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aenslem · 1 year ago

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This is PART II of the GIF tutorial.

Part I

In the part 1 i talked about all the settings I used to create this specific gif, adding some more of the same color balance, curves, levels and selective color the final result is

Could do, but not really what i want to. If you want to go with natural colors or smt, then yeah, it will do. But that's me and if I don't enhance blue I will probably die or smt.

I could use color balance to do it, or other tools, but I prefer using new fill layer - solid color. Choose the color you want.

You see, this gif does not have much movements and it will be easy to use fill layer and erase parts you don't want to. If you have a gif where character moves you will need to adjust it for each layer :\ But it's fun, just takes forever of your time.

I put it under adjustment layers and set blending mode to soft light.

there are blending modes if you don't know where they are, just press where 'soft light' is (by default you will have it on 'normal') and you will see them all. Play with them, you will love them

Now, the blue is BLUE. But his face also is blue. And for that we will choose 'brush tool', press 'D' so foreground/background colors are black and white. Depending on which layer you select it might be white and black, so you just swipe them so the black is on top. Then go and click on the white box near the color fill layer, erasing it can be restored after

Since I want his Spock's uniform be super blue and the background too, i just draw over his face.

Basically, by clicking this vector mask tool you can add those white boxes and erase using black color, or undo it by drawing over the image with white color. And vice versa, if the box turns to black it is invisible (ctrl+i) unless you use white and draw over it, by that you make parts of the layer visible.

I love vector masks, they are my best friends, yeah i don't really have friends *sad emoji*

But before saving or smt, play the animation, erase more if needed. At this point we have this (and I realized i did not reverse frames in the beginning, so i will fix it later)

Using vector masks you can change background color as well, if you want it different.

But also, you can change already this by those tools explained before, or hue and saturation. This blue is much easier to edit.

Play with the sliders, drag them from one point to another until you like the result. And if the background looks off for some, you can always add more tools and change settings to look pretty.

You might ask, why we went through all the tools and settings if we could just color it? :D a good question, but without it the result would look like

and while the blue is great, everything else looks not as good, and also, I wanted more blue.

So that's it, we have finished the gif!

Now add some text

If you are worried about you might make mistake somewhere while typing, you can always go to chakotaya.net and use transcripts from there :3 You have star trek, doctor who transcripts and some other stuff i never checked. Like, all the love to Chrissie who put so much work into it and made it possible to have all the scripts in one place <;3 AMAZING!

So, choose text, click on the gif somewhere (don't worry, we will position it after) and copy paste or write down text you want.

I do not like calibri font for subtitles when it comes to big gifs, so i choose Arial round MT bold with these settings

Now, you need to add some more, outline and shadow. Double click on the text layer, in a menu that pops up choose Stroke and Drop Shadow, I used these settings

And you are finished, now text positioning. You can either press and hold 'ctrl' button and drag text layer wherever you want, or press move tool and do the same. After you positioned it press the second button from this picture to align text layer in the center.

so now we have this

it's time to save it! YAY! If you read to this line you must be really patient, i respect you :D

select all the layers and convert it to smart filters

click on those 4 lines on your timeline and choose flatten frames into clips, so not you have this, you have to convert timeline, press those tree empty boxes at the bottom

After that click on those 4 horizontal lines again and make frames from layers - select all layers

open menu by clicking on 'time' on one of the layers - other - set to 0.05, that's the best option for the gifs if you do not skip layers.

and since I did not do it in the beginning, we need to reverse layers, as gif is playing backwards.

now you can save the gif, go to file - export - save for web

I did not need it here, since gif is playing 'forever' by default, but make sure that it is set to 'forever'. And those are settings I save gif. Sometimes you need to change adaptive to selective, but i live diffusion there since i do not like how pattern looks like.

That's it, we are finished! Thank you for sticking up to this point

a few advices by the end.

do not skip frames

always set to 0.05 so your gifs look good and are not too slow (for animated tv and movies it is different)

always choose the best quality of the video you can get, the better quality is the better gifs turn out to be.

experiment and enjoy the process! HAVE FUN!

FIN!

a very foking detailed GIF tutorial you asked for and how I color my gifs

However, I color them individually, so there will be explanation of tools I choose instead of showing what settings I used for this specific gif in this tutorial.

I will go through entire process of how I create gifs, the process of gifmaking can be different for others and there is no obligation of how to create a gif. Basically, do it however you like and enjoy the process.

this is part I, part II is here\in reblogs.

First, you will need to prepare everything, you choose the moment you want to gif and make screencaps. I use mpv player to create them, here is a great tutorial on how to install it. So I won't go over it, just follow it and or use another player which allows to make screencaps, such as kmplayer.

Once you make screencaps go to photoshop - file - scripts - load files into stack - browse - select screencaps and upload them.

At this point I will also add that I use keyboard shortcuts a lot, you can set them up to your preference, that is much easier for me and might be for you too, and I am so used to them that I forget where are some settings. You can do it from edit - keyboard shortcuts, you may set up anything there.

You will have all screencaps uploaded into one file. Once I have it I change canvas/image size, I also remove 10 pixels from each side, because I hate that some files have that weird black line which looks awful on gifs. But that's up to you. Use proper dimensions for tumblr, that is important since your gifs will look 'not good' when you upload them. I will go with 540x500px this time. (correct dimensions for tumblr are 540px for big gifs, 268px for two gifs along each other and 177-178-177px for the three gifs together)

Go to images - image size (crtl+alt+i) and change the size.

After that I make animation, because without it we would not be able to convert all the screencaps into smart filters. Go to windows - timeline

you will have something like this by default

click on create frame animation - then on 4 horizontal lines which will open menu - make frames from layers

click on convert to video timeline (that 3 horizontal lines and 1 vertical line or whatever it is, right under the first layer) you will get something like this.

now, this will be animated. If you choose convert to video timeline right away it will not be animated.

Now, select all the layers - filters - convert to smart filters

You will have something like this, and if you play it - it will be animated anyway. That way you can edit ALL the screencaps at once.

I usually start with sharpening, settings may change according to the files I have, for some you will need more sharpening, for some less. I go with filters - sharpen - smart sharpen and usually that's enough

but I sometimes add more sharpening, just change radius to 0,2. So, repeat the action.

You will have it like this

and at any point of making gif you will be able to change settings for it, if after coloring it will look not as good as you wanted to.

I will not go into a lot of details about coloring for this gif, because does not matter how good the coloring on this gif will be, it won't work as good on another gif.

There is no right way to start coloring, you may start with curves, levels or selective colors depending on the screencaps you want to edit.

Well, this time I did start with layer - new adjustment layer - curves. (yeah, i guess by the end of the day we all do lmao) (Always use 'layer - new adjustment layer'. That's the only thing I suggest to remember when you color. ) Just to brighten gif a little bit, but you also can change colors with it.

those are not settings I used for this gif!

Curves have option to edit colors, just press RGB and you will see options for RED, GREEN, BLUE. Upper slider adds the said color, the slider at the bottom removes it. That's a great tool if you have a very red\yellow\blue\green scene, with those settings and moving sliders here and there you will be able to add the color you want, for red scene I suggest to use more green and blue, as well as for yellows but with less green. Just move them to see what fits your gif better.

there are also eyedrop tools which will help you to edit picture, with the first one you need to find the darkest part of your gif and click, it will adjust your picture according to it. If there's too much red, it will make it bluer, etc. The middle one is the one I use the most out of them, cos it changes the midtones, it's great if you have very yellow picture, just press the yellow part and it will make it bluer\greenish, depends on the picture, and then you can adjust it to make it look better. And the last one you can use to lighten picture as well, just find the brightest part of the picture and press it. It will adjust other colors accordingly.

I like to play with settings, I could add more darkness to the gif by levels, by selective colors making dark colors even darker, but sometimes I just use layer - new adjustment layer - black & white. Putting it on soft light blending mode and changing opacity. Idk, I like the effect :D Also, by using these, you will be able to darken part or lighten specific colors

so yeah, play around and figure out what is the best way for you.

after that I used layer - new adjustment layer - selective colors. I think this is one of my favorite tools out there, I love it, I usually end up with 30 selective color layers if I make a super complex gif :D

You can change colors with it, make them more vibrant, or less.

for each color you will have 'cyan, magenta, yellow and black' and by dragging sliders you can change colors, make them darker or lighter for the lovers of those paster gifs :D

But don't worry, that's not where I will go with the gif, so it will look better, i promise.

You know how much I love making blue even more blue. So I go with more selective color layers to enhance it.

You do not have to use just one, and you won't be able to make it with just one sometimes. So add as many as you like to get the result you want.

next is one of my favorites - layers - adjustment layers - levels

with it you can darken colors or lighten them, there's also auto, as well as on curves, which will find the most suitable settings for your picture.

I hardly ever change the middle slider, cos

nope.

so, we are at this part of the gif by dragging sliders.

next one I used is layers - adjustment layers - color balance. right now I will stop adding directory, this tutorial is already long enough, so most of the things are there in layers - adjustment layers.

Absolutely love it, most of settings do the same things but a little differently, this one changes colors but also entire picture, not just part of it. You have shadows, midtones and highlights

Each of them is really great when you have a yellow\red\blue\green picture to edit. And each of them has 3 sliders cyan\magenta\yellow.

You see, if you drags sliders the other way it will make picture more yellow.

END OF PART I

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vocalfriespod · 5 years ago

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Practice Makes Easier Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi. Welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.

Carrie Gillon: And I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: Well, happy 2020 to you.

Carrie Gillon: Oh, my god.

Megan Figueroa: I act like we never talk, by the way. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We only talk during our podcast and never at any other time.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. We actually hate each other and never speak. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, 2020. There’s just something terrifying about that number.

Megan Figueroa: I know. It doesn’t seem real.

Carrie Gillon: It doesn’t help that 2020 has already been a dumpster fire of a year.

Megan Figueroa: I know. It really has. And, I mean, it’s America’s fault. Let’s be real.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. It is.

Megan Figueroa: I mean, mostly. And since – I mean, I’ve been thinking about Australia a lot and I know we have a lot of listeners there so sending loving thoughts to Australia.

Carrie Gillon: I know. I can’t even think about it too much because it’s so sad.

Megan Figueroa: I know. Yeah. I saw this thing – it was an article. It was a climate scientist, and the headline was “Things That Keep Us Up at Night.” I was like, “Oh, shit.” Yeah, I guess being a climate scientist is kind of a real shit experience.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen these kind of articles for a long time now because they’re like, “We know what’s coming.” And now, it’s, “We saw this was coming, and here it is.” I’m so mad at some of my friends who would say things like, “Oh, this is all overblown.” Well, was it?

Megan Figueroa: Right? Yeah.

Carrie Gillon: Anyway. Let’s talk about language!

Megan Figueroa: Yes, sorry. Hi. The world is ending.

Carrie Gillon: Let’s pretend it’s not, just briefly.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Yes. For about an hour. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: As FilmEssaying pointed out to us –

Megan Figueroa: On Twitter.

Carrie Gillon: – on Twitter, Sharon Choi, who translated for Bong Joon Ho, who won for Parasite, which is an amazing film if you haven’t seen it.

Megan Figueroa: At the Golden Globes, right? Best Foreign Language Film.

Carrie Gillon: Right. Everyone was praising his speech that he gave in Korean. But really the words that we understood – unless you’re a Korean speaker, but for those of us who aren’t – were Sharon Choi’s trans – wow, not translator, interpreter – her interpretation of his words. What we heard was, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” which is true. I love his films. The ones that I’ve seen, anyway, are all really great – and mostly in Korean.

Actually, T.K. of AAK!, or AskAKorean, on Twitter says, “A more direct and worse translation for Bong’s remark might be ‘The barrier called subtitles – well, it’s not even really a barrier – it’s barely an inch. Once you jump over that barrier, you can enjoy many more films.’” So, that’s a more literal translation of what he said.

Megan Figueroa: Huh. The sentiment is still, I think, 100% there. She said it in a way that feels very poetic because it was, I dunno, I guess in English at least it was less words. It was like – I dunno what it is about it.

Carrie Gillon: It was pithier.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah, that’s the word I’m looking for. Exactly. But I feel the same. Hearing that more direct translation of it, the sentiment for me is exactly the same.

Carrie Gillon: The sentiment’s the same. It’s just slightly more awkward, which makes sense because when you’re speaking on the fly, you can say the most beautiful things in the most awkward ways.

Megan Figueroa: Listen. That’s how I feel about everything I say on this podcast. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Right? Yes. Because we’re not speaking from a script.

Megan Figueroa: No. Well, no shit. Everyone’s like, “No shit you aren’t.” [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we did write this all out?

Megan Figueroa: Oh, my god. If we wrote this all out, I think we’d actually be pretty good at dialogue.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah, no. It would be a really good skill, for sure.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. So, I saw that. And, of course, Nyle DiMarco, the deaf actor and model that I follow on Twitter, he was like, “Yeah, deaf and hard of hearing people have been saying this forever,” you know, because subtitles make films accessible for them.

I think about this because, growing up, I had the privilege of – I am hearing. My parents are hearing. So, I just didn’t grow up in family where we watched subtitled films or any foreign films. When I was younger, I was like, “That’s what rich people do. They watch foreign films.” I thought it was a privileged thing to be able to watch foreign films. I never thought about it as an accessibility issue until I was older.

Carrie Gillon: Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess it is a privilege but it’s not a privilege in the sense of – it costs the same as any other movie. So, it’s not an economic issue. But there are people, I guess, who are not super literate. So, maybe for them – we don’t wanna say, “If you can’t read subtitles then you’re worthless” or anything like that – no. But, if you can, you should try! There’s many, many, many great films that are subtitled.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. And I don’t have dyslexia, but it might be uncomfortable, too, for people who have dyslexia. Although, I have seen some dyslexic people share the type of font that you use may be more helpful. I wonder if that’s been done – if people have made subtitles using that kinda font or anything.

Anyway, if you know, let us know. I think that’s really interesting.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. And I will say that not all subtitling is – it’s not all equal. Sometimes, the way that they’re – like, okay. There’s always the choice that you’re making, right, when you’re translating a movie – do you say it more directly or do you say it more poetically, right?

Megan Figueroa: Mm-hmm, yes.

Carrie Gillon: But also there’s the font choice or even the color of the font. Sometimes, it’s hard to read. It’s been better more recently than in the past. But there’ve definitely been movies where I’m like, “I’m glad that I have super great eyesight” – or, well, with my glasses anyway.

Megan Figueroa: It’s so tiny!

Carrie Gillon: But like, “I can actually read this, but it’s really hard.”

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. Sometimes, I just don’t think that they’re as large as I would like them to be.

Carrie Gillon: Which is another – there’s another constraint, right? Because if you make them too big, then you’re covering up stuff –

Megan Figueroa: It’s true.

Carrie Gillon: – some visual information. So, it’s tricky. But, anyway.

Megan Figueroa: Actually, this is kind of related to what we’re talking about today with our guest. Because I was thinking about how sometimes with Derry Girls, which is – it’s Irish English. And I sometimes put subtitles on just so that I can understand some of the words better. Obviously, we speak the same language, right? But I’m enjoying the show. Sometimes, it takes me a little bit harder to work through what they’re saying if I’m not also reading subtitles.

Carrie Gillon: Right. Yes.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. We talk about that today with our guest.

Carrie Gillon: Well, we don’t talk about subtitles, but we do talk about the difficulties of understanding mostly non-native accents but also some native accents that are very different from our own.

Megan Figueroa: Exactly. And what that means to process that and how it is more difficult but not a barrier that cannot be surpassed with practice.

Carrie Gillon: Yes. It’s all about practice.

Megan Figueroa: You get better. Just like anything.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. And if subtitles help, then definitely you should use them. There’s no shame. No shame.

Megan Figueroa: No. Are there some people that think that there’s shame involved?

Carrie Gillon: Yes.

Megan Figueroa: Aww. Of course. We’re so good at shaming ourselves and each other.

Carrie Gillon: Ugh. Yes. I don’t even wanna get started on that topic because – oh boy.

Megan Figueroa: I know. When did this become therapy? [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: I think the very first episode.

Megan Figueroa: It’s really true. So, we wanted to make one note before we go over to our guest is that we talk about native and non-native accent. That’s just one way of talking about it. Carrie, have you heard other ways people talk about native versus non-native?

Carrie Gillon: I’m sure there are other ways of talking about, but I don’t think I know of another way of saying it.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. I mean, I wanna point out that we don’t mean to other, right? It’s just one way of talking about –

Carrie Gillon: Other than L1 and L2, which is the way that linguists talk about it. But outside of that – no.

Megan Figueroa: So, this is an accessible way of talking about it because we all understand what we’re talking about. But we do wanna make a point that everyone has an accent.

Carrie Gillon: It’s impossible to not have an accent.

Megan Figueroa Exactly.

Carrie Gillon: I was editing a novel for the very first time. And in this novel, one of the characters basically has been turned into a cyborg, and the author describes this person as not having an accent. And I was just like – because they’re computerized. But I was like, “Hmm. [Laughter] Nope. There’s still an accent there.” Because there’s still pronunciation choices that you’re making –

Megan Figueroa: That’s true.

Carrie Gillon: – for the computer program that’s creating the sounds. Anyway.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, that’s a good point. Because Siri definitely does not know how to pronounce some Spanish words the way they are pronounced in Spanish.

Carrie Gillon: Right. Well, also –

Megan Figueroa: Siri’s got an accent.

Carrie Gillon: Well, I mean, the original Siri has a California accent because that’s where that woman – the voice per –

Megan Figueroa: Oh! Yes, of course. That makes sense.

Carrie Gillon: – the voice actor comes from.

Megan Figueroa: Oh, wait. That’s a person?

Carrie Gillon: It’s a person!

Megan Figueroa: It’s not computerized?

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. Well, the –

Megan Figueroa: I didn’t know that.

Carrie Gillon: – sounds are from – yeah. The words are from a person, yeah.

Megan Figueroa: Huh. Okay.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. You didn’t know that?

Megan Figueroa: No.

Carrie Gillon: You can follow her on Twitter. Or at least you used to be able to.

Megan Figueroa: Huh. I mean, okay. That makes sense. So, they’re taking words that she said individually and then putting them together. So, that’s why it sounds like a robot to me.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. It’s obviously not fluid human speech.

Megan Figueroa: Right.

Carrie Gillon: But it is human speech, yeah.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Oh. Well, I learned something. Time to call it quits for today at 11:00 in the morning. [Laughter]

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: Today, we have Dr. Melissa Michaud Baese-Berk, who is an associate professor and David M. and Nancy L. Petrone Faculty Scholar in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. She’s also the director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching certificate program and the director of Undergraduate Studies. In her research she focuses on phonology and phonetics, examining speech perception and production with special attention to non-native speakers and listeners.

First, before we start on the question we really wanna talk about, can you explain what speech perception and speech production are?

Melissa Baese-Berk: Sure. Those are good questions. When I talk about speech perception, I’m talking about how we go from the acoustic signal, or the sound waves that hit our ear drum, to coming up with a linguistic message. I’m interested in everything that happens during that process, so how we turn those sound waves into meaningful sounds and then how we combine those sounds to make words that we can understand. Then, I basically stop at the words more than moving up to the sentences.

Then, for production, I’m talking about the other side of that process, which is how we go from having some sort of linguistic message that we know we wanna convey, some idea that we wanna convey, and how we turn that into speech sounds.

I do work primarily on speech, but a lot of the stuff that I talk and think about, I think, can also be applied to signed languages. I just focus on the speech side. So, when I say “speech,” I’m mostly talking about the sound side of things. But I think a lot of it can be applied to other modalities as well.

