What is going on everybody? Let me know that you can hear me in that chat section if you would, just give me a hello. Yes, I can hear you, sit below those lines. It would be greatly appreciated. Of course, I do these lives every day to help you guys out, to help you start running grow online businesses. Share with me some of your successes, share with me some of your problems, share with me your questions, put it all in that chat section. If you aren't listening live, you can put it in the comments section later on. There'll be a spot down there if you aren't listening live and you can put your comments in there and I'll get back to you there too, don't worry about that. You know, and it doesn't matter if this is a week old or a month old or whatever it is, I go back and I look at my other videos and I try to jump in there and answer questions for you guys. So make sure you do that really important. Today I'm gonna talk about getting comfortable on camera and if you ever wanted to shoot a video, I'm gonna give you some steps you can go through that'll really help you out. And it's really not bad, it's not horrible. You know, it's nothing into the world. I think a lot of people think, oh my gosh, I'm gonna do a video and it's gonna be terrible. Well, so what if it is? I mean, it's still not the end of the world. You know, I have terrible videos, it's just the way it is, you know? We do stuff all the time in life and it doesn't come out right. Let's see here, James is loud and clear. Nobody else said anything. So I guess James can be the only one that can hear me. No, come on guys, jump in that chat section.  It doesn't matter what age you are, it doesn't matter if you're a kid, it doesn't matter if you're in your 80s, 90s, it doesn't matter. And everything in between, somebody's gonna wanna hear you. You know, it used to be like you were in your town and there was a population of, let's say, 500,000 people, okay, we'll pick a number out and you had to find enough people in your town that were gonna like what you had or what you had to sell. But it ain't like that anymore. Maybe there weren't enough people to support your business. But it's not like that anymore. Online, what are, there's seven billion people in the world, I think that's right, I don't know. You can definitely find an audience. And an audience of a thousand people is really what you need to make a living if you think about it. If you get a thousand people and they're paying you $10 a month, that's $10,000 a month.  So, you know, you can do this stuff online, guys. Take advantage of this. Let's see here, Mike Roberts says sounds good, good, good. Glad you can hear me. So what I'd like to do, and like I say, in the meantime, put your questions in there. Camera, what's going on, good to see you here. And don't forget to subscribe, guys. If you haven't subscribed, please do so right now. Before you forget, click that subscribe button there. Turn on your notifications. There's a bell right next to that subscribe button. You got to ring that bell, turn on all notifications so that you're notified when I do go live like this so you don't miss it. In addition to that, every time I upload a video, it will notify you and say, hey, there's a new video. I'm doing a lot of content right now. I edited five videos yesterday and I got seven more to edit today. So I've got a lot of stuff going on, plus these lives I'm doing right now. So there's a lot of good stuff for you guys to grasp onto. And the reason I say it's good stuff is not because I'm going, oh my gosh, I'm so good. I do all these things. I'm just giving you the things I've done that works. Okay, so I'm not shared with you all by mistakes and I do have mistakes. I had a lot of them, I have them all the time. But if I can share with you all the things that work, then you can apply it and you can get good results too. It's really that simple. It honestly is. But you also have to participate and that means putting something in that chat section there, talking to me so that I can answer your questions and help you out. If you've got all the answers, well, I guess you don't need me. But I don't think anybody does. I don't have all the answers. I know I don't. Oh, my bill is kind of out of shot here, isn't it? Let me get that right. So we'll see here. Cameron says, sir, soon you will have 100,000 subscribers in six months. Well, I hope so, Cameron.  And most of the people that were charging you money then hadn't done anything worthwhile. So, you know, that is, that's kind of ridiculous. But they would do it. They would charge you money. Alldeen, what's going on? You showed up. Hey, everyone, hope you're all doing great. Cool, cool. Alldeen's here. So what I'm gonna do is I wanna go over and I wanna talk to you about the things that you can do to actually be comfortable on camera, okay? It's not that hard. It's not that difficult. Yes, you can do it. And you gotta understand, you know, really where your fear is coming from.  Okay, everybody is. It's not just you. It's not like you're different or anything like that. We're all scared. You know, we're worried about what people are gonna say about us or people are gonna like it. You know, it's really about that image. Public speaking anxiety, they say is one of the strongest fears there is.  You know, well, I guess when we were first in groups of people living in the woods, you know, if you offended the group of people, then, you know, they weren't gonna protect you.  And I guess we still kinda have that inside of us now, but it's not like that anymore, guys. You know, so what if somebody doesn't like you? I have plenty of people that don't like my stuff, but I have more people that do like it.  I just block them. It's really that simple. Now, there are some things you can do to be more successful online. Morad's in there. What's going on, Morad? Good to see you. There are some things you can do like, number one, know what you're gonna say. Be prepared. You know, you could write a list of stuff. If you wanna write a script, you could do that. You know, there are teleprompters that you can put it on your phone now where you could, it's an app. You can actually download it. And let me see if I can tell you what the one is that I have. It's pretty darn good. I think I paid like $19 for it. It's called Teleprompter, just called Teleprompter. Yeah, so you can find that in the app store. And then what I do is like, if I'm gonna use a script, I have all my scripts right there. See that? And I can just scroll through them all. And let me see here. There you go. There's one of the scripts right there. And I hit start and it just kinda scrolls along, right? As I'm doing something. So you can, if you wanna do a script, you can do it on your phone. But be prepared. Know what you're gonna say, okay? The next thing you can do, if you're really worried about being on camera, is rehearse it. You know, do it two or three times without recording it or without it being live. If you do this, that's gonna get you some confidence. And confidence really comes from knowing what you're gonna do and knowing what's gonna happen, okay? That's where your confidence is gonna come from.  I mean, that's kinda scary to do.  How often do we try? That's how often we try, okay? That's how often you try. But the next thing is lighting. Lighting is huge. Lighting is huge, guys. Right now, I've got double lights over my head. These long strip lights. I've got a big ring light over here. It's about this big around. I've got these box lights here. I got one here. I got one here and I got one here. So I got three of those. So one, two, three, four, five, six different lights. Now you say, well, JR, I don't have six lights. I can't do all that. Great, open your window behind you. Let the sunshine come in and film with you facing the window, okay? Don't have the window behind you. If you have the window behind you and it's called backlighting, you never want to be backlit. You want to be frontlit. So you always want to face your window, all right, with the light coming in on you and that's the angle you want to film at. I see a lot of people will stand in front of the window and go, well, I wanted some light, which then film themselves in front of the window. You can't do that. It just washes you out, okay?  So if that makes sense. If it makes sense, put it into that chat section there. When using a script, doesn't it look obvious that you're reading from a script? You know, not if you practice. Not if you practice. How do they know that you're reading from a script? Now, I have a teleprompter on my phone so I'm looking directly at the phone. Now I'll tell you what it looks fake is when somebody's talking to you like this and they're reading a script, right? Or if they're looking like this and they're reading a script. So some people will try to put their script or their computer and then put their camera above it. And believe me, that little look down when you're like, if I'm talking to you like this and reading something, yeah, then it looks fake. So if you're gonna use a teleprompter, make sure it's built into your phone that you're gonna be recording on or you actually have a teleprompter. Here's the truth. If it looks a little fake, so what? You know, the other thing is you're not gonna be perfect. I'm never, ever, ever, never, ever perfect. And I know it. I know I'm not perfect. No big deal. Show me somebody who is perfect. I can show you people that are better than me. I can show you people who are worse than me. But I don't know anybody that's perfect. I mean, everybody makes mistakes. And I can tell you, when you make little mistakes, it kinda humanizes you. They look at you and go, yeah, I can relate to that person. They're human. They make mistakes just like me. I like that person. I watch a lot of cooking videos on YouTube. I wanna start a cooking channel so hope you guys will join that. But I watch a lot of them on there and one thing I've noticed, and I watch Quantran, I watch Sam the Cooking Guy, I watch tons of them. Almost without exception, every single one of them in their video will burn themselves.  And I mean, they can't possibly burn themselves every time they do a video, but they do it on purpose or pretend to burn themselves every time or cut themselves or do something to show that they're vulnerable, that they too mess up. And I know Sam the Cooking Guy, and every single one of his videos, he makes a mistake. And he talked about it one time because in his very first video, he made tons of mistakes in a TV station and didn't wanna show his video and they wouldn't give him a spot because they said, no, you're making too many mistakes. We need somebody that's perfect and that's right on. So what he found was that people watched him, kind of liked it. They were like, yeah, he messed up. He spilled something. He dropped something. He burned himself. He overcooked something. People make mistakes, okay? So if you're worried about being perfect, don't worry about it.  And what I mean by that is don't have it like so far away can barely see you. Don't have it like right up in your face like this. I've seen people do that with a camera, like looking up their nose. Don't do that. You always want the camera. Like my camera here is a little slight angle down. You don't want the camera angle underneath your chin. Like if you put a laptop on the desk, and right now I've got like two things that stack it up and make it higher.  It just doesn't look good. I don't have the best chin anyhow. I don't have a perfect chin. Let's see what else we got in here. Let's see. When using a script, okay, I did that one. You present very well. Well, thank you, Mike. I appreciate it.  You know, I gotta clear my thread every now and in the morning, you know? And you know, like I haven't shaved today.  I will. I just, I don't have to. Isn't that cool? Isn't that cool that I can come to work and I go, yeah, I don't want to shave. I couldn't do that on my other job.  