Hi everyone. So glad you could join us for another episode of Most Powerful Women in Sports where the world's greatest marketers, media pros, athletes and coaches share their remarkable journeys and how they achieve peak performance. We'd also like to hear from you to join the conversation in the chat and questions in the Q&A box. Today, we'll be speaking with Jessica Berman, National La Crosse League Deputy Commissioner and EVP of Business Affairs. We're going to talk to Jessica about leadership lessons learned from the different stops, her different stops along the way, but first a little background on Jessica. Jessica joined the National La Crosse League in 2019 after 13 years with the NHL where she was VP, community development, culture and growth. Jessica was and is the first woman to hold the title of Deputy Commissioner at any professional sports league in North America. She oversees all of the league's legal affairs and transactions, manages team services and assists the commissioner with the National La Crosse League's growth strategy. That's a lot to chew on. Jessica, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. We have a lot to dig into here. Thanks for having me. This is crazy. You have a big job. So I'm told or so my kids tell me. So let's start from the beginning just a little bit of you know where you grew up and who shaped you in terms of just in terms of your your leadership style. If you got into sports, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, which for those who are less familiar, well, I call it real Brooklyn. It's not probably what people think of today as Brooklyn. Really, it was a melting pot of people from different backgrounds and I was actually the minority in my community. And that really shaped me in terms of the things that drove me and inspired me in my life. I was always interested in and passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion really since I was a young child and had firsthand and front row seat to the impact of how being underrepresented or marginalized in a community impact you and that really was the catalyst for me wanting to work in sports because I always believed that sport has the power to change the world and was inspired by Nelson Mandela from the time I was a young child and felt that if I could have a role to play in an industry that was a community asset the way that sports are that that would be the way that I wanted to have a positive impact on the world. In terms of my leadership style, I guess I'll start with my parents probably had the biggest impact on me. My mom's a child psychologist and forced a lot of self reflection in my life, including daily journal writing and just really being self aware, taking tabs on at any given minute hour or day what I need in order to be my best self. That was a practice that was instilled in me from the time I was young really given permission to have ups and downs and really just be human. And I do think that that sort of empathy and compassion is not just how I lead myself through my life, but also how I try to mentor and manage and support others around me. And my dad was an entrepreneur, unfortunately passed away earlier this year, but he self made ran his own business built from scratch was a started pumping gas and his dad's gas station and went on to buy a lot of gas stations and gas and oil businesses and his hard work and work at work ethic really shapes who I am every single day. Well, I want to get into a little bit more on the leadership side of things. That sounds really interesting to me on on your approach. Were you always sporty? Is this something were you a late bloomer or were you into sports early on? I was into sports as a fan from the time I was young, but actually my role directly in sports was really I think more on the periphery growing up. I don't know. My my parents didn't have me play sports when I was a kid. Like I was never put in team activities. I was a dancer and so I was a cheerleader and a dance part of the dance team throughout my life through college actually and through that ended up doing halftime shows and being sort of on on the sidelines. But also play a role as a manager of various different teams from the time I was a freshman in high school keeping stats and doing press notes and organizing interviews for players. And so I was always around sports. My brother was actually a football player and played in college. So I definitely had influences from him watching him actually be on the field. So yeah, just always in and around sports. So how did you get into the NHL? Hockey was actually my favorite sport growing up. And so for better or worse, it was sort of to me as a teenager, the pinnacle of working in sports. That was my framework because it was my favorite sport as a fan. And I worked at Prosk Arrow Rose, which is the law firm that represents all the major sports leagues, but the NHL as well. And I happened to link up with the main partner who represented the NHL and collective bargaining back in 2003. When I was a young associate at Prosk Arrow and Bob Baperman, who was the partner was looking for a young eager, hardworking associate who could manage the project with him and for him. And so with with him as my mentor, I got to work every single day. That was like every day was like a year in collective bargaining when the NHL had a season long work stoppage in 0405. And that was really my very quick indoctrination into the NHL world I got to as a very young person, probably unusually so got to work directly with Commissioner Bettman and Bill Daly and David Zimmerman and all of the senior leadership at the NHL and so much so that when collective bargaining was over and we had our new agreement, they hired me to come in house. Interesting. So in talking to a lot of people in the women in the sports arena, it seems that a lot of people came from the outside in rather than started maybe as an intern. There were a few people who started as an intern or you know a floor wiper or whatever unbasketball. But would you say that a legal profession or business profession is the way to go for somebody trying to break in? It was for me a successful route for a couple of reasons. I felt like as a woman as an underrepresented person in the industry, it gave me, I think a level of credibility coming in the door through the professional route that was helpful. I think as a starting point, but also I would say I also really worked my way up like some of the stories that you're referencing throughout my career. I had countless internships really from the time I was 16. I worked at the NFL. I worked at agencies. I worked at marketing agencies. I worked for on air talent. I worked at different media companies on the sports side all in an internship capacity really to learn the industry and to build my network because as folks who work in the industry now or others who are interested in being in the industry know it is a very small industry and everyone seems to know everyone and when you're not in it, it can be very intimidating. But my approach was really to have a quality based networking approach where I would try to attend conferences or events consistently so that repeat instances of meeting people. I was able to really build I think more substantive and long lasting relationships which really helped me in my career. Okay. And did some of those relationships help you go from the NHL to lacrosse? Like talk about a little bit of that transition and what that was like that's a big change in many ways. It was a big change. It was a very hard change for a lot of reasons leaving the NHL which as I just described was my dream job. I mean if you met people I went to high school with they would have said that I would have never left the NHL because I love hockey and I love the NHL. I made a decision and maybe it's in part some of the references I made earlier to the self-reflection that I do as a general practice for my own sort of keeping tabs on how I'm doing that continuing to work at the NHL in that capacity wouldn't really allow me to reach my potential and in part because it's such a big organization and no matter how important my role was there and I do feel like I had the opportunity to contribute and worked with amazing people and got amazing opportunities to contribute. It just felt like at the end of the day I was a very small cog in a very big wheel and that's probably the case for a lot of big businesses and I really felt like I wanted the opportunity to try and work in a different kind of work environment where it was a little more scrappy in terms of being a challenger property being more risk tolerant and being able to infuse more innovation into our approach to the next generation of fans and to have more leadership role in the full holistic business as opposed to one vertical that I was responsible for and that's really what led me to the NLL in my current role and yes it was absolutely by virtue of my network of people who helped me do a lot of soul searching about what I was looking for to really make sure that what I was going to was going to really help me to achieve what I was looking to achieve in the next phase of my career.   What's what's happening on that front? So I'm two and a half years into my role and since I've joined we have expanded by two teams. So we've gone from 13 to 15 teams which each of those transactions is massive undertaking massive opportunity for growth. We've recast our media partnerships and landscapes. So we went from a deal with Turner and be our live to now we are on ESPN in the US and TSN in Canada which for those who aren't familiar with the Canadian media landscape really the sort of equivalent of ESPN they're actually related related entities. So we've completely recast our media distribution strategy. We have introduced new corporate social responsibility initiatives at the league actually this past November we announced NLL Unites which is our CSR platform to really communicate our our why our cause. I really believe that purpose driven storytelling and education initiatives is really particularly for a challenger property like ours a differentiator in the marketplace and we have a very strong culture around indigenous roots obviously very socially relevant today and very authentic to the sport of lacrosse and yeah we're working on a variety of new initiatives we've announced several and one more to come on Friday that's in the works new non-indemic sponsorship and partnerships. Again all towards sort of taking the league more mainstream having the league be where sports fans are and go we are now as of a year ago since I joined selling merchandise with Fanatics our partner at Fanatics so that sports fans can shop in the place where they shop for other sports NLL shirts hats jerseys etc. So yeah there there's a lot of momentum in the league in terms of our growth so I'm just I actually have always wondered about this it lacrosse is so popular in schools at all levels what what's been the challenge at at the professional level. Yeah it's it's very it's a question that I had frankly before I joined because it's a little perplexing why lacrosse isn't more popular considering the grassroots growth. Yeah I guess what I would say is that it takes a generation number one to build fandom right particularly if you're doing it through grassroots so 30 years