In this latest episode of the Bespoke Parenting Hour, host Julie Gunlock jumps behind the scenes to talk to the man who makes it all possible—Bespoke Producer Tim Burg. Julie and Tim—both parents of teens—talk about the choices (and lack of choices) parents have in tech for kids, compare the challenges they’ve each had with this issue, offer advice on tracking apps for parents, and discuss why, when it comes to your kids and phones, sometimes being a helicopter parent is the right thing to do.
TRANSCRIPT
Julie Gunlock:
Hey everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, host of The Bespoke Parenting Hour. For those new to this program, this podcast is focused on how parents should custom tailor their parenting style to fit what’s best for their families, themselves, and most importantly, their kids. So today, I’m really excited. I have my friend, Tim Burg, on. Tim is the father of a 16-year-old boy. Sorry about that, Tim. He’s a former radio talk show producer and current podcast producer, and he’s also a news consultant. Most importantly, he is the producer of this show, so giving everybody a little bit of a behind-the-scenes look at our wonderful producer, Tim Burg. Tim, thanks for coming on.
Tim Burg:
Sure thing, Julie. Glad to be here with you on this side of the microphone.
Julie Gunlock:
I’m going to throw some really hard questions on you. My goal is to make you cry, so let’s see how we can do with that, right, Tim? Because you know me. I’m such a hard interview. I’m like the Barbara Walters of a podcast. Isn’t that right?
Tim Burg:
Yes. I was wondering where you were going with that, what you’re going to use, but yes, that’s a great analogy. Yeah.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. Tim has to do a lot of editing. He has to edit all of my cuss words out and all of my inappropriate statements. So I love Tim, and Tim does not just produced this podcast. He does the She Thinks podcasts for IWF, many of our other online projects, Tim produces for us, and is a great consultant on things all about technology and radio and podcasts. So the ladies are all big fans of Tim. The reason I thought Tim would make a good guest is because I have actually consulted Tim on personal matters. Another weird thing you’ll need to edit here, Tim. Not weird personal batters, but really about kids and technology. I think that I have noted a couple of times on this show, how I’ve sort of struggled with my kids and video games, my kids and phones. None of my kids have phones.
And I think Tim has shared his own struggles with finding the right kind of technology, so we thought it’d be a good conversation to have on the show because I think this is a common struggle that parents have. When it comes time to considering phones or looking at phones or looking at any kind of technology, this is something that all parents have in common. So Tim, why don’t we start off with you talking a little bit about the searches you’ve gone through to try to find good technological programs and products for your own kid?
Tim Burg:
Well, yeah. When I’m sitting, listening to you do your interviews, I hear and feel there’s a lot of the same struggles that I had as a parent when I had a 10, 11, 12-year-old in the house and some of the things we’re dealing with, from when to get him a phone, to video games, to screen time, which screen time kind of went by the wayside in our house with COVID and schooling. So I feel some of the same things you guys are dealing with. And the one thing I think is good is that you guys are thinking and addressing it now. It’s one of these things where I feel like you have to do at a younger age to get the child to kind of go along with it, I guess the best way to put it.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. It’s funny, because I feel like in everything with parenting, there’s a ton of products out there to sort of make it easier, but I actually don’t agree with that when it comes to phones and technology. And I want to talk a little bit about a product that you’ve found that you’ve talked to me about, but I also want to kind of set the stage here. And you’re right. My kids are younger, but not that much younger. I mean, I have an 11, 12, and 14-year-old. And when I was looking initially for something… My son was going to take a bus for the first time and he was nervous, and the school district, which you’ve heard me talk about millions of times, is kind of bad, and I didn’t really trust them to get bus times correct.
So we bought him one of those… I think they’re called Gizmo wristwatches, which were great, because you can only call for numbers. It’s not like you can surf the internet with those little wristwatches. And that was perfect, but it did frustrate me that there was almost nothing besides that in terms of a smartphone or a phone that didn’t have full data plans. And so I remember talking to you about that and getting kind of frustrated with, it’s like all or nothing, except for these wrist phones. So have you found, as now, I assume your 16-year-old has a phone?
Tim Burg:
Yes, he does.
Julie Gunlock:
So tell me about, I don’t know, the searches you’ve done before. Did you have the same experience where it was like, “Okay, you either get a super expensive smartphone with a full data plan, or you get an old person flip phone with the big…” Because they have those, I don’t know what they’re called, jitterbugs or something. They have these phones that are flip phones that are made for very old people. And my husband and I considered getting one of those, but we ended up with the flip phone, or I’m sorry, with the wrist phone, which again, it offers almost nothing. So again, it’s either everything under the sun or nothing. What was your experience?
