up 10 ambulances in the warm zone, let's just get one at a time and get them out then send that next ambulance in. So you can, to a certain degree, minimize that risk before you have these warm fuzzies.Bill Godfrey:I think that's a great point, so let me sum it up this way. Cordons are a great tool in the toolbox and they're fantastic when you can get them set up. But that tool may not always fit in and it may not always work so you got to have other ways of getting that done. All right. So we've covered hot zone, the direct threat area, we've covered the warm zone, the indirect threat area. So now let's talk just briefly about the cold zone, which we define as an area where no threat is reasonably expected there. So TECC defines it as the evacuation care area where you can do without limit, what your procedures need to be or whatever medical care you need to provide. I don't think this one's terribly complicated, but Bruce, there's a couple of functions that should be in the cold zone that's so often seemed like they're not. You want to talk a little bit about that?Pete Kelting:Or staging, it should be in the cold zone.Bill Godfrey:You mean it shouldn't be across the street Pete? Ron? It's not supposed to be across the street from the target building?Ron Otterbacher:No, sir.Bill Godfrey:No. I thought it was.Ron Otterbacher:Your command post, obviously. And if you've decided that you want to put... based on that situation where you have to designate a treatment area or a treatment group, where you don't have enough resources to get them off the scene, that treatment area should be in a cold zone as well. Those are the ones that come to mind immediately.Pete Kelting:Yeah. And I think just what you all were talking about, one of the things we quite often overlook is, we talk about a cold zone and where the command post is located or where staging is. But too often, we've seen that it designates between warm and cold sites the goal line, our command post and our staging is like three yards off with the goal line. And then yeah, the bad actor and so forth is 30 yards into the area or has gotten into the warm zone, they're undetected and then all of a sudden your cold zone is not a good place to be that close to the goal line.Bruce Scott:I think the key is relatively. And I use an example in the early '80s, we had a situation out in East Orange County, set the command post as SWAT deployed everyone else, and all of a sudden this fellow that they were looking for came blasting through in a car and fired up the command post and everything else. And they were far away, but he had just made it out and they weren't prepared to stop it and he decided to shoot him. Luckily, no one was injured, but again, even though we may call it a cold zone, we're in a life of the unexpected and we've got to be prepared for the eventuality. The other thing we've done is we've changed our philosophy and our position to where anytime now we set up a command post, well, it was that way before I left, but we would always screen the entire area with bomb dogs and make sure that... and this came after the Atlanta situation where they were going to have to follow on responders. So, we take certain steps to do the best we can do and it's relatively safe.Bill Godfrey:Relatively safe. We're having a little bit of chuckle about this and we don't mean to belittle that this occurs with some frequency, because there is a very, very serious implication of law enforcement having their command post or their staging too close to the incident. And that's that fire/EMS won't go there. Fire and EMS just won't go there and that's a problem. Because now you end up with two command posts, that's a disaster, you end up with separate staging areas, that's a disaster. And so this isn't something that we're trying to make light of, it is a fairly serious thing to make sure that law enforcement and fire are sharing a command post, they're sharing a staging area and that those things are in a relative area of safety. And yeah. Ron, I think you make a good point. Why wouldn't you have a couple of officers that are responsible for securing the staging area, are responsible for securing the command post?Ron Otterbacher:And you should, you absolutely should.Bill Godfrey:All right. Anything else about the cold zone that you guys want to hit?Bruce Scott:I just think it's important. I mentioned earlier changing our organizational culture. I don't know how many fire chiefs that I've worked with, they absolutely want to be on a fire scene where they can see the scene. In this case, you may not be able to see the scene, especially if you have IDs, you have people that are using rifles, bad actors that are using rifles. That cold zone is significantly, may not be where you see the scene. And again, you just have to overcome that and understand that.Ron Otterbacher:It's a giant paradigm shift for all of us, because now we've got to set our positions, whether it be tactical which is closer to the incident, but it's not actually in the hot zone or even our command post and staging at a place where the fireside is more comfortable with being than we've got to understand. In certain areas, if we're at a big fire, cops aren't comfortable being up close to a big fire where you all are near it every day. If we're in a bad situation that involved law enforcement, that's where we operate. But we've got to understand both sides of the equation. And we've got to move back and make sure that as we set things, it's a place where you're more comfortable because if you're not, you're not going to be there and then our situation fail.Pete Kelting:And it might be a topic for another podcast, but we've also come a long way in a use of technology that when our command post now, a lot of times in a cold zone, we have the ability of the down link from the helicopter. We're starting to see drone usage in surveying tactical downrange operations and that information being able to come back to our command post or come back to our tactical command. So we're really making progress in those areas too, to keep us from becoming complacent or stepping somewhere where we shouldn't be just trying to glean some information that we could get it some other way and still remain safe.Bruce Scott:Absolutely. I think it's also important to say, "If it's wrong, fix it." If the command post is in the wrong spot or staging is in the wrong spot, yes, it's going to take us a minute to unscrew this up, but you got to fix it. You can't continue to pile on doing it the wrong way or in an area that they're under potentially direct threat. You have to fix it. And if we do it right to begin with, we don't have to fix it.Bill Godfrey:And Bruce, I couldn't agree with you more. The pain that you'll feel to fix it is nothing compared to the pain you're going to feel after the fact and in the after action report if you don't fix it. Because you're going to find out there was all things that went wrong that would not have gone wrong if you had taken the time to fix it. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about this. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed the show. If you have not subscribed to the podcast, please click that subscribe button. And until next time stay safe.

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Today, on a very special episode of AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field, we say our goodbyes to Pete Cheslock.Amy: Oh, no. Did the ops bus finally get him?Jesse: No. Wait, what? What? No. No, he’s not—Amy: You know, the ops bus, the one that takes out all of the ops people, which is why you need data recovery plans.Jesse: [laugh]. I mean, I have plans for other reasons, but no. No, Pete, Pete’s not dead. He’s just—I mean, he’s dead to me, but he’s just not going to be here anymore.Amy: Only on the inside.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Arumbulo Negrette.Pete: I am Pete Cheslock. I’m here for one last, beautiful, glorious time.Jesse: I feel like this is going to be like Breakfast Club but in the data center server room.Pete: Yeah. A little bit. I think so. We will all sit cross-legged on the floor in a circle, share our thoughts and feelings. And maybe some sushi. There were sushi in that movie. And that was, like, really advanced back then in the ’80s.Jesse: Yeah, I like that. So Pete, you want to give us a little bit of background about why you will be moving on from this podcast?Pete: Moving on to a whole new world. Yes. Sadly, I am not dead. The ops bus did not get me, and I was not eaten by my smoker, my meat smoker.Jesse: [laugh]. Although at this point, it’s probably overdue.Pete: You know, the odds of all three of those are pretty high out, to be really perfectly honest, given this pandemic and everything else going on in this world.Amy: Isn’t that how it works? You eventually become the smoked meat.Pete: Yeah, yeah.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: All the time. You know, you are what you eat. And if you eat junk and whatnot—so I eat smoked meats, eventually, I’m just going to become, you know, smoked meats, I guess. But no, I am moving on from The Duckbill Group. Just bittersweet is the best word I can come up with. Very sad, but also very excited.I’m moving on to a new role at a new company that was just kind of an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. And I’m really excited for something new, but really sad because I don’t get to work with two of my three favorite cloud economists, Jesse, and Amy. Yeah, Corey is one, too, and yes, it’s fun to work with him. But it’s also fun to rag on him a little bit as well.Jesse: I’m pretty sure you still have the opportunity to rag on him no matter where you go.Pete: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we’re Twitter connected. So, I can just slide into his DMs as needed. Yeah.Amy: And really, what else is Twitter for—Pete: Exactly.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —than roasting former coworkers and bosses?Pete: Yeah, I expect a constant stream of Twitter DMs every time you find something, some little fun nugget that I’ve left behind.Jesse: I feel like that’s appropriate. So today, Pete, I have two questions for you now that you will be moving on from Duckbill Group, moving on from this podcast, I want to know, looking back at your time here working with Duckbill Group, what did you learn? What are the things that surprised you, that you didn’t expect? And what would you say to somebody who wanted to start working in this space, maybe start a career in cloud economics on their own?Pete: Yeah, so this kind of feels like an exit interview a little bit.Jesse: [laugh]. And a very public exit interview at that. So, make sure that we bleep all the swear words.Pete: I think it’s in Duckbill fashion to do a public—a very public-facing exit interview, right? That is Duckbill in a nutshell.Jesse: I think the only thing more public is if Corey asks you to hold the exit interview on Twitter.Amy: Exactly.Pete: [laugh]. I mean, we might have to do that, now. I like that idea. Yeah, so I think those are great questions, and I love the opportunity to talk about it. Because Duckbill is a fantastic company, and coming into Duckbill last year was totally by luck.Not really—no, not—luck is maybe not the right word. But I had been doing some consulting on my own, and the pandemic and some other forces caused a bunch of my consulting work to dry up really quickly. And I was sitting at home and I’m like, “Wow, I should get a real job.” And I saw a tweet from Mike on Twitter that was like, “Oh, we’re growing The Duckbill Group.” And Mike and Corey and I have known each other for such a long time.We’ve always said it’d be great to work together at some point in the future, but it’s so hard [laugh] to do. You know, to kind of work with your friends, and timing, and circumstance, and schedule, and everything else. And so when I saw that, I was like, wow, like that might be a lot of fun working with that crew. And I’ve got a lot of experience in AWS and I’ve—my title at one of my previous companies was Captain COGS—for Cost Of Goods Sold—because I was so diligent with the Amazon bill. So, it’s kind of one of those things where I felt like I could be useful and helpful to the organization, and talking with Mike and Corey, it just made a ton of sense.And so, it was a lot of fun to come on board. So, but then once you’re kind of in, and you start doing this type of work—and you know, Amy and Jesse, you’ve both experienced this—I think no matter how much knowledge you have of Amazon, very, very quickly, you realize that you actually don’t know as much as you really think you did, right?Jesse: Yeah.Pete: Because it’s so—there’s just so much.Amy: And it changes once every five minutes.Pete: [laugh].Jesse: Oh, yeah.Amy: Literally if you—well, just keep an eye on that changelog, you can watch your day get ruined as time goes on.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. It’s—yeah, it’s a real-time day ruining. And that’s the new. It’s like Amazon Kinesis: It’s all real-time.