Podcast appearances and mentions of steven well

Host Victoria Guido sits down with Steven Plappert, CEO of Forecastr, an online software designed to aid founders in financial modeling, which was born to help non-finance savvy founders understand and communicate their company's financial health. Despite the pandemic beginning right after Forecastr's launch in 2020, the company didn't pivot significantly thanks to extensive preparation and customer discovery before the launch. Steven delves into the operational and strategic aspects of Forecastr, highlighting the importance of balancing growth with financial sustainability, a consistent theme in their business strategy. Forecastr's significant development was integrating a strong human element into their software service, a move very well-received by their customers. Steven also outlines the company's key objectives, including cultivating a solid culture, achieving profitability, and exploring opportunities for exponential growth. Additionally, Steven discusses the importance of work-life balance, reflecting on his previous startup experience and emphasizing the necessity of balance for longevity and effectiveness in entrepreneurship. Victoria and Steven further explore how companies, including Forecastr and thoughtbot, incorporate these philosophies into their operations and culture. Forecastr (https://www.forecastr.co/) Follow Forecastr on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/forecastr/), X (https://twitter.com/forecastr), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/forecastrco/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ForecastrHQ), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/forecastr), or TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@forecastrco). Follow Steven Plappert on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-plappert-59477b3b/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant R¬obots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Steven Plappert, CEO of Forecastr, an online software that helps founders who hate building financial models in Excel actually understand their numbers, predict runway, and get funded. Steven, thank you for joining us. STEVEN: Hey, yeah, Victoria, thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here. What's up, guys? VICTORIA: Just to get us warmed up here a little bit, can you tell me what's going on in your world? STEVEN: Well, you know, what is going on in my world? I had a great year last year, very healthy. I have a loving fiancé, and I'm getting married this year, which is going to be super fun. And, obviously, running a business, which takes up more than its fair share of my life. But yeah, it's early Jan, so I've been kind of reflecting on my life, and I got a lot to be grateful for, Victoria, I really do. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. You know, I used to work with a VP of strategic growth who likened forming partnerships with companies as getting into a marriage and building that relationship and that level of trust and communication that you have, which I think is really interesting. STEVEN: Oh, for sure. Emily always, Emily is my fiancé, she always says that, you know, Forecastr is essentially my mistress, if you will, you know what I mean? Because, like, that's [laughs] where the rest of my time goes, isn't it? Between hanging out with her and working on the company, you know, so... VICTORIA: So, how long have you been in a relationship with your business around Forecastr? [laughs] STEVEN: Yeah, right? Yeah [laughs]. Four years with this one. So, you know, we started it actually January 1st of 2020, going into the pandemic, although we didn't know it at the time. And so, we just celebrated our four-year anniversary a few weeks ago. VICTORIA: Well, that's really exciting. So, I'm curious about when you started Forecastr, what was the essential problem that you were trying to solve that you had identified in the market? STEVEN: I'd say the main problem we were trying to solve is that, like, specifically founders, you know, startup founders, really struggle to get, like, a clear picture of their financial health or, like, just the financial aspect of their business. And then they also struggle to communicate that to investors because most founders aren't finance people. You know, like, most people that start a company they don't do it because they're excellent in even, like, business or finance or anything like that. They usually do it because, like, they've identified some problem; they've lived it; they've breathed it, you know what I mean? They're some kind of subject matter expert. They may be good at sales, or marketing, or product. But a lot of times, finance is, like, a weak part for them, you know, it's not something that they're strong in. And so, they really have a hard time, like, understanding the viability of the business and communicating the financial outcome of the company to investors and stuff like that. And my co-founder Logan and I live that because all we did all day was built financial models in Excel for startup founders working for a CFO shop called Venture First. So, that's what we really saw. We really saw that just, you know, it's really hard for folks to get this clear picture. And we thought a big part of that, at least, was just the fact that, you know, there's no great software for it. It was just like, people are using Excel, which, you know, for people that are great in finance, you know, works but for most people, doesn't. And so, yeah, I think that that's what kind of inspired Logan and I to fly the coop there at Venture First and start a company. VICTORIA: No, that's really interesting. So, you found this problem. You knew that this was an issue for founders, and you built this hypothesis and started it. I think you said, like, right before 2020, right before the pandemic. So, were there any decisions you made that once you got more information or once you got started, you decided to pivot? And, like, what were those pivot points for you early on? STEVEN: There wasn't a lot of pivoting early on, I will say. And a part of that is because, like, this isn't my first company. I started a company right out of college back in 2013 called FantasyHub. In that company, we pivoted a lot and, largely because we didn't really put a lot of forethought into that company when we launched it, you know, we didn't do any customer discovery. We just launched the company. And then we skinned our knees a bunch of times [laughs] as we scaled that company up and had to change gears a lot of times. In Forecastr, you know, we had actually been kind of building towards starting the company for 18 months. So, Logan and I actually had the idea originally in middle of 2018. And we decided at that time, look, like, we're not going to go launch this company right away because we got full-time jobs, and we might as well de-risk it. So, we spent about 12 to 18 months just doing a lot of customer discovery, kind of in stealth mode while at Venture First. After about six months, we brought it up to Venture First and said, "Hey, here's this idea for a company we have. We want to go do it." You know, to Venture First's credit, you know, rather than viewing that territorially and saying, "Hey, you know, there's a great new product line for our company," they really inspired us to go forward with it. They said, "Hey, this is great. We want to support you guys." They put some money in. We did some more discovery. We built a prototype. So, long-winded way of saying that by the time we actually got to the starting line in 2020, you know, we had 18 months' worth of really clear thought put into this thing. And we had been building in this space for years, you know, building financial models and Excel for founders. So, I think we had a great understanding of the customer. We had a great understanding of the market and the needs. We'd done our diligence in terms of distribution and figuring out how we wanted to generate, you know, a good, healthy funnel for the business. And so, it was really just kind of a matter of execution at that point. And, you know, here we are four years in, and there really hasn't been anything that we've done that's really pivoted the business that much across those four years, except for one moment, which was actually six months ago. So, in July of 2023, we did finally have our first kind of pivot moment where one of the interesting things about Forecastr versus some other solutions in the market is that we're not just a product, just a SaaS platform. There's a real strong human layer to our solution. We've always felt like a SaaS plus human model was the right model for financial modeling for startups because a lot of these startup founders don't have finance expertise on staff or inherently. And about six months ago, it wasn't as much of a pivot as it was a double down. You know, we really doubled down on that human element, you know, and now that human element isn't just through, like, a white glove onboarding and some email support. But we actually do give our customers an analyst in addition to the software that's with them for the lifetime of their subscription and is with them every step of the way. And so, that's the only time that we really made, like, a significant change into what we were doing. And it was just, I think, off the back of three years of saying, "Hey, like [chuckles], people really love the human element, you know, let's lean into that." VICTORIA: I love that you saw that you couldn't solve this problem with just technology and that you planned for and grew the people element as well. And I'm curious: what other decisions did you have to make as you were growing the business, how to scale the tech side or the people side? STEVEN: So many decisions, right? And that's why I tell people all the time, I'm like, you know, I've been a founder for 11 years now. And, in my opinion, by far, the hardest part about being a founder is that all day, every day, you have to make a bunch of decisions. And you hardly ever have enough data to, like, know, you're making the right decision. So, you got to make a bunch of judgment calls, and ultimately, these are judgment calls that could make or break your company. And it's really taxing. It's taxing on the mind. It's stressful, you know. It is not easy. So, you know, I think it's one of the really hard things about being an entrepreneur. I would say one of the most consistent decisions that we've had to make at the highest level is decisions around kind of capital preservation, fiscal responsibility, and investing in the growth. So, categorically, it's like, on the one hand, you have a desire to build the company kind of sustainably, to get to profitability, to have a healthy working model, you know, where you have some real staying power, you know. And that line of thinking leads you to, you know, be conscientious about investments that you're making that, you know, increase the burn. On the other hand, you have a desire to grow the company very quickly. You know, you have certain benchmarks you need to meet, you know, in order to be attractive to venture capitalists. And so, you have decisions that you want to make, you know, to invest in that growth. And so, I think that's a very consistent theme that's played out across the four years is Logan and I trying to walk that tightrope between growing 2 to 3X year over year and being really mindful of the company's burn, you know, both for equity preservation and just to build the company in a more sustainable way. And I think as financial professionals and founders, the finance person in Logan and I a lot of times wants to be more conservative. The founder in Logan and I, a lot of times, wants to be more aggressive. And so, we kind of just, like, let those two forces kind of play themselves out. And I think it creates, like, a nice, healthy tension. VICTORIA: That is really interesting, yeah. And sometimes you have to make a guess [chuckles] and go with it and then see the results of what happens. So, you're a financial forecasting company. What kind of, like, key results or objectives are you working towards this year with Forecastr? STEVEN: Yeah, great question. So, we're really mindful of this kind of stuff. I'd say, you know, it's something that we really consider at a deep level is, like, you have to ultimately set objectives, which are very aligning and clarifying, you know, at an executive level, and then those should kind of filter all the way down through the organization. Because so much, I think, of building a company is you have to kind of punch above your weight. You have to grow faster than [chuckles] the resources that you're putting into it might expect or whatever. I mean, you have limited resources, limited time, but you got to go really quickly. I think alignment is a big part of that, and that starts with setting clear objectives. So, we actually have three very clear objectives, really four. The first one is living up to our cultural values. You know, we're a culture-first organization. We believe that, like, culture, you know, kind of eats strategy for breakfast, that age-old kind of cliché, but it's true. It's just like, I think, you know, if you build a really good culture, people are just...they're happier. They're more productive. You get more done. So, that is our number one strategic objective. Number two is to become profitable. Like I mentioned, we want to become profitable. We want to build a sustainable company. So, by setting that objective, it kind of forces us to be conscientious about spend and only invest in areas that we think is, like, a one plus one equals three. Our third strategic objective is reach 5 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year. We're at 2.4 right now. We want to at least double year over year. That's kind of, like, the minimum threshold to keep playing the venture game. And then number four is unlock exponential growth opportunities. So, we definitely adopt the philosophy of, like, hey, we've got a model. It's working. We've got 700 customers, you know, we've got two and a half million in annual recurring revenue. So, like, 80% of our focus should be on becoming profitable and hitting $5 million in annual recurring revenue. Like, that's, like, the bread and butter there, just keep doing what's working. But 20% of our attention should be paid to, well, what could we be doing to, like, triple down on that, you know, to really start to create an exponential growth curve? And, for us, that stuff and, like, kind of the data in investor space, like, there's a lot of interesting things that we could do, of course, as long as it's consensual, anonymized, et cetera, safe and secure, you know, with the kind of data that we have on private companies, you know, anonymously benchmarking companies against their peers, things like that. And I think there's a really big opportunity that we have to serve investors as well, you know, and to create a better investor experience when it comes to financial reporting, also something that we think can unlock exponential growth. So, those are the four objectives that we have going into this year. VICTORIA: Well, I really appreciate that you had culture at number one, and it reminds me, you know, you said it's old adage, but it's true, and you can verify that in reports like the State of DevOps Report. The number one indicator of a high-security environment is the level of trust and culture that you have within your company, not necessarily the technology or tools that you're using. So, being a financial company, I think you're in a good position [chuckles] to have, like, you know, protect all those assets and protect your data. And yeah, I'm curious to hear more about what you said about just unlocking, like, exponential growth. It's hard to keep both the let's keep the lights on and keep running with what we have, and make room for these bigger strategic initiatives that are really going to help us grow as a company and be more sustainable over time. So, how do you make room for both of those things in a limited team? STEVEN: Yeah, it's a great question. And it's not easy, I would say. I mean, I think the way we make room for it probably on the frontend is just, like, being intentional about creating that space. I mean, ultimately, putting unlocking exponential growth opportunities on the strategic company roadmap, which is the document that kind of memorializes the four objectives that I just went through, that creates space inherently. It's one of four objectives on the board. And that's not just, like, a resource that sits, you know, in a folder somewhere. We use the OKR system, you know, which is a system for setting quarterly objectives and things like that. And these strategic objectives they make it on our OKR board, which filters down into our work. So, I think a big piece of creating the space is just as an executive and as a leader, you know, being intentional about [chuckles] putting it on the board and creating that space. The thing that you have to do, though, to be mindful is you have to make sure that you don't get carried away with it. I mean, like you said, at the end of the day, succeeding in a business requires a proper balancing of short-term and long-term priorities. You know, if you're focused too much on the short term, you know, you can kind of hamstring yourself in the long run. Yeah, maybe you build, like, a decent business, but you don't quite, you know, reach your highest potential because you're not investing in some of those things that take a while to develop and come to play in the long run. But if you're too focused on the long run, which is what these exponential opportunities really are, you know, it's very easy to lose your way [laughs] in the short term, and it's very easy to die along the way. You know, I do think of startups as much of a game of survival as anything. I always say survive until you thrive. And so, that's where the 80/20 comes in, you know, where we just kind of say, "Hey, look, like, 80% of our time and energy needs to be devoted to kind of short-term and less risky priorities, such as doubling down on what's already working. 20% of our time, thereabouts, can be devoted to some of these more long-term strategic objectives, like unlocking exponential growth. And I think it just takes a certain mindfulness and a certain intentionality to, like, every week when you're organizing your calendar, and you're, like, talking with your team and stuff like that, you're just always trying to make sure, hey, am I roughly fitting into that framework, you know? And it doesn't have to be exact. Some weeks, it may be more or less. But I think that's kind of how we approach it, you know, conceptually. VICTORIA: Oh, what a great perspective. I think that I really like hearing those words about, like, balance and, like, being intentional. MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. VICTORIA: You mentioned earlier that you're getting married, so, like, maybe you can talk about how are you intentional with your own time and balancing your personal life and making room for these, you know, big life changes while dealing with also the stress of being in kind of a survivor mode with the company. STEVEN: Like I mentioned, this is my second company, and Emily, bless her heart, my fiancé, she's been with me my entire entrepreneurial career. We started dating the first month that I started my first company, FantasyHub. And in that company, I ran that company for three years. We took it through Techstars down in Austin. It was a consumer gaming company. Interesting company. It ended up being a failure but, like, super interesting and set me on my path. Yeah, I was a complete and total workaholic. I worked around the clock. It was a fantasy sports company, so weekends were our big time, and I worked seven days a week. I worked, like, a lot of 80-hour-plus weeks. And, you know, looking back on it, it was a lot of fun, but it was also miserable. And I also burned out, you know, about six months before the company failed. And had the company not failed when it did, you know, I don't know what the future would have held for us. I was really out of balance. You know, I had deprioritized physical health. I hadn't worked out in years. I wasn't healthy. I had deprioritized mental health. Emily almost left me as a part of that company because I wasn't giving her any attention. And so, you know, when that company failed, and I was left with nothing, you know, and I just was kind of, like, sitting there licking my wounds [laughs], you know, in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house, you know, I was like, you know what? Like, I don't know that that was really worth it, and I don't know that that was the right approach. And I kind of vowed...in that moment, I was like, you know, look, I'm a startup founder. I love building these companies, so I'm, like, definitely going to do it again, but I'm not going to give it my entire life. Like, regardless of your religious beliefs, like, we at least have one life to live. And in my opinion, there's a lot more to life than [chuckles] just cranking out work and building companies. Like, there's a whole world to explore, you know, and there's lots of things that I'm interested in. So, this time around, I'm very thoughtful about creating that balance in my life. I set hard guidelines. There's hard, like, guardrails, I guess I should say, when I start and end work, you know, and I really hold myself accountable to that. Emily holds me accountable to that. And I make sure that, like, I work really hard when I'm at work, but I take the mask off, you know, so to speak, when I'm at home. And I just kind of...I don't deprioritize the rest of my life like I did when I was running FantasyHub. So, I think it's super important. I think it's a marathon building companies. I think you got to do that. I think it's what's in the best interest of the company and you as an individual. So, I think it's something I do a lot better this time around. And I think we're all better off for it, not the least of which is, like, one of our six cultural values is live with balance, and that's why. You know, because, like, we adopt the philosophy that you don't have to work yourself to death to build a great company. You can build a great company working a pretty reasonable workload, you know what I mean? It's not easy. It is kind of a pressure cooker trying to get that much done in that little time, but I think we're living proof that it works. VICTORIA: And if you don't make time to rest, then your ability to make good decisions and build high-quality products really starts to suffer eventually, like, I think, is what you saw at the end there. So, I really appreciate you sharing that and that personal experience. And I'm glad to see the learning from that, and making sure that's a core part of your company values the next time you start a company makes a lot of sense to me. STEVEN: Yeah, totally, you know, yeah. And I've always remembered, although this might be an extreme and a privileged extreme, but, you know, J.P. Morgan, the person, was famous for saying, "I get more done in 9 months than I get in 12," in relationship to the fact that he would take his family over to Europe for, like, three months of the year and, like, summer in Europe and not work. And so, while that's probably an unrealistic, you know, ideal for a startup founder, there's some truth to it, you know what I mean? Like you said, like, you got to rest. And, in fact, if you rest more, you know, yeah, you might be working less hours. You'll actually get more done. You're a lot clearer while you're at work. It's a mindset game. It's a headspace game. And the better you can put yourself in that good mindset, that good headspace, the more effective you are. Yeah, there's just a lot of wisdom to that approach. VICTORIA: Right. And, you know, thoughtbot is a global company, so we have employees all over the world. And I think what's interesting about U.S-based companies, I'm interested in how Forecastr might even help you with this, is that when you start a company, you basically form, like, a mini-government for your employees. And you have input over to how much they paid, how much healthcare they get. You have input over their hours and how much leave and everything. And so, trying to balance all those costs and create a good environment for your employees and make sure they have enough time for rest and for personal care. How does Forecastr kind of help you also imagine all of those costs [laughs] and make sense of what you can offer as a company? STEVEN: I would say the main way that we help folks do that, and we really do play in that space, is just by giving you a clear picture of what the future holds for your company from a financial perspective. I mean, it's one of the things that I think is such a superpower when it comes to financial modeling, you know, it can really help you make better decisions along these lines because, like, what does a financial model do? A financial model just simulates your business into the future, specifically anything related to the cash flow of your business, you know, cash in, cash out, revenue expenses, and the like. And so, your people are in there, and what they're paid is in there and, you know, your revenue and your expenses, your cash flow, your runway, all that's in the model. One of the things I feel like we do really help people do is just get a clearer picture of like, hey, what do the next 3, 6, 12, you know, 24 months look like for my company? What is my runway? When am I going to run out of money? What do I need to do about that? Can I afford to give everybody a raise, or can I afford to max out my benefits plan or whatever that is? It's like, you can make those assessments more easily. You know, if you have a financial model that actually makes sense to you that you can look at and say, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I can offer that, like, Rolls Royce benefits plan and still have 18 months' worth of runway, or maybe I can't [laughs]. And I have to say, "Sorry, guys, you know, like, we're cash-constrained, and this is all we can do for now. But maybe when we raise that next round and when we hit these growth milestones, you know, we can expand that." So yeah, I think it's all, for us, about just, like, helping founders make better decisions, whether they be your decisions around employees and benefits, et cetera, or growth, or fundraising, you know, through the power of, like, financial health and hygiene. VICTORIA: Great. Thank you. I appreciate you letting me bring it all the way back [laughs]. Yeah, let me see. Let me go through my list of questions and see what else we have here. Do you have any questions for me or thoughtbot? STEVEN: Yeah. I mean, so, like, how do you guys think about this kind of stuff? Like, you know, you said thoughtbot's a global company at this point, but the name would imply, you know, a very thoughtful one. So, I'd be curious in y'alls kind of approach to just, like, culture and balance and some of these things that we're talking about kind of, like, straddling that line, you know, between, like, working really hard, which you have to do to build a great company but, you know, being mindful of everything else that life has to offer. VICTORIA: Yeah. Well, I think thoughtbot, more than any other company I've ever worked for, really emphasizes the value of just, like, people really want you to have a work-life balance and to be able to take time off. And, you know, I think that for a company that does consulting and we're delivering at a certain quality, that means that we're delivering at the quality where if someone needs to take a week off for a vacation, there's enough documentation; there's enough backup support for that service to not be impacted. So, that gives us confidence to be able to take the time off [chuckles], and it also just ends up being a better product for our clients. Like, our team needs to be well-rested. They need to have time to invest in themselves and learning the latest technology, the latest upgrades, contributing to open source, and writing about the problems they're seeing, and contributing back to the community. So, we actually make time every Friday to spend on those types of projects. It's kind of like you were saying before, like, you get as much done in four days as many companies get in five because that time is very highly focused. And then you're getting the benefit of, you know, continually investing in new skills and making sure the people you're working with are at the level that you're paying for [laughs]. STEVEN: Yeah, right. No, that's super cool. That's super cool. VICTORIA: Yeah, and, actually, so we're all remote. We're a fully remote company, and we do offer some in-person events twice a year, so that's been a lot of fun for me. And also, getting to, like, go to conferences like RubyConf and RailsConf and meeting the community has been fantastic. Yeah, you have a lot of value of self-management. So, you have the ability to really adjust your schedule and communicate and work with what meets your needs. It's been really great. STEVEN: Yeah, I love that, too. And we're also a remote company, and I think getting together in person, like you just talked about it, is so important. We can only afford to do it once a year right now as an earlier-stage company. But as amazing as, you know, Zoom and things like this are, it's like, there's not really a perfect replacement for that in-person experience, you know. VICTORIA: I agree, and I also agree that, like, once a year is probably enough [laughter]. That's a great amount of time. Like, it really does help because there are so many ways to build relationships remotely, but sometimes, at least just meeting in person once is enough to be like, oh yeah, like, you build a stronger connection, and I think that's great. Okay. Let me see. What other questions do we have? Final question: is there anything else that you would like to promote? STEVEN: I guess it's my job to say we are a really awesome financial modeling platform and team in general. So, if you are a startup founder or you know a startup founder out there that just could use some help with their financial model, you know, it is definitely something that we'd love to do. And we do a ton of education and a ton of help. We've got a ton of resources that are even freely available as well. So, our role in the market is just to get out there and help folks build great financial models, whether that be on Forecastr or otherwise, and that's kind of the approach that we take to it. And our philosophy is like, if we can get out there and do that, you know, if we can be kind of the go-to resource for folks to build great models regardless, you know, of what that means for them, a rising tide will float all boats, and our boat the most of which, hopefully. So [laughs], if you need a model, I'm your guy. VICTORIA: Thank you so much for sharing that. And I have a fun question for you at the end. What is your favorite hike that you've been on in the last three years or ever, however long you want to go back? [laughs] STEVEN: Well, I would say, you know, I did have the great pleasure this year of returning to the Appalachian Trail to hike the Roan Highlands with a friend of mine who was doing a thru-hike. So, a friend of mine did a southbound thru-hike on the A.T. this year, went from Maine to Georgia. Good friend of mine. And I had not been on the Appalachian Trail since I did a thru-hike in 2017. So, I had not returned to the trail or to that whole community. It's just a very special community. It really is a group of, like, really awesome, eclectic people. And so, yeah, this last year, I got to go down to the Roan Highlands in Tennessee. It's a beautiful, beautiful area of Tennessee and in the Southeast, rolling hills and that kind of thing. And hike, for him, for, like, three or four days and just be a part of his journey. Had a ton of fun, met some awesome people, you know, great nature, and totally destroyed my body because I was not prepared to return to the grueling nature of the Appalachian Trail. So yeah, I'd have to say that one, Victoria. I'd have to say that was my favorite in the last couple of years for sure. VICTORIA: Yeah, it's beautiful there. I've hiked certain parts of it. So, I've heard that obviously the Appalachian Trail, which is the eastern side of the United States, was the earlier trail that was developed because of the dislocation of people over time and that they would create the trail by getting to a peak and then looking to another peak and being like, "Okay, that's where I'm going to go." So, when you say it's grueling, I was, like, a lot of up and down hills. And then what I've heard is that the Pacific Trail on the western part of the United States, they did more of figuring out how to get from place to place with minimizing the elevation change, and so it's a much more, like, sustainable hike. Have you ever heard that? STEVEN: Oh yeah, that is 100% true. In terms of, like, the absolute change in elevation, not, like, the highest elevation and the lowest, just, like, the change up and down, there's twice as much going up and down on the A.T. as there is on the Pacific Crest Trail. And the Pacific Crest Trail is graded for park animals, so it never gets steeper than, like, a 15% grade. So, it's real groovy, you know, on the PCT where you can just get into a groove, and you can just hike and hike and hike and hike for hours, you know, versus the A.T. where you're going straight up, straight down, straight up, straight down, a lot of big movements, very exhausting. I've hiked a good chunk of the PCT and then, obviously, the whole A.T., so I can attest, yes, that is absolutely true. VICTORIA: I feel like there's an analogy behind that and what Forecastr does for you. Like, you'll be able [laughs] to, like, smooth out your hills a little bit more [laughs] with your finances, yeah. STEVEN: [laughs] Oh, I love that. Absolutely. Well, and I've honestly, like, I've often likened, you know, building a company and hiking the Appalachian Trail because it is one of those things where one of the most clarifying things about hiking a long trail is you just have this one monster goal that's, you know, that's months and months ahead of you. But you just got to get up every day, and you just got to grind it out. And every day is grindy, and it's hard, you know, but every day you just get one step closer to this goal. And it's one of the cool things about a trail is that you kind of steep yourself in that one goal, you know, one-track mind. And, you know, like we were saying earlier, there's so much more to life. So, you can't and probably shouldn't do that with your startup. You should continue to invest in other aspects of your life. But maybe while you're within the four walls of your office or when you open up that laptop and get to work on your computer, you know, if you take that kind of similar approach where you got this big goal that's, you know, months or years away but every day you just got to grind it out; you just got to work hard; you got to do what you can to get 1 step closer. And, you know, one day you'll wake up and you'll be like, oh shit, like, I'm [laughs] pretty close, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think there's definitely some similarities to the two experiences. VICTORIA: I appreciate that, yeah. And my team is actually it's more like starting up a business within thoughtbot. So, I'm putting together, like, my three-year plan. It's very exciting. And I think, like, those are the types of things you want to have. It's the high-level goal. Where are we going? [chuckles] Are we on our track to get there? But then day to day, it's like, okay, like, let's get these little actions done that we need to do this week [laughs] to build towards that ultimate goal. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Steven. I really enjoyed our conversation. Is there anything final you want to say? STEVEN: I just want to thank you, Victoria. I think it's a wonderful podcast that you guys put on, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and to chat with you. You're lovely to talk to. I enjoyed the conversation as well, and I hope everyone out there did, also. So, let's make it a great 2024. VICTORIA: Thank you so much. Yeah, this is actually my second podcast recording of the year, so very exciting for me. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining again. So, you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter, @victori_ousg. And this podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I am your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome someone who is a veteran of the industry. Sorry, Steven, it has to be said. The Founder, Chief Visionary Officer for College Recruiter. We'll give Steven a chance to introduce College Recruiter and what they do, but I'm excited to have a conversation with Steven about what is happening in the world of campus recruitment and university hiring and all of those activities that kind of used to require a travel budget.And so what, what happened over the last couple of years, what's gonna come to us in the future, and how do we keep hiring young talent without breaking the bank without it costing what it used to cost, basically. That's what we'll be talking about. So, Steven, welcome to the show.Steven: Well, thank you very much, Max. I think the word veteran is code for extreme age. Okay but that's cool. With age comes wisdom, and at some point, I'm hoping to have both, not just the former.Max: Age is just surviving, surviving everything that could have happened and all those buses that could have hit youSteven: All those I've tried have to dodge.Max:   So yeah, it's a compliment of course. You've been running college recruiters since, your LinkedIn says since November, 1991. Pre-internet so well, how did you end up in that space? Cause I saw from your background that you come from the legal, from being a law clerk and studying law and being a law graduate. Right? So you're a lawyer.Steven: Yes. I like to say I'm fully recovered. Family members would definitely disagree and that's fine. I'll Sue them.So in 1991, I had graduated from law school and was clerking for a couple of judges. And it's a pretty common thing recent grads from law school do. It's, kind of almost the equivalence of like a residency program for positions. You know, you go, you get that formal education and it kind of gives you like an internship kind of a year, but you're paid for it.You're paid pretty decently for it. The work is really interesting but during that year, a friend of mine reached out to me and tried to get me to join his small business, which I had actually started the small business when I was in college, when I was in undergraduate school, he took it over, tried to get me back in and that kind of got my entrepreneurial bug going again. And so in 91, while I was working full time as a law clerk, I got the business that college recruiter grew out of started part-time and what it was for a few years, it was publishing maps of college and university campuses and selling the advertising around the borders to restaurants, retailers, et cetera.That then led into publishing employment magazines, where the magazines I gave them away for free to career service offices. They gave them away free to students and grads. And the revenues came from employers paying to advertise their jobs. And then in 96, this thing called the internet came along. And over the next few years, we gradually got rid of all of our print publications. And so since 2000, it has been the job board, collegerecruiter.com.Max: Right. I'm gonna show my age by telling you that in 2000 I was working for a company called Zip Davis and I was working for a computer shopper magazine. So I was there for the slaying, the final days of computer list, people buying computers on listings and you know every month we would lose advertisers. But I'm sure the CNET networks was able to recuperate some advertising on the other end, but yeah it was a time of just destruction, all over the place. And I guess there must have been one year when you went from 80- 20 to 20-80.Steven: Yeah, 1999 was the year that we shut down the maps, which were ridiculously profitable. You know, I think in 98, the maps provided something like 80% of our revenue. Sorry. I think it was 80% of our profit with only 20% of the revenue and about 5% of my time. It was painful to give that up, but the writing was on the wall. It's like, you know, you give this up now and work from a position of strength and cannibalize your own sales.Or somebody's gonna do that to you.Max: And fortunately, you were young too.Steven: Yeah. I was young and, and I mean, my wife and I had a couple of kids at that point. We ended up with three, but, it is a different situation at that point than, you know, when you're still fairly early in your career, you're, you're better able to take on risks. Uh, everything else being equal.Max: Yeah. So, college recruiter has been, is it, can I call it a job board? A market?Steven: Yeah, Max: I know it's not a sexy term, but like a marketplace for young talents?Steven: yeah. You know, it's not sexy, but one thing about job boards, is that they work. Yeah. They, really deliver, the good ones, they deliver really great value. They've been around for a long time. Without a doubt, the industry has its haters. The haters, the most vocal ones tend to be those, with skin in the game, the ones that are competing against the job boards for the same budget. And so you see third party recruiters talking about how awful job boards are and how nobody uses job boards and blah, blah, blah.It's like, well, okay. If your whole focus is on recruiting C-suite executives, then yeah, job boards are not the place for you, but if you're recruiting a lot of relatively early career talent at scale, there aren't too many more efficient ways of getting that opportunity in front of the candidate. There are loads of ways, including Talkpush of then taking that candidate who has discovered the opportunity, who's discovered your organization and converting them into an applicant or converting that applicant into a hire. There are loads of ways out there that do that better than a job board would. But that initial, “I don't know who I wanna work for”, “I may not even know what kind of position I'm looking for”, I don't just don't think there's anything better out there than job boards for that.Max: mm-hmm yeah, I've been a promoter of social media for sourcing at high volume for a long time. And, I think it's effective, if done right. And, you know, depending on the geographies, but if you're in a college town and you're targeting a specific age bracket, I think it can be very effective for jobs that are suitable for a large trench of the population.But instead of taking it from the employer's perspective and we take it from the job seeker perspective, then yeah, the benefits of this sort of virtual career fair that you get in a job board is it's unmatched. The only thing that was close to it maybe was Facebook jobs, but they shut down in March that I think that was, that could have been a good, uh, Yeah, maybe another job board killer.I know there's been a lot through the, over the years who have come and gone.Steven: yeah, I was a fan of the concept, and I think if they had more focus on it, I think they could have made it into a real success. It'll be interesting to see five years from now when the truth comes out, why it was really killed, what the reality was. I suspect it had to do with privacy laws that they were gathering or needing to gather a whole lot of information about job seekers that just doesn't play well with laws like GDPR.Max: Yeah.Steven: And, better for them to focus on their core. You know, serving basically display ads than job postings, resume searching. It's different. It's really different.Max: It was poorly monetized. Um, it was driving traffic out to sort of clunky and ugly career websites and ATSs. And, it was opening Facebook to a world of pain, which is the regulatory employment laws. So. Yeah, sad to see it go myself. But, anyway, there's plenty of other venues.So for people who want to find out more about College Recruiter, they, I suppose, where should they go and read more or find out about your services?Steven: Yeah, so they can go to collegerecruiter.com. We're very transparent about who we are, what we do, if they wanna reach out to me directly, they can do so on LinkedIn is a good way. linkedin.com/in/Steven with a V uh, Steven Rothberg, or just email me Steven@collegerecruiter.com.Max: And then, there's your podcast, that you co-host with? I forget his name.Steven: Yeah, Jeff, Jeff Dickey Chasins, that's the job board doctor, he and I last September launched a podcast called the job board geek podcast, and it's about the business of connecting candidates and employers. One way of doing that is through job boards. There are loads of other great, technical tools out there too that do the same or similar thing, usually just kind of in a different way and reaching different kinds of candidates, different points of engagement, requires different kinds of tools.Max: Would you consider that your number one customer is the employer or the student?Steven: So we are, my answer to you is neither. Okay. Neither and both, if that makes sense. So neither in the sense that we don't look at either the employer or the student or the candidate as being the customer, we're in a double-sided marketplace. That means that we have two different customer groups. We have the employer and their intermediaries, advertising agencies, job distribution companies, et cetera, that act on behalf of the employer. And then we have the candidate for us. That's going to be a, somebody who's currently enrolled or graduated within the last three years.So shorthand, zero to three years of experience. If we serve one far more than the other, the whole thing crumbles. You have to serve both. You have to balance the interests of both. For example, if we were to say the candidate is all that matters and we need to do what is in the best interest of the candidate, where that would lead us would be to provide the home phone numbers of our employer customers to the candidates. That's not a sustainable business model. I don't think we're gonna have too many employers that are thrilled if we were to do something like that. On the flip side,Max: Total transparency is not gonna please the ones who are paying for the service. Yeah.Steven: Right. And then they'll stop, and when they stop, then how are you helping anybody? Cuz now there aren't any employers that are using your platform to hire. So then the candidates who are using your platform, then can't get hired that way. So, and then the same is true in reverse, you know, if we were to be completely loyal to the employer and sort of disregard the interests of the candidate, then we start treating candidates like inventory.And again, we start providing the employers with a bunch of information that maybe we know or find out about the candidates that the candidates don't want us to be providing. You know, why did your boss really hire you last week? You know, that's something that should be between the candidate and the prospective employer.That's not something that an intermediary like a job board should be revealing. Now, again, it's different if it's an executive recruiter, because the executive recruiter is then acting on behalf of typically the employer. Not always, but typically, and they're essentially the agent, but we're not the agent of the employer. We're not the agent of the candidate. We have to balance both interests.Max: Yeah. Yeah. Well that makes sense. So let's talk about the interests the students, the college students. Yeah. how did the college students fare from 2020 to 2022 on, on the plus side?We still have very low unemployment, so there's high demand, plenty of jobs available, checks coming in the mail, getting a lot of bad press for what it's doing to the hunger and drive of the new generation. But, so overall it seems like they're doing all right, you know, but of course we know mental health issues, blah, blah, blah.You know, all of the hardship that comes with the pandemic and being locked at home, not being able to socialize. Let's put all of that aside. Just focus on the college stuff yeah. On the hiring, on the hiring problem. How did college students get hired in the last couple of years?Did they switch entirely to video and zoom calls and was that the primary channel for college hiring?Steven: Yeah. So just for a little bit of context, you know, COVID really hit hard, the us, you know, March of 2020. By March in any year, the vast majority of the hiring of students in recent grads is complete.By basically February, the very, very beginning of March, employers, just aren't on campus interviewing. They're not reaching out to students as part of their college recruiting programs, which are increasingly being called things like early talent, or early careers or something along those lines. Employers are kind of broadening it. We can get into that later if you wish. But so. The graduating class or those who were looking for internships that first year of COVID were not greatly impacted in terms of finding jobs, applying to them, getting hired. Fortunately, that first summer, the summer of 2020, most large employers did a really fantastic job of transitioning their workforce from being in-person in offices, to being fully remote, working at home. And so, although the students who were interning or those who were new grads lost that in-person experience, along with it mentorships. You know, good management, et cetera, only a small percentage of them lost out on their jobs.Most employers did not rescind their offers, but the programs were definitely highly adapted. We saw a lot of things like employers taking a 12-week internship program and making it four, rather than in person, it was virtual and they would do a lot of zoom-based training, and they would create projects.So that rather than that student working side by side with her manager instead, she would get a project and kind of report back to me in four hours or 12 hours or 20 hours, or, you know, however long that project might take. Okay. Most students, a large percentage of students worked for large employers and it was the large employers that had the resources and the know-how to do that adaptation, small employers were the ones that really didn't. So, the students that kind of got their offers rescinded or showed up and the door was locked, I literally heard that one time, they tended to work for small employers, loads of exceptions though. The next year's graduating class and the students who were looking for internships in the summer of 2021, by then vaccines were already coming out. And you had a lot of employers who were starting to hire back really quickly. It's kind of hard to remember. It was only a little over a year ago, but it was like, wow, vaccines are coming out. Life is returning to normal; people are starting to travel again. Isn't this great.We made it through and then Delta hit, but Delta didn't really hit until July, August, you know, in most areas of the country. So again, it was kind of fortuitous a difference of a few months would've made a big difference. But the students by and large, already were interning, most of it was remote. The new grads were already working, most of it was still remote, but you were starting to see some hybrid. So, it didn't have as much of an impact on the labor market as it would have if the change had come in, say September, October, when, when the bulk of on-campus hiring's done. Um, and by this year, things were pretty much back to, I guess back to the new normal, if that makes sense.Yeah. So one of the big differences between say 2019 and 2022 is that we've all learned how awful on-campus career fairs are. Any employer that still thinks that that's a great way to hire is an employer that probably has a brain injury. It is excruciating for the employer and for the student, the only real reason that they exist is because they always have existed. And because the career service offices use them as a primary way of generating revenue. So career service offices will say to employers, quite literally, if you want access to, “my students”, they own them. Yeah. Then you have to spend a thousand dollars and come out to our career fair, even though it's gonna be a complete waste of your time.Max: I rememberSteven: That's ridiculous.Max: I remember being asked for money to advertise on campus, but it's yeah. I mean, the argument is just to weed out the employees who are not serious. Yeah.Steven: Yeah. And those without money to give to the career services, but who might have great job opportunities for the students. Right. At the end of the day, the career service offices are there to serve the students. Not To use that relationship in order to balance their budget, they should be getting their budget from student services or somewhere else in the university. I mean, not from employers, you, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go to an employer and say, Hey, if you wanna park in our parking lot, you gotta pay a thousand dollars. And if you don't pay a thousand dollars, you're not gonna recruit students. You know, the parking lot has to be paid for, but they're gonna pay a nominal fee to park there they're gonna pay 10 bucks or whatever that money out ofMax: That's a conflict of interest Steven: Yeah. it really is. It does a massive disservice to the students. So what a lot of schools did during the height of COVID was that they shifted that whole business model online. If you thought in-person career fairs were bad. Wait till you see virtual career fairs. And some organizations did them well, but most didn't.  Most of the virtual career fairs, and again, there were definitely some that I looked at and I said, Hey, this is done well, but most of them were basically glorified zoom calls with 60 people in a waiting room.And so you want your 30-second chance to talk to that employer. You're gonna, you were sitting there and you were waiting often for an hour or two to have a 30-second conversation. And then the employer would say, well, for this reason, or that reason, we're not interested and moving on or thank you very much, go to our website and apply online. And the student is sitting there, like, why did I just spend an hour here? I could have just gone to their website and applied.Max: So with, or without the pandemic and the fact that people, it was harder to meet in person, harder to travel and so on, would you agree with the statement that campus hiring is a very imperfect way of connecting employers and students and kind of keeping, you know, actually closing off a number of opportunities for students who are at a stage when they should be opening their mind to all kinds of possibility. Perhaps, it could be argued that it has a detrimental effect because they end up thinking that you know, the workplace is represented by these, know, 10 employers that is Accenture and, BCG and, a couple of other, you know, management, you know, PWC and that's it. That's, that's my landscape.I imagine that most students have more imagination than this, but still, it should be enabled rather than limited by these physical barriers. So, care to comment on this?Steven: No, I totally agree until campus recruiting in 2019. So before COVID.Basically looked the same as it did in 1952, you had mostly large employers flying recruiters and hiring managers around the country, staying in nice hotels going on campus, and interviewing wining and dining professors. And. Not so coincidentally very often arriving on campus right in time for the homecoming game and getting tickets on the 50-yard line. So there was a lot of I don't know, feather betting or quasi-graft, kind of going on in that world where those who were in charge of the budgets often greatly favored the school that they went to or a school that had a really fun party kind of an atmosphere that they could take advantage of when they went there.Then often, the employers would often make excuses about not being inclusive. So there are about 7,400 post-secondary schools in the U.S. There are about 3000 4-year colleges, universities in the U.S. And basically, other than the U.S army, no employer goes to all of them. Right. So how do they pick and choose? Well, they, you know, it comes down to budgets and need and you're gonna favor a school that's close to you rather than a school that's far away from you that all on the surface makes sense. The problem with all of that is that it's anything but inclusive. So, you know, one of the other things that happened in 2020 was the murder of George Floyd.And all of a sudden, all of us were really forced to come to grips with what are we doing to improve diversity, equity, inclusion. And saying to students that the only way that you're gonna be hired here is if you happen to go to one of these 12 schools is not inclusive and because it's not inclusive, it's also not equitable. And it's, you're also not enhancing your diversity and employers started to understand, some already had. But I think a much larger percentage really grasped it, that the more diverse their workforce was, the more productive their workforce was. So I think for the first time, employers really, really started to invest in DEI, not just for compliance purposes, but to enhance their productivity.And that meant they had to go to a lot more schools. So in one sense, having to use virtual career events and zoom and other tools like that, job boards to advertise your roles in one sense, felt like a step back for employers because they got, they lost out on the fun football games and they lost out on staying in, you know, a nice suite at a Marriot hotel in their favorite city, and going drinking with their friends on the weekend when they got to stay over and they lost out on all the miles that they would use to take their families to Europe during the summer. And there was a lot of that. Max: Doesn't sound too bad, you're right. Steven: Yeah. But on the other hand, they no longer had to literally plan 14 months ahead. For how many people are we gonna hire into what kinds of roles and where are they gonna be located throughout our organization? Now hiring manager calls up and says, Hey, we just landed a new contract. I need 20 electrical engineers, and I need them in three months. Right now you can do that. You can't do that when you're doing on-campus recruiting because it just takes too long. So employers very quickly were forced to, and then saw the value in shifting their resources from flying a bunch of people around the country to doing it what a lot of them call virtually. Which is just, you know, using this thing that basically was invented in the mid-nineties, that's the internet. So the ROI on recruiting somebody online is way better. The studies are showing that the productivity's actually higher than recruiting people on campus and the cost of hiring somebody is way lower.This isn't about college recruiter. This is probably the same with just about any sourcing tool. But when we talk to our customers, their cost per hire are usually measured in the hundreds of dollars, right. NACE, which is the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the association for basically campus recruitment just before COVID. They said that the average cost of recruiting a student through on-campus recruiting was $4,600. It's like $4,600. It's like, but we only spent $200 at a career fair. It's the travel. It's the staff time. When you start flying a team of recruiters around the country. And they can go to a campus maybe once a day, probably every other day, cuz of travel time, and they meet with couple, a dozen students and maybe they hire one of them maybe they don't, it's frightfully expensive and it's not at all diverse. And so I think that one of the few positive things that have come out of COVID. is that employers of students have started to take a better picture. They're looking better at their ROI, not just their cost of hire, but also the productivity.Max: I love the positive spin on the last two years. And I do think it is a more inclusive world, in that sense that you, you no longer are bound by geographical, material boundaries on how you're gonna pick your talent. And that's an enormous boom for mankind because it means we're gonna make better hires. Productivity's gonna go up it's good across the board. But in a more literal and direct sense; was it good for business for you? Like do you, did the travel budgets that got canceled, did they convert into ad spend on college recruiter.com?Steven: Yeah. Our revenues have been up 30 to 50% a year, year over year, the last few years.Max: Nice.Steven: And we're growing and we're doing it profitably. Our headcount has basically doubled in the last six months. Max: Cool. Steven: And it was very overdue. We basically had to make sure that this was real before we started hiring a bunch of people and then we didn't wanna start, like laying them off three months after we hired them, but it was overdue. We put way too much stress on our staff by not hiring quickly enough. And we still have a couple of open roles. So, you know, max, if you're looking Max: Quite inspiring, 20 you're 20 years, how many years? It's 25 years into this business. 30 years?. Steven: Yeah.Max: Yeah. Yeah. And then you have this two years with 25, 30% year over year growth. So, it is never too late to have a record year.Steven: Yeah. And, you know, like, I think a lot of businesses in our space where it's primarily technology-based, you sort of, it's not the same business it was three years ago. So we made a huge shift towards pay for performance, like pay per click and programmatic before COVID. We started to really shift in like 2014, 2015, 2016. So it's not like we saw a pandemic coming. It's like, oh, well we better do programmatic and pay per click because there's gonna be COVID. No, it was, we were fortunate. We had the right products in place. Our entire platform has really evolved since the mid-2000s, since like 2015-ish to be really good at high volume hiring. Employers that are hiring dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands. That's basically what college and university hiring is. The vast majority of students and recent grads go to work for large employers, that's the way they hiredMax: When I was coming out of college, my master's degree, and it was in 2000. So you know, it was not a great year to be looking for work. So I spent a lot of time on monster.com and I, you know, I'd applied to like 10 to 20 jobs a day like steady for a month. Is that quite characteristic? I mean, in terms of the volume of jobs that the average student would apply to, do you have a way of quantifying that?Steven: Fortunately, they're smarter than you were.So what students are counseled to do now is to do a lot more research upfront about the kinds of jobs that they're looking for, really much better understand what kind of a job am I looking for? What kind of organization offers that? And then to really zero in and apply to five to 10 jobs. And when you apply to a far smaller number of jobs, you're able to do a much better job up front, making sure that they're the right jobs to apply to. And that, you know, there are still loads of job seekers out there who will apply to any job that moves and, and employers complain about them all the time.And I think for good reason, you know, if somebody applies to hundreds of jobs, the likelihood of you hiring that person is really low. The likelihood of that person really not having any kind of qualifications for your job is pretty low, but that's also where technology can play a role. So yeah. You know, any employer that says, oh, well, you know, I have to sift through hundreds of resumes in order to find a good one, that's an employer that's investing too much in manpower and not enough in technology because technology should be preventing those people from applying to begin with to dissuade them, to basically say, Hey, you know what? No, you're not well suited for this role. Maybe there's another role over here, or we just can't hire you at all.You have to be a U.S citizen to work for us because we require a security clearance and you are a citizen of, you know, God forbid Canada, or you know, where I grew up. You know, you definitely don't want to hire Canadians, can't trust any of them. They all smell like maple syrup. Yeah.Max: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think you're on the side of the market where the marketplace could become intelligent and advise your students to apply to a different, better-suited job. I'm on the receiving end. My company, we process applications coming in from all kinds of places. And then we can go on and ask some qualifying questions to the candidates. Are you sure this is right? Are you sure you've got U.S citizens so you can do it on both. Can you tell us about some of the employers that are inspiring you in 2022 that really have nailed it when it comes to hiring students this year, that have done something nice because it's really hard to do a, virtual career fair, it's very hard to do a good candidate experience when you're doing high volume. So maybe you've got, a case study for us to think about?Steven: Yeah. So, you know the shiny examples year after year after year, and it really COVID didn't change this would be, you were talking earlier about someone like the big management consulting firms, you know, the Deloittes, the PWCs, the Ernst & Youngs all over the world. So they have a ton of money, they hire 10,000 plus students in recent grads a year. They're very, very sophisticated about what they do. One of the things that those organizations do along with lots of others that a few years ago, hardly any were doing it at all is pre-application assessments. And you know, when I was a recent grad, if somebody had said assessments to me, they were probably talking about some BS thing, like Myers's briggs, or if you could be a tree, what kind of tree would you be?And somehow that was supposed to show them that I was gonna be a productive employee. And now there are loads of assessments out there off the shelf or companies as little as ours we built our own because we couldn't find one to assess developers, if they had the right skill set, if they had the right experience with the tech stack that we use, it's not that hard and not that expensive any more to have every candidate go through this assessmentMax: There's a lot of solutions online, so much stuff. So if you don't have you know, budget to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on assessments, you can go and build your own these days. Right. You don't need to be an engineer.Steven: Yeah, exactly. And, and so I'm seeing more and more and more employers doing that. Now, partly what excites me about that is from the employer's perspective, It does a really nice job of greatly reducing, not eliminating, but greatly reducing the number of unqualified applications, which means then that they can spend more time on the qualified applicants, which means they're gonna hire more of them. That's best. That's good for everybody. It's also good for the candidate because wouldn't, you rather know 30 seconds into a process that this is not a job that you're ever gonna get than 30 days and five interviews later?Max: It weeds out candidates like me in 2000, then I wouldn't have had time to do 20 assessments a day, half an hour assessment each. I mean, it would've beenSteven: you probably would've modified your behavior. You would've applied to fewer jobs. Yes. And that also would've then led you to do probably better research to which jobs to apply to. Max: Yeah, my life would've been better. I would've had a way better life than the one I had. Steven: Yeah. It's, you are a cliche that people talk about is hunting with a rifle instead of a shotgun, you know, you know, you're, you're going and it just tends to lead to better results. The other thing that I think it does, that I know it does is that it helps to diversify your workforce because under the old system where a recruiter would look at your resume and they would see, it's like, oh, Max went to X, Y, Z school and that's a really impressive school. So I want to interview him, you know, and Cindy went to some school I've never heard of, so she can't possibly be well qualified, so we're not gonna interview her. Now it's based upon your actual skills. Yeah. Maybe you did go to an elite school, but you probably spent all your time playing Frisbee. Where Cindy went to a third-rate school, but had three amazing internships. Who would you rather hire? The person with work experience?Max: No Frisbee. The Frisbee guy, Frisbee guy. A hundred percent. Steven: Well, yeah. I mean, it depends. I guess it depends. If you're the Frisbee corporation, then yes, you'd rather hire the Frisbee. If it's like a Frisbee golf tournament then, yeah, the Frisbee guy. But, otherwise, you're just going to, you're just gonna end up being like a podcaster and an owner of like a workplace tech company. And that's not a good living. Max: No, no,that's rough. Okay. Well that I agree with a hundred percent that, you know, skill-based, assessment-based hiring is gonna be more meritocratic and more fair and more, I don't know if it necessarily falls into diversity.But it can help certainly. It's more diverse than just hiring at the University of Wisconsin. That's for sure.Steven: Right. And as a graduate of the university of Minnesota, I can definitely say that you do not want to hire people from the university of Wisconsin. Actually, my wife who's, our CEO went there and despite that,t I love her.  Max: Okay. Okay. Give faith my regards. I wanted to, uh, end on the question I ask all my guests which is - we all make hiring, and with that, we all make hiring mistakes. Thinking back about your long journey as an entrepreneur and all the people you hired, can you walk me back through one particular hire you made, where you missed the mark and did the service to yourself, to the hire, to the organization and then without giving names, of course, but just giving us the moral of the story, what can we learn from it?Steven: Yeah. I'll just give you their social security number. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You know, there was a common thread. So, Faith became our CEO in 2008 and so I have not led hiring since then. And, probably about five or so years ago, I really haven't been involved in interviewing or whatever. It's not something I'm good at. That said, in my role, I will talk with candidates before they're hired, if they want to, to sort of get a better picture of the company, but I'm not evaluating them, it's helping them evaluate us. But to answer your question, Max, about sort of people we've hired that have not been a good fit.I think a really common thread. Would be two things, two real common threads. One would be, I used to hire people that I felt that I liked and I could trust. And liking somebody and maybe trusting them, that kind of thing leads you to hiring people yoou know, people who are friends of yours, people who are family members of yours, and you're hiring them for the relationship and not what their skillset is, not what their career aspirations are. We've had a couple of people that we hired that way that were, that were great, but they were the exception. Repeatedly, we ended up hiring sort of good people who just were not a good fit for the work and, you know, right person, wrong seat kind of, kind of thing. The other real common thread that we found is that, and this is a little bit unusual for us.We've been fully remote since 1997. So before it was cool before it was often legally required, we were fully remote. There's a huge difference between hiring somebody who's gonna work shoulder to shoulder with their manager versus hiring somebody who's gonna work halfway across the country or even halfway across the world. So we've gotten really good at hiring people who are gonna be working remotely. And we've tried to share a lot of that knowledge on the college recruiter's YouTube channel. But basically, you've gotta manage that the burden falls on the manager. It's not actually so much on the employee.The manager has to be really good at managing by outcomes. Yeah. So if we've got a manager of that department, who's really good at managing by outcomes, it makes hiring a lot easier. If the manager struggles with that, then we have to pay particular attention to the employee's ability to manage up, to communicate with their manager, hey, when do you want this done? What resources am I gonna have? What's the priority of this versus the other 18 things you've already given me? And a lot of people, they can't do that. They just won't or can't manage up. And so that's been an important factor for usMax: Great. Well, I won't add anything to it. We're over time, but I agree with all that Steven said on the managing by outcome, and how important it is and that the onus is on the managers. So thanks a lot, Steven, for joining and for sharing your unique insights into the world of campus hiring, college hiring,  early careers hiring.We'll talk about labels next time we get to do a podcast interview together, maybe on yours, if you'll have me.Steven: Absolutely. Well, we're gonna get some dates on the calendar. Max has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Max: Thank you.Max: That was Steven Rothberg from College Recruiter. Hope you enjoyed the interview. He really made me think it doesn't always happen overnight. You can be running a business for 30 years as he has and a technology which is 20 years old, which is the job board market, and still have your best year. In fact two of his best years back to back are 2021 and 2022 because the market is shifting and because the old way things are done, they take a while to break down and the old way of hiring on campus where you have to send an army of recruiters and post a stand and pay the university for an entrance fee, well that's on the way out. So, never underestimate the power of technology to change behaviors over time. If you enjoyed this and would like to come for more, please subscribe and please share with friends.

