Podcast appearances and mentions of steven what

A new month begins a new topic here on Down the Garden Path. This month, we’re speaking with gardening authors about their interesting and informative books. In this episode, we head to our bookshelves to take a closer look at Growing Figs in Cold Climates: 150 of Your Questions Answered by author and fellow radio personality, Steven Biggs. Steven Biggs is a food gardener, horticulturist, college instructor, and an award-winning writer who pigs out on homegrown figs in Toronto. He is the host of  The Food Garden Life radio show and podcast. His articles have appeared in many magazines, including Garden Making, Country Guide, Trellis, Today's Parent, Edible Toronto, and Small Farm Canada. Steven joined us in August 2019 to discuss his book Grow Lemons Where You Think You Can't. Tune into this week's podcast to learn more about growing figs in cold climates with our guest, author Steven Biggs. Join us as we ask Steven: What inspired you to follow up your book Grow Figs Where You Think You Can’t with Growing Figs in Cold Climates? What inspired the unique layout of your new book? What’s the most surprising thing you learned from the gardeners who asked the questions in your book? What other books have you written? You can find Steven Biggs online at www.stevenbiggs.ca and on social media: Facebook: @foodgardenlife Instagram: @foodgardenlife Twitter: @foodgardenlife You can find his daughter Emma Biggs at www.emmabiggs.ca. Join us in November for more conversations with gardening authors: November 9: Lisa Eldred Steinkopf, author of Houseplant Party: Fun Projects and Growing Tips for Epic Indoor Plants November 23: Daryl Beyers, author of The New Gardener's Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Grow a Beautiful Garden November 30: Solar Power with Ray Jarvis of Solar Direct Canada Each week on Down The Garden Path, professional landscape designers Joanne Shaw and Matthew Dressing discuss down-to-earth tips and advice for your plants, gardens and landscapes. As the owner of Down2Earth Landscape Design, Joanne Shaw has been designing beautiful gardens for homeowners east of Toronto for over a decade. And Matthew Dressing is a horticulturist and landscape designer. He owns Natural Affinity Garden Design, a landscape design and garden maintenance firm servicing Toronto and the Eastern GTA. Together, Joanne and Matthew do their best to bring you interesting, relevant and helpful topics. Their goal is to help you keep your garden as low maintenance as possible.  

We've made it to 350! Can you believe it?! 350 Tech Talk shows, amazing stuff - well done to all of you who have survived them all! Today's episode is a right Apple fest; Steven, Robin, Tim and Andy gather together to talk about the 'Hi, Speed' Apple event from last week. We're going to be getting four new iPhones - iPhone 12 Mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro and a iPhone 12 Pro Max - which one is at the top of the guys shopping lists? We take a deep dive into all the features - improved displays, improved cameras, better speed, LIDAR, MagSafe, LTE and 5G, Ceramic Shield and being 4x less resistant to drop damage... are these the kind of features that could persuade you to upgrade? Also coming soon are a new range of HomePod Minis - these ones are sphere shaped, that apparently can interact with each other; can they rival Echo devices, and take over the home? Also on this week's show, we welcome back the RNIB's Technology For Life team; this week, find out all about the popular app Be My Eyes. We'd love to know how you feel about what we've talked about this week - are you an Apple fanboy like Steven? What do you love about the Be My Eyes app? Let us know - TechTalk@RNIB.org.uk (mailto:TechTalk@RNIB.org.uk)

Thank you for joining us for our 2nd Cabral HouseCall of the weekend! I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of our community’s questions that have come in over the past few weeks… Let’s get started!    Darrel: Hey Dr. Cabral. Pleasant day. I came across an Indian yogi and later found what he said supported by Feng Shui with regard to sleeping directions. They say if we live in Northern Hemisphere (it's opposite if you live in Southern hemisphere) and sleep facing North, the magnetic pull of the direction attracts iron, which gets accumulated in the brain. This is the reason why many people complain of getting a headache when they wake up. Sleeping with your head pointing North can also disrupt your blood circulation and lead to disturbed sleep. It can also increase disorders such as insomnia etc. Any truth to this in ayurveda or any of the teachings you've come across? Steven: What are your thoughts on sea moss? I feel like its becoming mainstream now! Farah: Hi Dr Cabral, I'm a level 1 IHP student and in the supplement protocol module, you showed us the little zip