Podcasts about Versus

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest  Dion Lack This Week We Discuss Dinner With All Your Exes vs Game Night With Your Enemies Never Get A Haircut/Do Vs Never Get New Shoes Stood Up At Your Wedding vs Caught In A Celebrity Scheme S/o To Our Sponsors Blue Chew BlueChew.com/SQUADD

Versus (2000) dir. Ryuhei Kitamura   Stranglehold (2007) dir. Brian Eddy   On this episode we talk DIY filmmaking in the woods, with a backing soundtrack of a Youtube playthrough of Stranglehold, the video game sequel to Hard Boiled.   Topics covered:   Ain't It Cool News hype, the Blade 2 wave, Matrix homage, Midnight Meat Train, philosophy puts me to sleep, wolves turning into anuses, 666 portals, punched-through faces, who's the bad guy in this movie?, censoring Ichi the Killer, the importance of good sound in movies, reading the Versus wiki, Japanese actors, not liking movies when you're young, John Woo's Stranglehold, how babies see the world, DMT apples, movies on a $10k budget, David's storage unit gets destroyed by a tornado, Kelby's Pepe LePew get rich quick scheme, male feminists, the importance of iconic posters, and a rant about people who don't like our kids making noise. For our Oscar recap and our own best and worst Agitator episodes of 2022, visit our http://www.patreon.com/agitator.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest  Kanisha Buss This Week We Discuss Have Your Ex As A Therapist vs Your Mom As A Wingman Have A Twin You Hate vs A Disrespectful Child This Is How We Do It vs Summer Time S/o To Our Sponsors Blue Chew Bluechew.com Promo: SQUADD

Hello, and welcome to Beauty and the Biz where we talk about the business and marketing side of plastic surgery and blending plastic surgery with wellness. I'm your host, Catherine Maley, author of Your Aesthetic Practice – What your patients are saying, as well as consultant to plastic surgeons, to get them more patients and more profits. Now, today's episode is called "Blending Plastic Surgery with Wellness — with Emily Hartmann, MD". The healthier your patients are, both physically and mentally, the better their outcomes and the less grief you have to deal with. So, you can either hope your patients are fit or you can proactively help them get to sound body and mind, so they have a smooth journey before, during and after surgery. This week's Beauty and the Biz episode is an interview I did with Dr. Emily Hartmann, a board-certified plastic & reconstructive surgeon in private practice in Chico, CA, where she was born and raised. She takes the sound mind and body philosophy to a new level. After suffering from her own health issues trying to juggle being a wife, mother, surgeon and business owner, she needed a new approach for herself and her patients. Here's what we talked about: The downside of tackling medical school, marriage and babies all at once How the COVID lock down helped her prioritize How her approach to addressing ALL of her patient's mind, body and wellness issues has grown her practice kingdom quickly through word of mouth. Visit Dr. Hartmann's Website P.S. If you want to attract more cosmetic patients, check out my latest resource to help:

In a jam-packed program full of abundant insight, Ralph first welcomes back Dahr Jamail to discuss his work “We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth” about what we can learn from indigenous people who have survived incredible disruptions to the climate to their families and to their way of life. Then Karen Friedman from the Pension Rights Center gives us an update on how they are fighting to save our hard-earned money. And finally, Cal Berkeley grad students, Sandra Oseguera and Jesus Gutierrez explain the university's “inverted priorities” as it spends millions of dollars on football coaches' salaries and real estate while shutting down campus libraries.Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, as well as The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. He is co-editor (with Stan Rushworth) of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth.One of the themes of the book is the difference between the Western settler-colonialist mindset of: What are my rights? I have my rights. Versus a more Indigenous perspective that we came across time and again in the book of: We have two primary obligations that we are born into. One is the obligation to serve and be a good steward of the planet. The other obligation is to serve future generations of all species. So, if I focus on my obligations, it's very very clear that I have plenty of work to do in service to those. If I focus only on my rights, I'm going to be chronically frustrated.Dahr Jamail, editor of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing EarthKaren Friedman is the Executive Director of the Pension Rights Center. She develops solutions and implements strategies to protect and promote the rights of consumers, and for more than 20 years has represented their interests in the media and before congressional committees.Social Security is the strongest system we have. While opponents of Social Security have tried to undermine confidence in its future, the truth is that Social Security is one of the most universal, efficient, secure, and fair sources of retirement income…It's not going broke, folks. It's a great system. That's all propaganda, meant to scare the bejesus out of you.Karen FriedmanSandra Oseguera and Jesús Gutierrez are graduate students in the Anthropology department at The University of California, Berkeley.  Last month, campus administration announced their plan to close the Anthropology Library, one of only three dedicated Anthropology libraries in the US. In response, stakeholders including students and faculty have organized to demand that the Anthropology Library be protected and fully supported by the University.[Fighting to save the library] has been a wonderful experience of community and collaboration among many stakeholders. However, we the grad students see ourselves as the keepers and also the main users of [the Anthropology Library's] collection because all of our research really relies on the resources that are there.Sandra OsegueraThe library is a really valuable space. It's not only a space for simply going in and accessing a book. It's also a space of encounter. The kind of thing that the University is trying to destroy is essentially this possibility for having a happenstance run-in with a book that you may not necessarily have intended to type into the catalog system or with a person who you may not otherwise run into.Jesús GutierrezThe situation at Berkeley has become grotesquely inverted, in terms of the University. They have millions for football and other sports and paying coaches huge salaries. They have millions for administrative officials. But they want to shut down one of the great Anthropology libraries in the Western World.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

This Episode is Sponsored by: Dandy | The Fully Digital, US-based Dental Lab‍For a completely FREE 3Shape Trios 3 scanner & $250 in lab credit click here: https://www.meetdandy.com/affiliate/tdm !‍‍‍Guest: Zhanna KonovalenkoBusiness Name: ZK Coaching LLCCheck out Zhanna's Media:‍LinkedInSign Up for Zhanna's Mailing List!‍Other Mentions and Links:Master Your Emotions - BookDale CarnegieNapoleon HillTony RobbinsMartha BeckLife Coach SchoolLife Coach School Podcast‍Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society‍‍My Key Takeaways:Taking action from a negative emotion will often result in a negative outcome!Look at the reasons BEHIND your money goals. Math is simple, but drama around money can be complex.If discipline is the only way to meet your goals, you may find yourself burning out!Tying your self worth directly to your work performance is a fast-track to negativity.Marketing your practice is about how you can help people, not how you can get more patients.Niching down your services when marketing will go a long way!‍Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]‍p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)Michael: Dr. K, how's it going? ? Zhanna: Hi Michael, I'm doing amazing. How are you? Michael: I'm doing pretty good. Thanks for asking. If you don't mind me asking right now, where are you located? Zhanna: Uh, I'm in northern California on the peninsula. Uhhuh, and um, foster City. Michael: Okay, nice, nice. Awesome. So let's dive into it. Tell us a little bit about your past, your present. How'd you get to where you are? . Zhanna: Sure. It's, uh, it's a long, it's a long story . Mm-hmm. , but I try to make it short. So I am I'm a board certified orthodontist, but I'm also a dental coach. That is my main focus on my passion, is my coaching practice where I help busy doctors create a thriving work and life balance so they can succeed, uh, without burning out and the way I got there.So I'm a doctor and a coach. I am actually something that's called a foreign trained dentist. So I was born and raised, not in the United States. I was born and raised in the Ukraine. Uh, a country that sadly many people know more about now with what's going on there. and, uh, so I grew up there.my father is a dentist, so I come from a family of doctors. and when I was about 15, you know, I decided to go to dental school. back home, it was actually in, in Moscow, in the Ukraine, but I've always had. Two passions. I've always wanted to study abroad. I don't even know why , we didn't even have internet back then in the nineties, but I've always wanted to study abroad and I always had passion for, behavioral psychology, motivation.What makes people successful? Midway through dental school in Russia, I decide to move to Europe. So I turned 18 and on my own I moved to Prague, Czech Republic. That's where I finished my dental school. Five years in in Charles University in Prague. moved back to Russia opened a general dentistry practice with my father, who still practices there.Worked there for about a year and decided that I wanted to move to the United States. So 13 years ago I moved to the us learned the language went back to dental school. Your listeners who are foreign trained dentists would understand this track. If you are trained in another country, uh, other than the US as a dentist, when you move here, you have to get recertified, meaning you have to go back to dental school for a shorter number of years.It was two years for me. I went to University of Pacific here in California in San Francisco. And after that I decided to specialize in Orthodon. So I went to the residency on the East coast in Philadelphia, temple, and became an orthodontist. And after that I decided, nah, it's too cold. Moving back, , moved across the country again and have been practicing in Northern California since, since I graduated.Okay, nice. That's a little bit how I became a dentist or orthodontist. And like I uh, mentioned to you, my passion has always been. , what makes successful people? Successful. I've always been, listening to tapes when I was like, since I was in my teens and early twenties, you know, classics, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Martha Beck and Tawny Robbins, you know, mm-hmm.people like that. I've always had it in my, in my ears, that helped me reach to where I am in my career. and when I was practicing as an orthodontist in California, I was in a very busy practice. where I saw close to 100 patients a day. And as you can imagine, it's, you know, you have to manage your mind really well to be successful and still have that work-life balance.Mm-hmm. . And that's where I stumble across life coaching. Like it's becoming more knowing now what coaching is, but still people are like, Hmm, my coach, what is it exactly? So I discovered life coaching. I hired my coach. She really helped me. have that entrepreneurial mindset rather than an employee mindset where I was able to take control over, just my life balance really.And then I decided to get certified. I spent a year becoming certified as a life coach through, it's called the Life Coach School. There's different type of schools, but that's where I got certified in 2018. And Fast forward opened my coaching practice mostly because people around me noticed that something has shifted in me.Mm-hmm. and my colleagues start reaching out, like, how are you so chill? You saw so many patients today. So I started coaching my friends who were also dentists. And then, when the pandemic hit, I just decided to go, full speed into coaching and started my business. It's called ZK Coaching. And uh, that's has become my main focus and my main. Michael: And you still have your ortho, like your practice, your Zhanna: orthodontic practice? Yes. I'm still a board certified orthodontist. Correct. But most of my focus right now is in my coaching practice. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So if you don't mind me asking, how many times do you practice clinically in Zhanna: like a month?It varies. It really varies depending on the demand. So it's really different month to month. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So let's rewind a little bit. Why did you decide to become an orthodontist? Go that. . Zhanna: Yeah. Such a good question. Why did I decide it? Because I had a teacher in dental school who believed in me, that I could Uhhuh,Let's fit it this way. Orthodontics seemed interesting, seemed different, you know, in general dentistry, uh, or in dental school, you're not exposed very much to orthodontics. As a general dentist, you do pretty much all of the procedures except orthodon. like root canals, surgical extractions, things that endodontics, root canal specialists focus on you doing dental school, some of it.So you get experience, extraction of wisdom teeth for example, or difficult extractions, so-called surgical extractions. You do the, in dental school, that's what oral surgeons do. You probably don't place implants, although it depends on the dental school. So you kind of get exposed to different pediatric dentists, right?Working with kids. You do that in dental school, so, You get exposed to all of the specialists except for orthodontics, you don't really move teeth. as a dental student. And I just remember peeking, in an orthodontic, residency, program at my school at U O P and thinking, wow, this is so cool.You know, there, it's just you can move teeth. Like what is happening right now from one side to another? That seemed like so futuristic. And I was like, I don't know, it's so competitive. Like, should I, should I not? And you know, one of my instructor, you know, basically was a life coach . Kind of type thing and said, yeah, you totally should, you know, like that little train I thought I could.So I did. Yeah. I just decided that would be very interesting. And I was always also drawn into aesthetic and like complicated cases. And I also thought as a woman who Had envisioned a path of having a family. You know, in the future I thought that my work, work-life balance would be better with orthodontics versus, for example, surgery.Although I'm sure there's oral surgeons who have work-life balance. But that's how I thought about it at that time. So that's why I decided to go the, the route of orthodontics. Okay, Michael: nice. So then fast forward a little. and you decided to hire a coach. I mean, you've always been interested in like motivation, what makes successful people successful, like you said.Yeah. But where was the moment where you were like, I need something. This can't continue to happen like this? What? What was that like? Zhanna: Yeah. Let me see when it was, I think it was 2017, I think I was at the gym. I almost remember that. And I was running on the treadmill as many, many successful people, you know, work out to, not just be in shape, but like be in mental shape, right?Mm-hmm. . And I just remember running on the treadmill and thinking, I am still thinking about my patients. Like I am still constantly reliving all these cases and like, Like, I just want a break. . Mm-hmm. , I don't have this break. Right. And, you know, I'm the kind of person who listens to podcasts when I work out, not so much music.I think I was looking for something like efficiency, productivity, you know, I was always interested in, how, how to be like, Top organizer. Mm-hmm. . Um, and the podcast came out, the Life Coach School Podcast. So I started listening to her and I was just blown away by the principals that she was talking about, that had to do with mind management around life, really everything. when I decided to hire her. And things that I had learned completely changed the way I looked at. Work and my goals and my personal life and, just where I was heading and how I was thinking about it, that really helped me be 100% present at work when I was at work and not take it home.So I think that was kind of like a pivotal moment for me where I honestly just ended up hiring a life coach and I didn't look for it. It wasn't like a thing, at least for me that I knew about. But it was truly a pivotal moment in my life and career, obviously. Mm-hmm. since I became a life coach, that changed everything for me.Yeah, Michael: cuz that's super common, Jon, where like you're. , at night, you're thinking about work in the morning, you're thinking about work on your vacation, you're thinking about work. You know, it's just like life of an entrepreneur. So yeah. How did that change, especially when you're looking at goals, because if you, you're taking a flight right, to your vacation and you're like, you're thinking about new goals, you're, you're creative and you're like, oh man, I'm excited about this.Is that a good thing or a bad? Zhanna: I think it depends how you look at it, right? So if you're looking at it in a way that's disempowering you, that's probably not a good thing because whenever you take action from a negative emotion, you're not going to create a favorable outcome. Most of the time you really don't.So the way it, the live designed it actually, which is great because in order for you to hit your goals, you have to like what you're doing. You have to enjoy the process. You know how they always. Not about the destination, it's the process. Mm-hmm. , it really is, meaning any lofty goals requires a lot of action over a prolonged period of time.In order to do that, there's only two ways. One is through self-discipline, which we all know. One, it's hard. Second of all you, that's how you get burned out, right? You take a lot, a lot of action, and you're like forcing yourself. Verse is way number two. is when you enjoy the process, and then it's a pool, right?You're pulling yourself towards your goal. So you may be thinking about it when your plane is taking off, but you're thinking about it in an inspiring and empowered way, and that will propel you to take more productive, massive action and feel good. Michael: Gotcha. So can you gimme an example then, like on how we can utilize this?So, I mean obviously a lot of us are like, I wanna have goals to like, you know, reach a million by the end of the year on collections or whatever. Right. Is that something like you would say, yeah, you should add that in your life, like goals coaching or is it more like be content with 800,000 and you have the freedom and.you know what I mean? Kind of thing like Zhanna: that. Yeah, yeah. I see what you're saying. Mm-hmm. , um, the way I approach it, and that's definitely a topic that I coach McClue a lot on, so I always tell them, especially when it comes to the revenue goals, the money goals, there is math and then there's drama. Math is simple. Drama is what I help you with as a life coach. Mm-hmm. , for example. Let's say you make a million dollars in revenue, as a general dentist a year, and you really want to make two for whatever reason. So we would first dive in. Why do you wanna make two? Totally fine. It kind of goes back to how you said, should you be content?Like your reason, if you want to make 2 million just because Dr. Jones next door is making two, and you feel bad about yourself, this is probably not a strong enough reason for you to do what it takes to get to 2 million. Mm-hmm. . But if it's because you just want. That's a good enough reason, or you want to be able to impact more people in your community.That's a good reason. Maybe it's because you want a different lifestyle for yourself or your or your family. Do you feel good about it? That's a good enough reason. So we'll start with the reason why you want it. If you like your reason, then the rest is just math. This is what I coach my clients on. Okay, you wanna make 2 million?In a year, then tell me, we reverse engineer the result. How many weeks a year do you want to work? So let's say you wanna take two months off a year. Okay? 52 months minus eight is 44 weeks. You will be working that year. How many days a week do you wanna work? See, people don't think about that. How many weeks, uh, days of a week do you wanna work?Okay, I wanna work four days. That's the typical for general dentist. Okay. So then, That means, I think it's something around 178 days if I do my math. Math right. And then you just divide 2 million by the number of days that you're gonna work. So then you have the production goal that you need to make per day.I think it's gonna be something around $11,000, 11 and a half thousand dollars. And now when you look at that number, that helps you now narrow down, okay, how much should I. What kind of procedures should I focus on? Who will be my target market that I'm going to attract? How will I brand myself to attract that target market?And what is the value that I'm producing that they will actually want? And then you just do the rest. Michael: Gotcha. I mean, it sounds easy, Zina by like you've seen it, right? Like a lot of us aren't doing it like that, or something happens. What happens where it. Maybe we do the reverse engineering. We make it happen, but then I guess life happens, right?Like, I don't know, oh my gosh, an unexpected pregnancy, or, oh my gosh, I'm getting something happen, a natural disaster. I don't know. Things like that, right? Mm-hmm. , is that what, where the burnout comes or where does that come? Zhanna: Yeah. You know, I, the way I see it is, and the way I coach my clients is that something happens is the, Your brain talks to you or behaves to stop you from getting that goal.See, I always explain to people in a very, Basic way that we have two types of brains. We have our primitive brain that just wants to keep us safe, right? Everyone says to protect us from pain, give us pleasure and keep us condensing energy. And then we have this higher brain that is capable of planning and, you know, setting goals.So when you set your revenue goals and you do the math and you decide you know what you need to do that's here using your higher. . But then when you say life happens, like some circumstance happens, you get pregnant or, I dunno what other examples you gave me. You don't feel like it, or, staff members quit.Your marketing person goes on, I don't know, something, right? Mm-hmm. , these things happen. Our brain, our primal brain kicks in and our primals brain's only job is to keep us from taking action. It does not want us to. because the safest thing to do is to stay like in bad undercovers, watch Netflix and eatingIt's the safest way. Yeah, yeah. Right. Don't put yourselves into harm's ways. So you always go to your default unless you manage your brain. I mean, unless you manage the messages that are literally popping all these sentences every day in your brain. So when people say live happens, I always help them make it more specific, because live happens is very vague. Mm-hmm. . And when something is very vague. We can't solve for it. For it. There's no fixing, there's no solving. Life just happens. But when I coach clients and we narrow down exactly what happened, then there's always a solution. For example, you said pregnancy happens. . Okay, so I would ask my client, what do you make it mean?What does that mean that you're pregnant? And there's always some sort of a story that their primal, like that scared brain is telling them, oh, I won't be able to work, or I will get tired, or maybe I'll be sick, or all these things. And I always like to say, okay, let's write a whole list of obstacles and then we're gonna turn them into.That's what life coaching does. Unlike a consultant, it doesn't tell you what to do. It's not just about like steps or strategy, because those don't always work unless you have, unless your mind is there, right? Mm-hmm. Coaching helps you tap into your own resourcefulness so that you can figure out very quick and clear ways to solve solutions.So, in case of a pregnancy, or let's say half of your staff quit . Mm-hmm. . Okay, so neutral circumstance. Let's figure out all of the obstacles right now. Let's say there's nobody tomorrow to like open the office, how we gonna solve it? But if you just say life happened, you can't solve for that. You see? See what I'm saying?Mm-hmm. , when you're like really narrowed down, become extremely specific, anything can be solved. God. Michael: So you like hyperfocus on the situation kind of thing, right. Zhanna: Instead of you always have to, because brain just likes to throw hands up in the air and say it can't be done. Mm-hmm. . And you have to zoom back in and say, well, what exactly are we talking about here?Gotcha. Kinda like going back to the basics. Michael: So can you gimme. An example and also like a really good definition of what burnout is exactly. Sure. Cause you feel like sometimes we're like, I'm just burnout. But it's like, are you tired or are you like still, I feel like sometimes I can, you know, you can work all day and you feel still excited and happy, but that's not burnout, so, or is it?I don't know. Zhanna: Yeah. Good question. So a true, true burnout. , like a combination of mental and physical state where you are at a point where you literally cannot get out of bed, right? You are just so down. You have zero energy, you're completely exhausted, and you can barely move around like your environment, And it has three stages of the burnout, first stage. So it's not like you wake up and. Literally burned out like a match. Mm-hmm. , the stages are typically first you feel very low energy. You're very tired, you're constantly exhausted. You're having these perpetual thoughts like, oh, another day at the office, right?Like mm-hmm. You're looking at the clock and you're thinking, oh my God, another hour, another patient. Right? Stuff like that. Then there's that second stage. You becoming, it's called depersonalization where you become very cynical, right? Where you like look at your schedule and let's say you say, oh, is my 4:00 PM here yet?Like, you don't call people even by their names, right? You call them by a time, right? Or like, did that crown prep show up or are they running late? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. , you're deep like you are taking the person, like a person out, like you're grouping together, your patient, your person with.the procedure that you're doing all the time slot, whether a schedule, and then the last stage is where you are just constantly unsatisfied with your own achievements. Like nothing you do is good. You're self critic. You know, we all have that inner voice that's self-critical. That's always like, oh, I should have said this, or My hair was wrong, or, I should have changed the angle on the video or something like that.Yeah. That critic becomes so loud that you just can't stop. You're not happy with anything you do. It would look like, you know, oh, I should have cleaned the cement more around that crown that I prepped. Oh, my stitches were not great after that surgery or for orthodontist. I didn't finish with a great overbite.I could have created a better orgen for that patient, but that's for every single person. So you. Extremely self-critical of yourself, of others, and that mental state becomes psychosomatic, meaning so many thoughts, negative thoughts, start affecting your body so that you physically have no energy and you cannot.almost get out of bed. You can barely function. That is a true burnout and that is something where life coach cannot help you. You know, you have to see a psychologist, psychiatrist, you might need even medication therapy. If you're a non, if you're non-functional as an individual in a society, life coaching is not the best option for you.You can work together, you know, with a therapist and a life coach. But that's something you wanna address first. What you were talking about. You know how people say, oh, I'm so burned out, you know, I'm feeling like I'm burning out. That's not true. Burnout, it's pre burnout, but nobody really calls it pre burnout.So I usually tell people I'm a burnout coach. Mm-hmm. . And then when I do consultations with clients, that's when I determine are they in true burnout or are they, are they in pre burnout? , but if somebody can get on a call with me, they're probably not burned out. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. , like they're functioning, they're walking.They could press the button. . Yeah. So the Iron Am Burnout, uh, phrase that's been thrown out there regularly, is typically like a mental state which has several characteristics typically, uh, you. Pre burnout, when you do a lot of work, a lot more work to get somewhere. So in other words, you are not hit like you.You have your goal, you want to make certain amount of money, or you want to produce 10 podcast episode a month because you wanna have this rating and you don't see that rating. So you start producing more and more and more. And so like you're taking so much action and it's not rendering the result that you want.but all this action has an effect on your mentality and your physical body. So you are getting in this pre burnout state and those qualities that lead to that is typically perfectionism. So people who, hold themselves to unrealistic standards. Right. This we can be perfect. Yeah, it's impossible.But perfectionists, they understand that intellectually, but they're like, yeah. I'm gonna try . Yeah, right. Close as possible. I know, I get it. I understand you cannot be perfect, but I'm really gonna try. Mm-hmm. , and that's what sets you up for failure. So perfectionistic mentality, people pleasing, and a lot of the, that's a big one, especially for dentists.we are trained to follow these protocols, to cut this perfect class to cavity or have this perfect class one molar. You know, when we finish an Orthodon case, Like we are literally trained to be micro-focused on a perfect outcome really, and that permeates your life and your personality. So it's really hard to separate what you do at work.Like Sure, strive to do your best is different than strive to be perfect because it's unattainable and it leads you to. Extra amount of action that you're just literally spinning the wheels and not moving in a productive way towards your goal. And that creates burnout, right? Okay. So perfectionism be, uh, people pleasing, which kind of like a side effect of perfectionism where, you know, you wanna do your best and you have these unrealistic expectations of what you can achieve.And so when patients come into you, you wanna acc, acc accommodate them no matter what, because you're tying in your self worth to your work, right? In other words, you are thinking, you know, I'm a good doctor if I can help every patient. I'm a good doctor. If the patient leaves me a good yield purview, right?Like you're tying in your self worth to your. , and these are two separate things. And when you do that, then you wanna please everyone, right? Because you want them to say, oh, you're so great. Thank you, doctor. You're amazing. You're the best. I'm gonna write you a yield review, which has nothing to do with you as a person.And that has everything to do with the service that you provide. But the service cannot be perfect because it's impossible. So you're becoming unrealistic with what you're promising to your patients. And when you cannot meet what you had promised them, you start pupil pleas. , you know what I'm saying?Mm-hmm. . And that just leaves you feeling icky because it's unauthentic. You know, you start going oh yes. You know, Mr. Smith, you came, for the third time this week without an appointment. That's okay. We're gonna squeeze you in. You know, you came an hour late for your appointment. Oh, that's okay.We're, we're going to squeeze you in. because you are afraid that if you don't, Mr. Smith will get so upset and maybe throw a tantrum or write you about, you'll review or I don't know, scr at your staff and something like that. So you're not setting these healthy boundaries mm-hmm. that these patients really need.You know, boundaries is another big component, because you don't understand your Owen, limitations as a clinician and, and as a person. and then the last one is, it's a personality who's highly self, self-critical. , you know, low self-esteem. Mm-hmm. , people who are like, have a lot of self doubt.which sadly happens in a lot of women dentists. Which has to do with the way we're socialized. You know, men and women are socialized a little bit differently, so we're not as assertive as men and we tend to be more, more looking within ourselves and criticizing ourselves. That's why there's so fewer women leaders in dentistry, especially, you know, who are stepping forward and leading the industry.So we tend to be more self-critical. So when you are. Perfectionist, expecting impossible things from you, and you are self-critical. No matter what you do, you find the flaws. Yeah. So you'll end up people pleasing because you want them to like you, and then at the end you feel just crappy because you're not showing up as yourself, you're not being authentic, and you can't deliver what you had promised.Which feeds even more being self-critical, you end up doing extra work. More and more miles for people who will never be pleased and you end up earning out. So it's Michael: like a, let me see if I got this right. So, so if you're being very self-critical mm-hmm. , you tend to, you said compensate with perfectionism.Yeah. Pretty much. Okay. Perfectionism and then that's impossible to reach. Right. Right. Be perfect. So then you tend to people please mm-hmm. and. If somebody gets upset, then you'd be so critical against, so it's like a little Zhanna: It's a it, it's a cycles. Exactly. So it's a rated cycle. Wow. Which forces you like the only solution that you're braining him up with, will I have to do more?And then you start doing more work. That's not necessarily a thought through work. Right. Like for example, , you just start accommodating all these patients who show up without an appointment. You start giving them discounts just because you want them to like you. Like it's completely defeating the goal of your revenue and what you're set to do.Mm-hmm. . Right? Which also ties in. You probably haven't thought about your brand and what's your positioning with these people, right? Cuz you're starting to mix your personality with your business . Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you just start spinning the wheels, Throwing every, all the resources that you have and burning out, unfortunately.So then when people, you know, end up coming to me, we have to unpack all of this and go back to the basics, okay. What exactly success looks like for you at the office? What exactly does it look like for you at home? And let's make sure that your self-worth as a human has nothing to do with these two.Your self worth is. Your self-worth is Absolut. , there's nothing you can do or say that will make you more worthy or less worthy. So once you start with that, dealing with your business and your personal life becomes so much easier. See what I'm saying? Michael: Yeah. You're able to separate kind of the, the two.Mm-hmm. , uh, when it comes to, cause I think that's the hard part. I feel like a lot of times we, we don't separate it or we go through seasons, right? Mm-hmm. and I, I don't know, you can tell me if I'm wrong or not Jonna, but like sometimes I believe like. There's gonna be seasons where you're gonna have to work really hard, right?And it's gonna be like, mm-hmm. , I'm gonna do everything. And then there's seasons where you're like, yeah, we could watch Netflix today. Or, you know what I mean? We could relax and stuff like that. But there's hardly ever a moment where everything kind of just feels balanced, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. ? Zhanna: yeah, so you could do it this way. , but you could also a little bit even things out because a feeling of balance is a feeling that's created by your thoughts. So there's sometimes things in life where it's easier to do something and sometimes it's harder.Like for example, weight loss actually comes up a lot for my clients. Mm-hmm. . And you know, if it's I'm trying to think if it's September or August or September. It's easier for people to lose weight when, rather when it's end of October in November, in December, right? Mm-hmm. like the holiday spirit because of the environment.So people always say, oh my gosh, the holidays come in. There's no way I'm like, around all these food pushers. It's so much harder. So it's kind of like that rollercoaster that you described, that people think that it's easier to lose weight when. , they're not surrounded by holidays and cookies and, and Turkey and all that stuff, right?Mm-hmm. . But that's really your perception, your mindset, because if you created a sustainable goal for weight loss and how many pounds you wanna lose per month, and what are all the actions that will take you there, right? Like I'm gonna work out five times a day. I'm gonna walk 10,000 steps.I'm gonna drink 60 ounces of water. I'm going to be eating, you know, two meals. four ounces of protein and veggies like you, you become very specific, right? Then it doesn't matter. Then it's holidays. All you had to do is just manage your mind around, you know, I'm at a dinner table and my plan says to do this and, Mary here is passing a pumpkin pie.So you just have to manage your thoughts around. . I want it like a simple thought as I want it. That creates, right, like an urge for you. We think it's a fact. Like I want it means I should have it, right? Mm-hmm. . So it creates that rollercoaster effect. But if you level it out and you expect, remember that, I was telling you about obstacles and strategies, if you, anticipate all the obstacles that might happen, and the majority of obstacles really are our.How we're gonna think about what my mom says who baked a pie. She's gonna think that if I don't eat it, I don't love her. Yeah. It's not about, you know what I'm saying? Like we do these things to herself. Yeah. But if you explain to her, mom, I love you more than anything and I'm gonna have that pie tomorrow.But right now I'm just not hungry. Or I choose now to. , then it's gonna, it's gonna create a very different experience where you can equalize and balance out your effort when it's planned. Remember with that higher brain? Mm-hmm. , when you plan it out and then you manage your mind around it so that you don't have this mind drama, then you can just execute the math and everything becomes more balanced and playing field, so you don't have to go through up and down.Michael: Okay. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Okay. I wanna ask you so much more about this stuff, but when we focus on like the business side of it, what can a dentist do today to improve their, their marketing and business with this? Zhanna: Yeah. So, as a dental coach, I think about marketing very differently than as a practitioner would.So the way I think about marketing is really you are telling people that you can help them. , that's all that marketing is. The majority of doctors think of marketing as a way to get new patients. Mm-hmm. . And when you think about, oh, I have to get people to come to my practice because my practice needs money or something like that.That's kind of like Anki way to think about it. No wonder they don't go in their, they don't take action. Mm-hmm. . Right. That's why. There's a lot of strategies on marketing out there. There's a lot of great advice, but unless you have the mindset of the person who gave, who gave you that advice, you're not likely to create the same result as their strategy promises.Mm-hmm. Right. Makes sense. Mm-hmm. ? Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Makes sense. Because somebody will say, okay, let's go on social media right now. Social media is big. You have to market your practice on Instagram. They can even give you like the marketing strategy for Instagram. They're gonna say, this is what you're gonna do. You have to have a long PO post. A short post, a cur cell, a reel, and a testimony. . But if your mindset as a doctor is, oh, that sucks. I don't wanna do that. I'm, I'm, what is the reel? Even like, I am horrible on camera. Mm-hmm. , what kind of reels do you think they will create? Probably not the ones that will ex attract a lot of patients, right?Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you think about marketing is this is just me telling people that I can help them. Isn't that. You're just, your sign is open. I'm here open for you to come here and I'll help you. And I always look at it as a trifecta. So in order to be confident in telling people that you can help them, you need to believe in your product or service.You need to believe in your client or your patient, and you need to believe in yourself as a clinician. So let me give you an example for dentistry, you need to believe in your product. What services are you providing? What exactly is your dental practice doing? Are you a general dentist? Are you a specialist?I am a big proponent of having a niche. I really believe in nicheing down, and here's why I. . A lot of doctors are afraid to knee down because they are afraid that they will turn down, turn away. Some patients, right, they're, they want to attract everyone as much as possible, but if you market to everyone you attract no one buying behavior of people has changed, especially since the pandemic. People still want to buy the best product, but they also want to buy it from the best. Which means that their values need to align with yours or the other way around. Your values need to align with theirs. They want to know about you. Like for example, you, Michael, you help, practices with ground marketing, Uhhuh, , right? For marketing. And you do this by helping put the doctor's story in the forefront, create the website around their story that. The part of marketing where you connect with your customer, you tell them your story, right? You, this is your branding too.Like they need to resonate with your values and that's okay that some people will not like you, but then some people will love you and they're not gonna hesitate. They're gonna come and they're gonna bring their friends, That's how you create the brand. Recognition and loyalty. Like for example, when you think about Starbucks, what do they.Coffee, right? Mm-hmm. , like when you think coffee, you think Starbucks? Do they, do they sell sandwiches? Yeah. Do you go to Starbucks for sandwiches? No. Mm-hmm. . So by focusing on one thing, one niche coffee equals Starbucks, you will attract those people and then you can you know, increase, uh, or add other, products that you are, that you are selling or other, other, uh, services that you are providing because these people are already in.this is how it might look like for a dentist, you know, as a general dentist. And I think dentists also do that a lot. Like, marketing. I am a cosmetic dentist, right? I do just, just be the guy or the gal on the block who does amazing veneers. . It doesn't mean that you don't do rick nails and crowns and you know, fillings, but be known for that one thing.Don't be afraid to niche down and really get good at this because people wanna buy the best product, right? So believe, believe in your service what you're providing, be really great at it, or be like an aligner company. Uh, practice, right? Create the brand recognition, and that's what we'll. your clients. So it's number one, believe in your product or service.Number two is believe in your client. Really think that your patients want help. They want what you have to offer and what you have to offer will change their life for the better.Like really like zoom out. Don't just be a doctor who's diagnosing teeth and decay. Look how, what? What is the. The service that you will provide for them, the experience they you'll provide for them will have an effect on their life. So if you really believe that you have the best product, For that person that will benefit from having smile makeover or better bite or cavity free mouth and educated, about oral health so that they can educate their, uh, children and, you know, have a whole healthy family.The last pieces believe in yourself as a clinician. Mm-hmm. , you know, you need to em embrace and embody that you are the best person to help that patient. So when you, when all this trifecta is working, that's when you will market in the most efficient and the most confident way. Really, I have the best product.People want it, and I'm the best person to do that. For them to give that service, uh, to them. Now I just have to tell them I have to go meet people, tell them that I'm a dentist and make them offers to. . Yeah. So that's how I look about marketing. Michael: Okay. And I feel like a lot of the times we get kind of like, tunnel vision or, or maybe clouded with like, we just took out a huge loan, we opened up a practice and now we gotta get these new patients like as quickly and as possible.And we kind of, go really fast over these three things. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Zhanna: instead of sit down. Meditate. Yeah. That typically, that typically happens because that primal brain kicks in. Right? It's trying to keep you safe. Mm-hmm. , right? Because the primals brain's job is to. , make sure you don't take any action.So whenever these sentences pop in your head, oh, I just took out this practice loan, we have to make money. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to be an entrepreneur. You don't have to have a practice. You don't have to be a dentist, you don't have to get outta bed. You choose to now ask yourself, why do I choose to do that?Do you see? You feel like it's a little bit, it's a lot more empowering question to ask yourself. So that istalking to yourself this way and just be, be kind with yourself, you know? It's okay. It's just my conditioning. This is my habitual thinking is telling me about this loan and the pressure that I'm putting on myself and stuff like that. That's okay. Your opinion is noted, but I'm going to focus on. What actions can I take to actually efficiently, successfully get to my goal by serving people?That's, I think what's, doctors always often forget that you're not just there to, make money or diagnose cavities or extract decay teeth or straighten their teeth. You are there to serve people. How can you best serve people? Think about that. You know, or when. You are networking with other doctors for specialists.You know, they go network with general dentists. When you go to the networking event. There was I think it was like a study where they looked at 250 people who showed up to a networking event and they said everybody raised their hand who came here to sell something to another person? Everybody raised their hands all two 50, and they said, and now raise hands who came here to buy something?One person raised their hand. That's why people hate networking events, right? Yeah. Because we feel like this pressure like, oh, I have to sell myself or my practices or like, send. Send me patients, send me, uh, referrals and stuff like that. But if you're thinking, how can I serve them? Right? Because there's always value exchange in anything you are doing.You just have to think about it this way. So let's say for me, for an orthodontist, if I'm an orthodontist and I going to go meet my referring dentist, general dentist or just any dentist on the block, I want them to refer me patients, what's in it for them. . Like it's not just dropping off, uh, donuts and saying, hi, Dr.K, I'm next door. Mm-hmm. , send me patients. Yeah. Like what's in it for them? It goes back to that tripod of, belief system. What is that specific value that I can provide to your patients? If I am the veneer doctor, you know, I do the best veneers You. If your patients need veneers and need smile makeover, I can help them see this like value exchange.There's something for that referring doctor that you do as another doctor or a specialist. And when you approach it this way, it, it takes this weird sexiness out of it because you're not selling anything really. Marketing is not selling. You're just trying to, help people, show people that you can help them.Right? So like, thinking about us a little bit differently is very, . Michael: Yeah, I like that a lot. The reciprocity effect, right? Like, this is what we can do for you, kind of thing. Yes. Okay. Awesome. So then, right now, another question is, what would you like to see more from a dentist? you can put yourself in the shoes of the general population, right?Or you can put yourself in the shoes of, of what you do as a life coach and think about what would I wanna see more from? What do I feel like they're neglecting or what do I feel like maybe they can be doing increasing more on Zhanna: just like as, as a doctor in, in their practice? In terms of service or in terms of marketing?Michael: It could be in terms of, it could be in terms of both. In both. Yeah. let's go for that. Yeah, Zhanna: so I think it goes back to that nicheing, you know, having, being specific in something I think. Helpful will be for doctors is to figure out what's their target market is, because then they can help the best, these people, these patients, because these patients will receive the exact experience that they want.And that would help doctors too match with more, uh, patients. So I would love for, you know, my colleagues to really look at the map where they're at. Hopefully they have done it before they purchased a practice. Mm-hmm. , they can do it now. And if they figured out that, you know, uh, their practice is focused on dangers, but they're in the middle of their rodeo drive in la.probably not the service you wanna be selling, right? . Yeah. So you might wanna shift a little bit, or sometimes honestly, the best solution is just to sell the practice and do all that homework and move somewhere else. You know, I always tell my clients, do you want to be bright or do you wanna be rich?Right? , you kind of have to decide. So really looking into your target market. Who is in your vicinity? What do people want, right? And you can do that by, you know, setting the demographics or really get to know your, your clients, your patient. I think what's really helpful and would benefit both patients and doctors is look at your competitors.Look at their yield reviews. Look at what people are talking, what are patients not happy about? And then solve that in your practice. That will not only help you help more people, but more people will be helped with something that they need and your competitors are missing. Mm-hmm. , right? Michael: You see that?Yeah. Yeah. Makes a Zhanna: lot of. . Yeah. And you know, really, like I said, look at your numbers, figure out what your goals, figure out how you want to run your practice, what you wanna charge, what kind of people you wanna attract, and what would serve them best. Like what would, what kind of product or service you can create that will really like, create amazing experience for that.Mm-hmm. , because then that will really benefit. your patience and that will help you grow your practice too. Yeah. Okay. So I think having this like niche down approach and be really specific and serving would be helpful for both. Michael: Okay. Yeah. Awesome. And then, right now, someone who's pretty involved in like social media, you know what I mean?Mm-hmm. , like you're, you're out there and everything. And also like you're involved in the industry, but I really appreciate that you're also involved in like the lives, right? Of a lot of these. practice owners and dentists. So I wanna ask you right now, looking at it from your point of view, what do you hate?And then what do you love about dentistry? Zhanna: Ooh, what do I hate and what do I love about dentistry? How interesting. In terms of social media, I think. , I'll start with what I love. I think what I love is that I think more doctors are understanding the importance of like personal branding and bringing, bringing their own personality to their businesses, right?There's two, there's two schools of thoughts when it comes to branding your business. You can either create. Business persona that represents your brand. That is kind of like faceless, meaning you don't have to like necessarily put your own pictures everywhere, especially on social media and stuff like that.Maybe just one. But. , your customers get a sense of like the energy, the or around your business. Like what exactly, are you a boutique? Are you high volume? Like what, where exactly do you stand? So that's one approach, like this business entity or you can just be yourself and you are your own brand.Mm-hmm. and I thi, this is what I do in my business. Like what you see is my brand is me. . And I think that creates, you know, the like and trust the two important components for people to, to buy from you. Right? And I think a lot of doctors are starting to embrace that, which is very hard. So I like that, that doctors are starting to do that.And I um, you know, I applaud them because as professionals we are, we are, we are taught to be professional, right? Like personal life and professional are completely separate, you know, like tight upper lip type thing. But. people are buying from people. You know what I mean? Yeah. We can't just hide behind the mask of the white code because there was a person behind there.And as much as we wanna be perfect, people know we're not. Mm-hmm. , but they really appreciate if you're passionate about it. So that kind of bleeds into what I, I wouldn't say I hate, but I wish I could see more. Doctors being more passionate about what they're doing, which I think has to do with really finding that niche that you love.And then when you are passionate about it, people actually, customers perceive, passion as in we are going to do a better job for them. because if, like, think about it, a doctor who just comes in a, in a consult room and just spits out diagnosis, I mean, you're, you're just sitting there thinking like, like, you're an idiot because they're just talking all this terminology at you and then they tell you everything that's wrong with you and how much it's gonna cost.Right. Versus a doctor who comes and they love what they do, they're interested in you, they wanna incorporate. Uh, work that they're recommending for you with your lifestyle and how it's gonna all make it work with, you know, how much it costs and stuff like that. Who would you rather go? Probably to the second doctor, right?Mm-hmm. . Yeah, because you think like he or she will do a better job for you because they care. So I would really wish that doctors embraced more the importance of, You know, personal branding and the mindset that they bring to their daily work and finding the area that they truly love and improving as much as possible in that niche of dentistry that they're doing, because I think that will bring the best value to both the doctors and the Michael: patients. Awesome. Okay. As long as, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. But before we say goodbye, can you tell our listeners where they can. Zhanna: Yes, sure. So the main area they can find me is on LinkedIn. That's where I hang out the most. and in the show notes, we'll probably leave my my coordinates.It's just my name, Dr. Janko. And there is I have a mailing list where I send, weekly motivational and inspirational nuggets for doctors to become thriving leaders in dentistry. So we'll probably leave a link to that too so I can hop on that mailing list. Michael: Awesome. So guys, yeah, that will all be in the show notes below.So definitely reach out to Jean after that. And thank you so much for being with us on this podcast. It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you soon. Zhanna: Sounds good. Thank you for having me.‍