Odysseus and company are trying to invade Troy. Guess who thinks up the horse scenario? Oh, and Vicki might be Cressida....yeah, The Cressida. Hold your horses for Doctor Who's The Myth-Makers!So, in all honesty, I recorded this one several times and also cut it down considerably. I may come back to the Myth-Makers in the future. Still not sure I did it justice. I also think that how I feel about this ending has changed with every viewing...so there's that!_______STEVEN: Well, the Doctor said they were Greeks. We're probably in Greece.VICKI: Oh, but that would be wonderful, wouldn't it? We might meet the Heroes!STEVEN: Those men who carried off the Doctor wouldn't be heroes, or anything like them. _____DOCTOR: Yes, yes. I'm afraid we must face up to it, Odysseus, man was never meant to fly.ODYSSEUS: Wasn't he now? Well, that seems to me a great shame. Now if your machine won't work, Doctor, I propose to fly you without it.DOCTOR: Oh? What do you mean?ODYSSEUS: Simply this. That my catapult is ready and it seems a great pity to waste it. Now you have failed me, therefore you are expendable. I propose to fire you over the walls of Troy.DOCTOR: Ah, but I have another idea. And a much better one.ODYSSEUS: It had better be. Well?DOCTOR: Have you ever thought of a horse?Upcoming:Celebrating Companions: Vicki We need to take a moment to say goodbye to our revolutionary, our Cressida, the Doctor's first pea in the pod companion, dear Vicki!Monday, May 9thSerial #21: The Dalek's Master Plan ("The Nightmare Begins,"** "The Day of Armageddon," "Devil's Planet," "The Traitors," "Counter Plot," "Coronas of the Sun," "The Feast of Steven," "Volcano," "Golden Death," "Escape Switch," "The Abandoned Planet," "Destruction of Time")All missing EXCEPT: "Day of Armageddon," "Counter Plot," & "Escape Switch"Buckle in...this is a long one.Probably will be broken into multiple parts. Monday, March 14th Special thanks to Cathlyn "Happigal" Driscoll for providing the beautiful artwork for this podcast. You can view her work at https://www.happigal.com/ Do feel free to get in touch to share the love of all things Doctor Who: throughthevortexpodcast@gmail.com

A planet has two dawns before exploding and Team TARDIS landed on it, of course. Welcome to commentary and analysis of Galaxy 4!The Doctor, Steven, and Vicki land on a planet due to explode and must navigate a conflict between the beautiful Amazonian Drahvans led by Maaga and the monstrous Rills. But appearances can be deceiving....MAAGA: This is a fight to the death for existence itself.DOCTOR: I see.MAAGA: in which one of us will be obliterated.________RILL: But if there is a choice, the Doctor must go. He travels further than we can. And everything he has shown he stands for is what we believe in. So it is better that he goes.STEVEN: I'm sorry. You can't blame me, though, for being suspicious. In that case, there's something you ought know. Whilst I was in the Drahvin ship, they said they intended to leave this planet in yours.RILL: We are prepared to take them with us.STEVEN: Well, that's not what they mean. They take your ship, you stay here.RILL: We must hope they do not succeed._____RILL: To the Drahvins we are ugly, so they become frightened.DOCTOR: You are different from us, of course, but at least you are intelligent.STEVEN: Yes, what difference does it make what your form is?DOCTOR: Importance lies in the character and to what use you put this intelligence. We respect you as we respect all life.Upcoming:Serial #19: Mission to the Unknown The one-episode prequel to "The Dalek's Master Plan"Monday, February 21stSpecial thanks to Cathlyn "Happigal" Driscoll for providing the beautiful artwork for this podcast. You can view her work at https://www.happigal.com/ Do feel free to get in touch to share the love of all things Doctor Who: throughthevortexpodcast@gmail.com

 Discover how branding helps you to stand out from all the other startups that struggle to gain attention on a crowded market Discover what the essence of your company is and how it relates to your branding Find out how branding can make your startup a 'sticky' one, building affinity and familiarity with your audience Resources/Links: Want to know more about how to survive and build a successful startup? Grab a copy of Steven's Book NOW: www.foundersspace.com/promo Summary Have you been struggling with your branding? Do you want to know more about the secrets of branding that will surely put you on the right track? Branding is at the core of any great business. All you have to do is look around you to see it. Dyson, Virgin, and even Coca-Cola made an impact more than just by creating great products. Effective companies present their goods and services in the right manner to the right audience at the right time. Steven S. Hoffman is the CEO of Founders Space. He is a venture investor, serial entrepreneur, and author of several award-winning books. These include Make Elephants Fly (published by Hachette) and Surviving a Startup (published by HarperCollins). In this episode, Steven talks about his insights on what makes a brand meaningful and memorable. Aside from that, he reveals the secrets of branding and the ways to create a brand that everyone will love! Check out these episode highlights: 01:31 - Steven's ideal client: “My ideal clients are startup founders. Anybody running a small business. Any entrepreneur.” 01:45 - Problem Steven helps solve: “The big problem I solve is that a lot of entrepreneurs are good at their business, but they know nothing about branding. They know nothing about messaging. So, I come in there with my team, and we give them everything they need to know to really get on the right track.” 02:44 - Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Steven: “Well, there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who have a really solid business, you know, good business plan. They have all the pieces in place, but they really haven't figured out who they are. What is the essence of their company?” 05:00 - Common mistakes that people make before they find Steven's solution: “A big mistake people make is they want to be all things to all people. They want to speak to, you know, the whole world. They want the whole world as their customer.” 06:15 - Steven's Valuable Free Action (VFA): “So finding your brand isn't like waking up one morning and having an epiphany, "Oh, my God!" You know, "This is my brand!" You know, we all want that to happen. And if it does, and it works out perfectly, but what you really need to do, and even if you have that epiphany, you need to test it on your customers.” 07:09 - Steven's Valuable Free (VFR): Check out Steven's Website: www.foundersspace.com/promo 07:46 - Q: What stops founders from really successfully branding their companies and themselves? A: The answer is that founders have preconceived notions about what their company should be, without looking at what it really is. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “In branding your company, you have to think about what is the value you give these people.” -Steven S. HoffmanClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

 Discover why startup founders matter when it comes to branding Find out what's the essence of your company and how it relates to your branding Learn more about why customer feedbacks are important for your brand Resources/Links: Want to know more about how to survive and build a successful startup? Grab a copy of Steven's Book NOW: www.foundersspace.com/promo Summary Have you been struggling with your branding? Are you having a hard time with your startup? Do you want to know more about the secrets of branding that will surely put you on the right track? Are you ready to find out the promising solutions that can guarantee your clients will love your brand more? Steven S. Hoffman is the CEO of Founders Space. He is a venture investor, serial entrepreneur, and author of several award-winning books. These include Make Elephants Fly (published by Hachette) and Surviving a Startup (published by HarperCollins). In this episode, Steven talks about his insights on what makes a brand meaningful and memorable. He also shares the secrets of branding and tips on what really matters in making and creating a brand that everyone loves! Check out these episode highlights: 01:31 - Steven's ideal client: “My ideal clients are startup founders. Anybody running a small business. Any entrepreneur.” 01:45 - Problem Steven helps solve: “The big problem I solve is that a lot of entrepreneurs are good at their business, but they know nothing about branding. They know nothing about messaging. So, I come in there with my team, and we give them everything they need to know to really get on the right track.” 02:44 - Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Steven: “Well, there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who have a really solid business, you know, good business plan. They have all the pieces in place, but they really haven't figured out who they are. What is the essence of their company?” 05:00 - Common mistakes that people make before they find Steven's solution: “A big mistake people make is they want to be all things to all people. They want to speak to, you know, the whole world. They want the whole world as their customer.” 06:15 - Steven's Valuable Free Action (VFA): “So finding your brand isn't like waking up one morning and having an epiphany, "Oh, my God!" You know, "This is my brand!" You know, we all want that to happen. And if it does, and it works out perfectly, but what you really need to do, and even if you have that epiphany, you need to test it on your customers.” 07:09 - Steven's Valuable Free (VFR): Check out Steven's Website: www.foundersspace.com/promo 07:46 - Q: What stops founders from really successfully branding their companies and themselves? A: The answer is that founders have preconceived notions about what their company should be, without looking at what it really is. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “In branding your company, you have to think about what is the value you give these people.” -Steven S. HoffmanClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:09 Welcome, everyone, and another warm welcome to Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from Little Castaways Beach here in Queensland, Australia, joined today by Steven S. Hoffman who's doing a roadshow right across North America. Steven, good day! A very warm welcome, sir. Where are you at right now? Which part of the journey are you on? Steven S. Hoffman 00:28 So, I started in San Francisco, my home, and I am in Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm almost to the Atlantic Ocean. Tom Poland 00:36 Wow! That's a fair way from where you started. How long is the road trip? Steven S. Hoffman 00:40

Todd: OK. Hello?Steven: Hello, there!Todd: How are you doing today?Steven: Pretty good.Todd: Could you please introduce yourself.Steven: Yeah. My name is Steven and I come from the north of England.Todd: Oh, really? Where in the north of England?Steven: A little village called Gawsworth.Todd: Is it a big place?Steven: No, it's about 10 thousand people I think.Todd: Oh, really? Do you go back there often?Steven: Not so often. The last time I went back was Christmas.Todd: Oh, really? OK. Did you have a good time?Steven: Yeah, it was very nice. I saw old friends and family and did the usual Christmas things.Todd: What actually are the usual Christmas things?Steven: Oh, I guess a lot of eating and a lot of drinking and a lot of laughing. Just general fun and games I guess.Todd: Great. How many of your family members still live in this town?Steven: Well, they don't actually....my mom and dad live in the town. My brother and sister actually live pretty close to this town, so my family is all in that general area.Todd: Oh, OK. Great. Thanks a lot Steven.

Todd: OK. Hello?Steven: Hello, there!Todd: How are you doing today?Steven: Pretty good.Todd: Could you please introduce yourself.Steven: Yeah. My name is Steven and I come from the north of England.Todd: Oh, really? Where in the north of England?Steven: A little village called Gawsworth.Todd: Is it a big place?Steven: No, it's about 10 thousand people I think.Todd: Oh, really? Do you go back there often?Steven: Not so often. The last time I went back was Christmas.Todd: Oh, really? OK. Did you have a good time?Steven: Yeah, it was very nice. I saw old friends and family and did the usual Christmas things.Todd: What actually are the usual Christmas things?Steven: Oh, I guess a lot of eating and a lot of drinking and a lot of laughing. Just general fun and games I guess.Todd: Great. How many of your family members still live in this town?Steven: Well, they don't actually....my mom and dad live in the town. My brother and sister actually live pretty close to this town, so my family is all in that general area.Todd: Oh, OK. Great. Thanks a lot Steven.

Todd: OK. Steven, you're looking at a picture. Please describe what you see.Steven: I can see a red double-decker bus. It's the kind of bus you'll see very often in London. In fact, I know this bus is from London because I can see the names: Chelsea, Sloane Square, Victoria, Charing Cross. These are all areas in London. Obviously, the bus is in London.Todd: OK. Have you ever been on a double-decker bus?Steven: Yeah, many times. When I was younger, you used to get double-decker all over England but now you only tend to see them in the big cities.Todd: Oh, really? How much is the fare?Steven: Well,it depends on the journey. It's..I guess it's not too expensive but the minimum price you would pay is -- for a short journey is about a pound.Todd: Yeah, who can you see on the bus? Can you pick out anybody on the bus who looks interesting?Steven: This girl here at the back that's leaning on the door, she looks really bored actually. Maybe she is going to work or something and she doesn't want to go.Todd: Yeah. Is that how you feel on the bus?Steven: No, not really because I haven't worked in England for a long time so I haven't taken a bus for a long time.Todd: So, you're British, do you missing them?Steven: Yes, sometimes.Todd: OK. Great. Thanks a lot.Steven: No problem.

Todd: OK. Steven, you're looking at a picture. Please describe what you see.Steven: I can see a red double-decker bus. It's the kind of bus you'll see very often in London. In fact, I know this bus is from London because I can see the names: Chelsea, Sloane Square, Victoria, Charing Cross. These are all areas in London. Obviously, the bus is in London.Todd: OK. Have you ever been on a double-decker bus?Steven: Yeah, many times. When I was younger, you used to get double-decker all over England but now you only tend to see them in the big cities.Todd: Oh, really? How much is the fare?Steven: Well,it depends on the journey. It's..I guess it's not too expensive but the minimum price you would pay is -- for a short journey is about a pound.Todd: Yeah, who can you see on the bus? Can you pick out anybody on the bus who looks interesting?Steven: This girl here at the back that's leaning on the door, she looks really bored actually. Maybe she is going to work or something and she doesn't want to go.Todd: Yeah. Is that how you feel on the bus?Steven: No, not really because I haven't worked in England for a long time so I haven't taken a bus for a long time.Todd: So, you're British, do you missing them?Steven: Yes, sometimes.Todd: OK. Great. Thanks a lot.Steven: No problem.

Steven Sabel - City of Grants Pass Information Coordinator | Host of the Don't Quill The Messenger Podcast | Will play the role of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion at the Barnstormers Theatre starting Oct 23rd City of Grants Pass Information Coordinator Pygmalion starts on Oct 23rd at the Barnstormers Theatre Don't Quill The Messenger Podcast A new Grants Pass native. Steven Sabel works as an Information Coordinator for the City of Grants Pass. Beyond insightful conversation about working for the city, we then venture into his hit podcast he hosts called, Don't Quill The Messenger and just what is the Shakespeare Authorship Question? Also head over to the link below and get your tickets (physical and virtual) for his upcoming theatre event. Steven and his wife Annie will be lead roles in Pygmalion, at the Barnstormers Theatre, starting on October 23rd, 2020 (dates below). Get Tickets today - https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?ticketing=barns Dates and Times for Pygmalion at Barnstormers Theatre Friday Oct 30, 20207:30 PM - 10:00 PM PDT October 23rd - November 8thFridays and Saturdays at 7:30 PMSundays at 2:00 PMNo performance on Halloween Take a listen to the Don't Quill The Messenger Podcast that Steven Hosts - https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/ Transcription Brian: Steven Sabel is the Information Coordinator for the city of Grants Pass. A position he's held for the past year after moving his family to Grants Pass from the LA region of Southern California where he owned and operated his own Theatre Company for eight years. He's an award winning producer and director with more than 130 successful productions to his name. He has an extensive background in journalism, public relations, marketing and the performing arts. Welcome to Grants Pass VIP. Steven: Well, I'm thrilled to be here. I don't consider myself a VIP in any terms or under any circumstances. But I'm thrilled to have been asked to be your guest today and talk to you about how I came to become a Grants Passien. I don't even know yet if that's exactly how you refer to Grants Pass residents. But it's the one that I've seem too stick with since moving here. As you mentioned, in the intro a little over a year ago, my family and I are very proud to be Grants Passien's now. And I'm happy to be here. Brian: Yeah, that's great. So why Grants Pass of all places? How did you end up at this spot? Steven: Well, you know, my wife, her mother and stepfather moved here almost 15 years ago, to be closer to her brother and his family who lived in the Salem area. And so they chose Grants Pass as a means of not having to go quite so far north, so they could still venture down into California to visit California family and relatives. But to be in Oregon, and not California, and to enjoy all that Grants Pass and its surrounding area has to offer, which as you know, is one of the best places in all of Oregon, if not all the country, if not all the world. So when I met Annie, my wife 10 years ago, very early on in our relationship, we knew that it was going to become a very serious relationship. And that sparked our first trip up here. It was the, you know, come spend some time with mom and step dad and sister and brother in law who also live in Eugene close by. So it was sort of, you know, this guy's really a thing and get to know the family better, kind of a weekend trip. And that was my first introduction to Grants Pass. So over the 10 years that we've been together, we've been married seven. Now we just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary on September 14. Over that 10 year span, we would come up here at least once a year, usually two to three times a year, over that period of time. So during that time, I came to know more about the community, I came to know more about the Rogue River. Their property is right on the Applegate River. I came to fall in love with our beautiful historic quaint downtown ...

Preacher: Rev. Steven Well, UPCI Missionary to Chile

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rachel: You were talking about Earth Hour and that's switching the lights off is one way to save electricity and protect the environment. What other things do you do in your life to save for example water?Steven: Well, as for me, I recycle all my waste. I also, as for water, before brushing teeth, I have a cup. I just fill the cup and then use it. I don't know if you do it. Do you do it?Rachel: Actually, I have to confess, I don't save water very efficiently. I usually leave the tap running when I'm brushing my teeth, so I will try.Do you have any other tips for saving water?Steven: Well, start off buying a cup before you brush your teeth, and of course, try to close the tap. When you're trying to like throw trash or something, try to separate your trash, and of course, turn off any electricity that you're not using. Unplug them because even if you don't use it, and you have a plug, it will use electricity.Rachel: Thank you. So do you always unplug your laptop computer when you go to sleep or do you sometimes leave it running?Steven: I actually plug my laptop. I will charge it fully and then I will unplug it and use it -- all the battery, so I guess I do, and especially I don't use my laptop. For my laptop I just use it for class, so pretty much yes.Rachel: Well, my computers very old, and I'm always scared if I turn it off that it won't start up again, so I leave mine on all the time. I think I'm the worst environmentalist. But I do recycle a lot of our trash, and I also have never owned a car, so I take public transport everywhere. Do you have a car?Steven: I do have a car. However, I try not to use it, because if I use it I will just take the whole family: my parents and my sisters. And as for shopping, I will just take public transportation because it's right almost really near to my house.Rachel: In Costa Rica, do you actually need a car to travel between places or is public transport very good?Steven: Compare Costa Rica with other countries, for example, the United States or Japan, Costa Rica doesn't have the railroads. It doesn't have the subways. But we do have a good bus, transportation, and it's pretty much really cheap.Rachel: So Steven you've inspired me to be more environmentally friendly, so I think I'm gonna go and buy a cup so I can brush my teeth and save water.Steven: Great idea. Thank you Rachel.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rachel: You were talking about Earth Hour and that's switching the lights off is one way to save electricity and protect the environment. What other things do you do in your life to save for example water?Steven: Well, as for me, I recycle all my waste. I also, as for water, before brushing teeth, I have a cup. I just fill the cup and then use it. I don't know if you do it. Do you do it?Rachel: Actually, I have to confess, I don't save water very efficiently. I usually leave the tap running when I'm brushing my teeth, so I will try.Do you have any other tips for saving water?Steven: Well, start off buying a cup before you brush your teeth, and of course, try to close the tap. When you're trying to like throw trash or something, try to separate your trash, and of course, turn off any electricity that you're not using. Unplug them because even if you don't use it, and you have a plug, it will use electricity.Rachel: Thank you. So do you always unplug your laptop computer when you go to sleep or do you sometimes leave it running?Steven: I actually plug my laptop. I will charge it fully and then I will unplug it and use it -- all the battery, so I guess I do, and especially I don't use my laptop. For my laptop I just use it for class, so pretty much yes.Rachel: Well, my computers very old, and I'm always scared if I turn it off that it won't start up again, so I leave mine on all the time. I think I'm the worst environmentalist. But I do recycle a lot of our trash, and I also have never owned a car, so I take public transport everywhere. Do you have a car?Steven: I do have a car. However, I try not to use it, because if I use it I will just take the whole family: my parents and my sisters. And as for shopping, I will just take public transportation because it's right almost really near to my house.Rachel: In Costa Rica, do you actually need a car to travel between places or is public transport very good?Steven: Compare Costa Rica with other countries, for example, the United States or Japan, Costa Rica doesn't have the railroads. It doesn't have the subways. But we do have a good bus, transportation, and it's pretty much really cheap.Rachel: So Steven you've inspired me to be more environmentally friendly, so I think I'm gonna go and buy a cup so I can brush my teeth and save water.Steven: Great idea. Thank you Rachel.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rachel: So Steven, we've been talking about Costa Rica and how beautiful nature is there and how important it is to preserve it. What do you do in your life to save the environment or to protect the environment?Steven: It's almost daily that I think about this question that you just asked me. For example, in my university, I made this project for promoting Earth Hour which is just turning off the lights for one hour and enjoy a concert or some activity that doesn't require electricity. This Earth Hour is actually produced or created in Australia but we just trying to promote eco-systems, eco-friendly programs to the world.Rachel: That sounds great, so how many people attended the event?Steven: More than two hundred people from the university came in and watch and enjoyed and actually, all of them stayed and we also attracted faculty people which we never thought they would ever come and it's impressive that all these people actually wanted to make a change to the world.Rachel: So that sounds like an amazing project Steven. If other students in universities around the world wanted to organize something like it, what were the steps you went through to organize that event?Steven: Well, this even was mostly already planned by this organization called earth hour of course. However, in order to make the idea to actually work, we went through lots of paperwork. We tried to recruit as many people through advertisement and trying to be as eco-friendly as possible by reducing paper, and also we tried to recruit activities from the university in order to promote people to come in and enjoy this wonderful concert, and of course, we had some marshmallow[棉花软糖], chocolate, cracker which attracted most of the people.Rachel: That sounds wonderful. So you had the barbeque as well as the concert and then candlelight as well. Is that right?Steven: Yeah, I actually had candles which is lighting the concert and of course the barbeque. This was the main attraction for people but also because of this, they learned that by turning off one hour of light they can actually survive. They can actually survive without the internet or turning on the lights and doing their homework