Tim Burg:
So we went through the same struggles, it sounds like. We started initially with a flip phone, and it was just your very basic phone that you could not do much except call or text us or text grandma, that sort of phone. So that suffices for a while, and then as he gets older, and inevitably there’s that one friend who has a new phone, and then it eventually transitioned into a hand-me-down phone, like you’re saying, so it wasn’t the iPhone 10, it was the iPhone 6. And then now it’s transitioned to, I think actually, honestly he still may only have a 7. He still doesn’t have the latest and greatest phone, which he-
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, you child abuser. How could you?
Tim Burg:
Right? Well, and so now he’s actually where he’s earning money. He has a part-time job, and so I’ve put the bug in his ear. He’s very frugal on some things, but others, he isn’t. And I’ve put that bug in his ear that if he wants to upgrade his phone, that’s on him, but he’ll be paying the extra upgrade or paying for the phone, however he wants to do that. And apparently the iPhone 7 seems to still be good enough and covering all his bases for the time being.
Julie Gunlock:
I struggle, though. Even at 16, I don’t think kids are mature enough to make good decisions. I worry about kids filming things. I worry about, with a full data plan, the access to, frankly, sources that I don’t want them to see. And I know, look, this is where it gets into… Because I have always fashioned myself a free-range parent, but I really screeched to a halt on the free ranging. And I think most free-rangers think more in terms of physical freedom to go to the playground, or ride your bike wherever you want to go, or go to the ice cream shop down the road, or do some small errands for Mom.
But I’m not free-range when it comes, and again, I think most would agree that you do really need to monitor what they’re seeing. Do you monitor your son’s phone? Do you ask to see it once a week? Do you look at histories? Kids are smart. They can always erase that stuff. But I think every parent is probably a little bit concerned about what their kids are seeing. Do you institute any rules or do anything to monitor it?
Tim Burg:
So initially when he got the phone, yes, there was a, “We get to look at it. We can scroll through things.” And that was probably around the age of 14. That was probably when… I’m trying to go back, it seems like forever, when he actually had the phone, but that was at that age. It was, “The phone stays outside the room at night, and we get to look at it. We know the password, et cetera.” And then we get to be a little bit older, he gets to be a little bit older, gains some trust, and so then what we said was, “Okay, we’re going to install…” I had started doing some research and found some monitoring systems out there for you, some things that’ll monitor his technology, what he’s looking at, seeing. And we came across an app that we can download called Bark, B-A-R-K. And full disclosure, there’s no financial interest for me to mention them. They were just the one we chose. So I’ll give examples-
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, full disclosure, there’s none here either. I don’t even know what Bark is, and I’m glad you’re going to explain it to me because I’m going to instantly download it. And I want to talk about other things, but we should be very clear. We have no incentive here to mention it. So go on. Thank you.
Tim Burg:
Correct. And I will say, there are some glitches in the app that I’m not a fan of, so it’s not going to be singing like it’s going to sound like a full-on commercial for them, because that certainly isn’t the case. There are some issues that I think are kind of clunky with the app, but it, for the most part, does what I need. So you download the app on your child’s phone, and the first glitch I think right out of the bat is, the money for the monthly or yearly subscription then comes out of his phone, so then there has to be something already-
Julie Gunlock:
Why is that a glitch?
Tim Burg:
Well, yeah, right? It comes out of his-
Julie Gunlock:
I totally approve of that.
Tim Burg:
Yeah. If he doesn’t have the… But then there’s… Yes.
Julie Gunlock:
I get it.
Tim Burg:
Yeah, so that’s the first thing. So it downloads that. You download it on his phone, and then it asks for all the information and permission, basically, on all of his apps. And so now this is where for us it got a little dicey because he had a few apps downloaded before, and he was like, “Well, I don’t want this one to show up, but I want that one.” And so my son sometimes wants to be the next greatest attorney in the world, like maybe all boys do, and so we kind of conceded on a few of those.
So there are a few apps that aren’t being monitored, but the main ones we want… For us, the main ones were his text communication. So we see all the text communications, and that’s really the main one. And then another one is YouTube. And I know YouTube, I’ve heard you talk on the… There’s kids… It seemed like as he gets… And here’s some, I guess, maybe light at the end of the tunnel for you. It seems like his YouTube viewing is going down as he gets older. And then I’ll still get some alerts, some stuff he must’ve signed up for as a younger teen or preteen. And with those, you can put ignore.
