Podcasts about so rick

If Rick has gotten one email, he's gotten a thousand about the COVID vaccine. What does Rick think? Should we get the vaccine? Or shouldn't we? Some are blaming talk show hosts like Rick for people not getting the shot. So Rick clears the air once and for all. Rick's position on the vaccine is...he's not a doctor. It's not his job to give you medical advice. So the choice is yours: think for yourself, talk to your doctor, then either get the shot, or don't. Rick can't make that decision for you! Clear enough? The Rick Roberts Show is on NewsTalk 820 WBAP...(Photo courtesy of WFAA) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On WBAP's Facebook page, we asked the question: Is $15 an hour the magic number? And we stood back and watched our Facebook page blow up! Walter Biden and the Democrats have pushed nearly doubling the minimum wage because they say you can't make a living. But isn't minimum wage meant to be for those starting off? Young people learning a job and a work ethic. Or maybe a second job. So Rick throws the question to you: should the minimum wage be $15/hr? The Rick Roberts Show is on NewsTalk 820 WBAP...(Photo Courtesy of WFAA) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rick and his daughter had a conversation, and she asked him: what is America's biggest concern? Omg, where to start? Record numbers of unemployed, but plenty of jobs available; inflation and gas lines; the Middle East on fire; border crisis; Biden's plans to tax and spend the country into bankruptcy; the indoctrination of our kids in school...we could go on and on. So Rick throws it to you: what do you think is America's biggest concern? The Rick Roberts Show is on NewsTalk 820 WBAP...(Photo Courtesy of WFAA) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lauren's off today. So Rick, Brad, and Ryan bring you today's episode of ShowBiz News. 

There are so many questions to be answered about the world of sports right now. So Rick talks with Gil Fried, this week. He chairs the Sport Management Department in the College of Business at the University of New Haven and is a Sports Management Professor. Professor Fried is a specialist in sport law, finance, … Continue reading Gil Fried, Sport Management Professor at University of New Haven →

Rick Rubin, like all of us, has been thinking a lot about fear lately. And few people on the planet understand fear in the same way that Rick's good friend, David Blaine, does. David has made a career of pushing his mind and body to the limit. So Rick thought David might be a great person to talk to about facing fear. Ok obviously this conversation isn’t about music. But it does touch on one of Rick’s other great loves—magic. When he was a kid, Rick studied magic. Since then magic has become so much more than sleight of hand for him … he uses the idea of pulling something out of nothing when he’s making music. So it makes sense that he would turn to one of the best living magicians for words of wisdom. To check out David Blaine's latest special visit: https://abc.com/movies-and-specials/david-blaine-the-magic-way Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rick Valicenti (founder and design director of Thirst, a communication design practice for clients in the architectural, performing arts and education communities), Iker Gil (architect, director of MAS Studio, editor in chief of the quarterly design journal, MAS Context), and Jenn Stucker (associate professor and division chair of graphic design at BGSU, founding board member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA Toledo) discuss community-based collaborative design.    Transcript: Introduction: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Song Lyrics: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the BG Ideas podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and american culture studies and the director of ICS. Today we're joined by three guests working in collaborative design fields. First is Rick Valicenti, the founder and design director of Thirst, a communication design practice for clients in the architectural, performing arts and education communities. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art and resides in the permanent collections of the Yale University Library, Denver Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, he was honored by the White House with the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for communication design. Jolie Sheffer: We're also joined by Iker Gil, an architect, the director of MAS Studio, editor in chief of the quarterly design journal, MAS Context, and the editor of the book, Shanghai Transforming. He curated the exhibition, Bold: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, included in the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. Iker is the associate curator of the US Pavilion at the 16th Annual Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2010, he received the Emerging Visions Award from the Chicago Architectural Club. Jolie Sheffer: Finally, I'd like to welcome Jenn Stucker an associate professor and division chair of graphic design at BGSU. Her work has been published in several books on design and she's received various awards including two international design awards from How Magazine for her community based works in Toledo. She's also a founding board member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, AIGA Toledo. And she previously co-chaired two national AIGA design education conferences. Jolie Sheffer: The three of them are here to talk to me as part of the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds series. Thank you and welcome to BGSU. I'm thrilled to discuss more of your work on creativity and collaboration. I like to start by having you each give a little background on your current work and how you came into the kind of design work that you're doing. So Rick, how did your career change from your time as a student at BGSU to your work now? What are some of those major u-turns or forks in the road for you? Rick Valicenti: Well, thank you. That's a good question. That's a really good question. Okay, so let me fast backwards to 1973 when I graduated from Bowling Green. I went back to Pittsburgh, spent some time in a steel mill for two years, went to graduate school at the University of Iowa. Came to Chicago afterwards with two graduate degrees in photography and discovered that I was not interested in photographing hotdogs, cornflakes and beer. So with that I thought I would leverage a time in the writer's workshop doing a little bit of letter press work as well as my time at Bowling Green studying design. And I thought I'll be a designer. It wasn't that easy. But it has been a journey for now almost four decades since then to get to a place where I feel there's relevance in what I do. And that has been the challenge, and it continues to be the challenge. Design, as you know, is a practice that has at its core, or patronage, somebody else. Rick Valicenti: In fact, it's been said you have to be given permission to practice graphic design. Not necessarily the case, you can do self-initiated projects. And it was in leveraging what I learned in graduate school, which was how to make up a project, how to provide for myself a thesis and then create work in response to that. That has allowed me to both do that on my own as well as in collaboration with other people. And then to encourage younger designers under some guidance to do the same. And of late, the more interesting work has been work that has been related to an issue, not unlike the work that Jenn practices in her classwork. But to me that's the most fulfilling and it was unfortunately not the work that I showed because it was work I was prepared to end the evening with. But I chose because we had been blabbing for so long last night to just stop early. But it's okay. Jolie Sheffer: Tell me what led you to start your own firm? Rick Valicenti: I was one of those lucky designers who, while it was difficult to crack the Chicago design scene, two years of doing what I would refer to as thankless design work, design work where I was asked to do something prescriptive. Like do this by Friday. Yes, I could do that. I was quite good at it. I lucked out by having the opportunity to be the dark room guy for a very reputable Chicago designer, who was at that time 63 years old. And so in his last three and a half years of practice I had moved from the new guy in the studio to the last employee he had. And it was a fantastic experience to be in the company of real design practice. Design practice that understood the history, it understood the present, and it was looking out to the future. This guy was connected to the other thought leaders in the Chicago design community and I had access to them even though it was vicarious. Jolie Sheffer: Great. Thank you. Iker, tell us about your journey into Chicago architecture and the current kinds of collaboration you do. How has your approach to design changed over time and what were some of those key junctures for you? Iker: So I'm originally from Bilbao, which is a city in the North of Spain in the Basque country. And I think a lot of the changes in design and a lot of the ways that I've been thinking had been motivated also by the change of place or how the people that I've encounter or any other aspects that really change as I move from other places. So from Bilbao I went to Barcelona to study architecture. I had the chance there to not only have the professors that were faculty there, but also other visiting professors, like David Chipperfield and Kazuyo Sejima. So that was a way of beginning to connect with other experiences that maybe were not the local ones. And I was very interested in expanding that. And I've had the luck to get a scholarship from IIT in Chicago to go there for a year. Iker: So it was a little bit coincidentally in a way that I ended up in Chicago. And I was there for a year as an exchange student, I still had to do my thesis so I went back to Spain. But there was something about Chicago, a apart from my girlfriend that now is my wife, who is from Chicago. But there was something very intriguing about the city, a lot of potential, very different from being in Barcelona. But there was something always in Barcelona that was interesting for me about the cultural aspect of architecture. There was the aspects of people building a significant building or just a civic building that there was always a publication and an exhibition, a way of coming together to talk about why those things were important. Iker: So when I went to Chicago, when I moved back and I did my master's, I worked for an office. I was always interested in the ADL, the community, the design community, the architecture community. How do you strengthen that and how do you create the platforms to do that beyond what you can design? So I decided at some point that I really wanted to make sure that I did both of those things. And I went on my own about 11 years ago just to make sure that I could create the designs within my office, but create other platforms for others to have that conversation. And more recently I've been able to create the structures to support or organize design competitions and really began being interested in not only the final product, but how do you structure the conditions for those things to happen. Jolie Sheffer: So you're talking about not just designing buildings, but designing communities and relationships. Iker: Yep. And I think that's a role of, in my case, an architect or designers. Like the work that you do, but also the work in the city that you do. And how are you part of the community, and also how are you proactive shaping that community? Not something that you want to benefit from someone else's effort to structure something. What is what you can do and why you can give to the community back? Jolie Sheffer: Great. Jenn, talk to us about your path into graphic design and how your approach has shifted over time. Jenn Stucker: So I was at graduate here at BGSU. Very proud of the training and the experience that I had from Ron Giacomini, a chair that Rick also had the opportunity to study under. And when I graduated I went right out into the field, I got a job in graphic design. And I think was pretty good at my craft and pretty good at making. And also at the same time pursuing this educational path. I am originally a transplant from Colorado, I guess you could say. And one of the things about the Toledo area is there's this "neh" mentality. It's the rust belt. I- Jolie Sheffer: Better days are behind us. Jenn Stucker: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:09:16]. Yes. It's definitely like, why did you move from Colorado to Toledo? Is usually the question that I get asked. And I'm always like, wow, there's so many great things here. You're four hours from Chicago, you're this far from Toronto, you're this far from here. In Colorado you're four hours from the border of Wyoming, at least where I live. Right? And you're looking at the same topography and you're not getting any cultural change. And so for me, my family was here. My husband and his family. And so I was here for the long haul. Jenn Stucker: So the idea really just became, I need to bloom where I'm planted. I need to make this space and place better, and contribute to it and work towards that. Changing the attitude, how do we create positivity in this community? And so I started getting involved in creating projects that really illuminated Toledo in a positive way. And so then I reflected back on the fact that I wasn't necessarily armed with that as a student, with that understanding of the fact that I had agency and power that I could do something. I didn't necessarily have training with, how do you collaborate and get a, you know, writing a grant to get the funding for this? And who do I need to talk to and who needs to bring this to the table? And all of those things. Jenn Stucker: So part of that I think now is coming to what I do as an educator, is to show those students. I tell them, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm completely fumbling through this. I don't know what I'm doing. This dots project in Toledo that I'm literally the one that's going to be photographing all the dots around Toledo, or trying to find spaces in January and it's cold. And then actually putting them down on the ground and actually taking them off the ground and doing these sort of things. I don't know that when I'm creating the idea. But I know it has to get done and I'm going to do that. And the fact that I'm just Jenn is what I tell them. I'm just one person, I'm not any different than you. And so I try to give them a lot of power that they can do that thing that they want to make change for. Jolie Sheffer: You're all talking about very place-based design practices, or in different ways your work is all very much about locating yourself, right? And building in relationship to that community, and creating community. Could you give an example, Rick, of one of your projects that had a very Chicago-centric, and how that place shaped the process and the collaborations that you developed? Rick Valicenti: With pleasure. In 2016, I was the artist in residence at Loyola University. And there we devoted an entire year to prototyping empathetic ways of grieving for those who were left behind by gun violence. That was a very Chicago-centric theme. And it was something that I was curious about beyond the candle vigil, right? Or the protest march. Are there other ways we can come together both as community led by design in order to acknowledge and honor the life lost? And of course help the healing process for the families left behind. That was a very place specific design assignment. The difference was we were doing it on the North side, and a lot of the activity, gun violent activity was happening on the South side. Not all of it because in the building that we were located, in the alley right next door one of the students had been shot. Rick Valicenti: Down the street the young photographer had been shot and killed on that street. So as they call it, the franchising of gun violence had migrated North to the Rogers Park and Edgewater area, which is where Loyola is located. It made it more real and more tangible, but the prototyping of these empathetic gestures was, I think, healing for all of us. And I've been rewarded by that project ever since. And I really want to see now if something like that can migrate to other cities. And I've been talking to a few people like, wouldn't El Paso benefit from this kind of intervention? Dayton, Ohio, would they not benefit from it? Jolie Sheffer: And could you talk through what that project actually ended up looking like? Rick Valicenti: I'll give you an example. There were 20 students in the class, half of them were from the fine arts area, half of them were from design related fields. And so they all had different approaches to it. And every class began with somebody from the outside. Rick Valicenti: Okay? And I thought this was important. And Iker knows this model of practice that I use, I call it moving design is what I have named the umbrella. But I'll give you an example of three kinds of people who came to the class. One person we arranged for a car to pick up the head of the emergency room at Stroger, which is the hospital, Cook County hospital. And this guy was picked up in a car, came to our class in his [Ohar 00:14:07] blacks with his red tennis shoes. And it was the day after a very violent weekend. This guy showed up shell shocked. You could just see the trauma in his face. He never made eye contact with the students. He was a young guy, maybe 38 or something, had his head down as he spoke. And that was a moving moment. More for me, I think, than anybody else. Rick Valicenti: But it was like, oh my God, here's a first responder who's there and he told us of some of the things that he had seen that have kept him from sleeping. We also had Emory Douglas, who was the communication director, minister of the Black Panthers. So Emory talked about the use of graphic design to move an agenda. And how an unskilled, unfunded initiative of communication design could migrate into the public through the printed ephemera. And he was there to really rally these students. That was fantastic. And then another woman, her name was Cecelia Williams. Cecelia Williams was 28 years old. She is an activist. She's a mother. And in her 28 years she has lost 29 family and friends to gun violence. The first one was her second grade teacher. She came to the class, again, with her version of PTSD. Moved the students and begged the students to do something. Rick Valicenti: Just something. It was in the form of just write the mothers of one of these victims a sympathy card after you hear the headline. Right? That's a simple thing. Or, gather all your cards and one person just take it to the funeral home and leave it in the basket. Simple moment. If you'd like I could share you an example of one of the projects, how we manifested our work at the end. We had lots of installations and interventions around the area, but one in particular was a community based exercise. I showed them an image of logging in Wisconsin. Tree logging. And those images that we're all familiar with are the felled trees in the shallow water, and the guys are standing on the tree trunks. And I said, it wasn't too much earlier before that picture was taken that those were living organisms, but now they're felled to the ground. And let's just imagine that we use the tree trunk as a symbol of those who are fallen. Rick Valicenti: And we've returned them to their vertical position. So that was the form of it. And then we started to talk about, well what could we put on those and what is the form? Are we going to be having tree trunks, that seems wrong. So we ordered lots of very long and very huge custom mailing tubes from a firm in Chicago called Chicago Mailing Tubes. And they made 24 inch, 18 inch and 12 inch mailing tubes of varying lengths. We had them wrapped in white paper and then the students took the grid of Chicago and wrapped each of those trees with black tape to suggest, not replicate, the grid of the city. And then we invited the community to come. And we had the list of the 760 some victims from the previous year to write their first names in whatever black calligraphy we could, whether it was with a Sharpie or whether it was with a brush pen. Rick Valicenti: And to see the community members come together with the students, honoring everybody with the names. And so, okay, that's one facet of it. And we have all these tubes now, and we put end caps on the tubes and the students started to talk about things that they would like to say. If you had to say something to a mother, to a community, to just reduce the pain of gun violence, what might it sound like? Everyone is a hero. I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. Whatever those messages were. And they typeset them in a black and white type, in all caps in a Gothic typeface on an orange disk. That orange disk had a hole cut in the middle and there was an orange piece of a cord, nylon cord, that we knotted. And that provided now these tree trunk-like forms to be carried. Rick Valicenti: And so there was a procession around town into the quad of the campus until they... Oh, I'm sorry. When the morning started all of the trunks were there in the center of the quad. That's right. Like the felled tree trunks. And then the procession started. And there were prayers read, and some music played, and some dancers from the music school came and they did a performative dance. A kind of celebration and resurrection, if you will. And then we were all invited to grab the chords and walk the trunks back to the alley where this student had been shot in the back, and return them to their vertical position. And there, I don't know, there we just reflected on it. But it was all quite moving. And we had it filmed and photographed and there was the record of it that could carry on. Rick Valicenti: We thought that could live in other places. The alderman, I'm sorry if I'm going on so long, I'm taking up this whole hour. But the alderman, his name is Harry Osterman, he was also invited to come. And he said, you know what, I would like that to be re-installed in my local park. And sure enough we installed it in his park and complete with all of the rides that a kid would have, the seesaw on the slide. A couple weeks later we get a call from alderman Osterman's office saying, it seems that there has been some violence in the park and your display has been vandalized. In fact, it has been destroyed. It has been cut up. It has been sawed. It has been smashed. Rick Valicenti: And I thought immediately, oh my God, the last thing we need is for Loyola to be a headline. And this good intention to be diminished. So we quickly scrambled and we went and we cleaned up the site and we got a chainsaw, we rented a chainsaw and we cut the things up so that we could transport it. And here what had happened was the other gang from the other side of the street was upset that, right, there had been some franchise in some retaliation of a recent shooting and this was the way that they could mark their territory. So there's lots healing that needs to be done, but design was certainly there to put a mirror to it. To make a good intention. And to certainly reveal the scab or the wound. Jolie Sheffer: Iker, can you give us an example of some of your place specific work? Maybe one particular project. You talked last night about the Marina Towers. I don't know if you want to talk about that or feel free to take that in a different direction. Iker: Yeah. Maybe one thing that I think is more important is structurally I think being in Chicago is what has saved my practice. I think a lot of the opportunities of doing self-initiated projects or projects that I was particularly interested are allowed to happen in Chicago because maybe there is not the pressure that there is in New York or any other places. And I think the idea of having space as a designer and an architect to think about things was something that I found very important and very unique to Chicago. Iker: So I think in a way, the way I was trained and the way I practice right now is different because of being in Chicago. And particularly that project of Marina City, I think it's one that it's very specific to the idea of Chicago about how it reflects how I work and how the projects evolve. And taking one icon of the city and really using that for me as a personal interest in understanding not only the building but understanding the architect, the ambitions of the architect. Why that building was so forward thinking when it opened in the early 60s. And then beginning to understand, how do you capture that value? Iker: How do you tell that story to people who are not architects? What are the tools that you have? And in that case I worked with Andreas Larsson, a photographer, to really begin to capture the diversity of the community. And it was a way of saying, you don't have to read plans in sections and elevations or use models to communicate the value of a building. There are other ways that maybe you can engage. And then through that you can learn some of the other things. Iker: And then that was exhibited, and then it has continued in doing then renovations in the building with Ellipsis Architecture. So always in collaboration with someone else. And the idea there is that, how do you celebrate the spacial qualities of the marina architect, but at the same time making it modern so new people can be living there. So it's an interesting project that has been ongoing for 10 years. And it just summarizes my interest in Bertrand Goldberg. And then as you work with other people, as you evolve or you have other skills, you can really begin to communicate that in different ways. And I can see that he's probably not going to be the last renovation or not the last project in some shape or form that I'm going to do about that building and that architect, which I think it's fantastic. Jolie Sheffer: Well there's something really interesting. You said something about this at your talk about how a project never really ends, it just sort of evolves into some new shape. Right? And clearly that work is an example of that notion that you never really have an end point. And your example too, Rick, went that way. That it takes on a new form and it may be not what you intended or what you imagined, but you have to let that life go on. Iker: I think in the end they are like your own personal obsessions. They are your interest, but it's sometimes it's an interest and sometimes it's an obsession. And they are in the back of your mind and then there is something that happens that it comes forward again, you have the opportunity to do it and then he goes back. But there are things that obviously you have a certain attachment. And then you realize that there are a lot of buildings, in this case, that share some of the ambitions because they were built in the same period. And then you can make a comparison or connect it to other experiences in other cities. So something that is very local and particular you can engage in a conversation with something that is happening in other cities. So I find it very particular, I never let go of those interests. It's just they transform and the outcome is very different. Jolie Sheffer: And Jenn, you mentioned the dots project. Could you talk about what that was and how that was very much play specific to Toledo? Jenn Stucker: Absolutely. So the genesis of that project came from the Arts Commission. I'd previously had done a banner project for them collaboratively with my colleague Amy Fiddler. And at the time I was president of AIG Toledo. And they came to us to say, oh we're having the GAS conference, the Glass Art Society is going to be coming. It's an international conference and maybe you could do some banners again. And I thought about that and really wanted to do something different. And one of the things about banners is the passivity that it has. And you have to be looking up, kind of encountering those. And so I've always been fascinated with maps and the "you are here" dot specifically. When I go to museums, when I go to zoos, wherever I'm going, I look for that and it gives me a sense of place. And the idea of sense of place seemed very important here at this time. Jenn Stucker: They were going to have people coming from all over the world. What is our sense of place? What is Toledo? And knowing that I wanted people to discover the city, and hopefully through walking. And how could I branch out into various places? So thinking about this dot of "you are here" and wanting people to discover the city, came up with this idea of three foot circular dots that had artwork on them created by a hundred different artists in Toledo that were site specific to that place. So working with the Arts Commission, what are the signature places in Toledo? The Toledo public library, the San Marcos Taqueria. It could be anywhere within the Toledo area, Point Place. So they helped curate that list. We talked about signature points, reached out to all of those establishments to say, more or less, congratulations, you're going to be part of this project. So that they would know that there was going to be a dot in front of their place. Jenn Stucker: And then having artists participate in creating those dots. And then on the dots was a QR code, and this was 2012, so it was still kind of cool then. And the idea was that you would scan the dot and you could then get the background information about the place in which you were standing. So you would learn about St. Patrick's Cathedral and get more information. And then to also give honor to the artist that they too would have their artist statement and what inspired the artwork that they created. And so one of the things about public art is that oftentimes if it's a sculpture, it's a very place specific, and only if you go to that place. And it's typically usually one artist. And so what I really liked about this project was that it was a hundred different artists that were participating in this. Jenn Stucker: And it was originally developed for outsiders to discover Toledo. The things that happened secondarily to that were amazing, where I was getting emails from people that had read about it in the newspaper. And one couple in particular said, we've read about this, we went out to start looking for these dots. They collected 25 of them and ended up at San Marcos Taqueria, said they had the best tacos they've ever had, had no idea it was even there. And they said they were looking forward to discovering more of their city. And I was like, that's a mic drop kind of moment. It couldn't have been any better than having people really realize the great things that we have in the community. So the byproduct of that was just, like I said, people seeing the great things that were here. Jenn Stucker: I wish I'd partnered with a cell phone company at the time because we had people that are actually buying cell phones. Because really, the iPhone had only come out, what, 2007 or something. So we're not too far to not everybody having a smartphone. There were people that were going out to buy a smart phone so that they could participate in this project. And there was a scavenger hunt component too, so we had an app for it. And the first hundred people to digitally collect 25 dots got a custom silkscreened edition poster. And so people are posting on Facebook and finding this dot and taking their children out. And I don't know, couldn't ask for a better project. Jolie Sheffer: We're going to take a short break. Thank you for listening to the BG Ideas podcast. Speaker 1: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ics@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome back. Today I'm talking with Rick Valicenti, Iker Gil, and Jenn Stucker about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in creative fields. One of the things that you both talked about during your visit was the idea that the form of a given project will change, right? And I think Iker, you put it as something like, what's the story I want to tell and what's going to be the best form to tell that story? So how do you go about, what is part of your process and figuring out that answer to that question of the relationship between form and story? Iker: Yeah, I think that came out about the work and the way we structure MAS Context. And then really the first thing is just framing what the topic that we want to do, and then who should be the voices that need to be part of that issue. And sometimes you realize that you need something that sets the ground and it might be more academic. It might be an essay that really gives the shape to that. And then there are many other elements that can compliment, that can contra, that could take another direction that comes in the form of a short essay. And you need to be very aware. I think that a lot of the work that I do is actually paying attention to what other people are doing in their work. So whenever there is an issue that is coming together, I know I already have in my head what's the work that everybody's doing so I can make those connections. Iker: So it's really understanding how they work, what they are trying to say, what's the shape that it can be. And we've had, in the issues, we have long essays, short essays, photo essays, diagrams, poems. But also the people who write, they don't come from all the academic world. And some of the most interesting articles have come from people who are just residents in a building. And they can tell a story much better than an academic that has talk about housing. And one of the examples is we've done this for 10 years, and then the most read article is about Cabrini–Green, about our resident who grew up there and live there. And we walk with him, with Andreas Larsson actually. And we told him just let's walk around the neighborhood and tell us the stories of what are the meaningful places for you here that you grew up here and your families. Iker: And we just took photographs of that and we made captions of that. And it really was a way for us to understand what it means to leave there. Yes, there are some negative things, but there are many other positive things about Cabrini–Green that they all mask under headlines and other things from other people who have no relationship. So yes, there are many people who write about public housing, about Cabrini–Green, but his point of view and the way to talk about it in a very clear, succinct, and just experiential way of there. It was remarkable and it obviously resonated with the rest of the people because it's still the most read article. And it was in issue three, 10 years ago. Rick Valicenti: We should also keep in mind that Cabrini–Green, if we're talking about form, no longer exists. That building complex has been raised and it's gone. Now it's a Target. Is it not? Iker: Yep. It is. So it's like, when you demolish buildings you just don't demolish the actual building, you demolish the structures, the society, the relationship, everything that is built around that. So the void that it's in the city with the destruction of public housing is not just the building, it's all the fabric, the social fabric that got destroyed. And it's very complicated to regain. And unfortunately nothing really... It's happening at the level that it should be done. Rick Valicenti: And at the time you had an idea that it was going to be demolished or did you not know it was going to be demolished at that time? Iker: I did know that it was going to get demolished. Rick Valicenti: Oh, you did. Okay. But in either case you have left behind through the medium of design and this documentation a real important record of what it was like there at that moment. Iker: Yeah. Because in a way, these stories are not just headlines that once the headline leaves the story leaves. These are people who this is the place where they grew up. Where they live. Where they have their family. And then once the buildings are remove, they have to keep going with their life. They have to do other things. So it is really unfair to just live through headline after headline. The city is a much more complex thing. And I think one of the goals that we tried to do with the journal is really, yes, talk about issues that are important. But that there is a legacy that those things are looked in depth, that someone can go back 40 years later and finding that it's still relevant because there's another situation that contextualizes in a new way. Iker: So this is just a series of thinking that evolves and it grows and builds from each other. But I think there needs to be some, like paying attention to all these issues and build from those rather than be surprised by the latest thing that happens. And then once it goes, it just, oh, it's all sold. Jolie Sheffer: Could you talk, Rick, about your own forays into book work, as you describe it, and why that form made sense for some of those projects? Rick Valicenti: The book format I particularly love, I love its linearity but I also love its ability to be opened at any page. I also love its form, its tactile nature, its ability to change voices and change perceptions as you change the tactile experience when your hand touches a page. Change the paper, change the size of it. All of those things are available tools to find engagement in that which is being communicated and that which is being received. So you know, perhaps as a writer, you're able to capture your thinking in your typing. Jolie Sheffer: Absolutely. I don't know what I'm thinking until I'm typing it. Rick Valicenti: That's right. Until after maybe you've read it and say, oh my God, that's really special. But the designer takes that source material, if you will, and either amplifies it or adds harmony to it in a harmonic sound, or adds depth to it, or adds another perspective. And so I'm keenly aware when I'm making a book that it's not a typesetting assignment, that it really is a duet at the most basic level with the content. Whether it's with the author, whether it's with a photographer, whether it's with both. And how can you bring something to life in a way that under different hands or different perspectives or different budgets or whatever, it would sound different. Rick Valicenti: And just like you can do that when you're reading a poem, or a kid reading a kid's book, you know it sounds different than the parent. It happens when people perform songs, other than the person who wrote the song. So I like the book form, but I really like its linearity. And I must admit, when non-linearity was all the rage with interactive media, I was like, what's that about here? What's happening? I'm getting used to it, but that doesn't mean I need to like it. Jolie Sheffer: What about you Jenn? You've published work in book form. What for you is your particular process in thinking about that as a medium? Jenn Stucker: Well most of the publications, I guess probably been a little bit similar, it's been mostly for documentation that this happening happened has been a big part of that. The other part is most of the work has been with recent alums or with students, and so there's something about creating the object that adds that secondary level of, I guess, accomplishment, right? Or achievement, or that this thing... I guess the same thing is it happened. And so if we have evidence of that. I taught at SACI in Florence, Italy, through our program here at BGSU, last summer and we self published a book out of that called the FLRX times 14. Or 14 of us and putting material together to sort of, what was our experience here in Florence? All being American citizens coming into this place and space. And I don't see those students again. Right? They were from University of Michigan, Penn State, Parsons, couple from BGSU, Marshall. And it was a nice moment to capture and make a capsule, I guess, of that experience. Jolie Sheffer: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. It has been a real delight. Our producers for this podcast are Chris Covera and Marco Mendoza with help from Aaron Dufala, Hannah Santiago and Kaleah Ivory. Research assistants for this podcast was provided by ICS undergraduate intern Tay Sauer. This conversation was recorded in the Stanton audio recording studio in the Michael and Sara Kuhlin Center at Bowling Green State University.  

