I'm Martha Teter, and I'm your host for Timely Topics with Martha Teter. My guest today is Mary Zoo. Mary is a Davis citizen, Davis resident, concerned citizen. And we are here to talk to you about Proposition 16, which is on the ballot for very soon, just a couple of weeks from now, June 8. And we're particularly concerned that people understand this proposition, which would severely limit local communities in California from choosing who they get power from. If past Proposition 16 would require a two-thirds majority in order to change power from current providers, which in most cases is PG&E. So... Yes, Martha, it really is a preposterous proposition. And we want to make sure the public understands what's at stake. Yeah, I think that if the public understood the proposition, then they would have a much better chance of not falling for the $35 million that PG&E is spending on the rhetoric for this. And this is why we're here, because the opposition, the vote, no, on 16 just doesn't have funds to match the millions of dollars. What is it, $35 million? Yeah, $35 million is expected to be spent. Which is peanuts out of their 1.22 billion profits from last year. So thanks to Davis Media Access for airing this. This is the people's voice. It's the poor man's way to get the truth out. And what we're going to do today is we're going to watch a number of videos that have been created as kind of a people's no on 16 campaign. And the videos that we're going to be showing are available for anyone watching this show. And I believe we have information on how to get those videos. And those videos you can share with friends through social networking. Some of the sites actually say how to do that, how to use their sites and embed the videos and to get the word out, to get the education about Proposition 16. The terrific videos, they sparkle with authenticity. And when I listen to this right to vote, I'm just outraged. You know, there's, I think everyone has a sense of what's right. And they know when they're being lied to. And the videos have the ring of truth. They really do. I think this first video especially is good in that regard. It's a man in the street video about how PG&E has effectively fooled this gentleman who's being interviewed at a local Earth Day fair. So we could have that first video. Yes, I am. Okay, so then you can tell us, we can contact you on Facebook. So tell us how to get to it. Okay, my name is D. Wayne Christmas. You can reach me at Pastor Daryl D.C. on Facebook. One is more American than Christmas. All right, why do you want to vote for the taxpayers' right to vote? Oh, because we have a right to have a say in what our government does. This is a democracy. So let me ask you a series of questions and. Monopoly or competition? Competition. 30% rate increase or community choice of rates? Community choice of rates. The demand for more nuclear power or the choice for green power? The choice for green power. What if I told you that Prop 16 is actually not about the taxpayers' right to vote, but about requiring a two-thirds majority just for your community to consider getting clean, green energy that is not fixed in price? That's horrible. We're already paying too much. We don't have any competition. It's only one company that runs everything. So whatever they throw out there, we have to accept. If you increase my PG&E next month, who can I go to? I can't switch from you and go to another company. That's too much power for one company. So if you saw that it said taxpayers' right to vote act, you would have voted for it? Yes. By the wording, yes. And now that you know more. No, vote against it. No, no, no, sir. No, vote against it. No, no, no, sir. No, vote against it. Obviously, this taxpayer had quite a different view of it. This is excellent. We're not going to be the uninformed during Christmas. No. We're going to be the informed one. Absolutely. When you know the facts, it's very simple. I think their campaign, which they call the taxpayer's right to vote, is particularly insidious on Facebook. I was on Facebook the other day, and I was going to get my mail and up-prop popped a survey which asked, did I want to have the right to vote? And yes or no? I think we got it. Right. 100 years ago. We got the right to vote quite a long time ago. Actually, women 1920. Women 1920, but in the Constitution, 1776 or whatever, very long time ago. And in fact, what the proposition suggests is that they're wanting the government not to have the right to change energy providers. So people should have the right to vote on what their energy source is. So that's their argument. But it's a particularly specious argument because everybody has the most communities, in fact, give people the right to choose in a vote if they're going to change a power company. It's a very small exception if they don't. And if they don't, we also have the right to influence local politics. Apparently, the way to competition to PG&E is either through a city council vote and we vote for council members or a vote from the electorate. And so this is our right to vote. You know, I think it's very interesting that Jerry Brown is the one who insisted on changing the wording. The name of this proposition, 16, was going to be right to vote. And that's what it would be on our ballots. And Attorney General Jerry Brown, to his credit, said that's just so deceptive. So now it's the new two-thirds requirement. Well, at least it is on the ballot. And all their advertising still says taxpayers right to vote. Yes, and that's hitting all the major networks. It's so heavily infested on the networks that even I caught several of them. And that's unusual that I see any of them. Yeah, so it's not about government power to change. It's about PG&E maintaining their monopoly on electric power and stifling the competition. I think this is really what it is about. And it's the old bugaboo about government is out to get you. So, you know, if it isn't government helping us, it's PG&E running it. So would you rather have a greed directing your life?  They have, yes, they have a different motive. And this would really change that we would be more concerned about the well-being of the people than about the profit of PG&E. Another local community, I think it might have been in the Marin area where they have, in fact, gone to community choice of power. The next video is called The Community Speaks. Why not a Prop 16? Because I want local clean energy. Because it unfairly restricts my choice. Communities have to choose who we buy power from. No to Prop 16, because honest competition works. Monopolies are bad. We have two young grandchildren. One of them has asthma. Being able to breathe the air and, you know, not have dirty fuel coming from coal and oil and things like that is very important. It's important for all the children of the future. Because clean energy is the clean world. Families deserve the option of a clean energy future. No on 16, because California needs clean energy jobs, local clean energy jobs. This takes away power from my government to create those jobs and to create clean energy. We've got a lot of solar energy. We've got a lot of wind power. We just have a lot of options due to the geographic location of our state. Public power on the average charges approximately 30 percent less. I believe in free market and we always benefit the community. I'd like to be able to vote on the ability to have clean energy. And also the two-thirds requirement means that if I'm in the majority, I'm still not in the majority unless there are twice as many of me as anybody else. Strengthening our democracy. It strengthens our community. Monopoly is not a game. It takes away our choice. We need affordable power. Not rate hike after rate hike. Local jobs. They're the key to vibrant communities. Let's create a sustainable, healthy, future for all. Stop with the power graph. No. No. No on 16. Use your power. Vote no on Prop 16. That's a wonderful video. Yes, these are real people. Yes, what I'm talking about. They are real people, real jobs. And what they face is really an impossible task. Actually, PG&E's concern, I think, is primarily economic here. It's fighting the possibility of communities choosing their energy. You know what I think is interesting. PG&E is behaving like a dinosaur. It has invested in a certain way of bringing energy, which reflects the last century, really. They have a tremendous investment in fossil fuels. Now, in recent years, we've wised up. Fossil fuels are not going to be forever, and they're killing our environment. So there's been an impetus for green energy, but that means new investments. So there's a reason that PG&E is invested, literally invested in maintaining the old way of bringing energy, because they've sunk money into it. So that's why they don't want change. But we have to for the environment, and the video said 30% less. Their companies going under, businesses going under because they can't pay their bills. So it's about keeping our economy up. If we have businesses that function that can pay their bills, they pay taxes to the city, and we can get our roads paid. So it has huge repercussions. Yeah, I think that PG&E is targeting two types of groups. One is public utilities like SMUD, POUs, publicly owned utilities, and these electric service providers that are coming up with alternate energy mixes in their total that are a lot more of alternate energy. So a community could effectively choose if it wants more green power. And I think that you have information about these publicly owned utilities, and their rates are substantially less than... They're quite good. Our next door neighbor, Sacramento, SMUD, you know, we don't have SMUD now because PG&E spent, what is it, 15 million. 