Podcast appearances and mentions of alex yes

About AlexAlex is the Chief Product Officer of Twingate, which he cofounded in 2019. Alex has held a range of product leadership roles in the enterprise software market over the last 16 years, including at Dropbox, where he was the first enterprise hire in the company's transformation from consumer to enterprise business. A focus of his product career has been using the power of design thinking to make technically complex products intuitive and easy to use. Alex graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Electrical Engineering.Links Referenced:twingate.com: https://twingate.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig secures your cloud from source to run. They believe, as do I, that DevOps and security are inextricably linked. If you wanna learn more about how they view this, check out their blog, it's definitely worth the read. To learn more about how they are absolutely getting it right from where I sit, visit Sysdig.com and tell them that I sent you. That's S Y S D I G.com. And my thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted episode is brought to us by our friends at Twingate, and in addition to bringing you this episode, they also brought me a guest. Alex Marshall is the Chief Product Officer at Twingate. Alex, thank you for joining me, and what is a Twingate?Alex: Yeah, well, thanks. Well, it's great to be here. What is Twingate? Well, the way to think about Twingate is we're really a network overlay layer. And so, the experience you have when you're running Twingate as a user is that network resources or network destinations that wouldn't otherwise be accessible to you or magically accessible to you and you're properly authenticated and authorized to access them.Corey: When you say it's a network overlay, what I tend to hear and the context I usually see that in, in the real world is, “Well, we're running some things in AWS and some things in Google Cloud, and I don't know because of a sudden sharp blow to the head, maybe Azure as well, and how do you get all of the various security network models of security groups on one side to talk to their equivalent on the other side?” And the correct answer is generally that you don't and you use something else that more or less makes the rest of that irrelevant. Is that the direction you're coming at this from, or do you view it differently?Alex: Yeah, so I think the way that we view this in terms of, like, why we decide to build a product in the first place is that if you look at, sort of like, the internet in 2022, like, there's one thing that's missing from the network routing table, which is authentication and authorization on each row [laugh]. And so, the way that we designed the product is we said, “Okay, we're not going to worry about everything, basically, above the network layer and we're going to focus on making sure that what we're controlling with the client is looking at outbound network connections and making sure that when someone accesses something and only when they access it, that we check to make sure that they're allowed access.” We're basically holding those network connections until someone's proven that they're allowed to access to, then we let it go. And so, from the standpoint of, like, figuring out, like, security groups and all that kind of stuff, we're basically saying, like, “Yeah, if you're allowed to access the database in AWS, or your home assistant on your home network, fine, we'll let you do that, but we'll only let you go there once you've proven you're allowed to. And then once you're there, then you know, we'll let you figure out how you want to authenticate into the destination system.” So, our view is, like, let's start at the network layer, and then that solves a lot of problems.Corey: When I call this a VPN, I know a couple of things are going to be true. One, you're almost certainly going to correct me on that because this is all about Zero Trust. This is the Year of our Lord 2022, after all. But also what I round to what basically becomes a VPN to my mind, there are usually two implementations or implementation patterns that I think about. One of them is the idea of client access, where I have a laptop; I'm in a Starbucks; I want to connect to a thing. And the other has historically been considered, site to site, or I have a data center that I want to have constantly connected to my cloud environment. Which side of that mental model do you tend to fall in? Or is that the wrong way to frame it?Alex: Mm-hm. The way we look at it and sort of the vision that we have for what the product should be, the problem that we should be solving for customers is what we want to solve for customers is that Twingate is a product that lets you be certain that your employees can work securely from anywhere. And so, you need a little bit of a different model to do that. And the two examples you gave are actually both entirely valid, especially given the fact that people just work from everywhere now. Like, resources everywhere, they use a lot of different devices, people work from lots of different networks, and so it's a really hard problem to solve.And so, the way that we look at it is that you really want to be running something or have a system in place that's always taking into account the context that user is in. So, in your example of someone's at a Starbucks, you know, in the public WiFi, last time I checked, Starbucks WiFi was unencrypted, so it's pretty bad for security. So, what we should do is you should take that context into account and then make sure that all that traffic is encrypted. But at the same time, like, you might be in the corporate office, network is perfectly safe, but you still want to make sure that you're authorizing people at the point in time they try to access something to make sure that they actually are entitled to access that database in the AWS network. And so, we're trying to get people away from thinking about this, like, point-to-point connection with a VPN, where you know, the usual experience we've all had as employees is, “Great. Now, I need to fire up the VPN. My internet traffic is going to be horrible. My battery's probably going to die. My—”Corey: Pull out the manual token that rotates with an RSA—Alex: Exactly.Corey: —token that spits out a different digital code every 30 seconds if the battery hasn't died or they haven't gotten their seeds leaked again, and then log in and the rest; in some horrible implementations type that code after your password for some Godforsaken reason. Yeah, we've all been down that path and it's like, “Yeah, just sign into the corporate VPN.” It's like, “Did you just tell me to go screw myself because that's what I heard.”Alex: [laugh]. Exactly. And that is exactly the situation that we're in. And the fact is, like, VPNs were invented a long time ago and they were designed to connect to networks, right? They were designed to connect a branch office to a corporate office, and they're just to join all the devices on the network.So, we're really, like—everybody has had this experience of VPN is suffering from the fact that it's the wrong tool for the job. Going back to, sort of like, this idea of, like, us being the network overlay, we don't want to touch any traffic that isn't intended to go to something that the company or the organization or the team wants to protect. And so, we're only going to gate traffic that goes to those network destinations that you actually want to protect. And we're going to make sure that when that happens, it's painless. So, for example, like, you know, I don't know, again, like, use your example again; you've been at Starbucks, you've been working your email, you don't really need to access anything that's private, and all of a sudden, like, you need to as part of your work that you're doing on the Starbucks WiFi is access something that's in AWS.Well, then the moment you do that, then maybe you're actually fine to access it because you've been authenticated, you know, and you're within the window, it's just going to work, right, so you don't have to go through this painful process of firing up the VPN like you're just talking about.Corey: There are a number of companies out there that, first, self-described as being, “Oh, we do Zero Trust.” And when I hear that, what I immediately hear in my own mind is, “I have something to sell you,” which, fair enough, we live in an industry. We're trying to have a society here. I get it. The next part that I wind up getting confused by then is, it seems like one of those deeply overloaded terms that exists to, more or less—in some cases to be very direct—well, we've been selling this thing for 15 years and that's the buzzword, so now we're going to describe it as the thing we do with a fresh coat of paint on it.Other times it seems to be something radically different. And, on some level, I feel like I could wind up building an entire security suite out of nothing other than things self-billing themselves as Zero Trust. What is it that makes Twingate different compared to a wide variety of other offerings, ranging from Seam to whatever the hell an XDR might be to, apparently according to RSA, a breakfast cereal?Alex: So, you're right. Like, Zero Trust is completely, like, overused word. And so, what's different about Twingate is that really, I think goes back to, like, why we started the company in the first place, which is that we started looking at the remote workspace. And this is, of course, before the pandemic, before everybody was actually working remotely and it became a really urgent problem.Corey: During the pandemic, of course, a lot of the traditional VPN companies are, “Huh. Why is the VPN concentrator glowing white in the rack and melting? And it sounds like screaming. What's going on?” Yeah, it turns out capacity provisioning and bottlenecking of an entire company tends to be a thing at scale.Alex: And so, you're right, like, that is exactly the conversation. We've had a bunch of customers over the last couple years, it's like their VPN gateway is, like, blowing up because it used to be that 10% of the workforce used it on average, and all of a sudden everybody had to use it. What's different about our approach in terms of what we observed when we started the company, is that what we noticed is that this term Zero Trust is kind of floating out there, but the only company that actually implemented Zero Trust was Google. So, if you think about the situations that you look at, Zero Trust is like, obvious. It's like, it's what you would want to do if you redesigned the internet, which is you'd want to say every network connection has to be authorized every single time it's made.But the internet isn't actually designed that way. It's designed default open instead of default closed. And so, we looked at the industry are, like, “Great. Like, Google's done it. Google has, like, tons and tons of resources. Why hasn't anyone else done it?”And the example that I like to talk about when we talk about inception of the business is we went to some products that are out there that were implementing the right technological approach, and one of these products is still in use today, believe it or not, but I went to the documentation page, and I hit print, and it was almost 50 pages of documentation to implement it. And so, when you look at that, you're, like, okay, like, maybe there's a usability problem here [laugh]. And so, what we really, really focus on is, how do we make this product as easy as possible to deploy? And that gets into, like, this area of change management. And so, if you're in IT or DevOps or engineering or security and you're listening to this, I'm sure you've been through this process where it's taken months to deploy something because it was just really technically difficult and because you had to change user behavior. So, the thing that we focus on is making sure that you didn't have to change user behavior.Corey: Every time you expect people to start doing things completely differently, congratulations, you've already lost before you've started.Alex: Yes, exactly. And so, the difference with our product is that you can switch off the VPN one day, have people install a Twingate client, and then tomorrow, they still access things with exactly the same addresses they used before. And this seems like such a minor point, but the fact that I don't have to rewrite scripts, I don't have to change my SSH proxy configuration, I don't have to do anything, all of those private DNS addresses or those private IP address, they'll still work because of the way that our client works on the device.Corey: So, what you're saying is fundamental; you could even do a slow rollout. It doesn't need to be a knife-switch cutover at two in the morning where you're scrambling around and, “Oh, my God, we forgot the entire accounting department.”Alex: Yep, that's exactly right. And that is, like, an attraction of deploying this is that you can actually deploy it department by department and not have to change all your infrastructure at the same time. So again, it's like pretty fundamental point here. It's like, if you're going to get adoption technology, it's not just about how cool the technology is under the hood and how advanced it is; it's actually thinking about from a customer and a business standpoint, like, how much is actually going to cost time-wise and effort-wise to move over to the new solution. So, we've really, really focused on that.Corey: Yeah. That is generally one of those things, that seems to be the hardest approach. I mean, let's back up a little bit here because I will challenge—likely—something that you said a few minutes ago, which is Google was the first and only company for a little while doing Zero Trust. Back in 2012, it turned out that we weren't calling it that then, but that is fundamentally what I built out of the ten-person startup that I was at, where I was the first ops hire, which generally comes in right around Series B when developers realize, okay, we can no longer lie to ourselves that we know what we're doing on an ops side. Everything's on fire and no one can sleep through the night. Help, help, help. Which is fine.I've never had tolerance or patience for ops people who insult people in those situations. It's, “Well, they got far enough along to hire you, didn't they? So, maybe show some respect.” But one of the things that I did was, being on the corporate network got you access to the printer in the corner and that was it. There was no special treatment of that network.And I didn't think much of it at the time, but I got some very strange looks and had some—uh, will call it interesting a decade later; most of the pain has faded—discussions with our auditor when we were going through some PCI work, and they showed up and said, “Great. Okay, where are the credentials for your directory?” And my response was, “Our what now?” And that's when I realized there's a certain point of scale. Back when I started as an independent consultant, everything I did for single-sign-on, for example, was my 1Password vault. Easy enough.Now, that we've scaled up beyond that, I'm starting to see the value of things like single-sign-on in a way that I never did before, and in hindsight, I'd like to go back and do things very differently as a result. Scale matters. What is the point of scale that you find is your sweet spot? Is it one person trying to connect to a whole bunch of nonsense? Is it small to midsize companies—and we should probably bound that because to me, a big company is still one that has 200 people there?Alex: To your original interesting point, which is that yeah, kudos to you for, like, implementing that, like, back then because we've had probably—Corey: I was just being lazy and it was what was there. It's like, “Why do I want to maintain a server in the closet? Honestly, I'm not sure that the office is that secure. And all it's going to do—what I'm I going to put on that? A SharePoint server? Please. We're using Macs.”Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's, we've had, like, I don't know at this point, thousands of customer conversations. The number of people have actually gone down that route implementing things themselves as a very small number. And I think that just shows how hard it is. So again, like, kudos.And I think the scale point is, I think, really critical. So, I think it's changed over time, but actually, the point at which a customer gets to a scale where I think a solution has, like, leveraged high value is when you get to maybe only 50, 75 people, which is a pretty small business. And the reason is that that's the point at which a bunch of tools start getting implemented a company, right? When you're five people, you're not going to install, like, an MDM or something on people's devices, right? When you get to 50, 75, 100, you start hiring your first IT team members. That's the point where them being able to, like, centralize management of things at the company becomes really critical.And so, one of the other aspects that makes this a little bit different terms of approach is that what we see is that there's a huge number of tools that have to be managed, and they have different configuration settings. You can't even get consistency on MDM is across different platforms, necessarily, right? Like, Linux, Windows, and Mac are all going to have slight differences, and so what we've been working with the platform towards is actually being the centralization point where we integrate with these different systems and then pull together, like, a consistent way to create those authentication authorization policies I was talking about before. And the last thing on SSO, just to sort of reiterate that, I think that you're talking about you're seeing the value of that, the other thing that we've, like, made a deliberate decision on is that we're not going to try to, like, re-solve, like, a bunch of these problems. Like, some of the things that we do on the user authentication point is that we rely on there being an SSO, like, user directory, that handles authentication, that handles, like, creating user groups. And we want to reuse that when people are using Twingate to control access to network destinations.So, for us, like, it's actually, you know, that point of scale comes fairly early. It only gets harder from there, and it's especially when that IT team is, like, a relatively small number of people compared to number of employees where it becomes really critical to be able to leverage all the technology they have to deploy.Corey: I guess this might be one of those areas where I'm not deep enough in your space to really see it the same way that you do, which is the whole reason I have people like you on the show: so I can ask these questions directly. What is the painful position that I find myself in that I should say, “Ah, I should bring Twingate in to solve this obnoxious, painful problem so I never have to think about it again.” What is it that you solve?Alex: Yeah, I mean, I think for what our customers tell us, it's providing a, like, consistent way to get access into, like, a wide variety of internal resources, and generally in multi-cloud environments. That's where it gets, like, really tricky. And the consistency is, like, really important because you're trying to provide access to your team—often like it's DevOps teams, but all kinds of people can access these things—trying to write access is a multiple different environments, again, there's a consistency problem where there are multiple different ways to provide that, and there isn't a single place to manage all that. And so, it gets really challenging to understand who has access to what, makes sure that credentials expire when they're supposed to expire, make sure that all the routing inside those remote destinations is set up correctly. And it just becomes, like, a real hassle to manage those things.So, that's the big one. And usually where people are coming from is that they've been using VPN to do that because they didn't know anything better exists, or they haven't found anything that's easy enough to deploy, right? So, that's really the problem that they're running into.Corey: There's also a lot of tribal knowledge that gets passed down. The oral tradition of, “I have this problem. What should I do? I know, I will consult the wise old sage.” “Well, where can you find the wise old sage?” “Under the rack of servers, swearing at them.” “Great, cool. Well, use a VPN. That's what we've used since time immemorial.” And then the sins are visited onto yet another generation.There's a sense that I have that companies that are started now are going to have a radically different security posture and a different way of thinking about these things than the quote-unquote, “Legacy companies.”—legacy, of course, being that condescending engineering term for ‘it makes money—who are migrating their way into a brave new world because they had the temerity to found themselves as companies before 2012.Alex: Absolutely. When we're working with customers, there is a sort of a sweet spot, both in terms of, like, the size and role that we were talking about before, but also just in terms of, like, where they are, in, sort of like, the sort of lifecycle of their company. And I think one of the most exciting things for us is that we get to work with companies that are kind of figuring this stuff out for the first time and they're taking a fresh look at, like, what the capabilities are out there in the landscape. And that's, I think, what makes this whole space, like, super, super interesting.There's some really, really fantastic things you can do. Just give you an example, again, that I think might resonate with your audience quite a bit is this whole topic of automation, right? Your time at the tribal knowledge of, like, “Oh, of course. You know, we set up a VPN and so on.” One of the things that I don't think is necessarily obvious in this space is that for the teams that—at companies that are deploying, configuring, managing internal network infrastructure, is that in the past, you've had to make compromises on infrastructure in order to accommodate access, right?Because it's kind of a pain to deploy a bunch of, like, VPN gateways, mostly for the end-user because they got to, like, choose which one they're connecting to. You potentially had to open up traffic routes to accommodate a VPN gateway that you wouldn't otherwise want to open up. And so, one of the things that's, like, really sort of fascinating about, like, a new way of looking at things is that what we allow with Twingate—and part of this is because we've really made sure that the product is, like, API-first in the very beginning, which allows us to very easily integrate in with things, like, Terraform and Pulumi for deployment automation, is that now you have a new way of looking at things, which is that you can build a network infrastructure that you want with the data flow rules that you want, and very easily provide access into, like, points of that infrastructure, whether that's an entire subnet or just a single host somewhere. I think these are the ways, like, the capabilities have been realized are possible until they, sort of like, understand some of these new technologies.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: This feels like one of those technologies where the place that a customer starts from and where they wind up going are very far apart. Because I can see the metaphorical camel's nose under the tent flap being, “Ah, this is a VPN except it doesn't suck. Great.” But once you wind up with effectively an overlay network connecting all the things that you care about within an organization, it feels like that unlocks a whole universe of possibility.Alex: Mm-hm. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head there. Like, a lot of people approach us because they're having a lot of pain with VPN and all the operational difficulties they were talking about earlier, but I think what sort of starts to open up is there's some, sort of like, not obvious things that happen. And one of them is that all of a sudden, when you can limit access at a network connection level, you start to think about, like, credentials and access management a little differently, right?So, one of the problems that well-known is people set a bastion host. And they set bastion host so that there's, like, a limited way into the network and all the, you know, keys are stored in that bastion host and so on. So, you basically have a system where fine, we had bastion host set up because, A, we want limited ingress, and B, we want to make sure that we know exactly who has access to our internal resources. You could do away with that and with a simple, like, configuration change, you can basically say, “Even if this employee for whatever reason, we've forgotten to remove—revoke their SSH keys, even if they still have those keys, they can't access the destination because we're blocking network access at their actual device,” then you have a very different way to restrict access. So, it's still important to manage credentials, but you now have a way to actually block things out at a network level. And I think it's like when people start to realize that these capabilities are possible that they definitely start thinking about things a little bit differently. VPNs just don't allow this, like, level of granularity.Corey: I am a firm believer in the idea that any product with any kind of longevity gets an awful lot of its use case and product-market fit not from the people building it, but from the things that those folks learn from their customers. What did you learn from customers rolling out Twingate that reshaped how you thought about the space, or surprised you as far as use cases go?Alex: Yeah, so I think it's a really interesting question because one of the benefits of having a small business and being early on is that you have very close relationships with all your customers and they're really passionate about your product. And what that leads to is just a lot of, sort of like, knowledge sharing around, like, how they're using your product, which then helps inform the types of things that we build. So, one of the things that we've done internally to help us learn, but then also help us respond more quickly to customers, is we have this group called Twingate Labs. And it's really just a group of folks that are outside the engineering org that are just allowed to build whatever they want to try to prove out, like, interesting concepts. And a lot of those—I say a lot; honestly, probably all of those concepts have come from our customers, and so we've been able to, like, push the boundaries on that.And so, it just gave you an example, I mean, AWS can be sometimes a challenging product to manage and interact with, and so that team has, for example, built capabilities, again, using that just the regular Twingate API to show that it's possible to automatically configure resources in AWS based on tags. Now, that's not something that's in our product, but it's us showing our customers that, you know, we can respond quickly to them and then they actually, like, try to accommodate some, like, these special use cases they have. And if that works out, then great, we'll pull it into the product, right? So, I think that's, like, the nice thing about serving a smaller businesses is that you get a lot of that back and forth to your customers and they help us generate ideas, too.Corey: One thing that stands out to me from the testimonials from customers you have on your website has been a recurring theme that crops up that speaks to I guess, once I spend more than ten seconds thinking about it, one of the most obvious reasons that I would say, “Oh, Twingate? That sounds great for somebody else. We're never rolling it out here.” And that is the ease of adoption into environments that are not greenfield because I don't believe that something like this product will ever get deployed to something greenfield because this is exactly the kind of problem that you don't realize exists and don't have to solve for until it's too late because you already have that painful problem. It's an early optimization until suddenly, it's something you should have done six months ago. What is the rolling it out process for a company that presumably already is built out, has hired a bunch of people, and they already have something that, quote-unquote, “Works,” for granting access to things?Alex: Mm-hm. Yeah, so the beauty is that you can really deploy this side-by-side with an existing solution, so—whatever it happens to be; I mean, whether it's a VPN or something else—is you can put the side-by-side and the deployment process, just to talk a little bit about the architecture; we've talked a lot about this client that runs on the user's device, but on the remote network side, just to be really clear on this, there's a component called a connector that gets deployed inside the remote network, and it does not have to be installed on every single destination host. You're sort of thinking about it, sort of like this routing point inside that network, and that connector controls what traffic is allowed to go to internal locations based on the rules. So, from a deployment standpoint, it's really just put a connector in place and put it in place in whatever subnet you want to provide access to.And so you're—unlikely, but if your entire company has one subnet, great. You're done with one connector. But it does mean you can sort of gradually roll it out as it goes. And the connector can be deployed in a bunch of different environments, so we're just talking with AWS. Maybe it's inside a VPC, but we have a lot of people that actually just want to control access to specific services inside a Kubernetes cluster, and so you can deploy it as a container, right inside Kubernetes. And so, you can be, like, really specific about how you do that and then gradually roll it out to teams as they need it and without having to necessarily on that day actually shut off the old solution.So, just to your comment, by the way, on the greenfield versus, sort of like, brownfield, I think the greenfield story, I think, is changing a little bit, I think, especially to your comment earlier around younger companies. I think younger companies are realizing that this type of capability is an option and that they want to get in earlier. But the reality is that, you know, 98% of people are really in the established network situation, and so that's where that rollout process is really important.Corey: As you take a look throughout what you're seeing customers doing, what you see the industry doing as a result of that—because customers are, in fact, the industry, let's be clear here—what do you think is, I guess, the next wave of security offerings? I guess what I'm trying to do here is read the tea leaves and predict what the buzzwords will be all over the place that next RSA. But on a slightly more serious note, what do you see this is building towards? What are the trends that you're identifying in the space?Alex: There's a couple of things that we see. So one, sort of, way to look at this is that we're sort of in this, like, Third Wave. And I think these things change more slowly than—with all due respect to marketers—than marketers would [laugh] have you believe. And so, thinking about where we are, there's, like, Wave One is, like, good old happy days, we're all in the office, like, your computer can't move, like, all the data is in the office, like, everything is in one place, right?Corey: What if someone steals your desktop? Well, they're probably going to give themselves a hernia because that thing's heavy. Yeah.Alex: Exactly. And is it really worth stealing, right? But the Wave One was really, like, network security was actually just physical security, to that point; that's all it was, just, like, physically secure the premises.Wave Two—and arguably you could say we're kind of still in this—is actually the transition to cloud. So, let's convert all CapEx to OpEx, but that also introduces a different problem, which is that everything is off-network. So, you have to, like, figure out, you know, what you do about that.But Wave Three is really I think—and again, just to be clear, I think Wave Two, there are, like, multi-decade things that happen—and I'd say we're in the middle of, like, Wave Three. And I think that everyone is still, like, gradually adapting to this, which is what we describe it as sort of people everywhere, applications are everywhere, people are using a whole bunch of different devices, right? There is no such thing as BYOD in the early-2000s, late-90s, and people are accessing things from all kinds of different networks. And this presents a really, really challenging problem. So, I would argue, to your question, I think we're still in the middle of that Wave Three and it's going to take a long time to see that play through the industry. Just, things change slowly. That tribal knowledge takes time to change.The other thing that I think we very strongly believe in is that—and again, this is, sort of like, coming from our customers, too—is that people basically with security industry have had a tough time trying things out and adopting them because a lot of vendors have put a lot of blockers in place of doing that. There's no public documentation; you can't just go use the product. You got to talk to a salesperson who then filters you through—Corey: We have our fifth call with the sales team. We're hoping this is the one where they'll tell us how much it costs.Alex: Exactly. Or like, you know, now you get to the sales engineer, so you gradually adopt this knowledge. But ultimately, people just want to try the darn thing [laugh], right? So, I think we're big believers that I think hopefully, what we'll see in the security industry is that—we're trying to set an example here—is really that there's an old way of doing things, but a new way of doing things is make the product available for people to use, document the heck out of it, explain all the different use cases that exist for how to be successful your product, and then have these users actually then reach out to you when they want to have more in-depth conversation about things. So, those are the two big things, I'd say. I don't know if those are translated buzzwords at RSA, but those are two big trends we see.Corey: I look forward to having you back in a year or two and seeing how close we get to the reality. “Well, I guess we didn't see that acronym coming, but don't worry. They've been doing it for the last 15 years under different names, so it works out.” I really want to thank you for being as generous with your time as you have been. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Alex: Well, as we're just talking about, you try the product at twingate.com. So, that should be your first stop.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being as forthcoming as you have been about all this stuff. I really appreciate your time.Alex: Yeah, thank you, Corey. I really appreciate it. Thanks.Corey: Alex Marshall, Chief Product Officer at Twingate. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a long angry ranty comment about what you hated about the episode, which will inevitably get lost when it fails to submit because your crappy VPN concentrator just dropped it on the floor.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

What if you could perform beyond the limitations of your own voice? Anne is joined by special guest Alex Serdiuk for a bonus Voice and Ai episode. They discuss Respeecher's speech-to-speech technology, the limitations of your natural voice, and how a synthesized voice is similar to a printing press. The future isn't just on its way - the future is here - and creative possibilities are endless when human voices and technology work together... Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast for another episode of the AI and Voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to bring you special guest Alex Serdiuk. Alex is the founder and CEO of Respeecher, an AI speech-to-speech based company that creates voice cloning for content creators. Respeecher's technology was the first synthetic speech adopted by big Hollywood productions starting around 2019. And their primary focus is in improving the voice cloning technology in many directions, including the tech democratization to let sound professionals and creators have access to it. And as a voice talent, we love that. So Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure having you. Alex: Hey Anne, everyone. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. Anne: Yes. So I have so many questions. You're a relatively young company founded in 2018, correct? Alex: Yes. That's correct, yes. Anne: Yeah. So, but you seem to have come a really long way in a very short amount of time. So if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about your company and how you got started. Alex: Yeah, actually for us, it felt like a very long amount of time, like eternity. But yeah, we started a bit earlier than 2018 with the idea we were playing around for several years. So we actually participated in one hackathon in Kiev, in Ukraine, and everyone were picking this ideas of applying deep learning AI, quite sophisticated machine learning techniques to do something with visuals, to do something with pictures. And we thought that would be cool to try doing something with speech, and that's harder task because we are much picky about the stuff we hear, unlike the stuff we see. And we ended up winning that hackathon with a very simple prototype of voice conversion technology that allowed one voice sound like another voice. Then we started to play around with the technology, started to speak to some folks we thought who could be our first clients, if you start this company. And they told us that it's all about quality. So if you talk about high quality voice cloning, it should be really high. So it should be indistinguishable for listener, whether it's synthesized or not. And given that we are quite picky about the sounds that we spot all the tiny little artifacts in sound the task has been challenging. So we launched the company in 2018 and took us about a year to get to the level where it could actually be of interest to some big sound engineers in Hollywood. And since then we've been improving the technology in several directions, usability, quality of the sound, speed, all that stuff. We try to make better on constant basis. Anne: Got it, got it. So, all right. What might seem like a simple question, because I think a lot of us in the voice industry, we've heard about text-to-speech. And as a matter of fact, we've been doing it for a very long time, you know, TTS projects. But now speech-to-speech is different. And so tell us exactly what is the difference between text-to-speech and speech-to-speech. Alex: Yeah. The differences in input, right? So when you use text-to-speech, you type words, and there is some AI that tries to make those words sound like they were spoken by human. The thing is there are two, in my opinion, holistic problems with text-to-speech. And that's one of the reasons why we do speech-to-speech. The first holistic problem would it text-to-speech be so limited to language models, to vocabularies. So if you want to try something different from what is in the vocabulary, it would fail. So if you try to pronounce some unusual name or street address, text-to-speech doesn't know where to take it from. That's one problem. The second one would be emotional control. And this one is huge. So text-to-speech can offer you few emotions, right? It can sound excited or sad, but that's it. And we humans are best in terms of producing emotions as we use our vocal apparatus. And we are the best in terms of being guided, how to produce emotions. So if you try to imagine very sophisticated text-to-speech that would allow you to have all these triggers our vocal apparatus has from the day we were born, that would be a very comprehensive tool. That would be extremely hard to use. It would be just simpler to say it in the exact way you want to say it. And that's where it's speech-to-speech comes in. So the idea of speech-to-speech is to enable a human speaking. The voice of another human is speaking in another timbre and all the emotions, all the inflections, all this stuff is being taken from source speaker. That means that you act, but you remove this boundary of being attached to the vocal apparatus, you were born with, the voice you have at the particular moment of your life. You can sound very different and that would be natural because emotions, inflections, acting would be yours. The timbre would be different. Anne: So then you require an actor to be a model for whatever voice that gets applied to? Is that correct? Alex: That's correct. We heavily rely on the actors. Anne: So then I would think that it's a different process because what I'm familiar with in terms of synthetic voices is that we record a whole bunch of prompts and then there becomes this voice that's created from that. And your technology basically has a source voice, is that correct, that is the actor? And then you can apply any different voice to that voice model? And so for every script, you would have an actor speaking those words, and then you would be able to apply any voice to that? Alex: Yeah, that's right. So basically our model compares voices. So it compares your voice to another voice you want to sound like, and it understands the difference between your timbre and the timbre you want to sound alike. And then after model learned those differences, you can actually feed their recordings in your voice. And those recordings would be converted into the voice of your desire. Anne: So then let's talk about the target voice, first of all. Is that something that let's say when you have different target voices, if I want it to be a target voice, I would say, how do I create that target voice? Is that similar to how most people create their synthetic voices? Meaning I record a series of prompts, and it becomes part of the data model, and then a voice is created, and then that is how you create your target voices? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. It's similar to text-to-speech. So basically you would need to record your voice in very good condition for some time, though speech-to-speech requirements are all over usually than text-to-speech. You don't need to go in studio and spend like hours. Say on a particular script, we can take existing recordings of your voice. And that would be enough. We just need observations of your voice saying different things in different emotions so model would learn it and then it's good to go. Anne: Interesting. So then it's basically your model, which is the actor, would be any good either audio example that you have of acting, but it doesn't have to be the exact script? Alex: Correct. Anne: Is that correct? Okay. Alex: Yeah. That they can read a lullaby for their baby or whatever. And in many of our projects, in many of our film projects, we had to deal with old recordings because we used to do a lot of de-aging or resurrecting projects. And that's cool about speech-to-speech that we can take existing recordings in quite a small amount. So currently we require like 40 minutes, but in plenty of projects, we had to deal with much less data. Anne: Wow. So then, so this is an additional layer that you do. So not only do you create the target voices in a traditional like text-to-speech kind of way where you're creating the synthetic voice, but you're also creating that speech-to-speech model, which is the acting. And that, again, like you're saying, doesn't necessarily have to be the same script that you want to be repeated. Let's say there's a new movie out, and you want to have a particular target voice on it. Would the actor model have to go in and say all the lines first so that the speech-to-speech target could kind of, I guess, mimic it or reiterate it? Alex: Yeah. So the -- the way how our system works, we would on the first stage, on the training stage, we would need just examples of a target voice, someone we impersonate, and source voice, a voice actor who would be doing impersonation. And we don't care much about what is the content, what are the spoken words? So it could consist of the content that needs to be converted further for the movie, but it could be something different. But then once the model is trained, you can say exact lines in the exact performance that are needed for the movie. And that would be converted into a target voice within minutes. Anne: Got it. That's pretty impressive. What are the applications that you see for your speech-to-speech software? Alex: Yeah, we've been focused on very high quality content because what's special about our technology, it can produce very high quality results, not just because of sound quality itself, quality of the sound files, but also because of the control you would have over emotional content. So you can make it sound exactly as you want it to sound. We've been applying our technology for films, animation, TV series, where we helped content creators get voices they cannot get in any other way. Like we did some work for Mandalorian season two, where we helped with making the voice, synthesizing the voice of young Mark Hamill, young Luke Skywalker -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- who appeared in the very last scene. And you cannot get this voice anymore. You have recordings of 40 years old, but the voice of Mark Hamill is drastically different -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- from what he had 40 years ago. Anne: 40 years ago. Alex: That would be one application. We did some resurrection projects. One of them audience might have heard of would be Super Bowl opening where Vince Lombardi came and said some encouraging things about all the challenges our society needs to go through in this quite, quite hard time. Anne: I remember that. Alex: Yeah, that was a powerful piece we did together with NFL Digital Domain, 72 and Sunny. And the idea was to resurrect the voice of this person. We also did one cool project in resurrection where we made quite famous announcer -- not just announcer, but basketball commentator in Puerto Rico, who died 20 years ago, to voiceover the whole game in August, when -- Anne: Wow. Alex: -- Puerto Rico made it to Olympics. Anne: Wow. Alex: And that was huge for us because we were focused on short form content for quite a while. Our technology has been heavy and we required a lot of take. And that might have been one of the first projects when we had like our own health (?) of voiceover in one take that had to be converted overnight for putting on TV the next day. And it worked out. So it sounded good. And recordings for target voice for Manolo were extremely bad. So it was quite, quite complicated, but it turned out to be working, and Telemundo put it on stream. Anne: Wow. So then that's very impressive. Now it's also very scary, not just for me as a voice actor, but I'm thinking for the consumer, right, who's listening to the voice. So what sort of steps are taken to, I guess, notify the listener that maybe, especially if you're resurrecting voices. I would imagine that there's gotta be some sort of a protocol where you're allowing people or letting people know that this voice is resurrected or like, what are your thoughts on that? Alex: Yeah. I mean, we basically build some guiding principles, guiding ethics principles from the very beginning when we started. And the first thing we always ask our prospective clients, when they want to do a project, whether they have permission or going to obtain one from owner of the voice they're going to clone. And in case if that person would be deceased, we would require permission from their relatives or estate or if that's a president, from president library, from company or individual that owns the right. And that would be the very first step. Then we actually need to be sure that the project is not controversial in general, because it might be not wrong to do something with permission. But if it's very attached to politics or were a controversial content, even with permission, we can just say no, because there is a lot of fear to this technology -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- in general and -- Anne: And deep fakes, I'm thinking. Right? Alex: And deep fakes. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, the technology itself is neither good or bad. It's just an instrument like a Photoshop, like hammer, like printing press. The thing is that we used to be scared of something new. And our goal is to showcase exciting, cool projects, creative opportunities, opportunities for voice actors using this technology without some bad projects to be in the news, because bad news travels so far, right? Everyone's heard about this end Tony Bourdain project that is -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- very controversial. Right? Anne: Yes. Alex: But I guess much less people heard about the amazing work we did for Mandalorian -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- even though Mandalorian is the biggest TV series of 2020. Anne: That's very true. That's very true. So then maybe you can answer this question. As a voice actor, what are the opportunities for me, as a voice actor -- number one, I like that you have an ethics statement on your website, and that you say that you are not allowing any deceptive uses of the technology. But number one, how can voice actors use this to let's say enhance our opportunities? And also how are you protecting the voice actor from any type of misuse or deepfakes or ethics? Alex: Yeah, I mean, in terms of protection, we do have quite strict protocols that are required from us when we've work with biggest Hollywood studios, right? So have data security and stuff in place. In terms of opportunities, look, let's think about this technology from the point of view that the technology itself removes limitation you have. You -- you've been attached to your voice, and you're attached to your voice you have in particular moment of your life. So you can act, you can, you can work only with the particular vocal timbre you have been born with, right? The technology allows you to sound very different. So you can sound like 70 years old woman, or like 12 years old kid. And it would sound like 12 years old kid or 70 years old woman in terms of naturalness. The thing is you would, you would act those voices. And that means that, in my opinion, in future, the distribution of load between voice actors could be significantly improved in future. Because when voice actor is being hired, they're hired for two things, their ability to act and their vocal timbre, the unique timbre they have. And now we can remove the timbre part from equation, and voice actors would be hired because their ability to perform. And that's amazing because some voice actors who meet very high demand for their particular vocal timbre can give this timbre, can license this timbre to other voice actors who can use it with their approval. But also the voice actors who cannot get jobs just because their vocal timbre does not match this particular character can actually get these jobs because they can sound like, like a different person. Anne: So then they would buy a license for that target person? Is that correct? How does that work? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. I mean, our company has been focused on like one-off projects for quite a while because the technology has been heavy, but this year we launched what we call a voice marketplace, and that would be a self-serve product. There -- it's been a roller coaster for us to make this heavy technology we used to operate manually the work in self-serve mode. But voice marketplace is out and it works. And it's really cool piece of technology where we try to democratize access to such a fine tool, to smaller creators and to voice actors. And the idea of the voice marketplace that as user of the voice marketplace, you can speak in 40, more than 40 different vocal timbres we created there for you. And we actually hired people. We paid them money. We got their release and consent to use their voice in the voice marketplace. And those voices we have in the voice marketplace so far belong to average people because the most important part is this -- Anne: The timbre. Alex: -- timbre. Yeah. But acting could be done by user -- Anne: Interesting. Alex: -- and that means that you can sound exactly like any of those voices we have in the system and just utilize opportunities in terms of acting and performance, instead of being limited to the vocal timbre you own. So that's one way how -- Anne: Got it. Alex: -- voice actors can benefit from this technology right now. Anne: So then I can have an account in your marketplace, and then I can purchase additional timbres. Is that correct? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. And you can get access to all the voices we have on the voice marketplace, try it out, but that's like a starting point. Anne: Interesting. Alex: We started with some like average voices, but in future, we want to add other voices, professional voices, because I mean, when system has not seen some particular emotions like singing, or crying, or whispering, it performs suboptimal, right? And people who are not professionally trained to be voice actors cannot produce many emotions. And that means for getting very high quality and professional voices in the output, you would want to see in target voices some professional voices. Anne: Yes. Alex: We want to invite voice actors in future as well as we want to get licensing deals with some famous voices and even voices from the past. Anne: Sure. Alex: But the thing is this kind of improvement to the voice marketplace as a product requires us to build two more layers. The first one would be approval layer. So as target voice, when you supply your voice to the system, you should feel secure that your voice is not used for something that you feel is inappropriate. Anne: Sure. Alex: So you need to be able to approve the content that is being created -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- with your voice or approve the user, the company, or the individual who want to use your voice. That's first thing. The second layer would be building compensation model -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- because there should be economics there's built on usage. Anne: Sure. Alex: It shouldn't be just one time licensing deal. Anne: Right. Alex: And those layers, they require some time to be built as well as some attention. And they should work very properly because it should be trusted. Anne: Yes. And I do believe that for a voice talent, if they were a target voice or the source voice, I think they would want to number one, it should be a permission-based model. Or they would want that. Also they would want fair compensation. And I, I agree with you saying that that compensation would be on a per job basis because there is, you know, the way that we determine usage now, if we're doing a McDonald's commercial, right, we have a certain time that we can use that. And we aren't able to use our voice for a competitor. So I think on a per job usage basis is wise, and that is going to be, from what I understand -- I mean, especially for you, because you're doing the AI development, right, and the products. And so now also to have a marketplace, that's a whole other ball game. So kudos to you for wanting to build that marketplace and to do it in a fair and ethical way. So when any of us go onto your website or marketplace, and we are, let's say recording on it or inputting our voice or sending you files, what is your policy in terms of who owns that voice? Alex: Yeah. Voice is owned by the person who, whose voice it is. Right? And there is quite clear legislation around that. So that's your IP and you own it. And without your permission, your voice cannot be used for something you have not authorized. So your recordings as a source speaker belong only to you. Recordings of converted speech, you get them. So you own the recordings of converted speech, if you're, if you use our voice marketplace on paid basis and that's quite clear and fair. Anne: Great. Okay. So how, going back to the ethics where you say that we don't allow any misuse of our technology, how do you actually prevent anybody from misusing your technology? Alex: Yeah. I mean, on example of the voice marketplace, you can not introduce any target voice, right? You cannot just put their voice of Donald Trump and try to say something in his voice because system does not allow it. Anne: Okay. Alex: And we do not have any public API or even non public API that would allow users or our partners to create target voices themselves. In those cases, when you need a particular voice to be cloned, always need to go through us. And we would require permission. And we actually require written permission, or in cases when we've worked with big and legit studios, we can put it on their shoulders. So they would need to get the permission themselves. The second part of protecting our technology from misuse is actually bringing awareness about existence of this technology. And we did plenty of projects that were focused more -- mostly on bringing awareness like Nixon project we did in 2019 with MIT. And the whole idea of the project was to make Richard Nixon say the speech that was written in case if moon landing (?) goes wrong, actually showcase what modern technologies can do to change our understanding of history. And this educational part is extremely important because we all understand that this type of very fine technology could -- would fall in wrong hands in the future -- Anne: Absolutely. Alex: -- and that's in quite foreseeable future. And the thing is we can protect ourselves only being aware that voice can be manipulated. Anne: Yes. Alex: Like if we're aware that something that is typed in the newspaper could not be true. Though. Our grandparents or grand-grandparents used to believe in everything that was typed. So that's, that's about how we treat the information we receive. And that's about awareness. Another thing we work on is to create a watermark, and the idea of watermark -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- the watermark to be able to tell Respeecher generated content from any other content. That's been quite complex and hard task because with our technology, you can generate a very small file and to put there a legit watermark, you will need to have this balance of watermark being not hearable -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- but being not easily removable. Anne: Right. Alex: And keeping this balance in very short chunks is quite hard task, but I hope in next year, we would release the watermark. Another thing we are doing, we are actually working in several communities that are designed with the idea of building detection of synthetic speech algorithms that would detect synthetic speech or synthetic images. And we are providing our samples, we are providing our recordings that sound very indistinguishable in order to improve those algorithms. And the idea is those algorithms should be created and adopted as soon as possible, and big platforms -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- that distribute content like YouTube or Facebook should have this stuff embedded there. So it would just notify people that this recording or this video might have been manipulated. And that's quite important thing to do. Anne: I agree, especially after hearing samples on your webpage, how really good your technology is, because it is encapsulating like the emotion. And I can only imagine for us, it makes us like doubly scared. You know, text-to-speech, synthetic voices is already scary, but this is an extra kind of step where it sounds so real that -- and especially how can you tell? Let's say that, you know, somehow my voice gets out there, or somehow the model of what I said gets out there, and how do I know that I approved that and allowed that to happen or allowed that usage? So I think it's great that yes, you should get those models out there and that watermarking out there as soon as possible on all platforms. Because I also think for us to be able to give the permission and to know where our voice is being used and for the people listening, they need to know that what they're listening to may not be human or may be altered. So good stuff. Alex: Yeah. That's correct. Anne: Yeah. Alex: However, I want to contradict you a bit about letting viewers of the film be obligatorily notified about synthetic speech being part of that. I mean, viewers are not notified about effects, about postproduction that has been made to speech. And you can think about some cases -- Anne: True. Alex: -- when our stuff is more like a postproduction technique, like we de-age some voice. So an actor acts themselves, but they sound younger, right? It's nothing bad with this use case and you don't obligatory need to have like a huge notification -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- on the center of the screen that -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- this audio has been manipulated. Because if you think about dinosaurs in Jurassic park, you don't have -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- and you don't expect to have those -- Anne: Sure. Alex: -- notifications that this creature does not exist, or Terminator, or like that's a creative part of things. And in cases, if it used in postproduction or as a creative tool, it shouldn't be there in my opinion. But in cases when it's, it might consist of controversial content, it my consist of alternative history content, when someone like Anthony Bourdain never actually say these lines, even if he wrote it himself, the notification should be in place. Because in such cases, we always encourage our clients and documentary creators to be very straightforward and tell their listeners that voice has been modified. Synthesized. Anne: Excellent point, excellent point. Thank you for that. Wow. So this has just been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for educating us and talking about your product. Respeecher. How can BOSSes get in touch with you if they're interested to find out more, or maybe try it out, or maybe be a voice, how can they get in touch with you? Alex: Yeah, so you just basically go to our website, respeecher.com, and you can hear a lot of examples, read our blog, read our ethics statements, look some projects we finished, and we can actually talk about, because there are plenty of projects that have delayed PR rights for us. And you can easily try voice marketplace. You can try the same core technology that we are using for Hollywood for your needs. And we would really appreciate the feedback because voice marketplace is something quite new for us -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- but we want this to be a very good creative tool and tool that would let voice actors do what they do best, act, without being limited to their timbre, and creators be focused on creative opportunities without being limited to necessity of finding a particular vocal timbre. And sometime it's very hard to find. Anne: Wow. Well, thank you so very much for joining me today. I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL that allowed me to connect with Alex today. You can find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and I'll see you next week. Thanks so much, Alex. Alex: Thank you, Anne. Anne: Bye-Bye. Alex: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Allen: Welcome passive traders. Welcome to another edition of the podcast today I have with me my good friend Alex. Alex is one of our graduates of our credit spread Mastery program and I brought him on to talk about what it was like in the program, what his results have been, and what he sees for the future. Alex, how're you doing today? Alex: I'm doing great. Allen: Awesome. Awesome, cool. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, how you got into options, what you do full time, all that kind of good stuff? Alex: Sure, I worked in the corporate world for about 15 years and always invest in real estate. And in 2015, I left the corporate world to focus 100% on real estate. But as far as option trading, you know, in real estate, there are lulls in activity, you know, whether you're caught up in in building and planning, or, as we were discussing earlier, there's a global pandemic. So the Option Trading provided the prospect of additional streams of income. So I had a good friend that actually a family member has been trading options for decades. And he kind of figured out all the stuff you figured out, and they told me about it. And they basically said, Hey, there's this guy, the Option Genius. Of all the crazy programs and snake oil salesmen out there, you know, they said, This guy's he knows what he's doing. His strategies are legitimate. So that's how I kind of got turned on to your stuff. Allen: Awesome. Sounds good. So basically, it was I mean, you're in California, you know, I know you're doing well for yourself. It was basically I need, I'm gonna diversify income, and I'm gonna just try to learn this new skill, or was it more to it? Alex: No, that's exactly it. I mean, we have multiple streams of income. And we're always looking for additional streams. And this, again, based on the family friend that introduced us to you and your program, and this style of trading, we just seem like a very viable additional stream of income. Allen: So you're not looking to quit what you're doing and just go full time trading. This is something in addition to what you're already doing? Alex: Yes. Yeah. But not not yet. You know, I started out I did your program. I started out slowly, I started with the paper trades. And then.. Allen: Well, that's because you had never traded options before. That was your first time doing anything. Right? Alex: Exactly, exactly. I never traded options. I mocked around in the past with securities, but you know, probably lost a bunch of money doing it. So you know, this is really my first introduction to Option Trading. Allen: And how did it go? Alex: I think it's gone great. I've learned a ton. So like I said, I started out with paper trading. And then probably the end of March, I started with my real trades, I can tell you I did since the end of March, I've placed 46 trades, I currently have three active trades for those three trades. So far, so good. They're set to expire at the end of next week, of the trades I've placed, I had 37 out of 43 were successful. So that's like an 86% success rate, the longest run I had was about 14 successful trades. And you know, so interestingly enough, I started out at the end of March, and then by the beginning of June, I was up by 1100 bucks. So again, these are small trades, like 50 bucks or so and potential earnings and, and so on for potential profit. And then all of a sudden, by the end of June, I was actually at $35. So, so what happened was I placed a few trades, and you know, a bunch of them were the potential profit was somewhere around $50. And then there are other trades that maybe are based on the spread or the actual stock or the option. You know, they were worth 100 bucks, potential profit, or max profit. And some of those just didn't go my way. So that I don't know, if the term the trades weren't exactly balanced. So those six trades took me you know, that didn't go well took me from 1100 bucks down to $35. A couple I made mistakes that, you know, like, one was Amazon, I lost about 250 bucks on that. And that was because I placed a trade too soon after earnings, which and I can hear you in my heads. Oh, the credit spread mastery sessions and we're, you know, we're too close to earnings or not before earnings, but after earnings, you know, and the stock got a little bit of a bump, yeah, after earnings and started heading south. But you know, and then a few others like United rentals or Norfolk Southern, they're just larger trades, and they just didn't go well, or they didn't go my way. So.. Allen: So that was basically you were trying to scale it up a little bit or it was just it just happened that they were.. Alex: It's just at that time. I wasn't aware of it. You know, it's interesting, looking back how much I've learned and how much more aware I am of what's happening in the trades, and I have a better sense of what's a good trade, I have a better sense of what's actually trending well. And since I started I got back on the horse in early July. Since then I'm nine for nine In all my all my trades are somewhere around 100 bucks max profit I made sure that I had, they're all balanced. So if I take a hit, you know, for all the wins that one hit won't wipe me out. Allen: So is that 10%? The 100 bucks? Alex: Yes, yes. Yeah, right. I get out of 10% on every trade. So.. Allen: Okay, so basically, you learned your lesson, you figured out like, okay, hey, this needs to be balanced, they'll need to be the same amount. It'll make it easier for me. And then, since then you've recovered. And now.. Alex: Yeah, at this point, I'm at year to date, I'm at 1040. Allen: Good. Alex: I'm up 1040 so.. Allen: How much are you playing with? Alex: I have 15 grand in the account. Okay. Just, you know, again, just, they're not huge transactions. But again, they're all about max profit, or somewhere around $100. And I'd like to start scaling up. Allen: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, it's a wonderful place to start, you need to go from zero to not knowing anything about options to where you are now, where you're like, Hey, I'm consistently being profitable on these traits. And I think now from (inaudible), I believe you do have that confidence that, hey, you know, what this stuff works? If I follow it, if I do it, and I just, you know, put in put in the effort, it's gonna like you, you it's like an ATM machine that or like a slot machine, you know, putting the money you get the money back, you get more back, right? Alex: No, for sure. For sure. And I you know, it's during the the class, I used to ask a lot of questions. And you would say, just you got to go for it. You got to you got to place the trades. And it's, you know, volume. And I can see that it's the more you do it, the more you develop that sixth sense that you always talk about and you put yourself in a better position to see success. Allen: Yeah, I mean, what I remember is that you were you were trying to overthink it, you know? Yeah, it's like, okay, I'm looking at this trade. And there's just one little thing that is like, not perfect. Do I do it? I'm like yes. Allen: Yeah, like six months from now, they're saying that they're not going to have you know, they're gonna have this problem. Like, no, yeah. Let's put it on and see how it goes. Because, and I love the fact that you are starting out small. I mean, obviously, you can go much bigger if you wanted to. But you're like, hey, you know what I'm going to, you know, play with this, I'm going to learn it. I'm not going to risk a lot. Because a lot of people they come in and they, you know, they start off with big numbers right away. Some people come to us like I had one guy. Just yesterday, before he emailed me, he goes, "You know, I have $9,000 but I can't do this. It's like, why? Because I only have $9,000?" You can't, but you could learn it. Right? I mean You could learn you don't have to use the 9000 to you don't even need 9000 to learn. You can do paper trade, like you did. And you start off and you do it, do it, do it. You gain confidence. And then you put a little bit in each one. And then it just grows and grows and grows. Are you at the point now where you feel that you're going to start putting a little bit more money into each one? Alex: Yeah, like I said, I coming into June, I was doing really well. And then I though there are several trades that that almost basically wiped me out and wiped me out. We're talking less than 1000 bucks. But it didn't Allen: It didn't hurt you. Because I mean, that was your profits that you gave back. You didn't go actually go negative. So.. Alex: No so yeah, so now I'm a little more focused. And I upped each trade, like I said, max profit of somewhere around 100 bucks. And so far, so good nine for nine and, you know, slowly ramp it up. So my, you know, my goal for the year is to end up profitable so that, you know, I see some of your, many of your students have seen incredible success. And some of the some of the people in the very class that I was in and make 1000s of dollars or exponentially grow their, their accounts. I'm happy just to be profitable this year. I'm okay to you know, being slow and steady, you know, are taking that approach. Allen: Looking at the long run, the long term picture. Alex: Yeah, I'm a real estate investor. So, you know, we we, um, you can make a killing in real estate, but we were we're primarily buy and hold. You know, we've, I mentioned we started building houses a couple years ago, but by and large, our strategy has been buy and hold. So.. Allen: And it's worked well for you. Alex: Yeah and we're talking about option trading. We're not talking about buying and holding but my point is, it's about you know, the, the broader horizon or the, you know, thinking about the long haul. Allen: Yeah. And I love it that you understand your temperament. You understand your personality, you know, because sometimes somebody in your shoes where they're like, You know what I want, I want to take it long term, or I feel more comfortable when it moves slowly. And then they start doing something that goes against that and they started like day trading or buying options and trying to make 1,000% overnight, and internally, they can't handle it, you know, emotionally, it's like they don't understand why they're not doing well is because, you know, their temperament or their personality doesn't jive with that way of doing it. So I love that you found a balance, and you're not worried about everybody else, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, hey, you know, this guy made 50% this year. Okay, great. I made 100 bucks, I'm okay, I, you know, I got my confidence, I got my practice, I did it over and over again. And I proved it that, hey, this can this can work for me. And so you have from now until the end of your days to keep doing it, and compounding it and compounding and you know, the effort, you know, like, when you start compounding the money, it just gets larger and larger and larger. So what, you know, $100 right now might not sound like a lot to some people, but that $100 is going to grow and grow. And five years from now, it's going to be 1000 to trade and then 10,000 to trades and 20,000. So, cool. Awesome. So I mean, was there anything that anything that was holding you back? Was there anything that didn't click for you right away,or? Alex: I used to sell software, and I was working in Silicon Valley during the internet boom, you know, the whole dotcom thing. So I dabbled in, in a number of tech stocks and so on. Beyond that, I had zero experience. And as far as options, forget it, I dated a girl that went on to trade options commercially. That's about that was the that's about the extent of my experience with options. So I knew absolutely nothing. And just like the logistics of placing trades, and so on. And so many of the things, we talked about your strategies until you actually do it. For me, personally, I had to do it a bunch of times to really internalize it. You know, like I said, simply, you know, what does it mean, for a stock to be trending nicely, you know, or positively, I have a better sense of what that is, at this point. So yeah, it's interesting, I think this is so much like real estate. In real estate, you always say, trade with the odds in your favor. And, you know, that's what the Option Genius is all about. That's what we do in real estate. I mean, you, you do due diligence, you know, and there's there's definitely luck involved. But if you do due diligence, you're investing with the odds in your favor. You know it's, you know, that's how you ensure success, and slowly, slowly build it up. So but anyway, to answer to go back to your question, I, you know, this is you have to figure out how to actually place the trades which can be a challenge in itself, and really internalizing what all these strategies are and how to actually implement them successfully. It just took a little time, but I don't really feel like there were any major barriers are, or challenges, you know. Allen: So it was just because it was all brand new, just.. Alex: Yeah, yeah. And then mentally, you know, I, I'm doing what works for me, you know, mentally building up the size of my trades, or scaling up, I'm scaling up at my pace based on what works for me, like we were just saying, Allen: Yeah, and I mean, the scaling part of it, it's all, it's gonna be all emotional. Because once you have the skill of finding the trade, putting it on monitoring and and managing it, then it's just a matter of zeros, whether you do one contract or 10 contract or 100 contracts, right? Almost all of it is identical. So the hardest part is being profitable, like you said, and then after that, you can just add to it, and then you just managing your emotions and be like, Okay, I'm taking too much risk. I know, I'm feeling stressed out, I'm going to cut it down, or, you know, or, Hey, I feel good about this. Alright, let's, let's, let's go a little bit, let's put the pedal down a little bit. But I also like the other thing, that in options, there are like 1001 different strategies that people could do, you know, everything from under the sun. But you came in and you join the credit card mastery course where we only do one strategy. And that's the one you learned. That's the one you're still trading you haven't, you know, been like, Okay, I like this. This is good. Now, let me go learn something else. Now, let me go learn another one. Let me go let it go. I know you just stuck to that one. And you're at that point where like, Okay, I'm gonna get good at this one. And then we'll see what happens later on. Alex: No, exactly. I mean, by staying focused, I have a better chance of success. And by staying focus, I am learning so much that I know when I start to expand my strategies, or incorporate other strategies, everything I'm learning now by focusing on this one strategy will benefit me. I know towards the end of the course, we got into some of them some other strategies and some more complex strategies. And I just I said, That's not for me. I can't I don't want to hear it right now. You know, I mean, ideally, I'd like to start acquiring using your strategies and acquiring stocks holding on benefiting from the dividends and so on. I just right now, I'm still focused on the credit spreads. Allen: Great. That's awesome. I mean, you know what you want you going after that.Nobody can fault you for that. So give me a couple of takeaways from your trading journey so far, what have you learned? Alex: Yeah, I think it's, you can trade with the odds in your favor, you can put yourself in a position to realize consistent returns, I think you know, that the credit spreads are one thing, but you know, like, you're saying, that should be a small percentage of your portfolio, I see, I just see a lot of potential, you know, again, I mentioned I sold software for a number of years, I was I was a lot of these tech stocks that were blowing up, I was, you know, interacting with these companies directly. And I never really paid much attention to stocks, I just, I was always a did my job. And then I was, I was investing in real estate on the side. So it's just really opened my eyes to the potential of the stock market and investing and, you know, I, I really look forward to building up a portfolio where I have a stream of dividends coming in, and you know, leveraging your strategies to secure those stocks. Allen: Yep. Yeah. And it's gonna be kind of like, buy and hold, you know, it's gonna be like, Yeah, we're gonna own it, and we're gonna collect income every month. We're just gonna rent those suckers out to like income every month. So what was it that surprised you the most about options? Alex: I don't say how easy it is. But that that, that you can actually implement a specific strategy and get consistent results. And I hope I don't sound like a commercial for Option Genius. But that's yeah, that's like I've always thought, you know, even with all the financial regulations in place, you still don't know what's happening within a company, what decisions they're making, what shenanigans are going on. And it's just, it's not so much about the company, it's about what the stock is doing. I mean, outside factors can impact the performance of the stock, but it's what the actual stock is doing in the market versus the performance of the company is that Is that fair to say? Allen: Yeah, I mean, like when we're talking about when we're looking at our layup spreads, you know, it's a one month trade. So, if something is there, that's going to impact the company a year from now, two years from now, it doesn't make any difference to us. We're only worried about, you know, from the start of the trade to the end of the trade. And then we're not worried about the fundamentals or all that other stuff that that happens. If the trade looks good, we'll get in. If not, we don't we skip, and we don't have to do the same trade on the same stock every month. Right? We can we can vary it and move it around. But that said, we do like, there are certain times where we want to go into the same stock over and over again, because they do have a good fundamental picture. They are growing, they're, they're hiring more people, they're getting more customers, or building revenue or more stores or whatever, you know, and the stock will then continue to trend in our in one direction, which makes it easier for us to figure out okay, how do we want to play this? Alex: So actually, I got into Costco three times since June. They've been going up and up and up, you know? So, yeah. Allen: And the end, the cool thing is that, you know, you take a look at Costco, it's like, oh, this chart is doing really well, the stock is going up. Okay, well, if you had bought the stock at the bottom, or whatever it was, and you had hold it to the top, how much would you have made, compared to if you had done spreads on it, you know, from that same time period over and over and over again, wish would have been better? Well, the spread would have, you know, totally kicked it that the stock might have gone up like 20, 30%, and we've been up like 40, 50%. So you're looking at the same thing, and you're looking okay, do I want to buy it? Or do I want to just sell spreads on it? And the spreads if it's continuing to trend in one direction, the spread will always do better than that. So but is that one of your, you have any other favorites besides Costco that you've been playing? Alex: Not really. I mean, I don't think I've been doing it long enough. I guess SPX is another one I invested in several times since I started trading at the end of March. And I've been I have yet to, that is yet to fail me, so.. Allen: Right. So class started in January, you started with real money in March. Right now it's what is it? Start of September. So March, April, May, June, July, August, September. So seven months? You've been doing it for seven months? Cool. So do you feel that you're confident right now that you understand it? You got to you've if you needed to if you had to you could scale it up right now? Alex: Yeah, I think I think I could. I'm infinitely more confident than I was in January. The revelation that all the trades have to be balanced and so on. June was a turning point. I would say, okay, like I said, I started out up 1100 bucks and then all of a sudden at the end of the month I was at 35 bucks. I'm I'm trying to think what the word is.. Allen: It's like a wake up call? Alex: It's like a milestone or.. Allen: A turning point. Alex: Yeah, a turning point. I am at another level at this point. Allen: Okay. All right. So how long do you think it would take somebody else to to go from zero to okay, now I can actually do this, on average, like, how long do you think it should take somebody? Alex: I would say reasonably, two to three months, being part of your class was super helpful when you have the opportunity to work with someone that, you know, with your level of expertise and knowledge. That was huge. That was tremendous. I mean, every week jumping on the call, and going through watching everything you're doing, and hearing your thoughts about specific trades, and so on. That was that was tremendous. So that helps a lot. So I, you know, for me, it was two to three months where I was, you know, able to figure it out and start trading. Allen: And how much time did you put into the learning aspect and the doing it and focusing and watching the calls and all that stuff? Alex: Yeah. So I made an investment in your programs I wanted to get, I wanted to make the most of it. So we had the class every week, and then I, several times a week, I'd go back and listen to the, you know what, listen to the videos, I say, listen to the videos, I'd pull them up as I was, you know, exercising or whatever. And then I'd stop and make notes either on my phone or in my notebook, you know, but I had, I have notes of every class and, you know, go back and make sure I really understood everything go through with a fine toothcomb and truthfully, I haven't looked at the videos in a few months. But every time I'd go back and review the videos, it was like, oh, you know, it always find half a dozen new gems, you know? So, but so yeah, I would, I would spend several hours a week, in addition to the actual official session we had every afternoon, you know, every year. Allen: So but between between the the class time and the study time and the trading that you did, so, you know, like somebody listening to this, they're like, Yeah, you know what, I want to start this, but how much time should I put into it? How much time should it take me every week that they would devote to this? Alex: Yeah, I mean it's if starting off 5 to 10 hours a week, Allen: 5 to 10 a week, okay. Alex: I would say, you know, just thinking, you know, including the class and going back and transcribing the videos. And then doing my own trades, you know, I did 40. I've done 46 real trades today, but I did 37 paper trades. Some of them were purely recommendations from that you provided with us. So you provide it to the class and others were ones that I found on my own. In several instances, I identified a trade and then a few days later that you selected the same stock for the class. So that was, that was encouraging. But uhm. Allen: Okay. I mean, yeah, cuz sometimes people are like, you know, I work a job. I don't know if I could do this, but five to 10 hours a week, I think anybody, if they're serious about learning a new skill, learning about changing, you know, something that could change their life, potentially, I don't think five to 10 hours a week, is that big of a commitment or sacrifice to do something like this.. Alex: Yeah, no. And, you know, the things don't happen by magic. You know, I always like the the saying, the harder you work, the luckier you get. We create our luck, you know, and now I am nowhere near the expert that you and many people like you are, but you know, probably a couple days a week, I sit down and go through my list looking for trades. And then you know, maybe I have to sit if something's not going right, I have to make an adjustment. But now it's probably an hour, two hours, max per week. And that's, you know, that's being in not even two hours a week. You know, my trades. So.. Allen: Sweet. Yeah, I mean, so took a little bit in the beginning. But then once you got the hang of it, then obviously, it's gonna continue down. And now it's just, hey, it's already ingrained. I know what to do. I don't have to go watch the video and say, oh, what would Allen do in this situation? What am I supposed to do here? What does this mean? Now that you've done it so many times? It's just like second nature, where you're like, Okay, boom, boom, boom, steps up steps already in your head. Alex: Right, exactly. Allen: That was the reason that we did the class and the way we did it, where it's like, every week, we get on the call, and we just go through it step by step by step over and over and over again. So you guys can see it and ask questions along the way. And then you guys go, and you do it on your own. And then when you're like, oh, wait a minute, I got stuck. And then you come back and you say, Hey, I got stuck here. And I know you were the I mean, to be honest, you asked more questions than anybody else. And I loved it. And I was like, Man, this guy is into it. This guy's exciting guy. Yeah, he's doing great, you know, because you kept asking and asking and asking. And it really, really helped. Not only you, but also it helped me because I'm like, Okay, this is where they didn't understand. You know, like, if you came, you ask a question. I'm like, Man, I covered that. Okay, but he didn't get it. So let me go and go more detail. You know, let me make another video to address that specific. So he made the class better. So I wanted to thank you for that as well. Alex: I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm not afraid to ask dumb questions, that's for sure. But no, I mean, we'd kind of kind of compiled a list of all the things that we need to look for in a trade and what makes a good trade. And initially, I would go through my list line item by line item. And at this point, I just didn't, you know, I just, it's, I get it in my head, and I just go through, like you said, boom, boom, boom, and then I'm off to the next thing. So, in full disclosure, I probably spend more time than I need to watching like, a couple times a day, I'll pull up my phone and look at Thinkorswim to see how things are doing. And maybe down the road, I won't do that so much, but I still am curious and think about it during the day. Allen: So well, as you scale, it'll be more and more important to do that, you know, and like, I know, you have the funds that you could put into it. So when you do when you're not so busy and doing the other stuff. And you're like, Okay, let me let me make this a bigger part of the portfolio. At that point. You're gonna Yeah, I mean, but it doesn't even take that long. You know, it's like, Oh, hey, I'm going to the bathroom. Let me check my trades. Oh, okay, cool. Done, you know, but it's, to me, at least it's fun. You know, it's like, it's like, points, like, you're playing a video game. And it's just joins, and they're going up and down. And like, oh, no, I got it. So, to me, it's an interesting part of.. Alex: Yeah, no I really enjoy the process sitting down, I pull up my list, and I just, I go through it, I look at the charts. And, you know, I document, you know, something looks interesting, I write it down, I might do some analysis on it. And then once I go through the list, I come back and, and place my trade. So I really enjoy the process. Awesome. And then like I said, this is just like real estate, we, in real estate, you invest with the odds in your favor. And with the credit spreads and all the other options, strategies, you're investing with the odds, and you're trading with the options in your favor, you know, so just it just makes sense to me. Allen: Cool. So what do you what do you think the future is gonna hold for you now? Alex: I'm, like I said, I'm very interested in the passive trading formula program you have, I just, I want to be I want to, if I do it, I want to be present and focused on it. We're just like I said, we got a lot, we have a lot going on at the moment. But I want to expand my portfolio, I want to expand beyond credit spreads, I want to start using these strategies to buy and hold hold stocks for a longer period of time. And, you know, who knows, like when I'm not when I'm out, you know, as a landlord, fixing a, you know, I'm sitting under a sink, fixing a leaky pipe or chasing a tradesman to do something, you know, to fix something that they messed up on a build. I think about how nice would be to just sit behind my computer and have 100% of my income come from options. Yeah. Allen: You think that's ever gonna happen? Maybe we're gonna make that switch? Alex: Maybe I mentioned that family friend that has that was his has been doing this for decades. I mean, this, this is what he does, you know, he's got a significant stream of income from trading options. I think I told you about him. And I think his he loves Tesla. I guess that's what he focuses on a lot right now or the past so many years. So yeah. But he you know, he has a more than healthy stream of income, some purely from doing that. Allen: Right. Now, do you guys sit down and compare notes or get together? Alex: So I keep saying it's a family friend, this is a really good a couple of you know, it's one of my wife's childhood friends. It's her grandfather. So I talked like, he's the guy I don't, I've met him several times. But a lot of my what I'm sharing comes through the his granddaughter. So I'm actually trying to set up some time to sit down and talk to him specifically about this. Allen: She's the oil program yeah? Alex: He's in the oil program, and then she does she trades options on her or she sells options on her own based on what her grandfather taught her. Allen: That's awesome. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you can see it right. It goes from generation to generation. And if you can pass that trade along, it's like, Man, my kids, my grandkids, they're not gonna have to work. They'll know what to do. And it's like using your mind instead of your skills and your body to actually go out and manual labor to do something. So it's really exciting. And I think you got lucky in that sense, where, you know, she, she introduced you to this world, but then you took it to the next level, and you're like, Hey, I'm going to learn this and you put in the time, the effort, and now you're seeing that it works. I still want to see you scale it a lot more. Alex: I'm sorry, I can't report huge earnings. But that's.. Allen: No no no, that's fine. It's not it's not about that. It's it's you know, the fact that you're doing it that's that's a that's a good thing, you know, and you're getting there you're doing it but I want to see you get a better for the time that you put in I want to see you get a better income back. You know what I mean? Because I know you could do it. I have I have 100% faith in you. I know you're doing it. I know you know how to do it. But instead of making just 100 bucks I want you to make like 1000 bucks per trade. So it's like, hey, yeah, you know, a little bit more skin in the game. I feel a lot more fun too. Alex: Yeah, you know, I'll tell you so I said in June I that's when I realized like, hey, all these trades have to be the same amount and I need to I need to scale up from 50 bucks a trade and Honestly, going from 50 to 100, was it took a little bit of a leap of faith. But already, you know, just several weeks later, I'm like, what was the big deal? You know? So.. Allen: It's all mental. It's all emotional, you know? And eventually, you know, you'll do it from 100, you go to 200 to 250. How many trades at one time do you put on? Alex: I was doing as many as 10. Allen: Okay Alex: Like the most was was 12. I know you in the class, we talked about just keeping it a manageable level. Now, since since June, it's been Max four trades. Allen: Okay. Okay. So I mean, if you're doing for them, maybe we could do a little bit more on each one. And see how that goes. Alex: Yeah, I mean, we, you know, what, I'm part of the appeal of the passive trading program is to be able to, you know, pick people's brains and get feedback from the group and ask you some of those specific questions. Hmm, maybe I should get on it not. Yeah, that now's the time. Maybe now's the time to just do it, you know? Allen: Yeah. I mean, if you I mean, but you you said, you know, you don't have all that time right now, because you got all the other projects going on. But like you said that it only takes maybe five hours a week to study. So if you got five hours a week, then yeah, you know, go get that one, it's gonna be now that you've understood, probably 80% of it, the rest of it is going to be pretty simple. You know, because now you know, what an option is, you know, what a call is, you know, what a putt is, you know, what a moving average is, you know, all the indicators and, and all the other stuff that we talked about almost 80% of it, you know, now it's like, okay, which stocks do I buy? And how do I do a covered call? How do I do a naked put rows, things you'll be able to pick up very quickly, because you've already got the foundation for it. So it's not going to take a lot of time. Most of the time, we tell people, Hey, do passive first so you understand the basics, like the covered call is the easiest trade, you know, puts are really easy. And then we get into spreads, you went to spreads first, which is fine. Most a lot of people do that. Because the stocks and the covered calls and naked puts they require a little bit more capital. So if you're going into spreads first, that's fine. The other ones will be a little bit simpler to actually understand and implement once you do Alex: Right. And I realize I'm leaving money on the table by not well beyond not doing bigger trades, you know, not doing the naked puts in the covered calls and so on. There's a lot of there's a lot more money out there. Allen: It's all up to you know, when you feel comfortable, and the time is right. You know, you'll you'll feel it inside you. But hey, you know what, now it's time for me to do this. So it's something that people regret. And they kicked themselves. Oh, man, I should have started 20 years ago. Yeah, but you didn't. So don't worry about it. Don't beat yourself up, forgive yourself, you know, let's just move on. Let's just do whatever works for us right now. Let's just be happy with it and move forward. So.. Alex: I'm doing it. I'm doing it. So.. Allen: Oh you're doing great. You're doing wonderful. And so is there anything else that you wanted to share with our audience? Any final tidbits or advice? Alex: Nothing really, I think we've talked about a lot I will tell you one funny story. I've heard you. You've talked about Disneyland a bunch. So we actually we picked up some passes in in May, or June, we went to we went to we went to Disney they had reduced capacity. So they you know, allegedly it was only 25% of their their allowable or max capacity. So we we had the run of the place, It was still pretty crowded. But man, we we got to go on every ride and never waited more than 15 minutes for anything that's outside. It was amazing. But here I am at the happiest place in the world. And my stocks are going sideways, you know, so I'm on the rides and my kids and we'll walk around the park and I keep looking at my phone and I'm watching Amazon go down. And you know, it's funny, you get emotionally involved in the trades. And in reality, it's 200 bucks, it's no big deal. But finally, by the end of day two, you know, I was out of Amazon and a couple other stocks and just I was able to relax. But it was I thought of you because I know you've been to Disney. You've talked about Disney World a bunch and.. Allen: yeah, I mean, if you're going on vacation, or you know, I've had some people they're like, Hey, I'm going into surgery or I'm doing this or do that. It's like hey, if you're gonna be out of it for a while, take the trade off. It's not worth ruining your vacation. Alex: It didn't ruin it, but it just funny that you know that. Like I said, I was at the happiest place in the world. And I had this I was battling with my with my trades, you know? Allen: Well, that's because you're still learning and so it's still a new thing for you. So I get it. It's exciting, you know. Alex: But you know, as far as parting thoughts, it was a tremendous program. I'm so glad I did it. You know when my family friend introduced us to the whole thing. I was just absolutely intrigued. I read your book, I read That book by the Wharton professor of being that the way to really beat the market is by acquiring stocks with dividends. And I wish I did know about this sooner. It's a very viable means of addition, it's proven to be a very viable means of additional income. And I'm really excited to expand what I'm doing and increase the results. Allen: I mean, you know, because of COVID, we did have a market shock, right, we had a bear market because of COVID. And then the government stepped in and they started printing money like crazy. And so since then stocks have been on a roll. So it's been a great time. So you did miss out on that part of it. But I do believe that, you know, once they stopped printing, and once they start raising the rates, things will stabilize a little bit. And then once the economy comes back, or you know, COVID gets a little bit more under control, and the supply chain issues get fixed and things get back to normal. I think the market and the stocks will be a great place to be as well, you know, so you're still a young guy. And so for the next 20 3040 years, there's a lot of appreciation, there's a lot of gains that you're going to have. Because you now have this skill. Right? And so it's nothing to feel bad about that. Oh, yeah, I wish I wish it started. Yeah. But now's as good a time as any to get started. Alex: I agree. Allen: I like I like what you said, but so thank you, Alex, thank you for everything. You know, it was a pleasure having you in the program and can't wait to see you in the passive program. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. It was fantastic. Really appreciate all the all the knowledge that you shared. Allen: Awesome. Thank you so much. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.  

