Well, well, well, returning listeners and new listeners how you do and how you live and how you're feeling now if you consider yourself an anxious person this episode is for you. Okay, if you deal with anxiety, if you know someone who deals with anxiety, if you have that nervous tension within the body, these intrusive thoughts excessive worry scenario building thinking about the future avoiding social situations for fear of embarrassment that might yet that you might fail that you might do something wrong. This episode is for you. Now, I would never label any person with an emotion. So I just said that for simplicity sake, you know, an anxious person, a happy person, a sad person, a depressed person, emotion. The word motion is in the word emotion. All right. Our feelings are in constant flow. Even if you consider yourself an anxious person, I'm sure there's times where you do get relief if not only when you're sleeping. So how can you be an anxious person when you're not anxious exactly 100% of the time? See, you know what I'm saying? So you're not an anxious person. You're a person that might experience anxiety. And first of all, I just want to start with saying that's okay. Let's start with where people are when speaking about mental health rather than where we think they should be. See, that's why I cringe sometimes when I see other coaches and other people in the mental health space and I don't want to name specific names. That's not what this is about. I have my own little process. I like to give you the power and you the tools. What good is it if I just tell you what to do and then you do it? First of all, that's not very empowering, but it's not really fun. I can't go into someone's mind and turn the gears. At some point, an individual needs to make the choice, needs to make the decision to turn those gears themselves. Now I can give you a little screwdriver. I can give you a bit of grease to make those gears turn a little better. Okay, but the person needs to do it. And you know what? That's the fun part. That's the part where people see growth and they get excited. They say, oh my gosh, I did that on my own. Right? I was given a little nudge. I did it on my own. I'm feeling relief. My gosh, I'm capable of so much. I have more control than I thought. Right? The wind doesn't break me every storm. Okay, I don't get burnt by the sun every time the clouds move. I have strength within me. And that's the fun part about conversing and being a coach for these people who deal with anxiety. We're on the same level, everyone. Okay, there is no hierarchy in this. And that's where I think, through maybe through Hollywood and what we watch on TV, it's like therapist is here and then patient is lying on the leather couch.  And the patient who's getting the pills is down there. And the pharmacist is like, okay, I'm giving you the pills, but you'll wait down there. Only people who are like me can be up here. Right? The classic Seinfeld bit. It's amazing. We're on the same level here when it comes to anxiety. So I want to speak to you as a human being, as someone just like me with those same psychological needs. And I've been there. I know what it's like. And I still get there. A person who doesn't experience some anxiety is flatlined. We need anxiety. It helps us stay alive. But of course, like any emotion, it doesn't help if I was happy all the time. That's not a life. That's not a life. If you're depressed all the time, that's not a life. If you're anxious all the time, that's not a life. The point is if you're stuck in that state of anxiety, that's that you're not getting the most out of what life has to offer and what you can offer to life and what you can offer to others. All right. It's about getting unstuck in that anxious state and being in that nice flow and being content with those emotions that come and they go, oh, I could cry just talking about it. So first of all, I just want to say it's okay if you feel anxious. That's all I want to say to you right now. It's okay if you feel jittery. It's okay if you're worried right now, because you know what? By all, by all statistics, the majority of statistics, we live in an amazing time, sanitation, less people are starving, right? Food availability, okay? We have cars, we have computers, we can talk to people across the world. We're going to go to Mars, we went to the moon. This is amazing stuff. But sometimes that logic doesn't help because it's too far gone. It's too out of our reach. We're like, yeah, I know we're going to Mars, but I've never met Elon Musk and I've never been in the shuttle. That doesn't help me with this grand perspective. Anxiety starts within us. We need to feel content. We need to love ourselves first. We need to get excited for life first. We need to love ourselves and know that we have something to offer. We have meaning in our lives that can be shared if we decide to share it. So as you know, my friends, I'm going to continue with that tangent because I feel for people who are dealing with anxiety.  I've never gone like, you know, from A to Z with my story of anxiety and depression. So stay tuned for that. But again, there's no ads or sponsors on this channel. I just want to make a quick little plug in this episode. 12 years in the making, 12 years ever since that anxiety diagnosis and depression diagnosis and me being the human guinea pig for all things imaginable. To understand these mental illnesses, these emotions, how to mitigate these feelings, to understand them, to go deeper into them, what works, what doesn't work. Well, after 12 years, I've put together an online course called Conquer Anxiety, the Mind Body Method. That's right. I'm so excited. Should we should we announce that with like some some cool music? Let's let's use Beethoven in this. How about the sixth symphony? How about that? How about, OK, let's try that again. And my friends, actually, let's do a calm, calm announcement. OK, this course is going to blow your mind, but let's just have fun with it. OK, let's try this again. Ready? OK, get back, relax. Here we go. My friends. I like to announce something to you today. Coming out with an anxiety course. It's called Conquer Anxiety, the Mind Body Method. And you're listening to this on 96.3, the classical wave of brilliance. Maybe that even made you calm. I think it'd be great in the course if that if that made you feel soothed. No, but seriously, 12 years in the making, I wanted to come out with something that wasn't rushed. Obviously, after 12 years, this wasn't rushed. I want to be proud of something. I stand by this course 100 percent to deal with anxiety, to overcome anxiety, to conquer anxiety. You can't just come out with this stuff in a week. You can't just read a book and then decide to come out with a course. This took a long time. This is well thought out. This is going to resonate and help so many people. There's already hundreds on the wait list. So. Conquer Anxiety, the Mind Body Method, if you're interested in this course, that's unlike anything that's out there. I wouldn't have come out with a course if I knew there was something better, because then I just honestly tell you all, hey, look, if you're dealing with anxiety, go do this course. It's going to help so much because I've done that too. And no course helped me. Therapy wasn't even as helpful as I thought it could have been and maybe even should have been. It didn't help. Everything that I've learned over the past 12 years is in this course. Step by step, how to overcome anxiety.  