Podcasts about thomas you

In this powerful episode of Geek Freaks, Frank sits down with longtime friend and podcaster Thomas, who is launching his brand-new project, Sick Burn Podcast. But this isn't just any podcast—it's a deeply personal journey about overcoming tragedy, finding humor in hardship, and reclaiming independence. Thomas shares his incredible survival story after a devastating plane crash that left him with burns over 60% of his body. What followed was an intense period of recovery, both physically and mentally, that eventually led him to podcasting, gaming, and reconnecting with his geek roots. In this episode, he discusses how Sick Burn is dedicated to exploring the mental, emotional, and even comedic aspects of overcoming life's toughest moments. We also talk about how fandom and geek culture can be a healing force—from finding joy in comics and gaming to building a supportive community. If you're looking for a story of resilience, humor, and inspiration, this episode is a must-listen! Timestamps & Topics 00:00 - Introduction – A special Geek Freaks episode 01:27 - Meet Thomas – The story behind his new podcast 02:58 - Surviving a Plane Crash – The life-changing moment 05:41 - Finding a New Purpose – From trauma to storytelling 07:36 - The Power of Geek Culture – How fandom helped Thomas recover 10:20 - Why Sick Burn Podcast Matters – Laughing through pain 14:52 - Lessons from Guests – What different survivors have in common 20:15 - Rebuilding Independence – Finding confidence and a new way forward 24:49 - The Role of Mental Health in Recovery – Insights from personal experience 28:31 - Starting a Podcast from Scratch – The technical and emotional process 31:20 - What's Next for Sick Burn Podcast? – The future of Thomas's journey Key Takeaways ✅ Geek culture can be a lifeline – Comics, gaming, and movies can help people heal. ✅ Even the worst moments can lead to something great – Thomas turned tragedy into a platform for growth. ✅ Humor is a survival tool – Laughing through hardship can make the impossible more bearable. ✅ Mental health needs to be a priority – Talking about struggles is the first step to overcoming them. ✅ Community is everything – Having support makes all the difference when rebuilding a life. Memorable Quotes

Everyone has doubted themselves at some point in time.   The most infamous doubter of all time (in the bible) was Thomas - You can read this section in John 20:24-29.   Peter climbed out of the boat and walked on the water until reality set in, and he started to doubt. You can read this in Matthew 14:29-31.   We want to believe so badly that we can be good leaders, and that we can do the right thing, which includes dealing with difficult people, speaking up in certain circumstances, and handling those battles we often just avoid because we'd rather just confrontations altogether.   But as soon as a situation arises, we doubt ourselves, our abilities, our knowledge, our experience and we believe we're just not good enough, or I can't do this!   Sometimes we forget just how unqualified ALL the disciples were. But Jesus chose them anyway, because HE knew, he knew their potential, he knew that he wanted imperfect people to lead. He is NOT looking for you to be perfect! Not by any means!   All he wants is for you to trust him, have confidence that HE put you in that position, have confidence every day that He loves you and all that He wants is just for you to be an instrument.   So, when self-doubt kicks in, why not memorise a verse that will give you courage, that will remind you that God is with you right now and that YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS because He is with you!   Matthew 19:26 reads: "Jesus looked at them intently and said, “Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.”   Here are 5 bible verses that will help and encourage you to overcome your self-doubt with the knowledge that God knew that you were going to doubt one day, he already knew and therefore he already made provision, and He already overcame it for YOU!   1. Joshua 1:9 "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."   2. Proverbs 3:5-6 "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight."   3. Isaiah 41:10 "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."   4. Isaiah 41:13 "For I am the Lord your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, do not fear; I will help you."   5. Romans 8:28 "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."   BONUS: Philippians 4:6 "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God."   I pray that this encourages you today!   Know that HE is Lord and that HE's got you!   Have a listener question? Submit it at https://www.womenoffaithinleadership.com   Next steps:  1. Navigate to https://www.womenoffaithinleadership.com where you can: Join the community of like-minded female Christian leaders. This is where I will be hanging out if I'm not on the podcast chatting to you all. Come share and support each other here.  Subscribe to my newsletter so you can stay up to date with all upcoming episodes and any other exclusive or special offers. 2. If you need any support, you can get in contact with me for a 1:1 coaching session. Just email me at support@rikawhelan.com 3. Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rikawhelan

In this thrilling episode of Challenge Accepted, Frank and Thomas kick off 2025 with a bang, diving into the cinematic wonder that is Jurassic Park. As part of their month-long celebration of John Williams, they dissect the magic of Spielberg's dinosaur epic, exploring its groundbreaking special effects, unforgettable characters, and the iconic score that continues to inspire. Along the way, they reflect on the film's themes, discuss its cultural impact, and share personal stories of experiencing the movie for the first time. Whether you're a lifelong fan or a newcomer, this episode is a celebration of everything that makes Jurassic Park legendary. Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction and John Williams Month announcement 00:01:22 Reflecting on the community's fundraising efforts for the animal shelter 00:02:01 Excitement for 2025 conventions, including WonderCon 00:05:28 Exploring the iconic T-Rex breakout scene and its practical effects 00:06:56 Nostalgia: First encounters with Jurassic Park as kids 00:12:28 Ethical science and Dr. Malcolm's iconic “Life finds a way” speech 00:25:00 Dinosaurs, birds, and the evolution of paleontological science 00:28:30 The emotional power of John Williams' score and its lasting legacy 00:36:00 Fun facts about the sound design, including the T-Rex roar Takeaways: Jurassic Park blends practical and CGI effects to create timeless visual storytelling. John Williams' score seamlessly balances wonder and fear, making it a cornerstone of the film's emotional impact. The film's themes of playing God and the ethical dilemmas of science are still relevant today. Practical effects, like the animatronic T-Rex, elevate the movie's realism and longevity. The movie's cultural impact inspired a generation of paleontologists and remains a benchmark for adventure cinema. Memorable Quotes: “Life finds a way.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park) “John Williams mixes wonder and fear in his score, leaning one way or the other depending on the scene, but never forgetting the other side.” – Frank “If they opened up Jurassic Park today, my ass would be there so fast.” – Thomas “You didn't stop to think if you should.” – Dr. Ian Malcolm, reflecting on ethical dilemmas. Call to Action: Love what you hear? Subscribe to Challenge Accepted wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review! Your support keeps the conversation alive. Links: GeekFreaksPodcast.com: Your go-to source for all geek news and updates! Social Media: Follow us for behind-the-scenes content and more discussions: Instagram: @challengeacceptedlive Twitter: @CAPodcastLive TikTok: @challengeacceptedlive Apple Podcast Tags: Jurassic Park, John Williams, Spielberg, T-Rex, Jurassic Park review, Challenge Accepted podcast, movie analysis, 90s movies, iconic movie scores, film nostalgia, practical effects, CGI, dinosaurs, ethical science, Ian Malcolm, Dr. Grant, John Hammond, velociraptors, movie soundtracks, Geek culture, Challenge Accepted, podcast episode, timeless movies, WonderCon, movie breakdown, Spielberg movies.

In this exciting premiere of House of the Dragon Season 2, titled "A Son for a Son," Thomas and Greg delve into the aftermath of the intense first season. They explore the deep character developments, political intrigue, and the growing tensions between key players in Westeros. With detailed analyses and lively discussions, they break down the significant moments and set the stage for the thrilling season ahead. Timestamps and Topics: [00:00:00] Introduction - Thomas and Frank welcome listeners back. [00:00:16] Overall Impressions - Hosts share their initial thoughts on the episode. [00:01:04] Winterfell and the Starks - Jacaerys seeks support from Cregan Stark. [00:02:02] King's Landing Politics - Alicent Hightower navigates complex politics. [00:02:41] Rhaenyra's Grief - Rhaenyra deals with the loss of her son. [00:03:30] Blood and Cheese Plot - Daemon's ruthless revenge unfolds. [00:05:52] Character Dynamics - Analysis of key character interactions. [00:08:29] Dragon Lore - Insights into the dragons and their riders. [00:11:12] Otto Hightower's Schemes - Otto's influence and plans. [00:15:05] Helena's Prophecies - The significance of Helena's dreams. [00:20:31] Final Thoughts - Concluding remarks on the episode and predictions. Key Takeaways: Jacaerys' plea for Stark support underscores the North's strategic importance. Alicent Hightower's moral conflicts add depth to her character. Rhaenyra's intense grief highlights the personal stakes in the power struggle. The "Blood and Cheese" plot marks a dark turn in Daemon's quest for vengeance. The episode balances political intrigue with emotional character arcs. Dragon lore and the bond between dragons and their riders are explored in detail. Otto Hightower continues to manipulate the power dynamics in King's Landing. Helena's prophetic dreams foreshadow critical events to come. Quotes: "I'm so happy to be back in Westeros... these impeccable actors. Yeah, I'm fully on board." - Frank "Rhaenyra had one line and it was, 'I want Aemond Targaryen,' and man, is it powerful." - Thomas "You could almost see her psyche shattering in front of you." - Frank on Helena Listener Questions: We want to hear from you! Send your questions or topics you'd like us to discuss in future episodes to challengeacceptedgf@gmail.com or connect with us on Instagram, TikTok, or all the other socials at Challenge Accepted Live.

Thomas Manuel of the Indie RPG Newsletter and the Yes Indie'd podcast joins me to talk about Secondary Missions, a mechanic from Band of Blades by Off Guard Games.In Band of Blades, a grim military fantasy forged in the dark game, you and your party go off and do missions. Meanwhile, there's a whole other squad out there doing a whole other mission! What's up with them? This mechanic tells us. It's such a change in the mouthfeel of Band of Blades compare to other forged in the dark games.We get into how it supports the genre and themes of the game, all the tough choices it puts in front of players, and how mechanics like this one that couldn't exist in any other game are often our favorites.It's a classic Dice Exploder deep dive this week. Enjoy.Further reading:* Blades in the Dark* Malazan Book of the Fallen* Band of Brothers* Darkest Dungeon* The Watch* Dream Askew // Dream ApartSocials:Thomas on itch and Twitter.Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch.Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!Transcript:Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and have its back as we head behind enemy lines. My name is Sam Dunnewold, and my co host is Thomas Manuel. Oh, so exciting. Thomas is an Indian playwright, journalist, and game designer. He runs the Indie RPG Newsletter, for my money one of the best sources of IndyRPG news on the internet and an easy subscribe. Plus he's the current host of the excellent Yes Indeed podcast. He's also the designer of This Ship is No Mother, a card based take on the kind of Mothership genre that's very much worth your time. Thomas is great, And he brought on a mechanic from Band of Blades, a grim military fantasy forged in the dark game from Off Guard Games and Evil Hat. Specifically, Thomas brought secondary missions.In Band of Blades, while you and your party are off doing one mission, there's a whole other squad over there doing a whole other mission's worth of stuff. What's up with them? This mechanic tells us.Secondary missions, have a deceptively big impact on the mouthfeel of Band of Blades. We get into how it supports the genre and themes of the game, all the tough choices it puts in front of players, and how mechanics like this one, that couldn't exist in any other game, are often at least my favorites. It's a classic Dice Exploder this week, a deep dive at its very best. Here is Thomas Manuel with Secondary Missions.Thomas, thanks for being here.Thomas: Thank you for inviting me. I'm so excited to talk about Band of Blades.Sam: Hell yeah. What is Band Blades?Thomas: Band of Blades is a sort of dark fantasy military take on the forge in the dark framework. Sam: Yeah. A band of Blades kind of play on Band of Brothers is where the name is coming from. Right?Thomas: Yeah, I, I assume it is a play on that, but it is also different enough from that show that I don't think people should use it as a touchstone. The premise of the game is that you play The Legion, which is an army that has just lost the decisive battle for the fate of humanity.There is an undead horde that is an existential threat to humanity. And we fought that battle and we lost it. And now the legion is in retreat. And it ends up being a kind of a point crawl where you're retreating from the location of the battle to a fort where you hope you can hold up there and figure things out and, you know, other pockets of the legion might end up there as well and that could be the last stand.Sam: Yeah. So we, before we get into specifics of what mechanic you brought from this I just wanna say, first of all, this game has like six different mechanics in it that I would be excited to do episodes on. Like truly there's so much innovative design in this game.And also I. I, I think it's okay. Like, I think it's a great game that was like an okay experience for me. It was like a little dark, like parts of it didn't quite, quite fit with me. Like, my experience with Band of Blades was that I'd started running a campaign in January of 2020 and it was going okay. We were like, kind of getting a feel for it when you know uh, March happened of 2020 and we were all like, this might be a little crunchier and darker than like, we wanna play right now.And I, I never really felt like it was something I was super drawn back to because I prefer a little bit more at that like minimalism level and there's, there's just so much game in this game but I, I really love so much of, of the innovation that went into this game.Thomas: I, I also think that this game is extremely innovative, like has, really interesting design. I think Off Guard Games, uh, Stras and John kind of have done so many interesting things that I am constantly coming back to it and learning stuff about design and like getting inspired by it. I ran, I think this is probably 2021. I, I ran the whole campaign uh, sort of reskinned for Malazan: Book of the Fallen and kinda set in that world if that, which, you know, I'm a big fan of that series. It's also sort of military fantasy and we ran the whole campaign and I, I really enjoyed it. I think it is, yeah, it does have some crunch. It does have some darkness, but I think it kind of balances it out really well for me. And yeah. I'm, glad we picked this one because this is in the spirit of taking something small that is not particularly discussed in the text and then kind of exploding it like, this is a great choice. Sam: Yeah, totally. So let's get into it. So what mechanic specifically did you bring?Thomas: So, yeah, we are gonna talk about secondary missions which I think in the text might be, you know, a page at most. And the idea is that like Blades or other games, one of the phases of play is a mission phase where you are going to take your player character and go out and do a mission that is going to help the legion.And then you come back and there's a second mission. There's a second mission that is other members of the Legion people you aren't controlling, what they did while you were out. And that is resolved with one dice roll. It's basically just the engagement roll. It's the same procedure as the engagement roll for the primary mission. You're gonna roll that engagement role and then just based on the result of that, of that one role, you're going to narrate how the secondary mission went. And yeah, it often goes really badly.Sam: Yeah, I mean, you have to do really well for like many people to not die. And band of Blades like has troupe play, so you're constantly rotating between characters. So you're often like sending out some of your faves onto this secondary mission. And whether or not they fucking die is gonna be determined by a single die roll.It's, it's hardcore.Thomas: It is. It is. And you know, I think it brings in that... like a war game needs to have a certain level of gravitas. And I think that's what the secondary mission is, is bringing.Sam: Yeah, totally. So, yeah, why did you bring this? Like what is it specifically about this that really made you wanna bring it on the show to talk?Thomas: Okay. So I have not seen a mechanic like this in another game. That isn't to say that it doesn't exist, but my experience of the secondary mission was that we would go on this primary mission ,and because this is a forged in the dark game, like our characters are awesome. We are going to go up against impossible odds and we are going to somehow, pull success out of the jaws of victory. And we are going to come home battered and bruised, but triumphant.And then we come back. And then we'd roll the secondary mission and we'd be like, fuck. War is hell. War is hell, and we can't save everybody. And it was often really powerful moments that led to things like, people like talking about like mourning and like how, you know, a character just died. Like how do we, how do we respond to that? Like what are the traditions around that stuff? Like in the Legion, it led to some really great moments. Yeah.Sam: Yeah. Another thing that it does with that sort of, you go off and like kick ass, then you come back to camp, is it gives you that feeling of you can't be everywhere at once. Like the Legion is bigger than just your playgroup. Like what? Any four of you, they're out on a mission or whatever. That there's all of these other people, like both doing their best and succeeding at times away from you and coming back victorious, but also often failing without you, and you just have to... it, it makes you feel small in this way that I think is really appropriate to that war setting.Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I think through play is again, one of those other things that we could have been talking about today. And this is, yeah, it, it slots into troupe play like really well. And what it does and what true play really does is it makes this the story of the Legion.Sam: Yeah,Thomas: Like every individual character is, their own saga, living and dying. They have all the humanity that we associate, you know, that we want to inject into them and all of that stuff. But the story is the story of this Legion, which is, something greater than any individual.Sam: Yeah. You know, I was just in the Dice Exploder discord, hashtag Dice Exploder discord, this afternoon. We were having this like long conversation about the crew sheet in Blades and whether or not it's effective at what it's doing. Because a lot of people I think feel like the idea of the cruise sheet is really great and also people get attached to their own characters and don't want to... like you're focused on your character. You're not focused on the crew in the way that like Blades, I think, wants you to focus more on the crew at least according to my reading of the text.And I think Band of Blades really succeeds through troupe play explicitly and through mechanics like secondary missions at really doing the thing you're saying at, at foregrounding the story of the legion of the crew more than any individual in it.And that's really impressive.Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I think that sort of gentle confusion about Blades as priorities is a part of the text. I think John Harper leaves the door open for troupe play but is also like, you know, people like to play their characters. So I'm gonna, I'm not gonna take a strong stance on that.But Band of Blades is like, there's a role called the Marshall, and they decide who goes on the mission, and they decide who's playing who.And I'm like, amazing.Sam: Well, it's, another thread from this conversation from this afternoon was like, a lot of people feeling like a lot of the mechanics on the Blades crew sheet are a bit unnecessary or just like not their favorite or a little bit more like paperwork like, as opposed to the mechanics on the playbooks. And band of Blades actually, like this is another mechanic from this game we could have spent a whole episode on like it's dividing up like the GM role in some ways and like all of this paperwork stuff among different roles at camp that all the players get to play like the Marshall, like you're saying. But somehow like bringing in even more crunch to that the, that crew role basically it, instead of feeling like, oh my God, I'm like drowning in the crunch, it, it really does pull you up into that Marshall level, that bird's eye view of the legion as a whole, as opposed to being down with your individual guy or, or whoever.Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, in terms of GM load, Band of Blades is doing something amazing with that restructuring that we're talking about. And in that sense, the secondary mission roll is also a part of that because what, what the secondary mission does, it takes the pressure off you as the GM to drive home a kind of misery in the primary mission.Like if you as the GM are like, I'm playing a war story. I need to bring these elements of tragedy into it, like the primary mission, players should and can succeed. And because the secondary mission and the design of the game is going to help you hit those notes and that is such a huge relief that the game allows you to simultaneously be a generous and a fan of the players while still still able to experience those themes, you know.Sam: yeah, yeah. Yeah. Another thing I like about it is how the choice of what mission is going to be the primary mission, what mission is going to be the secondary mission. And sometimes you have like a third mission that you just can't do because you don't have the people and you automatically fail it.And that choice of which of these are we gonna prioritize is a really interesting choice every time. I think a lot of that theme that we've been talking about of this being a game of is clearly a game about war and making almost like resource choices almost that like the kind of cold math you have to do in war with human life, I think it, is really highlighted every time you have to choose what mission is gonna be primary and what's gonna be secondary.Thomas: Yeah, I think there are a series of games, especially video games that have this trend of what you're actually doing is you're playing the world's worst HR manager. You know what I mean? Like, like Darkest Dungeon is a good example, right? Like, you are just sending these folks into a bad situation and then you're like, putting them in a, in a bar a church and saying, deal with your stress and come out and then you go back in.And there is a certain kind of inhumanity in that, that that cold calculating thing that you're doing. And I think Band of Blades for me specifically does a better job of that than those games. Like there is in some sense because it's a role playing game. Like you are never really treating anybody as a pawn, like you're feeling their feelings. And it is always like this hard choice to be like, Um, the most common result of the secondary mission roll is the four to five, right? Like that is, you know, it's very common to get one to three, but maybe six. And the critical result is the only result in which nothing bad happens. So, on the four to five, you are given this difficult choice of saying either fail the mission and all the troops return unharmed, or you succeed the mission, two squad members die and all the specialists take some harm. Which are wounds.And what is interesting is while so much of the game is very clear about who makes what call - Commander, you decide whether the Legion moves. Marshall, you decide who goes on the mission - the question of how the table decides this call is not explicit. The only way for us to decide, you know, it isn't the Marsh's decision, it's we all sit and we go like, oh my God, if we succeed, who is dying? And everyone has to kind of like have that thing of like, I don't, I, I don't know. And sometimes it's fine. Like it's a really important mission. You're like, we have to succeed. But sometimes you are like, nah, let's, let's fail this. Like we can eat the failure, but you know, we can't lose people.Sam: I will not have my wonderful bug man die. Like I'm too in love. Like... and no, that's, that's a great observation about Not having a specific person make this choice, unlike a lot of the rest of the game. It almost feels like you all have to get your hands bloody in this choice. Like, it's not letting anyone off the hook. You all have to put your stab into the murder victim's back, like,Thomas: Oh, that is so good. Yeah.Sam: It's, yeah, no one gets to sit this one out.Thomas: Yeah. And yeah, often you fail and then you just feel that failure. And that's, in some sense, that's easier. It's, it's simpler. It's simpler than the four to five, likeSam: If everyone is just sad, at least they're alive. But like sometimes, sometimes also the mission is like save a small town from being eaten by zombies and you're like I mean, they're probably gonna die when the zombies get here anyway. We'll save our two guys. Let's, let's move on. Let's move on. And it's, it's like, it's hard. It's hard choices.Thomas: Yeah, it is. It is. I think that is... a lot of this game is supposed to be hard choices, but I think there are various kinds of hard choices. There's the tactical choices, which is, you know, a lot of the crunch of the game is like, let's make cool tactical decisions about, you know, setting us up for success when we reach our, our destination, which is Skydagger Keep.But a lot of the, the decisions are also just emotional you know, just in terms of like what narrative we want and we've talked about like not letting people die. There's also this moment of your like, I think it's this character dies and I think that is appropriate. I think there's a moment in the Band of Blades actual play on the Actual Play channel where I think they fail a secondary roll or they get a four, five or whatever and they, two, two characters just had a fight in the, in the previous session, in, in the downtime phase or whatever, and they're like one of them died and the other person is going to have to live with the fact that the last thing that they interacted with this person was a fight. Sam: Yeah. Thomas: You know, and I'm like, awesome.Sam: We touched on this, but I really wanna highlight explicitly how this mechanic forces you into the position of doing the math with human life, but it does it without dehumanizing people. That the exact moment you just described is always the thing that you're thinking about as you make this decision that largely comes down to numbers.I, I also wanna say like, I think fundamentally the most interesting part of roleplaying games, oh, story games for me is characters making hard decisions. And not just this mechanic, but this game is absolutely riddled with hard decisions. You also were just saying that, but I, I just think it's so cool to see a mechanic that is so explicitly and reliably, that's the other thing, reliably putting a hard decision in front of people.Thomas: Yeah. You can play Band of Blades and you will have the experience that this game wants if you're willing to engage with the game on its terms and like treat these characters like as people and all this stuff, which most people playing this game will do.But that hard decision stuff, like, yeah, I think it's perfectly fine to flag that that can become grinding down. Like I know some people, Paul Beakley, I think on the Indie Game Reading Club has an article about Band of Blades. He describes how at the end of the campaign, everyone was kind of tired. And that was not my experience, but I, I get it. Like, I guess, you know, that is something that can happen both thematically and mechanically Sam: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. That's like in a lot of ways that exhaustion I think is part of what the game is about.Thomas: But I, I mean, I think it's still supposed to be fun.Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is. And we did a whole episode in season one on The Watch. Right? Which is also, I think a lot about not like, can you win the war. But what is the cost of war? How do you live with the cost of war? And, and this is another game that is even more explicit about that, I think, than The Watch is, which is already pretty explicit about it.Like, you, you're not winning. You lost, like, what, cost are you gonna pay?Thomas: Yeah, I think if you are making a war game, you have to be really conscious about, you know, what you're saying about war. And yeah, both of these games, I think The Watch is, kind of using war as, as metaphor and Band of Blades is again, sort of like, very consciously stripping the glory out of this.Like, this is not that game. Which Band of brothers to some extent does have, right? It's, it's a show that it know, you know, war is awful, but like these characters are, are noble and brave and righteous and all of that to some extent. And this game is like, if we focus on the fact that it's a retreat, we can tell an interesting and sometimes under explored facet of war stories.Sam: Yeah, I should state for the record, I've never actually seen Band of Brothers, so I, I, I cannot actually speak to it, but but the, the other thing I wanted to just touch on in all that is just how brutal this game can be and like, very clearly and, and intentionally. And this particular mechanic as we've kind of discussed, I think is especially about brutality. Like when you fail, just three people die. And like several more are like critically wounded. Like you could just wipe out and every person who dies like Thomas: half a squad. Sam: And like the morale is hard to keep up in this game. And you fail one secondary mission and you're just, the whole legion is in so much trouble.It's a hard game. There's a, but you know what? You know what rule we really should have done a whole episode on is the single sentence in Band of Blades "this is a game you can lose." Like it's, yeah, it's a lot.Thomas: Again, like why is that sentence there? Why is this game that you can lose when role playing games usually aren't? And I think, again, that all flows from the decision to make a game about war. And you touched upon this adjacent mechanic, which is morale, which we should clarify that. Like, anytime a member of the legion dies, the legion loses morale and, you lose enough morale, you lose the game.Sam: Yeah. Yeah.Thomas: And other things also, but like yeah. Worse situation. Yeah. The game's over. And yeah, one failure can demoralize the squad in a huge way. And also like if you lose three squad members, a, a squad is like five people. They've lost more than half your squad. All your specialists are, you know, who went on the mission are beaten up. Yeah, it is. It is awful. And so what usually happens is that people will look at the primary mission and say, okay, we are going on this, so we failed the resource here. The fact that we are awesome and we can do stuff, let's load out the secondary mission with the best, best, you know, assets we can give it like Quartermaster, can we send them with like extra supplies? Like, you know what, what do we have to like, increase the odds there? And, and I think that is also like a kind of fun and meaningful choice. Yeah.Sam: There's something really nice in that, about how this mechanic is sort of indirectly encouraging you to be empathetic to that secondary squad. It's like, don't you love them? Don't you like feel for what they're about to go through? Like you should care about them, you should give them the extra ammo.Yeah, Is there anything about this mechanic that you have trouble with or that bumps you?Thomas: It can, if your primary mission has gone badly, it can be a second punch in the face. Like, I think, I think that is that is a thing. But otherwise nothing specifically that I can, that I can think of that is like an issue I have with it or I will change the design or something. Sam: Yeah. Thomas: Yeah. Sam: Another thing, look, one of the first things you said on this episode was that you've never seen another mechanic like this one. And I think that's a testament to how specific to the setting and genre and story that Band of Blades is telling this mechanic is.And I always love it. I love it when I see mechanics like that because I literally just before this recording, moments before this recording, wrapped up a forged in the dark Pirates campaign with one of my home groups where we just weren't using an established setting. We just like have played a lot of Blades and we were like, eh, I'll make up some special abilities and go. And it worked totally fine and for a lot of ideas I can just do that.But it, it takes. Like the new systems, the new games that are really interesting to me are the games that have mechanics like this one that are so bespoke, so tailor made to what this game is doing. And I really love that. I really really respect mechanics like that.Thomas: Yeah, and it is again a testament to band Blades, good design, and why I want to talk about, 'cause I think it's completely like under-discussed. I think we should all be talking about it all the time, is the fact that all of this is so like, enmeshed together. Right? In some sense the secondary roll is necessitated because forged in the dark is such an empowering framework for players.Right. Like, how do I tell a war story with this? And you, and you started that question and then something like this is almost, almost required. I would, I wouldn't have thought of it, but it does, it does like something like this is needed once you decide to go with this framework. And I think, yeah, it is, It does feel like something bespoke and tailor made that has then through play testing kind of integrated into everything smoothly and perfectly.Sam: Yeah. So after you've made the secondary mission roll and you've kind of determined the results of it, there's then this moment that the book encourages of you to sit at the table and sort of flesh out the story of what happened on that secondary mission. Like, you know what the goal of the mission was and you know how many people got fucked up and or died on the mission.But there's a lot between point A and point B there. So it kind of sets you up to devise this short story together of what happened on this secondary mission.And I think it does a good job of giving you enough handholds of what was the beginning and what was the end of that story, to kind of flesh it out such that it doesn't really need a framework of doing that in between. And that in itself is like pretty impressive to me.Sometimes you'll be given a mechanic as you're playing a game, like the game will present you with a mechanic where it, it has a little bit of that, like now draw the rest of the owl feeling to it. Where, where it's asking you to, fill in the blanks on something that it has not set you up well enough to fill in the blanks on. And this moment of fleshing out what happened on the secondary mission in some ways feels like drawing the rest of the owl, but in a way where like I feel empowered to draw the rest of the owl. And that's, that's cool.Thomas: And you know, one reason is that as a GM, before the Commander makes the decision of which is the primary and secondary mission, you fleshed out both equally, right? Like you have as much information on one than the other. So you're starting off in a good place, you're not taking it lightly.And then, yeah, when we get to the result, like there is this question like immediately that comes to mind of like, how did this happen? Like, you know we chose that as a secondary mission 'cause maybe we thought it was safer. And you know, we have to now, now sort of at the table discuss and figure it out because also we might be in the next primary mission playing the people who went on this mission, right?Like, we want to, we want to reflect the fact that, you know, I just broke my shoulder like last time and I'm coming like half patched up into this one. Stuff like that, like, yeah.Sam: Maybe we encountered like a new type of zombie for the first time. And so Thomas: Mm. Sam: that specialist is the only one who's seen that type of zombie before and that's gonna come up next time. They can be the person who's like Uhoh on the next mission and, and do that foreshadowing, but all that, all that.And they can also be like the person telling the horrible war story, like around the campfire, like the ghost story almost of what happened. That can be in itself, a cool downtime scene.Thomas: Yeah, I think that is actually a thing that comes up regularly often where you want to contextualize what happened on a mission to the other characters, not necessarily the players. So you wanna see it through one character's eye, like what they experienced and stuff like that. 'cause if you're going to limp home limp back to camp, you know, half your squad gone, people know it went horribly wrong. And you know, there is like, there is just this sense of like, you know, at some point we need to know why. And often it's at like the Commander Marshall level where, you know, you might role play like having a character debrief the senior officers going like, this is, this is what happened. And the senior officers had to sit around going, Yeah, it's our fault, you know, like, we made that call and we have to settle with it. Yeah.Sam: Yeah. Or like maybe you decide that one person who came back alive really was at fault and you hold a disciplinary meeting for them. Right? Like Thomas: Oh, wow. Yeah. Sam: Um, a specialist who comes back injured and carrying tons of guilt, like, yikes, I, let's do it.There's another line at the end of the procedure here that is, if any squad members died, ask someone what they remember most about one of them, which is really just like sticking a finger in the wound. Right. It, it, it's making sure if it wasn't clear enough already, like you are supposed to feel these deaths.Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It is again, just and, and if people are sort of hearing this and going, oh, this is a bit, this is a bit much like I cannot overstate how much the primary missions can be just a joy, like a complete, like you can, you can be in this dark fantasy world of zombies. And you know, the humanity has lost the war.But like when you start a primary mission, like when I was playing it very often my players would absolutely flub the engagement roll. And they would start in like a desperate position and I'd really kind of revel in like, how screwed they were. And then they would just go, okay, flashback, this was the plan all along, this is the diversion. I'd be like, shut the.Sam: Flashback this, resist that. Yeah. I've got some explosives in my back pocket. It's all fine. There's, you, you say there's a broken themselves, one of the head zombies coming in to kill us? Like that's fine. We'll just collapse a church on their head. It'll be fine.Um, Thomas: We prepared for this all along.Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It's cool to have both of those dualities in the game, like to have the wild successes. 'cause that also feels like a part of war is like sometimes you do get those miraculous victories too.Thomas: Yeah, I will say that, and this is something that I'm still unpacking, but it can't be overstated how much culturally we have this fantasy, especially for young men of like the greatest destiny being that you gave your life on the battlefield, right? Like that you took a bullet for your comrade.Like that is such a powerful you know, cultural feeling, I think. So And it is hard to sort of have that feeling in games that don't, at the end of it, make you go, okay, yeah, I think we might have glorified war there.Sam: Yeah.Thomas: and it is this game this game lets you do that.So I am, I am going to unrelentingly recommend this to folks even though it can be dark. Like I think you have control of that dial to a huge extent. And you can You can make sure that this is a fun and pleasurable experience.Sam: All right. What mechanic from Band of Blades should I do an episode about next?Thomas: I mean, I think the immediate one that comes to mind is the idea of roles. That the one thing that players have continuity on is that they're either the Commander or the Marshal or the Quartermaster or optionally the spy or, and the Lorekeeper, I think.And yeah, they just, they just divide the GM role in a nice way. Primarily because like, those are now player responsibilities, right? It's the Marshal's responsibility to name every member in the squad as in when they need a name. It's not the GM's job, you know. And that you know, you might think that a small thing, but it's, it's a big thing.So I, I think that's an obvious other thing to kind of discuss all the ways in which Band of Blades gently and, sophisticatedly kind of divides that, GM experience.Sam: Yeah. It both distributes all the paperwork and bookkeeping that the GM or someone would have to be doing among several people so that no one person is fully responsible, and by doing so, it puts more hard choices into the hands of each player.Thomas: Yeah, and it also facilitates their mutual cooperation, right? Like when, when you have a sense of like, whose final call this is, like that doesn't mean you're not gonna discuss it. You're gonna discuss it and then someone has final call and you're going to respect that. And that does a lot for having straightforward and fluid like conversations.Sam: Yeah. Well maybe I'll have you back in a year or two uh, to do that one. Um, But uh, this was excellent. This was great. Thanks for for being here and talking about secondary missions with me.Thomas: Thanks so much. I am thinking about Band of Blades like all the time, you've just given me an opportunity to like talk about it, but if you had it, it'd just be me in my head thinking about it.Sam: Thanks again to Thomas for being here. You can find him on socials at chaibypost, C H A I B Y P O S T, but in my opinion, you're better off just subscribing to the Indie RPG Newsletter and the Yes Indie'd podcast. Links for all that in the show notes. As always, you can find me on socials at sdunnewold, bluesky, and itch preferred, and there's a Dice Exploder Discord! Come on by, talk about the show, and if you've backed the Kickstarter, claim your fancy pants roll. Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.Thanks, as always, to you for listening. See ya next time. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit diceexploder.substack.com

Today we revisit one of our most popular episodes, an early interview with Sheryl Paul, author of "The Conscious Bride". Sheryl's work allows us to reflect on how the pain, grief, discomfort, and vulnerability that can arise throughout the wedding process can actually be doorways into joy if we are willing to let them in.    Music by Terry Hughes   Links: Sheryl Paul's work The Conscious Bride Shelter in Place Podcast   Also Check Out: Inviting Grief to the Wedding My Self-Marriage Story   Rate This Podcast Full Transcript   Paul: I'm always interested in what's not being talked about what people are experiencing, but are trying to stuff away, trying to sequester, trying to sweep into the corner under the rug... when all that does is create shame and all that does is create anxiety.   Sheryl Paul has a unique ability to see the invisible, to see what has been silenced. Her book "The Conscious Bride" has been helping couples prepare for marriage for 20 years - and prepare in a very specific way. Her work helps couples create room for all of the emotions that come with transition, not just the picture perfect ones. Funny thing is, that allows for even more joy. Join me for a conversation with Sheryl Paul.   This is Shame Piñata. I'm Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. When I got engaged six years ago, a good friend of mine gave me a book called "The Conscious Bride". Now, I'm not a reader, as my husband will tell you, but I devoured this book. I loved it because it touched on the shadow, the stuff we don't talk about, the stuff that gets in our way when we want to feel one way but actually feel a myriad of other ways all at the same time. It named the shadow that hovers over the wedding: the attachment, the fear, the uncertainty, the hidden power-struggles and the grief that lies beneath them, and that a big part of stepping into a new life is letting go of the old one - and not just for the couple. The Conscious Bride gave me permission to feel all the ways, and it helped me create room for everyone else to feel all the ways too, so ultimately, we could all process the transition without getting into weird fights about random things. I was so happy to have a chance to speak with Sheryl Paul.    Thomas: So what led you to write this book?   Paul: So, I was in a master's program around that time. I was at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it has a very strong Jungian focus. And I had always been interested in rites of passages and I had a deep sense that there was a lot that was not being talked about around the wedding. And I started to interview women and I did a lot of interviews, especially when it came time to write the book, which came from my master's thesis. So it started out as as a thesis and then evolve into a book. And I started to see that there was a big gap in the cultural conversation around around transitions in general. All transitions are bypassed and overlooked, but particularly the wedding and then in particular, how much focus there is on the joy and the perfection and everything has to be blissful and ecstatic from the moment of the proposal into the first year of the wedding, and there was just no conversation happening about the shadow, about the death experience, about what women (and men) are actually experiencing quite a bit of a time. And, you know, the more I researched and the more I looked and the more I spoke, the more it became quite clear to me that just that again, that there was a real gap in the conversation around this pivotal rite of passage, one of our few ceremonies that we still invoke in the culture. And yet it's done in such a way where we really gloss over the element of a transition, of the reality that when you are in transition, you are in a death experience, you are in a liminal zone, you are between identities, you are letting go, you are grieving. And we only expect people to feel joyful. It creates a lot of anxiety and it creates even more chaos than there naturally would be around an event like this. Because I'm feeling sad, because I have a sense of loss, because I feel like a part of me is dying, because I'm not over-the-moon ecstatic... something must be wrong with me, or with my partner, or with the decision to get married - something's wrong. And it's an incredibly deep sigh of relief to the soul to know that nothing is wrong. In fact, the more you let those difficult feelings in, the more you will open to the joy; that the pain and the grief and the discomfort and vulnerability are the doorways into the joy, into what we are expected to see all and into what we hope to feel. And what I started to say earlier was that that the wedding more than any other transition, I think, has (probably being pregnant becoming a mother comes close) carries a very strong cultural expectation of unilateral joy and it is supported in a big way by the wedding industry that sells perfection and sells joy. So it's a it's very big money behind selling us the bill of goods by selling us this message that you are supposed to be joyful and the way to do that is to create a perfect event.   Thomas: How do you work with someone if they're just starting to realize that they don't have to only feel joyful?   Paul: So, I tell them to read my book. And, you know, it's really the first part it's about re educating people to understand all of the normal and necessary feelings that accompany this transition. And once they understand that everything they're feeling is normal and necessary, they can start to let it in and and feel it, feel the grief, feel the loss, feel the vulnerability, feel the loneliness. These are all normal feelings that accompany transitions. So once we give ourselves permission to feel without that overlay of "because I'm feeling this it means there's something wrong" everything changes from there. We don't then have to misassign meaning to the feelings and to think, "Because I'm feeling sad, it means I'm making mistake." No, it has nothing to do with that. You're feeling sad because you are in a rite of passage. You're feeling sad because you are in the death experience, letting go of this identity, this primary identity as single person, as daughter, and shifting into an entirely new stage of life, a new identity. And there is no way to go through that without feeling grief.   Thomas: You spend a good portion of the book talking about how the bride is separating from the father/father figure and the mother/mother figure and the friends. Can you say more about that process?   Paul: Yes, so it can go a few different ways. If the bride is very close to her father, that's one set of emotions and experiences where there is tends to be a lot of grief, a lot of crying, really good, medicinal, necessary crying to make that separation process... and to make it more effective to make it more complete to make it more conscious. Again, in the naming, to say, I am separating from my dad, I am no longer going to be... Yes, I'm his daughter, but not in the same way, not as my primary identity. That my new partner is going to be number one and I'm transferring allegiance. So, that's one example of one way that it can go if if someone's very close to their father. If somebody doesn't have a close relationship with their father or there is no father figure in their life, that's a different kind of grief of the loss of not having had that or never having had that. The same as somebody has passed away. If somebody who's getting married and their mother's no longer alive. You know, that's, that's one way that grief can come through, as opposed to a mother who is very much alive and very much involved. And then there's a separation. There's… there's a loosening of cords that is required.    Thomas: I'm curious as you're speaking how this applies, I'm sure it's very different, but how it applies to folks who were older when they get married, or maybe a second marriage.   Paul: It can be different, it can be similar. It depends. It depends on a lot of factors. But regardless of the age, especially if it's a first marriage and you're getting married at 40, you're still letting go of a massive identity. And in some ways, it's even more of a letting go because of all of those years that you spent as a non-married person. And so there's a lot of grieving, a lot of shedding of the independence, the separateness, all of the control that you have when you are a non-married person, that every inch of your life is your own: your home, your space, how you spend your time, how you organize your weekend, it's all yours. And so that is its own massive death experience for somebody who marries later, you know, and who has had that many more years than someone who's 22 if you're 42, that's a lot of years of being the sole architect of your life.   Thomas: So you work with people around transitions, all kinds of transitions now, and I'm curious if ceremony plays a part in that with them.   Paul: I'm a big fan of ceremony. Because my work is largely over the internet. I'm not the one doing the ceremony with them. I would love to be that person, but I'm not. But I always encourage people to create ceremony and create rituals. And so, you know, if it's somebody getting married... and I've had a lot more men come my way, by the way, since I wrote The Conscious Bride. And I'm thinking of some right now who are in one of my small coaching groups. And he's getting married on Saturday, and I won't, I won't share the specifics, but it's... because it's his story. But it's really beautiful to witness men in their transitional process and the rituals that they come up with because I encourage people to find their own rituals that are meaningful to them. Ways to acknowledge the end of you know, in his sake, his bachelorhood that that time in his life is over. And so he has been sharing these incredibly potent rituals that have come to him for ways of recognizing that that time in his life is over. And what ritual does is, as you know, is it, it concretizes, it makes it and embodies what's happening, so that it brings it out of just that realm of talking about it and it sends it into a realm that we can't see with our five senses, but very much exists and yet calls on the five senses to help transmute the experience into another form. And so rituals help us cross over that sometimes very scary divide that just looks like a big, cavernous, empty space, crossing from one identity to a new identity, from one stage of life to the next. And without the rituals we are... we're pretty lost and so, you know, again, as I, as I said earlier, the wedding is one of the few ceremonies that we have, which comes with ritual. A lot of people tend to minimize or diminish the ceremonial aspect because they're so focused on the party and the reception, you know, that's where all of the energy goes. When really, it's the ceremony that has so much power to carry us over the divide between one stage and the next.   Thomas: And that's something I'm trying to encourage and put seeds out in the world for as well, that people take that the ritual, the ceremony of the marriage, the wedding and they, they feel free to do it their way so that it's powerful and is as powerful and meaningful for the couple as possible.   Paul: Yes, yes! And I think we are at this extraordinary time in our world where we have freedom to do that, where we are breaking out of the traditions that have gone stale and revitalizing them with personal meaning of what is meaningful for you. And there may be long-standing time-honored traditions that are still meaningful. And I'm by no means one to throw everything out that we've come from, because many of those rituals are gorgeous and meaningful - but only if they're meaningful for the individual, right? Only if they land in a place where something inside of you says yes, right? That helps me, that bolsters me, that comforts me. Right? So, you know, whether it's at a Jewish wedding standing under the Chuppah, you know, it's just this beautiful symbol of, of our new home and and this, you know, long standing tradition... if that's meaningful to somebody great. If it's not, then it really.. it's not going to do anything for you on a spiritual level.   I shared with Sheryl that before my wedding, I created a self-commitment ceremony for myself. And in that ceremony I presenced all of my Ancestral grandmothers with the acknowledgement of how important marriage might have been for them, how much of a survival tool. I did this because women's  standing in society has evolved so much even since my mother's generation, but yet we are still connected to our Ancestral legacy and felt like a really important thing to me.    Paul: That's incredibly beautiful that you did that and so powerful and it's probably the number one fear that comes up for women that I'm working with in their pre-wedding time in their engagement, is the fear of what does marriage mean? And does it mean that I am beholden to this person now and I lose all sense of self and I become boring and frumpy and... This is the legacy. This is what we've been handed, right? This is what it has meant for thousands and thousands of years is that for women, marriage has meant really the death of self: I exist, to take care of the man and to take care of the children and that's it. And so there's this very deep ancestral legacy that we have to consciously break with and recognize that we are so lucky and we are so blessed to be on this new threshold, that we get to redefine what marriage means for us. And we only can really know that after we've taken the leap, because on the other side, on the first side, on the engagement side, it just all looks and sounds so scary to most women. And you know, that's why I have so many exercises in The Conscious Bride, more-so I think in The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner, on what does it mean to be a wife? What does that mean to you? What does the word wife connote? When you think of wife, what is the connotation for you? And it's very rare that someone's going to say, "Oh, I see this rad, sexy woman, you know, like, doing like, the dance on the rooftops." Like, no, that's not usually what we think of when we hear the word wife. But it could be. More and more we are redefining that. And we are seeing that. And so I tell people, but look out into the world today and find those those models of marriage where you see a woman who is doing her life fully, you know, and yes, maybe she's also a mother and she's, you know, loves being married and she's fully committed to her path and and making her offerings, and doing her work in the world. Right? Separate from wife and mother. So, yeah, I love, I love that I love what you share. I love what you did. I think that is not only powerful, but essential on that ceremonial ritual level to recognize what we've come from.   Thomas: I'm just so happy and honored to have the chance to talk to you after, after all this time of really, really, really appreciating your book and your wisdom.   Paul: Yeah, thank you, Colleen.   It means a great deal to me to have the opportunity to share Sheryl's wisdom with you. I hope that you are able to use it or pass it along to a friend. Here's one final bit of wisdom, a quote from The Conscious Bride. "A marriage is a rite of passage no matter when it occurs, and the woman must still pass through the phases of her transformation. She must die, she must sit in the unknown, and then she will be reborn."   Sheryl Paul is the author of The Conscious Bride and The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner. Her website contains a plethora of resources for addressing life transitions. Learn more about Sheryl and her work at https://conscious-transitions.com. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I'm Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

