How do you become super confident if you are a man? What happens if you suddenly quit booze for 30 days or six months or a year? If you have an idea for selling products, how do you sell products? How do you turn that idea into a reality? How do you get millions of followers? Not just hundreds or thousands, but millions of followers. And then how do you help dudes pick out underwear and talk about manscaping? We're going to be talking about all of those topics. It's a kind of weird selection, isn't it? But our guest today is a gentleman by the name of Aaron Marino. He's a YouTuber, an entrepreneur. He's a men's lifestyle mentor. He has a YouTube channel which started in 2008. He now has 2.33 million subscribers. He sells hair products. He sells confidence. He's always immaculately dressed. And I first came across him when I saw season four of Shark Tank where he was unsuccessful in getting a deal from the billionaire entrepreneurs on that very successful television program. So we're going to be talking about a few of those things today. Aaron Marino, welcome to the show, sir. Great to see you, James. Thanks so much for having me. So wait, did you see season seven of Shark Tank where I went back? I didn't see season seven, but I know you did go back. You can't stop the story, half way, James. Well, we'll get to the story. Don't worry. Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me. And from what you said, I'm excited to be here and hear what I have to say. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, I got to tell you, when I first stumbled across you, I checked out your YouTube channel and I was thinking to myself going, you know what, this guy doesn't seem that alpha male to me.  And I actually had a program called Alpha Male Club and this podcast, this very podcast used to be called Alpha Male Club. And so I was looking at you going, this guy's immaculately dressed. I'm not sure that's very alpha male-esque.  He does weird things with his hair. And so I kind of didn't make that correlation between alpha male and well groomed. But I've subsequently changed my entire viewpoint on that. And now I'm like, it's very alpha male-esque. So what are your thoughts on that in terms of, you know, the alpha male image? You know, the whole name Alpha M and that sort of the brand behind it was just by accident. Years ago, I was starting an image consulting firm and I was trying to come up with a name. What said Macho? What said guy without being too like King of the Jungle Consulting? And alpha male or alpha M sort of sort of transitioned or transpired as a result of that. When I started my YouTube channel, I never even really gave it a thought. I didn't really think of what I was actually putting out there. And the fact that by naming yourself Alpha M, people were going to definitely form or have an immediate reaction or opinion. And what I've come to realize over the years is that my version of alpha male and what it means to be a male in today's society and an alpha male has morphed and it has changed. I think that the man in today's world needs a whole different skill set than our fathers or our grandfathers did. It used to be an alpha male was quintessentially the strongest leader. He walked in a room. Boom! He command presence. He had panache. Now the alpha male is a little bit different. He's got to wear a lot of hats. He almost has to be a Renaissance man. He's got to be in touch with his emotions. But at the same time, he's got to be confident and and understands the value he brings to the world and does his best to lift people up with them as opposed to keeping them down. And so my version of alpha male has definitely changed as I've sort of gone through this this evolution myself as well as this YouTube journey. It's funny. When I first started the show and it was called alpha male club and people would ask me, oh, what's the name of your podcast? And I say it's alpha male club. Women would always have this kind of like, oh, that doesn't sound very good, you know, like that sounds kind of aggressive almost. But in actual fact, the show was was was all about helping men be better men and showing up for the for the women in their lives and it actually was was, you know, everything that if I'm making men better than obviously women are going to be happier and that's going to improve relationships. But it's funny that that negative connotation around James, is that why you changed the name and the branding of everything that you're doing? It was one of the reasons. Yeah, I mean, and one of the reasons was that because of the name and the negative connotation with it. The other reason was actually that I got fed up and tired of just talking about men's issues. I actually liked talking about women's issues as well. And I didn't really want to pigeonhole myself into I'm just the guy who talks about men's issues. My interests are vast. So it's it is true. The idea of what an alpha male is has transformed over the years, but what's your view of just a good man like a strong man, a considerate man, like a man for 2017 as where as we're recording this. Yeah, I really feel like it's somebody who who is in touch with his emotions. He's not afraid to communicate and express himself. He's curious. He is constantly trying to learn and doesn't doesn't feel like his ideas or ideals are so rigid and and one dimensional that he's not open to exploring other options and other other viewpoints and he's a provider. He provides for himself. He does the hard work and he might not necessarily be where he wants to be ultimately, but he's motivated to try and try his best. So if someone's listening to this right now, there's a male somewhere in the world across the world listening to this right now. If he doesn't feel like he is any of the things that you just described, what would be your advice to him? My advice would be to start helping people. The first thing I would I would say is to do something kind and generous every day for somebody else. And it sounds sort of sort of funny, but the the benefit that you get from helping other people is is remarkable and it the feeling you get not because you get a reward in terms of anything monetary and sometimes people might not even notice. But the fact that you're doing something for somebody else that selfless in my opinion is the first step to really truly finding your your confidence in that inner voice. That would be sort of the the place I would I would start if I were just listening and I didn't know what else to do. Start helping people every day do something. They've done studies that have shown that the moment that you help someone else is the moment that your dopamine levels increase. Did you see that? Did you see the the the documentary or the movie happy? No, I haven't seen that night. You got to check it out. It's called happy and what they found I think what you're referring to is that that helping somebody else is the the response in your brain is equivalent to antidepressant drugs and really the only thing that does is they the premise behind this movie which was fantastic is that everybody sort of has a happiness level or threshold sort of like tolerance with alcohol and you might win the lottery you win a million dollars and it might go up but it's going to settle back down to normal really fast something really bad could happen to your your your mother could get killed in a car accident and it sends you down deep dark places but quickly you're going to rise back up to that level. They found that the only thing that truly changes that level and raises your happiness threshold is helping others and so that's obviously something you know they thought of it. I didn't and they're much smarter than I am but I I know that as I get older I should listen to smart people and do what they said. One of my top five books of all time is called happiness hypothesis by a New York professor called Jonathan Heist and he said exactly the same thing that did all these studies that if you are depressed if you're sad if you're like lonely if you go out there and just do one act of kindness and help someone you can literally just not not entirely wipe away your depression that your happiness level increases exponentially. Right now on my wrist actually I'm wearing a reminder it's from a company called One Kindness a friend of mine John Wayne who's been a guest here on the show is the the producer of these things and you wear it on your wrist and all you have to do is one kind act a day and when you do it you just flip it over and there's the heart with the tick through it so it's just a daily reminder that just do one nice little helpless sorry not helpless but selfless thing every day and you're around happiness will increase and if you are happier happier people make more money and people who make more money are happier and healthier and if you're healthier your relationships are better and it just has this ongoing ongoing spin-off effect so we're talking to Aaron Marino who is a YouTube star I guess you could say if you've got 2.33 million subscribers you'd have to say that you're a star his YouTube channel is called Alpha M and you can check out his website at imalpha m.com Aaron just give us a little bit of your life story first if you would and then we'll delve into a few other subjects but where were you born where did you grow up and how did you become this this men's lifestyle mentor and grow this now 2.33 million subscriber channel you okay I'll give you the quick version I grew up in Philadelphia my parents got together super young we grew up very very poor they got divorced I went through my mother I think in an attempt to find stability for me was she was she had she made some bad choices in men ultimately I growing up I had two abusive stepfathers nothing physical but the mental stuff is is equally as as traumatic sometimes I think more so but the one gift that she gave me when I was 12 years old was a fitness membership to a gym and that's what changed everything for me I might have had a crappy home life I might not have really felt great about myself because in these relationships and being around abusive people that were you know you lose your voice at least I did I lost my ability to stand up for myself and so when you do that your self esteem really takes a nose dive but when I went to the gym I felt amazing I felt like I found my home and at that point I realized that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life so you know 12 years old I knew what I wanted to do long story short I graduate from college I went to West Virginia University degree in business management minor in community health promotion and marketing I was going to open a fitness center