Hey Everyone, Angela Bowen here, the host of Together, We're Gonna Find Our Way: An Unofficial Silver Spoons Podcast. Today, I covered S4E3: Poor Evelyn, which aired on October 6, 1985. In this episode Rick's mom comes for a visit. And they discover she's broke. And she refuses to take money from Edward. So Rick asks Edward to give her a job and let her stay with them. And on her first day, she causes nothing but problems. While I liked this episode enough, it just didn't have that wow factor. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Rick's adventures in high school. Join me next week when I cover S4E$4: Promises, Promises, which aired on October 13, 1985. In this episode Rick tries to decide if he should buy a promise ring for a girl at school. If you'd like to EMAIL The Podcast Go To: silverspoonspodcast@gmail.com Have a great week everyone!

Hey Everyone, Angela Bowen here, the host of Together, We're Gonna Find Our Way: An Unofficial Silver Spoons Podcast. Today, I covered S4E2: Mrs. Stratton Builds Her Dreamhouse, which aired on September 22, 1985. In this episode Edward allows Kate to redecorate the house, which becomes chaotic for him and Rick. After Edward gives Kate permission to add her own personal touch to the house to make it feel more like her home, she goes overboard causing a communication breakdown between father and son who are still adjusting to the fact that a woman now resides there and it's no longer a bachelor pad. It's the last straw for Edward when the construction workers and interior decorator go to remove his train that has been and will continue to be a Silver Spoons Staple for the run of the show. He puts his foot down and tells Kate enough is enough. Some little changes here and there, a powder room for her fine, but she was doing a complete overhaul which caused the roof to leak in Rick's room right over his head and the ceiling in the kitchen was blown out from the second floor while Rick and his Dad were hashing out their grievances over the seemingly never ending remodel that up to that point had been going strong for 3 weeks. I mean, come on, they could have been killed! That ceiling came crashing down on them. I really enjoyed this episode more than the Season 4 Opener Head Over Heels guest starring Whitney Houston because there was more going on. Join me next week when we get a returning character (shakes head in annoyance) Rick's Mom Evelyn. (GAH!) That's right in S4E3: Poor Evelyn, which aired on October 6, 1985. In this episode, Rick's mom comes for a visit. And they discover she's broke. And she refuses to take money from Edward. So Rick asks Edward to give her a job and let her stay with them. And on her first day, she causes nothing but problems. Yep you heard it here first. She got no money. Well, why not, Evelyn, where did it all go? I'd say she's wearing it. Her lavish furs and jewels. Now you're as broke as a joke! You can bet there will be a lot of ridiculing from me. I've never liked Evelyn since the day I met her in Season 1. She's selfish, never having her son's best interests at heart, also she treats Edward and Kate like garbage. To EMAIL The Podcast Go To: silverspoonspodcast@gmail.com Have a great week everyone!

What a treat to celebrate Hanukkah with COMEDY LEGEND, Larry Charles. Writer, Director and Producer, you know his work on Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiam, almost all of the Sacha Baron Cohen movies and of course, as a Take Your Shoes Off alum. Per the holiday spirit, Rick gives Larry a few gifts. One inspires a story about how he came up with the idea to have Jerry Stiller play George's dad on Seinfeld. One, they smoke. Any guesses on the other two? (HINT: you can get one of them here) Once high, Larry talks about what makes the greats, like Jerry Seinfeld, so great at stand-up and gives Rick a little advice. Larry say the holidays are nostalgic, and how he tries to avoid nostalgia. And, you can't have Larry over TWICE without pitching him a project. So Rick does just that! Stay tuned until the end to see if Larry wants in! Want this podcast with video?? Check it out on YouTube here! Thank you Goblins for joining me on this wild ride of #8NightsOfTYSO. It has been a LOT of work, and we're almost done. Join Rick as he hosts his first guest of TYSO, and last guest of 2019... Jon DeWalt!! Get the new TYSO shirt here! Sound & Mixed by: George Krikes Casey Abrams on VOCALS and BASS, Jacob Scesney on SAX, and Rick Glassman on KEYS. Theme Song written by Casey Abrams & Rick Glassman #GlassmanBoppers #TYSOGoblins #Hanukkah #Christmas #HappyHolidays #8NightsOfTYSO

In this episode of Stories of Hope in Hard Times, Tamara K. Anderson interviews Richard Paul Evans. Did you know NY Times Bestselling author Richard Paul Evans was bullied as a child or that he lived in a home infested with rats? Listen as he shares the stories which shaped him to become one of the most loved and heart-stirring authors today.Richard Paul Evans: Lessons from Brokenness, Bullying, and Tourette’sRichard Paul Evans BioWhen Richard Paul Evans (Rick) wrote the #1 global best-seller, The Christmas Box, he never intended on becoming an internationally known author. The story was written as an expression of love for his then two young daughters. Three years later, this quiet, simple story of parental love and the true meaning of Christmas made history when it became simultaneously the #1 hardcover and paperback book in the nation. Since then, more than 8 million copies of The Christmas Box have been printed. Eight of Rick’s books were produced into television movies and have starred such well-known actors as Maureen O’Hara, Rob Lowe, Christopher Lloyd, James Earl Jones, Naomi Watts and Academy award winners Vanessa Redgrave and Ellen Burstyn. He has since written 40 consecutive New York Times bestsellers and is one of the few authors in history to have hit both the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists. There are currently more than 30 million copies of his books in print.Rick won the American Mothers book award, two first place Storytelling World awards, The Romantic Times Best Women’s Novel of the Year Award, the German Leserpreis Gold Award for Romance, is a five-time recipient of the Religion Communicator’s Council’s Wilbur Award and more than a dozen other awards for his young adult series Michael Vey.During the fall of 1998, Rick founded The Christmas Box International, an organization devoted to maintaining emergency shelters and providing services and resources for abused, neglected or homeless children, teens and young adults. To date, more than 100,000 children have been served by the Christmas Box House facilities and programs.Rick lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri. They have been blessed with five children and two grandchildren.A Personal ConnectionRick has become a great friend and mentor to me. I went to his first Premier Author Training almost three years ago. We had a lot of fun and I learned so much. I felt like I was drinking out of a fire hose just with the amount of knowledge he imparted on not only writing but on marketing books.The King of CrepesA little known fact about Rick is he is the crepe-making King. He first learned to make crepes at a friend’s house in Seattle. He then decided everyone should know how to make three things really well. So, Rick know how to make three things: French toast, crepes and fried rice.Writing from the HeartI love the ending of Rick’s latest book, Noel Street, as I think it gives us a picture of his life. He says, “I’ve always thought of God as an artist. One who uses our hopes, fears, dreams, and especially our tears to paint on the canvas of our souls rendering something beautiful. The hardest part I suppose is waiting to see what he’s up to.” So many of Rick’s books dive into people who are broken and waiting to see what God is painting on the canvas of their lives. He seems to write from a personal place of brokenness.Rick gave us a sneak-peek into the next book he is working on which will launch in 2020. He is taking his writings and blogs from the past 25 years and compiling these personal stories of things which have made him who he is. Some of these blogs have been read by millions of people, so they are very compelling.Lessons from Hard Times1. A Broken ChildhoodThe year 1970 was a really bad year for Rick’s family. They lived in Arcadia, California and his father lost his job and was blackballed in the community where he worked in Beverly Hills. As he tried to provide for his wife and eight children, things quickly went from bad to worse. They lost everything. Eventually his dad found a job teaching in Pocatello, Idaho and moved there with half of the family. To get the family back together, they finally moved into his grandmother’s 70-year old home. The home was next to bars, and pawn shops. It was in bad place, but it was empty, except for the rats. It was filled with rats.On a side note, people always ask Rick why they feed people to the rats in Michael Vey, and it goes back to his fear as a child that he would be eaten by rats. He would lay there at night and hear the rats running around after hearing his older brothers explain the rats would eat him if he got out of bed.So, their family situation was a perfect storm. They had no money. His dad, who was in hospital management was now doing construction work and was gone all day. And his mother began exhibiting the first severe signs mental illness. She became highly suicidal and was incredibly depressed. She would basically stay in her room for days at a time.BullyingSo Rick basically had no parents. He was eight or nine years old at the time. It was the same year his Tourette’s Syndrome manifested. The first Saturday in their new home, his mom took the three youngest and dropped them off at a dollar theater. As they walked out of the theatre, they were surrounded by a gang of kids who wanted to see them get beaten up by the local bully who was about a foot taller than them. Finally Rick said he would fight them, but his older brother couldn’t stand for his little brother to be defending them and he walked over, pushed Rick aside and his brother actually beat the kid up. Rick just remembers him kicking the bully in the face on the ground, and the bully screaming for mercy. Of course everyone was laughing because everyone loves to see a bully get their due. Then the crowd dispersed. His mom then pulled up in the station wagon and they just got in and didn’t say a word about the fight.In the midst of all this upheaval there was also a tremendous amount of bullying going on at school. One day Rick was so tired of being bullied he just stayed home. His mother never knew because she never came out of her bedroom. To make it worse he had this soul-crushing teacher named Mrs. Covey, whom the kids called Covey the Ogre. To give you an example of what she was like, a week before Christmas, she asked all the children in her classroom, “How many of you believe in Santa Claus?” Most of the kids raised their hand. Then Mrs. Covey said, “Don’t be stupid. There is no Santa Claus. Your parents lied to you.”Mrs. Covey, the OgreSo, their teacher just dashed their beliefs. That day Rick went home and ventured into his mom’s darkened bedroom. He said, “Mom, Mrs. Covey said there is no Santa Claus.” Rick’s mom responded, “Rick, Santa Claus is the spirit of giving.” He countered with, “But he has a reindeer and sleigh, right? And he comes down the chimney, right?” She just looked at him and sadly admitted, “No, there is no Santa Claus.” Rick’s little nine-year-old heart was broken. He kept thinking–wait a second, faith, goodness, and good people are supposed to prevail, not the nasty ones. So he looked at his mom for a moment and said, “Well, did you lie about Jesus too?”A few months later Rick was walking home from school and got beaten up by some boys who took his only treasure–his Mickey Mouse watch. It was the only thing he owned and treasured.“Ricky Evans, The Great”The next day Rick was sitting in class working on his homework and he wrote down “Ricky Evans” on the top of it. And then something possessed him to write “the great” next to his name. Now, he was not arrogant. He had no reason to believe he was anything. At this point in his life, he had no parents involved. He had no friends. No one who would defend him from the bullies. He was nothing. But for a few seconds, it felt good to write “Ricky Evans, the Great,” and turn the paper in. The next day he got the paper back and Mrs. Covey had erased “the great” and wrote three of her own “shame on you.” She then got up and gave a lecture on pride and sin.Rick hasn’t seen Mrs. Covey since he left fourth grade. He is sure she is long dead because back then it felt like she 200 years old. But he would like to see her and look in her eyes and say, “That little boy went on to reach tens of millions of people with his words. His movies were some of the biggest in the world on television. And he started a shelter that helped house more than a hundred thousand abused children. He was invited to the White House and he danced in the Green Room. But that Ricky Evans was greater than Richard Paul Evans. Ricky had nothing and yet he got up every day and got himself ready. He had gruell for breakfast and walked to school every single day. And he just did his best amidst all the abuse and the violence and just tried to be a good kid. Rickey Evans was great. And you, woman, are just mean.”Lesson: Don’t Let People Erase Your GreatnessThe lesson Rick learned from all of this is we all have people our life who are walking around with these erasers like Mrs. Covey. They try to erase the greatness from our lives. And the biggest lesson Rick has learned is, “Don’t listen to them. Don’t give them that power. Don’t wait around for people to validate who you are because you’ll be waiting a long time.” Rick continues to plead that we “tell kids that they’re great.” To clarify, he isn’t talking about hubris or pride. He just wants us to “acknowledge their intrinsic value and worth. That’s what they need.” Tell them, “You are great and beautiful in your soul–in spite of your bad choices, decisions, and your circumstance. Greatness resides within you and you don’t get it out by erasing it.”2. Tourette’s SyndromeRick wasn’t officially diagnosed with Tourette’s until he was 40 years old. His diagnosis came because his son Michael has Tourette’s. People used to ask him when he was younger if he had Tourette’s and he always wondered why because he wasn’t swearing. He did have the impulse to swear, but he didn’t. What he didn’t understand was only 10% of people with Tourette’s have coprolalia (or swear all the time).When Rick’s son Michael was two-years-old he began swearing. He and his wife wondered, “Where did you even hear these words?” They realized something was going on with him. So, Rick wrote the Michael Vey series just for his son. Rick confesses, “I wanted to make Tourette’s more mainstream because it’s always just a joke.” People swear and then they laugh and say, “It’s my Tourette’s syndrome.” Rick continues, “Well, some of us actually do have Tourette’s” and tic or twitch.The Anonymous LetterOne day Rick spoke at a church about grace and God’s love for us. Afterwards he got this anonymous letter from a woman who wrote, “You have no place in the house of God. You have no place speaking. You’re obviously a sinful man. I can see through it because I saw you were ticking, blinking, and twitching.”Shining Light on Disabilities–The Viral BlogIn response to her anonymous letter, Rick wrote a blog, “To the woman at church who wrote me an anonymous letter.” In that letter he explained yes, he is a sinner, just like she was because, “We’re all broken.” He then went on to explain, “That’s not why I was twitching. I was twitching because I have Tourette’s syndrome.” Rick wrote this blog and posted it on Facebook. He got up the next day and had 80,000 shares and went viral. People wanted to help find that woman. Rick actually hoped she would see it.In his letter, Rick wrote, “In all honesty, I must admit that I was angered by your letter. But not for me–I am far beyond your reach. I am angry for those children who are still trying to figure out who they are: children who are teased and ridiculed and bullied by cruel, self-righteous people like you. I am angered for those sweet, innocent children, who would rather die than show their tics, because you are so eager to let them know how unlovable and imperfect they are. And some of them do take their precious lives. Yes, this makes me very angry. The other day, at a book signing, a young woman I had never met before, put her arms around me and told me that she loved me. I asked her why. She told me that she had Tourettes and the kids at school made fun of her. But now many of her schoolmates are reading my books and, knowing that I have Tourettes, are now treating her better. I told her that she is not her Tourettes. I told her that I loved her too.”Lesson: The Greatest Disability is the Inability to LoveRick concluded his letter by saying, “Dear anonymous, I hope you read this letter. I hope it opens your eyes. Or, better yet, your heart. But whether you change or not, remember this: we, the “abnormal” are not the ones to be pitied. The greatest disability is the inability to love those who are different than you. May God Bless you with His unfathomable and unconditional love.”3. Look for The Hand of GodRick likes to remember the words of Kierkegaard when looking back on his life. He said, “We can understand our life looking backwards, but we must live it forwards.” Rick says he clearly sees the hand of God when he thinks back on everything that has happened to him.With his first book, he took the story to a local publisher but it was rejected. He recalls being so disappointed and discouraged. But now he realizes that rejection was God looking down and saying, “No, I have big things in store.”Always Trust GodBeyond the path that his career took, Rick has felt a personal relationship with God throughout his life. He says that when he was going through hard time he always trusted God. He knew God would not drop Him. There have been times he wondered why he has been hurt, but now he understands. Those things he went through made him who he is and have given him empathy and heart. Because of this empathy people read his work and feel understood.The Power of Writing and HealingAfter Rick was diagnosed with Tourette’s, his diagnosing doctor (who wasn’t actually taking clients), told Rick he wanted to return the favor to him and took him on. Rick wondered what favor he was referring to, as they had never met.The doctor then told Rick he and his wife had lost their only child. His wife had become very depressed and the doctor worried she might take her life. Neither he nor psychologists could help her.Then this woman read one of Rick’s books and it gave her hope. The doctor saw her smile again–for the first time in years. This woman knew Rick was another person who had truly suffered, so she felt she could trust him since his books are written from the heart. She began to heal after reading one of his books.Lesson: There is a PurposeGod can see the purpose of things we don’t understand in our lives. Keep trusting Him and someday, you will understand and it will all make sense.4. How I Saved My MarriageRick also writes many of his blog posts from the heart. One particular blog he remembers is his post, “How I Saved My Marriage.” This post went viral very quickly, but his wife Keri didn’t appreciate Rick had written about their struggles.Rick and Keri went to dinner a few nights later night, with Keri still upset. They met a couple while out at dinner who thanked them for saving their marriage. They had been on the verge of divorce but read Rick’s post and decided to save their marriage. Rick started hearing from marriage counselors who said they were using his post as a resource for their clients, as well as friends saying it saved their children’s marriages.Writing the TruthOne day Keri told Rick she felt he shares too much. Finally, Rick apologized, but asked if he anything he had written wasn’t true. Keri acknowledged everything he wrote was true.Lesson: Share TruthRick has always felt it is important to share truth with the world. He says he doesn’t know any other way to write. He then told Keri if he had to choose between her and the talent God had given him to write and share the truth, he would choose God. Keri agreed, and he has to continued to write the truth. This became a very defining moment for him.5. Tips for Hard TimesRick knows we don’t always feel hope during the Christmas season. But he explains if you are in a bad place there are a few tips you should remember:a. Remember life is cyclical. As soon as we get up, life knocks us down again. And if we are down, life will pick back up again.b. Hope comes from faith in God. Keep that faith–even when things are hard.c. Find the stars. While the reality is we will all suffer, Rick says his hope that there is something better is what keeps him going. “The really dark nights is where we see the stars.”d. Show kindness to strangers.e. Choose to love. We can make the choice to love.f. Be worthy of your sufferings. Rick remembers the quote from Viktor Frankl about choosing to be worthy of our sufferings. It took awhile for Rick to understand what that meant. We can’t take away suffering, but we can learn from it and keep going through it. It will refine us and make us better.Poignant Bible StoryFor Rick one of the most poignant part of all scripture is when Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. While there he looking up to heaven and asked, why have you deserted me? (Matthew 27:46). In those greatest moments, we ask why, just like Christ? Christ knew he was alone. Rick believes there are times God leaves us and says, “No, I’m going to let you have this. I’m going to let you walk alone. I’m going to let you have the greatness and understand what it is to be great.”In the Screwtape letters CS Lewis share some wisdom when the Demons are talking. They say something like, “Nowhere is our cause of evil more threatened than when a man, nailed to a cross looks up into a universe devoid of God, say, why have you deserted me? And still he marches on. And still he holds fast to truth. That shakes the very core of all evil.”Lesson: You are Not Deserted or AloneThere are a few moment of life where we have nothing, where we don’t see a reason to go on. But we should remember to keep going–that we will not fail. “We are not deserted. We are not alone even when it feels like it.”6. Determination, Prayer, and MiraclesRick remembers one of the hardest times of his life when it felt like he was crawling on glass. His daughter Jenna even asked him, “Where is God? Why has he left you alone? Dad, you are carrying this by yourself.”Rick was pleading with God and trying to keep his son alive. He told God, “I am doing everything. I don’t know how much longer I can take this. Keri has finally broken down. It’s just me. I don’t know how long I can carry the entire family and all of this. We need help.” After telling God he had done everything he knelt down and told God, “It’s in your hands. He’s your son too. I have given everything.”After this heartfelt prayer, Rick went to the hospital and had an incredible experience with his son. An incredible miracle happened. Everything switched and it was such a powerful and faith promoting thing.The great ending this story is that now Rick and his son are buddies. He is so proud of him, what he’s accomplished, and what he’s overcome. Michael has told him, “One of my sisters is a pediatric nurse, another does makeup for movies, another is an international bestselling author. The other is a scientist. And then there’s me.” When Michael told him this, Rick looked at him and said, “And you have accomplished more than all of them. You have climbed a higher mountain than all of them.”God’s Message–Keep Going, Don’t QuitAnother example of this was when the board voted to close the Christmas Box House due to lack of funding. Rick left the meeting for a moment to pray and ask God if he could please quit. And he received a distinct impression, “If you fail, no one will succeed.” So Rick returned to the meeting and said no, they weren’t going to quit. He told everyone he would accept their resignations but he would not be quitting. Everyone stayed.Now, the Christmas Box House has helped more than one hundred thousand children. Rick is extremely grateful God did not let him quit.Lesson: Get on Your KneesHe says his best advice for finding hope when discouraged is getting on your knees. We may feel at times God has left us all alone. There are times when we say, “I’m done,” but God says, “No, you’re not.”The greatest times in Rick’s life were not when we was getting an award. They were private victories. They were times when he was on his knees and chose not to quit and kept going with God’s help.Contact InfoRick’s website is RichardPaulEvans.com and you can also find his page on Facebook. You can find his most recent book, Noel Street, on Amazon or at Barnes and Noble.

