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Introduction 0:01
Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns 0:20
It's a beautiful day for the #piratebroadcast. For some reason, my normal camera is not working. However, just like always, we have a backup and we have a plan and we have a strategy. That's the way life goes. You're served up something and you just have to work with it.

Red O'Laughlin 0:43
And you smile on top of it, regardless.

Russ Johns 0:46
You smile on top of it, regardless, Red, I just want to introduce Red O'Laughlin. He's a longtime friend and somebody from Houston that I really care about. I have an opportunity to share him with you today the #piratecommunity and now your a pirate, Red. Thank you so much for being here. How you been man?

Red O'Laughlin 1:08
All those years in the Navy didn't qualify me, huh?

Russ Johns 1:15
You were sailing around.

Red O'Laughlin 1:16
So yeah, I was an Airdale. So I guess there are air pirates, maybe. That kind of dates me way back when.

Russ Johns 1:24
Well, we didn't need permission to to do this broadcast. So we're kind of a pirate set anyway. I wanted to catch up with you, Red, because I know you've been really a huge advocate for a couple of areas of life. One is writing and the other one is healthy lifestyle. However, I really want to share with people a story about you and how we had a training session. I think it was Future Media Association, where we sat down and you explained how to publish a book and go through the process and get all these things put together for public self publishing on Amazon. It was really fascinating. I know that you help people do that now. So I kind of want to expand on what you're doing with that and the fact that you've produced over 290 blogs just this year alone. It's just amazing stuff that's going on in your world. So let's talk about the author and speaker, Red O'Laughlin.

Red O'Laughlin 2:35
Okay, we could do both. I'm actually going to be speaking this morning at the Houston West Chamber of Commerce, on fasting and longevity, again, two of my favorite fields. Every month, I fast a minimum of 72 hours, most of the time I try to go to 120 or more, 130 or so. But the fasting into things is one of those things that actually makes you probably more healthy than you were. It really truly minimizes the things that we have to worry about later on in life. I just turned 74 back just about a month ago. I just do whatever I need to do. I have no restrictions. I've never taken any prescription meds. But I absolutely, for years now, I have been doing the 72 hour fast because the rebuild your immune system from scratch. 120 hour fast. I'm talking about water only or unsweet iced tea, but basically nothing to eat nothing to drink as far as taking in calories. That rebuilds your pancreas numbers, your insulin sensitivity remains what it should have been basically back when you were a teenager and you could eat anything in the world and you're bulletproof. You could do anything, but I speak generally speaking about once a week at networking meetings for a business trip. I speak once or twice a month on some aspect of health. Periodically I'll be interviewed for doing how you write and publish your book, those kinds of things. So the speaking part with COVID has actually picked up, I find. I just committed this morning already to speak tomorrow for Toastmasters. They had two speakers fall out. So I said well, I'm available, are we okay, I'm in there. My writing...I write literally every single day. I joined a group in Facebook called my 500 words about six or seven years ago. It started out as a 30 day challenge to write 500 words a day. I have not missed a day in six or seven years. It's just one of those things. If you're a writer, you write. If you're an author, you write books, you get them published. I actually started out and published my first book, it wasn't too difficult, but it was a major learning experience. I gave a speech to Toastmasters and I said, if you really want to be set apart from other speakers, be introduced as an author, particularly in the field you're in if you're in public speaking. I didn't think much of it and then a year later, this guy says, I was at that meeting you were at. You spoke about how you wrote your book and I can't get published. So I said, well, you know, I'll help you. So that started my publishing business. I've done over over a dozen authors and probably nearly 20 books for people over time. It's not difficult, but you have that first part of the phase where it's the idea, the concept, you know, let's get this thing written, you get everything done. Then you come to the really narrow process where you want, okay, I got to publish it. Then the really hard part, which is really why it's called marketing and sales and advertising and everything else. But this little niche part here, where it says published means the size of your book, how much it costs, the formatting, getting it into Amazon, making the ebook, it's not difficult, but it's not something that people typically do. That's the niche that I do. I work with other people that have the bigger packages. But sometimes sticker shock takes over some of these authors, and they don't want to pay those big prices, all they want to be is a published author, and that's where I help them. Because that's what I do. If I were to publish your book, I would say, okay, here, it's done. It's yours. It's #RussJohns publishing company, I don't need the name of my publishing company on your book. I turn it over to you. I can show you how to change prices. So you can have sales anytime you want. I give you two free content changes, no questions asked. I'll give you one cover change, no questions asked. Free. That's what I do. I fit that little niche in the middle that says, format my book, and give me a physical copy, and I'm a happy camper.

