Podcasts about then bam

There's a lot of discourse around the value of research in the sales development world. Is it worth the opportunity cost? Does it make sense to minimize research to maximize activity? Can prospects tell? Do they even care if my rep has done their research? Valid questions - managers want their reps to spend time on revenue-generating activities, after all. It's easy to get lost in a research rabbit hole. Then…BAM! Hours have flown by without a single activity to show for it. Tsk tsk. But if you've ever been in a situation where a prospect bashes you for not knowing anything about them/their company, you know there's value in preparing at least the bare minimum. We sat down with demandDrive's own Greg Cammarata to talk about his research process. We'll cover: His goal for net new accounts to pull in on a daily/weekly basis. His process for mapping those accounts and pulling in relevant contacts. How he executes account & industry-level research - and why that's important. Moving that research to the contact level and the importance of personalizing your messaging - to a certain level. Wrapping it all up into a cohesive, repeatable outreach strategy.

I used to wonder why all my dreams felt so far away from me. I knew the dream and yet it was hard for me to get moving on the dream. I wanted everything to look perfect. It had to look or sound a certain way before I would post anything. Then BAM it hit me I'm the reason my dreams aren't happening. Well that was an eye opener and now I knew how I was able to make the impossible possible. Go Follow Reject The Regular at Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube!

You just bought something from your favorite brand. Then BAM! 2 days later, you get an email that they're offering 20% off sitewide...we've all been there. And it's a pretty brutal experience, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, offers are amazing. But you need to be thoughtful about who's getting them. Here's how you can run a killer offer without getting in hot water with your most recent customers.

Well before I started it, I thought what a lovely long holiday I have stretching in front of me.And then we had Christmas and the frenzy that is Christmas, with all the ensuing shopping, wrapping, cooking, cleaning, planning, and, most importantly, eating.Then BAM, it’s festival season, and if you have kids at festival attending age, you’ll know that that means a lot of worry.They turn up either side of their festivals to stay, with their mates, and that part’s good, that part’s fun, I mean apart from the fact they drink all your beer and eat all your food, it’s lovely to have them. But then they pack up their tents and sleeping bags and head off.And any parent of a child at a festival knows this is a bit of a nail biting time.  Will they be OK? Will they be sensible? Will they come home in one piece?Teenagers on the road in cars at Christmas time is worrying enough as it is, but add friends and festivals to the mix and it’s quite the worry cocktail.Then there’s the no man’s land time after New Year where you don’t know what day it is, and you’re still eating leftover Christmas food and chocolates. That part’s bliss. The days all roll into one, the sun is shining, and you never know what day or time it is.Then suddenly, it’s the second week of January, and you’re like, OMG this is almost over, and I’m only just starting to feel normal. Only just starting to NOT feel tired, only just starting to feel relaxed.And boom, you’re back into it, time flies.But isn’t slowing down just the best? Not everyone slows down of course - I’m married to what I’d call an ‘active relaxer’.  His idea of a holiday is mowing lawns, weeding the garden, exercising, waterblasting, washing cars, vacuuming.What else did he do? Cleaned all the outdoor lights, swept, took rubbish to the tip, cleaned out cupboards. If he wasn’t working in some way shape or form, he would go stir crazy.It takes a while to adapt to being on holiday with an active relaxer. You have to learn to just let them zhoosh around you and do their thing without you feeling guilty yourself that you’re just sitting back with a box of Quality Street chocolates and a cup of tea watching endless episodes of Schitts Creek.So that was our holiday. I don’t know that parents ever get to really stop, do they? When your kids are babies your holiday revolves around them. When they’re toddlers it still revolves around what they’re capable of. When they’re a bit bigger it’s all action action action to tucker them out. When they’re tweens it’s all about their mates so you’ve got a house full. When they’re teens it’s still about mates but also festivals and cars, that’s the most worrying time.But I wouldn’t swap it for the world. Busy kids, active-relaxing husband, sunshine, and no Covid here, we’re pretty lucky.

https://DanWeedin.comAs a businessowner, you've been coping and managing through the pandemic. You might feel like you are just keeping your head above water and will survive. Then BAM! Another calamity hits. There is no pause button in business or life. The next calamity doesn't care what you've been through. Make sure you are setting up a strategic plan to prevent, respond, and recover from any future challenge or crisis. This episode will get you started on that path!© 2020 Toro Consulting, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Episode 74 of the Everyman Movie Review! I have been following the story of Pete Davidson for a few years now. I see so much of myself in him and how he talks about his life - just with way less weed. I had heard that there was a semi-biographical movie coming out about him directed by Judd Apatow, but with everything going on in the world, I assumed it would be delayed. Then - BAM - it drops on streaming. I was stoked, and so was the entire crew. So, we scheduled a movie night to check it out. Was I disappointed? Check out the episode to find out! Spoiler Alert at 12:02 Back to the Show at 18:02 The King of Staten Island on streaming. The Everyman Movie Review is a different kind of movie commentary - it's not about the art of movie-making, but rather about the enjoyment and entertainment of the film itself. It's not about me or my opinion, it's about the movie - does it deliver on what it promises? New episodes on Thursdays - subscribe to be notified when new episodes are available. Share the podcast to let everyone know about your favorite movie review series! Send me a message with your thoughts and questions. EMMR is now available on social media! Check out the Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook Page! Want more from Rob? Check out the O The Anthem Podcast, available every Tuesday at OTheAnthem.com and on Anchor. Find Rob on Social Media Support the show! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/everymanmoviereviews/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/everymanmoviereviews/support

It's Arbor Day, so Bam decides to knock down one of the tall trees in the backyard. Aaron Hernandez hears the noise from the house and comes outside to yell at Bam. He gets the idea to build a casino. Then Bam hangs John Demjanjuk's Honda Civic in the trees to test the durability of them for the casino. Anthony Weiner comes out to see his friend's car in the trees and freaks out. Then the casino gets built, and Bam calls it Fast Eddie's Tree-Top Casino. During the Grand Opening, Bam hires professional wrestlers to fight in a ring below the casino. In the end, it becomes a Battle Royale that includes John Demjanjuk, Anthony Weiner, the wrestlers, and Bam.