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Rachel: So Steven, we've been talking about Costa Rica and how beautiful nature is there and how important it is to preserve it. What do you do in your life to save the environment or to protect the environment?Steven: It's almost daily that I think about this question that you just asked me. For example, in my university, I made this project for promoting Earth Hour which is just turning off the lights for one hour and enjoy a concert or some activity that doesn't require electricity. This Earth Hour is actually produced or created in Australia but we just trying to promote eco-systems, eco-friendly programs to the world.Rachel: That sounds great, so how many people attended the event?Steven: More than two hundred people from the university came in and watch and enjoyed and actually, all of them stayed and we also attracted faculty people which we never thought they would ever come and it's impressive that all these people actually wanted to make a change to the world.Rachel: So that sounds like an amazing project Steven. If other students in universities around the world wanted to organize something like it, what were the steps you went through to organize that event?Steven: Well, this even was mostly already planned by this organization called earth hour of course. However, in order to make the idea to actually work, we went through lots of paperwork. We tried to recruit as many people through advertisement and trying to be as eco-friendly as possible by reducing paper, and also we tried to recruit activities from the university in order to promote people to come in and enjoy this wonderful concert, and of course, we had some marshmallow[棉花软糖], chocolate, cracker which attracted most of the people.Rachel: That sounds wonderful. So you had the barbeque as well as the concert and then candlelight as well. Is that right?Steven: Yeah, I actually had candles which is lighting the concert and of course the barbeque. This was the main attraction for people but also because of this, they learned that by turning off one hour of light they can actually survive. They can actually survive without the internet or turning on the lights and doing their homework

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Steven you've been talking a lot about adventures you can do in your country. Do you have any stories of adventure that's happened to you in your own country of Costa Rica?Steven: Well, when I was in middle school, my school decided to take all the students in my grade to go to this place called Punta Mona where it's just the tip of Costa Rica. It's located northeast of Costa Rica. This place is … that I went is just mainly in the forest. I was living there for one week without electricity, without any technology, and we were using biodegradable[能进行生物降解的] products, for example, cactus, washing face products which you don't really find in the markets, and also we were eating nothing out of meat. We were only eating leaves. We were eating plants. We were eating vegetables that was in the ground, just walking through and we just found them. This is really wonderful. We were also kayaking which is wonderful for me. Canoping. We were growing some plants for later. And of course, we were living with the bugs. It was horrible that we were getting bitten all the time, but we found, like, for example, some herbal which we just applied and the insects would just disappear from thin air. You would never see them again if you use this herbal, and this just educates people how the environment is so important. You don't need drugs from the pharmaceuticals[制药的] to just survive. You can use plants. You can use the trees and all these leaves which you can use.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Steven you've been talking a lot about adventures you can do in your country. Do you have any stories of adventure that's happened to you in your own country of Costa Rica?Steven: Well, when I was in middle school, my school decided to take all the students in my grade to go to this place called Punta Mona where it's just the tip of Costa Rica. It's located northeast of Costa Rica. This place is … that I went is just mainly in the forest. I was living there for one week without electricity, without any technology, and we were using biodegradable[能进行生物降解的] products, for example, cactus, washing face products which you don't really find in the markets, and also we were eating nothing out of meat. We were only eating leaves. We were eating plants. We were eating vegetables that was in the ground, just walking through and we just found them. This is really wonderful. We were also kayaking which is wonderful for me. Canoping. We were growing some plants for later. And of course, we were living with the bugs. It was horrible that we were getting bitten all the time, but we found, like, for example, some herbal which we just applied and the insects would just disappear from thin air. You would never see them again if you use this herbal, and this just educates people how the environment is so important. You don't need drugs from the pharmaceuticals[制药的] to just survive. You can use plants. You can use the trees and all these leaves which you can use.

文章来源于微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Steven, you're from Costa Rica. Now, I look on the internet sometimes for really cool adventures, and Costa Rica's always up there for these wild things you can do, like Kayaking, surfing, windsurfing, nature hikes, volcano hikes and stuff. Have you done any of these things in your country?Steven: If you haven't done all these activities in Costa Rica, you pretty much are not in Costa Rica. And Costa Rica is mostly composed of these activities. You can surf in both seas, because we have both seas. We also kayak. Kayak you can go through the forest in Costa Rica. You can go inside, look at the roots of Costa Rica and also rock climbing. Rock climbing ... we got tons of mountains, everywhere. You can see them everywhere and if you see a mountain, you can climb it.Todd: So of all these activities, sounds like you've done them all, which is your favorite?Steven: My favorite I think is kayaking because you just goto the inside of the forest. You go inside. You can see animals moving around. You can see the sea where fishes are just swimming through you. And of course, if you are a nature lover as me, I would recommend kayaking.Todd: So when you do this, do you actually have to own your own equipment like your own kayak and your own helmet or is it something you just rent?Steven: Well, for these places they are all available. You can rent them, but if you own one, you can take it with a kayak wherever you want, but it's more efficient and it's better for the person to just rent the kayak as they maintain it and you don't have to have lying down in your garage.Todd: Do you need training before you do this or do they just plop[撲通聲，咚] you right inside a kayak[獨木舟，單人小船] and push you downstream?Steven: Actually kayaking in Costa Rica is not like throwing you down the river. The water is chill, and you don't need any training. You just go hop into the kayak and start moving.Todd: Sounds good man. I want to go.

文章来源于微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Steven, you're from Costa Rica. Now, I look on the internet sometimes for really cool adventures, and Costa Rica's always up there for these wild things you can do, like Kayaking, surfing, windsurfing, nature hikes, volcano hikes and stuff. Have you done any of these things in your country?Steven: If you haven't done all these activities in Costa Rica, you pretty much are not in Costa Rica. And Costa Rica is mostly composed of these activities. You can surf in both seas, because we have both seas. We also kayak. Kayak you can go through the forest in Costa Rica. You can go inside, look at the roots of Costa Rica and also rock climbing. Rock climbing ... we got tons of mountains, everywhere. You can see them everywhere and if you see a mountain, you can climb it.Todd: So of all these activities, sounds like you've done them all, which is your favorite?Steven: My favorite I think is kayaking because you just goto the inside of the forest. You go inside. You can see animals moving around. You can see the sea where fishes are just swimming through you. And of course, if you are a nature lover as me, I would recommend kayaking.Todd: So when you do this, do you actually have to own your own equipment like your own kayak and your own helmet or is it something you just rent?Steven: Well, for these places they are all available. You can rent them, but if you own one, you can take it with a kayak wherever you want, but it's more efficient and it's better for the person to just rent the kayak as they maintain it and you don't have to have lying down in your garage.Todd: Do you need training before you do this or do they just plop[撲通聲，咚] you right inside a kayak[獨木舟，單人小船] and push you downstream?Steven: Actually kayaking in Costa Rica is not like throwing you down the river. The water is chill, and you don't need any training. You just go hop into the kayak and start moving.Todd: Sounds good man. I want to go.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:　VOA英语每日一听Rachel: So, Steven, you're from Costa Rica, and I've heard it's an amazingly beautiful country, and I've seen some of pictures you've shown us in class. Do you get a lot of tourists going?Steven: In Costa Rica we are considered one of the most important places where there's mostly rainforest. We are composed of 4% of the world's natural forest. But this is increasing due to the fact that Brazil's cutting down the trees.Rachel: So, do most tourists go to Costa Rica for eco-tourism or are there any other reasons?Steven: Most of the people that go to Costa Rica is not only due to the environment, like going to see the trees, volcanoes, animals, but they also come to Costa Rica because they want get plastic surgeries because in Costa Rica it's really cheap. Also they travel to Costa Rica in order to retire because Costa Rica is also considered one of the world's cheapest living costs in the world.Rachel: Wow, I didn't know so many people went there for medical tourism. So that's really interesting. What kind of countries do they come from?Steven: Well, when I was on the plane going to Japan I found it was packed of people with bandages and they all were going to the United States and this just surprised me that people we coming and having surgery and leaving the country.Rachel: Yeah, that's amazing. And you said as well you have people coming to retire. Is that changing the demographics of the country?Steven: Actually, when people are coming into Costa Rica, it's really good due to ... they bring money into the country, but one thing that is really bad is that they are cutting trees in order to live next to the forest. They're killing off animals in order to live next to the beaches, and this is one of the big problems that Costa Rica is facing.Rachel: So how are the authorities or people in Costa Rica trying to protect those areas of natural beauty?Steven: Currently Costa Rica is trying to .... like the government is trying to protect these places however there are places where the government cannot interfere so organizations and schools are collecting money in order to buy these properties and let them unused, uninhabited. For example in the case in my school, I donated 500 Koolon which is around one dollar and we collected for several years and finally, we bought a chunk of land and currently no one is living there, and the forest and the animals living there are untouched.Rachel: That's so cool. So you own some of the rain forests.Steven: Yeah, pretty much I do.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:　VOA英语每日一听Rachel: So, Steven, you're from Costa Rica, and I've heard it's an amazingly beautiful country, and I've seen some of pictures you've shown us in class. Do you get a lot of tourists going?Steven: In Costa Rica we are considered one of the most important places where there's mostly rainforest. We are composed of 4% of the world's natural forest. But this is increasing due to the fact that Brazil's cutting down the trees.Rachel: So, do most tourists go to Costa Rica for eco-tourism or are there any other reasons?Steven: Most of the people that go to Costa Rica is not only due to the environment, like going to see the trees, volcanoes, animals, but they also come to Costa Rica because they want get plastic surgeries because in Costa Rica it's really cheap. Also they travel to Costa Rica in order to retire because Costa Rica is also considered one of the world's cheapest living costs in the world.Rachel: Wow, I didn't know so many people went there for medical tourism. So that's really interesting. What kind of countries do they come from?Steven: Well, when I was on the plane going to Japan I found it was packed of people with bandages and they all were going to the United States and this just surprised me that people we coming and having surgery and leaving the country.Rachel: Yeah, that's amazing. And you said as well you have people coming to retire. Is that changing the demographics of the country?Steven: Actually, when people are coming into Costa Rica, it's really good due to ... they bring money into the country, but one thing that is really bad is that they are cutting trees in order to live next to the forest. They're killing off animals in order to live next to the beaches, and this is one of the big problems that Costa Rica is facing.Rachel: So how are the authorities or people in Costa Rica trying to protect those areas of natural beauty?Steven: Currently Costa Rica is trying to .... like the government is trying to protect these places however there are places where the government cannot interfere so organizations and schools are collecting money in order to buy these properties and let them unused, uninhabited. For example in the case in my school, I donated 500 Koolon which is around one dollar and we collected for several years and finally, we bought a chunk of land and currently no one is living there, and the forest and the animals living there are untouched.Rachel: That's so cool. So you own some of the rain forests.Steven: Yeah, pretty much I do.

How to Get Over the Fear of Buying Property (1070) Transcript: Steven:                Steven and Jill here. Jill:                          Good day. Steven:                Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill:                          And I'm Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steven:                Today, Jill and I talk about how to get over the fear of buying property. Seems like such an interesting, funny, incredibly unnecessary topic, but I know it's- Jill:                          Oh my gosh, are you serious? Steven:                Yeah, to me it does. Jill:                          To me it's a necessary. Steven:                Yeah. Jill:                          Unnecessary. Just because you have no fear and I have no fear, it doesn't mean- Steven:                Any fear of buying real estate at all. Jill:                          I do not. Steven:                Have you ever? Jill:                          No. Steven:                Neither have I. Jill:                          Hold on a moment. That does not mean that everybody's that way. If it's one thing I have learned. Steven:                Well you just cut me off in the middle of the sentence, but that's okay. Jill:                          I'm sorry. I didn't know you were going there. Steven:                You know what we should do that's so, it's going to be annoying to the listener, but really fun for us. Jill:                          So sorry. Steven:                Every single sentence the other person says, just cut them off. Jill:                          Not nice. Steven:                Go ahead, Jill. Jill:                          No I didn't mean to do that. Steven:                It's not a trap, I mean it. Go ahead. Jill:                          Finish your thing. Steven:                No, I can't remember what I was going to say. Jill:                          Oh, well, sorry. Steven:                Look, this show is all about learning how to buy and sell real estate, so it's not really about Jill and I at all. So what comes easy to us might be incredibly difficult for somebody and vice versa. So this topic came up because we have a lot of new staff right now, and I'm learning by watching how they're doing deals and what they're bringing to the table that adds to what Jill and I can bring to the table. You know, there's some concern about ... you know what I think this really shows really about, and then I'll let you take over, because I know you have a lot of notes. It's just insecurity, not about buying real estate, it's just like fear of failure. Jill:                          Well I was going to say, I really saw it when we were talking about the topics. Not our people, the members. I talked to new members all the time. New and or thinking about jumping in, and this is one of their concerns. Steven:                Oh, okay, good. So it is necessary. Jill:                          It is necessary. And I have a lot more to say when we talk about the show. Steven:                Before we get into it, let's take to a topic posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill:                          Joe wrote, "Hello, my name is Joe. I'm 28 years old, married and no kids. New to this site and learning about land investing. I'm very interested. This is definitely something I want to do. However, I don't really know the best path to take at this point in my life. I have a decent paying job, but I hate it." Poor guy. "I'm just now getting to where I can make a change. I either want to go back to college or go back into the military. Now that I've found this, I'm not sure if I should focus on getting a better career first and then working towards investing in land, or just use the job I have now to save and get started. I don't know really what it takes to get going and I don't know h...

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hello! Can you introduce yourself, please?Steven: Sure, my name is Steven Patterson and I'm from a small town called Brentwood in Essex which is in England.Todd: OK. Essex. What part of England is that?Steven: That's in the southeast.Todd: Southeast.Steven: Yeah, yeah. It's attached to London, just next to London.Todd: Oh, OK, but you said it's a small town.Steven: It's quite small, well, relatively small. The populations about 50,000.Todd: OK, well what kind of place is your town where you grew up?Steven: Um, it's actually a very nice town. People often move into Brentwood from the surrounding towns, or from the east end of London. Um, it's quite prosperous. Well, you could, in some respects, it's a dormant town. People often travel out from Brentwood into London and they work in the city, but it's a pleasant place to live. It has lots of countryside around it. There's a very large country park. Ah, it's quite a small town but it's, at the high street it's quite small but it's quite a pleasant town to shop in.Todd: Oh, it sounds nice. Well, now if you live in a little town that's near London is it really expensive?Steven: Well, Brentwood is particularly expensive just because it's a desirable place to live and it's proximity to London also makes it, the housing is quite expensive, even a town next to it would have much cheaper housing.Todd: Oh, really, cause when I think of a small British village, you know, I think of really old houses, and nothing's changed, so do you have modern stuff, like do you have a health club and a movie theater and things like that?Steven: Uh, I think the cinema in Brentwood actually closed down, with the advent of out of town shopping centers they always have their multiplex cinemas with six or eight screens and the cinema in Brentwood only had two screens and it couldn't really compete for everyone has cars these days so they can easily travel to big shopping centers, so that closed down, however, yeah, it has a very nice health center and as I said lots of parks to play. There are lots of opportunities to exercise and do various forms of recreation.Todd: Wow, sounds like a nice place to live.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: Now Steven, I'm single and, but you are married and you are a father, correct?Steven: That is correct, yeah.Todd: OK. I'm just curious. What is it like being a father?Steven: Ah, right. OK, well, I think if I first of all talk about what it was like not being a father, being me and not being a father. I think I used to make the most of my free time, well, in fact, I didn't make the most of my free time. I was a very lazy person. I was an incredible time waster, so I would have all of this free time to make use of and I would probably just sit in front of the TV, or I'd probably go to a pub and drink, but anyway I took my time for granted. I thought I have this time. It wasn't such a precious thing for me. I had so much of it.Once I became a father, suddenly my time disappeared but strangely enough, now that I've become a father and I've, it's taught me to appreciate the time I have. My time is now very limited. My work has become busier but I actually make much more use of my time now than when I did so much of it. It's kind of strange.Todd: And how many children do you have?Steven: Ah, two boys,Todd: Oh, two boys.Steven: Yep, they're both still very young. They keep us very busy. The eldest is four and the youngest is three.Todd: Wow!Steven: So they need, they still need quite a lot of attention.Todd: Yeah, so when you first have kids do you lose a lot of sleep? I'm always worried that I won't be able to sleep.Steven: Well, something that carried over from my previous lifestyle was an ability to sleep very well, and, um, fortunately, I have a very understanding wife so if the children woke up, yeah, well because I had to work my wife was, my wife tended to be responsible. She would look after the children if they woke up during the evening, during the night, sorry, and I'm such a good sleeper that even if they were crying incredibly loudly I could just go back to sleep. I don't think there are many fathers like me. I've spoken to some other fathers and they don't have the same talent as I do.Todd: Oh, well, thanks, Steven.

