Every month I scoured the internet for really cool Linux applications and when I find them I put them on a list and then present them to you guys as the top apps of the month. Now it's February, that means it's time for a new list. So let's go ahead and jump right in. The first app on the list this month is called Veeb. Now Veeb is a VIM based web browser. Now if you've ever used something like Qt Browser, it's similar to that although it's not exactly the same. When I first went into this I thought it was going to be basically a clone of Qt Browser but it's not. It actually does things quite a bit different than Qt Browser does in that it has more modes and really it's a mode based browser. So it has several modes that you can use like Explore Mode and Search Mode and these other things that just kind of facilitate the way you use the browser. But all that aside the basic functionality of navigating the web is basically the same as any other browser of this vein where you'd use keyboard shortcuts to navigate between websites and your search history and all this stuff. I will say that it is designed differently than Qt Browser. It does have a configuration file. I didn't get into it all that much. I haven't spent a lot of time with this yet. I want to make a video of that. If you're interested in that kind of video make sure you hit the subscribe button because I think that I'm going to spend some time in Veeb. It looks really interesting. I'm not sure what the differences between Qt Browser and Veeb are like in totality. Like I don't know all the differences yet. So I'm still messing around with it. But I'm really interested to see where those differences lie. How fast it is. And that's so I'm so forth in the brief time that I spent with it. It was fairly fast. It's I'm not going to call it like the fastest browser you've ever seen because it's not. But I didn't notice that it was horrendously slow either which is something that you would notice. If you've ever tried surf before you'll know that browsers like this can be very very slow. This was not like that. It was not noticeable in terms of its slowness. It was actually fairly speedy. So that is Veeb. I'm looking forward to giving it a more thorough try. The next one on the list is called Mark Text. Now Mark Text is a markdown editor. Now I've featured several markdown editors on this list in the past. And they're all varying levels of good. A lot of the times there's not much you can do to make a markdown editor special. I mean it's just going to do markdown and as long as it does that well it's good right. With Mark Text I think that I've probably found the best one out there at least so far. It's well designed. It has a lot of features and despite the fact that it has a lot of features it still feels minimal. Things are out of the way. One of the things that I prefer in a markdown editor is that there's not a lot of buttons. Like if I wanted to have a lot of buttons and chrome and all this stuff I'd just use LibreOffice. You know that's just the way it is right. But I don't like that. So I prefer something very minimal. Now Mark Text is exactly that. It's white or dark if you use the dark mode. Just sheet of paper I guess is what you'd call it. And do you go through and do your stuff. Now it supports full range of markdown text. You can go through and do things like math, do charts, do coding. It has a cool HTML block where you can go through and do a whole bunch of HTML stuff within a div. And it'll actually then translate that and make it look like it's a rendered HTML file right there inside of your markdown file. That's really cool. I didn't even know markdown was capable of that. I don't know if that's something that they've added or if it's always been that way. I didn't because I didn't know it but it's really cool. In terms of settings and stuff that there's quite a few settings. It allows you to change things like if you want to enable it to save files automatically you can do that. You can upload images to the cloud if you wanted to use a cloud sync to upload images for your notes and stuff. There's a spot up in the top left hand corner where it will show you the words, characters and paragraphs that you have. So if you're using this for actual like novel writing or whatever you can go through and know how many words you've written. You can also export as HTML if that's something that you want to do. Now the one thing that I did not see here was the ability to sync this your stuff to other places. So I'm assuming that that does not exist but outside of that this is a very full featured markdown editor. And I've been looking for a GUI markdown editor for a while that is really good and is not bloated. Like some of the other ones that I've tried out not necessarily like bloated but you can tell that they're kind of slow. Like maybe they're written electron or something. I'm not actually sure what mark text is written in but it was really speedy.  So I kind of like that. So that is mark text. It's definitely one of the best markdown editors at least in terms of GUI markdown editor that I've found. One thing I will say is that the spell checker is marked as experimental so I don't know how that will play into actually using it. I did not give that a test so just keep that in mind. So that is mark text. The next one on the list is called manuscript. Now manuscript is a program that is similar to what you'd get if you bought a Windows application called Scrivener. Now it's not a one to one program at all and it's not as good as Scrivener. I'm going to put that out there right now. But the problem with Scrivener is that it's not on Linux. Like if you want to use it on Linux you have to either find a really old binary of it where somebody kind of forked it on the Linux. It's just jank or you have to run it through wine which is not a great experience. It's also $40 which is not I mean it's not for what it is that's actually a reasonable price but still $40. It is what it is right. With manuscript you get quite a few of the features that you get with Scrivener not all of them but some of them you can go through and basically create yourself a novel. And what this is meant to do is organize not only your novel itself but also everything that kind of surrounds creating a novel. So creating the characters creating outlines creating plots creating the world you know world building and so on and so forth. It's actually really cool. So it kind of gives you like a step by step way of creating your own novel. It's not well designed. I'm going to put that out there right now. The icons are huge for some reason. I believe this is built in cute. So I don't know why they have done a better job of actually you know designing this well but you know they haven't. I will say that some of the smaller buttons you have no clue what they do until you click on them because there's no tool text in this application at all. I don't know why the tool tips don't exist in this. It would be a really big help but it doesn't. It also saves upon exiting which is really nice. It also has a few settings not a ton of settings but basically what you want it has a full screen mode where it kind of like a distraction free mode writing mode and other than that it is a fairly good option for people who use something like Scrivener if you want a native application like that on Linux. It provides you with the basic functionality is what I'm going to say. So that is manuscript. Okay the next one on the list is called Logsec. Now this one here I had a hard time shooting B-roll for because there's just so many features and I was expecting to work like Notion. So basically what this is is an open source knowledge base similar to what you'd get if you use Notion. Now if you don't know what Notion