Okay, so welcome to the behind the host podcast and today I'm so excited. We've got Pamela

Holt. Pam, as she likes to be called here, Pamela is the host of been a host for three

decades. She's also just started the Happy Host Academy, which we're going to dive into

and find out a lot more about. And also she's part of the Hospital hosts project, which

is where 40 absolutely amazing hosts from across the world have all come together to write

their chapter within a book and I'm excited to find out about that today as well. So thank

you very much for coming on Pam and yeah. I'm so happy to be here. I'm so excited to

talk to you. I'm excited to. So just tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get into

hosting and who is Pam Holt? Well, it starts a long time ago. I'm a real estate

broker. My entire career, I've been a real estate broker and attorney in Chicago. And so I

do downtown, you know, for sale and working with buyers and sellers and that's what I've

always done. But in addition to that, my family has had a vacation rental since I was a teenager.

And I can never convince my family to actually make it a business. And so every now and then

we would rent it out and my family hated it because we didn't know what we were doing and

we always had, you know, bad guests and it was always a bad experience for them. So I can't

hold that against them. But I will say, if we had just done a little bit, I would be retired

on a beach right now and instead I'm not. So so we had in the family. I never really thought

that much about it until it's about six years ago now. I was going to I was going overseas.

My daughter was doing some service work in Africa and I was going over to meet up with her.

And the friend of mine was like, well, you're going to be gone. You know, you should put someone

in the house where you're gone. And I thought that was the most ridiculous thing that I have ever

heard because because it's my house. It's my house where I live with my two kids and my dog.

...