Podcasts about whenever i've

What's the best way to develop a content strategy that reflects the reality of today's buyer journey? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Ashley Faus, who is the Content Strategy Lead for Software Teams at Atlassian, shares why she thinks a playground provides a better analogy than a funnel for marketers looking to develop their content strategy, and how to use the concept of a content playground to provide your customers and prospects with a better buying experience. Highlights from my conversation with Ashley include: Many marketers use the concepts of the linear funnel and the looping decision journey to develop their content strategies, but Ashley says that those don't reflect the reality of how people buy. Much like in a playground, where there isn't a singular goal (get to the top of the jungle gym!), your prospects aren't always ready to buy and may have other interests. For this reason, a playground offers a better analogy. Rather than forcing prospects to follow a specific journey that we as marketers have determined is ideal, Ashley recommends focusing on creating strong content depth that allows your prospects to follow their own journey, wherever it takes them. For smaller teams that are just getting started, Ashley recommends identifying your "hedgehog principle" - that one thing you do better than everyone else - and creating a very in-depth piece of content on that. Then, you can use that content to repurpose into a variety of assets that can be used on social media, for your trade shows, in the sales process, etc. The key is to find a topic that is substantive enough to support the development of this amount of content.  In terms of how this content gets presented on your website, Ashley recommends ungating it, and then being very explicit with your CTAs so that your website visitors know exactly what they will get if they click a button.  She also suggests adding a related content module on your site to encourage visitors to browse through your content. The best way to begin measuring the impact of your strategy is to use simple tools like Google Analytics in combination with UTMs. As you grow, you can use more sophisticated marketing automation software like HubSpot or Marketo. Resources from this episode: Visit the Atlassian website Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn Follow Ashley on Twitter Check out Atlassian's Team Playbook and Agile Microsite Listen to the podcast to learn why envisioning your buyer's journey -- and their interactions with your content -- as a playground is a more effective way to approach the development of a content strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Ashley FOSS, who is the content strategy lead for software teams at Atlassian. Welcome Ashley. Ashley Faus (Guest): Nice to be here. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to have you here. Ashley and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: And, and for those who are listening, you can't see it. But Ashley has an awesome virtual Zoom background of the golden gate bridge. That's one of my favorite things about the pandemic is that it is revealing people's personalities through the Zoom backgrounds that they choose.  Ashley: It's been interesting. I actually think didn't have the latest version of Zoom. I got scared that if I upgraded and something went wrong, I wouldn't have access to it. So for a long time I was the lame person that didn't have a background and it was just my kitchen the whole time. So yes, I finally upgraded. Tell any of the listeners that are hesitant, you can upgrade. And it's not going to ruin your computer. And you, too, can have a nice virtual backgrounds. Kathleen: Oh yeah. For our all hands meetings at my office. We've been having so much fun with just seeing the backgrounds that people come to these meetings with. It's, it's awesome. It reveals so much about their personalities. About Ashley and Atlassian Kathleen: But so we have so much to talk about. And the first thing I want to talk about is really have you explain to my listeners what Atlassian is, and then also your background and what led you to your current role as Content Strategy Lead. Ashley: Sure. So Atlassian is a collaboration software maker. A lot of people are very familiar with JIRA, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Status Page. We have a number of different products that people use all the time. JIRA especially is a staple for software teams. So I actually started at Atlassian two and a half years ago and I moved among a couple of different teams. My background is primarily marketing, but I actually started on the corporate communications team, moved over to editorial, doing a mix of content strategy, social media, thought leadership for the corporate side, and then just recently made the move over onto software teams. One thing that's kind of interesting and great is having that diverse background has given me that ability to move across different areas and go where my skills can be most useful. So I'm excited to dive in. I'm fairly new to the role, so it's been an interesting transition to try to onboard from home and then also start to get up to speed both from a content standpoint and a strategy standpoint, and then also from a tactical standpoint of where are all the different boards, where's the JIRA tickets? Like what's the process, what are the meetings? So, um, it's been fun. It's been fun. Kathleen: I will definitely say as far as Atlassian is concerned, I've been a user of so many of the company's products. I've used Confluence and JIRA. I'm currently using Trello. I know our dev team uses a number of products as well. It's a great company and a great suite of products, especially for anybody who's practicing agile, which I have done a few times. And so that was another reason I was excited to talk to you. But one of the things I think is really interesting is, you know, you mentioned you're relatively new in the role and we were just talking before we came on and you were explaining how your fiscal year, it's going to change over pretty soon. And so not only are you relatively new in the role, but you're being thrust into the situation of having to plan and strategize for a whole new year in the middle of the pandemic, no less all of these things happening at once. Your current focus is on content and I was really fascinated by how you think about content and content strategy planning and this concept of the content playground. So could you talk a little bit about that and what do you mean when you say a content playground?  What is a content playground? Ashley: I started thinking about it because I needed a new metaphor. Everybody that I talked to was talking about primarily the linear funnel. And you know, you've got your three phases with your editorial calendar and you say, "I need three content, three pieces of content per phase. I'm going to do one per month. Cool. Now I have nine months of content strategy, if my math works out". Most of your listeners are probably sitting there going, "That's not how you do content strategy. You can't just say one piece of content per phase and then call it". Kathleen: Wouldn't it be nice if you could though?  Ashley: You bought a calendar, write three articles and you're done. Then, you know, I know a lot of people have moved on to the looping decision journey where you basically add a fourth phase in there. And you're kind of almost recycling these people, but now there's a cross sell or upsell, but somehow you're dumping them back into that awareness phase from the linear funnel. If you look at the Google results for both the linear funnel and the looping decision funnel, it's kind of terrifying. It's very confusing. It basically just shows that we all agree that humans don't work this way. Nobody just goes politely down our little funnel. The 10-3-1 conversion was kind of the standard for a long time. You get 10 people in awareness. A certain amount of drops. So you get three into consideration to be able to get one to that kind of purchase decision. I was really wrestling with this because I was like, how do you create content in a way that allows people to do what they actually do, which is enter and exit and go sideways and all of that? So I had originally come up with this idea of a jungle gym. But there's two problems with that -- mainly that there's only one objective. It's either to get to the top or, if you're my three year old nephew, it's to go across without touching the lava below that. It's still me as a marketer forcing you into what I want you to do and it's taking all these touch points and saying, what's the fewest number of touch points that I can use to get you to a purchase? And yes, ultimately we need to sell products. Ultimately we have to make money as businesses, but it feels bad to everybody to just constantly be like, are you just trying to sell me something? Like what's the catch? I don't really trust you because I know you're trying to sell me. So if you look at an actual playground though, what's the point of the playground? Is the person who's sitting on the bench just enjoying the sunshine? Are they enjoying the playground the wrong way? No, actually perfectly acceptable. Sit on the bench. Again, you know, thinking about what the right way is to play on the playground for the adults and the playground designers, going down the slide is the right way. Three year old nephew, every time wants to go up the slide. If you translate that to content strategy, I recently had an example of this where in the traditional funnel, pricing is considered a very bottom of funnel action. If I'm asking you about price, man, I'm ready to buy. Well, in my case, I needed to go ask for budget before I could even do the RFP and I had no idea what that budget should be for. It was going to be a SaaS product. So understanding, you know, the subscription, SLA, the licensing tiers, all of that. And so I started reaching out to some vendors in the space asking them for just ballpark pricing so I could go get budget. And so many of them were like, well, allow me to send you a white paper about why this matters a lot and you know, Oh, you need to do a demo. And I'm like, Nope, I don't want to waste my time going through your traditional funnel when I don't even know if I have a budget yet. Kathleen: I have to just interject there and say amen because this has been a frustration of mine for so long. I had this recently with a marketing software product. It was exactly what you're talking about. It was last November and I was working on my budget and I knew that I was not going to purchase this product until halfway through 2020. And that was even before all this craziness with the pandemic hit. But I needed a placeholder number for it in my budget. So there's no chance I was going to engage in, like multi meetings and demos and hours long calls with people to pitch me what I know I'm not ready to buy yet. I just needed a price. There's nothing more frustrating than companies that make it that hard and it wasn't a one time thing. I just found myself doing this yesterday. Somebody started talking about email signature software and they mentioned the name of a new company, and I literally Googled the company name and pricing because I was like, I don't even want to waste my time looking at everything else and getting excited about it if I can't afford it. Ashley: Yeah, well, and it's interesting too because once I got the budget approved, I was already completely sold that this problem needed to be solved. I just needed to get management on board that yes, we are committed to solving this problem. So then I actually got into the sales process and you know, I started kind of at the top of that and I just said, look, I'm bought in, draw me all the way down to the bottom of the funnel and I want you to just pitch me. Kathleen: Yeah.  Ashley: It blew the sales people's minds. And they're like, well, let me just go through the deck. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know how many slides you have, but I'm telling you I'm bought in, I agree with you. This has impact. It solves a problem that I have. I have money, here's what my budget is. I'm BANT qualified. I need you to drop me all the way in and I need you to sell me. A majority of them just froze because they didn't know how to go through there. They only know how to do this step by step. And that's where I think the content playground comes in. Obviously there's a sales component to this too. When you do get people who just want to jump right in, I wouldn't send them to play on the swings. That's what we're doing right now. We're spending all our time on the swings. Let's just do it. Quit trying to force them to go down the slide. It's so funny because people have this idea that there's a specific way that you're supposed to build the relationship and you're supposed to, you know, okay, let's get you through the marketing funnel and get you through MQL and then SQL and then a sale. And it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you meet somebody and they come at you and they're like, no, I'm literally ready to sign on the dotted line, whether it's you or one of your competitors. So why should it be you? Kathleen: Yeah. And not only is that an issue, but it's like I'm going to sign and it's going to be fast. So if you can't meet my fast timeline, just get out of my way. Exactly. That's so interesting. I love that concept. How to use the concept of a content playground to develop your content strategy Kathleen: So give me an example of, conceptually, how does that play out in terms of developing and executing your strategy? Ashley: I've done this at a number of different companies and then we also, you know, do this similar type of thing, whether you see whether you recognize it and call it a content playground or not. When you start to recognize companies that do it because you go through and there's a nice experience to say, Oh, I've kind of landed in this problem space or solution space and now I have the ability to go explore. So we've done that quite a bit in it last year and moving into this content strategy role on software teams, I'm getting exposed to some great ways that they've done it. So for example, we have this agile microsite and then we paired that last year with this agile coach series. This is all work that has been done that I'm excited to come in and kind of optimize and see how can we replicate this across other content types. And it basically says, you know, yes, JIRA helps you run in an agile way, but if you don't have the right practices set up and you don't have that mindset in those processes, a tool is not the thing that's going to fix it for you. And so sure we can sell you JIRA, but if we don't show you the right way to set up the workflows, if we don't help you have acceptable standups, if we don't help you improve your retros, having these things on a board is not going to solve, you know, your agility problems. And so putting that together, if you look at it from a content depth standpoint, instead of organizing around specific phases of the funnel, organizing it around content depth. So from a conceptual standpoint, what the heck is agile? Why does it matter? What kinds of success, you know, have people seen with it, what are the problems from a strategy standpoint, what are the practices and rituals? So that's where you get into some of the standups. That's where you get into some of the retros. And then from a tactic standpoint, how do you actually do those things? And so we have a number of things from the agile coach series, from the agile microsite and also our team playbook, which talks about things like my user manual. So how do you work together as a team? Um, putting together project coasters for kickoffs. And then yes, there's some product demos in there. There's some guides in there, there's some tutorials, there's here workflows that you can set up to do that in JIRA or to do that in Trello. But it's really that full content experienced to say, I just need help figuring out how to run my standups or my retros. And then, cool that I can do that in JIRA as well. So I previously worked at Duarte, if you're familiar with Nancy Duarte's work. Um, she wrote Resonate, which was, you know, a big game changer for a lot of people. They do workshops, they do presentation design for tons of big names and Fortune 500 companies. So we did this in a number of ways. When we launched her slide decks book for example, we put that as a free, ungated version on SlideShare. And then we linked over to this kind of more traditional inbound strategy page where you've got a landing page with a form, you give away a free piece of content, show good faith that this is good quality, and then you've got a form fill out to download some templates that people could use that would then drop people into a drip campaign where we would showcase more templates, we would showcase some use cases that we had built and give them more content to ultimately lead them to say, "Hey, if you want to buy a workshop to learn how to do this at a pro level, here's how you can do that." Getting started with your content playground Kathleen: So if I love the whole concept here, and I love the notion of content depth because I do think that there are so many marketers that almost try to cover too much and they skim the surface on everything and it doesn't work. I think the thing that could be challenging about this is hearing that, like, where do you start and how do you, how do you get there? Because you can't snap your fingers and have a lot of depth in all these topics right away. And also, how do you know what those top level topics are? If you were teaching this to somebody, how would you walk them through that? Ashley: So there's a couple of ways that, uh, we've been able to do it at Atlassian. Obviously we're fortunate we have a large team and a ton of experts that have complimentary skills. So for example, we have done a ton of keyword research to understand both search intent and the specific wording of that. From a market standpoint, agile came in and changed the game, and it turns out that JIRA was actually a really good fit to run agile. So we already kind of were keeping a pulse on the market and we started to see that agile is becoming this very mainstream thing, that our tool and our technology is really useful in helping people run. So let's focus on agile. Okay, where do we focus? And that's where things like SEO and keyword research, that's where focus groups, that's where digging through the feedback that your customers are giving you and asking like, what are the top questions in terms of workflows? How do those map to things like running scrum teams or running Kanban boards? How does that now map to workflows and guides and onboarding tutorials that we would share with somebody who starts with your product or working with Trello products, for example? So I would say I'm doing a listening exercise and there's a number of tools. You could do it on social media as well, particularly for software devs, which is one of our core audiences. They hang out on Hacker News, they hang out on Reddit. And so go look there. That's, that's another core tenant I think as marketers is loving the whole human and not just who are you as a buyer? I only care about you as a buyer or user. How do I get you to engage in the product every day or buy more of the service? Okay, these people have lives. And so if you can figure out what do they love, what are they passionate about outside of the one thing you're trying to sell them, that also gives you an entire new space to explore for thinking about what topics could you engage in. And so, when you think about engineers, efficiency, optimization, clean and concise process is something that's very important to them. Well what are some of the frameworks or what are some of the topics that deal with optimization that could potentially lead you to lead you to something like Six Sigma or manufacturing