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01. Piero Pirupa, Paolo Pellegrino - Asereje 02. Mr. Sid, Van Snyder, Torok - Check the Bass 03. Don Diablo, Ty Dolla $Ign - Too Much To Ask 04. Chapter & Verse - Losing Control 05. Marten Horger, Brandon - Let's Try It 06. Axwell, Ingrosso - Behold 07. Moti, Corsak, Georgia Ku, Willim - Back To You 08. Fetish - My Heart 09. Benny Benassi, Chris Nasty, Constantin - Make Some Noise 10. Alok - The Club Is Jumpin' 11. Disco Fries, Hawk, Beyge - Family Affair 12. Jack Back, N.F.I, Mya Francis - Case Of The Ex 13. Zen_It - Illusion 14. Volac - Work It 15. Hardwell, Vinne - Balanca 16. Smack, Eleganto - Turn It Up 17. Graymatter, Avenue - Nasty 18. Hartfir3 - Enough 19. Tujamo, Jord - Clap Your Hands 20. Martin Garrix, Mesto - Limitless 21. Riton - Sugar 22. Brotech, Redux Saints - Dis House 23. Hugo Doche - Take Me Up 24. Trilago, Urbano - Phone 25. Matroda - Can't Fight The Feeling 26. Versus, Albert Breaker, King Ro - Bottle Flip 27. Tom Budin, Kastelo - Time 28. Tobtok, Covenants - Safe 29. Dannic - Womp 30. Dubdogz - Ghostbusters 31. Jasted, L-Dis - She Wants Me 32. Ayor - TIME 33. Diplo, Sleepy Tom, Hugel - Be Right There 34. Cloudrider, Din & Vic - Furrow 35. Alle Farben, Maurice Lessing - Apollo 36. Martnello - Just Like You 37. Ferreck Dawn - Aphrodisiac 38. Oliver Heldens - Disco Voyager

For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI's board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I'm like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.'”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it's a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it's more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta's enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley's trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It's a world full of contradictions. There's constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI's governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech's conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn't feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans' failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it's very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It's the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you're like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.'” He went on, “Now, us can't be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman's politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel's public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that's totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There's a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern scale AI, you need to have billions of dollars of compute. Where do you get those billions of dollars? Because, you know, the foundations and the philanthropy industry is generally speaking bad at tech and bad at anything other than little tiny checks in tech.And so you said, well, it's really important to do this. So part of what I think, you know, Sam and that group of folks came up with this kind of clever thing to say, well, look, we're about beneficial AI, we're about AI for humanity. We're about making an, I'll make a comment on “open” in a second, but we are gonna generate some commercially valuable things.What if we struck a commercial deal? So you can have the commercial things or you can share the commercial things. You invest in us in order to do this, and then we make sure that the AI has the right characteristics. And then the “open”, you know, all short names have, you know, some simplicities to them.The idea is open to the world in terms of being able to use it and benefit from it. It doesn't mean the same thing as open source because AI is actually one of those things where opening, um, where you could do open source, you could actually be creating something dangerous. As a modern example, last year, Open AI deliberately… DALL·E 2 was ready four months before it went out. I know cause I was playing with it. They did the four months to do safety training and the kind of safety training is, well, let's make sure that individuals can't be libeled. Let's make sure you can't create as best we can, child sexual material. Let's make sure you can't do revenge porn and we'll serve it through the API and we'll make it unchangeable on that.And then the open source people come out and they go do whatever you want and then wow, you get all this crazy, terrible stuff. So “open” is openness of availability, but still with safety and still with, kind of call it the pro-human controls. And that's part of what OpenAI means in this.Eric: I wrote in sort of a mini essay in the newsletter about, like tech fatalism and it fits into your sort of messiah complex that you're talking about, if I'm a young or new startup entrepreneur, it's like this is my moment if I hold back, you know, there's a sense that somebody else is gonna do it too. This isn't necessarily research. Some of the tools are findable, so I need to do it. If somebody's going to, it's easy if you're using your own personhood to say, I'm better than that guy! Even if I have questions about it, I should do it. So that, I think we see that over and over again. Obviously the stakes with AI, I think we both agree are much larger.On the other hand, with AI, there's actually, in my view, been a little bit more restraint. I mean, Google has been a little slower. Facebook seems a little worried, like, I don't know. How do you agree with that sort of view of tech fatalism? Is there anything to be done about it or it's just sort of—if it's possible, it's gonna happen, so the best guy, the best team should do it?Or, or how do you think about that sense of inevitability on if it's possible, it'll be built?Reid: Well, one thing is you like edgy words, so what you describe is tech fatalism, I might say as something more like tech inevitability or tech destiny. And part of it is what, I guess what I would say is for example, we are now in a AI moment and era. There's global competition for it. It's scale compute.It's not something that even somebody like a Google or someone else can kind of have any kind of, real ball control on. But the way I look at it is, hey, look, there's, there's utopic outcomes and dystopic outcomes and it's within our control to steer it. Um, and even to steer it at speed, even under competition because.For example, obviously the general discourse within media is, oh my God, what's happening with the data and what's gonna happen with the bias and what's gonna happen with the crazy conversations, with Bing Chat and all the rest of this stuff. And you're like, well, what am I obsessed about? I'm obsessed about the fact that I have line of sight to an AI tutor and an AI doctor on every cell phone.And think about if you delay that, whatever number of years you delay that, what your human cost is of delaying that, right? And it's like, how do we get that? And for example, people say, wow, the real issue is that Bing chat model is gonna go off the rails and have a drunken cocktail party conversation because it's provoked to do so and can't run away from the person who's provoking it.Uh, and you say, well, is that the real issue? Or is it a real issue? Let's make sure that as many people as we can have access to that AI doctor have access to that AI tutor that where, where we can, where not only, you know, cause obviously technology cause it's expensive initially benefits elites and people are rich.And by the way, that's a natural way of how our capitalist system and all the rest works. But let's try to get it to everyone else as quickly as possible, right?Eric: I a hundred percent agree with that. So I don't want any of my sort of, cynical take like, oh my God, this version.I'd also extend it, you know, I think you're sort of referencing maybe the Sydney situation where you have Kevin Rus in New York Times, you know, communicating with Bing's version of ChatGPT and sort of finding this character who's sort of goes by Sydney from the origin story.And Ben Thompson sort of had a similar experience. And I would almost say it's sad for the world to be deprived of that too. You know, there's like a certain paranoia, it's like, it's like, oh, I wanna meet this sort of seemingly intelligent character. I don't know. What do you make of that whole episode? I mean, people really, I mean, Ben Thompson, smart tech writers really latched onto this as something that they found moving.I don't know. Is there anything you take away from that saga and do you think we'll see those sort of, I don't know, intelligent characters again,Reid: Well for sure. I think 2023 will be at least the first year of the so-called chatbot. Not just because of ChatGPT. And I think that we will have a bunch of different chat bots. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be, you know, entertainment companions, witty dialogue participants.I think we'll have chatbots that are there to be information like Insta, Wikipedia, kind of things. I think we'll have chatbots that are there to just have someone to talk to. So I think there'll be a whole, whole range of things. And I think we will have all that experience.And I think part of the thing is to say, look, what are the parameters by which you should say the bots should absolutely not do X. And it's fine if these people want a bot that's like, you know, smack talking and these people want something that you know, goes, oh heck. Right?You know, like, what's, what's the range of that? And obviously children get in the mix and, and the questions around things that we already encounter a lot with search, which is like could a chat bot enable self-harm in a way that would be really bad?Let's really try to make sure that someone who's depressed doesn't figure out a way to harm themselves either with search or with chat bots.Eric: Is there a psychologically persuasive, so it's not just the information provided, it's the sense that they might be like walking you towards something less serious.Reid: And they are! This is the thing that's amazing. and it's part of the reason why like everyone should have some interaction with these in some emotional, tangible way. We are really passing the Turing test. This is the thing that I had visibility on a few years ago because I was like, okay, we kind of judge, you know, intelligence and sentience like that, Google engineers like it.I asked if it was conscious and it said it was because we use language as a way of doing that. And you're like, well, but look, that tells you that your language use is not quite fully there. And because part of what's really amazing about, “hallucinations”—and I'm probably gonna do a fireside chat with the gray matter thing on hallucinations, maybe later this week—where the hallucination is, on one hand it says this amazingly accurate, wonderful thing, very persuasively, and then it says this other thing really persuasively that's total fiction, right? And you're like, wow, you sound very persuasive in both cases. But that one's true and that one's fiction.And that's part of the reason why I kind of go back to the augmented intelligence and all the things that I see going on with in 2023 is much less replacement and much more augmentation. It's not zero replacement, but it's much more augmentation in terms of how this plays. And that is super exciting.Eric: Yeah. I mean, to some degree it reflects sort of the weakness in human beings' own abilities to read what's happening. Ahead of this interview, I was talking to the publicly available ChatGPT. I don't know if you saw but I was asking it for questions and I felt like it delivered a very reasonable set of questions. You know, you've written about Blitzscaling, so [ChatGPT] is like, let's ask about that. It's, you know, ask in the context of Microsoft. But when I was like, have you [ChatGPT] ever watched Joe Rogan? Have you ever been on a podcast? Sometimes maybe you should have a long sort of, you should have a statement like I'm doing right now where I sort of have some things I'm saying.Then I ask a question. Other times it should be short and sweet. Sometimes it, you know, annoys you and says oligarchy, like explaining to the chat bot. [In an interview, a journalist] can't just ask a list of like, straightforward questions and it felt like it didn't really even get that. And I get that there's some sort of, we're, we're starting to have a conversation now with companies like Jasper, where it's almost like the language prompting itself.I think Sam Altman was maybe saying it's like almost a form of plain language like coding because you have to figure out how to get what you want out of them. And maybe it was just my failure to explain it, but as a journalist replacing questions, I didn't find the current model of ChatGPT really capable of that.Reid: No, that's actually one of the things on the ChatGPT I find is, like, for example, you ask what questions to ask Reid Hoffman in a podcast interview, and you'll get some generic ones. It'll say like, well, what's going on with new technologies like AI and, and what's going on in Silicon Valley? And you know, and you're like, okay, sure.But those aren't the really interesting questions. That's not what makes me a great journalist, which is kind of a lens to something that people can learn from and that will evolve and change that'll get better. But that's again, one of the reasons why I think it's a people plus machine. Because for example, if I were to say, hey, what should I ask Eric about? Or what should I talk to Eric about and go to? Yeah, gimme some generic stuff. Now if I said, oh, give me a briefing on, um, call it, um, UN governance systems as they apply to AI, because I want to be able to talk about this. I didn't do this, but it would give me a kind of a quick Wikipedia briefing and that would make my conversation more interesting and I might be able to ask a question about the governance system or something, you know, as a way of doing it.And that's what AI is, I think why the combo is so great. Um, and anyway, so that's what we should be aiming towards. It isn't to say, by the way, sometimes like replacement is a good thing. For example, you go to autonomous vehicles and say, hey, look, if we could wave a wand and every car on the road today would be an autonomous vehicle, we'd probably save, we'd probably go from 40,000 deaths in the US per, you know, year to, you know, maybe a thousand or 2000. And you're like, you're shaving 38,000 lives a year, in doing this. It's a good thing. And, you know, it will have a positive vector on gridlocks and for climate change and all the rest of the stuff.And you go, okay, that replacement, yes, we have to navigate truck jobs and all the rest, but that replacement's good. But I think a lot of it is going to end up being, you know, kind of, various forms of amplification. Like if you get to journalists, you go, oh, it'll help me ask, figure out which interesting questions to add.Not because it'll just go here, here's your script to ask questions. But you can get better information to prep your thinking on it.Eric: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the self-driving car case and, you know, you're, are you still on the board of Aurora?Reid: I am.Eric: I've, you know, I covered Uber, so I was in their self-driving cars very early, and they made a lot of promises. Lyft made a lot of promises.I mean, I feel like part of my excitement about this sort of generative AI movement is that it feels like it doesn't require completeness in the same way that self-driving cars do. You know? And that, that, that's been a barrier to self-driving cars. On the flip side, you know, sometimes we sort of wave away the inaccuracy and then we say, you know, we sort of manage it.I think that's what we were sort of talking about earlier. You imagine it in some of the completeness that could come. So I guess the question here is just do you think, what I'm calling the completeness problem. I guess just the idea that it needs to be sort of fully capable will be an issue with the large language models or do you think you have this sort of augmented model where it could sort of stop now and still be extremely useful to much of society?Reid: I think it could stop now and be extremely useful. I've got line of sight on current technology for a tutor, for a doctor, for a bunch of other stuff. One of the things my partner and I wrote last year was that within five years, there's gonna be a co-pilot for every profession.The way to think about that is what professionals do. They process information, they take some kind of action. Sometimes that's generating other information, just like you see with Microsoft's co-pilot product for engineers. And what you can see happening with DallE and other image generation for graphic designers, you'll see this for every professional, that there will be a co-pilot on today's technology that can be built.That's really amazing. I do think that as you continue to make progress, you can potentially make them even more amazing, because part of what happened when you move from, you know, GPT3 to 3.5, which is all of a sudden it can write sonnets. Right? You didn't really know that it was gonna be able to write sonnets.That's giving people superpowers. Most people, including myself—I mean, look, I could write a sonnet if you gave me a couple of days and a lot of coffee and a lot of attempts to really try.Eric: But you wouldn't.Reid: You wouldn't. Yeah. But now I can go, oh, you know, I'd like to, to, um, write a sonnet about my friend Sam Altman.And I can go down and I can sit there and I can kind of type, you know, duh da, and I can generate, well, I don't like that one. Oh, but then I like this one, you know, and da da da. And, and that, that gives you superpowers. I mean, think about what you can do for writing, a whole variety of things with that. And that I think the more and more completeness is the word you are using is I think also a powerful thing. Even though what we have right now is amazing.Eric: Is GPT4 a big improvement over what we have? I assume you've seen a fair bit of unreleased, stuff. Like how hyped should we be about the improvement level?Reid: I have. I'm not really allowed to say very much about it cause, you know, part of the responsibilities of former board members and confidentiality. But I do think that it will be a nice—I think people will look at it and go, Ooh, that's cool. And it will be another iteration, another thing as amazing as ChatGPT has, and obviously that's kind of in the last few months. It's kind of taken the world by storm, opening up this vista of imagination and so forth.I think GPT4 will be another step forward where people will go, Ooh, that's, that, that's another cool thing. I think that's—can't be more specific than that, but watch this space cause it'll be cool.Eric: Throughout this conversation we've danced around this sort of artificial general intelligence question. starting with the discussion of Elon and the creation of eventually Open AI. I'm curious how close you think we are with AGI and this idea of a sort of, I mean, people define it so many different ways, you know, it's more sophisticated than humans in some tasks, you know, mini tasks, whatever.How, how do you think we're far from that? Or how, how, how do you see that playing out?Reid: Personally amongst a lot of the people who are in the field, I'm probably on the, we're-much-further-than-we-think stage. Now, some of that's because I've lived through this before with my undergraduate degree and the, you know, the pattern generally is, oh my God, we've gotten this computer to do this amazing thing that we thought was formally the provence of only these cognitive human beings.And it could do that. So then by the way, in 10 years it'll be solving new science problems like fusion and all the rest. And if you go back to the seventies, you saw that same dialogue. I mean, it, it's, it's an ongoing thing. Now we do have a more amazing set of cognitive capabilities than we did before, and there are some reasons to argue that it could be in a decade or two. Because you say, well, these large language models can enable coding and that coding can all, can then be self, reflective and generative, and that can then make something go. But when I look at the coding and how that works right now, it doesn't generate the kind of code that's like, oh, that's amazing new code.It helps with the, oh, I want to do a parser for quick sort, right? You know, like that kind of stuff. And it's like, okay, that's great. Or a systems integration use of an API or calling in an API for a spellchecker or whatever. Like it's really helpful stuff on engineers, but it's not like, oh my God, it's now inventing the new kind of training of large scale models techniques.And so I think even some of the great optimists will tell you of the great, like believers that it'll be soon and say there's one major invention. And the thing is, once you get to one major invention, is that one major invention? Is that three major inventions? Is it 10 major inventions?Like I think we are some number of major inventions away. I don't, I certainly don't think it's impossible to get there.Eric: Sorry. The major inventions are us human beings build, building things into the system or…?Reid: Yeah. Like for example, you know, can it do, like, for example, a classic, critique of a lot of large language models is can it do common sense reasoning.Eric: Gary Marcus is very…Reid: Exactly. Right. Exactly. And you know, the short answer right now is the large language models are approximating common sense reasoning.Now they're doing it in a powerful and interesting enough way that you're like, well, that's pretty useful. It's pretty helpful about what it's doing, but I agree that it's not yet doing all of that. And also you get problems like, you know, what are called one shot learning. Can you learn from one instance of it?Cause currently the training requires lots and lots of compute processing over days or in self play, can you have an accurate memory store that you update? Like for example, you say now fact X has happened, your entire world based on fact X. Look, there's a bunch of this stuff to all go.And the question is, is that one major invention is that, you know, five major inventions, and by the way, major inventions or major inventions even all the amazing stuff we've done over the last five to 10 years. Major inventions on major inventions. So I myself tend to be two things on the AGI one.I tend to think it's further than most people think. And I don't know if that further is it's 10 years versus five or 20 years versus 10 or 50 years versus 20. I don't, I don't really know.Eric: In your lifetime, do you think?Reid: It's possible, although I don't know. But let me give two other lenses I think on the AGI question cause the other thing that people tend to do is they tend to go, there's like this AI, which is technique machine learning, and there's totally just great, it's augmented intelligence and then there's AGI and who knows what happens with AGI.And you say, well first is AGI is a whole range of possible things. Like what if you said, Hey, I can build something that's the equivalent of a decent engineer or decent doctor, but to run it costs me $200 an hour and I have AGI? But it's $200 an hour. And you're like, okay, well that's cool and that means we can, we can get as many of them as we need. But it's expensive. And so it isn't like all of a sudden, you know, Terminator or you know, or inventing fusion or something like that is AGI and or a potential version of AGI. So what is AGI is the squishy thing that people then go, magic. The second thing is, the way that I've looked at the progress in the last five to eight years is we're building a set of iteratively better savants, right?It just like the chess player was a savant. Um, and, and the savants are interestingly different now. When does savant become a general intelligence and when might savant become a general super intelligence? I don't know. It's obviously a super intelligence already in some ways. Like for example, I wouldn't want to try to play, go against it and win, try to win.It's a super intelligence when it comes, right? But like okay, that's great cause in our perspective, having some savants like this that are super intelligence is really helpful to us. So, so the whole AGI discussion I think tends to go a little bit Hollywood-esque. You know, it's not terminator.Eric: I mean, there there is, there's a sort of argument that could be made. I mean, you know, humans are very human-centric about our beliefs and our intelligence, right? We don't have a theory of mind for other animals. It's very hard for us to prove that other species, you know, have some experience of consciousness like qualia or whatever.Reid: Very philosophically good use of a term by the way.Eric: Thank you. Um, I studied philosophy though. I've forgotten more than I remember. But, um, you know, I mean…Reid: Someday we'll figure out what it's like to be a bat. Probably not this time.Eric: Right, right, exactly. Is that, that's Nagel. If the machine's better than me at chess and go there, there's a level of I, you know, here I am saying it doesn't have an experience, but it, it's so much smarter than me in certain domains.I don't, I, the question is just like, it seems like humans are not capable of seeing what it's like to be a bat. So will we ever really be able to sort of convince ourselves that there's something that it's like to be, um, an AGI system?Reid: Well, I think the answer is um, yes, but it will require a bunch of sophistication. Like one of the things I think is really interesting about, um, as we anthropomorphize the world a little bit and I think some of this machine. Intelligence stuff will, will enable us to do that is, well what does it mean to understand X or, or, or, or no X or experience X or have qualia or whatever else.And right now what we do is we say, well it's some king of shadowy image from being human. So we tend to undercount like animals intelligence. And people tend to be surprised like, look, you know, some animals mate for life and everything else, they clearly have a theory of the world and it's clearly stuff we're doing.We go, ah, they don't have the same kind of consciousness we do. And you're like, well they certainly don't have the same kind of consciousness, but we're not doing a very good job of studying like what the, where it's similar in order it's different. And I think we're gonna need to broaden that out outcome to start saying, well, when you compare us and an eagle or a dolphin or a whale or a chimpanzee or a lion, you know, what are the similarities and and differences?And how this works. And um, and I think that will also then be, well, what happens when it's a silicon substrate? You know? Do we, do we think that consciousness requires a biological substrate? If so, why? Um, and, you know, part of how, of course we get to understand, um, each other's consciousness as we, we get this depth of experience.Where I realize is it isn't, you're just a puppet.Eric:  [laughs] I am, I am just a puppet.Reid: Well, we're, we're talking to each other through Riverside, so, you know, who knows, right. You know, deep fakes and all that.Eric: The AI's already ahead of you. You know, I'm just, it's already, no.Reid: Yeah. I think we're gonna have to get more sophisticated on that question now.I think it's, it's too trivial to say because it can mimic language in particularly interesting ways. And it says, yes, I'm conscious that that makes it conscious. Like that's not, that's not what we use as an instance. And, and part of it is like, do you understand the like part of how we've come to understand each other's consciousness is we realize that we experience things in similar ways.We feel joy in similar, we feel pain in similar ways and that kinda stuff. And that's part of how we begin to understand. And I think it'll be really good that this may kick off kind of us being slightly less kind of call it narcissistically, anthropocentric in this and a broader concept as we look at this.Eric: You know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and I was saying, you know, oh, I did this like kind gesture, but I didn't feel like some profound, like, I don't, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I did it. It felt like I did the right thing should, you know, shouldn't I feel like more around it?And you know, her perspective was much more like, oh, what matters is like doing the thing, not sort of your internal states about it. Which to me would, would go to the, if the machine can, can do all the things we expect from sort of a caring type type machine. Like why do we need to spend all this time when we don't even expect that of humans to always feel the right feelings.Reid: I totally agree with you. Look, I think the real question is what you do. Now that being said, part of how we predict what you do is that, you know, um, you may not have like at that moment gone, haha, I think of myself as really good cause I've done this kind thing. Which by the way, might be a better human thing as opposed to like, I'm doing this cause I'm better than most people.Eric: Right.Reid: Yeah, but it's the pattern in which you engage in these things and part of the feelings and so forth is cause that creates a kind of a reliability of pattern of do you see other people? Do you have the aspiration to have, not just yourself, but the people around you leading better and improving lives.And obviously if that's the behavior that we're seeing from these things, then that's a lot of it. And the only question is, what's that forward looking momentum on it? And I think amongst humans that comes to an intention, a model of the world and so forth. You know, amongst, amongst machines that mean just maybe the no, no, we're aligned.Well, like, we've done a really good alignment with human progress.Eric: Do you think there will be a point in time where it's like an ethical problem to unplug it? Like I think of like a bear, right? Like a bear is dangerous. You know, there are circumstances where pretty comfortable. Killing the bear,But if the bear like hasn't actually done anything, we've taken it under our care. Like we don't just like shoot bears at zoos, you know? Do you think there's a point where like, and it costs us money to sustain the bear at a zoo, do you think there are cases where we might say, oh man, now there's an ethical question around unpluggingReid: I think it's a when, not an if.Eric: Yeah.Reid: Right? I mean, it may be a when, once again, just like AGI, that's a fair way's out. But it's a when, not an if. And by the way, I think that's again, part of the progress that we make because we think about like, how should we be treating it? Because, you know, like for example, if you go back a hundred, 150 years, the whole concept of animal rights doesn't exist in humans.You know, it's like, hey, you wanna, you want to torture animal X to death, you know, like you're queer, but you're, you're, you're allowed to do that. That's an odd thing for you to do. And maybe it's kind of like, like distasteful, like grungy bad in some way, but , you know, it's like, okay. Where's now you're like, oh, that person is, is like going out to try to go torture animals! We should like get them in an institution, right? Like, that's not okay. You know, what is that further progress for the rights and lives? And I think it will ultimately come to things that we think are, when it gets to kind of like things that have their own agency and have their own consciousness and sets of existence.We should be including all of that in some, in some grand or elevated, you know, kind of rights conceptions.Eric: All right, so back back to my listeners who, you know, wanna know where to invest and make money off this and, you know.Reid: [laughs] It isn't from qualia and consciousness. Oh, wait.Eric: Who do you think are the key players? The key players in the models. Then obviously there are more sort of, I don't know if we're calling them vertical solutions or product oriented or whatever, however you think about them.But starting with the models, like who do you see as sort of the real players right now? Are you counting out a Google or do you think they'll still, you know, sort of show?Reid: Oh no. I think Google will show up. And obviously, you know, Open AI, Microsoft has done a ton of stuff. I co-founded Inflection last year with Mustafa Suleyman. We have a just amazing team and I do see a lot of teams, so I'm.Eric: And that's to build sort of the foundational…Reid: Yeah, they're gonna, well, they're building their own models and they're gonna build some things off those models.We haven't really said what they are yet. But that's obviously going to be kind of new models. Adept, another Greylock investment building its own models, Character is building its own models, Anthropic is building its own models. And Anthropic is, you know, Dario and the crew is smart folks from Open AI, they're, they're doing stuff within a kind of a similar research program that Open AI is doing.And so I think those are the ones that I probably most track.Eric: Character's an interesting case and you know, we're still learning more about that company. You know, I was first to report they're looking to raise 250 million. My understanding is that what's interesting is they're building the models, but then for a particular use case, right?Or like, it's really a question of leverage or like, do people need to build the models to be competitive or do you think there will be... can you build a great business on top of Stability or Open AI or do you need to do it yourself?Reid: I think you can, but the way you do it is you can't say it's cause I have unique access to the model. It has to be, you know, I have a business that has network effects or I'm well integrated in enterprise, or I have another deep stack of technology that I'm bringing into it. It can't just be, I'm a lightweight front end to it because then other people can be the lightweight front end.So you can build great businesses. I think with it, I do think that people will both build businesses off, you know, things like the Open AI APIs and I think people will also train models. Because I think one of the things that will definitely happen is a lot of… not just will large models be built in ways that are interesting and compelling, but I think a bunch of smaller models will be built that are specifically tuned and so forth.And there's all kinds of reasons. Everything from you can build them to do something very specific, but also like inference cost, does it, does it run on a low compute or low power footprint? You know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, AI doctor, AI tutor, um, you know, duh and on a cell phone. And, um, and so, you know, I think like all of that, I think the short answer to this is allEric: Right. Do you think we are in a compute arms race still, or do you, do you think this is gonna continue where it's just if you can raise a billion dollars to, to buy sort of com GPU access basically from Microsoft or Amazon or Google, you're, you're gonna be sort of pretty far ahead? Or how do you think about that sort of the money, the money and computing rates shaping up?Reid: So I kind of think about two. There's kind of two lines of trends. There's one line, which is the larger and larger models, which by the way, you say, well, okay, so does the scale compute and one x flop goes to two x flops, and does your performance function go up by that?And it doesn't have to go up by a hundred percent or, or two x or plus one x. It could go up by 25%, but sometimes that really matters. Coding doctors, you know, legal, other things. Well, it's like actually, in fact, it, even though it's twice as expensive, a 25% increase in, you know, twice as expensive of compute, the 25% increase in performance is worth it. And I think you then have a large scale model, like a set of things that are kind of going along need to be using the large scale models.Then I think there's a set of things that don't have that need. And for example, that's one of the reasons I wasn't really surprised at all by the profusion of image generation, cuz those are, you know, generally speaking, trainable for a million to $10 million. I think there's gonna be a range of those.I think, you know, maybe someone will figure out how to do, you know, a hundred-million version and once they figured out how to do a hundred-million dollar version, someone also figured out how to do the 30-million version of that hundred-million dollar version. And there's a second line going on where all of these other smaller models will fit into interesting businesses. And then I think a lot of people will either deploy an open source model that they're using themselves, train their own model, get a special deal with, like a model provider or something else as a way of doing it.And so I think the short answer is there will be both, and you have to be looking at this from what's the specific that this business is doing. You know, the classic issues of, you know, how do you go to market, how do you create a competitive mode? What are the things that give you real, enduring value that people will pay for in some way in a business?All of the, those questions still apply, but the, but, but there's gonna be a panoply of answers, depending on the different models of how it playsEric: Do you think spend on this space in terms of computing will be larger in ‘24 and then larger in 25?Reid: Yes. Unquestionably,Eric: We're on the, we're still on the rise.Reid: Oh, yes. Unquestionably.Eric: That's great for a certain company that you're on the board of.Reid: Well look, and it's not just great for Microsoft. There are these other ones, you know, AWS, Google, but…Eric: Right. It does feel like Amazon's somewhat sleepy here. Do you have any view there?Reid: Well, I think they have begun to realize, what I've heard from the market is that they've begun to realize that they should have some stuff here. I don't think they've yet gotten fully underway. I think they are trying to train some large language models themselves. I don't know if they've even realized that there is a skill to training those large language models, cause like, you know, sometimes people say, well, you just turn on and you run the, run the large language model, the, the training regime that you read in the papers and then you make stuff.We've seen a lot of failures, of people trying to build these things and failing to do so, so, you know, there's, there's an expertise that you learn in doing it as well. And so I think—Eric: Sorry to interrupt—if Microsoft is around Open AI and Google is around Anthropic, is Amazon gonna be around stability? That's sort of the question that I'll put out to the world. I don't know if you have.Reid: I certainly don't know anything. And in the case of, you know, very, very, very, um, a politely said, um, Anthropic and OpenAI have scale with huge models. Stability is all small models, so, hmm.Eric: Yeah. Interesting. I, I don't think I've asked you sort of directly about sort of stepping off the Open AI board. I mean, I would assume you would prefer to be on the board or…?Reid: Yeah. Well, so look, it was a funny thing because, um, you know, I was getting more and more requests from various Greylock portfolio companies cause we've been investing in AI stuff for over five years. Like real AI, not just the, we call it “software AI”, but actual AI companies.For a while and I was getting more and more requests to do it and I was like oh, you know, what I did before was, well here's the channel. Like here is the guy who, the person who handles the API request goes, go talk to them. Like, why can't you help me? I was like, well, I'm on the board.I have a responsibility to not be doing that. And then I realized that, oh s**t, it's gonna look more and more. Um, I might have a real conflict of interest here, even as we're really carefully navigating it and, and it was really important cause you know various forces are gonna kind of try to question the frankly, super deep integrity of Open AI.It's like, look, I, Sam, I think it might be best even though I remain a fan, an ally, um, to helping, I think it may be best for Open AI. And generally to step off a board to avoid a conflict of interest. And we talked about a bunch and said, okay, fine, we'll do it. And you know, I had dinner with Sam last night and most of what we were talking about was kind of the range of what's going on and what are the important things that open eyes need to solve? And how should we be interfacing with governments so that governments understand? What are the key things that, that, that should be in the mix? And what great future things for humanity are really important not to fumble in the, in the generally, like everyone going, oh, I'm worrying. And then I said, oh, I got a question for you. And he's like, yeah, okay. I'm like, now that I'm no longer on the board, could I ask you to personally look at unblocking, my portfolio company's thing to the API? Because I couldn't ever ask you that question before. Cause I would be unethical. But now I'm not on the board, so can I ask the question?He's like, sure, I'll look into it. I'm like, great, right? And that's the substance of it, which I never would've done before. But that wasn't why, I mean, obviously love Sam and the Open AI team.Eric: The fact that you're sort of a Democratic super donor was that in the calculus? Or, because I mean, we are seeing Republican… well, I didn't think that at all coming into this conversation, but just hearing what you're saying. Looking at it now, it feels like Republicans are like trying to find something to be angry about.Reid: WellEric: These AI things, I don't quite…Reid: The unfortunate thing about the, the most vociferous of the republican media ecosystem is they just invent fiction, like their hallucination full out.Eric: Right.Reid: I mean, it just like, I mean, the amount of just like, you know, 2020 election denial and all the rest, which you can tell from having their text released from Fox News that like, here are these people who are on camera going on where you have a question about, you know, what happened in the election.And they're texting each other going, oh my God, this is insane. This is a coup, you know, da da da. And you're like, okay. Anyway, so, so all like, they don't require truth to generate. Heat and friction. So that was, wasn't that no, no. It's just really, it's kind of the question of, when you're serving on a board, you have to understand what your mission is very deeply and, and to navigate it.And part of the 501(C)(3) boards is to say, look, obviously I contribute by being a board member and helping and navigate various circumstances and all the rest. And, you know, I can continue to be a counselor and an aid to the company not being on the board. And one of the things I think is gonna be very important for the next X years, for the entire world to know is that open AI takes its ethics super seriously,Eric: Right.Reid: As do I.Eric: Does that fit with having to invest? I mean, there are lots of companies that do great things. They have investors. I believe in companies probably more than personally I believe in charities to accomplish things. But the duality of OpenAI is extremely confusing. Like, was Greylock, did Greylock itself invest a lot or you invested early as an angel?Reid: I was the founding investor as an angel, as a, as a program related investment from my foundation. Because like I started, I was among the first people to make a philanthropic donation to Open AI. Just straight out, you know, here's a grant by Wednesday, then Sam and Crew came up with this idea for doing this commercial lp, and I said, look, I, I'll help and I have no idea if this will be an interesting economic investment.They didn't have a business plan, they didn't have a revenue plan, they didn't have a product plan. I brought it to Greylock. We talked about it and they said, look, we think this will be possibly a really interesting technology, but you know, part of our responsibility to our LPs, which you know, includes a whole bunch of universities and else we invest in businesses and there is no business plan.Eric: So is that the Khosla did? Khosla's like we invested wild things. Anyway, we don't care. That's sort of what Vinod wants to project anyway, so yeah.Reid: You know, yes, that's exactly the same. So I put them 50 and then he put in a, I think he was the only venture fund investing in that round. But like, there was no business plan, there was no revenue model, there was no go to market…Eric: Well, Sam basically says, someday we're gonna have AGI and we're gonna ask you how to make a bunch of money? Like, is he, that's a joke, right? Or like, how much is he joking?Reid: It's definitely, it's not a 100% joke and it's not a 0% joke. It's a question around, the mission is really about how do we get to AGI or as close to AGI as useful and to make it useful for humanity. And by the way, the closer you get to AGI, the more interesting technologies fall out, including the ability to have the technology itself solve various problems.So if you said, we have a business model problem, it's like, well ask the thing. Now, if you currently sit down and ask, you know, ChatGPT what the business model is, you'll get something pretty vague and generic that wouldn't get you a meeting with a venture capitalist because it's like “we will have ad supported”... you're like, okay. Right.Eric: Don't you have a company that's trying to do pitch decks now or something?Reid: Oh yeah, Tome. No, and it's awesome, but by the way, that's the right kind of thing. Because, because what it does is you say, hey, give me a set of tiles, together with images and graphics and things arguing X and then you start working with the AI to improve it. Say, oh, I need a slide that does this and I need a catchier headline here, and, and you know, da da da.And then you, and you know, obviously you can edit it yourself and so on. So that's the kind of amplification. Now you don't say, give me my business model, right?Eric: You're like, I have this business model, like articulate it.Reid: Exactly.Eric: Um, I, politics, I mean, I feel like we, we live through such like a… you know what I mean, I feel like Silicon Valley, you know, has like, worked on PE everybody be able to, you know, everybody can get along. There's sort of competition, but then you sort of still stay close to any, everybody like, you, you especially like are good, you know, you you are in the PayPal mafia with a lot of people who are fairly very conservative now.The Trump years broke that in some ways and particular, and that, yeah. So how did you maintain those relationships?I see headlines that say you're friends with Peter Thiel. What is, what's the state of your friendship with Peter Thiel and how, how did it survive?I guess the Trump years is the question.Reid: Well, I think the thing that Peter and I learned when we were undergraduate at Stanford together is it's very important to… cause we, you know, I was a lefty. He was a righty. We'd argue a lot to maintain conversation and to argue things. It's difficult to argue on things that feel existential and it's ethically challenged is things around Trump. You know, the, you know, Trump feels to be a corrosive asset upon our democracy that is disfiguring us and staining us to the world. And so to have a dispassionate argument about it is, it's challenging. And it ends up with some uneven ground and statements like, I can't believe you're f*****g saying that, as part of dialogue.But on the other hand, you know, maintaining dialogue is I think part of how we make progress as society. And I basically sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly and committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and committed otherwise.And so, you know, there are folks from the PayPal years that I don't really spend much time talking to, right?. There are others that I do because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can't allow your own position to be the definer.It almost goes back to what we were talking about, the AI side, which is make sure you're talking to other smart people who challenge you to make sure you're doing the right thing. And that's, I think, a good general life principle.Eric: Well, you know, I feel like part of what my dream of like the Silicon Valley world is that we have these, you know, we have, Twitter is like the open forum. We're having sincere sort of on the level debates, but then you see something like, you know, the…Reid: You don't think it's the modern Seinfeld show I got? Well, not Seinfeld, um, Springer, Jerry Springer.Eric: Yeah, that's, yeah. Right. But I just feel like the sort of like, if the arguments are on the level issue is my problem with some of the sort of, I don't know, Peter Theil arguments, that he's not actually publicly advancing his beliefs in a sincere way, and that that's almost more corrosive.Reid: Oh, that's totally corrosive. And as much as that's happening, it's terrible. And that's one of the things that I, um, you know, in conversations I have, I push people including Peter on a lot.Eric: Yeah. Are you still, are you still gonna donate a lot, or what was, what's your, are you as animated about the Democratic party and working through sort of donor channels at the moment?Reid: Well, what I would say is I think that we have a responsibility to try to make, like with, it's kind of the Spider-Man ethics. With power comes responsibility, with wealth comes responsibility, and you have to try to help contribute to… what is the better society that we should be living and navigating in?And so I stay committed on that basis. And I do think there are some really amazing people in the administration. I think Biden is kind of a good everyday guy.Eric: Yeah.Reid: In fact, good for trying to build bridges in the country. I think there are people like Secretary Raimondo and Secretary Buttigieg who are thinking intensely about technology and what should be done in the future.And I think there's other folks now, I think there's a bunch of folks on the democratic side that I think are more concerned with their demagoguery than they are with the right thing in society. And so I tend to be, you know, unsympathetic to, um, you know…Eric: I know, Michael Moritz, it's Sequoia, that oped sort of criticizing San Francisco government, you know, and there's, there's certainly this sort of woke critique of the Democratic Party. I'm curious if there's a piece of it sort of outside of he governance that you're…Reid: Well, the interesting thing about woke is like, well, we're anti woke. And you're like, well, don't you think being awake is a good thing? I mean, it's kind of a funny thing. Eric: And sort of the ill-defined nature of woke is like key to the allegation because it's like, what's the substantive thing you're saying there? And you know, I mean we we're seeing Elon tweet about race right now, which is sort of terrifying anyway.Reid: Yeah. I think the question on this stuff is to try to say, look, people have a lot of different views and a lot of different things and some of those views are, are bad, especially in kind of minority and need to be advocated against in various… part of why we like democracy is to have discourse.I'm very concerned about the status of public discourse. And obviously most people tend to focus that around social media, which obviously has some legitimate things that we need to talk about. But on the other hand, they don't track like these, like opinion shows on, like, Fox News that represent themselves implicitly as news shows and saying, man, this is the following thing.Like there's election fraud in 2020, and then when they're sued for the various forms of deformation, they say, we're just an entertainment show. We don't do anything like news. So we have that within that we are already struggling on a variety of these issues within society. and we, I think we need to sort them all out.Eric: Is there anything on the AI front that we missed or that you wanted to make sure to talk about? I think we covered so much great ground. Reid: And, and we can do it again, right. You know, it's all, it's great.Eric: I love it. This was all the things you're interested in and I'm interested in, so great. I really enjoyed having you on the podcast and thanks.Reid: Likewise. And, you know, I follow the stuff you do and it's, it's, it's cool and keep doing it. 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Rising Heroes is upon us... And we bring special guest FishOnAHeater to talk about his feelings towards the new update and securing a spot in Worlds! Enjoy this fun episode, recorded live on Twitch as he attempts to be the longest episode we've ever done.https://twitter.com/FishOnAHeater_https://www.patreon.com/pallettownpvpJoin our Versus tournament!versus.btwpvp.comOur Getting Good Series is live on YouTube! Click the link to check it out.Getting Good Episode 1Check out the BTW Web Site for merch, bios, videos and more: BTWPvP.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel!Team BTWLyleJeffs111 on Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/lylejeffsiiiInstinctLeaderSpark on Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/nstinctldrsparkKyleThrows on Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/kylethrowsCnfessionhttps://www.twitch.tv/cnfessionEvan777713https://www.twitch.tv/evan777713GracieZhttps://www.twitch.tv/vgraciezCheck out and listen to our friends The Round Table ChatotIf you have suggestions, ideas, or inquiries, you can contact:Our Executive Producer: matthewbraeker@btwpvp.comYou can email us at the following:The Show: info@btwpvp.comAstro: astrozombie954@btwpvp.comDinho: dinhoelmagico@btwpvp.comWildcat: wildcatdad17@btwpvp.comGood Luck and Get Good! Become part of Team B.T.W Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest  Dion Lack This Week We Discuss Date A Gym Rat vs Inspiring Rapper Spend The Night In A Pyramid  vs A Graveyard  (Date)Someone Who Talks Through Movies vs Chews W/ Their Mouth Open  S/o To Our Sponsors KIKOFF KIKOFF.COM

Welcome to the Land Academy Show episode 1941, hosts Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit discuss why re-mailing land offers is effective and also delve into commercial real estate 101, prompted by a question from a member of their Discord channel. They also share tips and insights about commercial real estate terminology and answer more questions from the Land Academy Discord Forum as well as review land acquisitions from their weekly Thursday member webinar. If you're not yet a member of the Discord community, you can check it out in read-only format on landinvestors.com or landacademy.com. Transcript:  Steven Jack Butala: I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill K DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, and this is the Land Academy Show. Steven Jack Butala: This is episode number 1,941, and today we are talking in depth about why re-mailing land offers is so effective. And then also, I'll give a little talk on commercial real estate 101. Both of these things were highly suggested this week- Jill K DeWit: Really? Steven Jack Butala: ... in our Discord Channel. Yeah. That's where they came from. Jill K DeWit: Well, I understand the re-mailing land offers. Steven Jack Butala: I don't make this stuff up. I just take direction from our members. Sit next to you. Jill K DeWit: Are you sure? I'm not sure because there's sometimes topics creep in there that are like, dad says, "You need to know this." They may not be- Steven Jack Butala: That's why I asked you. That's why- Jill K DeWit: They may not be requested, but maybe they're required. Steven Jack Butala: We moderate each other. We're supposed to moderate each other. Jill K DeWit: Yeah. I understand. Steven Jack Butala: How effective is that? Jill K DeWit: It doesn't go very well sometimes. That's so true. I'm curious about, I like that commercial real estate 101. Is it because people are making mistakes, or they're just assuming things incorrectly? Steven Jack Butala: No, nobody's doing anything wrong. They're asking questions, which they should. You'll see what the question prompted this. The question's actually in here in a few minutes, but it's like, what the hell's commercial real estate and why is it different and how should it be treated? And more specifically- Jill K DeWit: Is it good? Is it bad? Steven Jack Butala: How can I talk about it and not sound like a ding dong? That's what I'm going to... By the time we're done with my little spiel here, you won't sound like a ding dong. Jill K DeWit: You'll learn some new words, so you too can sound like you know what you're doing. Steven Jack Butala: Is that what you do, Jill? Jill K DeWit: Drop 10 cap. Steven Jack Butala: That's good. Keep going. Jill K DeWit: Just make up. Steven Jack Butala: 10 cap. Jill K DeWit: Just make up anything cap. Well, it's a 32 cap. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah, they would kick you out for that. Jill K DeWit: Could you- Steven Jack Butala: You know what? If you could analyze a girl as a capitalization rate, Jill's a 32 cap. Jill K DeWit: Thank you. Versus some of my friends, which are five caps or- Steven Jack Butala: Or three and a half cap. Yeah. If you know commercial wheel estate it, and you're listening to this, you know what a three cap girl looks like. Jill K DeWit: True. Steven Jack Butala: And forget about how she looks. Jill K DeWit: Exactly. Steven Jack Butala: It's just how she's talks to you. Jill K DeWit: What do you do with a three cap girl? Steven Jack Butala: You walk away. Jill K DeWit: See already right there. Aren't you glad you're listening? You can sound like a professional. Steven Jack Butala: It's just not gender specific. There's three plenty of three cap guys out there too. Jill K DeWit: I dated some three cap guys. Steven Jack Butala: Yeah. And I've heard about her three cap guys, and all I wonder is why stay? Why stick around for that three cap stuff. Jill K DeWit: Yep. Thank you. Steven Jack Butala: Hey, I hope you're also enjoying this new 2023 weekly ...