So if you want to join that wait list and I hope you get in because I'm only taking a handful of students because I want an intimate environment. We're going to have people from all over the world who come in, who are going to be on that same mission, that same pilgrimage, understand what what anxiety feels like, track each other's progress, see how we're doing live streams with me. This is going to be so much fun.  And I wouldn't have come out with this if I wasn't ready and I didn't think it would be helpful. So if you want to join that wait list, it's conqueranxietycourse.com. Conquer C-O-N-Q-U-E-R course. No, I messed that up. Conquer anxiety. Let's just leave that blooper in. And I don't like editing. Conqueranxietycourse.com. So conquer C-O-N-Q-U-E-R and then anxiety, even just the word anxiety makes us anxious. You know what I mean? A-N-X-I-E-T-Y and then course, C-O-U-R-S-E. It's like we're in a spelling bee. We never had those in school. Maybe I went to the wrong school. We never had those. Did you have spelling bees? Is it more of an American thing? I'm not sure. In Canada, we're a little weird up here. We just we just were taught to hunt beavers and live in the woods. So if that if you want to join the wait list, please go to that URL. Conqueranxietycourse.com and all you do is put your name or sorry, just your just your email into the wait list. And then you're going to get all the email updates. I'm coming with a six part video series just for you. Six part video series that actually gets you started on your own journey through the mind body method, like step by step. It's going to be amazing. I'm so excited to hear your feedback and to meet people and to work with you and to watch your progress, my gosh, because I did a video a few days ago and it makes me emotional and it also, you know, brings up a little bit of anger that people who deal with anxiety or any any kind of mental issue, they have you have so much to offer to the world like you have so much. Your ideas are original. I want to hear your ideas. I want to hear your perspectives.  Like we need you out there. The world wants you out there. And it's weird because the people I don't want to talk bad about anyone. OK, but when I go to like social gatherings or events, networking events, parties, I'm like the people that I want to hang out with right now are probably at home and too anxious to come out. But those are the people with the cool ideas. Right. The anxious people, correct me if I'm wrong, but the sympathetic nervous systems when people are anxious are through the roofs. They're very active, but we're perfectionists. We want everything to be just like so. We need to line up the world like so. You have cool ideas to organize the world. You have creative ideas. I know that. There's talents within you that maybe aren't being expressed because of anxiety. And that's what makes me emotional. That's Kelly Brogan and I were talking about that video and podcast episode to be released soon. We were talking about that. It's like people bogged down by anxiety and depression have so much to offer. And I feel like it's my passion to help get your talents and your personality and your ideas out into the world for not not for the world.  So, listen, the course is unlike anything else out there. Again, I wouldn't have created it if I knew there was something better. And here's the big deal with it. It's fun. I know it sounds weird, but I'm a weird guy. The course is fun. If it was a serious course, like the tools you're going to learn, the exercises you're going to learn and the regimes, the morning regime before bed to get better night's sleep, how to start your morning to embrace a sense of calm that lasts the day. These are things that are fun to learn. If it was just me doing a screen recording and speaking monotone, you're not going to get a lot out of it, but it's fun. We do fun exercises. We don't take ourselves too seriously, which actually reduces anxiety because people who are anxious think that the world revolves around them, not out of narcissism, but you put the pressure of the world on you because one failure, one mistake, one wrong note. And my gosh, the world will crumble. So, my friends, you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.  So the course is fun. And that's why people complete it because it's fun and you get results along the way and you have a community of support and understanding.  It needs to be exciting or else people won't do it. It's just like when you were forced to listen to Shakespeare. Did you do that at school? Did you have to learn Shakespeare? I did. And the teacher was terrible. And we just read Shakespeare at our desks. You can't understand Shakespeare by reading it and with a bunch of high school students. It wasn't fun. Therefore, studying for a subject that isn't taught well, that isn't fun and exciting. You don't put work into it. You don't put time into it. When something is fun, you're going to want to study. You're going to want to do more. Therefore, the more you do in the right way, the better results. So that's enough of that. I really hope to see you on the wait list. And I hope you get into the course. It's conqueranxitycourse.com. It's going to be all over my social media within the next few weeks as I talk about a little more, because I'm so dang excited. So thanks a lot for going to that website. If you pause in your back, you put your email in, that's amazing. Now, let's talk more about anxiety.  Like the world doesn't care about what we're doing. But the world is too anxious for us to take part in. And that's living in the world of anxiety. Like, have you ever watched the news? Have you seen what's going on in the world? The world is in an anxious state. I feel like if we zoomed out that pale blue dot, that Carl Sagan pale blue dot, right, if we zoomed out on the world, I swear it would be shaking right now and the atmosphere would be crumbling. But it feels like an anxious time. And again, I want to say, first of all, that's okay. Start in a place of compassion. That's okay that you feel anxious. But why? I know, don't get mad at me. But really, why are you anxious? Have you asked yourself that? Because a lot of the time our answer is, I don't know why I'm anxious. I'm just anxious. And then, yo, fair enough, fair enough. Because what happens is, okay, here's an example. There's like two different ways memories work. Memories can actually be stored in the amygdala, those almond shaped things in our brains. And then memories can be stored in the frontal cortex. Okay, now memories in the cortex are emotional memories. Okay, but that we actually have the memory of. Okay, so if you were in the sandbox, I'm going to use an example. The last time I got stung by a bee, I was in a sandbox in my hometown and I tried to hit it with this. I remember it was a yellow plastic shovel. But if memory serves me right, it probably wasn't a yellow shovel. It probably wasn't even a shovel at all. If we look back about, we get about 50% of our memories are incorrect when we when we look back in time, which is why I witnessed testimony so bad. It's like it was a blue car that hit me. Actually, sir, it was a green car and it wasn't even a car. It was a it was a Ford pickup. So anyways, I was in the sandbox. Let's just pretend my memories. Right, swung for the bee, hit me right on the cheek. I remember going inside my mom put cream on me. I'm crying. Now, if I think about that, maybe today I'm anxious when I see a bee. But I can know that. OK, that's because of that memory. I had a bad experience with that bee and I'm afraid it'll happen again. OK, that's our cortex memory. The amygdala, we get anxious, sometimes out of nowhere. But