ago 20 years ago lacrosse was not popular like it is today so the people who grew up playing lacrosse are just now getting to the point where they're in their 20s 30s 40s and that is the beginning of sort of this next generation of fans for us a good example of that is that our most recent one of our most recent ownership groups are former lacrosse players and they run enormous hedge funds now but yeah super helpful. They love the game they love lacrosse they want to be involved in the growth of lacrosse they coach on the side their kids play and so yeah I think over time you're just going to start to see that but also I the other observation that we're really trying to take a leadership role in is really about the fragmentation of the sport and I think the more we can serve as a beacon of unification for the different stakeholders to come together on joint initiatives the the easier it'll be for the consumer to find us and support us and not be confused by the landscape there needs to be like a North Star that everybody from I mean from a marketing perspective. You know having too many initials brands messages communicators can really bifurcate your audience and I think that's been a bit of a of impediment to the lacrosse growth. Okay I have a question from the audience I'm going to ask you now and it has to do with marketing. Can you talk about cause marketing and sports philanthropy and how much that has changed in the last decade or so. Yes well for me for you this is my passion point I I genuinely believe that really the sort of old school way of marketing which is just like branding or static images or what has been in sports just like a Dasher board signage just not going to penetrate and one of the things that cause marketing will will do for leagues and for sports is really have the fans understand why we matter and what we stand for what we care about and we know from the data that the next generation of fans particularly Millennials and Gen Z's will make decisions based on their belief that a sports brand or any brand for that matter really genuinely and authentically care about cause and so to from my perspective it's table stakes at this point and I think the sports industry is a little bit late to this line of thinking I'll give credit to the NBA that started NBA cares at least 10 to 15 years ago before the rest of professional sports frankly had sort of bought on to this concept of do good and do well that you can appropriately leverage philanthropy and doing good in the communities for your brand to do well as long as it's done the right way and as long as it's done appropriately and in good faith. So I think it's essential to any marketing strategy at this point certainly that's the NLL's focus. So another question do you think do you think there'll be a point where we'll start to see women's teams flourish or is it still early days? This is the time I think for women's sports and I think you're starting to see it right the the WNBA the NWSL they're flourishing and it's not philanthropy for a business any thought of as philanthropy there's a little data real data to support that there's business reasons to invest in women's sports people care and watch about women's sports in fact some of the data shows that a women's sports fan is a more engaged sports fan because of that cause related element they really care they really wanted to be successful there's it's not a passive experience for a women's sports fan I would argue in some ways and I've often said this internally that the NLL has a lot of similarities to women's sports in that way because people who follow it like really care and it's much less of a casual or passive experience. Do you think there'll be a time where you'll see professional and women playing in the NLL like a women's league or are we a little ways off that's I think certainly in the field game probably closer in time than the door game which is our version of lacrosse but and again this is sort of a little bit in the weeds of what I was referring to about the fragmentation of lacrosse which is that there's so many versions of lacrosse this is the other thing that I think is a real challenge for people you know unlike say like soccer like you can pick up a soccer ball like whether you're in Mexico or in Canada or Israel you're soccer is soccer right in lacrosse there's girls lacrosse there's boys lacrosse there's field game there's the there's the indoor game there's now fixes which is another version of lacrosse that just came out that is the international version and so from that perspective it it will be a potential obstacle I think for for making the transitions for example there's an outdoor lacrosse league the PLL we share 40% of our players with them but not 100% because not every player can play in both leagues so because it's a different version of the game. Got it. Okay. Wow that yeah that'll that'll create some some complications but but it but it is interesting to see the momentum that's been going on and we actually are just about out of time so I'm going to have you throw to your takeaways. This has been a really great conversation by the way and we'll go from there. My takeaways this is actually really fun to do when when you guys asked me to think about three key takeaways so I guess my first takeaway is I think maybe the opposite of what I think people's tendency is to do which is to try to really like lean into just proportionally focusing on your weaknesses improving your weaknesses and that's not to say that you shouldn't be aware of them and manage them but I think really what I've tried to do in my career is manage my weaknesses and backfill as needed in areas where I know I might not be as strong but really lean into my strengths and and do the things that you know you do well and not be afraid to sort of acknowledge or admit that you need help in some areas because not everybody can be everything to everyone and I think that's okay. That's why we have a lot of people around us who can who can help us. The second is to we talked about this a little bit already to always remember and share your why. I think context is everything. I really live by this not just in my professional life in terms of how I manage people and initiatives that we do that are public facing with fans but also in my personal life with my children. It's it's my mantra of how I parent my children. I always try to give them some context if I'm asking them for something or asking them to do something. And the last one this is really I can't take credit for this. This is this is a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg who is my my one of my many sheroes which is to fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you. I think there are ways to build consensus and have people really want to join you in your efforts to be successful or to push forward with an initiative but it's the old like honey versus vinegar thing. You get a lot done if you have allies and people around you who are supporting you and wanting you to be successful and it's definitely a lot harder to do it when you're going at it alone. So I surround myself with a very large village of people who are part of every single success that I've ever had. So yeah, those are my three takeaways. They're excellent and very thoughtful. They're actually really great words to live and work by. So thank you for them and and thank you for joining us today today. This has been a lot of fun and really interesting learning more about La Crosse and and what you what your role is. So thanks for joining us and hope to see you again soon at one of our events. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Lisa and have a great day. Thank you too. And thanks to everyone for joining us today. We will see you back here on January 26th.


I'm James, or sub-stack, from the internet. If you want to follow along online, there's a link to these slides. You can poke around and just be on your laptop the whole time. I don't care. Anyways, I don't really work anywhere. I just do some freelance stuff sometimes, but I'm not very good at it. I mostly just tinker around on the internet, making open source modules, and I want to talk about permanence and sort of rethink, perhaps, how we build web apps here in the present so that maybe our future, aka FutureJS, is a little bit nicer. One thing that really sucks is we have all of these web services, but they don't tend to last very long. I think I listened to a talk by Brewster Kale of archive.org, who had some stats that the average web page lasts 100 days, which is pretty terrible, I think.  It's pretty terrible how the business models of the web sort of run themselves into the ground, and then us developers with all of these third-party endpoints have to put up with that, which is terrible. So also, people really haven't adopted offline techniques very much because it's hard. What makes it hard is one of the two or three hard problems of computer science. One of them is cache invalidation. Another one is naming things, and the third one of the two is off by one errors. Good. But basically, the network, as you will doubtless be aware here, is extremely unreliable. And we really shouldn't pretend that things that we make are going to be able to use the network in any meaningful capacity if people are actually out in the real world and not in a suburb of Minnow Park in California building a web app. So there's also this really huge problem in terms of making things that are going to last on the web, where there's a power asymmetry where the clients are bundled with the services that they depend on, and identity is kind of a commodity, which is really unfortunate. So how can we get away from some of these things? Well, if someone owns a service, then they can just take it down whenever they want. You depend on them to provide the service, and if they don't want to provide that service anymore, there's really nothing you can do about it. So how can we build services that nobody owns? I think is a really interesting question, and we can use a lot of techniques from distributed computing to actually answer this question effectively. So here's some pieces that I think a lot of modern web apps use that we can replace with distributed alternatives. And a lot of these techniques are just becoming practical on the web with tools like WebRTC and different torrent modules and stuff like that. So we've got to have identity, we've got to have a system for doing trust that's not baked into the SSL, cartel, domain name, extractive, rent-seeking enterprise that it is. And we've also got to have some way of doing feeds, like sort of a Twitter-style data model for pointing at big blob storage. So anyways, for identity, how can we do this? Well, if you've ever used an SSH connection before, it's quite simple. You run an SSH keygen command that you copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, and then you just copy your idrsa.pub onto the server you want to connect to. So at no point did you have to talk to a third-party service to register a domain or to register a username. Your username doesn't have to be unique. It already is unique because it's based on entropy. So a really common technique that you see a lot of the time for building distributed identity is either using the public key directly as the identity or using the hash of