Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Mike, welcome aboard to the show. I'm so happy to have you on today.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: With your permission, I would like to start with a difficult topic and if you don't want to go down the path, you know, that's totally okay.
Your daughter got sick.
If you would be so kind to share with us the story of what happened when you all discovered this and kind of how it impacted you.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Sure. My daughter had a seizure at the age of two, so prior to that she was progressing fine. Didn't. I had no idea what seizures were or what epilepsy was. My wife found her in a crib. We911 didn't work that morning, so we rushed, we drove her to the hospital. She flatlined at the hospital.
They ran all these tests. They were able to revive her. And that was kind of our journey for figuring out epilepsy. And that was the age of two to the age of eight. It was back and forth to different doctors, getting a lot of misinformation, a lot of medications left. A doctor that wasn't giving us the right information went to another doctor that really kind of was fighting for us.
And that doctor introduced us to the vagus nerve stimulator, which is like a, I'm not supposed to say this, but it's like a pacemaker for your brain and that's the easiest way to describe it. But it's an implant that's near your heart and then sending electronic impulses to your, through your vagus nerve and it's interrupting the seizures. And I was very hesitant about that. It was, that was probably the scariest part of my life, was having to sit down, sit my daughter down to talk about, hey, this is what we're going to have to do. But I think this device might save your life. And ultimately it did. And she's been seizure free eight years, given me the time to then go and talk to family and other families who have epilepsy. There's 65 million people worldwide with epilepsy. There's no cure for epilepsy. There's 3 million people in the United States with epilepsy in the state of California, which I live in. There's no, really no laws. So it's kind of everybody's. Nobody's really on the same page about epilepsy because there's no cure for it. Nobody's really on the same page about it, which is why I do go and, and speak about epilepsy because there's so much misinformation about it. And it's been around 2,000 years.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
What are the gaps that you see? What are the misinformations or lack of knowledge? What are the big things that you would like to get out there? So people knew.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: The number one thing is that people think that it's not a big deal. I mean, epilepsy, you know, causes. It can cause death.
And there's just people that think that it's funny. There's fake seizure videos that are on YouTube and TikTok, and they're. Because they're monetized, they won't take them down. And people don't think that that's a big deal. But what that does is kids all have cell phones now. So they have those. They do fake seizures. Seizures in front of my daughter at school, Bully my daughter at school. My daughter's had a long history of being bullied because of her epilepsy. And so. And I see that with a lot of other children and adults for that matter. I was just at the epilepsy awareness convention in Disneyland in Anaheim yesterday, and people makes it very. It alienates people, so they're very afraid to talk about it, especially children. They don't want to talk about it at all. And so with that lack of information, with the information of not getting out there and talking about it, then people think that it's not a big deal. And I've had this happen many times from family, so. Oh, I thought she was cured. She's fine. Well, there's no cure for epilepsy. It's. Yes, she sees her free. She still has other problems that go along with that because it's a brain disorder. It's affecting your brain. It's affecting every aspect of how you. How kind of all the things we take for granted. Just processing through the day and thinking.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: I appreciate that. Mike, what would you. If you had to recommend to, you know, any one of the people in our audience today, what would you recommend them to do? Is there anything that, you know, individuals kind of, you know, touched by the story that you're sharing today that they can do share with their friends? Research. What would that be?
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Definitely research. And I was always writing things down.
And I really do think you need to meet your doctor halfway. I went into this, you know, I really had barely ever had to go to the doctor, and I was going to the doctor with full faith, thinking that doctor knew what they were talking about. And unfortunately, a lot of doctors have specialties, but they're not going. They're not going to tell you that they don't know something. And so we went to a doctor very long who. He just. He didn't know what the vagus nerve stimulator was. And. But he said it wasn't going to work. And I still hear this from a lot of families is my doctor said this isn't going to work.
But nobody's ever brought that doctor information about it. And the doctor's never looked at it. And kind of the way that everything. It's with anything, it's with any other business. The model for the medical care system is pharmaceutical. So it's.
What kind of drugs can we use on these patients? Well, what's great about the vagus nerve stimulator is it's not a drug and it's working 24 hours a day.