About ThomasThomas Hazel is Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist of ChaosSearch. He is a serial entrepreneur at the forefront of communication, virtualization, and database technology and the inventor of ChaosSearch's patented IP. Thomas has also patented several other technologies in the areas of distributed algorithms, virtualization and database science. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of New Hampshire, Hall of Fame Alumni Inductee, and founded both student & professional chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).Links Referenced: ChaosSearch: https://www.chaossearch.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChaosSearch Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CHAOSSEARCH/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at AWS AppConfig. Engineers love to solve, and occasionally create, problems. But not when it's an on-call fire-drill at 4 in the morning. Software problems should drive innovation and collaboration, NOT stress, and sleeplessness, and threats of violence. That's why so many developers are realizing the value of AWS AppConfig Feature Flags. Feature Flags let developers push code to production, but hide that that feature from customers so that the developers can release their feature when it's ready. This practice allows for safe, fast, and convenient software development. You can seamlessly incorporate AppConfig Feature Flags into your AWS or cloud environment and ship your Features with excitement, not trepidation and fear. To get started, go to snark.cloud/appconfig. That's snark.cloud/appconfig.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our returning sponsor and friend, ChaosSearch. And once again, the fine folks at ChaosSearch has seen fit to basically subject their CTO and Founder, Thomas Hazel, to my slings and arrows. Thomas, thank you for joining me. It feels like it's been a hot minute since we last caught up.Thomas: Yeah, Corey. Great to be on the program again, then. I think it's been almost a year. So, I look forward to these. They're fun, they're interesting, and you know, always a good time.Corey: It's always fun to just take a look at companies' web pages in the Wayback Machine, archive.org, where you can see snapshots of them at various points in time. Usually, it feels like this is either used for long-gone things and people want to remember the internet of yesteryear, or alternately to deliver sick burns with retorting a “This you,” when someone winds up making an unpopular statement. One of the approaches I like to use it for, which is significantly less nefarious—usually—is looking back in time at companies' websites, just to see how the positioning of the product evolves over time.And ChaosSearch has had an interesting evolution in that direction. But before we get into that, assuming that there might actually be people listening who do not know the intimate details of exactly what it is you folks do, what is ChaosSearch, and what might you folks do?Thomas: Yeah, well said, and I look forward to [laugh] doing the Wayback Time because some of our ideas, way back when, seemed crazy, but now they make a lot of sense. So, what ChaosSearch is all about is transforming customers' cloud object stores like Amazon S3 into an analytical database that supports search and SQL-type use cases. Now, where's that apply? In log analytics, observability, security, security data lakes, operational data, particularly at scale, where you just stream your data into your data lake, connect our service, our SaaS service, to that lake and automagically we index it and provide well-known APIs like Elasticsearch and integrate with Kibana or Grafana, and SQL APIs, something like, say, a Superset or Tableau or Looker into your data. So, you stream it in and you get analytics out. And the key thing is the time-cost complexity that we all know that operational data, particularly at scale, like terabytes and a day and up causes challenges, and we all know how much it costs.Corey: They certainly do. One of the things that I found interesting is that, as I've mentioned before, when I do consulting work at The Duckbill Group, we have absolutely no partners in the entire space. That includes AWS, incidentally. But it was easy in the beginning because I was well aware of what you folks were up to, and it was great when there was a use case that matched of you're spending an awful lot of money on Elasticsearch; consider perhaps migrating some of that—if it makes sense—to ChaosSearch. Ironically, when you started sponsoring some of my nonsense, that conversation got slightly trickier where I had to disclose, yeah our media arm is does have sponsorships going on with them, but that has no bearing on what I'm saying.And if they take their sponsorships away—please don't—then we would still be recommending them because it's the right answer, and it's what we would use if we were in your position. We receive no kickbacks or partner deal or any sort of reseller arrangement because it just clouds the whole conflict of interest perception. But you folks have been fantastic for a long time in a bunch of different ways.Thomas: Well, you know, I would say that what you thought made a lot of sense made a lot of sense to us as well. So, the ChaosSearch idea just makes sense. Now, you had to crack some code, solve some problems, invent some technology, and create some new architecture, but the idea that Elasticsearch is a useful solution with all the tooling, the visualization, the wonderful community around that, was a good place to start, but here's the problem: setting it up, scaling it out, keep it up, when things are happening, things go bump in the night. All those are real challenges, and one of them was just the storaging of the data. Well, what if you could make S3 the back-end store? One hundred percent; no SSDs or HDDs. Makes a lot of sense.And then support the APIs that your tooling uses. So, it just made a lot of sense on what we were trying to do, just no one thought of it. Now, if you think about the Northstar you were talking about, you know, five, six years ago, when I said, transforming cloud storage into an analytical database for search and SQL, people thought that was crazy and mad. Well, now everyone's using Cloud Storage, everyone's using S3 as a data lake. That's not in question anymore.But it was a question five, six, you know, years ago. So, when we met up, you're like, “Well, that makes sense.” It always made sense, but people either didn't think was possible, or were worried, you know, I'll just try to set up an Elastic cluster and deal with it. Because that's what happens when you particularly deal with large-scale implementations. So, you know, to us, we would love the Elastic API, the tooling around it, but what we all know is the cost, the time the complexity, to manage it, to scale it out, just almost want to pull your hair out. And so, that's where we come in is, don't change what you do, just change how you do it.Corey: Every once in a while, I'll talk to a client who's running an Amazon Elasticsearch cluster, and they have nothing but good things to say about it. Which, awesome. On the one hand, part of me wishes that I had some of their secrets, but often what's happened is that they have this down to a science, they have a data lifecycle that's clearly defined and implemented, the cluster is relatively static, so resizes aren't really a thing, and it just works for their use cases. And in those scenarios, like, “Do you care about the bill?” “Not overly. We don't have to think about it.”Great. Then why change? If there's no pain, you're not going to sell someone something, especially when we're talking, this tends to be relatively smaller-scale as well. It's okay, great, they're spending $5,000 a month on it. It doesn't necessarily justify the engineering effort to move off.Now, when you start looking at this, and, “Huh, that's a quarter million bucks a month we're spending on this nonsense, and it goes down all the time,” yeah, that's when it starts to be one of those logical areas to start picking apart and diving into. What's also muddied the waters since the last time we really went in-depth on any of this was it used to be we would be talking about it exactly like we are right now, about how it's Elasticsearch-compatible. Technically, these days, we probably shouldn't be saying it is OpenSearch compatible because of the trademark issues between Elastic and AWS and the Schism of the OpenSearch fork of the Elasticsearch project. And now it feels like when you start putting random words in front of the word search, ChaosSearch fits right in. It feels like your star is rising.Thomas: Yeah, no, well said. I appreciate that. You know, it's funny when Elastic changed our license, we all didn't know what was going to happen. We knew something was going to happen, but we didn't know what was going to happen. And Amazon, I say ironically, or, more importantly, decided they'll take up the open mantle of keeping an open, free solution.Now, obviously, they recommend running that in their cloud. Fair enough. But I would say we don't hear as much Elastic replacement, as much as OpenSearch replacement with our solution because of all the benefits that we talked about. Because the trigger points for when folks have an issue with the OpenSearch or Elastic stack is got too expensive, or it was changing so much and it was falling over, or the complexity of the schema changing, or all the above. The pipelines were complex, particularly at scale.That's both for Elasticsearch, as well as OpenSearch. And so, to us, we want either to win, but we want to be the replacement because, you know, at scale is where we shine. But we have seen a real trend where we see less Elasticsearch and more OpenSearch because the community is worried about the rules that were changed, right? You see it day in, day out, where you have a community that was built around open and fair and free, and because of business models not working or the big bad so-and-so is taking advantage of it better, there's a license change. And that's a trust change.And to us, we're following the OpenSearch path because it's still open. The 600-pound gorilla or 900-pound gorilla of Amazon. But they really held the mantle, saying, “We're going to stay open, we assume for as long as we know, and we'll follow that path. But again, at that scale, the time, the costs, we're here to help solve those problems.” Again, whether it's on Amazon or, you know, Google et cetera.Corey: I want to go back to what I mentioned at the start of this with the Wayback Machine and looking at how things wound up unfolding in the fullness of time. The first time that it snapshotted your site was way back in the year 2018, which—Thomas: Nice. [laugh].Corey: Some of us may remember, and at that point, like, I wasn't doing any work with you, and later in time I would make fun of you folks for this, but back then your brand name was in all caps, so I would periodically say things like this episode is sponsored by our friends at [loudly] CHAOSSEARCH.Thomas: [laugh].Corey: And once you stopped capitalizing it and that had faded from the common awareness, it just started to look like I had the inability to control the volume of my own voice. Which, fair, but generally not mid-sentence. So, I remember those early days, but the positioning of it was, “The future of log management and analytics,” back in 2018. Skipping forward a year later, you changed this because apparently in 2019, the future was already here. And you were talking about, “Log search analytics, purpose-built for Amazon S3. Store everything, ask anything all on your Amazon S3.”Which is awesome. You were still—unfortunately—going by the all caps thing, but by 2020, that wound up changing somewhat significantly. You were at that point, talking for it as, “The data platform for scalable log analytics.” Okay, it's clearly heading in a log direction, and that made a whole bunch of sense. And now today, you are, “The data lake platform for analytics at scale.” So, good for you, first off. You found a voice?Thomas: [laugh]. Well, you know, it's funny, as a product mining person—I'll take my marketing hat off—we've been building the same solution with the same value points and benefits as we mentioned earlier, but the market resonates with different terminology. When we said something like, “Transforming your Cloud Object Storage like S3 into an analytical database,” people were just were like, blown away. Is that even possible? Right? And so, that got some eyes.Corey: Oh, anything is a database if you hold that wrong. Absolutely.Thomas: [laugh]. Yeah, yeah. And then you're saying log analytics really resonated for a few years. Data platform, you know, is more broader because we do more broader things. And now we see over the last few years, observability, right? How do you fit in the observability viewpoint, the stack where log analytics is one aspect to it?Some of our customers use Grafana on us for that lens, and then for the analysis, alerting, dashboarding. You can say that Kibana in the hunting aspect, the log aspects. So, you know, to us, we're going to put a message out there that resonates with what we're hearing from our customers. For instance, we hear things like, “I need a security data lake. I need that. I need to stream all my data. I need to have all the data because what happens today that now, I need to know a week, two weeks, 90 days.”We constantly hear, “I need at least 90 days forensics on that data.” And it happens time and time again. We hear in the observability stack where, “Hey, I love Datadog, but I can't afford it more than a week or two.” Well, that's where we come in. And we either replace Datadog for the use cases that we support, or we're auxiliary to it.Sometimes we have an existing Grafana implementation, and then they store data in us for the long tail. That could be the scenario. So, to us, the message is around what resonates with our customers, but in the end, it's operational data, whether you want to call it observability, log analytics, security analytics, like the data lake, to us, it's just access to your data, all your data, all the time, and supporting the APIs and the tooling that you're using. And so, to me, it's the same product, but the market changes with messaging and requirements. And this is why we always felt that having a search and SQL platform is so key because what you'll see in Elastic or OpenSearch is, “Well, I only support the Elastic API. I can't do correlations. I can't do this. I can't do that. I'm going to move it over to say, maybe Athena but not so much. Maybe a Snowflake or something else.”Corey: “Well, Thomas, it's very simple. Once you learn our own purpose-built, domain-specific language, specifically for our product, well, why are you still sitting here, go learn that thing.” People aren't going to do that.Thomas: And that's what we hear. It was funny, I won't say what the company was, a big banking company that we're talking to, and we hear time and time again, “I only want to do it via the Elastic tooling,” or, “I only want to do it via the BI tooling.” I hear it time and time again. Both of these people are in the same company.Corey: And that's legitimate as well because there's a bunch of pre-existing processes pointing at things and we're not going to change 200 different applications in their data model just because you want to replace a back-end system. I also want to correct myself. I was one tab behind. This year's branding is slightly different: “Search and analyze unlimited log data in your cloud object storage.” Which is, I really like the evolution on this.Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And I love it. And what was interesting is the moving, the setting up, the doubling of your costs, let's say you have—I mean, we deal with some big customers that have petabytes of data; doubling your petabytes, that means, if your Elastic environment is costing you tens of millions and then you put into Snowflake, that's also going to be tens of millions. And with a solution like ours, you have really cost-effective storage, right? Your cloud storage, it's secure, it's reliable, it's Elastic, and you attach Chaos to get the well-known APIs that your well-known tooling can analyze.So, to us, our evolution has been really being the end viewpoint where we started early, where the search and SQL isn't here today—and you know, in the future, we'll be coming out with more ML type tooling—but we have two sides: we have the operational, security, observability. And a lot of the business side wants access to that data as well. Maybe it's app data that they need to do analysis on their shopping cart website, for instance.Corey: The thing that I find curious is, the entire space has been iterating forward on trying to define observability, generally, as whatever people are already trying to sell in many cases. And that has seemed to be a bit of a stumbling block for a lot of folks. I figured this out somewhat recently because I've built the—free for everyone to use—the lasttweetinaws.com, Twitter threading client.That's deployed to 20 different AWS regions because it's go—the idea is that should be snappy for people, no matter where they happen to be on the planet, and I use it for conferences when I travel, so great, let's get ahead of it. But that also means I've got 20 different sources of logs. And given that it's an omnibus Lambda function, it's very hard to correlate that to users, or user sessions, or even figure out where it's going. The problem I've had is, “Oh, well, this seems like something I could instrument to spray logs somewhere pretty easily, but I don't want to instrument it for 15 different observability vendors. Why don't I just use otel—or Open Telemetry—and then tell that to throw whatever I care about to various vendors and do a bit of a bake-off?” The problem, of course, is that open telemetry and Lambda seem to be in just the absolute wrong directions. A lot.Thomas: So, we see the same trend of otel coming out, and you know, this is another API that I'm sure we're going to go all-in on because it's getting more and more talked about. I won't say it's the standard that I think is trending to all your points about I need to normalize a process. But as you mentioned, we also need to correlate across the data. And this is where, you know, there are times where search and hunting and alerting is awesome and wonderful and solves all your needs, and sometimes correlation. Imagine trying to denormalize all those logs, set up a pipeline, put it into some database, or just do a SELECT *, you know, join this to that to that, and get your answers.And so, I think both OpenTelemetry and SQL and search all need to be played into one solution, or at least one capability because if you're not doing that, you're creating some hodgepodge pipeline to move it around and ultimately get your questions answered. And if it takes weeks—maybe even months, depending on the scale—you may sometimes not choose to do it.Corey: One other aspect that has always annoyed me about more or less every analytics company out there—and you folks are no exception to this—is the idea of charging per gigabyte ingested because that inherently sets up a weird dichotomy of, well, this is costing a lot, so I should strive to log less. And that is sort of the exact opposite, not just of the direction you folks want customers to go in, but also where customers themselves should be going in. Where you diverge from an awful lot of those other companies because of the nature of how you work, is that you don't charge them again for retention. And the idea that, yeah, the fact that anything stored in ChaosSearch lives in your own S3 buckets, you can set your own lifecycle policies and do whatever you want to do with that is a phenomenal benefit, just because I've always had a dim view of short-lived retention periods around logs, especially around things like audit logs. And these days, I would consider getting rid of audit logging data and application logging data—especially if there's a correlation story—any sooner than three years feels like borderline malpractice.Thomas: [laugh]. We—how many times—I mean, we've heard it time and time again is, “I don't have access to that data because it was too costly.” No one says they don't want the data. They just can't afford the data. And one of the key premises that if you don't have all the data, you're at risk, particularly in security—I mean, even audits. I mean, so many times our customers ask us, you know, “Hey, what was this going on? What was that go on?” And because we can so cost-effectively monitor our own service, we can provide that information for them. And we hear this time and time again.And retention is not a very sexy aspect, but it's so crucial. Anytime you look in problems with X solution or Y solution, it's the cost of the data. And this is something that we wanted to address, officially. And why do we make it so cost-effective and free after you ingest it was because we were using cloud storage. And it was just a great place to land the data cost-effective, securely.Now, with that said, there are two types of companies I've seen. Everybody needs at least 90 days. I see time and time again. Sure, maybe daily, in a weeks, they do a lot of their operation, but 90 days is where it lands. But there's also a bunch of companies that need it for years, for compliance, for audit reasons.And imagine trying to rehydrate, trying to rebuild—we have one customer—again I won't say who—has two petabytes of data that they rehydrate when they need it. And they say it's a nightmare. And it's growing. What if you just had it always alive, always accessible? Now, as we move from search to SQL, there are use cases where in the log world, they just want to pay upfront, fixed fee, this many dollars per terabyte, but as we get into the more ad hoc side of it, more and more folks are asking for, “Can I pay per query?”And so, you'll see coming out soon, about scenarios where we have a different pricing model. For logs, typically, you want to pay very consistent, you know, predetermined cost structure, but in the case of more security data lakes, where you want to go in the past and not really pay for something until you use it, that's going to be an option as well coming out soon. So, I would say you need both in the pricing models, but you need the data to have either side, right?Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch. You could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they're calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you've come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you're using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They're also available now in the AWS marketplace if you'd prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Corey: You'd like to hope. I mean, you could always theoretically wind up just pulling what Ubiquiti apparently did—where this came out in an indictment that was unsealed against an insider—but apparently one of their employees wound up attempting to extort them—which again, that's not their fault, to be clear—but what came out was that this person then wound up setting the CloudTrail audit log retention to one day, so there were no logs available. And then as a customer, I got an email from them saying there was no evidence that any customer data had been accessed. I mean, yeah, if you want, like, the world's most horrifyingly devilish best practice, go ahead and set your log retention to nothing, and then you too can confidently state that you have no evidence of anything untoward happening.Contrast this with what AWS did when there was a vulnerability reported in AWS Glue. Their analysis of it stated explicitly, “We have looked at our audit logs going back to the launch of the service and have conclusively proven that the only time this has ever happened was in the security researcher who reported the vulnerability to us, in their own account.” Yeah, one of those statements breeds an awful lot of confidence. The other one makes me think that you're basically being run by clowns.Thomas: You know what? CloudTrail is such a crucial—particularly Amazon, right—crucial service because of that, we see time and time again. And the challenge of CloudTrail is that storing a long period of time is costly and the messiness the JSON complexity, every company struggles with it. And this is how uniquely—how we represent information, we can model it in all its permutations—but the key thing is we can store it forever, or you can store forever. And time and time again, CloudTrail is a key aspect to correlate—to your question—correlate this happened to that. Or do an audit on two years ago, this happened.And I got to tell you, to all our listeners out there, please store your CloudTrail data—ideally in ChaosSearch—because you're going to need it. Everyone always needs that. And I know it's hard. CloudTrail data is messy, nested JSON data that can explode; I get it. You know, there's tricks to do it manually, although quite painful. But CloudTrail, every one of our customers is indexing with us in CloudTrail because of stories like that, as well as the correlation across what maybe their application log data is saying.Corey: I really have never regretted having extra logs lying around, especially with, to be very direct, the almost ridiculously inexpensive storage classes that S3 offers, especially since you can wind up having some of the offline retrieval stuff as part of a lifecycle policy now with intelligent tiering. I'm a big believer in just—again—the Glacier Deep Archive I've at the cost of $1,000 a month per petabyte, with admittedly up to 12 hours of calling that as a latency. But that's still, for audit logs and stuff like that, why would I ever want to delete things ever again?Thomas: You're exactly right. And we have a bunch of customers that do exactly that. And we automate the entire process with you. Obviously, it's your S3 account, but we can manage across those tiers. And it's just to a point where, why wouldn't you? It's so cost-effective.And the moments where you don't have that information, you're at risk, whether it's internal audits, or you're providing a service for somebody, it's critical data. With CloudTrail, it's critical data. And if you're not storing it and if you're not making it accessible through some tool like an Elastic API or Chaos, it's not worth it. I think, to your point about your story, it's epically not worth it.Corey: It's really not. It's one of those areas where that is not a place to overly cost optimize. This is—I mean we talked earlier about my business and perceptions of conflict of interest. There's a reason that I only ever charge fixed-fee and not percentage of savings or whatnot because, at some point, I'll be placed in a position of having to say nonsense, like, “Do you really need all of these backups?” That doesn't make sense at that point.I do point out things like you have hourly disk snapshots of your entire web fleet, which has no irreplaceable data on them dating back five years. Maybe cleaning some of that up might be the right answer. The happy answer is somewhere in between those two, and it's a business decision around exactly where that line lies. But I'm a believer in never regretting having kept logs almost into perpetuity. Until and unless I start getting more or less pillaged by some particularly rapacious vendor that's oh, yeah, we're going to charge you not just for ingest, but also for retention. And for how long you want to keep it, we're going to treat it like we're carving it into platinum tablets. No. Stop that.Thomas: [laugh]. Well, you know, it's funny, when we first came out, we were hearing stories that vendors were telling customers why they didn't need their data, to your point, like, “Oh, you don't need that,” or, “Don't worry about that.” And time and time again, they said, “Well, turns out we didn't need that.” You know, “Oh, don't index all your data because you just know what you know.” And the problem is that life doesn't work out that way business doesn't work out that way.And now what I see in the market is everyone's got tiering scenarios, but the accessibility of that data takes some time to get access to. And these are all workarounds and bandaids to what fundamentally is if you design an architecture and a solution is such a way, maybe it's just always hot; maybe it's just always available. Now, we talked about tiering off to something very, very cheap, then it's like virtually free. But you know, our solution was, whether it's ultra warm, or this tiering that takes hours to rehydrate—hours—no one wants to live in that world, right? They just want to say, “Hey, on this date on this year, what was happening? And let me go look, and I want to do it now.”And it has to be part of the exact same system that I was using already. I didn't have to call up IT to say, “Hey, can you rehydrate this?” Or, “Can I go back to the archive and look at it?” Although I guess we're talking about archiving with your website, viewing from days of old, I think that's kind of funny. I should do that more often myself.Corey: I really wish that more companies would put themselves in the customers' shoes. And for what it's worth, periodically, I've spoken to a number of very happy ChaosSearch customers. I haven't spoken to any angry ones yet, which tells me you're either terrific at crisis comms, or the product itself functions as intended. So, either way, excellent job. Now, which team of yours is doing that excellent job, of course, is going to depend on which one of those outcomes it is. But I'm pretty good at ferreting out stories on those things.Thomas: Well, you know, it's funny, being a company that's driven by customer ask, it's so easy build what the customer wants. And so, we really take every input of what the customer needs and wants—now, there are cases where we relace Splunk. They're the Cadillac, they have all the bells and whistles, and there's times where we'll say, “Listen, that's not what we're going to do. We're going to solve these problems in this vector.” But they always keep on asking, right? You know, “I want this, I want that.”But most of the feedback we get is exactly what we should be building. People need their answers and how they get it. It's really helped us grow as a company, grow as a product. And I will say ever since we went live now many, many years ago, all our roadmap—other than our Northstar of transforming cloud storage into a search SQL big data analytics database has been customer-driven, market customer-driven, like what our customer is asking for, whether it's observability and integrating with Grafana and Kibana or, you know, security data lakes. It's just a huge theme that we're going to make sure that we provide a solution that meets those needs.So, I love when customers ask for stuff because the product just gets better. I mean, yeah, sometimes you have to have a thick skin, like, “Why don't you have this?” Or, “Why don't you have that?” Or we have customers—and not to complain about customers; I love our customers—but they sometimes do crazy things that we have to help them on crazy-ify. [laugh]. I'll leave it at that. But customers do silly things and you have to help them out. I hope they remember that, so when they ask for a feature that maybe takes a month to make available, they're patient with us.Corey: We sure can hope. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to once again suffer all of my criticisms, slings and arrows, blithe market observations, et cetera, et cetera. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Thomas: Well, of course, chaossearch.io. There's tons of material about what we do, use cases, case studies; we just published a big case study with Equifax recently. We're in Gartner and a whole bunch of Hype Cycles that you can pull down to see how we fit in the market.Reach out to us. You can set up a trial, kick the tires, again, on your cloud storage like S3. And ChaosSearch on Twitter, we have a Facebook, we have all this classic social medias. But our website is really where all the good content and whether you want to learn about the architecture and how we've done it, and use cases; people who want to say, “Hey, I have a problem. How do you solve it? How do I learn more?”Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. For my own purposes, you could also just search for the term ChaosSearch in your email inbox and find one of their sponsored ads in my newsletter and click that link, but that's a little self-serving as we do it. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. There's no need to do that. That is not how we ever evaluate these things. But it is funny to tell that story. Thomas, thank you so much for your time. As always, it's appreciated.Thomas: Corey Quinn, I truly enjoyed this time. And I look forward to upcoming re:Invent. I'm assuming it's going to be live like last year, and this is where we have a lot of fun with the community.Corey: Oh, I have no doubt that we're about to go through that particular path very soon. Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.Thomas: Thank you.Corey: Thomas Hazel, CTO and Founder of ChaosSearch. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that I will then set to have a retention period of one day, and then go on to claim that I have received no negative feedback.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode, Conor Joslin '23 interviews Thomas Cotter '17 and Brendan Quinn '06.  Thomas and Brendan met while Thomas was a student at Holy Cross. Their professional journeys converge thanks to the app INDX, a startup co-founded by Thomas and funded by Brendan. Through INDX, they hope to channel their energy and create a product that fosters learning, discovery and growth for all. True entrepreneurs at heart, they show us what's possible when you take a problem and focus your efforts on finding a solution. Interview originally recorded in March 2022. --- Thomas: You can't just build something because you care about it, right? At the end of the day, there has to be a problem and you have to be able to solve that problem for people. And so I think you get lucky when you find a problem that you experience personally, that you also care a lot about in trying to solve it. Maura: Welcome to Mission-Driven, where we speak with alumni who are leveraging their Holy Cross education to make a meaningful difference in the world around them. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney from the class of 2007, director of Alumni Career Development at Holy Cross. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's show. Maura: In this episode, we hear from two alumni, Thomas Cotter from the class of 2017 and Brendan Quinn from the class of 2006. Thomas and Brendan met while Thomas was a student at Holy Cross and their relationship has grown from there. Mentor, fellow Crusader, friend and business partner are all titles that can be used to describe their relationship with one another. Their professional journeys converge thanks to the app INDX, a startup co-founded by Thomas and funded by Brendan. Conor Jocelyn from the class of 2023 joins Thomas and Brendan to learn about their journeys through Holy Cross and the circumstances that led them to collaborate on this startup. Champions of a Holy Cross education, Thomas and Brendan are passionate about promoting lifelong learning. Through INDX, they hope to channel their energy and create a product that fosters learning, discovery and growth for all. True entrepreneurs at heart, they show us what's possible when you take a problem and focus your efforts on finding a solution. Conor: So hey Thomas, hey Brendan, how are you guys doing today? Brendan: Hey, Conor. Good to be with you. Thomas: Doing well. Thanks for doing this, Conor. Conor: Yeah, thank you for joining us. So Brendan, how about we start off with you? So could you please tell me a little bit about your background, maybe where you are from, your family life, and then also maybe tell us about when you were searching for schools, what convinced you to choose Holy Cross? Brendan: Yeah. So I am class of 2006, to date myself just right off the bat. Was born in the Bay Area. My folks were in the service, both in the Navy. So I lived in California until I was about four, moved to New England, Southeastern Connecticut more specifically, and grew up there predominantly. Started Holy Cross in 2002. And then after Holy Cross, went on to spend 15 years in financial services at one organization called Silicon Valley Bank. And we'll get into kind of what I'm up to now later on, I'm sure. In terms of what attracted me to Holy Cross, I really think it was like there was an intimacy about it. When I came to visit, I was definitely looking at a number of schools in varying shapes and sizes. And I just had that there was like a intangible feeling about Holy Cross and the community that it embodied that was just very attractive to me. Brendan: And so it was a pretty easy decision. I actually did early decision, was able to convince some people that I might be a good fit. So it worked out and then it's been, I would put it in the top five most important decisions in my life in terms of where I am today. So there's not a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for Holy Cross and my time there and all the relationship that have extended from that one of which being Thomas. Conor: Yeah. I had a very similar experience going to Holy Cross. I applied ED as well, and I was very attracted just to all aspects of it. I mean, it's a great place. Now Thomas, could you also share a little bit about your background, where you're from and then why you decided to attend Holy Cross? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Conor and Brendan, and I know each other pretty well at this point and I didn't know you were from the Bay Area, Brendan. So I just learned something right there. So that's awesome. I'm from Acton, Massachusetts. So not too far away from Holy Cross, about a 45 minute drive. A little different experience in terms of how I ended up there though. I originally went to Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where I played football, got some concussions and knew I might want to transfer. And I only looked at a few schools after my freshman or kind of in mid flight of my freshman year to look at transferring. And ironically with Holy Cross, was the first school I ever toured. My mom dragged me, I think as a sophomore or a junior to just go see what a college campus looked like. Thomas: And I always liked it, but when I was originally looking at a school I was out of high school, I just knew I wasn't going to be playing on any of Holy Cross's sports teams. So kind of brought it out of my mind, but I did an interview and looked at the campus and at that point had been in college for a little while. So I feel like I was able to make a pretty informed decision. And the liberal arts education, I was really interested in Spanish and economics and Holy Cross had great programs. And then the smaller school community and liberal arts education really attracted me, which is what brought me there. Thomas: And I'm super appreciative because transferring can be a bit of a challenge to overcome, because you're coming in fresh. A lot of people have their friends and everyone about Holy Cross was super useful and I'll throw a little jab because my grandfather went to BC, but BC actually let me in for transferring, but wasn't going to offer housing. So I'm always even extra appreciative of Holy Cross for their kindness to transfer students. Conor: Oh, awesome. Happy to hear that. So Thomas, I guess we'll ask you this question. During your time on the hill, what were some of the offices, clubs or extracurricular activities that you were involved in and were there any specific experience, classes or professors at Holy Cross that really set you up for success in the professional world? Thomas: Absolutely. No, it's a really good question. As far as extracurriculars, I experimented with a lot of things. I was the co-chair of the Sales Club. I was in the Finance Club, which is actually how Brendan and I ended up meeting, which is a funny story that we can probably pop into with one of those awkward networking calls that everyone tells you to do that thankfully has turned into a friendship, I guess almost lifelong friendship at this point, which is a funny story that I guess those calls actually work, which is nice to see. Thomas: I think one professor that stands out for me is a professor in the economics department, Professor Boyle. I had her for three or four economics classes and she was very rigorous, but she did a really good job of I think leaning on both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of economics, which is what I really liked about it. I also had a lot of really good professors in the Spanish department through that lens. But to your last question on I think how it set up for professional success, my worldview right now retrospectively is that the faster you can learn something new and apply it, the better off you're going to be. In our world things change so quickly that nothing is very static and it's very much a cliche with liberal arts education that you're learning how to learn, but I think there's a lot of truth and foundation to it. Thomas: And so I think my overall experience kind of being able to take in a lot of information, practice thinking for yourself and then applying it, has been the most impactful thing early on in my career because going back, I'm a 2017 grad. The world has changed a lot since then. If I were to be just looking at very specific skills, I think they would've already evolved. Like some of the software skills that I learned at Holy Cross I don't use anymore. Because even though softwares can be out of date, not just one small example. And I think that Holy Cross provided that foundation to continue to learn and adapt, which is really important. Conor: Awesome. Thank you very much. Brendan, I'm assuming you guys probably have pretty similar experiences at Holy Cross with all the different classes and professors, but anything different that stands out to you as something that really impacted your success in the professional world? Brendan: Yeah, I would definitely echo a lot of what Thomas just said there, particularly around the, just like the foundation that a liberal arts education affords. I was also an economics major. I mean, there are so many professors that influenced me, motivated me, touched me in different ways. But the one that actually stands, there's two, one is Professor Mosher who at the time was an adjunct professor and he was my indoctrination into economics at all. I was a pre-med biology major coming into Holy Cross, having grown up in a family, a medical family. And after my freshman year, I was starting to realize that that was not the path that I was going on. And so I was in a lot of ways back to square one in terms of my major and direction I wanted to take. Brendan: My forthcoming professional career and Professor Mosher was, he just had a very lightness about him. He was very, he was a great teacher, a great instructor, very great relationship builder. And so like that, and then kind of marrying that with just my, I have a very macro way that I think and operate, which aligned very nicely with the macroeconomics curriculum that I was being exposed to at that time. And so it just, things clicked. And then further on down the road, Professor Rask was one, took multiple classes with her. I just remember her being again, another just incredible teacher, very careful about the way that she did not try in one size fits all curriculum. She was very customized in her way that she was able to explain different concepts to different people that are coming from things from a different point of view. Brendan: So tying it back to the liberal arts, which I do think is above any specific vertical of subject matter that you're studying, knowing how to think, learning how to make better decisions with better information while also acknowledging for a lot of reasons that Thomas outlined that you're never going to have perfect information continues to serve me every day. And so also like Thomas, I would say that there's very few things in my, like the actual tactical part of my study at Holy Cross that I feel like I'm drawing upon every day. But the foundation of the liberal arts education in like helping you learn how to think and make better decisions, that's going to be a lifetime of value for me personally. So for that I'm grateful. Conor: Yeah. I think that's the beauty of the liberal arts and going to a school like Holy Cross. A few weeks back, I was talking to an alumni and he said something that really stood out to me. He said that like the difference between a Holy Cross student and students that go to large, massive school undergrad business programs, we are completely separated from them because we learn so many different skills. We learn how to problem solve. We learn how to analyze. We learn how to critically analyze. We learn how to read, write. We learn how to present in front of a big crowd. Now that just separates us from so many different students when applying for jobs and internships in the business world. Conor: And I think that's something that really stood out to me as something very impactful for people's careers as a Holy Cross student. So that leads me to my next question. Brandon, our motto at the Ciocca Business Center is major in anything and succeed in business. So can you speak a little bit about, well, I guess both of you, can you guys both speak a little bit about your economics and your accounting majors and the impact that it has had on your professional career? So Brandon, we can start with you and then we'll head over to Thomas. Brendan: Yeah, I would say in terms of my economics understanding in the context of my career, I think what it did was in a little bit more of a specialized way still gave me this foundational understanding of how to think, how to analyze, how to communicate, how to make decisions with imperfect information. Economics is like there's an academic side to economics, but there's also just a practical side of it as well. And so you can't model everything. And so yes, models can help you create a map of reality or the world, but it's not the territory, right? It's a model and it's a framework and it's one that can be utilized to give you kind of broad strokes, directional understanding of things. But specific to the taking that into the real world, you also have to acknowledge that every model is broken, to the upside, to the downside. It's a guide. It's not the answer. Brendan: And so I feel like that with the backdrop of liberal arts education, like I walked out of Holy Cross into my job in financial services at Silicon Valley Bank with that appreciation, probably more so than a lot of my peers that came from more focus financial undergraduate degrees. And in the short term, I definitely had a feeling of, it's not like imposter syndrome, but I felt like I was playing catch up on some of the more technical aspects of my job, but that goes away. Right? Every job, you're going to get technically trained up based on the particular roles and responsibilities of that. And then ultimately where the competition happens, if you will, is at the more foundational levels of how do you think, how do you communicate? How you read, write, make decisions, that's the stuff where liberal arts education and more specifically Holy Cross's version of that, I think sets new graduates up for longer term success relative to their peers. Conor: Yeah. I absolutely agree. That's great points. Thank you. Yeah. Thomas, can you talk about your economics major and the impact it had on your career? Thomas: Yeah. I think I'll just build on what Brendan said or even what... It's funny, you said in chatting with that alum, Conor, a leg up to maybe more traditional skills, but I think Brendan added a nuance to it that's really important, that tying back to the first thing that I said in terms of optimizing for the rate of learning, like how quickly you can apply something, knowing that the benefits aren't going to be linear. So you're not going to take one step and get one step of benefit. It can be sometimes take one step, get four steps of benefit. That sometimes you actually do feel in starting your career that you're behind on some tactical technical skill sets, right? Putting for Brandon's case like a discounted cash flow together. For me, understanding like I don't know, gross margins. I didn't directly learn that in any of my coursework, but you can fill up on a lot of that technical and tactical skills and then start to apply it with systems thinking, communication, leadership skills that I think allow people to benefit. Thomas: And if you think about your college education as a lifelong investment, or hopefully jump starting a lifelong full of learning new things, right? The more important thing to learn is how to learn than the concrete sand you filled in a box in a temporary place in time when you were in school. And so as I think about the economics major, like I said, I spent a lot of time in the Spanish department. For example, I studied abroad and Buenos Aires. A lot of those experiences, I think set up to echo what Brendan was saying, the ability to learn new things with like a very common set of skills that can allow you to be successful in different environments. Thomas: And I think that that would be something I'd pass on to all Holy Cross students that even that first job out of school should be viewed through the lens of just the first step. Right. And even if there is a bit of a learning curve on understanding something super specific to whatever industry or function that you're in, that leaning into those other skills that are lifelong can kind of help you make that something that's more exponential. Conor: Yeah. Thank you. I absolutely agree. Obviously, all of these skills that we learn from the liberal arts education helps to succeed in the business world. But personally, I also think that a big part of it is also the Holy Cross alumni network and everything that they do for us. So how has the Holy Cross alumni network supported you, Brendan? Brendan: Oh, man. I don't even know where to begin because there are so many examples of it. Look, when I was coming out of school, I was doing a lot of meetings. I was doing a lot of coffees and phone calls and whatnot with quite literally just like cold inbound alums and crusaders want to help crusaders. Right? So it's like there's an element of just being part of this community. And if you're an alum, you remember those people that helped you. And so it's almost like a pay it back, pay it forward kind of thing. Another one I'll just say, and I'm not going to, I don't want to flatter Thomas too much, but I will say the alumni network establishing the relationship that we have now and that one being a lifelong friendship first and foremost, and also is flourishing into a number of other dynamics to our relationship that spanned the personal professional continuum. Brendan: And so, I mean, it is the alumni network in a lot of ways that brought us together. And I would say, yeah, Thomas is going to shake his head at me. But I actually look up to Thomas in so many ways in his entrepreneurial spirit, his courage, his commitment, his ability to go from the macro to the micro. And so this, the Holy Cross alumni network, you are engaging with it right now, like the potential and the vibrancy of it. And the encouragement I would give as Thomas was alluding to it before is like you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. So leverage it, take advantage of it. Brendan: As alum, we want to help. And so don't be afraid to reach out, but it is on the individual student to take that first step be proactive, because there's a lot of Holy Cross grads every year. We don't know who needs what and what, where, so it's like people need to come and like have an ask or have a, they want to have a conversation or whatever it is, but just demystifying the fear of taking that first step. Because it's pretty good once you... The water's pretty warm in the alumni network. Conor: Absolutely. I think every person I've talked to in the networking field has been amazing, an amazing experience, and they're so willing to help, which is awesome. Thomas, do you have similar experiences with the Holy Cross alumni network? How have they impacted your- Thomas: Yeah. Well, I mean, first off, thanks Brendan for the overly flattering words. But I mean, I think I can probably answer it just through a story. Right. And it kind ties into how Brendan and I even know each other. But I was terrified my senior year of not having a good job. So I was economics major thinking about finance. I think a lot of Holy Cross students think about that path because it's something their friends are looking at. There's a lot of really good relationships there. And I had no idea what else was out there in the world. And so I had lots and lots and lots and lots of networking calls, reaching out to people, asking about it, those kind of things and a lot of people were super helpful. And a lot of times I didn't help myself in terms of like really thinking about what I wanted, what I like to do and what gave me energy. Thomas: And so with Brendan, it's funny how it happened was he was doing a Holy Cross Finance Bootcamp. I think one of 40 people we followed up, but what I remember about our first networking conversation is it didn't feel forced, right? There was overlap and commonality and things. I think we ended up talking for 20, 30 minutes past the time that we allotted. A lot of it not about working at Silicon Valley Bank at the time, which is what I was thinking in a very short term way. Long story short, I didn't end up going to work for Silicon Valley Bank. I interviewed a few times, went to different places. I ended up going to grad school and then in technology consulting, but Brendan and I maintained our relationship. Right. Out of the maybe hundreds of calls we've had, I've kept in touch with maybe three to five people. Thomas: And then Brendan the most out of all of that. And it's super non-linear in terms of the benefit of that. Like Brendan said, friendship, a lot of professional advice. Brendan is an investor in what I am now working on now. And so if you look super short term around the alumni network even, if you're just like, "I want a job from this conversation," I did not get a job from the first time that Brendan and I chatted. But four years later, Brendan was the first, one of the first people to encourage me to work on INDX, which is the company I'm trying to build right now and continues to be one of our biggest supporters. Thomas: So I think that's one other thing I'd tie back is it's not a temporary access point. I think when you think about an alumni network, I think it's a great opportunity to build relationships that can be lifelong. And Brendan graduated in 2006, I graduated in 2017. We're both now working in the world. There's no difference, right? We have similar interests, a lot of overlap and a lot of support for one another. And I think I wouldn't have had that opportunity without that entry point through Holy Cross and then you can kind of take the rest from there. Conor: Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Yeah. So Thomas, I guess we'll kind of leeway into this question about current students looking for jobs and internships. Obviously it can be very stressful managing with school and extracurriculars and stuff. So could you tell me a little bit about your experience and maybe provide some advice for students looking for their first internship or their first job? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I'll tell you what I think now, and then I can also frame it with what I actually did, which like a lot of advice is kind of how it goes, right? You learn it by suffering. I'll start with my own experience. I had absolutely zero idea what I wanted to do and was very... I think like a lot of Holy Cross students wanted something that would be good, that would look good, that I thought I wanted. And so chased and tried a lot of things where there wasn't a ton of fit. Through that process ended up finding technology consulting, helping out companies build tech products, which I can kind of talk about a little bit later on, which is where I ultimately landed, but it was a very roundabout way. So the advice I'd give would be explore as much as possible. Thomas: And then when you have opportunities and have a little bit of fit, like exploit. Explore exploit is kind of the mental model I think for thinking about it. But there is an insane range of things that you can do, especially when people talk about business broadly, like that's a, obviously I think it's like the entire economy, except for a couple of preset tracks like becoming a doctor or a lawyer, where there's kind of a credentialing hoop there. So I would say try as many things as you can, try to build things, try to do things, try to do it on your own and figure out what you like, which sometimes can fall on deaf ears when you just want to know you're going to make money, know you're going to have a job when you're out of school. Thomas: But I think the more you can look at it as something a bit more of longer term in terms of finding fit, the better off you'll be in terms of testing that out. And I'll hand it over to Brendan on that point, because I know that his first job became many jobs within the same company and to what he's doing now. But I mean, that was definitely my experience of it. Brendan: Yeah. I would again, echo a lot of what Thomas just said. I had gone through while at school as I mentioned, I'd gone through a pre-career shift if you will, like being pretty tracked on being a doctor and then morphing into something more business. I always had an eye towards financial services. So coming out of school, same thing. I was looking for something that was going to look good on my resume, make some money. And with the idea that I probably actually wasn't going to be there for very long in the... I like Thomas's model around explore exploit. I would definitely... That resonates with me probably more so today than it did back then. But even back then, I kind of just thought like, okay, this is going to be a stop on the train and I'll figure it out. Brendan: What happened was I wound up staying at Silicon Valley Bank for 15 years, but it was not the same Silicon Valley Bank for 15 years. And it was like my job function through those 15 years, took three discreet kind of shapes and sizes, four really. So even within, while it's the same company, it was very different jobs and workflows. And I think in the end, just you got to follow the learning, follow your growth edge. If you don't feel like you're developing, particularly earlier on in your career, if you don't feel like you're developing and gaining skills and building relationships and just growing as a human, it's probably not a great fit. And that's probably... The trust your gut. Brendan: And that's probably the time to start, whether it's like doing some deeper work on yourself to understand where you want to be in five, 10 years and then work backwards. Or just, if you have an idea of where you want to be, then getting tactical around what the next move is. But I think it starts with, if you feel like you're everyday challenged and learning and growing and doing it with people that you enjoy being around, then that's probably a pretty good thing. And if the opposite is true, then it's probably time to start considering something else. Thomas: The only one quick thing I'll layer on that is I think a lot of times, and Brendan kind of gave me this idea. When you think about internships in college, it's a very formal thing. But if you think you might want to be like a product manager or help build products, try to build something. Like if you think you might want to be in finance, get one of those dummy stock trading apps and trade dummy stocks that you can talk about. If you think you might want to be in sales, go sell something, right? Thomas: I think one way to combine the best of the liberal arts education and giving yourself the best starting point out of school is as you have those inspirations, layering in action on top of it so that there's a learning. I think if you make what you're going to do after school something that's very hypothetical, it can be easy to kind of not encounter blind spots that you have about what that actually entails. So I think that'd be the only thing that I'd add on that. Again, I didn't do that. So I mean, this is retrospective learning, but- Conor: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that advice. And I know any student my age or around my age, listening to this will also very, really appreciate the advice as well. So Thomas, when looking back at your four years on the hill, what is your favorite memory about Holy Cross? I know there's probably a lot, but- Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think the, I mean probably a cliche answer, but definitely the friendships and shared experiences. I'm still very close with a lot of the people that I went to Holy Cross with to, I live in Denver now. One of my very close friends lives here as well. He's still one of my very best friends from school. Relationships built with people like Brendan. I got married last summer and I think three of my groomsmen were from Holy Cross. And I think it's just those relationships and those shared experiences without being too cliche or stealing Brendan's answer. Brendan: Yep. I'm going to go cliche and you in fact did steal my answer. So I'm just like, yeah, it's in the end, Holy Cross's community and there's the big community that is Holy Cross at large and then we all have our micro communities that we curate while we're there. And like Thomas, most of my closest friends in life today being 16 years removed from Holy Cross are my friends from Holy Cross. And so there's countless, countless times of just like just being together, getting into a little bit of trouble, having some fun, learning a lot that you just cement these relationships for life. Brendan: And so it is cliche, but it's also true that the people that you're making, I mean, when you're in college, you're really becoming an adult. You're becoming a fully independent human and you're forming relationships on your own accord, full stop. And so just leaning into that and enjoying the time there, but also recognizing that it's not over after the four years. In a lot of ways, it's just beginning. And I think as an example, the relationship that Thomas and I now have is an example of how that can continue. Conor: I agree. I've made so many valuable relationships so far at Holy Cross and I haven't even graduated yet. So I'm excited to see who else I can meet and generate relationships with. So we're going to ask one more question about Holy Cross and then we'll get into INDX and the app. So how has the Holy Cross mission influenced your work? Thomas, you want to take the first one? Thomas: For sure. I mean, I can start with that. I know we'll talk a little bit more about what I'm working on now, but I think, thinking about men or women for others, the thing I'd layer on top of that I think as it relates to how I think about what I work on is solving problems that matter, I guess, would be how I'd put it. There's an infinite amount of problems that you can chase and tackle in the world and tackling ones that you personally care about that will be beneficial for society being someone with a vocation for others. I think business is one of the best avenues to do that. If you can set up a sustainable way of solving a problem at scale, I think that's one of the best ways to have out size impact on issues that you care about. Thomas: And so I think we'll get more into what we're trying to build with INDX, but a lot of it's around lifelong learning or continuous learning after you leave school. It's something I'm very passionate about. It's something I think is very important. And I think that helping people continue to learn and adapt and almost own their self-learning or self-education is something that is I hope a net benefit for folks. And also something that thinking about the purpose or having a vocation that kind of comes from Holy Cross is how I think about where to spend my time and what kinds of problems that are worth solving. Conor: Awesome. Thank you. Brendan, how has the Holy Cross mission influenced your work? Brendan: Yeah, not surprisingly, a lot of the same kind of values that Thomas just shared. I would say as far as like where I'm at now, I guess the best way to characterize myself is I'm an entrepreneurial investor. But I'm also building a business myself called Can Deliver Advisors. But the ethos of everything that I do spanning my entrepreneurial activities, my investment activities is really about empowering individuals, democratizing access and opportunity to as many people as possible. In addition to just selfishly wanting this product to exist, a big reason why I am so honored to be as involved in the INDX story as I am is because of exactly what Thomas said in that, by building a product, a company, an experience for individuals that enables in this case, lifelong learning, what a gift. What a gift to the world and what an important thing to be doing in this day and age where there's a lot of just noise that's out there. Brendan: And being able to parse that signal from that noise, using a tool like INDX, it really, it powers down into those just foundational values that certainly Thomas and I both share around everything that we're doing is actually in service of others. So you peel back the business, the capitalist, the narrative around that, it's actually like what a tool to business aligning incentives in ways to create products, experiences for people to advance humanity. We're getting= pretty meta here, but it's a pretty inspiring thing to feel like that's what you're doing on a day in day out basis and that's what Thomas I get to do. Conor: Awesome. Thank you. It was so amazing to hear about both your Holy Cross experiences, but now I'd like to hear more about your company INDX and more specifically why you started it and the goals you have. Personally, I've downloaded INDX just to take a look at it and I love the app. It's awesome. And it's been very educational and eye opening, and it has allowed me to learn various new material in a multitude of different formats. And I really like the diversity of different topics that the app offers as it makes room for a variety of different lessons to be learned. So before we get into the more personal questions about INDX, can you provide the audience with a brief description of the app? Thomas: Yeah, for sure. In super simple terms, I like to describe it as kind of like Pinterest, but for learning. So we make it easy for you to save the podcasts, articles, videos, Twitter threads that you come across so that you can save and share it with colleagues and friends. So as you come across something seems interesting to you, you click a button, you get reminded to go back to that content. So you actually read it, watch it, listen to it, and then be able to connect with the community of people who are trying to learn about similar things and the tactical. On the higher level, more on the mission side of what we're trying to do is content creation is exploding. So there are tons of articles, videos, podcasts published every day, just the amount of content is insane. Thomas: And so one of the theses we have is that it's going to need some curation and community for people to be able to connect and learn around that content. So what you see with the app today is very much the beginning in terms of trying to get off the ground, but what we're trying to make it easy for people to do is find really, really high quality curated content around what you're interested in. So for example, Brendan has a Bitcoin collection on INDX. If you're interested in Bitcoin, rather than just going on YouTube or trying to learn about it on your own, you can basically fight through a lot of the noise to find some signal from someone like Brendan, who has done a lot of the work to know what content is worth spending your time on. So we're not exactly sure what that looks like right now. Part of it is being very iterative and chasing it, but that's the higher level problem that we're trying to solve. Conor: Awesome. Thank you very much for that description. I know we've kind of briefly went over your career paths to it, but Thomas, could you briefly explain your career path that has led up to your decision to create the app INDX? Thomas: Yeah, for sure. After Holy Cross, I went to a graduate program at Notre Dame. It was a technology entrepreneurship masters, so it was a really cool I think and beneficial additional experience on top of my Holy Cross education to learn a lot, push the technical skill sets for me, which is around data and analytics, and also learn a lot more of entrepreneurial skill sets specifically around technology. And after that, I went to work for a company called Avanade which is owned by Accenture, and then Ernst & Young in their technology consulting practices, basically helping really big companies build out products and services that allow them to better serve their customers. So if you think about like the Starbucks app, that's not an exact example, but helping a company build a loyalty and rewards app and building that out. Thomas: And then as I was doing this, I felt like I was building a lot of the skill sets to be able to go into entrepreneurship, which is what I always wanted to do. And as I came across the pain point for INDX in my own life more and more, being a young professional outside of school, I was very used to learning. And I felt like I had to continue to do that and doing it purely on my own was very difficult. What content should I spend time on? If I did consume a great podcast, there was a lot of friction in maybe like calling Brendan up and asking him to listen to it so that we could both have a chat about it. And that's kind of what inspired the leap into trying to build what we're building now to make that a lot easier for people to benefit from all the incredible business, productivity, health content, name the other topics, that way you can kind of self-learn or self-educate as a part of a community. Conor: Awesome. Thank you. And Brendan, I know that you talked about your first job was Silicon Valley and how you climbed up through the ranks through there and had possessed multiple different jobs while you were there. But can you explain a little bit after where you went after Silicon valley and then what led you to your involvement in INDX and how you decided to become a essential partner? Brendan: Yeah, so I would say so Silicon Valley Bank is a organization as the name infers is a heavily focused on the innovation economy. So does a lot of work in the technology space, which is where I spent my entire 15 years SVB doing. And so for the last 10 years I was there, actually it was an entrepreneurial experience in and of itself under the umbrella of a big company and actually starting, we'll just call it a venture capital practice within the bank. It was technically debt investing versus equity, but that doesn't matter for purpose of this conversation, but it was really an investment business into growth stage companies. And did that for 10 years at SVB. So I really got schooled and trained and learned a lot about venture capital investing in early to mid stage businesses that are in growth. Brendan: And so that is, as I think about my investing being my craft that I practice, it is like I'm not going to be your guy that tells you the best public market stock to pick. I'm much more of a asymmetric thinker in terms of invest early in opportunities that yes, have a high probability of failure, but also have significant upside potential to them. And so as it pertains to INDX specifically, in addition to just how it kind of aligns with a lot of the values and the ethos that I just operate within at like kind of the foundational level, from an application perspective, and then obviously overlay the relationship that I have with Thomas, it was a very logical investment. In addition to the fact that like, this is a product that I want and I use this thing every day, not because I'm investor, but because it actually adds efficiency to my life and value to my life in the curation process, the consumption process, and then the community aspects of it as well. Brendan: And so it was fun. Thomas was so kind to bring me into his entrepreneurial ideation. We had a lot of meetings, whether it was over lunch or in an office or on a phone where we just riffed. We literally just like, because this wasn't his first idea. Thomas is an entrepreneur through and through. He's constantly, I'm sure he is thinking about stuff right now. Maybe not. But I remember we had a lot of conversations about a health app at one point, Thomas. The point is like being in on the, like Thomas inviting me in on the ground floor, seeing his entrepreneurial wheels turn and go from idea to now something that is in full blown execution mode has been a really, really been a really fun, been fun to be a part of that journey. So yeah, I'll just leave it at that for now. Conor: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you very much. Seems like Thomas is quite the entrepreneur. Thomas: Not yet. We're working on it though. Conor: So Thomas, I've read a little bit about you and Susie's road trip and the day that you guys came up with the idea for INDX and it is a very interesting story. So could you please share that story with the audience? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. And no, thank you for mentioning Susie. But so Susie Lira-Gonzalez is my co-founder. We actually met at Notre Dame. She went to Gonzaga, so not quite Holy Cross, but they're in the Jesuit family. Heartbroken by their lack of a title in March Madness yet again, but she's being resilient. But I'll share a few things, like first off, we haven't been successful yet in the definition of an exit or making our company public. But it is a long road that you try to take as quickly as you can when you're trying to test and validate if an idea is worth working on and then building it. And there's a lot of people who support and that's what makes it really fun. And so in addition to Brendan and Susie, as my co-founder, we worked together in technology consulting. As I was kicking around ideas, it sounded a lot different than the product is today, but we were in a car ride from Redmond, Washington. Thomas: We were at Microsoft for the day, back to Seattle, which is where I lived at the time, just talking about different problems that we faced and kind of both had a lot of overlap in terms of our conviction that helping people learn from distributed content would be a big problem. And we didn't know exactly what that was. And so it's been the two of us and we're now a team of five over the past year. But those early, early days, or even now, you need partners. You need people who are going to support you in terms of figuring it out. And super thankful for Susie with that as well, especially because we have very complimentary skill sets, which she's an engineer by trade and very operationally focused where I can come at things from more of a higher level. So I guess the takeaway from that is finding partners and team members and whatever you're working on that compliment the way you think and how you like to solve problems. Conor: Awesome. Thank you. What a great story. But I love how INDX is for lifelong learners like we are here at Holy Cross. So have you guys always wanted to create an app or something that promotes lifelong learning or did that day driving home to Seattle just searching from some inspiration for you guys? Thomas: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there's a few things. I think that there's your values, right? Like Brendan was kind of talking about earlier. And then you can't just build something because you care about it. At the end of the day, there has to be a problem and you have to be able to solve that problem for people. And so I think you get lucky when you find a problem that you experience personally, that you also care a lot about in trying to solve it. So definitely didn't always have this in mind. Like Brendan was saying, there's a lot of other problems and ideas that we looked at related to health, related to other aspects of education and learning. And this is kind of the one where we just saw the most early demand or in talking to people and testing the idea, building prototypes, that kind of thing got the most traction. And that's kind of what we just continue to chase is additional traction, additional ways to level up and see if the business is viable. Conor: Awesome. Thank you. Seems like a great, great idea. And I know that there are probably so many different steps and factors that went into and are going into making the app of INDX. So can you briefly summarize and explain the process that it took and is taking to create the app? Thomas: Yeah, for sure. And I think the layer I'd add on top of it is I think that Holy Cross students, hopefully making this useful and interesting for people, like as you're thinking about career paths, I think working for startups, being in entrepreneurial environments that Holy Cross students are very preset to benefit there. A lot of it involves critical thinking, communication, having clarity of thought, going to gather evidence on things, right? And I think that that education can really help you chase that. But I think the process is like in simple terms and there's no one way to do it, but the way that we've done it is when we had the initial almost hypothesis of a problem for a particular person, we went and talked to them, tried to better understand and not solution or come up with what exactly an app or a software or an email service or whatever it is, looks like, but really define the problem and the pain that someone goes through and their experiences, and really observed that. Thomas: And then we built something that was really crappy, but people still used it, which kind of told us that even this really crappy thing might be worth making better because people were still able to... For example, the first app we built quickly, you had to put in your password every time, which I'm sure you can imagine, Conor, like you wouldn't want to do ideally, but people were still using. That was a pretty good signal that we could keep doing it. And then we ended up raising a little bit of money and built a team around the idea to chase. And we're still building out the app right now. It's not done. It's a constant work in progress. But I think the main thing is staying super close to who you think that customer is, seeing how they're interacting with it and continuing to be as intellectually honest as you can, if you're actually solving the problem and able to build a business on top of it, which is kind of the stage that we're at now. Thomas: We have the app built. We have some investment that gives us time to figure it out. And the next steps for us are, what channels can we go through? Do we really know who that beginning customer are? How are we going to monetize the product in a way that is sustainable and has incentives aligned with the user are kind of the challenges that we're tackling now. And each time you gather evidence, make a decision, see if you're right or wrong. And then if you're right, you can keep going. If you're wrong, you got to go back and see which I guess road in the woods you're going to have to take next. Conor: Right. So I guess a follow up for that. So how do you guys promote and advertise the app? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. We haven't spent a ton of time on advertising until recently. A lot of it has been, so having like 1,000 people in a beta or like people coming in, super communicated with them as they're using early versions of the app. And it's just gotten to the point now where we're able to start to push for more people, just because we have more conviction where we're at and kind of pushing to handle it. There's a, like you want to figure out that value hypothesis first before you can grow. Because if you're building something no one cares about, when you try to grow, they're going to try it and then they're going to leave. And then you should just go back to the drawing board and making sure that you're creating that value. Thomas: But predominantly through newsletters and podcasts, which probably makes sense given what the app allows you to do. But the most traction that we've got is either organic or paid advertising in different newsletters. People who are already self-selecting into owning their own education and they're learning, subscribing to a writer or listening to a business or a technology or a health podcast, those kind of areas is where we've had the most success. And that came from trial or error. We've played with Instagram ads and stuff like that and they didn't play very well for us relative to kind of those more specific forms of advertising. Conor: Awesome. Thank you for that. Would you say that your liberal arts degree majors in economics, has it had like an impact in your creation of INDX? And if so, how did it help you in the creation of the app and moving forward? Thomas: Yeah, I think it definitely helped. I think the main thing it helped with is just the experience of it. When you're in school, you have a professor who's spending time curating content that you're going to spend time on. If you're in a history class or an economics class, like read these materials, spend time on this. And then after you kind of consume that, you have an opportunity to connect within a community that's just built in your classmates. And I know you're not there yet, Conor, but you hit the professional world and you really have to make time for that learning. Like a lot of times it can feel like there's just an immediate task at hand that you want to tackle. But continued learning is also important, right? We also live at a time where the ability to create content has basically no cost. Thomas: If you look at the podcast we're creating now, it's one of millions and millions that will be published, I don't know, in the next couple months. How do people find the content that's worth spending their time on? And once you do spend your time on that content, how do you have a feedback loop around it? How do you connect with somebody who also read it? How do you maybe revisit that three months ago? And I mean, that's how people learn for the most part in the professional world. There's a lot of friction in taking a course or going to night school if you're building a family or have a full-time job. And so as we think about trying to solve that problem, it's kind of taking this spirit of that education, where you can consume great content and connect with great members of a community and make it way, way, way, way lower friction and have software that helps people do that on their own. And it could become a different variation as we continue to learn more but that's how we're thinking about it now. Conor: Sweet. Thank you very much. Obviously you guys have made a lot of progress on app, including a blog and a podcast. So what next steps or ideas are you thinking about? There are so many different topics for people to submit podcast blogs and articles under. So have you guys thought about adding any other topics as well? Thomas: I think the main thing, the stage that we're at right now, and I'd love Brendan's take on it as well is we're still hunting for people call product market fit, right? Like iterating on the product where it's truly pulling people in and doing a great job and solving that challenge for them. So less of thinking about like tactically, what we're going to add. The main mode we're in right now is just hunting for the iteration that can hopefully actually crack the nut. So as you think about growing or people using it, or giving feedback on it, at the end of the day, you're trying to find continued traction or where to go next based on if you're actually solving the problem. But Brendan, I'd love your take on that as well. Brendan: Yeah. I think as far as what I'd add there is identifying your initial addressable market in any early stage business is critical. You cannot be everything to everybody at all times, particularly in the earliest of stages of a company's life. And so it relates to what Thomas is saying, but like finding the, when I say beachhead, there's a certain addressable market from a demographic perspective that you want to target, and that could be age, that could be educational background, that could be interest, that could... There's a whole bunch of different facets to that, but it's really figuring out as fast as possible through as much iteration as possible, what that best beachhead, that best early addressable market to focus on and then exploit it. Brendan: Again, back to the explore exploit thing. You don't want to explore forever and try and do everything because then you'll accomplish nothing. Once you kind of tap into that early sign of product market fit, like engaged addressable market, then you just go. You go run it that hard. And to me, from the purview that I set with INDX, it feels like we're entering into that phase where we're really going to start getting tactical around the exploitation of the addressable market that we are in the mid to late innings of really nailing. Conor: Sweet. Thank you for that input. So the final question we're going to ask and then wrap it up is what does your five year plan look like? And so are you guys interested in selling it off, merging, expanding or et cetera? Thomas: Yeah, I think it's a good question. I'm not sure there's a five year plan related to it specifically. I think it really depends on trajectory, right? I guess, answering it generically, like it could not work and essentially go to zero. There's acquisition, there's continuing to have the built business grow and eventually have companies go public. I think in general, what I'd close with is I think that it can be challenging, but it's a lot of fun and worth pursuing a problem that you care about. I think that Holy Cross in general, the community, other students, as they look at career opportunities should look at something similar. And so for me personally, whether it's with INDX or whatever may come next, it's the kind of ecosystem that I want to be involved in, like early stage technology startups. It's very dynamic. There's a lot of opportunities to solve problems that you care about and technology's changing every day, which is going to give you new tool sets to solve those problems. Conor: Awesome. Thank you. Brendan, do you have any input on that? Brendan: Yeah, I mean, I don't have much. Yeah. I tend to just be as much of a sounding board and a... Just for Thomas and Susie. And so ultimately I think INDX could become a bunch of different things. And ultimately the market's going to be the referee and all you can do is continue to just be maniacally focused on executing, on solving the problem that INDX is setting out to solve and what's going to be, is going to be not to be. Not to finish on a super cliche, but there you go. Conor: Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for your time. I really appreciate hearing about your Holy Cross experience and how you use your liberal arts education to pursue the business world. And then I also, it was awesome to hear about INDX. Such a great app. I know on my part, I'm going to talk to my friends about it, show them the app, have them download it, check it out. Because I know definitely a good amount of my friends will be into that and then bring it home to my hometown, talk to my parents, my siblings, and hopefully they can bring that in their own paths to their schools and their colleges. So hopefully we can all have a part. Thomas: Feedback is much appreciated. So as you play with it, let us know. Conor: I will. I will. Thank you, Thomas and thank you, Brendan. Brendan: Thanks, Conor. Thomas: Thanks, Conor. Maura: That's our show. I hope you enjoyed hearing about just one of the many ways that Holy Cross alumni have been inspired by the mission to be people for and with others. A special thanks to today's guest and everyone at Holy Cross who has contributed to making this podcast a reality. If you or someone you know would like to be featured on this podcast, then please send us an email at alumnicareers@holycross.edu. If you like what you hear, then please leave us a review. This podcast is brought to you by the Office of Alumni Relations at the College of the Holy Cross. You can subscribe for future episodes wherever you find your podcast. I'm your host, Maura Sweeney, and this is Mission-Driven. In the words of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, "Now go forth and set the world on fire." Theme music composed by Scott Holmes, courtesy of freemusicarchive.org.

In this episode, moderated by Dr. Alissa Thomas (University of Vermont), patient caregiver Ms. Sandra Klima, hospice and palliative medicine physicians Dr. Gregg VandeKieft (Providence Institute for Human Caring) and Dr. Frank Ferris (Ohio Health), and medical oncologist Dr. Charles Blanke (Oregon Health and Science University) exchange perspectives on medical aid in dying, including legal, ethical and practical aspects. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Learn more at https://education.asco.org, or email us at education@asco.org.   TRANSCRIPT Dr. Thomas: Hello, and welcome to the ASCO Education podcast series. My name is Dr. Thomas, and I'm a Neuro-oncologist at the University of Vermont Medical Center, and  Associate Professor in the College of Medicine in the Department of Neurological Sciences in Burlington, Vermont. As today's host, I will be moderating a discussion on medical aid in dying with four guest speakers, Dr. Gregg VandeKieft, who is a Palliative Care Physician, Clinical Ethicist and Executive Medical Director at Providence Institute for Human Caring in Olympia, Washington. Dr. Charles Blanke, a Medical Oncologist and Professor of Medicine at Oregon and Health Sciences University in Portland, Oregon. Sandra Klima, who is the partner and caregiver of a patient who passed away using medical aid in dying in Vermont. And Dr. Frank Ferris, who is a hospice and palliative medicine physician, as well as executive director of Palliative Medicine Research and Education at Ohio Health in Columbus, Ohio.     For consistency during this talk, we'll be using the term medical aid in dying or MAID to refer to death with dignity and physician-assisted dying. So, to begin the discussion, I'd love to hear from Sandra about your perspective as a caregiver. Can you share with us what it was like caring for your partner and what your reaction was when you learned about his wishes?  Sandra Klima: Yes. Thank you. I'm glad to participate. My partner had died of glioblastoma in April of 2018. When we found out, it was pretty shocking. The very first thing he brought up was Act 39. And initially I was very surprised and uncomfortable with it because I didn't want to think about death, I wanted to think about living. And he was very quick, Rob was very quick. We made an appointment at the funeral parlor. He wanted to get everything taken care of quickly. So I was shocked that he wanted to use Act 39. I did not feel that it was, as I said, appropriate to talk about, but he explained he had a friend who had glioblastoma and she did not take that action.  And she kept a diary and he said it was very difficult to read. And he did not want to go through that process that she went through. He didn't want to lose who he was. He wanted to die as himself instead of a short time later as a lesser person. And wanted the choice, and Act 39 gave that to him. And I respected and supported his decision once we talked about it. Cancer is a progressive disease and there comes a time when you will not be in control. Facing that and knowing it only goes downhill is scary. So having the option that looked out before the end phase is a blessing, and it is death with dignity, and that's how it feels to me.  Dr. Thomas: Thank you so much for sharing that experience. This has been a hot topic and I'd love to hear from our panel, what are some of the common misconceptions around medical aid in dying, and how is this different from concepts like euthanasia or assisted suicide?  Dr. VandeKieft: Well, for starters in the United States, all the states that allow aid in dying require the person to self administer the agent. So it's not euthanasia where somebody else administers the lethal agent. Our neighbors to the north in Canada actually do allow voluntary euthanasia and about 90% of their aid in dying individuals do it by voluntary euthanasia as opposed to self-administration. Another misconception is that it is heavily targeting the most vulnerable and disenfranchised, when in fact data from Oregon and Washington really indicate that it's mostly the well-educated, economically privileged who tend to utilize the aid and dying acts. And so there's actually been some questions in recent years about equity in rural areas and for other people who have difficulty accessing aid in dying,  Dr. Blanke: I'd love to reinforce that point. So, the Oregon data suggests that 74% of participants have at least some college, and almost 99% actually have medical insurance, although getting the insurance company to actually pay for the drugs is a different issue. I'd like to also suggest that opponents of death with dignity say that it violates the Hippocratic Oath, which I do not believe it does. Death with dignity deaths make up a tiny minority of overall deaths in any of the states where it is legal, and a good chunk of patients, somewhere between 30% and 60%, get the prescription and never even take it. So, I like to say that the act fights out of its weight class. A lot of people get the power and control of having that medication, but never actually need it.  Dr. Thomas: I understand there are a number of safeguards within the law to try to protect patients and help access and protect physicians. Would you be able to touch on the safeguards?  Dr. Blanke: I'll start there if okay, and most of the other states have modeled their law after Oregon's. So first the patient has to make multiple requests over time. They have to demonstrate a continued interest in death with dignity, and the law has built in cooling off periods. The patients have to clearly understand what will happen if they actually take these drugs, and what happens in 99.5% of cases is they will die as a result. The patients have to put in a witnessed written request for medications, and one of the witnesses cannot be related by blood or marriage, cannot be the patient's doctor, and most importantly can't be in a patient's will. They cannot have a financial interest in the death. So I think those are very reasonable patient safeguards.  Dr. VandeKieft: One exception I would call out is the state of Montana, which did not actually pass the legislation or a voter initiative to legalize aid in dying. But it was a state Supreme Court decision that said it was unconstitutional to prohibit it. So they actually don't have a regulatory framework in place, but they do offer protections to physicians. If they participate, they cannot be prosecuted. But all the other states in the US that have laws have a regulatory framework, much like Dr. Blanke just described.  Dr. Thomas: That's really helpful for the legal ramifications. What are the main ethical considerations around medical aid in dying?  Dr. VandeKieft: If you think of the classic ethical framework, autonomy tends to drive a lot of the conversation, that is the patient's right to self-determination. If they choose to pursue aid in dying, even if we morally disagree with the appropriateness of it, is it our position to prohibit them from following through with it? But then many others will also look at the concepts of beneficence, that is the obligation to do good for our patients, and non-maleficence, that is the obligation to not do harm for our patients. And people on both sides of the arguments will invoke those terms. People who oppose it would say the good is to prolong life. People who support it would say the good is to give people the right to choose the best quality of life and self-determination. People who oppose would say that the death, if it's self administered is actually a harm. The supporters would say the harm is making a person suffer, when in fact they have the potential to cut that suffering short on their own terms.  And so those ethics discussions tend to get into it fairly significantly, particularly around the public policy and social aspects. And then finally, at least within the health system I work, we've really shifted our focus away from a lot of the high-level legal and ethical debates and into what do you do for the patients who request it, and how do we make sure that there's non abandonment, accompaniment through the end of life, and that we seek out the reasons that they asked about aid in dying in the first place, and figure out how we can best serve the concerns that raised the question?  Dr. Blanke: I would love to actually strengthen that last point that Dr. V just brought up. A lot of patients use up three months of their expected six months survival barely finding me. Because what happens is they went to their primary provider, asked for death with dignity. Their physician says, "I don't do it. I don't know anybody who does. Good luck with it." This is a legal option in the state of Oregon, as well as about 11 other states. And the question as to whether or not providers have the obligation to at least refer, is a strong ethical point. A lot of the state's statutes say they can't hinder referral. They have to supply records if the patient asks for it, but I'm not aware that any of them have mandatory referral. And I think the physician is ethically obliged to offer that possibility, even if they don't want to write a prescription, which of course is totally okay.  Dr. Ferris: And if I might comment, I think the other obligation here is to, for the patient, particularly with cancer, but with anybody with any diagnosis who might be choosing this pathway is to ensure that they've had very early referral for palliative care services. That all their symptoms, any issues that are causing suffering are actually being addressed. And that as you have suggested, that they are clearly accompanied by somebody without bias, who understands how to unwrap and provide counseling in all the different realms psychological, social, spiritual counseling, to make sure that they and their families or their partners are in a really good place. Everybody's comfortable with the choice. The family lives on after a situation like this, and they need to have been comfortable with that. That the choice was the appropriate one for the person, and that what we're doing is we're respecting that person's choices and they're comfortable with it.  Dr. Blanke: I totally support that. The flip side of the coin is none of the states really say what to do if you are unable to offer death with dignity. They don't certainly mandate palliative care. I see a number of patients who really don't have terminal illnesses, or they have terminal illnesses that they are not expected to die within the mandatory six months. And I think we should ask ourselves, why are they seeking death with dignity? We have to ask ourselves, "Should we be referring these patients for psychiatric care?"  Dr. Ferris: Well, and if I could come back and emphasize that, I think oncology broadly has frequently had late referral patterns to palliative care services. I've got story after story, I'm a radiation oncologist by background, having done palliative care for the last 35 years. Even in the last couple of weeks, students learning with me have said, "We tried to get referrals and the oncologist wouldn't refer. Is there anything wrong with having a partnership?" So, the oncologist continues to do their wonderful work, at the same time we're managing the patient's experience and that people understand all their options, of which this is one of them, and they have a legal right to that in 11 states, so that we do the best possible care for people.  Dr. VandeKieft: I want to amplify your point. Dr. Ferris, if people choose aid in dying as the culmination of excellent palliative or end-of-life care, that's a very different scenario than if they're choosing it in lieu of palliative care because they don't have access. And so anybody who has access to aid in dying certainly should have access to the highest quality palliative care and hospice care and behavioral health, as Dr. Blanke pointed out, to make sure that they aren't despairing for something that could be treated more readily.  Dr. Ferris: And if I could add one more point, I think there's also a palliative care evangelist who says, "Well, if you just do this a little longer, everything's going to be wonderful." Except that we haven't made a difference. We as a community need to recognize when that's the case as well. So none of us are perfect, but it's the making sure we're a really comprehensive team and able to walk with people and honor and respect their choices.  Dr. Thomas: Thank you. We've spoken a lot about some of the logistics and legal and ethical aspects. I'd love to hear about what the experience is actually like. What are the barriers that patients face when they're trying to seek out medical aid in dying? We have a caregiver here who directly experienced this. How was it trying to access this and are their barriers either individually or systemically?  Sandra Klima: When Rob made his choice, we obviously had to go to the physicians and do the two interviews and get the approvals and wait the days in between and sign all the forms. But eventually we got to go pick up this medicine. But there was one pharmacy that had the medicine. We went, made a drive there. It was far from where we were. So we went over there. We had to plan it to be when there was a physician there who would give us the medicine. So that kind of struck me as strange. So you had to schedule everything and then you get there, and I don't know if it was my paranoia or what, but you feel like everyone's looking at you from behind the counter like, "Oh, you are the people coming to get that medicine?" And it was really just a little uncomfortable.  And you feel like you were almost doing something illegal. So that is the pressure I felt during that process about that. The only other piece is once you start this process in motion, we had the hospice people and the palliative care people contact us. We had several meetings with them. We talked about it with our cancer counselor, so I was very comfortable. And most importantly, Rob was comfortable to get the medicine that he would have to take and have it with him. It gave him peace of mind. It gave him freedom to enjoy his life.  Dr. Blanke: I'll add a few practical matters. The states that have death with dignity mandate that the patient takes it through their GI tract. That usually involves swallowing. We have a number of patients who are unable to swallow, or they have GI obstruction. They're allowed to take the medication through their rectum, although that eliminates a lot of the dignity from death with dignity. But we are not allowed to use intravenous formulations. Even if the patient self-administers. We also have patients and patients with Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis make up about 11% of death with dignity users. Many of those patients do not have the use of their limbs. I had one young lady who was nearly completely paralyzed. She could move her head and she could move the pinky of one hand. And I spent somewhere north of four hours simply figuring out how she could fulfill the law by self administering a drug.  Finally we put in an NG and she was able to press a syringe plunger while I held a syringe, legal in Oregon, with that single pinky. I think the law is incredibly discriminatory against people with disabilities in the interest allegedly of protecting them. Next issue is we talked about the written request, which I do think offers safeguards, but sometimes it's hard. If patients want confidentiality, which the law allegedly is interested in, they may not want their neighbor to know that they're going to do this and they may not have somebody who is able to sign the form. Finally, we have talked a little bit about finding a participating provider. That continues to be an absolutely huge barrier, particularly because it's not just one provider, it's a prescribing physician and a consulting physician. They have to find two doctors, and if they're in say a Catholic health system or they're at the VA, sometimes it's nearly impossible for them.  Dr. VandeKieft: Loop back to Miss Klima's comment about the peace of mind that her partner experienced, and note that sometimes even just the conversation provides that. I've had numerous patients who brought the topic up, and they weren't actually asking for requests. They were just seeking information or in one instance, trying to let her family know how badly she was suffering and bringing this up was a way of demonstrating that to them. But I had a patient with ALS who brought the question up. The fact that I accepted it, spoke back to her in a respectful and supportive manner, provided her some relief.  But then when the doctors from End of Life Washington, the advocacy group who can help provide support to people in the home, came out and visited her, she responded that it alleviated her anxiety and her depression, didn't resolve them, but eased them. And that also she learned that she didn't have to act as early as she thought she would have on her own. And so I kind of jokingly said, "So meeting with doctors may have actually prolonged your life." And she laughed and said, "You know, doctor, it did, because I would've done it earlier if I hadn't met with them."  Dr. Ferris: If I can speak to what you just said back in the era of HIV and AIDS, when we had very little, I cared for more than 1,000 people out in the community. And I would say more than 60% of them asked me that question of when they got to a spot of intractable suffering, when I hastened their death. And of course that was illegal in those days. But what I was clearly able to do, is talk about palliative sedation for them, to be clear I would look after them, clear I would look after their families. And just as you have suggested, I think one of the huge issues is, "I have an option. I have an alternative here. Somebody is going to look after me. And if I've decided, if I'm going to go to medical aid in dying, if I'm going to go the palliative route, I don't have to experience the horrible part that I don't want to experience."  We need to talk about both of these openly with people, and be clear that they and their families will be accompanied in whatever the process and as you've suggested, without judgment, maintaining confidentiality. These are super important issues for people. I think about my own personal future, these things loom. I think it is people with lots of thoughts about what might happen, maybe a bit too much knowledge, who worry about the intractable nature of suffering, whatever it is, whether it's psychological, physical, spiritual. It's being able to accompany people appropriately and respect their choices.  Dr. Thomas: Right.  Dr. Blanke: So I'd like to add one more practical detail. We talked a little bit about finding providers and how difficult that is. And if you think about the challenge of finding two providers in Portland, you have to multiply that by about 100 to find any providers in Klamath Falls or Eastern Oregon. The good news is telemedicine has made our lives and the lives of our patients quite a bit easier.  Dr. Thomas: As I listen to the conversation, I'd be curious about your thoughts about health equity issues around this. You've alluded to the fact that somebody who has physical or neurologic disability may have challenges depending on where you live. It may be challenging to access. Are there other populations of patients where you worry about health equity and access to medical aid in dying?  Dr. Blanke: Well, I can comment that most of the patients find me or my colleagues who provide this through web searches. So, they have to have access to computers, which is not necessarily all that easy for all the rural residents of Oregon. Even though I told you that 99% of patients have insurance, we also mentioned that getting the insurance company to pay for the drug is very, very difficult. Hospice almost never wants to pay for it for the usual hospice- related reasons, and the drugs are about $700 in Oregon. That is a hindrance to a lot of my patients.  Dr. VandeKieft: I think being mindful of historic disenfranchised communities, people of color, Native Americans, that the healthcare system has not always treated fairly historically, and they have reasons to be suspect at times. Now this is something that usually they will seek us out as opposed to the healthcare system promoting it, but just being sensitive to the fact that we're doing something that could be perceived as problematic by communities who have historically been mistreated by the health system as well as other systems.  Dr. Thomas: I'd like to just have a better understanding of residency and the law. I think that there is written into most of these laws, you have to be a resident of the state where medical aid in dying is available. But what does that mean to be a resident, and how do states define that?  Dr. Blanke: So for us in Oregon, it's not like the classic situation where you have to demonstrate that you have a driver's license or you have to produce a gas bill in your name. The statute basically allows the prescriber to define residency in their own mind.  Dr. Thomas: What advice would you give to oncologists and other physicians who might have patients approach with questions about this? How do you talk with patients about this matter?  Dr. VandeKieft: The very first thing I respond to is... This is a very important question. I appreciate that you brought it up and that you have the [inaudible 00:20:35] and trust in me to raise the topic. But before I get into the details, I'd like to learn more about what led you to ask me about it. Would that be okay? And even that last phrase, would that be okay as intentional and that by asking permission, I'm making sure that they have agency, and demonstrating respect to them. But that approach has made a huge difference in that I have learned on many occasions, people have no intent of actually proceeding with it. As I mentioned earlier, they may simply be asking for information.  One gentleman, his response was, "Well, my buddies told me about it, and I didn't even know that was a law. And when I started to explain it, he said, oh, that sounds too much like suicide. I would never do that. And then the other woman, I referenced, she went through it and then looked at me and said, “Doctor, I would never do it.”, and looked at her daughter and son-in-law, “I just want my family to know how badly I'm suffering.” And so starting with that open-ended question is really crucial because if we make assumptions and if we start projecting our own biases onto them, we may completely miss what they're looking for and the opportunity to provide them the best services that we could.  Dr. Blanke: If I merely mention that this is an option, the patient is going to think that I'm recommending it, and I certainly don't see it that way. It's just one of many options. If we offer chemotherapy, we are not mandating that particular drug or even suggesting they get chemotherapy at all. Certainly, with the exception of palliative care, I recommend they seek that out, that I really want them to seek it out. But I think it's incumbent on the providers if they see a patient with a terminal illness to list this among the many options that are possible for the patient living in Oregon or those other 10 states. I know that's controversial.  Dr. Ferris: Well, I really want to highlight what you just said, Gregg, about the process of inquiry. To me, everybody practicing oncology, everybody practicing medicine needs to be able to model exactly the way you opened when asking any significant question, including prognosis, "When am I going to die? What about this therapy?" Because what we know, many of the times, patients aren't asking what the words specifically say, they're calling out their suffering and how can we help them? Or they've got a plan, they've got something they want to do. So that was beautiful modeling, Gregg.  Dr. VandeKieft: Dr. Blanke, he used that example of people not hearing. And one of the cases that I still struggle with a little bit, I work in a Catholic health system, so I'm not a participating physician. And we're really counseled that we shouldn't be the one to bring it up. And I had an elderly woman. I was doing a hospice home visit and she asked me how long I thought she had. And unfortunately, Dr. Ferris, I didn't think to ask her what led her to ask me the question on that occasion. And I probably should have, because I told her my prognosis and she looked at me with a profound look of disappointment and said, "I don't think I can suffer that much longer." And a couple of days later, she died very unexpectedly. She took an intentional overdose and the fact that I didn't inform her of the option of aid in dying still haunts me that I may have failed her.  Dr. Thomas: Thank you so much for sharing that. Ms. Klima, we've heard a lot from the experts. Is there advice you'd give patient to patient or caregiver to caregiver about what to ask your physicians?  Sandra Klima: You need to ask as many questions as you want and have the doctor answer you truthfully. I think when a patient is asking a doctor a question, they're asking the doctor, "What are my options?" I'm going to assume you're going to give me all the options. I'm not going to assume you're not going to tell me the options you don't like, because I want to know what are my options. I'm the one who's suffering. I'm the one who will have to make a choice. And I can tell you the choice Rob made, to use Act 39 in Vermont, was a blessing for us. It was a peaceful death that I cannot overemphasize. It was the right decision to make. It was for his decision, but it was the right decision to make.  And I think if a physician would not have told us of that option, I would be in the same situation that you felt, Gregg, where the lady took it upon herself. Because you thought through it, you had a plan, it was planned. It was a nice wind up to an ending. And I think that physicians owe it to their patients to tell them all of the options available and let the patient make a choice. I also think physicians owe it to the patient to be clear what the end phase of their life will be. Because it's not roses. If they don't do this, they have to live through that end phase, which sometimes it's horrific. And I think they need to have a clear understanding of what's to come and a clean list of all the options. And I think that should just be required, and personal choice of a physician is not on the table.  Dr. Ferris: So it's important that we explain all the options, I completely agree, that are available within the context of the law. And certainly in the Americas, in Europe, and I've been in many other countries where palliative sedation is one of those therapeutic options. Where the patients can have amnesia, the family can be well looked after. We need to describe all the available options that are within the law, in the jurisdiction in which we live. I completely agree.  Dr. Blanke: And I'll add that that actually also applies to some of the patients who want death with dignity, are suffering horribly but don't actually qualify because they have a chronic illness expected to live too long. I just saw a patient last week and we actually talked about VCED, the voluntary cessation of eating and drinking, which is something that many, many people fear, including providers, but if done properly is fantastic. She used VCED. She passed away. She died two days later and her family could not have been more thankful.  Sandra Klima: I'll chime in on that because the comparison between my father dying and Rob dying, it really just has an impression on my mind. My father did not have a diagnosis of X amount of months to live, but my father had chronic problems and he was suffering. And the death that I watched him go through and was with him for, was nothing like Rob's death. It wasn't peaceful. It haunts me today. It haunts me. My father should have been a candidate, but he wasn't. What was the point of living four more months in this miserable state?  Dr. Thomas: You know, it dawns on me that this is a very different kind of death. It is not suicide legally or medically. It's a different process than natural death from a terminal illness. And it's not even possible in every state or every country. And I imagine it is very different for the people who are left behind, for family members and caregivers to process this kind of death and bereavement after their loved one passes. Can you comment, Sandra, on how medical aid in dying affects the caregivers and affects the family and how you can prepare for bereavement and support in bereavement?  Sandra Klima: I felt that this death was anticipated, and my bereavement, the part that bothered me about Rob's end of life, was that I was unprepared for how quickly the decision was made. The decision was made quickly because he started getting paralyzed again on the side of his body. And he decided, "Today's the day." And it was three or four hours later, and it took me by surprise at how quickly the decision was going to be made. That's the only part I regret was I didn't have a strong enough plan about what was going to happen when that decision was made. That probably needs to be emphasized because you can plan all you want when it's not going to happen. But at the moment it happens, it's like a fire drill. You got to go through and get all those things lined up. And I can tell you, I felt worse for my father's death than I did for Rob's death. So even though it's a different kind of death, it was a peaceful death with dignity.  Dr. Blanke: In terms of the bereavement, I have seen all sorts of responses from patients' families initially, from those who could not be more supportive. Sometimes they even seem to want it more than the patient does, to those who actively oppose it. But in my experience, which now numbers about 205, the families are almost always on board at the end when they see how much the patient has been suffering and how much peace the actual control over the patient's life and death gives them. I always offer after the patient is gone to the family to contact me whether it's a week later or a month later, or a year later, if they have questions about the process, if they need any help in referrals. It's never happened a single time.  Dr. VandeKieft: I think back to the landmark article that Tim Quill published in the early 1990s about his patient, Diane, and how he highlighted that she ended up committing suicide. And there's kind of a shame, it's done in the shadows, and that when you have aid in dying as an option that can be brought out into a planned open manner in the way that Ms Klima is describing with her partner. And then also with the bereavement and the partners, I think we need to listen once again. I just had a case yesterday that somebody was telling me of a gentleman who got the prescription for aid in dying, but ended up not taking it and died of "natural causes."  His wife told the bereavement counselor afterwards, “That was such a relief because I was struggling terribly with the spiritual aspects of this. And I would've really had a hard time had he gone through with it.” She had not shared that with her husband or anyone else because she wanted to be so supportive of him. And it was only by the bereavement counselor, listening and opening up that she could really understand, "What are the true struggles that this family is going through and how can I meet their needs?"  Dr. Ferris: If I can comment, it doesn't matter whether people have chosen medical aid in dying. When people die, there's a loss for anybody who's a survivor. People can be comfortable with the process that occurred or not. They can perceive suffering or not. The loss leads to changes. And what we know is the transitions through the loss period that we call bereavement for different people are profound in different ways. And what we need to make sure is that people are connected with services. It's why with every patient I care for, whatever therapy provided, I do participate in ventilator withdrawal. I participate in palliative sedation. I've done this all my career. I make sure they're in the hospice system, in the United States, which provides people with 13 months bereavement support or more, because if a death occurs in a hospital without hospice care, then the patient gets a decedent phone call from the chaplain, if they're lucky, or they're lucky enough to have a physician like Dr. Blanke who says call me.  Most people don't make themselves available and you're out at sea. And we know that the suffering of a bereavement can lead to incapacitance, people depressed, not functional, people even get illnesses in the process. So there's a huge cost to society for not addressing this issue carefully. It's about the preparation, and what I try to do is get the bereavement conversation going before the person dies, so that we're talking about it and integrating it.  Sandra Klima: Right, I agree.  Dr. Thomas: Thank you all so much for this conversation. Thank you, Sandra Klima and Dr. VandeKieft and Dr. Blanke and Dr. Ferris. I think this was such an important conversation. Talking about death can be very difficult and I just appreciate the openness and sensitivity and your willingness to share these experiences. Thank you to all of our listeners. We appreciate you tuning into this episode of ASCO Education podcast.    Thank you for listening to the ASCO Education podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please click subscribe. Let us know what you think by leaving a review. For more information, visit the comprehensive education center at education.asco.org.  The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care, and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. 

Remember what it felt like the first time you saw something truly amazing, something that blew your mind? Like the first time you saw a movie in the theater as a kid or someone showed you the constellations? Magician and mentalist Erica Sodos helps us learn to rediscover that sense of wonder, awe, and amazement.   Music by Terry Hughes   Links: Erica's Virtual Winter Show 12/26/21 (The Witch and Wizard)   Video Erica's Routine with Her Mom (Momma is Magic)   Erica's Public Psychic Show in Denver 12/18/21 (The Magic Within, Psychic Explorations with Erica Sodos)   Erica's Website   Also Check Out The Programming Language of the Soul   Rate This Podcast   Full Transcript Sodos: And literally, I swear, the tree was my bestie after that. And now… it's like, if I don't walk there... Today I didn't walk over there and I thought, “Oh, I haven't seen my friend!” You know? And I'm not just a tree hugger, I kiss them. I love to kiss them and get in there. Do you do that? Do you hug trees? I love it.    Remember what it felt like the first time you saw something truly amazing, something that blew your mind? Like the first time you saw a movie in the theater as a kid or someone showed you the constellations? Maybe when you discovered the best superhero ever? What if it could be possible to keep hold of that sense of wonder, awe, and amazement?   This is Shame Piñata. I'm Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Believe it or not, that sense of childlike wonder is a place we can still go, even as adults. It can be a little more complicated to get there (b/c adulting), but I'm a firm believer that joy, awe, and wonder are foundational components to living a healthy life. And what's more, they are essential skills if we want to build our own unique ceremonies to honor, appreciate and acknowledge the many ways we grow and change as we move through life. There are huge industries cashing in on our need for expansiveness and joy (think Disney, Hollywood, and gaming)and there are also simpler ways to find magic closer to home in everyday life. Slowing down, being alive to possibility, and noticing exquisite beauty in little moments are a few examples.   Today we will be talking magic. What is it? Where do we find it? And how do we spell it? We'll be focusing on many different types of magic, from stage magic to real magic and how they overlap. Our guide for this conversation is Erica Sodos, one of a small number of female stage magicians in the US who is also a mentalist. I've known Erica for almost 20 years and I can tell you that she truly walks her talk. She finds magic all around her in every moment and she's inspirational. I'd like to invite you to listen in on a conversation Erica and I recorded about a year ago, when we were all still in lockdown.   [MUSIC]   Thomas: You are somebody in my life who has helped me connect with magic like really nobody else in your own unique, totally unique way, and I've always wanted to ask you, and I'm glad to have on the chance, how do you find magic in life? Like, what's your thread? What's your connection? There's several kinds of magic that you're connected to. So I want to know, how are you connected? What is that like?   Sodos: First, I want to say that means so much to me, Colleen, for you to say that because as you know, I think you're one of my wisest friends. So that means a lot. Yes, so how do I find magic in my life? Well, you know, it's funny because I look for it, right? I look for magic. And so because I'm looking, I also find it. And I believe that everything has energy and everything is connected. I guess you could call me an animist, right? So everything is alive. I also like to sometimes call myself a biophiliac, which is a lover of life. So I find magic because I love all… everything that exists. And so being outside... and I understand that not everybody can get outside... so even looking outside or having houseplants. I counted recently. We have 39 houseplants and so… they are these beings are taking energy from the sun and they're living. And then of course, there's the spirits in our house, house spirits... and then, because I know we're all home a lot, and we feel kind of isolated, but I believe that life is all around us. So... and then animals of course.   Erica has a cat named Princess Patches Precious Poppycock McGee and at the time of our interview, Erica had a daily practice of drawing a sigil in her wet cat food every morning. A sigil is a symbol considered to have magical power. We recorded our interview on a Sunday.   Sodos: Like today I did a sun because it's Sunday that we're recording. I made a sun sigil, so everything can be fun and to me it's fun too to do that. What else do I do? Correspondences! So for people who want to get involved you know and find more magic, like learning correspondences. I mean, everyday like, is it like Monday… Oh and the moon cycles, of course we share that. You know, that's another way to harness magic. What sign is the moon in? What cycle is she in? But the correspondences: so Monday is the moon and Tuesday is Mars and Wednesday is Mercury and so that they're different deities and so you could get into that energy and learn the correspondences. And foods of correspondences! So what we eat has energy and what we wear. And, you know, it's…so that's another ways and that then you find meaning and like everything is connected. Oh, and then magic. I mean, I think working on magic alone, you know, that's how I connect to magic. And magic connects, performing magic connects me to real magic and ritual in so many ways. First of all, it's archetypal. So I mean, I have... I'm super into Tarot and I have like... but I put the cards everywhere. I don't look at them so much always, like telling the future but more as meditative tools, like I put them on altars and things. And the Magician archetype is so powerful. And a long time ago, the magicians would combine trickery with their performance to you know, to create change to help people believe, right? They... so they would combine trickery with real magic. And so I love that. So that helps me and also having an idea of something I want to do, like a magician goes, "Oh, I'd like to make that levitate." And then we have to think of how we're going to make that levitate. And so that's magic. And then the third most powerful is how it affects people, is when people see magic. They're in an altered space. And I didn't say that, Colleen, that's the biggest that's also another way I find magic is being present and meditating. And, like I have this…  every time I blow out a candle now by where we have all these plants, the smoke, the way it intermingles with the leaves of the - you know what I'm talking about, right - the way it intermingles with the leaves. I mean, it's pure magic.   Thomas: I want to go back for a second, you just said several kinds of magic. So I'm going to try to say them back and correct me because I'm thinking that you said that there's the magic of connecting to spirit. And then the magic of performing magic as being a magician. And the magic of how the receiving of the magician's work affects your audience, when their mind is blown and they're like, "Wow". And then a fourth kind where you're seeing magic in everyday life, like little magical moments that are just that just blow your mind.   Sodos: You know, it's funny, because... so I think there's a lot of overlap, because, and the first one, I might call it, I think it's cool. You said connection to spirit, but it's like... it could be connection to plants. So I guess you could say plants have spirit, not looking at it like there's one spirit, like, Great Spirit, but more like everything is alive. So you're saying like... it could be ghosts, you're connecting to it your Ancestors, or fairies or plants or a certain deity that you have a connection to or something? Yeah, I like that. And then there's actually performing magic which overlaps because there's that, and that of course, is about transcending having the person go into a magical moment, right? And then there's magic in the everyday. And then there's also magic, because, you know, like, if you look at the definition of magic, it's basically, you know, control over natural forces like supernatural powers. I mean, the dictionary will define only two of what you said they will define one, a magician, which I am like, who can do tricks and then two, extraordinary power. But I think when you're in a transcendent state watching a magician, you can do anything because inspiration moves, right? I mean, there's overlap.   Thomas: Tell me more about the magic with the C and the magic with the CK. I've never been very clear on that.   Sodos: I know that traditionally MAGIC is magic on stage. A magician is on stage performing a magic show. And then magic with an MAGICK is more real magic. Like if you look online, there's all these people who are into, you know, spells and rituals and that kind of thing and they would spell it with a CK like magickal living, you know, "how to infuse everything with real magick" with a CK. Unfortunately, I can't go into the minutiae of why but I know that the words actually have... sort of like faerie and fairy, FAERIE and FAIRY. They actually have different etymology, those two words. They come from different... and then they just got blended. And for me ferry AE is the authentic fairy and AIRY, is like Disney. And so like I like to say, my passion, my real deep passion is where real magick, like CK, meets performance magic. I mean, I have a lot of passions, but you know, where they blend.   [MUSIC]   It's great to have you with us today! Magical moments come in all shapes and sizes. They weave through our lives in predictable and not-so-predictable ways. If you're in a life transition right now (a magical moment or a not-so-magical moment) and would like some support, you can work with me to have a custom ceremony built just for you. Find out more at shamepinata.com.   Thomas: Has magic helped you deal with a life transition, with a hard life transition?   Sodos: I thought about this a lot and I'd say... what... you said helped me, has magic helped me with a life transition? And I think the biggest experience that I had of that specifically is when my mother died. I don't know if you're familiar with what I did with what my mother died. So I'm going to tell you,   Thomas: You did a show, right? And you had her join you in the show.   Sodos: When she was dead, yeah.   Thomas: Right   Sodos: So my mother was a performer when she was younger and had some mental illness. It was a challenging relationship but she was also very funny and dynamic and alive and alive... And she had a big shadow. And so she always wanted to perform with me, but it was… the relationship was challenging. And she was in nursing homes. This is so funny, funny and sad. I would do magic shows at the nursing home. And we'd practice like, "Oh, we could do routines together!" Her nursing home. And so I'd say, "When I hand you this cylinder, you do this." And so I… and we practice and I'd hand it to her... and she had dementia really bad so she couldn't remember what we were supposed to do. So when she died, when she was dying in hospice, I just knew, and I kept saying, "Mom, I'm going to make up a routine with you. I'm going to make up a routine with you, I promise." And I didn't know what it was. And a couple months after she died, I realized that I still had so many of her voice messages saved on my machine. So I edited them together and she was hilarious, like, and she would sing on my machine and she'd say things about how... how unhealthy she was. And so I edited them and then we perform... we... I put together this routine at her memorial, which we did at a theater where I before the pandemic was doing my monthly psychic show, although my mom has been dead for quite a while now. And I created this thing where we had a conversation and I put her ashes, her real ashes, in this box and I did a seance and we had this conversation. And I called on my mom's spirit. And it was funny, like, "Where are you?" And it was her actual voice saying, "Well, I think you know where I am." And I'm like, "Well, are you enjoying yourself?" And she goes, "Well, as usual, I'm eating too much." And because she was at times in her life very, very obese. And I had her say really funny things like we had a hilarious conversation. And then I said, "Show me a sign" and I put the box down on the table and it levitated all over the room. And to me that combines real magic and performance magic because it was a way to process her, my relationship with her, and grieve and not only grieve her death, but grieve the challenging relationship. And I mean, it's always layers of the onion, so I'm still doing that many years later. And it was amazing, Colleen, because many... because the next day I performed it in Vegas at this nightclub, the same routine. And every time I did it crazy things happened. Like three years later, I did it in Vegas and my sister called me the next day. And when my mom was admitted into the hospital before she died… like six months before she died we lost her wallet and everything and it was found the day after I did that routine three years later.   Thomas: Wow!   Sodos: It was hilarious, like... so it definitely tapped into some dimension of spirit.   Thomas: Wow, I was following along with you doing that work, but I've never heard you really describe all of it before. So I just feel so honored to be let into that time in your life. And to be aware of how amazingly embodied and empowered you are to… and creative you are, you're just so amazingly creative, to have to brought that together and to have shared that with the world your own processing of that really, really big loss.   Sodos: Thank you so much. That means a lot. That means a lot.   Thomas: Wow. Well, so… one thing I wanted to ask you, because I know that you are connected to magic in so many different ways and it's also your day job. So I wonder if it ever starts to be a little bit less than fun, or it starts to feel like work, or you need a break from it, or… does that ever happen?   Sodos: Yeah, so you mean... Right. So the performing magic, does that take away from my experience of magic as I...   Thomas: Because it's your job? Because you're in a half-to position with it to some extent?   Sodos: Well, I think it's actually the opposite. I think it deepens my connection to magic, because there's witchy people who are into real magic and then there's magicians and it's shocking how few magicians actually like real magic. Like they hate it. Like, like, some magicians actually dislike real magic. And I think, "Well, you're a magician. So I would hope that you would love real magic. You're pretending to do magic. So..." For me, as someone who loves real magic, I do my magic from that way. So I do many different kinds of magic. So I can do card magic with the rest of them and then I do this branch of magic called mentalism. If you're familiar, it's a psychic magic, so it's mind reading, and predictions. And when I do that, I'm combining all kinds of magic and people don't know what's going on. Like, they're just, "What the heck?!" And you know, so when I do that form of magic, feeling people's reaction to it and seeing it helps me believe in magic. So it actually deepens my connection to magic. Does that make sense?   Thomas: Yeah that does. Mm hmm.    Sodos: I think where it does limit my magic is, when I see a magic show, like most magicians want to know how everything's done. Like, that's all they care about. I mean, it's very male dominated, so you can imagine it's... that's a different conversation, but... They want to know how the trick is done and unless I'm going to do something I'd rather not know. So if I see a magic show where I know it's tricks, I don't want to know because that takes away the magic for me. I only want to know the magic that I'm going to do otherwise, I'm going to be enjoyed by what you're doing and to me, it's real magic. And not only that, but I do some magic effects that I literally don't know how they're done. I know that sounds weird. But there's a whole there's magic that it doesn't even make sense. That's why it's so cool, magic. [LAUGHES]   Thomas: You don't know how they happen, but they happen reliably enough that you can perform them and trust that they'll happen?   Sodos: Yeah, there's certain techniques in magic. There's different techniques… and you know, I was learning some card stuff and it's like, "How... How is that working? I... this is my card..." I practice myself.  And to me, that's magic. And I also think it's magical that people think of this stuff that like somebody makes up this stuff and then they sell it or whatever they write books. Yeah, it's very cool.   Thomas: So you just said, and I know from knowing you that a big part of your… a big part of your inspiration and your work is to inspire people to find their own magic. What advice do you have for helping people begin to open their eyes to the magic around them in everyday life?   Sodos: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd say slowing down, paying attention, looking around them, utilizing all their senses. So again, I can just walk into a room and notice the sun coming through the window, and again... the highlight of my day. You know, you're transcended, even if it's just for a second. So I'd say one of the ways to experience more magic is to slow down, pay attention, and feel. Open to our feelings, connect to nature as best they can, you know, I know again, different bodies, but being outside and feeling the sun and the wind. And, you know, weather and the changes. Meditating, the old classic that's pretty much good for most things. Meditating is brilliant. And I even think altars, you know, just starting to create even if it's just a candle and a glass of water, you know, lighting a candle and sitting in front of the candle and make things fun. Cleaning. During the pandemic, I have gotten so into cleaning, it's actually weird and I make it a whole ritual, because you have to clean and it's… whether it's I'm listening to a podcast or to music to a mood and I think of intention and as I sweep by put the… So it's like, it's like infusing intention, you know, even if it's just when you wash your face and you say, “I open to magic and I'm going to see clearer” and paying attention to. If... if one lives with a companion animal, or a plant, you know, feeling the plant and sensing, I think opening up to subtler vibrations. It's really helpful.   [MUSIC]   Opening up to subtler vibrations, infusing intention into the things we do, and creating simple altars. These are three great ways to find our own magic. And it's important to find what sparks for each of us, right? I may miss the little things that jump out to you and you may miss the ones that appear to me. They're really reflections of the magic within us, of that space that is alive to awe, open to wonder, and willing to believe in magic.    We will hear more from Erica in season 3, but for now I invite you to consider how you might find more magic in your world. You might be like Erica and find yourself called to draw meaningful symbols in your cat's breakfast, maybe you'll have a conversation with a certain tree you pass on a walk, or see if you can hear the spiders laughing. Whatever you do, follow your intuition, as you continue to find your own magic.    Erica Sodos is a magician, speaker, emcee, psychic entertainer, one of only a handful of female mentalists in the world. An avid lover of nature, dedicated vegan, environmentalist, activist and tour guide at an animal sanctuary, Erica is committed to ending speciesism by creating a world that honors all beings. You can find out more about Erica and see examples of her magic at ericasodos.com. You can also find links to upcoming shows in the show notes.   Our music is by Terry Hughes. You can follow us on IG and Twitter at shamepinata. You can reach us through the contact page at our website, shamepinata.com. And you can subscribe to the podcast on Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite player. I'm Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

About ThomasThomas Hazel is Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist of ChaosSearch. He is a serial entrepreneur at the forefront of communication, virtualization, and database technology and the inventor of ChaosSearch's patented IP. Thomas has also patented several other technologies in the areas of distributed algorithms, virtualization and database science. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of New Hampshire, Hall of Fame Alumni Inductee, and founded both student & professional chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).Links:ChaosSearch: https://www.chaossearch.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinksCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead  to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous non-sense.   Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats v-u-l-t-r.com slash screaming.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at ChaosSearch.We've been working with them for a long time; they've sponsored a bunch of our nonsense, and it turns out that we've been talking about them to our clients since long before they were a sponsor because it actually does what it says on the tin. Here to talk to us about that in a few minutes is Thomas Hazel, ChaosSearch's CTO and founder. First, Thomas, nice to talk to you again, and as always, thanks for humoring me.Thomas: [laugh]. Hi, Corey. Always great to talk to you. And I enjoy these conversations that sometimes go up and down, left and right, but I look forward to all the fun we're going to have.Corey: So, my understanding of ChaosSearch is probably a few years old because it turns out, I don't spend a whole lot of time meticulously studying your company's roadmap in the same way that you presumably do. When last we checked in with what the service did-slash-does, you are effectively solving the problem of data movement and querying that data. The idea behind data warehouses is generally something that's shoved onto us by cloud providers where, “Hey, this data is going to be valuable to you someday.” Data science teams are big proponents of this because when you're storing that much data, their salaries look relatively reasonable by comparison. And the ChaosSearch vision was, instead of copying all this data out of an object store and storing it on expensive disks, and replicating it, et cetera, what if we queried it in place in a somewhat intelligent manner?So, you take the data and you store it, in this case, in S3 or equivalent, and then just query it there, rather than having to move it around all over the place, which of course, then incurs data transfer fees, you're storing it multiple times, and it's never in quite the format that you want it. That was the breakthrough revelation, you were Elasticsearch—now OpenSearch—API compatible, which was great. And that was, sort of, a state of the art a year or two ago. Is that generally correct?Thomas: No, you nailed our mission statement. No, you're exactly right. You know, the value of cloud object stores, S3, the elasticity, the durability, all these wonderful things, the problem was you couldn't get any value out of it, and you had to move it out to these siloed solutions, as you indicated. So, you know, our mission was exactly that, transformed customers' cloud storage into an analytical database, a multi-model analytical database, where our first use case was search and log analytics, replacing the ELK stack and also replacing the data pipeline, the schema management, et cetera. We automate the entire step, raw data to insights.Corey: It's funny we're having this conversation today. Earlier, today, I was trying to get rid of a relatively paltry 200 gigs or so of small files on an EFS volume—you know, Amazon's version of NFS; it's like an NFS volume except you're paying Amazon for the privilege—great. And it turns out that it's a whole bunch of operations across a network on a whole bunch of tiny files, so I had to spin up other instances that were not getting backed by spot terminations, and just firing up a whole bunch of threads. So, now the load average on that box is approaching 300, but it's plowing through, getting rid of that data finally.And I'm looking at this saying this is a quarter of a terabyte. Data warehouses are in the petabyte range. Oh, I begin to see aspects of the problem. Even searching that kind of data using traditional tooling starts to break down, which is sort of the revelation that Google had 20-some-odd years ago, and other folks have since solved for, but this is the first time I've had significant data that wasn't just easily searched with a grep. For those of you in the Unix world who understand what that means, condolences. We're having a support group meeting at the bar.Thomas: Yeah. And you know, I always thought, what if you could make cloud object storage like S3 high performance and really transform it into a database? And so that warehouse capability, that's great. We like that. However to manage it, to scale it, to configure it, to get the data into that, was the problem.That was the promise of a data lake, right? This simple in, and then this arbitrary schema on read generic out. The problem next came, it became swampy, it was really hard, and that promise was not delivered. And so what we're trying to do is get all the benefits of the data lake: simple in, so many services naturally stream to cloud storage. Shoot, I would say every one of our customers are putting their data in cloud storage because their data pipeline to their warehousing solution or Elasticsearch may go down and they're worried they'll lose the data.So, what we say is what if you just said activate that data lake and get that ELK use case, get that BI use case without that data movement, as you indicated, without that ETL-ing, without that data pipeline that you're worried is going to fall over. So, that vision has been Chaos. Now, we haven't talked in, you know, a few years, but this idea that we're growing beyond what we are just going after logs, we're going into new use cases, new opportunities, and I'm looking forward to discussing with you.Corey: It's a great answer that—though I have to call out that I am right there with you as far as inappropriately using things as databases. I know that someone is going to come back and say, “Oh, S3 is a database. You're dancing around it. Isn't that what Athena is?” Which is named, of course, after the Greek Goddess of spending money on AWS? And that is a fair question, but to my understanding, there's a schema story behind that does not apply to what you're doing.Thomas: Yeah, and that is so crucial is that we like the relational access. The time-cost complexity to get it into that, as you mentioned, scaled access, I mean, it could take weeks, months to test it, to configure it, to provision it, and imagine if you got it wrong; you got to redo it again. And so our unique service removes all that data pipeline schema management. And because of our innovation because of our service, you do all schema definition, on the fly, virtually, what we call views on your index data, that you can publish an elastic index pattern for that consumption, or a relational table for that consumption. And that's kind of leading the witness into things that we're coming out with this quarter into 2022.Corey: I have to deal with a little bit of, I guess, a shame here because yeah, I'm doing exactly what you just described. I'm using Athena to wind up querying our customers' Cost and Usage Reports, and we spend a couple hundred bucks a month on AWS Glue to wind up massaging those into the way that they expect it to be. And it's great. Ish. We hook it up to Tableau and can make those queries from it, and all right, it's great.It just, burrr goes the money printer, and we somehow get access and insight to a lot of valuable data. But even that is knowing exactly what the format is going to look like. Ish. I mean, Cost and Usage Reports from Amazon are sort of aspirational when it comes to schema sometimes, but here we are. And that's been all well and good.But now the idea of log files, even looking at the base case of sending logs from an application, great. Nginx, or Apache, or [unintelligible 00:07:24], or any of the various web servers out there all tend to use different logging formats just to describe the same exact things, start spreading that across custom in-house applications and getting signal from that is almost impossible. “Oh,” people say, “So, we'll use a structured data format.” Now, you're putting log and structuring requirements on application developers who don't care in the first place, and now you have a mess on your hands.Thomas: And it really is a mess. And that challenge is, it's so problematic. And schemas changing. You know, we have customers and one reasons why they go with us is their log data is changing; they didn't expect it. Well, in your data pipeline, and your Athena database, that breaks. That brings the system down.And so our system uniquely detects that and manages that for you and then you can pick and choose how you want to export in these views dynamically. So, you know, it's really not rocket science, but the problem is, a lot of the technology that we're using is designed for static, fixed thinking. And then to scale it is problematic and time-consuming. So, you know, Glue is a great idea, but it has a lot of sharp [pebbles 00:08:26]. Athena is a great idea but also has a lot of problems.And so that data pipeline, you know, it's not for digitally native, active, new use cases, new workloads coming up hourly, daily. You think about this long-term; so a lot of that data prep pipelining is something we address so uniquely, but really where the customer cares is the value of that data, right? And so if you're spending toils trying to get the data into a database, you're not answering the questions, whether it's for security, for performance, for your business needs. That's the problem. And you know, that agility, that time-to-value is where we're very uniquely coming in because we start where your data is raw and we automate the process all the way through.Corey: So, when I look at the things that I have stuffed into S3, they generally fall into a couple of categories. There are a bunch of logs for things I never asked for nor particularly wanted, but AWS is aggressive about that, first routing through CloudTrail so you can get charged 50-cent per gigabyte ingested. Awesome. And of course, large static assets, images I have done something to enter colloquially now known as shitposts, which is great. Other than logs, what could you possibly be storing in S3 that lends itself to, effectively, the type of analysis that you built around this?Thomas: Well, our first use case was the classic log use cases, app logs, web service logs. I mean, CloudTrail, it's famous; we had customers that gave up on elastic, and definitely gave up on relational where you can do a couple changes and your permutation of attributes for CloudTrail is going to put you to your knees. And people just say, “I give up.” Same thing with Kubernetes logs. And so it's the classic—whether it's CSV, where it's JSON, where it's log types, we auto-discover all that.We also allow you, if you want to override that and change the parsing capabilities through a UI wizard, we do discover what's in your buckets. That term data swamp, and not knowing what's in your bucket, we do a facility that will index that data, actually create a report for you for knowing what's in. Now, if you have text data, if you have log data, if you have BI data, we can bring it all together, but the real pain is at the scale. So classically, app logs, system logs, many devices sending IoT-type streams is where we really come in—Kubernetes—where they're dealing with terabytes of data per day, and managing an ELK cluster at that scale. Particularly on a Black Friday.Shoot, some of our customers like—Klarna is one of them; credit card payment—they're ramping up for Black Friday, and one of the reasons why they chose us is our ability to scale when maybe you're doing a terabyte or two a day and then it goes up to twenty, twenty-five. How do you test that scale? How do you manage that scale? And so for us, the data streams are, traditionally with our customers, the well-known log types, at least in the log use cases. And the challenge is scaling it, is getting access to it, and that's where we come in.Corey: I will say the last time you were on the show a couple of years ago, you were talking about the initial logging use case and you were speaking, in many cases aspirationally, about where things were going. What a difference a couple years is made. Instead of talking about what hypothetical customers might want, or what—might be able to do, you're just able to name-drop them off the top of your head, you have scaled to approximately ten times the number of employees you had back then. You've—Thomas: Yep. Yep.Corey: —raised, I think, a total of—what, 50 million?—since then.Thomas: Uh, 60 now. Yeah.Corey: Oh, 60? Fantastic.Thomas: Yeah, yeah.Corey: Congrats. And of course, how do you do it? By sponsoring Last Week in AWS, as everyone should. I'm taking clear credit for that every time someone announces around, that's the game. But no, there is validity to it because telling fun stories and sponsoring exciting things like this only carry you so far. At some point, customers have to say, yeah, this is solving a pain that I have; I'm willing to pay you money to solve it.And you've clearly gotten to a point where you are addressing the needs of those customers at a pretty fascinating clip. It's bittersweet from my perspective because it seems like the majority of your customers have not come from my nonsense anymore. They're finding you through word of mouth, they're finding through more traditional—read as boring—ad campaigns, et cetera, et cetera. But you've built a brand that extends beyond just me. I'm no longer viewed as the de facto ombudsperson for any issue someone might have with ChaosSearch on Twitters. It's kind of, “Aww, the company grew up. What happened there?”Thomas: No, [laugh] listen, this you were great. We reached out to you to tell our story, and I got to be honest. A lot of people came by, said, “I heard something on Corey Quinn's podcasts,” or et cetera. And it came a long way now. Now, we have, you know, companies like Equifax, multi-cloud—Amazon and Google.They love the data lake philosophy, the centralized, where use cases are now available within days, not weeks and months. Whether it's logs and BI. Correlating across all those data streams, it's huge. We mentioned Klarna, [APM Performance 00:13:19], and, you know, we have Armor for SIEM, and Blackboard for [Observers 00:13:24].So, it's funny—yeah, it's funny, when I first was talking to you, I was like, “What if? What if we had this customer, that customer?” And we were building the capabilities, but now that we have it, now that we have customers, yeah, I guess, maybe we've grown up a little bit. But hey, listen to you're always near and dear to our heart because we remember, you know, when you stop[ed by our booth at re:Invent several times. And we're coming to re:Invent this year, and I believe you are as well.Corey: Oh, yeah. But people listening to this, it's if they're listening the day it's released, this will be during re:Invent. So, by all means, come by the ChaosSearch booth, and see what they have to say. For once they have people who aren't me who are going to be telling stories about these things. And it's fun. Like, I joke, it's nothing but positive here.It's interesting from where I sit seeing the parallels here. For example, we have both had—how we say—adult supervision come in. You have a CEO, Ed, who came over from IBM Storage. I have Mike Julian, whose first love language is of course spreadsheets. And it's great, on some level, realizing that, wow, this company has eclipsed my ability to manage these things myself and put my hands-on everything. And eventually, you have to start letting go. It's a weird growth stage, and it's a heck of a transition. But—Thomas: No, I love it. You know, I mean, I think when we were talking, we were maybe 15 employees. Now, we're pushing 100. We brought on Ed Walsh, who's an amazing CEO. It's funny, I told him about this idea, I invented this technology roughly eight years ago, and he's like, “I love it. Let's do it.” And I wasn't ready to do it.So, you know, five, six years ago, I started the company always knowing that, you know, I'd give him a call once we got the plane up in the air. And it's been great to have him here because the next level up, right, of execution and growth and business development and sales and marketing. So, you're exactly right. I mean, we were a young pup several years ago, when we were talking to you and, you know, we're a little bit older, a little bit wiser. But no, it's great to have Ed here. And just the leadership in general; we've grown immensely.Corey: Now, we are recording this in advance of re:Invent, so there's always the question of, “Wow, are we going to look really silly based upon what is being announced when this airs?” Because it's very hard to predict some things that AWS does. And let's be clear, I always stay away from predictions, just because first, I have a bit of a knack for being right. But also, when I'm right, people will think, “Oh, Corey must have known about that and is leaking,” whereas if I get it wrong, I just look like a fool. There's no win for me if I start doing the predictive dance on stuff like that.But I have to level with you, I have been somewhat surprised that, at least as of this recording, AWS has not moved more in your direction because storing data in S3 is kind of their whole thing, and querying that data through something that isn't Athena has been a bit of a reach for them that they're slowly starting to wrap their heads around. But their UltraWarm nonsense—which is just, okay, great naming there—what is the point of continually having a model where oh, yeah, we're going to just age it out, the stuff that isn't actively being used into S3, rather than coming up with a way to query it there. Because you've done exactly that, and please don't take this as anything other than a statement of fact, they have better access to what S3 is doing than you do. You're forced to deal with this thing entirely from a public API standpoint, which is fine. They can theoretically change the behavior of aspects of S3 to unlock these use cases if they chose to do so. And they haven't. Why is it that you're the only folks that are doing this?Thomas: No, it's a great question, and I'll give them props for continuing to push the data lake [unintelligible 00:17:09] to the cloud providers' S3 because it was really where I saw the world. Lakes, I believe in. I love them. They love them. However, they promote the move the data out to get access, and it seems so counterintuitive on why wouldn't you leave it in and put these services, make them more intelligent? So, it's funny, I've trademark ‘Smart Object Storage,' I actually trademarked—I think you [laugh] were a part of this—‘UltraHot,' right? Because why would you want UltraWarm when you can have UltraHot?And the reason, I feel, is that if you're using Parquet for Athena [unintelligible 00:17:40] store, or Lucene for Elasticsearch, these two index technologies were not designed for cloud storage, for real-time streaming off of cloud storage. So, the trick is, you have to build UltraWarm, get it off of what they consider cold S3 into a more warmer memory or SSD type access. What we did, what the invention I created was, that first read is hot. That first read is fast.Snowflake is a good example. They give you a ten terabyte demo example, and if you have a big instance and you do that first query, maybe several orders or groups, it could take an hour to warm up. The second query is fast. Well, what if the first query is in seconds as well? And that's where we really spent the last five, six years building out the tech and the vision behind this because I like to say you go to a doctor and say, “Hey, Doc, every single time I move my arm, it hurts.” And the doctor says, “Well, don't move your arm.”It's things like that, to your point, it's like, why wouldn't they? I would argue, one, you have to believe it's possible—we're proving that it is—and two, you have to have the technology to do it. Not just the index, but the architecture. So, I believe they will go this direction. You know, little birdies always say that all these companies understand this need.Shoot, Snowflake is trying to be lake-y; Databricks is trying to really bring this warehouse lake concept. But you still do all the pipelining; you still have to do all the data management the way that you don't want to do. It's not a lake. And so my argument is that it's innovation on why. Now, they have money; they have time, but, you know, we have a big head start.Corey: I remembered last year at re:Invent they released a, shall we say, significant change to S3 that it enabled read after write consistency, which is awesome, for again, those of us in the business of misusing things as databases. But for some folks, the majority of folks I would say, it was a, “I don't know what that means and therefore I don't care.” And that's fine. I have no issue with that. There are other folks, some of my customers for example, who are suddenly, “Wait a minute. This means I can sunset this entire janky sidecar metadata system that is designed to make sure that we are consistent in our use of S3 because it now does it automatically under the hood?” And that's awesome. Does that change mean anything for ChaosSearch?Thomas: It doesn't because of our architecture. We're append-only, write-once scenario, so a lot of update-in-place viewpoints. My viewpoint is that if you're seeing S3 as the database and you need that type of consistency, it make sense of why you'd want it, but because of our distributive fabric, our stateless architecture, our append-only nature, it really doesn't affect us.Now, I talked to the S3 team, I said, “Please if you're coming up with this feature, it better not be slower.” I want S3 to be fast, right? And they said, “No, no. It won't affect performance.” I'm like, “Okay. Let's keep that up.”And so to us, any type of S3 capability, we'll take advantage of it if benefits us, whether it's consistency as you indicated, performance, functionality. But we really keep the constructs of S3 access to really limited features: list, put, get. [roll-on 00:20:49] policies to give us read-only access to your data, and a location to write our indices into your account, and then are distributed fabric, our service, acts as those indices and query them or searches them to resolve whatever analytics you need. So, we made it pretty simple, and that is allowed us to make it high performance.Corey: I'll take it a step further because you want to talk about changes since the last time we spoke, it used to be that this was on top of S3, you can store your data anywhere you want, as long as it's S3 in the customer's account. Now, you're also supporting one-click integration with Google Cloud's object storage, which, great. That does mean though, that you're not dependent upon provider-specific implementations of things like a consistency model for how you've built things. It really does use the lowest common denominator—to my understanding—of object stores. Is that something that you're seeing broad adoption of, or is this one of those areas where, well, you have one customer on a different provider, but almost everything lives on the primary? I'm curious what you're seeing for adoption models across multiple providers?Thomas: It's a great question. We built an architecture purposely to be cloud-agnostic. I mean, we use compute in a containerized way, we use object storage in a very simple construct—put, get, list—and we went over to Google because that made sense, right? We have customers on both sides. I would say Amazon is the gorilla, but Google's trying to get there and growing.We had a big customer, Equifax, that's on both Amazon and Google, but we offer the same service. To be frank, it looks like the exact same product. And it should, right? Whether it's Amazon Cloud, or Google Cloud, multi-select and I want to choose either one and get the other one. I would say that different business types are using each one, but our bulk of the business isn't Amazon, but we just this summer released our SaaS offerings, so it's growing.And you know, it's funny, you never know where it comes from. So, we have one customer—actually DigitalRiver—as one of our customers on Amazon for logs, but we're growing in working together to do a BI on GCP or on Google. And so it's kind of funny; they have two departments on two different clouds with two different use cases. And so do they want unification? I'm not sure, but they definitely have their BI on Google and their operations in Amazon. It's interesting.Corey: You know its important to me that people learn how to use the cloud effectively. Thats why I'm so glad that Cloud Academy is sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense. They're a great way to build in demand tech skills the way that, well personally, I learn best which I learn by doing not by reading. They have live cloud labs that you can run in real environments that aren't going to blow up your own bill—I can't stress how important that is. Visit cloudacademy.com/corey. Thats C-O-R-E-Y, don't drop the “E.” Use Corey as a promo-code as well. You're going to get a bunch of discounts on it with a lifetime deal—the price will not go up. It is limited time, they assured me this is not one of those things that is going to wind up being a rug pull scenario, oh no no. Talk to them, tell me what you think. Visit: cloudacademy.com/corey,  C-O-R-E-Y and tell them that I sent you!Corey: I know that I'm going to get letters for this. So, let me just call it out right now. Because I've been a big advocate of pick a provider—I care not which one—and go all-in on it. And I'm sitting here congratulating you on extending to another provider, and people are going to say, “Ah, you're being inconsistent.”No. I'm suggesting that you as a provider have to meet your customers where they are because if someone is sitting in GCP and your entire approach is, “Step one, migrate those four petabytes of data right on over here to AWS,” they're going to call you that jackhole that you would be by making that suggestion and go immediately for option B, which is literally anything that is not ChaosSearch, just based upon that core misunderstanding of their business constraints. That is the way to think about these things. For a vendor position that you are in as an ISV—Independent Software Vendor for those not up on the lingo of this ridiculous industry—you have to meet customers where they are. And it's the right move.Thomas: Well, you just said it. Imagine moving terabytes and petabytes of data.Corey: It sounds terrific if I'm a salesperson for one of these companies working on commission, but for the rest of us, it sounds awful.Thomas: We really are a data fabric across clouds, within clouds. We're going to go where the data is and we're going to provide access to where that data lives. Our whole philosophy is the no-movement movement, right? Don't move your data. Leave it where it is and provide access at scale.And so you may have services in Google that naturally stream to GCS; let's do it there. Imagine moving that amount of data over to Amazon to analyze it, and vice versa. 2020, we're going to be in Azure. They're a totally different type of business, users, and personas, but you're getting asked, “Can you support Azure?” And the answer is, “Yes,” and, “We will in 2022.”So, to us, if you have cloud storage, if you have compute, and it's a big enough business opportunity in the market, we're there. We're going there. When we first started, we were talking to MinIO—remember that open-source, object storage platform?—We've run on our laptops, we run—this [unintelligible 00:25:04] Dr. Seuss thing—“We run over here; we run over there; we run everywhere.”But the honest truth is, you're going to go with the big cloud providers where the business opportunity is, and offer the same solution because the same solution is valued everywhere: simple in; value out; cost-effective; long retention; flexibility. That sounds so basic, but you mentioned this all the time with our Rube Goldberg, Amazon diagrams we see time and time again. It's like, if you looked at that and you were from an alien planet, you'd be like, “These people don't know what they're doing. Why is it so complicated?” And the simple answer is, I don't know why people think it's complicated.To your point about Amazon, why won't they do it? I don't know, but if they did, things would be different. And being honest, I think people are catching on. We do talk to Amazon and others. They see the need, but they also have to build it; they have to invent technology to address it. And using Parquet and Lucene are not the answer.Corey: Yeah, it's too much of a demand on the producers of that data rather than the consumer. And yeah, I would love to be able to go upstream to application developers and demand they do things in certain ways. It turns out as a consultant, you have zero authority to do that. As a DevOps team member, you have limited ability to influence it, but it turns out that being the ‘department of no' quickly turns into being the ‘department of unemployment insurance' because no one wants to work with you. And collaboration—contrary to what people wish to believe—is a key part of working in a modern workplace.Thomas: Absolutely. And it's funny, the demands of IT are getting harder; the actual getting the employees to build out the solutions are getting harder. And so a lot of that time is in the pipeline, is the prep, is the schema, the sharding, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My viewpoint is that should be automated away. More and more databases are being autotune, right?This whole knobs and this and that, to me, Glue is a means to an end. I mean, let's get rid of it. Why can't Athena know what to do? Why can't object storage be Athena and vice versa? I mean, to me, it seems like all this moving through all these services, the classic Amazon viewpoint, even their diagrams of having this centralized repository of S3, move it all out to your services, get results, put it back in, then take it back out again, move it around, it just doesn't make much sense. And so to us, I love S3, love the service. I think it's brilliant—Amazon's first service, right?—but from there get a little smarter. That's where ChaosSearch comes in.Corey: I would argue that S3 is in fact, a modern miracle. And one of those companies saying, “Oh, we have an object store; it's S3 compatible.” It's like, “Yeah. We have S3 at home.” Look at S3 at home, and it's just basically a series of failing Raspberry Pis.But you have this whole ecosystem of things that have built up and sprung up around S3. It is wildly understated just how scalable and massive it is. There was an academic paper recently that won an award on how they use automated reasoning to validate what is going on in the S3 environment, and they talked about hundreds of petabytes in some cases. And folks are saying, ah, S3 is hundreds of petabytes. Yeah, I have clients storing hundreds of petabytes.There are larger companies out there. Steve Schmidt, Amazon's CISO, was recently at a Splunk keynote where he mentioned that in security info alone, AWS itself generates 500 petabytes a day that then gets reduced down to a bunch of stuff, and some of it gets loaded into Splunk. I think. I couldn't really hear the second half of that sentence because of the sound of all of the Splunk salespeople in that room becoming excited so quickly you could hear it.Thomas: [laugh]. I love it. If I could be so bold, those S3 team, they're gods. They are amazing. They created such an amazing service, and when I started playing with S3 now, I guess, 2006 or 7, I mean, we were using for a repository, URL access to get images, I was doing a virtualization [unintelligible 00:29:05] at the time—Corey: Oh, the first time I played with it, “This seems ridiculous and kind of dumb. Why would anyone use this?” Yeah, yeah. It turns out I'm really bad at predicting the future. Another reason I don't do the prediction thing.Thomas: Yeah. And when I started this company officially, five, six years ago, I was thinking about S3 and I was thinking about HDFS not being a good answer. And I said, “I think S3 will actually achieve the goals and performance we need.” It's a distributed file system. You can run parallel puts and parallel gets. And the performance that I was seeing when the data was a certain way, certain size, “Wait, you can get high performance.”And you know, when I first turned on the engine, now four or five years ago, I was like, “Wow. This is going to work. We're off to the races.” And now obviously, we're more than just an idea when we first talked to you. We're a service.We deliver benefits to our customers both in logs. And shoot, this quarter alone we're coming out with new features not just in the logs, which I'll talk about second, but in a direct SQL access. But you know, one thing that you hear time and time again, we talked about it—JSON, CloudTrail, and Kubernetes; this is a real nightmare, and so one thing that we've come out with this quarter is the ability to virtually flatten. Now, you heard time and time again, where, “Okay. I'm going to pick and choose my data because my database can't handle whether it's elastic, or say, relational.” And all of a sudden, “Shoot, I don't have that. I got to reindex that.”And so what we've done is we've created a index technology that we're always planning to come out with that indexes the JSON raw blob, but in the data refinery have, post-index you can select how to unflatten it. Why is that important? Because all that tooling, whether it's elastic or SQL, is now available. You don't have to change anything. Why is Snowflake and BigQuery has these proprietary JSON APIs that none of these tools know how to use to get access to the data?Or you pick and choose. And so when you have a CloudTrail, and you need to know what's going on, if you picked wrong, you're in trouble. So, this new feature we're calling ‘Virtual Flattening'—or I don't know what we're—we have to work with the marketing team on it. And we're also bringing—this is where I get kind of excited where the elastic world, the ELK world, we're bringing correlations into Elasticsearch. And like, how do you do that? They don't have the APIs?Well, our data refinery, again, has the ability to correlate index patterns into one view. A view is an index pattern, so all those same constructs that you had in Kibana, or Grafana, or Elastic API still work. And so, no more denormalizing, no more trying to hodgepodge query over here, query over there. You're actually going to have correlations in Elastic, natively. And we're excited about that.And one more push on the future, Q4 into 2022; we have been given early access to S3 SQL access. And, you know, as I mentioned, correlations in Elastic, but we're going full in on publishing our [TPCH 00:31:56] report, we're excited about publishing those numbers, as well as not just giving early access, but going GA in the first of the year, next year.Corey: I look forward to it. This is also, I guess, it's impossible to have a conversation with you, even now, where you're not still forward-looking about what comes next. Which is natural; that is how we get excited about the things that we're building. But so much less of what you're doing now in our conversations have focused around what's coming, as opposed to the neat stuff you're already doing. I had to double-check when we were talking just now about oh, yeah, is that Google cloud object store support still something that is roadmapped, or is that out in the real world?No, it's very much here in the real world, available today. You can use it. Go click the button, have fun. It's neat to see at least some evidence that not all roadmaps are wishes and pixie dust. The things that you were talking to me about years ago are established parts of ChaosSearch now. It hasn't been just, sort of, frozen in amber for years, or months, or these giant periods of time. Because, again, there's—yeah, don't sell me vaporware; I know how this works. The things you have promised have come to fruition. It's nice to see that.Thomas: No, I appreciate it. We talked a little while ago, now a few years ago, and it was a bit of aspirational, right? We had a lot to do, we had more to do. But now when we have big customers using our product, solving their problems, whether it's security, performance, operation, again—at scale, right? The real pain is, sure you have a small ELK cluster or small Athena use case, but when you're dealing with terabytes to petabytes, trillions of rows, right—billions—when you were dealing trillions, billions are now small. Millions don't even exist, right?And you're graduating from computer science in college and you say the word, “Trillion,” they're like, “Nah. No one does that.” And like you were saying, people do petabytes and exabytes. That's the world we're living in, and that's something that we really went hard at because these are challenging data problems and this is where we feel we uniquely sit. And again, we don't have to break the bank while doing it.Corey: Oh, yeah. Or at least as of this recording, there's a meme going around, again, from an old internal Google Video, of, “I just want to serve five terabytes of traffic,” and it's an internal Google discussion of, “I don't know how to count that low.” And, yeah.Thomas: [laugh].Corey: But there's also value in being able to address things at much larger volume. I would love to see better responsiveness options around things like Deep Archive because the idea of being able to query that—even if you can wait a day or two—becomes really interesting just from the perspective of, at that point, current cost for one petabyte of data in Glacier Deep Archive is 1000 bucks a month. That is ‘why would I ever delete data again?' Pricing.Thomas: Yeah. You said it. And what's interesting about our technology is unlike, let's say Lucene, when you index it, it could be 3, 4, or 5x the raw size, our representation is smaller than gzip. So, it is a full representation, so why don't you store it efficiently long-term in S3? Oh, by the way, with the Glacier; we support Glacier too.And so, I mean, it's amazing the cost of data with cloud storage is dramatic, and if you can make it hot and activated, that's the real promise of a data lake. And, you know, it's funny, we use our own service to run our SaaS—we log our own data, we monitor, we alert, have dashboards—and I can't tell you how cheap our service is to ourselves, right? Because it's so cost-effective for long-tail, not just, oh, a few weeks; we store a whole year's worth of our operational data so we can go back in time to debug something or figure something out. And a lot of that's savings. Actually, huge savings is cloud storage with a distributed elastic compute fabric that is serverless. These are things that seem so obvious now, but if you have SSDs, and you're moving things around, you know, a team of IT professionals trying to manage it, it's not cheap.Corey: Oh, yeah, that's the story. It's like, “Step one, start paying for using things in cloud.” “Okay, great. When do I stop paying?” “That's the neat part. You don't.” And it continues to grow and build.And again, this is the thing I learned running a business that focuses on this, the people working on this, in almost every case, are more expensive than the infrastructure they're working on. And that's fine. I'd rather pay people than technologies. And it does help reaffirm, on some level, that—people don't like this reminder—but you have to generate more value than you cost. So, when you're sitting there spending all your time trying to avoid saving money on, “Oh, I've listened to ChaosSearch talk about what they do a few times. I can probably build my own and roll it at home.”It's, I've seen the kind of work that you folks have put into this—again, you have something like 100 employees now; it is not just you building this—my belief has always been that if you can buy something that gets you 90, 95% of where you are, great. Buy it, and then yell at whoever selling it to you for the rest of it, and that'll get you a lot further than, “We're going to do this ourselves from first principles.” Which is great for a weekend project for just something that you have a passion for, but in production mistakes show. I've always been a big proponent of buying wherever you can. It's cheaper, which sounds weird, but it's true.Thomas: And we do the same thing. We have single-sign-on support; we didn't build that ourselves, we use a service now. Auth0 is one of our providers now that owns that [crosstalk 00:37:12]—Corey: Oh, you didn't roll your own authentication layer? Why ever not? Next, you're going to tell me that you didn't roll your own payment gateway when you wound up charging people on your website to sign up?Thomas: You got it. And so, I mean, do what you do well. Focus on what you do well. If you're repeating what everyone seems to do over and over again, time, costs, complexity, and… service, it makes sense. You know, I'm not trying to build storage; I'm using storage. I'm using a great, wonderful service, cloud object storage.Use whats works, whats works well, and do what you do well. And what we do well is make cloud object storage analytical and fast. So, call us up and we'll take away that 2 a.m. call you have when your cluster falls down, or you have a new workload that you are going to go to the—I don't know, the beach house, and now the weekend shot, right? Spin it up, stream it in. We'll take over.Corey: Yeah. So, if you're listening to this and you happen to be at re:Invent, which is sort of an open question: why would you be at re:Invent while listening to a podcast? And then I remember how long the shuttle lines are likely to be, and yeah. So, if you're at re:Invent, make it on down to the show floor, visit the ChaosSearch booth, tell them I sent you, watch for the wince, that's always worth doing. Thomas, if people have better decision-making capability than the two of us do, where can they find you if they're not in Las Vegas this week?Thomas: So, you find us online chaossearch.io. We have so much material, videos, use cases, testimonials. You can reach out to us, get a free trial. We have a self-service experience where connect to your S3 bucket and you're up and running within five minutes.So, definitely chaossearch.io. Reach out if you want a hand-held, white-glove experience POV. If you have those type of needs, we can do that with you as well. But we booth on re:Invent and I don't know the booth number, but I'm sure either we've assigned it or we'll find it out.Corey: Don't worry. This year, it is a low enough attendance rate that I'm projecting that you will not be as hard to find in recent years. For example, there's only one expo hall this year. What a concept. If only it hadn't taken a deadly pandemic to get us here.Thomas: Yeah. But you know, we'll have the ability to demonstrate Chaos at the booth, and really, within a few minutes, you'll say, “Wow. How come I never heard of doing it this way?” Because it just makes so much sense on why you do it this way versus the merry-go-round of data movement, and transformation, and schema management, let alone all the sharding that I know is a nightmare, more often than not.Corey: And we'll, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:39:40]. Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. As always, it's appreciated.Thomas: Corey, thank you. Let's do this again.Corey: We absolutely will. Thomas Hazel, CTO and Founder of ChaosSearch. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment because I have dared to besmirch the honor of your homebrewed object store, running on top of some trusty and reliable Raspberries Pie.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Catherine Monahon (producer of the wonderful Material Feels Podcast) shares their journey from breakup to new home. At the start of the journey was heartbreak. At the end was a celebration of the love that had supported Catherine all along the way.    Music by Terry Hughes   Links: Material Feels Podcast Rate This Podcast CXM Designs   Other episodes about making it through a hard time: The Un-Baby Shower Inviting Grief to the Wedding Full Transcript Monahon: When I got there and people were helping me with all my stuff I looked at the bed and it's like a different size bed than I'm used to, you know, sharing a space with another person. I was used to a larger bed. And I just didn't even have sheets to put on it. And she was helping me move and she was just like, "Let me run down the street to my house. I have an extra set of sheets." And yes, I could have gone to Bed, Bath and Beyond or ordered some sheets online. But in that moment, it was so bleak. Looking at that mattress on the floor that was this... the wrong size for a single person, you know? Or the wrong size for what I was used to. And she went down the street with... like within 15 minutes... materialized with sheets that she... I still have them... they're these dark, velvety purple sheets that I associate with that time. They're really soft and I will forever be grateful to her for that. So just people showing up in different ways, small ways that they probably don't even realize still.... I still think about it today.   How do we create ways for the people who care about us to show when we need it? When is it okay to ask for help? Does asking for help mean we are weak? Does it make us needy? We'll speak today with Catherine Monahon who asked for help when things were hard, and whose community showed up in a big way.   This is Shame Piñata. I'm Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.   So today we have a great story to share with you. It's a story of loss, of heartbreak, of healing, of hope and of gratitude. And not only gratitude but a brave showing of gratitude, a public sharing of love and appreciation. A ritual of love and appreciation.    You know when you go through something really hard and you dare to be real about how hard it is with your friends? When you dare to ask for help? Today we'll talk with Catherine Monahon who produces and hosts the Material Feels podcast. Catherine and I met through radiogines, listserv for women, femmes and gender non-conforming folks in San Francisco Bay Area who work in audio.    When I asked Catherine if they might like to speak about a rite of passage they'd gone through on Shame Piñata, at first they couldn't think of anything, but then they realized that the brunch they organized to thank the friends who helped them get through a breakup was a significant moment. We'll get into why and it was significant in a bit.    First, though, the journey. Catherine was 28 and had just been through their first major breakup. It was a time of uncertainty and pain. Not wanting to stay in the home they had shared with their partner, they struck out looking for a new place to live in the Bay Area, which was hard because housing is hard to find and because they were heartbroken. Catherine placed an ad for housing and that ad was seen by two good friends, Amos and Eirik, who hadn't even heard about the breakup yet.    Monahon: And it was actually an amazing moment because I was sitting with my two friends watching some live music outdoors and I remember I had looked up at the sky, and I was like, “I just... I can't imagine trying to find the right home for me right now. I just need something to fall into my lap.” And then I looked at my phone, and Amos was like, “Hey, I saw your ad. Like oh, my gosh, what happened between you guys? Do you need a place to land? You can live in our living room.”    Thomas: Wow! That's magical.    Monahon: I responded within 30 seconds. I was like, “Yes, yes. And yes!” Yeah. So I... I had a handful of people help me move into that living room for the indefinite future, you know, a couple months. And then I had some people help me move from that living room to where I live now near Lake Merritt.   Thomas: Nice. So your community really showed up for you.   Monahon: Yeah. I also, like, emailed 15 people, and I was like, “I need support!” Maybe not 15, maybe like 11... but for the first couple weeks, while I was sort of in shock, I had, by just by chance, three of my very close friends checking on me everyday, in but they would... it was weird. It was like they were coordinating with each other but they weren't. The rhythm of those friendships sort of kept me going for the first month or two while I was looking... because I was looking for housing. I didn't hear from Amos and Eirik for the first month of that experience. I was like sleeping on couches and like, yeah, so… And then I did, I sent an email out once I realized I had a place to live temporarily and people helped me go through stuff. I mean, I couldn't even think about all the crap I had to look through, like. They and they took stuff. Like I had one friend who was really excited about all of these things that I had that I was like, “If I look at this, I'm gonna cry” like, “I don't want this anymore”.    Monahon: That was a relief that they... she found joy in that stuff. So one person just basically helped me get rid of all my stuff.   I didn't realize at first that Catherine was basically couch surfing for the first month after the breakup. It was only in the second month that they found a place to land in the living room with their two friends. Here is a quick description of what life was like those two months in Berkeley.   Monahon: My time with Amos and Eirik was very enriching. Even though I was sleeping in their living room, it was a very cozy space, there were plants everywhere. And they are both very into food. And I had a pretty bad relationship with food at that time. I hadn't been eating from grief, and just in general wasn't really eating fresh fruits or vegetables. And they are both vegans. And they sort of reintroduced like, fresh, delicious, seasonal food into my life just because it was all around me and they would share with me. They had plants that Eirik adored and cared for, and we always would talk about the plants and notice their growth. It was a very zen and peaceful place to be. And they're both super sensitive queers who are totally down to hold space or emotions, which was a major added bonus. So during that time, I was basically going to school doing homework, crying in the kitchen, eating fresh fruit, looking at plants and searching for housing.   That sounds like a pretty good place to be doing the liminal space dance in, doesn't it? I asked Catherine if receiving that support from Amos and Eirik helped them feel ready to put the word out to a wider crowd, if it helped them feel that support would be there if they reached out.   Monahon: Yeah, yeah. And I think also with moving, I don't know.. You've... there are literal things to do. You know, “Put this in a box. Move this up the stairs”. And I knew that people were probably worried about me. I mean, this was... I was in a relationship for six years and we... these were mutual friends that you know. So yeah, I knew people want... people  would check on me. And I'd be like, “I can't deal with you. I want... I want you to be able to help me…” So I was like, I was like, and also moving was gonna be I had a feeling it would be really upsetting. So I was like, well, at least I can try to turn it into some kind of like, party not even… maybe party's the wrong word, but barbecue vibe.   Thomas: Right. Right. As opposed to just heartbreak and tears and Kleenex boxes lining the walls and...   Monahon: Yeah, and and most of these people who ended up at that, at the brunch that we'll talk about, they saw me in the... in those stages, you know. They... we had all been connected in some way, whether it was my heartbreak or something that they were going through. And I kept track of it too. Like I journaled about how each person showed up for me, and I really internalized those memories, like they were so that I they're so fresh. I kind of wanted to celebrate them, those people I mean, yeah.   Thomas: Yeah. So was the brunch a celebration?   Monahon: It was part... it was part celebration of, like how I felt each person had brought such special gifts to my experience and so different. And it was part... like, I've had that experience before I went to boarding school at a very young age so I've moved a lot. And I've always... I know what it feels like to move into a room, and then suddenly be like, “Well, I'm here,” like, “It's over,” you know? And that's awkward, that waking up. So I...I kind of anticipated that that would be even worse. So it was it was like part celebration part.... I didn't... I wanted that day to be a good day. And then it was also like a closing, I was like, “That time... Although I loved living with Amos and Eirik, That time is over now. The time of feeling ungrounded not knowing what's going to happen. Feeling like, I'm falling apart. Like, these people saw me through it and I want us all to, to like, kind of kiss that time goodbye.”   Thomas: That's awesome because it's really insightful of you because all these people have been, like watching you and supporting you and keeping an eye on you probably and all these things and, and it's so it's kind of like I can see it. Like if it's my story. It's like I'm getting to this place and I'm like, “Okay, I'm good. And thank you and you know, you can tone it down like 90% of how much you're worried about me now like I got this,” to kind of let them, like disengage.   Monahon: Yeah. And just kind of it's almost like a performance too because it was like, “Okay, you're doing it. You woke up and your new apartment. And... and you're gonna say thank you to all your buds and then you're gonna move on.” Whether or not that really happened, that it was still it... I think it... it worked a little bit. But then I feel likeI would remember the brunch, I'd remember those people and those moments like, it I felt like it was creating something that I could almost like a worry stone where I could like, go back to it.   Thomas: Nice. Do you have any mementos that you physically have from that brunch or that time?   Monahon: No, I think other than that page of my journal. Because I invited... I actually wrote their names down. I'm just gonna count them real quick. So I invited nine people two weeks beforehand. And three of them couldn't come. So the people who couldn't come, I texted them a picture of their part of the map that I had made. And I still, like thanked them and told them why... I even invited my friend Liz, who lives in Philadelphia. I knew that they couldn't come. But the invitation they got it.    Thomas: So what was the map like?    Monahon: So the brunch was kind of like: I had moved twice. It had been three months. And so the map that I made was essentially just a list of memories. Everybody had, like, you know, a bunch of green dots of like, highlighted dates. You know, August 22, we went camping. August 3, I had that meltdown in public and my brother gave me an omelette, or something. And so... if like my three friends who couldn't come, I took a picture of their part of that list I had made and was like, “Hey, you know, you really showed up for me in these ways and I really appreciate that about you.”   Thomas: Wow. That would be such a nice thing to receive, to have somebody like, remember some random thing that I did, or that happened between us like writing it down and putting a date on it and sending it to me as part of like a thank you, or acknowledgement. That's so thoughtful.   Monahon: You just don't know how big of a deal it is when you do something like that. Like for you, it might be a couple hours of your morning on a Saturday and your friend's cat has died. And for them, it's like, I'll never forget that Colleen showed up on this made up scenario. [LAUGHS] But like, yeah, I think, yeah, what? They got me through it.   Welcome to today's show! Whether this is your first or your 25th episode, it's always wonderful to have you along. If there is something changing in your world right now, some shift you're going through, know you're not alone. Shame Piñata will continue bringing you stories to inspire your own creative response to a changing self. Subscribe today in your favorite player!   Thomas: You said that you felt like something that was wrapped up nice and tight at the brunch.   Monahon: Yeah, it was a very emotional… it was a very emotional day. And I wasn't expecting it to be. Like when I had prepared to, like appreciate everybody in front of everybody. And I just wanted everyone to see everyone, like to know how amazing everybody at that brunch was and how much they impacted me. And so I like made a... I set a couple... I made it short, too, because I had one I have one friend who really doesn't like to be appreciated in public. So I really tried to do it like just short Cliff Notes/spark notes and it was wild to see people who like aren't necessarily tight. They are not close friends necessarily. But because we, it created this really sort of this like little bubble of like, trust and love. And my brother who, you know, doesn't really know my chosen family that well. He got really emotional and he sort of gave this speech at the end where he... he like cried. We're both cryers and you know, he was just like, “It means the world to me that Catherine has this support network...” And then he said a bunch of nice stuff about me and I was like, “This is not why I'm throwing this brunch.” And everybody's all, “Oh, we love you.” I was very mushy and gushy. gushy and it's not something I normally do. So, I guess, feeling held by like, it just felt very safe and I felt very present.   Thomas: Did you have a little bit of trouble taking that in at the time? Was it too much or was it okay?   Monahon: It was okay. Because nobody tried to... everybody was just kind of sitting with it, you know? It was because I think it was a brunch to acknowledge heartbreak and my empty new apartment room. So I don't think I think there was no, like... I didn't have to worry that anybody was going to be uncomfortable at the brunch.   Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I love this story. Because I love how much you're obviously taking care of yourself in it, you know, it's... I can see that you're honoring the people who helped you. And also, it was so bold of you to ask for help and to accept it. And then you had this whole brunch, which you could have just written them all, like, notes or emails or said thanks for something that you call them together and you put, you know, energy into it is just inspiring. And it's another example of how we can take care of ourselves through little things that we could call ceremony or ritual, or we could just not. But they kind of serve a purpose of, you know, of intention. Everybody knew what the meaning was of that whole time for you.   Monahon: Yeah, and I didn't really think about it like that until I listened to your show. Like, listening to the way that you talk about ritual and ceremony. And I started thinking like, What does that apply to my life? You know, as someone who doesn't… I... other than my art practice and creative endeavors, I don't feel particularly connected to it. And then I realized that the brunch kind of kind of tapped on that, or edged up against that, and overlapped with a lot of what you've talked about on the show. I was like, “Oh, that's what that was.” [LAUGHS]    Catherine is the producer and host of Material Feels, a podcast that explores the intimate relationship between artists and their materials. This means that Catherine speaks with artists about watercolor and clay, glass and wax. Recently they have been musing on and speaking about ritual as an art form.   Thomas: I know, you've been exploring ritual a little bit yourself on Material Feels and I'm curious, what has been moving for you about that? Or what have you noticed? Or has it... has anything shifted for you as you played around with it a little?   Monahon: I think one thing that I have noticed about myself and the way, like, my sort of ritual personality is that I really like... I like tradition and I like anniversaries. So you know, the day I dropped my first episode was like Valentine's Day and that's like a big deal to me. Valentine's Day is now always going to be a big deal about the podcast, about my creative love for the world and myself.    Thomas: Nice.    Monahon: But then, like, also, what I've learned as I'm exploring ritual and ceremony is witnessing and including other people. So, I've made art my whole life, but I've never I never included anyone else in it. It's always been very personal and private. But now with the show... there's this, like, sacredness to the audience for me. Like, whenever I start, whenever I start thinking about the next episode, like, organically thinking about it, I'm... I'm talking to my listeners in my head. So I think the ceremony of producing a show where I… I really want my listeners to be like intimately with me. And I think learning more about... like creating the container, as you say, sonically... I mean, that's been really cool to think about and try to try to move forward with.   Thomas: Yeah and Material Feels has so much sound richness and playfulness and it's... it's got such a unique container. It's kind of like, I just thought this... it's kind of like a... like a stained glass prism that turns different ways that... it's like, yellow here, and then blue here, and then opaque here and translucent here. And it's just... it's always changing as I listen to it, like the episode. And it's... but it's not like discongruent or whatever the word would be, you know? It's not like, “All these things… What? What's going on?” But it's kind of like no, no, it's it's art. And it just keeps changing. And it's such a unique format and it's so you.   Monahon: Oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that about the prism. That is really cool. I like that.    Catherine's story illustrates how taking a risk and getting vulnerable can not only open opportunities to receive support ourselves, but can provide our friends and loved ones with a chance to show up for us. And that's what we really want to do, right, show up and love each other? Because it feels good, because the struggles of the folks we love touch our hearts, and because we're all human and we all have something to offer, from carrying away some heartbreak-soaked stuff to bringing a friend a set of sheets.   I am super grateful to Catherine for sharing the ups and downs of their breakup journey and giving us a look into the brunch itself. I am also thrilled to have had a lot of time lately to talk ritual with Catherine. If you'd like to hear more of this conversation, told through the Material Feels lens, check out the latest episode of the Material Feels podcast, called Emotion (Ritual and Ceremony). It explores the elements, storytelling, and finding what needs to be moved.   Catherine is an audio storyteller with a background in art. They facilitate workshops and create podcasts with a focus on creative practices and art materials. Their writing about art, illness and disability has been published in The New York Times, WIRED Magazine and the Leonardo Journal. Learn more about Catherine's work at www.cxmdesigns.com.   Our music is by Terry Hughes. Please follow us on IG at shamepinata. You can also follow us on Twitter at shamepinata. Reach out directly through the contact page at our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the podcast on Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite player. I'm Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

The best way to learn something is by doing, which is a lesson that Thomas Lotrecchiano's father taught him early on. Thomas and his father started Omigo together in 2018 as an alternate route to Thomas going to school for an MBA, and in the years since, that lesson keeps cropping up. Omigo is a DTC bidet company, and like many industry disruptors, its biggest challenge is educating the consumer base and converting skeptics into loyal customers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Thomas explains how they have done exactly that by blending humor and educational content, building an infrastructure that allows them to ride the changing tides of demand, and by betting big on TV moving forward. Plus, Thomas shares some of the lessons he has learned from his father, who is an ecommerce gamechanger in his own right, having grown a small online business from a modest five employees to 250 in the early days of the industry.. Enjoy this episode! Main Takeaways:How Long Will It Take?: Getting consumers to adopt a new product, especially an intimate one, requires a great deal of education, patience, and listening. Just because your product works flawlessly and it has certain innate benefits doesn't mean that it will immediately be a hit. You have to invest in educating the consumer base and then listening to and incorporating their feedback into your products and messaging.Don't Overlook the Obvious: It's easy to fall in love with your product and spend time and money selling its unique features, but what actually makes people convert is if you can show them how to use it, how to install it, and lastly the value that can be derived from it. Those are the conversion areas that you should be laser-focused on, and highlighting any of the superfluous features can come later.Basic Building Blocks: There are three fundamental elements that DTC businesses need to start with before getting their company off the ground. They are: customer service, fulfillment, and a functioning, lead-generating website that has the ability to scale. Without these building blocks, your company is not ready to scale.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Thomas Lotrecchiano, the co-founder of Omigo. How's it going, Thomas?Thomas:It is great. You nailed the last name. Perfect.Stephanie:Yes. I'm so happy. I was looking at that like, "Oh, can I do this one?" So many tricky names on this show, but I'm like a 50/50 shot at getting them right, so it's all right. So I'd love to hear a bit about Omigo. I saw it's a bidet company, which was very exciting to me, surprisingly, because I've been to Japan before, and I remember entering the airport and going into one of the stalls, and it closed and music started playing. They had this beautiful toilet. I couldn't hear anything. I was in my own little spaceship. And the toilet was obviously a great bidet, and so I'm very excited about the world of bidets, but I want to hear a bit about how you guys even got into this.Thomas:I love hearing about people's first bidet stories, and they're always so different. A lot of people talk about Japan. Some people talk about [inaudible] or having to use their hand, or bum guns in Southeast Asia, or the traditional ones in Italy, and not having any clue how to use them. Bidets, bidets. So it started when my dad rented a new apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina, and they had an electric bidet seat there, and it was just like the ones that we're selling now. Very similar. So it was his first bidet experience, besides the ancient extra fixtures you see in European bathrooms that you might want to wash your feet in.Thomas:And he didn't use it for a month. Wouldn't touch it. My mom loved it immediately. And so, after some time, he warmed up and he sat down, used it. Basically, I like to imagine an epiphany where he sat down and some angelic music played and lights lit up around him and his life was changed forever. He wouldn't stop talking about it. I had been exposed to bidets in Southeast Asia. A little bit different than what we're selling now. But that's how both of us kind of got our start with a bidet, but the company came from when my dad just would not stop talking about these Japanese toilet seats every family gathering, whenever I was with him, I lived in the same city as him, and it just wouldn't wouldn't end.Stephanie:Yeah. Yep. Once you get that experience, I feel like it's hard to go back. I know when I worked at the main campus at Google, they were everywhere, in every bathroom. And to me, that's such a foreign concept, but there's so many different people there, that was just part of the norm. And I would always have friends come and visit me and family come on campus, and after just me being like, "Go try it. Don't be scared. You're going to love it," it's like it was a conversation for the entire week afterwards. So it was very life-changing. I mean, what's interesting, too, about your guys' company is that you co-founded it with your dad. Which I think is a very fun story and I want to hear a bit about that, because I see he has a big background in ecommerce, as well, and had a company that went from 5 to 250 employees, which you were working at as a teenager. So I'd love to hear a bit of the background there and what it's like working with your dad.Thomas:Yeah, absolutely. Super accomplished guy. Really happy to be working with him now. So just kind of how he and I got started, I'll fast forward to. There was a time where I was choosing a career path after I had done two years of service in AmeriCorps, which is a nonprofit, national organization: NCCC. And we had known we'd always wanted to work together. We're very similar people and we get along. We have a lot of the same thought processes. And so, it came a time where this bidet epiphany had happened, and he said, "Hey, I know that you're thinking about going to school for an MBA. Instead of getting an MBA, we're going to start this business together. You're going to learn more. You're going to actually get paid instead of paying. And it's going to start a new career for you." And I was game-Stephanie:Smart dad.Thomas:Right? Very smart dad. I trusted him, I believed what he was saying, and I knew from all of those years' experience, like you mentioned, that I was going to learn a ton. And so, the business that you referred to that he took from five to... I forget how many hundreds of employees, was called Canvas On Demand. And so, it is a digital or physical image-to-canvas art company, and when he started it, you only really found that in Walgreens. And so, he took it to the ecommerce space, which was... In 2005, selling stuff online was weird. It wasn't huge yet. You were still going to the store, picking things up. But I want to reel back just a little bit more. He started Art.com. He purchased the Art.com domain-Stephanie:Domain?Thomas:And started selling... Yeah, selling posters in 2001 with a different company. And that kind of set him on this online trajectory. Then, he launched into this Canvas On Demand company, which yes, I worked at as a teenager every summer, every holiday, I was probably the eighth employee, technically. From the beginning, I've been working with my dad, and I've definitely watched him run his companies and I've admired what he's done from afar and up close for years now, so it's great to work with him.Stephanie:Yeah. Very cool. So what does the separation of roles look like for what your dad does and when he's like, "And this is for you to run on your own"?Thomas:Yeah, so I would say that my dad is the big picture guy. He is really good at thinking outside the box, pushing the brand, and making sure that everything is in the right place, and then my job is running the day-to-day. So running the store, managing all of our agencies and merchants, and working on [inaudible]. And I'm really in the day-to-day of Omigo.Stephanie:Cool. And how challenging has it been to bring this product to the US, sell people on the benefits? How do you even approach that marketing? Because I feel like unless you've really tried it, it's pretty hard to convince someone who's never even thought about it to be sold on a product like that. So how do you think about introducing people to this kind of new product? At least in the US still feels kind of new.Thomas:Yeah, it's shocking. I still have to convince my friends to try it. I run a bidet brand and it's still work to get people that know and trust me to sit down and wash their butts. Washing your butt is such a foreign concept here and it is maddening, because, like you said, once you try it, it's almost impossible to go back. You have to get some sort of bidet in your home. And we knew it was going to be a challenge, but we know that that fact I just stated, once you try it, you'll never go back, and it's such a better way, cleaner way to go to the bathroom, that it's just a matter of time before it catches on in the United States.Stephanie:But it's been a long time. That's my thing. These have been around for [inaudible]. How much more time do we need? What kind of [inaudible] are you going to get yourself out there? What kind of marketing are you going to use? Are you going to pull a Poo-Pourri and really go hard with the unicorn type of stuff? Or how are you guys thinking about educating and selling this idea?Thomas:Yeah. Well, you need multiple people in the space to start disrupting and pushing this kind of taboo idea in people's faces, and what we've done is we took an educational approach. No one knows what Japanese bidet toilet seats are, and so we have this awesome product that does all these great things, makes you feel amazing, super easy to install, and that's the tactic that we went with was letting people know that it's not intimidating. So we use plain language to describe the installation. We let you know exactly how it functions. And then, along the way, we're using a little bit of humor and that expressive "how it makes you feel" experience, and try to get that across in our visual and audio cues.Stephanie:Yeah. And what kind of formats have you seen do best? Where you're like, "Oh, this one video that centered around humor did better than a pure educational one." What are you seeing connect with people, especially in the marketing campaigns that you're running?Thomas:Yeah. So humor has been a big one for us. We have one called "Bidet, Mate," and it's an Australian man and he talks about if you stepped in a lot of dingo dung, you wouldn't wipe it off, you'd wash it. So use a little bit of humor there, but he's also explaining exactly how this great product works, so it breaks down that wall of, "This is gross. I'm not talking about poop. But poop is funny, so let's make jokes about it." And then it says, "Okay, we're here. We're talking about it. Now, look at this awesome thing. Toilet paper is disgusting. You're reaching down and you're wiping yourself, so why don't you wash instead?" And so, [crosstalk] a good one. And an accent.Stephanie:Any accents you can get into marketing I feel like will probably have a good ROI. I don't know. Don't measure me on that, but it seems like it would. All right, so you're using humor. I sometimes feel like humor can go both ways though. You've got one side that can work really well, like I was saying, like Poo-Pourri and then the Harmon Brothers do a bunch of ad campaigns all around humor and a lot of them have done really well. But then, it also seems like it can be like a short blip of people are excited about the Squatty Potty, and then it's like, "Is anyone still using that thing? What happened to it?" So how are you approaching that balance between funny but then also, "This is something that you're going to keep for a long time"?Thomas:Yeah. So humor's a great attention-grabber. So I make you laugh. It's a little bit funny. You're interested in the product, and then we also have educational, but kind of... So I'll say I am in a video with my dad on YouTube and it is called, "Our Founder Spot and Why We Founded Omigo," and it tells you basically this story, and then, it lets us explain the product without being funny. And we think it's approachable and educational and real, coming from real people, not actors, and that seems to do extremely well combined with that humor. So I agree. It could definitely be flash in the pan and we've done funny stuff that hasn't worked, but on that front end, getting people's attention, humor does seem to work really well for bidets, specifically.Stephanie:Yeah, and I think that authenticity is definitely key, especially around a product that people don't really understand. And yeah, I'm even thinking, how do you guys lean into maybe user-generated content? Which to me, if you see someone using it that is like you, you're like instantly, "I'll probably give it a try, because you're like me and if you like it, I probably would, too." But for something like this, are your customers even willing to talk about it and get the word out there and help spread the message?Thomas:Yeah, so we have seen a steady increase in our post-purchase survey for friends and family, word of mouth. And that's exactly where it comes from: people that you trust talking about such an intimate topic. So UGC isn't always something that I'm going to be showing on my website, because it's true, I'm not going to be able to get the everyday consumer to send me a video while they're on their bidet, talking about how awesome it is. But when we do use that approach, it's been in the influencer space. A lot of people look at influencers as people they trust, guides in their lives, people they aspire to live like. Whether you agree or disagree with how people portray themselves on Instagram or social media, it's still a place for aspirational content and to look at people and see what they're doing. And we've seen some very good traction there, utilizing that influencer content elsewhere on our marketing channels.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative). What platforms are you working with alongside these influencers?Thomas:Yeah, so they post on Instagram and then we use whitelisting on Facebook and Instagram.Stephanie:Got it. Okay. And then, what are the results for that when it comes to conversions, and what does that funnel look like versus maybe just a typical ad out in the world or on YouTube, maybe running it against your video with your dad, like a very authentic company story. How do those two perform side-by-side?Thomas:Yeah. So we typically don't run those side-by-side or A/B test them. We kind of keep them separate. The best thing about whitelisting... Are you familiar with the concept?Stephanie:Yeah. Go into the detail, because I'm not...Thomas:Yeah, sure. So whitelisting content is working with an influencer where you get them to create some awesome content around your brand. You guide them and let them do their own thing, but then you technically have access to their account, and from there-Stephanie:Oh, got it. Yeah.Thomas:Yeah, you can use their audience and create a lookalike from it on Facebook and Instagram, and then re-target them with that content from the actual influencer. So that's where a lot of the power comes from is building those audiences on Facebook and showing them these people that look and think and talk like them, and then getting them to look at this product and say, "Oh, I've never heard of it. These people are using it. Hmm." It's kind of like that "this is everywhere" approach. You're going to get hit with a funny ad, you'll see my dad and I, and then you'll see an influencer with it. So breaking down those walls and making it normal is a big thing in the customer acquisition.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. Completely agree. So how do you even garner... I'm thinking about like, you have this product, and do customers give you feedback and do you let that influence the product? Or are you more kind of like tunnel vision? "We know it's good. We've been to Japan. We know what it needs to be like." How do you think about that product development cycle?Thomas:Yeah. The product is what the product is right now. We know that we have a great bidet seat, and we know that we have great bidet attachments, and we have faith in these products to perform extremely well. They're super high quality. A lot of people love them. When you're working with a product that 98% of Americans don't have in their homes, you're going to get a lot of feedback about that product in particular. We are always listening, though. It's not to say we turn a deaf ear to what people are coming back and mentioning about the product, because there are things you can change down the road. So it takes a long time to develop. Years and years. So being able to hear what people are saying, seeing patterns in their responses, will definitely be guiding our product development. But for me, listening to our customers at the beginning was more about why they decided to try the product, what they like about it, and what they were skeptical about, and then taking that feedback and putting it back into our messaging. So that was super important to me.Stephanie:Yeah. That's a really good way to view feedback, from all angles. What are some of the most surprising pieces of feedback, either before the sale or after, that you've received where you're like, "Oh, that's very interesting"? Where you actually maybe implemented it into your copy, your language, the way you educate people? What was something surprising, or more than one thing, that actually helped influence how you talked about it or sold it?Thomas:Yeah, so one thing that we hear a lot, and I love to hear it, is: "Why didn't I do this sooner?" And it's that sentiment where it's like, "Ugh, I've been living my entire life wiping with dry paper, and these bidets have been around. What was I doing before?" And so, we take that sentiment into our marketing now. And then, on the pre-purchase side, it really came down to listening the frustration points of what we weren't showing and telling people on our website.Thomas:So there are little complications with your seat size and shape and your plumbing fixtures, and it's a complicated world down there by the toilet. And I was looking at it from a world of head down in bidets and toilets, and I knew too much about toilets than I ever needed to, and to be able to hear a customer pick your head up and say, "Oh, well, I obviously need to show this information. Why wasn't I doing that before? It doesn't matter. Put it on there now." That always has been a winning tactic for us.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, it also seems like a good way, even around customer acquisition, building a piece of content of just, "How do I even hook this thing up?" I mean, even if they've bought it from a different brand or they're even considering it, I mean, that'd be my first question is, "Can I even do this myself? Do I need someone to come and install it for me? And what kind of things should I think about before buying something brand-new?" So it seems like a good content angle, too, to attract customers that maybe you wouldn't have otherwise.Thomas:Yeah. We put installation in a lot of our videos, and it's simple language, it's DIY, self-install, no special tools, no plumber required. Right? And that's kind of all you need to know. "Oh. I can handle it," is basically the message.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. That's great. So earlier, you mentioned working with agencies was a piece of your world, and that's a topic that... We've had many founders on here where some are excited about it, some are like, "It didn't go well." How do you view working with agencies? What things did you choose to maybe hire out? What did you keep in-house? And how do you keep a good working relationship there?Thomas:Yeah, so the agency battle is: it seems incessant, until you find an amazing partner. And we've really settled into a couple of great partnerships, and those are the ones that we work harder at because we like the people internally and the work that they do. We get along with them. We have similar values when it comes to business, and so we put in extra time and effort say, "Hey, we don't really like this right now. We would like to change it this way," or, "We would like to see more of this." And the ones that take your feedback and change are the ones that you're going to stay with, and those are the people that we continue to work with.Thomas:So it's not easy finding a good agency, and we've had agency turnover multiple times with Omigo so far, but settling into a great relationship is extremely fruitful; and it's still going to be work, but that's the approach that we've taken. And to answer what we have kept in-house versus kind of farmed out, we keep customer service and product development in-house. Super important to keep that close to home, understand that feedback loop of what are people saying, how can we answer their questions more efficiently, and making sure that when it comes to a plumbing product, they have a great experience talking to someone and getting their questions answered. So keeping that close to home is super important.Stephanie:Yeah, it definitely seems like a high-touch customer service experience that, once you get past that point, it can be an instant sale as long as you have a good lead in and know everything and their questions are all answered from the start much easier, and you have to kind of keep that in-house. I can see why. So getting back to you working with your dad, and he's done a bunch of cool things before, what are some of the lessons and insights he brought into the company that you're like, "Wow, that really helped get it off the ground," or, "These insights here or his experience here really helped kind of get it going"? What kind of things did he bring to this company today that helped you guys lead it to where it is?Thomas:Yeah, so after he sold and exited Canvas On Demand, he started to consult with other ecommerce brands. So he is the friendliest person I know probably, and loves being around people, talking with them, listening to them, helping them, so it was a natural fit for him to take this... How many years was it? Seven or eight years at Canvas On Demand, where ecommerce was changing. It was in such a growth stage. Everything was different year after year, and so he had to adapt constantly. And I think that really shaped his way of thinking about ecommerce and allowed him to go past this legacy concept of ecommerce, that you might get stuck if you started in 2001, and really grow with that channel.Thomas:So he took that into his consulting career, and so, for the six years in between his sale and Omigo, he was consulting with ecommerce brands of all sizes: $5 million a year to $120-150 million a year and everywhere in between. So what we took from his experience into Omigo was what he calls his "ecommerce playbook," and it was the fundamentals of where you need to start with a direct-to-consumer business. And the basics of that were: great customer service, like I mentioned, solid fulfillment,Thomas:And the fundamentals of a website, so that being: something simple and functional, having a great hero and landing page, having solid email capture, having all of your email flows built and all of your knowledge base in place and everything ready to scale, because something could happen overnight like it did with Omigo, and you have to be ready to go from 10 orders a day to 150. So he brought this ecommerce playbook and this really rich knowledge base and a lot of connections to the start of Omigo.Stephanie:Nice. And so, how many orders are you guys at today? You just talked about going from like 10 a day to a hundred. What does it look like today, and what did that process look like scaling to where you are now?Thomas:Yeah, it fluctuates. So it's been a funny year-and-a-half for Omigo, because at the beginning of the pandemic, the toilet paper shortage hit.Stephanie:Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.Thomas:Right? Forgot about that.Stephanie:Yeah.Thomas:What a crazy time.Stephanie:I like to forget about dumb things like that. We didn't actually have a toilet paper shortage, we just had a logistics problem. But okay. Carry on.Thomas:We had a hoarding problem and a logistics problem. Either way, it was great for the bidet industry. It was an odd time to prosper, when you had a lot of people going through hardships and a lot of unknown in the future, but we couldn't look at that in the moment because people needed a solution to the toilet paper shortage. And bidets are the best answer, so, "Hello. We're Omigo. We've been here. Welcome." And during that time, it was Black Friday every day for a week. And then, that lasted about a month and a half. We sold out. Sales tapered back down in the summer, picked back up during holiday paper shortage, and then kind of continued into the new year. And we're seeing kind of a mini decline right now, and a steadying out of how many purchases we get. So still trying to figure it out. We haven't cracked the code 100% and we're working at it constantly, but definitely going with the flow as far as when orders are coming in and when they're not.Stephanie:So what are some lessons or things that you're adjusting going forward now that you've kind of seen these fluctuations of demand and Black Friday every day for a week, and then tapering down again? What kind of things are you maybe adjusting going forward to kind of future-proof the back end as well to make sure that you can keep up with it when it's there and then still have your suppliers and manufacturers when it's not Black Friday levels? How are you guys thinking about that now?Thomas:Yeah. Well, after we sold out, we realized this could happen again, especially during the pandemic. It was super unsure times. So we really shored up our supply chain. We ordered a lot of product, and we have a lot of product, and we are continually ordering it. Because we know it's a matter of time until bidets are ubiquitous. I mean, I am confident in that. It may take five more years. It may take 20 more years, but there's going to be one day where bidets are everywhere. And our products, they're shelf stable. It's not like they're going to be going bad, so having that on hand, being ready for a boom, is one way that we're future-proofing ourselves.Thomas:And another way is just keeping everything tight on our website. We are constantly A/B testing and trying out new copy or new design to optimize how customers are coming in, learning about our product, and finally purchasing. So keeping everything tight on the website keeps us future-proof. And being direct to consumer, we have a great relationship with our distribution centers, so always knowing that we're going to have a distribution relationship where, "Hey, yeah, we're at X amount of orders today, but that could double in the next three weeks and we need to make sure that you're ready." So having the infrastructure there, as well.Stephanie:So where are you most excited to take Omigo over the next maybe three to five years? What are you guys working towards? What are you most excited about right now?Thomas:Yeah, I'm really excited about television.Stephanie:Yeah?Thomas:I think that it's funny, because you think TV five years ago, you're like, "Oh, TV is dying. It's all going to be streaming." And yeah, it is a lot of streaming, but it's still a traditional marketing platform. There are still ads on every streaming platform and cable is still a booming industry. It is a gigantic industry. A lot of people have cable, Dish, and the like, and I think that for a young direct-to-consumer brand, getting in front of that many eyeballs is really exciting for us. So it's not a new channel; it's just new to us.Thomas:We are going to be launching soon. Yeah, we're going to be launching soon and are excited about the results. We have some people that we know that are doing well on TV and we think that we're going to do well, also.Stephanie:Cool. And is it specifically focusing on cable? Which I do feel like a lot of people are kind of sleeping on that, but I also wonder if maybe it's a generational thing, where it depends on who your target audience is that you're trying to get in front of; where maybe people closer to our age, they might not have cable. They're probably Netflix, Hulu, everywhere else, YouTube. But then, when I about maybe my parents, for sure they still have cable, and they're probably not going to get rid of it for a long time. So which areas... Or are you exploring all of that?Thomas:Yeah, we'll definitely explore all of it. Streaming is great. We have those low-price bidet attachments at Omigo that start at $89. So great entry-level, great price for anyone that wants a bidet. And then, our top-of-the-line bidet is at $649, and we do see the demographic there swing older. And that's a demographic that is humongous in this country. A lot of them are still watching cable, like you said, so they don't know about these luxury bidet toilet seats. And if they see it on TV, I think that kind of awareness is just going to do good things for every bidet company out there.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, we'll have to circle back once you guys are live and [crosstalk] see you out there in the world on one of the channels.Thomas:You will.Stephanie:That'd be fun to hear the results and how it's going.Thomas:Yeah, so excited.Stephanie:All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Thomas?Thomas:Yes.Stephanie:Cool. What ecommerce tool or piece of technology are you most excited about right now that you guys are maybe experimenting with?Thomas:So we've been on SMS for awhile, but SMS has just been a great platform for us. Being able to get into people's pockets and the open rate and click-through rate has been awesome. So SMS is a killer. It's not going anywhere and we're super excited about it.Stephanie:Awesome. What's up next on your reading list or your podcast queue?Thomas:Let's see. Guiltily been learning more about crypto lately on my podcast queue, so trying to educate myself on not just kind of what's booming and busting, but the inner workings and how to actually invest longterm into that world. So definitely a little bit of crypto podcasts in there.Stephanie:Nice. Yeah. There's some good ones out there. Personal favorites.Thomas:I'll have to ask. Yeah.Stephanie:I'll just send some episodes your way that are good ones. When you want to get creative, what do you do to get into that headspace?Thomas:I turn off everything around me, because I'm a very distractible person, and I really put myself into the place of who this creative project is for. Put on a little different hat for email, put on a different hat for Facebook, and if I'm stuck, I leave. Wherever I am. I go outside and move my body. I'm a very active person, so being able to get some blood flow gets my creative juices going, too.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, same. Cool. All right. And the last one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Thomas:The next year: the continued at-home life. People are not going to go back to the office full-time. A lot of people are going to keep spending time at home. People are buying houses. So this at-home goods and everything that you can use around the house is going to be huge, because people are still shopping online. People are still getting everything shipped to their door. We're not going to go back to retail yet. I think that's going to be in the next year. A big one.Stephanie:Cool. All right, Thomas, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking about bidets and the fun world. Where can people find out more about you and Omigo?Thomas:Yep, so if you want to find out about me, you can find me on LinkedIn: Thomas Lotrecchiano. And if you want to find out about Omigo, you can go to Myomigo.com. That's M-Y-O-M-I-G-O dot com. We have all of your butt washing needs. Stop wiping, people. Wash your butt.Stephanie:Do it the right way. Come on. All right. Thanks so much, Thomas.Thomas:Thank you, Stephanie. It's been a lot of fun.

In the words of Nick Venegoni, “Initiation is a moment when you can step into the next level of power.” Nick compares initiation to leveling up, like in gaming. You gain a new power. What if this is true? What if we can reframe the challenges in our lives as initiations that not only help us get through the hard moments but also help us to level up?   Links: The Queer Spirit Podcast Website Facebook Twitter Instagram Rate This Podcast Music by Terry Hughes   Full Transcript In the words of Nick Venegoni, “Initiation is a moment when you can step into the next level of power.” Nick compares initiation to leveling up, like in gaming. You gain a new power. What if this is true? What if we can reframe the challenges in our lives as initiations that not only help us get through the hard moments but also help us to level up? This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we are going to explore a recent conversation I had with Nick Venegoni. Nick has been a guest on Shame Piñata and hosts his own show called The Queer Spirit Podcast. The Queer Spirit Podcast highlights conversations with artists, healers & activists who enliven, heal & empower the LGBTQ+ communities. In the following episode of The Queer Spirit Podcast you will hear a discussion focusing on ritual, initiation and change. Topics covered include the ritual I created to honor the 10 year anniversary of my father's passing, the first ritual I ever did, how rituals help us make sense of change and the power of initiation. We will also touch on coming out as one of the biggest queer initiations, my own coming out story and also, the story behind the name of the Shame Pinata podcast. Stay tuned through the end of Nick's show for a preview of what's coming on Shame Piñata this summer. And now, The Queer Spirit Podcast. Venegoni: Welcome to The Queer Spirit Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Venegoni. Here we have conversations with artists, healers, and activists who enliven the LGBTQ+ communities, and who empower our queer spirits to flourish. Before we get started with the interview, if you haven't heard, I've started a Patreon account for the podcast. Patreon is a way for you to help support the show and get special rewards in return such as a thank you shout out on the show, and an enameled button with the queer spirit logo. This year, I've also added access to videos of the podcast interviews and a free monthly live virtual sound bath. If you'd like to join in supporting the show, just go to patreon.com/queerspirit. You can also find the link in the show notes. Any Patreon funds remaining after the basic production costs will be donated to nonprofit supporting diverse queer communities. Once again that link is patreon.com/queerspirit. Thanks for your consideration. Venegoni: My guest today is Colleen Thomas. Colleen is a ritual artist and independent audio producer her podcast Shame Piñata focuses on creating rites of passage for real life transitions. Today we talk about the importance of ritual as a container and support for big and small changes in our lives. Colleen shares how she discovered the power of ritual to help her feel supported through life's challenges. She also shares some examples of the ways people have honored their relationships from the stories heard on her podcast. Find Colleen and her show at shamepinata.com. Venegoni: Hi, Colleen, welcome to the show. Thomas: Hi, Nick, it's so good to be here with you. Venegoni: Yeah, I'm excited to talk a little bit more about your podcast, having recently been a guest on it myself and share a little bit more about the vision that you're bringing out into the world. But before we do that, I wonder if you can just tell us a little bit about what inspired you to start a podcast about rites of passage? Thomas: Sure. Well, I guess it's sort of a roundabout answer. I have a very strong interest in radio and working in radio in some capacity, which there's a story around that too. But I'll just stick with this story. I was offered an internship with a local radio station and was so excited about it. But then I also started a new day job that exact same moment and I couldn't do both because one was 40 hours a week, and one was 20 hours a week and I was going to have a three hour a day commute so there's no way it was gonna fit! And so after about a year of getting my feet settled at the new job and learning all the new things with the commute and all the changes, life change, I found an audio coach and she helped me figure out a podcast project because I just wanted to be doing something. And I really wanted it to be about performance art, because I'm very interested in performance art and developing myself as a performance artist. But she said, “You keep telling me amazing stories about ritual.” And I decided… first I was like, “No… ritual... yeah, I do that all the time. I want to do this new thing.” And she's like, “No, no, I really think about it.” And then I thought about it and then I decided, “Yes, this is a thing. This is an important piece of my life. I have a master's degree in spirituality, I've put a lot of thought and energy into it. And I love to design ritual,” so I decided to make that the focus of the show. Venegoni: Great. So what is your history and your background with… or your just... your relationship with a ritual in general? Thomas: Well, I was an only child, I am an only child, so when I was a kid, I did a lot of things on my own. So I think a lot of my creativity comes from that. My friends say that I'm like, the most creative person they know. I'm like, sort of... that's like, “Oh, you're so creative.” They always say that. So I think I kind of had that already. And make believe it's been a really big part of my life, you know, I can see... I can entertain myself, I'm fine on my own. And I was religious when I was a kid but I wasn't... I guess really wasn't spiritual until I had sort of an awakening after college when I realized that my moon flow was a very sacred thing for me. And the time of the menstruation became a very big spiritual practice for me. And that led me to a school in Oakland, California, Matthew Fox's University of Creation Spirituality... well, that sort of spiritual, that awakening spirituality and me led me there. And then I got to focus on the blood mysteries for my master's thesis. So I got to really delve into the concept of the Red Tent during that time. And just sort of around that time, I just started, you know, honoring the new moon and the full moon and creating ritual for this and that and I just began to realize that rites of passage are super important, like whenever anything is going on in my life that you know is a little difficult or challenging, or I want my community around me... or it's usually for me, always things that nobody would understand. So like there's no ceremony for this weird thing is happening in my life, so I'm gonna have to create it. So that's kind of what prompted creating ceremony. Venegoni: Yeah. And for you what is important about creating some kind of ritual or ceremony for these strange or unique or significant things that are happening in your life? Thomas: Well, they're important, and they're usually scary and new, and I don't want to be alone in them. And they're all really important moments. And I guess it's basically I don't want to be alone. Venegoni: And even if it's something that's just happening to you, can you just share like how, by doing ritual, you don't feel alone? Thomas: Well, I usually do it in community. So that's kind of a built-in way. I do ritual by myself but lately, it's been more in community. I guess, what I do mostly when I'm alone, is I'm often planning something that I'm doing in community. So bringing people together... I just had a big ritual for myself about a month ago on the anniversary of my father's death, the 10 year anniversary of my father's death, honoring another step I felt I had taken in my own healing from that relationship. And it was really healing for me to plan it and to sense into what was changing exactly, and it was several things. And to honor... to figure out where those things wanted to go and exactly what would honor them. And exactly, then how would I bring community into that? And like, what would that look like? And it involved some jewelry, presenting myself with jewelry [LAUGHS] This is a typical theme for me - I have a whole bunch of significant jewelry. And I picked people to present me with the pieces. And those people, I gave them the full lowdown, “This is exactly what this means, and let's work together on how you will present this to me, you know, in ritual space.” And then I had... I also invited everybody to that particular ritual to bring something. So it's very important for me to have everybody's voice in the circle. And so everybody brought some kind of reading. Everybody got involved in some way. And the beauty of that is that at first I thought, “Oh, I'll just send out… please read that.” And then I was getting some… “Oh, that doesn't resonate with me... that doesn't… that feels weird”, or, you know, or “Can I read this?” and that was kind of I didn't want that. But then it actually turned into this really much deeper and richer involvement of each person so that they really showed up with this thing that meant something to them and then they contributed. So then it was like we were weaving, constantly weaving, this circle deeper and stronger with all of us. And it ultimately helped me achieve one of my big goals with ceremony, which is even if it's for me, for everybody to get something out of it as much as that's possible. And everybody always says things like, “Oh, you did this for us. This isn't for you, you engineered this for us” you know… It's like I'm always really happy when they they feel that way about it. Yeah, Venegoni: Yeah. Yeah. And you've used a word that I really resonate with when I think about ritual, which is weaving. You know, in pagan communities, when we talk about spellcrafting, we talk about weaving a spell. But even for those who don't resonate with the word spell, I do think even in ritual, particularly with other people, that there's this way that it feels woven together, like we all have a little a part of it, you know. I think about this idea of like the maypole at Beltane when people... everyone's holding on to a ribbon and they're all dancing together, and they're weaving this beautiful pattern around the pole. Or even if you're alone, and you are working with Spirit or other Deities, there's a way in which they are working with you and they're weaving this ritual with you together. And it could be the image I'm getting right now is, you know, weaving a blanket of protection or comfort around you if there's grief or sorrow, or some challenge happening. But the.. I really like that image and that sense of weaving. Do you have a special memory of one of your own rites of passage? I mean, you just mentioned this one about the anniversary of your father's death. But I wonder if there's something in particular maybe even like the first one that felt significant to you that really felt like, “Oh, this is for me, I'm really, you know, this works for me better than, you know, maybe this other religion that I was raised”? Thomas: Hmm. Well, I had a period of my life when I was just first in college, I met a woman who was a bi witch. And those both were new concepts to me - like as them as being legitimate was new to me. Like I had heard of bisexual people in my life, but it was always with, “Oh, yeah, that person is a little confused...” You know, like, it was never like, “Oh, that person's bi and they're cool.” or, “They're just a person”, you know, like, it was always like, there was a caveat that it was like - bad. And even from my gay friends that's what I was hearing. And later when I came out to some of my gay friends as bi, they were kind of like, “Oh, I'm sorry.” and I was like, “Just stop it!” So... but she was bi and so that was a little challenge for me, too. Like, you know, like, “Oh wait, she's really amazing” reprogramming you know, my brain. And then she was a witch and something about her being both challenged me in those ways at the same time. And I think I was always a witch and just didn't know it. When I was six or four or something like that, my mom made me a bad witch costume. The Wizard of Oz was big in our house. So she made me the bad witch costume. And the next year, she made me the Good Witch costume. And then I just, I literally wore them every year. I rotated the Good Witch, Bad Witch, Good Witch, just like and… I liked the Good Witch costume a little bit better because it had a like a princess... the hat was turned into like a princess hat and it had like a big piece of taffeta hanging down off the point, you know, so it sort of swirled around me. And so that felt very pretty to me, and soft, and blue was very blue. But other than that I didn't have a preference of the Good Witch, Bad Witch. And so I just feel like then later meeting this woman in college and realizing what being a witch meant to her being a pagan, earth based spirituality and learning what that was, that just felt like, wow, that makes so much more sense than, you know, the way I was trained to learn all the Christian things I was raised with. Those always felt very important to me, but I've never understood them and spent a fair amount of time banging my head against the wall trying to get them in. And it just never really it never fit. It never exactly made sense to me. And so then I met her and then I sort of moved into that space. And so that freshman year, I remember the spring of my freshman year in college, I remember, that was like a real time of awakening. And I was surrounding myself with pagan learnings and pagan experiences. And I had one, I don't usually refer to them as spells. Now, like you mentioned that word, I don't really resonate with that word. But when I first came to it, that word was used a lot. And so I was sort of involved in that word. And my first spell I did was it was this, like, “Let me be healthy and green. Love myself. Love the planet…” It was very, like, very, it was very good witchy! under a tree. And I just sort of like I read something out of a book, which is totally not the way I operate. Now, like I would never read something out of a book or a spell now, because it's like, “Wait, now what does that mean? And what was the intention behind that?” and I'm not going to read out of a book unless I really love it. But I was, you know, under this tree reading this spell, and it was something about having a green cord and tying it on a tree or something. And it was just basically a prayer. It was very simple. But I remember that as being a very profound moment of me moving into this nature-based place that felt so empowering and so lush and so real and immediate. Venegoni: So one of the things that you sort of tagline in your podcast as you want to talk to people about how rituals help us make a sense of change. And we sort of touched on that a little bit. But I'm curious, both through your own experience, and through the interviews you've had with people, like, how do rituals help us make sense of change? Thomas: Well, early on in my show, one of my guests, Betty Ray, she said, “Rituals help us create a container to hold the powerful emotions that come with change.” And that really, like I was like, Yeah. Like all my guests have been putting words to these things I've been feeling all this time and that is exactly… to me... that resonates for me. Because... if the other thing that I've been noticing is like if I'm developing this theory that we can handle change, and change is a very constant thing, but we don't like it. And we like to just tick tick tick tick along like normal and like, “Okay, I'm good if this like, you know, all these things in my life stay the same, and it's good, I'm good.” But then like something happens, then I go into this place of, “Oh!” and upset and fear. And it's like strong emotions. Basically like boom, strong emotions! So then maybe that's a situation... problems, not all of them. But maybe that's a situation where a ritual could help. You know, I was brainstorming last night, my next episode, which I'm thinking about calling, like, Do you need a ceremony? Or is it time for ceremony? Or how do you know you need to ceremony or something like that. And I was thinking about all the changes in our lives that happened, and maybe which ones of them, you know, how do we know if we want to ceremony around this or not? Like, like, if I need to move, maybe I don't have time for a ceremony because I'm busy moving so like, sorry, you know. But if somebody is that I love is sick and I can't be with them, maybe that's a perfect time for ceremony for myself, or to gather people around me to sit with me while I hold space for them, you know, across the miles or whatever is challenging. We can feel into like, “Would something be helpful? Would it be helpful to create a container for these emotions? Or would it just be helpful to like, write them all down in a journal and like, just put them somewhere?” You know, like, it doesn't have to be, you know, a zoom call with friends or people in my living room or you know, it doesn't have to be a big thing. It could be a very small, intentional act to help deal with a situation. Yeah. Venegoni: And I know that something You and I had discussed on your show a little bit was the concept of initiation. And I'm curious, you know, what sort of your ideas are about initiation, what initiation means, particularly in the construct of a ritual? Thomas: Well, you were the one who said that on my show, I thought it was Thom, but it was you. And it was really a magical moment for me when you said that I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is that's exactly…” Like I had been framing it like that, like, when I think of initiation, I tend to think of, you know, Imbolc, or, you know, joining a group and, you know, going through something... being initiated into, like, a coven or something official like that, like… Not just like, “Oh, I'm going into phase 27A of my life now” You know, and, or my relationship now, right? And so that's an initiation. So like that, that just struck me as like, wow, that's beautiful way to put it, because, especially if something is coming up that I don't want, you know, like, this thing is like, “Oh god, this horrible thing is happening in my life!” Like, you know, how, yes, I'm changing, I'm being forced to change in this moment. How can I reframe this as an initiation? Or how is it initiation, or what I want to claim and is one now, like, and what's being ignited in me what's being birthed in me and needing to deal with this change, right? And then, of course, the we can, you know, becoming 40, becoming 50, becoming 60, getting married, having a baby, all those things, you know, initiations into a new phase of life, it just seems to me like using that word initiation makes it, it just feels really different than saying, “I'm going into a hard thing or changing in some way.” Venegoni: Well, what I'm thinking about right now, as we talked about, is if you just take the word initiate, usually to initiate something means that you are doing it of your own volition. You know, you've talked about some of these other things that just kind of happen that we don't have control over like death, or the cycles of our body… you know, those kinds of things that often we know that they're going to come but we have to just prepare and deal with it and so let's just create this container to have to work through it more easily. But to initiate something means that you are doing it because you have to. So that was just something I just thought of now is like that's a way to sort of take the power back. And that's also the way that I think about initiation. So it's a moment when you can step into the next level of power. You know, if you think about it from a sort of gaming perspective, it's a level up. You gain a new power, and what is that power? And how do you really sink into that and hold that? Or what is that new tool that you may acquire through this process of the ritual and what comes after that? Thomas: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think so too. It's like a choice. Yeah. Venegoni: And in our culture, you know, there are certain things especially from a religious perspective that we do initiate ourselves, you know, as you've talked... mentioned, and you talk about on your podcast is weddings and baptism and other things. But, you know, I also talked to people about like an initiation, like a graduation as an initiation. Thomas: Definitely. Venegoni: You know, you are completing something, you are gaining this certificate or this diploma, that's gonna give you power and allow you to, you know, level up in your career or in your work or whatever it is that you do, and you can bring that out into the world. Thomas: Yeah, they often call it matriculation. You know, I had a situation in my school where somebody didn't have a diploma because they had matriculated; they were in a different system. They were like, “Well, you didn't graduate.” It's like... it’s the same thing! Yeah, but that word has like going on, that means going on finishing. So it's like it's a different way of... we call it graduation, but it's really matriculation, which is going on. Venegoni: Yeah, yeah. And as I think I talked about on your show, and I'll just mention it again here for folks, as I think one of the biggest initiations that queer folks go through is coming out, you know, coming out in terms of your sexuality or your gender identity. And it's also something that, you know, a lot of queer people... we have to continue to come out to more and more people as we move on and, and that there is a way in which it's looked at as something scary, or, you know, because it can be a significant change for people if their family or their community or their loved ones are not accepting that, they could be rejected or abandoned. But there's also a claiming of power that can happen with that too, like I'm stepping more fully into my truth and who I am. And there may be some big changes that happen that I don't have control over. But what are the ways that I can take this forward with more power and feel more solid and myself? Thomas: Definitely. Definitely. I feel like the coming out stories are very powerful to hear. And when we go to that place and queer community where people share their coming out stories, it's like... it's that deep, powerful sharing that happens within a group where everybody in the group, you know, gets it. And they've all got their own, like really deep well from it. And there's just a very personal place. And so obviously, hearing coming out stories for anybody would be powerful, hopefully. But within the community, it's like... it's all kind of like... it's just so much. It's so powerful. Venegoni: Yeah. Now, I've noticed that on your podcast, you've had a fair number of episodes where you talk about weddings. And I understand because that's probably the most common, you know, whether or not people are spiritual or religious, they still go through that ritual of a wedding, even if it's just going to the courthouse and signing a document. There's still something ritualistic about it. But I'm curious to know, like, if you've learned anything interesting or unique by talking to so many different people about their weddings, or, you know, if weddings have taken on a new meaning for you, now that you've heard so many different stories about it? Thomas: Well, I chose weddings as a focus for season one, because I thought, just like you said, it could be a good entry point for folks and I thought I might stick with a theme for each season going forward. And then I decided that I didn't know I could get enough stories about like coming of age for season two, or whatever. So maybe I just needed to kind of go generic, but I wanted that to be an entry point for people. And I talked about two different sorts of ideas behind rites of passage on the show. One is the ones that there are and there aren't party decorations for. That’s kind of the way I see it, like, there are party decorations for weddings, and graduations, and well... not exactly funerals, but that's accepted as like, you know, a rite of passage or community time around a significant change. And then there's the personal ones, like the one I'm talking with my father, you know, the 10 year anniversary of my father’s passing, like, there’s no party decorations for that, right? So I got to create it myself. So I sort of want to have those two branches constantly in the show, right? So… but to your question about learning about weddings, I've just been inspired by people who have done it their way, which is kind of... and I have sought out those people. “You did it your way. Come talk to me!” you know… And your handfasting with Thom resonated so much with what I did, in my own experience, with my husband. It was like pretty much... we did a very similar thing of involving the community, being married by everybody. We invited, you know, big, huge ritual, you know, in a big space, big… nobody's sitting in chairs, everybody's super involved the entire two hours, you know, like so it was a really... it was a joy to speak with the two of you, because it resonated so strongly with my experience which I still have so much good feeling about. You know, and there was one interview with Betsy Weiss, she and her partner, Brandon, they had not gotten married, they had a ceremony which was not a marriage. And that was so she could be connected with her family before her mother passed. So it was as if they were getting married - it was sort of hard to conceptualize. And her aunts like had to make centerpieces because they didn't know what to do. They were like, “We're gonna make centerpieces!” you know, we're just like… “Okay, you're not getting married, but we're gonna make centerpieces…” because it was such a hard time for the family and her mother was passing away. But it was like... they did a wedding right before her mother died but they consciously did not get married. And they had one everybody understand that, and everybody was really confused. But like, they did exactly what they wanted. In the end, everybody kind of got it, you know, and they had this lovely... different levels of the ceremony where the deeper ceremony was very intimate, it was just the family. And then they had like, another level where they had was sort of like a reception, but it was like a gathering of more people. And then another gathering of more people, like sequentially throughout the day not like another day. And it was just really beautiful, the way that they involved everybody at different levels, you know, in different ways around the ceremony that was super meaningful to them that people really didn't get, but they showed up for anyway. And they were just kind of trusting, “I think this is what you want…” you know, like… So it was just … that was the most unique one. But they've all been super inspiring in terms of everybody doing it their own way. And really, it's kind of soul searching in the process, because a lot of people in the interview share their process with me, you know, how did you get from here to there, you know, and taking it apart and really finding what sparked for them, you know, what does this need to be for us? How do we make it happen? Venegoni: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I like about that, and what you've sort of mentioned before, is that with ritual, it can usually be a lot more, a lot richer and more special if you are making it your own. You know, you talked about the first ritual that you did that you just kind of read out of the book, and you're like, “I don't really know, but I don't know how to do this. I'm just going to read something out of a book”, but now you only create it yourself. And that's one of the things that I talked to a lot of queer folks About especially queer couples or people who are in any kind of relationship, and they're like, “Well, I don't know if I want to get married…” or even if they do get married, like how they structure their relationship itself. It's like, you get to make it what you want. And I think that that something's unique that straight people can do too and they just don't think about it or know it. They just feel like, “Oh, I have to follow this formula,” you know? But you can make the ritual what you want it to be. It doesn't have to look like it looks in the wedding magazines or on TV, or that you can make your relationship look how you want it to look. And so, you know, that's just one of the things I think is really important to get across to all people, you know, just to keep sharing that. So I really like that, you know, that they created this unique thing for themselves. And like, this is not a wedding. I mean, it sounds kind of like a loosely, maybe a commitment ceremony. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I don't think they would have used that word for some reason, but I think you could, it was like an acknowledgement of their relationship. Yeah. Venegoni: It's an announcement of like, this is who we are, Thomas: What you just said, was making me think that telling people you can do... I do that a lot, you can do anything. You know, out of the box, it’s up to you. And yet people like, “Okay, if I can do anything, then what does that mean?” Like I mean that's like, “Jump off a cliff!” You know? There's like, you know… anything's possible and so it can be helpful to have, I guess that's kind of another thing I'm hoping maybe my show would fill or things like my show, it's like, here's a bunch of examples of things people have done. And like when I work with people to help them create a ceremony, I'll sort of feel into… “Okay, exactly, what are you looking for here?” and then like, then I'll just start throwing out… “Listen, I'm just going to dump a bunch of ideas out and you're going to maybe like a couple, you're maybe not going to hate a couple, whatever, I'm just dumping them on the table, and then you can just sort of flip through them. And if anything resonates, you know…” Then, because we need like some building blocks, when we go from a total structure to total nothingness, that doesn't work unless you really like... you've got a thread to build on, or you've already kind of picturing something, you’ve got a felt sense of what you want, and brainstorm. And all that… it kinda doesn't come out of nowhere. Like it has to be built. So... or has that you have to let it build, right? So it's like, we all need examples, like we all need that. Like, as a woman, I would say, we need that strong woman that we're like, that's a woman who's married, and she's still completely in herself. That... I like that and I want to build on that idea. Like, I did that in my life, you know? And so, like, we need examples, and we need ideas to kick around. Venegoni: Yeah, yeah, and that's, you know, one of the things I think is really great about your show, that it helps people hear, oh, this is something different and that's possible. And maybe I want to do something kind of like that, but maybe not exactly the same and I'll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I mean, to me, that's also a ritual is a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Throw it all together, and you see what happens. Thomas: Exactly and then you mix it all the people and yeah… Venegoni: And then the day of, you know, the magic comes together, and you're like, Oh, it's created something completely different. The alchemy of the ritual. Thomas: Exactly, yeah. You never know what's gonna happen. Venegoni: So Colleen, before we wrap up, can you share with us a personal practice or experience that has supported your career spiritual flourish? Thomas: You know, really, I would say, my mom. She... the short version of my coming out story is that my dad laughed, and my mom cried. And it was, you know, a hard moment. But then over the years, she became an advocate. It was like, extremely slow, from my perspective. You know, I would be at pride and I would see a PFLAG contingent and I would cry. I would always cry when I saw PFLAG because I just thought, “Oh my god, I'm so lost. My parents will never ever, ever, ever, ever be there.” And I just was just such a devastating to me that I mean, they hadn't been mean, they hadn't been cruel, but they were just never going to go there is what it felt like. And it mailed my mom one of the PFLAG books and I told her, “Listen, you got to find people to process with because I can't process this with you because I'm the problem in this, you know, equation for you.” And I sent it to her work because I didn't want like my dad to see it at the house. And she said she kept it in a drawer for a couple of years, I think. And then she read it. And then she found a PFLAG group in our town, which... Our town is very small so the PFLAG group was also like the gay group. So it was like both supporters and queer people. And there she met a woman who ran the Unitarian Church, and she was the pastor of the... minister of the Unitarian Church. She was a lesbian, and she thought she was amazing. And so then she joined the Unitarian Church... anyway, all this snowball effect, right? And that she was around a lot of queer people and, and then it... you know, years later, she sent me this picture of herself standing in front of the television. So my dad had taken it because my dad just watched TV 24/7 after he retired and, well that's not true but he was often watching TV. And so she stood in front of the TV. And she said, “Take a picture of me!” And she was wearing a like a sandwich board, like an advertising sandwich board that said, “I love my bisexual daughter”. And she was headed off to pride in some city nearby. And she said… she told me that she said to him, “There are five phases in, I don't know, acceptance or something”, you know. “The first is denial, that's where you are. The last one is advocacy, that's where I am!” And then she walked out of the room with her her sandwich board. You know, now she's still a big advocate when she can get out, she’ll go to pride stuff. And so she's jus... and she says to me, you know, it's really sad that my dad never really changed at all. And she said, “You know, it's really sad that your dad never really moved,” but she was just so… And, you know, and just knowing that when I was back at this Pride Parade, seeing the PFLAG, and it was just devastating to me, like, never ever imagining that she would end that there'd be any movement with them. It was just, she was really… She became a lot more comfortable with the witch thing too, eventually. So that was really scary, too. Of course, you know, we get it, we get a lot of messages about about witches that are bad. So she's continuing on an ongoing basis, being a very supportive person in my life. Venegoni: So one last question. Your show is called shame pan, yada. Can you help us understand what that's about? Thomas: Yeah, sure. So when I was coming up with names for the show, I was trying to think of like descriptive names, like, you know, reinventing ritual, things like that. And I was brainstorming with my husband, and he said, “Well, you could call it like blue dog. And it won't matter what you call it, as long as you then you know, put out your message and people associate your message with the words blue dog.” So he said, “So, you know, maybe think about that.” So I was thinking about that, and brainstorming with a friend at work. And I said, “Well, I don't know, like this blue dog idea. I don't know if I want to do that.” And she said, ”Well, okay, if you looked around, like what you do when you do ritual, and what do you see? You know, we don't see a blue dog, what do you see?” And I said, “Oh, I see a shame piñata because I had just done a ritual recently, which is how I had that job where I was with this new coworker on lunch talking about this, where I had been at my old job (and I'm going to do an episode on this, but I haven't yet) I had... I was at a job for 14 years and I stayed like 10 years longer than I probably should have. And each of those years, I ended up sort of dying inside and sort of a way, right? This happens. And when I didn't make the change I needed to make. And it got to a really critical moment and I needed to leave. And I had so many, so many, so many hard feelings. There were like 10 years of hard feelings about myself being at this job, which was crazy. And I decided that shame exposure was a tool I wanted to use, which is something I had learned about in therapy, where we talk about something we feel deeply shameful about in a safe place, with people who will be kind and not, you know, laugh and stuff. And so I created a ritual around... it was shame I was feeling about staying in this job. And I did a ritual around it and with some friends on on zoom. This was before the pandemic, but they were remote friends, I wanted to have them involved, just my like four closest friends in the world and... because I feel like, “I'm not gonna tell too many people about all this shame!” And so part of the ritual involves piñata that I bought on Amazon, that I put sort of the negative self talk... I just kind of let it all come out of my head and I pasted it all over this piñata and it was just all these awful words on this piñata. And I decided it was my shame piñata and part of the ritual involved finding it in myself to be ready to shift to like, “Let's make this change now!” And being not just an idea. It started with the idea, “Oh, I should go break the shame piñata.” And then it was like standing in front of the shame piñatawith a stick going, “I'm just… I want to die. I don't have any desire to actually do this.” And it was like, “Just let the ground open up and swallow me now. Whatever it is watching me like I'm still in it.” But then waiting, just waiting, just waiting and starting to hear this little voice say, “No.” It was very quiet. And then it got louder. And I just let it organically grow. And then pretty soon it was like “No!” and it moved into my arms. And then it was like smashing the piñata and then that magic happened, right? And then it like changed and shifted and a few other things in the ceremony facilitated that as well. But it was the like the moments, the ceremony was like the breaking of the shame piñata and it really worked. It worked. It got me like boom! out of that job boom! into another one really quickly. Everything just like lined up. It was one of those work rituals that like ended up working really well with the intention. So when I had that conversation with her, she said, “What do you see” and I said I see a shame piñata…” and nobody's gonna have that podcast name. Venegoni: That's true. It's a very unique and memorable name. Yeah. Was there anything inside the shame piñata? Thomas: Yeah, I had filled it with my favorite candy. And just as a side note on that was that I had, in my spirit of wanting everybody to get something out of their ritual, I had bought a separate set of little tabletop piñatas, these little tiny ones and I had asked my four friends who were participating in the ritual… I didn't want to tell them I was sending them a piñata, but I said, “What small thing do you like? What would be a nice small thing for you?” And one person wanted like bubbles that you blow out of a little tiny, you know, like in a wedding bubbles? One person wanted puzzle pieces. One person had told me some candy. So I stuffed these tiny little piñatas with whatever they wanted and I sent them off to them. And then I said, “Listen, you're getting this piñata, here’s this piñata. Everybody was to write something on their piñata that they want to let go of. And so then after I did my piñata, everybody did their own piñata. Venegoni: Nice. Thomas: We got to witness everybody you know, release a little something... because there's always something to release! Venegoni: So where can listeners find the Shame Piñata Podcast? Thomas: Anyplace you get your podcasts, it should be there. Very, very wide distribution, and definitely iTunes, Spotify, and then you can go to shamepinata.com Venegoni: And they can also find you on Instagram, right? Thomas: Yes, thank you Instagram and Facebook, mostly Instagram. And Twitter. Venegoni: Yeah. Well, we'll have those links in the show notes. Well, Colleen, thank you for being here and chatting about ritual and initiation and change and release and power with me. It's been a pleasure. Thomas: It has been Thank you so much, Nick. Venegoni: To find the resources we discussed today, find the show notes at the queer spirit.com and if you enjoyed the show, remember to subscribe rate and review on iTunes. This will help us reach and support more queer people all over. Thanks for listening and see you next time. You’re listening to a special edition of the Shame Piñata podcast featuring a recent episode of The Queer Spirit Podcast. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to share this conversation with you. If you are not already subscribed to The Queer Spirit Podcast, you can find it on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts. You can also find the show on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. See the show notes for links. And now, as promised, here’s a quick preview of what’s coming up on Shame Piñata in the next few months. Upcoming episodes will focus on reinventing ourselves, going deeper, everyday magic, releasing cords with a parent, and disability as initiation. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please visit https://ratethispodcast.com/shamepinata. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.  

When Reverend Tristy Taylor and her husband decided to stop trying to have a baby, she honored that loss with a special ceremony. During her time sitting shiva, "grief first" was her mantra. Then a dream inspired her to create a celebration of her decision to not become a mother.   Links: Tristy's Blog Post on The UnBaby Shower Video Tour of Grief Ritual Art Journal Tristy Taylor  The UnBaby Shower (KPFA International Women's Day Edit) Rate This Podcast Music by Terry Hughes   Full Transcript   Taylor: Yeah, it's a major life transition for women that's not acknowledged, you know, or talked about really.   Thomas: It's just like a failing, or a loss, or a...   Taylor: A giving up.   Thomas: Yeah, exactly.   On our journey through life, we will come upon moments that invite us to reinvent ourselves. Big changes can do this like moving away from home, getting married, starting a family or choosing not to start a family. How can we slow down in these moments and really honor what’s changing, really honor how we’re changing?   This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we’re going to go deep. Are you ready? We’re going to dive into one of those moments that’s really a rite of passage, an initiation, a change. One of those moments that ceremony is perfect for because it invites us to use all of our creativity and all of our heart. And what’s more, it invites us to use ceremony for what ceremony does best, to create the container to hold the strong emotions that come up with big changes.    Tristy Taylor joins us today to share the story of her unbaby shower, a three-part ceremony she designed when she and her husband decided to stop trying to conceive. She took her time. She followed the threads of what was changing in her and she ended up creating a beautiful ceremony that both honored her grief and was also a celebration.    Taylor: Yeah, I mean, I think... It does start with the journey my husband and I were on to make a baby together. And after trying the usual routes and discovering that nothing was happening, we entered the world of fertility treatments, medical intervention and started down that road, which included some pretty powerful hormone therapy that was... quite a journey to be on that. Basically, all my emotions were at 11 all the time. [LAUGHS] So like, you know, small inconveniences became like fiery, mountainous, rage-fueled tirades. [LAUGHS] And eventually did end up having a pregnancy, but then that pregnancy was... the pregnancy ended up being ectopic. So the fertilized egg and embedded in my fallopian tube. And, you know, we didn't know that and I ended up going to the emergency room one night with just intensive abdominal pain and they took one look at me and said, "You're bleeding internally, and we need to open you up immediately." And then that's when they discovered that... that my tube had ruptured... my fallopian tube had ruptured. And after that experience, we kept trying but it started to... all signs started to point to this was gonna be painful and challenging and not really get us where we wanted to be. And my husband and I talked for a long time about what that choice meant to be child-free. And he kind of took it in stride and sort of said, "Well,I'm gonna use that energy to do other things." And he, like started his own business and, you know, spent a lot of time away from me and away from home kind of diving into almost a little bit avoidant perhaps of his own feelings. But building this business that he'd always wanted to create and felt free to create now that we weren't trying to create a family and all the sort of pressures that might have come with being a parent. It kind of freed him up. And kind of the opposite happened to me where I just felt like my life had been pressed pause... like the pause button had been pressed on my life and I didn't know what happened next. And being someone who really tries to show up to what's happening in my life, regardless whether or not I understand it, I realized that I needed to honor this loss. So... and to really allow some space and time to feel the grief of the loss of being a mother and and even this particular pregnancy loss with the ectopic pregnancy. And being an interfaith minister, I read a lot about all sorts of rituals and I had recently read a really beautiful piece about the modern day of sitting shiva for someone who had passed away from the Jewish tradition. And, knowing that shiva means seven, seven days and I really like felt the like ritual power behind that. I mean, it's a ritual... but that seven days like I really felt how... to devote seven straight days to my grief where grief came first and nothing else had precedence over my sitting inside of my grief... My whole body just resonated with that. I just was like, Yes, that's what we're gonna do! And that's what I did. And I didn't, really... Other than my husband, I didn't talk to anybody. I ended up doing a lot of crafting, which felt really good. I ended up making these kind of heartfelt... heart-shaped sachets with like lavender and different herbs in them... calm... these sort of calming craft/sewing kind of stuff that would that was very focused, but I was also kind of putting my grief into these pieces that I was making. And yeah, it was... it was very powerful time and spent a lot of time in nature and just cried a lot. And didn't think about the future or what my life would look like, I just really tried to focus on the moment, which is challenging, you know. Our Western culture really pushes us to get over our grief as soon as possible and not to dwell and like... all of that stuff... When really, I think the more we can show up for our grief, the more can beautifully move through us. And we can truly let it go. We have to feel it first.    During the time of sitting shiva with her grief, Tristy had a dream. In the dream, she was out in the snow looking into a kind of hut, a hut that felt very ancient. Inside the hut women dressed in animal skins were gathered around a very, very pregnant woman, putting oils on her and celebrating her. There was a fire in the hut but Tristy was outside in the cold and she knew through the knowledge that comes in dreams that she was not allowed into the ritual because she was not fertile and she would be bad energy for the pregnant space.    Taylor: And I woke up crying, and hurt very hurt by the dream. And I also know from doing dream work all my life that no dream ever comes to hurt us and be like, "Look at you, you know, you're stuck, Haha!" You know... Our dreams always come for health and wholeness. And so I really sat with the dream. I drew pictures from the dream... I felt into it. And and the gift that came out of the dream, cause I do think all nightmares have a gift. The gift that came out of the dream was this idea for an unbaby shower. Because it didn't feel fair to me that I should be left out in the cold. And this transition that I was making is just as valuable as the transition of becoming a mother, the transition to not be a mother. And so I connected with two very good friends who are great ritual-makers and we started to piece together this whole ceremonial ritual around having this unbaby shower. And it started with the grief. It started with doing a grief ritual with these two women and really having their support and being in nature together, and making food together. And then that transitioned into this more celebratory shower-space where about 18 women came to my house and painted my body with body paints and gave me blessings. And it was so interesting because it was raining at the beginning of the shower ("the shower"). So we all had to like jam into my little, you know, 700 square-foot house. And then by the afternoon the sun had come up and then I was all like covered in body paint and we just went outside and we're just running around and it was so joyful. There was so much joy. And the way I kind of completed the ritual was making this dedication to being a creator, being a spiritual guide, being... offering my gifts to the world. If I wasn't going to be mothering a new life, then I would be holding this spiritual, creative space for others. And it always makes me think of that Dolly Parton quote, because she also couldn't have children. She tried and she couldn't have them and she just said, "Well, God just decided that I'm gonna be mom to everybody kids." You know, like, I just love that. And I love being, you know, an auntie to my friends', kids. And that feels really like a powerful and important role as as my auntie's were to me as a kid. So that's how that all came about.   Thomas: I love... I love that. I love... I love the way that you love ritual, and you lean into it and into your dreams. And I love your stories, because I love to hear you listening. The layers at which you listen inspire me. And remind me what you discovered about your grandmother and your great grandmother.   Taylor: Yeah. So my... my ruptured tubal pregnancy where I had to have emergency surgery was on March 3. And my... my mother told me that her mother, my grandmother, was born on March 3. And I remembered that her mother, my great-grandmother, died giving birth to her. So my great grandmother died on March 3 giving birth. And I had this emergency surgery that saved my life and I would have died through trying to become a mother. So there was this fascinating karmic Ancestral wound being healed, I believe. I didn't die, I survived. And I really do... from the ancestral work that I've done in my life, I've had visceral experiences. Because time is not linear in that world, like time is a spiral. It's past. It's present. It's future all at once. And so the healing that I did on that day and continue to do ripples back to my Ancestors. You know, and that's my female line. It's my mother's mother's mother, you know, that... all of that is relevant to my experience, you know. And of course, none of that was planned, it's just how it unfolded. It's one of those kind of magic, unexplainable moments, you know, where we've kind of put the pieces together afterwards. And it's like, oh, that seems significant! [LAUGHS]   Thomas: I've always loved the physiological connection that we have to our grandmothers, because... I always have trouble saying it... I... the egg that became me in my mother's ovary... that...   Taylor: ...was in your grandmother.   Thomas: ...was in my grandmother's body - yes!   Taylor: Isn't that amazing?   Thomas: It's so crazy!   Taylor: Yeah. Incredible. And the work they've done about how, like, the stress and trauma of our grandmothers are in those eggs within eggs, like we're literally physically inheriting that trauma. You know, which is, you know, powerful healing work that we all can do as women.   Thomas: Mm hmm. Absolutely.    Tristy's story inspired me so deeply because of the depth of her commitment to the process. Letting the grief ritual come to her, sitting shiva for the 7 days, then creating the unbaby shower to return to her society as a woman who will not be having children. Listening to her story reminded me of my own journey on the road to motherhood and my ultimate decision not to go there.    Thomas: I so appreciate hearing the story of the baby shower because I went through my own process of figuring out... of having a moment in time in my life when I needed to decide which way am I going to go - towards somebody who might want to have a baby or stay with somebody I really like a lot who's very clear they don't want a baby. And I was at the age where I had to pick. And it was a little hard, you know, because I had... You know, I felt like I was losing a lot. But then when I sat with it, and sort of took apart all the pieces of being a mom, I realized that I only wanted certain pieces that were definitely not... didn't equate with having a child or trying to have a child... it just was like, not my thing, even though I felt so much pressure to be a woman in that way. And a lot of, like, legitimate grief and loss when I when I walked away from it, which isn't something I ever thought I would feel but it was there. It was like, wow, okay, to go through these feelings. And my partner was, really, really there for me. And I sought out community, I put an ad on Craigslist for women who had chosen not to have a child who wanted to chat with me about it and I had like four or five women have conversations with me.    Taylor: Oh, I love that!   Thomas: You know, there's nowhere to go to find those women. So I found a few and that really helped me feel like okay, I'm not alone. And then I asked my mom, you know, what do you think? And she said, "You never wanted kids, even when you were a little." And I was like, "Oh, okay, that helps. Thanks." [LAUGHS] Because you know, figure there was some wisdom there that she might be able to give me, plus she never pressured me to have kids, which was immensely helpful on the journey to decide, you know, what was right for me. So I... I know a little bit about I didn't go through the journey of trying, but I went through the journey of deciding, you know, deciding to walk away. Actually, I just had a flash... My parents loved antiques and they had this antique cradle. And my mom lived in Italy before I was born and she kept beer in it and she said the Italian neighbor would always come in and... I guess he'd bring her beer... I don't know... he would come in the house and he would say, "Where is the baby?" And she'd be like, "It's the beer goes in the cradle." Because at that point in her life, she didn't think she was going have a baby because they had tried and tried and tried and tried and given up and then they had beer in the cradle.   Taylor: And then you're all, "Surprise!" [LAUGHS]   Thomas: TYeah. Hi. Move the beer, there's a baby now.    Taylor: That's amazing!   Thomas: Oh, thank you so much for sharing this story with me and with us. And I look forward to sharing out your blog posts with which has the some of the images from your journal and you have the video walkthrough of your journal that you kept during that time.    Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad to share it with you and anyone who resonates or is inspired to create their own ritual. And, you know, I mentioned the blog post, that part of it was inspired by a woman who had a ritual around starting menopause and what that meant to her so I really, I really love to encourage others to think about those major life transitions, like even like leaving a job and starting a new one or moving to another state, which I'm about to do, like, I've been thinking about, like, "Oh, I'm gonna be letting go of California, you know, and what does that mean, to me is born in San Francisco, and, you know, born and raised here. So I think there's lots of space for ritual in our lives if we make it. Yeah. If we have that conversation, we listen and respond.   Tristy Taylor is an Interfaith Minister and Ritualist, providing support and companionship to those that live on the fringes beyond traditional religion. She firmly believes that ALL people deserve to have rituals and ceremonies that honor life’s transitions, regardless of their spiritual beliefs. She has had major personal life experiences around grief and death and is comfortable supporting others during these very human experiences. You can find out more about her work at www.createwithspirit.com.   You can hear a longer version of this same interview where Tristy shares more about what her time sitting shiva looked like on the KPFA Women's Magazine Archives.  Look for the link in the show notes. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

Zach has the honor of having a conversation with Dr. Erin L. Thomas, Head of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Upwork, about organizational equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. She graciously shares some advice regarding what organizations can do during this time to at the very least reduce harm for their black and brown employees and talks a bit about how her perspective and focuses at work have shifted as this pandemic has continued. Check the links in the show notes to connect with Dr. Thomas!Link up with Dr. Thomas on Twitter! She's also on LinkedIn. Links in order:https://bit.ly/3c0BXKhhttps://bit.ly/3c7qhFELearn more about Upwork on their website. You can view their open positions by clicking here. Links in order:https://bit.ly/2TEC8Vnhttps://bit.ly/2A5X00WFind out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.https://bit.ly/2Ug4l5KHelp food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.https://bit.ly/2WD73UkCheck out our website.https://bit.ly/living-corporateTRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, everybody? It's Zach, and you know what? I'ma just go ahead and say it right now. It's also Emory. Emory, say something. [Emory breathes] That's just her breathing. Emory is, at the time of this recording, six weeks old. So we're here because I'm on daddy duty and my wife has to get some sleep. That's right. Husbands, help your wives, or partners rather, excuse me - not to be overly gendered on a podcast all focused on inclusion, equity and diversity. Help your partners, you know what I'm saying? Everybody, you know, they--one person can't do it all. Sometimes you gotta step in, and this podcast is great, and I love y'all, but of course I love my daughter the most. Well, I love my wife also. Let me not do any type of weird hierarchy right now live, like, a live-streaming conscience of thought on the podcast, but the point is you have responsibilities. There are things that take precedent. And look, we're in a new normal, so I'm just here. Where was I? Right, Living Corporate. So look, Living Corporate amplifies and centers black and brown voices at work. Why do I say black and brown and not, like, people of color? Because I want to be very explicit, we want to be very explicit, with what our mission is. So we aim to center and amplify black and brown identities, marginalized folks, folks on the periphery, in the workplace, and we do that how? We do that by having real talk in a corporate world. Now how do we do that? We do that by interviewing incredible leaders cut from all type of cloth. And, you know, we've had executives. We've had professors, entrepreneurs, public servants, activists, civil leaders, elected officials. We've had all types of people, artists, and today is no different. Today we have Dr. Erin L. Thomas. Dr. Thomas is the head of diversity, inclusion and belonging at Upwork where she leads diversity, inclusion and belonging, or DIBs. She leads the strategy implementation and coaching for all of Upwork. Prior to Upwork though, Dr. Thomas was a managing director at Paradigm, a diversity and inclusion strategy firm where she partnered with companies to embed DIBs into organizations through culture transformation and people development. Prior to Paradigm, Erin held positions at Grant Thornton LLP, Argonne National Laboratory developing D&I strategies, programming and metrics. Her work has been featured in Fast Company and the New York Times and recognized by Forbes, Human Rights Campaign, the National Association for Female Executives and the Equal Opportunity Magazine. She holds a PhD in social psychology, a Master of Philosophy in social psychology; a Master of Science in social psychology; and a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and international studies from Yale University. She is accredited, y'all. Okay? Don't question us, okay? We're coming to y'all. We bring y'all heat rock every single week, and the heat rock we bring is because we have guests that have heat rock. I'ma say heat rock again just so y'all get the point. Yes, I'm turnt up. Yes, it's a Tuesday. Who cares? Erin, what's up? Welcome to the show. How are you doing?Erin: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Hi, little baby Emory. I am so excited to be here, and I want to give you a number. So I'm really into, during COVID times, anchoring, you know, "How are you doing?" on a scale. 1 is, you know, "We've got to get out of here and get some more support." Like, "We're not doing well." 10 is, you know, "COVID what? COVID who?" But I think, like, if you're a 10, you also probably need some external support. Zach: Facts. [laughs]Erin: And I think today I am... I'm, like, a 7, 8. I'm very excited to be chatting with you. What's your number?Zach: That's a really good question. You know, I don't know. So it's interesting because your scale, I don't know how it accounts for, like, other things, right? So, like, I'm also here with, like, a six-week-old baby. So maybe I'm, like, a--so, like, coronavirus is not, like, at the top of my mind because I'm trying to focus on keeping this thing that looks like me alive. Maybe I'm, like, a--I'd probably say I'm, like, a 7, 8. Like, I'm pretty good. I'm happy, right? Like, I mean, life is good. The new Drake album--well, not the album, but a little collection of loosies came out recently that was very good, that I enjoyed. You know, my favorite shows are still coming on. I've caught up on some anime. So I'm keeping myself well-distracted.Erin: [laughs] That's good. I think distracted is good. I think--I don't know, I think in the beginning days of all of this it felt, for me at least, a little weird to compartmentalize, or I felt a little guilty, but I actually think that's incredibly healthy, you know, to find moments of just pleasure and delight. That's all we got, right? That's all we got.Zach: I mean, this--the reality is that before this pandemic, like, I was already a homebody. Now, people at work--like, people who know me from work would--they may not know that, because, like, in person, like, I'm a fairly gregarious guy. But, like, you know, people are complex, right? I think, like, we create a lot of these terms and things that aren't really academic or scientific just to kind of better compartmentalize people, like, "You're an extrovert, you're an introvert." It's like, "I mean, I enjoy people, but I also enjoy being alone." Like, I enjoy being at home, being with my wife and now my kid. Like, I'm fine with that. But I'm glad, I'm glad that you're excited. I'm excited and in a good place as well. You know, this would be interesting to do again, like, if our numbers were wildly different, right? So, like, you're a 7, 8, I'm a 7, 8, but if I was, like, a 2, then, like, I wonder how the dynamics of this discussion would look, especially considering what we're talking about.Dr. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think then--and this has happened to me at work, right? Like, I come in low and someone else is high or vice versa. I think then that's the--I mean, that's the point of it, right? It's a moment of pause to figure out what do you need to put aside or do you need to get off this call or how can I support you and give that person who's lower an opportunity to either just share or not or articulate more. I just think it's a great window into "How can we work together towards whatever it is that we need to achieve?" And if now's not the time, fair. You know? We gotta go and come back together when we're both in the right space. I think that happens all the time, we just don't often put numbers to it, right?Zach: I agree, I agree. So look, that actually is a really good segue for us to get into this. Like, this pandemic, it continues to expose and exacerbate all types of inequities, from social to governmental and of course workplace, just all across the board, and I'll tell you, frankly it just feels overwhelming for me to think about holistically, let alone try to address, and so I'm really curious about just, like, considering your role with Upwork, I'd love to hear how your perspective and focuses have shifted as this pandemic has continued, and considering your level within Upwork and, like, the organizational power that you wield by way of your level, I'd love to hear about how power and influence has shaped your praxis.Dr. Thomas: Yeah. Whoo, this could take the whole hour, which, you know, happy, happy to unpack it for that long, 'cause it's deep. It's deep and very real. Like, the quickest answer for me is not that much has actually changed about the objectives that we set out to achieve for this year. How we go about them certainly has had to stay agile and nimble, but in the work that I do that's always the case. I always like to be super responsive to context and not get so [prescriptive?] about how we execute but to kind of keep our eyes on the prize, and so from my personal vantage point, I--especially during the beginning days of this--have never felt more critical than I do right now. You know, I think there's so many external conversations and great thought leaders who have articulated this better, what this crisis has really done, like most crises, is magnify fractures, gaps, inequities, that already existed, and so I've used this really as an opening to accelerate my platform and the work that I'm doing for marginalized folks at our company. So just to dig into it, you know, I did a couple of tactical things once it became clear to me that, you know, "This is serious. This is not the flu. This is gonna change everyone's lives forever," and I don't think that's an overstatement. So once that reality sort of set in, the first thing I did was I revisited these operating principles that I had crafted when I started at Upwork. So I joined the company in December of 2019. I'm only about weeks in, and there's been a lot of change since then, internally and obviously externally, but as a team of one and as the first DIB leader in our organization, I thought it was really important for me to just get anchored on what [?] and, you know, use that decision framework for really [advertising?] how I [fell?] in my role. I think, especially when a role like this is new or especially when someone comes in with a multi-disciplinary background [or] a very strategic lens, folks don't necessarily know what the role is and they kind of fill in their own blanks and make their own stories. So that was important to me, and I revisited those once we started quarantining just to make sure that they were evergreen and [stood up?] in this crisis, and they did, thankfully, and I can put [?] on my name. There's only four, and everything we do is, you know, it's systemic, so #1 is account for the systems and structures we're operating in, and that's, you know, systems and structures within our company and certainly externally as well. So that's #1, definitely holds true today. #2 is everything we do is tailored to the most specific population or the most specific point in the employee experience as possible, and so it kind of goes back to how you introduce the podcast, which is it's basically about centering. We have to get specific. We have to get articulate and discrete about what problem we're trying to solve or what opportunity we're trying to seize, and certainly during public times that's been really critical, and I think that principle holds up. The third is active. So I really wanted to mark that for myself and for others. You know, there's no passive way to do this work. Like, we're gonna have to change some things, and, you know, I think that's intuitive, but also [?] to declare. And then the fourth thing which is super critical for me, and this is where I see a lot of DIBs or DEI, whatever acronym you want to use, professionals flounder a little bit, is being pragmatic and being compelling and cohesive and telling, you know, one story that folks can get behind that also makes sense in the context of the day-to-day decisions and work that they're doing, and I think too often DIBs work kind of exists in a bit of a vacuum, right? It's a little bit of a tag-along or an extra-curricular, and I think that's the piece, you know, during corona times, that I've had to really get critical, even more so with myself, about "[?]," right? Like, do people have the capacity for this new thing or this new structure or this new effort and just really kind of giving grace to the folks who have to carry forward on the strategies, who have to, you know, change their behaviors, because it's a lot to ask even in the best of times, and I want to push and, again, lean into this comfort, but also be gracious with the fact that folks are dealing with a lot right now. So that's one of the things I did, was just, like, double-check on the way that we're going about this work. So relevant during this time. Another thing was just re-prioritizing some of those actual objectives. There were just, like, a couple that, even before corona, were nicer to have, but now it's clear that this is not the year to be working on the frills. It's really--we gotta stick to the essentials in terms of our strategic goals. And then the last thing I'll quickly say is I actually really leveraged the fact that it seems like most folks are becoming kind of armchair experts in academiology these days, right? Like, I'm learning more, more about viruses and how they spread, and I think there's some really interesting--and if I thought about it hard enough there could be a poem out of this, but, you know, I think there's some really interesting overlays between what we're seeing with the virus [Emory makes some noise] and how I think about people and the fact that--hey, Emory! The fact that we are all connected, we're all inter-dependent, and we need to center the most vulnerable. I think, as a society, that's becoming more and more clear, just with the true facts that are coming out from COVID, but it also I think has been what activists and DIBs practitioners have been saying for, you know, decades, and so I think, at least in my company, it sort of seems like there's this window of opportunity to seize on this understanding of centering and equity and disproportionate impact that folks are getting externally and [?] that same framework and understanding through the work that I do internally. I just think folks are grasping it a little bit more easily now than they might have been before this. So that, for me, has been exciting.Zach: That's awesome. And yes, hello, Emory. But no, you're absolutely right. [laughs] You know, what I find curious about this time, or intriguing even, is that because of the real impacts that this pandemic is having with folks that look like us and that don't look like us and the frustrations that come along with that, it's creating avenues for people to have even more frank conversations and to really kind of, like, get past some of the jargon and, like, these super long monologues about whatever and really get into, "No, how can we actually create impact and change and help? Because there are people who actively need help," and I think that's--and I try to be, like, a silver lining type of person, so, like, that's--so I would say that is something that is a positive out of all of this. I do think also, to your point around DEI practitioners, I do think that there's a bit of a gap when it comes to, "Okay, how do we transition from--" And I've talked about this with some other folks in the past. I think we're now doing a decent job of, like, talking about the historicity of oppression, or we'll talk about systemic inequities in, like, these very, like, high level systems that almost seem--like, we speak about them almost, like, in the abstract, right? So we'll say, like, "Well, you know, black men, they have disproportionate--they're targeted by police and da-da-da," and it's like, "Okay, that's true," and I'm not being dismissive of that. "Let's talk a little bit more about the systemic inequities in your workplace though," right? Like, "How can we transition these conversations to be a bit more practical and targeted to the reality of your employees?" And, like, that's--and I get why, you know, there's a variety of reasons why we don't necessarily have those conversations when I don't think we necessarily know how, but then two, like, it's increasingly uncomfortable to have conversations about actual power in your workplace, because then we start looking at individuals, right?Dr. Thomas: Yeah. I mean, it's hard, or maybe impossible, not to take, you know, a conversation about power and privilege personally, but at the same time I think where I've seen the most effective work, where I've done the most effective work, is where we actually sort of meet somewhere in the middle. It's about what roles or positions do we hold, how are those products of a greater societal system, and given the seat we're in--it's not really about us. I think it's really about the position. But given that we fill it, you know, what is our responsibility? To disrupt things that before now we weren't aware, you know, we were products of, or now that we are we realize we have a bit of an urgency to leave a legacy or leave things better than where we found them, and I think that's where the activation can happen. That's where we can get [?] without guilting people, right? Without making them defensive. I think it's just the reality of, "Oh, this is all by design, and we're sort of products of this greater architecture. So now what are we gonna do about it?" And if we're not gonna do anything, that's fine too, but then we should stop talking about it. Right? So, like, that's fine. I don't--[laughs] I want to be clear that I don't judge or begrudge that. It's fine. You know, companies and leaders can make those choices, but then stop talking about it. That's where--right?Zach: Yes. That's my rub too. At a certain point it's like, "Look, I'm tired of us talking about diversity being our strength and there not being anybody that looks like me that actually has any type of authority or power." You know, "I'm tired of us always--" Like, not shoehorning in, because no disrespect. We talk about gender in these very, like, binary, exclusionary ways without being intersectional at all with race or sexual identity. We talk about sexual identity in these binary ways without including race. We ignore any race trans identities, particularly trans black female identities. So, like, if we're gonna do this, let's do it. If we're not gonna do it, let's not. It's 2020. Rona or no rona, let's just--let's just be honest. [both laugh]Dr. Thomas: I agree. I mean, you know, that's where folks get disillusioned. That's where, you know, when the word doesn't match the deed, it reads as inauthentic because it frankly is, and I think most companies or leaders within them would be honestly better served to talk a little less about diversity, about inclusion, about equity, [then keep on?], or to raise--you know, raise the bar for themselves, but this weird in-between is just not working, right? It's not working. It's frustrating the folks who are most impacted. And then we see the results, which is very minimal quantitative gains when it comes to actual representation within the workforce. So these things all [?] together. They all relate, so yeah.Zach: They do. Now this is me going off the chart, but it just popped in my--not popped in my head, 'cause I think about it a lot, but we didn't talk about it for this interview. We gotta have you back, Erin, 'cause I really want to talk about in group, out group dynamics and the pressures that marginalized people in positions of authority have to, like, toe the line in that regard or how much they push against to then create inclusive workplaces for people who look like them. 'Cause, like--no, and I recognize that's a big topic, but, like, I just want to say this 'cause it's on the top of my heart and my mind. Like, I've noticed--and I've had these conversations, like, with black folks, like, off the record, right? So, like, in consulting, you know, there's all these different tracks of leadership, and, you know, the highest up is typically managing director or partner, and I've talked to some black partners who I really respect and everything, and I'm like, "Look, how many of you do you meet?" 'Cause the people that I talk to, like, they're with it. Like, they're conscious. They genuinely care. They try to use their access, power and privilege, relative power and privilege, to help other folks that look like them--and I'm talking, like, two people, right? [both laugh] And I asked them like, "Yo, what's going on? Like, why are the rest of y'all a bunch of Clarence Thomases up here? Like, what is this?" And so we had this whole frank discussion about it, but I really want to have you back on, because, like--I don't know. I feel like you and I could have that conversation, but I want to have it because, like--and I had this very... it was not uncomfortable. Wait, let's pause. Everybody stop, everybody. Y'all should know by now. This is, like--we're a couple hundred episodes in, hundreds of episodes in actually of Living Corporate. Y'all know I enjoy awkward conversations, so this exchange I'm about to explain to y'all was not awkward for me. It was awkward for them, okay? It was not awkward for me. So, you know, I had this conversation, and--[Emory makes noise] Oh, goodness, my daughter is loud. Hey, y'all. Y'all, check it out. Y'all hear these vocals by Emory. Don't play. No labels, but, you know, we'll make a SoundCloud soon. So anyway, I was talking to this person and I was like, "Look, the reality is the folks in power only let a certain amount of us in these spaces, okay, and when you see us in these spaces high up, like, to find somebody that looks like us in those spaces who genuinely care, who are not closing doors behind and who are speaking truth to power--" Again, I'm not asking you to come show up in a Kunta Kinte shirt. I'm just saying if you could just--[Dr. Thomas laughs] Okay? If you could just, you know, act like you're black, act like you recognize, you know, experiences. To find those types of people, it's like finding a unicorn with gold teeth, you know what I mean? It's crazy. Dr. Thomas: Yeah, and it's hard for me to speak to personally simply because my role is diversity, right? [both laugh] I'm not here as a [?] professional, I am a diversity expert and researcher. So that's, I guess, a privilege if you will that I hold as a leader in my company, and I recognize that. It was true in my last role too. I was in a consulting firm, and I was on the leadership team, but we were a diversity consulting firm, right? And so even in there you see some of that where, yeah, I had to really reconcile with the fact that I was doing this work and certainly had more latitude to, you know, speak that truth to power than I would if I were in another profession, and at the same time even I find myself vigilant, of course, and protective, of course, of how much is too much, you know? Where do I strike that balance of advocating in ways that people can hear versus that active, you know, operating principle that I called out earlier, you know, [?] folks that healthy discomfort. It's tough. It's a whole level of calculus that I have become I think decent at. I think also though I always--and, you know, we should talk about this another time because we can go real deep into this, right? I always view this dance of, like, on the one hand, any professional--especially any leader--is context switching and code switching all the time, right? Like, that is effective leadership, right? That's effective, but yet when you're a person of color, when you are black--which I can speak to--when you're brown, I think it creates some compunction of, like, "How much of this is playing the game that anyone would play and how much of this is selling out?" And I don't have an answer. I think everyone has their own barometer for that, but it's something I challenge myself on all the time. Like, "What of this feels like me and what of this feels like I'm becoming complicit in something that I don't subscribe to?" And, you know, sometimes I can't really codify when I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I know what I'm feeling, and that's when I have to really check myself and really examine if how I'm showing up or what I'm sharing or advocating is really serving my key audience, which is our marginalized folks at our company.Zach: Yo, so thank you for real. Sound Man, put a little round of applause in here for Erin answering this question off the fly, 'cause we did a pre-production. This was not part of the questions, but it was just something on top of my mind. Thank you so much. Now, look, let's get into this though, because we're just now really at the top of the conversation we planned on having. So look, at the time of us recording this, over 32 million folks have applied for unemployment benefits. At the same time, many companies are trying to retain their employees and keep them engaged in new working environments. I mean, there's even a lot of unofficial conversations happening on companies having pressure to not let go of too many minority employees in the name of just optics and potential legal ramifications. I'm curious, can we talk about this dynamic [?] where tensions may be, particularly for black and brown employees.Dr. Thomas: Sure. I mean, when I hear this question I'm really thinking about it as what are black and brown workers maybe thinking, feeling, [?] with individually if they are still employed, and I think I've seen both--at Upwork it's certainly [?] as well, 'cause obviously I consume research, I consume, you know, thought leadership externally, and I think there's a picture that's sort of forming for me in my head, which is there's a range I think of emotional reactions for folks who are still employed, and I think at its best folks are feeling really grateful of course. Right? It's sort of--going back to operating on a scale of 1 to 10, it's, like, yeah, a very compartmentalized 1 to 10, but, like, we're grateful for the blessings we have, and I think certainly that is true for folks who are in jobs with fair pay and fair benefits. They want to give their all to their employers because their circumstances could be so much worse. And I think especially in, you know, people work, in mission-driven organizations and purposeful organizations, that's incredibly true, you know? I'm seeing more and more come out, for instance, among mental health professionals who are burning out 'cause they're just giving it all. And I think, you know, in normal times it's hard to strike that balance of taking care of others versus yourself, and I think especially now, if folks are lucky to still have some semblance of job security, they're giving a lot, and they're very grateful. I think, towards the more extreme ends of this spectrum of reactions, I'm also seeing certainly some guilt, some comparative guilt, you know, around--there are folks out there who are on the front lines, who are essential workers, who have lost their jobs, and so "Maybe I'm not feeling great about what I'm doing or where I am, but, like, how could I complain?" Right? Like, "How can I explain when--maybe things aren't ideal, but I have so much," and so that's where I start to get--yeah, I get a little nervous about that, but I understand it, right? Like, you won't want to rock the boat right now when employment is so precarious. I think there is, you know, on this extreme end of the spectrum, a bit of grief happening, just--obviously black and brown folks are more likely to have people around them succumbing to this virus, falling ill, being unemployed themselves, and so, you know, folks are at work but breathing different losses that some of their counterparts may not be breathing as directly. And then there's backdrop of fear. Like, even if you feel secure in your job for now, this whole situation is obviously unprecedented. We don't know what will happen to the economy, we don't know what will happen to our companies. And again, the research shows that black and brown folks, and women, are the first to get furloughed, to get laid off, to your point, and we know in secure times black and brown folks are more heavily scrutinized, and I think folks who are still working feel a microscope that may or may not be on them, but it's impossible not to be vigilant about if you're gonna make it out of here with the job you went into this crisis with and if that job is actually the right job for you or if you're feeling beholden to, you know, a vulnerable time in your life. I think it's a very confusing time, but it all goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is that it's just magnifying some of the sentiments that folks are always feeling. I think there's an overlay of, like, true uncertainty that is pressing, but I think folks are really trying to just get through the day, trying to keep the jobs they have, and, you know, trying not to encounter some of the secondary traumas that come when you lose that job, that security that you have in place. So I'm seeing a whole swirl of things, and the way they look to me basically is people are tired. They are exhausted. They are burning out and, you know, I think they're taking care of themselves a little less than they used to because it feels a little risky to do that.Zach: You segued really well into my next question about, like, black and brown employees and their experience, and it's funny because I was talking to a colleague about this, talking to a workplace colleague about, like, my own experiences, and I was telling him about, like, you know, "I've had some stresses because I've had some friends who almost fell victim to COVID-19," and, you know, they recovered, you know, but I also have acquaintances whose family members have passed, right? So you're right, like, what's on my mind and the stresses and the drama is--just what's on my mind is different throughout the day, or maybe it's just a little more real. Let me not say that other folks--'cause there have been white folks dying from the coronavirus too. So it's like, you know, not about trying to dismiss one to uplift the other. It's just like, "Okay, this is real for you, and it's even more real for me." And so I'm curious, like, you know, can we talk a little bit about what organizations can do during this time to at the very least reduce harm for their black and brown employees?Dr. Thomas: For sure. I think, you know, first I want to say 1. thank goodness for your friends who have recovered, and 2. I'm very sorry for the losses that are close to you, and to your point, I'm sorry for that for everybody. This is--you know, the backdrop to all of this is just... it's really hard to fathom honestly. It's hard for me to, like, wrap my head around the devastation this has caused, and it's just--it's so painful, and I'm sorry that everyone is going through this in some way, 'cause everyone is affected and is going to be in some way by the physical toll that this is taking on people. To that point, you know, I think there's a few things that orgs can do kind of from the top down. I think there's also things certainly that any individual colleague or manager can do for the folks around them, but I'll talk about this on a couple of levels. Sidebar, I always think of the Nick Jonas song "Levels" whenever I'm thinking about how to approach this work. Zach: Now, hold on, what is the Nick Jonas song--'cause see, the only song I know by Nick Jonas is that "I still get jealous--" You know what I'm saying? "[continues singing]."Dr. Thomas: It's about--I'm trying to think of how it goes. It's about "love has levels." "Levels, levels." I don't know the words.Zach: Come on, Erin. Come on. I hear you with the vocals.Dr. Thomas: I know. I gotta find it, but I like him, and I know he has a song called Levels, and I always think about it. It's like, "Oh, levels, take me higher--" I don't know. Levels take me higher. I don't know. It's a terrible song.Zach: It's a terrible song? Okay. Did he have a black choir in the background? [both laugh] Yo, when Nick Jonas came out there, boy, he came out there and they was like, "I still get jealoous." I was like, "What is going on? Jesus ain't got nothing to do with this." I mean, he's a jealous guy. Anyway, moving forward... [both laughing] Dr. Thomas: I'm gonna have to find it, I'm gonna have to sing it and just send you a little audio clip, 'cause I can't even remember the tune, 'cause it's not a memorable song. Love you, Nick.Zach: Okay. [laughs]Dr. Thomas: You know? From the top down, companies, and really I'm talking about leaders, people leaders, diversity leaders, can take care to do a few things. One is--and I saw this during the earlier days of people sheltering in place. I think it's leveled out maybe a bit, at least from my vantage point, but in the beginning there was a lot of corporate messaging--and I think you even see this still in commercials--of, you know, "We're all in this together," and on its face, cool, cool, cool. Like, right, you want to build camaraderie, you want to cohere folks around a shared sense of community, but if you beat that drum a little too long, especially within your company, I think it can kind of err to the side of being colorblind, right, and really minimizing the disproportionate strain that there actually is on employees of color and on black and brown folks. So I think striking that balance of certainly we're all in this together, and also there are distinct experiences that we know folks are grappling with. It's an important sort of dual approach to make sure that your folks who are black and brown know that they're seen, know that they're recognized for their unique experiences through this and the unique impacts that they're encountering. So that's one thing, just sort of take that multicultural lens to those company communications that you're sending out. I think another thing is, you know, wherever you can creating space for employees to uncover and share more about their specific experiences. So, you know, we did this back in April at Upwork. We partnered with Michelle Kim, who I know is a friend of the pod.Zach: Come on. What's up, Michelle J. Kim? Shout-out to Awaken Co. What's up? [imitating air horns]Dr. Thomas: [joins in, Zach laughs] She's awesome, and we sort of co-facilitated I think a 75-minute conversation with leaders of our Asian ERG(s)--and this is before the data about [?] were coming out with regards to black and brown folks, and the conversation was mostly around--in terms of the media--anti-Asian bias and discrimination and racism, so we seized on the timeliness of that conversation and built out, you know, a virtual forum for our employees to share what they were concerned about, what they were hearing in their day-to-day lives and interactions, and to scale out from that, from those stories to give more context to, you know, why are we seeing this, what is this. This is not unique to this moment in time. This is, you know, a pattern repeating, and really come from a place of urgency to educate our folks a little bit more about historical context and why it matters now and certainly what they can do to disrupt and call out bias in themselves and discriminations they're seeing externally. A third thing is certainly around mental health and benefits and resources to aid folks, you know, who are experiencing trauma and grief. And I don't think this just has to be if you've lost someone close to me. I think in general folks are really struggling obviously with anxiety and insomnia, and there's data coming in on that, and so making sure that your company has the right level and amount of bereavement and [leave?] policies, but also just coaching and support with your EAP if you have one or your [?] and getting them at least to a basic level [?] of providing that 1:1 support for folks and hopefully referring them out to medical providers if they need, you know, more professional coaching. And then the last thing, you know, is related to what you were saying about terminations and lay-offs and all that. Every company should be auditing the decisions they're making this time when it comes to furloughs and risks, making sure that they're looking at that through an equity lens, making sure that they're not just focusing on people's kind of positions in the company or tenure, because black and brown folks tend to sit lower in the org and tend to be earlier in their tenure, so really taking a performance-based approach to that analysis can be helpful in getting out of that sort of hamster wheel of, you know, first in first out when it comes to black and brown folks. So those are, you know, top-down, structural considerations that companies can be taking every day. I think on the ground, peers and managers can be doing some of what we've already role modeled in this conversation. Check in with people, my goodness. Just think about who you haven't spoken to in a while. Think about who you might normally pass at, you know, the water cooler or the coffee station, and if you haven't chatted with that person 1:1 in a minute, you know, Slack them, ping them, whatever you've got in terms of internal messaging systems, call them, pick up the phone and check in. Just see how people are doing, and make sure you create, you know, space to actually hear their answer and to actually respond. So, you know, as opposed to the normal "How's it going?" Like, really ask the question and really wait for the answer and be with that person with whatever they share, you know? I think it's really about those personal connections that we probably took for granted when we were back in an office setting, for those of us who were in offices, and that are harder to actualize now, right? Like, we're all home. We're all behind screens, and so there is no organic water cooler conversation. That means we have to make a little bit more effort to reach out to folks and to show them that we care about them, that we're connected to them and that we're a resource, or that the company has resources, for them whenever they need.Zach: I love it, I love it. Now, Erin, you know that we're about real talk in a corporate world like I said at the top of the show. For the executive leader to this and perhaps rolling their eyes or maybe, like, speed listening and being like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this. Yeah, yeah, yeah," like, you know, just kind of being dismissive as to the gravity of this and why this matters. Why should folks have an inclusive and equitable lens during this time, and then what's the potential fallout in your mind if they don't?Dr. Thomas: I have so many reactions to this question. I think, first, if someone's rolling their eyes to this, which... yeah, could be true, I'll just, like, emphatically say that's not my key audience. Like, I'm just not--you know, I'm really not, and I'm just not. That's not my sweet spot. There were times earlier in my career where that was, where I found it fun to really push the business case for equity, business case for diversity. I am not interested in that anymore, and thankfully I'm in an org where I don't have to do that. Like, kudos to those of you who are doing that. Frankly, for me personally, that's ineffective, right? You know, people do not make decisions based on facts or data. So, you know, I could stand here and talk about the research that's been done. You know, Great Place to Work just did a study around [?], right, and they showed that those who focused on inclusion did better during the recession and saw more returns. So, like, I could share all those stats and all that, but it doesn't matter. Like, if you're rolling your eyes, if you are asking why or if, like, it's probably not gonna happen for you. Just call it, you know--because you can Google it, you can ask Siri, you can ask Jeeves, you can do whatever you want to do, but, like--Zach: [laughing] Not ask Jeeves.Dr. Thomas: [laughing] You can go back to Jeeves if you have to, but my point is that this is not how people make decisions. People make decisions emotionally. They do what they want to do and then they rationalize it later. That is a fact. Zach: That is a fact.Dr. Thomas: You know, it is. And that's science. [laughs] And so if you're not in any way emotionally inclined to care, nothing I say, no data point is gonna make you care. So I think that's one thing. Like, I am impatient and frankly, especially with, you know, decades of research that I think has really caught on in industry, we're just past the point of denying the value proposition of diversity. I think it wastes calories. I think it distracts from the meaningful question, which is, like, how we can go about it during this time or, you know, what we should be prioritizing. I think those are fair questions, but if you're, for whatever strange reason, listening to this podcast and rolling your eyes, like, I don't have time for it. I just don't. I don't. And already that was too much time explaining how I don't have time for it. So that's my quick reaction to that. [both laughing] I think those who are kind of, you know, struggling with how to go about this or where to maybe invest less or more, that's incredibly fair. I think that is incredibly challenging. So what I would say there is just--it goes back to what we talking about earlier. I mean, this is life and death, right? It does not get more real in terms of a call to action than this moment in time, and I think every leader should sit themselves down and critically examine what legacy they want to leave, you know? This is the time for companies to demonstrate what living values, living their values actually looks like. It's their time to pressure test, you know, different mantras that companies love to share around, you know, authentic selves at work, or "Bring your whole selves to work," because you saying--it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. You're saying those things... well, here's your moment. Here's your moment to [know?] what it really means, and that's true at the company level, it's true at that personal level. Hopefully you're inclined to want to dig more deeply into what actualizing on your commitments actually could mean right now, and I think that's the place to get really serious about where are the potential gaps between what you're saying and doing. And as we said earlier, you know, if you realize "Huh, even in these most dire circumstances, we're maybe not really ready to make the investment that we might need to actually move the needle or create the environment that our people need." Okay. That's a tough conclusion to come to, but okay.Zach: That's responsible though, right?Dr. Thomas: Right. Yeah. I mean, and then okay, well, then you have to communicate that back, but if you have been talking a game for a while and are realizing you want to step it up, that's amazing, and I think from there what you can be doing is really leveraging external leaders--I mean, there's a lot of information, tools that are free. You could certainly and should be always leveraging your internal employees or workers however they want to be leveraged to help you reveal your blind spots. But this is it. Like, this is the moment, and hopefully orgs will really step it up and leave a footprint that I think can last for generations. You know, what companies do now I think is going to reset how people see them in the public light, how people see them as an employer of choice or not, and so it's a critical kind of come to Jesus moment hopefully for leaders and orgs to double down or to de-emphasize the things that we've been talking about for a while.Zach: Yo. Man, I mean this has just been an incredible conversation. I would be remiss not to drop a Flex bomb right here, and then also some air horns, put 'em in right here. Okay, there we go. Erin, before we let you go--before Emory and I, excuse me, let you go, any parting words or shout-outs? I know you've been dropping wild gems this entire time, but I just want to give you one last--you know, where they can find you, what you're excited about with Upwork, anything. Give you time to plug.Dr. Thomas: Oh, goodness. Okay, I did not prepare for this. I have so many people to thank. I would say find me on Twitter. That's it. Please don't try to find me on LinkedIn. I don't respond on LinkedIn. Real talk. It's just too cluttered. So ErinLThomasPhD is my Twitter handle. I would say check out Upwork. I have been a lot of places. I have led diversity within two other organizations before now. I've been an expert consultant. I've seen a lot of what companies are doing, and I wouldn't be at Upwork if I weren't rabidly passionate about what we're doing and about all of the magic ingredients that attracted me to our company. So I'd love for folks to check us out. Come work with us. We're a great, amazing, purposeful company doing great work, with cool leaders like me, so come on through.Zach: I mean, this is the best ad I could imagine. [both laugh] All right, y'all, you know what it is. We're having real talk in a corporate world. I'm saying it, like, three times this time, but you know we amplify and center marginalized, underappreciated, underrepresented, undersupported, underestimated voices at work, and look, you can check us out anywhere, okay? Look, we're all over Barack Obama's internet. You just Google Living Corporate, okay? We're gonna pop up. We're there, okay? We're all over. Check us out on Twitter @LivingCorp_Pod, @LivingCorporate on Instagram. Shoot, if you old school and you're like, "Nah, Zach. I gotta go in the browser and type in the domain like a true OG," then I'ma say, "Okay, cool," and I'ma tell you www.living-corporate.com, please say the dash, or livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.us, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.org, livingcorporate.net. We got all of the Living Corporates except livingcorporate.com, so if you type in livingcorporate.com and Living Corporate does not pop up do not be mad at me, 'cause I told you already we don't got that one. We got all the other livingcorporates, or living-corporate.com--please say the dash, all right? You can also email us at livingcorporatepodcast@gmail.com. You can also DM us, okay? DMs are wide open. We are not afraid of the random DM. Just hit us up. We'll make sure we hit you back. If you have a listener letter, you know, you could submit it right there. We'll answer it on the show. We got a decent number. We try to get to a critical mass so we can answer a few, and then we kind of make that an episode. Just so y'all you know. It's, like, a peek behind the curtain. Until next time, y'all. This has been Zach, and you've been listenimg to Dr. Erin Thomas of Upwork. Me and Emory are gonna catch y'all later. Emory, you got anything to say? [Emory's silent] Nope? All right, y'all. Peace.

Jesus is risen indeed! But how can we be sure that our faith is as real as those first eyewitnesses like Thomas? You might be surprised to hear what Jesus actually says about people like us who are not able to see Jesus with our eyes…or can we?

The pain, grief, discomfort, and vulnerability that can arise throughout the wedding process can actually be doorways into joy if we are willing to let them in. Sheryl Paul speaks about her book "The Conscious Bride" which addresses the MANY feelings that can arise around a wedding for everyone involved. Music by Terry Hughes Inspired to create something for yourself? Visit https://ever-changing.net/ Links: Sheryl Paul's work: https://conscious-transitions.com The Conscious Bride: https://conscious-transitions.com/books ---- Full Transcript Paul: I'm always interested in what's not being talked about what people are experiencing, but are trying to stuff away, trying to sequester, trying to sweep into the corner under the rug... when all that does is create shame and all that does is create anxiety. Sheryl Paul has a unique ability to see the invisible, to see what has been silenced. Her book "The Conscious Bride" has been helping couples prepare for marriage for 20 years - and prepare in a very specific way. Her work helps couples create room for all of the emotions that come with transition, not just the picture perfect ones. Funny thing is, that allows for even more joy. Join me for a conversation with Sheryl Paul. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. When I got engaged six years ago, a good friend of mine gave me a book called "The Conscious Bride". Now, I'm not a reader, as my husband will tell you, but I devoured this book. I loved it because it touched on the shadow, the stuff we don't talk about, the stuff that gets in our way when we want to feel one way but actually feel a myriad of other ways all at the same time. It named the shadow that hovers over the wedding: the attachment, the fear, the uncertainty, the hidden power-struggles and the grief that lies beneath them, and that a big part of stepping into a new life is letting go of the old one - and not just for the couple. The Conscious Bride gave me permission to feel all the ways, and it helped me create room for everyone else to feel all the ways too so, ultimately, we could all process the transition without getting into weird fights about random things. I was so happy to have a chance to speak with Sheryl Paul. Thomas: So what led you to write this book? Paul: So, I was in a master's program around that time. I was at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, which I don't know if you're familiar with, but it has a very strong Jungian focus. And I had always been interested in rites of passages and I had a deep sense that there was a lot that was not being talked about around the wedding. And I started to interview women and I did a lot of interviews, especially when it came time to write the book, which came from my master's thesis. So it started out as as a thesis and then evolve into a book. And I started to see that there was a big gap in the cultural conversation around around transitions in general. All transitions are bypassed and overlooked, but particularly the wedding and then in particular, how much focus there is on the joy and the perfection and everything has to be blissful and ecstatic from the moment of the proposal into the first year of the wedding, and there was just no conversation happening about the shadow, about the death experience, about what women (and men) are actually experiencing quite a bit of a time. And, you know, the more I researched and the more I looked and the more I spoke, the more it became quite clear to me that just that again, that there was a real gap in the conversation around this pivotal rite of passage, one of our few ceremonies that we still invoke in the culture. And yet it's done in such a way where we really gloss over the element of a transition, of the reality that when you are in transition, you are in a death experience, you are in a liminal zone, you are between identities, you are letting go, you are grieving. And we only expect people to feel joyful. It creates a lot of anxiety and it creates even more chaos than there naturally would be around an event like this. Because I'm feeling sad, because I have a sense of loss, because I feel like a part of me is dying, because I'm not over-the-moon ecstatic... something must be wrong with me, or with my partner, or with the decision to get married - something's wrong. And it's an incredibly deep sigh of relief to the soul to know that nothing is wrong. In fact, the more you let those difficult feelings in, the more you will open to the joy; that the pain and the grief and the discomfort and vulnerability are the doorways into the joy, into what we are expected to see all and into what we hope to feel. And what I started to say earlier was that that the wedding more than any other transition, I think, has (probably being pregnant becoming a mother comes close) carries a very strong cultural expectation of unilateral joy and it is supported in a big way by the wedding industry that sells perfection and sells joy. So it's a it's very big money behind selling us the bill of goods by selling us this message that you are supposed to be joyful and the way to do that is to create a perfect event. Thomas: How do you work with someone if they're just starting to realize that they don't have to only feel joyful? Paul: So, I tell them to read my book. And, you know, it's really the first part it's about re educating people to understand all of the normal and necessary feelings that accompany this transition. And once they understand that everything they're feeling is normal and necessary, they can start to let it in and and feel it, feel the grief, feel the loss, feel the vulnerability, feel the loneliness. These are all normal feelings that accompany transitions. So once we give ourselves permission to feel without that overlay of "because I'm feeling this it means there's something wrong" everything changes from there. We don't then have to misassign meaning to the feelings and to think, "Because I'm feeling sad, it means I'm making mistake." No, it has nothing to do with that. You're feeling sad because you are in a rite of passage. You're feeling sad because you are in the death experience, letting go of this identity, this primary identity as single person, as daughter, and shifting into an entirely new stage of life, a new identity. And there is no way to go through that without feeling grief. Thomas: You spend a good portion of the book talking about how the bride is separating from the father/father figure and the mother/mother figure and the friends. Can you say more about that process? Paul: Yes, so it can go a few different ways. If the bride is very close to her father, that's one set of emotions and experiences where there is tends to be a lot of grief, a lot of crying, really good, medicinal, necessary crying to make that separation process... and to make it more effective to make it more complete to make it more conscious. Again, in the naming, to say, I am separating from my dad, I am no longer going to be... Yes, I'm his daughter, but not in the same way, not as my primary identity. That my new partner is going to be number one and I'm transferring allegiance. So, that's one example of one way that it can go if if someone's very close to their father. If somebody doesn't have a close relationship with their father or there is no father figure in their life, that's a different kind of grief of the loss of not having had that or never having had that. The same as somebody has passed away. If somebody who's getting married and their mother's no longer alive. You know, that's, that's one way that grief can come through, as opposed to a mother who is very much alive and very much involved. And then there's a separation. There's, there's a loosening of cords that is required. Thomas: I'm curious as you're speaking how this applies, I'm sure it's very different, but how it applies to folks who were older when they get married, or maybe a second marriage. Paul: It can be different, it can be similar. It depends. It depends on a lot of factors. But regardless of the age, especially if it's a first marriage and you're getting married at 40, you're still letting go of a massive identity. And in some ways, it's even more of a letting go because of all of those years that you spent as a non-married person. And so there's a lot of grieving, a lot of shedding of the independence, the separateness, all of the control that you have when you are a non-married person, that every inch of your life is your own: your home, your space, how you spend your time, how you organize your weekend, it's all yours. And so that is its own massive death experience for somebody who marries later, you know, and who has had that many more years than someone who's 22 if you're 42, that's a lot of years of being the sole architect of your life. Thomas: So you work with people around transitions, all kinds of transitions now, and I'm curious if ceremony plays a part in that with them. Paul: I'm a big fan of ceremony. Because my work is largely over the internet. I'm not the one doing the ceremony with them. I would love to be that person, but I'm not. But I always encourage people to create ceremony and create rituals. And so, you know, if it's somebody getting married... and I've had a lot more men come my way, by the way, since I wrote The Conscious Bride. And I'm thinking of some right now who are in one of my small coaching groups. And he's getting married on Saturday, and I won't, I won't share the specifics, but it's... because it's his story. But it's really beautiful to witness men in their transitional process and the rituals that they come up with because I encourage people to find their own rituals that are meaningful to them. Ways to acknowledge the end of you know, in his sake, his bachelorhood that that time in his life is over. And so he has been sharing these incredibly potent rituals that have come to him for ways of recognizing that that time in his life is over. And what ritual does is, as you know, is it, it concretizes, it makes it and embodies what's happening, so that it brings it out of just that realm of talking about it and it sends it into a realm that we can't see with our five senses, but very much exists and yet calls on the five senses to help transmute the experience into another form. And so rituals help us cross over that sometimes very scary divide that just looks like a big, cavernous, empty space, crossing from one identity to a new identity, from one stage of life to the next. And without the rituals we are... we're pretty lost and so, you know, again, as I, as I said earlier, the wedding is one of the few ceremonies that we have, which comes with ritual. A lot of people tend to minimize or diminish the ceremonial aspect because they're so focused on the party and the reception, you know, that's where all of the energy goes. When really, it's the ceremony that has so much power to carry us over the divide between one stage and the next. Thomas: And that's something I'm trying to encourage and put seeds out in the world for as well, that people take that the ritual, the ceremony of the marriage, the wedding and they, they feel free to do it their way so that it's powerful and is as powerful and meaningful for the couple as possible. Paul: Yes, yes! And I think we are at this extraordinary time in our world where we have freedom to do that, where we are breaking out of the traditions that have gone stale and revitalizing them with personal meaning of what is meaningful for you. And there may be long-standing time-honored traditions that are still meaningful. And I'm by no means one to throw everything out that we've come from, because many of those rituals are gorgeous and meaningful - but only if they're meaningful for the individual, right? Only if they land in a place where something inside of you says yes, right? That helps me, that bolsters me, that comforts me. Right? So, you know, whether it's at a Jewish wedding standing under the Chuppah, you know, it's just this beautiful symbol of, of our new home and and this, you know, long standing tradition... if that's meaningful to somebody great. If it's not, then it really.. it's not going to do anything for you on a spiritual level. I shared with Sheryl that before my wedding, I created self-commitment ceremony for myself. And in that ceremony I presenced all of my Ancestral grandmothers with the acknowledgement of how important marriage might have been for them, how much of a survival tool. I did this because women’s standing in society has evolved so much even since my mother's generation, but yet we are still connected to our Ancestral legacy and felt like a really important thing to me. Paul: That's incredibly beautiful that you did that and so powerful and it's probably the number one fear that comes up for women that I'm working with in their pre-wedding time in their engagement, is the fear of what does marriage mean? And does it mean that that I am beholden to this person now and I lose all sense of self and I become boring and frumpy and... This is this is the legacy. This is what we've been handed, right? This is what it has meant for thousands and thousands of years is that for women, marriage has meant really the death of self: I exist, to take care of the man and to take care of the children and that's it. And so there's this very deep ancestral legacy that we have to consciously break with and recognize that we are so lucky and we are so blessed to be on this new threshold, that we get to redefine what marriage means for us. And we only can really know that after we've taken the leap, because on the other side, on the first side, on the engagement side, it just all looks and sounds so scary to most women. And you know, that's why I have so many exercises in The Conscious Bride, more-so I think in The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner, on what does it mean to be a wife? What does that mean to you? What does the word wife connote? When you think of wife, what is the connotation for you? And it's very rare that someone's going to say, "Oh, I see this rad, sexy woman, you know, like, doing like, the dance on the rooftops." Like, no, that's not usually what we think of when we hear the word wife. But it could be. More and more we are redefining that. And we are seeing that. And so I tell people, but look out into the world today and find those those models of marriage where you see a woman who is doing her life fully, you know, and yes, maybe she's also a mother and she's, you know, loves being married and she's fully committed to her path and and making her offerings, and doing her work in the world. Right? Separate from wife and mother. So, yeah, I love, I love that I love what you share. I love what you did. I think that is not only powerful, but essential on that ceremonial ritual level to recognize what we've come from. Thomas: I'm just so happy and honored to have the chance to talk to you after, after all this time of really, really, really appreciating your book and your wisdom. Paul: Yeah, thank you, Colleen. It means a great deal to me to have the opportunity to share Sheryl's wisdom with you. I hope that you are able to use it or pass it along to a friend. Here's one final bit of wisdom, a quote from The Conscious Bride. "A marriage is a rite of passage no matter when it occurs, and the woman must still pass through the phases of her transformation. She must die, she must sit in the unknown, and then she will be reborn." Sheryl Paul is the author of The Conscious Bride and The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner. Her website contains a plethora of resources for addressing life transitions. Learn more about Sheryl and her work at https://conscious-transitions.com/ Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please take a minute to review it on Apple Podcasts. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

If you and your partner are arguing more as you approach your wedding, there’s nothing wrong with you. There's also nothing wrong with asking for support. Landis Bejar shares how Aisle Talk in New York City is making therapy a shame-free option for couples approaching the big day. Music by Terry Hughes Inspired to create something for yourself? Visit https://ever-changing.net/ Links: Aisle Talk: https://www.aisle-talk.com Why Stress When You Can See a Wedding Therapist (NYT): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/fashion/weddings/why-stress-when-you-can-see-a-wedding-therapist.html Growing in Faith Group to Celebrate B'Not Mitzvah (Augusta Chronicle): https://www.augustachronicle.com/lifestyle/20200214/growing-in-faith-group-to-celebrate-bnot-mitzvah ----------- Full Transcript Bejar: Why do we need this? We're getting married. We're... you know, it's so early for us to be reaching out for ... people think of couples therapy as being the last straw or the rock bottom or something like that Landis Bejar has a job you may not have ever heard of before. She is a wedding therapist. In her room, individuals and couples plan for the big day by setting goals and processing the experience of the transition. Her blog offers tips on wedding therapy themes such as defending something you never meant to defend. Join me for a conversation with Landis Bejar. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we're exploring the idea of wedding therapy. Did you know that wedding therapists are a thing? I had no idea until I read an article by Alyson Krueger in the The New York Times called "Why Stress When You Can See a Wedding Therapist." I learned that there are therapists who not only specialize in life transitions but that some specialize in weddings specifically. Landis Bejar is one of those therapists. She's a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and she started her own practice called Aisle Talk two years ago in New York City. In addition to the New York Times, Aisle Talk has been featured in Brides magazine, Business Insider and The Atlantic. Landis is super personable and passionate about her work. She walked me though how Aisle Talk came to be and answered my questions about what makes weddings such a potent time for everyone involved. She is also a big proponent of removing the stigma from therapy. She regularly attends bridal fairs to get her work out into the world, bring it out of the shadows, and make it a shame-free option for couples. She stresses that there's nothing wrong with you if you are your partner are arguing a bit more as you approach the wedding, or if you communication isn't quote-unquote perfect. You're actually doing a monumental thing in rearranging your own life and potentially the lives of your family. Landis shared with me the moment the idea for her practice was born. Bejar: The sort of aha moment came up in the midst of an argument in a bridal dress salon between my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law was trying on dresses. My mother-in-law was commenting on how she looked in them. And I was sort of there for moral support. And my mother-in-law said something that did not sit well with my sister in law about how a certain dress fit and that sparked an argument between the two of them. So I sort of as the, you know, off duty therapist in the room said something to sort of smooth things over and kind of join them together and let each, essentially let each of them feel heard, which is a lot of what we do and family therapy, and kind of realized that, you know, this was not intended to be hurtful It was not intended to, you know, be taken in the way that it was and sort of got everyone on the same page. And in the wake of that, my mother-in-law sort of jokingly commented, "Good thing that we brought the therapist along. How come you're not a bridal therapist?" Which I thought at first was very funny. And a lot of people have made comments like that to me over my career, with a different specialties, whatever it was I was doing at the time, whether it was I was, you know, holding a baby or playing with an animal or something like that. "You should be a baby therapist...You should be a dog therapist." different things of that nature. But there was something about this comment where I sort of did have one of those aha moments. And I said, wait a second, does that exist? Because I've been a bride before and I know that there's lots of psychological and dynamic pieces that are involved in planning a wedding and thinking about getting married and there should be bridal therapists. So that was kind of moment where I started thinking about this as an actual business and some work that I could be good at. Thomas: Why is it that the deep-rooted family problems can come out of the woodwork at weddings? Bejar: First of all, like weddings are not new, even though the way in which we might experience them feels like it's ever changing and ever evolving. It's a really long standing tradition. And so I think that with that comes lots of ways to interpret that tradition and that can be just very different in one family to another. It can be really different from one individual to another and it can be really, really different from one couple as compared to each of their family of origin. So we have this thing that like has been around for so long, but everybody interprets it differently. And so I think that that's one set of circumstances that sort of informs, you know, how that can cause some some family issues to arise along that, along that plain, you know, weddings are also culturally informed. So there's cultural expectations, there's generational expectations about how this milestone is recognized. And it's a milestone not only for an individual person, and not only for a couple, but many view it as a milestone for our family. So I'm kind of, you know, those I feel like those two things are like a venn diagram where there's separate things and then overlapping things. And then on top of that, it's a marker of time. You know, and with any sort of marker of time or what I call in my work, life transition, all kinds of stress comes up because as we mark time, and as we move from one life state to another through a life transition, we ostensibly are grieving the previous state in order to make space for the new state. And that can be challenging both for the person who's moving through it and the people surrounding that person. So if we remove ourselves from the wedding example, we have like a mom sending her five year old to kindergarten, a mom might cry. And it's not because she doesn't she's not happy that her child is ready for the next step in their life that she might be grieving those toddler years or those years where she spent more time with the child and now is kind of watching them gain their independence and moving into this next state. And same reason why we cry at graduations, you know, and you know all of those things, so that comes up during weddings as well. And the other thing that I would say is that like, there's a lot of pressure for this to be the happiest day of your life. And so when you have all of these other sort of variables coming up that would naturally challenge our emotions and psychological states and family dynamics, the first sign of distress feels really upsetting and maybe extra upsetting because of the pressure that we're all supposed to be so happy. And I think that that kind of creates a little bit of a pressure cooker for some of these things to come out in really aggressive ways that we're not expecting. Thomas: You had spoken before about the taboo of therapy. It sounds like you, you address that in your work. Bejar: I do try to address that in my work first by acknowledging how hard it might be for somebody to reach out to me. And also to make my practice one that is trying to sort of in its presentation and where we show up, whether it's a bridal show or a workshop or you know something like that, but just in by by showing up and not being sort of in the dark corners of the internet, we're modeling that it's okay to seek out therapy. It's okay to seek out therapy during this time, and things like that. Thomas: That's wonderful. And specifically, how does that taboo relate to folks are planning to get married? Bejar: Yeah, I think that I think it's like that image of like, if somebody is sort of operating either consciously or unconsciously from this place that there is a taboo around therapy, then people might relate to either themselves, or maybe the perception of others that if you're going to therapy, you have hit rock bottom or things are really dire or things are really terrible. So, if one or more of the partners is operating under that assumption or they feel like people around them are operating under that assumption, that can be really disheartening to think that you've hit rock bottom when you're just about to get married, which is certainly not true, not true most of the time, of course, could be true, I'm sure in many cases, but it's not a requisite to seeking out therapy. Thomas: Are you putting that message out there to help combat the taboo of therapy around the couples that are getting married in some way? Bejar: Yeah, I think that in a like you know wider brushstroke when we're talking to like more people like then we're doing it sort of inherently in our actions rather than our words, right? So like showing up at an expo and being like, you know, at a table in between your, you know, the personal trainers and the bridesmaids dresses and the make up artist, is like your wedding therapist. I think that showing up in that way is our sort of like walking the walk rather than talking the talk is like we don't feel ashamed about it. We want to tell you what we're here for. We want to tell you the things that are very common to experience during your wedding planning and if that relates to you, come on over like we are here to support you during this process. And I think that is sort of like our, our walking the walk of de-stigmatizing therapy to not sort of be in the closets and in the shadows and be very present amongst the people the other people who help you with your wedding planners or your you know, all the things that you do as you're preparing to get to get married. And then maybe more on a micro level is when we're working with people, that's the first thing that we're addressing. We're saying, you know, it's really hard, you know, we're seeing how hard it is in the midst of whether it's our own personal stigma that we carry, or just societal societal stigma, we're acknowledging how powerful it is that they're seeking, seeking support in spite of that and normalizing for so many people that this is so common, and it happens so often, and there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing pathological about you because you're arguing a little bit more during this time or you're having difficulty with communication. You're collaborating on a big event together, not just the two of you but also incorporating the needs and wishes of your two families and trying to strike a balance between that. And you're on the precipice of committing to a life together and there's a lot of pressure in that. You know, and you're mourning, maybe a loss of your singlehood, which nobody wants to talk about. So we're really doing a lot to sort of normalize that experience and the stress that inherently comes with that. Thomas: What is the experience like for you, when you're at the bridal fairs? How to couples relate to you? Bejar: It's interesting, I think that like I do notice a difference between... like kind of across generations. So I noticed that some of the moms in the group or some of the maybe older generations will have, will have like, definitely some humorous reactions. I've definitely had like some older folks come by and just say, you know, kind of like laugh or giggle or say, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe... They think of everything lately!" Which is totally true and I totally I acknowledge that but I also think that in that is maybe layered with some discomfort perhaps with the idea of seeking therapy for all of these different reasons. But by and large, the reaction is, "Oh my god that is so needed. What a great business!" A lot of times we have people who are stopping by who maybe are accompanying a bride and they say, "Oh my gosh, what I would have given for this during my wedding planning!" or "My family needed this so much," or reactions like that. And then the other reactions are from the other vendors who have probably subbed in as surrogate therapists or just support people as they've been closer to the stress up until this point and wedding history and have taken on the brunt of, you know, family feuds or emotional breakdowns or things like that. And they're oftentimes the most supportive of this mission because that's not what they are contracted to do necessarily, or what they feel comfortable with, or what they're trained for any of those things. Right. So how cool would it be to actually have a trained therapist on staff, if you will, to help you navigate the stresses of the ceremony - not only your stresses, but those that might be coming up from the folks around you? I'm hoping this wedding therapy idea is one that catches on. May we all have all the support and witnessing we need as we go through our life transitions. Thomas: So on the show, we talk a lot about life transitions, and we've been focused on creating rites of passage for those as, as we feel called to do that, whatever we feel that urgency when something is really intense, and we, we really want to honor a transition with ceremony. And we also talk about rites of passage that we had, that we had in our life or that we wished we'd had in our life. And so I'm curious if there are any transitions in your life that you wish you could have had a rite of passage for. Bejar: Yeah, I don't know if I've ever really like articulated this. But when I was in like, middle school time, so like seventh eighth grade, I had a lot of friends who were having Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. And I think, for me as someone who has one Jewish parent but wasn't raised with any sort of formal religion in my family growing up, it was a time where I sort of long to be part of something a little bit more structured and I saw my friends kind of going through that rite of passage and all that comes with it. It's not just a day but it's, you know, years of practice and study and understanding and sacrifice in terms of like, the time and the energy and when you're, you know, a really young person, and you're often working on like a special philanthropic project, you're learning a new language, you're sort of performing that new language in front of other people, you're interpreting it, you're doing a lot of things that probably at the time I was like, interested in certain aspects, but as I've gotten older, I'm think it's really interesting, sort of rite of passage for a very young person and like, tasked with a lot of responsibility. Then I guess 10-15 years later, I was, you know, thinking about getting married to my partner and my person who I found and I was marrying somebody who is Jewish and who longed for a partner who was Jewish and might have converted or being if they weren't already either converted, or in my case sort of affirm their Jewish identity and gone through a process of like, doing that so that we could, you know, raise a Jewish family and things that I probably wasn't able to do without having the Jewish upbringing and just having my one Jewish parent. So, I think that, you know, that was a very special time for me going through that process before getting married. And they think that it's really interesting that as you asked me this question, the rite of passage of the Bar or Bat Mitzvah that I am immediately think of feels very, feels like it fits really well because ultimately, like I did sort of go through this conversion or affirmation of my Jewish identity that has been very important to me. And I feel like as a part of that work that I did when I was an adult, I reflected on many moments in my life where I longed for like being more a part of that community and I feel like as a part of getting married, I got to do that in a more formal way that I had longed for as an individual and then kind of gone through a process in my, you know, planning to get married. Thomas: So you went through the Bat Mitzvah process, but when you were older? Bejar: It was a conversion process. It was different than the Bat Mitzvah, but it feels like it feels very relevant that I guess that was something that I longed for, and later sort of affirmed my Jewish identity in a different way and sort of this adult way, which you can have a Bar or Bat Mitzvah at any age, and it's something that I kind of think about but it is actually quite more involved than the conversion - which is are already very involved, it's like a year long process - but the Bat Mitzvah... which is like amazing, because this is something that I try to wrap my mind around doing now and and like, you know, 12 and 13 year-olds are doing it at that age and I feel even more impressed by it now as an adult. But yeah, it’s still something I think about doing today but haven't. But I feel like it just fits in with the sort of this path that I sort of took on a little bit later in life. Thomas: There was actually an article in the Austin Chronicle this week about women in the fullness of their womanhood, no longer, you know, pre-teens and teenagers who are going through kind of a Bat Mitzvah experience. They call it a B'Not Mitzvah. Bejar: Oh, that’s cute! That's so cute. Well, when I was doing my conversion classes, there was actually a class there was simultaneously going on in the synagogue which was women who were, you know, fully in their womanhood, not teenagers or pre-teens, and they were all doing a Bat Mitzvah class together. And so I was in my class over here which was different, but I would sort of look over and say that would be something that I do you later on down the road. Thomas: Yeah well, thank you so much for this conversation it’s been so inspiring to talk with you today. Bejar: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about these things. I feel like things are all things that I love to talk about and I love to reflect on and are so important to me. And I love the kind of context of really focusing in on the transition of the ritual and how that is impacted by all things that, you know, my specific work is impacted by in terms of stigma and pressure and all of those things, so I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. Landis Bejar is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in private practice in New York City. Her practice is called Aisle Talk. Aisle talk focuses on helping individuals and couples cope through the stresses of planning a wedding and getting married through therapy and counseling. Learn more at https://www.aisle-talk.com. That's aisle DASH talk.com. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, we'd love it if you'd share it with a friend. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

Betty Ray walked to the top of Bernal Hill at the turn of the millennium. She brought three things with her: a candle, her checkbook, and a ring. Music by Terry Hughes Inspired to create something for yourself? Visit https://ever-changing.net/ Transcript Ray: Did that make sense? Should I say it again? Okay, I think that when a ritual is designed well, it is designed to make space for the soul to flourish and to show up. Betty Ray uses design thinking to help individuals and communities create meaningful rites of passage to navigate transitions. She’s a recent graduate of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Teachers College, part of Columbia University. She’s currently developing a program called Human Nature Academy to work with adolescent rites of passage. Join me for a conversation with Betty Ray. This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life Transitions. We are going to tackle two ideas today. The first is to explore the benefits of ritual - what it does and how it can be useful to us. We will reflect on some of the ways our Ancestors used ceremony and look at the benefits ritual can bring us today. The second thing we will touch on is a certain kind of ceremony you may not have heard about before. As you know, this season on Shame Piñata we are focusing on weddings and commitment ceremonies. There have been an increasing number of people over the past decade who have decided to commit to themselves instead of, in the absence of, or alongside the presence of a partner. It's called self-commitment or self marriage and it’s gaining popularity. So let's dive in. In our first episode, we talked about the power of ritual to create a container for the strong emotions that come with transition. Getting married, losing a loved one, the birth of a child, the end of a relationship... these are all times when our way forward changes, the future in front of us is totally new, where the sidewalk ends, as poet Shel Silverstein said. Who we were won't work anymore, we must become someone new: we must become the husband, the mother, the single person... The ceremonies that we turn to at these times help mark the beginning of these transitions, but they can be limited. Weddings, for example, can focus so heavily on joy that they block out any feelings of grief or loss which are a normal and healthy part of any transition. And funerals can feel stilted and solemn, laying expectations that grief is only appropriately expressed in tears, when in fact healthy grief shows up in a wide variety of ways. We can work with the traditional rituals as we have inherited them, making them deeper, richer, and more personalized for our own needs. We are 100% capable of this, because ritual is an inherent part of being human. Here's Betty Ray. Ray: So I feel like ritual is one of those things that has been in human experience since we were... since we were putting pigment on cave walls. I mean, ritual has been part of the way that humans have oriented ourselves. I mean, I think the earliest rituals were really a response to a chaotic world, and to uncertainty and unpredictability. And rituals gave people a sense of regularity and structure and they served to bind the community together, that we would all come together at the harvest, or we would come together to sow the seeds in the crops or the hunt or... you know, as young people came of age. There was a way for communities to reaffirm their strengths and their bonds and it was a way to sort of stay connected to the larger world in a way that felt safe. Because, you know, obviously when you don't know why the sun is you know, when the moon goes in front of the sun and, like, it's going dark, and you don't know why that's happening, that's pretty scary! So, you know, having stories and narratives and mythologies and rituals to kind of keep communities bonded together was a way to keep them safe and and obviously propagate. Rituals have been going on forever. So we have, you know, there's been a lot of study about rituals and research about the role of them and you know... And that one thing that I think is so interesting is that we know from all the research that that rituals have been, like, literally from every country, in every culture, and every society since the beginning. Like we just do it, it's human, it's in our DNA. I don't know if it's in our DNA, that's not a scientific quote, but I mean, they are really powerful and people do them and, and why? Why is that? Why do people do that? I mean, that's, you know, that's exactly your question. But I think it's, I do think it's about helping us feel safe and connected with one another. Rituals offer people a structure amid chaos. And whether that’s back in the day when we didn’t know if a mountain lion was going to come over the hill, or today when all of our systems are falling apart, you know, that when we have a sense of familiar.... The mark of a ritual is that it is rigid, it’s familiar. You do the thing as it’s always been done and you do it with an intention to devote yourself to that practice so that devotional angle... that devotional element of, like, I am surrendering myself to do this thing that is bigger than me - is healthy for people, to have a sense of right relationship with things that are larger than us. I think that when we have a ritual that is designed to help us grieve something, or help us celebrate life, or help us with more life transitions - and this gets us a little bit into rights of passage - but those rituals are really... there’s an element of them in which ego death is facilitated. We are no longer in control. It is not our thing we’re pushing through, it is a larger thing. That, you know, when you’re going to a ritual space, you are suddenly in a place that is less driven by, you know, sort of cognitive, intellectualized approach and it becomes more of a soul practice. And I am really interested in the soul practice because I think the soul the healthy element of rituals to my mind as a nurtures the soul. And we are desperate in our 21st-century hyper-mediated, hyper technology-focused, environmental crisis place, we need this more than anything in my view. Thomas: You gave me chills. Ray: Good! I really think... I mean it’s so important, it is so important, because the soul is smart. You know, the soul can really help us, the soul has a way for us to.... the soul knows a lot and it’s very wise. But Parker Palmer said once that was that the soul is like a wild animal. It isn’t something that you can be like, “Hey, soul, come on and party with us!” or like you know, “Come on, I’m going to make you come out!” It’s a wild animal and it’s fragile... Cultivating a place for the soul is an art and it needs certain kinds of tending. It needs to be welcomed and know it’s going to be okay and be able to express its wildness which means it’s not always going to be pretty. We live our day-to-day with so little awareness of the soul. We are so much about like get in the car and go to work, and I’ve got to figure out all the things I have to go to my day and I’ve got to write this and I’m going to talk to these people and we’re just in our heads and in our doing mode. And rituals provide a space for us to be in a more creative, deeper, messier-in-a-sense soul world where the soul is able to come out and be curious be aware. And we can listen to our souls with more clarity we can hear it more clearly because the ritual provides a buffer or a boundary between the sort of the crazy-of-every-day and increasing crazy-of-every-day. Rituals give us a quiet, centering practice that we can rely on to be nurturing to that soul part of ourselves. Self-commitment can be defined in many ways. At its heart, it means committing to ourselves first, being our own chosen one. It's mainly a women's thing right now, but I'm hoping that will change. Women commit to themselves in many situations: after a breakup, if they are tired of putting their energy into looking for someone, when they are about to get married. Ceremonies can be as simple as putting on a ring at a self-marriage workshop or as elaborate as planning a full wedding. Betty took the opportunity to design a self-commitment ceremony for herself about 20 years ago. As this episode will be airing on Valentine's Day, we thought this was a wonderful time to share her story. Ray: Oh my gosh. Well, I wasn't planning on having a self commitment ceremony actually. It was the end of the millennia. It was December 1999. And I had been involved with this conversation with this guy who I had had this like massive crush on for a long time. And I was really, like, we were supposed to go down to Mexico to a Mayan pyramid. We were gonna hang out down there and I was gonna conceive a baby. This is really embarrassing. And that was my grand plan. And anyway, he like at the last minute was like, "No, I don't want to do that,” but he didn't really tell me and I was embarrassed and I was like, and mostly I was just like, heartbroken and embarrassed and I felt really stupid. And so on New Year's Eve 1999, I had bought this ring that had the drama faces on it, you know, tragedy and the comedy. And I had this idea to go up to the top of Bernal Hill with my ring... and I brought my checkbook and a candle. And I, I kind of had an idea that I was just gonna... so I got up there I wasn't sure what I was going to do with all this stuff, but I knew I wanted the ring because I was... and that was part of the design. So I got up to the top of Bernal Hill and I wrote myself a check to myself and I wrote a check to him. And I lit the candle and I burned the check to him, and "I'm not going to spend any more time on you, dude." And the check to myself, I fold it and I put it like near my heart... I guess I was wearing... I put it in my bra, frankly. And then I took the ring and I made a statement. I made a statement as San Francisco was my witness as I was up on the top of Bernal Hill and it's kind of this cloudy, foggy you know gross San Francisco winter day. Kind of at the at the winding down of this millennia, you know, and so I had this sort of weight, this gravitas of the sense of this millennia is ending and I'm committing to myself for the new millennia to not get into drama with men anymore. And this was not the first time, this is clearly a little bit of a pattern. I don't know if that's clear, but it was totally a little bit of a pattern. So I took the ring and I put it on my left finger. And I said that I will now... I now am committed to myself and I'm marrying my own drama so that I don't need to marry it externally. I don't need to bring my drama... I don't need to create it externally and I certainly don't want to be engaged in a relationship with it anymore. I don't want to do that. That's done, adios. And so I, I finished and I blew out the candle and I went back home and I went out and I had an incredible New Year's Eve. And I was just like, I was in such gratitude like, let that guy go! And I just, you know, I could feel dancing... I was dancing and I just, you know, I danced him out... and you know, it was a way for me to reclaim my power. It was a way for me to reclaim my sense of agency about myself and to not be so, you know, not to outsource my sense of self and my sense of purpose and strength. And so it was a really, really important thing to do. And I'm so glad I did it! And I wore that ring forever, just about until I got married. Now I have a different one. Yeah, but anyway, so that was yeah, that was my self commitment. So it wasn't really a conscious decision. It was more of a, like, I gotta heal, I feel stupid, and I'm humiliated, and I'm embarrassed and I need to take care of myself because I did something really dumb. Thomas: I love that. Ray: Yeah. It was fun. It was powerful. Thomas: Wow. Wow, I love you're like, I took my checkbook. Like oooh, what's gonna happen with the checkbook? This is really interesting. Ray: Well, it was it was, you know, it was a symbol of you know, back in the day, right, people had checkbooks we probably don't have that anymore. Do you have a checkbook? I don't even have a checkbook. Anyway. Well, you know we had... that it was a way for me to... it was a metaphor for my money, which is power. Like it's my... it was a metaphor for my, my life force, which I was... I just... I had really stupidly given up and just embarrassingly so because, I mean, I'm sure he was like, "Who is this crazy stalker woman that wants to go to a Mayan pyramid with me and have my baby?" I don't know. It's kind of funny, but I don't know if it's like the long term, like realistic most realistic, you know sane thing to do. Thomas: What exposure had you had to the idea of self commitment before your own ceremony? Ray: I don't think I had any exposure to it. I would... Again, I had come to ritual through my mom and my mother and her use of ritual and I knew that having rituals could catalyze change. And I had done several other rituals over the course, since my rite-of-passage-one that were sort of self-related, but they weren't self commitment - that was different. So I don't know. I mean, maybe it's... I think, I honestly think these ideas float around the ether, and that we pull them down when we need them. Thomas: What are the benefits that you feel the ceremony brought to you short term and long term? Ray: Well, the short term ones were that I just had the best New Year's Eve ever, you know. The long term benefits were that I had a catalyst to... an experience that helped me catalyze a change in my attitude towards myself and my relationships. That it was an intentional taking back of my power and releasing him so that I could be more, you know, healthy and you know, all the stuff that you want to be when you're not obsessed with someone. You know, I think the long term effects were very real and that I feel like when, you know, I would get kind of like, "Oh, I wonder what it's doing," or, you know, I would just take it back and be like, "Dude, you just had this thing. You wrote that check. You can't... you know, that thing's burned! He doesn't have that check anymore, you've got the check, and that's not going to him!” So there was a way in which the just the gestures and the actions... the ring, I would look down at it and I would see it, you know, and I would I would maybe, you know, another several years later, you know, there was kind of a beginning of another relationship and I could feel the drama alert. "Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no! Look at that ring, look at what you got on! No, no, no, run away!" Like it is not... So I think that part of it was the the act but also the gestures, the ring, the checkbook, that that really concretized it for me so that, it helped... it was a tool that I would rely on as I kind of navigated through my, you know, some of these more treacherous waters which weren't as treacherous by that point. So the waters became less treacherous too, because I was more like... my identity was less about, "Oh, you need this kind of man or, that kind of person, you need to be in a relationship." I was single, I was happily so. It was really... it helped support that single exploration for me. Very, very, very helpful. Thomas: How does being married or committed to yourself mix with being married or committed to somebody else? Ray: That's a great question. Being married and committed to myself makes me a way better committed partner in reality because being committed to myself, in the way in which I'm committed to myself, means I'm more authentically myself and I'm not... I don't hand over core parts of myself for my need for approval, or my need for someone to tell me what to do, or my need to be in control, whatever those needs are, like I'm a much more whole partner as a result. So I can bring elements of myself my sucky or more annoying sides as well as my, you know, loving and compassionate sides in with more authenticity and more integrity. So it actually made me a much better partner. Yeah, I see no conflict there at all. It makes you a better person. When you're committed to yourself, you're much better. You have much more reserves to give, you can give a lot more, you have much more resources to give. And that makes you a better partner. I actually had a version 2.0 of that ceremony. When I met him, the man, I met him for coffee a couple years ago. And after he... and he's a writer, and he's got you know, he's just a really interesting person and very, you know, all the things that I loved about him I got to see, you know, and it was really fun and I finally had my act together. And after he left, I made a conscious decision to go sit in the chair that he was sitting in and to like, take back the energy that I had given him long ago. So I did a deeper dive. So I think we can so I guess what I'm saying is that we can always revisit our older commitments ceremonies and our older earlier ceremonies. We can we can ceremony anything. I mean, it's, you don't want to you don't want to one doesn't want to, but we can if we need to. Betty's story speaks to the power of ritual to help us gather our full selves back up from the chaos of chasing other people, which sometimes - can happens even when we aren't meaning to do that! There are so many ways we can get lost in the idea of a partner completing us. It’s kind of the water we swim in if you think about it. And when we find someone, it’s easy to inadvertently toss our authentic dreams and goals out of the boat to make room for the daily events that come with being in a relationship. This can be especially true for women given the historical importance of marriage for the women in our lineages. Committing to ourself can be a way to ground back into who we are at our core - our core values, core beliefs, core essence. Those are gems to be nurtured and honored. Betty Ray is a 2020 Mira Fellow where she is developing a program called Human Nature Academy. Before this, she spent the better part of 10 years working in senior leadership roles at the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Learn more about her work at bettyray.net. Our music is by Terry Hughes. If you like the show, please share it with a friend and leave a review on Apple podcasts. That is the very best way you can support this new baby show. Learn more at shamepinata.com. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

How did financial industry startup Rocket Dollar achieve double-digit month-over-month growth in the highly competitive financial services industry? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Rocket Dollar co-founder Thomas Young shares details on the marketing strategy that helped this scrappy startup take on the 800-pound gorillas of the financial industry and quickly grow into a household name within two years of the company's launch. The great thing about Thomas's approach is that it doesn't require a huge budget and is something that any company - in any industry - can use to get results.  Highlights from my conversation with Thomas include: Rocket Dollar sells self-directed 401(k) and IRA accounts for anyone that wants to invest their retirement savings outside of stocks and bonds. The biggest use case is investing in multifamily real estate, venture funds or directly into startups in a way that is tax-protected. The company is a startup in the financial services industry, which is highly competitive and has very large, established players with enormous marketing budgets. Rocket Dollar had to overcome several challenges, one of which was people concerned that the company would not be around in a few years. In addition, they had to fight the perception amongst their target audience that people should be very conservative with their retirement savings and invest only in the traditional, established brokerage houses. Thomas has found that the best medium through which Rocket Dollar can address the challenges it is facing is email, so Thomas's goal in the beginning was always to get someone's email address. One way the company got traction in the beginning was by building upon the personal brands of its founders and focusing specifically on winning its local market in Austin, TX. The team that founded Rocket Dollar knew that differentiation would be key to the company's success, so everything from the company name, to the colors used in the branding and the design of the website is deliberately different than the rest of the financial services industry. Another way they differentiated was through messaging. While the rest of the self directed investing community was using anti-Wall Street messaging, Rocket Dollar channeled a more positive outlook that resonated well with its audience. The Rocket Dollar team knew that it would be essential to build trust with their audience, so they made a concerted effort to personalize the way they marketed, from sending emails directly from a founder rather than a corporate catch-all address, to including their faces on the website, etc. When they were ready to really turn on lead generation, the team used paid search to connect with prospects who were ready to buy. They did this by purchasing ads targeting long tail, high intent keywords that the bigger industry players were ignoring. This approach resulted in approximately half of the company's new contacts coming from its paid search efforts. When a new contact lands on the website, the primary CTA they are faced with is "get started," which is basically an immediate sign up for the product. Anyone who doesn't complete the sign up process is put into a lead nurturing workflow and subscribed to the company's newsletter. They have found that staying top of mind works very well for them, whereas anything that smacks of a hard sell really backfires because it jeopardizes the trust they've built with their audience. The team has invested heavily in creating educational content that it can share via email, and the result is that the company's unsubscribe rate is below a half a percent. Whereas 50% of the company's business comes from its pay-per-click marketing efforts, the other 50% is split evenly between leads from channel partners and customer referrals. Rocket Dollar has grown considerably in the last two years and now has customers in all 50 states, $75 million worth of IRA assets in its accounts, and grow in the double digits month over month. Thomas's advice for other startups that are competing in crowded markets is to win your backyard first, focus on getting email addresses (so you don't have to pay for access to your audience), and pay attention to the little things (make sure your marketing is very buttoned-up). Thomas also recommends leveraging the personal brands of your leadership team.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Rocket Dollar website Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn Follow Thomas on Twitter Contact Thomas by email at thomas@rocketdollar.com Get $100 off the setup fee on a new Rocket Dollar account using the code INBOUNDSUCCESS100 Listen to the podcast to get all the details on how Thomas and the Rocket Dollar team structured a marketing plan that enabled them to take on the giants of the financial industry and achieve double-digit month over month growth. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Thomas Young, who's the co-founder and VP of marketing at Rocket Dollar. Welcome, Thomas. Thomas Young (Guest): Thanks, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Thomas and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: You have an interesting background because you formerly were an agency guy that used to work with financial services firms, but now you're actually the co-founder and VP of marketing in-house at a financial services firm. Can you talk a little bit more about your journey and your story, and also Rocket Dollar and what it is? About Thomas and Rocket Dollar Thomas: Sure. Yeah. So, my journey, it's been pretty fun and pretty fast-paced. Just right out of college, I kind of jumped into the startup ecosystem here in Austin, and my natural focus just sort of shifted to marketing, sort of accidentally. It was kind of the area that resonated the most with me. I graduated from UT Austin with an economics degree that helps in what I do today, but really, my focus and my sort of passion is marketing. I was working full-time at another company where one of the partners of that company also ran a financial advisory business sort of on the side and asked me if I could help her with some just very basic funnel stuff, everything from running Facebook ads to email marketing, just sort of seeing if we could learn together. It turns out I really enjoyed my time doing that, and so through her network I started getting more and more freelance clients, to the point where I basically quit my day job and focused full-time on this agency freelancing, and what I would do is just kind of run the project and then hire other contractors on Upwork or Fiverr or whatever to sort of help me with the heavy lifting. I really enjoyed doing that, and it was fun to market challenging products, which financial products are always challenging to market, and they're expensive to market, and so you have to get really crafty and creative, which I really enjoyed. In the sort of process of doing that, I came across this product that Rocket Dollar sells, which I'll get into in a sec, and I really didn't like the way it was being done by other companies, and I knew that just being in Austin and being in this space, that there was tech play here, and that this was a product that I really liked, that resonates with not only me, but with a lot of people, a lot of different investors. When I met my co-founders, we kind of decided that it was kind of a no-brainer to do this, because I knew the product, I knew the marketing, and my co-founders know the tech. So, it was just a very natural fit, and it came together really fast. So, what Rocket Dollar does is we sell self-directed 401(k) and IRA accounts for basically anyone with an IRA or a 401(k) that wants to invest their retirement savings outside of stocks and bonds. So, the biggest sort of use case that we have is you set up a Rocket Dollar IRA, and then you can go invest in multifamily real estate, or you can invest in a venture fund or directly into a startup, and it's all tax-advantaged, all tax-protected. So, any gains, for example, if you invest in the next Facebook as an angel with your IRA, you'll never pay taxes on it. We simply set up the structure of the account. We help you track your investments across whatever asset class, and then we service the account on the reporting side to the IRS. So, in a nutshell, that's what Rocket Dollar does, and I've been fortunate enough to not only be in on the ground floor, but also continue marketing this product that I really enjoy. David v. Goliath: How Rocket Dollar tool on the big players in the financial services industry Kathleen: Interesting. So, you alluded to this when you were talking about what led you to Rocket Dollar. It's obviously in the financial services industry. I too have had some experience with that at the agency level and know that it's incredibly competitive. There are a bunch of 800-pound gorillas in the industry, and that have really deep pockets, that can throw a ton of money behind the keywords they want to get found for. There are a lot of players, sheer numbers. So, coming in as a relatively new player in the industry that has a business model that is intended to be a high-growth model, yes, it's a tech play, but it's SaaS, essentially. It just happens to be in financial services. How do you wrap your brain around... You're going to have to grow this company a lot, and a lot of that growth is going to have to come through marketing, because this isn't an enterprise sales team pounding the pavement. I mean, I don't even know where to start. Talk me through how you begin taking on those Goliaths. Thomas: Sure. Well, it is challenging, and it's a lot of fun, but basically, what we started at the beginning is we knew that we were going to have to overcome several things. One is we're asking people to trust us with their retirement savings as a startup. So, the question, what happens if you're not here in two years, or in three years, or in five years, that question came up a lot in the first year of Rocket Dollar, and it scared a lot of people. So, that was one that we had to overcome. The second one was it's a completely new way of thinking about your retirement savings, something that you've been learning about since you were probably... Most people hear the word IRA from their parents when they're growing up, and the indoctrination of Fidelity and Schwab and Vanguard is strong, that this is money that is completely sacred, that you can't touch, that you can't do anything with, so just give it to us and let us fee you from now until you're 60, and that's strong for a lot of people. So, you have to overcome that. Then yeah, just getting any sort of bandwidth in that space, we have to be really creative with our lead gen, and then also with how we approach, for example, paid search on Google. I mean, it's so expensive when you knock up against certain keywords, and then it just drops off on other ones. So, we've been really creative there. The way that I think about it is if I can get to an email, then I can build that trust, because now I can communicate sort of one-on-one with that potential customer, with that consumer in a really cheap way, and then take my time building that trust. I'm not trying to sell you today. I'm not trying to sell you tomorrow. I just want to make sure that this is a good fit, and the best medium for us to be able to do that has been email. Then the other thing that we did just from the very beginning was try to win Austin. We're based in Austin. Our founders are known here. So, we each had a personal brand, if you will, and we really leveraged that in order to get Rocket Dollar sort of off the ground, and then just letting that sort of goodwill that we built up in Austin spread organically throughout the state, and then traveling to different conferences, making sure that we were there, that we were very present, very available, and that helped us a lot in the first year. It was not a lot of digital marketing, and a lot of face-to-face interactions, which I think really helped us out. Kathleen: I can appreciate that, though. I used to have an agency, and I live in Annapolis, Maryland, which is not a huge market. This is where my agency was, and I remember any time there came an opportunity that involved doing marketing for one of the small number of really large companies here in Annapolis, I was like, "We have to win this, because it's in our backyard." You have to win your backyard first, first and second and last. Right? You have to win at home if you're going to have any hope of winning everywhere else, because it's the friendliest market, and it's a great place to test out and kind of hone your messaging and your strategy. So, I can very much appreciate that approach. Now, did it really start with how you positioned the brand? I mean, is that kind of the first step, given that you're in this crowded marketplace? Why differentiation was key Thomas: Well, yeah, and one of the things that we knew that we needed to do was be a little bit different. The name Rocket Dollar is, in and of itself, different from some of these agencies, or some of these companies, I'm sorry, that are named after these titans, J.P. Morgan and Charles Schwab and these... We knew we needed a little bit of a different angle, and we needed to be just interesting enough to pique a little bit of curiosity. So, we did that. So, just beginning from the name, beginning from our approach to how we build our website, and just the tone that we took, it all sort of came together pretty organically, just because of the way we are as the founding team, but it was very conscious to not be, for example, another blue and white or green financial services company. We threw out the purple, and everybody thought we were crazy, and we got a lot of pushback, and now it's kind of just our thing. Kathleen: Yeah, can you actually... I want to dig into that a little bit, because this is something that I've run into myself. I used to, for example, do a lot of work with law firms, and there was one law firm I worked with, and I was like, "Everybody else is going forest green. You need to go left when they go right." You do get a lot of pushback because it's like, well, everybody else is doing it this way. So, I don't know if it's a fear-based reaction or what, but can you talk me through that decision-making process, and how did you get consensus around that? Thomas: Well, luckily for us, there was only two of us in the room at the time when we decided, so it wasn't this big... We were sitting in a conference room of another startup that Henry, my co-founder, was a board member of, and so they used to lend us this conference room with a whiteboard so we could sort of sketch out our ideas. We were on, I think it was Fiverr or Upwork or something, getting our sort of first logo made after we decided on the name, and we got this huge swath of different ones and different logo. One of them was purple, and Henry was like, "That sort of speaks to me," and I saw it, and I was... "Well, it's the one that stands out the most. These other ones look like regular financial services' boring logos, and I really like that purple." , we kind of just decided right there in about 15 seconds that we were going to have purple as our primary color. Then when we went out to investors, and when we built our first pitch decks, and when we hired our first employees, everybody just... They didn't really like it, and then now it's just a thing, and everybody knows us as the purple guys in Austin, and it just very naturally became our thing. Kathleen: But how did you make the decision to stick with it in the face of VCs and others who were saying, "We don't like this purple. It doesn't work"? Thomas: Probably mostly sheer stubbornness, to be completely honest with you. I think we just got attached to it, and the pushback wasn't all negative. There were some people that really liked that approach. So, we heard both sides of it, and we just decided that we were going to stick with our guns. I liked it as a marketer because it would just let me be a little bit different. On every conference that we went to, our logo is going to be a little bit different than everybody else. Everything we sponsor, it's just going to pop a little bit more. So, from a branding angle it was really easy... I really liked it just because it was easy to see, quite simply. There wasn't a whole lot of extra thought, whether purple means anything, or whether it stands for anything. I mean, I know that it does, but- Kathleen: Yeah. I think it stands for royalty, so maybe that means that you guys will be the kings of the industry someday. Thomas: Well, that's what we're going for. That's what we should've told the VCs instead of the fact that- Kathleen: There you go. Thomas: But no, it just happened very sort of naturally. Kathleen: In hindsight, do you think that taking that deliberately kind of different approach to visual branding helped set you apart? Thomas: I think so. I think it got us just that first little bit of mind share. The name as well, Rocket Dollar doesn't really convey that we're in the retirement industry, that we're selling IRA and 401(k) accounts, so I think that sort of piqued curiosity at the beginning, too, and Henry, our CEO and my co-founder, he had a company prior that was sold to Goldman Sachs called Honest Dollar, and they did very small business... It was a tech play on small business retirement accounts for businesses with less than 10 employees, that getting a 401(k) plan is very expensive. It was that, and so they exited, and it was a good win for them. So, Rocket Dollar was just kind of the natural progression. Now you can take a little more risk with your money, and so rocket it. I think we decided at 2:00 in the morning that we liked that named and... Kathleen: When all great names are developed. Right? Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: I think in the case of my business, it was very late at night over a bottle of wine. Thomas: Yeah. There was a couple of cocktails involved, and we bought the domain on his phone at 2:00 in the morning for like $1,800, and that was just it from that day forward. Audience research and product development Kathleen: Awesome. So, you established the name. You got the visual branding. What came next? Thomas: So, at that point we started really just focusing on product, and so we weren't really thinking about the marketing in a traditional sense. Even though I'm a marketer, I was pretty heads-down with our product team, just building what the MVP was going to look like. So, during that time, we also had the ability to sit down with a lot of people around Austin and sort of generate that first sort of list before we launched. So, we really just focused on product, and then on just communicating with our stakeholders, and we did the classic "download your email list off of LinkedIn," and just start communicating what you're doing, seeing if there's interest, asking questions, sitting down with a lot of potential customers in Austin. The coffee shop across the street, by the end of those two or three months, they already knew to have our coffees ready. So, we just talked to a lot of people and asked them what part of our product resonated, what part scared them, what part they were excited about, and really focused on getting our messaging through that, listening to people that I'd sold these accounts to prior, that I knew were customers of the last company that I worked for, and also people that just were interested in sitting down with us. So, it was just really kind of a month-long listening campaign, if you will, to sort of determine what our voice was going to be. For example, a lot of people in this specific niche are very anti-Wall Street, and so they take a very negative tone, a very anti-government tone, very fear-based tone that resonates with a certain audience, and it works because I've sold these accounts that way before. I didn't want to be that company with that tone and that negativity, and so it was really more about building an empowerment sort of message and sort of a... This is going to sound really cheesy, but a "reach for the stars with your retirement dollars" message, and that resonated really well with everyone I talked to, not just people that would've liked the anti-Wall Street or people that really thought that this was too risky, but they liked that tone. So, once I heard that enough, I knew that that was sort of going to be our voice for when we started going outside of our little bubble in Austin, and it's worked. We get really good feedback on how we approach our messaging. Kathleen: It's really interesting that you bring up that choice of taking a fear-based or a positive approach to messaging. I've done some research into this, and I've been fascinated by it, and there's a lot of data from particularly the public health space, that while fear-based messaging can work, positive messaging that taps into positive emotions is so much more effective, especially over the longterm. It goes back to antismoking campaigns, and I think it's really interesting because right now we're kind of coming full circle where they're using these pictures of people with tracheotomies and disfigured faces to try to convince people not to smoke. The most effective antismoking campaign was the Truth campaign, and it's because they realized that if you want to keep kids from starting to smoke, the whole reason they start to smoke has nothing to do with them not understanding the health implications. It has everything to do with them wanting to rebel against their parents. So, if you make it, "Hey, rebel against Big Tobacco that's trying to control you," then they're like, "Yeah, I'm going to stick it to Big Tobacco and not smoke." That actually worked, as opposed to, "You're going to get black lung disease. You're going to need to have surgery, et cetera." So, then they did the same thing with heart bypass patients, what got them to make healthy changes over the longterm, and it was all more positive messaging. So, it's just interesting from a marketing standpoint that so many industries continue to use the fear-based messaging, I think because it is kind of easier, but I don't know, what my observation has been, that the ones that tap into the more positive stuff, those are the companies and the brands that actually build the most loyal following over the longterm, because that's what people really climb onto, and they want to be a part of a movement. Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Even at its most basic level, it's just who we are as people, the people that work at Rocket Dollar. So, I'm kind of Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky. I come into the office with a big stupid smile on my face every day, and I'm not good at fear marketing because that's just not who I am. Building trust through personalization Thomas: So, it was also really easy for us to take this tone, just because it's our natural sort of way of existing, and I think that having that sort of authenticity early in our marketing, well, early and to this day, really helps us because it's very clear that there's people at the other end of our emails and of our messaging. I mean, I sign our emails. Our marketing emails, I sign them personally, or Henry does, or somebody does, because we want to make sure that there's people. We plaster our faces on our own website all over the place so that you can see who you're interacting with, who you're talking to on the phone, who is running the company that you're trusting with your retirement dollars. I mean, all of that is really important, especially in the retirement space when you're going up against these big brands like Fidelity or Charles Schwab or whatever. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that, that whole concept of personalizing it to transfer the trust. Getting into the audience's email inbox Kathleen: From what I understand, the company is under two years old, and it sounds like you spent the better part of the first year really developing the product, nailing down the messaging, et cetera, and then you talked about how then it became all about getting into somebody's email inbox. So, can you pick apart for me what approaches have you taken to that, what has worked really well? Because obviously, you're going after a big audience in the post-Austin kind of world. How do you go out to a cold audience and make it into their inbox? Thomas: Sure. Well, it's been fast. I mean, from when we sort of looked outside of Austin to having customers in all 50 states was a couple months. So, it went really fast. So, there is a natural sort of group of people looking for this product, and so at the beginning it was just capturing people that already knew that this was something they wanted to do, and it was going directly after our competitors on paid search, for example, and just capturing sort of the top of the funnel. Well, it would really be the middle of the funnel, because they already were aware. They were already educated. It was just a decision-making process. So, we were really good at capturing those people because the other people in this space, frankly, are just a little bit behind us on the tech and on the cost and all that, so it was pretty easy. Kathleen: Wait. Now, can you explain that a little bit? Because I think that's easy to say, but this is a challenge a lot of people have. This is an industry where your competitors are very well established. I'm sure the bid price for the keywords is really high. So, how exactly did you beat them at the paid search game? Thomas: Sure. Well, it was actually just going a little bit on longer-tail keywords, because the Charles Schwabs, the Fidelitys, they don't do exactly what we do, in that they don't sell you an account that allows you to invest in real estate or in stocks and bonds. So, whenever we go a little bit deeper into the keywords, the volume's actually much lower, and the keywords are much cheaper. So, if we were just bidding IRA, and then you're going to get all the big boys, and that's going to be a $15, $20 keyword. I mean, it's going to be ridiculous. Kathleen: Did you go after that at all, those short-tail keywords? Thomas: No, no. We couldn't afford it at all. The people that are searching for that are thinking about a Charles Schwab or a Fidelity account anyways. That's what they want. They want the stocks and bonds. But when you go a little bit further, then there's the people looking for, "Well, can I do real estate in an IRA? Can I do startups in an IRA, or investing in cryptocurrency through an IRA?" So, then you get to those, and yeah, the volume is lower, but the price is also lower, and frankly, it was more than we could handle. We weren't ready to scale and hit hundreds of accounts a month or thousands of accounts a month. So, it was good for us to be able to test that sort of slowly before really pouring gasoline on the fire. It was also a more educated audience because they knew that they wanted a self-directed account, and then we weren't going up against Charles Schwab. We were going up against Pensco Trust Company or Equity Trust, or some of these that as soon as you see their reviews online, it's pretty clear that we're going to just beat them on customer service, which is really where we do beat a lot of these people at, and our price point is significantly lower because, like you mentioned earlier, we're a SaaS play, not a service company. Kathleen: So, what percentage of your new contacts comes from paid search, roughly? Thomas: Probably about half. Kathleen: Okay. So, these people convert on an ad. They get into your database, and then you're putting them into email drip flows. Is that right? Thomas: Yeah. I mean, someone comes to our site, and we don't really have just plain lead captures. We really just have a signup button, and so that's our first lead gen, basically, tool. At that point, if they do not finish buying an account, then they come into sort of a short-term nurture that then turns into a long-term nurture after about a month, and then it goes into a newsletter list. So, we've found that if people... Because of the sort of mid-funnel group that we're really heavily going after in the paid search, they're already aware, they're already educated, if they don't convert within three days, it's going to be... They will convert. A percentage of them does convert, and it's a high percentage. It's going to be probably a month to three later, and that's simply because whenever you buy an account from us, you self-direct your money. So, if they don't have an investment in mind, they don't set up the account until they knew what they're going to do. So then really, it's just about staying top of mind in this space so that whenever something does come across that they want to do, it's just an automatic reaction that, "Hey, those Rocket Dollar guys, I'll just go set up my account there. It'll be easy, cheap, whatever, and then I'll make my investment." So, I'm really just more focused on staying sort of relevant, providing value, talking about the space, talking about different investment types, and then people convert naturally once they decide it's something to do. The thing that really does not work well for us is the hard sell, because people, the minute you start trying to do a hard sell on a retirement account, people lose trust, and then it's just very transactional, and it's not really... You lose, and we found that out pretty early. So, it's just providing content, being top of mind, staying in touch, and people convert naturally. Email lead nurturing Kathleen: Is there something you're doing in those email nurture sequences or in your newsletter to really keep people engaged? Because I do find for myself at least, if I show that initial interest, I convert on something, but if it is that two-to-three-month period, and I'm not ready to sign up, I get very highly likely to unsubscribe unless something is really, really delivering value, because I don't like my inbox being cluttered by things that are not really worth it. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, and I'm the same way. One of the big investments that we've made is on educational content. So, we share a lot of blogs, a lot of webinars that we're on sometimes. We've launched our own podcast that's growing pretty quickly. So, I think as long as we provide educational content and really go for those light bulb moments with people where, "Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. Let's see what comes next week or next month or whatever," as long as we share something that resonates and a little bit of a longer form, not just get a hundred dollars off emails. Those are really annoying. But we spend a lot of time and energy creating content that we think will resonate. Our unsubscribe rate is below half a percent, so it's really working, and we write about what we're reading or learning in that moment. So, it really kind of happens organically, what we choose to share, especially in our newsletters. Our nurture emails are a little bit more permanent. We don't edit them that much. But our newsletter and our blog is really just sort of what the team is interested in that week. So, that's worked, and I think we'll continue to do that. Channel marketing and referrals Kathleen: Now, you mentioned about half of your new contacts come from pay-per-click. Where does the other half come from? Thomas: Yeah. So, the other half, we spend a lot of time with partners, so people that are raising money for their own projects. So, it could be anybody from a real estate investor raising a small syndicate fund to an entrepreneur that's raising a fund, or that's raising money for their own startup, or there are some bigger partners. So, for example, Gemini in the crypto world, Fundrise, sort of these investment platforms, we go to them and say, "Hey, to tap into another pool of funds, did you know that people can invest in you through an IRA? Send them to us. We'll set up the account for them, and then you get their money as an investor." So, that's worked really well for us, too, on the brand-building side because these trusted sources are referring us business because we're taking care of their investors. As long as we continue to take care of other people's investors, we really win there. That, I would say, is about 25% of our business. Then the other 25% of our business is customer referrals. So, our own customers are telling people about us, and that's working really well. We do have a referral campaign that kicks off about 60 days after someone purchases, make sure that their account's funded, that they've made an investment, at which point we do circle back and say, "Hey, if there's anybody in your audience that you think would be interested in this, here's some material that you can share. We'd really appreciate it." The cool thing about these accounts is that it's, I think, the only retirement account that people talk about with their friends over the dinner table because they feel really smart when they bought a rental property with their IRA. So, it's natural that our customers share it, and it's... Yeah. That accounts for about 25% of our business, is just our referral campaign. Kathleen: Yeah. It's a lot more interesting than saying, "Yes, I am 30% invested in a low-risk bond fund." No, no, no. I don't want to hear about that. Customer Facebook group Thomas: Yeah. No, it's definitely something that people like to talk about. We have a really great customer-only Facebook group where people talk about what they're doing, where people share ideas, where people ask us questions. So, our team is in there moderating it all the time, and it's kind of the, "Oh, you don't have anything to do for an hour? Let's go check what's happening in the Facebook group." People are sharing some really cool stories. So, we market that a little bit, where you get access to this investor group. So, people like that education, and that group sort of sparks creativity for a lot of our customers, and I think that that really has been a good thing for us to do. Kathleen: That's interesting, because I guess... Correct me if I'm wrong, but are there many other companies like yours or in the industry that are tapping into Facebook groups? I don't get the sense that there are. Thomas: In my experience, no, and I've bought accounts from most of our competitors, just testing out their processes, seeing what's going on and what's not, what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, and then comparing it to what we're doing well and not well, and no, I've never been invited to a Facebook group. Kathleen: Yeah. It's also interesting, too, because... This could be my lack of knowledge speaking, but from the limited knowledge I have of marketing in the financial industry, you have FINRA and SEC guidance on what you can and cannot say yourself, but I imagine in the Facebook group your customers can say anything, pretty much. Is that right? Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, they can anything they'd like, and they do. But one of the advantages that we have is as a... I mean, technically we are a third-party administrator, so we are really handling paperwork. We're not advising. We're not investing. We're not touching money. So, we have a little bit more leeway in what we can say than a traditional financial services company. I mean, we cannot advise, but we can... Most of our customers aren't looking for us to advise. What they're looking for is if we come across a deal that we think they'd be interested in, a lot of times we'll share just if we have a personal relationship with that customer, which a lot of times we develop that relationship, and we can speak to the legality of whether it's an allowed transaction with the IRA, because that's a pretty clear yes/no. That's sort of where we keep it, but we'll talk about... If I make an investment through mine, I'll post it in the Facebook group and say, "Hey, I thought this was cool. I did it. If anybody else wants to participate, there it is." So, it's pretty crazy how much money moves around just off of those little posts that we put on that group. Our partners, luckily for us, are realizing that we're tapping into almost 10 trillion dollars worth of IRA money, and that there's some significant funds there for their projects. What makes Rocket Dollar's channel marketing strategy successful Kathleen: That's interesting. So, the partners interest me because I've talked with a number of different people on this podcast about channel marketing strategies, and I think this sounds like a channel marketing strategy, but with a twist. Fair to say that that's really what it is? Thomas: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we market directly to partners to try to get them in our... I mean, we have a whole separate funnel for partners and a whole separate section of the website for our partners where they can learn about raising money through IRAs with the goal really being of them referring us customers. What we tell them is, "Hey, look. It's available. You don't have to know all that much about it. You have to know that you can do it. Send them to us. We'll educate them. We'll let them know what needs to happen. You don't need to work that hard. Let us work hard, and then the end result is that you get your deals funded faster, and your investors will be taken care of." Kathleen: It's funny that you put it that way because I've been actually a reseller, a value-added reseller in a number of channel programs, and when I talk with people about what I think, at least from that side of the equation, makes a great reseller program, it is the programs that make your life really easy as the reseller. So, I was a HubSpot partner for 11 years, and they have an amazing partner program, and it's because they make your life so easy. They spoonfeed you white-labeled content. Here's 10 emails you can use to nurture people. They put you through sales training. Literally, you can't almost fail, and that makes it such an appealing program to be a part of, and it sounds kind of like that's the same approach you've taken here. Any thoughts on what it is that has made your partner program so successful? Thomas: Well, I think at the end of the day it's that it gets... I mean, they're not even resellers. It just gets their deals funded faster. So, it's a true win-win. We get a customer, and they get money into their deals. So, it's not even that... It's just a tool for them to make their life easier, so it's like... The easiest way to put it is if they have to work less and I'm saving them time, and they're just getting their money faster. I mean, it's just really that simple for us, and we're not paying our partners. Maybe we'll give them a discount, but it's really just... We'll make your life easier if you refer us business. Kathleen: Yeah, that is huge. Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It's pretty simple, but it's powerful. Rocket Dollar's growth Kathleen: So, can you share anything about the company's growth in the last two years, and kind of where you are right now as opposed to when you started? Thomas: Yeah. So, like I mentioned earlier, we've really sort of grown in 2019, is really when poured a little bit of fuel on the fire. We have customers in all 50 states now. We've got somewhere around $75 million worth of IRA assets in Rocket Dollar accounts. Right now, we're really sort of continuing to grow in the double digits month over month, so it's going really well. Then we're really focusing again on our channel partners, but some of the bigger ones. So, we're going after the big players, the YieldStreets of the world, the Crunchbases of the... Or Crunchbase. I'm sorry, Coinbase, the Coinbases of the world, where it's really a mega strategy where it's not five or 10 accounts. It's a thousand to 5,000 accounts, and really hooking in to their APIs with our own so that it's just a seamless experience for them and for their customers to get into their deals with IRA dollars. So, that's really sort of what's on the roadmap, and then we are also launching, about halfway through next year, a robo advisor so that if you don't know the alternative deal that you want to participate in, you can have your traditional stocks, bonds, mutual funds, inside of a Rocket Dollar account, so when you are ready to make that investment, your money's all right there, and you don't have to set up the account, or when you exit an investment, you don't have to transfer again to Vanguard or to Schwab. You can just do it all inside Rocket Dollar. So, we're really sort of pursuing the whole account versus just the amount that you're going to use to buy that rental house instead of transferring... If it's a hundred-thousand-dollar house, people are transferring a hundred-thousand dollars over to us, we'd rather them just bring over the whole thing and have everything in one account. So, that's really our product roadmap for the next six months to a year. What does it take for a startup to succeed in a highly competitive market? Kathleen: That makes sense. Now, if somebody is listening and they have a startup, and they're in the same situation you were two years ago, where they're entering a market that's very crowded, that has some very well funded incumbents, can you sort of boil down to two or three things that you think, based on your experience, are essential to do to be successful in that situation? Thomas: Yeah. I think number one is win your building, win your block, win your zip code, win your city slowly, and it's a lot of manual or in-person interactions. It's really getting yourself out there, and then your company sort of follows. I think that's number one, because you're not going to win on Google. You're not going to win on Facebook. You're not going to win on Instagram, because these guys are spending a day what you might raise for your entire seed round. I talk to people, I met with a company the other day, and they said that they haven't turned on their full digital spend. They're only spending $350,000 a month. Kathleen: Oh, amateur hour. Come on. Thomas: Yeah, and that's what I spend in a year. Kathleen: Right. Thomas: Right? You're not going to compete on their turf, so you got to be creative and come up with your own turf. For us, it was winning Austin, and your goal being not selling an account, but getting an email address, and that way we could continue to communicate with you without having to pay for it, if you will, because I can write copy, and I can write emails, and so it was really just finding the cheapest way to talk to people, and for us it was email. The other thing is we really focused on the little things, on appearing very buttoned up, on punctuation, on editing, on grammar, on spelling, everything that you don't really think about, but the minute someone sees a typo on an email from a financial services brand, you've lost because you can't be making those mistakes if you want to talk about someone's retirement. Kathleen: Right. If we can't trust you with our commas, how are we going to trust you with our dollars? Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. So, those two things for us were very sort of fundamental, is winning Austin, and then just focusing on the little things, like spending the extra hour to edit a blog post, or spending the extra 30 minutes to lay out the email perfect, and those little things really added up for us. We're still doing them. I mean, it's still a huge focus for us. We're still trying to win trust. We're still trying to win mind share. So, everything that we did in year one we're still doing. Kathleen: Now, just to digress for a second, you mentioned something that we really didn't touch on, which is putting yourself out there. I think you briefly mentioned it earlier, personal brands. I think there are probably a lot of founders who are technically very savvy about the product they're building. They're very passionate about it. But I've met many who are very reluctant to put themselves out there. Any advice as far as how to do it, why to do it, and what impact it's had on the business? Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. We've been lucky that two of our three founders are very extroverted. Henry and I are comfortable in front of crowds, and Rick, who's our third co-founder and our CTO, is also very comfortable with people, and he's very technical. So, we got very lucky that we have three founders that are very willing to grab a microphone. It really doesn't faze us all that much. Henry already had a pretty strong personal brand in Austin because of his prior exits, because of his work in the 401(k) space for... He set up probably a couple hundred 401(k)s for different businesses around Austin, so he was very well known. To be completely honest with you, I struggle with the whole concept of personal brands because it's not really my forte to really promote me. I'd rather promote the brand. So, it was something that I had to learn, but I think it's just practice and getting out there, and taking every opportunity that you can to grab a microphone, to speak, to talk about your company, and you don't even have to talk about yourself. Just talk about your company, because that's what you're passionate about, and that's what you know, and that's what resonates with people. Start with your audience. Start with your people. Right? If you're very technical, go to technical meetups and practice there, and then just grow slowly, and you'll get more and more comfortable just by sheer process of repetition. Kathleen: I love it. That's great advice for, I think, really anybody who's trying to build a company, whether they're the founder, the head of marketing, the head of sales, et cetera. Thomas: Absolutely. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Well, I don't want to finish without asking you the two questions that I always ask all my guests. Thomas: Sure. Kathleen: We talk a lot about inbound marketing on The Inbound Success Podcast, so is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it right now with that? Thomas: You know, I hesitated to say this because we talk about them so much, but I was having a conversation with our account manager at HubSpot a couple months ago, and they really kill it. They've actually recently stopped having any sort of outbound sales at all. They are only inbound now, which I thought was risky and also amazing. I mean, they must be doing it so well to be able to take that big of a bet on- Kathleen: I'm convinced it's because their database has every single person on the planet earth in it. Thomas: Oh, yeah. No, they know... Kathleen: Yeah. Thomas: No, I think they're doing it really well, and it's obvious that they're still accelerating, and they're still growing. I mean, we're on HubSpot. I love HubSpot. I'm a huge fan. Their educational content, it's fantastic. I think that they really are doing a really good job. Kathleen: Okay, and then second question, one of the biggest things I hear from marketers that I speak to is that things are changing so quickly. Digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally, as the head of marketing and a co-founder at Rocket Dollar, how do you stay up-to-date on everything? Thomas: Well, I'm sure like a lot of other guests, I read almost everything. I spend a lot of time... I love Medium.com. They have some really good publications. There's one called Better Marketing that is fantastic. It has really good content. So, I'm on Medium a lot. I read a lot of just news and a lot of sort of industry... The CMO section of The Wall Street Journal I think is fantastic, just because it's all relevant and timely. Then there's three books that have really spoken to me that have been fantastic, and one of them is called Don't Make Me Think, and it's all about user behavior online and why some things work and why some don't, and A/B testing and all that. It's pretty in the weeds, but it's fantastic. Another one is Lean Analytics. It's fantastic. It's very dense. It's like a textbook, but if you can get through that, you'll come out the other side just really able to sort of mix the creative and the analytical bit that's really important for marketers. I mean, the part that drew me to marketing was the numbers as much as the creativity, and I really like that balance. So, Lean Analytics is a great one if you're heavy creative and need some analytics help. Then there's a third that's really just a guide. It's called The Art of Digital Marketing. It's a big, thick book that's fantastic. So, those three, I think you could definitely get freelance clients just if you read those three. You could start working and marketing, and then just staying up-to-date with when Facebook changes their algorithms or when Google changes their bid process or whatever. That's just the sort of in the weeds stuff. But yeah, I would say Medium.com and those three books. Kathleen: I love those suggestions. Yeah. Those are three books that I have not heard people mention on here before, so I will definitely check those out. If you're listening and you want to find all those things, of course I'll put the links in the show notes, so head there to get ahold of those. How to connect with Thomas or learn more about Rocket Dollar Kathleen: If somebody wants to learn more about Rocket Dollar or wants to connect with you and ask a question, what's the best way for them to do that? Thomas: Yeah. So, I set this up for this podcast, but if you go to rocketdollar.com/inboundsuccess, we can talk there, and then also, I set it up, just if anybody is interested in one of these accounts, we'll knock a hundred bucks off the setup fee if you use INBOUNDSUCCESS100 at checkout. And then if you want to reach me personally, my email is thomas@rocketdollar.com. So, feel free to reach out. I mean, I stay on top of that, and I'm pretty open on it. So, that's really the easiest way to get to me. Kathleen: Great. Again, I'll put all those links in the show notes, so head there if you want to take advantage of any of those opportunities. You know what to do next... If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, leave the podcast a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That helps us a lot get in front of new listeners. And of course, if you know somebody else doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next interview. Thanks so much, Thomas. Thomas: Cool. Thank you, Kathleen. I really enjoyed it.

Dr. Veronica Anderson, Host, Functional Medicine Specialist and Medical Intuitive interviews Dr. Tom O'Bryan, an internationally recognized speaker and workshop leader specializing in the impact of celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and the development of autoimmune conditions. He has been in practice for over 32 years and is on the teaching faculty of the institute for functional medicine. While traveling the world, he teaches physicians about developing the big picture as to what's causing the symptoms that patients are coming in with. In this episode, Tom translates complex medical information into simple to understand ideas. We will discuss breakthrough plans to stop autoimmune triggers, restore your health and ways to prevent Alzheimer's and reverse Diabetes. Listen to the end to hear Tom’s vaccine administration strategy for infants.   Dr. Veronica Anderson's Links https://www.linkedin.com/in/drveronicaanderson/ https://www.facebook.com/drveronicaanderson/ https://twitter.com/DrVeronicaEyeMD?lang=en https://www.pinterest.com/drveronicaeyemd/?eq=dr.%20veronica&etslf=14837 https://www.instagram.com/drveronica/?hl=en   Recommended Books: http://amzn.to/2p9LK8L   Discussed: Betrayal Series:- http://www.bit.ly/TheBetrayal7PartSeries   Show Notes: 01:58 - What is Autoimmune disease? 08:40 - Thyroid problems in women 16:45 - Food promoting intestinal permeability ( leaky gut ) 19:00 - How your diet affects your thyroid 23:20 - How an autoimmune thyroid disease is triggered 29:40 - Preventing Alzheimer's and Diabetes 31:50 - Wheat sensitivity and inflammation in the brain 33:00 - Reversing Diabetes with a raw food diet 36:00 - Interviewing world experts of autoimmunity 38:20 - Vaccine administration strategy for infants   If you enjoyed this episode, do us a favor and share it! Also if you haven’t already, please take a minute to leave us a 5-star review on iTunes and claim your bonus here!     Want to regain your health? Go to http://drveronica.com/   Transcript Female VO: Welcome to Wellness Revolution Podcast, the radio show all about wellness, in your mind, body, spirit, personal growth, sex, and relationships. Stay tuned for weekly interviews featuring guests that have achieved physical, mental, and spiritual health in their lives. If you'd like to have access to our entire back catalog visit drveronica.com for instant access. And here's your host, Dr. Veronica. Dr. Veronica: Thanks again for joining for another episode of Dr. Veronica's Wellness Revolution. We're going to talk today. I want to jump right into this. I want to have enough time to be able to talk to this gentleman who is a guru. The gentleman I have with me today is Dr. Thomas O'Bryan. He is originally a doctor of chiropractic medicine, but you know what I've found? I feel really silly sometimes because I feel like I went to school before medical school with the chiropractors and I was getting really good grades and they weren't doing as well. And I felt like all these people they're not so smart at going into chiropractor. Then I realized on the back half of my career that I was the dumb one and they're the smart one and I better learn from them. So those of us who were the conventional smart doctors have now kind of thrown away a lot of what we learned. We know about the body and all that, and jumped in the pool with our colleagues because we're all colleagues out to help people get well who were the chiropractors of natural path and nutritionists. And we all collectively are out there getting the word out on how you can heal your own body. Dr. Thomas O'Bryan has a new book out there, The Autoimmune Fix. I see so many people every day who say, "I've been told I have autoimmune disease and they haven't quite given it a name but I have autoimmune disease."  The Autoimmune Fix talks about this but also talks about what's been going on in the health care system. What's been going on or not going on when you'd go to your doctor and here's the latest and greenest. And we also have a surprise coming up on some information that you can get where you can go and hear the world experts in autoimmune disease. Dr. Thomas O'Bryan, welcome to Dr. Veronica's Wellness Revolution. Dr. Thomas: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you. Dr. Veronica: First define for us what it's meant by autoimmune disease? Because as I told you and I said in the intro I get a lot of people who said, "I've been told I have autoimmune." The big diagnosis these days is, "I have Hashimoto's." Every other person has Hashimoto's. "Oh, you have an autoimmune disease too. Autoimmune disease, give us the definition. Dr. Thomas: Sure. Your immune system is the armed forces in your body. It's the army, the Air Force, the Marines, the Coast Guard, the Navy. It's there to protect you. And it's all we have to protect us. And you have exactly the same immune system that your ancestors had thousands of years ago. We haven't genetically changed.  What was it that our immune system was designed to fight? Parasites, bugs, viruses, molds, and fungus. That's it. There was no Polysorbate 80, or red dye number 3, or Bisphenol A, or mercury in the fish. There weren’t any of the toxins that we're supposed to every day. So our immune system is the same as our ancestors, so it's built to protect us from parasites, bugs, viruses, molds, and fungus. There is no way for it to adapt. When you get exposed to Bisphenol A for example, which is the chemical that softens plastic like water bottles, or pop bottles, or soft contact lenses, or credit card receipts have Bisphenol A. There is just millions and millions of pounds of this stuff being dumped every year here.  But when you're exposed to Bisphenol A this chemical gets into your body and it binds on to your cells. It grabs to on to proteins inside your body like an estrogen cell or a testicular cell. Now the immune system that's there to protect you from bugs, parasites, viruses, molds, and fungus has to attach this molecule that got in there that's not supposed to be there. "This is an invader. What is this thing?"  Your immune system attacks this Bisphenol molecule or lead molecule if you have lead poisoning, where mercury molecule, and you create this inflammation as the immune system is trying to destroy this invader. And the inflammation has collateral damage which damages your own cell that the Bisphenol A grabbed on to. And now your immune system has just damaged your cell. When the immune system attacks yourself it's called an autoimmune mechanism. It's the immune system attacking cells.  In the example I just gave you we make antibodies every day to ourself. There's a normal reference range for thyroid antibodies and brain antibodies. There's a normal range, why? Because your immune system is the garbage collector. It's got to get rid of the old and damaged cells, the ones that are breaking down or just worn out to make room for new cells to be built.  You have a whole new body every 7 years. We regenerate every cell in our body. But to make room for cells to regenerate you've got to get rid of the old and damaged ones. There's a normal level of thyroid antibodies. It's normal. But when you have a chemical binding on to the thyroid for this example, the chemical might be chlorine or it could be Bisphenol A binding to a thyroid cell, and your immune system says, "What is this stuff? That's not good for me. I better attack it.  Your immune system attacks that cell and causes the inflammation that damages the thyroid that the Bisphenol A's grabbed on to. Now the antibodies that your body makes to get rid of old thyroid cells, it has to make some more antibodies to get rid of the damaged thyroid Bisphenol A cell, because the thyroid cell's been damaged you got to get rid of it. So you make some extra antibodies to your thyroid. That's not a problem. But you're exposed to Bisphenol A every day. One hundred percent of the infants born today have Bisphenol A in their urine, 100% of them, because mom has it. Mom's toxic with this stuff, right? It binds on to your cells. And so every day you're exposed to this stuff, and then your body makes more antibodies to your thyroid to get rid of the damaged thyroid cell that the Bisphenol A was grabbing on to. And you make more thyroid cells.  And if you did a blood test you'd see you had a high thyroid antibody levels and you make more thyroid antibodies. Until one day this thyroid antibody production becomes self-perpetuating. It's got a life of its own. Now you develop the autoimmune disease, so you're on the autoimmune spectrum with elevated antibodies, but now it moves into an autoimmune disease because you've killed off enough thyroid cells because of the elevated antibodies, the thyroid can't function very well anymore. That's the autoimmune disease.  Mrs. Patient, you pull at a chain, the chain always breaks at the weakest link. It's at one end, the middle, the other end, your heart, your brain, your liver, your kidneys, wherever your genetic weak link is that's where the chain's going to break when you pull too hard. Inflammation is the pull on the chain.  That's why we here about anti-inflammatory lifestyles. It's that you want to live as much of an anti-inflammatory lifestyle with all that that means. And your show talks about that a lot, about anti-inflammatory lifestyles, so that you don't have that link of the chain break and get an autoimmune disease. What's pulling on the chain? What's pulling on the chain is the gasoline or the kerosene that you're getting in your body, if it's air pollution or if it's food you're eating that aren't good for you. The question is it a kidney or a brain cell, is it gasoline or kerosene? When you want to start fixing these problems you have to ask the questions, "Where is my immune system attacking right now and why is my immune system attacking there?" That's the way you uncover what the mechanism is that's causing the diseases that we have. Dr. Veronica: Talk a little bit about thyroid because I think all of us that are in the functional medicine wellness arena, the thyroid people come in because they just seem for whatever reason they're the most miserable... There's other miserable people, but the thyroid people seem to be miserable and go seek their help. Why thyroid and why mostly women, although there's a lot of men now prop up with it. Dr. Thomas: Yeah, but the ratio of women to men with Hashimoto's is 9:1. It's much more prevalent in women. There's a number of reasons for that. The first reason is receptor sites are catcher's mitts. The pitcher throws the ball to the catcher. You have receptor sites on the outside of your cells facing the bloodstream. So as the blood's going by it goes past these receptor sites. Hormones get inside the cell to do whatever they're supposed to do by going through the receptor site. Estrogen in your bloodstream only goes into an estrogen receptor site. It won't go into a thyroid receptor site. And it goes into the estrogen receptor site, it opens the door and the estrogen goes inside the cell and the body will do what it's going to do. Insulin won't go into an estrogen receptor site, it won't go into a thyroid receptor site. It only goes into an insulin receptor site. All the hormones have specific receptor sites. There are chemicals that we're exposed to now every day, never before in the history of humanity but now every day. And there are three chemicals known to compete on thyroid receptor sites.  Now, back up for a minute. There's only two substances for which there are receptor sites on every cell of your body. No, it's not testosterone, no not estrogen, no not insulin, the only substances for which there are receptor sites on every cell of your body are vitamin D... That's why vitamin D is so important for us because every cell needs it, and thyroid hormone. Because your thyroid hormone is the thermostat on the wall in your house.  At night you turn the thermostat down so the furnace goes down. It's colder in the house, so that you sleep and you save fuel. In the morning it automatically turns back on before you get up, and so it warms up the house but you save fuel during the night. Thyroid hormone controls the thermostat. That's called your metabolism and how hot your cells burn, how many calories you burn, that's your thyroid hormone. Every cell needs control as to how hot it should burn, that's what thyroid hormone does. Thyroid hormones in the bloodstream, and it goes past the thyroid receptor site and it goes right into it. It opens the door and the thyroid hormone goes into the cell. As you know many people will feel like they've got thyroid symptoms. They come in and the doctor does a blood test and sees that their thyroid hormone levels are normal but they've got thyroid symptoms so they write a prescription for thyroid hormone. And we're shot gunning thyroid hormone into someone that has normal levels because it's going to help feel a little better. How is it possible that their thyroid hormone levels are normal but a blood test that many doctors do is called TSH and it's a measure in the brain telling the thyroid how much hormone to make. TSH stands for thyroid stimulating hormone. How come the TSH can be a little high but the thyroid hormone levels are normal? And you see that all the time in practice. We all see that. How does that happen? It's because the thyroid hormone is not getting into the cell, it's in the bloodstream. Your bloodstream's just a highway. There's lots of traffic on the highway so you do a blood test and you're looking for are there Chevrolet's on the highway. Is there a thyroid hormone on the highway. There's enough hormone but it's not getting into the cell, so the brain says, "I need more thyroid hormone in these cells." The TSH goes up to say, "Make more hormone, make hormone." But you've got plenty of hormones. And doctor shot gunned with synthetic hormone and people will feel a little bit better. It doesn't fix them but they feel a little better.  How come the thyroid hormone is not getting into the cell? Because there are three chemicals that compete and will go into thyroid hormone receptor sites. But when they go into thyroid hormone receptor sites they don't open the door. They just sit there. The pitcher throws a fastball to the catcher but the catcher's got three baseballs in the mitt. And so the fastball just bounces out. The thyroid hormone just keeps going down the bloodstream, it can't get in.  What are the chemicals that compete in thyroid receptor sites? The most common one... Mrs. Patient, you're in an elevator in a hotel. The elevator doors open. Can you tell right away the swimming pools on that floor? Oh yeah. They smell it. But everybody else in the elevator can't smell it. But they smell it. Why do they smell it? Because they have a chlorine sensitivity. Their detox capabilities are not breaking down the chlorine, so the chlorine is sitting in the receptor sites of the thyroid hormone.  So the thyroid hormone is going by, it can't get into the cell. The thyroid hormone keeps going by, and yet the brain says, "I need more hormone. I need more hormone," and it's chlorine. It's a very common competitor for thyroid receptor sites. Those women, especially the women, cold hands and feet, sometimes they wear socks to bed, or your husband says you got really cold feet. You can't get up in the morning. You wish you had 20 more minutes in bed. Can't lose that last 5 pounds even if you don't eat for a couple of days. Bowels are sluggish, emotions are kind of sluggish, brain's sluggish, you kind of feel a little depressed, all signs of a sluggish thyroid.  Your thyroid hormone levels are normal but your doctor gives you thyroid hormone anyway because we know it's going to help a little bit. And they haven't had the chance to read about this competitive inhibition of chlorine into the thyroid receptor sites. That's a very common mechanism for thyroid dysfunction. How does that relate in terms of autoimmunity? Dr. Veronica: Let me just interrupt. Because you said there are three things, and you mentioned the chlorine, but tell people the other two that go along with chlorine just because people are going to start connecting the dots and say, "That could be me." Dr. Thomas: You won't like this. Fluoride is very, very common. It's a very common thyroid inhibitor substance. It's in your toothpaste, it's in your mouthwash, it's in your drinking water and it competes on thyroid receptor sites. And the result is your thyroid hormone doesn't work as well as supposed to. You gain weight, you feel sluggish, sometimes you can pack on an extra 20-30 pounds over five years that it just creeps up little by little by little. Fluoride is the second one. The third one is bromide.  So it's chlorine, fluoride, and bromide. Bromide is in baked goods. A lot of bromide is used in baked goods. Those are the three chemicals that will compete on thyroid receptor sites. And they don't breakdown, they just stay there. Dr. Veronica: Okay. That's chemicals. I know you're an expert on another food that everybody loves and when you tell them they have to give it up they want to murder you practically because they're addicted. Talk about that food. You don't have to talk to me about... Dr. Thomas: Unfortunately it's the most common food in America today. It's 132.5 pounds per person per year that we're eating. That's wheat. You have toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, a pasta for dinner, croutons on your salad, a cookie or a muffin, and it goes on a day, after a week, after a month, after year, after year.  Harvard's published another study last year. Hollon and his team published a study and they showed that every single human when they eat wheat gets intestinal permeability. The slang term is leaky gut. And that's the gateway into the development of autoimmune diseases that we'll talk about a little bit later, but that's the gateway. And every single person, every time they eat wheat, not just once in a while, every time. And their language was all humans develop intestinal permeability. Anyone that's watching this interview, if you're a human, I think most of you are, that means every time you eat wheat you get tears in your lining in your gut. It's called pathogenic intestinal permeability. Even for those that don't feel bad. Those that feel bad when they eat wheat they're the blessed ones. Because you can't argue with them, they know when they eat it they get sick. But the ones where the weak link in the chain is their brain they don't want to associate the pasta they had last night with the brain fog they've got today. They just don't want to associate it, or with seizures.  In the Journal of Gastroenterology children with drug resistant seizures, that means that they've been to at least two specialists and they've tried at least three drugs before they can get the classification of drug resistant seizures, 50% of those children go into complete remission on a wheat-free diet. Why don't our neurologists know this? Because it's in the gastroenterology journal, and neurologists don't read gastroenterology journals, they read neurology journals. So they just don't know this. Wheat can affect any tissue of your body. I'm going to give you an example of how it affects the thyroid. When you eat wheat, Mrs. Patient. Proteins are like a pearl necklace, hydrochloric acid made in your stomach undoes the clasp of the pearl necklace. Now you have a string of pearls. Our digestive enzymes are supposed to act like scissors to break the pearl necklace into smaller clumps of pearls, then smaller clumps, and smaller clumps, and smaller clumps. Until they get broken down into each pearl of the pearl necklace. That's called an amino acid. And the amino acids go right through the walls of the intestines, and then your body uses those as building blocks to make a new muscle, or a new bone, or a new nerve hormones called neurotransmitters that your body uses the amino acids.  Your intestines are 20-25 feet long. It starts at the mouth and goes to the other end. It's one long tube. It kind of winds around in your abdomen. It twists around quite a bit, but it's one long tube. If you could take a doughnut and stretch a doughnut straight down and look down the doughnut it's one tube. When you swallow food it's not in your body yet, it's still in the tube. It's got to go through the walls to get into the bloodstream and go everywhere else in your body. But there's a cheesecloth that lines the intestines so that only the single pearls of the pearl necklace can fit through the cheesecloth to get into the bloodstream, only the amino acids. The problem with wheat is that no human can breakdown the pearl necklace in each pearl of the pearl necklace. The best we can do is break it into clumps of pearls. There's a 33-pearl clump, a 17-pearl clump, an 11-pearl clump. And these clumps of pearls are gasoline and the fire in the intestines. They cause inflammation. And it's the inflammation that tears the cheesecloth. When you tear the cheesecloth now larger clunks of the pearl necklace of any food can go through the permeability into the bloodstream before there's been enough time for the digestive enzymes to break that food going down the track until it's small enough to get through. Does that make sense? Dr. Veronica: Yeah. Dr. Thomas: You got these clumps of pearls going through into the bloodstream. They're called macro molecules, big molecules. And your immune system says, "What's this? This is not good for me. I better fight this. If you had prime rib for dinner and you chew it three or four times instead of the 15-20 that you should... You chew a couple of times and swallow it down, we shovel more than we chew and you shovel it down you got this clump of stringy meat that's kind of hard to break down. And the enzymes are trying to cut off each pearl of the pearl necklace but it takes a while. That's why you got 20 feet of intestines for the scissors to work on that.  So it's going down in the first part of the intestines now, but there are tears in the cheesecloth. So these macro molecules of prime rib get into the bloodstream. Your immune systems says, "Whoa, I better fight this." Now you make antibodies to beef, and you're allergic to beef, or to bananas, or to chicken, or to potatoes, or to cantaloupe.  And the doctor that does the 90-food panel to see what foods a person is sensitive to, and it comes back with 20-25 foods and the patient goes, "Oh my god, that's everything I eat." Of course it is, because your body is trying to protect you. You don't shut down the immune system, you stop the tears of the cheesecloth. So you have to find out why is the cheesecloth tearing. And when you find out why the cheesecloth is tearing then 6 months to a year later you check again the 90 foods, now you're sensitive to two or three and not 20. That's the mechanism in the development of intestinal permeability, the leaky gut. Let's tie that now to the thyroid. How does this trigger an autoimmune thyroid disease? When this macro molecule of beef gets into the bloodstream and your immune system says, "Whoa, what's this?" The brain says, "You General, you now are General Beef. Take care of this."  General Beef builds an assembly line. The assembly line starts producing soldiers. They're called antibodies. The soldiers are trained to go after beef, that's all they do. They're in the bloodstream looking for beef. And when they see beef clumps they fire their chemical bullets to destroy the beef clumps. Remember your bloodstream's just a highway. There's no lanes of traffic. Everything's bouncing around in there. It's going in the same direction but it's bouncing around.  Think of the antibodies like Arnold Schwarzenegger and he's got his head out of the big Humvee. He's got those dark glasses on. He's got a big submachine gun. "Over there." And he's firing these chemical bullets at beef because he's been trained to go after beef.  The beef macro molecule may be 15 amino acids long because it hadn't had enough time to be broken down into each pearl of the pearl necklace. So there's 15 amino acids there and Arnold has been trained to go after what anything that looks like that 15 amino acids. I'm going to sat AA, B, C, D, but it really is 15 letters long in this example. Let's say Arnold is going after wheat because wheat got in, it tears the cheesecloth, it gets in as a macro molecule. Your immune system makes antibodies to wheat. I said beef to start with but I'm going to talk about wheat now. Let's say Arnold's looking for AA, B, C, D. Bouncing around in the bloodstream looking for AA, B, C, D. He's got these dark glasses on. The surface of your thyroid facing the bloodstream is made up of proteins and fats. That's what the surface is made of facing the bloodstream. Proteins are made up of amino acids. There are hundreds of amino acids long, the surface of the proteins of the thyroid, hundreds of amino acids long. But part of the thyroid includes AA, B, C, D.  Arnold that's looking for wheat, AA, B, C, D, he's like, "Oh look, over there." And he fires his chemical bullets at the thyroid to damage the thyroid cell because it's got AA, B, C, D. That's called molecular mimicry. And it's a big problem for people today, they just don't know it. It's a big problem as to why autoimmune disease is so prevalent.  Arnold starts firing his chemical bullet at the thyroid damaging the thyroid cell. Remember you have a normal amount of thyroid cells but now you have to make a few extra because there's more damaged thyroid cells than normal. That's after having toast for breakfast. But now you have a sandwich for lunch. More Arnold, more damage to the thyroid, AA, B, C, D, if that's the weak link in your chain.  If it's your brain Arnold goes after your brain with molecular mimicry. If it's your kidneys Arnold goes after your kidneys with molecular mimicry. It just depends on what the weak link is in your chain. With wheat it doesn't matter because AA, B, C, D is very common to the structure of the human body. It's a component of... If you think of proteins like it's big, long brick wall, many colors of bricks in there, but there's this pattern. Any time you see that pattern, "Oh look it's there. Oh look it's over too. Oh, it's there too. And that's AA, B, C, D in our bodies. It's very common in our bodies.  So whoever the weak link is in your chain that's where Arnold's going to go. And then you have to make more antibodies to your thyroid until this antibody production to your thyroid becomes self-perpetuating. Now you're on the autoimmune spectrum, killing off your thyroid in this example or your thyroid, killing off cells, until eventually you've killed off so many cells now you're starting to get cold hands and feet, or it's hard to wake up in the morning. Now your thyroid's not working so well for you. You go to a doctor and they take your thyroid hormone. The hormone levels are normal but you're not functioning very well. And they don't check to look for the autoimmunity that's causing all the inflammation in your thyroid and killing off the cells in your thyroid. That's the autoimmune spectrum. Dr. Veronica: Okay. First of all I love your analogies. They're just so beautiful. Thank you. I'm into this story and I'm just like... When you've heard the story before and explained in the medical health and all the lingo with all the stuff behind it it's like, "I've heard about that." But with the Arnold Schwarzenegger behind it with glasses it's like... Dr. Thomas: Yeah, it helps. Dr. Veronica: Thank you so much for that. I would've jumped over because that's a beautiful explanation. Now you're talking about the autoimmune fix and we talked a little bit before we came on about type 1 diabetes which people think, you just got it. There's nothing you can do about it. And also Alzheimer's, you just get old and you just get it. There's nothing you can do. You got the tangles in your brain. You're going to get it.  Talk a bit about can we fix this. Because most people think, "I'm a victim. I just got it. There's nothing I could do about it. I got the pill. I keep going to the doctor and gets adjusted. I feel miserable. This is just my luck in life. My family had it. My mom was like this. Too bad. Oh well." But that's not true. Dr. Thomas: No. That's not true at all. I was just  looking for something. I can't find them quickly so I'll just skip that. No one gets Alzheimer's in their 60's or 70's. It's a decades long process, slowly killing off brain cells. Until you've killed off enough brain cells that the system doesn't work very well anymore just like your thyroid. Dr. Dale Bredesen is at UCLA. He runs the Buck Institute at UCLA. That's the Alzheimer's Research Center. He published a paper in November of 2014 showing complete reversal of Alzheimer's in 9 out of 10 people within 5 years at UCLA. They reversed it within 5 years. How did he do it? There's a 34-point checklist. "They have this. They have this. Do they have this? Do they have this?" Top of the list, wheat sensitivity. Next, dairy sensitivity. Because AA, B, C, D is so very common with the brain when you have a sensitivity to wheat. When I give my lectures to doctors, there's 200 doctors in the room how many know we're suspecting of a sensitivity to wheat? Let me see a show of hands? And I say, "Hold your hands high for a minute please," and they do. I say, "Look around the room," and it's about 80% of the room. Then I'll say, "How many of you know or suspect if you have an inadvertent exposure to wheat it seems to affect your brain? Let me see your hands again? Come on, hold them up." And about 50%-60% of those people raise their hand again. And I said look around the room. This is a talk to doctors, health care practitioners. This is not a celiac group. This is your practice doctors. This is how often it's in your practice. "How many of you are finding it this often?" And maybe there'll be one person that raises her hand. In other words in clinical practice six to seven out of ten people will test positive if you do the right test, looking for a sensitivity to wheat. And of that number the most common system affected for molecular mimicry AA, B, C, D is the brain. Most common for most people it affects the brain. You've got Arnold firing at your brain causing inflammation in the brain, that's pulling on the chain. And eventually one day you say, "I'm getting old. I don't remember the way I used to. Haha..." "Really? How old are you?" "I'm 38." No, that's not supposed to happen. No, that's not normal, you're getting older. No, it's a brain that's on fire. You've got inflammation in your brain. Why? I don't know why. Let's find out.  But you're on the autoimmune spectrum, and that's what this book is about. The Autoimmune Fix just came out two weeks ago. What it's about is to understand this big picture concept. Everybody wants a cure. May I be gentle and say this to your listeners. Wake up. There's no such thing as a cure. There's no magic pill that fixes your diabetes. Wake up. A cure means you don't have the symptoms anymore. You have no markers of the symptoms like blood test or urine test, and you can do whatever you want. Remission means you don't have the symptoms anymore. There is no markers of the symptoms, urine or blood test. And as long as you live the lifestyle that got you feeling better you're going to stay healthy. There's no cure. You want to read about a cure for diabetes? Go to YouTube and type in Type 2 diabetes and raw food diets. And you'll see the videos of African-American post-menopausal women which is a very high-risk group for diabetes, you'll see a video of them. They go on a raw food diet for 30 days and you see the doctors talk about their blood tests, and this is unbelievable, their diabetes is completely gone. Their cholesterol's come down 85 points. I'm taking them off their cholesterol medication. You see the doctors saying this. The most potent thing you can do for your health is what's at the end of your fork. That's it. It's like, wake up people, wake up. And the reason I'm so direct about this is because for the first time in the history of human species, for the very first time the New England Journal of Medicine tells us today that children born today are going to get sick at an earlier age than their parents. They're going to get diagnosed with diseases at an earlier age than their parents, and they're going to die at an earlier age than when their parent's died.  For the first time in the history of the human species. This has never happened before. We're going down. Now, the statistics are very clear, our health care system is one of the worst. The U.S. is ranked second from the bottom in quality of health care at the World Health Organization, yet we spend more for health than anywhere else on the planet. It's in pharma's big interest to keep us dumbed down and not understanding any of this.  That's why I spent a year with Betrayal, The Autoimmune Disease Solution They're Not Telling You. When you guys wake up to this common sense stuff that's in here and that's in Betrayal you're just going to start asking different questions. And when you ask different questions your doctors are being demanded upon to get more answers. Because the things that I write about in this book just make common sense.  Stop throwing gasoline on the fire. Everybody knows that diseases are inflammatory. Alright, stop throwing gasoline on the fire. "How do I do that?" Well, you have to learn. And so it's going to take a while to learn. There's no cure that you take this pill and you're fine. There's no cure. There is remission. And you can have a wonderfully vibrant, dynamic life you can. But we have to learn how to ask the right kind of questions. Dr. Veronica: You mentioned Betrayal, I think so many people feel betrayed by the health care system, betrayed by their doctors, betrayed by the government, society, just betrayed by everything. We talk about Betrayal and we're going to talk about how people can get access to Betrayal and learn. Dr. Thomas: I've traveled the world, literally. For the last few I put 165,000 air miles now in this last year. Lisbon, Barcelona, Leipzig, Germany, three times in London, Dublin, Sao Paolo, all over the world, interviewing world experts, the godfathers and godmothers of autoimmunity. And they know all of this and it's shocking when you hear them talk about it. They've know about this for years these kinds of concepts, but no one's carrying the message out and putting it together. We put it all together. It's a seven-part series online, everything's free. It's about an hour a day for seven days. And you can register for it here with your website, so people can click on it and register and they can watch Betrayal. They're going to hear from the experts.  You're going to hear from Dr. Marta Vives Pi in Barcelona, Spain who is reversing type 1 diabetes with diet and nutrition, regenerating beta cells of the pancreas. So your body starts making insulin again. What we've been told it's impossible. No, it's not. Read her papers. Here's the evidence. It works. It's simple. It's not a drug, and it works.  You're going to read Prof. Yehuda Shoenfeld, the godfather of predictive autoimmunity. His book is there on the shelf, Vaccines and Autoimmunity. It just came out. Dr. Shoenfeld, to get a sense of who this guy is, 28 of the PhD students who got their PhD's under him, many more than that, but 28 of them share departments of immunology in med schools and hospitals around the world. This is the godfather. I interviewed him three times. And you hear him say, "Dr. O'Bryan, I am very much in favor of vaccinations. They have saved millions of lives. However, if the person carries the gene HLA-DRB1, and 30% of the population does, they are very sensitive to having an acute reaction to the adjuvants in vaccine. Thus, it is of wisdom to perhaps be cautious in administering the vaccines. Perhaps a smaller time scale of administration, not seven in one day, not three in one day to these infants that have a weakened, not developed immune system yet. So you give one and you wait two weeks. You give another one.  Sean tells all four vaccinations but he's saying for these patients that are HLA-DRB1 you got to wake up. You can't throw this toxic poison in them because their bodies can't handle it that well. Other bodies may be able to handle it okay. So it's not saying don't vaccinate, he's just saying vaccinate with caution if they have that weak link in their chain. That's the kind of stuff you're going to hear from these experts. It's just such useful information and it saves lives. It's going to save thousands and thousands of lives. I want everyone to watch this. It's all free. Because if you watch it you're going to ask different questions of your doctor. Dr. Veronica: I just got to share because we're just meeting for the first time a little bit before the podcast of how I personally felt betrayed by my medical education. I also felt betrayed in my health care. I realized that I was sensitive to certain things because my sons, one got depressed and one got bipolar, and we figured out that they were sensitive to wheat and soy. One had thyroid symptoms major. Dr. Thomas: AA, B, C, D. Dr. Veronica: The doctor came to me who was my [Unintelligible 00:38:56] Dr. Veronica who's a chiropractic at... "Come here mom. Let me test you." And then what do you know, I'm sensitive. I'm not eating tons of these food so I would get six sometimes and say, "What's going on. I don't even know what happened?" And all of a sudden it answered questions for me. And the other thing that I will say is as an African-American I used to feel, "That's a white people disease." And I realized it's not a white people disease. And probably everybody in my family is suffering from these things and oh my god we better wake up. My mother and my father has diabetes. I'm an eye surgeon by training. My grandmother went blind from diabetes. This is this betrayal that you're talking about needs to get out there into the whole world. So when people go to my Facebook page, to my website, even if it's after the date don't think that you still can have access to it because the world needs to see this. Dr. Thomas O'Bryan I thank you for your work, your book The Autoimmune Fix. For those of you who like to read go get the book. You need it on your shelves so you can pick it up and read it over and over again, because it takes a while to digest this. Dr. Thomas: May I say something about the book? Dr. Veronica: Yes.  Dr. Thomas: Here's the thing on the book. Right now it's on Amazon for 16 bucks. Amazon is selling it at a loss because it's getting more traffic. More people are coming. And then when you're on Amazon you're likely to buy something else, so that's their philosophy. But it's 16 bucks. If I make The New York Times Best Seller list that means I get invitations. I'm now a candidate for Ellen, Oz, Bill Maher, all these shows where I can carry this message out even further. For 16 bucks I promise if you're not happy I'll give you a refund. You just send me a note and I'll give you a refund. I'm very proud of it. It's 30 years of work. But help me carry this message out. Help me if you would by getting the book. There's no profit in this. You make a couple of bucks a book. This is not for that. This is really to carry the message out to wake the world up because our kids are dying younger than their parents, and that's what this is about. So help me and watch Betrayal. Tell your friends about Betrayal. Help us carry the message out there so we can reach a million people with this. Dr. Veronica: Yay, and I'm going to help you reach those million people with the followers of Dr. Veronica and all my posting on social media. Dr. O'Bryan, again, with much gratitude for your work and your time, those 165,000 miles to get Betrayal put together so we all could figure out what we need to do to heal ourselves. Thank you so much. Dr. Thomas: Thank you. Female VO: Thank you for listening to The Wellness Revolution Podcast. If you want to hear more on how to bring wellness into your life visit drveronica.com. See you all next week. Take care. _______________________________ Dr. Veronica Anderson is an MD, Functional Medicine practitioner, Homeopath. and Medical Intuitive. As a national speaker and designer of the Functional Fix and Rejuvenation Journey programs, she helps people who feel like their doctors have failed them. She advocates science-based natural, holistic, and complementary treatments to address the root cause of disease. Dr. Veronica is a highly-sought guest on national television and syndicated radio and hosts her own radio show, Wellness for the REAL World, on FOX Sports 920 AM “the Jersey” on Mondays at 7:00 pm ET.   To get started transforming your health, schedule a consult HERE.