Megan Figueroa: I think that’s a really important – I’m glad that you asked, Carrie. I think about production and perception all the time as someone who looks at how babies perceive sounds. Because I’m looking at babies before they even start producing things and I think so much about how we know so much before we’re able to produce something.

And I think that can be said about adults too. We are doing so much internal calculus before we respond to someone or when we’re taking in the message. That’s what we really wanted to talk to you about today because we’re doing a lot of that and there’s a lot of, unfortunately, discrimination that can come out when we’re doing that internal calculus.

And we’re all guilty, that’s why, again, having the podcast it’s like, “I’ve been there.” We have all of these biases that are at play when we hear speech. Yeah. Really glad to have you on the show.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Good. I’m glad to be here.

Carrie Gillon: You also look at the interaction between speech perception and speech production. How do they interact?

Melissa Baese-Berk: That’s a really good question. It’s something that’s super complex and we’re still trying to figure this out. One common assumption has been that speech perception and production are basically the same processes, just in reverse. So, one ends with an ear and one ends with a mouth and everything else in between is exactly the same.

I think, because of what Megan was just saying, we know really that that can’t be true because we can perceive so much more than we can produce and there are different factors that impact these two processes really differently. What we’re interested in specifically in the lab is how they interact during learning, which seems to be something that is really, really complicated.

So, I think everybody has had an experience or many people have had experiences in classrooms or learning a second language where you feel like you’re not able to express the things that you want to express even if you can understand them. I have always been a person who was like that. I’ve been very jealous of my friends who, it feels like, the oral fluency comes really easily to them, but then you put them in a natural communicative situation, and they can’t understand what somebody’s saying, maybe.

And so we’re interested in why these two things may develop at different rates. We’re peeling it back to the most basic level, looking at speech sounds and how those are related in perception and production during learning. But other labs have been working on the higher-up stuff, how words and sentences and grammar are related in perception and production. There’s some really nice work out of, for example, Maryellen MacDonald’s lab at University of Wisconsin, where Elise Hopman, one of her students, is looking at those issues.

Megan Figueroa: How does speech production differ between native and non-native speakers?

Melissa Baese-Berk: This is also something we’re trying to unpack the specifics of. What we know for sure is that native speakers and non-native speakers produce speech in different ways. We know that your first language, if you are a non-native speaker, will impact how you produce your second language.

There’re some general properties of second language speech. It tends to be slower than native language speech and it tends to deviate on all levels. By that I mean, like, segments tend to be different. So, the actual sounds tend to be different, sometimes in more or less systematic ways. The prosody, or the rhythm and pitch and intonation information, also differs. And, of course, non-native speakers don’t have the same vocabulary that native speakers do in all cases. So, there might be differences in words or in grammatical structure, so how we put together a sentence.

All of those things are influenced by our first language, for sure, but they’re also influenced by the challenge of trying to communicate in your second language, which is – as many of your listeners, I’m sure, know – is a real challenge, right? It’s something that’s a really hard thing to do.

Megan Figueroa: Just beyond the individual sound, if you just take one sentence in your non-native language and you say it, and as someone who is a native speaker says it, the melody might sound completely different. The “melody” – is that the right word for that? Yeah. So, it’ll be influenced by your first language.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. Even if you get almost all of all of the sounds almost exactly right, people are really good at telling if somebody is a native or a non-native speaker. There’s one study – and I can find the citation to send it to you all – where if you just play a T-burst for somebody, the burst of the sound /t/ – and this is, I think, French speakers – people can tell at a much greater than chance level if somebody is a native or a non-native speaker, which is totally wild, right?

We have all of these cues that somebody is or isn’t a native speaker. Those cues are used by listeners. I think that’s a really important thing to know in production. We’re not just listening to the speech for the actual speech sounds, we’re also using it – as you all have talked about a bunch – to figure out other things about the speaker, who they are in terms of their identity. One of the clearest things, one of the things people are best at, is telling whether somebody is a native speaker of the language or not.

Carrie Gillon: How about speech perception? How does that differ between native and non-native speakers?

Melissa Baese-Berk: Again, this differs pretty substantially, influenced by our first language. For example, the most famous case study is Japanese R and L, right? Or R and L in English, rather, for Japanese listeners. It is a really tricky thing for Japanese listeners to tell the difference between R and L, and we think that’s probably because the cue that signals R and L in English – which is the third formant, for anybody who’s caring about phonetics. If you don’t care about phonetics, it’s fine. There’s a cue in the speech signal that differs, which is the F3. That cue is not used meaningfully in Japanese to differentiate speech sounds.

If you’re a listener from Japanese trying to learn English, you have to learn to pay attention to something that you have never really paid attention to before. That’s a really, really challenging thing. Any time you’re learning any new skill, trying to pay attention to something that you haven’t paid attention to before is probably the hardest thing, right?

Megan Figueroa: Especially since – so thinking about developmentally – we narrow down our sounds as babies, if we are hearing babies. In the first six months, it’s vowels. And then the first year, it’s consonants. We, of course, are able to recognize all sounds when we’re babies, if we’re hearing, but then it narrows very quickly. So, the fact that all of these things, like, there’re cues to know if someone hasn’t been using this language their whole life, it makes sense because –

Melissa Baese-Berk: It does make sense, right? And there’s a reason why we see that narrowing, which is there’s so much variation in speech in general and you have to know what variation to pay attention to and what variation to ignore. Otherwise, you’re not gonna be able to do speech perception. You’re just literally not gonna be able to do it.

Narrowing our categories into these really fine-tuned categories for our first language is a super useful thing, but it’s really hard to unwind that and make our categories either broader or able to be developed into a two-language system instead of a single-language system.

Megan Figueroa: I think it’s important – this is not a thing where suddenly – or not suddenly. This is not a thing where non-native speakers are not capable humans. It’s a thing where it’s like, “Oh, no, your brain is doing exactly what it needed to do.” And so, exactly, unwinding that is very, very difficult.

Melissa Baese-Berk: It’s something that we forget when we’re listening to non-native speakers that they are native speakers in another language and that they are able to communicate the way I am communicating with you all right now without a ton of conscious effort and a ton of conscious thought. We’re able to do that in our native language. And as soon as you put somebody in a second language, that job becomes so much harder.

There’s a great quote from Javier Bardem when he was interviewed on Fresh Air.

[Excerpt from Fresh Air]

Javier Bardem: There is this office in my brain full of people working at the same time that I’m talking to you trying to not, I mean, be wrong with the intonation, with the words. So, it’s very exhausting.

Dave Davies: The office is translating, right? Okay.

Javier Bardem: Exactly. If I speak Spanish, that office is closed. There is nobody in the office. I mean, I’m fine by my own.

[End except]

He talks about how, when he is communicating in English, it’s like having an office full of people in his head who are trying to make sure that nothing goes out the door before it’s been fact checked. But when he’s speaking in Spanish, that office is closed. He doesn’t need the office full of people. I love that analogy because it really, I think, brings home the point of how challenging this is and how much work it is to communicate in your second language.

Carrie Gillon: That is a really good metaphor. And that is exactly how I feel whenever I’m trying to speak in any other language but English. Is non-native speech harder to understand than native speech?

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. It is harder to understand. We know this about speech that we’re unfamiliar with in general. An unfamiliar talker is harder to understand than a familiar talker. You see this, for example, with parents with little kids. They can understand their kids totally fine, and you may not be able to understand their little kid as well.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. When someone’s like, “He just said this.” I’m like, “Uh, did he?” [Laughter]

Melissa Baese-Berk: Right. We’re very good at understanding familiar talkers. We’re very good at understanding familiar accents and dialects. We’re less good at doing that when it’s unfamiliar. Again, this is just a practice thing, right? We have experience doing this particular skill, and when we have to step outside of that particular skill, it gets a little bit harder. I think we’ll probably get into this in a bit, but it’s not prohibitively harder. That’s the message I’m interested in spreading.

Megan Figueroa: Right.

Carrie Gillon: Yes, exactly.

Megan Figueroa: Us too. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: I mean, we’ve talked about it before. It’s just a matter of listening. So, how do language ideologies or attitudes impact our understanding of non-native speech?

Melissa Baese-Berk: It’s a good question. It’s something that I sort of have exasperated sigh here. Much more so than we, I think, would like them to. There’s been a lot of great work ranging from Rubin’s work to Kevin McGowan’s work looking at how just looking at a non-native speaker or someone who you think is probably gonna be a non-native speaker impacts your perception.

We know, especially from Kevin’s work, that that’s probably grounded in expectation. If you expect to hear an accent – if you see somebody who you expect to be accented – you’re likely to perceive them as, in fact, being accented. If you see somebody who is accented and you hear something that is not accented, that often can be – or if you see, rather, a person who you expect not to be accented and hear accented speech, that can also be disorienting for people. I’m using “accented” here to mean non-native accented, not in the “native speakers don’t have an accent” sense. I just wanna make that perfectly clear.

So, we know that that impacts things a lot. We also know that there are tons of individual differences in terms of people’s ability to understand unfamiliar speech. These individual differences can be driven by things like cognitive skills, so how big your vocabulary is can impact how well you’re able to understand unfamiliar speech. But they can also be influenced by social factors like attitudes toward non-native speakers.

We’ve done some work – a couple of instructors at the American English Institute, which is our ESL program here at University of Oregon and I –have done some work looking at how attitudes impact a score we call “comprehensibility.” When you’re talking about speech perception, especially of longer sentences, you can divvy this up into a few pots. You can talk about how accented someone is, and that’s just a sort of subjective measure of how accented you think the speech is. You can talk about intelligibility, which is how many words are you correctly able to transcribe. Then, you can ask people a question about comprehensibility or ease of understanding. How hard is it to understand this speech?

What we found is that, even when people have exactly the same intelligibility scores – so they’re able to transcribe the speech perfectly fine – you see comprehensibility scores differ, so their feeling about how easy the task was differs. The primary factor that predicted performance on that comprehensibility task was attitude about non-native speakers, which is a huge bummer because they’re able to actually understand the speech, but they feel like it’s really hard.

One thing we’re interested in doing – and one of my former students, Drew McLaughlin, is now doing this work at Washington University in St. Louis, looking at actual listening effort – how much effort are these people putting in, using physiological measures, things like pupillometry, where we can see how much effort people are putting into these tasks.

When I first saw these results, I wanted to figure out a way to make them slightly less depressing, and one potential option is you have a bad attitude about non-native speech because it is objectively harder for you to understand. It’s harder for you for maybe cognitive reasons. And those cognitive reasons might actually impact you having a negative attitude.

It could be this sort of vicious cycle where it’s really hard for you to understand and so you’re frustrated by that because we’re frustrated when we can’t communicate as well as we’d like to. So, you’re frustrated. You spend more effort doing this task. The more effort makes your tired-er. And we all know that when we’re tired, we’re really crabby. So, you’re crabby about spending more effort, and that makes you have a bad attitude about this.

I’m not sure about the causality in that direction. People could just be jerks. But I think that there’s something to be said about trying to unpack this idea of how much effort people feel like they’re putting forth and how much effort they are actually physiologically putting forth.

Carrie Gillon: Are they putting forth more effort?

Melissa Baese-Berk: We haven’t tied the attitude piece to the effort piece yet because Drew has been doing some really amazing work on pupillometry. We do know that even for fully intelligible speech – this is non-native speech that everybody can understand really clearly – Drew and her advisor have been doing work that shows that pupillometry measures demonstrate that people are putting forth more effort when they’re listening to non-native speech, even if it is fully intelligible.

We’re not making it too hard for them, it’s just more effortful. And that makes sense, right? It is something that deviates from the norm and we have to probably put forth a little more effort to understand.

Carrie Gillon: Has anyone also studied different dialects of English that are still native and how much effort you have to put forth? I’m just thinking, my experience, one of my grandmother’s cousins, I could barely understand him. He was Scottish. His wife I could understand, who was also Scottish. And they grew up pretty close together, so it was interesting. Yeah. Just that much effort I had to put into understanding this person who spoke English.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Right. Well, a few things there. One is there have been a bunch of studies that have shown that there are gender differences in intelligibility. Women tend to be more intelligible than men for a lot of reasons, including potentially socialization reasons. That’s speculation on my part.

I’m not sure if there’s been a lot of work on effort and unfamiliar dialects, but there is plenty of work on perception of unfamiliar dialects, including some of our work – this is work jointly with Tessa Bent at Indiana, and Stephanie Borrie at Utah State, and Kristin Van Engen at Washington University in St. Louis – where we’ve looked out how perception of unfamiliar dialects correlates with perception of non-native speech.

We show that on some metrics, it does correlate. On others, it doesn’t. It sort of makes sense because as you pointed out, Carrie, they are, in fact, native speakers of the language and so there are some things that they’re doing that are probably distinct from what makes non-native speech hard to understand. But it is the case that, even for unfamiliar dialects, it’s gonna be a really challenging thing for listeners to hear and to understand.

Probably some of that is the effort piece. Probably some of that is expectation. And those two things are probably linked in interesting ways as well. There’s a lot still to be examined. If anybody’s looking for a career, this is a great one. [Laughter]

Carrie Gillon: So, one of the reasons why I even thought of this, I think it’s the show – the British quiz show – QI, which has Stephen Fry. They had a Geordie speaker on, and the Geordie speaker said something like, “Cunny” something.

[Excerpt from QI]

Male Speaker 1: They make a cunny noise like.

Stephen Fry: I beg your pardon?

Male Speaker 1: Ferns make a cunny noise.

[End excerpt]

And it sounds like “cunt” to us. What he was actually saying was “canny.” But Stephen Fry also misheard it. And so there was this whole conversation –

Melissa Baese-Berk: Oh, interesting.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. So, I found that really fascinating because I thought Stephen Fry would be more likely to know the Geordie accent than me, and he was on the same footing as me actually.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s also the case that these things get harder the less context you have or the less frequency with which you heard the word. Maybe “canny” isn’t a word that comes up a lot, so he hasn’t had an opportunity to hear that particular thing. Perhaps for him the other lexical item is more frequent. Who knows. I mean, there’s a bunch of possibilities there. But I think it’s a really nice example of how all of these factors come into play.

When we’re listening to speech, we use every tool available to us. Some of those tools are things like, “What is the most likely word that this person has said?” And “canny” is a very low-frequency word.

Carrie Gillon: Absolutely. That’s exactly right.

Megan Figueroa: That goes back to how you said that vocabulary size will affect how you perceive non-native speech, so that makes a lot of sense. The thing that I think about automatically – and it’s because you’re at a university and this is where so many people, myself included, were introduced to so many different non-native speakers speaking English, etc. – is at university. And that might be the first time. These are also your subject pool, right?

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah.

Megan Figueroa: I also wonder about the opposite where we have students that are not native speakers of English having to listen to professors that are. I’m just thinking about how hard they’re working to learn new information and to listen to something that’s not their first language.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Right. This is a challenge in education broadly speaking, for both languages and dialects. If you put a person in a classroom, whether they’re a college student or a five-year-old, with somebody who doesn’t speak a language or dialect that they’re used to hearing, they’re gonna have to work much, much harder. I almost said, “twice as hard,” but that sounded like I was quantifying effort. Much, much harder than people who have the benefit of having their language or dialect match the faculty members or the instructors.

Of course, this is gonna have costs in terms of content that you’re able to learn. This is true, I think, across the educational system. It’s particularly marked in college students, I think, because we’re expecting college students in general to function at such a high level. I personally cannot imagine attending college in a language other than my native language. I think it would’ve been extraordinarily difficult.

Whenever I encounter students, as an instructor, who are doing this, I try to approach them with as much sympathy as I can because they’re doing something that I am certainly not brave enough to do and many of their peers are certainly not brave enough to do. Trying to be really patient about the fact that they are doing something that, to me, feels impossible and doing it actually with quite high levels of success. That is astonishing.

Megan Figueroa: I think it’s just a very important thing to remember when we’re looking at our peers too. If you’re college kids – listening to the college kids, like I’m so far removed from it – but, yeah, thinking, what is it – you just don’t really know what people are going through. But I think about that a lot when listening to speech because, yeah, think about how hard that is. How hard is it to learn organic chemistry? And then you’re doing it with, like – it’s another l – yeah.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Exactly. I think that is something that a lot of people just don’t think about. Because we think about maybe the outward things a little bit more. Language is so automatic for us that we don’t really think about the challenges – “They already learned English. They’re here. They’ve learned English. Everything’s fine” – but not realizing how challenging it is.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I love suggesting study abroad for students who are able to study abroad, especially in a country that is not an English-speaking country, because I think it develops so much empathy in students who are able to go somewhere, even for very brief periods of time, where communication is a challenge for them and where they are now in a situation where they cannot communicate as fluently as they would like to communicate.

Carrie Gillon: When their brain is constantly working and you’re just so much more tired.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Exactly. I mean, I think – I have never slept so well as I did when I moved to Spain and started being surrounded by Spanish all the time. It was so exhausting. And I mean, you’re jetlagged and all the rest as well, but I was so exhausted just from trying to unpack what was going on around me that I took for granted in the US.

Megan Figueroa: I wonder if that’s a little bit of what’s happening – so, like I said, maybe you’re living in a bubble, and that can sound like whatever it was. You go to university. And then, say you’re a native speaker of English and the professor is a non-native speaker of English, you’re just not used to being placed in that position because you have been living in some sort of sound bubble. That might be really frustrating for you.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. I think it is. I think it is really frustrating for students. We have more than anecdotal evidence that it’s frustrating for students. A year or so ago, the advising office at UO contacted me and some other folks and said, “We’re getting all of these complaints from students – we’re getting complaints from parents – about non-native, especially TAs, but also instructors in general. What can we do about this?”

This is where some of the training work that I’ve been doing comes into play because we’ve done some scientific studies suggesting that if you just practice, you can get better at understanding unfamiliar speech, especially non-native speech. When I say “practice,” the trainings that we’ve done have been 30 minutes a day for two days. We show really robust generalization to novel talkers and to novel accents.

For me, that’s an hour of work. And it’s considered work, right, you’re transcribing all of the speech and really practicing trying to understand the speech. But you get percentage point gains in intelligibility that are quite high. One thing we’ve been developing is some training for students that help them understand both what the non-native speaker is going though, so some basic literacy about how hard it is to understand – or how hard it is communicate in your second language, rather. We do some basic literacy about the fact that it is hard to understand non-native speech – so validating their intuition that this is a challenging thing – but then showing them that you can get better at it.

I think that has been a really important thing for us to share, both with advisors and with students and parents, to help them understand all of the social pieces that go into this as well as the cognitive pieces. One thing we’ve been doing that I love that we’ve managed to include – so a lot of our students are motivated, as any humans are, by external motivators.

One of the things we’ve talked about is the fact that this is a skill that you can use when you’re applying for jobs. If you can tell an employer, a potential employer, “I also have experience communicating across language barriers.” That’s something that is really important if you’re working for a global company or even for a company that has any diversity in it at all. If you’re able to communicate with individuals or at least are willing to try, you’re going to be more successful than somebody who is focused on native English only.

Megan Figueroa: I love that so much. I’m thinking about what a training might – you’re a freshman coming into university, just as an example, again, of college. And instead of – at the welcoming event or whatever – instead of talking about the pitfalls, it could be more of a, “Another exciting thing that’s gonna happen to you is that you’re gonna be introduced to so many different people that speak in so many different ways. It might be a little bit hard at first, but that’s normal.”