If you look on Twitter or do a quick Google search, you'll find a ton of chatter about the foolproof DTC playbook. Everyone has ideas about the surefire ways that young DTC brands should be setting themselves up for success. Alex Kubo is here to tell you that those playbooks aren't as written in stone as you might think. Alex is the VP of ecommerce and digital marketing at Burrow, a DTC furniture brand, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explained how and why the Burrow team threw out the playbook when certain aspects of it fell flat. For example, Alex talks about the lessons they learned about the signals that pricing sends, and why it's critical to put the right price on your product to attract the right customer even if that means pricing higher than the playbook says. Alex also dives into what it means to actually be customer centric and how Burrow stays in constant communication with customers. Plus, we discuss why marketing toward buying events or using a spray and pray strategy across a dozen channels is about as useful as setting your money on fire. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Sending The Right Signals: How you price your product or service is one of the most significant ways you signal to customers who you are as a brand and what value you bring. If you price too low, you risk being lumped in with brands that don't necessarily fit with the type of products or value you bring to the table.More Than Words: Saying you are customer-centric and actually being customer-centric are two very different things. To be truly customer-centric requires regularly talking to and learning from your customers and then building experiences and products based on those conversations. You can't just assume you know what customers want, you have to do the work to find out.A Horse of a Different Color: There are best practices and guidelines that many companies follow to get themselves off the ground. Sometimes those playbooks work, but in other cases, you have to toss out what everyone says is the right strategy and go in a new direction. Whether that's in your social strategy, your pricing, or how you're getting feedback from customers, don't be afraid to buck tradition and do something different.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today on the show, we have Alex Kubo joining us, who currently serves as the VP of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing at Burrow. Alex, welcome.Alex:Thanks, Stephanie. Excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm very excited to have you here. It was cool reading a bit about Burrow's background and starting at Y Combinator, and I was thinking it might be fun to start there, back in 2016. What did it look like starting the company, and then we can get into today?Alex:Totally. So, I was fortunate that I actually met the two co-founders of Burrow while were on the same business school program in Philadelphia. And back in the fall of 2015, actually, Kabeer and Stephen, the two co-founders and my classmates were both furnishing their apartments as they moved into Philadelphia for the program, and they had two very distinct but related experiences. Kabeer purchased a sofa from West Elm in Philly, and it wasn't going to arrive for about 12 to 16 weeks, which I think, nowadays, people are pretty used to seeing those timelines, but Originally, it was like, "Whoa, this is not Amazon." And so, Kabeer actually used the cart, the dolly in his apartment building and rolled it to West Elm, and picked up a floor model and brought it home, because the lead time was going to be longer than his first semester, so obviously, that was not going to be a great experience.Alex:Stephen went the classic IKEA route, right, where you don't come in to grad school with a ton of money and need to furnish your space quickly. And so he did that, and then ultimately, it's a waste down the road, right? IKEA furniture, you can't move because of the quality of the materials and that sort of thing.Stephanie:[crosstalk]. Yeah.Alex:Yeah. So, the question ultimately became, why can't you have that higher end quality that you might find at a West Elm, or Pottery Barn, or Crate and Barrel, but the convenience, the modern day conveniences that Amazon has made the default expectation of consumers, so fast, and free shipping, and easy delivery process, and be able to modularize that design so that you can set it up and not have to deal with like the IKEA hex key or any of these really cumbersome assembly processes? And so, that concept was born. And out of that came a series of product innovation that ultimately, Stephen and Kabeer got into Y Combinator with just a pitch deck and no product and used that accelerator to develop the product, to prototype the product, and ship it.Alex:A funny little anecdote is that from the time they incorporated the company to the time they shipped their first product was shorter than the period of time that West Elm quoted Kabeer to ship his first couch.Stephanie:Oh, wow. That's great.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:And what were you doing when they were going through Y Combinator?Alex:I was actually working on my own concept in the health and fitness space and ended up calling time on it right towards the end of the summer because of a number of challenges that I was having on my end, and joined up with Stephen and Kabeer to help build out the demand side of the business. And I had a relatively intimate knowledge of the business and where they were at because we were in all the same classes working on our own businesses. And I had helped them tangentially with sourcing components during our first year of the program, because I have a background in mechanical engineering and they didn't have any background in physical hardware. And so, there was already the groundwork for relationship. And then I was trying to move my own discipline into more of a consumer facing and ground level marketing and product marketing role, so it actually made a lot of sense.Alex:So, we set it up as a brief relationship to make sure that the working relationship was there, which it turned out very quickly, it was. So, I have been tasked or had been tasked with basically just building demand and ran with it since.Stephanie:So, since then, what does the world look like now compared to when you started and you were building up demand? I mean, I'm sure you guys were trying out Facebook and all the traditional platforms that everyone's like, "Every brand should be on Instagram and Facebook, and if you're not here, where are you?" What did it look like then and now?Alex:So, now it's a much more disciplined and much more properly positioned business than it was in the beginning. Two critical mistakes that were good healthy mistakes to make in the early days were, number one, brand positioning and product positioning. We had this idea in our head that... and sort of the classic Warby Parker pricing story of like, they wanted to price it $45, but their advisors and professors advised them not to do that because it would signal the wrong value to the customer. We had a similar experience where, for some reason in our heads, we had to price our couch under $1,000. And we made that decision because we wanted to be hyper competitive on price and make it the default, obvious solution.Alex:The problem that we failed to acknowledge is that consumers nowadays have very limited time to understand the differences and nuances between products. They're not stupid, they're not lazy, but they do have very limited time. And so, you have to be very clear and explicit with them, and part of that is signaling. And one of the most powerful parts of marketing that I think is most often overlooked is a focus on pricing and what that does from a positioning standpoint.Alex:When a lot of shoppers were seeing our product under $1,000 and the fact that it shipped in boxes, which we were very forward with, because we focus so much on the attributes of the product and less on the experience around it, which is another step in our evolution, that people immediately equated those two things, low price and ships in boxes, with a more expensive version of IKEA. So, then it was us talking to IKEA shoppers, and you're not going to convince an IKEA shopper to spend another 300, $400 on a sofa, right? What you need to do is talk to the West Elm shopper, the Pottery Barn shopper, the Crate and Barrel shopper.Alex:So, we actually, for a number reasons, increased prices in late 2017, about half a year after we launched.Stephanie:How much did you increase them by?Alex:Originally, the sofa was priced at 950. By the way, much different cogs, profile as well, at that point. We increased the price to 1,095 to start. So, it was a pretty meaningful difference on a percentage basis, and especially when you talk about margins.Alex:Interestingly enough, everything you learned in microeconomics about the relationship with the supply and demand curves went out the window, because we increased the price and demand shot through the roof.Stephanie:Wow. Did you get it in front of new people? What else were you doing to get it-Alex:I mean, we were doing a lot of the same things in terms of building full funnel architecture on paid social and paid search and that sort of thing, and again, applying a lot of those early D2C playbook type approaches, which ultimately turned out to not be the best approach for us. But nothing changed substantially from a marketing perspective. We were still reaching a lot of the same people, it's just that we were now signaling to those people that we belonged in the comparison set with a higher quality piece of furniture. That helps also, because a lot of our value props, it's much easier to convince somebody who has shopped at one of these higher end brands and had to wait super long or had to go to a showroom and deal with a frustrating shopping experience with this overbearing sales associate, pay for shipping, and ultimately, have to be home to get a piece of furniture delivered, and either take a day off from work. Again, much different world back then than it was today.Alex:But it's much easier to talk to those kinds of people who've experienced those pain points and tell them, "I'm going to take all of that pain away," than it is to talk to somebody who's never experienced those pain points and doesn't need the higher quality piece of furniture, again, the IKEA shopper, and talk to them about all these future pain points that they've never experienced but that we can help them avoid. That's maybe one of the biggest lessons learned, is that people do not think much about the future. They're often very, very focused on the present. And so, as much as you want to talk about why you should go to the doctor every year, why should you should go to the dentist every six months, it's like, people are not going to react until they have a problem.Alex:So, we've experimented a bunch with what is the leading value prop. So, we talked to consumers, and one of the ones that we talked about very early was this concept of modularity and how, when you move into your next apartment, you can just purchase another seat instead of buying a whole new sofa to accommodate the new space, or rearrange the existing configuration that you have to fit the new space requirements. Problem is, people are not thinking about that. They don't really care. They can't think that far in advance of two to three to four years down the road when moving into the next apartment. And so, we've deprioritized that in terms of communication and lead with other things that are more immediate, like fast and free shipping.Stephanie:Yeah. Got it. So, you're mentioning earlier that the D2C playbook didn't work for you guys, where now, even these days, you can search that and you'll find a bunch of the playbooks and people are still saying like, "This is what you need to do to be successful." What were some other things that you did back then that you completely reversed and you were like, "This doesn't work for us"?Alex:Yeah. So, I think, first, was not acknowledging how complex and lengthy the shopping journey is for a piece of furniture online. Obviously, it's a big investment, it's also mutually exclusive with something else, your home, right? Let alone the high price, you're not going to just buy another couch when you have an existing one in your home, right? You need to think about getting that out or you have to do it right at the right moment with a moving event or something like that.Alex:So, the first thing that we had to realize is that what we can't do is architect our funnel around existing attribution technology or just rely on optimizing towards purchase events in digital channels. What we had to do is to look upstream and find correlations and causation between different upstream, midstream, and bottom stream events to really architect a healthy full funnel. And so, most of our campaigns are not architected towards purchase events, they're architected towards or optimized towards something more upstream.Stephanie:[crosstalk] for a couple examples.Alex:Yeah. I guess one interesting one that we've learned over time is there's a pretty clear correlation between add to cart and purchase, and the cart abandonment rate is relatively steady. We do things over time, obviously, to improve that, but it's not something that fluctuates wildly over time. And so, one of the things we can do is just optimize towards an add to cart versus a purchase.Alex:The other benefit of that is it often can happen in the first session. So, when you see a lot of the privacy restrictions right now and a lot of the issues with cookies going away and that sort of thing, it helps us. We've actually always been architected to bear that burden a little bit better than some of our other D2C peers.Alex:And then the other thing, besides the purchase journey, was also that we were just doing way too many things at once. We had, and we still have today, a very lean team. The difference between now and then is that back then, we thought the best approach was to spray as wide as we possibly could and activate 10 to 15 channels with me managing all of them, by the way, and not doing a good job.Stephanie:It sounds very chaotic and not fun.Alex:Yeah. Not at all, not at all. And only until we really peeled back and just focused on a handful of things and did them really, really well, that's when we actually started churning results, but more importantly, honestly, that's when we started actually learning what was working. Because previously, we were just spending a lot of money, we were generating sales, but we didn't really have a clear idea of where they were coming from, again, because the purchase journey was so complex, right? It wasn't a problem that we could solve by just putting an attribution layer in somewhere. We had to really hyper focus on one or two things and do them really, really well.Alex:The concept of growth in the past has generally been focused on the top line. And what that means, often, for a lot of companies, is to just go into as many different channels and try to tap into as many different demographics as you possibly can and then find out what's working and what's not working. I think the issue is that the broader investment community has wisened up to that, right, and they're holding us more accountable on a unit economics and customer economics level, versus just month over month top line growth, which in reality, it's just a vanity metric, right?Alex:So, it is more favorable to take a more disciplined approach, albeit potentially slower top line growth, to really uncover those median sites that you can actually build a solid foundation on and grow a real, scalable, profitable company on versus just something that's just, scaling wildly at the top one but in reality it's just lighting money on fire.Stephanie:So, for a higher priced product like Burrow and a longer buying cycle, what platforms would you advise other brands to look at and optimize for and which ones would you pull back from?Alex:Yeah. So, I think if you acknowledge that it is, there are a lot of things that people have to learn about the product, a lot of things that people have to get comfortable with and confident in the purchase. You think that a lot of these shorter form mediums, like paid social, paid search, right? It's just a quick second and a half interaction with an ad, they're not going to be as effective for a product like ours, and that's true. What we have indexed up on are things that are more storytelling mediums. So, the earliest insight into this was we partnered with a small podcast in late 2017, and it's sort of one of those micro ones, it's not on a network, and just talks about fantasy football. And we just got introduced to the gentleman that runs it, and did a small test, and the results were incredible.Alex:Part of what we've learned over time from that point, rapidly scaled the podcast program for us is that it's highly dependent on the host, and the reason that it's highly dependent on a host is because the efficacy of that channel comes from the quality of the storytelling. And that is really what benefits our brand, is that if we go and we send a podcast host a product and they have the same amazing experience that our customers have, they can talk about it in a much more authentic way, but also, a much more individual way. We've actually matured to not providing very detailed scripts to a lot of our podcasts hosts and just telling them to talk about what has been most exciting for you, and that really brings out the energy in the advocacy for the brand from the host. So, I'd say it's really about focusing on storytelling mediums. So, I lumped other video, long form video into that as well. A little bit less of authenticity, but also helps communicate a lot of these little value props that add up to the major value proposition.Stephanie:So, the other thing that comes to mind is branded content. I mean, I'm thinking about something like Formula One where now the results are out, everyone knows it worked really well for them. It was very, I would think, pretty organic, didn't feel like it was just a brand push. How are you guys thinking about other kinds of content like this?Alex:I don't know if we're at the stage yet where we can start thinking about that sort of thing. I think that Formula One is a great example of taking two powerhouses and linking them together where the sum is greater than or the whole is greater than the some of the parts. So, we're thinking a little bit less about something like that and creating more on a micro scale, I would say, brand and content.Alex:So, when you talk about something like the influencer arena, I am probably the biggest advocate against using influencers in the context that they are used today. And first of all, just to clarify, a true influencer is not somebody that says, "I'm an influencer" on their Instagram profile description, right? A true influencer is somebody that can speak to a community and elicit a response, and often, within a specific category, right? So, I'm not going to give a beauty "influencer" a furniture product and expect him or her to have an outsized impact on the sales.Stephanie:Stephanie:So, you'd focus on the niche influencer who might only have 1,500 followers or something, which is something I think I talked about early on this show, of going through the comments of Instagrammers and seeing, are the people in there asking, "Where can I buy that? Where did you get that from?" Or are they just like, "That's great. Cool. I love that." What kind of engagement are you getting will show if that person has influential power over their community or not.Alex:Totally, totally. And obviously, it's going to vary by a vertical too. This is sort of an extreme example, right? Again, going back to the very considered purchase, even our ability to measure the impact of that is going to be super limited. So, we've actually leaned into the influencer community for, more so is, partnering with actually photography influencers. One of the bottlenecks and problems with our vertical is that our products are very large and our photo shoots and video shoots require massive studios and massive crews that are very, very expensive. Meanwhile, all of these people out there that can already take great pictures and already have really interesting homes need furniture. And so, we can often partner with them in a much more economically scalable way to get a huge diversity and huge volume of content created that can showcase different styles, different aesthetics, different home types, and different personalities, and just build this library of content instead of having to book homes ourselves and go through the whole production process.Alex:So, we've actually been doing that for a while just purely based on economic reasons. But it's interesting to see that now, I think there's going to be a massive shift towards organic for a number of other reasons. When you talk about a lot of the privacy regulations that are going on right now, over the last 10 years, the control of the voice or the conversation has shifted towards the consumer and towards the user. You see like case examples of this with like GameStop, for example. The retail investor just had a massive impact on the market from such a small player, right? Because the control of the conversation momentum is shifting away from the brands that have the big budgets and towards the customers that have the voice, the authentic following.Stephanie:That's the influencer of the year right there.Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:And Reddit. And that's probably where all the other influencers are, an area that I haven't even thought to go, but we've had guests come on previously where Reddit is how they figured out how to build their business, which I haven't even thought to go there. Alex:Totally, totally. I mean, it makes total sense, right? It's experts that are talking because they're passionate about what they're talking about, right, not because they have a vested interest or they are trying to make money off of it, then that's where you get that authentic content from and the actual truth.Stephanie:So, how do you go about incentivizing that or structuring it so it can come in? Because I'm sure a lot of brands are like, "I want my customers to talk about me and take pictures and do all the things," and then they just sit there and nothing comes in. So, what are you doing behind the scenes to make that happen?Alex:So, it's less about focusing so much effort on trying to elicit that response just by trying to elicit it and more about really focusing on that product innovation and that experience that will naturally have that effect on people, right? You don't want somebody to talk about your product in a positive way because you're paying them to talk about it in a positive way, you want them to really advocate, because that means that not only are they talking on the channel that you want them to talk about it, they're also having side conversations. And when people come over to their homes and they're asking, "Wow, where did you get that beautiful sofa from?" They are talking not just about, "Oh, I got it from Burrow," they're also saying like, "And it happens to have these stain resistant fabrics, and it has all of these great other materials, and it was modular, and it was super easy to get it delivered and get it set up." And that's what you really want to go off of.Alex:So, I would say the biggest focus should be on nailing that product innovation and nailing that customer experience, and that's how you can count on that customer conversation to be generated rather than trying to chase down your customers and get them to talk about it in a less authentic way.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. I think that the days when people on Amazon are like, "I got paid for this review," or something, those will be gone very soon, because I don't know about you, but every time I go through a threat and I see that, I'm like, "Don't trust you, don't trust you." I just want to see the normal person who's reviewing it at their own goodwill, or not, maybe they're mad, but I want that. I don't want someone saying, "I got a free product for this review." That just seems like those days are gone.Alex:Yeah, totally, totally.Stephanie:So, the other thing I want to talk about is product development. I saw that your co-founder and CEO said, "Every single product we've ever launched has exceeded expectations and projections, and that's a testament to our customer-centric research-driven design process," which I want to dive into that and hear. I'm sure many brands are like, "I want every single product of mine to be a success, and I want to expand my skews." So, how do you guys go about designing and crafting new products?Alex:Well, I think one thing that we should clear up is the concept of customer centricity is used so broadly and inauthentically, I think. A lot of brands will claim customer centricity and they'll think that they're being customer centric because that's who their customer is and they just need to make money off of them, and so they'll say that they're thinking about all their needs. The problem is they're not actually talking to the customers, they're assuming on behalf of the customers that they know what that customer needs. Or they're just testing messaging, which is fine. That's been the traditional approach of, "Okay, if I play up this feature or this benefit versus this feature or this benefit, and this one does better, that's what the customer must want," right? But it almost becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.Alex:We take it to a much deeper level, not just with our customer community but also our lead community, all of our email subscribers that have yet to join and make an actual purchase with us, and actually going to them and asking them very specific and lengthy questions. I remember the first time we sent out a customer survey about one of the next products that we were going to launch and just wanted to get their input on like, "Is this the right product?" Number one, and B, "What are those little things that really bother you about this product?" And did a ton of just open ended response analysis based on that.Alex:The biggest surprise for me from that was the response rate. For a quiz or rather survey that took probably a solid 10 to 15 minutes of someone's time to go through and really complete in depth, which they did, the response rate was astounding. And that opened our eyes to, "Wow, this needs to become a regular occurrence within our work stream."Stephanie:How quickly were you sending this to them? Was it a week after they got their product and are trying to set it up, or what did that look like?Alex:Well, there's a couple different ones. So, what we have is a couple different touch points that are automated or triggered based on somebody actually making their first purchase with us. So, we had, obviously, a post purchase survey right away, which I think is one of the most underappreciated and can be most impactful survey points that people do, or brands do, rather. We also have an NPS survey, which going back to how do you elicit a response from customers and activate customers, NPS is going to be your biggest indicator of how much of that is happening in the background. And that is actually backed up by an element on the post purchase survey where we ask, "Were you were referred by a friend? Does that friend own Burrow furniture, or do they not, or do not know?" And that can also give us a really solid indication of the impact.Alex:So, beyond the triggered survey points, we also do intermittent studies, and it's almost on a monthly cadence now, of either focuses on new categories in general, or we've already identified the category, we've already identified the specific product and we're trying to nail down colors, color combinations, finishes, specific features, doing conjoint analyses on like, what is most important to this set of consumer? I mean, we've really taken it to a super, super deep level.Stephanie:Have there been any products that you launch based off consumer feedback or maybe early launches where it's like, "Oh, they led us astray with that one"? Because I'd be like, "I want a fluorescent pink couch." And then I'd be like, "Oh, I had a little too much wine that night. Sorry about that."Alex:Yeah. Fortunately, we're pretty good at statistics and we can identify outliers and not get swayed by them too much. There actually have not been. And I think it speaks volumes for this concept of authentic customer centricity where... and you can also cross-compare between the customer set and the subscriber set, right? The subscribers are a great audience because they have not purchased anything from you, or at least the subscribers that are not customers, and there's a reason why, right? Versus the customers, they did find something that you offered already and they've already bought into the brand, and they're responding to you because they're still engaged. And so, that's one set of needs that you need to fulfill.Alex:And then there's the other set of needs, and oftentimes, there's a good amount of overlap, which is great for us, and oftentimes, there's not, and that's when we need to make choices around what does that offering look like and who are we really chasing with that?Stephanie:Yep. The other thing I think you mentioned in the past was around how you start thinking about zoning and mapping out what else a person needs in their room, which means like, "Oh, brilliant, okay, if someone got a couch, a little swivel chair, and obviously, they need pillows." And I want to hear, did that method work, and how have you expanded that since you first started trying it I think maybe a year and a half ago or so?Alex:It did, totally. I mean, you take one concrete example of this is with the advent of coffee tables for us. We first launched the sofa and then we launched our first line of coffee tables, and those were specifically designed dimensionally to work best with the sofa styles that were selling the most volumetrically. So, we knew that there was a high rate of match, right, between them. It wasn't like we were designing for something that we were only selling like 5% of our assortment or something like that.Alex:Where that took another level is in 2019, we launched the corner sectional, and then arrangements and configurations started getting a lot more varied and a lot more... opened up actually, additional demographics as well, with more suburban, satellite city homes with larger room spans. And that opened up a new category, and so what we had to do is to figure out, "Okay, well, if you have a five-seat corner sectional, none of our coffee tables really make sense for that. And so, how do we create a coffee table that works perfectly in that configuration for that customer specifically?" So, that's when you saw in late 2020, we released our Kettle and Signal collections, which are more of a round geometry versus a rectangular geometry. And that happens to work really well with things like a Double Chaise Long King Sofa, where the chaise is wrapped nicely around the round coffee table, or the corner sectional, it creates a really nice conversation pit type feeling.Alex:So, it is very much about understanding how our pieces interact. And then the next level that is, what are the types of rooms that people are using it in? What are the actual dimensions of those rooms? And what logically, could somebody need the most, given that room design and size?Stephanie:It seems like a lot of brands are missing that right now, because oftentimes, I mean, whether it's furniture or a lot of other things, I'm like, "Where is that matching dresser set? Or where is the pillow that goes with that?" And it feels like having to go around and look in different places and trying to find it myself, I'm like, "Why am I doing the work? I just want a kit which is like, 'Here's all the five things that match together.'" But why is that so hard? I don't get why can't brands do that?Alex:I think one of the biggest examples of this is that company brand list that skyrocketed, but they were launching things in such unrelated categories that there was no bond between them. And companies nowadays need to think a lot more about lifetime value than they had to necessarily, in the past. Acquisition cost is growing, and they can no longer just rely on first purchase profitability in order to sustainably scale their business, and they need to think about building a relationship with the customer. And that often comes from creating relationship and being the default brand or site to go back to when they may have that next need and finding that perfect accompanying piece, right? Versus just like you buy cleaning detergent from the company, and you come back and, oh, they're offering soccer balls or something.Stephanie:Pillows.Alex:Yeah, it's like, "Okay, well, that doesn't make sense."Stephanie:Yeah. Which makes me think, I mean, it seems like the world is headed towards a more curated world right now. Maybe back in the day, I would go to a Wayfair or something like that and I'd be like, "Cool, I'm fine with scrolling, scrolling," five years later, still scrolling and looking for what I want. It doesn't seem like consumers want that anymore. So, how do you see the consumer journey and preference adjusting now where maybe a couple years ago, that would be totally fine?Alex:Yeah. I think it's almost a byproduct of the ease of standing up a company nowadays. It is exponentially easier to start a company, a direct to consumer company than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. So, because of that, the market has just blown up in terms of the number of companies. And so, the paralysis of choice has shifted from like going to an old school Sears or Macy's and just having like a million different options, or as you put it, like a Wayfair, and just tens of millions of options, to now having to build a relationship with a brand and trust that that brand is making the right decisions. And so, that's why we offer a very select assortment of fabric colors, leg finishes, arm styles. In reality, we can house tens of component skews and offer tens of thousands of combinations to the customer, but what's ultimately the most important thing is that we do it in a way that is still a very simple and clean experience for the customer so that they get that sense of they're creating their own product, but not to the extent of being overwhelmed.Alex:I think of myself on old school furniture sites and staring at the screen from two inches away trying to figure out the difference between this gray and that gray, and I'm like... and then you request swatches from them and they come 10 weeks later.Stephanie:Yeah. I've recently been through that experience. It's not great.Alex:Yeah. No, it's not fun.Stephanie:They arrived and I'm like, "What was I trying to buy, again?" [crosstalk]. I mean, it seems like you guys could also have a very localized approach where, like you mentioned earlier, if someone is looking from a very suburban area, like my hometown in Maryland, where my expectations there would have probably been to have a huge wraparound couch, I've got this big living room, versus being in San Francisco or Austin, where now it's like a little bit more limited space, and what can I fit in these small areas? [crosstalk] think about that?Alex:I mean, the first step there that we're taking, it's more from a content driven approach. So, that goes back or loops back to the way that we're treating influencers and leaning into the photography community and the different styles and aesthetics that they have. Because what we are creating are based products. They are beautiful but they don't belong in an architectural [inaudible] editor's home, right? They're not the one-off piece that you design and custom build for 15 grand or something.Alex:And what's beautiful about that is that they stand up to any environment that you're putting them in, whether it's a very eclectic like Austin ranch style home, or the fourth floor walk up apartment in New York, or a more sprawling home in Houston or another geography like that. And leaning in with more of that stylistic approach than necessarily sub-segmenting, "Oh, we're only going to show love seats to this geography, or we're only going to show these massive sprawling corner sectionals to this other geography," because people still have varying needs, a lot of people have multiple rooms. So, we don't want to limit, necessarily, the assortment, but we are trying to diversify constantly the styles and aesthetics that our products are showcased in.Stephanie:Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So, for the last big point, I wanted to talk about the industry as a whole, like the D2C industry, commerce, what kind of things are you seeing or preparing for behind the scenes for what's to come?Alex:I mean, we could talk about the elephant in the room, which is-Stephanie:Let's talk about it. Yeah, let's do it. I haven't really talked too much about that, because it's been so up in the air, and when's it going to go through? It's more official now, so let's do it.Alex:Oh, yeah, it's official. This is a tough thing, and I think it's a reckoning for a lot of these companies, again, where it's been so easy to start a company and just go on Facebook, and you'll generate some sales, and go to a VC and you'll show 100% month over month growth, and they'll throw a bunch of cash at you. That's changing, and I'm thankful for it as much as I curse the fact that we don't have this GPS anymore, I'm very thankful that we don't, because it's forcing us to mature as marketers. And we're fortunate also that we've had to embrace this appreciation for marketing 101 and really lean into principles and not just trust what the ad platform are telling us, because it's a whole shopping journey.Alex:So, we've built a very healthy, full funnel approach proactively, even without any of this talk about these privacy regulations. That has helped us create something that can stand up in the face of this. There are a lot of companies that have not done that, they've not invested in really understanding marketing 101 and how to build a healthy full funnel without having that very granular level of insight or having automatic triggers in their campaigns and stuff. So, I think that is the most important thing, is like there is a day of reckoning for marketers everywhere in the D2C space to take a step back and really appreciate the principles of marketing and evaluate your program architecture overall and make sure that it's in a healthy state, and not just because your add to cart rates or your conversion rates are really high from this one campaign in this one ad unit, but really, overall, how is your program operating? Where are the weak points and how can you supplement those?Stephanie:Yeah. So, if you were starting over day one today, what kind of things would you look at? What metrics would you look at? What kind of things would you put in place to start building up that healthy funnel?Alex:Yeah. I think we would look at... I'm trying to think if I didn't have all the information that I have today, but I think what you would look at is the abandonment rate through the funnel, right? Of the people who click through to your site, how many of them end up viewing a product? Of those people, how many of them end up adding it? Of those people, how many of them end up actually proceeding to step one of checkout, step two, step three, step four? And find out what that makeup looks like.Alex:And obviously, you're going to spend a lot of time on conversion rate optimization and trying to improve the outputs of each step of that funnel. But that paints a picture of, okay, how broad do you have to invest at the top of that funnel if your ultimate target at the bottom of the funnel is X? And what does that reach look like? And what are the best mediums to do that to actually elicit a response and get people onto your site or into your store or signing up for whatever service you provide? So, that, I think, is what I would take as step one.Alex:The other one is, I would just consider, for the vertical that you're in and the product that you're trying to sell, how much of a story do you need to tell? And that will help inform how much you will need to invest in more storytelling mediums than more immediate click to buy type mediums. Also, how visual is your product? That will tell you how much you have to be content driven versus leaning into things like search or audio formats or anything like that. And that can really help govern your channel choices.Alex:And then the last thing is just, don't fall into the trap of doing too many things at once. There's always something to be said to acknowledging the resources that you have and trying to build a architecture that is best for that set of resources, not just the one that happens to be doing really well for the other portfolio company that your VC backer is constantly in your ear about, you have to focus on what is going to work for your company, your vertical, your customers specifically.Stephanie:Yep, yeah, I love all that. Is there or are there any tools right now that you're very excited about that are either new or just time tested, you're like, "We're going to keep using these forever because they do wonders for our marketing efforts"?Alex:I think a lot of it is less about tools and more about information sources. So, we've partnered with a number of different companies over time to do things like customer enrichment and really understand our customers to a deeper level, again, going back to that concept of customer centricity, not just talking to them directly, but also learning much, much more about them. And I think one of the biggest traps that a lot of companies fall into is they think of their customer as an average customer, and the problem is they're failing to acknowledge that customers are not one monotonous group, they are a system of clusters and cohorts. And what you really have to do is understand what is unique and important about each of these clusters and then create a messaging architecture, channel architecture, product offering that really speaks to each of those clusters individually.Alex:So, from a tools perspective, it's more about these data enrichment, customer data enrichment type platforms, and then using those to create these clusters and cohorts and really understand those customers. Again, for us, an attribution platform, not super helpful because of the complexity and both mix of offline and online activity that it takes to get to the purchase point. Much more about really understanding the customer and then applying a marketing 101 approach to it.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, that's great. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer.Alex:Oh, boy.Stephanie:Ready, Alex?Alex:Sure.Stephanie:Oh, boy. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Alex:Shoot. Where do I start? I think I would like to understand more about the global supply chain. I think over the last six months to a year maybe, we've seen, very intimately, the impacts of a broken or strained supply chain, and I think that there's a huge opportunity for D2C companies to innovate on the supply chain side. We focus so much on how do we innovate on the customer side that we focus so much less on the supply side of the business. So, I think that is where... and it will become increasingly important for marketers and supply ops to be speaking and working very much hand in hand to grow a company together. So, I do wish I had more of that background.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. And you guys just raised around, and I think that money, a part of it, was to focus on international supply chain effort, right? Figuring that out better.Alex:Yes, totally.Stephanie:So, you're already right in the right spot, the right time. You'll have to let everyone else know the insight. You have to come back and tell us what you learn next year.Alex:Yes, definitely.Stephanie:What's up next on your reading list or podcast list?Alex:There's actually a couple books I think that I want to reread. I'm one of those weird people that really likes to read technical books, and so there's a couple of conversations we're having right now about pricing in this book called Power Pricing that I love to read. There's also one by a gentleman named Douglas Holt called Cultural Strategy that I think is one of the most foundational and important books, especially for the world today. And again, how the customer controls the conversation, and understanding how to position your company and your messaging around cultural movements and ride momentum versus trying to create that momentum yourself as you have in the past. The last one is Shoe Dog, actually.Stephanie:Yes, such a good book.Alex:Amazing book. This would now be, I think, my third time reading it, but it is a way to, I think... A lot of people have been talking about languishing right now and the fact that we've been in this environment for so long and we're yearning for that personal interaction, and so tired of being in the sedentary and fixed on a digital screen environment. And I think Shoe Dog can help reignite a lot of that passion, right? Because it's like, "Wow, this multi-billion dollar company started at such a microscopic level." And it really helps you understand the power and the capability you have as an individual to create something like that and can help really reignite that passion.Stephanie:Yeah, that's one of my favorite books. Actually, we have a podcast called The Story that tells the unknown backstory of people who change the world, and we highlighted him in one of the episodes because we were like, "The story is too good not to tell, and tell, and tell until everyone hears it, and gets motivated and starts their thing today."Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:That's awesome. I feel like they need a movie out or something. Do they have one?Alex:I'm sure there will be. I'm sure there will be.Stephanie:There has to be one. Too good of a story not to. What's one thing you're secretly curious about? [crosstalk].Alex:TikTok, I think.Stephanie:Are you all on there?Alex:We are not. From a demographic perspective, in the past, I would say a year and a half, it hasn't made sense. The program is continuing to grow, the demographic adoption is continuing to expand, and so I am interested in what it looks like going forward. I think it is also a challenging medium for a lot of brands that are really attached to high production quality content, because what scales the best on that platform is very lo-fi content, very organic and authentic content. And it creates this shift for a lot of companies in the way that they think about creative. So, I'm curious in that we are actively learning about our potential approach to that channel, but also curious about how does that platform and program evolve over time. I've not heard great things about the ad platform that they've built so far, which is partially why we've been hesitant to really go after the channel, but that will evolve. They will crack that code. And what that looks like, I don't know, but I'm certainly curious.Stephanie:Yeah. We've definitely heard 50-50 on TikTok, some brands saying it works wonders, but they're the ones creating their own content, maybe not an ad partner programs. I also think from a consumer standpoint, how it's going to evolve, because at least me personally, I think I got signed out and I couldn't remember my password-Alex:Oh, no.Stephanie:... and I just never signed back in. I'm like, "I'm not sure I really like it then, or maybe I know that just scrolling is not good for me."Alex:Yeah. That was me with Clubhouse, actually.Stephanie:Oh, same.Alex:I loved Clubhouse for the first seven days and was on it constantly and I have not been back on it for [crosstalk].Stephanie:Yeah. I think it got crowded. I mean, now it's just so busy, so many people talking about so many things, it didn't feel curated. I started feeling like that to me too where it was 50-50 of like, "I like these videos, and next nine, I don't like." I think there has to be curation to keep at least us involved, it sounds like.Alex:Yeah, totally. I mean, honestly, that's what happened with the podcast world too, right? It became everybody launched their own podcast, and then there's so much content. The biggest problem with podcasts now is discovery. The only way you learn about what to listen to is through your friends.Stephanie:Yeah.Alex:And so, that concept of discovery is such a challenge for podcasts right now, and I think that's what Clubhouse is going through at 1,000 times faster through the learning cycle.Stephanie:Yeah. I think the next couple of years will be interesting, because I mean, they've been talking about discovery issues back to even when I worked at Google, figuring out Google podcasts, and that was an issue back in 2017. So, why hasn't this been solved yet? It should be so much easier.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:All right. Well, Alex, it's been awesome having you on the show, such a fun conversation. Where can people find out more about you and Burrow?Alex:Burrow.com would be the easiest place.Stephanie:What about you? Are you on LinkedIn? What if people want to talk to you?Alex:I am. LinkedIn. Alex Kubo. I'm not sure if you can actually search me and find me, but I'm sure you could.Stephanie:I'll find you. Don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Alex.Alex:Thank you so much, Stephanie.

