The Fabulous Learning Nerds

Hey everybody, welcome back to another fantastic, spectacular episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm your host, Scott Schuette. And, well, got some news for you everybody. Dan the man and Zeta are on vacation. That's right, they're on vacation. they're not, I know, right? They're not gonna be able to be with us. I told them, yee-ee.

Dan actually said, hey, I've got a microphone and I can record from the hotel room. And I'm like, you're kidding me. No, you're not going to do that. So that's great. So I thought I would go ahead and share the studio this week with someone we don't get to hear a heck of a lot from, get to know his stories, talk about learnings, all sorts of groovy stuff. without further ado, everybody, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam.

Scott (01:24.67)
Sam, how you doing my friend?

Sam (01:26.958)
doing pretty good, Scott. Have I ever told you that you're an awesome hike, man?

Scott (01:31.39)
I am an awesome hype man. You know where that comes from? I DJed weddings for like 14 years. I did event production for about 15 years. And actually over a couple of weeks ago, I did an event for Duke Energy and ran the whole thing by myself. That's right. So yeah, I like to build energy and get people excited about stuff.

Sam (01:33.87)
Where does that come from?

Sam (01:46.248)
wow.

Scott (01:57.758)
Can I share a little inside baseball when it comes to that kind of thing? Okay, inside baseball, for those people that are out there, hey, I'm a learning nerd and I want to be a DJ. I don't know why you'd want to do that today, but you could. And it actually kind of falls into place with presentation design and or delivery as well. When you realize that the people that are there,

Sam (02:02.392)
Sure, go ahead.

Scott (02:27.686)
don't care about you. They care about the music. Everything changes. You know what I'm saying? Like everything changes. And then it's not like, you don't work as hard to get the crowd involved. You really want to focus in on what's going on as far as a music perspective is concerned because they didn't pay me to.

They don't care about Scott. They care about the music. They care about the experience. once you figure that out, you're great. The same thing applies to training groups of people or facilitating people. Like those people who are the sage on the stage, it's all about me. Man, your career is going to be really limited. It's all about how we bring people together and have them show up. And yeah, I know that sounds really kind of...

Sam (03:16.354)
Yeah.

Yeah, like to go along with that, like, whereas like you bring the music that they want to hear. You're like the bringer of the music that they care about. So in a way they do care about you. It's what you can deliver.

Scott (03:36.23)
100%. Another piece of inside baseball around DJing is that, well, if you're DJing a wedding, whatever the bride wants, you play. I had a wedding once where a bride actually asked me to play a very naughty Prince song before 10 o'clock. And I was looking at her and I'm like, there are children out here. She goes, I don't care. I said that there are children out here. And she said,

Sam (03:39.224)
Ha

Scott (04:03.824)
I want to hear that now." I'm like, OK, dropped it. I had like five or six parents come up and what the? I'm like pointing right at the bride. Like, yeah, whatever.

Sam (04:12.312)
So, I snuck something into my wedding that's very similar vein. So, I didn't actually have the lyrics, but I did have some of the, like, a classical instrumental version of the instruments to Nine Inch Nails Closer.

Scott (04:29.182)
I've heard that version. It's great. Yeah, but there's no lyrics to it,

Sam (04:32.384)
Ha ha ha.

No, there was no lyrics, but like a couple people recognized it. And that's all I needed.

Scott (04:41.47)
Okay, if anybody doesn't know that song, can go look it up and then you can go ahead and unsubscribe when you're done.

At the bar, was great. I was back to the inside baseball part of it. People come up all the time and they go, you know, play this or play that, or you get a list of things that you want to play after a while. After years of doing it, you begin to realize what's going to work and what doesn't. And so a lot of the time I knew what I needed to do based on the music, not what I could bring to the music. And that that was amazing. You know, I did.

my brother's wedding, like say DJ, my brother's wedding. And he had all this like that, like late eighties stuff, like really obscure, like flock of seagulls kind of stuff. Right. And I'm like, we're in Wisconsin with a bunch of, you know, rural people. They, they want to hear some Garth Brooks. They they're going to want to hear, you know, all. And he's like, when are you going to play, you know, this, where are you going to play that? I can't even remember the names of these songs. Like I don't you would

never hear on the radio anymore. We love them. And I'm just like, I'll play one or two later, but just let me cook, which is my new phrase. Just let me cook. Let, let, let, let's cook baby. And we'll do that. But at any rate, that, that is important to know.

Scott (06:17.2)
that's right. Hey, everybody. You know what? We're not going to talk about DJs or weddings or music or even the rock for that matter. We're going to go ahead and I want to dive in. Sam's got a really interesting story. asked him to talk about it. So without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into our topic of the week.

Scott (06:39.74)
This week we're talking new to L &D. A lot of people out there thinking about making that change, maybe I'm gonna go into learning and development from whatever. And Sam, you're relatively new to this space. And what I would love to talk about is like, where you came from, what made you jump into learning and development. And then most importantly, what I wanna know about today is like, what did you learn? Especially being new, what's been successful for you?

Sam (06:54.513)
am.

Scott (07:08.35)
What have you struggled with all that other groupie kind of stuff?

Sam (07:12.046)
So I'm gonna say that my starting journey for learning and development is there's There's a few points that I'd call my starting journey Because I'll just start with like when I first got interested in the L &D field and where I got interested in the psychology of business and learning which is college I majored as a psych major and most of the way through my psych major

I had this epiphany that I really don't want to be the kind of person that has someone tell all their problems to and I find ways to fix them on a personal level. God bless the people that can do that. God bless them. But I figured out that I don't think I could be one of those people, but I still loved that idea of someone saying like, hey, we need X fixed. Well.

I'd like to be the person to help fix that. So I kind of pivoted into the business side of psychology where we talked a lot about things like HR and things with sales and the psychology of marketing. And that's really started to like hit my stride over what I wanted to do.

So after that, I had some time in between doing what I wanted to do with that. For a little bit, I did special education. And for a long time, I worked in public service. I worked as a park ranger. And as a park ranger, that's where I got my first taste of building material for training purposes. I bought some safety material with that. And I ended up

really loving that to the point where I kind of steered my career direction in that way. And if you want to say where I truly got my start in L &D, as in where I first got paid for L &D, that would probably be about a year ago when I dive full into that.

Scott (09:18.142)
Mm-hmm.

So what made you dive full in? Go in, I'm going in. Red one, we're going in.

Sam (09:28.334)
Well, I'd say that what really got me committed into doing that was the passion for helping people and the passion to learn new things. I am learning new subjects all the time for L &D. Part of the L &D process is going to talk to subject matter experts in different fields. That's the part that I find most exciting. And then I get to take that information

and build something that helps other people get that information. I'm this great part of this information transfer and that's what I really like about it. I get to have moments where I'm both the learner and the teacher for stuff.

Scott (10:16.19)
Yeah, no, I totally get that. That's great. And I think that one of the things that I love about our community is that, you know, we're a community of helpers. We're a community of people that really want to make a difference in this world, which is why I love, I don't know, have you gone to a convention yet?

Sam (10:25.358)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (10:34.998)
I have not, not for, not specifically for L &D, but I have my eye on a few of them.

Scott (10:41.052)
Yeah, so everybody like you need to go, right? If you haven't planned on going like you should totally go. Like a lot of our audience, they speak there and you know, you know, eventually I think they will have a platform to speak there as well because I want to get back and there's things that I want to want to do. But man, I tell you, you go to one of those things and it's just it's like walking into a different universe to be honest with you, because like everybody there is super nice and they're very genuine about it. It's not I'm going to be nice.

pretend being nice because it might get me something. No, no, they're just really good, nice people. And we're having a great time. you know, nobody this, okay, I haven't seen it. I'm sure it's happened. But I've, I've never seen anybody get completely wasted at one of these events either. Like I've never seen anybody like just totally go off the walls. And at other conventions, I know that that might be a problem, but not at learning conventions. I don't know why that is.

Sam (11:34.702)
I've been to a couple business conventions, not in the L &D field, but I know what you mean by wasted. Some people let the stress get to them.

Scott (11:48.434)
Yeah, so at any rate, that's cool. So you dove all in into learning development. Now full transparency, you have a relationship with Dan. So he was there to help you. If you didn't have a relationship with Dan, how would you have gone about maybe finding opportunities? Have you thought about that or not?

Sam (12:00.577)
yeah.

Sam (12:11.426)
I think the process to me getting to L &D would have been slower but would have still happened because I did want to go into the business side of psychology which steered me towards training and HR and things like that and I had a great love of public service and customer service.

And I feel like where those areas eventually start to intersect, you get LND.

Scott (12:46.034)
Yeah.

Sam (12:46.976)
So I think I would have reached that conclusion, but I think it would have reached that conclusion at 40 instead of 30.