So where my daughter was, you know, 10 years ago was kind of like a zombie because she was on so much medication. She just couldn't think and she couldn't be in. She was in school. She was in school, but almost on the verge of getting kicked out of school because she would have a seizure at school, and the doctors, or the. Not the doctors, the teachers would think she was lazy or she wasn't applying herself.
You know, at that time, I would have to walk her to school, walk her to sit in class. The school didn't want me to be in the class at school. So you were always. I was always fighting against different systems that were set up. And one of those is the medical system. You just have to do your due diligence. One of the things that I always had to do was carry around a care plan with me to give that to the hospital, because you would go to the hospital at different hours of the day, and there would be different shifts and different doctors, and they wouldn't know what it was. She had a seizure one time for an hour in front of a doctor in the emergency room who said she wasn't having a seizure. So you're just up against so many problems when you have medical conditions.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: This sounds like something that, you know, dark ages, kind of like 200 years ago. But how can there be such a lack of knowledge in the medical community itself?
[00:06:16] Speaker B: To me, my own personal opinion is just a lack of compassion. It's your. I really used to view the hospital as, oh, they want you to stay there and they want to help you. No, they want to get you in and out as fast as they can because there's more people coming in. And I get that it's a numbers game. There's a lot of money at Play.
But if you go. If I were to drive to. My daughter's having a seizure and I were to drive to the hospital, the hospital doesn't want to admit me. They want to make me wait in the waiting room. If I come with an ambulance, then they're going to admit me quicker because it's considered an emergency. So those are all the things I kind of had to figure out because again, it's the policy or the rules of how that hospital is or those doctors, and it's just figuring all that out and again, meeting everybody halfway, taking your information and just repetitive repeating over and over again. I've always had to do that, and it does get frustrating. But you have to repeat over and over again to people. Same with insurance. I mean, insurance is constantly canceling my daughter's medications because they're saying, nope, she's healthy, she's fine. You know, well, she's, you know, still needs that to live.
So you're always going to run up against those walls.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Mike, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your story for the audience with a little bit of a sharp pivot.
You were a.
Basically worked in a prison for many years. How did you get into that and why?
[00:07:44] Speaker B: At the time, I got into it just because I needed a job. I mean, the job. I kind of laugh now because there's so many jobs that the Internet has provided to us that didn't exist when I had one. And so I really just wanted medical insurance at the time. And I had a friend that said, oh, you work in a prison, it's real easy. And then I had an internship with probation, and they said, you're working a prison, it's easy. But probation doesn't know what the prison does because they don't work in a prison. Probation is. They're working.
It's basically people that are getting out of jail or sentenced to jail. That's probation. They had no idea what prison was, but I had no. I didn't have Google to fact check any of that stuff. I was just like, okay, I guess it's easy. And I was sorely mistaken because it is not easy at all. This is just the most depressing place in the world. But I also, as I went through college, I got my degree. I was like, oh, I like parole because you can be law enforcement. You can also help people. You can help people get jobs and housing and stuff like that. And I like the aspect of the helping part. But everyone that I talked to told me that I had to work in a prison first, which Isn't true, but that's the path that I thought. I'm at least grateful that I got the experience to work there, just to understand it. Because even the prison, if you were to be a parole agent, there's a lot of parole agents that have never worked in a prison. So they don't know what the prison is. So a lot of times they'll just release people from prison and they throw everything on parole. That's kind of the purpose of parole is parole is this kind of like adjunct to take care of everything when it's really not equipped to do any of that. But the prison doesn't know that. So they're just releasing people out in the street to parole. And don't worry, your parole agent will take care of everything.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: What are some of those gaps between, you know, being released and then prison and your parole officer?
[00:09:25] Speaker B: I mean, the big gap is you're supposed to have a counselor in the prison that's going to tell you what you know. You're given all these new laws and rules that didn't apply when you were in prison. And then, you know, you're given gate money, which is usually $200, and they'll charge you for if you don't have any clothing. So usually people arrive with like 180 or 100, 160, and sometimes a bus ticket, sometimes not. But it's just here, go figure out how to get to your parole agent, which I always thought was odd because here's somebody that's been incarcerated. Now you want them to figure out, like, how to get to a place that's usually. Sometimes they'll get out 100 miles away up north of the state, and you want them to be down there in 24 hours. And so kind of the second that they're released, it's like this clock is ticking to that for them to get.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Arrested again, right into the deep water.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And then they're supposed to then go find a job and find housing. And how are. How are they supposed to be doing that when they've been incarcerated the entire time and everything's been taken away? And I think a lot of people don't realize that when, you know, when you're in prison, your driver's license is taken away, all everything's taken away. You have to then figure out how to go, you know, a lot of it. I always looked at it like you're standing in line all the time, trying to get all that stuff back that you didn't have before because you were in prison. So I really did see two sides to it. I can see that, yes, you're a criminal, but at the same time, I think we could do a little better taking care of people, especially if they're on parole. I also do feel that parole was unnecessary. I think it hindered more people than it helped them.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Tell me more about that. Why do you say that?
