Podcasts about alex you

This week on the podcast we're joined by none other than filmmaker, Joe Black and GOF team member, Alex Ray! Ep180 - Mad Max: Fury Road & Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga - https://www.galaxyoffilm.com/shows/episode/3c8e627a/ep180-mad-max-fury-road-and-furiosa-a-mad-max-saga Check out Pretty Hurts - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHxhDrzSRis&t=2s⁠⁠⁠ Check out A Journey Through the 2024 Short Film Galaxy - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo9xi8nHgmY⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ You can find more of our podcast as well as the rest of our content on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GalaxyOfFilm.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ You can follow us on Instagram, X, and TikTok @GalaxyOfFilm and subscribe to our YouTube channel, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Galaxy Of Film Productions⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠The new show reel for "The Autograph King"⁠⁠⁠ - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOaAZvZp9b0⁠⁠⁠ Follow our guest stars! Joe Black - You can check out his work through his production company, Blue Means Pregnant Films both on their ⁠⁠website⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Facebook page⁠⁠! Alex - You can't find her anywhere! But you can check out her work on our film, Pretty Hurts - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHxhDrzSRis Music made by Dakari Holder & Tyler Jansen Graphic design by MC Media --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/galaxyoffilm/support

JLP Fri 9-13-24 Express Yourself Friday Hr 1 …6-min late! You love misery! Haitian dirt cookies. ROCKET & ALEX: Forgiveness // Hr 2 ALEX… SHAWN: relationships. Supers. Calls on forgiveness, fear… LEO: anti-2A gf // Hr 3 Trump, Kamala, Chinese lady for 2A, white man. Calls, Supers, Doug. Springfield caller! … // Biblical Question: Why are you afraid not to trust your thoughts? TIMESTAMPS (0:00:00) HOUR 1 late start (0:05:45) OK (0:08:05) BQ, in misery. (0:14:47) Blame. JLP Sings (0:16:55) Express Yourself (0:19:00) Stand alone. Let go. (0:22:55) Another debate? No. (0:24:20) Haitian dirt cookies (0:31:40) TFS. Love fathers. Nick. (0:36:30) Haiti, why Lord? (0:41:25) ROCKET, GA, 1st: Forgive father, Silent Prayer (0:47:45) ALEX, her husband: Whom to forgive? Married mother. HOLD (0:55:00) NICK NEWS: Springfield "conspiracy." Boeing strike. Brokeys. (1:00:55) HOUR 2, whatever you're doin'… (1:04:35) ALEX: Confess your sins, playing God (1:08:25) ALEX: You black? Prayer. ROCKET (1:12:23) SHAWN, TX: Live-in girlfriend. Forgive. Never argue. (1:22:00) Supers: Joel, T Swift govt, Bible, BQ, Jesus (1:31:25) Announcements (1:33:15) RACHEL, ID, 1st: Apologizing (1:35:50) ROBERT, MO, 1st, fears nuclear war. Forgive. (1:42:00) LEO, MI: Girlfriend's anti-2A tone, bothered (1:49:30) LEO: Rosary, Silent Prayer. Love sister (1:55:00) NICK NEWS: Ukraine. Typhoon. ND aborsh. AI medical. (2:01:00) HOUR 3, What that, baby? (2:06:35) Trump entrance after Biden-Harris (2:08:20) Kamala brags trans surgery in CA prison (2:11:00) Chinese immigrant Vs David Hogg: Annie Oakley (2:16:20) Ana Navarro cries racism, corners man (2:18:25) JEFF, CA, 1st, met a gal. No "nice Christian girl" (2:20:30) TRAVIS, AK, 1st, watch thoughts… Forgiven? (2:25:19) Supers: Debate? Tyreek Hill. Hake. (2:31:55) No Hake. TFS. Church. (2:33:25) Doug: Should Trump debate again? BQ. Kamala. (2:39:05) SONIA, Springfield, OH, 1st: Haitians! White people? (2:47:25) Supers… BQ, no debate, job, gambling (2:53:00) JOSEPH, UK: Forgave. Mother cried, I felt bad. (2:54:15) Closing

Heee youu, just dropping in for a quick super exciting update - as you are *still* here! ❤️ Soooooo I just launched a brand new podcast called Hustle Heart, and I am soo excited to invite you!! As always, I am all about empowerment. And in this podcast I empower you to move from Hustle, to Flow - with me. To get in the creator seat of your life and to a create a life that doesn't just look good, but feels GOOD. Can you believe I stopped this Limitless Living podcast nearly a year ago to the day! 14 June 2023 to be precise. It's been such a beautiful - wild - ride since as I have been going through a little transformation of my own : ) Spilling all the tea in Hustle Heart. Because, we gots to put our whole HEART into everything we do. If you like my vibe, have been loving my stories anddd got lots out this podcast, I'd loooove to see you on the otherside. The first three episodes just dropped last Sunday! See you there? xx Alex ====== You can find the Hustle Heart podcast on any platform, here are some links ** Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/32RAR7ZrG6EPCBQOtENC2F?si=repXAONvRN6YH44hbVHcag ** Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/hustle-heart/id1747482336 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/limitlessliving/message

As soon as you hear astrologer Eve's voice, you'll know you're in the hands of an old soul. And once you hear your story, you'll know her wisdom and magic. Evelyn Mari Crete was born to read the stars in a way that goes beyond one life. In this episode, she talks about the the history, complexity, dynamism and cyclical nature of astrology. She shares how she weaves in the elements of Earth, Wind, Fire and Water into her readings, and tells us how our birth charts can tell the story of our soul's evolutionary journeys over time immemorial. Evelyn also gives us a super rundown of how to read and understand the basics of your own birth chart. If you're curious about how astrology can support your karmic journey, this is an episode you aren't going to want to miss! Enjoy! Alex You're invited to join the WITCHHUNT COLLECTIVE I'm looking for 20 witchy women to join me, some of our guests and listeners in the Witchhunt Collective. The WitchHunt Collective is the coming together of 27 women under every Full Moon, Equinox and Solstice to connect with our souls and the soul mission we're here to realize. We'll plug into cosmic, lunar and Earthly energies to support our on-going growth and transformation. When you join, you'll get access to 13 Full Moon LIVE Women's Circles, including 4 Ceremonial Workshops — led by yours truly. You can join for as little as $37 a month. Click here for all the details or to reserve your spot. Or email me at alex@inessencecoaching.com with any questions. >> alexandrahughes.com/witchhuntcollective Spaces for this year-long experience with me will be available until March 20. I'd love to have you join. More About Evelyn Evelyn, also known as Astrologer Eve, is an evolutionary astrologer, spiritual counsellor and mystic whose guiding light is to help her clients connect to the beauty and magic of their soul's purpose found encoded in the birth chart. Her approach comes from the heart and is spoken in truth and with kindness, creating purposeful readings that support healing, and the type of self understanding that leads to self acceptance, healthier relationships, breakthroughs and inner peace. She has been practicing and teaching soul-focused and Jungian astrology for over 20 years across Canada and internationally. Evelyn weaves together many medicines into her practice including herbal medicine, flower remedies, energy healing, mind-body therapies, breath work, and divination. You can find her... https://www.innertemplehealingarts.com/about - website https://www.facebook.com/astrologereve/ - facebook https://www.instagram.com/astrologer.eve/ - instagram

Jasmine Control, a new hire at a shady governmental agency called The Department of Variance, went through an extended supernatural orientation that ended with her manager, Yellow Access, trying to meld the minds of every worker in the office. To save her friend Scarlet Jaunt from death at the hands of her new boss, Jasmine used her newly discovered psychic abilities to jump into the past, to a point where Scarlet was alive. She miscalculated, and now she's stuck in Scarlet's memories from 10 years ago. This season picks up with Jasmine, Scarlet, Violet, and Daryll visiting the woods to see a lunar eclipse after their senior year of high school, ten years prior to the events of season one. But something else is lurking in the woods with them. Something…midwestern. The friends will have to figure out what's going on and put a stop to it if they ever want to escape, and if Jasmine ever wants to return to her normal life. Check out our website for more info! Join our Patreon for early access! CREDITS: Cast of episode 1: Cody Heath, Jesse Syratt, Em Carlson, Tatiana Gefter, Dexter Howard, Lena Garcia. Art by NerdVolKurisu Written, scored, edited, and narrated by Rat Grimes. Transcripts available in episode notes at somewhereohio.com (CWs: alcohol, food, smoking, derealization) ___ TRANSCRIPT: ORANGE: It's just as Green said: the stairway to heaven is always moving. I figured I was on the first step when I heard the cat in the diner. I was heading to a little city in Michigan. I know, I know; “Orange Splice? In the field? Shouldn't you be behind a desk at the Commission signing off on quarterlies?” But on some cases I can't help myself. I can tell you that Red's disciplinary report's gonna have a lot of Orange in it. So this little city in Michigan, an industrial husk of a place. Full of slick palms and the poor souls wriggling between their fingers. I packed my bag and blew the joint. I slept in my rumbling hatchback on the way, and I ate and bathed as the great American trucker does. As I crested the overpass bend on the final leg of the drive, I saw a city blooming with rot. Squat brick piles wheezing into the streets, oily sunlight, cars bleeding rust into the earth. Plumes of gray hovered over the place, like cotton soaked with kerosene. One little spark and the whole thing could blow. Maybe we'd all be better off if it did. Maybe we're better off forgetting places like this. Scooping out what little's worth saving and dumping the rest. Writing them off as a loss–another failure in the long lineage of midwestern decline. Or maybe it's not that simple. I wasn't going to Deerland to set it ablaze, after all. I was being led there for something else. And so I rode up through the boiling roadkill highways of vulture county, past towns so small you could hear every single prayer on a quiet night. By antique malls decked with the heraldry of genocide. Under billboards letting you know you're fucked before you even get there: Hell is real, and it's about 25 miles that way. I was going up there to find Olivia, now designated Jasmine Control by the Department. First saw her face on a milk carton, and I didn't even know they still did that. Maybe they don't. I slid downstairs that morning in a haze, a little box of strawberry milk I'd bought from the grocer in my hand. The milk itself didn't last long. I turned the empty carton over in my hand, then unfolded and tore open the bottom. I held it up to my ear and listened for the ocean. *sounds as room ambience becomes waves and various sounds* ORANGE: I heard through and beyond the carton, through my wall and the early pink light outside, through misty pines and hundreds of miles of the big flat nothing. Through and before my life, and after too, and into a hip spot in Deerland, a coffeeshop on the corner that used to be three apartments. The tip jar on the counter was a glass milk jug filled with quarters and crumpled singles. And taped to the side was a photo and one word: MISSING—Olivia…Olivia. I exited the highway on the right, tires sizzling down the griddlehot blacktop of the narrow streets of Deerland, Michigan. I'd need somewhere to stay in this weather. Cruised a while and found a place overlooking a decaying mall: Hotel 7. One better than Motel 6, the owner assured me through a pushbroom mustache. One worse than Super 8, I thought. Next I needed food. I was wading through thick waves of exhaustion by then, rolling slowly but surely onward, bowled over by the blindfolds and needles of fate. On the way to my room, I stepped into a corridor dripping with window unit condensation and lined with posters. MISSING. A face repeated in nine squares. I shook my head and stared deep into the paper. GIRL MISSING. I got caught on the origin of the word, germanic, maybe dutch. Gone, disappeared, vanished, typically without a trace. To be absent. In absentia. Guilt without a face, death without a body. Holes in the ground, gaps in memory. The girl on the flyer opened her mouth and said something I couldn't hear. Her breath caught in the humid air, suspended green in the neon glow overhead. I fumbled with my lighter in my pocket. I flicked it on and patted my coat pockets. No pack. I hadn't had a smoke in two years. That'd change soon. High above, rising over the fire escape and ascending into the sick bruised sky, I saw two glowing spheres. The kid's breath vanished and so did I. Once again back at my kitchen table, soggy milk carton in my hand. If you were in my place, Green, what would you have done with your life? If you saw what was coming. Dive headfirst or take a dive? Deerland or Des Moines? After that first vision, I made the choice quicker than I'd like to admit. I dove, deep and breathless, into the variant night. Wait, let me back up. I'll tell you how it happened chronologically–ontologically–not how my brain stitched it together. See, in my head I had already been to Deerland via milky astral lanes, already tried the coffee and divined the lines in the sidewalks. I was three days ahead of myself. Psychic lag. Pages colored in without lines. I would be there in three days' time. I would seek out Olivia, this missing girl, and a creeping feeling told me there'd be more to it than that. More Departmental business, which meant more paperwork. Figured I might as well get packing, I was in for a long night. *** NARRATOR 1 (italics until Nyarrator/Narrator 2 shows up in ep 8 are Narrator 1, played by Rat): Jasmine looked around the jeep, trying to center herself. She was lightheaded, dizzy. She couldn't tell if it was a side effect of the binding agonist or if this situation was just too much for her mind to handle. Psionic nausea. OLIVIA: Is this how Green felt all the time? It was not. ASH: Look, Jasmine, you don't know me, but I'm going to help you however I can from the wire. I used to work for the Department, as well. Assigned name Ash Chorus, stationed with the Dead Letter Office, then the…the division of Fictobiology. I've been sort of…telling your story for you, as strange as that sounds. I may have gotten a few things wrong, but I think I captured the heart of it. And I will continue to do so. I only ask one thing of you, and recommend another: do not mention me to anyone, and do not tell the others what you've done. ALEX: Dude, who are you talking to? OLIVIA: Oh, it's just my mom making sure we got here okay. You know how she is. ALEX: I guess. We met a couple times, right? Whatever, we're almost at the clearing. This is gonna be epic. OLIVIA: Yeah, uhh “epic.” Hold on. *quieter, on phone with Ash* What the hell is going on? How do I get back to my time? ASH: I…I'm uncertain. What I do know is this: you're in a memory, not in the past. For the time being, dispense with any theorizing and stick to what we know for sure: you, Jasmine, are in a memory from a little over 10 years ago, and that goo you drank that let you do this has worn off.  Now you can't get out—a jaunt gone wrong—and you're just going to have to live through this memory, however long it lasts. OLIVIA: I guess that's why it was Scarlet's last resort when I was being chased. But still, she was dying, I had to do something! ASH: I know, I know. Keep your phone with you, and hold it to your ear if you need to talk to me. I'll help however I can in my limited capacity. Now hang up, you've been on the line too long and Scarlet's getting suspicious. OLIVIA: Okay, okay. *click, then quietly:* How did they know all that? The simplest explanation was that Ash Chorus was not real. They were as much a phantasm as this place, this metastatic memory structure. Like the larks, the butterflies, bigfoot. OLIVIA: They're…you're fictobiological. Sterling would have a heart attack. Wait, so you're like a cryptid or something? Can you tell me if Nessie's real? In a sense, Olivia was right. But now was not the time to speak with the air. Her compatriots were growing concerned. OLIVIA: Fine, I'll stop talking to the first fictional person I've ever heard. Normal world. Olivia recalled the advice of her father: the best way out is through. All she needed to do was live through this moment. This wasn't the past, and she had no way of altering what happened here. The only thing that could change was her mind. NADIA: Is she good? She's muttering and looks like she's gonna hurl. OLIVIA: Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Do you have anything to drink? DARYLL: Ch'yeah, dig this. Daryll took one hand off the jeep's wheel and leaned forward, reaching into a bag at Violet's–Nadia's–feet. He rifled around and pulled out a familiar blue and white can. He tossed one blindly into the back, and Jasmine fumbled the catch. Scarlet–Alex–snagged the can and cracked it open, taking a long sip before handing it to Jasmine and wiping the foam from her mouth. ALEX: Hope you like the bitter stuff. It was not the bitter stuff, it was gas station party fodder. OLIVIA: Ugh. I was thinking more like, water? Or Gatorade? *pause* Hey, wait. You're eightee—I mean we're 18! And we're in a car. With open containers. This is…this is bad. ALEX: Calm yourself, Liv, it's fiiine. We're basically in college now. Have you seriously never had *emphasized “A”* A beer? OLIVIA: I mean, I have, I like wine more, but— ALEX: Man, you're like 30 years old. Just let loose and enjoy the night. What, are you gonna tell my mom I brought some weed, too? Jesus. DARYLL: You are kinda harshing the mood here, Oli. OLIVIA: Whatever, but if we're going to do nicknames, can you not call me “Oli”? NADIA: Yeah, like who even is Oli? How about Livia? Via? DARYLL: “Vita means life” *Alex laughs* OLIVIA: How about this: we're going out in the woods, we're drinking illegally and, I assume, trespassing. So what if we had, like, codenames? ALEX: You remind me a lot of my cousin, Liv. He's five. *to the others* I don't know why we brought her, she just sometimes— OLIVIA, ignoring Scar: I'll be…hmmm…my shirt's yellow, so I'll be Jasmine. DARYLL: Aladdin, sick. OLIVIA: You can be Violet, Nadia, because you love purple and black. NADIA: I do. OLIVIA: And Scarlet for Alex, because. Hair. ALEX: Rude, fuck off. I dyed it for a reason, asshole. DARYLL, holding back a laugh: Nah, dude, it's pure gold. OLIVIA: And you, uhhh… DARYLL: Fuckface. NADIA: Ew ALEX: Fuckface Killer. OLIVIA: I was thinking something like— DARYLL: Vegeta! NADIA: No. ALEX: Nope. OLIVIA: What? DARYLL: You could just like…call me Daryll. OLIVIA: Ugh. Nevermind. I just thought it would be easier…forget it. The jeep's tires crunched and spun gravel as the four sped down unpaved roads through the trees. Hung overhead were dark boughs, holding the high heat of the night in their leaves. A ranger station hoved into view not far ahead. A small pickup rumbled in the driveway, its headlights illuminating the forest beyond the trail. DARYLL: Shit, shit, dump the open cans. Daryll threw the remaining beers into the backseat. Alex nestled the cans at her feet and covered them with a blanket. She fished in her pocket for the worst joint ever rolled and stuffed it in her sock. RANGER: How are you folks doing tonight? Daryll squinted against the light beaming at his face. DARYLL: Uhh, do you need my license? RANGER: No, I'm not a police officer. I'm just here to make sure you guys stay safe. DARYLL: Oh, yeah. Dumb. Sorry, sorry sir. RANGER: You wouldn't have any fireworks in there, would you? No sparklers or firecrackers? We been having trouble with some rowdy teens lately, almost started a forest fire last week. Wouldn't be you, would it? DARYLL: No, no. Not in here! We're not really firework people, you know? RANGER: And of course you wouldn't have any illicit substances, now would you? The ranger lifted her flashlight and shone it through the back windows. Alex winced and sat upright, Olivia put on a smile and waved. Nadia's eyes didn't leave her iphone. The ranger looked vaguely familiar to Olivia, but she couldn't place why. The ranger pressed her hand against her forehead and inhaled sharply. DARYLL: Y-you okay? RANGER: Ope, sorry, just a headache. Think we got a storm coming on, with the humidity and all. Messing with my sinuses. All the pollen doesn't help any. *pause* RANGER: I see you folks have a telescope. You all out here for the eclipse? DARYLL: Yeah we're looking for a place to set up the scope. RANGER: Gotcha. Well, the public gathering is back that way down the trail. You passed the parking lot about a mile back. Bout half mile ahead, the trail's off-limits after hours. Road's closed. So you folks ought to head back thataway. DARYLL: Oh, okay, sweet, thank you. We'll do that. RANGER: Enjoy the eclipse, then. And watch out for rain. DARYLL: Oh, we will for sure! I hate getting wet, so… RANGER, puzzled: Huh. All righty then. *ranger leaves* ALEX: That was hella close. DARYLL: Dude I sweat through my shirt. OLIVIA: We should probably drive back to the parking lot, then, right? DARYLL: No way, dude, we just had a clean getaway. We'll just have to find a place to ditch the Jeep. *jeep shuts off* DARYLL: Guess it'll be on foot from here. *** *chain shakes* OLIVIA: Says “no entry.” DARYLL: Olivia, try to keep up. That's why we're going there. Gonna be no one else around. ALEX: Don't be a narc, Liv. *sounds of footsteps, crunching gravel* ALEX: Oh, hey, this is the spot? NADIA: Gonna be kinda hard to see the eclipse from here, but whatever. DARYLL: Nah, it's up ahead still. Down the trail and across the stream. Then we'll be at the clearing. ALEX: Cool, come on Nadia. Want to like…walk together or whatever? Nadia had slipped on a pair of clunky headphones, nodding her head to some distorted guitars and guttural screams. A band of red spread across Alex's nose and cheeks. ALEX: Chhh, whatever, dude. Come on Liv, let's go. *** *blanket flaps, grassy footsteps: ALEX: You guys want a slim jim? Sour patch kids? DARYLL: Slim jim anybody? I got slim jims here! 2 for 5 or 3 for 5 or 4 for 5! OLIVIA: So this is just outside of…where again? DARYLL: The DL, duh? I guess you don't live in town, so. We're like 20 minutes out from your place, 30 minutes from Ohio. It's pure Michigan, baby. ALEX: I'm actually kind of…excited for this? NADIA: Probably the beer talking. ALEX: I had one sip before we had to toss ‘em. NADIA: I mean, it's cool and all. I'm mostly here for the hangs, though. OLIVIA: The weather's perfect for it. Clear sky, hot summer night. Where'd you get the telescope? I assume it's not yours, Alex. ALEX: Dude, it's your telescope. Are you sure we don't need to take you to urgent care or something? Right, her dad bought it for her sixteenth birthday. Had her initials on the case. OLIVIA: O.H.M… He set up a spot in the backyard for stargazing. She remembered the tall grass tickling her ankles, cicadas winding down their song in the cherry blossoms, condensation rolling down the side of a glass. The stray cat rubbing against her leg. She remembered the drawings of the constellations in her book. OLIVIA: Cygnus, Aquila, Heracles… She had snapped one of the tripod's legs when he left. He stopped by and taped it back together while she was at school. OLIVIA: Oh, yeah, didn't recognize it for…some reason. Nadia sat down first, reclining on her elbows and looking up through the sparse branches overhead. Olivia sat across from her on another blanket, and Daryll leaned against a wide trunk with a cold drink in hand. DARYLL: Which one is that? OLIVIA: The constellation? I think…the teapot? It might be part of Sagittarius. NADIA: It is. DARYLL: Oh, is it??  