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“Punch me as hard as you can, bruh!” A shirtless, flaxen-haired Heady Armstrong pounded his fists into his well-defined abdominal muscles and laughed. His friend, also laughing, stepped back until he was out of the frame. “Here I come dude, you sure?” the unseen friend called out. “I’m ready! Do it bruh!” Heady’s friend barreled into view and raced across the screen. Heady visibly braced himself. The still-charging friend swung his arm back, and then thrust it forward. Swinging fist connected with Heady’s groin. Heady yelped and keeled forward. The camera started shaking as its operator burst into laughter. “Officer Jefferies?” Sarah looked up from the phone hidden beneath the monitoring control panel that doubled as her desk. She was startled to see Officer Thompson standing in the small security office. Sarah wondered why he hadn’t used the intercom, like a normal person. Probably to annoy her. Sarah pushed a loose strand of jet black hair behind her left ear, surreptitiously grabbing the wireless earbud she was hiding there. Damn it, how long had he been standing there? “Officer Jefferies, the highway outpost has radioed that they saw a suspicious vehicle. It might be heading toward the compound. Keep a close eye on the perimeter, OK?” Officer Thompson spoke slowly and enunciated his words, as though he were suspicious of Sarah’s grasp of basic language concepts. Sarah loathed him. “I heard the report too,” Sarah lied. “I’m not stupid y’know. You don’t need to tell me how to do my job.” Officer Thompson nodded. “Yes, sure. Just making sure you got the message.” His eyes darted down toward Sarah’s control panel. Sarah saw his gaze shift and slid her chair forward, shoving the phone in her hands further out of view. “Right,” said Sarah curtly and forced a disingenuous grin. “Message received. Thanks.” Officer Thompson frowned and peered closer at the array of display screens splayed across Sarah’s control panel. His eyes lingered on the one that was off. “Did you fix camera nine yet?” he asked. “Not yet,” said Sarah. She hated Thompson so much. Why did he have to be so irritating? His stupid freckled face infuriated her. His dumb red hair made her blood boil. “It’s only been broke two days. Plus that section’s covered by the motion sensors so it’s not like we need the camera. I’ll get to it later.” “Make sure you do, Jefferies,” said Officer Thompson. “Before your shift is out, OK?” Sarah hated the way Officer Thompson called her “Jefferies.” Everyone called her that, but the way he said it seemed to drip with contempt and superiority. Like he thought he was better than her because he outranked her. Officer Thompson held his arms crossed out in front of him, forming the standard Nikola’s Children salute. “The Children be praised,” he said, then turned and left the security office. Sarah listened to his footsteps recede down the hall and out of earshot. “Dickweed,” Sarah muttered under her breath. “Children be praised,” she said in a mocking tone and put her earbud back in her ear. She returned her attention to her phone and the video that Officer Thompson had interrupted. An old one she’d already seen countless times, but one of her favorites. “Are you sure this is the way?” Doyle Tingler asked. They had turned off the main highway onto an unnamed dirt road close to an hour ago and had seen nothing but darkness and trees in the moonlight outside the car windows. “Yeah,” replied Heady Armstrong. “My boys scouted the coordinates you sent me a few days ago. The compound was right where you said.” “Ah,” said Doyle. “Can I assume that by ‘your boys’ you are referring to those half-witted imbeciles who star along side you in your idiotic videos?” “Yeah,” said Heady Armstrong. “And they’re not idiotic videos, I have almost ten million subscribers.” “Mmm,” said Doyle. “That’s where you’re wrong. You see, the majority of people who watch YouTube are, by definition, idiots, and the idiocy of a given YouTube channel is directly proportional to the number of idiots who subscribe to it.” Doyle enjoyed ribbing Heady about his YouTube channel. Heady and his friends started it six years earlier in college and it had exploded in popularity since. But it catered to an audience which Doyle considered to be lower than the lowest common denominator; the channel spotlighted a plethora of disgusting bodily functions, stupid pranks, terrible music videos, and horrendously unfunny (and typically offensive) “comedy” skits. Doyle was certain that the channel’s popularity was due entirely to the fact that Heady and his friends found reasons to take their shirts off in every video. Doyle’s objections to the YouTube channel were entirely based on its intellectual merits (or lack thereof) and certainly had nothing to do with, as Heady sometimes postulated during his less forgiving moods, jealousy over the idea that nobody wanted to see Doyle with his shirt off. Sure, he was a little heavier than Heady and his friends, a little less muscly, and his hair was a bit wispier and thinner on top, but he wasn’t all that bad. And at any rate, he was already spoken for. Or at least had been, and hopefully would be again soon, if the night’s plans were ultimately successful. “Uh huh,” said Heady. “If I’m such an idiot then why did you even ask for my help?” “I didn’t say you were an idiot, Heady. Only your videos. And the millions of idiots who idolize you.” “Those millions of idiots paid for my house,” said Heady. “And this car, plus a few others.” “Don’t rub it in,” Doyle said, and sighed. “Look, I’m grateful to you for agreeing to help. Someone needs to expose these assholes for who they really are, and I can’t think of anyone more suited to it than you.” “Because of my millions of idiots?” Heady shot back. “Well, yeah,” said Doyle. “Do you really think this will work?” asked Heady. “I mean, I know this vid’s gonna be bangin’, but do you really think it’ll make a difference?” “I really think so, Heady,” said Doyle. “I mean, despite appearances I believe you’re actually capable of great things. You’re so much better than that drivel you put out. I mean, what you did for me–that was the darkest period of my life and you… without you I…” “Don’t sweat it, bud,” said Heady. “Kirsten was–is my friend, too. You helped me through it as much as I helped you.” Doyle did his best to stifle the sudden wellspring of emotion he found himself swimming in. Heady was exaggerating, he knew. Heady liked Kirsten well enough, but not like Doyle did. Doyle hadn’t told Heady, but he proposed to Kirsten about a week before she disappeared. She hadn’t said yes right away, but she hadn’t said no either. She would have said yes, Doyle was certain, if only that fucking cult hadn’t… Doyle snapped out of his thoughts when his eye caught a glint in the distance. “Shh, slow down,” he told Heady, staring keenly through the windshield at the dirt path that stretched before them. “And kill the headlights, I think I see something.” Heady relaxed the accelerator and cut the lights. The sound of the gravel crunching under the car’s tires slowed as the two men squinted into the darkness. There was some kind of light in the distance, too far away to make out any details. Heady pulled off the road and maneuvered the car behind some trees before coming to a stop. “We gotta walk from here,” he said. “The guys found a spot where the wall crumbled away a little. They said we should be able to get in there. They took out a nearby security camera with a rock before they left.” Doyle unfastened his seatbelt and opened the car door. “You don’t think they’d have repaired the camera by now? Or the wall?” “Hopefully not,” said Heady. The two men shut the car doors and started walking along the tree line next to the road, toward the light in the distance. “Keep an eye out for a red cloth tied around one of these tree branches,” said Heady, motioning to the dark tangle of trees that lined the road. “That’s where we cut into the woods and make our way to the wall.” The men walked in silence for a while, trading nervous glances down the road in both directions, scanning for any sign of motion or approaching headlights. “I’m not going to make those videos for ever, you know,” Heady said, breaking the silence. Doyle glanced at his friend’s face, pallid in the moonlight and brushed by the jagged shadows of the treetops. “I mean, that’s why I’m collabing with you on this in the first place. I want this video to really help people. The first ever footage from inside the Nikola’s Children compound, together with all the dirt you’ve dug up on them over the past year, that’s gonna blow these mother fuckers wide open, right?” “I hope so,” said Doyle. “People haven’t cared about Nikola’s Children for a while though. I’ve offered my research to every investigative journalist who’ll give me the time of day but none of them were interested. They said there’s no story in it. It’s just another boring cult to them.” “That’s because they’re so good at keeping a low profile,” said Heady. “We’re going to end that, man. We’re gonna get people interested again. If even half the stuff you dug up on them is true, people are gonna flip their shit.” “Maybe,” said Doyle. “But honestly I just want some kind of sign that Kirsten’s OK. That they haven’t… done anything too her.” “I’m sure she’s OK,” said Heady. “She’s just confused. They brainwashed her or something. Like all those other scientists who joined. I’m sure of it.” Doyle stopped and put his hand on Heady’s shoulder. “Shh,” he said. “What is it?” Doyle pointed. Wound around a branch of one of the trees, a thin scrap of red cloth flapped lightly in the soft moonlit breeze. Heady reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He started a video recording and handed the device to Doyle. “Showtime,” he said. Doyle held the phone up and pointed the camera at Heady. “Yo yo yo what’s up Heady Nation?” Heady cried using the exaggerated dude-bro accent he reserved for his videos. “Heady Armstrong comin’ atch’a and you are never gonna guess where from, bruh!” Doyle lowered his head and sighed. Everyone told him he was always too pessimistic–that nothing could ever go as badly as he expected it to. Tonight he hoped they were right. “Officer Jefferies, report please.” Sarah watched and giggled as Heady Armstrong attempted to eat twelve sticks of butter as fast as he could. “Officer Jefferies! Report!” Sarah jerked her head toward the speaker on her console, then paused the video and put her phone down. It was the voice of Commander Chin, head of security. “Uh, yes?” said Sarah, holding the intercom button. “The motion detectors around section nine have been lighting up like a Christmas tree for the last minute and a half. What have you been doing? What does the camera show?” Sarah looked at the array of displays on her control panel, and directed her gaze to the one numbered nine. The one that was off. “Uh, nothing?” she said hesitantly. It wasn’t exactly a lie. There was a short pause before the speaker crackled back to life. “Officer Thompson has informed me that the camera in section nine is not operational. Is that accurate?” Sarah scowled. Damn that Officer Thompson. “Well, I mean the camera itself is not quite in a state that I would exactly describe as fully operational. Yes.” She glanced sideways at her phone sitting on the console. It had locked itself and was displaying her “Heady Nation” wallpaper. “Officer Jefferies, please do your job and find out what’s going on in section nine. Use one of the drones.” “Right, sending a drone,” said Sarah. She looked longingly at her phone again as its screen turned off. It looked like she would have to wait to finish her video. She already knew how it ended–she had seen it dozens of times. Heady makes it through ten sticks before vomiting gooey butter sludge all over himself. But he was so cute while doing it, and took his shirt off after; she just had to watch it again. Sarah wheeled her chair closer to the touch screen near the right edge of her control panel. She navigated through the menus and ordered a drone to section nine, then routed the video feed to the section nine monitor. The screen blinked to life and showed her the drone’s feed as it lifted off from its perch in the drone bay. A few seconds later the screen went dark as the drone flew up through a ventilator shaft toward the surface. Sarah grabbed her phone and was about to continue watching her video when the intercom crackled again. “Officer Jefferies, report.” Sarah groaned. It would take the drone thirty seconds to reach section nine from the drone bay. She could have made it through two more sticks of butter in that time. “Right, yeah,” she said into the intercom. “Drone launched. I’ll let you know what I see when it gets to section nine.” Sarah fumed while she resumed her video. She pictured Officer Thompson sitting all smug behind Commander Chin at the other end of the intercom. What a dickweed. She hated him. He didn’t even like Heady Armstrong. He actually made fun of her for watching Heady’s videos. She watched as Heady bit into a fresh stick of butter on her phone, then glanced back up at the drone’s video feed. Heady Armstrong stared back at her. Sarah looked at the familiar face staring up from her control panel, then back down at her phone. Her eyes grew wide; her jaw dropped. She felt her face go flush, and started hearing her pulse throbbing in her ears. She blinked and looked at the drone’s feed again. It was him! She looked back down at her phone, on which Heady was now vomiting yellow slime down the front of his shirt. She dropped the phone on the ground and stood up, felt faint as the blood rushed from her head. A million questions raced through her mind. Is this happening? Why was Heady Armstrong here? How did he get inside the compound? “Officer Jefferies, report,” came Commander Chin’s exasperated voice over the intercom. Sarah sat back down and slammed her fist on the intercom. “I…! He…! It’s…!” she stammered, then hesitated. She released the intercom and took two slow and deliberate breaths. It wouldn’t do at all to panic right now. She needed to think rationally about what was happening. A loose plan formed in her mind. She needed to control herself if she was going to do what she knew in her heart she must do. “Officer Jefferies?” “Um… All clear, Commander,” said Sarah. She watched as the drone tracked Heady running somewhere up on the surface. There was another guy with him; some fat bald guy who Sarah didn’t recognize from any of Heady’s videos. “Please confirm, did you say all clear?” Commander Chin asked. “Confirmed,” said Sarah. “Drone shows some wildlife near section nine exterior, looked like a deer. It must have gotten too close to the wall and tripped the sensors.” There was a long pause. Sarah did her best to control her breathing and collect her thoughts. Heady and the other guy had stopped running from the drone. They were crouching down next to each other–it looked like they were trying to hide between some bushes and the compound’s inner wall, but they were easily visible to the drone’s camera. Sarah pressed the intercom button again. “Um, I’m going to recall the drone and head up to the surface to fix that busted security cam right now,” she said. “Should have done it days ago, don’t want another false alarm, y’know?” She turned to her console’s touch screen, recalled the drone, grabbed her phone off the floor, and was already sprinting down the hallway outside her office when Commander Chin’s unheard reply came over the intercom. “Very good Officer Jefferies. Officer Thompson will meet you out there to assist. The Children be praised.” “I don’t hear it anymore. Is it still there?” whispered Doyle. Heady peaked his head up over the bush. All he could see above them was the giant concrete ceiling that covered the entire Nikola’s Children compound. “I think it’s gone,” said Heady. Doyle sighed with relief. “Do you think it spotted us?” asked Heady? “Are you serious?” said Doyle. “A drone the size of a Jeep pops out of nowhere as soon as we enter the compound and hovers directly over us for several minutes before disappearing, and you’re wondering if it spotted us?” “Well, what should we do?” asked Heady. “Let’s just get out of here,” said Doyle. “Look at this place, it’s empty. It must be a decoy or something.” Doyle gestured around them. They stood at the edge of an enormous grassy field encased in concrete. The wall behind them reached twenty feet up to the ceiling and stretched out for what looked like a mile in either direction. The entire compound was evenly lit by light panels in the ceiling so, despite its size, the two men could see clear across to the concrete wall at the other end. Aside from occasional bushes and disparately spaced concrete pillars, there didn’t appear to be anything else inside. There was no sign of the drone or where it came from or went to. “We can’t leave!” said Heady. “That drone didn’t vanish into thin air. And didn’t you notice how cool it is? I think this whole building is air conditioned. And the lights–why would they light it up if there was nothing here?” “Who knows,” said Doyle. “All I know is that whatever this place is, they know we’re here now. Our plan to sneak in undetected is officially a failure.” “All that money,” said Heady. “You found receipts for millions worth of supplies and equipment; and Kirsten and all the other scientists who fell off the face of the Earth; they didn’t spend all that money or go to all that trouble to build an empty concrete box in the middle of nowhere. There’s gotta be something here, we just haven’t found it yet. We can’t leave, we’ve got to keep looking.” “You’re right,” said Doyle, looking past Heady. “We can’t leave.” He pointed. Heady turned around and saw a red haired man wearing what looked like some kind of dark blue military uniform in the distance. The man was crouching near the crumbled section of wall–the only way in or out of the compound. “Run,” whispered Doyle, and the two men sprinted toward the nearest concrete pillar, about two hundred feet in from the wall. Neither of them looked back as they ran. Heady reached the pillar first and crouched low. Doyle arrived a few seconds later, dropping to his knees and panting heavily. “Do you think he saw us?” asked Heady. “I wish you’d stop asking that,” said Doyle. He peeked around the corner back toward the wall. The uniformed man was still standing where he had been, near the damaged section of concrete. “I don’t think so, he’s not coming this way.” “Maybe he’s waiting for backup,” suggested Heady. “Give me your phone.” “Why?” asked Doyle. He reached into his pocket and pulled his phone out, then placed it in Heady’s outstretched hand. Heady handed his own phone back to Doyle. “Stay hidden. You film with mine so they can’t confiscate the footage we already got if they take me away, I’ll film with yours.” “Wait, what do you mean take you away? What are you going to…” Before Doyle could stop him, Heady stood, put his hands up in the air, and stepped out from behind the concrete pillar. Sarah leered at Officer Thompson from behind her own concrete pillar. How did that jackass get here before her? She shifted her gaze over to the pillar where Heady and Baldy had run after they spotted Officer Thompson. Officer Thompson hadn’t noticed them. Too busy being an idiot, she guessed. She thought about what her next move should be. She had to get Officer Thompson out of there, but how? She could go tell him to buzz off, that she could replace the camera herself, but then Heady and Fatso would see her too and she might not be able to approach them without scaring Heady off. Using her radio was out of the question, the rest of the security team would hear anything she said, plus what would she tell him? Sarah was out of options and running out of time. She made up her mind, and stepped out from behind the pillar. “Officer Thom…” Someone yelled out at the same time, startling her. She shut up and dove back behind the pillar. That was Heady! What the hell was he doing? “Don’t shoot! I surrender!” she heard Heady shout. Sarah watched Heady wide-eyed as he started walking towards Officer Thompson. She saw Officer Thompson pull out his concussion pistol and point it at Heady. She felt a rage rise inside her. Nobody points a fucking concussion pistol at Heady Armstrong and gets away with it. As she watched Officer Thompson, he reached for the radio trigger on his shoulder. Sarah gasped and reflexively reached for her own. She mashed the trigger and held her breath, hoping that if she jammed the frequency, Officer Thompson wouldn’t be able to report what was happening. She watched Officer Thompson fumble with his radio, getting visibly frustrated. Sarah smiled, still holding her breath to keep her broadcast silent.Heady was much closer to Officer Thompson now, still inching toward him with his hands up. Officer Thompson gave up on his radio and put both hands on the concussion pistol he had leveled at Heady. “Don’t come any closer,” shouted Officer Thompson. Sarah released her radio trigger and lifted her own concussion pistol from the holster on her thigh. This was perfect. She would knock Thompson out, then approach Heady as the hero who had rescued him. He was sure to accept her! Maybe he’d even put her in one of his videos! Maybe he’d even… “Officer Thompson? Officer Jefferies? Report!” The voice of Commander Chin came from her radio with a burst of static. No time, thought Sarah. She took aim at Officer Thompson as he reached for his radio again. She fired. Doyle came running up behind Heady, who was staring dumbfounded at the red-haired man laying crumpled on the ground. “What the hell did you do?” asked Doyle. “Nothing, he just collapsed,” said Heady. “What? Like he had a heart attack?” “No,” said a woman’s voice. “Like he was hit by an incapacitating concussion blast from one of these.” Heady and Doyle both spun around to see a tiny-framed and young looking girl with short black hair. She was wearing the same military uniform as the red-haired man, and holding the same odd looking pistol in her hand. Heady and Doyle both took a step back and raised their hands in front of them defensively. The girl put her pistol into a holster on her thigh, then retrieved another device from her belt. It looked like a telescoping baton, which she extended to its full length of about three feet with a loud series of clacks. “Wha… What are you going to do with that?” asked Doyle. He took another step back and tripped on the unconscious man’s foot, landing in a sitting position on the ground. The woman approached with a wide grin on her face, holding the baton in one hand and slapping it against the other. Heady was frozen with a mixture of fear and confusion as he watched her advance. Sarah grabbed Heady’s arm, then spun him around so he was standing next to her. She attached a cell phone to the end of her selfie-stick and held it out in front of their faces. “Hi Heady,” said Sarah, then snapped a photo. “We’ve got to get out of here before the others get suspicious. Help me shove that ginger bastard through the hole in the wall and follow me.” “What…? Who… Who are you?” asked Heady. “Oh me?” said Sarah. “Just your biggest fan.”