the public key, depending on what kind of keys you have. So another interesting technique I've found for doing this stuff is if instead of having a unique name registry, you just operate like the real world, where your name is just what your friends call you. And if your friends don't call you that name, maybe they're not your friends anymore. Or like, you can have two Jameses in the same room, and we don't explode. You can even have two John Smiths, and that's okay. We figure out ways for resolving those conflicts informally ourselves. Humans aren't just a hash that has collisions. Fortunately enough. So how can we do this kind of stuff well? So a really good module for doing this in Node is called Sodium. So this is based on the NACL library. So if you require Sodium and then do .api, I'm wrapping it so I don't have to do that. So just do sodium.cryptosignkeypair, and that will give you a public key pair. So if I run that program in Node, oops, sorry, I think it was API. Ah. Oh, goodness. I've already broken this terribly. Anyways, if we have a program like this, we can create a key pair and load that into something like keys.json, and then we have this way of having identity on a service. So this particular example also runs in the browser with a module called sodium-browserfi slash browser for some reason. I'm going to bug Dominic Tarr to fix that. But anyways, if we listen on a port now, so if I go to localhost 5001, I've already prepared a little bit of an example for doing distributed peer-to-peer identity in the browser. So here I have Sodium, and this one actually works, so .cryptosignkeypair, and here we have an object that has a public key that's 32 bytes and a secret key that's 64 bytes. So if we take the public key, which is 32 bytes, so that's the same size as a lot of hash functions anyways, and we can convert that to hex. And there we go. Here is my username. Not exactly very rememberable, but there are techniques for building systems on top of this primitive as the username. So that's sort of an introduction to how we can start tackling the idea of identity, but we're going to need a lot of other data structures if we want to build a new distributed web that really challenges how the web currently works and makes it more permanent, more accessible, these kinds of things. So another really useful technique for building web apps of the future is this technique called Merkle Dag. So I bet almost everyone here has already been using Merkle Dag's probably every day because they're the data model that Git uses. So Merkle Dag's are a sort of content-addressed data store that has some really nice properties and we'll also be looking at some kinds of content-addressable blob storage. So content-addressable data is really fun. Basically you know how one of those hard problems of computer science, one of them is naming things. So with content-address storage, the name is just the hash of the content.  It's this hash. And content-address data is really nice because you don't have to... When you get that data from someone and you already knew it's hash, you can instantly verify it. So Merkle Dag's have this really nice property where they're self-verifying in a sense. So the other thing is... Here's an example of what a Merkle Dag looks like. So the really nice property of Merkle Dag is if you include the hash of a previous document in the current document, you sort of create this chain of custody for your application where you keep all of history around. So here's just an example where we have a previous header that says null for the first one and then it points at the first message in the second and the third message points at the second. So it goes one after the other and you can create this linked list that represents history. The nice thing about the structure is it's very trivial to do replication because all that you need to do is you have two logs and you can catenate them together and maybe perform some other operations, but it's relatively trivial. And if we can keep all of history around and if we can't rewrite history, which is sort of this Orwellian idea that we should maybe step away from, then we can build really robust web apps that will last as long as video games from the 80s, maybe, if we're lucky. So there's a great module on NPM called Hyperlog that lets you do this kind of stuff. So if we start from zero, as I often like to do, we can make a so-called log.js, load up Hyperlog, and we can instantiate a new log. We'll need a levelDB handle to do this, so we can require a level and make a DB. LevelDB is really nice. It's a really simple key value store database, and it's a lot like SQLite where you just need it to give it a directory and it exists in memory in your process. So if we instantiate a Hyperlog with a DB, then we can do some operations like log.append, a message, perhaps, so if we read from standard in, so here I'll require concat stream, so process.standardin.pipe.concat. That'll give us the body. And now we can call log.append, or there's also log.add if you know the hash of the previous content, but log.append, you don't need to know that necessarily. We'll give that the body, and that's all we need to do. So now if we echo beep boop, run that into node log.js, and if we fix our program so that it's not completely broken with an extra parent, there we go. So great, it prints nothing. That means it's succeeded. If we want to read out this data, I'll maybe add another entry. There we go. If we want to read out this data, we can change the program so that instead of piping from standard in, we can do log.createreadstream. And I'll just print out each record like that. So here we go. Here is our data. And note, just like in the Merkle-Dag example, or just like in git, the hash of the current document is like 523, and then in the next document, we point at the hash of the previous document, and so on and so on. And the really nice thing is if we want to do replication, it's pretty trivial, so I can take this log program, and make a replicate.js out of that. So now we can just call log.replicate. And one really nice trick I like to do for symmetric protocols is you can just use standard in, and we'll pipe that to standard out, like so. And so now we need a second program, so this one is going to replicate from .slashdata. But if we make that take process.rgv2, then we can replicate to another place. So if I run node.replicate on data, now I need to pipe another program standard in into the standard out of this program, so I need to do this sort of mix-y-match operation where I take standard in, pipe that to standard out, whatever. So there's this nice little 20-line program I wrote to do that called dupesh. So we can run this program again, replicate.js, and I'll say .slashclone. So it might have actually worked, but sometimes it doesn't always hang up correctly. So we do see that now that there's a directory called clone, which is good. If I take that log file, make a clone.js out of that. Whoa. So now instead of data, we'll print out the clone, and hopefully it'll give us something. Yeah, great. So it succeeded. Let's get that data set. What's even crazier is all of what I just showed you works in the browser. So to make that work in the browser, all that we need to do is take our replicate.js and instead of speaking standard in and standard out, you can just replace level with require level browserify and replace standard in and standard out with a WebSocket. So let's actually do that. Okay. So first we're going to need, but we will need some browser code. So we use level browserify, instantiate our database with whatever it doesn't matter in the browser what you use. And so now instead of standard in, we can use a WebSocket. So I like to use this module called WebSocketStream. So require WebSocketStream and now wsock hit ws colon slash slash local host. We'll use 5002. And now we'll do log.replicate ws.pipe log.replicate pipe.ws. This is an example of a duplex stream. You can read all about this in the stream handbook if you want. Or you can take the stream adventure node challenge. But anyways, this is a common pattern if you're doing stuff in node. So now if I run a static server, so I'll just make an index.html file really fast, bundle.js and put a body around it. Okay, so now if I browserify I think we I was using replicate.js, yep. So browserify replicate.js dasho bundle.js and give that a second. And now if I run a static on port 5000, that's just a static web server. So if this works our browser code now should open a web socket connection. So it should expect to talk to localhost 5002 but I realized that actually I need to use a different thing. So now if I run that duplex.h command from before, where I do node replicate.js dot slash data. The other endpoint I can use is a web socket connection. So I've got this handy little script like netcat, which talks standard in and standard out, but it uses a web socket connection. So if I listen on port 5002, if everything goes well, then if I go to localhost 5003, that's just the favacan thing. So, failed. Specified error event. Success. Possibly. Because it printed nothing, which is good. So if we want to actually get out that data that we put in to our connection, we'll have to change our program a little bit. So if now I put back in log dot create read stream dot on data, and then in the browser you actually have to bind a console, which is silly, but there we go. So if I browserify that again and give it a sec, then maybe it'll work, but it's okay if it doesn't. This is just to give you an example of how few moving parts you need to implement something like peer-to-peer data replication in the browser. So that's still running. And not getting data, but that's okay. So anyways, the next part of how we can build web apps that will outlive us, hopefully, is that we're going to need to figure out a way to do trusted updates. So when you get a web page, you normally fetch it from a server. And that server lives at a DNS record, so you have to pay some amount of money per month to keep that server running. You have to pay for hosting. You have to pay for all of these things. What if you just decide to stop paying, then all of your users suddenly can't use your software anymore. So how can we implement a system for giving people trustworthy updates so that they can fetch data from other peers in the network? So all of these things are not very future-friendly, I like to think. Like app stores and SSL certs, whatever, because they have expiry built into them and they cost money. So I've got this little experiment called Trustlog that uses signed messages on top of Hyperlog to give you things like trusted method and revoke. So you can do things like you might be used to with the app feed, where you have a GPG key and then that's trusted, but you can revoke it and you can add more keys around a single identity. So it gives you something more like a multi-device thing. So here's where this is building towards. I've got this little demo for this project called App Feed that I've been working on. So with App Feed, I think there's some versions already in there. So with App Feed, so there's a publish command and you can give it a version and then you pipe some HTML into the command. So if we have a web page, whoa. I'll make that web page on the spot. There's our web page, whatever. If we pipe that into App Feed publish version 1.1.0, then I get a hash. This is the hash of the content. So if you ran a shot algorithm on that HTML page, you would get the same content. And now I can list out the versions that I have in my local feed. So I had version 1, now I have version 2. If I want to replicate with another server, here I've got a server running and it just prints out the versions that it knows about. So right now it doesn't have any versions, but if I replicate with that server using the same web socket trick that we did before, then it doesn't kill itself correctly yet. But if I curl that page, I guess it still doesn't work. Oh, there we go. Hooray, it works. Great. So I just didn't wait two seconds. All right. So now our server has the entire history of everything that we've pushed to our page.  So you can see that your web.html variants aren't using it to ingest that information from your web server. But with this kind of a technique, you can have an experience where if you disappear, the users of your web app don't have to suffer that much. They can take that data and put it somewhere else instead. I think this is a much better model for building web apps. But it's sort of an active technique if you want to remove single points of failure from web apps. We can get data from peers. And how can we do that? Well, there's this really great suite of modules in Node.js called abstract blob store. There's dozens of these things. One of my favorites is called content addressable blob store. And I'll show how that relates to peer-to-peer data in a moment. So with content addressable blob store, you get you get data so that the data that you put in the key of that data is just the hash of the content. Just like you get and get, just like I was doing on the command line a moment ago. So the first thing you do to use this stuff is you require content addressable blob store. And then we can instantiate that with a directory. And so with abstract blob store modules, you get four methods. But the two that are important are create read stream and create write stream. So if I do standard in dot pipe B dot create write stream, then I get a callback that has access to the key of the data. So if there's an error, console log error else console dot log w dot key. I get the hash of the data that I put in. If I want to get that data back out again, I can do b dot create read stream and I can pipe that to standard out. So if I take that hash from before, I get out the data that I put in. Great. So we can use this basic kind of interface to implement a torrent blob store over bit torrent. Why not? That's pretty straightforward. So all that you need to do to use bit torrent instead of a local directory on disk is swap out content addressable blob store for torrent blob store. And you don't even need to give anything there. I think there is so I have a local tracker running. Here's what you can do to use torrents. So if I do echo hello future JS node post.js, now instead of a shah hash as the key, I get a magnet link which has a hash in it. So you can feed this magnet link into any bit torrent client. I've got one on the command line here that I like to use. And so this connects to the tracker in a sec. Sometimes it takes several seconds calculating estimated 100%. Great. So this torrent now made this file called file that has our content. Hello future JS. So that's basically all you need to use bit torrent as an arbitrary blob store for your applications. I might also add that all of what I've just showed you works in the browser too using this project called WebTorrent. And you can go to WebTorrent.io to read more about that. So this is great. We have pure distribution of blobs and we have a system for building replication for handling our HTML payloads. But we're still sort of dependent on servers. I mean we're going to have servers no matter what but it would be good if the servers were just there to provide some redundancy and availability to our network. So how can we build a peer-to-peer log. And this is something that I've only got working in the past few weeks but there is this extension to the BitTorrent protocol called BEP44 and this is a pull request that I made back in April that's still not merged but it's almost passing all of the tests. So the nice thing about this extension is that you can put mutable content into BitTorrent. So how BitTorrent works is normally you can only put immutable blobs. This is like a giant Linux ISO for example. But if you want to change data on the BitTorrent DHT, you can with this patch. You only get one kilobyte to work with but that's more than enough if all that you need to do is put a few hashes that point to other torrent files or other immutable data. So all that we need to do to build a peer-to-peer Twitter for example on top of BitTorrent is save the head which is just the most recent hash and then every new document that we put in BitTorrent it just needs to point at the hash of the previous document and then we can create a program that just walks those links walks that linked list data structure all the way back until we're out of messages with the most recent first which is kind of a nice model for something like Twitter. So let's go ahead and build that. So I've got a little prepared on the Rails sequence for that because I can't quite live code that kind of thing completely fresh. So here is how you can build a BitTorrent back to Twitter. So the first thing you can do, I've got a little module that just sets up the key pair infrastructure because it's a little bit annoying to do this by hand but it's not even that hard so you instantiate that. If you're in this program you'll get 32 byte public key printed to standard out as hex. The next thing we can do is we'll instantiate the BitTorrent DHT module from NPM directly which is not bootstrap it in this case because I'm on conference Wi-Fi but the main thing you need to remember is to pass in a verify function and this just checks the signatures because we're using these elliptic curve keys and if a node saves a key it needs to be able to verify the signature to make that work. So I guess I should step back a little bit how that Bep44 patch works is that the location in the DHT in the distributed hash table for mutable content is the hash of a public key so by signing messages it's guaranteed that whoever put that data there has ownership of that public key so anyways we instantiate this DHT instance and the next thing we can do is keep a pointer around to document what the latest head is of our of our append only log then you can just call DHT.put with the signature signed data so there's a little helper there called .store to handle that now we can publish things to the DHT so I'll just take lines from standard in and I'll pump them through to our DHT instance so the first thing is just to put the hash of the content as the first line and then all of the data payload will be everything else in the file so that's the value and we can call DHT.put to put that value into BitTorrent and just update the head so that is all that you need to do here's the entire program for creating for publishing content Twitter style messages to the DHT that's it 36 lines and lots of empty lines so if I run this program now and I run post.js the first thing we get is this hash so I've got a little get program right here it's also very simple all that it does is calls DHT.get on whatever hash we pass in so if I run get with the first hash I get back null because we don't have any data yet so if I type a message I get a new hash and now when I load the first hash again I'll see a pointer to that message so here's the pointer I can get now so now if I run get on that value I see the first message and the pointer to the previous message which is null so if we want to make another message we get another hash so if I load the identity load the hash of the public key again I get the most recent pointer now which is now this different hash so I get 5b whatever it says another post and it gives me a reference to the first post which is hello world cool so we can take this information we can take this get.js program and create a feed walker that will just render all of the messages so now if we take the body the hash is going to be the first line so we'll split our new line it's going to be the first one if the hash is not equal to null then we can call dhg.get on the hash and so all that we need to do is make our little get program recursive and if everything is working properly if I run get.js on the hash of that public key I'll add a third message just for fun and now if I run that program we get our hash not found oh goodness valid ID I'm not sure why that happened I'll make some new data really fast oh I know why it happened that should be a buffer okay so now if I run the program on the hash of the public key and we'll have a bit torrent demo luckily I'm using a local tracker but it still might fail oh I know what it is I'm not actually printing out any messages anymore I should do that so of course it's not going to print anything yeah so there's the pointer to the first message there's our first message there's our second message there's our third message we just made twitter on top of the dhd thanks so if you're interested in this kind of stuff there is plenty more where that came from there's a project called get torrent that uses that same patch to implement github style thing on top of only bit torrent and I think it also uses bitcoin to do a naming system so there are lots of different techniques for naming systems I'm not as personally familiar with those but there's also a project called ipfs that's definitely worth checking out but they don't quite yet have a pure javascript implementation but it's the same kind of ideas but a little bit nicer and there's tons more torrent modules check out web torrent and I have some homework for all of you so that was pretty easy to build a distributed twitter so what else can we build as a service that nobody owns that no one runs that's a good thing but if you're a developer and you've spoken flicker and soundcloud those are all easy you just put the payloads as magnet links in the DHT I've also thought it would be pretty straightforward using these techniques to build an auto archiving youtube style combination live stream service so you live stream torrent file and a git issue tracker that was peer-to-peer would be pretty cool but the main thing is that geocities never forget rip so thanks