You can go back home. So, of course nowadays it's a little bit more lax. They'll let you do that stuff. But set up a good camera angle, okay? So don't have it like underneath your chin or something like that. Dress for success. So I don't, you know, these lives I don't always, you know, dress up much because it's just a live one. When I'm shooting a video for my channel I will put on a nice dress shirt. I don't wear ties. Just hate them. I've worn them for too many years.  You know, I'm talking about earning a living. I'm talking about making money online.  They're gonna go, well, you know, I don't know if he knows what he's talking about. But if I was doing a carpentry one, my dirty white t-shirt's fine and I don't have to fix my hair. You know, or a cooking one or something like that, you don't need to. But I see some people really get fixed up. There's this one lady, Claudia, something I can't remember her last name, but she does some cooking videos, not being her hair's done, nails, makeup, jewelry, everything. There's no way you address this way to cook so. But she looks nice on camera, so that's what she chooses to do. Next thing I wanna tell you is stage your background. Oftentimes, people will do videos and they forget what it looks like behind them. And I mean, some of these videos I watch it's a disaster behind them. This doesn't mean you can't do your video if you don't have a great background. It doesn't mean that at all. But I mean, try to tidy it up a little bit.  If you can tidy it up, it's gonna make the video just look a little bit better so you can do that. Next thing I'll tell you is keep some water on hand, okay? When I filmed videos, like I did Thursday, I did 12 on Monday. Hang on one second. Ah, you need to hydrate. Your throat will get so dry. You'll make so many mistakes. Still, my throat's a little bit dry today. But gotta have some water on hand. Next thing I'll tell you also is you wanna try to talk a little slower than you would normally speak. And I don't mean like this slow, I don't mean that.  Sometimes you get ahead of yourself. What's Paul saying here? I love that brick background you had. I still have it somewhere. It's over there in the closet. I have the brick background. I probably in our new house, since it's so nice, will probably just use the house for the background. I'm gonna have a built-in bookcase done so maybe I'll use something like that for the background. Not sure on that one yet. And if you're still a little apprehensive and you don't wanna get on camera, you can do screen share videos where you're actually, and you've seen me do that and I'm doing live with you guys where I'll just like show a webpage I'm going to and then I'll talk about it. I did that yesterday when we were looking up that, the metadata, the title and the description, all that stuff, I put that in there. And guys, also put questions about what I'm talking about here too. Put that in that chat section. Super important that you do that. That way, yeah, I got a message from my watch, these watches are irritating. That way I get some interaction on the video which is really important. And I can answer your questions, okay? I normally charge for that. I charge money for that, okay? Let's see here, what else? Try to have high energy and use hand gestures. I don't have to tell myself to use hand gestures. Okay, I can't even talk without my hands.   People talk with their hands, okay? People have expression, people have intonation. So don't try to do this perfect speech like this. You'll see a lot of political candidates do that where they just kind of sit all stiff. They have their hands positioned in a certain way.   So try to do that. Try to use your hands and express yourself a little bit. What else? And a lot of people will worry.  What do I do with my hands? Just do whatever they normally do. Whatever they normally do, that's what you do.  Don't worry about mistakes. They happen. And I just told you that there's certain YouTubers that intentionally make mistakes so that they make themselves more open to their audience. Their audience likes it more.  There we go. And also put in that comment section, have you done any videos? I wanna know those of you who've done some videos and put that in there and tell me what your experience was in doing videos. Other people would love to see that. You're gonna really help some people out.  So don't worry about mistakes, there's no big deal. Don't do a million takes. That's another thing I'll see people do. And it just exhausts them where they just go, I don't know, that wasn't right, I gotta do it over again. No, that wasn't right, I gotta do it over again. At some point, just give it up and post what you got, okay? Just post what you got. It's okay to do it over once. What I do when I'm filming is if I make a mistake in the middle, let's say I was supposed to say, add salt to the flour and instead I said, add saffold to flour and I messed up like that. Hey, I messed up the words. Well, then I would just stop for a second, give myself a break and say, add salt to flour. And these are for recorded ones now and that way I can just cut out the messed up one and I don't have to do the whole thing over again.  It's gonna be like I'm talking also and it jumps to the next one. You'll see jump cuts all through my videos. That's where I edit and stuff that I messed up. Okay, so that's all that is and you'll see it all through videos on YouTube. Everybody uses jump cuts. And matter of fact, I wouldn't use anything other than jump cut. I see people try to like fade into one thing or the other or spin the screen around. All those weird transitions, they just look odd. They just do it, it's just better to do a jump cut.  I don't really like doing this because I don't really care what my friends and family think about my videos. They don't know what I do. They don't understand that. So it doesn't really matter so much, okay? All right, let's see here. Edit your own videos. Learn to edit your own videos. Don't go, oh my gosh, I'm gonna get a video editor and I'm gonna have them do these perfect edits. Don't do that, just edit it yourself. You know, you have iMovie on Apple and you have, shoot, what is it called on Microsoft? Let's see here. Microsoft Video Editor, what's it called? I don't use it, that's why. Movie Maker, Movie Maker is what it is. So you've got Movie Maker for Microsoft. So either one of those are free. They're not gonna do as much as something like Camtasia. I use Camtasia, I love Camtasia. I also have Final Cut Pro for a backup which I use every now and then. And let's see here, what else do I got? Oh, Press Record. What do I mean by that? Just start making some stuff, man. Just start making it. Why not you? Why not you having a five or $10,000 income off your YouTube channel? Why not you? Why, what's the difference with you and anybody else?  Why not you? You know, I can show you young people. I can show you old people. I can show you people in between. Why not you? You gotta Press Record, you gotta do that. All right, so let me see, what do I got in here? Do you know I am fat? So what? So what, Cameron? There's a lot of fat people. So what, be whatever you want. You know, Paul Prudone was very obese and he was one of the greatest chefs of all time. He's passed away now. Nobody cares, no people don't care. They don't care. And if somebody picks on you, block them. Screw them. It doesn't matter, you are who you are. What is your average editing time per video? Wow, it depends on what I'm doing and understand for the videos that I post during the week, I don't do all the editing, okay? There's a lot of B-roll puttin' in there and there's a lot of zoom-ins and zoom-outs and words on the screen. I don't do that. But if I do do that, I'm very slow at it. It can take me a half hour to an hour for a minute worth of video. Yeah, so it's a 10 minute video. It could take me 10 hours if I were to do that. Five to 10 hours, which is a long time. So what I do is when I film a video, I'll take that video and I take out all the things I don't want in it and I don't do any more edits and then I send it to my video editor and then he edits it and puts it up. But understand, I've only had him for the past couple years. Prior to that, I did all my own edits and I would suggest you doing that because it's really hard to tell other people what you want if you haven't done it, if you don't have that experience and yeah, it takes some time. So what else are you gonna do with your time? Watch TV?  I think that's illegal, right?  Might as well do something worthwhile. Let's see, what else we got here? What is your average time? Love that brick background, I got that one. Practice makes perfect. I don't know, I ain't got to perfect yet, but I know what you're saying. The more you do it, the better you're gonna get. I know what Paul means. Should I invest in small case? What is small case? I don't know what that is. Maybe let me look here and see if I can hear what you're talking about. Guys, when you put a word to a program or something like that or whatever, tell me what it is. What is small case? I'm looking it up. I'm looking it up. I don't see where it is or what it is. I'm gonna say, maybe I didn't put everything in there. Small case. Is it good to invest in small case? Let's see. Oh, it's a set of diversified stocks. I didn't know about it. It really didn't. I buy all my stocks individually and I do it based on, not through financials, but what I think the stock's gonna do based on emotions. And then I look at if the company is stable. So, like in the beginning of COVID, I watched all the airlines tank. I mean, tank. And then I heard that they were gonna be bailed out by the government. And I'm like, well, if their stock goes way, way down and they're not gonna go out of business when this thing's over with, they'll probably at least go back up to where they were.  I did the same thing with cruise ships except I was a lot more conservative because there is a chance some of those could go out of business. I bought Tesla because I was in the car business. And I saw what the guy was doing and I was very impressed. And now my stock is worth, well, a whole lot more than I paid for it. A lot, a lot more. Went up hundreds of times. So I did very, very well on that. I do, or I did have a stock broker's license. So I do understand the market. I understand, you know, puts and calls and shorts and all that stuff. I don't do any of those. I pretty much just buy stock and hang on to it. So, you know, I bought like Sirius XM radio. I bought that because it was 24 cents at the time. And I think it's, what is it today? And I was in the car business and I noticed they were putting that into all the cars, the Sirius XM thing. So I bought that for that reason. And I thought, well, yeah, I sold it recently after Howard Stern signed his contract because I didn't go up enough. What is your network? You don't think I'm gonna tell you that, do you? You don't really think I'm gonna tell you that, do you? That's some funny stuff right there. I have more than I owe. How's that? I have more than I owe. That's a good whip, isn't it? I can tell you this though, guys. If you're thinking about starting a business online, when I was working for somebody else, I would have never had the amount of money I have now working for somebody else. It's not gonna happen. You're not gonna get rich working for somebody. If you're working a job right now, you're not gonna get rich.  That's it. They're not gonna make somebody rich. It's very rare to like be on the ground floor of Walmart or Microsoft. You'll be some of the founding people who get stocks and get rich. That's an extremely rare case and that's why it's in the news. For the most part, no matter what your job is, how good you do it, you're only gonna be paid X number of dollars. I remember when I was in the automotive industry and I managed the department and it had skyrocketed and they paid me based on percentages. And the owner called me in and said, we gotta cut your pay because you're not gonna make more than me. And he literally said that to me and I was like, wow, so no matter how good I do, you're gonna cut my pay down because I'm only supposed to make X number of dollars. So that was really eye-opening.  