Welcome to Smash Notes, a podcast that brings you weekly summaries off. The best podcast on the Internet in this episode I'm going to share is segment from rather unusual podcast, and you'll see why we'll talk a little bit about education and start ups before we begin. Just a quick reminder that if you're a podcaster and you'd like to get your episodes on smash notes, just email me feedback at smash nose dot com and let's talk about it. Also, take a look at the show notes for an article that I read on Hacker Noon that I think would be interesting to you. It's Gold Millionaire, a 27 and what I Learned and its lessons from a guy who made all the money while he was young but realized that it was not actually making him a better person. Lastly, a quick shout out to Michael Fitzgerald and the team of submittal dot com. There were our batch mates at Y Combinator in summer 2012 and unlike many of the startups from the time, which is now a very dead Michael and team just raised serious, be to continue growing their company in Missoula, Montana, it's amenable,

is hiring. And if you're looking for a new job, this might be just the job for you. Oh, and if you want to hear more about Sam edible Michael Y. Combinator what it's like to be running a successful company while going through a Stage four cancer, then please share smash nose dot com with your friends. And when this podcast hits 10,000 listeners, I will gladly share those segments with you. Okay, I'm kind of kidding. I will share it with you next week. But if you can do share this with your friends so that I get more listeners, all right now let's get into this week's segments. But I'm bump. Remember I said I wanted to share weird podcast?

Well, at some point, I started looking in my Google analytics and Web master tools and realized that people were looking for Wait for it. Poor? No. Yep, they were looking for porn, and we're coming to my website, and I thought, Well, that is weird. Why would they come to look for their? So I dug into it and turns out there's a podcast called My Dad wrote a porno, and people really want to hear it. The backstory is this. Somebody's dead wrote a porno, and it's pretty hilarious because it's just God awful. So they made podcast about it. Here, take a listen.

I don't know how I'd feel if my dad wrote porn. I don't know how I'd feel if anyone a new road. Poor, Weirdly, I don't feel that weird about it. Which people are quite surprised about it when I evidently you're like broadcasting it? Well, I do think it's great

that he feels comfortable enough to share his innermost fantasies with world. He heard about the success of, As he says, 50 colors of grey. 50 Think actually red. I think he heard

it was successful. Bootleg copy Him

and my mom have both been quite into the self publishing

on. That got a bit carried away, and they start off doing that

little travel guides and now they've gone into porn. He's going to pull on Mom's very

much against. That's the problem. Is self publishing is there's no quality control like anyone could do anything. What you suggesting? Jones has no quality that suggested world a roller coaster ride of quality.

I think it's a pair of fun is in there for a 60 year old man to just write about.

So the 60 year old man in question is your dad. We will be referring to him by his pen name. His pen name is Rocky Flintstone. How that wasn't taking my mind. And if you get your fucking Flintstone, he's the first here later. How do you come to that? Well, I think I think is a fan of the fence does on maybe the real Iraqi. But Rocky Flats that genius is quite pornographic. Movie were filled out by, if you will. We didn't grow up on a street called Flintstone ever Pac called Rocky. So they know where he started from. But it kind of works, but he will be referred Thio henceforth as Rocky Mr Flint virus. So you're cool with it.

How did your mom think about it? Mums less cool about it. Definitely moments like this uber feminist, and she is not happy. I think she's mainly unhappy that people could think it's about her or about Koshis. Belinda's well, I want to say right here right now. She is no, and she's made that very clear. I have so many questions. So when you first presented this work of art to us, we should say I have three sisters

and my dad decided to give me is the only son The preview pages of Blender blinked, and I had to share it with you guys

in it. I started to read it. In fact, what an inheritance. Seriously, contacts that it was Christmas, wasn't We were having a Christmas dinner and you thought it was wise to bring the draft copy. Well, we've had

quite a few bottles of wine, and I thought, You know what?

This party's going nowhere. So let's get rocky above. We haven't actually read anything beyond the first chapter. Well, we've read the preliminary draft. We haven't actually heard the finished product that could be polished. I don't know. It was a work of art. Was the version I've heard should not be altered. Apart from the door, typo Rocky, leave it. It's perfect. I am I right in thinking that, um, this is in no way, uh, autobiographical. But your dad has drawn perhaps, on some of his fun to seize. Is it fair to say I think that that's why I think you should feel uncomfortable.