Russ Johns 6:25
I know there's a lot of people, Red, that are aspiring to try that and test it out and see what happens. Because, as much as anyone, that if you are a published author, if you could say I'm a published author and I'm a speaker, that carries a little bit of weight with the audience in it. When you're especially looking for speaking opportunities, or when you're going out there and COVID has changed a few things, it's shifted a little bit in some lives. However, I'm busy. I'm doing plenty of things on the streaming media side and setting up livestream events and virtual conferences and things like that. So you just have to not use it as an excuse that, hey, we're having COVID to stop you from making progress.

Red O'Laughlin 7:19
Yeah, but a lot of times the technology scares people and, okay, I don't know zoom. I don't know, whatever. I don't have a camera, I don't have whatever it is, it's not insurmountable. I use YouTube all the time for stuff. How do you do this? How do I make that? I go in there, and I'll watch two or three videos. Okay. I go do it. Okay, that wasn't that hard. So YouTube is my friend. It's amazing how many things you could find that you don't know how to do. But if you follow the yellow brick road, boom, it's there.

Russ Johns 7:54
Yeah, it's really fascinating how much information is truly available to us. These days, it's just amazing to think I can go out and almost any subject that I've ever attempted to learn, I could go on YouTube, I could find a couple of videos, I can find a couple of blogs, read a couple of stories. You just have to trial and error and keep going keep moving forward. It's amazing how far you can travel with just that alone. I've used it. It's an amazing time.

Red O'Laughlin 8:28
You still need the community sometimes, because just saying I can speak on whatever doesn't make you a speaker. Sometimes it may be a Toastmasters, it may just be a small support group to say hey, if you change this and this, that would really make your speech better. And the same thing with the video, maybe the lighting isn't right, or the audio echoes, sometimes you need a friend like #RussJohns, who has that ability, Hey, why don't you try this and this and boom, you've taken the industry out of things. Sometimes you need not only the YouTube, but you need that little community connection to the experts or to those people who know the experts.

Russ Johns 9:06
Yeah. Well, I know that when I was in Houston, Marian and I taught lots of classes from the Future Media Association. We tried dozens of classes, hundreds of classes. I don't know how many hundreds of classes. It was a great time to give back to the community and teach those little things that people had questions about and sometimes they didn't even know they needed to know it.

Red O'Laughlin 9:30
That is absolutely true. It is absolutely true.

Russ Johns 9:34
Hey, I want to I want to give a shout out to some of the people in the audience here, Red, that we're gonna meet today some of the #piratecommunity Sarathi, says hi, Russ and pirates. Good morning. So Gabriel's here. Gabriel's a live streamer. He does it in the afternoons. Hello there, Russ and all my fellow pirates watching the broadcast. Angie in Wisconsin. Good morning, Pirates from Periscope. That's awesome. I really appreciate you being here. Hello there everyone Gabriel. Hiett, you know Hiett, good morning.

Red O'Laughlin 10:12
I know Hiett very well. We're talking about his third book right now. We're working on that one.

