184 – Gadgets Galore: Tom talks My Favorite Gadgets

Episode 184 – My Favorite Gadgets
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody, it's Tom here with episode 184 of Screw the Commute podcast. This is going to be a crazy different kind of Monday podcast where I'm going to go over my favorite gadgets both offline and online gadgets. And they're not always physical gadgets. Could be software gadget and could be a self-defense gadget. Could be all kinds of crazy stuff that I use. And I'm sure I didn't get all of them because I just there's all kinds of stuff that I do. But but this will be a lot of fun. And hopefully you'll pick up some tips. Some of them will be business related. Some of them will be not business related. But I think they'll help you out in life. Put it that way. So I hope you didn't miss last episode. Lane Belone was part of Vetrepreneurs Month. He's a Special Forces Green Beret who talks about high performance and this is Vetrepreneurs Month. And we're paying tribute to all of folks that keep us safe. And I hope you get our podcast app. It's in the Apple store. You go to screwthecommute.com/app where we have complete instructions to show you how to use all the fancy features so you can take us with you on the road, on your cell phone or your tablet. And I've got a big freebie to thank you for listening this podcast. It's my twenty seven dollar e-book, How to Automate Your Business. And just one of the tips in this e-book has saved me over seven and a half million keystrokes and allowed me to handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and 40000 customers without pulling my hair out. Some people are just raving about the tips in this book and how it's helping their business. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And pass this along to your friends, too, folks. This can really help out a lot of people that are either in business now or want to get started in business. So tell them about Screw the Commute podcast. Now, our sponsor is the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia, and we're just into Vetrepreneurs Month here and we're approved by the Department of Defense to participate in the My CAA Military Spouse Scholarship Program. And we give just the school and myself and ninety five hundred dollars scholarship to military folks either active duty or veterans. We also apply that to law enforcement and first responders just to thank them for what they do for us. But the Department of Defense throws in for eligible military spouses an extra 4000 dollars so they can get thirteen thousand five hundred dollars towards their education. And that education can take they can take it with them anywhere in the world and keep working, which is very common for military folks. They get screwed over because they have to move all the time and they never move up in jobs where having this skill, the people giving you money don't care where you work and you can use it for your own business. So check that out at IMTCVA.org/military. And of course everything we do will be in the show notes this is episode 184.

[00:03:45] All right, let's get to the main event, my favorite gadgets I'm just going to go over a bunch of different gadgets both online and offline that I use just all over the place. I just brainstormed and sat my chair and thought about all the kinds of things that I use almost on a daily basis just to get through life and business. And I know I didn't get all of them. So if I get enough of them, I'll do a future episode as an update. But let's jump in and get started.

[00:04:14] You'll get a kick out of some of these, let's see, software and software as a service. These are just some of the things I use. One is called iPiccy. That is a photo manipulation program. That's very easy. You can put text on different sizes, resize your photographs, use different fonts, do all kinds of stuff and you don't even have to register. You just go to ipiccy.com and just start using it. Not that hard to figure out. Next thing is and this one's in my automation book shortkeys.com. This allows me to hit a key combination and it'll type in pre-programmed answers. And I usually use this for stuff that I get questions about all the time.

[00:05:04] So you gotta use this. This is the one that saved me seven and a half million keystrokes, probably more, but since we figured this out couple of years ago. Let's see Reflector 3. This is a cool thing where you can. Display your cell phone screen on your computer screen, and we use this frequently to teach how to use cell phone stuff. That's again, that's something else that's in the automate free book. Screwthecommute.com/automatefree to show you how to automate things on your cell phone. So that really makes you more efficient. But this will stick it onto a computer screen so that you can train with it through Facebook lives, record it and show people how to use their cell phone better. Zello, this is like an online walkie talkie. We spent a fortune. To have walkie talkies between or intercomms, you would call it between my house and my school, which is eight miles away. It's just crazy that it never worked and spread cost a fortune. So Zello is free and it's like a walkie talkie through the Internet. So I hold the button down on my computer screen and I say, Hey, Travis, you're around or Hey, Larry, are you around? I can pick who I'm trying to go to. So it's it's really great to connect with remote people that work for you or family members or whatever.