Today, I wanna teach you guys a VERY special technique I use… Which you've likely seen before, called Aging and Ascending, and how I do it to my MLM leads. AGING AND ASCENDING Recently, I was on a coaching call and there were several hundred people listening… It's always funny because there's always TWO people in the audience… The first type of person is the person who's excited to be there. Maybe they sacrificed a little bit to be there (even if it's on a virtual call) and they're very pumped about it. They're taking notes and they're REALLY engaged. The second type of person I see showing up to… An event A coaching call Or even just to LIFE … Is the person who is actively looking for holes and actively looking to discredit what they're being taught. The mentality of successful people is not knee-jerk skeptic. https://youtu.be/HIoQe3YLYfA The reason I'm telling you this is because the thing I'm gonna walk you guys through today about Aging and Ascending leads… It has EVERYTHING to do with how I actually run my business. I'm begging you, PLEASE don't be the person who's like, "That's not gonna work for me. It's worked for all these other tens of thousands of people, but not me. I'm unique." **THICK SKIN MOMENT** CHECK OUT MY VALUE LADDER I've got a cool piece of paper in my hand… I want to walk you through is how I actually Age and Ascend my leads through the use of what we call a VALUE LADDER. This is probably not the first time you've heard this term… I wanna show you guys how I actually run my business. I did a podcast episode a little while ago called Info Plus MLM, and that episode is one of the cornerstones of how I run stuff. Some people say, "No, that's not how it actually is happening." Go watch major MLMers. A lot of them have their own info products that are unrelated to the products that they actually sell… Unrelated to the MLM they're in! We've got INFORMATION… And that could come in the form of: Writing a book or an ebook Some kind of video course Audio training [If you’re not on YouTube right now, this episode might be helpful for you to check out on YouTube] What's cool is that when you understand this stuff, it’s not helpful for people unless you're solving legitimate problems. You cannot survive very long in this game without being legitimate. THE FIRST TIME I LEARNED ABOUT AGING AND ASCENDING I'm NOT telling you to go make crap. Go make things that are awesome. What we do is we share information and then we lead those people into the downline that we're in. THAT’S how we play the game. MANY big people play it that way. I'm NOT the first person to do this. I just noticed THIS is what big people are doing and I started going it. I wanna share with you how we take the leads from all this info space and we age and ascend them. That term comes from a book called DotCom Secrets. The first time I read DotCom Secrets, I was in the Army. It was in a 10-day training… I was laying in the dirt, and I had my M-16 in my right hand and DotCom Secrets in my left hand. I was reading DotCom Secrets and I'd laid down my weapon, pull a pen from the pen slots in the forearm of my uniform and take notes. One of the concepts in that book is called Aging and Ascending. Let's say that you get 100 people who come to you and say, "You know what? I'm interested interested in whatever MLM you're in." How many of them do you think are gonna join right off the bat? Let's say 10% of these people actually do something. If you get 10 people, that leaves 90 people who did not take action. Go back to the way most of us are taught MLM… And there's nothing wrong with it… So long as you're approaching those who are actually interested. AGING AND ASCENDING THE 90% Let's say you take your phone out and you get 100 contacts from your phone and 10 of the 100 take action. That's not bad… But what do you do with the other 90? You just toss them to the wayside? That's one of the reasons why people might feel used by you. Don't toss them to the wayside. What you do is what we call Age and Ascend. I'm gonna put some time on them. I'm not just gonna drop them. Same thing is true online. It's no different just because it's on the internet, it's just on the internet. What do I do with this other 90? I'm going to Age and Ascend them. That's gonna let me gain more of a relationship, more trust. I wanna teach you how I do that with what we call a VALUE LADDER. A value ladder traditionally looks like a series of steps. Basically all you're saying is, “How much money I can charge with how much value I give them”. The more expensive things are up the TOP and the less expensive or free things are down the BOTTOM. My MLM isn’t in my value ladder… It's actually in the BACK. A portion of the people who see my FREE stuff come to me even though I don't say the name of my MLM in this ENTIRE value ladder. It will kill it. I DON’T talk about my MLM and I DON’T say what I'm in. I DO say that I'm in stuff, like right now, making this for Secret MLM Hacks Radio. THIS is the FREE zone right there at the bottom of the value ladder. AGING AND ASCENDING YOUR LEADS A portion of you guys come to me and say, "Hey, I'd like to join whatever you're in." I'm telling you to do the same thing. A portion of you are like, "Hey, Stephen, I want the next thing to get to know you a little bit more." I have a book that's coming out. This is how I Age and Ascend leads. The whole point of this is to show you that a business without a lead machine is DEAD. It doesn't matter that you're in MLM and someone else makes and fulfils on the product. You still NEED a source of leads. In traditional models, you are your upline's lead gen… Which is why they tell you to gather all your phone contacts. I'm telling you to make your own lead source so you're not dependent on your upline or downline to give you your leads. You get better fish with better bait. If you're liking this stuff right now, go to secretmlmhacks.com, watch the web class, and BUY IT. THIS is the type of stuff that we go through. I DO NOT give everything out on the podcast. The course is in secretmlmhacks.com. THE FIRST STEP IN MY VALUE LADDER The FIRST thing I have inside my value ladder is all my FREE stuff. This is where I have: Secret MLM Hacks Radio MLM Masters Pack The Blog Hack MLM THE SECOND STEP IN MY VALUE LADDER The SECOND thing I have is a book teaching the three things you actually control in MLM… Because you DON’T control a lot. Go to moderndownline.com and join the waiting list there. A portion of people who see this are like, "This dude's legit. I don't care that his eyeballs are massive, I'm gonna go try and join his team," and that's great. I'm trying to teach you to do the same in your MLM. I don't care what you're in. I'm trying to change the industry. I'm super excited about that book. It's intense. THE THIRD STEP IN MY VALUE LADDER The THIRD thing on here is the actual Secret MLM Hacks course. This is the course that walks people through how to actually do it. There's a workbook, a group and tons of FAQs things. THE FOURTH STEP IN MY VALUE LADDER The FOURTH thing is EVENTS. I have an event called OfferMind. When people get the Secret MLM Hacks course, they also get a ticket for OfferMind. Hack MLM Live OfferLab is meant for those who have an existing business who are really looking to blow stuff up. It gets more expensive as you move up… But it's also meant to cater to where you are. If you're like, "Man, I'm brand new," sweet. You might wanna think about coming down into the FREE stuff, the book, Secret MLM Hacks. If you’re like, "Man, I'm existing. I've already got cash flow. My team's already grown. It's doing super well. I just need to expand and extend my reach. I'm looking at how to duplicate. I'm looking at how to make stronger lead machines." Then come to the events. THE FIFTH STEP IN MY VALUE LADDER There's one more thing on the top here… We have OfferLab… There's ONE MORE thing at the top here. This is what I call Titans of Industry. Titans of Industry is my mastermind where we go to cool destinations and do our masterminds. I LOVE Masterminds. I'm in Russell's Inner Circle… By the end of this year, I think I will have paid $150,000 in coaching (not to one person, I have lots of coaches). It's VERY important that whoever you're getting coached from is also paying to get coached. So that's my value ladder. The whole point of it is that I can Age and Ascend ALL of my leads. Every single value ladder step has its own individual funnel. It's also got its own marketing sequence that suggests, "Why don't you go to the next level? Why don't you go to the next level? Why don't you go to the next level?" In the FREE area, there's an email sequence that pushes up. The book has an email sequence that pushes up. And Secret MLM Hacks has an email sequence that pushes up. What's powerful about this is… Nowhere in this am I mentioning what I'm in. WHY I HAVE A VALUE LADDER The reason I do that is because I have people come and apply to join my downline. It's a natural occurring thing when I provide more value to the marketplace. The marketplace says, "Well, hey. Let me follow up with you." So I have is a whole separate recruiting funnel. THIS is how I age and ascend my leads. I make sure they're having success with it and then I ascend them to the next thing. There's a group of people that reach out and say, "Stephen, what are you in? I want to be whatever you are in. I don't care what you're in." The reason I do that is because I don't want them to go, "Well, look. I hate that company." I chose it for very specific reasons. I want them to join me as much as they're joining the company. A lot of people will reach out and say, "Well, Stephen, what are you in? I don't really care, I just wanna do whatever it is that you're doing." I give them the link, and then we start the process of seeing if they're a good fit for my downline. I'm not talking about my MLM… They’re not gonna like that. Instead, provide a lot of value to the marketplace. I've been doing this stuff for a long time now… I've built literally hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of sales funnels. That’s what I do. CREATING THE FIRST STEP IN YOUR VALUE LADDER But you just need ONE. If you have a book, do you have a book funnel? Are you driving paid advertising? Are you ascending them somewhere else? Age and ascend, age and ascend. That's the whole name of the game. I wanted this episode to be a little bit more eyes wide open, "This is what Stephen's actually doing. Oh, my gosh. That's so crazy cool." I wanna toss it out to you just to give you ideas and get your wheels spinning. If you need to listen to this a few times, I strongly encourage you to do so because this is how a marketer approaches MLM. This is how an internet funnel builder approaches the network marketing space. We look to see, "I've got a dream customer right here. Got this amazing dream customer." not a could-be customer… How do I track this person? They're living over here in this bubble on the side… How do I get them over here to my MLM on this side? How do I get them excited or interested and come on over to me? The way I do it is by creating value for that individual. I'm gonna solve legitimate problems. DON’T BUILD YOUR VALUE LADDER ALL AT ONCE Don't try and build the whole value out at once. The book's not out yet HackMLM is not live My Mastermind is not something that I'm offering quite yet (go to titansofindustry.com) Go to moderndownlinecoaching.com to see this. Moderndownlinecoaching.com will show all this to you, but it doesn't talk about my actual MLM. That's how I keep these two worlds separate and how I keep the two worlds safe. I can still attract with speed FASTER than if I was to go to a mall. I can go and attract the dream person who's a REAL builder, and actual grower, actual runner. How do I track them? Let me solve problems for them. Whether or not they join, I'm cool with that. I want it to be their choice. I want them to want to join me. Then BAM, I got all these things. Let me age and ascend, let me solve more problems for them. As of right now, we're about to cross 2,000 people asking to join my personal downline (not including all the other ones below) which is really powerful. But that doesn't mean I let 2,000 join. It's a vetting process for me… And it's completely automated. AGING AND ASCENDING THE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T INTERESTED Age and Ascend. What do you do with the people who are not interested right out of the gate? It doesn't mean you cast them to the wayside. Doing that often makes people offended and they're not likely to join in the future anyway. What do you do with the other 90% of people who are not interested off the bat? Age and ascend. Keep that in your mind. Hopefully, this episode has been helpful. Make sure that you're going back and saying, "Hey, what is he doing there? Or how's he doing that over there?". Be an active participant in learning actual marketing for multi-level marketing. Very excited that you guys have been a part of this. If you could, I would love a review. Go to smhreview.com. That's the review place where you can review this podcast. I would love an honest review. If you freaking hate me or whatever, just let me know. We love to know what it is that you’re struggling with, where you still are having a hard time, so that I can keep providing valuable answers. My intent here is to HELP educate the market on WHY we are doing it like we are. We got the internet! Just choose ONE thing and provide value with it. How can you capture the lead and then Age and Ascend them afterwards with the hope that eventually they're like, "You know what, what are you in?" MODERN DOWNLINE COACHING YOU listening to this right now… You're in one of two scenarios. The first is that you currently have an automated recruiting process that's bringing quality people to you. Quality leads, people who want to join your downline, people who wanna make a career and a real business out of this. Maybe you have ads and content bringing new customers to you. You may even have a product or two which you sell to attract people to you. Maybe you've even automated it and you make money while doing everyday things. Or the second option is that you DON’T have any of that set up… And you're trying to make all this work and tie all these pieces together, just so you can survive in modern MLM today. If you want my help, just go to moderndownlinecoaching.com and see where to get started. It took me a long time to get the skills to get all this moving forward, creating the sales letter and video, creating the actual sales funnel, writing the follow-up emails. The promotion campaigns, fulfilment plans, fresh new ads. There's a lot. And the place to start on the path is different for each person. So I created moderndownlinecoaching.com for you to check out where you should go next. Whether you're just starting out with no product, no list and no clue what to do next… Or if you're a seasoned MLMer, a network marketer and you just wanna add more revenues and scale your downline, go to moderndownlinecoaching.com. I don't really believe in shortcuts, but I do know you can speed up your journey on the path. Figure out the best place to start by going to moderndownlinecoaching.com now.