15 million, yeah. And in fact, they tried squashing SMUD, which began in 1923. And it wasn't until 1942, as I recall, that SMUD finally got one over PG&E, and YOLO wanted very much to have in. And we were locked out in 2006, thanks to PG&E's big money campaign. So looking at the lowest rates, it's complicated because the rates of energy are based on tears and usage. But looking at the very lowest, PG&E charges about a quarter more than SMUD. Now on the high, 25% more. So if SMUD charges you a dollar, you'll be paying a dollar 25 and multiply that out. Your bills are in the hundreds. So that's a lot. But that's just the beginning. The discrepancy gets worse with higher usage. PG&E penalizes very, very heavily for heavy usage. And this will be in the summer. You haven't... You've seen nothing yet. With the air conditioners, the price goes up to a difference of five and a half times SMUD. In other words, you pay five times more. If you paid one dollar with SMUD, you pay five dollars with PG&E. Five and a half dollars, 5.5, y'all. So there is a huge difference. And it may, as I said, make the difference between a family making it or business making it. Yes, yes. Apparently the powers that be at PG&E have had this in a plan for a long time. And there was a video, a short video on YouTube of Darby, one of the executives of PG&E. And in it, he specifically talks about diminishing the risk of having communities choose alternatives to PG&E. And so I think we have that on video as well. The idea was to diminish, you know, rather than year after year different communities coming in at this or that and putting this up for vote. We thought that this was a way that we could sort of diminish that level, unless there was a very strong, you know, mandate from voters that this is what they wanted to do. So it was really a decision about could we greatly diminish this kind of activity. There's going to be some flap. It'll take place between now and June. And then presumably, you know, we'll mend any broken fences after that. So we're, we're fences to be vended. We're, you know, I call, yeah, they'll mend the fence, but I call that a smoking gun. Yeah, I mean, there's a reason. So they are spending, they spent on smud to defeat smud. And the reason they defeated smud is because I believe one of the one of the letters to the editor a few days ago said that they defeated smud by saying that as a big lie that the property to be annexed by smud would cost 500 million. And in fact, two independent studies said that it was much less 100 million. And this convinced Sacramento to vote it down, although Davis voted 62 to 38 to go with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. It was effectively, they used their 15 million to get that to stop. So now they're spending the 35 million trying to get it effectively if they pass 16 that will amend the Constitution of California to make it that two thirds of any community is necessary to change the power. It's cheaper for them. It's more expensive for us. It's more, much more expensive in the long run. How much have we paid already since 2006 in PG&E bills that are 25 to five and a half times more than they would have been paying. And they're going up faster, I believe, than the public utilities. And I've seen figures that some of the public utilities, I believe in Santa Clara County, are 40% less. That's a publicly owned utility. But one another issue I think that's really important to see where we really have to get the turnout against Proposition 16 out. They have specifically chosen June 8th because who knows there's an election. There's one in November, but there's not a lot of big contests, at least among the Democrats. There are Republican races, the governor's race, that will bring out the Republican. So that brings out the conservatives. You've got a low-tonut. You've got a conservative turnout. Conservatives don't like big government. So we've got to get people to realize that they do have a choice and it's going to go away not just for a year, but for the Constitution. So it's really, it's a devious perversion of our electoral process. It really is despicable. Yes, yes. And they've used this initiative process, which is ordinarily a system where public citizens, if they have something that wants to get to a vote, they get the required signatures whereas PG&E has used it for their corporate gain. They've paid people to get the signatures to get it on the ballot. So it completely circumvents the popular process for which initiatives have come up. It's getting to be that if you've got enough millions of dollars, you can run the country. That's right, against our will. I want to talk about these groups that are forming or people, this community choice aggregation and what that means. Basically, as I understand it, it's a community using their buying power of electricity to choose to buy a different kind of electricity, either publicly owned or usually electricity that's green energy generated in another way. And we have a couple of videos that explain this in a little more detail. Oakland recently was considering community choice aggregation, also called CCA. And it basically means the community's right to choose. And we have a video on Oakland and a meeting that they had recently in Oakland about this. Tonight we're in Oakland at a meeting for community choice aggregation, which means local communities choosing where they get their own power versus the way it is now for many communities where they get their energy from investor owned businesses where the communities have no say where their power comes from. And tonight we're going to talk to some of the people who are involved in trying to get its legislation passed in the Oakland government here. What we have in Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville right now is a private utility, a Pacific Gas and Electric, a PG&E. And so they own the power plants and the lines and they do the building and all that sort of thing. What community choice aggregation or community choice energy is about is it's a hybrid between those two models. Local government, whether it's a city government, couple city governments in this case or county government gets to decide what's in the energy mix. They could decide where the energy comes from, which is key for addressing climate change because they can say we want more renewable energy. San Francisco is actually moving ahead and they filed a plan to have 51% renewable energy by 2017, which is much faster than PG&E is moving right now. The first community choice aggregation was in Massachusetts on Cape Cod, still exists, was formed 10 years ago, serves about 180,000 customers. The investor-owned utilities serve the investors who earn a rate of return on the infrastructure that's owned by the power companies. The CCA is a non-profit entity basically and so it cuts out the whole profit cost and allows renewable energy to become affordable today in California. We see community choices positioned in a way that it doesn't have to challenge the profit center of the utility currently serving the customers and that's because they would continue to own the wires, they continued to own the power plants that they're now making profits off of. Yeah, I think that explains about community choice aggregation and the history. It's not been around for that long. Very proud since I used to live on Cape Cod that Cape Cod was one of the first ones. It's kind of a little island in a way. But we have another video I think that I think people wonder, well, what's it going to look like for me at a local level if we go with a community choice aggregation? So the next video is from San Francisco, Clean Power. Good afternoon, folks. I think like many of you, I got this brochure over the weekend from PG&E and it says, what is community choice aggregation? So CCA allows cities to replace the local private electric company as the provider of electric power with a government-run program.  That's not what we're talking about here at all. CCA is not about taking over PG&E. If you have a power problem in your house, PG&E will still come out and they will still take care of it. They will still own the transmission system and the distribution system. When you get a bill, it will come from PG&E. You will still pay it to PG&E. What CCA is about is Clean Power SF is going to buy a cleaner, more renewable mix of power and deliver that to PG&E so PG&E can deliver to the homes and businesses in San Francisco. The initial idea is that we're going to buy that power. The long-term idea is that we're going to generate some of that power in San Francisco. It's the right thing to do. Yeah, I think that makes it really clear that it doesn't may not look that radical a change from the local person as to where they're getting their bills, but they're able to exercise some power in choosing where their energy is going to come from. Look how far that'll take you. Marin County is, I think their program is amazing. It started a week or two ago only. They are offering two plans and they call it light green and dark green. The light green will increase the percentage of green energy to 25%. Now mind you PG&E only gets 13% energy from renewable sources and this is probably because they're locked into fossil fuels so they don't have the maneuverability. So the light green gives you 25% and the costs will be at PG&E rates or less. Now you can opt for dark green which is 100% renewable and there are people in YOLO who would probably like that as well and that has a premium of $10 a month plus one cent per kilowatt hour. So it's a slightly increased cost but it doesn't seem phenomenal. So there's a great deal of options. It looks exciting. The future of electrical sources. I don't want to be locked out of this. It looks like a candy store. I feel like I'd be a little child looking in the window and I can't get in. And if you still want PG&E there is the option to stay with PG&E. So you have a choice. You're not locked into anything but if Prop 16 passes you are locked into PG&E. Yes right. We are locked into PG&E and I want to mention something about Marin because as you're right that came online May 7th very recently and just before like at 10 o'clock on May 6th they made a phenomenal number of calls to customers. Apparently most of the if you had trouble with your service or something you would call and they would say oh well let me tell you about Proposition 16. They called people they offered them refrigerators.   