[00:06:36] Now, since it is walkie talkie. This one is called simplex, which means when I'm holding the button down, just like most walkie talkies, they can't talk. And then vI let the button up and they push their button down and talk to me. Now you can get fancier ones called duplex, which means both people can be talking at the same time. OK, speakpipe.com. This is something where somebody can leave a voicemail right on your Web site. You can try this out at screwthecommute.com or Antion.com. You see a little thing that says leave a voicemail and then I get an email. And I can listen to your message right there in my email. And then I can hit the button on my cell phone and respond back immediately to you and you get an email with my answer by voice and it's really dirt cheap. It used to be free, but now it's really cheap. Okay. Next one is belive.TV. This is what I use for my Facebook lives and it does all kinds of stuff. It lets me display pictures and videos. And while I think I don't think I do the videos through Be live, I go to. It allows me to show my desktop, which is that's where I show the videos. And then it can if you're commenting, I can make your comment display on the screen so that everybody sees your comment and, you know, your Web site or any of those things.

[00:07:58] So it has a lot of cool features rather than standard Facebook live and standard Facebook Live makes all your text in the background backwards. So this keeps it straight. So that's Belive.TV. Kindle readers, the gadget I use, it's free on all my devices. So if I'm stuck, waiting to get my tires changed or an oil change or something or anywhere that I happen to be doing nothing, I can be doing something by reading a Kindle book. Roboform.com. I've been preaching about this for years. This is by password protection device at all. It's military grade encryption. All you have to do is remember one password. Although that's the name of another service that does the same thing. 1password.com. So this is a I can't tell you how many times people pay me a fortune. And then 20 minutes after we're on the phone, they still can't get in to what they wanted to show me. So this is the password protection thing. It'll generate really tough to crack passwords. It has a feature where you can put in all your important stuff. Social security numbers and all kinds of things. And they're called safe notes and they're again, highly encrypted. That's roboform.com.

[00:09:16] Camtasia. This is a screen capture video program, which is is kind of the gold standard. There's other ones out there that'll do the same thing. But it's it's got all kinds of features in it. But I've made a fortune. I've been using this over on almost 20 years now, and there are various versions of it. You know, again, it's it's almost like short keys in some ways in that I get the same questions. I just show people a video of the answer if they want to see how to operate the shopping cart or something like that. In fact, I did 45 videos on how to use our shopping cart system where I used to do a three hour consultation with each person that got the card. And we have fifteen hundred people. So Campagna, you can sell others products. I use it on the screen when I speak. I mean, it's just really great. That's screen capture. All right. Here's a couple TV things. That's a different category, Chromecast. This allows me to send something from my computer screen and projected onto my giant TV and it's called Chromecast. Another thing we use is both Roku TV, and Amazon Fire Stick. This is full blown television. It's kind of killing cable TV because if you have Wi-Fi, you can get Roku or Amazon on your smart TV and people are getting rid of cable. Cable's going down the tubes like crazy because you have to pay for it.

[00:10:49] So you as producers can get your content up on Roku TV and I'm getting three to four thousand views a week. Of my videos just on Roku, I know it's hard to. I don't know how many on Amazon, but it's a little bit of a pain to get it up there and I'll do it for you. Five thousand bucks each. All right. It took me like three months to figure out how to do it. You want me to do it for you? I will be glad to do it for you. But if you just if you're tech savvy and willing to take the time, you can figure it out yourself and have a whole new group of people seeing you. And I had public speaking stuff up there, which is the terrible everybody hates public speaking. If you have a more mainstream topic, you can you'll get way better results that I've been getting. OK. Here's some video stuff. I got a drone simulator software. See the people that sell drones? Well, if they're honest, they'll tell you. Everybody crashes their drone. Everybody when they first start up. So I thought, I don't want to do that. So you get a drone simulator software and a regular box like that control the zones, then you can practice on your computer without wrecking a real drone and you can crash all you want without hurting anything. So that's the drone simulator software.

[00:12:15] I happen to have a BeBop drone. Very nice. Takes great video. You get videos, the aerial videos, the stuff. That's a total gadget there. I have a video. This all video stuff, a gimbal. I think I have the OzMo Mobile three for my cell phone. And if you look up any kind of Gimbal stuff, you'll see all the beautiful shots you can get with a gimbal that smooths out everything and you can do all kinds of cool stuff with a gimbal. It'll follow your face around. You can set it on a tripod and it'll follow. Your face is all kinds of cool things. So that's what I got. And then, of course, the various selfie sticks so that you can shoot a lot of stuff that used to take me when I was doing stuff for TV and everything. It was six people to do a shot. Now you do it with the selfie stick, but you have to know how to do it. So get some training on it. Mini tripod's a gadget. It's one of those ones that has the little balls, those legs, so that you can wrap them around things and tie it to a fence or a tree limb or something. And you can be by yourself and be shooting great videos without having to hold it. You got a car mount for my cell phone, same thing. And you know, the new cell phones are so darn heavy.