That’s the other thing with this. If you get an alert, and it’ll show me a video game that he’s watching, I can just hit ignore. I don’t need to see this alert anymore. It’s just, maybe there was a bad word in the title or something, and that’s not great, but at this age, not what I’m into. So it does allow for that functionality to where if you see something and you’re like, oh, this is harmless or something, you can hit ignore so it won’t keep sending you those alerts.
Julie Gunlock:
I don’t mean to interrupt, but it’s interesting that you bring this up, because I think one thing that people always assume is that you’re going to monitor to look for bad stuff. But the interesting thing is that… So I had a system similar to this for my child’s Chromebook when he was attending the public school. It was called Securly. Again, no interest in Securly, no financial backing, but there is this company called Securly, and you can go in and look at every single website your child has looked at or even searched.
So it’s not just the ones that they’ve actually gained entrance to, it actually includes the searches. And I will tell you, there’s something actually reassuring to seeing what your kids are looking at. So it was funny. I looked at… At the time, he was in fifth grade, I think… No. He started in fourth grade on this program, because this is when we all went virtual for COVID, and fourth grade. So I was watching, monitoring my fourth, fifth, sixth grader, because… Anyway, it doesn’t matter.
The point is, I was monitoring this, and what he was searching for was hilarious. It was like Roblox, how to get over this bridge, or how to build the best Lego. Those are the searches. And honestly, the searches were all similarly innocent and really sweet. And so it was interesting. It actually gave me… So I think for some parents, you need to look at Bark or Securly or some of these things as not just like, I’m trying to root out any bad stuff they might be looking at. It will give you peace of mind. And it’s not like I talk to my kids every day about, “Okay, your searchers were, you did these five searches.”
I never even talk about it. It was only once when I saw something that, again, had a bad word in it, and I said, “Hey, what are you searching?” And then they were kind of like, “Oh, she’s seeing everything.” But by and large, it gave me reassurance that my kids were really still kind of in an innocent phase and not looking for things that I thought were inappropriate. So there’s a lot of reassurance. I just want to mention that, because I do think that some people think this is spying on your kids or whatever. It’s important to do this to know your kids and know what they’re seeing.
Tim Burg:
Well, exactly. And I will say, we do the same thing because there’s a few devices that we share in the house, tablets and such for homework. And my son, he’s very smart, school smart, but the street smart and the deleting stuff and covering his tracks, he’s not the best at.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s great.
Tim Burg:
I guess we used to call that street smart, where I’ve would have been that kid who was instantly deleting my history and everything. Yeah, so he’s not in that. And that’s where, too, like you’re saying, I’ll see some things, and so I will see the text messages, and it’ll tell you why it’s flagging… At first you get an email, and it’ll say, “Hey, we’ve noticed this thing.” And then it’ll send you an alert, an email alert, and then on my app, I download the same thing, and then they’re telling you what’s going on with it. Was it for profanity? Was it for bullying or health or something? And it’s funny, some of our messages have got flagged that I’ve read. So it doesn’t even-
Julie Gunlock:
That’s funny.
Tim Burg:
It’s pretty sensitive to when it sends you something. And so then I’ll see these and I’ll skim through them. And I haven’t yet, at least, confronted him on anything I’m seeing. Nothing has been to that level, I guess you could say, of concern of mine. It is nice, I guess, in a way to see that he’s going through some of the same things that probably most teens are going through, from disputes with friends and just kind of living life, I guess you could say.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. I think, too, this is a really important time for parents to be more involved in their children’s lives, but also their hidden lives and the lives that they don’t share with their parents. Because we know that because of COVID-19, of course I’m not suggesting this of my children or your children, but just in general, Tim, we know because of COVID-19, we have much higher rates of suicide, self-harm, psychological problems, depression, anxiety, et cetera.
Loneliness, deep loneliness and isolation, is something I really monitor because I just started homeschooling my oldest. And he’s loving it, but there is an aspect to homeschooling, especially for a slightly older kid, where they aren’t seeing classmates and having that kind of downtime. It’s like, “I’m with Mom all day.” And that’s why we’ve gotten him involved in some community things that put him in touch with other kids that he really enjoys.