Lauren returns to the show tomorrow morning. So Rick, Brad, and Ryan bring you the latest ShowBiz News headlines. 

We've recorded a number of podcasts discussing the environmental impact of food production, and the food choices made by individuals. But how aware of all this are consumers? How do they make sense of such information? This is but part of the work that occupies our guest Richard Larrick. About Richard Larrick Rick Larrick is professor of Management and Organizations at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His research explores individual, group, and organizational decision-making as specific areas of research. He has examined the wisdom of crowds, environmental decision making and de-biasing techniques to help people make better decisions. Interview Summary So you've published some fascinating work recently on consumers and their perceptions of the environmental impact of food. What did you find? So we were interested in seeing how well do people understand both the energy and the carbon emissions associated with their food. And based on prior research that looked at people's understanding of the energy that's used by their appliances, we thought that people aren't going to be very good at this. And that they're likely to underestimate the energy that goes into their food. And so we built on previous research that has shown that people know roughly that refrigerators use more electricity than light bulbs, but they really don't understand by how much. And we thought that the problem might even be worse for food, mainly because food and its energy use is kind of hidden from consumers. We have a bit of an Old MacDonald's Farm view of how our food gets on our table. Whereas with cars, and with light bulbs, we can see the energy being used. So we did a study looking at people's estimates of how much energy and greenhouse gas emissions were associated with their food. But we also asked about the energy use by appliances as a way of kind of calibrating their accuracy relative to this other standard. And we did find what we expected, which is that people know that beef has more energy and greenhouse gasses associated with it compared to, you know, corn or something like that. But they don't estimate it to be that much higher. And what they also do as a big mistake is estimate that both are much lower than their actual values, and much lower than comparable appliances that generate the same amount of energy or a carbon emissions. So Rick, can you put this in context like between corn and beef, for example? How much do people think there is a difference in energy and carbon emissions and then how does that compare, for example, with the refrigerators that will use? Sure. Let me try to put some numbers together. So beef is about a hundred times more consequential for greenhouse gas emissions. So, it has a very big impact and I think those who really follow this closely know that it's not just issues of turning grain into a protein--which is one of the things that you're doing when you produce meat. But, t's also things like there's natural gas used in fertilizer and there is the basic biology of cows. Beef, I should say, produces methane as kind of part of their digestive process. And that's a very potent greenhouse gas. So beef is about a hundred times as bad as corn, holding constant on the serving size. How much of a difference do people believe there is? Just a fraction. They think it's twice as bad. So it's a pretty big underestimation. So do you think there are reasons that people come to these under estimates beyond the obvious fact that they don't know or they haven't been informed? I mean, I do think it is because a lot of the food system is hidden from them. And we were motivated in this line of argument by previous research that has shown that if you ask people: do you understand how a zipper works or how a toilet works. They say yes, and they're very confident about it. And when you actually ask them to explain it, they actually can't do it, and their confidence goes down. So I think it's just one of those everyday things that we encounter and we think we know what's behind it, but we've just never had to sit down and articulate it. And in fact, in other research we had found that if you force people to try to draw out the system by which food gets to their table, they actually do become more accurate and understanding how much energy is in their food. Oh, that's interesting. So do you think knowing this information will be helpful to consumers ultimately? I do feel like we're kind of in an early stage in terms of helping make people aware. So I recognize that people's intrinsic concern for the environment does vary and there's probably portions of the population that are eager to learn this kind of information. But it's not readily available at this point. And so I think there's a kind of blind spot that exists at this point in society and we just have to think of creative ways of getting that information to people. One way to do it is just, you know, having articles written on the fact that people should pay attention to their food. But you know, another one that we were motivated to try, as a part of this research is, what would it look like to try to put a carbon label on food? And this is clearly something other countries besides the US have tried to do. And I'll say with mixed success, which we can come back to. But we just wanted to see what's the benefit of giving people the information directly. We actually did a study in a lab here at Duke where we had subjects come in. We gave them some money, we brought them into a little room that was set up like a grocery store and told them that we wanted them to buy some soup. And then we gave them some information about vegetable soup and beef soup, holding lots of things constant to the degree that we could. And then for some of them they looked at and had access to a label that described the carbon consequences of the different soups. And we use kind of the state of the art knowledge of trying to convey it in a way that makes it easy to understand. Which is also something we can come back to and talk about. But the key thing we found was if they had access to the carbon label and understood it by having it be made simple for them, it did shift their preferences. So they both had an accurate understanding of the carbon in the beef soup, which was higher than in the vegetable. And it affected their preferences when they literally walked out of the lab with soup that they had purchased that day. They walked out with more cans of vegetable and fewer of beef after they had seen the label. Oh, it's so interesting. Now let's get to that issue of what a good label might look like. And I know in the work that we do, there are big differences across the world in the way people use front of package labeling to convey nutrition information on food packages. And you said that in some parts of the world people have been experimenting with these carbon-related labels. So I suspect there's a lot of difference and variability in the way that's being done. What would make for a good label do you think? Yeah, I think the comparison to nutrition labels is really interesting just because nutrition is so multifaceted and it has so many kinds of things that are expressed like potassium and things like that where I'm not sure most people know what's good and bad, what more or less of it. So nutrition labeling is very challenging and in that respect, both energy and carbon, is actually a bit simpler because if you can make the numbers meaningful. So instead of talking about things like tons of carbon and stuff like that people don't really know what you're talking about. If you're going to make it more interpretable, you're really only expressing kind of one dimension really of impact. And so one of the things we did in creating a label for the soups was to give people what's known as a stoplight label, which I think has also been used in nutrition. You indicate the bad levels with red and good levels with green. And kind of inherent in that is also just the basic idea that this is a relative comparison. And there's just lots of work in psychology showing the value of people don't know what to make of these kind of dry, unfamiliar numbers. But if you can give them a way of seeing where it falls in a relative range, then they can be sensitive to it and act on it. So one of it was to kind of use the stoplight feature (a traffic light). And the other is to use a translation to a more familiar unit, which is essentially how many minutes of burning a light bulb is this equivalent to. And so, you know, for the beef soup it was equivalent to like a thousand minutes. And for the vegetable soup it was a 10th of that. So it was a way of making the impact of the beef soup kind of get their attention and translate it to a familiar unit for them. And did you test which of these two approaches work better? Oh I should say we just did everything. We threw in the kitchen sink to make sure it would work. So we did both of those things. Are you satisfied that there are good sources out there from which to derive the numbers that would be used to create those labels? Yeah, and in fact, as I mentioned earlier, there are challenges to creating these labels. And some of them is where does the information come from and what assumptions do you make? And it almost has to be country specific, and perhaps even region specific for countries. Which you know, for, for the US that would be very complicated. And so otherwise we're kind of using averages of how far something had to travel, etc. So there are challenges there. And, and I'll just note another challenge is we that scaled our impact within the category of soup and it meant that beef was high and vegetable was low. But it would not make for easy comparisons across foods. So the same kind of problem arose actually a few years ago when he US was redesigning the car label. The US considered putting grades and colors on it, which is something that they do in Europe. But it's tricky because all the large vehicles, like SUVs would get low grades and colors unless you graded within a category. But then that becomes confusing because some SUVs would be getting A's and some more efficient vehicles to dance would be getting Ds. So anyway, one of the big challenges with labeling is how do you label things that you can compare across product categories. So it's not trivial to do this. We also do know there's an informational benefit if you can help people by pointing them in this direction. So where do you see this work going in the future? Yeah, that's a good question. I feel like my kind of main research role has been to raise awareness of where blind spots are. And to try to point in the direction of helping people use the information better. And I, you know, I think at this point the timing of this research coincides with other kinds of papers that I've seen on trying to raise awareness around energy and carbon emissions related to food. And I believe the UK has a governmental unit, a nudge unit, that they've spent a lot of time kind of helping people with making better financial decisions and some energy decisions. I know one of their interests in the last year has been to raise awareness about the carbon consequences of the food that people eat. So in short my own kind of contribution tends to be stimulating the idea and trying to get it out there for the policymakers to be aware of. Yes, my instincts tell me you're on the cusp of something really important because you just see a lot of trends moving in the direction of consumers paying attention to this kind of information. And the fact that you showed that there are so many errors that people make. And that information can help affect decisions people make, and how to best convey that information--this is really important. So I suspect as we go forward, we will see labels like this on food and the kind of pioneering work you're going will have a lot to say about that.  

So Rick (me) wasn't there so I really have no idea what they talked about. I think it was about Google's console/streaming thing, EA isn't at E3 (and there was much rejoicing), the Halo MCC is coming to PC and other news! I'm going to guess Shaline played Fallout 76, and Vendor did things in ARK like killing baby dino's.... a few emails aaaaand I guess I never listen to these show if I'm not there?  Enjoy! It's probably a good episode.

