the tools that you are using matter. Okay, who realizes there are tools out there that can put me in chat, two panelists and attendees, by the way, put me in chat. If you realize that tools, software, dialers, phones, all that kind of stuff can make your life easier when you are helping yourself get in front of people, actually working the phone harder to where you can call literally someone every few minutes and you can get through 60,000 hours instead of manually dialing and maybe getting to like 15, okay?  That's right, that's right, that's right. I love tools, I do too.  Like you want to make life easier, trust me. The individuals that I know that are doing millions by phone, they have some of these tools in software, some of these other things rolling, okay? So we have came out with, okay, I'm gonna stop this year because I don't need to share the computer sound anymore, okay? I'm, we have finally, it's about time, finally came out with a custom drum roll please, okay drum roll, come on now. Hey drum roll please, we've just, we finally, I got a huge surprise, I'm so excited for the surprise, okay? It's been, it's been a lifelong dream to do this. We've been, I've been talking about doing this for five years by the way, five years and like four months we talk about doing this. I'm super excited to finally release it and talk about it and physically show you a buddy Mr. Matt up there is actually gonna be doing that for me. We've finally decided to come out with a C, a dialer to a custom built CA dialer to help you be better at getting in front of people, whether it's setting appointments or selling over the phone, okay? Is that good or is that good? Give me some fire and chat. If you're like, holy freak, that is huge. I'm excited, okay? Because what I've learned is there's a lot of dialers out there. There's a lot of options out there. There's a lot of things that you can do, okay? I just know that this one has to be better than whatever you're using and better than anything else on the market. Because trust me, I have scoured the market. I've looked to actually help you with a dialer. I now know what the best option on planet Earth is for an insurance agent to use software and tools to make your job easier. And that is the CA dialer, okay? So I'm gonna have my good buddy Matt actually jump on with me for a second. I'm gonna have him actually walk through and show it around, okay? This dude knows this thing inside and out. Let me actually add a spotlight. Boom, there we are. What's up, Cody? How are you, sir? I'm doing awesome. Happy to be on here. I love it, man. So I'm excited to introduce you guys to my good buddy, Matt. When it comes to software, tools, dialers, he's been an integral piece of the CA dialer coming together. Unbelievable, dude. You haven't got a chance to get to know Matt, you're about to, okay? Dude, I'm so excited for the launch of CA dialer. Oh man, we've been working hard for this day. So I am so excited about this. Yeah, it's huge, man. Thank you for all the hard work and all the help and all the guidance because I know that you've also been looking at the market on what's available. And I'm excited for you to, we're about to get behind the scenes on what's actually really available and why what Matt's gonna show you and talk to you about is that much better, okay? Well, I'll throw it to you, okay? I'll remove me as a spotlight. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you for being here, okay? Appreciate the friendship. I'm learning a ton from this dude. Take some notes, pay attention. Trust me, you want to be on the CA dialer. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, and just a quick little background on me. I've been in the insurance business for about eight years. My twin brother and I have a pretty large organization. We've got about 250 agents that write business every month. We're just killing it right now. This month, it's obviously definitely a record breaking month for us, but I think we're on track to do about 2 million in annual premium this month. A lot of the agencies in our group are probably people that you guys have probably heard of like Nate Offer, Marlon Faulkner, Jeremy Whitaker. So some of the best in the industry we're very fortunate and blessed to be a part of our organization. So we've been, just like Cody said, we recognize that professionals always use tools. And I'm not talking about just professionals in the insurance industry. I'm talking about any professional. If you think about any industry out there, one of the two biggest differentiators between professionals amateurs is the knowledge that they have, which is why doing stuff like this with Cody is so awesome as you can go from being an amateur or a beginner or someone who's maybe not getting the results that you want to be coming a professional because you're getting the knowledge, but the other differentiator is the tools. And so I first, it was funny, my brother, we were starting to work on this dialer and he had just bought a new house and he wanted to fence in his backyard.  So he went to Lowe's and he ordered the wood. And when this semi truck came to deliver this wood, it was so much wood. And he had about a hundred post holes that he had to dig. And all he had was a post hole dig. A manual, if you ever use those manual post holes, you got to slam it in the ground, pull it open, put the dirt aside, keep doing that because he didn't know of anything else. That's all he'd ever known was this manual post hole dig. So about 30 minutes in, he's just dripping in sweat. His shoulders are burning. He's only dug about six inches deep. And he's thinking, it's gonna take me all summer just to dig the holes, let alone put this fence together. Well, about a half a mile down the street, his father-in-law is a farmer. He's got all kinds of tractors and different equipment. He owns hundreds of acres and hundreds of head of cattle. And he happened to be driving by and seeing Brad struggle. And so he came by and he has this tractor with what's called an auger on the back. It's about a foot wide, it's about three or four feet tall. And he came and he dug a hole in about 30 seconds. And he went down and he had the whole entire yard done in about 30 minutes. And that's when Brad realized that he was an amateur and that professionals will use tools. And so the same goes for the insurance business. And so one of the things that I hated when I was in the field, the thing I hated the most, the absolute most was dialing the phones. I hated dialing the phones. But where's the money made in this business? It's always made on the phones. Whenever I am coaching or talking to an agent and they're not getting the results that they want, you can almost always come down to the fact that they're just not putting in enough activity on the phone. And Cody, by the way, feel free to jump in at any point during this. So if you have anything you want to say, feel free to jump in. But, and you may see this too, Cody, is that a lot of times agents just aren't spending enough time on the phone. They're not calling enough. They're not getting in front of people enough. And so we thought, well, okay, how could we help our agents increase their activity, increase their productivity, increase their efficiency, and also hopefully help improve the worst part of the business for most people, and that's the phones. And so we started looking at different dialers out there, just like Cody did. We started looking at different dialers and we found that number one, they were really expensive and probably too expensive for most agents, especially newer agents to afford. And number two, they were really complicated because they were not built for our industry. They were not built and created for an independent insurance agent. They were created for like a call center. And it took a very tech savvy person to set it up and to use it properly. So that wasn't a scalable, duplicatable way to do it. And so we started working on this dialer and partnered up with Cody on this. And we've had, we started off, as soon as we finished this dialer, we had 40 agents test it. And these weren't new agents, these were experienced agents. I wanted to see what results do we get when an average or average experienced agent is using the dialer compared to the ones that aren't. And so we had 40 of them that weren't using a dialer before. They were using like a cell phone or just doing it the old fashioned way. And the average agent, we looked at three months before using it, three months after using it. And the average agent had a 30% increase in sales, 30%. Wow. Whether that's you, go ahead Cody. I said, wow, that's freaking crazy. Yeah, it's unbelievable. And what also happened is they're calling ours on average, we're cutting half, cutting half.  And so I'm not gonna spend a ton of time going through the nitty gritty details because we've got an onboarding training where they'll spend 90 minutes going through how to set up the dialer, how to use the dialer most effectively. So I'm just gonna spend maybe in the next 10, 15 minutes going over some of the highlights and some of the differences in this dialer and other dialers out there because there was things that we wanted to have in this dialer that are really unique to insurance and really helpful in insurance that just did not exist out there. And so I'm gonna spend some of that time going over those items. I'm gonna bring a couple of people on, a couple of agents on that are using the dialer and these aren't your average agents. These are the cream of the crop top agents in the industry that have been using the dialer and you're gonna get to hear from them as well. So Cody, anything you wanna say before I jump in? I'm just excited about the potential, the possibilities. 30% increase in sales is incredible and getting to cut the time in half is huge, man. So I'm excited to get down and show them. And then, yes, like you mentioned, I'm excited after you guys see this and everyone make sure that you sign up for the free trial once we get to that point. There will be time for you to actually get some onboarding training so that you can make sure you understand that you're really leveraging because that's what's so cool with me is most people, I'm not that tech savvy, I'm not no Matt Smith, I'm not that tech savvy. Most people, they sign up for something, they just don't use it. Why? Because they don't understand how to use it or it gets too overwhelming. So I'm excited that we're gonna have a whole team to help with that. So that's a big benefit. Thank you, sir. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so this is what the dialer screen actually looks like. So when you're calling your leads and uploading your leads is really easy. We've got videos that will walk you through how to do that, but it's basically a CSV file or an Excel file, you just upload your leads and they're in here. And so you got your contact information for the client up here in the left. Any of the fields that you're gonna be trying to collect information for, so we have a lot of people that do mortgage protection or final expense or term, health insurance, PNC, whatever it is that you do, we have the fields that are customized for those different verticals. But in this example, we're talking about mortgage protection and final expense. And so the fields that you would, or the information you wanna collect on the phone to set your appointment is gonna be right here. Some of this information you may already have in the lead, so it's gonna show there. And then anything else you'd filled in at your discretion while you're scheduling that appointment. And so the script is over here on the left and it's customized for that client. So you'll notice when you say hello, Benny, it's actually pulling in Benny's name. I'm calling, you know, this is Matt, it's my name. I'm calling you about your mortgage in the amount of 180,000. That's the amount that was on his lead with Bank of America. And so, you know, think about, if you're building an agency and I saw a lot of people say, I wanna build an agency, I wanna build an agency. When it comes to building an agency, you've gotta have something that's duplicatable and scalable. And a lot of the challenge is the onboarding and the training. And so if you can plug a new person in and immediately they've got everything they need right in front of them, they got the script. They don't have to go back and forth between their lead and their script and their, you know, client qualification form and all these different things in front of them that could be overwhelming. They can simply focus on the script and as they get to parts where they're collecting information or verifying information, everything is right there. And what's cool about the CA dialer specifically is Cody and his team have come in here and they have put their best scripts. They've put their best rebuttals to different objections. So some people say, well, how do you cover an objection for this? Or what if they say I'm not interested? Or what if they say I already talked to somebody, I already took care of it. And a lot of people don't know what to say. And maybe you do, but maybe you're recruiting agents that they don't know that yet. And so if they click on an objection, it's automatically gonna update with the rebuttal. And so Cody's team has gone in here. He's got the best rebuttals from the best agents in the industry and how they cover these certain objections. Now you can always add more. So he's got his in here, but if you wanna add more, you can do that. And so what's also happening here is it's also tagging this person as having given that objection. So imagine being able to run a report on your agents or your agency and see, okay, how often is this agent getting the not interested objection? Maybe there's some things that I can coach them to say or not say to avoid that objection from coming up. And so that's pretty cool. We've got two different dialing modes. There's click to call and there's also a power dial mode. And so everything is browser based. You don't need any downloads. You don't need any installs. You literally log in and you're ready to go. So you can click to call or I can do a power dial and you'll learn more about what that is in the onboarding. I can drop emails at the click of a button. I can drop text messages at the click of a button, pre-templated texts that are customized for that client. I can drop a ringless voicemail. So if I wanna record, we teach people a lot on door knocking. So, or not door knock, it's a, well it is door knocking, but the way we do it is we set a warm, it's an appointment, a preset appointment for people that you never talked to. So let me give you an example. So let's say you're calling somebody, you've called them 20 times and they're just not answering the phone. They will not answer the phone. And we always teach people to get resolution on every single lead. I wanna yes or no. I don't want a stack of maybes or people I've never gotten a hold of. I want resolution on every single lead. So if you can't get a hold of somebody, you can drop a ringless voicemail. And you basically, it would basically say, hey, this is Matt from the Mortgage Protection Group. I've been trying to get a hold of you for a while about a really important matter with your mortgage and having to be able to do that. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop by your house tomorrow. I'll be in your area tomorrow meeting with some of their clients and we'll go ahead and take care of that. Then I'll be there sometime between five and 9 p.m. And so I might record that voicemail and let them know I'm gonna be there tomorrow.  So if you guys were part of the... Jeremy Whitaker has been on a lot of training stuff. I know Cody, you work with Jeremy Whitaker and he's one of our agents. Last year, he was one of the top agents in our company, wrote over $500,000 of personal production. And if you asked him about door knocking, he would say about a third of my sales came from door knocking, a third of them. So those are a third of the people that he could not get a hold of. He dropped a ringless voicemail, let him know I'm gonna be in your area tomorrow and he showed up and sold the policy. And so that's the kind of thing you can do. But so when we were designing this, we built in these features, but I said, man, wouldn't it be cool if we could actually tie a lot of this automation right into the disposition button? Cause after you're done with the call, in order to move on to the next lead, I've got to say what happened. Did I not talk to him? Are they not interested in my scheduling appointment? What happened on that call? What if I could tie in a bunch of actions, let's say email the client, text the client, email me the information, leave a ringless voicemail. So I have no contact and I want to leave a voicemail, I want to leave a text message. I want to do all these things all at the same time. And so what we did is we allow people to completely customize what happens when they click these buttons. So you could literally trigger 10 different things by the click of a button. You can even send a Zapier to a third-party application if you want to update a CRM or you want to, whatever you want, whatever you can imagine, you can pretty much do with these custom dispositions. And so you got your call queue, you've got the ability to have several different caller IDs. So one thing that we did when we were doing research in the industry and the dialers and stuff like that is we found out that about, you get about a 400% increase in your answer rate if you call people from a local number. So if you're calling a 423 number and you've got a 423 area code, statistically, you've got four times the chance of that person answering the phone. So now how many of you guys put in the chat, how many of you guys are running appointments virtually or in other states or via Zoom or would like to do that?  And if you had a local number, you'd have about four times the chance. So with the dialer, you can get as many numbers as you want, as many area codes as you want. And we've got what's called smart local ID and this is really cool. So what that's gonna do is every time I call somebody, it's gonna match up my caller ID to match theirs. So if I have a 423, it'll automatically put that in there. If I call some with an 847 area code and I've got an 847, it'll automatically use that one. And if they call you back, you can set it to ring to a cell phone or whatever number you want to come into. So that's gonna really help get more people to answer the phone. I've also got the ability to apply filters. So let's say you're calling a certain state and you just wanna focus on that state or maybe you're calling a certain type of lead. So you're calling final expense or you're calling Medicare or whatever and you wanna just focus on that lead type. You can create these filters to be able to do that. So if I wanna just focus on Green County, then I can just call my Green County leads. And so when I was in the field, I worked about seven different counties and there's no way you can work seven counties in a day. So I would have to do two counties a day and I would, so in this situation, I would have created a filter for the two counties I was working that day.  Like I might be focusing on a specific county or a couple counties, but I don't know how counties are where you guys are at but two counties, it could take me an hour, hour and a half to get from one appointment to another. And I used to try to sort my leads and so I'm gonna call people from this city first and this city, but again, you don't know who's gonna answer the phone. You don't know who's gonna book their appointment. And so what we did is we integrated Google Calendar with Google Maps. And so what this is gonna do is it's looking up the address of the person I have on the phone. I'm on the phone with George Gunter and I've already set some appointments and it's gonna tell me the appointments that are close to George. So I've got this set up to highlight in green any appointments that are within 15 miles. You could set that to be whatever you want. You could do five miles, you could do 10 miles. And so I already know I'm gonna be in this guy's area Saturday at one. And I'm gonna, so I'm gonna go for a Saturday two o'clock appointment or a Friday at six. Okay, and if I mouse over the appointments I'm actually gonna tell me the exact distance and the exact travel time to get there. So this guy, he's 14.89 miles. It's gonna take me 25 minutes with traffic to get there. So wouldn't it be nice if I knew that and I could leave a 30 minute drive time? This guy, he's 12 minutes away. This one's 13 minutes away. This one's 17 minutes away. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna book him right here. I'm gonna save it. And then what that's gonna do is it's gonna email the client a confirmation appointment. It's gonna actually include the calendar link so that it goes into the client's calendar and can remind them. I've got it set to email me all the information. So here's an appointment confirmation. It's actually gonna send the client this email. I can put the date and time. I can put whatever you want in this email confirmation. And then I'm gonna get as the agent all the information I just collected. All the information I just collected is gonna be in my email. All I have to do now is print that off and take it with me to the appointment. And then what's gonna happen is it's gonna go right into my calendar and it's gonna put all the information I just collected right into my calendar. So if I wanted to, all I have to go with is my cell phone or maybe an iPad and I just go through my appointments. I pick them up. Everything the client told me is right there in my calendar. I've got the address right there. If I'm going from a point to home, I just click on the address and I'm there. I've got their phone number. I've got everything right there in my fingertip. If it's a virtual appointment, it's integrated with Zoom. And so, or really any webinar service, if it's any other besides Zoom, you can do that as well, but it's gonna put the Zoom link right there. It's also gonna email that link to the client. I've got it set up to email a reminder, text a reminder. I can even send a ringless voicemail as a reminder. And a lot of times when you're doing Zoom, you want as many reminders as you possibly can to get that person to show up. So you could send an email, you could send a text and you could drop a ringless voicemail. So hey, I look forward to meet with you in about 30 minutes. I'll see you soon. And so you're gonna get a lot more people showing up to the appointments because of that. So, Cody, I'm not sure how much time we have left. I can spend a little bit more time going through this or we can to jump to testimonials or let me know. Go ahead, Matt. Go ahead and if there's anything else that we really want to show them that will help them, they'll help them be more successful, go ahead. And then we can jump into testimonials and go from there. Cool, sounds good. Okay, so since we're talking about custom dispositions, let me just quickly show you. This is where you can update phone scripts. So lead types can be tied to phone scripts. So if you're working with a final expense lead type, it automatically will apply your final expense phone script, mortgage protection, whatever lead type you're working can be tied to a specific phone script. You can record your voice drops, your email templates, your SMS templates. Once you have that stuff set up, this is where you can add or edit what a disposition does. So let's say in the schedule appointment, I'm gonna click on key settings here and I want it to email this particular template. So these are the templates that you create and most of, in fact, all of this stuff is already set up for you because the Cody's team has gone through and they've created templates that they're recommending. You can modify those if you want, you can create new ones, but all this is already preset up. So when you get your account, literally you could start selling right away, starts calling and booking appointments. It does not take much time to set that up, but we've got it set up to send this email confirmation and email reminder and you can say, okay, I want this email reminder to go out four hours before the appointment. Maybe you want it to go three hours before the appointment. I want it to email myself, the agent. I want it to text the client a confirmation. I want to send out a reminder 30 minutes before. I want, excuse me, I want to drop a ringless voicemail 30 minutes before the appointment. I want to do a live transfer. Let's say you have an appointment setter or a recruiter and when you get somebody interested, I want them to be able to click a button and forward that live call to my cell phone. So you can do that. You can send, you know, zap ears. So all kinds of stuff that you can do at the click of a button, we're going to keep coming out with more actions on those as well. One last thing, and then I'm going to bring on a couple of our guests. And that is the ability to add users. So this would be people that, they could be some of your newer agents. They could be an appointment setter or recruiter, someone that's going to make calls. And I wish I had added users. I should have thought about that before doing this demo. But if I had users here and they were on a call, I could actually see that they're logged in. They're on a call. And then I could listen into that call and I could do what's called agent or it's called a call whispering. And so I can listen on the call and I could actually unmute myself and talk to the agent without the client hearing what I'm saying. So I could say, hey, John, ask him this question or do this, say this, he could hear me but the client can't hear me. How cool is that when you're coaching somebody to be able to do that? Or I could do what's called call bar. So he wants to bring me in and actually introduce me as an expert. I could talk to the client or the agent with the call barge. So really cool. And that's a new feature for us. So we're super excited about that. All right. That's all I'm going to go over for right now. And I'm going to bring on, Cody, unless you want to say something before I bring on a couple of guests here to share their experience with the dialer. Well, just to reiterate, there's some, this is what some of the things I'm so excited about, by the way, because like, I don't even know what, what do you call the feature where it literally shows you the duration to the next appointment? We call that the proximity calendar. So yeah, it just shows you exactly how far away it is to all your appointments. I mean, when you're in the field, Cody, can you imagine how awesome that would have been to know where to schedule people most efficiently? It's just unbelievable. Yeah. That's the piece of it. Like times most valuable asset, I would book a one and a two. And I'd be like, well, I don't know how far it is, but I'll figure it out when I get out there, right? Well, that's hurting me when I get out there. So.  And at the end of the day, I would have driven all over hour, hour and a half in the opposite direction. Then I'd come right back and I would have been five minutes from where I was this morning. I was like, man, if I had known how much time and gas have I wasted by not knowing that kind of stuff? Exactly. Well, I'll have us jump to the guests. But yeah, this is unbelievable. Thank you for showing that. I mean, that was just a small taste of the ice cream that's in that bowl, by the way.  Crazy impressive. So thank you. Yeah. I do see some questions here. You can export leads from Excel and you can export them from the dialer. You can import them into the dialer. So there's lots of different ways that you can handle leads. You can use it as a CRM. We're gonna be improving the CRM functionality. So that's up to you. You can always sync with another CRM too. So if you like to use like Zoho CRM or another CRM platform, you can connect that with Zapier to automatically update your CRM based on dispositions that you click or things like that. So a lot you can do. All right. Let's bring on Adam. Adam Jr, you're out there. Great, awesome. So this is someone that's, he's one of our agents and he's been using the dialer. So Adam, how long have you been in the insurance industry? For a whopping seven months. Seven months. So you're not super experienced yet. You got a little experience under your belt, but just kind of still probably feel like you're figuring things out. What are you on track to do in terms of sales this month in April? This month, I think by close of business today we'll probably be close to $68,000. $68,000 in a month in personal production and it's only your seven month in the business. Right, right. That is, what did you do before insurance? I was a home builder. So you didn't have a bunch of sales experience. You weren't used to dialing on the phones or anything like that. You came from home building to insurance. And what has the dialer done for you in terms of helping you kind of learn the industry and get to the point where we are right now? Well, I think it really boils down, Matt and Cody, to a couple of things. When we came into the industry that we were looking for, my wife and I kind of sat down and we said, what kind of revenue can we expect from this industry or of ourselves in this industry? And because of COVID and what we felt were maybe limitations, we wanted the ability to work from home. And so the dialer has been an integral part or tool. I go back to my home building days, right? Like if I've got a tool belt on and I've got some essential tools in that tool belt to help me get through the day or walk on a job site and not necessarily look like a knucklehead, right? I actually look like I know what I'm doing a little bit. The dialer is just one of those tools that allows me to really kind of push all the momentum into our month as far as the revenue that we know will generate. The dialers allowed us to, I mean, I like the term kind of like at will create five or more Zoom appointments a day. It's almost spoiled me a little bit. If I'm honest, Matt, because I know that I can book five appointments at will for tomorrow if I sit down and have a few hours session tonight. I can book the next two days at five appointments a piece on Zoom calls. And we love the flexibility and lifestyle what this industry can give us. And the dialers allowed us to use that tool at will at strategic times of our week to fill those appointments and those appointments we know will have a direct result in the revenue we create. Well, so you mentioned Zoom. What percentage of your sales would you say are done virtually? I think we've only spent one day in seven months outside of Zoom. So about 99.9%. Wow, that's awesome. That is awesome. Well, we appreciate you using the dialer and giving us your experience and anything else you wanna add before I jump over to Omar. You were talking about those features and I just love the fact that you can have that PDF of the actual lead you're working on the dialer face that you're calling. I didn't even show that. That's a really good point. Let me just share what he's talking about here. You're talking about if you actually have the link to a PDF when you're uploading your leads you can actually view the lead. So this is the handwritten lead that the agent or the client had filled out. So while you're talking to them you're actually able to look at the lead that they filled out while you're on the phone. Yeah, I was just gonna say you're able to disseminate from that lead all kinds of additional information. Does it look like the wife's handwriting or the husband's? Is it the husband's name and information but you can tell from the handwriting that the wife filled it out. And so from that you can approach the call in a different way. And so it's just been an absolutely valuable tool for us and the success we're having. And I think really you and Cody for allowing me to get on the call today. Cool, thanks Adam. Omar, you out there? Hey Omar. Well, this is Omar Diaz. He's been with us for several years now and every single year he's pretty much been number one, number two and in a company with 4,000 agents. Not just, what's so impressive about you Omar isn't just the amount of business that you submit. It's what you get issued. You've had the highest amount of issue and the highest issue rate of anyone in our entire company for the last few years. Every year you get what we call the Golden Pen Award. And I think you get it's like over 90% of what you submit issued. And that's impressive if you're submitting $10,000, $15,000 a month. What are you on track to submit this month Omar? So I just finished to be about 73,000. 