Scott (12:55.838)
I think that's interesting. I think that's good. know, you know, my experience was that I knew that I wanted to do it right away. I was doing something else, but it was in a large enough company that there were opportunities there. So I just stuck my eye on an opportunity and then struck at every opportunity that showed up. And I probably would have vacated that company and gone to another company to get that opportunity because it was really important to me. So I think that passion is a big part of that. So, all right. So what

Sam (13:03.566)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (13:25.68)
What are some of the things that you've learned here? You know, spent the last year doing design work, right? Mostly design work, right? So what are some of your learnings around L &D that you maybe didn't expect?

Sam (13:46.968)
that didn't expect. Let me give a moment to think of a good answer.

Scott (13:54.494)
Or maybe think, you know, what were your learnings period? I mean, you don't, it doesn't have to be, didn't expect it. You might be, no, no, I totally get it. For me, my biggest learnings are the stuff I didn't expect, right? I planned things out, I'm ready to go. And then boom, know, Mike Tyson once said, everybody's got to plan until you get hit in the face, right?

Sam (13:54.808)
So.

Okay. Maybe I'm overthinking this a little bit too much.

Sam (14:07.832)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (14:16.928)
I think that what I, my most unexpected learning from LND doesn't involve LND. It's involved learning when LND isn't the answer. Because, well, with LND, with learning and development, with a client, you take a look and see like if

Scott (14:33.052)
Okay, explain that.

Sam (14:44.972)
learning and development is the right fit? what is this training going to do for you? How to implement this training? Well, sometimes in this discovery phase, in the analysis phase, if you love Addy, like everyone who's just started L &D does, you might come to the conclusion that maybe training isn't what this organization or this scenario needs. Maybe there's a different underlying factor.

And part of being a good learning and development professional would be knowing when that happens. It's, in my opinion, part of ergonomics, you know, using the right tool for the job. Well, when do you know that L &D might not be the right tool?

Scott (15:35.09)
Yeah, no, I think that's really important. Although quite frankly, my experience there was I did it anyway. At least initially, right? Because you don't...

Have you found as you build relationships and as you work on things that it's a little bit easier to push back or have you, have, or did you just finally stumble into I'm going to go ahead and ask the right questions and get to a different place or help me understand that.

Sam (16:02.68)
So, it's a little bit of both in my opinion, because having the ability to be upfront and say like, you know, we need X, Y, and Z, or we don't need X and we just need Y and Z can save people a lot of headaches and a lot of hassle and a lot of time. And in the business world, time is money. you know, being able to be upfront and

not do more than what is necessary can be very advantageous. But there's also times where you're getting into a project, you're getting into the weeds, and you might realize that something is a roadblock or something might not be necessary and it might need to be dropped off that way. And now that I'm saying it, guess even the opposite might be true as well, whereas you might, if you're

If you winnowed down, you might realize that you might need to add stuff back, so... It's still a learning process, just to be honest with you.

Scott (17:10.812)
Yeah, do you ever find that sometimes you just, you're gonna do it anyway to build on the relationship?

Sam (17:20.748)
Yeah. Yeah. So...

Scott (17:24.072)
think that's important because sometimes it's like, you know, especially if it's a, it's something that I know that I can get done relatively quickly, I'm going to go ahead and do it. Deliver for today. I say this a lot, deliver for today and then build for tomorrow. And part of delivering for today sometimes is low hanging fruits, quick victories to build that relationship of trust with people, especially if you're new. Like, so I've got

a new opportunity and meeting new people, I'm working on new things. If I come into that new opportunity to say, yeah, this ain't gonna work. Or, yeah, I don't know about that. It doesn't necessarily build that trust where I'm gonna need the bigger hammer later, right? And so part of the things that I think about is like, okay, if I can get this done and get a win, and it's gonna

meet a need for today, that's great because that plants the seed that I can go ahead and water and deliver extra value tomorrow. Does that make sense? Was that your?

Sam (18:31.95)
does that does make that does make sense you know the I'm trying to think of the right word the you know consistent consistent victories you know would plant the garden to success

Scott (18:45.388)
yeah.

Scott (18:49.65)
Yeah. Were you specific or in your conversations as you came on and Ellen, have you ever found yourself having those conversations around with those people that you work with around, what's, what are some quick wins we can go ahead and get?

Sam (19:07.432)
I yeah, I would say, I would say yes. I usually when working on a project, I'll kind of separate out into things that I know are going to take a while and things that I know that are easy to produce. And part of it is just self motivation, honestly, part of keeping morale up for yourself and for the client.

can be working on the smaller projects, getting some quick wins, and then going back to the bigger project that you need to make sure is done by the end of the week.