On today’s episode, Steve talks to Rick Miller. As a kid, Rick was really close to his dad. His dad was a personnel guy in the only non-union manufacturer in central Massachusetts. So Rick was accustomed to  sitting around the kitchen table and listening to stories about compensation, communication, and benefits and grievances. The apple does not fall from from the tree. Rick is an unconventional turnaround specialist, a servant leader, and go-to chief. All things that require skills he learned form his dad.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’re in a same-sex relationship, do the rules change? Or are there universal principles of relationship that foster intimacy and passion no matter what kind of relationship you’re in? Today’s guest is Rick Miller, author of Mindfulness Tools for Gay Men in Therapy and Unwrapped: Integrative Therapy with Gay Men. Rick Miller has also been featured at the Couples Conference, and is on the faculty for Esther Perel’s Sessions Live 2018. Rick and I chat about the unique challenges faced by same-sex couples, particularly gay men in relationship. How do you address the uniqueness, while at the same time staying true to what we know about what works in relationships? In this far-ranging conversation, we cover the particulars as well as what we can all learn from how to have a successful same-sex relationship. 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! Resources: Check out Rick Miller’s website Read Rick Miller’s books: Mindfulness Tools for Gay Men in Therapy and Unwrapped: Integrative Therapy with Gay Men 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/miller Visit to download the transcript, or text “PASSION” to 33444 and follow the instructions to download the transcript to this episode with Rick Miller. Amazing intro/outro music graciously provided courtesy of: The Railsplitters - Check them Out Transcript: Neil Sattin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Relationship Alive. This is your host, Neil Sattin. We've had so many relationship experts on this show, and there have been times where we've talked about the principles of relationship and whether they apply or not to everyone, and particularly to same-sex relationships, are there these universal rules of relationships that apply? And up until now, the best answers we've come up with have been things like, "Well, yes, of course." But it's not necessarily based on any empirical evidence, or just a statement that's... And of course, these things apply to same-sex couples as well, you just have to make a few adjustments, that sort of thing. So, you hear that enough times and if you're me, you start to wonder, "Well, what is different?" I think it's important that we know, both for you, if you're listening and you are in a same-sex relationship, and I think there's something for all of us to learn as we learn about each other in this world, in this project that is so important, of just understanding other humans, and how we operate and recognizing that we don't all think about the world in the exact same way, and we don't all have the same kinds of experiences. Neil Sattin: So today's conversation is meant to be helpful on so many levels, and I hope that it is. We have an esteemed guest with us today, his name is Rick Miller, and he is a clinical social worker from the Boston area, who I found out about when I was chatting with Jeff Zeig about this topic, and you may remember Jeff Zeig, he was on the show back in Episode 102 and in Episode 114. We were chatting about, "Well, who would be an awesome person to have on the show to chat about this?" And he mentioned Rick, who among having presented at the couple's conference on this topic of gay male relationships, he's the author of, Unwrapped: Integrative Therapy with Gay Men: The Gift of Presence, which is a book primarily for therapists, and then another book, Mindfulness Tools for Gay Men in Therapy. Both books are amazing in helping you really wrap your brain, and I think that's kind of ironic, right? 'Cause we're talking about unwrapping. But it helps you wrap your brain around just how different this experience can be, and also where the similarities lie. Neil Sattin: So, I'm really excited to have Rick with us today to talk about gay male relationships. We will as always, have a detailed transcript of today's episode, which you can get if you visit neilsattin.com/miller, as in Rick Miller, M-I-L-L-E-R. Or you can always text the word, "Passion" to the number, 33-444 and follow the instructions to download your transcript. I think those are all the details, so let's dive in. Rick Miller, it's such a pleasure to have you with us here today on Relationship Alive. Rick Miller: Thank you for the great introduction! Neil Sattin: You’re welcome! So Rick, perhaps a good place to start is this question of where we all might share principles of how to have an amazing relationship in common. Then from there, we'll go into the places where we diverge. What do you see as the principles that hold true, no matter who you are in trying to have a successful relationship? Rick Miller: I do believe that there are universal principles that are a part of every intimate relationship, and some of them include vulnerability, self-expression, expression of intimacy and sexuality, dealing with conflict, dealing with trust, dealing with betrayal, so many things like that. I think what's unusual for male couples is that they were raised as boys and as men. So the development of the gay male is different from a man and a woman who end up being together. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and it also, from reading your book, Unwrapped, I was struck by not only are gay men raised as men, but then there's also this underlying dichotomy or tension between being raised as a man and what it's like to grow up gay in a world that doesn't fully support people who are gay. Rick Miller: Yes. So I have a lot to say about you're pointing this out. First, and most important is that for the majority of gay boys growing up, they know that they're different, they feel different, they feel ashamed of being different, on some level they're attuned, probably unconsciously attuned to their parents and their society, aware that they're not the child that their parents want them to be. So by the time they reach adulthood, they've learned to constrict themselves and they've become masters at hiding. So, what do you do in an intimate relationship when you've been accustomed to being so hidden all these years? And then suddenly it's expected that you'd be communicative, open, unguarded, and all that stuff. Neil Sattin: Right. Where those are really the essential ingredients in staying connected when things get challenging? Rick Miller: Yes, yeah. Neil Sattin: Yeah, it's a great question. One thing, one nuance that I really appreciated that you brought up in your book was that it comes even literally down to how I might feel in my body and distancing myself from that. So that even that might be a challenge to overcome, this feeling at home and at peace in my physical experience. Rick Miller: Absolutely. One of the points in the book, and a lot of the work that I do, and the trainings that I do is that gay men and gay boys dissociate from their bodies because their bodies are dangerous to them, partially because of the conflict of growing up gay and feeling disenfranchised and shutting that off, or partially because many gay boys are not good at athletics, and they don't trust that their coordination will get them where they want. Neil Sattin: So there's this need to build trust with your body? Rick Miller: And so many people don't even recognize this tension that I'm describing, and I do a lot of hypnosis with my clients, which is a really fascinating process and a part of what it includes is relaxing, going inside, noticing what's taking place inside the body and creating space for openness, warmth, and resourcefulness. Frequently, what comes out for many gay men is that they've been tightening themselves and hiding themselves and dissociating themselves without even realizing that they've been doing it because it's their automatic go-to place for day to day life. Neil Sattin: So listening right now, how would I know? How would I know if that is part of my normal state of being, and I wasn't even aware that that was happening for me? Rick Miller: Well, the easiest way to know is simply to take a moment and put your attention inside of yourself in your body and notice what is your breathing like? How are you holding yourself in this very moment? Are you tightening up a particular part or a particular place of your body? What are your neck and shoulders like in this very moment? Even as I'm asking you these questions, what are you noticing? So if you'd like to be the guinea pig, perhaps you can answer these based on your own observations. Neil Sattin: Yeah, well, I'm happy to be a guinea pig, and what I was noticing was just as you were talking, that there was a smile developing on my face. Rick Miller: Nice. Neil Sattin: And at the same time, I always feel a little... It's a combination of nervousness and excitement as these conversations get underway. I was feeling that like an unevenness to my breathing as opposed to just like a regular, smooth breathing. Yeah. Rick Miller: So one of the lucky things is that our cameras are not connected to each other, so I can't make any observations or have you here. So I'm gonna go at face value with what you're saying. I like the openness that you have, that a smile can come to your face. And if I were sitting across from you, I might point out little things that I'm seeing, and ask you to make slight adjustments, and all that kind of thing. It's exciting. What's interesting about really being attentive to the body is that there are so many answers that we have available inside of us that many of us don't even pay attention to. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and it's coming to me really clearly right now and just so you know, and you listening know this, this is not planned, but I just became suddenly aware of how when I was reading your books and getting prepared for this conversation what it was like to grow up in this world, and I'm a product of the mid to late '70s and the '80s, I was born in '74, now I'm truly dating myself here and recognizing in relation to this dialogue, what my experience was, which is, I would not say that I'm gay and yet at the same time, I did experience a lot of, I think more things that might be considered more feminine and more connection to emotions. I'm realizing now just how much the fear of being labeled a certain way impacted me in terms of being fully in my expression of who I am. I wouldn't say that's the case for me now, but I think what came up for me was even a little bit of grief in recognizing like, "Oh, yeah, this was actually an obstacle for me in truly connecting with myself and with the people around me because I was afraid, afraid of being labeled." Rick Miller: I totally appreciate your openness in talking about this, and I think the experience of feeling different or even being noticed as being different is universal for people, but everyone has their own reason why. You strike me as a male who is sensitive and able to be open. That, especially back then in the '70s was perceived as possibly being gay. Fortunately, we live in a time now where being an expressive man is no longer a curse of being gay. It's allowed, it's encouraged. I'm very interested in the whole topic of masculinity in general, and what straight men can learn from gay men and what gay men can learn from straight men and how gender can be so fluid at this point in time. Neil Sattin: Absolutely. Rick Miller: Times are exciting and things are changing. The problem is, is that many gay boys who grew up in the era that you're referring to, or gay boys growing up now who live in very conservative areas still have the same difficulties that I grew up with and that you grew up with. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah. And even in parts of the country that are more liberal, I wouldn't say that, it's not like homophobia has been eliminated or discrimination, or just even people's maybe unconscious but still expressed biases around same-sex relationships in society. Rick Miller: Well, I'm glad to hear you say it because I do a lot of training, and frequently people come up to me and say, "The world is so much better. Why are you doing these workshops? Gay men don't have to worry anymore. Everything is fine." On one hand, I guess many gay boys or gay men don't have to worry about being killed or being abused, but it's still an issue. People are still struggling and my premise, as you know, is that people are struggling without even realizing how much they're struggling. That's my job as a psychotherapist when I work with people, but it's also my job as an educator to let people know that deep down, there are still parts of the self that are vulnerable and protective. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so that brings us back to where we were, which was this inner inquiry and experience of our bodies and how that would show up if we were shutting down or having ways in which we are hiding our experience. Rick Miller: So sometimes it's a physical sensation that people are aware of. Sometimes it's a thought that comes up in the mind, or sometimes it's an image, our ability to use imagery is pretty profound. There are moments where things just pop into our awareness and we may not understand why or what it means, but if we dig a little bit deeper, we can usually make sense out of these things. Neil Sattin: There's something that I love about hypnosis, among many things, and one is the way that it gives our inner world permission to communicate with the outer world. So there's something about that inviting that you just mentioned that is I think is so powerful. It's the willingness to just be open and then to experience what comes your way as a message and what does that message tell you. Rick Miller: Well, what a beautiful way of describing hypnosis. Given that so many people are afraid of what's gonna happen and what they'll end up doing. Excuse me, it's pollen season in New England. So, the way that you described hypnosis was so non-threatening and so inviting, so I love that. As I do hypnosis with gay men, again, the constriction that has been part of their lives suddenly transforms itself into a beautiful openness and a self-reliance that is incredibly magical just to see. Neil Sattin: Yeah. So I would love for you to share with our audience why you've been using hypnosis as a therapeutic tool, and in particular the tension between like why using hypnosis is so helpful? And on the flip side, why someone might resist wanting the experience that hypnosis is giving them? Rick Miller: Sure. I forgot the first question. The first question... Neil Sattin: Yeah, the first question is, what is it about hypnosis that you've found to be so valuable in working with clients? Rick Miller: So I've always done guided meditation and guided imagery, and I never got formal training in it, and yet I was doing it with my clients and amazing things were happening. So when I decided to get more formal training, it was based on some of my friends that loved hypnosis, that I ended up pursuing it. What I realized as soon as I started doing it is that it's something that we all know how to do, and it's something that we do in our day to day lives over and over and over again without realizing it. For example, when we hear an old song on the radio and we immediately begin to have flashbacks about where we were, how we felt, who we were with, what our lives were like, that's one example. Another example of being hypnotized by ourselves is a scent. So today is a spring day and I can smell the pollen and I can smell that beautiful spring afternoon, and suddenly I have memories of being a child late in May as it was getting warmer outside, and I'm flooded with amazing memories. So that's another example of being hypnotized. So when I work with people in hypnosis, I'm helping them achieve a state inside of themselves, or to shift a state away from unpleasantness into comfort, or pleasantness or resourcefulness. Neil Sattin: And how does that makes such a huge difference particularly for gay men who are dealing with maybe this problem that we were talking about initially, which is around dissociation from their physical experience? Rick Miller: I think in general, anyone who is open to trying these things will love hypnosis, whether you're a gay man or not a gay man, but given how limited our experiences has been as gay men to be able to go inside and recognize that enjoyment is there, is revolutionary. The other generalization about gay men being men is that many gay men are type A, over achievers, and have compensated for feeling inadequate by overdoing things in the work setting or in academic settings and of course, the price that we pay to do that is not always paying attention to what's happening inside. So having the opportunity to slow down to connect with oneself is a pretty important gift, and it's overlooked way more than it ought to be. Neil Sattin: Yeah. And you talk about that in terms of hypnosis and Milton Erickson and his viewpoint that all of his clients had the resources within them to do whatever shifting was necessary in their lives. Rick Miller: Correct. Neil Sattin: It also reminds me a lot, and I think you talk about parts work as well. It reminds me of Dick Schwartz in Internal Family Systems. Again, all about enlisting our inner resources to come online so that we don't feel like we're deficient in some way. Rick Miller: So, let me say a little bit about parts work. Neil Sattin: Please. Rick Miller: Which is, inside of us are all these different parts. We're so busy living our lives trying to either be our best self, or trying to ward off parts of ourselves that are unformed or more primitive and the harder we try to push something away inside of us, the more it comes out in a way that we don't want it to. So in doing parts work, what we do is we welcome all parts of ourselves that exist inside. And as a psychotherapist, what I do is I work with people to have them bring these parts forward to allow each part to have an equal voice, the part of yourself that does greater work, the part of yourself that feels like an awkward adolescent, the part of yourself that feels like a five year old who's naughty because you know that you're different from other boys and I'll ask each part to recognize what they need or what they experience, and with this is a sense of integration and from this, there's a sense of well-being and mental health that is absolutely necessary. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I love it. Let's bring that now, imagining that we've miraculously totally resourced ourselves [chuckle] in the past 15 or 20 minutes, and let's bring it to the question of relationships. We started out with identifying some of the universal principles underlying relationships, the ability to be vulnerable, to be courageous, to be who you are, to repair in conflict. What have you noticed that's particular to relationships between men that is different, or that makes their particular situation challenging in a way that a heterosexual couple might not experience? Rick Miller: So the first image that comes to mind is, "How many gay male couples have arrived at my psychotherapy office sitting on opposite ends of the couch?" Of course, any couple can do that, but there's a particular way in which men can kinda shrink in and hope to disappear, which of course doesn't happen in a couple's therapy office and the ability to be tender and vulnerable and to listen carefully and closely as opposed to providing quick and instant solutions is something that a lot of men struggle with. The other thing is that men, as I said, are not experts at allowing vulnerabilities to come to the surface. So when you're in a male couple with two men who are fighting vulnerabilities, it's hard to know what to do when one or both are either feeling conflict or feeling scared. Another common issue that comes up a lot is that men frequently are lacking role models about how to be tender and intimate and loving towards their partners, and having growing up in a world of masculinity, it's not considered cool to do those things. But then suddenly when you're in an adult relationship, it's one of the necessary ingredients for a relationship to flourish. Neil Sattin: Now you also talked about the impact of the mythology of gay culture, and as I was reading about that I was thinking about, "Yeah, that must be so challenging to on the one hand be part of this larger culture that looks at you one way, but then to have this idealized version of what it means to be a gay man that you also might not fully resonate with, but it at least gives you a place to go." Rick Miller: Well, there's a lot of pressure to be a certain kind of gay man and what's interesting is that before we had the internet or phone apps, being gay perhaps was more regional. That we were informed by where we lived and how people did things where we lived. Now, it's a worldwide experience and gay men are looking at other gay men all over the world and the pressure to be young, to look a certain way, to be professionally successful is what is driving many men in their desires to be successful. The problem with that is that many men are very successful in a variety of ways, but they don't feel like they measure up to this gay-male standard. It's a lot of pressure and frequently men will buy into this without even recognizing that it's what they do. Rick Miller: So when I do trainings, frequently people will raise their hands and say, "Well I have many gay male clients that live outside of the city, and they live in rural areas, and they don't buy into what you're talking about." and I'll come back and challenge them by saying, "Do they go online? What are they looking at? What are the pornography sites that they're looking at? What are the websites that they're going to as gay men were they being informed about what their life ought to be like as a gay man?" I make the comparison of how women will look at fashion magazines regardless of age, regardless of their size, and then experience this uncomfortable feeling inside of themselves based on not meeting those standards. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and how do you help a couple who were maybe one or both members of the couple is struggling with that issue? How do you help them support each other in finding who they really are in the midst of all of that? Rick Miller: Well, one of the things is to verbalize what I just said to you about noticing how some of the pressure to be a certain way is coming from outside of themselves, and that they're internalizing that without even realizing it. So one of the gifts of being a couples therapist is that I get to help people shift their focus inward, and to be the person that they really are, and accept who they really are, rather than trying to be a stereotype of who someone is supposed to be. The other thing that I do, which is part of the same process as going inside, is helping people to identify what they want, what they need, what they expect from their partner, and to also learn how to give parts of themselves that they didn't know they could do or didn't allow themselves to do because it wasn't considered masculine. Neil Sattin: Yeah, one thing that you mentioned, I think, in maybe the presentation that you gave for the Couples Conference that I can totally relate to, because I happen to think that just about everyone could use a bit of a sexual re-education. This idea that there's a discovery of what it really means to us as individuals to be healthy, to be sexual to... What gives us pleasure, what doesn't. And to really be able to explore that enough that we can take a strong stand for who we are in that, as opposed to just buying into some prescription that's been handed us. Rick Miller: Part of the prescription that's been handed to gay men is that there are certain ways that we're supposed to be sexual and that we're all supposed to have open relationships and that every gay male cheats on his partner and that belief system reinforces something that may not necessarily be okay. If a gay male couple chooses to have an open relationship, that's their prerogative, but it needs to be done very carefully with a lot of questions and communication. Rick Miller: The other aspects of sexuality that's very important with individuals and also with couples, is by being aware of sensory experiences. So here we are, going back in inward again, listening to the body. Each body, each person has their own preferences that feel good to them. Instead of having the norm of gay sex, have sex that you as an individual enjoy. What are the ways that you enjoy being touched? Where do you like being touched? How do you experience that? How do you like to give to each other, and what does your body tell you in these circumstances? Erection issues are common for all men and gay men tend to think that other gay men don't have erection issues. That's not true, but no one is talking about it because it's not a standard that's very cool to talk about. The harder you try to be sexual and pull off a great sexual act, the least likely you'll be able to be to have a great erection. It's like sleeping at night time. If you have sleep anxiety and you're trying to focus on sleeping well, you're gonna stay awake out of anxiety. Neil Sattin: Do you have... 'Cause with what you were just talking about, and I think in this ideal world, we would be able to just be... Well, for lack of a better word, be innocent with each other and have that exploration. To me, the big word that leaped out when I was having that thought, was shame, and how shame becomes an obstacle to being a willing explorer. Rick Miller: Yes. Yep, so shame, of course is a central experience for growing up gay. It's the backbone of one's being, and so as an adult, how do you rate yourself of something that's been embedded inside of you all this time? And so part of your approach in just being and finding comfort is a great way of working with shame and healing shame. So that's the good news about being in a relationship, is that the closeness and the tenderness that can be achieved is going to erode away these layers of shame. I also had an image of how men treat their animals, which is that they're able to speak in a high tone of voice. They're able to be very gentle, they're able to cuddle with them. Frequently partners will say, "If you treated me like you treated the dog, I would be so happy." and clearly, it's a less conflictual relationship. It's all about pure love, and for many men, they're not worried about being masculine with their dog. If only they could do the same with their partners, maybe they wouldn't need me. Neil Sattin: Yeah, yeah, that's a really interesting thought that brings me in so many different directions. [chuckle] Yeah, I'm curious about one thing in particular that... And I'm just wondering if you can shed some light on this, because as you've described it, one of the key possibilities for someone growing up gay is this sense that, "There's something not quite right about me," or, "a shame about who I am," and I think in 'Unwrapped', you described a client who was struggling with this question of choosing a relationship simply based on someone accepting them and what it feels like to actually be with another gay man and be like, "Wow, it's actually okay to be gay," versus taking it to the next level where someone isn't just accepting you, they actually want what you want and you truly have a symbiotic relationship. Is this a common problem in gay relationships where someone might kind of settle because they finally at least feel accepted even if they're not really getting the relationship that they want? Rick Miller: You're touching so many things that I could go in about 10 directions on [chuckle] but I think, again, the norms of the gay male sub-culture are such that gay men frequently are seeking out beauty over other qualities. The prize of a gay male is being with someone who turns heads and beauty is only skin deep, and what else is there? So in an ideal world, we don't just look for a partner who looks great on the outside. We look for a partner who complements us, who challenges us, who brings us tension and joy. One of the things I love about relationships is that there's an expectation that it's all smooth and hunky-dory and hearts and roses, when in fact, the truth about intimate relationships is that they're challenging, they're difficult, and there's a certain edginess that comes with this that's truly intimate, truly exciting, and keeps a certain freshness going. So this is much more about the insides of who we really are rather than how we appear on the outside or how people view us from the outside. I always say that every couple has their own particular hell that they keep secret from the rest of the world because they fear that if other people know, they're gonna blow the cover. But there is no such thing as a relationship that doesn't have this. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and for someone who at one point relished the fact that they were accepted, but now is recognizing, "Oh, this isn't really a relationship where I'm being fully met, but I don't have hope that I could find what I'm looking for in another partner." How do you create a light of optimism there for those people? Rick Miller: Basically, I will reassure them that the Hell that they're experiencing is normal. [laughter] So I have a timeline that I frequently tell people, which is that the first four months of any intimate relationship, not just men, is a time of such excitement and a time of great projection. During these moments, the rest of the world goes away when we're together and the other person is fulfilling all that has been unfulfilled, and it's so dreamy and it's so magical and obviously, there's a strong intimate and sexual component during this period of time. And around eight months or so, people really begin to see each other for who they really are, and this includes warts and all. So as people become more real, the challenges present themselves more and more regularly and frequently between this and about two years couples think that because this is happening, there's something wrong and a majority of people end the relationship because it isn't perfect when in fact, this is exactly what needs to happen. Rick Miller: And when couples experience this, separating out their love and respect for their partner, along with what their hopes and expectations were, and experiencing disappointment, knowing that this is part of what the big picture is about, it enables people to move forward and really accept who they are, who their partner is, and what their couplehood is about. And that is what true intimacy really is. And so, again, going back to male couples, a part of this recipe is also in accepting our own limitations based on how we feel inside of ourselves, how we were raised, what was expected of us as men, and how to give a soft, intimate loving part of ourselves to another person when we haven't really been taught how to do it. If we use our mothers as our role model, then we're losing our masculinity. If we use our fathers as our role model, then we may have a struggle with how to be soft in these certain ways. Neil Sattin: Yeah, that makes me think about the pull between the importance of attachment in relationship and creating safety and then the ways that we handle a lack of variety or things being maybe too safe in our relationships. Maybe this is a tension inherent in that stereotype that you mentioned. The stereotype that there are a lot of gay relationships where people have multiple partners or poly or open, and how that must be creating some tension and polarity with what's required to create a secure bond between two people. Rick Miller: It's so fascinating to me that frequently gay couples come into my office and say, "I think we need to open up our relationship." And I'll say, "Why is that?" And they'll say, "Because we're having a horrible time with each other." Since when would opening up a relationship be the solution to a struggle that has nothing to do with the outside role that has everything to do with the two people working on these vulnerabilities? So I frequently try to slow people down and to allow their focus to be between the two of them and themselves long before running out and making life a little bit more complicated. In terms of thinking about attachment, what we expect and need from our partners is for them to have our back. Our partners become a safe haven in the world. Our partners become a representation of our parents, or they even become a representation of the ideal parent that we never had. So as our partners tolerate us and love us and care for us, they're compensating for things that we didn't get when we were younger. And frequently, partners, men and women, need to be taught how to do this in a context of couples therapy or in the context of educating themselves in order to be more fully available. Neil Sattin: And when you say learning about how to do this, are you talking about really being aware that that is part of maybe the unspoken expectation in relationship and then deciding how you're gonna respond to that? Or will you be that ideal parent as much as possible? Or will you shine a light on that dynamic and try to dismantle it so that neither of you is putting that expectation on each other? Rick Miller: No. I will shine a light on that dynamic saying that this is what it is, this is what a truly intimate relationship is, and that each person in the world that's in an intimate relationship has some challenges with how to be a parent figure to your partner, 'cause that's not how we go into it. So how do you learn how to do that and know what to do? And so that's what I mean, is that we all have to learn how to nourish and nurture other people, especially our partners. Neil Sattin: Yeah. And what are your thoughts on how that creates... And I love this, we keep uncovering these little places of tension in relationship. Because as we show up more like a parental figure for our partners with unconditional love, unconditional support, not judging them, helping them through hard times, it sounds really great. At the same time, we potentially create a schism that makes problems with sexual polarity 'cause... Rick Miller: Sexual polarity and all other kinds of polarity. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Rick Miller: First starting with a sexual polarity, how do you feel sexual toward someone that you've exposed so much of yourself to, and still keep things hot? And again, going back to sensations and sensory awareness is that sometimes what feels good sexually is a physical sensation, and people don't always pay enough attention to that. Neil Sattin: Yeah. I wonder, are you familiar with Marnia Robinson's work? Rick Miller: No, I'm not. Neil Sattin: Okay. She was on the show, actually back in Episode 5, so a long time ago. She wrote a book called, Cupid's Poisoned Arrow, that's all about the biochemical effects of orgasms. And in particular, her whole thesis is based on this idea that if you have an orgasm, you're flooding your system with dopamine, and you're also creating this process by which you become desensitized to that dopamine and to your partner. So as we're talking about this and what keeps sexuality alive, it reminds me of her work because her whole thing is about how do you explore sexuality without orgasm in order to keep the sexuality alive and to keep the sexual chemistry going, as opposed to just repeatedly flooding your system with dopamine to the point where you're habituated to your partner and need to seek another person in order to get excited. Rick Miller: So if you talk about gay men, gay men learn to be sexual as men, and of course, men's motive during sex is to have an orgasm. And frequently men have orgasms very quickly. So the suggestion that Marnia is discussing and that you're talking about, is something that I frequently assign to couples for homework. And it's very, very hard for people to actually do this, which is to spend a lot of time taking turns with each other and exploring each other's bodies without focusing on orgasm and without having an orgasm, so that they can really learn to identify other great feelings, how to give to each other, how to receive, how to instruct each other and to learn about what else feels good inside the body. Neil Sattin: Yeah, and there's so much to learn there because I think for so many of us, men in particular, orgasms are a great way to dissociate from life and our pain and our shame and whatever stress we're feeling in the moment. So if that has become your gateway to sexuality, then you really do have to learn something new in order to give up the temporary relief and release that orgasms give you from something that we've been talking about for this whole hour is the question of shame and how that affects how we show up. Rick Miller: I think one of the joys that can happen for couples, and I'm thinking about this a little bit more detailed as you've been discussing this, is how good it feels to be with a partner and to help him be able to have an orgasm and if both of your minds approach sex from a similar vantage point, then it's a sense of power and conquering that two people experience with the help of each other. That's a pretty amazing feeling and even if it doesn't last that long, it's a great metaphor for success in a relationship. Neil Sattin: Yeah. How would you suggest someone when they're in a sexual situation with their partner and they notice shame coming up and starting to get in the way, their own sense of thinking that something going on with their body is gross or unacceptable? How would you suggest someone work with that in the moment with their partner? Rick Miller: By exactly what you were just talking about and what Marnia talks about, which is to de-emphasize orgasm. I also ask people to not worry about whether they have an erection. Frequently, what happens is that as men feel vulnerable, either about how they feel physically about themselves, or how they're performing as a partner in comparison to how people are supposed to be performing, they lose their erection. And then, as they begin to lose their erection, just like the sleep thing, they worry about it and then their partner may get frustrated and then the mind takes over and they're gone. So really, what I have people do first and foremost is slow themselves down. It's okay if you lose an erection, it's okay to keep doing what you're doing, keep exploring the sensations and take a break if you need, and worry less, enjoy more, be in the present, allow expectations to drift further and further away 'cause they only get in the way. Neil Sattin: I am so appreciative that you brought this up because another person whose work I so respect and admire, her name's Diana Richardson, you may have heard of her, she does a lot of work around Tantra. And her version of Tantra, she also calls it "slow sex", is all about just that, how you slow things down. One of the things that she talks about that I think is actually really missing from the common dialogue about what you do when you have problems maintaining an erection is this concept of, she calls it "soft entry." It's not the most glamorous term in the world, [chuckle] but it's this idea... Well, it's not an idea, it's a practice of if you don't have an erection, you can still get lubricated, and with the assistance of your partner, you can still actually be inside your partner even if you're not hard. Rick Miller: That's great. Neil Sattin: So you're overcoming this barrier and I'm making those finger quotes in the air around the word "barrier," you can overcome the barrier to intercourse by simply using some lubrication, some patience, and really gentle movement to actually penetrate your partner and to rest there. Rick Miller: And what a difference that makes to not have to rush so quickly and how freeing it can be. I don't know the statistics, but what percentage of people then experience erections as a result of allowing themselves to softly enter and be relaxed? Neil Sattin: Yeah, I wish I had the statistic on that. But... Rick Miller: Good one. Neil Sattin: I gotta think that it's a lot. It's a lot because what you end up giving yourself is that time and relaxation and the presence that you need to ignite that part of your system. Rick Miller: Can I shift gears for a moment? Neil Sattin: Please. Rick Miller: Because I'm thinking of a specific couple that I work with, where one of the guys frequently would lose his erection because he felt as though he wasn't being as good or as strong of a partner as he ought to be and through some exploration in my office, what was clear was that expectations were driving their sex life and it was getting in the way. Part of being more real included talking about sex more, but also sharing fantasies. It was hard for them to do that because it was considered naughty for them to be talking about these fantasies and ironically, gay men love porn. So instead of keeping it out of the relationship, why not bring it in and share the enthusiasm about it to help things along? So this particular couple started talking more about their fantasies and sharing the visual images of the pornography that they really liked, and their sex life transformed itself really quickly because they were no longer keeping a part of themself a secret from their partner. Instead, they were bringing it back home and it worked beautifully. Neil Sattin: Yeah, I love that and that sounds like a very healthy, strategic use of that kind of pornographic stimulation to bring a couple together. Rick Miller: It was great. Neil Sattin: I'm wondering though when you brought that up, it also made me think about... You used the word "expectations," their expectations of each other, and the ways that this is true across the spectrum now, especially because of the prevalence of pornography. Rick Miller: Yes. Neil Sattin: The way that people think they're supposed to be when they're being sexual. Rick Miller: That's right. Neil Sattin: And I'm wondering how you encourage people to abandon the scripts that aren't serving them? Rick Miller: Good point. Everything goes back in a circle to listening to your body and the pornography industry is thriving, and people are pursuing it and losing fact of their own humanity as they're doing so. I'm saying that not as a moral judgement, but more as a mind-body clinician who wants people to function highly and successfully inside of themselves. Again, it all comes back to the body. I'm constantly slowing people down, asking people to notice what they enjoy, what turns them on, what their fantasies are, and to use pornography as a help or as an aid for themselves, rather than as a way of being in the world. And incidentally, another thing that's happening is that many men have an unrealistic view of what their penis should look like, because they compare their penis to pornography who frequently hire men who are very well endowed. These days, men are barely naked in front of each other, locker rooms are more segregated and separated, and men don't have an opportunity to see other men's dicks to realize that there isn't a problem there where they think it's their own problem that they feel ashamed about. Neil Sattin: Right. Yeah, yeah. And even if you are seeing dicks, you're probably not seeing erect dicks, so... Rick Miller: Right. Neil Sattin: That's another place where you wouldn't necessarily know where you stack up against the average that's out there. Rick Miller: It's kind of incredible how much private shame people are living with and not doing much about it. Neil Sattin: Yeah. Yeah, and that makes me wonder in your book Unwrapped, you offer, for therapists reading that book, scripts to help them guide their clients through trance experiences, to give them that sense of safety and being alive in their bodies. Obviously, we can't do a hypnotic induction right here for the show. I'm wondering though, if you have some hints around language that partners could use with each other in a intimate situation, let's say, in the bedroom, language that they could use to help invite each other into that experience of being alive with each other, being present, or let's start there and then I'll maybe add on to that. Rick Miller: Yeah, so I think language is actually too limiting, because what I'm imagining as you were describing this is a shared moment together where there's plenty of time, where maybe soft music is playing, where there's no rush, and the experience to enjoy is what feels good. And sometimes it isn't through words that we can convey to our partners what it is that feels good. We can take our hand and move our partner's hand, or we can move our body in such a way that communicates what feels good. So I guess I would use the word language in a very broad metaphorical way, which is to expand the language that we experience sensations, and experience, and expand the ways in which we communicate our pleasure in these sensations, so that our partners can enjoy what it is that we're enjoying, being perfectly clear to convey that we're enjoying it. Neil Sattin: Yeah, so that's perfect. I love that notion of expanding language and expanding the ways that we're communicating in those moments. How about... And it makes perfect sense too, in the context of, that you said, I loved the soft music and I was kind of painting the picture for myself there. Rick Miller: Yes. Yeah. Neil Sattin: Too bad my wife is out in California right now. Neil Sattin: And, but what about... Because now we're coming back to shame, I don't wanna end on shame, so but what I do wanna do is, there's gonna be this dynamic where if you're being really present with your partner in sex, then you're either gonna maybe have moments of shame that you might recognize in yourself, or as the partner you might perceive that something is going on with your partner, that your partner's experiencing shame. What, again, we'll use the word language but broadening it to mean how would you communicate in a situation where you notice that your partner is in shame about something? Rick Miller: So this is when language really does come in handy. Frequently, what I suggest to people is if they don't need to focus on being sexual, don't worry about ending the act and ending in orgasm. Let it be. Let it be fine. Sometimes sex is great. Sometimes it isn't great. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work. So with language what I suggest is when things are a little bit more neutral and a little more okay, to have a simple basic conversation about what it is that one is noticing, either in themselves, or observing in their partner and just converse about what it is that's coming up. And so, again, we've gone full circle to how we started today, which is to be able to talk openly and honestly about what experiences are taking place and what partners are noticing in themselves and in each other. Neil Sattin: And is there something that you've seen as you work with clients around issues of shame, as like a common theme and for some reason, I don't know why this is coming up for me, but it's this question of something about my body that I don't necessarily like, as to why those things stick with us? Because intuitively, that doesn't make any sense. It's our bodies, they're... We were gifted these amazing vehicles for living in the world. Yet, sometimes they betray us, like you lose your erection when you wish it were there, or you fart at the wrong moment, or whatever it is, or your gut's a little flabbier than you wish it were. Do you see some commonalities around what makes those thoughts about ourselves sticky? And what the path is to letting them go? Rick Miller: Yep. So first, about shame, what I frequently do will generalize the experience of shame as a gay man and remind people that this is a common universal experience. It isn't just you, this is what most gay boys have experienced and internalized while growing up. So, that's at the baseline, and then in the here and now in terms of body image or sexuality, again, focusing on sensation rather than images of perfection, figuring out why it is that people are experiencing a sense of self-consciousness and shame. I love doing this with couples. I ask them, "When your partner gains five pounds how do you feel differently about him? And how do you feel differently about your sex life?" And, for the most part, what happens is that people don't care. Partners don't care. Rick Miller: At a certain point in the relationship it isn't necessarily the abs that are creating great sex, it's the connection, it's the way in which people communicate with each other, it's the way in which people give to each other, the way in which they're attuned to each other and they enjoy these sensations. That's what sex is, and that's what makes it nice. In all long-term relationships, beauty dies down in a certain way and being with the same partner has a certain level of predictability. So, regardless of how hot one is, or how one is perceived at the beginning of a relationship, over time that hotness shifts and changes into a much truer kind of intimacy. So again, we go back to expressing what feels good, aiming towards pleasing oneself and pleasing each other, and enjoying the moment for the moment, and enjoying the moment in the moment. Neil Sattin: I love it. I love it. Rick, thank you so much for all of your thoughts, and... Rick Miller: Absolutely. Neil Sattin: And I think as we've been dancing, we are really weaving the sense of where there's overlap and where there isn't, and I feel like we've just covered such valuable terrain in today's conversation. Rick Miller: Thank you, we could go on for hours, I'm sure. Neil Sattin: We absolutely could, but in lieu of doing that, I would love for you to share what you're working on, how can people find you. Of course, we will have links to all of your stuff in the transcript and show notes, but I'd love for people to hear from you directly. Rick Miller: Absolutely. So my website is rickmiller.biz, B-I-Z, rickmiller.biz. I'm working on a great project and maybe it's about how gay men learn to be intimate in the first place called, Gay Sons and Mothers. So it's gaysonsandmothers.com. I'm also on Instagram. I have a Facebook page, Rick Miller Psychotherapy+. I have a blog on Psychology Today called, Unwrapped. Where else can I be found? I think those are the main ones. Neil Sattin: Great. Great. And you're obviously in private practice, so people can see you. Rick Miller: That's right. Neil Sattin: And then you're also involved in doing trainings for therapists as well? Rick Miller: Yep, I do a lot of mental health conferences all over about working with gay men. Neil Sattin: Great, and I think you mentioned that you have some coming up, the Brief Therapy Conference and the International Society of Hypnosis. So there're a couple ways, but you probably have your events listed on your website as well. Rick Miller: I do, and I welcome any questions and any emails from people, so give me a holler. Neil Sattin: Awesome. Well, Rick, thank you so much for your time again today. If you are interested in downloading a transcript, you can visit neilsattin.com/miller, M-I-L-L-E-R. You can text to the word "passion" to the number 33444 and follow the instructions, which will also help you download the transcript, and we'll have links to Rick's site and all the ways that you can get in touch with him and to learn more about his work. Other than that, thank you so much for being here on the show with us today Rick. Rick Miller: Thank you very much. Take care. Neil Sattin: You too.