And the California Public Utilities Commission which is on one of the sites that I will I showed at the beginning and will show at the end the actual hearing of the Public Utilities Commission that has person after person who in the three minutes they were allowed tells their little story about what happened to them the night of May 6th or around that time. So the Public Utilities Commission has censured PG&E and told them to desist their tactics immediately. California regulators this week bluntly warmed Pacific Gas and Electric that some of their actions to undermine Marin County's new public power program break state rules and must end immediately. So they were really really pulling every trick in the book and they can do that with their corporate profits. In fact I heard that they were using energy efficiency money to stop Marin from going with their community choice aggregation. Breaking laws. Yes. Breaking laws. Not beyond them. You and I try breaking a law see what happens. And then we have and maybe this is the last topic before we'll wrap up smart meters. Smart meters. Which so many of us now have and this is this great you don't if the dog is out in the yard you don't have to worry that the meter reader isn't going to be there or whatever. Well that's perhaps what it seems like. But some of the real reasons are that it costs a lot of money when you have another person on your payroll. So smart meters eliminate personnel positions and also it allows them a lot of control when we get into the summer we get into those very high usage times with the air conditionings on they are able to cut off power at peak times plus charge premium rates as you pointed out they have information on in their smart meters booklet. So you may find yourself completely without power due to smart meters. And then the third issue is that there are reports I believe from Bakersfield that the rates their power rates have gone up significantly. Dan Berman in Sunday May 16th enterprise quotes. Worse yet PG&E maybe is incompetent as it's greedy. Complaints about PG&E's 2.2 million smart meter program started rolling in last summer from Bakersfield and points north.  I haven't changed my power usage the new meter is a scam. So if you have the same problem PG&E customer service is a joke. So they may not even function properly. After initial denial PG&E says yes there's storage problems with their data the software there's software problems there are hardware problems. And strangely the investigation of these meters will not complete till after June 8th election. Funny thing about it. So yeah it's peculiar timing you know I say just tell us the total kilowatts build before and after the meters for any community and let's see if they're the same it should be somewhere in the vicinity. You know could I say a word about the program smart meters program? Sure because they have the option of opting into a particular smart meter program just maybe briefly. Well it's it sounded very good to me. They sent out this booklet. I received this glossy multicolor booklet 10 pages inside. You want to learn about the program you've got to squeeze down to just this very small portion on almost the last page and what they say is if you sign up for this you will pay a premium during peak hours in the summer from 2 until 7 p.m. on no more than 15 days of the month that's 15 days of the month you will pay premium prices but in exchange you get reduced rates the rest of the month. Okay so what are the rates I mean that's the bargain two for one well let's see two of what and what is the one of that. Nowhere in this booklet nowhere on their website could I find data it was greener Fresno that described this and they said well look the rate is preposterous it's a dollar oh seven per kilowatt hour during the peak hours and they can run this 15 days of the year during between 2 and 7 p.m. the highest rate before the smart plan was 44 cents so it's more than twice that okay so what's the reduction it better be darn good no the reduction even doesn't even go down to the lowest tier it stays at a high tier and the higher the tier the greater so wait till summer if you sign up for smart plan I don't want to even see your bill it will be asked this is a rate increase disguised as a plan to help you save money yeah amazing yeah it's it's amazing well I want to close our discussion here with another video and then we'll come back briefly to close off this is a video which is a really nice wrap that summarizes a lot of the issues that are important in this process and it's a very creative way to educate yourself on the issues as I walk on home and get my mail once again I feel my face go pale damn PG and e deception looking so clean with another weekly flyer for prop 16 I really hate the trip but they got me so hot I really want this corporation to stop with the lies about their real motivation maintaining its energy domination PG I'll see your money and your power the power and the money minute after minute every kilowatt hour I'm an educated full sustainability on my mind got my hand on my heart and a gleam in my eye your front group a common sense coalition it's a sneaky ass way that you go fishing for control of our energy market I say PG and E why don't you just park it we homies out here know your campaign is a lie if we don't shape up we all gonna die from your nukes and toxic fossil fuel power plants the best you can do is to say that we can't have community run energy what is it worth you raps are willing to sell off the whole damn or clean up your ass and we say no prop 16 stop messing with the clean energy machine PG and E rats cold as ice but we want it's a green energy paradise PG and E we say no prop 16 stop messing with the clean energy machine PG and E we say no on prop 16 stop messing with the clean energy machine PG and E you're as cold as ice what we want is a clean energy paradise the most enjoyable rap song yes I love it yeah and what what uh our viewers out there can do is to go to some of the websites that we've shown you about where these videos are available and use your social networking to share these videos and send them to friends in fact I believe the first site there's a little you can click on a page will tell you exactly how to embed each of these videos their videos in the in a message and I think both of them may do that too and send it to your friends post it on Facebook many different ways but get the word out and get it to our communities that they're only sources television and not a lot of local excess the way we have in uh Davis so when you don't have 35 million you have to work harder you have to work harder so work harder people's campaign to combat uh PG and E and preserve community choice so keep democracy keep democracy for people keep our yes keep democracy for people keep democracy alive so we want to uh suggest that all of you tell your neighbors and vote uh no on prop 16 on June 18th June 8th and I want to thank you very much for joining us and uh thank you Mary for my pleasure providing a lot of the uh nice details that you've provided it's good to be here yes thank you


How is everybody doing? Great. How many of you are going to start a podcast? One out of 100. Awesome. Everyone else leave. All right. So I know this is a pretty compressed amount of time. There's a lot that goes into creating a podcast, publishing a podcast. The good news is I'm not going to cover all of these bad things. I'm not going to cover all of the technical nitty-gritty stuff, but at the end there's a resource I'm going to give you. You can go to Download. It has all of the real technical stuff. The stuff that I'm going to talk about today is how to keep your podcast alive, how to promote it, how to really find the story arc in your podcast. Many of us want to reach a new audience. How many people are trying to reach a new audience in their content marketing? Right. How many people are doing content marketing? What is content marketing? It's like, what's going on? The good news for us, for those of us who are just thinking about launching a podcast, there's some stats I grabbed from Jay Baer's website. One-third of Americans aged 25 to 54 are listening to the podcast monthly. So I look at that. We still have a lot of opportunity in the podcast. How many people listen to the podcast? A few of you that don't listen to the podcast. All right. 69% of podcasts are consumed on mobile devices, working out, driving your car probably, going for a walk, that kind of thing. Cooking dinner is one of the ideas most of my podcasts listen to, cleaning the house. So there's a great opportunity to be connected with your potential audience, your new audience. The forwarding part, right? The why. It's like, you have to have a goal. You have to set a plan. You're trying to lose weight. Don't eat that pizza.  It's not fun. But the why of a podcast is super important. And I'll tell you why the why is important. It's because running a podcast for those of you who maybe have attempted it in the past and are trying to do it again, you can get burned out doing it, right? And the thing what they say is you can get through the first 10 episodes.  