If only someone had – like, I don’t think that I really needed to hear that at that point because I understood that, I think, at 18. I understand it more now. But if someone would’ve said that, it still would’ve been like, “Oh, I love that someone’s saying that.” I feel like that would’ve been very validating for so many people.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. So, we’ve been working – and it’s, of course, slow because universities are huge bureaucracies – but we’ve been working with the folks at orientation which we, because we’re Oregon, call “IntroDUCKtion” with a D-U-C-K because of the ducks. [Laughter]

Megan Figueroa: Wow. Okay. That’s kinda cute.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. It is pretty adorable. “IntroDUCKtion.” And also working with some folks on our web design team to come up with ways to include this in really early-on communication with students. One of the things we’re interested in doing is developing an online training that’s a sneaky training. So, like, “Click here to learn some facts about the University of Oregon,” and we have those facts being delivered not just by native speakers but also by non-native speakers in a variety of dialects, so you get just a little practice listening to those things and understanding them in sort of sneaky ways.

But also being very clear to students that it is an exciting thing. We’re at a global, international university that attracts students from all over the world and attracts the best faculty from all over the world. That’s the other thing we try to frame like, “Your faculty and your TAs know a lot, even if they are not able to communicate with you the way that maybe a native English speaker is able to communicate with you. As part of that benefit, you also have this challenge which is trying a little bit harder to understand what these people are saying.”

Megan Figueroa: What would you recommend to people who are not in this environment? You know, you’re not a freshman student coming to your university, but you still want to learn how to improve your communication with someone who speaks a non-English language as their first language.

Melissa Baese-Berk: I think, again, the answer is to practice. There’s a bunch of different, creative ways you can go about practicing. With YouTube now you can find accented speech all over the place. There are other great resources that are open source, so the Speech Accent Archive is one of those at George Mason University. Northwestern University has a bunch of freely available non-native speech that you can listen to and practice.

And you can think about why you want to get better at it, right? Is it the case that you have a friend who is a native Mandarin speaker and you just wanna get better at understanding that person’s speech? Well, one really good way to do that is hang out with that friend more and practice with that friend more. Is it the case that you have a big community of Spanish speakers in your area, and you don’t speak Spanish, and maybe you’re trying to learn Spanish but you still wanna be able to communicate with people whose native language is Spanish? Well, then listen to a lot of Spanish-accented English. We know that if you train on a single accent, you get better at that accent.

And if you want something that’s broader, practice across a wide variety of accents and you’ll, we think, improve at novel accents as well. You can target your practice to whatever you’re most interested in doing, but there’s plenty of ways to do that both in person and online.

I think one thing non-native speakers really appreciate is if somebody says to them like, “I am having a hard time understanding you, but I wanna get better at it, so can we practice more? Can I talk to you more often?” I think non-native speakers would be happy to hear that instead of what they typically experience which is the sort of shutting them down because they are not as fluent as a native English speaker.

Carrie Gillon: Or told to get rid of their accent.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Or told to get rid of their accent. This is a thing that, I think, one of the most frustrating things to me about perception of non-native speech is, as you all are very familiar in Arizona, the US has this big push toward English only in a variety of domains and insisting that if you live in the United States, you should speak English. Of course, there’re many, many, many problems with the viewpoint, which you all have covered in great detail.

But I think one of the things that is so frustrating to me is that even when people do speak English, they have learned English, it’s not enough because they’re not native English speakers. So, then we start to see it’s not really a problem with the language at all. It’s never been about Spanish. It’s never been about Spanish-accented English. It’s about the people. That, to me, is super sad and really frustrating.

I would like to give an opportunity to people who – it’s not the people, right, they just feel like non-native speech is hard to understand – an opportunity to them to say, “We’re asking people to do a lot by communicating with us in English. So, why don’t we do just a little bit” – my student Drew, who I mentioned before, has this great analogy that she came up with that I love, which is if you think about communication like moving a couch, if you ask one person to move a couch, it is going to be slow. It’s gonna be a really awkward process. Your floor is gonna get all scraped up from the couch getting dragged around the house. But if you have two people lift the couch, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. It doesn’t mean that suddenly moving the couch is something that’s a day in the park. But you’re able to do the task. It’s easier when the communicative burden is shared across two parties.

So, I think even though you have to do a little bit of work, recognizing the huge amount of work that the other party is doing is something that, to me, is sort of a no-brainer in terms of wanting – I want to do that for communication. I think most people want to make communication be easier, especially when they realize the burden that the other person is carrying this case.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah. That’s a really great metaphor as well.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. It’s a lovely one.

Megan Figueroa: Well, it’s really helpful because then – I mean, I hope that this episode at least is just like one step in that direction. Although, our listeners are already taking those steps. But it’s kind of that thing where you’re like, “Okay, now that I know this, maybe I’ve been placing too much either blame or, like, just trying to figure out what the problem is and putting it on the person instead of a situation or whatever it is.” Just like how, when we discriminate against language, it’s not just about language, it’s about the person. We need to separate those two things so that we aren’t blaming people.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Right. I think being very clear – I teach a class called Language and Power even though I’m not a sociolinguist. It’s my favorite class to teach because our tagline, even before you all came around, was also “Don’t be an asshole.”

Carrie Gillon: Really? Nice!

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah! So, I love teaching that class. I think one of the things that I end the class by talking about is, you know, I’m not saying you can’t make any judgements about language. We all make judgements about language all the time. There’s stuff you like. There’s stuff you don’t like. There’s stuff that’s frustrating. But being aware of what those judgements are and whether or not they’re actually judgements about language – are they judgements about language or are they judgements about people?

And being able to unpack that for yourself or for the people around you is something that I think is so critically important because we make these judgements about language and we pretend like they’re just about language and there’re easy fixes, but we would never, ever, ever, ever tell anybody to change their race. That’s not an acceptable thing to say. But to say, “Get rid of your accent,” that’s something that people say. That’s something people make money on.

People make lots and lots of money helping people get rid of their accents, which is, to me, a little bit horrifying, but I won’t dive into that well today. But I think being aware of what we are asking people to do, and what we’re asking people to do especially for non-native speakers who are not always here by choice, who are not always speaking English by choice, and the fact that we’re asking them to change something about their identity that’s so fundamental to who they are, that to me is something we should be thinking very carefully about as we do it.

Carrie Gillon: Absolutely.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely. I mean, I think you’ve already said it, but is there one main point that you feel is important that you could tell our listeners so we can all be less of an asshole about all of this?

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. I mean, I think that just recognizing that it takes two to tango, right? It takes two people to communicate and recognizing that both sides have some responsibility for the communication to be successful, I think, is the most important takeaway from this work.

Megan Figueroa: Yeah. I love that. One of our guests, Ake, said, “Be good and be kind.” And I really – as we say, “Don’t be an asshole.” And we really mean it. I think that really helps relieve tension too when we say “Don’t be an asshole,” but “Be good and be kind” just gets me in the feels – like in my heart – and it’s like “Don’t you want to be good and be kind?”

Melissa Baese-Berk: Yeah. I mean, just putting a little bit of niceness into the world, if you can do something that is so – me trying a little harder to understand non-native speech is such a tiny thing. Why not just do this little tiny thing that makes somebody’s life a little bit easier? Because one thing we didn’t get into today, and I don’t wanna go into too much detail about, is some of the true horror stories people have about trying to communicate in their non-native language and the things that people say and do to them to shut them down. You know, bringing just a little bit of kindness back into those communicative scenarios, I think, is critically important.

Megan Figueroa: Absolutely.

Carrie Gillon: I agree.

Megan Figueroa: This has been a really great conversation. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you wanted to talk about?

Melissa Baese-Berk: No. I think we hit all of the big-picture things that I’m really excited to talk about and things that I think are really ignored, I think, by a lot of our society. I’m super happy you all have this podcast. It is assigned as extra credit to my Language and Power students because it is so relevant for them. And it’s always exciting when they come in with, you know, they’ve gone through your back catalogue and found something that they’re really excited about.

Carrie Gillon: Oh, that’s amazing!

Megan Figueroa: I love that!

Melissa Baese-Berk: I appreciate the work you all are doing. I know it’s not – you cover so many topics that are not easy topics, but I’m super impressed with the work that you all have been doing.

Carrie Gillon: Aw, thank you!

Megan Figueroa: Thank you so much. And now I know that I’m impressed with the work that you’re doing in Oregon.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Thank you.

Megan Figueroa: Thank you so much for being with us.

Melissa Baese-Berk: Oh, thank you. It’s been wonderful.

Megan Figueroa: And everyone –

Carrie Gillon: Don’t be an asshole.

Megan Figueroa: Don’t be an asshole.

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: We would like to thank our newest patrons from December.

Megan Figueroa: And ya’ll are the ones that helped us go over the goal we had, right?

Carrie Gillon: Yeah! So, we finally met our second goal. Going forward – so from this episode on – we can transcribe our episodes.

Megan Figueroa: Yay!

Carrie Gillon: If you wanna help us meet our third goal, which is to pay for previous episodes – meanwhile, I’m doing them, but I would rather pay someone else to do them because it’s not my favorite thing to do.

Megan Figueroa: Yes. Yeah.

Carrie Gillon: You can also join us. But first, let’s thank our newest patrons! Kyle Wilkinson.

Megan Figueroa: Yay!

Carrie Gillon: Shiloh Drake.

Megan Figueroa: Shiloh! Thank you.

Carrie Gillon: Yeah!

Megan Figueroa: I know you.

Carrie Gillon: Stephen Murphy.

Megan Figueroa: Yay!

Carrie Gillon: Mike Mena. And Adam Hartzel. So, if anyone wants to join us at patreon.com/vocalfriespod, you can join us at the $5, $3, or $2 level. We changed it from $1 to $2 because Patreon takes such a big chunk of the $1. But, $3 and $5, you get a sticker. Actually, you get multiple stickers over time. And the $5 level, you get bonus episodes. So, yeah, thank you!

[Music]

Carrie Gillon: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, for Halftone Audio, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at [email protected] and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

[Music]

#transcript #linguistics #sociolinguistics #linguistic discrimination #linguistic diversity #pronunciation #accents #non-native speakers #language #english #phonetics #phonology #perception #language perception #language production

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joshhutchsource · 8 years ago

Text

Josh Hutcherson AMA Transcript

This is the transcript from Josh’s AMA on Reddit on February 16th, 2017. All spelling and grammar errors are as written by the original people This is very long, so the majority is under a read more.

Q: Do you miss working with the Hunger Games cast?

Josh: yes... they were the best! family forever. i miss them all dearly... however we still hang now and then and keep in touch.

Q: Hi! What's your favorite television show to watch?

Josh: the Bob Ross painting show... i can benge for hours

Q: Hey Mr. Hutcherson, is there any actor (that you have not yet worked with) that you wish to work with someday?

Josh: so many.... joaquin phoenix is up there for sure.

Q: Hi Josh, You got second class treatment from Rosemary Telesco and continued with Katniss Everdeen. Does it hurt your feelings?

Josh: hahaha.... life imitates art…

Q: What do you define as your first "big break" into acting and that business?

Josh: For me my first ever job was personally my big break.. I was 9 and I held a goat in the backgroud for a bible study video in ohio.... everyone starts somewhere…

Q: How do you go about choosing a script that you want to work on, both for this project and other professional work?

Josh: I want originality. Characters that are bold and have clear voices. i also want to push the boundaries of what reality is.

Q: Hey Josh! What is the craziest encounter you've had with a fan?

Josh: i had two girls and their mom show up at my door a few years ago during christmas with my family..... that was..... awkward. Im not answering the door next time. Haha

Q: do you think 2017 is going to be a good year?

Josh: hard to believe it can be... however I feel like so many people are getting involved that werent before... this is a moment when people feel energized.

Q: If you had not been an actor, what profession would you have done?

Josh: i like building stuff... and i like photography... maybe building stuff and taking pictures of it... if thats a job

Q: Because Im sure you get the same questions over and over - what's your favorite day of the week, and why?

Josh: Thursday... not becuase im here... but because i like how the word looks. and wednesday is finally over.

Q: JOSH is there anything you couldn't live without?

Josh: my freedom of speech and gluten

Q: your favorite song at this moment?

Josh: Lazarus by David Bowie

Q: Why were you such a little bitch in the hunger games ?

Josh: i prefer other words... however this little bitch survived. so... yeah.

Q: Which country do you think is the safest in a zombie apocalypse?

Josh: Iceland... no doubt. Zombies hate Byjork

Q: What's your idea of a successful person. What would make someone successful in your eyes?

Josh: A person who is comfortable in their skin... I'm defintely not. I have gotten better as time goes on but someone who is and who is genuine is successful for me.

Q: Do you have any advice for someone dealing with depression?

Josh: I'm not certified to answer this sort of thing. However I go back to perception. As well as really find what you care about and express it. film, music, walking... whatever it is that you can connect with is what i try to lose myself in.

Q: i feel like, in my mind, i always associate you with the jungle. Why is that?

Josh: that really makes me smile. I love the jungle and i feel a part of it often. thank you.

Q: hi josh, I'm not very good at english so I can't write a good question but do you like mango?

Josh: yes... im human. never trust someone who doesnt

Q: What do you think about Darren Aeronosfsky as a director?

Josh: I think hes great... requiem is on point!!

Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Josh: here in this ama.

probably isolated somehwere thinking of ideas of things to make movies about. I dont know!!!! cant think that far ahead honestly.

Q: in ten words can you describe your experience directing "Ape"?

Josh: BEst experience of my life creatively hello cars cat apples

Q: What's your favorite food?

Josh: Skyline Chili... Only available in the greater Cincy area…

Q: You still here? And if so, what do you think of the Oscar contenders this year?

Josh: Moonlight!!! That movie was incredible. I also really loved LA LA Land. those two really stood out for me. so many great performances though. Denzel was on point!

Q: Donald Trump or President Snow ?

Josh: I mean... one in the same right?

Q: How are Driver and Manchi?

Josh: they are the loves of my life.... I worship them. I believe they are quite happy. they get plenty of love and attention!

Q: ‼️‼️‼️ BERNIE SANDERS !!!! ❗️❗️❗️❗️

now that i got your attention,

Do you watch TV SHOWS ? If yes which one

You are such an inspiration to me. After almost 10 years as a fan, im really proud of you and everything you've achieved! I cant wait to watch ALL your upcomings projects and you are such an AMAZING human being Joshua. Thank you for everything. Seeing you in Paris in 2015 was the best moment of my life, i hope i will see you again and talk with you. Please don't forget your fans, we love you so much. (We missed you so much) Will you ever come back in France? :)

Josh: THANK YOU!! that made my day=] I love france and would love to come back!

I do watch some tv... not so so much. I really love GIRLS. that show is so perfect in so many ways. Ive never seen a show that feels more flawed and honest like that one. Best characters ever.

Q: Really wanna know if you'll keep supporting Bernie although the election is over?

Josh: ABSOLUTELY. we must. things are crazy now but we need to vote in local elections and keep our voices loud. I miss the days when Bernie was a real option…

Q: Hey Josh! Congrats on your director debut of "Ape." Were there things you did differently as an actor because you were also the director? How did it change your perspective?

Josh: it was hard... I liked it a lot but it was tough because i couldnt watch the monitors obviously so i had to make notes in my mind while acting in the scene... i realy liked this experience though and i have somehow even more respect for directors than before.

Q: Do you believe in a real life happy ending? If yes, what would you tell someone who kind of lost hope?

Josh: I think a happy ending is possible. I really believe its all about perception. If you can learn to manage that then you can find ways to be happy all the time

Q: HEY JOSH! I'm so glad you have finally done an AMA!

What advice would you give you're teenage self when entering the theatre/acting community?

Josh: thick skin. actors are the most insecure and insane types of people... with that you need to have thick skin to deflect the dissapointment and let downs and judgements.

Q: Do you want to repeat the experience as a director??

Josh: No doubt. I loved it. its extremely addictive and Im feining fo some mo.

Q: Hi Josh ! How are you ? Will there be a French subtitled version for Ape ? I'm a French fan :) Thank you !

Josh: oui... i think.

Q: Yooo RV was a dumpster fire of a movie...that being said, how awesome was it to work with Robin Williams??

Josh: hahahahah! Robin is a saint... biggest heart in the world and never a dull moment. he was the best.

Q: What kind of movies would you like to direct in the future?

Josh: I like stuff that bends reality and questions the human condition... bending the rules. I love films like being john malkovich and eternal sunshine of a spotless mind

Q: Hey Josh! What's your all time favorite movie or a movie you think everyone needs to see?

Josh: Two for the Road. 60's film that was way ahead of its time and has inspried so many modern love stories. its great!

Q: Hello, Josh! As an aspiring filmmaker, I know how tedious making any sort of film can be. What gets you motivated to create? Also, what’s your favorite snack? Cause, duh, snacks are some of the best motivators.

Josh: Honestly I think i get inspired when i see a dope movie... like when i saw moonlight i just wanted to go out and create something personal and important.

Also sitting in a restaurant looking around and making up stories about the people...

Snack..... kale. Fuk off kale!! frosted flakes

Q: JOSH. Huge fan, you're awesome, yadda yadda ;)

You're such a strong ally to the LGBT community. How did you get involved with your organization, Straight But Not Narrow? What is your advice to the community in the wake of certain political events?

Josh: We started SBNN becuase it felt like there was a lack of outreach to bridge communities together... especially in schools where bullying is brutal. I think now more than ever showing your support to your neighbors is paramount in surviving whats going on.

We are all here and human

Q: What was it like working with Mark Ruffalo?

Josh: Hes the best guy in the world. I love that human!

Q: Josh! Favorite 80's movie?

Josh: Lost Boys

Q: Do you have any directorial advice?

Josh: prepare!! Its so important to know what you want to make so when youre there on set you have it all set up.

The script is the absolute base for everything. understad it inside and out.

Q: Hi Josh!

You and I went to the same school, and you even lived in the same neighborhood as some of my close friends. We’ve never met because you always looked like you wanted privacy and I wanted to respect that, plus I’m a shy person who wouldn’t have known what to say. I’ve always wondered if you felt like you sort of missed out on your high-school experience, and if that impacted you on a social and mental level.

I’m trying to pursue my dream of becoming a published author, but sometimes I just feel like it’s never going to happen and that I’ll never be successful in the only thing that I’m passionate about. What advice would you give to someone who’s been told over and over again to give up their dream and focus on a more practical plan for their life?

Thanks for doing this AMA! It’s really awesome seeing someone from Union doing what they love!

Josh: I think that going for something different in life is for sure the most important thing to do... FUCK THE HATERS!

Only you can stop yourself from going for it.

that should be on an inspirational cat poster...

Q: How would you beat up Donald trump?

Josh: With knowledge.... it seems to be his biggest weakness…

Q: Would you rather be attacked by 50 duck sized horses or 1 horse sized duck?

Josh: One horse sized duck.... no question... Ive seen some big ass ducks…

Q: What are the kind of things you learned while working your blockbuster role in "The Hunger Games Trilogy"?

Josh: TEAMWORK. we had massive crews and it is not possible without all that.

Q: Josh Do you have any Tips for a Happy life?

Josh: Inner happiness... you wont find it in anything else in the world. thats the only way to get by and be happy

Q: what is the number one thing on your bucket list?

Josh: go to patagonia…

Q: Was this role challenging for you to play and how do you think you did?

Josh: It definitely was challenging... its a deep and dark place to go to and I like tapping into that side of myself... I think I did alright... Im my hardest critic

Q: It's so easy to hack me because all of my passwords are your name, what do you think about that?

Josh: Its kinda dope,... maybe try changing it for a bit?

Q: What is your favorite horror movie?

Josh: I really like It Follows... and classics like the shining of course... some chronenburg stuff too... butchered that spelling

Q: Is it harder to be an actor or a director?

Have you thought about being in another large franchise such as the hunger games?