This weeks guest is Nathan Hirsch. Nathan Hirsch is an entrepreneur and expert in remote hiring and eCommerce. He is the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, a marketplace that connects businesses with pre-vetted freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, and much more. He has sold over $30 million online and regularly appears on leading business podcasts, such as Entrepreneur on Fire, and speaks at live events about online hiring tactics.Links: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/freeeupmarketplace Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/realnatehirsch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/ FreeeUp: https://freeeup.com/FreeeUp Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/outsourcingmasters/ My calendar: https://calendly.com/freeeup-nathanwelcome back to the fuel your legacy podcast. Each week we expose the faulty foundational mindsets of the past and rebuild the newer, stronger foundation essential in creating your meaningful legacy. We've got a lot of work to do. So let's get started. As much as you like this podcast, I'm certain that you're going to love the book that I just released on Amazon if you will, your legacy, the nine pillars to build a meaningful legacy. I wrote this to share with you the experiences that I had while I was identifying my identity, how I began to create my meaningful legacy and how you can create yours. You're going to find this book on Kindle, Amazon and their website Sam Knickerbocker. com.Welcome back to fuel your legacy. This week we have another guest that is not common for our podcasts, which is exciting because we get to learn something new. We have a lot of people talk about mindset. We have a lot of people to talk about different areas. But when we get these kinds of oddities, then I get excited because I'm learning equally as much like you who are listening. So if you wish that I would have asked different questions message me and we can happen back on and ask him those questions, because that happens, right? I see I have that happen all the time. I'm listening to a podcast, I think, Man, I wish you would have asked this. This is the thing I wanted the answer to the message, the person who's running the podcast, ie myself or whoever podcasts you listen to, and say, I would have loved to get this answer from that person. And potentially, you could just reach out to that person and ask them on social media. Most people are pretty accessible, which is awesome, even though it doesn't feel like that they actually are very, very accessible. So this week's guest is Nathan Hersh and he is kind of an expert, entrepreneur. So I had had a conversation with somebody on the self-making calls and they specialize in laying people off, which is interesting, but he's the opposite. And Nathan specializes in hiring people remotely. So if you're wondering like man, how do I get good people into my company. First is I debt identifying candidates and then actually being able to, to that and hire them that's important. So that's what his company does. And then e-commerce. So very interesting thing I'm getting into the, I guess you could say e-commerce industry through learning how to sell my, my books, my merchandise for my brand. So I'm really, really stoked to hear about this and ask lots of questions. But Nathan, go ahead and share with us really where you came from in your childhood, what your story of growing up college wherever it was, and then what was that epiphany where you went from? Okay, kind of undecided or not sure what exactly you want to do with your life to I has a passion. I have a legacy. I know my purpose and I'm chasing it. Yeah, sogrowing on my parent's Teachers so I grew up with a mentality that I was going to go to college, get a real job work for 30 years and, and retire. And I mean, that's what they did. They're retired right now they're traveling the world. There's nothing wrong with that. But I, they always made me get the summer jobs. I was working like 4050 hours a week, all my friends were outside playing that they wanted to teach me hard work at a young age. So from the time I was like, 15 on I was always working like 40 hours a week during summers during vacations. And I learned a lot about sales and marketing and growing businesses. But I also just learned how much I hated working for other people. So when I got to college, I kind of looked at it as a ticking clock where I four years to start my own business. And if I didn't do that I was going to go into the real world and get a job. So I started hustling. I took that summer money and started buying people's textbooks competing with my school bookstore offering better prices. I created a referral program. And before I knew it, I had lines out the door of people trying to sell me their books. So the point where I just got a cease and desist letter telling me to knock it off. So, from there, I didn't want to keep that a school. My parents are both teachers. So I pivoted, I sold some books on Amazon. I thought it was so cool. I could have this Amazon business that was like the storefront. No one really understood Amazon at the time, but I could use my customer service skills and my marketing skills and all that and I did to figure out what products to sell. I couldn't sell books anymore. So I started experimenting with outdoor equipment, video games, computers, and I just failed over and over and over. And it wasn't until I branched out of my comfort zone and down the baby product industry that my business really took off. So if you can imagine me as a 20-year-old single college guy selling baby products on Amazon, that was me. And, and this business just took off. I was making more money than I could imagine as a college kid. I was dropshipping from different manufacturers of different distributors. My parents told me I should probably start paying taxes. So I met with an account And the first question he asked me was, when are you going to hire your first-person? And I kind of shrugged him off, like, why would I do that? It's one out of my pocket, they're gonna steal my ideas. They're, they're going to hurt my business. And he just laughed in my face. And he said you're going to learn this lesson on your own? Well, sure enough, my first busy season came around the fourth quarter, and I just got destroyed. I was working 20 hours a day, my social life plummeted. My Grades went down. And I got to the other side, and I thought to myself, man, I need to start hiring people. So I don't know how to hire people. I post a job on Facebook. Someone shows up for my business. Law class says, Hey, I need a job. I don't know what you do. I didn't even interview him. I just hired him on the spot. ends up being an unbelievable hire. He's hard-working. He's smart. He's actually my business partner. We've been working together for eight years. I was texting him right before That's why we're delayed a little bit. But I just hit the ground running like right from the beginning get super lucky. But there I am as a punk 20-year-old thinking man, this hiring thing is easy you post a job on Facebook someone shows up you make more money you get more time back and I just proceed to make bad hire after bad hire after bad hire quickly learning that hiring not that easy. college kids were not that reliable. No one in person really wanted to work for me when I was 2021. So I went to their whole hiring world The upwards to fivers and hired some good people, people that are still with me today. But I always just hated the process, posting a job getting 100 applicants, interviewing them one by one just took forever. And that's what I had the idea to build my own marketplace free up. So I really took everything I liked and change everything I didn't like and I'm sure we'll talk about free up later on. But that's kind of how I went from broke college kids to books to baby products to eventually starting a freelancer platform.Awesome. So there's a there are a few things that I want to kind of share my perspective on. Because it's funny and this is something I haven't thought of in a long time. So I'm glad We're talking about this right? summer jobs so I was homeschooled so there's not like a summer thing it was like if you wanted income ever, then you just had to go get a job. And I rememberup until I was like ninelet's see when I was six or seven I wanted to play soccer. No money in my house. So I went got you to remember and like the old snapper, lawnmowers or heavy metal and I would shoot the grass right out the back. Anyways, this snapper lawn mower did not have a bag but I would push that thing up and down. are busy street as a six-year-old knock on people's door with my gallon of gas is a kind of cut your grass and I made enough money to pay for my soccer habit right? For the first little bit had the whole lemonade stand everything. By the time I was 1011 years old. I was like this. I am working More than whatever crap I've been getting paid. And so a neighbor woman asked my brother and I had to go and help pull weeds. And I was like, yep, I got two able young sons. They're going to go help you. And you can pay for them, right? So we go, we are businessmen in our mind. We go, we go to assess the job. She shows us what she wants to be done. And we're like, yeah, $5 an hour, or we're not doing and giving me this is a 16 years ago. So I grew up in Idaho. And so back then $5 an hour is still like, above minimum wage, almost right. It was a, it was a decent wage. And the woman like, Nope, not paying that. And so we're like, cool, we're not going to do it. Then we go home. And my mom was like, What are you guys doing back so soon? We're like, well, she didn't want that. She wanted $5 an hour. She didn't want to pay for it. So we're not going to do it. Yeah, that didn't happen. She was just right back over there. And we ended up working for free for the next two weeks. And it sucked. But it is important to do things, both on both sides, one know your value, but to understand the value of money and I think those summer jobs, those things where our parents kind of make us do things that we don't enjoy, at a younger age, they can really, really shape who we become, and, and how we end up operating in the world. So I love that idea of summer jobs and hearing what people did with their summer jobs. The other thing that I think is interesting because one of the focuses of this podcast, obviously is to help you as a listener, understand where your passion lies, what your identity is, and how you want to move forward. And for Nathan, it sounds like and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't as much of knowing what you wanted to do. Knowing what you didn't want to do.Yeah, that was part of it. Now there's another part of that I didn't touch upon. I saw I went to school and I grew up in East Longmeadow. My dad was a teacher at Longmeadow. And I got to go to the Longmeadow school system because my dad taught there and it was a much better school system. Now, in Longmeadow. Everyone's parents were doctors, lawyers, dentists, business owners, and I was broke by any means. But I had two parents that were teachers, we were middle class. So growing up, I was friends and I was around with people that had everything in my mind. And I feel like growing up in that experience, you always want more now 10 years later, I kind of realized I don't really care about money, I dress like I dress I don't go out and buy fancy cars. That's just not who I am. But as a kid, that kind of stuff resonates with you. So when you get to college and you want to pursue that entrepreneurship dream, yes, you don't want to work for other people, but there's that monetary component as well. You want to be able to just surpassed that ceiling cap and if you just go get a real job.Yeah, absolutely. And what I found because I think this happens with a lot of people, and it also holds people back. A lot of people, they aren't ready to step out because they think, well, I don't know really what my passion is, I don't know what I want to do. And so instead of going out and just doing anything, doing things, they sit there thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking about what they might want to do. And then sometimes even decide on what they want to do. They go all into it for like three months, and then I hate this, this is terrible. And then they're back to square one. And they start back thinking again, rather than, hey, look, I just know I don't want to do that. I've got a ticking time clock. I've got four years, I gotta succeed somehow because I don't want to have to work for somebody. So what can I do? How can I make money? Just simply asking yourself that question, how can I make 100 bucks a day? How can I make 10 bucks a day? How can I do something that I can do again and again and again, it's not going to get old or In, it's a need that's always going to be needed. Not necessarily that the repetitiveness is always going to be exciting to you. That's rarely the fact but it's something that's always going to be needed. Just ask yourself that question. And it's amazing what people will come up with. And the voids that you can fill in the marketplace to accomplish that.I and I like to focus on low risk, high reward situations, I try to try a lot of different things that don't cost a lot of money. I'll sacrifice my time over money, especially at the beginning, and you never know what's going to work out. I mean, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, if I'd be selling baby products on Amazon, I wouldn't believe you. But that's because I tried a lot of different things. And none of the things cost me that much money. I mean, buying books aren't that expensive. It's pretty Amazon accounts like 40 bucks a month. So I'm trying all these different things and you eventually come across stuff that's work. That works and you read the market and you make adjustments and you listen to feedback. And if you can save your car doing that and putting yourself out there, it can lead to a lot of really awesome opportunities.Yeah, I something that I've noticed is, as I've kind of got into the space of just trying a lot of different things. And for myself, at least one of the biggest fears was the fear of failure, the fear of getting that cease and desist letter, that fear of being shut down from regulation, the fear of getting sued, because you're using somebody else's trademark or copyright or like, just because You're, you're not even aware, right. I for a long time, I would just for my marketing stuff, I could download stuff off Google, Google Images, and throw it on my stuff. And it was until I sat down with somebody like, yeah, you can't like, you can't just do that. Right. Why not? Because that's, that's probably copyrighted. And maybe when you're a small fish, nobody cares. But the moment you make any little bit of money, people care, you know, so I'm like, okay, so it's those little things, but for a long time, I would not I didn't want to fail. I'm so scared of failure so scared of the repercussion that that would hold me from going out and trying. And how did you get over that? Or was that ever even a concern or a thought?It's always I mean, my business partner Connor is more relaxed like everything's gonna be okay. I'm much more like paranoid like every possible thing could go wrong in any different way, which I feel like has its pros and cons. I one part of it makes me a very good entrepreneur because I'm always looking out for things before they happen. Part of it makes me maybe not a good entrepreneur because I'll spend extra time stressing over things I don't have to instead of focusing on what I should be so there's a part of that I mean, I tend to be a little bit more conservative as an entrepreneur, I'm not out there taking big risks, whether dumping big money into stuff or trying to get into gray areas and push the limits and see what can happen. I definitely more on the conservative side. But I mean, absolutely. If you can't handle risk, and you can't handle that, that you can actually lose money in a situation if you wake up and go to a nine to five job. Are you're not coming home with less money than you? You did when you woke up that day, but that can happen in business. So if you're not prepared for that risk that entrepreneurship is probably not for you. But you can go about it in a way that minimizes risks and keeps them as minimal as possible.Yeah, I would, I would, I would say maybe entrepreneurship. If you're in the risky form is not there's a lot of people who have zero risks in their entrepreneurship or very, very low because it's they're already doing it. I think the side hustle is probably one of the best things that ever came about was moonlighting, right? If you're already doing something at your day job, and it's a skill that you're developing, it doesn't cost you anything, there's no risk, you're not going to lose income. If you say Okay, can I do this on the side for freelance work? an extra two hours a day for myself? Right, exactly. And all of the benefits that come with that, from taxes to planning for your future, to savings, to confidence, every Comes with that still when you're even just moonlighting. And there's very little risk, to adding time, and just putting yourself out there.Right. Yeah, completely agree. I mean, I never like to say that businesses are no risk because there's always some kind of risk. I mean, you could freelance and you could mess up some client's business in some way and they end up suing you. Is there a high likely chance of that happening? No, but you can't go into it with the mindset that I'm doing this completely risk-free. That's just not how entrepreneurship is.Yeah, agreed. And from Sorry, I did a presentation last night for some investors. And yeah, it was the same thing. I was like, Look, if you think if anybody ever tells you there are zero risks in whatever you're going to be putting your money into, run, run as fast and as far away as you can. Everything has a risk. But managing the risk is really what it's about and people think I hate risk. No, you just maybe you don't like certain types of risk and learning what risk you like and what you don't like, is important. And so with your parents being teachers, did they always kind of see you as this entrepreneur? or What did they see you becoming when you were in high school and entering college?Yeah, good question. Um, I don't know. I mean, I was always one of those kids. Like I was good at school. I wasn't like the best in the class, but I was fine. I got A's and B's and, and but I always just really didn't like school. I mean, certain things I would like, but there were a lot of subjects that I just didn't care about. And if I don't care about something, I usually don't put a lot of effort into it. I usually spend most of my time focus on stuff that I'm passionate about. So at a young age, there's a certain rebellious person to me, part of me and I think that that concern my parents being teachers, thinking that hey, I was just going to joke around through school joke around through college and that was going to hurt me later in life. And I think that once I started the Amazon business that they tend to be way more conservative than I am. They were kind of not pushing but suggesting that I go out and get a real job and have more stability and health benefits and stuff like that. And I had a really good internship at the Firestone Corporation at their corporate office throughout college, and I ended up having a job offer from them and a few other places after college. And it was between Hey, do I continue being an entrepreneur? Or do I keep the jobs and I had a lot of phone calls, I was really stressed out that last week of college, I still didn't know what I was going to do? And I talked to my parents and I could tell they were really leaning into picking the job and, and maybe doing the Amazon thing on the side. And I talked to my aunt who's an entrepreneur, and I remember spending an hour talking with her just pacing around my lawn, and she essentially told me like, if you're passionate about it, you got to do it, you got to go for it and those other jobs aren't going anywhere. You can always go out and get a real job. So um, I ended up going that route and I think a few years into it. I mean, now they 100% or they've always supported me support tonight, right? Where were they were going to support me No matter what I did if I want to go become a gymnast or firefighter, whatever it was, but I think they probably relax a little bit and realize that Yeah, like entrepreneurship is what I was meant to do. And, and, and they realized that I probably wouldn't have been happy at a real job.Yeah, I know, I know, for me, my parents were always very supportive and encouraging of entrepreneurship. But when I got married, when I was dating my wife, her parents are very much like, institutional, you know, go get a job with good benefits, whatever. And I would say it's, it's taken them a while to even get comfortable with where we're at. They're still not completely comfortable. They still think hey, so what is it that you do? Like they still haven't quite bought into what that I complete idea of entrepreneurship. And what's interesting about that particular situation is his. My father, I guess my wife's grandpa was an entrepreneur, like, his whole life. That's all he did, made his millions through entrepreneurship. And yet his son is a Go get a job nice salary and just like safe very very safe right and yeah for me it's just not for me so it's been interesting watching them kind of adjust to the the idea of I'm never going to have that yet I have everything that they have and he's not in the same manner so tell me the story of who your biggest naysayers were when you started the Amazon and how did you learn to silence them in your mind?Um, so I did a block myself away from naysayers pretty quick, I think on the Amazon thing, trying to tell other people that you're selling baby products where not only does that not make sense, but we're also just in a different time. Like right now everyone knows what e-commerce is right? If you go into like, hey, let's talk about Amazon. com like probably the play shop on Amazon. com. Back in 2008. Yes, people knew about Amazon but it was mostly as a bookstore and no one knew what like being an Amazon seller was like a term didn't exist. So me trying to tell people I sold baby products as on Amazon, and the Third Party seller that thought I was crazy thought I was running a scam. I remember it was a funny story. I, I had, I liked this girl that was in one of my classes. And for one class like I sat in front of her and I was like listening baby products on Amazon and she was just like, looking over the shoulder seeing what I see what I was doing. And I don't think I ever talked to that girl again. She probably thought I was some weird creep doing it for whatever reason. I mean, trying to just explain to people what you were doing was tough. I don't think I ever had anyone that was like you're a failure, you're gonna fail like, I mean, those are just not the type of people I surround myself with. And even the people that thought I was weird probably just didn't say it to my face. So I got lucky there. But I mean, there's been times more on like the free upside where I've gotten like bashing a Facebook group or something. But I mean, there's always going to be people that either don't understand you or put you down or want you to fail or have their issues going on. And my advice is just to block those people and get them out of your network out of your community and move on with life.Yeah, I agree and I'm going to share again, sharing experience, because I think this is a principle that anybody who is going to go starts their own thing is going to choose to follow a passion. I don't care if it's for income or just because you want to do it. There's a weird thing about human nature. People don't like to know that they're being offensive. Okay? I mean, like, if they know they're being offensive, then they're a lot less likely to do it just because they want to be friends most of the time, right? So, and there's always as outliers who just really enjoy being rude, but most people, don't want to be offensive. And what happens is, when you get this passion, oftentimes you tend we tend to share it timidly. We aren't pumped up bad. We aren't excited about it. We aren't like hey, this, this is me and I don't care what you're you're doing. My wife and I, we experienced that when we decided to have our baby at home because we like home birth. This is a good experience for us. I was born at home. So it's exciting, but it's interesting how many people have an opinion about it and if you just stay silent in the conversation, You'll hear people talk about how home birth is so risky and everybody should go to the hospital and all this stuff, right? But if you are just so excited, and rather than saying, Yeah, I think I'm going to have a home birth, right? If you say it like that, then you're going to Oh? Why? Like, why don't you like dogs and people are gonna start question you. But if you say, Man, I'm so excited. This one we're going to have at home, we're going to have a family there and we just go all out on your excitement. People will never say it to your face. Even if they do doubt you as you said, they'll never say it to your face because they're so like, like, Oh, he's committed Tamanna support him, even though I think he's nuts. I'll support him because he believes in it. And so that's a life hack. I think if you don't want negative people around, you just are so excited and so purposeful about what you are doing. The people who are negative the people who don't believe in you, you'll probably never tell you because they're too embarrassed to open their mouth after you just totally sold out on how excited you are about it.Absolutely. I mean, most people Not entrepreneurs aren't that excited about their job. I mean, there's just that's just the truth. So I think that's why entrepreneurs sometimes struggle to relate because I mean, entrepreneurs, we could talk about work all day, I'll go out to dinner with a bunch of entrepreneurs, we'll talk about work the entire time. And it's fun, it's exciting. You take two accountants and throw them in with people working at whatever and have them go out to dinner and not going to talk about work for four hours. And if they did, that was probably a pretty boring dinner. So you kind of have to put things in perspective.Yeah, totally. Totally. Totally. So if you were to focus on a specific habit, mindset or behavior that you've used to create kind of your e-commerce and hiring platform, what would you say that would be? What sorry, one What? Yeah, a habit, a mindset or behavior. So whatever, whatever you feel is like the one thing that's created your legacy the most?Yeah, so for me, it's about finding out what I'm most productive and maximizing that time. I tend to be most productive 6 am to 9 am other people might be in the middle of the night or the afternoon. But whatever that time is, I make sure that that's the time that I'm working that I'm getting the most done. Six to 9 am. No one's bothering me. I'm working on projects. I'm getting organized for my day. I'm brainstorming whatever the most important thing for the day is, that's the time I'm doing it. And I think a lot of our viewers, they think they have to work nine to five or they're, they're working 60 hours a week, but they're not focused on how what am I most productive? And how am I maximizing that time, every single day? And I think that's been a big habit that has helped me just get a lot done. My businesses move fast, they grow fast, we change things quickly. Because every single day, I'm maximizing my most productivetime. So I've heard a lot of entrepreneurs say that and even just business people. How do you identify when you're most productive?It took years I mean, I went to college I slept in I mean, after college, I didn't just go from knots or from sleeping in at college to waking up at 6 am. That's how it worked. I mean, it took me years to realize that hey, yeah, if I buy to start working on a project at four o'clock in the afternoon, that project comes out terrible. And the same thing on weekends and nights. I mean, I think I always knew I wasn't like a crazy night person like I did it to the party in college. But that's not my natural environment. So I think it's a little bit of self-reflecting and knowing yourself, and sometimes it takes a lot of time to figure that out. And a lot of working at different times to establish when you're most productive and when you get the best workout.That's, that's interesting. I've struggled to find out when I'm most productive. So it's a question I like to ask him. I don't know how to determine when I'm most successful yet, but I'm still working on that one. So hopefully I can figure that out before I die. Question about the freedom, the freedom platform. How does that differ from like zip recruiter or some of these other platforms that kind of offer a very similar service? What what what made your special Why did you choose to create your own Rather than may be asked to adapt the services that were already there,yeah, so we're marketplace for pre-vetted virtual assistants, freelancers and agencies, we get thousands of applicants every week from all over the world five to 100 plus per hour us Non Us fixed prices too, we vet them top 1% based on skill, attitude, and communication, get on our platform, one out of every hundred so we're very picky on who we let in. Once they're in clients Jones to browse, they simply put in a request telling us what they need.And we fill it basedon our pre-vetted network from their clients can meet with them, interview them, they can hire them to negotiate rate agree to fix prices, they don't like them, they can always request for options or pass and give us feedback and we'll get them someone else. So it's a very quick and efficient process in the middle. And on the back end, we have 24 seven support in case you have even the smallest issue all about customer service, and a no turnover Guarantee. If someone quits for any reason. We cover replacement costs and get them a new person right away. So that's what we're about the preventing the speed, the Customer Service and the protection. And yeah, I mean, that's those are the four ways that we're different.And is it? So? So I've worked with fiber I've worked with Upwork. I haven't ever used