we don't know the memory that's attached to that. The amygdala doesn't store that for us. So if we go to a party and we get anxious and we're just like, why? Anxiety came out of nowhere at times. This might be. Yeah, we did have a bad experience at a party years ago. We can't attach a memory to it. So we automatically think I don't know why I'm anxious. So my friends, that again, just having that knowledge now for you. That might help you say, OK, if I'm anxious and I don't know why, maybe there is some type of past experience that's making me say, hey, Scott, maybe there's a threat here just to let you know. I'm going to increase your heart rate a little bit. I'm going to tighten up that stomach. OK, now scan the area. OK, it's OK that you're anxious. Look for the threat. OK, I just wanted to warn you a little bit. OK, no threat. OK, now let's do an exercise to calm us down to increase that capacity to to lower our heart rates to activate our parasympathetic nervous systems to get back into the moment through the breath. Right. And that's how that works. So knowledge, my friends, understanding anxiety and asking yourself why is a very powerful tool. But even the I don't know, but then taking the next step and knowing this amygdala and cortex memory, that brings it makes sense now that you don't know. So we have to we have we have different steps of understanding anxiety. And we go through all of this in a course in the course. That's just one thing and it reassures you. Everyone wants reassurance today. That's about living in the anxious world today, too. And oh, my gosh, can I just stretch my shoulders real quick? Hold on. I don't want to edit this. So I'm just going to do this exercise right now. I did some heavy heavy bands yesterday for a workout. And my traps are just just so tight. I'm going to get the heating pad on there and do some stretches. OK, thanks for letting me stretch. So we're living in an anxious world, meaning that, OK, we ask ourselves, why are we anxious? We have this step one, step two process of actually knowing, knowing anxiety and what that feels like. And we want that reassurance. That's OK. But think about the world we live in now with covid, with everything that's going on in politics, with elections, with the environment, with our safety. We want reassurance, but we can't get it. We can't get it from the news. The news never gives you reassurance. Actually, it's the news job to not reassure you to keep you in a state of fear. So we need to do the work, my friends. And it's amazing because it's so probable, not even possible. It's probable you can do the work of reassurance. OK, that's where this OK. Let me give you another quick cognitive shortcut. And this was I spoke about this years ago in a YouTube video. I share the shortcut with every every talk I give, even to kids. It's great for kids, but it works for adults, too. It's with these negative thoughts that we experience and these things that let's just say psych us out of the moment. OK, one thought can trigger another. We follow this chain and we just get into a place that we don't want to be. We're completely removed from the moment. We need to ask ourselves the three words is this useful. OK, remember those three words. It's a quick cognitive shortcut. OK, when we have a negative thought, an intrusive thought or any thought for that matter, if we ask ourselves when the thought comes in, is this useful? Well, nine point nine times out of 10, my friends, the answer is going to be no. No, the thought isn't useful.  I ask myself, is this useful? I say, no, that's not a useful thought. That's not helping me achieve my goals. That's not that's not helping me calm down. That's not helping me connect with this person I'm speaking to. That's not going to help me get a raise at work, whatever your values are. That's not aligning with my values. And what happens is you ask yourself, is this useful?  And what happens is, oh, my gosh, we rewire our brains this way, my friends, because every time a thought comes in, right, you ask yourself, is this useful? Now, not every thought. OK, but we develop a practice with this. Is this useful? And then you say, yeah, that's a useful thought. That was a good thought. That thought made me think about something else. That thought actually made me work a little harder, work smarter. That thought actually pushed me to do this. That thought made me feel good. That thought reassured me. We say, yes, that's a good thought. And as we continue to do this in practice, yes or no, is this useful? The good thoughts stick. Not the bad ones anymore. Not the ones we follow down the chain. The good thoughts stick in our mind. We rewire our brains that way. It starts with us asking those questions. OK, so that's one. I want you to remember that trick. Is this useful when you have those intrusive thoughts, when you have those negative thoughts, thoughts of self-doubt. Self-doubt takes form in the mind, in cognition. It takes control of us thinking, why do you think you'd be able to do that? How dare you think you could do that? You're not good enough to accomplish this. Who gives you the right to do that? Why should you get that job? Right? Why would you be the life of the party? Why would you be the funny guy? Why do you think you can be funny? Why do you think you're the best? Why do you think you're cool? Why like we bring ourselves down? And then we answer the thought like, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, why did I even think I could do that now that I think about it more, right? I can't do that. We psych ourselves out. So the is this useful trick brings you into state of curiosity. You challenge those thoughts and then the good ones stick. So I hope you think that's that's helpful too. And that brings that reassurance. We're living in a world of anxiety. People are anxious. We're not alone in that emotion. But we can't look to the world for the solution. We need to take responsibility ourselves. And we've been told this told and sold this narrative that anxiety is something that you have to live with forever. That's it. Anxiety is something it's a mental illness. You have to live with it forever. There's nothing you can do with it other than take a pharmaceutical. You know my position on pharmaceuticals. Sometimes they work wonders for people. That's fine. That's fine. But it's not the only option. See in Canada we don't have pharmaceutical commercials. I remember it multiple times traveling to the US. I'll be in hotels or I'll be at a person's place and you turn on the TV. And actually in my condo I see. Yeah of course recently we have an antenna and we actually get stations in New York and Buffalo because it's right across the right across the lake and it's pharmaceutical commercials all the time. We're not allowed to have that in Canada. So when I see these US channels and it's pharmaceutical pharmaceutical commercials if you deal with depression here's a pill. If you deal with anxiety here's a pill. We always look for the magic pill. We always look for the quick fix. The truth is anxiety takes work. Well-being is a skill. Well-being is a skill. It's a habit. We need to put in the effort. We need to put in the work. Now what people don't tell you and why people get psyched out and they're like I don't want to do the work though. I just I'd rather take the pill. Well of course because when we use the word work we think of work. Hope that wasn't too loud. We think of work and so many people hate their jobs and they don't like work. Work means sweat. Work means stress.  