is it's kind of hard to explain. Notion is a note-taking application. It's a database application. It does just a ton of stuff and Logsec is kind of like that. Now I will say this having used Notion and then having used Logsec they're not even close to being exactly the same. There's no feature parity here. That doesn't mean that Logsec is bad. It just means that if you're expecting everything that Notion has in this you're just not going to have it. It does have a ton of different blocks. So when you go through and create a new page you have several different blocks that you can put in. You can also go through and tie pages together and stuff like that which is where the power really comes from. So if you're creating like a wiki or something like that you can go through and tie all the pages that are supposed to be together. You know together using links and stuff like that and then making you can travel back and forth between them. It also supports markdown so if you want to go through and write and markdown it will do that. Now I would not use this as just like a note-taking application. It's way too powerful for that. It also has a selection of many different plugins that you can go through and install in order to make it even more powerful. I did not get too much into the plugins so I don't know how useful or how well they work. So just kind of your mileage may vary on that kind of stuff. I will say to try to install another thing because by default the theme uses Solarized Dark and that's a thing that should never be used ever in my opinion. It's just a really bad thing. I can't stand it. But I tried to install a new one. It did not work. So I don't know whether or not that's because I did something wrong or if it's just broken I don't know. It's possible I was just doing something wrong. So outside of that, like I said, LogSec is really hard to explain because it is a lot of people probably don't know what a knowledge base is. And basically what is best I can explain it is it's a collection of pages that can be linked together in a certain way to by topic and such. It's great if you're going through and creating a like a wiki or a whole bunch of documentation because this stuff can be exported into HTML to create like a website if you wanted to. So because that's why you'd write it and mark down because it could be translated into something else. So that is LogSec. I'm going to continue playing with it for a little while but I don't think that I have a use case for it. It's just too powerful for me. I don't really need that. But for anybody who uses Notion but wants an open source version, LogSec is probably a good idea for you. So the last one on the list is kind of neat. It's called Glow. And basically what Glow is is a way to view Markdown in the terminal. Now the one thing you should know if you write Markdown and you've tried to view that Markdown text in a terminal, you know that viewing it just is basically viewing text. Now a lot of themes and stuff like that have gone through and made it so that there is syntax highlighting in various places for Markdown. It kind of works but you can't really tell a difference between an H1 header and an H2 header. They're both going to be the same. Maybe they're different colors. They're going to be the same size because in terminals you can't actually make some texts on screen bigger while the rest of it is the regular terminal font size. With Glow, it does its best to work around that limitation. So if you see some of the examples that are in the B roll, what it does is it adds a background color to like H1 tags. So if you have an H1, it will add a background color of blue and then the text becomes white. So it kind of stands out. It still can't make the text bigger but at least looks a little bit different. It also goes through and it renders lists and columns and all that stuff and it will actually make it look like lists and columns instead of just like asterisks with text beside it, if you know what I mean. So that's Glow. There's not a lot to it. There's not a lot of options and stuff like that. There is a 2e version where we'll go through and kind of search through all of your files so that you can go through and kind of view them right inside Glow. I find that kind of useless because if you've downloaded a ton of stuff from Git, every single thing that you download from Git or you clone from Git usually has a readme.md file and it's going to find all of those. So any files that you have is going to kind of get lost in the miasma of readme that you probably have on your computer. So that is it for this month's list. If you have applications that you'd like to see on this list in the future, you can leave those in the comments section below. Make sure you do not leave a link because YouTube will just delete that thing and I'll never see it. If you have other comments about certain applications on this list, you can also leave those in the comments section below. I really do appreciate everyone who comments and I enjoy our conversations. You can follow me on Twitter at Lenoxcast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Lenoxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. 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Alrighty, so we are one day 13 hours away from announcement and I cannot believe the amount of activity that's going on in the park. It's insane. So this video is a little longer. I apologize for it. I am trying to make my video shorter. Everyone likes shorter videos, but this one was just epic. I got some pretty good shots and I was like, do I wanna show them? I think so. I got shots up close for all you coaster nerds that wanna see the combs, the electronics for the station and the mechanics, all of it. I got some really cool shots of that. And as you can see, we have new track in the storage area. And from what I'm being told, I'm heading back to the park in just a bit to get some shots of some epic pieces of track that are arriving. I'm told I have to go see these pieces. So I will be at the park tonight and tomorrow night to get these pieces. I'm being told that I'm gonna wanna be there. So I'm going in person myself to film the track. Normally I have some members of my team that are filming for me at night, but I'll be there myself tonight and tomorrow night to get these awesome shots of the track. So if you happen to be there, feel free to come and say hi. I'll be there. I'll be there on Wednesday as well. I'll day with the team and some followers and all that and friends. So come hang out and chill with us then as well. So again, one day, 13 hours away. So here's some awesome shots of the station piece installed with the combs. And not much else has changed first thing, give it a second because it's about to take a turn. So we were filming all for about two to four hours today. I'm heading back again, but they got the transfer track ready and they were installing the support beams for the catwalks on the transfer track. And the transfer track will connect to the sliders. I don't know the official names for those sliders yet. Again, I am trying to educate myself. But yeah, as you can see, it looks like there was some slight damage to some parts, but nothing that a little hammer can't fix. But yeah, the station is super small. An interesting point to make about the station is how low it is for a BNM dive coaster. So this is probably one of the lowest stations I've seen on a BNM dive coaster. Correct me down below if I'm wrong. I swear to God, I'm gonna have to like trademark that statement, correct me down below if I'm wrong. But yeah, here's some nerd shots of the combs on the station bit and I just loved it. Like I was really looking at this after I was filming and I was like, whoa, has anyone ever seen