ZipRecruiter.And I haven't ever used a virtual assistant. What? Like what does that one? I guess one of the reasons I haven't is because I'm, I'm worried that I don't, I don't know how to effectively communicate what I need my virtual assistant to do. So how do you help somebody kind of enter that, let's say they want to use your service, and they want their time freed up, but they don't know how to even like, help somebody help them.Yeah, so we have a Facebook group called outsourcing masters where we spend a lot of time teaching people what to do with the talented freelancers, virtual assistants and agencies because we can get you, talented people but like you said, if you don't know what to do, after the fact it doesn't do you much good and a lot of it comes down to setting expectations and a project what you want to be done how you communicate part of it. It comes down to Figuring out Hey, do I need a follower? Do I need to do or do I need an expert? So followers five to 10 bucks an hour Non-Us, they're there to follow your systems, your processes, you should only hire them. If you're stuck in the day to day operations, you know how to do the day to day operations. And you can hire them to free up your hours and get them to do those tasks repetitively. Then you got the doers, we all have different projects that come up when you're an entrepreneur, whether it's writing a blog, article, or website or logo. These are graphic designers, bookkeepers, writers specialist, you're not going to hire a graphic designer and teach them how to be a graphic designer. They're doers, and they're not consulting with you either. And then you got the experts, the high-level freelancers that the consultancy agencies that are bringing their system, their processes the table, and they're there to su high-level game plans to help your business and something that you're not good at. And you could spend the next six months learning Facebook ads, but that's probably not a good use of your time. You can't do that every single part of your business. So at some point, you need to hire experts to hit the ground running right from the get So that's usually the good starting point is figuring out, hey, do I have systems and processes that I need someone to do them besides me? Do I have projects building out that are outside of my core competency that I need to get done? Or do I taking on something new, that's a big part of my business that I don't have the time to master not going to hire an expert right from the beginning. And if you focus on those higher, each one is a little bit different for a follower you're going to create. So PS and instructions and an onboarding process for the doers, you're going to get become better at defining the scope and due dates and what constitutes success and failure. And for experts, you're going to come up with a game plan and tweak that game plan until it's good and get better at executing game plans or collaboration with that expert. So it kind of depends on who you're trying to work with.So with the amount of how, how you navigate this, I assume most people on your platform they're speaking English, or at least communicating in English.They don't speak English at a high level. They don't get a foot into our interview process.Okay, yeah, cuz I'm working with somebody on Fiverr right? Now, and that's not to throw the guy under the bus, he's doing great work. But I feel like I have enabled to communicate my needs to him. It's like, the vaguer I am, the more I get what I want. But then when I want to be, like, more specific than it just like, I don't get what I want, I'm like crap, I don't know how to, like, tell you what I want. Because the more specific I get, the less of what I want I get. So it's just, that's it. And that's happened to me a few times on fiber. And it's not I don't think it's at all the people that I like, I just see it's a typical thing that could happen in that as the process. And so that's where I wonder like, how have you mastered that that communication commission communication channel?Yeah, I mean, I can't comment on your specific situation or could be anything could be you, it could be the free or whatever. But I've had similar experiences at other platforms. And that's why communication is such a big part of our platform and we are 15 pages of communication best practice that freelancers have a memorized get tested on before they get on our platform. I mentioned that we vet them for English before they get on. But we're also very quick to remove people that struggle with communication. And we have to chase that there and clients are complaining that they can't get on the same page. So we spent a lot of time bedding and we know how important communication is, at the end of the day, if you can't communicate, nothing else matters, they might have a great attitude, a great skill set. But if you can't communicate, that's it. So that's why communication is the foundation of our platform. And we're also there to help we understand everyone has a different level of remote hiring experience. So if you are running into issues and we're not trying to get anyone in trouble, we're on the same side here. We're going to give advice and suggestions and what's worked with us and help you come up with a good system to communicate better going forward.Yeah, I love that. That's cool. So in your transition is something that I noticed with our entrepreneurs, at some point the money does come up right there has to be a money conversation. How important do you feel like when you were starting or Now, even starting your textbook business because you had mentioned that you weren't paying taxes for a while, and then they said, okay, you try to pay taxes. How important do you think it is to understand the like how money works? When you're trying to build a legacy? Why is that an important task?In your mind? Yeah, I mean, you have to understand money. At the end of the day, if you don't make more if you don't make money, you can't do much else. And I feel like one of my mindsets and I told me I told my fiance that because she's into, like, volunteer and stuff, I told my business partner this, I mean, you got to make yourself money first. If you make yourself money first, that allows you to help a lot more people, if you're just out there helping people but you're not making any money at some point that helps to go to have to stop like you're going to have to pay the bills, or you're just not gonna be able to help as many people. So it's one of those things you have to be able to make money first, the whole profit-first mentality, and then what you do with that money, how much you donate to charity, how much you invest back into the company to expand other people to help clients customers, whatever you do with it is up to you, you have to be able to generate money. And that has to be the core of your mindset at all times.Yeah. And then how about the from the understanding side of money management, so there's generating money, which is making no money manage if you aren't generating it, or I see a lot of breakdowns is people and I because of my career, I manage people's money, right? But I see entrepreneurs who they go from very little money and they go up to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, the companies, but because they never really learned how to manage money, they learned how to grow money, which is important, but learning how to harvest and grow in an effective manner is equally important. I wanted to hear like, why why would that be important and what did you do to educate yourself in that arena?So I'm extremely fortunate. My dad from a very young age taught me to like the power of $1 he made me buy my stuff. I had a And eventually, a job and I had to pretty much buy everything for myself besides maybe like food and necessities and pay for my college and, and all that. And he also taught me about stuff like avoiding credit cards and avoiding debt and how important that is and how important is to save and, and not just buy random stuff that you don't need it and waste that money that you could be saving and putting in a CD and stocks and stuff like that. So I'm kind of a frugal person, because of him. I think at a young age, I probably didn't appreciate that as much. But again, I kind of told you I grew up with people who had everything, they had all the newest video games and newest toys, whatever it was, and I was kind of in the opposite boat. So I think now looking back, I'm so happy. I learned that I know people that are in tons of student debt, tons of credit card debt, they haven't done a good job manage their money, they're buying cars, which are terrible investments, stuff like that. And I think it's that mentality of every time that you make more money. That doesn't necessarily mean your lifestyle just continues to go up at the same pace or even faster. It's a listen, I live a very simple lifestyle too, to what I did three years ago, maybe it's a little better, maybe I can eat out a little bit more or buy the extra thing that I want me because I can it makes me a little bit happier. But I'm not I'm still even though I'm making more money, my expenses are just going up at the same pace and I think that's what a lot of people don't understand.Agree. So, do you feel like that frugality mentality though? And there's that there's a just for anybody listening. There's an I think there's a big line, but it seems a small line, but I think it's a big line between a frugal person who understands money and understands the power of money, and somebody who's a tightwad, or a miser. Okay, so I want to separate these two before I ask this question because, without a proper understanding of the term frugal and how it separates there, you might think something different, but I'm going to ask you this question has the mentality of frugality. How does that play into your growing your business?Yeah, so part of it is understanding like what a good purchase it well, I guess, well separate personal business for business, I only invest money in stuff that I think is going to be an ROI. I told you before about low risk, high reward situations, I do the same thing. When I'm big. I'm not just dumping $50,000 into Facebook ads and hoping it works out I'm starting small and going with the strategy growing up over time and trying lots of different things and seeing what works. I have a little bit of flexibility, I can take a little bit more risk. But I'm still not taking huge risks from a personal side is less to do with like, oh, I'm just not going to spend money on anything and more to do with spending money on things you care about. I love food. I love traveling. I love trying a new food that's exciting to me. That's a great way to live life. I don't care about clothes and I don't care about cars, that those things don't do it for me their physical objects. I don't care what I look like and as So, I'm spending way less money on clothes and cars than the average person in my position making what I make. But I probably spend a little bit more money on food, because that's a passion of mine. So it doesn't mean that you just are frugal and you just never spend any money and you eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day. Although if you don't care about food, I guess you could do that and you can buy more clothes. But the point is to focus on the things that make you happy and not just spending despair.I completely agree. One of the taglines of my other brand, the Samuel Knickerbocker brand is identifying your identity, right and it comes down to values. And when I'm sitting Matt is going over some of this money. The conversation is never and my objective is so they can feel zero judgment and the whole process of review, Financial Review, but it's not about where you're spending your money. I don't care where you're spending your money. I care about do you value where you're spending your money, or are you spending money out of habit habits sedation because you don't know like because you're just aren't aware and so I love that that that came up it's what do you value? I have a friend who values Formula One race cars, and he buys race cars. And he has a lot of them in my mind five or six, seven, and he has a lot of money in cars, and that's something you value is for me I would not put it there I don't value food I would spend on travel, right? or business development because I love the game of business. And I view that as a game not a by me it's just a game as a business as a game and I love the game. But it is interesting because when you're getting married because this goes into marriage. If you aren't aware of what you're your potential spouse values when it comes to money and you get married There's a misalignment of the value of where the money's going. And that's a recipe for disaster and it could kill your business could kill your I mean, even if you're not, if you're just working for your, for another company, as an employee, it could destroy you financially, not understanding. We need to make purchases based on my value system. And you're going to be happier if you're in business. I mean, even as business partners business partnership and marriage is the same contract. You've got to know that you're making those purchases based on your values, your value system,right? I mean, a perfect example is I don't have cable and it's not because I can't afford cable. Most people have cable but it's because I realized I just wasn't watching that much cable, I watch TV but it's a network that looks at Hulu. I have a Slingbox, which is great. It's hooked up to my parent's house or they're retired and they travel they don't use cable. So it kind of works out both ways. And I think the average person You can go through their lifestyle and say, Hey, I'm, I'm paying this every month and pay this every month and realize, okay, I probably don't need this I'm probably not maximizing this and, and really cut back on those expenses and you go through it and you can't cut back on stuff, that's fine too. But I've kind of found that it's not like I'm hiding in a corner, like, oh, I gotta say that extra hundred dollars a month. It's just like, I just don't I don't, I don't get $100 of value out of it a month. It's not something that I need.Yep, I agree. I love that. So let's say we want to learn more about how to start our own e-commerce business. Is that something you do? Do you offer coaching or, or some level of training on how to how somebody might start their own e-commerce business? Or is it just that's what you do?Nope. I do not offer any training or coaching. We have a lot of free content all about hiring and using virtual systems, freelancers and agencies. We're also happy to hop on a phone call free of charge to help although I tend to not consult more there to answer questions and just tell you how I how I've done things and how my classes about things in the past. But we do work with a lot of partners in e-commerce in the marketing space. So if you join the free up newsletter, the Facebook group will direct you to partners that we trust. We want to take really good care of their community just like we expect them to take really good care of our community. And those are the people that we kind of push you towards. Awesome. Ilove that just some people aren't aware of this is the best way to get an expert's advice. Come to the expert with a plan where you can ask pointed specific questions of direction where they can say yes, this direction or that direction, not Hey, what should I do? Who should I call like, that's way too broad of an example? You need to come with very specific things. Okay, I've got up to this point. What would you have given this goal, this is the objective. How do you How would you proceed most likely in this situation? And that's going to help Nathan or any other professional or expert better assist you because now they can answer a quick question and move on and still add a lot of value.Yeah, completely agree. And I mean, buying courses and stuff is great. But there's so much free content out there. And there's so much you can do with that free content. So I would encourage you to join a lot of groups follow people on, a lot of people are giving out great content for free that later have courses and you can decide who you like and who you don't like, I wouldn't just go from zero to buying the most expensive books.Yeah, I 100% agree that make sure you're in alignment and you like the communication pattern of the person teaching the course. So now if we wanted to get ahold of you, where's the best place to get ahold of you? Where are you most active? If we want to reach out to you on social media or LinkedIn or maybe on more podcasts? where's the best place to get more of you?Yeah, join my facebook group outsourcing masters. You can find my podcast outsourcing and scaling show. You can also at the top of the free of website free up with three E's is my calendar is my team calendars. You can chat with one of my VH which is kind of cool. Ask them questions about being a BA and you can understand that and then I'm on all social media channels if you want to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, connect with me on Instagram real Nate hearse. I'm pretty easy to contact.Awesome. Love it. So this is a section of my show that gets me the second most excited most excited I saved for last but this is this is I love this part called legacy on rapid-fire. So I'm gonna ask you five questions, looking for one word, one-sentence answers. The only caveat is you have to definitely Lee clarify the answer to the first question. Okay, so the first question goes as this what is holding you back from reaching the next level of your legacy today?Food? Yeah, good question. Oh, man, that is a good question. What is holding me back? I think I have a certain lifestyle in terms of running a remote business and a certain way that I've had an office before and I didn't enjoy that. I want to go back to remote and, and I've kind of I kind of practice what I preach. I only hire people back from I hire People for my platform, I don't work with consultants or coaches or anything along that line. So I have no idea if that's holding me back. I think at some point, I might hit a limit there and what that lifestyle can provide, but it's tough. I don't have one thing that I'm like, oh, if I just woke up, and I changed this, that I would double my business. I don't think it's that I think that yeah if I did certain things if I open up an office, and I hire full time, people, could we expand faster? Maybe, but I probably wouldn't be as happy with the business.Yeah, no, I like that. So inside of like, where you're at and where you where you'd be happy and where you wouldn't, there's always more growth you could potentially have. But maybe that's not what you actually want. So what do you believe the hardest thing you've ever accomplished has beenthe hardest thing I've ever accomplished? I mean, being an entrepreneur is hard. starting businesses is hard. It's probably harder than anything else. So I think just being able to get to this point with an awesome team and a great business partner, it's is probably the thing that I'm most proud of Actually, you know what the thing that I'm most proud of is we've paid out 6 million-plus dollars for freelancers around the world last year. To me, that's really cool.That is awesome. Would you say that's your greatest success to this point in your life? Or would you say something else's? Definitely. That's, that's awesome. And just, I'm gonna bring this out, right? People who have money and the thing that they're most excited about, once they like can provide for themselves is how can we help more people provide for themselves? That's what keeps the if you want to say the rich keep getting richer, it's because they are so focused on how do we get more people wealthy and I really believe that I think most people want to see the average of the world increase in, in lifestyle across the board and that's why they do what they do, doesn't always appear that way. I understand that. But I believe that's in the sincerity of their heart. That's what they're striving for. And everybody goes about a different way and you may agree with them or not, but I think that that is what they're striving for. Out of all the people. I've talked to I think that is there's one consistent thing. So what's one secret that you believe has contributed most to your success?Okay, I've gone through a lot of adversity. I've heard about personal standpoint, I think I've had like 15 surgeries, I've torn different things. I have like a bone condition where I keep having to get bone spurs, like shaved off. And it's one of those things that kind of hit you out of nowhere. And it's like a one to six-month recovery. And I feel like if you can go through that kind of stuff on a personal level, you can handle a lot on a business level.Yeah, agreed. So what are a few books that you would recommend to feel your legacy audience?Yeah, I recommend that the Amazon book, The Zappos book, pursuit, pursuing happiness. No, that's not it. It's. Oh, man. I'm blanking on that on the Simon Sinek book. Start with Why is a great one on anything by Russell Brunson is great. Yeah, those are the books I recommend.Awesome. So this is a this is my favorite part of the show, and which is why save it for last because we get to pretend that you're dead. Just exciting right? Now. So we're going to pretend that we you've died and you have the unique opportunity to come back and you your great great great great grandchildren sitting around a table discussing your legacy. So this is six generations from now. Do you think six generations back this is pre World War One, almost pre Industrial Revolution right along a while back six generations from now, if you were to view that conversation, what do you want your sixth generation grandchildren to be saying about you and about your legacy?I want there to be a lot of families that we helped. I mean, hopefully I remember people showing me like their houses and their cars and how they were provided for their family with the money that they made from the free up platform. And hopefully those people had kids, those kids have kids and, and we kind of helped them with a foundation to help them so I'm hoping that that that's the kind of impactthat they're talking about. Awesome. I love it. Well, hey, thank you so much for your time, and super excited. Hopefully, everybody reaches out And as always, if you got value today, let Nathan know, go and give him some love on Instagram, Facebook, wherever it's easiest for you to connect out or wherever you hang out the most. And then as always, you can go and rank and review this podcast on whatever platform you listen to as well. That way more people get to hear great information, like what you heard today. So thanks a bunch and we'll catch youguys next time on you your legs.Thanks for joining us if what you heard today resonates with you please like comment and share on social media tag me and if you do give me a shout out I'll give you a shout out on the next episode. Thanks to all those who love to review it helps spread the message of what it takes to build a legacy that lasts and we'll catch you next time.Connect more with your host Samuel Knickerbocker at:https://www.facebook.com/ssknickerbocker/?ref=profile_intro_cardhttps://www.instagram.com/ssknickerbocker/https://howmoneyworks.com/samuelknickerbockerIf this resonates with you and you would like to learn more please LIKE, COMMENT, & SHARE————————————————————————————————————Click The Link Bellow To Join My Legacy Builders Mastermindhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/254031831967014/Click here to check out my webinar as well! ————————————————————————————————————Want to regain your financial confidence and begin building your legacy?In this ebook you will learn:- The 9 Pillars To Build A Legacy- Clarify you “why”- Create Daily Action Steps To Launch ForwardWant Sam’s FREE E-BOOK?Claim your access here! >>> Fuel Your Legacy: The 9 Pillars To Build A Legacy————————————————————————————————————

The South Florida Disorderly Blondes are happier than Elle Woods at Harvard to unpack this stellar podcast episode featuring autistic attorney Haley Moss. Much like the time Elle found Cameron Diaz at Fred Segal, we blondes gain a closet full of invaluable autism insight. We may ask the tough questions (have you met us?), but you'll see this "exercise" in respecting differences gives off plenty of endorphins for all to enjoy. What? Like, it’s hard? Now who's in for a bend and SNAP? Read More

SERMON TRANSCRIPT BELOW: You’re probably familiar with the tragedy of “friendly fire,” but have you thought about the potential of “friendly faith”? Let me unpack the difference. Friendly fire refers to incidents when, in the fog of war, a soldier will accidentally fire upon his own forces. The history of warfare is replete with examples. Perhaps the best known is the case of Pat Tillman. He was a gifted athlete who played in the NFL. After 9-11 he voluntarily gave up that lucrative career and became an Army Ranger. He died in the mountains of Afghanistan as a result of “friendly fire.” Friends can hurt friends (and not just on the battlefield!). But, it is equally true that friends can help friends. Your faith in the Lord can encourage and transform the lives of your friends. That’s what I mean by “friendly faith.” A great illustration of this is the biblical account of four friends who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus. There he found healing and, more importantly, forgiveness for sins. God wants to use our lives and, particularly, our faith to influence others for Christ. Whom can you pray for or encourage today? Whom can you “bring” to Jesus? A kind deed, a quick email or note, a word of witness, an invitation--all of these are examples of ways that we can live out a "friendly faith." Join us this Sunday at Istrouma Baptist Church as we continue our series entitled, “Who’s Your One?” We'll learn more about living out a faith that makes a positive difference in the lives of our friends.   Friendly Faith Sermon Series: Who’s Your One? Mark 2:1-12 Istrouma Baptist Church – Jeff Ginn, Lead Pastor 9:15 AM Sermon March 31, 2019 https://vimeo.com/327794391 https://www.facebook.com/istrouma.org/videos/1013316938861397/     Outline:   CooperativeFriends        And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men (2:3). Come the same way Carry the same weight         CreativeFriends        And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay (2:4). Are desperate Are determined   ConfidentFriends        And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”(2:5) Have a faith that is visible Have a faith that is victorious     You’re probably familiar with the tragedy of “friendly fire,” but have you thought about the potential of “friendly faith”? Let me unpack the difference.   Friendly fire refers to incidents when, in the fog of war, a soldier will accidentally fire upon his own forces. The history of warfare is replete with examples. Perhaps the best known is the case of Pat Tillman. He was a gifted athlete who played in the NFL. After 9-11 he voluntarily gave up that lucrative career and became an Army Ranger. He died in the mountains of Afghanistan as a result of “friendly fire.”   Friends can hurt friends (and not just on the battlefield!). But, it is equally true that friends can help friends.   Your faith in the Lord can encourage and transform the lives of your friends. That’s what I mean by “friendly faith.” A great illustration of this is the biblical account of four friends who brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus. There he found healing and, more importantly, forgiveness for sins.   God wants to use our lives and, particularly, our faith to influence others for Christ. Whom can you pray for or encourage today? Whom can you “bring” to Jesus? A kind deed, a quick email or note, a word of witness, an invitation--all of these are examples of ways that we can live out a "friendly faith."   Today, I want to speak on the theme, not friendly fire, but its exact opposite, “Friendly faith.” That is, your faith in the Lord Jesus, lived out, can be a blessing to your friends. It can change their lives and their eternity. I’m going to take you to a story in the Bible where it’s a case of friendly faith. Four friends living out their faith influenced their lame, paralytic friend for time and eternity.   The story is found in Mark chapter 2. So if you have a copy of the Bible, I want you to open it there, please. Mark 2. And in honor of God's word, would you please stand as we read these verses. Mark 2:1-12. There God’s word says: 1And when he [that is, Jesus]returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. 2 And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them.   Could I pause right there and just note what Jesus was doing? As the crowds came, Jesus preached the word to them. You might think that Jesus was a great miracle worker who occasionally preached, but you'd actually have that backwards. He wasn’t a miracle worker who occasionally preached. He was a preacher who often enough did miracles. There is an emphasis in the word of God on the preaching of these truths because it is the preaching of the word of God that is used by him to bring folks to eternal salvation. So today, in the tradition of Jesus, we are preaching the word. Now look, please, to verse 3 and we’ll continue the reading.   3 And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. 4And when they could not get [him near] because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. 5 And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8 And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts? 9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’? 10But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11 “I say to you, rise, [take]up your bed, and go home.” 12 And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”   Let’s pray.   [Prayer]   Please be seated.   