Josh: Hmmm. I would say that directing definitely requires a shit ton more focus and work!!! Id say thats more challenging for sure

Q: Are you looking forward to doing the full length APE?

Josh: YES!!! The plan is to fastrack this into production after the short comes out. the feature is even deeper and darker... gonna be weird…

Q: If Peeta tried to fight you, could real life you take him down?

Josh: fuck yeah!!! well... maybe not. I have a ferocious side that I can tap into.

Q: Hi Josh (my brothers name too) What is the most Hollywood thing you have done/seen so far?

Josh: dont ever come to hollywood for a vacation... its tacky and nothing like they make it seem. Hah.

Q: There's definitely a theme of dealing with mental health issues in your film. Is this something you've dealt with personally?

Josh: There have been moments where I've questioned my mental state... haven't gone too far down that road but I think it's beyond interesting to try to empathize and deal with people who are dealing with those.

Q: hey josh! the other night i was really high and felt like i was you. did you feel it too?

Josh: Wait... was that monday?? I felt something then…

Q: Hi,

What is your dream role, if you could have any in the world, and what is your dream directorial role (genre, plot, cast to direct)? If you had to pick one of these, dream role or dream directing opportunity, which would you prefer to do?

Now this is the obligatory thank-you part that I could not pass up the opportunity to post, considering how much your LGBT+ work has meant to me:

I figured this would be a good opportunity to send some well-deserved thanks your way and hope you see it…! This idea of wanting to thank you started in a letter I started writing a good few years ago now… which I still happen to have in my bedside table, because it never got sent. (I don’t think I ever figured out where to send fan-mail to you, which didn’t help my cause.)

I don’t remember, when I was younger, knowing of any out actors. I’m 20 now, but up until my mid-teens, there was a big blank space around the ideas of ‘LGBT+’ and ‘the world’ being connected for me. I’ve known I was gay since I was 11, but the experience was very isolating, not knowing any gay people in real life. I had no foundation to go on, no experience in this, and obviously felt as though I couldn’t talk with anyone about it, even though I remember very few support-type services.

I remember seeing you in Zathura (my Dad loves Jumanji, so it was bound to happen) and ever since then, I think I’ve just sort of stuck with you. I must have seen that movie when I was about 12/13, and I think that’s when I started to hear what it was you were saying, because I noticed it was relevant to me. I followed what you were saying, and as I got older and more aware of myself and the world, it really started to have an impact on me. I felt as though that was my connection, as though that was my way of learning partly about who I was.

Even though you weren’t gay, the fact that you were only a few years older than me and were into the things and the field I also enjoyed really helped me relate to you. Because I related to you and because you actually meant something to me, the message you seemed so passionate about really resonated with me and it gave me a sort of courage and hope I don’t think someone older (or just generally someone whom I didn’t look up to) would have been able to instil. For the first time, someone I liked and someone I respected was talking about this thing I wasn’t able to share with anyone else. And they were a proper force in the ‘wider world.’

I never really struggle with ‘being gay,’ but I struggled with what other people might have thought, and again your dialogue helped with that. It was just so amazing to see someone whom I respected acting in a way that showed me he would treat me and people like me just as he would any other person. Even though it wasn’t a two way conversation between us, I felt that because you were a person with such a big stature who was brave enough to say this in public, that surely you knew people like me were out there and you were at least partially talking to us.

In the big scheme of things, I didn’t have it as hard as some others do, and I never want to take that for granted. My parents are relatively liberal and Australia is an OK climate to LGBT+ in. But I still found that it was hard to relate who I was with something bigger, and it was scary thinking about whether I would have to start a journey of discovery (not just self-discovery, but a discovery of ‘everything LGBT+’ I suppose you could say) on my own. Simply said, you helped me bridge the gap that I think sometimes people forget exists, even for young LGBT+ people in “supportive” environments. Just because they’re supportive doesn’t mean they’re informative or comfortable.

Nowadays, I’m so happy when I see younger celebrities come out, because I know how much that visibility and that platform means to young LGBT+ kids who simply want to see someone like them on television or in the media. Ellen Page, Charlie Carver, Tom Daley, Troye Sivan, Gus Kenworthy, etc, are all fantastic people that I just know will help make all the difference in someone’s life, as you did in mine.

So, all in all, I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done and continue to do for me and everyone else like me! I think it’s fair to say you’re not just an ally, but a friend too. I hope one day I get to shake your hand and thank you in-person for what you’ve done.

(...well this is the most personal thing I've ever written on this website.)

Josh: Of course! I think its beyond important to give people their voice and fair shot at what they want from life. GET OUT OF THE WAY HATERS!

Only light can drive out dark.

#Josh Hutcherson #interview #Reddit #Reddit AMA

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ladybaguette · 8 years ago

Video

youtube

La Belle et la Bête (2017)

French Transcript:

Note: If you activate the subtitles on YouTube, they’re rather accurate (they’ve added them manually so they’re not the auto-generated ones), but some words here and there seem to have slipped (they don’t change the meaning though), so I rewrote it here. I also used the French names of the characters so in case you don’t recognize “Big Ben”, “Mme Samovar”, and “Zip”, they’re “Cogsworth”, “Mrs. Pots” and “Chip” :)

Maurice : Belle, ma chérie... tu es tellement avant sur ton temps, et c’est un tout petit village !

- Belle, my dear... you are way ahead of your time, and this is a small village!

Gaston : Tu es la créature la plus sompteuse de tout l’univers.... Personne n’est digne de toi.

- You are the most sumptuous creature in all the universe... No one is worthy of you.

Maurice : Les gens ont l’esprit étroit, voilà tout... mais un village est plus sûr qu’une ville.

- The people are narrow-minded, that’s all... but a village is safer than a town.

Belle : Je suis venue chercher mon père.

- I’ve come for my father.

La Bête : Votre père est un voleur !

- Your father is a thief!

Belle : Il faut que je vous vois.

- I must see you.

Belle : Je m’enfuirai, je te le promet.

- I’m going to escape, I promise you this.

Lumière : Regarde ! Une jeune fille !

- Look! A young girl!

Belle: Qui a dit ça ?

- Who said that?

Lumière : Coucou !

- Hello!

Belle : Vous parlez ?

- You talk?

Big Ben : Mais évidemment ! Il ne fait même que ça.

- Obviously! He does nothing else (or that’s all he ever does).

Mme Samovar : Je suis ravie de faire votre connaissance.

- Delighted to make your acquaintance.

Zip : Vous voulez voir ce que je sais faire ?

- You want to see what I can do?

Belle : Qu’arrivera-t-il quand le dernier pétale tombera ?

- What happens when the last petal falls?

Lumière : Le maître demeurera une bête pour toujours.

- The master will remain a beast forever.

Big Ben : Nous deviendrons de la camelote.

- We will become junk.

La Bête : Que lui avez-vous fait ?

- What have you done to it?

Belle : Rien !

- Nothing!

La Bête : Sortez d’ici ! SORTEZ !

- Get out of here! GET OUT!

Belle : Il faut que vous m’aidiez. Tâchez de vous lever.

- You have to help me. Try to get up.

Lumière : Si c'est bien elle qui doit rompre le sort, vous devez enfin apprendre à aimer.

- If it is indeed she who must break the spell, you must finally learn to love.

Belle : Avez-vous réellement lu tous ces livres ?

- Have you really read all those books?

La Bête : Pas tous. Certains sont en grec.

- Not all. Some are in Greek.

Gaston : Tuons la bête !

- Kill the beast!

Time to take notes!

de la camelote : junk or crap

être avant sur son temps : to be ahead of one’s time

avoir l’esprit étroit : to be narrow minded

tâcher de [faire qqc] : to try/attempt to [do sth] (this is quite different from the verb tacher which means to stain.

rompre le sort : to break the spell (the verb rompre means to break off or destroy, but rompre avec [qqn] means to break up with someone...also sort (nm) can mean fate, spell or curse depending on the context).

demeurer : to remain (but it can also mean to dwell or live [more info here])

As always, if you have any comments or corrections, please let me know! This time I changed the way I wrote the transcript... in my previous posts I would write the entire French transcript first followed by the English translation, this time I put them together so that the translation of each sentence is written right below it.

If you’d like to check out more of my french trailer transcripts click here :)

#la belle et la bête #batb VF #my posts #french trailers #batb french #disney french #ladybaguette #french transcripts #disney #I think there was something between 'évidemment' and 'il ne fait même que ça'#but I couldn't quite catch it so if you did lemme knowww :D #ladybaguette transcripts

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notjustagirltattoopodcast · 5 years ago

Text

Not Just A Girl: New York

You can listen to the first episode with Anka Lavriv here. Or you can view the footage of this interview on YouTube with English subtitles/closed captions here.

NOT JUST A GIRL: Tattoo Podcast

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Season 1, Episode 2: New York

Eddy: [00:00:00] Hello friends. Welcome to not just to go the tattoo podcast where every week I will speak to socially conscious tattooers about their lives and art practice through an intersectional feminist lens. I'm Eddy and thank you for joining me for the second episode. Today we'll be discussing adapting to social change, meditation and self discovery in art and building a community around the tattoo studio.

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Who are the traditional custodians of this land that was stolen and never ceded. I'm honored to be on the ancestral land of the Awabakal people where this podcast is recorded and produced. I pay my respects to the elders past and present and extend my recognition to their descendants.

[00:01:00] I am so excited to introduce today's guest Anka Lavriv. Um, she's incredibly talented and is the co owner of Black Iris in Brooklyn. Um, her ethereal illustrative, um, tattoos are magical and her approach to her practice is absolutely beautiful. I had the great pleasure of meeting Anka when I guested it in his studio last year, and thank you so much for joining me today.

Anka: [00:01:39] Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm so excited about it. I'm so psyched to see you. Um, cause we were supposed to be hanging out right around this happened, so sad.

Eddy: [00:01:52] I'm so sad I missed out. I wanted to try and get tattooed by you and hang out and

Anka: [00:01:59] It was good [00:02:00] to at least see you on here.

Eddy: [00:02:02] Yeah, yeah, definitely. So like. Obviously you're in the epicenter of the pandemic in the US um, how are you going and how has the studio going?

Anka: [00:02:15] It's been like such an up and down experience. I don't know. We're kind of taking it one day at a time, you know? Um, I. Personally thought that I was going to be handling this crisis better than I am. And that was kind of like a humbling experience for me. Cause I'm always like, I'm so good in crisis. Like, you know, I figure it out and um, this really like knocked me on my ass. I was, especially the first couple of weeks I like right when we got locked out. We, um, got Corona and it was like such a horrible experience.

So when my fever broke and I came back [00:03:00] to reality, I was like, everything hit me at the same time. I just like had a complete melt down and. Yeah, it's been, ever since it's been like one day I'm just like, everything's great. Like we're going to figure it out. Like world is going to be a better place, and the next day I'm just like we're fucked.

Eddy: [00:03:24] It's all part of the grieving process though. Hey, like it's completely new and you've had everything kind of ripped away from you, like the world that we know and yeah, there's definitely like processing the loss. Like it's, it's, it would be weird, if we would just all okay with it.

Anka: [00:03:42] Yeah. It's just, I feel like for everyone this time is bringing up like the deepest oldest trauma and fears and, you know, all of this stuff is surfacing and hopefully we can deal with it finally. [00:04:00] Cause. Chances are we never properly dealt with it and recognized it and like, you know, ascended from, hopefully... it's been an experience for sure. Being here and just like seeing these images of New York empty and, you know, going to the grocery store and seeing all the businesses close, like the empty neighborhoods, people wearing masks. It's just like such a, such a strange sight.

Eddy: [00:04:36] Yeah. It's definitely not what you imagine the year is going to be. And then it's also just not what you imagine. Like how we react to things like, I dunno, I didn't think this was ever something I considered as being a possibility.

Anka: [00:04:53] No, it's, it's wild. Um, I'm convinced that by the end of 2020, uh, the [00:05:00] aliens will attck a hundred percent sure seems like a logical conclusion to 2020.

Eddy: [00:05:10] Shits just gone out of control.

Anka: [00:05:14] Yeah. Like who would have ever thought that all the like traveling will stop?

Eddy: [00:05:20] Yeah.

Anka: [00:05:20] Just that. Was such a such a part of everyone's life, like, yeah, it's wherever you look. You know? The changes are just so wild.

Eddy: [00:05:35] Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny you were talking about like how this experience is an opportunity to heal because I remember you posting on Instagram, I think it was before all this, how you wanted to like explore your art, making more and do more healing through that. And then all of this has just happened,

Anka: [00:05:57] Like not to make this about myself, but [00:06:00] this is like the perfect illustration of my whole life. I'm just like, let me do this thing. And then I just like get swept away in a tornado.

Sorry thats not what I meant. So I turned 33. Last year and for for this year for me was like, I was like, that's it. Like I woke up in the morning, I always tried to go somewhere where I can be around like a big body of water for my birthday and I wake up early, I go to see the sunset and like set intentions for the year, and I was like, this year I'm like, shedding all the llike skin and things that are untrue things that don't belong to me. Like I want to get back to like who I really am. And you know, it was like the universe definitely heard me.

It's been a lot of [00:07:00] shedding for sure. Um, but this was like such a, i feel like. It's been such a culmination of this because I, I've never in my life had an opportunity to just be and live and not do anything and stop like in my adult life, like never ever. So it's been a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, a lot of like writing, putting things together because, I don't know, I just feel like we all took a like a hard look at our lives and I don't know, for me, like being able to step away from my like daily routine and the hamster wheel and just like, you know, more rents, more money, more expenses, and just be like. What do you really want? Like how do you see your ideal existence?

Like what are you [00:08:00] chasing? Why are you so like obsessed with like doing more and more and more like. I don't know, it like really revealed so much for me personally, even though it's been very painful.

Eddy: [00:08:12] Yeah. I feel like, I mean, even though my situation in Australia is much easier than what you're experiencing in the US like its very much the same here, like an opportunity to really, you know, while I have the privilege of a comfortable home and food on the table and all of that, like I can really just like shed my expectations and reassess what's important to me and kind of discover a new way of life that's more comfortable and more healthy and that is not going to end up with me in agony and unable to work in 10 years time.

Anka: [00:08:47] Yeah. Yeah, because it's just like, it's just a part of, you know, this culture, the hostile culture, and just like, you have to do more and, you know, [00:09:00] never sleep. Never rest. Just like go, go, go, go. And like, that's not how life works. Like you have to. You have to go through the cycles, you have to give and you have to receive and you have to like be awake and then goes to sleep. Like just

Eddy: [00:09:16] Absolutely its very toxic like this way of life I've become accustomed to. And I think for me, like just sitting at home with my cats and watching them, like they do things when they want to. They rest when they need to. They eat if they're hungry. I was just kinda like, why can't, I know its stupid, but why can't I live like a cat?

Anka: [00:09:36] That's so funny you said that because I was thinking the same thing. I was like, no. When you scratch them and they don't want to be scratched anymore, they just turn away from you. They're like, I'm done. I do not enjoy that im leaving.

So it's been really eye opening for me. I, you [00:10:00] know, I was supposed to go to back home for a while and my sister and I were planned this whole trip. We were supposed to go to Budapest and like do all this cool stuff. Like I spend one week with my sister in the past 14 years.

Eddy: [00:10:18] Wow.

Anka: [00:10:19] So I was really looking forward to it, and it was so heartbreaking to just like cancel everything, but

Eddy: [00:10:29] Oh, I'm so sorry. That would have been hard.

Anka: [00:10:32] Yeah. And the other thing is the crap with immigration. You know, it's just like doing all this stuff with green cards, but it's, again, you know, it's, it's making me think maybe its not, you know, I'm not meant to live here for forever. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

Eddy: [00:10:52] Things might change, you never know.

Anka: [00:10:55] I hope so. Yeah. I really hope so.

Eddy: [00:10:58] Yeah. So will [00:11:00] you, for our listeners, like you were born and grew up in Ukraine? Um, yeah. And that like must have really impacted how you experience life, especially in the US like having such a different background and also like being more adaptable and stuff. Cause you mentioned that you did experience poverty as a child as well.

Anka: [00:11:24] So I was born like three years, four years before Soviet union, disassembled. And you know. I actually like talking to my parents helped me a lot to deal with what's going on right now because they were in the situation where they had like two youngkids. They're everything they knew in life, just like broke and you know the belief system, the like just, it just collapsed and they had to [00:12:00] pick up the pieces.

Like. You know, all I remember from my childhood is like standing in line with my mom all the time for like to buy bread or like milk or whatever. Yeah. And we didn't have money for a couple of years because you know, the Soviet currency was obviously done, but we didn't have our own currency. So we had these, like the temporary money that was called coupons, and like a loaf of bread costs like 2 million coupons. It was just like, so insane.

Eddy: [00:12:38] That is insane

Anka: [00:12:40] Yeah.

Eddy: [00:12:41] It must be confronting like seeing people complaining about not being able to go to a hairdresser when you're like, um, I couldn't buy bread.

Anka: [00:12:49] Yeah. So, but, you know, it's like I didn't know any other way of life, so it was just like, and honestly, like most people were in the same boat. Um, but. [00:13:00] I find it so interesting that, you know, like in Soviet union it was all about kind of, you know, theoretically it was about equality and everyone having the same amount. And, and then once it all collapsed, it was just complete madness. Like people were just like murdering each other for money and yeah, it was like, yeah, human nature, like

Eddy: [00:13:26] Humans.

Anka: [00:13:28] It comes through no matter what. Um, yeah, but. It is very, it's very different here. It took me a while to get used to it. I've always loved New York and I don't think that I would have stayed here if I wasn't in New York. Cause when I first moved to US, I was in ocean city, Maryland and it wasn't my favorite place, it was a strange place to be [00:14:00] when you first get here.

Um, but then they came to me. I was supposed to go home and I came to New York for two weeks to see a friend, and I was like, I'm not going anywhere. And went and threw my tickets and stayed. And like, that's the shit that you do when you're 19.

Eddy: [00:14:23] It seems like such an amazing city to be in though if you are creative because of the possibilities around you and like all of the different cultures coming together and just the art world in general is really, it seems to be really celebrated there.

Anka: [00:14:38] The diversity like was so it was like my favorite thing because I did not experience that at home at all. But like now things are different, but not when I was growing up, it was just. You know, we had like people from peace Corps come and like we were like all going at them, like wow [00:15:00] Americans such a such a site. Yeah. So I really do appreciate this aspect of living here. And just. I dunno. I felt like, and I still do sometimes when I go places like you feel though kind of the wall of people treating you differently when you're from somewhere else. And in New York, I, I never really experienced that because everyone's pretty much from somewhere else.

And like I worked at a Mexican restaurant for many years and it was just like. You know, so many different people from so many backgrounds and everyone is just like getting along and doing this crazy thing like this, you know, high pressure, like really weird and nothing like being a bartender in New York [00:16:00] city. It was like a bootcamp of life

Eddy: [00:16:06] That's such a good way to put it. That's what I found fascinating about New York as well, because I live in quite a small city in Australia and it's very like working class white like. You know, we're a bunch of colonizers here and there's not a lot of diversity. And yeah. So when I came to New York and I was hearing all of these different languages and seeing all of this different cultural dress as well, being adapted into modern fashion, and it was fucking amazing and beautiful and fascinating. And also like seeing the museums and galleries having more diversity in like what they were displaying as well, rather than just everything by old white men.

Anka: [00:16:48] I got here and I was like, how am I supposed to like un-see this and unexperience this and just go back to like the same old lifestyle? I was like, I can't, I'm corrupted [00:17:00] right now. I can not leave. I remember the moment when I was walking on the Brooklyn bridge for the first time and I was like. That's it. Like I can't do anything about this. Like I have to stay here.