Russ Johns 10:17
Oh, that's fantastic. Red is my publisher of both my books. So looking at the third one, it looks like he's also my nutritional mentor. Fantastic. We're gonna get into that in a minute. So morning Russ and Red. Michael Baker is here. Hiett Ives says, if you're even thinking about writing a book, call him. You get so much from him. Through him. Through him and from him. Which I totally agree 100% I'll be on Pivot180 at 11 o'clock this morning. Okay, Michael, fantastic. I'll have to take to take a look at that. Gabriel says the community always loves to have new pirates join us. And then Cathi Spooner says, good morning. Then there's Sheri Lally, good morning, Russ and Red. Slaptagz design, she's an awesome individual that you should know. All of these individuals, Red, are probably at different parts of their journey. Just like what you and I know about is, whether you're aspiring or you're a published author or you've had a number of books like yourself, there's always something more that we can learn and constantly be evolving. So what's on the roadmap for Amazon and self publishing and some of the things that you noticed and some of the things that are changed since you started? What are some big things that we can talk about?

Red O'Laughlin 11:54
Well, I don't know that the actual publishing part has changed, obviously, CreateSpace has gone away. That was a great asset, I still use their templates because I haven't found anything better. So you just go into createspace.com and you look for templates for whatever size books explain on whatever. I take them and that's what I use, I tell people to use that. You don't have to worry about everything fitting perfectly on the page, because it's already done for you. But that's still available, even though the asset is no longer functional, the information is there. So that part I like. Kindle is kind of a little different. Because when you get a finished product, I take the Word document, I put it into Scrivener, and I compile it and I get an electronic pub out. Normally you just go right straight into the Kindle world, but I don't like the way it defaults for the chapters and everything. It's not funky, it's just a little different. So I put into another software called Sigil, S-I-G-I-L, which is an ePub editor. I take and I move things around, where now it looks like a real book rather than a default book. I just clean it up a little bit, and I put it into into the Kindle. But they have a thing called Kindle Create that I've come across that may end up replacing Scrivener. I'm not sure. I haven't done enough experimentation with it yet. But when I do, I'll probably write one or two blogs about it, because it's one of those things I think people need to know about. But those are the things that I see. We have the ability now. I mean, pictures go into books very easily, I can easily see an electronic book, a video going in there. Why not? It's the medium that you're in, take advantage of it. With regard to the standard self publishing, it really hasn't changed. It hasn't gotten any easier. It hasn't gotten any harder. It's just it is what it is because those things. It evolves and evolves very incrementally. You know, maybe what I did five years ago to publish a book isn't the same thing I'm doing today. But if I had to tell you, well, that wasn't there, this is new, it would be difficult for me to say because it's my new change, whatever is there. Maybe years ago, you could put in three different categories, as opposed to the two you can put in now, but you can write them an email and have them add a category for you. In fact, I remember one story about a lady who had a particular category that wasn't anywhere in Amazon and she asked them to add it. So she bought a book, she had some friends buy a book and about five books later, she's the best selling author in that category, because nobody else was in that category. But when you start writing a book, you have to think of the end in mind. How many times have we ever heard that about other things in our life? Okay, the book is done, now I can start marketing it, because you've wasted all that time that you would have marketed up till this point in time. Now you're three or four, six months behind the power curve of the sales that you could have enjoyed. Or you could have had that team put together to make you a best selling author on day one, two or three. So those things in the publishing world are there and there's a lot of help out there to do it, I ran to a company the other day that does the video trailer for your book. Well, that's something I don't offer. It's something I don't really know, but I now have two companies that can do it for you. That's kind of nice. I don't do editing, I do not do proofing. You give me a finished manuscript. But I have editors, develop managers and copy editors, I can send you where you need to go, and you work one on one with those people. I have people to do press releases, I have people to do the social media. So if you want to do the marketing, I can get you in touch with the right people, but I do that one little sliver in the middle. I'm very happy to do it for you, I'm very pleased to turn it over and let you control everything. Then I walk on to the next person. If you like what I did, you're going to tell somebody and down the road, I'm going to get another client and and we're all happy. We're all smiling.

Russ Johns 15:54
It's fantastic. love the idea. You touched a chord there. I would be interested to find out if you could actually publish a book online with embedded video. That would be kind of fascinating.

Red O'Laughlin 16:08
There's so many different ways of doing these videos nowadays. Your cameras in the video business now. Yeah, why not take a 10 second Canva video as part of your intro to your book, you open it up, you push the click button and all of a sudden now here's #RussJohns smiling and saying welcome to the pirate world of E books. I don't know why you can't, but again, I don't know that it's done. But since you challenged me to think of something that...where are we going? Why not? I just don't know.