What do you do if you have an interference problem? Rick Hartley is an industry leader in the correct design of circuits and PC boards to prevent and solve noise, signal integrity and EMI problems. He consults and teaches internationally and he has taught seminars at numerous conferences, including the IEEE EMC Symposium, PCB West, IPC Apex/Expo and others. He is a past member of the Editorial Review Board of Printed Circuit Design Magazine and has written numerous technical papers and articles on methods to control noise, EMI and signal integrity. Listen to this episode where Rick shares the worst ideas for a 4-layer and 6-layer stackups. He also offers a sneak peek of what to expect at his AltiumLive 2018 Keynote Presentation: The Extreme Importance of PC Board Stack-up. Show Highlights: Contest - can you guess how many countries the OnTrack podcast has reached? You can win a Summit pass to be Judy’s personal guest at AltiumLive 2018! Just tag #OnTrackPodcast on Twitter with your best guess! Mid-80s - in digital domain things started to not work right and no one had answers. There was research to do (120 books later), learned what causes function vs. not function In the 90s, began to realize the problem wasn’t clock frequency, the problem is the frequency associated with the rising and falling edges of signals. Person who helped me the most - Ralph Morrison I didn’t learn what I needed in college, it had to come from experience. Energy and Fields and how they move - the energy is in the fields, not in the Voltage and current. Field dielectric / routing AltiumLive Keynote talk: The Extreme Importance of PC Board Stack-up If I’m contacted with an Interference problem, the question I ask is: “What is your printed circuit board stackup?” The most critical item is the board stackup, and it’s what people most often get wrong. Two or three voltage planes in a stackup with no grounds anywhere - a very serious problem e.g. high layer count board, 20 ground planes in board + signal routed on layer 1 and ground plane on layer 2 - return - 100% of signal on layer 1 would be in ground plane on layer 2. No current from that trace would be in any other ground layers, because energy is in the dielectric between layers 1 and 2 With 2 or 3 signal layers, and then a plane - all signals try to reference one plane, all fields intermingling in the dielectric space, all coupling energy into one another and that’s one of the places where EMI comes from. It’s a matter of keeping fields isolated from one another for proper functioning. 4-Layer worst stack-up 6-Layer worst stack-up What to expect at AltiumLive (Early bird pricing - 10% off through end of July.) Setting the record straight: 15 years ago, Rick wrote a paper called ‘Board Stackup to Control EMI’ and “some ideas that I suggested in that paper, I have since learned are not good ideas.” Ignore this paper because the physics have changed. The speeds have become too fast. Links and Resources: PCB2Day Seminar PCB West RF Design Concepts High Speed PCB Designer’s Guide, Martyn Gaudion You can also read more articles featuring Rick Hartley in the OnTrack Newsletter here and here.   Hey everyone this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack podcast. Thank you again for joining. We want to thank you so much for continuing to listen and we wanted to share with you that from May to June the listenership has doubled and absolutely exploded because I have amazing guests like I have today. Which is Rick Hartley. But before we get going with Rick, I wanted to give a few of you a shout out. I wanted to say thank you for the notes and ideas for the show that you sent: To Daud Zoss, I'm sorry if I'm killing your name; Dave Rehack, Spencer Kelly gave us some really good ideas for our future shows. Enoch Sotello and also a nice sharp shout out from a LinkedIn group, the Arkansas Signal Integrity community and I'm sure you guys will enjoy hearing from Rick today. So I thought I'd throw a fun thing out there since AltiumLive is going to be hosted in San Diego, October 3rd, 4th, and 5th. I thought I'd give you a little trivia question today. So can you guess how many countries the OnTrack Podcast has reached? If you guess close to the number, then I you will be my personal guest at AltiumLive and I'll give you a free ticket there. So how about that? So you can tweet your answers using the hashtag #ontrackpodcast. So whoever is closest, and we will announce the winner on our next podcast. Thanks again for listening. So today we are talking to, in fact, one of our keynote speakers for AltiumLive, a dear friend and longtime associate, Rick Hartley and I'm sure for many of you, he is no stranger and he is a celebrated speaker. He's been a leader in IPC for many years and a very gifted designer. So Rick, welcome thank you so much for joining me today, it's a joy to have you. Thank you Judy, it's a pleasure to be here. So what I thought we'd talk about today Rick, well first let's queue up and tell people who may not know you - the six people on the planet that may not know Rick Hartley - a little bit about your education and your background and sort of how you became a signal integrity guru? Oh, you want me to tell this? Yes I do. I'll try to make it brief. Okay. I basically started life in 1965 as a technician with a two-year tech degree and working for a large company in the east, and I spent a couple of years there and decided that wearing one hat a day for six to eight months wasn't what I wanted to do at the age of 20. That I really wanted to be able to wear five hats a day. And so I moved to a small company in Columbus Ohio - I'm still in Columbus - and basically joined an R&D group where I got to do just that. I would be testing boards one day and troubleshooting the next, and so on. Within a couple of years I moved to field service, and from field service I learned a lot about troubleshooting problems and field service as you can well imagine. From field service I moved into the engineering department in that company where I became a designer and as a designer - the designers back then designed everything but the circuit - they designed the circuit boards, the cabinets, the chassis, the wiring harnesses, the interconnects, everything except the actual circuit schematic and I spent a fair amount of time doing that. And then, over time, with school in the evening I earned a degree in engineering became an EE and worked several years as a circuit designer around 1976, seven-ish time frame, the company - I had moved companies by then. The company I was working for asked me to; they said you have some background with printed circuit design? I said yes, we would like for you to help out doing part-time circuit design, part-time board layout. I said, sure no problem. After six months of that, I decided board design was really the thing I liked most. And so I moved full-time into circuit board design, away from full-time circuit design. For a long time I was doing basically RF design, RF layout, which is a little more challenging, especially back then. Digital layout then wasn't too challenging. Anyway moved into board layout, spent a number of years there and along the way somewhere, about the mid eighties, things started to not work right in the digital domain, and frankly, most people didn't know why this was happening. They - most of the engineers I worked with, - were scratching their heads; I was certainly scratching mine. And over time, by doing a lot of reading; I purchased over 120 books since then, between the mid 80s and now, and read them all. Some of them, three or four times, and basically learned what causes things to function versus not function, what causes interference and so on, and probably the person that helped me the most to get to the understanding I have today, is Ralph Morrison, and I'm going to talk a little bit about Ralph as I go through this. But anyway, by just getting my arms around why people have signal integrity problems, why there are interference issues, it's helped me over time to become I guess what people call a guru, I'm not sure I am, but you know whatever, whatever the title is. A good guru will never say they're a guru Rick so it's okay, I'll call you a guru. All right. That's pretty much how I got there it was just a matter of, it was a matter of stumbling along frankly, for years and years - not fully knowing why, and little by little, gathering the knowledge, because sadly, I didn't learn in college, the stuff I really needed to know to take me to where I needed to be. I mean, it had to come through experience, it had to come through just hard-won, hands-on on the job experience. Because it didn't come from college, sadly. And that's kind of where, how I got to where I am today. And of course this all started in the mid-80s. By the mid-90s, I was really beginning to have a pretty good understanding of the issues and it's really all just built since then. And I think, you and I had a talk and you were actually in our OnTrack newsletter a year or so ago, and I remember you saying around that time is, when you... didn't you talk about... oh I'm gonna forget the term now, because I'm not an engineer - rise times. Yes oh absolutely. Was that something, was it around that time that you started realizing that rise times were problematic? That's exactly, it was actually in the 90s, when I started realizing that the problem wasn't clock frequency, the problem is the frequency associated with the rising and falling edges of signals. If you have a device on a circuit board, that is being clocked at a low frequency - two, three megahertz, but you have a rise time with two, three, four, five hundred picoseconds, you'll have energy in every transmission event that extends upwards to a gigahertz or beyond, even though you're only clocking at a low frequency. So it isn't the clock, the clock really sets the timing for the circuit. That's really why it's called a clock, it sets timing. The rise times are really the key element that drive signal integrity, and even worse; drive EMI issues and interference issues. It's really all about rise time, yes. That's - I thought that was fascinating when you talked about that earlier. Now I've sat in a few of your classes and I've learned a couple, in my novice kind of way, a couple really key things that really impressed me when I sat in one of your classes at IPC, and in that room of say 50 people, you asked the people in that room: who in this room are EEs and also printed circuit board designers? And a handful of people raised their hand and you asked the question; which one's harder, the circuit design or the board design? And they all like guffawed at that and just said, duh, printed circuit board design. To which someone like me went, wait - I thought the EE was the heavy lifter, the one that kind of got the creds for doing the hard work but you really taught me then, that - and I think this is a lot - because circuit boards have become so complex over time too but that probably wasn't always true - and I had just missed that, that it had become. So why is it that you asked that question, and what made you choose to go from EE to actual board design? The, just frankly, the challenges. I found even in the late 70s, I found the challenges of board design to be more stimulating and more invigorating and it made me feel just more alive everyday to go to work than to be designing circuits and setting up test procedures and that sort of thing. And not that there's anything wrong with that, my god, I asked the question of those guys which is more challenging and most of them said board design. If you ask them which took them longer to learn, they would probably say circuit design took them longer, there's more to understand to become a good quality circuit designer, to really get what it takes to design circuits, to function properly. But once you have that knowledge, the actual effort and energy and time expended once you're there - once you're at that knowledge level - is actually greater to lay out a circuit board than it is to do a circuit design and that's why they all answered that way. There is you're right. There was a time when circuit board design was ridiculously easy. I have a circuit hanging on my wall, you can't see it from this camera but it's a two layer board that I designed in 1985. It has no planes and it's just routed power and ground and routed signals it's hideously complex because it's over 200 ICs, on a circuit board it's really packed, and that's why it's hanging there because it is such a complex, by the way hand taped, artwork. It's a very complex artwork and that makes people go 'oooh' when they walk in that's why it's there. But the reality is, how that was laid out was immaterial, because its layout just almost didn't matter, you could do almost anything back then and the circuit would still work. I remember seeing a tape layout in the 1990s, of a guy from the aerospace world where I spent in the early 90s; a board this guy laid out in the 80s, that there was a corner powering ground pin IC for, like a 20 pin part, and there was a decoupling cap sitting above the IC, and he had a trace routed from the decoupling cap, all the way around the body of the IC and back up to the power pin of the device. It was probably an inch and a half long trace from it, and it was a skinny little, 10 mil trace, and the circuit worked. And it's because things were so slow back then compared to today. And it's about rise time not clock frequency. Rise times back then were measured in the tens, in some cases even hundreds, of nanoseconds. Today they're measured in the hundreds of Picoseconds so they are at least a thousand times faster than then - a hundred to a thousand times faster than they were in the 80s and that's why, things today are harder to make work than they were in those days. Well that just blows my mind to think of things - I mean, I know that it's happened it's just hard to get your head around those kind of numbers sometimes.The other thing you said, and then we're going to jump into what you're going to talk about at AltiumLive. The other thing I learned from you, which I've told you about this. A few times it just made my head explode was when you started talking about the energy in a circuit board is in the dielectric and it was like; wait what? No it's running like water through pipes on the traces, like that's how I pictured it and you explained it, and you showed a field you had and I all of a sudden, like well, I knew some energy moves through the dielectric, but not the way you explained and literally; it was like I felt embarrassed, and I remember walking up to you and going: okay don't tell anyone but I didn't know that. And you said... People don't know that. -then you said, it's okay judy EEs don't know that, and I'm like, okay all right I don't feel so bad. So why don't we know that Rick? Because it's not talked about generally in college. Voltage and current are important parameters, they are - I just had a discussion very recently with Eric Bogatin on this exact subject. Voltage and current are extremely important parameters for identifying how transmission lines work, why signal integrity issues arise. These are all things that you need to know, but the reality is if - and if you're trying to track down signal integrity issues - probably best to talk about voltage and current more than the fields. But when you're trying to identify why an interference problem has occurred, why did energy move from circuit A to circuit B, how in the world did it get over to circuit B? Where did that - because the voltage and current followed the traces that we routed in circuit A. So how did the energy... The reason is that, as you just said, the energy is in the fields, not in the voltage and current and the fields travel through the dielectric space between the copper features. And that's the key element. When you route a trace you're routing half of a transmission line, the other half of the transmission line is the plane, usually in most boards today, a plane where the energy returns. So you have the forward current traveling down the trace that you've routed, and you have the return current traveling in the plane directly under the trace that's routing across the board. And that current is being established because there are fields with energy creating the voltage and current in the transmission line. And that's the key element to understand. If the energy weren't in the voltage IRAM, sorry, weren't in the fields; radio wouldn't work. Think about it, radio broadcasting of fields into free space, that get picked up by antenna that focused the energy into a radio. Anything that uses broadcast medium works in exactly that fashion. And the reason it works, is because the energy is in the fields. Now you can capture those fields with copper structures. And when you do, then they will channel through the dielectric between the copper features; that's what an antenna does and an antenna focuses the fields into a center point, that focuses them to a transmission line, to the receiver and that's exactly what an antenna is. So bottom line, because the energy is in the fields, and the fields travel through the dielectric space, that's how things can sometimes spread. If we don't route traces properly, if we route, for example, two or three layers of traces above a plane; all of those trace layers are capable of coupling energy into one another, which causes the fields to then spread to places where they shouldn't be. Or, if you change layers improperly - that's something I'm going to talk about, at AltiumLive, is well - the main thing I want to talk about is board stackup. Yeah so let's just jump in right there I think that's a good place to segue. So Rick is doing, han hour keynote at AltiumLive and the title of his talk is: 'The extreme importance of PC board stack up.' So let's just jump right off there. So you've already started to talk about energy and fields and how they move. Talk about that relative to stack up and why that can be problematic in not so obvious places? Yeah I will, yes the main question that I ask people; if someone contacts me and says: Rick we've got an interference problem of some kind, be it EMI, be it interference between circuits, whatever. I've had, within the last year of it, people contact me to talk about op-amp circuits that were being interfered with by other things in a circuit board or inside a system. Why does this happen is the question that's often asked. The first question I ask them is, what is your printed circuit board stack up? Because the most critical item to get correct, to have correctly done, is the board stack up. The most critical item is the board stack up and that's why I ask that question because what people often get wrong is the board stack. I will often see examples of people who have put two or three voltage planes next to each other in a board stack, with no grounds anywhere nearby. And that's one of the things I'm going to talk about at AltiumLive; why that's a problem. It's a very serious problem. For example, if you had a circuit board that was many layers thick, and you had, let's say twenty ground planes in the board. If you had a signal routed on layer 1, and there was a ground plane on layer 2, all 100% of the return current from that signal on layer 1 would be in the ground plane on layer 2, and there will be no current from that trace in any of the other ground layers because the energy is in the dielectric... Yeah. Between layers one and two, it establishes a forward current in the trace and a return current - a reverse current, in that. All the other planes, it's like they're not even there. They don't even get used because the energy focuses itself in that tight area, and as I said a minute ago, if you have two or three signal layers and then a plane, now all these signals are all trying to reference that one plane. So all of those fields are intermingling with one another, in that dielectric space and they're all coupling energy into one another, and that's where the interference factor comes from. That's where - it's one of the places where EMI comes from - there are many things that cause EMI, that's just one of the many problems. So it's a matter of keeping fields isolated from one another. That's what we have to do if we expect things to function properly. Well I think, besides your prolific reading habits being an EE, I think, has obviously served you well and so, to understand how fields move and because, like I said, I have a very fundamental understanding of designs and certainly not of field theory and all of that, and how physics work but I think that's one reason why you've been such a popular speaker and consultant. You talked about - or you're going to talk about - and let's kind of tease it up a little bit; is the worst four layer stack up. What does that mean? Well there are actually two four layer stack ups that I'm particularly not fond of. One of them is - and I see this a lot in the automotive and appliance industries - where they will put a single ground plane on, let's say layer three, and they'll put routing with routed power, on one, two, and four. And what we talked about a minute ago, having more than one routing layer referencing a single plane,in this case layers one and two; are both trying to reference the plane on layer three. And the result is the field, even if you route them in orthogonal directions, the traces, the fields will still inter-lead one another and we'll couple energy. And the energy that couples, won't be enough to cause a signal integrity problem if you do the stack - if you just do the routing correctly - but it will still be enough that it can cause EMI problems. What a lot of people don't realize is that it takes as little as eight to ten microamps - microamps, millionths of an amp of common load current coupled into a balanced antenna to cause an FCC Class B, radiated admissions failure. Wow. So as it takes that little bit of current to cause an EMI problem, and it doesn't take much coupling of fields to create eight to ten, or even milliamps of noise current. So it's a problem that people need to pay attention to. So that's one of the four layers. The other four layer that's a problem, is the one everybody uses - and that's powering ground on two and three, and the reason that's a problem - if a circuit board is extremely thin - if a circuit board is say 10, 15, 20 mils thick; then those two power and ground planes on 2 & 3 are going to be very close together. And when you do that, when the power and ground planes are extremely tight - a few mils to maybe at most 10 mils away from one another, then you can get away with having power and ground on 2 & 3 or 4 layer. But if it's a 62 Milotic, a 1.6 millimeter thick board, and you have the planes on 2 & 3, they're going to be about a millimeter apart - and when planes are a millimeter apart, there's several things that go wrong. One, we rely on the planes to help deliver power. The planes basically become the low impedance path for power delivery 2 and IC, if you asked a lot of people, a lot of Engineers, where does power come from in a circuit board? Their answer will be the power plane. All right. Of course we know that's not true. The energy comes from the dielectric space between the power plane and the ground plane. See there it is again... Exactly. If the dielectric space is tight, the capacitance will be fairly high but most of all the inductance of the planes will be very low, and when the inductance is low, now you have a low impedance delivery path for power. If the planes are far apart, as they are in a conventional 62 ml thick, four layer board, the impedance is so high it doesn't do a good job of delivering power, and you end up with large LD/IDT voltage drops across the power system that we can refer to as power bus switching noise, and that issue alone can cause signal integrity problems but mostly will cause EMI problems. That's, again, it's like can't, my head's exploding again. Four layer board, 062 - standard thickness of your run-of-the-mill board, I mean this is not fancy, and you're saying this is a bad idea! And I'm like wait, what the earth does not flash? I mean it just that's what it sounds like to me like - it's crazy but it's fascinating and I can't wait to hear - I'm sure you'll dig into this more? Well I'm gonna get into it more because there are routing implications with that four layer board as well. Okay. I mean it's worse than just - than just power delivery. If you have a trace routed on layer one referencing the power plane and you want to change layers to layer four, you're going to have to move the reference to the ground plane, which means the energy in the dielectric space between one and two has to somehow move through that board to the dielectric space between three and four. How is it going to get there? And there are people who will say, oh, it uses the decoupling capacitors. Well that's true, if the frequency is low enough. If rise times look low enough, then that's what will happen. That's why for years, we could get away with four layer boards with power and ground on two and three because rise times were so slow. Gotcha. But now all of a sudden, rise times are measured in the hundreds of Picoseconds and that four layer board just doesn't work well. But we're gonna get into that in more detail at AltiumLive. Okay. You also talked about a six layer? mm-hmm... -please don't make my brain explode again Rick, but go ahead, tell me the six layer that's a bad idea? The six layer board that everyone uses is signal, plane - like power ground, two signals, the other plane. If you put power into that, they'll put ground on five and then a signal and six. And this is a common six layer board that just about everybody on the planet uses and it's even worse than the four layer board with power and ground on two and three. And we're gonna get into intimate detail at AltiumLive about why. It's about, I mean, think about what we said about power delivery with the four layer board. If you have planes a millimeter apart and that's not good enough, what do you think putting them on two and five, of a six layer board where they're even further apart, is gonna do two power delivery? And now, worse than that, you have the fields between two and five sharing the dielectric space with signals that are on three and four, and all of those fields are saying hello to each other; hey let's get together and party, and they do get together to party and they wreak havoc! And this is a bad board stack, and we're going to talk more about why it's a bad board stack, and then we're gonna get into exactly what to do to fix it. There is a solution. To be able to use that board stack and make it work, and we're gonna talk about how to do that. Well I can't wait and I intentionally wanted to have you on today to tease that out because, for those of you that don't know already, Rick teaches all over North America, and sometimes out of the country as well. If you haven't seen it, we will share all these links in the show notes. But he's been teaching, he's been on, at least a North American tour, with a series put on by UP Media called 'PCB Today' and those are two days right, Rick? It's a two day event, and then we go through everything we've discussed here and much, much, much, much more. Right so two days; so I highly recommend UP Media's PCB2DAY with Rick Hartley. We will share that link for any of you that might want to get a full two days. At AltiumLive we're gonna have you drink from the fire hose and give you an hour of Rick Hartley talking as fast as he can. Rick also speaks at PCB West, which is in Santa Clara in September, I think it's September 12 this year, or that week of September. It's September 11, 12, and 13 I believe - It's a three-day event, again loaded with great content there's an exposition day but Rick teaches more than one class there and they're always packed, so. I'm actually teaching six classes this year. That's crazy and besides Rick, there's a lot of really other illustrious teachers. It's like good luck with that one; picking your courses because it's a really good show also put on by UP Media so... I mean that show has Dan Beeker and Susy Webb, there's a host of people; Mike Creeden, I think is going to be there this year, there's just a boatload of people with talent talking about... Such talent! And by the way, I want to boast just for five seconds, because I have the neatest friends in the whole wide world. And that is that Susy Webb will also be teaching at all AltiumLive, Mike Creeden will be there; I don't know if he's teaching yet, Eric Bogatin, who Rick mentioned, will also be a keynote speaker , and I think that conversation you were talking about having with Eric, was probably on an email feed that I was eavesdropping on. It was actually just a direct email with Eric because yah, I think you were involved? I got looped in there and, a significant portion went over my head, but it was just interesting to see you guys kind of bantering about your subject. So again, Eric will be one of the other keynote speakers so I'm very privileged to know some very bright, gifted people, and Altium is bringing all these wonderful folks together. So I hope you will join us and I hope this conversation has encouraged you to join us. And we do have early bird pricing, which is like ten percent off through the end of July. So please be my guest we will - - Rick has shared links with us to other resources. Oh! You wanted to mention something about a paper that's floating out there, that you no longer endorse. So why don't you mention something about that? Yeah about 15 years ago, I wrote a paper called 'Board Stack Up to Control EMI,' and while the basic content of the paper is more or less correct, some of the board stacks that I I suggested in that paper; I have since learned were not good ideas, and in fact, the four layer and six layer that we just talked about, are two of them, that I recommended in that paper, because I believed at that time, that they were the right thing to do. I've since learned why they aren't, so if you happen to stumble across that paper again; it's called ' 'Board Stack Up to Control EMI,' ... or to help control EMI, something to that effect, and if you stumble across that, just ignore it. Ignore it cause we're gonna get Rick Hartley 2.0 where things have gotten faster and he's, I don't know that you've gotten smarter; I think just the physics of the boards people are designing have changed. The physics have changed and that's a key point. That's a very good point Judy, and that's partly why, I mean, it's possible that when I wrote that paper, that four and six layer boards were fine... Yeah exactly but the speed... -but they're not today. And again that's why we always advocate here that you need to always be learning because technology does not stand still and what worked yesterday, is not going to work tomorrow. And so we we try our best to stay on top of it. Rick thank you so much for joining us. I also am going to put in a photo, hopefully it won't embarrass you Rick; of - - You know, what I want to say about Rick Hartley and people like Susy Webb, Mike Creeden, Eric Bogatin; we are all - you all as designers and engineers are really standing on their shoulders and they used to do this stuff by hand. So I have the neatest photo ever of Rick Hartley with a big fat 70s tie I think, handling out the biggest board ever that I've seen - the biggest tape up I've ever seen. That's actually the one hanging on my wall... It is, that's the one? So I'm going to share that and the links too because you guys that just have snazzy racy tools and you started designing ten years ago won't believe the stuff these guys and gals did by hand. So, well Rick we totally and completely look forward to AltiumLive, thanks so much for agreeing to come and invest in the design community, and thanks again for doing this podcast you are a dear friend. Judy, thank you so much for having me. Yeah and thank you so much for all that you do for the industry Rick, we really appreciate you. It's a pleasure. Again this has been Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast and Rick Hartley of - how do you say that? R Hartley Enterprises. We look forward to seeing, or we look forward to you tuning in next time. Until then, remember to always stay on track.