I moved to Atlanta I met a guy we opened a nutrition store it was close wasn't the fitness center but it was a it was close the problem with the nutrition store we're incredibly successful right away we open three of them in the span of a year and a half was that my partner wanted to sell drugs out of the back because apparently illegal drugs are much more profitable than vitamins and protein powder and so I was around 22 at the time and I didn't know much but I knew that prison wasn't a place that I would thrive I'd be popular but I would not do well and so I left and I started a I was a trainer at a fitness center one of the women however that I met at the nutrition store I helped lose 100 pounds she came to me and said I want to help change change people's lives like you did me and I want to open a personal training studio with you and it was like jackpot this is incredible this is what I've been waiting for my whole life and so we did that it was a lot of work she put up all the money we signed the lease to our location on September 11th as in the September 11th and it should have been an omen because that's pretty much the trajectory at which the business was going to take long story short we we tried to expand we tried to raise extra money to or we raised investment capital to franchise this this concept and it was going well we're running out of money I was in debt over up to my eyeballs and ultimately we ended up having to shut down because there were some legal issues with one of our investors and my business partner Linda and it was the most devastating point in my life at that point I was I was so broke and I had no income that I was actually driving a beer cart at a golf course and it was horrible and I the problem with me is that being an entrepreneur I never had a plan B it was plan a all the time until obviously something drastic and bad happened and so I my wife gave me a video camera and I decided that I was going to try to make a make a YouTube video I had nothing no idea what YouTube was I didn't know what a subscriber was I didn't know any of it previous to that I had started an image consulting business because it was something that I was passionate about I really liked and I thought there was a market and you can charge a lot for it apparently and so I started posting videos and that's what changed my life you know fast forward to today and you know my life is just I mean I feel like I'm the luckiest guy in the world the fact that I get to do that I get to make videos I get to make content I get to help people and I get to make a living doing it and so that's it do you remember what the first video was that you recorded and stuck up on on YouTube yes the first video was just an introduction introducing me to the audience and it was just hey I'm Alpha M if you've got questions style related let me know and it was really bad it was two minutes long it was like 180p in terms of the quality but from that I got a question somebody who left a comment and they asked me it was actually the second video was was how to dress if you're a big dude or a big guy and all of a sudden I realized I had a voice and I found my home and it was it was it hooked me immediately it was this interaction it was this this this engagement is back and forth and I made my second video and then the next day I made another one because somebody else asked me a question and it was it was like a drug for me and and today I still get the same rush going in to fill my videos as I did the first day did you ever question yourself and say why are people asking me this why like no one really wants to know what I think or were you really confident in your own ability to be able to give advice on style and grooming and things like that I always sort of had had confidence that I always knew that there was a market for this because when I started the image consulting business it was one of those things where there weren't that many resources out there for regular guys to get basic advice on style and grooming there was gq magazine there was Esquire but that wasn't applicable to me or my friends or my dad and I knew that if I had questioned how to shave my testicles somebody else probably has to and so at the time I was sort of cutting edge in the turn in in the sense that I would talk about anything there's really no topic that's off limits and I was very comfortable in my own skin to be able to you know sort of give the information that I felt people might want to might want to hear about so you started recording these videos and sticking them up and then you started getting comments from people and then in the first say six months what happened like in terms of like was it a slow growth of YouTube subscribers and followers or was it like a tipping point where it just exploded I'm still waiting for the tipping point I will tell you this it took me what was it six six years to get a hundred thousand subscribers and then it took me sixteen months to get another nine hundred thousand wow that's amazing so just say that again so it took me what was it six year or I forget what I think it was six years to get a hundred thousand subscribers and then it took me sixteen months to get an additional nine hundred thousand that's amazing and and so but YouTube has changed a lot in in its algorithms and the way that it promotes people I've seen people nowadays sort of have a message do some things that are right and really start to be much more successful than I was in the span of like months as opposed to years for me but part of it is just the function of YouTube has changed the way that it actually promotes and recommends people it's funny you know people always say it takes ten twenty years to be an overnight success look at Ricky Gervais who was a British comedian who slugged it out for many years before all of a sudden producing that hilarious BBC series The Office which then later on was picked up by NBC in the US and they did an American version took him twenty years to be an overnight success George Clooney didn't really make it big until he was in his late twenties I think maybe thirty when he got his main got his main gig another great example I'm trying to think a Judd Apatowl who is now considered like the comedy king of of New York of Hollywood movies and and he produced knocked up and he produces girls on HBO and he does the forty year old you did the forty year old virgin movie he didn't really strike it big I think until his late late thirties I think it was and then you got stories like Ray A crock who who really you know built McDonald's into the global fast food empire that it is he didn't really hit it big until he was I think in like fifty five fifty early early to mid-fifties so it does sometimes take many years to be considered an overnight success right Aaron I that is what I I have heard and I know in my experience that is definitely true you know people don't see the long hours and days months weeks and years that it takes to to get to a certain level of success but yeah it's definitely not I've never I don't know what overnight success actually looks like yeah worst hater email message that you've received can you describe it for us like the worst comment nastiest comment funniest nastiest comment you know YouTube is one of those things and the comments are one of those sort of aspects of YouTube that that you're not really ever I don't think prepared for because I know at least for me regardless of how good I feel about myself you could be teaching blind kittens to read and somebody would have something super negative to say about it and it for me it never just bounces off like Teflon it's always it it always hurts a little bit I mean you know criticism is never fun on YouTube on the web it is it is it is multiplied tenfold because the anonymity these people are saying things to you that they would never in a million years say to anybody face-to-face but because it's safe and there is that autonomy you know or anonymity there that they feel feel that it's okay I've had really crazy things everything from I've called the police to find out what my options are I've had really crazy stalkers I mean it's that's a that's a whole another conversation but there is a some crazy crazy people online when you say you had some crazy stalkers was it a was it a woman or a man it was a man it was a man and yeah it's it was a man that was just sending me just incredible amounts of very disturbing content and and emails and and threatening my family he would he would walk right up to the point of physically harming me or my wife before he'd back off because that's where the the true harassment and crime starts it's gotten better in terms of the the laws have gotten a lot more protective of people online and they're having to adapt and adjust based on just sort of the way that we live nowadays but it's it's it was tough well what percentage of haters do you get to people who post either positive or it's not even and that's the thing it is the the the the positive outweighs the negative a million to one right it's and that that's it I mean don't let that or criticism stop you because the the the the the love and the passion and the the people the community is just so much it's just amazing it's life-changing don't let those few people dissuade you but you asked it's so funny I remember in 2010 I was blessed to meet and interview my childhood idol who is John Bon Jovi whoa and on September 7 2010 I was in New York City and I got to interview him for 20 minutes I was filling in for a journalist friend of mine and I got to interview John Bon Jovi and he's like anyone who knows he's known me for a while knows that I'm a massive Bon Jovi fan in fact look at my little figurine I have here Aaron yeah I've seen him three times in concert you and my one of my best friends would would would definitely give each other a run for Bon Jovi money I've seen him 13 times but anyway in 2010 I interviewed him and at the end of the interview I thought I'm just going to go for it here and I just started a blog or a YouTube channel around my favorite English soccer team called Tottenham Hotspur I supported team called Tottenham Hotspur and so I created this blog called Tottenham Nation and this was like my first foray into the blogging world and at the end of this interview with John Bon Jovi I said John is it okay if I ask you some questions about my English football team Tottenham and you clearly will not have any clue what I'm talking about but that's where the humor will come and I'll ask you the question and then you you know play Darman and maybe we can put I'll put it on my Tottenham blog and he said sure no worries and he played along with it so I asked