How would you even know? NADIA: Googled it, duhh. Alex looked over the three of them, equations spinning around in her head as she tried to calculate whether it would be too obvious to sit next to Nadia. She would've liked to, but then Liv and Daryll would be like ‘hey, why didn't you take the empty blanket, you nerd?' and then maybe Nadia would be weirded out. But if she sat on the empty blanket, then Daryll would have to choose one person to share a blanket with, and what if he sat with her? And— OLIVIA, quietly: Stop overthinking and go sit with Nadia. ALEX: Oh, haHA, yeah, totally. Sorry, I was just thinking about…basketball. *quietly, to herself* Basketball? That's the kind of game I've got?? Alex took her spot next to Nadia. She could hear Nadia's music bleeding through the foam pads of her headphones. She was sweating. But that was fine, right? It's hot out, people sweat. And it's not like she was sitting that close to Nadia. Oh god, was she sitting weirdly far away? Like she was trying to avoid Nadia? Alex took a deep breath and scooted a little closer. Nadia paid no attention to this or to much of anything that Alex was doing. She was locked in to the music. The crickets were humming in the tall grass nearby, spiders dangled and spun in the branches, tadpoles darted down a trickling stream. All was quiet, for a moment. OLIVIA: Wonder if it's about to happen. ALEX: It's uber dark out here. DARYLL: Yeah dude, moon's about to be gone-zo. ALEX: It's time already? DARYLL: Dude, this space shit owns. I can see the craters through this thing. OLIVIA: Ooh, let me see! ALEX: Whoa, you can see from here. There's just a little sliver. NADIA: Kinda makes me feel sick. Like knowing it's really out there, and we're here, small and alone. DARYLL: Aaaand it's gone. Complete darkness enveloped the group. The humid air clung heavy as wet gowns around them. The moon had vanished behind the shadow of the planet, and even the insects, birds, and Nadia's headphones hushed their songs in reverent silence. OLIVIA: Gosh, I forget how dark it can get out in the country. ALEX: You basically live in a farmhouse, dude. You're in “the country” all the time. OLIVIA: It's just…I'm in my room a lot I guess. Don't get out to see the stars much. ALEX: I see the taco bell drive through more often than stars. DARYLL: Fuuuuck, now I'm hungry. The gloom that surrounded them did not relent, even long past when the shadow should have given way back to the gentle glow of reflected light. OLIVIA: It should be back by now. ALEX: Give it a sec. OLIVIA: And where are the constellations? NADIA: The sky's like a black curtain. ALEX: Probably clouds. OLIVIA: No, it was clear when we got here. DARYLL: You think the moon's broken? Hey, try taking it out, blowing in it, and putting it back in again. Olivia could feel her pulse hammering in her throat. It was hot before, but the air was growing hotter, and the cool breeze that rustled the nettles and ivies was still. She was slick with perspiration, and the moisture in the air had her struggling for breath. Her eyes darted in every direction, looking for some landmark or image to anchor herself, but found nothing. In the total blackout, they could be anywhere: a basement, the bottom of the ocean. Or they could be nowhere, the great void between blasted stellar remains and dead planets. NADIA: It is weird, right? ALEX: Hey, uh, Olivia, check that telescope. Do you know what's going on? You're the space nerd, right? OLIVIA: There's nothing there. NADIA: What do you mean, “nothing there?” ALEX: Well, it's there we just can't see it, right? *silence* ALEX: …right? It must be coming, the thing that Scarlet and Violet—Alex and Nadia—saw all those years ago. OLIVIA: No, it can't be. Olivia knew, but they didn't know, couldn't know, that this would change them. NADIA: Oh, hey, there it is. ALEX: Finally! Hey, wait. What's…why is there… DARYLL: That's fucked up. That these next few hours would be the worst of their lives. OLIVIA: O-oh my god. There's…there's another. There are two of them, just hanging in the sky. Two moons. END

Alex Gallego, CEO & Founder of Redpanda, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experience founding and scaling a successful data streaming company over the past 4 years. Alex explains how it's been a fun and humbling journey to go from being an engineer to being a founder, and how he's built a team he trusts to hand the production off to. Corey and Alex discuss the benefits and various applications of Redpanda's data streaming services, and Alex reveals why it was so important to him to focus on doing one thing really well when it comes to his product strategy. Alex also shares details on the Hack the Planet scholarship program he founded for individuals in underrepresented communities. About AlexAlex Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda, the streaming data platform for developers. Alex has spent his career immersed in deeply technical environments, and is passionate about finding and building solutions to the challenges of modern data streaming. Prior to Redpanda, Alex was a principal engineer at Akamai, as well as co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high-performance stream-processing engine acquired by Akamai in 2016. He has also engineered software at Factset Research Systems, Forex Capital Markets and Yieldmo; and holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and cryptography from NYU. Links Referenced: Redpanda: https://redpanda.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/emaxerrno Redpanda community Slack: https://redpandacommunity.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1xq6m0ucj-nI41I7dXWB13aQ2iKBDvDw Hack The Planet Scholarship: https://redpanda.com/scholarship 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: Tired of slow database performance and bottlenecks on MySQL or PostgresSQL when using Amazon RDS or Aurora? How'd you like to reduce query response times by ninety percent? Better yet, how would you like to get me to pronounce database names correctly? Join customers like Zscaler, Intel, Booking.com, and others that use OtterTune's artificial intelligence to automatically optimize and keep their databases healthy. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more and start a free trial. That's O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Redpanda, which I'm thrilled about because I have a personal affinity for companies that have cartoon mascots in the form of animals and are willing to at least be slightly creative with them. My guest is Alex Gallego, the founder and CEO over at Redpanda. Alex, thanks for joining me.Alex: Corey, thanks for having me.Corey: So, I'm not asking about the animal; I'm talking about the company, which I imagine is a frequent source of disambiguation when you meet people at parties and they don't quite understand what it is that you do. And you folks are big in the data streaming space, but data streaming can mean an awful lot of things to an awful lot of people. What is it for you?Alex: Largely it's about enabling developers to build applications that can extract value of every single event, every click, every mouse movement, every transaction, every event that goes through your network. This is what Redpanda is about. It's like how do we help you make more money with every single event? How do we help you be more successful? And you know, happy to give examples in finance, or IoT, or oil and gas, if it's helpful for the audience, but really, to me, it's like, okay, if we can give you the framework in which you can build a new application that allows you to extract value out of data, every single event that's going through your network, to me, that's what a streaming is about. It large, it's you know, data contextualized with a timestamp and largely, a sort of a database of event streaming.Corey: One of the things that I find curious about the space is that usually, companies wind up going one of two directions when you're talking about data streaming. Either there, “Oh, just send it all to us and we'll take care of it for you,” or otherwise, it's a, great they more or less ship something that you've run in your own environment. In the olden days of data centers, that usually resembled a box of some sort. You're one of those interesting split-the-difference companies where you offer both models. Do you find that one of those tends to be seeing more adoption these days or that there's an increasing trend toward one direction or the other?Alex: Yeah. So, right now, I think that to me, the future of all these data-intensive products—whether you're a database or a streaming engine—will, because simply of cost of networks transferred between the hybrid clouds and your accounts, sending a gigabyte a second of data between, let's say, you know, your data center and a vendor, it's just so expensive that at some point, from just a cost perspective, like, running the infrastructure, it's in the millions of dollars. And so, running the data inside your VPC, it's sort of the next logical evolution of how we've used to consume services. And so, I actually think it's just the evolution: people would self-host because of costs and then they would use services because of operational simplicity. “I don't want to spend team skills and time building this. I want to pay a vendor.”And so, BYOC, to be honest—which is what we call this offering—it was about [laugh] sidestepping the costs and of being stuck in the hybrid clouds, whether it's Google or Amazon, where you're paying egress and ingress costs and it's just so expensive, in addition to this whole idea of data residency or data sovereignty and privacy. It's like, yeah, why not both? Like, if I'm an engineer, I want low latency and I don't want to pay you to transfer this thing to the next rack. I mean, my computer's probably, like, you know, a hundred feet away from my customer's computer. Like, why [laugh] way is that so complicated? So, you know, my view is that the future of data-intensive products will be in this form of where it—like, data planes are actually owned by companies, and then you offer that as a Software as a Service.Corey: One of the things that catches an awful lot of companies with telemetry use cases—or data streaming as another example of that—by surprise when they start building their own cloud-hosted offering is that they're suddenly seeing a lot more cross-AZ data charges than they would have potentially expected. And that's because unlike cross-region or the really expensive version of this with egress, it's a penny in and a penny out per gigabyte in most of AWS regions. Which means that that isn't also bound strictly to an AWS organization. So, you have customers co-located with you and you're starting to pay ingress charges on customers throwing their data over to you. And, on some level, the most economical solution for you is well, we're just going to put our listeners somewhere else far away so that we can just have them pay the steep egress fee but then we can just reflect it back to ourselves for free.And that's a terrible pattern, but it's a byproduct of the absolutely byzantine cross-AZ data transfer pricing, in fact, all of the data transfer pricing that is at least AWS tends to present. And it shapes the architectural decisions you make as a result.Alex: You know, as a user, it just didn't make sense. When we launched this product, the number of people that says like, “Why wouldn't your charge for, you know, effectively renting [unintelligible 00:05:14], and giving a markup to your customers?” That's we don't add any value on that, you know? I think people should really just pay us for the value that we create for them. And so, you know, for us competing with other companies is relatively easy.Competing with MSK is it's harder because MSK just has this, you know, muscle where they don't charge you for some particular network traffic between you. And so, it forces companies like us that are trying to be innovative in the data space to, like, put our services in that so that we can actually compete in the market. And so, it's a forcing function of the hybrid clouds having this strong muscle of being able to discount their services in a way that companies just simply don't have access to. And then, you know, it becomes—for the others—latency and sovereignty.Corey: This is the way that effectively all of AWS has first-party offerings of other things go. Replication traffic between AZs is not chargeable. And when I asked them about that, they say, “Oh, yeah. We just price that into the cost of the service.” I don't know that I necessarily buy that because if I try and run this sort of thing on top of EC2, it would cost me more than using their crappy implementation of it, just in data transfer alone for an awful lot of use cases.No third party can touch that level of cost-effectiveness and discounting. It really is probably the clearest example I can think of actual anti-competitive behavior in the market. But it's also complex enough to explain, to, you know, regulators that it doesn't make for exciting exposés and the basis for lawsuits. Yet. Hope springs eternal.Alex: [laugh]. You know—okay, so here is how—if someone is listening to this podcast and is, like, “Okay, well, what can I do?” For us, S3 is the answer. S3 is basically you need to be able to lean in into S3 as a way of replication across [AZ 00:06:56], you need to be able to lean into S3 to read data. And so actually, when I wrote, originally, Redpanda, you know, it's just like this C++ thing using [unintelligible 00:07:04], geared towards super low latency.When we moved it into the cloud, what we realized is, this is cost prohibitive to run either on EBS volumes or local disk. I have to tier all the storage into S3, so that I can use S3's cross-AZ network transfer, which is basically free, to be able to then bring a separate cluster on a different AZ, and then read from the bucket at zero cost. And so, you end up really—like, there are fundamental technical things that you have to do to just be able to compete in a way that's cost-effective for you. And so, in addition to just, like, the muscle that they can enforce on the companies is—it—there are deep implications of what it translates to at the technical level. Like, at the code level.Corey: In the cloud, more than almost anywhere else, it really does become apparent that cost and architecture are fundamentally the same thing. And I have a bit of an advantage here in that I've seen what you do deployed at least one customer of mine. It's fun. When you have a bunch of logos on your site, it's, “Hey, I recognize some of those.” And what I found interesting was the way that multiple people, when I spoke to them, described what it is that you do because some of them talked about it purely as a cost play, but other people were just as enthusiastic about it being a means of improving feature velocity and unlocking capabilities that they didn't otherwise have or couldn't have gotten to without a whole lot of custom work on their part. Which is it? How do you view what it is that you're bringing to market? Is it a cost play or is it a capability story?Alex: From our customer base, I would say 40% is—of our customer base—is about Redpanda enabling them to do things that they simply couldn't do before. An example is, we have, you know, a Fortune 100 company that they basically run their hedge trading strategy on top of Redpanda. And the reason for that is because we give them a five-millisecond average latency with predictable flight latencies, right? And so, for them, that predictability of Redpanda, you know, and sort of like the architecture that came about from trying to invent a new storage engine, allows them to throw away a bunch of in-house, you know, custom-built pub/sub messaging that, you know, basically gave them the same or worse latency. And so, for them, there's that.For others, I think in the IoT space, or if you have flying vehicles around the world, we have some logos that, you know, I just can't mention them. But they have this, like, flying computers around the world and they want to measure that. And so, like, the profile of the footprint, like, the mechanical footprint of being able to run on a single Pthread with a few megs of memory allows these new deployment models that, you know, simply, it's just, it's not possible with the alternatives where let's say you have to have, you know, like, a zookeeper on the schema registry and an HTTP proxy and a broker and all of these things. That simply just, it cannot run on a single Pthread with a few megs of memory, if you put any sort of workload into that. And so, it's like, the computational efficiencies simply enable new things that you couldn't do before. And that's probably 40%. And then the other, it's just… money was really cheap last year [laugh] or the year before and I think now it's less cheap [unintelligible 00:10:08] yeah.Corey: Yeah, I couldn't help but notice that in my own business, too. It turns out that not giving a shit about the AWS bill was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Who knew?Alex: [laugh]. Yeah, exactly. And now people [unintelligible 00:10:17], you know, the CIOs in particular, it's like, help. And so, that's really 60%, and our business has boomed since.Corey: Yeah, one thing that I find interesting is that you've been around for only four years. I know that's weird to say ‘only,' but time moves differently in tech. And you've started showing up in some very strange places that I would not have expected. You recently—somewhat recently; time is, of course, a flat circle—completed $100 million Series C, and I also saw you in places where I didn't expect to see you in the form of, last week, one of your large competitor's earnings calls, where they were asked by an analyst about an unnamed company that had raised $100 million Series C, and the CEO [unintelligible 00:11:00], “Oh, you're probably talking about Redpanda.” And then they gave an answer that was fine.I mean, no one is going to be on an earnings call and not be prepared for questions like that and to not have an answer ready to go. No one's going to say, “Well, we're doomed if it works,” because I think that businesses are more sophisticated than that. But it was an interesting shout-out in a place where you normally don't see competitors validate that you're doing something interesting by name-checking you.Alex: What was fundamentally interesting for me about that, is that I feel that as an investor, if you're putting you know, 2, 3, 4, or $500 million check into a public position of a company, you want to know, is this money simply going to make returns? That's basically what an investor cares about. And so, the reason for that question is, “Hey, there's a Series C startup company that now has a bunch of these Fortune 2000 logos,” and you know, when we talked to them, like, their customer [unintelligible 00:11:51] phenomena, like, why is that the case? And then, you know, our competitor was forced to name, you know, [laugh] a single win. That's as far as I remember it. We don't know of any additional customers that have switched to that.And so, I think when you have, like, you know, your win rate is above, whatever, 95%, 97% ratio, then I think, you know, they're just sort of forced to answer that. And in a way, I just think that they focus on different things. And for me, it was like, “Okay, developer, hands on keyboard, behind the terminal, how do I make you successful?” And that seems to have worked out enough to be mentioned in the earnings call.Corey: On some level, it's a little bit of a dog-and-pony show. I think that as companies had a certain point of scale, they feel that they need to validate what they're doing to investors at various points—which is always, on some level, of concern—and validate themselves to analysts, both financial—which, okay, whatever—and also, industry analysts, where they come with checklists that they believe is what customers want and is often a little bit off of the mark. But the validation that I think that matters, that actually determines whether or not something has legs is what your customers—you know, people paying you money for a thing—have to say and what they take away from what you're doing. And having seen in a couple of cases now myself, that usage of Redpanda has increased after initial proofs of concept and putting things on to it, I already sort of know the answer to this, but it seems that you also have a vibrant community of boosters for people who are thrilled to use the thing you're selling them.Alex: You know, Jumptraders recently posted that there was a use case in the new stack where they, like, put for the most mission-critical. So, for those of you that listening, Jumptraders is financial company, and they're super technical company. One of, like, the hardest things, they'll probably put your [unintelligible 00:13:35] your product through some of the most rigorous testing [unintelligible 00:13:38]. So, when you start doing some of these logos, it gives confidence. And actually, the majority of our developers that we get to partner with, it was really a friend telling a friend, for [laugh] the longest time, my marketing department was super, super small.And then what's been fun, some, like, really different use case was the one I mentioned about on this, like, flying vehicles around the world. They fly both in outer space and in airplanes. That was really fun. And then the large one is when you have workloads at, like, 14-and-a-half gigabytes per second, where the alternative of using something like Kinesis in the case of Lacework—which, you know, they wrote a new stack article about—would be so exorbitantly expensive. And so, in a way, I think that, you know, just trying to make the developers successful, really focusing, honestly, on the person who just has to make things work. We don't—by the time we get to the CIO, really the champion was the engineer who had to build an application. “I was just trying to figure it out the whack-a-mole of trying to debug alternative systems.”Corey: One of the, I think, seductive problems with your entire space is that no one decides day one that they're going to implement a data streaming solution for a very scaled-out, high-traffic site. The early adoption is always a small thing that you're in the process of building. And at that scale at that speed, it just doesn't feel like it's that hard of a problem because scale introduces its own unique series of challenges, but it's often one that people only really find out themselves when the simple thing that works in theory but not in production starts to cause problems internally. I used to work with someone who was a deeply passionate believer in Apache Kafka to a point where it almost became a problem, just because their answer to every problem—it almost didn't matter if it was, “How do we get more coffee this morning?”