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Because, say, if you didn't have any family members here in the state of California, and you have family members in other states, parole prevents you from going to another state. And then you could possibly have a loving family that wants to take care of you or get a job or something like that. So parole really prevents you from doing that, and it's preventing you from certain jobs you can't have.
Sometimes that's a good thing, but other times, you know, people are going to look at, well, this person is a felon. They don't know exactly what they did, but now they're not going to hire them, you know, and there's nothing. There's no system set up where they immediately, you know, in the prison. There's prison jobs that pay horrible, but there's at least a system of jobs specifically for those inmates. Parole, there's not. There should be. Nobody wanted to listen to me on that one. But there should be an area where, hey, now, now that you're on parole, here's a job that you can have immediately out the gate, immediately from your out of the prison, you know, whether or not you want to do it for the rest of your life. But there's nothing bridging that gap. And then, same with housing, there should be. If somebody's homeless, there should be a place especially homeless on parole. There should be a place where you can immediately go and house them. And I had so many people, so many parolees that were homeless, and then the department doesn't like them to be homeless. So everything. There's just so much red tape, so much hypocrisy, and it was just all thrown on the parole agent to deal with it. So you're really juggling a lot. There's a lot of stress to it because everything is blamed on you.
And I think I'm a testament to that because, I mean, I used to have all these medical problems, and when I retired, they're all gone now. And it's because that stress just. It's the unknown killer. I never believed it before.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: Oh, I can tell you I was in certain roles or jobs where I was stressed and I could count and quantify how sick I was. And how many sick days I had to take due to how that was affected me, as opposed to, you know, environments which, you know, I enjoyed the team. So, I mean, truly, stress has these incredible impacts on your body. It's, it's, it's a, it's a real thing. You decided to write a book about your journey. It's called Straight Fish, A Correctional Officer's Story.
Why did you. I mean, that's such a private thing to decide to open up your experiences in life through a book and share that with everybody. Why did you decide to do that?
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Because there, to me, it was therapy. The writing part was always. There was so much crazy stuff going on because it was a prison. It was the only thing kind of keeping me going because they had hiring freezes, so I couldn't get out of there and transition into parole, which is where I wanted to go. And then at the time, I'm having a, you know, I got married, I'm having a family. The money's really good. So you're looking around at you're. I was at the time. That's why I say, like, I always kind of miss these opportunities. But at certain times I would look around and all my friends had been laid off from their jobs, and at least the job was consistent, and it was consistent with a good amount of money. And so I was also thinking, okay, I'll write a book. And I've always, I always wanted to, you know, make a living as a writer, which I laugh at now because it's very hard. And I was thinking, oh, then I can quit my job at the prison. Well, of course, that didn't work out when it came out. But I also think there's a big draw to. Because prisons are their own cities within themselves, they don't allow people to come in and really figure out what it is. There's a mystery to it. So a lot of people have this assumption of what's going on in prison. You know, I would meet. If I would meet people outside of the prison, their first reaction was, you're not big enough to be a prison guard. That was the first. So people kind of have these set ideas of prison, what's actually going on in the prison, and right. Who, what people are supposed to look at when they, how they're supposed to look when they work in a prison. And it's all. It's just normal people that just wanted. They just wanted a job. And fortunately for a lot of people, that job is a very good paying job for a lot of people that Come there. And so there's a lot of people that loved it. I didn't love it and I was the minority that didn't like it. But most people loved it. They'll be there 30, 40 years. I tried to get out of there as soon as I could, but I always had the book that I was writing because there was always stories and a lot of them to me was the comedy of it because it is miserable. You put somebody in an 8 by 10 box, they're going to go crazy. And I've never quite understood that why we need to put them in an 8 by 10 cement box. You know, they're away from society. We could maybe Transition now in 2024 to a nicer place to be living.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: What strikes me is that the decisions that you've made over your life have been a incredibly of service oriented. So trying to support others. If it's to make people laugh, it's to help people, you know, make their way back into society. If it's to service and support the people that have really lost everything. You've made these decisions to do impossible things. One of them is to become a comedian.
Where did that start? How did that journey become?
[00:15:39] Speaker B: I think for me it was and I think a lot of comedians are like this also. It's that you're taking your trauma from your childhood or adulthood. Most times it's your childhood. For me it was, I. My family was so dysfunctional that all I could do was use humor to deflect everything. And I really saw that in the prison too. I could use humor in the prison to not get myself killed. And it was quite a bit. I mean it worked pretty well for me to being in situations where I really feared for my life but to be able to talk my way out of it by using humor.
And so when I was younger, you know, if you're dealing with a bully or something like that, using humor to get out of it. And for me it was using humor with my family. Like I would just the sarcasm to get out of things. That's where I saw it. I realized later on that's what I had done to survive was to use humor. As I got older, when I was in college, I think you're making other people laugh and then somebody will tell you you should be doing comedy. And for me there was a band and the guy had, you know, I was hungover, you know, going to get something to drink in a parking lot and that he pulled up in a car and said, hey, I want you to open up for my band. And I was like, I don't really. I have no idea. And he's like, we're going tonight. You need material. So I was like, okay. And I went home and I wrote, and I was just. It was the worst material ever, but it was. And it was Eddie Murphy impersonating Bill Cosby. But I gotta tell you, it killed. And so what that does is then that gives you. That propels you, like, oh, my gosh. I made this whole crowd. It just happened. This was in Isla Vista. It was on Del Playa Street. And at the time, there was a couple hundred people out in the street at that time.
And everybody, of course, is drunk, but you're making everybody laugh, so it gives you a big high.
And then when I found out that music doesn't mix with comedy, then I was bombing a couple times, and I was like, oh, I need to rethink this.
It. With comedy in the long game, if you can. That's what it is. You need to stay in it because it can hurt you if you bomb enough up on stage. But that's really what propelled me to think, oh, okay, this is something that I could do. And it really is. It's your vulnerability with comedy. So you're up on stage, you know, spilling your guts to people. I think people kind of don't realize that sometimes, but that is the best comedy.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: I mean, and the environment today has become almost dangerous or much more sensitive. We're much more in tune to our emotions, for better or worse. And, you know, cancel culture has become a thing. Are we. Is it more difficult to get on stage today? Are we seeing maybe if, you know, less comedians even choose the career? How is the. What's this. What's the environment look like today when it comes to comedy?
[00:18:24] Speaker B: For what I see, it's. It's bigger because I think that the comedy is the only place where you can say those things. There are certain. Of course, there are certain things that I can't say that, you know, that Everybody was saying 10, 15 years ago. But you, as a comedian, you take that out of your act and you. That's your job. You rewrite your material. And if you can't rewrite it, then you shouldn't be there. But now is the best time to do it. Because when I started doing it, I mean, I. When I was starting it with that band, that. That band was the only place I could do. There was no open mics anywhere. There was no other place to practice it. And now there's tons. Every place has Got an open mic. You can create your own open micro. You can get that equipment that used to be so expensive, but now it's dirt cheap. You can create, you know, you can put that stuff. There's comedians that have never gone up on stage that are putting their stuff on YouTube or TikTok or whatever, and they're able to have a career out of that. So the dynamics has completely changed. But I always go back to if you're going to be a comedian or an entertainer or whatever, your job is entertaining, your job is to figure that out. Yes, there are. There's cancel culture and there's things that you can't say, but your job is to figure out a way to say those things to get around it. And I also do say the audience is going to tell you whether or not you can say something or not, and then that's your job to get through it. I've really never been. I've had drunk people talking or being on their phones, but I've never really harshly been heckled. And I think that if you're doing your job, then you're going to be okay. Yes, you're going to offend people. There's no way around it. But I was doing a lecture about epilepsy yesterday, and there was a guy in the audience that kept. He was heckling me. It wasn't comedy, but he was still heckling me. And your job is to then figure out a way to calm that guy down.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: My God, I can only imagine. I mean, why would anybody even interrupt or interfere on a topic like that?
[00:20:19] Speaker B: That's.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: That's absolutely ludicrous. What you, you kind of dealt with these. These failures, and you're continuously dealing with failures. There's no other way to do it when it comes to comedy. What did that, how did that change you? What did you learn from this almost necessity to fail in order to succeed?
[00:20:37] Speaker B: That was pretty. For me, it was pretty recent. I just realized, you know, I'd rather be a failure. Like, I'd rather. I've at least tried to do that. I've tried to do something especially like I transitioned two years ago to do acting. And I absolutely love it. And what I love about it is that it's not real. You're there, you do your job, you leave. There's no consequences to it. When I worked in law enforcement, there's consequences to everything.
If I arrested somebody, the family would try to sue me or the department would try to sue me. That's what I love about acting. So kind of the Same thing where I really thought, I am a failure. I've always failed at stuff. People would ridicule me for failing at things. And I just. If you embrace the failure like I'm doing, then you're going to succeed. I think the thinking that nobody fails at anything and thinking, you know, like when you hear people talk about somebody like, oh, that's a washed up actor or whatever, and you're like, yeah, but that person was on a show, they made it onto a show, they're not washed up at all. They made it, they succeeded, they hit the lottery.
And so that's what I mean by embracing the failure is that if you embrace the failure enough, you're going to succeed. And that's really what changed my perspective on things, is I'd just rather be a failure in my life. And I think we get caught up and kind of convoluted in a lot of stuff that's, you know, in social media, where it's this fake life or whatever. And I simply just want to be a good person and be good to people.
And that's all that I want to be remembered at. And I think that the things that I'm doing now, that's what makes me happy. I wasn't happy doing law enforcement at all. And I made that conscious decision that, you know, and I even heard it from people like, you know, you're, you're a failure for leaving. Okay, I'm a failure. You know, it's kind of like being the clown, being ridiculed by people, but the clown knows that they're a clown, right? So the clown's succeeding.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: It's such an interesting paradigm because, you know, we only hear about people succeeding in their 1% success. But what we. And that's what we see. And we see it all the time, right? Whoever's on the COVID of Forbes, whoever's on LinkedIn, whoever sold their company, we're manufacturing this fake success, right, with all these Instagram pictures. But what we're not recognizing is that that overnight success preceded by 10 years of learning and quote, unquote failure, right? It's an overnight success. It took me 10 years to become an overnight success success. And that's something we're completely ignoring as a society, right? And we try to judge people and we're like, oh, that guy's a fader. And then what? But hold on. So tomorrow suddenly had a big break, now he's a success. What makes somebody a success or failure? It's almost like the terms, the way that we're Judging people is just completely wrong. Like the way we're looking at the world is wrong.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And everybody. And something that I don't agree with, that never happened when I was growing up is everybody's a criticism. And they don't. They don't really have. Not everybody has a right to be a critic. And that's why, especially with comedy, like, I'll never say somebody's or acting. I'm never going to say, like, that was a bad movie or that person is a bad. They went up there, they did their best. You know, they're. They're going to do something. It doesn't mean that they failed at it. But we are just a pessimist society. Same with, with parole. I've had more criminals that have called me to see how I'm doing than the people that. The people that I worked with that were supposed to be these great coworkers. And I think that that's where society has shifted, is everybody is kind of in this idea that it's about me, and I have this right to be mean to people when really they're just punching buttons on their phone and people aren't really thinking about what that is going to do to people.
And I think that does hurt a lot of people. Yeah, you can block those people, but I think a lot of people are affected by that. Not so much that it used to be before, but I remember when I was younger that you would have actors that didn't want to transition to TV because they would think that they were a failure. Now, nobody cares. But it's like people on social media, you know, just love to hurt people because it's easy, you know.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. This, you know, negative psychology, and if it bleeds, it leads. It's an easy way to get those eyeballs. Right. Because that's how. That's the human condition.