God wants to use our lives and particularly our faith to influence others for Christ. He wants us to live out what I'm going to call today a “friendly faith.” Now today, we're continuing our series entitled “Who's Your One?” We're going to learn more about living out of faith that makes a positive difference in the lives of our friends. You'll know that we have challenged one another through the course of 2019 to pick one person that God would lay on our hearts, a friend that we could pray for and seek to influence in an effort to bring them to faith in Christ. Do you have your one? I trust that you do. All throughout this week, we've been praying day by day, have we not? I hope you have been using your prayer guide. For the 30 days leading up to Easter we're going to be praying for our friends, and I want you to encourage you to invite them to come and worship with you here. If you'll go to the Welcome Desk before you leave, we have a lot of invite cards that you can pick up and use to invite others to come and worship with us, particularly on Easter that's right before us.   Now, the four friends in the story that we’re studying today are great examples for us of what it means to live out our faith with our friends. I'm going to describe these men with three words, and I'm going to give you the three words, and then we'll go back and look at them each in turn. They are Cooperative. They are Creative. And they are Confident. These are going to be the three key words for this morning.   Let's begin, then, by first of all describing them as “Cooperative friends.” Cooperative friends. Now here, I'm thinking of verse 3. Look at your Bible again, please. There it says:  3And they came [these four friends], bringing to him [Jesus]a paralytic carried by four men.   Now, there are two things that I notice about these four friends. First of all, they come the same way. That is, they’re traveling the same road. They have the same destination. They have the same North on their [compass], and he is Jesus. Notice that it says “they came...to him.” They are all going the same way. Now here they are, each of the four friends, I can imagine them, each one at a different corner of this cot on which the man is lying. Had they been going different ways, they would have drawn and quartered the poor fellow. But instead, they’re going the same way. They are coordinated. They are cooperative. And did you know that churches function best when we are like these four friends, and instead of us each going our own way, we cooperate together to do the Lord's work.   I'm so thankful here at Istrouma we have a North. We have an aim. We’re going the same way. And what is that way? We have a mission, and I think all of you probably can now quote our mission. It is, “We glorify God by making disciples of all nations.” Now, I want us to quote it together. Are you ready? “We glorify God by making disciples of all nations.” That is our aim. Our aim is to get people to Jesus and to help them become followers, dedicated followers, of the Lord Jesus. Let me remind you, here's our process that we follow. It's very simple. Four key steps in it. Number one, Connect. We're looking to connect people to Jesus by salvation and in active church attendance. Connect. Once connected, we want to help them Grow in their faith. Primarily, we do this by helping people get connected to a small group. A lot of these projects that you heard described that went on on Go Day, those were driven by our small groups. Cooperative friends working together to carry out the mission of the Lord. Growing in our faith. Connect. Grow. Thirdly, Serve. That is, get your hands dirty. Put your hands to the plow. Pull your weight. These projects, and projects like them that we do around the world, are avenues for you to put your spiritual giftedness to work for the Lord. And then, the process culminates by us actually going, locally and globally, to the very ends of the earth. This is our mission. This is our North.   I think it's largely because of this that Istrouma, now listen to this, you won't believe it; if you've been a Baptist for a long time, you really won’t believe it, Istrouma is almost a hundred years old – next year we celebrate 100 years – and did you know, to the glory of God, this church has never had a church split. We have always walked in harmony. Have you ever wondered why, why is it we don't fuss and fight? It's because we cooperate. We have the same mission. We have the same goal. We have the same aim. Jesus is our Lord, and we're cooperating together going the same way.   I remember a story I heard some years ago about this fellow who was moving. He was moving from his house, and so he was there in the doorway of his home, the front door, and he was working with a refrigerator. A passer-by walking there, a Good Samaritan, happened to note the fellow wrestling with the fridge in the doorway. The Good Samaritan said, “Hey, could I help you?” And the homeowner said, “I'd love it.” So the man jumped up the steps and came up, and each one got on one side of the refrigerator, and they began to struggle with that heavy fridge there in the doorway. After a couple of minutes they paused to kind of catch their breath. The Good Samaritan said, “Whew! I don't know if we're ever going to get this refrigerator in your house.” To which the owner said, “In? I'm trying to get it out!”   Now, I’ve loved that story across the years, because the truth is we've got to know which way we’re going. We've got to know which way we’re carrying this load. As a church, we don't ever need to be confused. We are working together, and our aim is to make disciples of all nations. If we’ll have the same North, and if we’ll have the same mission, if we’ll go the same way, we’ll be in harmony with one another. So these men, they’re coming the same way.   Secondly, they’re carrying the same weight. They're carrying the same weight. Have you ever heard this saying, “Many hands make light work”? It's true. Many hands make light work. I don't know if you’ve ever had to sustain someone who is what we’d call dead weight. Maybe someone passes out, and you realize how heavy the body is when there’s no life force at work in them. Here's this man, he's a lame man, he can't carry himself, and what a struggle it would have been for just one of these men to have borne him all the way to where Jesus was. But thankfully, there was not one friend or even two friends; there are four friends working together sharing the load.   Now the application is very easy to make, is it not? We, God's people, each need to take hold of our corner of the cot. Each one of us has a load to bear in helping our friends get to Jesus. Each one of us has a load to bear in helping the work of the church go forward, in giving life, and bringing the life-giving news of Jesus to a waiting world. I tell you, it's amazing what can be done when people cooperate together.   I want you to watch a video clip. It's from Perth Australia. You're going to get a glimpse of what people together can do [Video clip was shown]. Here's the story: In Perth Australia, and you can Google this and watch it, there was an incident several years ago where a man was waiting on a commuter train to come through, like a subway. As the train arrived, the doors opened and this fellow began to make his way into the train. There was quite a lot of traffic, foot traffic, and as he was stepping into the train, his foot accidentally slipped down into a crack between the platform and the train itself, and it went all the way up to his hip. There he was, stuck between the platform and a 43-ton train. Soon enough, that train is going to roll out of the station. Well, when the passers-by saw what was going on, they all rallied to where the man was and they, with their bare hands, they leaned into that massive locomotive, and together the crowd relieved the weight of that train enough; they rocked it off that man enough, that the man was able to escape. Now, can you imagine such a thing, the power of working together that they could move a 43-ton train off the leg of that trapped man? It's a lesson to us that if we work together, there's nothing that we can't do that God would will for us to do. We, God's people, have all about us people who are trapped, if you will, in their sins. The Bible even describes us as dead in our trespasses and sins. As good as dead if there isn't some help brought to bear to help them escape from the snare of the devil. And we, God's people, bring that help when we are connected and when we grow and when we serve and when we go together the same way, sharing the weight, God will use us to change the world.   I tell you, we do this as Southern Baptists in a great way. If you don't know, Istrouma is part of a larger network. We’re not an independent church. We are autonomous but we’re not independent; we cooperate, just like the word I'm using to describe. And it's often call “CP Missions.” Cooperative Program, that's what “CP” stands for, the Cooperative Program. Many of you may not even be aware of this, but we’re part of a network of about 45,000 churches, all of us cooperating voluntarily. We, every dollar that you give in the offering plate here, we take a portion of that dollar, and we actually send it away. The very first thing we do with your offerings is we give from our receipts to the work of the Lord around the globe through what we call CP Missions.   Let me tell you some of the things that are done with your gifts through CP Missions. First of all, we have the world's largest Evangelical missions sending agency. It's called the International Mission Board. By the way, we happen to have a couple of our international missionaries with us today, the Melancons. Would you please stand, Pat and your wife? God bless you guys, missionaries around from around the world with us today. Pat's going to come and dismiss us in prayer when we conclude our service. He directs a ministry called Baptist Global Relief. Can I say all these things publicly, Pat? Okay, very good. Sometimes we serve in sensitive areas where there are security concerns. But whenever there's a disaster around the world, let's say that there's an earthquake in Nepal, how do resources get to Nepal to not only alleviate human suffering, but to take the good news of the Gospel? They do it through our CP gifts, and we're supporting missionaries just like the Melancons who serve 365 days of the year taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth. So we support the International Mission Board, more than 4,000 career missionaries.   You know, sometimes we celebrate that we support a young couple in central Asia who are from our church; that Abbie and Tyler are about to go to Eastern Europe. We celebrate these young couples. But again, I say to you, you're not just supporting them. You’re supporting thousands of missionaries, many of whom you will not know their names until you get to heaven. But they're going to come and they're going to say, “Thank you for giving. And because you gave, I was able to go to Afghanistan or to Pakistan or to China or to Ecuador or wherever it may be in the world. Your gifts go. You go by virtue of your gifts. Not only the International Mission Board, but the North American Mission Board. Again, thousands of missionaries serving full-time across our nation, supported by your gifts. We have six seminaries, and many of them are multi-site. We're training probably in the neighborhood of 15,000 new pastors and missionaries and ministers who will serve all over the world, and your gifts sustain those seminaries.   We have the world's third largest disaster relief organization. I’ve already referred to Baptist Global Relief, but here in the states, Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. The yellow hats and the yellow shirts that do relief in places like New Orleans when Katrina hit. Believe me when I tell you, much of the work that is done is done by our network of corporation. So I want to encourage you that God is using you in ways perhaps you never dreamed or never knew. But that's what happens when all of us get against that weight and we do our part in carrying our share of the load. All right, that's the first word, “Cooperative.”   Now, the second word. How could we describe these men? I want to use as my second word the word “Creative.” These men were creative, were they not? Look, if you will, in your Bible again to verse 4. 4 And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.   Now, I've entered homes by a variety of means. I've rung the front doorbell and I've going in through the front door. If I'm a close friend of the family, I might come in through the carport door. Maybe even I'll come in through the back door. Maybe you've got sliding glass doors to the patio; I've come in through sliding glass doors. I even, I have to confess this, I’ve even come in through the window a time or two. I remember when I was in high school, I stayed out late one night, and my mom and dad, I guess they thought I was already in the house and I was already in bed, all the doors were locked when I got home. I was a teenager, so I began to look for a window that was open. I found an open window in our dining room. So I'm about halfway in the window when I hear this shriek. It's my mother who sees this strange man climbing in through the dining room window. So I’ve come in to a home by variety of means, but I'll tell you this, I've never entered a home through the roof. And I don't suppose these men had either. But the Bible says, they could not get near him, and because they could not get near him through a door, or even through a window, their ingenuity kicked in. Their creativity kicked in. I love this. Churches ought to be seedbeds of creativity. But instead, we're often known for quite the opposite. In fact, somebody has said that the seven last words of the church, do you know what they are? I've told you before. The seven last words of the church: “We've never done it that way before.” The seven last words of the church.   I can take you to a lot of churches today, and they're doing things the way they did them in the 1950s. You open up the door, you walk in, the music they play, the technology they utilize, it's like you've gone back in time. It's like a time warp. And very often, those churches are dwindling.   Now, we're never going to change the message we preach. Don't be alarmed. We're preaching the message that was once for all delivered to the saints. It's an unchanging message, but we ought to bring creativity to bear in our outreach. Let me just ask you this, off the top of your head, I want you to think of the most creative company, or the most creative entity, that exists today. All right, you got one? Let me see a show of hands, you’ve thought of a company that you think's pretty innovative, pretty creative, raise your hand. All right, you got one in mind?   What's the one you have in mind? [Disney.] How many of you thought of Disney when you thought of creativity? All right, a few of you. Someone else, raise your hand. What did you think? [Apple.] Okay, very good, how many thought of Apple? All right, a lot of you did, I see a lot of hands. Maybe one more, any other creative company that came to your mind? [HelloFresh.] Pardon? HelloFresh? What is that? All right, very good. I've got to get more current, I can tell!   How many of you thought the most creative entity on earth today is the church? Wow, okay, one or two of you. I don't think very many people think of the church when they think of creativity, and could I just say, shame on us. Now why would I say that? Because we have the image of God stamped upon us, the Imago Dei. He said, male and female, he made them in His image. He made them. We're in His image.   What does God like? Let just start at the beginning. In the beginning God…? Created – the heavens and the earth. You see, he is creative. Just think of the flowers that he made, the beauty of them, the grandeur of them, the delicacy of them, the colors of them. Roses. Irises. Daffodils. But the Lord is so creative, is he not? And here's the thing: the church is to be creative. You say, “Yes, but I like the way we've always done things.” I know that. I know that. I know you like the way it's always been done. Y’all sit in the same pews every week! I know you like it the same way, and the truth is, I do too. We're all creatures of habit, aren't we? We get in ruts. Have you ever heard this definition of a rut? A rut is a grave with both ends kicked out. You may ought to get out of your rut. And the truth is, we do get out of our ruts. Most of you didn't get here by horse and buggy today. Most of you heated up your coffee with a microwave or Keurig, or whatever those things are.   You love innovation in certain spheres of life, and we in the church ought to appreciate creativity. I just want to say on behalf of Istrouma, and I want to say to the praise of God, we're a pretty creative bunch around here. By some measurements, relatively speaking, we're pretty creative. I can't say that for myself, I'm not that creative, but we have staff members who are quite creative. I would just put a piece of artwork here on the screen. This is from our artist here on staff. This was a design that was made by our art staff, and it was for our student DNOW event. That kind of artwork is very, very cutting-edge, and they were doing a Bible study on the Battleground, Ephesians 6, and the armor of God, and how to win in life. That's creative.   You know, the bumpers that you see before I get up to preach each Sunday, that's our staff, they produce those bumpers. Folks like Jim Szalay and Josh Boyd and Jana and Laura Fuson, very creative people, and it’s to the glory of God. We ought to rejoice in it. We're creative not just in artwork; we're creative, for example, in our outreach in sports. You know, it's not every day you have a church that has a whole sports ministry, and we're blessed that we have it. And I just want to say, Thank you Lord for giving us this ample property and that there were leaders before I came that had the vision to build ball fields and gymnasiums, and we utilize those for the Lord, and that's the way it should be.   A couple of Sundays ago we had a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, and of course this is the time of March Madness, so our Sports Ministry said, “Let's capitalize on that and let's have a basketball tournament.” But the real goal, and if you know ML Woodruff who directs our Sports Ministry, we don't play sports for sports’ sake. We don't even play sports for the children's sake. Well, we do, but I'll explain how. We really play sports for the Gospel's sake – and in that sense, for the children's sake and their parents and their grandparents that they might come to know Christ. For crying out loud, we even have a Pickleball League! That's right, pickleball. Very creative.   I think about our age-graded ministries. They're so creative. A recent Sunday, our children’s staff put on what I think they called “Pajama Day.” They let the children come in their pajamas to Sunday morning, and I know this out of the box, a little bit creative, but they wanted to do something fun for the children, something creative, something out of the box. And here's our children’s staff, just being creative. Don't be mad at them; rejoice that they’re being creative, trying to reach those boys and girls!   Our Student Ministry, they recently had what they called Paint Wars and they just throw paint on each other as a fun activity, and again, when they conclude that, they sit the teenagers down and they tell them the Gospel. Now, are y'all tracking with me? What are we talking about? We’re talking about creativity. Really, when you think about it, that's what Go Day is. Go Day is an expression of creativity, reaching out. We had teams yesterday wash EMS and first responders’ vehicles to touch them with the love of Christ. How creative!   I led the donut team, and we took donuts to Home Depot and just gave them passers-by. Had a team go to Istrouma High School and give out donuts there because our Sports Ministry was doing a baseball clinic, so there those two creative outreaches dovetailed.   We had a block party, and I can’t list all the projects. 53 projects scattered across the city, each one unique, creative, God-honoring, and that's how we ought to live our lives, for the Gospel. Let's do it.   Now, there's a couple of things about these friends and their creativity. The engine of their creativity was their desperation. They are desperate. Have you ever heard this saying, “Necessity is the mother of _____?” Invention. Exactly. These men were desperate. They knew they could not heal their lame friend. They’d known him perhaps all their lives. They knew no doctor could heal their friend. This is the time, this is the place, this is the person, this is the opportunity. If they don't seize it, it may never come their way again. They are desperate. If they can't come through the door and they can't come through the window, they're going to come through the roof, because they're desperate. And I’ll tell you what. One of the reasons our churches are not as creative as we ought to be is because we are not as desperate as we ought to be to see the lost come to Christ. I'm not as desperate as I ought to be, so one of our prayers this morning ought to be, “Lord, make us desperate to reach our friends with the Gospel.” If you're desperate to see your friends come to Christ, you will pray for them. You will invite them. You will share the hope of Christ with them, and I will as well. God help us to be desperate.   And not only were they desperate, they were determined. Yes, desperation makes you determined. They were not going to go home unless that friend got to Jesus. I can imagine it was hot. I've been to that part of the world. I remember one occasion Nell and I were in Jericho; it was 125 degrees in the shade. And here come these men. It's hot, that lame man's heavy, but they're not to be deterred. They're determined to get him to Christ, and they will not take no for an answer.   One last word I want to give you, and that is these friends were Confident. They were confident. Would you look now to verse 5? 5 And when Jesus saw their faith [you could just circle that word “faith”, When Jesus saw their faith], he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”   Now, I want to be clear about something because I don't want you to misunderstand me, and I don't want to fail to be clear. These friends were not confident in themselves. In fact, I would say they had no confidence in themselves. It was for that reason they made the journey to Jesus. They knew their resources had been exhausted. No, they had no confidence in themselves or in their flesh. In whom, then, was their confidence? It was in Jesus. That's why he was their North. They said, “We've got to get to Jesus.”   Two things about their faith stand out to me. Number one, it's visible. Jesus saw their faith. I'll submit something to you this morning. Listen. All genuine faith is visible. You say, “Where do you see their faith?” That hole up there in the roof. There's the evidence of it. You see, their faith drove them to that decision and that action. James said it this way, “You show me your faith without works; I'll show you my faith by my works.” He said, “I will show you my faith.” Now, we’re not to make a show of our faith, but if we have faith, it will show. Should I say that again? We're not to make a show of our faith, but our faith, if genuine, will show.   Their faith was visible, and then, because it was, that is because it was genuine, it was victorious. That is, their faith reached its goal. In fact, it not only reached their goal, it want far, far beyond their goal. I love what happens in this story. They let that man down in front of Jesus. Jesus looks at him. Well, let me back up. The Bible says Jesus saw their faith and he said, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now here there ought to be a sound effect. There ought to be [screeching of brakes]. What? Like the needle coming across the record. Your sins are forgiven? Who said anything about sins? I don’t think they brought him there to get his sins forgiven; how embarrassing is that? Right there in front of God and the world, “Your sins are forgiven.” What sins; who is talking about sin? No, Jesus, he makes a turn here that is sudden and is telling.   You see, the greatest need of that lame man that day was not that he would walk again, as great as that need was. No, the far greater need was that he be saved. That he be forgiven. I don't know in what condition you’ve come today. You may be here a paralytic, and God can heal you and we would rejoice were he to do so this day. But your greatest need is not to be healed of your physical malady. You may be here with intense pain, and I know several of you have aches and pains and sicknesses, and O that God would heal you. But the greater need is our spiritual healing. You may be here in bankruptcy today, and I'm heartbroken that you’re in bankruptcy. But perhaps it is the bankruptcy that will bring you to Christ so that your greater need can be met, and that is that your sins be forgiven.   I think I may have misunderstood this passage for years, because it says “Jesus saw their faith,” and I always thought that meant the faith of the four. And he said he saw their faith, and then he said to the paralytic, quite apart from that, “Friend, your sins are forgiven,” as though they were a separate thing. But I’ve evolved in my thinking on that question. I actually believe that when he said “Jesus saw their faith,” it encompassed the five. He saw the faith of those four friends, and I believe he saw into the heart of that lame man. After all, the lame man was willing to be borne to Jesus. He was willing to come through the roof; he was anxious to. And so I believe Jesus saw right into his heart that that man had faith not only to be healed but to be saved, to be forgiven.   You say, man, what, you think Jesus can see into the hearts of men? Yes I do. Upon what basis? This very story. Because don't you follow the story? It said there were some Pharisees sitting nearby who said – in fact, they didn't say it, let me correct that, they were thinking it in their hearts – “Who is this man?” I can just hear the disdain in their voice, “Who is this man that he could forgive sin?” Jesus perceived what was in their heart while it was yet unspoken. So of course Jesus could see into the heart of that lame man, and he saw faith there, and he responded to the faith that he saw and he healed that man and saved him of his sin, because I'm going to tell you something, the only way to get saved is to exercise personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. Here's what the Bible says. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.   The key to heaven is faith. The key to heaven is committing in your life in faith to Jesus as Lord. And I believe that's exactly what that lame man did.   And in Lagniappe, he got the great thing, forgiveness, but lagniappe came when he was healed. He was healed. Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” And then they questioned him, the Pharisees did, the religious crowd, and then Jesus put a question to them. He said – and I want to put the question to you; are you ready? Here comes the question: Which is easier to say, your sins are forgiven, or rise, take up your bed and walk? Church, how do you answer that question? Which is easier, and I'll give you a hint, which is easier to say? “Your sins are forgiven,” or “Rise, take up your bed and walk.” I'll answer it for you. The easier thing to say is “Your sins are forgiven.” And do you know why that’s easier to say? Because if I say to you, “Your sins are forgiven,” no one can verify whether it occurred or not. I'm clouded in this cloak of invisibility. You don't know if sins have been forgiven or not. But, by contrast, it’s harder to say, “Rise, take up your bed and walk,” because everyone will be able to see whether it happened or not, whether you’re genuine or not. So the harder thing to say is, “Get up and walk.”   Well Jesus took the easier route when he said “Your sins are forgiven.” But then he said to the religious rulers, But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” [lest you think I’m a charlatan]… rise, [take]up your bed, and [walk].”   That man took up his bed and he walked, and do you why that miracle occurred? That miracle occurred to confirm that Jesus is who he claims to be. Jesus is God come in the flesh to redeem sinners, and I'll say every miracle that occurs, occurs to verify and certify that Christ is Lord. It's pretty easy to say “Your sins are forgiven.” But it's not easy to accomplish.  Relatively free to say “Your sins are forgiven,” but excruciating to accomplish.   You know it's interesting, in the Bible, much of what occurs in the Bible occurs by virtue of God speaking it into existence. By divine fiat, God created all that is ex nihilo, out of nothing. He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, no action required. No price to be paid. He spoke it, and it was. One of the few things, if the only thing, that required his action was to redeem us of our sins. He didn't just say “Your sins are forgiven.” No, justice demanded, holiness demanded, that sin be punished, it be atoned for, a price be paid. Justice demanded it, and love paid the price. Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins, and to prove that price was paid, he arose from the dead. And he lives today to bring forgiveness and salvation to all who will put their faith in him.   Hey listen friend; I was talking a moment ago about the faith of these five. I honestly don't know of what quality their faith was or of what quantity it was. It could be that they came hopeful, not certain, but their faith was sufficient for them to make the journey, and what saves us isn't the amount of our faith, the quality of our faith. What saves us is that we exercise what little, feeble, weak faith we have. Come to Jesus, and when you come to Jesus, you'll find him sufficient to pay every sin.   Would you stand, please?  What a great story, a story about friendly faith. These friends brought their friend to Jesus. He got his cake, and he got to eat it too. He was healed of his illness and he was saved from his sin.     I know that God today wants to heal our sin-sick souls, make us his own. If never before you’ve called upon Christ as Savior, would you this day?  I want to lead you in a prayer to do that. From your heart, cry out to God.   [Invitation and Prayer]   [Lord’s Supper]   [Singing]  

Bells tells a story. We play an Or Game. There is a surprise call or two. Clovis and Rambo are referenced. You know, classic Dorktown.What? Like we haven't been here the whole time?Click to download: Dorktown230.mp325.5MB | 55:55 | Fowl Language!PODCAST LINKS-You can also find this pod on iTunes and Stitcher. Like our Face and Tweet & Instagram us @dorktown. Follow Mikey @thefresnan.