[00:13:38] The thing was bouncing up and down. The first time I used that, I said that. This is not going to work. I can't, you know, never come out. The image stabilization in the phone made it so that you didn't. It looked like I was sitting still. I couldn't believe it. So you can get a car mount. Get it, you know Of course, I'm not advocating doing stuff while you're driving. You should pull over and then that wouldn't be a problem. But if you are going to do something on the move, do some tests and see if the image stabilization on your phone is good enough to take keep from the bouncing. That will happen from a car mount that's stuck. You know, kind of stuck to your windshield. And I have various clamps, there's more gadgets for videos so I can clamp to a pipe, I can clamp to a bookshelf, something like that, so I can get a light where I need it. So a lot of clamps like that. Another thing you may not have heard of is gaffer tape. Gaffer tape is that kind of tape. It's way more expensive than. Duct tape that looks kind of like duct tape, but like, say, you had a silk blouse and you needed to in the behind somebody tape a microphone cable to him. While it was not going to ruin the blouse. All right. And its heat resistant also. So gaffer's tape in it comes in all different colors.

[00:14:58] And then I made a homemade dimmer for my lights because. You know, some of these lights are really high wattage in 600 watts, let's say, and that's way bigger than you can buy a dimmer at Home Depot. And if you go to the video store is a six hundred dollars or something or four hundred dollars for this. So I built one. Now, don't do this if you don't know electricity. All right. But I built one for like 15 dollars out of Home Depot. That'll go up to, I think, six hundred watts. Now, reflectors. These are a handy gadget to have around for video that you can bounce light. In fact, I learned from Hollywood guys that I studied in Hollywood lighting and then I had two Hollywood guys working for me. And then one of them showed me this trick with bouncing light up under your chin makes you look like 20 years younger and you can do it with a piece of white foam core or you can buy a real reflector. But haven't reflectors or foam core around really makes your videos look nicer. And the last thing on the video section is called Cookies. That's short for cucoloris. Now I have a video where you type in lighting with cookies. Of course, all this will be in the show notes into YouTube and put my name because I'm not the only one who has video and this lighting with cookies. Tom Antion. You'll see. I think it's nine minute video or something. Maybe I don't remember how long it is, but I'll show you how to make gorgeous backgrounds for pennies or almost nothing on your videos. And it's using a piece of cardboard or foam core and cutting out patterns on it and blowing a light through it. But it's just amazing. Way better than green screen stuff.

[00:16:43] All right, let's switch topics here. Self-defense. Now, some of you may know I have a Web site called BrutalSelfdefense.com. And it's based on my lifelong experience with being in gun fights and knife fights and bikers trying to kill me and being in the martial arts my whole life. So this isn't art at all. And this isn't something if you're easily offended. This is brutal stuff to keep you alive in the face of violent encounters and to protect your family. And I'm just going to give you some of the little gadgets. But there's hundreds of them and improvised weapons in the whole course I have there for you. But one is a portable motion alarm. So this is you can take it to a hotel room. And if some something moves that shouldn't, it blows off a big siren. OK. In other words, if your door opened in the middle of the night or something.

[00:17:35] Your flashlight. A high intensity flashlight that will fit in your pocket is one of the best self-defense things. We did a test of my high intensity light in broad daylight. A volunteer at brutal self-defense when we did it live. Let me shoot him in the eyes for about one second from, I don't know, two or three feet away. In broad daylight, he couldn't really see well for a minute and forty three seconds. We timed it. Okay. Plenty of time for you to do other things that incapacitate the bad person or to get away. So flashlights that are ready to go all the time. I always have one with me or great for this one hand open knife so that you can. I'm not talking about a switchblade or anything illegal, but something you can open with one hand quickly is a really good self-defense gadget. A dash cam that shoots both front and back of your car and then a more expensive one will shoot the videos that records to the cloud. So even if it gets destroyed in the middle of an accident or something. The video will still be up in the cloud. So dash cams that will shoot front and back are really handy to have to prove, you know, what actually happened. Another thing is a body cam. So if I'm in any high risk environment or I feel like I am, I got a body cam, it's almost just like police.

