Podcasts about todd well

This podcast episode delves into a powerful story of resilience and overcoming mental health challenges. Guest Todd Rennebohm shares his life-changing experience of a 911 call that not only saved his life but also opened up important conversations about mental health and addiction. Throughout the episode, Todd discusses his journey as a mental health advocate, a survivor of suicide attempts, and his recovery from addiction. From being diagnosed with chronic anxiety at a young age to battling alcohol and substance abuse, Todd's story sheds light on the connection between mental health and substance use. Todd emphasizes the importance of self-advocacy and seeking help within the flawed healthcare system. The episode also touches on Todd's book, which tackles the topic of mental health through a child's perspective, aiming to start conversations and normalize discussions surrounding mental health in families. ..................................................................................... Listen to Todd's podcast Bunny Hugs & Mental Health on Apple podcast or Spotify Follow Todd on Instagram @bunnyhugspodcast .................................................................................... RISING STRONG LINKS: Get new episode notifications: bit.ly/risingstrongupdates Follow us on Instagram: @risingstrongpodcast Facebook page - send your reviews and comments via the 'comment' button here: www.facebook.com/risingstrongpodcast WIN SWAG: · Email a screenshot of your 5-star review for a chance to win some Rising Strong swag! Lisa@LisaKBoehm.com Remember to follow and subscribe so you never miss an episode ..................................................................................... TRANSCRIPT: host/Lisa: In today's episode, we unravel the powerful story of a lifechanging 911 call that not only saved a life, but also opened up a conversation about mental health and addiction. Welcome to the Rising Strong podcast. I'm your host, Lisa, and today's guest is going to inspire you in so many ways. Tod and I met almost exactly one year ago at a mental health event where he openly shared his journey from the stage. He's a mental health advocate, suicide attempt, survivor in recovery from addiction, speaker, author and host of Bunny hugs and mental health. Welcome to the show, Todd. Todd Thank you. It's lovely to see you again. And at that exact same event a year ago this year, you were speaking at it. And so that was very exciting. Lisa: Right? It seems like we're like in a pinball game or something where we keep literally bumping into each other at these mental health events. So clearly, I really believe in the universe. When you meet people, it's for a reason. Todd: It's a reason. A season or a lifetime, I've been. Lisa: Told yes, or a lesson somewhere in there, I have a few lesson people. Todd: Well, yeah, that too. Yeah, sure. Right. Lisa So we're having this chat because you've had a long journey with mental health. How long does that go back and when did things start? Todd: Oh, boy. This could be a three hour episode if we wanted it to be, but it actually started in grade five. I was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer. When you're grade five, most kids don't have stomach issues that like 80 year old ceos of billion dollar companies have because they have so much anxiety and pressure and worry. But that is an ailment that kind of runs in my family. My grandfather had it and my mom has issues, so nobody thought anything of it. So they treated me for the physical part of it, but nobody really questioned why was there anxiety? Why does he worry so much? And that was the thing. Nobody called it anxiety when I was grade five. So I'm 46 years old, so that was almost 40 years ago. So, yeah, the word anxiety wasn't really a thing. It was more like, oh, you worry too much, or my mom would call it a nervous stomach. So the nervous boy love. It's called chronic anxiety, actually. So that's kind of when it started. And then in high school, I kind of was introduced to alcohol. Being in a small town mean, I say that, but I mean, kids drink everywhere. But that was very much the culture when I was that age in small town Saskatchewan. And a lot of my anxiety kind of, I don't know, it didn't go away, but I didn't worry about every little thing like I used to. And then, yeah, out of high know, drinking turned into more and more. And there's a lot of addiction to my family, a lot of anger issues with the men. So a lot of my anxiety and depression eventually turned into anger. I was bouncing around from job to job. It's so weird. I've been discussing this lately, how life can be very polarizing at all times. So it's like some of these moments, I look back and it's like, that was the darkest time of my life. But then I'm also like, oh, but I had so much fun, too. So it's like you can be miserable and happy at the same time, and it's hard to wrap your head around how that's possible. But I don't know if it's like different frequencies, so they're not actually overlapping, they're actually just happening at the same time or something. Anyway, yeah, I used to play in bands and stuff, and it was like, I mean, talk about touring with a band and stuff. It is so much fun, but also so anxiety inducing. And you're drinking all the time and you're calling home and the girlfriend's crying and upset and missing you. And so it's like, yeah, it's very polarizing. So anyway, I had cool things like that going through my life, but also just everyday kind of schlub stuff. Band breaks up, and then you're doing just labor jobs for minimum wage. So then my anxiety depression stuff kind of turns more into the anger. And I think I'd rather feel depressed than angry. I can't stand that feeling. I'd wake up angry and go to work angry just because I felt unfulfilled or something, or not satisfied with life and the drop of a hat. I would just be throwing stuff and smashing stuff, and it's not a good look. I mean, I felt like a child having a temper tantrum. Like, I've seen family members do it, and every time I'm just like, oh, my God, this is so, one, scary for people, two, just annoying. You just want to shut up. And then there I am doing it, and it's like, oh, my God, I hate this. But eventually I started drinking and using marijuana constantly, and my issues came to a head. I had a suicide attempt. I tried going to the hospital once and was basically turned away, which is kind of a reason for when I started advocating, because I went to the ER and was turned away. So then, yeah, eventually stuff came to a head again and I ended up. I quit drinking, and that was huge for my anger and my depression. Still working through anxiety, then Covid hit and more job bouncing around. Then eventually I was diagnosed with ADHD about a year ago. And so this fall I was working with EMDR therapists to maybe work through some of my trauma stuff. It's basically lifelong, and there's always, anytime you peel off a layer, there's another layer there that you could definitely work on. And whether it's you use the same strategies or the same tools that you used before, or you need a different strategy like EMDR, or a different diagnosis, like ADHD, a different medication, or a different perspective when it comes to therapies or different modalities. I'm just trying to get through the day without letting these extreme polar feelings pull me one way or another and just keep the balance, really. It's a journey. Lisa: I have a question for you. I just want to circle back to something that you said. Todd: Definitely. Lisa: In your opinion, do you think that there is a connection between. I don't want to just say mental health, but let's say anxiety, just because that's something you're familiar with. Do you think that there's an association, a link, a parallel between substance use, whether it's alcohol or drugs, and anxiety? Todd: I do, of course, everybody's different, but when I worked, because I worked at the treatment center I went to after I quit drinking for a couple of years, and it was quite obvious that addiction is a comorbidity of not just anxiety, but like PTSD, bipolar, different personality disorders. And really an anxiety is just a symptom of a greater thing quite often, too. So, yeah, I do think that substance abuse and anxiety, not only do they link, but they are a very common comorbidity of a lot of other bigger issues, including trauma. And I mean, trauma is also a huge contributor to personality disorders and things. It actually drives me nuts a little bit that when we say mental health and addictions, I wish we could just get rid of the addictions part, because it is part of mental health. When I say mental health or mental illness, it includes addictions. Someday it would be nice to just drop that. But for people that maybe don't understand, I don't know, they're still separated for some reason. Lisa: Absolutely. I found we were talking about this earlier before I hit record. Even amongst our own stories, we are not just this one silo, this single aspect of mental health. I really see mental health myself, as a massive umbrella. And under that umbrella. There are a myriad of topics, including addictions, including grief, including so, so many things. But you're right, the more I learn, and I feel like there's so much still to be learned, that trauma. Trauma, my goodness. I think if we could all heal our traumas, we would probably be far better off. But unfortunately, we live in this symptom, fix the symptom kind of society, right? So we kind of have to pick at the layers, as you say. We kind of maybe get a handle on one layer, and lo and behold, there's another layer to deal with. So interesting. Todd: Sorry, I was going to say also, even with my ADHD, I feel like that's a huge contributor to my anxiety, depression, substance abuse, maybe not the cause. I do think it caused those things, but also other things also contributed to those things. So it's very nuanced. It's all very complicated. There's no one treatment, one pill, one disorder, one diagnosis that's going to fix everything. For me, anyway. I'm finding that I think I have ADHD, but I also think I do have chronic anxiety. On top of that, I also do think that DNA has something to do with it. And nature versus nurture, like you were saying before, you throw spaghetti at the wall and you try different modalities and tools and things, and hopefully you figure out what's going to help you with that particular, I don't know, symptom or whatever. You peel another layer off and you go, okay, that's better. Now moving on to the next one. Lisa Exactly. And I'm certainly not an expert with a bunch of letters behind my name, but I do know that because we are all complex human beings and we are all learning so much more that I think the key maybe is being open. Right? Maybe we don't know what it is that we need or that what's going to, quote unquote, work. I don't know that we can be fixed as human beings as much as people try to fix us, but to cope better or to deal with the situation, whatever it looks like for us. Todd: Or change a belief system within yourself, right? Lisa: A mindset shift, whatever you want to call it. But I think the key is being open and like you say, to keep trying the things, even though you might not think that it's your thing. Like EMDR, man. Game changer. Game changer. When I first read about what it was and what was entailed, I thought, this is insane. I come from a long history of working in the medical system. I'm research driven. I'm data focused. And that EMDR, just when I was reading about it, I thought, well, I'm not so sure about this, but it was one of the greatest things that I did for myself and I cannot say enough about it. Todd: And I tell people all the time, even if it's a placebo and it works. It worked. So who gives a ****? Yeah. Lisa: So tell us about a visit that you had that involved a 911 call. Todd: Well, I'm getting so old. It was like eight years ago. And then it's like someone's like, no, that was like twelve years ago. It's like, oh yeah, I guess you were kidding. So I'm not sure how long ago it was. It was quite a while ago. So this was really some of my darkest times. The year before, I had drove myself to the hospital in Regina, in the ER, asked for help. None was given. And so I felt, as a man in a small town prairie, it was embarrassing for me as a man to go look for help, for emotions. It was huge for me to go do that and then to be told to go home. And basically I was super embarrassed. So I was like, all right, well, I guess I just got to suck it up here. I guess I was already on meds and kind of seen a counselor, but still, it was embarrassing to me. So over the year, I was a bad father, I was a bad husband, I was a bad employee, I was a bad son, and I was using marijuana, drinking all the time I was at a job. I wasn't finding fulfillment in whether that was at the job itself or just because I was in that frame of mind. And things came to a head one day and I had a few drinks in me already. I wasn't like super drunk or anything. My wife said something that triggered me. I don't even remember what. I don't know if it's a psychotic episode, but it's like a dream. I don't remember. I had people fill in some of the blanks, like even years later. But my wife said something and I snapped and I started punching myself in the face. I started slamming my head on the table and it freaked her out. She grabbed our kids. They were little at the time. She went out the door. And while I was there by myself, apparently I just put my head through the wall and I was slamming it as hard as I could against appliances of things. I was convinced in my mind that I just had ruined my life. My wife and kids are gone forever. Over that year, I not just had suicidal ideation, I mean, I was obsessed about it every night before bed, I was pushing knives against my throat and against my wrists, and I was doing really reckless behaviors at work that was dangerous, not for other people, but for myself. When people ask if you had a plan, when doctors are assessing you, do you have a plan? Are you suicidal? Do you have a plan? It didn't matter where I was during my day. I had places I could do things to take my life, right? I worked at the PFRA, at the tree nursery in indian head, and was like, that's a great tree. Mental note. Tools in my shop, I was, like, at work, it was like, didn't matter where I was. I had a plan. So things really came to a head, and, yeah, I was basically slamming my head against stuff. And then my brother showed up. He was the one I had a couple beers with earlier, and my wife apparently went to his place and said, what the hell were you guys doing? Like, you have to go help Todd. He's freaking out. And I pulled out a knife because I'd been practicing for a year, and this was it. And he tried to stop me, and I swung the knife at him, and then he jumped on top of me. He's a big dude. Got on top me and pinned me down. And apparently my sister was there too, and she's, like, trying to get me to smoke weed. To calm down, someone called the ambulance or called 911, and next thing I know, there's three or four police officers in my dining room. They don't know what the hell is going on. They see a knife on the floor. They see a big guy on top of another guy, and all hell breaks loose. Eventually, I'm screaming at them to shoot me. I'm begging them to kill me. I grab one of their guns. I didn't get it out of the holster, but I got my hand on one of their guns. And then things really escalated, and I had parts of my body that I didn't know had feelings that were hurting, because police are very good at detaining people, let's put it that way. And, yeah, they tied me up, and I just remember crying. Not sobbing. I mean, like, scream crying, begging them to shoot me. And I remember saying, like, you're hurting me. I'm tired of hurting. Stop hurting me. I'm tired of hurting. Kill me. Shoot me. But anyway, they detained me and got me in their vehicle, and they took me to my local hospital here in needing head, which then they put me in an ambulance and took me to Regina, to the general hospital, and they finally admitted me into the hospital there. But I remember pulling up. It was almost a year to the day that I tried going to the hospital on my own, and I thought, holy ****, this is what it took to get into the hospital this time, I'm handcuffed to a gurney, strapped to a gurney in an ambulance with two police officers on either side of me. But anyway, I got there. I spent a couple of weeks there, and, I mean, I could write a whole tv series just about the two weeks being in there. And I learned something while I was in there. I learned that you don't really get help in the hospital necessarily. It was a safe place for me to be to chill out for a couple of weeks till I was, like, got my wits about me again. And it did speed up the process to start seeing a psychiatrist because I was on, like, a year long waitlist. And once I got there, it was like, instantly I pushed up the waitlist. So there was that. And it was the beginning, I guess, of my healing process, even though it still took probably five years of really dark moments. There were a couple of kind of rock bottom moments after that, but that was kind of the major one that kind of got the ball rolling a bit. So that was scary. Lisa: Hey, rising strong listeners. If you've been enjoying the inspiring interviews on the podcast, we'd love your support to help us reach more listeners and hopefully gain some sponsorship. To do that, please, like, follow and subscribe wherever you listen to podcast. And here's a little extra incentive. Leave us a five star review, and you'll be entered to win some cool, rising strong swag. Your support means the world to me. Now back to the show. Well, what breaks my heart the most listening to that? Is that something, a situation so extreme is what it took for you to get some attention. Medical, professional, whatever. All the attention. Todd: Yeah. Lisa: How many people suffer in silence? Some people don't have these major breakdowns. That's terrifying that our system is so broken that it takes that much to finally get attention. And then what did your journey after that look like? Were you able to access a psychiatrist or a counselor? Did it tell us what that looked? Todd: Well, actually, while I was in there twice, aa came to my hospital room, and I was like, I shooed them away because I was like, well, I'm crazy depressed. I'm not an alcoholic. I have enough issues. I don't need to join a cult. I shoot them away. In the next few years, I was not thriving. Let's opposite. I was surviving, not thriving, let's put it that way. I was just going through the motions of my day to day. I kind of quit drinking on my own for a little bit, but I really upped my marijuana use because as a stoner, it's like, it's good for you, man. It helps my anxiety, bro. I know different now, but it drives me nuts when I hear people say that. It's not even addicting, man. And then I run out of weed and I have a nervous breakdown 4 hours later. It's my anxiety. Well, yeah, I wonder why I have anxiety. Anyway, I think it was a couple of years later. I did have another stint in the hospital. About a year after that, I had a kind of a bad weekend. It was only a couple of nights I spent in there. I'm doing my best. I'm self employed. Like I said. Eventually I start drinking again. I'm drinking, I'm smoking weed every day. And then I see in the newspaper that the health region or health district or whatever the hell it was called back then, they were laying off. I think it was like 20 some people from the general hospital, all from the psych ward, and I think it was something like 17 of them were psych nurses. And I thought, holy ****, like, I was in there. I know how I've seen how it operates, and I've seen how often security is called. At one point, security was called on me, and I ended up spending the night locked in a room with no bed. They just threw a mattress on the floor, and there was like, cameras. And I was like, security does not de escalate things like the psych nurses are trained. So anyway, I read this. I was like, how is this possible? And once in a while, anger, it's a good motivator. And I was so ****** off. Not like emotionally dysregulated anger. I was like, focused anger. I was like, this is bullshit. So I wrote, I don't know, a letter or blog. I don't know what I was doing. I just let my feelings out on. Well, it's not paper. It was on a keyboard. And I went through my. I basically told my story up to that point and how I thought this is all bs and all this stuff. And I talked about my suicide attempt, which I'd never really done publicly, especially in a small town. And I don't even remember doing this, but I sent it to a bunch of different media outlets and I posted it on facebook and stuff, and it blew up. It kind of went like, I don't know how many tens of thousands of times that letter got shared. I saw it on web pages, like in the states and stuff. Even. I'm like, what is going on? And the next day, it was like all the news outlets from Regina came out to indian head to interview me and talk to me about the stuff. So then I was kind of thrown into this advocacy role that I never thought I'd ever be doing. So then I felt like there was extra pressure on me. Now it's like, oh, okay, I've got people's attention, attention now, so let's keep this ball rolling and make some changes and make a difference. And within two months of having that pressure on me, not that other people were doing it, but my own pressure, I was in the hospital again, and I woke my wife up extremely intoxicated, told her I was going to harm myself and whatever. And that night, I wrote something on my computer. I considered it kind of a suicide note, but it wasn't really a suicide note. But again, a moment of clarity. I woke my wife up. Don't remember. I was so drunk. And that was the last night I drank, actually. I went to the small town hospital here in indian head, and I had an amazing doctor in town at the time, and he basically convinced me to go to treatment and start going to aa and stuff. And so I detoxed in the hospital here for a few weeks. And that really started. Well, actually. Okay, no, the other one started my journey. This was kind of mid journey now, but quitting drinking and quitting the marijuana and all that stuff, that was a huge thing. To this day, I have people reach out to me about a loved one they have, or even about themselves, and they're like, they're drinking, they're using, they're also depressed and all this stuff. And what do we treat first? The depression or the addiction? Again, no two people are the same for me. I had to get rid of that addiction before I could start healing about the anxiety and the depression and what was causing the depression and anxiety. That was the brown skin of the onion. I couldn't even get to layers until that big Chunk came off first. I'm assuming most people are like that, but again, everybody's different. Lisa Yeah. I think that is not a road that I have traveled, however, being on the sidelines of observing people in my life, I would say, from what I have observed, purely that I would concur with that. And so powerful. And it must be so difficult for loved ones spouses. May I ask how your marriage got through these years? I mean, that had to have been a massive strain. Todd: Oh, yeah. There was more than once where I wasn't sure we were going to make it. And I don't want to get too personal, but like I said, I was a bad husband. I was a bad father, I was a bad son. I was doing things that were against my own moral code. And then once you have some moments of clarity, you're like, what am I doing? This is not me. So she was amazing. My wife was amazing. After the first big stay at the hospital, I continued to see my psychiatrist and a counselor regularly. My wife knew somehow she's just a very intelligently, emotionally intelligent person. She knew that we couldn't work as a couple until she dealt with some stuff, too. So whatever I was going through kind of triggered some stuff in her. So she saw someone separately to deal with issues, traumas, and things she was dealing with, and then we would see someone together. So this was all happening at the same time. I was seeing my own person, she was seeing her own person. And then on separate days, we would see someone as a couple. And I really do feel like we got married young, like, we've been together for over 20 years, and I really do feel like we grew up together, even though we did know each other as children. We met when I was, like, 20 and she was 19 or something, but we really grew up together going through that. And then the next time when I was detoxing in the hospital and I quit drinking that night, it was shortly after that that I kind of wanted to leave the hospital and come home. And she said, like, I can't watch you do this to yourself anymore. I love you too much, and I just can't watch anymore. And she was like, if you are coming home, just come home to get your things, because I can't do this anymore. And I thought, oh, ****, okay, this is affecting people more than I thought. So I ended up staying at the hospital and detoxing and going through the whole thing the second time, it wasn't like she was mad or anything. I mean, I'm sure she was mad, but, yeah, it was just too. She was protecting herself and the kids. She's like, we can't do this anymore. I can't watch you do this anymore. And the kids are getting affected by it, and they're going to have traumas and stuff. Lisa: Do you think that hard line in the sand from her? Do you think that gave you a little nudge? A big nudge, maybe? Yeah. Todd: In addiction treatment, they're like, you're not doing this for other people. You're doing this for yourself. And it was kind of an ultimatum in a way, but also I was ready. I was so sick of it and I was just too scared. I was too scared to do it on my own. I didn't know how to do it. I was terrified. I tried for so many attempts to quit and to heal and it was too scary. So I'd quit. So generally, I don't think ultimatums work unless the other person is ready. Like I was ready. I just needed that nudge. And I tell people all the time too, that I think she had the harder end of the deal then. I've had people say, no, you can't compare pain, you can't compare traumas, and you can't compare, which is true. But as a parent now, it's like if my kids were going through it or my wife was going through the things I was going through, I don't know if I'd be able to stick around or just the sleepless nights, the absolute helplessness that she must have felt. God, I can only imagine how scary. Lisa Well, I'm glad that the two of you were able to work it through. I don't know the statistics, but marriage is hard enough on a good day to have extra stressors on it and so on and so forth. I mean, you clearly worked as a team, so I'm really glad to hear that. For anybody who might be listening, who is maybe at their lowest point struggling with either many of the aspects of mental health or addictions, what would be your advice to them? Todd: Oh man, there's so many things because there's so many levels to it. For one, keep advocating for yourself because the system does suck. And even when you're doing what your doctor's orders and you think things are going well, want more, demand more, get certain dates, whatever, like demand more. Because I guarantee you, I feel bad saying this because everyone I've ever met that works in addictions and mental health and in the health authorities, they're all sweet, lovely people, but the system, it's the system that sucks. And they know that. They even know that. So nothing against anyone that works in this field. It's just you have to demand more because the system will probably fail you at some point if you don't demand more. And I've seen it time and time again, and as far as we've come from my first suicide attempt to now, which has been about twelve years, it was only a year ago or a year and a half ago where that young guy was again told to leave the hospital in an hour later, he's found swim floating in the lake. So it's still happening. It's still not perfect. I know that there'll always be a certain percentage of people that get lost, but it's still very frustrating. And the other thing is, no one's going to do it for you. No pill, no therapist is going to fix you. You have to do the work. And that's the hardest part, is taking that first step to actually start doing the work. It took my wife saying, leave, I can't be around you anymore, to really start doing the work. I had seen a counselor for probably two or three years. Off and on. I wasn't doing anything. Like, I would go to the counselor session, I'd come home and not do anything to ask me to do. I'd be taking the pills and then be going like, why aren't they fixing me? Why haven't you cured me yet? And it's hard. It's simple. What you have to do is simple, but it's hard. It's not easy. It's a very simple plan on paper, but executing it is extremely difficult. It's painful, it's terrible. You think of having a broken leg, like the trauma of the broken leg, you don't even feel it at the time. It's the healing, it's the pain. That journey of healing sucks. And then it gets itchy under the cast and there's all types of things, and then you have to go through rehabilitation and all this stuff, like healing sucks, but if you don't do the work, you're just going to get gangrene and who knows what. It's kind of a weird analogy, I guess, but it works. So, yeah, it takes a lot of courage to heal, and unfortunately, a lot of people either don't get that nudge or they never, or something tragic happens before they're able to get into the mindset of doing the work. Lisa: I think you nailed it. There's no fairy godmother that's going to show up. No one is coming to save your butt. We've got to do the work ourselves. And you're absolutely right. It's simple, but far from easy. So one of the things I like to ask my guests on the podcast is what the word resilient means to you. Todd: I just used this word the other day, and I don't know if I've ever really used this word to describe myself or anyone other than Europe after World War II or something, but I use it the other day in a text to my know, life is still hard, whether it's financial or we were watching loved ones being sick. And like you said, even on a good day, marriages can be hard. So to me, resilience. When I think of the word resilience, I think of my wife and I, and I think of our family. And I said, we've been resilient in the past, and we're going to be resilient still, and we're going to get through this patch of it's not a relationship thing, but there's people around us that are suffering financially and kids are graduating, so we're borderline empty, nesting in a few months. So it's just a very transitional period in our lives right now for not just my wife and I, but for other people in our family. So when I think of resilience, I think of my wife and I, and I've never used that word to describe me or our relationship before. So it's kind of funny you use that word. You asked me about that today. Lisa: Well, when I started the podcast, and I knew I wanted to focus on mental health, but I knew that I also wanted to focus on people like you who really are resilient. And it's just really interesting to me because I do ask every single guest that question. Their answers are all varied, right? Because we're all unique snowflakes, but they're all the same at the same time. And I just find it so interesting. And I think it's your story that makes you resilient, right? I did a talk just a couple of weeks ago, and I said, unfortunately, we can't even talk about resilience until we talk about adversity, right? Because when we're sitting on a beach eating cupcakes all day long and the unicorns are running by, we're not growing, right? We're not becoming resilient. That's almost the opposite of resilience. So unfortunately, it does take adversity to get resilience. And like you are, you are that person. And I am so proud of you, Todd, so proud of you for the work that you've done, for the advocacy work that you continue to do. We didn't even get to your book. You've written a children's book, which I just think is just such a gift. It's such a hard topic to talk about. Yes, sometimes, daddy Christ, tell us just real quickly about your book and who it's for and where people can get a hold of it. Todd: Well, actually, the night I quit drinking and I said, I went to my computer and typed up a suicide note. It was actually the first draft of this book. So the night I quit drinking was the first draft of this book, and it was very different. It was the first draft, but it's basically the perspective of a kid watching his father go through depression, anxiety, and stuff. So the father never actually says anything in the book. It's always a conversation with the kid and the mother and the mother explaining to him that it's like having a stomachache. You're not well, so you have to get help. Sometimes you need rest. Sometimes you need medicine. Sometimes you have to go to the hospital. For whatever reason. I have a hard time tooting my own horn. But it's one of the things I'm very proud of, is that book. I think I've walked that fine line of making it realistic, but also not scary for kids. It's just this is what it's like. And kids do tend to understand physical things, so they can apply that to their emotions and to their mental health. And, yeah, it's gotten really great feedback from parents and from professionals. So, yeah, I'm really proud of it. lisa: Well, I think to me, the most important part is that it opens the door for conversation. Right. I mean, I am no parenting expert, but I do know that our kids don't necessarily learn from one conversation. Right. It's that constant revisiting topics. And a book for a small child is just a brilliant way to ease into it, open the door, make this a normalized part of conversations. Todd: Right, exactly. Lisa: It's very brilliant. And I'm, again, just so grateful that you were able to find the space and the heart space, really, to write that. So if people want to get a hold of your book, is it on Amazon? Todd Yeah, it. Yeah, if you go on Amazon ca. Or it's on some other websites and stuff, too. Yeah. Sometimes daddy cries. I wanted to add real quick that something I didn't expect with the book was opening up that conversation with the mother and the father, because probably 99% of the people that bought the book are females. So it's the mother or it's the mother of a child whose husband is suffering. Because for whatever reason, men. I don't know what it is. I talk about mental health all the time, and it's like 80% or 85% of my audience is female. And so it's like, I think men don't even know it's the problem because they either are drinking it away or getting angry. They don't realize their anger is actually depression or anxiety. Or whatever, so they don't even realize they're suffering anyway. That was a very interesting thing with the book, was finding that. Lisa: Absolutely. And maybe we'll come back and we'll do another podcast another time. But I think you critters, you males are absolute masters at a word I can never say. Compartmentalization, it's a big word and you just are able to put it somewhere. Push it down. I mean, not effectively. You don't get bonus points for doing that. But it's something that I think men do do, and I read something or heard something that we simple, right? We get better at what we do. So the more we push down, the better we get at pushing it down. The more we talk about it, the better we get at talking about it. So you know what? You are doing this world so much good by being a male voice speaking to mental health. And I know that eventually things will change and more men will know, opening up to this whole concept of doing the work. So I cannot thank you enough Todd for being here today, being vulnerable, sharing your story in such a raw and real way. Friends, make sure to check out Todd's podcast called Bunny Hugs and mental health. And make sure to follow him on Instagram at Bunny Hugs podcast. Stay well and be resilient and we'll catch you next time.