these this close up? But yeah, so the station is really small, but that's like every dive coaster. We know that it's not a dual station. It's just a one station bit. And the station is really low to the ground, which is super interesting. It means it could be good news. It could mean the coaster's gonna use a lot of its speed and momentum through the ride. And it's gonna have a really low brake run, which this is definitely suggesting from these transfer track and brake run pieces being lifted off the truck today. They are definitely gonna be installed tomorrow. So I'll be at the park tomorrow. I'm at the park every weekday, but yep, they're gonna be installed tomorrow. They were getting ready, having their little parts attached before they lift them onto the support beams. Again, I'll be at the park tomorrow. So this video, I'm not gonna talk through the whole video because again, I put a lot of nerd shots in here and shots of everything. Cause while we were filming this, by the way, lots of trucks were being unloaded in the storage area. So at the end of the clip, I actually have the storage area clips from everything being unloaded from five trucks. And when I'm being told, there's daily shipments of storage containers coming from Germany. And then you have your flatbeds coming from the Clearmount Steel Factory with the track pieces on them. And there's some supports. Cross your fingers, again, for column seven, it's probably not gonna arrive cause column seven does not exist. We have what we have. Again, the coaster's probably gonna be 213 feet tall, but cross your fingers for column seven. I will update you immediately if column seven happens to arrive. The truckers just told me to come tonight. Well, they told my team to come tonight. And yeah, super exciting. Nonetheless, I'm trying to see, oh, there was weird activity going on at Mindbuster. You'll see that clip too in just a bit. I think in a couple of minutes, you'll see it. So I just wanted to grab all these shots of them lifting the track. I thought that was cool in case anyone wanted to see that. But yeah, so there's some wood next to Mindbuster and some scaffolding next to Mindbuster now. And there was a maintenance worker monitoring Mindbuster. So I don't know what's going on there, but that's pretty cool. Rutherford Construction is back on site. That is good news. So they're back on site. They're getting rebar cages set up. So phase two might be starting. Again, they don't necessarily need to do heavy construction. They can do construction in the morning. We've seen that. They're removing trees in the Timber Wolf Forest. So they'll probably dig holes in the morning, then leave once a little like an hour before the park opens, dig those holes, place those rebar cages, maybe pour a footer here and there. We can tell they are on a rush for this project. It's very interesting. So on that note, I want you guys to join us tomorrow at 8.30 PM. I may make it earlier. I'll announce on Instagram. So right now it's 8.30 PM for a live stream. We're gonna do kind of like a celebratory, like live stream to talk and answer your questions. So comment down below any questions you wanna ask us. And we will discuss those questions on our live stream tomorrow to celebrate the announcement. Super excited about it. The park's been working really hard on this. The marketing team has been doing a fantastic job. This is the best teasing campaign Wonderland has ever seen. So thank you to the marketing team and anyone at the park a part of this project. It's been wonderful, speculating and joining in on the conversation. Really a huge thank you to you. And thank you to you guys for joining me on this journey of speculating the coaster and falling along on the construction updates. The construction updates are only gonna get better. The speculation is going in the garbage. Throw that giga theory out and join me on my drone coverage of the construction. And maybe who knows, a hard hat tour at some point down the road. I think so. Hopefully. But yes. Stay tuned and join us tomorrow for the live stream. Hopefully you enjoy the remainder of the footage. There is Mindbuster footage. There is the footage of Rutherford setting up the rebar cages. And then the shipments arriving as we're filming. Have a good one guys. I may post an emergency video tonight depending on what is arriving tonight and tomorrow night. But yeah, stay tuned. And thank you so much for watching my video. Give the video a like and subscribe if you haven't and stay tuned for drone footage. Have a good one guys. Bye.


I've known Chris for many, many years and we often talk about, we hang out together, we travel together, we do lots of things together, but we often talk about business and I do consider Chris a trusted partner of mine, somebody I can call up and just share honestly with what's going on in my business and things that, challenges that I'm facing and it's the kind of things that we talk about regularly and so I did invite him here today to share some of those things as well with you so I'm going to go ahead and let you start with, it can't be possible with a failure. You may have learned about failures. Something you've, just make it up. Maybe I just saw it on TV or something.  Puzzle? Okay, my wife loves puzzles. When we go on a cruise we find the library or the room where they do puzzles and the first thing she does she gets the box out and she lays out the pieces and she does a puzzle, okay? So I want you to imagine, right, given that I really struggle with failure, what it feels like to work on a puzzle where you take a piece and you try and place it like right next to the edge and then when it doesn't fit, I just lose it. I screw it, I'm like no! It's big and it's, that's how I deal with failure, right? Isn't that how you guys deal with puzzle pieces with anything? No, no, how many of you have key rings with keys on it, right? And you put the wrong key in the door and it doesn't fit and then you're like, no! Right? That's how you, no, that's not how you deal with it. Okay, so it turns out that I don't do that with puzzle pieces, I don't do that with keys and I don't do that when something doesn't work at work or in life.  I don't call putting a key in that doesn't fit a failure. It's just that one didn't work, let's go to the next one. If something, if I have a proposal at work and I want to pitch it and it doesn't work, I don't lose it, I don't call it a failure. Someday I may run, I don't know when that's going to happen but if I was in a 5k for example and someone went ahead of me, right? I wouldn't be like, no! I'd just be like, okay, yeah, okay. So I think one of the problems we have with failure is the label failure. If you're a teacher, you know this, right? When we talk about, if you were getting your master's degree in education, if you were a teacher, you would know that when you ask a question to a classroom of students, and the first person answers, you don't say that's right. Today in education we know that when you say, hey, how do you know whether or not this is popular? And five kids raise their hand and you go to the first one and they go, because a lot of people are clapping and you don't say that's right. You say what else? Because if you say that's right, you have four or five other people who put their hands down and just go, I guess my idea was wrong. And it wasn't. We look at things when we put in the label failure, what we're really doing is creating negative self-talk or criticism. There's an entire field of psychology that I love reading about, which is sports psychology.   