What can you do when your MLM does not allow you to sell online or recruit online. They’re practically forbidding you to be on the internet, say their name online or drive ads to your MLM products.   WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR MLM FORBIDS YOU TO BE ONLINE   This is probably one of the biggest questions I get about MLM. People are shocked when I tell that my MLM lets me sell online.   The truth is, sometimes MLMs WILL let you say their name on the Internet.   But what do you do when:   Your MLM doesn't like it when you say their name on the Internet They say that you can't directly recruit online You can’t drive ads to your MLM product or sell online   I’m about to tell you the answer to that question…   This is the way that I've been able to leverage the Internet to increase my speed and the quality of my leads, without fighting against the rules of my MLM.   You might have to go over this a few times if it’s the first time you ever heard of some of these concepts - that's okay.   THIS is how I've been able to automate the systems in my MLM. We get two or three leads per day. People I’ve never met before, asking to join my downline.   THIS is how I do it online without being shady or weird. Without having to find some secret small little loophole that might close some day. This is how I do it.   If your MLM is telling you that you can't sell online or recruit online at all, that’s okay. JUST DON’T DO IT.   The answer is…   CREATE FRONT END OFFERS!   That way you're not directly recruiting or selling online. All you have to do is close them in the back. That's one of the things that I do.   HOW I RECRUIT ONLINE   I've been very, very careful to choose an MLM that lets me sell and recruit online. I can put their name on ads without getting in trouble.   Let's say you're a part of an MLM like that but you love it - that’s great.   I'm not encouraging you to leave it.   You can still create value for people in the MLM space if you can’t sell or recruit online. Have them COME TO YOU through front end offers. Then you close them afterwards. That's totally okay.   If you're openly like, "Hey, come join my downline." your MLM is probably going to have a problem with that.   "Hey, come buy my MLM products." They probably won’t be okay with that. I'm not saying that’s what you should do.   Do I ever mention the name of my MLM? NEVER!   The moment I start talking about the MLM I'm in, it taints all of this. People think that I'm just here to recruit them.   I'm telling you right now... If you LOVE what you're in, you stay in it!   You still use the internet to help you in your MLM without selling or recruiting online. What you do is, you create a paid prospecting product. You don't even have to say the name of your MLM.   I don't say the name of my MLM. You can still qualify people as subscribers and buyers by getting them to pay for something related to MLM.   Then BAM, you can go in and talk to that person afterwards. You got HOT leads!   You’re not saying, "Come join my MLM downline." MLM is not a fan of that. That's why I don't do it. That's not what I teach here.   HOW I SELL ONLINE   How do you recruit and sell online then? PAID PROSPECTING.   It's not challenging. It doesn't need to be crazy at all. There are some really easy products you can create that have a high value.   High value, low impact products for you. High value to them, low impact for you.   Those are fantastic ways to bring people to you. It helps you sift out the people who are the cheapos. The people that are never going to pay for anything. I don't want those people in my downline.   I want only those joining at the very top of the MLM. It shows me their mentality and how much they're going to work. It shows me that they're hungry and they actually want this.   If someone joins at the very bottom level, I don't even give them the bonuses that are in my offer. There have been multiple times I've reached out to people who have joined at the very bottom level. I've reached out to them and said, "Hey, out of respect for those who joined at the top, I cannot give you the bonuses unless you turn back around and join at the highest level."   You don't even need to create your paid prospecting products. Just assemble them. Go to YouTube, type in "How to succeed in MLM." Anything that pops up on YouTube is public domain. Grab the videos, put them in a members area and charge a few bucks.   You just seen to sift people out. That's the principle behind it. You’re pre-qualifying individuals.   Because they’re paying you and there's money coming in, you can afford to spend on ads. Which means your speed increases beyond anyone in your upline or downline. Whoever can spend the most to acquire a customer, wins.   PAID PROSPECTING ONLINE   So you can’t use:   A website Any broadcast communication method Mass mailing Telemarketing Anything of that nature   That's fine. Stop promoting your MLM.   If your MLM is yelling at you for that or they're telling you not to do that, DON’T DO IT.   Follow their rules. You still can make a podcast to do with MLM. Just don't say the name of your MLM. Talk about what you're learning and people will start reaching out to you.   "I'm learning a lot of stuff here. What MLM are you in?" That’s been happening to me for three years now.   This is Secret MLM Hacks, so how do you HACK the industry? You create offers in front so you don't have to talk about your MLM.   I had to do this in my old MLM. I was able to recruit online like crazy even through the MLM siad, "Don't talk about our product on the internet." and "Don't talk about recruiting on the internet."   If that's their viewpoint, that's okay. Work with what you've got. All you have to do is create one extra little offer. A paid prospecting funnel. Once you’ve pulled somebody in, talk to them afterwards.   You're not driving ads to something that says, "Join my MLM." That'll get you shut down.   Pull people in with paid prospecting then you can say to them, "Oh, by the way, I don't know if you want any soap or whatever." If they say, "Yeah, sure." Send them to your product funnel.   PAID PROSPECTING WILL HELP YOU RECRUIT ONLINE     Paid prospecting is an incredibly effective way of bringing people in the door. You get paid whether they join your downline or not. It gives you money for ads so that increases your speed.   You’ll outrun so many people in your upline and downline because they don't understand any of these principles.   You need to make your front end offer super sexy. Don't think about your limitations. Come up with a sexy offer then find a way to make it. It doesn’t need to take a lot of time. Time is not equivalent to value.   It would be really awesome if everyone in this group created ONE THING and shared it with everyone else. That way you’ll all have a cool front end offer but you only had to make one thing. That’s called crowd creating. Crowd creating products is a great way to do it. I crowd create products like an animal. I find a bunch of experts and say, "Hey, would you teach for 10-15 minutes how to use your expertise?"   A lot of them grabbed their phones and said, "This is how I do it." I got 15 people to do that, packaged it up. BAM, product. Real easy.   If somebody knows that what they're about to say is going to be used inside of a product, that’s a huge status increase for them. They usually do it for free because they’re getting to promote themselves to your audience.  

I have a special show today where I’ll be doing a LIVE coaching session with one of my very good friends, Mike Macdonnell. I invited him over to my house a few weeks back and promised him cold beer and snacks. Then BAM, I surprised him when he came down to the man cave to find micropohones and my recording equipment all set up to interview him. There was beer too, I’m a good host. I brought Mike on the show because he is a very good friend of mine and I noticed he wasn’t as active as much as he used to be. I wanted him help him out by Cracking is Fitness DNA and getting to the bottom of why he has just been stagnant with his fitness. You can get your copy of the quiz by visiting www.remixmyfitness.com. We hit the hot topics like How to balance work and family life. We identify how he found success in the past with his personal fitness What is his current roadblock from starting any kind of physical fitness What you will also hear is how I actually talk him out of doing a marathon and instead try something a little different. I'm definitely sure, it will surprise his partner and family because he has agreed to give it it a try. I won’t spoil the surprise, you got to listen to the show to find out what it is. Also, I designed a custom 10 min bodyweight Fitness Test for Mike to give him a baseline of how in his own personal physical fitness lies. I made it available to you the listeners as well and all you need to do is visit remixmyfitness.com/podcast to get your copy of it. Get in Touch with Me: * Website: www.remixmyfitness.com Team Remix on FB: Team Remix (https://www.facebook.com/groups/remixmyfitness/) Instagram: Remixmyfitness (https://www.instagram.com/remixmyfitness) jimmy@remixmyfitness.com How do I lose weight? What exercises do I need to do? How to stay motivated? These are big questions that fitness coach Jimmy Kim digs into in the Remix My Fitness Podcast. Featuring inspiring guests who have their own inspiration success stories, how they reached their fitness goals, step by step guides on exercise and food for every part of your journey. Each episode is designed to get you to start IMMEDIATE action in your quest to be the BEST version of yourself. Jimmy's speciality is being able to crack the Fitness DNA that has been holding you back from achieving your goals. You can't choose what exercise or diet program is best for your needs? There is too much information out there that it's hard to know who has the right or wrong answer? Discover why 1000's of people both online and in person have worked with Fitness Coach Jimmy Kim to get shed those pounds, keep it off but most importantly actually enjoy the process. If you're at your wits end or just need a fresh outlook on your fitness, health or life, then it's time to tune in, listen and to become the best version of you!