Work is negative in our culture. Work is not negative when it comes to healing from anxiety. At least not in my experience. That's why in my course just to plug it one more time because I freaking love it. Like I absolutely love it. It's supposed to be fun. The work has to be fun for people to do it. So of course a pill is easier and may not be as effective but it's easy and people can continue going on with their lives. What if the work to deal with anxiety was fun. People looked forward to it. Oh my goodness. People look forward to it then you make time for it. It's not like oh I better go do this exercise because it's going to help me rather than oh I just have to pop a pill take the water go back to work. No we need to make these things fun for people so it's long lasting so it's sustainable. We're so backwards today aren't we? Like it's no wonder. And this isn't pointing fingers at you. And remember it's okay if you feel anxious right now but it's no wonder the world is anxious. It's not surprising to me why people are depressed and anxious. It makes so much sense why people are anxious and depressed. Doesn't it make sense to you? Let's ask why again. Why are people generally more anxious and depressed than ever before? Look at the state of our world and how people are living their lives. Our values are way out of whack.  We save our money to get the latest iPhone rather than buying healthier food rather than saving up to go to therapy. We'd rather the latest phone. We'd rather different clothes. We'd rather get a boob job. Unbelievable. Our priorities are way out of whack. I see people just the cars they drive in the city and I'm like even if I was a billionaire and mark my words if I ever become a billionaire, I don't really want to but let's say it happens. I will drive a Honda Civic. Mark my words my friends. I'm actually, you know what? I'll probably drive a Prius. Amazing fuel economy. Why are our priorities the way that they are? We don't value human connection. We value video games and don't get me wrong. I love video games, okay? All right, any Call of Duty Warzone players out there? Okay, hit me up. I love them but it shouldn't take place of human connection. See, so we're prioritizing the wrong stuff. We're prioritizing like technology over human connection and fast food over healthy food and sitting down over exercise. So look at the state of the world right now and then we'll ask why people are depressed. Okay, so the number one killer of human beings in the West in the US is sugar, okay? Heart disease, okay? And obesity, all right? That kills more people than gun violence. By a long shot, it's sugar, it's our diet, okay? We're sitting for way longer than we used to. We all have desk jobs. We're sitting indoors, okay? We're not exposed to sunlight. Every, I'm not gonna say every single Canadian. The majority of Canadians have low vitamin D levels. We're inside all the time. We're not getting enough sunlight. That's not even during the winter months. During the summer months, we're not getting outside enough and getting sunshine. Our vitamin D levels, then we don't even know what to eat. We're eating the wrong foods. We all have these very high carb diets which spike our blood sugar, make us feel more anxious and then we crash and we're eating more because we're not actually satiated from the carbohydrates. They give us the temporary energy we need and then they go right through us. What we should be doing is having more healthy fats and proteins, whether it's animal protein or plant protein, that's okay. But we have refined sugars. We have so much dairy, right? We have all of these carbohydrates in our diet that don't actually do much for our bodies and brains. So all of that combined, mixed with more people than ever living alone right now. Okay, so there's less actual friend groups and social connection, okay? Mix that with the state of the world of this pandemic. Okay, we got another thing on top. Mix that with, I think, one of the biggest things if we're gonna stack this on top, I'd put this at like number one or two, social media use, put that on top. With social comparison, we're like feeling like we're not good enough. Like the data on social media and anxiety disorders and depression is in. It's terrible for us. It's absolutely terrible. It's wiring our brains completely different. It's completely messing up our dopamine response. It's, because every light, you get a little shot of dopamine. And what happens is, this is why these dopamine detoxes are so powerful now, is you take a break off social media, you start to feel better immediately.  So let's combine all of these factors with lack of exercise, with lack of sunlight, with lack of proper food, and with social media use, and lack of good sleep because we're on our phones all day and then at night. Now let me ask you, does it make sense why people are depressed and anxious? Of course, of course. Now who can we point a finger at? That's the tough one. Now we take as much responsibility as we can, but a lot of the time the knowledge isn't out there. Like that the food pyramid told us that we need to have dairy every single serving, that we should have a glass of milk with every meal, that we need to have whole grains, and we all know now that the food pyramid could actually be flipped and fats should be at the bottom and proteins, dairy shouldn't even be on there. Unless you're breastfeeding, children don't need milk. Adults don't need cow milk. And I wish I could interview Dr. Joanne Cacciatore again because she's a vegan and I'd love to hear. She's been a vegan since the 70s.  She still looks 30. Dr. Joanne, if you're listening, you look great. I don't know if you were, maybe she was born in the 70s. Yeah, she's not old at all. Okay, let's move on from that. But you know what I mean? Science changes, we need to learn these different things as we continue to live. So what's happening is people are still living this way with screens, with not enough exercise, with the same diet. We're not evolving as a species as we should. We're still monkeys. We have this reptilian brain, that's gonna be in another episode, but we are still people with 200,000 year old brains and now we have cars and cell phones.  Like, we have a 200,000 year old brain and the iPhone came out in 2007. Like, our brains don't know what to do with this stuff. It's no wonder we have trouble calming down. It's no wonder that we're an anxious species. So we need the tools, we need the exercises, we need the knowledge, we need to understand what anxiety means for us and how to mitigate and understand and overcome these feelings. So I'll plug it one more time. That's what the course goes through. There's gonna be a lot more information as well as a six-part video series coming out. Make sure you're on that email wait list for the course. I can't wait to actually meet you face to face or at least via Zoom when we do the live streams in the course. I can't wait to meet you. I wanna end on a softer note. Cause I always get carried away with this stuff. Cause it's a passion. And when you care about certain things, that's when arguments happen, right? No one argues with another individual. It usually happens when two are passionate about different things. Cause you wanna defend your position. You're so passionate about it. So you think you're right. And if the other person disagrees, well, of course you're gonna fight it. Arguments and disagreements come from passion. Energy comes from passion. And I'm passionate about this stuff. So thanks a lot for listening. It's an anxious world. But the good news is you actually have the power. Sorry to swallow there. It's gonna burp. You actually have the power. You have the intelligence. You have the capacity to overcome it. It's not a life sentence.  