You're like, been here, going to get through this, right? Been here before, going to get through this and that's how you push it through. A lot of times what happens when we put the failure label on something is we close down our thinking, right? There's a tiny little bit of stress that happens in our brain when we go, I failed so now I'm bad, right? We talked about this earlier, Chris Ford was talking about it. I'm bad. We limit options like well if that didn't work therefore nothing will work. If I have a proposal work that doesn't work, I just find another way to bring it in and then another way and I try. It's like keys going in the door. That one didn't work, let's go to the next one. That one didn't work, let's go to the next one. So I've learned a lot about failure, but mostly what I've learned a lot about is how to persist past it, right? How not to give it that big label because that big label starts narrowing down options rather than trying to open up options. That make sense? There's a documentary that I think I turned you on to recently on Netflix. That's awesome. That's exactly what you're talking about and if you haven't watched it, it's an eight-part documentary called Losers. I just want to pause right there. When your best friend calls you up and goes, hey, you should watch Losers, maybe rethink your friendships, right?  It's awesome. You specifically. You specifically. I'm giving you a record and you're like, wow, okay, thank you very much. If you haven't watched Losers, I highly recommend watching Losers because it's very much about what Chris was just talking about, about sports philosophy, right? Yeah, absolutely. So years and years ago, I was raising money for startups, right? So three times a week, I would put on a suit, I would drive to Silicon Valley and I would do probably three to four meetings a day, 10 meetings a week, asking other people for millions of dollars. And that's probably 50 meetings in the year and we got one yes, right? 49 knows one yes. And I think much like if you've ever worked with Steve, you know Steve's really good at sales, Steve probably makes, you know, not that he does outbound calls, but when he interacts with other people, see that little dig, but he may have 49 conversations that don't go well, but he knows all he needs is the one, right? There is a certain dynamic, a certain skill in learning how to let the 49 go because all you need is the one, right? All you need is one to work for it to move forward. And so a lot of times for me, it's just a game of numbers, it's just a game of persistence. If it doesn't work this way, it will work this other way. So I work really hard on plan B, plan C, plan D, plan E, plan F, plan G, and it just keeps going, right? It's annoying to the people that are close to me because by the time something hits, I'm like, oh, no problem, we'll just do this. Or we'll do this, and they're like, how do you think about this? Well, I spent the last two months thinking about this, right? Like, I'm just always prepared for the next failure and how to move around it to get to the next thing. So you haven't given us any specifics? Yes, okay. Okay, come on, man. One of the biggest failures of all time! I was responsible for hiring an SVP, a senior vice president for a software company, and I hired them. They were awesome. They had spent 16 years at Microsoft as a technical evangelist. They were everything we needed, right? I knew that the guy was awesome, right? I knew he was a technical evangelist at Microsoft because even when he mistakenly, like, his bag fell down, his badge from Microsoft fell out, right? He was the legit thing. If you're a technical evangelist at Microsoft, it means you've passed a whole bunch of criteria already. Like, I don't have to vet you. I still... I made a couple phone calls, made sure he was legit. Two days in to the job, I asked him to do something, and he started getting cagey. You know that feeling where you're like, hey, well, show me what you got. Well, I'm not ready to show you yet. Yeah, but just let me see what you got. No, no, I just... You know, let's take a look at it tomorrow, and then tomorrow he doesn't show up to work. But it's because his wife is at the hospital and we're like, well, have some compassion.  So great. Let's call the hospital and ask for Mrs. Green and send her flowers, except there's no Mrs. Green. So then we send an email, and he's like, well, she's not at that hospital. She's at this other hospital. But she's already checked out. She's at the house. Great. Send us your address. We'll send flowers all we want. I know what you're trying to do. What? When someone says, I know what you're trying to do, and you were trying to send flowers, right? It's really awkward, because you're like, I don't really know what you're saying I'm doing. So in the back of our head, we started wondering, like, what's going on? What's the issue? And my boss comes in and says, hey, how much vetting did you do of this employee? Oh, no. And I'm like, well, I called a couple of people. Plus he's a Microsoft. I mean, like, he works at Microsoft, right? In those days, Microsoft didn't do employment verification, right? Or they didn't do references, right? And it was a big deal back in those days of technology and what they would say or not say. But they had just opened up a service where you could pay $50 and punch in the person's information, and they would tell you when they worked there. This guy spent 16 years at Microsoft. Or at least that's what I thought. I paid the money, right? I paid the money, and he had worked there for six months, right? He was friends with, we knew, because when he came into the interview, like, I wasn't a moron. We had him physically show up. Several of us interviewed him, right, including my boss, so I didn't feel like this was all my failure, but it was mostly my failure. He had mentioned that people he knew at Bank of America and we were doing deals with Bank of America, and so eventually I called Bank of America and I'm like, hey, you know, like, Stan Green, do you know Stan? And they're like, who's that? And I'm like, well, he's the guy. Remember, we saw each other. Oh, I was saying hi to you guys. I didn't know who was with you, and he was like, oh, yeah, I worked with her for years when I was over there at Wells Fargo. And so, I mean, it started falling through. He said he went to San Diego, or UC San Diego. So we called UC San Diego and I said, okay, like, I'm guessing his age. He'd be around here. And they're like, no, we don't have anybody by that name. I'm like, oh, sorry, not in the computer science department. And she goes, no, no, no, not, like, we don't have anyone in the computer science department, you know, with that name. I'm like, okay, what about the university? No. What about any time in all of history? Have you ever had this person? No, right? So then I wrote the email that said, I'm gonna need you to bring in your transcript and this and that, and he just launched this massive email of bad words. And I was like, well, I guess that's your resignation, right? So he worked for me for three days. But the amount of energy we had put into hiring him and the amount of plans we had set up for him, that was a $30,000 or $40,000 failure. When I was 27 or 28, and I was terrified to hire for the next couple of years, right? Because you do something bad and you think I'm bad, right? And it turned out, no, it was just, it was a mistake, it was a failure, but you have to eventually get back up and start again, right? So these days, of course, if you've ever worked for me, if I don't know you, just plan for a six or eight week process to hire, like I won't hire fast, I'll fire fast, but I'm not hiring fast because I want to make sure we do everything right. So hire slow. Hire slow. Fire fast. Okay, good. Any questions? So far? So you want another one? I had a follow-up question, but absolutely no, no, no, no. We only have nine minutes, ten minutes. I absolutely want another one. So how many of you send out quotes for people to sign up for your services? Right? Yeah, okay, a good amount of you. So I sent out a quote to a client once, right? We had this whole conversation, sent out the quote, and they signed it and sent it back right away. And nothing about that sounded bad. Like, there was not a... Awesome. There was no failure there, right? You send out a quote that says it will be like $9,000, and they signed back saying great and done. And then you're in the middle of the work, and he goes, I'm super impressed by the work you're doing for just $9,000.  What were you expecting to pay? Right? And he goes, well, we talked to a couple other folks that wouldn't do nearly what you have on your list, right? Like, you have gone over and above. We talked to a couple other folks. I think the cheapest quote we had was like $75,000. So we said, let's just throw it to this guy for $9,000. If he's a bozo, it's not even like it doesn't matter if it's $9,000. And if it works out, we got a deal, right?  You could have given me a heads up, right? So from then on, I have never sent out a single price, right? I always send out three. So here's 80% of what you want, right? For the price I'm willing to do the project for. Here's 110% of what you want for, you know, a bigger price, right? And then here's what you might need two years down the line if you really want to pay and get going now and go for success and push that price up. And I have been far more committed to asking a lot more questions. Like, have you talked to anyone else? Do you have a set budget? Have you heard a lot of questions? What's your range? How do you characterize how much you want to spend? Learn a lot from, again, doing that one really, really wrong. Have you done this kind of thing before? What did you pay in the past? You know what, don't use logic with me. That's not right. Awesome. So on the pricing, what you just explained, I just lost my question. It'll come back to me for a second. Questions for Chris on that story? Yes? Mike, come and hang on a second. So what happens if you ask the questions such as what's your budget or what's your range if you don't get back an answer that gives you an idea? And then how would you then present a quote that allows you to... Yeah, so what happens if they don't give you a range back or they don't give you enough information? So I learned this trick when I went to go build a pool in my backyard. So I invited a vendor to come to the house and put fake grass in the front of the house. Fake grass in the front, little square. My son's allergic to grass, so just fake grass in the front. Called the vendor over, but I'm in the meeting in my office so my wife takes the meeting. And I tell her, just fake grass in the front, get me a number. And so two hours later, I'm done with the call. I come out of the office and the dude is sitting in my living room. And so I look at my wife and I'm like, what happened? And she said, well, he said that project was too small, but he said he'd be more than happy given that I told him all about what we wanted in the backyard. And I'm like, wait, what? And she said, remember the other day you were telling me about what we were going to do in the backyard?  I'm like, that's why the vendor's sitting in my house. He's been waiting for two hours. We'll just pay straight cash. Oh, thank you, sweetheart. You're amazing. Have I mentioned how awesome you are today? And so the guy says, let's review what you want. Of course. And so we go in the backyard. He looks at everything. He's talking about the pool and everything else. And then he says, what's your budget? Now, I've written a book on pricing, right?  You think I'm going to give you the first number? And I said, out loud, I said, no, dude, I'm not the pool expert. I haven't built pools before. You do this. You've done this for what? 20 years? He goes, yeah, 22 years. So you've done this for 22 years. You know what it's going to cost. You tell me what this is all going to cost. And instead of answering me, he says, well, in 22 years, what I've discovered is that most people do have a number in their head, but it's about 50% of what it will actually cost. And I blurt out, I'm not spending 150 grand on this thing. And he goes, so your budget is 75? I learned that from my pool guy. And by the way, what did he do? He gave us a quote for just the pool to this, the basics, the waterfall, but no cave beneath it. If you want the cave, add on. If you want solar to heat up the pool, add on. And by the time we were done, we were back up to $150,000. And you're like, this is insanity. But he played it perfectly. So when someone tells me they don't have a budget, then you start navigating around it to say, well, here's an experience. You might tell them about other projects. And as you're telling them, you might drop the anchor of the price. So this is a project we did. This has the automated marketing. That was $35,000. And you're watching them in the eye where they're like, no. You don't have to do everything that we did for there, but it is just to give you an example. Here's this other one. Oh, that's painful. All right, I think we're OK. OK. So I might use two or three examples to anchor them on price and say, we don't need to do all of this, or we don't need to do all this, but we could do some of these things and just help them understand where the guidelines are. Does that make sense? Awesome. Just to reflect what Chris said, when I'm doing that, I do the exact same thing. I say, here's a project. It's not exactly like what you're thinking. I always start with that. This is not exactly, this is not an apples-to-apples match. But here's that cut, because that leaves me the door open to say those kinds of things. So I start with that. I remember my question. My question was, I know that this wasn't your intent when you quoted the $9,000 project, but a lot of people play the pricing game by quoting low, giving an exact scope for what they're doing, like your pool guy. And so I wanted you to expand on that a little bit if you wanted to play the pricing game. You can absolutely be the low price leader, as long as you're willing to narrow down the dynamics. You probably don't know this unless you're super astute, but the size of your peanut butter jars have been changing over time.  Your peanut butter jar pricing hasn't. And so you're like, oh, look, it's still the same jar that I bought five years ago. No. Grab the jar, flip it over, and look at the dimple on the bottom. They've been slowly... This is an entire conspiracy I'm just letting you in on. They've been slowly taking away peanut butter from the peanut butter jar for years, right? By changing the size of that dimple. Why? Because fundamentally they can keep the price of the peanut butter jar the same and give you less peanut butter. What does that have to do with this? You can do the exact same thing in your pricing. You can keep your price at $9,000, give them less. Oh, you need to migrate the site over, that's separate. The performance of the... Oh, that's separate. Oh, you need responsive design or that's separate. But the base of the design of your website or the base of your installation of WooCommerce or whatever it is, that's this price. So you can start with a lower price, right? As long as you're letting them know here are some of the extras, and then they'll walk themselves up to wherever they're comfortable. And if you've ever competed in the RFP game, especially government RFPs, that's how they work typically. They're looking for price. But you can play that game with a narrow scope and adding on. Other questions for Chris?  All by myself. Any other stories you want to share? No, I'm good. Thank you guys so much. Have a great lunch.