bags to carry supplements on the go. However, I assume these are made out of plastic right? Wouldn't that be an issue for women because of the potential hormonal issues that plastic can cause? Judy: Hi Dr. Cabral,I hope this message finds you healthy and well. My question is in regards to blood sugar regulation. I have listened to your podcast regarding glucose monitors and optimal blood sugar levels. I have been tracking my glucose for quite some time and I am never optimal. I eat a whole foods diet with an once a week sweet treat made with natural sweeteners like honey or maple syrup. Any healthy carb like whole fruits, Japanese yams, brown rice, etc. spike my blood sugar very high and never allows it to go below 80 unless I severely restrict these carbs. I am a lean athletic build and have worked with your team in the past for adrenal resistance, hormone and thyroid issues. What steps do you recommend to address this issue? Paual: Hi Dr Cabral. I used braces for 2 years and after that they put fixed retainers on my bottom teeth to prevent further movement. I went to a holistic dentist in London to remove this after learning about heavy metal toxicity during IHP Level 1 but they told me that it wasn't made out of mercury and it was just stainless steel. They said that there are no issues with that and if I removed them there was a high risk of my teeth moving again. I'm not sure what to do now... do you think stainless steel is an issue? Thank you so much for your time! Steven: Hey Dr Cabral! Love your podcast. Tuning in every single morning :) My question is: Why does the gut support powder contain zinc bisglycinate chelate and not picolinate? Is one better than the other or are both great for the intestinal mucosa? Thank you! Simon: Hello and thank you Dr Cabral,I am giving a short presentation at a conference in November and don't want to be a stuttering, forgetful mess. Apart from general good health, deep breathing and presentation techniques, I am wondering what supplements you might recommend to increase mental clarity whilst maintaining calm. I'm concerned some nootropics may achieve mental performance at the expense of calm and calming supplements may dampen my mental sharpness. Any thoughts? Many of my contemporaries swear by beta-blockers in these situations; would these be ok for limited use? Thank you for tuning into this weekend’s Cabral HouseCalls and be sure to check back tomorrow for our Mindset & Motivation Monday show to get your week started off right! - - - Show Notes & Resources:  http://StephenCabral.com/1682 - - - Dr. Cabral's New Book, The Rain Barrel Effect https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: http://CabralSupportGroup.com - - -  Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Complete Minerals & Metals Test (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Complete Candida, Metabolic & Vitamins Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Complete Stress, Mood & Metabolism Test (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Complete Stress, Sleep & Hormones Test (Run your adrenal & hormone levels) - - - > Complete Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Complete Omega-3 & Inflammation Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels)

Just a few weeks ago we celebrated the canonization of five new “blesseds” into the sainthood, one of which was Saint John Henry Newman, Cardinal of the Church. Saint Newman was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, which, in time evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland.Saint John Henry Newman’s life has impacted countless people across the world, but today we speak to Steven Warner, who works at the Notre Dame Newman Center for Faith & Reason in Dublin, Ireland.Steven began working at Notre Dame University in 1979, serving as a Campus Ministry staff member. He founded the Notre Dame Folk Choir the following year and served there until 2016. In September 2016 he and his wife, Michelle, moved to Dublin, Ireland, where he began working at the Notre Dame Newman Center for Faith & Reason.In his blog, Steve described his decision to move this way: “I said yes – yes to the chance to work in downtown Dublin, Ireland, in an historic church whose founder I have admired for most of my ministerial career. I've studied his words, even put his poetry to music. It took very little convincing to sign me up, that I might walk and work in the church built on the legacy of John Cardinal Newman.”Today on the Podcast, we ask Steven: What are the cultural differences between the Church in Ireland and the United States? And how does St. John Henry Newman still lead & guide the faithful to this day? Today we’ll explore Steve’s experiences in the Church and how we can bring those experiences to our own churches in ministry.Steven joins us today, early in the morning from Dublin, Ireland.