Eddy: [00:17:17] That's so good. Did you start tattooing in New York?

Anka: [00:17:21] I just started tattooing back home, actually. I started tattooing when I was 15

Eddy: [00:17:26] Oh wow.

Anka: [00:17:28] I always have been like obsessed with the idea and I really don't remember where I got the the idea in my head because that's not something I was around. It's not something that was like very developed at the time where I'm from and I just had these like little flash sheets and I would like draw on my friends and my neighborhood and then like.

When I turned 15 my dad was like, okay, you have to like stop asking me [00:18:00] for money and you have to go get a job. Like, what do you want to do? And I was like, I want to be a tattoo artist. And like, my dad asked his friend to teach me how to, yeah. Like I didn't appreciate it at the time, you know? And now I'm just like, this is really cool.

Eddy: [00:18:17] Thats awesome

Anka: [00:18:20] And, uh, like. I talked to so many clients who are like oh man and I'm like almost 40 and my mom still doesn't know I have tattoos and I'm just like, that makes me really appreciate like how cool my parents were.

Eddy: [00:18:40] That's so cool,

Anka: [00:18:42] Yeah. So I got my apprenticeship. I like literally my first day ever of my apprenticeship. I was supposed to just sit there and watch the guy and like, you know, clean the studio and stuff and his client didn't show up. And the guy [00:19:00] was like, all right, get, take the machine and like, go over my old tattoo. Like I have never seen a tattoo machine in real life. Like,

Eddy: [00:19:10] Wow

Anka: [00:19:10] I, completely blacked out. Like I just don't remember anything about it. The first day of my apprenticeship

Eddy: [00:19:21] That is amazing.

Anka: [00:19:23] It was like, you know, we were like soldering needles, like it was very, very different. And I'm sure it was very unsanitary because they had some like autoclaves, but they were like a million years old. Yeah.

Eddy: [00:19:41] That's really cool that you got to experience, I guess, that old world of tattooing like,

Anka: [00:19:47] Yeah.

Eddy: [00:19:48] Before this, like new age brought in by social media where everything's kind of changed and you just buy things in packets now and like, actually the person was smoldering needles. I've only done it once, but it's really [00:20:00] incredible.

Anka: [00:20:01] And, um, we went to get me a license to some guy's place and he was like, you know, it's gonna be this much money. And like, I gave him the money and he just like, wrote this like license for me. Like completed this training. It was just like everything was just such bullshit because it was a very different in Ukraine and yeah you can pretty much buy yoursef whatever you want, definitely a very unconventional story.

Eddy: [00:20:42] I love it

Anka: [00:20:43] But then we're like, I started college and I was like practicing on all my college friends and yeah. And then I moved here and I fell out [00:21:00] of it for a long time cause it was, you know, things are a little different here. Yeah. So, you know, it took me a while to get back to it. Like a long while, but I, I've always drawn, I always made art work and I actually started showing around Brooklyn, Manhattan and like getting invited into like a bunch of art shows and that's how people were like well, you know, she can draw, so how bad can she be at tattooing? And they was like, let me practice on them.

Eddy: [00:21:37] That's awesome. It's cool that you had the opportunity to establish yourself as an artist first. Like I think that that sometimes gives you a much stronger foundation to build a career upon. Like

Anka: [00:21:49] I still think that I still, like for me, I'm an artist first. And tattooing is just like a medium and like a way [00:22:00] of life that I'm super grateful for, but it's kind of always like second for me.

Eddy: [00:22:08] Yeah. I think that. That's a good thing in a lot of ways though, because that means your focus is on good design and beautiful art rather than making money. Sometimes people who are just tattooers by trade, like their focus is so different,

Anka: [00:22:25] But like even saying this, like making me sweaty, somebody is listening. But if its how I feel. Trying to be honest.

Eddy: [00:22:43] I had, um, how did you come to the point where you were using, like the imagery you use its like, it's very powerful, like you see a lot of goddesses represented in your work and stuff. Is that like a cultural thing or is that a personal thing? Like what's kind of [00:23:00] informed that subject matter.

Anka: [00:23:02] So it's definitely a personal thing. And, um, I usually, like, my process is usually like when I work on like bigger drawings is that like, I get the imagery from, from meditation basically. And I just get these kind of like flashing images of like how the layout is going to be and I like quickly draw it out. And at this point I kind of, you know, and I, I just know that like, if I try to like come up with something, it just, it doesn't feel right.

But when I, like when it comes to me, like it's always super smooth the process of like putting it out there. So, yeah, I do a lot of meditation and it like absolutely changed my life for so much better in every possible way and just kind of [00:24:00] like tuning into this, like, I don't want to say channeling because it's not channeling, but it's just like letting letting the process come to you versus like trying to squeeze something out because I'm sure every artist can relate to the feeling of, you know, being like come on, let's, let's create something awesome and you're just sitting there frustrated at the white page.

Eddy: [00:24:30] Absolutely, it probably what makes your work so unique and authentic? The fact that it. Literally just flowing from you and you just, you're just like this vessel to like express whatever's coming through you and you're giving it a space. That's, that's like very powerful.

Anka: [00:24:49] It took a really long time to like tune into it because I I have like a complex of like, Oh, I don't have art education. [00:25:00] So I felt like really inferior for like imposter syndrome as we always, like, we all have, I'm sure. Um, and I would look at my work that looked like my work and I didn't want it to look like my work. I wanted it to look like something that I thought was better and I would just like get so frustrated.

Like, why? Why is it like this? Like why does it look like this? And until I started appreciating that, like, you know, this is how you do it. Like you can change it. You can try different ways where you always go back to that specific style. Um, like things got so much better for me.

Eddy: [00:25:48] Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Cause I've always been like a big believer in, if you just do what feels right for you and what feels natural then there's the space for everyone. Like we don't have to [00:26:00] compete, and you just get to be yourself and you get to enjoy the process of art making more and it it contributes in a much more positive way to the world.

Anka: [00:26:09] But I think to get to that, to be able to just let this expression fully come, like you have to work through so much, so much to learn and

Eddy: [00:26:20] That's something I struggle with

Anka: [00:26:22] So many layers of crap and like capitalistic shit. And you know, it's like I've only gotten there through doing like really a huge amount of inner work.

Eddy: [00:26:36] Yeah. Cause we're conditioned to hate ourselves and to be numb so that we just follow and do what we're told. But actually like acknowledging yourself and looking at how you feel and processing it, that is a very difficult thing to do.

Anka: [00:26:51] Yeah. And I like have been pretty like, you know, in hindsight, like I look back at my life and I'm just like. Whoa, [00:27:00] you really did whatever you wanted then. You know? Like when I was like, I'm staying here, and my parents were like, what are you talking about? Like you are 19 years old, just turned 19 like you don't have any money or any friends. Like, and that was just like, no, I feel it in my gut that I like, this is where I have to be.

And you know, you do a lot of this and like some of the decisions look very like bad at the moment, but over time you're like, Whoa, like really kind of, I don't even know what I'm trying to say, but I'm trying to say that like I've kind of trained myself to follow like that instinct, you know, when you just feel like something is right and like you have to act on it. Like even though it looks. Like kind of crazy.

Eddy: [00:27:58] Yeah. That's awesome.

[00:28:00] Anka: [00:28:00] And I think it's same thing in, in like following your voice in any kind of artwork.

Eddy: [00:28:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you, I mean, you take that kind of approach with your customers as well. Like your whole process is very like, I guess, spiritual or ritualistic like, so to speak, like, um, you know, how do you, how do you go about like, giving your customers an experience like, like that where they're able to help channel themselves into what they're getting tattooed by you?

Anka: [00:28:36] I think like our job is such a unique opportunity to connect with people on like such deep level, like right off the bat. Sometimes I like to ease the tension I like sometimes talk to people about how absurd this is that you like, come to someone that you've never met and you were like, hi, nice to meet you. Like I'm going to shave you now [00:29:00] poke you with needles for awhile and then you'll pay me or it

Eddy: [00:29:07] Next level.

Anka: [00:29:09] It's crazy. And like sometimes I just block it out because when you start thinking about it, it's it's unbelievable. Truly, you know, but I, I'm so happy that I get to do this because the genuine experiences that you have with people is like nothing else I can think of.

Eddy: [00:29:33] Yeah.

Anka: [00:29:33] And you know, people just like tell you. Things that are so personal, and I'm actually like, I hate small talk. I was a bartender for 10 years and I had to do so much small talk that I just cannot even, I can't, I cannot stand being like the weather is good.

Eddy: [00:29:58] Get to the deep stuff, Tell [00:30:00] me what your soul says

Anka: [00:30:02] Like. I do not mind. When people will share like really personal stuff with me. Like, you know, it goes into like another territory where you have to set boundaries for yourself. Because I started getting to the point where I was like, I, I love connecting with my clients. I love talking about the deep stuff. But at the end of the day, I feel like I got run over by the truck and because I am an empathetic person and I like really take everything to heart. And I didn't even realize how much it like built up in me until this time where we can just like sit home and donothing and think about our lives. And I was like, wow. Like I didn't realize how tired I was. And like, not so much so [00:31:00] physically, but. Emotionally.

Eddy: [00:31:02] Yeah.

Anka: [00:31:04] Like sometimes just sit here and like stare at the wall for like an hour and then like, I dunno, it's just like hits me like the level of of exhaustion that was there and I didn't even know.

Eddy: [00:31:20] We do so much emotional labor in our tattooing that like it does, it does take a huge hit. Like on our bodies.

Anka: [00:31:31] It's the trap where you're like, well, you know, I love what I do. I love my clients. I love, and you feel guilty admitting to yourself that like, maybe I need help or maybe I need rest. And you just like keep calling yourself. Oh, well you're just being ungrateful. Or you know, whatever. You were like being a brat. Like at least I do that. And you know, I worked enough shitty jobs for [00:32:00] years that just like made me hate my life, be so depressed and like I just never wanted to do anything else. Like, honestly, I try not like a huge broad spectrum of jobs, but like, enough different fields to just like say, I don't want to do anything else.

Eddy: [00:32:23] Yeah. Yeah. I'm the same. I think when you're a creative, like and you're not doing something that's in that ballpark. It's life is very miserable.

Anka: [00:32:34] Yeah. But then you know, you have to find a way to like recognize that you're a person too, and sometimes you need a break and. Like, I'm so amazed that like, you know, we have so many guests now and meeting a couple of people who are truly like, yeah, you know, I go and they work for like a month and then I [00:33:00] go away for three months and I rest. Its a dream

Eddy: [00:33:06] It doesn't occur to you that that's actually a possibility and that it's okay to rest.

Anka: [00:33:11] Like, why not? You know, we like this, this illusion that we're not in control of our lives and our schedules, like I still have the mindset of working for someone, even though I'm working for myself, and I always used to say like if I worked for myself, I would be so chilling all the time. And I'm like, I'm the meanest boss I've ever had. It's just like. Maybe it's time to look like what's beneath this, like, you know?

Eddy: [00:33:55] Yeah.

Anka: [00:33:56] And just like do learn to be kinder to ourselves. [00:34:00] I don't know,

Eddy: [00:34:04] Theres a lot of things to unlearn there.

Anka: [00:34:08] And for me personally, when I'm not kind to myself and the like overworked and cranky. And when someone's complaining about it, I'm like, Oh, whatever. Like you don't need to work that hard. You know? Like I stop myself and I'm like, Oh, like talking, like who's saying those things

Eddy: [00:34:30] We, we do start to judge other people through that nasty lens that like we apply to our own lives and it's very, very toxic and

Anka: [00:34:40] Yeah. How much have you produced?

Eddy: [00:34:45] Yeah. I hate that. Like we don't have to produce anything. It's okay to sit on your ass like there's other ways to contribute to society as well. I think just kindness and love and there's [00:35:00] other ways to contribute without having to make money and

Anka: [00:35:03] Yeah

Eddy: [00:35:04] Like working.

Anka: [00:35:06] Yeah. And I've been, I've had so many realizations during this time, you know, on like what really drives me here. And i, you know, like if it's not oversharing, I have been sober for four and a half years now, and that is something that I never thought that I was going to be able to pull off.

Eddy: [00:35:33] That's amazing.

Anka: [00:35:35] Thank you. Um, so proud, cause you know, it's been like a really, really long road for me and changed my life completely. But it was so much stuff was not processed and it's still not, and just like when [00:36:00] you live your life a certain way and then you can't do your usual coping mechanism anymore, like lots of things come up and you react to things in a way where you just like explode over, nothing, you know? And you're just like, what am I doing this?

And it's, it's just because you, you don't have your crutch anymore. You can't, you know, you can't just like check out or numb out. You have to actually go through the painful experiences. And I've been having like a lot of things from like the residue from that come up in this time. And just like the way I'm able to deal with things as a sober person is so much better.

Eddy: [00:36:53] That's amazing.

Anka: [00:36:54] And again, you know, just like meditating on things and being able [00:37:00] to separate yourself from like this part of you that's like freaking out and being able to. Like almost have a conversation with it and be like, what do you need? You know, what are you missing right now? Like what? What really is the problem? It's not really that email thats making you jump out of your skin.

Eddy: [00:37:22] That like internal self-parenting where you've just got to calm yourself down and be like it's ok, what's the next thing

Anka: [00:37:30] With dealing with clients so much? Cause I, I used to, like when I first started, I would like let myself get like, cranky with someone if they would, you know, not act the way I wanted. And, uh, yeah. So the past couple of years, my view on it changed so much and I'm just like. You do what you need to do. If someone's driving you [00:38:00] crazy, you go to the bathroom, scream in the roll of toilet paper.

But like because this, like, I feel like when you get tattooed, like it's such a hyper hightened experience. It's such a like hightened state. You have to be so aware of what you're saying, how you're acting, because like the smallest thing that's so insignificant to, you can set someone off like set off their, their past trauma or you know, you just have to be so careful. And then that's all they remember about their experience, no matter how amazing the tattoo is.

Eddy: [00:38:43] Yeah. And sometimes when like people's trauma is triggered during a tattoo, they can associate that trauma then with the tattoo that they have to look at on the skin every day and that it can really like compact the trauma for them. And [00:39:00] like we have, even though tattooing is not essential, so to speak, we do have a much more important role in people's lives than we realize and we have a lot more responsibility to to be cautious with how we treat people and to be more considerate and empathetic.

Anka: [00:39:21] Yeah, absolutely. It is. I don't know. You know, for me, it's, I take it as a huge responsibility because you are with the person in a very vulnerable moment for one reason or another. And that's why I think it's so damaging and toxic to just perpetuate this culture where like, just suck it up. Just lay there, you know, just shut up and sit there. Who needs this? We all have enough trauma already. Like we don't need more.

Eddy: [00:39:55] Absolutely.

Anka: [00:39:55] We dont need to be paying for an experience that's going to traumatize us.

[00:40:00] Eddy: [00:40:00] And there's lots of little things we can do to help our client have a better experience. Like I, I play music that's got like a softer beat, so that brings the heart rate down a bit, you know, keep them hydrated, you know, do everything I can to relax their body, offer them more pillows, you know, like,

Anka: [00:40:18] Yeah, absolutely.

Eddy: [00:40:20] If we're not always able to be there emotionally for our customers, like it makes sense to them. That way we can still do other things to make their experience better

Anka: [00:40:31] I always feel so happy when people say like, wow, like your space is so welcoming and they, I just feel so relieved like to me it's the biggest compliment because I get really uncomfortable where it's like crazy music blasting and like everyone's just like screaming on top of their lungs. Like I have like really shot nervous system after like so many years working in nightlife, so everything that's [00:41:00] like really, like, I can't even go to the shows anymore because it's just like, it honestly scares me and theyre not always the best environment. Yeah. I'm like so hypersensitive to everything that's like, I need it to be a serene environment.

Eddy: [00:41:23] You can, you can tell that the minute you walk into Black Iris, like it's so warm and welcoming, like the plants everywhere, the artwork, like on the walls, on the floor even the whole environment is like, I felt instantly comfortable there. And like when I arrived in New York, we'd had a hell of a time getting there driving from, um, Salem. We got stuck in a snowstorm. We were having the worst time and we rocked up to get tattooed at Black iris before my guest spot. But, and we will like on the verge of what felt like a breakdown. Like we just wanted to cry. [00:42:00] And then we got there. And I think if we hadn't had that experience in the studio and felt so safe and comfortable. I think it would have changed our entire holiday in New York.

Anka: [00:42:10] That means a lot

Eddy: [00:42:12] Yeah, it was. It's honestly one of the most incredible studios I've ever been in.

Anka: [00:42:16] Thank you. Johno and I like really put a lot of thought into how the space should be, and I think because we do a lot of community events, like I think that contributes to just like the general feel of it. Uh, cause that is like hands down my favorite thing about the studio, just having classes and events and meditation circles and you know, even people who don't want to get tattoos, like they can participate and they can be a part of the space. And um, it, like the community that it created is absolutely [00:43:00] incredible.

Eddy: [00:43:00] Yeah, and I mean community is really so much more important than I think we grew up realizing like in capitalist countries like the US and Australia with very individualistic, but when you kind of figure out how important community is, and you start to create one and create one in such a positive way, like you guys have, like what that does, not just for yourself, but for everyone around you is invaluable.

Anka: [00:43:28] I really think like, honestly, this is the only thing that like truly matters, because I'm like, this is the only thing that you can contribute to as like a regular person, not like a billionaire and see immediate result, like coming back to you. And that will like encourage you to, to put more effort into your community because you know, like, we feel so helpless by reading the news, everything is like, like we're all [00:44:00] attacked with these like huge problems that just make us feel paralyzed and make us feel helpless. And you know, you're like, I'm just a little guy like how can I, and it makes me think of Lord Of The Rings. It's like how can I stand in the face of the great evil like I'm nothing I'm a spec.

But when you make a change in your community or you know, you contribute in some way, where. People say that like, wow, this really helped me. Or, you know, it really changed my perspective. Or, you know, I just feel like I have a place to go to now. Like we had a person who said like, I just moved here and I don't know anyone. They felt really depressed. But now we can just come to these events and feel like I have friends and you know, I feel like home. So and I was [00:45:00] like ahh youre going to make me cry

Eddy: [00:45:02] I feel like thats success for me.

Anka: [00:45:06] It's powerful

Eddy: [00:45:06] That's a marker of success when you've like been able to have a positive impact on someone else's life. That's just, that's the greatest thing we can ever hope to do.

Anka: [00:45:16] It's true. And it's not like. Instagram followers or you know, like, of course, you know, it's a great tool to use as a way to reach more people and make contacts. And, but when you, when you put so much value in it, like it's, it doesn't mean anything. You need to nurture the real connections. And until I'm saying this to myself, first and foremost, you know, I'm not trying to preach like I'm still figuring this out for myself. Like don't put your energy in there. Like I'm obviously grateful for [00:46:00] that aspect and that I have a platform, but the only thing that really matters is people that are around you.

Eddy: [00:46:10] Yeah, absolutely.

Anka: [00:46:14] Yeah. You know what I mean?

Eddy: [00:46:16] Yeah. And we're so lucky to have that, like to have those people who, who do reach out and who do get involved and who do participate like, yeah. It just, it's a sad world when you see people who, who don't realize what they've got around them or who don't have respect or gratitude for it. Yeah, we are very lucky.

Anka: [00:46:41] Super lucky. I still, I can't believe it, you know, like where I came from and my life now, it's like, Whoa. You know, my parents came to visit me three times now and they were just like, you know, they were like, you have a space [00:47:00] in New York like crazy. And. Yeah. It's like when I look at Google maps and I see it, I'm still like,

Eddy: [00:47:12] That's so amazing.