Elie Katzenson interviews East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest (EBABZ) organizers Gillian Dreher, June Hong, and Maira McDermott about the specialness of zines and their relevance as underground publications for activists, artists, and writers in search for total creative freedom and publishing options.Transcript:Elie Katzenson:This is Method To The Madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley celebrating Bay Area innovators.I am Elie Katzenson. I am here with the organizers of EBABZ, which stands for the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest, which is coming up this Saturday, December 8th at Omni Commons in Oakland.It's from 11:00 to 5:00. That venue, Omni Commons, is located at 4799 Shattuck Avenue, which is super close to the MacArthur Bar, and there's a drop off on the sixth bus line in addition to other bus lines. For now, I am here with Jill, June, and Mira. Hi y'all.Mira:Hey.Jill:Hey.Elie Katzenson:Let's start by talking about what a zine is.Mira:A zine, in my opinion, is really anything you want it to be. It doesn't even need to be printed. You can have online zines, digital zines. It's anything that you feel really passionate about or interested in that you want to share with other people, and you just kind of put together this little book.It doesn't have to be a traditional book shape. It can be any shape you want. Staple it, copy a bunch of pages, hand it out. That's a zine.Elie Katzenson:Zines are interesting because, as I understand it, historically they've been and they continue to be like an underground publication used a lot by activists, artists, and writers that are looking for the ability to self publish, which affords them total freedom.There's a lot of identity exploration that maybe traditional publishing houses wouldn't allow for that space, and so you have lesser represented communities exploring their identities.With this, I'm thinking queer people, I'm thinking like there's a lot of diasporic exploration, mixed identities, mixed ethnic identities, anarchist groups, a lot of unique politics are getting space. Then kind of nontraditional relationship models. I've seen some like polyamory and nonmonogamous related zines.Really valuable information that isn't able to get exposure elsewhere, in zines gets massive exposure. These fests, which take place across the country, they are really hubs of, this is a big word to say, but like revolutionary information sometimes. It all starts it seems on a small scale, but this work can have major repercussions in a positive sense for a lot of people.Mira:In my personal experience it has been revolutionary, because through zines that's how I have found the words to work through my own gender identity, and that was revolutionary for me.Elie Katzenson:What Mira just said is proof of why zines are so important. In your experience why are zines so special?June:I think the beauty of the zine is, as Mira said, the total freedom and creative control you can have over your publication, and because you don't have to go through the process of a publishing house, and you self publish, you can really make it anything you want it to be.Jill:I also love the element of like speed and spontaneity. An event can happen and you can make a zine about it immediately. I think it's so great for like activism, or current events, because you can react, and share your ideas. Any idea, super quickly.Elie Katzenson:When I think of something like writer's block, or like fear of showing your work, zines, in this punk way, emphasize the naturalness and the power of your first response,and sort of like first thoughts. How do you let go enough to just say like I'm going to put myself out there. I'm going to put my work out there. How do people do that? I'm so impressed by that with zines that I've seen. They're very thoughtful, but they're not over-thought and they're not manicured to the point of perfection.June:I feel like that's such like a classic problem with creative work or like an issue is at what point do I feel comfortable enough to like share my work. With zines I feel like there's such a broad spectrum. Even the range of zines that I've seen some look definitely more spur of the moment, first draft, made photocopies, and published versus zines that look more like traditional books.I feel like the answer to like when do you feel comfortable? Like how do you get over that hump? Like is this getting over your own perfectionism to publish is something that zines kind of help with, because it is so easy to make. That's one less barrier for you to like put your content out there.Elie Katzenson:How zines have been seen more in the mainstream, and so you're talking about the first draft zine, which is a little more, not less marketable. Then you have commercialized zines that maybe are a little less substance oriented.Maybe a little less political, a little less extreme, a little more surface level, and I've been kind of curious about what the dynamic is within the zine community in regards to content.Is there more collaboration in the same community? There seems to be maybe a little bit more friendship. I know that treating your zines is a big part of what you do when you table.Jill:I've had really good experiences making friends through zines, and even making friends zines on Facebook groups, and then traveling to those people's fests, and let me stay at their house.I've never met these people, and there's just a level of trust that comes in I think when you're sharing your work that's really personal. You kind of get to know someone and then they're like, "Yeah, I've never met you but I think you're not going to murder me, so come stay at my house for a weekend."Thinking specifically about when I went to Omaha Zine Fest, and the organizers of that fest were super sweet. I think there's just a lot of camaraderie in the zine community, because we're all just kind of doing the same thing. Not the same exact thing, but we all have the same passion for this art form.Elie Katzenson:This is the ninth year of EBABZ. As I understand it, it was kind of born out of people enjoying Portland Zine Fest, and San Francisco Zine Fest, and thinking that there was enough artists and creators in the East Bay to have a fest here, and even the organizers nine years ago are different than the organizers that are y'all, right?Mira I know that you kind of had like this sub-zine fest, The Bay Area Queer Zine Fest. I think that the space that EBABZ creates, not only at The Fest, which I've been to a couple of years in a row, but the work that you're championing and really like helping proliferate, how can people and the community of the East Bay in general help EBABZ thrive and help zinesters thrive. How can we support the creation of this work?Jill:Volunteer.June:Yeah.Mira:Show up day of. That's really important still.June:Please volunteer.Jill:It's crazy. My boyfriend especially lately has been in awe of all of the work that we've been doing. I think with events like this you don't realize, you always think, "Oh, someone's in charge."No one's in charge. We're just kind of making all this up as we go, and like working together and like figuring out how to get stuff done. Like I'll come home from our meetings working sessions and he'll be like, "Oh what did you do today?" I'll tell him and he'll be like, "What? Like you're doing so much stuff. That's so cool."So yeah, it would be great for people to get involved.Elie Katzenson:What kind of things can people do?Jill:So much, so everything, from all year long, we have different events. Mira's always really good, and June at like planning, fundraising events, getting in touch with like different organizations, figuring out how we can work together, teaching people how to make zines, like workshops like that.We also do planning stuff throughout the year. We have to like send out applications. We have to figure out like what are our mission statement is.Mira:There's administrative work, but all the way to like really fun poster makes.June:Yeah, make a flyer. InstagramMira:Follow their Instagram y'all.Jill:There's fun stuff happening. Voluntaring looks fun if you follow the Insta.June:I think a lot of people are afraid to volunteer, because putting yourself out there is always really scary. Also maybe in capitalist society in general, there's the concept that you have to pay a lot of time in a place before you have any power or say, and so you think that you shouldn't be there helping, or deciding how things are run because you're new, but EBABZ is a democracy as far as I can tell, a major democracy, and people are really welcome, and like radically welcome. It's radically inclusive.Jill:A friend of mine reached out to me and said they were too busy to volunteer but they know this person who's in high school who was looking for like some way to get involved with zines.We brought them on, and they have just gone for it. They reached out to like all the different high schools in the area to ask for people to get involved, share their zines. Any level of effort is appreciated.Mira:For sure. I feel like that can happen in such different ways too. Like so as we said, there's like many different capacities in which you can volunteer, but also like we all started volunteering at the same time three years ago, and how I showed up was I just saw like a volunteer meeting on Facebook.I just like showed up without really knowing that much about The Zine Fest. I'd like gone the previous year, but my friend had posted it on Facebook, so I was like, "Yeah, well I'll just like show up, and now I've continued to stick with it for the past three years, so you never know how it's going to go.Elie Katzenson:Tomas is one of the organizers who I think is not strictly active anymore, and he was talking about the idea that a zine more than maybe certain other mediums is really like a one-on-one interaction between the creator and the reader.What makes a zine one-on-one interaction? Why is that one-on-one interaction really essential, especially when you're talking about subject matter that is frequently very intimate, and life changing I guess I would say, because I think so much of reading zines is related to identity, and people find a sense of belonging that maybe they're not experiencing as frequently in reading fiction.Mira:In my experience it's been kind of like handing someone my diary, and they just happened to be standing right in front of me sometimes making really awkward eye contact. It's terrifying, but that's just kind of what it is.I don't know. It's really cool to have these one-on-one interactions with people even if it's not in person, and then have them give you feedback, or tell you that, "Oh, this zine meant a lot to me, because x, y or Z," and then it's like, "Oh, I'm not alone in what I'm feeling. Wow, this feels great." There's like solidarity with other people over just, I don't know, stuff that maybe you felt like you were alone in.Jill:There's those kinds of zines. I feel like that with a lot of mirror zines, and a lot of per zines, that are like diary type zines, but there's also the zines where it's more communal, and I feel like rather than like a one-on-one, it's this feeling of entering into a group just through reading.I'm thinking of ones that are collaborative that community produces, or ones that maybe share like history of like a place or a thing that you weren't familiar with. It's like you're entering into this world more of a shared base instead of one-to-one. It's one to a bunch. Even if you've never met those people, or seen those people.Elie Katzenson:When people think about getting involved in community, it seems like you have to be a people person, and really enjoy being extroverted all the time, etcetera. What's interesting about Zines is there's face for everyone, and there's sensitivity to whoever you are.You are just radically accepted and loved, and that respect is just so special. I don't think that's really a question, but I think it's something that I want people who maybe aren't familiar with zines, or who haven't participated in an event where zines are shared to know that that is really the environment that is created at a fest.Like Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory where you're going to find the level that you want. Maybe you find the blueberry early, and you get rolled away, or you make it to the end and you get your gobstopper. You know? So.June:Yeah, totally. That reminds me of how earlier we were talking about how to support zine communities and stuff, and we talked about volunteering, but also what I found that has been super important to me within zine organizing, and the Oakland art community in general, is I found that people are so supportive and welcoming, and down to help you out with your projects.People's generosity and acceptance has really blown my mind. It's super inspiring to see people be making things and helping other people make things, and being able to express their selves, and creative projects through helping each other out. That's another way to support is help a friend make something.Elie Katzenson:Totally. I read this newsletter, it's called The Creative Independent. I'll have to send you a link, because it's really great. They interview an artist every day, and sometimes they talk about in different art worlds there's more competition than others. Right?One of the pieces of advice that I read today was about being confident in charging for your work. People can pay for your work, and I don't know why that seems so radical to me, because it can feel so hard to say like, "No, that costs money, or that Zine is 10 bucks." You have really made something, and that's like a sacred exchange.Mira:It's hard sometimes, but I feel like the time that I'm most able to stick out for myself and my work is when people just try to take it off the table like it's free.It's the only time I'm really adamant like "No, I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this." That happened at zine event that I'm tabling at. It's hard to put a price on something you've created, but sometimes it's necessary because you have to even or you have to pay your bills.Elie Katzenson:Right? I mean even beyond breaking even though, right? It shouldn't just be, I just had to pay for my materials. It's like, "No, it's okay for me to make money off of a work that I made."Jill:Totally. Yeah.Elie Katzenson:But why does it feel so hard to do that?Mira:It can be hard to do because money obviously is not like the end-all-be-all of the world, but you also need it to survive, and pay the bills. It's something I do think about is why do we not hesitate to buy a five dollar coffee, but you have a problem with buying a five dollar zine, or something like that. I don't know. Not that it's always necessarily like that, but-June:Yeah, I think it is important to keep in mind value and the effort that people put into making creative work that isn't necessarily sold in a store, and for some reason that seems more official. Okay to give money to.Mira:Both as organizers charging for space, and on the zinester side of the table, charging for these things filled with ideas. We've been conflicted with anticapitalist sentiment too. Then like charging for things.If I'm making something that's against consumerism, and then I'm charging for it, like, "Oh, what do I do? What's happening?" It's all about valuing yourself, and your ideas and-Elie Katzenson:Right. You still have to function in the environment that we were functioning in, [crosstalk]June:It's not that we like money, but-Mira:Yeah.June:Give me my moneys.Mira:Yeah, that's, yeah. Personally I feel like that's been really hard.Elie Katzenson:It's interesting to me, because the price that you're charging the zinesters is quite fair in my opinion. I think it's what, 50 bucks if you're accepted?June:No, not even that.Mira:It's less.June:That's for a double.Mira:For a half table we have a sliding scale, 20 to $40, and then if you have a full table, it's 50 to 75 I want to say. We also-Elie Katzenson:You've always employed a sliding scale?Mira:Always a sliding scale, and also if people have financial struggles, they could email us and we waive the fee.Elie Katzenson:Wow.Jill:Some zine fests are not like that. It's really nice to be able to be a part of one that is like that.Elie Katzenson:I want to talk about The Fest schedule in general. I know the Rock Paper Scissors Collective did a memorial fund, The Rheo Memorial Fund, where they were giving away grants of $100 for people to make zines.You could apply for this zine scholarship. That was really special, because again, $100 means a lot. Be it to EBABZ if they can get a table, or just being able to make 50 copies of their work.Okay. So again, reminder the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest is this Saturday, December 8th it's from 11 to five at Omni Commons, 4799 Shattuck avenue. It's free to get in. No admission. All these tables you can buy zines and peruse.I know that there's some workshops happening. Can you tell me a little bit about that?Mira:We have three different workshops. They're each about an hour long. We have writing from the margins, creativity, and embodiment for artists of color with Fatima Nasir. This one sounds awesome. It's a writing workshop, meditative practices, some brainstorming, and sharing stories.Elie Katzenson:What Times that?Mira:That one is at 12 and then at 1:30 we have mixed media sticker making with Raphael Tapra the third. Sounds extremely fun. You just use a bunch of stuff and make stickers. Very DIY. That's at 1:30 until 2:30, but you can stop by. It's kind of like an in and out situation.Elie Katzenson:Awesome.Mira:Or you can say the whole time. At 3:00 we have letterpress basics with Christie Holahan, and she's gonna show how this tabletop water press works.Then everyone's going to get to make good thing. They're gonna choose a phrase, and then everyone's going to let her press that phrase.Elie Katzenson:Cool. What part of Omni are they doing those in? Do you know? Cause it's like those two big rooms, right? The entry room, and then the larger back room.Mira:It's in the entry room and it's way in the back. You'll see these big wall partition screen things.Elie Katzenson:Oh cool.Mira:It's behind the partition.Elie Katzenson:Awesome. Couldn't have asked for a better workshop description. I was reading online that you are doing something new this year. I think it's called a zine store.June:Yeah. So the zine shop is something new that we're trying out this year. Mostly in response to how we were feeling that we wanted to include as many people as possible, because there are a limited number of tables, but we do get a lot of applications.For people who either didn't get to table, or just have like one or two zines, and don't feel like they can fill a table, they actually still have time to drop off their zine at five Friday at E.M. Wolfman Downtown. It's a bookstore. The organizers will be there the whole day selling them instead of having all of those people having to table.Jill:Another thing we're trying different this year one of our organizers had this cool idea. At all these fests, it's always a person behind a table, and it is super weird. I'm sure for anyone who's been to an event like this, or a craft show before, when you're walking around, and you're like, "Do I make eye contact? Do I not make eye contact? I want to look at this stuff. But I don't want them to feel offended if I don't buy the stuff."It's this kind of tense relationship sometimes. Sometimes it's really fun and you make good connections and you have a great time. Sometimes different personalities, some people feel awkward.One of our organizers was like, "What if we move the zinesters out from behind the table." It creates a more like open layout, and visitors can kind of like file through and peruse without having to have these tense eye contact moments.The tabler will still be there, but it's off to the side, and it creates more opportunities for organic conversations.Elie Katzenson:That's interesting.Jill:Yeah it's our first year doing it. So we'll see.Elie Katzenson:Oh I'm really excited to hear that, because I'm totally used to the awkward dynamic. I just put that Mona Lisa smile on my face for like an hour.Jill:Yup. Same. It's like part of the thing.Elie Katzenson:Yeah.Jill:We still have tables like that, so you will get an opportunity to show your Mona Lisa smile. But yeah, it'll be cool.Elie Katzenson:I think sometimes I personally want to engage in conversation, but I'm conscious of taking up too much space, or maybe they need to spend time with other people and I'm scared of taking too much attention, but sounds like people are maybe more open to speaking than I think that they are. Right?Jill:Yeah. We should mention that we're only using the wheelchair accessible rooms, and it's kid friendly.June:We have the childcare room, but we do not have childcare. BYO Care. You can use the room. That's what Rebecca said. BYO Care.Elie Katzenson:It's wheelchair accessible and you can bring your kids. You can't bring your dogs.June:No.Elie Katzenson:I know. My life is not fair.Jill:You can't have it all.Mira:You really can't.June:After The Fest, there's a EBABZ after party that's happening from six o'clock to around 10 o'clock at Classic Cars West slash Hello Vegan Eats. So yeah, come through.Mira:There's going to be like 10 djs.June:I think it's going to be like six.Mira:Six to 10.June:Six to 10 djs.Elie Katzenson:If you each had kind of one last sentiment or thought to put out into the world as an EBABZ organizer, or something that you'd like to put out there for the end of this interview.June:Just every year. I'm so grateful for zine community, the applications we receive, and the care that is taken in those applications. Also my fellow organizers I'm super grateful for it, because everyone really tries their hardest. Put's a lot of effort into it. Also, yeah, I'm eternally grateful to Aura for introducing me to this community and I think of her.Jill:I went to cal, and I was super DIY, and in high school I feel I was super punk into all this stuff. Then you grow up, and you have to get a job and you have to make money. I have a mortgage now.I start to get out of touch with all my roots and this happy community and what matters in life. Coming to Zine Fest, and volunteering with Zine Fest, reminds me of all that stuff, and keeps me connected, and keeps me grounded in reality, and what's good.Mira:Sort of to echo what both of you were saying, I think organizing EBABZ has been one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. For that I am eternally grateful to Aura for getting me involved. Also if you come to The Fest, please bring caffeine for the organizers.June:Yes.Jill:I don't drink coffee.Elie Katzenson:The East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest is taking place on December 8th from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM at Omni Commons, which is located at 4799 Shaddock Avenue in Oakland. You can follow EBABZ online on Instagram at E-B-A-B-Z-I-N-E fest, or visit them at their website, EBABZfest.com. Thanks. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Just as we were recording this episode, a girl in our sorority decided to get a perm. We tried to talk her out of it because curls weren't a good look for her, but she went ahead and did it anyway. When she entered the wet t-shirt contest, she was completely hosed down, lost all of her curls and then we all decided to sit down and watch Legally Blonde.In this episode, we talk about the brazen nature of 2000s fashion, the wishy-washy nature of LGBT acceptance and debate whether the "romcom" is suitably named.What? Like, it’s hard?Follow You Know What I Like...? on Twitter (@YKWILPodcast)Like You Know What I Like...? on FacebookMusic: http://www.purple-planet.comCover Art: Andrew Losq

Hi everyone! This is Connie Sokol, and you're listening to Balance Redefined Radio. I've spent over 20 years teaching people how to redefine what balance really is, meaning a more purposeful and joyful life.   They’ve paid off credit cards, lost weight, organize their homes, and created a meaningful life plan. They've managed their time, changed habits, and experience greater success both at work and at home.   So now I decided to take the plunge and help about 100,000 new people who want to redefine balance in their lives. People ask me all the time, “How do I go from an overwhelming and chaotic life to more purpose, organization, and joy?”   That's the reason why I'm doing this podcast, to give you trusted answers and create a space where you could find balance. My name is Connie Sokol and welcome to Balance Redefined Radio…   Welcome back to Balance Redefined. I'm Connie Sokol, and I'm so happy that you're joining for more wonderful things.   Today, I am talking about the vital benefits of being a B-plusser. Now if you're not familiar with this concept, this is one of my favorite concepts.   I've been teaching for almost 20 years, but it is fabulous because my belief is you have to hit 80 before you hit 100…   So before we're completely perfect at something, we have to be a B-plusser. Before an A, we’ve got to be at least a B-plusser...   This has saved my life and my relationships with my children especially because instead of being hyper-focused on being a perfectionist on certain things, I now have this joyful feeling of being a B-plusser. All is well.   I'm going to explain what that means because, a little caveat, that does not mean we are sludgy, that we are slackers, or that we intentionally don't do our best at something.   That is not what being a B-plusser means. I'm so sorry to say, but there are certain things that require an A, they just do-fidelity in marriage, paying bills on time.   But other things, you know, they're just things that require a B plus like folding towels...   Okay, my kids fold my towels starting at age, say three. I think about three is when I start them, and they look like bowling balls, and volleyballs. In fact, I remember one time, one of my children, was it a boy or girl? I can't remember.   I just remember the conversation because I said, “Oh, could you please fold your towels with a little bit of irritation?” And whoever it was, I just remember these eyes looking up at me and saying, “I just did.” Yeah, I did not realize that was the final product.   Yeah, that's how they looked. But you know what? It's all good because it's towels. It's all good.   All right, so as far as for recently, let me share a few things and apply to this B+ because it has been reaffirmed to me in my experience. This is a great principle. This is an eternal principle.   This works. So how does this work?   If you've heard my other podcasts, as you know, we were evacuated for a fire-number one fire in the nation in my backyard. It was my city, and so we were evacuated. We had miracle after miracle and all structures were safe and sound.   In fact, we came back and I couldn't believe how everything looked. It was incredible. It was as if no fire had happened. There's a few burns scars on the mountain. We are right up against the mountains, but other than that, I mean we still had the fall trees that looked all beautiful on the mountains.   It was pretty incredible. You would not have even known this raging, scary, thing was threatening our city, several major times. The fire had been at work.   So after the fire we get moved back in for about a week and then comes the rain because now we have threat of mudslide. I was joking with a friend that it was kind of like out of that cartoon movie, the Disney Movie Hercules, “Was that after the earthquake or before the flood?” It was so like that.   Here we were after moving back into our house, sandbagging. Now we were sandbagging as a community. It was incredible.   Once again, this community is amazing. It’s going to be lifted up into heaven because seriously, we had one hour of church where we were on that Sunday, and then we got dressed to go over and bag sandbags. They had already bagged 6,000 sandbags the night before on Saturday night.   Then Sunday morning, a whole group of youth had come down. These young single adults came and they had helped bag 6,000 bags. Then there was no more for us to do. So we got sent home, if you can imagine. They ultimately did a total, I believe, of 30,000 sandbox...   So the point that I make here is that we were now facing a new threat, and it was mudslides, rain, and torrential rain, that kind of thing. So we put the sandbags at the top of the driveway.   We walked around the window wells and and my daughter covered one of the ones that we thought would be kind of more of a big concern. We batten down the hatches.   We got everything off the floor, the basement, and in the garage just in case. We did all of that again, got gutter stuff to make sure it would not fly away from the house, and those kinds of things.   So we felt really good and solid. I have to say that they had predicted four or five days of torrential rain. Just that it's going to downpour, and if we get a quarter of an inch and a half an hour, we're in trouble. That gives you kind of a baseline.   They were predicting one and a half to two inches, and at one point they were predicting two to four inches of rain. So that's where we were kind of standing. Okay.   Once again, there were miracles for days in a row. There was hardly any rain. In fact, initially a hurricane was supposed to come through Utah. What? Like what? When does that happen?   The initial hurricane that got downgraded to a tropical storm was coming through, rerouted around our city. I am not joking. We're talking...community prayer works people. It got rerouted and hit north instead dumped on salt lake.   So that was kind of, not funny, but it was an irony…   Anyway, the point that I'm making with the b plusser things is that…   You know, we thought we were all solid and good.   Well then we wake up this morning to my daughter who comes to me at six in the morning and said that her window well is leaking. And I went, “Oh, what went down? And here's the stream of water coming in her window.   We probably had a foot and a half, maybe more than that of water. And at this moment I'm thinking, “Oh no, this is actually happening in real time. I'm going to have to make a plan here.” Obviously an amended plan to my original awesome plan.   So, I looked at her and I thought, “We've got to cover that one window. Well we thought was going to be just fine and here's where the b plusser thing comes in...   I'm standing there at six in the morning just having awakened, and I think, “What can we use?” We want something that's going to move away from the house in a diagonal fashion and kind of let the rain fall off of it. So we can tarp it and let the rain kind of drizzle off, not just flat.   In the hallway right by his room is my son's whiteboard and he was supposed to have put that away. He didn't put it away, and it's sitting right there. I look and I go the whiteboard. So we took two white boards, angled them against the house covered in tarp, and sandbag the bottom on both sides. Boom. Done. It worked fabulously.   So nice job on not putting everything away in the house…   The second thing is when we went to find the tarp just a few days before, we had gone out to, you know, the recess (where we have a little bit of property).   We went out to the recesses of the property just to clear everything up, and there were some tarps kinda laying around. I thought, “Well let's just bring those into the entry where we're going to fold them and put them away.”   Thank goodness we did not do that. Because you know what happens when you fold and put away something. What happens? You never know where it is. So it was sitting right there in the entry. Grab that on the way out.   Then when my daughter was clearing out that window, well we stopped it, and got that window well covered. Then we wanted to clean that out and siphon it out. She had this wonderful idea of taking thing stuff out by scooping it, and dump it into a water buckets, you know, to carry it upstairs. This was down near in the basement.   Then we carry it upstairs and take it outside. Then dump it up in the rocks, and the rock area, but you know, it's hard. Those five gallon buckets can slosh all over. They're really heavy and hard to move...Shazamm! We have these drinking water buckets for emergency preparedness.   Months ago we had a family night where we were filling these blue water buckets. I call them “lego buckets” because they sort of stack together like blue legos that are about, I don't know, two feet to a foot and half tall. We had gotten to a good place, almost done and hadn't quite finished it and said, “We'll get back to it.”   Yeah, we never got back to it…   So we had some of these that were empty, so we grabbed those. She literally just siphon it out and put them right into these water buckets. Then we'd easily carry them out to dump them.   Done. So, so easy. So three things in a row: the whiteboard, the tarp and these lego water buckets. It was perfect.   Within a matter of minutes, we had not only taken care of the problem and made sure there wasn't more water coming in, but we weren't stressed. We weren't exhausted. It worked so smooth.   I hopped in the shower, got the kids to school, and boom. I went off and did a spiritual activity over at the temple. I mean, it was amazing. Amazing. So B plusser. Yeah. I'm an absolute advocate. So what does that look like in daily life and not just for emergency preparedness, right?   What that says to me is do the best you can. Just do the best you can because when you're a B plusser you say, “I'm going to do all that I can do today. I'm going to do what I can with what energy that I have. I'm not going to put myself in a coma and crawl to bed every night. I'm going to do what is reasonable and I'm going to do those things that come to mind that I should do.”   And the second part of that is, and you know I'm a god fearing woman, but you put in whatever that is for you, higher power, the universe, divine influence, whatever that is for you...   I know that that second principle is God fills the gaps. He fills the gaps. You know, like when you build a wood cabin, this always comes back to me when you build a wood cabin, there's the gaps in between the logs and you have to fill it with a substance called chinking.   That's kind of like this flexible sealant that seals between the gaps of the logs. Does that make sense? It's that white stuff. Often it looks white and it goes between the logs. That’s chinking.   I kind of look at God as you know, he does the chinking. He fills the gaps because we cannot do it all ourselves. We can't. And especially when I talk with and work with women, they have this feeling that society makes them believe that they're supposed to fill all the gaps. We're not.   We're to do all we can and women are wired to do more multitasking than men are. And I get that we have different wiring, different gifts, so we can do a lot more of those kinds of things, and have that be all taken care of, but that is not our job is to make sure every jot and tittle is taken care of.   That is not our job... We're just to do the best we can and then live for God's divine help. That is my feeling. If I'm doing my best to do God's will, obey his commandments, do whatever it is that you personally feel, and I personally feel is what God is wanting me to do, if I'm doing my best, but that I can ask for that help.   I can rely that God's going to fill those gaps. So that's something to consider because there's no way we can be 100 percent. There's just no way.   The third point is...I love this from Stanley Greenspan. He writes parenting books, playground politics, and things like that. And he wrote The Challenging Child. I think he wrote Playground Politics. I could be wrong on that, but he wrote The Challenging Child. I know that for sure because I read that cover to cover, underlined and came back, probably read it several times.   With Seven kids, you know, there's a little bit of experience with challenging children and one of the quotes I love, and I'm paraphrasing, but he says, “We have to learn as parents when we become parents, we have to learn that we have to choose to do less than our best in different situations.” That it's the first time often that parents are facing that challenge.   When we're single, we have a lot of choice about when we want to do our absolute best and when we're not, but when we're parents, we're now put in a situation where we feel less than our best and choosing to do less than our best is actually our best.   Have you been there? Have you experienced that where you're like, “I am working it here. I am spinning the plates as fast as I can. There's nothing more that I can do. This is as good as it gets, and yet it's still not perfect, or it's still not all taken care of, and that's okay because that's parenting.”   I personally feel that's intentional because I feel that God is my divine parent. I feel that he is my Heavenly Father. I know that he wants to help me. So if I'm able to take care of everything, where do I put him in my life? Do I need him?   So I love that things are needing me to be a B-plusser and that I can't do everything on my own…   I actually like, well, not in the moment-I don't like it in the moment and that's the truth-but I really eventually when sanity returns and rationale returns, I really do like that because I know he has better solutions more often than I do. He knows how this is going to work best.   So I think it's a beautiful thing. I know studies show even in religious activities...They had studies shown in different congregations of people who if they read scripture, prayed, attended church, you know, held family night, that these different things were supposedly, you know, ideal.   What they found is that the most successful families over time were those who were B plussers those who did it, about 80 to 85 percent of the time. Love, love, love, love it.   I know for my son that has aspbergers, no one knew much about aspbergers years and years and years ago. And I just knew in my soul there were certain things that I needed to do, provide structure, give him a heads up when we were transitioning.   I just knew these things in my soul and I was praying for answers so I knew them, but I was not being this perfect mom and knowing everything that I should do for an asperger son.   And yet my B+ efforts when I didn't know any better, actually proved to be extremely fruitful and turned out to be the things that I should have been doing most of the time. Which who would have known. So this is such an important concept in our lives.   I hope that you will look around today, look at your life and say, “What am I stressing myself out about to be a perfectionist about? What am I really putting my best energy to and can I be a B-plusser or instead, can I pull back a little bit in this area to carve out more energy to put over into this area? Maybe I'm going to be a b plusser in this project that I'm doing for work, so that I can have more energy to spend with my child when he comes home from school...”   “Maybe I'm going to be a B plusser in this meal that I'm taking for this church function or to the neighbor. Maybe I'll have more energy to put towards my spouse when my spouse is needing time with me.” So do you see what I'm saying?   Or maybe I can be a B plusser in the way that I'm cleaning that bathroom or the front entry because we all know we'd rather have a clean front entry and front room because anybody comes over. We want it to be clean, right? Rather than the bathroom.   But maybe I should put less energy to that so that I have time to sit down for 20 minutes and read a good book or just be still…   So today I invite you to look at your life. See where you can be a b plusser.   Let God fill the gaps and just be good enough. Just be good enough. Just for today. So I invite you to take that challenge and join me for more podcasts with Balance Redefined.   You got it! Thanks for listening. Remember to rate and subscribe. If you are feeling the need for real balance in your life, get your free five step life plan, and get started today! Just go to conniesokol.com/download.