him these questions like Mr. Bon Jovi now that Rafa van der Vaart has arrived at Whiteheart Lane what do you think this means for the future of Jermaine Jenis and then he would he would give a funny answer he said he said oh he's fucked and then you know and and you can actually see this video if you go to YouTube you type in my name and Bon Jovi or Tottenham it should come up and you can see it anyway I did this video I stuck it up on this YouTube channel called Tottenham Nation I think it was or maybe it was my my James Swannick YouTube channel and then I posted the video in a forum of Tottenham Hotspur fans right that I was in as well where we discussed the week's game and he was playing all this kind of stuff and I thought that most of these guys would just find this hilarious the fact that like a rock star talking about an English soccer team and that they would find the comedy and the humor in that it was lost some people some people went wow other people went you shouldn't be posting this shit in this thing you should you're not a real Tottenham fan blah blah blah blah blah like just started bitching and I was like what and I started I remember I was walking along Houston Houston Street in New York City and I was looking at these comments on my phone and I couldn't believe it like I couldn't believe that what was supposed to be this positive thing this funny thing was all of a sudden getting like negative reaction from so-called my so-called fellow brothers in you know the support of our team sure I was depressed for like an hour I was walking around I was like I can't believe this and I remember talking to my friend at the time we still my friend Dan Ilick who's an Australian comedian and I've had him on the show a couple times now and Dan said to me Swannock my nickname Swannock he said Swannock there's always gonna be people who give you shit mate just do what you think is best just do you and you'll find people that love you and you'll always gonna find people who don't love you but just like water off a duck's back man just don't let that stop you from putting yourself out there and I remember and I always remembered it and I felt better and from that point on now I just post stuff that I'm interested in that I like it and if people don't like it or whatever yep I like it that is a good attitude I'm I'm not there yet I do I do my best but but no it's still you know the the negativity does get to you from time to time but you need to just remember that that you know it is the the very very vocal minority and so so don't let it dissuade you from starting no no no no absolutely not at all all right so let's let's move the conversation before we get into the alcohol stuff let's actually just give us give us a few tips for men on on grooming and being immaculately dressed and and getting confidence on that give us like your top two or three tips I know you've done you've done thousands just pick out like a couple of very simple things that men can do to make them more confident in terms of their presentation sure in terms of clothing finding clothes that fit I mean it's it's it's talked about in every men's fashion blog magazine but fit is so incredibly critical and so many men mistake large and roomy with comfort and you know there's nothing that will change your image or the way that you look better more than than just clothing that is that is fit to your body and that actually accentuates all your positive attributes and minimizes your perceived negatives grooming develop a grooming regimen it doesn't have to be that you shave your chest it doesn't mean that you've got to pluck your eyebrows but just identify what areas you need to focus on or that you want to focus on and then execute that plan well groomed means different things to different people and that's okay yeah I remember the first time I put on a fitted shirt I didn't even know what fitted meant and fitted just meant that it was slim you know fit over your body and I remember I had been working out and I was pretty healthy and fit at the time and but before then I'd been wearing what you just suggested baggy your shirts you know didn't like fit my body and I put the shirt on and I actually looked at the minute shit actually look pretty good here yeah you put it on you're like what the hell exactly it it's it's incredible another thing is is that I'm a big fan of is get a great pair of boots a leather jacket and jeans and a t-shirt it is it is such a simple classic masculine look but you feel like such a badass and I mean that's that's like my go-to outfit if I'm just wanting to feel super cool but still casual all right so I've actually I actually have a date tonight so so you can help me with what I was gonna let me tell you what I was gonna wear I was gonna wear a great t-shirt a black leather jacket pair of gray jeans and then I was debating where I was gonna go with my dark pair of Converse or whether I would wear my nice my brown pair of brown kind of boots that I have so it's great t-shirt black leather jacket gray jeans and then either the boots or the shoes how does that sound is this a first date or second date first date going to a sports sports event to chill out what's event I probably wear the converse really yeah okay it's casual it's fun but it's still stylish and playful all right done okay so you just you just confirmed what I was going to do all right good good we're on the same bar well done James well done thank you very much good luck on the date by the way thank you very much gentlemen thank you very much we'll get to the drinking because I know you quit drinking for a while maybe I'm not sure what you've gone back we'll get to that in one second but just for someone who's listening who maybe wants to start a business where they sell products because I know you sell your own range of of hair products and skincare I skincare company as well now so I have a physical products business I'm wearing them on my face right now these are my swanies blue light blocking glasses the glasses blocked the blue light from electronics you use them mostly at night time when you're staring into your phone and you're looking at a computer you're watching TV your body's able to produce melatonin therefore you're able to have an easier time falling asleep and getting and spending a longer time in that deep restorative sleep as we're recording this we actually had our records a record sales day so I'm kind of like bouncing on air today because we did a we did a promotion yesterday and we just crushed it three times very good what we usually do where did you how did where did you run the promotion and what medium so I well we have a Shopify site so an e-commerce store where we sell the products and then I just screamed from the rooftops yesterday and said 40% off on the swanies and I put it on my snapchat my Instagram I emailed it to the list because we have a list of customers and then also a list of opt-ins people who haven't yet bought that have expressed an interest and then all over the website we put you know 40% off sale etc and and plus we ran some Facebook ads as well and we ran some paid traffic and you know yesterday was actually you know our best day in the 14 month history of the business which were thrilled so I've gone through that process and I've and I coach people on how to do this because I have a James Wanick in a circle coaching program and I'm putting together a more extensive program to teach people how to build an e-commerce physical products business in general what I want to ask you is what advice do you have for the listener or the viewer right now who has an idea that got this idea but they're not taking action on they're not executing on it so maybe you could answer by just telling us a little bit about what your story was around finally getting a physical products business and what and what advice you have for the listener to take that first step. So for me once you for me failure doesn't really scare me anymore and the thing that does scare me is having an idea and not actually going after and having regret and so for me I because I've had a few successes now it's my risk is is minimized it's also a little bit lower because I've got this I've built this big community of men and I sort of know what they're interested in you know my first sort of physical product was the DVD series that I that I pitched on Shark Tank and what happened was I developed a system it was an info product that I created into a physical product and it's because I am incredibly not tech savvy so I figured this out I have a physical product my dad said hey how are you going to advertise this I said I don't know he said you should go on Shark Tank and so it was a Friday we were having coffee that night I went home I applied and and and I I basically on Monday I got an email saying hey we'd like some more information and it was a pretty quick fast and furious you know ascension onto Shark Tank but one thing that I learned when I was out there I thought that it was the greatest idea in the world I thought they were going to be super into it I thought they were going to be incredibly excited but they weren't the night the Shark Tank aired I sold one unit 9 million people and I sold one are you kidding me that told me that something was off and so about two months later I was I was thinking like what's the next product what's the next product and I was styling my hair and and all of a sudden it hit me I'm like hey I think I could probably sell a lot of hair product because I've got this built-in audience where I'm talking about grooming and hair and styling and all that and so I went to my hairstylist we partnered up and basically he told me he gave me a phone number and I pretty much did the rest and you know that product was a prior is a private label product and so what was the phone number two sorry it was to a lab to actually make that made hair product and private labeled hair product if you're somebody who has an idea or a business or you want to start a business there are a few different ways that you can go you know you can go the private label route or you can go sort of the the development route the one the private label where you go to somebody else who has the product you slap your logo on it and resell it it's quick it's easy and the the amount of of units you have to sell or or buy the opening order is much lower when you go and do something from scratch it's it's much more expensive in my experience my skincare line is completely custom created by a chemist and we went to the lab and did the sourcing it's much more labor intensive and so there are ways to start you just got to figure out what's right for you yeah so when I started my my business of the swanese blue like blocking glasses we were sourcing them from from China so I had the idea to make a stylish pair of blue like blocking glasses up until that point they were particularly ugly you wear these ugly goggles you might wear you're at the gun range or to protect your eyes from like flying stones if you're doing gardening around the home sure so what I did was I put the orange lens into a stylish frame so I would feel comfortable going out here in Los Angeles and flirting with girls and you know having people go oh they're interesting tell me about those as opposed to why are you wearing a pair of ski goggles on your face yeah so when I went to a manufacturer it was pretty simple I was like I want to put this lens in this type of frame now that process took six months it didn't have to take six months but I was never done this never done it before and so I wasted a lot of time and then ultimately I had to buy 300 units once I was was happy with the prototype now at that point it was like man I'm working out in my in my head this is you know this is thousands of dollars here even just 300 units I don't know if anyone's gonna like this should I do it should I not do it and in that moment it was like hmm you know what it's either short term pain or long term struggle so I was like I'll take the short term pain of investing the money and just do it and risk it and see what happens and in my head I was like what's the worst that can happen the worst that can happen is I lose my money and I and I find out that people don't love it but thankfully I got a minimum order it was only 300 you know I mean if I had a choice I would have said I'll do 30 you know yeah yeah absolutely so I got the 300 I launched it on black Friday 2015 and we sold three on the first day then then four and then five and then it came back out of four that jumped to eight and I kind of hovered around there you know around underneath the 10 but guess what I sold out of them like it took a while but we sold out of it yeah I was like okay cool this is enough now what I got to do well now I've got to put in a bigger order and now I've got to go bigger and then it just sort of it went from there just started to build from there now a lot of hiccups in between I had to pay an FDA charge because I didn't realize the glasses or anything to do with eyewear were considered a medical device so I had to pay this like three thousand seven hundred and fifty dollar fee to just get the three hundred units into the US for out of from the border which I didn't know about so I'm like damn it now my my costs have blown out and I remember one guy telling me said dude glasses are a dead thing don't worry about it don't do it just take the loss and move on to something else and I said and this is a guy in an entrepreneurial group I mean yeah and I went not I'm just gonna keep doing I'm just gonna do it anyway and I'm so glad I did because now we've built a million dollar business in eleven months and you know we're going onwards and upwards and creating like a big sleep sleep company now I'm not telling this story to say I'm so special look at me I'm so great I'm retelling the story because you will doubt yourself many many many times you will but the difference I think between being an alpha male or a man or whatever and I'm being a mouse if you like or just being average or mediocre whatever you want to describe it is feeling the fear and just doing it anyway absolutely I couldn't agree more I mean that's what being an entrepreneur it takes a different type of stomach it takes a it takes being okay with being uncomfortable and you know that old saying you know nothing great was ever accomplished that was easy you gotta have risk if there's no risk if there's not that little bit of fear and whatever you're doing it's not right I think there's probably always going to be fear with any with any new venture any product that you launch because like you said what if people don't buy it but what's the worst thing that happened you lose some money it's just money and the worst thing that can happen is that you lose some money your egos hurt a little bit your prize hurt a little bit but let me tell you even if that worst case scenario happens you still have experience now you still have experience of trying exactly have experience which will then move you on to the next goal or open up another door or help you get closer to what does work look at Aaron story here Aaron went and pitched a DVD of men stuff I remember watching that shark take episode and thinking this is a terrible idea because I can get I can get all this freaking information on YouTube why do I need to buy David and like DVDs who the hell exactly exactly I'm like this is the dumbest sorry I'm sorry I don't know no it was and and and it's funny because if it wasn't for that I wouldn't have had the idea for the hair product company there you go I went back they didn't buy the hair product company this time but they bought me and I did end up getting a deal the second time with Barbara and it was all about me the YouTuber the content creator the influencer that was where the value was and so I ended up not taking the deal when I got home I thought about it wasn't right but at the end of the day it was a successful triumphant return but if it wasn't for the failure and that stupid product I wouldn't have a great product so so two questions how did you feel in the minutes after you were turned down for a deal on the first time that you were on Shark Tank and how did you feel in the minutes after you were you got the deal when you returned to Shark Tank the second time yeah the first time it was at first when I didn't get a deal I left and I thought they don't know what they're talking about I love that is yeah I'm gonna be on national television I'm gonna sell tons of these I'm gonna be rich and then reality set in once it actually aired and so the second time though I got a deal and after I was finished because it wasn't exactly what I went in there to pitch I get done and I'm thinking about it and I go oh shit what did I just do so you know yes I was excited that I got a deal but at the end of the day it was it was sort of this this weird surreal experience where I wasn't sure now if this was the right direction for me and so but it was exciting nonetheless well what good on you for dusting yourself off and going again what is the website for your products for you it's peter and Pedro the hair style Pedro dot com and then there's I have a skincare company it's a it's a monthly subscription system called a tshanley which is tsh-t-i-e-g-e dot com and that business is going to be the big one I did something really smart with that business I started vlogging the process of starting the company and basically I allowed some of my subscribers whoever wanted to to come and experience the starting of the company and building the brand with me each week there's a business lesson and so I was giving value and in today's world and the way that we basically consume things in terms of we buy products we buy products that we connect with on an emotional level and it was the smartest thing I did was to actually give value before actually asking them to buy anything from me and so that business is just incredible and it's going to be it's going to be a big success story I've got three partners with it and we are crushing it that's amazing congratulations I'm looking at it online now tge dot com t i e g e dot com looks really cool it says introducing tge Hanley helping men look amazing with a simplified skincare system it's it's true every time I talk about how I built this business of my sleep company swanic sleep people who end up you know people end up being customers that they feel emotionally involved and invested in the in the growth of the business which is terrific it's customer loyalty and feeling a part of that and and just stripping back and showing people how you do this business really is powerful for for you know selling your own products and building your own brand let's move the conversation now we're on the homeward stretch here and we are talking to Aaron Marino YouTube star entrepreneur and men's lifestyle mentor you can check him out at i am alpha m dot com and his YouTube channel which is alpha m now many of my listeners will know this and maybe they're a little bit sick and tired of hearing me talk about it but I quit alcohol in 2010 I was tired of being hungover and and I was a little bit overweight and I was a bit tired and lethargic in 2010 I decided you know what I'm just going to take a little 30 day break and see how I feel and after 30 days I lost 13 pounds my skin got better I looked better I slept better I was more productive I started hanging out with the more inspiring type of friend and person I joined the gym I started concentrating on nutrition a lot more had all these amazing benefits including clarity and focus and it felt so damn good I just kept on going and I haven't drunk since and then people kept asking me about it all the time so a couple years ago I started an online program called the 30 day no alcohol challenge it's now a book 30 day no alcohol challenge book if you want to check that out and get your free copy you can go to 30day no alcohol challenge dot com forward slash book and you know now somehow I become like a poster child of sorts for for guys and women quitting alcohol for at least 30 days and maybe more and maybe they end up reducing their alcohol intake and some of them end up quitting forever what was your experience with alcohol what did you set out to achieve and what have been the benefits you found from I always I drank alcohol from the time I basically was in 11th grade until I quit I I consumed alcohol I consumed too much alcohol but it was nothing that I would consider myself to have a problem with it was just the way that I socialized and and I lived but one of the bad habits I picked up when I went away to college was using nicotine I I chewed tobacco and I did this for 16 years I did two cans a day which is the equivalent to a six pack of cigarettes a day habit and so you can imagine the level of addiction that was going on with me and I decided one day that that it was time to quit it was the day and it was New Year's it was the second of January 2000 and it was 2012 so about five years ago and I decided I needed to stop to end tobacco I put it down but I realized if I was going to be successful I had to stop drinking because it was too much of a trigger as soon as I had that first sip of beer I craved nicotine and so I stopped and it was the hardest thing I ever did not the alcohol but the nicotine and quitting chewing tobacco is the thing that I am most proud of myself for doing because I have apparently an addictive personality and I never thought that I I couldn't see myself as a non-nicotine user but what happened was remarkable I don't think necessarily it was because of the nicotine I really believe it was because of the lack of alcohol all the sudden everything started to get clear I was more inspired I was focused I was looking at the world differently I didn't have a hangover every day or on on Saturday I was more productive I slept better everything that you're saying James was I was experiencing and I learned things the hard way you could tell me that but until I actually did it and experienced it for myself I would have never learned I would not have been the guy to pick up the 30-day challenge and actually take it because it was it was not in my wheelhouse it wasn't in my my I I didn't think I needed to but what happened was remarkable so much so that I have sort of quit drinking I mean I will still have I don't say that I'm a non-drinker because to be honest I like the idea of a glass of wine at an Italian meal I like the idea of sipping on a nice glass of scotch or a bourbon but whenever it comes down to me actually doing it and I think it's like the idea sounds great in my head and it's not that I have a problem with somebody else who's drinking I just know for me I'm in a really good place and I'm really happy I'm really productive and I don't want to fuck it up and if there's anything that I do in my life that is potentially going to derail the the path that I'm on I don't want to do it and so for me the alcohol was just a not drinking alcohol is a by-product of putting tobacco but the benefits have drastically and far outweighed any drink that I ever had or ever will have but like I said I still occasionally will have a glass of wine with my wife at dinner once every two or three months but it's I haven't been drunk in probably five years amazing well thank you for sharing your story Aaron that's amazing and congratulations for the tremendous health benefits that you get from it and I don't know about you that's that's the other thing I mean I'm I'm you know I'm a vain person I like to be in shape I like to look good I like my clothes to fit well I like to look decent with my shirt off and when I quit drinking the it was so much easier to stay in good shape because along with drinking for me came binge eating and eating a lot of crappy food going to fast food and Taco Bell when I you know on those late nights and so by eliminating the alcohol which is caloric eliminating the crappy food that comes with low self is or not low self but low um willpower it was it was so much easier to stay in great shape which I also very much like and appreciate so the benefits are just incredible and if you try it for 30 days you will see the difference period I promise yeah absolutely and I agree with you wholeheartedly I used to go to the Jones bar on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood midweek for a couple drinks nothing not getting drunk but I'd like have a Bombay sapphire gin and tonic or have a glass of red wine or have a couple beers and on the way home there's this cup there used to be this Carl's Junior Burger right on the corner of Lebrayer and Santa Monica Boulevard there and most of the time I would pull in to the drive-through and I would get a Carl's Junior Burger with some fries and a Coke well I think actually I was like I'll get Diet Coke thinking that that we're going to like reduce the calories and I go home and I and I eat that and you know I'd wake up in the morning feeling crappy and even if I didn't have that bad of a hangover because maybe I had a couple drinks I felt crappy because I'd eaten shit food before I went to sleep and then I'm fatter and because I'm fatter I'm less less energetic and because I'm less energetic I'm less likely to go for a run or go to the gym and because I'm less likely to go to the gym I'm don't have as much clarity and focus I'm not relaxing as well so I'm easily stressed and irritated and because I'm stressed and irritated I'm not productive and because I'm not productive I'm not attracting productive and energetic and inspirational people into my life and because then I'm feeling sorry for myself I don't make as much money because I don't make as much money I tend to eat Carl's Junior burger a lot more so I can feel a little bit better and go to Jones bar to have a couple of drinks just to drown my sorrows because I'm feeling so crappy until I have a Carl's Junior burger on the way home at night to make me feel so feel a little bit better and you get the point pride I get the point the vicious cycle absolutely and the productivity that's something where I mean it's like everything has gotten better exponentially better since I quit drinking alcohol make more money more productive happier healthier I have better relationships with people I also don't do stupid shit like I used to I used to make really alcohol I still make bad decisions but it's not because my judgment is clouded by the alcohol and to be completely honest I don't hate myself when I wake up in the morning anymore yeah well said well thank you for sharing that story Aaron really inspirational stuff there we've got a new poster child for not drinking I love it I need to share it with someone so thanks Aaron you're very welcome Aaron Marino YouTuber entrepreneur men's lifestyle mentor make sure you check out his youtube channel as we're recording this year's 2.33 million subscribers if you can check out his his products you can go to tshed handley dot com that's T I E G E handley dot com just tshed dot com I'm sorry just tshed dot com my mistake thank you tshed dot com t-i-e-g-e and if you want to check out his main website go to I am alpha M dot com Aaron this has been terrific man sharing your story and your words of wisdom with my audience James thanks for doing what you're doing you're really changing people's lives and so I appreciate it and I'm honored to be a part of it just for a little bit so thank you so much thank you sir


Hey y'all, it's Tammy. With Collard Valley Cooks today, I made the traditional Southern Hummingbird cake, except of course I changed something. I used a whole large can of crushed pineapple and you'll see how when you watch this video. So be delicious y'all. We're gonna taste it. We're ready to do one of the most famous cakes that's the Southern cake and that's the Hummingbird cake. Everybody loves it. We're gonna start with two cups of sugar to add just a little bit more because I didn't have it all the way full. I'm gonna go ahead and add two cups of bananas. So whenever you mix up a cake before you add your flour, look at your recipe and make sure every item has been added. All right, we've got flour, we've got sugar, we've got cinnamon, bacon, soda, salt, three eggs, vegetable oil, vanilla, the pineapple, the bananas and all we need is the pecans. So we are ready to add our dry ingredients. We have the pecans last. Something a little bit different with my Hummingbird cake to make it pretty for Easter and you will see in just one minute what I'm going to do. Make sure you spray them good and coat it really well. You spray these over my sink but when I'm doing a show I like to just have them out here so y'all can see what I'm doing. And since this is a different cake pan, this is the one I'm going to do the top layer with. I'm gonna do the top layer and I'm gonna put in, I'm gonna put in just a little bit of brown sugar and this is a little bit of light and dark mixed together but you don't have to do that. Just use what you've got because you want this to come out and now what we're going to do is we're going to add pecans. Raising this backfires on me and don't work though we just won't put it on the top layer. We'll just put it in the middle of the cake. The special layer we made. All right I'm using three eight inch layers. You're going to bake these at 350 degrees and time them for 30 minutes and check on them after that and you're just going to wait till they come out with the toothpick clean and start pulling away from the sides a little bit then you know it's done. Right they've been in there about three more minutes and now they look. I like to wait till the pan's almost very you know cool to the touch before I flip it. It's our top layer this is how it's looking. You can see it's pulled away from the side so we can flip it out now and I'm hoping crossing my fingers that it's going to be really really pretty. I'm going to zoom y'all in so y'all can see it as I flip it out. Can't see the pecans as good as I thought you'd be able to. I scraped the sugar off of this. Next time I do this I'm just going to put pecans in the bottom of the cake pan. I think that would have been much prettier but you'll let me learn. Okay we are going to use my crusted bottomed cake. I'm going to add some fresh pineapple to the top not fresh pineapple but some more crushed pineapple to the top of it and I'll show you how we're going to do it. Let's go ahead and start out by putting our other layers. They look really pretty. They look delicious. They're nice and golden and I'm putting this on a cake thing so that I can take it off my cake plate and put it in the refrigerator because the hummingbird cake of course has to be refrigerated due to the cream cheese and the icing. I'm going to clean up the bottom of my board. Okay now I'm going to take the pineapple. I had a large thing of pineapple instead of a small thing and so I'm going to take this pineapple and I'm going to put it on the top of my cake. Juicing all. Now I could have put a little pineapple in the cake when I baked it and that would have made it more like a pineapple upside down on the top. So you can do what you want to do. You can do it this way where you're adding it to the top to make it look fresh for Easter. Yummy. Kind of break that up a little bit to make it look better. Don't let it be flat looking. Okay and then I'm just going to sprinkle some pecans on top of it. If you wanted to you could go around the top with a border of cool whip. You know if you want to but I'm not going to. That's all I'm going to do. This will be delicious y'all. We're going to taste it. All right let's cut our cake y'all. Let's see how it looks. It's moist and I haven't refrigerated it yet so keep that in mind. Once it's in the refrigerator for a while it won't be quite as moist. I mean you know it'll be easier to cut because it'll be cold.  You want to see it? That's like having on a plate. Let me just taste it. Y'all that's dreamy. Mmm. That's so good. Yummy. Thanks for watching Colored Valley Cooks where we cook like mama did. Bye y'all. Love ya.


is about participatory events and one such event in particular but I'm going to try to make it a little bit more general so that people can use the same sort of principles for other things. And it's about participatory events and one set of tools to help run them and make their community stronger. Now what is a participatory event? It's an event where the line between organizer and attendee is blurred or nonexistent and at events where art and performance play a part the line between artists and audience is blurred. And of course the camp that we're at right now is a great example of a participatory event but that's not the event I will focus on because you're already here and you already know how this is but I will tell you about an event called the boardland with which I have been heavily involved in recent years. So this is the boardland. It's a participatory event in which the boardland organization brings only toilet waters, some heavy machinery and electricity and although we bring electricity the participants often even have to help roll out the 63 amp cables if they arrive early. Everything else from stage to structures to street lights and showers are brought and built by the participants themselves. And there are now over 3,000 of them. We do this event every year and many of them stay for eight or 10 days on site and some stay for up to 18 days. And much like camp here everyone pays their own membership and even the board of the organization pay to be there the same as everyone else. And it was started with a very specific purpose in mind and the purpose is to prototype our dreams and allow our imaginations to run free and try to bring dreams and realities closer together. And experimentation is at the very core of the boardland and we want to apply that not only to the art and the self-expression and the parties but to the community and the organization itself and again blurring the line between participant and organizer is in the DNA of the boardland. So let me just use a minute or two to show you rather than tell you what the boardland is. The boardland is moving things back and forth. It's building infrastructure. It's leaving a better trace in this case a temple that we left on site this year. It's communal effort here 50 people helping to raise the central tower of the temple. The boardland is art. It's kitchen conversations. It's dancing. It's midnight meditation. There's a lot of different sources of spiritual practice meditation yoga etc at the boardland plays a big part. The boardland is setting things on fire in this case an old piano while somebody was playing it. It's a pretty good concert. The boardland is gifting it's a completely gift oriented economy. There's nothing as bought or sold on site nothing at all so people bring the things that they want to give to others be it food or drinks or presents and they give them out creating abundance for the participants. The boardland is a sea of LEDs much like camp here. It's an improvised black metal band. It's engineering and it's peeing and if you see here the the balloons coming out of that toilet stall it's because a lot of the toilets are actually decorated a lot of the time by this a group that makes it into the art project to create a unique experience in each toilet stall and it's friendship and it's an online community and this is what I'm going to be focusing on during this talk because we've built a few custom-made tools for the boardland and other tools we've found dreams and realities and Lumio are the ones I'm going to focus on we built dreams we built realities Lumio we use me made by a great group in New Zealand and then we also use pre ticks that I know comes from here and key cloak but my focus tonight is going to be these three tools and before I move on to those specifically I want to throw us a little bit into another participatory event which is Burning Man and at Burning Man there is this saying that the playa provides and the playa being what people call a black rock desert and what do people mean when they say the playa provides what they mean is that there's this feeling of that you can very quickly find exactly what you need just by wandering around often before you even knew that you needed that thing and there are many reasons for why this is a common experience but I think that one of those reasons is that black rock city compared to a modernist city which is very straight roads and everything is sufficiently planned is a much denser network. Mealing that walking from A to B at Burning Man you're exposed to a much larger variety of people in places than you are in a modern structured city you have many more interactions in a given period of time meaning that everyone accumulates much more knowledge about what resources are available and where they are and simply put the network is denser so the number of jumps from you to what you need is perhaps smaller at Burning Man than it is usually the case in much of ordinary life. So I'm going to talk about a few design principles that I found useful in building tools for all in communities and thinking about how to use them. Based on my experience I'm going to make a case for that it's possible to nurture a connected community online by trying to build, maintain and map a dense network and I'm going to take us through three steps which are to increase the collision rate to make sure that good connections have a chance to last and grow and finally to map out the paths so that people can find their way to what they need. And first side a little bit of a segue I want to give us a stronger framework to build on and also because I find this example so incredibly interesting let me take you on a short detour to Central Asia and the Silk Road. The Silk Road was in fact not a single road at all it wasn't even a few roads it was a dense and dynamic network of thousands of routes through the Central Asian Highlands and a merchant could not decide an exact route before they set out it wasn't possible what you needed to do was make your way on this resilient web of different possible connections step by step if one passage was blocked or otherwise unavailable there were other paths to choose from and of course this story might be familiar for people here because it's in the context of how packets are sent over the internet as well it's the same story so how do these networks arise you know I mean a lot of the time people talk about them as if they arose because of trade but Professor Michael Froschetti who has graciously lent me this slide and the next slide has built this very likely hypothesis that what drove the creation of the networks was migration of sheep okay sheep and nomads you might be thinking bear with me I'm going somewhere with this promise just trust me now in the spring nomads release herds of sheep for summer gracing in the Highland pastures over the Central Asian Highlands and these sheep would look for the best quality of grass and that would often be in pastures high up in the mountains so sometimes sheep from one side of the mountain another side of the mountain come to the same pasture and they meet and they sit there and you know eat grass for the summer then the nomads come to get their sheep they find their sheep at the same pasture and nomads from one side of the mountain and the other side of the mountain meet and understand that each other exists and a network a path is formed and Michael Froschetti was actually able to with simulations and then excavations prove that this is very likely the case trade did not come first trade was made possible because of the network and the network is formed by some completely different mechanism so what we learned from this is that it was not it wasn't planned but it arose from something else so how can we increase the density of our networks with the tools that we use online for for planning our events and coordinating our communities what could drive our networks to form and at the borderland one could argue that our sheep are dreams or art and how can we harness the way that art brings us together and projects brings us together and events bring us together to make our community stronger and more connected so we built a platform called dreams it's essentially an internal Kickstarter without actually handling any real money in the system just little tokens going back and forth and it allows participants to gather projects they want to bring to the borderland on this platform and every dream every dreamer that puts a dream on the platform gets a guide and the guide is just another community member another peer helping them to get the dream to a place where it's fulfilling the guidelines and it's likely to be funded and now we also use the dream platform to distribute the budget the entire art grant budget of the borderland it's crowdsourced to the participants themselves each of which get 10 tokens to distribute among the projects each token being worth some amount of money again there is no actual money this is not any crypto there are no transactions it's just little tokens it's voting basically and finally all the projects and camps are self-placed on a map so that also increases these connections between the different projects because they have to interact with each other when doing placement rather than having placement being done for them by some other group and this might seem chaotic but it drastically increases these connections and makes people talk to each other so this is how dreams looks it's very familiar it's very similar to crowd crowdfunding websites this is how it looks when you're looking at such a dream and in the admin view you see here you can you know enable granting or you can look at some safety documentation so forth a little bit of those features and what we did then this before a dream gets approved for the granting phase each dream is peer reviewed by another dreamer to make sure they meet the guidelines and that the budget of the dream makes sense and dreams are reviewed by posting comments and by this mechanism of startling little monsters so anyone can go in and you can click the you know a necessary material monster or the incomplete budget monster and that goes it gets read like that and gets startled until the dreamer sees it fixes the problem and calms the monster down that's another way in which you can promote this sort of collision action of people actually going and really reading about what is going to happen at the event and helping each other out then during the granting phase participant distribute a total of 10 tokens to the dreams they most want to see so how are we doing four years in well in 2016 around 70 percent of the total budget of the entire boardland event went to these participatory projects straight to funding the projects of participants but because infrastructure costs and venue rental don't scale linearly it's now around 50 but it's still a very high number thinking that you know this is not going to anything else but what the participants themselves want to bring and this year we distributed around 120 000 euros to about 190 projects and each project was granted from 100 euros for the smallest projects up to 10 000 euros for the biggest projects and participation in granting among the members of the boardland is now at around 50 percent having grown from we started at around 20 50 percent is around the same participation rate as us midterm elections horrible for midterm elections pretty good for participating in governance of what is essentially a big party but think about what it means that half of all participants spend time going through projects that are going to be at the boardland if 10 people in your camp have given grants and they have even vaguely remembered 10 different projects they looked at to give grants that means that in your in your camp you might have knowledge of up to a hundred different things just among the people in your camp before you even arrive and what does this mean more importantly you've interacted with people online who have built these projects meaning that the number of relationship between camps and the density of the entire network of the organization and community is much much higher and these relationships can now be used for other things much like the networks of the silk road to lend equipment to coordinate logistics plan events together and do other things together because you have these connections that you can start using them so here's one example of how we've applied this design principle to increase connection density in the first year we noticed that 40 percent of participants were giving all of their grants to a single dream instead of spreading it out a lot of the time probably they were giving it to their own dream or to a dream that was off their own camp so we tried setting a max of how many tokens you can give to a single dream starting at seven and what happened immediately is that it got more spread out people didn't just now give seven tokens and then leave the three tokens to be wasted they usually gave those three tokens away so you can see the the red line on the graph being how it was in 2018 and the blue one we tried to have five as the maximum pretty much the same result so i think we'll just stay there at maximum of five so we've talked about how to increase collision rate and how to sort of make people have to interact more with each other to form a denser network but this creates a lot of pretty loose connections how do you make these connections between people last and turn into paths of collaboration about things like infrastructure safety security and so forth how can you make the make use of these connections what do people need to be able to make use of these connections to do other things on the silk road important paths were reinforced by building caravanserai there were basically big stone structures built on important paths in the network at great effort hauling all these rocks high up into the highlands because you needed a place in which you could plan continuation of your journey a place where there was infrastructure where you can stock up of supplies find new companions to work with a place that keeps the culture and the sort of memes of the silk road that help you survive in it intact and reinforce those paths so our sort of digital caravanserai is Lumio and we've named our little instance of it boardland talk Lumio is great built by some great people in New Zealand I really recommend it especially if you need to make a lot of decisions together it's really good and I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about what I think really helps what sort of features really help when you're wanting to have a community interact with each other together and make connections last you need to be able to form subgroup somehow and you need to be able to collect and tag reference and link it's bizarre to think about that Facebook groups don't allow hyperlinks or don't allow you to link to a specific comment in a thread we used to have this stuff it was called bb bulletin forums and apparently most of people online now have forgotten how to do that you need to be able to move conversations around of course to fork conversations you need to be able to come back to a conversation maybe a year later and find it and if you want to make decisions together you need to be able to gather advice and make decisions and last but not least you need some way and to be able to formalize a social contract on the platform some way where people can agree on you know what are the rules of engagement in this group so just a little bit about that and also noting that Facebook has almost none of these features which is why things a lot of the time turn to shit when people try to use Facebook for this sort of coordination so this is how it looks this particular group in on boardland talk is very important it's where we make decisions transparently through a method called the advice process and it allows members of the community to step into decision making and change things when they feel there's a need to do so like I mentioned before the heart of the boardland is experimentation and that also goes for how we organize ourselves and make decisions and we come up with a process for governance that is mixing to walkercy that is the person who does the work calls the shots mixing that with conflict resolution practices and with some really good tools from a book called reinventing organizations by Frederick Lou we don't use the process he describes in that book of face value but we're definitely inspired by it so I'm bringing it up but these methods without the digital tools like Lumio and the other platforms to use would not have been possible to scale to an organization of 3,000 participants that sort of come and go in a flux that's completely reliant on having good online tools so here's an example of how borderland infrastructure is planned openly our main lead for building the power grid this year outlining his plans and asks camps to let them know where they will be placed so that he can plan accordingly and also if they need a lot more power than he might be expecting to let him know and to also comment on on the plans as they happen it's all happening transparently even to the outside world by the way and this advice process is one of my favorite examples one of the members thought it was unfair that his son would not be allowed to enter for free when he turned 13 just before the event started because he bought his membership when the when he was still 12 but then he turned 13 right before and the rule was that if you're 12 years old or younger you can go for free and he thought it would make more sense to allow all children who were at 12 at the beginning of the calendar year to be able to attend so he goes into the borderland advice process group and he starts that process he says I want to change this and then he seeks advice transparently in that group from people on whether he thinks they think that he can change this and then the decision is his to make completely and he made the decision to change it to a slightly different proposal than what he had first what he'd first meant to do but essentially he was able to do what he wanted and solved problem that he had and if you think that this process seems completely bizarre and you go like well that doesn't work for x y said maybe not but a lot of the time it does work and I can't now because of just the time constraints go into exactly how and all the different protocols but I recommend reinventing organizations that book and you can also have a look at talk.theboreland.se slash advice where you've sort of gathered those protocols and you might be able to answer your questions there or just contact me later if you want okay so how engaged are our members on talk or in governance in the blue graph you see the number of users who've interacted with some content at least once and today it's around 1800 users remember the event has 3000 participants and there are about 3600 users registered on the platform and the red graph you see that in the red graph what you see is the 30-day active users so users that have been active within 30 days and you see at any given point around 20 percent of our members this year were active in planning for the borderland up to three months in advance 20 percent were active at any given point in governance and in total of course more than 20 percent because they don't they don't overlap all the time and I want to show you something interesting here in 2018 we lost our location only seven weeks before the event and when that happened five different groups self-organized went out and started negotiating in five different locations um without having to ask the board for permission without having to ask anyone for permission they were able to go out and try to solve the problem that the community had eventually a new location was found um and in a month before the event all the plans had to be adapted to the new location which meant that the capacity had to grow very quickly of the organization to handle everything and because it's decentralized and because people don't have to be elected into positions of power and authority people could come in and fill vacancies that they saw were there and you can see that over by that little arrow over there when I were assessed five locations negotiated how activity on talk just shot up as people were trying to solve the problems of the organization so what's essentially happening I think is that people are reusing these networks that are built by dream prototyping to then use them for governance and infrastructure co-creation and this is a way in which the borderland differs from a lot of other participatory events you have a sort of three circles in which you can do co-creation you have the creative container the infrastructure container and the process container so this picture is made by my good friend Gustav who came up with this this classification and an event like Burning Man pretty much only allows co-creation in the creative container you're completely free to create and co-create inside of that and you can make pretty much any decision you want about the creative content but you are not able to co-create process or infrastructure and that's the gap we're trying to bridge to be able to live in the middle of all these circles and allow co-creation of all those containers at the same time so after having reinforced connections of course going back to the Silk Road once these caravans were out there once these paths were out there you need to map them because as a new person coming into this network you want to be able to look at them a little bit beforehand especially when they become very sprawling and important also for trade so of course people started mapping the paths from China to Europe and making maps how can we do the same thing in this context so we're trying this is a very complicated problem but we built a tool called realities basically it's a mix between a wiki a task manager and an organizational chart and what you do is you can define a need like power and that's defined in the green column there and then you can define a responsibility that completely or partially fulfills that need which is in that purple column and each responsibility has a realizer which is the person responsible for making that thing happen and the guide which is somebody who knows how something is done and what skills are necessary to be the person responsible for that so if a realizer suddenly drops out the the guide can find a new person and the guide is also tasked with checking in on the realizer to see that they're actually doing what they said they were going to do and finally defines them dependencies between responsibilities and we do this for three reasons first of all when you need to make a decision you need to know who is dependent on you who are the stakeholders in your thing so it's a good way to keep track of who are the people who I should ask for advice when I'm making a decision and it's the job of those other people to define that I depend on you so they go into realities and they can define that dependency we're still in the process of actually making this work but it's new and it's been this year used to a fair amount I would say the second thing is that by looking at a map of all the dependencies someone you and the organization can understand how things fit together and third we can identify critical responsibilities that a lot of people depend on in order to identify points of failure and to see that the people responsible for those have everything they need in time so it has a little graph it's very experimental and rough still but here you can basically see people on the outermost ring and then the ring within that are responsibilities that have been claimed by someone and the inner ring are responsibilities that are not yet claimed so you can see things like how the guide edges are drawn around the board so you see there that somebody up there who doesn't have a lot of their own responsibilities might be guiding quite a lot but here you have something that's even more interesting which is the dependency edges and if you look at that up in the left corner there you can visually see that there is something critical going on there and you can sort of identify these hotspots of where you might have points of failure whether you should pay attention to and in this case what that responsibility is is the event permit application a lot depends on it and it depends on a lot of other things so we should make sure that Peter who's in