for example, right? There's a lot of ways that you could think about it if you just know what do engineers generally like? And it's like, they really like efficiency. They like optimization, they like tight, elegant solutions and just jump off from there to see, okay, what are the specific topic areas that would coincide with your product offering? And with the things that they generally care about, what does that mean? Kathleen: And if you don't have an enormous team and you want to take this approach, how do you do it? Because I imagine you'd have a choice of like, okay, I've identified 10 areas that I want to go deep on, you know, and I could either take area number one and fully play it out and develop all the content. Or I could do one article for each of the 10 areas and then go back and do the second article. Like how would you tackle it? Ashley: Yeah. So one of the things that Nancy Duarte actually talks about a ton, from Jim Collins book Good to Great is this concept of the hedgehog principle. And that's if you can do one thing and be the best at it, just do that one thing. So instead of trying to spread yourself too thin across all of those 10 topics, I would be ruthless initially in what is the thing that we actually have the ability to talk about without having to spend a ton of time and energy going and finding that expertise? What's the thing that leads most to the product market fit, or the service market fit, whichever of those that you're selling? And then what's the thing that has depth? This is something that I see a lot, is people start throwing topics on the board and you're like, okay, but how many words can you actually say about that thing? And for the most part, people were like, "Whoa". And it's like you can't even say one sentence about it. How are you going to write a full article? And then that also gets into, it's not just one article, it's okay, how do we also turn that into a video? How do we turn that into an infographic? How do we turn that into a social media post? Because this thing has to live for a lot of time. Nobody has time to keep creating net new content all the time. And so if this piece can't be repurposed or broken apart, it probably doesn't have enough depth to chase. So I would say if you're very first, starting from scratch, to limit it to probably two, maybe three topics that are related to each other and that you know, have depth. And I would say especially if you're dealing with a small team, like you're at a start up and the founder is kind of the only person who could talk about this, I'm definitely limiting that to two topics that you know you have in house expertise and then doing a good job to capture that from a conceptual, strategic and tactical standpoint the first time. And then go with the repurposing strategy. So instead of saying, "Oh my gosh, we have to cover it, a thousand words or a 20 minute video every single time", think about it as, no, nobody wants to read that, nobody's going to scroll through all of that. So let them pick their journey of how deep they want to go. Repurposing your content Kathleen: So can you dig in a little bit more to that repurposing topic because I was interested to hear you discuss all the different ways that the content can manifest, because I think a lot of people might hear this and think it's a bunch of blogs, but it's, it's really not. Ashley: One of my favorite campaigns that was super successful, there was a startup that I worked at that got acquired by Oracle called Palerra. Palerra was a cloud access security broker, which, you know, doesn't matter as much to the majority of the audience if they're not in tech, but, basically they're kind of a complimentary security product to a lot of cloud offerings. We were primarily an enterprise solution. Technology is a really heavy topic. And so what we did, when I came in, there was this raw word doc of just random customer interviews, and problems that they had faced. And so for example, we all know on a personal level we should update our passwords regularly. A lot of companies have that installed where it's like 72 days time to change your password. So at an enterprise security level, there's a similar concept for your keys to your different cloud services. And so we had a scenario where there was a customer that hadn't rotated their keys in like two years. It blew our minds. So our product actually found that. So we actually were talking about cautionary tales and focusing specifically on AWS because that cloud offering is quite ubiquitous among our customers and these are a lot of common pitfalls that our products can help solve. So we called it a cautionary tale. We turned it into an ebook first that then became the basis for our booth graphics at AWS Reinvent. And then we had a booth giveaway. We put an Amazon Tap in a clear box and then we had a bowl of keys sitting next to it and they looked identical. And so you drew a key and if it unlocked the box, you won the Tap. And so that was able to lead us into, "Have you rotated your keys? How are you doing password management?" But not just those basic tactical issues, but also like how do you know there's even a working key in the bowl? How do you know that Kathleen is supposed to have the key and not Ashley? What happens to the keys after the show? So let's say Kathleen and Ashley both leave and the bowls just sitting there. Now what happens to the keys? Right? And our product can help with that. And from a security standpoint, those are a lot of blind spots that at the time people were missing. And then the nice thing about that being at a security conference, people were very skeptical that there were any working keys in the bowl. Right? There's no keys. Yeah. So every time someone won, we took a picture and then we put it on the company Twitter feed. And then if they had a Twitter handle, we tagged them and ask them to retweet. And so there were people, and I mean we had people, well, again, they're very methodical about this. They're like, okay, it looks like roughly once an hour people are winning. So the last time somebody won, they just won. Okay, well I'm going to come back and try again later. Kathleen: Like people play slots.  Ashley: Yeah. It's like slots. But that was a great way. And then we were also able to share that ebook on Twitter as well to say, "Hey, if you're curious why we're taking pictures of the food, you can read this ebook." And then we were able to send that as well with some deeper case studies to anybody that we had scanned at the booth. So it was a really nice integrated online, offline and social media experience. That's another one of my pet peeves is people who are just like, come to booth 123. I'm not at the conference so you're just going to spam me for three days. So making sure that you have content that tells a story to your social media audience, whether they're attending the conference or not. Kathleen: That's great. That's a really good point about the shows too. Because yeah, you do so much marketing. And if somebody is not going, it's just annoying. How to share your content on your website Kathleen: So if you've created all this content, what does that look like on the website from an experience standpoint? Are there content hubs? Is it a resource center? How do you organize this all for presentation to your audience? Ashley: I think it really depends on the audience. I think HubSpot, obviously from the hub and spoke model that they've done, is amazing so that you can kind of see, you can dive in deep per topic, you could dive in deep from an integrative marketing standpoint, you can dive in deep from a tech stack standpoint and obviously they have solutions for that. So the way that they've organized it is actually really great because it allows people to kind of slice and dice how they want. One of the things that we've done that I think is really great and it lasts and is, for example, on the work-life blog, which is like a corporate level, so deals with things like teamwork, practices, leadership, et cetera. We've got a related articles function. And so when you get to the bottom of the article, yes, there's a CTA. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, you want to um, go talk in the community. Or in some cases where we're doing product focused content, it's go to the product tour or something like that. But then at the bottom there's related content. And so we have a mix of collections, a mix of tags, and then those get fed into the related content. And so there's always a next step for people to take. I think that's the biggest thing, whether you organize it as a hub, whether you organize it as a resource center that's done by topic filtering or content tagging, that ability for somebody to always take the next step and to, to only force that next step to be a buying action if they're in a head space for buying action. So if you're on a product tour, the request a demo or the sign up for free, or the do an evaluation for seven days or 30 days, whatever it is, that makes perfect sense. But if you've just read an article about productivity, it's a really hard landing to talk about five tips to manage your time and then all of a sudden be dropped into, you know, by the way, you need to buy Trello. It's like, why would I do that? So making sure that there's always a next logical action that either takes them deeper toward a purchase or deeper tool, words and practices that will help them or allow them to say, I don't know how I landed here. How do I get back to the first thing that I clicked so that I can get back on the path where I think I should be? Kathleen: Yeah. How do you execute that? Because you just gave the example of somebody who's just poking around and then they're all of a sudden getting pushed to buy. You know, being that it's a playground and people can go in any number of directions, how do you craft those next steps so that they make sense? Ashley: I think the biggest thing is, there's obviously an ideal customer journey and that does include some post-sale engagement. That could be things like documentation. It could be a support community. But really, I mean even from like, um, practically accessibility, labeling your buttons with what it is you're doing. Are you downloading this? Are you reading this? Are you clicking to do an evaluation? Are you starting a trial for free? What is that? And then that way people are very clear whenever they get down there, they know what they're clicking on. I know I've had this experience a few times where it's like, see more. And I'm like, yes, I wish to do that. And it automatically takes me into this form where it's like put in a credit card. And I'm like, you didn't tell me that's what I was doing. That's not, I didn't agree to that. So having really clear navs and in the resource center, not having buy CTAs all over the resources. For example, Intercom does a great job with this. They're a messaging, communication growth platform. You can go over to their journal section or their resource center and it's all thought leadership. It's all very high level and they state at the top, "This is free content. It's educational, no sales." And so, you know, when you're that part of the website, you're not going to get sold to and there's a nice handy button at the top. It's like go back to home. And that's where, you know, you could either be directed down an education path or sales path and you can kind of choose. So I think just being really explicit. We're past the point of I'm going to trick you into sales. It might've been on LinkedIn. I saw a discussion that maybe you and somebody else were having about, "Oh, I got a thousand leads from this form. And the question is, are they qualified?" Jay Acunzo actually has a whole rant about this. Stop gating your best content and then pretending whoever fills out that form is a lead sales lead. That's not what they agreed to. And so don't try and trick your audience. If they want to buy, they'll let you know. If they want to be educated and they want to form a relationship with you, they'll do that. And so giving them a clear path to let them either do sales or build a relationship makes them feel empowered. It gives everybody good feelings and it doesn't clutter up your sales process with people that are junk, that are not qualified or that are not actually interested in buying. Kathleen: So true. I find it's counterintuitive because, I started a few years ago ungating as much content as I possibly could and just putting it on the page and then adding like a little field just for email saying, "Want to get the PDF? Put your email in." And that was it.  What was fascinating to me is that not only did conversion rates not go down, in many cases, they went up. It's really psychology if you think about it. There's so much crappy gated content out there and the problem with gating it, first of all, is people are very jaded and a lot of them will think, I'm not giving up my email only to find out that this is junk. And so then they don't convert at all. Whereas, if you give the content away and then give them the option of downloading, you're basically allowing them to try before they buy. You're proving that what you're giving them is really good and if they do think it's really good, they are going to convert because they're like, "Well, it's no skin off my back. This is great content. I don't mind giving up my email address for it." And so the people that wind up converting on the ungated content are more qualified because they've self qualified. The other thing I've found, it goes back to your thing about being explicit, is especially when you don't have things gated, like on the page before or in the marketing you're doing for it, just coming right out and saying, "No need to fill out a form to get it." Ashley: Yeah. Kathleen: You don't have to give us your email address. People are so naturally almost defensive or they're like, Oh, Nope, Nope, Nope. They're going to ask for something. And if you can just come out and say, I'm not going to ask you for anything, that goes a long way. Ashley: Well, and I think what's interesting in this, in this thought about building relationships and giving that content away, a great example, there's a company that I worked with, they were an agency for us. We were a startup. We were using, you know, a lot of agencies and freelancers and they host these dinners and it's basically, you know, just get five, six, seven people together, have dinner, nerd out about marketing topics. And yes, we all know full well some of us are current customers of this company. Some people are prospects of the company. But I don't have budget or need to work with them anymore. But every single time I meet somebody that says that they have the need that this company services, I refer them and I refer probably three or four clients to them. I would continue to do that and we have a great relationship. They still invite me to the dinners. I sent one of my colleagues to a dinner to basically make a connection to say this might be relevant for you to meet some people that we might want to put spokespeople on panels with in the future. And so that willingness to connect with each other. I'm loyal to that company even though I have no budget and no need to buy from them right now. But I'm referring, I'm still giving them revenue because again, it's, it's fine for, for me, when I meet somebody at a conference and they're like, how would you do this? I'm like, actually this is a great company. Would you like an intro? And so a buying action may not necessarily be the person who downloaded the content buys. It may be, I mean, again, I talk about Intercom. I love the content that IDEO puts out. Again, I have no need to buy their services at this point, but I tell everybody, go look at HubSpot's content or go look at Intercom's content. And so there's no way for them to measure that. I'm just another random name on their list that hasn't converted, but I'm a brand champion for them and they don't even know it, you know? Measuring the ROI of your content playground Kathleen: That's awesome. So speaking of measuring, you get this all set up. You deploy it. How do you track and measure whether it's working, how it's working, et cetera? Ashley: So I've done this in a number of different ways depending on the company and the strategy and the bandwidth and all of that kind of stuff. If you're just starting out in your tiny little team, and you don't have the ability to do, you know, Tableau or Databricks or kind of all of these fancy data pipelines, at minimum just start out with your Google tracking. Google has free stuff that you can put on. Use your UTM codes to understand if these things are getting tracked from a social media standpoint, what's the referrals, if you are using any pages with forms from any of the marketing automation providers. Again, I'm pretty partial to HubSpot just because I think they do amazing content. The platform is great. We've used Marketo in the past, and other companies. So any of those are great to really understand what are the trends. I think that's the biggest thing. Making sure that you're looking at a correct trend level. I've worked a lot on the social media side and people get freaked out per post. "Oh my gosh, we did 10 posts last week and this one did, you know, half a percent better than this one." And it's like, let's zoom out and look monthly. How are things trending? Let's do some testing to see if we post more. Does our engagement rate go down if we, um, the other big thing is optimizing the CTA is for what you want to happen. So it's going to be really impossible for you to get somebody to like, comment, retweet, follow, and click through all in the same posts. Like there's not enough words for that post. And so making sure that each CTA belongs where it should be. So if you're asking for a poll on Twitter or Facebook, that's the goal. Responses in feed is the goal versus explicitly asking someone to click through. Make that explicit and you need to make sure that you're putting in some sort of hook or benefit. I see this a lot with people who are just starting in social media, for example, that they just give the title of the article or they just say, read these five tips. Well, what are they? On the opposite extreme, they give it away and they say, here's the five tips. And then they laid them out. And I'm like, well, now why do I need to read the article? You already gave me the tips. Give me the first tip that you think is the most interesting and then say, click through to read the next four tips. Kathleen: Right? Ashley: So, from a measurement standpoint, being very clear on a per post basis about what your goals are, if you're looking at click through rate or engagement rates and what type of engagement. So that's kind of more from a social media standpoint. If you're doing YouTube, if the answer is subscribe to the channel, if the answer is watch the next video, if the answer is go visit the page, those are very different actions. And so making sure you're optimizing those. And then obviously looking at things like organic traffic is always great. Looking at whether you have emails or product tours. From an email standpoint, looking at the open rates and the click to open ratio. So a lot of people look at the CTR, but that's a little bit out of whack. If there's a thousand people that opened it, but you sent it to 5,000, it's not very fair to say what's the CTR on the 5,000? Use it on the thousand. In some cases we've gotten really granular to look at which pieces of content get the most clicks. And so that helps us to understand, it's great that you want to put 10 pieces of content in the newsletter, but if only the first five ever get clicked, you need to find something else to do because you're not amplifying those things. Kathleen: How do you get people down further? Ashley: Yeah, exactly. What kinds of results can you expect? Kathleen: So any examples of like, what kinds of results does taking this approach yield in terms of pipeline or engagement or revenue or any of the above? Ashley: Yeah. From a scale standpoint, it depends. It's not very fair to say like, Oh, you'll get a thousand leads. It's like, okay, well if your revenue goal is 10,000, that's a struggle. Or if you're a billion dollar company, a thousand leads doesn't do you any good, right? So, we've done content pairing for example, where we've done a mix of gated content and ungated content. When we did that at Duarte, the ungated piece has over 300,000 views. Now it's been up for a couple of years, but it's got over 300,000 views. We were getting roughly 10 to 15% download rates of people going and getting that content. And so that's something where you're still getting the benefit of the people looking at it for free and ungated, but then you're starting to see higher engagement, you know, 10, 15% on that. Whenever I've done newsletter sends that have been more thought leadership focused with very light touch sales, we've been able to see 20, 30% open rates, 15 to 25% CTOR rates. Again, because we're serving that content that they've requested, not trying to shoehorn in sales. Whenever we've done sales, as a piece of content, like, "Hey, get a trial" or "Use this code" or "Refer" or "Here's an eCourse and then we'll give you one module for free because you've signed up for this newsletter" or something like that, those do have a much higher conversion rate for whatever the next buying action is. Again, it depends on the scale. So like the Palerra one at the time, you know, that ebook and we were a tiny little company. I mean we only had, I think when we got acquired, we had maybe 60 employees total. So very small company, 10 by 20 booth at AWS Reinvent, which is a massive conference. And we got, you know, almost 2000 views on that small ungated ebook. And then we got substantially higher open rates, and then our lead scans at that booth, I mean it was ridiculous. I want to say we scanned like 500 people and at most shows we were only scanning probably a hundred to 112 and so it was huge because it all tied in. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: That's awesome. Well shifting gears because we're gonna run out of time. I have two questions that I like to ask all my guests and I'm really curious to hear your answers because you've worked with some really interesting companies who are very good at this. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Ashley: So I will do the shameless plug for Atlassian, A, because I work there so of course I think we're doing a good job. But truly, I think one of the biggest examples of this, we have our team playbook and this is something again where we connected our work futurist Don Price, has done a number of different keynotes around the world and always promotes the team playbook and that has led to this health monitor -- the team health check, understanding where your blockers are. That led to a large engagement with ANZ bank, which is a huge bank in Australia and they have now done a case study with us. They're huge champions that come for our conferences and speak about how this one tiny little interaction with this health monitor has led to this entire agile transformation across their business. It's a mix of the tools, the people, the practices, it all came together perfectly. So, yes, that had a revenue result for us, but it started with that ungated content at a conceptual level about how do you do your team work better and that's what Atlassian really tries to empower. I mentioned Intercom as well. They have a ton of great content. They've got sales manuals, they got marketing manuals that talk about a variety of different ways to think about content marketing, sales, the interaction between sales and marketing. Highly recommend their content for both sales and marketing practitioners. And then, IDEO, just like if you want to elevate your creativity and you want to kind of think outside of a traditional business or products. I work in tech, so of course I'm in this little bubble that everything is SaaS and everything is ARR. IDEO has none of that. And so every time I go to IDEO and just like, this is fascinating, how does the world work when you're not in your little bubble? And so I would say, no matter what bubble you're in, IDEO will help you get out of it. That would be three that are a mix of marketing focused, tech and then a design consultancy that's just completely out of my wheel house.  Kathleen: I can't wait to check some of those out -- particularly IDEO. It sounds really interesting. Well, second question is, the biggest pain point I was here from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly and they feel like it's drinking from a fire hose to try and keep up with everything and stay educated and on the cutting edge. So how do you personally do that? Ashley: Yeah, so from a broader view, kind of outside of marketing or just business chops, which I think is really important, it's how do we fit in and especially as you move up in your career and you become COO or something like that, understanding that business acumen is really key. I love MIT Sloan review for that content and they've been killing it lately. Every single thing that's come out from them over the last probably six or seven months, I'm like, "Yes, one hundred percent fascinating". So I love MIT Sloan from a business standpoint. There's a couple of marketers that I think are a little bit contrarian and I joked about going on rants about things and I'm like, "Yes, ranting. I love it." Katie Martell is somebody that I've been loving her content lately. Jay Acunzo I think is great. He's really honing in on podcasting and show running over the last year or so. But just in general, his thoughts on content marketing and strategy are great. I love Scott Berkun. He is primarily a designer, and more on that design thinking. He has a new book out that I need to get because it looks amazing. It's like How Design Makes the World, I think is what it's called. And it's looking at how all of these interactions and everyday things influence our path, our actions, et cetera. So Scott Berkun is great. And then I would say just like a book that I always come back to is this book called The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. It's primarily about intersectional thinking and divergent thinking. And so yes, there's an element of understanding the tactical nitty gritty from a digital standpoint. I think there's a number of, you know, Marketing Profs, CMI, HubSpot, all of those do a really great job of that. But how do you think about change? How do you think about a problem space? How do you think about a solution space? The Medici Effect is just every, it's like I come back to it kind of annually. It's like, okay, somewhere in there I'm missing something. I should probably just reread the The Medici Effect. In fact, I should probably just to think about the concepts and The Medici Effect to jolt myself out of being so focused on, okay, what does this button on Twitter do or what does this ads do? Like are we doing AB testing? We're doing multivariate testing, what's our competence interval, whatever. We're pulling those things down. Like I don't know what the best practice is. It's like I'm clearly thinking about it in the wrong way. If I'm so twitchy about such a small detail, you get lost in the weeds pretty easily. Kathleen: Those sound like some really good resources. I will put links to all of them in the show notes. How to connect with Ashley Kathleen: If somebody is listening and they want to connect with you online or follow you or learn more about this topic, what's the best way for them to do that? Ashley: I would love to connect on LinkedIn. I'm Ashley Faus. For the most part, I think I'm the first search result for that. And you can also follow me on Twitter also @AshleyFaus. Kathleen: Great. I will put Ashley's links to her social accounts in the show notes. So head there if you want to find them. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you are listening and you liked what you heard today or you learned something new, and how could you not because Ashley shared so many good ideas, head to Apple podcasts and please leave the podcast a five star review. That helps us get found by more people. And if you know somebody who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next interview. Thanks so much for joining me this week, Ashley. Ashley: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's always fun to nerd out about marketing. Kathleen: Yes!

Tristan Burrell is Chief Strategy Officer at Vizeum in Sydney, Australia. Whenever I've worked with media agencies, there's an echo of my experience working with Tristan in my desires for each media plan but often the desires go unmet. In this episode, we discuss how Tristan landed a creative role inside a media agency, the impressive cast of characters he grew up around at Universal McCann, winning a Cannes Young Lions trophy, his jaunt in New York, as well as his return to Sydney and his new movie podcast Double Impact. You can find Tristan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristanburrell/ For more strategy talk: Newsletter: http://www.markpollard.net/email-newsletter/ Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/markpollard Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/markpollard Facebook - join 9,000+ strategists: http://www.sweathead.co The deskbook “Strategy Is Your Words” is out soon http://www.strategyisyourwords.com

We welcome Daniel Vitalis onto the pod today and might I just say stoke level is pretty high! Daniel is a forager, registered Maine Guide, writer, public speaker, interviewer, and lifestyle pioneer who is deeply passionate about helping others reconnect with wildness, both inside and outside of themselves. After learning to hunt, fish, and forage as an adult, Daniel created WildFed; a show, podcast, and lifestyle brand that integrates hunting, fishing, foraging, and ecology with nutrition, cooking, community, and outdoor adventure.    "WildFed on its face is about food, but beneath the surface of that, it's about a lot more. It's about how we are in relationship with wild species and wild places." -  Daniel Vitalis   Daniel and Mason discuss: Daniel's WildFed food philosophy. The importance of becoming enmeshed into your ecosystem and utilising your local food shed. The hunting, gathering, collecting and foraging of wild foods. Staying grounded and undogmatic in your approach to living consciously, sustainably and in harmony with the earth. Applying traditional hunter gather philosophy and practice to modern day life. The significance of developing a relationship to the earth and to the species that inhabit it, especially in our modern era of artificial intelligence and disconnect.   Who is Daniel Vitalis? Daniel Vitalis is the host of WildFed. WildFed is a show, podcast, and lifestyle brand that integrates hunting, fishing, foraging, and ecology with nutrition, cooking, community, and outdoor adventure. For ten years Daniel lectured around North America and abroad, offering workshops that helped others lead healthier, more nature-integrated lives. A successful entrepreneur, Daniel founded the nutrition company SurThrival.com in 2008. Most recently, Daniel has hosted the popular podcast ReWild Yourself.  Daniel is a Registered Maine Guide, writer, public speaker, interviewer, and lifestyle pioneer who’s especially interested in helping people reconnect with wildness, both inside and outside of themselves.  After learning to hunt, fish, and forage as an adult, Daniel created WildFed to inspire others to start a wild-food journey of their own. Headquartered in the Lakes Region of Maine, he lives with his beautiful wife Avani and their Plott Hound Ellie.   Resources: Daniel Vitalis Instagram Daniel Vitalis Facebook WildFed Website WildFed Podcast WildFed Interactive Program WildFed on Facebook   Q: How Can I Support The SuperFeast Podcast?   A: Tell all your friends and family and share online! We’d also love it if you could subscribe and review this podcast on iTunes. Or  check us out on Stitcher :)! Plus  we're on Spotify!   Check Out The Transcript Here:   Mason: (00:00) Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the pod, man.   Daniel: (00:04) Yeah, man, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for sharing my voice with your platform here.   Mason: (00:09) I know that there's going to be a bunch of SuperFeasters that are like super stoked to see... Already I've hinted that you are coming on and they're all just like, "Yes." Then I'm really excited about like a bunch of people who maybe... A little bit early on their onset into the health scene. I'm really excited about introducing them to your work, and then this new project. Are you at home in Maine at the moment?   Daniel: (00:35) Yeah, I am. Yep right at my house. I don't get out too much anymore. I travel a little bit, but as I get older it's like I really want to be based out of my home. I spend a lot of the time, a lot of the last 10 years on the road, but now I've got so much, I'm so integrated into this place with what I'm doing now that it's like, you got to really talk me out.   Mason: (01:00) WildFed, which we'll jump right into. That seems to be like this pinnacle declaration for your public work as well. That that's what you're doing. You're throwing your roots down, and then through that I've realised that on the stealth you've become a guide to me anyway. You've become like a guide in Maine. That's an interesting mindset already that I think is entwined into what's now culminating in WildFed from being someone who's traveling all over the world, all over America, doing the LA conferences. All that stuff to now being, really living and breathing… That was a long-term like little deviation. What was in that process psychologically and emotionally to really throw down your roots?   Daniel:  (01:46) Yeah, well, I mean you look back on 10 years and it makes sense. The journey makes sense. But if I tell you about point A and then point B, they don't seem to almost like line up. But my journey has been that I started off speaking in those conferences. I have all these raw food vegan folks because I came out of that scene. They would let me speak at their conferences. I was not a vegan and I was not a raw foodist. I had been in the past, but I wasn't by the time I started my public journey. Those are early days of YouTube before podcasting. That was before social media man, it's so strange to think about that. Because it's so recently really. Now we're really talking like 12 years ago probably. I'd get up on these stages and my message would just be like starting to contradict the whole purpose of the event.   Daniel: (02:36) It'd be this thing to push veganism, to push raw foodism. I would have stuff that touched in with that, but I was into this idea of, well, what are like natural humans? What do they do on the landscape? What do they do without superfoods? What do they do without the health food stores and internet suppliers and stuff? What's natural for people? I always wanted to talk about that and explore that idea. I would get up and I'd give my talk. Because I was popular with audiences, I kept being invited back. My message grew further and further away from that idea. I started there, but I kept on the journey following the path. Even though a lot of people are like, "I don't like this direction, Daniel, you're starting to get away from our ideals."   Mason: (03:21) Well, what was interesting, and I really I'm aware. We don't want to go too far into this thing to the history. We're here to talk about WildFed. That's what I want to talk to you about. I was someone in that audience, really loving the fact that you were up there talking about like booze. There was this subconscious awareness in one pocket that we appreciate that we're going through a change, and we liked originally what the health scene was about. We were opposing what was deteriorating us. Then there was that split of people falling in love with that push back against society into whatever.   Mason: (04:00) It happens with anything. It happens with diet. You more than anyone have led the charge in terms of making that distinction around veganism. But of course it happens with the carnivore diet and TCM diets and everything. Everyone's just a fanatic. But I really liked that anarchist energy, and I think everyone secretly did as well. That's why you kept on getting invited back and it was such a-   Daniel: (04:25) I was amazed they would have me back year after year, but eventually obviously, we parted ways and I started my podcast ReWild Yourself, which I ran for three years as a fluke. I was really writing an online magazine and I wanted multimedia. I started doing interviews and pretty quick those interviews were just so much more… People liked my writing, a small group like 6,000, 7,000 people reading what I'm writing. 100,000 people are listening to the podcast and it's like, "Okay, this is really what people want. Less of me just writing these long articles. More of me interviewing." Before I knew it, there was this podcast. It was early days of podcasts, I hadn't set out to start one. That podcast ReWild Yourself was exploring like what's natural for human beings if they step outside of our industrial system?   Daniel: (05:11) What would we be like if we lived on the landscape, and what do we know about the health outcomes of people who live that naturally? Hunter-gatherer peoples. I just got fascinated by it. I was talking to so many different characters, psychologists and doctors and nutritionists and death experts and birth experts. Just it kept coming clear and clearer to me that being divorced from nature was the root cause of our problem. That led me deeper into foraging, eventually led me to hunting and fishing and this idea of like, how do I apply this stuff? Because I didn't want to end up like the Biohackers, walking around with big orange sunglasses on and a bunch of electrodes tuned to me, and breathing some weird modulated air. Just gets so outrageous that you're like this is the opposite of what I want.   Mason: (05:56) I remember you actually because I followed along what was really interesting is you shared your inner journey in terms of your away from a superfood packet towards maybe more of a subsistence on nature. That's what I've always read in everyone's comments for you. Because people come across your work and they're like, "Oh, cool. He's hunting and gathering. He's from Maine. That's what he does. He's a hunter." In WildFed you say, "I didn't grow up this way. I've had to learn this shit." That's what has been… The people along the way. I read your comments and everyone goes, "I appreciate so much you sharing this inner journey with everyone." I remember a pivotal episode when I think you had like a sleep expert, but like a Biohacking sleep expert on the podcast.   Mason: (06:41) In reflection after that podcast, I could hear you going, “You know what, I don't want to be taping up my curtain. I don't want to be putting tape all over little electrical things all over my house.” You want to leave the window open. That was a pivotal one for me as well because there's all these crossroads as we go along in this journey. It's something I've learned from you, is how to be aware of the upcoming crossroads. That last night when we were watching WildFed, Tahnee, my fiancé, she was saying, and she's been following you before we got together as well at, a long time. She's like, "I really love that, once again you're not presenting yourself as an expert. You're very confident in what you know, you're just very adamant about your ongoing journey once again."   Daniel: (07:32) Go ahead.   Mason: (07:33) I was just going to say that allows you to be aware of crossroads coming. Then you get to go deeper rather than getting over identified with a stage persona.   