73,000 in personal production. Oh my goodness. And if you get a 90% issue rate on that you guys can do the math. That's probably what, I don't know what contract level you're at but I would say you're gonna be making 60 grand this month from what you tell me. Good, on personal production. Man, this industry is just awesome. So talk to us about the dialer because I know you were number one before you use the dialer. And that's why I wanted to bring you on here because the dialer, a lot of people use tools as crutches. And you don't use the dialer as a crutch. You're gonna be number one no matter what. But I remember, tell us a little bit about what did you do before symmetry or excuse me, before the insurance industry and why did you decide to get into insurance from what you were doing before? So I was in the restaurant business and I was working 75, 80 hours a week. Okay. It was horrible. It seemed like every time I got an increase in pay I got a decrease in time. And the ROI was just wasn't there anymore. Like you got to see your kids play soccer through FaceTime and you lived in the spots, right? So when I came over here, I was really just, man, I just wanted some time back. That's all that went. I was willing to come over here and I remember talking to my wife that, hey, I don't care if we make $50,000 a year, as long as we get some time back. Like we were willing to lose everything just to get some time back. And the reality is when I got here, they told me, hey, you're gonna have to go 18 appointments, stuff like that.  And that's what I did. And you're right. I think the reason that I love the dialer so much because man, I hated being on the phone for eight or nine hours on a Saturday to get my week filled out for the week. And just getting on the dialer and spending two hours, probably about an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. And that was it. And booking those 15 appointments for the week. And then come Monday, spend a little bit more time in the morning to book the rest of the week. And then if anybody didn't show up or stuff like that, you spend a little bit more time dialing, but it was so efficient because number two, Matt, I was in the restaurant business and the restaurant business, it has cost at any cost. Like you're gonna make your budget. And just the amount of ink I went through starting off right here, having to buy paper, having to buy ink because you had to print out your leads. It was very inefficient to be going back and forth. And the dialer just having everything in one place for me was a keeper, it reduced our paper expenses, our ink is very expensive, like super expensive. So that for me was that. And then you think of how do you do 72,000, 3,000 a week? You're constantly dialing. So if you have an appointment center and you say, hey, I'm on the field, I got this room booked off.  You got an appointment here after this meeting. And it sends you a notification like that side and you're right away and it said from there, I went over there because I only like working three days a week. Like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, days a week. You look at 73,000, it was done at an average of three days a week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that's what I was in the field. Because there's a Friday, you got to follow up on pending business. You got to go over that issue. So you got to copy it all your business and do it in three days, that's possible. And, but it wouldn't be possible without the dieter because I wouldn't have all the, you know, it's so simple. Then, you know, the week is set up and then you say, hey, well, I'm gonna be in this area. You know, I was talking to you earlier, 10,000 of my business this month has been a little bit over like 11, 11, three, I believe I added it up. I'm even starting to label them when it's a doorknock. Just being able to schedule those doorknocks because I'm gonna be in this person. You know, schedule 20 doorknocks. You schedule two because I'm at this appointment. Two because I'm disappointed. One because I'm at this appointment. And all of a sudden you get $11,000 in business from clients that, hey, well, you know what? My change my phone number. The other one, hey, I have my phone number program that if you're not on my contact list it automatically blocks you. Not even that is spam. It's just we don't ask if you're not on our contact list. Just being able to do that, it's always fishing for me. So people understand what you're doing. You have a disposition that you set up for doorknocking. You probably put like a 30 minute window for that appointment. And you'll book all your appointments out and then you'll go back through the ones you couldn't get ahold of and you'll use that proximity calendar to know when are you gonna be near these people?  Is that what you're saying? That is exactly what I'm saying. That's exactly the way I do it. Because one- You probably got it set up so that when you set that doorknock it's gonna send them a text, maybe drop them a Ringless voicemail, let them know, hey, I'm gonna stop by when I'm in your area tomorrow. Yep, and I do that every single week because I don't do 20 doorknocks. I'll do five doorknocks a week and only when I'm close to them. Because for me, I talk a lot about the restaurant business but you brought food in and the reality when that food came in you wanted to get the most out of it, right? What the leads to me when I started this, the leads for me were my food. I didn't want ways. I wanted to get what's most out of it and I wasn't really to just let it sit right there. I was gonna make sure I got resolution. So the goal is, hey, how empty can I get the dialer in resolutions? How empty can I get? Like if you got 500 leads, there's a problem for me. If I got 50 leads, I'm getting closer. But a lot of us say, hey, I got a whole bunch of leads. Well, the dialer will help you get less leads because you'll bring so much resolution into them. And that's how you really write $50,000, $40,000 a month. It's just efficiency. Man, that is awesome. I appreciate you being on here, Omar. I know Friday's a heavy calling time for you so we appreciate you taking time out of your schedule. Cody, I mean, you wanna- I think we're much better, absolutely. Yeah, you wanna go through how people can get a hold of this dialer and start using it? Oh man, Omar, dude, who doesn't, talk to me. Say me and Chad, if you're like, man, I wanna be like Omar when I grow up. I work three days a week and I make $60,000 a month. Like, man, both of these gentlemen, thank you guys very much for coming on. That really means a lot. That was really cool for everybody to not only hear your success with the dialer, but just also to hear like your personal success in general, you know? Like, that's what it's all about. So that's so cool, man. Thank you for hooking it up and making it possible, Matt, for some real powerhouse and real impressive production oriented individuals to come up and hang with us. Yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna have Cassie put the link in chat right now. We are doing, I believe it's a 14-day free trial too, right? Yes. Actually, the link that she put in there is for the onboarding, which is great. We want everyone to go through that. It's a 90-minute free onboarding. It'll walk you through how to get everything set up, how to use it in more detail. Yes. If you go to cadialer.com. I'm gonna get the right here. You can actually sign up for it. And we try to make this as affordable as possible. It's cheaper than any, pretty much anything out there that we could find, and you get so much more for it. But you're gonna make so much more from increased, you know, increased production, increased efficiency, time savings from gas, like Omar said, from ink and print, you know, paper, all that stuff. So we try to make it a no-brainer. But in addition to that, you get your first 14 days for free, try it out, and then go to that link that Cassidy put in there, which is cadialer.com. Forward slash onboarding, and you can sign up for the group training, which is next Tuesday at two, and she'll walk you through exactly how to set up everything. That's awesome, I love that. Yeah, that's also a cool piece too, not only to hit the link in China for the free trial, make sure you guys do that, okay? Right away, but also the onboarding is one of the coolest pieces, because I've bought a lot of software over the years. I've never had someone like away from me to jump on a training and actually walk me through setting it up and being on it. So that's really cool, it's gonna be every week, by the way, this next one's Tuesday, the following one will be the next Thursday, so we'll alternate between Tuesdays and Thursdays each week. And that'll be for individuals that are using the dialer and want to be better at using it and really learning how to customize it, and like these guys have, right? Like Omar. Yeah, which is huge, man, I love that, okay? Well, I know for me, I have seen enough to sign up for the dialer if I'm you guys, okay? Matt, anything else you wanna add, sir? Appreciate you showing us around. No, I just appreciate you, Cody, and everything that you do, and pouring into agents, and it's awesome what you do. So I'm happy to be partnered up with you, and yeah, thank you very much. I love it, okay, give everybody a hand for Matt. All right, thank you very much for being on, appreciate you showing us around. That is a bad man right there, that dude is a bad dude. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you. Hey, if you enjoyed this, I got another one you're gonna love. It's right there, click on it, see you next.  And I was like, why he means like that? And then I- I'm getting chills, because that's so good. Yeah. It's so good. And then I realized- Be attentive to this, guys, I'm telling you, this is cool.


The scene in Mariupol was one of the devastation and despair as heavily damaged buildings were in every district in the northern part of Port City, with residents collecting their possessions and gathering food supplies among the debris of conflict, even as cars queued and men's streets trying to leave Mariupol. The Port City has been encycled by Russian forces and has been the scene of some of the fiercest bombardment of the conflicts after Russia set thousands of troops into Ukraine. Ukrainian officials said that Mariupol residents have been trapped in the city by Russian shilling without heat and electricity and running water for most of the past two weeks.