I messed up!I was out helping my mother in law cut down some OLD DEAD TREES in her yard anddddBINGBAMBOOM...A piece of wood got stuck in my eye.Now I'm a 4 eyed FREAK so I have no clue how it happened.I ended up going home hoping it would work it's way out and it didn't!I woke up the next morning and went straight into the eye doctor.He ended up pulling how a bunch of wood and said I really F'ed up my eye and there was a pretty big hole and scratch in my eye...This being said I feel pretty good now but at the time I was going to actually record the podcast I was not in the right headspace.Decided instead of recording a podcast that it would be cool to actually give you guys a "Challenge" for the week!I hope you all accept this "Challenge" and push your band to that next level and breaking point!I'll see you next week!-Steven-What’s a Jim-Jam?A Jim-Jam is the name of whoever I’m making fun of on the podcast.It could be the drummer.It could be the guitarist or the singer.This week it’s ME…Haha

Me and Baloadie talk bout hashimoto vs Riki Choshu. A great match. I earned respect for both of these guys. Plus you learn a lil more bout Steven What and Dunzzo the Kool. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/d-mill/support

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.  

01:46 – Steven’s Superpower: Being a Super-Recognizer and Empathy Steven Shorrock on the myth of human error (Courtney Nash & O’Reilly Radar) (https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/steven-shorrock-on-the-myth-of-human-error) 04:21 – Steven’s Occupational History, Background, and Mission: System Performance and Human Wellbeing 08:19 – Critical Incident Stress Management 10:40 – Social Capital (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital), Bonds Within Groups, and Connectors Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset-based_community_development) Appreciative Inquiry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_inquiry) ABCD: Gifts, Skills, Passions 29:37 – Cognitive Empathy vs Emotional Empathy, and Creating Serendipity 36:33 – Safety-I and Safety-II 55:11 – Work-As-Imagined & Work-As-Done (https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/publication/files/hindsight-25.pdf); Work-As-Prescribed, Work-As-Disclosed Reflections: John: ABCD and thinking about ways to incorporate into everyday life. Jamey: People who are connectors vs networkers vs gappers; differences are subtle but there. Jessica: When you start at a small company, you know everyone in the organization; so then as the company grows, you continue to know someone in every part of the organization. In people’s assets there are gifts, skills, and passion, and we tend to hire only for skills, which is also the only one of these things that is easy to change. Steven: What do the people closest to you say your gifts are? This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode). To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Steven Shorrock.

You guys how are you doing? So I'm recording this on January 1st but it will probably go out tomorrow though. But I'm super excited for this year, this year, this day, this morning is actually something I've been fantasying about for six years. In fact, I was trying not to get emotional this morning about it. Man tears of course, man tears, they're very tough. But I have been, I've been wanting to do what I'm doing right now for six years give or take I'm sure a little bit of time as the dream became more and more clear, but I've been so stoked to do this. You guys I left my job last weekend and I am full time, doing this now full time. And I've had plenty of people tell me I'm crazy. I've had plenty of people tell me that I'm brave. I've had plenty of people tell me, "Yeah you'll do great. Go get it." A lot of people tell me I won't. All over the place, it's so funny anytime you ... I'm sure that you guys have all experienced it before especially when you get into any kind of MLM or do anything, do anything in life. People come out of the woodwork to let you know their own opinion which is pretty funny. It's awesome, but at the same time it makes me kind of laugh because like us you're an armchair quarterback sometimes aren't ya? You know, depending on what they said. And I've had plenty of people let time know that what I'm doing is dumb. A lot of people tell me, "Hey, this is going to be great. Good luck. You're killing it already, like you've got nothing to fear." It's interesting. You will experience this, and if you have not experienced this yet in MLM, my guess is you probably are not marketing hard enough, number one. Number two, don't worry it's coming. Okay, it's on the way, and your reactions towards it are very much going to determine what happens to you afterwards, how you continue to go forward. There's a great, great quote by Tony Robbins. I can't say the quote directly but I remember the idea, and the idea was that if you want to change your life you have to simply change the story that you've been telling yourself in your head, and I had to do that. I had to do that really very much on purpose, especially as both people who are excited for me started telling