charge of that has everything he needs to to do his job and what is this for I mean essentially if you have a decentralized organization and you've decided that you don't have the sort of normal hierarchies and people elected into positions it makes it very hard for you to be able to have this an organizational chart and those are useful for people coming into an organization to understand who does what so this is a little bit what you can do to replace that but also of course organizational charts are not true an organizational chart looks more like that in reality you have a lot of more connections that are perhaps a lot more important than what you actually see in the clean chart yeah there are a lot of really good ones in that one all right so come through to mapping the paths and just want to reiterate the things that we gone through the idea is to increase collision rate and then reinforce those connections and then map out those paths and in closing we started this project called participio to collect other useful tools for participatory organizations of course dreams and realities lumio and others and we're gonna basically use some of the funding that we've had we've we got some funding last year to push into some of the development of these projects and we also push them to a few other projects also doing really interesting stuff for participatory culture and organizations and there are now eight different events at least that I know about that use one or some combination of these three tools and they range from Germany to Israel Austria Sweden Norway and you see the the orange dots there they don't actually use the dreams platform but they use the methodology and just use a spreadsheet because they're really small events but they use essentially exactly the same idea and just closing I want to give a really honorable mention to often or try thousands which is a really really great platform that does similar things but in a very different way where you essentially define resources events and places and then you can mix those together in order to create a participatory festival for example in a city so I'd really recommend going and checking that out as well it's a very different way to to do similar things another really interesting tool is that is do create it's essentially an open source task manager with a little bit of bells and whistles that helps you do it well for for participatory organizations and that is it I'm planning this participial project on this URL so you can go check it out there ask questions find the git repo and I'm also at who you at edsriders.eu so you can ask me questions there and I think that's it for me thank you very much thank you well thank you thank you very much do we have any questions from the audience does anybody want to know over there and you'll have to speak into my microphone please thanks for the the great talk one thing that was a bit unclear to me is that it's it's decentralized and there's nobody being voted position and I was wondering how you then decide on competence like if somebody shows up and says hey I want to do the power grid but he has no experience with it for example how do you organize or deal with this so this is where two things come in one that we have this guide position meaning that there's supposed to be someone in place who knows what skills are required who can talk to that person and say listen I'm not sure if you can do this the second part is that there to make any decision you must seek advice so when this person comes in and start making decisions they're going to go around and seeking advice from stakeholders hopefully those stakeholders for pretty quickly figure out that this person does not understand what they're doing and they'll talk to them and maybe find someone else that can do it instead this has happened and that's sort of how it goes it's a little bit of a soft way to do it yeah thank you is there another question okay so there's a the exact question I was I was thinking when you looked at it like what's the what's the discovery mechanism for stakeholders in that graph of people like is it based on the dependencies was it where does it come from how do you know who to ask for advice where do you find them so this is yeah the part of it that's a little bit of magic and this is also why when you say that anyone can make a decision about anything it's not necessarily that simple because you have to be in a place in the organization where you actually do understand these things but that is also a little bit of a safeguard because it means that it's very hard to start making decisions without first getting to know people and getting to understand the organization but realities is also supposed to help you with that by defining those dependencies so that you can see at least some list of stakeholders and maybe ask those stakeholders if there are other people that they think you should talk to there is a space for informality yeah can you give an example of like conflict resolution on this platform or whether you had any kind of drama should show happening and how did you solve that right thanks yeah so conflict resolution is completely vital for this thing to work if you don't have that the whole thing collapses because if one person makes a decision and another person makes a decision about the same thing and they can't agree then you have a conflict and you need a way to solve that we have a conflict resolution escalation that starts with those two people just talk while examining their own drives and try to look at themselves and why they are in this conflict the second escalation goes to having a impartial mediator someone who knows conflict resolution get these two people in a video chat and try to get them to resolve the conflict using those tools they can escalate up to a further level which is a tribunal where they both pick a person that represents them and then they both agree on a third person and that little tribunal makes the decision the fourth escalation step it just goes to the board of the organization we've never gone further than the second because we've never done a tribunal but it's also a community of hippies they're pretty good at at chilling out when necessary okay and do we have a signal angel is there a question from the internet who who doesn't look like anybody else want to know anything here we go i understood that you have a board so what happens if the board disappears will the event still happening or it will just disappear well i'm not sure how it could disappear but um i guess what you mean if they just leave so the boardland is organized by a non-profit association based in sweden um what happens if the board leaves is that the members of the organization who are the people who had memberships to the last event call a new annual general meeting and elect a new board so the the members are in the end um the highest position of authority and there's an annual general meeting every year where the board is elected by the members okay thank you anybody else want to know anything i sort of have to squint below the brim of my hat no three two one okay there's one there oh over there hang on um with people being able to choose the jobs that they do sort of you know ad hoc do you notice that um people select the same jobs year over year or that there's a lot of turnover between who takes on what responsibilities and yeah it's very different for different people i mean i've gone through a lot of different roles of responsibility myself i like to change a lot other people just staying the same thing i mean i actually think personally that we should aim for people not being in the exactly same job for more than about three years we're not shooting rockets to mars here like you don't need that long to be able to learn how to do these things and i think it's better for the organization to get new blood into doing things so we don't get stagnant that but that's just my two cents okay three two one well come out here hi uh i'm into borderland this year really good right nice um i'm asking um you had it a few few years before how did you develop how did you how did you end up with this like how did the decision process and yeah talk about that yeah thanks um so the decision to go towards this decentralized device process thing um was made in 2015 by the annual general meeting that year um and then there wasn't really any plan for how to do this online there wasn't any plan for dreams there was nothing of that there was essentially just a feeling of that it wasn't sustainable or interesting for the board to keep making and calling all the shots about everything and it sort of just grew out from there um there was a period in the beginning where um we had people being very evangelical about this reinventing organizations book and then it became almost like a war about the uh you know validity of the exact protocol that they defined in that book and that wasn't useful at all so we stopped using the terminology that the lu used in that book which is teal we just banned the word we said we're not doing teal we're doing our own thing we're just inspired by that um and then a lot has really happened with running into points of failure you see something um that doesn't work when you have uh no systems in place which is essentially how we started we just said everyone can make a decision about anything go and then things started going wrong and you start understanding how do we fix this how do we fix that because in the end the really vital thing in order to make this work is to accept that there might not be a border land and that would be fine i mean if there is no border land then the organization has not wanted a border land enough for it to happen otherwise it would have sort of worked out to fix it and if there isn't a border land one year well if the organization is strong enough it will survive that there will be a border land next year in the end it's a big party in the field a lot of people would be sad but it's not the end of the world the stakes are low so that has been a good way to do it and i think it might have been a lot harder if the stakes were much higher and if the stakes are much higher in the organization you probably have to pay a lot more attention to things not breaking but we have a luxury so we can experiment yeah you probably also have problems when it scales into large we have realized that we'll go up to 17k participants yeah those structures begin to become very unhandable sort of yeah yeah as long as it's small it's very neat and doesn't scale always that well okay um three to one we have one more question no do i miss out anybody okay well thank you very much for coming and telling us all about and let's have one final big hand for Hughie from Iceland thank you


All right, Lady, what is this? OK, so we've got these two motors here. This is a plastic gear motor. And what's interesting about this motor is it's like double headed. It's got the rotating part coming out both sides. And we had a request to get the metal gear motor that we stock also with two ones on both sides. So this is the sample. And it looks pretty good. And then testing the torque. Hold on. So it's nice to do the metal gears. It's a really good torque. So this is tested and works great. It's a 3 to 6-volt motor and 1 to 90 gear down. And works great. I'm going to get this stock in the store.


The Street USO Experience for Military Families was designed specifically to address challenges that face military kids and their families and bring them a show through Sesame Street Muppets that helps them address those challenges and overcome those challenges. Sesame Street introduces them to characters, especially with the show here, that talks about that story and familiarizes them with somebody that maybe they can relate to. Oh, I know what they're feeling. I know what they're going through. We want to do a PCS back to Gordon and that's what this story was about as well as the deploying aspect of it. So when that time comes we can say, you remember when we went to the Sesame Street and saw the story. The kids kind of connect with them and see that they're real characters and not just on TV. It's a pretty new experience and that our family can be a strong family even if we're not together all of the time.