—Kafka would be the answer for all of it.And that's great, but it turned out, they became one of these people that borderline took on a product or a technology as their identity. So, anything that would potentially take a workload away from that, I got a lot of internal resistance. I'm wondering if you find that you're being brought in to replace existing systems or for completely greenfield stuff. And if the former, are you seeing a lot of internal resistance to people who have built a little niche for themselves?Alex: It's true, the people that have built a career, especially at large banks, were a pretty good fit for, you know, they actually get a team, they got a promotion cycle because they brought this technology and the technology sort of helped them make money. I personally tend to love to talk to these people. And there was a ca—to me, like, technically, let's talk about, like, deeply technical. Let me help you. That obviously doesn't scale because I can't have the same conversation with ten people.So, we do tend to see some of that. Actually, from our customers' standpoint, I would say that the large part of our customer base, you know, if I'm trying to put numbers, maybe 65%, I probably rip and replace of, you know, either upstream Apache Software or private companies or hosted services, et cetera. And so, I think you're right in saying, “Hey, that resistance,” they probably handled the [unintelligible 00:16:38], but what changed in the last year is that the CIO now stepped in and says, “I am going to fire all of you or you have to come up with a $10 million savings. Help me.” [laugh]. And so, you know, then really, my job is to help them look like a hero.It's like, “Hey, look, try it tested, benchmark it in your with your own workload, and if it saves you money, then use it.” That's been, you know, to sort of super helpful kind of on the macroeconomic environment. And then the last one is sometimes, you know, you do have to go with a greenfield, right? Like, someone has built a career, they want to gain confidence, they want to ask you questions, they want to trust you that you don't lose data, they want to make sure that you do say the things that you want to say. And so, sometimes it's about building trust and building that relationship.And developers are right. Like, there's a bunch of products out there. Like, why should I trust you? And so, a little easier time, probably now, that you know, with the CIOs wanting to cut costs, and now you have an excuse to go back to the executive team and say, “Look, I made you look smart. We get to [unintelligible 00:17:35], you know, our systems can scale to this.” That's easy. Or the second one is we do, you know, we'll start with some side use case or a greenfield. But both exists, and I would say 65% is probably rip-outs.Corey: One question, I love to, I wouldn't call it ambush, but definitely come up with, the catches some folks by surprise is one of the ways I like to sort out zealots from people who are focused on business problems. Do have an example of a data streaming workload for which Redpanda would not be a great fit?Alex: Yeah. Database-style queries are not a fit. And so, think that there was a streaming engine before there was trying to build a database on top of it, and, like—and probably it does work in some low volume of traffic, like, say 5, 10 megabytes per second, but when you get to actual large scale, it just it doesn't work. And it doesn't work because but what Redpanda is, it gives you two properties as a developer. You can add data to the end or you can truncate the head, right?And so, because those are your only two operations on the log, then you have to build this entire caching level to be able to give this database semantics. And so, do you know, I think for that the future isn't for us to build a database, just as an example, it's really to almost invert it. It's like, hey, what if we make our format an open format like Apache Iceberg and then bring in your favorite database? Like, bring in, you know, Snowflake or Athena or Trina or Spark or [unintelligible 00:18:54] or [unintelligible 00:18:55] or whatever the other [unintelligible 00:18:56] of great databases that are better than we are, and doing, you know, just MPP, right, like a massively parallelizable database, do that, and then the job for us, for [unintelligible 00:19:05], let me just structure your log in a way that allows you to query, right? And so, for us, when we announced the $100 million dollar Series C funding, it's like, I'm going to put the data in an iceberg format so you can go and query it with the other ten databases. And there are a better job than we are at that than we are.Corey: It's frankly, refreshing to see a vendor that knows where, okay, this is where we start and this is where we stop because it just seems that there's been an industry-wide push for a while now to oh, you built a component in a larger system that works super well. Now, expand to do everything else in the architectural diagram. And you suddenly have databases trying to be network transport layers and queues trying to be data warehouses, and it just doesn't work that way. It just it feels like oh, this is a terrible approach to solving this particular problem. And what's worse, from my mind, is that people who hadn't heard of you before look at you through this lens that does not put you in your best light, and, “Oh, this is a terrible database.” Well, it's not supposed to be one.Alex: [laugh].Corey: But it also—it puts them off as a result. Have you faced pressure to expand beyond your core competency from either investors or customers or analysts or, I don't know, the voices late at night that I hear and I assume everyone else does, too?Alex: Exactly. The 3 a.m. voice that I have to take my phone and take a voice note because it's like, I don't want to lose this idea. Totally. For us. I think there's pressures, like, hey, you built this great engine. Why don't you add, like, the latest, you know, soup de jour in systems was like a vector database.I was like, “This doesn't even make any sense.” For me, it's, I want to do one thing really well. And I generally call it internally, ‘the ring zero.' It's, if you think of the internet, right, like, as a computer, especially with this mode to what we talked about earlier in a BYOC, like, we could be the best ring zero, the best sort of like, you know, messaging platform for people to build real-time applications. And then that's the case and there's just so much low-hanging fruit for us.Like, the developer experience wasn't great for other systems, like, why don't we focus on the last mile, like, making that developer, you know, successful at doing this one thing as opposed to be an average and a bunch of other a hundred products? And until we feel, honestly, that we've done a phenomenal job at that—I think we still have some roadmap to get there—I don't want to expand. And, like, if there's pressure, my answer is, like… look, the market is big enough. We don't have to do it. We're still, you know, growing.I think it's obviously not trivial and I'm kind of trivializing a bunch of problems from a business perspective. I'm not trying to degrade anyone else. But for us, it's just being focused. This is what we do well. And bring every other technology that makes you successful. I don't really care. I just want to make this part well.Corey: I think that that is something that's under-appreciated. I feel like I should get over at one point to something that's been nagging at the back of my mind. Some would call it a personal attack and I suppose I'll let them, but what I find interesting is your background. Historically, you were a distributed systems engineer at very large scale. And you apparently wrote the first version of Redpanda yourself in—was it C or C++?Alex: C++.Corey: Yeah. And now you are the CEO of a company that is clearly doing very well. Have you gotten the hell out of production yet? The reason I ask this is I have worked in a number of companies where the founder was also the initial engineer and then they invariably treated main as their feature branch and the rest of us all had to work around them to keep them from, you know, destroying everything we were trying to build around us, due to missing context. In other words, how annoyed with you are your engineers on any given afternoon?Alex: [laugh]. Yeah. I would say that as a company builder now, if I may say that, is the team is probably the thing I'm the most proud of. They're just so talented, such good [unintelligible 00:22:47] of humans. And so—group of humans—I stopped coding about two years ago, roughly.So, the company is four-and-a-half years old, really the first two-and-a-half years old, the first one, two years, definitely, I was personally putting in, like, tons and tons of hours working on the code. It was a ton of fun. To me, one of the most rewarding technical projects I've ever had a chance to do. I still read pull requests, though, just so that when I have a conversation with a technical leader, I don't be, like, I have no clue how the transactions work. So, I still have to read the code, but I don't write any more code and my heart was a little broken when my dev prod team removed my write access to the GitHub repo.We got SOC2 compliance, and they're like, “You can't have access to being an admin on Google domains, and you're no longer able to write into main.” And so, I think as a—I don't know, maybe my identity—myself identity is that of a builder, and I think as long as I personally feel like I'm building, today, it's not code, but you know, is the company and [unintelligible 00:23:41] sort of culture, then I feel okay [laugh]. But yeah, I no longer write code. And the last story on that, is this—an engineer of ours, his name is [Stefan 00:23:51], he's like, “Hey, so Alex wrote this semaphore”—this was actually two days ago—and so they posted a video, and I commented, I was like, “Hey, this was the context of semaphore. I'm sorry for this bug I caused.” But yeah, at least I still remember some context for them.Corey: What's fun is watching things continue to outpace and outgrow you. I mean, one of the hard parts of building a company is the realization that every person you hire for a thing that's now getting off of your plate is better at that thing than you are. It's a constant experience of being humbled. And at some point, things wind up outpacing you to the point where, at least in my case, I've been on calls with customers and I explained how we did some things and how it worked and had to be corrected by my team of, “Well. That used to be true, however…” like, “Oh, dear Lord. I'm falling behind.” And that's always been a weird feeling for me.Alex: Totally. You know, it's the feeling of being—before I think I became a CEO, I was a highly comped  engineer and did a competent, to the extent that it allowed me to build this product. And then you start doing all of these things and you're incompetent, obviously, by definition because you haven't done those things and so there's like that discomfort [laugh]. But I have to get it done because no one else wants to do, whatever, like say, like, you know, rev ops or marketing or whatever.And then you find somebody who's great and you're like, oh my God, I was like, I was so poor tactically at doing this thing. And it's definitely humbling every day. And it's almost it's, like, gosh, you're just—this year was kind of this role where you're just, like, mediocre at, like, a whole lot of things as a company, but you're the only person that has to do the job because you have the context and you just have to go and do it. And so, it's definitely humbling. And in some ways, I'm learning, so for me today, it's still a lot of fun to learn.Corey: This is a little more in the weeds, I suppose, but I always love to ask people these questions. Because I used to be naive, which meant that I had hope and I saw a brighter future in technology. I now know that was all a lie. But I used to believe that out there was some company whose internal infrastructure for what they'd built was glorious and it would be amazing. And I knew I would never work there, nor what I want to, because when everything's running perfectly, all I can really do is mess that up; there's no way to win and a bunch of ways to lose.But I found that place doesn't exist. Every time I talk to someone about how they built the thing that they built and I ask them, “If you were starting over from scratch, what would you do differently?” The answer often distills down to, “Oh, everything.” Because it's an organically evolving system that oh, yeah, everything's easier the second time. At least you get to find new failure modes go in that way. When you look back at how you designed it originally, are there any missteps that you could have saved yourself a whole lot of grief by not making the first time?Alex: Gosh, so many things. But if I were to give Hollywood highlights on these things, something that [unintelligible 00:26:35] is, does well is exposing these high-level data types of, like, streams, and lists and maps and et cetera. And I was like, “Well, why couldn't streams offer this as a first-class citizen?” And we got some things well which I think would still do, like the whole [thread recorder 00:26:49] could—like, the fundamentals of the engine I will still do the same. But, you know, exposing new programming models earlier in the life of the product, I think would have allowed us to capture even more wildly different use cases.But now we kind of have this production engine, we have to support Fortune 2000, so you know, it's kind of like a very delicate evolution of the product. Definitely would have changed—I would have added, like, custom data types upfront, I would have pushed a little harder on I think WebAssembly than we did originally. Man, I could just go on for—like, [added detail 00:27:21], I would definitely have changed things. Like, I would have pressed on the first—on the version of the cloud that we talked about early on, that as the first deployment mode. If we go back through the stack of all of the products you had, it's funny, like, 11 products that are surfaced to the customers to, like, business lines, I would change fundamental things about just [laugh], you know, everything else. I think that's maybe the curse of the expert. Like, you know, you could always find improvements.Corey: Oh, always. I still look back at my career before starting this place when I was working in a bunch of finance companies, and—I'll never forget this; it was over a decade ago—we were building out our architecture in AWS, and doing a deal with a large finance company. And they said, “Cool, where's your data center?” And I said, “Oh, it's AWS.” And they said, “Ha ha ha ha. Where's your data center?”And that was oh, okay, great. Now, it feels like if that's their reaction, they have not kept pace with the times. It feels it is easier to go to a lot of very serious enterprises with very serious businesses and serious workload concerns attendant to those and not get laughed out of the room because you didn't wind up doing a multi-million dollar data center build out that, with an eye toward making it look as enterprise-y as possible.Alex: Yeah. Okay, so here's, I think, maybe something a little bit controversial. I think that's true. People are moving to the cloud, and I don't think that that idea, especially when we go when we talk to banks, is true. They're like, “Hey, I have this contract with one of the hybrid clouds.”—you know, it's usually with two of them, and then you're like—“This is my workload. I want to spend $70 million or $100 million. Who could give me the biggest discount?” And then you kind of shop it around.But what we are seeing is that effectively, the data transfer costs are so expensive and running this for so much this large volume of traffic is still so, so expensive, that there is an inverse [unintelligible 00:29:09] to host from some category of the workload where you don't have dynamism. Actually hosted in your data center is, like, a huge boom in terms of cost efficiencies for the companies, especially where we are and especially in finances—you mentioned that—if you're trying to trade and you have this, like, steady state line from nine to five, whatever, eight to four, whenever the markets open, it's actually relatively cost-efficient because you can measure hey, look, you know, the New York Stock Exchange is 1.5 gigabytes per second at market close. Like, I could provision my hardware to beat this. And like, it'll be that I don't need this dynamism that the cloud gives me.And so yeah, it's kind of fascinating that for us because we offered the self-hosted Redpanda which can adapt to super low latencies with kernel parameter tuning, and the cloud due to the tiered storage, we talked about S3 being [unintelligible 00:29:52] to, so it's been really fun to participate in deployments where we have both. And you couldn't—they couldn't look more different. I mean, it's almost looks like two companies.Corey: One last question before we wind up calling it an episode. I think I saw something fly by on Twitter a while back as I slowly returned to the platform—no, I'm not calling it X—something you're doing involving a scholarship. Can you tell me a bit more about that?Alex: Yeah. So, you know, I'm a Latino CEO, first generation in the States, and some of the things that I felt really frustrated with, growing up that, like, I feel fortunate because I got to [unintelligible 00:30:25] that is that, you know, people were just—that look like me are probably given some bullshit QA jobs, so like, you know, behemoth job, I think, for a bank. And so, I wanted to change that. And so, we give money and mentorship to people and we release all of the intellectual property. And so, we mentor someone—actually, anyone from underrepresented backgrounds—for three months.We give then, like, 1200 bucks a month—or 1500, I can't remember—mentorship from our top principal level engineers that have worked at Amazon and Google and Facebook and basically the world's top companies. And so, they meet with them one hour a week, we give them money, they could sit in the couch if they want to. No one has to [unintelligible 00:31:06]. And all we're trying to do is, like, “Hey, if you are part of this group, go and try to build something super hard.” [laugh].And often their minds, which is great, and they're like, “I want to build an OpenAI competitor in three months, and here's the week-by-week progress.” Or, “I want to build a new storage engine, new database in three months.” And that's the kind of people that we want to help, these like, super ambitious, that just hasn't had a chance to be mentored by some of the world's best engineers. And I just want to help them. Like, we—this is a non-scalable project. I meet with them once a week. I don't want to have a team of, like, ten people.Like, to me, I feel like their most valuable thing I could do is to give them my time and to help them mentor. I was like, “Hey, let's think about this problem. Let's decompose this. How do you think about this?” And then bring you the best engineers that I, you know, that work for—with me, and let me help you think about problems differently and give you some money.And we just don't care how you use the time or the money; we just want people to work on hard problems. So, it's active. It runs once a year, and if anyone is listening to this, if you want to send it to your friends, we'd love to have that application. It's for anyone in the world, too, as long as we can send the person a check [laugh]. You know, my head of finance is not going to walk to a Moneygram—which we have done in the past—but other than that, as long as you have a bank account that we can send the check to, you should be able to apply.Corey: That is a compelling offer, particularly in the current macro environment that we find ourselves faced in. We'll definitely put a link to that into the [show notes 00:32:32]. I really want to thank you for taking the time to, I guess, get me up to speed on what it is you're doing. If people want to learn more where's the best place for them to go?Alex: On Twitter, my handle is @emaxerrno, which stands for the largest error in the kernel. I felt like that was apt for my handle. So, that's one. Feel free to find me on the community Slack. There's a Slack button on the website redpanda.com on the top right. I'm always there if you want to DM me. Feel free to stop by. And yeah, thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.Corey: Likewise. I look forward to the next time. Alex Gallego, CEO and founder at Redpanda. 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 an insulting comment that I will almost certainly never read because they have not figured out how to get data from one place to another.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.

Today's episode of the Live Better Sell Better Podcast is a throwback to KD's conversation with Alex Schlinsky, Founder of Prospecting on Demand. As salespeople, it's natural to want to learn what goes on in the consumer's mind. Alex discusses why humans make certain decisions when it comes to buying and how we can take hold of that as sellers.HIGHLIGHT QUOTESSimplify your sales process because consumers have to choose between too many things already - Alex: "You can literally find anything to disrupt your day at any point. And so making decisions has become significantly more challenging in our day and age which is already a proven challenge for human beings because of the availability of so many options."You can find out more about Alex in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexschlinsky/Website: https://prospectingondemand.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/schlinskyLive Better. Sell Better. is sponsored by our proud partners:Rocket Reach | rocketreach.co

I felt so inspired to record this episode this morning as I created a new manifestation ritual for Quantum Queen Rising.  My energy shifted massively during and after this ritual, which is key to any manifestation practice and I knew I just HAD to share this with you. I also take you through WHY your manifestations are not working.....  Here's a hint: it shouldn't feel like yet another chore on your to do list.  Manifesting should feel easy & fun. Otherwise it defeats the purpose.  P L A Y is where it's all at.  I'd love to hear when you have done this ritual, how it feels and the magic that you will start to see in your life.  xx Alex  ========== You can find me over on instagram @alexandra.filipe   . Are you a fempreneur ready to break-through your biggest block that's holding you back from skyrocketing your success in business and life? Then head to my page HERE to book in your 90-min 1:1 Empowered Break-through Session.

INTRODUCTION: Alex Sanfilippo is the host of the top-rated podcast called Podcasting Made Simple. He is also the founder of PodPros.com, a software company focused specifically on the podcasting industry. Alex and his team have created popular services like PodMatch, a service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews, and PodcastSOP, a project management tool that helps podcasters keep up with their episode releases.  INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to): ·      The Significance Of Making It To Episode #50 In Podcasting·      The Awesomeness of PODMATCH!!!·      Leaving Corporate America To Become An Entrepreneur ·      Pitfalls To Avoid In The Podcasting Industry ·      The Investor Has The Upper Hand Always·      Get A MACBOOK – Just Do It·      Apps That Make Podcasting Simple·      Start Small And Build From There·      Why Do You Do What You Do?·      The Value Of The Still Small Voice CONNECT WITH ALEX: Website: https://www.PodPros.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsanfilippo/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlexJSanfilippoYouTube: https://bit.ly/3smLjefPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/podpros/_created/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ajsanfilippo/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Podpros.com  CONNECT WITH DE'VANNON: Website: https://www.SexDrugsAndJesus.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3daTqCMFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/SexDrugsAndJesus/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexdrugsandjesuspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TabooTopixLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devannonEmail: DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com  DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEs ·      Upwork: https://www.upwork.com·      FreeUp: https://freeup.net·      Disabled American Veterans (DAV): https://www.dav.org·      American Legion: https://www.legion.org INTERESTED IN PODCASTING OR BEING A GUEST?: ·      PodMatch is awesome! This application streamlines the process of finding guests for your show and also helps you find shows to be a guest on. The PodMatch Community is a part of this and that is where you can ask questions and get help from an entire network of people so that you save both money and time on your podcasting journey.https://podmatch.com/signup/devannon  TRANSCRIPT: [00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to! And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right at the end of the day. My name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world as we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your life.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Hello? Hello. Hello everyone. I am a self fucking excited to be releasing my 50th episode today. Thank you all so much for being with me on this journey. Many blessings be upon you today. I have with me, Alex, Sanfilippo the creator of pod match pod pros.com podcast SOP. He's the greatest, so many things, and he is largely responsible for me still being in podcasting today.This man is gorgeous. He has a gourd does mine and I am pleased to [00:01:00] introduce him to you all. So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about the significance of making it to episode 50 and podcasting the awesomeness of pod match some pitfalls to avoid in the podcasting industry, as well as why it's important to start small and not try to do everything all at once.And then build from there. Please listen close to this episode, Alex has a huge heart for humanity, and he's always coming up with ways to help others succeed in life. And I hope you succeed too. Yeah, well, I've got Alex Sanfilippo here with me today. I can't express how phenomenal the day is and how special it is because this is going to be my 50th episode. And we're going to talk about during this show, how big of a deal that is an Alex Sanfilippo is a huge reason why I've made it to episode 50 while I stayed in podcasting to begin with.And [00:02:00] so I really, really wanted to have him for episode 50, because these milestones, like the 50th episode, that 100, that was so in all of those things like that are very, very special. And you can't just have anybody on the show. Like it has to be somebody that means that something special insignificant.And so that's why I went with him, Alex, how are Alex: you? I'm great. I am just so thankful that you're having me for episode 50. Like I, I understand as a podcast for myself, like how big of a deal that is like, it's you, you didn't just wake up one day. You're like, oh, I need someone for my 50th episode. Like, you've been thinking about it probably since like episode 30 or 40, like who's going to be that 50 of episodes.I am just honored that you chose me to be here. Thank you so much for. De'Vannon: Oh, fuck. Yes. And so Alex created, okay. So his current website is pod pros.com. All of this information will go in the show notes. He's on all the social media and everything like that. Podcasting made simple as his podcast. I met Alex sometime last year when he sent [00:03:00] me an email to my sex drugs and Jesus account, introducing himself as the creator of an app called pod match.Pod matches like Tinder, but for podcast, guests and hosts. Now, usually I get bullshit in my inbox and I looked at his email and I was like, oh Lord, here we go. Another one of these motherfuckers trying to waste my time and shit. And I didn't open it at first because I had more pressing matters and shit.Then when I had time, I didn't delete it because I don't like to delete things until I at least purview purview them. And I looked at it and I was like, Hmm. This might be a little something here I might be able to work with. And then, so I messaged him back and then he had a very handsome photo in his email too.He's a very good lucky man, as you all can see. And and I was like, okay, he ain't bad looking. And he seems like he has a brain of there between those good looking ears. So then I responded back to him. Yes, there's more to, I need a man that I just looked good y'all he needs to have some common damn sense and some [00:04:00] sort of intelligence and some practical information I can work with, not just good looks.And so so he responded back to me personally, not his team with people that everything like that. I can't stand dealing with middlemen. And that comes back from my drug dealing days. But you know, he actually had useful information. His app is free, you know, you don't, you know, I didn't have to pay for it.And I was just starting and everything like that. And so I needed that option. And you know, and the rest is history. I ended up signing up for pod. And I'm still on pod match today and I'm still in business. So we're going to talk about pod match. Alex has a couple of different companies that he's dealing with it all have to do with podcasting.And we're gonna talk about podcasts, SOP, his podcast, lottery Southern come, a pod.style and the pod pros community in this show. That's the that's what's going to be coming up. [00:05:00] So tell us, Alex, what, what, what, what got you into this whole podcasting business? Alex: Well, first off I have to say thank you. I appreciate the fact that the one you think I'm good looking and two that you responded to me.Back back when I emailed you, I had just I'll share this real quick. I'll get into it, but I come from a background of, of corporates. I did 15 years in corporate. And if there's one thing that it taught me, it's how to write terrible emails. And thank you for the grace you had with me, because I look back at those emails now I'm like, what, why did I type that up?Like, it looked like a computer typed it up and like, just pick the words for it. It was so bad, but I was conditioned after 15 years of writing emails in corporate that I just didn't have to write a good email, but you had grace with me. You're one of the first people that give me a shot. And I'll say this Devon and writes the best testimonials for people.Like maybe it's just people you believe in. Like, but art, like if I'm having a down day, like when people were just being rude and mean to me, I'll go back and like, I actually have like pictures with your [00:06:00] testimonial on it and I'll go back and read that and be like, you know what, like we are doing something good here.Like forget this person who just wants to cuss me out for no reason. Right. Like they just are being mean. And I'll just remember people like Devon and that have helped me. So anyway, thank you for that. So to, to jump in, like I know I already mentioned the corporate thing, so I, I come from a background in corporate America.I was in the aerospace industry and I, I just hit a day where I was like, I think I'm ready to move on. Like, I want to do something. But I didn't know how to do anything else. So I was like, I don't want a nine to five job anymore, but I don't know how to do anything else. So I started a podcast to talk to people that had successfully left a nine to five job to become a full-time entrepreneur to kind of have like that financial time freedom.And because I wanted to learn and I couldn't afford the coaching necessarily. So I was like, it's like free coaching when you have a podcast, as you know, right. Like you get some of the best people, smart people in the world. You've had that tons of times on your show, haven't you, De'Vannon: you really do though.You learn, you learn so much of the huddles. Alex: Yeah. You really, I mean, you're like the number one student and all the listeners are the bonus. So [00:07:00] but anyway, so I started a show and just really started learning a lot about entrepreneurship. And while I was doing that, I knew I wanted to start a company of some sort, and I just fell in love with the podcasting space.Like in general, it's a real. Optimistic space full of like abundance mindset people, which is my tribe, right? Like we can all be kind and all have like a piece of the pie if you will. Right. And I just really respected that about the industry. So I decided I was like, you know what, I'm going to jump into this industry.And my show at that time did really well. So I started speaking on podcasting stages and doing some educational stuff, and I just started asking other podcasters what they're struggling with. And I defended, I can tenuously heard I'm struggling to find the right guests for my show, like the ideal guests for my show.And I just realized, you know what, there's probably a need to connect guests and hosts together. And to keep the story short, I just decided to build something that was really similar to a dating app, but for podcast guests and hosts. Now, granted, I'll say this I've been married longer than dating apps have been around.So I had no firsthand experience with it, but the one time I decided that's what I wanted to do. I went to a friend's house to hang out. [00:08:00] And I knew he was like being in the dating apps. Like he was recently single and just had all of them. So I'm like, Hey, can I just watch you for the next 30 minutes while we eat, play on your dating apps?And so he started like doing all these things and then you start getting concerned. Cause I started asking question, he goes, what's wrong, dude. Like, are you okay? Like you and Alicia good. I'm like, yeah, we're great. I'm like, I think I want to build one of these, but for something else. Anyway, long story short, we were able to develop just that.And it's worked really well to serve the industry. De'Vannon: Alicia is his beautiful wife and she helps them out there. She's a season like, you know, a really big part of you know, of, of all of that Alex does. Alex: Oh yeah. She's like the brain behind the operation in many ways. So De'Vannon: she, she definitely is. Now concerning.Those people who you say was cussing you out and everything. If you ever have that problem again, you let me know. I've got people who take care of them. Alex: Yes. I like it.De'Vannon: And then they won't ever bother you again. Trust me. [00:09:00]Alex: Yep. You know, you, you mentioned that if you don't mind the guy riff on that for a minute.So, so here's the thing. Like I I've trained me and my team. We're a small team, but I've trained people to remember one thing. Like, I mean, this is the sex drug and Jesus podcast. I'm gonna mention Jesus real quick. And like, for me as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus, I've always known that my job is to love people that aren't always lovable.And so I've just trained the team to think this way that Hey, hurting people, hurt people. So if somebody is hurting us is because they're hurting themselves and we might be the only love they get. So we're never going to retaliate in a menial. I might take you up on your offer, but you know, we were always going to respond in a loving way.Like we're not gonna go over the top of someone's just overall rude, like said something terrible. We're just gonna ignore it and let it go. But in general, if someone's like just being harsh rubric and responding in a really loving way, not necessarily to win them over, to make them a customer the other day, that might be the only nice person to interact with.So for us, we always remember that hurting people hurt people. And our job as a company is to love people. Like first and foremost, we are a [00:10:00] human to human business. So we're not like B2B or B to C. We call ourselves human to human. So H to H and our job is just to be the light for some people in the world, whether they become customers of ours are members of ours or not.Right. And that day that's, what's important for us to do that. Mentality is not always easy to keep. That's why we actually have on our slack channel, a little channel called happy news, and people will just go back through and post nice things people have said about us and your name comes up a lot. So I'm always just thankful to see your name come from.Like, that's somebody who actually like, if I need to jump on a call and I need them to take care of. If I needed somebody to take care of this, this mean guy, right? Like demanding is my, my, my contact. So I'm good to go, but I appreciate you. Thank you. De'Vannon: Yeah, I'll say the, yeah. Or as, as the everything that's stated in the Hebrew Bible each and every time we do to D though, to do good, that there's evil presence.And so these are the heart of what you're doing is to help, to elevate people. So if we're going to get spiritual about it and look at it, even metaphysically, you know, you're driving positive energy, negative negativity, doesn't want to see you prevail. [00:11:00] And so people who have been hurt when you say hurting people, hurt people, they are vulnerable more vulnerable to negativity than people who abide in a, at a more constant state of positivity.And so therefore negativity wants to attack you. It can do so through people who are catering to their pain rather than to their positive. And so you're doing the right thing by overcoming that with more positivity as the Hebrew Bible also says, we overcome that evil with good. And so so speaking of foolishness though, this sort of show here that, that, that I'm doing, it's kind of like a step away from the main, my main, you know, my main vein in a way, but I don't care because I wanted to do it because of the signal.Of the, you know, of who you are and why the show was here. So I want to talk about the issues that I had when I started podcasting and [00:12:00] everything like that. And that's going to get down into more of the the dark side, the taboo side of things, which is the main vein of the show. So this isn't really like a businessy podcast.We're still gonna talk some shit y'all Alex: please. I hope so. By the way, this is the first time in like probably almost a year that I've come on a podcast. It's not specifically about podcasting. So I am down for anything which I know your show is all about. So I am here to get into whatever we want to, but honored to go whatever direction you want.But thanks again for having me. De'Vannon: Absolutely. Thank you for, for coming. I would like when I met you, I was like, I gotta help you. He wants to come on my show. I know this is really, really wild and not conservative.So I was writing my book, sex drugs, and Jesus, my memoir, and then someone told me, Hey, it's a good idea to start a podcast. You know, to have basically a cross promotion thing and already built an audience and everything. And I'm like, oh, that's a good idea. The same person also went about the business of introducing me to their podcasting team that was helping them.[00:13:00] And so, so I hired them and everything for a ridiculous amount of money. When I, when I met you, I think I was paying about like 1500 a month. Okay. So they were charging me like say $150 or $200 per person just to have someone come on my show. Now these are just recycled people that this other guy who already knew who had already been on his show.So all they were doing were sending an email and saying, Hey, will you come on this new podcast that we are starting? And we have something to do with, so that's, what's called hustling. This is the danger of dealing with middlemen and stuff like that, because they're going to charge you a lot of money and stuff like that.And so now I'm paying $150 a week for show notes. You know, and, and things like that. And so basically 450 to $600 per episode, just to get it created. And this is a large reason why people don't either get into podcasting or stay in it because it looks more expensive than it has to be. I fell into the same trap myself.[00:14:00] So I had pause the creation of it because I was like, this is incredibly expensive. I don't really like the energy of dealing with these people. I feel like I'm being used and hustled and taken advantage of, there's got to be a simpler way. I didn't know what way when I searched the Google and everything like that, I would find these companies doing similar things as them, Hey, come pay us this exorbitant amount of money.And we're going to get you on these big shows and everything like that. No guarantees the one who's going to benefit you or not. But you know, it was that same thing. And then you messaged me and I was like, okay, I can do it for free or this like $39 a month. If you want the upgraded version of hot and match, which I went with because that's a hell of $39 a month is a lot cheaper than 1500.It's Alex: good math De'Vannon: right there. So right. And so. I want you to speak to me, Alex, about some of the bullshit that people have come to you, crying, groveling and crying. Just like I did licking their [00:15:00]wounds saying, please help me. I don't want to quit podcasting. What helped me? What, what, what sort of shit have you seen people been going through Alex: all kinds of things.I mean, that's a perfect example of something that's very common and what happens. I just called the people that are those hustlers lever. We want to call them. They're like the gurus of the industry and maybe guru shouldn't be a bad word, but my head, if someone tells me they're podcasting guru, I'm going to be like, that's a red flag.Like, what does that mean? You know, like, why are you a guru? And like, what are you teaching other people to do? It's, it's just, it's so common. And it all starts from taking advantage of somebody who has a passion and interest, something they're trying to do. Like your show is extremely purposeful. Okay.Sex drugs. And Jesus is like a purpose-driven show. Like you have a plan for it, you know where it's going. Maybe it started as a hobby and maybe it still is a hobby, whatever you want to call it. But the, of the day it is, it's something that actually adds value to people's lives. And you have a specific focus on it.And those are the people that get taken advantage of because somebody knows, you know what? This person's passionate. They want to do [00:16:00] this. They're willing to invest. I'm going to charge them way too much. And I don't like to ever talk bad about anybody, but it, it doesn't have to be that way in podcasting.It's just people taking advantage of somebody who wants to, who wants to explore that passion. And that it's, it's something that's very common. If you use Google to this day, you're still most likely going to find those types of people, but there are alternatives. Thankfully, there, there are other ways around it.You don't have to spend an arm and a leg to do it at the end of the day. Maybe if you're in a place financially where makes sense and you just don't want to touch anything, right? You want to wash your hands up at salmon record. I'm not gonna touch anything else ever. You could go for it. That would be fun if it keeps the main thing, the main thing while for, but then the day, most of us are not in.I'm not in that boat. Most people aren't right. They just doesn't make sense. So, I mean, I've seen all kinds of things like this happen and people fall into the trap of this is the only route. So I think the first thing I really want to get in people's heads that are listening is that if you have a passion or something you want to do with the podcast, you do not have to go that route of spending a ton of money.There are alternatives, and you can work your way up to things. If you're saying eventually I want to outsource this or do [00:17:00] that, but you can start everything on your own with just, I don't know the exact dollar amount, but probably less than $50 a month. You could have, you could be doing really well at that dollar amount De'Vannon: right now.And I stayed with podcasting because along I started. Because of the reasons that they told me like, Hey, this would be a good compliment of being an author, but I stayed with it because in the process of doing it, I realized that this is basically like a every show is like a message preached. Every show is a testimony, if you will, but this is better than just standing up and testifying on a Sunday morning and charity hallelujah, or preaching a message because it's recorded and it'll outlive me.So even if somebody stops the podcast, though, that those shows are main, you know, out there and they can always be accessed until the end of time. And so have, have, after having gone through everything, I went through being homeless and, you know, getting HIV and everything like that. And living on the streets and being a drug dealer.And I started kind of tip telling in and out of churches. Again, it never really [00:18:00] felt right or came to me to like stand up and speak about the deliverance that God had given me. The words never came. I considered maybe was there something wrong with me or something like that, but it just. God is preferred platform for me, I think podcasting was because I get to tell it again and again and again, from different angles all the time.And then people can access it at their leisure, which is better than just speaking to one congregation. And so I want to remind people though, that when you have the money to spend on things and stuff like that, and these people are trying to corral you that you, the investor, you have the upper hand always.And it's very, very interesting how, when those of us who have some expendable income to spend on something are spending it, but the, the team, the assistance, or whatever, try to, there's almost like they have a way of seizing this control over us, even though we're the ones with the money. So have you, have you ever seen that sort of mindfuck before?Alex: Yeah. You know, before [00:19:00] I answer that I got to go back to something cause your mom, this show being like, it's an extension of you. This is how you can leave a legacy. I'm about halfway through episode 39 with branch and he talked about guilt combination. Like being so hard on yourself, like, and how to stop doing that.It's easily. One of the most profound, powerful podcast episodes I've ever heard, and I'm not even finished with it yet. I encourage everybody. Who's hearing this. It has not listened episode number 30, nine of sex, drugs, and sex drugs, and Jesus go back and listen to that episode. It is again profound. So what you're doing here is going to leave a legacy.Like I believe people will be listening to that episode alone for forever, right? Like that's going to be something can always go back and really help people a lot. And going back into what you're talking about now, like, yeah, even if you have, if you have the money, like you're saying, it's good wisdom, you do have control.When I got started, I didn't necessarily have a lot of money, but I thought that I had to use, I start off with somebody to edit. Everything I read was the editing is almost impossible, which isn't the case, but everyone thing was like, Hey, you're not gonna be able to edit yourself to me too much. And I [00:20:00] went with the most recommended one I could find they were charging me, like shot, just shy of $200 per episode.I didn't have that money back then. And I felt like I was trapped because they were like, Hey, you need to buy this in sets of 10, because you're going to save X amount instead of just buying one a time. And then the next time they're like, Hey, you should buy 30 because your show is doing well, you need to keep it going.And I felt like I was, I was like, okay, this is a money pit, but I know it's helping people, but I'm not making any money yet. Like, what do I do? Do I just outpace it until eventually I can pay for it? Like, what do I have to do here? And that was the first time I started talking to other podcasters. This was early in my journey.This is like around the time of the launch of my show. And when I started talking to their podcasters, I felt empowered because they're people like, oh, well, no, you could do it yourself here. I'll, I'll teach you. Like, let's do like a quick zoom and I'll show you like how I edit really. And it wasn't until I got around the community of people that I started feeling like I could get freedom from the people trying to charge me a lot of money to do podcasting.And again, if you do have the money and you just say, I don't want to touch it fine, you can. But then the day, I think [00:21:00] there's something to be said for someone who learns how it works. Anyway, for me, like I don't do all of podcasting anymore. Like I'm not the only guy in my team. There's multiple people now that I've actually hired that I'm getting a good deal on, but I know how every piece of the puzzle works.So when one of them says, I'm struggling to keep up. I'm not like, wow, you lose our cable. If you're not keeping up, like, what's wrong with you? I'm not saying that because I can go back and be like, you know what? I remember how much work that was. So I can say, how can I support that? Do you want me to come in and help edit a little bit more?Do we need another team member? Like what do we need to do to improve that? So I think there's something to be said for us, sitting back, taking a little bit extra time and learning all the elements of podcasting, just like anything else in life. When you know it all, you don't necessarily need to do it, but you have at least empathy towards someone else who might be doing something that you previously didn't under.De'Vannon: You better preach it on a Tuesday afternoon. And so like that for a second, you're going to use it. I use my Mac book, which I tried this doing this on like on a windows computer. Don't you need to get a Mac book once you go Mac it's true. I was reluctant, oh my God. This thing is like an electrical [00:22:00] orgasm.Every is perfect about this fucking thing. Fuck PC. You need an Mac baby, honey. And they Alex: better be paying you. That's all going to say they better be paying.De'Vannon: They will, when they damn it, they will. Alex: I believe it. De'Vannon: And so. That's it just that I use an app called transistor to distribute it. So if you're wondering, how do you get your show on all of these 50 million? Really literally about 20 different podcasting platforms is just put on one place and it's distributed automatically is really just that simple.And then Alex told me about the script, which is how I learned how to edit it myself, edit each show myself rather than paying. I think it was $200 per show for editing. I think the script might be like $10 a month. I do the annual thing and I think transistor might be like 10 or 20 a month. So like you said, it's true.You need less than $50 to [00:23:00] have all the, all the, all the things to do a show. You get yourself a good mic. That camera. Or you could start with just the Mac book, Mike and camera is, you know, not necessarily the best, but it's better than than nothing. And I don't want people to get obsessed with feeling like you have to have the top of the line, everything and all of these sound mixing boards.I know, I know, I know people who Who feel the need to do that? Like, like when they start, they go, okay, let me go on Amazon or somewhere and get this whole podcast production, kit and everything like that. And I know so many people who do that. What do you have to say about like starting equipment?Alex: You know, start with what you have.You're talking about a Mac. If you have like a brand new Mac book, the built-in camera and Mike is actually pretty good. Like, no one's ever gonna be like, oh, what's that terrible sound? Now don't like, use your, your cell phone. You know, like don't even, even an iPhone, isn't gonna be near as good as the actual Mac book, like start with what you have.And here's like, my I'll dive in a little bit more, but here's what I'll say [00:24:00] overall about this. People will forgive you for the quality of like the sound and the production. They won't give, forgive you for the lack of quality of content. So again, the sound and all the production doesn't have to be the best, but the content itself.Isn't good. And then one can forgive you. Now, what I mean by that is you could have the most expensive mic on the planet. You could spend 50 grand on your setup. If what you're saying, isn't good. No one cares about the other side of it, right? So at the end of the day, you need to try like putting a little bit effort, of course, like do your best to, to soundproof a little bit or whatever you do, but don't go over the top with it, focus on having really good content and over time things can improve.I've got a shirt M V seven. I'm not great with the tech stuff. MV seven is what it's called. I think I paid $220 for this mic. And this is like my forever mic. I'll use this one for as long as I podcasts before this, I had a mic that was about $80. Wasn't great. But here's the thing that got me through my first, like 80 or 90 episodes.No problem. And, and it was great. It worked, worked really good. So at the end of the day, really focus again on the quality of the [00:25:00] content. And don't go over the top on the production. I think that a lot of us defendant, we get nervous about the idea of starting a show. So we just fully engrave ourselves in all the things, right?Like, oh, I need to like learn the best sound I need to buy this mic. I need to test out of. What I challenge you to do is just press the record button and get started. I'll tell you who really, really spoke this to me in a big way with Jack, actually, Seth Goden. He and I had a conversation at one point, and he's like a marketing, like genius.The guy's brilliant. And he told me, he's like, Hey Alex, all right, let's imagine that you're a lifeguard. You're brand new. It's your first day on the job. You're out there by the water. And you see somebody on the ocean. Who's drowning now because you're new and not experienced. You see that person drowning is your reaction to go find a really experienced lifeguard and say, hold on.I know someone would be really good at saving this person. Let me go run back to the lifeguard station and find them, or you just going to jump in the water, not think about it as sloppy as it is, do your best to save that person. Every single time. Everybody who is in that scenario is going to jump in the water and do their best to save that person no matter how pretty or ugly it ends up looking.That's just our [00:26:00] instinct. And I think that with content creation, we have to remember that what we're doing is serving the world, but it doesn't serve the world. If you don't hit the record button again, you might not have all the best gear. You might not have everything that you feel that you need to be super successful with it.When you don't hit publish when you don't hit record, it's not serving anybody. So start off by serving people and then focus on continuous improvement over time. And eventually you might sound really good and get really great at it. But today, do your best to serve people where you're at. That's my little rant right there, rant De'Vannon: on.And so it just like with all things, we get better over time, you don't start anything as an expert or as a fully proficient that would Rob us of the of the fulfillment that comes when we grow. If we just, we're just perfect at everything from day one, you know, it doesn't work like that. And yeah, I did that on the PC, but like Alex was saying, we had to start somewhere.Look, you can do it if you have a PC, but just what mine's, the bitch was slow. And it took like 50 minutes to do shit on my Mac book. It takes like two [00:27:00] minutes. So it just really pressured me to create it more stress. But if you have a PC, then baby, you start with the PC, just like I did. And when you can afford to.Upgrade to the Mac, or you can get you an apple card and then you can get just finance the ship interest free on your apple card. And in terms of like the sound quality and yeah, I'm almost like my third mic too. You know, I think we all do that, you know, got that fucking mic, fallen out the closet, you know, from when we upgrade and shit.So the script that, that, that app that you recommended to me, they have two features on there that will really take away. Most of your worries. They're really all of your worries when it comes to how you're going to sound. There is a button that you can click to enhance your recordings. And so it'll take your voice and pull it forward.Like the voice of yours and your guests, and really clean it up. It eliminates background noise. Is it like the damn dogs that get out when you just knew you had them put up and shit like that? And the, in my [00:28:00] case, the birds and the pages and shit that fly by the window. Cause I live next to a nature Oasis, basically in my backyard.And then there's another button on there. You can click, that'll get rid of filler words. And by filler words, I mean like oohs and OMS and stuff like that, which annoys, some people doesn't really bother me. But just with like with one flip of the switch, you can just get rid of them all. So this shit is not complicated to do.We record these meetings and zoom. Some people use other apps. I like zoom. They're simple. They've been around a long time. They're quick, concise until. And then once you press the record button, once it's, once it's over, it will convert it to an MP3 MP4 or whatever the damn audio file is. And then that's what you put into the script.And in the script, we'll transcribe, it it'll create a transcript for you, which you can in turn use for your show notes for your search engine optimization and all of it later on. So it's a bit of a learning curve. It's not as hard as you might think. But it's worth, it was worth [00:29:00] me learning to save four or $500 a month to do so don't let people hustle.You try to act like this shit is complicated because they're using the same damn programs that we're telling you right now and charging you an arm and a Dick for it. And then try to act like they're doing something special. No, but they do in the same damn thing. Alex: You know, w one more piece of advice I like to give to people is if you're listening to this show, like you're, you're hearing, you've been.The sex drugs and Jesus for a long time. Right. And Devon, and speaking like your language, like I want to start a podcast, email demand and say, I've got a hundred dollars with your name on it. If you'll just give me 30 minutes of your time. Cause that would be so valuable. I think that if someone spent 30 minutes with you now, knowing what you know about podcasting, you could probably save them thousands of dollars just by the little bit of knowledge that you're sharing here, but going a little bit more in depth, showing somebody how to record for 30 minutes.I bet spend that a hundred dollars would again, save somebody hundreds of hours and probably thousands of dollars. I mean, you'd probably agree, right? If day [00:30:00] one, you're getting ready to start. If someone could have been like, Hey, hold on, let me show you this. That would have saved you a lot. I'm imagining, right.De'Vannon: Oh sure. I mean, I have a personal guide to go. Here's transistor. Here's the script and everything like that. I mean, knowledge is power. Yeah. And as they say it isn't said as the Hebrew Bible, you know, my people perish for a lack of knowledge, you know, we, we literally discharge ourselves for not doing research.So it's a good thing to be passionate, but then the Hebrew Bible also tells us that knowledge zeal without knowledge is destructive to, or it's not good. I don't know if it's destructive, but it's not good to have zeal without knowledge. It's basically, I want to get up and go do shit, but I don't want to take time to study about what the fuck I want to go do.Sometimes Alex: that's the problem with the world in it. De'Vannon: And so, oh, I hear a Republican echo what you just said. And Alex: I, oh, no, I like it. I like to sit in the middle instead of politics. So I hope I didn't sound too much like that. [00:31:00]De'Vannon: Oh, this is how this is just me because of the things going on inside of me and how I feel about them.So whenever somebody says something about like people who are extreme for seemingly no logical reason at all, they're the first things that come to my mind because Alice is not political. I became political a couple of years ago, so I always say, fuck Republicans. And I always say, I wish Democrats would grow a pair of balls and do more with the power that they have.So it sounds like Alex: you're right in the middle with me then. Sounds exactly like where I sit. De'Vannon: Oh, well that's the middle then there was this Malcolm in the middle of this shit. That's an old show. Y'all.You mentioned earlier about people like being passionate about starting their podcast, you made the analogy of the lifeguard and everything. And so, so y'all when you're thinking about starting a podcast, let's not get caught up in what seems like the glitz and the glam of it all. Hey, I've got to show, [00:32:00] you know, it looks like people are making a whole lot of money.You're going to be the next fucking, I guess if you would want to be someone like Joe Rogan or, or, you know, whoever hell is on serious or whatever the case may be, you know, making good bajillions of dollars and everything like that. Okay. So the way you got to go about this is like you, you got to pray about it, meditate, whoever, whatever deity you worship, or if you don't do any of that, get in your head, why you want to do it for reasons other than fame.And then if one day you have. To reach the level of, you know, how a shore, you know, or someone like huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, all the better. But if that doesn't happen, then you're totally happy and satisfied anyway. So why, and this is a big thing with you, Alex, you always challenged, you know, people, you know, why, what's the, why?What's the why? Why are you here? Why are you doing this? I always say, I need you to not even know why I feel the way I feel, why I believe what I believe, why am I doing what I'm doing? So if you're going to start a [00:33:00] podcast and there's all kinds of podcasts from people talking about gossip, the clothes, the shoes, the titties, the sex to music, to business, so much business.There's a good variety, but why do you want to do it? And what, what unique thing do you have to say? Are you just trying to, and like, and there's nothing wrong with looking into it, some stuff we start and we don't finish it. And there's no shame in that because we're all on a journey. So anything more you would care to say about.About purpose. Alex: Yeah. I think that this is, like you said, this is where I always tell people to start, because what I find is people burn out too quick because they didn't sit back and think about their why. And like you're saying, people go to the, the, the wanderings of the world, like, that's one of the big networks.The MPRs is the cereal that the Joe Rogan's right? Like these, these big names and podcasts and say, I want to do that, but you and I know this, like no one ever got famous because they wanted to be famous. Right? Like there has to be something that you do. And it wasn't usually [00:34:00] most of the time I'd say it wasn't their initial tent.They started something because they cared. They had a why behind why they were doing it the first place. And I find that people start instead was saying, I'm gonna get rich. I'm gonna get famous. I'm gonna quit my job. When that doesn't happen, they quit really. Like, they just stopped way too soon. But if, instead you say, you know what I really care about, there's always dogs walking by my window.I don't know why, but I have like a busy street and there's like people with their dogs, like all the time, I care about dog walking. So we use that as an example. Right. And how to get help your dog be more appropriate when you're walking them. So they don't go off to every squirrel and bark at every other dog.Right. Like if you're passionate about that and you have like a real, why behind that matter to you about how, like you used to be embarrassed about taking your dog out for a walk. Cause it was so misbehaved, right? Like if you had that, why behind it? And that's why you decided to do this, you might do really well in that niche, but you've got to sit down and decide, okay, why am I going to do this?I want to help educate other people, but they don't have to be embarrassed about their dog. Right. And I, I don't have a dog. So this is probably a terrible example. But you get the idea. I'm saying you pick that little focus and say, this is who I'm going to speak to. [00:35:00] I'm doing it because I care because I want to help someone else not struggle.The way that I did when you start with that, it makes it a lot easier for you to keep on going when things get. Cause defendant, you talking about like doing the editing and stuff like that. And yeah, we found some, like, you have found a really simple way to do this and your show sounds really good. So anyone could duplicate that, right?Like you could teach someone to do that. And like I said, probably 30 minutes, someone would be set up to win in podcasting, but in the day you still have to sit and do the work at some point when those times get tough and you have that strong, why you can say, you know what, I'm doing this for my neighbor.They really need to hear this episode. I've got to get this out. But if you're saying I'm not getting any richer, I'm not getting more famous. Why am I even wasting my time? You're going to stop too soon. And now the flip side is something that you mentioned as well, which is some people they, they just are trying it out there.Their friend does it. And they're like, oh, I'm gonna try doing. There is no harm in that. If you do three episodes inside, it's your least favorite thing on the planet. At least you can say you tried it so you don't need to go through all this, unless you feel that there's a real reason for it. If you're just exploring a passion or a potential passion or hobby, go for it.There's no reason to stay in it. If it's just not right for you, don't feel like you have to. There's [00:36:00] plenty of other mediums. But if you are getting into this for a specific reason and you know that there is some power behind it, start with that. Why really determine it. Sit down. I even talk about writing it out, write it out.Think about who is me listening, and then start going for it from there. De'Vannon: Child. See, that's why I had to have you on my show. You have a clear mind, you have, you're just teaming and overflowing with posse own. Then all the things that makes people want to get up and do shit. You're like a natural born leader.Like, like, like Barack Obama, you know, the main reason why white people, not all white people, but like a lot of them, a lot of Republicans really hate him is because he has that essence, that flare, that thing, you can't go to school for. Nothing wrong with going to leadership schools and all of that. You know, people got their different ways of some people are just born with that thing that makes people want to get behind them and their delivery when [00:37:00] they're talking.And speaking is as though they've done it ever since eternity was spawn into motion that you have that same spirit about Alex: you. Thank you. That totally just made my day. I could go ahead and we can hang up now and I'm good to go, actually, you know, I always say this, I, when, when Obama was leaving office after a second term, I always so president Obama was like on his way out.I always say no matter who's president for the rest of my life, they're never going to be that polished. Like, there's just no way, like, we're all gonna have to get used to a lower standard of like just the ability to speak. Cause everyone else talks. And I'm like, what are they trying to say? Like spit it out, man.You know? Like, but so yeah, I mean, president Obama set a standard from that regard. I, I appreciate you even putting me in that category. Like I said, just made my day. Thank you for that. De'Vannon: You know, only speaks the truth. Alex: I know it, you know, actually that's one thing that I just, I have to say this, I actually reminded myself, I put it down on a piece of paper cause earlier.So for me being a Christian, like I don't mean over spiritualize things, but I was going to, I prayed about this interview today, knowing it was coming up, prayed for you as well. And I felt like God reminded me of like [00:38:00] your, your genius, if you will, you've got a sense of boldness and realness that is just so rare in the world.And I believe that that's why you're going to succeed so much in the world. Like you're already succeeding, but I just believe that it's just gonna continue to multiply and God's going to bless the fact that you're again bold and you're real. Those just aren't things anymore. Like in today's world, unfortunately not like it used to be at least.And you have that rare gift and I just really respect that from you. And, and so I just wanted to say thank you for that. I had to say some time during this interview. De'Vannon: Thank you. I appreciate your kind words. I want you to remind me though, cause I seem to remember my research. If you like in the beginnings of pod match, Like maybe you were doing yard work or something like that.And you had like an epiphany or like something, some sort of knowledge came to you in a, in a it's like you went back inside and you started writing. Alex: Oh yeah, I definitely wasn't doing yard work. I live in a condo because I hate yard work so much. So you De'Vannon: were doing something else that you stopped Alex: it?[00:39:00] Yeah, I was actually working out, so it was right at the beginning of COVID and I was doing like a kettlebell workout. Cause I only had a few things at home at that point. Like I had to buy equipment, but I had like a kettlebell. So I was like swinging a kettlebell, like thinking about this idea and literally, I can't even explain it the van and like, it just like, it hit me at one.I've got not the weight, but I mean like the the idea hit me. I put down the weight, I ran inside to some whiteboards and I have three whiteboards behind, like where I'm at right now behind like this screen here. And I just mapped the whole thing out. Like it just hit me in an, in a moment. Can't really.It just came out of nowhere. Like again, when I'm working out, I'm not usually thinking of business, but it just, it really hit me in that moment. And you talking about pod match? Oh, so sorry. Yeah. Pod match specifically. Cause I came back from a conference I spoke at right before the world shut down like a week before the world shut down, which a 2000 person conference.It was the first week of March, 2020. And that's where people continuously were telling me I'm having trouble finding guests for my show. And it was interesting that same conference there's people there that were like, Hey, I just released this book. Do you know any podcasts about this? I [00:40:00] could talk to you.And I was actually saying, oh, I just talked to that person, come over here. Let me introduce you real quick. So it's making those connections there and I'm not always the smartest guy in the world. I came home, not knowing what to do with that idea. And then when I was working, I was when that, when that came forth.So yeah, the idea for pod match came from during that workout is when it just really was like, this is what I've got to do. And it came to like a moment, you De'Vannon: know, that that was a moment of divinity. And this is the sort of thing that comes to people who call upon the Lord who call up on Who call upon the, you know, power is greater than a power greater than themselves, because there's been several times in my life in the Hebrew Bible and always referred to the Bible as the Hebrew Bible, because I always like to pay tribute and homage to the middle east from where the Bible really Alex: comes from.And I, but my mom is Hebrew. So I appreciate that. Do you speakDe'Vannon: the language? Alex: No, I take fully after my dad. Who's Italian. Sorry. [00:41:00]De'Vannon: He ruined Italian. Ain't a bad mix. Alex: Oh, no, not at all. I'm De'Vannon: happy. Pretty good. You know, the Hebrew Bible speaks to us about a still small voice. There was a prophet in, something was going on and it was like, you know, there was a fire and a wind, but God wasn't in the fire and the wind, but then they know here it comes a still a still small voice when I Gosh, I have so many examples.Let me see. What's a good one. And epiphany like that came when I was trying to get the name for my massage business, I was at a wine party and I didn't know what to name it. A friend looked up like in a moment, it's like, it just hit her from nowhere. And she was like, you need to find something has to do with your third eye.And then that's how I found the Swahili word for vision, which means my own. Oh. And my massage business was my own a massage and wellness. When I was coming off of being homeless and I was a janitor, I had walked off of the [00:42:00] gym to job as they pissed me off. And I was trying to figure out what to do. I was setting steals.And when it came to me to look up food delivery jobs, and I had like three felonies, I still have those felonies on my record and I couldn't get a job anywhere. And I thought about that and I ended up being able to get hired that way. It's it's, didn't like these quiet moments in a workout is a quiet time and meditation as a form of active meditation to me.Yes. You know, I feel like the Lord can speak to us because our minds are not as busy as they usually are. And so the Lord can slip an idea into our conscious, you know, and then we can immediately go and do something about it. So I was very intrigued when I read that, wherever it is that I've, that I saw that ad.And I was like, Hmm, it looks like the spirit spoke to Alex in this moment. And then re energized his soul to neatly go and do it because when God puts something in you, he also gives you the [00:43:00]energy to go about the business of getting it done. And then when other people are looking at you thinking, well, how is he doing that?And how is he keeping it all together? It looks exhausting because it's not their calling, you know what, you're yours. And so this work that you're doing is not just a natural work, but it's a spiritual. And you see not all forms of ministry have to do with preaching from a pulpit or be, or have to do with a church.When I was going to go be a recruiter in the air force, my spiritual leader, evangelists, Nelson who was a prophetess and her own, you know, in a, in a highly clever woman, you know, a true prophet is I don't, it's very hard to find people like that anymore, you know, and she was like, you know, that's ministry that you're going to go do.And I was like, recruiting, you know, what does that have to do with ministry and everything like that. But anything that you're doing to enhance somebody's livelihood is true religion. That is mission work that is outreach, and it can come in any kind of form. I don't give a shit if it's a Tik TOK channel, you know, so you don't have to go to church to do the lowers the work.[00:44:00]And so I just want it to really drive home the divinity that surrounds the brands that you've created and how divine the nature is of what you're doing at its core. Alex: Yeah, thank you for that. You know, you talking about this, like that still small voice. That's always been so true for me. And whenever someone in my life who I know who happens to also be a believer in Jesus when like, oh, I keep on asking God about this.He's just not answering. I always say, have you taken any time to listen? And the answer is always, no, not really. I'm like, well, if it's a still small voice and you're just, God help God, God, God, God, God. Like, you're not really given any time to hear anything. And in my life, that was not, that was not a normal moment for me to have like, yes, like you're saying like for me, I wasn't like listening to loud music.I usually don't listen to music while I work out. So it was quiet. So it is like somewhat therapeutic, but I didn't expect God to speak to me in that moment. I think he just needed my attention and you're right. And since then, I've learned to make intentional time just to sit down and be [00:45:00] quiet. Some people call it meditation.It's just like, you're, you're not letting your mind actively just run, just sitting down and like being present in that moment, being still. And any other idea of had is coming those moments. And people who maybe aren't spiritual at all right. Aren't into that stuff. This might sound totally crazy, but I can not really take full credit for any of my ideas now execution.I can, because at the end of the day, an idea, no matter where it comes from, it doesn't really matter if you'll don't do anything with it. So I've always been able to, to perform and execute at a high level, but I really give God the credit for the ideas that I've had. And that, that is my ministry. Like church, the churches here, where, where I live, they all shut down.When COVID happened, there was a year and a half where that wasn't even an option anymore. And so this just became my ministry. I was used to serving at church, like I was used to greeting at the door and picking up the trash. Like, those are the things I love to help do or parked cars, whatever it is. But then it just became, you know what, this is my ministry.This is what I have. And I felt like God spoke it to me. And I just have done my best to steward it really well. And I'm glad that you brought it [00:46:00] up that way. I've never gotten to share it quite like that before. De'Vannon: Hallelujah, tabernacle and praise it's it's. It's a good thing to always take the time to invite God into whatever it is that you're doing and to get quiet and listen.And just because you don't feel like you hear anything. And when we were talking about God speaking, y'all, we're not necessarily talking about an audible voice, although it's not like he can't do that as like you just kind of know, and you also understand that it's it comes with a zest of energy and inspiration.That is a part from how you usually are. And so when we say God is speaking or something like that, that's really generally what we mean. And so, so you create a pod match to bridge people, hosts and guests. How many people are on pod match now Alex: there at time of recording this there's about 27,000 people using it, De'Vannon: 27,000 [00:47:00] people.So. And then we said that the average to speak to us about the averages of about how many episodes, someone records before they quit the average in the Alex: industry. Yeah. So people who quit, unfortunately, it's called pod fade. It's like been used forever. You've heard pod fade. It's seven episodes is like the magic number that people would just like, I'm done forget this.Like that's where that people just tend to stop. But I decided to look past that. So let's imagine you get past the seven episodes, where do people stop the amount of people that make it to one year after passing the seven year mark? So I think it's something like 90% or 95% of people stop at seven episodes.So the 5% that keep on going 90% of them stop that before the end of one year. So, you know, granted one episode per week, let's just say 50. Like only a very small fraction are making it to that. Like, I don't know the exact number, cause I haven't been able to drill down to the data that much. Cause it's hard to really get access to, but it's, it's almost, nobody makes it to 50 episodes.Like that [00:48:00] is an extremely rare thing. And it's a huge achievement because it basically means if, Hey, if you're doing one episode a year or a day or a week after one year, you've got about 50, 52 episodes. Right. And so yeah, that's where people are really stopping it. It goes back to them and we said they don't have a strong wide and maybe they just want to test it and that's fine.Or they spent all their money trying to get those first few episodes produce and other out of, out of money. Cause they thought they had to go spend it all. Those are some of the most, those are the main reasons that was really hard. That's why people stop it at that really low number. De'Vannon: So. I want to dig deeper into pod match.So pod match, it's very, it's a very organized website. Another issue that I had when I had my team of assistant or whatever, my production team, fuckingfucking everything up and call it, creating stress on my life where they didn't need to be. So they booked this person. Now they got a. If I want to ask this person something, I have to let the assistant know, then they've got [00:49:00] an email them. Then I've got to wait for them to email me back. I got to request pictures to use for promotions that they had to request their bio.Then I got to talk about whether or not they're going to send me their book. You know, anything they might want to talk about it. It could take like weeks pod match with what Alex has done is combined everything into an electronic media kit on your profile page. So we're like on a dating app. If you're going to say that you're a five foot, two green eyes, brunette hair, 10 inch Dick, triple Z, boobs, whatever the fuck you want to say, you know, you like long walks and kayaking.Doing the bioluminescence and shit and all of that, you know, we're going to have on there, your biography about you, you're already approved photos. Your call to action, your links, your social media, everything is all on one side. And page 10, if you're a guest and 10 questions, you're ready to answer. So that way, when you evaluating somebody, these 50 questions that you [00:50:00] were going to ask them is already there before you, this is saving you time, energy, and effort.It's the problem is one of the greatest things that I appreciate about it. Cause I'm like this entire media kit is right here. It's already done. And there are other websites out there that are trying to do with pod matches doing, but they're failing miserably. Because I've been on some of those y'all were acquired.Who were those people, pod being, and that you acquired, then you gobbled them up and hopefully get the gobble more. Because as I meet people, say like, sometimes when I'm on, I have a standing profile on matchmaker.fm. I don't actively use it. I just leave it there. And if somebody messages to me then grapes, and then I tell them about pod match and they never heard of it.Then they go sign up on pod. Alex: I love you. De'Vannon: I'm all like, you need to do better than matchmaker because matchmaking there's other websites out there now. And I haven't seen any of the others, but I'm like, I haven't found one [00:51:00] that is easy to use as pot match. They have everything there. Then, then Alex has like systems there to encourage.You to do things. There's like a rating system systems. We've been making it like the top 10. And then there's your affiliate program where bitches can get paid too. So tell us about these intricacies. Alex: Yeah, I mean, go back to the media kit. That was like really early on that we decided to do that because of the same problem.That's one of your listeners. So everyone listening to sex, drugs and Jesus, right now, you don't care how long it took Devon. And to get me booked or how long it took them, like how long it took to find a picture of like all these things, right? You don't, that doesn't matter. Like the back and forth of that, what matters is the content getting out there?And so in my mind, I was like, Hey, we need to get all this on pod match so people can just make it really simple. So it's like, okay, yeah. I want this guy as a guest, or I want this lady as a guest. Like I want this person to be on my. Cool. Here's their images. Here's their bio. Here's some questions ready to answer.In [00:52:00] case we get stuck. All these things, like the idea was just to have a one-stop shop to make the whole process seamless. You can book straight through the platform. So if you want to basically schedule the interview, you can use our built-in messaging platform. You don't ever have to exchange an email unless you want to.And I, some people would like to, and that's great. That's fine. I actually prefer people to actually make a, build a relationship as well. But if you don't want to, you don't have to do any of that. And yet, so we built this thing in just basically say, this is a one-stop shop for finding your guests or being a guest.That's the idea and everything you need is right here in the platform. And then for me personally, going back to just like the purpose side of things, I love this industry and I want to help creators be able to make some extra money. Cause I get it. Like even if you're spending 50 bucks on. That's that's a lot of money to some people that's like eating for a day for some people like they, they might not have that.So if they're saying I'm going to start this, I want to way they can make that back. So we really did the affiliate program. We have some we're calling pod value initiative, which basically means if you're completing interviews, using our platform, we're going to give you a piece of it. [00:53:00] Like we actually split our revenue in half.So 50% of our revenue we're giving back to creators that are using the platform. And it just kind of, there's a whole mathematical equation. I'm not going to get into, but basically the point is we just want to say, Hey, you know what creator? So the podcast host side of things here is a little cut of what we're making.Just our way of saying thanks and stay in the industry, keep it up. Because end of the day, that 10% of people that make it past their first year, I would love to help make that 11% of people making it. Like that would be a dream for me to just help increase it by 1%. Now that might be a really ambitious goal or not ambitious enough, but right now that's my.And I know if we could put a little bit money in people's pockets, make the whole process more seamless than maybe, maybe just, maybe we'd be able to do that. And that's really, my big focus is to help those creators because ultimately when they share an episode, that's what serves the world. This episode going out is what helps people, not all the administration that went behind it De'Vannon: and keeping in this same spirit, the pie, the pie upon pros community is a big deal.And so, and this is one thing [00:54:00] that, that I, that I really appreciate and got so much out of, especially at the beginning. So as a podcast, And especially during these times that we're like still kind of reeling with this pandemic, the feeling of isolation can be quite poignant and you can feel alone, espe

About AlexAlex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego, and has spent over a decade building high-performance, robust data management and processing systems. As an early member of a couple fast-growing startups, he's had the opportunity to wear a lot of different hats, serving at various times as an individual contributor, tech lead, manager, and executive. Prior to joining the Duckbill Group, Alex spent a few years as a freelance data engineering consultant, helping his clients build, manage and maintain their data infrastructure. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexras/ Personal page: https://alexras.info Old Consulting website with blog: https://bitsondisk.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: The company 0x4447 builds products to increase standardization and security in AWS organizations. They do this with automated pipelines that use well-structured projects to create secure, easy-to-maintain and fail-tolerant solutions, one of which is their VPN product built on top of the popular OpenVPN project which has no license restrictions; you are only limited by the network card in the instance. 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That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm the chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, which people are generally aware of. Today, I'm joined by our most recent principal cloud economist, Alex Rasmussen. Alex, thank you for joining me today, it is a pleasure to talk to you, as if we aren't talking to each other constantly, now that you work here.Alex: Thanks, Corey. It's great being here.Corey: So, I followed a more, I'd say traditional path for a cloud economist, but given that I basically had to invent the job myself, the more common path because imagine that you start building a role from scratch and the people you wind up looking for initially look a lot like you. And that is grumpy sysadmin, historically, turned into something, kind of begrudgingly, that looks like an SRE, which I still maintain are the same thing, but it is imperative people not email me about that. Yes, I know, you work at Google. But instead, what I found during my tenure as a sysadmin, is that I was working with certain things an awful lot, like web servers, and other things almost never, like databases and data warehouses. Because if you screw up a web server, we all have a good laugh, the site's down for a couple of minutes, life goes on, you have a shame trophy on your desk if that's your corporate culture, things continue.Mess up the data severely enough, and you don't have a company anymore. So, I was always told to keep my aura away from the expensive spendy things that power a company. You are sort of the first of a cloud economist subtype that doesn't resemble that. Before you worked here, you were effectively an independent consultant working on data engineering. Before that, you had a couple of jobs, but you had gotten a PhD in computer science, which means, first, you are probably one of the people in this world most qualified to pass some crappy job interview of solving a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard, but how did you get here from where you were?Alex: Great question. So, I like to joke that I kind of went to school until somebody told me that I had to stop. And I took that and went and started—or didn't start, but I was an early engineer at a startup and then was an executive at another early-stage one, and did a little bit of everything. And went freelance, did that for a couple of years, and worked with all kinds of different companies—vast majority of those being startups—helping them with data infrastructure problems. I've done a little bit of everything throughout my career.I've been, you know, IC, manager, manager, manager, IT guy, everything in between. I think on the data side of things, it just sort of happened, to be honest with you, it kind of started with the stuff that I did for my dissertation and parlayed that into a job back when the big data wave was starting to kind of truly crest. And I've been working on data infrastructure, basically my entire career. So, it wasn't necessarily something that was intentional. I've just been kind of taking the opportunity that makes the most sense for me it kind of every juncture. And my career path has been a little bit strange, both by academic and industrial standards. But I like where I'm at and I gained something really valuable from each of those experiences. So.Corey: It's been an interesting area of I won't say weakness here, but it's definitely been a bit of a challenge when we look at an AWS environment and even talking about a typical AWS customer without thinking of any of them in particular, I can already tell you a few things are likely to be true. For example, the number one most expensive line item in their bill is going to be EC2, and compute is the thing that powers it. Now, maybe that is they're running a bunch of instances the old-fashioned way. Maybe they're running Kubernetes but that's how it shows up. There's a lot of things that could be, and we look at what rounds that out.Now, the next item down should almost certainly not be data transfer and if so we should have a conversation, but data in one form or another is very often going to be number two. And that can mean a bunch of different things, historically. It could mean, “Oh, you have a whole bunch of stuff in S3. Let's talk about access patterns. Let's talk about lifecycle policies. Let's talk about making sure the really important stuff is backed up somewhere. Maybe you want to spend more on that particular aspect of it.”If it's on EBS volumes, that's interesting and definitely worth looking into and trying to understand the context of what's going on. Periodically we'll see a whole bunch of additional charges that speak to some of that EC2 charge in the form of EMR, AWS's Elastic MapReduce, which charges a per-hour instance charge, but also charges you for the instances that are running under the hood and under the EC2 line item. So, there's a lot of data lifecycle stuff, there's a lot of data ecosystem stories, that historically we've consulted out with experts in that particular space. And that's great, but we were starting to have to drag those people in on more and more engagements as we saw them. And we realized that was really something we had to build out as a core competency for ourselves.And we started out not intending to hire for someone with that specialty, but the more we talked to you, the more it became clear that this was a very real and very growing need that we and our customers have. How closely it is what you're doing now as far as AWS bill analysis and data pattern deep-dive align with what you were doing as a freelance consultant in the space?Alex: A lot more than you might expect. You know, I think that increasingly, what you're seeing now is that a company's core differentiator is its data, right, how much of it they have, what they do with it. And so, you know, to your point, I think when you look at any company's cloud spend, it's going to be pretty heavy on the data side in terms of, like, where have you put it? What are you doing to process it? Where is it going once it's been processed? And then how is that—Corey: And data transfer is a very important first word in that two-word sequence.Alex: Oh, sure is. And so I think that, like, in a lot of ways, the way that a customer's cloud architecture looks and the way that their bill looks kind of as a consequence of that is kind of a reification in a way of the way that the data flows from one place to another and what's done with it at each step along the way. I think what complicates this is that companies that have been around for a little while have lived through this kind of very amorphous, kind of, polyglot way that we're approaching data. You know, back when I was first getting started in the big data days, it was MapReduce, MapReduce, MapReduce, right? And we quickly [crosstalk 00:07:29]—Corey: Oh, yes. The MapReduce white paper out of Google, a beautiful April Fool's Day prank that the folks at Yahoo fell for hook, line, and sinker. They wrote Hadoop, and now we're all stuck with that pattern. Great gag, they really should have clarified they were kidding. Here we are.Alex: Exactly. So—Corey: I mostly kid.Alex: No, for sure. But I think especially when it comes to data, we tend to over-index on what the large companies do and then quickly realize that we've made a mistake and correct backwards, right? So, there was this big push toward MapReduce for everything until people realize that it was just a pain in the neck to operate and to build. And so then we moved into Spark, so kind of up-leveled a little bit. And then there was this kind of explosion of NoSQL and NewSQL databases that hit the market.And MongoDB inexplicably won that war and now we're kind of in this world where everything is cloud data warehouse, right? And now we're trying to wrestle with, like, is it actually a good idea to put everything in one warehouse and have SQL be the lingua franca on top of it? But it's all changing so rapidly. And when you come into a customer that's been around for 10 or 15 years, and has, you know, been in the cloud for a substantial—Corey: Yeah, one of those ancient customers. That is—Alex: I know, right?Corey: —basically old enough to almost get a driver's license? Oh, yeah.Alex: Right. It's one of those things where it's like, “Ah, yes, in startup years, you're, like, a hundred years old,” right? But still, you know, I think you see this, kind of—I wouldn't call it a graveyard of failed experiments, right, but it's a collection of, like, “Well, we tried this, and it kind of worked and we're keeping it around because the cost of moving this stuff around—the kind of data gravity, so to speak—is high enough that we're not going to bother transitioning it over.” But then you get into this situation where you have to bend over backwards to integrate anything with anything else. And we're still kind of in the early days of fixing that.Corey: And the AWS bill pattern that we see all the time across the board of those experiments were not successful and do not need to exist, but there's no context into that. The person that set them up left five years ago, the jobs are still running on time. What's happening with them? Well, we could stop them and see who screams, but very often, that's not the right answer either.Alex: And I think there's also something to note there, too, which is like, getting rid of data is very scary, right? I mean, if you resize a Kubernetes cluster from 15 nodes to 10, nobody's going to look at you sideways. But if you go, “Hey, we're just going to drop these tables.” The immediate reaction that you get, particularly from your data science team more often than not is, “Oh, God, what if we need that?” And so the conversation never really happens, and that causes this kind of snowball of data debt that persists in some cases for many, many years.Corey: Yeah, in some cases, what I found has been successful on those big unknown questions is don't delete the data, but restrict access to it for a few weeks and see what happens. Look into it a bit and make sure that it's not like, “Oh, cool. We just did for a month, and now we don't need that data. Let's get rid of it.” And then another month goes by it's like, “So, time to report quarterly earnings. Where's the data?”Oh, dear, that's not going to go well, for anyone. And understanding what's happening, the idea of cloning a petabyte of data so you can run an experiment on it. And okay, turns out the experiment wasn't needed. Do we still need to keep all of that?Alex: Yeah.Corey: The underlying platform advancements have been helpful toward this as well, a petabyte of data now in Glacier Deep Archive cost the princely sum of a thousand bucks a month, which is pretty close to the idea of why would I ever delete data ever again? I can get it back within a day if I need it, so let's just put it there instead.Alex: Right. You know, funny story. When I was in graduate school, we were dealing with, you know, 100 terabyte datasets on the regular that we had to generate every time because we only had 200 terabytes of raw storage. [laugh]. And this was before cloud was yet mature enough that we could get the kind of performance numbers that we wanted off of it.And we would end up having to delete the input data to make room for the output data. [laugh]. And thankfully, we don't need to do that anymore. But there are a lot of, kind of, anti-patterns that arise from that too, right? If data is easy to keep around forever, it stays around forever.And if it's easy to, let's say, run a SQL command against your Snowflake instance that scans 20 terabytes of data, you're just going to do it, and the exposure of that to you is so minimal that you can end up causing a whole bunch of problems for yourself by the fact that you don't have to deal with stuff at that low-level of abstraction anymore.Corey: It's always fun watching how this stuff manifests—because I'm dipping a toe into it from time to time—the easy, naive answer that we could give every customer but we don't is, “Huh. So, you have a whole bunch of EMR stuff? Well, you know, if you migrate that into something else, you'll save a whole bunch of money on that.” With no regard for the 500 jobs that run against that EMR cluster on a consistent basis that form is a key part of business process. “Yeah, if you could just do the entire flow of how data is operated with throughout your entire business that would be swell because you can save tens of thousands of dollars a month on that.” Yeah, how about we don't suggest things that are just absolute buffoonery.Alex: Well, and it's like, you know, you hit on a good point. Like, one of my least favorite words in the English language is the word ‘just.' And you know, I spent a few years as a freelance data consultant, and you know, a lot of what I would hear sometimes from customers is, “Well, why don't we ‘just' deprecate X?”Corey: “Why don't we just—” “I'm going to stop you there because there is no ‘just.'”Alex: Exactly.Corey: There's always context that we cannot have as outsiders.Alex: Precisely. Precisely. And digging into that really is—it's the fun part of the job, but it's also the hard part of the job.Corey: Before we created The Duckbill Group, which was really when I took Mike Julian on as business partner and CEO and formed the entity, I had something in common with you; I was freelancing for a couple of years beforehand. Now, I know why I wound up deciding, all right, we're going to turn this into a company, but what was it that I guess made you decide to, you know, freelancing is all well and good, but it's time to get something that looks a lot more like a quote-unquote, “Traditional job.”Alex: So, I think, on one level, I went freelance because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do next. And I knew what I was good at. I knew what I had a lot of experience at, and I thought, “Well, I can just go out and kind of find a bunch of people that are willing to hire me to do what I'm good at doing, and then maybe eventually I'll find one of them that I like enough that I'll go and work for them. Or maybe I'll come up with some kind of a business model that I can repeat enough times that I don't have to worry that I wake up tomorrow and all of my clients are gone and then I have to go live in a van down by the river.”And I think when I heard about the opening at The Duckbill Group, I had been thinking for a little while about well, this has been going fine for a long time, but effectively what I've been doing is I've been you know, a staff-level data engineer for hire. And do I want to do something more than that, you know? Do I want to do something more comp—perhaps more sophisticated or more complex than that? And I rapidly came to the conclusion that in order to do that, I would have to have sales and marketing, and I would have to, you know, spend a lot of my time bringing in business. And that's just not something that I have really any experience in or I'm any good at.And, you know, I also recognize that, you know, I'm a relatively small fish in a relatively large pond, and if I wanted to get the kind of like, large scale people, the like the big, you know, Fortune 1000 company kind of customers, they may not pay attention to somebody like me. And so I think that ultimately, what I saw with The Duckbill Group was, number one, a group of people that were strongly aligned to the way that I wanted to keep doing this sort of work, right? Cultural alignment was really strong, good people, but also, you know, you folks have a thing that you figured out, and that puts you 10 to 15 steps ahead of where I was. And I was kind of staring down the barrel that, I'm like, am I going to have to take six months not doing client work so that I can figure out how to make this business sustain? And, you know, I think that ultimately, like, I just looked at it, and I said, this just makes sense to me, like, as a next step. And so here we all are.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of “Hello, World” demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking, databases, observability, management, and security. And—let me be clear here—it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself, all while gaining the networking, load balancing, and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free, you can do things like run small-scale applications or do proof-of-concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free? This is actually free, no asterisk. Start now. Visit snark.cloud/oci-free that's snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: It's always fun seeing how people perceive what we've done from the outside. Like, “Oh, yeah, you just stumbled right onto the thing that works, and you've just been going, like, gangbusters ever since.” Then you come aboard, it's like, “Here, look at this pile of things that didn't pan out over here.” And it's, you get to see how the sausage is made in a way that we talk about from time to time externally, but surprisingly, most of our marketing efforts aren't really focused on, “And here's this other time we screwed up as well.” And we're honest about it, but it's not sort of the thing that we promote as the core message of what we do and who we are.A question I like to ask people during job interviews, and I definitely asked you this, and I'll ask you now, which is going to probably throw some folks for a loop because who talks to their current employees like this? But what's next for you? When it comes time for you to leave the Duckbill Group, what do you want to do after this job?Alex: That's a great question. So, I mean, as we've mentioned before, you know, my career trajectory has been very weird and circuitous. And, you know, I would be lying to you if I said that I had absolute certainty about what the rest of that looks like. I've learned a few things about myself in the course of my career, such as it is. In my kind of warm, gooey center, I build stuff. Like, that is what gives me joy, it is what makes me excited to wake up in the morning.I love looking at big, complicated things, breaking them down into pieces, and figuring out how to make the pieces work in a way that makes sense. And, you know, I've spent a long time in the data ecosystem. I don't know, necessarily, if that's something that I'm going to do forever. I'm not necessarily pigeonholing myself into that part of the space just yet, but as long as I get to kind of wake up in the morning, and say, “I'm going to go and build things and it's not going to actively make the world any worse,” I'm happy with that. And so that's really—you know, might go back to freelancing, might go and join another group, another company, big small, who knows. I'm kind of leaving that up to the winds of destiny, so to speak.Corey: One thing that I have found incredi—sorry. Let me just address that first. Like that—Alex: Sure.Corey: —is the right way to think about it. My belief has always been that you don't necessarily have, like, the ten-year plan, or the five-year plan or whatever it is because that's where you're going to go so much as it gives you direction and forces you to keep moving so you don't wind up sitting in the same place for five years with one year of experience repeated five times. It helps you remember the bigger picture. Because I've always despised this fiction that we see in job interviews where average tenure in our industry is 18 to 36 months, give or take, but somehow during the interviews, we all talk like this is now your forever job, and after 25 years, you'll retire. And yeah, let's be a little more realistic than that.My question is always what is next and how can we align in a way that helps you get to what's coming? That's the purpose behind the question, and that's—the only way to make that not just a drippingly insincere question is to mean it and to continue to focus on it from time to time of, great. What are you learning what's next? Now, at the time of this recording, you've been here, I believe three weeks if I'm not mistaken?Alex: I've—this is week two for me at time of recording.Corey: Excellent. Yes, my grasp of time is sort of hazy at the best of times. I have a—I do a lot of things.Alex: For sure.Corey: But yeah, it has been an eye-opening experience for me, not because, “Oh, wow, we have an employee.” Yeah, we've done that a few times before. But rather because of your background, you are asking different questions than we typically get during onboarding. I had a blog post go out recently—or will be by the time this airs—about a question that you asked about, “Wow, onboarding into our internal account structure for AWS is way more polished than I've ever seen it before. Is that something you built in-house? What is that?”And great. Oh, terrific, I'd forgotten that this is kind of a novel thing. No. What we're using is AWS's SSO offering, which is such a well-built, polished product that I can only assume that it's under NDA because Amazonians don't talk about it ever. But it's great.It has a couple of annoyances, but beyond that, it's something that I'm a big fan of, but I'd forgotten how transformative that is, compared to the usual approach of all right, here's your username, here's a password you're going to have to change, here are your IAM credentials to store on disk forever. It's the ability to look at what we're doing through the eyes of someone who is clearly deep into the technical weeds, but not as exposed to all of the minutiae of the 300-some-odd AWS services is really a refreshing thing for all of us, just because it helps us realize what it's like to see some of this stuff for the first time, as well as gives me content ideas because if it's new to you, I promise you are not the only person who's seeing it that way. And if you don't really understand something well enough to explain it, I would argue you don't really understand the thing, so it forces me to get more awareness around exactly how different facets work. It's been an absolutely fantastic experience so far, from my perspective.Alex: Thank you. Right back at you. I mean, spending so many years working with startups, my kind of level of expected sophistication is, “I'm going to write your password on the back of a napkin. I have fifteen other things to do. Go figure it out.” And so you know, it's always nice to see—particularly players like AWS that are such 800-pound gorillas—going in and trying to uplevel that experience in a way that feels like—because I mean, like, look, AWS could keep us with the, “Here's a CSV with your username and password. Good luck, have fun.” And you know, they would still make—Corey: And they're going to have to because so much automation is built around that—Alex: Oh yeah—Corey: In so many places.Alex: —so much.Corey: It's always net-additive, they never turn anything off, which is increasingly an operational burden.Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, it's nice to see them up-level this in a way that feels like they're paying attention to their customers' pain. And that's always nice to see.Corey: So, we met a few years ago—in the before times—at a mixer that we wound up throwing—slash meetup. It was in Southern California for some AWS event or another. You've been aware of who we are and what we do for a while now, so I'm very curious to know—and the joy of having these conversations is that I don't actually know what the answer is going to be, so this may never see the light of day if it goes to weird—Alex: [laugh].Corey: —in the wrong direction, but—no I'm kidding. What has been, I guess, the biggest points of dissonance or surprises based upon your perception of who we are and what we do externally, versus joining and seeing how the sausage is made?Alex: You know, I think the first thing is—um, well, how to put this. I think that a lot of what I was expecting, given how much work you all do and how big—well, ‘you all;' we do—and how big the list of clients is and how it gets bigger every day, I was expecting this to be, like, this very hyper put together, like, every little detail has been figured out kind of engagement where I would have to figure out how you all do this. And coming in and realizing that a lot of it is just having a lot of in-depth knowledge born from experience of a bunch of stuff inside of this ecosystem, and then the rest of it is kind of free jazz, is kind of encouraging. Because as someone that was you know, as a freelancer, right, who do you see, right? You see people who have big public presences or people who are giant firms, right?On the GCP side, SADA Systems is a great example. They're another local company for me here in Los Angeles, and—Corey: Oh, yes. [unintelligible 00:24:48] Miles has been a recurring guest on the show.Alex: Yeah. And he's great. And, like, they have this enormous company that's got, like, all these different specializations and they're basically kind of like the middleman for GCP on a lot of things. And, like, you see that, and then you kind of see the individual people that are like, “Yeah, you know, I'm not really going to tell you that I only have two clients and that if both of them go away, I'm screwed, but, like, I only have two clients, and if both of them go away, I'm screwed.” And so, you know, I think honestly seeing that, like, what you've built so far and what I hope to help you continue to build is, you know, you've got just enough structure around the thing so that it makes sense, and the rest of it, you're kind of admitting that no plan ever survives contact with the client, right, and that everybody's going to be different than that everybody's problems are going to be different.And that you can't just go in and say, “Here's a dashboard, here's a calculator, have fun, give me my money,” right? Because that feels like—in optimization spaces of any kind, be that cloud, or data or whatever, there's this, kind of, push toward, how do I automate myself out of a job, and the realization that you can't for something like this, and that ultimately, like, you're just going to have to go with what you know, is something that I kind of had a suspicion was the case, but this really made it clear to me that, like, oh, this is actually a reasonable way of going about this.Corey: We thought otherwise at one point. We thought that this was something could be easily addressed their software. We launched our DuckTools SaaS platform in beta and two months later, did the—our incredible journey has come to an end, and took it off of a public offering. Because it doesn't lend itself to solving these problems in software in any reasonable way. I am ever more convinced over time that the idea of being able to solve cloud cost optimization with software at VC-scale is a red herring.And yeah, it just isn't going to work because it's one size fits some. Our customers are, by definition, exceptional in many respects, and understanding the context behind why things are the way that they are mean that we can only go so far with process because then it becomes a let's have a conversation and let's be human. Otherwise, we try to overly codify the process, and congratulations, we just now look like really crappy software, but expensive because it's all people doing it. It doesn't work that way. We have tools internally that help smooth over a lot of those edges, but by and large, people who are capable of performing at especially at the principal level for a cloud economics role, inherently are going to find themselves stifled by too much process because they need to have the freedom to dig into the areas that are relevant to the customer.It's why we can't recraft all of our statements of work in ways that tend to shy away from explicitly defined deliverables. Because we deliver an outcome, but it's going to depend entirely, in most cases, up on what we discover along the way. Maybe a full-on report isn't the best way of presenting the data in the way that we see it. Maybe it's a small proof of concept script or something like that. Maybe it's, I don't know, an interpretive dance in front of the company's board.Alex: [laugh]. Right.Corey: I'm open to exploring opportunities. But it comes down to what is right for the customer. There's a reason we only ever charge a fixed fee for these things, and it's because at that point, great, we're giving you the advice that we'd implement ourselves. We have no partnerships with any vendor in the space just to avoid bias or the perception of same. It's important that we are the authoritative source around these things.Honestly, the thing that surprised me the most about all this is how true to that vision we've stayed as we've as we flushed out what works, what doesn't. And we can distantly fail to go out of business every month. I am ecstatic about that. I expected this to wind up cratering into a mountain four months after I went freelance. Not yet.Alex: Well, I mean, I think there's another aspect of this too, right? Because I've spent a lot of my career working inside of venture capital-backed companies. And there's a lot of positive things to be said about having ready access to that kind of cash, but it does something to your business the second you take it. And I've been in a couple of situations where, like, once you actually have that big bucket of money, the incentive is grow, right? Hire more people get more customers, go, go, go, go, go.And sometimes what you'll find is that you'll spend the time and the money on an initiative and it's clearly not working. And you just kind of have to keep doubling down because now you've got customers that are using this thing and now you have to maintain it, and before you know it, you've got this albatross hanging around your neck. And like one of the things that I really respect about the way that Duckbill Group is is handling this by not taking outside cash is, like, it frees you up to make these kinds of bets, and then two months later say, “Well, that didn't work,” and try something else. And you know, that's very difficult to do once you have to go and convince someone with, you know, money flowing out of their ears, that that's the right thing to do.Corey: We have to be intentional about what we're doing. One of the benefits of bringing you aboard is that one, it does improve our capacity for handling more engagements at the same time, but it also improves the quality of the engagements that we are delivering. Instead of basically doing a round-robin assignment policy we can—Alex: Right.Corey: —we consult with each other; we talk about specific areas in which we have specific expertise. You get dragged into a lot of data portions of existing engagements, and the rest of us get pulled into other areas in which you might not be as strong. For example, “What are all of these ridiculous services? I can't make heads or tails have the ridiculous naming side of it.” Surprise, that's not a you problem.It comes down to being able to work collaboratively and let each other shine in a way that doesn't mean we load people up with work. We're very strict about having a 40-hour or less work week, just because we're not rushing for an exit. We want to enjoy our time working, we want to enjoy what we're doing, and then we want to go home and don't think about work until it's time to come back and think about these things. Like, it's a lifestyle company, but that lifestyle doesn't need to be run, run, run, run, run all the time, and it doesn't need to be something that people barely tolerate.Alex: Yeah. And I think that, you know, especially coming from being an army of one in a lot of engagements, it is really refreshing to be able to—see because, you know, I'm fortunate enough, I have friends in the industry that I can go and say like, “I have no idea how to make heads or tails of X.” And you know, I can get help that way, but ultimately, like, the only other outlet that I have here is the customer and they're not bringing me in if they have those answers readily to hand. And so being able to bounce stuff off of other people inside of an organization like this has been really refreshing.Corey: One of the things I've appreciated about your tenure here so far is the questions that you ask are pitched at the perfect level, by which I mean, it is never something you could answer with a three-second visit to Google, but it's also not something that you've spent three days spinning your wheels on trying to understand. You do a bit of digging; it's a little unclear, especially since there are multiple paths to go down, and then you flag it for clarification. And there's really so much to be said for that. Really, when we're looking for markers of seniority in the interview process, it's admitting you don't know something, but then also talking about how you would go about getting the answer. And it's—because no one has all this stuff in their head. I spend a disturbing amount of time looking at search engines and trying to reformulate queries and to get answers that make sense.I don't have the entirety of AWS shoved into my head. Yet. I'm sure there's something at re:Invent that's going to be scary and horrifying that will claim to do it and basically have a poor user interface, but all right. When that comes, we'll reevaluate then because this industry is always changing.Alex: For sure. For sure. And I think it's, it's worth pointing out that, like, one of the things that having done this for a long time gives you is this kind of scaffolding in your head that you can hang things over. We're like, you don't need to have every single AWS service memorized, but if you've got that scaffold in your head going, “Oh, like, this thing sounds like it hangs over this part of the mental scaffold, and I've seen other things that do that, so I wonder if it does this and this and this,” right? And that's a lot of it, honestly.Because especially, like, when I was solely in the data space, there's a new data wareho—or a new, like, data catalog system coming out every other week. You know, there are a thousand different things that claim to do MLOps, right? And whenever, like, someone comes to me and says, “Do you have experience with such and such?” And the answer was usually, “Well if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.” And, you know, that tends to help a great deal.Corey: Yeah. “No, but I'll find out and get back to you,” the right answer. Making it up and being wrong is the best way to get rejected from an environment. That's not just consulting; that's employment, too. If 95% of the time, you give the right answer, but that one time and 20 you're going to just make it up, well, I have to validate the other 19 because I never know when someone's faking it or not. There's that level of earned trust that's important.Alex: Well, yeah. And you're being brought in to be the expert in the room. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are the all-seeing, all-knowing oracle of knowledge but, like, if you say a thing, people are just going to believe you. And so, you know, it's beholden on you—Corey: If not, we have a different problem.Alex: Well, yeah, exactly. Hopefully, right? But yeah, I mean, it's beholden on you to be honest with your customer at a certain point, I think.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to got with me about this. And I would love to have you back on in a couple of months once you're fully up to speed and spinning at the proper RPMs and see what's happened then. I—Alex: Thank you. I'd—Corey: —really appreciate—Alex: —love to.Corey: —your time where's the best place for people to learn more about you if they haven't heard your name before?Alex: Well, let's see. I am @alexras on Twitter, A-L-E-X-R-A-S. My personal website is alexras.info.I've done some writing on data stuff, including a pretty big collection of blog posts on the data side of the AWS ecosystem that are still on my consulting page, bitsondisk.com. Other than that—I mean, yeah, Twitter is probably the best place to find me, so if you want to talk more about any weird, nerd data stuff, then please feel free to reach out there.Corey: And links to that will, of course, be in the [show notes 00:35:57]. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.Alex: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.Corey: Alex Rasmussen, principal cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Corey Quinn, cloud economist to the stars, 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 an angry, insulting comment that you then submit to three other podcast platforms just to make sure you have a backup copy of that particular piece of data.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.