But the point is that because of COVID-19, you really do have to monitor your kids a little bit more. And I am not one of those people who believes kids have privacy. You’re in my house, I’m paying for your food, I’m paying for your housing, all this stuff. I don’t believe that kids have any kind of privacy, and I don’t think that… I mean, I’m not saying that, okay, I’m taking the hinges off the bathroom doors or I’m taking the hinges off their bedroom doors. I do give them some measure of privacy, of course, but the whole idea of kids have a right to complete privacy and that kind of stuff is kind of silliness. It’s obviously, that’s a fringe position in parenting groups.
But I actually think that it is a very core parental role to do this. I’ll just tell a very quick story here. I have a neighbor, and I knew them from school pickup, and we were sort of friendly in the kind of walking the dogs, pause for a few minutes, have a conversation. And he told me that they had gotten their 12-year-old son a iPhone with a full data plan, and that child proceeded to watch horrifying things that no child should see at 12, no person should see ever. And they started to notice some behavioral changes, and they had no monitoring on this phone, and they really didn’t talk to him about what he was watching and seeing. And I think out of horror and guilt and shame, he finally admitted it to his parents.
So I’m talking to this man, and I just felt terrible for him. And I felt so sad that this child had seen some of these extreme pornographic and extreme violence content. And so I said to dad, I said, “Well, you took the phone away, right?” Because again, the kid’s only 12. What does he need a phone for? And the father looked at me perplexed and said, “Well, no. We’ve now had some conversations, and we trust him to do better.” And I’m like, “What?” So I don’t know how you feel about that stuff, Tim, but I feel like you clearly, from what you’ve said so far, see the importance of keeping an eye on what your kid is seeing.
Tim Burg:
Well, exactly. And I also don’t mind sharing that he sees a counselor once every couple weeks, or it’s a little less frequent than what it had been, but once or twice a month, and the counselor will even chat with us for a few minutes at the beginning. And one of the things he said within the last year really stuck with me, that at the age our son is in, we’re more training him to be an adult. And of course we still have rules and regulations, but it’s preparing him for his adult life, as opposed to when you have that younger child, that 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old, where it’s the rules, the regulations, et cetera.
We still do have house rules and everything, obviously, but it’s a different set of consequences and a different expectation, as he now is, like I mentioned, working and beginning to do some more adult things. He has his driver’s license, he has a car, all sorts of things. So it’s a different, I guess, phase in parenting, which it’s been a challenging transition as far as it is, because it can’t just be the same. Yes, of course he can still be grounded. He can still lose privileges. But I’m more training him to know these are the rules. There’s a speed limit. There’s a stop… Some of this stuff.
Julie Gunlock:
And they’re there for a reason. There are certain things that… I mean, I think also, as two people who tend to be pretty libertarian on many things, but there are good reasons for helmets and [inaudible 00:20:58] and seat belts and things like that, that aren’t necessarily some sort of means of social control. But yeah, I agree with you that the transition is hard. I’m approaching that now. I’m at the beginning, and it’s hard to give them a little autonomy, a little bit more. But I think you’re right, and that’s really a great statement from that psychologist or psychiatrist to say, “You’re training them to be an adult.” It does shift from training them to not, I don’t know, spill spaghetti on their shirt, to really training them in some pretty important fundamentals about adulthood. It’s a much, I would say, more difficult phase of parenting.
Tim Burg:
It is. And it’s funny. We’re talking technology. The latest thing that we did is because he works on some school nights, and even just in general, and I’m not a fan of those monitoring doorbell-type things, but we did set up… it’s more sitting in the house where he comes, anyone comes in, but it lets us know when he gets in, because we’re both in bed. We’re kind of early risers, so we’re in bed between nine and 10 o’clock, and there’s nights he’s… He has a curfew on the weekends. And I know my parents had a dog that would inevitably bark every time I came in, so they didn’t need to wait up, but the dog would be.
Julie Gunlock:
And you’re still bitter about it.
Tim Burg:
Yeah, right? But we set this up, and it works. And even some nights he works. He’ll work till 11:00 on some nights, and this lets us know when he gets in. So that’s the latest thing we’ve done that seems to be working. But again, even for us, it’s even house rules. It’s, “Hey, you clean up after yourself in the bathroom.” Well, of course that’s going to be an issue when you have a roommate if you’re a slob in the bathroom or a shared living space. Is your roommate going to want this? Because probably not. You won’t have a roommate if that’s the case.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. I’m hoping that my sort of personal hysteria about cleanliness and my OCD about cleanliness, hopefully that alone will rub off on them. Or it could go the opposite way. They could be complete slobs as a form of rebellion. Who knows? Yet to tell. But again, I think that these are really important things, just how to be an adult. How to be an adult. There’s a great book. One of my favorite parenting books is How to Raise Adults. It’s by Julie Lythcott-Haims. And she actually, in the back, offers some checklists of things that you should be teaching your children.