So give me a second to read this out loud for everyone. Most dating advice is based on early attraction methods without any regard or commitment. I'm gonna repeat that. Most dating advice is based on early attraction methods without any regard to commitment.  Relationships have far more moving parts. Monogamy, commitment, trust and loyalty. Let me read that one more time. Relationships have far more moving parts. Monogamy, commitment, trust and loyalty. This is provided that you want a monogamous relationship. So why am I bringing this up? Because all too often I see so much dating rhetoric out there, not advice for men and advice for women in particular centered around the following. When I say advice, there's talk shows and YouTube videos out there.   And the real narrative is telling women that they are basically wrong for wanting what they want because they're overselling themselves. Now there might be some truth to that. I'm not here to judge that. What I'm also seeing is a lot of advice for men based on attraction, the Andrew Tates of the world if you will that are in my opinion, quite misogynistic and quite demeaning to women because it's all based on early attraction methods. Now for the men, he's selling the idea be your best self, make lots of money but treat women as second class citizens because that's what they're are. That's kind of what he's selling. In fact, recently my girlfriend and I have been watching the show on Apple TV call for all mankind. And it starts with the mid 60s astronaut program in NASA. And why I'm bringing this up is it's kind of interesting and whether this is true or not, a lot of the astronauts were players. In other words, excuse me, they were married men cheating on their wives habitually and the wives had to accept it as part of their role of being an astronaut's wife. And quite frankly, I think back in the 60s a lot of women experienced this because they didn't have very many options to take care of themselves and they were in these prestigious relationships. Well, times have certainly changed where a woman isn't necessarily dependent upon a man for her survival and she has every right to be picky on the men she chooses.  There was an ultimate commitment. Well, now because of birth control men don't have to make that ultimate commitment. And yet I believe women's standards should be just as high as to who they choose to invest their heart in not their body anymore, their heart in. And why I'm bringing this up is choosing people who are more emotionally mature more emotionally attuned because ultimately as I said before, you have a choice. You wanna focus on early attraction or do you wanna seek a life partner where there's monogamy, commitment, trust and loyalty? And I want you to think about this it takes about a hundred hours of face to face time just to build the first stage of trust, the first stage and let's just assume there's 10 stages to trust. I don't know what there are but I'm just saying it takes at least a hundred hours of face to face time to build that first stage of trust. Isn't it fascinating how humans will enter into relationship all based on physical attraction and men oftentimes chase a woman based on lust or limerence. And if you're not familiar with limerence I highly recommend you type in Google limerence L-I-M-E-R-C, wait a limerence L-I-M-E-R-C-E-N-C Oh, I'm butchering it, but you get it, limerence because that early stage of chasing doesn't necessarily mean that he's capable or desires a deep commitment. And if you really want a man to actually invest let's replace the word chase with invest in the relationship then every man needs to experience this.  Now for some people I've had emails from people saying oh my God, Jonathan you live together, you're living out of wedlock and all that kind of stuff you're a bad human being. Folks, I would marry this girl, I want to marry her I'm waiting for her to wanna marry me and we just haven't reached that point yet but I certainly know this is someone I definitely wanna go the distance with. And yet I didn't know this in the beginning of our dating. Now a lot of men will tell you they knew she was the one on a first date but I want you to think back to when men used to say that they used to say that before these devices, okay before we had ample access to opportunities. And I think what's bastardized the dating mating or relating process is internet or swipe dating in particular the belief that if something doesn't work out with this person there's always another person around the corner. So understand that we are in different times than in the past when a man knew she was the one because certainly before there was internet dating we used to date based on proximity we dated the person that we physically saw and within a short period of time by the way that short period of time sometimes was just weeks before people got married. Nowadays, the average person has had multiple relationships and because of those multiple relationships many people, myself included can be gun shy. That's right, gun shy. And what oftentimes happens for men when they pull away is this sense of gun shy because many of us myself included have been hurt before. I know many of my friends who have gone through divorce have told me how horrific the experience was and that makes them a little bit less likely to fully commit to a relationship or fully commit to someone until they actually know this person is safe to be with. I know even with my beloved even though I was strongly interested in her I had that push-pull experience meaning I pushed forward and then pulled back and I pushed forward and pulled back because it takes time. As I said, it takes 100 hours to just face-to-face time to build that layer of trust.  So I'm here to say almost every man on some level pulls away, even myself included even though from the moment we met I have not literally, I have not dated anyone I haven't pursued anyone since the moment we met, okay? So I've been, we've been fully engaged with each other. And yet I did pull back a little bit. There was fear that happened, it's natural but that didn't cause me to ghost or disappear that pulling back is merely a reevaluation based on the past hurts.  And so we naturally come to a place of center just to feel safe for a moment which is very common for a lot of men. Now, for men who have done the personal development self-help and spiritual work. And I'm here to say, I'm here to say that it's critically important these days that humans come to the dating, mating and relating process having done some healing from their past relationships. That's right, some healing from their past relationships because if there isn't any healing oftentimes that if there's a traumatic experience they carry that forward and a lot of times two people connect together in their trauma bonds finding that they're attached to another human being in an emotionally unhealthy way. This is why folks, I teach in my private coaching. Here's a link to schedule a discovery call with me. What I teach in my private coaching is first out are we determine really compatibility understanding compatibility and understanding who's compatible with you. Secondly, how to ask the right questions based on your personality to see if he's compatible with you. And lastly to vet for his emotional maturity. If you're not familiar with my emotional maturity relationship skills, many of you are a little bit of a glare there. I want you to say this is merely an opinion, not a fact. I believe roughly 20% of the population has clinical issues. And while I say 20% have good relationship skills, the vast majority of human beings are dysfunctional.  And again, if you need help, there's a link below to schedule a discovery call with me to see if working with a coach is right for you. Because the bottom line is this, most people we meet are rather got terrible relationship skills. And by the way, this chart isn't about men. This is women as well. Ladies, just because you have a propensity to express your feelings more so than men doesn't mean you're good at relationship skills either. Just because many of you get attached to somebody in an unhealthy way doesn't mean you're good at this stuff either. So let's recognize that this isn't a singular male issue. This is a human being issue. So what's it gonna take? What's it gonna take for a relationship to get over the edge, to get over the hump, to really lean into something more substantial? Well, I wanna share something with you. That I wrote. As I was saying early on, I went through a push pull, meaning I was pushing and pulling away. Just very briefly, because with so many previous experiences in my life and also the perceived choice, it was a little bit harder to know if someone was a fit for me. Meaning we had to build this level of trust. We had to build this following piece. And that is, and every man needs this to be able to lean into a healthy, happy relationship. We need these two things. We need to become friends with you. That's right, friends with you. I wanna, and there's a second piece I wanna share as well. There's a meme I posted on my Instagram today. I'd like to share it with everyone. It's a cute little meme. It's gonna be hard to see it. So I just wanna put it up in the camera just so you can see what it looks like. But the first says, I love, I love, wait a minute, I love laughing with you. It's a boy and a girl looking, I'm gonna say it's a boy and a girl looking together, looking at each other. The next is I love walking with you. The next picture of the two of them together, I love working with you. The next is I love talking with you. And then the girl says, but I also love just existing with you.  Folks, what I see missing today in so many relationships is this piece of developing the genuine friendship between two people. It's relations, so again, a lot of dating rhetoric is so hyper focused on attraction and so hyper focused on game playing like the book, the rules and so hyper focused on romance. And yet without any regard to really the most important aspect of a relationship is building the deep friendship, the deep roots of trust. And if you follow my narrative, you know trust is built through spending three or four days and nights a week together, doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork building skills both in your personal and professional life. Intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy with an agreement of moving towards either living together or getting married. Folks, many of you are choosing casual relationships. Many of you are choosing unbeknownst to you friends with benefits relationships. Many of you that are in long distance relationships are merely in cyber relationships. Many of you are experiencing mediocre relationships wondering when is magic theory just gonna change all of this? But Jonathan, I'm being told that if I sit in my feminine energy a man will naturally claim me. Let me tell you something. Being claimed, let me think about that narrative. I've heard this from other feminine energy coaches being claimed by a guy. Property is something we claim. A relationship is about choosing mutual partnership with one another mutual partnership with one another. And that starts by building that friendship together along with this second piece that is critically important for a man to genuinely want to invest in you. And that is he has to wanna take care of you. Folks, I remember earlier I said monogamy, commitment, trust and loyalty. What does that mean? Loyalty, that means I've got your back. I'll be there for you when you need me. To some degree, I wanna take care of you. Do you know many of you are swimming in mediocre relationships where there's literally no feeling of this person has my back? That don't mean take care of you financially but certainly take care of you emotionally. What's the whole narrative of provider protector used to be protect you against the lions with my spear? Well, we don't have to deal with that. By the way, most guys wouldn't know how to fight their way out of a paper bag, myself included. But providing for isn't necessarily about money. It's about the emotional protection that comes from building deep emotional intimacy between two people and deep emotional intimacy comes by building that kind of friendship with one another or you know, it's interesting. You know, my girlfriend said to me yesterday, we're doing the binge watching of that show I was talking about. She said to me, I just like being with you. I just like being with you.   