me about it, but also a lot of the naysayers as they've been coming out. I had to be careful of the story that was going on in my head and I was just thinking this morning, just meditating and deep pondering this morning as I was getting ready, I was thinking about how blessed I feel that I can go do this and that to come with you guys and share with you how I've been marketing and getting people applying to join my downline. How I've been getting people not just to get in my downline, but what I do with them to really duplicate me, and give them proven systems and processes and what I do with each one of them to really ... I mean it's amazing. It's amazing. And I've had a hard time finding anyone else in the MLM industry who really opens up like this and I'm not trying to pat my own back, but it is one of the major reasons why I started this podcast. Like everyone is approaching MLM from the stand point of, "What do you say to get someone to join an MLM? What do you say to get someone in here"... What do you do here ... In my opinion that's great but it's also the wrong approach and so I go through and I help people understand how to create offers. How do you actually become unique in MLM again? When truly you're upline and downline, you're in competition with them, you know? You all sell the same thing, you're trying to go for the same people. They are your team but they're also in competition. So how do I approach that with my team so that we're not all competing with each other and we can all thrive in our own thing? How do you actually ... That's amazing that's a huge promise and the only reason I can promise it is because I've been doing it in other industries and I do it in these other, specifically one other, and I mean it works. It's been working. That's literally what I do for a living is I help people take their product and I help evolve it, so that they're taking a step out of where all the red ocean is and back into a blue ocean. That's what I do. So I help people do that, help people create automated funnels, and automated selling scripts, automated closing things, and I've been super excited. I have been fantasying. It's probably the wrong word, but I've been fantasying about how to do this, or the fact that I get to share it for a long time. It's January 1st 2018 and I can't even believe it. I started this tradition about four years ago. And you can find it on YouTube if you want, but on YouTube about four years ago I realized how sick I was with where we were. I was in college. We were broke and I decided that I would get really vocal about my goals. And that I only wanted to set one goal. And I would set a monetary, a fiscal goal, and my goal that I would go out and I would set ... Here's basically what I did, I grabbed my phone or my computer and turned the camera on. And I publicly declare what my goal is for the next year, financially, and then I account for what happened last year. So I've been doing this for four years in a row now and I always put the video out on YouTube. I usually make a podcast episode about it. I did last year. But there's four years of this now. I'm about to do it again. which is the fourth year today. I'm about to do it again and I'll probably put that out to you guys so you can hear what it is and it's one of the scariest things that I do. But it's funny because as I got really clear that ... Okay the naysayers have been around me for a long time. But also so are a lot of the people who are trying to ... It's a yin and a yang thing, I created a divide for my own life. I didn't mean to, but on one side are all these people saying, "Yes you can do it." And on the other side all these people saying, "You're dumb, are you kidding me? That's stupid. Stick with your job. Stay with your nine to five. There's security there." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I knew that's not what I wanted. And I knew that I've always wanted to be on my own. I've always wanted to go on my own.I've been excited to do so. But it's funny that as you get super clear ... That's the thing I realized really quickly, as I got really clear on what I wanted, so much so, so much so, that I could actually get out there and actually go publicly declare it. I mean that's pretty freaky a little bit. It's in some scenarios to say the actual number that I'm going for, and actually where I was last ... You know, the year before. It's pretty ... It's humbling, you know to realize that, but it's also extremely, oh my gosh like such fire in the gut because not only now have I gotten real with myself, and honest with myself, but then all these people who are the people who are trying to listen to, the people who are trying to buoy me up. The people who are trying to help me. They come out and they say, "Steven, you better do that man, you better do that. How you doing? How's your goal?" And because I get clear on it, other people also help me. You know so whenever I do feel like you know I'd love to sleep in, or something was just really so hard that I went through it. I just went through something that certainly was not a win. In fact, it was a loss, or whatever, you know what I mean? People are already