You're really energetic about doing this thing. And then it's like episodes 10 through 30. You're like, why am I doing this again? You have to find new guests. You have to do show notes. You have to promote it. You're like, nobody's listening. You're getting one star reviews. So hopefully I've talked you out of doing a podcast lately. But it's very important to understand the why because it keeps you grounded. It keeps you rooted when you're really doing, when you're really in the motions of doing a podcast. And you remember why you're doing this. Is it money? Is it to grow that audience? Is it to drive an email list? These are the things that you're really going to go through as you progress through a podcast. The why makes you create new content. Hopefully this reason that you're doing a podcast is because you want to drive more traffic to a brand. If you're somebody that works for a brand and you think this is a great avenue to grow traffic, it is. If you're looking to supplement a blogging business that you already have or a product or service that you already have, this is a great way to drive revenue. Goal setting, like I just mentioned before. What is that goal that you're looking to set out with? It's very important that you revisit that, but it's also important to know that it's going to change. My original podcast, network.com, it was all about WordPress, and when I started it, it was just to learn what other people were doing with WordPress, like how are they building an agency? I was launching my agency and at the time, I wasn't a developer, still not a developer, but I wasn't rooted in the WordPress community as a lot of other people were in the beginning. So I set out saying, how can I have conversations with people so that I can get to know this WordPress community? And it was a great starting point for me. And that was the goal. That was the original intent that it still is today. Very much is a roller coaster ride. Sometimes I'm just like, man, who wants to listen to people talk about WordPress all the time? Really. Right? Really. So you go through those ups and downs and depending on what you don't think you might be talking about with your podcast, you might go through that same thing. Just be ready for that roller coaster ride. And it comes in waves. It comes in, you are super pumped up about listening to your show. You have this amazing guest on. You get all of these reviews and readings and shares. And then you get the next guest on. It's not as, it doesn't hit the mark as much as the last one did. You can kind of feel like, this is tough. This is something that I have to keep pushing through. And it is to a little bit of a degree. What is a podcast? For me, podcasting isn't just like iTunes and Google Play. There are so many platforms out there now where we're publishing stories. And it's in the form of social media. It's in the form of Instagram stories. It's in the form of your YouTube channel. It's in the form of your Facebook Live stuff. It's exhausting. Right? It's exhausting. But it's something that has to be done or can be done to supplement your audio podcast. So for me, it's really about publishing message. So for those of you that are in the audience thinking about watching that podcast, and they're saying, oh man, it's so technical to do all this stuff. I have to go to iTunes. How do I do that? It doesn't always have to be that formal way when you launch. It can be just your Instagram stories. Or it can be just a YouTube channel in the beginning. And then you can launch this into a greater, you know, your own platform called podcast. So it's all about broadcasting. It's everywhere that you can be. One of the things that I've been investing a lot more into this year is YouTube. I'm doing a lot more on YouTube because I don't know what. I just know that there's a lot of people going back into YouTube. It was something that I started years ago. I said, you know, this audio thing is great, but I need to supplement it with video. And not cool. I'm not going to be on Snapchat. You know, I don't even know how to use Instagram anymore. Just swipe left to pull up the stickers. It's just too complicated for me. YouTube, I can just create a video and upload it. Save me a little podcast. I can just create an audio episode and upload it. So while I was making this presentation, I asked a whole bunch of people online about, what is it that they would want to hear me talk about creating a podcast. And a lot of it, a lot of folks said, how do I find the confidence to do it? How do I get somebody on the show? I don't know somebody. I don't know anybody in my particular field, but I want to start having these conversations. And number one, you know, marketers ruin everything. I haven't said that. It might have been Gary Vee or somebody else. But marketers, when they're putting together their listicles of how to start a podcast and all of that, it's just very sterile. It's just very, you know, follow this system. To me, I just love having conversations with people. And that's it. Like, that's why I do podcasts. There's no real monetary gain for it for me. I'm not trying to grow any email list. I just love it. I just love having the conversations. And that really just helps me keep doing it. It helps me find people that I'm interested in to have a conversation with. And I just ask them. When I started the first episode with the network, which was like five or six years ago, my first guest was Jesse Friedman, who spoke a couple hours ago. He was the only guest I knew. He was like the first person I knew in the WordPress space. And then from the next 10 episodes on, it was just people I had swallowed on Twitter. They'd say, hey, want to be on this podcast? Can I talk about WordPress? And I'd be like, yeah, sure, no problem. It's just having the confidence to ask and know that, you know what, we're all trying to achieve the same thing in this conversation. If it's about WordPress, we're all trying to learn a little bit more. So having the confidence to ask people is just finding it within you to say, look, we're all on common ground. Let's have a conversation. So like I said, I did it my way. These are the three things, really, that still drive me today. Being interested in being curious, just ask, and find a way to help and entertain others. So if any of you have been listening to my guest for a while, there's a podcast out there called Mixer G. I started listening to Andrew Warner years ago. And when I started my first, very, very first episode, I copied him exactly to a team. The way he did his introduction, the way he introduced his guests, the way he broke for like an ad slot. I think I was maybe just making an ad for myself because at the time I didn't have any sponsors, I didn't have any products. So I was just doing everything exactly the way he did it. Even the camera angle was exactly the same way. And I found that, you know, over time it's flying to start by looking at what others are doing and be influenced by that, but finding your way, finding your voice is what I intended to do a year away. I'm interested in curious. I'm always the dumbest person in the room. I don't know a lot of things. So I ask questions. And that's why I have conversations with people. I'm generally interested and I'm generally curious on how people do things. Just ask me, cover that. Just ask me what you want me on the show. A lot of people want to help themselves, get the word out for whatever their product or service is. So it's generally a great fit. Finding a way to help and entertain others is something that I found to be my sticking point with doing podcasting. We'll talk about this in a little bit. Like, you measure the success of a podcast, is a podcast successful, that kind of thing. It's really just to find the feedback I get on Twitter in person. People send me notes and they say they love the podcast. They love what they've learned and ask it. Like, that's where it ends for me. That's all I need to keep doing what I do. But at some point you want to try to entertain people just a little bit. Think about what podcasts you listen to. After a while it's just how-to content or if it's just developers speak, that kind of thing. It can get probably pretty boring. So you want to try to at least entertain people. And that's just the model that I've gone with for quite some time. Thinking outside of the audio client. So these are things that I start to think about when I'm creating an episode is is this going to be the same thing over and over again? Am I asking the same questions? When I think about my own story arc of creating a podcast, I went from copying Andrew Warner, Mixergy, and there was a guy, Andre was on fire, Jonathan. Can't remember his last name right now. But I started copying his lightning round set of questions and I noticed that a lot of the hot casters were doing that. Then I started thinking, well what else can I do besides pulling in these, being influenced by these other entertaining shows? And at one point I created the Matterport Startup Challenge. So it was like sharp tank for WordPress. It was just having a round table of people who were watching their businesses with a guest panel of judges. There were no winnings. There was no money earned, but it was great education and a great feedback for the entrepreneurs.  And I think that that's inherently why I am drawn to doing podcasts because it's incredible. It doesn't always have to be the same way. You get to own that experience. You get to own that connection with somebody. You're having a conversation. You're having a conversation your way and hopefully you're connecting with the audience. You own content on WordPress and that's sort of the whole connection here for me. Getting guests, asking for reviews, keeping the conversation moving. These are all things that are in play while your show is live, while you're talking to your current guest, or you're doing a live stream, or you're doing a round table. You're always looking for that next guest by asking the people you're talking to that are there or pulling your audience and saying, hey, who do you want to see on the show? Who can you recommend? That used to be one of the staple questions of my early days of doing a podcast as to who should recommend to the other show. Asking for reviews, everybody, here's how many people actually left reviews? Nobody. Oh boy. Reviews really keep us going.  