Russ Johns 16:44
Yeah, well, it's an interesting conversation to have. I want to shift a little bit now, Red. I'm committed to start fasting, and I'm going to start probably juice fasting, I want to start with juicing, to reset and go through some changes and get back on the bike again, now that it's a little cooler. I can actually maybe get outside and not melt the tires. So I want to talk a little bit about health, you're a huge advocate for that. I just really love you for that. You've always been an advocate and been very versed in the topic of that. We started off mentioning fasting 72 hours and resetting your body and things like that. I just wanted to find out a little bit about why that works. Why is it that fasting works and how are the mechanisms in your body actually taking place because it seems counterintuitive. I'm going to go without to rebuild.

Red O'Laughlin 18:02
So okay, you're just just like everything else every day, you need some sleep to function better the next day, right? And if all of a sudden you only get four hours sleep instead of your eight hours sleep, you might be a little bit cranky. If you do that two or three or four nights in a row, your probably gonna be not quite the #RussJohns that you used to be, you're not going to have that that brilliant beaming smile, the upbeat voice, those things that are #RussJohns. The same thing works in the body. The body needs some time to do what it needs to do. Depending on a number of things, let's say toxins, if you're not really conscious of labels, your liver has to clean all those things out. If you're constantly every 246 hours, you're throwing stuff in and your body is behind, do you know where it stores the excess of toxins? In the fat cells. It can't get rid of them, so it's got to put them someplace and now you have fat with toxins in them and that's not a good place for them. But what your body needs is time to recoup. You need time. And that's what the fasting does, whether it's 18 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours, it doesn't matter. But you need a good 12 hours minimum, 18 to 20 would be great. Can you not eat one meal a day that has everything you need? For most people, it's more psychological than anything else. You have a habit of having breakfast at seven o'clock in the morning. Then when you get up, your body is in that habit mode. In reality, you're probably dehydrated. You may lose three pounds at night, part of it may end up in the toilet. Part of it is going to be what you exhale through your lungs because you lose weight that way also, so you end up a couple or three pounds down when you wake up in the morning automatically. First thing I had this morning is 10-11 ounces of water. First thing every morning. That takes care of that dehydration issue. Then I switch over to unsweetened iced tea and I may not eat until four or five, six o'clock this afternoon. If I feel like it, most of time, I don't. If I don't feel like eating, why eat? But when you do eat, you have to eat the right kind of foods, because balanced nutrition is super critical. My wife had chemotherapy about six, seven years ago for breast cancer. The only thing I could not address as a side effect was fatigue. She started radiation, and they said the fatigue would get worse 48 hours into radiation. The one fatigue side effect was naps. She was taking 1 or 2 two hour naps a day. 48 hours into radiation, she's never had another nap, literally in five years. Within seven days of radiation starting, she was able to go back and volunteer her time up at the church. The last day of radiation, we left Houston at noontime drove to Jacksonville, Florida, two days turn around. I rented a u haul, she followed me 500 miles each day, back two days in a row by herself. 48 hours after her last radiation, what had changed? The nutrition of what she was eating. There's a book called The Wahls Protocol. Dr. Terry Wahls is a physician, she came down with MS. And it got worse and worse. She ended up in a wheelchair for years. She wrote a book. But basically, I changed my wife's diet. I gave her the foods that she needs, over 30 nutrients that she needs on a daily basis. When she finally got this and she wasn't depleted, she wasn't deficient in anything. It changed. It wiped out chemo fog, it wiped out radiation, it wiped out everything. Why are we sitting here eating meat potatoes and ignoring the veggies and fruits? Or if you're a vegetarian, why are you ignoring fish and and some other things. Their amino acids are all sorts of things that our body needs, but if we're purposely not eating them...For whatever reason, I don't like brussel sprouts, that's fine. You don't have to eat that, there's other ways of getting those nutrients, but you have to have balanced nutrition. One of the things I learned from being on Atkins for about six years was that pH is super critical. If your pH of your body is not right, your body is going to leach calcium out of the bones. I'm a weightlifter. I used to run six eight miles a day and I didn't think I'd ever have a problem with weak bones. I had a bone density test about 20 years ago, I found I was osteopenia. I said no way in the world, but when I did the research on it, I found out the because, in Atkins, I was eating eggs and cheese and meats and fats and no veggies, no fruits, no carbohydrates. So I could live on four or five grams of carbs a day easily for months. But I was doing my body harm because it was leaching calcium out of my bones to keep my blood pH the right level. Well, now that I know that, I've gone back and looked at the books, I had read five different books on Atkins before I started. I even looked at the newer books. They don't talk about acidosis at all. It's something they should talk about because if you make the wrong choices in food, it can affect your health. So when you are fasting, that's great, your body, the inflammation goes down, the cells can repair themselves, a lot of those biochemical things are not disturbed and your body comes to a just a natural rhythm of being in alignment with everything. That's where you have the benefit, you're not having that insulin surge where the body's going crazy with blood sugar, because now the body is leveling out the sails, they repair themselves. So you have those things, but when you come out of fast, you need to have that balanced nutrition that keeps your body slightly alkaline to know what you pay attention to the pH with the green that you use in the colored fruits and vegetables and the sulfur laden vegetables to keep the repair mechanism. So you keep all those things in alignment. So that when you come out, you're not staying you had three or four or five days that you didn't need. I'm deficient in these vitamins and these minerals, because I didn't really have them. But to me, it was worth that several days to reset my body. Now I come back in and a couple days is no big deal. So I have a couple days, three or four days, no eating. I eat but I eat very sensibly with regard to the foods I choose. So I really truly now rebalance the body on the inside, but now I'm feeding it the vitamins and the minerals, the amino acids, all those needs on a daily basis to take care of itself properly.

