Okay, we're back real live. This is Think Tech OIMJ Fidel. And we're talking about community matters, including where we get our water from and how we can plan for a sustainable future of water and what the Red Hill tanks have to do with any of that. And for this discussion, we're gonna talk to a geologist, more specifically a hydrogeologist retired from DLNR. And that's Paul Eyre. Paul, thank you for joining us on the show. It's my pleasure, Dave, thank you. So Paul, tell us where do we get our water, at least here in Oahu, but what's the source of it and how reliable is it right now today? The source is rainfall, falling on the land, infiltrating through the rocks and accumulating near sea level and below sea level, a big body of fresh water. Let's look at slide one and then we'll see more relevant to where we are right now. Okay. All right, do you see diamond head? And when you go in, you have the crest of the Coal Lows. Then you swing up and swing across Oahua, then swing down the Waianae crest. That whole area receives the rainfall that that area receives, infiltrates into the ground and forms a large body of groundwater in the subsurface, very large, that whole area is more or less a single body of water. Now- It's like a lake, it's like a lake in there, right? It's just a big lake. I know, I don't know if you recognize that people do believe that. I hope you don't believe that. In fact, the water occupies cracks and pucas in the rock. We all know what lava rock looks like. You drive up the Pahway Highway, look at the rocks, layers, layers of rocks, cracks in the rocks, pucas in the rock. That's what it's like. This island goes below sea level, obviously. We're not floating on the water. So down with depth, the slopes of the volcano continue down below sea level and all those lava rocks with their cracks and their pucas hold the fresh water that then we pump. Normally, we consider the groundwater flows Malka Makai. It rains in the uplands and it discharges near the shore. So we go Malka Makai. It's not static. Every day you get more recharge from the rain and every day water discharges at the shore. Now, so we think about Malka Makai but because we're gonna focus on Red Hill, we must also realize that water from Honolulu, not only does it flow Malka Makai, it also flows towards Pearl Harbor. Why? Why does it do that? It has a hard time getting out at Honolulu. The way the rocks are, the way the sediments are piled up against the lava rock, that water just has a hard time getting out. So it builds up to a high level and then whatever doesn't come out the wells or seep out near the shore in Honolulu flows to the Northwest over across Moanalua, Red Hill, and then into Halava. So you have the water going both ways. It's important now because there's a concern that the contamination at Red Hill from the fuel tanks will migrate over to the Board of Water Supplies pumping station near H3 over by North Halava Valley. So which way the water naturally flows is something that's getting a lot of attention now. So the tanks, can you describe the tanks and where is the water flowing with relative to where the tanks are? Let's look at slide number two. Oh, okay. All right. So if you remember that peach shaded area in the previous picture, that was centered on Red Hill and Halava. So now we focused in on that peach shaded area. This is Red Hill Ridge. Those, you can count 10 pairs of two tanks going up the ridge. They look, the ridge is actually transparent in this application. Those tanks are underground. They're cocooned and scanced in that ridge. And so...  How big are those tanks? Yeah. Well, 250, each tank is 250 feet tall, 100 feet across. And I think it's about 60 feet between the edge of each tank. And they hold 12 and a half million gallons of fuel. Now... Now this is built by the military back in World War II. The whole thing was constructed way back when? From 1938 to 1941 or two, the crews, mining crews from the mainland were brought out here and they dug and they blasted and they hollowed out that mountain. Actually, no, they didn't hollow it out. Each of those tanks is its own hollowed out area inside the rock. They formed that area, poured that concrete, four foot thick walls of concrete for each tank and then they lined the inside with quarter inch steel plates. Then they injected grout between the rock and the, between the outside of the concrete and the rocks. They injected grout at high pressure to just firm the whole thing up. So it's quite securely embedded in the mountain. Was this in accordance with the standards of construction for tanks being constructed at that time? And is it consistent with the standards of construction for tanks like that that would be built today? These tanks are unique. I don't think the engineer did not go to the engineering handbook and decide how to build these. They figured out they wanted to put these tanks in the mountain to protect them. Also, they don't occupy a lot of land space. I mean, they're in there. If you moved about it there, they'd have to exist somewhere on land where we'd see them and they'd be vulnerable to other mischief, mischief. So there weren't standards, but the engineers were real engineers and they're well-made. This is 80 years ago now. They're well-made, but they made them in a terrific hurry. It's the war's coming. They worked day and night, 24, 24, 7, blasting. I forget how many men died 20, 30, 40, something. Wow. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, it's a tremendous feat. And so there's those tanks and then there's tunnels that run between the tanks for access. And then there's the pipes that refill the tanks with fuel and take the fuel out and route it down to Pearl Harbor. Now, in addition- When you say, excuse me, when you say access, you mean that sometimes people have to get down, what, into the tank when the tank is empty, in order to do that, then you have these tunnels for access. Am I right? There's no, no. The tunnels are outside the tanks. Let's go back to slide two again. Okay, you see between the rows of tanks, they're separated. There's a tunnel there, people work, they spend their days there monitoring the equipment. So they go, you know, tank one and two closest to you, tank 19 and 20 at the far end. There's a tunnel with a train car and the fuel lines and the water lines all inside that tunnel. And that's the access tunnel I'm talking about. One more thing now, at the same time they're building the tanks, they're also putting in a water system that can pump from up to 15 million gallons a day of water. And that, if you follow that access tunnel line down from the tanks, a ways, then you see it bends to the left and then you kind of see a triangle down, down at the far end there. That's where the water pumping station is. That's also inside the mountain underground and it's pumping, like I say, five to 15 million gallons a day. And then the tunnel that goes off to your right leads down to Pearl Harbor where it delivers the fuel and the water. Now, if we look at slide three, well, there's a couple more things I wanna say about that. Let's go back to that one, two. Okay, I'm not showing it to you here but at the bottom of those tanks, those tanks are 80 years old. Of course they've leaked. Sometimes it's just chronic little small leaks, sometimes it's major 50,000 gallon leaks. Rare, those are rare, but they have happened. So beneath the tanks, the rock just beneath the tanks is horribly contaminated, solid, not solid, but fuel residue occupying all the cracks in the pores in the rocks.  From the bottom of the tanks down to 100 feet, you'll be at sea level. The contamination that leaked out of the tanks worked its way down to the water table and the aquifer beneath those tanks is 10 to 40 times beyond the EPA's action level with respect to total petroleum hydrocarbons. What does that mean? Non-potable, couldn't drink it. I don't know if it'd give you cancer or just make you throw up, but either way that's the state of the groundwater beneath those tanks. So let me ask you this, you mentioned aquifer and I guess it's an important term here. Above sea level is the aquifer, below at sea level would be the lens, right? Where the freshwater and the seawater meet and then below the lens would be the seawater, am I right? Correct, and that lens is, the top of that lens is about 20 feet above sea level. The bottom of that lens is about 800 feet below sea level. You look at those drops and in the image behind you, you see those drops of water. Picture one of those being the size of that first area I showed you from Diamondhead to the Wyonites. That drop occupying from 20 feet above sea level to 800 feet below sea level, but within the cracks and holes of the rocks is what's down there. And that's the aquifer. So can you picture that? Yes, yeah. Okay, so almost anywhere you drill, you'll drill down to sea level, you'll hit water at 20 feet above sea level, like in our neighborhood, we're at 600 feet. We could drill down about 20, 25 feet above sea level. We'd hit the top of the