[00:19:04] You know, you just clip it on the to my vest and I can see that it's recording because I look down and there's a little red light behind. Let me know. It's recording and records, audio and video. So, again, proof that rather than just everybody saying what they think happened, you've actually had proof. In various micro cameras are hidden in my house, not in the bedrooms or bathrooms for the guests. But so that things are recorded, what's happening and sent to the cloud. I'm not going to give you a lot of details on that because I don't want to reveal my own security plan. But you should have one. And all this stuff is available now to you. I think I put on Facebook recently on my personal thing about it was like a whole half an hour of this burglar telling all these things that would either make him want to rob your house or not want to rob. So worth listening to. All right. I have a portable shooting bench that I. They cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. So I built one that's really, really nice. Probably nicer than the ones you can buy so that I can practice shooting. I have a BOB back in my workout room, a bob. It stands for body opponent bag. And I put a sport jacket on him to teach people how to choke somebody out if they're wearing a jacket.

[00:20:27] And then, of course, he gets pummeled in all directions for practicing self-defense. Now, here's something I give a lot of my female friends as the storm whistle. You can go online and Amazon and find those easily out of the few dollars. I don't know how much they are. And it's one of the loudest whistles on earth. So it could blow somebody's eardrums out that's trying to get you and wants their ears get blown out. That messes their equilibrium up. It's extremely painful. And also, depending on the size of your hands, it's made out of hard plastic and you can hold it perfectly, grasp it to strike with it also. So check it out. Storm whistle. There's another thing called an air horn. It's a little miniature thing that just screeches. Bloody murder. Loud noise that you could hold up to somebody's ear. See with the storm whistle you have to blow into it. But this one, you just hold it in your hand. It's like maybe the size of a skinny tube of lipstick, a little bit taller and you push the thing on the top holding it. There's somebody whose ear will blow their eardrums out. So, again, a non-lethal thing legal to carry anywhere. So check that out. And then in my vehicle, we have a seatbelt cutter in both sides of the doors so that if you get in an accident, you can cut the seatbelt to get out.

[00:21:51] Also have a glass breaking device on my key chain so could break the glass if necessary. I got run flat inserts in my tires so nobody can know if I'm in a bad situation. Even if somebody tries to slash my tires, I can go for I think I can go for 30 miles at 30 miles an hour, 15 miles at 60 miles an hour before they disintegrate. And I've got a heavy duty bumper in case I have to crash my way out of something and I'll protect my radiator. And then I have dual batteries inside where inside the cabin of the vehicle, I can jump start my own vehicle. All right. So. So that's very handy if you're in a bad situation. Your vehicle won't start. I hit a button and it switches to the other battery and can start the vehicle. And then the battery can run a lot of extra heavy duty lights and things like that. So that's dual batteries. All right. Switch gears again, podcast stuff if you really want to make your podcast. And is this driving you crazy folks be popping all over the place? Well, you have to get used to it because we got a long way to go. Here's a couple podcasts things. If you want to do a high quality podcast, you want to use what's called a compressor. This squeezes the top in the high end frequencies.

[00:23:11] On the low end frequencies of your final podcast after it's edited into it squeezes it down into the middle range. And what this is for is so that people on crappy earbuds, on a train or a plane or in a car can actually hear your podcast, because if they can't hear it, they're going to unsubscribe. So you can either do it in software. And I have a physical thing cost about 150 bucks a compressor limiter, it's called, and it squeezes that down. It does other things, too, for your podcasts. So that sounds better. Let's see I use zoom digital recorders. I record on an iMac and then I have two backup recordings on a zoom H4N and H5. And I just got a real cheap thing and an H1 that's even smaller that I used for other stuff. So the zoom quality digital record is this isn't zoom as zoom, the, you know, webinar kind of thing on your computer. These are physical devices called digital recorders. So the latest I think is an H6. But you can get H4s for less than 100 dollars on some of the buying apps used in there. Really great. And then I have a scissors boom. That's a really nice gadget so that I can sit down and move the microphone around in and out. And you don't have to have it sitting on the desk.