Anka: [00:47:14] It's such an amazing experience,but I feel like, you know, like I got. I got the, like my dream came true, hands down like better than I could ever imagine. And, but I feel like I serve the space. Like this space is not for me to just be like, you know, be power tripping or walking around thing like I'm a business owner or whatever. It's like. I have like two needs, a sacred space and like I'm there to take care of the space and I'm there to like watch our artists grow and [00:48:00] be able to like facilitate these workshops.

Eddy: [00:48:03] You're a custodian rather than an owner.

Anka: [00:48:07] Yeah. Yeah.

Eddy: [00:48:08] That's fantastic

Anka: [00:48:09] It's an amazing experience. I will always be forever grateful for it.

Eddy: [00:48:16] Yeah. Do you guys have like, like you and Johno have any like kind of ideas or plans on how you're going to move forward, like after all of the madness has settled?

Anka: [00:48:29] I'm not sure yet because we're kind of like taking it month by month. Like, you know, we're still paying the rent and basically just like paying it up with our own money.

Eddy: [00:48:41] Wow.

Anka: [00:48:41] So, yeah, but you know, it's really hard to say, cause we just don't know how long this is gonna last and from what I understand, New York put tattoo shops in like [00:49:00] phase four reopening. So there is one is going to happen on May 15th so it might still be a while. Yeah, so like it's kind of like a time of where we just have to sit and wait and see what happens. But I really, I, I have confidence that we can pull through.

Eddy: [00:49:24] Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, sometimes when it does get hard and you reach out to the community, they will be there to help you get through if it comes to that anyway.

Anka: [00:49:36] Right. Yeah. But you know, at the same time. I just got to, I was like freaking out for so long and now I just kinda got to the point where I'm like, you know, whatever happens, happens. If we can't keep the business in this space, we'll just start in a new space. Like, you know, we have the [00:50:00] community, so

Eddy: [00:50:00] Absolutely, and you'll, you'll adapt.

You've adapted a million times before.

Anka: [00:50:07] For sure

Eddy: [00:50:10] Oh, that's so cool. Well, I might wrap it up there, but like it's been so amazing to speak to you and hear your story and I always, I really love your approach to tattooing and your studio and your clients. It's always a joy to see on social media and when I've got to talk to you as well.

Anka: [00:50:31] I think it's just like, I don't know if we still have time, but I really, really, really do think that we have to all approach it from, from like the, the real place, you know, not just to seem cool on the internet or for money. It's, it has to, it has to come from the right place because you, you are changing people's bodies [00:51:00] forever. Like that's a great responsibility. I don't know. I feel like we all have to remind that to ourselves all the time.

Eddy: [00:51:12] Yeah, definitely, absolutely. Well, um, this footage will be on YouTube for our listeners to watch later. So, um like for all of our listeners, you can head over to YouTube. Um, I'll put all of the like information, like how to find Anka and Black Iris in the show notes. Um, you can follow our Instagram. Uh, not just a girl underscore tattoo. Um. You know, please subscribe, follow, and share. Um, you know, let's spread the love for tattooing and for the amazing artists that we get to speak to.

Um, thank you so much, Anka, it's been so, so amazing talking to you and thank you to everyone who listened. Um, we really, really [00:52:00] appreciate it. Um, we hope you have a wonderful day and be kind to each other.

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goodra-king · 5 years ago

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Transcript of Creating the Right Morning Routine To Transform Your Day

Transcript of Creating the Right Morning Routine To Transform Your Day written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Amy Landino. She’s the bestselling author and award-winning host of Amy TV, but today we’re going to talk about her latest book. Good Morning, Good Life: Five Simple Habits to Master Your Mornings and Upgrade Your Life. Amy, thanks for joining me,

Amy Landino: John. Thanks for having me on. I’m a fan of yours, so this is just a pleasure.

John Jantsch: Well, thank you. I’ve just been around a long time, so that’s, that’s all I can say about that. So why morning? Why is morning so important?

Amy Landino: Honestly, I just think that it’s really easy to let moments process by very, very quickly if we don’t pay attention to them. So what better time to start doing that then when you start the day? I really believe that if you can, even if it’s just 15 minutes, if you can take ownership and own and really feel like you have done something on your terms to start the day, you’re good. It’s going to be a little bit easier to take on the curve balls that come throughout the day, especially when you get better at anticipating them. Which I just think more self-awareness and time with your own thoughts can help you accomplish. So yeah, I think mornings are something everybody has. Even if your morning doesn’t start until one in the afternoon because for whatever reason you work a night shift or something along those lines, it’s your way of starting the day. So how are you doing that?

John Jantsch: So I know a lot of this is, is your own personal experience that you’ve put into this, but have you done any, I’m sure there’s some scientific research out there about like our rhythms and what’s the best time to do some of this? I mean, did you study any of that or are you aware of any of that kind of research?

Amy Landino: Yeah, a little bit. I mean I definitely researched it in terms of like sleep because even though the book was about morning routines, a lot of people get the wrong idea that it’s this means it has to be a certain way and at a certain time and everyone is completely different, and not only that, the majority of the time, those of us who are trying to perform a little bit better lack in performance in other places and they take away from sleep when they do that. And so I think sleep is really important. Making sure that you’re getting the amount of sleep that’s right for you is important. That might be six hours, that might be seven hours, that might be nine hours. Obviously we hear the recommendation is seven to eight but everybody’s different. And noticing that about yourself and just knowing that that’s got to happen is important.

Amy Landino: And then I also think that there are people who just genuinely cannot fathom getting up before the sun and they very much are thriving off of that connection with light or any vitamin D that they can get. I’m not one of those people, but maybe if you live on the West Coast and you’re just so used to thriving off of the sun that that’s how you would want to wake up. That was sort of the research that I looked into is just how people are different and the problem is that a lot of people wouldn’t even know that because they haven’t taken time to notice it about themselves. We’re too busy consuming content about how it should be without actually really taking stock and what’s important to us and how we genuinely feel about it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that’s a good point and particularly for entrepreneurs, there seems to be a lot of literature, a lot of writing of late about the these morning routines and almost more coming at them as like hacks, which I think is actually not terribly healthy. However, I do think that people can establish routines and habits that do serve them. So I’m sure I’m not the first person to ask you what’s your morning routine look like?

Amy Landino: Oh, thank you for asking. And I’m so glad you said that because that’s really the motivation behind the book was that there’s just so much of this going around where it’s like this is the exact process and it’s not. It’s about a habit becoming a habit because it’s habitual. And that can only happen if it’s natural to you. So what’s natural to me is lately I’ve been waking up between 4:30 and 5:00 I think that’s a little bit crazy. I’m not going to lie, but I also just absolutely love going to bed and I know I am not productive at night. So I reverse engineer what time I wake up So I get at least seven hours of sleep every night. I’m not worried about staying up late. I’m not a night owl. I don’t thrive off of watching 10 episodes of something on Netflix.

Amy Landino: I just don’t. So I would rather wake up and make the most out of the next day once I’ve sort of hit my point. So that’s waking up. That first half hour I just let myself figure out how to be awake. That’s typically just washing my face, doing a skincare routine, preparing some lemon water to sip on when I start trying to use my brain at some point and getting the coffee going. And so that’s sort of like the first 30 minutes, letting the dog out. These kinds of things that are super easy going and not making me do anything to stress myself out. After about being awake for about 30 minutes, I’ll sit down and just brain dump is a little a methodology I learned about from Julia Cameron in the book the Artist’s Way. She talks about morning pages. I think she ended up writing like a spinoff book about this too because it was so popular.

Amy Landino: Essentially the topic is you just allow your brain to offload anything on it first thing in the morning for three pages of stream of consciousness writing. And by doing so, you write some of the crummiest stuff you’ve ever written in your life, but it allows you to break through all of the gook and nastiness that you’re waking up with. Grudges from the day before, any bad sleep, you got a bad dream or just any stress that you’re thinking about. It gets it off your mind a little bit and puts it into the real world in a journal I guess. And then you can kind of do more creative work because you cleared the way for that. So that’s the first thing that I do.

John Jantsch: I will tell you, I am a little older than you, so I read that book when it first came out 25 years ago and have been doing that practice ever since. And I unfortunately, I just kind of like write it all down like garbage almost and throw it away. But do you know Dean D’Souza? Is that his name? How do you say his last name? He’s been around forever. He’s in Australia and I was talking about journaling and he sent me a picture. He’s got like this, well first off he’s a really great artist as well, but he’s got this amazing like bookcase full of all of his journals from 20 some years of journaling and they’re all illustrated and they’re gorgeous. And I was like, I bet you that is pretty amazing to dive into.

Amy Landino: You know what, I hope to have a bookcase full someday. But I will say that I have been keeping, they’re paperback journals, they’re always paperback journals. I order a different colored one different themed one every time I need a new one. But I have been using a label maker on the side of them and keeping track of the dates. This became more important to me. My brother passed away in the last couple of years and so I realized maybe at some point in time as judgmental as I am about what I’m writing in those pages every morning later down the line it might be interesting for me to look back on a couple of moments to see where my headspace was. So yeah, I’ve actually been holding onto them in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch: So I, I interrupted you at your journaling practice.

Amy Landino: Yes, of course. So after morning pages, I like to look at my goals and that’s just because I have the memory of a pea and also I get shiny object syndrome. So I have to remind myself every day, what are the goals of the company, what are my personal goals and what should I be really focused on? Because it makes it a lot easier to go throughout the day and say no to something when it’s supposed to be a no. And we talked a little bit, I think before we went on the air. I’m a big fan of Ryan Holiday’s book, The Daily Stoic. I’m rereading it for the second year in a row and it’s just a page a day read that kind of just gets me outside of myself. Things can get petty and complainy very quickly all the time. And so I just feel like starting the day with a little bit of wisdom that’s far beyond my years is a really good way to go into the day. So those are sort of just some basics.

John Jantsch: Well for balance I would suggest that you add The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur to your daily reading because it is a little, I tease Ryan about this. It’s a little less bro-ish. Just saying that.

Amy Landino: All right cool.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about the habits that subtitle the book, five simple habits, decide, defy, rise, shine, and thrive. Do you have way to kind of thread all that together for us?

Amy Landino: Absolutely. They were. They rhyme, which is super fun, but they all have a really good reason. So for the decision being in the habit of deciding, I think you’d probably talk about this in The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur because this is so important. Being able to make decisions easily, even if they are difficult ones to make, especially when you’re in business is important. And so taking decisions off of your plate that are less important is good too. But the decision that you should really be making with your morning is like, why do you even care to get that time for yourself? And it could be that you’ve realized you’re caught on the hamster wheel of business and you’re not big thinking and you’ve lost your creativity and that could be a good reason why. But really knowing why this time is important to you, so that you’ll stick with it is big and I think that this resonates a lot with people who are trying to look for different morning routines that they should try because they work for other people and that’s not going to be good enough.

Amy Landino: It’s not sustainable, it’s not your reason why. So the habit of making the decision is really big and it certainly plays a role from the first moment you step foot on the ground. Defy, also an entrepreneurship thing, but very important in the mornings. We know what it’s like to hit this news and not wake up on time. We know what it’s like to have car trouble. We know what it’s like for the kids to mess up our plans a little bit, and knowing how to defy the obstacles that are going to come is a really good way to make sure that you still get your morning routine and make the most of it. It’s not about, is it going to be perfect? It’s about when is it going to get disrupted and what are you going to do in that case. So learning how to defy the obstacles.

Amy Landino: That is a huge habit that has to be in place. You should be expecting it as they come. For the rise habits, that’s that big sleep thing that I was talking about before. We’re all adults. We know how to wake up in the morning, but it’s not necessarily fun and we know for a fact that the majority of the time the less fun that it is it probably has to do with the amount of sleep that you’ve got. And are you really getting restful sleep? What does that look like for you? Have you even experimented with the fact that maybe your shade should be drawn or your plugs should be in? Are you really setting yourself up for success to get the amount of sleep that you get?

Amy Landino: I often find that people don’t really think about the period of time before you’re meant to be asleep as a fall asleep period where we take our eyes off devices and we get away from computers and from TVs and we really start to shut down the mind so that we have an easier time falling asleep. Falling asleep is sometimes the hardest part for most people and really trying to figure out what that looks like for you is a habit to be in. It’s not like I like bragging about going to bed super early. I just know I feel at my best when it’s by a particular time and that’s a habit I have to stick with in order to have the habit of a morning routine.

Amy Landino: Yeah. Particularly us Midwesterner you know where at five o’clock, it’s dark.

Amy Landino: It’s so dark. It’s like exciting for me now because I’m like I feel I get to watch the sunrise and that’s can be very beautiful but I know that that’s an acquired taste, genuinely why are we waking up in the dark? That’s a whole situation. You’ve got to go back to your decision that you made on this, what is your why? The shine habit is all about what that morning routine is and this takes time. You have to just try things out, see what feels good to you. Sometimes things that don’t feel good to you still need to become a habit and that becomes getting clarity around it and finding what those things are. I decided that it was morning pages and goal writing and my skincare routine, lemon water and you know, get into my mastery for the day, which is usually eating the frog of my business.

Amy Landino: Whatever that big task is that I’ve been procrastinating on or I know I won’t get around to in the afternoon when I’m much more skirmish and looking for things to do in the afternoon. So you don’t really know what your morning routine is until you’ve figured out what it is for yourself. And so that’s really what that shine habit is about. When you figure out what those things are sticking with them so that every single day, making the time to do them will pay off in a much bigger way. And then you need to thrive. And that’s a habit too because we’re living a life and not just a morning. So what you do to be productive in the morning, you can really learn a lot about how you can execute that throughout the rest of the day. And I talk about things like calendar blocking and time batching.

Amy Landino: Can we be making better use of our time by doing similar tasks all at once? For instance, I’m doing a couple of podcast interviews and they’re all happening today and not every single day this week. Just things like that that make more sense for us as entrepreneurs when we have to play so many different roles in what we have to do to make the business stay afloat. You know, when are you in marketing mode versus when are you in accounting mode or when you’re in whatever mode can you do a better job of compartmentalizing that and truly thrive throughout the rest of the day and then start all over again tomorrow.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers and this allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation email autoresponder that are ready to go. Great reporting. You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships. They’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docu-series. A lot of fun. Quick lessons. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondBF, Beyond Black Friday.

John Jantsch: What role in your view, do your kind of core beliefs come into establishing your routines to bringing them into today? Like you said, I mean it’s so easy to get knocked off center, through things that happened in the day that were maybe not planned. So what role does kind of having an understanding and kind of holding onto your core beliefs play in your routine?

Amy Landino: You know, that’s a really good question. I think it pops up so much more.

John Jantsch: It must mean it’s a hard question.

Amy Landino: Yeah, is it because it’s so true. I know what it feels like to answer that question, but it sounds different for everybody. For me I know how often I disappoint people now. I’m much more self-aware of it. But the difference between myself as an entrepreneur today versus 10 years ago when I was really just getting started, is that I know I’m disappointing people and I’m okay with it when it’s my core belief that you think I should be doing something that I’m really clear I shouldn’t be. It’s a not right now thing. And also that sometimes we get so wrapped up and excited about certain opportunities, we think that they’re going to put us over the edge and make us big, bad and amazing. And it’s like, I really don’t believe that. I think we’ve been swindled on that so many times for so many different reasons and shiny objects come in and it’s like, wow, this is going to make everything better.

Amy Landino: That’s not true. It’s the little things every day that you work at that make a tremendous difference over time. So I just know at my core that if my gut is telling me something isn’t quite right, that I have to go with that because I’ve been right most every time. And the best part about that is the habit of deciding. When you are really good at just making a decision and going with it you don’t spend a lot of time in regrets. Say if you made the wrong call every once in a while you just move on to the next thing. You learn the lesson, you go forward. And I don’t know if that answers the question, but that’s where I feel like it is for me in terms of my core beliefs and where they play a role.

John Jantsch: So do you ever feel like, and I know this book hasn’t been out that long so maybe you haven’t experienced it much, but do you ever feel like, Oh God, I’ve written this book now I have to like be amazing and on every morning now or somebody’s going to see that I’m a liar.

Amy Landino: 100%, you have no idea. I specifically set aside, I took the summer off like I did all my content in advance and then I had set aside three weeks in August to write the book. It was all in my head ready to come out. But in July, June and July we took three weeks to go to Italy and I just had so much imposter syndrome coming back because I was like I didn’t do my morning routine a single day while I was in Italy, I barely did morning pages. I barely had any lemon water. Like actually I had some of the best lemons on earth because I was in Italy. But still I was so disappointed in myself.

Amy Landino: But I still wrote the book and it’s because I know that a habit is a habit because it’s habitual and I’m going to come back it, things happen. We go through seasons of life, we make these different changes and things just, it’s okay. Like at the end of the day it’s okay if it’s really a routine that’s customized to you, you will get back to it. So yes, trust me, I love to just judge myself when I miss it. But yeah, that’s life.

John Jantsch: So one of the things I’ve been talking about a lot lately, and it probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve been doing this 30 years, that I look back now and I, and I see so clearly the mind, body, spirit connection in involved in what we’re doing now. Not everybody is willing to go there, but I think that if we’re trying to have impact, if we’re trying to make a difference, I think we have to recognize the connection. First off, physically doing this is hard. It certainly, from a mind standpoint, mentally it’s draining. But I think also I work with too many entrepreneurs that are getting the life and joy sucked out of them doing this. And so is there an element of that sort of self-work that you’re conscious of?

Amy Landino: Yeah, I think especially, I don’t know how long you’ve been doing this, but I definitely feel like I’m in a different season of life than I was when I started. When you first start its sort of like, especially if you’ve been lucky enough to find a passion, which I do think that it’s a very fortunate thing these days. It’s like find your passion. And I talk about it on my channel all the time. It is a luxury when you find it, but it also becomes a job if you really do something with it. And so at the beginning its sort of like on never going to get sick of this. And now it’s like, all right, I don’t, I’m not sick of it. But like it’s a job. Like it’s not like its sunshine and rainbows all the time. And so I think the self-work for me and just being aware is that the space away from it is just as good as the space with it and being more aware of when that happens.

Amy Landino: And because I’m so good at planning, if I’m really that good at it Amy, you need to plan to have the space away as much as you’re planning the space in it because it’s just too easy. Especially in my situation where my husband and I co-own a company together, work/life balance does not exist. It is just everywhere. And that’s okay because that’s the life we wanted and that’s the life we got. But you also need to respect yourself that this isn’t who you are, it’s just what you’re doing to be who you are. And so being able to have a little bit of space is really important. And I think I’ve observed that more recently than ever before.

John Jantsch: Yeah. For me, and this could just be my personality a little bit, I get bored with things, just about when they’re done. And so I’m constantly looking for new things and I think that can be okay. People talk about shiny object and you know, getting distracting going to the next thing. I think the key is finding a thread that runs through everything that you do that brings you joy. I mean, I talk about in my book Seasons of the Entrepreneur and I think that a lot of entrepreneurs when they stick with this thing will go through multiple seasons.

John Jantsch: Not just seasons, but come back and start over again multiple times. I think you’re probably experiencing that at the point that you’re in. And I think the longevity for a lot of people comes by staying true to kind of here’s the difference I want to make in my life and my family’s life and the people that I come into contact with. And I think when you have that, and I’m just throwing that as an example, but I think when you have that kind of thread that that continues to run through it, you can do anything you want and still find joy.