Scott (19:43.516)
Yeah, no, I totally get that. All right. So we you learned that, hey, the biggest learning is may not be trading. So let's go out and do something else. Right. So that's kind of cool.

Sam (19:52.725)
Mm-hmm. That sounds yeah, it sounds kind of weird for like, you know the biggest takeaway being like, you know why someone might need not lead to but need LND but I feel like that is that is one of the more more surprising conclusions I came to because it kind of switched my switched my mindset around about it like Like, know, like I want to be able to provide the training that is exactly what the what the client needs so

Scott (20:21.704)
Well, let's switch gears just a little bit from a learning perspective. you, I know you had to learn particular software, right? And stuff like that. What are some things that you learned while building that gets you really excited? Like, wow, I learned how to do this and it was really, really cool. Or maybe on the flip side, I learned I can't do certain things and that made me want to go and experiment with other things.

Sam (20:50.36)
So while learning articulate and looking into different principles of design, such as looking into Bloom's taxotomy and looking at different ways people learned, I kept on seeing repeated things like having tactile senses with learning. And

I gave myself a challenge and I was wondering if something is possible, how well I could do something given the limitations of an e-learning, which is how do I make tactile learning experiences in an e-learning? what I came, the conclusion I came to that made me really proud, that made me think like, oh wow, I can make really cool things with this, was that

I had the idea, was like, well, we can't physically turn a page on a screen, but maybe I can have them recall the memory of turning a page, have them feel like they're turning a page and get the tactileness of it that way. So I built a, it was a small book that you drug a slider across. It had a sound of a page turning as you drug the slider and there is a quick little page turn with it.

And it made me think, wow, that does feel like turning a page that stimulates that recall. Where can I go from this from there? Now that I've stimulated that tactile recall, what can I do to further increase the learning? It may help make this stick.

Scott (22:14.396)
Right.

Scott (22:28.188)
Yeah, that's really awesome. Have you used flipping books?

Sam (22:33.462)
like a a note card that flips?

Scott (22:36.894)
Flipping books is an online PDF reader. So you put your PDF up there. and same thing, like when I turn the page of my PDF, goes, don't have, I'm gonna need to find the sound, right? Um, and I find it awesome because it improves engagement for whatever reasons. you gave somebody something that they didn't expect. So it's going to improve engagement. Did you find that that was the same kind of response your audience had on that particular?

Sam (22:40.64)
okay.

Sam (22:47.341)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Scott (23:06.888)
piece of work that you did or what was your findings from an audience perspective?

Sam (23:11.992)
pretty good. Pretty good. I think you're right where it's that little bit of engagement that you get from even just the small things like the sound of a page turning or like the sensation of dragging something across. All that kind of cumulates together to form a strong learning experience.

Scott (23:36.168)
Yeah, for sure. We talk about micro learnings and I've been talking about micro learnings amongst my new peers who are still on the eight minute videos are great. my gosh. We're really talking about learning being effective if it's 80 % of it is active and what you've done there by adding just a little piece of noise and some things that need to happen in order for people to go from A to B creates that active sense.

And it makes people want to continue doing things. It's kind of like, are you on Instagram?

Sam (24:12.922)
A little bit.

Scott (24:14.266)
OK, are you on TikTok?

Sam (24:19.566)
No, no most real things I don't do as far as social as far as social media is concerned I'm on Facebook because that's the only place one of my hobbies exists. Apparently is Facebook groups and I'm I Think that's that's about the only Social media that I'm I'm really in it does LinkedIn count as social media a little bit

Scott (24:43.998)
Well, yeah, it does. like LinkedIn for that. My whole point is, have you ever doom-scrolled on a social media app? Like, Instagram's great for doom-scrolling. Do know what I mean by that?

Sam (24:56.218)
I do and I try to avoid it.

Scott (25:00.41)
I can't avoid it. I'm addicted to it, but that's that's part of part of the deal, right? So that whole that whole application is designed, designed to to stimulate. I forgot what that's called, but it's it's designed to have you keep go dopamine. It's a dopamine hit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a dopamine machine. We are addicted to dopamine, everybody. And so doom scrolling is really just I need that next thing.

Sam (25:19.0)
Dopamine, yeah.

Sam (25:24.173)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (25:28.126)
You can still apply that without being unscrupulous or scrupulous or whatever the heck you want to call it into your learnings as well as from a dope and mean hip perspective of, I know if I turn this page on CM's learning, it's going to make that sound, that paper sound. I love it. I'm addicted to it. my goodness, I got that. It was great. So that's really cool. What other?

Sam (25:32.686)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (25:50.86)
Yeah, there's a part of everyone's brain that likes the pretty noise or the flashing light. And as long as you don't push that button too much or you just have something crazy flash across the screen, you just need a little bit of that reminder it's there.

Scott (26:07.41)
I mean, if you look at design from seven taps, which is a micro learning platform, I know if you ever used it, but the same thing, we're just swiping right to learning. That's why I tell people all the time, it's like Tinder for learning, right? Like, ooh, I wanna get to the next thing and know what it is, swipe, right? Ooh, I wanna go ahead and hit this button to get to the next thing, hit, right? So I think that that's really cool. Back to you, sorry. What are some other groovy things that you learned through design or?

Sam (26:28.135)
No, that's good.

Scott (26:34.204)
You you played around with and this was super cool and I really just want to talk about.

Sam (26:38.83)
Um, I think AI is another really cool tool that I've been using and playing around with.

Scott (26:43.666)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (26:47.326)
Talk to me about that. What parts of the AI are you using in your learning?

Sam (26:53.794)
What I really like AI for is the research aspect of AI. The ability to give a language bottle pages upon pages of documents and then ask. Now you can just ask the language bottle like, hey, I need a summary of this and also ask for references. I know we've had issues of AI being the lying machine in the past. Yeah, it does.

Scott (26:59.528)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (27:19.971)
it lies with confidence for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam (27:23.214)
But now, you know, with larger language models and being able to do a deep research, you can ask it for sources. And it still might be completely wrong about something, but you can go look at the source for where it got the information and figure out with much more certainty whether or not the A is right and just about on any subject it gives you. It pushes it.

Scott (27:32.072)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (27:52.472)
helps with my workflow. enjoy looking at the AI and basically proofreading it a lot. That sounds kind of weird, kind of like saying, I have to go and, you know, go and, like, you do go make sure that the AI is correct. But it's another tool for research. I can pinpoint where the information I need would be in a document. The AI helps me find that. And I can reference back to the document with more ease because of it.

Scott (28:12.21)
Yeah.

Scott (28:23.198)
So you ever use AI for content creation, AI content creation?

Sam (28:27.264)
a little bit here and there. Usually I'll use AI as a tool to help cure writer's block, if I'm having that, and just to bounce some ideas around. I've noticed that AI can have a bit of a weird cadence to how it gives words, very much likes one word in particularly, so I oftentimes do a lot of rewriting to make sure that it's, you know, they're

Scott (28:38.011)
yeah.

Sam (28:57.154)
the voice matches when typing stuff out, but yeah, I have used AI a little bit for content creation.

Scott (29:02.75)
Well, you know, that's fine. know, the rewrite stuff is fine. But, you know, if you didn't have AI content generation, how long would it have taken you?

Sam (29:12.43)
I think I think AI and the field we're talking about has at least doubled productivity for me at least and Just I don't have too much of a frame of reference since I kind of came into L &D the same time AI kind of came into L &D as well So I've kind of been going alongside it So the veterans probably have a bit better of the perspective but I'd say

Scott (29:20.761)
my god.

Sam (29:41.046)
I'd say between what I have and haven't used AI, it's easy. It's easy. Double my productivity for it.

Scott (29:47.345)
Yeah. You know, the thing that's really cool is like, I'm a problem solver. So I love, are you a problem solver? I love solving problems. Okay. I love making things better by solving problems. And quite frankly, the tools that are out there for me, either your AI content generation or AI helping me do my work, helped me solve a problem today. if I, if, can I tell you the story? Cause it's a great story. It's a great story.

Sam (29:52.674)
Mm-hmm. Yes, yes.

Sam (30:12.408)
Sure, sure. I love Scott's stories.

Scott (30:14.206)
But we had Steve Corneon the other day talking about like, Hey, what's the best tool? And it's really just kind of a mix or a hodgepodge of tools. We'll get them on again. Everybody. Don't worry. I love that guy at any rate. So I, it was funny. Like I'm in a new industry that I know nothing about. know nothing about this industry, but you know, I'm a learning professional, so this is not a problem. So we're going to do that. But it was like, okay. Uh, I want you to go ahead and take this webinar and put it on, put it up there in, uh,

you know, on a platform and people watch it. I'm like, okay, that was one of those I'm going to deliver today plan for tomorrow because that's a terrible way to learn. It's just terrible. Right. And a lot of the stuff that I'm working with, as I came into, there's a lot of that letter, like 30 minute, 20 minute webinars, and there's no retention. There's, there's nothing. It's just this webinar and, and, okay, fine. I'll do that. And then we're going to plan on something better. Right. But in the back of my head, I'm like, we gotta have retention. There's gotta be some questions.