[00:24:40] All right. Let's switch gears again. Dog training stuff. All right. I got a baby monitor. That's really hard. You know, I you know, this is kind of a podcast is business related. I don't know what else I should mention that whether it's business related or not. But this is business related, the dog training stuff to me, because I have a protection dog company. This is part of my making your hobbies tax deductible. So one of the things that you want to really make sure with, especially with a protection dog that can do a lot of damage is if you tell them to stay there, darn well going to stay. Okay. And so when you standing there and you can correct them if they if they don't stay. That's all great. But what happens when they can't see you, when they don't think you're there? So I have a baby monitor. This one is really hard to find. I'm still looking for another one right now. But if you get one that's through Wi-Fi, you think, oh, that's great. I can be anywhere. Well, the problem is there's up to a seven second delay through Wi-Fi. And with dogs, you have to correct them within a second and a half or they don't know what they're being corrected for. So they can already be 20 yards away from where they're supposed to stay. And you correct them and they're like, what? You know, what? Do you have no idea what you're correcting me for? So this baby monitor is direct radio frequency and it's instantaneous.

[00:26:06] So if I hide somewhere and have the camera looking at the dog, the instant they decide not to stay, I can correct them. All right. So that's a baby monitor. Also, we have a light up collar so that at nighttime you can see where the dog is. You can either flash or be constant. Now, another cool thing we have, I built a three sided box. This teaches the dog to not forge forward when they're supposed to down or stay. And there's just a lot of little tips and things professional trainers do with three sided boxes. And there's loads of other gadgets. I mean, if you go to protectiondogselite.com and click on glossary, you'll see probably a hundred videos on different things we use to train dogs and protection dogs. And also, if you want a protection dog, protection dogs elite would be happy to provide it for you, it's a big deal that they call it the bullets. So you can recall right in. I mean, I feel. I mean, you know, I'm pretty competent at things than, you know, with guns and safety and all kinds of things. But the dog having, the dog with it just takes it to a different level. All right. Of feeling safe and secure is not and nothing. Nothing's 100 percent. But boy, it sure, it sure makes you feel good.

[00:27:31] And and the dog I mean, the dogs would lay their life down for you and your kids. Okay. Switch gears again. Internet stuff. I have a Verizon hotspot that I can take with me anywhere. You know, some people make their cell phones in the hotspots, but I like this separate one because I can you know, if I'm in a convention or something is sitting at the back of the room, I can let my friends hook onto it. And everybody loves you. And and also, I'm not a safety expert, but it's more safe to do any banking things that I have to do on it than it is on the just general Wi-Fi that everybody else has, you know, so. So I still reduce any kind of really serious stuff when I'm on a hotspot. Then when I'm at home and then at home, we have this thing called open mesh. And, you know, I don't want to brag about it too much because we've been having trouble with one of the nodes recently. But open mesh allows you to have one router somewhere and then have these different nodes around your building that keep your speed, your Wi-Fi speed up wherever you are. So that's the I think the generic term is open mesh, but there's also a company called Open Mesh.

[00:28:50] All right. Here's a little bit on computer, and so that's definitely business related. Here's a little bit on computer stuff. Multiple monitors. If you go from one to two monitors, your entire life changes. I actually have four monitors in my main office and allows me to not be going up and down with windows all the time. I can have stuff open and four different monitors and I are three of them. And then I can be watching a tennis match on the fourth. So so multiple monitors will change your entire life. Do it. Then a lot of you probably haven't heard of this. It's a USB thumb drive called an iron key. I know we do stuff in the cloud, everything, but there's sometimes you want to just have some super high security on stuff. And I mean, if those you remember the old Mission Impossible where they would give the guy the instructions and then the tape recorder would burn up. All right. Well, this is like that. The the iron key, if it's if somebody tries to break the password to get into it like 10 times, it destroys itself. So very cool. So just check out Iron Key. They have many different sizes of capacities. OK. OK. Next is workout stuff. So it is not necessarily business related, except they have extremely high energy level, part from working out, part from good genes from my dad. But one of the gadgets is the neck harness and you know, your neck carries your head, which is unproportionally heavy.

[00:30:26] And so it works my neck out. And I have a garbage can full of rice. I had to go down to the Asian store and buy like big 50 pound bag of rice and put it in here and you can do amazing things with your grip strength and your hand strength with a big garbage can full of rice. Just look it up online if and see how that works. Various grip exercises that I have a crushing grip. Then we also have a thing called the BLOCK. Anybody that has visited my retreat center has seen all this stuff, but it's it's like multiple dumbbells where you pull a pin out and then you can change the weight on a dumbbell without having dumbbells of different weights laying all over the floor. So it's called the block. I have a recumbent bike with an inclinometer on it, so you can tell, you know, the grade that you're going up or down and it sits back so that, you know, it's just a whole different riding experience. Your butt isn't sitting on a skinny little seat. And the seat for me is like an easy chair. It's really nice. It's I think mine's called a tour easy and it was very expensive. But I've had it over, oh, jeez, 30, almost 30 years. And it's amazing bicycle.