Every film is both a product of its environment, and a rebellion against it. Artists (and audiences) search for something new and fresh, but cannot escape the world as it exists around them. Die Hard is no exception. While Die Hard is often marked as a turning point in American action cinema, we must first look at the state of action cinema as it existed before 1988. What does a “typical” 80s action movie look like? What artistic and societal pressures shaped that mold? And in what ways does Die Hard break it? As we kick off this limited series, let us know what you think! Drop us a line at diehardwithapodcast@gmail.com, or visit our site at www.diehardwithapodcast.com.   Source Links A/V Club, Die Hard humanized (and perfected) the action movie Creative Screenwriting, “There is no such thing as an action movie.” Steven E. de Souza on Screenwriting David Bordwell, It's the 80s, stupid Hollywood Suite, The French Connection and the gritty realism of the 70s IndieWire, 10 Defining 1970s Disaster Movies IndieWire, Cruel Summer: Die Hard (1988) James Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed: Violence in 1980s American Cinema Medium, New Hollywood: Why The 70's Were The Greatest Decade In America Cinema New York Times, How the American Action Movie Went Kablooey Oxford Bibliographies, Action Movies Slate, In The Parallax View, Conspiracy Goes All the Way to the Top—and Beyond Vulture, How Die Hard Changed the Action Game   Guests Shannon Hubbell Ed Grabionowski Adam Sternbergh Katie Walsh Scott Wampler   Get In Touch Email Website Twitter Facebook Instagram Patreon   Full Episode Transcript Welcome to the podcast, pal. My name is Simone Chavoor, and thank you for joining me for Die Hard With a Podcast! The show that examines the best American action movie of all time: Die Hard. Thank you to everyone who listened to the first episode of the show! It’s been so fun to get this podcast off the ground. Everyone’s been really awesome and supportive, from the listeners to the experts I’ve been talking to for the show. Starting in this episode, we’ll hear from filmmakers, film critics, and pop culture writers to get their perspectives on Die Hard and what it means as a part of film history. I’m excited to introduce them to you later in the show. If you want to share your thoughts on Die Hard and the things brought up on the podcast, reach out! Email Website Twitter Facebook Instagram I’ve been trying to post lots of additional photos and facts to the social media accounts in particular. My favorite so far was a Dungeons and Dragons character alignment chart I made for Die Hard. McClane is Chaotic Good, Al Powell is Lawful Good… You’ll have to visit the pages to see the rest of who’s who on the chart. And if you like this show, kick me a buck or two on Patreon. Patreon helps to offset the cost of doing this show, not just in pure dollars and cents, but for the sheer amount of time this podcast takes to put together. This is my first solo project, and although I have the wonderful, amazing support of my guests and fans, it still takes a lot of time researching, writing, recording, and editing. Patreon There are some cool bonuses you can get, everything from shout outs on the show, to stickers, ornaments, and the bonus episode – which is TBD, because you get to vote on! So check that out, and pitch in if you can. Shout out to our contributors… Rob T, Jason H, and Saint Even! I hope I’m saying that right. Anyone who’s listened to my other podcast knows that I can’t pronounce half the names I come across. It’s amazing how good you think you are at pronouncing things until you get in front of a mic... Thank you so much! You can also support Die Hard With a Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. With more starred ratings and written reviews, the show becomes more visible to other potential listeners, so please share the love and let me know what you think! All right. On to our main topic. Every film is both a product of its environment, and a rebellion against it. Artists (and audiences) search for something new and fresh, but cannot escape the world as it exists around them. Die Hard is no exception. While Die Hard is often marked as a turning point in American action cinema, we must first look at the state of action cinema as it existed before 1988. What does a “typical” 80s action movie look like? What artistic and societal pressures shaped that mold? And in what ways does Die Hard break it? But before we talk about 80s films, let’s talk about… 70s films. 70s cinema was a time when shit started to get real. After years of glossy studio pictures, filmmakers wanted to show things as they really were. And with Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis, rising crime in cities, and so much more, things were… fucked up. And the movies made then reflected that. They were dark, pessimistic, gritty, bleak. No happy endings to be found here. Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver are two of the most 70s-ish depressing-ass movies that I like to point out as an example of this. [CLIP: MIDNIGHT COWBOY - I’M WALKING HERE] With that mood in mind, let’s drill down into some specifics. [INTERVIEW: ED GRABIANOWSKI I’m Ed Grabianowski, and I am a longtime writer; I’ve written for sites like io9 and How Stuff Works and a whole bunch of others, and I also write horror and fantasy fiction. If you go back to the 70s, there weren’t really movies in the 70s that were just like action movies, like that you would just define as action movies, to the extent there were later. You instead got sort of different sub-genres; you had sort of like cops and robbers movies with gunfights and car chases, and then you had like martial arts movies with lots of fist fights and sword fights.] Within this general movement, a few particular genres stand out. There was a lot going on in 70s film as the studios’ creative control was usurped by a new wave of auteur filmmakers. Now of course, there were lots of popular genres in this moment, all important in their own ways, like science fiction, horror, spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation films, kung-fu movies. You can see some through lines from then, to the 80s, and into Die Hard in particular. But for our discussion today, we’re going to focus on three: disaster movies, paranoid political thrillers, and rogue cops and vigilantes. Let’s start with disaster movies. [INTERVIEW: ED GRABIANOWSKI And then you had the disaster movie subgenre, which was a huge trend for a while, and that was more based on spectacle and the visuals of a disaster happening. And also interestingly tended to be more ensemble casts.] After all, As we discussed in our first episode, Die Hard was directly inspired by one of the best-known disaster movies of the 70s: 1974’s The Towering Inferno. These movies featured people going about their business – attending a party, trying to catch a flight, taking a nice little cruise. Then BAM! A fire starts, a bomb goes off, a tsunami hits. These disasters, some natural, some natural-with-the-help-of-man’s-hubris, and some entirely man-made strike large groups of people, who we quickly learn are totally expendable. We follow these thinly written characters in multiple plot lines as they try to escape, survive, or stop whatever calamity is going on. In the process, the audience gets to experience their peril... which usually includes a bunch of explosions. The Towering Inferno boasts an all-star cast that includes Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and Fred Astaire. Our main characters are at a dedication ceremony for the new Glass Tower, the now-tallest building in the world. (As an aside, I work quite close to Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, which is currently the tallest building in San Francisco and the second-tallest west of the Mississippi. The fictional Glass Tower in the movie is taller than both of those by 500 feet. And every time I look at it I think about either The Towering Inferno or Nakatomi Tower, and neither of those are things you want to think about on your lunch break.) While at the ceremony, a fire breaks out on the 81st floor, trapping the people above. A group makes it to the roof for an attempted helicopter rescue, but the copter crashes and sets the roof on fire. After many thwarted attempts to escape, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman use plastic explosives to blow up the water tanks on the top of the building, flooding the floors below and putting out the fire. [CLIP: THE TOWERING INFERNO TRAILER] It’s easy to see how novelist Roderick Thorp could see that movie, dream about it, throw in some terrorists, and come up with the seed of Die Hard. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, the paranoid political thriller came to the fore. We’re talking Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View, and obviously All the President’s Men. These are films mostly centered on an individual uncovering a government conspiracy, and trying to either expose it or just escape with their life. But, fitting with the general mood of American cinema at the time, things usually don’t work out too well for the protagonists. Spoiler alert – in these films, usually the big bad government conspiracy gets away with it, leaving the heroes either dead or defeated. The individual, no matter what knowledge they’re armed with, is helpless against the faceless cabal that keeps the populace in line. To put it bluntly, the government is all-powerful and all-knowing, and you, the lone citizen, are fucked if you go against them. [CLIP: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN TRAILER ] The final 70s genre we’re looking at as a direct influence to Die Hard is the “rogue cop” or “vigilante” movie. The protagonists in these films are also lone individuals, but of a different stripe than what we’ll see later: they’re the anti-heroes. They’re deeply messed up in some way. They’re the cop who doesn’t play by the rules, or the everyman who gets pushed too far by society and turns to violence. Death Wish, Dirty Harry, The French Connection. These movies manifest the existential dread of audiences who feared social upheaval, economic instability, and rising crime in cities. And then they offer the wish fulfillment of being able to buck the rules and do things your way – no matter what the police chief says. [CLIP: DIRTY HARRY] As Ed pointed out earlier, the 70s didn’t have what we consider a blanket “action movie” – as you can see, the genres we just talked about had action in them, but it wasn’t the defining characteristic of the movie. If the word “action” was used to describe a movie in generic terms at all, it was usually paired with the word “adventure” to convey something more fantastic and epic. But moreover, the action in these films was, well… kind of a bummer. Violence and destruction were used to emphasize the more troubling aspects of our society. Even if these scenes were exciting, they were heavy. They were serious. So what tipped these old genres over into a new kind of film at the start of the decade? [INTERVIEW: ED GRABIANOWSKI It just sort of happened. There’s – yes, people – there’s this sort of gestalt like, let’s take elements of all these things and make something that just embodies all of that. And that became the action movie.] Audiences were transforming from Steven and Elyse Keatons into Alex P. Keatons. But in addition to a transition from Carter and the recession to Reagan and a “greed is good” economy, the film industry in particular had new pressures and opportunities that ushered in a new era of filmmaking. David Bordwell, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, sums it up: “With the new attractiveness of the global market, the demands of home video, and increasingly sophisticated special effects, the 1980s brought the really violent action movie into its own.” Bordwell amusingly closes his exploration of 80s action movies with one, lone sentence: “I save for last the obligatory mention of Die Hard, the Jaws of the 1980s: a perfectly engineered entertainment.” Guess that statement stands on its own... The writer of Die Hard and Commando, Steven De Souza, expands on Bordwell’s point about the global market. He says, “I would argue that the genre of an ‘action movie’ is a completely false creature. There is no such thing as an action movie. All movies have action. ‘Action movie’ is a term that was invented in the ‘80s. I think Commando may have been the first one in 1985. They noticed for the first time that a handful of American movies were making more money overseas than in America. This had never happened before. Commando made 60% of its money overseas and 40% in the US. Action speaks louder than words. You don’t need to read the subtitles to know it was a bad idea to kidnap Arnold Schwarzenegger’s little girl. I disagree with the idea that there is such thing as an action movie, but we are stuck with that term now.” Well, if we’re stuck with that term, let’s go with it. So: what makes an action movie? In the 80s, “physical action and violence [became] the organizing principle, from the plot, to the dialogue, to the casting.” That’s according to academic reference site Oxford Bibliographies. Picture your typical action movie poster. There’s probably some kind of aircraft or ship or ground vehicle, maybe a hot lady kinda small and in the corner there… there’s definitely a bunch of fire… And standing tall in the middle, our hero. And he’s probably holding a gun. The lone hero is one of the defining characteristics of what we think of the stereotypical action movie. But he – and it’s almost always a “he” – is different than our “rogue cop” of the 1970s. The 80s action star was a one-man army, alone more powerful than the hordes of henchman thrown up against him. Our hero might have a sidekick or lead a small team, but in the end they’re either ineffectual and/or expendable – by the end of the film, it’s our protagonist who takes down the bad guy by himself. The action hero inhabits his body, not his mind. His powers come from physical strength (and firepower) instead of cleverness. I mean, when we meet Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, we see multiple shots of his biceps before we even see his face. As IndieWire put it, the heroes are “obscenely pumped-up one-man fighting machine[s]... outrageously entertaining comic-book depictions of outsized masculinity.” [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH My name is Adam Sternbergh. I’m a novelist and a contributing editor to New York Magazine and a pop culture journalist. 80s action films, as we think of them now, they’re very excessive, they’re all about a sort of oversized machismo and enormous guns and enormous muscles and enormous explosions. Which was very exhilarating, but I think even by the time Die Hard came out, was starting to feel a little bit tired, and there was a hunger for action film fans – certainly myself, I would have been about seventeen or eighteen, for something a little bit different.] [INTERVIEW: SCOTT WAMPLER My name is Scott Wampler, I’m the news editor at Birth. Movies. Death. I’m also the host of the Trying Times podcast. The first word that’s coming to mind is “sweaty.” When I think of action movies in the 80s I think of, you know, dudes that are super cut up, they look like condoms filled with walnuts, and they’re always glistening with sweat. And usually there’s a dirty tank top involved, or maybe some camo pants.] [INTERVIEW: SHANNON HUBBELL My name is Shannon Hubbell, I’m editor-in-chief of LewtonBus.net. I’d say action films of the 80s – I mean, it’s obviously dominated by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, and so a lot of the larger action films are centered around big, burly, unstoppable killing machines. Just barely human. Other than Terminator, that kinda thing doesn’t yank my chain. But also, you have things like, say, Escape from New York – smaller fare, different types of heroes, anti-heroes, instead of just hulking, machine-gun-spraying douchebags.] Matrix and Dutch, Rambo and Cobra – these guys were far from helpless. Once pulled into a conflict by circumstance, our hero is unstoppable. It’s a reclaiming of agency that had been taken away by faceless forces in the 70s. Our heroes’ incredible power is just that: incredible. I know this might be shocking news to you, but a lot of these 80s action movies are… unrealistic. After all, in Predator, Arnold escapes a thermo-nuclear explosion by just… running away. These guys are superheroes pretending to be regular dudes. Comic book movies weren’t so much a thing yet, although we did have that platonic ideal of a superhero – Superman – appear onscreen in ‘78, ‘81, ‘83, and ‘87. But invulnerability is okay. That’s part of the appeal. We want the heroes that fight for truth, justice, and the American way to be assured of victory. This leads into another characteristic of 80s action: patriotism. Now, of course, not all of our protagonists are American. Arnold definitely does not – er… can not – try to pass for an American, and neither can Jean Claude Van Damme. But most of our protagonists are not only American, but working-class, everymen Americans who are just trying to get by with an honest day’s work. Sometimes that honest day’s work involves special forces missions, but you know what I mean. Adam Sternbergh explains. [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH There was a sort of parallel ascent of the John Rambo paradigm, and Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was quite open about making references to Rambo, and I think Reagan at one point quoted the Dirty Harry line, “Make my day.” And there was a real sense in American culture that post the 1970s, post Jimmy Carter, post this national ennui or whatever people decided had overtaken the country, that America was being proud of being America again, and part of that was watching movies in which American POWs blow entire countries. And in fact the third Rambo movie is just sort of a ridiculous patriotism porn where he goes to Afghanistan and essentially single-handedly defeats the Russian Army in Afghanistan. That kind of action movie, I think if you look at it in a historical, sociological context, it made perfect sense for the national mood.] [CLIP: REAGAN AND RAMBO] In other words, if America was in fact a shining city on a hill, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Carl Weathers were there to guard its walls. Finally, the hallmark of an action movie is all the… [GUNSHOTS, EXPLOSIONS] If you’re having a celebration of American masculinity and strength, what else are you gonna do but blow shit up? There was certainly a fetishization of weapons in the preceding decade. Robert Blake’s character Beretta shared his name with that of a gun manufacturer, and Dirty Harry gives a whole soliloquy about his .45 Magnum. But the films that followed had to be bigger. Louder. If the 70s were the decade of the handgun, the 80s were the decade of the automatic weapon. [CLIP: NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN, HO HO HO] General explosions were also bigger and better, due to improved special effects technologies. The disaster movie of course had terrific destruction, but the buildings getting blown up were more obviously flimsy sets, if not just miniatures. And to me, the differentiating factor that separates 70s action from 80s action, was that 80s violence and destruction was… celebratory. It was fun. It was generally free of consequence. Our hero can’t die, remember? And the bad guys he’s blowing away are largely faceless cartoon characters, a dime a dozen. It was perfectly okay to sit in a theater and shove popcorn in your mouth while large-scale mayhem unfolded before your eyes. With these definitions in place, let’s go back and tick off the action movie characteristics that Die Hard shares. Lone hero? Check. John McClane is almost totally alone, with only a walkie-talkie as a tether to the outside world. The LAPD and FBI are ostensibly on his side, but they’re certainly not working with him. John must face a whole gang of terrorists by himself to rescue his wife. We’re confident that he’ll achieve his goal, even if things look dicey sometimes. [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH I mean, Die Hard was similar in the sense that it featured a sort of lone, male protagonist who’s battling against the odds, and if faced with a sort of intractable situation where he’s trying to fight his way out using his brains and brawn. An interesting parallel is the movie Commando, which came out just a couple years earlier with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he basically has 24 or 48 hours save his daughter from these evil military types. And he goes about breaking everyone’s neck and shooting a bunch of people and blowing things up, and spoiler: he saves the daughter at the end. And so in that sense, Die Hard was sort of a very familiar setup. It obviously was kind of ingenious setup because it launched its own mini-genre of movies, which was the “Die Hard in a blankity-blank movie.”] Physical prowess? Mmm, not as much. John McClane isn’t in bad shape, not at all. He’s a cop, he can brawl. But he’s not one of those guys with “gleaming sweat [and] bulging muscles that couldn’t possibly exist without chemical enhancement... A bodybuilder’s fever dream, the sort of thing he might imagine after doing a mountain of blow and watching nothing but early MTV for 48 hours,” as the AV Club puts it. [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH Everything else was moving in that direction, toward more invulnerable, more muscular, more explosive. And then Die Hard came along and said, what if a real, normal guy found himself in this situation? What would he do, and how would he prevail?] Bruce Willis’s embodiment of a wisecracking cop caught in an extraordinary situation was a key factor in John McClane’s believability. [INTERVIEW: SHANNON HUBBELL On paper, just like describing Die Hard to someone, you can totally imagine Schwarzenegger playing that role, or Stallone playing that role. It’s the details and execution that makes it different. You have a character who is fallible, and hurtable and emotionally vulnerable, which is not something that comes across in a paragraph synopsis of Die Hard.] John is a pretty regular guy. He gets tired, he gets hurt. In fact, his physical vulnerability in the original Die Hard is famous. [CLIP: SHOOT THE GLASS] [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH From the very beginning of the movie, when he takes his shoes off at the beginning of the movie, you know, he’s in bare feet, he’s incredibly vulnerable and there’s this real sense that he’s this regular guy, who, there’s no way he’s going to accomplish this. He doesn’t even seem to believe it at the beginning. And it makes it so much more satisfying at the end of the movie when he does; he’s bloodied and he’s broken and his feet are bleeding. And that was just so different from that kind of Rambo, Schwarzenegger paradigm that had been established that had been so successful.] When you watch an action movie, you get the thrill of watching a superman executing a perfect plan. But watching a normal guy making it up as he goes along in Die Hard, you start to wonder – what would I do in this situation? We’ll get more into McClane’s physical and emotional vulnerability in our next episode. Patriotism? Die Hard isn’t an explicitly jingoistic film. There aren’t American flags waving as soldiers fight to defend American values. But we do have John, a white, heterosexual, working-class dude as our hero. See, not only is John representative of the American way of life, he also reflects a tension between classes within America, as well as in relationship to other world powers. Our bad guys are an International House of Terrorists, including what Ellis calls… [CLIP: ELLIS EUROTRASH] [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH I think there’s definitely some quintessential American ideas of class in the movie, and it’s not a mistake that the terrorists are not just Europeans but they’re all wearing turtlenecks and sort of beautiful European clothes and then there is a whole conversation in the elevator between Hans and Mr. Takagi about their suits and their respective tailors. And John McClane’s just a guy with a singlet on, running around like Johnny Lunchbucket. And I think at that particular moment in American history, that was a very resonant idea, again because there was this sense of America’s influence in the world being undermined – in particular by Japan, but just in general. American industry and this sort of notion of the blue-collar American economy was faltering in coming out of the 1970s. There was a sense that that was changing. So McClane is interesting, and I wonder if you made Die Hard now, if he would still be a New York cop, or if they would try to make him even more of a kind of heartland hero.] It’s also worth noting the presence of another foreign “threat” in Die Hard. The Nakatomi Corporation represents a very real American fear in the 80s that the Japanese wouldn’t so much invade as they would conduct a hostile takeover. Richard Brody of The New Yorker explains: “There’s another ethnic anxiety that the movie represents—the film is centered on the Nakatomi Corporation, headed by a Japanese-American man named Joseph Takagi, which is an emblem of the then widely stoked fear that Japanese high-tech businesses were threatening to dominate the American economy.” At the time, the Japanese economy was booming thanks to post-World War II reconstruction and a strong manufacturing industry. Japanese corporations began buying American companies, starting with car factories, steel works, and media companies – industries that are held as quintessentially American. [CLIP: TAKAGI TAPE DECKS] [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH It also has interesting strains of things that were happening in politics at the time, you know, the whole idea of a Japanese corporation that’s come to America and is a powerful corporation, and then the American inevitably has to save them. There’s a little mini-genre of 80s-era films that were sort of about America’s anxiety about Japan’s rising influence in the world. So I think a little bit of that is in Die Hard. You know, this sort of twist of having the terrorists be political terrorists who just turn out to be greedy robbers, was a little bit of a wink at the notion that all the other movies were about politics.] As Adam points out, American fear of this so-called threat can be seen in more than just Die Hard. 1986’s Gung Ho is specifically about a Japanese company buying Michael Keaton’s character’s auto plant. The Back to the Future series (which kicked off in 1985) also has a few telling moments. [CLIP: BACK TO THE FUTURE ALL THE BEST STUFF IS MADE IN JAPAN] [CLIP: BACK TO THE FUTURE II McFLY’S BOSS] In Die Hard, Nakatomi is positioned as not just another Japanese mega-corporation with more money than they know what to do with, but it’s also the company that is threatening to take Holly away from John. Okay, onto our last action movie qualifier: [CLIP: GUNSHOTS, EXPLOSIONS] Welp, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Die Hard has big explosions and over-the-top stunts. Lots of ‘em – and really good ones, too. They’re well choreographed and a pleasure to watch. Plus, they keep their own sense of fun. Having your hero dispatch a bad guy and follow it with a quippy remark is a classic action movie cliche. [CLIP: FEET SMALLER THAN MY SISTER] But the difference is that Bruce Willis has the comedy acting chops to actually pull it off. Look, Arnold’s great at a lot of things, but line delivery ain’t one of ‘em. [CLIP: LET OFF SOME STEAM] In the end, Die Hard is very much in the mold of traditional 80s action movies – and where it breaks that mold, is where it improves upon it. Hollywood’s been trying to recapture that magic ever since. [INTERVIEW: SCOTT WAMPLER I would say that it probably broke a general mold that had a hold on Hollywood for at least a decade. Outside of the work of say, Stallone, Schwarzenegger, who – you know, Schwarzenegger did a lot of sci-fi stuff, and Stallone – Stallone’s always been pretty ‘oo-rah American.’ But I think Hollywood as a whole, it definitely reformed the template, you know? There were shock waves coming off of Die Hard for at least a decade. You can still feel them.] [INTERVIEW: ADAM STERNBERGH I remember sitting in the theater and watching the movie and just being completely blown away by how great it was and how fresh it felt. That is really the thing I wonder if people watching it now can appreciate, is just how it felt like this gust of fresh air, given all the films that had come before. And those action films again, they were all tightly packed in in just like six or seven years in the 80s. It was a very sort of young genre itself. But this kinda came in and it was just a complete reinvention of what an action film could be, and John McClane was a completely different kind of hero, and it was so exhilarating.] The elevated craft of Die Hard, from the airtight script to McTiernan’s direction to De Bont’s cinematography, to the performances of Willis and Rickman, took what could have been an unremarkable summer flick and turned it into a classic. [INTERVIEW: KATIE WALSH My name’s Katie Walsh. I am a film critic for the Tribune News Service and LA Times. You know, you see enough bad action movies, and then you watch Die Hard, and you’re like, “This is so impeccably made.” The cinematography is gorgeous, there’s these amazing camera movements, and the lighting and all of the stuff that’s going on is just so perfect. And then you’re like, “Okay, this is a perfect movie.” I think cinephiles now are saying John McTiernan’s an amazing director, Jan De Bont is an amazing cinematographer, the craft that goes into this movie is impeccable, and it’s a very well-made movie; I think people are recognizing that.] In our next episode, we’ll dig in to arguably the most important contributor to Die Hard’s success: the character of John McClane, and Bruce Willis’s portrayal of him. So get ready, take off your shoes, make some fists with your toes, and join us next time. Thank you to our guests Adam Sternbergh, Scott Wampler, Shannon Hubbell, Ed Grabionowski, and Katie Walsh. Be sure to check the show notes on the website to learn more about them. Thanks again for joining me, and yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers!  