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Yeah, it’s so true. And I think the reason behind it is, you know, one of the first things I kind of realized is that when you are working inside of a business and you’re trying to understand, like, an Amazon service, you don’t necessarily go that deep because you’ve got a real job and other stuff to do. And when you’re finally, like—let’s say you’re in Cost Explorer; this is actually my favorite one because learning this took us a while. The documents aren’t very good. But in Cost Explorer, there’s a dropdown box that can show you your charges in different ways: unblended view, blended view, amortized view—if I’m saying that word really incorrectly—net-amortized view, net-unblended view. Like, what do all these mean?Most people just are like, unblended, move on with their lives. But at some point, you kind of need to know and answer that question, and then understand the impact, and all those things, and spending more hours than I care to count trying to correlate the bill and Cost Explorer to look the same. Something that simple, why is that so hard? You know, it’s things like that.Amy: Why is that so hard? I do not understand it. It is exhausting. [laugh].Jesse: It drives me absolutely crazy, and it’s something that in previous roles, you could just say, “Well, this isn’t my responsibility, so I’m not going to worry about it.” But now we’ve got clients who are asking us these questions because it is our responsibility and we do need to worry about it.Pete: Yeah, exactly. So, I think that’s just, kind of, one example. Now, there was a ton that I learned. I mean, just in how discounts might be applied when you look at charges in an account whether if you have an enterprise discount program, or private pricing in some way. I think one of my favorite ones—and this is actually something that catches a lot of people up—is especially in Cost Explorer, there’s kind of two ways that you can view a charge.So, let’s say you’re looking at S3, and you are trying to find your usage by the usage type. Like, I want to compare standard storage to maybe data transfer or something like that. And you go and group by usage type, and they’ll show you, “Hey, for your S3 for this month or day or whatever, you’ll have some spend associated storage and data transfer,” and you’re like, “That’s neat.” And then you say to yourself, “Now, I want to look at it by API.” And maybe you’ll see, wow, there’s a ton of spend associated with GETs or PUTs.And you’ll think that that is actually a request charge. And it’s totally not. It’s like, when you group by API, it’s the API that started the charge, not the charge itself. So, you could have a PUT that started the charge, but the charge itself is actually storage. It’s the little things like that, where you might glance at it in your account and go, “Oh, okay.” But then when you actually need to get down to the per penny on spend and share it with a client, you go even further down the rabbit hole.Jesse: Because why would all of the billing information across different sources be accurate?Amy: And also, why would things be named the same between the bill, and Cost Explorer, and the curve? Having those names be the same, that would just make it too easy, and just streamline the process too much, and be too logical. No, let’s work for it. We have to work for it. It’s a pillar of excellence; we have to work for it.Pete: [laugh]. Exactly. So yeah, I think it’s those types of things that you just start seeing the edge cases. But because of, kind of, the work we do, we keep going. We’re not just, “Oh, wow. Haha, silly Amazon.”But then we keep diving in deeper and deeper to figure out the why. And the reason for that really just comes down to the fact that we’ll need to communicate that in some effective way to the client to get them to understand it. And actually, that kind of leads me to the other thing that I think is probably the most important skill of being a cloud economist, of being in finops, is your ability to write long-form writing, being able to write clear, concise information explaining why the spend is what it is, explaining all of these edge cases, all these interesting parts of cloud cost management, and being able to write that down in such a way that anyone could read it; like a CFO could understand how the charges are happening, just like a head of engineering, who has maybe more impact to the spend.Jesse: Being able to communicate, the differences between different AWS services, between different billing modes, to different audiences is so critical to the work that we do because we’re ultimately going to be working with different people with different backgrounds at every single client that we work with. So, we need to be able to speak the language of different audiences.Amy: And it’s really different, how different C Suites, different departments, their goals are going to be different, too, because they have requirements that they have to fulfill. Finance is very concerned about the literal cost of things, while engineering is—they understand that their architecture comes at a price, and so long as they have the budget for it, they’re cool with it. And you just have to align what those goals are, and have that translate as like, into the document as, “They built it this way for this reason, which was fine at that stage. But as you grow, you need to make sure that it also fulfills these other external expectations.”Corey: Let’s be honest—the past year has been a nightmare for cloud financial management. The pandemic forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than anticipated, and we all know what that means—surprises on the cloud bill and headaches for anyone trying to figure out what caused them. The CloudLIVE 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with FinOps and cloud financial management practitioners and get a behind-the-scenes look into proven strategies that have helped organizations like yours adapt to the realities of the past year. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20th, the CloudLIVE 2021 conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend, so you have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to connect with the cloud management community. Visit cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. That’s cloud-l-i-v-e.com/corey to register.Pete: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s just—and can you imagine, you have some knowledge you want to share around something as complex as the Amazon bill. I mean we ask for a PDF of your bill when you start working with Duckbill Group. That could be hundreds of pages long, and you’re trying to distill that down into something that, really, anyone can understand. It’s a true superpower to be able to write long-form content like that really well.And I never used to like writing. I was never—never really enjoyed it that much and over the last year, that muscle that you’re working out, now, the ability to write many, many pages around this type of content, just it comes so much more easily. So, I think that’s another big aspect, right? The more you work on it, obviously the easier it gets.Jesse: I don’t know about you, but now that I have focused more on flexing that writing and communication muscle, I’ve noticed it more in both everyone that I work with day-to-day with Duckbill Group and also in my daily life, just watching how people communicate with each other, and how effectively people communicate with each other; it’s both amazing and nerve-wracking all at the same time.Pete: [laugh]. I know. And even—not to say that whenever we sit down to write our reports that we give to our clients, we don’t go through the wave of emotions between the back and forth of, like, “I don’t know what to write,” and then, “Oh, I know of a lot of stuff to write. Let me just get something down.” And then you can’t stop writing. It’s just—it’s this emotional roller coaster that I feel like no matter how many times we need to write a lot of detailed information down, everyone always goes through.Amy: And we really do have a highly collaborative process here, too, where we’re all in the same document, writing, and the person who owns any given report will always have the same stage at the end when all of the sections are filled out, where they go to one of the other people on the team and go, “Every word I put down is absolute garbage. Please help me trim it down, take it out. I don’t even care anymore. Just look at it and tell me that I wrote down words that are in some kind of human language.” [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. Oh, the plight of the writer. It’s, like, the imposter syndrome that affects the writer. It’s like, “Okay. I wrote a bunch of stuff. I think it’s terrible.” And then you sleep on it, you come back the next day, and you’re like, “Actually, this is pretty good.” [laugh].Amy: I explained concepts. It was fine. I didn’t use a single comma for three pages, but it’s probably fine. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: You can take one of mine. Usually, all of my draft documents are commas and M-dashes, just all over the place. Yeah, so I think that’s honestly a big superpower. And I think the last two things that—this is actually something that I’ve looked for in people that I’ve wanted to work with, and people I was hiring, and I see it here as well as these, kind of, two concepts of intellectual curiosity and aptitude to learn, where if you have a base knowledge around Amazon and you have those other attributes—that curiosity and truly enjoying learning—you can accelerate your ability to understand this so incredibly quickly because there’s such a wealth of information out there, and there’s so many documents, there’s so much stuff. It just requires someone who really cares enough to dive in and really want to understand.That’s something that I think we’ve seen here is that the folks who are most successful are just—they want to know why, and they’re not satisfied until they can explain it in a simple way to someone else. That’s the key, right? The attribute of a true expert is someone who can explain something very difficult in a simple way. And I think that’s something that would be critical if you were joining Duckbill, if you were building your own finops or cloud finance team, it is so complex. It’s the intersection of technical architecture and cost, and it touches almost the entire business. So, I think those are some other attributes that I think are just incredibly helpful.Jesse: We’re also usually not entirely satisfied until we’ve either opened a support case with AWS, responded to one of their feedback icons in the AWS documentation—the public AWS documentation—or trolled somebody on Twitter saying, “Shame on you, AWS, for writing documentation that doesn’t make sense.”Amy: It’ll be fine. Someone in your mentions will go, “Did you check the region?” And you would have, and then it’ll still be wrong.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: And it’ll be fine. [laugh]. Eventually, we’ll fix it.Pete: That one—Jesse: Too soon.Pete: —that one still hurts, when we—oh, I’m just like, “Why do the numbers not line up?” And then someone was like—Amy: It's a thing I check for, even if it’s like, “It’s a global resource.” I don’t care. Just tell me. Just tell me it’s fine. [laugh].Pete: “Are you in the right region?” Like—“Dammit, no, I’m not. Oh.” [laugh]. Yeah, that happens to the best of us.Amy: I did, unfortunately, burn so many hours, I think it was last week trying to find out where someone had put their resources. It’s like, “Oh, not us-west-2. It’s us-west-1. Of course.” [laugh].Jesse: So, annoying. Well, I would just like to say, Pete, it has been a joy and a pleasure working with you, it has been a joy and a pleasure complaining about AWS with you, on this podcast, so thank you for your time. That sounded really… really, really standoffish. I didn’t mean it quite as bad as it came off there. [laugh].Pete: Well, you know, I think we need to thank Corey for having a child and thus needing to offload some of his podcast duties over to us, and then the fact that we just never gave him the podcast back, and we just took it over.Jesse: Well, if you’ve got questions that you’d like us to answer, you can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. And if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what qualities you’re looking for when building out your cloud finance team.Pete: Thanks for coming in.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

It's Christmas! So Pete and Marc are here to let you know that the 12 days of Wrestle Me-mas are back for 2020.www.patreon.com/wrestleme to hear them all, but you'll still be getting a nice chunky show per week on this feed. Peace and love! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

When Kathleen Schroll called her mom late one night in the spring of 2008, her voice shook with fear. She said that a man named Ollin “Pete” Coones was in her house. He’d stolen her lawn mower, and now he planned to kill Kathleen and her husband, Carl. Kathleen told her mom that Pete said “he has his tracks covered where no one will know who did it.” When police arrived at the Schroll home, it was too late. Carl and Kathleen were dead. So… Pete did it. Right? In that same vein, Kristin tells a story that starts bad and gets so much worse. In 1913, Atlanta was rocked by the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan. Mary was killed at the National Pencil Company, where she worked long hours for little pay. The crime scene was littered with evidence, including bloody fingerprints, footprints, human feces, and two notes -- presumably written by Mary as she lay dying. Atlanta police rushed to solve the case, but didn’t go where the evidence led them. They went to Leo Frank, the factory’s superintendent. And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases. In this episode, Kristin pulled from: “Leo Frank,” famous-trials.com “Leo Frank case,” New Georgia Encyclopedia “Star witness in Frank case arrested here,” The Atlanta Constitution, October 21, 1941 “Frank case witness to be freed Nov. 15,” The Atlanta Constitution, November 5, 1941 “Jim Conley admits attempted at burglary,” The Atlanta Constitution, January 17, 1919 “Leo Frank,” entry on Wikipedia In this episode, Brandi pulled from: “Did His Dad’s Caretaker Frame Him for Her Own Murder-Suicide?” By Rachel Olding, The Daily Beast “Kansas man was framed in ‘Machiavellian’ murder-suicide scheme, lawyers argue” by Luke Nozicka, The Kansas City Star “Olin “Pete” Coones v. State of Kansas, Motion To Vacate” Midwest Innocence Project “KCK man goes free after 12 years in prison” by Luke Nozicka, The Kansas City Star “Olin ‘Pete’ Coones Exonerated” Midwest Innocence Project

I have heard enough. The Blazers are being held up like some crazy underdog so much that they are now one of the most overrated teams in my lifetime. So Pete and I discuss the matchup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Week 17 of the NFL season and for the brave few who have a Week 17 championship game on the line, Pete Davidson and Jim Hackett have you covered.  Every year Week 17 is a muddy week. Many teams have nothing to play for, others rest their studs to ready themselves for the postseason. So Pete and Jim walk the full Sunday slate, from the 1 p.m. games all the way through the big night tilt between the 49ers and Seattle. Piece by piece, Jim and Pete spotlight the games you can trust, lean into and the ones to avoid at all costs. See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One of the TOP questions I get asked by my followers is: what is the best way to land a board seat? It can be overwhelming when you think about all the work you’ll need to do to build a platform for your candidacy and then network in the right way. While it may seem daunting to do, there are actually ways to shortcut the process. And this is exactly what Peter Gleason and I discuss on today’s episode.  Pete is CEO of the National Association of Corporate Directors. NACD empowers new and aspiring directors to lead with confidence in the boardroom. They prepare today's directors for tomorrow's challenges. So Pete is perfectly placed to help you understand how to land a board seat! Here’s a Peek Inside the Episode Use an education program to learn the best practices. Leverage that certification to bullet-proof your credentials. How to network using secondary connections. Tips on using a peer experiential learning environment to rapidly grow your knowledge. Understand what diversity means in the boardroom and how that’s an opportunity for your candidacy. Why the traditional path to the boardroom has been upended. How concern about overboarding provides opportunity for you. Understand the trends boards are currently facing. Once you’ve listened to the episode, here’s what I hope you’ll do: take one step. Pick one of these ideas and put it to work in your board search process. I think you’ll be blown away by the results.   Let's Get Social!  I absolutely love connecting with listeners on social media. Right now, I'm hooked on Instagram. And yes, I do personally post and respond on my accounts! This is a great way to hear my latest thinking, get the inside track on new products, and even seen a few pictures of my toddler. Connect with me on @alexander.s.lowry.   Resources Mentioned in This Episode Book: NACD's Practical Guide: Fundamentals for Corporate Directors NACD's Public Company Governance Survey NACD's podcast: Future Fluency