Dr. Sean Stephenson dives deep with Mike Domitrz into our self-value, self-esteem, when we are in a dark place, and much more. From the importance of owning your Agenda and stating it clearly to being independent from your partner’s happiness. This show is packed with incredible wisdom!! * You are invited to join our community and conversations about each episode on FaceBook at https://www.facebook.com/MutuallyAmazingPodcast and join us on Twitter @CenterRespect or visit our website at http://www.MutuallyAmazingPodcast.com**     WATCH RAW FOOTAGE of THE SHOW HERE (CC is available on this video):https://youtu.be/zqhWqKGl6fc OR SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE TRANSCRIPTION   Dr. Sean Stephenson’s BIO: Dr. Sean Stephenson was predicted not to survive at birth because of a rare bone disorder that stunted his growth and caused his bones to be extremely fragile (fracturing over 200 times by the age of 18). Despite his challenges, he took a stand for a quality of life that has inspired millions of people around the world.   Over the past 24 years, his powerful message has been heard at live events in nearly all 50 states and in 16 countries. Sean has presented at hospitals, universities, prisons, and to companies such as Nike, Whole Foods, Zappos, Walmart, and Sharp Healthcare. He's shared the stage with U.S. Presidents, billionaire business moguls, celebrities, and his Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Sean has appeared on everything from The Oprah Show to Jimmy Kimmel, in addition to online videos with tens of millions of views. The Biography Channel produced an hour-long feature on his life called, Three Foot Giant.    Book Sean Recommends: The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz   Links to Sean: https://seanstephenson.com/ Sean TEDx Talk on the Prison of Your Mind at https://youtu.be/VaRO5-V1uK0 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Seanclinch READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPTION of the EPISODE HERE (or download the pdf): **IMPORTANT: This podcast episode was transcribed by a 3rd party service and so errors can occur throughout the following pages: Mike:                       Welcome to the Respect podcast. I am your host Mike Domitrz from mikespeaks.com where we help organizations of all sizes, educational institutions and the US military, create a culture of respect. And respect is exactly what we discuss on this show. So let's get started. Mike:                       Alright I am super excited today because I get to have a friend of mine, a brother of mine, not by blood but certainly by all other methods. We've known each other for so long, we built the early years of our speaking businesses together. Up on the phone until 4 a.m. trying to make a difference in this world together, decades ago now. And so happy to have you on. So this is Dr. Sean Stevenson, a dear friend, brilliant. You may know him because you may have seen him on TV. That's correct. For instance, the biography channel produced an hour long feature on his life called the Three Foot Giant. Mike:                       But he's also worked with companies like Nike, Whole Foods, Zappos, Walmart, Sharp Healthcare. He's shared the stage with presidents, billionaires, business moguls, celebrities, and the Dalai Lama. It's just amazing, Sean's story. Now Sean, obviously I know your story inside and out but I'm going to let you tell the brief version of it, so it comes from your authentic voice. Give me a little background on how you got to where you are today, helping organizations and individuals really develop to where they want to be. Sean:                       Yeah, yeah. So, I'd say the most fascinating part that people get really zoned in on when they're learning about Sean Stevenson and what I have to offer is they're intrigued by the container I'm in. That's where it starts. Being born with a rare bone disorder called Osteogenesis Imperfecta, also known as brittle bones disorder. Doctors told my parents I'd be dead within the first 24 hours of my life and my joke on stage is 39 years later, all those doctors are dead and I'm still here. The only doctor remaining. And that I have a very clear message to rid this world of insecurity. I've had to face a lot of my own insecurities. Still do to this day and my mentors over the years have really groomed me. And I'm so grateful that they have pushed on me to look at what can I do with the time that I have to make the biggest splash on this planet while I'm still here? And hopefully create a body of work that will outlive beyond. Sean:                       And I met you, as you said, through that process of evolving. And Mike, I consider you my frientor. You're as much a friend as a mentor. And my goal here today is to share with the listener, the viewer to ... how I have built up an internal world that is a very peaceful space and one that I think then creates a space externally that can help that permeate into society. And by no means am I perfect. I've made a bunch of mistakes. I'm continuing to make them, but as I've learned, if you're willing to observe your own ego and really work on yourself, forgive what you've done and move forward, you can really create some cool things with the time you've got here. Mike:                       And you have. You already have, in addition to what you will do going forward. How do you think respect played a role both in your early years, maybe where it was a struggle to figure out what I'm going to do here, what my path is going to be, and then on each juncture along the way? Sean:                       If I could define respect for me, so that we're on similar footing on what I think is respect, I think respect is acknowledging value. And the moment somebody doesn't feel valued, their body doesn't feel valued, their intellect doesn't feel valued, their emotions, their spirit. When we feel devalued, we don't feel respected. And it works the same from within. So if you aren't acknowledging your own value, you aren't seeing what are you doing right and what are you proud of and what are you grateful for. When you're not willing to go inside and acknowledge your value and what you created, you won't be able to respect yourself. And therefore ... it's very hard to give something to somebody else that you won't give to yourself. Sean:                       You can do it. There's a lot of people that are nice to others that aren't nice to themselves, but it's a lot easier to have peace externally if you have peace internally. And I also kind of merge something else in with this respect conversation, which is trust. And I believe that those are two pillars of gaining somebody's rapport, gaining rapport with them. And if respect in my definition is acknowledging value, then trust is acknowledging agenda. That if you are clear on what your agenda is and you are actually truthful about your agenda and you're not saying one thing and doing another, if you are clear on your agendas, people can begin to trust you. Sean:                       And then if you make sure that their value is acknowledged, the second you know someone's agenda and it's accurate, and you know they respect you, you will allow them in to coach you, to lead you, to guide you. And the moment pain arises, the moment you pull back go "Ow, why'd you do that" is the moment that somebody feels that your agenda wasn't authentic or that you actually didn't really believe that they were valuable and you were just going through the motions to try to win them over. Sean:                       And what I've found is as long as we have that bond of this person sees my value and I know what their true agenda is, we can create such magic together. And you don't even need to ... this is what blows my mind. You don't even need to like somebody to trust them because you could see them and they could be clear about something that you're like "Nah, I don't want anything to do with them." But at least when you know what their agenda is, you know what you're dealing with. I always have a problem is when people express an agenda that's false. They tell a girl "Oh, I love you" when they really don't love them. "I care about your children's well-being" when they really just care about your money. Sean:                       And when we get those mixed agendas and then on top of it they don't really, truly see our value, they just came up with some pat response, it's really hard to build a bond. Mike:                       Yeah, let's dive into this because I can remember back in my early days and even a decade ago, when I would send out an email and you'd learn from people who say "Well, take the email strategy this way so they don't really know what you're seeking is this over here." And you think okay they know what they're doing, I'll take that formula and you suddenly notice "Wait, nobody's wanting to respond to my emails a year later." Because you created a ... you though you were doing the right thing because you were mission based, you were topic based, you believed in what you were doing, but it wasn't a clear agenda. Mike:                       You're better off to say if you're a salesperson "Yeah, this is what I'm selling. Yeah, because I believe in it, that's why." Sean:                       So, we sell a lot through our company and we hold live events. You're actually going to be speaking at one soon. By the way, I've been looking forward to that for four years. So, when we start that event, we come right out and say "Look, we're going to pack this weekend together with great people, great material, and then we're going to, at some point we're going to make an offer to you that may or may not be for you and it's only for those that want to continue the party with me. That want to continue to learn and be guided and have the kind of fun that we're going to have. If that's not of interest to you, just listen and see what you can learn about sales in general and do what you want. You are free to follow your intuition." Sean:                       And by setting that standard, being very clear, "I'm going to ask for fun tickets." Money, right? "I'm going to ask you for your fun tickets. In exchange I'm going to give you more fun and learning and is it okay if I do it in a way that you get a ton of value for what you already paid for and I'm just sharing with you an opportunity if you want to continue the party. Do I have your permission to make that offer to you?" Everybody said yes. Mike:                       Right. Exactly. Because you're being upfront. But it's amazing how when we're raised in this society we're taught "Don't do that. Don't show your cards." Sean:                       Because they think it's not going to work. Mike:                       Right. It's fear. Sean:                       Because they think it's not going to work. It's fear. It's also because let's be clear Mike, and I know you know this, but the listener needs to know this, and that is human beings can make a lot of impact financially and movement by screwing people over. And so if you are interpreting that "Oh, I need to screw people over to make movement in income." That's an incorrect statement. Because that's one way. It's not the way I like to roll. It's not the way you like to roll. It's not the way I think your listener would want to roll. But when you're naïve and you're just getting your start and you see somebody and you see that they're getting financial success or they're getting more exposure, you think "Oh, I guess I need to be a jerk." Sean:                       And it's not true that's ... there are many ways to get inside a house. You can either put dynamite on the side of the wall or you can use a key. They'll both get you in. They'll both gain you entrance. One's going to have a far less devastating impact. Mike:                       Yeah, that's a great analogy. I love that. And so, we were talking there about the fact of how we go about being upfront and being honest. What do you think is the number one fear people have in that moment? Because agenda is everything. We have agendas with our family. We have agendas with our work. Sean:                       The word scares people. Mike:                       Yes. Right, they didn't want to say "I have an agenda." They don't want ... "I don't have an agenda." That's the number one defense you'll hear. "I don't have an agenda." We all have agendas. Sean:                       What I think they mean is "I don't have a negative agenda." And so that- PART 1 OF 3 ENDS [00:11:04] Sean:                       ... mean is, I don't have a negative agenda. So that's why you need to be very clear about the difference between empowering and limiting, draining and recharging agendas. I think it's very healing, it's very healing to be clear on your agenda. I could take it into the realm of romance, for a second. Sean:                       On my first date with my wife, I said, "I would like to sleep with you someday." She was like, "What?" Like, what kind of guy says ... I didn't say it in a slick, gross, pushy way. I just said, someday I'd like to sleep with you. She said she trusted me in that minute. That was the moment she was like, "Oh, my God. This guy just made it very clear what his agenda was." Sean:                       It didn't meant that I wouldn't be her friend if we weren't gonna do ... There was no manipulation. She's like, "But that was the moment I knew that I could trust you because you told me an actual, authentic agenda. I'd never heard a man confidentially say that." I say that same thing when I get into a sales call. Sean:                       I say to somebody, "Listen, the opportunity I'm going to offer you is going to be 10 times what you're going to pay me, so I do not feel bad whatsoever in the exchange of receiving the energy that you worked hard to gather because I'm gonna 10X what you're paying for. So I want you to know, I'm going to get really excited by taking your money, because I'm exchanging something way greater for you." Sean:                       They're like, "Heck yeah. Let's do this." Now, not everybody says, yes I'll pay. But everybody says, let's have a dialogue. Mike:                       Right. Sean:                       I just want people to be excited to have the dialogue. Whether it's about romance, whether it's about income, whether it's about progress, movement, making an impact. Let's not be afraid to ask for what we want. If they say no, they say no. It's okay. Mike:                       How do think that plays ... What would be an example you could think of where that plays in family dynamics and putting the agenda out there? Sean:                       Making it very clear, the standards that you set for your children, as a parenting role. Like, I have a very clear vision of you graduating with a great GPA. I have a vision of you working really hard on your mind, your body, and your spirit. I'm not asking anything from you that I am not doing myself. Sean:                       You're going to see dad will be in the gym. You're going to see that dad works hard at Office. You see that dad works on his relationships with your mother. So, I'm not asking anything from you that I'm not willing to go first on, son / daughter / whomever. So being very clear on a vision that you hold. I think that is okay. Having a family, like, mission statement is setting an agenda. I think it's really good to also pull the agenda out of the kid. Sean:                       Like, so what do you want out of this life? What are some of your goals, sweetie? Or even in a marriage. Like, how can I best support you? So Mindy and I, you were at our wedding. You know that I married my wife because I couldn't afford her coaching rates and I wanted her to coach me. Because she is the wisest, most beautiful person I know. Sean:                       Mindy's goals are printed out next to my goals because I want to be able to see what's important to her every day. I want her to see what's important to me every day. I came to her multiple times and said, "Let me know what matters to you in this life. I need to know what matters." So I push on people to see, what do they want. So I think when it comes to a family dynamic, making no apologies for having awesome standards. Sean:                       But here's the difference, nobody is going to be perfect. There are going to be so many days you're not going to want to get back up. Mike:                       Yes. Kids can feel, if they don't understand this correctly, they can feel that that standard is an expectation of perfecting that. Sean:                       So that is an imperfection of the communication from the parent, then. Not an imperfection, but just a lack of clarity. So that's why it has to be ... It's the same thing as like ... I heard this great mom talking about raising child and he said, "When a child's learning to walk, funny coming from somebody who doesn't walk. But when a child is learning to walk, you have to encourage them a thousand or a million times if necessary." Sean:                       "So when they fall and they hit their head, they bump their butt. When they fall back, you pick them back up again. You're just encouraging them. You got it, you got it, good job, good job. You keep going." So you are both holding a standard of, you're going to walk, we're going to make this work. But also, everything that you do in the process of learning to walk, I'm going to support you, and love you, and be proud of you because you're in this process. Sean:                       So when the kid is like, "But you have this vision for me." Say, "Yeah, but not a day goes by when I'm not gonna celebrate you for just being who you are." I love the quote by Byron Katie, "There is nothing that you can say or do that can stop me from loving you." Mike:                       Absolutely truthful. Any parent- Sean:                       It's so- Mike:                       Any loving parent should get that message a hundred percent. I love that you say to them that, when you tried to walk, I lifted you back up. I supported you, I helped you do that. I'm going to do that with whatever battles, or mistakes, or failures that you have. I'm going to celebrate your success, but I'm also going to be there. You're going to fall. I fall, in some way or form, every week, every day. In some way or form, there's something that doesn't go right. Sean:                       Yeah and there's something that I also like to have as a caveat when I'm working with people is to say, and at some point when I'm coaching, or I'm there therapist, or their friend. "At some point in the process, sweetie, you're going to blame me for not being where you should be. I want you to know I'm going to love you even when you blame me. I'm just going to patiently wait until you realize that I'm not the reason why you don't have what you want." Mike:                       That's powerful. Sean:                       Yeah. I'm not the reason why you don't have what you want, even how you feel. I love my wife. I know you love Karen, right. Yet, we're not responsible for their feelings. Mike:                       Yeah. That one is huge, because a lot of people feel, "Wait a second. I'm married, it is part of my responsibility to be responsible for their joy and happiness." But more and more research has shown, that actually creates an unhealthy relationship. You should be able to be happy even on their worst day. Sean:                       Yep. Mike:                       They should be able to be happy on your worst day. You should obviously be able to be ... you should be able to be unhappy on their best day. Sean:                       Yeah. Mike:                       Right? Sean:                       Yeah. In our marriage, Mindy and I call it, you need to be a self-cleaning oven. Mike:                       Yeah, right. I love it. But it's hard to do, it's hard to do. Because when you're on a cloud nine- Sean:                       It's hard not to do. Mike:                       Yeah. Sean:                       It's hard. Mike:                       Yeah. I mean, you and I just had a conversation before we stared this. We're both on cloud right now because of things going on in our work and in our organizations. The day that cloud nine pops, right, this is going amazing. The last thing you want that moment is your partner to go, "Well, it's not going amazing for me, blah, blah, blah." We're like, not today. You shouldn't be saying that today. This is my day to be cloud nine. Sean:                       That's the way I used to be. Mike:                       Yeah, I've made the mistake, absolutely made the mistake and it's not fair. They are experiencing their life in their moment. Sean:                       The moment you ... Talking about respect, the moment you are disrespectful, which is acknowledging, the moment you are not acknowledging a human being ... It's not even valuing now, if you think about it. It's acknowledgement in general. It's the moment you don't acknowledge their feelings, acknowledge their ideas, acknowledge their statements, acknowledge their mannerisms. The moment you stop acknowledging them, you deal with problems. Mike:                       Yes. Sean:                       You deal with problems, because look, I could be on cloud nine and if Mindy's not, the most loving thing I could do is to listen to where she is, because this is what partners do. Sometimes, and we don't mean to do it, but sometimes it happens where we try to see if we can rock that person out of their good day because they're pissing us off. The most loving things I can say to her, and she said to me before, is, "Babe, I love you and I'm not gonna come down in my frequency because that's not gonna pull you up." Mike:                       Yeah, that's brilliant. Love it. It's so hard to do, right. You know, what's interesting is, when we're on cloud nine, it should be the easiest time to be compassionate because we have all this energy. But yet, we get caught up in let me be in my place. Right, let me be in my place. Don't you dare dent that. Sean:                       Yeah. That right there, though, is from the psychology of the outside world can control my feelings. Mike:                       Right. Sean:                       Because if you don't ... Like, I don't buy that anymore. I used to, but I don't buy it whatsoever. So the moment I think that somebody can take me out of my bubble, I'm delusional. Mike:                       So can you go a little deeper there so everybody can understand, because this is key of respecting yourself. Sean:                       Yeah, yeah. The moment I think that you can shift my frequency, is the moment that I become a slave to you. The moment I go on a roller coaster that is where you can energetically manipulate me. It's the moment that I'm delusional. You are not responsible for how I feel. You can neither make me have a good day or make have a bad day. Sean:                       You can influence me, but you can't change me. I have to do the lifting. Nobody can do Sean's pushups, energetically, or metaphorically, or physically. I have to do them. So if I'm on cloud nine and I come along and Mindy is angry, or overwhelmed, or upset and I'm like, "Damn it, why can't she be on the same plane as me." I am being delusional because she doesn't need to do anything to support my bubble. That's my responsibility. Sean:                       Now, I might say to her, "Babe, if you would like me around this evening, I'm gonna need you to say some nicer things about me. If you do not want to say nicer things about me, I'm okay with going out and doing some things in the office or whatever. Just text me when you feel-" PART 2 OF 3 ENDS [00:22:04] Sean:                       -some things in the office, or whatever, and I'll ... Just text me when you feel that the storm has rolled out. And- Mike:                       Right, because this is really important for abusive situations. You don't want the listening right now thinking, "Oh, I have to tolerate. They're in their space; I'm in my space. So I have to tolerate that because I'm responsible for my happiness. They're responsible ..." So, how do you help people understand there's a difference here in what we're describing? Sean:                       Light is both a wave and a particle, okay? Light, when you look at light, it's got waves and it's also got little particles? So, is light one or the other? No. It's both, right? So, you need to be able to respect your own boundaries and also maintain a level of a standard for how you want to be treated. So, no one is responsible for how you feel, but you are responsible for respecting your boundaries, and saying to somebody, "If you're gonna speak to me that way, or if you're gonna ever put your hands on me, or if ever you're going to try to do that demeaning behavior, I'm out. I maybe be either out for the night, out for the month, or out for my life." But you gotta determine. Sean:                       I look at it whether it's in a relationship that can become abusive, because I've been in abusive relationships where I was mentally, emotionally abused. I can tell you, it came because I only had half the equation. I thought I was only a wave, or only a particle. I thought, "Well, I need to be responsible for my own feelings. So, they can keep beating on me emotionally, energetically." Then, I woke up and went, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's only half the equation. The other half is I gotta draw a line in the sand and say, 'This is the level of respect that I request out of human beings that are in my presence.'" I tell people constantly, you don't have to worry about knowing where you stand with Sean. I'll let you know. Mike:                       Right. So, let's say the person who is an abusive situation, since we went there, is in an abusive situation and has serious, physical fear. There is actual danger to their life. So there is the separation of, "Geez, if I say those words, they could kill me in the next hour." And there is it, that at least I know those words to be true to me, that maybe I am not at a place that I can verbally say those words right now. But I know them to be true to me. Is that the key there. Sean:                       Yeah, and it's deeper than that, which is, it starts within you first. Then, you have to- Mike:                       Yeah, it's starting to know that I deserve to be treated a certain way. We're not saying any blame at all on the abuse. You're responding to, it starts with me knowing I deserve to be respected. Sean:                       We're talking about your own worth and value. Mike:                       Right. Correct. Sean:                       That starts within you, and then, if you are in that toxic place, let's talk about that. I've been in toxic places. Sometimes it takes a while to plan your escape and you need to be loving toward yourself in the process. It's kind of like the movie Shawshank Redemption. It took him a long time to chip away at that wall, and let the little rocks out in the yard. Sometimes, that's what people need to do. Now, sometimes it's so dangerous that they've gotta figure out a way to get out there faster. Sean:                       Neither you nor I are in any of these people's shoes. So, we're not saying we have 100% understanding of them. However, we have 100% appreciation and acknowledgement of the pain they're in. I personally believe that negativity ... All violence is, is negativity that's just not been dealt with over time, and then it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. Usually nobody starts out violent. It's built up over time. Sean:                       Now, when you meet somebody who is verbally, physically, emotionally, sexually, intellectually, whatever it may be, manipulative and abusive, that was a stew that they've been cooking in for a long time. That doesn't make it right, but what I have learned in working with these people as a therapist is, some of the best things that you can do is know that you need to keep yourself away from toxic people, toxic energy, toxic places. Sometimes, it may take you time to plan your escape, but you better have a plan. You better know how you're going to get out of something that is dangerous, either physically, emotionally, any of those other levels. I will tell you, it takes courage to leave sometime that you fear. Mike:                       Absolutely. Sean:                       You fear for your life. It's not even just ... The fear for your life is something that's so clear for people to see, but what about people who are being abused spiritually, energetically, emotionally? They don't leave scars. Mean words don't leave physical scars on the body for the police to see, and so that's sometimes just as hard, if not harder, to be like, "Wow, I need to get away. This is killing my soul. This is draining me." Sean:                       What it really comes down to, for me and what I've experienced, speaking only for myself, is "What will you tolerate?" What are you ... And not tolerate, what do you want from life? What do you want from other people, in terms of, what standard are you willing to hold. Mindy would've never entered into a relationship with somebody that was physically abusive because the moment somebody was even slightly degraded to my wife, she would have been gone in a conversation. She would've never given them a second date, never respond to their calls, because she has such a high threshold bar of how she will be treated. Mike:                       Right. Now, I wanna be clear. If someone's listening, we're not implying because you don't, you weren't taught that far, that it's your fault, like Mindy did it right, and you did it wrong. It's a matter of, "No, can I shift now? Can I shift the paradigm to know I always deserve to be treated with that dignity? With that respect? I can choose it. This roller coaster doesn't have to exist forever. There's a point I can choose to get off, that's the planned escape. There's a point because I deserve to be treated." So, how do you help somebody, and we're getting towards the end here, I know it's tough to do quickly. In 30 seconds to one minute, what's a gift you can give someone to help them realize their value? Sean:                       Yeah, it's what Mindy had to do and anybody would have to do to get to that level. You have to have impeccable self-care. If you take care of your mind, your body, your spirit. You are exercising to pull out the toxins, you are journaling to acknowledge your own feelings, you're meditating and praying, you're surrounding yourself with empowering people, you're reading empowering messages, you're listening to programs like this, you are continuing to put yourself in empowering environments. It makes it easier and easier to head in the right direction because if you wanna respect yourself, then you have to take care of yourself. You wouldn't trust a nurse or a doctor that didn't take good care of you. You have to be the great person first, to take care of yourself first, to get the strength to know what you deserve. Mike:                       Love it. Thank you, Sean. Now, for all of our listeners, your book is Get Off Your But. It's an awesome book. And people, it's not just talking about the physical butt, it's talking about the "But, I would, but..." and it's sensational- Sean:                       B-U-T, yeah. Mike:                       Yeah. It's sensational. In addition to your own book, what's a book that you think is a game changer for people's lives, that had a major impression, impact on your life? Sean:                       I would say The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. Mike:                       Awesome book. Yeah, yeah. So, we'll have that link for everyone listening. Sean, you know how much I love you. Thank you so much for sharing with everybody on today's show. Sean:                       Absolutely. Mike:                       Thank you for joining us for this episode of The Respect Podcast, which was sponsored by the Date Safe Project at datasafeproject.org. And remember, you can always find me at mikespeaks.com. PART 3 OF 3 ENDS [00:30:20]

Welcome back! Six whole days since our last episode.  That makes it almost a whole week.  That was a close one! *Sigh of Relief*. Victor finally has his car back? What was the total damage? Rix takes a few guesses.  Over or under $1200? Remember that PSA announcement from the 1970s to "Keep America Beautiful"? No? It's the the one with the Native American shedding a single tear.  Yes, that one.  Well, we talk a little bit about recycling, carbon footprints and what we currently do (and don't do) that contribue toward the downfall of humanity and it's lack of respect toward Mother Nature. WE'VE SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST!  What is it?  BOOBS. What? Like when you were in 4th grade and entered 5-8-0-0-8 on the calculator and then flipped it upside down.  Rix knew of somebody that was written up for sexual harassment because he stared at a woman's cleavage for one too many milliseconds (be careful guys). Another contrasting opinion between Rix and Victor is sure to set your socks on fire and make you rethink our cultural norms. Get on the bus and strap yourself in.  Here we gooooooo...*hands in the air, sharp descend into oblivion, stomach drops*  (ENJOY!!!!!)