But it definitely keeps us energized. We'll see a review come in and a positive comment which would be great. Keeping the conversation moving is another staple too when you're doing something with multiple people. I mean, people have tuned into a podcast or round table of experts. It's like seven people and it takes like a half an hour to get through everybody's introductions. Just keep the conversation moving, right? As the host, this is like probably number one or number two piece of advice I have for orchestrating or for being the person I think ahead of a podcast is make that super fast. You do the introductions for them. Tell them they've got 10 seconds. Always thinking about your audience. That's the way I approach it. Trying to think of it as a virus into this. Let's just get through the good stuff. Putting your audience first. This is stuff that is a no brainer but you can kind of get lost in just asking questions that only you're curious about. And that's fine. But eventually you want to start pulling your audience and asking them how do you want me to shape the show and getting people engaged with that kind of thing. What I used to do way back in the day, well, not way back in the day, but at one point I had somebody who was an avid visitor of the show and she wanted to be more of like a producer, right? She said, hey, I really love the show so much. Would you want to put me out there to interview guests for you? That was a great way to bring somebody in that I've wanted to listen to the show every day or every week that I published. But they were also out there asking curious questions that you wouldn't have thought of, right? So you kind of enhance your podcast by bringing on a producer and being more, you know, how many would like if you will. That's a great way to do it. So let's talk about just tying this stuff all to WordPress. If you're somebody who watches a YouTube channel, let's say, let's use that as an example, you can hear from a lot of YouTubers that it's getting harder and harder to make money on YouTube, right? The ad revenue is going away. There's an apocrys thing, and people aren't watching all the time. People aren't advertising much. There's a platform called Patreon if anybody's heard of that where you can kind of donate to people monthly recurring. For me, that's great. And it's great for a lot of creators who aren't technical or don't really run their own .com website or whatever they might have. WordPress gives you that flexibility, right?  You can use something like easy digital downloads to sell your own e-book or, you know, create a product that you want somebody to download. You can sell them consulting services. You can do this all within WordPress and you own that platform. If anybody who has followed me before I have strong feelings against platforms, some of them are good, some of them are really bad. You see this with, you know, things like Facebook where they shift their business model and you have to shift the way that you connect with an audience. I like to bring this all back to WordPress because I can own this platform. This is my content, my data and my users that come to the site and I want to be able to monetize it in my way and control the experience in my way. And that's why I'm the point of doing podcasting with the WordPress website. It's this whole, like, art versus livelihood versus platform dilemma that I see a lot of people do is going through. So there's a lot of artists on YouTube that create awesome, engaging videos and then they have a really hard time monetizing it because they're on the YouTube platform and they just don't know how to cook into this WordPress thing and own the traffic. And I think you can make strides that way. Is anybody thinking about monetizing creating their own product, creating a membership site one of two people, three? It's an awesome way to do it. I think it's the smartest way to do it versus giving it all to the platform. I'm going to go into some quick tips. That was more sort of broad strokes. And now we're going to go into some tips and then hopefully enough time for answering some questions and even showing you some backend stuff of what I have set up on a couple of websites. How many people read transcripts on podcasts? Awesome. Show notes and stuff like that. Rev.com. Temi.com. I think that's how you pronounce it. Temi.com. These two websites are super fast, super affordable for doing transcripts. Folks that monetize their shows, people that run ads or have sponsors, you're more likely to see transcripts and show notes being done more consistently because it does cost money. I think if it's like a 45 to 60 minute show, both of these top websites here might run through about $20, $25 to get a transcript made, roughly, to get a little bit of cost star. So there's some hard costs there.  Not counting everything else that you might do. You can hire somebody. Hiring somebody can come from your eye but you can hire somebody from your audience to do show notes for you. This is something that I've done in the past where people have just come to me and said, hey, again, super fanless is the show a lot. You want somebody to write show notes for you because I like doing it. It's another great way to do it. You can get third party service to do stuff like this. I think it's a podcast motor for a little bit on the higher side of expense, but they'll do all of this stuff for you. They'll do the transcripts with the show notes. And you can go in and wait a minute. But roughly what I found is if you're trying to do transcripts and show notes, you're probably looking at 50 to 75 dollars per episode. It's just for those costs, right? Never mind some of the other stuff that we'll talk about here. So while I think it's great for accessibility and everybody should get these up on their sites, it's not feasible for some people. A possible limit of money. Production, intros, and making it sound good. I'm a fan of Adobe Audition. I've locked in to the CC 30 bucks a month thing, so I don't really have a choice. I'll use what I have. But Adobe Audition does a great job. There's a pretty big learning curve. Again, it's stuff that I'm still working with years later. But it can really make your podcast sound a lot better by cleaning up background noise and adjusting the types of tones in the voice. Especially when you're interviewing somebody over Skype or Zoom, that kind of thing. But for most of us, GarageBand also works just as fine. So it's not going to have some of the scientific things that Adobe Audition has. If you're not on Mac, Audacity, which also runs on Mac. But if you're on Windows, Audacity is another free audio editor. Again, a lot of the stuff is going to come with some learning curve stuff, but it's easy to chop, edit, and cut things out of your podcast with this. MusicRadioCreative is a website. I should have put MusicRadioCreative.com. This is a site where you can get voiceovers from people from all over the world, male and female, different tones. They can lay it on top of music if you want. So if you're looking for something that's a little bit more professional for your intro or outro for your podcast, MusicRadioCreative is a great source for that. Don't throw anything at me, Fiverr.com. Sometimes for voiceovers, you can do good. You can use Fiverr for really anything else, but for voiceover people to do intros. I've had some success there, but it certainly wouldn't have to be a website. Music from Bakers. This is a gentleman that I interviewed. I think he's outside of San Francisco. Musicfrombakers.com, he just makes audio tracks. Every week, he releases a free one, and I think it might be $100 a year for access to all of his music. So if you're looking for intro music, outro music, and you do some other creative things within your podcast, it's a great source of music. And he's a poor man fan. He uses easy digital networks. That's how I got him. So he's supporting the WordPress cause. Seasons, story arc, and creativity. Seasons really believe in pressure, right? I know we get it all up in arms when we're late. Game of Thrones, I'm gonna come back for another two years. But it takes time to create this stuff. We always want these episodes thrown at us super fast. It's not so different in the podcasting world where when you're doing it over and over and over again, there's no real break. There's no real break to introduce a new storyline or to pivot and to cover new topics. I'm going on my eighth season, and I haven't published an episode probably since the start of Summertime. I took this summer off, going into the fall, start releasing new episodes. But it allows me to set the tone of a new season. It just allows me to adjust a little bit. There are people who just pound away every week. It's very news-topical stuff for where they're at in their business. It's great if you want to pursue that route. But for me, I'd like to have some time of the beginning story arc. Season 8 would be all about some of the changes in the WordPress business market space. It's a great way to progress. It's a great way to reset and find others to host gap seasons for you. Again, going back to the audience, once you start to produce a podcast and get it out there, folks want to help you out. What I've often done is when I take a break personally from podcasting, I bring on other people from the community to host little gap seasons. I bring on people with voices that people don't necessarily hear from all the time or people that have strong opinions about WordPress and the WordPress space, and I let them host it. That's always fun. Sometimes I have to go post a show. Plugins and services. Again, you'll be able to get these slides when I'm done and another resource in here that has a lot of the stuff in greater detail. Seriously simple podcasting plugin. Let me take a step back. For me, there's only really two options to go with plugins. It's either seriously simple podcasting or PowerPress.  