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Things get a little heated this episode when talking about Niantic's latest transgressions. Astro tried to bribe his kids. Wildcat calls it like he sees it. And the guy's tendency for tangents has finally rubbed off on Matthew!Join our Versus tournament!versus.btwpvp.comOur Getting Good Series is live on YouTube! Click the link to check it out.Getting Good Episode 1Check out the BTW Web Site for merch, bios, videos and more: BTWPvP.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel!Team BTWLyleJeffs111 on Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/lylejeffsiiiInstinctLeaderSpark on Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/nstinctldrsparkKyleThrows on Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/kylethrowsCnfessionhttps://www.twitch.tv/cnfessionEvan777713https://www.twitch.tv/evan777713GracieZhttps://www.twitch.tv/vgraciezCheck out and listen to our friends The Round Table ChatotIf you have suggestions, ideas, or inquiries, you can contact:Our Executive Producer: matthewbraeker@btwpvp.comYou can email us at the following:The Show: info@btwpvp.comAstro: astrozombie954@btwpvp.comDinho: dinhoelmagico@btwpvp.comWildcat: wildcatdad17@btwpvp.comGood Luck and Get Good! Become part of Team B.T.W Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest  Brent Taylor Kanisha Buss Dion Lack This Week We Discuss Being A Bounty Hunter vs Being A Security Guard Forget Spouses Birthday vs Forget Anniversary Lightsaber vs Hoverboard 

On this episode the we touch on an idea for a tv shows. The question is if you could create a TV show what would you create. The idea that I came up with I can see happen! I'd watch it! Let us know it the comments what show you would make 

Transcript Kimberley Quinlan: Well welcome, I cannot believe this is so exciting. I've been looking forward to this episode all week. We have the amazing. Reverend Katie o'dan with us to talk all about scrupulosity and religious obsessions. So welcome, Katie. Katie O'Dunne: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here and to chat about all things Faith and OCD. So thanks for having me. Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah, so let me just quickly share in ERP school we have these underneath every training, every video. There's a little question and answer and I'm very confident in answering them, but when it comes to the specifics of religion, I always try to refer to someone who is, like an expert. And so this is so timely because I feel like you are perfect to answer some of these questions. Some of the questions we have here are from, ERP school. A lot of them are from social media and so I'm so excited to chat with you.  Katie O'Dunne: Thank you. Kimberley Quinlan: So tell us before we get into the questions, a little about your story and you know why you are here today? Katie O'Dunne:  Yeah. So I've navigated OCD since before I can remember, but just like maybe a lot of folks listening. I was very private about that for a very long time. I had a lot of shame around, intrusive thoughts. I had a lot of shame around religious obsessions that I had, moral related obsessions, harm obsessions. And this shame particularly came because I was pursuing ministry and OCD really spiked in the midst of me going to graduate school, going to seminary. And when I was in seminary and I started really struggling, I wanted to seek treatment for the first time and was told really by a mentor that it would not help me to do that. In my ministry that I wouldn't pass my psych evaluations and that I shouldn't pursue treatment that I needed to keep that on the down low. So as many of us know, that might not get that effective evidence-based treatment I continued to get sicker Katie O'Dunne: And had a really pretty full-blown OCD episode in my first role in ministry. Katie O'Dunne: So I ended up in school chaplaincy working, with lots of students from different faith backgrounds, some of what we'll be talking about today, through an OCD lens. And I was trying to keep my OCD a secret, but in the midst of navigating, some difficult tragedies and traumas with students, my OCD latched on to every aspect of what I was navigating. And particularly in the midst of that, I was experiencing losses and mental health crises with students from different faith backgrounds. And when I came out of my own treatment, where exposure and response prevention, very much saved my life. I felt like, I had an obligation to those students that I worked with to let them know that their chaplain, that their faith leader had gone through mental health treatment and that there was no shame around doing that. And I went from the space, in seminary of being told that I shouldn't seek treatment to a space of having families call me for the first time and say, Oh now we can actually talk to you about what's going on in our life. Can you help us talk with our rabbi or our imam, or our priest about my child's diagnosis? How can we reconcile faith with treatment and that opened the door for me to continue this work in a full-time way. Where moving from those students that I love so much and  now work in the area of faith and OCD full-time helping folks, navigate religious scrupulosity and very much lean into evidence-based treatment while also reconnecting with their faith in ways that are value driven to them and not dictated by OCD. Kimberley Quinlan: Hmm, it makes me teary. Just to hear you say  that folks were saying, Well, now, I can share with you. That is so interesting to me. You know, I think of a reverend, as like, you can go to them with anything, you know, and for them to say that you're disclosing has open some doors, that's incredible. Katie O'Dunne: And particularly, I worked really heavily with my Hindu and Muslim students. And we had the chance to do some really awesome mental health initiatives for the South Asian community, where students started then doing projects actually in their own faith communities, and opening up about their own journeys, and then giving other space to do the same. And I really, I think about the work I do now, which is very much across faith traditions around OCD. And every person I work with, I think of those awesomely brave students, who started to come to me after my disclosure and say, Okay, we want help and also we want to share our stories and continues to inspire me. DOES RELIGIOUS OCD/SCRUPULOSITY SHOW UP BEYOND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION?  Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah, so cool!  It leads me to my first question which is, does this for OCD religious scrupulosity, have you found, and I  definitely have,  that It goes outside of just the Christian religion. I know we hear a lot about just the Christian religion, but can you kind of give me your experience with some other religions you've had to work with? 00:05:00 Katie O'Dunne: Yeah. And so I always tell folks OCD is OCD, is OCD. And it always loves to latch on to those things that are the most significant and important to us. So it makes a lot of sense, that, that would happen with our faith tradition, whether you're Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Sheik, or beyond or even atheist or agnostic can really transform into anything, particularly from what, you might be hearing from faith leaders and I always go back to this idea that OCD is just really gross ice cream with a lot of different gross flavors and those flavors might be in the form of the Christian faith or in the Jewish faith or in the Muslim faith. But the really big commonalities is the fact that it's not about what a person actually believes just like, with everything else with OCD. This is very much egoistonic. It's taking their beliefs. It's twisting them and it's actually pushing them further away from the tradition. So, it's just some examples. Katie O'Dunne:  That we see, of course, in Christianity, you all might be familiar with obsessions around committing blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, or fear of going to hell or fear of sinning in some way. But we also see lots of different things in Islam, whether that's around not being fully focused during Friday prayers or not doing ritual washing in the appropriate way. In Judaism we see so many different things around dietary restrictions or breaking religious law. What if I'm not praying correctly? Hinduism, even what if I'm pronouncing shlokas or mantras incorrectly? What if I have done something to impact my karma or my dharma? What if I'm focusing too heavily on a particular deity or not engaging in puja correctly. or in Buddhism I see a lot of folks, really focusing on what if I never stop suffering, What if I've impacted my karma in some way? What if I don't have pure intention, alongside that action and… Kimberley Quinlan: Right. Katie O'Dunne: then all the way on the other side. We can see with any type of non-theism or atheism, agnosticism humanism What if I believe the wrong thing? What if I'm supposed to believe in God, what if I'll be punished for for not? So there are all different forms and then with any faith, tradition. I mean any form possible. That OCD could latch onto Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah, absolutely I think there's just some amazing examples I had once a client who felt his frustrations weren't correct. Katie O'Dunne:  Yes. Kimberley Quinlan: And got stuck really continue and trying to perfect it so I think it can fall into any of those religions for sure. So you've already touched on this a little bit, but this was one of the questions that came from Instagram. Just basically there was saying like OCD makes me doubt my faith. Like why does it do that? Do you have any thoughts, on a specifically why OCD can make us doubt our faith? Katie O'Dunne: Yeah. I mean OCD is the doubting disorder and we always say the content is irrelevant, but it definitely doesn't feel like it. I think for anybody navigating OCD, you're most likely in a space of saying I could accept uncertainty about any theme except the one that I have right now and that's very much true with faith. If your faith is something that's significant to you and at the center of your life, it makes sense that OCD would latch on to that and that OCD would twist that particularly… Kimberley Quinlan:  Right. Katie O'Dunne: because we really don't have a whole lot of certainty around faith to begin with and where there's a disorder that surrounds uncertainty and and doubt. That makes a lot of sense. And yet it's so so challenging, um, because we want to be able to answer all of these questions without OCD making us question every single thing we believe, WHEN OCD DOUBTS MY FAITH Kimberley Quinlan: Mmm. It's sort of like religious obsession. I mean relationship obsessions too in that and you're probably looking at people across the your religious faith hall or wherever going, but they are certain like why can't I get that certainty? Right. But it's like they've accepted a degree of uncertainty for them to feel certain in it. But when you have OCD, it's so hard to accept that uncertainty piece of it. Katie O'Dunne: I'm so glad you said that I actually get this question a lot. And this, this might be a strange answer for folks to hear from a minister. But I always tell folks, I'm not certain I Have devoted my life to faith traditions. I'm ordained. I'm not certain about anything including about the divine. Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah. Katie O'Dunne: I have really strong beliefs, I have strong things that I lead lean into and practices that are meaningful to me. But it doesn't mean that I have certainty. And often, when you hear someone in a faith tradition, say that there are certain, I don't think it means the same thing as what we're thinking, it means from. 00:10:00 Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah. it's Yeah,… Katie O'Dunne: a different context. They are accepting some level of uncertainty. Kimberley Quinlan: that's why I compared it to relationship OCD, You're like, but I'm not sure if I love my partner enough and everybody else is really certain but when you really ask them, they're like, No I'm not completely certain,… Katie O'Dunne: Yeah. WILL GOD PUNISH ME FOR MY INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS? Kimberley Quinlan: like I'm just certain for today or whatever it may be. So I think that that is very much a typical trade of OCD in that, it requires 100%, okay? So, so, This is actually really one of the first common questions we get when we're doing psychoeducation with clients. Which is why do I have a fear that God will punish me for my intrusive thoughts? You want to share a little about that. Katie O'Dunne: Yeah, I mean there are so many, there are so many layers with this and again, latching on to what's the most important but also latching on to particular teachings. Whether it's in a church or a mosque or a synagogue where I always say there are particular scriptures, particular, teachings, particular sermons, where you might hear things that relate to punishment in some way, or relate to rigidity, but I think folks, with OCD hear those, through a very different lens than maybe someone else in that congregation and we might hear something once at age, five or six and for the rest of our lives latch on to this idea that we're doing something wrong or that God is going to punish us, we tend to always see everything through that really, really negative lens and maybe miss all of the other things that we hear about compassion and about love and forgiveness. And I think there's also this layer for individuals with OCD often holding themselves to a higher standard than everyone else and that includes the way that they see God as viewing them. So I'll often ask folks. How do you think, how do you imagine God, viewing a friend in the situation? Just like we might do a self compassion work and they're like, Well, I believe God would be really forgiving of my friend and that they might not be perfect but that they were created to live this beautiful life. And then when asking the same thing about themselves, It's but God called me to be perfect and I have to do all of these things right. I'll ask often ask folks, What does it look like to see yourself through the same loving eyes through which God sees you or which you imagine that God sees those around you which is something we don't often do with OCD. Kimberley Quinlan: And what would they often say? Katie O'Dunne: Ah well it's so I'll actually use self-compassion practices to to turn things around. And I'll say I'll ask someone to name three kind things about themselves and then to put their hand over their heart and actually say it through the lens of God saying that to them. So I'll have them say something like The Divine created me to be compassionate, the Divine believes that I am a kind person, the Divine wants me to have this beautiful life and to be a good runner or a good baseball player or whatever that is. And it's always really difficult at the beginning just like any self-compassion practice. And then I'll watch folks start to smile and say Well maybe God does see me in that way. Kimberley Quinlan: That's lovely. Katie O'Dunne: Maybe create me in a beautiful way. DO NOT FEAR…SHOULD I TURN MY FEARS OVER TO GOD? Kimberley Quinlan: Mmm. That's what it's bringing them. Back to their religion and their faith when they do that, which is so beautiful, isn't it? Mmm. Okay, This question is very similar but I really think it was important to to address is there are some scriptures where people here that they aren't allowed to fear or that they must turn their fears over to God. Do you have any thoughts or you know, responses that you would typically use for that concern? Katie O'Dunne: Mm-hmm. Katie O'Dunne:  Yeah, I think, you know, it looks very different across faith traditions and across scriptures and individuals, of course, view Scripture and in very different ways but depending on their denomination, or depending on their sect, but I think sometimes, unfortunately, those scriptures are used out of context. We see this often where there might be a particular verse that's pulled that from a translation perspective isn't necessarily really about anxiety in the same way that we're defining anxiety through an OCD lens or isn't really about intrusive thoughts, in the way that we're defining it through the lens of OCD. And I think it's really unfortunate when we hear religious leaders or folks in communities say, Well, you aren't allowed to fear or if you just prayed a little bit harder, your anxieties would be able to be turned over to God. And I think we're hearing that or they're using that and maybe a different way than the passage was intended. And then we're hearing this through a whole nother another layer where it actually could be flipped. And instead, when you're you're saying, Don't fear. I always tell folks. So what does it look like instead to not fear treatment or to do it  even if you're afraid. To ask God, to give you strength in the midst of that fear  and to approach that in a different way. But I think sometimes those who are taking particular passages out of context, might not fully understand the weight of OCD, or what comes with that condition. 00:15:00 HOW DO I KNOW IF IT IS OCD OR IN LINE WITH THE RULES OF MY FAITH? Kimberley Quinlan: Right. Right. I love that. Thank you for sharing. That was actually the most common question, I think. So like four or five people off the same question. So I know that's a such an important question that we addressed. Quite a few people also asked how to differentiate like, you know with OCD treatment, it's about sort of understanding and being aware of when OCD is present and how it plays its games, and it's tricks in its tools that it uses. How would people know whether something is OCD or actually in line with the rules of their faith? Do you have any sort of suggestions for people who are struggling with that? Katie O'Dunne:  Yeah, so I'll actually often show folks a chart when we start to work together and we'll put things in different buckets of what are things that you're doing, because they are meaningful because they bring you hope because they bring you comfort because they bring you joy. And then on the other hand, What are things that you're doing out of fear? Out of anxiety things, that feel urgent things that are really uncomfortable. And of course, there is never any certainty around anything, which is very much one of the tricky parts with with treatment, right? We want to have certainty but I invite folks to really make the assumption that probably those things that bring joy and meaning and hope and passion and connection are the authentic versions of their faith. Versus the things that we're doing out of fear or anxiety. And, you know, I was doing a training, a couple months ago for clinicians in this area and I was, I was talking about how, you know, we don't necessarily want folks to pray out a fear and someone had a really great question. They said. Okay. But if a plane is going down and someone's praying because they're afraid like that's not because it's OCD, I'm like No that's that's very true. But in that situation they are praying because they're afraid to bring meaning and hope they're not praying because they're afraid of not praying and… Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah. Katie O'Dunne: there's a very big distinction there. Are you doing the practice? Because you're afraid of not doing it or not or you're afraid of not doing it perfectly, or are you engaging in that practice even in moments that are tough in order to bring you peace and meaning and joy and comfort. WHEN PRAYER BECOMES A COMPULSION  Kimberley Quinlan:  And that if that, maybe I've got this wrong so please check me on this, but it feels like too, when people often ask me that similar question but not around compulsive praying of like, but if there is a problem, shouldn't I actually do something about it? And I'm like, Well, this that's a difference between doing something about something when there is an actual problem compared to doing something because maybe something might happen in the future, right? It's such a trick that OCD plays. Is it gets you to do things just in case. So would that be true of that as well? Katie O'Dunne: Okay. Yeah. And I often tell folks just again because it's just another form of OCD that's latching on to something that significant very similar. I tell folks, if it's really a problem that you need to address, most likely you would do it without asking the question to begin with. But it's I think the unfortunate thing that the other example I give is well, if we think most traditions we think of God as a parent figure and I ask folks, who are our parents to imagine their relationship with their own child, and do you want your child to connect with you throughout the day out of meaning and out of hope and out of genuine, a genuine desire for love or because they're afraid of not talking to you and… Kimberley Quinlan: Right. Katie O'Dunne: those are two. Those are two very, very different things. Kimberley Quinlan:  Right. As it's like a disciplinarian figure. Yeah, that's a really great example. I love that. Yeah. Okay. This is, this was one of the questions that I got, but it's actually one of the cases that I have had in my career, as well, which is around the belief that thoughts are equal to deeds, right? Like that. If I think it, it must mean, I love it, I like it, or I want it or I've done it. Can you give some perspective to that from from specifically related to religious obsessions? Katie O'Dunne:  00:20:00 Katie O'DunneYeah this can be really hard for folks and of course with OCD thought actions fusion can be really challenging anyway and there is often, for folks in a faith context this belief that because I had this though, because I had what might be perceived as a sinful thought, I must be committing blasphemy, or I must be committing this particular sin and that can make it really really tought to do diffusion work with you clinician because its like I had this thought it must actually mean that I have done this thing that is in opposition to God and I always tell folks that of course I am not going to reassure you fully that those things are completely separate but I would invite you to lean into the possibility that a thought is just a thought. Just like any other aspect of OCD we have a jillion different thoughts a day that pass into and out of our minds and I actually think from a faith perspective that it is pretty cool that our brains produce alot of different thoughts, that we see things and make different associations. Ill tell folks way to do God we see things and make all sorts of connections. But, having thought doesn't equate to having a particular action even if we are looking on the form of most scriptures. It is really referencing things that we are doing, ways that we are actually engaging with those thoughts and taking that into our actions. And again from the pulpit, you might hear someone talk about thoughts or intrusive thoughts in ways that are not equivalent to how we're talking about them through an OCD lens,… Kimberley Quinlan:  Mm-hmm. Katie O'Dunne: something very different and they're really talking about more of an intentional act, in something that you're you're doing, as opposed to what we're thinking about. It's just a biological process of thoughts, moving through your mind. ARE THOUGHTS EQUAL TO DEEDS? Kimberley Quinlan:  Right. And and what I be right in clarifying here, is it important to differentiate between a thought you had compared to a thought that's intrusive, is that an important piece or do we not need to go to that level? Katie O'Dunne: Do you mean, in the religious context? I, I don't know. I mean, I, I'm curious what you think from a clinical I go back to thoughts or thoughts or thoughts and… Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah. Katie O'Dunne: they are intrusive because we're labeling them as intrusive. Unfortunately, sometimes in religious context, and I hear this a lot, someone might go to… I hear actually from sermons all the time, where someone is saying that intrusive thoughts or in some way sinful and really what they're thinking are just regular thoughts that people are giving value to and… Kimberley Quinlan:  Yeah. Yeah. Katie O'Dunne: it makes it makes it really challenging for folks where they're giving more value to their thoughts and then thinking, well my preacher said that if I have a thought that's quote unquote bad that it means something about me. EXPOSURE & RESPONSE PREVENTION (ERP) FOR RELIGIOUS OBSESSIONS/SCRUPULOSITY Kimberley Quinlan:  I think you just hit the nail on the head,  when we apply judgment to a thought as good or bad, then we're in trouble, right. That's when things start to go sticky. Yeah. Okay, excellent. Okay. Let's talk about specific treatment for religious obsessions and exposure examples. I know for those listening we have done an episode with Jud  Steve,  I will link that in the show notes. He did go over some but I just love for you to go over like what are some examples of exposures? And how might we approach exposure and response prevention, specifically related to these religious obsessions? Katie O'Dunne: Yeah, so his health folks, I'm not I'm not a clinician, but I work alongside a lot of really amazing clinicians in religious scrupulosity to develop exposure hierarchies. And one of the big fears when I'm working with someone is often, how could I possibly engage in exposure and response prevention because what if someone asked me to do something that's in opposition to my faith? And I want to go ahead and just put that on the table right now… I know that's a big fear and I want you to know that a good OCD specialist or an ERP therapist is really gonna work with you not to go against or to oppose your faith. But to do some things that are a little bit uncomfortable in service of you, being able to get back to your faith in a value-driven way. Katie O'Dunne: I really believe we are never going to be incredibly excited about exposures. When I was on my own exposure and response, prevention journey, I never once walked into the office and said, Yes, I get to do this really scary exposure today. It's gonna be so fun. Well, I guess I did say that because my therapist made me pretend to be excited about exposures, but that's different. That's a different conversation was not necessarily genuine. And so i'll often ask folks, I know that this isn't something that you want to do, but why don't you want to do it? And if the answer is well, I'm afraid that it might upset God or I'm afraid something bad might happen. That's probably a good exposure. If the immediate response is Well, no, I'm not gonna do that. No one else in my tradition would do that. That's completely in opposition to everything we believe, probably not something that that we would ask you to do and often clinicians will use the 80/20 rule of what would 80% of the folks within your congregation be willing to do and that can be really helpful working with a faith leader as well or with other folks within your particular sect or denomination to establish that. 00:25:00 Katie O'Dunne:  The same time there. Oh my goodness, so many different exposures that we can go into. But a lot of things that I see folks commonly working on are things like praying imperfectly maybe speaking or speaking of blasphemous thought aloud or thinking through that in an intentional way, writing an aspect of that, not completing ritual washing again and again only doing it once and even thinking through the fact that it might not have been perfect that time or maybe even intentionally diverting your attention in the midst of a prayer. Sometimes for folks who are avoiding Scripture that is intentionally reading that aspect of Scripture and then maybe thinking intentionally about something that they've thought as a bad thought or that they've defined in that way. But again it very much depends for each person and I really want folks to know that it doesn't mean that you are going to be asked to eat something that goes against your dietary restrictions or to deface a religious text. Those are the two things I hear folks, very fearful of and that isn't something that you need to do in order to get better. It's about having conversation and handing over the keys to your clinician to do some uncomfortable stuff in favor of getting back to your faith in a value-driven way. Kimberley Quinlan: Yeah, I love that. I'll tell a quick story, when I was a new intern treating OCD having no clue really what I was doing. I'm very happy to disclose that was the facts, but I had amazing supervisors and I grew up in an Episcopalian denomination and I had a client who was of similar denomination in the Christian faith. And my supervisor said, Well, okay, you're gonna have him go and say the blasphemous words and in my mind, this being my first case going like are we allowed, like side eye.And he said Okay this is your first go around. I want you to ask your client to go and speak with their religious leader and say, This is what I'm struggling with. AndI have this diagnosis and this is the treatment, it's the gold standard and Kimberley's gonna go with you and do we have permission to proceed and the minister was so wonderful. He said, If that is what's gonna bring you closer to your faith, go as hard as you can. And for me, it was just such a beautiful experience as a new clinician to have. He knew nothing about OCD but he was like if that's what you need to do to get closer, go. Like he had so much Faith himself in, I know it'll bring you to the right place and so it's so beautiful for me and that kind of helped me guide my clients to this day. Like go and get permission speak to your minister if that helps you to move forward, do you have any thoughts on that? Katie O'Dunne: Oh yes, and this is really my favorite thing that I get to do with folks in addition to working with clinicians and clients and developing exposures, also in faith traditions that are not my own, but then I might have studied make connections to other faith leaders so we can talk about what makes the most sense in this particular set so that someone can fully live into their faith tradition while well, maybe being a little uncomfortable in this moment or doing something tough and I deeply believe whatever that looks like for you, even if the exposure seems a little bit scary, that God can handle our exposures. Across faith traditions. We see the divine as this big, wonderful powerful all knowing force and with everything going on in the world, I deeply believe theologically that the exposure that we're doing over here, which might seem really hard for us, that God can handle that as a way for us to get back to doing the things that we were actually created to do. And in that way, similar to the minister that you talked with that said, Hey, go for it. I'll even tell folks, I see ERP as a spiritual practice because a spiritual practice is defined as anything that helps you to reconnect or get closer with the divine and in that way, doing ERP really does that because it's breaking down the OCD so that you almost stop worshiping OCD and actually reconnect with God in a way that's value driven for you. That's actually what I'm getting ready to start. My doctoral research on is actually redefining ERP as a spiritual practice across faith traditions in ways that are accessible for a diverse population. Kimberley Quinlan: And that's so beautiful, I love that. Okay, let's see. Okay, This is actually the last question, but this is actually the one I'm most excited to ask. This is actually from someone I deeply care about. They have written in and said, When I get anxious, I try to submit it to God knowing of his love and power. So, by writing a script, which is an ERP practice, for those of you who don't know, it seems I'm in conflict with my religious belief. Do you have any like points, final points, you want to make about that? 00:30:00 Katie O'Dunne: Yeah. So two big things, one going off of what I was just sharing a second ago. I would encourage you to know, or maybe not to know, for sure but, we can lean into uncertainty around this right? But to accept all of the uncertainty, while also leaning in and believing that God can handle this difficult script that you're writing or this difficult exposure that you're doing in favor of you getting to live the life that you were created to live. Not defined by OCD and that you still can pray and ask for God's support as a part of that. I would never ask someone not to continue to connect with God during some of sometimes, the most difficult process of their life which treatment can be, I know it was for me, it was incredibly scary. But rather than asking for reassurance, or asking for God, to undo any of that exposure work we're doing or or saying, oof, disregard this script I just did. We're not, we're not going to do any of those things, but rather, I would invite you to say, in whatever way makes sense to you, Dear God, please help me to lean into the uncertainty, please help me to sit with this discomfort associated with this exposure, on the way to getting back to this big, beautiful, awesome life that you've created me to live. It's really hard right now. This is really tough, but please walk with me as I sit with all of it, helping me not to push away that anxiety, but rather to be with it as I reclaim my life. Amen. Or something of that nature. Yeah. Kimberley Quinlan:  Yeah, that's beautiful. So thank you, really. I get teary again, this is such a beautiful conversation. Okay, so number one, thank you so much for coming on, really, it's a blessing to have you here and you know, I think this will help so many folks. Is there something that we didn't cover that you you know that point that you just made alone, I feel like it's like mic drop. But is there anything else you want to add before we finish up? Katie O'Dunne: Yeah, um, and just, and this is a little bit more Christocentric, but I think it goes across faith traditions, I often talk about the recovery Trinity and just to leave folks with this as well. That I deeply believe that it's possible to have faith in yourself, faith in the divine and faith in your treatment all at the same time and that those three pieces coming together, allowing those to be together, actually can be a huge key with religious scrupulosity, and taking a step towards your life during treatment. Kimberley Quinlan: That's beautiful. And I've never heard that before. That is so beautiful. I'll be sure to get my staff all trained up in that as well. Thank you. oh, Katie,… Katie O'Dunne: Oh sorry, one more thing. Sorry, as I say that and I know we're closing out. I also always want folks to know that ERP. This is, this really is my last thing. I promise. Kimberley Quinlan:  Oh no, no. Go for it. You've got the mic go. Katie O'Dunne:  No. Um that I've worked with a lot of folks across traditions with religious scroup and I would say um a majority of the folks that I've worked with have moved through ERP and at the other side actually have a deeper relationship with their faith then maybe they did before and I would encourage you to hear that that actually leaning into that uncertainty translates far beyond OCD sometimes into a closer relationship with God. And I've worked with folks who have moved through ERP that end up going into ministry because that's meaningful to them in a way that isn't driven by OCD. So just knowing that it doesn't ever mean, you're stepping away from your faith, you're taking actually this leap of faith to reconnect with it in a way that's actually authentic to you. Kimberley Quinlan: Mmhm. I'm so grateful that you added that. Isn't that some of the truth, with OCD in general, like the more you want certainty, the less of it you have. And the more you let go of it, the more you can kind of have that value driven life. I love it. Okay, I can't thank you enough, really, this has been such a beautiful conversation. I probably nearly cried like four times and I don't, I don't often get to that. It's just so, so beautiful and deep. And I think it's, it's wonderful. Thank you. Where will people hear about, you get to know you reach out to you and so forth. Katie O'Dunne: Yeah, so folks are more than welcome to reach out to me via Instagram at @RevkRunsBeyondOCD or on my website at RevKatieO'dunne.com. I do lots of work again with clinicians and faith, leaders and clients but also have free weekly faith and OCD support groups along with interfaith prayer services for folks navigating what it means to lean into their faith traditions from a space of uncertainty and an inclusive environment. And then I would also encourage folks to check out our upcoming Faith and OCD conference with the Iocdf in May along with a really awesome resource page that we were so proud to put out last year. I had the chance to work with a really great team of clinicians and faith leaders to create a resource page for all of you to see what scrupulosity might look like in your faith tradition along with resources. So check out all of those wonderful things. 00:35:00 Kimberley Quinlan: Amazing. We will have all that linked in the show notes. Thank you, Katie, really! It's such an honor to have you on the show.Katie O'Dunne: Thank you. This was lovely. Thank you so much.