You're never gonna have a chance. It got me to thinkin' and it got me to quit that place. Do you do fundamental analysis or technical? I really, I do a little bit of both and I do a lot of gut feeling, a lot of gut feeling. Right now I can tell you some of the stocks I have on this portfolio, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, AMD, Micro, Processor, BigCommerce, Carnival Cruise Lines, Delta Airlines, Dexcom, Dexcom is a continuous glucose monitoring device. Let's see here, Ford, Facebook. I bought Facebook at $27 when it first came out. So I think today it's $264. FedEx, I bought during the pandemic because a friend of mine who's very wealthy lives down the street from Fred Smith. If you don't know who Fred Smith is, he's the guy that started FedEx. And he told him that their sales were skyrocketing because of COVID, a lot of the airlines weren't flying so they couldn't fly a cargo. So FedEx was getting a lot of packages. So I bought that stock and I've done very well on that one. Let's see, this one here is Hertz Renekar. I've not done well on that one. I'll tell you that. I bought JetBlue, Eli Lilly, Southwest Airlines, Mile, which is a car insurance type thing that charges you based on your driving habits. They put like a chip in your car. And I just recently bought that one. I bought Moderna, which you know about for the vaccines. Norwegian Cruise Lines. InVax, which is a medical device transmission thing. I bought Pfizer also because of the vaccine. Rural Caribbean, oops, Target. I just bought the other day. It hasn't done well for me yet. Tel Ray, Toll Brothers construction because that's another thing if you wanna invest in construction. If you're interested in any of this, they build homes, the largest home builder, single family home builder in the country. So that's Toll Brothers. I have Tesla, of course. I told you about that. Like United Airlines, VTRS. I'm trying to remember what the heck that is. I can't remember, but I'm making money on it. So that's good. And I bought Walmart and that's in this portfolio right here. And I won't tell you how much is there, but those are the ones that I'm into right now and they're doing pretty good. Overall, I mean, they're all green except for a few reds. Let's see here. Where are you from? Where am I from? That's a great question. Where am I from? Well, I was born in Norfolk, Virginia. I've lived in Cyprus, Nicosia. I've lived in Cuba and Western Germany. Went to school in Florida. Went to high school in Memphis, Tennessee. Went back to Virginia, went to college. Got a degree there. Then I moved out to California. In San Diego where I'm at now for about nine years. And then I went back to Virginia and lived there up until 2013 and came back to San Diego in 2013. And now we're moving to Austin, Texas in a few months. So that's where I'm from, if that makes any sense. No, you won't.  Yeah, Mike, this was when I was managing. You know, I was a general manager of a department there. And yeah, even then, do you use a length of time before you do a multi-part series? Yeah, yeah, I kind of do, Paul. If it's gonna be like a 20 minute video or longer, I split it into two. Generally, I only do a series of two videos. Like let's say I have the 14 steps to do something. I'll have like seven steps in the first one and then seven steps in the next one. Really important, if you're gonna do one of the series things videos, that you tell them in the very beginning, this part one of part two, you're gonna wanna watch part two after you're done with this. When you get done with it, yeah, at the end of part one, you say, hey, now what you wanna do is look below. There's a link below. It'll take you over to part two, go watch part two. In the beginning of part two, I say, hey, this is part two of two. If you haven't watched part one, go back and watch part one. Really important that you do that because that way you're gonna get more watch time. People are gonna watch all of it. So yeah, that's basically when I do it. When it gets to that 20 minute mark, and I can generally tell because I put notes that I'm gonna talk about and I can tell how many pages I have of notes and if it exceeds a certain amount, I know that I can make that a two-part video and I can do it that way. These notifications are irritating. Let's see here. Do you ever check with Motley Fool? I do not, James. I mean, they're fine and I'm sure they got some good stuff but I understand that they are sponsored, okay? So people pay him money and anytime somebody's paying somebody money, I just, I worry about their advice. I really do. I've been burned too many times and I used to listen to Howard Stern a lot and he would talk about products. Now great they were. And I tried a couple of them and they were great. He'd lied about it. So I don't like doing that. Southwest Airlines, great choice. Yeah, yeah, it's done good for me. It really has. I like that stock. Amy, anime, anime love. How do you keep an eye on every stock you buy and not forget, have you forgotten any? Oh, no, I use an app. I use an app. I use, what is it? Thinkorswim. And I don't want to show you my stocks but I just look at them here on Thinkorswim and then what I do is let's say there's some stocks that I feel like at a certain point and I want to sell them. On Thinkorswim I can put an alert bell next to it. So if it is equal to or greater than that amount it sends me an alert and lets me know, hey, that stock, you may want to sell this stock.  I did that with all the airlines. What I did is let's say they were at $10 and they fell down to $2 but their average was 10. So I would put an alert in at 10 because when they get back to where they were I'm getting out. I don't think airlines historically are a great investment but they were because of COVID. So I normally would never have bought an airline but I knew they all went down and they were gonna come back up. They have to because they were bailed out and they're gonna go back to where they were. So those were good investments. So that's why I did that. Let's see, that's how I stay on top of it. Enemy love. Which degree you got? I do have a degree in finance, corporate finance, investing. But I don't think that really has any play in anything.  All that means is I went to some classes and I memorized some stuff. They told me to memorize and then I took a test on what I could remember. I mean that's what a degree is. I don't know, it didn't teach me much about business. I had one teacher, a professor and that one professor taught me a lot. He was really good in business. He would build apartment complexes and what he would do as students, he would send us out with these surveys to go around and knock on doors at apartment complexes and ask people questions about what they want, what they like, what they didn't like and then he would take all that data and he would actually go out and build apartment complexes and he actually hired me to write some papers. He put his name on it but that's okay. I mean he hired me to write some financial papers when I was in college. And it's funny because I got out of college and I ended up in the back of the car business and I was at a Toyota dealership and he came in one day. His name was Bernie Groblowski, smartest guy. I mean smartest guy in business, funny, nice.  So that's the one professor. I'm gonna say I learned a lot from and I'm not saying the other people that teach me stuff. I mean, I learned calculus and I learned some scientific stuff and I learned business law and stuff like that but the guy that really inspired me to go make money was Bernie. Bernie was amazing. Let's see here. Hal's home doing in Texas with crazy weather. Well, we just got our foundation poured. What day was that? Friday? I think it was Friday. Thursday or Friday we just got the foundation poured because the weather broke and it's fine now so we don't have any problems. I have noticed that your videos capture your audience very quickly. Well, thank you. That's nice of you, Mike.  You're all right. Great opening statements and you keep us intrigued so that we have to keep watching to see what happens. Well, it's very nice of you. What I do and it's more for SEO than anything, whatever the title is in one of my, not the live videos, but my other videos that I post during the week, I say the title upfront and then I tell you what you're gonna learn in the video. That way, people know what they're getting, okay? So I say, hey, how to make $10,000 a month by doing free SEO. So I'll say that and then I'll say in this video, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through all the steps that you gotta do to earn $10,000 a month with your website. It's gonna be simple and easy. We'll get through it very quickly and we're starting right now. And then I jump into it and talk about whatever the video is. And that's just me watching other people's videos is learning. Is that natural for you or did you master it with practice? Oh, definitely practice, practice, practice. I wasn't good at anything. You know, and I'm still very borderline in most things but here's what I know. You know, and I can't say who said this the best. Elon Musk was in an interview with 60 minutes and this is what I want you to really take away from this. Oh, I gotta plug it in my computer, hang on. Hang on, I'm about to lose my battery. I'll lose you guys. We don't want that to happen. We don't want that happening. Hang on. Ugh. Got it, okay. So Elon Musk is in this interview and the interviewer says to him and let me switch to my other screen here I can actually see myself. The interviewer says you started this rocket company. You're not a rocket scientist. You never went to school for that. How did you do that? And you know what he said? He says, well, there's books on it. That's all he said. He says there's books on it and that's so true. If you wanna learn anything guys, type it into YouTube. Anything you wanna learn, if you wanna learn calculus right now, type it in there. You wanna learn biology. You wanna learn how to film videos. You wanna learn anything you want. You can just type it into YouTube. You can learn anything, but we're free. When has the world ever been that way? When I was a kid, if I wanted to know something I had to get on my bicycle and I had to go down to the library and I had to have a library card. Then I had to go over to the little card index thing and then I had to try to find a card that would match up. Then I'd find that Dewey decimal number. Some of you don't even know what a Dewey decimal number is. Then I would find that aisle and then get in there and go to find that book and then it'd be gone. I mean, that's how we got knowledge. Now what do we do? We type it in. For somebody to say, I don't know how to do something nowadays. It just blows my mind. My sister the other day said that her phone was messed up and it wasn't allowing downloads. And she was gonna have to go down to the Verizon store and get the phone fixed. I said, no, it's probably a setting. And she's like, now, now, now I've tried and I've looked at it and my husband's a computer whiz and he couldn't figure it out. And I typed in there what her problem was and instantly there was a solution and I sent her the text and she texted me back.  I mean, really, everything we wanna know is there. And you guys can make money. You guys can make money online.  