Because she was the dean of a college, and she would meet these kids, and she said that over the decades that she had met them… I don’t know. I don’t remember exactly the year she became the dean of the student, but over 20 years of working in this college, they started out very confident, able to have a conversation, shake hands, make eye contact, and then able to care for themselves once they got in the dorms, to today where she said, “Kids are having major breakdowns and massive anxiety attacks because they get to college and they’re like, ‘Uh, I don’t know how to do my laundry. I don’t know how to spend money. I don’t know how to do anything.'”
What she was basically realizing is that parents are doing so much for kids, and that’s a part of helicopter parenting. I mean, if you got a 17-year-old kid who’s never washed his clothes before or doesn’t know how to make a simple fried egg, or even warm up ramen, which hopefully you’re teaching your kids a little bit beyond ramen. But the point is that you’re going to have some kids who are launched and are just… Really, it’s a tough world. It’s a scary world if you don’t know some basics. So that was a great book, again, Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult.
And it’s what you’re talking about exactly here, is that you’ve transitioned to, “Okay honey, let’s cross the road together. Let’s hold hands,” to literally, I’ve transitioned into raising a kid who will function as a member of society. And again, that’s just very weighty, but there is this transition period. And this is what Tim and I are talking about here, is this transition period here where they’re not fully capable of making all these great decisions, and you still have to make sure they make it into their bed at night or that they are sticking with a curfew, that kind of stuff.
And these technologies help. And I think this is really great because, as well as running this podcast or recording this podcast, I also run a program at IWF called the Center for Progress and Innovation where I talk about innovative products and how they make life easier. And I think this is particularly true for parents. This is one of these, this whole area of innovation and sort of tracking, I hate the word tracking, but sort of monitoring, really, and tracking and keeping up to date on what your kids are seeing, this makes parenting easier, ultimately. I mean, being able to be notified when your kid walks through the door and not have to get out of bed, that’s kind of nice. So I’m glad you mentioned these things.
Tim Burg:
Yeah, it certainly is. And the other thing, like you mentioned the wash, that’s a struggle. I think he can do it on his own, but it’s one of these where as long as you have Mom and Dad around, I’m still going to ask you guys to help with that. So that is next on the agenda, and yeah, one of those things. And you’re right, it is a different transition. We’re also going through that transition of the chores. At 12, 13, he had chores. Well, as he’s older, his chores are changing. Now they may involve going and picking up groceries. We order groceries, you go pick them up.
They may involve some… Stuff like that has been a challenge for us. And we’re dealing with an allowance. Like I mentioned, he’s working, so he’s actually making a decent amount of money. And it’s like, okay, well, we’re not just going to give you your $400 check and say, “Go have at it.” He still has an allowance. And even that can be something where we think about, well, what about when he’s… He’ll be 18, and it’ll be legally his account at that point. How will that work? But that’s where we just have to trust that we raised him right, that he won’t go and spend it.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, well, I’m trying to get the kids interested in a project of mine. I’m trying to get my kids interested a little bit in investing sort of at a young age, because I thought, okay… One of my sons, he’s… And it’s so amazing because they’re so different. One of them, you give him 25 cents, he’s off to the candy store. He can’t even hold onto a buck. And then the other one is kind of moderate. He kind of saves a little bit, but he often will go on these… He’ll go to a pizza shop and buy pizzas, or he’ll go and get ice cream or something, or just spend it on something that he wants.
And then I have a hoarder, a complete money hoarder who literally has been saving his money since he started getting allowance, and he has a ton of money. And so I’ve been trying to say, “Let’s think about maybe buying one stock, or let’s think about what we can do with it.” And I feel like there’s all these little strategies. I know many parents don’t have time to do this, but there are these strategies that can maybe help them appreciate money a little bit more, so that when they do start, or when they hit 18 and you can no longer control this stuff, that maybe they’ll have a sense of what that means.
I think, too, you mentioned the one thing that’s hard for me to let go is the constant reminders. You mentioned you’re teaching them these different things or hoping he has more independence. That’s been hard for me. Every morning, “Go brush your teeth.” I’m hoping these things become habits without my reminders. And I think that’s another transition for me, is importing to them or imparting to them how important it is that they do this stuff on their own, not with the help of Mom and Dad.