I gotta make sure that my audience is getting some questions, getting some value out of the time that they spend in here. So I'm gonna go ahead and have you do this, right? And so like, do I have time to watch this 30 minute presentation and make questions about that? No, I don't, I don't, but I know it's important. So what I did was I used, I took the video. by the way, audio wasn't great from the video. So I used Adobe Podcast and

Adobe Podcast is great. And I cleaned up all the audio, took two minutes to clean the audio, saved it as a different file, right? Then I uploaded it into the video, uploaded it into Descript so I could get a transcript of it, right? So now I've got a written account of everything that's said in this video for the most part, right? And then I took the Descript, I downloaded it, saved it as a PDF, and then I dropped it.

into a AI content generation quiz creator, and it read through the document and created 20 questions for me. Were they great questions? Nope, they weren't, but they were a start, right? And so what would have taken me a week, probably, to generate, and by the way, could have totally just said, here's your video, we're not gonna add anything extra to it, we're not gonna do any guerrilla learning with it, and that would have been.

Sam (32:36.983)
Mm.

Scott (32:37.682)
fine, the person would have been fine with it. I'm not okay with it. Like, Hey, we're going to do this. It took me. I mean, I had five of them to do. It took me this afternoon. That was it. I got it done like three, four hours, three, four hours, five of them, one, couple of them were like an hours long. Like, again, no one's going to watch this, but at any rate, if they do, they got good questions. Right. So I guess my whole point is if you're not testing out, if you're not kissing frogs with AI content generation,

You're missing out because quite frankly, it's like the amount of stuff that we can do more better or faster through content generation. Again, just to give you a baseline to work from is great. And by the way, sometimes just like in my story, you're going to have to use two or three of them to get what you need. That's okay, but that's the value that we bring. Anyway, I'm sorry. This is really about you, not about me, but you know.

Sam (33:19.618)
Mm-hmm.

Sam (33:32.396)
Now you're good.

Scott (33:35.634)
So that being said, what I want to do is give you an opportunity, like these last few minutes, like, hey, what's something you wanted to share with your audience today that we haven't gotten to yet that is really important to you, big learning, or something you're really passionate about? And I'll just shut up and I'll listen.

Sam (33:52.065)
Alright.

passionate about or what's passionate about L &D with because I can talk about rocks for 30 minutes but...

Scott (34:00.958)
No, I really don't want you to talk about rocks. For 30 minutes.

Sam (34:07.862)
I would say that...

Sam (34:17.464)
that as far as L &D is concerned or involving L &D, the biggest start I had or the biggest driving force I have behind L &D is the drive to help people. Like you said earlier, we're all helpers. We're all people that want to add value or all people that want to help see people learn. And I think that's kind of the big connecting force.

in the L &D space is that we all have this commitment to make people smarter and make the world better. you know, that's when I had the drive or when I figured out that I had the drive to do that, that is truly where the L &D journey begins. And I see that a lot with people who come from different careers.

going into LND. see teachers going into LND. I see people who have done public service go into LND. All with the same idea of I got into a field because I wanted to help people and I learned that I can help people through learning.

Scott (35:40.35)
Well, Sam, thank you so much today for sharing your journey and letting me rant about AI and not talking too much about rocks. We really appreciate that. Did you let our audience know how they could get a hold of you?

Sam (35:54.296)
Sure thing, Scott.

We're going to have a cut here. what do I need to read off, Scott? Because I remember this is something that people say. this is about me.

Scott (36:04.03)
No, no, it's about you. No, how did they get a hold of you?

Sam (36:09.068)
Okay, cool. You can get a hold of me pretty easily at emailing me at sam at thelearningnerds.com. That's where you can go ahead and find me or you can also email thirds at thelearningnerds.com. They'll probably know who I am.

Scott (36:10.002)
Yeah, go ahead.

Scott (36:29.554)
Okay, great, are you on LinkedIn?

Sam (36:31.318)
I am on LinkedIn as well. You can find me at Sam Van Tassel.

Scott (36:36.926)
Okay. All right. Well again, thanks for sharing what you got. I think it's really groovy.