It's about mental illness. It's about labels. It's about putting people into boxes. It's about saying anxiety is a mental illness that you live with and people telling their stories and not actually learning. Not actually taking a step forward into a new direction. Not the same path, forging a new path of understanding, of growing spiritually, physically, emotionally, whatever it may be. We don't need to stay on the same path of disorders. That's why my conversation with Dr. Kelly Brogan was so awesome because she's anti-pharmaceutical and it's cool to just get a new perspective. We have to be curious about these things. Open mind, we have to value our health more than anything.  It's only until people get unhealthy that they value their health more than anything. That's it. Once people get sick, money doesn't matter. Of course, money doesn't matter. You trade all the money in the world to just have one more healthy day.   What would you do? How much would you pay to not have cancer? They'd be like, take all my savings. Health is everything, my friends. Unfortunately, we realize that too late in our lives. To just end off, I'd like to thank you all for listening, for taking the time that does mean a lot to me. It really does. I'd like to thank you for your emails, for your messages and I'll see you all in the course. And again, I just wanna let you know that if you feel anxious, that if you deal with these things, that's okay.   It's okay where you are right now. You have to be somewhere first in order to get somewhere else. So it's all right. Stay strong. Keep being you. Don't forget to express yourself. This is Scott St. Marie, signing off. Bye-bye.


From the beginning, we recognized that this was going to be a highly regulated industry. MJ Freeway is the best innovator and best partner that anybody can have. We really kind of stuck our neck out in the beginning. I mean, my brother owns a software company and I was trying to talk him into this very same thing and he was like, nah, I'm not going to do that. It's too much of a risk. We are still operating at a federally illegal market and one of the things that we like to say is that our job is to make sure that our clients know that we've got their back because they wake up and break federal law every single day. As a cannabis manufacturer, do you use business insights to help you make important decisions? Well, you'll need them if you want to work smarter and MJ Platform can help you do just that. Well, in any business that's going to be growing, you've got to have a backbone of your business and they're going to be able to manage your business from end to end. We call it seed to sale in cannabis. MJ Freeway, the platform, is our second generation. It's an enterprise resource planning solution. So it helps businesses run their operations more efficiently and also track all of the necessary required data. I guess I would say MJ Freeway is, for lack of a better word, groundbreaking. I mean, we really started the seed to sale tracking system. So in starting the company, we wanted to give businesses tools to help them make their business successful and sustainable. But we also really wanted to give them tools to ensure that they can easily comply with all the regulations facing them. It's cool to see two intelligent women like that who are, again, sticking their necks out before others. The fact that they like to work together and that they see the vision of this industry and it's not just about being on top, it's about actually helping everybody get there with us. They both have an incredible amount of passion and integrity. And I think to me that's everything. In late 2009, I had invested in one of the very first legally licensed dispensaries in Colorado. And as the investor owner who owned an IT company, they asked me to choose what software to run in their business. And there was nothing I could find that was a good choice for us to run in this business. And I was in Telluride, Colorado, where Amy and I both lived at one point in time. I had since moved away visiting over New Year's Eve 2009. And we talked about using her web development firm or some of her engineers to maybe build this product that was needed for these brand new dispensaries in this emerging industry. And at the time we said, we'll do some market research and then we'll decide if we're going to pursue this business. But we drank a lot of champagne and stayed inside and just totally whiteboarded the business and bought our domain names and decided really what was later to become MJ Freeway. When we first started, it was definitely a stigma. We had trouble hiring people. We've talked about that before that lots of people, some of the people who had worked for me previously in my other company, when I asked them to come work on this new venture, they didn't want to and would say things like, what would I tell my kids? I remember vividly living in Atlanta, Georgia when I first started the business and I remember hiding that this was the business I was in. Some of the time I would make that decision. I remember being asked like at kid birthday parties, so what do you do? And sometimes I would say, I have an HRP software business. I think for me one of the biggest challenges at the beginning was I still had my other business as Jessica did and this was a side project and we really had to cross that hurdle in late 2010 of determining is this going to be enough of a thing that it's worth stepping aside from exiting the other business. And that was a huge leap of faith and a very scary one because MJ Freeway was not making enough money to support us to pay us salaries at that time. So we really had to bank on what we saw was the future. This is the first of many double downs. Yes. So the history is really very interesting about how cannabis came to be a prohibited substance. It was actually motivated by big agricultural, primarily the cotton and tobacco industries and there was concern there both about hemp from the cotton industry because hemp was such an interesting fiber, uses so much less water, has so many more applications as a textile and of course tobacco was concerned about the smokable nature of cannabis. So those industries really propelled the U.S. towards this idea of reformadness and then ultimately propelled the U.S. into an international treaty that was what prompted the classification of cannabis as a Schedule I drug. The original campaigns were all around the idea of safer and all the big billboards said safer on them and it was based on an overwhelming wealth of research and evidence that indicated that marijuana is actually safer than alcohol or nicotine or some other products. But they changed the direction and the wording of that campaign from safer to tax and regulate it like alcohol. Tax and regulate it like alcohol was a sea change for the movement for the industry and in the adoption of the idea of we can do this product safely. From a cautionary standpoint we have seen some states try to raise the taxes too high and when you raise the taxes too high that's where we've seen black or gray market pop back up. They have to be careful to not get too greedy there because if they do it'll just push everyone back to the black market and undercut everything that we've been doing. Are you a cannabis grower or producer? Do you process marijuana or infuse products? Are you part of a collective dispensary or legal cannabis retailer? Do you have government compliance requirements