Have you ever experienced then weird phenomenon where you give yourself a rule, then next thing know, you’re breaking it? Like this. You decide to get off sugar. You’re aware of the dangers of sugar. You know that Americans are an average of 164 lbs of sugar a year. Sugar is NO BUENO and you’re convinced. So you promise yourself, “no more sugar”. Then BAM, out of the blue, you’re hit with a hankering to eat a pan of brownies. You eat them. You get mad at yourself. You feel stuck. Then you wonder “what just happened?” Say hello to “Resistance” - the sneaky saboteur of our goals and aspirations. And not just with health. Anything that has to do with personal development, spiritual development, creative or entrepreneurial work in the world. Resistance is universal and unrelenting to the point that we can feel that there’s actually something intrinsically wrong with us. Makes us second guess what we previously thought was a bright idea. Makes us feel stuck. Now, resistance isn’t all bad. It actually can help point you toward True North if you understand it. Listen to this audio to understand that reasons resistance exists + what to do about it. Hint, hint: that weird tapping thing I’m always telling you about helps a lot ;)

 You know what's funny? Watching somebody try to drink right after a trip to the dentist's office while their mouth is still numb and everything spills down the front of their shirt like a tiny baby. You know what's NOT funny? After the numbing stuff wears off and every single nerve ending is zapping you face with electric hell. I've had some conditions I've had to heal from that have been quite embarrassing, gross, or both, and I wouldn't normally even consider mentioning them, but hey – we throw ourselves out there for the sake of comedy, right?  ________________  A Tooth Extraction Is A Major Head Wound  The following was written in a pain-induced state on a hot and humid night in July of 2015.  And NO, I DO NOT WHINE!  It’s a hot and humid night in July of 2015.  I hesitate to write about the poor condition of my teeth because I’m from the south and there is a long observed stereotype about southerners and their dental habits, or lack thereof, and I don't enjoy the idea of progressing it. However, I'm moved to do just that in order to tell a complete story.  This narrative officially begins as follows: My teeth are crap.  I don’t mean that I have a few cavities in need of looking into; I’m telling you that what I have are laboratory curiosities. They're brittle enough that I fear being in the proximity of even a mildly talented soprano. The word “cavity” is a misnomer for me, as the plight of my teeth should more readily favor a new word, “cavern-ty”.  So it should come as no surprise when I tell you that I recently had to have an extraction performed. The tooth in question had worn – allow me to rephrase that - it had rotted to the point that it had become merely two broken wedges sticking out from the gum at the back of my mouth. Upon inspection, I found it to resemble the black, volcanic peaks of Tolkien’s Mordor, but it didn’t hurt, so I let it go. The absence of dental insurance will cause one to do stupid things like that. Also, as I said, it was at the back of my mouth and thus hidden, so I was able to smile when I saw my reflection and note that no one would be the wiser.  There's a word in the medical field when something such as a rotten tooth becomes infected. That word is “Abscessed”. In more practical layman terms it means, “HOLY MOLAR, THAT HURTS!” And oh by the way, if unattended, it can kill you.  That happened to the tooth right before a trip to the beach, of course. I’d looked forward to it for weeks while my gums and broken tooth happily played well with each other. Then BAM! “You think you’re going to enjoy the beach trip?” my mouth said to me because it’s a mouth and mouths say things, “How about we amp up the dang it factor and throw a little infection party?!” It’s akin to planning a trip to Universal Studios and getting an ingrown toenail right before you go. (Oooooh, a little foreshadowing.)  You might imagine my festive demeanor among the waves over the next few days and I made an appointment to get it extracted as soon as I got back. For the layman, the word “extracted” means, “Someone just shoved a needle into my gums over and over and then wrenched bone out of my skull in the similar fashion a dog employs when playing tug of war with a rope.”  You may even be interested to note that while the aforementioned round of tug of war was being enacted, I could hear the sound of bone fragments cracking and popping inside my head and I started to laugh about it. I solemnly swear that I was not on any medication that would have induced silliness. It was just that I realized how loud it sounded as the intrusion happened in and around my skull and it made me chuckle. I couldn’t feel much at the time other than the tugging. It did occur to me that it would be my luck to get a dentist that would, much like the dentist in the Little Shop Of Horrors, take my laughter as a challenge. But she remained undaunted and eventually blighted Mordor from the face of Middle Earth. In the course of it all, though, she destroyed my gums.  While the numbing agent was still at work, all was well and once I had my pain meds, it was easy enough to manage then too. But as I traveled to work on a bright Tuesday morning, I had a six-hour commute to think about how two ulcers that had developed over the last couple of days had made the healing process more painful than it needed to be. At first I pushed the idea aside and told myself to be a man! It’s only a couple of sores in your mouth alongside a deep hole where your tooth used to be. It’s no more than three open lesions seriously restricting any profitable use of the left side of my mouth. Then I remembered it was more than that. She'd torn my gums asunder back there.  I HAVE A MAJOR HEAD WOUND! An extracted tooth hole is a head wound; a gaping maw of tender and vulnerable flesh.  Why hasn’t the great jury of society come to this verdict yet? Have we been systematically brainwashed to believe there’s really nothing to it by the ADA? Did three out of four dentists agree that we should keep this information under wraps; great big spit-filled gauze wraps? I want to feel some sort of victory at this discovery, but coming to terms with the fact that I have a major head wound has made me question everything I once believed to be true.  Is there really a silver lining to every cloud? What if the little engine actually couldn’t? Did Joanie truly love Chachi? And what if it’s all about something other than the Hokey Pokey?  I’ve been led to believe that the pit in my gum where a tooth used to be – formerly the deadly destination on the itinerary of hobbits with evil rings - is only a minor inconvenience, but googly-MOOGLY, my mouth hurts right now!  Perhaps a good night’s sleep will help me to make some sense of all of this once I take some of the meds.  Something tells me this rant owes a wee bit to needing the meds.  And now my big toe is beginning to hurt. What’s that about?  _________________  I believe that at least once in every man's life, there comes a time when he must do something stupid to make the pain go away. For some men, it may take going through torment to get to that point. For me, it only took realizing that …   An In-Grown Toenail Is A Major Foot Wound  An in-grown toenail is painful. Think about it - there is a hard, sharp item (the toenail) growing inside (in-grown) your toe. One might say that it’s not much to complain about. After all, it’s only a small inconvenience in and around the area of a toe; a tiny body part when compared to say, your chest (another body part that can be problematic if you have pain there – you should probably get that seen about).  But an in-grown toenail is much more than a minor inconvenience. When there is toe pain, you feel it with every step. It’s sort of like a hobnail boot you can’t take off.  What made mine all the more irritating is the knowledge that I could have avoided the whole ordeal had I paid better attention to my grooming.  I don’t like to admit it, but sometimes I forget that there are duties I must attend regarding my feet, i.e., cutting my toenails. It doesn’t happen often, but on occasion I find it would be quite possible to journey up the trees in the park alongside the savviest of squirrels. And because I have the feet of a caveman, with the nails on the two big toes being the consistency of barnacles, I have to take care to make sure I get all but the necessary nail off when I cut them.  That didn’t happen on one of the last sessions and I've paid a mighty price.  I cut the nail on the big toe of my right foot to completion, or so I thought. What I didn’t realize was that I had left a jagged, pointy shard – a toenail spear if you will – that would eventually grow into the flesh at the front of my toe. I suppose the growth was so gradual and I was so completely irresponsible as to the needs of my feet for a while that I just didn’t notice until a fateful day when I rammed my big toe - and the spear growing inside it - into a chair in my motel room.  Words cannot relate the delight I felt and the words of praise I expressed at the discovery of my new condition. Actually, there are words available and I tried my best to use them all, but this is not the place for such pleasantries. EUREKA, by the way, was not one of them.  I am a man. And a man comes up with solutions to such circumstances. My solution was this: Wait for it to grow through the front of my toe, then pull it out.  Hindsight has educated me in the ways of the human body and I've learned it has certain procedures it employs, unwavering from its course. And although I didn't want cutting to occur, eventually it would have to.  I began to try and broker deals with my body on behalf of the big toe, which I came to know by the endearing name of “Ow”. I would have pedicures on a regular basis. I promised to massage my feet every night after a soak in epsom salt. I would never, ever, ever, for-the-love-of-all-that-is-pure-and-holy, let my toenails go without proper maintenance again if Ow would only regurgitate the spear without my having to go to the doctor.  But my body is a jerk. It either didn’t hear me or simply refused because it never relieved me of the pain. I decided to take matters into my own hands and I’m glad I did.  