Daniel: (07:43) That's a huge danger, a pitfall. I talk about it a lot that I see happen where people get so pigeonholed into something they had been into in the past, and then they feel like they can't break free. The longer you go doing that, the harder it is once you… I remember just like I cut my hair at one point. I don't know if you remember back in the day I had long hair. It's just like even that was like, people have you so, they want you to be this one character. I feel bad for like when an actor has an iconic role, it's like you're Jason Bourne in a movie, and then you want to do something radically different. People are like, "No, you're Jason Bourne." It's like, "Oh, come on." We're dynamic people. Another thing though I'll say is that I've had many opportunities along the way to root in and become the expert on the thing that I've been spending time on. I always like to push forward.   Daniel: (08:36) The challenge with that is that I'm always the beginner in a scene. I'm always the new guy everywhere I go, because I'm constantly trying to learn new stuff. It can be you have to get comfortable with that, like the discomfort of that. You have to be able to relax into the discomfort of being the new guy everywhere if you're going to constantly learn new stuff, and you surround yourself [inaudible 00:08:59]. Back to it my podcasts led me to realizing that I would be a prisoner to all of these life hacks, and all of these diet hacks and eventually the encumbrance of it. When I started off, I remember before I started speaking, I was like 19 years old, walking around in Hawaii in nothing but a pair of shorts, barefoot on the beach. That's where I felt the most real and alive. Then before you know it, you're encumbered with just all of these things to be healthy.   Daniel: (09:27) You're like, wait a second, this is the opposite of where… I noticed that anything taken too far becomes the opposite of what it starts off as. That's usually what ends up happening. You can see this in a lot of people's career trajectory, which is why I don't want to get too stuck in any one thing. What happened with ReWild Yourself is I kept learning more about wild food and I kept resonating to that. Because food was really my first passion. I realised like of all this stuff that I've learned about, the one thing that I really I'm most drawn to doing, where I want to take it next is into the wild food arena. Rather than making the mistake I made in the past, which is like, "Can I be 100% this or can I do this all the way?" That's like that vegan thing or that carnivore thing where it's like, "Well no, I'm going to make a commitment for life to only do this one thing."   Daniel: (10:12) It was just like, "Man, can I keep pursuing this idea of wild food in a more moderate..." what I think of as moderate, most people think of as still pretty extreme. Can I hunt fish and forage for calories and can I make it a real thing? Can I bring it into my house? Just to tie it back to your show theme too, that started for me with medicinal herbs. That's how I got first excited about, it was foraging chaga, foraging, reishi. Because as somebody who was into superfoods, the cost of those things is high, and the connection to the thing is less than when you go get it yourself, and that was more exciting.   Daniel: (10:45) That was my first inroad, and then eventually it was like, "Wait, can I do this to fill my refrigerator and my freezer with food?" That led me to where I'm at today, which is making this show WildFed and doing the podcast WildFed and just exploring what a modern hunter-gatherer looks like, who lives in a super developed industrial society.   Mason: (11:06) I really appreciate you saying like someone looking in, they're going to be like, "This is full on man. He's foraging for like everything." But I know you can take it way further. The fact that you're taking your ingredients to a gastropub, and allowing him to have his little injection of his other ingredients. Some of it's like a sustainable agricultural crop or even him using his own chicken stock or something.   Daniel: (11:31) I'm sure it's like mayonnaise and mustard and ketchup. I don't care anymore. My thing of like food exclusivity, because once you start to get the very best food in the world, it starts to, for me, it started to make me relax about other foods a little bit more. You know what I'm saying? It's like when you have venison to eat, if somebody wants to put it on a piece toast, you're like, okay cool man. Because I know I got this thing so I don't care as much as I used to when I was like always fretting about what I had for food.   Daniel: (12:03) So it's created a relaxation in me, which has been really healing. The relaxation comes from several different components of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that I've been promoting. But yeah, you got to see the show man. I'm curious how it landed for you and what you thought about it. Because here's the thing, I've been incubating this project for two years and I've gotten very little feedback because I've been really secretive about it.   Mason: (12:24) We know you're [inaudible 00:12:25]   Daniel: (12:25) You're one of like 20 people that's seen in it, man.   Mason: (12:28) I feel so special. I do.   Daniel: (12:30) Seriously, you're one of like 20 people that's seen it. I'm really curious how you felt about it.   Mason: (12:36) We loved it. I think especially coming from like Tahnee and myself watching it. This is off the bat. Watching the first episode. Okay, two things off the bat. I love that there's like three or four people involved in the production, and the quality is very high. I noticed that straight away because that's something that again, that is in alignment with the simplicity of this whole lifestyle. I appreciated that, and appreciated the fact that the production was really high as well because let's face it, it matters. Second of all, straight off the bat, I liked that I know you and I know that watching one episode is gonna be very good, and it was put together very well in one episode. It had a story in the beginning and middle and end. It almost has its own catalyst in there for like the emotional ride.   Mason: (13:27) However, I know that there is a plan over the entire series to take you on a journey, and you didn't shy away from that. That's what I would definitely, anyone listening, I would recommend staying in that little journey, in that path. Because off the bat, the first episode is the slowness. That was like where you got to you're like it's something about the how slow, the speed of food. There's something slow about this lifestyle. That was after you were going after, I think it was the fiddleheads and it was just like, "Fuck, we're too early. Fuck, we're too late." Then the turkey hunting. It wasn't just this, "We're going to give them a little insight into how frustrating it can be. We'll quickly go, missed it, the turkey's going away." We were there and you took us on the journey. That was something I think you were maybe consciously doing.   Mason: (14:24) It was like I want to make sure that I don't glorify this lifestyle, or just show peak experiences. I really want everyone to be involved, and then see the underlying principle, which what came out in that first episode anyway was, there's just something about the speed of food. The speedier it is, the more it tastes bland and I think you said like cardboard. That straight away there's principles. You don't deliver rules. That's what I've got out of the three episodes I've seen, there's principles that you keep slippery and non-dogmatic so that it can be integrated into wherever someone is at. That's genuinely where they're at because that's something that doesn't happen. It's like, "Wherever you're at, it's okay, you do this," but, wink, wink, you really do need to get to my point in order to like [crosstalk 00:15:15].   Mason: (15:16) There was a real, it is that softness, and that first principle anyway got me really thinking about how that pace of food even going to farmers markets, I don't feel anything is bad or wrong. It's just made me really think about the fact that it's like a king tide when you're out in the surf. The more and more you get that quick speedy food, the more you get sucked out really quick. It's hard to get back into really feeling the essence in that romance, in the slowness of food and really earning it in one sense. Then just obviously showing the respect in the currency of time that you're giving. That was my initial takeaway, man.   Daniel: (15:57) The pace of food thing is really important to me, because I like that there's tension sometimes. Even with plants as you saw, it's not just like, "Oh, they can't run away, so I'll just walk out and get them." You've got this very, as you saw with the fiddleheads, it's very delicate time window, where loading up the canoe and you and your partner going out and paddling out to the spot, it's not something you're going to do every single day. You've got to like, "Okay, when do I think they're going to be ready?" Then you paddle out and you're like, "Oh, no, we're too early, so now I've got to go back." Then you go back and it's like, "Oh man, are we too late?" Because even they can slip away from you because they got this little window where they're edible. Then as you see with hunting, I think hunting has one of the biggest PR problems.   Daniel: (16:41) People have such a mistaken idea about it because of what they see. You see people who've hunted their whole life, they got 40 years of experience. In hunter-gatherer societies, it's pretty understood that as a hunter you reach peak efficiency in your 40s. Because you've got all of those decades of experience that have built up. When you start and you're 40, I was 35 or so when I started, it's like maybe a little older than that. You don't know anything. It's like trying to get going. You make mistakes. I want to put all that in there. I mean everybody makes mistakes. I want to put that in there so people could see the pitfalls and the challenges. Another thing that happens is people will think, "Well yeah, it's real easy to hunt when you have a gun, oh it's cheating." Actually it's not really that simple. It's pretty complex.   Daniel: (17:31) You got to really understand animals, and in order to understand those animals, you've got to understand those animals' foods. You got to understand their natural life histories, and before you know it, you're becoming so enmeshed into your ecosystem, that this idea of you're an alien on earth who is like can't touch anything because humans just destroy everything they come in contact with. Instead of that you start to like reorient yourself to like, "Oh, I'm part of this ecosystem." It's not just ecological literacy, which a lot of people are lacking, but it's like integration into your landscape. You become this animal on your landscape. Sometimes predatory, sometimes herbivorous. That's one of the things that's neat about being a human is we're like a bear or a pig in that we eat both plants and animals.   Daniel: (18:14) Sometimes I'm out there foraging and I'm clearly not a predator on the landscape. Other times I'm out there as a predatory animal. We have these two different, and I want to, if you've noticed the way the show is put together I like to leapfrog scenes back and forth, where sometimes I'm a predator and sometimes I'm the forager. Sometimes I'm a squirrel and sometimes I'm a hawk. Both are legitimate ways we interact with our landscape. But what I really hope that show does, because obviously, where you live, you're seeing a different suite of plants and animals that are familiar to you. But I'm hoping that what it does is inspires people wherever they are to get involved in their food shed. Because wherever you live there's lots to hunt, gather, collect, forage, whatever it is.   Daniel: (18:58) I want people to go, "I might not have fiddleheads, but what do I have in the spring?" Then lastly, I just want to say to your point about a seasonal arc. One of the things I've noticed from this lifestyle that really excites me is, the very first thing I'm doing in the beginning of the year, a couple months from now, is I'm tapping my maple trees and I'm making maple syrup so I get all my sugar for the year. Then it goes into the, what you saw, the fiddleheads, leaks and turkeys. Then over the course of the season, I have these activities that I'm doing every year, and every year I get a little better and I learn a little bit more and it begins in the snow and then it ends in the snow. In the middle is that summer, like that beautiful peak summer growth that happens here in the temperate regions of the United States.   Daniel: (19:41) I wanted people to see a seasonal arc, because this world we're living in now is becoming so homogenous, especially with the way our tech climate control is, and the way our built environment is. Even though the weather is one way outside, inside's just always the same flat line thing. I wanted people to see these beautiful seasons. Each episode has a show arc to it and its own tensions and wins and losses and all of that. But then there's this arc of the season, and that's one of the most powerful things about this lifestyle for me is that every part of the year, I have something I'm excited about, like really excited about. It's snow on the ground right now. I can't get at the acorns, the hunting is all winding down, but I know ice fishing is coming. I'm so excited about that. When that ends, it's maple syrup time, it's just goes, goes and goes forever.   Mason: (20:34) That's the simplicity you were talking about like a calming effect on your body I think, of anything that's made in the West, it's that calming effect so that we can explore the nuances of our parasympathetic nervous system. Whenever I've had those longer periods in nature, there's a foraging friend that I haven't been out with him for a while. He's just North of Sydney though. He was always telling me he'd go out for weeks at a time, and he just watched his senses coming back online. He'd watch his hearing become acute, and he'd watch his eyes... I didn't even realise my eyesight was getting a little blurry at particular distances when he was out. It always reminded me that consistency of time in nature, that's going to be my ultimate health practice, no matter what.   Mason: (21:20) Then what you're talking about, just being on the terrain. Barefoot at times if appropriate. But even just watching the seasonality outside of a Gregorian calendar, that's something I've always really watched and considered. It's interesting because I had such a mental need, a high pace of learning the expertise of this healthy lifestyle. When you get into what you're talking about, that needs to be a slow journey. Understanding our own seasonal arc. Here, there's a beautiful Instagram here in Byron Bay in this region, koori country. It's a local mob sharing. All right. Now the winds of change, now we're getting the westerlies, now we're in this season. Right now you'll start seeing the pippies. You've got pippies over there, the little mollusc on the beach. You dig your feet in and you can go and like harvest your... It's beautiful. It's one of the easy accesses.   Daniel: (22:16) Collecting.   Mason: (22:18) Collecting, which brings me to my next point. The slowness I feel you'd probably coming from knowing the lifestyle that I come from having that raw food like 'raji baji'. For me there was a little bit of like the rules don't apply. I'm always ahead of the curve. Even if I enter into like this foraging landscape, it takes me a while sometimes to really slow down and up and think, "I will listen to this person who has that 30 years experience." Even though they don't share that baseline spring water, not bringing preservatives into their life. That's something I think I learned from you heavily as well.   Mason: (23:04) That ability to actually slow down and then what I think is important into your message you are actually willing to not just become a guide, but really understand this new terrain of foraging in terms of what are the regulations in order they are. We're new to this world. Remember these regulations are in there for a reason. There are quotas on what you can be harvesting. See for me, that would seem limiting coming from where I was coming from in the beginning.   Daniel: (23:38) Infinite consciousness, man.   Mason: (23:40) Infinite consciousness, yeah. I'm like the goose man. I can just cross borders. I don't need.. Yeah That kind of [inaudible 00:23:47]. That is something that was really like, it's really helping me go like, "Right this is community." It's already in existence and we can be bridges between those communities to an extent. This is the term that I hear in opposition to the foraging lifestyle. I just wanted that to be the context. Well, not everyone can do this. It's not sustainable. That's an interesting comment and it's like a cliché kind of thing and you go and then the cliché answer is like, "Well everyone doesn't have to do it. I'm doing it." But I feel like we can have more interesting conversations and I feel like you're important to that.   Daniel: (24:28) I'd like to explore that a little bit because it comes up so much.   Mason: (24:32) I'd love to hand it over to you, yeah please.   Daniel: (24:33) Well I just think that one's really interesting because it's like not everyone on the planet can play golf. That's not sustainable. But nobody's yelling that at people playing golf. Not everybody can do anything. There's like almost nothing that everyone can do sustainably. Why is it that I must defend against that? Also, why is the burden of planetary sustainability on my shoulders all of a sudden? I have to only do the things that everyone can do. Why? There are people more intelligent than me, and I'm not banging on their door like, "Why are you doing math problems I can't do? Not everyone can do that, so stop it." That doesn't make any sense. There's all this talk these days about privilege. It's like, I don't know, this is just what I'm doing. I'm not trying to exert a privilege. I'm not trying to say that everybody on the planet needs to do this.   Daniel: (25:23) Now I will say this, everybody on the planet used to do this. Everybody on the planet used to do this. You're only here, if you're on earth today, is because of the hunters and foragers of the past whose genetic lineage you are the current incarnation of. You do come from foragers. Now, I think of it like this, and this is an important aspect of why I created WildFed, because WildFed, I hope is a brand that goes on past me. I'm currently like a focal point in it, but that's not the long-term goal for me. I want to create a project that carries the torch of, I'll say foraging in a general sense. Because anthropologists will refer to foraging peoples as a shorthand for hunter-gatherers. I don't just mean plants here. I mean plants, animals, fungi, algae, everything. Some people need to carry the torch in this generation, especially in this generation more now than ever.   Daniel: (26:20) Although every generation for it to last, there needs to be people who carry it forward. We live in the era where the last hunting and gathering peoples are blinking out into extinction, extra patient or being assimilated into the modern lifestyle. They are probably not going to be able to carry that torch, the way that some of us are going to be able to. Secondary to that, is that they live in very remote pockets of the planet like Indonesia and parts of Africa and places in South America. But what about where we all live in the, you were saying the West earlier, in the developed parts of the world, and the industrialized parts of the world. Somebody needs to maintain that relationship. Here in the United States we have, like you there where you are, museums that are there, where there are people whose lives are dedicated to keeping aspects of the past alive.   