Danny talks to Steven Spohn about growing up as a gamer with a disability, and the work he does at the Ablegamers charity to make games more accessible. (Recorded January 10th) iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,913 Patrons. -------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip; the podcast about people who play and make video games. I'm your host Danny O'Dwyer and today I'm joined by somebody who kind of has a finger in both of the pies we generally talk about; people who play games and also people who make games. We're gonna talk to him about a lot of different areas of his work and also the ways in which he enjoys playing games as well. He is the COO of AbleGamers, he is a fellow Trending Gamer nominee survivor. I am delighted to be joined by Mr. Steven Spohn. How are you doing my friend? - [Steven]I'm doing well. Can we just talk about pies for the next 15 minutes? - [Danny] I wanted to bring up the pie because I was trying to think about how you fit into the world of video games and, in a way, your work at AbleGamers is involved in both sides of the equation. You help individuals who have trouble accessing video games to get controllers and the means by which to play the games they wanna do, but you're also talking to game studios and hardware manufacturers about they ways in which they can make it so you don't have to do the other thing. - [Steven] Yeah. The truth is when I did the game awards video, one of the things that they captured me saying was that I don't know how I got where I am and I don't know what I'm doing and it was the absolute most truthful thing I had said during the whole piece. I don't know exactly what you would call my job. My job is literally whatever AbleGamers needs and sometimes that's talking to hardware, sometimes that's talking to developers, sometimes that's talking to fundraisers, sometimes that's talking to people with disabilities who need tech support, so I have really become the Jack of all video game trade at the moment. - [Danny] I've got a lot of questions about your work at AbleGamers and we've got some from the Patrons too. We've actually been, like, I feel like we've been working on the AbleGamers documentary, in some respect, either us having conversations or filming stuff like we did last summer, it feels like it's been going on forever and it's something that we eventually will get done. Today I kind of wanna talk a bit more about Steven; about how you came to be in the position you're in because, like you said, in a way I can't imagine anyone else doing your job, but also I couldn't imagine anyone doing your job until you did it. So, let's go all the way back. When did you start playing games or when did you start getting interested in games? - [Steven] I became interested in video games actually thanks to a friend I had made in high school. We were in a vo-tech class and we were doing AutoCAD designing and... - [Danny] Oh, cool. - [Steven] I, for just a brief hot second, I wanted to be an assistant engineer and then I wondered how much work it is and I said, "Nah". - [Danny] What was the name of the class? It sounded like volt-tech class. - [Steven] It was vo-tech. - [Danny] Vo-tech? - [Steven] Yeah, vocational technical school. - [Danny] Oh, okay, okay. - [Steven] Yeah, vo-tech is like the American, "We're not going to real school, we're going to fancy 'you're going to learn actual useful life skills' classes". - [Danny] Awesome. - [Steven] Yeah, like its where your mechanics go and all the people who are gonna do computers and what they do is, or at least in my school, you did your math and your science in the morning and then they shipped you on a bus during lunch to go to the other school. It's kinda cool. - [Danny] Wow, we had something similar in Ireland. It was called Leaving Cert. Applied and it was where all my friends who are tradesmen went. Like electricians and plumbers and then they all ended up moving to Australia anyway because the economy crashed and nobody was building houses. So you were in that class and you were learning AutoCAD. Was that the first piece of software you ever encountered? - [Steven] It was the first time that I had really worked on computers for more than a few minutes. Of course, everybody had Oregon Trail on their MathLab or whatever, but I grew up poor so we didn't own a computer and that was really the only time I got to have hands on a computer from multiple hours at a time. One of my friends there worked at a computer shop and he was telling me how he just got all these parts for computers secondhand because people would turn them in for repairs and then they wouldn't want them, so he would just end up fixing them and taking them home, and I was like, "That's amazing", so he started talking me into getting into video gaming and he told me about this fabulous game where you could go online and you could have a life and you could do amazing things like walking around the town of Britain and you could fight dragons and you could own a house, and I was like, "This is amazing", and so he sort of talked me into this persistent world, he was a Guild Master in his own right. That's how I got sucked in to Ultima Online and from there I just became super interested in the alternative reality that video games present. - [Danny] Was there an element of the escapism that appealed to you? Escapism is something that we all enjoy, but perhaps somebody in your position, maybe, was there an added element of escapism for you? - [Steven] For me it was the timing of where it hit me in life. I had gone into my senior year of high school and I had discovered friends and it sounds corny, cheesy; it's something that I'm probably gonna get up on a stage and give a TED Talk about one day, but it's interesting how our school system kind of segregates people with disabilities away from the main population if you let them. They'll put you in a special classroom and they will put you in a special room to eat lunch and they really keep you almost walled off from everyone else and I was super lucky that I had a friend who talked me into doing that and I made friends. Long story short, I sort of got a huge case of senior-itis and I just didn't want to do the school thing anymore. I wanted to go have a social life because holy crap having friends is awesome! And so I just wanted to go experience that and have fun with it and it was fantastic. The only problem was that I was just at the age where we were transitioning from middle-teens to late-teens so it was a couple of years of doing... - [Danny] Hell. - [Steven] Oh, hell! But also doing video games in your friends garage, to, "Hey, let's go to the club and pick up girls." and its like "Well, the club has a stair to get into it, so I can't do that, oh damn". So I started kind of being walled off by life. Just happenstance of things not being wheelchair accessible and here's my other friend going, "Hey, here's a world where your wheelchair doesn't eff-ing matter". I don't know if I can say swears on this show. - [Danny] Say whatever you want, man. - [Steven] Right, cool, so they were like "Who the fuck cares if you're in a wheelchair. Go play this world where everybody's equal", and I was like "Oh, this is my first experience where everything is a level playing field" and it was amazing, so... Was it escaping or was it choosing to forge a different path in life? I don't think I'll ever really know the answer to that, but consequently, through the butterfly effect, deciding to do that and take that friend's advice led me to where I am right now. - [Danny] You're an incredibly social person. I feel like everyone in the industry has met you and had a conversation with you. I've noticed that you're very good at advocating for people's time, which is something that a lot of people who like having friends and like being social, they sort of don't put themselves out there to, you know, they don't want to be a bother or something like that but I've always found you to be incredibly inviting and sort of proactive in your friendships, which I think is a really important trait, especially the older you get. Video games, in that way I suppose, have sort of provided you with a lot then, in terms of both your social life and your professional life. Is it fair to say that most of that sort of revolves around the world of games? - [Steven] I think it is now. I mean, you hit the nail right on the head. When you're in your thirties, going out and making new friendships is exceedingly difficult and we could literally talk for the rest of the podcast about the difficulties of living the disabled life and having to fit in to the norms of society. But as far as the video games industry has been, to me it's been a very welcoming and inviting place and I am super honest guy, you know, you follow me on twitter, we've been friends for a couple years now. I, to my own detriment, I am way too honest sometimes and I am sure that there are people in the industry who love me and there are people who probably wish I would just stop talking so much and I feel like if you don't have some people that think you talk too much then you're probably not making change and that's what I'm trying to do. I have terminal illnesses, I have a disability for those of you who don't know me. I am aware that there is that shot clock ticking and I don't talk about it a lot but I'm aware it's there probably more than your average person and I'm trying to use all the time I've got to do something with it. - [Danny] It's an interesting dichotomy you bring up there, in that, in many ways, who could say a bad thing about Steven and AbleGamers, you know what I mean? At least, who could say it out loud? But you are kind of creating problems for companies, right? Like you're creating a problem that, by the fact that you're even having the conversation with it was a problem that they thought didn't exist. You're fashioning it for them. Is that the case? Like, is it different now talking to companies than it was when you first started doing this work? - [Steven] The difference really is that I didn't make the problem. I shined a spotlight on a problem that was in the darkness. It was always there and the more technology advances, the less accessible it becomes, just by the very definition of advancing technology. So, we banded together, me and Mark Barlet and Craig Kaufman, and a bunch of amazing people, now AbleGamers, got together and decided that we were going to take this problem head on and we changed a multi-billion dollar industry. I tell you the weirdest thing that I could ever say to another human being because it is entirely factual, you could prove it, in fact, we're doing a documentary talking about it, so it's, you know, it's something that's kind of shock and awe to even try to talk about it, but here we are, years later, where developers went from laughing at us and walking away to now coming to talk to us, so, you know, it's pretty amazing. I am very fortunate in my position that I am able to walk all these different sides of the video game life. - [Danny] When you think about some of the ways in which you guys have changed the industry, the one that comes to mind right away, for me at least, because it's probably the most recent, is the work that you guys did with Microsoft on the, is it the Adaptive Controller, is that what the name is? - [Steven] Yeah, it's called the Adaptive Controller. - [Danny] What other stuff comes to mind for you, over the years? - [Steven] You know, I think some of the biggest were going into Harmonix and getting to talk to Alex. Sitting down in his office and doing the whole Rock Band thing and talking about the various ways that you might wanna play the game. The fastest way I can tell this anecdote is we were sitting in his office and we were talking about how, if someone wants to play the video game, how many buttons would they have to use at minimum? Could you do this if you only had three fingers on on hand? Could you do it if you were one-handed? You know, yes, no, yes, no. So we talked about that for a minute and I just came up with a question to ask; "Why did you come up with three buttons as the minimum to be able to play?" and his answer was, "Well, it's just the number that we thought was the smallest that people would ever wanna do". I said, "Well, what about somebody who only has the ability to push one button?" He said, "Well, we never thought anybody would want to be able to play Rock Band with just one button." I looked him in the face and I said, "I would." And the color just drained out of his face and he just nods his head and goes, "Okay, we'll have to work on that" and that was sort of a great beginning point for, not only my friendship with Alex, but AbleGamers as a company we have worked with Harmonix ever since and they've been really great partners of the business and I've made some good friends over there as well. It's this amazing thing of how, one of my friends put it best, my job title is to go out and be who I am very visibly and let people learn lessons from my experiences and I've been able to thread this needle of using personal experience and second hand experience from the gamers I've met along the way to then translate that into the friendships that I've forged in the industry and then turn that into making changes for other people. So it's this tightrope act of making sure to be friends with everybody because the only way that you really can get people to make change is if they want to. If they don't want to, they're not gonna change. - [Danny] When you think about changing those games, were there games when you were growing up that you were like "Oh man, I'd really love to play that", but then you realized that there were barriers in your way to doing so? - [Steven] Yeah, I can tell you that I wanted to play Dance Dance Revolution and that'd be a great sound bite. Of course I'm in a wheelchair but I've always been a very realistic kind of guy. I am a logic-based person, I have the weird sort or emotional Spock thing going on where I wear my heart on my sleeve and I will fight for anybody if I believe in them, but there has to be logic in my brain, also why this is a thing, and I'm never gonna be on Dancing With The Stars. I'm never gonna be a ninja. It's just not in the cards for me. So I am okay with that and there was no particular game that I wanted to play that made me start advocating for people. It was simply having a disease that was advancing slowly, taking away abilities one by one, made me go, "Oh, shit, I guess I need some technology" and somewhere along the way I discovered that it was a lot more fun to help other people than to help myself. - [Danny] What was it like then for you, trying to gain access to that technology? Presumably you were doing that before AbleGamers existed, so was it a case where your conditions were getting worse and you were effectively looking for solutions as the issues presented themselves? - [Steven] So it's interesting when you're doing a technology upgrade as someone with a disability because it's often a mismatch of just MacGyver-ing your way through technology. To eat potato chips, I used to use hot dog tongs as I couldn't lift up my biceps, but I could rotate my wrist so I would just pick up one chip at a time with a hot dog tong. It's the same thing with video games. I used a little tiny dental hygiene tool that has a little crook on the end of it, has a little rubber tip and I would use that to push W, A, S, D when I couldn't reach it and operate the mouse with the other hand. So I was already using technology, it was just this way... Doing things the low-tech way was beginning to start to fail, so I had to find a little bit more high-tech solutions. - [Danny] And how did you do that? Did you fashion stuff yourself? Were there people out there making custom rigs for people? - [Steven] Well, you know, I started doing it by finding ways to play video games with only the mouse and just getting rid of keyboard entirely. Fortunately, I had found a program called TrackIR which generally allows you to look around in the cockpit of a Microsoft Flight Simulator and when you're looking around, you're also telling the computer to push different directions and I found that you could use this to push keyboard buttons and it was a totally unintended thing that this program was offering. They were trying to use it to help people have a more virtual experience, more immersion, and I ended up using it as a disability tool and now I teach others how to do the same thing. - [Danny] That's incredible. So you sort of hacked it in a way to be quick key-binding stuff. How many buttons could you set up on a TrackIR? How many directional ways are there to use it? - [Steven] So the best way to think about it is to think about a dartboard. - [Danny] Okay. - [Steven] If you think about each position, each little block, being a different key then the laser pointer that is attached to the brim of one of my hats allows the laser pointer to move around based on the way I'm looking. - [Danny] Right. - [Steven] So I can move it to whatever block. The only downside of that technology, of course, is if you're thinking about moving in a straight line. If you gotta get to block number three, you gotta run through block number one through two. - [Danny] Right. - [Steven] So, it sort of becomes this interesting way of lining up the buttons so that they don't do the wrong thing at the wrong time. - [Danny] It sounds like key-binding is something that is one of the most powerful ways of allowing people to use controllers in these interesting ways. You say using a mouse only; I imagine setting up 'run' to be right-click or something like that would maybe fix one sort of problem. We talk about the hardware issue, but also one of the biggest issues in games that has sort of been slowly fixed over the past five, 10 years, well, maybe closer to five, is the ability to re-bind controls, which certainly has never been something that was standard and is a lot more common now. Is that a big issue with accessibility as well? - [Steven] Yeah, re-mapping has gotten a lot better. Now, re-mapping is almost as standard as closed captioning is for TV shows and movies. That's a lot thanks to the groundwork that people have done, demanding it to be a thing. It's not just a disability thing. Everybody loves for you to be able to re-map things so that they're more comfortable, so that your hand isn't stretched out in weird ways that the developers didn't quite think somebody would try to do. So it's good for everybody, it's good design and it allows us to be comfortable playing video games. - [Danny] So what other big games were you a fan of? Or what other games were you a big fan of, rather, back in those days, back in the Ultima Online days? Eventually those doors closed, but you could've got back into that fantasy world. So what other games are your favorites when you look back? - [Steven] Back then Diablo was huge, I loved that game. Star Wars Galaxies actually was the bait that Mark used to get me into AbleGamers. - [Danny] How'd he do that? - [Steven] Okay, so I loved Star Wars Galaxies so much. Star Wars Galaxies was, and maybe is, my favorite game of all time and they had just changed it to the NGE and the NGE made it more into an action simulator game, which took away a lot of the accessibility. - [Danny] Oh, really? - [Steven] Yeah, in SWG, the original vanilla version, you had macros, you had slash commands, you had buttons on the screen that you could click, you could do macro ability to do more than one action at a time. It was a very very friendly game for people with disabilities and they didn't even realize they were designing it that way. They were just trying to make it friendly for everybody. So, it just happened to be accessible and I happened to latch on to it as the most amazing thing since pizza and it was great and they changed it and then, right after that, they were gonna change it again for the combat upgrade and they were gonna make it into this, I don't even know what kind of 'Barbie Ken Dreamhouse' thing they were trying to do with this game, but it was just destroying it from the inside out and then then closed it so I literally told Mark that I would come work for AbleGamers, volunteer my time, and at the time I was just being a writer and trying to help the cause, and I would do it, but only if he would give me the email for Smedley so I could tell him off. - [Danny] And did you? - [Steven] I did, yeah, absolutely. - [Danny] Oh, God. - [Steven] I wonder if he still has that email. - [Danny] Did he respond? - [Steven] No. I was nobody then, so just an angry guy yelling at him, which he had a bunch of those already. - [Danny] How long is the email, do you reckon? Is it like one paragraph or was it like 20 paragraphs? - [Steven] It was like five paragraphs with expletives and doing something between rational explanation of why he should change it back to, you know, "I hope both your eyebrows catch on fire!" It was not my most refined moment but I was just so passionate about it. - [Danny] Yeah, shoot your shot, fair enough. So what have you been playing at the moment? We were playing a bunch of PUBG I remember last year and then you went off and joined the Fortnite gang. You said you could never be a ninja but there you are, every day, playing Fortnite. Are you still playing it? - [Steven] Actually, no. I don't play Fortnite as much as I used to. It is still a fun game for me, but I've actually began to fall away from first-person shooters a little bit. I've been doing the Rocket League thing, I've been really into Kingdom: Two Crowns recently, just playing that 8-bit life. Yeah, it's the third installment of this franchise where you're just a little dude or a queen that's got a kingdom to take care of and there's little greedy things that are trying to take all your money and beat up your people to get it, so there's no fighting involved so, I don't know, I'm one of those gamers that, I used to run a violent game like a Diablo and then I would run The Sims Online. I would just bounce back and forth to satisfy both sides of my brain, so I guess right now I'm just like, "I don't wanna shoot people, I just wanna watch little monsters be murdered." - [Danny] Okay so by that rationale, Rocket League is the violent game? - [Steven] Yeah, well, if you've ever seen me play Rocket League, it depends how many times I get scored on. - [Danny] Oh dude, I swear to God, I have never been as angry and stressed out as when I play Rocket League online. - [Steven] It's like a stress test, they should replace that at the doctor's office. - [Danny] I swear to God, I had to start playing on PS4 because then I couldn't type shit at people. Then I just started doing it on that as well, bringing up the little PlayStation keyboard. In between goals where you've hardly any time to trash talk anyone and you just figure out ways of doing it. - [Steven] What a save, what a save, what a save! - [Danny] Oh, yeah, totally and all that sarcastic stuff for sure, yeah. It's ridiculous. Did you do a 'Top 10' list or anything for 2018? - [Steve] You know, I think I'm one of the three video game industry people that didn't do a 'Top 10' post. - [Danny] You need to get Alex Navarro over at Giant Bomb to email you as well next year. - [Steven] Apparently, yeah. Next year I need to get on the list, I was like, "every one of my friends has a list, what the hell?" Damn. - [Danny] So what was the stuff last year that really caught your eye? Were you playing a lot of those games? Well, playing Rocket League I guess, since 2017. - [Steven]Yeah, it was a good year for video games, man. The one I wish I could have played the most was Spider-Man. Man, that looked like an amazing game. I couldn't personally play it, so it was actually one of the only games that I sat on Twitch and watched friends play from the beginning to the end. It was so good. I loved it so much. - [Danny] Is that because it's a console game and it's just the accessibility issue? - [Steven] It was the way that the accessibility was set up was just a little bit rough for trying to aim and change your weapons. Anything that has a weapon wheel just adds another layer of complication for people who have a limited number of buttons that they can push, so, yeah. Even if you were using a QuadStick on a console, the weapon wheel is just difficult, so, you know. - [Danny] How does the QuadStick interface with the PlayStation? Because obviously Microsoft now has a controller that's like officially doing it. Do you have to hack it to get it to work? - [Steven] Yeah, its just an adaptor. - [Danny] Oh, really, just like off the shelf? You just get it off Amazon or something, or eBay? - [Steven] Well no, it's not off the shelf, but there are adapters out there that let you use PlayStation and Xbox things, vice versa, depending on which console you need to use the most, so we can put a QuadStick on either one. It doesn't really work on a Swtich, unfortunately, looking at you Nintendo. But, yeah, PlayStation and Xbox works just fine. - [Danny] Is it the type of thing that they know about and they're cool with or they know about it and they're just gonna go, "Ah, whatever"? Like what is it that Nintendo are doing that stops people being able to make adapters for that? - [Steven] You know, I'm not really sure what I can say, legally. I can tell you that it's still works on Xbox and PlayStation and it doesn't work on Nintendo. - [Danny] Fair enough. Sorry, you were saying, what other games are you playing? - [Steven] The God of War series was, of course, super amazing. I had a lot of strange indie taste as well, like Tricky Towers was a really good game I found. Just something sort of different. I loved Into the Breach. I think the only one I've lost a lot of time into was Odyssey. Odyssey is just so good; I can't stop playing it. - [Danny] My wife is playing it too. It's the most game I've ever seen. - [Steven] It is ridiculous, it is. I mean there were so many good games that came out last year, but Odyssey is maybe the first one in forever that I've been playing off-stream. There's usually, for me, only two kinds of games that I play; either I play them for work or I play them for stream work. Don't you get it where it's like, I'm sure, just like you, I don't like play just to play very much, so when I do, a game's gotta be great and Odyssey was fantastic. - [Danny] Did you play the Origins? The one that came out the year before? - [Steven] I didn't. You know, Odyssey was actually my first venture into Assassin's Creed world. - [Danny] Oh, cool. It's crazy how people are, I feel like there's two groups of people; there's the people who played so much Origins that they just can't play Odyssey because it's just like, it's just so too much, too quickly and then there's people who didn't play Origins who are loving Odyssey because it's a lot of the same sort of systems and stuff that worked there, but in a much bigger map with so much stuff. It's ridiculous how much stuff is in that game. Like how much of the map have you uncovered? My wife's been playing for months and like a third of the map has been opened up. - [Steven] You know, I probably have got a little over half of it at this point, and it just seems like the game just keeps going and, I gotta say, I'm into it though. It's one of those games where I'm finding I don't mind how much time has been sunk into it. Normally by like hour 50 I'm like, "Alright, come on, we gotta wrap this up", but this one I'm like, "You know, I could probably play this off and on for the next year, I'd be alright with that." - [Danny] What is it about it? Is it the setting or the combat or is it the ticking off the things on the list? There's a lot of 'do these things' and then you do the things and they give you stuff for it and you're like, "Yeah, give me more things to do." Is it that? - [Steven] I think it's a combination of the story and the never-ending tasks. I love the bounty hunting system, oh my goodness. I love how you just randomly get hunted and then you get to kill them and then more people hunt you. It's just awesome. - [Danny] That's rad. What are you playing at the moment? So you're playing that at the moment still, are you? - [Steven] Yeah, I mean whenever I get spare time, that's where I'm sinking my time right now. That was after I beat Far Cry. I don't know if you got a chance to sink your teeth into that but, man, that was a mind trip. - [Danny] Yeah, that was another one, my wife is basically just on the Ubisoft open world ticket at the moment, so that was another one I watched her play a lot in the evenings. Had you played previous Far Cry games? Was that your first foray into that one as well? - [Steven] That was another first note as well. It seemed to be my year to break into story games. I guess now we're looking back at it and I liked it but, this is gonna turn into spoiler-cast if I'm not careful, but, man, the ending in that game. At the end of the day I am a writer who just happens to be doing other things right now and so I love, love, love a good story. So, if it had something that can just grab my attention and make me wanna find out what happens at the end, then I'm in. - [Danny] You're one of the first people we're talking to in 2019, I mean you're one of the first people we're talking to on this podcast, this is the 5th episode. I feel like I haven't been able to stop and take stock of what's coming out this year. Is there anything, I have a list in front of me here but is there anything off the top of your head that you're looking forward to? Because I feel like 2018 actually ended up being a fantastic year but I worry that we ended up going into a slower one, when that happens. But is there anything off the top of your head that's popping out that you're looking forward to in 2019? - [Steven] I don't know, it can't be a slower year than last year. Last year was just boom, boom, boom. I would say, right off the top, and the same thing everyone is gonna say is Anthem. If Anthem is bad then I am going to riot. I'm going to grab a pitchfork and I'm going to the studio and I'm gonna stand there and be like, "You guys fix it." I'm gonna do it in a very non-threatening way. I'm just gonna stand there and it's gonna be a safety pitchfork, there's gonna be little plastic things on top of it. - [Danny]Orange tips. - [Steven] Yeah, orange tips on it. I'm gonna have a peaceful vest on me and just be like, "I just want you to fix the game." - [Danny] Well you say you're a fan of stories, does that mean, are you a fan of Dragon Age and Mass Effect, the other BioWare games? - [Steven] Oh yeah, oh my goodness. Dragon Age: Origins is... So Dragon Age: Origins, I love it so much, so anybody who really is a fan of mine may have picked up my one and only book that I have out there and if you look hard enough at the book, you'll see that one of the main characters is actually nearly directly pulled out of the Origins video game. - [Danny] Oh, careful, this is fucking EA man! - [Steven] I did not steal their IP, but that was like my main inspiration. It was so good. - [Danny] That's awesome. - [Steven] It was like, you know, the character and the everything just was so great to me that I was like, "I have to create my own version of this and plug it in somewhere", and I ended up doing that. - [Danny] That's right, what's the name of the book? Where can you get it? - [Steven] It's a horrible book, you don't wanna go find it. - [Danny] Hey man, I a 33 year old video game fan. I don't read books, I just buy them and put them on my shelf. - [Steven] That's fair. So the book is called The Finder. You can get it on Amazon still. I got it under my pen name, Steven Rome. Honestly, I hired an editor but the editor really kind of let me down so there's grammatical errors and there's an audio book uploaded to it. I really tried pretty hard and it sold actually pretty well. So I've actually got a screenshot. Back in the day, you could put your Amazon book up to be downloaded for 72 hours for free and I put it up to be downloaded for free and it was downloaded as much as Game of Thrones was bought. - [Danny] Oh wow. - [Steven] So I've got picture of my book right beside George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones. - [Danny] That's rad. Yeah I see it here, right here on Amazon. Go pick it up everyone, 13.95 paperback, Amazon Prime, you can have it by the time your next bowel movement comes, that's the way Amazon works now, it's pretty good. - [Steven] Yeah, if you need bad reading material, then... It's so sad too, because it's one of those things. It was a good story in my head and then it's like you can tell there's a certain point in there that I just wanted the book to be done. So I was just like, "You know what, I'm just done with it", and it goes from a very slow-paced book to "Alright, it's done." - [Danny] Steven, I feel like people go their entire lives trying to write their books so do not kill, or kick yourself over the fact that your first novel wasn't exactly what you needed it to be. That's incredible. Are you writing another one? Are you looking to write another one? Are you too busy with AbleGamers stuff? - [Steven] You know, I am super busy, but this is actually AbleGamers' 15th year. So, as I was saying to you privately when I agreed to come talk to you, not only because we're good friends and I wanted to help you launch this thing and if three of my fans will come listen, that'd be great. You know, its one of those things where I'd like to get into the writing and doing some of my own flights of fancy that I've been putting on the back burner for so long because I feel like after 15 years I've put in a little bit of blood and sweat into the cause and now maybe I can do a couple of other things I wanna do before the shot clock quite runs out. - [Danny] Well, I think there'll be a lot of people who would be interested in experiencing whatever you put out there into the universe, so... Let me tell you about this place called Patreon.com and it lets people do their dreams and get funded by the people who want to experience those dreams. - [Steven] Really, I'd never heard of that, Danny! Do you have one of those? - [Danny] Steven, can I ask you some questions from people who pay us money? - [Steven] Nope! I'm out of here, bye everybody. - [Danny] Thank you to Steve for being here. If you wanna get your questions in, go to Patreon.com/Noclip. If you're on the $5 tier you also get this podcast early. You don't get it exclusively. We had some people be like, "Hey, I can't get the podcast" and we had to be like, "No, you literally can't, everything we do is available, except the behind the scenes stuff". But if you're on the $5 tier you get this beautiful podcast early as well as a bunch of other stuff and we put the word out for some questions, we got a bunch of them. I'm gonna ask about two or three of them here. This one's from Matthew Glenn, he said, "What accessibility feature should indies and small teams prioritize when hoping to be more accessible?" Any come to mind? - [Steven] You know, I think the thing about being an indie, and I've had so many great conversations with Rami about this, indies have such a luxury of being flexible. Being an indie developer is super hard, right? It is back breaking work in a mental way. It is blood, sweat, part of your soul going into this game and here I am telling you you have to do even more. To indie developers out there, keep in mind everybody on the accessibility side understands that you didn't need one more thing to worry about, but if you add things like re-mappable keys, you add things like sliders for all of your settings, or allowing people to edit the INI files instead of keeping them hidden or encoded. Allow people to move the game as much as they can, without breaking your game or altering it, ` then let them play it your way and you'll have more sales and you'll have happier customers. It's interesting how some games tackled problems. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite indie games of 2018 called Raft. Raft was a cool little indie game where you basically were on a raft, spoiler! You had to fish junk out of the ocean and build a bigger, better raft that had air conditioning somehow, I don't know. It was a fun game but the settings in it were bare and minimal and when I reached out to say, "Hey, I can't play your game because the mouse sensitivity is very low, you capped it barely above what you'd need to move the mouse across the screen if you got an entire mousepad, not to mention you don't have the ability to re-map, you didn't have stuff like that. And within two days they turned around; they added the ability to map the mouse, the added the ability to uncap the mouse sensitivity. These are all things that don't take developers a lot of time, but if you don't do them, they can lock people out of your games. I happen to be one of the people that gets caught up in those times when you're alienated, so I always recommend, you know, do as much as you can with little effort and things like adding settings and adding re-mapping are often relatively easy, nothing is "easy" in development, but if you do it early in development cycle, it's doable without too much cost. - [Danny] Raymond Harris asked the question, "Have you tried Microsoft's new accessibility controller, if so, what do you like and dislike about it? I mean you guys were involved in the whole R and D aspect of that, is that correct? - [Steven] I was privileged to be one of the people that Microsoft pulled into it first. Me and my co-worker Craig, we were the ones that were asked to come sign some NDAs and check this out on a low key, 'here's a tablet with a drawing on it because our lawyers won't even allow you to look at the real prototypes, so here's what it looks like' kind of thing. Yeah and then from there we brought in AbleGamers and we became an entire organization to help, not just one or two of us, but everybody had a hand in making this thing better, so it was great to get to be a part of that and it's honestly going to go down in my brain as one of the highlights of my career. I had a very small part in personally bringing about a controller that is now available in freaking Walmart. Well, technically the Microsoft Store, whatever. Walmart, Microsoft Store, same difference. I'm definitely not gonna get an angry message from Microsoft PR tomorrow, its fine, right? - [Danny] Matthew Rogers asked the question, "Do you find that people with disabilities often write off video games as a hobby and don't realize that there are organizations like AbleGamers out there?" - [Steven] I do. I think one of the things that my job has become has been fighting against the stigma of being a gamer, let alone having a disability, so, in a lot of ways, 15 years ago when I got into this game and when AbleGamers first started, we were not only fighting for people with disabilities, which, back in the early 2000s and early 90s, was not as welcomed as it is now and neither is being a gamer and both of those had negative connotations on them. If you were a gamer, you're lazy. If you were disabled, you're lazy. We had to fight all these stereotypes and yeah, I think that there are so many companies out there who don't even understand what we do, what I do and my daily operations and what my company does and what even is represented by gamers with disabilities being a part of the world. I don't know that everybody's quite yet aware. I think we're making it so. I think people like Danny are helping us push the narrative into the mainstream that it's not some little niche bunch of people that just wanna play a couple of games, but gamers with disabilities are everywhere. People like Halfcoordinated who are out there on the stage of Games Done Quick, who are out there pushing, me being on award shows pushing. I think we're all doing our parts and I think everybody who is listening can do their part by saying to their friends, to their family whenever the situation comes up, that people with disabilities want to enjoy every hobby, including gaming. I think it's gonna be interesting watching companies get involved more and more as they figure this out. - [Danny] We go back and look at the commercials of the 90s, where the prevalent idea of the teenage boy, the white teenage boy, right? The able-bodied, white teenage boy was the... - [Steven] Straight, able-bodied, white teenage boy. - [Danny] Yeah, lets keep going! Eventually we'll find that gamer. The one that gave birth to us all. Do you find that accessibility and people with disabilities have a place at the table now in a way that they didn't five or 10 years ago, or it is for people like you that are visible, but for most people it's not? - [Steven] Here's the thing. I think that accessibility has come a long way in a lot of ways thanks to the work that has been done at AbleGamers and our allies and our people that care about our narrative, right? There's no question, accessibility is better. Full stop, period, end of sentence. However, to continue the conversation, if you are not somebody that has a high profile, you do not have as good of a chance of things being made accessible quickly. I am extremely privileged, in that if somebody gets a hold of me and says, "I can't play this game because of this feature being in the way", chances are I can get to a developer and say, "Hey, is there something you can do about this?" Sometimes they can do it quickly, sometimes they can't. I've had developers literally, and I will not tell you who, go behind their bosses back and find code and tell me slash commands in engines to get around the accessibility things because the publisher didn't want to deal with the problem and the developer cared enough that they were like, "Just tell them to do this and it'll be fine." Okay, cool, I am super privileged in that I can do that, but there's not a lot of people in my position that can do that and I can't do that for every single person all the time. Everybody at AbleGamers has their people that they can turn to and they can make magic happen sometimes, but there's only so many of us and only so many hours in the day, so you can't do that for everybody. What happens if you're a gamer who can't play a certain game and its because of a feature in a game and there's nothing that can be done until that feature is changed? Well, you can tweet and you can email and you can send a feedback report, but you have to wait your turn, right? So there's definitely a position of privilege there for people like you and me who are in the game industry because we have the right ears. We try to do that honorably. Danny and I try to use our power for good. At least I do, Danny, I don't know... - [Danny] No, no, honestly please don't even say us both in the same sentence because you give me credit that I do not deserve. The work that you've done is literally changing people's lives. Maybe I'm making people smile a little bit, but you're doing some work that is really affecting people in incredibly important ways. - [Steven] I think we all have a different part to play though. I think that everybody who's listening has their part to play. This magnification of positivity that I have turned my "brand" into, if you will, is 100% honesty and compassion. We're all playing a part. I think anybody who's listening to the 75 minutes of this that we've done so far is doing their part by absorbing this information that they might not have known, about the struggles of people with disabilities. They may not have known that these are problems and issues. Now they can watch out for them. Now they can be an advocate. But, to get back to the original question, you do everything that you can and I think that we're in a position that we can make as much change for as many people as we possibly can, but I think that there are minority groups who are very vocal. The LGBT community which, of course, I support and Blacks in Gaming is one of my favorite GDC groups. I support every minority I can because I know my own struggles and while I may not know theirs, I know how difficult mine were and I can imagine and empathize with their struggles and I try to amplify where I can. The problem that I always find, and it breaks my heart, is that I'll see people that I respect so much in the industry, tweeting about how we need to support races, genders and sexualities and then they'll leave out disability and I don't understand why we're still not putting disability on the same level as these other minorities. Because guaranteed every single one of those groups, there's also people with disabilities within that group. So I would like to see when we're all unifying a bit more, to say that my LGBT friends who are disabled need support, my black friends, my latino friends need support. We are all in this together and I think that if we continue to amplify each other, we'll make this battle just a little bit easier. - [Danny] Is that why you make yourself so public? Like, you talked about your brand, right? You don't strike me, I'm not gonna bullshit you, you don't strike me as someone who suffers fools, you've got an incredibly intelligent head on your shoulders and you talk about this like feel-good brand that's really really important. Do you have to be watchful of people who would try to utilize that for their own optics? Like who would try and manipulate or would try and use the feel-good narrative to make their brand look good and then ultimately not really invest in your mission in a way that is substantive? - [Steven] Oh, absolutely. It is a hard and fast rule at my place of work, that no one with a disability is to do work without being compensated in some way. It does not have to financial because sometimes the government frowns upon that kind of thing, so maybe someone who is on government assistance can't take a payment because then that could endanger their insurance, and that we would feel horrible about, so instead maybe they get a copy of the game. Maybe they get a free tablet. Maybe a new webcam, who knows? It's that you don't use people. You utilize their skills, you utilize their experiences, you do not use them. And I think that's something you have to watch out for, and again, just anybody who has followed me so far, or if you plan on following me, Danny knows all too well that I am a lover but I'm also a fighter. If I see an injustice, I will strap on a sword and I'll go to town. I have no problem with picking up the battleax and running into the fight. I am not somebody who thinks the world is rose colored and we can just all love each other because that's the right thing to do. I think sometimes there comes a time where all people must fight. - [Danny] And whenever the battle happens, I'll be, hopefully, standing right beside you, swinging my morning star as well. Steven Spohn, an absolute pleasure to talk to you as ever, my friend. Where can people follow your work? What are you up to? Where can they consume your delicious content? - [Steven]I don't want that advertisement on my phone. My most active place right now is Twitter. I find it's the best place to amplify positive messages to fight some of the darkness; you can find me @StevenSpohn and you can find me on Twitch at the acronym that is my name: SteveInSpawn, like the comic book character, and I stream on twitch five days a week, just trying to showcase that people with disabilities are out there and we're not innocent snow flowers that don't so anything but sit around and watch TV. We're out there playing games, we make dick jokes and we're funny and inappropriate and we're just human beings like everyone else and I'd encourage anyone that has a disability that happens to be listening to the amazing Danny O'Dwyer, that you too should go out and live your life as visibly as you can because that's the only way that we're gonna change the world. - [Danny] Steven, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. We'd love to have you back on if you're up for it again in the future. - [Steven] I'd be more than happy, Danny. Thanks for having me. - [Danny] No problem. Thank you, as well, for listening, everyone out there. We don't know who's up next week, but if you follow @NoClipVideo on the Twitters, you'll get an update over there. I'm @DannyODwyer on Twitter. If you have any feedback or any ideas for guests, you can also hit up our sub-Reddit, r/Noclip, or if you're a patron there is always a Patreon post you can just jump into, or hit us up on the DMs. The podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, the whole sha-bang. Anywhere podcasts are sold, stick 'noclip' in there and hopefully we'll pop up. We also have a new YouTube channel as well. If you type 'noclip podcast' into YouTube, we'll get that short URL soon enough, but until then if you hit that up, you'll be able to watch, slash, I mean 'watch', it's just a static image, pretty much with some gameplay in the background, but it's up there on YouTube. We also have full transcriptions as well. We don't talk about it very often. We do closed captions on all of our videos, but we actually also provide full transcriptions of the docs if you go to our Libsyn page, so that's like noclippodcast.libsyn.com and there's a link in all the descriptions no matter how you're listening to this and you can go check that out as well. Patrons get the show early. $5 if they're on the $5 tier. Thank you to them for making this ad-free and making it possible in the first place. Patreon.com/Noclip if you're interested in that. I hope, wherever you are, this finds you well. I hope you're enjoying some video games and we look forward to talking to you again on the next edition of the Noclip podcast, next week. See you then.  