Get excited for Aries season! And make sure to live your life in the first part of this month because when the monster moon comes on April 26, who knows what will happen! Susan Miller herself can't even tell us what to expect.   In this episode, Laura and Alex continue to be confused about Susan's posting habits (she was on time again and it wasn't even an April Fools' Day prank) and work through their fears about the ominous monster moon in Scorpio that will bring unexpected and unwelcome obstacles and changes to all of the signs. They discuss Susan's note to her readers, geezers versus geysers, Scorpio hate, and of course, all of Susan's practical advice for getting through the monster moon and the pandemic.  Horoscope highlights for each sign can be found at the following timestamps:  Aries: 6:46 Taurus: 11:30 Gemini: 15:44 Cancer: 17:41 Leo: 19:29 Virgo: 21:36 Libra: 22:35 Scorpio: 23:32 Sagittarius: 29:19 Capricorn: 30:52 Aquarius: 33:16 Pisces: 35:12 Practical advice from Susan Miller: 36:25 Share your own thoughts on Susan Miller's Astrology Zone with us (and let us know about your experience with the monster moon!) by emailing astrologyzoned@gmail.com. Links: Order “If You Really Love Me, Throw Me off the Mountain,” by Erin Clark, a strong and powerful Aries woman: https://www.erinclarkwriter.com (https://www.erinclarkwriter.com) Help Laura reach the full potential of her Susan Miller legacy by buying her romance novels: http://lauralovelybooks.com (http://Lauralovelybooks.com) Listen to Laura's other podcasts, The Mermaid Podcast and You're Doing Great, at: http://mermaidpodcast.com (http://mermaidpodcast.com) and http://fairybossmother.com (http://fairybossmother.com) TRANSCRIPT:  Laura: Hello, everybody! Welcome to April 2021. We made it this far! Yay! Alex: Hi everyone. Hi Laura! Laura: Oh, hi Alex! Alex: How are you doing? Laura: I think I'm okay but then I read our horoscopes and now I have some concerns for something, but you know, I think we'll get through. We'll talk about why we're scared, but also I feel like we've lived through so much already that maybe I shouldn't be so scared, but I don't know, I got nervous. Alex: The fact that we have lived through so much and we're scared though maybe says something. Laura: Maybe it says something. Yeah, yeah. Well let's get into, as usual, when Susan Miller released the horoscopes for April. Again, another surprise. Another surprise, she released them on April 1. Wow. And I think, you know, last month in March we were so shocked because she released them a day early and that was really out of character and now it was just on time. So you and I agree that that while we don't like it and we're perturbed by her promptness— Alex: Extremely Laura: Extremely—we are just going to now keep track of like this streak and see how long it goes and also if we ever get an answer about why it's after 25 years she's suddenly become prompt with her horoscopes. It's a mystery. Alex: Right, so it's like a challenge. Susan, can you keep this up? But also why? Laura: Also why? Yeah we don't know why is it happening. Alex: Why are you doing this to us? Laura: Yeah why you're doing this, what's changed about your process, what's going on. But she released them on time. It was April 1. I had just gotten my second dose of the vaccine and I was really out of it so it took me a few days to read. But now we have and I think we should start off with the note from Susan Miller. Alex: Yes, so she starts off the note by saying: April will be a good, cheerful, and productive month until we get to the monster full moon in Scorpio on April 26. I know. And then she wrote: I know I am writing this on April 1, April Fool's Day, and I wish I were pranking you. This full moon will be no joke. Laura: Oh no, but see I got scared. Alex: It's incredibly ominous but also I was wondering if she like crafted this and she was like, Oh, this is

This Part 2 of my interview with Alex Norman, co-founder of TechTO. Today's episode dives into how he grew TechTO into the leading tech-events company in Canada. This episode has background music added in. Feedback so far on the background music is negative and I will discontinue it after this podcast if I don't get overwhelming feedback in the other direction.Subscribe to the podcast: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed.TRANSCRIPT:Edward Nevraumont: This is part two of my interview with Alex Norman. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as Managing Director of TechTO. First, Alex, can you describe what TechTO is?Alex Norman: TechTO is an organization that helps the Canadian tech ecosystems improve. And what I mean by that is we're a member-based organization that helps members meet other like-minded people, learn from each other, and advance their career in technology, either as a founder or as an employee.Edward: Traditionally that meant events, right? You guys started with a monthly event and then added more and more and more of these in-person events.Alex: That's correct. It started off with a monthly event and then March, 2020 I think the previous 12 months that we had a hundred events. Anything from a small dinners to 1,000 people showing up to the event.Edward: And obviously COVID has made that a lot more difficult. Basically you're running an event company with hundreds and hundreds of events, and then all of a sudden events dropped to zero within like a three-day time period. How did you guys manage?Alex: So I'd say there's two parts to this. One is going back to what I said yesterday about you should always be doubling down on what works and have experiments on the side. I think the year before we started experimenting with a digital membership, so not digital events, but a membership and community. And how do we make the community exist beyond events and online? So we had some learning about what we have to do from a community perspective online to make this still a vibrant community add value to our members. So we were prepared from that perspective and had some knowledge there. So we ramped that up quickly.The other thing is, I remember March 10th, I think we had an event and then both Jason and I were supposed to go on vacation because March break on March 11th. March 12th we decided that there's going to be no events for the next year. Let's figure out how to do online events and what that meant, what technology can enable us and how our events could represent something similar to what we do. What will work that we used to do, what won't work?And so I think the next five or six days we tested like 30 platforms. We started learning limitations of what could be done, what couldn't be done. And we did a test event, I think on March 18th or 17th, with just some of our members. And then March 24th we did our first event and then basically did an event, I feel like it's every weekday, since then. And it was constant iteration and improving how to improve experience and how we could deliver value.And I'd say from March until now, being August 2020, probably done 150 events, a bunch of different formats. And we're actually now thinking we have enough impetus strategically about how do we take it to the next level. Assuming there's no events for another year in person, what do we have to do to actually deliver value for members? And how do we have to change, for lack of a better word, our product. But we have now enough data, enough insight, enough interactions with people to build a fact-based hypothesis versus we went live and started iterating and we had enough of community and brand to experiment online.Edward: I read somewhere recently that in order to win in quality, the way to do it is to massively increase quantity. Does that match with what you guys are doing?Alex: Yeah. I've never heard that before, but I fundamentally believe in that. Again, maybe there's vision, product-driven founders and people out there that can see the end product. And maybe that was what Steve Jobs was, but the way I've always more than likely got the best product is doing hundreds of experiments. And sometimes experiments are hypothetical and sometimes they're building a product and putting it out there and seeing how the world reacts. So it's been a lot of quantity, we had a quality level we had to keep, but now we have an idea how to take the quality level, make it three times better.Edward: I want to dive into some of your more significant marketing channels. Let's start with meetup.com. How did you start using Meetup to grow TechTO at the beginning?Alex: So originally we used Meetup. We came to Meetup. We said, "Okay, this might be interesting way to get distribution," but it was more of tool for functionality. It's an easy way for people to register interests, show up. We could use their ticketing. They had some ticketing built in. We could use it to administer our initial events. And initially we didn't think of Meetup as a distribution channel, but we quickly found out after doing the first few events, seeing a lot of people were just discovering and joining our Meetup group, not necessarily events on Meetup. We said, "Okay, this is actually a strong distribution channel." Because a. Meetup gets lots of organic traffic. You find out that they get ranked pretty high in some SEO terms. And if you could basically, for lack of a better word, figure out how their recommendation engine recommends groups, you could probably drive a lot more traffic.So I don't know if it was three months in, nine months, but I spent a lot of time researching in and playing around to figure out how you set up a group and how you set up events. How you can basically take advantage of organic traffic from Meetup. So I'd say we optimized how we did everything on Meetup to basically optimize the flow of people to join our Meetup. And then we experiment a lot with how do we communicate with people to get to them to attend events. And I'd say at the peak, when doing offline events for some of our, and we have different committees, for some of our committees it could be 30 to 40% of our initial interaction. And coming to our event was from Meetup. It could be lower for some. It's just like search is optimized for Google or YouTube. You could do that for Meetup.Edward: And how did you do that? So how do you search engine optimize for Meetup if you're not going to give away any secrets?Alex: So I think it's changed over the years. So I think the first thing was what terms. You could say, I think 10 or 12 terms that you associate a group with. It could be how many events you have listed on there. So is it a regular event? Are you listing two or 10? The more regular frequency and the more events you have listed and the right hashtags, the right wording... And so we could find also how we did research. You could look at like New York Tech Meetup group. You could click on it. They have 50,000 members. I think they were the biggest Meetup group at one point. You could see what they were hashtagged for. Then you can then use those hashtags.You can search those hashtags. They tell you how many people are members. You get metrics, you can basically navigate around Meetup to find metrics and tags. You could figure out which groups or you could just reach our communities. We had different meetup groups, we'd start measuring the growth of them and try to figure out what was working or not. We tried to research articles and there wasn't much out there, but it was just exploring Meetup and basically trying to backwards engineer how they were recommending stuff.And we'd test results and we'd see. Because we tried different things with different communities and you could see the growth rates and we'd see our biggest group was growing twice as fast as our smallest group. So what are we doing different? So it was just a lot of analytics, a lot of backwards engineering, also experimenting. It's also doing great products. So I think what we also believed is if you have a lot of people attending and a lot of repeat attendance to events and people come looking for you, Meetup would recognize that as a quality event. So it was just basically observing what would make a difference and we could see by the rate of people joining our group.Edward: You even put a bid in to buy Meetup when WeWork was divesting it, is that right?Alex: Yes, we did. Our belief with Meetup is it's a great brand. It has tons of organic traffic, but it doesn't know who it wants to serve. And then there's a few different types of groups that leverage Meetup and that can either build different products for different groups or could just focus on one. So we believed there was a lot of value in Meetup but it hasn't ever really figured a way to unlock it for itself or for its organizations. And there was an opportunity to potentially buy that asset and just make it much more powerful.Edward: Your other big channel is organic social, which is primarily Facebook and LinkedIn. Now I've always thought that companies overvalue organic social, but you seem to have found something that drives more than a quarter of your business. What are you doing that's working so well on organic social?Alex: Let's be clear, I think it's changed over time and we've sort of zigged when everyone zagged. So I think Facebook was doing a way that you got the people attending events to interact with content for them. So a lot of pictures, a lot of videos, a lot of content that... We have a Facebook group, but that gets no distribution anymore. So we probably took 200, 300 pictures of an event. And even though there's 700, 800 people, we would try to tag all the people in those pictures. We would have postings after, which were interactive. And so when people interacted with it, their friends see it and hopefully a lot of them have like-minded friends that'd be interested in the same thing. And then that would translate into people signing up for us and coming to events.I think Facebook was good by leveraging our community, to get distribution and get like-minded. So you didn't need a huge amount of distribution because you had the right members and they would attract like-minded people. We started off with using Twitter a lot. I think Twitter is a great for awareness, but Twitter is like pissing in the wind. You put a tweet out... Every time we did an event, we'd be number one trending in Canada because we just had huge engagement. We have 800 people, huge engagement. We do our events on Monday night, it'd be us or NFL Monday Night or the Bachelor. So you're talking about good awareness, but the distribution of any one tweet's not huge. It disappears after a few seconds. And once you start trending you also get lots of spam that paws on to take advantage of that.So it gives you [inaudible 00:09:48] metrics, which give you credibility and gives you a bit of awareness because people that aren't at events seen an event's going on and they want to interact with that. But we're interacting a lot with Twitter but we de-emphasize it as a marketing channel because we saw it's great for the community. It's a great communication app, but doesn't really do anything. My hypothesis at one point was LinkedIn has become more of a social network. And I can't remember when this was about two or maybe three years ago we said, people aren't leveraging it like they would leverage other social networks, so let's experiment with LinkedIn and see if that can make a difference because you're not going to get necessarily the person that wants [CentreTech 00:10:21] but you might get tech leaders that are trying to recruit.You might get potential partners that look at LinkedIn and no one's really filling their feed. So we started doing a bunch of experimentation on how to get distribution, and LinkedIn's horrible from an analytics and distribution perspective, but we started de-emphasizing Twitter from a social stream to LinkedIn. And it actually paid off because we got to activate a different customer set that we were targeting. It builds a brand and gets people out. And they introduced LinkedIn events, I think 10, 12 months ago. So we were being quick to try new tools. So we got a lot of initial bump there because no one else was using it or experimenting with it. So you adapt for the channel, but you also take learnings from other channels. And I think our approach to LinkedIn was early and different than other people's. So it helped us grow our communities.Edward: Tell me more about what you were doing on LinkedIn. You weren't just posting, "Hey event having happening tonight" or, "Here's some pictures of the event."Alex: No, I'd call them two buckets of content. One is just interacting with the overall tech ecosystem. Just being a source of information, but I think more importantly we'd have Jim McKelvey speaking. He's not good example. He was co-founder of Square. So once we have Jim McKelvey speaking we do content around that beforehand. "Hey, here's Jim, you may not know him. He started a company with Jack Dorsey. It's called Square" and do stories. And then maybe we'd say, "What would you like to ask him?" So a bit of information about upcoming events, but not advertorial. It was more information about why this is relevant to you. And then maybe try to engage with the audience.And then post event we'd have postings that would be like, "You may have missed an event, but here's the three key takeaways from Allan at Wattpad." Or we do member stories. "Here's a member that joined TechTO and she found her first job." Or a perfect one was, "Here's a member, she attended TechTO three years ago. She loved the founder that was talking, she reached out to him. Now she's the CEO of that company." Highlighting stories and highlighting takeaways and what was going to community. So building awareness by providing two, three paragraph insights and then engaging with the community and-Edward: And you're doing that daily?Alex: No, we found daily's too often, but it'd be once every couple days. We experiment a lot. I think anything more than once a day in LinkedIn's too much just because it's the exact opposite of Twitter. Stuff stays up there long. We never really spent too much time figuring out how everything works, but we just knew that if you do more than once a day, I think LinkedIn seems to hide your postings. So one thing we did learn is if you have quick reactions on LinkedIn, it gets spread faster. So in the first 10 minutes 10 people give it a like, or whatever they call it, it would be more likely seen by your wider community. So you have Facebook equivalent, your company can have followers? We never even focused building that on LinkedIn because it's just enough other ways to get distribution on there.Edward: I want to loop back a little bit to your Facebook comment. You were trying to tag 700 people. How did you manage something like that?Alex: Dedicated team. The thing is everyone has name tags on them and usually your name tag's in the picture. So maybe you get a Tammy or a Jessica but even in the group of 800 there's five Jessicas? Either the team would know her or we had a group of volunteers and team members that we'd try to do it with. We weren't 100% successful. But if you have just five people in the picture and you get one person, usually the other people come tag themselves. So you need like a 60% success rate to make that strategy valid.Edward: That's incredible. So now that COVID's happened and you switched from in-person events to online events, has that changed the marketing channels that are working for you?Alex: Yes. And I don't think we were well aware of it at the beginning. So I've always been overly worried about the margin channels we work on because it's not our platforms. One of our biggest marketing channels we didn't discuss. We have an email list of members, which is 50,000-plus strong. So that's something we own. And other channels we rely on are all the channels we don't control. So the email channel still works, but I'd say we are over-relying on three channels before and two which don't work the same way. Who goes to Meetup today? You go to Meetup because you want to see an in-person event. They're doing digital events, but just my guess without knowing anything is their traffic's probably down 80 to 90%. Because people aren't inherently going out to go look for, "Hey, I want to go to a tech conference" or "I want to go meet a bunch of bicyclists."And so the activity on Meetup has significantly dropped. I think the other channel, which we're aware of never really quantified, but I think it's actually significantly hurt us is I think we had a unique word of mouth. And what I mean by that is, someone goes Monday morning and goes, "Hey, I'm going to TechTO tonight" to their colleagues. Maybe they go themselves the first time. Next day they go for coffee. He says, "Man, I had a great time at TechTO. You should come to it." And then three weeks later, when the next TechTO or let's say your FinTechTO in two weeks comes along, someone goes to buy a ticket. And they say, "Hey, I'm buying a ticket. I'm going to TechTO next week."And then they say, "Why don't you come out with us?" And they pull their friends. The word of mouth was actually dragging friends that enjoy social experience together in person. And I think we still have strong word of mouth, but it's not nearly as impactful because when there's a point you have to schedule to go see something in person together, you make plans around it. It becomes part of your social activity. And when you think it's good enough for your friends to enjoy, you'll suggest it and you'll go to it together. And then they become advocates and come together.What I noticed online is no one does, "Hey, I'm going at 7:00 online to this event tonight. Why don't you come join me?" And then there's a couple of things that happen. I think when you want to go to TechTO an event in person, you actually have to plan your day around it. At 7:00 you have to be at RBC WaterPark for a TechTO event on Monday or 6:00, you're going to plan that Monday not to work. Maybe you have an issue with the babysitter. Maybe you got work and you don't come, but you're usually buying your tickets ahead of time. What I've noticed online is, "Hey, we have an event at 7:00 on Tuesday." People are like, "Oh, let me see what's happening and I'll register at 6:55."So first of all, people don't plan. And I think second of all, this shared social experience online right now is not like a shared social experience in person. You're not going there. You're not laughing together. You're both in your own rooms or your houses. So I think we still get strong word of mouth, but [amplifier 00:16:48] where people drag their friends along, it doesn't happen. And I think that's a significant impact on us. So Meetup as a channel is not working and word of mouth is not working. So we've relied a lot more social. We rely a lot more email and we're still trying to experiment because I think lots of people have had the marketing channels changed, not just events, but retail and stuff like that. So I think it's a lot more crowded and there's a lot more volatility and noise in lots of channels right now. So it's not clear to me which ones will scale up in the near future.Edward: This has been awesome, Alex, thank you so much. Thanks for being on the show. Before you go, tell me what comic book we should all read next.Alex: I haven't read it but I've enjoyed the Netflix series Umbrella Academy so I want to actually pick up the comic books and read them. But I haven't read any good comics in a while. If you want a classic, it's the Sandman series. It's written by Neil Gaiman and it's about the mythology of the character Sandman: Master of Dreams. It's not what you expect from a comic book. Go read it.Edward: I think ending on the Master of Dreams is a fantastic way to end. Thanks, Alex. Really appreciate having you here today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

I sat down with my yogi Alex Schimmel from LifeTime Fitness here in Phoenix, AZ. Because I believe the health benefits of yoga are too important to ignore or at a minimum, spread the word, I had to have Alex on to share his knowledge with all of you, my listeners. If there is no other exercise you ever do, you MUST do yoga to stimulate every area of your body. It's amazing how using your own body weight in various poses, can make you really strong and get you in the best shape of your life. ********** Styles of Yoga taught at Life Time Fitness FIRE (HIIT)- Experience our new high-tempo format that blends intense anaerobic exercise with recovery periods ROOT (Fundamentals) - Start here and begin to understand yoga movement while holding the body in long basic poses SOL (Guided) - SOL is a guided yoga format that provides direction throughout from supportive teachers in a dynamic vinyasa format FLOW (Vinyasa) - Try our new guided practice where your teacher provides more deliberate cues throughout class SURRENDER (Yin) - Experience long connective tissue stretches and meditative breathing for greater breathing and self-acceptance BE (Meditation) - Develop a conscious, calm mind through meditation with a focus on breathing Alex's Links:"Inspire The F*ck Out of People" - eBook Presale Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theyogageneral/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexander.schimmel.5 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-schimmel-374484a/ Email: schimmelyoga@gmail.com Alex Schimmel - Life Time LifePower Yoga Boutique Manager LifePower Yoga Teacher Training Faculty LifePower Yoga Master Trainer https://youtu.be/vo_c_5pILKU ********** Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass ********** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review:I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe:Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Alex Schimmel: Joe: Ok. Today, my guest is Alex Schimmel. Alex and I met over at Lifetime Fitness in the Biltmore area. And Alex is the yoga manager over there. And I was super excited to take as many yoga classes as I could. And luckily, Alex is the person over there that we really fell in love with. The way he teaches is his demeanor, everything about what he does. So, Alex, I'm really excited to have you here. And thanks for taking the time to do this. Alex: Yeah, thanks for having me, Joe. A pleasure. Looking forward, Joe: Yeah. Alex: You get to know each other better. Joe: Yeah, man. So my first. What I want to do first is just get to where we are today in the sense of how you got into this. I would I would assume that, you know, you took yoga like me, and then it became more of a passion. And then you became a yogi. But what can you go to when you started? Why you did it? How long you did it? Before you decided to make the jump to be a yogi. And and then we'll go from there. Alex: Yeah, for sure. So I'll give the abbreviated version, because it could be pretty long, but so my mom's a yoga teacher, so I've had yoga in my life, like, forever. I remember being a young kid maybe like seven or eight years old, and my friends would be playing wild in my house. And my mom would like eat. Guide us through relaxation in my living room. Like, you know, just to get us to probably calm down is it's probably not just to show us yoga, but to help us chill out a little bit. And so I used to go to my mom's yoga classes and I was like a little kid. And then my teenage years kind of rebelled against it. I thought the yoga was something that just like women do. Just people my mom's age did. So I wasn't really too open to it. And then towards the end of high school, I started to just get more like into spirituality. I read some spiritual books as I was given a book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, by Deepak Chopra. And there's a lot of yoga philosophy in it. And it was things that I really like. It made sense to me. And it was the first time that because I wasn't really religious, I grew up Jewish, but not really like strong in religion. Alex: And those that that book and those spiritual teachings, it just it just resonated with me. And so that kind of open my eyes a little bit. And then I had an injury. I was a baseball player in college and I hurt my shoulder just playing like backyard football. And to kind of help heal that, I started to get into yoga, go to my mom's yoga classes again and. Soon after. I noticed that yoga was like. Not only did it make me feel better in my body, it also really helped me balance my schoolwork and just help me. Like I felt like it was just making my life better. And a lot of ways. And then my mom encouraged me to do this like two week teacher training. That was when I was like 19. I was my first teacher training. And that was really for my for my own knowledge. I wasn't really sharing it yet. But it was something that I knew enough where I could practice in my living room at home. And then fast forward a few years. My senior year of college actually got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And Joe: Allow. Alex: I was a pretty tough, pretty tough time in my life. There was a lot of challenges. And yoga then became like instead of it just being an exercise, it really became my medicine. And to this day, it's still my best, my best medicine. So that was like that was the moment in my life where yoga was no longer just like a hobby or something. I did sometimes just like it's what I needed. And it became a daily way of living again, not just what I did on my map, but like a way that I live and honor all my relationships. And then after college, I graduated and I worked a sales job in New York City and really hustled and then did the grind for about a year. And it just was not a good mix for my health. And I realized, like, I was making a lot of money, but I wasn't fulfilled at all. And I I left that job. And then for the next, like three months, I traveled around to different yoga retreats and I did my first real two hundred hour teacher training. That was seven years ago now. And. And then once I got back from that, I was like, yeah, this is my. This is my path. It's my purpose. And I just kept going from that. Joe: That's really cool. And where did you take this training? Alex: Yes, it was it was so special. I did a. It was like a three week immersion and it was twenty five days in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. So it's a little island off the coast of Cancun. And it was like a super cool kind of rustic resort hotel retreat center. Like no TV's in the room. Very, very basic. But it was it was just like super blissful. And, you know, I feel really blessed and privileged. I was able to take that kind of trip to do my teacher training. I definitely, you know, empty my savings account and those, like, months of, like, wobbling around. But it was super special. And that training, it was way different than what I teach now. But it really taught me how to be a yogi. So it taught me not just how to teach yoga, but what it really means to to live a yoga lifestyle, what it really means to be good at yoga. And it was it was really powerful. Joe: Yeah, that's cool, and people talk about going to certain places to become a yogi, right? I mean, I guess I think like even myself, you think that people that do meditation and yoga and it stems out of like being in India or something like that. Right. Is that true or is that just another fallacy that Alex: Yeah, Joe: You know. Alex: I mean, yoga's origin, like, you know, the first the first time yoga was kind of found in any text or whatever it did, it did seem to originate from India, at least the yoga exercises. Right. The poses if you look at pretty much every spiritual tradition as far as like the philosophy goes. All of them are ways to practice yoga. So that's why some people can be really religious and they can practice yoga and they can become a better or more devout Christian or Jew or Muslim. So it's it's not like yoga is not a religion, but it is a spiritual practice. And a lot of those teachings are are universal, which I think is another reason that yoga is growing so much because they realize, like, wow, this kind of goes with what what I believe in. But as far as like historically. Yeah. And India's India's the the the birthplace of it. Joe: Kind of like the Mecca. Right. Alex: Yeah, yeah, it takes Joe: Ok. Alex: A lot of people go to India for four different paintings and stuff. There's I haven't been to India before. I think a lot of yogis kind of consider it like a rite of passage. You know, once you spent time in India, maybe you get a little more street cred and some. Joe: So that's the I so I was wondering, I guess my next question was going to be, had you gone to India yet? But it sounds like not yet, but I assume at some point maybe that's a goal. Alex: At some point, I mean, it's not like the top of my bucket list. There's a lot I love from Alan Watts and I think it's really applicable to that. He says the only Zen that you'll find at the mountaintop is the Zen that you bring with you. Joe: Yup. Alex: So like, you know, India sure, you can be immersed in a culture. And I think it's cool to learn about the history, but it doesn't necessarily make you a better yogi to spend time in India. You can you can find all those teachings. They're already they're already inside you, right? Joe: Sir. Alex: That's the idea. Like, whatever, you know, whatever yoga you find in India is probably yoga that you already have. Know, it just helps you kind of uncover it. So for some people, it becomes a life changing experience. And I've heard from other yogis that, you know, it didn't it didn't do so much for them. Joe: So let's bounce back to something that you said was was when you were in high school, you rebelled a little bit against it. Right. And it was based on the stigmatism that we all think about. There's these yoga people walking around, burning incense and walk around and samples and, you know, draped clothing or whatever. I don't know. Right. Alex: Maria. Joe: But I. But the purpose of this podcast for me is to inform people and to bring subjects like this, especially when I believe in it. Like, I wouldn't do this if if it was something I didn't believe in. I know how it's helped me. And I look forward to being there in your class. So I don't think enough people do yoga. And I think it's such an amazing thing to do if you can't do anything else. Like, if I have a day where I know I'm slammed and I can't go and pump a bunch of iron or whatever, and there's days where I'll do it before yoga and yoga is like the release of all of it right from me. But I would like you for me, it's like God if there's one thing you can do. Just do yoga. Alex: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's I think especially like the styles that that I've learned, you know, and I do feel really grateful that I've been taught the practices that I've been taught. It's really all encompassing. Like, there's some people that I know that practice just yoga and they are ripped. Strong human beings, if that's what you're going for. But then in addition to that, like in addition to the physical, you get the mental benefits of the focus and the memory and the kind of meditation aspect of it. And then I think also just moving your body and doing breath where there's an incredible emotional release. And to me, most importantly, it's it's a spiritual practice that you connect with your essence and who you really are. So, yeah, I think I think yoga is it's it's amazing to do. And I and I agree with you more people. It's growing for share. It's great. Becoming more and more mainstream. But there's still a lot of people, especially especially men, that would benefit, that would benefit from it. How long Joe: Yeah, Alex: Have you. How long have you been practicing? Joe: To be honest with you, when we got to Lifetime and started with you. That's the only time I had done it up to that point. And I think I might even said this to you is that we had the P90X disc right. From Tony Horton and that, that yoga program on that desk was pretty good. It put us through a lot of cool things, but I don't think I ever took a class until yours. Alex: Nice is awesome. Love it. You got them there. You guys been there almost every day, it seems Joe: Yeah, Alex: Like. Joe: Now I'm hooked. And so here's the thing that I want to convey about you, just to take kind of like my own little infomercial about you and the reason why it's it's such a great class and Joelle and loves it and Ashley loves it. And there's you have this combination about you that is like the perfect yoga instructor or I don't know what. Is that what you call it? Yoga instructor. What's the proper. Alex: I guess the guy's a teacher. Some people Joe: Ok. Alex: Say doctors I feel like instructors, correct? Teacher. Teachers connect. Joe: Perfect. OK. So to me, you encompass the perfect yoga teacher. Now I'm lucky that I found you as my first. And I didn't, you know, whatever. I didn't get tarnished by anything else. But you're, you're the tone of your voice. That's the first thing we all talked about when we got back, was like your. Your voice is like very soothing for the practice. And then you do ramp up really nicely through the class. And then it comes back down really nicely. The storytelling that happens intermittently throughout the class. So I encourage anyone to just go there and take one of your classes. I know that. I think. But you can only go. You can only do it if you're a member. All right. Alex: Yeah, I think that right now, with with everything that's going on, I don't think really guest, guest passes. Joe: That's right. Alex: But luckily for everybody and all your listeners, too, there's a lifetime app and you don't have to be a member to download the app. And there's recorded classes on there. And I was just in Minnesota, I just recorded like five classes. So probably in the next week or two. Everyone, if you have a if you have a phone, if you have an app and on YouTube, I believe you, you'll be able to take my classes online. It's not the same experience. I'll tell you about it really even. I made a post on my social media about it yesterday. It's different teaching to just a camera. Like I realized that I really feed off people's energy Joe: Yep. Alex: When I'm in class. And I think and this is a shift that's happened to me more lately when I teach now. I used to be like a big planner. I got a plan what I was going to say and what stories I would tell. And now I just go in there with maybe a loose idea of what I teach, but I just kind of let it flow like and I feel like the students that are in the class, in a way, bring bring what they need to hear out of me. So it feels really good when that happens. And it was just different, you know. There was no students to bring it out of me. So much so. So those online classes are a different experience, but yet still still good in a way. You can check me out. Joe: Yeah, that's perfect. So I'll make sure that in the show notes, I put the link to all of that so that everyone can get a taste. And then unfortunately, the reason I didn't want to do this episode with you is I don't want the class to get full. And then Alex: Oh, Joe: I can't get in it. So Alex: Yeah. Joe: I was this balance between I want to have Alex on and I don't want people to take my spot in the class. Alex: Make sure you get a spot to. Joe: So let me see what I had. Oh, so I want you to tell. I want you to tell a couple of stories that you've told. So I, I and I remember, too. So I want you to tell the water bucket story. If you don't mind. Alex: Ok, to that Joe: I think Alex: One. Joe: It's super cool. Alex: Yeah, so I love stories, first of all, I actually just wrote an e-book for teachers, leaders, speakers. It's called it's called "Inspire the Fuck Out of People." And. Joe: Awesome. Alex: And it's a book about it's really just a book about storytelling mostly and like themes. It's what I do a lot in my teaching. All of my students realize that, like, when you come to my class, it's going to be more than a physical. There's always gonna be there's not always a story, but there's something deeper. So I just I just wrote my book. I compiled, like, all my stories and everything together. So. So that's pretty cool. And I do love stories. And one of the things about storytelling that's really cool is, is we're wired for storytelling. That's how we like as it as through history. That's how we've communicated. And so our brains are actually wired and there's all kinds of research and studies that have been done. And one thing that's really cool is when you tell a story, your you and your audiences brains get sinks. So I kind of think about like Inception. Have you seen the movie Inception? Joe: I probably have and I don't read. I'm the worst at remembering that Alex: It's Joe: You'd Alex: A stupid. Joe: Be surprised how many times I purchased a movie on Netflix and 10 minutes into it and like, damn, that's $4.99 I just wasted because I already saw. Alex: So anyway, so it's just like the idea when you when you tell stories, you can you can like better plant seeds in your audiences mind. So it's a really powerful way to convey messages and meetings and deeper teachings. So that's where I look. What's one of the things I love about storytelling? So that that storytelling of the the water bearer. So it's a story that there's a water bear. And I think the story of the woman is in India. And every day she has to go and walk like two miles to get water for her family. And she carries this big pole on her back with two buckets on each side. And every day she fills up the buckets and or the pots. And when she gets back to her house or her family or whatever, one of the parts is always like a little bit down, like half empty because there's a crack in it and a cracked pot feels inadequate. Right. It feels like it's not enough. Very similar to how a lot of humans feel and different things, especially when we live in such a world of comparison and competition and starts to feel like upset. And tell us the woman, you know, I feel so bad. You work so hard, you know, to take this long walk. And I don't I don't carry my full weight. Right. I always, always let some water go. Norman says the tomorrow when we take the walk, just notice the beautiful flowers that are along the path. Alex: And so they take a walk in the pot sees all these beautiful flowers shining in the sun. And it's like, you know, temporary happiness school. Beautiful. They get home still, that pot is half empty and still is is upset. It's like, yeah, I noticed the flowers. But that doesn't I'm not full, you know. And the woman says to the pot, hey, I knew you had a crack. So every day I noticed that you were like dripping water out. So what I do is I planted seeds all along the path. And did you notice how there was only flowers on one side? So every day we take that walk. When you leave the water out, you're not leaking the water. You're watering these beautiful flowers. That makes my walk more beautiful. It makes my family happy when I can bring the bring the wildflowers home. And, yeah, it's just it's a really big reminder that we all have cracks. We all have things that we look at as flaws. And recently, I don't know. I heard this from from one of my teachers. But our our mess. Right. They got flaws can become our message and they can become our purpose. And a lot of times those things that we view maybe as as ugly or we hide from others can end up being the most inspiring thing that we have to offer the world. Joe: Yeah, yeah, it's it's so true. Man, this is part of why I started to share just some of the things that have gone on through my life. Just because I think you have to tell these things to let people know that they're not alone in in these struggles or these these turns in the roads or whatever might happen. It's like you were talking in class about I think you reference about, you know, getting knocked to our knees and getting back up. And it's when we're in certain poses and that you can feel the distress and that sensation. And, you know, my arms is doing the side planks today. And my arm was wobbling like crazy. And I like man and it's true in it. And it's it's the way you teach it and it's the metaphors that you bring up and and you never correct anyone in the class. You know, everyone smile. There's a slight hint like, no, raise your arms up, not for whatever. But it's it's it's you know, it's done in a very compassionate, gentle way. And that's what keeps me coming back. It's like I don't want to go to a class and not know the poses and be judged, you know. And I was lucky, like literally Tony Horton's disc taught me enough to at least initially walk into that class without feeling completely ridiculous, but. Alex: Confidence. Joe: Right. But the cool thing is that you have these classes online that people can learn. Some of these initial poses are what you call them. Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Joe: Ok, I got I don't want to say the wrong thing and go, oh, my God, it is. And then take your first class. If you do some of the basic things, you'll feel really comfortable. Right. Alex: Yeah, and I've I have begin people that have never taken yoga classes that come in and take take those flow classes that are hot and and challenging for sure. But, you know, one of the big things and one of the things that like let me rewind a little bit when I was first starting to get back into yoga that I didn't like is I would take classes that were very like alignment based where it was all like posture focused. And hopefully you get and when you take my class, it's not really about the pose. I like Joe: Correct, Absolutely. Alex: Most. OK. It's it's there and it's good to move your body, but it's it's not so important. So I use to take these classes in like the whole class would just be pretty much like you're doing it wrong. This has to be turned this way and this has to be done in this way. And I felt like it didn't make me feel empowered. It made me feel like I was just like not good and weak and that like that I really had to honor what the teacher was saying. And then I decided that I tried to teach. I want you to come in and realize, hey, if all you do is breathe for 60 minutes and that happens sometimes, it hasn't happened so much and more because it's a new community. Sometimes you just gotta come on to your mat and breathe and it doesn't matter anything else that you do. Like if that's what you mean. Beautiful. And the poses truly are secondary and they truly are just an opportunity to to have some awareness in your body. It's not about like perfecting the pose. And I really want people to know that not just for me, but for many yoga teacher, yoga teacher stressing or like or like marketing themselves on. I'm going to help you do this posture where you can get really good at poses if you if you practice my yoga. There's a there's a A out there. You know, I think that some people really like that. And I get it. For me, though, there's there's so much more. And like I say, in say in my classes, we don't practice. You're going to get good at yoga poses. We practice. You're going to get good at life. Joe: Yeah, man, it's it's so true. Like I said, I can't thank you enough for, you know, this the way you handled the classes and it's we're like we're signed up for as many as as many as we can take. I don't want to, like, dehydrate myself. Taking a high flow class every day. But, yeah, we keep signing up. We love it. So before you when you you took the training and to become a yoga and where. How did you teach and how did you get into. What did you do before you landed at lifetime. Alex: Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, like when you do a teacher training, the kind of the introductory level is 200 hours. That's like that's the training and really 200 hours because yoga is so complex and deep and there's so much to it. Two hundred hours is like kindergarten, right. You get that that kindergarten degree and you definitely have a knowledge foundation. But then you have to become you have to continue to learn. You have to always be a student. And so for me, I finished my 200 hour. This was this was after I lived in York City. I moved back with my parents and I came home from that training and I convinced my parents to get rid of our couches in the living room and turn it into a little yoga studio. But a yoga studio at my house and I didn't I guess I didn't really feel that confident yet to apply. There was really only one yoga studio in my town and I didn't really feel that confident yet. But what I started to do is just have three classes at my house and I put it on Facebook and I invite people to come in sometimes and have three or sometimes five. A lot of times like one and a lot of times just no one would come because again, I was like new to my, you know, seven years ago even there wasn't a whole lot of people that were practicing yoga wasn't very popular where I was living in South Jersey. But I did that for like three months. And I probably had like three classes a week at my house and started sharing where I could. And then and then I felt ready to audition at a local studio and taught there. And then fast forward, like, you know, for my first year of teaching, I was teaching and probably like five or six different studios in South Jersey. They're all super spread out. Those times are I'll drive an hour to go teach a class Joe: Oh, Alex: And like, Joe: Gosh. Alex: You know, and when you're a brand new yoga teacher, you don't get paid a whole lot. So sometimes I would like, you know, drive an hour to teach a class for fifteen bucks. But if that wasn't what it was about, it's never been Joe: Right. Alex: About that Joe: Right. Alex: Night. I do feel like I've, I've been blessed and I am happy that I have an entrepreneurial mind where it's yoga. I live a good life. I'm very happy with with the lifestyle and able to live through it. But I was teaching for a while. And then what I really wanted to do was share yoga, like I wanted to share with as many people. That's been my my mission for a long time. I heard this somewhere that inspired me where they said something about like instead of focusing on being a millionaire, how about you influence a million people? So then I. So my goal for, like, I don't know, forever, when I heard that, I was like, OK, I want to be a billionaire. I want to have an impact on a billion people. That's a lot of people. And I know that the way to do that is to influence people that are influencers. So. So my my next kind of step in the process was I knew I wanted to lead teacher training. You know, I wanted to teach other people to teach yoga there. There I would have like an exponential growth on who I'm impacting. And I met someone actually out here in Arizona, which is funny, was way before I lived here. This was this is about five years ago, a little over five years ago. And they told me that they recommended a a three hundred hour teacher training. So that's like, you know, 200 hours, the kindergarten, 300 hours, like Joe: Hey. Alex: Maybe you got a high school little a little higher level. You go a little deeper in. And they told me to do this teacher training in Michigan with with my teacher, Johnny Quest. And I went there and it's funny, like the way I in life, I let things flow so. Right. That like that it felt very like just. It just made sense to me. So I didn't even do much research and I just went to this 300 hour training in Michigan. It was another immersion. It was like three weeks, three weeks straight. Joe: Wow. Alex: And when I was there, I realized that that training was the style that they teach at lifetime. And and that was. And then I was told when I was there about one of the other teachers that their friend was going to Grand Open. They were going to be the general manager of this club in South Jersey that happened to be like 40 minutes from my house. So when I get home from the training, I went to talk to the one of the managers there about just teaching that I was thinking, like, I you know, it's an hour away, 40 minutes away. Maybe I'll teach, like back to back classes. Let me see if it's worth it. And then, like, I show up one day and kind of just tell my story. And the woman who's a dear friend of mine now, she's like, well, we have a yoga manager. And you're hired like you're the you're our guy, you know, because I was the only person in that area that knew the style that Joe: Yes. Alex: We taught. So, yeah. So, again, fast forward a little bit. Got hired at that. That was my first lifetime. I was the yoga manager and we had like just a thriving community. Just incredible. You know, there would be we'd have classes where there would be 80 to 100 people in a Wednesday night. Joe: Oh, my Alex: Yeah. Joe: Gosh. Alex: Well, like, almost the whole floor was mats. You know, there'd be that maybe I would I would say it would it wasn't really a joke because it was true. I'd be like, if you don't know the person next to you, then you can have like two inches between your mats. If you do, another person next to your mats could be touching. So very different world than now. I don't think super to me people would be into that. But it was amazing. The energy was incredible. People made like lifelong friendships. And I was there for a while, kind of felt like I was without a teacher. So then, you know, and the universe provided me the next step where my teacher, Johnny, called me and said, hey, come to Michigan, learn from me, learn with me. There's no there's like we need a yoga manager at this lifetime, Michigan, when they're taught for a few years. Also, you know, is it amazing to be a part of that community because they had all really learned from my teacher. So it's just a really strong community. They just really got what we did. So a super cool. And then I got tired of the Michigan winter. So Joe: Yes. Alex: The last Joe: I don't Alex: Year Joe: Blame you. Alex: Last year, I was like I called my my boss who do directs Lifetime. I said, Terry, I need to know, like, what lifetimes are opening in the next year. And this built more. One was one of them. And, you know, I'd I'd come here on retreats. I'd led retreats in in Scottsdale, Phoenix, for three years, my first three years of teaching at lifetime. Not sure why Phoenix. Like, that's just just a synchronicity. I just happened Joe: Yeah. Alex: To have picked Scottsdale to come to you and I was again familiar with it. And now I'm here and I love it. Joe: That's awesome, man. That's a great story. Alex: Yeah, and I think that one of the things that's important about it, too, is like if you look from a from an external point of view, it might just look like, oh, like everything just fell into your lap. You're very lucky. And I don't believe it's luck. I believe that, first of all, it's blessed. I do feel very blessed in my life. My life, not my whole life hasn't been a blessing, but in a lot of ways and very blessed. And I recognize that. But also, I believe that when you are doing your work and yoga, get called Dharma, when you're doing like your soul's purpose. Doors are going to open up for you that you didn't even know existed. And and then, like the old paradigm is that you have to have, like, super hard work to live the life of your dreams. And the new paradigm is if you're on your path, your path. Right. That's important. Not what other people think Joe: So Alex: You should do Joe: Important. Alex: When you're on your path. It doesn't it doesn't feel like hard work. You know, I've had a lot of success teaching yoga. And I've been a student and I've put effort in and I've taken inspired action, but it's never felt like hard work. And I think it's. And I know it's because I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm doing my my life's work. Joe: Yeah, it's so awesome. And this is great because my audience, the listeners, this is what I preach when I don't have a guest like you on, you know, it's all about that. Even though I'm older, it's taking me all this time to finally say I just need to do the things that that speak to me, that make me happy, that make me want to wake up every day Alex: Neverson. Joe: And smile. Yeah. And so I've come to the game late, but I'm working on it, you know, and hopefully I have a few more years before I take a dirt nap and I can get a bunch of really cool stuff done. So we'll see. Alex: And really, too, like your neck, it's never too late to to to to move in the direction of your dreams and really realize, too, like it's it's not a destination. It doesn't matter how early you start. You don't eventually get to this place where you like up there. I don't care Joe: Right. Alex: Anymore because it's there's always there is always a path, a continuous journey. So it doesn't matter when you get on the path. But it's it's a beautiful thing that you've found it, you know, because for a lot of people, they don't find it till maybe they're laying in their death bed. Right. Joe: I know. Alex: A Joe: Yeah, Alex: Lot of Joe: And I. Alex: It takes lifetimes to find it. Joe: Right. And I've actually I've I've talked about this in some of the. I've done a couple where it's just me kind of spilling my heart saying you don't want to have regret, you don't want to lay me there. And, you know, you want to have it be where you feel like you really live an amazing life. And so you more people have control over this than they think. And the problem is they they don't think they have control over it. They're they're just they're letting their life become something that is being steered by other people, other things, whatever. And. And I think that's why this time with the corona virus happening, this wasn't just a localized thing. Right? It was the whole world shut down and it gave everyone the opportunity to sit back and reflect on what it is that they do and what's the next step for them. And if they got laid off or fired or whatever, you know, they might not have a job. So what do you want to do with your life? Right. So to me, this is it's a cool conversation because it's it's not just about yoga. Your frame of mind is in the same thing that I'm trying to convey to the people that listen to this podcast is that let's, you know, pick what you want to do and make yourself happy. You have control to engineer your own life to to live the fullest life that you can. So figure it out and start. Now, we're never gonna get a plan. I did a podcast on this. We're never gonna get a break like this again. Our lease? I don't think so. Not in our lifetime, where literally everything just halts. Alex: Right. And also a lot of people get it individually, right? Sometimes it comes as like a diagnosis or a we're getting fired or laid off, you know. But this is a collective where we have an opportunity as a collective to reflect on, like, how do we want to be not just on our individual life, but how do we want to live as a community, as a whole, as a collective? And I think also that's why a lot of things are coming to the surface. You know, a lot of the tension and seeing like injustices and starting to the fact that there's more awareness there. It's a beautiful thing. Weather doesn't matter. You know, there's there's a lot of different opinions on how it's been addressed. But we're going to see. And I really do believe this is like a new paradigm. Things are no longer hidden. And and we're seeing that and more and more and more and more ways, like even restaurants go to go to new restaurants. They almost always have like an open kitchen. Right. Like you Joe: Yeah. Alex: Go to because you can see the food being prepared. And that's how our whole life is starting to be, where it's there's there's nothing hidden anymore. And we don't want the hidden. So, like, whatever's been in the darkness where we're shining light on it. And it's it's arising. And like what you said. Yeah. It's so important to do what you love doing, to do what makes you feel good, because there's a lot of people that are even super and putting this in quotes against successful. Right. And usually that's like a monetary thing. That's kind of how our American dream Joe: Yeah. Alex: Then equated that are like super rich and just like so unhappy and numbing themselves. They're addicted to all kinds. All kinds of shit. Whatever it is that that, you know, everyone has different ways to numb themselves. But, you know, it's not just about money. It's not just about like working hard. It's about loving your life and living the truest version of your life. That's that's what's going to bring you the most fulfillment. Joe: Absolutely. You know what? And here's a good segue way, because you talk about community and how we're all thinking about the future together. Now it's really like a shot in the head for everyone saying what is going on and we've got to fix this. And and it's not just singular now. It's it's your your family. It's your community. It's everything. And when you were in yoga and you talk like that, can feel it in the room that everyone is is realizing that we have to make the right changes to move forward. And. And it just it's it's powerful. So this is a Segway to that really cool story you talked about with the kids lined up and the Alex: Oh yeah. Joe: Basket. Alex: The trive...yeah. So there's a there's. A phrase in African culture from certain tribes in Africa. And it's I don't know exactly how to pronounce it, I think it's Ubuntu, Ubuntu. And the idea that phrase means I am who I am because of who we all are together. So like we're a product of our environment. And an anthropologist went to this tribe in Africa that kind of lives by this ritual. And they didn't experiment where they lined up all their all the children. And in the distance, like 100 hundred yards away under a tree, they put a basket of fruit and candy and all kinds of sweet treats. And this this anthropologist explained the rules of the game. He said, when I say go, it's a race. And the first person there, they get the basket of treats. They get the basket of goods. So obviously, like some of the older kids have a big advantage, they're probably going to be a little faster. So you lines them all out and he says, "Ready? Go." And the kids, they didn't have any time to talk to each other beforehand. And as soon as he says go, they look at each other that turns had side reach out and grab each other's hand. And together they like kind of jog or skip to the basket and they get there at the same time and they shared all. Anthropologists ask one of the older girls in the tribe that that probably was was one of the fastest, fastest ones. And you said why you could add it all to yourself. Why do you do that? And she said, you want to. How can one of us be happy if the rest of us are sad? Joe: It was so powerful when you told that story as a wow. Alex: Yeah, I mean, when you get that story mixed with, like, intense, you know, physicality, transformation, that's another thing that's beautiful about yoga. What I love about this platform is when your physiology changes. So if you're doing some kind of activity, you're also more open and receptive on on all those dimensions. So then when you hear something like that, it really lands. It really impacts you Joe: Yeah. Alex: More than even just listening to this or listening to a podcast or something. It's a different level when you're getting your physical involved. Joe: Yes. Absolutely. Alex: Huge one too like that idea, because a lot of us and this is another, like old paradigm we're taught. How many times we hear it like the idea of survival of the fittest and it's a shark eat shark or Joe: Yeah, Alex: Dog eat dog world or starve. Joe: Yeah. Alex: You've got to be a shark. And you've got to know in order to be successful that you need to kind of push other people. There's there's people that you need to kind of push down for you to to rise up. And that's that's bullshit. Like that's gone. That maybe that's how it used to be. But that's not how this new world, this new paradigm that we're moving into is like now it can be rather than competition, it's collaboration or conscious competition where we can kind of grow together. There's Joe: Yeah. Alex: A quote that my teacher used, always used that all ships rise in a high tide. So collectively we're raising each other up or lifting each other up and there's enough abundance for everybody. And that's huge to understand and to really get to and believe because we believe it on an individual level, the collective starts to believe it and then we'll start to really see it in our lives that like there's enough work for all of us. Joe: Yeah, yeah, and that's why the classes are so strong in the sense of it's the it's the work out that you get and it's that all of the things that that you get out of the class, but it's you get this benefit of all of this positive energy that comes out of it. And it's just it's amazing. That's what I want to touch upon. All I want to know for people that don't understand yoga. And obviously it's new to me. But I. I just know the benefit. I can feel it. I can already twist certain ways that I couldn't twist a month ago. Whatever it is. But I want to educate the listeners who have been on the fence about taking a yoga class. What are the benefits that you can express of what yoga does and why it's so needed? Alex: There's there's a there's a lot of benefits, and it really happened in in a lot of different ways. So I'll talk about the four dimensions. I talked about that a lot in my trainings and stuff four dimensions, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. And yoga has it's going to improve your life and in all of those physically. Is gonna help you feel good, right? Like moving your body and breathing deep. It's medicine for your body. And and and like, if we're honest with ourselves, we want to feel good. And there's enough shit that we do that kind of brings us into a state of not feeling great that this will help balance it out. Right. So if you'd like to party a little bit and drink or maybe, you know, indulge in some unhealthy food, that's fine. But this will help you. This will help you be balanced and and moving your body has it has a ton of benefits and moving. You're like just body weight is really good, too. So I know that a lot of people like my age. And when you're younger or really I should say, like men, men in general, we we think and we've kind of been programmed to think that in order to be. I don't know, appealing and sexy. And we need to lift a lot of weights. Right. And it's good to be strong for sure. But there's just so much wear and tear that comes from lifting heavy weights. Alex: And in most cases, like, we don't need that kind of strength. Right. Like like in our day to day life, we're not doing things well. So then it becomes not even that functional. But yoga, moving your own body, that's it. We're constantly doing and through those body weight movements. Not only is it going to build strength, but it's not going to, like, wear you down as much as I'm doing other other types of exercise. So that's a one big one physically is just feeling good in your body, going even deeper. Like I can tell you. So I have two autoimmune conditions. I've been diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is intestinal inflammation. Kind of throws off my digestion and diabetes, so affects my blood sugar. When I practice yoga or really now I see it more now and I don't practice yoga because I do it frequently. If I don't practice yoga, my blood sugar is way higher. So it regulates my blood sugar. And there are studies that show it helps really everybody's blood sugar, which is good. But you have diabetes or not. It's good to have regulated blood sugar, helps your body just stay in and kind of balance. And and my digestion is better, too. And there's a lot of people that that have digestive problems. So just moving your body around and a lot of the forward folds and twists, it's like a massage for your digestive organs. So those are just like little benefits. Alex: And I'd say that each person you kind of have to experience it for yourself to really get to know. Right. Like I could tell you that honey is sweet and delicious, and I could talk about it all the time. How good honey is. If you never taste honey, you're not going to really understand. But when you really do it yourself, then you'll start to realize, like, well, yeah, I do feel better. So that's physical. Mental. It's gonna help you. I think the biggest one is it's going to help you be less reactive in your lives. So reactions are like, you know, someone cuts you off in traffic and you die. You start getting crazy and like fight or flight response, start getting angry. Or maybe it's with your partner that you live with where they say something that kind of pisses you off and you you just get super agitated right away. And there's no like, there's no. There is no cause from like the stimulus to the response. It's just right away that you're super reactive. And it's really powerful to be able to increase that space. So something happens, there's some kind of stimulus, and you're able to take a little bit more time to respond with with your whole being, not just like out of emotion or not just like out of anger or you're able to more intellectually, intelligently and emotionally respond. So I think that helps a lot. Joe: That's really interesting, too. I never thought of it that way. But to have that space between between what happens in your reaction is really cool. Alex: It's huge when you can when you've made that space even bigger, when that gap becomes bigger. That's really you talk about regret a little bit. Usually we only regret things when we react to them. When you have that space and you usually have a little more time before you respond to something, then you're probably not going to regret you're probably going to make a decision that's that's going to be best for it, for all parties involved. Definitely increases your ability to focus. Right. So if you want to be more proficient, efficient at work, if you want to be able to have better conversations, be a better communicator. Is going to help you with that, too. So mentally really powerful. And it just goes to improve your mood like movement and breath helps you feel better. So you're gonna be in a better state of mind when you're not when you're in a better state of mind, in a more elevated state. You're going to attract better things into your life. That's the best law of attraction and law of attraction. Is not this like hippy dippy, crazy thing that is real. And we're all doing it constantly. Right. We just aren't necessarily aware emotionally. Yoga is a great way to express it. So it's another thing with men like men were taught that to to be a strong man, we need to be stoic and we need to not really show emotion. Alex: And that takes it takes a big toll. Right. And that's why more men have like serious health conditions, because this is a popular saying mom like wellness practitioners, our issues are stored in our tissues. Right. So if we never release emotionally, then then then we have so much stress that we're just holding in and holding onto. I think also that's a big part of why I had a disease, why I got diagnosed, because I didn't have a healthy outlet to express the things I was feeling and some of the challenges that I went through. So. So yoga like moving your body, breathing. Kind of shaking things I talk about. Like shaking. That's a way that our bodies release. So that's a really powerful thing on an on an emotional level. And it just allows us to feel right. Like, most of the time we're numbing ourselves. Yoga is like the opposite. Like, go ahead and feel. You can feel angry. It's OK. You can feel happy. You can. You can. You know, there's a lot of people that practice yoga. And they they feel emotional, like they might cry or like feel like they're tearing up beautiful and you off to try to make sense of it, just like that's a release that had to happen. Joe: Yeah. Alex: And then finally, the good news is that. Joe: Not I don't know if it's it's exc. I was just going to say that you talk about the emotion part of it and how I even said to you after one of the classes, I couldn't keep tree pose, I couldn't keep it without falling out of the pose and losing my balance. And I found myself getting mad at myself a couple of times. And over the months I've learned to to just breathe and settle into it. And then it's it's become a better way of doing it for me. But I used to get mad at myself because I want I'm one of those people I got to do everything good or I suck, you know, and it's. Alex: You know, that man and I and having the awareness of it. That's a huge benefit of the practice. I say it a lot in my classes. How you do anything is how you do everything. Joe: Yeah. Alex: And, you know, this is an opportunity to become more aware of, like what happens when you struggle. Right. Do you get pissed at yourself? Do you start to have this negative self talk? Because all that does is bring you to a downward spiral. Right. So as you become more aware of it, you go into your yoga mat and you might do something that like, OK, you're going to struggle in it, but can you still stay, like, optimistic? Can you still keep your energy up even when you're struggling? And that's going to help you so much in other areas of your life and your relationships in your in your work, in your, you know, whatever it may be. So that's really powerful. And in the final dimension where you get benefits is the spiritual and spiritual true. That's a pretty, like, misunderstood term. Couple of things that that it means to me. One of the one of the most powerful emotions or traits, I guess, to feel is inspired and inspired is that word in spirit. So it's like when you're connected to soul, right? When you're connected to your true self. Because you don't have a soul. You are so right. Every single human being is Joe: Mm hmm. Alex: A school. We have a body. We have a mind. But we are we are soul. And when we're in that place of spirit and soul, we get out of our own way. And we start to realize that we are our biggest obstacles, like our ego. Right. That that part of us that maybe gets pissed when we're not doing so good or maybe gets offended or overthinks things like we get in our own. Our ego gets in our own way all the time because we just want to be loved and we want to be appreciated. We want to be like, you know, our ego wants to be the best and recognized as the best. And when we're in spirit, we don't care about that. Like when you're really inspired, all that shit goes away. And I think everyone's experienced it in some way where they're just in the flow of life. So, like, I'm a big athlete, I love playing sports and I've had moments in life. I'm just totally in the zone. Right. I know musicians and runners. They experience it, too. And in the zone is the same thing. You could change interchange that word with being in a state of meditation or being in it in a state of inspiration. In spirit. Joe: Yeah. And it was interesting because, again, talking about the practice of yoga. And I wanted to actually ask you, what do they call it, the practice of yoga. Alex: Yeah, I love that because it's not a performance and it's not a competition, right. And it helps you realize that it's not a destination. So if you if you're not performing yoga, there's no one that you're trying to impress with yoga. Social media. Maybe there's some other things about it, because you'll see a lot of these famous yoga accounts that just pose like pretty photos. But to me, that's not really what yoga is about. And yoga for four more more of the time that it's been around, as has not been about postures, it never really was about posture. It's just in the past few hundred years, poses became became what yoga is like known for. It's never a performance and it's never a destination. And, you know, one thing about practice is like you don't really need to label or judge it as good or bad just by putting the effort in. You get the results out. And I think that's a pretty powerful thing because most of the things we do in life, we're doing to, like, impress other people or to to perform something and almost everything that we do, we do to kind of impress other people or or get some kind of recognition and yoga. It's not about that. Just you come to your mat. We just practice certain things. And what you're really practicing in yoga, not getting good postures. You're really practicing strengthening the qualities of the mind that serve you right. So equanimity, having a balanced mind, non reactivity, kindness, compassion, enthusiasm, inspiration, like those qualities, the mind you're strengthening and then you're learning to weaken by just not giving energy to the qualities of the mind that that detract from you. So like competition and judgment and negative self talk, those things. So really, that's what you're practicing. You're practicing getting better at living your life. Joe: Yeah, awesome. I want to, if you can, and I don't know I don't know how deep you want to get into it, but I want to get a little deeper in the physical part of it, because I think that that's what's important for people to understand. I don't want them to think it's like to showing like I think the other benefits will come out of it if if they understand the health benefits in a physical nature of what it can do to them. And I know that where we're in certain poses and when we're in class and you're talking about how your toes are spread out when you're let's say you're in downward dog or your fingers are spread out. And it's and they talked about us all getting more down into the earth, like sitting on the floor during the day occasionally, like feeling more connected to the earth. Alex: Yeah. Joe: And and I know that when we do these poses and you talk about how you're pushing on your ankles and your fingers and your toes, and it's it's creating this circulation in the areas that normally aren't getting that kind of attention. Alex: For sure. Yes. Love it so. So let's start by saying, like, first of all, in in our Western culture, right. In America, there's something like one in four people have chronic illness. It might even be higher. It might actually be like one and two. But we live in a culture where a lot of people have disease and disease dis Joe: Yes. Alex: Ease. So the opposite of having ease in the body is dis-ease and the cause of most diseases. And this is really according to like all traditional medicine practices that have been around for thousands of years. Right. Way longer than our modern like pharmaceuticals and what we do here in our health care system. But like traditional Chinese medicin, Ayurveda which is the kind of sister science of yoga, traditional medicine that was practiced in the Middle East for thousands of years. It all says that the main cause of disease is stagnation. Right. Like when there's just stuck, when we're stuck, they're stuck. Energy, that's the reason that we get tension, everybody. That's the reason that our digestion kind of sucks. So yoga in the poses and we work in the yoga posture to bring sensation to every single part of our body and wherever there's sensation that that's that goes hand in hand with there being stimulation. Right. So that part of your body is stimulated. And if you just, like, took your arm and you stack smacked your arm a lot. Right. This is stimulation. It's going to start to turn red. That's increased circulation. So wherever you stimulate whatever part of your body you stimulate. There's more blood flow, more energy flow. And when everything is flowing, that's when we're at a at a greater place of of health. Better place of healing. And I love using the analogy of like a stagnant pond. Alex: Right. It's like very murky. It's it's kind of nasty. A lot of mosquitoes and bugs compare. And that's that's when we're stagnant. And if you think about it, probably a lot of people that we know well, maybe people that are listening to this right now. We spend hours a day sitting in a chair. So there's a lot of stagnant energy, a lot of blockages. Tips are so tight, our low backs are so tight. That's the pond. That's real stagnant energy. And then if you look at like a stream, it's very clear. It's smooth. It's flowing. That's the. That's what yoga helps helps us get like, more circulation in our body, more energy flowing in our body. A huge one. A huge benefit of the practice is you don't you'll see that you, like, don't need to be addicted to coffee and caffeine to have energy. Right. Like, you can find weight. Just breathe deep. You'll have more energy. Do some sun salutations, which is like a basic yoga warm up super D. D series of movements. You'll you'll have more energy. And that's a beautiful thing too, because it's really empowering. You start to realize, hey, I can take my healing into my own hands. I can take my energy and my efficiency into my own hands. So that's a big part of how the physical postures work, is bringing more stimulation and therefore circulation to every little party about. Joe: Yeah, I think it's really important, so I wanted to just kind of drill that home because again, I think that the the idea of what yoga is, is you have to experience it. Like you said you can. You can tell me all day that that honey is sweet. And if I don't taste it, I'll never know. Right. So I just I want to encourage the listeners to initially if they just want to watch you online in a training, but ultimately I don't care if it's at lifetime or. I do care. I don't want anybody at lifetime. I don't want that. Alex: Save you a spot. Joe: No but I encourage people to go in and when they're ready to go take a class, because I really think it's super important. Alex: And I'm glad you said that because that it is a little bit of a blind spot for me, because if you talk to people that are close to me, like you'll see like I love yoga for definitely more than just the physical practice, like the physical to me is like really a smaller benefit to all the other practices. Like I said you don't practice yoga to get good at poses. You practice, you're going to get good at life. But I also realize it's really important for people to realize that, like, the physical is usually the introductory. Right. Most people come to yoga because they want to feel better in their body. They want to be more flexible. They want to kind of like, you know, if they have low back pain, they want to they want to help take care of that. So I think it's important for me to realize that and talk to that, too. And really, if you come just for the physical, that's fine. You'll get everything else. That's how it works for most people. They come for the physical. They want to Joe: Yeah. Alex: Be more flexible. They want to, you know, open up their hips a little bit. And then they start to realize, like, wow, this is. Like, I didn't freak out when someone just cut me off. I used to have road rage. Whoa. This is like my yoga practice is helping. I breathe. I did deep. I took a deep breath. Instead of, like, maybe yelling at my partner or yelling at my kids when they kind of pissed me off. Like, I saw that there's a little more space between my response. You don't have to. You want to go to yoga for that. But you'll get the. Joe: Right. So on top of that, this is just more of a personal question. Do you meditate also? Alex: Yes. Joe: Ok. I just that was a selfish question because I've done it off and on. And I was just wondering if it's something that you do as part of your daily lifestyle. Alex: Sure. I mean, I've I've been inconsistent over the years where I'll go and be really consistent with we're going to fall off. But that's like the seated meditation practice. And I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions about what meditation is. I've had I can't tell you how many students I've had say I can't meditate. I can't get my mind to still to be still. I can't get my mind to calm down to any thoughts. And like, that's very natural. But that's that's part of being a human having a human mind. It's not about making your thoughts go away. The practice of meditation and this is ancient yoga philosophy. This is like that the eight limbs of yoga, which is a really foundational yoga philosophy teaching before you get to meditation, that kind of the precursor is is concentration. So when you're doing when you're meditating, what you're really doing is concentrating on one thing. And if your mind wanders, it's OK as part of the practice. But you just sucks instead of letting your mind go away off into the distance. You notice it wandering and you bring it back. You notice it wandering and you bring it back. So the practice is concentration. Meditation is not really a verb. It's more of a noun that you might get into. But just because you sit and sit for five minutes doesn't mean you're gonna get into that state of meditation where you're like in the zone. Alex: And that's not it's practice another you know, another thing like you want to judge it as like, oh, did I actually meditate or not just take if you. And I like to teach when I do like one to one coaching, I just teach. Hey, guys, this is like we're just gonna practice concentration and let me call it meditation. We're gonna practice concentration. And as you get better at concentration, you start to get into the zone. And some people, almost everyone meditate just in different ways. Like runners. You know, I've talked to some people, too, that work with or might you have like a concentration practice, ignite or meditate. And I was like, well, what do you do to kind of like get out of your own head like or like, you know, what do you do to kind of if you have a lot of thoughts going on it, like why I like to run when I'm running, I'm just like fully in the zone and not thinking too much. Perfect. That's your meditation. Some people meditate when they play basketball and they play music when they create art. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. And I think that's important to realize, too, to. Joe: Yeah, and it's funny because what yoga has helped me to do is to understand how poorly I was breathing because I'm definitely a breath holder type person like I. The tension from holding my breath for certain things. And so it's opened up the fact that I need to breathe deeper and longer. And it's all part and it's all these little benefits that you don't realize you're getting. And that's why I think it's so important. I wanted to have you on because of all of this, you know. Alex: Yoga changes your life does Joe: Yeah. Alex: If you commit to it. And it just it just works for everyone. The big thing is you have to find the right teacher, right? The right Joe: Yeah. Alex: To feel like I'm not everybody's teacher. I've had people that don't like the way I teach. They don't. I talk a lot to a lot of stories. Some people like that. Some people like more silence. You know, I play my music really loud. Some people like that. And that's fine. And I and I realized that, like, not everyone's going to like me. I think if people if I wanted everybody to like me, I'm probably doing something wrong. I'm sacrificing Joe: Yeah. Alex: My truth. But there's plenty of teachers. There's plenty of styles of yoga. So once you find your teacher and your style and your person, you dive in and and like, it'll it'll change your life. Joe: And you touched upon something there that I wanted to ask you, this is about the music and how. How do you think that Paris, with what we're all doing in that room and and how do you I would, knowing you

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Alex: So how do you feel about long-distance relationships?Maria: Not that good. I had two relationships by now and both of them ended after me going somewhere. First time I was in Denmark but like I lived on a school in another city and while I was there for four months like I think two months after I went home to him and broke up and then came back to the school and just didn't really care. And then the second time I went traveling and I missed him so much and I came back and realized that there was nothing left. I'd lost everything while I was away so I don't, after one month, after two months, I think it just doesn't work for me if it's not really special.Alex: Yeah, I guess you're kind of like me. I have to see the person.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Almost, you know, daily.Maria: Exactly and you can have conversations online and on the phone but if there's no, I don't know, it doesn't have to be much, just like be close, see each other in the eye.Alex: It's a big difference, yeah. I did a month when I went home to Australia away...Maria: This summer?Alex: Yeah, this recent summer and like Skype is just not enough. Do you know what I mean? You can see the person, you can talk to them, you know you can kiss the camera if you want but it's not...Maria: If you want.Alex: You know it's not the same but that's not to say I don't think, some people can do it.Maria: I figure if it's a very like if the relationship is very, it's very passionate or you've been going on for a long time because both of my relationships were under one year I think. The first one was one year and the second one was half a year. So if we're used to staying together then I think you can work it out. I'm just too impatient.Alex: Yeah, I guess under a year you haven't really learned to depend on the other person all the time.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Or...Maria: Still going by the passion and if you can't see the person every day or like whenever you want, then the passion just slowly fades.Alex: Yeah, agreed.Maria: But this is your first relationship right?Alex: Yes it is and I did one month when I went home away from the person and it was just...Maria: And that was the first time you ever went away from the person?Alex: Yeah and it was just aah horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.Maria: I remember the first time I like traveled while my boyfriend was still at home and it was a week and I was devastated so it's if it's passionate it's...Alex: Well I did Christmas away from them when I went to Christmas, I did India for Christmas last year.Maria: OK.Alex: And two weeks was bad enough and then a month and I was just pulling my hair out, do you know? So.Maria: Yeah, it's hard.Alex: It, yeah, it certainly is.Maria: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Alex: So how do you feel about long-distance relationships?Maria: Not that good. I had two relationships by now and both of them ended after me going somewhere. First time I was in Denmark but like I lived on a school in another city and while I was there for four months like I think two months after I went home to him and broke up and then came back to the school and just didn't really care. And then the second time I went traveling and I missed him so much and I came back and realized that there was nothing left. I'd lost everything while I was away so I don't, after one month, after two months, I think it just doesn't work for me if it's not really special.Alex: Yeah, I guess you're kind of like me. I have to see the person.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Almost, you know, daily.Maria: Exactly and you can have conversations online and on the phone but if there's no, I don't know, it doesn't have to be much, just like be close, see each other in the eye.Alex: It's a big difference, yeah. I did a month when I went home to Australia away...Maria: This summer?Alex: Yeah, this recent summer and like Skype is just not enough. Do you know what I mean? You can see the person, you can talk to them, you know you can kiss the camera if you want but it's not...Maria: If you want.Alex: You know it's not the same but that's not to say I don't think, some people can do it.Maria: I figure if it's a very like if the relationship is very, it's very passionate or you've been going on for a long time because both of my relationships were under one year I think. The first one was one year and the second one was half a year. So if we're used to staying together then I think you can work it out. I'm just too impatient.Alex: Yeah, I guess under a year you haven't really learned to depend on the other person all the time.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Or...Maria: Still going by the passion and if you can't see the person every day or like whenever you want, then the passion just slowly fades.Alex: Yeah, agreed.Maria: But this is your first relationship right?Alex: Yes it is and I did one month when I went home away from the person and it was just...Maria: And that was the first time you ever went away from the person?Alex: Yeah and it was just aah horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.Maria: I remember the first time I like traveled while my boyfriend was still at home and it was a week and I was devastated so it's if it's passionate it's...Alex: Well I did Christmas away from them when I went to Christmas, I did India for Christmas last year.Maria: OK.Alex: And two weeks was bad enough and then a month and I was just pulling my hair out, do you know? So.Maria: Yeah, it's hard.Alex: It, yeah, it certainly is.Maria: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Alex: So how do you feel about long-distance relationships?Maria: Not that good. I had two relationships by now and both of them ended after me going somewhere. First time I was in Denmark but like I lived on a school in another city and while I was there for four months like I think two months after I went home to him and broke up and then came back to the school and just didn't really care. And then the second time I went traveling and I missed him so much and I came back and realized that there was nothing left. I'd lost everything while I was away so I don't, after one month, after two months, I think it just doesn't work for me if it's not really special.Alex: Yeah, I guess you're kind of like me. I have to see the person.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Almost, you know, daily.Maria: Exactly and you can have conversations online and on the phone but if there's no, I don't know, it doesn't have to be much, just like be close, see each other in the eye.Alex: It's a big difference, yeah. I did a month when I went home to Australia away...Maria: This summer?Alex: Yeah, this recent summer and like Skype is just not enough. Do you know what I mean? You can see the person, you can talk to them, you know you can kiss the camera if you want but it's not...Maria: If you want.Alex: You know it's not the same but that's not to say I don't think, some people can do it.Maria: I figure if it's a very like if the relationship is very, it's very passionate or you've been going on for a long time because both of my relationships were under one year I think. The first one was one year and the second one was half a year. So if we're used to staying together then I think you can work it out. I'm just too impatient.Alex: Yeah, I guess under a year you haven't really learned to depend on the other person all the time.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Or...Maria: Still going by the passion and if you can't see the person every day or like whenever you want, then the passion just slowly fades.Alex: Yeah, agreed.Maria: But this is your first relationship right?Alex: Yes it is and I did one month when I went home away from the person and it was just...Maria: And that was the first time you ever went away from the person?Alex: Yeah and it was just aah horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.Maria: I remember the first time I like traveled while my boyfriend was still at home and it was a week and I was devastated so it's if it's passionate it's...Alex: Well I did Christmas away from them when I went to Christmas, I did India for Christmas last year.Maria: OK.Alex: And two weeks was bad enough and then a month and I was just pulling my hair out, do you know? So.Maria: Yeah, it's hard.Alex: It, yeah, it certainly is.Maria: Yeah.