Before I venture into further detail, here is my official disclaimer:  The actions I took which I am about to relate in no way constitute any promotion of self-surgery and any medical procedures for which one is not qualified, including but not limited to: Toenail surgery, Fingernail surgery, Liposuction, General Dentistry, Captain Dentistry, Paleontology, Astrology, Faith Healing, etc. should always be conducted by a professional. (A medical professional, not just like a plumber or prostitute. Either one of those operating upon your person could set you up with much bigger issues.)  After several weeks of getting to know Ow and having to clean and dress the toe daily, I realized that it was not going to heal on its own and measures had to be taken. With a $425 price tag attached to a procedure that would be performed by a person of the Doctor persuasion in mind and having noticed that holding it under a running faucet of hot water caused the pain to subside, numbing it a bit, I decided the time had come to add “Surgeon” to my already impressive, if not stupid, list of things I can do all by myself.  I procured the following instruments in preparation:  A razor blade  Large toenail clippers with the little knife/toe-jam-digger-outer in the middle.  A second set of large toenail clippers from the bathroom drawer with only the handle part rusty. The clipper area, though dull, was shiny.  Paper towels to apply pressure to the wound  My favorite bible (for obvious reasons)  Very hot running water Good old-fashioned man-courage  An imaginary monkey (Monkeys make me smile)  My wife was out of the house, but my son was in the next room and I informed him that he should contact his mother and tell her what I was doing on only two conditions. 1. If he heard a scream that lasted more than 10 seconds, and 2. If a pool of blood began to seep into his room from under the door of the bathroom. He said okay.  Two minutes later, being the loyalist that he is, he entered the bathroom just as I was about to make the first slice with the razor blade and handed me the phone.  My wife calmly asked me one simple question. “Why are you such an idiot?”  “I know what I’m doing, don’t worry.”  “You need to let a doctor do that!”  I did not let a doctor do that, hence the disclaimer presented above.  After about ten minutes of painful slicing and digging into my flesh and periodically spooning blood spray off the sides of the bathtub with my hand, the spear was removed. After it was over, the relief was amazing and all was right with the world. I felt not only like a new, hardcore, bull of a man, but also a little bit like a smarty pants. As a matter of fact, I may submit this article to the Journal of Medicine for their consideration. I imagined all the pats on the back I would be getting from impressed friends and neighbors. I was, for all intents and purposes, a Doctor. I couldn’t wait to call my mom and tell her the good news, in no small part for the fact that she’d been terribly worried about Ow. I dialed her number and told her everything.  She calmly asked me one simple question. “Why are you such an idiot?  “That’s Doctor Idiot.”  _________________  The bible can be scary if you read some of the passages, especially the ones about issues that people have had to endure due to either being unlucky or enslaving the people of Israel and refusing to let them go. One of the things that always struck fear in me was any mention of boils. I always associated that condition with uncleanliness and the Days of Good Ol', but now I know it's common and not always because of unsanitary practices. I found out the hard way that ...   It Boils Down To Pain  It never fails to be a humbling experience when something happens to me that I always thought was reserved for tales of olden times or people who refuse to type “Amen” and share a Jesus loves you meme on Facebook. But once last year and now recently I have had the tumultuous experience of living with a skin boil.  That’s right, a skin boil.  And I think I can deliver my message without it having an effect on your lunch. It’s just that this is information that might be valuable if you're to avoid having to deal with a boil of your own. I won’t go into gory detail about what exactly a skin boil is, but instead I'll allow you the opportunity to Google it for yourself, saving everyone but the sick and curious from a grotesque experience. Just know that a boil is painful and depending on where it surfaces, you might wish that someone would crack you over the head with a croquet mallet to put you out of commission for good.  Counting this last one, I have now suffered through three of them; the first was in my crotchety area and that was bad enough. I didn’t know what it was, only that something had seemed to burrow under the skin, way too close to sensitive stuff for my comfort. It became hard to walk and eventually, it had to be “taken care of”. I’ll just say that I have a wonderful wife who must love me more than I could ever know to willingly be the one who “took care of it”.  After the first episode, I did a little research and found that I had been the lucky host of a boil, so I knew what to look for in the future in order to stop it before it could get bad. Unfortunately, the second one apparently knew that I was wise to the ways of the boil and it crept up silently before pouncing onto my back just to the right of my spine. Upon first glances, I took the spot to be nothing more than one of those big ol’ zits one will get sometimes on their back. You know what I’m talking about. It’s like Mount St. Helens has attached there and it feels like there’s lava flowing directly beneath it till it comes to a head and either you or someone who can reach it is able to “take care of it.” It’s those little numbers that always seem to be right at the spot where your back touches everything when you sit back in a chair.  I waited for the slightly uncomfortable, yet tolerable, pimple to head up and go away, but it had other plans. It was only the tip of the iceberg and when I got home from play rehearsal two days later, I noticed that it had become hardened, painful, and very large. It had become a boil. The third one happened to be on my elbow. And while it was equally as gross as the other two, it didn't hurt at all. It mainly just caused children to cower and dogs to bark at me when I passed.  Why, you may ask, am I even telling people about it? Wouldn’t I want to keep something like this private? Do I want to be a disgusting medical oddity on a TV show about medical oddities called Disgusting Medical Oddities?  The answer is simple and, I believe, honorable. I want to be that messenger that lives on in history books and lore, galloping through the internet on my data horse shouting, “The boils are coming! The boils are coming!” I want to be remembered as the one who saw through the fog that our bodies glaze us over with when they’re about to infect us with infectious infection. And now that I have witnessed the heights my body is willing to go to in order that it could fool me and sneak this abomination onto my back, elbow, and crotchy groinous area, I think it’s only fair that I pass along any hypotheses I may have developed as to other devices your body might use on you.  So here’s a list of conditions you'll want to watch out for. The Susan Boyle Boil – So you’ve settled in for the night and started a lovely flame in the fireplace. All you want to do is sit by the fire under a nice warm blanket and jam to the soothing voice of the one and only Susan Boyle. And why not? She was an over night sensation who would soon find her CDs in thrift stores everywhere. But there is danger here. Because when Susan sings, you become carefree and at ease with everything around you. You loosen your grip on caution and that’s when boils are at their stealthiest. You’ll never see it coming. One minute you’re belting I Dreamed A Dream with one of Britain’s finest voices, the next you have a boil on your neck the size of Big Ben. You may as well draw a clock on there and hang a bell because you’re gonna be a very painful spectacle for several days. The Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle Boil – Similar to the one above, you may think you have your best, most attentive eye on things as you, via delving headlong into your reading, become the greatest detective the world has ever known. You are living vicariously through Sherlock Holmes and nothing will get past you. The tiniest detail will be scrutinized and thus, always before you. Yet you are deceived, my friend. You are the victim of diversion. Before you know it, there might well be a hound the size of a St. Bernard in the area of your Baskervilles and there’s nothing to do but let it bark at you with every step. It can be tamed, but it ain’t fun. Trust me. The Mohel Boil – No one is safe from the danger, even those who do Yahweh’s work. If you think you’re a mentsh and performing a spiritual duty will keep you from having to do a little suffering, you’re wrong. Look at Job. I think he may have been covered in boils before it was all over with. You feel good about the circumcision you’re about to do, but you realize that this is a super sensitive task. You’re dedicated to having all your concentration focused on the foreskin at hand … so to speak, and that’s when it happens. The surgery goes okay, but when you get home you realize you’ve got tsuris, or serious troubles, on your tuchis. Don’t be a putz. Get it seen about before the pain makes you destroy some poor kid’s svantz. The "To The Victor Goes The Spoils" Boils – It would seem that being a winner is ideal. Who doesn’t want to come out on top? But I doubt you’ve ever been hoisting a huge trophy with the number one glued to it and thought, “You know, I’m not really defending myself against boils right now.” Welcome to intense sorrow. You should have been on alert. You should have blown the race or fumbled at the goal line because now you’ll be dealing with an avid fan that goes everywhere you go for a while and it’s a pain in the pigskin. Did you ever hear that the winner takes it all? My friend, you’re gonna take it ALL.  Now if after looking at this list, which is nowhere near exhaustive, you've decided that life is too short to go about your day unaware of the potential threat of getting a boil somewhere on your body, then you've taken one step closer to a happy existence and I applaud you.  But if you think it would never happen to you, I can truly say that I’m sorry and I hope that you’ll remember me when you realize you’ve been intruded upon by a ninja boil you never saw coming. ________________  I'm glad I brought all of this to light. Everyone has things that have happened to us and some of them are embarrassing, but confession is good for the soul, I guess. I just hope you can enjoy a good meal after this trip down medical lane.    