It's so easy. I'll show you how to set it up on one of the other sites. CastOS is their hosted solution if you want to host clients with that. They get some other briefings and they're like statistics and listener account and that kind of thing. PowerPress is probably just the big leads of podcasting plugins. It's a lot more technical to set up. Seriously difficult podcast plugin? It's a lot more difficult but it's got all the bells and whistles in there and you're very, very concerned with metadata SEO rating, connecting to every possible podcasting outlet. PowerPress is the way to go and they're a blueberry network. There is no e-mail name, by the way, it's not a typo. The blueberry network is where you can go to host their files and they have great support. I originally had hosted my files on Amazon S3 using PowerPress plugin and then the cost was just two great on Amazon S3 where I was able to pay 50 bucks a month at the blueberry network and save a boatload of money. And then SoundCloud. SoundCloud is just another place to put audio files and this is a great way to sort of publish into a greater footprint and I also publish over there as well. People can subscribe to SoundCloud and you get a bunch of cool stats there as well. I know I don't really like platforms but Angular FM is one of these cool podcasting platforms. You can host and start a podcast for free but you are a platform and I don't know what happens if they ever give it and change their model and free goes away. But it's a great way to put up a smaller clips of your of your podcast. We'll put some bonus material over there because they might have some other monetization features. Does anybody use Angular FM? Nobody. It's not even going. But for those of you who are interested I'm just giving you a microphone to choose because I know some of you are out there thanking that. You can start super affordable.  I'm sorry about that but the Audio Technica ATR 2100 in USB. 64 bucks plugs right into your laptop. Sounds pretty darn good and if you ever upgrade to like a mixer and you're going to have a whole bunch of people in a room doing a podcast they can use XLR cables. The one that you can't see because of my logo is the blue microphone from the Yeti microphone. A little bit more expensive. Sounds really good. Plugs into USB for any of you that are about an hour south of here. I run a podcast called We Are You Podcast you can get at southcoast.fm but the example shown here is I've been running the Mavicorp for so long I said I want to do something more local I want to do something that highlights entrepreneurship in the south coast and one of the things I do is always sort of just a pain point with the Mavicorp is having consistent branding across mobile devices where most people are listening to regain the show notes and clicking on the episode on my website and having consistent branding and before I launched this I just met up with one of the local graphic designers now in the south coast area and she created me a whole bunch of assets that I can use my Facebook pages my YouTube pages more importantly nice big and bold on the iPhone so when you're searching for it in iTunes you can find it and I would definitely recommend if you're getting really serious about doing this that branding is very important I know it's been said a lot in a lot of other areas but get some assets made for all of the different podcast places that you would be the major ones but think about other areas like YouTube SoundCloud and other places that you might get I wrote this book with a friend of mine about a year and a half ago it's thepodcastbook.com it has way more information technically on how to produce a podcast technical recommendations on microphones different levels of audio testing things that we did it's thepodcastbook.com you can get 100% free it's not a gimmick, not a lead, it's anything else it has all the more technical details in here if you go to thepodcastbook.com and use coupon code WCBoston2018 you can download that puppy for free Matt McGillis on Twitter, Matt report pageley.com, great hosting company that I work for and if you want these slides it's maricord.com slash slides you can download these slides I attempted it it's perfect, I'm just going to hit escape right here I just want to show you how super light weight this WordPress website is an idea of it, so this is the We Are Here podcast super light weight theme, I'm only publishing podcast episodes up here so I know I'm not going to be doing anything crazy I won't do any membership stuff so it doesn't look like the Dumps for Fire then it's the back end at patentport.com so it's just all about branding the podcast getting the featured images up here and this is one of the things this is why I think it's so important to try to set your branding emotion early on because the Matterport is like I never did this, I never sat down for even branding and had a template writing role and I was always like record a podcast spend a couple hours talking to somebody spend an hour or so editing it then you write the show notes yourself let's say and you're just like man this is tough, this is a lot of work and then the last thing you want to do is get a featured image out and then put text on it and try to make it look good so setting your branding emotion early, those examples that I showed you in that last slide just go up there real quick I'm able to just easily go in and take somebody's image, grab it from them throw it in here and it looks pretty good and I just ended the episode the back end for this website is 8 plugins so kids and their friends easy forms for MailChimp just to connect people up to sign up for the newsletter so they go to slash subscribe just super easy because most people are going to be on their phones, drop in your email and then click on the links to access the different publishing outlets Jetpack, Jesse just talked about that I primarily use this for stats because I don't even have Google Analytics look up to this it's just overkill for what I need it's a small, very focused podcast so if I can just see who's visiting through Jetpack's stats it makes it easy for me MailGun is just because forms get delivered to me Ninja Form is for a contact form Ceprod, Viral, Giveaway Pro this is really cool I forgot all about this and it's seriously simple podcasting for the podcast tool and what I do is I actually publish it on CastOS which is their hosted platform and I just grab a little embed code from the CastOS website and just drop in the player right to the body of the content and I just write a quick little snippet about what this is and people can listen to it right here one of the things I did when I watched this again right before the summertime is each store owner because I'm highlighting the small owner of businesses, most of them are store owners or service-based businesses I use this tool called Viral Giveaway Pro by Ceprod and I just create new giveaways so this is a great way to I think they'll be able to see it so it's not going to see the format revealed but basically what I'm able to do is people are able to go in and put their email in and share with friends to spread the word and win a chance to get a gift card from whatever entrepreneur I might be interviewing in that episode so that's a cool little way to when I just started launching to have more traffic come to the site, people who live in interested and I don't giveaways I usually get and just leads that aren't good, they're just there for the giveaway but I felt like in a local market people know these entrepreneurs they're generally interested to learn about them I felt like it was a good fit with good success rate and I've grown the email list probably up to 200 people so far it's only been about 4 or 5 episodes that's pretty good for a South Coast area so I'll leave it up to questions yeah they make it seriously simple I don't know if yeah as long as the cars can get as long as it's subscribing to the RSSP or can't subscribe to an RSSP then it should be able to yeah so this is their proposed version is it just the first 5 episodes that I put out so this does all the heavy work for you yeah so it's this main RSSP right here and that's what you drop into either I and soon as Google play or another service that might syndicate your episodes but again this is castOS it's very lightweight you upload your cover image put your names and stuff in there and you're off to the races if you were one of the same sort of thing what else do you have on having to pay for that production because I think you mentioned 75 dollars episode or something for yourself radio stations can do that some are extra broadcast others are more about a close circuiting there's some other variation which I'm sure you'd much prefer yeah it's a great question maybe how to monetize your podcast and when do you do it should you do it that kind of thing if I were to go back up to something like this from my experience I'm not a high production podcast I'm not sending it out to get one through a real audio editor so often I consult with people and I consult with a local state rep in my area and I say we should really do a podcast for the topics that you can talk about do something like that with your sound effects it's about a million dollars do not do stuff like this this is not easy work you really have to ask yourself in the early days I never did transcripts I never did show notes it was just the sweat equity of doing it myself you really just have to find out do you want to be paid for it the time you put in you need to do transcripts I think at some point you get big enough and you can start asking for sponsorship money I have a lot of thoughts about that I used to sponsor the narrowcore podcast I don't want to say it was easy to get money but because it's such a niche market and I built up enough of a reputation over the years I was able to turn to people like Patreon where I work now Liquid Web and other folks that had iTunes easy digital downloads I was able to ask them for money and to sponsor a show I think if you were looking to start a WordPress podcast now there's a lot out there and I think roughly people are charging maybe about $100 to $300 an episode for an ad spot depends on who that person is and what they're going after I don't think the same dollars translate to if you turn to like I don't know if you'll let say hey I get $10,000 $300 a month not even talk to you I think it's smart because like I mentioned earlier it does become a lot of work and if you're a solo person out there you're a freelancer, running a small agency you have so much other stuff going on that you eventually hit a wall if you're doing it at your one person shop doing it all yourself, you're like I gotta go out and sell this stuff and if you can get somebody to do show the woman that does it for me it's $45 an episode it's a no-brainer for me because I would sit there for like two hours staring at the screen like I remember what this conversation was again I can't even spell words so I would rather just give it to somebody else and do but being able to get to a point where you're big enough to hire somebody is definitely a longer strike, took me about two or three years to really start to consider spending a couple hundred bucks on producing this stuff I hope that sort of answers your question yeah, I've never used the local radio station to do that to do anything yeah yeah, I mean if they provide I've never explored that option but if they provide some kind of like production and editing or stuff like this that's pretty cool I have somebody else speak for me actually because I hate my own voice so the question is what do you do by voice how long should an episode be I'm done so it totally depends on where your podcast is I launched a podcast that was just like this others do three hours I do hate my own voice but I just roll with it if anybody wants to talk after I'm happy to