So let's take a closer look at continuous functions. So we might take a look at the type of information you might get from a flight data recorder. And so here we have an airplane traveling from New York City to Los Angeles, both of which are at sea level. And we might record information about the altitude of the plane in kilometers above sea level, t hours after takeoff. Unfortunately, the plane flew over a top secret installation and the government erased the data to conceal the existence of a common software glitch that caused the data to be erased. T1. So we don't have a record of what actually happened between hours 2 and 3. But the truth is out there, and you can't hide it, so let's find the limit as t approaches 2 from above of h of t. Since this is the graph of y equals h of t, we can find the limit as t approaches 2 from above of h of t by finding the values of y as t gets close to 2 from the right. Except we don't have that part of the graph. So what can we do? Well, one thing we might do to proceed, let's start with something that we do now. We can approach t equals 2 from the left, and so this suggests that we know the limit as t approaches 2 from the left of h of t. Since we can approach 2 from the left, we know the limit as t gets close to 2 from the left of h of t is going to be 8. Now we don't know whether this is useful, but it is a fact, and so let's go ahead and record it anyway. What else do we know? Well, one useful thing to remember is that the unqualified limit exists if and only if the one-sided limits exist and they agree. And so we also know that if the unqualified limit as t approaches 2 of h of t exists, then the limit as t approaches 2 from below and the limit as t approaches 2 from above and the limit as t approaches 2, no plus, no minus, all have to be equal. And so we have to ask ourselves, self, does the unqualified limit exist? Well, one way the existence of the unqualified limit would be guaranteed is if h of t were continuous. And that's because one of the requirements for a function to be continuous is that the limits must exist. So if we'd like our function to be continuous, we might ask ourselves what would make it be discontinuous? As we saw, there are two situations where a discontinuity occurs. A discontinuity occurs when the function isn't defined, but the plane always has some altitude, so h of t is always defined, so this case can't apply. The other possibility is the function has a break, but this would require that the altitude change instantly from one height to another, and that's physically impossible. So this situation can't apply either. And what that means is that h of t must be a continuous function. Since h of t is continuous, we know that the limit as t approaches 2 of h of t exists. But if the limit exists, then the limit has to be the same whether we approach it from the left or the right. And that means that the limit as t approaches 2 from above and the limit as t approaches 2 from below have to be the same, and we know this limit as t approaches 2 from below. And so we know that this limit is going to be 8.


Hi, my name is Mark and in this lightning talk, I'm going to be defining the concept of open source and how it applies to the field of education research. I've separated this presentation out into three main questions, followed by a resource section to get you started on your open source journey. First, we'll look at the definition of open source and how licenses can allow for customization of how open source technology is used after being shared. Next, we'll explore how open source can be used within the field of education research. Lastly, I'll provide some reasons why open source may be a better solution for your research needs in comparison to proprietary solutions. Open source code is code that is publicly available for all to see, modify and distribute as they see fit. However, this doesn't mean that there is no control at all over how software gets used. Licenses, which are assigned alongside the code, determine how others may use the code. If you are using the code of others, you'll want to read the license yourself. I would also like to mention that open source does not mean that software is any less secure. Having access to the source code does not mean that everyone will have access to your particular system. Even the most sensitive systems, such as password managers, can be open source. So how does this apply to education research? I would like to stress that open source is not just for coders. We all use software every day, both in our personal and professional lives, and having more transparency into how that software works allows us to all contribute and further our understanding. The first step is to make the research code available. This should be done in a specific place, such as a repository, where others can go to get access. This place should be kept as constant as possible, and the changes that are made over time should be documented. Next, we can use open source solutions where possible in the research process. If you have a discussion board where students interact with each other as part of your project, pick an open source solution. This will enable other researchers to better replicate your research methods by also having access to the software solutions you used. Lastly, inspire a spirit of collaboration, either between research groups or even between researchers and participants. Using open source enables everyone to propose improvements or spot pitfalls. There are many reasons why open source technology may be better than proprietary solutions, ranging from practical to philosophical. The first bullet point on this slide may be the most attractive to many. Open source solutions can help reduce cost because they're often cheaper than their proprietary equivalents, and in some cases are funded entirely by donations. If you do end up with large cost savings after adopting a particular piece of software, I would encourage you to consider donating some of those savings to help keep software maintained. Adopting open source solutions can also help reduce silos. When using proprietary technology, issues are often resolved between a vendor and a lab, and this means that any improvements that are made may not be shared. Open source allows research groups to learn from each other and adopt improvements as they see fit. Finally, central to both science and education is the notion that ideas should be shared so that we can learn from each other. I don't see why software should be any different. Getting started with open source can feel like a lot, but it doesn't have to. These are some resources that may help you get started. For more information on license definitions, you can check out the open source initiatives license list. For getting started on storing your code and research information in one central place, you can look to projects within the OSF from the center of open science. To explore thousands of open source software projects, you can take an adventure through GitHub. I would like to thank you for attending this conference and for watching this presentation, and I hope that you have learned a little bit about the concept of open source through this presentation. Together, we can help make the world a more open place.


I.P.s, FEDRA GOVERNESANTS, UNIVERSITIES, POLITECNICS, AUTHORS, AND REVERSE CRICES, ASSEMBLY DECLAYED SEEDS OF 27 LAWMAKERS VAKAN, AS A MEWILE GROUP CONVENDS SITTING DAY AFTER COMPLEX STIMULATION, I AM BOLA OBA ANTHYS IS PLUS POLITICS. FEDRA UNIVERSITIES, POLITECNICS, AND COLLEGES OF EDUCATION, HAVE BEEN TAKEN OFF THE INTEGRATED PERSONAL PAYMENT SYSTEM, I.P.S. THE ASSEMTION APPROVAL REACHED TO IN THE FEDRALE EZEKT OF CANCEL METING AT THE PRESIDENTIAL VILLA IN ABOJA ON WONSTAY, COMES AS A RELIEVE TO TOUCHERY INSTITUTIONS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. The Minister of Education, Prof. Tayyar Mahman, disclosed this while briefing state as correspondents alongside other ministers on the outcome of the Federal Executive Council meeting, noting that this takes immediate effect. According to him, the council observed that vice-chancellors of universities did not need to abandon their work to come to Abuja to process the salaries of their personnel. We also have been very happy for the education sector, because one of the problems which the vice-chancellors to directors and provosts of college education, those managing the tertiary sector in Nigeria, have been complaining about, have been the subscription to IPPs.   That says it is very, very important development for the licensedthat for allow for efficient management of the university and tertiary education contributing and then secondly which is connected to that but before now, when the tertiary education institutions want to make recruitment, they have to run to the office of the head of service for waiver, for approval, for all that sort of thing. Today the council, through the director of the president, has exempted them from that. They have nothing to do, they don't have to go to the office of the head of service because it is actually not in the line of supervision. So that too, that has been a big bottleneck in management of staff in the universities where they have to apply to that office whenever there are vacancies and have built up a lot of vacancies in the universities and polytechnics and that level of service waiting sometimes for years, for months. And so from this, at this today's meeting, that requirement has been removed. So they will only be guided by what their law prescribes and then of course there are other levels of supervision. The NEC, the Federal Ministry of Education is there. So that's a very big relief for the universities and we sincerely hope that these measures will be responsibly reciprocated by the institutions. Joining us is former ASU chairman Prof. Rufus Lower. Prof, good to have you on PlusPolitics. Prof, what will be your initial response to the two concessions made by the Federal Executive Council yesterday to what has been ASU's age-long agitations? Well, thank you very much. This is actually a welcome development because the ASU has been present at this matter for a long time. Universities are supposed to ask their own autonomy. IPPS, as you