Amy Landino: I completely agree and I think I experienced this in terms of outside feedback and in terms of me staying true to that. When I made a pretty big pivot in my content in 2018 and I think that’s, that was the moment I realized like, yeah I know what I should be doing. That even though I need time and space, sometimes everything has to do with the same vision that I started with. It’s just that maybe at one point I was speaking about a little bit more of a niche topic and now we’ve gotten to a bigger space. And then soon enough it’s going to be in another space. It’s amazing what happens when the book comes out on something. It’s like suddenly I’m like, okay, what’s next? But I don’t know what it is.

Amy Landino: The book is the cap on everything I guess. I don’t know, but that’s definitely true. And I remember getting a lot of feedback like, Amy, what are you doing? Like you used to do this and now you’re doing that. And I’m like, but my community and like the people that I truly help on the deepest level, they get it. And quite frankly that’s all that matters because they’re who I’m serving. So I’m sorry you don’t get it, but we get it and so it’s fine.

John Jantsch: How much did you have to fight through that though a little bit. Because you probably had people who were not just confused. They were afraid you were leaving them. So how much did you have to wrestle with that? To be okay with it?

Amy Landino: I think I grappled with it, but I don’t see it as a person that existed before that I’m abandoning. I feel like I’m just sharpening more skills as I go.

John Jantsch: I’m not saying you, that’s just a lot of what you ended up having to deal with.

Amy Landino: Yeah, absolutely. So it was kind of, it was really funny. Some of it was really vanity and some of it was a little bit confusion of brand because at the same time that I made a pivot in my content I also changed my last name because got married. So there was so much stock in like, wow, you really made a name for yourself before. Well, I made a name for myself because I present value, not because I had a certain last name or because I talked about a certain topic. There were people watching my videos about making videos that never planned to ever make a video. They just enjoyed spending the time with me. And then I got to the core of that and it turned out that it was just about how do we manage our time better? How do we do something that’s bigger that would merit making a video or doing anything else?

Amy Landino: And so I just took, I just went broader with the people. But yes, the audience I felt like I was leaving was more, they were never truly the target. They were never truly the perfect person. The perfect viewer as I would usually call them in my first book, they were not really the perfect person. So it’s not that I’m leaving them, it’s just that we’re going down a different path. And I also believe you graduate from certain schools. There may be people who were in The School of Duct Tape Marketing 10, 20, I don’t know how, well, I shouldn’t say how many years it’s been, but it could have been 10 years ago, right?

Amy Landino: And then maybe they’ve fallen off of you and they might come back and go, “Oh my God, this is so cool. I used to follow you back in the day and now I’m following you now,” that it’s like, Oh that’s, that’s really crazy. But that’s okay. I graduated from the schools of certain thought leaders who I found long time ago and then maybe we make ourselves back. Or maybe you just set the tone for me at that stage that I really needed and I’ve grown from you. I accept that. I’m super good with that. And I don’t think somebody has to be a lifelong fan for me to make a lifelong impact on them.

John Jantsch: Yeah, Seth writes beautifully about that very topic in his book Tribes, I don’t know if you have read it or remember reading it.

Amy Landino: I have. I actually reread this year already so it’s funny you say that.

John Jantsch: Yeah because I think he touches on that very point about people go I’m going to go over here now because I think what’s happening over here is cool. Then I think a lot of people do that. Well Amy this was great catch up with you. I probably need to have you back on again just to talk about your whole video production because it’s kind of off the hook but we could do a whole ‘nother show on just how you do that and approach video. So let’s do that at some point.

Amy Landino: I would love that.

John Jantsch: Awesome. So Good Morning, Good Life, Five Simple Habits to Master Your Morning and Upgrade Your Life. You want to tell people where they can find you Amy?

Amy Landino: Absolutely. You can check out more details about the book at goodmorninggoodlife.com or you can just kind of tune in, see what I’m all about at youtube.com/amyTV.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Amy, great catching up with you and hopefully we will run into you next time I’m out on the road.

Amy Landino: Good to talk to you, John, thank you.

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timothyakoonce · 6 years ago

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Transcript of Why Great Leaders Give Advice Less and Listen More

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life, that’s axa.com, advice, retirement and life insurance.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Michael Bungay Stanier. He is the founder and CEO of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less good work and more great work. He’s also the author of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever.

John Jantsch: Welcome, Michael.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Hey, John. We’ve been friends for over a decade now, so I’m stoked to be on the podcast. I love all your books, so thank you for talking about mine. I really appreciate it.

John Jantsch: Well, we will not have a decade go between our next episode, how’s that?

Michael Bungay Stanier: I like that plan.

John Jantsch: So, when I was starting to write the intro, like we do, I did CEO, a Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less, and I thought, “Well that doesn’t seem right.” But “do less good work and more great work” makes a ton of sense, but I had to stumble on that a little bit.

So, The Coaching Habit and Lead is also in the subtitle. It’s certainly become very popular, hasn’t it, to talk about leadership being coaching?

Michael Bungay Stanier: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Coaching has been one of those words that’s been around forever and it’s one of those words that everybody’s kind of heard of and kind of knows what we’re talking about, and certainly in organizational life, big company, small company, there’s been people familiar with the whole idea of getting a coach, you know, help me out, get a coach. If I’m leading a small company, it helps me scale and grow and focus and the like.

Our focus at Box of Crayons is to make coaching be seen not as a profession, somebody you can hire, but as a core leadership behavior. It’s a way you show up in the world. And the way we define it, just to make it easier for people, is we say, look, we define it in a really behavioral way, and it’s this: Can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush the action and advice-giving a little bit more slowly?

Because most people we found are advice-giving maniacs. They love it and they default to that as their form of leadership and guidance ’cause they’ve spent their whole life getting rewarded for having the answer and they want to be helpful and they thought, “This is how I be helpful.”

While there’s always a place for advice, for us we’re like, can you just slow down that rush to advice, can you be curious a little bit longer, ask better questions and that’s going to elevate the way that you lead.

John Jantsch: One of the things that struck me in re-reading this … I actually read it sometime ago, and in re-reading it more closely for this interview I sort of got … You know how you when you go back and re-read a book and you go, “That wasn’t in there the last time I read it.”

Michael Bungay Stanier: Totally.

John Jantsch: And the idea that people don’t actually want you to answer their questions, that just floored me ’cause I think I’ve spent my whole life thinking, “Well, if they came and asked me a question and I know the answer, then they want the answer.” And that blew me away.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, it’s one of those they do and they don’t. Lots of people have trained their bosses to be the person who has the answer, and that’s kind of a comfortable collusion. You know, well it’s a whole lot easier if I just go to that person and go, “Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it,” because that saves us all a whole lot of trouble and effort later on.

But there’s a price everybody pays in that equation. The boss pays that price because they become the bottleneck and they become overwhelmed and they feel like, “I’m trying to do everybody else’s job as well as my own.” The person who’s asking for the answer pays a price because they don’t get a chance to grow and to learn and to feel like they have autonomy and mastery and purpose. Those are the three drivers that Dan Pink talks about in his book Drive. And the organization, no matter what size, pays a price because you are training people not to think but just to follow orders and follow advice, and it’s not always the best advice.

So there is one part of the people that go, “Sometimes I just want the answer,” and that’s true for everybody, but I think for the people who listen to this podcast, these are people who are going, “Look, I’ve got a sense of autonomy, I’ve got a sense of growth, I want to shape my own life, I want to take responsibility for my own freedom,” and those are people who have a hunger for, “Ask me a question so I can figure some stuff out myself.”

John Jantsch: Well, I’m going to admit to the public listening here that I was one of those people. My team would come and ask me and I would answer questions. Sometimes I would go on eloquently for long, extended periods of time.

Michael Bungay Stanier: For days, for days John would pontificate.

John Jantsch: And then I thought, “Okay, I’m going to try what Michael said,” and so I started having my staff ask me those same questions and I literally just … I don’t think this is actually one of your questions; it’s the spirit of one of your questions. I would just say, “What would you do?”

Michael Bungay Stanier: Nice.

John Jantsch: “What do you think?” And it was amazing. They always had the right answer, and I was like, “Well, you should take on more accountability for doing that, then.”

Michael Bungay Stanier: I love that.

John Jantsch: We do a book club with my staff and we made your book a book club, and so now when somebody asks me a question and I write back, “What would you think?” all I get back is a smiley face.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, that’s perfect.

John Jantsch: Because-

Michael Bungay Stanier: Part of what I love about this, John, is the genius around … One of the barriers to coaching is people feel like it’s this black box, arcane art where something mysterious happens, and [inaudible 00:06:07] it’s not that difficult. It’s a few good questions, ask them well, stay curious, and what happens in a perfect world is everybody understands what’s happening.

So just as you’re saying, you ask a question, you got a smiley face back which says, “Ah, you’re doing that coaching thing and you know what? That’s actually the right thing to have done.” So, well played, sir. And they figure it out themselves, so that’s perfect.

John Jantsch: Now, another application … We’re talking about this in the context of leadership, which of course it is, but as I read it I was also like, “Hey, that’s a way better way to work with your clients and to sell.” How often do we show up and assume what the client wants or thinks or is doing and tell them what to do without really knowing what’s actually going on?

Michael Bungay Stanier: Honestly, anybody in the world of sales knows that the key problem people have when they sell is they start pushing their stuff too soon. They’re kind of like, “I don’t know what your problem is, but I have the answer for you. Let me tell you all the benefits and this, that and the other of this widget that I’m trying to sell you.”

And you know great sales people are people who are basically great questioners. They’re like, “I’m going to keep asking until I figure out what the real thing is you’re struggling with, and then I’m going to find a way of framing what I’ve got to be the solution to the thing that you’re wrestling with.” So absolutely, these questions …

I mean, I wrote this for people who are managers and leaders, but what I have loved getting is emails from people who are parents and sports coaches and spouses and sales leaders. Basically, if you interact with other human beings, the mantra “you should stay curious a little bit longer, you should rush to action advice-giving a little bit more slowly” is a pretty good mantra. You don’t have to have a direct reporting position with each other.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and it’s almost like … I was talking about a staff member, but in a sales situation it’s almost like you let them sell themselves. You add value by asking questions nobody else is asking them and they ultimately almost come to the conclusion on their own, and that’s so much more powerful than us telling them the solution.

Michael Bungay Stanier: John, the other day … probably 12 months ago, I happened to be in a small group setting with Alan Mulally who was the CEO of Ford and who came into Ford when Ford had lost $12 billion in a year, so a billion dollars a month for 12 months in a row, and the first person brought into lead the Ford company that wasn’t a member of the ford family. So it was an act of desperation by the Ford company.

Mulally has been written up many times as one of these exemplary leaders, and when he talked to us about his style, he said, “You know what? I never, I never gave my opinion on challenges that my team were facing because I knew that even if I had an idea or a thought or opinion that was slightly better than the other one being brought to the table, the benefit of having their own and implemented by the person who came up to it outweighed my idea being slightly better.”

So he basically went through his whole process, which was turning around Ford losing a billion dollars a month, by resisting giving advice and creating a space for his team to figure stuff out for himself, and I was thinking to myself when I heard that, I’m like, “Wow, if ever there was a temptation to go, ‘Let me take control here ’cause I’m on the hook …'”, and I figured if Alan Mulally can do it, then everybody can do it because I don’t think a single person here is currently losing $250 million per week for a year.

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by AXA Equitable Life. It’s time we start giving life insurance the credit it deserves, it’s because life insurance can be so much more than protection for you and your family, it also helps you live, keep and potentially build more cash value over time. To learn more, go to axa.com.

A lot of people will use examples of really big companies. Sometimes small business owners start to say, “Well, they’ve got an executive team, somebody meets with so-and-so.” But I think this is actually more relevant in the small organization because you’ve got five people on your team, if you don’t have everybody working together, everybody being coached, everybody kind of on the same page, I think it’s more devastating than having a rogue division manager that’s not a very good leader.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Well that’s right. I mean, I run a small company. I have 20 people in my team, so we live through this all the time, and I’m the founder, and for the folks who are listening in who are the founders or the leaders of their companies, that temptation to be the person with the answer is so much stronger because, after all, you founded this company, it’s got your name on the plate somewhere, and the temptation for the people on your team to go to you as the person with the answer is strong as well.

But you’ve hired these people because of their brains and what they can bring to your organization, and you know that if you had the opportunity to tap into the full potential of what these people can bring your small business, your small business will flourish. The challenge with being more coach-like …

At Box of Crayons we say we don’t train people to be coaches, we train managers and leaders to be more coach-like, is not just that you’ve got a long-term habit of giving advice and you’re being rewarded and given badges and all that for years, it’s that fundamental [inaudible 00:12:04]. Asking a question is actually giving up control to the other person, because when you’re giving advice, it feels pretty good. You feel smart, you feel like you’re adding value, you feel like you’ve got the high status in the relationship, you feel like you’re the big person in this conversation, and even though your advice isn’t always as good as you think it is and half the time you’re solving the wrong problem, it still feels a pretty comfortable place to be.

But when you ask a question, you have this moment where you’re like, “Okay, was that a good question? Did they understand the question? What happens if they give me an answer that I don’t understand or I do understand but it’s crazy?” Where’s this conversation now going? You’re literally empowering that other person, but behind empowerment is this insight of you giving up power, ’cause I know there’s nobody in this call going, “I’m against empowerment.” I want my team to feel empowered.

But when the rubber hits the road [inaudible 00:13:02] that means you giving up some control. Giving up some power and being more coach-like, asking questions, is one of the most powerful ways of doing that, but you have to sit with the discomfort of going, “I’m allowing this person to take control and I’m playing a bigger game. I’m playing for a future state of success rather than trading that against an immediate sense of control and let me take this on and let me give you my answer.”

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that’s a [inaudible 00:13:30]. I’m not saying it’s really counterintuitive, but maybe it feels like that ’cause you said it feels like you’re giving up, but it’s almost like that we’re giving up control for the good of the long-term game.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, exactly. You’re playing a bigger, smarter game, and that means you’re giving control and power and autonomy and mastery and purpose to those people on your team so you get the most of them, and so they can fully connect to who you are and what your organization’s becoming.

John Jantsch: So we’ve been skirting around some of this, but I probably should let you … The book is really organized around seven questions and the use of these seven questions and when and how and why, so maybe I should let you give kind of a global overview then of … You don’t have to go question by question, but just a global overview of sort of the methodology, I guess.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah. The starting point is to go, let’s make coaching un-weird, because for lots of people, coaching comes with a whole bunch of baggage. Like, “I’ve met life coaches and I don’t want to be a life coach. Executive coaching, I don’t understand that,” or, “I was traumatized by a sports coach who made me do push-ups in the mud.” So it’s like let’s make coaching an un-weird, everyday leadership behavior, and let’s make it as simple and as accessible and as practical as possible.

So after much going back and forth, I came down to seven questions. I went, “Look, if you have seven good questions and you ask them well, you will be more coach-like, you will elevate your leadership.” And the questions are uniformly simple and powerful and challenging. I’ll give you some examples.

There’s the coaching bookend. These are questions number one and number seven in the book, and one of our core principles around coaching, John, is to say, “Look, if you can’t coach somebody in 10 minutes or less, you don’t have time to coach them.” And that means that you’ve got to get into the real conversation fast and you’ve got to finish it strong, and that’s what the coaching bookends are for.

So the opening question or the kickstart question, as it’s called in the book, is simply: What’s on your mind? And we found that what’s on your mind works really well as a question because it is both open … It says to that other person, “Hey, you get to choose,” but it’s also focusing ’cause it says to them, “Don’t tell me everything, don’t give me a report out on everything that you’ve ever thought of in the last week, tell me about what’s important or exciting or worrying or overwhelming for you right now. Let’s go there.” So it’s a way of accelerating [inaudible 00:16:05] real challenge.

And then the closing question or the learning question comes with this insight that one of the most powerful things you can do as a leader is to teach your people, to help them learn, and to do that you have to understand how people actually learn. They don’t learn when you tell them stuff, they don’t learn when they do stuff, they really learn when they have a moment to reflect on what just happened, and this is the learning question and you simply ask: What was most useful or most valuable here for you?

Michael Bungay Stanier: As an example, like, we’re almost done on this podcast. People are going, “John, Michael, they’re a awesome couple, they’re so interesting,” but this podcast becomes more valuable when I ask you, the listener, what was most useful or most valuable here for you? ‘Cause now you’re forced to go back to all the stuff that John and I covered and go, “I’m going to pull out A and B and C as the things that were most useful and most valuable for me”, so now you have to work.

And if you chose to post this on social media in someway, I’d get a chance to see that and go, “Oh, so all the things I talked about, this is what was most useful and valuable for people, so I’ll talk more about that in my next podcast interview.”

John Jantsch: And let’s use that a segue to say, let’s give away a couple of Michael’s book, The Coaching Habit. All I’m going to ask you to do, and these instructions will be in the show notes as well, but I really would like you to listen today and post on Twitter what was most useful for you about this podcast.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Perfect.

John Jantsch: You can just tag me @ducttape. That’s probably the easiest one, and, Michael, you want to share yours. Is yours easy to [crosstalk 00:17:52]

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, sure. My Twitter handle is @boxofcrayons.

John Jantsch: @boxofcrayons. Okay. You had to think about that, didn’t you?

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, I sure did.

John Jantsch: So, what was most useful for you from this interview? Go ahead and tag me @ducttape, and we’ll pick a couple really useful replies and we’re going to contact you and send you a copy of Michael’s book, which I’m holding in my hand here.

I have an admission. So, question number seven I had already made a note to talk about: What was most useful for you? I have started to use this now. I do a lot of strategy sessions with clients and at the end of those I’ve started using that question, and it’s amazing-

Michael Bungay Stanier: Fantastic.

John Jantsch: … it sort of resells them on how much value they got. Rather than me telling them, they sort of state it.

I’ve also gone as far as, not in really big groups but in small groups when I do speaking, asking that at the end of my talk, if it’s a small enough group where we can really engage, and that’s been a lot of fun too because it’s interesting, sometimes, just to hear people’s different perspectives of what they actually got from it and sometimes it’s not exactly what I thought was the most important thing, so it’s been really useful.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, I love all of that. I do the same. Even when I’m speaking to a big group I’ll go, “What was the most useful and most valuable? Turn to the person next to you and share that with them.” And just as you say, not only does that crystallize it for them, but hearing other people’s kind of, “Well this is what I got out of it,” just resells the value of the experience, so they walk away feeling better because of the time they’ve invested in being with you and, of course, that serves your reputation as well.

John Jantsch: Right, I want to drill into another one. Number four, the foundation question: What the hell do you want anyway?

Michael Bungay Stanier: Exactly. What do you want? You put it in a kind of nice blunt way, but I almost call this the goldfish question because when you ask somebody, “So what do you want?” they often get that kind of goldfish look on their face. Their eyes pop open and their mouth makes that kind of guppy, guppy kind of sound or that expression.

I love this question, and for me this is the hardest question to wrestle with but really fundamental because when things are confusing or you feel you’re discombobulated or knocked off your game or you’re not sure what’s happened or you’re kind of emotionally riled up someway, you know, angry or frustrated or sad, whatever it might be, it’s a really powerful question to ask yourself, what do I want right now? It’s a very powerful way of grounding yourself in the moment to go, “All right, I’m feeling out of sorts, I’m a bit lost, I’m feeling off balance, what do I want?”