The study of whole vine physiology does not isolate one variable in grape growing. It looks at many factors at once including data collection in the plant, in the environment and in fruit. In her research, Patty Skinkis, Viticulture Extension Specialist and Professor in the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University helps growers improve their farming practices by evaluating the plant growth stage, shoot growth, pruning weights, yield, cluster weight, berry size, and fruit chemistry. Patti shares her surprising results from a 10-year trial on crop load management. Grower trials found there was very little difference with crop thinning in both fruit and wine quality. References: 145: New Class of Compounds Linked to Smoke Taint in Wines 2/15/2023 Managing Grapevine Trunk Disease Webinar | REGISTER Elizabeth Tomasino, Associate Professor, Oregon State University Patty Skinkis Patty Skinkis Google Scholar Page Patty Skinkis on Instagram SIP Certified Vineyard Team – Become a Member Yield Management Video Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript Craig Macmillan  0:00  And our guest today is Dr. Patti Skinkis. She is viticulture extension specialist and professor in the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University. And really excited to have you here tonight. Welcome Patti.   Patti Skinkis  0:10  Thank you. It's great to be here.   Craig Macmillan  0:12  So there's a concept that's kind of out there. I'm familiar with the words, but I'm not entirely familiar with what it means. What is whole vine physiology?   Patti Skinkis  0:21  Whole vine physiology is really looking at the study of how the vine is responding to its environment. And it's not looking at just one component, it's looking at how the entire vine is responding. A lot of times, whole plant physiologists are more applied plant physiologist, rather than more fundamental in that they're looking at exactly how that plant is responding to its environment. And sometimes that environment is things that we do to it, such as the studies that we do and in crop management, as well as fine tuning, looking at some aspects and and trying to understand how it links to other aspects of how that plant is responding to its environment. But we're taking the plant as a whole.   Craig Macmillan  0:59  That sounds kind of difficult. It sounds like there's a lot of variables there. How do you do you identify a couple of variables? And say, we're going to look at these? And if so, how many might you be able to handle at a time? You know, I've done a lot of research and statistics. And every time you add something the whole system gets exponentially more complex. As an example, what kinds of things might you look at with a plant, you're going to modify one variable in the environment? But then what other kinds of responses might you look at?   Patti Skinkis  1:23  Well, doing whole plant physiology work is difficult in it's the nature of the beast, when you're looking at the entirety and taking it in as a whole. I like to address this question from a standpoint of what it is not. And partly because I work with a lot of other scientists who work in biochemistry or fruit chemistry. And they always want to isolate the one thing or two things that can explain what we might be seeing in fruit chemistry, or in plant nutrition. But the reality is, we have to accept that we can't explain at all that it's a whole package. It's not one specific mechanism. As a result of that we look at a lot of things, we try to understand how one piece will influence another piece. So a lot of times in the studies that I'm doing, we tend to do a lot of data collection on the plant as well as in the environment. And then the fruit, it means that we do a lot of data collection, maybe more so than other scientists would if they are just looking at pathology or insects or some other aspect, we monitor the vines phonology. So the growth stage, we monitor shoot growth early season, and then we switch to leaf area, we do pruning weight. So all of those are giving us an idea of the plant size, how much it grows. And then of course, we look at yield, and then yield components, which takes it through looking at cluster weight and rakus, length and very size. And all of those just take a lot of time. And then of course we get into the root chemistry. And it's not just you know basic ripeness at harvest, we then go into global analyses of key compounds like nitrogen and the phenomics. We do collect a lot of data and ultimately, what refines what we're looking at is kind of we always write our research questions to say, Okay, here's what we're going to target. But then a lot of times, we end up coming back to doing all of those measures, in part because we know that a lot of it is interlinked. And so it is a lot of data collection, a lot of complexity. One of your questions was how do we deal with all the variables? And so that really, you know, from the standpoint of doing whole plant physiology, where I'm working in a vineyard, I'm working typically in research farms, or on grower collaborator sites. And when it comes to controlling variables, that's when we try to do as much as we can. So can we pick a trial site where we've got very healthy vines that we know are consistent, rootstock consistent soil as best we can consistent, slope, we try to even avoid hillsides if we can. And if we can't, then we block accordingly. So we're doing a lot of re study evaluation of the site to know what can we at least try to eliminate instead of creating more messiness, in a system that we're trying to understand.   Craig Macmillan  4:02  You mentioned work that you're doing what what kinds of things you're looking at right now.   Patti Skinkis  4:05  So right now we have a number of different trials, but main work is in vineyard floor management rootstocks and yield management. And so those are the three primary areas that I'm working on currently.   Craig Macmillan  4:19  What do you do with root stocks? I know that wasn't the topic you and I talked about earlier, but I'm curious about that, because that's a fixed thing. Pick the root stock. And that's it forever. I hope I made the right choice.   Patti Skinkis  4:30  While we're doing a rootstock trial, and I'm lucky that my predecessors had established a block in 1997. So we have a well maintained mature trial with 19 rootstocks that are include Pinot Noir on those 19 rootstocks and owner divines. And so we came back thinking okay, there's a lot more questions coming from growers here in Oregon about what rootstocks they should be using climate change is definitely occurring. We see warmer, drier seas Once and while most of our vineyards can be dry farmed in the Willamette Valley, many people are very concerned about being in sites that have limited soils or not as luxurious soil. So we call them in terms of soil moisture as and nutrition, but also there, even though we're dry farmed, we don't necessarily have access to water. So if they needed to irrigate and may not be be possible if they're getting into different vineyard properties, we decided to embark on looking at this trial that has been in place at our research farm and come in and start looking at plant water stress and comparing those to our standard rootstocks, which happened to be in our trial. So we have a whole mix of more drought tolerant root stocks as well as our standard vineyard rootstocks, which are mostly vigor reducing, not drought tolerant. And those are what most of our industry is planted on, at least here in the Willamette Valley. And so the the trial was really done to see, okay, if we do switch to root stocks, what does it look like for yield for canopy size. And we, of course, looked at the the water stress response as well. And so we've been monitoring over the last four years different components of that rootstock trial, and the last two years being looking more in depth at plant water stress as a result.   Craig Macmillan  6:12  This is kind of a practical question, in my mind when we're talking about things like yield changes, are you pruning like this rootstock tell? Are you pruning everything to the same bud count? Are you leaving the same number of growing points on every mind?   Patti Skinkis  6:22  That is a great question, because it's such a mature trial, the results of rootstock are clearly visible. So for the most part, we can prune to the same number of buds per plant. But in some cases, we have to do balance pruning, because there's so little vigor, so for example, with Riparia rootstock, it's very degrading. And so we cannot do the same number of buds as we can, for 1616 or 1103 or 140R for the most part, we try to keep to the same, but number. But again, we have to balance prune some of those that are clearly very invigorated by the rootstock.   Craig Macmillan  7:00  You've been doing work on crop load recently, which I'm very, very, very interested in. What is it specifically that you're looking at terms of variables, manipulations, then also very user? How did this come about? How did this become a research question they became interested in?   Patti Skinkis  7:12  The crop load work has been a part of my research program now for about 12 years. And I started out doing that work, because I saw a lot of focus on reducing yield in the Oregon industry. When I first came here, it didn't make sense to me, because our vines are very healthy, we get a lot of leaf area, they're well managed. And it's not high shoot density. I mean, everybody has shoot thinning to the the required three shoots per linear foot, or three to five at most per linear foot. And so their crop thinning at that time to one cluster per shoot, which is about a 40% crop reduction, and they're doing it late in the season. So around lag phase, of berry development. So I embarked on a study to studies timing by intensity trial in 2010, through 2013, and looked at just when should they be cropping and by how much. And we found that from that study, there was very clearly no benefit to really doing it early, we could do it late in which was my surprise, I thought if there was going to be any impact that would be necessary to hasten ripening, then, and that's always our goal, hasten ripening and increase quality because a lot of growers believe we need to do it to get our harvest end before the fall rains, or just to improve what they call concentration.   Craig Macmillan  8:34  Real quick, just talked about Oregon in general. So if I've got Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley, how much danger do I have from rain coming into harvest? Is that a common problem? Is that happen occasionally, but enough that it's an issue?   Patti Skinkis  8:46  Certainly 10 to 12 years ago, it was a real and present danger every year. And now in recent years, it's been less of a concern because we become warmer and we tend to be harvesting earlier. So when I embarked on this trial, you know, it's always a concern. And it certainly is at the forefront of most of the longtime grape growers and winemakers as we get new people and I think they're willing to do more hangtime. So there's always this dichotomy of wanting hang time, but always the threat of, of rain, and we just don't know there's no crystal ball to know how long we'll have. But typically, we're seeing more dry September's than we have in the past. Usually, by the time we get to October, everybody's you know, they're worried about the rain coming, it's a percentage chance of having rains during harvest is significantly higher. As we get into October when we were doing the work. We wanted to see, you know, should they be thinning because their vines are behind and they need to thin earlier or do we thin later as a means to kind of have them catch up. And what we found in those first studies was that did not really make a difference to crop thin, early, and in fact, it made more vigor and we deal with a lot of over vigor in the Willamette Valley, so there was definitely not worth cluster thinning preboot Boom or at bloom or even at fruit set and waiting to leg favs was completely founded. The second thing we found is that the cluster thinning really didn't have had much of an impact at all. The only year it did was in 2011, which was a, a cooler season, and a very big crop. And we were very late. So about a month later in everything. And so we did see a benefit of of cluster thinning in that year where we kind of reached a maximum level that we would expect that these plants would be able to carry through ripeness. So when I did all of those trials, I shared it with growers, they were very excited to hear the results growers much more excited than winemakers about the results. But their answer kept being to me, you know that that's great, you got an answer for those two vineyards where you did that work. But those are special cases or only those vineyards. And I thought, you know, is bigger. When we look at crop load management is such a entrenched practice that you crop then in high in cool climate regions for high wind quality. Restricting crop is important. And that's something that one study here there is not going to change. And the only way to really change it would be to embark on a very large project that directly engages growers in that process, not only growers but winemakers, too, and doing that work on their farms. So prior to my first crop load studies even being finished, I started embarking on this idea of a much, much more grandiose project that involved a lot of partnership with industry directly. And so over two years, we had planned the study, working with growers on an advisory committee and said, Okay, here's my idea, what do you think, will you join? And how can we make this work. And so that was in 2010, I basically started having those conversations while I was also doing my smaller scale projects. And as a result of that, we started what's called the statewide crop load project. And we ran that for 10 years from 2012, to 2021. So 10 growing seasons, and we solicited partnerships with growers, they were all volunteers, and they came mostly from the Willamette Valley. And they basically did the cluster thinning or crop thinning to their determined levels that they wanted to use over as many as 10 years. So so they had to be in the project at least three years if they could. And the the goal was for them also to make wine. And so sometimes the winery that owns the vineyard made the wine sometimes other folks or other people who bought the wine made the wine, the wines had to be made. And so the process was that the growers had to do the thinning and collect data per protocols that my lab gave them. And then they had to produce the wines that then we did some analysis on. And we did the analysis on fruit as well.   Craig Macmillan  12:43  These growers, were they doing different different levels of thinning on their property, side by side, and then you were using site as rep. I'm totally geeking out here, but or were they designed as replicated experiments on site or just this ranch does this and this ranch does it? How did you how did you set it up? Because that's hard?   Patti Skinkis  13:01  Yes. So we set it up as more robust is what I wanted, I wanted to be replicated on site. And then so each trial is its own trial. So each grower had to replicate it in a randomized complete block design in their individual vineyards. And so that at the end of the day, we could analyze their data within their vineyard, as well as across all vineyards. So it's replicated at least three times. In fact, most vineyards were replicated far more than three times, but I only made them get data on three reps, because they've quickly realized that they could divide their vineyard up into as many treatment reps as they wanted. But then if they would collect data on all of those, it would just be time to time consuming. So we did minimum of three reps of data collection.   Craig Macmillan  13:45  You are my statistical hero. Now, I've had to do these. And what you're doing is just the gold standard gold plated. I'm so happy. I can't wait to find out what you found out because you did it exactly right. I'm so struck, anyway continues to have. So this is great. So the industry they're doing, they're doing it on site. They're collecting data.   Patti Skinkis  14:03  They're collecting the data, they hand in the data, they make the wine, and then we did sensory for five years with the Oregon State University. My colleague here Elizabeth Tomasino led sensory trials with winemakers. And so we did the first five years that way. And then the second five years, the group as a whole decided they wanted to switch gears and focus on just their internal sensory. So in house evaluation of their wines, which I had hoped that they were doing the first five years, but it turned out unless you gave them a protocol, they did not collect the data on it. They were collecting data, but they weren't sharing it. So that was my the second half of the study. I thought okay, we'll shift gears and part of that was, you know, ideally, someone would say, Well, why don't you just stick it through with that the sensory analysis at OSU? Well, it costs money. And this project was, you know, for a 10 year project, we had to try to save money as best we can because no granting agency wants to get have money for 10 years of research. And so we decided, you know that we were not going to continue with that and, and shift really to the focus of the growers. I mean, that's who's making the decision growers and wineries, I should say, making the decisions about the quality of the wines as a result of thinning to make their choices as to where that fruit goes and make future plans on crop thinning. And so we really took it towards that first five years looking at do we see a difference? Versus and doing some descriptive analysis to the second five years still trying to see asking questions about difference testing, and about descriptive analysis, but now taking it from a standpoint of who's making this decision about these wines, and they're tasting them. And so really encouraging growers to taste them and wineries to taste them if they had not already done so.   Craig Macmillan  15:51  And what kind of things did you find out?   Patti Skinkis  15:53  So the power of doing the research in each individual vineyard meant that I could do the stats for each vineyard and hand them a report of their project. And each year as we went through the project, we would share the results with the growers. So we went every year crop year that we closed, we shared the viticulture data with them. And the results were there's very little difference with crop thinning over time, we figured okay, this might be a you know, impact of, you know, over time, you know, we always hear from crop consultants or vineyard managers, if you keep cropping heavy, you're gonna have to add more inputs. We didn't see that, generally speaking, we have some vines in the study that were full cropped, never thinned for 10 years. And they did just fine. There are some things that we did find, you know, generally speaking in any one vineyard with lag phase crop thinning, there was very little impact on and fruit quality. So fruit composition is mostly what we had data for. But we're talking bricks, pH titratable. acidity, very rarely were they different until we got into years where our base yields were just much higher than normal. So we saw that in a year where maybe our yields were double. So cluster sizes were bigger fruitfulness was higher than we saw some impact, but it wasn't every site, it was maybe a third of the sites, the results really came that most sites there's very little difference in that end wine quality and when I'm sick or fruit quality, I should say. So Brix pH ta Yanes. So use this global nitrogen, we looked at total phenolic total tannins total anthocyanins and for the first five years of the study, we had ETS labs run their whole phenolic panel, and as well as their ripening panel, and we saw very little differences in there might be some years that a certain vineyard had a difference. But then after that year, they didn't have it anymore. So it was very inconsistent. And it's not to say that thinning did nothing, but it was very, very limited in the results to say okay, we are definitely changing x when we crop then we didn't see that. And that was a real eye opener. So that was the fruit. So I should say that was what the fruit told us now when it came to the wine. For the first five years, our sensory panel led by Dr. Elizabeth Thomasino, you know, here at OSU, she was winemakers. So the winemakers were Oregon winemakers, the results of those years was that crop level was not what drove the quality or the perceived preference of wine, it was really the vineyard or the the winemaker from a given site, there was never really any clear identity of higher quality or higher concentration or higher certain descriptive analyses for a crop level. So it became clear that there wasn't very much difference. And that was one of the reasons the real reasons why I think the collaborators wanted to go a different route because they were not seeing seeing much difference. And so they thought, Well, maybe if we start looking internally, we see differences. So the second five years, we did ETS labs didn't run the analysis, I ran those in house in my lab. And so we we did the same measures as ETS lab from from the standpoint of global analyses, same thing, very little difference. But when we switched to looking at the impact of wines from getting the data from the winemakers, number one we had a really hard time getting that data and so many collaborators, they followed through, and they didn't do the paperwork, or they didn't ever follow through with us. And so it was really challenging to get the data but from those who did follow our protocols, the results mirrored our first five years which was there was very little difference. And it was very hard to tell a difference in in the wines. Now they knew that there was a difference. So when we asked him for a difference test, we said can you tell the difference? Of course they said yes, because they knew they were blind tasted but they knew if any, it was an evaluation, so it was a little leading there. But when it came down to describing what they were seeing in the wines, comments like all of these wines are lovely came up and so there wasn't a clear distinction on quality, that one was very clearly bad. So we did a two step approach, we had them first taste some blind, do their ratings individually, then they would find out the identity of the wines. And then they as a group, they would talk about them. And it always came out that after they knew the identity, that's when they were changed their mind about any given wine that they rated initially. So what we see in the pattern of the results was that they were willing to not completely downgrade the higher yield. Unless it was the no thin. If it was no, thin they felt very uncomfortable saying, Okay, we don't need tp thin, but they felt more comfortable saying, Okay, we like this one and a half clusters for shoot, which is a one to one to thinning pattern, which is about a 15 to 20% crop production. And I can understand that as a winemaking team, as a grower team, you want to be conservative, you want to be careful, you don't want to say okay, yeah, so I found a lot of what they were answering on was more future looking rather than what's right in front of you right now. Like looking at, okay, here's the wines use the full crop or no thin and here's your one and a half cluster, one cluster pursuit, you didn't find them all that different in the descriptive analysis. But now when you're, you know, the identity, then you're saying, Okay, we're not going to take these notes into our highest here. We're going to leave those aside. So there's some bias.   Craig Macmillan  21:20  Yeah, well, no, absolutely. And that's one of the things I love talking about. And you know that the winemaking techniques were consistent across the lots. Yeah, so it wasn't canopy management manipulations or anything like that.   Patti Skinkis  21:32  Yep. So both in the vineyard and in the winery. So when we said they did this in their vineyard, they couldn't do things differently in the vineyard of two, one or the other. And we actually picked up an issue. And that some you know, when you do crop thinning, you have labor crews come through and leaf pull. And we recognize that early on that some growers just wouldn't leaf pull as much in there no thin so we had them go in and leaf pull the same as they would for their other thinned to remove that that issue. In the winery we told them they had to make all their wines the same. And we did not have them do for example, long barrel aging in oak barrels, they could make the wines how they normally make their wines. But they we did not want them to go to barrel. And so they had to be bottled and then tasted after about a year of bottle aging.   Craig Macmillan  22:21  Interesting. Maybe I missed this but you were talking about the thinning protocols meaning like around bloom time and round lag phase. What about at verasion that's at least around where I'm at in Central Coast's is very common to do crop dropping about 85% verasion was that a component what you did was or verasion era?   Patti Skinkis  22:40  We did verasion time point included in our time core study that was before we launched on the big project. So when we did the big project, we decided we would just go with what growers always do, rather than adding more time points. And so they just did in the statewide crapola project just did like face for our crapload are thinning by timing by intensity trial, we did include verasion for that time for that trial.   Craig Macmillan  23:08  And that green drop is at about the same, like at about 85% or somewhere in there. What was the trigger for the drop at verasion?   Patti Skinkis  23:16  It's post lag phase  was done when there's about 50% color.   Craig Macmillan  23:20  Okay, there we go. Okay, that makes sense.   Patti Skinkis  23:22  The verasion time point is or late, even later, is oftentimes done in Oregon as well. But usually it's a result of either thinking that they have way too much crop out there for their target yields, or disease, so botrytis.   Craig Macmillan  23:54  And when you're talking about these different crop load levels, I would imagine that disease pressure would be an important issue, especially in Pinot Noir in Oregon, I would think.   Patti Skinkis  24:04  So that's a great point, because some people, you know, will crop thin because they want to avoid overlapping clusters. But in our trial, what we did was we said, Okay, for the no thin, we want you to just do things like you've always done and some growers would say, Okay, now when they're, we're sorting that fruit, should we sort out at the sorting line, you know, and I said, No, you know, if you do sorting line for that fruit, make notes, you know, obviously, you don't want to make a bad wine because there's too much botrytis. But basically, what we had them do was if you're going to sort through one you have to sort through the other and don't just have preconceived notions that you're going to have to sort more in your no thin than the others. And we always in the data that we got in we looked at as we dissected clusters, we looked for detritus, and what we found is in most years, there is not an impact of having no thin having more disease. Now Could there have been sure if there was years with very heavy crop yield, and with high shoot density, but most of our vineyards have when we looked at all of our data we got in and one of the quality control checks is, what was their shoot density, and almost everybody's following in that perfect shoot density. And so there wasn't that necessary, necessarily that much fruit on their vine. So they're all cane pruned. And they're all shooting for that shoot density of between three and five shoots per linear foot. And we're more on the three end. So we can see that in all of the data. So it's not surprising to me that we didn't see disease issues as a result of leaving that full crop on there, why we didn't see a lot of differences in this trial, I should provide some context here. Without you know, the amount of yields were not terribly high, with that kind of shoot density. So single canopy, low shoot density, we're at a pound per linear foot on average full crop in only a couple of years. During the 10 year period, we're over one and a half pounds per linear foot. So the tonnage that would come off of that. And I always put talking pounds per linear foot because our vineyards were in many different spacing and shoot and vine density. So you we can't talk tonnage, what we found in looking at the data that there were clear years where once we had yields over one and a half pounds per linear foot, then we saw some benefit of cluster thinning. But those years where we are barely at one or just over one, there really was not a benefit. And of course, that's because of the canopies being well maintained. The shoe density is not too high cluster density is not too high a cluster size themselves are smaller.   Craig Macmillan  26:36  What has been the reception so far, for both growers and winemakers because this goes a little bit against conventional wisdom, at least in my experience?   Patti Skinkis  26:45  It goes a lot against convention,   Craig Macmillan  26:47  I'm trying to be polite.   Patti Skinkis  26:51  Well, the nice thing is, you know, because along the way of doing a 10 year project, I was always giving presentations as the new data set came out and people in the industry would hear me give presentations about it. But I think the strongest impact was seen because I had grower collaborators, they saw the impact in their vineyards and in their wineries. And what we found was that people are much more willing to increase their yields. My answer is not that they they stopped crop thinning, surely that didn't happen. But they were allowed to evaluate and recommend higher yields than they had in the past. And this is a data set that was really hard to get directly from people. But we see it in our state yield reports that basically they've gone up 25% The yields have for Pinot Noir. Since the work has been started. When I talk to people who are contracting fruit or selling fruit. They said they definitely see that winemakers are more receptive to vineyard owners and vineyard managers recommending higher yields. And they're no longer saying it has to be one cluster per shoot, or it has to be two tons per acre. And I would say the 25% increase in yield is conservative I when we did ask the collaborators about the project, we asked them about three quarters way through the project said, What do you feel comfortable doing as a result of this work. And they said, we feel comfortable adding another half to one tonne per acre, which is about a 20 25% increase from what they've done before. And so that's really is really astounding, I think any if I hadn't done the project this way, I don't think that people would have been able to understand the true impacts or lack thereof, of doing cluster thinning. So it provided with them with more evidence that they can take this risk and or they they didn't feel like it was as big of a risk to leave more fruit out there.   Craig Macmillan  28:48   Which reminds me I know it's difficult to talk in terms of tonnes per acre. So we can talk through the linear foot, but the range in your work from the most aggressive thinning to the unthinned. What kind of a range is there, how big of a difference in terms of the crop load?   Patti Skinkis  29:04  In terms of the yield that they've had in vineyards, the lowest crop thinning level that growers did was half cluster per shoot. So that meant thinning pattern 0101 or 1010. The yields on those would be as low as one and a half tonnes per acre. But it depends on the vineyard that it came from because one of the vineyards that did it was a very high density. So their yields were actually pretty high even still, but I'd say the max that we got in any vineyard was probably close to about eight tons per acre. So clusters per linear foot were always pretty consistent unless they went to a double canopy. So we did have one collaborator in the study that was on a GDC or Geneva demo curtain. But that vineyard was actually pretty degraded so it didn't explain higher yields. What we saw was higher yields were from those vineyards that had high density meter by a meter and a half spacing. Normally we were at on a pounds per linear foot bed He says that the extremes were about two to two and a half pounds per linear foot. And so for those vineyards, they could be pretty substantial if they were in the high density.   Craig Macmillan  30:09  We are running our of time. So I want to ask you a couple of kind of closing questions. Is there one piece of advice or insight or one thing that you would tell a grower regarding this topic.   Patti Skinkis  30:18  It all depends on what you have for your vineyard, your rootstock, how the vines are trained. So the biggest thing that we came up from this research is that we don't want to tell people that they have to crop them or that they don't have to crop them that and that we don't have a real answer of how much it has to be. But one of the things we do have clear in the data is that we know when we've gone too much, a lot of people think that that's every year and it's not every year because of our climate is so variable, we don't know what we're gonna have, we can go and quantify fruitfulness. But really until we get through fruit set in June, we don't know what our yields look like. And so I always tell people to keep monitoring your printing weights, your yields, calculating your your your Rivas index or the crop yield printing weight ratio, and just keep monitoring it for your site to know what Max is going to be because some vineyards can handle more than others. And the last thing I would say is quality is dependent on the vineyard site and how that site is managed. And even if you have a good manager, you are never going to have a really high end wine if you don't have the right site or the right you know, selection of clone rootstock etc. So it all plays into that quality and just crap any is not going to guarantee you a high quality wine.   Craig Macmillan  31:41  Once again. It's a great big world with lots of different variables all of which have to be considered. I want to thank my guest Dr. Patty Skinkis she is a viticulture, extension specialist and professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Horticulture. Real pleasure this has been really, really fun. Like I mentioned, this has actually been kind of a pet topic of mine for a long, long time. And I'm really happy that you've been doing this work and I hope more people learn about it.   Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The sun is hot, the speed of light is a fixed constant, and VERSUS is funny. There are certain things in this universe that are immutable laws, which cannot be broken. If you're not a fan of this concept, hey, don't get mad at us, pal! Take it up with God! (The right one, you know which.)On this week's immutable force of nature: the team performs at Grovel-fest 2023, gets obscure with the clues, and has a scientific breakthrough that leads to one of our contestants' deaths! (Shocking!)VERSUS: Is This Thing Still On?™Show notes and credits