Why Dave Decided to talk to Pete: Pete Vargas is an entrepreneur who helps people grow their businesses and spread their message through stages. He is the founder and CEO of Advance Your Reach, an organization with a shared vision of impacting 1 billion people across 7 spheres of influence. Since 2003, he and his team have booked over 25,000 stages worldwide–and generated tens of millions of dollars of revenue through those stages. Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business: Why stages? (1:30) Lead collecting (8:40) Where to get One Hour Launch Workshop (14:00) Quotable Moments: "Facts tell and stories sell." Important Links: OneHourLaunchWorkshop.com/dave ---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 to [inaudible] Speaker 2:     00:18         radio. I am your host Dave Woodward and I am so, so excited. I've got a dear friend of mine I want to bring on and the reason I want to bring him on his. I was actually out at his event and while I was there and I rarely paid to go to people's events anymore these days, but this one we actually paid to go to because of the value that I wanted to make sure we got from him and while I was out there at his event, I wanted to make sure that I had him on my podcast so he could share the same types of things with you and give you the opportunity to actually get involved with something like this. So without any further delays here, I want to bring on a dear friend of mine, Mr Pete Vargas. Welcome to show bud. Hey Man, I'm excited to be here. Speaker 2:     00:56         Thank you for having me. I'm stoked and just absolutely love you man. Well, I am so excited. Again, for those of you guys just don't know Pete. He's got a company called advance your reach. It's actually why we went out. A lot of you guys have heard. We actually are in the process of starting our own speaking team and even though Russell spoken on literally hundreds of stages and we've done literally thousands of Webinars, I was, we started looking at trying to systematize actual speaking and using, speaking to build our business. I thought there was no one better that I could bring on than Pe. So I flew myself and Chris who runs Chris now runs our, uh, our speaking team, flew him and myself and miles out to Colorado to spend three days with Pete and his team to learn really about how do you land stages, how can you use stages in your business, how can you actually use a stage to build your business by providing massive value and really you state using. Speaker 2:     01:47         For us, we're looking at using stages to scale and I know for a lot of you guys who are in the situation or listening to podcasts, some of you are sitting there going, I don't know. I haven't even. I've never done a stage presentation. How would I do that? Pete's going to answer that for you today. For those of you guys who were in Russell situation where you sit there going, the last thing I want to do is actually get on more stages. He's going to tell you how you can actually create a speaker team like what we're doing and do the exact same thing. Again, I'm you guys don't want to hear from me. What you really want to hear from is my friend who I'm so excited to have on the show. Again, Mr Pete Bargas. So Pete, let's kind of talk about what you refer to now as this one, our launch. Speaker 2:     02:19         What the heck is a one hour lunch? Yeah, so let me just tell you that one. Our launch, we're the one hour launched was birthed for me, like that's an important piece to understand. I, as you know, as a youth pastor and I brought speakers in because I didn't want to speak on the stage and so I brought these speakers in and I remember showed up my first Wednesday night. There were three kids there and I thought, how am I going to grow my youth ministry, which is going to be equivalent to how you're going to grow your business. And so what we did, Dave, is I brought in speakers and in one hour I saw my kids get so moved and inspired that they, the youth group just continued to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. We went from three kids to 750 kids in a town of 12,000 from bringing in over 30 over the course Speaker 3:     03:00         of four years. And our youth group just grew. And I saw the magic in one hour on a stage and the action that my kids took. One of those speakers, as you know, his daughter was the first girl killed at Columbine in 99. And he came and spoke and he came and he said, you know, there's five people that you need to let them know how much you love them because you don't know how long they're going to be here on earth with you. And I couldn't help but think any said some of them you're not in good standings with. So he, I couldn't help but think about my dad. I hated my dad because of what he had done to me. And so growing up as a kid. So that night I begged my dad to come back to the 90 defense and all of a sudden at the night event, my dad came back. Speaker 3:     03:39         He heard the speaker speak. We had tried for a decade. Everything, counseling church, his siblings constantly saying, you got to make things right with your son. And in one hour on a stage, one hour on a stage, it prompted my dad to write me a letter and say, I'm sorry for the father up then here my son is having an impact on hundreds of kids lives and I can have an impact on my only son's life. And he asked me for a second chance to do things right. I called that man, now this is important for the list because I said, dude, you did something in one hour that nothing could happen that put my head in the last decade wouldn't happen for my dad, which is a lot like our business. We tried so many things that don't work or they take forever to work and in one hour things can change as you get on a stage. Speaker 3:     04:23         So I called him and I said, why aren't you getting this out there to everybody? He's like, I'm trying this, I'm trying this. I'm trying this, who's trying a lot of things? And I'm like, get on a stage with your ideal clients in the crowd for one hour and watch what begins to happen. I don't know what the listeners, ideal crowd, they know who it is, but his ideal crowd was principals and superintendents. That's what his ideal crowd was because they were the decision makers who controlled the budgets. So the very first stage I put them on, I was like, Ooh, I hope this works. And because I figured out how do I land this stage, how do I make him great on the stage and how do I make sure that this is one of the biggest customer acquisition channels that exist because that's where he's going to change their lives. Speaker 3:     05:03         So I got to my first stage, I worked my system back in 2003. I've been working at cents 500 educators in the room. We couldn't make an offer. Five hundred educators in our later 450 of them were turning in a physical piece of paper, what we call a contact card because we lead collected by giving away a free gift for 150 are turning in papers. And in the next two weeks, 70 to 80 new clients paying three to $5,000, just shy of a quarter of a million dollars in one hour in the last year, struggling with everything in this business. He had done $52,000 in the last year. Now here's what happened with him and it's very much like Russell, very, very much like Russell. He started getting big. It started being recognized in the educational system and he couldn't be that, so a lot of you out there solo preneurs or if it's just you on your team and you're trying to really be like, what could I do it start with stages like Russell built click funnels with being on Webinars, you know, he did webinars, there's offline and there's online stages, but here's what happened with them and what's happened with Russell's. Speaker 3:     06:09         He got too busy and he couldn't be on all of the stages that we're requesting for him. So what did we do? We created a presentation that duplicated past him. We told the stories to company's story on the front end. We talked about the content. Everybody shared the same content in the middle, but at the beginning of the presentation we mentioned the company story and then how the company's story connected to the speaker and then the rest of the presentation was the same for every single one of those speakers. Dave, before it was all said and done, not only did he grow the organization from $50,000 to $7 million in the educational system, which might not sound like a lot on an annual basis, but they don't have budgets. Speaker 2:     06:49         That's huge. It's huge. Speaker 3:     06:51         Fifty two speakers out in any given year, sharing one presentation for one hour driving business, so whether it's somebody who wants to do it on their own and go to attract more customers, or if you're like, man, I'm like Darryl and Russell and I don't want to be on the road anymore. I get too many requests. Then build a team of people that can go do it, but here's what stages does it expedites the sales cycle in 60 minutes. A lot of people, it might take them six, nine, 12 months to consume 60 minutes of content online, but when you've got a captive audience, it's called the one our launch because you've got their undivided attention for 60 minutes and we know what can happen when you get on a stage for 60 minutes. Speaker 2:     07:33         I love it and I think people part I love the most is for one, your passion behind this. I get chills. I've heard you tell that story. I think six different times that I can think of about you and your dad and I get chills every single time because you have this ability to put yourself back in that actual moment to actually experience and have the person who's listening to you experienced the same feelings, the same raw emotions that you were going through right then and it's such a skill set that I think too often a lot of us getting this idea as far as you start telling instead of of of actually sharing and telling stories and as you know, you don't have joked all the time as far as you know, facts tell and stories sell and you're a. You are the master at when it comes to actually getting stories that have impact for people to then use those stories in their, in their presentation to connect with people. Speaker 2:     08:23         And that's one of the things I love and I was out there to readmit learning from you and just seeing the way that you are so good at connecting with people beat. The one thing I know that a lot of our listeners, they've heard about this whole perfect webinar script from Russell for forever. And so we've talked a lot about webinars. The one part I want to, if you don't mind kind of address is this idea as far as how you made mention that they were able to delete, collect meaning collect when you typically couldn't sell. Most everyone I know when they think of going to speak on stage, it's a 50 slash 50 split. This is one of the things you kept slapping me in the face. And Dave, hey wait, there's Speaker 3:     08:56         more, there's more. You actually can make more money not selling directly on stage. So if you don't mind kind of explore and explain to people how they actually can use that to build their business when they can't sell. So when you can't sell, there's two things that you're either in your presentation, your co, the we have, uh, we believe in your presentation that you start with the heart and you connect with people you teach and while you're teaching, you're embedding and you're sharing case studies and you're doing all of that. You're basically selling during the year, but you're teaching, you're teaching. But then in the call to action, the only difference between when you can sell and you can't sell as you're either collecting order forms, you're collecting leads when you can sell your collecting order forms. And that's the speak to sell world. And it's only one of four types of stages that you get. Speaker 3:     09:39         Five types of stages that you can get on the speak to sell world. When you can't sell, you're collecting contact information by giving away a free gift. You give a free gift the way that gets them from a to B, not a to z because nobody's gonna read your book and nobody's gonna go look at your slides, but they will consume a piece of content for 10 minutes that will move them from a to b and when they see that piece of content that moves them from a to B, how to get a date in the next week, how to rent your house and save $10,000 a year, how to go when your first stage in 24 hours and they get that a to b all of a sudden how to build a funnel and in in one day or 10 minutes, you know when they get that a to b, they're like, oh my God, that's his or her aid to be what is going to be there a to Z. Guess who the A to z is here, the ADC and so after that free event, you're following up for 10 to 15 days with automation, with click funnels and you will begin to see sales close. Speaker 3:     10:39         If it's a low ticket item, it's all automated. If it's a high ticket item, it's phone calls and one of the things that I get the biggest compliment for today on three different interviews, they said, Pete, you opened our eyes to the fact that I can't believe I never thought I could use a stage to sell an eight, 15 or $25,000 product. And then I saw you do it. I just