For decades, Harvard's MBA program has been primarily focused on the traditional model of entrepreneurship. In the past 6 years an elective course on the acquisition of established businesses has been attracting as many as 30% of the program's candidates. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Royce Yudkoff, who teaches the course “Entrepreneurship For Acquisition” at Harvard Business School's MBA program. Here at Quiet Light we've also had the honor of collaborating on the course for the past 5 years. Today, we delve into the details of how Harvard is sending experienced professionals out into the business acquisition marketplace with hands-on experience that is invaluable to their success. The trend toward real-life marketplace experience as a replacement for textbooks has taken hold in Harvard's MBA program. These case-study and field guide learning modules are teaching candidates the key ways to enter and be successful in the acquisition arena. The course Royce teaches alongside Professor Richard Ruback is focused on how to screen potential acquisition targets, do the financing, negotiate the typical deal terms, and do due diligence when buying a small business. Episode Highlights: Harvard MBAs are on average 28-35 years old so all they come into the program with professional experience. The course works with real life companies and case studies so students learn about how companies succeed in buying existing businesses. The course follows the entire arc of buying a small business from the search, to the financing, through due diligence, and up to the transition of ownership. The participants are learning how weaving good business practices from the very start of the process leads to better chances of ROI and growth. Royce explains how the candidates are taught the best financial practices for buying for a business, whether through traditional bank or private equity investment. The course follows students through the program and beyond by performing surveys and gathering statistics on success rates for those who go on to acquire companies. Royce shares the single most common contributor to the success and non-success in the search and acquisition process and what he advises all buyers to look for in a potentially successful business. Transcription: Mark: Joe did you know that a dream of mine that has gone unfulfilled in my life was to attend the Harvard Business School? Joe: I didn't know that knowing that your nickname was slacker in college I would think that'd be the last dream you could ever have. Mark: Well, we technically changed my name my last year mainly because I had a t-shirt that said slacker on it. And it made a terrible first impression when you walked in the class the first day the professor sees that. You get targeted pretty quickly. Joe: You know we did a tour of Stanford last summer because I have teenage boys. We happen to be there, my kids probably won't get in; I understand 3% do. And when I graduated from college, I went to Northeastern University in Boston, when I was done I was done. I never wanted to go back to college. Touring a campus like Stanford or I imagine Harvard just at any age would make you want to go back. Mark: Yeah it's a fantastic school. I love their MBA Program there because they do things a little bit different. It's not textbook based, it's case study based. So a Harvard MBA student, when they attend that school first of all the school pretty much requires that you have real world experience. Not 100% but it's really hard to get in if you don't have any real world experience. They want people who have been out there in the field doing stuff. And the entire class structure itself is also based around case studies. So you end up with a group of people that you do these case studies with and you study real life, real business scenarios and go about how … figure out how to address those real world scenarios. It's a way of trying to replicate some of the things that they're going to actually experience when they leave Harvard Business School. So yeah a few years after I graduated college and had a job and I thought well it would be a lot of fun to attend that. I really liked the idea of it but life got in the way. Bad grades got in the way and it never was something that I actually was able to pursue. I went so far as taking a GMAT but I never actually applied. But I bring this up because for as you know for the past five years we've been working with Harvard at Quiet Light Brokerage. They have done what a lot of people that listen to this podcast know, they have really started to turn their focus towards entrepreneurship acquisition or acquisitions and entrepreneurship and the combination. And they have a whole course that they teach on it; how to build … sorry how to buy a small business and lead an entrepreneurial life through acquisitions. And for those five years, we've actually been working with them, they approached us to see if we could support their class with some supportive materials and me being the closet Harvard fan boy that I am was like absolutely that sounds really cool. Joe: Excellent, excellent. Well, I'm excited to listen to this podcast. I know that they did some studies that show the people that go through this course and the success rate that they have. And it's really more about buying versus building which is a little follow up from almost with the podcast with Walker that you had so I'm excited hear it. Mark: Yeah absolutely so there are some statistics in here, people ask us this all the time you know what percentage of buyers are successful. Well, Harvard is actually tracking that. They're taking a look at the kids who go through the courses … and I shouldn't say kids these guys are 30 years old with tons of experience. But they're looking at people who go through the courses doing acquisition and they're tracking to see how they're successful. Also in this episode, we talk about what they're teaching on the course, what they're guiding their students as far as how large of acquisitions they should be making, how to do the financing on these large acquisitions. So it's really a chock full of a lot of information that's been taught at the highest levels at one of the leading institutions in the world. Joe: And all of it hopefully and an awful lot of it can be applied to the businesses that we're listing. Because I'm going to just throw some numbers out there for those that haven't been to the website recently, we've got listings of really all shapes and sizes. But we've got a couple up there in that I think minus under LOI just under nine million dollars. Brian's got one at twice that amount. And then, of course, anything from a couple hundred thousand dollars up to that 80 million dollar range. So these larger listings that take more funding from Venture Cap money or from a larger SBA loan are really becoming more prevalent. So I think everything that these guys talk about and the book that they published as well can be very helpful to the audience here today. Mark: Absolutely let's get on to it. Mark: All right Royce, how are you? Royce: I'm great it's a pleasure to be with you today Mark. Thank you for organizing this. Mark: Oh my pleasure. I'm so glad to be able to actually finally talk to you and see you in person as well. We've been working together I guess sort of indirectly now for what four or five years? Royce: Exactly and you've been a big help to our course in Harvard Business School so we're very appreciative. I should start with a big thank you. Mark: Well it was always my dream when I was in college and then shortly after college to get my MBA at Harvard. I started looking at the GMAT and I took PEP courses for that and then life happened. And I never got around to actually doing it. I actually talked to a Harvard recruiter at one point, sat down with them and was going through that but then it never did happen. So the fact that I actually get to participate in you guys program is kind of like a dream of mine come true that I get to actually work with you guys at least indirectly if not directly as well now. All right so the Harvard Program, how long have you guys had this Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Program? Royce: That program is now in its 6th year Mark, and for decades Harvard has had a large program teaching people about traditional entrepreneurship; what I refer to as rubbing two sticks together and make fire, meeting … going into startups. But about half a dozen years ago we started teaching about the idea of buying an established profitable company usually from a retiring founder and the idea has really created a lot of excitement at Harvard. About 30% of all of our MBA students take these courses to try if this is a potential career and learn about it; which makes us probably the largest elective course on campus. Mark: Wow, that's fantastic. Now you do this and one other professor Richard … is it Ruback? Royce: Yes Richard Ruback. So Rick and I created a course and we co-teach it and it's really become our … the center of our professional activity. Including following our students closely who go down this path. We stay very connected to them after they graduate from the program. Mark: Yeah I know that's great. So I want to make just one point about Harvard's MBA Program and again I know this because I looked at potentially participating in this program but you guys are a little bit different than other MBA programs in the way that you set up your courses right? That it's a lot of this case study sort of approach to everything is that right? Royce: I think the two differences in our programs from what most people think of as MBA is this first exactly what you said which is we do not lecture, we do not have textbooks. The whole two year program is set up around cases which are sort of short nonfiction business stories. And the discussion the faculty elicits about the decisions they require to be made. And the second difference is our students typically come to us at about age 28 and graduate at age 30. So they have six or seven years of mid-level, junior level, executive experience before coming into the classroom. So they're not kids; they're young professionals by the time they leave. Those are the two distinctions I highlight about HBS. Mark: Yeah and one of the things I love about that … so one of the knocks against university especially among the entrepreneurial community is that a lot of entrepreneurs see university degrees and MBA degrees as being almost wasted money right? Because a lot of them have become successful. But what I love about you guys program is the fact that you do require that experience is not textbook learning, its actual looking case studies. Delving in deep into these actual cases and amplifying a real world experience in the classroom setting. Royce: Yeah you're exactly right. That's the purpose of the case studies. In addition, the faculty is routinely engaged in a commercial world too and thus expecting to bring that into the classroom. And we also utilize experts like yourself Mark, and bring in work done by experts or even experts as guests into the classroom. So we try to stay very engaged with the practical commercial world. Mark: That's great. That's absolutely great. I absolutely love that. Now you guys have also … you and Rick have also put together a book. And for those watching at YouTube at … this is the book here, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business. And you put this out two years ago is that right? Royce: Yes we'd put it out two years ago and it's been very satisfying. Our goal was to produce a very practical handbook that walks people through each step in buying a smaller firm and to try and reach beyond campus to the thousands of people who are thinking about it or wanting to do it and give them something that's just immensely practical and we've been very gratified. I think almost everyone who goes down this path ends up reading this book and we get lots of comments that it's been helpful. Mark: That's a really good book. I mean I've thumbed through it before and you know I've learned a lot in this industry by doing and that has its learning curve. Frankly, a book like this to start out would have been really really useful in shortening that learning curve. So it was a really good book and I assume that you can get this on the HBR website correct? Royce: The HBR website and even more conveniently on Amazon, so it's just an easy thing to buy and a kind of quick easy read as well. Mark: It is a quick easy read. There's large margins in there as well so that people can take notes alongside it; which is super super helpful. So all of you out there that are readers and soak up as much information add this one to your list; for sure it's definitely one to add. You're getting some good information here. All right so let's do this, let's get into some of the material that you guys actually teach in the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Course. What is the format and what is the structure or maybe what is the syllabus that you would look at for a typical is it on a semester basis or is it a full year? Royce: Yes it's a full year course and we start with an overview of the small firms market. Sort of what are some of the management issues in running a small firm, how do you buy small firms. And we let people sort of figure out whether this is of interest to them generally. And then the course gets really really practical. We kind of follow each step in a small firm acquisition beginning with how do you source opportunities, how do you evaluate them, how do you do due diligence, how do you finance them, and how do you negotiate the legal documents and then we move them to sort of a transition because almost always after a firm is sold the seller stays on for a while at least part time teaching the new owner the ropes. And that is somewhere between three months and 12 months part time for the seller but it's a key part of making these purchases successful. So that's how we [inaudible 00:11:59.1] we like to say we're following the arc of the small firm acquisition. Mark: Now the arc is something that our listeners are probably very familiar with. It's something that we have laid out on our site as well. I want to ask a broader question with the popularity of your course. When people think about Harvard Business School I think a lot of them think about graduates going into large financial firms you know working in Boston, working in New York, and really kind of working with a Fortune 500's out there. Do you see a lot of your students now pursuing this more entrepreneurial path? Royce: Yes I do and it's a great comment you made because I do think Harvard is viewed that way. And one of the reasons this program is important is it's highlighting the fact that the business school makes a difference in ways that help ordinary Americans. In other words we send our well trained, smart, energetic graduates into cities all across the country and they create jobs for regular people that make their lives better. I'll give you a quick example, one of our students … and this is very representative is a woman named Jennifer Rouse. She spent about five or six years as an engineer at a couple of leading manufacturing companies in the Midwest. Came to HBS to be trained as a general manager. Fell in love with the idea of running her own company. Instead of getting a job out of HBS she searched and bought a revenue cycle management company in the Pacific Northwest that essentially handles the billing for municipal ambulance services to insurance companies; very specialized complicated set of procedures. And she's grown the business from about 40 employees to 70 employees over the three years she's owned it. So it's been an enormously gratifying experience for her and profitable one. It allowed an entrepreneur who wanted to retire to get his just reward and take cash out of the company. But it's also created a lot of good paying jobs in that mid-sized city. So kind of all the way around it's exactly what our business school ought to be doing, we think. And that's what we're trying to do in this program. Mark: You know one thing I think that people don't understand about our industry and when I talk to them for the first time, they often ask “Who buys an online business?” And one thing I've found is the synergy that exists between the bootstrappers and the startups, these guys that are really really good at the hustle and they can create something amazing out of practically nothing. And then they grow up to a certain size where it now needs management and now needs … it kind of enters into that phase two and a lot of these entrepreneurs don't want to do that because they don't want to be managers. They don't want to do that additional growth step of now managing lots of people. Royce: Yeah and I think that's exactly right. These businesses reach transition point where once they needed someone who is not only energetic and smart but knew service they were providing incredibly well and 15 or 20 years later it's more about a trained manager who's got a certain managerial skills. I'll also add to your comment that there's a life cycle to entrepreneurship. You know the 60 year old entrepreneur who's made a lot of money in their smaller firm quite likely might not want to work as hard as they did when they're 30 years old. And that's a very sensible decision that the business may have a lot more potential in it in the hands of a 30 or 35 year old who's willing to put in those 60 and 70 hour weeks. And that's another transition that makes sense for everybody. Mark: Sure. I remember one client that I worked with. He had … he was selling … well just say durable goods, I won't go into exactly what he was selling, but he was sourcing all the inventory putting it in to a secondary garage and fulfilling all the orders on his own. I mean he was working 45 hours a week and have really maxed out and I asked him I said “Why are you selling them?” because business is growing, it's growing rapidly. Why not hire on some people and kind of expand to an actual warehouse. And his answer was probably the simplest most logical answer I've ever heard it was because I don't want to. Yeah, I don't want to manage people. I like doing this on my own but that's the obvious next step. Royce: Yes. Yeah, exactly and it's a very human thing and the right answer is to put the business in the hands of someone who's going maximize it. I think conversely from the perspective of a young entrepreneur through acquisition, I see this opportunity as so much lower risk than starting a company from scratch. Because you're buying an established proven profitable business with a business model that really works and an owner who will sort of do an orderly transition with you. So it's a way to express entrepreneurial desire without taking the enormous risks of a startup or having to have some idea. Mark: Right you're absolutely … and I think this is something we talked about in a recent podcast and that is the difference between buying versus building a business and how you can get that leg up and get that initial startup so much faster. There's much less friction in working with something that's already established like that. So let's do this, let's follow the arc of the deal that you had talked about a little bit earlier and let's give the listeners here and the few viewers just a little flavor as to what this arc looks like. And maybe some of the things that you guys teach in the course as well. Let's start with this how do you source your deals? This is a problem for so many buyers out there. I've talked to some buyers that are looking for a year and a half, two years for a good business. And the good ones frankly I know from experience when we put something out that's good we're going to get a lot of intent on that within four or five days and so it can be really tough. So what do you guys teach as far as sourcing deals and some of the tips that you would offer there? Royce: You're exactly right. You know sourcing is immensely difficult in a small firm space. First of all, there are two paths people go down. One, which we certainly recommend is dealing with the intermediary professionals in the small firm space. As you know there are hundreds and hundreds of these across North America. And you're required to just do an enormous amount of outreach because unlike say with real estate where there are multiple listing services, confidentiality is extremely important to these owners of smaller firms. And so you only get to see these firms by establishing relationships with reputable intermediaries. So it's a great deal of work to establish that kind of dialogue. And then on top of that, once you have done that, the majority of businesses that are for sale are not high quality businesses. They're average at best and a few of them are really good businesses. So it's an enormous outreach and sourcing process that frankly takes from the time someone starts sourcing to the time they close the average time is about 18 months to find a good quality business negotiate diligence it and close that. So … and that's 18 months of full time work. Probably the question I get asked most often by aspiring entrepreneurs through acquisition is “Is this something I can do part time?” because it would be so great to do it part time right? You could keep a full time job, earn income, and you imagine you might be able to do it next on weekends like rebuilding an old car or refinishing a basement. But the truth is I've never seen anyone do this part time. It is for everyone who goes down this road it is a demanding full time job to source, evaluate, diligence, negotiate and it takes an average of 18 months. So it's hard. Mark: What are some ways in your opinion that people can speed that up if they're really anxious to get going? Like their working a corporate job right now and they want to get out of that corporate job. Do you have any tips on how they can speed that up? Royce: Yes we see that a lot of people that have worked in a corporate job they just find it unsatisfying and they want the professional independence that comes with this kind of entrepreneurship. You know it's hard to make this go faster. I've seen people close quickly because we've seen scores and scores of people do this, I've seen people buy businesses in as little as five or six months. But I have to say my conclusion after years of doing this is that those are just flukes; that in the same way that the person struggles on for two years is a fluke. That you get some outliers but it's just really hard to make the process go faster. And one reason for that is out of those 18 months probably the last four months are spent in that deal you'll close on. You know doing that signing the LOI, diligence, financing, closing. So really you're talking about a little over a year of searching before you finally get to that deal that makes. I wish I could hurry up this process. But it's one of the reasons that I suppose this space hasn't been beat up or overcrowded is that someone has to really want this. Mark: Sure and I think that's really good advice. You're right there's some luck of the draw right? There's just some pure luck on the draw. I talked to one person years ago I was … when we first tried to do the podcast and it didn't really work, but I talked to one buyer who said that he was ready for that sort of 18 month time period and within two months something just spread across his desk and it was perfect. But he didn't have a financing lined up for it and so he had to let it go. But it was that luck of the draw. It came to him perfectly; right away if he was ready he would have been able to move on it. That actually leads well to my next question which is financing. What are you guys advising your students and what are you seeing them actually do in terms of financing some of these deals? Royce: Yeah so the typical acquisition is financed with about two thirds debt and one third equity. And let me deal with each of those. On the debt side in the small firms marketplace, it is almost universal for the sellers to take back some amount of seller paper usually 20 to 25% of the purchase price is taken back in what's on average at four, five year subordinated note. There are few exceptions to this but it's a very large percentage of the transactions. And about 45% on average of the transaction is funded by a senior bank loan. And this comes in two flavors; one, is just a regular way, a commercial bank loan will typically finance a little under half of the deal and it will be repaid over five to seven years usually from a local or regional bank. The first candidate being a bank the company has an existing relationship with. The second path is the Small Business Administration has a terrific program called the 7(a) Program. I'm sure you're familiar with this. It's administered through banks. Most of the banks that lend commercial loans also will do a 7(a) guaranteed loan. It is a wonderful loan product because they will lend against businesses that have no tangible assets; service businesses that just have cash flow. They lend up to 80% of the business. They lend over 10 years. There are no covenants. It's a very very attractive loan with a single exception that you are required to sign a personal guarantee on it. So it's something for very thoughtful consideration by the entrepreneur. But those are the two sources of debt. And as I said with the salary debt they cover the two thirds of the purchase price. One third is usually raised from friends and family. And most common is that these prospective entrepreneurs will go around and raise money in $100,000 here or $200,000 here from anywhere from six to 15 individuals and they will cut a deal to divide the prospective profits between their investor group and themselves. Because this typical small business that we see … when we talk about a small business we're talking about a company with one to two million dollars of EBITDA that might sell for five times EBITDA or 10 million dollars of which three million dollars might be equity. And so it's not that difficult to raise that amount of equity by passing the hat. Mark: I think one thing that a lot of our buyers that come into us feel is that they can't reach that level of a transaction right? They can't reach that 10 million dollar acquisition and so they start out a lot with these $200,000 or $300,000 businesses and then they find that they've effectively buying that job. So it seems like you guys are really pushing a lot of your students to think a little bit bigger than that and do … in buying a business as well. Royce: Yeah I think that's exactly right. You know I think they are … when you get to a very small business and you are the entrepreneur you're showing up every day to process out that day's work and that's that $200,000 EBIDTA business. You know when the business gets to be a million dollars you usually have some department heads who report up to you and you're coming in thinking about the week's objectives or maybe the month's objectives. And then when you get up to a business with say two million dollars in EBIDTA, you're really managing a little further it than that. So the jobs are very different along the way and so with that we tend to point our potential entrepreneurs towards the larger end of that spectrum. But entrepreneurship can surely be expressed anywhere along the spectrum. Mark: Yeah, I think a big phrase that we hear all the time in our space is work on your business rather than in your business. And it's a transition point for a lot of people. But it seems like you guys are really pushing people to start with a business that you would work on because some of that infrastructure is going to exist already. Royce: Yes I think that's right. That is our goal. We recognize that people have different resources including experience in managing and opportunity to access capital. Mark: Right. Do you have any tips for people that might be considering reaching out to friends and family? How do you get over some of the discomfort maybe with asking friends or family for investments? Royce: Yeah I get that question a lot so I do have some recommendations. I think the first recommendation is just a psychological one which is when you go to someone to ask them for an investment you really have to make yourself feel that you're not asking for a favor. It's not like you're asking for personal loan, your presenting an opportunity to that person. And it's one you believe in so sincerely that you're going to dedicate the next five or seven or eight years of your life to it. So it's very important to really be in that psychological headspace. My second recommendation is to actually start with the people who know you best. Because they're going to be really inclined if they respect you and like you to line up behind you and then it's going to make it easier to go to people who know you less well. My third recommendation is the time to approach people for investing is when you start your search; it's not when you find your company. Because what you want to do is collect a group of people who might be interested in investing and update them across the year or year and a half that you're searching. Because when you do this, it allows them to get to know you better. It shows them that you have lots of energy, it shows them your street smarts, you talk to them of that deals you looked at but ended up rejecting which gives them a sense of your high quality standards. So when you finally approach them with a deal in hand they've been expecting this and now you're making one sale, not two. You've sort of sold them on the idea that you're a hardworking and street smart entrepreneur who is being highly selective and now you're simply selling them on the merits of the business. So for that reason, it's tremendously important to approach them early and get them to follow you. It's also a much more comfortable discussion than showing up with a deal in hand because you're able to say look if you're sincerely interested in this I'll make the investment and inform you about my journey and you'll have plenty of time to decide. It takes a lot of pressure out of that discussion. When you approach the types of people I see are entrepreneurs approaching … and here you should think about people who are partners in law firms, entrepreneurs have their own small businesses, these people don't have … while they are wealthy people by normal standards they don't have the resources to invest in private equity funds. They can't just throw up a check for two million dollars or five million dollars that private equity fund would expect. So when you come to them with the opportunity to participate they would essentially as a private equity investment; it's very additive to them. It's not an opportunity they see every day to make the kind of returns you can make buying a private business. Mark: Yeah and I think … tons of really good information in there. You're right as far as that relationship is concerned when you're asking somebody for money, building that relationship over time makes that discussion a little bit easier and also gives you the flexibility. That example I brought up of the guy who started his search and didn't have his funding lined up in advance, he actually gave me that exact same point. He said had I been having these conversations with friends and family in advance I would have been able to do this deal very very quickly. But it was just way too much for him to try and call in together an investment group within a few weeks. These things don't happen in a week, they happen over months and even a year. Royce: Absolutely and as you know from your own professional experience in those last eight weeks before closing the entrepreneur is sort of fighting on multiple directions. He's dealing with a lender, he's dealing with lawyers on a purchase agreement, he's finishing his due diligence, he's dealing with investors; you just don't have time to sort of raise investment capital from scratch. Mark: That's great. All right let's talk a little bit about the transition stuff and then we're going to be rounding out as far as our time here is concerned. Now there's some stuff obviously that happens in between, we've talked about ways to search for a company and source those deals. It can take about 18 months on average depending on a little bit of the luck of the draw, talked a little bit about the finances and some of the vehicles there. So let's assume now that you find that business, you find a good opportunity, you've gone through negotiation. And I know there's a lot that we could talk about just through the negotiation stage but I want to talk a little bit about the transition period and plan. How important do you think it is to keep previous employees, previous key people, previous owners on staff and what other elements do you think are really really kind of you should almost always take these steps in a transition? Royce: The advice I give entrepreneurs through acquisition is twofold. First, the first and most important advice I give them is in your first six months don't make any important changes. You'll have lots and lots of decisions to make but if an important change is one that is expensive or hard to reverse hold off on that. Because you will be a different person at the end of six months than you are on the day you walk into that company. And if it's the kind of enduring profitable business we hope people will buy, it certainly can wait on these decisions. I also find that transition periods can be relatively short. Three to six months is usually all you need in a transition period with some occasional access to the seller after that. By the way, this is another reason why having a seller subordinated loan is important because you want the seller to be financially on side with you after the purchase. That that seller is going to introduce you to his or her important clients. They're going to make an endorsement of you as the person they're entrusting the business to. They're going to answer a lot of process and historical questions that in a small company aren't written down in any textbook. But for most of these businesses that transition can take place well over three to six months. And after all, you want to buy a business that is not so centered on the selling entrepreneur that transferring it isn't easy. In other words, if that transfer is really really really hard that might not be a business that you want to buy. So I think that's a consideration you want to have before you step in and commit to the business. But a three to six months transition I've seen works pretty well. By the way, it might be helpful as long as we're sort of at this point in the arc of buying a small business if I shared a little data we collected over the years of that success in this path. Mark: That was my next question, so perfect timing. Royce: Okay. Mark: Yes let's go there. Royce: Well we've had the chance to survey a fairly large number of entrepreneurs through acquisition and what we've found over that six years that we've been doing this is of the people who embark on a full time search to buy a company about 70 to 80% of them end up acquiring a company and closing on it and about 20 to 25% try it, give up, and go back and get jobs that are pretty much like the jobs that they had before they embarked on this path. Of course, they've spent a year or to a year and a half doing this and that hasn't been a profitable use of time except in terms of experience but they go back and get a job that tends to look like what they had three quarters of them end up closing on a company. And then we turn to the question of is this successful? It's harder to get that data because these are all private companies but over the years Rick and I have had the benefit of actually getting some very active investors in these type of small firms to share with us their financial history of all their investments. And we've collected about 60 different transactions made by a handful of professional investors and what we found is that approximately 80% of those are profitable and about 20% are unprofitable; which is a really high rate of investment success. I mean if you think of that investing in the stock market and do you get four out of five investments profitable, I mean that would be a tremendous bar of success to have. And of the investments that are made both winners and losers the average rate of return to the investors has been about 22% annually; which is also a very high return consistent with what you would expect in private equity investments. Very importantly these results don't tell any specific individual what their results are going to be. I mean you could find a company or not to find a company, you could be successful or not successful. But I think it suggests that the area is a reasonably fruitful area to try and achieve success in. That's what I take away from the data. Mark: That's really good and I get these questions all the time so I actually now have something to go back to people with. This is great. I am curious on the 20% that are not successful; do you guys have any data as to what's leaned to do at not being profitable? Royce: Yeah. Well, of course, there's always a huge element of chance as you and I have talked about earlier in this. But yes I think that there is a single most common contributor to success and non-success in the search. And that is when an entrepreneur through acquisition start searching on their very first day looking at their very first prospective deal they quite rightly set their standards unbelievably high. In other words, nothing would get them to buy the first company they see because they want to learn what's available in the market. And as they see more and more companies they gradually bring down their standards into what normal market is for a small company. In other words, they start to say okay I'm going to raise the price I offer into the range that companies transact that. I'm not going to require that this company be absolutely perfect. It's okay that it has some flaws like every company. And their quality standard gradually moves to market. How quickly they were able to learn what a small company really looks like determines how successful they're going to be. Some people never get there. Some people it takes a year to get there. Some people can do it in 60 to 90 days and they have a much better chance of buying a company in the time period. By the way Mark just as in the side the same thing is going on with sellers as I'm sure you'd recognize that person who owned a business for 30 years enters the market with a price expectation. It is well above market and as they get feedback from the market they're gradually bringing their expectations down to market or they're leaving the market. What you're looking for is the collision between those two forces entering the zone at the same time but that speed of learning is the difference between being highly likely to succeed entrepreneur through acquisition and not. Mark: A lot of the work that we do at Quiet Light Brokerage with sellers is that sphere of expectations in trying to bring them to that place. Or more importantly I guess advising them to only enter into the marketplace when their expectations have moved because it's got to happen, right? Royce: Exactly. And it's a delicate conversation as I'm sure you've experienced many times. Mark: It is you know we try to be very just blunt with people. My personal background is before I started Quiet Light Brokerage I got really good advice from an intermediary who told me to wait but then when I actually went to market with them they actually blew my expectations up higher and when I got those first offers and it's how people at the marketplace is brutally honest. You know I might be nice the marketplace isn't, they'd just be honest and blunt. And when I got those first few offers it was like a punch in the gut. Like wow okay I'm not even in the same neighborhood of what you guys are talking about. I want to leave with this question, if you were to be talking to a potential buyer and you were to give them one or two just solid pieces of advice and that's all you had time to be able give them because that's also all the time we have left, what would you tell them? Royce: I would tell them to look for an established, slow growing, slow changing company because for a first time entrepreneur having an enduringly profitable business is the most important thing. It will allow them to make the kind of mistakes a first time CEO makes and still be successful. Sometimes people are enamored by fast growth but fast growth means change, competition, new customers. So something that's established and slowing growing and proven is what they want to look for. And it's okay that it is in a quote boring type business, you'll find plenty of excitement as being a CEO. That would be my number one piece of advice to a potential buyer. Mark: Well I wish I had talked to you before I did my first acquisition. I think that would have been helpful. Royce: Yeah. Mark: Royce, thank you so much for coming on here. Again I've been completely enamored working with Harvard Business School over the past several years. I hope that we can continue to work with you guys and someday maybe if it works out for your guys you'd be able to come out there as well and I'll meet you guys in person so thank you so much. Royce: Thank you and we're very grateful for your participation. Links and Resources: Harvard MBA Program Entrepreneurship through Acquisition Course Royce's Book