What you find is finding that within you allows you to get clearer on what your goal is, which makes it really clear what the next step for you to take is. But it’s also really powerful in a coaching conversation ’cause when you have a conversation with somebody and they’re talking about whatever the challenge might be and you tend to go, “So, I get all of that, and what do you want? What do you really want?” you’ll have that question land with power. There’ll be a silence as they wrestle with it. Once they see what they want, the doors of possibilities open up, and one of the challenges …

You know, on a sidetrack, I’m just thinking about why people don’t give feedback and why feedback is so difficult and tricky for people and they go, “Oh, I don’t want to get into these emotional conversations.” But I actually think, John, that quite often it’s because you haven’t got clear on what you want. When you know what you want, you know what you want to ask for, you know what outcome you’re going for, and it kind of just makes the next steps that much more purposeful.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think that, in some cases, especially in a leader/subordinate type of role, I think you’re really giving somebody permission to stop beating around the bush, because a lot of times it’s just, “Can I say this, can I not say this? I’m talking in circles,” and it’s kind of like, “Wait a minute. What do you really want?”

Michael Bungay Stanier: Exactly.

John Jantsch: I think it gives permission, I think.

Michael Bungay Stanier: I love that. Yeah, I agree.

John Jantsch: Okay, so when I read through the list of questions … we’re not going to cover anymore, you’re just going to have to pick up a copy of the The Coaching Habit so that you can own all seven of these. How do you sometimes …? I mean, I think I could see the temptation to deliver these a little bit in a mechanical way. It’s like, “Oh, Michael said my third question should be blah blah blah,” and it doesn’t really come off as sincere or maybe even appropriate in the situation.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If you’re just using this as a kind of mechanical process to drill people through, it’s not going to do your relationship with that other person as much good as it might.

When we teach our programs around coaching skills for managers and leaders and we go, “Well what do we even mean by the word coaching?” Often we’ll get people to pair up, tell them about a time when they were well coached and then distill from that experience what are the attributes of good coaching? And it turns out that it’s not very technical at all, it’s, “They were curious. They had my back. I felt it was a safe spot and I felt they cared about me.” That’s what it boils down to.

Built into all of this, ’cause every tool can be used badly, but built into all of this is the assumption of, coaching [inaudible 00:23:24] be powerful, you showing up to be more coach-like will be powerful if you are genuinely interested in that other person, if you genuinely want the best for them, if you genuinely want them to help figure out the next step.

If you’re bored and you’re doing your email and you’re kind of looking out the window and you’re like, “Yeah, whatever.” What is the real challenge for you? It’s going to be so-so. But if you’re actually interested and kind of commit to caring for that person, then it’s going to be that much more powerful.

In between the seven questions in the book are just really short kind of little take away chapters about how to ask a question well, and one of them is, like, actually care about the question.

John Jantsch: Absolutely. You have a lot of resources at thecoachinghabit.com, so you want to invite people to find inside the book videos and all kinds of good stuff.

Michael Bungay Stanier: Yep. I love that John said go out and get the book, and of course I would love you to do that as well, but if you’re like, “I’m not sure yet. He hasn’t quite sold me,” go to thecoachinghabit.com and pillage it. You can download the first, I think, three chapters, there’s a lot of videos and podcasts that we kind of connect to from the book, so they’ve got kind of context in the book, there’s a couple of download papers that you can get there and have it [inaudible 00:24:40] in particular, so there’s just a ton of resources there. So if you’re not up for the book, definitely go to the website and check that out.

John Jantsch: People can also find more about Michael at boxofcrayons.com, but obviously you can find that from thecoachinghabit.com as well, and we’ll have all this great info in the show notes. Michael, thanks for joining us and hopefully we’ll see you someday soon after on the road.

Michael Bungay Stanier: That’s sounds great, John. It’s a pleasure. Thanks.

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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John Jantsch: If you’re a founder of a startup, maybe you need some brutally honest advice from somebody who’s been there. For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I visit with Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz, and he’s written a book that you’re going to want to get into because it’s got some really practical and heartfelt advice of what he learned along the way.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help the support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rand Fishkin. He is the founder and former CEO of Moz. I think people used to call him the Wizard of Moz. He actually has a new venture called SparkToro, which we’ll touch on today. But we’re going to talk a lot about his new book called, “Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.” Rand, thanks for joining me.

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I said off air but I’ll say it on air as well, I’ve been doing this podcast forever as a lot of my listeners know, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve had you on. It’s a treat for me. We are going to talk about your book, but I got to ask one SEO question. It’s a really broad one. Where does SEO sit today?

Rand Fishkin: Where does SEO sit today? Well, it’s at an interesting point in its history in that, in a lot of ways, search has become a mature industry and SEO has, too. That means that it’s more competitive than it’s ever been, and for the first time I think, thanks to the growth of voice search and how Google is displaying answers, there’s actually not the same acceleration rate of increasing opportunity in SEO. It’s sort of everyone is warring for more competition but with less potential new opportunity. So interesting timeframe.

John Jantsch: I’ve been coaching a lot of business owners that I think there’s a element of SEO that needs to be much more strategic. As we plan the website, they’re messaging their content, even SEO has to be a part of that, even how we structure their entire business to some degree before we even start talking about, as you said, the technical aspects. I think that’s a message that’s starting to make sense to people maybe because it’s gotten so competitive.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

John Jantsch: I’ve been doing this a long time. I can’t tell you how many small business owners would get a website built, put some form of content on it, and then come to me and say, “Would you SEO this?” You used to be able to do that.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

John Jantsch: You used the word ‘startup’ in the title, or at least the subtitle of the book. That’s such a term anymore that gets bantered around. I’d love to know what you consider … if you have a definition of a startup.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

Rand Fishkin: Well, I would hope that most mature businesses are seeking to maintain their growth rate or maybe grow it a little, and most of them have already found a scalable, repeatable business model, so startups are unique from both those aspects.

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, absolutely. In many cases, a mature business, the founders are not involved anymore. In many long-standing businesses, the founders are retired or passed away. In many other businesses that are mature, founders have left and they’re off doing other things. But typically in startups, founders are still heavily involved and so that changes culture and a whole bunch of other things, yeah.

John Jantsch: This book is certainly a guide for somebody who’s starting a business, so in that way it’s kind of a how-to book, but it’s also very much a memoir. I’m curious if there was something that really compelled you to include the painfully honest part.

Rand Fishkin: I think that’s something that I’ve always been passionate about, and part of that is the catharsis that comes from the release of writing about something. A big part of it, also, is that when we share something that is not often shared, that the painful parts of journey or the hard issues, we help people to feel like they’re not alone in their journey. That is a really, really important aspect of all the work that I did at Moz and that I think I’ll ever do is trying to hopefully forge a path for other people to follow in and to be able to feel less [inaudible 00:05:49].

John Jantsch: Of course, while that is obviously an awesome contribution to the world of entrepreneurship, I suspect that it also in a lot of ways … you’ve got a new venture going, in a lot of ways I guess the question is what do you learn from it.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, sure, absolutely. I think “Lost and Founder” is really exactly that. It’s kind of a, “Hey, what are all the lessons that you’re taking away that you wish you could have known before you started Moz?” and trying to pass that on to a next generation of entrepreneurs but also to myself. When you sit down and collect your accumulated knowledge and put it into a written form, I think you process it in a way that you would not otherwise be able to do. So this is a very positive learning experience for me as well. I hope it’ll have a good impact on SparkToro.

John Jantsch: I’ve written five books now, and they are me postulating ideas, I suppose, which hopefully brings some value to the world. The idea that I would also share things that were painful that showed that I was actually vulnerable, that I didn’t have all the answers maybe at some point, was that scary at all for you?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I think it’s always scary. I mean the difference between transparency and marketing or honest marketing at least is that when you’re doing honest marketing, you are not telling any lies and you are showing off the good things that you’ve done and things that you’ve learned. When you’re being transparent, you are both being honest and embracing, wholeheartedly embracing the hardest, toughest, nastiest, ugliest parts of yourself and your journey and exposing things that other people would normally want to hide, things that could embarrass you and make you look bad. I think there’s actually more power in that one, certainly from a representation and a helping people feel not alone part of it. The, “Oh, I’m going to tell you the Facebook story of how I became the third richest person in the world,” neh, it’s not that interesting to me.

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

Rand Fishkin: I would say people who have known me and followed me for a long time, this book probably was a very good match. I think the one frustration, which Andrew Warner from Mixergy noted when I talked to him, was that there’s maybe two or three chapters that touch on SEO and web marketing kinds of things, but this is not an SEO-centric book. Of course, most of the people who’ve followed me historically over the last 17 years have done so because I’m in the SEO world and I help people learn more about that topic. So I think it’s a departure on that front and I think for folks who have read it, which is a few … I don’t know. Something between two and 7,000 people, I think, have bought the book so far. For those folks, it seems to be doing well. I get a lot of nice comments online so far.

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Again, the world of what … maybe it’s a misperception about what startup life is really like. Do you feel like a lot of people who are starting businesses look at the Silicon Valley common advice and common model and really fall prey to that in a not so positive way?

Rand Fishkin: I think one of the challenges is that Silicon Valley startups are built for a very specific asset class, venture capital, which is an asset class that’s designed to invest in 100 companies and three or four of them will return the entire fund and another 10 will be doing okay. The rest will hopefully die because the partners don’t even have time to engage with 100 companies. You don’t want to be putting money toward an investment that’s not return 5X, 10X. The advice that the Silicon Valley startup world gives to companies is very good if you fit that model, and it’s pretty bad if you don’t fit that model. I think the challenge is that popular media and culture and all of the focus of entrepreneurship especially over the last two decades has been so heavily centered, so heavily biased toward that model that the vast majority of businesses, which are not in that vein and shouldn’t follow that advice, can’t helped but be seduced by it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

Rand Fishkin: Right. Yeah, yeah. This is a big challenge. It’s a challenge in all sorts of things. If all the toys are geared towards, “Well, if you’re a boy, you have to play with Army toys. If you’re a girl, you have to play with princesses.” Well, no wonder kids want to dress up as certain things for Halloween and act certain ways when they grow up.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

John Jantsch: Years ago I’d take my kids to McDonald’s … Okay, I’m just going to admit it. We got the odd Happy Meal every now and then. They would always say, “Do you want a boy toy or a girl toy?” I was like, “What does that mean?” It drove me crazy.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

Rand Fishkin: I’m one of those people who absolutely fell prey to the classic Silicon Valley startup, taking venture. That’s the ultimate challenge, and that’s the ultimate goal. That’s what every entrepreneur … If you’re a great entrepreneur, you seek to do that. Of course, now that I’ve been through that experience, I have the wisdom to say, “Hang on a minute. That’s a totally biased perspective.” There’s no one class of entrepreneur that’s so much better than another. If you start a bakery, you are no less an entrepreneur than someone who starts a tech company. If you raise venture capital versus getting a bank loan, you are no less or more of an entrepreneur. So I think removing some of that external input is certainly a big thing.

The other big one I’d say, for me at least, is having a lot more self-knowledge, so some of that’s being able to push exterior forces away and recognize what I want, but also some of it is being able to say, “Okay, I know that I often fall prey to these problems or these mistakes. I know that I’m good at this and not good at that. I know that I need to shore up these weaknesses, and I know that I have challenges with hiring,” whatever it is. I think that’s why so many more entrepreneurs who start businesses in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s tend to, on average, have higher success rates than those who start them earlier in life. No surprise.

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Oo, that’s an interesting one. Let’s see. I would say in my life personally and broadly, I’m a very mission-driven person, but as far as the business goes, SparkToro for me is not, “Oh, I want to solve this bordering on philanthropic problem.” It’s very much a, “Hey, this particular marketing problem that I kept seeing people have and that I encountered a lot when I worked with newer companies or companies for whom SEO wasn’t a good match.” That problem feels like there’s a great technological solution that could help with it. No, I think I’m still very innovation-driven when it comes to product market.

John Jantsch: Do you get, I’m assuming, a lot of startups or wannabe startups writing you and saying, “What should I do first? Where do I start?” What’s your one piece of advice that everybody always likes to … the one thing?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: Not necessarily how do you manage that, but do you have sage advice for the person that you decide, “I’m going to sit down and write a long, thorough fulfilling email back to them”?

Rand Fishkin: “Lost and Founder” has been great on that front because for a lot of the, “Hey, what should I do? What should I not do? How should I think about this?” there’s a chapter for a lot of those items in the book. That being said, I think probably one of the most common ones I get, no surprise because of my background in web marketing, is, “Where should I start my web marketing efforts, and how should I attract my first customers?” For me, the answer to that is always the intersection of three things. One, an area where you have personal passion and interest. I have never found, literally never found anyone who said, “You know what? I hate Instagram. Hate the whole platform. Ugh, it’s terrible. But I do get most of my business that way.” It doesn’t happen. People who are not interested in or passionate about or have some value they can just [inaudible 00:17:28] that they’re just not great at it. So I tell people to pick a marketing channel that they personally like. If you hate SEO, you hate content marketing, fine. Go for ads or PR or something else.

The second thing is somewhere where you can add unique value, and the important word in that statement is unique. Many people can add value. Many people can copycat other people who are adding value. It’s very difficult for a lot of organizations to recognize how they can add unique value. Why is this thing that you’re doing more uniquely valuable to the audience? If you have a great answer to that question and the first one, the third thing is you need to pick channels where your audience actually pays attention. So you find something at the intersection of those three.

John Jantsch: A lot of people really struggle with that uniquely valuable thing because they just say, “Hey, what I created, surely it’s valuable.” I find the best way to find those is find problems. What are people complaining about? What are they not getting? Like when they leave reviews with competitors and they talk about, “They didn’t show up on time,” or just whatever goofy things they’re saying, those are the problems that you need to figure out.

Rand Fishkin: Or problems where people are only solving them in one way. For example, lots of people are having this problem, and no one is helping those who prefer video content or those who like podcasts, or no one’s doing visual-centric content, or no one’s solving this in a way that’s accessible for whatever, an older demographic or that kind of thing.

John Jantsch: I’m certain because of your front of the leading edge, I suppose, SEO online stuff, you occasionally have people who say, “Okay, on this stuff that’s coming, what’s coming next?” Maybe just riff for a minute on voice search and assistance and AI and bots. That seems to be kind of the thing that’s got a lot of people’s attention but they’re not sure if they should pay attention yet.

Rand Fishkin: First off, my broad advice on this is that when you are investing in marketing, you do not need to and should not be leading your market. You should be following. That sounds weird because we have this culture that’s so innovation-centric, like what’s the next big thing? How do I make sure I don’t get left behind?

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

Rand Fishkin: Right, right. There’s a first mover advantage. In marketing, there’s a first mover advantage but not until the market moves. For example, I know a bunch of companies that invested very heavily in chatbots over the last few years. They were sure three, four years ago that chatbots were going to be the next big thing, and they built a bunch of tech around this. Those have not paid dividends for very many companies at all. In fact, I would say the majority of folks I’ve talked to who’ve invested there regret investing deeply. They still think maybe in the next few years it will be something that consumers really want but so far, meh, not so much. My broad advice is follow the market. Don’t try and adopt something before it’s popular. Don’t be on, whatever, [Kick 00:20:49] who went out of business or-

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

Rand Fishkin: Sure, yeah, absolutely. This is a product for a lot of different marketers who encounter a consistent problem that we saw which was basically folks who’d try and figure out, “I have this audience I want to reach. Maybe it’s a new audience because I have a new company, or I’m trying to expand my audience and grow. But I’m trying to reach this audience, and I don’t know where I should I go to reach them. Because of that, I spend all my money with Google and Facebook and the rest is sort of, eh, I don’t know what do to.” As a result, those behemoths become even more giant.

When in fact, if you dig into any audience, there’s almost certainly podcasts that they listen to and YouTube channels that they subscribe to and people they follow on social networks. There’s publications that they read and news media and blogs that they consume and online forums that they hang out in and events that they go to offline, places they actually go to and participate in. Discovery of those different people and publications and sources is an incredibly manual, challenging, often weeks or month-long process for a marketer to discover and uncover. If you have to do it every six months or every year, it’s even more painful. That’s what we’re trying to solve with SparkToro through technology.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The idea is that you could plug in something very broad like, “I’m interested in reaching travelers to Southeast Asia,” or you could go for something more niche like, “I want interior decorators on the West Coast,” or you could go for something hyper-niche like, “I’m looking for mechanical engineers who work in clean water facilities.”

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

Rand Fishkin: Well, since we just started, it’s going to be nine months maybe a little more away before we have any kind of product. You can go check it out certainly and read a little more about the problem. If you want, you can sign up and get an email when we launch, but there’s nothing there yet. The eventual idea, though, is that I want to do something very much like I did with Moz. I don’t want to charge thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to use this product. I want this to be something that anyone can subscribe to and use, sort of a search engine for marketers to learn more about their audiences’ affinities and where they pay attention.

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

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seopt58147 · 6 years ago

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

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ramonlindsay050 · 6 years ago

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

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duilawyer72210 · 6 years ago

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

#Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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constructionsworkr3053 · 6 years ago

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Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

#Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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vidmarket32514 · 6 years ago

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

#FEED 9 MARKETING

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inetmrktng75247 · 6 years ago

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Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

#Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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vidmktg30245 · 6 years ago

Text

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

Rand Fishkin: John, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s going to be very, very tough for businesses that tack on SEO as an afterthought to compete against the folks who baked it into their marketing DNA.

Rand Fishkin: You did. I mean that’s the problem. The problem is, I think, that the perception of the industry is also going to be five to 10 years behind where the industry actually is.

Rand Fishkin: I think it’s a company that is striving for rapid growth and seeking to find a scalable, repeatable business model that works.

John Jantsch: Isn’t that every business?

John Jantsch: So the culture’s unique, the point of view of the founders is unique, maybe even the decisions they make from a profitable standpoint are unique?

John Jantsch: You have a lot of fans. Obviously your Whiteboard Fridays … Is it Friday? Am I getting the day wrong? I forget.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, yeah, Whiteboard Friday, sure.

John Jantsch: Sorry, sorry. Had a momentary lapse there. Your Whiteboard Fridays obviously had lots and lots of fans. How has that fan base, if you’ll call them that, reacted to the book?

John Jantsch: That’s good.

Rand Fishkin: So we’ll see.

John Jantsch: Yeah, especially since that’s really all the media will talk about is that 1% that does it.

John Jantsch: I always remember when-

Rand Fishkin: You lose some of that freedom.

Rand Fishkin: What does that mean? Why am I not allowed to play with dolls, and why are they not allowed to play with Transformers? I don’t get it.

John Jantsch: Now that you’re starting another business … How long …? 17, 18 years at Moz?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. I dropped out of college in 2001, so this would be 17 years in.

John Jantsch: Now you’ve got a new venture going. Would you say that your business point of view in general has changed?

Rand Fishkin: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: I guess if so, how so?

John Jantsch: I’m not suggesting that you started Moz for this reason, but would you say that you are now more mission-driven than, say, innovation that could blow up and be a big deal?

Rand Fishkin: Some combination or aspect of those questions I think I get two to three emails a day, sometimes more.

John Jantsch: First mover’s advantage.

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:20:54].

Rand Fishkin: … Periscope or something like that.

John Jantsch: Do you remember Plurk, I think it was called?

Rand Fishkin: Right. There you go, yeah.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I haven’t given you much time to talk about SparkToro, but tell us about what you’re trying to do there and who you’re trying to serve.

John Jantsch: How niche can you get with that? Could you go down to some obscure form of engineering software company or something of that nature?

John Jantsch: Wow. Obviously people can go to sparktoro.com and check it out. What’s the basic revenue play there?

John Jantsch: I think it’s a brilliant idea, so I will certainly be on that waiting list when you get it going.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you, John.

John Jantsch: Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully next time I’m out the Seattle way we can meet in real life and have a beer or something of that nature.

Rand Fishkin: Ah, I look forward to it.

John Jantsch: All right, take care.

https://ift.tt/2LBrz2p

#Transcript of Honest Startup Advice From Somebody Who’s Been Through It

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