see, is an encouragement to the autonomy of the universities. So for everything to be done separately at ASU, that means that each university of the council or university management, they have no control over the staff and the movement of the staff. In fact, we have seen that this advocate is one of the very good of the most, the issue of a ghost worker. There are some people who say what appeared there. They are not even, they are not even, because they have a point on the system. whereby they might not even know so much good that I wouldn't point in the system. They are not even aware of those workers. So there is no way they may be able to spend the proper day and the issue of the certain wages of a woman of the staff who does the proper control by the university management of the university administration. So it is a serious argument to the autonomy of the university. And therefore, this IPPS has also considered a lot of differences in terms of environmental conditions. Like you see, even this is not just a teaching institution. It is also a professional research and a professional idea among various universities. The use of IPPS has prevented many of our colleagues from even going on sabbatical within Nigeria. This idea can really affect everyone. Anybody that goes to mute the rules that sabbatical and anybody that invests in a woman will not be faced. And sabbatical is very, very essential for the good of research of every institution. No institution in any university of the world has been appointed as one of them. You need course for clarifications and ideas. You need a church that is promoted. You can go for more events in Nigeria. You know some of the tabloids of the imagine system that cannot be compared to IPPS. There is no way the IPPS can work for any institution in Nigeria. And you can see ever since the IPPS has started, it has started to grow to so many events in terms of the staff and the academic experience in Nigeria. Now we move with this scene. Is a welcome development. Is a welcome development. Prof. Is a welcome development but it automatically also precedes the degree of responsibility and accountability on associations such as ASL. And the reason is that people and journalists will be looking forward now to seeing the integrity of governance in our universities. Because we must remember that it was a regime of abuses that ultimately precipitated the idea of the IPPS. Now we stand in the fact that it was not done in a manner that was very reflective of the needs and the impurities of university governance. How would you respond to that? Let's get back. It's fine. It's because we don't have a good governance in place in many of our institutions. We provide corporate governance in place. We can check all these for accountability issues. Each institution we deal to regulate itself. Okay? Our government council, we have to do their work of oversight. The fact that the idea is not the one to take me there. That's why the government put government council there. And if we have the proper corporate governance legislation, this is what I expect government to do now. I mean, we should have the corporate governance legislation so that we know who and what is what. We should have to take this accountability issue. And so the organization that we have a lot of work to do now, okay, to put all these corporate governance in place. Maybe the financial reporting council, okay, I believe they are trying to do something on that, okay. So I mean to be able to put accountability in these different institutions. So each institution should be able to do this on their own. We are working as a government governance regulation in place. Then we comply with this. And we do the government council, okay. Then they try to do everything properly in each every institution. But why don't the government itself not be interfering? I think it's only in some of these government council issues. Once there is a regulation in place that everybody is supposed to comply with, the government council never knows their role. There is an approval limit. This is not their role. I mean, everything is well properly defined. Properly defined, okay. I believe the issue of accountability can be checked in Nigeria University system. It is because there is no government governance in place now. But in many of these institutions, that's why maybe we are having accountability issues. Okay, but these things can be done. But because of that, we have not eroded the autonomy of these investments. This government has said the performance of the investments. Thank you. Prof, you will agree with me that in so much as the theoretical presentation of corporate governance, as if just articulated sounds very convincing, you will agree with me that the universities, the tertiary institutions, not only the universities, the tertiary institutions in some respects one does not want to talk about it. Indeed, there was one particular occasion that the chair of the government council of a particular university's board came on national TV and called the vice chancellor a thief. And he said he had tapes to that effect. And you know what? The guy was relieved for investigation and was reinstated and on his statement we had even members of ASU jubilating with him from the gate of the university. So one is sitting there and one is thinking, you know what? It does seem in some respects too that ASU that should be a thought force of accountability, all being the management, the constitutional management of the university to account sometimes it does seem that there is a degree of complicity and things that don't show shortly that even one is obvious to the open eyes that you know what, things are not properly done, ego comes into it and you don't want ASU to be involved. One also, that will not be the direction we will be going after these victories for ASU. Okay, if I get you right and that is, you know, we expect to especially work up with lots of neighbors we have by the chair of the government council claim that we will see and we will be committed to my justice. Am I getting you right? Yes sir. Yes me. As I said, I am not committed, I agree with ASU. We have to work about this. Although what we are said to address, this is the sure of God to be the way to just ASU is involved also pretty and get my capability but what ASU is worth after another term was that the chair of the government is not following these wishes correctly. The deal was there was not for us. Prof, to be honest with you, some of us in the world of journalism and, you know, analysis of events, we know that the very reason why he did say that the VC and the ego triples of Unilog got away with mother was because the person concerned, and I am not mentioning names there, the person concerned had his own, had his own, you know, reputational baggage. If it was not for the fact that that person had his own reputational baggage, what happened in Unilog was indeed a disgrace to tertiary education management in Nigeria. If somebody had the temerity to come on national TV and call me a thief, I will litigate and I kept telling people that if that VC did not go ahead to litigate, it would be an indictment, not only against himself, but indeed against ASU that was celebrating with him when they instated him. And I concede the fact that even you said you weren't too happy with it and one is just praying at this juncture that the management of universities will not be going in that direction with some perceived degree of complicity by the local ASU leadership. That is the only thing that the point I am trying to make sir. But they, I, I, you know, we great, but no matter, we didn't, we didn't totally agree. There was the vision among us. Because as I said, my own point around that thing was the fact that we should have allowed the government council to have their way. If the government council says somebody is corrupt, the petition should be the one to grant the benefits, okay? The petition should also be the one to define itself. But the government also added to the whole point because the government should have tried to interfere with the university that is already an autonomy act that gave the government council, okay? The power to be the one to liquidate whereby it will be the vital system. So they are also the ones to also determine which way it will be. The government is trying to interfere in the whole process. The government is also, it is not the people, it is not the people that are involved in that matter. So what is very necessary now? What is very necessary is to have a good corporate governance in this now? So I must celebrate this kind of thing in future? I must celebrate your condo because for so long time I have never seen somebody this high up in Asu saying that at that point he or she was a bit, but having said that to wrap up now I must just ask you this question. Now that after long suffering, after abuses, after deniers, Asu has gotten this victory for the management of tertiary institutions in Nigeria because Asu was the most steadfast, especially on the issue of the over-centralization of the remuneration system. Now that Asu has gotten it some of your members felt that you people were just being unduly obstinate. How would you go now? I guess if the rain falls, it falls on everybody. It's going to be a general blessing, isn't it? Am I still on? Yes sir. My comment of that is that what the government has done now is part of the things Asu wanted. It's part of the demand of Asu and so it was good that the government itself saw it. It saw that this attitude might not really work for the universities. So that might say it's a well-called development and it's going to be well-embraced by Asu. Okay? So we also appeal to the government because since they have addressed one of these the demand of Asu the government should also ask the father to take another look at some of the demand of Asu that led to the last strike in 2022 because what Asu was demanding that time also was clear. Thank you very much Prof. We really appreciate your virtual presence on the program today. Thank you sir. Thank you so much. We wish you all the best. We go on the short break now and one way back we go on the second segment of the show. Thank you so much. Thank you sir.