did it at Jj Virgin's event. We couldn't sell in our first session date. We had a hundred and 10 people in the room. We gave free gift away. We did strategy sessions on site. We did 105 strategy sessions out of 110 people in the room and we saw 40 of them go deeper with us and then in the next two weeks we saw another doesn't go deeper with us. After that, you know, another 10 or 12 go deeper with us after that. Speaker 3:     11:29         That's an unbelievable stage. And guess what, there's no splits. You know, there's no splits and that's the beautiful thing. And so I love the five types of stages. Yes, you can get paid when you get paid your lead collecting. Yes. You can do free events when you do free. Eventually collecting. Yes. You can do speak to sell. When you're doing speak to sell, there's a 50 slash 50, 60 slash 40 type of split. Yes. You can sponsored stages where you pay a fee and you get to keep 100 percent of your money or you're like click funnels, and I love this. How they built click funnels is by doing their own stages. They did, I don't know how many webinars in the first year to launch this baby, but they did their own stages and so that's the powers you. There's four of those that you can be on other people's stages and one of them is your own stage stage. Speaker 2:     12:18         I love your passion. I love how good you are, what you do, and I think the part I. I had so much fun when we're together at your, at your event, was really diving deep into all four of those. Again, human, it's we. We've done a ton as far as webinars and we've really spent a lot of time on the 50 slash 50 side, but it was the other sides that I was fascinated about, especially as we start building out a speaker team is this ability to to land stages where we may be sponsoring or were there actually is free, which I'm still. I still need to hire you more on that so we'll work out the details of that later, but for me that the real benefit is to really understand how large the opportunity is. I think too often a lot of us in the online funnel world, we think of just webinars or or being at an event and just speaking and splitting it 50 slash 50. Speaker 2:     13:05         There's such a much more broad opportunity out there and it's really why I wanted to have you on this podcast is to help people understand you're missing the boat. There's so much more opportunity. It's really why, again, pizza whole idea as far as this one, our launch formula or a workshop is set up for that one reason to really allow people the opportunity saying, listen, you actually can build your business in multiple ways besides just webinars and and a typical 50 slash 50 type of a Jv partnership type of thing. So if you don't mind, I know we've just got a few more minutes here. What are some of the things? First of all, I want to make sure people understand how they can get this. So what are they going to get? How do they get it? Where do they go? Yeah, so I'd encourage people. Speaker 3:     13:44         Well, the goal was to one our launch workshops, spell one out o n e one our launch workshop.com, and we're going to show you how to actually use stages and to grow your business. We're going to show you what to do on the stage. Most importantly, we're going to show you how to get on this. Actually not most importantly, that's the easy part. How do you get on the stage and most importantly, how do you attract customers from those stages? Because Zig Ziglar said, I've never changed someone's life with a speaking Gig, but sometimes they buy my tapes and cassettes and I got a shot at changing their lives. What? Zig understood because the data showed him the data. Meaning his son told me a couple of weeks ago, Pete that had data to prove that dad knew that stages didn't change their lives because out of every hundred testimonies that came in, only one of them was about him impacting them on the stage. Speaker 3:     14:33         Ninety nine of them were about the products and services that they invested in him with. So that's why we want stages because in one hour to expedite it exponentially exponentially expedites the sales cycle. And so the last part of what we're going to be teaching people is how to actually create customers in all of these different types of stages exist. And so we're giving away thousands access to thousands of stages and we'll be interviewing over 30 meeting planners who control thousands of stages all across the world. So you understand what they think as they're hiring speakers, so that's the one, our launch workshop.com that we're going to be doing the next couple of weeks and I'm really excited about a day, but you asked a good question. You said, what? What is this opportunity with stages in you have you have this opportunity? There's this, there's this pyramid that you can say, I either want to go do on other people's stages or I want to do my own stages. Speaker 3:     15:25         Both are right. The answer is both are right, but what you're doing other people's or your own. There are eight different offline stages that exist in eight different online stages that exist and if you can just begin to build a portfolio of one, two, or three of the offline and one, two, or three of the online, it becomes powerful. And the thing is people in the Internet marketing space typically only know about a few of those like the speak to sell once, but there's associations, there's a huge association stages. There's seminar stages, there's local stages, there's end user stages, there's media stages, there's masterminds, there's eight different offline stages, and then there's eight different online stages. There's webinars, there's trainings, there's online media, there's podcasts, there's summit's, there's all of these stages that exist and what we basically are showing you how to do is how do you go get on other people's stages and I'll tell you the key is when they realize that you can solve a problem for their community, they'll open it up for you to be on their stage. Speaker 3:     16:27         Dasia dates, letting me do a round table at clip, at funnel hacking live because he knows I'll provide value because he's seen me and what I provide and so there's this opportunity. J Dave have stages that exist everywhere and the big thing that will get really clear on the in the, in the, in this launch workshop is what's your stage portfolio? Because for Russell it's two to three offline stages a year and that's it. But for the speaking team, it's hundreds of stages for them. You know, for me this year it was 17 to 18 offline stages and I did 125 online stages, kind of like Russell did they get click funnels starting next year. That'll shift for me because now I have three speakers that are going out on my behalf to for Stu Mclaren. He's like, dude, I want to do four stages and I want them to be for big stages and that's it, and that will move the needle in his business on a big way. So for everybody in the season of life they're in, I want you to understand that this is so many stages and you don't even realize how many exists and we're gonna help you get really clear on your portfolio in this training. Speaker 2:     17:33         I love it. For me, one of the things I get the most out of you, pete, is the idea as far as expanding my mindset with how many additional opportunities there were, and then the other thing was exactly how to get on those stages. I think a lot of the people I talk to says, well, I've got my presentation and I questioned whether you really do, but I'll leave that to let him deal with that. Whether you have your presentation pizza deal, but one thing I can't say that pizza, amazing that is helping you actually get on stages and teaching you how to get on stages. As I mentioned, we've hired will have probably some of the neighborhood of 15, 15, possibly even 20 different speakers this year to try to get on 500 stages and in 2019 and it's all because of pete and his skill set and helping us get on those stages. Speaker 2:     18:15         That's allowing us to basically have a complete huge event team that's going to be going out this year again to spread click funnels, message to the world and we're so excited to be working with Pete and with advanced have reached team and really spending that kind of time. I can tell you if for me, if I was to, you and I talked back and forth as far as my past and different boards. I've been involved in real estate. I've been involved in financial services I can tell and a lot of internet marketing, every single business I've ever been in has always had a speaking component to it and it's the only way you can truly scale a business, so understanding that those guys who are listening right now, if you have a product or a service and you think you're just doing it online, I can tell you you can 10 to 20 times what you're doing online by adding the speaking component to it. Speaker 2:     18:59         There's. You get so much more credibility. You have so much more of an authority figure when you start speaking and talking to people and they hear you, they see you. They connect. It's a relationship built. I mean, I go on and on about the importance of stages. It's again against the whole reason why a higher peak was to help us take our stages to the next level. So again, if you guys are in that situation where you're trying to scale your business, you're trying to add additional revenue, by all means, check it out. Again, it's a one hour launch workshop against one hour long. H O u r launch workshop, is that right? Speaker 3:     19:29         Yeah, one hour launch workshop.com. And Dave, what I would say, and I got a funny story with data, but like I want to really. I've got a really funny story. I want to drive home like the power of the one hour launch, like forget that one our launch. So Dave calls me a couple of years ago. He's been, he's become a friend of mine. Like I'm so glad that Keith Yackey introduced us. We're going to be doing something cool this year at an event and we're going to be doing a lot of cool things, but in being able to help the speaking team, but they've called me a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, year and seven months ago. I was like, dude, you never believe it. We just did 900 k on this stage and a lot of you know that because it was the first time at 10 x. Speaker 3:     20:07         and I'm like, all right, he's just motivated me. So watch this. No, this is fun. And you've helped a lot of organizations or individuals go from zero to six using state agency or to seven zero to eight overall in their business. And we've never taken seeing someone go from zero to nine, I believe. I believe click funnels can be that organization. But here's the thing. We've seen a lot. We had seen a few million dollar stages at that point. I had seen it from our clients and I'm like okay, he did 900 k, I had a big stage coming up this January, this past January. And I'm like okay, I just want to be able to tell Dave what I did. And so Michael Phelps was the opening keynote. Howie Mendell was the closing keynote. I was the in the middle of that. Speaker 3:     20:49         And by the way, they treat me dates. They paid me to be on that stage because of the value I provide and they let me talk about my products and services. And when it was all set in that said and done, that was a seven figure stage. We did over a million dollars from that stage. And I was like, yes, the one hour and I got Dave and Russell and then obviously all of you know the story, like I know Russell doesn't do physical stages much, but when he does, I think that's a commercial, but when he does a million dollars plus in, I am so excited to see what Russell does this year as well. And so like, look at your leader. He built his company in the first year on digital stages. Look at them in physical stages. When he does them, he knocks it out of the park, the one our launch really works. And so dave, thanks for having me. I love to have a lot of people join us in that one hour launch workshop name. Speaker 2:     21:46         I love it again. So it's one our launch workshop.com. Go there, check it out. Uh, for one it's built on click funnels or it better be right. Maybe it's Speaker 3:     21:55         well pieces of it or not. So yes, I'm a, I'm a two comma club guy. Speaker 2:     22:07         I would love to get you to our eight feet. I should've had a ring here that, uh, I just, in fact, we just got a new ring for Russell actually as I'll show it to you later. Speaker 3:     22:17         Hey, that stage I just talked about, for me, that stage was one with a click funnels page. They actually scheduled a call to see if they wanted me as a speaker on a clickfunnels page because our stage campaign is all built within clickfunnels self. Man, it's, I'm a big advocate of Cleveland. Speaker 2:     22:34         It's just fun for me. I can tell you again, I bet you were such a dear friend and I love spending time with you. I appreciate. I know you're limited in the middle of the launch right now and I know how busy things are. You've got a million other interviews and podcasts and stuff going on. I appreciate you taking the time today. Again, people, anyone who's listened to this, I hold back anything that does these days, it's been so much fun. Uh, we actually are a crazy yacht coming up here with him and all this other stuff. He's always sucking money out of me some way or the other. Anyways, bottom line is again, go ahead and check out one hour launch workshop.com. I regardless, you've got to be doing stages and if you're not exactly sure how to do it. Pizza. The Guy I hired him and I totally. That'd be opportunity spending time out there with both Chris and miles. Spend three days with them. God knows what he's talking about when it comes to stage it, so check out one hour launch workshop. Again, Pete, always so much fun having any other parting words before we let you go. Speaker 3:     23:31         Oh Man. Dave, thanks so much and I just thank y'all for. I'm excited to see click funnels in 2019 and the game plan that you have with this powerhouse speaking teams. So Speaker 2:     23:41         thanks man. We'll talk soon. All right everybody, thank you so much for taking Speaker 4:     23:46         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 or 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 100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve 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 there's people 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 I can do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.

So Pete and John had grand plans of getting together and putting out this pod in the start of the holidays and then doing a couple of pods during the holidays. Look, we all know that didn't happen. I'm not sure what's on this one either - I like to take a gamble and see what's on there when it's published.  In other words, as John likes to say, I'm rubbish. I might update these show notes after I listen. But I doubt it. Dear listener we love you, my rubbishness is less a reflection on how we feel about you and more a direct correlation with the intensity of life at the moment.  Thanks for sticking with us, and if you get the chance give it a rate and review on iTunes or wherever else you can. Thanks, Pete (@mr_van_w) and John (@jfcatto)

So Pete and John had grand plans of getting together and putting out this pod in the start of the holidays and then doing a couple of pods during the holidays. Look, we all know that didn't happen. I'm not sure what's on this one either - I like to take a gamble and see what's on there when it's published.  In other words, as John likes to say, I'm rubbish. I might update these show notes after I listen. But I doubt it. Dear listener we love you, my rubbishness is less a reflection on how we feel about you and more a direct correlation with the intensity of life at the moment.  Thanks for sticking with us, and if you get the chance give it a rate and review on iTunes or wherever else you can. Thanks, Pete (@mr_van_w) and John (@jfcatto)

As your relationship changes, are things getting better and better? Or have you gotten stuck along the way? If you get stuck - how do you get unstuck? And no matter what happens, how do you foster a sense of collaboration, of being on the “same team” with your partner? Today’s guests, Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, have charted the course of how relationships develop - in fact, they created the “Developmental Model” for working with couples. Along with practical experience from having helped many couples, Ellyn and Peter are among the leaders in the field of training couples therapists to become more effective. Their book for therapists, In Quest of the Mythical Mate: A Developmental Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment in Couples Therapy is a classic that has stood the test of time - unlike many other books and theories that have come and gone. Today you’ll learn how to figure out where you’re stuck in your relationship, and how to be on the same team as you steer things back in a healthier direction. Also, please check out our first episode with Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson - Relationship Alive Episode 24: Why We Lie (and How to Get Back to the Truth) As always, I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this episode and what revelations and questions it creates for you. Please join us in the Relationship Alive Community on Facebook to chat about it! Sponsors: Along with our amazing listener supporters (you know who you are - thank you!), this week's episode has a cool new sponsor with a special offer for you - Songfinch.com. Songfinch.com helps you create an original song as a unique gift for any special occasion. You tell them what the occasion is, what emotions you want your song to evoke, what type of song you want, and give them a little bit of your story - and they bring your story to life with a radio-quality song that captures it all. Songfinch is offering you $20 off a personalized “Song from Scratch” if you use the coupon code ALIVE20 at checkout. Resources: Check out Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson's website Get Ellyn and Peter’s Guide to Super Negotiation for Couples and find out about their other resources FREE Relationship Communication Secrets Guide - perfect help for handling conflict… Guide to Understanding Your Needs (and Your Partner's Needs) in Relationship (ALSO FREE) www.neilsattin.com/development Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Thank you so much for being with us here today on Relationship Alive. Pete Pearson: It's good to be here, Neil. Ellyn Bader: Yeah, really happy to be with you again, Neil. Neil Sattin: Awesome. Yes. It's been a while since episode 24, which was when we last spoke, when we're now in the 150s here. So ... Pete Pearson: Oh my goodness. Neil Sattin: I know, I know. So Pete, we were just talking, and we were talking about the ... Before we started officially, we were talking about this question about what people do when they get triggered, and you said, "That's not the most important question for people to be asking." And so I'm curious, from your perspective, what is the most important question that people should be asking? Pete Pearson: See, here's what's interesting, Neil. In just about every couple that we see, a couple will get an insight into where they're stuck, how they're stuck, and why they're stuck. And the next question almost inevitably is, "Well, what do we do about it?" And that's an understandable question. And I used to think, "Oh, they're asking me for advice. I'll give them advice about what to do right now." And then they will leave, they will practice what I just expressed, they will come back, and they will be on bending knee thanking me for my wisdom, intelligence, smarts, etc. Pete Pearson: What I discovered is, and they say, "God you're so wonderful, what other advice do you have? And we're gonna tell all our friends about you, because you're so smart. " Well what I discovered was, it didn't happen that often. But yet they asked, "What do we do about it?" And then I discovered, the what do we do about it is a good question, but it's a premature question. Really the question that comes before is, "How motivated are you to do something about it?" See, it takes a strong motivation, a bigger picture that pulls us forward, and that bigger picture, that stronger motivation is what allows us to unhook from those triggers. And if the motivation is puny, then no matter what I say that could be effective, will not be applied. Neil Sattin: Yeah, we had David Burns on the show, and he was talking about how surprised he often is that when it gets right down to it, a lot of couples that he's worked with, actually aren't willing to change. Even though they are coming to couples' therapy, they would prefer being stuck where they are, versus whatever's required to change the direction. Pete Pearson: Well I think that's true for one part of them. Here's what I mean. And I think the dilemma of change was summed up brilliantly by James Baldwin, the playwright and writer, when he said, "Nothing is more desirable than to be relieved of our affliction." And that's the motivation that brings couples into therapy. "Nothing is more desirable than to be relieved of our affliction, and nothing is more terrifying than to be divested of our crutch." And that I interpreted as, "nothing is more terrifying than to be divested of our coping mechanisms. Our self-protections." Pete Pearson: So couples are in a terrible bind. They want to be relieved of their affliction, yes, and it's terrifying to be divested of their coping mechanisms. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and you speak also in your work about the importance of both people recognizing that there's something in it for them, whatever it is they're experiencing. I'm thinking right now of the example you give of people, and we'll explain this a little bit more as we go, but people who are in a symbiotic and practicing relationship. Where one of them is working to be more independent from the other, and the other one is like, "No, come back here. Be with me." And it creates all of this tension and conflict and it's easy for the practicing partner to overlook the fact that they actually benefit a lot from that symbiotic welcome home, that they get from their partner, even though it's confounding them in their quest for independence. Pete Pearson: Ellen, you want to speak to that? Ellyn Bader: Yeah, but I'm not sure what the question is. I can speak about that type of couple, but Neil, did you have a question there? Neil Sattin: Yeah, good point. So the question in there, I think it was more of an observation that this is a situation where people are invested in the problem, or invested in the crutch as Pete was talking about. Maybe the question is, what are some strategies you have for helping people become aware of their role or of the crutch that they have in the moment, even if they think, for instance, that something is all about their partner's problem? Ellyn Bader: So I think what you're asking is, first of all, at least to me it's like, how does a person take a look at what they're doing that's getting in their own way, and can you get some acknowledgement that a particular thing somebody is doing, is actually getting in their own way of being able to realize the dreams that brought them together or being able to accomplish something they want to accomplish. So there's the question of, "Okay, what are some things you do to help somebody realize it?" So that's one piece. Then the second piece is what Pete was talking about, is "Can you lay out what it's going to take to change it, and then increase motivation? Or is there motivation to actually do the work or put in the effort." And then certainly you want the couple to be able to collaborate and work together on that process of change, so that they are reinforcing each other as they go through what is challenging and difficult for them to do. Ellyn Bader: So when you can get all three of those things really solidly in place, you're gonna have a couple that's motivated and working with you in the therapy process. When any one of those things, is missing, you're gonna have a much harder time, and therapists often report having sessions that are repetitive and seem to go nowhere and the couple comes in week after week with the same fight or the same dynamic. So I think you have to look at all three of those, and make sure that you've got them all in place. Neil Sattin: Yeah, where do you feel would be a great place to start? I mean, what's popping into my mind immediately, is your concept of developing a strong future focus for a couple, based on where they are developmentally? Pete Pearson: See, that's an important place when we start to figure out the steps for change. But to get people to own their part, I find now is, what I do in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the first session, is to have people own their part. But I do it in a rather indirect way. It's like it's traditional for most therapists, when a couple comes in for the first session to ask, "Why are you here," or "How can I help?" And at that point most couples launch of barrage of cross complaints about, "Well, I'm here because my partner is insensitive. They're a slob. They're not affectionate. They're not responsible. They don't follow through." Etc., etc. And so they trade blames. Pete Pearson: And then after a few minutes, everybody in the room is feeling miserable, I know that because I've been there so many times. And then I found there's a much better way to get to the bottom of what they struggle with without any blame at all. And I will say to them, "It's typical for most therapists to ask when we start the first meeting, is to say, 'why are you here?'" I say, "I don't want to do that, because it just ends up everybody blaming everybody. So what I'd like to do is ask you guys a diagnostic question, and it lets me know how well you've been listening to each other. Which also lets me know how hard you're gonna have to work in here. So Joe, tell me what do you think are Sue's major complaints about you are? And Sue, what do you think Joe's major complaints about you are? And it doesn't matter who goes first, because you both get a chance to express that." Pete Pearson: And at that point, Joe will say, "Well Sue will say that I'm too preoccupied with my devices. I don't spend enough time with the family. I don't call if I'm gonna be home for work. I just, and I want affection without being nice during the day or the evening, and ..." And then I'll say, "Oh, man, those sound really good, Joe. What else?" And he says, "Well, I think she thinks I'm not very careful with money." Well I'll say "Dynamite. Those are good. Joe, how confident are you on a scale of one to ten that Sue's gonna say you nailed it?" Joe'll say, "Well about a seven or eight." And then I'll say, "What those complaints you just mentioned, is there some legitimacy to her complaints?" And he'll say, "Well, yeah." But I don't go into detail. Pete Pearson: See at that point, and then I'll say, "So Sue, how good has been doing?" "Well he's been listening, and frankly, I think he's listened better than I thought. I'd give him about a seven or eight on that or maybe even a nine." "Sue, do you have any appreciation for Joe, listening so well to you? Now why hasn't he done anything is why you guys are here. But is there a part of you that appreciates that at least he's been listening?" And she'll say, "Well yeah." "Well tell him." "Joe I didn't know you listened so well. Thank you for listening." Pete Pearson: So instead of being defensive, now they're collaborating and giving each other compliments, and each of them, when they do that, have just laid out what the problems are by owning their stuff instead of having their partner do it for them. Almost nobody Neil, nobody wants to meet somebody and within 10 minutes start being ripped by their spouse about all their flaws and faults. All that does is create shame, embarrassment and guilt. But doing it this way, people claim their stuff for themselves, I don't have to work as hard, I get to understand the problems, and the atmosphere in the room is a whole lot better. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I can see how that would get things started off on the right foot. Both with giving you a sense of what's going on for them, and how well they listen, and also, the degree to which they're able to see their part or take responsibility for at least what they think their partner is complaining about with them. Pete Pearson: Exactly. And that can only be done in the first 20 minutes. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. That's perfect. I'm curious. Do you still ... You talk about the paper exercise in your book, The Inquest of the Mythical Mate. Do you still do that exercise with couples? Ellyn Bader: Actually, you're right where I was gonna go. Because that exercise is an absolutely fabulous exercise. In five minutes a therapist can see and then can help feedback to the couple where they break down. It's an exercise that's designed to help you and couples ... And a concept the we talk a lot about is the concept of differentiation. And basically, the way the exercise goes is the therapist hands the couple a piece of paper and asks them to hold it between them, and gives them up to five minutes to decide who gets to hold the paper without ripping or tearing it. They can do it verbally, they can do it non-verbally, they can do it anyway they like, but at the end of five minutes, decide who has the paper. Ellyn Bader: And then you get to sit back as the therapist, you get to sit back and watch for five minutes, and then in watching, you're going to be giving the couple feedback about how they do. And the exercise, I can give you a few highlights right now. It's a very wonderfully sophisticated exercise for getting to leverage stuck places in couples' relationships. But I mean, you're looking for whether people self-define. Whether they avoid conflict. Whether they're able to go into the conflict. Whether they have skills to negotiate and move a conflict forward. Ellyn Bader: And so when you can talk to a couple about, "Hey, here's what I saw. Does this make sense? Here's what I think each of you did that was positive and great and effective, and here's where I think you're stuck, or here's where I see you getting stalled. And usually what you see in terms of how couples are getting stalled in that exercise, are similar to what they do at home, that prevents them from solving problems or sets them up to be angry at each other. And it's a very not-threatening, very sort of collaborative process that you can get into with couples when you do that exercise with them. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and what I loved about reading your book, was not only the recognition that I had about, "Oh, okay. Yeah. I recognize having been in a relationship that was stuck in this place or that place," and let's, before we go too much further, we'll define them so that people know what we're talking about. But I also love PART 1 OF 3 ENDS [00:17:04] Neil Sattin: how, I think it's easy to, let's say, someone here says, "Well, I'm going to try that with my partner. Let's grab this paper and see if we can figure it out." And then for some reason they can't or they have a huge eruption or at an impasse to feel like, "Wow, we must be really horrible as a couple because we couldn't even do this paper exercise right." Neil Sattin: But what I love is that it just is simply a way of getting insight into where you are, but that each place where you might be stuck simply represents a place where you need to grow and growing past that place gives you a pathway to a new level of intimacy and being able to handle conflict better and being able to stand really strongly in who you are while still enjoying intimacy with your partner. Ellyn Bader: Oh, absolutely and one of the things that I think is so valuable about it is that it's easy when you're in the midst of it with your partner and you're like going home after work and you're having fights or you're not getting along well on weekends or you're fighting over disciplining the kids. It's easy to think you have a whole lot of problems, but when you can find the leveraged place, the place that repeats, and you learn how to do that differently, then you start doing it differently in all the different areas that you have conflict. So you don't actually always have to go back and solve every single problem that you think that you have if you change the process of how you talk and the process of how you approach things that are stressful. Neil Sattin: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. How much do you feel like awareness, before we dive into it, briefly, of the developmental model, how much do you think that awareness is helpful for a couple to be able to see, like, "Okay, this is the span of how couples develop looks like and this is where we're at." Is that enlightening or confining? From a couple's perspective versus the therapist's perspective. Ellyn Bader: I can tell you what the therapists in my online training program report. And so, I have therapists who work with me, basically, who are in countries all over the world and many of them report that their clients feel relieved when they see the process. We have little brochures that we use and that a lot of therapists give to their clients which layout the stages and sometimes they'll send a couple home to look at it and figure out where they are. Sometimes they'll just talk about it. But when couples can see, hey, there is kind of a normal progression that a lot of relationships go through and either we're right on track, which is sometimes the case, or hey, we got stuck here and this is what our challenge is so that we can move forward. And what we always say is, when couples get unstuck, then they can get back into their own developmental process. They don't need a therapist all the way through their whole development. Neil Sattin: Right. So, would you be willing, or I could do this too, but because I don't want to put you on the spot completely, but to give sort of the two to three minute overview of, what are we talking about, the developmental stages that a couple goes through? Ellyn Bader: Pete, do you want to do it or do you want me to do it? Pete Pearson: Go ahead, Ellyn. Ellyn Bader: Okay. So, the quick version is, two people meet, they fall in love. In the ideal world, everything is beautiful, wonderful. They have that incredible falling in love period, which I sometimes call a period of temporary psychosis. But it's a period in which there's bonding and attachment and not everybody starts that way, but a lot of couples do. And then it's normal by about two years into the relationship, sometimes a little sooner, sometimes a little longer, but it's very, very normal to hit a period of disillusionment when the partner is taken off that pedestal and instead of being seen as wonderful, all of a sudden the flaws start to show up and that disillusionment period is normal. Ellyn Bader: And then what people have to contend with is, how do we work out who are you and who am I given that we not only have parts of ourselves in each other that we love, but parts of each other that we find sometimes disgusting or we don't really want to be around or we don't like and that's all normal. But what's hard for couples is to learn how to manage those differences effectively instead of ineffectively. When they handle it ineffectively, they start to blame, accuse, or withdraw and then they get into some negative patterns. Ellyn Bader: So the second stage of relationship is the stage of differentiation. It's a stage in which partners do learn how to come to terms with their differences. When that goes well, actually people are able to have a lot more independence than they had in the first two stages because there's a base of connection and a base of, hey, we know to solve things. We solve them well. And then they can be out in the world more. They can be doing more independent things, enjoying other things that they're bringing back to help nourish the relationship, and so there's often a period in which that can go on for many, many years in which each partner is developing their own self-esteem apart from how the relationship is fairing. Ellyn Bader: And then at some point often there's a period of reconnection or of returning to the relationship as a source of greater nurturance and often couples at this time tend to focus more on their sexual relationship or on different aspects of intimacy when they're reconnecting. And many couples who get through all of this end up wanting to create something together and so we even talk about a last stage being a synergistic stage. A stage in which one plus one is really greater than two and they support each other in ways or goals or projects that are meaningful to both of them. So that's a very quick version of sometimes what I teach in a whole morning. Neil Sattin: That was great. And I'm thinking back to how you mentioned that you're working a lot with entrepreneurial couples these days and I'm curious to know how you draw distinction between couples who are working together from a synergistic place that one plus one is more than two, versus couples who are coming at that from a more enmeshed place where they're not ... It's about just not being able to be without each other. Pete Pearson: I guess, that gave me, what a great question. If couples want to start working together and they haven't been able to work out yet how to manage their differences or their disillusionments, boy, are they in for a wild ride. If you think about all the different areas of interdependence that couples have when they're not even working together, where they have areas of interdependency, our family and friends and finances and fitness and food and fidelity and faith and man, there are a lot of F words in an interdependent relationship. Pete Pearson: And each one of those areas require a set of negotiation problem solving skills and working together. And then you add all those areas of interdependency with all the areas of interdependency at work, when they're working together. What could possibly go wrong? So, the problems just are geometric when you work with your partner, your spouse, and yet, more and more couples are working together. There's a lot of entrepreneurs out there on the internet or doing franchise operations and their spouse is involved and that just really doubles the opportunity to collide. It also doubles the opportunity to synergize your strengths and abilities. Pete Pearson: So, it really, the push and pull is enormous to deal with the differences and it's ... Sometimes I will say, I will ask couples, "Would you want to be married to a personality clone of yourself?" Most couples say no. And I'll say, "Well, why is that?" And the category it's generally falling to, "Well, if I'm married to a clone of myself ... If I married a clone, it would be like World War 3." Or, "If I married a clone of myself, it'd be really interesting, but nothing would get accomplished." And as one woman said, "I would have all my problems times two." Pete Pearson: And so the good news is, they're smart enough to know that differences can enhance a relationship, but the same differences can also corrode a relationship, but we want to marry somebody who is different. And that's the good news and the bad news. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I'm just thinking too about how time, being such a limiting resource in many respects with everything that people are trying to accomplish in today's world and so I could see that providing incentive for people to want to work together as a way to actually maybe be able to spend more time together. Pete Pearson: Right. Neil Sattin: And yet, from what you're saying, I also gather, like, wow, it is so important in that case to be able to identify, oh, here we are not handling conflict very productively and here are all the signs of that. Whether it's increased resentment or increased ... Just increased conflict that gets explosive versus actually resolving. And that comes from what you were talking about, right Ellyn? That sense of, have you differentiated effectively enough so that you can stand in who you are, but actually meet the other person as a whole person unto themselves and have a collaborative way of being on the same team as you navigate those places where you're not in alignment. Ellyn Bader: Yeah. One of the things, Neil, that I find really interesting, as I said, I've started doing some more work with entrepreneurs and their spouses and particularly, I love working with the couples who are fairly new to going into business together because one of the things that they know they have a ton at stake because if they don't make it, their business is going to have problems or have to be split up as well as their marriages or their committed partnerships. And so they actually have, in some cases, a much higher motivation to get it right at the beginning, and also sometimes it's easier for people to get the concept that in business, our roles and responsibilities need to be really clearly defined. Ellyn Bader: And that's also true on the home front with a lot of couples, but couples don't tend to think about it that way, they tend to think about it as, well, if our relationship is good, everything will just go smoothly and we can move back and forth smoothly. Neil Sattin: Right. It all just works itself out. Ellyn Bader: Exactly. And so they know- Pete Pearson: That's the hope. Ellyn Bader: Right. That's the hope and the belief that it should be easy. But yet, when you have clearly defined roles, it mitigates a lot of conflict. Ellyn Bader: Here comes our gardener making some noise I'm sorry to say. Neil Sattin: I can hear it, but it's so faint in the background and you're coming through so loud and clear that as long as you're able to concentrate, then I think we're good. Ellyn Bader: Okay. Neil Sattin: Yeah. So, I love that. So, one potential option if you're having trouble motivating to actually change is to start a business together. Ellyn Bader: Well, except if your relationship is a mess, it's not a great time to start a business together. Pete Pearson: You'll have all your problems times two. Neil Sattin: Just kidding. But it does bring us back to that question of how you get people to buy-in. To like ... Okay, this is actually going to require something of me to create change in our relationship. Ellyn Bader: Yeah, and most people who have worked in the workplace understand that there are different roles and responsibilities that come with a job and they've been in jobs where they've had people on a team who are doing different aspects of the work. And so they've had that experience and it makes logical sense. But then when they go home and they think, there's just two of us, they don't think about saying, okay, who's responsible for organizing childcare? Who's responsible for our finances or is somebody paying the bills and somebody else doing the investments? Who's responsible for cooking dinner on Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday or does somebody always cook and somebody always clean up? And they get into patterns, but often it's not really clearly delineated. Neil Sattin: Right. So, is there a process that, if I'm listening to this and thinking, "Oh, you know, some of those things we haven't actually figured out," or "I wonder if we've differentiated effectively?" How could I diagnose myself or our relationship to know if that's happened or not? Pete Pearson: Well, the easy way to know that it's happened, Neil, is, what does my partner do that annoys me? And when you start from a place of, what does my partner do that annoys me in what area of stuff around the house, I would bet that it's because you haven't clearly delineated and agreed upon the roles and responsibilities of that area. Couples kind of normally fall into those patterns in kind of like happenstance, but there's a lot of slippage and a lot of boundary confusion or unclarity about who is really responsible for what and who gets the deciding vote in that area. And that's when our annoyances almost always come from expectations, "My partner's not meeting my expectations." So, the annoyances have to do with expectations of partners that haven't been clarified very well or agreed upon. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Or assumptions that you're making. Pete Pearson: Assumptions, yes. Neil Sattin: So, I'm curious for couples who say, think, "Well, generally it works out okay, but when we try to have that conversation, it doesn't go so well, like either ... That could be an explosive argument, or it could be I just always have to give in, because we can't have that conversation. What are some ways that you offer couples to help them have that conversation in a way that's more generative, and you talk about ... I think you talk about fighting fairly or conflict ... I can't remember the exact phrase that you use, but agreements around how you have conflict. Ellyn Bader: Well, before we even go there, let's say that when couples are trying to negotiate, they make some mistakes. One of the big mistakes that people make is caving in too quickly and they don't realize that when they hit that place of tension, that's actually the place where it's important to stay with it a while longer and figure something out and not see that tension as something bad, but see that tension as where their growth edge actually is. Ellyn Bader: And so, it's a long story, and we won't go into all the details, but Pete and I talk about many years ago, when we ran workshops together, how we reached a point of conflict, and where we each wanted something very different and it took a full year to sort it out and a full year of actually having to work with the tension, until we came to something that worked for both of us and enabled us to keep working together, because otherwise we would've had too much conflict and not been able to continue working together, running workshops together. People think they should get through stuff faster sometimes than is actually possible. Ellyn Bader: The process of getting through it is a process where both you get to know yourself better, and you get to know your partner better, if you can stay curious about why something matters to your partner, stay curious about why is it so important to you, learning how to ask really good questions, learning how not to cave too fast. There's many different capacities that are involved in successfully differentiating and successfully managing conflict that get strengthened. The emotional muscle gets built as couples go through that together. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, so I could almost see, like for instance, if you sense that your partner is just caving in, because you've hit that point of tension, to have the willingness to say, “No, I don't want to just get my way here. Let's figure out a way to have this conversation, as long as is required.” Ellyn Bader: Right, right, and you know, people who tend to be very active and assertive often end up with partners who are a bit more passive than they, themselves, are and for a while it may work to let the more passive person just cave in, but then, over time, instead of having clear roles and responsibilities, what you actually have is the active person doing way, way, way, way more, and the other person doing less, and resentment building. You need to be able to stop that caving in process early. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, what's ... Maybe we could talk briefly about a structure that could be helpful for people, when they realize they're at this place, a point of tension that's where they tend to get stuck. What might- Pete Pearson: Hey, I have an ... Ellyn, I have an idea. Neil, if we could post somewhere, where your listeners could go to and get a four-page document called, “Super Negotiation for Couples.” Neil Sattin: Love it. Pete Pearson: It's a really step-by-step process for how to negotiate and how to avoid the two big problems of negotiation, which is either caving in too quickly or pushing yourself too hard to get what you want, at the expense of the other. I can give you a link where your listeners could go and get that document. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that would be great, if it's easy. We can always post it in the transcript of the show, as well. Pete Pearson: That would be great, but very quickly, and then we'll send you the link, and it could be posted in the transcript. It's couplesinstitute.com/blog, and then in the blog, it's Super Negotiation for Couples, couplesinstitute.com/blog, and the blog is “Super Negotiation for Couples.” It's four pages, which is really good, a step-by-step process to lead you through what can be negotiated, and, interestingly enough, what cannot be negotiated, and even more importantly, how to prepare ahead of time to make an effective negotiation. Neil Sattin: Great. I can already envision enlisting Chloe and doing it experimentally and recording ourselves for the podcast- Pete Pearson: Oh, cool! Yeah. Neil Sattin: So that you can hear us live going into negotiating or not, something really sensitive for us. Pete Pearson: Oh, that would be interesting. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, totally. I appreciate your sharing that link, and we will definitely have a direct link to that in the transcript and show notes, as well. Pete Pearson: Terrific. Neil Sattin: I guess that saves us from having to go through the whole thing here. Pete Pearson: Right. Neil Sattin: One thing that I want to touch on is when people get into relationship and, Ellyn, you mentioned, very often, not always, but very often there's that initial falling in love or that feeling of merging, or we're the same, or we're meant for each other. This is perfect. Then the disillusionment happens, where you start realizing the person isn't perfect. Yet, towards the end of the developmental process, when you're actually in that place of synergy, I don't think you're going to feel like you're the same again, but you will feel an intense level of intimacy and closeness that, in some ways, is at least a variation on the theme of that kind of intimacy that you experience at the very start of your relationship. Neil Sattin: I want to bring this up, because I feel like, so often, the struggle for people is wanting to hang onto what they experienced at the very beginning out of fear of moving like that, in the differentiation process, they're going to lose each other. How do you keep people connected, while they're differentiating? Ellyn Bader: First of all, one of the ways that I explain this, and I think it's a visual that people really get, is you know the disco balls that have mirrors all around them? Neil Sattin: Yes. Ellyn Bader: I keep a disco ball in my office. What I say is a disco ball represents each person, and all the mirrors on the ball are different facets of yourself. When you two met and fell in love, the disco ball mirrors that were facing each other or were setting each other off, and you were falling in love, and all the brain chemicals got going, are those places where you really felt like you were the same, like you were meant for each other, like everything was just perfect. Ellyn Bader: Well, because everybody has so many different facets of themselves, it's inevitable that those balls are going to spin. There's going to be a period in which the ones that are facing each other are actually the ones where you don't get along so well, or you're not the same, and where you have growth that needs to take place, in order to keep the connection. Over time, the balls are going to continue to spin, and you will learn things that will deepen your connection and, actually, the kind of intimacy that most couples experience when they get to the other side of that is a kind of intimacy that feels more real and more grounded than that super-exciting, temporary psychosis that went on at the beginning. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I mean the disco ball isn't terribly effective when it stays in one place. It needs to spin for- Ellyn Bader: Exactly. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. Ellyn Bader: Now, and a relationship needs juice. It needs energy, and some of that energy comes from the differences, as well as from the similarities. Neil Sattin: I suggest that you, at home, you pick your favorite disco tune, and you can hum it to yourself when you're in a moment of uncertainty about the direction that you're headed. I'm already getting it might be the night fever, we know how to go it. Pete Pearson: Cool. Neil Sattin: There's that reassurance that you're headed towards that place, and yet it can feel really scary to give, to grant, freedom, or to take freedom, let's say, to take that independence. Is there a specific way that you encourage people to do that, to enter into that required process, but to maintain an awareness of the other person's heart and how they're affecting them, but not in a way that leads to codependence? Pete Pearson: That question, Neil, brings us full circle back to where we started. Instead of saying, “Here's how you do it,” or, “Here's the way to do it,” it's like, “What is your motivation for doing it? What are the advantages for put ... Why would you put forth the effort? Why would you take the emotional risk? Why would you take the sustained effort to bring that about?” Then we can talk about how to do it, but let's first talk about the "why" you would be willing to do it. It's the why that gives us the motivation to do the work. Ellyn Bader: Pete, I think of some of the stuff that you've been doing lately around couples as a team also is part of an answer to Neil's question. Pete Pearson: Totally, because we first have to identify where we get stuck, where the pain is. That's easy for couples to do. Pete Pearson: “Here's where I get triggered. When my partner does X, this is what happens, and I get triggered.” Pete Pearson: I say, “Great, let's look at what you feel/think when you get triggered.” Pete Pearson: They go, “Oh, that's easy to do.” Pete Pearson: Now I will say, “Let's shift, because we have to shift from where you are in that emotional brain, that lizard brain reflex, that self-protection, and let's talk about how you aspire to be instead. If you come from your higher self, your transformative self, you're better self, what would that look like? Instead of responding from a defensive, blaming, accusatory, withdrawing place, what would be a better way of responding?” Pete Pearson: Most of the time, people can say, “Well, I'd be better if I was calmer, if I was curious, if I was a little more compassionate, if I was a better listener.” Pete Pearson: Then here's, I say, the key question, which is, “Why would you be willing to make the effort to go to that future focus, that forward focus? Why would you be willing to do that?”  Then, that gets us to all the benefits for change. People only change for three reasons: to avoid a greater pain, for the benefits involved or the rewards involved, and to live more within our integrity about how we aspire to be. We talk about why they would be willing to make the effort. Pete Pearson: Then, I'll say, "When you get stuck, when you get triggered, I want you to clasp your hands together and squeeze. That will, first of all, distract you from being looping in that emotional, lizard brain response. Then, think about how you would aspire to be, and why you would change and be that way. When your partner sees you clasping your hands, that's a signal to your partner that you are struggling to change your response and come from your better self. Then your partner will say to you, 'Oh, thank you. I appreciate your willingness to try to avoid going into that old place and do something different. I really appreciate that. What can I do to help that? What can I say or what can I do right now that would be helpful?'"  I say, "When you guys do that, now you're working together as a team." Neil Sattin: Perfect, and that being the whole goal is recognizing that, even as you progress through these stages of togetherness leading into greater independence, leading back to greater interdependence, that you're on the same team with each other. Pete Pearson: Yes. Neil Sattin: You're not out to get each other. You've got each other's back, and you can help each other through that process. Pete Pearson: Exactly. Neil Sattin: Well, Pete Pearson and Ellyn Bader, it's been a treat to have you on the show again, just like the first time around. I wish I had read your book, In Quest of the Mythical Mate, years ago, but I'm so thrilled that I read it now. I would say it's required reading for any couples therapist out there. You're doing a lot of work, training couples therapists, as well as work helping lay people just do better in relationships, through your work at The Couples Institute. Neil Sattin: Thank you, again, for being with us here today. I'll make sure we have links to your website, so people can find your work. I just want to say how grateful I am for the work you're doing in the world, and for your willingness to come and share it with us here on Relationship Alive. We could talk more, and hopefully, we'll get that chance again sometimes soon. Pete Pearson: Thank you, Neil, so much, for what you're doing to bring the message to the people out there. Neil Sattin: My pleasure. Ellyn Bader: Yes, thank you, Neil. It's always a pleasure talking with you, and I also will mention that I'm going to be doing a free online workshop between August 13th and 25th, so if any of your listeners want to participate in that, I can send you a link for that, as well. Neil Sattin: That would be great, and I can actually send that out to my mailing list, as well, so that people can find out about it that way. Ellyn Bader: That would be fantastic. Pete Pearson: Thank you, Neil. Ellyn Bader: Yeah, that would be great. Neil Sattin: Absolutely. Well, we'll be in touch about that, and always great to talk to you guys. Take care. Ellyn Bader: You, too. Pete Pearson: Bye-bye, Neil. Ellyn Bader: Bye.  

Pete da Silva – CEO of the Jasco Group- joins us to discuss why the time is right for companies to take proactive action and consider alternate energy solutions in order to lessen the company's impact on the environment and importantly, save some money. Jasco has recently very successfully implemented a solution which has reduced their carbon footprint by 50% - So Pete offers useful advice in this discussion. The approval of the Carbon Tax Bill has been in the making for a while, with the most recent development being South Africa's cabinet approval of the release to parliament. It may be finalized and gazetted sooner than we think. It is not only the ever-increasing cost of electricity that is driving companies in South Africa to rethink their energy consumption and strategies, but the imminence tax imposed on an organization's carbon footprint is driving a greener thought process too. South African companies are going to have to adopt a new approach to energy conservation with the ultimate impact on climate change by reducing the emission of greenhouse gasses. Photovoltaic (solar) energy as an alternative energy source is now gaining traction in the South African market and as the cost of hardware decreases, the solution becomes financially more viable. Further driving this is the impact of Eskom's proposed 19.9% increase. It becomes even more apparent that a long-term alternative energy solution is the solution to preventing a hefty carbon footprint tax whilst reducing the ever-increasing cost of energy. One very effective (consumption and cost wise) solution is to look towards photovoltaic projects that leverage an area of a company's real estate that is costly and doesn't generate any benefit in terms of revenue – a company's car park. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/africabusinessnews/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/africabusinessnews/support

Pete da Silva – CEO of the Jasco Group- joins us to discuss why the time is right for companies to take proactive action and consider alternate energy solutions in order to lessen the company’s impact on the environment and importantly, save some money. Jasco has recently very successfully implemented a solution which has reduced their carbon footprint by 50% - So Pete offers useful advice in this discussion. The approval of the Carbon Tax Bill has been in the making for a while, with the most recent development being South Africa’s cabinet approval of the release to parliament. It may be finalized and gazetted sooner than we think. It is not only the ever-increasing cost of electricity that is driving companies in South Africa to rethink their energy consumption and strategies, but the imminence tax imposed on an organization’s carbon footprint is driving a greener thought process too. South African companies are going to have to adopt a new approach to energy conservation with the --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Pete da Silva – CEO of the Jasco Group- joins us to discuss why the time is right for companies to take proactive action and consider alternate energy solutions in order to lessen the company’s impact on the environment and importantly, save some money. Jasco has recently very successfully implemented a solution which has reduced their carbon footprint by 50% - So Pete offers useful advice in this discussion. The approval of the Carbon Tax Bill has been in the making for a while, with the most recent development being South Africa’s cabinet approval of the release to parliament. It may be finalized and gazetted sooner than we think. It is not only the ever-increasing cost of electricity that is driving companies in South Africa to rethink their energy consumption and strategies, but the imminence tax imposed on an organization’s carbon footprint is driving a greener thought process too. South African companies are going to have to adopt a new approach to energy conservation with the ultimate impact on climate change by reducing the emission of greenhouse gasses. Photovoltaic (solar) energy as an alternative energy source is now gaining traction in the South African market and as the cost of hardware decreases, the solution becomes financially more viable. Further driving this is the impact of Eskom’s proposed 19.9% increase. It becomes even more apparent that a long-term alternative energy solution is the solution to preventing a hefty carbon footprint tax whilst reducing the ever-increasing cost of energy. One very effective (consumption and cost wise) solution is to look towards photovoltaic projects that leverage an area of a company’s real estate that is costly and doesn’t generate any benefit in terms of revenue – a company’s car park. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/africanperspective/support

A weekly chat tackling the issue of educational technology from both sides. Ben Rimes, a former teacher turned educational technologist, chats with Pete Poggione, an Information Technology Professional from the private sector turned School IT Director.Technology Directors don't always make the decisions we feel are best for our students. All of our classrooms have unique challenges, opportunities, and realities, and it's incredibly easy to get caught up with the idea that everyone is ready for the change you need in your classroom. It's not always popular to "lead from consensus" but you may find that being patient and working closely on building positive relationships will lead to manageable change. This week's episode speaks to that reality; many school districts continue to separate student and teacher digital learning environments, as well as block access to certain tools and abilities that many feel students should have access to. Finding balance is key, and difficult. But the conversations are necessary, even if they take time.Timestamps for this week's questions::58 What has Pete been up to?3:45 Wait, so we don’t have more laptops and devices coming from the bond?6:14 Jason asks, what importance does Pete see in keyboarding skills?8:00 So Pete isn’t the type of guys that read instructions?10:30 Steve asks, why do some school districts separate Staff Google Accounts from Student Google Accounts?12:15 Why do Tech Directors want to separate staff systems and student systems?17:55 Mr Wolski wants to know, should Google Hangouts be open for student Google Accounts so they can video chat with experts outside of the school?22:05 Stump Pete!23:15 What was Pete’s first computer? You can talk about the show or continue the conversations on Twitter using the hashtag #TechDirectorChat or chatting up Ben (@techsavvyed) or Pete (@ppoggione) on Twitter.

Pete sits down with our host, Mike Harris, and discusses his artwork, art philosophy and his approach to art. Pete was born in Neptune, New Jersey, which is very close to the ocean.  Living close to the water is something Pete missed very much, while living in Atlanta, Georgia.  It was in Atlanta where Pete began his professional career as an Artist.  He joined an artist group in Atlanta and was accepted into a few local galleries, where he began selling both his original paintings as well as his reproductions.  Pete is born to an artistic family.  His brother is also a painter.  Pete came to art late in life. He felt that art belonged to his bother.  So Pete pursued music.  These days you’ll catch Pete playing his music as well as creating beautiful art. Pete considers his art to be somewhere between realism and impressionism.   Pete works with watercolors, gouache, and acrylics.   Pete enjoys painting a wide range of subject matter. Don't miss this lively and entertaining show.   To view Pete's work, visit us at www.contemporaryartgalleryonline.com..  While you there check our daily blog and art competitions.   Contemporary Art Gallery Online continues each month with their monthly art competitions.  Go to www.ContemporaryArtGalleryOnline.com, for details. If you are looking for gallery representation, visit  www.ContemporaryArtGalleryOnline.com and click on the Membership Tab, and follow the prompts.  And of course, if you are in the market to purchase art, visit us a www.ContemporaryArtGalleryOnline.com.  

The Rambleforce Ho-bos smash the sweet innards out of this week's football Pinata: Sol Campbell, as expected...does something unexpected. Jack Wilshere goes a bit daft, and a child receives free cheese. What's not to love about this episode of the Ramble? (We had to change studios half way throught the pod, so the profile might sound a bit wonky to the trained ear. So Pete apologises for that. But who wants a trained ear? It sounds like a horrible thing to have.) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.