"An advanced practice provider's scope of practice can vary drastically depending on where you practice; listen to the ASCO Education's third episode of the advanced practice providers series, and learn more from our co-hosts, Todd Pickard (MD Anderson Cancer Center) and Dr. Stephanie Williams, (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine), along with guest speaker Heather Hylton (K Health) on what scope of practice is, who or what defines it, and why knowing this information is critical to your oncology care team success. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. Learn more at https://education.asco.org, or email us at education@asco.org   TRANSCRIPT Todd:  Hello everyone, and welcome back to the ASCO Education Podcast, and the third episode of the Advanced Practice Provider series. I'm Todd Pickard, your co-host for this series, along with Dr. Stephanie Williams. We'd also like to introduce you to our guest panelist today, Heather Hylton. Heather, why don't you share a bit about yourself, what you do, and where you're from. Heather: Sure. Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to join you in this podcast. My name is Heather Hylton. I'm a physician assistant based in New York. Most of my career has been in oncology, but I've been fortunate to have been able to serve in administrative and clinical roles in organizations in multiple states. So, I'm currently working in the remote care space, and I'm excited to bring this experience to our conversation. Todd:And Stephanie, why don't you remind our listeners today about your background, and why you have so much experience and really just have a really true appreciation for working with advanced practice providers. Stephanie: Thanks, Todd. I've worked in oncology for almost 40 years and I've had the opportunity to work with advanced practice providers, both physician assistants, and nurse practitioners for a couple of decades now. I've been in stem cell transplants and cellular therapy, and they're absolutely integral to our practice, both inpatient and outpatient in that particular field. Todd:  Well, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about advanced practice providers' scope of practice; what it is, what it means, who defines it, and why it is important for oncology APPs to know and understand what their scope of practice is. So, why don't we jump right in? So, I think it's important to define scope of practice first. So, I would like to just offer a little bit of a perspective around that language of scope of practice. Generally speaking, it is what is allowed by law at any particular state for an advanced practice provider to perform care on patients; what types of patients they can see, what kind of medications they can prescribe and write, what kind of activities they can be in, what kinds of relationships they have to have with other providers and delegating or collaborating physicians. So, generally speaking, a scope of practice can be very, very broad or it can be very, very narrow. And it really depends on the state and how the state defines it. So, I'm going to ask Heather to jump in here and can you provide an example or a story, or a case that comes to mind that helps illustrate scope of practice for an APP? Heather: Sure, I'd be happy to, you know, in terms of how I think about this, very simply stated is, what it is that I'm permitted to do as an advanced practice provider. And the boundaries, as you said around this, are really determined by a number of factors. So, education, training, experience, my competency, federal law in some cases, state laws, regulations. And this may also include, as you mentioned, specific physician collaboration requirements, facility policy, clinical privileges that are granted by that facility, sometimes payer policy factors in, and then of course, the needs of the patient. So, one very common question that comes up in the oncology space is, can APPs order or prescribe systemic therapy? And the answer of course, is really going to be determined by going through that checklist of the entities that determine if this is something that that APP can actually do. So, one example I have is a facility where the module that they utilized for ordering systemic therapy provided system rates only to physicians. And the facility that had been using that module before APPs were widely integrated. So, there were some innocent assumptions made that the absence of the APPs in the module meant it was “illegal” for APPs to order systemic therapy. So, in working with this group, we were able to go through this checklist. So, there were no federal or state restrictions on this particular clinical activity, but it needed to be written into the facility policy. So, criteria for establishing competency were devised. And then an education training plan was designed, implemented, and driving systemic therapy became part of that privileges requests from the APP, and then the systems' rights issues were also addressed. So, this was truly a success story in being able to safely expand the number of clinicians, who were able to prescribe systemic therapy in a busy and growing facility. Stephanie: Heather, what does it mean to you (this is a term that our administrators throw around a lot and our nurse managers throw around as well) to practice at the top of your license, whether you're a nurse, physician assistant, or an advanced practice nurse; what is the top of your license? Heather:  Well, this is a hot topic. And top-of-license practice really comes down to role optimization. It is just good business. It means that the patients and the caregiver's needs are being met by the professional with the appropriate training, experience and competency for each function or task that the professional performs. And from an engagement standpoint (which I know is not the topic of our conversation today, but it is important) we know that people want to engage in work that they find meaningful. While that definition certainly is individualized, a common thread is being able to leverage that education, training and experience you have to help others. And often, the reason why we really pursued our careers. Todd: I think this is such an important topic to talk about, is the top of license practice, because it really impacts all of us, Stephanie. You know, as physicians, you want to do what you've been trained to do, which is to assess a patient, have a differential diagnosis, do a diagnostic workup, arrive at a diagnosis, create a treatment plan, and have that treatment plan implemented so that you can care for the patient. And APPs are the same way. So, when you have folks, whoever they are, whether they are the nurse or the advanced practice provider or the physician or the social worker or the pharmacist, whoever it is; if they are utilized in a way that does not take into account all the skills and competencies that they have to deploy and provide for that patient, they're really working below the top of license. As an example, if you had an APP go from room to room to room with you seeing patients and the only thing that you had the APP doing was scribing, that APP is working well below their licensure. And in fact it's incredibly wasteful with limited resources in healthcare, to have folks who have lots of skills and competencies working at a level where you really should have a different member of the team providing that service. Like if you need a scribe, you should get a scribe. And so, I think that kind of illustration really makes it salient to folks to think about; we should all work to stretch the knowledge and skills and competencies that we spent so much time developing in all of our training and our certification. Because otherwise, it's just wasteful. And as Heather said, it's not very satisfying. Stephanie: Todd, I think that those are excellent points that you bring out and I think that's very important for people to realize that APPs aren't scribes, they aren't there to extend me. They're there to help me as a physician in my practice, to help the patients actually. And then we should work together as a team to give the best patient care that we can. But many times I see my colleagues, just as you said, going from room to room with their APP and expecting the APP, you know, “I'll pontificate and tell you do this, that, that and the other, and then you go out there.” I think also from a career and job satisfaction rating, it's really important to have that team around that can help each other out. And I think that really does help in terms of decreasing burnout and other things like that. Todd: So, Heather, can you give us some idea of how is scope of practice defined at a state or an institutional level? How do people arrive at those kinds of decisions or, you know, how does an institution decide what the scope of practice is? How does it work? Heather: Taking a step back and just, you know, kind of thinking about it through different lenses. So, you know, in contrast to physicians whose scope of practice has minimal variability from state to state, we know that there can be a bit more state to state variability for APPs. And the regulatory bodies or agencies can also be different. And there may be multiple agencies that weigh in on what that APP can do within a particular state. And so, it's certainly important to be familiar with the Practice Act for each state in which you are licensed. And I would also add onto this, in certain geographic areas, this may be particularly relevant to you if you are in a practice that has multiple locations in multiple states, but we'll come back to that a little bit later. But, you know, again, kind of going through your checklist, starting off, looking at what the Practice Act says, and these can all be written up in many different ways. Sometimes it comes across as what I would call like a laundry list, which when you first read it, seems pretty straightforward, but it can also kind of lead you into some issues because if it isn't on there, then what does that mean? Some Practice Acts are written up really more on the basis of what activities are excluded or things that you cannot do as an APP. And then some are just kept very broad, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable, but I would encourage you to not be uncomfortable with that because sometimes, they're written this way in order to give you more flexibility to set that scope of practice at facility level, which is ideally where you really want to be cited. You don't want to create something more limiting or more restrictive than what the state actually allows you to do. Todd: That is a critically important point and one that in my 24 years as an advanced practice provider who happens to be a PA, that has come up often and frequently is, “Well, it doesn't say this” or, “It doesn't specifically exclude that. And so, we're uncomfortable.” And my response is, “Well, that gives us an opportunity to create this space”, because, you know, many times, as you point out, Heather, these kind of ambiguities are written intentionally, so that local practice decisions can be made, so that physicians and advanced practice nurses and PAs can decide as a team, how do we work? You know, in my state, it was very specific that they wanted APPs and physicians to collaborate on ‘what does our practice look like?' And every local level, outside of those very large kind of rules about who can prescribe and who can pronounce a patient dead or write a restraining order — outside of those very large things, they really want us, they want the care team to figure it out and to do it in a way that's best for our patients. I think that is the best approach, is when we get to decide how we work. You know, the places, some of the states that have these laundry lists, you're right, Heather, it seems like, “Oh, that's easy,” but then you're like, “wait a minute, there's only 10 things on this list and we do, you know, 57, what does that mean?” And so, I think it can be very disadvantageous when you have those lists. And I do think it's important to think through these things, work with your legal colleagues to analyze these things, and then take an approach, stake out some territory, you know, once you've gotten informed and say, “This is what our scope looks like, we've all talked about it and this is how we're going to work as a team.” So, that's wonderful when you've got that level of flexibility. I think that's really great. Stephanie: Does insurance reimbursement play any role in terms of scope of practice, either locally or nationally? Heather:  It absolutely can. And it's important to know, for example, if you are in a practice, where you're seeing Medicare patients, to understand Medicare conditions of participation. If you are in a practice where you are taking care of patients with Medicaid or certainly private payers as well, like understanding what is actually in those contracts, so that you can make sure that you are either updating them if you need to, or making sure that what you need to be able to bill for is billable within those contracts. Todd: It's really interesting because I always have a sense of feeling like I need to cringe when somebody says we can't do this because of a reimbursement issue, and also, partially laugh. And the reason why I have both of those reactions is it's typically a misunderstanding, because saying that we won't reimburse for oxygen unless a physician's order is present to prescribe the oxygen does not equate to only a physician can do this. And so, you constantly have to kind of explore these issues and say, “Okay, so yes they use the word physician, but as an APP who has a collaborative delegatory relationship with a physician, and according to my state license and scope of practice, I write physician orders.” So, if you connect those dots, if I, as the APP, have written the physician order for the oxygen, it meets your criteria. It doesn't say a person who holds a medical license, it says physician order. And so, I think that's where you have to really constantly be on guard about these misconceptions, misunderstandings, and these ambiguities. And as Heather said, working with APPs, you just have to say, “Look, there's going to be ambiguities, we're going to work it out, we're going to figure it out. And, you know, reimbursement is important.” But you have to remind folks that reimbursement doesn't define practice, it defines how you get paid. Stephanie: Excellent point, Todd. Excellent. Heather: I'll add a story to that as well. When I first came to New York, I became aware of a situation where the narrative at a particular facility was that a major private payer would not reimburse for services provided by PAs. Now, I thought that was a little strange, but, you know, I was a new kid in town, but at that time — there are more now, but at that time there were 10,000 PAs in New York. That's a pretty big number. And so, I thought, you know, I probably would've heard something about this if this major payer would not reimburse for these services. So, to help with the situation, I started doing the research, you know, looking at specific information from the payer, checking with connections at other facilities to learn about any issues that they may have experienced with this payer, checking with our national organization and so forth. And really, nothing was coming up, suggested that the payer would not buy reimbursement for services provided by PAs. And ultimately, it came down to something very simple, which was the facility just didn't have this in their payer contract, they hadn't needed it up to that point. So, it made perfect sense and it was fixed once the issue was identified. So, this goes back to just being very vigilant about the research that you're doing. And sometimes, it takes a little time to get to the solution, but really that perseverance does pay off. Todd: Heather, I'm sitting here, I'm laughing because I just had a recent example of where the right and the left hand within a state had no idea what was happening. So, an employer who does ambulatory outpatient treatments at different retail locations (we'll just leave it at that) there was this concept that PAs as an example, were ineligible because of the state requirements that then were reflected in this company's policy. And what was so interesting is that a PA colleague of mine started investigating and I said, “Well, what does the state law say?” And she went and she looked and she said, “Oh, it was changed last year that this thing that was causing this policy in this employer was changed.” And I said, “Well, does the company know that the law was changed?” So, she reached out to the medical director who was a physician, whose daughter was happening to want to go to PA school. So, she had an in, she had an in right away, which serendipity does play a part here. And she said, “Did you know that the state law changed?” And they said, “No.” And so, she sent them the state law and then within a week, the medical director said, “Oh, just so you know, we're hiring PAs now, we've updated our internal policies to reflect state law.” So, sometimes it's just these small things that people forget the details, that when something changes, you have to reflect that in your policies of companies or institutions or your practice group. And that's the one thing that I think is so different for APPs from physicians. Physicians are kind of just granted this big broad authority and it rarely changes. It's very stoic and it's kind of fixed. But for APPs it is constantly in flux, constantly in flux. And that's just the nature of it. I don't know why it's been that way. We've organically developed this in the United States over the past 50 years, maybe 50 years from now, it'll be different, but right now, it's not. And so, I think that's the important thing is there's more space out there for advanced practice, scope of practice and top of licensure, than you think is possible. It just requires a little work. Heather: I will say that I 100% agree and, you know, when you take a step back from some of these, like these Practice Acts, they tell a story about the climate in the state and the history in the state. And it's quite fascinating if you like that. I'm not the most fun person at a party, but, you know, these things, they tell a story and it gives you a good sense of what's actually going on in the micro environment in that state. In the last year plus, I've spent a lot of time reviewing Practice Acts of most of the states of the union, and so, I have this ability to really compare. And I also know which states I really, really like and which ones are a little bit more challenging. But there are things like even legislation that's left over from the industrial revolution that's actually influenced how a particular pharmacy interprets, you know, whether or not they can accept a prescription without a counter signature from a physician. And so, some of these things, like when you start drawing some of these lines, it becomes very interesting and it definitely comes down to some interpretation as well. So, always being able to work with a good legal team or people who do understand Practice Act information and working with your state resources as well, as well as your national organizations can be very impactful. Todd:  I would also say step one is to pull up whatever Practice Act is influencing something and read it. They are in English, they're not in Latin or French, they're in English. And many times, you can find something very plainly said. Other times you do need your legal friends to help you understand, “Okay, now what does this mean? I read the words but it's not clear.” But sometimes it will say, you know, “An APP may prescribe a controlled substance.” Period. So, oh, well, there's an answer right there. Now, there may be a how-to section later, in another part of the regulatory or administrative code within a state, but for the most part is, don't be afraid to look, don't be afraid to phone a friend and explore and ask questions. Stephanie:  You're eligible though for controlled substance licenses nationally, right? A DEA number? Todd:  That's a hot topic. Stephanie:  Is it? Heather: There may be other things that you need to do within a state as well in order to prescribe. So, for example, in Massachusetts, even to prescribe legend drugs, you need a Mass Controlled Substance Registration, because any substance that's not a DEA scheduled substance is considered a category 6 substance in Massachusetts. So, if I'm going to write a prescription for Omeprazole, I need to have a Massachusetts Controlled Substance Registration, as any prescriber would in the state. So, again, some of these little nuances, making sure that you're very familiar with that and doing the research. Stephanie: So Heather, you're in New York, I'm sure you get patients from Massachusetts. So, you have to make certain that you can prescribe both in New York and Massachusetts and probably, Rhode Island and all the states around there? Heather: Well, you bring up a really good point, which is, you know,when you are in a practice that has locations in multiple states, and we can talk about telehealth a little bit later. But if you are in a medical group that has practice sites, say in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, licensed in all three states, and you work at sites in all three states, say you're an APP who likes to float and you make these commutes each day. So, all three states may have significant differences in their Practice Acts or what you need to do in order to optimize your practice in that state. And that includes collaboration requirements. So, some states have the ability for nurse practitioners to have autonomous practice, but there may be other steps where you may need a particular license, in order to be able to do that within that state. So, again, being very aware of those steps that you need to take is really important. Stephanie: So, Heather, you mentioned telehealth, which is a big topic through COVID. I don't really have to tell people how big a topic that is. So, what are the changes or what is going to happen with that now that we're “getting to the other end of COVID”? Heather:  That's a big question mark, right? So, certainly, the advancement of telehealth was an important development during the pandemic. And many states have a separate set of laws, regulations that govern delivery of healthcare services through telehealth. So, if your practice is utilizing telehealth to deliver medical services, it's necessary to be fluent in this information. So, this can include important information such as how a patient provider relationship is established. And, you know, it may also include information on prescribing practices, what may or may not be permitted or the conditions under which a prescription can be provided and so forth. And so, some states relaxed telehealth-related rules under state of emergency declarations. And so, making sure that you are up-to-date on this as some of those rules have returned to the pre-pandemic state and some of those relaxations actually became permanent. And of course, if you're billing for these services, knowing the payer requirements and then the policies and procedures you need to follow, in order to bill for those services. And where the patient is physically located at the time that the service is being provided, is the state in which you need to be licensed in order to provide that service. So, if Todd is performing a telehealth service for a patient in Oklahoma and he's not licensed in Oklahoma, he won't be able to see that patient. Todd:  It's really strange because telehealth has brought a different layer of perspective around scope of practice and licensure that we hadn't really faced as much before, right? So, for example, I've been a PA for 24 years. I have been able to call across state lines and interact with patients and talk to them on the phone, get updates on their surgery, if they're having, you know, a postoperative infection, get them an antibiotic and do that kind of work forever. But as soon as you add that technology and that billing entity called a telehealth encounter or a virtual encounter, it becomes a different animal all of a sudden. And this really came to light during the pandemic. And we quickly realized all of these things made it impossible. And that's why all the states did all of these emergency declarations saying, “Just forget it, just take care of people.” But now that we're getting past that, we're kind of going backwards, not because anything bad happened, but because folks are saying, “Well, we want to go back to the older ways where, you know, every state could have differences in regulations and make folks pay those professional fees to get licensure.” So, it'll be interesting to see how this space develops, particularly since our patients are becoming more consumers. Really, they want to talk to who they want to talk to, when they want to talk to them, and they want service here and now. And I think we're going to have to continue to respond and adapt to that. And some places will lead and some places will lag. But those lagging places quickly are going to start having conversations within the state and our legislators will respond. I mean, politically, it will change over time. It just, you know, matters how quickly. So, it's really an interesting thing to watch unfold in real time. Stephanie: Heather, any final remarks, concerns, advice to those out there, both physicians and advanced practice providers, about how to handle questions about, my God, what is your scope of practice? Heather:  I'm so glad you asked Stephanie because I have a list I might be able to pass them along. So, here we go. Do take the time to review the state Practice Act information and laws and regulations and of course facility policy governing a practice where you are. And as the license holder, you are responsible for knowing what you are permitted to do. Please do not make any assumptions about others' knowledge of this. Unfortunately, I've seen people get caught up in that and always own it, yourself. Generally, recommend facility policy not be more restrictive than what is permitted under the Practice Act of the state. Fact check, challenge your assumptions, and if you haven't had the chance to already do so, do check out the ASCO Advanced Practice Provider Onboarding and Practice Guide for more resources. Stephanie: Well, I'd like to thank Heather for her excellent insight into this very complicated topic. Todd, as always, is always on top of everything. And sharing both your experiences and your ideas with us on APP scope of practice, which can vary quite drastically depending upon the state and also the type of institution you practice in. Stay tuned for our next episode. Until next time, take care. Voiceover:  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. Voiceover: 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.