for your marijuana business? Every country in the U.S. that has any kind of cannabis regulation Every state in the U.S. Every state in the U.S. Every state in the U.S. They feel like little mini-country stocks because their regulations are so different from state to state. They do. Every state has their own regulatory structure. There's no real consistency around that. So our compliance team spends a tremendous amount of time trying to keep up on what's happening with every state. Our clients who operate in multiple states have a lot of challenge with that as well trying to run a business with consistency when the rules are different on the playing field for every market in which you operate. You know we've seen different states have different attitudes towards enforcement as well. So there are some where in the tiniest infraction like the font on your label is not exactly the right size and they'll shut a business down until it's fixed. States are really not equipped to deal with this kind of thing. They've never had to regulate this kind of thing before. You know it just doesn't exist. There are no other products that have these similar kinds of qualities. Our involvement with the National Cannabis Industry Association through Jessica sitting on the board has really helped us to be part of the effort to educate states and NCIA has become a resource for quite a number of states where they reach out to industry and say okay we're starting our regulations what do we need to be aware of and then industry can provide feedback. You need to consider this equivalency factor. You know trust us you'll be sorry if you don't. That kind of thing. We want enough regulation that we can keep moving the cause forward but not so much that it stifles the ability for new people to get involved or makes the price so high that small operators can't afford to be in the cannabis industry. So 2011, pretty much the whole year we spent trying to fundraise and we did go to banks. We went to private VCs. We went to people who were interested in funding the cannabis industry but at that time you know that was a much less regulated, a much more scary market. The cannabis market was for investors. So there had been no federal statement that gave anybody any feeling of security. The regulatory structures were just starting to come out and we talked to many many individuals who were very excited about investing in us and then when they talked to their lawyer or their accountant the program got nixed. We ended up securing some bridge funding, some loans that got us through to profitability in early 2012. Be clear we signed for those individually. That's true. Severely and lively. I truly believe that our very biggest mistake in that first full year of operating MJ Freeway full time was in believing that we would be treated differently because we were a technology and compliance company that we wouldn't be tarred with the same brush as the rest of the cannabis industry and that just did not prove to be true. Not only could we not get funding but we lost our credit card processing three times that year We had to change banking relationships. Our insurance cancelled us and we had to get different insurance. We had all these hurdles that we thought we would be immune to. I totally agree and it's not just those kinds of relationships. We had trouble finding a company even to print t-shirts for our trade shows. I mean they didn't want to print anything that had a cannabis leaf on it. We lost our email marketing account because they didn't want to distribute emails that talked about cannabis. So there was discrimination at all levels, not just on the financial markets or investment markets. I think given the history of cannabis the fact that when prohibition was initially passed in the U.S. it was funded and organized by big agriculture and the campaign around that was all of this kind of reformadness idea.  So I think there's a generation of Americans who grew up with that idea and feel like cannabis is incredibly dangerous. Despite evidence to the contrary. So when you have that idea implanted in people's minds and then you have many, many years of it not being available, of it being you could only acquire it on the black market. If you were to party and your friends were passing around a joint, that was a big deal, that was scary, you were breaking the law. With that kind of cloud over it I think that attitude just kind of permeated a big chunk of our society for a large number of years.  I am just glad that we caught you boys before this became an everyday thing. Get it? What's to say for yourself? I'm starving! If you wanted to get one of the first medical licenses in Colorado you probably could have done it with $50,000 in credit cards. And today we see states that are doing things like requiring $2 million in escrow. So it's keeping a lot of people out of the industry, yes. And because you can't get a loan from a bank it's private wealth game. I think in cannabis it's really interesting too because minorities have been disproportionately affected by cannabis prohibition. The rates of people in jail for cannabis offenses is dramatically more impactful for people of color. Me mentoring is something that's really important because I believe that it's really the most effective way to actually make a difference whether it's increasing gender diversity in a company or in an industry or racial diversity, the programs that you see that are more formal like let's get more women in tech. Why can't we have more people of color? Those typically don't work because they often come from a much more punitive aspect and what people really need is that lifting up aspect. So the U.S. is in kind of an interesting position now because we have legislation at many many levels both state and local across the U.S. that creates a legal structure for cannabis yet we as a nation are still a signatory to this international ban on cannabis as well as other drugs which has put I think our international relations in an interesting position with other countries where we're trying to hold them to standards of this treaty around other drugs and yet they look at us and see that we're not upholding the treaty as relates to cannabis. I think that's one of the big hurdles that will have to be crossed and resolved before the U.S. can truly make a change at the federal level. Is it the position of the INCB do you consult with the DEA in the United States and say to them look what you've got as a Schedule 1 drug that shouldn't be there should be rescheduled or rescheduled because rescheduling will allow more medical research on it. And we reiterate it to the American government to look at the implementation of these prerequisites which are in the convention. So just two words. First it is allowed but under certain conditions and very often these conditions are not fulfilled. In short our problem for the United States when it comes to the medical use of cannabis. In fact because cannabis is Schedule 1 NIDA is the organization that is in charge of whether any grants can be issued for studying it and that makes it actually incredibly hard to study even for researchers who want to study it. So we had a client and we were going to do a massive medical study with the University of Arizona and the University of Arizona got a pretty stern absolutely not you can't do this study and it came down, it came down the pipe from farther up. So there are things like that that really impede the type of things that you need to show in order to be able to show progress and then you still look like you're on the fringes a bit. I feel