[00:31:50] Oh, and then I think the workout app that keeps track of like how far I went and how long I paused and how many calories I burn, everything is called my workout. And then the other cool thing I have is called an iPod. You know that they said that sittings like the new smoking. Well, the problem is, is that you sit a lot when you work on the Internet. So I took my treadmill and I put a shelf across the top where I can put my laptop and it's in front of the big screen TV so I can walk. Even one mile an hour is better than sitting and work on the laptop and watch TV or do whatever. And then, you know, so. So some guys think from Harvard or something called it an iPlod. iPlod along. It's better than sitting.

[00:32:44] Here's some bigger gadgets. I got two portable generators, even though the main house here has a a built in generator in case the electricity is out over my other building. We didn't have one of those. So I've got freezers over there of stuff. And so I've got two portable generators. I've got a drill press with a machinist vice. You know, one of the things that worries me about today's generation, they can't do anything. They can't do anything with their hands. In fact, one of them was bragging the only thing they learned in shop class was how to call for estimates. Right. But my dad taught me to be able to fix stuff. So I have a drill press with a machinist vice on it so I can do precision work. I got an out of round checker gadget. So it makes sure the drill press is perfectly going up and down rather than wobbling. I got a crosscut saw on a big table that I can pull out the build stuff I built. She's that built Rubik's, his casket on that funeral I did for one of my protection dogs. I got an air compressor very handy to have along. I got a jigsaw, the key to jigsaw. I try to do high quality tools whenever I can. And I got knife blades on it. I said, what is that for? Well, I put insulation, this purple Styrofoam insulation all in my hunting trailer. And if you try to do with a razor blade knife or any other method or a saw is just stuff is everywhere and the cuts aren't precise.

[00:34:23] So I found out that if you use a razor knife on a jigsaw, that cuts are perfect. There's no Styrofoam all over the floor. All of you stick into your body. Nothing. It just makes perfect cut. So that's that. And then I got a router. I built an entire shelf with a Formica shelf from wood and did all the trimming with a router. So some bigger gadgets and some tools that I use that are kind of neat. I got a hose pincher. I'm sure if you made it this far, you like gadgets because some people are thinking, why in the heck would I listen to this crap. Anyway a hose pincher, certain things you do on your car.

[00:35:05] You gotta unhook a hose, but you don't want all the stuff to leak out. So this is a remote hose pincher. The other thing I like for tools is Forstner bits. These are where I can drill. A hole in the bottom of the hole will be flat and a regular drill bit's going to make a, you know, like a angled depression at the bottom of the hole. But I need it flat because a lot of times I want to glue a magnet into where I put the hole so that it's flush with the surface and then I can stick things up with a magnet. All right. So those are called Forstner bits. Multimeters are very handy. I'm doing a lot of my own air conditioning, heating stuff and electrical things. So a multimeter is good, but don't mess with that if you don't know what you're doing. All right. And then I got a reverse flusher for my AC line. See all your your AC units in your house have a pipe that you know, the condensation is going to drip out onto the ground somewhere. Well, if you don't clean that out once in a while. And guess how I know this. A whole ceiling collapsed on me because the pipe got kind of sludged up with crap over time and the water backed up into the ceiling and then kept soaking the ceiling. Soaking the ceiling till the whole ceiling came down. That was the mess. So every, you know, maybe once a year, all you need to do is reverse flush there, your AC drain pipes.

[00:36:33] Here's some miscellaneous stuff. I got a battery checker. It's just a little device you can stick AA battery in or AAA or 9 volt and you squeeze it and it tells you if the battery is any good or not. I don't know how many batteries I had to throw away because I really did that. The usage was too important to just hope that they were good. And so you throw away ones that you don't know if they're any good or not. So this way we get full use out of the batteries. I got a remote control living room fan in my bedroom, in my house. All right. Think about this. I live in a 7500 foot house. My self. And I've got a 4000 square foot office and TV studio. But it's just me. There's five different air conditioning units in this building in two and the other building. There is just no sense in running them all like crazy for nothing. I mean, the electric bill could be a couple thousand a month if I did that.