I'm not special. You know what? You're not special. You don't need to be special. All you gotta do is do some work. You know, you gotta press record if you wanna do videos. You gotta look up stuff on e-commerce if you wanna do that. If you wanna do digital course, do one. It's really that simple. Let's see here. Do you invest in stocks that pay consistent dividends? I can care less about dividends. Doesn't matter to me. I'm always about words that stock gonna go up to. I don't care about dividends. I just don't. It's not my thing. Not saying it's bad. This is not my thing. It's not what I do. Please don't give up on your YouTube. We love you. Anime love. You so nice. You so nice. I really appreciate that. Driving now will catch the rest of the replay. Okay, Paul. So guys, I wanna open it up to you for a couple minutes. If you have any questions about anything, anything, making money online, put that in the chat section right now. If you're watching this after it went live, you're gonna wanna put it in the comment section. We'll come back today. I'm gonna answer a lot of questions. I know I got a few in there I haven't gotten to, but I will do that today. I'm gonna do that today. I'm gonna edit the rest of my videos today. I'm gonna help my wife rewrite some scripts for ads today. Get a very full day. That's what I'm doing today. And you could even put in there what you're doing today. And if you don't have anything to put there, why? Why? You should be doing something today. You should, what? What? That's how often. That's how often right there. That's how often, okay? If you're wondering when you should do stuff. That's when you should do stuff, okay? So put it in there. Tell me what you're doing. I don't see any typing going on. Who's doing something today? Also, if you haven't subscribed yet, oh my God, seriously? Not yet? Give me a thumbs up. Click the thumbs up down there. Make sure you click the subscribe button down there and make sure you ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every single time I do a video or if I go live. What selfie stick do you recommend? You know, James, I have a good one I do recommend. And if you look in the description section, after this video's over with, you're gonna find a link in there and it'll say selfie stick. And it's an Amazon link. Click on that and you'll see it. So I do have that in there. But there's a lot of good ones. I mean, goodness gracious. I've been watching your videos. Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate that. And don't watch the beginning ones. They were terrible, terrible. They were bad. Please don't go back and watch the beginning ones, whatever you do. But you know what? You start somewhere. I mean, I had these cheesy green screens behind me and I would have like, like I was in some high-rise office building. I had some crazy stuff. But back then everybody was like, oh, you got to have a green screen to be professional. You got to have a green screen. And I don't even know if I want to be professional. Some of the stuff you got, like wearing a tie. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. I don't want to do that. Now what I've also done, if you haven't noticed, excuse me guys, when all the videos I've got scheduled for this week, I have the subject after it. So you can go in there and let me see. I'll give you an overview of what's going on this week. You can go in there. Mike says he'll learn from those videos. Good, and you should. I mean, it's free. Do you do business on Amazon? Yes and no. I have some of my products there if you search survival cave food. And then I have a lot of my resellers who sell my products. They post on there so I don't try to compete with them much. I don't want to do that. So let me go to my channel real quick and I'm gonna tell you what's going on for this week. Videos, okay, hmm, I don't know. See, yeah, my phone, it doesn't show me. It doesn't show me what I want to see. Yeah, but if you go look yourself, you'll find that I've got these videos scheduled and you can actually look next to it and see what the subject matter is. Check out Friday's video. Friday's video is gonna be a lot of fun. It's how to live on $20,000 a month. What do you think of that? Put your comments about that one there. How to live on $20,000 a month. How could you possibly do that? So put that in the comment section there too if you like that idea. When did you start making YouTube videos? Wow, I can tell you the year I started but I really didn't do it right. I didn't put any effort into it. I did it lazy. I did it to make money. I did it for all the wrong reasons and that was 2015. And I dabbled with it up until 2020. I really didn't do anything. I mean, for five years, I mean, I put some videos every now and then. They were sporadic. They were different lengths. Some of them were only a minute or two. They were salesy.  And then in 2020, I was like, maybe I ought to really do good videos. Maybe I ought to really do research and have really good information for people. And that's when my YouTube channel started to take off. That's when I started making money. That's when I started getting subscribers. It was when I changed. Before that, I was blaming the algorithm. I'm like, oh, YouTube doesn't like me and they don't show my videos. And they're trying to keep me from getting subscribers.  That's not the case at all. It's a business, man. If you don't have good videos and you're not doing stuff, right? Yeah, YouTube's not gonna show your videos. Surprise, they're there to make money. So I had to kind of look in the mirror and that's what all of us kind of have to do. Like, if you're not making money online right now, why don't you look in the mirror and go, I'm no different from anybody else. I'm just not doing the right things. I need to do the right things. Just have a conversation with yourself. And I do that now. Now, if I don't get results, I tell myself, I'm like, I must not be doing the right things. Let me go find the right things to do and I'll get the right results. Really, it's that simple. It's not that hard. See here, I bought your survival cave food on Amazon. Oh, James, you did? That's very cool. Thank you so much. I do appreciate that. I'm waiting on fourth video of the four steps to successful online business. Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, that will be coming to you. That is a sequence. But what you can do, Mike, if you want to get to it, if you click on next video, there should be a button down there and it'll take you to the next one. So that's a little hack of those videos if you want to do that. Hello, sir. Zakaria Chana, Zakaria Chana. Cool name, by the way. I like that. Hello, sir. I've got a kind of philosophical question for you. Did making more money make you happier? Hmm. Hmm. Wow. I can tell you that whatever you are, it will accentuate what you already are.  What it did for me to make me happy wasn't the money part, it was the freedom part, okay? Being able to get up every day and do what I want did make me happier. It wasn't, you know, as you see, I don't have a bunch of jewelry, I don't have bracelets, necklaces, none of that stuff. It wasn't that. It wasn't being able to buy stuff. But it was having the freedom. So if I had the freedom to go to Cancun with my wife and sit by a pool and talk to her instead of being at the car dealership and not seeing her all day long and just being exhausted when I get home, and not wanting to talk to anybody, that made me happier, okay? So that made me happier. Seeing her be able to run her own business and make money online and do what she wants and help animals, because that's what she does. And she has dog training courses and all that. Makes her happier. But it's not the cash. It's not like I go out and buy whatever car I want, because I don't. I've been driving the same car for eight years. I don't care. I don't care. And if people want to judge me based on my car, that's okay. They should look at my stock portfolio. That's what they should look at. But the money itself, no, will not make you happy. But the freedom that money brings can make you very happy. And yes, I am happier now that I have the freedom. So that's a long answer, but that's the real truth, okay? I'm not gonna buy jewelry. I'm not gonna buy a thousand dollar shirt or something like this. This is probably $19, I don't know, whatever it costs, probably less than that. Let's see. Uh... James Breen. I have a problem spending $20,000 a month. I'm gonna get into that on Friday. I'm gonna get into that on Friday. And I'm not gonna tell you what the key to that is, but that's interesting. And in my love, money can make you happy. It's not the money. Be careful with that, because buying a shiny car feels great. Buying that new car feels great. It smells good. You feel like people are looking at you. You feel like you're getting attention.    The other thing money can do is when you share it with other people, it can make you happy. You know, I remember my son was going through school and he was having a hard time.   So he went back to school and started doing really well, but he didn't have enough money to live off of.  So we determined an amount he needed and I gave him that amount every month to raise bills. And then when he got out of school, I said, oh, by the way, you don't owe me a dime. I was just helping you out, but I wanted you to think you would have to pay it back to make you do what you should do. And that made me happy because I could just give to him because I didn't have that growing up on me.  They did not do that. That didn't happen. So that makes me feel good or give some money to my daughter because she had twins and she needed some extra money. Just gave it to her. That makes me happy. So giving away money and helping others can definitely make you happy. I was getting some Chinese food the other day and the guy in front of me, his card wouldn't go through and he had ordered like four or five meals and it was like $40. And I said, I got it. I'll take care of it. And he looked at me and he's like, I didn't even know you. I said, I don't know. It's all right. He'll take care of somebody else one day. And things like that can really make you happy. They really can. They can do a lot for you. Let's see here. Money is not everything, but for everything, you need money. That's a pretty good saying. That's a pretty good saying. What do you think about white hat versus black hat methods for making money and which one made you more money? I don't do any black hat. I don't do anything that's not only up and up. I just don't, I don't want to. I wouldn't feel good about myself. Let's say black hat worked and you could beat everybody with it. Would you feel good? And I know you're doing it for money but I want to feel good at the end of the day. I just want to feel good. You know, I was at the grocery store there today and I got organic red onion. It didn't have a sticker on it so you couldn't tell it was organic. And I knew if I went up there and set it down they would just charge me for a red onion. I told them it was organic, it's organic. And you said, well, J.R., you could have gotten it cheaper. No, I couldn't have.  Maybe not from that store, but somehow somebody's going to cheat you. So that's just how I look at stuff. I'm really afraid of cheating anybody. I really am. I don't like doing that. Let's see here. Oh, I loved your answer spot on. You have freedom is great man. Freedom is everything. Freedom is 100% everything. You know, if you have freedom you're going to have a pretty happy life if you choose to do the right things and you got the right heart. Okay, that matters. At what age did you quit your job? You're going to love this one anime. 50, 50, it took me that long. Now I had had businesses before that, but I had to go back and work for somebody because I won custody of my children. I was a single dad. And the only way I could get custody at the time was to have a job because the business that I had, I traveled, I was on the road about eight months out of the year touring. I was a professional speaker and I had a sales training company.  