Okay, So first things first. If my dad wrote a porno, I think I'd make a podcast, too, because it's kind of hilarious and props to these folks for making an entire show of it. Because if the script is bad, then the show is actually really good. And I'm still figuring out how to take notes about this because it's it's about the story. But at the same time, it's about the jokes. So, you know, stay tuned. I'll figure it out over the next couple of weeks. But here's the gist of what the storyline is like. So you know why? It's kind of so hilarious.

Oh, come on. Whether she run the cold tap and dabbed the water onto her nipples, making them stand to attention, that'll have to do for now, she thought. She shoved her bra into her leather handbag. She put her blouse back on, leaving three of the five buttons undone. She was now showing her cleavage big time and through her jacket casually over her shoulder, the silk blouse quickly became transparent, deuce the water and clung longingly, longingly, tohave, Stelling breasts drink. So that's what she's up to. But wait,

it's only gonna be clinging in. The nickel area is gonna look like she's lactating. Through sexy. She walked back into the drinking area. The bar, the watering hole. Observe the effect she had on her new sales team. Only two of her manager's immediately observed have subtle change of attire That's not settle on. Belinda soon noticed some astute elbow in going on around the team, her blouses sopping wet. What do you mean, a company with rice? Miles from the northerners? Don't worry about Jim was chuckling to himself as he was office based, and he had heard the rumors put around by battering Giselle. Now he could believe him. Are you freaking kidding? They think spreading about the instigator, mucky puppies themselves

isn't that fascinating? All right, if you Google for smash notes, plus, my dad wrote a porno, you'll find more episodes and you'll find some notes. And if you find this fascinating as I do, please come back and tell me what you think about this podcast. Now let's switch gears, put our clothes back on and talk about start ups again. If you're thinking of doing a start up there might be various reasons why. Here's an indie hacker interview with the founder of interviewing that Io on why she started our company, what it feels like to be doing it and whether it's making her life better or her happier. Thank you. Having accomplished all this, would you say that it's worth it? Are you happy?

I don't know if I'm happy, but I'm certainly happier than I've been before. I had this job, I think one of the nice things And I think you and I talked about this in the past, right? This idea of like when you were a founder, even if you're sort of tactically miserable, right, you don't have time to be existentially miserable. So you're so busy and, you know, hopefully you're doing something that you find meaning. And even if you know, certainly nothing has meaning, right? Everything is completely chaotic and meaningless in the universe. Give zero fucks about you,

but in your little corner, you've kind of created the suspension of disbelief that what you're doing matters, and as long as you have that lode star of like, I am doing this something that matters, and you pretend that it does then all of a sudden, even if if your life is terrible even if you know 1 1/4 you know your revenue goes down or like you know, people leave your company. All sorts of things happen that are very, very stressful when you run a business. But you don't lay around at night thinking, you know, why am I here and what am I doing? And this is the first job where I felt that way where I feel like I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And, um, I don't care how miserable I am on a day to day basis.

I will trade that for being kind of existentially purposeless. Okay, let's talk about this. Let's talk about some of these other jobs where you didn't feel like you're doing what you were supposed to be doing. What were some of those jobs? I've generally been fortunate enough to work in companies where I've like the people that I work with and some jobs I stayed at way longer than I would have otherwise because I love the people. But every job I've had after the first I don't know sometimes the learning curve was more steep than other times. But eventually, once you figure out what you're doing and you're not overwhelmed, like why why am I doing this? And it didn't matter how great the company was. It didn't matter how good my coworkers were. Ultimately, although that did keep me pretty happy day today. It always felt, felt a little bit empty.

I am. I used to cook for a living like, I guess that job for a minute satisfied my existential existential longings because it was so difficult and I was so bad at it, at least for the first few months that, you know, I didn't have time to think about other things, and that job was was really, really cool. And then eventually I figured out that like, I'm never gonna be Tony Bourdain, Brodin Bourdain. God, I don't even know how to pronounce his name. That's embarrassing, but I I realized I wouldn't be him and a TTE that point. I quit,

but like, for a little bit, that job was was almost a CE fulfilling, as is doing this, but never quite us.