Daniel: (27:11) Why is there nobody keeping our hunting and gathering tradition alive? Is that not more important to keep alive than memories of past wars or who invented light bulbs, or all of these things that we're keeping all that alive in museums. Or there's like museum martial arts, let's say. There's people who are practicing obscure martial arts from the past that have very little relevance to today, but they keep them alive as a museum art. You know what I'm talking about? So many things like that that we do, yet this fundamental thing that binds all humans together, which is how we got to be here, our fundamental relationship to the natural world, we need people keeping that alive, I think more fundamentally than anything. Partially what I'm doing with WildFed is just trying to pick up that torch and carry it forward. I'm most certainly not the only one.   Daniel: (28:02) I share this responsibility with a lot of my colleagues who are doing the same thing. Many of which are going to be featured in the video show, and many of which are featured on my podcast. People that I meet who are either doing it in a general, I'm doing it in a very generalist sense. Then there's people who are doing it in a much more specialized sense. My thing is a generalized hunting and gathering approach. But I really get excited when I meet somebody who's really specific on one thing, like they hunt bear, or they hunt only mushrooms or whatever it is because I throw a very wide but shallow net as a generalist. I get excited when somebody throws a very narrow but deep net, because I can learn so much from them. I'm trying to also create a platform that brings those people together.   Daniel: (28:47) Because you'll notice, I'm sure you've noticed this in the tonic herbalism thing, you'll get people who are all about foraging medicinal mushrooms. Tonic herbal mushrooms, but they don't hunt. Then the person who hunts would never even think about foraging those mushrooms. Then the person who is a dedicated plant forager might never hunt or fish. Or the fishermen might never... I'm trying to create a platform that will start to be a hub for all of those different people and those voices and those lifestyles to say, “Hey look, we're all sharing this one commonality here, which is wild foods.” It's so much more than nutrition. It's relationship to species. Because every plant, every mushroom, every animal, every algae is a living entity. It's about how we relate to that entity.   Daniel: (29:35) To me, there's a really deep thing going on here. Then how we relate to all of those identities together, those entities together is like how we relate to the ecosystem, and how we find relationship to it. It's just sad that we're at this point where we have to forge relationships with ecosystems as if we are from another planet. That really has bothered me over the years, this sense of alienness that we have to our own earth. Now where if you read headlines, you will see a lot more about people going to Mars than you will see about people making relationships with nature. You'll see stories about the Amazon burning, you'll see stories about the pollution of rivers and the extinction of species. Then you'll see stories about going to Mars. It's like, really, we're not going to stop first and fix this, we're just going to leave?   Daniel: (30:24) Isn't that like somebody in a relationship who has a bad relationship and so they split, and they get in another relationship, and the same thing happens, and they split. They never stop and face it, and face themselves and learn how to have a good relationship. It's like you just run away, run away, run away. Aren't we doing that right now? We trashed the planet and then we run to Mars and then what? Like trash Mars? Do we have a plan for Mars? What are we going to do with the garbage there? We're going to put in the ground like we did here. Where are we going with this? WildFed on its face is about food, but beneath the surface of that, it's about a lot more. It's about how we are in relationship with wild species and wild places.   Mason: (31:06) Yes, mike drop. I want to say that I definitely have got that sense over the years of creating that web weaving between all these specialised fields, and the sharing of knowledge, someone who's foraging for [inaudible 00:31:21] culinary mushrooms starting to open up into say like that medicinal mushroom world and vice versa. Creating this somewhat like beautiful fascial tensegrity between all these beautiful elements of the subsistence, on which I want to talk to you about. You were just talking about that seems like a very classic pattern of you get into a relationship, you screw it up, you bounce it, you get over to the next relationship and that's a pattern. Possibly developed genetically, who knows where it came from, maybe from parents patterns.   Daniel: (31:53) All kinds of things.   Mason: (31:57) Now what I see as you were talking about martial arts say Kendo in a dojo, what's the relevance of that? I see the relevance is that you get to do it in a very contained system that even though it's got this very certain element of making you mentally hone yourself. It's a very contained system where you can get into uncomfortable states in order to refine yourself. It's not this open ended, for lack of a better word, getting uncomfortable. Which is what I see is the difference between like a museum art and actually getting into the wild and foraging, and as you said, becoming a new beginner.   Mason: (32:35) That's uncomfortable in a beautiful, beautiful way. Now getting uncomfortable for me it seems like it's going to be the only access for us to, you know, getting out of our comfort zone to an extent, in order to deal with these patterns that we have as a species that is destroying where we came from. Can you talk about that connection through foraging, through the fishing, through the hunting? How does that actually help us in our inner world basically evolve and deal with this shit that's making us run away from the most important relationships of our lives?   Daniel: (33:14) There's a lot there, so lets unpack it. First I'll say you brought up Kendo like with full respect to practitioners of Kendo, you would be mistaken to think that that was a contemporary art that you were going to step into the octagon and fight an MMA specialist. You'd just get your ass handed to you right away. You'd be beat down. We know it because we created a forum to test people, and everybody brought their arts and pretty quick, everything went away except ground game grappling and standup game basically boxing type stuff. That survived and everything else was obliterated very quickly. Stylistic elements remain, but we see that those things are good. Kendo is good against Kendo in a controlled setting, but it doesn't work in the real world. I want to say that partially, with WildFed, one of the things I'm trying to do is show people real meals of food.   Daniel: (34:09) This isn't, "Oh, did you know dandelion is edible?" It's like, that's just some mental masturbation. Let's see you make a meal out of this stuff. Because that's where what's the saying? Like the rubber meets the road. It's like I wanted to show people the real thing because we're actually, this isn't just trail nibbling stuff where we're showing real meals coming out of these wild foods. That was important to me. Now to the meat of what you were asking about. I think that if you had lived your whole life in a small town and you knew everybody, everybody knew everybody. Maybe it's a little uncomfortable sometimes because everybody knows all your dirt, but also they all know who you are, and you have these interconnections and familial connections. You grew up with people. Everywhere you go you're just waving hi to everybody because everybody knows everybody.   Daniel: (34:59) Then I transplant you to a new place, big city let's say, and you don't know anybody. You would have a low level anxiety taking place because you would be alien to that place, and all of your connections that gave you stability and strength, they're gone. You're now in this fragile position because of the vulnerability of that. Now extrapolate that metaphor out and it's like here you are on planet earth, but you only know other humans. You don't know plants, you don't know fungi, you don't know animals. You don't know how to survive in your environment. You don't know how to source your own food, and you're totally reliant on these systems that provide you with your sustenance. Then you keep learning about, wow, not only are these systems really delicate and prone to failure and wow, that's kinda weird.   Daniel: (35:47) But also like, wait, they're also super toxic in the sense that we're poisoning this food and we're poisoning the landscape in which the food comes from and we're poisoning the watersheds. Wait a second, like this wheat was genetically modified with gamma radiation. Wait, what? This isn't just like healthy natural food? You start realizing, "Wow, I'm dependent on systems that are really fragile, super destructive to the earth and on top of it, are not good for me, and I don't even know how to solve that except through tons of money spent on really expensive products that start to encumber me." It starts to get a little bit, I think what happens is we have this low level anxiety. I think you see that anxiety projected out into the world in the form of apocalypse media, which is like a whole genre of media that most of us are kinda drawn a little bit to.   Daniel: (36:36) Whether it's Mad Max or it's The Walking Dead or it's like prepper stuff or it's whatever it is, or survival stuff. Shows about people living on the frontier of Alaska. Why are there so many dramatic reality shows where people are sent into nature naked and afraid, or they're sent into nature to survive on an island with each other and then they dramatically compete to see who's the survivor? We have so much of this media being pumped out because it speaks to the part of us that feels vulnerable on our own planet, because we don't actually know. It's not really about, "Can Joe survive the next episode?" It's not really about that. It's about can I survive and we're using him as a surrogate. We know that we can't survive and that freaks us out a little bit. The answer is not a whole bunch of cool Bear Grills survival skills where you have like some big bowie knife and you can pee in a snakeskin instead of a canteen.   Daniel: (37:32) It's not about those things. It's about for me, how many species am I familiar with that I know that are food for me? So that when I walk down my street or I drive down the road, I look out the window and go food, food, food, food, food. The difference for me of a maple tree to somebody who doesn't produce maple syrup, it's just night and day. When I look at a maple tree, I know that I can pull a gallon of sugar out of that tree next year. It's like one little step less afraid that I am internally and then it's like, the Oak trees. Like I can pull acorns off of those. That's food for me. Okay it's a little bit more confidence. Squirrels, that's food for me and I love that animal and that animal and I have a relationship. Then you start adding in all this stuff. I know where the clams are, I know where the Periwinkles are. Okay, I know how to catch fish out of that river.   Daniel: (38:26) Before you know it, you start having all these interconnections. It's like being back in that small town where you knew everybody. Earth starts to be this safe place for you because you're anti-fragile. You have this network that makes you robust. You're like, "You know what? It wouldn't matter to me if it did go Mad Max. I know where everything is. I don't care if there's a problem in the banking system. I don't care if there's a problem with the computer systems. I don't care if there's a three week shutdown because of a tsunami that takes out the grid." All those things that people talk about, it's like I'd just be good. I don't mean there'd be no hardship, but I'm saying like all those fears start to like go away and you have this sense of relaxation into your home, which is the earth.   Daniel: (39:12) I think people lack that so much and they fear that nature is so hostile. It's interesting with Australia to me because it's like this place from which all these shows come that we see here in the West about how dangerous the land, the 10 deadliest snakes. We got this whole croc hunter image of Australia of like this dangerous place. But then I'm sure people over there see shows about us about Alaska and it's like, "Oh my God, Grizzly Bears and Polar Bears," and all this stuff. It's like we just have this obsession with how dangerous nature is. It's like, man, it is, if you don't know how to coexist with it, but we know.   Mason: (39:48) That's interesting. Even just here in Byron, it's like even city slickers, I grew up in the city, always coming to the beach. Most times I'd be coming and visit here, which is now in my home. You're going to see a brown snake go across the path on your way to the beach in one way or another. You're going to find these red back spiders, and you're going to have huntsmen in your house. People go, "Holy shit, that's a huntsman" and even a city slicker, you're like, "Yeah, that's fine. They're okay as long as they're on the wall, his name's Pete, he's a friend." That's something I do appreciate about Australia. There's certain pockets through Maine and Connecticut that you can see especially seeing New Zealand, there's this ensconced connection to the natural world. As we know if you leave even the tiniest gap, nature's going to start creeping in, and then it's going to be easy to repopulate your in a world with those connections. That low level anxiety is insane.   Mason: (40:51) I mean just here, the amount of like distinction we need to make around people going like, "Right, I read that reishi is really good for anxiety, so I take reishi." It's like, well, let's take a couple of steps back. We're completely stepping out of this, "I've got a problem give me a pill," mentality, and we need to create this fabric of a personal culture and a family culture. That can, as you said, it's like, it might be this seemingly like rough, wild world, but when you do step into it, it's this inner cushioning, and this inner easing that you have because you've gained a genuine connection.   Mason: (41:30) When you were just talking about like, I assume is survivor just then, and having our experience of being able to survive through Bear Grills or through Tom surviving the next day. That's virtual reality. We're talking about the goggles coming on and us tapping out. It's on. It's a pivotal point not to get sensationalist about it, but most of us as we will be in most times of our lives, life is on and then we're at pivotal points most of the time. We do have really big choices and opportunities to take with our personal culture right now.   Daniel: (42:03) Bigger and bigger choices coming very soon. I'd like to talk about that a second. I want to add one more piece, which is in the raw food culture, which I think a lot of people don't understand how interwoven the raw food culture kinda got what psychedelic drugs too. Because those two things became very interwoven.   Mason: (42:22) Massively.   Daniel: (42:23) Massively. That culture started to get a little... those medicines are so powerful. Abused you can get pretty far out on a limb with them in your thinking. Things will feel extremely real to you that have basis and truth, but maybe aren't actually functional out in the world always. Pieces of truth. Sometimes things are true implicitly but not explicitly. It's true that we're all one internally, implicitly. Explicitly there are people who will kick your door down and hold you at gunpoint, and kill your family sometimes. Hate to say it, but that happens it's happening right now somewhere. Yet we're also all one.   Daniel: (43:08) What's happening in the explicit world and what's happening in the implicit world, they're not always the same. It's like that with the medicines you can get far out in your thinking like that the implicit reality you're experiencing that those medicines open you to is the explicit world, so you can get a little bit confused. I was thinking of just now as we were talking about a book series that some of the friends of mine in that culture were reading. I just know the name of the first book was Anastasia. Do you know these books?   Mason: (43:37) Absolutely. There's Anastasia and the other channeling texts.   Daniel: (43:44) These books people who aren't aware it's like they come out of Russia I believe, or at least they claim to and their stories about this culture in Russia where maybe in Siberia or something, where these people are living in like pure harmony with animals and with nature. All these really interesting stories. Well people I knew were taking those as anthropological reports. They were believing that those were true stories, and that this was anthropology. I would try to stop and say, “Hey listen, there are actual people scientists called anthropologists who study indigenous peoples on their landscape and this stuff is bullshit that you're reading. It's fairy tales. It's not real.” That's not real. People would be aggressively angry with me. They wanted that to be real. They wanted to know that squirrels were bringing Anastasia her nuts.   Daniel: (44:32) They wanted that stuff to be real. On one end, you have people who think nature is this ultra-dangerous place where around every corner something's about to gobble you up and you need to hide in your home. On the other side you have people who are like... I've been studying bear attacks lately because I'm around a lot of bears and I'm just curious like, what happens? Why does it happen? It's interesting that you sometimes have people who are so on the other end that they'll actually provoke an animal attack on themselves because they believe like, "No, me and this bear are friends." It's like, man you can get confused on that side too. It's like the brown snake is not your enemy, but he's also not necessarily your friend. You coexist on the planet. You have different agendas and you try not to meet in a negative way, but you also don't try to unnecessarily hug him either.   Daniel: (45:24) Now, some people get away with it, right for a while. Like who is your homeboy out of Australia, Steve Erwin. Got away with it for a while and then he gets a sting ray stinger through his heart. It's like you also learn a respect for nature too when you're part of the food chain. Because you start to understand every time you kill an animal, you take an animal's life and you open that animal up and you see its insides you are met face to face with mortality. You're met very quickly face to face with what your organs look like, and how you're a made of meat too. That there are things that'll be just as happy to consume you whether they're microbiotic or macrobiotic. You're like, both things are true. Nature is a lot safer than a lot of people think, and nature can be also a lot colder than a lot of people think. There's some Buddhist thing going on here. It's like some middle path   Mason: (46:22) Even like with TCM and that's what we talk a lot about these theories, these Taoists theories and it seems very poetic and romantic and clinical as well. It's a Yin transforms Yang. Yin Yang Wuxing, Yin Yang and the five phases of energy, it doesn't go beyond this that we're fucking talking about right now. It's very basic. We can get out of our head with it and experience it, but how far do we go down that rabbit hole of the magical thinking when it comes to far out.   Mason: (46:58) That definitely was a bit of a... I could have kept on going down that world and stayed functional in my personal egoic inner knowing. That I know the reality of what's going on in this world and despite the fact that I know that it's not appropriate for me to talk about it, these people just are not tapped in. One day they'll wake up and realise what I know internally. You can go really far with it. I didn't go so far down with the psychedelics. I definitely had a few dieter's, and will continue to when I can find I can have some grounding in terms of the appropriateness of-   Daniel: (47:28) Has its place like any medicine has its place.   Mason: (47:31) Absolutely, and the calling. I feel like we all, some of us dive into it and then step back and mature in our approach and appropriateness.   Daniel: (47:42) Or accept the healing of the medicine and don't just go to the medicine all the time. Because sometimes you just hit it and hit it, and it's like, "Hey man, how about you take 20 years and integrate some of that?"   Mason: (47:53) I love that you went two decades with that as well. That's it. Because that's an appropriate amount of time to integrate it. Well and what's giving you the medicine? Is it your chop wood, carry water, meek, mundane, day to day. That's what Buddhism is anyway. You can keep chopping wood, keep carrying water, get a little pop, get enlightened for a second. Let it go. Keep fucking going.   Daniel: (48:14) We have this happening on an experiential level too. I want to tie that in there. You were talking before like about how far out you can get with something. Sometimes we need a litmus test, like a reality test to check. Have I gotten too far out? For me what that became was like, well can I actually feed myself? Let me try to explain. I was at Burning Man, the big party right in Nevada. It's pretty far out. This is over a decade ago, maybe about a decade ago. I'm there and everybody's vibe is like, "Oh, this is the new model of humanity. This is how we can live in harmony together." I'm looking around like, "No, you're on a lunar plateau right now. There's no food here." Like you're going to live this way you brought all your food. Here's a test, are we really a tribe? Okay, let's feed ourselves, can you?   Daniel: (49:14) Or are you super reliant on these external systems that you say you're destroying, but you're actually still completely like nursing off of it? I find like this is really fake. The same thing happens in the medicine circles to a degree too. "No we can just live like this forever." It's like, "Yeah, you're going to get up tomorrow and you're going to go to the supermarket." You say you're stepping away from the system with this stuff, but you're only doing it up here. But who's chopping the wood and who's carrying the water? That's what it's really about. Your enlightenment, if you're not chopping wood and carrying water, your enlightenment isn't integrated. That I think is what I love about hunting and gathering. It's my chopping wood, carrying water. It's how I make sure that it keeps my feet on the ground.   Daniel: (50:00) Because I have one of those brains that wants to take me up into the clouds all the time. That real airy sense of exploring ideas is what I get most excited about. It's that earthy groundedness of, "Okay, I'm going to go out today and get food, and it's going to be challenging, and it's going to take time, and I'm going to have to utilise. I'm going to get into that discomfort you were talking about. I'm going to come face to face with what I don't know." Sometimes it's hard because I don't know what somebody who's done this their whole life would know. I am forced back to the ground.   Daniel: (50:33) That is I think really important for some people because it's like they've cut loose all the ballasts and they've rocketed up to 70,000 feet, and from up there, they're not really contributing very much. They think they are by just being, man like, "I'm contributing my vibe." It's like, "Yeah why don't you come down here and carry some of this wood with us?"   Mason: (50:54) My absolute favorite conversation. For people that don't know what we're talking about, I've been there going like reading the Pleiadian channeling texts getting to this. It gets confusing when you go and hang out with some of the local mob, the indigenous mob, and they will point to the Pleiades and say, where do you come from? That's where we're from. We're from the Pleiades. Then you get these modern interpretations of some of the rock art and you see the Biami, creator Biami standing on what is possibly a rocket ship until you go fuck.   Mason: (51:30) There's some like hieroglyphs here and you go, "Right, these hieroglyphs show DNA, did the Pleiadians come down and seed our DNA here?" Then there's like a little depiction and a modern interpretation of a spaceship coming down and falling into those waters between like Gosford and Sydney. This exists, and you start going into this inner world and going, "This storytelling's got something to it. I'm going to make that my exact reality on the outside world, and that completely skyrockets you."   Daniel: (52:03) The people who are telling you that will also chase like a giant porcupine down and pull it out of the ground and butcher it and share it in the tribe. It's like they will chop wood and carry water. I'm way more open to hearing that stuff from somebody who can demonstrate that they have integrated it. That's one of the things about indigenous peoples around the world, is that they have creation stories, creation myths, or sometimes what they say are their histories too, that are pretty far out to us, but they can demonstrate the viability of their worldview through their ability to live sustainably on the earth.   Daniel: (52:37) But when people who are trying to demonstrate the validity of their worldview but can't do that, it's like, "Well, I'm pretty suspect. Go back, integrate so that you can actually live here in some sustainable way, then I'm more open to your ideas." What like an Aboriginal person from Australia has to say has a lot more merit to me because they've got 60, 70,000 years of proving it. They've proved it probably longer than just about anybody who left Africa. I'm all ears. Show us how. But when somebody comes from Burning Man like that and they're telling me that stuff. I'm like, "Man, you don't even know how to like do your own laundry, your mom's still doing it."   Mason: (53:18) I think we're talking about the difference between someone that's just like, it's that same escapism. I'm going to get these beliefs and I feel superior and I'm going to become a missionary to these-   Daniel: (53:31) That's super dangerous man. That's super dangerous when you start thinking like… That was one of the things that I had to face when I started to hunt and fish. Foraging a little less so that world's a little different. But learning to hunt and fish man, I had to go speak to men who had fathers a lot of the times. Because I grew up without a father so I'm part of that culture, which is so common now in the developed world, especially as we see the breakdown of the family structure. Now, with such an emphasis on personal freedom, we'll see more and more of that probably, unfortunately, right. A lot of hunting and fishing least here in North America is passed on patrilineally. You learn it from your dad or your uncles or something. If you have a break in that like I did, you don't learn it at all. That's not to say that women don't hunt and fish, but they tend to not be the ones who pass that knowledge on at least in the past.   Daniel: (54:29) I would have to go in front of men who I did not understand and they didn't understand me. It's like I'm showing up with my man bun and my five toed shoes, and I want to do everything alternative to how they do it, because I know my ways are better. They're like, "Yeah, well, we actually get this done." Again, it's that same thing I was talking about before. They would have these political ideas, they would have religious ideas, they would have social ideas that were like, I thought I was superior to. And over time, I realised, that's like a really interesting type of armor that I was wearing. I was using health practices and ideas of consciousness as a shield, so as not to have to interface with some of the pricklier parts of reality that I didn't like. The parts of me that wanted the Anastasia reality. These guys were like, "Well get the fuck out of here acting like that."   Daniel: (55:18) Slowly, I had to learn how to humble myself to people I had thought I was superior to. Then realise like, these are the people who can teach me. This has really, really turned me around in a big way. I needed this bad. I was pretty far out there, because getting on stages and talking to thousands of people and having a podcast and all that stuff where you get this little bit of internet celebrity and you think you're sort of a big deal. Then you realise like, well in your small town nobody knows what a podcast is, and they don't care. If you want to hunt with them, this is the conditions and this is the way they're going to let it happen. You're like, have to be meek and humble.   Daniel: (55:55) I mean that was hard, and it was so good. My bullshit meter has I don't know has moved several steps back towards center because it was way out there. My bullshit meter was more like, "Well if you don't know about like green juice and you don't know about coffee enemas, and you don't know about six day meditation retreats in silence, then you don't know anything." It's like, dude, here I was way off the mark.   Mason: (56:23) You're not paranoid about parasites all the time.   Daniel: (56:25) You're not worried about what they're doing [inaudible 00:56:27]. Now it's cool though, as I feel it's that third eye idea. It's like I've got a left eye and a right eye, and they are connected to different hemispheres and those brain hemisphere see the world in kind of opposite ways. One sees the world pretty analytically, and one sees the world pretty artistically. There's a merging in the center where you take those two worldviews and you bring them together. Well, I was spending all my time with just those right-brained people, and I was avoiding all those left brain people like they were wrong. Now I got a lot of those people in my life and they've brought balance to the other side, so that I feel now like I can walk a middle path. If you lose that, you might think you're on a middle path not realising you're all the way to one side or the other because you've lost the contrast.   Daniel: (57:17) Now I've got these people who are some of my very best and closest allies and friends, who are not people I would have necessarily connected with before, but they have opened my world up to things that I didn't know what I was missing in my life. I haven't jettisoned all the other stuff I've just for every far out idea you need some earthy idea to balance it and counter oppose it. That's really important. What we're seeing right now, it's probably a very different political landscape in Australia than it is here in the States right now. But I'm sure from the outside you can see what's happening here, which is like this soft civil war, this cold civil war that's happening here with these oppositional ideas. I get frustrated because we call one left wing and call one right wing. I'm always like, "Man, every plane I see has like both wings."   Daniel: (58:02) That's how it flies. You cut one off, like, "No, we're just going to be the left wing plane." It's like we'll crash and vice versa we're just the right wing. It's like you need both. They're supposed to keep each other in balance. What's happening now is they're saying, no, only this or only this. So similarly, this is a holistic, and what's cool about that is just every mystery teaching ever is always this. Whatever place you look where there's a mystery teaching, it talks about these two oppositional forces that bring each other into, and finding that balance point in the center. I think when you have this hunting gathering component, it gives a platform for exploring consciousness in a way that you never get too far off balance.   Mason: (58:47) Dude, and that's why I love your work so much. I mean, when someone would go like, "Hey, so what does Vitalis do?" It's like, "Well, I'm going to tell you all the things." It's at some point it's experiential. What you're talking about is holding that consistent ground of integration and sharing, for lack of a better word, principles in and around these hardcore ideas that can be applied actually to your life. But that's why, if you are going to the supermarket, if you're going to farmer's markets, if you're doing a little bit of foraging, it doesn't really matter if you listen to the podcast. The WildFed podcast I've dug into a little bit, I'm really enjoying it so far. But the show's relevant wherever you're at, and you'll really get that. It's like, yes, it is absolutely about the hunting and foraging and the fishing.   Mason: (59:34) But no matter where you're at, it's not just this bullshit idea of like, "Yeah but it can work for anybody. "It is because underlying are principles that you can… Everything you've just talked about nailed it. For someone like myself that is fanatical and does shoot off into the heavens quite often as well, that's been a nice stable ground. It helps, kind of, me feel comfortable in the direction that I'm at. I always have people coming towards me who have cracked out in one particular identity and they're trying to integrate. It's interesting trying to explain what that is. I really, really appreciate that. I'm sure it gets sung a lot, but being there and sharing authentically to help us continue to integrate and not go into the excesses that can cause pathology when we are having these beautiful intention to become healthy, that's really appreciated.   Daniel: (01:00:31) We are in that time where people, like, pathology around every corner right now. We have to be really careful. There's never been a more confusing time in history. I feel like the fundamental thing that's going to be, I mentioned it earlier, I feel like big choices are coming. Because pretty soon the distinction between reality and augmented reality and virtual reality are going to get so gray, it's going to be so difficult to sort out, not for us, man, we grew up in reality. But the next generation of kids are going to grow up in augmented reality and the next generation of kids are going to grow up in a virtual world.   Daniel: (01:01:08

  Let's talk about burnout amongst medical students... On this week's episode of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry we follow up last week's discussion with Kessy Joseph with another fourth-year medical student, Aprylle Thompson, MS4. Aprylle was born in Jamaica and decided to pursue medicine after her aunt was diagnosed with the crippling disease of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Today she talks to us about how her experience with burnout has affected her as a medical student & offers tips not only for medical students but physician as well. Text LUNCHLEARNPOD to 44222 to join the mailing list. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and share the episode with a friend or family member. Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, Spotify Sponsors: Lunch and Learn Community Online Store (code Empower10) Pierre Medical Consulting (If you are looking to expand your social reach and make your process automated then Pierre Medical Consulting is for you) Dr. Pierre's Resources - These are some of the tools I use to become successful using social media My Amazon Store - Check out all of the book recommendations you heard in the episode Links/Resources: Facebook Instagram Social Links: Join the lunch and learn community – https://www.drberrypierre.com/joinlunchlearnpod Follow the podcast on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/lunchlearnpod Follow the podcast on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/lunchlearnpod – use the hashtag #LunchLearnPod if you have any questions, comments or requests for the podcast For More Episodes of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry Podcasts https://www.drberrypierre.com/lunchlearnpodcast/ If you are looking to help the show out Leave a Five Star Review on Apple Podcast because your ratings and reviews are what is going to make this show so much better Share a screenshot of the podcast episode on all of your favorite social media outlets & tag me or add the hashtag.#lunchlearnpod If you are looking to help the show out Leave a Five Star Review on Apple Podcast because your ratings and reviews are what is going to make this show so much better Share a screenshot of the podcast episode on all of your favorite social media outlets & tag me or add the hashtag.#lunchlearnpod Download Episode 126 Transcript Episode 126 Transcript... Introduction Dr. Berry: And welcome to another episode of the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. I'm your host, Dr. Berry Pierre, your favorite Board Certified Internist. Founder of drberrypierre.com as well as a CEO of Pierre Medical Consulting. Helping you empower yourself for better health with the number one podcast for patient advocacy, education and affirmation. This week we bring you an episode with student doctor Aprylle Thompson who's a fourth year medical student. She again continues this discussion that we have on Physician Burnout and really more aptly medical student burnout. And she was very poignant during her interview just talking about some of the trials and tribulations that she had to face as a medical student. Some of the expectations of a medical student that I think she will agree with me as well, is really at a line for what we shouldn't be expecting of medical students and she really asked the question, why don't we include medical students in this discussion of physician burnout. The discussion that is definitely had when we're talking about attendings that people who are in their career. About feeling signs of being down at a price where for some reason we don't have this discussion when we talk about the medical students and she really wants to make a point and what I love about her interview today is that please think about the medical students again and remember that we're all human. And if we're all human, understanding that not only are the distressors that the residents and the attendings are going to feel, you best believe the medical students have their own pervasive feelings of concern. So I want you to again, check out this week's episode with Aprylle Thompson, a fourth year medical student talking about medical student burnout. Let me know what you thinking. If you have not had a chance remember subscribe to the podcast. Leave us a five star review and tell one friend to tell a friend about this amazing discussion we're having here on the Lunch and Learn with Dr. Berry. Episode Dr. Berry: Alright Lunch and Learn community just heard another amazing introduction for a number two, so this is actually gonna be our second medical student on a topic at hand that is extremely important. That is extremely, I guess becoming very popular now with this discussion of Physician Burnout. And because of the matter at hand of how we started a series out, we really wanted to make sure we reached out and not only talked to just physician, but we wanted to talk to residency medical students. So I'm thankful that we got a chance to talk to Aprylle Thompson today, who is a fourth year medical student who's going to be gracing us today in helping us with our discussion. Aprylle, thank you. Aprylle Thompson: Glad. Thank you for having me. Dr. Berry: So Aprylle, I always did the introduction. I have a lot of people who love to skip right to this portion here. For someone who skipped through and they say you know what, who's this Aprylle Thompson? Tell a little bit about yourself that may not even be typically in your bio and always ask, especially since you're a medical student. Let's talk about your motivation for going to medical school, your career aspiration goals and all that good stuff. Aprylle Thompson: Well, I'm a fourth year medical student from Ross University School of Medicine, which located in Barbados. My interest in medicine started from my junior year in high school. The reason being was because my aunt was unfortunately diagnosed with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. So my family had to care for her around the clock and as she deteriorated she became more