It's not going to happen. This is not going to happen. You're not going to get custody. So I had to go work for somebody. So that's what I did while I raised my kids. I breed world-class Maltese. Really, that's interesting. That's a cool little dog. That's a little tiny dog. Isn't it Mike?  Want to be happy? Cultivate an attitude of gratitude. You're 100% right. No matter what you have, if you can't be happy with it, what makes you think getting more is going to make you happier? Think about that.  It won't. It won't. You just got more. I'm becoming more and more of a minimalist to where I don't want a lot of things. I don't want a lot of furniture. I don't want a lot of cars. I don't want boats. I don't want all that stuff. I've had a boat. I've had a lot of cars, had all that. And it really doesn't make me any happier. It's just more stuff to take care of. If you've got a boat, then you've got an insurance and you've got a slip or you've got to park it somewhere. You feel like you've got to go out in it because you have a boat, you've got to use it. If I want a boat, I'll go rent a boat. I'll just go rent a boat. That's what I'll do. I'm a big newbie at stocks. Is it N-O-O-B-I-E? I'm terrible at spelling. Or is it N-E-W-B-I-E? I don't know. Anyhow, newbie at stocks just catch up on G-M-A Reddit story. So did all those degenerates, as they call themselves at Reddit, make nothing in the end because Robinhood forbid the exchanges? I don't know. I saw that and I didn't follow it. It was a little confusing to me. So anything that looks too easy, I'm like, yeah, probably shouldn't do it. It's like, I won't do Bitcoin because people are going, oh my gosh, you can get rich in Bitcoin. Everybody's doing it. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I don't understand it. So I'm not gonna do it. What is attitude of gratitude? What he's saying is you have to have an attitude where you're thankful for whatever you have no matter what it is, no matter what it is. And I can tell you no matter what you have, there's somebody that would love to have it. No matter how bad your situation is, somebody would love to have it. You said, well, JR, what about the guy who's searching for food every single day and doesn't have a job and his health is poor? I would tell you somebody who died the day before would love to have that opportunity. So there's always, always somebody that would love to have what you have unless you're dead and then nobody wants dead. Nobody wants dead. I have never been motivated by money, only motivated by how I can use it to impact my life and the lives of others. That's all money is. I mean, really, but it comes right down to it.  That's the only real use for money. But short of that, it's what you do with it that matters. And if you only spend it on yourself and you never help anybody else, you will not be as happy. This is a guarantee, guys. Guarantee. Great talking with you, sir. You got a new subscriber from Morocco. Oh my God, that's awesome. I gotta go to Morocco. I love Moroccan food. I love couscous. I love the dishes. I love Moroccan food. We've got a couple here in San Diego and I haven't checked Austin yet where we're going to. I love Moroccan food. And it's got a little bit of Middle Eastern bent to it. I love Persian food too. Yeah, so yeah, I love that food. Great stuff. Of course, I love all kinds of food. They put a lot of work into it, a lot of love into it. Are you planning to visit here someday? I hope. Good things in the weather, but the economy is meh. Yeah, I would like to go there. There's a lot of countries I want to go to when this thing breaks. I was doing six or seven trips a year. I think I was in six or seven countries in 2019. So yeah, I love doing that. Newbie is used in games. Oh, okay, so you guys spelled N-O-O-B-I-E. Make sense? What anime love said, it's just video game slang. Oh, look, I learned something. I learned something. You're normal, JR. It's the rest of us who are not. No, no, that may be normal. I don't know. Think life is difficult? Google Nick, Juva, wait, hold on, hold on. All right, let's Google this. Somebody gave us a suggestion and I'm going to get real here and his name is Nick, N-I-K-J-U-V-U-C-I-C, go. Australian American Christian Evangelist and motivational speaker. Okay, so he does positive stuff. And I want to show you guys a picture of the happiest guy I think I've ever seen in my life. Hang on one second, you know. If I could find it. If I could find it, I pulled it up the other day because it was showing it to somebody else. But this is one of the happiest people I think I've ever met. He's an awesome person and I have a picture somewhere with him. Let me see if I can find it. I hate when this happens, when I'm like there's something I'm gonna show you guys and I'm live and then I can't find it. All right, let me go back to 2000 and I think it was 16 when I was with him. If I could find that, I'll look for this 2017 and put your comments in there guys while I'm doing this. All right, love to see your comments. Love to see what's going on with you guys. I love that. There it is. This is the happiest guy I know right there. Can you see that? Now, Google Sean Stevenson. That guy is one of the coolest guys. He's a motivational speaker, was a motivational speaker. He passed away and that's me with him. And you Google Sean Stevenson and listen to some of the stuff he's got to say about life. He was one of the happiest people I've ever seen. He had brittle bone disease and broke almost every single bone in his body at one point or another. Wasn't supposed to live past being a child. He lived into his 30s. Awesome human being. Listen to Sean Stevenson. Okay, he's since passed away, fell in his head and caused him to go into coma because of the brittle bone disease and died. But I gotta tell you, man, if you listen to him, you're not gonna feel sorry for yourself ever again, ever, ever, ever, never. I felt so lucky to have met him. Anyway, JR, how much money did you lose when learning stock trading? I didn't. How about that? I don't trade. It's very rare for me to trade. What I do is I buy and I hang on to it and watch it go up. That's basically what I do. Now, do I buy and sell some? Yes, based on events. I was gonna hold on to Sirius forever and I think I sold it for $6 and something. I bought it at 24 cents. Why did I sell it? I sold it because there's other players in the market now. There's Spotify and there's all these streaming things. When I bought it, there was only Sirius XM radio and all these other streaming platforms weren't big. They certainly weren't in cars. But now if you jump into Tesla, you can listen to Spotify, you can listen to something else. You don't need Sirius XM so I just felt like it was time to get out. But I have not lost money in the stock market. Now, did I lose money on some individual stocks? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I had bought Chrysler and Ford and GM and GM went bankrupt and I lost all my money in GM. But it wasn't a whole lot. I mean, I don't put a whole lot in one stock. Sometimes the amount I put into a stock grows into a whole lot like Tesla has grown. Woo, I mean, I've really done well there, I will tell you that. But I didn't know it would and I didn't want it to be that much of my portfolio. It just is, it just is what it is. Nick was born with out arms or legs. Well, there you go, James. There you go. And he's a happy person. So duh, you know, I get to have failure because I'm still studying. There you go, you can't fail it, you don't try. Wait, that's not good, is it? Is that good? And it may love, come on. Is it true that you learned from failure 100%? What else would you learn from? You don't learn from success. You only learn from failure and here's what you learn. You learn what doesn't work and quit doing those things. Like right now I'm running ads and I've got hundreds of keywords and phrases and all that and all the ones that reach a certain amount without getting a sale, without getting enough clicks. I kill those and I know not to use those anymore. Sounds reasonable, right? That's how I do that. And I'm spending a lot of money a day trying to figure that out. Guys, I'm going along today. I'm going along, is it 10 o'clock? You guys stuck around until 10 o'clock. I'm impressed and amazed. Would you do me another favor? Please, please, please, please, please. Put in the comments what you think of this training. I want to hear that. Put in the comments if you like it, if you didn't like it, if you got some value out of it. If there's something else you want to know, put that in the comments. I'm here to serve you guys. I seriously am. Doesn't matter if it's live and you're doing the chat now, if it's in the comments later on, I really want to serve you guys. I want to give you what you want. If there's an area that you want me to cover that I know about, I'm not going to cover something I don't know about. I'm not going to teach you sewing. I don't know something. But if there's an area I know about, I'm making money online and I do know about a lot of areas. I've done millions in sales in both digital and physical products. That's what this is about. It's about helping you guys. So put that in that chat section if you would, comment section if you're watching this and it's not live. In addition to that, if you haven't subscribed, do so and ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every single time I go live. And I really enjoy talking to you guys. It's been amazing. It's a great day, but I got to get it out there, get some work done. So can we buy stocks and hold onto them indefinitely until the price rises? Yeah, that's what I do. If that's the case, that's like a cheat code for making money. 100%. It is. Because you know, in general, the stock market's going to go up about 10% a year. I also have index funds. I have Fidelity Index Fund and that's just an index of a whole bunch of different stocks. And I know it's going to go up about 10% a year. Yeah, so I mean, the first year you get 10%, the next year you get 10% on your stocks plus another 10%. So, yeah.  Consistently buying in. That's another big thing. It was good talking to you, and I'm like, yeah, great having you here. You've been a nice addition. How about changing the word failure to results? I do, I do. I say these are the results we don't want. I say that often. That's a really good point. That's an excellent point. These are not the results we want. So we're going to stop doing these things and let's keep doing these things here because they're working. But you got to try a lot of things, right? I don't run two ads and see what happens. You know, I got 11 different videos. I've got hundreds of keywords and topics and audiences and tons. And we throw this wide net out there, which I learned from Ad Outreach, which is a really good company. I throw this wide net out there and then I gather what works and just get rid of the rest. You know, get rid of the things that didn't hit the target. That's what we do. JR, have you heard of shout outs? For example, you pay an influencer and Instagram five bucks for a 24-hour post. Haven't tested it yet, but it seems it's far superior than ads. Yeah, I have heard about it and I've heard people have gotten good results out of it. Would I do it? Probably not. No, I like doing my own stuff. I like doing my own ads. Hey, JR, you've been unstoppable today. Whoa, thank you, James. You're always a kind. You know, it's like, when I see James in here, I'm like, it's going to be a good day. Everything's fine. James is here. Everybody else cheers up. Paul's here. Doesn't matter. But now we've got so many Mike and anyway, love so many good people in here. My point, great live, sir. We'll see you around. Okay, guys, I'm going to go ahead and end this. Thank you so much for being here today. I want you guys to have a great day. Don't forget, subscribe, thumbs up, share, like, do all those things, okay? And I'll see you in the next video. I'll see you tomorrow morning.