water table and we could keep drilling for several hundred more feet and have all that water available. So that's the aquifer that occupies that area from slide one. Okay, so now we have the corrosion. We have some of the residue from the petroleum that leaked out, some little, some lot. We have it seeping into the rock. We have, as you described, the freshwater and the seawater connection. What do we need to be concerned about there? If the residue stops, if the petroleum stops at a given point, why are we worried? As a hydrologist, I look at the future of water development from this island. There'll come a time when the amount we pump now, well, as the population grows, we're gonna need more and more water. So we have two ways to handle that. Stop growing the population, don't let anybody come to the state, don't have any more babies, or account for the increase in population and pump accordingly. Well, we're already pumping 140 million, the board of water supply, which is most of all the pumpage, is 140 million gallons a day of water being pumped from the island. There's not a whole lot more than that available. So every million gallon a day that you can, we're going to need it in the future. And with the contamination at Redhill, one option is we just ride off that area, that shaded pink area that on the first slide or beneath the tanks. We ride off that area and say, no, I'm not gonna get any more water from this area. Well, water's too precious for that to be the conclusion. And so the point should be, I think, and it's quite feasible, is to operate those tanks better, reduce the leakage and to clean up the, call it the mess that's there right now. All of these are quite feasible and straightforward. But so for me, that's the concern is to not be riding off portions of the aquifer that can continue to yield more water. What the general population and the board of water supply are very concerned about is that the water will move from Redhill off to the west, cross South Halava Valley, cross North Halava Valley, and then reach the Board of Water Supply to the Lava Shaft and contaminate that water, which would just be disastrous because that's one of the most important sources of water for the board. I don't believe that's going to happen. If the water, it's not sure that the water even goes that way. If it does, it's highly unlikely that the concentrations of contaminants would ever be high enough to be measured there. And two, let's see, there's a slide where, let's try slide number four. All right, again, in the middle of all those blue things that are hard to read, you'll see the 20 tanks inside the ridge. At the top of the screen to the left, that's where the Board of Water Supply's Halava Shaft is. In between is the Halava Industrial Park and the prison. Well, those are the observation wells that have been put in since 2005 around the tanks to monitor the degree of contamination. If there was ever a concern for Halava Shaft, those wells would start to show it, you'd see it. As of now, those wells to the northwest of the tanks do not show contamination. Someone might argue and say, oh, they do, but it's very small and very rare. The monitor wells that show contamination are those three blue dots in the middle of the 20 tanks. Those are the ones that show 10 to 40 times the concentration of hydrocarbons that the EPA, it's the action level for the EPA to say, hey, you've got to do something about this. Also, the Navy's pumping well, which is off to the left, about half a mile down from the tanks towards the ocean, towards Salt Lake. That well also shows wisps of contamination every now and then. When there's a big leak back in 2014, 13, 14, at one of the tanks, about two years later, we saw a bump in the contamination at the Red Hill Pumping Station. That well, that was way below the action level, not a health concern, but to me it shows that well, the water does go there and in fact, the contamination will move to where you pump the water. Well, let me go to the headline phase of this. I guess from time to time, the figures of contamination are released to the public or the press and then somebody gets excited that there's contamination and it violates the EPA standard. And then what we have is a reaction by environmental groups who say, no, that's not so good, we can't have that water, you've got to do something. And then it seems like it's usually an attack on the Navy. This is all the Navy's fault. The Navy, I mean, I don't have a sense of exactly what their complaint is, but I think it's the Navy's fault and the Navy should remove these tanks, they don't need these tanks, store the fuel somewhere else or don't store the fuel anywhere and give us our groundwater back. And that doesn't seem very practical, but it seems to me that's the nature of a very broad-based complaint against the Navy about this contamination. You're saying though that it's manageable in various other ways and my question to you is, has it been managed or is it just happening anyway? Let me take a short break, Paul. We're gonna take a short break, we'll be right back after this break and we'll resume our conversation on the groundwater and the Red Hill tanks and how we can make things work for clean water in Oahu. My name is Mark Shklav, I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Being a lawyer has many aspects and I try to cover them every time I do a program of law across the sea. Not everything has to do with law or being a lawyer per se. Some of it has to do with the people you meet, the things you see, the places you visit. And that's what I try to combine in Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Thank you for watching, Aloha. Okay, we're back, we're live with Paul Eyre. He's a hydrogeologist, was with DLNR, the Department of Land and Natural Resources State of Hawaii and he's retired now. But he's telling us about how water works on the groundwater system in Oahu and how it interacts with the tanks at Red Hill, which still today are used for fuel, which sometimes leaks out of the bottoms. So Paul, people want to remove the tanks and do drastic things, but maybe that's not really necessary in any event that would be pretty expensive. And maybe it wouldn't even solve the problem. What should be done to solve the problem? What has the Navy done so far and what could be done now? To emphasize what you just said, let's look at slide two. No, let's look at slide three. All right. That's your 250 feet tall and 100 feet across and your quarter inch steel liners on the concrete. That's what you're talking about, abandoning 20 of those. That's what you're talking about, abandoning and finding some other place on the island for that. You don't want to do that if you don't have to. Well, I know what people would say, sure, but not in my backyard or anywhere near me. Right. That's what they would say. And here, if you don't have to, why would you move this? And, but, well, the why is because, well, you've contaminated the aquifer, but like I say, that's manageable. This contamination I'm talking about is only in the top couple of inches. We talked about the top and the bottom of the freshwater lens. This, the fuel that leaks out of this tank through the steel, through the concrete, down to the water table, exist in just the top couple of inches of the aquifer. So it's not like you've destroyed the aquifer. You've made it a lot more difficult to get more water from, but just to put it in perspective, it's not like it's ruined from top to bottom. And so the solution for, I believe, in which the Navy hasn't done a good job about is maintaining the tanks, repairing the tanks. I mean, they've worked very hard at it. You can see all the white dots in this picture, the orange square and the lower left, those guys in the basket, they're inspecting this whole surface, top to bottom, round and around, finding every point that might leak. Then people are gonna come in and weld patches where they need to do the work they need to seal this tank up again. That job has not been done well enough, and you might say, or often enough. But now because of the spill, 27,000 gallon spill in 2000, call it January, December 13, January 14, because of that spill. What year was that? December, 2013, January, 2014. The tank had been under repair for three or four years, something like what we just looked at. Then in December, 2013, the contractor said, okay, job well done, certified, fill the tank up with fuel. Boom, it leaked, it leaked right away. They had to quick rush, shut it down, 27,000 gallons leaked out, and that's the latest spill that has caused all the ruckus. That spill was the result of very bad workmanship and very bad contract management by the Navy. The EPA, the DOH and the Navy have prepared and are negotiating and having public meetings about what they call the administrative order on consent that will define how the Navy must operate so that that doesn't happen again. In that AOC, the Navy acknowledges how bad the workmanship was, and the fact that they let Port Waimimi in California