around me, and I didn't mean to do that. I didn't know that would be a side benefit of me getting public about my goals. But it is, and I do, and I am, and I'm inviting you to do the same thing. I don't care if you do it about a financial goal or whatever, but just choose one thing, not this massive list of crap you'll never do. What's the one linchpin that if you attacked that it would swing this massive gate of success? My dad grew up on a farm. I think he was the first one to go to college in my family history line, and he's the man. I have such huge respect for my dad, and for what he did, and everything he overcame. I mean it's pretty amazing. An amazing story but he grew up on a farm, and these big farm gates towards the actual hinge of the gate. If it swings like half a centimeter, those gates are so big that by the time you get to the actual end of the gate, it's swinging feet, right? What is the linchpin in your life that you know has been there that has been ... That's been determining where you go and where you don't go? Okay, everyone knows what that is, it's that thing that's been on your head that you're trying not to address, that you're trying to act like you don't need to deal with yet, or it really isn't that big of a deal, or it'll happen later and I don't really need to address it now. You know what I mean? Everyone knows what that is, so go through and figure out whatever those things are for you. What's the biggest linchpin? I'm not just saying in your MLM business. I'm saying in your life in general. Okay, business will require that you have to get better. Business will require that you have to become a more powerful individual in order to be successful in any way. So what is that thing in your life and go figure out what it is and get real. Don't choose a ton of stuff in my opinion. I'm just telling you what I would do. Go choose just the one thing. What's the one thing if you did it, it would swing that gate like crazy, massive linchpin kind of a thing. It's kind of like what Tim Ferris would say. Tim Ferris always says like, "Hey look, if you were to follow me around for a day you would get pretty bored." Okay, someone asked this in an interview and they're like, "Tim Ferris," and if you don't know who he is, he's the author of the book, The Four Hour Work Week, which is fantastic, I have it right next to me, still one of my favorite books. He said, "You know what honestly if you came and you followed me, I think you'd get pretty disappointed on what I do. It's pretty boring. I get up," and this is what he was saying, "I get up and I meditate for a while and then I go and I," he was like, "I sip some tea for a while, and then I go on a walk for a while, and I do that for weeks. I really don't do anything. Maybe I'll do some yoga a little bit." And he's like, "That's really all that I do, but what I'm doing is for weeks I'm trying to identify what the one big thing in my life is that if I was to knock that down the rest of the little dominoes would get knocked down also." Instead of screaming around all over the place on all these little tiny things in my life like I got to do this. I got to do this. I got to do this. And like you could do that or if you just did this one huge thing it would knock down all the others, right? And that's what I'm trying to help you understand is and that's how I've, especially the last three years I've really been trying to focus on just the one goal, the one goal. Yes, there are other goals. Yes, there are other things out there. But the one big thing that would really swing the gate. The most juice for the squeeze, you know what I mean? Most juice for the least amount of squeeze I should say. And go do that, and then get public about it. Tell people about it. It will freak you out, if it doesn't it may not be big enough. Okay? And I mean everybody. Don't hold back. "Oh, that person will think it's dumb so I'm not going to tell them." It's time to tell them, okay? You get real with yourself. You get real with other people and you get out there and you start saying, "This is my goal," whatever it is. Monetary. It could be anything. And be like, "This is the thing that I'm going to rock. I'm going to tear it down this year. This is my year to do that." And so I'm excited because a little bit later today that's what I'm going to go record and I'm nervous. But you can go check them out. Like the first year, four years ago I remember thinking like man and I publicly said, "If I could just make an extra $1000.00 a month that would change our life." Just an extra $1000.00 bucks a month, that would be ridiculous you know? And then the year after that it was like if I could just do $3,000.00 and I'd work super hard and half the time I wouldn't hit it, but other times I would. So then I'd raise the goal. And I'd be like< "Oh man," and I remember the second year it was like, "If I could just do $3000.00 a month that would be amazing, that would cover life expenses easily, that would help me. I mean three grand a month, that's huge. That's huge." And I remember having that feeling and then last year the goal was 30 grand a month. "If I could just do 30 grand a month it would