Starting the career search process can be intimidating, especially since the first thing any job search website asks for is WHAT? Like you’re supposed to know what job title you want in the first place? When you don’t know what career path you want to take, the process is not only hard to get started, it can be paralyzing when you don’t have all of the answers. Just thinking about a career change causes stress, anxiety, frustration, and fear to rise inside many people because the majority feel stuck and unsure of what to do first. But, there’s a way to get unstuck. You have to be willing to change your mindset and approach your career change differently than you have before. Our guest, Kathryn Minshew, CEO and Co-Founder of The Muse, a career discovery platform that “puts the human at the center” and helps over 50+ million people a year in their career search, has outlined tips on how to get unstuck and get moving on your career journey. In the episode, Kathryn takes us through her career and discusses tips on how to get unstuck of your current career situation because it wasn't too long ago that she was in that same exact place. Listen in to find out how to get unstuck and find your new career path.

On this week’s episode, Brian and Lauren discuss their favorite moments and guests that have appeared on the show during Season One of StudioPress FM. In this 25-minute episode Brian Gardner and Lauren Mancke discuss: Their favorite episodes of Season One The most downloaded shows Most memorable guests and topics What they’re looking forward to in Season Two Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Brian on Twitter Follow Lauren on Twitter The Transcript The Season One Recap of StudioPress FM Voiceover: Rainmaker FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I discuss our favorite moments of Season One of StudioPress FM. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress. Today, on this very last season episode for Season One, I am joined, as usual, with Lauren Mancke, vice president of StudioPress, mom of one, soon to be three. Looking forward to just wrapping up Season One. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Thank you for joining us again this week. We’re closing out Season One and we will be doing this week a little different. We have no guests. It’s just Brian and I talking about some of our favorite moments on the podcast so far. Brian Gardner: Typically we like to go somewhat scripted, where we prepare questions for those that we’re talking to, but Lauren and I, this morning, we’re going to just completely wing it. We have just some general idea of what we want to talk about for this closing episode. It won’t be long. It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 episodes already. I know that for you it might feel a little bit longer because you started editing the first handful of them or first half of them and then we turned that over because you have more important things to be doing, but can you believe, 16 already? Lauren Mancke: No. It’s really flown by. Brian Gardner: I remember when I did No Sidebar, it seemed like it took just forever to edit the shows. I wasn’t structured when I set it up and it felt like it was hard to find ideas and guests and things like that. I’m almost forcing us to close the season down because we have a lot of stuff we have to do before the end of the year, but I don’t want to, because I’ve been having so much fun. It’s been great talking to the members of the community. When I sit down and try to think of who do we want to talk to next or what series we want to have, I’m loaded with all of this, these ideas, these people. There are so many people. I want to do two episodes a week, which of course isn’t realistic. There’s just so many people to talk to and so many topics to cover. For me, it’s been fun so far. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’ve already got some great people lined up for next season, so it’ll be good to take a little bit of time off and get that all organized and lined up for next January. Brian Gardner: I almost feel like we have a legit show here, where we actually follow a format and we have a good audience. We get at least a few thousand listens on every show, if not more. I don’t know. I feel really good about what we’ve done. It’s our first full-time gig together, doing the podcast thing. What do you think so far? Have you felt like this has been a successful journey? Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I’ve really been happy with who we’ve gotten a chance to talk to and hearing everyone’s story. It’s really cool how so many people have that same sort of, they were doing something else and they found WordPress and then they built this whole thing. It’s great to hear everyone’s different take on that journey. Brian Gardner: The good thing about WordPress and the cool fascinating thing I find is that even though we have generally that same story, we all come from just much different backgrounds. We also are in the middle of just different types of expertise, where some people come in as designers, some people come in as marketers, some people come in with a technical or programming background. You’ve got a designer who was sitting at a bored day job and then you’ve got like a technical guy who was working for the man and wanted to do his own thing. There are so many different levels of skillset and just expertise that’s being represented within the WordPress space. It’s fun to watch just how many people from how many different avenues of life are coming together in this whole open source project. Lauren Mancke: For sure. So many different types of personalities, too. It’s not just the same type of person. You’d think all these WordPress people would be maybe slightly nerdy or whatever, but it’s not true at all. It’s so many different types of people, and they’re all really cool. Brian Gardner: Yeah. Even within the short spurt we did here at the end with the designers, even the designers that we talked to like Bill Kenney at Focus Lab and Jason Schullermega and Megan Gray, even within just one segment of that audience, you’ve got people with different personalities and flavors. Bill works and owns a creative agency and Megan’s by herself and Jason’s doing a startup. Yes, there’s a lot of resonating stories, but even within a certain sub-niche of the WordPress designer ecosystem, there’s just so many types of different people represented. That wasn’t boring because everyone brought something unique to the conversation. Hopefully, designers and people who don’t design and do other things even were able to pick up something from that as well. Lauren Mancke: In WordPress, I think, when you mentioned the guests specifically, it makes me remember all the different things that make each one of those people unique. You got Bill, who is very, very good at being efficient and I love that about him. He has so many ways of doing that and that’s his focus. He can tell other people about that. Then you got Jason, who is; he’s just a family guy. That’s his passion and you can see that with everything he does and everything he talks about. Those are just fun and unique things that everyone who works on WordPress, they can be their own person and tailor their job and their company around those skillsets that they have. The Most Downloaded Shows Brian Gardner: You know one of the things I think for me that I found for me interesting as a metrics guy and somebody who looks into that kind of thing? There were certain episodes that I thought would have been more popular than others and vice versa. When I would go in and see the analytics and the number of downloads and so on for each one, there were a few that surprised me where I was like, “Okay, this one’s probably not going to do as well, maybe because of the audience. It isn’t such a widespread thing or an ‘interesting topic.'” Then those were the ones that got the most distribution and those that were shared the most. It’s funny how you can draw up a game plan. Nine times out of 10, things go the way you want, but then once in a while you get that one where I’m like, “Wow. That was the one I almost didn’t even suggest doing and it was the one that was in the top three or whatnot of most listened to shows.” That just goes to show, you never know. Lauren Mancke: What were some of the more popular shows that we had this season? Brian Gardner: You’re going to make me look that up, so I’m going to make you talk while I go look that up. Lauren Mancke: You know, we can edit this, so we can break for a second. Brian Gardner: I know. All right, so I was able to pull up the analytics. Sadly enough, three of the bottom four episodes were the first three, which were my story, your story, and the redesign of StudioPress. I don’t know if that’s an indicator of the fact that it was new, and not as many ears were on the show, or if people were just don’t find that interesting. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Let’s go with the first. Brian Gardner: I’m going to go with that one. Top to bottom, I’m just going to spitball these out here quickly. A Beginner’s Guide to SEO That Works is the number one show. We did that with Rebecca Gill at Web Savvy. I had a feeling that that one … SEO is a topic that a lot of people want to talk about. Lauren Mancke: I thought that was a very informative episode. Lots of good nuggets on that one. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I actually took the show notes to that and the transcript, and wrote up my own little iteration of that. I think I talked about this back then, that I was going to try that a couple of times with these and try to use that from a curation standpoint, a re-purposing content, and so I pulled some of the best things that Rebecca had to say and wrote a blog post about that, and tried to rank for, I think it was a Beginner’s Guide to SEO or something like that. I think last time I checked, that was on page three of Google, so it kind of sort of working. Yeah, there was definitely a lot of stuff that came out of that that was good. Number two, and this does not surprise me just because I know that Matt and some of the folks at Automattic were helping with the distribution of this, and that was the show we did, How and Why It’s Okay to Make Money with WordPress, which of course we just talked about just all of the different types of people within WordPress, so that makes sense because that would appeal to everybody. The next one was How to Scale a Freelance Business. That, I believe, was the one that we did with Bill Erickson. Then How to Build an Online Education Business, now this is the one I was referring to earlier that I didn’t think was going to strike a chord as much, just because it seemed a little bit more of kind of a sliver segment specific to doing an online education because that’s not what we’re all in the deal here for. We did that with Tonya Mork. That was a good one. Great information. She’s got a ton of knowledge. She’s worked 20, 30 years in her field, so she has a ton of expertise that she brings to the table, so that was one a little bit surprising. The How to Sustain a Profitable Creative Agency came next. The Importance of Entrepreneurial Mental Health with Cory Miller. That was probably my favorite episode that we recorded just because it kind of dove a little bit more into just the personal touchy-feely stuff, which I’m a huge fan of. Again, a lot of these were within 1% to 2% of downloads, so it’s not like certain episodes crushed other episodes, but that’s a quick recap. Then of course you and I, and our whole stories, are down there at the bottom, pulling up the caboose. Lauren Mancke: Nobody cares about us. I’m just kidding. Brian Gardner: Which is why we have guests on the show. Lauren Mancke: Yes, exactly. Brian Gardner: Because they’re the ones people will want to listen to. Their Favorite Episodes of Season One Lauren Mancke: I think the Cory Miller episode was very good as far as the content. I think all three of us were tearing up on that one. Brian Gardner: Yeah. I wish I would have seen Cory’s talk at WordCamp Denver just because, and I’m sure it’s on WordPress.tv, but that is something that I think without a doubt every single person who listens to the show struggles with in some regard. Some better than others. I’ve had my seasons of even within the last six years, after we merged the company, of really struggling, especially early on. This was before we brought in the mid-level management and brought in people like you, who came in and really helped do a lot of the stuff that I do. I remember, I think it was within the first year, we came together as partners in Boulder. I had a meltdown and I was like, “Look, guys, I’m just completely fried.” I remember Brian Clark said to me … He says, “Just take the next month and a half off. Do nothing.” I was like, “What?” Like, “No, I m a creative. I can’t do nothing.” It’s one of those things where it creeps in and life gets in the way and clients get in the way. Hard work and stuff like that do pay off, but the whole entrepreneurial mental health thing is something that I think far too many people don’t discuss or don’t have an … It doesn’t even have to be talked about across the internet via a podcast. You got to have a couple of people in your life who even if it’s a Skype call … I know Cory a lot of times has tweeted things out saying, “Hey, I just got a message from a friend and it meant the world.” Just things off radar, offline. Just check in with the people, whether they are people who you work for, who work for you, or people like Jason, who are just peers within the community. That stuff matters, so I’m glad we had a chance to talk about that. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think when you’re working on the internet, it’s easy to get lost in that. You’re connected to everyone, but you’re also connected to no one if you’re just in your own little bubble and you’re not really able to sit down and talk with people face to face or, like you said, even on a Skype chat or something like that, so it’s an important issue. Brian Gardner: All right, so let’s talk about some of the other episodes. I’m just going to look down and just see. I know we talked, as I mentioned earlier, Brian and Jennifer, husband and wife team. They own their own agency and we talked a lot about … You weren’t on that episode because I think you had mom duty that day, but that was a good episode because it talked about work and family balance, which is in a way relevant to the mental health thing, where as creatives and those who do stuff online, we have access to the internet 24/7, and so it is difficult at times to balance work and home life. I struggle with it sometimes. There are times where I literally have to just shut my laptop and tell Shelly, “Do not let me open this because I need to go play catch with Zach because that’s important, because I don’t want him growing up thinking the computer is more important than him and so on.” For you even, you’re a mom and have two more on the way, and all of that. I mean, what’s that going to look like for you next year? Lauren Mancke: Well, I thought that episode would have been good for me to be on because I ran a creative agency with my husband, so I know a little bit about that. I even notice my son isn’t even two and a half yet and he’s already … He’ll come in and sit at my desk and say, “I’m working. I got to get on a conference call.” He picks up. He puts on the headphones and he pretends that he’s on a conference call. I’m like, “I don’t know that I want that to be my legacy with my son.” So spending more time with family is definitely a priority. Brian Gardner: Yeah. Going back to Jason and the episode that we had with Tim, that was the one thing, over the last few years, of things that I see online that I get envious about, is the ability that some people have to do that and make that so important. By all means, I don’t shun my family. Shelly is at home all day long, so we get to talk to each other. I’m home at 3:00 o’clock when Zach comes home, so we do have our time together, but Jason, of anybody I’ve ever seen online, puts more importance on his family, his wife, especially his daughter. I can’t imagine the bond that they’re going to have throughout their life because of how much importance he placed on the balance of work versus time with them. It’s fun and sometimes, like I said, I get envious of the fact that people are able to do that, maybe not so much as I wish I could, but yeah, it’s important too to balance that out because relationships, marriages, mother-daughters, father-sons, those types of things, in my eyes, big picture, matter way more than what we do for our jobs. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that I think just everybody needs to hear, that it is important to balance work and life. All right, so another one of my favorite episodes was when we had Shay Bocks on and talked about food blogging. That also is something that I thought would have been a little bit more less heard because of the fact that it was very niche-specific. I think it resonated with a lot of people because people took things that she said out of the food blogging discussion we were having and those are the things that could have been easily applied to any other niches. So I think even thought it was a food blogging episode, a lot of the stuff that Shay talked about, things that we discussed, could have certainly been used across the sphere. Food blogging to me is interesting because it’s one of the … It sort of came out after real estate, which is sort of not really been that big a thing anymore, but the food blogging industry has exploded. You know, Will, your husband likes to cook and you like to take photography and you’ve done a couple of food-oriented themes on StudioPress. I can’t believe how popular that still is and how many people still … Foodie has regained number one status on theme sales on StudioPress. With the exception of two, maybe three months over the last almost two and a half years now, it’s been number one every single month. Shay and I talk probably at least once a month just about stuff in general and she’s always like, “I’m waiting for the ship to sink.” I’m like, “Don’t.” I’m like, “Embrace the fact that …” Shay has done something of a big lesson for all of us. If you do something that works, instead of trying to replicate that somewhere else, really hone in on that. She’s really crafted her business around the idea of food blogging and she re-branded her company, called Feast Design Company. How more relevant of a brand name than to work within the niche? That is also something I think has been fascinating for me to see, is people within our community really identify where they belong and then really attack at that point. Lauren Mancke: Shay is also just a great person. It’s really great to see her succeed and all of her success. She’s just a wonderful, wonderful human being. I think too, also, food blogging, people … We’ve talked about focus on family. I mean, that’s a trend. People are spending more time, I think, focused on their family and eating and community and all of that, so I don’t see food blogging going anywhere any time soon. Brian Gardner: Yeah. People always eat. There’s always going to be the internet and the will to make money. For people, not so much Shay, but the people who use Shay’s themes per se, that’s the dream, right? Living the dream, we talked about that with Jason, is to take your passion, something … In this case it’s something that you do at home, so you could literally be hanging out with your kids and working at the same time, and even having them help. I recently redesigned a website called Simple as That Blog with Rebecca Cooper. She’s got to a really, really big website. She’s got four kids and she’s a great photographer. She does a lot of her DIY craft and recipe type of things with her kids. She uses them as props. They get dressed up and they do things. For her, it’s a really creative way to do that work-family balance thing because she includes her kids with her work, and so therefore there’s no … I don’t know. Just disconnect between the two, and so I think food blogging is just another example of where that can be done. All right, so the episode that I actually wasn’t sure we would be able to do, mainly because I know Matt sometimes is a little bit slow on email as he should be … I’m sure he gets thousands of emails a day and from probably people way more important than me. I reached out to Matt Mullenweg to talk about WordPress and making money. He wrote back within like a day or two. I was very surprised and very pleased that he was very open to talking to us about that. It was a great episode. We talked almost an hour, I think, on that one, and probably could have kept going. The premise of that show was very obviously how to make and that it’s okay to make money with WordPress open source community. We did a couple of episodes on that. Also I remember we did one with Carrie Dils. With Matt, we talked about just the WordPress ecosystem and different ways that we can make money with WordPress, that it’s okay to make money with WordPress, and the fact that he even endorses the fact that it’s okay to make money with WordPress because I think at this point, the community as a whole has identified that WordPress is a business in a sense. Even though there’s a free version of it, even though it’s an open source piece of software, there’s a full blown ecosystem, as we talked at the beginning of the show, just all the different ways that people use WordPress and can offer WordPress as a business, either as a service or like what we do with commoditized type things with selling themes and plug-ins and so on. It was fun to talk to the guy, right? The guy who founded all of it. I was a little bit star struck, as I always am every time I talk to him. It’s a little bit difficult to … I don’t know. Feel like we were pulling our weight in that conversation, but what did you think about that show? Lauren Mancke: Oh, we’re totally BFFs now, so it’s all good. Brian Gardner: You guys on HipChat or Slack together? You just ping each other with ideas and whatnot. I like to think of Matt as like the mini Richard Branson because he’s always … At this point in his life, he’s probably got tons of money and he’s out travelling around. He’s out in Bali or in Antarctica. I forget that he’s probably 30-something now or late 20s or whatever, but to me he’s always going to be a kid. I don’t know. The whole thing is a great story. Just imagine how many people, their lives have been changed by what he’s done. Mine, yours, everybody who listens to the show, everyone in our company. It’s kind of crazy if you think about that. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think he’s around my age, but yeah, he’s definitely prolific and I too am a little envious of his schedule. He gets to go everywhere and do all sorts of fun, cool things. Brian Gardner: Again, I think that goes back to the point of, if you have some crazy idea, sometimes you just need to execute it. Like, what if he never decided to fork b2 back in the day. We all have that question in our life. What if I never left my job or what if I never asked people if they would buy a WordPress theme or any of that stuff? I think the moral of the story here is that sometimes you do need to take that risk and just do that thing, as George Costanza did in Seinfeld back in the day. Do the opposite, right? Because if what you’re doing isn’t working, maybe the opposite will. That was a great episode, by the way. Lauren Mancke: I always get tuna on toast. Brian Gardner: Ah, there you go. Seinfeld, one of the best shows ever, if not the best show ever. What They re Looking Forward to in Season Two Brian Gardner: All right, so moving forward, we are going to take break here. We ran that through our guy in charge of the podcast network and said, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of things we’re working on.” We will not be discussing any of those here on the show because they’re just fun, internal projects that will make a big splash and a big difference next year to everyone listening to the show. What are the types of things you want to do as we probably open back up in January of next year, after the holidays? Who are the types of people we want to have? Anything specific you want to see happen? Lauren Mancke: Well, I know we have Dan from Dribbble lined up, Dan Cederholm. I’m excited about that one. He actually came up to the Northbound office a few years ago when ConvergeSE was going on. That’s a conference in Columbia, where I live. It was great to meet him and Rich, and spend time with him. It’ll be fun to have him on the show. Brian Gardner: Now one of the things I want to do and throw out there is, we would love to hear from you guys, those who are listening to the show. At the bottom of the show notes, we’re going to put mine and Lauren’s Twitter handle. If you have any ideas or suggestions or people, if you want to nominate people, we are definitely open to hearing from the community. I know you and I are both creatives and designers, and so we err a little bit more on the side of that, in terms of show. I do want to make sure that we don’t forget our nerdy friends who are developers and programmers, and bring those types of people in as well, and talk to them because I’m sure they have a ton of wisdom to share with our audience. I’m trying to think of who else I would want to have on the show. I know that we have a little Google doc where we keep track. I want to get outside a little bit of just the general WordPress space and just find some really big entrepreneur type people who happen to use WordPress, but it’s not their business. I know people like Paul Jarvis is a guy that I want to bring on the show, possibly Jeff Goins. From my perspective, those are a few of the people that I plan to hit up. Maybe we’ll see if we can get a guy like Chris Brogan on just to talk some sense into us all and whatnot. We’ll have to think about that over the coming weeks, who else we want to have on the show. Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’d love to hear from the audience, of suggestions. That’s a great idea, Brian. Brian Gardner: Hit us up on Twitter, @laurenmancke or @bgardner. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Even if you don’t even have a suggestion for the show and just want to say, “Hi. Thanks for putting together the podcast,” we would love to hear some of that feedback as well, good or bad. Let us know. We will wrap the show up. This is our 17th episode, I believe, which still amazes me. Sorry for those who really like the show and want to hear next week. We won’t be here because that will be Thanksgiving week. Actually, you know what? This will air the day before Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, people will be out shopping. No one wants to listen to us anyway. December is really a time for that family and stuff that we talked about. We will be back in January of 2017 with Season Two of StudioPress FM. On behalf of Lauren and I and all of us within our company who touch the StudioPress brand, we thank you very much for your support as customers, as listeners and those who spread the gospel of StudioPress. Thank you very much and we will talk to you next year.