I think that's a very interesting take, because I guess I've never admitted this to myself. But yes, doing a startup is a way to distract yourself completely and fully from the existential dread of life. Yes, of course, start up is also a great way to learn to do everything it wants to be fully engaged. But I guess if you look at it from this point of view, it's also a way to be fully distracted from the fact that you could be doing something else. Or maybe there's nothing else to do. Or maybe that there is no meaning to it all. If you want to hear another episode on the the existential dread in the meaning oflife, check out show notes for ah segment with the hell living yet and his learnings from his start up and how at the end, we're just all going to die and there's no point. So you might as well pick a distraction that works for you and make sure it works for you and make sure ah, you're happy doing it and then just going happily do it. Good luck getting through the rest of the day today,

I guess here's something to cheer you up. The segment is from a podcast called Freelance to Founder and it's about the Brokeback Packer and how he's built a business from making barely found the knowledge of months to come a couple of years, but now he's making over 200 k every months among all his businesses. Maybe start up. Sorry, distraction, but it's not so bad after all.

Everything at the moment, which is very, very exciting. I did start off with the bright backpacker and that had Bean going in the background for a little while whilst I was backpacking. And then I was making a grand a month without really having to do anything, which was fine. I was able to travel by beer, stay in hostels, but I didn't really have, ah, huge amount of motivation to grow it quickly. I just wasn't at that point until I met my now wife in Iran on DA That very much put a fire under my ass because we didn't have any money on. We needed my to be together and to travel together and to be able to get around the fact that she was Iranian because visas for her are extremely expensive and complicated. So that was really my motivation to start growing on ass. I grew that I spoiled all these other opportunities. Well, either areas I want you to be involved in and that's how we have these Abbott businesses I'm now involved in started. This is absolutely incredible. And so let's go with that number. The 200 k ish number. That's as

we're recording this and talking in 2019.

When did this all gets started? How far back in time do we have to go to where you became a business? So probably about three years. But three years ago is where we started taking this a lot, Maur seriously, But the growth over the last year has just bean exponential. I mean, we increased our traffic on the broad backpacker by about 1400% over the last 12 months. All of the other sites that I started I mean, as you probably know, right when you start a new site, you know, you've got that period where you were in the sandbox, where it isn't moving where it takes time and what is still possible in in 2019 toe start site and to rank in six months doing out on a budget is very, very hard. If you've got money to dump into it, you can do it a lot faster on Did.

You can't be a lot more successful. It's so over the last year, I've had money to invest into projects on Dhe. Since then, that growth has just been exponential referred the for two years before that. I mean, I was doing absolutely everything myself. I was wearing every how I was writing with the content. I was doing all the outreach. I was building all the links. It was it was absolutely crazy. We ran out of money. So I started this Ah epic backpacker tour company, which was literally just like we were completely out of money. I was in Pakistan. I was like,

Yo instagram in Pakistan. Does anybody want to come to Pakistan? It will be 1500 bucks and I'll show you around on that. That's how that business died. Eso like, Yeah, it was very much like, you know, ask opportunities made themselves available and as I became, to be honest, increasingly desperate to make money and to make it happen and to be able to re invest that money into things. We started a whole bunch of different thanks.

Isn't that kind of fun? The guy went hiking, got lost for 10 years and then eventually turned all of those experiences in tow, a serious of businesses that are now making him a lot of money. If you want to check out the rest of the Brokeback Packer story, check it out on smash notes. And now let's switch gears a little bit again and talk about education and classrooms. Here's Toby daily and how to teach your third graders about consent?

Um, a little while back I wrote a lesson about consent, and to some people, this was very exciting because I took this topic that seemed very taboo and scary, and I broke it down into a way that was accessible for young learners. However, to other people, the idea of consent is so strongly tied to sex and sex is often considered a taboo subject that it made them very uncomfortable. But my students are third graders, so we're not talking about sex and class. Rather, I wanted them to understand that everybody has different physical boundaries that make them feel comfortable, and the social and emotional intelligence it takes to read somebody's words and tone and body language are skills that often need to be explicitly taught the same way. We teach things like reading and math, and this lesson is not reserved for students of one single demographic. Things like questioning and making observations and critical thinking are things that any student of any race or ethnicity or background or language or incomers zip code should be learning in schools. Also,

deliberate avoidance of these conversations speaks volumes to our students because kids notice when their teachers, when their textbooks leave out the voices and experiences of people like women or people of color. That silence speaks volumes. Acid recently asked to my class of third graders what they would say to adults who think they're too young to learn about issues of equity. And while this is a small sample of my 25 students, all of them agree that not only are they capable of having these conversations, but they view it the right to learn it as a right and not as a privilege. And in their words, we're big enough to know about these things because these problems are happening where we live, and we have the right to talk about, um because it will be our life in the future.

Pretty cool, isn't it? You can teach little kids about fairly important topics, and turns out they actually want to know, and they want to talk about this. But what do you do if kids and classrooms don't really want to pay attention to something they don't want to learn? Though they don't seem to be engaged, here's not the segment. Also from Ted. Talk about how to use cold calling in classrooms to engage kids who otherwise don't want toe.

After calling students who raised her hand, you calling them randomly right, regardless of whether or not they raise their hand. But they're too important parts of this first. You can't use this technique to kind of catch students. You know, when they're not focusing. You can't say, Oh, John, what's the answer? Just because you saw that he was, you know, on his phone or whatever, right, because the minute you do that, they'll resent you for it,

right? Right for calling them out so you can't do that. It has to be done genuinely right has to be done in good faith. It has to give everyone a chance toe quote unquote to shine, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing is that you wanna use cold calling consistently meaning every single class. Because if you don't students, they might feel like they can still kind of get away with not raising their hands sometimes because they'll rely on those who raise their hands. So that's really that's That's really the key. But what? What? What I also wanted to say was that you know what happens, like if you call them, then they don't know the answer right? Because if you're randomly calling sometimes students just don't know the answer.

And we all know what happens when they, you know, students are trained to know that when I say I don't know, that usually means that the teacher will probably call in someone else, and they could just keep saying I don't know and never have to participate, right? Yep. Yeah. So what do you do? Right. So the other kind of technique that's kind of part of this is called no opting out. Right? And basically what you do is if a student says, I don't know. All right, you pose that same question,

toe another student, and then you go back to the first student and ask him or her to repeat it or rephrase the response. Right? So this holds that that student accountable for listening, right? So you say, You know, John, you know what are one of the causes of ruled war one? Alright or World War Two and and John says, I don't know. All right, then you go to someone else to let's say Sean and say, Shawna, can you can you help John out? You know what's the answers?

And then she says, whatever her answer is, and then you go back to John, You say, John, did that make sense? Can you repeat what Shauna said? Or can you rephrase what Shauna said? Or my favorite is? Can you add to that right because of the very basic level? If you if you are not so confident John's ability, you might just ask him to literally repeat what Shauna set right? Right? He didn't answer the question. Ultimately, he does answer the question.

Even if you're right. I mean, so the point is that he right? That's exactly he knows that he has. He's he can't just opt out, right? He has to answer the question. And if he's able to kind of do it in a more critical way, not just repeating or phrasing, but maybe even just, you know, adding his own thoughts into it. That's the best way.

As a parent who is constantly trying to teach his kids something and as a student who's never actually like school. I really love this approach, and I hope more parents and teachers and professors can use this and to go gentle on the students who are. The whites are not paying attention and help bring everyone into the conversation. All right, now that we're almost at the end of this episode, let's recap. You've heard about a poorly written porno start up twice and how to use a start up in order to find meaning in life, how to start a business out off backpacking for a living and a couple segments on how to teach kids better. And now to finish it off on a heavy thought. Here's your segment about anger and how to channel anger to create positive thoughts,

you get a bite to eat. Your anger can motivate you to respond to injustice, because we don't have to think too hard to find things we should be mad about when we go back to the beginning. Yeah, some of those things. They're silly and not worth getting angry over a racism, sexism, bullying, environmental destruction. Those things are really those things are terrible in the only way to fix them is to get Matt first and then channel that anger into fighting back. And you don't have to fight back with aggression or hostility or violence, their infinite ways that you can express your anger. You can protest. You can write letters to the editor you can donate to and volunteer for causes. You create art. You create literature. You create poetry and music.

You can create a community that cares for one another and does not allow those atrocities toe happen. So the next time you feel yourself getting angry instead of trying to turn it off, I hope you'll listen to what that anger is telling you. And then I hope you'll channel it into something positive. So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now. Go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yeah. Hey, must l? I'm not gonna take this anymore. I want you to get out right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell. I must mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore.

And that concludes this week. Episode of Smash Notes. If you want to hear more of something less of something, please get in touch feedback at smash nose dot com or find smash notes on Twitter and let me know. Today's episode was a little late. So the next episode is coming in just a couple of days. Stay tuned.