online privacy. Just a few years ago no one seemed to care, but today Big Tech has us all under surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. This is especially true of voice assistance. Five years ago they were a novel feature on your mobile phone. Today they are in our homes observing everything, what we cook in our kitchens, what we watch on our TVs, and even how we sleep in our bedrooms.  At Mycroft we've spent the last five years working with a community of tens of thousands of developers to create a voice assistant that is capable, customizable, and private. In addition to our smart speaker, developers have integrated Mycroft into vehicles, toys, robots, desktops, televisions, and nearly anything else you can imagine. With regular releases, steady improvement and a commitment to community, Mycroft has cemented its position as the open and private alternative to offerings from Big Tech, and Mycroft's market is growing. Mycroft is perfectly positioned to serve the 20% of the market that wants a smart speaker but also wants privacy. We've seen strong demand from businesses who want to deploy voice technology but don't want to give Big Tech information about their customers. Finally, there is a growing community of people who are turning off, tuning out, and dropping Big Tech platforms. They want the convenience of modern technology, but without the surveillance. I'm Joshua Montgomery, one of the founders of Mycroft AI, and I'm proud to be part of a team led by CEO Michael Lewis. Michael is a highly experienced entrepreneur who led stellar semiconductor and cryptic studios to return more than $200 million for investors. Our team is composed of industry-leading thinkers in the field of voice technology and design working to bring our state-of-the-art voice assistant to tens of thousands of customers all over the world. Mycroft is serving the fastest growing market in the technology sector. Driven by global marketing campaigns for voice assistants built by Big Tech, the voice market has exploded over the last five years, creating a huge opportunity for the acknowledged open-source leader, Mycroft. Our company has risen to the challenge. Mycroft was started through a successful Kickstarter, joined tech stars in 2016 and went on to win Tech Week National. We accepted a slot in 500 startups and took an investment from Jaguar Land Rover. We delivered our first Kickstarter and ran a second highly successful crowdfunding campaign. We were among the first companies in the United States to oversubscribe a regulation CF crowdfunding campaign with more than 1,300 investors in 2019. Our investors include Tech Nexus Venture Partners, Kika Capital, T2M Capital, Social Starts, MTC, A-Semetry Ventures, the Antspar Foundation, and hundreds of angel investors from all over the world. At Mycroft, we believe that the community of more than 60,000 developers is the key to our success, and that is why we are making our fundraising open to you, where you'll be a good company. We've got marquee angel investors like Albert Wenger and Rob Ness on board, and our CEO Michael Lewis is making a major investment on the same terms as Start Engine Backers. In fact, before we even launch this campaign, we have more than 1.4 million in investment security. If you believe that voice is the future and that privacy is important, invest in Mycroft.


In this presentation, we will take a look at new employee tax forms and the concept of a contractor versus an employee relationship. Whenever we have a new employee, the tax form typically that needs to be filled out by that employee will be a W4. The W4 form looks like a straightforward form. It is a straightforward form, but it is a bit more complex and it's very important when recording the information for the employee to get the proper withholding. It's also a form that the payroll department within a company can't really give as much guidance with as a lot of employees would hope because the payroll department can't typically give tax advice. So even though the employer in other words is required to withhold the employee taxes for federal income taxes, they're not able to give the kind of advice that would be considered tax advice because the reporting of the income taxes in terms of the 1040 is really the responsibility of the employee. So in other words, the reporting of the W4 is going to deal with exemption amounts and how much is going to be withheld from an employee paychecks for federal income tax, their federal income tax. And then the employee, that means it's going to be related to the tax filing at the end of the year by the employee using the form 1040. So the W4, the withholdings, and your reporting of the 1040, our employees reporting of the 1040 at the end of the year are going to have a relationship to each other. We also have some other important data from the W4. So whenever considering the W4 when entering data into our payroll system, the W4 is often the form that we're going to use if we're going to enter data into our database system about a new employee, we can typically get a lot of that information from the W4. Now the W4 is a IRS form, it's a federal form, you're going to get it, you could find this copy to get a current IRS W4 form from irs.gov. You type in W4, you can find a current copy of W4 form as well as instructions for the W4 form and see how it all fits together and how it's going to be worked out. Note, I also didn't include the worksheet that it will typically be here that will help with the calculation for how many exemptions we have. So I'll talk about that more in a bit. This is just going to be the reporting form. So the W4, when we're entering data for a new employee, this of course has the first name and middle initial, the last name, it's going to have the social security number, which we're going to need to put into our database system, it's going to have the full address, which we're going to need to put into our system, it's going to have the marital status. And again, you might be thinking, well, why do I have a marital status? And that is going to feed into the calculation for the federal income taxes. You'll note that when you file your form 1040, which again is related to this form, that you have to say whether you're married or single or head of household or widowed. And the reason for that, of course, is that there's different tax rates. And so when we do the withholdings, because of that complication, we have to know the marital status. So it could be single, married, or married, but without a higher single rate. And so the reason for this third option is the fact that when we combine incomes together, it can confuse things, of course. So if we only had one employee making income, then that's usually what the tax system was first designed to do, meaning most houses used to be single income houses. And therefore, if you worked for a company, and you were the only wage earner for that company, then we could pretty accurately calculate your withholdings based on whether you're single or married. And that'd be it. But when you have multiple different types of wages that are going into the home, as well as different sources of income, then that really complicates the matter in terms of what the withholdings should be. So long story short, if we select the married but with a higher single rate, we're basically saying, yeah, we're married, but we want you to withhold at the higher single rate. Because if we were single, we would be paying a higher tax rate than if married because we typically have double income if married and therefore lower rates. Why would we do that? Because the higher the withholdings we have, the lower, you know, the more likely we'll get a refund at the end of the year or the more payment we'll be making towards the 1040. And if we have someone else that is working within the household, another spouse working within the household, then we may have higher rates that we need to be calculating at because our income combined will be at a higher rate. So and then and then, of course, we have if your last name differs, then we have the total number of allowances that we're claiming. Now this has a kind of a loose relationship to the number of exemptions you're recording on the on the 1040, meaning if we're single, we have at least ourselves as an exemption. If we are married, we have ourselves and our spouse as an exemption for married filing joint. If we are having dependents, children, for example, types of dependents, then we would have ourselves or our spouse and our child or children as exemptions. Now the allowances are not exactly the same as exemptions. Those are going to be part of the calculation. And this would be the information if we looked at the at the more comprehensive types of calculation for the W for to try to come up with this this number number five will take into consideration these exemptions in this calculation. But just note there's a relationship there. Why are we doing this? Why do we need this? Because we're trying to figure out based on the complex individual tax system, what the withholdings will be so that usually we want the withholdings to just barely be more