Todd Riccio, Realtor and longtime Investor from California, discusses how he became interested in the Memphis real estate market and offers his experiences over the years of real estate investing and management of rental properties here in Memphis, TN. Find out more about this real estate investing podcast at: https://epmrealestate.com/podcast/california-based-realtor--investor-on-investment-real-estate--property-management-in-memphis-tn   Aaron: Today on the podcast, we have Todd Riccio. He is a longtime investor with Enterprise Property Management and EPM Real Estate, and we're going to talk a little bit about how he has become interested in the Memphis real estate market and maybe even tips and bits of wisdom that Todd has had over the years investing here in Memphis. Todd, you have been an investor with Enterprise Property Management for six years. Is that right? Todd: Yeah, six years.  Aaron: It's been a fast six years, right? Like, you really got in at a great time. Todd: I remember flying out to you, man. Well, I flew out to you and said, look, my goal is to get 40 to 50 properties. I want to get at least one to two a year, and you said right now, when we spoke, you said it's the equivalent of California's 2009, and six years later, you are pretty accurate, man. You know what I mean?  Aaron: Yeah. Todd: Because the prices have gone up and the properties that I first bought on Ross Road and stuff like that, that was like $105,000, probably like 250 right now. Just real estate agent out here in California. Obviously, prices make it extremely hard for me to build a portfolio out here. When the average house in Memphis, that would be 120,000, out there would probably be about 700,000 out here. So I knew that kind of branching outside of California would be the best option for me to accomplish my goals of having a portfolio that brings me $50,000, $60,000 a month when I get older. That's the goal right there. That's my 401K. That's my pension. That's my retirement, all these properties. Aaron: Do you remember what brought your attention to Memphis originally? Like what caused you to look over in our direction? Todd: I always did a bunch of research. I was going to seminars. I'm always looking for passive income, and Memphis was at that time one of the cities that would always pop up in different websites of best cities to buy rental properties, and Memphis popped up. Boise popped up, Indianapolis popped up, and Fort Lauderdale popped up. I think Scottsdale popped up, but Memphis was one that always consistently kind of popped up to me. Personally, I don't like the Panhandle States. I don't like Florida. Every time you turn on the news, Florida is getting a Hurricane. They're getting flooded. All this other stuff. There's Hurricanes. There's tornadoes. So Memphis was super stable. I remember when I spoke to you, you said, look, Memphis is pretty much an established metropolis. It's gone through its growth stage, and it's pulled backstage. You got Amazon headquarters there. You got Nike, it's growing. They're putting money back into the community. You got the Amazon fulfillment center. You got Shelby Farms. You got all this stuff. So it was kind of one of those cities that have already been established. It's not like an up-and-coming one, and I just felt comfortable. I felt comfortable with you guys. I felt comfortable because I actually flew out and me flying out and checking out the different neighborhoods is just one more piece of info gathering and due diligence, and ever since then, I'm comfortable with the knowledge, and I kind of think that that's kind of one of the things that I respect you on is there's times where I've said, hey, Aaron, what about this area, and you're like, look, I don't even think we could get a roofer out there because the neighborhood is not the best or anything like that, and you need that as an investor because it's not just about numbers, oh, this is a quadplex or a fourplex at this price, and the return is good. You need someone that's boots on the ground. That's, like, you probably want to like, from what you're looking for Todd, this isn't the neighborhood that you would express to me that you wanted or anything like that. I appreciate that info, and I think I'm comfortable after the first couple of them to get in my kind of system now, my numbers and my algorithms and everything, you know what I'm looking for and stuff like that. So it just seems to be working, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Aaron: Yeah, well, one of the things about working with you that I wish that other investors and other clients of mine would adopt is you do have a very decisive approach to investment real estate. You understand exactly what it is that you're looking for. I think that you had a really good start to your run. We bought some single-level homes in established neighborhoods that were built in the 90s, I believe, and you and I discussed this. We discussed in Memphis, what generation or what age of construction is really good for investments in an ongoing manner here, and so you and I talked about how, like we here in Memphis, if you live in Memphis, if you've lived in Memphis for a long time, if you do real estate in Memphis, especially, we have a term out here that we use called new construction or newer construction, and so what does that mean to us? Well, new construction basically means anything to me, at least, anything that's the late 80s or newer, and why is that different? Well, it's different because the technologies that we're putting into houses as we were building them back then are more durable. We're not dealing with poisonous building materials such as asbestos or lead. We're not dealing with shoddy electrical lines, like aluminum wiring that you found a lot in the 80s or late 70s all the way up into the early 80s. You're not dealing with things like I don't know… Todd: Asbestos. Aaron: Right, as asbestos. There's a type of plumbing material that the Dow Oil company produced. I think it's called polybutyrol or something like that, which is known to burst. It's like early Pex, and so if anybody knows what PEX is, we improved. We improved code and zoning, and these areas of newer construction are also in neighborhoods that are still highly desired by owner-occupants. And so Memphis being a wonderful town for investment, you can still get in and buy just like you have an investment property, which is right next door to someone who was on their property for anywhere from ten to 30 years, and you want to live next door or an own investment property next door to that guy you don't want to buy in neighborhoods that are all investment properties. You might as well buy a condominium or an apartment if you want to do something like that. But you've been very smart. You're like, where is the value? Right. So I've really appreciated you for that, and then the other thing that I love working with you on is you and I will often get in and we'll talk about a property and it'll get down to $10,000 or $20,000 difference in the price of the negotiation, especially in the last two years. You'll tell me, you'll say, Aaron, I feel like this is overpriced by 20 grand. What do you think, and I'll be like, yeah, I think it is. Your ability to walk away from a contract that's being negotiated and just say, you know what? I didn't like, what I saw, that the deck or the roof looks weird or that skylight looks like it's going to need repair. It's always going to be a problem. I'm just going to walk away. But we know that buyers can use that inspection as an excuse to walk away from something where they don't feel like now that they know the house better, they don't feel like they're getting a good deal, and you're very fast to point that out and say, you know what? I'm just going to pull the plug and walk away, and I love that about you. It's really good. Todd: Yeah, and the thing is, I'm on property number six and all other five of them that I've gone into contract. I've closed on because I'm also, like, a realist too of, like, look, at the end of the day, it's one-time fixes and stuff like that. But I think also having experience with the five other properties becoming more and more anticipatory of, like, I know that I'm going to get a letter from you guys saying, like, hey, the fence is shot or this that and the other thing and being in this industry, being in the real estate industry for so long, too, I'm all about preventative stuff and pro-activeness and stuff. So very rarely do I ever cancel. But this one I think I was like, look, it's probably like 15K, 16K, 17K to get it even rent ready, and after talking to a couple of agents, they think that it might slow down in November. I don't know if that's true or not, but around Thanksgiving time because I'm always hungry, too to get a minimum of one to two a year. So I'm still on the prowl of getting it. But it has to make sense as well, and the thing is, I've narrowed it down to a single story because me and water after being in this industry, water does not do well with houses and having a second floor. I just get nervous about water leaks through the ceiling and stuff. So single-story brick house for the maintenance, two-car garage, because I just value storage and stuff like that a usable yard, all that stuff where I'm sure other properties would do just as good. But this is just what I feel comfortable with, because you and I always have that conversation I'm like, look, Aaron, I know the rental market is very active right now, and properties are renting pretty quick, but I want the properties that no matter what the rental market is, if it's slow, if it's fast, if it's quick, what properties are going to be in the top 10% to rent out? I don't want the black sheep. I don't want the white elephant. I don't want the ones where in the time where the rental market is good, it gets rented out. But then when it's not good, we're sitting there and stuff like that. So I'm going to pay a little bit extra to be like, look, it's cool to have the two-car garage and storage when it's snowing and stuff like that. It's cool to have the brick and single-story because that's desirable and stuff like that. It's cool to have a yard because they barbecue and have their kids play outside and stuff. So that's also something that I value, as well as your opinion of this is going to be a very active one, no matter what the rental market is as opposed to on the lower end of it when the rental market does slow down. Aaron: Which it's funny that you should bring that up. So earlier, Todd, you had briefly touched on the fact that there will eventually be a slowdown in the rental market, and I know that your philosophy is obviously to make sure that you have just operable properties that aren't going to require. They don't require a lot from the renter. For instance, in order to move into their relatively simple, relatively basic layouts. There are all kinds of very specific preferences that you have that I think really head off these larger maintenance costs. That's really smart, and I agree with you. I want to go back and talk about storage for a second, at least a one-car garage man. For years you and I have talked about we'll look at a property. You'll say this one came up, the money looks good, and every single property that you send me has at least a one-car garage, which is very, very smart. In Memphis, Memphis is a very typical city of a million people more or less, and so in an urban setting or even a suburban setting that has urban tendencies or an urban demographic, you're going to have foot traffic, you're going to have petty crime, and so having an open carport in a city like Memphis is not a good idea. You know, like in Memphis, you need a garage for the door that shuts, and so you can keep your outside stuff outside, but also in an enclosed area that's secured. So another point that I would make to any investor that's looking to purchase property in Memphis is this if the house that you're looking for or if the house that you find that doesn't have a garage is $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000 cheaper than the house with a garage by the house with a garage. From a rental standpoint, it will always stand out to the renter. We have a great house on the market right now. It's a three-bedroom, two-bath. It's less than ten years old. It has a beautiful brick and French country facade. It was one of the last French country houses that were built here, and it has no covered parking and that it has no garage, obviously, and that poor house is just sitting out there and nobody wants it because they can't like, where are you going to store your stuff? Todd: Yeah, I kind of base it, even though California and Memphis are different markets, price point-wise. Human psychology, I think, is the same, and I think that after hearing clients out here, garages are huge because even if you're not going to park your car in there, people always have more stuff than they have room and stuff. So it's just having the options. I remember when I first started looking six years ago. There were some properties in central Memphis that have the laundry area outside in the carport area, and I'm like, Look, I don't want that either, because I relate that to the equivalent of houses out here having laundry in the garage, and sometimes when I hear people going when I'm showing buyers around like, oh, I don't want to go to the garage for laundry. I want it in the house. I just associate that with the same thing with Memphis, like, who wants to go out when it's snowing to get clean underwear from your dryer when it's 20 degrees out and stuff like that. So I just basically take my knowledge here and say what's the most desirable and the most desirable is going to be a two-car garage. Its single story is going to cater to not only the younger people that want to, but it's also going to cater to older people that don't want to climb stairs or anything like that. So single story. It's cool because it caters to more people having a yard to just stretch your legs out and stuff and not feel crammed to have kids play around and stuff and then again, the brick facade where there's not wood rot and damage and termites and all that stuff. So I just basically take whatever my knowledge is here and just transferred over to the Memphis properties, because again, at the end of the day, people want the same stuff just as people don't want to go in the garage in California. I'm sure people don't want to go out in the cold in Memphis and stuff, and so we can have an indoor laundry and they could park their car in the garage and walk-in their house with direct access and stuff like that. All that stuff is going to be desirable in my mind for the long term. Aaron: So there was a time when you and I were looking at these possible purchases, and we found several you would find, especially back in 2015 or so, and you would find four or five comparable in a certain area, and you would say, I'm looking at all of these. Which one of these do you think would be the most reliable? You know, which one of these do you feel like is going to bring the highest rent and obviously be the most attractive on the market, and we used to thumb through a Rolodex of houses that were possible purchases. I know that those purchases have probably become limited as you look in the Memphis marketplace right now. Can you kind of compare markets? Let's even say from 2019 to now, like, what is the difference to an investor when you're looking at the marketplace now versus two years ago? Todd: Well, I mean, the one thing that two years ago, I think that the good properties and stuff like that from what I saw two years ago, something would go like maybe 5000 over the asking. So if it's listed at like, 149, because up till last year, it seemed like $150,000 was like the ceiling of what these properties could yield that would fit what I'm looking for. But over the past couple of years, it seemed like 150 now is kind of the minimum, and it's kind of surpassed that. So I saw the prices increase. But another thing I've seen is whereas two years ago where if a property was like 149, it would sell for 156 or 155 and go 50. 00, 60. 00 over, and stuff like that where I just wrote an offer on another property and the highest offer with multiple offers was $30,000 over the asking price, and that just blew my mind because I was like, Are you kidding me? That's 20% over the asking price and stuff like that. So that's something that is new to me that I've seen is buyers in the Memphis market are aggressively going over asking, whereas a couple of years ago, they might go over asking, but it would be five, six grand, seven grand, maybe eight, nine grand, but not 30 grand. That was just unheard of or anything. So that's the one thing I've seen. But given that my background is real estate, I also have strategies that I could separate myself to where I can call the shots. For instance, when I wrote the offer, I was like, look, remove the appraisal contingency. I get it. I understand the terms, and I was like, put an escalation clause in which says I'll pay 33,000 over the highest verifiable offer and stuff like that, and that's where the listing agent came back and said, hey, we haven't offered 30,000 over the asking price, and I said, I'm out, you know what I mean? But it gave me the opportunity to know what I needed to be at as opposed to the listing agent. Just saying, oh, you didn't get it. We chose someone else. So there's different strategies that I use here that I use there that really stand out to the seller. And that escalation clause is great, because why not have a seller get 3000 more dollars with no appraisal contingency and stuff like that? So, again, if I could separate myself and write a more aggressive offer, I'm in the know of the risk and rewards and stuff like that. But it's all little strategies here and there that at least put you in the running to see if you want it at that price.  Aaron: Well, do you put a cap on your escalation clause? Todd: I don't because I could just walk away, like when the person said we had 30,000 over the asking price. I'm like, I'm out. But the thing is, I've seen when you put a cap, they know exactly where you're at, and so they know exactly where your cap is, and you could tell it. Say, I put offer 150 with a 3000 escalation up to 160 if someone comes in at 162, I'll never hear about it. So it's like, I'd rather not put a cap, and if an offer comes in at 161, they might say, hey, we had an offer of 161. You want to come in at 164. So I don't want to lose the house over two or three grand or anything like that. But when you put a cap in, you're kind of putting a ceiling on your place. So I would rather have no ceiling, and that also makes it difficult for the listing agent to know exactly where you're at because if you put a cap on it, the listing agent knows exactly what you're willing to come up to. If you put no cap, he's kind of flying blind to what he's advising the other buyer's agents of where my offers are. Aaron: So how are you financing your deals right now? Todd: I'm financing it with my own cash, 25% down. So $150,000 property probably takes about 30 GS, probably 35 with closing costs and stuff like that. So 35 grand gets another property. Aaron: So you got, I assume, a line of credit, or are you doing individual mortgages on each property, individual mortgages. So having said that and I know you're probably going conventional and not FHA, and so you don't have to deal with all of the federal requirements for houses to close. And then you've got repair addendums, and you've got all these other things that you have to deal with an FHA loan that you don't have to deal with conventional. So now we know you're fantasy game does appraisal matter to you? Todd: It does to a certain point. I think that I'm experienced enough to look at a property, look at what's sold around it, and kind of have a pretty good idea of where this thing is going to appraise that. So like the one that I was just talking about earlier, the one that came in 30,000 over. I'm out of that one. But if they came in 5000 over 6000 over and stuff like that, I'm not too concerned about it. I mean, even if it doesn't appraise by a couple of $1,000, I understand you have to pay to play and stuff like that, and at the end of the day, if it costs me a couple of thousand extra Bucks out of pocket, it's not a scarcity mindset. It's an abundance mindset, and I already know that I'm going to make the money back tenfold with just having another property because my main thing is keeping my momentum going and keep growing the portfolio and pushing myself to keep adding to and keep adding to it. I think I'm a good mix between looking at the numbers and being number conscious and stuff, but then also understanding that this is a good property. It's a good property. It's in a good area. If I have to pay an extra two, three, $4,000 to get it. It's the name of the game. I already know that I'll make it back and stuff like that in the next month with all the other incomes I have coming in and stuff, and it gets me one property closer to my goal of financial freedom and stuff. So it's just taking the abundance mindset and not the scarcity mindset because if you're dealing with the scarcity mindset and anything in life, you're always going to be hesitant and pulling the trigger and stuff, and it's just one of those things were being in this industry has really helped me out making these decisions and stuff, because again, I deal with a bunch of buyers out here where they find the property of their dreams, and they're scared to do a couple of thousand bucks, but they're paying 3,000 bucks a month in rent and it's like, look, just bite the bullet and just take a leap of faith and stuff like that. So if it matches everything and it's single-story with a two-car garage and it's upgraded because then I also look at okay, say, I don't get a house as upgraded. Is this what's the cost of the rent-ready one and that's like the other one I canceled on earlier this year. It's like by the time the fence around the whole perimeter was done cutting back the bushes, getting the wood trim of the deck repair, and stuff like that, as opposed to getting a property that's completely upgraded and spending an extra three or four or $5,000 because it didn't appraise but not really putting any money into because it's completely upgraded. I can quickly do the pros and cons and the risk and reward of that. Aaron: And the one that we were talking about may have only been a month ago. I'm not sure. Todd: Yeah, it was in September. Aaron: Yes, it was Southeast Memphis is where we were looking, and that house had zero updates. It was really disappointing, and you were really smart to pull out of that one. I mean, just updating a home in $2019. You're looking at $10,000-$15,000. We've got delays now we've got supply chain interruptions. I don't think we've necessarily seen the effects of the Hurricanes in the New Orleans area affect us as badly as we thought was going to happen. But we had a Hurricane come through about a month ago and it hit the Glidden paint factory. Hopefully, I can say that on-air and not have any issues. But the Glidden paint factory basically had stockpiled paint, as they always do, and the base paint and primer and things like that. But basically, the Hurricane flooded the entire factory, and they said, look, we can ship out what we've got and we can ship the base solution out to other refineries and paint makers so that they can finish the base product and move that out. But they were talking about a 30 to 45-day retrofit, and so we were going to have paint shortages and all of the lows and all the Home Depot and all these stores, my painters, a lot of my painters. They just stockpiled paint. They just said we're a Glidden company. We're going to buy up this paint and we're going to make sure that we have some in case there's a shortage so that they could continue to work through the winter. So anyway, that's just a random thing that's happening here in the south. We know what you like and we know what you've purchased. How do you foresee the changes in the marketplace if we take the whole foreclosure opportunity out of there, and I think that's something that you and I really need to investigate at a different time. But what are you looking at now? Because we know what was on the market. That was really great. That was rehabbed before. We know what's currently on the market, which really is not upgraded without a huge premium, and to ask and we know that you're not going to overpay and I respect that. I'm not going to overpay either. I'm not going to do it. I'll pay above a little bit for the joy of owning it and operating it and say, okay, I've got my one or my two for this year, but I'm not going to waste 50 grand just for the opportunity cost. That's not a good opportunity cost. Did you buy one this year already? Do we have one under your belt? Todd: Not this year. I'm going to be aggressively looking around November. November and the last two years. I've closed in December of that year. So like last year I closed December 31, and then I think the year before that I closed right around Thanksgiving and stuff like that. So I'm going to be aggressively looking in the next two or three weeks to be looking again, picking up my one for the year and then continuing to just push and push and push and even exploring the multi-units with you and stuff like that. So just always be open to pulling the trigger if the right property comes along. Aaron: That's cool. Just so that, you know, Glenn has got a couple in the bag right now. That just came across today, like in the last 2 hours, and they're both Cordova. Todd: Yeah, for sure, man. Aaron: Yeah, and that's exciting because we don't get Cordova a lot anymore. But these two, they're slightly distressed, just marginally. I would say 2% distressed, and that two to 4%, and of the value of the house itself, I would say, is cosmetic. So that's cool, and that's just proof right there to anybody listening. There's always an opportunity out there. If you're willing to have a conversation, right, you've got to be open to having conversations with people. You cannot do this on your own. When you listen to Todd and me talk right now, you're listening to two Realtors, and so earlier in our conversation, Todd was talking about how not trusting your realtor can get you into a lot of trouble. Realtors go through a lot of education. We go through a lot of continuing education. Being the principal broker of enterprise, property management, and EPM real estate, I have to take so much more education than even my agents. I have to constantly be paying attention to the news that comes down from our local state real estate Association and from the National Association of Realtors, and really know what's going on. Your realtor is being paid a Commission for their performance. Todd is a performer. There's no question, and he looks for a similar performance with us. Even though our markets are completely different. He asks me very high-end questions, high-level questions that he is asked as a realtor every day. He wants to know as the buyer, what am I getting myself into? What's my risk here? What do you think about this? What's your opinion? What would your experience suggest would be the proper course of action at this time? And then he relies on the information, my feedback, and my insight in order to make his decision, and I love the fact that he faces a lot of his decisions based on what I convey to him, not just his gut. So that's just so, so important. Listen to your realtor. There's a reason why you've hired them. So anyway, just to sort of ask you a couple of questions just to kind of wrap up where we are, and it's been a great conversation with you. Your fingers are on the pulse of what's happening in California, and I think California is kind of a leader in what happens in real estate. Really in the rest of the United States. You guys are sort of on the top end of fluctuations in the national real estate market. What happens in California often informs, the rest of the country as to where the real estate market is headed. You got some weird stuff going on over there like you were talking about earlier, very inventive insightful, imaginative solutions to real estate transactions, lots of technology, the rest of the country, though, like, if you stay away from the coasts, we still deal with hands-on. Right. Like, we want to go to the property, Glenn that we were talking about before. A lot of my agents will meet the neighbors. My wife, who just became an agent, by the way, four months ago, was at a property two days ago, and she was with the buyer who had flown in from New Jersey, and they were looking through the property and who would come out except for the neighbor. Right. So they met the neighbor and they got to ask those questions, right? Like, really important questions. What's your experience here? What would you do differently? What do you think about this property that you're next door to, or do you think they're asking too much? What would you do with this as a rental if you were to own it? Is it going to bother you to have a rental next door? What are your expectations of the community and of the tenant that leases here, and so a lot of that's going on? So back to my question again, when you consider your own business next year, and you also consider your investment business, what are the changes that you see happening in 2022 that you are aware of that you're going to be maybe shifting gears a little bit in order to respond to, and then how does that affect your investment outlook for 2022? Todd: I just think that there are so many moving parts right now that's all the statistical previous historical data. I think it goes out the window. We have a pandemic going on. You have inflation talk. You have the stock market talk, interest rate talk, Treasury bond talk, jobless talk. You got the borders that are going crazy around the country. You got other countries that are going crazy. So it's one of those things where I just put my head down. I just put my head down and do everything I can and just do better than the year before that and not really sway. I always think of Warren Buffett, where he said, when everyone scared, you go head first and stuff like that and that's kind of what I've been doing even in the stock market right now, like, all the stock of inflation and this that and the other thing I've just been continuing to buy and just continuing to buy and continuing to buy stock and properties I feel like are going to be in the future very productive and stuff like that. I'm getting into electric vehicle materials, raw materials. I'm getting into cannabis stocks. I'm getting into Carnival Cruise Line and United Airlines and Royal Caribbean and cell phone towers because of the 5G with electric cars and stuff. So it's just basically doing you and not really letting outside factors get in the way because there's times where I've seen time and time again people that I spoke to in my career five years ago, six years ago, two years ago, like, oh, the market is still going to dip. So I'm waiting here and they're trying to time the market, and they said that four years ago, I remember I spoke to a tenant four years ago and I was like, look, man, get in, and he was so Gung-Ho that he was getting a good deal on his rental, whereas just say the market value is like $2,000. He was getting charged, like, 1600, and he felt like he was winning the Lotto because he wasn't paying market rent, and that hindered him to buy a property because he was looking at the perfect property and this and the other thing and that didn't come along, and then all of a sudden, another year goes on and that and then nothing came, and then another year. Before you know it, if you would have bought four years ago, he would have had, like, 200 grand equity in this property and stuff like that, and you fast forward, and he's still been renting, no tax write-offs. So a lot of people look at outside factors of the market is going to dip in this, and the other thing. I just go with my plan, and my plan is at the end of the day, I want to have 50 properties by the time I retire, and if you really look at real estate, it might go down. You know what I mean? Look at 2009 when everyone thought the world was going to end in California, and then you fast forward to 2020 and they're above water again, and all the people that held onto their house and was okay with the 30 years the fixed rate at that number, paid and paid and paid and now have equity and now are above water, and the world didn't end, and all the people that short sell their house and gave up on it and thought that it didn't make sense to pay a mortgage on an $800,000 house when it's only 600 and they ruined their credit and they paid for rentals and this and the other thing and they're letting outside factors screw them up. It impacts you so much. So I have a big ideology of, like, make a goal and just whatever the factors are just making an educated decision and stuff like that. But I'm not slowing down whatsoever, because I already know that even if I buy a property that's 180 or 190 in Memphis and it goes down a little bit by the time I retire and stuff, I'm not looking at it to sell it. I'm looking at it as investment, passive income. I want to have about 50,000 a month when I retire, coming into me from all my rental incomes and stuff like that. If rent is going to go up over the next 20 years and I'm cool with this payment, and it makes sense now, then I do it. I don't try to time stuff. It's just it's one of those things where there's so many factors with Covid numbers, China defaults of Evergreen, you got the chip shortage, you got inflation, you got interest rates. There's so many factors that you could pick one and be like, this is really going to happen. But if I just do me, I've done that all the time and I lead with what my goals are, and it seems to work out because, at the end of the day, I don't let fear get in the way. I just say, you know, what if I pay this and it goes down because I also have that talk with my buyers and they're like, well, what if the market goes down 30K? I'm like, well, let me ask you this. If you buy a house and it goes up 30K, you're going to sell it and they're like, no, don't sell it. If it goes down 30K, I'm like, you understand that if you're cool with the monthly payment, you're fine. Right? It's like a stock. You could buy Tesla stock or go Bitcoin. Even Bitcoin was 40K, 45k. It went down to, I think last week 30K, and now this week, it's at 65K. So did the people really lose 10K or did they really gain 20K or are they still cool with what they got and only makers or lose money when they sell it and stuff like that? And when I'm buying these properties, I'm not looking to flip these things. I'm looking at my future 50-year-old self, and when I'm 50 and it's 2040 or 2041. I really going to care that I spent 170 on a property that the next year was 160, or am I going to be happy that I got 50 properties and stuff like that and they're all paying for each other and stuff. So it's always coming from a place of abundance and not scarcity, and the people that I've seen live their life on scarcity are the people that don't live a good life. I'll tell you that. Aaron: I think you're right. I think that there are a lot of people that make decisions out of fear, and I was reading an article about whether or not we have a balanced economy or an imbalanced economy, and this article that I read gave a lot of different ideas as to whether or not it was an economy that was based on greed or fear, which are the animal spirits which drive the stock market. Basically, it stated that there was more greed than there was fear, which is a good thing. It's a market that's a little out of balance. It's a little look to the positively expecting that things will be even better, and there's a lot of risks that people are taking out there. But at the same time, there's a lot of cash that people have right now, and we've seen that in California real estate, for sure. As I've said previously, that rip effect has gone all the way down to places like Memphis, Tennessee, Indianapolis, Cedar Rapids, other cities that are very popular for real estate investment. I definitely agree with you. Real estate, to me, is a buy-and-hold venture. I think a lot of people watch HDTV and they think I could flip this house. They watch Chip and Joanna Gaines or The Property Brothers or several new shows out there. I obviously don't watch IGTV because I don't know the name of the new shows, but they've got these new shows out there that are like people that are out there flipping houses and they're making money. My favorite shows are the shows where they do show people that lose money, and then they ask them at the end of the episode, they say, does this change your faith in the market or because you lost money on this deal? Some people get their shirts handed to them and they lose that $30,000 or that $40,000 on a venture that was supposed to make them $100,000, whatever because they tried for the fast money, right? I really appreciate your perspective on real estate, and I will say this one last thing. We have had so many houses sell out of the enterprise property management portfolio over the last two years. I would say it's at least 200 houses that have left in my management portfolio. That is a lot for a property manager to lose in two years. Simultaneously, we have had at least 300 houses come on over the last two years. So there are more people getting in similar to you, Todd, than there are people getting out. That's a big deal. I hope our listeners are hearing that I really appreciate you and your perspective on investment, real estate, and your partnership with all of this, and I am looking forward to working with you as the leaves change color and as they fall, things get cold around here. People do not want to buy so much. I think there's going to be an opportunity here this winter, this fall and winter, and then into next year. It's going to be great. So I really appreciate you coming on with us and sort of sharing some of your energy about investment real estate and how you've applied that here in Memphis. We're grateful to you as an investor and as a friend. Todd: Yeah, man, I appreciate all the insight that you give and it's invaluable, too, because again, the big picture is to have this for my retirement and stuff like that, and you really are the last line of pulling the trigger and stuff like that. Even down to a potential tenant where one of your staff was like, hey, Todd, we got these people and I said, hey, if Aaron's cool with it, I am and you came back and you're like, I'm not really comfortable with this. I value all that because again, what your ideal client is completely different than what California ideal client is, and so I could go and kind of base it on what the ideal California landlord is looking for, and it's going to be different than the Memphis landlord, and so I really value your guys ‘opinion and just the raw truth of it and stuff like that. So, that's all stuff that I appreciate you doing, and I think that we got a good system going on. I'm looking forward to many more purchases. Aaron: I'm grateful for that. Thank you for that. Interestingly. We're seeing the quality of the local Memphis and Southern tenant coming up, which is unbelievable. It's a really good sign of the local economy and the local demographics doing better. They're more successful in their own business ventures and with their education. You had mentioned major corporations which have relocated to Memphis and are now employing more people. That, of course, is going to continue. You and I didn't even have a chance to talk about the Ford F-150 Lightning plant that's coming into the Memphis area. It's a really cool concept. We could talk about it later. Basically, Ford had a plant here in Memphis that built Model T's and Model A's and all kinds of Ford vehicles here in the Memphis area all the way up until 1951. I think they sold at that time, and then now here we are, 70 years later, 75 years later, they're breaking ground. I believe next year on the Ford F-150 Lightning platform, which is all-electric.  Todd: Nice.  Aaron: This is just outside of Memphis, and so it's going to mean lots of great jobs and new housing, housing developments, and stuff like that. So anyway, we're going to walk through that together and see what kind of opportunities are out there. But thanks again for coming on, and I appreciate your insight as well. It's always very informative and helps me to even educate other investors as to how to do things based on your knowledge and your experience. So thanks for coming on.  Todd: Thank you for having me.