Hey, this is Joe Bakhmoutski and welcome to Simplify Cancer Podcast! I've got a great conversation for you today.  I'm talking to my new friends, Gabrielle and Alex. They have a podcast called Soar Above Cancer, which I love and we have a fantastic chat today about what it's really like to be a young adult who's dealing with cancer. Here are some things that we cover today: The shock of being diagnosed with cancer as a young adult The importance of calling on your support network through treatment How relationships and friendships can change after cancer and much, much more! Links Soar Above Cancer website Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/soarabovecancer/ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/soarabovecancer/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/alexmandarino/ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/alex.mandarino.12 Full Transcript Joe:                 It's so fantastic to have you on, guys.  Alex, I really want to start with you first, what was life like before cancer? Alex:                Yes, so myself, before the time of diagnosis, right before that, I was about 20 years old, so I was in university, I was studying my Bachelor of Commerce degree.  That was interesting.  I was very into my academics.  I was very interested in school and into the business aspect, working as often as possible and on my studies and things like that.  When you're 20, you have a big social life, so I was trying to hang out with friends as often as possible, go out on Friday/Saturday nights, even physically I was in the gym as often as possible. I was very active, I was building up muscle.  At that time, in your life, you're figuring out where you are in terms of what you want to do, in terms of the type of person you want to be, you're meeting new people, you're meeting new friends.  It was a very fast-paced lifestyle in a sense.  It was at the time where you feel a little bit carefree and on top of the world. When you're 19/20 years old, first of all, you feel like you know everything and you feel like when you plan something out, you feel like that's what's going to happen and you're going to see it through to fruition.  Obviously, at the time of diagnosis, it changes your perspective on things, but prior to that, I was a very active human being.  It was a big drastic change when that happened. Joe:                 Yes, absolutely.  What about you, Gabrielle, what was it like for you? Gabrielle:        I was also in university.  Actually, similar experience as Alex, I was 19, I had completed my second year of my bachelor's degree.  I was like Alex, very involved with school, with friends, focusing on just getting it done and enjoy that life of a young adult.  That, like Alex said, is kind of carefree and really out there.  You get to experience a lot of new things and living on my own for the first time, too.  Then the diagnosis happens.  Then there's that huge drastic shift that a lot of young adults do live where you might become dependent again and the life just isn't the same. Joe:                 Yes, absolutely.  Gabrielle, what was going through your mind when you first found out that you had cancer? Gabrielle:        I tend to like to think that I was really thinking, “I've got this.” I think I was to some degree.  I think I was in denial, too, at first, about how big this cancer experience would actually become.  I like to think that my first initial thought was, “I can do this.” I've got this, we can go from there, and whatever happens, I can manage.  It won't be easy, but I can manage it. Joe:                 Yes, it's great that you felt that you could work it out.  Alex, did you feel the similar way? Alex:                I would say so, but initially, I would say shocked.  I'd say for the first ten seconds or so, I didn't really know how to react.  Obviously, your parents are in the room, so you want to be strong.  It's a new experience.

Alex Lyon from Avask Tax Advisors works with over 2,000 eCommerce and FBA clients. Her role is to help them understand, register for, manage and comply with VAT registrations and payments. Did you know that when selling online in Europe the taxes (VAT) are included in the purchase price? Did you know if you don't increase your list price your margins shrink by the VAT amount? Did you know that if you have a UK company there is a minimum total revenue threshold amount you can reach before you have to collect VAT? Did you know the biggest mistake made by US companies is not registering for VAT, but that you can sell on Amazon prior to having the registration number? If you answered “no” to at least one of the above questions…and plan to expand to Europe, hearing Alex's explanation of the VAT process could be critical to your expansion success.   Episode Highlights: The biggest mistake Alex sees is not registering for VAT, and it is costly! You can sell before being registered, but it'll cost you if you don't increase your prices to account for VAT. You do not have to set up a foreign corporation to sell in Europe, regardless of your overseas location: i.e. US, Singapore, etc. You only collect in countries you are shipping from (there is a caveat). Amazon does not show VAT charges separately in your seller account. The PanEU program makes sense for some, most only register in the UK and Germany. If you don't pay VAT…your Amazon account will be suspended and/or closed (eventually). “Import VAT” is charged on the inventory shipped into the country and paid immediately. “Sales VAT” is charged on the retail price of your goods, and paid quarterly. The UK and Germany are the two largest markets for selling online in the EU. The UK is the easiest to expand to from the US because of language and the challenges of shipping to Germany. Wiring VAT payments can take 4-5 days and a currency account in Europe shortens the wire times. Using an intermediary bank, or currency account, can save 1-3% in exchange rate fees. With Avask, the costs to register for VAT in the UK is about $200 USD, and then about $1200 USD per year. Caveat to costs: “Distance Selling Thresholds”, if met, require more than $1200 per year because VAT is required in countries you do not store inventory in. Transcription: Mark: Good morning Joe. How are you? Joe: I'm good Mark. How are you? Mark: I'm hanging in there. I'm enjoying the weather lately and getting outdoors a little bit not working as hard but we're still recording podcasts. And you recorded one on an interesting topic and something that I think more and more people are having to face that have Amazon businesses and that's some of the tax implications going overseas. Joe: Yes. Actually, anybody who has a physical products business that wants to sell in Europe and it's on value added taxes, oh my God not exciting at all. But did you know real quickly that you know obviously here in the States you buy something and then the tax is added? When you buy something online, or in Europe, UK, Germany, France, Italy, etcetera the price is built into…I'm sorry the taxes are built into the price. So if it's 120$ the item might be 100 but the taxes are 20. And a lot of buyers that ex…by sellers that expand overseas don't quite understand that concept initially and they could immediately start losing margin by not increasing the prices for the value added taxes. A great conversation it was with Alex Lyon from AVASK Tax Advisors they have over 2,000 FBA clients and e-commerce clients throughout the world that sell and need value added tax compliance so really informative stuff. And anybody that's considering expanding overseas should absolutely listen to this because it's not that complicated once you listen to what she says. Mark: What are the consequences if somebody is not taking care of the value added tax? Do you know by any chance? Joe: Yeah absolutely. So they're very-very compliant over there. It's not gray like it is here in the States, its black and white. So the problem is that if you sell in let's say the UK and you're not registered, you're going to be determined. Amazon has to share the information with I think it's the HMRC. They have to by law; they share the details of everybody that sells on Amazon. So the HMRC has access to your sales information and therefore can force you to pay the value added taxes that you should have collected. If you didn't collect it you're going to pay for that out of your pocket simple as that. So you've got two choices: pay for it out of your pocket and lose that 15 to 20% margin and probably make no money at all or walk away and be banned from selling in in Europe on Amazon. Mark: That's significant. I think moving across the ocean to selling in different countries is a huge opportunity for anyone. Buying an e-commerce business that wants to ship overseas that you need to start taking advantage of that opportunity but you also have to go through some of the understanding of what sort of regulations are in play. I think this you know isn't…this is not exactly an exciting topic but you know and I think it's a really important topic for anyone to listen to, to possibly unlock an opportunity that your competitors are not taking advantage of. Joe: Yeah and before we say let's jump into it let me just say this that I've seen explosive growth with people moving and expanding their products to the EEO, explosive growth in particular France. I mean the UK and Germany. And the cost associated with it using someone like AVASK and they're not the only ones who do it, it's not all that expensive. You're looking at maybe 1500 $ to get the ball rolling and get it done right. And you can you can start selling immediately as long as you're registering and then you pay from the date you started selling. It's really not that complicated. There's a lot to it but it's really-really important that if you're going to sell overseas which I think everybody should if they have real growth plans that they listen to the whole podcast. Mark: All right with that I will say let's jump into it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got to Alex Lyon from AVASK Tax Advisors with me. She's an expert on VAT which I believe is value added tax. Something a lot of folks trying to expand their e-commerce businesses over to the UK and beyond really need some help on. So Alex welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Alex: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Hi everyone. Yeah as Joe has mentioned my name is Alex. I am Indirect Tax Client Manager of AVASK. So I've been working here for three years now just helping e-commerce sellers expand over into Europe. So we've got over 2,000 Amazon sellers that we work with. UK companies also companies based all over the world as well. So yeah that's been us. Joe: That's fantastic. Are they all FBA clients (Fulfilled By Amazon) or do they you know sell off FBA as well (off Amazon) with their own e-commerce businesses? Alex: It varies so a high majority of people are FBA sellers just because it's a lot easier to hand everything over to Amazon and kind of let them do fulfillment. But there are quite a large number of Amazon Sellers as well such as shipment from your own country which obviously makes a lot of things easier in terms of the VAT because you don't have to actually declare the sales in Europe because you're not fulfilling from his countries. So yeah it's kind of a majority FBA but we do have MFM sellers as well. Joe: Okay, good. Good. Good. So let's talk about the basics, get things straight here for our listeners because a lot of people here in the states are expanding their Amazon.com accounts beyond Amazon into the European countries and seeing explosive growth. But the big mystery is how to set up the VAT's and how to find an agency like yours to handle it most of the costs associated with it are. So you can start am I getting it right is it Value Added Tax and tell us how it works? Alex: Correct. Yes, it's value added tax. It's the same principle across the European countries but they have different rights and different filing frequencies. The easiest way to explain it would be that it's similar to the sales tax you have in the US. But the main difference would be the way which you include it within the price of your product. So this is kind of the biggest hurdle where people fall over on where they don't actually include the VAT amount within the price of the product which means that you're not actually collecting the VAT from your customer but you still have to pay it to the revenue. So you're essentially paying it out from your pocket if you don't include it. So in the US for someone like myself when I come over I don't realize it works like this when I go to the checkout in sell sites because I didn't know and I'm kind of how…where is this amount coming from. Whereas in the UK you don't know that it's already there in the price of the product so yes its essentially the same as the sales tax but it's more hidden. Joe: So Amazon is collecting that 20% for units built into the purchase price of the product. So if it's 100 $ if the VAT is 20% for instance, 20% is something set aside to pay your VAT…your taxes? Alex: Yes. Joe: Okay. Alex: So you need to list in on Amazon for the straight 120. Amazon won't do that for you. Joe: Okay and do a lot of people make that mistake where they just list their business without bumping it for the value added tax? Alex: Yeah there's a large number of that do. Without getting kind of proper advice on how VAT actually works. So it is…see it's hard enough to in taxes in your own country let alone I'm kind of working out how to do it in a foreign country. So yeah that's a big hurdle where quite a lot of people fall over on. Joe: Okay. So you're located in the UK. AVASK is located in the UK. But I think I saw offices around in different parts of the world, is that right? Alex: Yes that's right. So we've got an office in London and I'm on based on in Winchester which is about an hour south of London. And then we've also got offices in Shenzhen and LA. We try to come over to the US as much as possible as well just because oversea it's kind of US sellers that we've [inaudible 00:08:19.0] work with. So yeah we try and get over to the events as much as possible as well and get that travelling. Joe: So the vast majority of clients as you said are US based clients and they start selling and Amazon.com and then expanded to the European countries? Alex: Yeah, definitely. Amazon is oversea, it's huge in America and it's just kind of been taking off here in Europe as well. So it's a massive market in Europe and I think if you're product is successful and you've been able to make it successive there in the US then there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't also be able to do in Europe. Joe: Okay. So let's say I own an Amazon.com account, I want to reach out to you what…and I want to sell in the European countries, step one two three can you walk us through that? Alex: Yup sure. So step one is to work out where you're going to be shipping your products from. So most people go with the UK or Germany just because they're the biggest markets, UK is obviously a lot easier because you don't have to translate any of your products. So whichever country you decide you're going to fulfill from you then have to get a VAT number in that country and also an EORI number for all of your shipments. So those two numbers you have to have those before you make a shipment. If you make a shipment without those numbers you're going to get charged import VAT and then you won't necessarily be able to reclaim that back whereas you would if you have the numbers. So that's very important. In terms of the registration process, engaging a UK agent is really helpful because you've got someone who can communicate with tax authorities on your behalf. And that also means that we know exactly what documents are needed for each of the registration. We'll process all of that for you. Once the application has been submitted and you're waiting for the numbers to come through at that point you should start getting your listings up. Working out some shipping quotes and kind of working out all the details on actually how you're going to get your product there and what the listings are going to look like. Joe: Okay. And I just had a conversation with someone that is buying an Amazon business and they were confused about when the VAT was going to be applied. Is it to the amount of products being shipped into the country or is it the amount that's sold? Alex: It's both. So if you're doing FBA you're making a box shipment to an Amazon warehouse. That box shipment you're going to have to declare at customs. So any shipment that's out into a warehouse is going to have import VAT at UK customs charged on it that's assuming of course that your shipment has come from outside of Europe, so most people ship from China or from the US. So import VAT is going to be charged on the cost of your goods. When you put together a commercial invoice of that shipment, that's the amount of the import fees then we charge on also with freight charges and things. Joe: And then what time do they pay that import VAT, when it arrives? Alex: Yeah correct so usually depending on what shipping company you'll go for usually they'll pay it for you and invoice it back to you. But they still have to do your kind of clearance number to create a shipment. Joe: And then do they have to…then they collect that VAT when it sells and they keep it or is it a different…are we talking about two different things? The import VAT versus the VAT that's charged to the customer on the Amazon account is that two different things or it's the same? Alex: It's the same tax but it's computed in different ways. So import VAT is non-cost whereas VAT on your sales is on the retail price of your goods. And they're also kind of declared differently so with the VAT when you [inaudible 00:11:35.18] you pay that in your VAT within each quarter. You don't pay that immediately when you make the sale. Whereas the import VAT, you pay it immediately at customs. And the way that those kind of…they tie in together although they're separately you…it's within your VAT return. So you do your VAT filing every quarter. So every three months you declare the amount of sales you made and then obviously you're declaring the VAT that's due on your sales and then any import VAT that you pay you can get that refunded and it's used as a credit within your VAT return. Joe: And how easy is it within the Amazon seller account to see that money that you've collected and have it match up against what you're going to owe? Or is it not as black and white as I think it would be or is it really relatively easy? Alex: It's gotten a lot better, to be honest. And so Amazon have got a specific VAT report that you can now download so you can see the breakdown. But in terms of the actual…when your customer purchases an item they won't be able to see the breakdown of VAT and the amount that's going to the amount that's going to the revenue. Another kind of stumbling block where a few Amazon sellers fall over where they don't get the kind of proper…do the proper research before is that's that although Amazon take their fees from the money you receive in terms of your sales, the VAT is [inaudible 00:12:49.6] on the total sales price. You can't deduct Amazon fees and then the amount that you actually receive from Amazon is what you pay VAT on it's the total amount that you're costumer is paying you pay VAT on. Joe: Why is there any calculation at all that the seller does? Doesn't Amazon calculate it for you it seems like they would since they know the exact sales? Alex: Yes so, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. You have to include it. You have to price your product you have to do your pricing matrix. If you're expecting to move due your pricing and then Amazon add the VAT on it…that's not going to happen. You have to make sure you're including them. Joe: Well then I was thinking in terms of Amazon that in your pricing you would say this is my price and then this is my VAT amount it's not done that way you just simply mark it up to 120$ if it's a 100$ item. Alex: Yeah, exactly. Mark out straight away. And you can tell Amazon with the VAT calculation service you can let them know if you've got any kind of reduce rated or zero rated items which will reflect on the actual sales report. But it's not going to affect what your actual retail price is on Amazon and what it's listed as. Joe: Okay. Let's talk about volume. Here in the States, there's a lot of question about when should I start collecting sales taxes and [inaudible 00:13:58.6] and all these different [inaudible 00:13:59.8] unfortunately not black and white yet. It's still very-very gray. I had a situation where I listed a business for sale and asked about collecting VAT and he said well I'm not…I haven't hit that threshold yet in the UK. And I think it was a UK corporation as well, can you talk about thresholds and when and if you have to collect. In different [inaudible 00:14:21.4] what if you're a UK corporation or a Hong Kong Corporation if you're someone at the LOC or corporation here in the States? Alex: Okay, so if you have a company that's incorporated anywhere apart from the UK then you have to register for VAT immediately so that's sale number one whether it's going to have 1$, 10$, or 100$ it's straight away so no threshold whatsoever, you have to be registered. If however, you have a UK company there's a threshold of 85,000 Pounds and that's in terms of a turnover over a 12 month loaning period. So if you hit that within three months you have to be registered if you hit that in 11 months you have to be registered but that's just for a UK company. So if you've got an overseas entity you have to register straight to it there's no threshold. Joe: As far as buyers go, when you and I talked about this and have conversations with buyers when they buy an Amazon account that has a European component to it there's always questions about TMI not going to be collecting during a certain period of time, how do we sign up, how do we get that registered, what kind of danger I'm going to be in. I think you said the other day in a call separately in preparation for this that you can start pricing your products right away while you register and you're not going to…you're not going to lose any grounds or sales while you're registering and then paying VAT down the road a bit. Can you talk about that again a little bit so that…and talk about it from a buyer for perspective. If say someone is buying an Amazon account and taking it over and would reach out to you to register how do they ensure that they're collecting from day one of ownership and that they're not going to…not get themselves in a little bit of trouble? Alex: Well, first of all, I want to make sure, well check whether the Amazon account has already previously been charging VAT. So what we've discussed in terms of the pricing, obviously if you're taking over an Amazon account you're buying that account. And if they haven't been including VAT in the prices, you obviously then need to…the first kind of goal is to straight away go ahead and increase everything by that 20%. Joe: Let me just jump in here for a sec. So that's a consideration when someone…this is for the buyers that are listening, correct me here Alex if I'm wrong but when someone's buying an account and the owner has UK corporation, if they're below that annual threshold of 85,000 Pounds in revenue they're not charging VAT. But if I buy it and I'm not a UK corporation I immediately have to increase the prices in order to collect VAT or leave it alone and I'm going to lose 20% of my sales to the VAT. Is that correct? Alex: That's correct. Yes, so you because you're an overseas company you have to charge VAT on your sales even though they haven't been charged previously. Joe: Okay really critical for buyers to understand that when it's a UK corporation. Okay sorry to interrupt please continue. Alex: Okay so once you have then kind of taken over the company you can actually back date a registration. So say I'm talking over…I'm buying an Amazon account under my US company from a UK company we'll stick to that example. From the 1st of May you know going through the whole process it's taken a couple weeks to actually get everything set up. When if it got to the 1st of June and you still hadn't registered you can then back date that to the 1st of May. So as soon as you know that you're going to be buying the Amazon Seller Central, I would make sure that you're charging VAT to your customers because although you may not be registered you can backdate the registration. And it means that you have to pay VAT in all sales you make previous even though at that actual moment in time you weren't registered but you're back dating registration. Joe: Okay just to summarize. Don't change a thing in terms of prices assuming it's a…let's go with back to the it's a non UK entity so that they're a US entity buying a US entity but they have a UK account to it. If they're charging 120$ now and they're collecting VAT you don't have to change prices at all. Alex: Correct. Joe: You're going to register with a firm like yours and then when it's time to pay for the first time you're already collecting those and you'll go back dating and calculate what's due. Alex: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Joe: And how often do you pay? I think you said was it quarterly? Alex: Yes quarterly so every three months yeah. Joe: And is it the same every three months? Is it the beginning of the 15th of the next quarter is when you have to pay the taxes or is it depends upon when you register? Alex: So you got one month and seven days to actually do the filing and make the payment. As you can fall into different stagger groups in VAT quarters so it's not necessarily you are January to March you can be February to April or March to May. So there's three kind of different groups of VAT filings you could fall into. Your VAT advisor should obviously let you know and would be contacting you when everything's due. In terms of the frequency yeah it is quarterly. Joe: Listen, Alex, as you can see I'm an old guy, got some gray hair here. I fell asleep in accounting class in college. I honest to God I did fell asleep, the next class came in and I think I've told the story again so I won't go to much detail. I don't like this stuff. I don't like this level of detail because of what I do for a living it's absolutely critical as an entrepreneur and know how important it is. Do I have to really…if I'm the guy that's buying an FBA business and it's got European components to it, how much do I have to really know or can I just rely on you guys to do the work for me? Alex: You can definitely rely on us to kind of advice you and let you know. But it is…I do think it's good to know kind of the basics of what you're doing. In terms of Amazon, you've got two different programs so European Fulfillment Network or Pan-European Program. Pan-European Program is great you get to move your stock around to seven different countries [inaudible 00:20:03.1] you're stock is close that your costumers time are positive reasons to do that. But if you just kind of turn that on on your Amazon Seller Central and you'd haven't done any prior research, you won't know that you then actually have to get [inaudible 00:20:17.6] registered in seven countries. You have to do filings maybe month in more than half of these countries. So everything that you do in terms of where your stock is located, where your sales are going will have an impact on your VAT registration, your VAT applications within Europe. So yes it's good you should have [inaudible 00:20:36.6] in there. We'd let you know but don't be completely ignorant to what you're doing and where your stock is going. Joe: Hey it sounds like you just touched on being able to shift from seven different countries in a penny you…there's a lot of potential savings in terms of the shipping costs and fulfillment costs that you're closer to the customer. But you talked earlier I think that if you've got your inventory in the UK or Germany in the two biggest centers that you register for VAT in those countries what if your inventory is spread around seven different countries so you're closer to the customers do you then have to register in all of those countries? Alex: You do. Yeah, as soon as your stock is in that country and you can sell in from there you have to be VAT registered in that country. So VAT is basically payable to the country and is being done close at supply. So if your stock is in a Czech Republic warehouse the place of supply VAT sale when it's going from the Czech Republic to the customer in Italy is going to be in Czech Republic. So being VAT registered in the UK is completely useless. Joe: Okay. Alex: So yeah- Joe: Very much like nexus here in the States if there's 15 Amazon centers theory is that if you have 15 different locations of inventory you have nexus in those states and that's where you collect sales taxes. Not as formal as where you are. Tell us about the biggest hurdles and biggest mistakes that you've seen people make…well that you have in been bringing people to the European countries and selling an FBA. What things are really obvious? What mistakes are really common that people can avoid? Alex: So first one is to not get registered at all. So with that threshold, quite a few people get confused that the 85,000 threshold is applicable to them; sounds really appealing and really lovely so they just don't register full stop. And then when you do get registered you just do it from today's date because [inaudible 00:22:27.3] realize but now I know that I'm going to do it from today. There's a huge amount of compliant checks going on with the revenue in the UK. They are hurdling through every single Amazon account and doing tax investigations. You know we've had to help clients where we're going all the way back to 2012 when the legislation came in that they have to register. So that's kind of six years of taxes you're going to have to go back and pay and if you don't your Amazon can get shut down. So the first kind of hurdle is actually getting registered. It's kind of what you'd think is the most simplest part just to do the application. Joe: Six years of VAT taxes you've had people in that situation? Alex: Yeah. Joe: I would think that in some situations people will just throw their hands up in the air, close the account, and walk away, and not pay the taxes. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Is that something where if you're a US resident where you're going to be found and have to pay those taxes in some way shape or form? Alex: Well you spent a nice six years building up your Amazon account. You've got all of your reviews you know you've built up that kind of brand in the UK so to kind of just throw your hands up and walk away is a big thing to do in the first place. Because even if you opened up a new Amazon account you're not going to have all of those reviews and obviously the name of you as a director of that company when you do a VAT application in the UK you have to state that information and you have to kind of give all of those details of yourself anyway and yeah so you'll have- Joe: So if you're going to walk away there walk in away forever. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Unless they cheat and get around the system somewhere. Alex: Exactly and unfortunately like in the US…so as not like in the US there's now amnesty in the UK so if you think that you're going to be negotiating and kind of say that oh I'll make sure to pay everything going forward so I'll pay a percentage you wouldn't get that and you also have to pay mass penalty as well so it do not kind of sound all that great if you haven't done the right thing to start with. Joe: Okay. So I've talked to a lot of Amazon sellers. I've seen their financials. Some people tell me you know I've done the analysis Joe and it's just not worth the effort for me to sell in Germany and Italy in France and in the UK. It's just not worth it. And I think they're completely and utterly wrong because I've seen the explosive growth. You've got 2,000 FBA clients. What country are you seeing people get the most bang for their buck? What's growing rapidly over there and what country should they pay attention to the most? Alex: UK and Germany definitely. They're just the two biggest markets. France is…does follow very closely but yeah 100% they're the biggest. Joe: Okay. And the easiest of those two might be the UK because you don't have to do translation? Alex: Yeah, exactly. And I'm shipping direct into the UK is a lot easier than it is shipping to Germany. Joe: Okay. Okay. There are a lot of concerns about money laundering. I've heard people talk about this and how complicated it is and on the German side and German FBA accounts. Am I just hearing people with sort of the chicken little mentality that the sky is falling and being really paranoid or is there something to that? Alex: I think sales in Germany in terms of my money laundering and everything is all going through Amazon. So amazon are collecting the funds and sending it to you. You don't need for some representation in Germany so payments go directly to the tax authorities whereas in France you've got to pay to your French advisor and then it goes to the tax authorities so yeah I'm not sure of what grounds. Joe: Do you even know who Chicken Little is or what that theory…okay, I see you just- Alex: No sorry. Joe: Okay. It's a cartoon character here in the States disguised- Alex: Okay [crosstalk 00:25:55.9] Joe: I used that terminology when there's so many people online talking about all the horrible things that can happen when you're own an Amazon seller account as opposed to the reality of how many great things are happening and it's changing people's lives. Alex: I think that's like when you go to a restaurant or you go anywhere, you're more likely to leave a bad review if you've had a bad experience whereas if you've had agood review you probably leave any review at all. I do notice that happen. Joe: A hundred percent, you're absolutely right. One of the things that I see often and I know you guys are AVASK tax advisor so I want to talk about that advisory part and the tax part. But one of the things that I see happen is that sometimes when sellers expand overseas they just take the easy route and they'd let Amazon handle making deposits directly to their US bank account. Whereas other people that take a little bit of time, do some research, still use World's First Bank or somebody else to be that intermediary and the money will go there at a lower exchange rate saving them tens in…tens of thousands of dollars annually. Do you find that to be the case, do you would advise folks to do that and if so what world banks do you suggest they use or look at or is that a service that you provide as well? Alex: Yeah, definitely. So if you kind of first of all from a VAT paying perspective there's…most people have to pay via wire transfer. And if you're getting kind of close to the payment deadline it can take for to five working days for that payment to clear with HMRC. They then if any payment is received late they will give you a surcharge with subtentiative liability and that can go up to 15 cents. So if you've got a currency account located here in Europe the time that it takes for the funds to actually clear and consider the payment to be made is a lot quicker. So that is a big benefit of getting a bank account over here even just a currency account. Joe: Can you define what a currency account is and how it differentiates from a bank account, please? Alex: So it has kind of all the benefits of a bank account and they're very similar but I don't think I mean don't 100% take my word for this. Obviously, it's better to speak to a currency account provider. But you can't hold large amounts of funds in that account. It's kind of like an intermediary way. You're basically doing a transfer and a transfer to your local account. You can't also do things like direct debits and buy out checks and things like that. Joe: Okay. And as I understand it just for people listening that currency account I think Amazon, for instance, may charge you if you are a…may charge you 4% currency exchange. Whereas the currency account you may only be charged 2%. And so you might be…and these are ballpark numbers so you're saving 2% on whatever amount of money is flowing through that. And if it's a million dollars, you do the math on that. If it's 10,000 $ you do the math on that. So I see a lot of people do that as well. That's what a currency account is right? Alex: Yeah. And especially with kind of making payments in Europe in terms of VAT you're going to be transferring your money from Amazon to the US and then back so the UK again so you're kind of transferring it a couple of times and to make that payment. So if you want to incorporate a UK company [inaudible 00:29:08.3] you could have get an actual high street UK bank account which is obviously a benefit of that UK company. You could just kind of grow the funds and leave it in a high street bank account in UK. Joe: Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Maybe I should have asked this at the very beginning and listeners I apologize because this is a question I get offset. You know I'm expanding to the UK, I'm expanding to Germany do I have to set up a UK business with a UK address or German company? Do I have to set those up or can I simply be a US based company selling products overseas? Can you explain, you've got 2,000 clients what are they doing? What do you recommend? Alex: You do not have to incorporate a UK company. It's the majority of people use their overseas company just because it is a lot easier and has less administration in terms of the accounts that you are drawing up each year. It's all just falling onto one company. You've got your CPA in the US. He's doing everything for you. You don't have to hire a CPA equivalent in the UK so ask accountants to do your [inaudible 00:30:03.9] paying your kind of all those tax due filings. In terms of what's actually best is really hard for me to say because it is on a case by case basis. It's you know do you want to build a brand, do you want a UK bank account, do you want to take advantage of the VAT threshold, there's so many factors. It's not one, it's one size fits all, unfortunately. Joe: Okay but the simple answer is for anybody listening if you're US based with a US bank account a US corporation, you do not have to set up a European company a UK company or in Germany that's misinformation. You don't have to do that. You can register for VAT and start collecting and paying and still have your one CPA here in the US. Is that correct? Alex: Yes. Joe: Good. Of your 2,000 plus or minus clients, what are their sizes? I mean you have you got people that are doing you know a million, two million dollars a month in revenue and those that are just doing five or 10,000 $ a month? How does it range and how does it flash out [inaudible 00:31:01.5] so we just know more about you guys. Alex: Yeah, exactly that range I don't [inaudible 00:31:05.4] information but- Joe: Maybe I should have said a half a million a month. Alex: Yeah there's a huge range there is. And that's for the UK companies and also overseas companies. You know we've got a lot of Chinese clients as well. We've got kind of a whole Chinese department [inaudible 00:31:20.6]. So yeah the range is massive. We can help you whatever size. Joe: Okay. Let's say that I'm doing a quarter of a million dollars a month here in the States and I decide I want to expand overseas and I'm going to start with UK and Germany. Aside from my inventory costs and getting the product there, what are my costs for someone like you in setting up VAT and getting registered and compliant and all that stuff? Alex: Well it depends which country you're going for. If it's just one if it's selling- Joe: Say I'm gonna start with two. I'm going to start with the UK, actually I'm just gonna go with one. Let's go with UK. Alex: Okay 150 Pound registration one up fee and then 870 Pounds a year annual compliance and that doesn't depend on turnover. So whatever your turnover is it's the same. Joe: That's pretty cheap, if I'm doing a quarter million a month, 150 Euros a couple of hundred bucks tops and then maybe a thousand US dollars a year simple as that. Who calculates what my VAT is owed each month? Is it me and my CPA or is that part of your 870 5,000- Alex: Yeah we do that. We calculate everything. And you can give us limited access to your seller central we'll go in and download all the reports directly. You don't have to be a part of that process. Your sole responsibility is to make the payment. Joe: Can I just have you make the payment for me if you have access to funds or you just tell me what to pay and I pay it? Alex: No we don't do that. We will tell you what to pay and then you have to make the payment yeah. Joe: This is…okay I'm a little [inaudible 00:32:47.2] I haven't talked to anybody about pricing but to me, this is so incredibly fair and reasonable. Are you guys…is this the standard fees? I mean this is normal cost or you're really expensive or really cheap? What's the situation? Alex: I think that's about average. We pride ourselves over the service that we give kind of in comparison to the actual fees to other providers and things. We don't get too hung up on what the actual charges are in terms of that. What I would say though, I don't want to be [inaudible 00:33:16.2] in terms of that 870. Because if your turnover was in the millions you will be breaching distance selling thresholds to all of the European countries. Joe: You'll be what? Say that again. Alex: Breaching distance selling thresholds, we haven't spoken about that so- Joe: Distance selling threshold. Alex: We'll go into that really quickly. So if you've got all of your stock in a UK company…country sorry company the UK country, UK warehouse and is going to customers in Germany. So UK from a warehouse going to a customer in Germany, if their sales go over a certain threshold to Germany you then have to register to VAT in Germany even though you're not fulfilling from that country. Joe: Okay. Alex: Makes sense? Joe: Yeah, all right. This is the part where Joe doesn't love this level of detail but thank you for that. Alex: It's just that I don't want to be misleading in terms of 870 Pounds you know whatever your turnover is because that's all UK fee. If your turnover is massive you will have an obligation to register in other countries as well. Joe: And if the turnover is massive to probably going to be shipping from those countries to save that fulfillment cost anyway. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Joe: And that's something that they would do the math on and you guys may help them with. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Okay we're running out of time. We're about 30 minutes in which is actually a bit long but this is a fascinating subject, a critical one, and I'm sure some people just they fell asleep because it's also not their favorite which is a shame. Because the number one thing people can do to make their business more valuable is get the books right. Get the details like this absolutely correct. It's going to help with the transition of the business as well as well as the value. Alex thank you so much. Any last thoughts that you can share with people listening? Whether they're buying and selling in terms of what they should do and how they should do it other than just do it and do it right. Alex: I honestly I would just say to speak to someone you know we do free consultations [inaudible 00:35:07.0] if you just give us a call then we can just run through everything with you. There's you know all though we've covered a lot in half an hour it's a lot of information, there are still some things that haven't been mentioned so yeah I would just speak so when I mention we've got all the information for before you completely just jump start in. Joe: Okay. Well, we'll make sure that all of your contact information is in the show notes. Alex: All right. Joe: But for those listening that can't see them there it's AVASK tax advisors that's A-V-A-S-K tax advisors and they do free consultations. I think it's really important as a buyer or seller if you're planning on selling over in the UK. Alex thanks so much for your time today I really appreciate it. Alex: Okay thanks. Thanks, everyone. Links: Alexandra Lyon Indirect Tax Client Manager Skype: alex.avask Email: alex@avaskgroup.com T: +1.213.330.4904; +1.213.256.0537 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandragrant4/ https://www.avaskaccounting.co.uk/   James Shayler International VAT Technical Officer Skype: james.shayler16 Email: james@avasktax.com T: +1.213.330.4904; +1.213.256.053

Alex Matchneer: @machty | FutureProof Retail Show Notes: Charles and Alex Matchneer have a great discussion that centers around routing in Ember.js: what they want to see in a router, what problems it solves, what's wrong with the routing solutions we currently have, and what the ideal future looks like in respect to routing. Resources: Episode 067: ember-concurrency with Alex Matchneer Cordova ember-rideshare react-router Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #86. My name is Charles Lowell, your developer here at the Frontside and podcast host-in-training. I'm flying solo today. It's been a while but that's okay because I've got a really fantastic guest on. Actually, we debated this at the beginning of the show, whether this was the third or the fourth time he's actually been on but no times are too many so hello, Alex Matchneer. Welcome back to the podcast. ALEX: Thank you. It's great to be back. CHARLES: You're still at the same place that you were the last time. ALEX: Yeah. Still working at FutureProof Retail. I'm still working on bunch of mobile ember-cordova apps and that's definitely occupying on my time. CHARLES: Nice. Because FutureProof Retail has a large hardware component and we were doing a series on IoT, we were originally going to have you on the show to actually talk about that experience of what it's like to be a part of a startup and develop software that's going to be running on a bunch of devices and the unique set of problems that poses. But in the pre-show, we decided to scrap that because there's actually a topic that we're both very interested in and you've been heavily involved in lately and might be a really interesting preview as to what's coming in the Ember community and at large. Today we're actually going to go back to talking about the same subject that we talked about in our first podcast, which is routing: what we want to see in a router, what problems does it solve, what's wrong with the routing solutions that we have today. Talk about what that beautiful, ideal future that we want to live in looks like with respect to routing. You've been thinking about this a lot lately. What have you been thinking? ALEX: I'm an Ember core team emeritus and back when I was on it and I'm a lot more active, I did a lot of work on the router, particularly with how it handles asynchronously loading data when you click on links and go to different sections of your app. I spend a lot of time over the last three or four years figuring out the nice patterns for what you actually want to use if you're building out lots of Ember apps. Then kind of around that time, right after landing some cool stuff and some not cool such us query params, which has been a challenging aspect, I start working at this company FutureProof Retail that is like 90% of the Ember work that I do there is in mobile apps. We use Cordova so we're basically running these apps inside a web view, inside either iOS or Android so that we can stay with the technologies we are most familiar with, such as JavaScript and CSS and HTML and build apps using that. We can use Ember to do that. What I found was that I couldn't really apply a lot of the same patterns, all these nice conventions that Ember router gives you. I couldn't really find a way to map that onto what I need to build in mobile apps and there's a few different reasons. I got really busy with the startup, just trying to build these things and kind of went off the happy path where I really just couldn't find a way to make it look like an Ember app. One of the nice things about the whole points of convention over configuration as this sort of Ember and Rails philosophy is that, one of the benefits is that if you know Ember and know Rails, you can drop into someone else's apps as long they're following these basic conventions and immediately know how to be productive and know how it's structured, know how to make a change to it and have it maintain a convention and not just have everybody who's using some framework build these totally different apps from each other that have no shared conventions and whatnot. Everyone is supposed to be able to learn from each other, grow with each other as long as they stay with these conventions. I couldn't really find out how to stay within Ember conventions and build this mobile apps. For a long time, I just didn't really contribute too much to the Ember router at all. I kind of fell out of touch with how most people are using it because most people are building these desktop-centric apps and here I am working on these mobile apps after three years. CHARLES: What are some of the specific use cases that were just impossible to, or not impossible but presented a challenge? ALEX: The first one is which is I think is actually one of the easier problems to solve but still some challenging is that you want something that's called stack routing or stack navigation in a mobile app, which is if you're actually building a native iOS app or an Android app, they both have different names for how they provide you this. But you're thinking of things in terms of stacks. In Android, you might open another activity, which is a full frame of a page in your app and you can push it and then when you press the back button, which is built in in Android phones, it'll pop that off the stack and take you back to where you were. In iOS, they give you a UI navigation controller and let you push and pop view controllers and that is how they want you to think about these applications. That is contrasting to what Ember makes you think about, which is go and define your static hierarchy of all the different places that you can be in an app. But with stack-based navigation, you don't necessarily know upfront all the different orderings of which frames are going to be pushed onto what and you might have situations where you want to be able to dynamically push, say an 'Add a Credit Card' page to where you are and maybe it depends on some data that's been loaded at some lower level in the stack and you can't model that as nested routes in the way that you might think about it in classic Ember apps. It's a different structure -- CHARLES: Now, when you say lower in the stack, I'm curious, if you're entered in aren't you... Oh, you mean... I see, previously in the stack. Okay, so lower in the stack so you're thinking like your current position is at the top of the stack. ALEX: Right, yeah. CHARLES: I see. Now, let me just clarify this in my own head. Your Ember routing structure is ultimately realizes a static tree but at any moment, you are entered into one path through that tree so you do have something resembling a stack. It's just is it the pathways that the ways that you can actually get nodes onto the top of the stack is you're limited because that can't be dynamic. ALEX: Yeah, but even then, it's hard to describe what the difference is but the kind of stack that you're thinking of in terms of the classic Ember router map is more like you're in these different substates than you are different frames that you've pushed onto your -- CHARLES: There's a finite and fully enumerated set of next states. ALEX: Right. To be very concrete, if you have a post route and then a post show route and then a comments route under that and these are all nested in a row, then if you're in the comments route, you are in a kind of hierarchical stack that might have loaded the post that you're looking at and maybe the post call-to-action above that and the comments for that but you're still in one thing. You've just expressed that one thing in terms of these substates so that every other state that's in the parent state can share the same data loading. That's different from saying, "I'm on this page and now, I want to push another page on it and maybe tap some of the data that has been loaded on previous pages." That's more of a navigation stack in a hierarchical substates stack. CHARLES: Is the difference then, the data dependency? Because if you think of the Ember classic where you got the static tree, at least theoretically all of the data in the leaf nodes depends on the data that's above. It's not just being able to dynamically push stuff onto the new stack but it's also saying, you want to be able to push stuff that might have no dependency on the stuff further up and it doesn't need to be re-rendered if stuff further up the stack changes. ALEX: Correct. CHARLES: But sometimes it might. ALEX: Right so there are a lot of corner cases that come out if you try to model this new way that a lot of corner cases have been thought out of if everything matched nicely to this hierarchical substate classic Ember stack but not for navigation. If you want to do something that's stacked routing-based, I've had a few different approaches. At our company, we maintain a suite of different apps that are sort of retailer or grocery-centric and the first one we did, which is more popular flagship one is Mobile Checkout, which is an app that lets you going to stores, scan items with your phone and checkout and skip the cashier line, which is great if there's huge lines and you just want to buy a little handful of things or maybe in your shopping cart. But that is like any other mobile app is really conducive to this step navigation approach. Then we had to make a few apps after that such as like another app that is [inaudible] do a manual check then ordering app and other of handful things that you can imagine is might be used on a grocery store. I took the opportunity to like, "I don't really like how the routing turn out the main mobile checkout shopper apps so let's try different things." If you approaches, at least have their pros and cons without really feeling you're solving the problem and one is to maintain your own in-memory stack of where you were, every link to you, you might recall where you were and then use that logic in addition to what's in a URL to decide what transitions to make, which to use Liquid Fire for that. But already, there's these weird growing questions like, "Why are you even using the URL? Is it helping you at all?" That was the main issue with the main app that we did. The other approach was to try and not even use any of the 'router.map' stuff at all. I use the router.map to basically just create one wildcard route. You can use normal Ember to use it like '*half' and that basically collects the rest of the URL as a param that you can use to do whatever you want with. I was using that to basically pass to another, which is internally used by Ember to do the stack-based parsing like grab a little bit of the URL and then parse the param for that then grab another. Every time you could see your stack in the URL. That has its benefits but the worst part about it is that it's getting further away from Ember so any add on that you might want to use at Internet of Things in terms of which route you're in and has conventions like that you just can't use. I can't think of a good example at the top my head but it's like the further you get away from those norms, the less the Ember system can help you and on your own building your own framework. This is all to say that I think I have enough experience at this point to bring home some of the things to Ember and I'm excited to get back into contributing to Ember with this one particular thing that I'm focusing on now, which is... I don't even know what to call it. It's like -- CHARLES: What does it do? The route stuff? ALEX: It's route stuff. Actually, let me get into the other... That's what is tricky about stack routing and tricky to sort of, if you already have to go through a mental hurdle with thinking of the Ember router and as a stack of states or substates and you train your brain to think that way, it's really hard to take yourself out of it and realize that what you're trying to build with like a classic mobile navigation is almost looks like the same thing but it's really different. The other challenging problem, which is specific to our particular app is that you wouldn't think of it as a very heavily server-driven app but if you're writing an application that at any point can get a message from the server like, "Hey, your status has changed," and that state is heavily coupled to navigation of where you're allowed to be in your apps for the state of some certain model, then you're going to have a really hard time, I'd say in modeling an Ember. I have a really hard time convincing people of this until they've actually tried to do it themselves, which is why I'm going off and just building things showing people. CHARLES: You don't have to convince me because I think one of the biggest problems is the router is like the one non-reactive piece of Ember, which is unfortunate because it's essentially, what is the equivalent of the Redux store in a Redux application, where it's the state that drives literally the entire application and yet, any type of non-hash change driven updates, you have to manually manage. Every time that we've done it, it's been a problem and depends on what data, at that point you have to be very thoughtful because, at least from the highest level, if there's damage to a piece of the tree higher up, you need to realize those effects of that damage or that change all the way down the tree. ALEX: Exactly. That is a great way of putting it. This is maybe a good time to mention this thing called ember-rideshare. I've had a really hard time describing these problems to people so I figured what I would do is write this blog a few months back, a little article called ember-rideshare. It's just a given name to the kind of app that still really hard to write in Ember. It's a mobile app. It involves stack routing but the other part is really difficult about it is this problem of the router being in a silo. It is reactive but it's only reactive to that URL. Other things changes, they need to, like you said come in and patch up something else about the router in case you add some URL that is no longer able to present some model of whose status changed. That's an article on a blog that I can probably link to in show notes or something. When I talk about ember-rideshare, imagine using Ember to build Uber or Lyft and it's got just the slightest bit of the whole thing. The whole point of the app is to coordinate your client-side request of I want to ride with the server going off and doing a bunch of things and finding a nearby driver, displaying you bunch of driver locations and it'll show up. Then finally, find you a driver. It's a constant communication. Throughout that point, you can sort of imagine modeling all the different screens as routes but the routes that are actually allowed to see at any given time are heavily dependent on what is the current state of the user's current ride. But you shouldn't be able to go to a route that says like 'cancel ride request,' if you haven't requested a ride in a million of these other things. If you're an Ember developer and you think that's an easy problem to solve, you're probably thinking, "I would use before model hook when I'm entering that route to check the state of the model," and if it doesn't make sense for the route of entering, I want to transition elsewhere. That's fine. That's good if you're doing an app if the user is the one deciding where to navigate to. But then when you're on a route like that and then the server tells you that your ride is done, you can't still be on that route so you've got to have some kind of validations that is like, "This is no longer a valid route to be in. Is the user still in this route?" CHARLES: "Where am I going?" ALEX: Yeah. Before model doesn't really help you. It's this one-shot discrete event and you just can't capture all the different things. The ember-rideshare describes some of these problems a little bit more detail but that's the main issue with it. Like you said, what is actually missing about the router? Maybe it's reactive but it's only reactive to the URL, what about all these other things that are happening into your app? I think there's a handful of APIs in Ember that they're great but they're kind of siloed off in a way. If you want to make two different kinds of worlds meet, you've got to write a bunch of your own code yourself or you just have to do mentally going back and forth and being like, "I did this, so I can't use this kind of API." I did a lot of work on the Named Blocks RFC, which previously there is silos between if you're passing blocks to a component versus data, you've got to think about them differently and all the ways that you might forward that data to a different internal component, if you want to build these composable, reasonable internals, you got to be kind of split-brain about it. I feel the same way about how the Ember router works. It's only good at dealing with stuff that has to do with the URL and you're on your own, if you needed to react to data changing. That's what I'm trying to fix. Does that correlate with your experience of working on Ember stuff as well? CHARLES: Absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. I think we've come to a consensus of the problem statement. I am curious to see a big separate query params. I'm going to throw that wildcard out there or maybe we should save it for later. ALEX: Yeah, I definitely going to come back to it. If I say all this cool stuff and I still don't have a solution to that, then what am I talking about? CHARLES: Right. ALEX: Which to be honest, I haven't thought of every single possible thing. I'm doing the thing where I talk about it on a podcast that everyone can guilt me into really finishing it. I actually really think that I'm going to finish it. I'm very confident in stuff I'm working on. I'm very excited to bring it to people but it is not all 100% fleshed out and I definitely appreciate anyone's help to those interested, understands the nature of the problem and wants to help me work on some of this stuff and like that, in Ember community Slack or wherever. CHARLES: Yeah, I'm really excited to hear it and see in what ways we might be able to contribute. ALEX: Basically, the goal is to find some underlying primitives that can model the current behavior without mistake because obviously, we can introduce something that's going to break into Ember apps. Basically, to recognize that the URL is something that goes through multiple passes of transformation, to eventually become the thing that displays stuff on your screen, from the very foundation of it, and this is the actual mini-course of what Ember router does internally because it involves a few different libraries and maybe this is a re-hash from the podcast that I did with you guys but -- CHARLES: Can I just say that there are some things that the Ember router really does right, that are fantastic? One of those things is it baked in to every single piece of data. It doesn't do the stack but in that tree that it models, every single node in that tree abstracts away the asynchrony of that node. I think that's absolutely huge so you get both the dependency enumerated like these are the things that I need to marshal the data to render myself and it's implicit that it might take some time. I might need to draw on a couple of different things to actually assemble this data so the asynchronous nature is modeled up front and it's implicit and it's there every single time, which turns out to be the right thing. The sampling that I've missed has been an excruciating void in all the other routing solutions that I've tried outside of the Ember community is that they just punt over asynchrony to you. You deal with it, not our problem and it's like, "Actually, that is the problem." Anyway... ALEX: That's a great point because if the router doesn't help you with any of this stuff at all, then it basically means that every one of your pages that you might want to render after the fact, probably has to have some loading logic like if data is loading, show us spinner. Otherwise, here's all the data -- CHARLES: Yeah, if something happen wrong. ALEX: Right and sometimes that is actually what you want to do. Sometimes you want to do these skeletal in UIs that looked like the page that's about to display but the date isn't there yet so everything is, regardless going to be wrapped in these 'if' statements, 'else' statements. I worked in ember-concurrency and some people are using that to basically move more of that loading into controllers, that's fine. If that's what you're actually trying to do and that's what you're opting into, that's a perfectly reasonable solution but most of times, chances are you're entering a route and you don't want to have to teach the entire template tree underneath it that has to handle all these different states. There's these nice ideas that work in some cases and I'd like to make them work in more cases than Ember helps with and a whole loading all the promises and the model hooks and absolutely going into the loading state are really cool primitives that Ember is going to do for you. The other frameworks, they don't try to be opinionated. They won't do any of that for you. Sounds like you ran into that with some of your React stuff? CHARLES: Yeah. I definitely did. There's just not much help when you actually want to model asynchrony. You can do it. It's pretty easy. You just implement the right hooks or model a series of actions, either with a Saga or Epic, if you're using redux-observable. But again, you have to assemble it by hand and you have to generate those abstractions by hand and you just want to have them at hand already and not have to worry about that. But the advantage, though is that generally those ones that you do have at hand or that you generate are fully reactive. If new information comes that's germane to that particular leaf in the tree or that particular note in the tree, there's no difference between the initial state and the update state. Whereas, in Ember, you got your first shot and then that data is now at rest. ALEX: Right. I definitely have been looking at React router, in particularly v4. I think it's all contentious for people to see it at first but being able to put things like in your render function, you can say, "If this data is present, something that's going to be past and be a prop or something," then show a loading spinner or otherwise, start matching these subroutes. That's really cool. That's expense that you can't look at essential map of all the states of your router can be in but that's also a real problem and if you can demonstrates that the state world is not in a separate silo than the routing world. CHARLES: With great power comes a lot of bugs. You do run into a lot of things where you have rogue matching. You have random things that are inside your view tree that are matching against the route and they just render and you have to be very careful because it's almost the difference between blacklisting and whitelisting. I see what you're saying. It could be confusing. ALEX: Yeah. I think it's definitely a tradeoff. I think if I had something like a match, I might have been able to maybe arrive at a stack routing solution a little earlier. I'm not sure about that. It's definitely something that could be handled by React router. I think one of things that React and React routers better at in general is that everything is, more or less a component that is more easily swappable or something else here. You're not going to have as many of those silos and I really do think, it went through a lot of churn and maybe, some people had trouble, maybe a lot of people, I don't know had trouble kind of following all the major versions. But I think React router Version 4 is pretty damn cool. I think there's a fullest realization of that kind of modular mindset. CHARLES: I think the biggest problem I have with it, though is it requires the view tree to model your routing structure. That bothers me. I feel like you could do the exact same thing. You could have a way to express your routes, not necessarily with a separate routing file. I supposed you could do it with JSX or something but actually have it be kind of orthogonal to your view tree. The way you can model this dynamically updating thing that can match against anything and maybe, even express it all in one place. Although once you get a big tree, it could be hard to control that. The part that I've come into most conflict and maybe who knows, maybe I just haven't used it enough, we've only got one application that we're using the router V4 on. But the fact that it's actually in the view tree, it bothers me. It's in the state objects. It's hard to adapt to Redux because that state is opaque. It's the routers controlling it and I would it to be not have to pass through React components but just be like, give me the firehose of the router state. ALEX: Right. I love what you're saying. If I'm going to bring this stuff to Ember, I can't suddenly make it work like matching within the view tree. That's not what I'm working at or proposing here. All the stuff is basically to empower that firehose to respond to more things that can drives views and respond to them in a live way, not like a one-shot async validation, only when you enter. CHARLES: Maybe this is what the problem that you're trying to solve and one of the things it's really nice to be able to match against anything inside the view tree is that Ember's rendering process of a route is very opaque. The process, by which an outlet gets connected, that's not something that you really have much visibility into. Is that a good statement of the problem? ALEX: That's definitely part of it. You definitely have to go to the documents. I think it's telling that -- CHARLES: I've never done it. I don't really know how that works and I've written a lot of Ember code. ALEX: How what works? CHARLES: How the route gets rendered, like the mechanics around, which I understand how the route object actually, you makes the decision to render its template and do all that stuff. I know it as a user but I don't know the mechanics and I wouldn't know how to extend it. ALEX: I'm not sure if the stuff I'd work on but it immediately make some of that stuff more clear. One of the goal or constraints is to really try and break down the silos. Whatever I'm about to propose bringing to Ember, I want it also be something that would be useful, possibly at the component or template or controller level, rather than just being this thing that lives only in the router's weird black box of logic that occasionally calls hooks that everyone knows about. CHARLES: Right. In a sense, I'd say that they both suffer from that same problem. I'm curious to hear about the firehose. ALEX: To actually get into what I think you're building here, we can dance around it all day and then we -- CHARLES: Just save it for the last 30 seconds of the podcast. That way there could be no -- ALEX: We're swapping JS for React router V4. Bye! It's basically this. What's happening today is that you have a URL, it's going to be parsed in a way that you've tied it to via the router map file, which every Ember app has the place to go to see all the different places that you can navigate to an Ember app, which is great. You basically taught Ember how to break your long URL string into these usable bits and that's going to give you an array of these things that internally who cares what they're called but they're called handler infos and they basically say, "The first element of this array is named application. Every Ember app has one. It doesn't have any params." The next one, it starts getting into what your URL actually is. Maybe it corresponds to the '/post' portion of the URL so that's going to be named 'post,' and that doesn't have any extra params either. Then there's this thing that is post show or something like that. That has a dynamic param because that's the part of the URL as like the '/123' and that corresponds to the post ID. It's basically, if you like thinking of things in terms of transformations or observables or mapping and functional transformations, that's taking a URL and turning it into an array of these useful POJOs of information. The goal is to keep transforming that into something eventually has enough data to display and templates and whatnot. In this giant black box of the Ember router, it's going through those transformations and then it's going to go through this long series of using these params and this useful array of POJO information, start hitting hooks on people's routes to load data. Hit before model after model, redirect all these things to give tasteful names to all the tons of validations and checks that you might want to do. You do cool things in your before model hooks, check if the current user is actually an admin to prevent them from going into any '/admin' subroute. That's a really cool place to go and it's also a great convention. If you're new in Ember app, you realize you can't go on this route. It should sort of click in your head and that sounds like they've got one of these redirect hooks to ensure that you're not going anywhere you're not supposed to go. All these things are really still to this day, extremely strong, well-designed, it went through many passes of review before it landed. I think they cater to a certain kinds of user-driven clicking around apps but they are extremely strong to this day. I think the only thing that's missing is the smell. That example I gave like checking if the user is an admin, it's a bit of a smell that is not reactive. It's a hook. If it passes, great. You're in the route. It's not going to keep on checking that. What I want to do is basically, either in addition to or as an alternative to specifying these one-off model hooks or these hooks that you, not only really just fire one time, have essentially what is an async computed property or an async validation that is upfront about things it depends on. Ember is going to be smart enough to constantly reevaluate these things as stuff changes. It can depend on not just URLs or URL parameters but it can also depend on data. If you're thinking about ember-rideshare, which again is the imaginary Ember app that it's essentially Lyft or Uber, if you have a current ride model loaded somewhere, maybe by a parent route or maybe it's some sort of service, you should be able to specify it like an async property or validation that says, "I depend on ride.state," and for all these subroutes, you would want to say that, either upon entry or any point in the future, if the state ever changes to something that I don't know how to handle that go to some default route. That would be already, particularly in my app, which is a subset of a different kind of ember-rideshare app, that would be a huge help because the only other alternative is to build a sibling-central coordinator to the router that isn't the router but has to sort of agree with it and then, every one of these frames that you might push onto the navigation stack, they have to do some little chunk of code and then invoke this logic and be like, "Did the state change? Go where you're supposed to go," and they have to do that logic. It would be, I think a great win for conventions as it has if it's a benefit to make people shout out their states in advance to empower them to shout out also their data constraints in advance so that you get things like automatic redirects and things change, I think that would be huge. I know that would immediately benefit off of it and I think it would fall in the same kind of problem solving that they worked on like Ember-related stuff which people don't realize how big a problem is until they see there's a better way of doing stuff. I think with that being there -- CHARLES: As an example, let's say that you're an admin and then all of a sudden, you got fired and there's an event that comes from a server that's this person is no longer an admin and it wipes out the Ember data store and then redirect you outside of the admin route or something like that. ALEX: Yeah, that's a perfect example. To be pedantic, I think a lot of people do hard refreshes between login/sign-off stuff but if you have it all in your Ember app, that would just happen automatically. You'd still want the ability to have more graceful transitions because one of the tricky things about having stuff driven by data is that you have this giant matrix of like, "If I'm in this state and this event happens, how do I handle it? How do I make it look well-designed to the user?" But you're not going to be able to hit every one of those constraints so to just have some basic logic that's just like, "Oops, something happened," you're not an admin so we move you to the sign-in page. For in those cases, we haven't fully filled in all those leaks. I think it would be a huge win and you can just progressively decorate things according to the common flows that people take through your app. CHARLES: You know, I'm just imagining this. Model promise, for example would be some computed property, then how would you enumerate your dependencies? Just do the mechanism that we have now? Or are you imagining something entirely new? ALEX: I don't have a strong opinion on it because the moment I start saying what that specific syntax is, more people will agree on what's missing and what we need to have, regardless and be like, "I don't like it." I'm leaning toward something inspired by a lot of my learnings from observables, which is actually we talked about last time. The whole thing about observables is that there's almost limitless flexibility as to if you're in observable, it can take that event. It has been another observable based on that thing. If a URL changes and you're listening to that via observable description, inside that, you could kick off another observable of Ajax request based on that URL and it doesn't make you enumerate all these things upfront. I think there is going to be a compromise between that. I think when you get into these kinds of problems, you run into stuff like Relay, which is familiar with -- CHARLES: I haven't used Relay. ALEX: Just the idea of dynamically collecting all of your dependencies upfront before hitting the server and asking for specific chunks of data that you need, it's a very promising idea. There's cases of just dynamicism where the data comes back from the server, then you realized that you need this other piece of data and there's no way you could have collected upfront, unless you statically wrote it upfront. I expect to find that with this approach that there's going to be some stuff where you just have to be more upfront about it. But I had a cool little strike the other day on auto-computed properties and I'll also link to that. It's a different way of running computer properties where you don't have to specify your depending keys upfront but your getter function gets passed a getter function itself. CHARLES: It's past the dependencies? ALEX: Not even that. Imagine writing a computer property and the first [inaudible] is a function that you can call to get a property off of this but also track that you've got that property. If it ever changes, it'll invalidate again. That means if you're implementing a [inaudible] in computer property, you don't have to write first name twice, both in your dependent keys and in the actual getter in your function, which I think is kind of cool. I'm trying to make that pattern work for this data loading thing so that you don't have to have this huge verbose thing. You just lift this stuff in one place. I've sensed that the magic will probably break down in some complicated cases but that's what I'm trying to run with because I think it's pretty cool and succinct and sort of the natural evolution of what people think of as computer properties. The other major constraint and this is also what we're talking about because it's one of the best kept secrets about the router or it's one of these things that everyone's benefiting from without realizing it, is that if a transition occurs in the router, everything in the router is going to be a possibly long asynchronous chain of operations that it collects all the data that it needs for the new routes to display. In that time, if something happens, if some hook comes along and has an exception, it can load data from the servers. If something happens then it just says 'transition.abort,' that's going to stop whatever transition is in place and you're going to stay exactly where you were and if you're not stuck in a partial transition state, that's pretty awesome. That's basically database atomic transaction semantics that people have been benefiting from if they've been using Ember for years at this point. But again, it suffers a problem being locked away in the router. That is a cool concept. You should be able to specify like I intend this change of the state this way and if I gave you something that is logically inconsistent or can't be fulfilled, don't leave me in a weird half-assed state that I need to somehow fix and know how to fix all the different places, where I might be kicking off this transaction. I'm trying desperately to preserve those semantics when data comes into it. One of the hardest things to do is and honestly, can be one of the hardest sells for people who are used to thinking about Ember is there's an issue of if you imagine whatever API we're talking about, it's probably going to live on the route. Some kind of hook that might be called resolve or something else, like what is the value of this context object that every function has? Is it a route? It's tempting to want to do that and maybe, that will end up winning but winning out is the best API to get people to use. The thing to realize is that there is no consistent value of this. This implies that there's a state of the world and you're looking at it and currently, these things have these values. But in the transaction phase, there is no stable 'this object' and you can wind up with some weird surprises. I know because, not actually these days but particularly, when a lot of the stuff landed and people started trying to do weird things and these transaction hooks, there's just like, "Why can't I grab the controller? The property isn't what I expected?" Honestly, all the stuff that is gross about query params because of this fundamental violation. You have something that pretends to be a property that is there today but is still driving this asynchronous thing that could fail. CHARLES: I kind of viewed this as playing an off-note in the jazz thing like you only want to reserve using this, unless you're the Miles Davis of JavaScript, don't use this. ALEX: And by Miles Davis, you just mean like the god of concurrency that's incorrect race-condition-y code. CHARLES: Right, so it's just like you've got the right reason and you can spot the one-in-a-million case, where it's appropriate. You can spot it in an instant. ALEX: Exactly. I'm not that person and I don't know too many people who are and that's not the API you want to land. I'm trying to, maybe wean people off on dependency on this because the way we've gotten around it in the past is to use again, is more discrete, get the value functions called 'get model' and 'get params.' These are all very in-depth stuff if you're pretty experience Ember developer but it's a way of getting a value from one of these parent routes when you're inside a transition and the rest the world can't see it but you can because you call this hook at the right time. It's super gross because it's just a method on a route that anyone can call in any given time, whether you're inside this transaction or not. The branching logic of, "Should I look up the data from the transaction object?" because once valid, I should have get the current value of a loaded route. It's really gross to me and it causes real problems that confuse people and causes them to write issues because they've given an API that makes them feel good about treating these things as stable objects. CHARLES: I'm trying to imagine now, just like a spike in my head. I know you don't want to get too into syntax but essentially, modeling the route tree as a set of observables, where essentially, instead of returning a promise from your model, you're just mapping an observable off of some combination of the URL state or what are the other streams of state you want to merge to realize that route. But what I'm not seeing, which I'm sure you also have the answer is the original problem, which was stack routing. What we've been talking about is making the router fully reactive like this fully reactive tree that's always on. But that problem seems almost orthogonal to the stock routing problem. ALEX: It is. It's been very tempting to combine them. Why it is such a hard problem? Because you've got navigation stack, which almost to this route hierarchy stack that [inaudible] about but they're separate so you can't really apply the same lessons. Then you've got stack routing, which is you want the ability for routes to while they're loading, reference data that is dynamically available to them. I don't have a solid answer but I would say, the one thing that I think is going to help is that you have a few options for what you want to stash how you want to represent a URL or where you want to stash your hierarchy. Actually just track it in-memory and if you refresh the page, it'd be like, "I depend on some data that I expected to be there but it's not. It transition elsewhere," which is not a great developer experience. You could want to be able to make changes and refresh the page and continue where you left off. Otherwise, URLs aren't actually used by mobile app users. But the other place that you could possibly put the navigation where event stack is in a query param because that can be fully dynamic and you can just sort of manage every single page. The most current page you've pop is just some top-level route but you're tracking the state on the side. I think if you solve the problem of being able to depend on things that aren't the URL or go through a more complex transition than what the router gives you by default, I think it would be possible to treat that query param or that thing you're stashing in in-memory as another source of data. The other thing that I want to try and make sure that this new API has is really treated dependency injection where you specify all the things that you need and you don't really care from a route's perspective where they come from. I think if you had that, that would solve a lot of problems with stack routing and where it gets data from. To be very specific, today if you were in that post '1, 2, 3' comments route and you needed to access the post model from within the comments route, you would probably do this model for post. Basically you're naming not just the model that you need. You're naming the route that you know provides it upfront, which I think is that. Actually, the real reason it's kind of the smell is that, if you ever need to change the nesting, maybe you need to introduce another level or you want to nest all that under an admin route. Then suddenly, you're asking for the wrong route name. You're not really sure all the different things you need to update if you ever change the nesting of your router. There's solutions like relative URLs that a lot of people thrown around but I think -- CHARLES: To go back in the observable world and specifically, the redux-observable world, it's like a simple map. You're just mapping down off of a global prop, you've got some tree of state and you're just mapping off... What was that like? A model hook and you're just mapping down off of that? Wherever that state lives, you're mapping to it and now you kind of slicing off your little garden hose off of the firehose. But still one huge -- ALEX: I've tried to apply observables to this problem. I don't think I've never seen the observable analogue of is this idea of dependency and injection. To model something as a stream that transforms over time, that's proven to be very useful but to sort of say, "I am an observable that expects these objects given to me," I'm not really sure what that API would look. CHARLES: I would say, just as a straw man perhaps, you have this dependency that it's a well-known location. It's a well-known name. With dependency [inaudible] in classic, it's like, "I depend on the off service. This thing called 'service:off' or whatever. Imagine that you have some pool of state and there's some key called ‘service.off' there and as long as I'm just basically basing my stream, the first thing I do is map off of this and maybe map off of another key and then combined those into a single stream, then I can be sure that I have those things at all times. If they change, my mapping function or my transformation function is going to get evaluated again. Does that make sense? ALEX: Yes, I think we should [inaudible] C without code or something. CHARLES: And maybe I'm thinking about it wrongheadedly but that would be a simple mechanism. ALEX: Could you run by me one more time --? CHARLES: Yeah. Let's say that we've got some authentication service that you want to depend on like you want to inject on it. You want to inject that dependency so why can't you base your stream off of that key? You have observable map, for example. The list of transformations that you would have to do to peel off multiple keys, I'm sure you could write helpers for it. But basically, probably if you're going to be wanting to inject multiple dependencies will -- ALEX: The problem is this. Basically, if you want to write your resolved observable, if this thing based on observables, remember that there is no this in a route because of the transactional reasons of what we've talked about earlier, what are you getting that from? You need to have something passed into you, to be like 'context.get observable blah.' CHARLES: I would just assume that it's implicit. I was thinking a bit basically, the simplest case would just be an observable that was basically taken off of the entire global state or whatever of the router or what have you. The way the redux-observable works is every single epic is what they call them is just a transformation on the global stream. Usually, the first thing that happens is they map down to the local context so the -- ALEX: Like a path? CHARLES: They have a helper like action of type, blah. You only see a subset of the actions that get maps to the Redux store. I think it's redux independent but at least in theory, every single epic is basically going off of the entire global state but the first in reality, what the first thing that happens is you're like, "I am only interested in this subset of the state," so you do a map off of the global state down to your local scope and then you work from there. In fact if you had the convention around that, you could even make that part implicit. It's like I return an observable that it's only seeing the stream of local states. ALEX: That makes sense if there's sort of canonical state of the world but what you're doing when you're transitioning into a route is trying to feel out another state in an asynchronous manner. Redux is the action causes state to change, now the state is this. But the action for type thing, I think that makes sense if you are subscribing to the world global action on this one store when you're constructing this new tentative, may not actually become the store, you're depending on values. What we need in our API is something that depends on values that are from a tentative store. CHARLES: It's similar so in redux-observable, you're mapping actions to actions and you're not necessarily mapping actions here. You want to get state into the equation. ALEX: Yeah and it's so almost observables. It's just this twist of transaction dependency injection. It sounds really over-engineered but the thing is it exists in Ember today and if it exists in a less siloed way, I would certainly benefit on it. I think everyone else would too. CHARLES: Okay. With that hand wave... ALEX: Oh, I didn't mean for that to come as a hand wave. CHARLES: No, no, no. I'm kidding because I think we actually have a lot more to talk about here and we're running out of time. One of the thing that I want to ask is, talking about redux-observable, talking about redux and stuff, have you given any thought as to what this might look as a library that everybody could use? ALEX: I basically have something that's using Ember CLI only because it's so easy to just use it as a sketch pad and get test passing but everything I'm building so far is just ES6 class syntax that can be transpiled in it to whatever. I'm actually realizing, there's a lot of overlap between some of the primitives that are involved and Glimmer so it may or may not have a pass that uses references for tracking when things change until no one to invalidate and refire these async hooks. But either way, I'm going to make sure it lives in the JS usable world and not just Ember's special object model end. CHARLES: Right. Those interfaces are pretty narrow. The things that implement those interfaces are huge and complex but the way, at least I understand it, isn't the reference interfaces themselves -- ALEX: They're really simple, yeah. CHARLES: -- Really simple. It could almost be copied and pasted and not have much maintenance overhead in there. Here's a question and this is probably getting too far into the weeds. Can you not model a transaction as an observable? Essentially, with a flatMap, you would merge in some observable into the chain that was basically a transaction of all the other observables from which it is composed. ALEX: You know, a transaction as it builds up all the new state over time could be part of the main tree and if there is an active transition, then that's future potential state that the world might become and it could be modeled as a leg of the Redux state. I think you could theoretically do that. Definitely worth a try. I don't think I would benefit too much from doing it now and I think this could be a premature optimization but I think there would be just quite a bit of intermediate object collection to express that. I think theoretically it works but how it's going to physically map to Ember in the near future, it would be harder [inaudible] in a way. There's actually a lot of stuff that is very redux-y that again, a lot of Ember people don't maybe know about because it's internal but the way that Ember [inaudible], I think since Edward brought some of his learnings of Liquid Fire back to core Ember, there's this concept of outlet state, which describes -- I'm not an expert on it -- what's rendered where and then each outlet gets a chunk. Like you said, a little piece of the firehose or garden hose, pulled off the main thing so it can just focus on the one piece of state. Those are simple objects that produce this part of this transformation process. That's kind of redux-y in the way that everything just gets a new POJO and stuff changes but it's not strictly redux, obviously and probably won't become that just because it's already good enough on its own. CHARLES: Yeah. I think it's actually good at this point to be hand wavy because the most important thing is to be non-committal about the syntax, like you said because that's when the bikeshedding begins and now it's not the phase. The phase is to come to some agreement about what is that we would love to see. ALEX: Basically, the thing is this. I think people need to realize that Ember won the bet that the URL is an important thing to build apps around and if you have a state that's representable in URL, that state should go in the URL so you can send links around and not break the web and have an app that works that's built on half-assed routing. The only thing I'm proposing is going to make that go away. It's just that there is already this giant world of stuff that's not expressible in Ember today because it is driven by state. If you make that as easy to express and as upfront to express, I think you can have shared conventions versus what everyone is building these apps that I have to do, which is to make a sort of separate router of state-aware stuff and not have to make those two things agree with each other because it's really hard. CHARLES: Right. At that point, you're writing your own framework. Maybe this is the next big thing because I feel like Ember usually has the best stuff way, way, way, way before. Now, we're finally getting to a point where everybody seems to realize that having a CLI is absolutely critical to the developer's experience and most frameworks aren't taken seriously until they've achieved that. It was the same thing with a router back in the day. I'm wondering what that next thing is. ALEX: I don't know. I don't think this is going to be it. I just think it's a good progression. I think a way forward that progress is still a pretty legit central structure to build apps around and just would be welcomed. CHARLES: When are you going to be done? ALEX: About two or three days. I don't know. I think I'm basically going to be continuing to get feedback like the way that a lot of that original router stuff came back or it's just like constantly hit people with real examples, Ember twiddles, things are just like, "Oh, yeah. That thing. That's a cool pattern. That sucks in my app. I didn't realize that until I saw this example." These things that really teach people why this is necessary because that's going to get people's urge to be like, "Well, you could just do..." Oh, you can't because the thing that's hard to explain. It's going to be a lot of that regardless and I hope that will kick off in the next few weeks. CHARLES: And the focus of that is going to be the ember-rideshare application. ALEX: I think that's a good one. This is one that everyone's familiar with. CHARLES: Have you already kind of implemented in it, like this kind of Frankenstein-ish, like this is the kind of histrionics that you have to go through in order to implement the style of routing or the style of application using today's Ember? Or have you started to begin experimentation with these new concepts and try to build out better ways of doing it? ALEX: I'm not strictly extracting it from one app. It's sort of combined. Like I said, the few different apps that we had were an opportunity to be like, "This sporadic stuff is hard." The main route recognizer approach was an example to try different stack routing pattern. But the thing that sort of working on is drawing from three different apps and slightly different takes on it. Basically, I have something that is close to being testable in one of my main apps that will be a great chance to validate if all the stuff is as nice as I think it is going to be. CHARLES: Okay. If the people want to get in touch with you, to help to contribute to the conversation or just publicly guilt you into moving faster towards it, how would they get in touch with you? ALEX: I'm at @Machty on Twitter and GitHub and also, the Ember community Slack. I think I'm going to try to get people to talk about this on channel called Dev Dx Router where it's focused on development stuff all around the router. This is kind of funny because I'm talking about this thing that I've only had maybe, 12 people take a look at and comment on and begins these conversations. I think maybe some people are going to hear this and be like, "What are you talking about?" but if it gets people -- CHARLES: No, no, no. You know, the best conversations seemed to be organized around you, man. I'm just trying to think of some of the best development conversations that I've had in 2017 and you were definitely, I would say the one who fomented them. It starts with 12 people but then, if enough people take interest and be like, "Wow, yeah. Oh, man. I didn't even know that was a problem. This would be a cool way of doing it." They have a tendency to balloon and some fizzle out and some end up with real results. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. ALEX: I appreciate it and likewise, you're definitely one of the best people to talk about this stuff with. CHARLES: Well, I hope other people will love listening to our conversation. With that, we'll head on out. Thank you everybody if you've made it this far. As always, you can get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or just send an email to Contact@Frontside.io. We will talk to you next week.

Jamison Dance: @jergason | Blog | GitHub | Fivestack | Soft Skills Engineering Podcast | React Rally Show Notes: 00:58 - The Elm Programming Language 01:36 - Who should try Elm? What is the attraction? 03:09 - Scaling an App Across a Team; Conventions 06:19 - Routing 07:48 - Writing Tests 09:38 - Jumping Into Elm from a Component-based Framework 12:20 - Tooling 17:28 - Productivity 19:21 - The Elm Community 25:13 - Could Elm Replace JavaScript? 28:28 - Lessons Learned from Elm to Write Better JavaScript 33:45 - The Elm Syntax 35:49 - Checking Out New Languages and Communities 37:31 - Data Modeling Resources: Elm Packages elm-format Evan Czaplicki: Let's Be Mainstream! User-focused Design in Elm The Elm Guide Elm on Slack The Elm Tutorial Jamison Dance: Rethinking All Practices: Building Applications in Elm @ React.js Conf 2016 Transcript: ALEX: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 49. I am your host, Alex Ford, developer at The Frontside. With me as well is Chris Freeman. Chris, do you want to introduce yourself? CHRIS: Hi, everybody. I'm Chris. I'm also a developer at The Frontside. ALEX: We have a really special guest for today. I'm really excited. Jamison Dance is with us. JAMISON: Hello. ALEX: Jamison runs Fivestack Software Consulting Company, hosts Soft Skills Engineering Podcast, organizes React Rally Conf, and spells 'array.length' incorrectly sometimes. Is this true? JAMISON: It is true, yeah. I think I have a special ESLint plugin to yell at me now when I do that or something. But that has caused some pain in my life. CHRIS: Oh, that was very brave. Thank you. ALEX: We're going to be talking Elm today and writing better JavaScript with Elm. This is really exciting for me. I've gotten the chance to dive into the Elm tutorial a little bit, which is an absolutely beautiful tutorial if you haven't checked it out yet. JAMISON: Yeah, Elm is a programming language that runs in the browser and compiles down to JavaScript. It's a pure statically-typed programming language, which if that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry. The take away for you is that Elm tries really hard to make it easy to write programs that don't crash and are easier to refactor and easier to work on and maintain, basically. CHRIS: And Elm is a language in of itself but it is pretty specifically intended for front-end development. Is that correct? JAMISON: Right now, there are some long term plans, but yeah. For now, it's front-end for building UIs and applications in the browser. ALEX: I heard about Elm. When should I check it out? Who do you see jumping into this language? JAMISON: I think it's aimed at people that want to build robust applications which is so vague, it sounds meaningless. Maybe I talk about what attracted me to it. The two things where I was interested in functional programming -- that's kind of like the technical language wonk, like geeky side of it. But the other side is I've worked for a while in some fairly large JavaScript applications and I've seen the nightmares that I can create for myself In just building something that works and is just really hard to work on. So the idea of a language that's focused on keeping your productivity high as the application skills and as the team skills was really attractive to me. Like the bio says, if I spell array.length wrong, sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't, then my program breaks. Elm has a compiler that runs on all your code and basically, make sure that your code cannot crash. You could still have bugs and you can still just make your code do the wrong thing but it helps eliminate whole categories of errors. It just makes them impossible to create in Elm. If you're interested in functional programming or if you're interested in just building stuff that is easy to work with, like this kind of this curve of productivity over time where some environments and some languages start out really high, it's really easy to build something fast at the beginning and then maintaining it is just really hard so the productivity drops over time. Elm is trying to kind of flatten that out so your productivity stays high throughout the lifetime of your application. CHRIS: I actually have a question about that. I'm planning on bringing this up later but you gave me such a good segue that I feel compelled. You mentioned that one of the things that is nice about Elm-type system is that it helps scale an app, especially when it comes to a team. My experience there are kind of true different facets to what scaling an app across a team looks like. One is the categories of bugs that something like [inaudible] compiler helps you catch. But the other is, and this is totally coming from the fact that I use Ember every single day, that conventions also help scale across a team. I'm curious like what I've looked at with Elm, it looks like they definitely have the type system there and error messages there to help quite a bit. But I haven't seen conventions arising yet in terms of a lot of things, about how you build a front-end application. I'm curious, is it that those conventions are there and just haven't found them yet or they're still very much in development? Or is that not even really a goal for Elm in the same way that it might be nothing like Ember or Angular. JAMISON: You mentioned first the kinds of bugs that the compiler will help you catch. I want to talk about that really quickly. If people aren't familiar with what a compiler or type system will do at build time, it checks all of your code to make sure that all of the variables and inputs and outputs from functions match up. So you say this function takes in an 'int' and returns a string and it will go find everywhere that calls that function and make sure that they're always passing in an 'int' and return it, so that it always return a string. It kind of does that throughout the whole flow of the program. It eliminates those kind of areas where you just get the interface wrong. The program is huge. You don't remember all the inputs to a function so you just like passing an object when it expects a string or something and then later on it will explode. You don't get those errors with Elm which is the first kind of thing you're talking about. You mentioned that conventions and I'm not on the Elm core team or whatever. I don't have any special insight but my experience is Elm very much wants to create strong conventions around how you build applications. The Elm architecture is kind of a way to build front-end applications that is basically baked into the language. There isn't like a UI framework for Elm. It is Elm. That to me is a huge point on the strong convention side. There isn't like an Elm fatigue because there isn't a choice between a hundred different UI frameworks in Elm. Some patterns around how you build apps this small, I think are still being established but I think there are strong conventions already and the trend of the Elm community is towards picking strong conventions. You'll see Evan, the creator of the language, He'll talk about how he wants to have one really good library instead of 15 overlapping libraries of varying quality to solve the same problem. Elm has conventions already. The places where it doesn't have strong conventions are I think places that will get filled in but the goal is to pick up the language and you get everything you need to build an application attached to it that's all kind of figured out for you. CHRIS: It's been interesting you mentioned the thing about it's better to have one good library, rather than 15 libraries of varying quality. I've seen that a little bit in practice. One of the things that I started looking for pretty early on when I was messing with Elm was what client-side routing look like. There are a couple of different routing libraries. But if you look at them, you can see that they're actually kind of this progression, like you can see how they have built on each other and they're kind of like building up the stack of abstractions toward one final solution. It's very interesting because it's not like those other libraries that are still there. If you really wanted to use just a regular URL parser and build your own, you could. But you can also see this development towards something that anyone could take off the shelf and start using. JAMISON: Yeah, and Elm has been around, I think it was 2011 when it first started. But really, Elm as like a popular thing that people hear about and use in production is only a couple of year's old maybe. There are still some things that are evolving like that. I think you're right that they're evolving towards convention instead of, in my mind JavaScript values, the proliferation of tons of different ideas and just wild exploration. Elm seems like it values a little more consensus and aligning the community behind one solution. I think it's happening, if it's not there yet, it'll get there, I guess. ALEX: I have a question about writing test in Elm and how that feels different than writing tests in JavaScript because the way I find myself writing tests right now is I understand the language to be fragile and I understand some frameworks have some fragility because of that language so I find myself writing really strong tests that are easy to break. I imagine that maybe in Elm, that's a little bit different with this very strong convention that you're talking about. JAMISON: Yes, some of it is around not having to be as defensive in your testing. If you wanted to get really, really down in the nitty-gritty in JavaScript, there are just an incredible array of different inputs you would have to test to make sure someone doesn't pass in like [inaudible] to this function where you think it's an array or whatever, like you just don't have to write any of those tests because the compiler catches that. We haven't talked about purity at all and this concept in functional programming where your functions can't cause side effects. They can't just go make a network request or write to disc or console.log like right in the middle. The functions take an input and return an output. You can do that in JavaScript. You can write your functions that way but because that feature is built into the language, it's the only way to write functions in Elm which makes it really easy to test functions because you just pass them stuff and you check what they return. In my experience, that makes them easier to test. You still build UIs and you still make network requests so you still construct some HTML at some point in your program. You can if you want to test that the HTML looks right or that elements have certain classes and stuff. But I guess what I'm saying is the tests feel like they're testing the behavior more than the edge cases when I write tests in them just because the compiler eliminates a bunch of weird edge cases you don't have to worry about. ALEX: Coming from a component-based JavaScript framework, what is going to be my experience jumping into Elm? How is that going to feel different for me? JAMISON: That's a great question. Myself and almost everyone I've seen get started in Elm that comes from something based around components that the instinct is to create components in Elm for everything. You have a select box in Ember or React or whatever and you wrap it in components. You can just reuse it everywhere. In Elm, if you try to do that, you will hate it and think Elm is broken and horrible and just sucks. It's because the Elm architecture comes with, I guess, you could call it boilerplate, there's some work you have to do to build a component that can do IO and respond to events and stuff. That work is... I don't know, maybe like a dozen lines of code. Then there's some work to wire those components up together, that's maybe a couple more lines of code. So if you have like 300 components in your Elm application, you'll have... I don't know, like thousands of lines that just wiring stuff together code which won't really buy you that much because in my experience, using components is an attempt to make things understandable and isolate concerns. You get a lot of that from having peer functions and having a strong a static-type system. In Elm, you end up making a lot wider components, instead of having this deep tree of lots of components nested inside of each other. You'll have a much flatter but wider tree. That took a while to get used to but I think it makes sense for the language now. You can still create reusable things but you focus more on creating reusable functions instead of creating components that are black boxes, that you kind of package up and pass around. You can still do reuse but it's a little bit different than reuse in a component-based framework. This is a thing. I would say, in the last year, there's been a lot more discussion on blogposts and screencasts and stuff on a year ago, a couple of people were talking about it but there weren't really lots of great examples of this and now, I think, even the Elm Guide has some examples of reuse without components. ALEX: Yes. One of my favorite things about component-based JavaScript is because I've learned to test them so well. Even though, sometimes they can turn into a configuration ball, I've been able to make them very reliable, even if they are deeply nested so going away from that scares me. JAMISON: Yeah, it totally scared me. It felt wrong and weird and bad. But now, it doesn't. I don't know, I'm used to it, I guess, and I still write a lot of JavaScript. It's not that hard switching back and forth between those two mental models but I definitely had to develop a different mental model when writing Elm code. CHRIS: I'm interested in talking about some of the tooling. I know Elm has a lot of tooling. They have elm-reactor and they have the compiler. But I think I know that you also do the kind of dip into some of the JavaScript tooling if you are getting into bigger Elm application. You're probably still going to need something like a Webpack or Browserify, I guess. I'm curious what's your experience with that has been? JAMISON: You can definitely just write an Elm application and then compile it into this JavaScript file then drop that in a script tag on your page and it will all work. The complexity can get very low. If you want to do more advanced stuff like talking to JavaScript, You can still do all that without any additional tooling, if you would like. If you have a lot of dependencies in your JavaScript or you have a large JavaScript application or code base that you want to integrate with Elm, then you can use something like Webpack or Browserify. In my experience, it's no more painful than Webpack or Browserify. All the rest of that stuff already is. I don't know, there's an Elm Webpack plugin that will run the Elm compiler and allow you to import your Elm application into JavaScript file and I think there are similar stuff for Browserify and some of the other module bundlers. I don't think there's anything radically new on the Elm side as far as bundling up your application or anything like that. It just kind of works like you expect. The places where, I think Elm tooling is cool in ways that I haven't seen that much in JavaScript are in the Elm package manager. If you are building a package yourself, it has automatic semantic versioning built in so they have a type system. They can detect when your interfaces change automatically. If you try and release a version that you change the interface and you don't bump the version, they will like yell at you because that's a breaking change. There's some cool stuff around that that you get with the language having a static-type system. The debugger is a new thing as of a couple of weeks ago. That's built into the language. You might have seen similar stuff in other frameworks but it's all kind of extra add-ons. In Elm, because it has kind of a framework built into the language, they can also build in a debugger for that framework in the language. You can enable debug mode, pull up an application, click around, do a bunch of stuff, and then it'll record a log of all those actions and you can scroll back through them and jump to any point in that timeline to reload the state of the application to that point. You can export that log to a JSON file and then kind of send that around, have someone load that log in, and it'll get your application back into the same state. It's a really good for creating bug reports. You click some button 15 times and then it breaks -- do that, export the logs, send that to someone else. Instead of having to follow all the steps, they can just load your state and then figure out what's broken about that. I think that there are some tooling advances that are enabled by both the language itself, like the static type system and also the focus on strong conventions and frameworks built into the language. Does that makes sense? CHRIS: Yeah, absolutely. As you were talking, I thought about was that some tooling that you lean a lot on in JavaScript is kind of rendered unnecessary by the error messages in Elm. All of the things that you may bring in an extra tool to catch in JavaScript when in Elm will just tell you when it compiles and it will give you this just unbelievably friendly, informative, and easy to diagnosed error message that tells you like, "This is the exact line where this happened. Maybe you mean to do this instead," because it can make all sorts of inferences about, like what you probably meant to do based on the type signature you gave to a function or something. I could see that going a long way toward making a subset of tools just unnecessary in Elm. JAMISON: Yeah, a lot of tooling around JavaScript has sprung up to address... I don't know, not weaknesses but areas where people have identified JavaScript needs a little help now. If that's passive aggressive enough way to say it. The language is 20 years old. It was created way before people were building giant, million line code bases in it. But Elm is much younger and has the benefit of a lot of history and hindsight. It turns out you can avoid a lot of tools if you eliminate their need. I have had that weird feeling where I'm building a JavaScript project and it feels like I'm flying a 747. There's a thousand switches everywhere. I'm like powering up a bunch of different things. It feels like I'm being really productive because I'm configuring ESLint in Webpack, in Flow, and all these different tools. Then I go to Elm and I just start typing and it feels like I'm less productive but I've just skipped so many steps. It is a different feeling. ALEX: Would you say that maybe you feel so productive in JavaScript because it has such a strong community, with so many examples and so much shared code? Elm being a younger community, and this is strictly an assumption, may not be at that maturity level where you can share code and have that particular level of productivity. JAMISON: Yes. There are definitely third party libraries in Elm. There's probably a few orders of magnitude difference in the community sizes between Elm and JavaScript. There are just way more people writing JavaScript. The likelihood that someone will have ended up at your weird feature that you need for some random program is probably a little higher. There are some numbers differences. In my experience, the people that are really into Elm right now enjoy solving their own problems because it does feel like they're a little bit more of your own problems to solve. It's a tradeoff. I was going to say, if you value 100% focus on building business features, JavaScript might be better but I don't necessarily think that's the case. Using a bunch of third party code comes with a cost and some of that cost is you have to understand the API and some of it is you have to kind of take some responsibility for knowing where it breaks down. In Elm, I think that responsibility is lessened by the language because the API is a lot easier to understand when you can look at the types that the API creates and uses. It's a lot harder for it to just break your stuff. I think you could make the argument that even though there's a giant repository of JavaScript code out there, a lot of it might not be great for your program. But if you're using Elm, the smaller amount of code that is out there already could be easier to use and help you even more productive. ALEX: I would like to try to segue into the Elm community now and what that looks like? What is this Elm community? How do you get involved, say, I'm coming from JavaScript or any language and I love it? Maybe my work doesn't use Elm just yet but how can I contribute? How can I continue to write more Elm code for not just my specific use cases? JAMISON: I think my favorite thing about the Elm community is its focus on friendliness and learnability. I call it 'ruthless focus'. They are aggressively committed to building a language that is easy for people to pick up. If you are coming to Elm for the first time, you're pulling your hair out because it looks totally different from JavaScript. That might not make any sense to you. But a lot of the ideas that Elm has come from other languages like Haskell or ML languages and those languages, I would say, are proudly hard to get into. It's like a badge of honor to learn Haskell and then you like bleed to do it and then you enter this elite club where you got to talk about monoids all day. Elm is like a strong negative reaction against that, like they want this to be a language that people can learn and get some of the benefit. Because there are cool things in languages like Haskell so the goal is to take some of those cool things and other cool things from other places too. But put them in a package that is easy for people to pick up without devoting their life to an arcane branch of mathematics. I think they do a really good job of that. I've done Haskell pretty hard a few times and I'll bounce off it some more. I don't feel confused about Elm at all in anyway. In Elm, it's not like I'm some genius that can pick it up. It's that they have eliminated a lot of complexity and made it friendly and easy to learn. I think that carries over into the community. They're really interested in helping people who are new to functional programming or are new to programming in general. They're also just nice. if there's an Elm Slack channel that you hang out in and like any internet chat channel, sometimes people will get a little testy and in the Elm one, they're so good at defusing situations, calming people down, like apologizing, and like being human beings. You don't see a lot of rage-y arguments where people say mean things about each other. I've been really impressed with that. I want to talk a little bit more about what the community is like and then maybe talk about how to get into it, if that's okay. I would say the community is -- I know, it's evenly split but it seems fairly evenly split between people coming from JavaScript's who don't have any functional programming experience and people coming from functional programming who don't have any UI experience. It's interesting seeing those two very different groups come together and they're both attracted to Elm for different reasons and they kind of pull it a little bit in different ways. But it makes an interesting group of people to be around because you learn a lot of cool UI stuff, a lot of cool functional programming stuff. ALEX: Sounds like a recipe for success, really. JAMISON: Yeah. I think if they can make functional programming not have the snootiness that it has sometimes in genders and people, then I think functional programming is great technically. I think the culture around it can be just obnoxious. So I think if Elm can take the good things without the bad things, that's amazing and that's kind of what it's trying to do. As far as getting into the Elm community, are you talking about writing open source or contributing to open source or just where they hang out? ALEX: Yeah, I was talking about contributing to open source but maybe Elm is just a better community for a certain style of contribution and maybe that looks like a blogpost and a coding example of how to do something yourself. JAMISON: Like any new technology, there are definitely in the kind of evangelism phase. If you do write a blogpost that says nice things about Elm, there's like a horde of people that will swarm all over it because they like people to say nice things about Elm. There's a bunch of people like writing books, doing screencast, speaking on it, introducing people to it, and that's well received very well. I think there's at least one podcast on Elm already. So all that to say that I think the community receives kind of education and I guess, you can call it evangelism stuff very well and they're excited about that. If you are interested in contributing to open source, you can actually go to Package.Elm-Lang.org and you can see all of the Elm third party libraries and they all have these GitHub for the backing of its package manager. They all have source links right there. You can just find any random library and get to its source. I think the community is pretty open to contributions from people. If you want to see Elm source code and contribute to it, they're very open to that. This is kind of a culture shock to me coming from other communities where you can't just like show up, submit a patch to Elm core, and then have a discussion, and get it accepted or rejected. They're not super open to direct code level contributions. They would prefer more use case feedback, discussion, and suggestions. Then the core team will take all these feedback in, think about it, come up with a plan, and then implement it, instead of take a lot of little patches from people. Some of the core libraries are a little bit harder to directly contribute code to but they are very open. If you try and use it, you run into something that doesn't work the way you expected and you can create a small example that demonstrates that. They're super open to discussions about that to influence the direction of the API. CHRIS: I think over the course of JavaScript and front-end development, there has been kind of waves of abstraction over JavaScript. There were just libraries and there were things like backbone and then it kind of moved into doing something like CoffeeScript or TypeScript and a couple others where the idea is -- ALEX: Good old Objective-J. CHRIS: Yeah, exactly. You might be transpiling down a JavaScript but there are still very much a clear link between something like CoffeeScript and JavaScript. Elm seems like it is one of a new batch of approaches where we're actually going to just sidestep JavaScript almost entirely. Like it is going to be like JVM bytecode or a browser and we're going to build an entirely new language on top of that. I know there's also a bit like ClojureScript, Scala.js, and PureScript and I'm curious, do you think that is going to be a continuing trend that front-end development is going to land on a mainstream solution that might not actually be JavaScript at all? Or do you see it as eventually circling back and pulling a lot of these features into JavaScript itself? JAMISON: I don't think that front-end development will be Elm in like five years or whatever. I don't think it's going to replace JavaScript at all. I think it might definitely influence tooling libraries or the language itself. The Elm architecture looks a lot like Redux because the Redux author read Elm and they're like, that's cool and then they wrote it in JavaScript. There are other places where like time-travelling debugging. I believe the JavaScript thing came from the Elm time-travelling debugger as well. There are cases where it has influenced JavaScript's already and I think that will continue to happen. Flow is a gradual-type system. You can lay it on top of JavaScript and they have done a lot of work on their error messages influenced by Elm. It's super cool to see all those influences back into the JavaScript community as a whole. I think there are classes of people who are more interested in doing some sprinkling of JavaScript on to pages. They might not even be like programmers really. They're kind of like designers who do a little bit of coding and I don't know if Elm makes sense for that kind of role where you just need to add a little bit of interaction. You can do that but it doesn't seem like a thing that group would focus on. It's just really hard to change the world. I write a lot of JavaScript so I'm bias but it feels like it's the most popular language in the world and being the most popular Language in the world is not a thing that's easily overthrown. But I think it will grow, like programming will look more like Elm does just in general in the future and I think JavaScript will as well. But I also think Elm will continue to grow. There's a lot of excitement about it and there's not a ton of people bouncing hard off of it. There's some people they're looking at it and they're like, "Eh, not yet." Some people just look at it and hate it. But from people that use it, I don't see a lot of those people dropping out. I've seen most of them sticking around. I think the trend is definitely -- Elm will grow. But I don't know if that will take over the world. ALEX: Then what lessons are developers bringing back to say and to write better JavaScript? JAMISON: I think a lot of people are learning about types and data modeling. If you learn programming through JavaScript, the idea that there's this defined shape that your data has and some tool will help you make sure that your data always looks like that is kind of like strange and foreign. I think a lot of people are learning that there's value in that. If you grew up in the MongoDB / Angular world like everything is schema-less, you just kind of slam some JavaScript objects everywhere, it all works, then it breaks, and you don't know why and you need to track it down. But I think seeing the value and thinking a little bit more clearly about what your data looks like and then forcing that through tooling is one lesson. That is taking a little bit more root in JavaScript. All the stuff around functional programming in JavaScript is like achieved buzzword status by now. But there is definitely still some education happening around how it's easier to test peer functions, how they're easier to understand and reuse, and how it's good to write them. I think Elm will continue to push that. Some of it though is there are some ideas you can take from Elm but it's just so much easier to use them to their fullest potential in a language and environment built around those ideas. You can kind of like cram a type system on to JavaScript. It's still really easy to get around and it does not model side effects at all. The elm type system modeled side effects so it helps you reason about where my program can talk to a network, where it can do things that are going to take a while to come back, and kind of sandbox those things into a place where you expect them, instead of have them sprinkled all over your program. CHRIS: I definitely feel that uncanny valley of trying to bring FP -- functional programming -- things back into JavaScript when it comes to pattern matching. That's something that in Elm or Elixir or any number of more functional languages. Pattern matching enables a lot of these higher level patterns that don't always translate super great back to JavaScript land. JAMISON: Yeah, the uncanny valley is a great way to put it. There are a lot of things that you can do that will lead to better JavaScript. But you always have to take the environment that you're working in into consideration. There are just some things you can't do or some things that are going to be more pain than they're worth to do. On the other hand, it is kind of nice to just type console.log wherever you want or type like '$.getJSON' or whatever. The added security that Elm brings comes at a cost of locking you down a little bit and that can be a little frustrating to people sometimes. But I think the payoff is worth it. ALEX: A side story. About six months ago, I tried to get into the Haskell programming book. That's currently being worked on. That's because I want to learn some functional programming lessons, maybe bring them back into my JavaScript, or just learn something new. It's useful to learn a new language and bring it back to your work. Of this 1300 page book, I got just past Chapter 2 and I was in a Haskell book club like everybody held each other accountable to finish this book. I did not make it. I could not figure out how to bring any of these lessons back into my code which is what I wanted to do here. Elm takes that functional programming concept and says, "We're applying it to UI right away." There's no, "How do I apply this? How do I side step this?" No, you're doing it immediately. Really, you're getting me excited to jump back into this tutorial and learn it and check out the community, just to be able to bring this back to my day to day and bring those lessons and do it. JAMISON: Yeah, the first time I tried to learn Haskell, I learned that I could sort an array of integers in memory and that was it. That was as far as my Haskell skills took me so I definitely feel you there. In Haskell, they'll tell you it's a research language so they have a lot of reasons why it kind of works the way it does and learning it takes the pathway it does. Elm is definitely not a research language. It's trying to be incredibly pragmatic so you build UIs. In the guide, that's how they teach you the language. It's the stuff you normally build. Thank you for bringing that up. I think, it's a thing that they focus on. I'm glad you picked it out. ALEX: Yeah, at the learning curve is the syntax but you're still solving those same problems. If you're coming from UI, you already have that context. That is probably the majority of the hard work -- it's solving problems that are meaningful to you. JAMISON: Yeah, for me the syntax, I had learned enough Haskell that the syntax wasn't hard -- how to make HTTP requests and do site-affecting things like that. It was the hang up for me but Elm, there is a way to do it and they show you and that's how you do everything and it all works the same way and it's fairly easy to understand. I don't want to call it easy because that makes people that struggle to feel that but they put a lot of work into making that both robust so it won't break your program and also learnable. CHRIS: One thing I would love to mention about the syntax, I have learned a number of languages, I guess and the Elm syntax was definitely one that threw me the most and it put me off for, I guess it wasn't so much just the syntax, it was the syntax combined with how people do things that I would call more like style choices. JAMISON: The formatting? CHRIS: Yeah, Elm formats things in weird ways. Except that there is a tool called 'elm-format'. Once I've discovered that it has a really great editor integration for a lot of editors, it effectively remove that problem because I discovered that I can essentially write garbage basically in my editor and I can say that anything will make it look beautiful. It's fantastic. It removes such a big barrier for me when I was trying to learn it. JAMISON: Yeah, elm-format, there were some great debates about it while it was being created but now that it exists, it's awesome. Speaking a little bit more of tooling, Elm comes out with new releases of the language with some backwards and compatible changes. But along with that, they release a tool to upgrade your Elm code automatically. It's not perfect and it won't run on 100%. It won't fix everything but with most projects, it fixes everything. Again, the benefit of having such a strict language is there's tools that will just upgrade all your stuff for you. That's pretty awesome. It lowers the cost of evolving the language because they can keep adding new things and changing things without just leaving the community in the dust like we've seen in some other stuff. That's kind of an Ember-ish thing, I guess. Ember has the whole stability... What is it? Something without stagnation? Stability without stagnation? CHRIS: Stability without stagnation. JAMISON: Where you just get all these free upgrades that are really easy to opt into and Elm has that same philosophy. ALEX: What made you decide to check out Elm, to check out this community? Do you like to jump into new languages, new communities, and poke around and see what sticks? Or is there something that attracted you to Elm in particular. JAMISON: Yes to both of those. I do poke around in a lot of new languages. I have a good friend, Sean Hess who's really into functional programming and he's a Haskell true believer. I am not but he is, so he teaches me stuff by Haskell. I think, he told me about it. I might be misremembering though. It might have been just some random blogpost or podcast somebody did a few years ago. But I was already excited about new languages and functional programming and I had tried to learn Haskell and bounced off so the idea of a functional programming language that takes some good ideas from Haskell, that runs in the browser that's new. It was like all the shiny things that I look for altogether in one thing. I tried it and I liked it. I, also was really impressed by Evan Czaplicki, He's the creator of Elm. His philosophy around creating a language and the goals he wanted to accomplish with it. There's a really good talk he gave and called 'Let's be mainstream' which talks about some of the stuff we talked about around if functional programming is pure statically-typed functional programming is so amazing and it has all these people that love it and swear it's the only way to write software, why no one does it? Why the number of people use it is so small? His thesis is basically because the languages that do this are kind of user hostile so he's trying to make it a user friendly, the one that takes all those ideas. I just really liked that philosophy. CHRIS: I want to go back to something that you mentioned a little bit ago and that was data modeling because that is definitely something that I noticed being extremely helpful, any time I'm using a statically-typed language. It is very much something that I brought with me back to JavaScript. But I was wondering, Maybe you could talk a little bit more in depth about what data modeling really means in terms of Elm, the type system, the record type, and that kind of stuff. JAMISON: Yeah, if you've worked with statically-typed languages like Java or C++ or something, you might have an idea of things like classes as a way to model data where you create a class and you say it has all these fields on it. I think, in the Elm type system, I'm going to say it's a lot better than those languages because it has a lot less ceremony and it is a lot more powerful. Elm has type inference which means you don't have to declare the type of everything. It can just figure it out from a lot of places. That's the thing that makes your code a lot friendlier to write. To model data in Elm, there are two main ways to do that. One is with these record types that you mentioned, Chris. You basically declare an object that has a certain shape like I'll make a type called 'user' and it has a user ID and a hash password and... I don't know, a list of my favorite cats or whatever. Then you can just refer to that user type in function arguments or in return types or anything like that. In Elm, because you created that type, it knows that these are all the fields it has. If you try to access a field that's not on there, it'll yell at you because you're doing something that won't work. Because you have to think through all of the different fields that are on your types, it forces you to do a little bit more. It's kind of like the other side of TDD instead of writing test first. You have to think about your data first. You could call it type-driven development, I guess. CHRIS: That's awesome. JAMISON: In my experience, that's helpful. In the same way, TDD is, right? It helps you to do a little bit of design first. Think about how you're going to interact with the program in some way. Instead of writing tests, you're thinking what data do I need here. They also have these things that you could call them -- there are a bunch of different names for them: algebraic data types, I guess. Some people call them tagged unions. They're kind of like enums where you say this type can take any of these finite list of values. But instead of an enum being like an integer, like it is in some languages with a fancy name wrapped around it, the enum types can contain other value. You can say... what's a good example for this? You could say a user is either an authenticated user with a user record inside it or an unauthenticated user. Then when you're using that type in your program, you check, "Is this user type the authenticated user?" Then, if so it has this user field inside of it that you can pluck out and use. Or, "Is it an unauthenticated user?" Those two different things, the super enums, the algebraic data types plus the record types are really powerful for modeling what data looks like in the real world. I haven't run into that many issues where it's been hard to do something I want to do with just those two concepts. Type systems are hard to explain over the air but hopefully, that helped a little bit. ALEX: I thought that was great. CHRIS: I think a good example of the algebraic data type thing is looking at messages in Elm versus actions in Redux. If our listeners are familiar with those, they are very, very, very similar at a high level. But in Redux, you just have string then you do a switch statement or something and you match on some strings. You hope that you synced everything up correctly. JAMISON: Yeah, you say, "This action has a message and then has a payload that looks like this." See if it match against the message and then hope that the payload somebody sent actually looks like you expect it to look. CHRIS: Yeah, whereas in Elm, you can actually say, "My message type is a union of all of these different things," and now, Elm knows exactly what you're saying and you can't accidentally send the wrong payload to the wrong update function or something. It's one of the cases where I found that there's a very, very clear similarity in JavaScript and it highlights, I think a lot of the nice features that Elm brings to that equation. JAMISON: Yeah and there's even more strictness around that, like you have to handle every message type in Elm. So if you say, "This function takes in a message and does something with it," and then you check against what kind of message it is, you have to check every case or Elm won't compile because they don't want you to just blindly miss something, I guess. But in Redux, you could just happily forget a thing in your case statement and then you send a message and it doesn't do anything and then you have to kind of trace through it and debug why that's happening. There's just more helpful stability stuff built in. CHRIS: Cool. I am so incredibly happy with how this podcast went. I'm just excited to start coding and start getting into Elm. I think people and developers maybe at an inflection point with JavaScript and just going and checking out something else that they can immediately apply back to their day to day. I think, it's so incredibly valuable and something that I'm going to be looking to explore very certain. JAMISON: The value pitch is pretty strong because everyone that's written JavaScript has just written code that breaks when things get passed around that they don't expect. I do that all the time and Elm makes that impossible. You can break it in other ways but you just eliminate this class of errors that plagues your existence in JavaScript. If you want to experience that life, check out Elm. It's got a lot of other good things too but just writing code that does not crashes is a pretty strong pitch, I think. ALEX: Jamison, are there any resources that you might recommend for someone who wants to get started with Elm? JAMISON: Somebody mentioned the guide a few times. Everyone says that about every language, check out the official tutorial or whatever, and they have wildly varying quality. The Elm guide is the thing that worked a ton on. It's pretty good, I think and geared towards people that have no knowledge of Elm, no knowledge of functional programming stuff. That's a Guide.Elm-lang.org. Then there's a Slack channel. If you just go to Elm-lang.org, it will have links to the Slack channel and there are lots of helpful friendly people there. I think those are the two best resources because with those, you can find all the other stuff. CHRIS: There's also another one that I really like to mention which is the elm tutorial. I think, it's Elm-tutorial.org. I found it to be a really great compliment to the official Elm Guide. I think it walks through a little more in building a full app where the Elm Guide kind of touches on a bunch of different related topics. But they're not necessarily one narrative. The Elm tutorial did a really good job of tying all that together for me. JAMISON: Yeah and this is been around for a long time and has kept it up through the evolution of the language. This is good stuff. ALEX: Jamison, thank you for coming on the Frontside Podcast. We really appreciated talking to you. JAMISON: Thanks for having me. ALEX: If you love Jamison's voice, you should check out his React Conf talk from 2016 also about Elm. It's a wonderful talk. Go check that out as well. JAMISON: Thank you. Can I pitch my other stuff too? Is that kosher? ALEX: You can absolutely pitch it. CHRIS: Soft skills engineering! JAMISON: Yeah, I do a podcast called Soft Skills Engineering with my friend Dave Smith where we talk about all of the non-technical stuff in writing code. It's like you [inaudible], you can submit questions, and we answer them. If you're interested in talking about building software together, you should talk to the Frontside first. But after that, you can find me at Fivestack.computer. That's where my consultancy lives. Consults is maybe a strong way of describing it. That's like saying the three toddlers standing on top of each other in a trench coat is like an adult. But if you want to work together, then check that out. ALEX: Great. All right. That wraps it up for us. Thank you very much for listening and we'll talk to you next week.