Oftentimes we use the feeling that I care for someone but when you like someone you treat them with a different level of respect. And yet sadly, many people are experiencing companionship, connection and sex without any real genuine development towards partnership.  Shared values, blendable lifestyles and emotional maturity because if you're walking in the dark or you're walking with dark glasses on in a dark room, you're gonna trip and fall. And if you're watching this video, there's no excuse because I recommend book after book after book on my channel. By the way, there's a book, a look in the description below to read all the books or check out all the books I recommend. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. So what's gonna make a guy chase you folks? It's going to be the development of the friendship and how do you develop friendship? Social activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills both in your personal and professional life, intimacy and physical and emotional intimacy as well. That's how the bonding of two people can occur where a man will invest you. You don't have to worry about him chasing you. He'll invest you because men need this just like you need it. We need to develop the friendship and we need to get to that space of wanting to take care of you. And until that happens and many of you are experiencing this you just might be in a casual relationship right now. And I invite you to set a higher standard for yourself. But Jonathan, I'm supposed to let a man lead. Folks, most guys are winging it. They don't know what they're doing. You're in charge of your relationship, Destiny. And you're the emotional leader of the relationship by setting the standard from the get-go and making sure you've established good boundaries for yourself. And that's my two cents and I'm sticking to it. All right, I think you get the gist of where I'm going tonight. I think this will be a great place to start our Q&A for tonight. All right, if you're familiar with my format if you have a question for me, write the word question then post the question there after or you can purchase the super sticker super chat. There's a little chat dollar sign in the chat box. All the monies from the super sticker super chat goes to a scholarship fund in the name of my son, Connor Asley. That's a picture of him right there. It's one of my favorite salty pictures. In his honor, he's my son who passed away a few years ago and in his honor, I've started a scholarship fund to donate to the Hoffman Process and Insight Institute just to name a few places. So, and by the way, I have an apology to make really quickly. Every once in a while, I do get on someone's case who says they write a question and then there's no question listed there. Again, write the word question so I know that there's a question coming. Write an actual question, then you can share the backstory, okay? Or purchase the super sticker super chat. And if you're watching the replay, a super thanks would be appreciated as well. Hey, Jennifer Bigelow, you're in the house. I wanna say thank you for watching. Hey, sweetheart, how you doing? All right, for those who have a question, write the word question and post the question thereafter. All right, here's Lisk as a question. Do men ever pull away because they're unsure of how the woman is feeling? Oh my God, that's a great question. And the answer is yes, yes, yes. I think part of the reason why I might have even pulled away a little bit was my fear but also a little uncertainty. I don't know if I knew, I sometimes wonder if I still know how she feels. And that's just a tongue-in-cheek joke between us. No, I think it's very common a man doesn't, many men don't wanna over-invest. Now, players and the guys who have game, they never over-invest, they under-invest because they want you chasing them. They treat you with, they use neuro-linguistic programming techniques, one of them is called negging as a way to undermine your confidence, gas lining, a lot of narcissistic type of abuse that happens to make them put them in a power position. So, but coming back to your original question, yes, men, this is really tricky because when you, listen, I didn't say this earlier, but given the fact that we're meeting total strangers most often, there is very little familiarity and safety so it takes time to build that familiarity, that safety, that trust. And it's kind of a push-pull. I think it's really important that two people like each other at the end of the day, say, I'd like to get to know you better, be crystal clear. Now, sometimes people say that and they never call you because the other thing that happens is we don't wanna hurt people's feelings and can you see how messed up that is? That's why I say we're in a dysfunctional world. But yes, Liz, that's exactly what happened. So thank you so much for that question. I really appreciate it. Rosemary says, what do you think of matchmaking services? You know, one of my dear friends is a matchmaker and I have a great deal of respect for her, but matchmaking is rather, it's a big investment with the, I'd say traditionally the results are a low percentage most often. Okay, but then again, you know, they do find they have certainly have plenty of success stories. I've been watching my girlfriend, I've been watching Indian matchmaker. We find that Netflix series very fascinating. So I do believe that they do have some success rate, but for the investment, you gotta be able to, it's like gambling. If you spent it and you'd lost, and if you didn't get what you wanted out of it, you have to be okay with it. If you're attached to the outcome, I would put it on a clause that says, if you don't find me a match, I get half my money back. That might be something I'd ask for. Anyway, that's my two cents on that Rosemary. Thank you so much for that question. All right, Franz says, Jonathan, your partner is one lucky lady. You're an amazing man imparting such wind helping us. Thank you, Fonzie, London, UK. Thank you so much. That's very sweet of you to say. I'm actually the lucky one. I really am. I am blessed to have met a person who are temperaments, are personalities, are, I can't believe how often we're watching something on TV and we literally are thinking the same thing at the same time. We believe that forks should be down in the dishwasher. We believe the toilet paper should be over, not under.  And so I'm very, I'm the lucky one. So thank you, Fonzie. I appreciate that. All right, let's go swim in. Let's see. Okay, I've already asked the matchmaker. Thanks for the question. Jane says, thanks for the question list. Great. Rosie asks, question. How do you bring up the topic of moving in together or getting married? I'd be happy with either one. I think, by the way, it starts on the very first date. If two people are interested in each other, I would be very upfront as I'm looking for the kind of relationship that within a relatively short period of time, we choose to either move in together or get married, short peering a time being less than two years, okay, or less than a year. I think when you're in midlife, I'm gonna tell you most midlife folks I know have moved in together within one year of knowing each other with my sweetheart and I was at the five month mark that we moved in together.  I think, by the way, the truth is you really don't get to know someone until you live with them anyway, that's when you get, by the way, think of people that have been relationships for three years, four years, five years that don't live together. How well do they really know their partner? I've talked to women who are in three-year relationships, they eventually got married and within six months they went through a divorce. Why? Because they really didn't know the, you really, listen, bottom line is this folks, we really don't get to know someone until we live with them. That's why traveling together multiple times is critically important. By the time my girlfriend and I will have known each other six months, we would have traveled together four times. Actually, no, excuse me, by the time we've known each other nine months, we will have traveled four times. I think you learn a lot just even traveling with someone. So anyway, coming back to your question, how do you bring up the topic right from the very beginning? That is something you desire. And then talk about why that's important to you. And hear what the guy has to say.  But ladies, if you know my rhetoric, before the penis goes inside the vagina, you should be reading the book, the first chapter of this book called Eight Dates by Drs. John and Julie Gottman. And I was just, and here's some practice, some reasons why it's important to talk about commitment. The importance of building trust, I should say. The first chapter is about commitment and trust. Because ways that trust is broken, not showing up on time, not making their partner feel like a priority, not being there when their partner is hurting or sick, not contributing to their wellbeing or their family, not keeping promises, keeping secrets, lying, humiliating or putting down your partner in public. And what they should be focused on is, do you cherish me? How important am I to you? Do I come first in your life? Will you take me for granted? Folks, before you begin a sexual relationship with someone, read chapter one on trust and commitment before you allow that guy to really potentially, emotionally get you attached to him.  But Jonathan, that's too much. I'm demanding too much.   They're not serious. A man who's genuinely serious about you will want to, excuse me, a man who's genuinely serious about commitment and generally capable of commitment doesn't have a problem of going deeper even if you two don't know each other well. But if he's not capable of commitment or he doesn't desire commitment, then what you might have is a guy that wants companionship, connection and sex, but he's not able to go the distance. And do you want to spend three months, six months, a year, or even three weeks with someone who's in it for the short run? No, you don't, or I'm gonna assume you don't. And if you're those ones that do, then follow other channels because I'm not your coach. All right, I just got off on the tangent there. Thank you, Rosie, for that question. All right, question. What do you think has been the biggest issue with dating nowadays? There's too many to list. So number one, I think we have to start with the recognition that we're meeting total strangers and we know nothing about their backstory, unlike the past when our family vetted them or our friends knew them or you know, I always say, I wished I was your big brother there on a first date with the shotgun pointed at the guy's face saying, what's your intentions with my sister? Because there was a level of tribe accountability. So that's number one. Number two, the perceived choices that we have. See, it used to be perceived choice via this. Oh, I got a text message. See, we have this perceived choice because the internet used to be, we basically only had a few people to choose from. When we lived in an environment of, when I say scarcity, there was limited choices. We actually had to work harder within the choices we had because if it didn't work, we may have no more choices. Now we have all these perceived choices that the minute it doesn't work out just because someone said, you know, Republican, the other person said, Democrat, at least here in the United States, they were on to the next person. There's no tolerance anymore for just being human.  