like there's incredible scientific potential medicinal potential that we really really owe it to ourselves to explore and then also I kind of tend towards the libertarian side of the political spectrum and I just have it just makes the hair in the back of my neck stand up to say why is this why do we have why are we prohibiting the substance. There is an IRS tax code provision called 280E and 280E came about in the 80s when a very specific Colombian cocaine drug at Kingpin was expensing expenses related to his illegal enterprise and the tax provision that was written was that if your expenses relate to a Schedule I substance you cannot take those expenses and so the impact that that has had on cannabis and businesses today is that they're allowed to take their cost of goods sold but not their payroll or operating expenses and so it changes their tax rate from 28-30% to sometimes as high as 80 or 90% and it's just wrong. It's crippling to its problem so it really is. Sunday morning attackers took down both MJ Freeway's production and backup servers causing an outage for all our clients. I am incredibly sorry for the impact this has had on your businesses. Keeping our clients data secure has always been a top priority. In January we were the victim of a cyber attack. Our systems were hacked and it was truly devastating to the company and to our clients. Our team rallied to a humbling and awe inspiring degree truly but I certainly had that moment in the hours and days following that attack of saying I, thinking to myself I don't think we can come back from this. We did have two employees leave within two days after the attack because they didn't want to be here anymore but all the rest of it. Two out of 80. Everyone else buckled down and worked amazing hours and shifts and it was incredible. And our clients stayed with us too. We've only lost some. Many of those have since come back. They had tried to competitor for a couple months and then came back to us and the vast majority of our clients stayed with us. So I feel truly blessed to have great clients as well. They stayed right involved. They stayed right engaged. They're openly communicating and they've stood right up and said that we are the first to innovate but we're also the first to stumble. I mean we're not perfect. We make mistakes and software is not perfect. There is no business that is. But you lead by example. And I think that that gives a lot of confidence in the employees and the team members themselves because you don't have people that are standing behind the scenes. They're right out in front. You lead from the front. So thinking about the future, I mean I think for us one of our, kind of our path has always been to make sure that the company is as powerful as possible, that our reach is as extensive as possible by the time there's a change in the federal legislation. So that's really our moment. That's our inflection point for the future of the company and that's really what we're driving towards now. I think our inability to raise money back when we first tried to raise money in 2011 was a failure that has turned out to be incredibly invaluable to us over time. So because of that we were forced to take all these additional risks and to double down personally and loans and et cetera. But at the end of that we turned this company profitable in two and a half years which is very impressive. Paid back all of our loans within another year and ran the company profitably for another year before we accepted VC capital. And as a result of that we've been all the way through series B financing while still retaining over 50% of our company and that's really unheard of. Absolutely. And we would have taken the capital in a heartbeat back in 2011 and we would have a fraction of the ownership of our company today. As part of the industry it's incumbent on me to share what I can to help make sure that we're all successful. I really like feeling like I'm on the cutting edge, feeling like I'm making a difference. And what we're doing as a company is pushing this effort forward. We're getting to do our dream jobs. I love what we're doing and I love our team and I just hope we get to continue doing it.


Hello everybody, E here welcome back from the desk today. We're gonna talk about pacing but first and foremost I want to talk about where I'm at with my writing and upcoming things Right now as of last week The day I will it would have been Monday the day after I recorded last week's from the desk I submitted the final on my end It still has to go through their editing and proofreading at thunderstorm books But the final draft of everything is horrible now that book is now finally gone off to the publisher I'm happy with it the way it is. Does that mean they're gonna be happy with it? No, but we'll find out when we get there Many thanks again to Gregor Zane to Sarah Frost to Thomas Stromquist I think that's everybody who read it before I think that's everybody if I missed you I apologize So that's where I am with and I'm working on a new book now And I have another actually I have two more books marinating So at this point I have one gone off to the publisher one that I'm actively editing One that I'm actively writing and one that's marinating actually. I lied. I haven't started editing yet I will start editing it today. Anyways Come next month the end of next month July 25th through the 27th. I'm going to be at Hoover sci-fi fantasy fest the Hoover public library in Hoover, Alabama Anthony Vaca was nice and I hope I got your last name, right? Was nice enough to invite me And I will be a vendor and I'll be speaking on four different panels then in October And this has to go into the from the desks. That's why I'm not going to give you a time signature So you can jump ahead. This is important if you are here to find out how to be a a professional independent author and how to make money and how to live off your work I am the reason why I haven't tackled that yet is because I'm doing an hour-long speech at the Hoover Public Library in October on October 27th I believe and I'll be going over everything it takes to actually get to the how I got to this level and Hopefully how you can try to get to this level, but everybody's different So finally getting into the pacing video Pacing is near and dear to my heart because I that's one of the things that and character dialogue are the two things that I want More than anything else like the story can go wherever it wants to go and that that's that's how I feel anyways It's gonna go naturally wherever it goes the things that I try to hone and work on and sculpt is Dialogue and pacing we've already talked about dialogue. So now we're talking about pacing also This was a request from somebody if you're watching this. I forgot who you are. I forgot your name And I don't even remember where you to talk to me about it whether it be Twitter or whatever So this one's for you. I apologize First thing you're gonna want to do with pacing is Your well not first thing but first thing I'm gonna talk about is you want to entertain yourself If at every put if at any point in time you're sitting there and you're gonna bump into this at any point in time You're sitting there going.  Yes Pacing and dialogue always need to be honed later on same with word choice in the narrative But I think we'll talk about that a little more in some other videos How to actually do rewrites and whatnot if you want to see that Leave comments. So first entertain yourself. That's the first topic of this discussion. The next one is because this Because pacing cannot be taught because pacing is subjective I think just about every single fantasy novel I've ever read is boring because they have to tell you so much information to build the world that you're just sitting there Chapter after chapter after chapter figuring out, you know, these characters in this world and all this and I'm usually all four character development What I don't care too much about is setting and that's what fantasy novels do they they well the ones I've read anyways They they're they're boring. I mean to me. So but many people that mean fantasy is a huge genre for a reason They feel that those you know those books I've read some people say that Terry good kinds the wizard the wizard's first rule moves Very quickly and I couldn't even get past the first hundred pages of it. It was a slog so entertaining yourself doesn't mean you're necessarily going to entertain other people which brings me to Actually doing it almost almost mathematically. So what I suggest is every single page on Every page there has to be something that moves the plot forward whether it be a piece of dialogue a piece of narrative Something that makes the reader feel like they are progressing now that doesn't have to be huge You don't have to have a twist on every single page What I'm talking about is just a little something that progresses to something that go makes the reader go Okay, there's some information. I didn't have on the last page that might sound difficult but if you if you take a huge and this is also how you can break up info dumps if You take a huge piece of information and chop it up and put it throughout a scene or several scenes or However, if you take that big info dump and chop it up you can stretch that out That's also that's also a good way to bring your short stories your novelettes your novellas up to novel territory I was asked this on Twitter the other night if you want to that's not necessarily filler filler is you know play Descriptions of places you're only gonna be for a second descriptions of people you're never gonna see again that kind of thing next up Cliffhanger chapters if you don't want people to put down your book don't give them any easy place to this might seem counter-intuitive And I there's probably some readers out there screaming. No do chapter I'm not talking about not putting chapters what I'm talking about is every single end of the chapter You want to end off that chapter with something that makes the reader want to keep on reading because if they put if they Want to put your book down. This is a problem Every single I look at every single chapter unless something like sound of broken ribs that only has page breaks I look at every single chapter as a short story the betting of boys Or better yet Bay's end is like this every single chapter or sub chapter leaves off on a cliffhanger There's some information on there. I've left some information out But each and every chapter has a beginning middle and an ending just like a short story But that ending is always a cliffhanger Next well the the last piece of information I want to give you is going back to there's a first or second episode I can't remember what I think it was a second beta readers because all of this stuff is subjective You're going to have to find Pre-readers who are not going to do editing for you who are only going to give you advice on how the story progresses Whether or not they are bored Whether there I have a really exceptional beta reader named Sarah Frost Well, and I just got one in the most recent one. She did was this is where the story slowed down to a crawl for me Now in the book it was supposed to there was so much information being thrown out there It was supposed to slow down for a bit. So I'm I wasn't too worried about it But and Sarah if you've reading this, thank you Watching this not reading this if you're watching this. Thank you but the The the point I'm trying to make here is you want to You want to try and garner all the information you can before you put this thing out in public in the public Now with beta readers one thing you have to you have to find are people with differing Opinions and differing tastes than you if you can find somebody who doesn't necessarily like your work that would be even better and To an extent I have that with Sarah. What I mean is I'm far more supernatural and existentialists and That she's she's made comments about how you know, that's not her preferred thing where I when I go off on tangents about crazy wacko stuff So that's why I send the stuff for because I know there's a lot of people that don't like that I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I think that's everything with pacing. That's how I do it anyways So you want to entertain yourself? You want every single page to move the plot forward? You want oh, I'm sorry. I did miss one. You want a big event to happen every 30 pages Every 30 pages you want something big something Well something that's natural. I don't want you forcing anything But some some big event that not only moves the plot forward, but makes people anxious you you want something whether it be you know Any any genre you can do this with even romance you want to throw some kind of drama in there every 30 pages I think that I think that's every like 10,000 Words roughly if you're not counting pages if you do the industry standard It's roughly I think every every 30 pages is 10,000 words every 10,000 words I think that's everything so If you have any questions leave them down there in the comments below and until next time I have any you've been You this has been from the desk talk to you guys later. Bye. Bye


Ok, hello everyone welcome back ah continuing onward um today we are going to change topics of fair amount. Let me just remind you a little bit of what we have done so far. So, so far I have given you a high level birds eye view in the first lectures that covered the software hardware and human sensation and perception parts and then I spent time going over um geometric models and transformations that are applied to them and then went through the entire chain of transformations so that you can go from defining movable objects in the world or movable bodies in the world and stationary ones put them all together and then determine through a chain of these transformations where your points in your original models where you place them are going to end up on the screen. So, it will end up with pixel coordinates at the end um there were several parts to that and um not going to cover them all in detail again here, but I just wanted to remind you of that and so we had the rigid body transformation, the eye transformation, the canonical view transformation and the viewport transformation and um there is going to be a distortion transformation that is applied at the end to cover optical distortions which is something we are going to talk about today. And um also in these matrices the canonical view transform broke down into a scaling and translation matrix and a perspective transformation matrix and as one of the students pointed out at the end of class yesterday um the scale and translation matrix is a little bit too general for our purposes. So, we can simplify it a bit because by the way I said everything up in class last time the viewing frustum is perfectly centered and so because of that symmetry um this component goes to 0 and this component goes to 0 because r plus l is 0 and t plus b is 0. However, the near and far planes are not perfectly centered so that the origin is is directly between them um so this term stays. So, if you want to simplify that matrix from last time this is how to do that.