Hey everybody, welcome back to magic orthodoxy. My name is David and this is my deck collection Hey today, we're gonna look at some of my odds and ends decks. What are these? Well, basically this is like a long time before all the custom decks started coming out long before like illusionist started making custom cards When I was a little kid like when I was a teenager and I was collecting decks of cards There was really nothing out there except for like bridge decks bicycle decks Just decks you'd pick up at a movement parks decks you'd pick up You know when you went to an airport in a new state You know, I had or casino decks, you know That was pretty much all you could collect back in the day and so I was collecting cards even way back then and so these are just some of the cards that I've picked up and I've got three shoeboxes full of these cards The you know the shoeboxes that your vans come in like these are literally vans shoeboxes And so I'm gonna do three different videos gonna show you How how many of these random cards I have there's not much to show you other than just to say hey This is part of my collection for those of you who've asked so let's get to it Okay, so first up I got some cards from Disneyland So I bought the deck from parts of the Caribbean ride I think somebody else went later and got the same deck for me So they both come in these little plastic hard shell boxes the backs look like that and the faces look like that Then I got these at Disneyland It's Mickey. It's a two-way image and this these plat You know, it's the plastic cards that you can get waterproof that don't bend or break So yeah, somebody picked these up for me at a garage sale It was Disneyland's 45th anniversary and they came out with the deck of cards to commemorate that and so there's a Joker Goofy right there Also from Disneyland is the nightmare before Christmas Decker cards, there's the ace of spades and Come in these little hard shell boxes and then later I got the 50th anniversary edition from Disneyland as well And so there's a daisy duck Joker my brother-in-law got these for me these are navy cards from the Naval Academy their bridge size and Still wrapped in plastic. They didn't have a box never even opened them.  There's the back design. It's a boat And it says canasta on the side. There's a Coca-Cola deck again bridge size says plastic coated on it And then I got two decks of crooked cards. This one's from Las Vegas This is a crooked deck get it the crooked deck and comes this little plastic box and then I have these they're called curious crooked cards, but they look exactly the same on the inside But it's just a little different box got a deck of World War two spotter cards not from World War two obviously There's our like reprints so but they're made to look like spotter cards And I got these at like a hardware store my dad got these for me their bridge size They say I love music on them. It's a piano keyboard still wrapped in shrink wrap never even opened when I went to Maui I picked these up it says land of Aloha and the bridge size card lady playing old ukulele and again I don't think I've ever been open those. I got these in an estate sale I don't know anything about them they come in this little plastic box and they're Asian I think and so they're like old Asian drawings. I Picked this up at a secondhand store. It is a chem arrow Cardcase and so it had vintage cards inside of it, but I took them out because they were just thrashed But it's a cool little KEM Cardcase and then I have these not to be sold pinnacle cards when they work in Red Cross It says not to be sold on the side. They're really old. They say July 29th 1954 so I have no idea where they came from the boxes all torn to heck and but it's a cool deck of cards All right, so that's my second video of all my odds and ends cards. I'm gonna make three videos in total I'm gonna put all the links below to all three down there in the description. Bye


We ride the ears, because when you ride the ears, you're riding his attention. The open face of the ear points to where the eye is looking. Now, I could wiggle my inside leg to say to him, can you look to the right? See, right ear back. I could wiggle my left leg, and I could say, could we get you to look to the left? It'd be no different than if somebody walked up from behind you, and they tapped on your right shoulder, and you said, huh, oh, hi.


Income tax 2021-2022. Software examples. Schedule C impact on tax return using tax software. Get ready to get refunds to the max diving into income tax 2021-2022. Listener tax software. You don't need tax software to follow along, but you might want the form 1040 which you can find on the IRS website at irs.gov, irs.gov. Starting point. Single file or Adam Smith. Living in Beverly Hills 90210. We got the 100,000 W2 income to start with. 12,550 standard deduction. Getting us down to the 87,450 at the taxable income. Mirroring that in our income tax equation. 100,000, 12,550 and the 87,450. If we go back to the tax software and look at page numero dos. Number two that is 15,15 tax calculated. And we're going to mirror that on our tax software as well with the 15,15. Back to page one. We're now going to make an adjustment and move to a schedule C type business and try to mirror the same kind of income level to see all the different impacts that will happen just by adding the schedule C type of business.  Because if you're thinking about doing business returns, it's quite likely you're going to spend a lot more time doing possibly some accounting type of work because a lot of small businesses in particular might not have the perfect set of books and they might need help with that. And you're also going to have to do more research and some more data input into the system and be able to visualize and understand more things that are going on within the tax return and most likely be able to make projections into the future so that you can calculate estimated tax and have tax questions as people go through the growing pains of their business, hopefully their business growing and the tax implications that will be involved with that. Or are we going for a smaller type of business where we're not trying to do as complex of a business tax returns, for example, and possibly wanting to focus on tax returns where we can automate the system? There's some software out there that basically you can use tools to kind of try to do the data input from a scanned document of all the W-2s and 1099s and whatnot. And to do that, you need tax returns that kind of fit into a set mold which basically the schedule C often will break that mold. In other words, if you're just going to use the data input forms to populate the tax return and want to automate it as fast as possible and be as efficient as possible to try to do as many returns as you can in like an automated fashion, then you want returns that are basically going to fit into a standard mold and that means that the complexity of returns usually at the higher income level and or complexities like business returns can make things more complicated. So just keep that those kind of things in mind as well. So let's just change this from the wages here at the 100,000 and let's put that 100,000 into a schedule C and just look at the different components that are going to be impacted. So this is what we have at the 100,000 W-2 income tax calculated and that's basically what we have thus far. Let's go back into our data input now and say, okay, let's go to the wages and say wages are at zero, deleting the rate wages and then let's go into our schedule C. And so I'm going to say it's a restaurant here for the schedule C data input and we're going to say it's an accounting method of a cash method. This is something you would have to determine are they on a cash or a cruel method if you have inventory involved then you might be required to have like an accrual method at some point in time so that can complicate things, might want to talk to your accountant about that in terms of your accounting method and then I'm just going to go down to the income level. I'm going to put the 100,000, let's put 120,000 in income and that's going to be, this is basically just simply an income statement now and then we're going to have the expenses which I'm going to put 20,000 in the expenses. If I jump back on over to the forms now on page one of the form 1040 you would see what you would expect the net flowing through because that 20,000 that I put in, I believe advertising expenses is now something that was consumed in order to generate revenue and so the net is what's pulling over to page one of the form 1040. Let's follow the flow and see what happens. We've got the news form which is the schedule C. This is what most people will think of when you've got a business like sole proprietorship. Also note that businesses could be set up in other ways when you're talking about business returns and you're going to get questions with regards to the business entity and the type of entity and there's going to be, oftentimes you're going to be dealing with other companies that specialize in setting up certain types of entities like an S corporation or LLC and they have incentives to want to set people up in those areas and you've got to be able to say these are the pros and cons of those kind of entities as well if you start to pick up these types of business returns but the schedule C is the sole proprietorship that we would be picking up. It would be the easiest thing to do if you're a business to start out with and I won't get into the pros and cons of other entities at this point but we've got the 120,000 on the income line up top so first off let's just run through this. We've got the profit and loss, Adam Smith we're going to say it's the restaurant social security number, enter the code from the instructions that's indicating the type of industry that we're in and then you also might have an EIN number and this is going to be important when your schedule C business because you might have to give your EIN number which is an employee identification number even if you don't have employees to someone else so they issue you a 1099 so we might talk about the EIN number in a little bit, a future presentation but then we've got the method that we're going to use we're going to say cash method at this point and then down below we've got the income line item at the 120,000 and then we've got the expenses that are down below which we just put the expense of the 20,000 that gives us the net income of the 100,000 now note that the business income mirrors what you would expect from an income tax system most closely in other words it doesn't make sense if you have your own business for the government to tax you on 120,000 the gross proceeds if you had to spend 20,000 in order to make the 120,000 because if you were to do that it would kind of really wipe out some businesses that have higher expenses in order to generate the revenue so what it makes sense to do is say well we're going to tax you on the net income down here at the 100,000 that means that all these expenses that we're recording on the schedule C are really deductions you can call these expenses deductions it's an income statement on the tax return everything's flipped backwards meaning income is bad for taxes and expenses are good for taxes which is backwards to what it is in like real life but just realize that all these are you're taking these expenses and you're pulling in the 100,000 the net ultimately to page one of the 1040 which is a little bit deceiving because this 100,000 now is in the income line but it's already been net against a bunch of expenses because the whole income statement had already been taken into consideration which had income and the expenses the expenses in essence being business deductions so that's going to be the general now we can get into a lot into the weeds on what's deductible over here and we'll talk more about that but just to get a general idea here we see that this net income flows through to page one of the form I'm sorry schedule one so we got schedule one there's the 100,000 it's coming from the schedule C this totals up to the 100,000 down below that then pulls into the form 1040 so now we're going to go into the 1040 the 100,000 now if that was all that happened you say that's not too bad I can deal with that but we also have some other activity one of the big ones we can see down here that we have the added item of the qualified business income deduction so that's a huge one it's a fairly newer kind of thing that happened a couple years ago the changes to the law and stuff so that's kind of a confusing one we might touch in on that one because it's a big item and then the other one is if I go onto page two we now see that we have the tax calculated but we also have this other thing down here which is the other taxes including self-employment tax like wait a second that's usually what shocks a lot of people and if you're talking to clients that's going to be something that you're going to have to explain to people because if they've been W-2 employees they don't understand self-employment tax and how it ties into the payroll taxes if you were an employee so then you got to basically explain this and this is the thing one big thing that often makes people get behind on their tax payments and even if a business is profitable if they get behind on their tax payments it will discourage their growth process and so you want to make sure that you have that kind of in mind and so that's calculated over here on the Schedule SE so we've got the Schedule SE which is the self-employment tax Schedule SE so in essence if you were to explain this we'll dive into this in more detail later but if you were to explain this to a client or try to think through it yourself so you can explain it to a client you're basically saying hey look the IRS wants to make the sole proprietorship kind of mirror the same kind of activity that's happening in like a normal corporation between the employee and the employer and they're basically treating you as the self-employed person on the Schedule SE as if you are the employee and the employer in other words the wages or the net income that you get at the bottom is kind of similar they're going to treat it kind of similar or in a similar way as being treated and they're treating you as an employee of your own business and the employer of your own business with regards to payroll taxes what that means is on the Schedule SE side of things or I'm sorry on the SE corporation side of things usually what happens with payroll taxes is the employee pays payroll taxes Social Security and Medicare is what we're mainly talking about here and then the employer matches the payroll taxes so you have two sides paying payroll taxes kind of like a 401K plan they kind of sold it that way when they put it into the system it's kind of like a 401K plan or something like that but it's only really with the payments they're kind of mirroring that structure and so they're basically saying okay you've got net income down here we're going to kind of pretend or act like with regards to payroll taxes or self-employment taxes like that's kind of like wages to you and you're the employer so we're going to charge you the employer the employee payroll taxes but we're not going to call them payroll taxes we're going to call them self-employment tax so that's basically what self-employment tax is it's kind of the payroll taxes that they're putting on to the self-employment income on the Schedule SE you're paying both the employer and employee portion in essence so we might dive down into this in a little bit more detail later but in essence you got the 14 129 over to the 1040 page number two 1040 page number two right here and that's a significant as you can see that could be quite significant that could be something that's shocking to people because again they're usually thinking of just calculating the income tax with regards to the tax return if they're not used to the self-employment thing and they're just a W2 employee because if they're a W2 employee they already paid their payroll taxes because they got pulled out of their pay by the employer so they don't really think about it and when you do your income taxes you're not really thinking about the payroll taxes so that's something to keep aware of. Now another thing if I go back on over here and this has to do again with the relationship between a normal corporation and then a sole proprietorship so you're like okay so now you're treating me with my net income as if I'm my own employee and the employer paying the employee and employer portion of payroll taxes but wait a second because if I was a normal corporation I would get to deduct at least a half of the taxes that were the employee taxes so if you're trying to match what I'm doing here on the Schedule C to a corporation I should get to deduct at least half of