We are riddled with flaws and a lack of emotional maturity and relationship skills. Those are the three things I see pretty. So thank you so much for that question. I hope that helped. Let me know if it did. Rosie writes, why do men say they will always be there for you when things are, wait, why do men say that they, that, wait, why do men say that I will always be there for you than when things happen, you need and you need them and they disappear? Well, why does that happen? A lot of different reasons why. One might be they're just not that into you. In the moment they were into you, that later they realized they weren't. That's one reason. Another was why they lean in so much quickly. Hey, we're driven by our penises. Look, I mean, the desire to have sex, make a guy say almost anything, myself included. I've said lots of things that came out of my mouth.  Fear, the fear of promising something, promising something, like in other words, living up to a promise, there's a fear of that. I think also the vast majority of human beings have dysfunctional lives. The ground underneath them doesn't feel solid. So if a man's life or woman's life is dysfunctional, they might say anything in the beginning, but they don't have a capacity to actually be there for someone. Those are a couple of the reasons why. Thank you, Rose, for that question. I really appreciate it. Ah, let's see. Jennifer writes, question, met a nice guy. We've been texting, talking on the phone, but he has had health issue and haven't made plans to meet because he feels off. Should I stop being in touch with him past this point? Folks, I have a simple rule. It's called three, two, one, three. No more than three email or text exchanges should lead to no more than one or two phone calls should happen, should lead to one date all within a three week period of time. If in three weeks you don't have a face-to-face, by the way, I'm not a big fan of dating multiple people at the same time, but I'm a big fan of prospecting a lot of people at the same time, okay? Prospecting might be what you're doing right now. By the way, he's just a prospect. He's not even a real lead. He's just, well, he's a lead, by the way, and sales are something called leads and prospects. He's a lead. That's all he is. That's all he is. If you haven't seen each other within three weeks, I'd be working on a lot more leads. That's my suggestion for you, Jennifer. I hope that helped. Question, if I just said, if he just said to me that he thinks we don't want, wait, if he thinks he doesn't want anymore what he wanted before there is anything, what can I do? I need to say we had a very good communication up until tonight. If he just said to me that he doesn't think he, I'm gonna use the word doesn't want anymore what he wanted. So I think what you're saying, this is what I think you're saying. He originally probably said that he wanted a relationship and now he says he doesn't want a relationship. Very common thing men do. Because ladies, you guys don't define the word relationship. Let me give you an example of a relationship. I say this over and over and over again. The best relationships in my opinion are ones where you spend three or four days and nights a week together doing shared activities, hobbies, mutual interests, spending time with family and friends, traveling together, teamwork, building skills both in your personal and your professional life, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy. That's a relationship. That might be your standard of a relationship or it might be twice a week. Might be once a week, whatever it is. Your standard's this. And his standard is the word relationship means I'm just gonna see you when I wanna see you. That might be his word for a relationship. If you don't find out what relationship actually looks like, what does it look like, folks? I beat this drum over and over and over and over and over again. The same thing. Why? Because I'm trying to get it through a lot of thick skulls. You better figure out what a relationship looks like, not the first date, not the second date, but once you're having regular sex together, you should know what that looks like and what it's gonna look like three months from now, six months now, nine months from now and year. When I mean what it looks like is what do you want to be experiencing might be a better way of putting it. What do you wanna be experiencing? And I know many of you, but Jonathan, I'm too busy. Well, yeah. People that are really busy have partial relationships. They have casual relationships. They have situationships. They have friends with benefits. People that have partnership kind of relationships are making agreements to be in partnership with one another by doing partnership activities with one another. All right, that's my two cents on that one. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Hope I answered your question, Alexandra. All right, let's go swim in, let's go swim in. T. Davis says, excellent discussion. Love this as it is straight to the point. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Rosie says, you're absolutely right. Pretty says, yes. Jennifer says, hey, sweetheart, 100% agree, travel is key shows you a lot, exactly. Linney writes, question, when he pulls away, how do I know when to fight for it or let him go? Great question. I don't believe in fighting for a relationship. If someone pulls away, I'd simply want to have a conversation with them, finding out what's going on with them emotionally. Okay, finding out what's going on for them emotionally. If they don't want to share, then if they're not willing to share what's going on for them emotionally, and by the way, sometimes it's hard. Listen, folks, feelings aren't facts. Feelings aren't facts. So sometimes it's hard to know what you might be feeling. By the way, I want to, what I mean to say is sometimes feelings can be very confusing. So I wouldn't necessarily, I would want to find out what he might be feeling, recognizing that what he might say could be difficult because what he might be feeling, what he might say might not be exactly what he's feeling because he doesn't know exactly what he's feeling. Okay, but I'd make a request to have a conversation to find out what's going on, what might be causing the pullback. And if he's unwilling to have the conversation, then you don't invest more time. And if someone, listen, I think if someone takes more than 72 hours, listen, if you've had a relationship where you've communicated every single day, sometimes two or three times a day, and then out of the blue, they go cold turkey for more than 72 hours without a legitimate reason. And folks, I lost a child. And I, okay. I had a date the day my son passed away. I still had the courtesy to reach out to the person that I had a date with and say, I have to cancel family emergency. I'll let you know why later. Okay. And I lost a child. If someone doesn't have the respect and courtesy, listen, one day, two days. Okay. But by the third day, if they haven't reached out and this is someone, let me just make an assumption.  Let's not talk about someone you met. It's Friday. You had your first date Thursday and your next date. And then he never talks to you again. That's not pulling away. That's just called dating. Okay. I'm talking about those that are in a relationship with one another. They've made a commitment to explore a relationship.  That's my two cents on that, Lenny. Hope that helped. Let me know if that does help. This is why Jonathan's advice is so important. Thank you so much. All right. Let's keep going. Trisha says, or Tanisha says, question in the process of reconciliation, how can I help with his fears of trying again, trying again? I think when two people are reconciling, if, if, by the way, there's a good book. By the way, my dearest friend, Dr. Sherry Myers wrote a book called chatting or cheating. What I love about this, it's called how to detect infidelity, rebuild love and a fair proof of your relationship. Why I like her book is it gives some great tools for reconciling. How to reconcile in relationship. So hold on a second. Bear with me, everybody. Cause I know there's a chapter on reconciliation. Oh, and of course I can't find it. Okay. Check out this book. It gives a lot of cool examples of how to reconcile relationships. Also the work of the, the work of Gottman's work. Again, coming back to the book, eight dates. There's a lot of on their website. Go to the Gottman Institute website. There's a lot of great videos and content on how to reconcile. That's not my necessarily my area of expertise.  Or if you're in a relationship, how to determine if he's worth investing in. So again, schedule a discovery call with me right here, right there, right there. Jonathanasley.com forward slash coaching. See if coaching works is right for you. Thank you for your question, Tanisha. I really appreciate it. All right. What is the best dating site for people in their sixties? Met my sweetheart on match.com. Match.com and millionaire match. Bumble and hinge. So those are the four that I happen to like. Match.com, millionaire match, Bumble and hinge. Those are the four that I like. All right. Rose says, thank you. Appreciate that. Jennifer says, thank you for answering my question. I'm working on many more leads for sure. This guy found me on Instagram and is now following me. LOL. Yeah, we'll see. If he's legit, he'll want to get a listen. If two people are legitimate with each other, then they'll find a way to go out with each other. All right. Hillary writes question. What is it with a man who insists that getting to know one another is better done organically and by observing me and thinks asking questions is forced. So he won't do it.  You know, when I was in sales, I used to do corporate insurance sales. And before I invested my time, my energy into a prospective client, I asked a lot of questions to see if I was a fit for him or them, excuse me. And if I was a fit for them and they were a fit for me. Some, what does it mean to date organically? Well, by the way, you could say, dude, we can date organically all you want.  You can tell him that. See how long he'll date you organically. Okay. But when a guy does that because it's not forcing questions, what's the word curious to be curious? I'm curious about you. I'm curious about you. So I'd like to know about you. And the only way I'm going to get to know you is ask you questions. What happened in your childhood? What happened in your marriage? What made you choose the profession you chose? By being curious, if that feels like an interrogation, then you're probably not a serious guy or girl. And you want to organic, you can do organic all you want.  