[00:37:34] So basically if I'm sitting in my chair, I hit the button on my remote control fan. Keeps me cool where I sit most of the day or if I'm on the iPlod, you know, hit the button and it turns over and points toward the iPlod. I guess technically that's a business thing because it saves a lot of money on this retreat center.

[00:37:54] We've got a wireless cloud based security system, so I'm not going to go into details on that either for security purposes, but I do want to tell you that burglars hate wireless systems because a lot of times what they do is they just cut your phone wires and then even if the alarm goes off locally, it won't get reported to the police or to your monitoring service. But if they see wireless, they're like, oh, no matter what I do, the police are going to be notified like almost instantly. So it's a deterrent to robbing your house.

[00:38:29] So. So look into wireless and cloud based security systems. Okay. I got a hot water tap on my water thing, so I don't have to do the nasty microwave, the heat up water for coffee or anything. Just one cup at a time. Now I've got a steamer for my kitchen. This I love this because I like hard boiled eggs, but I always forget. And then they start exploding on my my oh, my stove in the water. You're melting the pots and everything. Twenty bucks for this thing. And it's the best thing on earth for guys like me. I put the eggs in it. Turn the thing on. Twenty five minutes later, it quits streaming them. Turns itself off. A little kitchen gadget for you. I got this lemon lime squeezer too. It's like yellow and green. It's metal and it's the greatest thing on earth to squeeze lemons and limes. This is all kitchen stuff. Let's see.

[00:39:28] Oh, for those speakers out there that do magic or need to use their hands, hand-held mikes are always the best. I don't care what you try to tell me. I've been through this a million times with a million speakers. You're lazy if you use lavaliers and and you want to look cool, like Tony Robbins wearing a little headset mic. Well, that doesn't impress me at all, but handhelds are best. And but sometimes you do need to use both hands, like if you're doing magic or doing something on stage that we need both hands. Well, there's the thing a little you can hang around your neck that'll hold the microphone right in front of your mouth while you're using both your hands. You could use a mike stand also, but this is more portable. Ah, here's the here's the thing, I've used it for years, it's called a sock buddy. It's it's something where you put your socks. It's a little plastic thing. It's got two circles on it. You put one sock in each side and you can throw it in the wash and then throw it in the dryer and throw it in your drawer and all your socks are matched up. I mean, this little piece of plastic changed my life. I'm telling you. Next thing is silicone ice trays. These are great, great things in that, you know, they they don't crack so much and you can make great things that make fat bombs and I'm for my Keto stuff and so forth.

[00:40:59] Now I also have a label maker that's really it's a 20 dollar thing and the labels have lasted forever. But it allows you to label things. I got a wire label or that's little things that wrap around all the wires to your computer and you can write on it with marker to tell which you know what's going on. And I got tray tables all over the place, so it makes it. You can make a portable laptop stand wherever you are. All right, so there's a bunch of crazy stuff, gadgets that I use, some of them will help you, some you've probably never even want to try. But there it is.

[00:41:34] But I do want to tell you about our Vetrepreneurs Month before we leave today. I really want to tell you how my school sponsors military families and how our training can help them. I mean, first of all, we give them that 50 percent or it's about a ninety five hundred dollar scholarship to thank them for their service. This applies to either active duty or our veterans and then eligible military spouses get this four thousand dollars from the Department of Defense. And this is really great for military families because what happens is as a military spouse has to take a crappy job because people know they're going to leave in a couple of years and then they go to the next place and take another crappy job if they can either find a crappy job. So when they have Internet skills, they can legitimately work from home. And if they get deployed somewhere else, it doesn't matter. I mean, you still can be handling social media and email marketing and shopping cart stuff and customer service and all the other things. Every business on earth needs. And and not only that, you can study at home with no expenses for books, travel or child care. It it's perfect for military families. And one more thing. You can also sell your own products and service with the same exact skills. So check this all out at IMTCVA.org/military or if you if you are not military, who cares? I mean these same skills are what allowed me to sell stuff around the world for over 25 years now and just stay home if I feel like it. So check it all in the show notes. This is episode 184, my favorite gadgets, and that'll be in the show notes you can go to screwthecommute.com/184. All right. Make sure you check the next episode out. Joel Stewart is here. That's 185. And he's going to talk about franchises. I learned a lot when I talked to this guy about how you don't have to spend 40, 50, 100 thousand on a franchise. There's some in a couple thousand dollar range and on up. All right. We'll catch y'all on the next episode. See ya later.

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