I would argue that if you can be successful without using those psychologies. Right, by being positive, by creating something that's not, in essence, bullying somebody else, that success, to me is so much more impressive because it is truly more difficult.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the things I was always shocked at with having a child in school was that the schools do nothing for bullying. And a lot of it is what we're seeing in media is you're just fabricating these stories. And then if you get caught with these saying that even the story was false. Oh, well. So really the media or in life, there's no really, you know, repercussions for anything. So people kind of. I think that, seeps into our minds where people think, oh, it's okay for me to, you know, scam people. You see scams all the time where people are, they're bombarded. I mean, I probably get 12 a day, you know, trying to get loans or, you know, it seems like every other month it's something else where people are just trying to get money out of you. And then it's haha, you should have known that I was scamming you.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: My question to you is, when you kind of look at your career and your learnings, what would you advise younger 20 year old Mike? What would you tell him?
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Nothing, because he would have listened.
Advise other people that also don't want to hear anything. I just think that's the process of life is when you're young, go have fun. I always tell when younger people are like, should I, you know, should I move across country to be in la to be an actor?
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Yeah, do it.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Because once you have a family, you're not gonna have the time to do that. I mean, when I was younger I had all the time in the world. I just didn't have the brains to think how to apply any of that. And there's so many things that I can look back and go, I would have done that. I would have signed up for more open mics or I would have auditioned more.
I had an audition when I was, I think 19 for a PBS special. It was like I got my girlfriend pregnant or whatever. I was so embarrassed of the script, I didn't even show up for it. I mean that could have easily led to something else. Those are things that I just never thought about before. I never thought about, hey, showing up, show up on time, you know, and you know, see what it is that you can do for those other people. And I think that we're always kind of in a society of what are those people going to do for me? And you're waiting for those people and if you're younger, go and do it. You know, you got your whole life to do it. I just think I meet more people that they just don't do it. They say that they do, but they just don't. You know, whether they're too afraid or they're too lazy, they just don't want to do it. So for younger me, I wouldn't have listened, but there are things that I would have done which is show up and do my job.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: I mean, that's half the battle, right? It was an interesting thing. I read that, you know, how do you get really good at, you know, keeping your weight and being healthy. And the thing you would think is like, oh, I need to meet this certain target of, you know, whatever pools or laps or minutes. And what this person said is, no, no, no, you should have one and only one target, and that's the show up. Just make sure that the only thing that you do is get wet. That's all. And if you do, you know, one pool or 20 pools or 30, it doesn't matter. But if you got wet and you do that every single, whatever day or week, whatever your target is, that's going to get you so much further than having this, you know, tremendous target of doing 30 pools and then, you know, missing that. So I think we're very, to a certain degree, we're very harsh with ourselves. We're extremely, we're our worst critics, so to speak. So there's something delightful in what you said. Like, just show up. Just show up and do the best that you can.
To me, that's an inspiring message. I really appreciate it.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I would also add to that, you know, do the work, like if you're, say you're a comedian, do your routine, just five minutes a day, do your routine to yourself in your living room. But it's that repetition and then you're, you're going to build off of that. Most people don't do that. Most people are, you know, we're absorbed with the TV or we're watching YouTube, but it's just, I look at it like the baby steps of write that stuff down, you know, keep a notebook with you. Because anytime you can find a joke out of something or if it's acting, do a scene over and over again. Doesn't mean you're going to get a job or whatever it is, but whatever it is, you always want to practice at what it is that your craft is. And I think especially with the arts, people are thinking, like, it's going to take this one thing that's going to propel me and I'm going to be famous. And a lot of people are sidetracked by that fame. But you got to approach it like it's a job and just completely. And practice at it every single day.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Those are two so fundamental insights that you just shared. I just want to take a minute here to articulate those because it's so important, right? This idea of capturing ideas and concepts and actually writing them down so you can come back to them and develop them. That's so important because we all have these moments of brilliance and we forget about them three minutes, five minutes later. So just writing it down. And, you know, I have my little journal here that I write stuff down. I recommend that everybody does that. So I appreciate that point. And then whose mother hasn't told them that practice makes perfect? It's such a simple and fundamental thing, and yet we don't do it. We kind of think, oh, if I did a bad job, then I'm, you know, this is not my forte. No, you can be so much better at anything if you just put in the work. So I, I mean, such an important, such important and fundamental points that you said.
Mike, what an absolute delight. I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Thank you.