do the contractor oversight, which of course didn't work. So they've acknowledged their culpability. They've got new home standards of how they will operate and maintain the tanks. In the next year or two, the 22 tanks are scheduled for inspection and repair. The last overall inspection repair was in 1980. They're supposed to get inspected and repaired again in 2000 on a 20-year timeframe. They missed most of the tanks. They worked on a couple, but they didn't work on most of them. So over the next couple of years, they're going to inspect and repair the 20 tanks. Now, if they do that well, that then... That's my last question to you. If they do that well, should we rest easy? Or do we need other systems in addition? For example, a system to clean up the water and remove all the hydrocarbons from the water. I don't know if that's possible. Just a sort of a backup clean-up system. What steps beyond this AOC, you called it? This country. Administrative order of consent. How the Navy must operate. Yeah, beyond that, is there anything else we need to do to feel comfortable about the purity of our water in Oahu? Well, I wouldn't leave that part yet because we said if they do it well. I'm not sure if there's anything in the AOC that forces them to do it well. I think there should be fines. There should be penalties. Part of the AOC should be this contamination that I've described so far. They should be getting rid of it. They should be cleaning it up. Yeah. And they can. Who's watching on this? To me, we're almost out of time, Paul. And I want to just close with your answer to this question. Who's watching? Because I think just as the Navy has been irregular in its maintenance, so has the public been irregular in its observation. And so if we all return to our corners and the time goes by, it will be back in the same place. So who's watching? Is it DLNR? Is it some other federal agency? Who's going to make sure that our water supply is pure? Statewide, for the state, the lead is the Department of Health. The Water Commission, DLNR, the Water Commission at DLNR, I'd say should be more involved, because that is their mandate is to maintain the sustainability of Hawaii's waters. And then the EPA is also a big player. So the big players are the EPA, the State Department of Health, and the Navy. Somehow, I think in the same way the Navy needs to oversee their contractors better, somebody needs to oversee the Navy better. I don't know how that gets accomplished. Oh, I think it's simple. It's you and me, Paul. It's you and me. We'll have to regroup on this and examine from time to time how things are going. Because I think the stats are out there. Somebody has to look at it. Somebody has to remind the contracting parties that we are depending on them for clean water. We'll cover this again. Paul Iyer, our retired hydro geologist for DLNR, really appreciate the insight, the sort of an underground insight of what's going on at Red Hill. Thanks so much, Paul. Aloha. OK.


Welcome to the insurance sales lab podcast. My guests today are two legends in the PNC space. I've Greg Bredsinger and Jason Feltman. Hey, hey, how are you doing, Vlad? I'm doing great. Uh, thank you for being on the, on the show, on the podcast. You guys put me on the spot the last time we spoke and you guys started out in the power of five rapid fire questions. So I'm going to return the favor and do the same with you. I love it. Number one. Who did you idolize growing up or look up to growing up? Axel Rose. Craig, my dad. Cool. Would you rather go in the past and meet your ancestors or go into the future and meet your great grandchildren? Future. Probably future. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah. Because I want to see all the other stuff that's happened to, like if there are flying cars, I mean, when is this going to happen? It's the tunnels. The tunnels will happen. Business partner with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos? Oh, Elon, without an even question. Yeah, Elon, Elon, all the business would be good. I think five years ago, it would probably been a 50-50 question. You'd have to know that now it's like a no-brainer. Yeah. Have unlimited first class tickets or never have to pay at restaurants again. Oh, never have to pay at restaurants. First class tickets. First time you do it. He gives me a hard time. He says I go on vacation every month, which it's maybe it's accurate. Kids are growing up. Yeah. Rather be forced to dance every time you heard music or be forced to sing along to any song you heard. Dance. Heck, yeah, go with sing. Well, all of it. Some of it's just terrible. It has to be all of it. So this is a very serious question. And I only asked this because you are the insurance dudes. Would you rather be compelled to high five everyone you meet or be compelled to give a wedgie to everyone in a high five? Wedgie, everyone in green shirt. Oh, I don't want to give anybody. I don't want to give anybody wedgies. We played this game. My sister-in-law left our house and sends me a picture. She's like, man, I can't get this out of my head. Everybody I see on Instagram with a green shirt. I want to give him a wedgie. So you guys are the insurance dudes. You have true story. Five thousand downloads a week, something epic like that. Is that right? New podcast. Yeah, where did this dude's idea come from? You guys have the tele dudes company you're wearing the shirt. You have tele dudes and do debts working for you. How did you come up with that and why did you take this angle?  I don't think that insurance comes across as the most fun. Industry, it's a little bit more and the agent himself. They they portrayed in the flow commercial what what agents are like the dudes in suits that are hiding behind the hedges or whatever. And we just wanted to have fun. I think Jason coined it. He coined the whole thing. And when we initially, yeah. Yeah, what was the OK. So we both started podcasts at the same time, but we only had a couple. Mine was just Jason Feltman, the agent journey or something like that. And then what was what was yours? Leverage your leverage your agency to maximum. It was something. It was just something. Yeah. So so then we were talking and Craig's like, why don't we do it together? And then I said, why don't we just call the insurance dudes? Because it's like every time we talked, it was super fun.  Craig grew up in California. We both say dude a lot and just we thought it would be the best pattern in a rep to call us the insurance dudes. And literally it came up in conversation like that fast. And we were like, OK, that's it. It was like, oh, that is it. That's awesome. It's it. And then he just started. She starts making graphics instantly. He's like, look, I made this.  To anyone who's spent 10 seconds watching any of your videos on YouTube, which are epic, like the synergy that you guys have is so compelling. And I just learned before we started here that you guys really haven't spent that much time in person together. A lot of what you do is by phone call zooms that you guys do. So how did this whole partnership begin? Where did you guys first bump into each other? Well, so so I had a another company was it was a like consulting and sales training and Jason actually bought the product. And so so we started he'd call and ask me questions. And I'm like, this is like, we're just having good conversations every time we're talking. So it just it just sort of blossomed from there. We were we were talking on the phone a lot. And then we started talking on Zoom a lot. Like, I mean, we have just looked at each other on Zoom.  And the funny thing is we we built the business. Did did we already hit the the the award? The ClickFunnels Award before we met two comma club? No, I don't think we know. I don't know because I think it was just last summer, right? The last summer is the first time. Oh, yeah, that we hung out. And that was a year and a half almost two years after we first met. We had already started business together. We were at, you know, one hundred and something episodes by that point. And it was funny. So going back to like when Craig and I first met, I was I called him. It was a sales call, basically, for his for his consulting agency. I love buying courses. And if you have a course, yeah, Jason, he'll buy it. So Craig and I ended up like talking for like two hours. And the funniest thing was is I ended up selling him on ricochet. Do you remember that? Yeah, it's like a two hour conversation. I like why are you selling me? Yeah, I ended up selling him on the on the phone system that we still both currently use today in our agency before Craig. I do. I'll. OK, you made it just. I mean, I thought that it was it was great at the time because I just didn't know what I didn't know. And then, yeah, you look under the hood on ricochet and you can't. I don't know how you could scale an agency and and really, really maximize leads, drive down that cost per sale on leads without it. And we've now looked at we said we can do it without it. Let's let's find something. And we literally looked at hundreds of different system. There isn't there isn't anything. And we don't get paid anything by ricochet to say that I was just going to say it's a free plug should we should. Absolutely. But I think they know they know how valuable it is. Yeah. Yeah. So when did it go from just being a great idea to work together to an actual business partnership where you guys are partners in a real business that's making a serious impact on a lot of agencies? So, well, yeah, you know, yeah. So we started doing the podcast. Yeah, we wait to see if the other person is going to go, both of us. And then we both got to say so. The first six months, we were doing the podcast randomly and very inconsistently, but we were doing.  Yeah. But there was no schedule. And I remember being like six months in and reading everywhere. And the number one thing was when it comes to any kind of show per se, you know, YouTube or anything else that having that schedule and that release time and release date was a big thing. So that's when we right around six months was when we did that. And then when we did that, we also kind of looked at it like, OK, this could be like a business because like we're starting to get some listeners here. And we started gaining some traction when we did that schedule. So that that was the first thing we had. We developed a process. We developed a schedule that we stuck to kind of like we do in our agencies. And then then it was like you were like, how, you know, we should monetize this at some point, maybe do commercials, maybe. So we were exploring different things. That's kind of how how we did it. And then Craig. Well, well, yeah, we I mean, we didn't we didn't at first. I think we thought that we would the way that we could monetize it was with ad revenue. And as we start researching that, they're talking in the, you know, a couple bucks per thousand. Like, OK, well, that's how Rogan makes money. But we're never going to have anything like those kind of numbers just because the the ocean isn't big enough. And and so we're like, OK, and we did. We had a couple for a little while. We had a couple sponsors, but it just, you know, it was it was nothing. It was mailbox money. And so we kept going about what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And as we we we both opened up scratch agencies back in November of twenty where I was November, twenty nineteen, he was October, twenty nineteen. And we developed a whole process on that on on how to how to buy create basically predictability around it and and that started working. And then people start bugging us. How are you doing that? And we're like, oh, wait a minute. OK, so we have the podcast with listeners and we have a thing that's getting us results and everybody wants to do this. Boom, like, you know, push them together. And we realized that that's when Teleduce was born right at the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah. And when we first started, we weren't. I mean, we just wanted to help agents. Yeah. And that was just solely it was right around that six month mark when we said, hey, maybe we should like put more time into this. And maybe we could do some sort of business out of it. And then it was like, well, you know, that's when we, you know, maybe right around the one year mark, maybe a little less is when we started looking into getting sponsors and sponsors, the sponsors. Like we we were doing our goofy stuff and they're like, no, we don't. That's not what we want. Like, we can't read it that way. Can't read it. And we're like, OK, well, then I don't even want to do it because this is doesn't I mean, get him paid a few thousand bucks for this and being told what to do makes it a job. And, you know, like we don't want, I remember just call them and tell them that we don't want to do it anymore. Yeah. That's horrible. I don't want to do that. Now is the best way because your your product that you're selling that's generating revenue for you guys is something you guys personally using your agency to write over 250,000 in premium every month. And what people need to realize is that both of you are in unique market conditions where Craig, your premiums are really low, some of the lowest in the country and then low. Yeah, too low. Like someone in Detroit, Michigan can write a fraction of the business units wise, items wise, and they'll make more in premium. And you can't even write homeowners a lot of the times, right? So you have to write it with that. Yeah, you still found a way to write 250,000 in premium. And you're doing that on an ongoing basis, right? Not really having a massive team. You you're you're both around the eight to 10 mark, right? Yeah, as far as team members, you said you have 11. Craig, you have 18 members. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to get into the tele-dudes program here in just a moment. But first, I got an email for you guys a couple of days ago and came from I dudes. And at the very bottom, there was a PS that said, PS, we are on a mission to thrive in an industry that is trying to automate and commoditize the true value of the agent. We are insurance dudes with a passion and mission to save the agent. So my question to you two is, are agents in trouble? If so, why? Yes. And this is what I mean when I say this is that the agents that are not leveraging the tools that we have today are in trouble because they're it's not that they're not good. It's just that their their message is not going to get out to enough people Frank down the street that might have the best agency in the world that, you know, has a has a dial up phone that doesn't really, you know, he has file cabinets. When I came into this agency four years ago, it was just file cabinets. It was a it was a phone through the phone company. And I literally I have it on the floor over here. It has it's a big box that if one phone number is busy, it rolls over to the next phone number. It's this crazy box. It's worth I guess it's worth a lot of money. I think it's like a relic at this point. But this is what I mean by all this is that people are not walking. I mean, with the pandemic, people are not walking into the agency. They weren't doing that at my agency prior to that anyways, because of the circumstance of this agency. But you can be the best agent on the planet. And if you can't get out to that many people, you're screwed. I mean, it's just like any other product or anything else. People look at technology as something that might take over. I don't look at it like that. I look at it like tools like in business. We're going to war every single day.  And that's what the market is bringing these days. They have all these tools. These the big carriers have Uzi's. They have a whole army of of of weaponry, if you will. And the modern agent needs to pick up the tools to be able to fight back just to be on the to be able to keep up. And we're in a super awesome time where we can keep up. If anything, we get, you know, everybody in there, everybody in the U.S. has a cell phone.  So there's no excuse that, you know, 40 years ago, you'd have to drive by, see a sign and maybe stop by that. Street corner might have only had 1,000 people a week that drove by.  So yeah, there's so many ways to tell your story and then so many ways to to acquire the new business. And let's just say you're doing leads, right? You're buying leads. Everybody says leads suck.  I'll give you an example. I remember talking to an agent and and he was asking me about buying leads and doing all this. And there's a whole thing about that. You have to understand how leads work and the pricing of leads and all that kind of stuff. But but I said, how are you working the leads? What system do you have? And he said, well, you know, we just have phones and we call them. And I said, OK, well, let's dig deeper into that. What what do you do to track your leads? He goes, well, I put him on an Excel spreadsheet.  You have no chance of winning when you put your lead into an you you print it out. You transcribe it into an Excel spreadsheet when I'm over here calling that same lead 90 times. I'm sorry. There's there. That's the machine gun versus I don't even know if that's a pocket knife. So and but the technology is there, you know, a year and a half ago. I wasn't I was the guy not necessarily with the spreadsheet, but something slightly better, but nothing close to what I have now. We were writing maybe 70,000 on a really good month in premium. Now it's 250 and I mean, I'm there one tenth as much, right? So it's it's leveraging the technology and utilizing the time you have, which we all have the same 168 hours in a week. If if if you're spending that time going through some spreadsheet instead of having that completely automated where you don't even have to look at the leads, why would you do that? Right, because then you're taken away from the other time, which is something that you do, Vlad, which is coaching. I mean, there's nothing more important for your team than them being coached. They have to be coached or or then they're going in with pocket knives, right? And I know you've seen it. This this business, everybody does a quote a different way every single time. It's like, what?  These steps, if you don't have something consistent, you don't have something to train against, you don't have something to measure against and create improvement.  Everybody wants them because of the low hanging fruit. But then the one thing with leads, the most leads that you can get are internet leads. There's so much supply, it's incredible. There's not enough agents to actually to buy them all up, right? So then there's two options at that point. One, find the best internet leads, pay the premium. But let's be honest, leads are good. Leads are technically good sometimes or bad sometimes, right? Like they're either ready to buy right then or they're not. Or be better than anybody else at closing the leads. And then it doesn't matter what kind of leads you have. Just you got to have the best process to close them and be the best at contacting the leads. You know, we talk to people that say they're spending 25 bucks because they're really good leads. Well, dude, guess what? The contact rate on that lead is the exact same as the $3 lead. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and you can have the greatest technology in place to get people on the phone. But if your people aren't trained on how to sell, then it doesn't matter how many conversations you have. You have numbers that spend four or five hours on the phone every day, making over a hundred calls a day. But they're just not closing as much business as someone who makes or just takes incoming calls and or live transfers or makes 40, 50 about calls a day. They're just closing a lot more business. So the there's there's two very different worlds. I think we're talking about getting people on the phone in the most efficient way using technology. So for someone who is not tech savvy, because let's be honest, most agents don't know much about tech. They don't even want to learn more about tech. It's intimidating. So how could they still leverage technology and be at that cutting edge and be a modern agent in today's higher? Somebody that can do that. I mean, you have to put some you you can either learn it yourself or get somebody else that can do it. But it has to be done, you know, to your even the original question. You're going to be left behind if you don't embrace the technology and use it because because Frank down the street is going to. And this is a very red, red ocean, right? The the world of insurance. Yeah, there's a there's a million shingles out here in Tucson.  Why are they going to go to mine? They're not they're not going to walk in the door. They're not going to call. I mean, sure, we could we could be a little bit better on Google. And then we're going to get a few more phone calls. But at the end of the day to write 250 K. I mean, you have to you have to talk to a lot of people. If you're closing 10 percent, do the math on it. I mean, how many, you know, that's a that's a lot of people that you have to quote to get to that spot. And I would say like, like whoever is listening to this is obviously on the search to find their they're trying to improve their agency. They didn't just stumble upon this. So they're on the right path. Bottom line is model. That's what I did when I first started. I modeled what somebody else was doing because I had no idea what a CRM was, which that's the one thing to look up.  But I modeled, I modeled.  And I just constantly. That ball was rolling into to what into what we're doing now, which I think is the is the most efficient system. Yeah, it doesn't close deals, but it, you know, we're making hundreds of thousands of dials a month. On the on the back and not our agency, but the system is and then getting as many people on the phone over to our agents, our agents are spending hours and hours and hours of talk time a day and doing, you know, eight to 10 quotes a day.  Like if you like to your point, you're saying that if somebody doesn't they don't have to talk to a lot of people to sell. You just have to be really good. But if you want to sell a lot, it's all the components together. It's being able to have a flow of people, being able to quote a lot of people and being able to close a lot of people and not just doing a cruddy quote, because we all know that at that point it's going to take 10 quotes to even have a chance to sell one if you don't have a rock solid process. So yeah, I'd like to go deep into your guys's process. How do you get people to be transferred into your agency? Tell us about your tele-dutes program and how it works. Well, something that we something that we learned because we've it's been trial and error. First, Jason modeled somebody, figured it out. Then I modeled Jason and and he he helped mentor this whole part of my development in growing this and and it's not easy, right? Nothing's easy. Everything requires some work, but but building it out and then understanding, we do it a lot. Like I'll say, what would old Craig think? You know, an old Craig didn't didn't understand the importance of the cost of the cost per sale. Well, Craig didn't didn't realize that. OK, like old Craig wouldn't be comfortable with buying 500 leads a day, spending two thousand dollars on on new business, right? But but it took a while to get there. And understanding the numbers, you have to understand the numbers and in the beauty of of the system is is we know at each spot what it should look like. And the funny thing is a lot of agents will say, well, it's, you know, it's different in my market or it's different. No, it's not. It's the same. It's the same everywhere. The only thing that may be different is the close ratio, maybe a little bit less, but then you can fix that. You can figure out what you need to do. You have to have an input, right? There has to be a certain number of quotes to come in from those quotes. You know what your contact is going to be. You know those numbers. Once you have the contacts, then you then you know what the transfers are going to be, then you know what the quoted transfers. And so the whole thing creates very, very high level analytics into each step. So if somebody's struggling or somebody's not getting results, the first thing like this is the agent mentality is I'm not getting any transfers.  And it's like, OK, well, let's look at where it's broken first. And then we can figure out because it doesn't suck. I mean, we have evidence.  So typically what we'll find, and this is our newest iteration of learning in this is it's coming down to contact. And so then we know it's it's either they're their numbers spammed or or or the lead quality isn't great, right? Somebody could be pumping sales genie numbers into there. And well, guess what? You're going to have one percent contact rate on that. Yeah. Yeah. So those analytics, I think really, really provide a ton of insight and value. And that's again, one of the reasons why we picked the CRM that we use is because it gives you that. Like we don't spend any time figuring that out. It just tells you. So the highest view level of teledudes is basically you could have any size agency, even if your solo agent can have the power of, let's say, like Geico in your own agency, one teledudette, as we call them, one of our callers can make up to 10,000 dials a month. So what does that mean? Um, our the teledude system is also training. It also shows you how to put this. And we call it the machine, the part of the machine is this. Yes, it does have to do with telemarketing, but it's even more than that. It's everything from buying internet leads, being able to make the contacts, being able to call them enough, the right call sequence, even how to buy the internet leads, get them through that, then getting them over to your agents and then, you know, helping train your agents how to take a lead that's not warm and at least initiate the quote and then producing something that's consistent when it comes to meetings, everything, all the analytics for the telemarketers to look at, all the analytics for your agents to look at. And basically it's a machine that when you when you see that numbers aren't coming through to Craig's point, you can diagnose it because the machine's built. You just kind of look at each part of it and you can exactly see where the problem is.  So it's just creating this machine where the leads will constantly be followed up with because we realized that when agents, two things happen, when an agent, a sales agent is forced to telemarket, they will increasingly be discouraged at work. We've noticed that a good contact rate of internet leads is 10 to 15 percent. So that means they're only going to get 10 to 15 people on the phone out of a hundred calls, which means they're just sitting behind a phone droning out. And this person went through a lot of training, went through, you know, a lot to be in your agency, including getting the licenses, all this stuff to sit there and just call, just keep dialing, which is a very low skill. So they're highly skilled trained, but they're doing this low skilled job. And Craig and I, when we first started, had looked at it like the way we set up our agency is a lot like McDonald's in the sense where not quality wise, but in the sense of how well a McDonald's is trained, right? That's why Ray Kroc made franchises out of it because he saw the efficiencies out of it. He had each part of the machine getting the most out of that. And when it comes to our agencies and our agents, we want to get the most out of our agents. We want our agents to sell a lot so that they can make enough money for them to justify being in the position that they're in and going through all that training and stuff. And it's our jobs as agency owners to figure out the way that our agents can sell the most. A lot of times when Craig and I started in our own agencies, we talk about it a lot is that we tell them, oh, yeah, you guys got to bring in the sales. Well, as a business owner, you know, how silly would that be? If, you know, I don't know, Best Buy required all their salespeople to bring people into the store and they just didn't do ads or whatever. You know what I mean? Like that's just not how business works. So it's our job as business owners to create a system where we can be assured that every day there's a virtual line out the door of clients ready to be helped and their problem solved and, you know, being, you know, selling them what they need and then having the agent who is trained and that's constantly talking to these clients and being able to, you know, solve their problems and welcome them into the agency. So yeah. And we we've even crunched, we've even even crunched the numbers on that to Jason's point on the on on those very things. You can't have not only is it discouraging for the producer if they're if they have to go hunt, but there aren't enough hours in the day mathematically. There are not enough hours in the day for them to make the dials they need to make to make the leads work and do the 10 quotes. There are 10 quoted households that they need in order to generate the revenue for the agency that makes them worth being there. So, you know, just mathematically, it's not even possible to do it. It requires a 16 hour work day. And that's where you go, OK, of those 16 hours and of those activities, where is this highly trained person best suited to be doing quotes, right, doing quotes all day long, right? And I mean, I remember pre machine I mean, my people weren't on the phone for even even then. They still weren't on the phone for four or five hours like they are now because being on the phone sucked like it was it was hunting and they didn't want to hunt. And, you know, a lot of us come like I come from old school where I was making dials, I was doing all these things. And I used to think, well, I had to do it, so they should have to do it. But that kind of thinking is doesn't work.  So if you create a situation where here you're feeding them, well, great, now they're writing 40,000 in premium each. And if they're writing 40,000 in premium each, everybody's making money. Right, they pay for themselves because I may pay them 7000 for for their with the base and the commission off of 40,000. But guess what? That would have taken three people the old way and and they would have turned over anyway. So what's the cost of that turnover? There's hard and soft costs associated with all of that turnover, that plus gray hair, you know, that that that comes with that. And so having a culture and in both of our agencies, I mean, before the thing, you know, I said I had to let a couple of people go. But in the last year, nobody's left. Nobody's left voluntarily, just most recently, two people, you know, had to be had to be escorted out. But but but that's that's a total switch from what you hear. It's a total switch from what I have my experience was previously and from what you hear in agents. I mean, you ask these how's your staff and they're going to. Oh, that's the worst, right? They go with this whole diatribe about that. And and it's like, you know, I love my staff. They're I don't like to call my staff. I like they're my team. They're awesome. And they like being there. Right. We just had a like, I don't want to bring it up, but I'm going to I'm going to bring it up because it's because I know it's it's just crazy. I can't believe they said it. We had a we had a an event at the office at my office here in Tucson.  They had to 20, 20 K plus days in a row, which was just perfect timing, perfect timing. Right. But everybody, all the people that were there, all of the agents, some really awesome agents from all over the country, they went out there. They're like, why do you know, why do you do this? You've got you're jammed into a room, which they choose to be in. They want to all be jammed in this one little room. And I have a big office. They want to be in this one area, the bullpen. And and they all asked them, you know, why are you here? And I mean, I did not tell them to say it. I can't believe that they said because of me.  And it's the it's the flip from, you know, providing you provide the leads, you get the return, you provide the training, you get the return, you give them all the things that they're not getting at any other agencies in health insurance, the, you know, these a higher base. Like all of these things that people are like, oh, I want to do that because there's turnover. Well, there isn't turnover because of that. And so it just worked out really well and it's it's a great system. So what you guys have effectively done is you've taken a skilled position. And I believe that anybody who's licensed as a PNC producer, it should spend most of their time doing that, not leaving voicemails, 90% of the day, which most team members do. So I think more agents who are listening to this that have never heard of teleduce is the first time they're saying the two of you. When they start working with you guys, they pay for one or two teleduce and the agency say has three team members, one service rep, two sales producers. What can they expect on a daily, weekly basis when they work with you guys in terms of lead transfers? How many transfers can they expect? What what's the average? Don't give me the definite numbers because it really varies. But like, what are we talking about in terms of cost per transfer? Like what's the range if you can get into that? I'd like to learn about that. Yes. So each of our telemarketers usually make they definitely make over 500 calls a day. And then it really comes down to contact rate. So if they're they're transferring right around a 10% of the people that the contacts that they get. So if you're having a 2% contact rate, something that awful and they're making 500 dials, that's only 10 people. They're that that's only one potential transfer at that point. It's not going to get you much. You see a 1% to 2% in your sales genie X cold dates, your old crappy data. You know, with a lot of more like newer leads, you can get, you know, 15 15% contact rate. So then you can see with the 10% what is possible at that point. But there's a there's a really cool thing. The cool thing about the system is it's your telemarketer. So she works for you. She's going through your data. We've noticed that 68% of sales happen actually between the 18th. What is it? The 8th and 21st, 8th and 21st dial. So as leads come into the system, they're not going to I mean, they're probably going to get like one to two quote because we call them accountable to quoted transfers because a transfer without a quote is is worthless. That's what we hold. Yeah. Yeah, which is actually makes a really cool thing. So they're all on the same team. So, you know, the tele-dudet really helps the agent like, Hey, did you quote him? Did you quote him? Like, we got to get this thing quoted. So they're pushing your team and you don't have to because they're both being held accountable to quoted transfers. And so you might see like two a day. Some people knock it out of the park, but you might see one to two a day the first the first week. You know, the second week, maybe two. But as that data gets towards those 20th phone calls and stuff, now that pipeline's filled. Now you have data in there for a few weeks. Now you can start seeing if you have some good data in there that you're getting a 10 percent contact rate. Now you're starting to see we're seeing about an average of five to six transfers a day quoted transfers a day with those kind of contact rates. See, that's fascinating because there are a lot of companies out there that do live transfers. And then one metric they look at is the transfer. We gave you the lead. Your job is to close it. If the person hangs up, well, that's your fault as the agent. Right. Where you guys take it a completely different approach through feedback and talking to agents that use your programs. What agents really care about is how many people that get transferred over to the agency can actually get a quote. And that's the metric they look at. And I think that's pretty fascinating. So I think you brought up something really important there, Vlad. And I'd like to like to address that. So we're agents and and we understand agents. And and if you read our mission statement, like we truly want to save the agent. We want agents to be successful. I mean, we talk to people and we'll say, hey, look, it may not work if you're not coachable. This and that, because it is a different way of thinking. But but the lead company who gives the transfer, they don't care. We've we've met with lead companies and they've said to us, we understand that the turnover is so high with agents that, you know, we need to blah, blah, blah, whatever. And and it really struck me because they don't care, right? They just care about feeling like, hey, we know that we're going to have turnover with this agent because they're not going to be successful. So we need to get as much money up front. And then they're going to leave in three months. Well, guess what? We have a 90. It's what was it 97 percent retention with with the teleduce. So so people stay because we help them be successful. Those who aren't successful are not tried. I mean, that's at the end of the day. If they want live transfers, go buy live transfers. Have fun. Yeah, have fun with that. If you want a scalable system, then then come and join the community because because it's a community. Yeah, we have we have the Facebook group. We have weekly coaching. We have coaching for the for the for their producers from, you know, our producers teach their producers. So every single piece is there to understand and know how to execute, whereas the lead company doesn't. And so I think that that's an important, you know, that's that's why people are successful with it. Yeah, I think the first time I've heard of an agency doing that at scale was a health insurance Medicare agency here in my area. I went pay to a visit. I told you guys about this where I came over, they had like 20, 20 to 30 producers and none of them were a players. Like the agency owner said, we're not looking for the very best producers. We hire everybody, anybody who gets a health insurance license and everybody comes in, puts on their headset and they get an incoming call. They accept the call, they follow a script, they close the deal. That's all they do every day. So their job is just so easy and they make a six figure income just by closing a couple of deals a day.  So I think agents who are interested in and learning more should definitely reach out to you guys. What's the best way to get ahold of you guys to learn more about your program? So we do a weekly call and it's actually going to be available a little bit more often than that, but they can just head to are we to do the Yeah, live.teledueds.com. So that's yeah, now and then or they can just read out, reach out email as support at theidudes.com. Either one will work or teledueds.com. You can go there. So cool. So many ways. I'll include information right here. And anybody who's interested in reaching out to you guys must do that. And the other thing is if you're not subscribed on the YouTube channel, what is the YouTube channel? How can agents find you guys? I think you just hit the it's the YouTube link, whatever that is, slash insurance.  There's not many other insurance dudes. Awesome. Thanks for hopping on this call. We'll do more of this in the future. I appreciate it. Yeah, love to come back. Thank you so much. And anybody listening, you want to check out Vlad's episode on the insurance dudes, which was fantastic. He brought the heat and your program is fantastic. So anybody listening should also take a look at Vlad's program because it is it is fire. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate you saying that. Love it. Well, thank you for having us. Yep. Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks, Vlad. Yep. See you. Thank you for watching this video. If you are an insurance agent who wants to write 100, 200, 300 policies per month, then I'd like to show you how this script can help you do exactly that. This script is what I personally used to write over 150 policies month after month after month. And many insurance agents have implemented this sales script in their agency and now are also writing over 100 policies per month. If you want to see a live demonstration on how this script works in action, then go ahead and register for my free sales training webinar. I'll include a link right below this video. Register for that free webinar and you'll be able to see exactly how the script works and you'll be able to start implementing it in your agency right away. There's no theory in that sales training webinar. I'll actually show you the script and how it works. Go ahead and register for that webinar and I'll see you there. Take care.


Hey everyone welcome back to another python programming video. We're still looking at python challenge. We're now on the 8th challenge We just got finished off with the last one number seven oxygen. We moved on to integrity So right in front of us staring us in the face is this be Okay, there is a scroll bar, so there is more to this page and the only hint that we get here is down at the bottom Where is the missing link? Alright Let's do some investigation as always. I'm gonna right-click this and View the page source and here we go. Okay title is working hard Stame CSS same CSS page. We've always seen Is an image integrity dot jpeg. Oh, it has a map. Okay map So that brings us to good HTML Can we go there just go Where's the missing link and on and On the NPW UNPW This comment down here kind of wonder what all this is I'm kind of curious what the map is though. I'm gonna go to that one first Oh, I want to go to return good.html. Let's go there Go up in my URL bar return good.html Hey username and password of being requested by the page the site says inflate username and password Guest no password admin Administrator Okay, that didn't help. Oh Not allowed to go there. That's the same thing that the map will take us to right so alright I notice if I move my cursor around the image If I get on the B if I click the B Okay, yeah, it takes me to that same authentication thing UNPW Well, okay, if we go look at the page source one more time this This UN and this PW must represent username and password that makes sense. So I'll just I don't know why these would be username and password, but I mean Let's try it because it this looks like random raw data. No, that didn't work either username and password being requested by Python challenge the site says inflate What? What is inflate? I don't know what that means Well We're using Python. So let's do some research. I'm to create a new tab. I'm a Google Python Inflate I'm feeling lucky. So let's go to the first result Python inflate and deflate Know that Python includes Zlib and the C libraries. Okay, it wasn't And if I hit the back button, okay, yeah Zlib is a return result in In In Google I'm gonna look at the documentation here compression compatible with G zip What? Okay, so do we have to like that like this at this rod data here? Do we have to inflate it? It's got to be what the hint is I'm gonna look to this inflate on this page. There is no inflate function No speaking of inflate if I go back to this stack overflow page He's using this decompress function Let's try I'm just gonna fire up idle and play with it in here because We're just playing import Zlib Let's grab that Let's grab this username here. I'm just gonna copy and paste that Zlib dot decompress that's the function to use Zlib dot decompress and he's passing in a string of some kind so decompress paste in the string Error negative three will decompressing data incorrect header check. Okay. I don't know what that means either Oh, he gets the same error I received the following error error negative three incorrect check G zip doesn't work either these guys tell them. Oh wait, wait, wait Says he solved it All right solve To handle raw deflate and inflate data Without the header and checksum. Okay, if we're getting an incorrect header check, I guess we don't need the header Strip the first two bytes Yeah, the following things need to happen Strip the first two bytes and the last four bytes to check some decompress, okay strip the first two Last four these are These are escaped and there's another thing that needs to happen. Oh There's a second argument. Oh, that's deflate Strip the first two bytes header and last four bytes checks. Okay, so we don't have to do that if we're inflating on inflate Which is I think what we're doing since I mean, that's what it said on the page site says inflate There's a second argument for window size if the value is negative it suppresses headers, okay, so Arguments negative negative one No Well preparing to decompress data and consistent streams eight. Let's just do a little bit more reading What did this guy say see sharp deflate streams Java okay, all right, I think I'm getting into no man's land up here More information the first the first two bytes of the dotnet deflate data After B64 decoding just not Be zip to data Okay, we're working with zealib Gzip it said didn't work for him either. What is B zip is B zip to I remember when we removed the release when I was thinking of removing Like the first two bytes it says BZ up here I Wonder okay, that could just be like pure coincidence, but I wonder if that has anything to do with B zip I'm not gonna need to have and just research that Python B zip to hey, all right. There's a module for it compression compatible with B zip to and Python Decompression of files. Hey, that's the same like thing we were doing with with ours and we were trying to inflate So, okay, I'm gonna go back to it Decompression of files. Is there an inflate function if I control F for that? No, there is not But whoa brought me down to the bottom of the page and there is a decompress function Let's do it. I mean, let's just let's just try it Decompressed data in one shot if you want to decompress data sequentially use an instance of BZ to decompressor instead I think this function just might do it though back to idle Import what is this module called BZ to? BZ to import BZ to BZ to dot decompress Passing the string. Oh, okay. All right. We get a string huge Whatever that means Well, that's got to be that was the section of that was the username, right? So now we need the password pw I'm a copy and paste this guy If I run BZ to decompress Oh didn't need those extra quotes huge file Okay so so username is huge password is file Hey, all right, awesome challenge number nine. We did it. Dude. That was that wasn't that bad. Um I'm kind of curious what more stuff BZ to can do now So a copy of interface for the BZ to compression library Implements a complete file interface one shot decompression functions and types are sequential Made I am very curious. I'll have to read and learn a little bit more about this Huh, okay. Well, uh, well, I mean the purpose of the video is done. I mean we're done We we got to the next challenge So, let's see Well, we didn't have to write any like real code in a text editor for this We just kind of worked in idle. So now we got a little Christmas tree of Strings and errors, but well, hey, thanks for watching guys. Hope you enjoyed this one I know it was a little bit of a different kind of poking around trial and error thing, but well, I mean it works So again, thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next tutorial


Let's move on to the second game. The second game is also really fun. It's called ABC Word Chain, ABC Word Chain. So what is this about? This game is really, really great for building vocabulary. And it's also very versatile. You can really use this for very low level students, but also higher level students, depending on the category that you choose for this game. So how does this game work? The teacher chooses a topic and asks a student for a word that fits into that topic. So for example, the topic could be animals. And then you ask a student, OK, who can tell me an animal? And the student says, lion. So you write down lion. And next, the students, they take turns building a word chain. And usually, you can do this in a row. You start with this student, and then next, next, next. Go in a row like that. So the students, they take turns building a word chain by looking at the final letter of the last word in the row. So for example, if you start with lion, the last letter is n, then the next student needs to find an animal that begins with n, right? And also fits into that category, so animals. So in the case of our animal word chain, it could be lion, newt, turtle, elephant, and so on, and so on, and so on. So obviously, animals or things like that is really easy. You can play this with very low level beginner students. But then you can also do other categories. For example, you could do adjectives, even for advanced students, adjectives. Or you could do countries and capitals, depending on what you teach them. You could do literally anything. You can also use this if you, typically, your lesson has a topic, right? So you can do this as a review game. So the topic would be whatever topic that you talked about the last class, like environment. So all the words need to be related to environment, for example, or things like that. Or we recently had Earth Day, right? So you can do that as a topic, everything that relates to Earth or whatever. So you can really, you're really free with this. And it's a really, really fun game. It's not only an icebreaker, but I also really like to use this when it's towards the end of the class. You still have five minutes. You don't know what to do. You can play this game. So it works really, really well. So let's also try this real quick together. I have a piece of paper here. And I chose the category fruit. Also not that difficult. So I'm gonna start with a fruit. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do just apple. Let's see. And you would write this down. First word. Oh my gosh, can you see that? Okay. Apple. So now into the comments, let's play this game. Continue the word chain. Continue the word chain. So anybody, the first comment that I see that's gonna be the next word in our word chain. And then we're gonna do a couple of more examples, okay? So apple is the first one. Apple. All right, so we have banana. That doesn't fit. It needs to start with E, right? It needs to start with E. Banana starts with B. Then we have non-NC elephants. Elephant doesn't work. It doesn't fit into the fruits category. We're doing fruits now in our example, okay? All right, so let's see. A fruit that starts with E. It's actually kind of difficult. Is there a fruit that starts with E? You can Google it. I'm sure there's a fruit. So a fruit start starting with E. Let's see, can somebody figure it out? Hmm. Yeah, eggplant, vegetable, right. Yeah, is there a fruit that starts with E? Okay, let's Google this. Fruit that starts with E, or somebody Google it. Fruit, fruit that starts with E. See, sometimes it can be really difficult. Okay, there are a couple. Oh, and even eggplant is on there. Is eggplant actually a fruit? No way. Okay, there are a lot of crazy fruits. Anybody find something? All right, Google it and tell me one. There's a lot. Can you Google it? There's a good one. Elderberry, elderberry. Let's do that one. Elderberry. Okay, so you would do that. Yes, elderberry. So now we have Y. This might be more difficult. Y. This is a really bad example. But see, it gets your students thinking. Gets your students thinking. Is there anything that starts with Y? There must be a fruit that starts with Y, right? Yeah, okay. Is that actually a vegetable? I'm not sure. All right, let's do that. Let's do fruits and vegetables, okay? All right, let's do fruits and vegetables. To make this a little bit better. All right, apple. So this is typically how I write it down onto the board. So we have apple, elderberry, yam. Yuzu fruit, that's a good one. Yuzu fruit, yangmei fruit. Okay, good. All right, let's just do yam. Let's do fruits and vegetables. Let's just do it. So next one. Let's do a couple more, three more. Let's do three more. Great, thank you, Juliana. Juliano says mango. Perfect, so I need to start back here. Mango. Yeah, now it's gonna be a little bit easier, isn't it? Okay. Great, mango. Awesome, yes. Orange, perfect. Orange. Oh, this looks like a P, it's an O. Orange. Awesome, and one more with E. Another one with E, yes. Thank you, I just saw that too. Elephant apple, I think I saw that, I Googled it. Or eggplant, okay, let's, Mikey, we said fruits and vegetables. You said eggplant earlier, so let's do eggplant. Eggplant, okay. Okay, and then maybe the last one's tea. Someone with tea, one more, and then we'll just finish. Thanks, you're so fast. Good, Mikey, tomato. Good, or tangerine, yes, nice, taro, good. Yeah, so that's how the game works. And it's really fun. We had a rough start, but yeah. Sometimes if you feel like it doesn't work, you can expand your category a little bit. But yeah, you can adjust this, depending on the level of your students, you can do something easier, something harder, you could do parts of speech, like I said, you could do adjectives only, or more difficult category, or anything like that, right? So this is a great game to get your students started and talking in English, but you could also use this if you have, like I said, five minutes left at the end, you don't know what to do, play this game, it's usually super fun. Yeah, Candice said the game is challenging, but fun. Yeah, sometimes it can be challenging. Even though I thought fruit is an easy category, but yeah, right, fruits start with E, it's kind of hard. So you could do fruits and vegetables, I think then it's easier. Great. Good, okay. This was fun though. Thanks so much for playing, guys. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for Tefal and TESOL training courses. If you liked this video, please subscribe by clicking the button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.