dependent on us. And we have to learn about the process and what to do. And because of that, my interest was piqued and I wanted to learn more about medicine and treat patients on a more intimate level. Dr. Berry: I love that. And it's so interesting, especially for a lot of us who get into the field that a lot of times our first experience of medicine is a family member who really makes us appreciate the system at hand and really helps put us in that situation where like, you know what, I can be like that doctor. I always tell people about Dr. Gaston who was my pediatrician growing up. And I just used remember thinking like, oh my God, one day I want to be like that Dr. Gaston because I just seen the hearts he was able to touch with just his interaction of being a physician. So we were talking today about Physician Burnout, which is again, especially for those who are in Lunch and Learn community. A topic that's getting much fanfare as of recently to the point where they're even classifying it as ICD 10 codes and all of these things there that are really trying to make it seem as popular as it is. And when we had Dr. Nicole on the podcast, she talked about how this phenomena isn't like a new issue. It's just gotten came out to light with that aspect of people were really being concerned about the onus of being quote unquote burnt out. And what I want to talk about today is really like how are not only physicians, but really how are people who are on the front lines, which our medical students. What's that onus like? What's their thought process? I like to start out just talking about as a medical student, what are some typical stressors that you face on a day to day, month to month basis just being a medical student? Aprylle Thompson: I believe the few stressors that we usually have, well number one is we have to impress everyone. By can go for the CEO of the hospital down to the garbage man. Not just that, as a medical student, sometimes we don't feel as if we know enough material to impress people. So we have that battle that we deal within ourselves. And then we have to also learn how to balance everything. Connect all the pieces together. So what I like to say is that we feel as if we really want to be at the table with everyone, but although we have the knowledge to get close enough, we're still not there yet. And then when you put in the hierarchy of medicine and what goes on in medicine, it just complicates everything altogether. Dr. Berry: And what was very interesting about that was, especially those who may infer, when we talk about the physician who is typically one who, again I say this all the time, that they're in a job where they're supposed to be correct 100% of the time. But a lot of times people, people don't realize too, to get to that point we face almost a daily struggle of I don't know enough. And I think and you said it right on the head, it's really bad in medical schools where we, I always say especially in on in a GME side, we train backwards, right? Where if you're a second year medical student, I start pimping you on stuff that the third year medical student knows. And if you're third year, I started pimping you on stuff for the fourth. For some reason, every time you get to a certain level, we expect you to know a level higher than you're actually at. Aprylle Thompson: Yeah, I've seen that. Dr. Berry: So question, as a medical student, and even when you're in the premed stage where some of the stresses that you've been facing, where they expected? Were you like, yeah, I'm probably going to have to deal with this type of stressors? Or was there anything like, whoa, I didn't realize medical students had it like that? Aprylle Thompson: Honestly, before I started medical school, I thought it would've been a walk in the park as ludicrous as that sounds. I thought it would like I would wake up every day. I'll go to the hospital. Helps sick patients. Get them back to their normal baseline and then go home happy. That's what I thought. I didn't understand that some days when it rains it will pour. And my thought process, what they're being sunshine and roses everywhere was obviously wrong. Dr. Berry: That’s so true. Do you have any family members in the health field prior to pursuing it? Aprylle Thompson: No. I was the first one. Dr. Berry: Same here. It's funny because most of my family, they all went like the business route and manager route. I was literally the only one who was even on the premed side. Didn't have any mentors on that side. I think it's so true that when you don't know what you supposed to know, sometimes kind of walking in the dark. I mean, a perfect example, I didn't realize until I was a, let's say a sophomore and somewhere undergrad. There was this test that you had to take before you went into medical school. I remember just walking into the career center and when Ms. Anderson, shout out to Ms. Anderson at Florida State. When she asked me, hey, what do you want to do? I want to go to medical school. Oh, have you been studying for MK? I'm like, what is that? Just to give people an idea that it's not uncommon for people who want to pursue a goal, but because they don't have the mentorship dare that they need to really be walking into, almost like the firing squad, but it kinda is. Especially in our system where we don't like to talk and we'll talk about that later too as far as how older physicians and people who have kind of been there, done that, don't really reach back enough to like say, hey, you know what you're going to get in medical school and you're going to have to deal with some of these issues that you may not be ready for. So we just want to give you a heads up. Aprylle Thompson: I think apart from that, with my id of the walk in the park, I think it's also the fact that TV shows don't do it justice either like Grey's anatomy. You think it's so happy and it is fun 24/7 but it's really not like that. Dr. Berry: Grey's anatomy, Scrub, ER, all of these. Yeah, trust me. Yeah. And they still funny. My wife can't stand watching those times shows with me because I'm like, I guess it was like I didn't need mumbling under my breath and I'm like, okay, alright. Sure that’s how it goes. For some of the stresses that you know that the typical medical student faces and then I asked especially because Ross University is an international medical school. What was that experience like? Not only going to medical school but going to medical school in an entire different country. Aprylle Thompson: It was honestly a great experience. But I think I have a little bit of leeway because I was born in Jamaica and my family is from Jamaica. So I felt like I was at home. I was in paradise. Dr. Berry: I love it because when you hear of the international medical graduate, I know a lot of times they're saying, well you're going to a medical school outside of the country, because we'd had even taken the fact that there are people weren't actually born in a country who are also going into that school as well too. So that definitely, I love that aspect of it. Now, as a medical student, what were some of the stresses that you typically faced? And just going from first year medical student all the way up in your last year now? Aprylle Thompson: Correct. My biggest stressor would have been balance. I mean, while I was in high school and college balance was a lot easier. But in medical school you have to learn that people will not spoon-feed you. You have to learn how to grow up and figure things out. And I had to learn how to balance my friends, my family, my social life and of course medicine. I believe that being a medical student or even a physician, it makes you realize that having just 24 hours in a day is not enough because everyone is pulling you in different directions and you're only one person. So you have to figure out how to break that up and split that up amongst everyone. Dr. Berry: I love about that. I think sometimes and it happens a lot, especially when you're a medical student, and I say, I always use a term like life be lifeing. Stuff is still happening, but you're in this, almost like this cocoon of being in medical school and having all of the pressures or responsibilities placed upon you. Sometimes you can't even really enjoy the typical experience of someone who normally would, you as a 21, 22, 23, 24 year old, in that range, especially in your 20s. I tell people my twenties were gone. My twenties were highlighted by me studying. And just what it is when you decide to embark on this journey. For sure, I think as a medical student, just having those pressures, not only the inside pressures that the school itself, places on this. But it's the outside pressures of friends and family and just life in general, that are still going on because unfortunately they don't pause while you're in it. Now would you say, especially with some of the stresses that you had to face and some of the stresses that medical students typically have to face, what would you say, from a preparation standpoint, what was the position of your school? And the reason why I ask that is because when we speaking with Dr. Nicole, she talked about the fact that as a physician, as an attending physician, the systems are in place for us to deal with physician burnout. So, now that we bring it all the way back to the medical student, I wonder what that situation is like as well too? How well would you say you were prepared for some of the stresses that you had to face over your time in school, by your school? Aprylle Thompson: I believe my school realized that burnout was increasing amongst physicians as well as medical students. So the clinical student affairs at my school, they promote something that was called a self-care day. And with that, that's what made the day, students are able to focus from their clinical rotations as well as within the classroom. They're able to take that day off and they can work on their mental health, emotional health, and even physical health. So that's one way my school did it. I know other schools love to incorporate therapy in which students are able to have maybe 30 to 45 minute sessions with a therapist and talk to them about what's bothering them and ways that they can plan to help improve burnout or whatever issues the student might be facing at that moment in time. Dr. Berry: I love that especially because it seems like it's coming from the top above where they're recognizing like, hey, our students are being affected by the pressures of burnout. And I talk about burnout a lot when we do this general discussion. When you say the Self-Care Day and you're able to decompress and you just get away from it. How was that one day like for you? Did you feel like it was enough? Do you feel like it was a start for things that come? How would you grade the actions of your school? Aprylle Thompson: I believe it was very beneficial because usually it comes in at the right time. Usually the day before I'm at the peak of my stress. And just knowing that the following day I can stay home, sleep in and relax or even just go to the gym. And I could just figure out ways how I can start my week or what I can do differently to help decrease rate at which I'm burning out. Dr. Berry: Now I got to ask, especially being in this stage of a graduate medical education director and really an attending in itself. Was there ever any time where your attendings either notice or even worse, probably didn't notice some of the burnout associated symptoms in the medical students? Was there something that essentially had to come from the top? Ross essentially had to say like, hey, give these guys a day off because you guys are at work. What would you say in that matter? Aprylle Thompson: I believe students spoke to Ross about it because sometimes attendance can be very oblivious because if faculty have to deal with their own issues and what's going on with their patients, sometimes medical students are overlooked. But luckily for me, my program at Ross University, they're able to identify the issues that we have and whenever we speak, they listen. So I've been very fortunate to be a part of this institute that really cares about their students to help fix the problem that's on arise. Dr. Berry: I love it. And we hedge that a lot. But when you hear the term physician burnout and understanding that you're a medical student. So you're, a few months is about to be a physician who I guess walking into this field where this aspect of physician burning out is very real. What do you think about it when you hear the term? Aprylle Thompson: I believe the term physician burnout, it's very synonymous to the word overworked. So when it happens, we don't perform our best and when we can't perform our best, we're not able to treat patients to the best of our ability, which will increase the rate at which medical error occurs. Dr. Berry: I love it and I think you really hit it on the head because again, like I said not I have a problem with the term physician burnout, but I do think it's something that's masking problems at hand. And sometimes I feel like, especially when you tie the phrase of physician burnout, you're putting the onus on the doc. But not putting the onus on all of the other factors that got the doctor to that point. It just like, oh well, Berry burnt out, that's holidays. Berry burnt out, not realizing, well Berry burnt out because the hours are too long. Very burnt out because he couldn't take care of his patients the way he wanted to take care of his patients. Very burnt out because the frustration of maybe not getting paid enough will continue to grow, all of these different reasons. But when it's titled Physician Burnout, all you hear is the physician is the onus and the physician is the responsible party associated with it. I'd definitely for sure love that definition because I think it's so true and it really cast light on a system that again, it has seemed to now trickle down and I'm not sure if it's was purposeful or I'm not sure if it was just a cumulative effect. But something that's kind of purpose all the way down to now the fact that you could be in training and still experiencing these symptoms of a burnout. Now as a medical student, I asked, you're a fourth year, you're about to be out of here. But was there ever times, especially in the mid before to self-care days and those things in that regard, there ever times you're like, yeah you know what? I'm feeling it right now. I guess this may be a little too much for me at the moment. Aprylle Thompson: I believe that time for me was while I was studying for my board examination specifically step 2 CK and while I was studying for my boards, I was also working in the ICU. So as you already know, the hours are very long. Dr. Berry: When you say ICS, oh alright. Aprylle Thompson: Yes, very long hours. So I had to balance trying to impress my attendance because as a medical student you want to be on the forefront. You want to show that you know your stuff. Apart from pressing my attendance after, make sure I impress my residents, whether that's just, I don't know, doing scutwork for them or being around the patient 24/7. Reporting back to them as soon as possible. I have to always be on my tip toes to make sure that I'm viewed in a positive light. Because as a medical student, your residents are usually they advocate for you. So if you impressed them, you can work your way up. And while trying to do that, I had to also learn as much as I can in the ICU. Because ICU is a whole another world, a different ballgame in medicine. And then when I left the hospital and I went home at about 8:00 or 9:00 PM, I had to still pull out my book to study until about one or two o'clock in the morning and then go out by four or 4:45 AM to get to the hospital by six o'clock and that cycle continued. And after a while I started to feel myself burning out and I couldn't really tell my resident or my attendant because as a medical student, we're not allowed to feel that way because we're not officially doctors yet. And while I was feeling burnout at that stage, I didn't even in the fact that I still had to eat, I still had to cook my meals for the week. I still have to go to the gym, do my laundry. But with everything like that, it's very tough to talk to people about it. Dr. Berry: And most importantly, you still got sleep. And especially Lunch and Learn community, I really want you to have to really pay attention to this story because it is not an uncommon story. First of all, again, I'm an internist. I'm a hospitalists. I take care of patients all day in a hospital. But I 100% agree when Aprylle talks about the fact that ICU is a, just a different ball game, a different beast, a different mindset that it takes to really take care of the sickest of the sickest patients. I can 100% agree with that. And just this understanding, and she touched on a couple points where she talked about one, the hierarchy aspect of it, where the attendings who are there, you have the residents who are there and then you have the medical student who is there and understanding that the work that you have to put in to impress not only the resident but also the attending, on top of juggling effect that this is I'm assuming this is your first time in ICU, right? Understanding that I'm having to learn on the fly while impressing all of the people who are above me. And because I may quote unquote medical, I've got to say quote unquote, but because I'm a medical student, no one recognizes that I can also be burnt out. Is definitely a quandary that a lot of our medical students I realize are facing, in this aspect of quote unquote training. And again, we shouldn't want to train our physicians to have to deal with that level of burden or stress. Because trust me in a light that when you're an attending, I could tell you wholeheartedly just so you can see some type of a light at the end of the tunnel. That level of work isn't there, but it's a different type of stress that you're going to be walking into. Aprylle Thompson: Yeah. You guys live the good life. Dr. Berry: Right. So it's one of those things where I'm becoming very keen now, especially with physician burnout, being discussed on a more and more aspect of it. Understanding that yes, as a physician. Because again, I used to be naive, I used saying, well when they talk about physician burnout, it was people who've been in the game, 10, 15 years and they were just tired. But then when I started walking around and I'm at a residency, let's see, five years now. So I'm five years out of residency and I'm seeing colleagues who are around my age exhibiting and talking about they're tired and done. So you can be five years out of training and already experiencing those symptoms definitely something needs to occur and change. When you're doing the ICU and you are recognizing like hey, I'm not sleeping. I'm not eating. I'm not, you're just probably not talking to friends. I'm not doing the things I needed to do to take care of my own. The support system that was there. Can you talk a little bit about it? Is this where the self-care day really came into play and really helped you or what was happening during that time? Aprylle Thompson: I believe I've been very blessed to have a big support system, specifically my family. From the moment I told you I wanted to go to medical school, they've been there with me from day one, whether if I had a bad day, if I had a happy day. For me, whenever I leave the hospital, the first set of people I call are actually my parents. We talk about my day, I try to replay how did they went. If it was good, they're happy. If it was bad, we talk about ways in which I can improve it tomorrow. And apart from talking to my parents, my fiancé has been a great support system as well. Whenever I've vent my frustration to him about what's going on in the hospital. He listens and he listens very closely and he helps me think about ways that I can distress ways that I can improve myself for tomorrow. So in that way, I don't bring the low from the previous day to the next day and it makes me feel 