Russ Johns 24:13
One of the things that I think one of my one of my weaknesses is, is the addiction of sugar. I mean, we're so much in today's time and meals and everything. We put a lot of sugar in everything. It seems like you look at a label and it's there's, tons of sugar. I think that's one of the areas that for myself, I would like to in one of my goals is to kind of remove that addiction from my life.

Red O'Laughlin 24:47
And in this addiction you actually have withdrawal when you give it up. You just totally give it up, sure your body's gonna revolt. That happened to me. I know what you're talking about.

Russ Johns 24:57
So you can't go through the process without the pain. Is that what you're telling me, Red?

Red O'Laughlin 25:05
No, what you had to do is start with the mindset. You get this part going right and it takes me about two days of mindset to start a 72 hour fast. It really does. Literally, I'm on a 72 hour fast or a 120 hour fast. I have no cravings. My body isn't there. If I have a little bit of a pang, it's usually because I need some liquid in me. If I drive by a Chinese restaurant or a burger place, and I smell that...when I'm on my fast, my mindset says I don't need that. That's a great smell, but I don't need it. So when you're looking at the same thing, that doughnut, maybe all I need is just one bite. Maybe all I need is literally four or five potato chips. I don't need the rest of it. So what you're doing is you're incrementally taking yourself away from it. But when I start a fast, I just don't start it willy nilly. I can't just boom, I can but it's hard. But if I tell my wife, okay, I'm starting Monday, I'm starting a fast, I'll tell my daughter, I'll tell people. That way. I have accountability. People know, I know, I've told people, and it makes it so much easier for me to do. The biggest problem I have is stopping. I'm sitting here 120 hours, so you say, I can easily make 144. Then I have to say, what is the benefit? I had a goal set in mind. What is changed? Usually I say I'm going to do 72 and make a decision on 120. And that's what I've been doing the last five months. But why do I need to go 144 or 160 or whatever. There are benefits to it. But you have a goal. Okay, it's there. Okay, declare victory and move on.