01:09 - Todd's Superpower: Advocacy For Accessibility * Getting Started * Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/dp/0321616952) * The A11Y Project (https://www.a11yproject.com/) * W3C (https://www.w3.org/) 06:18 - Joining The W3C * The W3C Community Page (https://www.w3.org/community/) 07:44 - Getting People/Companies/Stakeholders to Care/Prioritize About Accessibility * Making A Strong Case For Accessibility by Todd Libby (https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/07/strong-case-for-accessibility/) * Diplomatic Advocacy * You Don't Want To Get Sued! / $$$ * “We are all temporarily abled.” 15:20 - The Domino's Pizza Story * Supreme Court hands victory to blind man who sued Domino's over site accessibility (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/dominos-supreme-court.html) 18:21 - Things That Typically Aren't Accessible And Should Be * The WebAIM Million Report (https://webaim.org/projects/million/) * WCAG (https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) * Color Contrast * Missing Alt Text on Images * Form Input Labels * What's New in WCAG 2.1: Label in Name by Todd Libby (https://css-tricks.com/whats-new-in-wcag-2-1-label-in-name/) * Empty Links * Not Using Document Language * Triggering GIFS / Flashing Content * Empty Buttons – Use a Button Element!! * Tab Order * Semantic HTML, Heading Structure 26:27 - Accessibility for Mobile Devices * Target Size * Looking at WCAG 2.5.5 for Better Target Sizes (https://css-tricks.com/looking-at-wcag-2-5-5-for-better-target-sizes/) * Dragging Movements 28:08 - Color Contrast * Contrast Ratio (https://contrast-ratio.com/) 33:02 - Designing w/ Accessibility in Mind From the Very Beginning * Accessibility Advocates on Every Team * Accessibility Training 36:22 - Contrast (Cont'd) 38:11 - Automating Accessibility! * axe-core-gems (https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core-gems) Reflections: Mae: Eyeballing for contrast. John: We are all only temporarily abled and getting the ball rolling on building accessibility in from the beginning of projects going forward and fixing older codebases. Mandy: Using alt-tags going forward on all social media posts. Todd: Accessibility work will never end. Accessibility is a right not a privilege. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 251. I'm John Sawers and I'm here with Mae Beale. MAE: Hi, there! And also, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Hi, everyone! I'm Mandy Moore and I'm here today with our guest, Todd Libby. Todd Libby is a professional web developer, designer, and accessibility advocate for 22 years under many different technologies starting with HTML/CSS, Perl, and PHP. Todd has been an avid learner of web technologies for over 40 years starting with many flavors of BASIC all the way to React/Vue. Currently an Accessibility Analyst at Knowbility, Todd is also a member of the W3C. When not coding, you'll usually find Todd tweeting about lobster rolls and accessibility. So before I ask you what your superpower is, I'm going to make a bet and my bet is that I'm 80% positive that your superpower has something to do with lobster rolls. Am I right? [laughter] Am I right? TODD: Well, 80% of the time, you'd be right. I just recently moved to Phoenix, Arizona. So I was actually going to say advocacy for accessibility, but yes, lobster rolls and the consumption of lobster rolls are a big part. MAE: I love it. That's fantastic. MANDY: Okay. Well, tell me about the advocacy. [chuckles] TODD: So it started with seeing family members who are disabled, friends who are disabled, or have family members themselves who are disabled, and the struggles they have with trying to access websites, or web apps on the web and the frustration, the look of like they're about ready to give up. That's when I knew that I would try to not only make my stuff that I made accessible, but to advocate for people in accessibility. MAE: Thank you so much for your work. It is critical. I have personally worked with a number of different populations and started at a camp for children with critical illnesses and currently work at an organization that offers financial services for people with disabilities – well, complex financial needs, which the three target populations that we work with are people with disabilities, people with dementia, and people in recovery. So really excited to talk with you today. Thanks. TODD: You're welcome. JOHN: When you started that journey, did you already have familiarity with accessibility, or was it all just like, “Oh, I get to learn all this stuff so I can start making it better”? TODD: So I fell into it because if you're like me and you started with making table-based layouts way back in the day, because what we had—Mosaic browser, Netscape Navigator, and Internet Explorer—we were making table-based layouts, which were completely inaccessible, but I didn't know that. As the web progressed, I progressed and then I bought a little orange book by Jeffrey Zeldman, Designing with Web Standards, and that pretty much started me on my journey—semantic HTML, progressive enhancement in web standards, and accessibility as well. I tend to stumble into a lot of stuff [laughs] so, and that's a habit of mine. [laughs] MAE: It sounds like it's a good habit and you're using it to help all the other people. So I hate to encourage you to keep stumbling, but by all means. [laughter] Love it. If you were to advise someone wanting to know more about accessibility, would you suggest they start with that same book too, or what would you suggest to someone stumbling around in the dark and not hitting anything yet? TODD: The book is a little outdated. I think the last edition of his book was, I want to say 2018, maybe even further back than that. I would suggest people go on websites like The A11Y project, the a11yproject.com. They have a comprehensive list of resources, links to learning there. Twitter is a good place to learn, to follow people in the accessibility space. The other thing that, if people really want to dive in, is to join The W3C. That's a great place and there's a lot of different groups. You have the CSS Working Group, you have the accessibility side of things, which I'm a part of, the Silver Community Group, which is we're working on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0, which is still a little ways down the road, but a lot of great people and a lot of different companies. Some of those companies we've heard of—Google, Apple, companies like that all the way down to individuals. Individuals can join as individuals if your company isn't a member of the W3C. So those are the three things that I mainly point to people. If you don't really want to dive into the W3C side of things, there's a lot of resources on the a11yproject.com website that you can look up. MANDY: So what does being a member entail? What do you have to do? Do you have to pay dues? Do you have to do certain projects, maybe start as an individual level, because I'm sure we have mostly individuals listening to the show. Me as a newbie coder, what would I do to get started as a member of this initiative? TODD: Well, I started out as an individual myself, so I joined and I can get you the link to The W3C Community Page. Go to sign up as an individual and someone will approve the form process that you go through—it's nothing too big, it's nothing complicated—and then that will start you on your way. You can join a sub group, you can join a group, a working group, and it doesn't cost an individual. Companies do pay dues to the W3C and if your company is in the W3C, you get ahold of your company's liaison and there's a process they go through to add you to a certain group. Because with me, it was adding me to The Silver Community Group. But as an individual, you can join in, you can hop right into a meeting from there, and then that's basically it. That's how you start. JOHN: What are the challenges you see in getting not only the goals of a W3C, but I'm assuming specifically around accessibility? TODD: Some of the things that I've seen is buy-in from stakeholders is probably the number one hurdle, or barrier. Companies, stakeholders, and board members, they don't think of, or in some cases, they don't care about accessibility until a company is getting sued and that's a shame. That's one of the things that I wrote about; I have an article on Smashing Magazine. Making A Strong Case for Accessibility, it's called and that is one of few things that I've come across. Getting buy-in from stakeholders and getting buy-in from colleagues as well because you have people that they don't think about accessibility, they think about a number of different things. Mostly what I've come across is they don't think about accessibility because there's no budget, or they don't have the time, or the company doesn't have the time. It's not approved by the company. The other thing that is right up there is it's a process—accessibility—making things accessible and most people think that it's a big this huge mountain to climb. If you incorporate accessibility from the beginning of your project, it's so much easier. You don't have to go back and you don't have to climb that mountain because you've waited until the very end. “Oh, we have time now so we'll do the accessibility stuff,” that makes it more hard. MAE: John, your question actually was similar to something I was thinking about with how you developed this superpower and I was going to ask and still will now. [chuckles] How did you afford all the time in the different places where you were overtime to be able to get this focus? And so, how did you make the case along the way and what things did you learn in that persuasion class of life [chuckles] that was able to allow you to have that be where you could focus and spend more time on and have the places where you work prioritize successful? TODD: It was a lot of, I call it diplomatic advocacy. So for instance, the best example I have is I had been hired to make a website, a public facing website, and a SAAS application accessible. The stakeholder I was directly reporting to, we were sitting down in a meeting one day and I said, “Well, I want to make sure that accessibility is the number one priority on these projects,” and he shot back with, “Well, we don't have the disabled users,” and that nearly knocked me back to my chair. [laughs] So that was a surprise. MAE: There's some groaning inside and I had to [chuckles] do it out loud for a moment. Ooh. TODD: Yeah, I did my internal groaning at the meeting so that just was – [chuckles] Yeah, and I remember that day very vividly and I probably will for the rest of my life that I looked at him and I had to stop and think, and I said, “Well, you never know, there's always a chance that you're able, now you could be disabled at any time.” I also pointed out that his eyeglasses that he wore are an assistive technology. So there was some light shed on that and that propelled me even further into advocacy and the accessibility side of things. That meeting really opened my eyes to not everyone is going to get it, not everyone is going to be on board, not everyone is going to think about disabled users; they really aren't. So from there I used that example. I also use what I call the Domino's Pizza card lately because “Oh, you don't want to get sued.' That's my last resort as far as advocacy goes. Other than that, it's showing a videotape of people using their product that are disabled and they can't use it. That's a huge difference maker, when a stakeholder sees that somebody can't use their product. There's numbers out there now that disabled users in this country alone, the United States, make up 25% of the population, I believe. They have a disposable income of $8 trillion. The visually disabled population alone is, I believe it was $1.6 billion, I think. I would have to check that number again, but it's a big number. So the money side of things really gets through to a stakeholder faster than “Well, your eyeglasses are a assistive technology.” So once they hear the financial side of things, their ears perk up real quick and then they maybe get on board. I've never had other than one stakeholder just saying, “No, we're just going to skip that,” and then that company ended up getting sued. So that says a lot, to me anyways. But that's how I really get into it. And then there was a time where I was working for another company. I was doing consulting for them and I was doing frontend mostly. So it was accessibility, but also at the same time, it was more the code side of things. That was in 2018. 2019, I went to a conference in Burlington, Vermont. I saw a friend of mine speaking and he was very passionate about it and that talk, and there was a couple others there as well, it lit that fire under me again, and I jumped right back in and ever since then, it's just then accessibility. MAE: You reminded me one of the arguments, or what did you say? Diplomatic advocacy statements that I have used is that we are all temporarily abled. [chuckles] Like, that's just how it is and seeing things that way we can really shift how you orient to the idea of as other and reduce the othering. But I was also wondering how long it would be before Pizza Hut came up in our combo. [laughter] MANDY: Yeah, I haven't heard of that. Can you tell us what that is? TODD: [chuckles] So it was Domino's and they had a blind user that tried to use their app. He couldn't use their app; their app wasn't accessible. He tried to use the website; the website wasn't accessible. I have a link that I can send over to the whole story because I'm probably getting bits and pieces wrong. But from what I can recall, basically, this user sued Domino's and instead of Domino's spending, I believe it was $36,000 to fix their website and their app, they decided to drag it out for a number of years through court and of course, spent more money than just $36,000. In the end, they lost. I think they tried to appeal to the Supreme Court because they've gone up as high as federal court, but regardless, they lost. They had to – and I don't know if they still have an inaccessible site, or not, or the app for that matter because I don't go to Domino's. But that's basically the story that they had; a user who tried to access the app and the website, couldn't use it, and they got taken to court. Now Domino's claimed, in the court case, that he could have used the telephone, but he had tried to use the telephone twice and was on hold for 45 minutes. So [laughs] that says a lot. JOHN: Looks like it actually did go to the Supreme Court. TODD: Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think they did not want to hear it. They just said, “No, we're not going to hear the case.” Yeah, and just think about all these apps we use and all the people that can't access those apps, or the websites. I went to some company websites because I was doing some research, big companies, and a lot of them are inaccessible. A little number that I can throw out there: every year, there's been a little over 2,500 lawsuits in the US. This year, if the rate keeps on going that it has, we're on course for over 4,000 lawsuits in the US alone for inaccessible websites. You've had companies like Target, Bank of America, Winn-Dixie, those kinds of companies have been sued by people because of inaccessible sites. MAE: Okay, but may I say this one thing, which is, I just want to extend my apologies to Pizza Hut. [laughter] MANDY: What kinds of things do you see as not being accessible that should be or easily could be that companies just simply aren't doing? TODD: The big one, still and if you go to webaim.org/projects/million, it's The WebAIM Million report. It's an annual accessibility analysis of the top 1 million home pages on the internet. The number one thing again, this year is color contracts. There are guidelines in place. WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, that text should be a 4.5:1 ratio that reaches the minimum contrast for texts. It's a lot of texts out there that doesn't even reach that. So it's color contrast. You'll find a lot of, if you look at—I'm looking at the chart right now—missing alt texts on images. If you have an image that is informative, or you have an image that is conveying something to a user, it has to have alternative text describing what's in the picture. You don't have to go into a long story about what's in the picture and describe it thoroughly; you can just give a quick overview as to what the picture is trying to convey, what is in the picture. And then another one being another failure type a is form input labels; labels that are not labeled correctly. I wrote a article about that [chuckles] on CSS-Tricks and that is, there's programmatic and there's accessible names for form labels that not only help the accessibility side of it, as far as making the site accessible, but also it helps screen reader users read forms and navigate through forms, keyboard users also. Then you have empty links and then a big one that I've seen lately is if you look up in the source code, you see the HTML tag, and the language attribute, a lot of sites now, because they use trademarks, they don't have a document language. I ran across a lot of sites that don't use a document language. They're using a framework. I won't name names because I'm not out to shame, but having that attribute helps screen reader users and I think that's a big thing. A lot of accessibility, people don't understand. People use screen readers, or other assistive technologies, for instance, Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice input. But at the same time, I've got to also add accessibility is more than just deaf, or blind. I suffer from migraines, migraine headaches so animation, or motion from say, parallax scrolling can trigger a migraine. Animations that are too fast, that also trigger migraine headache. You have flashing content that can potentially cause seizures and that's actually happened before where an animated GIF was intentionally sent to someone and it caused a seizure and almost killed the person. So there's those and then the last thing on this list that I'm looking at right now, and these are common failures, empty buttons. You have buttons that don't have labels. Buttons that have Click here. Buttons need to be descriptive. So you want to have – on my site to send me something on the contact form, it's Send this info to Todd, Click here, or something similar like that. MAE: Can you think of any, John that you know of, too? I've got a couple of mind. How about you, Mandy? MANDY: For me, because I'm just starting out, I don't know a whole lot about accessibility. That's why I'm here; I'm trying to learn. But I am really conscious and careful of some of the GIFs that I use, because I do know that some of the motion ones, especially really fast-moving ones, can cause problems, migraines, seizures for people. So when posting those, I'm really, really mindful about it. JOHN: Yeah, the Click here one is always bothers me too, because not only is it bad accessibility, it's bad UX. Like HTML loves you to turn anything into a link so you can make all the words inside the button and it's just fine. [laughs] There's so many other ways to do it that are just – even discounting the accessibility impact, which I don't want it. TODD: Yeah, and touching upon that, I'm glad you brought up the button because I was just going to let that go [chuckles] past me. I have to say and I think it was in the email where it said, “What's bothering you?” What bothers me is people that don't use the button. If you are using a div, or an anchor tag, or a span, stop it. [laughs] Just stop it. There's a button element for that. I read somewhere that anchor tag takes you somewhere, a div is a container, but button is for a button. MAE: I love that. The only other ones I could think of is related to something you said, making sure to have tab order set up properly to allow people to navigate. Again, I liked your point about you don't have to be fully blind to benefit from these things and having keyboard accessibility can benefit a lot of people for all kinds of reasons. The other one is, and I would love to hear everybody's thoughts on this one, I have heard that we're supposed to be using h1, h2, h3 and having proper setup of our HTML and most of us fail just in that basic part. That's another way of supporting people to be able to navigate around and figure out what's about to be on this page and how much should I dig into it? So more on non-visual navigation stuff. TODD: Yeah, heading structure is hugely important for keyboard users and screen reader users as well as tab order and that's where semantic HTML comes into play. If you're running semantic HTML, HTML by default, save for a few caveats, is accessible right out of the box. If your site and somebody can navigate through using let's say, the keyboard turns and they can navigate in a way that is structurally logical, for instance and it has a flow to it that makes sense, then they're going to be able to not only navigate that site, but if you're selling something on that site, you're going to have somebody buying something probably. So that's again, where tab order and heading structure comes into play and it's very important. JOHN: I would assume, and correct me if I'm wrong, or if you know this, that the same sort of accessibility enhancements are available in native mobile applications that aren't using each HTML, is that correct? TODD: Having not delved into the mobile side of things with apps myself, that I really can't answer. I can say, though, that the WCAG guidelines, that does pertain to mobile as well as desktop. There's no certain set of rules. 2.2 is where there are some new features that from mobile, for instance, target size and again, I wrote another article on CSS-Tricks about target size as well. So it's if you ever noticed those little ads that you just want to click off and get off your phone and they have those little tiny Xs and you're sitting there tapping all day? Those are the things target size and dragging movements as well. I did an audit for an app and there was a lot of buttons that were not named. A lot of the accessibility issues I ran into were the same as I would run into doing an audit on a website. I don't know anything about Swift, or Flutter, or anything like that, they pretty much fall into the same category with [inaudible] as far as accessible. JOHN: I also wanted to circle back on the first item that you listed as far as the WebAIM million thing was color contrast, which is one of those ones where a designer comes up with something that looks super cool and sleek, but it's dark gray on a light gray background. It looks great when you've got perfect eyesight, but anybody else, they're just like, “Oh my God, what's that?” That's also one of the things that's probably easiest to change site-wide; it's like you go in and you tweak the CSS and you're done in a half hour and you've got the whole site updated. So it's a great bit of low-hanging fruit that you can attach if you want to start on this process. TODD: Yeah. Color contrast is of course, as the report says, this is the number one thing and let me look back here. It's slowly, the numbers are dropping, but 85.3%, that's still a very high number of failures and there's larger text. If you're using anything over 18 pixels, or the equivalent of 18—it's either 18 points, or 18 pixels—is a 3:1 ratio. With that color contrast is how our brains perceive color. It's not the actual contrast of that color and there are people far more qualified than me going to that, or that can go into that. So what I'll say is I've seen a lot of teams and companies, “Yeah, we'll do a little over 4.5:1 and we'll call it a day.” But I always say, if you can do 7:1, or even 10:1 on your ratios and you can find a way to make your brand, or whatever the same, then go for it. A lot of the time you hear, “Well, we don't want to change the colors of our brand.” Well, your colors of your brand aren't accessible to somebody who that has, for instance, Tritanopia, which is, I think it's blues and greens are very hard to see, or they don't see it at all. Color deficiencies are a thing that design teams aren't going to check for. They're just not. Like you said, all these colors look awesome so let's just, we're going to go with that on our UI. That's one thing that I actually ran into on that SAAS product that I spoke about earlier was there was these colors and these colors were a dark blue, very muted dark blue with orange text. You would think the contrast would be oh yeah, they would be all right, but it was horrible. JOHN: You can get browser plugins, that'll show you what the page looks like. So you can check these things yourself. Like you can go in and say, “Oh, you're right. That's completely illegible.” TODD: Yeah. Firefox, like I have right here on my work machine. I have right here Firefox and it does this. There's a simulator for a visual color deficiencies. It also checks for contrast as well. Chrome has one, which it actually has a very cool eyedropper to check for color contrast. If you use the inspector also in Firefox, that brings up a little contrast thing. The WAVE extension has a contrast tool. There's also a lot of different apps. If you have a Mac, like I do, I have too many color contrast because I love checking out these color contrast apps. So I have about five different color contrast apps on my Mac, but there's also websites, too that you can use at the same time. Just do a search for polar contrast. Contrast Ratio, contrast-ratio.com, is from Lea Verou. I use that one a lot. A lot of people use that one. There's so many of them out there choose from, but they are very handy tool at designer's disposal and at developers' disposal as well. JOHN: So I'm trying to think of, like I was saying earlier, the color contrast one is one of those things that's probably very straightforward; you can upgrade your whole site in a short amount of time. Color contrast is a little trickier because it gets into branding and marketing's going to want to care about it and all that kind of stuff. So you might have a bit more battle around that, but it could probably be done and you might be able to fix, at least the worst parts of the page that have problems around that. So I'm just trying to think of the ways that you could get the ball rolling on this kind of a work. Like if you can get those early easy wins, it's going to get more people on board with the process and not saying like, “Oh, it's going to take us eight months and we have to go through every single page and change it every forum.” That sounds really daunting when you think about it and so, trying to imagine what those easy early wins are that can get people down that road. TODD: Yeah. Starting from the very outset of the project is probably the key one: incorporating accessibility from the start of the project. Like I said earlier, it's a lot easier when you do it from the start rather than waiting till the very end, or even after the product has been launched and you go back and go, “Oh, well, now we need to fix it.” You're not only putting stress on your teams, but it's eating up time and money because you're now paying everybody to go back and look at all these accessibility issues there. Having one person as a dedicated accessibility advocate on each team helps immensely. So you have one person on the development team, one person on the dev side, one person on the marketing team, starting from the top. If somebody goes there to a stakeholder and says, “Listen, we need to start incorporating accessibility from the very start, here's why,” Nine times out of ten, I can guarantee you, you're probably going to get that stakeholder onboard. That tenth time, you'll have to go as far as maybe I did and say, “Well, Domino's Pizza, or Bank of America, or Target.” Again, their ears are going to perk up and they're going to go, “Oh, well, I don't really, we don't want to get sued.” So that, and going back to having one person on each team: training. There are so many resources out there for accessibility training. There are companies out there that train, there are companies that you can bring in to the organization that will train, that'll help train. That's so easier than what are we going to do? A lot of people just sitting there in a room and go, “How are you going to do this?” Having that person in each department getting together with everybody else, that's that advocate for each department, meeting up and saying, “Okay, we're going to coordinate. You're going to put out a fantastic product that's going to be accessible and also, at the same time, the financial aspect is going to make the company money. But most of all, it's going to include a lot of people that are normally not included if you're putting out an accessible product.” Because if you go to a certain website, I can guarantee you it's going to be inaccessible—just about 99% of the web isn't accessible—and it's going to be exclusive as it's going to – somebody is going to get shut out of the site, or app. So this falls on the applications as well. Another thing too, I just wanted to throw in here for color contrast. There are different – you have color contrast text, but you also have non-text contrast, you have texts in images, that kind of contrast as well and it does get a little confusing. Let's face it, the guidelines right now, it's a very technically written – it's like a technical manual. A lot of people come up to me and said, “I can't read this. I can't make sense of this. Can you translate this?” So hopefully, and this is part of the work that I'm doing with a lot of other people in the W3C is where making the language of 3.0 in plain language, basically. It's going to be a lot easier to understand these guidelines instead of all that technical jargon. I look at something right now and I'm scratching my head when I'm doing an audit going, “Okay, what do they mean by this?” All these people come together and we agree on what to write. What is the language that's going to go into this? So when they got together 2.0, which was years and years ago, they said, “Okay, this is going to be how we're going to write this and we're going to publish this,” and then we had a lot of people just like me scratching their heads of not understanding it. So hopefully, and I'm pretty sure, 99.9% sure that it's going to be a lot easier for people to understand. MAE: That sounds awesome. And if you end up needing a bunch of play testers, I bet a lot of our listeners would be totally willing to put in some time. I know I would. Just want to put in one last plug for anybody out there who really loves automating things and is trying to avoid relying on any single developer, or designer, or QA person to remember to check for accessibility is to build it into your CI/CD pipeline. There are a lot of different options. Another approach to couple with that, or do independently is to use the axe core gems, and that link will be in the show notes, where it'll allow you to be able to sprinkle in your tests, accessibility checks on different pieces. So if we've decided we're going to handle color contrast, cool, then it'll check that. But if we're not ready to deal with another point of accessibility, then we can skip it. So it's very similar to Robocop. Anyway, just wanted to offer in some other tips and tricks of the trade to be able to get going on accessibility and then once you get that train rolling, it can do a little better, but it is hard to start from scratch. JOHN: That's a great tip, Mae. Thank you. TODD: Yeah, definitely. MANDY: Okay. Well, with that, I think it's about time we head into reflections; the point of the show, where we talk about something that we thought stood out, that we want to think about more, or a place that we can call for a call of action to our listeners, or even to ourselves. Who wants to go first? MAE: I can go first. I learned something awesome from you, Todd, which I have not thought of before, which is if I am eyeballing for “contrast,” especially color contrast, that's not necessarily what that means. I really appreciate learning that and we'll definitely be applying that in my daily life. [chuckles] So thanks for teaching me a whole bunch of things, including that. TODD: You're welcome. JOHN: I think for me, it's just the continuing reminder to – I do like the thinking that, I think Mae have brought up and also Todd was talking about earlier at the beginning about how we're all of us temporarily not disabled and that I think it helps bring some of that empathy a little closer to us. So it makes it a little more accessible to us to realize that it's going to happen to us at some point, at some level, and to help then bring that empathy to the other people who are currently in that state and really that's, I think is a useful way of thinking about it. Also, the idea that I've been thinking through as we've been talking about this is how do we get the ball rolling on this? We have an existing application that's 10 years old that's going to take a lot to get it there, but how do we get the process started so we feel like we're making progress there rather than just saying, “Oh, we did HTML form 27 out of 163. All right, back at it tomorrow.” It's hard to think about, so feeling like there's progress is a good thing. TODD: Yeah, definitely and as we get older, our eyes, they're one of the first things to go. So I'm going to need assistive technology at some point so, yeah. And then what you touched upon, John. It may be daunting having to go back and do the whole, “Okay, what are we going to do for accessibility now that this project, it's 10 years old, 15 years old?” The SAAS project that I was talking about, it was 15-year-old code, .net. I got people together; one from each department. We all got together and we ended up making that product accessible for them. So it can be done. [laughs] It can be done. JOHN: That's actually a good point. Just hearing about successes in the wild with particularly hard projects is a great thing. Because again, I'm thinking about it at the start of our project and hearing that somebody made it all through and maybe even repeatedly is hard. TODD: Yeah. It's not something that once it's done, it's done. Accessibility, just like the web, is an ever-evolving media. MANDY: For me. I think my reflection is going to be, as a new coder, I do want to say, I'm glad that we talked about a lot of the things that you see that aren't currently accessible that can be accessible. One of those things is using alt tags and right now, I know when I put the social media posts out on Twitter, I don't use the alt tags and I should. So just putting an alt tag saying, “This is a picture of our guest, Todd” and the title of the show would probably be helpful for some of our listeners. So I'm going to start doing that. So thank you. TODD: You're welcome. I'm just reminded of our talk and every talk that I have on a podcast, or with anybody just reminds me of the work that I have to do and the work that is being done by a lot of different people, other than myself as well, as far as advocacy goes in that I don't think it's ever going to be a job that will ever go away. There will always be a need for accessibility advocacy for the web and it's great just to be able to sit down and talk to people about accessibility and what we need to do to make the web better and more inclusive for everybody. Because I tweet out a lot, “Accessibility is a right, not a privilege,” and I really feel that to my core because the UN specifically says that the internet is a basic human and I went as far as to go say, “Well, so as an accessibility of that internet as well.” So that is my reflection. MAE: I'll add an alt tag for me right now is with a fist up and a big smile and a lot of enthusiasm in my heart. MANDY: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Todd. It's been really great talking with you and I really appreciate you coming on the show to share with us your knowledge and your expertise on the subject of accessibility. So with that, I will close out the show and say we do have a Slack and Todd will be invited to it if he'd like to talk more to us and the rest of the Greater Than Code community. You can visit patreon.com/greaterthancode and pledge to support us monthly and again, if you cannot afford that, or do not want to pledge to help run the show, you can DM anyone of us and we will get you in there for free because we want to make the Slack channel accessible for all. Have a great week and we'll see you next time. Goodbye! Special Guest: Todd Libby.

Howard: Hi, Todd.Todd: Hey, how's it going, Howard? So I heard that you're really into motorcycles.Howard: Ah, yes, I love motorcyles. I've been riding motorcycles since I was 15 years old.Todd: Oh, really. Wow! So, what's the allure of motorcycles?Howard: Freedom. I like the fresh air. I like being out on my own. And I just like the feeling of riding on a bike. It's like a bicycle without having to pedal and you go a lot faster.Todd: Yeah, that's for sure. Do you have any good motorcylcle stories?Howard: About 10,000 of them.Todd: Well, have you ever like taken a special trip on a motorcycle?Howard: I've been all over the East coast of the United States, from Pennsylvania to Florida on a motorcycle.Todd: Oh, wow.Howard: Yeah, I've travelled many times and many different kinds of roads, and taken all kinds of camping trips on bikes.Todd: Wow, sounds great. So do you usually travel alone or in a group?Howard: Almost always I go alone. Some guys like to travel together but I found I enjoyed it by myself most of all.Todd: Oh really. Oh, wow. Don't you get kind of lonely?Howard: Never, there's always a new adventure on every trip.Todd: Have you ever made any special friends out on the road?Howard: Sure, bikers are like a special kind of fraternity. Every biker knows each other, and we're all very close even though we're not close.

Howard: Hi, Todd.Todd: Hey, how's it going, Howard? So I heard that you're really into motorcycles.Howard: Ah, yes, I love motorcyles. I've been riding motorcycles since I was 15 years old.Todd: Oh, really. Wow! So, what's the allure of motorcycles?Howard: Freedom. I like the fresh air. I like being out on my own. And I just like the feeling of riding on a bike. It's like a bicycle without having to pedal and you go a lot faster.Todd: Yeah, that's for sure. Do you have any good motorcylcle stories?Howard: About 10,000 of them.Todd: Well, have you ever like taken a special trip on a motorcycle?Howard: I've been all over the East coast of the United States, from Pennsylvania to Florida on a motorcycle.Todd: Oh, wow.Howard: Yeah, I've travelled many times and many different kinds of roads, and taken all kinds of camping trips on bikes.Todd: Wow, sounds great. So do you usually travel alone or in a group?Howard: Almost always I go alone. Some guys like to travel together but I found I enjoyed it by myself most of all.Todd: Oh really. Oh, wow. Don't you get kind of lonely?Howard: Never, there's always a new adventure on every trip.Todd: Have you ever made any special friends out on the road?Howard: Sure, bikers are like a special kind of fraternity. Every biker knows each other, and we're all very close even though we're not close.

Todd: Hello, Daniela, how are you tonight?Daniella: Hi, Todd. I'm fine, thanks.Todd: Now, you were showing me a picture of a horse.Daniella: Yes.Todd: And you were saying that female horses and male horses are different.Daniella: They behave different to me, so maybe it's just my imagination, or not but female horses, mares, are kind of cold and aggressive towards me cause I'm a female and I kind of compete over the male coaches' affection, that was my conclusion because male horses are so nice to me.Todd: So you saying the horse can tell if it's a man or woman rider.Daniella: Exactly, my horse can do that. She's more affectionate towards men.Todd: Really!Daniella: Yeah, and she's a female.Todd: So if I want to go horse riding for the first time and I'm on my own.Daniella: You don't have to worry because the coach will make sure the horse will behave and it will fear the coach, at least, and it won't do anything wrong to you, but if you want to make friends with the horse you'll probably have to work out more with a male horse.Todd: Really.Daniella: Yeah, for me it's very difficult to become friendly with a female horse. Maybe it's just my impression. Maybe it's not true but that's my conclusion so far.Todd: Well, that's good to know. Thanks.

Todd: Hello, Daniela, how are you tonight?Daniella: Hi, Todd. I'm fine, thanks.Todd: Now, you were showing me a picture of a horse.Daniella: Yes.Todd: And you were saying that female horses and male horses are different.Daniella: They behave different to me, so maybe it's just my imagination, or not but female horses, mares, are kind of cold and aggressive towards me cause I'm a female and I kind of compete over the male coaches' affection, that was my conclusion because male horses are so nice to me.Todd: So you saying the horse can tell if it's a man or woman rider.Daniella: Exactly, my horse can do that. She's more affectionate towards men.Todd: Really!Daniella: Yeah, and she's a female.Todd: So if I want to go horse riding for the first time and I'm on my own.Daniella: You don't have to worry because the coach will make sure the horse will behave and it will fear the coach, at least, and it won't do anything wrong to you, but if you want to make friends with the horse you'll probably have to work out more with a male horse.Todd: Really.Daniella: Yeah, for me it's very difficult to become friendly with a female horse. Maybe it's just my impression. Maybe it's not true but that's my conclusion so far.Todd: Well, that's good to know. Thanks.

Todd: OK. Hello?Conrad: Hi, Todd.Todd: How are you doing?Conrad: Oh, not too good. I've got a little bit of a cold I think.Todd: Oh, man. That's not good.Conrad: Yeah.Todd: How long have you had the cold?Conrad: I think just starting a couple nights ago.Todd: Oh, really?Conrad: Yeah.Todd: Oh, man. What are you doing for it?Conrad: Oh, just trying to take it easy. Right now, I'm just resting.Todd: Uh-huh.Conrad: Yeah.Todd: Do you eat anything special when you get sick?Conrad: Sometimes. Let's see.. what do I eat? Sometimes I eat umeboshi.Todd: Umeboshi?Conrad: Yeah.Todd: Really? What's umeboshi?Conrad: That's that Japanese kind of a pickled sour plum. You eat it with rice. So it's a red color.Todd: Yeah, it comes in the onigiri sometimes.Conrad: Yeah, that's right.Todd: Wow. OK. Well, what are your symptoms?Conrad: Oh, let's see.. a little bit of sore throat, a cough and basically just feeling tired.Todd: Well, that's terrible. I'm sorry. I hope you feel better.Conrad: Well, thanks Todd.