10 times better when I'm able to vent to my parents and my fiancé about what happened. Dr. Berry: Talk about this especially I want to hit you a follow up question. Is your fiancé in medicine or health or outside of it? Aprylle Thompson: It's funny you asked me that. A lot of people love to ask that. No, he's not. Dr. Berry: And the reason why I asked especially because you talked about how understanding he was is that sometimes a lot of our friends outside of our bubble don't really comprehend. The level of stress that we're dealing with. I definitely want to say you're very fortunate to have that person who can understand like hey, nope, she's on ICU this month. Yeah. I'm probably not gonna see her as much as I want this month. I'm not gonna make her feel guilty for not seeing her as much as I want this month. Those types of things that can build upon a relationship or hurt a relationship when there is that communication disconnect. And especially having parents as well too. Like I say, because having someone to say like, oh my God, today was crazy. And just to be able to talk about it is definitely something. Because one, our typical conversations. We just can't really have all willy-nilly. Unless you're in the field, no one's gonna really understand. I had to see 40 patients a day and being served for 10. Then I got really understand it. But if they're able to be sympathetic to the thoughts in feelings, it really helps you and really helps leave this stress that is usually there when you walk into that building. Whether it’s a clinic, whether it’s a hospital. But be able to go home and have that stress behind. Aprylle Thompson: Exactly and that's why I think it's great that he's not in the medical field as well because when I bent my frustration to him, I just vent. And then that's that. I don't have to bring work home every single day. Dr. Berry: I love it. We talked about just the system in general, of just our medical training. And again, I have some personal thoughts about just training and especially in only being, going through the process of being a medical student and a medical resident right now and attending, but also now being decided where I'm also training as physician, be attendings as a program director. What do you think about just our system in general? Is it our system that's really set up for people to burn out? And especially when we talk all the way down to the medical student, is it just set up so that people are gonna burn out just because the way we do our things? Aprylle Thompson: I believe so because in this system with medicine, not all position, but a lot of physicians, medical students are taught by intimidation and sometimes we're not allowed to feel tired or we're not allowed to know something. And if that happens, sometimes we can be scrutinized by physicians. And the culture of medicine with that, I hope it changes sooner than later and students overwork themselves because you want to impress everyone. So we sacrifice our mental health, our emotional health, and even our physical health just to prove a point that we are good enough and that we are equal to everyone else. Dr. Berry: I love that. I can tell you that's going to be a quote somewhere. We're going to definitely quote something up somewhere. I love the word intimidation because it is such a word that unfortunately does not stop. It's one of those things where I remember being a premed student and feeling like if I'm studying with this person next to me, this person may be able to take my spot in medical school. So I had to be fierce, be tougher to try to get that quote unquote last spot. And then it's the feeling that does not change when you get to medical school. Where not only are you feeling the intimidation from your colleagues and I always joke this because especially in medical, I used to think we're going to be colleagues, I'm not your like enemy. They still bring those kinds of same types of feelings into, that atmosphere. And then you walk into a system, especially for those who may know Lunch and Learn community, what typically occurs depending on the school, but some schools differ is that your first couple of years of medical school, you are essentially doing a lot of the bookwork, laying down the foundations from a basic science aspect. And then your last couple of years you're actually in the hospitals, in the clinics and awards, seeing patient direct patient care on a more, a full time basis. And for those who may not know Lunch and Learn community. But what happens is once you get into the latter years where you're a lot more direct patient care and then you're having to deal with residents or medical attendings who were either brought up differently or brought up in a certain way and don't really know how to get their point across without making you feel like you're lesser. This is a very common problem for a medical students. And again you talked about the pressures, not only the pressures of board exam, but the pressures of oh, if I don't perform and resident don’t liked me, they gave me a bad grade and they tell the attendant to give me a bad, all of these things here that they have to perform on a day to day basis, 24/7. And that's a pressure that I always tell people most career professionals do not have to deal with the pressure that the physician has to deal with. So just even make that micro and think about the pressures that the medical student has to deal with and understanding every single day they feel they're being graded and if one day right, they're human. Because I think that sometimes gets lost. If one day they're human and aren't as enthusiastic as they were the day before yesterday, they can be docked points for it. I think especially when it comes to physician burnout, because I think a lot of times I tell people when you have a physician who's burnt out and understand that they're not just gonna flat out quit, they're going to keep working. They’re going to keep seeing patients, they're not going to do it effectively. But they're going to keep on doing it. So when we talk about physician burnout and then what it can ultimately lead to, I think a very important topic and one that really I think probably should get much more fanfare than it is just the aspect of the physicians even committing suicide. And the fact that we don't have many people who are going into medicine as much as we did any more. Just this shortage that's around everywhere in that regards. What do you think about just those aspects of physician burnout, physician suicide, which is extremely high and as well as just the overall aspect that less people are going into medicine? Aprylle Thompson: Well, I believe in the rate at which physician suicides occurred. It's definitely at an all-time high. But I think for these people, it crosses the line of abuse. Reason being is because some people don't know how to distress. They don't know how to take what they're given, switch it up, and then find a way to relieve themselves. And that's because in the culture of medicine, we can't talk to each other because we're seeing as if we're less than or we're not able to keep up with the rest of the crowd. So because of that, we keep everything bottled up until we can't take it any more than fortunately some people they commit suicide because of that, because that's their way of getting away from all of the stress that they're dealing with within the workplace. Dr. Berry: Very poignant. I think you hit a home on another point. I mean, is sad is that physicians, we don't really talk to each other like that for that fear of being seen as less capable to do. And again, if you took the physician title away from us and someone just told you like, hey, I'm feeling down, I'm feeling bad about myself, I'm feeling depressed. People would automatically know, okay, this is the type of steps you need to do. But people wouldn't say that, okay, you're a less of a blank because of it. Well, for some reason when it comes to physicians and the feel that aspect of burning out, right? That automatically goes to the top of the head like oh, people are gonna think I'm less of a physician and I can't take care of the patients like I used to be able to take care of because of, I'm actually acknowledging this issues that I'm going through. Aprylle Thompson: It's funny you say that because I believe as physicians, sometimes we dub ourselves as being super human because even the burnout could just be from ourselves too. Because we actually look at one another as if we're greater than thou and we're not allowed to not know something. We're not allowed to feel tired. Because even sometimes the outside world, they don't see that. But we put it on ourselves and maybe if we can change that where it's okay to not feel fine, it's okay to let loose a little bit. Maybe that can help our culture a little bit. And the rate at which physician burnout occurs. Dr. Berry: Amazing. For the medical students, because again, you're almost added there. But if you could look back and say like, hey, if you want to, and I hate to say avoid it because it sounds like the system that we're in is going to be very difficult to avoid it. But if you want to be able to deal and manage some of the stressors and the symptoms of medical student burnout. Because I think that's the term that we need to really call it. What tips would you give to say like, hey, if you could do this and if you could do that, that could help you in the long run? Aprylle Thompson: Well I have a few tips. For one is, destress as much as possible, however you want to destress. If it's going to the movies or even a book, do what makes you happy. Secondly, I believe exercising is very important because as we all know, you'll have an increase in endorphins which will make you very happy and if you eat healthy, that can also change your health. And it can also make you feel better about yourself. Funny story is, I'm actually someone who loved burgers amongst other people. And after a while when you keep eating that you don't feel your best. But then whenever I changed my diet and I incorporate more fruits and vegetables, it's amazing how much clarity I have, how it improves, how I feel much happier. And I'm able to focus more. So if we're able to just exercise and maintain a healthy diet that can really help in the way that we react to burnout and how much we're able to tolerate before we get to that stage. Dr. Berry: Amazing tips. Before I let you go. Before we get you out of here, first of all, it has been absolutely amazing and your insight has definitely been something that I think is needed. Because I think is eye opening. I think as we continue to really highlight this phrase physician burnout, I think we need to make sure that we don't just start looking for problems once they become an attending and understand that a lot of these issues and a lot of the lack of support for these issues are happening as early as the second we start being a medical student. Before I let you go tell us about, especially because you're a medical student, so I love to hear about just your plans. What's about to happen? Where are you trying to match? Let's give all that stuff there so we can make sure we're on the lookout for you. Aprylle Thompson: So currently I'm applying for the 2020 match. Going through the hectic motion of getting my application done before September 15. I know a very big day. So I'm from Orlando, Florida. I hope to stay home, be with my family, but if I get matched anywhere else, I'll happily take a position there. So I love all aspects of medicine and as of right now, I'm loving internal medicine as well as general surgery. Dr. Berry: Okay. That's as interesting. I could tell you, I’m an internist right? You don't want me to know OR and I realized that very quickly that you want me nowhere near to OR. I just didn't have the mindset of a surgeon. I just knew it. One of the most important things that I tell anybody is just knowing yourself. Understanding like, oh, I like medicine, but that's not just have medicine I like to be. And so very interested that internal medicine or surgery still in the bread basket for you. So as a program director, I obviously definitely wanna wish you good luck on this upcoming match. I hope you get to whatever this by you're going to get. Like I say, it's a very different, internal medicine or surgery so hope you get to wherever you want to get to. But I want to thank you for sobbing vital podcast and really helping educate Lunch and Learn community on all your endeavors. From a social media standpoint, where can people find you, follow you, track your journey if they wanted to track your journey? Aprylle Thompson: So you can follow me on Facebook at just my name, Aprylle Thompson or on Instagram @cheecah_med. And you could also follow me on Twitter. I don't tweet as often as I should @ Aprylle Thompson. I don't have snapchat though. Dr. Berry: Sure. Okay. Alright. Appreciate it. Remember Lunch and Learn community, we always put all of these links in the show notes so you don't have to write anything now real quickly. We'll make sure it's in the show notes so that you can just click and then go right to Aprylle s page. Aprylle again, thank you for joining the podcast today and you have an amazing day. Aprylle Thompson: Thank you for having me. You have a wonderful day as well. Download the MP3 Audio file, listen to the episode however you like.

In this episode, we're focused on advocacy - getting students motivated to speak up for themselves and change the world. We have so many brilliant voices who feel limited to the classroom, not realizing the power they hold. Particularly, we're going to look at how writing instruction lends itself to promoting student voices, featuring a variety of English educators, as well as authors, who recognize how important the Humanities are to promoting a flourishing democracy.Whenever I've attempted to rally my students up - to get them to stand up for what they believe in - I'm honestly not that successful. Certainly, there's some students who take command and advocate, but most shrug it off. That's not to say they don't care - students overwhelming care about the problems they see in our world...they just don't necessarily think they have the power to change it.There's so much untapped potential in today's youth - an entire generation of young adults who care about tolerance, acceptance, the Earth, and love. Yet schools rarely, if ever, want their students to engage in political discourse....to fight for what they believe in. It makes sense, given how political volatile the United States is, it isn't an advantageous position to have one's students on the news. However, these issues are core to what students find interesting and important, and seeing that relevance in their work...and most importantly, making the connection that their work is valuable, could literally change the world.Further, our classrooms are places of "rank and filing", which frankly is just a reflection of society itself. Our "merit-based" consumerist lifestyles don't lend themselves to positive, fulfilling lives, and schools are increasingly intertwined with the belief that success is framed by hoarding money and obtaining the perfect job. With so much focus on purely capitalist gains, it is no wonder that students feel they lack purpose. Plus, our unjust society contributes to most of our "on paper" problems in education - a lack of food, safety, or any safety net for our disadvantaged youth means we'll never find a human-centered education without reforming to make equitable communities. If educators aren't demanding political action to help impoverished families, then isn't all our work for nothing?The question then becomes twofold: 1) How can we encourage advocacy in schools among our student body, and is that advocacy appropriate? and 2) What is the educator's role in advocating for their students and communities?GUESTS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCEBryn Orum, director of Rise Up and Write, a summer writing program centered around advocacy in Madison, Wisconsin, who used to teach high school English and further, co-founded Clark Street Community School, who our previous guest, Bennett Jester, attends.J.J. Burry (Jess Houser), an English educator at a small public school in Texas, who is an aspiring writer and advocate of writer’s notebooks.John Warner, an author, editor, speaker, and professor focused on writing instruction. Recently, John's work has focused on writing instruction through Why They Can't Write and its companion book, The Writer's Practice.Stephanie Hurt, an English educator at Brodhead High School in Brodhead, Wisconsin. Stephanie is a teacher leader for the National Writing Project's College, Career, and Community Ready Writer's Program and The Greater Madison Writing Project.Dr. Richard Wilkinson, an accomplished social epidemiologist, author, and advocate who served as Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham. He is co-founder of The Equality Trust and was awarded the 2013 Silver Rose Award from Solidar for championing equality. His co-author and significant other, Kate Pickett, wrote The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, which both focus on the across-the-board improvements of equitable societies.RESOURCESRise Up and Write (website, Facebook)Greater Madison Writing Project MediumJess Houser’s blogThe College, Career, and Community Writer’s ProgramHRP Book Review: Why They Can’t Write by John WarnerHRP Book Review: The Inner Level by Richard Wilkinson & Kate PickettDr. Richard Wilkinson’s TED TalkNCTE: Introduction to Writer’s NotebooksFURTHER LISTENINGS2 Highlight: Restoring Humanity to...Purpose (Changing the Focus of School)S2 Highlight: The Importance of Relationships w/ Monte Syrie See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If your sense of humor is as dark, sarcastic and nerdy as mine, you really need to follow @FakeThemePark on Twitter.  Announcements are made to theme park go'ers and employees of a theme park that doesn't exist.  Whenever I've done appearances at Busch Gardens, Disney or Universal, I'm shocked when I find an employee who hasn't heard of it.  Once they scroll through a few pages of tweets, they're hooked.  Theme parks always have to put that smiling face on that everything in the world is perfect, even if behind the scenes, the cast members are miserable and cursing their existence.  The tweets are written by former Universal Tour Guide Jason Ginsburg.  We talk about how the account started, his first famous follower, @FakeThemeParks biggest tweet, why he remained anonymous for years, the Twitter accounts Jason follows that crack him up, his tips when you go to real theme parks, and Fake Theme Park's new $5 eBook "If The Princess Rolls Her Eyes, Your Wish Will Come True."

What actually makes you happy? What brings you joy? Are you pursuing the things that make you happy? Have you ever thought about what your top priorities are? Whenever I've felt like my life wasn't where I wanted it to be, it was because I wasn't pursuing things that bring me joy. Hey did you like this show? I would love for you to subscribe and write a review on iTunes! My podcast grows when you do those two things! If you want to check out the website, you can go to www.talkhealthyto.me ! A huge thanks to my podcast editor for making this show sound so amazing! Stock media provided by AlumoMusic and www.Pond5.com.

This is a very special episode for DIY MFA Radio because it features a wonderful writer--and one of my writing heroes--Jane Yolen. Known as the "Hans Christian Andersen of America" Jane Yolen has written over 360 books. But what truly sets her work apart is her artristry and versatility. She has written in just about every genre imaginable, and for just about every type of reader. Whenever I've heard her speak, Jane Yolen offers the perfect blend of practical advice and pure inspiration. This podcast episode is no exception. I am overjoyed to share this episode with you today. For show notes and more information, visit DIYMFA.com/015.