Russ Johns 26:42
Yeah, I'm always fascinated having conversations with you, Red, and I really appreciate all this information. There's so much diversity in the idea of what diets need to be, what nutrition needs to be, and how to set the standard for yourself. The thing that kind of was in the back of my mind was with DNA testing, and all of these things. Everybody's slightly unique. Some people need more of something, one thing like calcium. It's like, okay, you might be calcium deficient. If there's a way that you could say, okay, here's a diet that you could use to fit your lifestyle. It sounds like what you're saying is fasting is fairly universal. It's not a diet, it's more a reset. It's a temporary thing that you just go through. Is that a fair assessment?

Red O'Laughlin 27:43
I would say it's a lifestyle, I do a 72 hour fast every month. I have for over two years. It's part of my life. It's what I do. It's the same thing as going out and bicycling. If you're bicycling four days a week, so 20 miles each shot is part of your life. So fasting is not just one thing I do this month and I don't do it again for six months. If you're going to fast, whether it's 18 hours a day, or 12 hours a day, it becomes part of your lifestyle. It's what you do. Now the diet. I prefer to say look at the Wahls protocol, Dr. Terry Wahls, W-A-H+L-S. I think that is the best one because it says you get all of the nutrients. She was in a wheelchair for four years. She put herself on her own diet. Within 30 days, she was able to get out of a wheelchair and walk using a walker. Three months later, she was walking using a cane. Within a year she was bicycling 18 miles and she had had severe MS and crippled. But because of diet, exercise, toxin removal and stress relief, those are her four pillars. Those are the things that she was able to just wipe MS out of her background that had taken over her life. She was a doctor taking all the meds that they were giving her and it was making her worse. Yeah, but foods that we choose to eat, and the time we choose to eat them. Like they say, have six meals a day. Well, if you do that your blood sugar is just just going crazy. You have one meal a day, you know that blood sugar has a chance to really settle down. If you go to keto, you don't even worry about blood sugars. You get ketosis. So there's just a lot of things that we do, but we don't know why we do them. You know? You talked about DNA. Well, DNA unravels a bit and mutations, that 72 hour fast, should set DNA in the foot and gets rid of it. Now you are back with properly working DNA and other properly working cells. Anyway, back to you.

Russ Johns 29:34
I want to give a shout out before we wrap up, and I know that we could talk for days on this subject, but I just want to give a shout out to Lori joining the #piratecommunity. Thank you Lori for being here. I love that. Angie says, I would love to get into book editing. So there's another editor for you. Hiett says, Russ, Red's on Gail Stolzenburg's Personal Development Networking at 10am this morning. Oh, that's fantastic, Red.

Red O'Laughlin 30:05
Speaking on fasting and longevity.

Russ Johns 30:12
Howard Kaufman says, all you need now to complement your diet and fast is perfect pH toothpaste. Howard has a toothpaste company that's...In fact, I just brushed my teeth this morning, Howard. Some ORL, and it's just fantastic. It tastes good and it's good for you. So it's fantastic. Hi, pirates, Sarathi says. Happy morning/evening. Angie says I would do a fast with you, Russ. #piratefast. Okay. #PirateFast. All right. Sarathi says, R2 = R squared today. It's nice. Hey, Russ and Red. Thank you so much. And Hiett says, Red, good choice of shirt color. Sarathi says, Ayurveda is better than 380 year old medicine. It's really just a lifestyle. Thank you so much for being here, Red, and helping us learn about improving ourselves and writing about it. So it's one of those things. I appreciate you, I thank you so much for being here today. Now you're officially a pirate. If you're not connected to Red, connect with Red, and let him know that you're a pirate, too. If you want to talk about being an author, improving your speaking opportunities and your writing and publishing opportunities, he's a great resource. If you want to talk about nutrition, longevity, there again, talk to Red. Thank you so much for being here, Red, it's been a pleasure, as always, to see you again. I look forward to our next conversation.

Red O'Laughlin 32:00
I do, too. Keep smiling.

Russ Johns 32:02
Yeah, keep smiling. Cuz you know what I always say, #kindnessiscool, #smilesarefree so you #enjoytheday. See you soon, Red. Take care.

Red O'Laughlin 32:15
Take care. Bye now.

Exit 32:19
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