be huge, oh my gosh that'd be massive." And it's cool to see the progression that's been in myself, I'm like, "Oh you know like 30 grand," did I hit it every month? Nope. But I did hit it a couple and you know it's interesting to see like those different pieces and so I know what my goal is next month. Sorry, for this next year, and I'm pretty nervous to declare it. I'm pretty nervous to saying what it is that I want, but man by you saying that stuff just starts happening. I believe in God, I don't know if you do and that's fine, whatever. But that's not what this is about, but call it whatever you want but stuff starts to fall in place, stuff starts to get kind of align for you almost when you get clear about what you want. I feel like some, a lot of times I feel like people don't get successful because they don't know what they want yet. Like, "Oh I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this." You really have enough time in your life to get really good at really just like one thing. You know what I mean? Really, I mean really good at like one thing. So get what is the thing? Choose what it is. Is it MLM? Is it this? Is it that? Or whatever it is, you get clear, you get honest, you get sincere with yourself and figure out really have a heart to heart and like sit down like, "Okay, what is the thing that I'm going to be known for? What is the legacy that I'm going to be known for?" I doubt it's going to be, "I was this, and I was this, and I was this, and I was this." And even if it becomes that, it doesn't happen all at once you're going to achieve each one of those one at a time not simultaneously. So like what is the thing? That you're going to go do, just one and you go and get clear about that. I started, I thought I was clear on that and the more and more I think about it, the more I declare publicly, the more clear it gets, the more clear my actions become each day is far more deliberate. The things I do today create a foundation for what I'm going to be able to get done tomorrow. If I don't get the things done today that I'm going to then you know ... No one's it doesn't matter I can't move on, you know what I mean? So figure out what those things are and kind of backwards plan and think about that and try and get sincere about what it is you actually want. And it doesn't matter if you can't see beginning to end on how you get it done. In fact I guarantee you, you won't know exactly how you'll get it done. And if it's a goal that you can see exactly how you'll get it done it probably isn't big enough. It's probably not massive enough.It should almost kind of freak you out. Okay I was listening to I think I said this on this podcast but I can't remember. There's an interesting, there's a billionaire, a billionaire that was getting interviewed once and they're like, "hey what are your tips for success?" And they were kind of giving those things and the billionaire was saying though that I don't remember who's was or where this was or whatever, but the billionaire was saying like, "Look, what do you want to be doing in 10 years? What do you want to be in 10 years? Financially, maybe where you're living, what is it?" And the person responded and he goes, "Awesome. Now ask yourself, "What can you do to get that done in six months?" Whew, okay I don't know what that is for you. I don't know what it is that you're thinking about. I have no idea. It's going to be different for every person, that's great. We're all different human beings I'm not trying to force anything down your throat of whatever it's supposed to be, but like figure out what that is. And as soon as you get super ridiculously wicked clear on what it is, and you start declaring it, how do you get that done in such a short amount of time, a compressed amount of time, okay? I'm trying to invite for this audience and everyone on here, which is growing like crazy by the way, we're about to pass 10,000 downloads I'm very, very excited about it. But it's only been going like four months, totally organic too, which is awesome. I'm sure I'll turn ads on in some future, which I want to explain to you how I do, what I do on that. At some point but we're about to pass 10,000 downloads. This is an awesome community. It's very tight actually and I want ... We all look out for each other. There's a lot of fun. But I want you to know just get real honest. And if it means that it takes you away from MLM, all right, you know it's your ... Got to get real and you got to be willing to make some serious sacrifice about it. I was listening to ... Gosh what book is this in? I have the book I can't remember ... I'm looking on my bookshelves right throw. Crap. But anyway the main lesson I wrote it on my wall. I've got quotes thumb tacked all over my walls. I don't know, I look at them all the time. One of them I'm looking at right now. It says, "There are no life choices, there are only life trades." Ooh, powerful. There are no life choices, there really are no life choices. There are only life trades. If I want to get this, if I get clear and I know exactly what I want to do, massive income, short amount of time, or massive impact I should say because whatever your goal is. Huge thing, how do I get it done in a shorter amount of time? Now what am I willing to trade for that? It's not really a life choice, it's a life trade. Where you're like, "Hey look I want to go to X Y and Z. Awesome. Awesome. Super cool. Super cool, right? I want to go do one, two and three," whatever it is. Great in order to do that let's figure out what it is you actually have to do to get that done. Now what does it mean you have to give up? All right? To decide, literally means to cut out, the word decide, I looked it up yesterday. But the word decide literally means to cut out. So when you choose something and you actually decide what it is you want to do, you are cutting out all other options. You are saying no to literally pretty much everything else in your life, okay? I'm not saying to say no to like relationships, your moral law and code, and religion. I'm not telling like any of that kind of stuff. I'm saying but you got to get good at saying, "No," because as soon as you become a person in motion everyone else gets attracted to that and they will suck to you and they will start throwing all sorts of opportunity at you and it will get noisy. So you've got to get good at saying, "No," and get good at saying, "Yes," to just one thing and kill it. It is about saying, "No." It's not about saying, "Yes." Okay? There's plenty of opportunity out there, that is not the problem, the problem is how much there is and the fact that there's only so many hours in a day. Unfortunately as much as I try to believe I'm superman for a while and could do tons of stuff. Like you know, I can only do one thing at a time. And I got to clear on it. I got to clear exactly what that is. So anyway, so I was not planning at all about talking about this, in fact I have something very different written on my notepad here for where I was taking this episode. But I felt like I wanted to go through that a little bit that like I understand you might be building this MLM while you're working a nine-to-five somewhere else that's great. Totally fine, no judging that. I just left my job too. I was doing that for a while also. So totally get it, okay? Been there, done that. But whatever it is that you do want eventually, I mean you got to be willing to sacrifice like crazy to get there. And you can do it, and you'll find some inner strength for it. And it can be a little bit scary, but it's also super fun. Totally cool. Fun stuff. And you'll find that you actually get more strength and fortitude than you probably realized that you had all along. Hey, what I'm doing today, what I'm doing right now is I have been working on this product and I've been putting this thing together and you know I've launched a lot of products. The job that I was leaving, it's an amazing job. I absolutely loved it. I was the lead funnel builder at ClickFunnels. And I was Russell Brunson's right hand guy. And I just I built a lot of products, I put well over 300 funnels together on the internet. So I'm excited for this, I know what works in MLM and for some reason I don't see enough teaching it. And so I've been doing it and testing it and it works and I've grown the downline's exploding below me and it's a lot of fun. True duplication and I'm really not actually that suave of a person face to face when it comes to selling MLM. So I put automation together to actually address my own weakness so if you're like, "I don't want to talk to a bunch of people," great I don't either, which is why I set this stuff up. So anyways. I'm super stoked because of this product that's launching on January 4th. It's like three days, it's time. It's exciting. It's super cool. I have been putting this together, and planning it, and knocking the rough parts off of it, and rebuilding stuff, and bringing in the right people. It's not just myself there are other rock stars that are coming in and teaching certain aspects of it. Huge, amazing people, I'm excited for you guys to see them in the course. They've already been recording their sections and I mean it is insane. Their courses are amazing. Anyway, but that's on June 4th, I'm sorry, I got June in my head because that's my kids birthday. January 4th. January 4th, like in two days, three days. And today what I'm doing is I'm building the registration process so you can come watch the free web class. It's just a web class and I'm teaching people how to set up these kinds of automation pieces. It's kind of the cool preview of what's really inside there but you'll still leave being able to do stuff. And so anyway if you want to go to SecretMLMhacks.com, secretMLMhacks.com and that's where you can register, you can check out the product that I've put together and it's all extremely proven stuff, okay? It's the stuff I do with my own downline and what I did is I flipped it into like a training and teaching model and course so that you can go do the same thing with your downlines. which is freaking awesome. Oh man I'm so pumped. If you love automation, if you realize that you're not unique in your MLM. If you realize you're in competition with everybody else. If you realize that you're selling with the exact same scripts as everybody else. You have the same duplicated websites as literally everyone in your MLM, upline and downline. If you realize that the only tactic your upline's been teaching you is to talk to a whole bunch of friends and family, come check out the course, okay? That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I was emotionally scarred enough the first time I ever joined an MLM and what happened and how there's still soured relationships that I have because of that first experience. That was like three years ago and I hated it so bad I left my first MLM. I couldn't believe what how, it was extremely embarrassing, and I became that guy at family reunions. I became that guy that friend to kind of stick around from because everyone would be like, "What's your next thing Steven? What are you going to try and get me in here and there." I was like, "Oh my gosh, like if that's MLMN this sucks I'm gone." Okay and I went through and I got really good at these other automation processes, really good at closing people with tons of other ... And I was like there's got to be a way to apply it so I did. And the result was insane and I got tons of people joining my downline who I'd never met, and it's not that I'm trying to take the human out, the human element out of MLM it's still networking, it's still meeting people. But the kind of person that's coming is amazing, the kind of person's who's applying to join my downline, that's insane. Who does that? Anyway, I'm excited. Go check it out secretMLMhacks.com, you can get signed up there, and check it all out so. It's finally time, this is amazing January 1st, I've had kind of this feeling of euphoria a little bit, I've been dreaming about being on my own for pretty much my entire life. And today's the first day, this is crazy. I'm very, very excited and I'm proud of myself. You guys should all be proud of yourself too. Go get real about your goals, what it is you actually want and if something isn't working, have the courage and honesty to nip that and move on. So all right guys. Talk to you later bye. Hey thanks for listening. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Would you like me to teach your own downline five simple [inaudible 00:24:08]and recruiting tips for free? If so go download your free MLM Masters Pack by subscribing to this podcast at secretMLMhacksradio.com.

Thank you Samara Hernandez ( https://www.theconsumervc.com/91-samara-hernandez-chingona-ventures-why-chicago-how-diverse-vc-teams-lead-to-investing-in-markets-that-are-overlooked-and-some-of-the-differences-when-investing-in-consumer-vs-enterprise/ ) for introducing me to today's guest, Steven Wolfe Pereira ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolfepereira/ ) , co-founder and CEO of Encantos ( https://www.encantosbrands.com/ ) , an award-winning edtech company that believes kids learn best through play while teaching kids 21st century life skills. We discuss some of the learnings of working at technology companies and communication companies, the inspiration and insight behind Encantos and how he introduces new brands. Without further ado, here's Steven. You can follow Steven on Twitter @wolfepereira ( https://twitter.com/wolfepereira ). You can also follow your host, Mike @mikegelb ( https://twitter.com/MikeGelb ). The Consumer VC Summit: February 23-25 Full Lineup and to purchase tickets: *Summit.theconsumervc.com* ( https://app.redcircle.com/shows/3af1af78-a3bd-428f-a8f8-947073d6388c/ep/0fb856e1-7f1c-4c67-8a98-4c414cd58645/Summit.theconsumervc.com ) Enter *CONSUMERVC* at checkout for 20% off A couple of books that inspired Steven: The Element ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143116738?camp=1789&creativeASIN=0143116738&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Ken Robinson Unscaled ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073P3CMWM?camp=1789&creativeASIN=B073P3CMWM&ie=UTF8&linkCode=xm2&tag=theconsumervc-20 ) by Hemant Taneja Some of the questions I ask Steven - * What was your initial attraction to technology and media? * I can understand how the media background would be super helpful, but what were some of your learnings in enterprise SaaS that influenced your approach to building Encantos? * Take me to the beginning of when you founded Encantos. What was the insight that led you to start your company? * Talk to me a little bit about the company's mission and where you think education might miss or feel outdated in this current climate? * When you think about giving back and legacy. What do you believe are some modern traits in a business that might have been overlooked/nonexistent 20-30 years ago? * Walk us through the three brands that you've developed under Encantos and how each of them came to be? * How do you think about creating new characters or building new brands? * What's your strategy when it comes to physical products, software products and shows? * What was your process when you decided to raise venture capital funding? * Was it harder to fundraise during COVID? * What's one thing that you would change about venture capital? * What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally? * What's one piece of advice that you have for founders?