Todd: OK. Hello?Conrad: Hi, Todd.Todd: How are you doing?Conrad: Oh, not too good. I've got a little bit of a cold I think.Todd: Oh, man. That's not good.Conrad: Yeah.Todd: How long have you had the cold?Conrad: I think just starting a couple nights ago.Todd: Oh, really?Conrad: Yeah.Todd: Oh, man. What are you doing for it?Conrad: Oh, just trying to take it easy. Right now, I'm just resting.Todd: Uh-huh.Conrad: Yeah.Todd: Do you eat anything special when you get sick?Conrad: Sometimes. Let's see.. what do I eat? Sometimes I eat umeboshi.Todd: Umeboshi?Conrad: Yeah.Todd: Really? What's umeboshi?Conrad: That's that Japanese kind of a pickled sour plum. You eat it with rice. So it's a red color.Todd: Yeah, it comes in the onigiri sometimes.Conrad: Yeah, that's right.Todd: Wow. OK. Well, what are your symptoms?Conrad: Oh, let's see.. a little bit of sore throat, a cough and basically just feeling tired.Todd: Well, that's terrible. I'm sorry. I hope you feel better.Conrad: Well, thanks Todd.

Todd: OK. Jessica, we're back. We're gonna talk about your future. What do you want to be when you grow up?Jessica: Well, I want to be a physician's assistant.Todd: OK. What is a physician's assistant?Jessica: Well, normally when you go into the doctor's office, you wouldn't usually get-- well you would get your doctor all they do is check, give you check-ups or you know maybe take out stitches or something, not surgery.You just go in and do the little things. So the doctor does not have to do them.Todd: Oh, OK. So that is what you want to do?Jessica: Yeah.Todd: OK.Jessica: And make lots of money.Todd: You want to make lots of money?Jessica: OK. Nothing wrong with that.Todd: How do you become a physician's assistant. I can't even say it.Jessica: It's a lot of schooling. You have like six years, four or six years of college and you obviously take like nursing and other kinds of classes like that, and then you do like two or four years at like a hospital as a..Todd: Like an assistant, or..Jessica: Like you're actually doing the work.Todd: Oh, an intern.Jessica: An intern, yeah! An internship for two or four years at a hospital.Todd: Then, that's it. You finish.Jessica: And then you hopefully go on and maybe have your own little doctor's place and open that up or something.Todd: Well, best wishes on becoming a physician's assistant. I'm sure you'll make a good one.Jessica: Thank you.

Todd: OK. Jessica, we're back. We're gonna talk about your future. What do you want to be when you grow up?Jessica: Well, I want to be a physician's assistant.Todd: OK. What is a physician's assistant?Jessica: Well, normally when you go into the doctor's office, you wouldn't usually get-- well you would get your doctor all they do is check, give you check-ups or you know maybe take out stitches or something, not surgery.You just go in and do the little things. So the doctor does not have to do them.Todd: Oh, OK. So that is what you want to do?Jessica: Yeah.Todd: OK.Jessica: And make lots of money.Todd: You want to make lots of money?Jessica: OK. Nothing wrong with that.Todd: How do you become a physician's assistant. I can't even say it.Jessica: It's a lot of schooling. You have like six years, four or six years of college and you obviously take like nursing and other kinds of classes like that, and then you do like two or four years at like a hospital as a..Todd: Like an assistant, or..Jessica: Like you're actually doing the work.Todd: Oh, an intern.Jessica: An intern, yeah! An internship for two or four years at a hospital.Todd: Then, that's it. You finish.Jessica: And then you hopefully go on and maybe have your own little doctor's place and open that up or something.Todd: Well, best wishes on becoming a physician's assistant. I'm sure you'll make a good one.Jessica: Thank you.

Todd: So Tim, you want to talk about road trips?Tim: Yeah, I wanna talk about road trips.Me and my friends when we were in high school we took a lot of road trips to lots of different places.Todd: OK.Tim: We would go down to California sometimes Mexico. One time when I was living in Wyoming, in one weekend we drove from Wyoming through Colorado, New Mexico, and Mexico and back in the same weekend.Todd: Wow! Well, actually for people who are not familiar with the United States how far is that?Tim: It's a long way. I don't know. It took.. I don't know, it took probably about 15 hours one way.Todd: Wow!Tim: So, thirty hours altogether. But it was fun. We drove down to Mexico had a good night a good meal, a little bit of drinksand drove back the next day.Todd: So you went to Tijuana?Tim: No, we went to Ciudad Juarez.Todd: OK. Nice.Tim: That was really fun and a lot of other trips we took when I lived in Oregon when we'd go down to California and we'd surf.Todd: Oh, really?Tim: Yeah!Todd: Oh, you're a surfer?Tim: A little bit, a little bit of surfer.Todd: OK. What kind of car do you drive? What do you use for this road trip?Tim: Well, typical American a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Big vehicle, lots of gas but a lot of fun.Todd: Oh man, you're from Oregon you're supposed to be a tree-hugger!Tim: I know. I know. But they're good. One rule we had on our road trips was any lake or big body of water we had to stop and swim in. It was a good thing to do.Todd: Well, you live in Japan now. Do you ever do road trips in Japan?Tim: I took a road trip from Niigata up around Hokkaido and back, so it was a long road trip actually.Todd: OK. Wow! What's the difference between a road trip in Japan and a road trip in America?Tim: Well, a road trip in Japan..it's a little bit more difficult to get around, it's a little bit more expensive. In America, road tripping is sort of.. something a lot of people do.Todd: Yeah.Tim: And in Japan, when we do that it is a little bit strange, a little bit different, not very normal.Todd: Yeah, that's true. OK. Great, thanks a lot Tim.Tim: All right.

Todd: So Tim, you want to talk about road trips?Tim: Yeah, I wanna talk about road trips.Me and my friends when we were in high school we took a lot of road trips to lots of different places.Todd: OK.Tim: We would go down to California sometimes Mexico. One time when I was living in Wyoming, in one weekend we drove from Wyoming through Colorado, New Mexico, and Mexico and back in the same weekend.Todd: Wow! Well, actually for people who are not familiar with the United States how far is that?Tim: It's a long way. I don't know. It took.. I don't know, it took probably about 15 hours one way.Todd: Wow!Tim: So, thirty hours altogether. But it was fun. We drove down to Mexico had a good night a good meal, a little bit of drinksand drove back the next day.Todd: So you went to Tijuana?Tim: No, we went to Ciudad Juarez.Todd: OK. Nice.Tim: That was really fun and a lot of other trips we took when I lived in Oregon when we'd go down to California and we'd surf.Todd: Oh, really?Tim: Yeah!Todd: Oh, you're a surfer?Tim: A little bit, a little bit of surfer.Todd: OK. What kind of car do you drive? What do you use for this road trip?Tim: Well, typical American a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Big vehicle, lots of gas but a lot of fun.Todd: Oh man, you're from Oregon you're supposed to be a tree-hugger!Tim: I know. I know. But they're good. One rule we had on our road trips was any lake or big body of water we had to stop and swim in. It was a good thing to do.Todd: Well, you live in Japan now. Do you ever do road trips in Japan?Tim: I took a road trip from Niigata up around Hokkaido and back, so it was a long road trip actually.Todd: OK. Wow! What's the difference between a road trip in Japan and a road trip in America?Tim: Well, a road trip in Japan..it's a little bit more difficult to get around, it's a little bit more expensive. In America, road tripping is sort of.. something a lot of people do.Todd: Yeah.Tim: And in Japan, when we do that it is a little bit strange, a little bit different, not very normal.Todd: Yeah, that's true. OK. Great, thanks a lot Tim.Tim: All right.

Todd: Hey Victor, I hear you're going home tomorrow.Victor: Yes, I am.Todd: Ah, that's too bad. So how long have you been here?Victor: I've been here for two weeks.Todd: I'm sorry, I was never sure. Why did you come to Japan?Victor: Came to Japan to study martial arts. Budo Ju Jitsu is the art that we study.Todd: Oh! OK, cool. So are like a black belt?Victor: Yes, yes!Todd: Oh, really? Wow, how long have you been doing your martial arts?Victor: I've been studying this art for about 18 years I guess.Todd: Really?Victor: A long time.Todd: That's a long time. You're a young-looking guy. You like 18 years.Victor: Well, I'm an old guy.Todd: Well, so when you go back to the States you also trainVictor: Yes, yes! We have a group that we train in martial arts there as sort of a hobby. In a way, it's a sort of a way of life also. But I have a real job. I'm a civil engineer.Todd: So, actually what does a civil engineer do?Victor: In America, a civil engineer designs things. In my case, I work on buildings, buildings that have structural problems and I work on repair plans.Todd: OK. Sounds like a tough job.Victor: It's OK. It's interesting. All buildings need repairs and it's fun.Todd: Great. Thanks a lot, Victor. Have a safe trip tomorrow.Victor: Well, thank you very much.

Todd: Hey Victor, I hear you're going home tomorrow.Victor: Yes, I am.Todd: Ah, that's too bad. So how long have you been here?Victor: I've been here for two weeks.Todd: I'm sorry, I was never sure. Why did you come to Japan?Victor: Came to Japan to study martial arts. Budo Ju Jitsu is the art that we study.Todd: Oh! OK, cool. So are like a black belt?Victor: Yes, yes!Todd: Oh, really? Wow, how long have you been doing your martial arts?Victor: I've been studying this art for about 18 years I guess.Todd: Really?Victor: A long time.Todd: That's a long time. You're a young-looking guy. You like 18 years.Victor: Well, I'm an old guy.Todd: Well, so when you go back to the States you also trainVictor: Yes, yes! We have a group that we train in martial arts there as sort of a hobby. In a way, it's a sort of a way of life also. But I have a real job. I'm a civil engineer.Todd: So, actually what does a civil engineer do?Victor: In America, a civil engineer designs things. In my case, I work on buildings, buildings that have structural problems and I work on repair plans.Todd: OK. Sounds like a tough job.Victor: It's OK. It's interesting. All buildings need repairs and it's fun.Todd: Great. Thanks a lot, Victor. Have a safe trip tomorrow.Victor: Well, thank you very much.

Todd: OK. Victor, tomorrow you're flying home?Victor: Yes, that's correct.Todd: OK. So, are you afraid of flying?Victor: No, flying's fine.Todd: Really? Back home for your job, do you fly?Victor: No, I drive to work and to different assignments.Todd: OK. You never have to fly to go to conventions or other cities or stuff like that?Victor: Once or twice each year I do fly to go to conventions connected with my work.Todd: OK. Tomorrow you have a really long flight.Victor: That's correct.Todd: It's probably what about 15 hours?Victor: From Narita to Washington DC is 12 hours in the air.Todd: Wow. So how do you pass the time on the plane?Victor: On the plane, I like to sleep as much as possible.Todd: OK. Do you take medication or just have a beer or..?Victor: No. I don't take any medication. I just.. I tend to stay up late the day before so that I'm so tired I will want to sleep on the plane.Todd: Well, good strategy and I hope you have a good flight.Victor: Thank you very much.

Todd: OK. Victor, tomorrow you're flying home?Victor: Yes, that's correct.Todd: OK. So, are you afraid of flying?Victor: No, flying's fine.Todd: Really? Back home for your job, do you fly?Victor: No, I drive to work and to different assignments.Todd: OK. You never have to fly to go to conventions or other cities or stuff like that?Victor: Once or twice each year I do fly to go to conventions connected with my work.Todd: OK. Tomorrow you have a really long flight.Victor: That's correct.Todd: It's probably what about 15 hours?Victor: From Narita to Washington DC is 12 hours in the air.Todd: Wow. So how do you pass the time on the plane?Victor: On the plane, I like to sleep as much as possible.Todd: OK. Do you take medication or just have a beer or..?Victor: No. I don't take any medication. I just.. I tend to stay up late the day before so that I'm so tired I will want to sleep on the plane.Todd: Well, good strategy and I hope you have a good flight.Victor: Thank you very much.

Todd: Keri, I heard you have a new house.Keri: Yes, I do.Todd: Oh, so what's your new house like?Keri: It's small, it's old. It's mostly wooden in the inside. It has two bedrooms and a balcony off of those rooms. Downstairs, there's like a living room area and a tatami mat room, kitchen, bathroom.Todd: Wow, so do you live in the tatami mat room?Keri: No, there's two tatami mat rooms. There's one upstairs and there's one downstairs and I don't live in either. One we use as kind of a spare room and the other one is my roommate's bedroom.Todd: Oh, OK. So you have a roommate?Keri: Yes.Todd: What's it like having a roommate?Keri: It's good. I like living alone too but sometimes it's nice to come home and have someone there. My roommate gets home before I do and she likes to cook so often she's cooked dinner for me.Todd: Wow, that's nice.Keri: I know.Todd: Well, you do all the cleaning?Keri: Now that you mention it, I do a lot of the cleaning but not all of it.Todd: Oh, OK. Well, what kind of things does she make you?Keri: Last night she made curry. I think it was an Indian curry, tomato-base.Todd: Spicy?Keri: Yes.Todd: Cool. Thanks a lot, Keri.Keri: You're welcome.

Todd: Keri, I heard you have a new house.Keri: Yes, I do.Todd: Oh, so what's your new house like?Keri: It's small, it's old. It's mostly wooden in the inside. It has two bedrooms and a balcony off of those rooms. Downstairs, there's like a living room area and a tatami mat room, kitchen, bathroom.Todd: Wow, so do you live in the tatami mat room?Keri: No, there's two tatami mat rooms. There's one upstairs and there's one downstairs and I don't live in either. One we use as kind of a spare room and the other one is my roommate's bedroom.Todd: Oh, OK. So you have a roommate?Keri: Yes.Todd: What's it like having a roommate?Keri: It's good. I like living alone too but sometimes it's nice to come home and have someone there. My roommate gets home before I do and she likes to cook so often she's cooked dinner for me.Todd: Wow, that's nice.Keri: I know.Todd: Well, you do all the cleaning?Keri: Now that you mention it, I do a lot of the cleaning but not all of it.Todd: Oh, OK. Well, what kind of things does she make you?Keri: Last night she made curry. I think it was an Indian curry, tomato-base.Todd: Spicy?Keri: Yes.Todd: Cool. Thanks a lot, Keri.Keri: You're welcome.

Todd: Hello, Gabrielle!Gabrielle: Hello!Todd: How are you doing today?Gabrielle: Good thanks.Todd: Now, Gabrielle, I hear that you are going back home to New Zealand.Gabrielle: That's right. I'm going home for summer.Todd: OK. What are your plans?Gabrielle: Probably a week relaxing, going camping, and then I'm going back to work.Todd: Oh, OK. Where do you work?Gabrielle: I teach as an English teacher in Christchurch in New Zealand.Todd: Oh, OK. And that's where you're from, naturally.Gabrielle: That's right.Todd: Were you born there?Gabrielle: I was, yeah.Todd: Well, you are going to have this short little break or vacation, are you going go to the beach or the mountains?Gabrielle: Probably, to the beach and camping for about a week with friends. Yeah.Todd: Actually, how warm is it in the summer?Gabrielle: Probably, a maximum of about 30 degrees. A nice dry heat. Very comfortable.Todd: So when you go to the beach is the water warm enough to swim in?Gabrielle: No, no! We swim but it is not warm. Yeah! It's pretty chilly actually.Todd: OK. Any other plans when you go home?Gabrielle: Yeah, I'm looking forward to catching up with friends and family and animals.Todd: Animals?Gabrielle: Well, I miss my pets.Todd: OK. Well, what pets do you have?Gabrielle: I have a cat, a dog, a sheep called Sydney, and two goldfish.Todd: Wow!Gabrielle: Yeah! And I really miss them.Todd: I'm sure they're really excited to see you. Alright, thanks a lot.Gabrielle: Cheers!

Todd: Hello, Gabrielle!Gabrielle: Hello!Todd: How are you doing today?Gabrielle: Good thanks.Todd: Now, Gabrielle, I hear that you are going back home to New Zealand.Gabrielle: That's right. I'm going home for summer.Todd: OK. What are your plans?Gabrielle: Probably a week relaxing, going camping, and then I'm going back to work.Todd: Oh, OK. Where do you work?Gabrielle: I teach as an English teacher in Christchurch in New Zealand.Todd: Oh, OK. And that's where you're from, naturally.Gabrielle: That's right.Todd: Were you born there?Gabrielle: I was, yeah.Todd: Well, you are going to have this short little break or vacation, are you going go to the beach or the mountains?Gabrielle: Probably, to the beach and camping for about a week with friends. Yeah.Todd: Actually, how warm is it in the summer?Gabrielle: Probably, a maximum of about 30 degrees. A nice dry heat. Very comfortable.Todd: So when you go to the beach is the water warm enough to swim in?Gabrielle: No, no! We swim but it is not warm. Yeah! It's pretty chilly actually.Todd: OK. Any other plans when you go home?Gabrielle: Yeah, I'm looking forward to catching up with friends and family and animals.Todd: Animals?Gabrielle: Well, I miss my pets.Todd: OK. Well, what pets do you have?Gabrielle: I have a cat, a dog, a sheep called Sydney, and two goldfish.Todd: Wow!Gabrielle: Yeah! And I really miss them.Todd: I'm sure they're really excited to see you. Alright, thanks a lot.Gabrielle: Cheers!

Todd: Hello, Matt!Matt: Hello, Todd!Todd: Matt, I'm going to ask you some questions about pets.Matt: OK.Todd: First question, do you have a pet?Matt: Yes, my pet at my mom's house we have three pets; two dogs and a cat. My family actually raises dogs for helping blind people.Todd: Oh, really?Matt: Yeah.Todd: Wow, like how do they train the dogs?Matt: How do they train the dogs? Well, I mean it's a long process right? We get them when they're puppies and so we train them basic. You know, sit, come... really basic things. Then after they're about two year old they go to a different training school.Todd: Oh, wow. That's great!Matt: Yeah!Todd: Well, how many dogs do they usually train at a time?Matt: Oh, just one. We have our own dog and then we have a dog that we have that we are training.Todd: Oh, OK.Matt: Yeah, just one dog at a time.Todd: Do you ever see the dogs you trained like out on the street or anything?Matt: Sometimes we see them. They'll have like sort of conventions of reunions of the pets. Yeah, you get to see them every once in a while.Todd: Oh, wow! That's cool. Why do people keep pets?Matt: I guess the most important thing is companionship, right? So there is always somebody there for you that will like you no matter what.Todd: Yeah, that's true. OK. Besides cats, dogs and fish, what are some other pets people keep?Matt: Well, I guess if you are Siegfried and Roy you can keep a tiger or lion. I guess all types of things don't they?Todd: Yeah.Matt: I mean, my friend has a snake. I don't know if you mention that snake, ferrets and insects, spiders...Todd: OK.Matt: All kinds of things.Todd: All right. Yeah, like there is so many. What are some costs associated with keeping a pet?Matt: Food is probably the biggest cost. But also if you keep the dog, particularly a dog in your house when they are puppies and we have a lot of puppies they'll chew up everything they can so we're constantly replacing shoes and you know, cleaning up pee from the carpet and things like that. It can be a hassle.Todd: Yeah, OK. Thanks a lot Matt. By the way, where are you from?Matt: I'm from the U.S.A., from Minnesota.

Todd: Hello, Matt!Matt: Hello, Todd!Todd: Matt, I'm going to ask you some questions about pets.Matt: OK.Todd: First question, do you have a pet?Matt: Yes, my pet at my mom's house we have three pets; two dogs and a cat. My family actually raises dogs for helping blind people.Todd: Oh, really?Matt: Yeah.Todd: Wow, like how do they train the dogs?Matt: How do they train the dogs? Well, I mean it's a long process right? We get them when they're puppies and so we train them basic. You know, sit, come... really basic things. Then after they're about two year old they go to a different training school.Todd: Oh, wow. That's great!Matt: Yeah!Todd: Well, how many dogs do they usually train at a time?Matt: Oh, just one. We have our own dog and then we have a dog that we have that we are training.Todd: Oh, OK.Matt: Yeah, just one dog at a time.Todd: Do you ever see the dogs you trained like out on the street or anything?Matt: Sometimes we see them. They'll have like sort of conventions of reunions of the pets. Yeah, you get to see them every once in a while.Todd: Oh, wow! That's cool. Why do people keep pets?Matt: I guess the most important thing is companionship, right? So there is always somebody there for you that will like you no matter what.Todd: Yeah, that's true. OK. Besides cats, dogs and fish, what are some other pets people keep?Matt: Well, I guess if you are Siegfried and Roy you can keep a tiger or lion. I guess all types of things don't they?Todd: Yeah.Matt: I mean, my friend has a snake. I don't know if you mention that snake, ferrets and insects, spiders...Todd: OK.Matt: All kinds of things.Todd: All right. Yeah, like there is so many. What are some costs associated with keeping a pet?Matt: Food is probably the biggest cost. But also if you keep the dog, particularly a dog in your house when they are puppies and we have a lot of puppies they'll chew up everything they can so we're constantly replacing shoes and you know, cleaning up pee from the carpet and things like that. It can be a hassle.Todd: Yeah, OK. Thanks a lot Matt. By the way, where are you from?Matt: I'm from the U.S.A., from Minnesota.

Todd: So, Anthony we're talking about bitcoin. Now you've invested in bitcoin before?Anthony: Yeah, yeah, a bit.Todd: Do you still invest a lot now?Anthony: I haven't recently.Todd: Okay, so why did you stop?Anthony: I stopped because I was getting a little anxious about seeing my portfolio swing up and down by 5, 6, 7 thousand dollars in a day. I kind of decided that I would take out the money that I invested in it and just let my profits ride, basically.Todd: Right, so basically originally then, you were using bitcoin for speculative purposes. Not to actually buy things. You weren't using it as a means to actually make transactions.Anthony: That is correct. I've only bought one thing with bitcoin, and that was, it's called a hardware wallet, which is basically, it looks like a USB stick, but it's a way to secure your funds.Todd: Do you think that in the future we will have people using bitcoins more, like it's going to become a viable alternative to actually, for commerce to pay for things?Anthony: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think bitcoin will be what we all use, but it's definitely, in my opinion, the archetype for what is coming.Todd: It's the pioneer.Anthony: Yes, the pioneering technology. There's going to be something that is similar to bitcoin that we use as a digital payment system.Todd: Yeah, so a lot of people are freaked out about bitcoin. What are some reasons people are skeptical against it?Anthony: That's a good question. One question that I've been asked before is, who controls it? Everyone always wants to know who's in charge. Right. Who's the CEO? Right? Because we're so conditioned to this kind of system, but that is the thing. It's kind of scary for some people, but there is no control over it. It's a program at the end of the day. And there's no governing body. There's no government organization that really has a say. I mean governments, specific governments, will try to regulate the markets to a certain extent. But at the end of the day, the power is in the hands of the people that use it, really. And as long as people use it there will be some kind of value to it. Just as long as we use paper money, there's value to it. As long as it's exchanged, right?Todd: Right. And some people have made some good points. For example, nobody foresaw the use of ecommerce or smart phones, or social media. But these things adopted and ramped up quickly. So, do you think this could happen with these crypto technologies?Anthony: I think-Todd: Is that the right way to say it? Crypto technologies.Anthony: Cryptocurrencies.Todd: Cryptocurrencies.Anthony: Or block chain technologies.Todd: Block chain technology, okay.Anthony: I think it's very rapid right now. It's kind of becoming a household word. Whereas, when I first got into it, if I talked to someone about bitcoin, they would look at me like I was crazy. They would look at me like I had a hole in my face or something. But now people know. Even older people who aren't really so in touch with technology, know what it is or have at least heard about it.Anthony: I think the biggest hurdle to mass adoptions is as it stands now, it takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of know-how in order to safely, because the reason why I say safely, is because if you're dealing with bitcoin, you're in charge of securing your funds. So, if someone hacks into your funds, or something, then it's your fault. You don't have anyone to blame. Where as if you have your money in a bank-Todd: You can't call customer service.Anthony: Exactly. You can't call customer service, so there's a big hurdel as far as the knowledge you need to safely and effectively maneuver in that space. So I think until some second party or third party comes about and makes it more user-friendly, I don't really think it's going to be ready to really take over until that happens. Either more people need to be educated and know how to use it and how to purchase it and how to store it, etc. Or there needs to be some huge company that going to say, "Look, we'll manage it for you. You just need this app, or something." I don't know, something like that.Todd: Yeah, it's going to be interesting in the crossover. They always say be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. If bitcoin or some crypto-Anthony: CurrencyTodd: Currency becomes the primary source of transactions, I think a lot of the ills and the dodgy stuff we have with banks, will seep into it. It'll be interesting if they could keep it out. If you know what I mean. But one thing that's interesting about the currencies is that, I think a lot of old people will go for it. I think a lot of old people usually are hesitant about technology and change, but the thing, they have a lot of money that they're sitting on, usually, older people. They also don't trust the government. They've been around a long time and so I think these cryptocurrencies are going to be very attractive to a lot of tech un-savvy people. What do you think about that?Anthony: I think you have a point. I think that probably more so than young people have money to invest, but I think that's, like I said before, I've spent so many hours reading about these kinds of technologies and just really obsessing over it, and I still feel like there's so much I don't know. So.Todd: Well, I guess we all got to learn.Anthony: Yeah. Alright.