the payroll taxes because that's kind of how it works in a corporation okay so they're like okay we got to do that but we can't put it in here in the expenses as the payroll deduction for the self-employment half deductible because then you'd end up with a circle reference because that would lower the 100,000 so they then take half of these taxes as you can see here and they charge you the full amount of the taxes that we saw on page two of the form 1040 but then they take half of it and they give you a deduction for income tax purposes not for payroll tax purposes but for income tax purposes so we get a deduction so we're going to say okay where are you going to put that then well that's going to be then on page two of the Schedule I so it's page two of the Schedule I we've got the deduction for part of the self-employment tax which comes from here and then that totals up to all your adjustments and it flows into the 1040 so now we've got the 100,000 here we get to deduct half of the payroll taxes not for self-employment tax purposes but for income tax purposes and then we get to this item here and then they also have and this was another, they gave some benefits to you know the tax rates and so on for business entities and whatnot and then to try to match things up they had to include qualified business income deduction which again it's kind of like a plug in the tax code like to try to reconcile some things that they were trying to do which I think were actually good things but this is kind of an ugly kind of plug thing that they put in there to try to fix everything so now you've got this thing this is a fairly new qualified business income deduction and you can see the calculation here on it which is quite significant and we'll dive basically into that again as well but there's a couple caveats in terms of you know who qualifies and the calculation of it could differ basically on the industry a bit so we might dive into that a bit in future presentations as well so those are some of the things that basically are impacted so you can see that there's just a lot of things that are impacted just from not even just from a bookkeeping standpoint in other words you can also think about diving into the Schedule C and say well does this did they actually get the bookkeeping right where did I get this their Schedule C business and this or did they get this from the software and so on and so forth and you also have then projections out into the future for things like estimate tax payments that they're going to have to make because they're not going to have withholdings that are coming out from their wages from the from the employer that they're going to have to think about and then they can also think about whether something is deductible or not on the expensive side of things what about things like home if you have a home office what's the deductibility of that what about a car if you use the car for work those kind of things get complicated in terms of the deductibility of them same with things like should I have a retirement plan and so on and then of course if you add employees into the role then you've got to deal with the employees that's kind of a bookkeeping side of things but you're also going to have to deal with it when you have the tax when you have the expenses that you're going to have to record if they have employees and then they have the expenses of the payroll that they're running as well so it adds a significant even a basic schedule see adds a significant amount of complexity to the tax return even without considering bookkeeping projections in that kind of stuff going forward so just it's something to be aware of now if I was to mirror this on my tax return over here I'd say I'd say okay we got the hundred thousand is gone let's go to the schedule see and I might mirror the the actual calculation here but I might not always do that for the whole I might not put a whole income statement here in other words if I'm going to do the bookkeeping help them with adjusting entries I'll do a whole another worksheet with it which will be adjusting entry worksheet to help them out with that otherwise I'm going to depend on their numbers maybe and then I'll get to the one hundred thousand there's the one hundred thousand that pulls over to the page one of the of the tax formula so that looks good and then we're going to have to get into the fact that they have the self-employment tax so I'm going to go back on over to the the adjustments and we could get into the calculation of the self-employment tax but I'm going to depend on the software for now to do it but it's a fairly straightforward it's more of a flat tax in other words so if you wanted to actually recalculate it it would be a lot easier to do than the actual federal income tax but I won't do it right now we're going to say we're going to depend on the tax return they came up to fourteen one twenty nine so I'm going to say okay that was fourteen one four one two this is wait a second hold that that's the deductible part this is going to be the additional taxes for self-employment tax additional taxes alternative self-employment okay fourteen now I forgot the number fourteen one two nine one two nine so that pulls over to the first page of our formula down here where we had the tax calculated and then the fourteen one two nine this tax I'll plug in later so we've got that then we've got the deductible part of it which is going to be on the adjustments to income which I could do with a formula I could say this equals the additional taxes for the self-employment tax that divided by two because half of it's going to be an above the line deduction that then pulls into the first page of our formula here so now we've got the one hundred thousand we got the seven thousand sixty five that we get to deduct half of the self-employment tax that brings us to the ninety two nine thirty six we got the standard deduction no change there then we've got this business this qualified business income deduction again we might dive into this in a bit more detail in future presentations right now I'm going to let the software do the calculation for us which is going to be the sixteen seventy seven so sixteen one six oh seven seven and that brings us to the sixty four three oh nine so we got the sixty four three oh nine letting the software do the calculation for the federal income tax of the nine thousand nine hundred so I'm going to say this is going to be the nine nine oh oh and then if I have that and the other taxes which is the self-employment taxes that brings us the twenty four twenty nine so we got the twenty four twenty nine we're not talking about anything on the payments and just remember the payments is a whole different problem than it is if you're a W2 employee because you got nobody helping you out with the withholdings on it you have to actually write a check or make an electronic payment is what they prefer to the government if people do not do that because they're not used to doing that which is very very common then they can easily get behind even if their business is doing good and get discouraged on on their business it's also quite common that people get ten ninety-nines for their income but they don't actually file their tax returns and they don't then write off all their expenses and if that happens then the government's going to come back and say I see your income of one hundred and twenty thousand I don't see any expenses because you didn't file a schedule C they're going to charge you taxes on the gross income and that's where people get really really backed up on the taxes because now they're getting charged on the gross income when they should only be getting charged on the net income and if they don't file the taxes then they can get quite behind in that scenario as well so especially if you're talking to new people that are starting the schedule C type of business to get off on the right foot you want to make sure that they understand the social self-employment tax and the fact that they have to actually make the payments during the year and that they have to do the books especially if they're getting a ten ninety-nine they got to do their taxes because if they don't they're not going to write off their expenses and the iris is going to charge them on gross income which is that's devastating to the business so those are just a quick recap of the things that what we want to keep in mind we'll dive into more of them in more detail as we go