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: OK, Steven, what do you want to talk about?Steven: Hiking!Todd: Hiking! Are you a big mountain man?Steven: Yeah, yeah, I really love getting out into the mountains.Todd: What mountains have you climbed?Steven: Well, recently, I climbed Mt. Fuji.Todd: Wow, how long did it take you to get to the top?Steven: Well, I actually climbed Mt. Fuji on four different occasions.Todd: Wow, really!Steven: Yeah, so it was different times each trek.Todd: OK, did you go in summer or in spring?Steven: No, actually, the first time I went in, to climb Fuji was in the winter.Todd: Wow, man that must have been cold.Steven: Yeah, well, it wasn't too bad. We had warm clothes and, you know, we were constantly walking, so our body temperature was quite high.Todd: Didn't you slip on the ice? Wasn't the ice really slippery?Steven: Well, we had crampons and ice axes with us.Todd: Really, I'm sorry, you had "crampons"?Steven: Yeah, they're like spikes that go on your feet, yeah, basically ice shoes, yeah, so you can actually walk on the ice with these shoes without slipping, no problem.Todd: Really! What was it like on the top?Steven: Well, on that particular occasion we didn't get to the top because it was too late in the day. We would have arrived at the top just as the just was setting and it would have been very dangerous I think coming back down, so.Todd: Because it would have been dark?Steven: Yeah, yeah.Todd: OK. Wow, well, really impressive.Steven: Yeah, I really loved it.

WHY I get so excited for Funnel Hacking Live... Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Oh yeah. I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine-to-five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business. The real question is, "How will I do it without VC funding or debt? Completely from scratch?" This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. What's up guys? I am so freaking excited for Funnel Hacking LIVE. It is coming up. Just to be clear, I've had a lot of people reach out and say, "Oh, Steve, now that you're leaving ClickFunnels, are you gonna keep podcasting and publishing and doing their podcast?" Please understand that this is my own show and it's not affiliated at all with ClickFunnels. I just happen to be a ridiculous fanboy of everyone over there, what they do. They're changing the world, and so that's why I talk about it so much. Also, besides the fact that I've worked there. It's just a lot of part of my history, and I have massive, ridiculous respect and love for Russell and what he does. And, frankly, when you've made the kind of money he has, he obviously very easily could kind of drift off into the night, and he doesn't choose to do that. He decides to continue to go out and change stuff. So, anyways, I'm excited for Funnel Hacking LIVE. If you are not going, please find a way to get there, okay? I'm not being paid to say that. I am trying to help you understand and get to the spot that changed my life. It changed my life for me when I got there, and it was amazing. It changed everything. To be around the right people, to be around the right information, to be around the most cutting-edge stuff ... Anyways, there's my pitch for you. Hey, I have for the last several episodes been teasing you guys with this idea that I've got something special for you who are coming, and I do. I'm sure we're gonna meet anyways, but I really want to meet you guys if you're listening to this, okay? And so, I've got something special for you. I went out and I grabbed these sweet little flash drives and these flash drives ... What I'm gonna put on them is pretty incredible. I have been going out ... And if you haven't been noticing, I've been building a bunch of funnels live lately. It's been a lot of fun. I've built, maybe, nine of them and each one of them is about five hours long. I build them from scratch and I record myself doing it, and I do it in front of a live audience. And I've been doing that for the last, I don't know, four months, five months, something like that. And it's been fun. I've really, really enjoyed going through and doing that. It's a ton of work, oh my gosh. But I teach for the first fourth, the first third, something like that, and then I build from the ground up and everyone asks questions while I go. So it's extremely in-depth. Every single thing I place on there is on purpose. Everything has a purpose, and it's all part of the strategy. Anyways, I hope if you've been able to watch those, it's been kind of awesome... Well, when ... It's probably, like, what, three years ago? I built this funnel. It was probably the fourth or fifth funnel I'd ever built. The first funnel I'd ever built was, I told you guys, it was a smartphone insurance funnel. It went well. It was kind of a break-even business. If I had known more at that time, I would've kept it going and sold something more expensive on the back end because we were getting customers. Break even, which is awesome. That was our first funnel, first attempt, which is pretty cool when you think about it. It's awesome. But, shortly after I started building all these funnels for all these other companies. I was ... A lot of you guys know, I am actually just barely leaving the Army right now. Paperwork in the government takes a long time to do what it's supposed to, I guess, and get the final signature. I don't know what it does. It must just sit somewhere and have a four or five month timer on it, and then someone walks up, signs the last thing, and hands it back. I don't know, but everything's out of my hands. I'm in the middle of leaving the Army right now. As soon as the last signature happens, I am completely out of the military. Anyways, so I enlisted first, and I went through basic training and I loved it. It was hard. It wasn't impossible, though. I was actually hoping it'd be a little bit harder, but there were some challenging moments. There was some challenging aspects to it. I didn't eat that much. I still actually slept pretty well for the most part. We didn't really eat, though, that much, which was ... I lost 15 pounds, and I went in weighing, like, 170. I was really skinny when I came out of basic. It was crazy. So that part was challenging, and there were some challenging aspects along the way. So I get out, and I was officially in the military at that time, and when I get in college and start building these funnels, build the smartphone insurance funnel, build all these other things. And what ends up happening is ... I was in a program called ROTC, and I became an officer when I graduated. However, we wanted to put on a fundraiser. We wanted to put on a mud run. So what we did, was we put together this track. It was a 5K mud run, you know what I mean? Like, there was mud everywhere, obstacle courses all over the place. We had cool fire pits you had to jump over. We had spots where ... We made it military style, you know what I mean? You ran with M16s through all the stuff while we had simulated explosions going on around them. It was really, really cool. And we put this awesome course together and they're like, "Hey, how are we gonna get people?" I was like, "I've got it. I've been learning about this thing called ClickFunnels. I know none of you know what it is. I'm gonna go build it, I'll be right back." And I spent probably 40 hours. I didn't totally know what I was doing at the time. I was just kind of figuring it out as I went, and I was talking to Support pretty much every single day. A couple times, actually. I became "that guy," you know what I mean, to Support, probably. Which is fine. I was learning. And I went through and I was building all this stuff and I put together this event funnel. And it was the first time I ever did anything like that. Well, from that event funnel, I went out and we started promoting it, and we got it on the news. We got it in newspapers. We got it on our school ... And we went, basically, the equivalent of what a Dream 100 would be. We ended up getting 650 people to my first time ever building a live event funnel. 650 people to a live event. We ended up raising ... We collected $7,000. We raffled off an AR-15. If you don't know what that is, it's like an M16, but the civilian version. And we went out and we raised all this money and donated it to the Fisher House Foundation. Which, the Fisher House Foundation is the ... It's pretty awesome. When a soldier gets wounded and they get flown to a hospital, the Fisher House Foundation funds the expenses for the family to fly out to whatever hospital the soldier is being taken care of in. So they can actually go see their loved ones while they're in the hospital getting better. So we were able to make a good donation there, which is awesome. It was a really, really cool experience. So, it's very fascinating, though, because very shortly after that funnel ... No joke, meaning, the event happened ... A lot of people don't know this. The event happened and the next week I was at my first Funnel Hacking LIVE event. When I bootstrapped my way to that event. That was all literally a week after we ran that mud run, which was the funnel that I built to get people to it. I was like, "This is working. Holy crap!" And I was building it for other people. And I was like, "What if I did this for this event and it worked?" And we ended up straight cash, and I bootstrapped my way building more funnels for other businesses to get to that Funnel Hacking LIVE event. Well, lo and behold when I got hired, time came for Funnel Hacking LIVE again, 2017. And I had the complete, ridiculous, insane honor of helping build, obviously, like every other funnel that I was there for ... Helping build the funnel for Funnel Hacking LIVE 2017. Guess what? Same process, okay? I literally funnel hacked, basically, Russell's 2015 event funnel for my mud run funnel, and then I went through, and I was at the 2016 one. And when the 2017 event came along, I was like, "Sweet. We're gonna build this funnel." And guess what? Obviously, the page looked different. Obviously there was better sales copy than I ever wrote, that first time I ever built that mud run event funnel, that 5K ... We called it the 5K Warrior Mud Run. Obviously, it was to a higher quality, but it was the same funnel. And I went through, and I was like, "This is so sweet. Holy crap!" And I went through and I got the extreme, ridiculous honor of building this thing and putting it altogether for the 2017 Funnel Hacking LIVE. Well, I am extremely ecstatic. In just a few weeks here, like, one week to be exact. I get the honor of going again to Funnel Hacking LIVE and meeting those of you guys who are also coming, and guess what I want to give you? I went through, and I've been building these funnels live. Let me go full circle with this, okay? You're like, "Man, Steve, you're going all over the place." Just follow me for a second, okay? I've been building ... When I left working there, which crushed my insides. I just felt like it's something I had to do. It crushed my insides when I left that job. I was like, "I've gotta go put in stone a lot of these very specific lessons and tactics and tricks that are very funnel-specific. I've gotta go put those down in stone." So that's why I've been building live a lot of funnels. There's been a group of about 40-50 people that have been joining me for the majority of these funnel builds for the last five months, and I have the recordings of all of them. I have the share funnels. I have the email sequences. I have how it works in each industry. I have other ridiculous stuff that I put inside of it... And my plan is to sell those ... A lot of people have asked me, "What are you doing with these, Steven?" Well, number one, I've been putting them in my product for my webinar. A lot of you guys have been going out and buying that product just so you can get the funnels, which is awesome. There's like, eight, of those recordings in there. Almost literally every single one of them's in that product... But a lot of you guys, though ... Like, the ones that ... There are others that I've been obviously not including that did not apply to the product that I've been selling. So, anyways, my plan is to be able to give you some of those funnels, as well as the five hour recording of me, first of all training you on that funnel. When to use it, when not to use it, the order in which to use it, the best scenarios to use it in. And then me actually building it. But then also, the share funnel itself. The email sequences with it. The pdf map that shows you how the whole thing works from a top level view, 50,000-foot view. And I want to give the event funnel to you. Now, obviously it's not the Funnel Hacking LIVE event funnel; however, it is the same funnel. Does that make sense? I went through and I built it ... I don't know when that was. It was recent, and that was one of my favorite ones ever. I want to give it to you guys for free. It's my future plan, though, to sell them individually anywhere for $400-$500 a piece because they're freaking awesome and they're worth more than that. I don't start building funnels for somebody until the $50,000-$100,000 range with royalties in the back. They're definitely worth $500, okay? Anyways, I want to make them $1,000 each, but I wanted to make them more available. So, it's the training, it's the funnel, it's the email sequences/other sequences that come along with it. It's the pdf map, and it's when I went and did a full training on the event funnel itself. It's like five hours. It's a live Q and A in front of a huge group, which is awesome. Anyways, so I wanted to give that to you. I'm gonna put that on the flash drives, and I've got like 60-70 flash drives, and it says Steve Larsen on them. And I want to be able to give them to you, though, at the event. Here's what I'm asking for in return. Yes, I am a marketer, so what I'm gonna ask is that when you come up to me, you say a little magic phrase so that I know that you are one of the people who are listening to this show. And here's what I ask from you. That we take a picture together, and you post it on your Facebook profile. That's it. Say, "Hey, I'm with this good looking champ right here," of whatever. Does that sound good? That's all I'm asking for in return. This is me pitching. Sounds good? I told a story to break and rebuild your belief about the importance of an event funnel and what it can do. And then what I do, is now this is me putting the offer out. Sound good? And what I'm doing, is this is call to action. You're gonna walk up to me, and this is what you're gonna say. First of all I'm gonna say it. Actually, you know what? I'm not gonna say it. I need to tell a story to help explain it. So what I'm gonna do, is ... When I was in the Army in basic training, I went in the middle of winter. And winter was rough, guys. Winter was rough. It was a stupid decision to go to basic training in the winter because the drill sergeants totally took advantage of it. There were ice storms all the time, and just out of a mental toughening factor, they'd leave us out in the ice storms in shorts and a t-shirt for hours. And you'd just be sitting there at the position of attention, which means you can't move. The only thing you can do is move your eyes, but even then you're just supposed to look straight forward. So you're staying completely still, just freezing your butt off, and there's these ice storms going off. And you're just, "Ah!" And one day, we were practicing taking over areas. Like, "How do we enter in an area and take over that position?" There's 200 of us. Can you imagine handing over a bunch of 17 and 18 year olds M16s? There's gonna be some coordination. There's gonna be a plan. So we were practicing taking over, and I was significantly older than most of the rest of the people there. I was in college. That made me very different. I was married. That made me very different. I had a kid. That made me very different. I was a very different scenario. I was running side businesses. That made me very different. I was a very different kid than the person that was already there. But anyways, we were practicing taking over these areas, and we get to this field, and the field is flooded. It had been raining/ice falling. Not snowing, it was either ice or rain. It was sleeting for the last several days. And I went and they were like, "Hey, we're gonna practice taking over these areas." And we were kind of walking through the scenario, so it wasn't run at full speed. We're all doing it half-speed. And they're like, "Okay, Larsen. You're gonna run out here, and you and this guy, you're gonna dive on the ground and you're gonna interlock your feet. And you wiggle your foot, and that's how you would talk back and forth to each other. So you don't have to actually speak with your mouth. Your feet are interlocked. Just one of the foots of the guy next to you. Does that make sense? So I went out and I go out there and they're like, "Okay, get down right here." And where they pointed was this, probably, like, six inches of water. It was a lot of water. It was a full out puddle, and the drill sergeant knew that, and they were smiling at me. And they wanted to make it crappy, and I was like, "Okay." And if you've ever seen the movie Unbroken, this is nothing like that intensity, but please understand that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to say, "Alright. Bring it. I can take it." So I laid down, and what happens when you get in cold ... It's 33 degrees outside. It was not quite cold enough yet to freeze, but it was so cold that ... It was almost ice. Guys, I'm laying in six inches of water, 33 degrees. Freezing. Massive wind coming in. Nonstop wind. And I'm laying in water. It's now almost completely covering my entire body, and I'm laying in it completely still in the prone holding my weapon with our feet interlocked. And my first thought was, "Oh my gosh." What happens when you get in water that's that cold ... If anyone's ever taken an ice bath before or if you've ever had the luxury of Russell throwing you in the middle of his Cryosauna, your body starts to shake. And what's happening is, when you start shaking, the capillaries are cinching up and the blood is sucking out of your capillaries and rushing to your organs. And that shaking feeling is kind of your body trying to get warm, but also after a while your body just kind of sucks the blood out of it. That's why your fingers start to turn a little bit blue, it's because the blood's taking out of your extremities towards your organs to keep them warm. And when you stop shaking, you know that you are starting to head towards a dangerous area... So, I was shaking. I was like, "Oh my gosh," and I just started yelling. I was like, "Whoa, yeah." I'm gonna react to this well. I'm gonna react to the scenario well. I cannot control what is happening to me. I can control my reaction to it. So I'm going to change the way I view this. And I'm going to start yelling, and I'm going to get excited. And I'm gonna be bigger than this situation because we did not go back for a long time. I stayed wet for a long time. My feet were gray, I don't think they're supposed to be that color, when I finally took my boots off. But I was like, "I'm gonna react well. I am going to choose how this happens. I'm gonna choose the outcome of this scenario." And it was the first time ... It's not the first time, but that was a very vivid time that I was like, "You know what? This is an important opportunity for me to learn something if I choose to." So this is what I did. I stood up when the drill sergeants weren't looking. I stood up and I started running. I started running and I started jumping in the puddles of water next to all the other soldiers. And I started playing with them. Does that make sense? I started making it this thing ... We were in a slow speed, kind of, environment. This was not like ... We weren't running this at full space. We weren't being ... Anyway, we're all holding real weapons, but we were jumping around. We were being safe, but we were jumping around, we're splashing water. And I was like, "Woo! Yeah!" Jumping around. And people were like, "Larsen! Shut up! Shut up! I hate you!" And they're swearing on my unborn, future children at the time. They're like yelling at you. They're like, "Oh, I'm gonna kill you. You're dead tonight. You're dead. We're putting soaps in our socks and hitting you." They're threatening me with all this stuff, and I'm jumping around, and I was just doing what I could to react appropriately to the crappy scenario I had no control over. And I started saying this phrase, and it sounds stupid, but it's what I want you to say to get the flash drive. Okay? Don't mess it up. There is a vernacular to it. It sounds very simple, okay? I started going ... And what I would do is I would start saying in my mind, "H!H! OO BAYBAY!" and I would start yelling that. I would start yelling it. "H!H! OO BAYBAY!" Don't jack it up. This is how you do it. This is how it's spelled. It's h ... This is all in caps. If you're writing it, it's all in caps. Massive 72-point font. Bold. It's H!H! OO BAYBAY. It's baybay. Not baby. You're not, "Oh baby." No. None of that weak crap. You're gonna reach down. You're gonna grab your boot strings, and you're gonna go "H!H! OO BAYBAY!" And you're gonna scream it. And when I see you, that's the phrase. Because you're probably gonna be tired at Funnel Hacking LIVE. You are probably ... There's probably so many things gonna be lodging into your brain that you've never considered. New connections, new ideas, new things to take your business to the next level, that often a lot of times what will happen is if you are not in the correct state of mind, you will miss it. And I don't want you to. This is all about self-state control, and you've gotta get good at it. I believe in it, and it's the reason Russell and I were able to build funnels at the speed we were. We didn't always feel like it. We're tired most of the time. But by choosing my state ... Yes, even on the internet when I'm sitting in my office by myself and there's no other person around me to cultivate that energy, I choose the outcome. I choose the scenario. I'm sorry, I don't choose the scenario. I choose the way I react to it. Which, that is what determines the outcome, funny enough. Not the scenario. How many people have you ever heard of who were super poor, terrible with life scenarios, and then they turn it all around? Why? Life didn't dish them up this amazing card deck. It's the way they reacted to it that determines the outcome. I use that phrase in so many ... Guys, when we were ... Later on, just to keep the military thing going on ... Honestly, I use it in so many areas. I still do today. We were doing gas chamber ... I don't know if I've told this story before, but we were doing gas chamber training, and I put my gas mask on. I put my gas mask on, and it's CS gas. If you don't know what CS gas is, it's not fun. It gets inside of your ... As soon as you breathe it or it starts to seep into your skin, it literally makes all of your glands and your pores start to ... The equivalent of defecate, okay? You have no control over your nose and you start to get these disgusting runny noses. Your eyes start to get all red and watery. It's pretty nasty stuff. And it's basically riot control gas. But, they really increased the dosage for my group. Because they want to teach you how to use gas masks. So we're all lining up there, and people start kind of freaking out and kind of hyperventilating. We're all standing outside of this gas chamber, and we all got these gas masks, and they all start practicing. "Gas! Gas! Gas!" And we all put our gas masks on. We have to do it within seven seconds, seal it, clear the mask of any gas that actually might have gotten in while we were putting the mask on. So, you blow air in and then you grab another valve, seal that one off, and then suck in really hard, and it seals it to your face. It's not comfortable. And they're like, "Okay, we're gonna go in," and we start going into this gas chamber, and it was a little bit freaky, I'm not gonna lie. You get in there, and it's thick, green smoke all over the place. You're like, "Crap, I really don't want to breathe this garbage. Oh my gosh, I hope I sealed my mask correctly. H!H! OO BAYBAY!" Does that make sense? All these fears, "Scared! H!H! OO BAYBAY! Let's just do it, baby, and you just jump out the plane, build the parachute while you fall." That's why I say that phrase. Does that make sense? It's crazy, though. Some girls in there started freaking out, and they had to physically grab this girl and shove her against the wall and tell her to settle down. It was a little bit ... Anyway, and then you take the mask off and you start doing exercises in there, and it was not fun. People were throwing up. That was a terrible experience. That was not fun. But that's what I'm saying, though. You don't always have control. In fact, you almost never have control over the scenarios in your life. And when you're given a little bit of rope to have control, you take that rope and you run 15 miles with it and you go as far as you can with it. Most of the time, it's about reacting appropriately to the actions that are handed to you. That's, like, 90% of why I do what I do, guys. That's, like, 90% of the reason I've been able to do what I do. It is a mentality. I hate the phrase, "Oh, it's all about ... I do mindset coaching." Like, okay, what does that mean? I don't understand that. To me, though, that is what that means. State control. That means something more important to me than mindset training. That's what I do, though. It's about how I react to the scenarios given to me. Very rarely do I ever have a great deck that is just given to me. I believe in luck, I just don't believe in chance. Does that make sense? Luck. Have you ever heard the quote, "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity?" I think that's how the phrase goes. I can't remember. "Luck is where preparations meets opportunity," or something like that. I believe in luck, I just don't believe in chance. I believe that if I work my absolute guts out, I will be ready for the opportunity that just kind of comes my way. And it will be handed to me because I've been running. I'm already in motion. Opportunity goes to those who are already in motion. It is so frustrating to try and coach individuals who are not in motion yet, and their main hurdle is for me to help them get in motion. Oh my gosh, that is a rough scenario. Oh, just be in motion. I don't even care if you're running the wrong direction. Just be moving, and you will find guidance as you move. It is so much easier to steer a moving canoe... Have you ever sat in a canoe before? I was in scouts. I got my Eagle Scout award. I went and did all this other stuff. It's a lot of fun, right? But paddling ... I've been in many canoes before where you're paddling, and if you're trying to just coast along with the river, it could be a little challenging, if you're moving at the speed of a very still river, to actually steer. It's way easier to steer when you're going somewhere. You control the speed, rather than try and drift. Drifting with the paddle is, like, worse than not having a paddle at all. You don't have a paddle. You've got ClickFunnels. You've got the best marketing out there. You've got the best of the best of the best. The only thing that's up to you is to start rowing. I don't care if you're going the wrong direction. So, the phrase is, "H!H! OO BAYBAY!" And you've got to say it like that, or I'm not handing you a flash drive. I'm excited for you to get there. I'm excited for you guys to feel the change if you want it to be there. You guys, understand that I had so much belief that if I just got in the room ... If I just got in the room, my life would change. That was my belief. It was that strong. That first event I ever got to when I did not have the discretionary income to actually pay for something like an event and I bootstrapped my way there. And because of that, it did change. And when I got hired at ClickFunnels, 20 minutes after my interview, they give a call, and they said, "Hey, you're hired. We want you to sit next to Russell," and I was like, "What?" I was trying to go for a sSupport position. I just wanted to be near where the action was. I was like, "Are you serious? Of course. You're gonna pay me to do that?" And I called my wife, and ... Years of struggling ... I was in motion. I was in motion, and that's why I feel like it came my way. I did not have all the answers, but I had enough to see the three steps in front of me. I knew where the peak was. I could not see anything in-between. And I called my wife, and I said, "Babe ..." I was trying not to cry, but I was also losing my voice because I was just yelling I was so excited. I was like, "Babe, our life just changed." I was driving the five hours back to where my family was. Less than a week later, we were living in Boise, Idaho. What I'm trying to say is ... I said, "Babe, the course of our life just changed. The outcome of where we were going to go, it's different now." If you choose it to be ... It's the reason I get so freaking pumped about Funnel Hacking LIVE. If you choose it to be, Funnel Hacking LIVE is that for you. It was for me. It is not a trite thing. It's not just another event. I will tell you from working there from my own experience that every individual who works at ClickFunnels is there to change the world. It's an active conversation. Unfortunately, that's an awkward conversation for most other places in the world. It is an active ... "How can we change the world?" Like, "What? Who talks like that?" Those in the ... Just like Steve Jobs said, "Those who are actually gonna try and change the world are the ones that actually do." And they are. It's the reason I get so pumped about it. They changed my world. They're changing everyone else's world. They're changing industries. That's why I get so pumped about it. People are like, "Man, you're a freak show about Funnel Hacking LIVE." Yeah I am. I get more pumped about it than Christmas, every other holiday. It literally is ... And it's because of what it can do for you. To be in a room with that many other millionaires, to be in a room with that amount of mental ... Top of the line stuff, you guys. And software. How often do you get the marketing education and technology blend in the same sitting? That's so freakishly rare it's ridiculous. You get both at Funnel Hacking LIVE. The top of the top, the best of the best. The who's who are all there. And if you're like, "Steve, I still don't have my ticket." Well, you've got, like, a week. Find a way and get there, and know that it has the power to change your life and put the course of your life on a different outcome based on how you react. So you come up to me. I've got ... There's two things on them. Number one, I'm gonna give you guys the event funnel. Some sweet training on there. I'm gonna give you guys ... There's a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm not gonna advertise, okay, that's really, really cool. I've got some extra little Easter eggs in there for you. But you walk up to me, and you give me the most interactive, "H!H! OO BAYBAY!," I will give one right back, so long as my voice is not completely gone, and let's take a picture. You post that up there. I will give you a flash drive. On your Facebook profile, and I will hand it off to you. Sound good? Alright guys, that is the prepare for Funnel Hacking LIVE plan. I would start going through. I would re-listen to any ... If you've got a Funnel Hacking LIVE ticket ... I know because I built the Members' Area, okay? When you got a Funnel Hacking LIVE ticket, you also got access to the 2015, 2016, and 2017 replays. I have been ... I'm almost done listening to all the replays again. Yes, I do listen to them all the time. I just reread 108 Split Tests. I am re-listening to tons of stuff. That's how I'm preparing, guys. Prepare. Put yourself in a state-control. Choose. Decide the outcome. Decide the outcome before you actually start the event. How crazy of an idea is that? That's what you can do with this. So, go out and start preparing. Re-listen to the past episodes. They came with your ticket this year, which is awesome. Go and actually start re-reading Expert Secrets. Re-read [inaudible 00:30:00] Secrets. Re-read 108 Split Tests. Go through the Funnel Hacker Cookbook. Go through those things, and start consuming that stuff. Get yourself in a state to receive. Most of you guys are coming to my Mastermind the day before. I'm very excited to have you guys. It's gonna be great. It's a small group. I'm excited it is. So, very, very excited to have you, though, and I am excited to meet you. Excited to meet you guys over there. Give a high five, brotherly hug, whatever. Give me a little state-controlled shout out. A little, "H!H! OO BAYBAY!" And we'll take a picture. You post it up there, and my thank you is a flash drive with the event funnel. The event funnel, as well as a whole bunch of other goodies that I'm just gonna toss on there for fun. I've only got, like 60 or 70 of them, so ... Anyways, thanks guys. I appreciate it. I know this was kind of a different styled episode, but you need to know why I get so pumped about it. Someone was laughing at me. They were like, "You get that excited about it?" I'm like, "Okay, let me tell you why. It's because I chose it to be and it's because I knew ... I believed that Russell knew how to get me to the next spot." Half of you guys are still trying to decide if this stuff works. Get past that freakishly stupid doubt, and go and just believe it. Take a chance. They're not paying me for this. They don't even know I'm doing it. I just know it works. Before I knew it worked, I had to believe that it worked. There's nothing that's gonna happen. I'm not gonna actually act unless there's just this little inkling that it could possibly actually work. You've gotta get there. Drop the other doubts. Choose the outcome before the event starts by your state-controlling self. Prepare like crazy. I've got some cool goodies for you. Come give a little state-controlled shout out, "H!H! OO BAYBAY!" And come on out and say hi. Let's take a picture, and I'll give you guys some sweet stuff as a thank you. And hopefully you guys can get out there and start crushing, as well. Alright guys, thanks so much. And I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I certainly did. We'll talk to you later. Thanks for listening. Please remember to write and subscribe... Hey, you want me to speak at your next event or Mastermind? Let me know what I can share that would be most valuable by going to stevejlarsen.com and book my time now.