Todd: So, Anthony we're talking about bitcoin. Now you've invested in bitcoin before?Anthony: Yeah, yeah, a bit.Todd: Do you still invest a lot now?Anthony: I haven't recently.Todd: Okay, so why did you stop?Anthony: I stopped because I was getting a little anxious about seeing my portfolio swing up and down by 5, 6, 7 thousand dollars in a day. I kind of decided that I would take out the money that I invested in it and just let my profits ride, basically.Todd: Right, so basically originally then, you were using bitcoin for speculative purposes. Not to actually buy things. You weren't using it as a means to actually make transactions.Anthony: That is correct. I've only bought one thing with bitcoin, and that was, it's called a hardware wallet, which is basically, it looks like a USB stick, but it's a way to secure your funds.Todd: Do you think that in the future we will have people using bitcoins more, like it's going to become a viable alternative to actually, for commerce to pay for things?Anthony: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think bitcoin will be what we all use, but it's definitely, in my opinion, the archetype for what is coming.Todd: It's the pioneer.Anthony: Yes, the pioneering technology. There's going to be something that is similar to bitcoin that we use as a digital payment system.Todd: Yeah, so a lot of people are freaked out about bitcoin. What are some reasons people are skeptical against it?Anthony: That's a good question. One question that I've been asked before is, who controls it? Everyone always wants to know who's in charge. Right. Who's the CEO? Right? Because we're so conditioned to this kind of system, but that is the thing. It's kind of scary for some people, but there is no control over it. It's a program at the end of the day. And there's no governing body. There's no government organization that really has a say. I mean governments, specific governments, will try to regulate the markets to a certain extent. But at the end of the day, the power is in the hands of the people that use it, really. And as long as people use it there will be some kind of value to it. Just as long as we use paper money, there's value to it. As long as it's exchanged, right?Todd: Right. And some people have made some good points. For example, nobody foresaw the use of ecommerce or smart phones, or social media. But these things adopted and ramped up quickly. So, do you think this could happen with these crypto technologies?Anthony: I think-Todd: Is that the right way to say it? Crypto technologies.Anthony: Cryptocurrencies.Todd: Cryptocurrencies.Anthony: Or block chain technologies.Todd: Block chain technology, okay.Anthony: I think it's very rapid right now. It's kind of becoming a household word. Whereas, when I first got into it, if I talked to someone about bitcoin, they would look at me like I was crazy. They would look at me like I had a hole in my face or something. But now people know. Even older people who aren't really so in touch with technology, know what it is or have at least heard about it.Anthony: I think the biggest hurdle to mass adoptions is as it stands now, it takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of know-how in order to safely, because the reason why I say safely, is because if you're dealing with bitcoin, you're in charge of securing your funds. So, if someone hacks into your funds, or something, then it's your fault. You don't have anyone to blame. Where as if you have your money in a bank-Todd: You can't call customer service.Anthony: Exactly. You can't call customer service, so there's a big hurdel as far as the knowledge you need to safely and effectively maneuver in that space. So I think until some second party or third party comes about and makes it more user-friendly, I don't really think it's going to be ready to really take over until that happens. Either more people need to be educated and know how to use it and how to purchase it and how to store it, etc. Or there needs to be some huge company that going to say, "Look, we'll manage it for you. You just need this app, or something." I don't know, something like that.Todd: Yeah, it's going to be interesting in the crossover. They always say be careful what you wish for, you might just get it. If bitcoin or some crypto-Anthony: CurrencyTodd: Currency becomes the primary source of transactions, I think a lot of the ills and the dodgy stuff we have with banks, will seep into it. It'll be interesting if they could keep it out. If you know what I mean. But one thing that's interesting about the currencies is that, I think a lot of old people will go for it. I think a lot of old people usually are hesitant about technology and change, but the thing, they have a lot of money that they're sitting on, usually, older people. They also don't trust the government. They've been around a long time and so I think these cryptocurrencies are going to be very attractive to a lot of tech un-savvy people. What do you think about that?Anthony: I think you have a point. I think that probably more so than young people have money to invest, but I think that's, like I said before, I've spent so many hours reading about these kinds of technologies and just really obsessing over it, and I still feel like there's so much I don't know. So.Todd: Well, I guess we all got to learn.Anthony: Yeah. Alright.

Todd: So I'm here with Jerri and she is from Thailand, and we're talking about islands. So these islands in Thailand get a lot of tourists.Jerri: Yes, right.Todd: Thailand probably gets more tourists to its islands than any other country in the world. Is there like any concerns about the environment or development on the islands?Jerri: Yes, of course. Wherever there are people, there's always an effect on the environment. And you see this a lot, especially on the most visited islands such as Phuket and Samoi with the development of condominiums, schools, malls, leads to deforestation, of course, and more pollution. You also see the effect more on the more vulnerable islands like the smaller islands such as, I think, Koh Phi Phi or Koh Lanta. All of the islands used to be full of trees and it used to be like national parks. And now with the people taking speed boats and everything, you really see the oils on the sea. The coral reefs are not as colorful as they should be. All the plastic that comes with, you know, getting food boxes, plastic straws. Yeah. And you really see the ecosystems in the sea are affected.Todd: Yeah, that's what I tell – that's a problem that we have to solve everywhere in the world, it seems like, especially the plastic. Do you know about Easter Island in Chile? You know, with the big stone statues?Jerri: No, not so much.Todd: Yeah, that reminds me of Easter Island which is, you know, famous in Chile for its really large stone monuments like the stone faces. And they couldn't figure out how the people disappeared or why they disappeared, and now they think it's because they cut down all the trees.Jerri: Oh, wow.Todd: And after they cut down all the trees, that basically destroyed the environment, and the people couldn't survive anymore so they had to leave the island. So islands really are vulnerable, especially with their trees, right?Jerri: Right. Yeah, absolutely.Todd: That's one of the reasons I really like Koh Chang, because you can only develop on one side of the road, you know.Jerri: Yeah.Todd: So there's a road around the island and if it's on the beach side you can develop, but anything inland on the other side of the road, there's pretty much no development.Jerri: Yes. But there are also on the positive side you see, you know, when – there are things like bad things happening to environment, you see innovation, people actually coming up with ideas. So a lot of hotel chains, for example, are becoming more sustainable. They're incorporating metal straws, paper straws. So you do see some changes but there's a long way to go.Todd: Yeah, you know, I think that's a great point. Like eventually, business can find the solution.Jerri: Yeah, yeah. That's always…Todd: It's in their best interest, right? Oh, that's really nice. So what about the economy? I guess the biggest jobs are the resorts?Jerri: Yes. So the Thai economy relies on tourists. Yeah, like the hotels, the restaurants, that's where we get our money flowing, I would say.Todd: Right. So that's your of the capital influx from other countries.Jerri: Yes.Todd: Right, okay. So, you live in Bangkok. Out of curiosity, how often do you get to a resort or to the beach?Jerri: More than I should, to be honest. Like I love the islands so every opportunity I get, I'll fly down south, and then visit the different ones. But yeah, as I mentioned, my favorite one would be Koh Pangan. Yeah.Todd: Can you fly directly from Bangkok to Koh Pangan?Jerri: Yes. Well, not directly, but you can fly to the mainland which is Surat Thani. And it's actually nice just to spend a day there because Surat Thani, there's like a culture there and then you get to try the authentic Southern food before you actually go to the islands and it becomes a little bit more like Western, with the taste and everything. So that's my recommendation. And then the next day, you can just go to the pier and take a ferry to the different islands you want to go to.Todd: Oh, wow. So I definitely, definitely want to take your advice.Jerri: Thank you.Todd: Well, that's really nice.

Todd: So I'm here with Jerri and she is from Thailand, and we're talking about islands. So these islands in Thailand get a lot of tourists.Jerri: Yes, right.Todd: Thailand probably gets more tourists to its islands than any other country in the world. Is there like any concerns about the environment or development on the islands?Jerri: Yes, of course. Wherever there are people, there's always an effect on the environment. And you see this a lot, especially on the most visited islands such as Phuket and Samoi with the development of condominiums, schools, malls, leads to deforestation, of course, and more pollution. You also see the effect more on the more vulnerable islands like the smaller islands such as, I think, Koh Phi Phi or Koh Lanta. All of the islands used to be full of trees and it used to be like national parks. And now with the people taking speed boats and everything, you really see the oils on the sea. The coral reefs are not as colorful as they should be. All the plastic that comes with, you know, getting food boxes, plastic straws. Yeah. And you really see the ecosystems in the sea are affected.Todd: Yeah, that's what I tell – that's a problem that we have to solve everywhere in the world, it seems like, especially the plastic. Do you know about Easter Island in Chile? You know, with the big stone statues?Jerri: No, not so much.Todd: Yeah, that reminds me of Easter Island which is, you know, famous in Chile for its really large stone monuments like the stone faces. And they couldn't figure out how the people disappeared or why they disappeared, and now they think it's because they cut down all the trees.Jerri: Oh, wow.Todd: And after they cut down all the trees, that basically destroyed the environment, and the people couldn't survive anymore so they had to leave the island. So islands really are vulnerable, especially with their trees, right?Jerri: Right. Yeah, absolutely.Todd: That's one of the reasons I really like Koh Chang, because you can only develop on one side of the road, you know.Jerri: Yeah.Todd: So there's a road around the island and if it's on the beach side you can develop, but anything inland on the other side of the road, there's pretty much no development.Jerri: Yes. But there are also on the positive side you see, you know, when – there are things like bad things happening to environment, you see innovation, people actually coming up with ideas. So a lot of hotel chains, for example, are becoming more sustainable. They're incorporating metal straws, paper straws. So you do see some changes but there's a long way to go.Todd: Yeah, you know, I think that's a great point. Like eventually, business can find the solution.Jerri: Yeah, yeah. That's always…Todd: It's in their best interest, right? Oh, that's really nice. So what about the economy? I guess the biggest jobs are the resorts?Jerri: Yes. So the Thai economy relies on tourists. Yeah, like the hotels, the restaurants, that's where we get our money flowing, I would say.Todd: Right. So that's your of the capital influx from other countries.Jerri: Yes.Todd: Right, okay. So, you live in Bangkok. Out of curiosity, how often do you get to a resort or to the beach?Jerri: More than I should, to be honest. Like I love the islands so every opportunity I get, I'll fly down south, and then visit the different ones. But yeah, as I mentioned, my favorite one would be Koh Pangan. Yeah.Todd: Can you fly directly from Bangkok to Koh Pangan?Jerri: Yes. Well, not directly, but you can fly to the mainland which is Surat Thani. And it's actually nice just to spend a day there because Surat Thani, there's like a culture there and then you get to try the authentic Southern food before you actually go to the islands and it becomes a little bit more like Western, with the taste and everything. So that's my recommendation. And then the next day, you can just go to the pier and take a ferry to the different islands you want to go to.Todd: Oh, wow. So I definitely, definitely want to take your advice.Jerri: Thank you.Todd: Well, that's really nice.

Todd: Did your kids work when they were in school? How did you feel about your kids when they were in high school?Angela: My kids had to work for their pocket money, so they would have chores to do and they would get pocket money. They would help with the washing up, sweeping, cleaning, whatever. They worked hard to earn their pocket money. They thought it was really hard.Todd: So did you ever withhold their wages?Angela: Yeah.Todd: You did? Really?!Angela: Yeah.Todd: You'd be like, “No, you didn't do your chores. You don't get the money”?Angela: Yeah, you're not having it. Yeah.Todd: Really?! How often would you have to do that?Angela: More so in the beginning. Once they get the idea, you know, if you don't work for your money, you don't get your money. And that's a life lesson, isn't it? If you don't do your work, you don't get money.Todd: That is great! Because I think a lot of people just assume, even me, like I've never had children, but the parents just spoil the kids. They don't want to have the hassle, they don't want to have the fight, they just give them the money.Angela: But you look at the difference between the Western kids and the kids out here. You can go on a bus trip with the kids out here. You can go on a six-hour bus trip. You don't hear a peep out of the kids. They stop there. The mom's asleep, maybe the kid's asleep as well. If you put Western kids on a bus for six hours, you'd have to have a PlayStation or a tablet or something. They'd be crying. You'd have to feed them things. It's a totally different way of acting.Todd: Yeah.Angela: I miss that. When I came to Asia, I noticed that the kids were happier with less, much less than we have. And it wasn't until I spent the year in Asia and then I went to Australia, landed in Sydney, noticed one thing, that the people were much bigger, but also the kids were just so spoiled. The parents were just giving in to them.Todd: So you think that maybe we need to rectify that situation, that we should stop spoiling kids.Angela: Yeah, I do.Todd: Take away the PlayStation.Angela: Yeah.Todd: Just stick them outside, yeah.Angela: You can get stalls today with - a place where you can put the kids' tablet.Todd: Yeah, it's crazy.Angela: Why won't the kid just look at the world?Todd: Yeah. It's so funny you mentioned that because before we were talking about potential business ideas, and I have an idea called “Camp Boredom.”Angela: Boredom is good.Todd: Yeah. What happens at Camp Boredom is you send your kid to Camp Boredom and it's just a camp in the woods or on a farm. The kids come and they go, “What do we do?” and I go, “I don't know. Nothing. Go outside. Just find something to do.”Angela: No Wi-Fi.Todd: Yeah, because I grew up no Wi-Fi, no nothing. I grew up on a farm and I'm really blessed. I had no idea how blessed I was at the time. But I grew up, I spent all time on my grandfather's farm, and we had nothing to do. I mean, nothing. But we had this farm, like, so we had everything to do. So the rule was, you had to be up for breakfast at 7:00 and then once you finished breakfast, you had to be out of the house, like you could not be in the house. It was almost forbidden to be in the house unless it's like raining outside. And you would be outside from sun-up to sundown.Angela: Yeah, climbing fences, climbing trees, haystacks.Todd: Right, having the best time of your life. And your imagination is going and you just… Oh! The little things that you would do. Oh, we're going to build a tree fort. Oh, we're going to do this. Oh, we're going to do that.Angela: We're going to stop the river from flowing.Todd: Right, right. So that's my idea. I think Camp Boredom. So maybe we have to…Angela: I think boredom is good for kids.Todd: Yeah. How so?Angela: Because, as you say, you know, if they're always entertained and always fed, then they don't get to learn how to entertain themselves.Todd: Yeah.Angela: If you sit them in a car with nothing for six hours…Todd: Right.Angela: Then look out the window.Todd: There was a great thing recently with Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian. He has a bit where he talks about how his mother would take him to the bank when he was a kid, and like a bank or department store was the ultimate space of boredom. Like there's nothing you can do. You're so bored, you just want to like flop down on the floor type of thing. But you're right, like I don't know if kids have that anymore.Angela: No, they don't.Todd: Where they hit that wall where there's nothing for them to do, you know.Angela: No.Todd: So do you think that maybe we should limit the devices, the smartphones, all that, that kids use?Angela: I do think we should but I think it's too late now. I think we're past the point where you can get Wi-Fi and it's that… You know, if we took off the kids now, what would they do? They'd be bored.Todd: Well, you can just never give it to them, right?Angela: Yeah, in the first place.Todd: Maybe that's impossible.Angela: It's impossible.Todd: Okay, cool.

Todd: Did your kids work when they were in school? How did you feel about your kids when they were in high school?Angela: My kids had to work for their pocket money, so they would have chores to do and they would get pocket money. They would help with the washing up, sweeping, cleaning, whatever. They worked hard to earn their pocket money. They thought it was really hard.Todd: So did you ever withhold their wages?Angela: Yeah.Todd: You did? Really?!Angela: Yeah.Todd: You'd be like, “No, you didn't do your chores. You don't get the money”?Angela: Yeah, you're not having it. Yeah.Todd: Really?! How often would you have to do that?Angela: More so in the beginning. Once they get the idea, you know, if you don't work for your money, you don't get your money. And that's a life lesson, isn't it? If you don't do your work, you don't get money.Todd: That is great! Because I think a lot of people just assume, even me, like I've never had children, but the parents just spoil the kids. They don't want to have the hassle, they don't want to have the fight, they just give them the money.Angela: But you look at the difference between the Western kids and the kids out here. You can go on a bus trip with the kids out here. You can go on a six-hour bus trip. You don't hear a peep out of the kids. They stop there. The mom's asleep, maybe the kid's asleep as well. If you put Western kids on a bus for six hours, you'd have to have a PlayStation or a tablet or something. They'd be crying. You'd have to feed them things. It's a totally different way of acting.Todd: Yeah.Angela: I miss that. When I came to Asia, I noticed that the kids were happier with less, much less than we have. And it wasn't until I spent the year in Asia and then I went to Australia, landed in Sydney, noticed one thing, that the people were much bigger, but also the kids were just so spoiled. The parents were just giving in to them.Todd: So you think that maybe we need to rectify that situation, that we should stop spoiling kids.Angela: Yeah, I do.Todd: Take away the PlayStation.Angela: Yeah.Todd: Just stick them outside, yeah.Angela: You can get stalls today with - a place where you can put the kids' tablet.Todd: Yeah, it's crazy.Angela: Why won't the kid just look at the world?Todd: Yeah. It's so funny you mentioned that because before we were talking about potential business ideas, and I have an idea called “Camp Boredom.”Angela: Boredom is good.Todd: Yeah. What happens at Camp Boredom is you send your kid to Camp Boredom and it's just a camp in the woods or on a farm. The kids come and they go, “What do we do?” and I go, “I don't know. Nothing. Go outside. Just find something to do.”Angela: No Wi-Fi.Todd: Yeah, because I grew up no Wi-Fi, no nothing. I grew up on a farm and I'm really blessed. I had no idea how blessed I was at the time. But I grew up, I spent all time on my grandfather's farm, and we had nothing to do. I mean, nothing. But we had this farm, like, so we had everything to do. So the rule was, you had to be up for breakfast at 7:00 and then once you finished breakfast, you had to be out of the house, like you could not be in the house. It was almost forbidden to be in the house unless it's like raining outside. And you would be outside from sun-up to sundown.Angela: Yeah, climbing fences, climbing trees, haystacks.Todd: Right, having the best time of your life. And your imagination is going and you just… Oh! The little things that you would do. Oh, we're going to build a tree fort. Oh, we're going to do this. Oh, we're going to do that.Angela: We're going to stop the river from flowing.Todd: Right, right. So that's my idea. I think Camp Boredom. So maybe we have to…Angela: I think boredom is good for kids.Todd: Yeah. How so?Angela: Because, as you say, you know, if they're always entertained and always fed, then they don't get to learn how to entertain themselves.Todd: Yeah.Angela: If you sit them in a car with nothing for six hours…Todd: Right.Angela: Then look out the window.Todd: There was a great thing recently with Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian. He has a bit where he talks about how his mother would take him to the bank when he was a kid, and like a bank or department store was the ultimate space of boredom. Like there's nothing you can do. You're so bored, you just want to like flop down on the floor type of thing. But you're right, like I don't know if kids have that anymore.Angela: No, they don't.Todd: Where they hit that wall where there's nothing for them to do, you know.Angela: No.Todd: So do you think that maybe we should limit the devices, the smartphones, all that, that kids use?Angela: I do think we should but I think it's too late now. I think we're past the point where you can get Wi-Fi and it's that… You know, if we took off the kids now, what would they do? They'd be bored.Todd: Well, you can just never give it to them, right?Angela: Yeah, in the first place.Todd: Maybe that's impossible.Angela: It's impossible.Todd: Okay, cool.

Todd: So, Meg, what do you like to do in your free time?Meg: Actually, I love cooking. I like to try new dishes and I love baking as well.Todd: Oh, nice. That's interesting. Because I hate cooking.Meg: Oh, really?Todd: Yeah. And I don't know anything about baking, but I like cleaning. Cleaning is relaxing.Meg: Really? Is that true?Todd: Yeah. Really, I like cleaning. So, my house is usually very clean.Meg: My house is usually clean also, but I don't like cleaning very much.Todd: Yeah, I think most people don't like cleaning. But some people think cleaning is relaxing. Like me.Meg: That's true. What else do you like to do?Todd: Well, I like exercising. I like going to the gym. I like listening to podcasts. So, I listen to a lot of podcasts a lot. I like surfing the internet. And sometimes, I enjoy reading books.Meg: I also enjoy reading books when I have time.Todd: But these days, I often listen to books instead. I listen to audiobooks.Meg: Oh really?Todd: Yeah, I like listening to audiobooks.Meg: Why?Todd: Because I can exercise at the same time.Meg: So, exercising and reading at the same time.Todd: Yeah, it's fun. So, I love jogging and I go jogging almost every day, usually for one hour. I listen to audiobooks when I jog.Meg: So, you can do two things at once.Todd: Very important. Multitasking. I love multitasking.Meg: Sounds like you're good at multitasking.Todd: Let's talk about outdoor activities. Do you like doing yard work?Meg: I don't especially like doing yard work. But right now, I don't have a yard. So, doing yard work isn't something I have to worry about. What about you?Todd: I like doing yard work. I think it's very relaxing. It's like cleaning. So, I enjoy it. But like you, I don't have a yard. So, now I don't do yard work very much. Or I can't do yard work.Meg: So, you like gardening if you have a yard?Todd: Yeah. I grew up on a big house. So, we have lots of yard work, lots of gardening. So, yeah.Meg: Right.Todd: But what about other things like hiking, do you like hiking?Meg: I love hiking. Anything that is in nature, I love doing. I love hiking. I love kayaking. I love canoeing. Any outdoor sports. Do you like hiking?Todd: I do. I'm with you. I love hiking. What about things like rock climbing?Meg: I have never been rock climbing. Have you gone rock climbing?Todd: No. Rock climbing looks dangerous. So, I'm still scared.Meg: Yeah,Todd: So, I've never done rock climbing either. What about things like singing and dancing? Do you enjoy singing and dancing?Meg: I enjoy singing, but I'm not very good at it. So, I like singing when I'm alone or in my car. Are you good at singing?Todd: No, I'm terrible at singing. So, I hate singing. I really, really hate singing. But I like going to karaoke and listening to people sing.Meg: Yeah, some people are really good at singing. What about dancing?Todd: I hate dancing too. Yeah, I'm not good at dancing. So, dancing is very embarrassing for me. I don't like it.Meg: I'm not good at dancing either.Todd: Are there any other activities you really dislike doing? Like for me, I hate writing letters. For example, I don't like writing thank you letters. I don't like writing anything with my hand. Typing is okay. I don't mind typing things, but I hate writing.Meg: So, using your hand to write, you hate writing?Todd: Yeah, I like typing. Fingers is okay. Thumb is okay on the phone. I don't mind texting, I don't mind typing. I just don't like physically writing with a pencil or a pen.Meg: Yeah. Pen or a pencil, like writing a letter.Todd: Right. Because my writing is really bad, and it's hard to read. So, it's embarrassing.Meg: I'm sure it's fine.Todd: Yeah. How about you? For example, do you like iron in your clothes?Meg: I don't like having my clothes, but my clothes usually don't need ironing, so I don't have to worry about it too much. I don't like doing laundry. It's related to ironing clothes. So, it takes a long time. And the clothes, I have to dry the clothes. So, doing laundry is a little bit boring for me.Todd: I don't mind doing laundry if I go to the coin laundry, but I hate hanging my laundry out. I hate hanging out my laundry. It takes forever. I don't know why, you put it out, you take it back in, it just takes so much time.Meg: That's funny. I'm kind of the opposite. I don't mind hanging out my laundry, because I like saving money, so I don't have to use money at the coin laundry.Todd: Plus, you are helping the environment.Meg: That's true. I like helping the earth.Todd: Yeah, I should change. Okay. Thanks Meg.Meg: Yeah.

Todd: So, Meg, what do you like to do in your free time?Meg: Actually, I love cooking. I like to try new dishes and I love baking as well.Todd: Oh, nice. That's interesting. Because I hate cooking.Meg: Oh, really?Todd: Yeah. And I don't know anything about baking, but I like cleaning. Cleaning is relaxing.Meg: Really? Is that true?Todd: Yeah. Really, I like cleaning. So, my house is usually very clean.Meg: My house is usually clean also, but I don't like cleaning very much.Todd: Yeah, I think most people don't like cleaning. But some people think cleaning is relaxing. Like me.Meg: That's true. What else do you like to do?Todd: Well, I like exercising. I like going to the gym. I like listening to podcasts. So, I listen to a lot of podcasts a lot. I like surfing the internet. And sometimes, I enjoy reading books.Meg: I also enjoy reading books when I have time.Todd: But these days, I often listen to books instead. I listen to audiobooks.Meg: Oh really?Todd: Yeah, I like listening to audiobooks.Meg: Why?Todd: Because I can exercise at the same time.Meg: So, exercising and reading at the same time.Todd: Yeah, it's fun. So, I love jogging and I go jogging almost every day, usually for one hour. I listen to audiobooks when I jog.Meg: So, you can do two things at once.Todd: Very important. Multitasking. I love multitasking.Meg: Sounds like you're good at multitasking.Todd: Let's talk about outdoor activities. Do you like doing yard work?Meg: I don't especially like doing yard work. But right now, I don't have a yard. So, doing yard work isn't something I have to worry about. What about you?Todd: I like doing yard work. I think it's very relaxing. It's like cleaning. So, I enjoy it. But like you, I don't have a yard. So, now I don't do yard work very much. Or I can't do yard work.Meg: So, you like gardening if you have a yard?Todd: Yeah. I grew up on a big house. So, we have lots of yard work, lots of gardening. So, yeah.Meg: Right.Todd: But what about other things like hiking, do you like hiking?Meg: I love hiking. Anything that is in nature, I love doing. I love hiking. I love kayaking. I love canoeing. Any outdoor sports. Do you like hiking?Todd: I do. I'm with you. I love hiking. What about things like rock climbing?Meg: I have never been rock climbing. Have you gone rock climbing?Todd: No. Rock climbing looks dangerous. So, I'm still scared.Meg: Yeah,Todd: So, I've never done rock climbing either. What about things like singing and dancing? Do you enjoy singing and dancing?Meg: I enjoy singing, but I'm not very good at it. So, I like singing when I'm alone or in my car. Are you good at singing?Todd: No, I'm terrible at singing. So, I hate singing. I really, really hate singing. But I like going to karaoke and listening to people sing.Meg: Yeah, some people are really good at singing. What about dancing?Todd: I hate dancing too. Yeah, I'm not good at dancing. So, dancing is very embarrassing for me. I don't like it.Meg: I'm not good at dancing either.Todd: Are there any other activities you really dislike doing? Like for me, I hate writing letters. For example, I don't like writing thank you letters. I don't like writing anything with my hand. Typing is okay. I don't mind typing things, but I hate writing.Meg: So, using your hand to write, you hate writing?Todd: Yeah, I like typing. Fingers is okay. Thumb is okay on the phone. I don't mind texting, I don't mind typing. I just don't like physically writing with a pencil or a pen.Meg: Yeah. Pen or a pencil, like writing a letter.Todd: Right. Because my writing is really bad, and it's hard to read. So, it's embarrassing.Meg: I'm sure it's fine.Todd: Yeah. How about you? For example, do you like iron in your clothes?Meg: I don't like having my clothes, but my clothes usually don't need ironing, so I don't have to worry about it too much. I don't like doing laundry. It's related to ironing clothes. So, it takes a long time. And the clothes, I have to dry the clothes. So, doing laundry is a little bit boring for me.Todd: I don't mind doing laundry if I go to the coin laundry, but I hate hanging my laundry out. I hate hanging out my laundry. It takes forever. I don't know why, you put it out, you take it back in, it just takes so much time.Meg: That's funny. I'm kind of the opposite. I don't mind hanging out my laundry, because I like saving money, so I don't have to use money at the coin laundry.Todd: Plus, you are helping the environment.Meg: That's true. I like helping the earth.Todd: Yeah, I should change. Okay. Thanks Meg.Meg: Yeah.