Hi, my name is Kevin Mahal and I'm a senior technical customer success manager here at TechSoup. In this demonstration, powered by the AI capabilities of machine translation and optical character recognition, I will show you how to use the data from a picture function of Microsoft Excel to transpose text and numerical content into a spreadsheet. By quickly taking data from your non-profits documents, such as annual reports, past financials, or a list of past owners, your organization can significantly cut down on the task of data entry, giving you more time to serve your constituents in other ways. Let's say I just received an email from our organization's outside accountant. Attached to the message is an image that captured of our latest financial statement. While we could manually input it into a new Excel file, that's inefficient and, quite frankly, not very fun. Let's see what this looks like using the data in a picture feature. At our mail, I'm using Outlook for Desktop here. We'll first locate the file. Now let's save it to our downloads folder. Next, I'm going to launch Excel. We're going to create a blank document. Let's call it company financial statement. Next, we're going to click on the data tab. We're going to select the from picture option and select picture from file. Let's click on the downloads tab, find the file we saved, and click insert. We'll see the data from picture menu pop up on the right hand side of the screen. Next, we're going to click on review. Let's expand the menu size. Now if they look good, we'll accept the review. If not, we'll want to modify what's in the field line, then accept. We've gone through all the potential errors that were flagged. Time to insert the data by clicking the insert button. Now the data is ready to be shared. I'm going to use the share button, which will first store the file in our OneDrive for Business account, but you could of course just save it in your local drive and either email it to the user or even send it in a Microsoft Teams message.


This is a hot take. I think that every single person alive should take a gap year. I am only as successful as my last report card. Hi everyone, we're in the car today and we're just gonna go drive around going to go pick up an acai bowl because If I don't eat an acai bowl at least once a month, then I actually die. So that's what we're doing. That's fine. Okay, I gotta pull the seat all the way down. When I drive I'm really short. I'm like 5'2". I have to pull Really close up there, but I have to pull the seat all the way back down when I film because Otherwise, I would be like this close to the camera. I got my playa bowl. Isn't she cute? Okay, I I'm just having like a self-care day. Like I just I love I'm sorry. I'm also I'll probably see this when I'm editing. I'm gonna be like Katie. That's gross take it off But I'm wearing like so much Vaseline right now Does anyone else get to like that point in the year? We're like it literally doesn't matter if you wear chapstick or not even chapstick because I know there's a conspiracy theory about that But like if you wear something like like a chapstick any time of the day, but it just doesn't matter At all because your lips are just always tapping. That's that's my story. Yeah, I went to playa bowls It was fun. I was in the parking lot and Like I grew up in this area So it was just like there were all these like teenage girls just like laughing about something and like I don't know whether people do this or if it's just like because of past trauma But like anytime I see a group of like teenage girls laughing about something. I'm like what did I do? And this week I wanted to film a chill video because I just have like a lot of stuff on my mind Hi, if you are a college student this year and you are living at home or you're a gap year student or You are you know just a person who's thinking about taking a gap year I really just I want to talk about it. First of all, I was if you haven't watched this channel before and you're new to this Video, I was supposed to be living in Scotland this year for the whole entire year I was gonna be studying abroad in Edinburgh, which was Look, I'm gonna put pictures of Edinburgh like it's my dream destination It's literally like out of a storybook. It's gorgeous. I I was just like I was so Incredibly excited and then the pandemic hit and that was a really sad time for sure When I started this year, I did not want to take a gap year like and what's even funnier is Last year for like the whole year. I was in like one of the Like the some of the biggest classes this past year of my major So it was like I was really grinding and which I love by the way Like I love that side of my life and I love school and like I don't say that like in a Like I don't know.  I just and The idea of like not being there in person like just really deterred me Just not the way that I like to learn because I learn during the in-between I learned when a professor is like You know telling us about a thing But then they tell us a personal story and we get off on a tangent and you know People are saying random things in class and raising their hands and like joining in discussions like that is how I Like to learn that's like that is the core of why I love schools So that's why I decided to like take my gap year and Um With all of that out of the way, yes, okay, so I'm I'm on this gap year and now we're in months Like I guess I would have started school in August So it's like month three of like really not doing anything or month two. I don't know it's been two or three months Maybe three months Okay. Well, let me just tell you how I spent my summer. I spent my summer applying to Like five or six different internships and jobs and trying to just like put myself out there because In my head. I was like there is absolutely no way that I can sit around this year like It's kind of crazy that that was my my first thought because it's so this is what's so strange.  This is what I was trying to say earlier I kept on saying like everyone in my life I kept on like if my dad or my mom called me this I was so excited For my year in Scotland as like my year off so like every time I would call someone I'd be like, oh my god Like mom like I'm just I'm so excited like I just feel like I need a year off Like I just need a year to travel and like be a kid because like I am the type of person that like I put So much pressure on myself and it's it's self-inflicted like my parents are not helicopter parents at all Like if that if I got a bad grade in high school, which like I wasn't a bad student Like I was a good student like I would beat myself up like I was the one that was like killing myself so it's It's just very interesting that like I was just I kept on saying like I just I just needed this year off. I oh Getting too heated. I just I really wanted like be able to be a college student because You know, I was always jumping into something new to sort of distract myself like my freshman year I found that I had so much free time. So I got a part-time job and Then my sophomore year I got an internship and I was just like always just like going and going and going So I was like so much looking forward to this year off Which I think is just like so ironic that I ended up like really getting a year off And if you're watching this and you're like I don't know if I should take the next semester off or if I should go back like I obviously can't make that decision for you Oh, and if you're like a high school student wondering if you should take a gap year This is a hot take. I think that every single person alive should take a gap year here Here's my thing I I feel like it's more of a common thing like in Europe that people just like take a year off and travel like that's Just not a thing that happens in America like not so much at least maybe not in my area like in my area It's very much like you go to high school. You apply to college. You go to college and like that's it Which I think is a very narrow worldview Which is so interesting because this area is so like well educated. I think that's so many people could Gain something from a gap year because I have had to fill my time. I Have had to like really fill my time and I actually this is to if you're like an online student because you're gonna have to Fill your time this year too. Well, I was talking to my friend the other day And she was like you just seem like so good Because we talk about like my existential panic like all the time like I am such a warrior I am such like a panicked Person Like that makes me sound really bad like I'm no I'm really fun like I'm a great girl but like just the undertone of my life is just that I am so panicked about like doing well in school and getting internships and like grinding and like doing you know like all these things and And it's so strange. This is the first year of my life Where my success has not been determined?  It's just that this year. I have had to really focus on What's gonna make me happy? Beyond getting a grade or beyond Planning for my future because I can't plan anything one Two, I don't really have a physical thing to define my success So it's just it's allowed me to like really explore what it is that makes me happy And what it is that makes me me and I think that I had lost that for a little bit in college the first couple of years because when I was in high school I did a lot of theater and Inquire and like all all that kind of stuff I did dance for a while, too But beyond that like having that creative outlet like I did not realize how important that was to me I still I started doing YouTube, but having a creative outlet again has given me so much purpose and I don't know if I like fully hammered the point home, but like I just truly think that everyone should take a gap year because I Think that this is kind of weird coming for me because like I was a kid who in high school knew exactly what they wanted to do in college Which is not super common and I'm aware of that, but I think that just a lot of people could benefit from like Taking some time off and thinking about like what really matters in life And what they want to do and what they're willing to like spend their money on Because college is really expensive and if you don't love what you're going to school for you don't You know or if the school that you're going to for what you want is like so much money and it doesn't match up with like Your aspirations like sometimes you don't have to go to the you know the craziest most expensive elite school To get and crack into the field that you want to so it's I think a lot of that gets put into perspective And when you're 18, it's like you're just looking at labels and you know, you're just trying to fit in and it's just like You know, it's just like anything else.  I was so scared of someone seeing me