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest  Roxxy Haze This Week We Discuss Become A Pro Skater vs Become A Pro Boxer Only Drink Hot Beverages vs Only Drink Slushies Box Mike Tyson Vs Fight Jackie Chan S/o To Our Sponsors Blue Chew Bluechew.com Promo: SQUADD

In episode 171, I reconnect with Justin Jones from Ontario, Canada, for a discussion about designing streets with Intention - Specifically, identifying who is the intended preferred or prioritized user, the party that is welcomed or invited into the environment. Versus the ancillary users that are merely accommodated or tolerated. Justin's premise is that in North America, the car is welcomed on nearly all streets and roads, whereas people outside of cars are barely accommodated, and this should fundamentally change, with more streets treated as public spaces where people outside of cars are prioritized and welcomed, even if that means restricting the access of motor vehicles.Watch the video version of this episode to get the full effect.Landing page for the episodeHelpful Links (note that some may include affiliate links to help me support the channel):- WSP Canada- My Fietsstraat episode with Justin and Matt Pinder- Strong TownsFour Easy Steps to Support My Efforts:1. Become an Active Towns Ambassador by "Buying Me a Coffee" or by pledging as little as $1 per month on Patreon2. If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a "thumbs up," leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and share it with a friend.3. Subscribe to the podcast on your preferred listening platform and the Active Towns YouTube Channel4. Pick up some Active Towns #StreetsAreForPeople Merch at my storeCredits:All video and audio production by John SimmermanMusic:Epidemic SoundResources used during the production of this episode:- My awesome recording platform is Ecamm- Adobe Creative Cloud SuiteFor more information about my Active Towns effort or to follow along, please visit my links below:- Website- Twitter- Newsletter- Podcast landing pages- Facebook- InstagramBackground:Hi Everyone, my name is John Simmerman.I'm a health promotion professional with over 30 years of experience and my area of concentration has evolved into a specialization of how the built environment influences human behavior related to active living and especially active mobility.In 2012 I launched the non-profit Advocates for Healthy Communities as an effort to help promote and create healthy, active places.Since that time, I've been exploring, documenting, and profiling established, emerging, and aspiring Active Towns wherever they might be, in order to produce high-quality multimedia content to help inspire the creation of more safe and inviting, environments that promote a "Culture of Activity" for "All Ages & Abilities."My Active Towns suite of channels feature my original video and audio content and reflections, including a selection of podcast episodes and short films profiling the positive and inspiring efforts happening around the world as I am able to experience and document them.Thanks for tuning in; I hope you have found this content helpful.Creative Commons License: Attributions, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives, 2023Advocates for Healthy Communities, Inc. is a nonprofit 501c3 organization (EIN 45-3802508) dedicated to helping communities create a Culture of Activity. To donate, click here. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Frame 160 - Winner Gets Ants. All the usual rubbish from this long running snooker competition, plus all the excitement of the FA and Scotch Women's football. And also some snooker. It's a very exciting frame. But can some puppets predict the result? I used to be on TV.

This week we sit down with Carlos Perez, founder of Bike Monkey to discuss the upcoming 2023 Truckee Tahoe Gravel event. We dig into why Truckee Tahoe is such an amazing area for gravel riding and Carlos' definition of influencers. Truckee Tahoe Gravel Episode Sponsor: Dynamic Cyclist (Code: TheGravelRide 15% off) Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the show, I'm thrilled to have Carlos Perez talking about Truckee Tahoe, gravel. Carlos is the founder of bike monkey. If you live in California or maybe in the surrounding area, undoubtedly, you've done a bike monkey event. Carlos and his team have produced Levi's Gran Fondo bogs fish rock hammer road, rally. Wente the list goes on and on of the events that Carlos has had a hand in producing. I've had a number of friends that have done the Truckee Tahoe gravel event in the past and had a great time. So I'm finally got around to pinning Carlos down and getting him on the podcast to talk about this year's event. They've made a couple changes to the event, which I wanted to have an opportunity for him to highlight, but all in all, it's just one of those events here in Northern California, that is well-regarded from an athlete's perspective. It's certainly taking place in a beautiful area. We'll get into why Tahoe is so special for cyclists and why it's a region that you can bring the whole family to. On that point, we did also dig into when Carlos and his team create events. They think about influencers, but not influencers. In terms of someone on Tik, TOK or Instagram, they think about influencers from the perspective of the family that might be joining you, whether it's your husband or your wife, joining you while you go out and ride, it's always great to have a location where the whole family can enjoy the event and have an event organizer. Who's thinking about that broader community. Versus just simply the athletes themselves. So I'm excited for you to hear about the Truckee Tahoe gravel event. But before we jump in, I want to thank this week sponsor. Dynamic cyclist. If you scroll back your feed to episode 1 54, you can hear my interview with Sarah from dynamic cyclist. Dynamic cyclist is a video based mobility, strength and injury prevention program designed specifically for cyclists. I am probably about 30, 35 episodes into my stretching routine and my low back injury prevention routine. My low back has been a big issue for me the last couple years, and probably the most gating feature of my body in terms of how long and how hard I can ride. So this winter, I was definitely determined to do the thing we all should be doing, which is stretching. I've struggled, even though I've known the stretches that I need to do. I frankly, struggled to fit it in and having dynamic cyclist in my life and the 15 to 20 minute long routines available for me each night. Has gotten me focused on something easy. That I can do. And I found it really easy to follow, and I've been impressed in terms of the different tweaks and orientations that they've encouraged me to do throughout the routines to get to different parts of my muscles. And I'm very excited about this being part of my daily routine, because I think we all know that stretching. Is the number one way in which we can prevent injuries and make sure we're taking care of our bodies. But anyway, I encourage you to check out dynamic cyclists. They have a seven day free trial. If it looks like a fit for you, use the code, the gravel ride, and you're going to get 15% off the already affordable rates. To check it out, just head on over to dynamics, cyclists.com. With that said, let's jump right into my interview with Carlos. [00:04:10] Craig Dalton: Carlos, welcome to the show. [00:04:12] Carlos Perez: Thanks, Craig. Happy to [00:04:13] Craig Dalton: Good. Yeah, good to see you. It took us a little while to get this scheduled, but I'm stoked to finally have you and, and get you on to talk about the Truckee Tahoe Gravel event. [00:04:22] Carlos Perez: Yeah, it can be a little hard to pin me down sometimes, so I'm glad that we made it work. [00:04:27] Craig Dalton: It sounds like it's especially hard to pin you down in the spring and summer months cuz with Bike Monkey you're producing events all over California and also outside of the. [00:04:38] Carlos Perez: Yeah. Yeah, our spring's very busy. [00:04:41] Craig Dalton: Let's take a step back before we kind of jump into Bike Monkey and into the gravel event up in Tahoe. How did you get into cycling originally? And then let's talk about how you got into event production. [00:04:54] Carlos Perez: Uh, well, it can be, I'll, I'll keep it as short as I can. . Um, we, I was working for a, a medical manufacturer company as a software developer. And, um, my boss at the time, Russell Briggs actually, uh, was like, yo, dude, let's go mountain biking. And I didn't really have a mountain bike at the time, so I went and I bought a mountain bike and he took me into Adel State Park and I was like 20 at the. And I was like, what the heck is this is amazing. Like, I want to do this and that. That was where I got the bug for, for riding bikes. And did that for several years. Uh, and then ultimately one day, uh, some friends of mine were around, you know, trying to do some fundraising for a cause that was important to us. And I kind of raised my hand and said, Hey, you know, like I'd like to actually organize a bike race. And so that's where it started. And we organized a small. Mountain bike race with, you know, like one truck full of supplies for about 80 people. And um, that's kind of where the spirit of Bike Monkey was born. And I, I got the bug. [00:06:04] Craig Dalton: And to set the stage a little bit for people. So you're, you're based in Northern California, right? [00:06:09] Carlos Perez: Yeah. We're based in Santa Rosa, which is in the middle. It's the biggest city in Sonoma County, uh, which actually has. roads more paved and gravel roads per capita than I think almost anywhere in the state. [00:06:26] Craig Dalton: Absolutely. And then that that first event was called Bogs, and where was that located? [00:06:32] Carlos Perez: uh, it was actually wasn't in Sonoma County, it was just outside of Sonoma County in little town of Cobb. In this demonstration state Forest called Boggs. and we'd gone mountain biking up there a bunch in the past, and so it's about an hour and 15 minutes outside of Santa Rosa. [00:06:51] Craig Dalton: It's such a great spot. I mean, you talk about a riding in Annadale, getting, getting you hooked. If you have the opportunity to ride in bogs, you'll also get hooked on mountain biking. It's just so good up there and I had the pleasure of doing that event. God, it was must have been eight or 10 years ago, I feel like. [00:07:08] Carlos Perez: Yeah, bogs. There's a, a lot of history with us and bogs, you know, we, uh, resurrected mountain bike racing there. When we first produced our eight hour event, there had been a multi-year hiatus of mountain bike racing in that space before we came along. And then that event ran for 10 or 11 years before the valley fire blew through that area and just decimated the entire forest. And so it was off limits. Probably three years, four years at least before we were able to actually go back and host the event again, which it returned last year for the first time in, in a long while. Actually, I take that back, I think it was closer to seven years that nobody had been riding or racing in bogs. So that was a big milestone for us to be able to go back and get back to our. [00:07:58] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I remember the word spreading amongst my local bike community that it was back and people were super stoked cuz I think everybody has great memories from racing at bogs. It's such a fun place to ride and doing an eight hour event, whether it's solo or where the teammate is. Always just something that's special. [00:08:15] Carlos Perez: Yeah, it really is. It's, there's so much camaraderie and hanging out and you know, taking it casually or taking it seriously. It is such a good mix of racing and fun. Um, there really, for me, there's no event that's more fun than our eight hour mountain bike races. [00:08:38] Craig Dalton: Yeah, there's just like, you know, it's, there's an interesting dynamic when you're doing one of these events with a partner. Because you can decide, you know, the laps are typically 45 minutes or an hour in length. You can decide to do two laps, one lap. If you're tired and your partner wants to keep going, you can do that. There's all kinds of strategy that just makes it fun. And there's rules around obviously, like how and when you cross the finish line within that eight hours that come into play. And so you have to have a little strategy in in your mind as you start to figure out your lap times. [00:09:10] Carlos Perez: Yeah, there's tons of strategy around it. It's really cool you see people coming through going, trying to ask us like, should they go back out for another lap? And we're trying to figure it out and you know, we've got it down to a science where like, you do need to go cuz somebody's like nipping at your heels and if you don't and they do, it's game over. You go from first to third pretty quick. [00:09:30] Craig Dalton: Yeah, exactly. So that's amazing. So from that or original sort of beginnings of like, Hey, I'm willing to throw my hands up because I think I can produce an event. I'm willing to do this as a fundraiser. What was the path towards you doing it again and, and then expanding to other events? [00:09:47] Carlos Perez: Well, I, I, after that first event, I definitely had to do some soul searching because, you know, I had a full-time job as a software developer and it paid. L. Um, but I was still young and I just, um, I saw an opportunity to do something that I was really passionate about and I had some close friends really pushing me to try and. achieve that, and they're like, basically, we're gonna disown you if you don't take a stab at this. And so I took a big risk and I kind of threw all my chips at race production because I just loved it. I loved what it did for the community. I loved that we were able to raise money for a good cause. It just had, uh, all the good stuff around it. it didn't feel like work. So it was that second year, after that second year that I decided, you know, I need to really take this seriously because if I don't, that opportunity's gonna pass me up. And so I took a risk. Uh, I quit my job, cold Turkey, and, you know, kind of lived, uh, hand to mouth for a while, uh, figuring it out. And then we just, it just grew, you know, what we were doing made a lot of sense. I brought on my first. . And then my second, and then, uh, Levi Leipheimer lived in the area. We were a super small production company at that time, and we were only doing some small mountain bike races and cross races, and he wanted to, he had this idea of putting on a Fondo because him and a friend of his, uh, you know, were on a ride and his friend being Italian was telling him about these amazing events that they have in Italy. And he's like, you know, Levi, you should do that. Uh, through, again, a mutual friend through Yuri. Uh, somehow Levi came to us, uh, and, um, we said, yeah, we're, we can do this. Nobody had ever done that in the United States actually before. We were the first big grand Fondo on US soil. And, uh, well, I guess technically the second. There was one in San Diego that had happened a year prior and no one really knew about it. It was, it was relatively. [00:12:06] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I feel like it, it's impossible not to know about the Levi's Grand Fondo if you ride a road ride road in California, but I imagine that statement probably holds for almost the entire US at this point. It's such a popular road, grand Fondo. [00:12:21] Carlos Perez: yeah, yeah. And it exploded. You know, we went the very first year we had 3,500 people, and it was in the heyday of Levi having, uh, he was heading into winning his third tour of California. So he was huge in California. and a very popular cyclist at the time. So it was the right timing. So there was, there was kind of that golden moment for us where we had to work really hard to do something really big and really outside of the box. And we grew really fast, uh, like from a production standpoint. It forced us to grow up really quick. [00:12:56] Craig Dalton: Yeah, what is, what does that look like? Just to explain to the listener and frankly myself as well, for event production, what type of organiz, what are, what are you doing at the event, and what type of equipment do you need to own in order to provide these services to something like Levi's Grand Fondo? [00:13:13] Carlos Perez: well, you've got some event organizers that maybe are purely volunteer based and they're kind of scrapping to pull together as much rental equipment as they can and outsourcing a lot of it to produce. And then you've got other nonprofits like the Santa Rosa Cycling Club, which own a ton of equipment that they've just amassed or built over the years. and multiple trailers that they'll use to move things out to produce stuff. every race organizer. And I, I always, I find this topic really interesting because as race organizers we do talk to each other and we share ideas, uh, on things like simple stuff like how are you calculating how much water you need to have at an aid station and what mechanism we're using to transport that water out there? Cuz it's heavy, right? And it takes time to fill up a lot of jugs versus it doesn't take as much time to fill up one big jug. You know, how are you getting it out? That kind of stuff. The, the logistics behind the scenes, I think people, they don't have enough information to really appreciate what goes into producing an event and setting up an aid station and marking a course. Um, but we have, I mean, we're, I'm in my office right now, which is adjacent to a, a warehouse full of equip. Ranging from course stakes to snow fencing, to stage material, to water jugs, to weight down tents, the tents, the tables, the chairs, the timing equipment, um, the arch to make stuff look fancy, and the list goes on. We've got a lot of equipment too that we use, electronic equipment that we use for radio communications and for R F I D timing tags. and it's just a lot of weird stuff too. It's not the kind of stuff that you would see in like a typical business. [00:15:06] Craig Dalton: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to note, I mean, everybody, when you go, it's easy to think of like, oh, I'm just putting it together, a group ride. And when you're doing that for 20 people, there's, there's next to no infrastructure that's involved in that. But anybody who's been to one of these events, you start to look around and you see like, oh, the aid station has a table there. And oh, there's this massive container of water that somehow got it out into the wilderness. Someone needs to do that and someone needs to provide the equipment. Uh, it's a really fascinating space and I think more and more as I interview event organizers, I'm uncovering that there are entities like bike, bike monkey in other states and other places that are carrying the load for lots of these events in the background. [00:15:49] Carlos Perez: Yeah. A lot of people will get in touch with us and say, you know, we, we wanna produce a bike race, but we really don't know where to start. Um, and, and a lot of times it starts with the vision of what it is that you wanna produce, but a lot of times people don't, they underestimate how far into the weeds you really need to get simple things. you know, putting a label on a, on an envelope and putting the rider's information inside of that label and then putting the stuff in the packet so that you can streamline packet pickup or the process of capturing their information in a way that, uh, makes that whole experience smooth. Because it starts when you show up. If you have to wait two hours to get your packet because the line's too long, well, something's not right already. Little, little tons of, little, little details that you really. , uh, there's no school for this kind of stuff. That's the, I think the thing that probably is one of the most unique characteristics that all event organizers probably share is we all learn, learn through experience and through trial and error, working events and seeing what does and doesn't work. And that's, that's one of the crucial components. You have to be the type of person that's willing to just continu. Bumble and fail and try to make corrections, and you have to stay committed to that. Cause if you're not, then you're, you're just not gonna make it. It's, it's too much learning that has to happen on the job. [00:17:25] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Yeah. It's a big lift to put on any of these events. So you were talking about how Levi's, grand Fondo kind of was a big break in terms. Pushing you guys to create more infrastructure, more discipline, understand how to manage a 3,500 plus person event. When did gravel start to become part of the pitcher for bike monkey? [00:17:47] Carlos Perez: Well, interestingly, we started doing gravel. In 2012, so before it really exploded, right? And it was because of Levi's Grand Fondo, Rebecca Rush came to that event as a guest and at the end of it just came up to us and said, Hey, this was amazing, and I wanna do something like this in my hometown of Keem, Idaho, but I want you guys to help me do it. I want to do it on gravel, on dirt roads. And we're like, that sounds amazing. Yeah, let's do it. And so we actually started Rebecca's Private Idaho with her, and we ran it for two years. At the time, we weren't really a consulting company, we were in the pattern of just building our own events from scratch and putting them on. And so we weren't structured the right. To continue to run that event. So we stepped away and let her run with it on her own. And she did that for about seven years and then came back to us last year and was like, can you guys please, please, please come back and run this event for me? Because it's really hard to do and we just need a solid team. While over that nearly decade that passed, we did become a consulting. and, uh, we came back and, and produced it last year and we're producing it again this year. And it, it's amazing and it, it feels right at home with us and for her. And so we're super excited about it. But that was where we started our first gravel event. And then gravel kind of exploded everywhere. And the next one that we did, um, officially was, uh, you know, Sagan Fondo, Truckee Gravel. , which takes place on June 10th of this year. [00:19:48] Craig Dalton: Interesting. So let, yeah, let's go back to that origin story cuz I think it's so interesting. You had mentioned to me offline that obviously like being in this region, the idea of putting on an event out of Truckee had been in your head for a while. Let's talk through like. What, what transpired prior to Sagan's team contacting you, and then what was that like to get that call? [00:20:11] Carlos Perez: Yeah, it, it's funny, I mean, I always find myself looking back and going, wow, how did the stars align for this? Like, what was it that caused us to go up and start looking around in Truckee for gravel roads to, you know, to go and ride? And it was just, uh, some rides that I had seen people. , just a couple people do. They were like, wow, check this cool stuff out north of Truckee. And then, um, you know, that's when the gravel scene was starting to pick up a little bit. But in Sonoma County, we don't have a whole lot of gravel. There's, there's gravel roads, but it's not like you have in other parts of the state. But we also knew through experience that in order for an event to have teeth, we needed to have a place that appealed to. the family component. So we started looking at different towns and we love Truckee and you know, we've been up there so much and it's just, uh, it's got so much going for it. It's got such a cool vibe and culture. The ski scene is amazing, but the Artisan Craft brewing at 50 50 Brewing company and some of the others like alibi and the um, the food scene and the bakery scene and the coffee scene and like the. Stuff and the outdoor stuff, it was all just, it's just bumping all the time. So it was like, you know, we really should start exploring trucking. And so we spent some time looking around up there. And then we got the call from uh, Peter Sagan's team of people. It was actually through Osmo. Ben Caprin over Osmo reached out to us and we've been associates for quite some time, and he said, Hey, Peter's looking to, Peter and his team are looking to do an event in the US and I recommended that it be you guys because of what you're able to do around here. And so we started talking and decided to choose Truckee. Uh, we actually persuaded them to move their off-road event to Truckee that they wanted to create and change it from mountain biking to. And that's where it actually was born. Uh, and then we teamed up with, uh, Kurt Gen Shaer, who formerly angry single speeder and now a Trail whisperer. He's a big in the mountain bike scene in that region and big with Sierra Trail Stewardship. Uh, he was really familiar with that area and lives in Verdi. and so him and I started exploring. He drove me all over these roads. They're basically his backyard. He's also built a lot of trail up there, and we came up with the gnarliest gravel event that I think anybody had ever really ridden at that point. We kind of nicknamed it Segundo you, you. Left Truckee and you went up into Tahoe National Forest and you went past, uh, a handful of pretty large reservoirs and you went up over Sarine Peak. This huge summit dropped down, uh, towards Loyalton. So you're getting way north now. And then we turned and we came up this trail, this Jeep Road, uh, called Badden off Canyon Road, and it was just, Freaking junkyard of people trying to ride these baby head rocks all the way back. So we definitely, like, I think, overshot in some aspects that first year. But again, everything's a learning experience and we were exploring, but anybody who did that first Saigon Fondo event definitely earned, earned their keep [00:23:54] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I. [00:23:54] Carlos Perez: someone capable of riding a gravel. [00:23:58] Craig Dalton: I know, I love it. I, I have a neighbor who is constantly scratching his head about gravel bikes and is like, why don't I just ride my hard tail? And he always chooses his hard tail. And he happened to do that event on his hard tail, and he came back and he was like, this thing, this event was amazing, but I don't know how anybody wrote it on a gravel bike, [00:24:18] Carlos Perez: a lot of people did not ride that section on their gravel bike. And it was long. It wasn't like this, you know, moderate quarter mile long section of, you know, tough to ride stuff. It was probably two miles of climbing on just really technical, uh, stuff, but beautiful country and, you know, I, I'm always intrigued by what our events do to like the Strava heat maps, because prior to us having that, Nobody was riding out there like probably old crusty dudes that, you know, don't use Strava. You had ridden out there for, you know, eons. Right. But nobody, uh, was going out there and riding with any frequency and now that place is just full of gravel bikes since that event. [00:25:07] Craig Dalton: So the, the original event was called, was it the Sagan Dirt Fondo? Am I recalling that correctly? And so that happened for, was it two editions under his branding? [00:25:18] Carlos Perez: Yeah, [00:25:19] Craig Dalton: Yes. and then it transitioned to the current Truckee Tahoe gravel. [00:25:24] Carlos Perez: yeah, yeah. Then it transitioned into Trucky, uh, well, it was Trucky Dirt Fondo, and then we rebranded Trucky Tahoe Gravel. But our short name and like the, the operative name is Trucky Gravel. Tahoe is, is part of our name because, um, There's the marketing tactic in there. A lot of people from outside of the state or even further outside of the country maybe aren't as familiar with Truckee. So it's important that we capture the region and our partners at Visit Truckee Tahoe, uh, are also influential in the naming of it. So we have a strong partnership with Visit Truckee Tahoe. . And so, uh, last year we rebranded the event Truckee Gravel and the long form name is Trucky Tahoe Gravel. [00:26:15] Craig Dalton: as you're talking about the event to rider from around the world, how would you talk about Tahoe as a destination? Let's set aside like the gravel experience, which I definitely wanna get into, but there may be people out there who just don't understand what Tahoe is. [00:26:32] Carlos Perez: Yeah. Well, I mean, the lake is the first thing that comes to mind. I mean, you have this ancient crystal clear lake. that has been there for millennia and it, it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet Earth. And it's surrounded by, you know, the lake sits at over 6,000 feet. Uh, and around that basin are the Sierra Nevada mountains. And, you know, they go up to, you know, 11,000 feet in some areas, and you've got ski resorts in every direct. and you've got mountain bike trails and hiking trails and off-road trails and climbing and hiking and you know, all the stuff that comes with being able to do something on the lake. And then you go almost any direction from Lake Tahoe and you have these other communities like Meyers and um, you know, Carson City and Reno and Truckee. Um, you've got. more of that in these towns that live up in this area. And so the entire region as a whole has an incredible mix of every type of outdoor activity that you could imagine. And it's just, if you appreciate the outdoors, it's all there. Everything, it's all there. And it's, you know, it's, it's a populated area because of. It's about as populated as it can get right now, especially during the pandemic. Like everyone went up there. We kind of missed our window cuz we were interested in, in getting a place up there. But that ship kind of sailed during the pandemic [00:28:17] Craig Dalton: Yeah, no, you're, I mean, you're a hundred percent spot on. It's such a magical part of the country that if you're interested in, if you enjoy being in the mountains, if you enjoy being around lakes, it's just stunning. , and to your point, like 360 degrees around that lake is mountains and ski resorts, and there's so much beautiful terrain regardless of whether you're on a bike or on foot that you can explore out there. One of the things you alluded to, and you certainly mentioned it to me offline very strongly, was as you think about producing events, you're not just thinking about the riders, you're thinking about their families and what the experie. They are gonna be having at these events. Can you just talk a little bit about that and why that's important to you? [00:29:02] Carlos Perez: Yeah. Well, so there, there are a lot of different types of events. There are events that are designed for the The Racer that's chasing points, right. And they're just like, there's an event every single weekend. And. Sometimes they're just like in the event promoter's backyard, because it's easy to do that. You are gonna use the, the local park and you're gonna put on a cross race or a mountain bike race or a road crit. And those are great for the sport of cycling as a competitive sport. Um, we always have, um, strived to produce events that are a little bigger. Chasing points. We we're always, we've always had this mantra of putting on events that are appealing to what we call the influencers and not influencers like on social media, you know, influencers on Instagram or Facebook, but the influencers are my family members, so my kids, my. They might not race their bikes, they might not be able to participate in this event that I wanna go and do, but there's something in it for them. When you do it in a place like Truckee, or you do it in a place like the Wente Scout reservation, or you do it in a place like Carson City or um, you know, you name it someplace, that has a lot more going on for it. So I can be out racing my bike for four hours. and they might wait for me. They might go out to an aid station or they might just go shopping, or they might go get on the lake and wait for me, or they'll see, we'll see you at the brewery. Uh, we'll see you at the climbing gym. Uh, but then there's the before and after as well. So we stay there for multiple days and most people do. It becomes a destination for the whole family. as opposed to just another race that I have to somehow finagle time away to go and do that. And it's, I drive up, I do it, I turn around and I go back home. [00:31:06] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I feel like that's such an important component for so many of us gravel athletes that are, you know, not super concerned about the pointy end of the race. We're really looking to have a good. Had a hard day out there on the bike, but also wanna share time with our families and not make cycling. Always something that takes us away from home. [00:31:23] Carlos Perez: Yeah. And I think that that mentality has shifted as a whole too. It's not just, it's not just, uh, that we are focused on those events, but I think the appeal has shifted over the last few years, a little bit away from racing and a little bit more towards that whole experience that you get from going and having races, and you see that. You know, the conversations that a lot of pro-athletes are now having about, you know, I raced my bike for a while and that was important and it got me here, but I also wanna ride with my friends. Like, I started riding a bike as a kid because it was fun and I enjoyed it. And then I got serious. And being serious is exhausting, you know, it's like, it is like you can't, almost cannot have fun when you have to be so serious about bike racing and when you can let go of that a little bit at our events and not take it so seriously. There's a lot more room to enjoy yourself. There's a lot more room to be okay not standing on the podium and riding with your friends and just being there in the moment and, and experiencing what everyone else. [00:32:38] Craig Dalton: Yeah, a hundred percent. I took us on a little bit of a detour. You had started talking about how in that first year the course was maybe a little bit more technical than, uh, it is today. Can we talk about what the course will look like for 2023? [00:32:54] Carlos Perez: Yeah, totally. So, um, it's changed a little bit over the years, you know, not necessarily because. It had to, um, well, I guess in some, in some ways it, it did have to, there were some years where the snow was so deep that we just, we couldn't go over Sarine peak. Right. And so the elevation ended up having to be a little bit lower that year because the snow pack was too high. Ultimately, we pushed the event from. To a later date in June. And so we're in a pretty good spot now where unless it's like crazy snowy in March, we should be able to get over Sardine Peak. That's one of the signature high points on the courses that we design up there that um, you know, it makes sense to go up Sardine Peak. [00:33:45] Craig Dalton: And when you're, when you're, when you're getting up there, uh, Carlos, like what kind of terrain is that climb and is it like, you know, one of these long sustained efforts? [00:33:56] Carlos Perez: It is. Um, so once you get to the base of starting peak, you're at about 6,000 feet and it tops out just over 8,000 feet. And it, it starts off at like, you know, four or five, 6% grades. And then as you get near the top, you're pushing, you know, 11, 10, 11% pretty consistently. , you, you don't have to stay seated for this stuff, but it, you definitely are putting out some watts to carry yourself to the top of this climb. And then as soon as you get over the top, it is just a ripping, white knuckle descent all the way down. Um, about to the same elevation in the past. This year, there's a change. We're actually extending the course, so last year we were about 64 miles in length for that. this year we're gonna be 75, and so it's, or maybe it was 67. We've, we've increased it by several miles and we're going a lot further north towards Loyalton, and so that dissent off of Sardine Peak goes from 8,000 feet all the way down to 5,300 feet over the course. Probably 10 miles. So you just have this constant descent. It's such a reward to get that after finally making it to the top of Sardine Peak. And then once you get to that part just south of Loyalton, you turn and you climb a gradual, really well graded and maintained gravel road. And so your return isn't like, arduous, painful journey back. You can really get into a rhythm and warm yourself up and, and keep the pace going. Pretty good. [00:35:45] Craig Dalton: As we're coming down off Sardine Peak, is that, is it a fire road and is it, is it kind of loose? Are we, are we sort of white-knuckling scared, or [00:35:53] Carlos Perez: it [00:35:54] Craig Dalton: it pretty, pretty flowing? [00:35:55] Carlos Perez: can be rutted. And so it changes a little bit every year. And what happens is we go out there right before the race, like a couple days before the race and we're cutting down trees that have fallen. We're cutting down branches where, you know, maybe there's a spot where it's really bad, there's like a lot of rocks that we're exposed. We actually go out there and try to fix some of that stuff up where it might be deemed. Unsafe. Uh, and then we mark the crap out of it. So we've got a signed guy, this guy Cole Rasmussen, who goes out there. Um, this actually this past year, it was, um, it was an associate of his, went out there and, uh, marked the course over, over two or three days. And we take these big, you know, it's like, it's a big deal. We're not just putting. Uh, flags in the ground or hanging ribbon in the tree. We're driving a stake in the ground and then we're putting a big two foot sign on it with an arrow for each of the route colors telling you where to go, or that it says hazard or, you know, sharp turn or, you know, cattle guard things that are important. Um, for riders to not only be able to race safely, but also to make sure that no one gets lost, cuz it's hard to find 'em once they do. Um, and so anyway, I, I got a little off track with what we're doing out there. The course. On that diss descent off of Sardine Peak. Uh, it varies each year, but it can be a little bit hairy. And so we do advise people like really pay attention, try to control their speed because you can come around some areas where all of a sudden there are ruts, you know, and how, how that feels. How you pucker when you're like riding next to a rut that's like a train track and you're trying to stay out of it. [00:37:40] Craig Dalton: Sometimes you do exactly the wrong thing when you see those [00:37:43] Carlos Perez: you look at it, that's the problem. [00:37:46] Craig Dalton: Yep. Exactly. Yeah, I was looking at the course profile and I see that big prominent sardine peak, and then to your point, you actually looks like you descend to a lower elevation than kind of the baseline to begin with, and then you've got that one gradual bump and a few bumps, but largely kind of progressively downhill on the way back to the start finish. [00:38:10] Carlos Perez: Yeah. Yeah. And there is. , there's one descent. Uh, after you get back up to your next peak at about 7,000 feet. That next descent, uh, is a little harrowing. Also, it has some baby head sticking out of it and some ruts and things and roots and stuff. So it's definitely like an o hv road, not, not like a gravel road, but totally doable on a gravel. You just have to pay attention to where your line is. And like I said, we go out there every year with my beat up Nissan Titan, and we carry tools and we clean it up and get it as prepped as we can For the [00:38:48] Craig Dalton: I imagine for people listening, there's a couple camps. There's one people like me who are like, that sounds awesome. And there are others that are like, maybe I won't really like that part of this event. [00:39:00] Carlos Perez: we do not produce events that are easy. , we just don't, uh, there's, there's a sense of accomplishment. Having completed any one of bike monkeys races, whether it be a mountain bike race or a mixed gravel and road event like fish rock or hammer road rally, or a road event like Levi's, grand Fondo, or a gravel event like Truckee or Rebecca's private Idaho. There is always an element of pretty extreme challenge. We have shorter routes, right? We're talking about the big route right now. We have shorter options for people that do forego having to take on some of those tougher challenges. and that option's there. And there's even time cuts too. So if you don't make it, you know, to the base of starting peak by a certain time, you're not gonna be allowed to go back over that. Uh, we can't restrain you. You could climb over it if you wanted to, but your support is not guaranteed at that point. [00:40:05] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's nice that you have the easy, moderate, and hard courses. Available for people. If you, when you think about kind of advising riders, and I know this is like a horribly tricky thing to do, but when you think about ad advising riders as to what sort of tires they should be thinking about running, what are you putting out there in the world about the the Trucky Gravel event? [00:40:26] Carlos Perez: Well, I mean, tire technology has changed a lot over the years, right? Like it's really improved. We used to, everybody used to think that, um, [00:40:36] Craig Dalton: I. [00:40:36] Carlos Perez: a big tire. Was gonna slow you down. Um, that's really not the case. And, and even just the science behind it really. Um, we, we advise you guys as big as, as you want, really. I mean, it's, uh, as long as you feel like it's fast rolling enough for you, the challenges that you're gonna see and running a small. on any of these events is that when you do get to the rough sections, you risk, uh, you take on more risk in losing control in an area, um, or pinch flattening. Uh, so, you know, and a bigger type volume tire allows you to run tubeless easier and that improves the quality of the race or the ride. So, you know, 40 C plus, uh, you know, easily, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go smaller than that. . Um, but some people do, you know, it really does come down to preference, but generally bigger riders are gonna want bigger tires and smaller riders might be able to get away with something that might be a little bit faster rolling on some of the flat stuff. But at the end of the day, I think the tire technology that we're dealing with today has improved so much that. you know, a good volume gravel tire is gonna be the perfect choice for this event. And we see people come out there on mountain bikes and do pretty good. Actually, you know, one of the, one of the, um, photos of the lead group on our homepage is you're scrolling down. Actually has a dude like with that lead pack, like on a mountain bike, just going for it. [00:42:11] Craig Dalton: Yeah. I, I mean to each their own, right. There's a lot of fast, hard tail mountain bikers out there that can keep up with the best gravel racers, I'm sure. when you think about, [00:42:21] Carlos Perez: is like one of the most common questions that we get is like, what tire do I pick? And honestly, like the, the, it's really up to the racer. Uh, the best we can do is explain the course profile and then you have to make your own choice. [00:42:37] Craig Dalton: Yeah. And look, I mean, I think at the end of the day, a lot of people. Just don't bother changing their tires and run what you brung, right? Run, run what you're comfortable with. There's no, no need to kind of spend money to kind of get somewhere you don't need in your home terrain. That said, I'm, I'm with you. Like I enjoy the bigger tires and certainly on those descents with baby heads, like it's just nice to have that volume to be able to slam through things even if it's not purposeful. [00:43:03] Carlos Perez: I think at the point where people start asking and trying to make critical decisions around tire. You're almost splitting hairs at that point. You're really getting into the, to the nitty gritty of like, how am I gonna get that little extra edge what it comes down to. I mean, unless you're on, like, you're talking about running 30 c you know, slicks on your bike, on road bike, then you know, maybe that's a little extreme, but, uh, you know, we're talking like mountain bike size tire versus like a, a bigger gravel size. [00:43:39] Craig Dalton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm always like, for me, that performance edge is just around comfort and control, and I'll error that wave over speed any day of the week, even though I totally agree with you. Like the modern high volume tire is not any slower than some of these smaller tires at all. [00:43:56] Carlos Perez: Yeah. [00:43:58] Craig Dalton: Yeah. When we talk about sort of the racing element of this event, like is that something you're leaning into? Is that something that you're kind of craving as an event promoter to get the fastest men, men and women around to the table and, and see them throw down? Or is that a, a secondary consideration for the event? [00:44:16] Carlos Perez: For me, that's secondary. Uh, I've never been one of the camp to really invest in. Making sure that the professional road racer with a ton of followers is showing up at our events. I wanna make the events appealing enough that they, they want to be there. Um, and so, and there is a competitive component to these events and they often do end up standing on the podium, but I really want to cater to the families. because that's just how my business is built. It's really built around family experience and. Yeah. So we're not like the, we're not like the lifetime events where it's just hyper-competitive, you know, super like you're, we're . You don't really read about us in Bellow news that often cuz we're not catering to that professional market. We want professionals to come to our event and because they wanna be there and enjoy themselves, and many of them do. And we make sure they have a good time just like everybody else. And we try to put on a good event for them, but that's not our. that's not by design for us. We really are designing events that are, uh, meant for people to come and have an amazing time with their friends, with their family, and hopefully not take it too seriously. Um, but we do a professional scoring operation and we give away amazing awards. I mean, behind me and you know, I mean people are mostly gonna see this on nut or listen. On an audio podcast, but we work with graphic designers to make these posters for each of our events, and every one of 'em is fully custom. And this is kind of the touch that we put on giving awards away. Last year, Forte's Painter, I actually made, uh, We, we handmade, or I hand cast silver ingots because it's in the silver state and we gave away bars of silver that I made myself. That's the kind of stuff that people get to walk away with from our events. We don't do like cash prizes or, you know, stupid metals. Like everybody's got a drawer full of metals. It's useless, and I hate giving that stuff away. So we don't do it. You know, we give you something that's like either a work of. A real keepsake. Uh, occasionally we might do like a bottle opener, but we just, you know, people have enough junk. So we try to give people something useful for their efforts that they really feel good about, that we've put our heart into. [00:46:56] Craig Dalton: I love it. I noted one thing that I thought was interesting. It, it, it looked like on the site that the sort of the race, quote unquote, ends at the, before the last aid station. [00:47:07] Carlos Perez: Yeah. [00:47:07] Craig Dalton: Is that sort of purposeful because it's unsafe to race the last eight miles, or was there other intention there? [00:47:13] Carlos Perez: There's two reasons for it. Uh, one, uh, safety is important and you're in a very remote area when you finish. So you're finishing next to Boca Reservoir. next to a dam. Uh, part two is there. It's beautiful there. And we want people to be able to stop and maybe regroup with somebody that they were racing with before and do the high five and they get actually like a nice, uh, return back to the Riverview Sports Park where we have our festival. and they don't have to race it. It's on a shared use bike path, and it's important that we don't have racers going the opposite direction of a mom with a stroller and her kids or a dog walker. And so there's the safety component is number one, but number two, we get the added benefit of people being able to do a pretty decent cool down ride after they just throttled themselves for 50, 60 miles. [00:48:13] Craig Dalton: Yeah, I thought that was a fun concept as I was thinking about. It is nice to your point, to just be able to kind of reconnect with people you might have dropped or been dropped by a few miles back, and then just chill as you have a cool down and then get to the, to the sort of the end point. Just be ready to transition into enjoying the community. [00:48:33] Carlos Perez: Yeah, and Truckee Gravel is one of the few events that we have where there is a long sustained racing portion of the event. A lot of the events that we're producing now actually have segments. that you add up over time because it's actually really fun to, it's almost like how we ride with our friends in a group nowadays is we ride and then it's like we go hit a segment and then we regroup. and we ride together and we're bringing that element to a lot of our events and legitimizing it by accumulating segments. And what it means is that you race for a little while, but then you ride with your friends and then you race for a little while and you ride with your friends and it makes the whole experience so enjoyable because you still race, but you don't have to race the entire time and destroy yourself. But with Truckee Dirt Fonda, we do have more of a traditional longer duration race, and I think that's important. You know, each event we evaluate for what the best experience is gonna be, and Truckee's one of those where we want people to really go out there and work hard. [00:49:34] Craig Dalton: Fun. And final question, Carlos, around the post-race experience there, I think you mentioned it was Riverside Park. What, what is it like, what's the, what should the, uh, the riders expect at the end there? [00:49:46] Carlos Perez: Riverview Sports Park is right next to the Truckee River. And so people that are, you know, at that park can actually walk down to the river, which is super cool, you know, and there's a path that takes you down there and it's a really beautiful area. But the park itself, uh, is a pretty neat facility. There's lots of trees and shade and grass and. It's next to this awesome bike park that the Truckee Bike Park organization has been building over the years. Uh, Brooks Millon, uh, has, has, and, uh, a partner of his have been building this thing and it's amazing and you can. Take your mountain bike or your cross bike or your gravel bike and ride on, uh, the pump track or these features and just, it's a real cool skill building thing. And they have events there. There's a little pump track for kids. So, uh, it's really is like a, a cycling maker. Mountain bikers make a. It's a really neat place to finish the race at and we're actually partnering up with them this year and we're gonna do some really cool stuff. Activations with that bike park that's part of Riverview Sports Park. [00:50:58] Craig Dalton: Fun. And then is, is there, are there food and beverages available at the end there? [00:51:02] Carlos Perez: Oh yeah, absolutely. We, uh, we always have a beer partner that, um, you know, both NA and traditional beer. So we've been working with Best Day Brewing Company, uh, and Truckee. We've worked with 50 50 Brewing Company and, you know, they're right there. Obviously, uh, that changes up every year. So we might have another partner this year. and then we bring in some really cool food trucks to make sure everybody's fed well afterwards. I think we had three different options for folks last year. Uh, we usually have some music going and it's just a really cool atmosphere to hang out and, and kind of recap the day. [00:51:41] Craig Dalton: That's awesome, Carlos. Thanks so much for giving us this overview of everything that Bike Monkey's about. I know we only touched on probably like a quarter of the events you have your hand in, so I definitely encourage people to go check out the Bike Monkey site. I'll link to it in the show notes. I also very much appreciate the intention that you've put into all these events and how you make. Really a community experience in the way that, you know, I certainly look for in events. So thanks for all your hard work over the years. [00:52:11] Carlos Perez: Yeah, of course. Craig, thanks for talking to me about it and letting us kind of tell a little bit about our story [00:52:17] Craig Dalton: Yeah. Awesome. And thanks for getting everybody stoked on, uh, trucky Tahoe Gravel 23 [00:52:22] Carlos Perez: Is the place to be on June 10th. [00:52:25] Craig Dalton: That's going to do it for this week's edition of the gravel ride podcast. Thank you for joining us and big, thanks to Carlos for a putting on all these great events over the years and B for working so hard to make the Truckee Tahoe gravel event. So amazing. Another. Thank you. Goes out to dynamic cyclists for supporting the show. I remember you can use the code, the gravel ride@dynamiccyclists.com to get 15% off your order. They have monthly and annual subscriptions available. If you're looking to connect with me, please join the ridership. That's www.theridership.com. That's a free online cycling community for gravel cyclists. If you're able to support the show, please visit buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride or ratings and reviews are hugely appreciated and helpful in our discovery. Until next time. Here's to finding some dirt under your wheels.