has kpop officially surpassed american pop music i don't know you might have to ask usher andrew this is going viral because usher he has joined the blinks but after he joined the blinks i heard he might join bts army oh ne yeah so this is going viral right now because usher in a gq interview gave huge props to blackpink after his sons took him to the atlanta concert and he was like yo man i feel goofy like the their technicality their light show it was so mind blown i gotta go tweak my vegas show yeah man so uh that's it usher was inspired by blackpink guys uh we're gonna go through all the reactions and we'll give you our takeaways on what american artists can learn from kpop artists right now so please hit that like button check out other episodes of the hot pop boys let's go yeah the first major comment online was like man i am so glad that western and us artists are finally showing love to kpop artists because for the longest time it was the other way around the kpop artists were always showing love to the us artists and then sometimes people would even accuse kpop of being a copy of american r&b hip hop and pop music but like it's just great to see that the influence is coming back around yeah i do think that years ago it was definitely more accurate to say that koreans were copying american pop music but i do think it's become its own thing in the past several years and with these new bands like i think they're just dominating that type that genre is is the koreans got it and we are many generations deep into kpop now i think we're at generation three or generation four i think that you know the west has always been aesthetically inspired by the east maybe specifically japan with the whole harajuku neon like super future thing with nigo and bape and teriyaki boys but uh it never was individual band so it's dope to see andra it's sort of like how the car went from germany to america and then you know japan and korea are doing cars like tayota hundai and now ford which originally did the original commercial car is copying tayota and hundai so it is all coming back around uh the next comment was oh my gosh if he was impressed by black pink wait till he sees bts then his head will explode and other people were like yo man how come the bts army is never happy for anybody and they're always trying to downplay other people's successes and somebody will say i don't even care about usher who cares about western validation kpop all the way and you know there was just a range of opinions of uh you know basically i guess what the tribalism within the kpop fandom world yeah i guess i didn't know that the bts army and the blinks which is the black pink fans like had some type of tension i'm not saying it's like real beef but you know that they would get each get at each other on the internet so i think that's fun i mean i guess in a way kpop's reaching that point where now not everybody is a fan of everybody's you see it has to fracture and splinter into like it has to segmentation and vulcanize yeah somebody was like yeah i am glad that they are not inspired by usher because then their music would be trash and most uneducated garbage for i don't know you're saying that about usher one of the top three at least five r&b artists of all time i think the toxicity of the kpop fanbase is online is a whole another debate you guys got to clue me into that because it's not my world moving on and somebody said what about a usher black pink track dude that would be huge and maybe that would be like the biggest collab of all time so i had to look through the previous kpop american collabs andrew we've got housey lady gaga selena gomez duolipa coldplay megan the stallion nikki minnaz john legend wale missy elliott french montana that one came out of left field snoop dog charlie pooth where would a usher black pink collab rank on this like hierarchy of kpop american collabs dang i guess it would be pretty big even though usher has passed his peak he's a little old now but i'm swear that's messed up man these are my confessions i'm not in my hottest like i was 20 years ago um andrew what do you think about people saying man this is obvious because kpop and other asian pop artists but specifically south korea they take pop music the most serious so of course they would inspire everybody else because of all the genres obviously not saying necessarily that asia or south korea rap is better than american rap but as far as pop goes this genre is dominant globally i don't know man kpop might be like the mma of music where it's just like mixed like mixed sounds and mixed influences all thrown together uh all spun together and woven together you know seamlessly you're saying it is logical that usher would be influenced by essentially the best pop uh system in the world yeah listen i think the best pop groups in the world are just korean right now because i mean think about what what are the other pop groups after one direction which was a great group i can't think of another one i'm sure there's one's bubbling trying to rise up but i can't think of them they're not big enough for me to know also i do think the western world is kind of like maybe done with producing group pop groups seems like they've shifted their focus yeah i don't i don't know what they think about i don't know i guess in the west maybe it's just seen as like kind of campy or maybe they can't they don't they don't have faith that they can control all the characters without a bunch of uh controversy coming out scandals and only the asians are the ones that can like buy in enough together and then create like this whole yeah like well you're saying treat pop like it's harvard um somebody also said you know this is on the western side but usher doesn't need all that stuff that the k-pop shows have with all the lights he's just a true rare talent he just needs a spotlight and a microphone and he can do all the dancing and the singing himself because you know he's not like systemized and factoryized yeah i do think that falls in line with some aspect of like american individualism where we would want to put the spotlight on this one grassroots artist that's truly talented writes produces performs all their own music and dresses cool and has style and made it out of their mom's basement or their parents garage or whatever it is like they love that story in america it's like rags to riches it's that rebellious culture yeah i mean it is true that culture is like incredibly different yeah and i would say this i mean i guess the fact that the world is latched on to the kind of factoryized k-pop world so much goes to show you something that people don't mind because ultimately the performances are good and the music is good and it's a clean image generally lyrically they are generally cleaner than a lot of you're saying the backstory of coming through the farm system doesn't turn people off i guess i guess why would it honestly it just depends on what culture you come from um and what are your three major takeaways about why k-pop has surpassed american pop specifically in the pop music genre yeah so one analogy is like i feel like k-pop to a lot of westerners is seeing how like asians are seen to a lot of westerners you know so a lot of people know that asians together when they train enough can achieve something and do something very cool whether it's k-pop performances whether it's the 2008 Beijing olympics whether it's all those school kids those chinese girls dribbling at the same time in sync it looks incredible but then you also say oh well individually maybe they're not that good it's just because all of them are training together for 12 hours a day for like two years right i i agree with you that that would be a very hyper critical western eye looking at k-pop or just things in asia in general obviously in asia more collectivist more confusion we just would think we would just not see it that read it that way america likes to highlight the natural talent that someone has while versus like in asia it's almost like these people got together worked together bought in and created this amazing product it's almost like comparable a little bit to like ronaldo ronaldo is considered like a hyper talented a little bit selfish soccer player versus japan doesn't necessarily have like the same level of ronaldo but like as a team very collectivist right very strong as a team um somebody also said yo man i feel like k-pop in the west is a little bit like animes where people can name bts blackpink and maybe now stray kids 50 50 depending how deep they are into the k-pop game and almost like for animes they know pokemon they know dragon ball z they know sailor moon but they don't know the top 50 groups and they don't know the top 50 animes right well the it runs deep and especially in asia more people are going to be fans of all the smaller groups but even in america in asia they're fan of k-pop as a genre but in america they might be only a fan of like the top one yeah i mean even as a casual anime fan i could probably name like five several animes but like i can't name 10 or 15 or 20 even that you know off the top of my head yeah i mean it makes sense even in europe guys if you guys don't know hip-hop is not as big as it is in america so they will name you like 50 cent stoop dog m&m dr dray you know the old school guys but they're not necessarily gonna be listening to vince staples in bulgaria um moving on later somebody just said yo k-pop is 10 out of 10 super polish from the beats to the hooks to the dances that go along with the hooks to the music visuals and they're blending all the genres that you might have five different breakdowns representing five different songs in one track you got an acoustic part a hip-hop part an r&b part a pop part and an edm part all in one song mixed together you can't find that in western music man i don't even know if they would put that much work into like a single song maybe i don't know i mean but yeah it is pretty amazing and uh i just know that koreans the korean pop industry has essentially mastered that style of music yeah no it is very very cool and it's very very let me tell you this if something's been out long enough and asian's going to learn how to do it better yeah somebody also said the fans are hyper participatory in a way that they never were participatory in people's careers in the west yeah i think you have to understand and another thing that people like about kpop is because the the stars despite them coming from like these academies they feel very personal right and they're really good at interacting with fans interacting with them on the internet going on game shows showing their personality travel shows food shows yeah i mean it's something that maybe in the west they would find also kind of cheesy in a different way so because like an artist would not want to put themselves on a game show all the time just for exposure because i don't know like maybe it just seems like overexposed or something like that you know there's this it's very different culturally everything is different um i always thought it was interesting i remember the kpop fans got andrew wiggins to be a starter in the mba all-star game and that's when i was like whoa because i didn't even know kpop they probably weren't even that into the mba but they were able to shift it through the galvanization unified internet efforts obviously they were messing with trump a lot as well some people say that um also the kpop stars are so much better than the american stars i mean naturally i guess maybe because they're asian or maybe because for whatever reason a staying out of trouble not saying that there haven't been anybody surgery from 2 p.m and ended up going to jail but but for the most part it's like five percent or three percent of the criminal charges that you sometimes see against western artists yeah no but in in the west we like our bad asses we like our artists our performers to mess up make a mistake and have a redemption story but in asia it's a little bit more like ahead so like we give you the opportunity to be like rise up and be this star so you gotta be clean yeah let's say you can't make no mistake man if you make a mistake you're gonna go to prison let's just say this in asia if you get caught with certain substances even if you're a pop star you will go to jail for so long your life will be altered forever ever yeah and in america you may just get a tiny slap on the bush but you know it's pros and cons i don't think kpop fans necessarily are dying to see their biggest stars like make a mistake and come back yeah i don't think sherry's coming back and releasing the solo album about like i was like but in america we're like yeah do something wrong be human yeah it's a very up and down country over there i think they value more like stability and like kind of like a slow rise and a slow grind i mean man it's just very different anyway guys let us know in the comment section below what do you think why do you think that kpop or do you think that kpop is surpassed us pop as a genre and why do you think that is if you agree with that statement what do you think about usher given you know black pink all the props are you a blinks are you a bts army shout out to everybody like we said this was not really our core competency field you know i didn't know 10 out of 10 or even close to that in this world but let us know what you thought of our takeaways until next time we to hop up boys we out peace


Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Many of us are feeling helpless in the face of the current pandemic, but the good news is there are things we can do right now to reduce our risk of falling seriously ill and dying from COVID-19 and preventing even greater infectious disease threats in the future. Today we ask, how do we prevent the next pandemic? And the answer has to do with changing our food system. Infectious diseases are emerging globally at an unprecedented rate. Literally hundreds of new pathogens have emerged, re-emerged over the last few decades, and what we eat is responsible for most of the new diseases that have jumped from animals to humans. In response to the torrent of emerging zoonotic or animal-to-human diseases, three of the world's leading authorities— the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations, and the World Organization for Animal Health— held a joint consultation to determine the key underlying causes. First on their list was the increasing demand for animal protein. The greatest swords of Damocles dangling are the H5 and H7 bird flu viruses blanketing much of the earth. A bird flu pandemic could be devastating, given their current upwards of Ebola-like flip of the coin death rates. Given that the emergence of these deadly bird flu viruses, H5N1 and H7N9, are linked to intensification of the poultry sector, there have been calls for the deindustrialization of animal production. For example, as suggested here in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, we're placing large industrial units with smaller farms with lower stocking densities, potentially resulting in less stress, less disease susceptibility, less intense infectious contact, and smaller infectious loads. Maybe they're the ones that could use little social distancing. The American Public Health Association, the largest and oldest association of public health professionals in the world, has called for a moratorium on factory farming for nearly two decades now. Maybe COVID-19 is the dry run we needed, the fire drill to awake us from our complacency and reform the food system before it's too late. But if, as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations visualized it, the next pandemic starts with increased demand for poultry products before ending up with human-to-human transmission. Maybe we need to move beyond just giving these animals some more breathing room and the Journal of the American Public Health Association goes beyond just calling for a de-intensification of the poultry industry, questioning the prudence of raising so many animals for food in the first place. It is curious, therefore given the pandemic threat, that changing the way humans treat animals, most basically ceasing to eat them, or at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten, is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure. Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic. It would be even more likely to prevent unknown future diseases. That, in the absence of this change, may result from farming animals intensively and killing them for food. Yet humanity doesn't even consider this option. However, thanks to food innovations, this may be changing. Have you looked in the dairy case at the supermarket lately? Some of America's largest dairy producers have recently filed for bankruptcy due to the constellation of new consumer choices. I was peripherally involved in the largest meat recall in human history. Remember the footage of the cows getting forklifted? A hidden camera investigation at a California slaughter plant for spent dairy cows led to a recall of nearly 150 million pounds of beef for violations of food safety rules meant to protect the public from mad cow disease. Downed dairy cows, a too sick to even walk, were being dragged to slaughter with chains into the federal school lunch program. You don't have to worry about contaminated cattle brains in your oat milk, though. Plant-based milks are a no-brainer. But you can see what I'm saying, right? Yes, you can pass public health regulations to stop the cannibalistic feeding of slaughterhouse waste to dairy cows, or you can just provide the public better alternatives and let the market eliminate the risk entirely because there's no prions in plans. HIV AIDS likely rose from people slaughtering primates. 30 million people wouldn't be dead right now if we were eating meals from bushes instead of bush meats. We can't get coronaviruses from cauliflower. There is no flu in falafel production, no matter how tightly you crowd the balls together. What I'm saying is our food choices don't just affect our personal health, but our global health, not just in terms of climate change, but in terms of stifling pandemic risk. There's been a tremendous surge in interest in diversified protein sources given the increasing consensus that reduced meat consumption is critical for addressing both the climate crisis and our burgeoning epidemics of lifestyle diseases. Eating less meat may not only help save the world, but could help prevent the loss of more than 10 million human lives a year. To their credit, in 2016, the Chinese government recommended that citizens cut their meat consumption in half, in part to reduce their growing rates of chronic disease. A completely plant-based diet might reap 30 trillion dollars from the health benefits alone, and that would be just from the lowered rates of chronic diseases, like cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, not even factoring in the decreased catastrophic pandemic risk. What we eat doesn't just affect our personal health, but our global health in more ways than one. Making healthier choices could also help mediate the next coronavirus epidemic, not only at the source by sidestepping wet markets, but by also decreasing the rates of comorbidities found to increase the risk in all the deadly coronaviruses— SARS, MERS, and COVID-19. Consider the underlying risk factors for COVID-19 severity and death. Obesity, heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and chronic pulmonary disease inversely all studies of vegetable protein is superior to animal protein in terms of lower rates of heart disease, and type 2 diabetes and lower blood pressure than animal protein. Here's a meta-analysis published a few months ago on diabetes risk in animal protein consumption. For hypertension, meat, including poultry, may contribute to a higher risk of high blood pressure. Meat may even be associated with impaired lung function, increasing the risk of lung diseases like emphysema. The same diet that can help you survive this pandemic can also help prevent the next. So instead of propping up the meat industry to the tune of $100 million taxpayer dollars a month and forcing meat plants to stay open, pandemic proof your diet. Thankfully, expanded options are now hitting the meat case as well, no longer a niche market for vegetarians. Major meat producers have started blending in vegetable proteins to make hybrid meat products, like Purdue's Chicken Plus Nuggets or Tyson's Whole Blend Sausage Links. Smithfield, the world's largest pork producer, recently debuted an entire line of plant-based products. Hormel has a new plant-based line to the purveyors of spam, now believed in the power of plants. From a few weeks ago, this headline, KFC, to roll out Cargill's Plant-Based Chicken Across China. Talk about a cultural revolution. And we're not talking about Tofurky. Cargill is America's largest private corporation and one of the biggest meat packers in the world. How many fewer curly-tailed viral mixing vessels are there now that Dunkin' Donuts has a meat-free breakfast sausage? How many fewer hens are packed beat-to-beat now that egg-free mayo has taken the sandwich spread sector by storm? Corn, a brand of meat-free meat made from the mushroom kingdom, opened a single facility that can produce the meat equivalent of 20 million chickens per year. These products may not be the healthiest from a personal standpoint. A doughnut sandwich without pork is still a doughnut sandwich. But, hey, swapping an egg-free omelet from Tim Hortons and from a pandemic standpoint, zero risk. Doesn't necessarily have to be plants, though. Researchers are seeking alternative protein sources everywhere. Can't think of any possible alternatives to cow's milk. How about cockroach milk? Could be healthier than cow's milk and, hey, no lactose, no dairy allergy problems? An important alternative. I mean, I can't imagine anything else you could make milk out of. And gluten-free, too! The only downside, evidently, was the flavor. But the researchers, perhaps funded by Big Bug, chalked this up to the fact that the judges knew there were cockroaches in the bread, and so they were all just biased. I think I'll stick with the plants. But if you're like, you'll have to pry that pork chop from my cold, dead hands, we may be able to have our meat and eat it, too. An even more innovative approach to pandemic prevention was suggested by Winston Churchill in 1932. In an article in Popular Mechanics entitled 50 Years Hence, he predicted that we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. And indeed, the prediction is becoming a reality. Instead of taking a cutting from a plant and growing vegetables, you're taking a sample from an animal and growing meat. Potentially, lots of meat, like maybe a billion pounds from a single sample. Indeed, in terms of efficiency, growing meat straight from muscle cells could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and water use by as much as 96% and lower land use by as much as 99%. But when you factor in pandemic risk, the benefits to human health of a slaughter-free harvest could arguably rival those to planetary health. Food safety has been considered the primary human health benefit of such an approach. There's been a six-fold increase in food poisoning over the last few decades, sickening tens of millions of Americans every year, and contaminated meats and animal products aren't the most common cause. So, when the cultivated meat industry calls its product clean meat, that's not just a nod to clean energy. Food poisoning pathogens like E. coli, Campylobacter, and Salmonella are due to fecal residue, traces of which are found on most poultry sampled in the United States in about half of retail ground beef and pork chops. They're intestinal bugs, so you don't have to worry about them if you're producing meat without intestines.  A culinary choice in South China led to a fatal infection in Hong Kong and subsequently to 8,000 cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, and nearly 1,000 deaths in 30 countries on six continents. If only we had learned our lesson then, we may be one bushmeat meal away from the next HIV, one pangolin plate away from the next killer coronaviruses, and one factory farm away from the next deadly flu. Tragically, it may take a pandemic with a virus like H5N1 before the world realizes the true cost of cheap chicken. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to NutritionFacts.org forward slash testimonials. We may share it on our social media to help inspire others. See any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here? Please go to the Nutrition Facts podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. For a vital timely text on the pathogens that cause pandemics, you can order the e-book, audiobook, or actual book of my latest book, How to Survive a Pandemic. For recipes, check out my How Not to Die Cookbook. And if that's not enough, my How Not to Diet Cookbook will be out this December for everyone on your gift list and all proceeds I receive from the sale of all my books goes to charity. NutritionFacts.org is a non-profit, science-based public service where you can sign up for free daily updates, and the least in nutrition research via bite-sized videos and articles. Everything on the website is free. There's no ads, no corporate sponsorship. It's strictly non-commercial. I'm not selling anything. I just put it up as a public service, as a labor of love as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition.