Wes Schaeffer, The Sales Whisperer®

Jan 27, 2017 to Jul 24, 2025... 3,101 days... 443 weeks... ~2,200 90-min training sessions... ~3,300 hours on the mats... 55 years old with 7 kids and 3.9 grandkids when I received my black belt. When's the last time you did something for the first time? Need some help? HMU.

A woman who was caught in the crossfire during Monday’s shooting on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says a Marine helped her escape with her life. Best Second Amendment advertisement ever... Anyone know this Marine? I'd like to buy him a round or 3 or at least a gift card for a box of ammo if he doesn't drink. 💯 #nbc10boston #cambridge #news

Doctor: "Your LDL is still high. I'm adding a second statin." Patient: "I'm already on one. My legs ache." Doctor: "That's a known side effect. I'll add CoQ10." Patient: "And I'm tired all the time." Doctor: "Fatigue is common. I'll add modafinil." Patient: "My memory is foggy." Doctor: "Cognitive effects can occur. Donepezil should help." Patient: "I have a cough now." Doctor: "That'll be the ACE inhibitor I prescribed last visit. We'll swap it for an ARB." Patient: "I'm not sleeping." Doctor: "Zopiclone." Patient: "Heard that's addictive." Doctor: "We'll taper you with mirtazapine when the time comes." Patient: "My blood sugar has gone up." Doctor: "Statins can do that. Metformin." Patient: "I get diarrhoea on metformin." Doctor: "Loperamide." Patient: "I've gained weight." Doctor: "Ozempic." Patient: "I feel nauseous." Doctor: "Ondansetron." Patient: "I don't want to be on twelve medications." Doctor: "Anxiety is common at this stage. I'll add sertraline." Patient: "What if I just stopped the statin?" Doctor: "Absolutely not."

@JUSTcatmeme Ha. I know this family. She’s been consistent in her branding for 15+ years.

Having your BIG FAT TITS as the focus of your Mother’s Day video is crazy work

Why does Mary look younger than Jesus in Michelangelo's Pietà? The answer is one of the most beautiful in art history... Mary is holding the body of her 33 year old son, but she looks 20. Critics noticed it the moment the sculpture was unveiled in 1499. The mother of a man who has just been crucified would have been in her late forties or early fifties. Michelangelo had carved her as a girl. His own biographer, Ascanio Condivi, was the one who finally asked him why. The answer Michelangelo gave is preserved in Condivi's Life of Michelangelo and has been repeated for centuries: "Do you not know that chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste? How much more in the case of the Virgin, who had never experienced the least lascivious desire that might change her body?" Most modern critics treat this answer as a half-serious deflection. Michelangelo was famous for his sharp tongue and refused to explain himself to people he considered beneath his intellect. The deeper answer is older, and it lies inside one of the greatest poems ever written. In the final canto of Dante's Paradiso, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux begins his prayer to the Virgin with one of the most extraordinary lines in Italian literature: "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio." "Virgin mother, daughter of your own son." Michelangelo, who knew Dante by heart, was carving that line into stone. Mary is younger than Jesus because Jesus is older than the universe... because she gave birth to her own creator. But there is another reading, simpler than either of those, and it is the one I find myself thinking of today. Every mother who has held her child has held them at every age at once. The infant is still inside the toddler. The toddler is still inside the teenager. The young man on her lap, even dead, is also the boy she nursed and the baby she first carried home. And maybe that's why Michelangelo did not carve Mary as the years had aged her. He carved her as love had kept her: outside of time, outside of grief, holding her son the way she had always held him... Happy Mother's Day. -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: James-lucas.com/welcome I write about beauty in all its forms. If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

@Thevictoria76 yes, she's halfway out of the dog crate

Babies really sleep like they pay the bills 😂 One minute they’re in a crib, next minute they’re folded like a pretzel with one sock missing and somehow still sleeping peacefully 😭👶💤

@Thevictoria76 She was 3 then (12 now.)

@Xtopher_Uzo @agentskills_ai

This man, a former Baptist, gave a solid reason why he returned home to the Catholic Church.

@IMJustinBrooke That's why I say humanity is the next killer app.

MANY have said... "Why don't you give me the training for free and then I'll pay you from the profits." Here I am giving them the training for free first, and they're saying "its B.S.," and "if it actually worked you wouldn't share," and "But API costs." These are all the mindset issues rookie entrepreneurs have. It's not an information issue because Youtube and ChatGPT can tell you anything you want to learn. It's not a skills issue, because now AI can code for your or write for you or design for you. We are living in a world where Claude can connect to databases and servers through CLI, so that means Claude can build your websites and apps for you. But then there are over 16,000 installable skills on GitHub, 87 of them on my website for free all about marketing. So AI can also write your sales letters, create your social posts, do your SEO, fix your paid ads, etc. All of the excuses are gone. And what we are seeing now is entrepreneurs exposing their actual problem... mindset. They have scarcity mindsets so they can't believe I would freely share something of real value (been doing it for over a decade). They have negativity mindset so they jump to hate and contrarian comments, before ever actually even trying something. Notice how vague their comments are... It's not like they are saying "Ok so I just installed this exactly as you showed, screenshot, screenshot, and it doesn't work because of issue 1, issue 2, etc" They NEVER do that. It's always "Merr this is B.S." or "Wahh you're a liar liar pants on fire." 🤣 Because if they did actually be specific, well then we could talk about it, I could help them troubleshoot. But they don't realize they are so struck with "fear of failure" that their brains are instead reverting to negative comments to help them cope. It's real. Look it up. Our brains are always trying to save us from over exertion, failure, etc. If you don't overcome that, what it ends up expressing itself as is negative mindsets and scarcity mindsets. Anyways, go watch a few neuroscience videos on Youtube. Or... maybe for once... just try it. Take a leap of faith, ask for help, lots of us here will help you. And if you can genuinely prove me wrong, I am happy to be a student, swallow my pride, and lift you up. Results > feelings.

We are not freer, more prosperous, nor safer. My kids have it worse than I did. My grandkids...I fear for their future. We have more regulations, more Big Brother, more bureaucracy than ever. Big cities are filled with drugs, homeless, and out of control crime. Everything is taxed. Our air and water and food are poisonous. Big Pharma and Big Defense own our politicians. Criminals have more rights than victims. Our courts are not the place for justice. I could go on, but I have taxes to pay so the corrupt politicians I did not vote for can send money to nations I don't give a shit about and bomb nations the average citizen can't find on a map because our education system sucks...but I digress. Other than that, yes, I guess things are pretty good here.

We raised seven kids like that. Made a “side bed” for the next oldest when a sibling came along because they wanted to be near us, and by us, I mean their mom! My second son is 28. He moved into our neighborhood a month ago with his family. He’s had some health issues and wanted his mom. She’s been there 7 of the last 8 nights helping them with their two babies. Keep your babies close. Moms, nurse your babies for a year. Dads, support your nursing wives.

A kid drew himself sleeping in bed between mom and dad and labeled it 'safe.' In Japan, this exact sleeping arrangement has a name. They call it 'the river.' Mother is one bank. Father is the other. The child between them is the water. Roughly 70% of Japanese mothers sleep this way with their kids, sometimes through the teenage years. The Western model of putting a kid alone in their own bedroom is barely 200 years old. For most of human history, in most cultures still alive today, kids slept beside their parents. James McKenna runs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at Notre Dame. He spent decades watching what happens when parents and kids share a bed. The bodies sync up. Heart rates align with the parent's, breathing falls into the same rhythm, and by morning even sleep stages have started matching. The parent's body, in McKenna's words, acts as a kind of biological jumper cable for the child's. In 2013, researchers in the Netherlands tracked 193 babies through the first year of life. They measured cortisol, the brain's main stress hormone. Babies who had spent more weeks co-sleeping in the first six months produced less cortisol under stress at 12 months. Sleeping near a parent had rewired the kid's stress system to be calmer under pressure. Inside the kid's brain at night, the amygdala, the fear alarm, gets more sensitive as the body gets tired. Darkness makes it worse. A 2021 paper in PLoS One from Australian researchers showed that light directly suppresses amygdala activity. Lights off, alarm louder. The whole brain is wired to read 'alone in a dark room' as a threat. Now add a parent's body to that bed. The kid's nervous system reads warm body, breathing nearby, familiar smell. The threat alarm dials down. Two parents on either side dial it down twice. The drawing is the kid's brain calculating maximum safety: I am surrounded by the people who keep me alive, and nothing can reach me without going through them first. The arrangement in this drawing is what most of human history called 'sleeping.' Sleeping the kid alone in another room is a 200-year-old Western invention that we forgot was an invention. Every kid who has ever padded into your room at 3am and crawled into the middle of the bed is just trying to redraw the picture.

People don't think that's real. I took advantage of some Google Ads offer around 2013 for maybe a month. That's the extent of my Google Ads experience. The interface seems daunting and confusing. Retargeting and Tag Manager and UA or GA4...??? Is $10 really enough? What if I click the wrong thing and it's $100 or $10,000...and I type in the wrong link...so I waste $10k sending traffic to a 404...and do I need to drip on people...do I just sell them something...do I offer a bonus...do I have a pop-up window if they scroll 50%...or linger for 10 sec...or 7 sec...or on exit intent... Ah, nevermind. It's the playoffs. I'll deal with it next week...

It never ceases to amaze me how HARD people will work to do things the “easy” way. Here’s a wild idea… What if… Now hear me out… What if you just targeted keywords where people were already searching for exactly what you sell for $10/day with Google ads 🤷‍♂️📈

@Primewave96 What if I have a lot of hate?

You gotta have a lil hate in ya heart for this job😅

Yep

@IMJustinBrooke A blood sample.

What’s the first thing Netflix, Facebook, Uber, and AirBNB ask you for?

@IMJustinBrooke @amasad Now you tell me!?

Replit was free all day yesterday. Build anything you want, zero charges for the credits. Full Claude 4.7 access. Thanks @amasad ❤️❤️❤️ Built my nephew an iOS app that’s like TV Guide for MMA fights. The ultimate second screen for fight fans. My brother added insane SEO features to his gaming news website. The goal is to get both of them ranking and monetized with Adsense. Built their own versions of Wordpress right into their sites. Accepts markdown files so AI can write most of the content. It’s still blowing my mind what’s possible right now. In 20yrs of building online, this is the greatest time to build ever. I’ve never had more fun or had so much opportunity available.

Ha. So accurate. All roads lead to Rome.

Why the anger over bowing on the mats? Perhaps our society needs deeper roots in traditions, moving beyond a purely quarterly-driven, secular focus. #Tradition #Culture

The biggest mistake in business and marketing? Being boring. Marketing is sales, and sales is business. Don't be boring. #MarketingTips #BusinessGrowth

@RickD_GK As the father of 7 and grandfather of 4, I can absolutely, definitively, positively, with great certainty, assure you that this is the way the gates should be used.

I don't think this is what the baby gates are meant to do, lol. I guess Dad needed a little break. 🤣