Well, Tim, I know you have sort of a hard break coming up here, so we’ll wrap up, but I think that, honestly, we’ve just scraped the surface of this. And really, this conversation started out as talking about, “Hey, these technologies can help you,” into a, frankly, more involved conversation about transitioning from parenting young kids to older kids. And it really is. It’s an interesting subject we should explore again.
Tim Burg:
We should. And it’s one of these things. I’m sitting and producing the shows that you do, and they’re always very interesting, and it always has me, my head’s thinking and going as to how I can apply it to my life and to our life with our child. So I find a lot of these shows very interesting. And it’s one of these things, too. Sometimes I think if I would have what you guys are talking about or what the topic is, it may have made things a little bit easier, but they’re still very interesting to listen to. And I feel like I grab and try to pull some things out that I can make and use as part of-
Julie Gunlock:
Oh, that’s good.
Tim Burg:
… our raising of our son. And I’ve tried to tell him, too. Even people think letting their child ride a bike is a… You let them out on the bike and you’re worried. Well, wait until he has a car, and, “I’m going to Jimmy’s house,” or, “I’m coming home from work.” I mean, it is truly one of these things where I hear him come in almost every night from work. Even if I’m in bed, I’ll hear the door slam or hear something. It’s just, I guess, that parental instinct.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah. And you can finally exhale, right? [crosstalk 00:30:50]-
Tim Burg:
Exactly. Yes.
Julie Gunlock:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’m not looking forward to that phase. In fact, I’ve told the kids that they just changed the Virginia law to 18 before you can drive, and so far, they believe me. So that’s good, because I’d like to keep them driverless or carless and off the roads for as long as possible. But eventually someone will Google that and figure out I’m lying, which also, lying is I think a perfectly acceptable thing for parents to do.
But that’s another show, Tim. That is another show. But we’ll do this again. I think this is a great podcast, a great episode for helping parents. I know personally, a lot of parents have a lot of questions about this stuff. And again, every parent, you can have a two-year-old right now, but you’re going to face these questions. So Tim, thanks for coming on and letting us know about some of these technologies, and let’s do this again soon.
Tim Burg:
Certainly. The one piece of advice I would also say, if someone does decide to go to one of these monitoring things like Bark, or there’s other ones out there you can Google, obviously, that do the same sort, is to start it at a young enough age. Use it as a bartering chip when they’re 10. Say you’re getting your child their first phone, and that way you’ll have every app. He already had the phone, so for us it was connecting apps, and it was this somewhat of a give and take that we chose to go through with him as opposed to, if it’s a precondition to getting the phone, then there’s no ifs, ands, or buts, and it will monitor every app. And we’ll also see when they download a new app. It says, “Hey, so-and-so just downloaded a new app, and that’s not good.” That’s when you can go and confront them if it’s an app that they maybe shouldn’t be having.
Julie Gunlock:
That is really smart. That is a really smart idea. And actually, that’s something that I’m going to do, because we’re approaching that phase. So yeah, we’ll definitely look at these technologies to get, to make it a condition. I like that idea. Tim, if you’d like to include any contact information or if you have a website or anything else where people can… I will tell anyone who’s considering starting a podcast or doing a podcast, Tim is the best in the business. So Tim, is there any way people can contact you?
Tim Burg:
I would say the best thing to do would be to reach out via Twitter, which I don’t mind giving my Twitter handle out. It’s just at, and then Tim, TBurg. Jeez, now I’m going to give it wrong. At T-B-U-R-G underscore 95. So it’s just @TBurg_95. And anyone can send me direct messages, and yeah. Thank you, Julie. I’d love to sit down and do a chat regarding someone if a podcast is the right fit for them. That’s the first thing we have to decide. I mean, there’s a lot of people out there thinking podcasts are… And they are a great way to get the message out on their, whether it’s a group or an organization, but it also has to be the right fit, and I’d help you guys decide that, the organization or person or however, because I certainly don’t want you to start something that doesn’t seem to have the longevity to work out well.
Julie Gunlock:
That’s important to know. Tim has really helped me as I developed this. He’s getting some great advice, sound advice on strategies and length, and he’s given guest ideas. So he’s truly someone who can be a partner in it. So Tim, I am a big fan of yours, and I really appreciate you coming on. And to everybody listening, Tim is always there, always in the background, making the show much better. So thanks again, Tim, for coming on, and let’s do this again.
Tim Burg:
Thank you, Julie.
Julie Gunlock:
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