Abidemi: Todd, are you good at saving money?Todd: No, I'm terrible. I waste money. I waste so much money.Abidemi: How?Todd: Well, I don't buy things on sale. I don't use coupons. I buy anything I see.Abidemi: So, when I shop, I don't look at prices. I just see the food or the thing and I get it and I buy it and I pay for it. And, then it's sometimes very expensive, so I just waste money. I don't budget. I need to budget my money but I don't budget my money.Todd: What about you? Are you good at saving money?Abidemi: I don't think I'm too bad at saving money. I look at prices a lot. I also buy a lot of things on sale, so I'm able to save some money.Todd: So, you look for discounts.Abidemi: Yes, I do.Todd: Do you use coupons or special offers?Abidemi: No, I don't, but if I see some I will use them.Todd: So, do you waste money on anything? Like, maybe eating out, buying clothes, renting movies?Abidemi: I waste money on buying clothes.Todd: Oh, okay!Abidemi: But, I save a little bit because I buy them on sale.Todd: Ah, do you buy things online?Abidemi: No, I don't. I usually go into the stores to shop.Todd: I'm good with clothes too, so I don't spend much money on clothes. I only shop maybe once a year. Or, I only shop if I need something, like it's really cold and I need a jacket.Abidemi: I see.Todd: And, I'm really bad, so I often only wear clothes people give to me.Abidemi: That's good!Todd: Yeah, so I get shirts or ties for Christmas gifts or a birthday gift, and I do that. My mom often asks ... every year, my mom asks, "What do you want for Christmas?", "What do you want for your birthday?"Todd: And I'll say, "Underwear and socks" or "Socks and T-shirts". And so, she buys them for me and then I don't have to buy them.Abidemi: Wow. Sounds like you're an easy person to give a present to.Todd: Yes, for clothes. Yes, for clothes. But, I waste money on computers and electronics and those things are expensive, so I buy a new computer every year. I have four computers now in my house.Abidemi: Wow.Todd: I have five mobile phones.Abidemi: Wow.Todd: I have an iPad. I have lots of electronic equipment. So, I spend so much money on those things.Abidemi: I waste money on traveling.Todd: Ah, yeah.Abidemi: Every year, I take about one or two trips to different countries, so that's where a lot of my money go.Todd: Yeah, traveling is expensive.Abidemi: Yes, yes.Todd: But, when you travel, do you save money? Do you stay at cheap hotels? Or, do you buy cheap plane tickets?Abidemi: I try to. I try to all the time. But, usually the plane ticket is so expensive that a lot of my savings is already gone.Todd: Yeah, I know. I buy my tickets online, usually with Expedia. And, it's cheap. It's pretty cheap. I waste money on food. I eat out almost every day.Abidemi: Wow.Todd: Or, I buy my dinner at the supermarket almost every day. Do you waste money on food?Abidemi: No, I don't. I usually get bored if I eat out too much, because even though I am not a very good cook, there are some thing that I cook that I like to eat. So, I would miss those things. So, no, I don't waste money on eating out.Todd: Ah, that's interesting. So, you save money, I waste money. You have to teach me your tricks. You have to teach me your tips on saving money.Abidemi: Please teach me how to get cheap travel tickets.Todd: It's a deal.Abidemi: Thanks.

Abidemi: Todd, are you good at saving money?Todd: No, I'm terrible. I waste money. I waste so much money.Abidemi: How?Todd: Well, I don't buy things on sale. I don't use coupons. I buy anything I see.Abidemi: So, when I shop, I don't look at prices. I just see the food or the thing and I get it and I buy it and I pay for it. And, then it's sometimes very expensive, so I just waste money. I don't budget. I need to budget my money but I don't budget my money.Todd: What about you? Are you good at saving money?Abidemi: I don't think I'm too bad at saving money. I look at prices a lot. I also buy a lot of things on sale, so I'm able to save some money.Todd: So, you look for discounts.Abidemi: Yes, I do.Todd: Do you use coupons or special offers?Abidemi: No, I don't, but if I see some I will use them.Todd: So, do you waste money on anything? Like, maybe eating out, buying clothes, renting movies?Abidemi: I waste money on buying clothes.Todd: Oh, okay!Abidemi: But, I save a little bit because I buy them on sale.Todd: Ah, do you buy things online?Abidemi: No, I don't. I usually go into the stores to shop.Todd: I'm good with clothes too, so I don't spend much money on clothes. I only shop maybe once a year. Or, I only shop if I need something, like it's really cold and I need a jacket.Abidemi: I see.Todd: And, I'm really bad, so I often only wear clothes people give to me.Abidemi: That's good!Todd: Yeah, so I get shirts or ties for Christmas gifts or a birthday gift, and I do that. My mom often asks ... every year, my mom asks, "What do you want for Christmas?", "What do you want for your birthday?"Todd: And I'll say, "Underwear and socks" or "Socks and T-shirts". And so, she buys them for me and then I don't have to buy them.Abidemi: Wow. Sounds like you're an easy person to give a present to.Todd: Yes, for clothes. Yes, for clothes. But, I waste money on computers and electronics and those things are expensive, so I buy a new computer every year. I have four computers now in my house.Abidemi: Wow.Todd: I have five mobile phones.Abidemi: Wow.Todd: I have an iPad. I have lots of electronic equipment. So, I spend so much money on those things.Abidemi: I waste money on traveling.Todd: Ah, yeah.Abidemi: Every year, I take about one or two trips to different countries, so that's where a lot of my money go.Todd: Yeah, traveling is expensive.Abidemi: Yes, yes.Todd: But, when you travel, do you save money? Do you stay at cheap hotels? Or, do you buy cheap plane tickets?Abidemi: I try to. I try to all the time. But, usually the plane ticket is so expensive that a lot of my savings is already gone.Todd: Yeah, I know. I buy my tickets online, usually with Expedia. And, it's cheap. It's pretty cheap. I waste money on food. I eat out almost every day.Abidemi: Wow.Todd: Or, I buy my dinner at the supermarket almost every day. Do you waste money on food?Abidemi: No, I don't. I usually get bored if I eat out too much, because even though I am not a very good cook, there are some thing that I cook that I like to eat. So, I would miss those things. So, no, I don't waste money on eating out.Todd: Ah, that's interesting. So, you save money, I waste money. You have to teach me your tricks. You have to teach me your tips on saving money.Abidemi: Please teach me how to get cheap travel tickets.Todd: It's a deal.Abidemi: Thanks.

Todd: So Katie, I want to go to the mall.Katie: Okay.Todd: Have you been to the new mall?Katie: Yeah, I actually went there just yesterday.Todd: Okay. So I want to buy some computer stuff. Is there a computer store?Katie: There are two computer stores.Todd: Really? Ooh, that's good.Katie: There's a computer store on the first floor, and then very close to that there's also a Mac store.Todd: Ooh, that's perfect. I want to buy a new Mac.Katie: Oh, me too.Todd: They're so expensive, though.Katie: Mm-hmm.Todd: Okay, what about books? I really like books. Is there a bookstore with English books?Katie: There's a huge bookstore on the fourth floor.Todd: Ooh, that's good.Katie: It's really big. And there are lots of English books you can read there.Todd: Oh, great. Nice. And how about the food there?Katie: The food's okay. There's a big food court on the third floor, and you can get a variety of food. You can get a Subway.Todd: Oh, that's good. I love sandwiches. Is the food good there, though?Katie: They don't have any sandwiches that I like, basically.Todd: Oh, really. Okay. So what else is there at the mall?Katie: Oh, there's so much at the mall. There's a café on the ground floor.Todd: Oh, nice.Katie: If you like drinking coffee.Todd: I do. I like to go and study and just relax.Katie: That's the perfect place for you, then.Todd: I like to people watch. Is it a good people-watching place?Katie: Oh, it's a great people-watching place.Todd: Oh, cool.Katie: The windows are really big, and you can see out onto the street.Todd: Oh, cool. What else is there? Is there a movie theater?Katie: Mm-hmm. There's a movie theater on the fourth floor.Todd: Oh, great. Now, do they have English movies?Katie: They have English and Japanese movies.Todd: Oh, that's good. I should watch some Japanese movies too.Katie: They're interesting.Todd: And how about food? I hear there's a new supermarket, a big supermarket there.Katie: It's pretty big. And you can get lots of food there. It's on the first floor.Todd: Okay. Is there anything else I should see?Katie: What about the roof garden?Todd: Oh, what is the roof garden?Katie: It's on the fifth floor, and it's, well it's on the roof, and you can see a beautiful view of the city. And there's also places for you to sit and just enjoy the view.Todd: Oh, nice. A roof garden, I like that.Katie: It's really nice.Todd: Now, do you buy clothes at the mall? Do they have nice clothing shops?Katie: Yeah, they have nice clothing shops. Some of them are a little bit expensive.Todd: Ah, yeah.Katie: And I like buying cheap clothes.Todd: Okay. When's a good time to go?Katie: I think the best time to go is probably weekdays.Todd: Okay. Why?Katie: If you go on the weekend, there are so many children there.Todd: Oh.Katie: Ugh. It's hard to walk around.Todd: Yeah, and we're teachers, we teach kids all day.Katie: Mm-hmm.Todd: Okay. I don't want to go then.Katie: No, me neither.Todd: Well, I want to go there next week, maybe Thursday night.Katie: Okay.Todd: Do you want to join me?Katie: Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe we can watch a movie.Todd: Cool. I'll buy you dinner.Katie: Sounds great.

Todd: So Katie, I want to go to the mall.Katie: Okay.Todd: Have you been to the new mall?Katie: Yeah, I actually went there just yesterday.Todd: Okay. So I want to buy some computer stuff. Is there a computer store?Katie: There are two computer stores.Todd: Really? Ooh, that's good.Katie: There's a computer store on the first floor, and then very close to that there's also a Mac store.Todd: Ooh, that's perfect. I want to buy a new Mac.Katie: Oh, me too.Todd: They're so expensive, though.Katie: Mm-hmm.Todd: Okay, what about books? I really like books. Is there a bookstore with English books?Katie: There's a huge bookstore on the fourth floor.Todd: Ooh, that's good.Katie: It's really big. And there are lots of English books you can read there.Todd: Oh, great. Nice. And how about the food there?Katie: The food's okay. There's a big food court on the third floor, and you can get a variety of food. You can get a Subway.Todd: Oh, that's good. I love sandwiches. Is the food good there, though?Katie: They don't have any sandwiches that I like, basically.Todd: Oh, really. Okay. So what else is there at the mall?Katie: Oh, there's so much at the mall. There's a café on the ground floor.Todd: Oh, nice.Katie: If you like drinking coffee.Todd: I do. I like to go and study and just relax.Katie: That's the perfect place for you, then.Todd: I like to people watch. Is it a good people-watching place?Katie: Oh, it's a great people-watching place.Todd: Oh, cool.Katie: The windows are really big, and you can see out onto the street.Todd: Oh, cool. What else is there? Is there a movie theater?Katie: Mm-hmm. There's a movie theater on the fourth floor.Todd: Oh, great. Now, do they have English movies?Katie: They have English and Japanese movies.Todd: Oh, that's good. I should watch some Japanese movies too.Katie: They're interesting.Todd: And how about food? I hear there's a new supermarket, a big supermarket there.Katie: It's pretty big. And you can get lots of food there. It's on the first floor.Todd: Okay. Is there anything else I should see?Katie: What about the roof garden?Todd: Oh, what is the roof garden?Katie: It's on the fifth floor, and it's, well it's on the roof, and you can see a beautiful view of the city. And there's also places for you to sit and just enjoy the view.Todd: Oh, nice. A roof garden, I like that.Katie: It's really nice.Todd: Now, do you buy clothes at the mall? Do they have nice clothing shops?Katie: Yeah, they have nice clothing shops. Some of them are a little bit expensive.Todd: Ah, yeah.Katie: And I like buying cheap clothes.Todd: Okay. When's a good time to go?Katie: I think the best time to go is probably weekdays.Todd: Okay. Why?Katie: If you go on the weekend, there are so many children there.Todd: Oh.Katie: Ugh. It's hard to walk around.Todd: Yeah, and we're teachers, we teach kids all day.Katie: Mm-hmm.Todd: Okay. I don't want to go then.Katie: No, me neither.Todd: Well, I want to go there next week, maybe Thursday night.Katie: Okay.Todd: Do you want to join me?Katie: Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe we can watch a movie.Todd: Cool. I'll buy you dinner.Katie: Sounds great.

Todd: Okay, so, Jen, we're gonna talk about media and technology, phones and music, things like that. So the first one is, how addicted are you to your phone? How long can you go without using your phone?Jen: That's a difficult question because I'm very, I would say I'm very addicted to my phone because I keep on checking it every five minutes. I feel like without my phone my head doesn't, my brain stops working, you know?Todd: Wow.Jen: I would say the maximum I can stay without it would be one or two hours.Todd: You've got to be kidding me.Jen: I mean, if you asked me in the past, yeah, I could stay without it for awhile, but nowadays, I don't even own a watch so that would be my time as well, so, I have to keep checking it. What about you?Todd: We are polar opposites. Actually, I am so bad about not using my phone, and that's a smartphone, actually, I have two. I have an Android Galaxy and I have an iPhone. I set them down and forget where they are, and go days without actually checking them sometimes. I'll go to work and somebody will be like, are you mad at me? I've been trying to reach you and you won't ... And I'm like, no, I'm not mad at you, why? I'm like, oh, I haven't checked my phone in two days.Jen: That sounds so crazy to me because I could never go without my phone for two days.Todd: Well, one, there's a couple of things. One, it's old school, right? And two, I get all my information on the Internet on a PC. So I'm working, so I get everything on the Internet, like Facebook, news, stuff like that. The computer, like you said, tells the time. So I actually forget about my phone.Jen: I think if I have a PC then I would also forget my phone.Todd: But your generation, it's all in your hand, right?Jen: That's right because it's more convenient.Todd: Have you heard the term second brain?Jen: No.Todd: Yeah, somebody at some teacher conference was saying that phones are students' second brain, so they use it, you hold it and you have two brains, one in your hands and one in your head.Jen: I would agree.Todd: It's weird. So how about music? How addicted are you to music? Do you have to have music playing all the time?Jen: Not all the time but then I would have to listen to music at least once a day because it just refreshes your mind and you can relieve your stress through music. But it depends upon what kind of music you have. What about you? Do you like listening to music?Todd: No. I do, but I'm not a music aficionado, and I always listen to the same ten songs. I think a lot of older people, we kind of get into that rut where I listen, honestly, to music. And I'm from the 80s, so I'm 48, I'm almost 50. So I love music from the 70s and 80s and that's all I listen to.Jen: That's understandable. Actually, I also have a lot of old songs, but I just don't listen, I just, it's not like I just keep on listening to that music. I actually keep on adding more music, more songs to it so that my playlist is updated every now and then. I think, if you have good music, you will actually be addicted to it. Maybe you don't have good music.Todd: No, the music from the 80s is good. Okay, so what about TV? Do you watch TV every day?Jen: Not so much because lately, I've been so busy at school so I cannot really, yeah, I don't watch much TV. But, during weekends, yeah, I do like to watch new movies or different series.Todd: What about, are you one of those people that will stay up till 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning just watching YouTube videos?Jen: Not YouTube videos but yes, if I'm addicted to some series then I would just binge watch and watch them till 5:00 in the morning.Todd: What shows do you watch?Jen: Shows. Recently I've been watching Suits, it's like, it's a new series and it's really good. You should try it, too.Todd: Okay, I'll have to check it out. Thanks.Jen: You're welcome, Todd.

Todd: Okay, so, Jen, we're gonna talk about media and technology, phones and music, things like that. So the first one is, how addicted are you to your phone? How long can you go without using your phone?Jen: That's a difficult question because I'm very, I would say I'm very addicted to my phone because I keep on checking it every five minutes. I feel like without my phone my head doesn't, my brain stops working, you know?Todd: Wow.Jen: I would say the maximum I can stay without it would be one or two hours.Todd: You've got to be kidding me.Jen: I mean, if you asked me in the past, yeah, I could stay without it for awhile, but nowadays, I don't even own a watch so that would be my time as well, so, I have to keep checking it. What about you?Todd: We are polar opposites. Actually, I am so bad about not using my phone, and that's a smartphone, actually, I have two. I have an Android Galaxy and I have an iPhone. I set them down and forget where they are, and go days without actually checking them sometimes. I'll go to work and somebody will be like, are you mad at me? I've been trying to reach you and you won't ... And I'm like, no, I'm not mad at you, why? I'm like, oh, I haven't checked my phone in two days.Jen: That sounds so crazy to me because I could never go without my phone for two days.Todd: Well, one, there's a couple of things. One, it's old school, right? And two, I get all my information on the Internet on a PC. So I'm working, so I get everything on the Internet, like Facebook, news, stuff like that. The computer, like you said, tells the time. So I actually forget about my phone.Jen: I think if I have a PC then I would also forget my phone.Todd: But your generation, it's all in your hand, right?Jen: That's right because it's more convenient.Todd: Have you heard the term second brain?Jen: No.Todd: Yeah, somebody at some teacher conference was saying that phones are students' second brain, so they use it, you hold it and you have two brains, one in your hands and one in your head.Jen: I would agree.Todd: It's weird. So how about music? How addicted are you to music? Do you have to have music playing all the time?Jen: Not all the time but then I would have to listen to music at least once a day because it just refreshes your mind and you can relieve your stress through music. But it depends upon what kind of music you have. What about you? Do you like listening to music?Todd: No. I do, but I'm not a music aficionado, and I always listen to the same ten songs. I think a lot of older people, we kind of get into that rut where I listen, honestly, to music. And I'm from the 80s, so I'm 48, I'm almost 50. So I love music from the 70s and 80s and that's all I listen to.Jen: That's understandable. Actually, I also have a lot of old songs, but I just don't listen, I just, it's not like I just keep on listening to that music. I actually keep on adding more music, more songs to it so that my playlist is updated every now and then. I think, if you have good music, you will actually be addicted to it. Maybe you don't have good music.Todd: No, the music from the 80s is good. Okay, so what about TV? Do you watch TV every day?Jen: Not so much because lately, I've been so busy at school so I cannot really, yeah, I don't watch much TV. But, during weekends, yeah, I do like to watch new movies or different series.Todd: What about, are you one of those people that will stay up till 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning just watching YouTube videos?Jen: Not YouTube videos but yes, if I'm addicted to some series then I would just binge watch and watch them till 5:00 in the morning.Todd: What shows do you watch?Jen: Shows. Recently I've been watching Suits, it's like, it's a new series and it's really good. You should try it, too.Todd: Okay, I'll have to check it out. Thanks.Jen: You're welcome, Todd.

Todd: Okay, so I'm here with Jen and we're talking about clothing. Now, Jen, I'm a bit older than you, so I probably don't really care about what I wear so much. I always kind of pay the same price for my clothing. So I'm wondering, what's it like for a younger person? How much are you willing to pay? What is your price range?Jen: It depends upon like what you're buying. For example, if it's a pair of jeans then I would pay around 4,000 yen, that's Japanese yen. $40?Todd: Oh really? That's still relatively cheap. Like some people pay like $100, right? Or $200.Jen: I don't think I would ever pay that much because I'm a student right now,so paying more than that would be something I wouldn't do.Todd: Well what about in your home country of Nepal? How much would people pay for pants there?Jen: In Nepal, like compared to Japan, it's really cheap there. You can actually get a really decent pant in 1,500 yen.Todd: That's like $15.Jen: Yes.Todd: Around. Oh that's good. What's the cheapest you would pay? I mean, I guess you could get stuff for free, but what's the lowest you pay for clothes? Or for pants? For pants?Jen: Okay, so sometimes when there's a sale and especially if there's shorts then you can just get it for like 500 yen.Todd: Oh wow. Five bucks.Jen: Like five bucks, yeah.Todd: That's good. Now what about shoes? Do you have a lot of shoes?Jen: Yes I do.Todd: Okay, for some people like shoes they spend a lot of money on shoes. I have a rule, unless it's dress shoes for work, I don't like to spend anything over $100. If it's athletic shoes, like sneakers, never more than $50. Ever.Jen: Okay.Todd: Like how much do you on average pay for shoes?Jen: I think it's different for girls, because our shoes range from $10 to, you know, a lot of money.Todd: What's the most you've ever paid for a pair of shoes?Jen: $100.Todd: Oh really? That's not too bad.Jen: Yeah, it's not bad at all.Todd: Yeah, no, that's good. Kind of good range. How about the cheapest? Five bucks?Jen: Not five bucks, maybe 10 bucks, yeah.Todd: 10 bucks, yeah. All right. I don't even know if I could find shoes for five dollars. They'd fall apart, right?Jen: You can, though.Todd: Oh yeah?Jen: Yeah. On sale you can even get it in like three bucks.Todd: Okay. That brings up a good question because we're talking about shoes. How important is fashion for you? Are you willing to wear uncomfortable clothing to look good?Jen: Not always, because I really like comfort. I would rather wear pajamas and go out than, like you know, wear something really uncomfortable. But it depends, like if you're going to a party then you would obviously want to look good and wouldn't really care about comfort much. But in a daily basis, I would go for comfort always.Todd: Okay. Nice. How about for example, jewelry? Do you like to wear necklaces, earrings, rings, things like that?Jen: No, I'm not much of an accessories person.Todd: Okay. Now in your home country, Nepal, is it common for people to wear a lot of jewelry?Jen: Yes, they do.Todd: Oh yeah? Oh, okay. What do people like to wear?Jen: Everyone prefers gold I guess, because it's like people think that if you wear gold then you are rich. And yeah, gold, silver, and some wear diamonds.Todd: Okay, nice. Nice. I don't have any jewelry, I don't think. Oh wow, I didn't even realize that. I don't have one piece of jewelry.Jen: Really?Todd: Yeah, I have no rings. No necklaces. I have a broken watch. But yeah.Jen: Don't you ever feel like buying one though? Don't you ever follow a trend and thought about piercing your ears or something?Todd: That would be interesting, piercing my ears. You know, when I was your age, which was about over 20 years ago, it was just starting to happen that boys or men would pierce their ears. But it was a bit controversial, it wasn't like it's common now. So yeah.Jen: What about necklaces?Todd: Yeah, I used to have a necklace, yeah. And I just stopped wearing them, it's just not a thing. Yeah. How about you? Would you like to have piercings? Like do you have, you have earrings, right?Jen: Yes, I do, but I rarely use them because at some point it's just hurts and you just feel like you don't really need it, so yeah.Todd: What about in your country, do people have piercings in different places like eyelids or lips or ... ? Like a nose ring?Jen: Yeah, they have nose ring and then they also pierce their ears, like in so many different places. But I've never really seen anyone really piercing their eyelids or stuff. I would want to pierce my-Todd: Belly button? The belly button?Jen: Yes.Todd: Oh my gosh, that looks like it would hurt.Jen: I know-Todd: So much.Jen: -but I really want to do it.Todd: Really? All right, well, just be careful.Jen: Okay, I will

Todd: Okay, so I'm here with Jen and we're talking about clothing. Now, Jen, I'm a bit older than you, so I probably don't really care about what I wear so much. I always kind of pay the same price for my clothing. So I'm wondering, what's it like for a younger person? How much are you willing to pay? What is your price range?Jen: It depends upon like what you're buying. For example, if it's a pair of jeans then I would pay around 4,000 yen, that's Japanese yen. $40?Todd: Oh really? That's still relatively cheap. Like some people pay like $100, right? Or $200.Jen: I don't think I would ever pay that much because I'm a student right now,so paying more than that would be something I wouldn't do.Todd: Well what about in your home country of Nepal? How much would people pay for pants there?Jen: In Nepal, like compared to Japan, it's really cheap there. You can actually get a really decent pant in 1,500 yen.Todd: That's like $15.Jen: Yes.Todd: Around. Oh that's good. What's the cheapest you would pay? I mean, I guess you could get stuff for free, but what's the lowest you pay for clothes? Or for pants? For pants?Jen: Okay, so sometimes when there's a sale and especially if there's shorts then you can just get it for like 500 yen.Todd: Oh wow. Five bucks.Jen: Like five bucks, yeah.Todd: That's good. Now what about shoes? Do you have a lot of shoes?Jen: Yes I do.Todd: Okay, for some people like shoes they spend a lot of money on shoes. I have a rule, unless it's dress shoes for work, I don't like to spend anything over $100. If it's athletic shoes, like sneakers, never more than $50. Ever.Jen: Okay.Todd: Like how much do you on average pay for shoes?Jen: I think it's different for girls, because our shoes range from $10 to, you know, a lot of money.Todd: What's the most you've ever paid for a pair of shoes?Jen: $100.Todd: Oh really? That's not too bad.Jen: Yeah, it's not bad at all.Todd: Yeah, no, that's good. Kind of good range. How about the cheapest? Five bucks?Jen: Not five bucks, maybe 10 bucks, yeah.Todd: 10 bucks, yeah. All right. I don't even know if I could find shoes for five dollars. They'd fall apart, right?Jen: You can, though.Todd: Oh yeah?Jen: Yeah. On sale you can even get it in like three bucks.Todd: Okay. That brings up a good question because we're talking about shoes. How important is fashion for you? Are you willing to wear uncomfortable clothing to look good?Jen: Not always, because I really like comfort. I would rather wear pajamas and go out than, like you know, wear something really uncomfortable. But it depends, like if you're going to a party then you would obviously want to look good and wouldn't really care about comfort much. But in a daily basis, I would go for comfort always.Todd: Okay. Nice. How about for example, jewelry? Do you like to wear necklaces, earrings, rings, things like that?Jen: No, I'm not much of an accessories person.Todd: Okay. Now in your home country, Nepal, is it common for people to wear a lot of jewelry?Jen: Yes, they do.Todd: Oh yeah? Oh, okay. What do people like to wear?Jen: Everyone prefers gold I guess, because it's like people think that if you wear gold then you are rich. And yeah, gold, silver, and some wear diamonds.Todd: Okay, nice. Nice. I don't have any jewelry, I don't think. Oh wow, I didn't even realize that. I don't have one piece of jewelry.Jen: Really?Todd: Yeah, I have no rings. No necklaces. I have a broken watch. But yeah.Jen: Don't you ever feel like buying one though? Don't you ever follow a trend and thought about piercing your ears or something?Todd: That would be interesting, piercing my ears. You know, when I was your age, which was about over 20 years ago, it was just starting to happen that boys or men would pierce their ears. But it was a bit controversial, it wasn't like it's common now. So yeah.Jen: What about necklaces?Todd: Yeah, I used to have a necklace, yeah. And I just stopped wearing them, it's just not a thing. Yeah. How about you? Would you like to have piercings? Like do you have, you have earrings, right?Jen: Yes, I do, but I rarely use them because at some point it's just hurts and you just feel like you don't really need it, so yeah.Todd: What about in your country, do people have piercings in different places like eyelids or lips or ... ? Like a nose ring?Jen: Yeah, they have nose ring and then they also pierce their ears, like in so many different places. But I've never really seen anyone really piercing their eyelids or stuff. I would want to pierce my-Todd: Belly button? The belly button?Jen: Yes.Todd: Oh my gosh, that looks like it would hurt.Jen: I know-Todd: So much.Jen: -but I really want to do it.Todd: Really? All right, well, just be careful.Jen: Okay, I will

Todd: So Megen we are talking about Holidays and Christmas and in the last interview we talked the difference between Christmas in a cold country and a warm country, so now I thought we would talk about Christmas in countries that aren't really Christian countries. They don't really celebrate it for religious reasons. So we're in Japan and it's interesting that in Japan it's a romantic day, right?Megen: Yes. Yeah, it is.Todd: It's like Valentine's DayMegen: Yes, you have to spend Christmas with your partner.Todd: Right, and everybody looks forward to it - to go out on a date and give each other gifts, and yeah.Megen: Yeah, yeah, I think the fireworks are for the boyfriend and girlfriend and I think, and I think there are a lot of decorations that are similar to like Valentine's actually.Todd: Yeah, it's interesting because they have the Christmas decoration everywhere, but nobody gets the day off. No families celebrate it really.Megen: Yeah, it's a regular day.Todd: Except eating the chicken dinner, which we talked about -- the fried chicken dinner. Yeah, so it's kind of like one of those like I call it a soft holiday. Like in America a soft holiday would be St Patrick's Day. Like everybody has to go to work but you do something that day related to the holiday even though you have no historical connection to it at all.Megen: Ah, I see.Todd: So for example on St Patrick's Day you drink green beer and you wear green. Like, do you do that in Australia?Megen: Ah, that started to become a thing in Australia that the bars do tend to have green beer, and you have green clothing that you might wear and people go out. It's definitely a drinking holiday. Not a holiday though.Todd: Right, are there any other holidays that you've absorbed into Australia?Megen: Well, people are starting to celebrate Halloween more these days and people take their kids trick or treating.Todd: Oh, really?Megen: Yeah! Not everyone does it, though I think that some people like to put a sign on their front door to say that trick-or-treaters are welcome because generally, we don't do that kind of thing in Australia, but the departments, the department stores are having more decorations and it's definitely infiltrating from America I think.Todd: Oh, that's interesting. So, in America Halloween is a big time to have parties. Do you have parties?Megen: I think more and more people are having parties. They have their own party in their house with decorations and costumes, but it's hard to say how many people celebrate Halloween really.Todd: Well, what about costumes? Did you wear a costume?Megen: I never wore a costume in Australia. I had never celebrated Halloween, but I noticed that some of my friends, and friends with children, they are celebrating it more, and it's becoming just a chance to have a party and dress up.Todd: As an English teacher did you dress up here in Japan?Megen: Yes, I did actually. Twice.Todd: Oh, you did. Did you like it?Megen: I did. It was fun to dress up. I dressed up as a character from a Jubilee movie, and it was really good to get together with my friends and to go out. Have you ever dressed up before?Todd: Oh, countless times. Countless. Yeah, so as a kid it was a big thing definitely in America.

Todd: So Megen we are talking about Holidays and Christmas and in the last interview we talked the difference between Christmas in a cold country and a warm country, so now I thought we would talk about Christmas in countries that aren't really Christian countries. They don't really celebrate it for religious reasons. So we're in Japan and it's interesting that in Japan it's a romantic day, right?Megen: Yes. Yeah, it is.Todd: It's like Valentine's DayMegen: Yes, you have to spend Christmas with your partner.Todd: Right, and everybody looks forward to it - to go out on a date and give each other gifts, and yeah.Megen: Yeah, yeah, I think the fireworks are for the boyfriend and girlfriend and I think, and I think there are a lot of decorations that are similar to like Valentine's actually.Todd: Yeah, it's interesting because they have the Christmas decoration everywhere, but nobody gets the day off. No families celebrate it really.Megen: Yeah, it's a regular day.Todd: Except eating the chicken dinner, which we talked about -- the fried chicken dinner. Yeah, so it's kind of like one of those like I call it a soft holiday. Like in America a soft holiday would be St Patrick's Day. Like everybody has to go to work but you do something that day related to the holiday even though you have no historical connection to it at all.Megen: Ah, I see.Todd: So for example on St Patrick's Day you drink green beer and you wear green. Like, do you do that in Australia?Megen: Ah, that started to become a thing in Australia that the bars do tend to have green beer, and you have green clothing that you might wear and people go out. It's definitely a drinking holiday. Not a holiday though.Todd: Right, are there any other holidays that you've absorbed into Australia?Megen: Well, people are starting to celebrate Halloween more these days and people take their kids trick or treating.Todd: Oh, really?Megen: Yeah! Not everyone does it, though I think that some people like to put a sign on their front door to say that trick-or-treaters are welcome because generally, we don't do that kind of thing in Australia, but the departments, the department stores are having more decorations and it's definitely infiltrating from America I think.Todd: Oh, that's interesting. So, in America Halloween is a big time to have parties. Do you have parties?Megen: I think more and more people are having parties. They have their own party in their house with decorations and costumes, but it's hard to say how many people celebrate Halloween really.Todd: Well, what about costumes? Did you wear a costume?Megen: I never wore a costume in Australia. I had never celebrated Halloween, but I noticed that some of my friends, and friends with children, they are celebrating it more, and it's becoming just a chance to have a party and dress up.Todd: As an English teacher did you dress up here in Japan?Megen: Yes, I did actually. Twice.Todd: Oh, you did. Did you like it?Megen: I did. It was fun to dress up. I dressed up as a character from a Jubilee movie, and it was really good to get together with my friends and to go out. Have you ever dressed up before?Todd: Oh, countless times. Countless. Yeah, so as a kid it was a big thing definitely in America.

Todd: Do you feel pressure to get certain gifts for your kids?Aimee: I ... sometimes. Sometimes. Thankfully they ... it's not ... there's not too much pressure where we live right now, so I don't feel too much pressure and I also work hard to fight against it. Yeah. Every year I tell myself, "OK, they're so young. We have so much stuff already. We don't need to go crazy with gifts. Just get one or two" and we do that and then last minute is like "Oh, no! We don't have many gifts" and then we end up buying a few more, so... We're not as bad as we could be. There's not as much pressure as there could be.Todd: Yeah. I'm lucky in that I live in Japan. You know, we both teach in Japan. So my family's in America, so Christmas usually always falls like the day after we finish school, so I can't actually make it home in time for Christmas, which is awesome because then I don't have to buy gifts for everybody. And I don't mind ... its not the money. I don't mind spending the money, but I really don't like shopping, and I hate having ... I have a huge family. Huge!Aimee: Right.Todd: So the thought of having to buy 20 different gifts!Aimee: It's a lot of gifts.Todd: Oh, really it's not the cost either, it's just I'm too lazy to think of "Oh, what sweater can I buy this person or ..." it's not my thing. And I don't want gifts and I don't want to give gifts.Aimee: Well, you know that's fair.Todd: How about you? Are gifts still something special for you?Aimee: I'm not ... I'm not very good at it. I'm trying to improve cause I know a well-thought-out gift can mean the world to someone, so I'm trying to improve. Yeah, but I'm not the best. I don't mind, I'm not like. I won't fall out with someone if they don't get me a present. I'm not like that.Todd: Well, like, I like getting people birthday gifts, I have to admit that. Birthday gifts I like. It's just having to buy twenty, thirty gifts within a one-month period to me just seems obscene.Aimee: I know, and that's the pressure people are under cause that's the way it is, isn't it? And it's always ... it's always the mothers of the family that have to do it as well right? They're the ones that have to make sure they buy all the gifts for everyone, so they feel they have so much to do. That mental list of everything, and everyone they have to buy for, of course they have to organize it, so they maybe start earlier, right, and taking advantage of things like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are manageable ways to deal with that load.Todd: You've changed my mind. I was very anti-both but now that you put it that way, maybe you're right.Aimee: I don't know.Todd: Let's go!

Todd: Do you feel pressure to get certain gifts for your kids?Aimee: I ... sometimes. Sometimes. Thankfully they ... it's not ... there's not too much pressure where we live right now, so I don't feel too much pressure and I also work hard to fight against it. Yeah. Every year I tell myself, "OK, they're so young. We have so much stuff already. We don't need to go crazy with gifts. Just get one or two" and we do that and then last minute is like "Oh, no! We don't have many gifts" and then we end up buying a few more, so... We're not as bad as we could be. There's not as much pressure as there could be.Todd: Yeah. I'm lucky in that I live in Japan. You know, we both teach in Japan. So my family's in America, so Christmas usually always falls like the day after we finish school, so I can't actually make it home in time for Christmas, which is awesome because then I don't have to buy gifts for everybody. And I don't mind ... its not the money. I don't mind spending the money, but I really don't like shopping, and I hate having ... I have a huge family. Huge!Aimee: Right.Todd: So the thought of having to buy 20 different gifts!Aimee: It's a lot of gifts.Todd: Oh, really it's not the cost either, it's just I'm too lazy to think of "Oh, what sweater can I buy this person or ..." it's not my thing. And I don't want gifts and I don't want to give gifts.Aimee: Well, you know that's fair.Todd: How about you? Are gifts still something special for you?Aimee: I'm not ... I'm not very good at it. I'm trying to improve cause I know a well-thought-out gift can mean the world to someone, so I'm trying to improve. Yeah, but I'm not the best. I don't mind, I'm not like. I won't fall out with someone if they don't get me a present. I'm not like that.Todd: Well, like, I like getting people birthday gifts, I have to admit that. Birthday gifts I like. It's just having to buy twenty, thirty gifts within a one-month period to me just seems obscene.Aimee: I know, and that's the pressure people are under cause that's the way it is, isn't it? And it's always ... it's always the mothers of the family that have to do it as well right? They're the ones that have to make sure they buy all the gifts for everyone, so they feel they have so much to do. That mental list of everything, and everyone they have to buy for, of course they have to organize it, so they maybe start earlier, right, and taking advantage of things like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are manageable ways to deal with that load.Todd: You've changed my mind. I was very anti-both but now that you put it that way, maybe you're right.Aimee: I don't know.Todd: Let's go!

Meg: Hey Todd, so continuing talking about then and now, I was thinking we could switch to talking about just life in general.Todd: Sounds good.Meg: So my first question for you is are movies today more interesting than before?Todd: Well. I'm gonna sound like an old guy, but I would say no, movies are not more interesting today. Movies were much better, twenty, thirty years ago. The stories were better. They were more interesting. These days movies just have too many special effects, and there are too many movies about superheroes. I hate movies about superheroes. So yeah, I think movies used to be more interesting. What do you think?Meg: I have the opposite opinion of you. I think movies today are more interesting than before. Maybe I'm too used to a lot of special effects, so when I watch some older movies, the story might be interesting, but I get a little bored watching it and actually, I love superhero movies.Todd: Oh really?Meg: So I would say that yes, any superhero movies - Spiderman or Batman especially is my favorite so those movies for me are more interesting than in the past.Todd: OK, well we're talking about comparatives, so who's cooler Batman or Spiderman?Meg: Oh, Batman. Hands down.Todd: I'm sorry. I think Spiderman's really lame. I've never liked Spiderman.Meg: He kind of whines a lot.Todd: He looks like a kid in his pajamas.Meg: He is a kid in his pajamas.Todd: Maybe that's it.Meg: Whereas Batman has a lot of skills that he's developed himself, so.Todd: True, true. OK, well how about Batman, so like who is better?Meg: Who is the best Batman?Todd: Yeah, so who is better? Who was the last one? It was ...Meg: Well, the most recent Batman was Ben Affleck, but I didn't watch that oneTodd: OK.Meg: So before that, there was Christian BaleTodd: Oh, that's right.Meg: So without having seen Ben Affleck, I would still say that Christian Bale was a better Batman.Todd: Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. OK, so let's talk about other things. How about the news? With news are you more knowledgeable these days than before, say five-ten years ago?Meg: Actually, I think I am less knowledgeable than before. There's a lot of news out there, and it's easy to access the news but there's so much news coming from so many sources, I'm now sure which news service is more trustworthy, so I think it's more difficult now to find the correct news. The true news. What do you think?Todd: I agree. Sadly I think I am less knowledgeable because before I would read the newspaper, or I would read magazine articles or I would listen to better news stories on the news. These days I just look at a Facebook headline and I don't even read the article, so I don't even know what's going on sometimes. Which is terrible for a man my age.Meg: Terrible for anyone I think.Todd: Yeah, I think it's because I think the news was more honest than before than now, sorry. I think the news is less honest these days. It used to be more honest. I just don't trust the news anymore.Meg: Yeah, I don't really trust it either.Todd: Yeah, less trustworthy.Meg: So along those lines, would you say social media makes like better or worse for people?Todd: I think it's both like I think it's you know, three points better, two points worse, so it's a negative. It's better because you can keep track of so many family members, especially if you're far away, so I like how it connects people, yeah, it just makes people sad sometimes or makes them frustrated about their life may be, so yeah, I don't think it makes life better. But I'm an old guy, so...Meg: Yeah, I think it's true. I think there are scientific studies to show that because of social media, people compare themselves too much so it's quite appropriate that we are talking about comparison because people will see other people's lives on social media that look quite good and they will compare themselves and feel bad about themselves, o for some people I think it has made it worse, but like you, I agree that some points are better like seeing pictures from my family.Todd: Yeah, so true.

Meg: Hey Todd, so continuing talking about then and now, I was thinking we could switch to talking about just life in general.Todd: Sounds good.Meg: So my first question for you is are movies today more interesting than before?Todd: Well. I'm gonna sound like an old guy, but I would say no, movies are not more interesting today. Movies were much better, twenty, thirty years ago. The stories were better. They were more interesting. These days movies just have too many special effects, and there are too many movies about superheroes. I hate movies about superheroes. So yeah, I think movies used to be more interesting. What do you think?Meg: I have the opposite opinion of you. I think movies today are more interesting than before. Maybe I'm too used to a lot of special effects, so when I watch some older movies, the story might be interesting, but I get a little bored watching it and actually, I love superhero movies.Todd: Oh really?Meg: So I would say that yes, any superhero movies - Spiderman or Batman especially is my favorite so those movies for me are more interesting than in the past.Todd: OK, well we're talking about comparatives, so who's cooler Batman or Spiderman?Meg: Oh, Batman. Hands down.Todd: I'm sorry. I think Spiderman's really lame. I've never liked Spiderman.Meg: He kind of whines a lot.Todd: He looks like a kid in his pajamas.Meg: He is a kid in his pajamas.Todd: Maybe that's it.Meg: Whereas Batman has a lot of skills that he's developed himself, so.Todd: True, true. OK, well how about Batman, so like who is better?Meg: Who is the best Batman?Todd: Yeah, so who is better? Who was the last one? It was ...Meg: Well, the most recent Batman was Ben Affleck, but I didn't watch that oneTodd: OK.Meg: So before that, there was Christian BaleTodd: Oh, that's right.Meg: So without having seen Ben Affleck, I would still say that Christian Bale was a better Batman.Todd: Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. OK, so let's talk about other things. How about the news? With news are you more knowledgeable these days than before, say five-ten years ago?Meg: Actually, I think I am less knowledgeable than before. There's a lot of news out there, and it's easy to access the news but there's so much news coming from so many sources, I'm now sure which news service is more trustworthy, so I think it's more difficult now to find the correct news. The true news. What do you think?Todd: I agree. Sadly I think I am less knowledgeable because before I would read the newspaper, or I would read magazine articles or I would listen to better news stories on the news. These days I just look at a Facebook headline and I don't even read the article, so I don't even know what's going on sometimes. Which is terrible for a man my age.Meg: Terrible for anyone I think.Todd: Yeah, I think it's because I think the news was more honest than before than now, sorry. I think the news is less honest these days. It used to be more honest. I just don't trust the news anymore.Meg: Yeah, I don't really trust it either.Todd: Yeah, less trustworthy.Meg: So along those lines, would you say social media makes like better or worse for people?Todd: I think it's both like I think it's you know, three points better, two points worse, so it's a negative. It's better because you can keep track of so many family members, especially if you're far away, so I like how it connects people, yeah, it just makes people sad sometimes or makes them frustrated about their life may be, so yeah, I don't think it makes life better. But I'm an old guy, so...Meg: Yeah, I think it's true. I think there are scientific studies to show that because of social media, people compare themselves too much so it's quite appropriate that we are talking about comparison because people will see other people's lives on social media that look quite good and they will compare themselves and feel bad about themselves, o for some people I think it has made it worse, but like you, I agree that some points are better like seeing pictures from my family.Todd: Yeah, so true.

Todd: So, Katie, you are from England, correct?Katie: Uh-hmm, that's right.Todd: Are you from a big town?Katie: I'm from a very small town.Todd: Oh, what's the name?Katie: It's in the southwest. It's called Torquay.Todd: Torquay.Katie: Uh-hmm.Todd: OK. Is it a fun place to live?Katie: I think so. It's, it's very famous in the UK because we lots of beautiful beaches.Todd: Oh, that's nice.Katie: Hmm.Todd: So, in your town, where is a good place to go food shopping?Katie: There are a lot of supermarkets that you can go to. Most of them you need to go by car.Todd: Oh, that's a problem.Katie: It's difficult to walk to a close supermarket. But I'm lucky because there is one very close to my house that I can go to.Todd: OK. And can you recommend a good restaurant in your town? Where is a good place to eat dinner?Katie: There are lots of amazing restaurants along the sea front. So, you can sit in a restaurant and you can look at the beach at the same time.Todd: Oh, that's nice.Katie: Uh-hmm.Todd: How romantic.Katie: It's beautiful.Todd: Is it expensive?Katie: It depends what restaurant you go to. If you go to an Italian restaurant, that's going to be expensive.Todd: What kind of foods do they have?Katie: They have all kinds of foods, but the most popular food in my home town is Italian food and Chinese food.Todd: OK. No British food?Katie: Not really. (laughs)Todd: OK. We don't have American food either except hamburgers.Katie: They're good though.Todd: In your town, where is a good place to exercise?Katie: It depends on what kind of exercise you like. But we have lots of parks and people are always playing football in the parks.Todd: So, there's a, is there a big park in the middle of town?Katie: Uh-hmm.Todd: OK. Is it easy to get to?Katie: It's pretty easy to get to. Most people can walk there.Todd: So, that brings us to nature. Where's a good place to see nature?Katie: Well, you can see beautiful beaches wherever you look. There are so many beautiful beaches in Torquay. But there are also lots of beautiful gardens and you can see lots of flowers.Todd: OK. Nice.Katie: It's very nice. Yeah.Todd: That is nice. So, are there walking trails on the beach?Katie: Uh-hmm, and in the gardens too there are walking paths that you can take. And you can go in the mountains—Todd: Oh, beautiful.Katie: —and see stuff there too.Todd: That's lovely. So, in your town, where is a good place to meet people?Katie: Well, I keep saying the beach but lots of people from all over the UK come to Torquay to see the beach, so you can meet lots of different. People come for their holidays.Todd: OK. So, you can meet new people.Katie: Lots of new people. Yeah.Todd: That's cool.Katie: You can make lots of new friends.Todd: Now, what about a quiet place? Where's a good place to study or read or just relax?Katie: Well, we have lots of cafés that you can go to if you want to just have a quiet moment or just to read some books. You can go to a café.Todd: OK. And are the cafés easy to find?Katie: They're very easy to find. And we have lots of famous café brands as well.Todd: OK. Are there cafés on the beach, too?Katie: No. They're in the town center but the town center is very close to the beach.Todd: OK. Now, when is a good time to visit your town?Katie: Well…Todd: So, you say the beach, so summer?Katie: Yeah. I would say summer is a good time. But in England, there is not usually a good time because it's raining almost every day. But if you want to go to the beach, probably summer is a good time.Todd: OK. What about the fall?Katie: I mean, the fall is okay. Winter is good. Lots of people go to, go swimming on Christmas Day.Todd: Well, I definitely want to go there.Katie: Yes. It's a lovely place.

Todd: So, Katie, you are from England, correct?Katie: Uh-hmm, that's right.Todd: Are you from a big town?Katie: I'm from a very small town.Todd: Oh, what's the name?Katie: It's in the southwest. It's called Torquay.Todd: Torquay.Katie: Uh-hmm.Todd: OK. Is it a fun place to live?Katie: I think so. It's, it's very famous in the UK because we lots of beautiful beaches.Todd: Oh, that's nice.Katie: Hmm.Todd: So, in your town, where is a good place to go food shopping?Katie: There are a lot of supermarkets that you can go to. Most of them you need to go by car.Todd: Oh, that's a problem.Katie: It's difficult to walk to a close supermarket. But I'm lucky because there is one very close to my house that I can go to.Todd: OK. And can you recommend a good restaurant in your town? Where is a good place to eat dinner?Katie: There are lots of amazing restaurants along the sea front. So, you can sit in a restaurant and you can look at the beach at the same time.Todd: Oh, that's nice.Katie: Uh-hmm.Todd: How romantic.Katie: It's beautiful.Todd: Is it expensive?Katie: It depends what restaurant you go to. If you go to an Italian restaurant, that's going to be expensive.Todd: What kind of foods do they have?Katie: They have all kinds of foods, but the most popular food in my home town is Italian food and Chinese food.Todd: OK. No British food?Katie: Not really. (laughs)Todd: OK. We don't have American food either except hamburgers.Katie: They're good though.Todd: In your town, where is a good place to exercise?Katie: It depends on what kind of exercise you like. But we have lots of parks and people are always playing football in the parks.Todd: So, there's a, is there a big park in the middle of town?Katie: Uh-hmm.Todd: OK. Is it easy to get to?Katie: It's pretty easy to get to. Most people can walk there.Todd: So, that brings us to nature. Where's a good place to see nature?Katie: Well, you can see beautiful beaches wherever you look. There are so many beautiful beaches in Torquay. But there are also lots of beautiful gardens and you can see lots of flowers.Todd: OK. Nice.Katie: It's very nice. Yeah.Todd: That is nice. So, are there walking trails on the beach?Katie: Uh-hmm, and in the gardens too there are walking paths that you can take. And you can go in the mountains—Todd: Oh, beautiful.Katie: —and see stuff there too.Todd: That's lovely. So, in your town, where is a good place to meet people?Katie: Well, I keep saying the beach but lots of people from all over the UK come to Torquay to see the beach, so you can meet lots of different. People come for their holidays.Todd: OK. So, you can meet new people.Katie: Lots of new people. Yeah.Todd: That's cool.Katie: You can make lots of new friends.Todd: Now, what about a quiet place? Where's a good place to study or read or just relax?Katie: Well, we have lots of cafés that you can go to if you want to just have a quiet moment or just to read some books. You can go to a café.Todd: OK. And are the cafés easy to find?Katie: They're very easy to find. And we have lots of famous café brands as well.Todd: OK. Are there cafés on the beach, too?Katie: No. They're in the town center but the town center is very close to the beach.Todd: OK. Now, when is a good time to visit your town?Katie: Well…Todd: So, you say the beach, so summer?Katie: Yeah. I would say summer is a good time. But in England, there is not usually a good time because it's raining almost every day. But if you want to go to the beach, probably summer is a good time.Todd: OK. What about the fall?Katie: I mean, the fall is okay. Winter is good. Lots of people go to, go swimming on Christmas Day.Todd: Well, I definitely want to go there.Katie: Yes. It's a lovely place.

Todd: So Meg, in the last one we were talking about idioms, but we didn't cover them all. Let's go over some more idioms.Meg: OK.Todd: Alright so the first one is what activity is in your blood?Meg: Hmm, I would say anything with nature in my blood, so hiking or especially kayaking. I love going kayaking, and so it's hard for me to resist if I'm in a place with beautiful nature, I need to go outside.Todd: So what about baking? Isn't the baking sort of just natural for you. Don't you just love to bake? Isn't it in your blood?Meg: I do also love to bake. Yeah. I guess hiking and baking are both in my blood together, kind of two different activities. So baking especially when I can make very creative and decorative desserts, to share with people, so I don't like to bake for myself, but sharing with others, it's quite enjoyable for me. Do you have any activities or things that are in your blood?Todd: Well, I think one is just teaching. I love teaching. I just want to teach all the time. Even if I won the lottery, I would be a teacher. I just like thinking of lessons, thinking of new ideas for lessons, trying technology with lessons, so even on my free time, I like thinking about it. And another thing is jogging. Even though, most people are surprised because I'm a little fat. I'm about 20 pounds overweight, but I run almost every day.Meg: I think I've seen you running before.Todd: Yeah, I literally run every day. Like if I don't run, I feel terrible, like it's the most relaxing thing for me.Meg: Yeah.Todd: I can't go two or three days - two days maybe - but I can't go three or four days without running.Meg: So jogging is really in your blood?Todd: Yeah, and I started when I was a kid. You know the movie Forest Gump, where he just starts running.Meg: Right, yes, yes.Todd: That was me as a kid.Meg: Run Forest Run!Todd: I would just run out of my driveway, also in the country, and just go running for an hourMeg: Wow!Todd: Just to run, I thought it was fun.Meg: Well, that's great.Todd: Yeah, it's definitely in my blood.Todd: OK, so we'll talk a little about feelings. So when you get criticized, do you take it to heart?Meg: I think my first reaction, is to take it to heart, so sometimes I might be a little oversensitive when I first get criticized, but after some time passes and I'm able to think about it, usually I can see how that criticism can be useful, and I can try to make a change or improve something. Or I can decide that I don't care about that person's opinion. What about you? What do you do? How do you respond?Todd: Yeah, I used to take things to heart a lot, but as I've gotten older, as many people do, now a lot of it just rolls off my back, as we say, like water off a duck's back, so it doesn't bother me at allMeg: Yeah.Todd: Yeah, I just realize everybody has different opinions and don't worry about it.Meg: Yeah, I think that's a good attitude to have.Todd: Yeah, OK, so the next one also about feelings and opinions. So are you more likely to bite your lip, or speak your mind when you disagree with somebody?Meg: I think it depends on the situation, so if I feel like someone else is being treated unfairly or there are some rules that are there for a reason that should be followed, I am more likely to speak my mind, but if it's something personal, or just related to me I might bite my lip to try to keep the peace. What would you do, bite your lip or speak your mind?Todd: Well, I have a big mouth, so no, I always speak my mind. So I have a really big mouth. I just never keep it inside. Yeah, it's really hard for me to bite my lip.Meg: Hmm.Todd: Yeah, so. That can be a bad thing.Meg: But sometimes good.Todd: Yeah, say it like it is, as they say.

Todd: So Meg, in the last one we were talking about idioms, but we didn't cover them all. Let's go over some more idioms.Meg: OK.Todd: Alright so the first one is what activity is in your blood?Meg: Hmm, I would say anything with nature in my blood, so hiking or especially kayaking. I love going kayaking, and so it's hard for me to resist if I'm in a place with beautiful nature, I need to go outside.Todd: So what about baking? Isn't the baking sort of just natural for you. Don't you just love to bake? Isn't it in your blood?Meg: I do also love to bake. Yeah. I guess hiking and baking are both in my blood together, kind of two different activities. So baking especially when I can make very creative and decorative desserts, to share with people, so I don't like to bake for myself, but sharing with others, it's quite enjoyable for me. Do you have any activities or things that are in your blood?Todd: Well, I think one is just teaching. I love teaching. I just want to teach all the time. Even if I won the lottery, I would be a teacher. I just like thinking of lessons, thinking of new ideas for lessons, trying technology with lessons, so even on my free time, I like thinking about it. And another thing is jogging. Even though, most people are surprised because I'm a little fat. I'm about 20 pounds overweight, but I run almost every day.Meg: I think I've seen you running before.Todd: Yeah, I literally run every day. Like if I don't run, I feel terrible, like it's the most relaxing thing for me.Meg: Yeah.Todd: I can't go two or three days - two days maybe - but I can't go three or four days without running.Meg: So jogging is really in your blood?Todd: Yeah, and I started when I was a kid. You know the movie Forest Gump, where he just starts running.Meg: Right, yes, yes.Todd: That was me as a kid.Meg: Run Forest Run!Todd: I would just run out of my driveway, also in the country, and just go running for an hourMeg: Wow!Todd: Just to run, I thought it was fun.Meg: Well, that's great.Todd: Yeah, it's definitely in my blood.Todd: OK, so we'll talk a little about feelings. So when you get criticized, do you take it to heart?Meg: I think my first reaction, is to take it to heart, so sometimes I might be a little oversensitive when I first get criticized, but after some time passes and I'm able to think about it, usually I can see how that criticism can be useful, and I can try to make a change or improve something. Or I can decide that I don't care about that person's opinion. What about you? What do you do? How do you respond?Todd: Yeah, I used to take things to heart a lot, but as I've gotten older, as many people do, now a lot of it just rolls off my back, as we say, like water off a duck's back, so it doesn't bother me at allMeg: Yeah.Todd: Yeah, I just realize everybody has different opinions and don't worry about it.Meg: Yeah, I think that's a good attitude to have.Todd: Yeah, OK, so the next one also about feelings and opinions. So are you more likely to bite your lip, or speak your mind when you disagree with somebody?Meg: I think it depends on the situation, so if I feel like someone else is being treated unfairly or there are some rules that are there for a reason that should be followed, I am more likely to speak my mind, but if it's something personal, or just related to me I might bite my lip to try to keep the peace. What would you do, bite your lip or speak your mind?Todd: Well, I have a big mouth, so no, I always speak my mind. So I have a really big mouth. I just never keep it inside. Yeah, it's really hard for me to bite my lip.Meg: Hmm.Todd: Yeah, so. That can be a bad thing.Meg: But sometimes good.Todd: Yeah, say it like it is, as they say.