Click above to listen in iTunes... I'm A Huge Fan of Learning From Those WhoAre DOING, Rather Than Just Talking.... What's going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best Internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. How are you guys doing? Hope everyone's doing great. It is barely 5:00 AM here. I set the alarm for 4:00 AM, but I slept in a little bit. Anyway, it's a Saturday, though, and a lot of you guys will be like, "What the heck are you doing up so early, Steven?" Well, number one, my brain works too fast. Sometimes I can't sleep, so I just get up. Number two, the real reason is because today, I'm not sure totally if I'm supposed to talk about this, but I'm actually really, really excited. Today, what's going to happen is one of my buddies ... You guys all know him. I actually interviewed him probably several dozen episodes ago. His name's James Smiley. He's the man. James Smiley was kind enough to send his own videographer, who's totally awesome, up to Boise, and today, Saturday, we are spending the entire day filming Gary V. styled videos, which is kind of cool. I'm getting up early so I can lift, honestly, and so that I can start prepping the different storylines. They want to film at least 12 different storylines, 12 different videos, that they can turn into those fast-paced, cool, Gary V. styled little snippets, those little vignettes that he puts out all the time on Instagram. Quite honestly, I don't really get on Instagram too much, but I am excited to get my own series of videos filmed like that. It's kind of cool. It's very exciting. I'm going through my podcast, and guess what I'm doing? I'm hacking my own self. Which means I'm going through my podcast, looking at all the stats, seeing which ones resonated with people the most. Those are the ones that will be turned into awesome videos. Just so you know, that's the process. They're like, "What's 12 cool things you could talk about?" I think everything that I put out is cool, and that's why I talked about it, but what did everyone else think was cool? So let's go look at the stats. Let's look at what people liked and shared and things like that. So I'm going through my show. I use a software called Libsyn, which I talked about in episode 1661, if you want to learn more about how I podcast. I'm going through all the stats, and I'm looking at basically seeing which 12 are the coolest ones. Then, I've got a whole bunch of thoughts on my own that I'll have to go add, as well. I'm excited, though. I'm supposed to bring a whole bunch of different changes of clothes as we continue to move around Boise to different locations that are undisclosed. I have no idea where we're going today. I have no idea, really, what we're doing. I'm just pumped. I'm excited about it. I'm extremely honored to be able to do it. It's going to be fun. It'll be cool. I'm just kind of swinging with it, honestly. To have 12 different videos and stuff like that ... The thing that I have a hard time with is I am so anti ... Not professionalism. There's certainly an awesome thing that comes with trying to be professional. It's when it makes you put so much starch in your shirt that you can't be your own personality. You know what I mean? Like I'm trying to wake up right now. I'm not going to lie. I probably should not have started podcasting. I don't want to come across in these videos in a way that it's like, "Hey, Steven is getting pre-framed and pitched and framed as if he's this pro guy." I don't look at myself like that. I don't look at myself like that. I don't look at myself as this ... I don't know. It's weird. I feel like drinking your own Kool-Aid can really kill you. You know what I mean? It's something that I've seen many times, especially with where my job has been over the last two years, sitting next to Russell Brunson. It's something that we'll see, not from him, ever, but we'll see other people in different communities and things like that start to drink their own Kool-Aid. The moment you start doing that, you start to try to distance yourself from your own audience. When you start to distance yourself from your own audience, guess what happens? They leave you. Why would I try and act like I'm someone I'm not? Anyway, that's actually my biggest fear with this. I'm excited. It'll be awesome. Hey, the whole purpose of this podcast today, though, is something interesting that was brought up. I was at ClickFunnels' HQ. I don't think anyone really touches the ground there. Everyone just kind of floats and glides around. I can't remember what I was doing. I think I was grabbing a drink from the conference room or something like that or the event room. I was walking back in, and Russell was talking to someone else, too, and he and I ended up walking at the same time back to his office. He goes, "Everyone needs to be more like Steven." I was like, "What are you talking about?" He goes, "You follow ... " What did he say? You follow the biggest pile of cash rule, biggest pile of gold rule. I was like, "What's that, man?" He goes, "It's the biggest pile of gold rule. Whoever has the biggest pile of cash, that's the person you go and follow." I was like, "That's kind of interesting." He was like, "Everyone should be more like that." He's like, "That's super cool that you're ... " He's like, "You're naturally like that, man." It felt a little bit from left field, the comment did, but he must have been talking about it from somebody else. What I did is I went online and ... You guys got to understand that when I met my wife, i was 6% body fat. I was working out at least once a day, a lot of times twice a did. I did a couple three days. It was all self-driven. I really like it. I'm very aggressive as an individual physically. I like to push my body. As I have been married and in school and college and the pressures of everything, I'm not going to lie, I gained a little weight. I want to change that. About six weeks ago, I got on YouTube with the intent of finding a buff dude that I could hire. What I did is I went on YouTube and literally found the most shredded guy I could, the guy who has to walk sideways through doors. You know what I mean? I wanted to find the guy that could kill me in a single flex. Not punch, flex. So I went and I found this guy. He's massive. He won all these fitness competitions. I just messaged him totally out of the blue. I didn't know if he did any coaching at all. I was like, "Hey, man, I really want to get ripped. How can I hire you?" I was like, "I've been disciplined to do it before on my own. I want help with the meal plan. I'd like help with the X, Y, and Z. The lifting part is easy. I want help with the meal plan. Please help me with that." He was like, "Sure, man, sounds good." He's been working with me for the last six weeks. I have no idea where he lives. It's all been remote. I am not, by any means, shredded yet, but my whole goal is to be more buff looking than Russell is by Funnel Hacking Live. So a lot of the office right now is in this competition, trying to get swol. Swol patrol, baby, woo! Anyway, Russell, he was laughing. He was like, "You follow the biggest cash rule. This dude's ripped, so that's why you hired him. You came here, you learned marketing. Biggest pile of cash rule. You follow that all the time. I wish that more people learned that." I was like, that's interesting. I was thinking through just my life. Kind of subconsciously, that's kind of how I've done it for a long time. I explicitly did door-to-door sales because I knew it would be one of the most emotionally challenging sales environments that I could conjure up. That's why I did door-to-door sales. Honestly, I did door-to-door sales voluntarily, knowing that it was going to suck. That's why. I did it for two summers. Then, after that, I guess I didn't get enough of it. I went and did telemarketing, because I knew that I hated talking on the phone. I knew that I would learn how to sell. Those are the reasons why I did it, so that I could get better and put myself in an uncomfortable scenario. Fascinating. I took two or three minutes just to think through the list. I was like, that was kind of like a biggest pile of cash rule. Then, I went to the next one, the next one, the next one. I was trying to speak at different events and things like that, years ago. A lot of you guys may not know this, but I sang for a long time, since fourth grade. I had a lead role in several musicals. I was in the top choirs. I sang in a band. I played drums for, like, six years. What was funny is that when I was doing singing, at first, I was so shy that no one could ever hear me, so I just kept practicing, practicing, practicing until finally ... I mean, I got a lot better. I put myself in really challenging scenarios on purpose. You know what I mean? Stage scenarios. What's funny is how much I'm on stage now, and I had no idea those two should coincide. Army. I legitimately went into the Army because I wanted to get my butt kicked. I didn't need to go into the ... There were other ways, okay? I wanted to do it because I wanted to go into those extreme stressful environments where it's physically demanding, where it's all you can do to just keep it together. You know what I mean? I wanted that, which was so funny. It sounds like a problem, but when Russell pointed it out just a few weeks ago, I was like, huh, maybe he's right. Is this a problem? You know what I mean? He's like, "Think about that. You came to learn marketing here. The buff guy, you went and you hired that guy." I'm leaving my job, not because I have a bigger pile of cash than Russell. Please never think that. I think that everyone already knows that. That goes without saying, probably. Because I think that there's things I need to learn that a job can't teach me. You know what I mean? There's some stress that comes with it. Good stress. I'm not freaking out or anything. I'm actually really, really pumped. It'll be awesome. All I wanted to do is I wanted to help you understand the biggest pile of cash rule, as coined and termed by Mr. Russell Brunson himself. Trademarked, register mark. Put a huge thing of disclaimers in right there. Honestly, I don't know where it stems back from, but definitely early on in my childhood, some things that I started doing ... I think, honestly, in my early teens or mid-teens. I don't know what clicked or what it was, but I kind of liked putting myself in stressful environments on purpose, because of what would happen to myself after I was done with them. Honestly, I may not have even understood that consciously, that that's what I was doing, but I did seek out slightly stressful environments kind of on purpose. Probably first as just kind of an adrenaline high. I was a bit of an adrenaline junkie growing up. I would go long board down ... I was a big long boarder guy. I loved to long board. It's like a skateboard, but it's long. It's long board. I had a speed board, and I would go 45 miles an hour. My brother would clock my in a car behind, barefoot down hills. That's stupid. Who does that crap? That's stupid. I've always been a little bit of an adrenaline junkie, so I don't know if I can blame it on, yeah, I consciously knew that was the biggest pile of cash rule as coined by Russell. That's slightly been the outcome from it, though, is that putting myself in scenarios where not all the pieces are quite figured out, where not everything is quite laid out in front of me, where I can't really see the middle, I just kind of know where the end is and where I'm trying to get. I know that it'll work out on the other side. Long boarding barefoot, that's stupid, okay? Don't do that. That was a dumb example. That was an example of what not to do. I think it comes down to some lessons that Perry Belcher talked about. There's a great course. I just heard that DigitalMarketer ... This is, honestly, the best course that I think DigitalMarketer's come out with. It's a course called secret selling system. It's like 18 hours long, by Perry Belcher. It is fantastic. It is one of the best funnel training courses I've ever listened to ever. A fair warning, though, there's a fair amount of swearing in it. Anyway, I wouldn't listen to it around kids, just to let you know. Perry Belcher's a bit vulgar, if you know anything about him. There's a few different levels. I think he named seven. I'm just going to go through three of them here. Seven different belief phases. These are different phases that an individual has to go through in order to make a sale. You think about what you're doing to yourself, too, as you start to follow, if you want to, the biggest pile of cash rule. I was thinking through that's interesting, because it really is following that same thing. Instead, I'm just selling myself, which is why I go through those scenarios on purpose. Pre-thought out, whatever that term is. One of the very first phases of this is that a person needs to go through and ask themselves, okay, this guy's got this cool product. Is this possible at all? Meaning not for anybody, but can I see this product working at all, for anybody? If the answer to that question is yes, they can kind of move on to the next question, which is if it's possible for other people, in general, is it possible for me? There's a whole bunch of in-between steps. I cannot remember all of them. This is the basic premise, though, and honestly, the same effect comes from these three, in my opinion. These are the three, also. Number one, is this possible at all? Is it possible in general that this product could get the change that this guy says it is? That's the first phase of belief. The second one is is it possible for me? Can I pull this off? Is this something where I could actually go off and be successful with it? Which kind of leads me, honestly, to the third thing. Honestly, the place that you want to stay if you're going to follow the biggest pile of cash rule, meaning whoever has the biggest pile of cash, whether that's money or some kind of result or whatever it is, those are the people you go learn from. If you're going to try and learn funnel building, go find a freaking awesome funnel builder who's built a ton of them. Right? This is Sales Funnel Radio. That's why you're listening to me... I've built a lot of funnels for a lot of people in a lot of scenarios. You're following the biggest pile of cash rule already right now. I've had a ton of you guys reach out and ask me if I'm going to have a mastermind after I leave ClickFunnels or coaching or something like that. I was like, hm, that's interesting. That's probably the market telling me that that's what it wants. I haven't thought of that. Maybe I should do that. Anyway, you want to stay kind of in this third phase if you're going to follow the biggest pile of cash rule. This is something I identified for me, anyways, where if I can get past a belief that ... Let's take this lifting example, this example of me trying to ... I want to go get buff again. I was doing sprint triathlons. Guys, I was killing it. I was the fastest dude out of, like, 50 guys that I would run with. Oh, man, I so miss that. It's such a huge physical rush. I like pushing my body to those uncomfortable places. That's awesome. Maybe it's a little bit of an issue. It goes back to the adrenaline long board barefoot issue, maybe. Let's take this as an example. Is it possible at all? Is there any belief that I have that it is possible for anyone in all of humanity to get ripped and buff? Yeah, I do believe that it's possible. Okay, that lets me go on to the second phase. Obviously, in tandem, think through this, also, with money making. So let's go to the second phase. Is it possible, then, for me? Do I believe that I have the capacity to be able to do this? Yeah. Yeah, I have. Not just because I've done it before and was that way for a while, until I kind of focused on making money, which makes sense. I was trying to follow my fatherly roles and husbandly roles of providing. That leads me to my third phase, the third one here, and this is honestly kind of a personal one. The third one is since it's possible, if this is possible ... How should I say this? Since it's possible, I'll just figure it out and start walking. That's kind of what I'm going to name the phase. Meaning I never, hardly ever, have all of the steps planned out. I have a very rough, 30,000-foot view plan of what I'm actually trying to do. I've noticed that it's the same way with how I build funnels. That's always that way. We never have all the details, all the plan. This is what it's going to look like. This is what it's going to be like. This is what this page is going to say. This is what this email's going to pop ... No. What we do is we set a very rough flag out on a hill. We say, "That's where we're going. Take the hill." We just start walking towards it. As we encounter the hill, there's a random boulder that comes up or there's a cliff that appears and we didn't know it was there. Or there's a huge chasm or a massive river or a rope bridge where it's barely working. You know what I mean? Then, we just deal with that problem at that time only. I think sometimes one of the reasons people will not progress, and something that I see ... There's hundreds of people I've coached through the coaching program now, hundreds that have come to the FAT event, the Funnel Hackathon event. There's hundreds, you guys. One of the things I think people ... There's really two different personality types that I see, as far as it comes to action-taking, happens all the time. The first one is the one where it's like I have got to have everything planned out in front of me so that I know it's safe for me to jump, so that I can handle every single contingency that's ever possible. I'm like, gosh, that contingency right there rue asking me about, the probably of it is so tiny. Are you kidding me? Deal with it when it comes, which is the second personality. The second personality that I see comes through ... It's funny, because when I'm saying it on stage and I'm seeing all these people ask questions and I see them progressing, I can see who's getting it. I can also see who's already implementing it in the event. They haven't waited to leave or go home. They're doing it there. The second personality is the one who goes, "Ah, I get it. I see the vision. Not all the steps. I see the vision. I see where you're trying to take us. Therefore, I will fill in all the gaps that I personally can, because I know that my success is not on your shoulders, Steven." Does that make sense? What I've seen, too, is when someone hasn't taken action but they've got everything filled out ... They've got all the pieces. They've got all these pieces together. They've got all the little parts. A lot of times, what ends up happening is they're looking for another thing that they think they need in order to distract themselves from getting started. They're looking for excuses to not buy into the process. I am begging you to not fall into that trap. If you're going to follow the biggest pile of cash rule, you can't fall into that trap, because you will not have all the answers, and you never will. Entrepreneurship is one big answering game after another. Another question, another question, every day you wake up. Guys, I cannot tell you how many times I sit down for my own personal business, and I'm like, crap, I don't even know what to build next. Or I don't even know what to build next or what's the next step here. No one's giving me a to-do list. No one's giving Russell a to-do list. No one's sitting down and going, "Okay, what do I got to do today? All right, who's got that list for me?" He's sitting down and saying, "Huh, what's hurting right now? Is there something I need to go fix? Is there something we should go increase revenue on or optimize?" Does that make sense? There's no such thing as entrepreneurship where all the answers are given to you, and I am all about entrepreneurship. I know you guys are all in here, too, who are. If you are trying to become one, please understand that it is a biggest pile of cash game. Go learn from the best people. There's a reason Russell has his own inner circle. 100 people come in from pretty much every industry you can imagine, and then he has his own personal growth-styled masterminds, also. Then he goes and he hangs out with these massive guys that are also on his level and even higher so that he can continue to grow. Does that make sense? It's the same thing. It's the exact same thing. You will not have all the answers. You sit there and go, "Yeah, I know. No duh." If you've been waiting to launch something for quite a while, you're not following the rule, then. Does that make sense? It is a game of jumping out of the plane and building the parachute while you fall, not before you jump. Funny enough, the first time I ever built an info product, I did it wrong. I did it so wrong. I did it terribly. I spent eight months building it, building the product. I was convinced that the product was the thing that made the sale. Products rarely make sales. A sales message makes sales. They're not the same thing. It's the whole reason why we'll go out and we sell stuff before we ever make it. Anyway, I'm totally getting on a soap box here, because I'm noticing that a lot of people haven't started because they think that the product needs to be done or has to be perfect. It's not going to be perfect. It's coming from your own head, when the market is the thing that needs to tell you what you should be building. You don't have the creativity inside of you to be successful and make a million dollars. That's why this game is more like a game of detective. It's like a detective game, where you're going to go through and you're going to discover what the market wants. You're going to toss things out there. Nope, that wasn't it. Let's take these three things out. Let's adjust that. Now, let's relaunch. Oh, cool, all but one of them stuck. Okay, let's go back. Relaunch, relaunch, relaunch, relaunch. Interaction, iteration, iteration, iteration. It's part of this biggest pile of cash rule, too, where what you're really trying to do is you're trying to help just get your own self in motion. Action creates action. Motion creates motion. Success creates success. One of the easiest ways to follow the biggest pile of cash rule that I've noticed in my own life is that I try to have personal, small wins every single day. I try to get at least ... Guys, I work full-time for somebody else, and it's way more than full-time. Way more than a 9:00 to 5:00 job. It's fun, because in the last two months here, Russell's like, "Dude, can we just do a normal 9:00 to 5:00 schedule?" I was like, "Yeah, we've never done that. That actually sounds really nice. It's the holidays coming up." I mean, we're just killing ourselves. You know what I mean? You're not going to have any success at all if you have to have all the pieces together. That's basically what I'm trying to say. If you're trying to follow the biggest pile of cash rule, one of the easiest things that you can do is go just try and do three ... That's what I was trying to say before. Sorry, I totally lost my train of thought, because I was thinking through ... I totally have the squirrel brain. Squirrel! Squirrel! Which is nice for brainstorming scenarios, and I'm totally doing it right now. I was trying to wrap up with this, and I got distracted. I'm sorry. This is me being vulnerable and just real. What I was trying to say, though, is one of the easiest ways to follow the biggest pile of cash rule is just try and make three moves a day if you're working for somebody else. It's going to be way more than that for me when I am completely solo January 1st, which I'm very excited about. Just make three moves a day, and that's all I try and do. Sometimes I don't get a full three, and sometimes I just get two. Meaning I try and get two to three big things done ... What's three? I try and get three things done each day that just move the ball forward. I don't even know always where the ball is going. I just try to move the thing. Motion creates motion. Action creates action. I kind of thought that was a cliché, okay, that's nice kind of thing five years ago, and it is so true, though. Just be in motion. Guys, I got an email from someone this morning that was ridiculous. It was so cool. It was an invitation to go hang out with some incredibly huge people that have helped massive celebrities we all know become very successful. I was like, what? What? That's crazy. Why? Motion. Moving. I hate coaching people who are not already in motion. It's one of my things. If I can tell an individual is not already moving, looking for their pile of cash, just moving towards that ... If they're not already actively learning, I hate coaching those individuals. Or they're not actively already trying to make money. Not thinking about it. Not thinking about how nice of a goal it is. Not planning it out. Actually trying to make sales. I hate coaching those kinds of people, because I've got to teach them the biggest pile of cash rule. They've had no practice following it, where you're going out and you're learning from the best people. You're trying. You're already doing it. Nobody's motivating you. You're motivating yourself. Does that make sense? Anyway, I try not to put too many ideas in a single podcast, and I tend to string them all together, so I should probably stop this here, just so you guys know. What I'm trying to say here is now that Russell brought it out and I realize, oh my gosh, I do follow that rule. That is why I'm actually leaving my job. Huh, that's why I called that dude and said, "Hey, make me buff," and why I've been reaching out to all these ... That's fascinating. So follow the pile of biggest cash rule. Who is it that has actually done it? Not talked about it. Not written books about it. Who's actually done it? Who's actually done the thing? Who's actually doing the thing? Who can you follow? Follow those people. Those are the people to go follow, okay? A lot of times, what's funny is the people who have the biggest pile of cash are not the ones that are talking. Sometimes they're the ones who don't want to talk. They don't want to let out their secrets. It's been funny to watch this whole fill your funnel process, because sometimes people don't want to reveal the traffic secrets that they're using, because they're proprietary. They're the ones that are the cutting edge. Usually, the ones that you're hearing in courses are not the ones that are the most cutting edge ones. You know what I mean? That's like hearing the news say, "Hey, this is the best stock to go get right now." It's like, yeah, well, like yesterday. The opportunity's already passed. You know what I mean? Same kind of thing. Sometimes when those biggest pile of cash people come into your life, you've got to find ways to convince them that you are coaching worthy. Just like I just said, I've got things that turn me off as far as someone when they want me to coach them. It's the same thing. You've got to go convince those people that you're coachable, that you're worthy to be coached. It is the most unattractive thing on the planet when someone's asking me to coach them and I can tell they haven't even started. They're waiting for permission to start. Cut that crap out. Just start. No one's going to give you permission or a to-do list, and it's going to be all one massive, big, continuous problem-solving exercise. It's very fun. It's kind of a liberating thing, actually. It's fun to have that kind of control. Anyways, guys, probably said too much there. Just think through that, though. What is the thing you're trying to go for? Find the person with the biggest pile of cash, and keep yourself in the phase where all you need to know is enough, not all of it. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best Internet sales funnel for free? Go to salesfunnelbroke.com/freefunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.

