Editing The Pen Addict 378/transcript (section)

== New Sponsor Segment ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. It's good. It's really good. I like it a lot. Funny. Very funny indeed. All right. Should we take a final break and then do some Ask TPA to round out today's episode? Let's do it. All right. We've got a new sponsor for this week's episode, and that is Care Of. Fall is a great time to set some new goals for yourself, get back into a healthy routine, reprioritize yourself. Care Of is a wellness brand that makes it easy to get the right vitamins, supplements, and protein powders for your specific needs. Care Of can help figure out what you need of a short online quiz that will ask you about your diet, your lifestyle, and your health needs. It only takes five minutes, and you'll get research-backed recommendations for everything that you need. Your Care Of order gets shipped right to your door in convenient daily packs, which is perfect for a busy on-the-go lifestyle. And it's super easy to see where the ingredients are sourced. Everything is made with the highest quality. And if you're a vegan or vegetarian, Care Of can also cater to that as well. Brad, I believe that you have gone through the Care Of quiz and received your first order.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I think you really enjoy having me part of the network because I'm willing to be a guinea pig for pretty much all of our new sponsors, right? Yes. That's one of your favorite things about me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You'll do anything I ask. It's nice.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And actually, I enjoy it because it's always kind of things that's like, well, that's something I've thought about and have never really dug into very much. So I went through the Care Of process, and they have this quiz like we were just talking about up front about the types of products I use. I don't really take any vitamins or anything like that. So it wants to know, the quiz asks different things like, what type of things do you use? Do you have any things like in your daily life that you would, do you want more energy? Are you getting tired? Do you need more brain power? Are you stressed out? All these kinds of things. So you can go through and take the quiz, and it asks you things like, they sell vitamins, and they also sell herbal products. So it's like, are you skeptical about herbs? And can we provide you more information? Or do you just want to avoid that completely? It's very open, this whole process. I was like, oh, yeah, those are kind of cool questions. So in the end, they sell a bunch of different supplement products. But at the end, it gave me maybe six things that I would, based on the answers to my questions that I might be interested in. So I went through that list and picked out two things, two vitamins, and then like one energy pack. So you do that, and you place the order. And then I kind of, you know, just didn't think anything of it. And, you know, the order showed up, and it's this box. And it's like this little kind of about half-sized shoebox type of thing. And then I open up the package. And like all of my pills, so like I take two pills a day now. And I'm going to tell you what all these things are in just a second. But they come in like this box, this single box with like a little hole you rip at the bottom, like a 12-pack, like a box or something. And each day's worth of pills slides out in this little package. And it says...

'''Myke Hurley:''' They're all individually wrapped.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, they're individually wrapped for each day. And just so you know, like the first thing I thought of was, wow, that's a lot of waste, like in paper and plastic. But right on the package, it says, please compost me. Learn more. Take care of slash P slash eco. So they're eco-friendly packaging. Compostable packaging. I was like, okay, good. I figured it had to be, but I was like, wow. Okay, good. So you take out this little package. And every day, the little package says, hi, Brad. Today's challenge. Unscramble this word. So it gives you like a little mind, you know, thing, little game to play with yourself or like a writing prompt or, you know, something to do today. You know, on each little package, it's all, they all say, hi, Brad, and here's your thing. And then you open up and take your two pills. So I got rhodiola, which is called the cosmonaut, which is for like brain endurance and recovery. Like, so you can continue to think like all throughout the day, you know. So, so you notice the things I got were mostly around brain health. The other one is called astaxan, which is called the coral king, and it supports cognitive health. So I got kind of like, I want to keep my mind going like all throughout the day. Like, I don't want to have like lulls or get tired. I want to have consistent brain energy. I want to be good or better at remembering things, you know, because I'm getting older and you start to slip a little bit, even though you don't think you are. Um, you do. So the first day I took a mic, I was sitting there, it was last Friday and I was writing refill. So writing refill is about a six hour process every Friday for me. So I booked my whole Friday to sit on my bum and write. And I'd taken my vitamins for the first day this morning. And I realized as I was writing, like I'm hammering through it. Like I'm just pounding the keyboard. The ideas are coming like hot and heavy. And then I posted this tweet when it hit me. I was like, whoa, am I in a good mood just because I'm in a good mood or am I in a good mood? Because I started these new vitamins today. And that was the day I started care of. And I didn't even think about it at the time until then it hit me. I was like, is this what happens? Because with like any type of new product, especially something you're putting in your body, you wonder, am I going to feel weird or different? And that's the thing is like, I never did. Like, you know, there was no heart rate spike or temperature change or, you know, anything that made me feel any different than I did any other day, except I guess maybe my energy level was higher and maybe it's still going. So I've been taking these every day. I've been enjoying them. Um, I also got one other thing. It's called extra batteries, which I haven't tried yet. It's just a little powder packet that like if you, it's called on the go energy support. So you just, you take these little, they look like those little sugar packets, those long skinny sugar packets. And you just kind of, you just pour it into your mouth. Yeah. Just dump it in. Like you don't mix it with water or anything. Um, I haven't tried those yet because it is just, it's essentially caffeine. So it's a hundred milligrams of caffeine in these little packs for energy packets. So instead of maybe sometimes I go for an afternoon coffee, if I'm dragging, um, I haven't had to recently. So when I do, uh, feel like I need that pick me up, I'm going to try that out, but, uh, that's on the agenda. So that's where I'm at. Yeah. Everything's like all personalized. Like it says, like I have this little form. It says made for Brad and here's Brad's, um, uh, pills that he's taking. And here's what all of these pills do. And like, it's very like specific and like, I only get the information for the things that I get. Right. So like, I don't have like all the product information that have to go hunt down my products. I get my product information specifically for my order. So it's very cool how they set that up. So I've been happy with it so far and I'm gonna keep it going.

'''Myke Hurley:''' All right. If you want to get 25% of your first care of order, go to takecareof.com and enter the code pen addict to check out. That's takecareof.com promo code pen addict for 25% off your first order. Our thanks to care of for their support of this show and relay FM. All right. Should we do some hashtag ask TPA to finish off today's episode?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We should. And one of them relates to what I wrote in my first day of theme system journal. Like I mentioned, my friend Jay stopped by and we were just talking about different, you know, businessy things. Like he's into, um, into like business marketing and he has the productivity and tech podcast, which we'll link in the show notes, my appearance on his podcast. And he was in town, swung by and we hung out for a bit. And he said, have you ever made a word cloud from all of your ask TPA questions? I was like, oh my God, no, but that's a genius idea. And I was like, well, then I feel bad because I delete, like we have a scrolling Excel spreadsheet that gets, you know, 500 lines long and it's hard to scroll to the bottom. So I truncate it frequently. So I only had back until May. So I had a little over 200 ask TPA questions, sent them over to Jay. He, um, he manipulated the data to give me the word cloud and I put the results in the show notes. So it kind of goes like, as you think, but I thought it was a neat thing to do. So the, the words are weighted by size based on how often they were mentioned. And, uh, we'll link that in the show notes so you can check it out. I kept ask TPA in as the most popular word, just so it's, it was kind of like the header image for the word cloud than everything else, you know, pen, pen, sailor, Lamy, fountain, paper, notebooks, writing blue was a surprise architect was in there. So these were all the words with over five mentions in the word cloud of the last 200, um, ask TPA questions. So I see I missed get, I tried to take out all of the, you know, your standard, your standard, you know, a, the, at, why all that stuff. I took all those out. So it was pretty cool. I thought it was neat to look at.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Hmm.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That is fun.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I like that.