Hey, good morning everyone. My name is Aaron Bear from Athena Health and today I'll be talking about breaking apart the monolith and breaking apart our monolith at Athena Health as well.  Original intention was actually that he was going to be presenting this content to you today. And and much of that comes directly from from his brain, but he was unable to make it and so I Also attending was able to step in for him so Welcome to everybody and hello so myself been building business system applications for 16 years at least I've been working in the public cloud AWS Amazon space for five or more years. I Love writing infrastructure as code That's been my primary focus for those last five years. So You know, I've gone from the old school business applications writing ABAP and SAP and and Coming up through all of that large IT organizations infrastructure to now More recently working in the public cloud. I love to build things. It doesn't matter what it is I really like to build it and So now I'm building things at Athena Health on the infrastructure team there So thanks to Ryan and I'm Aaron. Hello So Often in the healthcare industry Technology sticks around for a long time you know it is Often becomes very old in that time and so It's hard to break into that space with new technologies For example one of the main focus one of the main Functions that Athena Health performs for the healthcare care industry is processing faxes so At Athena Health, we're trying to do a couple of things unbreak health care What we like to say and what that means is we're trying very hard to Bring all of the tedious difficult workflow items of a physician's day or an office administration's day and Free them from that and allow them to just be doctors allow them to just be with their patients and allow them to focus on That information instead of processing like we do for many health care places all over you know, we're processing hundreds of thousands of faxes a day and Not only just things like faxes, but there's still a long paper trail that exists throughout the entire industry so with that though the healthcare industry is trying to go through a Digital transformation moving its information into The digital world instead of in out of filing cabinets and the path to that that Everyone is taking but the health industry or companies like Athena Health are Undergoing is that transformation from the giant monolithic application stack to microservices and a more modern framework for that so that You know We're and in that one of the challenges that we will always face Especially in the EHR market, which is another part of where Athena Health focuses a lot is the adaption of new technologies into the these offices into the doctor's hands into Whatever that may entail So out of Athena Health, we're trying to let doctors be truly doctors not have to spend six hours every day Just doing their paperwork helping to perform efficiencies in that space so computing systems have been moving to cloud-based solutions and more hybrid models for quite a long for not quite a long time, but for for a while and It's hard it is difficult to do that I will say since Ryan developed all this content that slides and content and data and the information that I'm Sharing with you, although I work with on an everyday basis is definitely New for me and presentation layer to you. So as we go through this I'm going to reference notes and And hopefully we'll keep this loose. So in that as well if I'm speaking and I become a little bit unclear in anything We're going to take questions towards the end, but feel free to just Raise your hand and and ask for that clarification at any time so That being said we're moving our products many other companies are trying to move of their products into this space the cloud space the mobile space as operators at the infrastructure level and developers at the application level Moving into a much more flexible CI CD pipeline Making information access easier at the application level and at the end user level and Provide platforms where information sharing becomes much more fluid and much more accessible so another challenged or regular system Thing that happens in our space being health information is that We're often also needing to deploy that infrastructure in the old paradigm into Sometimes the doctor's offices Into our data centers and not as much in the past Into public cloud spaces as we're moving towards today So what we're trying to do is strangle the monolithic design So and I'm here to talk about how We're creating our pathway towards breaking up this monolith and make our transition into the cloud Because as an industry It's important and it's time to be cloud more than it is to have our data locked up in silos and in a Place or location that's difficult to to interact with the data or move that data around or share it in between platforms And as you know health we have you know your typical monolithic design right now it's Apache Pearl and Oracle and it's in one big chunk and All of it is dependent on all of the rest of it and to Expand that you have to lift and shift the entire monolith and What we have found is that it's also difficult to scale that monolith in any And so that You have a stack that can perform to a certain size But the only way to continue to add customers to that or to add functionality to that or or anything is to replicate the entire thing in another place and Certain customers go to this one certain customers go to that one certain customers go to that one So on and so on and so on until you have all of these deployments of this big giant thing that is Very Inflexible you're bound by that monolith to what data you can view what data you can Use what data you can see for instance in the health care industry a big trend is for merging large hospital groups into larger hospital groups and if Say hypothetically a one customer was already Athena health Merged into a hospital group. There's also Athena health But they were already on two different Athena health systems There's a very big challenge for us to bring those together in a useful way And so why micro micro services in that paradigm is because that scale there's There's no way to do that in the current monolithic platform the other is That you know you're bound by that technology stack for any innovation that you can make into the market and so microservices and our path towards microservices is a Way for us to be able to innovate faster so that someone can have an idea and write a service for that and tie into our data stack and have You know something up and running within days where before You know it may take Quarters to get a release into the pearl code where one Change might affect the entire The entire application stack in itself so also in that as a large organization That Is at the head of this Model in the health care industry Having that big monolithic stack makes it hard for us as an organization to continue to hire new talent that wants to come in and Do something really exciting right because we can say oh you're really smart. You've got 10 years or 20 years of writing applications, and you're building all these things Come work for us, and you can write pearl and query data out of Oracle with SQL. I mean that's not too thrilling so our journey towards this Microservice and Mesosphere environment is to allow us to be more agnostic Agnostic to what technology someone has to use to make something a part of Athena health software offers across the board So the challenge is then breaking apart that monolith right so You know you've got this big thing and what we're trying to do is to get to all these yummy little pizzas all over the place That we can eat and consume at any time we want to and the middle ground is Breaking that apart in chunks right everybody loves pizza everybody everybody wants to have a slice everybody wants to do to make it Easier to Adapt into the overall platform So the one thing that is challenging, but also very important is to avoid the distributed monolith, right? We can't just lift and shift this pizza all over the place We can't just take this big stack and Containerize the big stack so that we can just launch this giant stack more times in a container You you don't get any benefit out of that you end up paying for You end up paying a lot more Especially in the cloud space for no actual platform benefit as You move towards this the benefits you gain is is you get a polyglot environment, right? You can think up of an idea write it in whatever thing you want and hopefully you're going to get the data that you need to make your application Work and do Really awesome things But you're not going to want to be bound by that monolith to do that And so we are using the strangler pattern to do that so Choose to keep this big monolith around we don't have too much of a choice to just get rid of it in one file swoop but what We feel like we can do well is Move towards the microservice architecture over time moving from the old to Platform 2.0, which is what we might call that at Athena health and and and know that We can rely on what we have and we can break off chunks and Start net new information and products in this new Model by just kind of squeezing pieces out of that monolith over time so You know the reason why we choose to do that is That One it makes it easier to write in that new functionality, right? With the monolith you're bound by all the interdependencies of what that monolith represents You're bound by you have to write in pearl you have to know that you know Not only is that host accepting the incoming queries for any requests to your application stack but it's also You know running the database and that data is only one thing. It's a relational database. You can do a lot of stuff with SQL but Can you really do a lot of good stuff with your data in SQL or use it in different ways or move it into different patterns that you are able to Support these new and Exciting models that hopefully you're you're coming up with in your head and hoping to become some part of the framework that we Want to provide to help the industry improve its efficiencies so You know another thing that this helps you do is move more quickly into a pattern where you can Break things and fix them more quickly you can You know testing the monolith is really hard but testing a component of that monolith That I wouldn't even that's not actually correct So you're not going to be on the test a component of the monolith in this model but testing that new functionality outside of the monolith in this model becomes a lot more easy and You know scaling that monolith with your business is really challenging It's definitely a big challenge that if you know health follows finds in that You know the only way we can scale is to repeat this giant thing Spoke to this just a bit but you know in the monolith You have your you know your classic three-tier web application You've got this big giant database that holds all of your data You have some component of your application stack that accesses that data You have a layer that's doing your business logic to that information And then you present that to the user in some way as a whole so our solution and and what we're working towards is Breaking that apart and a really important part of that journey for us has been POC evaluations of lots and lots of technologies Trying them out just figuring out, you know, what works and what doesn't in a Short cycle Environment and part of this as an organization Athena health has made a big change over the past year moving to an agile Method as a company so not just in our DevOps teams not just in our operations and not just in in As a department what we call I AAS But at the developer level and at the application developer level Reorganizing ourselves into scrum teams. So we have smaller groups of people working on more focused points of the product and iterating on those projects much more quickly So in doing that we can function and we can perform these POCs more quickly The information that we learn out of those Can be shared amongst our groups more quickly and as we find useful things out of that We can start putting them in place, you know, one of our mandates or or needs in the past year has been moving from Only our data center. So this is going to represent Athena health and it's on-premise data center and all the components of what that is to the public cloud space First being, you know, Amazon, but we're already working in Azure. We expect to try to be agnostic in the platform the Place where with we run applications But build an environment and an ecosystem that is consistent across all of those at the same time These are a number of the components that we've chosen so far that we're working towards right now DCOS, MISOS, Portworx, Docker Docker Docker, Amazon Web Services, which is the team that I work on in our group Mostly Ryan is our is a counter to me in our on-prem kind of activities and deployments of this so that we are Moving to An overall solution that that fits the microservice platform really well So our future state as we are transitioning from that monolith Moving away from a single code base Into a much more flexible Write what you want use what technology you might need Environment allowing you to refactor and rewrite little components of your overall architecture stack much more quickly You know if right now if there's any Component of our monolith that that we want to change It's likely that it's really difficult to do that because of the interdependencies of everything else in that application stack in this microservice model, you know your goal is to Remove