Join Mike Domitrz and Rick Clemons as Rick shares the importance of respect in coming out and having the choice to do so. * You are invited to join our community and conversations about each episode on FaceBook at https://www.facebook.com/MutuallyAmazingPodcast and join us on Twitter @CenterRespect or visit our website at http://www.MutuallyAmazingPodcast.com**     Rick Clemons BIO: Rick is the host of the Life Uncloseted podcast and author of the book “Frankly My Dear I’m Gay."   Rick’s no virgin to bold moves. On whim, a prayer, and without a job to support the necessity of his dual income life, he made a crazy move, leaving his dead end hotel career in the Southwest to pursue whatever would come his and his wife’s way In Sunny Southern California. 10 years later, after being married for 13 years, fathering (yes like a stallion LOL) two beautiful daughters (with the help of Mommy incubator), he made the heart wrenching, yet necessary, bold move to come out of the closet, end his marriage, and live his truth as a gay man.   Comfortable in his revitalized, California hospitality operations career, Rick took a bold risk to pivot into the hospitality technology arena, barely understanding what a function key was on a frickin’ computer. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Rick soon found himself at the marketing helm of innovative technology organizations building relationships with Microsoft, IBM, Hilton, Cisco Systems, Starwood Hotels, Intercontinental Hotels, and Ian Schrager Company.   Ricks bold yet unexpected pivot into speaking, personal development, culture design, and podcasting came after his last position at a hospitality technology start-up went fizzle and kaput…laying him off the day he returned from vacation after 5 years of service, building their biz from the ground up. It was then that Rick took a stand, decided to live his life uncloseted, made another bold move, and said, “I’m done. Done building other people’s businesses!”   Rick now inspires corporations, entrepreneurs, college and university students, and individuals to make their bold moves. His keynote speeches, workshops, coaching, and podcasts touch people’s souls, ignite their desires, and help them breakthrough the taboos of living by other people’s damn expectations.   Rick lives in Southern California with his husband, now empty nesters as both daughters have flown the bird cage. When he’s not traveling the globe disrupting corporate cultures, pushing university students to buck systems for the right reasons, challenging entrepreneurs to make bolder moves, and guiding individuals to step into their sexuality, he can be found hiking, cycling, and wine consuming…not all at the same time…usually.   Links Website – RickClemons.com   Book – Frankly My Dear I’m Gay   Podcast - Life Uncloseted   Facebook - Facebook   Twittter - @RickClemons   Linked - Linked In   Free Course - Supercharge Your Confidence Free E-Course   READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW (or download the pdf): **IMPORTANT: This podcast episode was transcribed by a 3rd party service and so errors can occur throughout the following pages: Mike Domitrz:                      Welcome to the respect podcast, I'm your host Mike Domitrz from mikespeaks.com, where we help organizations of all sizes, educational institutions and the US military create a culture of respect, which is exactly what we discuss on this show. So Let's get started. Mike Domitrz:                      This weeks guest is Rick Clemons, a close friend of mine, I wanna let you know about Rick right away, he is the author of Frankly my dear I'm gay. Host of Life uncloseted podcast, certified life coach, Tedx speaker, world record holder and a guy who's helped thousands of people in over 50 countries across the globe come out of the closets of their lives, to escape their BS, explore their fears and elevate their f-ing self expression. Mike Domitrz:                      Now if a few of you are listening going whoa Mike, I've seen you speak on stage around the world, you don't drop the F bomb, you don't swear, but this is Rick's bio and I honor the voice of the people we have on the show, so that's why you're gonna hear me speak that, and your gonna her people, such as Rick speak in their language, I'm not gonna censor people. Even my own work, some people will be like, hey but you call people out when they use inappropriate language, the key is inappropriate, where the context of the language is, it's not always just about the words. So that's important here, but the context of what Rick is saying is so important. So Rick lets get right into it. Thank you so much for joining me. Rick Clemons:                      Thanks for having me Mike, I love that you started with that, because this is of respect is respecting people's voice and truly letting people step into who they are, and I don't always drop F bombs on stage, there are moments I do, and if I do, it's because there's a point being made by either the story I'm telling or the thing I want someone to learn. And I've learned from myself, having been a guy who disrespected himself over and over again by not being who I was that sometimes you just gotta let yourself be who you are and by doing that, you teach other people how to do the same. So thank you for having this awesome platform man, and I am just so honored to be here on the show with you. Mike Domitrz:                      Well, I am thrilled to have you here, lets get right into that, because your life history talks a lot about one's voice, and gaining the voice back and that journey. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. Mike Domitrz:                      Let's talk about how respect plays a role there, because I think a lot of people don't think about respect on the self journey of coming out, from whatever that coming out means. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mike Domitrz:                      So to give all of our listeners and viewers a little background, when people hear, Life uncloseted frankly my dear I'm gay, they're probably thinking there's gotta be a story there, there some ties there. So Rick can you share your personal story? Rick Clemons:                      There's no story, its just that Mike picked up, and said hey lets go do this right. Of course there's a story, and you know, I kind of already alluded to it but there was so, much of my life that I disrespected myself because I was trying to live by other peoples standards, and I'm so blessed that I did because I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't disrespected myself. Rick Clemons:                      I came out to my parents when I was 19 years old and they pretty much said no, you can't be that. There's was a little bit of faith based stuff going on there, and I'm glad they did because that was right at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and I know myself, now that I can ... you know, the wise on, as you lose more hair you become wiser and wiser and wiser, and I realized that had I come out back in 1982 when I told my parents, fully come out, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation, I just know it, I know it in my heart, I know it in my soul, because I was naïve, I was immature, I hadn't had any kinds of sexual experiences so to speak at that point in time and honestly believe that I would've become a little rebel and probably have contracted the virus and wouldn't be having this conversation. Rick Clemons:                      So then we roll almost double that amount of time forward, I was 36- Mike Domitrz:                      I'd it's okay to pause there Rick? Because, I think there's a lot of powerful stuff there. One, when you came out and your parents said no, you went back in. Rick Clemons:                      Yes I did. Mike Domitrz:                      Okay. Which a lot of people don't realize happens, I think everybody thinks, oh once somebody is out, their out. Rick Clemons:                      No. No. Mike Domitrz:                      But you're well aware that's not the case. Rick Clemons:                      No, and that's why I do the work I do today, is because so many of my clients are older and I'm gonna kind of, you know, [crosstalk 00:04:28]. Mike Domitrz:                      Thanks for pointing at me by the way Rick, for anybody who can't see, Rick went older with his hands right at me. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. Exactly its [inaudible 00:04:30]. Mike Domitrz:                      Somebody might be asking am I a client, no Rick and I are friends. Rick Clemons:                      No. Mike Domitrz:                      Not that being a client of Rick's would be anything but wonderful but yes, so continue Rick. Rick Clemons:                      So, its so interesting, so I say older in general, but what's so fascinating is my work started with people like myself 35 plus, all the way up, I mean my oldest client was 72 when he came out of the closet and what I found is many people go back in the closet. Now heres the interesting thing Mike, is in the last couple years, I have still had young people come to me and go, you know, I'm about to get married I think I shouldn't, you know, their stories unfold. And in two cases, they actually went back in the closet, and I was fully supportive in their decision, because my role as a coach is not to say go do this. My role is to help you become comfortable and respectful in your own right of who you are, and so its been really and interesting [inaudible 00:05:27]. Rick Clemons:                      When my book came out, what I was shocked the most by, is the younger people who came to me, I'm talking in their 20s, okay, so that's what I mean when I'm young, I'm like almost 55 myself here. Young people who came to me and said, "I'm so glad you wrote this book, because I'm way behind the [inaudible 00:05:49].", 22 and your behind the [inaudible 00:05:49], but you have to put it in perspective of where we are today. Kids are coming out at eight, nine, 10 and its amazing to hear those stories. Rick Clemons:                      That respecting of yourself and realizing, I might have to respect myself and go back in the closet, is so that you can, as I love to say percolate and let the yeast rise in your life and finally go okay either, this is where I supposed to be, which is a path, or wow, I'm gonna do this and it's gonna happen much later in life. Mike Domitrz:                      Very powerful. So, Rick right there you talked about the fact that people choose to go back in and you support this because this is their journey, you said hey, I'm glad I went back in when I did, because I think I would've been, by what you were saying, I don't wanna change your words, but exploratory in that rebellion stage and therefore not as safe in decision making. Is that considered controversial? Rick Clemons:                      Of course, it is, because people then can come back at you and say, well then you knew what you were doing, you were consciously doing this even though you know. And I would argue that yes, in some cases that is true, in my case that was 50 percent true, but I was still trying to figure out, am I really gay? Or is this just something part of my sexual awakening? Am I trying to figure it out? Rick Clemons:                      Other people they will actually go back in and they push that way, way, way, way down, and there is no acting and there is no going forward and exploring it, its like nope, this is where I'm supposed to be, and then something happens, and that comes rushing back forward. And that's only two examples, there's lots of different ways that people will go do this. Rick Clemons:                      And its not just in sexuality, I have kids that I talk to in university that literally have shown up- you'll love this Mike, because I know you do this too, I was in a classroom one day, just in the moment, I had this brilliant question of, okay I'd like everybody to close your eyes, and nobody peek and I'm gonna ask you a question, how many of you in this classroom are here at college pursuing a major or a path that is because someone else told you what you were supposed to do. Rick Clemons:                      50 percent of the room raised their hands, because they were in college pursuing a major or a direction because mom and dad, someone else said this is what you're meant to do. That was so impactful and so powerful, because it drove home the same story that I had just told them bout myself going back in the closet. Mike Domitrz:                      Yeah, absolutely. Are there people that would say, Rick since you're out, how can you be telling others to go back in. Rick Clemons:                      Because its their life. Mike Domitrz:                      I'm not saying that, that's what I'm preaching, but I could see that push back. Rick Clemons:                      No, no, no, no, I know. And it happens all the time. That's where I say, my job as a coach is not to say this is what you should do, my job as a coach is to help people find a path to their truest essence themselves, and if that's what's their truest essence, then they need to go do that. Rick Clemons:                      I have a client who I just finished working with who did exactly that, he went on an exploratory path for about three months, his wife totally knowing what he was doing and he came back and said, I believe my path is not this path, and I said then you need to follow your values, your belief, your heart and you need to live life your way. Rick Clemons:                      Which is always what I say, I want my clients to live life their way, I want the audiences that I have the privilege to speak in front of, that is my message, you know this Mike, its about make the bold move, life your life uncloseted, live life your way. And if that's what we gave each other a human beings man, I don't know, I think the planet would be so much different. Mike Domitrz:                      Absolutely, to really honor each person's choices is the key to what we're discussing. For anyone listening, some of the things we're discussing, the aspects of it are not choice, they're born, how do I live with innately who I am? Rick Clemons:                      How do you give your yourself permission? There's the choice, how do you give yourself permission to accept this is innately who I am, this is how I'm supposed to show up in the world. That's the choice, when we know who we are. I have so many entrepreneurs that I've worked with that they knew, they knew for so many years they were not supposed to be sitting in a corporate cubicle, they weren't supposed to be following those kind of rules, that they were supposed to be doing their thing, they knew it innately, as much as I know innately I am a gay man. But they have to give themselves permission to say, I'm going to go stand in my truth. Mike Domitrz:                      All right, so lets go to- because we jumped in early on your story, you didn't get to finish that, and so to honor and respect his voice lets go ahead. You were jumping the bean in your 30s, so that was like 19, now your in your 30s. Rick Clemons:                      30s, I'd been married for 13 years and- Mike Domitrz:                      And married, as in a heterosexual relationship? Rick Clemons:                      ... in a heterosexual relationship, with a wife, I had two daughters, very young daughter. Four and a half, and nine months old, and there was a moment, there was a moment that I realized this can no longer be the way I live, I could no longer live a dual life, I could no longer pretend that this was the way life was supposed to be. And I made the conscious decision to say, i gotta do this. And that's when I came out of the closet, and it was a very specific reason that I came out of the closet. Rick Clemons:                      Some people say, oh you met a guy. Yes I did, but this guy made everything completely different for me because I was used to hooking up, that was my outlet to okay, I know this is what I am, but I'll go hook up and then I'll pretend like nothing happened. Not proud of that, I will never say, oh yeah that's the way to do this, it is a way, but its not the way. Rick Clemons:                      And when I met this guy- Mike Domitrz:                      So for listeners, you're referring to during the years of being in a heterosexual relationship, you would still explore the sexuality side of who you innately are during the marriage. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. Mike Domitrz:                      Okay. Gotcha. Rick Clemons:                      So, there was a weird twist of respect there, that I was respecting some of my truth but I was disrespecting the honest truth. I would take it only to the sexual realm, I couldn't at that point in time take it to the innate emotional, you know, just connected, being with someone realm, because I was like, well no, gay people can't do that, we just have quote sex because of so many things that had been raised and societal views on that. Rick Clemons:                      And then I met this guy, and started down the same path and I ended up in his hotel room, but that night was the night that there was no sex, I literally fel in love, and I fell apart because there was a connection, it was all about the connecting. And I saw something in that moment that I hadn't seen, and in that moment even though I knew I was about to embark on a journey, and I knew it, I knew I was going to embark on a journey that, this is where I had to step into my self respect, this is where I had to respect the process, this is where I had to respect the journey. And eventually I figured out this is where I also have to respect others. At that moment I realized I had to respect my wife, because this could no longer be the way I did life. Mike Domitrz:                      And so you now go to your wife. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah, yeah. Mike Domitrz:                      Talk about one's voice. Rick Clemons:                      Not an easy thing to do, except, and now we've talked about my book being frankly my dear I'm gay, that's pretty much how it went down. I didn't use those exact words but it was, I walked in the door from that trip I'd been in London, landed at LAX airport, because I'm from southern California at the time, and I had about a two hour drive home. I called her from the airport and said, "I'm home.", and she goes, "Great I can't wait to see you.", and I said, "Yeah, I can't wait to see you too.", and then I dropped a bomb and said, "We got some stuff we gotta talk about.", and I hung up the phone and I felt like a real shit to be honest. Rick Clemons:                      The whole way home, I was like, this could be so much easier. And I remember four times on that trip, four times Mike, on that trip, four times looking over my shoulder, right in front of semis, and going I could just turn the wheel, just turn the wheel and nobody would ever know, nobody would ever have to know this dirty little secret that I held. Rick Clemons:                      And when I think about the respect piece that you talk about, that's when I really started respecting myself, respecting my wife, and respecting my children, because I needed to man up. I needed to be who I was meant to be, I needed to man up and be the father I was meant to be, and I actually needed to be the husband I was meant to be and say, I created this nasty space and I need to clean it up. I walked in and I literally said the to her, "I love you and I care about you but I'm gay. And this isn't gonna work.". And of course, not pretty stuff happened, I was literally out of the house the night, justifiably so, I mean justifiably so for her, she was upset. Rick Clemons:                      Through a lot of work and every thing we made it, we made it through we've continued to raise our children and- kind of back to what I said just a minute ago, I had to respect myself, I learned to respect the process, because it is a process coming out, no matter what that coming out is, there's a process. Rick Clemons:                      Even becoming speakers like you and I have, there is a process to respect in the process of being a speaker and respecting the journey of being a speaker and respecting others as you go through that journey. Those are four huge pillars that I think a lot of people will miss as they come out of the closet, whatever it is. Rick Clemons:                      I've seen people come out to be an entrepreneur, and they respect themselves but they don't respect the process, they don't respect the journey and then they sure don't respect others, they want everybody else to tell them exactly why how to do it, what they need, like thanks, good, got it, and there's not really a genuine thank. There's not a thing, and then they think okay, now, here I am I'm supposed to do this, but they haven't respected the process and they haven't respected that there's a journey. Rick Clemons:                      This is what I love about doing what I do, because I can take this and really overlay it into, you wanna do this? Great. What is it you need to do first? Well you gotta respect yourself. Now some people will miss that piece all together. They'll do this because they think okay, this is what I need to do and people are like, yeah this is what you need to do, but guess what, as soon as they keep listening to what somebody else says they need to do- Rick Clemons:                      I have a really good friend who so badly wants to run his own business, and I'm sure you're gonna like this Mike. He keeps going to people, going to people, going to people, and then he'll adopt what that person says and then he'll adopt what the next person says, and then he'll adopt what the next person says and at the end of the day, he doesn't respect himself, because he won't allow himself to say here's what I wanna do to run my own business- Mike Domitrz:                      Right, he won't listen to the voice inside himself. So Rick, how do you respond to the person that says, what a second, why am I listening to this expert Rick Clemons, who disrespected his relationship for all these years by living a lie and I'm not saying that, you and I both know that, that statement living a lie is overused, it can be harmful. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. Yeah. Mike Domitrz:                      But why am I listening to this person who cheated, who wasn't himself, why is this the person I'm gonna listen to when it comes to respect. Rick Clemons:                      Because I think I bring forward the insights of, wow, when you can see that, then you're able to help other people see it. If you haven't lived it, if you haven't done it, you can't teach other people and you can't keep learning yourself. That's the place where I think it starts, you keep learning yourself, and I don't do this because is wanna teach people, I don't do this because I think I'm a guru or an expert. Rick Clemons:                      I do this because I want to help people avoid the pain, no of us want to live in pain. And this was not easy, this was not pain free, this was not stress free. In fact, I was so stressed out that first year coming out of the closet that I literally lost 120 pounds and when people saw me- Rick Clemons:                      here's where it was really interesting, so Let's roll back to when I was 19 and didn't know anything about HIV and stuff, so now we're in 1996, things are still being figured out right. I lost so much weight that people thought, oh my god he came out of the closet and he's positive, because I looked skin and bones. Those of you who can see me now, you can see I'm a fluffy guy, I'm not skin and bones but it was that thing where I had to learn this. Rick Clemons:                      Now I do this because I don't want anybody to not live their truth, that's why I go speak at colleges and universities, because I want kids to respect themselves enough, in this moment, in this time, as they start college and university to go, this is my life and this is how I want to live. Because you don't want wait to about 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, and go, oh, I could've don't his differently. Mike Domitrz:                      And I love this about you, you're open and your vulnerable along the journey I mean, you're the definition of someone speaking their voice, respecting their voice, because you don't hold anything back when you're talking with people and I love that about you. Mike Domitrz:                      What are strategies you would give people, maybe questions, thought, skill they can use to help them find that respect for themselves? Because there's and interesting dichotomy in this conversation, right. Because you said at 19, I'm sort of glad my parents pushed me back in, because of the danger I could've been in, but at the same time that means, were talking almost 15 to 20 years of some form of not being able to live with that respect of yourself. Rick Clemons:                      Right. Right. Well, the first thing that I like to ask clients is, do you want to end up here 20 years from now and still feel the same way you do? If you don't do this now, what's going to be different? And what's going to be the same? Because its all about getting to that emotional space Mike, it's about figuring out- anybody who's in pain, they don't wanna feel it. So if they make this change now, what's will be different? Mike Domitrz:                      Let's pause there, that's so powerful Rick, because this applies to so many things in peoples lives. So can we go back and just say that question one more time? So if it was 20 years from now ... Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. What would be different? And what won't be different? Mike Domitrz:                      Right, if you stay on this track, the key wording you used right was if you stay on this track, is this where you're gonna wanna still be? Is that- if I remember right. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. Yeah. It's really, is this where you wanna be. And if you don't stay on this track what might be different? And its not about having people predict their future, its about inviting them to go explore that future, it about giving themselves permission to even ask the question, so many people don't give themselves permission to ask the questions. Rick Clemons:                      One of the best ways to do this Mike, I think this will help your audience so well, if you're struggling with this thing, whatever it is, doesn't matter what it is, but if you're struggling with this thing and tomorrow morning you woke up and you had made the decision that, that thing, it was time to give yourself permission to fix it. Rick Clemons:                      How much different might you feel, just tomorrow morning if you went to bed knowing I'm going to fix this, and you woke up tomorrow morning and you knew you were fixing it. I can guarantee you, that one nights sleep will be completely different than all the nights sleep you've been having until this decision was made. Mike Domitrz:                      And its very much where the 10-10-10 principal comes in, and that's this idea that in 10 hours from now, 10 days from now, 10 months from now, sometimes you'll take it to 10 years from now, how will I feel if I make this decision? Well in 10 hours I might be scared out of my mind, in 10 days I might be dealing with some really difficult consequences of this, in 10 months, I could start to be feeling freedom and in 10 years, I'm gonna look back and go why didn't I do this sooner. Is that very much in line with that? Rick Clemons:                      Yes. Because heres on of the exercises I have my clients do, and it is the 10 levels, at a level one, if you don't so this or you do, do this what are you gonna feel? And then at a level two, and at three, and at four, and at five, by the time you get to a level 10, if you do this what will you be experiencing? Rick Clemons:                      The whole point is I'm gonna be scared to death at level one but by the time I'm living at a level 10 and I'm doing the thing I wanna be doing, wow I may be changing careers because I camera out of the closet, because now I know I don't have to settle for anything. I may be going on that trip around the world, I may be deciding to have a child with someone new, because my other spouse is like, I'm never doing this, and I was able to do the coming out journey. But I love the exercise because I have clients take it, at each level what will you be doing that will then make things different. Mike Domitrz:                      Is the number one fear the judgment of either family or colleagues that have that sort of leadership role in our life, those that we look to like parents. Is that often the number one fear with somebody coming out with whatever they're coming out with? Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. It's always the number one fear, what are other people gonna think? Mike Domitrz:                      The the question I would imagine becomes, if I'm so afraid they won't accept me, and I don't know, but from a coaching perspective as a response to that, then why do you want that person dictating your life, someone who doesn't wanna support you and give you true love and let you be who you are. Why do you want them to dictate your life? Is that a question? Rick Clemons:                      That's definitely a question. Like if that person were no longer playing that role in your life, what would be different? If they weren't telling you, you couldn't be this? If they weren't disrespecting you and your dreams, what would be different? Rick Clemons:                      And the dream one is a huge one, its like, okay, so if you're living by that persons dream and you quit living their dream through your life, then what's gonna happen for you? If you just basically just ejected them out of the picture, what would you be able to do? If you didn't carry the burden of them on your shoulders all the time, how much taller and prouder and powerful would you stand in your life? Rick Clemons:                      This isn't about disrespecting other, I don't want people to get- it's about finding the space and respect to put someone in where it enables you to live you're life the way you're meant to live it. Mike Domitrz:                      And we forget that you're gonna gain new people in your life, because when you're in that realm arena of respect, you draw people in, you draw like energy, like values, and you're gonna be in a supportive environment, not instantly, right away, but over time you're gonna have connections that are gonna be powerful and wonderful if you're open to that if you're truly respecting yourself and being open to the world. Rick Clemons:                      Exactly. Well, Mike as you were saying that, the first thing that went through my mind is that's exactly why you and I are even having this conversation, that is why you and I are friends, because yes, Jess introduced us but Jess would not have introduced us if she didn't feel like, hey, these two guys, they belong in the same circle. Rick Clemons:                      As we've gotten to know each other it's because we do get each other, we get each other, we're totally different. Yes, you're a straight guy kids, I'm a gay guy with kids, we have fun, we both have this quick wit but its because we know we can operate in this space and I drew you, you drew me because of how we show up in the world. Mike Domitrz:                      Love it. I think that's awesome for listeners to think of, who could I draw into my life if I could truly be me, if I could respect every element of me, that's so powerful. Mike Domitrz:                      Rick, obviously your book is Frankly my dear, I'm gay. What is another book that has impacted you along the journey? Rick Clemons:                      Well, it would be the one that I sent you Mike, and you know which one I'm talking about because this is where I am draw out the F bomb, it is the subtle art of not giving a fuck. And when I read that book, I was like oh my gosh, this is- if I could've have written any book, that would have been the book. But I'm so glad that Mark Manson did, and read it. There's things in it that I don't 100 percent agree with, but for the most part its spot on, spont on about how to truly live your life and live it in the right way with respect for yourself, with respect for others and truly step up to that space you're meant to live in. Mike Domitrz:                      The book is so powerful, and like you, there are some examples he chose that I wasn't a fan of, I thought did some harm to our work. But that doesn't mean there's not some incredible lessons in that book, and powerful lessons in that book. Rick Clemons:                      Yeah. Mike Domitrz:                      I wanna thank you so much for joining us Rick. Rick Clemons:                      Oh thank you man, it's always a pleasure to get to do anything with you and to be a part of your journey and supporting the work you do. Mike Domitrz:                      Well thanks. For everyone listening you can find Rick at rickclemons.com, we're gonna have all of the links to his social media, his book everything in the show notes of the respect podcast. Mike Domitrz:                      Thank you for joining us for this episode of the respect podcast. Which was sponsored by the date safe project at datesafeproject.org. And remember you can always find me at mikespeaks.com