Carolyn: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr. Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Centre and Duke National University of Singapore. Have you ever wondered what the clinical implications of very brief episodes of device-detected atrial tachyarrhythmias are? Well, we will be discussing this with novel data from the RATE registry in just a moment. First, here's your summary of this week's journal.     The first study provides the first evaluation of the Sweden nationwide abdominal aortic aneurysm screening program. Of almost 303,000 men invited for screening, 84% attended. The prevalence of screening detected abdominal aortic aneurysm was 1.5%. After a mean of 4.5 years, 29% of patients with aneurysms had been operated upon with a 30-day mortality rate of 0.9%. The introduction of screening was associated with a significant reduction in aneurysm-specific mortality. The number needed to screen to prevent 1 premature death was 667, while the number needed to operate on to prevent 1 premature death was 1.5.     Furthermore, the authors showed that their screening program was highly cost-effective in the contemporary setting in Sweden. These findings confirm results from earlier randomized controlled trials in a large population-based setting, and may be important for future healthcare decision-making. This and the diverse requirements for efficient population screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm, from program management to maintaining skills in open repair are discussed in an excellent accompanying editorial by Dr. Cole from Imperial College London.     The next study looks at thoracic epidural anesthesia and suggests that caution may be needed in patients with or at risk for right ventricular dysfunction. You see, thoracic epidural anesthesia involves blockade of cardiac sympathetic fibers, which may affect right ventricular function and interfere with the coupling between the right ventricle and right ventricular afterload. Dr. Wink and colleagues from the Leiden University Medical Center therefore used combined pressure volume conductance catheters to study the effects of thoracic epidural anesthesia on right ventricular function and ventricular pulmonary artery coupling in 10 patients scheduled for lung resection.     Thoracic epidural anesthesia resulted in a significant reduction in right ventricular contractility, stroke work, dP/dt max and ejection fraction. This was accompanied by a reduction in effective arterial elastance such that ventricular pulmonary coupling remain unchanged. Clamping of the pulmonary artery increased right ventricular contractility but decreased ventricular pulmonary coupling. These effects of increased afterload were the same before and after thoracic epidural anesthesia. In conclusion, therefore, thoracic epidural anesthesia impaired right ventricular contractility but did not inhibit the native positive ionotropic response of the right ventricle to increase afterload. These findings are clinically relevant for daily practice in cardiothoracic surgery because pulmonary hypertension is frequently encountered, and right ventricular function is an important determinant of early and late outcomes.     The next study suggests that the use of point of care hemostatic testing may have a place in the management of patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Dr. Karkouti and colleagues of the Toronto General Hospital hypothesized that point of care hemostatic testing within the context of an integrated transfusion algorithm would improve the management of coagulopathy in cardiac surgery, thereby reducing blood transfusion. They therefore conducted a pragmatic multi-center stepped-wedge cluster randomized controlled trial of a point of care based transfusion algorithm in 7,402 consecutive patients undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass in 12 hospitals in Ontario, Canada. They found that the trial intervention reduced rate of red cell transfusion with an adjusted relative risk of 0.91 and a number needed to treat of 24.7.     The intervention also reduced rates of platelet transfusion and major bleeding but had no effect on other blood product transfusions or major complications. These findings that point of care testing improved management of coagulopathy in cardiac surgery support the consideration of their broader adoption in clinical practice.     The next study provides experimental evidence that brings us one step closer to therapeutic targeting of arterial leukocyte recruitment in the context of atherosclerosis. In this study from first author Dr. Ortega-Gómez, corresponding author Dr. Soehnlein and colleagues from LMU Munich, authors focus on cathepsin G, which is stored in neutrophil and azurophil granules and discharged upon neutrophil activation. They studied site-specific myeloid cell behavior after high-fat diet feeding or TNF stimulation in the carotid artery, the jugular vein, and cremasteric arterioles and venules in APOE E and Cathepsin G-deficient mice.     Their studies revealed a crucial role for Cathepsin G in arterial leukocyte adhesion, an effect that was specific for the arteries and not found during venular adhesion. Consequently, Cathepsin G deficiency attenuated atherosclerosis but not acute lung inflammation. Mechanistically, Cathepsin G was immobilized on arterial endothelium, where it activated leukocytes to firmly adhere, engaging endocrine clustering, a process of crucial importance to achieve effective adherence under high-sheer flow.     Therapeutic neutralization of Cathepsin G specifically abrogated arterial leukocyte adhesion without affecting myeloid cell adhesion in the microcirculation. Repetitive application of Cathepsin G-neutralizing antibodies really allowed the inhibition of atherogenesis in the mice. Taken together, these findings presented evidence of an arterial-specific recruitment pattern centered on Cathepsin G adhesion, thus representing a potential novel strategy and target for the treatment of arterial inflammation. Well, that wraps it up for the summary of this week's journal. Now, for our featured discussion.     Our feature paper for today discusses the clinical implications of brief device-detected atrial tachycardias and really novel findings from the RATE registry. I'm so happy to be here with the first and corresponding author, Dr. Steven Swiryn from Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. Hi, Steven.   Steven: Good morning.   Carolyn: We also have with us Dr. Mark Link, associate editor from UT Southwestern. We all know that prolonged episodes of atrial tachycardia or atrial fibrillation are associated with increased risk and that if we anticoagulate those with a high CHA2DS2–VASc score, we can lower the risk of stroke. Now, the European Society of Cardiology guidelines also say that recent data reinforced the assumption that even brief episodes of silent atrial fibrillation may convey an increased risk of stroke. We also know that prior studies have looked at device-detected atrial fibrillation. Steven, I'd really love if you could start by telling us what makes your study different. What was the main thing you were trying to look at?   Steven: Well, one reason it's attractive to use the device population, patients with pacemakers or defibrillators, to look at these issues is because devices have a very high likelihood of detecting episodes of atrial fibrillation whereas symptoms or single 12 EKGs miss a lot of atrial fibrillation, so the sensitivity is much higher, although not perfect. The problem is that very brief episodes of atrial fibrillation are very poorly detected by devices. The specificity of automatic detection is very low, such that all previous studies until the RATE registry have excluded any episode of atrial fibrillation detected by a device less than 5 minutes in duration because they're unreliable. A lot of them turn out to be false positive detections. Our study was designed to evaluate whether even very brief episodes of an atrial tachyarrhythmia might also be associated with risk of clinical events and might or might not warrant anti-coagulation.   Carolyn: Ah, that's interesting, so you really helped to answer how brief is "brief" when we need to talk about device-detected atrial fibrillation. Could you expand on how you actually defined "short episodes" here?   Steven: Right. A short episode for the purpose of the RATE registry was defined as an episode where the electrogram that we scrutinized had both the onset and the offset of the episode within the same electrogram tracing, so although we can't put a specific time duration on it because that wasn't part of the criterion, it's typically less than 20 seconds or so, although not always, whereas a long episode was defined as an electrogram where either the onset and/or the offset was not captured by the device memory and therefore we don't know the duration. Some of those may not have been very long, and some of those may have been extremely prolonged episodes. That allows us to actually scrutinize the electrogram. We looked at 37,530 individual electrograms using 8 teams of adjudicators, each with a physician and a field clinical engineer from the device company so that we could actually say definitively, "Yes, this was atrial fibrillation," or, "No, it wasn't."   Carolyn: This is the first study to really look under that 5-minute limit of atrial tachycardias. What did you find?   Steven: Well, we found that in contrast to prolonged episodes, short episodes of atrial tachyarrhythmias were not associated with an increased risk compared to those without atrial fibrillation of pre-defined clinical events, including death from any cause, heart failure, stroke, hospitalization for atrial fibrillation, and a few other smaller events.   Carolyn: This was over a 2-year follow-up period, is that right?   Steven: The median follow-up was slightly less than 2 years, that's right.   Carolyn: What I really was struck with was also the second finding, the propensity to develop longer episodes. Could you expand on that?   Steven: We reasoned that in the clinic, one might be faced with a short episode was we defined them, and then you don't know what's going to happen for the next 2 years to bring to bear the results of our study. We looked at if your first episode was short, what was your likelihood over the full follow-up of the study of progressing to longer episodes. About 50% of patients who had their first episode as only a short episode progressed to a longer episode over the full follow-up and therefore were in the long category for the rest of the results. Half of them never got a longer episode.     It was, as one might imagine, if you had your first short episode very early in the study and had a longer follow-up, you were more likely to end up in the long category, and if you had very frequent short episodes, you were also more likely to end up in the long category by the time the full follow-up was over with. Having an initial short episode is not a guarantee that you're never going to get a long episode and that you'll never acquire a consideration of anti-coagulation.   Carolyn: That was a very important message to me as well because it meant that although I can be secure or reassured by these data for very short episodes, I needed to look out for the development of longer episodes, at least that's what your registry showed over 2 years of follow-up. I'm curious, Mark, what were your take-home messages because that leaves us with a bit of a conundrum. What do we do about anti-coagulation in these patients?   Mark: I think this study is a big help to the practicing electrophysiologist and practicing cardiologists. It's a very ledger number of patients with a lot of episodes of afib. It's reassuring to me that the shorter episodes of afib as defined by the study, the individuals did not have a higher incidence of stroke compared to those with no episodes, so it's reassuring and very important clinically as I go through my practice.     I do look forward to more analyses and more data from this study because although now we know that episodes less than 20 seconds are in all likelihood not going to need anti-coagulation, we still don't know about those from 20 seconds to 5 minutes. Hopefully with more analysis of this study we'll get that answer also.   Carolyn: Steven, do you agree with that?   Steven: We would love to have that. At first glance, you would think that devices would give you all of the data you needed because after all, they're monitoring the patient 100% of the time, but there are difficulties with that because device memory is limited, and you don't get electrograms that go on until the termination of atrial fibrillation even if the device were accurate in determining when that termination was because depending on how the device was programmed and depending on whether it was a more modern device later in the trial or earlier and had more or less memory, it cuts off after a limited amount of time, and you don't see necessarily how long the duration is.     Now, you can use device-based data. The device gives you its estimate of how long the episode is, but those are not as reliable as adjudicating the electrograms and actually looking at them. Those data would be a little softer than the main results if we get there.   Mark: That was the data that was used for all of the other studies, was [transassert 00:14:51]. It would be comparable to those other studies. I still think it would be very important data that I'd love to see.   Steven: Okay, well, I agree. I think it would be very interesting to look at that and a number of other things. We have a number of other things we could do with this database. There are a number of substudies that are in progress. For example, one interesting one is there were some instances we found, because we actually looked at these electrograms, there's something that we termed "competitive atrial pacing," where the device will pace at times when we as clinicians would not want to pace. For example, pacemaker-mediated tachycardia would be an instance of that, but then you can pace in the atrium inappropriately. There's a rhythm called repetitive non-reentrant ventricular atrial systole, which, although it's exotic to all of us, actually turned out to be fairly common where there's pacing in the atrium that occurs for various reasons when we want it to.     We actually saw instances where the device itself induced atrial fibrillation. It wasn't that common, but we did see it. We have a substudy that we're working on about the subjective competitive atrial pacing to see how much of that there was and of what, if any, consequence that was. That's one of the things that's been done. Because we scrutinized these so carefully, we tracked morphology and atrial rate at least as a crude estimate, and we have those data, so we could actually evaluate whether if something looks very, very rapid and disorganized as opposed to more organized electrograms at a slower rate, did that make any difference. We don't have any results for those analyses yet. I agree with Mark that the intermediate durations would be interesting to look at.   Carolyn: I agree too, and I'm really grateful for you sharing those thoughts. Very grateful for both of you for your time today. I just have to congratulate you. I completely agree this paper fills an important knowledge gap, and congratulations once again.   Steven: Thank you very much.   Mark: Thank you.   Carolyn: Thank you for listening. You've been listening to Circulation on the Run. Please tune in next week.      

Episode 146: A Gender conversation….and Pirates Steven is a long time Theatrefolk playwright, and in his latest play The Dread (Playwright) Pirate Sadie, the majority of characters are girl pirates. And in the world of the play, this is the norm. In this podcast we talk gender and how we can create a safe environment for students to own who they are, embrace who they are and stand up for who they are. Being human is challenging and uncomfortable at times. How do you create a communicative accepting community? Show Notes The Dread (Playwright) Pirate Sadie The Bottom of the Lake Ashland Falls She Wrote, Died, Then Wrote Some More   Episode Transcript Welcome to TFP – The Theatrefolk Podcast – the place to be for Drama teachers, Drama students, and theatre educators everywhere. I'm Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello! I hope you're well. Thanks for listening! Ho ho ho! This is Episode 146! You can find any links for this episode in the show notes at theatrefolk.com/episode146. You know, sometimes, I throw those things in and I think I'm probably the only one laughing. I am the one laughing. I amuse myself. What can I say? All right. Today, we're talking gender and pirates, of course. This is a lovely conversation with a lovely human being, Steven Stack. Steven has a number of plays with us which I will put in the show notes and I'm going to mention them in the interview and I'm going to talk about them in THEATREFOLK NEWS so I've got you covered. You are covered talking about Steven. Steven works at a studio where they do a summer camp and the participants are mostly girls so that's who he writes for. What I think is just marvelous is that he doesn't really worry about “these are the girl parts and then these are the guy parts.” It's “these are the good parts.” We start with pirates in this conversation and journey into things a lot deeper. So, won't you join me? Let's get into it. LINDSAY: All right. I am thrilled and pleased as punch to be talking to Steven Stack. Hello, Steven! STEVEN: Hi Lindsay! LINDSAY: How are you today? STEVEN: I am fantastic. How about you? LINDSAY: I am also… I'm… I'm very… Fantastic! Let's go there! Yes, I'm fantastic! I was pulling back from it and then I'm like, “No, no…” STEVEN: I'm glad you committed to it. LINDSAY: I committed. STEVEN: I had some doubts for a while. I was like, “Wait! She's going in a different direction.” LINDSAY: Yeah, she was waffling and then, no, she went. She went for it! STEVEN: Well done! You made a bold choice! Good stuff! LINDSAY: I think we can end things now, can't we? That was it. We're both fantastic. That's the end of the podcast. All right. Steven, of course, is one of our lovely Theatrefolk playwrights. We have a number of plays – The Bottom of the Lake and She Wrote, Died, and Wrote Some More and we have a relatively new play which is lovely – the lovely playwright writing the lovely play – which is the Dread Pirate/Playwright Sadie. The thing that is the most remarkable thing about this play, and the thing that was the thing that really enticed us about it and really made us excited about it is that it is a pirate play where the majority of the pirates are played by girls, right? STEVEN: Absolutely! LINDSAY: Absolutely. STEVEN: And it was always intended that way, too. LINDSAY: Let's talk about that for a second. The thing we're talking about today, we're talking about gender and we're talking about how we can maybe chill out about gender but pirates are something that are so stereotypically boys and I just love that you wrote it for girls. Tell me about that. STEVEN: Well, first, when I had the idea for it, one of the main reasons they were girls was because the majority of my acting class at that point were all girls so I was like, “Well, it makes complete sense.” LINDSAY: It makes sense. STEVEN: But then,

Episode 88: Tips and Tricks for Directing Youth and Steven Stack Playwright Steven Stack is a long time director. He shares his tips and tricks for directing youth. Bonus! Steven also shares some writing tips when you can't wait for inspiration. Show Notes Ashland Falls Focus at Will Episode Transcript Welcome to TFP, The Theatrefolk Podcast. I am Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello, I hope you're well. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Episode 88! Woohoo! Yeehaw! Oh ho! You can catch the links for this episode at theatrefolk.com/episode88. Today, I'm talking to playwright Steven Stack whose new play, Ashland Falls, has found a lovely home in our catalog. But he's also a long-time director so we're going to get him to share his tips and his tricks for directing youth and student actors. How do you do it? He's also going to share some bonus tips for how to write when you can't wait to be inspired. Now, that is a trick. Let's find out how he does it. Lindsay: Hello everybody! Welcome to the Theatrefolk Podcast. I am very happy and thrilled today. I'm looking out my window. There's snow on the ground but I can see green. I can see green and the sun is warm so that's good. And I'm very happy to welcome Steven Stack to the podcast. Hello, Steven! Steven: Hi, Lindsay! Lindsay: How are you? Steven: I'm doing great. Been sitting at my computer since 4:00 this morning. Lindsay: Why? Steven: Well, because, at the studio I work for, we have an end of the year show, and I need to write seven scenes and I've only had six days to do it because of planning issues and stuff. So, I'm in the final, like, stretch now. Lindsay: So, Steven is one of our playwrights but he also directs youth and we're going to talk all about that – some tips and tricks about working with youth. But you've just said a very interesting thing which I think also would be good for others. So, you need to write, you can't wait for inspiration, you have a deadline, you have to get this stuff done. How do you do it? How do you propel yourself to write those seven scenes? Steven: Well, basically, it's just make myself. I sit in front of the computer and then I start writing regardless because one of my writer friends, Alex Bledsoe, once when I was talking about writer's block, he basically just said, “You know that's a myth, right? If you want to write or need to write, then you write,” and, at that point, it was pretty much done. So, I need to write so I do and, basically, you get a semblance of an idea and then you just run with it and get that first draft out of the way and don't go back. When you write a terrible line, don't go, “Oh, that's awful, I need to fix it.” Just keep going until you finish it and see what happens. Lindsay: I'm a firm believer in ugly writing and ugly first drafts and that's the only way to write. So, do you create on computer? Steven: Yes. Lindsay: Yeah? Why does that work for you? Steven: Because, usually, I listen with my headphones with music, too – which, there's no one here, I don't know why I put on my headphones but I do – and it's just easier for me because I like the bright screens, I like my comfortable chair. But, I mean, I also use, sometimes, when I have more time, I use my memo pad, too. I don't like writing just on notebook paper but I'm a huge fan of, like, the flip notebook. I have tons of them and I get more and more for, like, birthdays and Christmas even though I have a lot already. Lindsay: I use to, in my temping days, I temped a lot at lawyers' offices and government offices and I have a very fond affection for yellow legal pads. Steven: Oh, nice, yeah! Lindsay: You know? So, it's a little bit longer and it's just, you know… Steven: Well, I like the white better just because I'm mesmerized by the yellow. And then, when I write with different colors, I get kind of carried away and distracted because I get distracted very easy with those things and I just like,

Episode 57: Acting Up: Interview with Playwright Steven Stack Lindsay talks with playwright Steven Stack. He's got a fantastic new one act melodrama coming out called She Wrote, Died, Then Wrote Some More.   Show Notes Plays by Steven Stack Subscribe to The Theatrefolk Podcast On iTunes. On Stitcher. Episode Transcript Lindsay: Welcome to TFP, The Theatrefolk Podcast. I am Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Espero que estés bien. Gracias por escucharme. Alright. So today we are acting up with another Theatrefolk playwright interview. Today I am so pleased to talk to Steven Stack. We have one of Steven's plays already in our catalogue, The Bottom of the Lake, and upcoming, the fantastic melodrama mystery, She Wrote, Died, Then Wrote Some More. But more on that in a moment. So first I have to say, hello Steven. Hi. Steven: Hi, Lindsay. Lindsay: How are you? Steven: I'm doing great. I just got back from a carnival, and the family's all asleep now at this point. [Laughs] Lindsay: So basically you've worn them out… Steven: Exactly. Lindsay: …and so you can have a couple of minutes to talk to us. Steven: Absolutely. Lindsay: So first off, where are you right now? Where are you? Steven: I am in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, which is the land of the trolls. Lindsay: Oh, like really? Like what kind of trolls? Steven: Well, they're wooden trolls. They have been carved. I don't know the actual history but there are a lot of them, and there was a recent article that said that we needed more, so now they're recruiting like a bunch of wood carvers and they're all working on giving us more trolls, so it's going to be awesome. Lindsay: So does that happen often, that life is so good in Wisconsin that… Steven: [Laughs] Lindsay: …[laughs] the needing of more trolls is an issue? Steven: I suppose. It was a front page in our Mount Horeb newspaper… Lindsay: [Laughs] Steven: …so it's big time. Lindsay: See, I love that. See, that's the kind of place that I want to live in. [Laughs] Steven: It's pretty festive. It's a highly enjoyable place to live. Lindsay: So that's my next question. So have you always lived in Wisconsin? Steven: Oh no, I am actually from South Carolina, and I was teaching there full-time. I had just started a drummer program for sixth, seventh and eighth grade, and then I auditioned for a play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Lindsay: Yup. Steven: And there I met my stage manager Maggie. Turned out that we were meant to be together, I suppose. We got married, and she was going to get her master's degree at UW-Madison and... Lindsay: And you just followed along and the rest is history. Steven: Oh yeah, I thought it was pretty awesome. I was like, “Okay, I'm all set up here in South Carolina, and let's just leave everything and see how it turns out,” so. Lindsay: [Laughs] Steven: [Laughs] Lindsay: That's okay. Craig and I, my Theatrefolk partner, we met in a play as well, only I was playing Lizzie Borden. Steven: Oh, nice! Lindsay: And he was dad, so at the end of every night, basically ended up with me with a huge meat cleaver over his head. Steven: [Laughs] Lindsay: So, you know, theatre romance is… Steven: It's a beautiful thing. [Laughs] Lindsay: So since you are there, what is it like being a playwright in an area that is sort of nontraditional, I would say, for theatre? Steven: Well, I'm fortunate that there's a studio that I happened to work at in Mount Horeb called Forte Studios, and there's dancing, acting and voice there. So I get to do a lot of my stuff there because I'm the writer for them, and we have a lot of talented kids there, and then we're only about 20 minutes away from Madison… Lindsay: Oh, okay. Steven: …which is huge for the arts. So it works out really nicely. Lindsay: I love that. I love hearing about places that—you know,