We are almost at the end of January and I want to ask you... ​ "How are your New Year's resolutions working out?" ​ I'm asking because, this is typically the time when New Years resolutions fizzle out and old habits kick back in. ​ And it's not your fault.   If you've been trying to create a change in your life but are starting to feel like your white knuckling it, there's one thing you can do that'll help you create the results you want. ​ You can start working on your self-image. ​ When you want to create lasting results in your life, the best place to start is with how you think about yourself. ​ Everything that surrounds you is most likely a reflection of your self image. ​ How you see yourself determines the choices that you make. So the choices that you make determine the surroundings that you find yourself in. ​ You've created what is around you right now by the choices that you've made, based on the beliefs that you have but your environment is also reflecting back those beliefs about yourself. ​ So when you feel like your white knuckling the actions needed to create the result that you want, think about the women you need to become. ​ Ask yourself: ​ "Who do I need to become to loose the weight?" ​ "Who do I need to become to have a home that's clutter free and organized?" ​ "Who do I need to become to ....?" ​ When you start think about your goals in terms of who you need to become, then you can start to embody that future version of your self now. And when you embody your future self now, then you can begin to take strategic action that aligns with how you feel and who you're becoming. ​ Versus trying to take action based on old thoughts. It will always feel like an uphill battle. ​ This is the number one mistake I see women making when they are trying to create change in their life. ​ And if you want to learn more about how to shift your self image so you can create an elegant life you love, then I invite you to join me as a founding student inside Always Elegant Living.   www.alwayselegantliving.com

This week we're so delighted to welcome Ryûhei Kitamura to our show! He's the director behind Midnight Meat Train, Versus, Godzilla: Final Wars and so much more. His latest film The Price We Pay is currently available on VOD. We chat about Ryûhei's career, the changes they made to the ending of The Price We Pay and he shares so many fantastic stories about first coming to America, living in Australia and basically living at the movie theater. Don't miss this conversation.Then we dig into Phantasm, the movie that scared Ryûhei growing up. We talk about the Japanese poster, the programs they make for movies with the salacious details inside as well as the dreamlike nature of the film. You can follow Ryûhei on Instagram. And check out his site XROSSCOUNTER for cool merch.Follow Mary Beth, Terry and the Podcast on Twitter.Support us on Patreon!If you want to support our podcast, please please take a moment to go rate us on Spotify and give us a rating and review on iTunes. It really helps us out with the algorithms. We also have a YouTube channel! If you want to join our community on Twitter, go here.  Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are heading back to 1993 to to look at songs and albums that turn 30 this year. It was a solid year for rock and roll, with Versus from Pearl Jam, In Utero from Nirvana, and Siamese Dream from Smashing Pumpkins. Debut albums from the Counting Crows, the Cranberries, Bjork, Tool, Collective Soul, Candlebox, Lenny Kravitz, Snoop Dogg, and the Wu-Tang Clan.  We've got a lot of great music to talk about in this one – and some not so good tunes too (we're looking at you, Snow). Our show is sponsored by Boldfoot Socks and McCusker's Tavern at 17th and Shunk Streets in Philadelphia. We're also proud members of the Pantheon Podcast Network. Hear More If you want to hear the music of 1993, check out the Spotify playlist for this episode. Get In Touch Check us out online, on Facebook and Twitter, or drops us an email at show@prisonersofrockandroll.com. . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing the All Def SquADD Cast show “Versus". It's a podcast with the OG SquADD! Each week, the SquADD will debate topics and vote at the end to see what wins. Versus airs every Monday and you can download and listen wherever podcasts are found. Special Guest  Keysha E. Dion Lack This Week We Discuss Win A Vacation vs Win A Car Run Really Fast vs Fly Slow Win $200,000 vs Gain 2 Million Instagram Followers S/o To Our Sponsors Kikoff Kikoff.com

For some time now, it seems that both liberals and conservatives are split between their elites and individuals. Maybe the true divisions between groups are changing. For example, Bill O'Reilly sounded more like an elite than he did a conservative recently.audio edited by: http://JayPrescott.comAlso, please visit our YouTube Channel at:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk7egW4657D6IBrlzOTd6Dwvideos edited by: http://JayPrescottVideo.com

Michael Moorhead continues our Winter "Living the Versus of Scripture" Sermon Series with his Sermon "All for One and One for All." Scripture readings of the day are Luke 12: 13-21 and I Corinthians 12: 12-27.

Michael Moorhead continues our Winter "Living the Versus of Scripture" Sermon Series with his Sermon "All for One and One for All." Scripture readings of the day are Luke 12: 13-21 and I Corinthians 12: 12-27.

Irfan Alam is the CEO of Frontrow Health, a startup with a mission to finally put Americans in the front row of their own healthcare. Will and Victoria talk to Irfan about his background in business strategy and development for healthcare companies, how he went about searching for and building the perfect team, and how he started the culture of Frontrow Health on a level where there is balance and people want to join because it has a good culture. Frontrow Health (https://thefrontrowhealth.com/) Follow Frontrow Health LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/frontrowhealth/). Follow Irfan Alam on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/irfanalam12/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Irfan Alam, Founder, and CEO at Frontrow Health, a startup with a mission to finally put Americans in the front row of their own healthcare. WILL: Hi, Irfan. Thank you for joining us. IRFAN: Thanks for having me; super excited to chat more about the whole process of building and launching Frontrow Health. VICTORIA: Yes, we're super excited. Of course, I know you as a client of thoughtbot, and I'm excited to hear your story. And you have this background in business strategy and development for healthcare companies. But what led you to decide to start your own platform? IRFAN: I think it was a combination of two things; one was a lived experience being inspired by the power of entrepreneurship with my family and then working at Everlywell. And then two, it was discovering and being reminded of a critical problem that I saw in the industry that I then became excited about solving. So growing up, I was raised by my two parents and my grandparents. My grandfather was an entrepreneur himself and also an immigrant and kind of brought our whole legacy of my family into the U.S. from Southeast Asia. He has always motivated me to take risks and to build something great for the world, and that's what he's always wanted for me. And so I joined Everlywell, a small digital health startup, back in 2019 because I was excited to get my feet wet in the world of startups. It was just within a number of months after that I had joined where COVID-19 hit, and Everlywell, a home lab testing company based out of Austin, got swept up into the storm of COVID and, in a lot of ways, threw ourselves into the center of the storm when we ended up launching the first home COVID-19 test. And it was that summer of 2020 when I probably had the most profound personal and professional growing experience of my life, just trying to handle this chaos and confusing world that we were all living in. But then also simultaneously watching how a small team could make an outsized impact in the world during a time of need. And that really led me to want to pursue my own startup ambitions. So I started thinking about business school. The founder and CEO, Julia Cheek, went to Harvard Business School in 2009 and publicly talks about it being sort of this magical moment in time where people were flooding in from the downturn economy, excited about solving new problems. And her class of graduates is sort of like a famous class of entrepreneurs. And so I brought it up with her, and she was super supportive. And I went through the process and got super lucky. And I decided to take the summer off in 2021 before coming to HBS and moving back to Boston. And it was during that summer where I started thinking about the problems that companies like Everlywell and direct-to-consumer health brands faced that I realized was not just at the fault of their own but because the industry didn't have the right digital tools necessary to succeed. That's sort of the origin of how Frontrow Health came to be. WILL: Sweet. So perfect segue; tell us more about the mission of Frontrow Health. IRFAN: We're on a mission to put people on the front row of their own healthcare. And we really just want to reimagine how people shop for their healthcare online. What I learned at Everlywell was that this boom of consumer health which means people who are taking charge of their own health and are able to do that directly through these digital health companies was a form of healthcare that could create a tremendous amount of value in people's lives. But that was only really accessible to a small niche audience. And it didn't feel like it was equitably accessible to the average American. And so some of those barriers that I realized as a part of my work at Everlywell for why the average American wasn't engaging with consumer health, this otherwise really powerful form of taking charge of your own health and wellness, was because of these three blockers that we're trying to address at Frontrow Health. The first being that people just don't know about what kinds of solutions are out there that can address their health issues beyond just taking a prescription medication given to them by the doctor that they visit in their office. The second is if they do know, they don't know what to trust. They don't know whether this spam of healthcare companies that they're getting advertisements on from Instagram are the right companies, whether these products are safe and effective for them uniquely because of their unique health issues their unique health history. And then finally, even if they are aware and they do trust the health product, at the end of the day, a lot of Americans just can't afford to spend money out of pocket to pay for these consumer health and wellness products like consumables, devices, virtual services, et cetera. And so Frontrow Health is all about trying to break down those barriers in order to unleash consumer health to the average American. VICTORIA: And were you always drawn to that healthcare industry from the beginning? IRFAN: Yeah. So I grew up very privileged with two parents who are physicians. My mom is a psychiatrist, which is quite rare for women of color, specifically of South Asian descent, to be a psychiatrist. And then my dad was a gastroenterologist. They were always the gut-brain connection between the two. And so, growing up, I somewhat classically assumed that I was going to be a doctor. Got to college, thought that that was going to be my path. I realized quickly that there is a whole world outside of being a physician yourself that I could still be a part of in healthcare without being a doctor. My parents actually, interestingly enough, began to encourage me to think beyond just being a doctor, with them both feeling like the amount of scale of impact that they could have would never be the same as someone who could do that through business or policy or these other facets that are important to healthcare. And so I got to undergrad, started studying policy economics. I started doing internships at different healthcare consulting firms. And I ended up first working at a life science business strategy consulting firm out of college. And it was great, but it ended up not being what I was most excited about because it was really focused on the biopharmaceutical and medical device industry. And what I realized when I got there was I just had this growing passion for digital health and technology, as I saw that it was kind of the future of how people were going to be able to take more preventative charge and improve their health over the long term. And so I was working on this digital health white paper with a partner at the consulting firm I was at, and I was doing research and stumbled upon Everlywell. And then, they had a job opening for this business strategy role. So that's why I ended up taking the leap into the startup world, into the digital health world, and just loved it and kept wanting to continue to grow my experience in that space. WILL: That's amazing. Your parents encouraged you to step outside of just the doctor-physician role and to think higher. So, as a founder, you know, it was amazing that your parents, as physicians, encouraged you to think higher and think into different roles. And as a founder, what were some of the decisions you had to make? What were some of the easier ones? What were some that were surprisingly difficult? IRFAN: I think the biggest misnomer of the founding experience is that founding a company is extremely linear. Sometimes you go one direction forward, and then you take a direction diagonally back, and then you go horizontally straight, and that was my story. When I do my pitch about Frontrow, I try to make it feel a little bit more linear, so it makes sense to people. But the truth is the quote, unquote, "hardest decisions" were about every time there was a direction changing point, and it required a decision about is this the right idea? Do I want to spend more time on another idea? Have I validated this enough? Should I validate it differently? Should I pursue this one further? What does that pursuit look like? Who should I pursue it with? Is it time to raise money? Do I drop out of school? Like, those direction-changing points that then create this much more complex map of the founder experience versus a linear line up into the right is, I think, the more challenging parts of being a founder. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense that you have to really go through this iterative process to figure out where are you spending your time, is it in the right place? A lot of hard decisions to make. And while you were founding Frontrow Health, you were also a part-time investor at Rock Health and reviewing other healthcare startup proposals. So did you see any trends or patterns that influenced how you progressed as a founder? IRFAN: Totally, yeah. That was actually instrumental to Frontrow Health. So the story is when I took the summer off before business school, I started thinking about different problems in the world, healthcare, and non-healthcare. Or actually, to be clear, I started thinking about lots of different solutions and ideas and then quickly began to realize that that was not the right approach to founding. I think the first step is to think about problems, problems you've seen, problems you've experienced, that you know others are experiencing, and then work to a solution from there by starting with what the user is experiencing. And so as I was going through that hacky journey over the summer, just randomly, a number of small healthcare companies started reaching out to me asking me for my opinion and advice about how or whether they should go direct-to-consumer, whether they should sell healthcare products direct to the consumer, which is what I did a lot of work on at Everlywell as one of the pioneering consumer health brands in the space. And I started to notice this trend of me telling these companies, "No, don't do it. It's really expensive. It's really ineffective and unprofitable to acquire customers through traditional paid media avenues like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, et cetera." And, unsurprisingly, you could imagine Everlywell was trying to sell a home diabetes test for people who are type 2 diabetics but were only able to target people based on their interest in yoga and running, which is not really a substitute for a severe chronic condition. And as a result, thousands of people would see our ads every day that had no clinical relevance to our solution. And that was one of the deep problems of why consumer health companies weren't able to reach out to the audiences that actually really needed their solutions. And so when I got to Rock Health at the first semester in business school, doing this sort of part-time investor gig, on the first day, the partners basically told me, "Oh, we don't invest in consumer health." And I was like, "Oh, whoa, okay, that's my jam. That's a bummer. That's like [laughs] the only thing that I know about." And as I started to see the data and the pipeline of companies that were looking for investments and understanding what their unit economics looked like, what their go-to-market approaches looked like, that's when I started to put the dots together that this was not just an Everlywell problem; this was an industry problem. Mark Zuckerberg didn't build Facebook so that direct-to-consumer healthcare companies can cost-effectively target clinically relevant patients online. That just happens to be what it's being used for today. And so that's when I started to realize that there had to be a quote-unquote, "better way." WILL: You bring up social media at Frontrow Health. Have you had to combat the medical advice of social media? IRFAN: Yeah. You mean like this concept of quote, unquote, "Instagram medicine?" WILL: Yes. Yes. IRFAN: It's a great question. So as the story continues, I began to think about what is the right solution to this problem? And instead of Everlywell, I started thinking about the right solution to this problem. What I realized was instead of Everlywell wasting away millions of dollars to big tech companies that wasn't going to improving the health of anybody, what if we gave that money back to the consumer in reward for sharing their health information which would allow us to target them with the right clinically relevant products? That was the first version of Frontrow Health. I called it Health Mart back then. And so I basically started to get people to fill out a Google Form with their health data. And then I worked with my parents to send weekly product recommendations over email based on their unique health needs; you know, I want to sleep better; I'm a diabetic, whatever it is. And then, I wanted to see if I was just going to Venmo them cashback upon purchase if they were going to be any more likely to buy these products for these health brands. And at first, people were incrementally more likely to buy. It wasn't mind-blowing. And so, as I started to talk to the participants of the study, I started saying, "You know, you said that you have high cholesterol. These supplements have active ingredients that have been shown to reduce LDL levels. It's pretty cheap. I'm giving you 25-30% cashback. Why haven't you bought it?" And what they started saying was, "Well, I don't know what these active ingredients are. And before I put that in my body, I want to check with my doctor first." And so that was the final aha moment that led us to Frontrow Health, which is, what if we could bring the doctor into the fold? And instead of consumers just experiencing this Instagram medicine where they're just being blasted with Instagram ads every day about different health products, and they don't know what to trust, that second barrier that I talked about earlier, what if the doctor could instead of just being a guide for what prescription medications you should be taking could also be a guide on what health and wellness products you can be using? And so I added my dad to the email thread, and I said, "Okay, you can talk to an independent medical provider and ask them questions about the products that you're being recommended." And that's when people started buying because then they were able to find the trust in the products that were being curated based on their unique information. WILL: Wow, that's really neat. So to help the audience understand your iteration today, so the first iteration was just giving products and then Venmoing them back cashback. And then the second was bringing in a provider. So what does the product look like today? IRFAN: We went through, like you mentioned, a lot of different iterations of this. There were even prior iterations to this that are more representative of that founder map versus the linear line that you've sort of just heard now. But in terms of where the story went from there, I began to think about how to validate this idea further. I came into winter break; the pilot went well. People were buying a lot of products. And so, I decided to sunset my part-time investor gig at Rock Health and decided to reallocate all my time to working on Health Mart at the time. What I started to think about was, well, what if the doctor was able to earn compensation for writing private product reviews regardless of their opinions? So that was the next iteration was like, how do you incentivize a doctor to take time out of their day to do this new behavior that doesn't exist? Doctors are not writing personalized private product reviews for their patients on supplements, home medical devices, apps, et cetera. And how could we get them to? And so, I started thinking about what are the different motivations of providers? Their time is extremely valuable. How do you incentivize them correctly without incentivizing them to give good or bad feedback but just honest feedback? Then I started basically having my dad recommend Health Mart to his patients every day to see would patients sign up. Like, if doctors were intrinsically motivated to get their patients on the platform so that they can help them get away from Instagram medicine and at the same time earn compensation for themselves as an additional revenue stream, could independent medical providers see that as valuable and a good use of their time? And the first piece of that about whether patients would sign up worked unsurprisingly very well. If your doctor is telling you to sign up for something, or it's free to sign up, and you only pay when you want to buy a product, and they're going to, for the user, be able to ask for feedback from the provider, they were pretty excited. But then the question of would doctors sign up, I started...basically, I had my mom. The next iteration was I had my mom make a couple of posts in these doctor Facebook groups. I put together a little website, a very ugly version of what we have today for a provider marketing page. And I had my mom drop the link in a couple of different doctor Facebook groups. And we actually started getting signups from the doctors. And then, as we started talking to them, what we realized was two things; it was like a win-win. The doctor was happy because they were getting compensated, and they were happy because their patients' health was improving. So when Obama was in administration, he passed a really fundamentally important piece of legislation called The Sunshine Act. And that basically ended this quote, unquote, "golden era" of pharma companies giving kickbacks to doctors. WILL: Oh wow. IRFAN: And so since then, doctors have been very eager to find additional revenue streams that they can leverage their decades of medical expertise to earn. They got medical bills to pay off loans to pay off. They spent 20 years training for this job. And so they were excited about an additional revenue stream that leveraged their medical expertise and also helped their patient. Because they also started saying things like, "Well, my patients are always asking me like, 'What about these supplements I saw for these ads online?'" And the doctor says, "I don't know what these supplements are. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: I don't have the data in front of me. I don't know what the ingredients are. I don't know whether to trust the company or not." And we are building a platform where it's all streamlined for the provider. The provider is able to review the clinical information. They're able to review their patient information. They're able to really quickly write reviews. We give them templates. We give them suggestions. They're able to reapply recent reviews. And so that was sort of the next iteration. And that's actually when thoughtbot came in and when I started thinking about raising a small round, getting a dev shop to help me build the MVP. And that's kind of how the semester ended up closing out. VICTORIA: I love that your mom and dad were so supportive, it sounds like, of you going full-time on this startup. Was that scary for them for you to do that? IRFAN: It's so funny, yeah. So what happened next was I decided I wanted to start raising a small round because I had the conviction that there was a problem to be solved for consumers, for doctors, and for health brands. And we could build this one unique multi-sided marketplace to solve them. I ended up going back to Austin for spring break partially to visit my family and partially because I wanted to pitch to Julia, the founder of Everlywell, who I thought of all people on planet Earth would understand what I'm trying to do. She would get it because I am building a SaaS solution for health brands like Everlywell and her consumers. And she got it. She was jazzed. And so, she decided to angel invest. And that basically spurred a ton of interest from venture capital firms. I wasn't originally thinking about raising an institutional round but was very lucky with the timing. Just before the market crashed, it was a very hot market. And so we ended up closing a real seed round with the question on hand about whether I should pursue this full-time because the capital that I raised necessitated building a real team. Or should I just take a smaller amount of money and go back to school? And it's unsurprisingly, every different person in my life had some opinion about this, from my wife to my investors, to my parents, to my friends. What I wanted was somewhere nestled in between all of those things. And when I caught my dad up on the phone a couple of weeks after spring break and told him of all the crazy stuff that had been happening...and it was just happening and unfolding so quickly. I was like, "Okay, dad. I'm laying out all my cards here. You have full liberty to be mad at me for wanting to drop out of Harvard." And his first reaction was, "Well, you know, I don't really see the downside. Like, you could either start a company that you're really passionate about and it could go well, or you could be the worst entrepreneur of all time and then just come back to school during this leave of absence," or deferral thing that I'm on right now. And that was the first time where I was like, "Oh, you know what? I think you're right." And the truth was I decided to just continue to let the summer go by to think about the decision a little bit more before I formally submitted my deferral to HBS. As the markets turned, we realized that we needed to hire internally to save on cash burn a little bit. And so once I had built this really awesome team that I'm so lucky to be surrounded by, that's when I was, you know, without a doubt in my mind, I was like, I got to keep pushing for this because now we have this awesome team that just wants to keep driving this mission forward. And we were getting traction. We were talking to hundreds of doctors over the summer. We were talking to health brands. And it really felt like we were onto something. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. That's T-B-O-T.I-OVICTORIA: I-N-C-U-B-A-T-O-R. WILL: I hear you have an amazing product team. How did you go about searching and building the right team? IRFAN: We got lucky in a second way because of timing, where the first time was I raised the capital when the market was really hot in April. And then, I started hiring when the market crashed. And, unfortunately, as you all know, lots of people have been getting laid off since the summer, particularly in the tech world: designers, engineers, marketers, et cetera. Now, all of a sudden, there was a flood of really great talent on the market. And that was also what spurred me to start thinking about hiring sooner than I was originally planning to. My forecast was to hire people end of this year, maybe in a month or so from now, to start that process. Versus, we ended up making our first full-time hire, I guess in July, maybe. And it was...the best way I can describe it is like dominoes falling where once you get the first one in, then it builds trust and credibility, and then the next one comes, and the next one. And so the first couple of folks were these two brilliant engineers who were close friends of my interim CTO and classmate, Amit, who was helping us build the foundation of the product this past summer. He did an amazing job of basically recruiting one engineer, Anand, our first engineer who started his career as a PM at Microsoft and then turned into a software engineer at a number of different startups and studied comp sci and electrical engineering at Berkeley with Amit, where they first met. And then the second engineer was Nupur, who was a colleague of Amit, a machine learning engineer at Google Brain and the moonshot X team at Alphabet. And they were both, I think, just kind of tired of big tech and were ready to bet on the upside and their career. And the timing was right based on where the market conditions were. And so they decided to take the leap of faith with me. And then after that, or around that time, kind of in the middle, we were able to bring on our head of design, Jakub, who is like a unicorn human with so much rich experience in the product world. So he was a computer animator and then studied visual arts, but then started his career very early in the coupon website space as a product designer actually. And then led product design as a founding designer at a number of different startups. And then, most recently, was a senior product designer at Roman, which is a really large digital health company similar to Everlywell. And Ro, Everlywell, Truepill, all these companies had mass layoffs in the middle of the summer. And so when Jakub took my call...He talks about a really funny story where he wasn't taking me seriously at all. Convincing these excellent, talented people to come join my dinky startup at the time was not easy. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And so he just kind of took it because there was a mutual connection. Or he just said, okay, I'll explore what's going on given how crazy the market is. But once he heard what we were building, he was immediately on board, actually, because Roman has also struggled with the same customer acquisition problems. And it's a huge reason why a lot of these digital health companies continue to remain unprofitable. And so he understood the problem deeper than I think anyone because of the experience he had in the same space that we were in. And he realized that there was an opportunity to build a solution to solve these problems. So that was the first core team. And then from there, it kind of just snowballed, you know, there was more and more interest from other folks to join. And we brought in a great junior product designer. We just hired our platform engineer. But that was the original core team from the summer who took the big leap of faith and joined because of the market conditions, the belief in the space. And we actually just met up in San Diego for the first time for a company retreat in person. And it was just fun meeting everyone in person for the first time because now I get to know them as real people and see all their personalities. And we're really psyched about coming to product launch pretty soon here. VICTORIA: That's wonderful and, you know, that compelling vision and having those first initial people join and brought in everyone else. You know, I think part of the reason people are hesitant to join startups is because there is that reputation for kind of unhealthy work-life balance. So you're a healthcare startup. So how do you start the culture of your company on a level where there is that balance and people want to join because it has a good culture? IRFAN: It's a super interesting question that we spent a lot of time actually talking about in San Diego as a team. And it was brought up because I have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with work. And I am constantly working. And this is the most important thing right now in our life. And so Nupur, one of our engineers, had a phenomenal analogy that I think is the right framework to think about this from a company culture perspective. Because I've always tried to share with a team, like, I don't expect them to work nearly as much as I do, and I don't want them to either. I think the analogy was such a fun, helpful way to think about why that was the case. And so she kind of said, "I'm like the aunt, and you're like the single father. And the aunt doesn't have to take care of the baby at nighttime and on the weekends, but the single father does. And it's not that the aunt doesn't care about the company, but there's some space and boundary in that relationship." And so that's actually our motto right now is like, yeah, we all care about this product and this company, quote, unquote, "baby," but there's always biologically intrinsically going to be a deeper relationship between me and this company, for good reason. And so that is going to require me to work harder and longer than anyone else, probably for a long, long time. And I had to be ready for that. My wife and I had to be ready for that. And so far, honestly, I've never been busier. But I've also never been...or, like, I've never had this ratio between busyness and stress where I'm really busy but not that stressed. And I think it's just because I love what I'm doing every day. I haven't ever found this happy balance where I actually just enjoy what I do. And I'm constantly excited about continuing to build the right product to help people. WILL: Wow. VICTORIA: I'm actually babysitting my niece and nephew this weekend. [laughter] My brother would say, "You need to be here on the weekends with them." IRFAN: Maybe not the perfect analogy. But-- VICTORIA: I like it, though. It makes sense. [laughs] WILL: There's a difference. [laughter] VICTORIA: Oh yeah. Will knows; he's a dad. WILL: Yeah. I know company values can be so...we have them. Do we follow them? Or sometimes they get put on the shelf. I was reading your company values, "People first, bias for curiosity, and dream big." For Frontrow Health, how does that play a role in the day-to-day? IRFAN: When Jakub, Nupur, and Anand had all joined like that first core team, we actually spent time writing all this out and creating a document that discussed what the company culture and values were. And we looked at different examples of other companies. Amazon famously has, I don't know, these 16 principles. And we kind of said, okay, we want to pick just a couple because you can't always focus on everything at the same time. And we need some sort of guiding North Star if you will. And so these were the three that we came up with, the ones that you mentioned. So we are people first; we have a bias for curiosity, and we want to dream big. So people first to us means that our mission like we talked about, we want to increase access to healthcare at home for the average American. And so every decision that we make at the company has to pass that litmus test first. Whatever feature we're building, whatever business model approach we're taking, whatever go–to–market approach that we're taking, is what we're doing going to increase access to healthcare at home for the average American? Yes? Then we continue onwards, and then we continue deliberating and deciding; if not, we pass. And so that is how we determine whether we can continue to be people first because that is our mission. And as we're going down that thread, we want to push ourselves to constantly be bettering and asking questions about how we can be better. That is the bias for curiosity. That was one of Everlywell's company values and was the one that I resonated with the most. I find tremendous value in asking questions. Nupur on our team, one of our engineers, is a great example of bias for curiosity. She's constantly challenging and asking the right questions. And that helps us be better at being people first and increasing access even more than we can because we're never settled with what exists today. And then dreaming big is about finding answers to those questions and not settling for the tried and true paths. Some of the greatest companies that have ever been created are the ones that invent new behaviors that have never existed before. So Airbnb, now all of a sudden, people are comfortable with strangers living in their homes. Uber, now all of a sudden, people are comfortable driving in a stranger's car. At Frontrow Health, we're dreaming big in a world where doctors are not currently engaging with their patients related to their home health and wellness journeys when they leave the four walls of their clinic. How can we change the behavior where doctors are more involved in that relationship in a way that doesn't exist today? And so that's a part of what we're trying to do, and dreaming big to go and increase access, like I said, is our ultimate North Star. WILL: Wow. You said something I think that was...it seemed very small, but I think it said a lot about you and your company. You said that you encourage your engineer to ask the hard questions. I think so many times, people hate the hard questions. They are fearful of that. But I think in your field, you have to be able to ask the hard questions. So that's amazing that you brought that up, and you're talking about that. IRFAN: Yeah. And it doesn't...it's not just me, for sure. I think my team is...and it's kind of you to point that out. But yeah, my team does such a great job of holding true to these values on their own and pushing me to remind myself of these values. Nupur actually is Slacking me right now about some thought that she had coming out of a meeting. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And two points about different alternative ways to think about things. And yeah, I want to keep encouraging them and our future employees to do that. Because you look at the worst examples in healthcare, in particular, tech as well, the worst examples of companies are the ones where the employees were not able to or encouraged to ask questions; that's when things go south. So Theranos is the simplest example of this where they were hiding everything from their employees, and people had questions constantly but never asked them. And that's when more and more bad decisions were made. So I don't want that to be the case for Frontrow. And so it has to start with, yeah, this bias for curiosity. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I wonder if that's part of your success, being someone who doesn't have a background in engineering or programming specifically and enabling your technical team to build what they need to get done. IRFAN: Yeah. I can't honestly explain to you guys how much I've learned over the past six months from my product and dev team. And you're right that I think one could see my lack of programming as a weakness which, in a lot of ways, it is. But what has also manifested as a result of that is I have naturally had to lean more heavily on my dev team to be owners of decisions that affect our business and to challenge them to think about are we being people first if we build and design solutions in the way that you're describing? I don't know the right approach about how to build this, or on what tech stack, or in what capacity we have the ability to. You guys have to take ownership of thinking through those, solving those problems, and coming up with the right decision. And as a founder, that's scary to do. You're giving up control of the decisions to others. But at the same time, by giving them that autonomy and encouraging them to take ownership of it, they feel I think more and more invested in what we're building. And that hopefully builds the habit of what you guys were talking about around wanting to constantly seek better solutions, challenge because they know that they have a voice in how things turn out. VICTORIA: Right. Maybe you've discovered this naturally or through your education and background. But studies that are done around high-performing technology organizations find that no matter what processes or tools you have if you have that high-trust environment, you'll have better security, more software development throughput, all of those things. So I think you're doing it right by setting your values and creating that kind of high-trust environment. IRFAN: Super interesting. I didn't know that, actually, but it makes sense. [laughs] We've been seeing it. I actually want to give some credit to thoughtbot because thoughtbot helped us set a lot of this important engineering culture at the very beginning, where I had to rely on my thoughtbot engineers, folks like Jesse, Dave, and others, to help me make the best decision for my company. They taught me a lot of these things at the earliest stage back in May around, okay, like, you guys are a consulting firm at the end of the day, technically speaking. But they pushed me to think of it more as how do we co-make these decisions? Like, how do we leverage each other's strengths to make the right decisions? The thoughtbot design team and engineering team...one of our designers through thoughtbot, Steven, is so funny because...and I gave him this feedback, which is great feedback, which is like, he constantly asked questions. And if he hears this, he'll laugh because he's constantly pushing, like, "Why are we designing it this way? Why do you think it should be this way? Where is the evidence that the user wants it to be this way?" And it was a great setup for when our internal team came on because I just kept up that momentum. And then they just kind of took with it and ran. VICTORIA: How did you find us, or how did you find the right technical partners in the very beginning to help you build your vision? IRFAN: It was not an immediately simple process. But when I found thoughtbot, it kind of unraveled quite quickly in a good way. So I was working with Amit like I mentioned, who'll become our interim CTO, one of my classmates at HBS. And he helped me put together an RFP where we outlined all the different feature requirements, all the different intentions for our solution or timeline, our costs, et cetera. And I just did a lot of Google research about different dev shops, and I started talking to dev shops in lots of different locations, U.S.-based, European-based, Asian-based, Latin America-based, started comparing prices. We had questions where we wanted to see their creativity in developing solutions. We started accepting proposals, reviewing those proposals. I somehow stumbled upon thoughtbot's website during this process. And I noticed that Everlywell was one of thoughtbot's clients, Everlywell, the home lab testing company that I used to work at before business school. I was like, oh wow. I knew that our engineering team and our engineering leadership had a really high bar for when we worked with outsourced talent. And so I thought that that spoke volumes about choosing thoughtbot. And so then we actually ended up asking Everlywell CTO an unprompted question of like, "If you had to pick any dev house that you've known or have worked with, et cetera, that was supposed to build you custom software from scratch, who would you pick?" And he said, "thoughtbot." It wasn't even like a question of, what do you think of thoughtbot? Or, what was your experience? It was just like, imagine you had to pick, and, unprompted, he said thoughtbot. So that was actually what did it for me. And I kind of threw aside all the other logistical hoopla that we were going through and said, you know, I got to trust the people who I know and trust, and having verbal confirmation of that was huge. And then, of course, I enjoyed speaking with Dawn at thoughtbot, who was helping broker the whole discussion, and it felt easy. And their proposal was also quite strong. And then, as I dug deeper into thoughtbot, it became clear that no pun intended, you guys are kind of the thought leaders in a lot of ways. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: It's funny, our head of design, Jakub, when I mentioned that he's a unicorn, it's because he also taught himself coding and programming. WILL: Wow. IRFAN: So he's like a pseudo designer and programmer. He can do a little bit of everything. And he actually...when I told him that we were working with thoughtbot, he was like, "Oh, I learned Ruby on Rails back in the day from thoughtbot with whatever content they had published back in time." And then, as I spoke to other dev shops about going with thoughtbot, they started saying things like, "Oh, thoughtbot, yeah, they're kind of the OGs of Rails and a lot of the core tech stack that's been around for a while." And so it was just continued validation of the right approach. And then, we started working with the team in May, right after my second semester of business school ended. And it's been an incredible process. We have never missed any deadlines, and we're actually two months ahead of schedule. And it's not just because they're good at what they do, but it's also because of the culture and the teaching me about the best way to run retros, and sprint planning, and things to think about in terms of trust in your engineer and building that trust, and all the soft, intangible things. It wasn't just like thoughtbot came in and built code. It was thoughtbot came in and helped establish the company in a lot of ways. VICTORIA: That's great to hear. Thank you for saying all those wonderful things. I'm sure me and Will agree 100%. [laughter] IRFAN: Yeah, it's been an awesome process. And yeah, we've even ended up basically bringing on as a full-time independent contractor someone who worked through thoughtbot because we love them so much. And they were just so excellent at what they did. And just, yeah, I think that probably speaks the most volumes about the kind of organization that you guys are running. WILL: I appreciate you saying that. That means a lot. It really does. I want to take a second to kind of circle back and kind of talk about how you find the providers because I think, for me, one of the most influential classes I had in college was my professor said, "Hey, meet me at the pharmacy." So we went to the pharmacy, and he started asking us questions. And he was like, "What medicine do you think would be the most impactful?" And we would try to pull it out. He taught us how to compare the active ingredients. IRFAN: Wow. WILL: Like how some stuff is just marketing, and it's not really helpful and things like that. But I also saw the side, you know, the amazing providers like your parents. You talking about your parents just reminded me of my parents and how supportive they are. So it's just amazing. You had your parents as providers. How did you find providers beyond that that you have to extend that trust to them? IRFAN: I guess two reactions. The first is how do we talk to doctors to get feedback on our solution as we're building it? And then how do we get doctors to sign up and use our solution with their patients? Those are the two chronological steps. So for the first one, we very liberally use a platform called usertesting.com, which we used at Everlywell, where I first got introduced to it. And it's amazing. We have the unlimited package, and we run tons of user tests a day. So, over the summer, we were literally having unmoderated tests from medical professionals, about ten healthcare professionals a day who were coming to our website, coming to our product, giving their feedback through these unmoderated tests. We were quantitatively assessing qualitatively assessing their responses to specific questions that we were asking them. Like, was it easy enough to write a review? What were you expecting to see? How did that compare to what you did see? Like, all the traditional kind of user research. They really helped us build the product, and then we were able to follow up with them, get on the phone with them, ask them more questions about their experience, about their current experience in their clinic, whether patients are asking them about these things, about their interest in certain supplements, et cetera. And then we actually had one medical provider, a family practice nurse practitioner from Vermont, who was so excited about what we were building. She was sending me all this other information and content about how to reach out to other doctors and stuff. And then, at the end of the summer, when we were just about ready to start getting our beta off the ground, we were going to choose one provider to work with who was going to recommend it to their patients, and they were going to slowly kind of monitor the experience. This nurse practitioner actually just happened to reach back out, and we happened to connect again. And she's like, "Okay, what are you guys up to? Are you guys done with your product? I really want to use it." And I was like, "Oh, wow. Well, it's great timing because we're looking for our first medical provider." WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And so that's where we ended up launching beta with, which was awesome. And since then, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the go-to-market approach beyond just one medical provider. How do we scale to thousands of medical providers? And luckily, selling to doctors is a solved problem, like; the biopharma and medical device industry has been doing this for decades. And so it was really just a part of me brushing up on a lot of the work that I was doing in life science consulting about helping Big Pharma and whatnot go to market and just stealing a lot of notes out of their playbook. So, for example, there are companies that allow you to run ads online that just target physicians. So instead of my dad seeing a Lululemon ad while he's reading The Wall Street Journal, he'll see an ad for Frontrow Health. And so we actually run marketing tests over the summer, towards the end of the summer, with a newer provider landing page that we had built to see what percent were going to click on the ads, what percent were going to come to the website and sign up, and then how much cost would that be per acquisition of a provider. And the results were actually much better than we thought. It was half as expensive as what we originally predicted, which is awesome. WILL: Wow. IRFAN: And that was before Jakub, our new head of design, had even touched the website. We're actually just revamping it right now because he's been going through and revamping other aspects of our product and marketing experience. And now we're at the provider part. So we're actually going to be just about a week or so away from launching the marketing tests and actually getting every day more providers on the platform. The product is now done, so they can start getting their patients on the platform. We just signed our first health brand. So now people are getting real product recommendations and getting ability to earn cashback. And we can be revenue generating, which is also super exciting that we're, like I said, a couple of months ahead of schedule, actually. VICTORIA: That's really exciting, and that certainly sounds like enough on your plate. But is there anything else on the horizon for Frontrow Health that you're excited about? IRFAN: Yes. We are super excited that we're just coming out of stealth mode and launching our full product experience for consumers, medical providers, and DTC health brands. Going forward into 2023, we're really looking to try to find this quote, unquote, "product market fit." Are doctors excited about signing up and getting their patients on the platform? Are those patients excited about the products that we're selling on our marketplace? And are we delivering new lifetime customers for these health brands at a more cost-effective rate than they've ever seen before? And solving that original problem that came to me while I was at Everlywell. And by doing all three of those things, hopefully, we'll begin to increase access to healthcare at home where people who are not suburban high-income folks who can afford to pay out of pocket for preventative healthcare; we can now make that more equitable by bringing down the cost through the cashback, by introducing the element of trust, by engaging with a medical provider, and by opening up people's eyes to thousands of different consumer health and wellness companies that now exist in the world that we want to be able to connect the right products to the right people with. VICTORIA: That's so exciting. I'm really glad we got a chance to talk to you today and hear more about your story. Is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap up? IRFAN: This has been super fun being able to even just reflect and think about our whole story. For anyone else listening who's interested or excited about entrepreneurship, there's a really good book that I read last summer as I started thinking about entrepreneurship for the first time called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" written by Ben Horowitz, who co-founded the VC fund, Andreessen Horowitz. He was an entrepreneur himself. And it's one of my favorite books because, as the title [laughs] explains, it just talks about the difficulty of the experience and the journey that's still ahead of me. But I think the overall takeaway of the book and my experience over the past year is that it's just the single greatest learning experience of my life. And that's actually really all I'm trying to optimize for personally is I want to keep growing and learning, and learning about the space, learning about myself, learning about how to work on a team, how to lead a team, how to grow a team. And if you're at all interested in any of those things, keep trying to think about all the right problems that are being experienced in the world. And we still live in a world wrought with problems and don't have nearly enough founders trying to go and solve all of them. VICTORIA: That's a really great perspective, I think, to bring to it about your own personal growth. And that's what it's really all about. [laughs] And hopefully, we're able to solve some big challenging problems along the way. IRFAN: Hope so. WILL: You can subscribe to this show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. VICTORIA: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. WILL: You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. WILL: Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Irfan Alam.