that dependency from the rest of your infrastructure. So the component of that that your deploying You can pull it out it can go away and or and it can be replaced without the entire Deployment need to be updated at one point all of your patches to just go cleanly into the system on your Your second release of a quarter where if that doesn't happen, you know, you've got a systemic system-wide issue in This smaller model you have the ability to Fail fast and fail forward you can release small alpha products into this environment To try them out it won't matter to the rest of your Your stack because you can launch it Try a subset of people to it pull it out next release release and beta move it out into production much more quickly Once you do that then you can go back to your monolith and start pulling out bigger chunks of that monolith and Moving components of that into your new infrastructure more efficiently and more successfully so Another key part of what we feel is important and what seems to be a really my opinion smart idea is that You make sure that your infrastructure is also API driven That there is a level of abstraction from where you're running something That your application developer doesn't need to worry as much about so You know that that API abstraction is key A value that you can provide in that abstraction is that you can move your individual business context outside of the platform with which you're running your containers or running your services Into that API level so that You're not Bounds by having to know every single thing about what you need to run your application and you can just run your application API driven deployment can speed up your feedback loops from What you think is happening what you think should be happening and That that loop back is important for Moving more quickly with your deployments your application development and your overall performance as a system so So a large part of also moving to this model is As an organization following it at the organization level To an agile transformation Like the infrastructure itself is making a transition to and then you're hoping to push ownership of these services into the teams that are developing them and You're not having to deal with Services that you may or may not know anything about at an operations level or at the IT level and allow The application team to deploy to the API know that their system should be up and running Know that when they fail they might be able to make their own update their own iteration on that and and manage how their service is working independent of the platform that it's running on another very important functionality that this is providing for us is the ability to run our underlying opera in from our underlying Technology stack that these applications are running on anywhere. We want to and our API in front helps to orchestrate the need the place where that Container service may run for example this represents two different things It represents exactly the same thing in two different places. So DC us and Miso's running in AWS DCs and Miso's running on-premise bare metal in the class are Front-end endpoint into what is on-premise can reuse The enterprise class net scalers that we already know as an organization and already utilize throughout our on-premise infrastructure and an ELB in front of how we get into our stack within on But the abstraction layer allows you to post your payload to the overall system and make a choice as to where you want to put it or Via business logic within the API itself help you choose the best place to run this In that, you know, you might need access to data that can't live in the cloud in the healthcare industry possibly and so you need to run on-premise, but You can rely on platform in both places is exactly the same You know Miso's fear says operating system everywhere operating system in the cloud this Is the the the place where we are and where we're more moving to So a big thing in the model if the big thing on our challenge is silos of information Giant Oracle databases that contain all of this important information But there's no way there's no easy way to work with it in any model outside of SQL queries in Oracle and the way you get You know information out of that relational database, you know, you can hire all of the super super talented SQL Jedi's you can but you still only have that data in our case not only in one place, but only in one place a bunch of times and You know when you have your data like that it is possible to affect Other places where that data other places where you need to get that data in negative ways it makes it hard and so You know a goal of our data layer is to extract that out of those silos and Give the application developers their choice of where they need their data and how they need it and Write their applications to more effectively use sources so they can expand it out put it all back together tie it together and and then Bring it back into the data silo right now bring it back into the monolith for its overall storage an interaction with our product as a whole or You know expose it out of some new service that That enhances our overall offerings to our customers Internally one of the ways that we do that is I Guess I learned this morning the smack stack but components of that smack stack Where we can stream data out of Oracle from on-premise and move it into the cloud and transform it in ways that make it much more useful and Then services then can be deployed to use the data in that manner instead of having to call Back onto on-prem select the data out of the big data silo Figure out what to do with it the data is coming streaming in it's being processed and transformed and it can be put back to where it needs to be to Enhance the overall You know data records of patients in a doctor's office or or something along those lines You give the application developer the ability to choose the right place to put its data or the right way to use its data Instead of limiting them to this this one way or no way Methodology so Just taking a quick look here And this song I just kind of describe one of the ways that we might be able to do this again We have our big silo of information And we can take that data out do processing and spark There's a layer this source agnostic CDC For example one way that we're transforming data out and distributing them amongst doesn't matter what what where the data is going necessarily could be on-premise could be in the cloud Pulling the data out with Kafka streaming it using Kafka mirror maker to distribute it very quickly to our other locations of our platform using spark to do Interesting data transformation or processing information on that storing it back into new data stores within the platform itself it might go from Oracle to Kafka to elastic search to spark back to elastic search to Neo4j and You Get that data out of the silo in a really efficient way And then you can distribute it across your platform which your platform might be distributed across many different locations So with that there is a little bit of a demo here and What we will see is our Business logic API endpoints into these two platforms Where the application developer can Define their marathon task In a way where they can either choose the destination and they want their application to be deployed to And and or multiple locations and have a single API interaction, but be able to Interact with all of our multiple platform locations to perform that and I'll just let it play Hopefully we can glean from this What is happening? And if and if we do end up with questions, I definitely can kind of answer this But basically it starts out with a API post asking for what are my environments available and that it returns that I have this Available in a playground. I have it in Bedford, which is one of our data centers And I also have a dev environment which would be located in AWS. I can define my job and in that marathon task I can Give these Clues to where I want my job to run how I want to run it what's happening when I run it This hopefully is going to be posted and We have a success it is created I can go back to my API and Ask the environment for The status of What I have running Fonts really small on my side too, so we're getting to basically what we're doing is interacting with launching a service in Two different locations with a similar With the same Definition of the task we get information back we know that how many instances are running in both environments and We're seeing that we're in two different environments This is the same API interaction for the same service running in two different locations and and What we'll also be able to see is that we can post the API to manage the the scale of that and In the end We have one place where a Developer can interact with many systems across the Environment so Planning is definitely a key to this just Moving the monolith to somewhere else isn't necessarily the answer Making Lots of POCs to experiment with technologies is really important Some other challenges service discovery and load balancing is always going to be hard Start small start with Small components of your application stack that you may Have or or not and then once you are starting to get the handle of that your organization has made that transition into this new model of Deploying services and creating services and then you can come back to your monolith and start pulling chunks out of it in a much more effective and much more easy way and You know the other thing that is difficult that you want to talk about sooner than later is is you know ownership of who's who's on call for what and You know instead of just typically throwing it over the wall to operations This Plan might help you better serve that and help to break apart your monolith so With that If there are any questions, I'm Aaron at Salinas on Twitter and Does anyone have any questions? You mentioned moving applications and you also talked about the whole idea of streaming data out using spark and stuff It's cool. It's you know a materialized view and like Writing applications for like new stuff, but it doesn't really address that one of the original Problems that you talked about in the very beginning, which is the user sharding User sharding deploying new instances of Oracle to be able to handle more users because you can't grow Oracle in play and then another issue is that all that data that's been streamed out is only it's read only in general You're not going to be able to stream it backwards back into Oracle and figure out which shard to go to and that kind of stuff Or can you I don't know that's what I'm asking I hope you have a similar problem because we also that user is so fundamental We can't just break out the users into some users service because it's too Fundamental to the the monolith right but from the monolith you might be able to break out the authentication component Or you might be able to break out a smaller component over time and pull that out and just like the streaming Wouldn't be done processing the the processing would be done bark Times the streaming in our case is being done using Kafka and out of that and and in that as well Hopefully and in our case There can be an API in front back into the original data source And so you can stream the data out Process the data Transform it into an answer for what you want and then post it to an API That then gets consumed back into your original data source. That's also rewrite bit about the sharding though any ideas and how Your company's gonna help shard So with my knowledge base I can't actually answer that question as far as the overall structure of how they want to consume data back into the whole of Athena net but You know, that's a good question. It's probably answered many different ways, of course But I don't think that streaming data out of a data source Necessarily means that you can't put data back into that same data source after it's been processed in some way The key I think the takeaway would be try to make it as an API Where you can post back to some location and then that that service or that logic is able to determine the proper place to store Again, thank you. Yep. All right. Well, thank you very much