than what the tax obligation would be, meaning, you know, the tax system is designed to hopefully try to make the employer take from the employee a little bit more than they're going to actually owe for income taxes, which they will then realize once they do their income taxes with 1040 at the end of the year. And therefore, they're going to get a refund. Why would it be set up that way? Because then the then the government is most likely to get paid. The government is most likely to get paid by the employer doing the calculation withholding the proper amount withholding a little bit more than is actually going to be owed. And therefore, at the end of the time period, the IRS will give the difference back, they'd rather give the difference back than have the employee owing money at the end of the year knowing that it's much harder to collect for the IRS. If the if the individual owes money at the end of the year and the IRS would also have the money sooner rather than later. So for those couple reasons that the system is designed for that format. So they're they're related. And this is going to be the line that will help us to get those exemptions. Now, we also have this this line additional amount, if any, you want withheld from the paycheck. Why would you want an additional withheld from the paycheck? That's going to be less income or less paycheck. And the reason is that that's basically saying, hey, you know, if we do a tax estimate with our tax professional, we might just come up with a number and say, I want to add more. Why? Because possibly we have other income sources, and that's going to push us into a higher tax bracket. And therefore, our withholdings from this W for will not be sufficient to pay for our taxes. Or we have a spouse, which would be part of our other income who has substantial income, and therefore pushing us into a higher tax bracket. And therefore the withholdings from this calculation will not be sufficient. We would need to increase it. And then we have a seven I claim exemption from withholding for 2008. And I certify that I meet both the following conditions. So we could try to say, you know what, I don't I don't need withholding. You don't need to withhold from me. And you have to basically tell the employer, the employer having the responsibility to withhold needs to needs to have a reason not to withhold. And that would be last year, I had a I had a right to a refund for all federal income taxes withheld because I had no tax liability.  So the IRS is going to say, well, if that's a condition, your taxes are probably pretty low. And maybe you don't have a responsibility to pay if you're under a certain threshold, then you probably won't have any taxes because you won't be over the the standard deduction. And if you weren't over last year, then maybe you won't be this year. So and the other this year, I expect a refund for all federal income taxes withheld because I expect to have no tax liability. So again, if you're if your taxes are if your income is under a certain level under, like under the standard deduction, then you're not going to have any taxes typically. And you can basically claim that you can say, okay, I don't have any withholding under that specific scenario. And then of course, we need the first date of employment and the employer identification number as we need on every type of payroll tax form, and the employer name and address. So then we have this concept between the employee and a contractor. And this is a huge kind of concept because there's pros and cons to having a contractor relationship to an employee employer relationship. So if we if we're trying to find work, we need someone to do something for us, and we're trying to hire out someone to do someone for us, our choices are to hire them as an employee, or hire them as a contractor. Now at one point in time, this relationship might not might have been more kind of foggy than it is now, right, at least from a legal standpoint, from reporting standpoint, we want to have a very definite line. Prior to this, we might have hired someone and said, hey, we're going to pay you so much at the end of the week. And it is what it is.  But now that of course, as an employee, the employer, the company, the employer has responsibilities to do things such as withhold and other responsibilities in terms of legal responsibilities over and for their employees, more responsibilities than they would have over, say, a contractor, a contractor who basically is running their own business. So if someone's a contractor, you're just paying them whatever they invoice you in essence. Whereas if they're an employee, then you have more legal responsibility, you have to withhold, you got to report all the reporting. So of course, one of the disadvantages when making this determination as to whether an employee is an employee or a contractor, we often have businesses that might want to lean towards contractors sometimes, because that would mean that they're not responsible for many of the legal responsibilities, such as reporting, withholding, and a lot of the other type of requirements, paying payroll taxes and some of that stuff that would be so it could cost. Now, the advantages of being an employee is, of course, you have a bit more control over the behavior of the employee, and you're able to take care of them more. In some cases, you're able to provide them with benefits, something like 401k plan, which could entice better people to work there. So those are going to be kind of like the pros and cons, some pros and cons between a contractor and an employee. Now, from an IRS standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, they're going to have their own kind of critiques of whether you're a contractor or not. One more point before we go into those. If you're an employee, obviously, you get your income reported as a W2 income telling the IRS that you made money. As a contractor, you get your income reported typically as a 1099 if certain conditions are met, meaning you're not like the contractor isn't an employee. I mean, the contractor isn't a company and typically earns over a certain dollar amount, which is fairly low, like five to $600 or so dollars, then you have to 1099. And remember what a 1099 is? To the contractor, it's similar to a W2. You're basically telling the contractor, look, I paid you this amount this year, and I'm reporting it to the IRS. And therefore, you really ought to report it in some way on your Form 1040. If you don't, you'll probably be notified by the IRS. Now, the problem with a 1099, again, is there's no withholdings. The employer is not responsible for withholdings. And also, when you're a contractor, you may have job-related expenses because you're on business that are not going to be included on the 1099. They're going to be something you have to deduct on the 1040 in some way on the Schedule C.  Now, from the IRS standpoint, they're kind of weary of an employer reporting someone as a contractor rather than an employee. I mean, from a regulatory standpoint, you may rather have someone reported as an employee from an IRS standpoint, because then you can hold the bigger, larger employer, the bigger company most likely, responsible for collecting taxes from the contractor. So rather than having the smaller contractor, the smaller business, probably the sole proprietor, responsible for reporting the income and paying their own taxes. They probably rather have the larger company that they can put more restrictions on to be required to withhold the taxes. Therefore, they probably are going to lean towards the idea that if someone's an employee, we want to make sure they're reported as an employee. So what does it mean to be an employee? There's a bunch of different tests that you can have, but the more control the employer has over the employee's work, the behavioral control, financial control, and the relationship between the party, if there's more control on the employer, then you would typically say, hey, that's more of a wage relationship. Meaning if you had someone like a secretary that was or an office worker that was going in every day and you told this is what you need to do, I need, I need this done, I need that done. It's nine to five job. You need to be here from nine to five and whatnot. Then that's a pretty high level of control. It would be pretty difficult to say if someone's working a nine to five job in a specific defined location and their jobs are being dictated on a daily basis, then that's pretty much an employee. It'd be pretty difficult to argue that someone's a contractor. If, on the other hand, we had someone that needed to do a specific job like paint the house or something like that or paint the office, then that would be more likely that we'd say, hey, this is the job we need done. You have your own tool and it would be the contractor's responsibility to bring their own tools, decide how to get the job done, work out the dates that will get the job done, and the goal there being the end goal, getting the place painted. Now, those are two pretty stark differences between a contractor and an employee and there's a lot of gray area as to when someone is a contractor and an employee in different industries. They could be industry specific. So there could be a lot of areas where there's debate as to whether we should be a contractor or an employee and it's important to make sure to go over those rules. So we don't get in trouble on that. We don't want the IRS to come back and say that someone is reported as a contractor and they should have been an employee and then say that we need to report Social Security Medicare. So it's really an important kind of distinction, the distinction between whether someone is an employee or a contractor. The employee has much more responsibility for reporting by the employer. The contractor still some responsibility to report the income given, given in certain conditions, but less responsibility in terms of many other types of regulations, including the concept of withholding the taxes for the contractor. They're very productive. Payroll paid off. Goodbye.