Well, the short answer, tho' not the whole answer, is: you can't. I wish you could. I can give you a hundred pointers and tips concerning it; and can even print out some prayers for you to say, in hopes of their breaking the soul-tie. But they would all be "tweaks". They would all be wistful hopes that will let you down. This is because in "the natural" -- i.e., within the systems and interactions of this world -- the soul-tie is a tethering of something eternal, your endless soul, to a contingency. The chain of your soul to the memory or person or situation to which it is chained partakes of eternity. You can't break it. From your/our end, it is unbreakable. On the other hand, it is nothing to God. Because God is in charge of your soul, He -- and He alone -- can unchain you. "Unchain My Heart" (Ray Charles, 1961). Exactly how God does this, exactly how and when and where God unfastens the unfastenable in your life -- I can't say. (Wish I could.) But one thing I can say. And mean it! "Once I was blind, now I see." I write as one for whom the soul-tie's been broken. I never thought it would happen. Had tried everything. Then BAM! Someone in whom the Spirit of God dwells broke my tie. Why it was she who broke it -- or better, was used to break it for my sake -- this I don't know. It's almost funny. I mean, given the context. But she did break it, and I now owe a debt I cannot repay. Listen to Eddie James' song again. And Tavares'. You can agree with Tavares: "It Only Takes a Minute, Girl." LUV U. PZ

As I prepared to record this show I sat back and thought "oh my goodness are you really doing this". YES I AM!! God put this on my heart a long time ago, I have been searching and searching for the right person to speak on this subject. Then BAM along came Shannon Ethridge, she is not afraid of talking about such taboo subjects and as a matter of fact spends her life improving intimacy with married couples. When I say you don't want to miss this episode, I really mean it. Do I share too much information, oh I am sure I do....but you know what God put me up to it. Tune in, drink in the information and if you are married....after the show Go make love to your spouse, it truly does make God happy. And yes I really just said that!To orer any of Shannon's Books please click on the link.shannonethridge.com

As I prepared to record this show I sat back and thought "oh my goodness are you really doing this". YES I AM!! God put this on my heart a long time ago, I have been searching and searching for the right person to speak on this subject. Then BAM along came Shannon Ethridge, she is not afraid of talking about such taboo subjects and as a matter of fact spends her life improving intimacy with married couples. When I say you don't want to miss this episode, I really mean it. Do I share too much information, oh I am sure I do....but you know what God put me up to it. Tune in, drink in the information and if you are married....after the show Go make love to your spouse, it truly does make God happy. And yes I really just said that!To orer any of Shannon's Books please click on the link.shannonethridge.com