The Good Food Festival, a conference promoting local foods, comes back to Chicago next week. So Rick and Steve talk with Jim Slama, the President of FamilyFarmed and Producer of the Conference; Dr. Geeta Maker-Clarke, a board-certified family physician, specializing in Integrative Medicine. She's participating in the Good Food is Good Medicine Panel;  Alex DeSorbo-Quinn, the Executive Director of Pilot Light talks about bringing Food and Nutrition Education into schools; Meg Barnhart is the founder and co-creator of Zen of Slow Cooking started the company in 2006, as a way to ease her mom-guilt and get a healthy dinner on the table, while employing individuals with learning challenges and Jordan Buckner is the co-founder of TeaSquares, a tea-infused energy snack made with small-batch organic tea, pepitas and puffed millet. It's mission is to fuel economic development in urban centers.

So Rick and Michonne are an item, Sasha and Abraham are not and guess what, there are thriving trading communities in the zombie apocalypse. Jesus said the world was going to get bigger and we get a taste of that in the visit to the Hilltop. A great episode and a lively discussion await in our most recent episode of Fear Me. By the way this is number 20 for us, so a big thanks to everyone for the support! We're having fun even if Scot is super grumpy. Please rate us on iTunes! If you’d like to contact us, you can email us at fearmepodcast@gmail.com or find us at www.facebook.com/fearmepodcast. Also find our feed on Stitcher, Soundcloud and Twitter @fearmepodcast

Trader Joe is spending some time at E3. So Rick, Kevin, Chris and Sam talk about what they have seen from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Sam and Rick are sort of quiet during the Sony and Nintendo part because real life got in the way, but Kevin and Chris do a good job of covering it. If you have any comments about E3 that you want to share, send them to: GamerHusbands@Gmail.com.

On this episode of the Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast, we talked all about Facebook ad targeting. But before we get to that, I wanted to tell you about some changes coming your way related to my podcast. First, starting in June I am going record one episode per week, rather than every other week like I have been doing. Look out for some extra podcast love coming your way! Second, I am going to add an extra layer to my podcast and start recording an “Ask Amy” segment where you get to send me your questions and I will address them on my show. In full disclosure I took this idea from my good friend, Pat Flynn who now has a show called AskPat. I called Pat to ask if he minded, and in true Pat fashion, he encouraged me to go for it. Gotta love good friends like that. So if you would like me to address any questions you might have about online marketing, Facebook marketing, list building, content creation, webinars - anything goes - so just go to Ask Amy and you can be one of the first to leave me a question. OK, switching gears, let’s get back to our topic for today, Facebook ad targeting. I’ve invited my really good friend, Rick Mulready to come on the show with me so we could talk about what we both are seeing that’s working right now with ad targeting. Rick has an extensive online marketing background and teaches Facebook advertising to entrepreneurs and small businesses. The cool thing is that he is in the trenches daily experimenting with ad campaigns and getting some pretty big results; the guy knows his stuff. So Rick lives in San Diego and lately we’ve been meeting up at Starbucks and sharing insights about our experiences with Facebook ads. (Does that sound super geeky? We can't help it - we love this ad stuff!) The discussions have been so good that I wanted to get Rick on the show and invite you all into one of the most valuable discussions we’ve had, which is focused on Facebook ad targeting. In this episode, here’s what we’ll cover: The most valuable Facebook ad targeting options, including Interests, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. Which targeting option to choose when you are just starting out. How to target your website visitors with your Facebook ads. How to expand your targeting options if you feel you can't seem to find a big enough target that is effective. We'll answer the question, "How many people should I target with my ad? We will also discuss which ad metrics to pay close attention to so you know your ad is working. To help you navigate your Facebook ad targeting, I've included additional details in this post so you can understand how each target works and where to locate. I suggest you create your ads in the Power Editor.  Think of the Power Editor as a more robust "Facebook Ads Manager" dashboard. You can do more in the Power Editor and I highly recommend you test it out. (It's a bit confusing at first, but I promise it gets easier once you understand where everything's located!) I can't stress this enough:  The MOST important part of your Facebook ads campaign is targeting. Below I will walk you through some of the most important targeting features. There are two different places where you will set up your ad targeting.  When you are totally new to ads, two of the easiest targeting features you can use are "Demographics" and "Interests." To locate these two targeting features, go into the Power Editor, and under the "Ads" tab you will see  the "Audience" tab in blue. Once inside the Power Editor, when you click on "Ads" you will see the "Audience" tab. Under the "Audience" tab, if you scroll down a bit you will first see "Demographics" where you can set the age, gender and location for your ad targeting.  Scroll down some more and you will see: Interests, Behaviors and categories. Let me briefly explain each to you. Interests The "Interest" field allows you to type in the name of the Facebook Pages you want to target. When you target a Facebook Page, you are asking Facebook to show your ad to the fans of that specific Facebook Page. Note that sometimes when you type in the name of the Facebook Page in the "Interest" field, it won’t show up. If you have this problem, be sure to first go to the actual Page and check the name of the Page and make sure you type in the exact name of that Page. However, sometimes that won't even work.  Some Pages just won't show up in the "Interest" field - it's a Facebook glitch.  Frustrating, I know! Hot tip: Brainstorm a list of people, publications, other groups in your industry, and even competitors whose fans you may want to target. Hot tip #2: Use Graph Search, which is basically a search functionality inside of Facebook. It is a really long search bar across the top when you’re logged in to Facebook. You can conduct searches such as, “Pages liked by people who like __________” (insert the name of your page in the blank). This will give you a good idea of Pages you might want to target. Here are some other searches you may want to try: Favorite interest of people who like. . . Groups of people who like. . . Pages liked by people who like xyz Page and abc Page You can get even more specific and search for things like, “Pages liked by women who live in Canada who like xyz page.” Especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have a large email list or a large fan base, "Interests" is a great place to start. There are two other targeting sections right below "Interests." Let's explore those briefly. Behaviors Behaviors is located right under interests. This is a more advanced targeting technique. The way this works is that Facebook partners with 3rd party data companies that track people’s purchasing behavior outside of Facebook. Categories Categories is the section located under Behaviors. "Partner Categories" are similar to behaviors, where Facebook partners with other companies to get data. There are also "Facebook Categories" you can explore. If someone likes a Page about cooking, you can target a broader category such as food and dining. Neither Rick nor I use "Categories"  because it tends to be too general, so we don’t recommend them, but they are worth testing just to see if they might be a good fit for you. Custom Audiences Now switching gears here, let's talk about a few other Facebook ad targeting strategies that are even more powerful than the targeting above. Once of the ways both Rick and I set up our targeting is with "Custom Audiences" and "Lookalike Audiences."  You can create a Custom Audience by taking a list of email addresses of those who have subscribed to your email list and uploading them to Facebook. Facebook will check it’s database against your email list and find matches. For example, out of 3,000 email addresses, there may be 1,500 matching email addresses on Facebook. Now you have a list of 1,500 quality lead you can target inside of Facebook. (Note: You need at least 100 matches for this to work.) Lookalike Audiences Now with Lookalike Audiences, this is where the magic happens! Once you have a Custom Audience, you can create a Lookalike Audience. Facebook can take your Custom Audience and create another targeted list that is very similar to the one you uploaded. Since Facebook knows so much about our likes, interests and behaviors, these Lookalike Audiences are pretty valuable to say the least! Regardless of the size of your Custom Audience, your Lookalike Audience may be as large as a couple of million people. The ideal target audience size can vary. If you have a HIGHLY targeted list it can be as small as 1,000 people, but we suggest you keep your targeting groups to a maximum of 600,000 - 700,000 people. I usually try to aim for 500,000. (Note:  This does not apply for people targeting a very local audience. Your lists will be much smaller of course!). Targeting Set Up To set up your Custom and Lookalike Audiences, you will do this in the Power Editor a well.  When you log into the Power Editor, in the upper left you should see a drop down menu that says "Manage Ads." Click there and then click "Audiences." Once you are on the "Audience" page, you can click on "Custom Audience." From there, the image below will pop up.  To upload your email list to Facebook, click the first option, "Data File Custom Audience." In the "Data Type" you will see a few options for upload, choose "Emails." It may take a few hours for Facebook to check your email addresses against those in their system, so be patient and check back in a few hours. Come back to this exact same spot in the Power Editor and you will see the status of your new audience. Retargeting with Facebook Ads Another feature of Custom Audiences is the ability to create a target list from your website traffic.  This strategy is also known as retargeting. Here's how it works: You generate a pixel code from Facebook and then place that pixel on your website. Facebook begins collecting data from that pixel and creates a Custom Audience for you of your website traffic. Now you can target that Custom Audience and show your ads to them OR you can create a Lookalike Audience so you can have an even larger, targeted group to use as well. Below I show you where to access the Facebook pixel that you will add to your website.  Click "View Custom Audience Pixel" to get the instructions you need to place this pixel in the correct spot on your website. Once you have your Custom Audience of website visitors in place, you can then create a Lookalike Audience to expand your targeting. In the "Source" field below you will type in the name of your website visitors Custom Audience and Facebook will create a Lookalike Audience for you. This is some pretty powerful targeting because it's so much more focused that just targeting people who have liked a specific Page! Now one more thing I will add to the mix.  As you might already know, you can target your existing fan base with your ads.  You would do that in the same section where you would target "Interests."  But what you might now know is that you can also create a Lookalike Audience to target people SIMILAR to your existing fan base. In the "Source" field you will type in the name of your Facebook Page to generate your new target list. Key Takeaways Facebook targeting is one of the most important components to your Facebook ad success. If you have not done so already, take a little time to experiment with Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences. I am 99.9% sure that your audience is spending time on Facebook. My challenge to you is to create smart targeting options to go find them! 2017 Amendment Graph search is no longer available. Facebook has replaced it with a similar tool called Audience Insights. To learn more about Audience Insights, click here.