Anyway, that's my two cents on that one, Hillary. Thank you so much. Alexander says, thank you. You're very welcome. Didi writes question. Why do men stare? I see a guy regular at the coffee shop. We used to talk, but now he just stands off to the side and stares at me without saying anything. Why is he doing this? I don't know why I'm reminded of a time. I remember it was St. Patrick's Day. I was at a bar and I'm sitting there with two friends at a high top table and I see four ladies, another high top table. I'm checking her out. I noticed one woman looking at me. I'm looking at her. She's looking at me. I'm looking at her. She's looking at me. I'm looking at her. This goes on for an hour and a half. And I finally got the nerve to come up and talk to her. My first question, and I was 45 at the 42 at the time, 45 at the time, my first question is how old are you? We're not my first question, but one of my questions says I'm 26. I thought she was 36. Not because she looked old, but women these days, 50-year-old women like they're 35 and 35 you look like they're 25. So these days I have no clue. Even my girlfriend, everybody thinks she's 20 years younger than me and she's actually a year older than me. So I didn't know. Okay. I said, well, we're probably not a fit because you want to have children. She said yes. And I said, I'm done having children. Anyway, my point is, why do we stare? Is there something we like in a person? At the same time, we might be experiencing fear. You don't know what's going on in this person's life. Fear might be one thing. Maybe he's married. There might be a hundred reasons why. Question I have is, why do you care? Why does it matter? Is there something that is attractive about him staring at you? Or is it something that turns you off? But if it's something that turns you off, then I would avoid going to the coffee shop at that particular time and find a different time to go there. But ultimately it doesn't matter why. What matters most is, what are you going to do about your life to be empowered to attract the type of person you want? That's what my channel is all about is individuals being in empowered space. This is why I love recommending the book, why men love bitches and bitch stands for babe in total control of herself, ES, and why I recommend this book. Not everything in this book is it's an empowerment book. This is why I wrote my book. Finally I made a plug for it this far into the video. What the heck a self-love anyway, a journey of personal development, self-help and spiritual work. Why do I recommend all these books? Because folks, individual empowerment is the message. Why men do things is irrelevant. What matters most is, what are you going to do with your life because you are in charge of your relationship, destiny, not the man. Anyway, that's my two cents anyway. Thank you, Didi, for your question. I really appreciate it. Let's see. Sherry writes, question. Do you believe in instant attraction? I recently had a date with a nice guy and has been very consistent with his communication and wants to go out again. Should I give another date? Well, I believe we all have. Yes, attraction can be instant. Look at the minute I saw Kate Beckinsdale on the movie screen, I was instantly in love with her. Have you guys, have you experienced it with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling? I don't know. Actually, Grace Kelly is one of my all-time favorites along with Stephanie Powers, which I talked about in my last video, the TV show Heart to Heart, instantly attracted to them. Yes, attraction can be instant. Is love instant? Listen, no. Love is not instant.  Will that person be there for you? Because that's what real love is. Real love isn't all the good, juicy, delicious things in the relationship. Real love is, can I count on this person to be there for me? If I'm sick, I wish a lot of people would recognize that many of you are experiencing attachment, not real love. And instant chemistry, instant lust or limerence is merely chemicals being released in the body saying, I like this person without any foundation to be deserving of that like. Kind of leads me to the beginning of this broadcast. What do men need to chase you or invest in you? They need to be friends with you and they want to have to take care of you. And until that happens and if it hasn't happened, these relationships aren't going to go anywhere. And what I mean by take care of, what I mean financially, I mean emotionally and also to be there for you if you're sick. So lust or limerence, absolutely instantaneous real love. Love is built through the deep roots of trust and how do you build that? I'm going to end on this narrative. Social activities, hobbies, mutual interest, spending time with family and friends, traveling the other teamwork, building skills both in our personal and our professional lives, intimacy, both physical and emotional intimacy that leads to either moving in together or being together. That's my two cents anyway. All right. Tashina says thank you. I appreciate that. All right, let's go on. Instant attraction for you is Sam Elliott and Jason Momoa. Yes, my girlfriend loves Jason Momoa. Who's the other guy that she likes? Oh, Sophia Regarra's husband. I'm competing with him. Oh, shoot. He's about half my age probably. Folks, is this resonating with you? Is it? Please let me know. Please hit that like button. Please share this video. Please subscribe to my channel if you're brand new. If you need some support and you can't check out the links in the description. A discovery call with me joining my group called Midlife Love Mastery. You can follow me on Instagram. You can get my book or any of the books I recommend. My even my dating vows is listed below. Because folks, I know I sometimes pontificate. Sometimes I come off as a know-it-all. Sometimes I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. And yet sometimes I curse.  Why? Because I feel like my role in life is to be a wake-up call for so many people to shift. To shift. Oh, Jennifer says, Jason Mamo is as hot as Sophia Ruggera's husband. Okay. I would say my girlfriend agrees. My role here is to help you make a shift into personal development, self-help, and spiritual work. To loving oneself. To being that babe in total control of herself so she can attract in an amazing relationship in her life. God, universe, spirit. I'm experienced. This is my invitation for all of you. God, universe, spirit. I am experiencing a juicy, delicious relationship where we have amazing chemistry with one another. And our communication is off the charts. And our combinator can go on for hours and hours at a time. And we have lifestyles that are compatible with one another. And we share the same values. And we want to build the deep roots of trust that can sustain the bumps. And sometimes the hurtful things that can happen in a relationship. Of course, even those things that we don't wish for to happen. This is what I'm experiencing now. God, universe, spirit. And for everyone I invite that in for you. Ah. Hey, $5 super sticker from Liz. Thank you so much. Ah. Kim says, swearing is a family trait. T.  There's no bar says I'm in such a trauma bond. What is wrong with me? There's nothing wrong with you. But you're being invited to heal your trauma bond. Check out, check out the Hoffman process. Check out the Hoffman process to heal. Hey, Sherry, I want to thank you for the $4.99 super sticker. The Connor Asley scholarship fund is going to be so excited. By the way, how do you guys like this new plant instead of the phallic symbol you all complained about? Thank you so much. All right, I think this would be a great place to wrap up today. Folks, thank you for allowing me to share. If he pulls away, this will make him chase you. I hope you get a greater understanding that you are in charge of your relationship. Destiny and recognize that men. Men who are in relationship with people that they feel like that they like as their friend along with the passionate sexual piece and they want to take care of their relationship and they want to take care of you. Those are the relationships that tend to go the distance and not the surface relationship.  Here's what you can do. You be in charge of your relationship, Destiny. You be in charge of your empowerment. Do the personal development, self-help and spiritual work strong in your divinity and your sovereignty. And that's my invitation for everyone. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. All right. I think this will be a great place to wrap up this video. First off, I'm going to give myself a big, gigantic John Thamberg of self-love. I'm going to reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm asking you to turn to someone, a pet, a teddy bear pillow. There's a teddy bear. Give it or them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. I want to thank Kim and T Davis and Linnie and Mary Ann and Pretty and Jennifer and Cece and Patricia and Liske and bartenders, Nobar and Sherry and Jules and Pamela. Everyone, thank you so much. I hope you have a fab evening. Take care. Bye now.


Hello everyone! On this occasion of World Lung Day, September 25th, I would like to highlight the importance of lung health for all. In the last two years, we have seen the COVID disease taking a toll on the lung health globally. Although COVID has caused a lot of lung changes, a lot of debility, it has also highlighted the importance of promoting lung health, the importance of vaccination, the importance of masking for not just COVID, but also for most of the respiratory diseases including TB, influenza and other respiratory infections as well. It also helps to protect from the allergies, including in asthmatics, wherein the allergy avoidance becomes the important role. Although we have advanced a lot in our medical field, we still see that lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The primary cause for this being smoking, be it active smoking or passive smoking. In fact, passive smoking is more dangerous than active smoking. So, if you are around the smokers, please make sure that you ask the person to quit smoking, take help from the doctors. There is a recent trend towards vaping e-cigarettes, which do not have any safety profile and they in fact are known to cause more harm than the conventional cigarettes, hence the ban of e-cigarettes in India by the central government also. Regarding the lung health, when we speak about it, smoking and air pollution are the two important hazards for the lung health. So, smoking and air pollution if are taken care of, then most of the lung health can be promoted in most of the people. Apart from this, we have also seen a lot of respiratory infections, asthma, chronic airway diseases and lung cancer which are taking a toll on the health of the lungs overall. Although a lot of advancements have happened in the lung health recently, including the airways trending, early diagnostics for lung cancer, management of asthma with monoclonal therapies and bronchial thermoplasties, newer molecules and targeted therapies for lung cancer, I would like to highlight the importance of early detection and proper treatment for most of the lung diseases can promote a good lung health for everyone and overall a good diet and regular exercise predominantly deep breathing exercises including yoga, pranayama and a regular good dietary practices can definitely promote the lung health for all.