In this episode I give a quick recap of my interview with Alex Sanfilippo including: - How he structures his days and weeks for maximum productivity- What doing things that don't scale means and why it's important - How he was able to grow podmatch.com so quicklyAnd so much more...Alex Sanfilippo is the host of the top-rated entrepreneurship podcast, Creating a Brand, and the founder of PodMatch.com, a free service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews.Click Here to connect with Alex*************************************************************You will never maximize your potential on your own so I'm personally inviting you to come and join me in the private Extraordinary Man Facebook group so you can level up your business and your life. Just Click Here to join the Extraordinary Man private Facebook group. Iron sharpens iron and this is the #1 place for you to connect with me and other like minded men who are on a mission to maximize their potential. My goal is to help you become the man God created you to be in all areas of your life. So come and join us in the Facebook group and upgrade your business and your life.

Alex Sanfilippo is the host of the top-rated entrepreneurship podcast, Creating a Brand, and the founder of PodMatch.com, a free service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews.In this episode, we discuss:- How he structures his days and weeks for maximum productivity- What doing things that don't scale means and why it's important - How he was able to grow podmatch.com so quicklyAnd so much more...  Click Here to connect with Alex**************************************************You will never maximize your potential on your own so I'm personally inviting you to come and join me in the private Extraordinary Man Facebook group so you can level up your business and your life. Just Click Here to join the Extraordinary Man private Facebook group. Iron sharpens iron and this is the #1 place for you to connect with me and other like minded men who are on a mission to maximize their potential. My goal is to help you become the man God created you to be in all areas of your life. So come and join us in the Facebook group and upgrade your business and your life.

Interacting with customers requires a level of finesse and talent that is beautiful when done well, and a tough sight when done poorly. There is give and take, and you have to flow through various movements and ups and downs to reach a satisfying end result. It’s like a dance. A tango if you will. At least, that’s how the folks over at LivePerson see it. Alex Spinelli is the CTO and EVP of product, technology, and operations at LivePerson, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he broke down what that dance should look like, and how A.I. is taking the lead.  As Alex explains, LivePerson is a set of tools, technologies and platforms that enable businesses to have conversations with customers through messaging channels, and to detect where customers may be getting stuck or frustrated. Then, with a small immediate intervention, LivePerson’s A.I. routes that customer to a human who can make the buying process easier. It is a way to get to a better end result more often, and it works. Businesses using LivePerson have seen double-digit-percentage-point improvement in conversions and higher NPS scores than ever. But the power of A.I. doesn’t end there, and Alex dives deep into where we are headed with A.I. as a tool in retail, including the blended in-person and virtual experiences that seem to be overlapping more than ever before. And Alex gets into the nitty-gritty of the ethics behind A.I. and how everyone will have to be more involved going forward when it comes to defining their limits, wants, and needs. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Joining Forces: The future of A.I. in the ecommerce space is in the way brands can join together an A.I. experience with a human-based one. The way brands should be looking at A.I. is as a conversation-starter and a tool that can solve transactional problems, but when a deeper conversation is needed, it should be able to usher customers through a seamless transition to a real person who can build a relationship, form trust, solve problems, and ensure that the customer experience is a good one the has a positive end result.Let’s Get Ethical!: With any new technology, there are ethical questions that have to be addressed. This is especially true when dealing with A.I. Not only do you have to take into account the repercussions that A.I. will have on the labor force, but you also have to consider how A.I. is being trained, what kind of biases are being programmed into the model, and how and when to start and stop collecting data to build bigger and better A.I. models.  Blend It Up: As we move further into the fourth industrial revolution, we are beginning to see more blending of virtual, digital, and physical experiences. Conversational technology will begin to follow us into physical stores and A.I., along with more targeting-types of technology, will be used in and out of stores.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:Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today we have Alex Spinelli joining the show. He's the CTO at LivePerson. Alex, welcome.Alex:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. So I was looking through your background. And I was hoping we could kind of start with your days at Alexa, because I feel like there's probably a lot of good juicy stories there and I want to hear a bit about what was your role there? What did you do there? And then we can jump into the big topic around AI and your current product?Alex:Sure, sure. I led what we call the Alexa OS. And what that was, or is today, is really the core software platform that powers the Alexa experience, the brain. It included things like personalization, speaker recognition, so Alexa knows who's talking to her. And then all of the APIs and technologies, dialogue management, they really power the whole experience and allowed both internal developers at Amazon and skill builders, so skills are like apps for Alexa, to go and build those experiences. So it was really the cloud operating system for Alexa.Stephanie:So what drew you to that field and industry?Alex:Yeah, so I've always been pretty connected to AI, natural language, even going back to, I have a lot of roots in news, something I was pretty passionate about, in news technology. So at Thomson Reuters, for example, where I lead technology for news, both for real time news, algorithmic trading, and then also all the Reuters news properties and journalists, the tools that journalists use, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how do people consume information, how they read information, and how can digital and computers really help us find the most important things, gain insight from information, gain insight from data.Alex:So then I kind of took a little bit of a hiatus from news, and when I joined Amazon, I was leading search. So the whole experience for browsing and discovering the right product for you, and trying to optimize that, make it easier. And one of the things that was really interesting is, I started to see the limitations of these very flat experiences, search pages, web pages and apps. And people started to try to have a conversation with Amazon search. So they'd ask questions in search, is this product compatible with this one? What's the best gift for my daughter who's graduating high school? And all these interesting questions, and the experience often fell down. So we actually started looking at what we called query understanding and natural search and all these interesting things where we wanted to help people get answers to their questions and have a dialogue with the search experience.Alex:And I thought it was pretty hard. In the sort of traditional, I put in a query, I get a set of results, that interface just didn't work really well. Alexa at the time was just kind of quirky little device that was just launching at Amazon very early days, I actually had one, I was part of the early beta testing. And I said, "God, I want to be part of that. That actually is starting to recreate the way we're going to interact with our digital lives and we're going to use natural language. And I guess the rest is history. I think when I joined there was 20 or 30 people in the team. And again, it was this quirky little device that people were like, "What the hell is this thing? Is this going to be big?" And yeah, in six months, we sold millions of devices, and I was growing a team, and we were adding all kinds of new features and capabilities. And it was pretty much a rocket ship, which was pretty fun.Stephanie:That's awesome. I have Alexas throughout the house. I've always wondered though, how to get past that hurdle of, like when you're talking with someone, you are very free flowing and you'll ask any kind of questions. And I feel like oftentimes, with Alexa or any speaker that you would talk into, you're like, "Ah, ah, what can I ask? I don't know what to say. I don't know how to phrase it." And it feels like there's still a bit of a hurdle with a lot of conversational speakers to get past the getting you help kind of with anything, and being able to query things in a million different ways, so that you're not like me, where you're just like, "And I'm stumped and now I'm just going to open up the app on my phone and resort to the old way of doing things."Alex:Yes. So it's interesting, because that same challenge is what actually led me to LivePerson. So when I met my current boss, he was explaining what LivePerson was doing, which was really a messaging platform for customer service and sales. And he said, "Listen, we're really interested in taking things to the next level with AI." And my first response was, "I'm good. I'm at the hottest product on the planet." And Rob and I had known each other for years from New York and we had conversations earlier. I said, "I'm good."Alex:He said, "Well listen, there's an opportunity to take what you're doing at Amazon, creating these natural experiences, but actually democratize it and do it for companies all around the world, large and small, and really help consumers interact in a new way." And it kind of stuck with me. And I started, we had more and more conversations, and I ended up joining. And I think the key differentiation that you're seeing is, I think the smart speakers in that whole space, they aren very transactional, right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Alex:They've kind of started to center around entertainment, home entertainment, smart home. And they are still fundamentally very, very, I ask for something, I get the result, I ask for something, I get the result. And what we're trying to do here, because we're working for all different businesses and companies, is allow you to have a full-fledged conversation to build a relationship with the things that are important to you in your life, your bank, your healthcare company, your insurance company — Industries that tech and AI have tended to ignore, like, "Those are big, boring, you can't change them." And I think the problem is we've kind of leaned into these proxies of relationship building, apps, well, you can't build a... You and I are having a conversation. I didn't send you the A.L.E.X. app and say, "Here, you can get any answer to any question, you can click and browse and tap and search, and you'll get..."Alex:You didn't send me your app. We're having a dialogue and a conversation. What's crazy is businesses have put the app, they've actually done that crazy thing. They've said, "Oh, no, don't talk to us. Don't have a conversation with us here, use our app, use our website." And what we want to do is actually do exactly what you described, have that fluid conversation, build a real relationship. And the key for us, and this is where I think the smart speakers fall down, is humans have to be involved as well. So you can't get stuck. The AI is not going to be able to solve every dialogue.Alex:So the way we look at the world is the AI as a kind of concierge in many ways, and begins and initiates the dialogue and conversation for simple things like play music, do this, do that, AI can do it. But then when you really need to have a more meaningful conversation, we want to connect you with the right person. And Alexa can't do that, because just the scale wouldn't work. It's just for Amazon, where I think when you start thinking about democratizing AI, we can actually start to do that and make it a useful tool, not just for the consumer, but also for the employees of the business.Stephanie:Yep. I mean, now it seems like it's the perfect time too, because I think through the past five years or so, and it seems like we've kind of gone through a period where everything had to be optimized, you don't want to have support centers, you've got bots everywhere, you can do drop shipping now, you don't need brands, you don't need... Just white label products, we went through this phase, and now we're kind of coming out on the other side where people are like, "I don't really want to talk just to a bot, I want to talk to a person. If I instantly want to call, I want to be able to have someone there. And it seems like now consumers' expectations have changed where it's like we're a little bit there, we were getting used to just, "Okay, I'll just talk to the chat and see if it fixes it." And now it seems like expectations are so much higher than they even were just a couple years ago.Alex:I think part of that is this digital was growing due to convenience, right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Alex:We were buying large bulk things. We were buying simple things. We were buying more toothpaste, more batteries, more this, more that. And as we started to need to use digital, and now in the pandemic, obviously, need to, have to, no other way, for all the things in our life. Yeah, we want to actually connect those things to values, our values, right? So the brands matter. The business matters, what does that brand stand for? What are the values that they stand behind? So I do think you're right, I think the need for developing a real relationship is important.Alex:And if you look at, actually it's interesting, banks, telcos, all these kind of big, stodgy, old businesses, or at least we used to think of them that way, or kind of were perceived that way, they kind of lost their differentiation, right? A banking app is a banking app is a banking app, they all look the same, feel the same, act the same. But not all banks are the same, they have different values, they have different missions.Alex:And without being able to talk and have a conversation, you don't get to connect your values to where you're putting your money. So I think that's the shift. I think people now care. They're spending all their dollars in the digital world, by and large. Even the restaurants, who's delivering? Is it Postmates? Is it Uber? Is it Grubhub? It matters. We want to support the right business who has the values that we share. So yeah, I think it's really important. A connection is super important.Stephanie:Yep. I also think a lot about retail. A lot of people probably do miss those experiences of going in stores and having someone there to ask questions to, and now that just needs to be mimicked more in the digital space where people are like, "Well, I can't," or maybe they can start to now, but for a while there, you couldn't go in and have your normal conversations and ask where things were. I mean, I go all the time, and I'll be like, "What kind of wine do you like? Just tell me what you like. I'll buy whatever you tell me because I don't know." And I miss that. And I was looking for that. But oftentimes it was lacking in the digital world. So-Alex:Yeah, so I think developing the tools to allow the... Brands are made of people, and enabling people to actually come through the digital world and connect is exactly what you're saying. Yeah, we thrive that human experience. I mean, we desire that human experience.Stephanie:Yeah. So tell me a little bit deeper about what is LivePerson? Because I'm hearing it is like it's essentially conversational AI for any industry, it's not just focused on commerce, it can be banking, it can be anywhere, is that the right way to think about it? Or maybe I'll let you describe it better.Alex:Yeah, so at our core, at our roots, it's a set of tools, technologies, platforms, that enable you as a business to actually have conversations with your customers through messaging channels. So this is the way we've all started to interact with one another. My daughter and I don't talk on the phone as much, it's all messaging, but I can talk to her all day long, right? Because it's asynchronous, it's on my time, it's on her time, she can be in class, I can be in this meeting, we can start a conversation and continue it. So the core offering is letting businesses do that. So giving those interactions back to the consumer on their schedule. And then we start to layer on a lot of intelligence.Alex:So a lot of those conversations can be led by an AI to gather information, to do the simple things, to actually help you with, what's your name, what's your account number, what's your size, reset my password, pay my bill, lots of things that really become kind of very rote. And then you start to really get more and more advanced in enabling you to shop, enabling you to buy, enabling you to transact. And the whole platform lets you never get stuck. So you can have a conversation, it can be part of an automation, you can be looking at a product, you can be asking questions to a bot about the size, color, compatibility, etc. And then when you get stuck, we can actually detect that and route you immediately to a person, a real human being that can help you. And we call that the tango. So it's this-Stephanie:I like that.Alex:... beautiful dance that allows us to go back and forth. And that's really, I think, where we excel. And then just from a technical perspective, we wrap all of that with a set of analytics and tools that even if you're a small business, you can use to look at the health of those conversations, how's it going? Is it making you money? Is it costing you more? How's your customer satisfaction? And those kinds of things. So it's a pretty full suite of tools to build a new kind of customer experience.Stephanie:That's awesome. So what kind of results do you see? Especially around commerce, when it comes to, like you said, you're doing the tango, you're sending them over to a customer service person. What would you see, otherwise? I'm sure losing that customer and not converting to a sale, are there any metrics that you guys have that you can share?Alex:Yeah, so it definitely is industry dependent and customer dependent. And we tend not to share direct customer numbers. But this is why I joined, the results are crazy. And so when Rob and I were talking about me joining LivePerson, he said that, "We're kind of onto something where we see costs go down, customer satisfaction go up, NPS go up, conversion rates go up, and agent turnover, or sales agent turnover go down." And I said, "There's no way all those metrics can be moving in the positive direction." Usually, there's trade offs. But right now, that's what we're seeing.Alex:So we do see conversion rates for conversations to be often double digit percentages better than experiences that didn't have. So if you were interacting in an app or a website, and we detect that you might be stuck, you might be jumping back and forth between pages, we'll actually offer like, "Hey, it looks like you might be having... Do you have a question? Do you have a problem?" And then we'll have that dialogue and that conversation.Alex:And that might be a tangoed conversation mixed and matched between an AI and a human. And we see conversion rates of those dialogues, again, double digit percent. There's a large big box retailer whose conversion rates typically exceed over 15% when a conversation is initiated. And a typical conversion rate on web shopping is single digits, mid to 5%, 6%. So significant increases when you actually connect and have a dialogue are pretty common for us.Stephanie:Wow, that's cool. So if I'm a brand-Alex:Yeah, it's pretty powerful.Stephanie:Yeah, I mean, it sounds amazing. It sounds like, why wouldn't someone use something like this? If I'm a brand, and I'm thinking about setting this up, would you be tapping into my customer support people who are trained my way and then you're like, you train the AI, you got the questions in there, the answers, you kind of map all that out, you've got your database, and then you're constantly learning, I'm assuming, from what people are saying and what's actually helpful. And then, when you go into the tango mode, it goes over to your customer service people, or how does that work?Alex:So our tooling, mostly, is used directly by the brand. So you're a brand, our technology sits inside, I mean it's SaaS base technology, but it sits inside your contact center. Actually, the way we typically will train AI, it's actually pretty cool, you have human conversations first, and you don't need many. So you actually start to have human to human conversations. And then just in a few weeks, we can actually collect enough data to go and build the best intents. So intent is, as you're having a natural language discussion and an AI is detecting what you need. So an intent is the thing that you want, I want to pay a bill, I want to buy that product. Is this product compatible? Does this come with batteries? Whatever have you. Those are all intents.Alex:So those intents are basically derived from your real customer conversations. So the accuracy ends up being very high. And we've actually built the whole series of proprietary data models that are very industry specific. So in retail, in airlines, in banking, in insurance, we can actually have some really high accurate recognition. And again, those intents can be recognized for human conversations, so that we can tell the agent exactly what's going on and what this person needs. And then they're also used to go and build those AI driven experiences.Alex:And the goal is, can we take all the mundane repeatable stuff away from the agents? So the agents are really closing the sale, they're really helping tough problems. And this is why you see agent satisfaction go up, because they're not doing the rote, same, same, same, same conversations, all that's done by the AI. And then the agents actually having a kind of much more high bandwidth interaction.Stephanie:Like doing the creative work, where they can think and solve- [crosstalk]Alex:Exactly.Stephanie:... problems. And I mean, I think it comes back to, for a while there, everyone's like, "AI is going to take our jobs." It's like, "No, it's augmenting your jobs. And it's doing the things that you probably don't want to do anyways. But now you just get to work on higher level things," I would think.Alex:We do see that. And it's interesting, we see the wait times... So rather than waiting for 30 minutes, you actually wait for very little time. And then that agent can actually spend the time and energy to have a, just like you said, a much more creative high bandwidth conversation. So we don't see this, "Yeah, take..." It's changing jobs, it's augmenting jobs, it does require some new training, for sure. But at least right now, it's not this job killer, it actually opens up the world for new jobs. We actually are converting agents to data annotators.Alex:So agents in real time can actually go and label conversations and data to improve the AI. So it's actually advancing their roles in some ways. Again, I'm not going to be naïve, there will come a time where automation and those kinds of things do impact jobs at scale. I think we as responsible business people need to think about what's the next thing, right? And what's the next set of opportunities. So I'm hopeful in general, we are pretty hopeful and positive on where we can get to, but I think we have to kind of wade in very open eyed and make sure we do the right thing as we go forward.Stephanie:Yeah, so when thinking about doing the right thing, I think it'd be good to get a little lay of the land of the AI field in general, because I feel like it's had a pretty bumpy couple of years, just I mean, so many headlines were made around unintended consequences of using AI models, labeling things incorrectly. There's just been a lot out there. So what does it look like now? And especially in the world of commerce, how do we think about, where is AI even being utilized properly, or misused? And where could it be in a couple years? Or where should it be?Alex:The biggest challenge with AI is bias. And I'll explain what that means. So some of the bias is deliberate, some is not deliberate, or intentional and unintentional. So AI is only as good as the data. So what AI is, at the end of the day, it's a tool that allows you to look at lots and lots of data, examples. And then you build a model, mathematical model, statistical model, that makes certain assumptions based on the examples. And so if you were trying to make an AI service that would recognize oranges, this is when I used to meet people in person at South by Southwest to give a talk, I put this big, gnarly looking orange on the screen. It was not orange, it was mostly white and moldy and green. And I'd asked the audience, "Who knows what this is?" And 95% of people would raise their hand, I'd say, "What is it?"Alex:And everyone knew it was an orange. No one saw an orange [inaudible] anything like that. Unless you went on vacation and left an orange on your counter for like three weeks, then you maybe have seen an orange like that. But everyone instantly recognized it, right? So really what's happening is very similar to AI, you've seen thousands of oranges in your life. So there's a bunch of features of an orange, little dimples, the skin, the [inaudible] possible colors, it's round. And your brain immediately matched that image to this archetype of an orange, even though you've never seen an orange that looks like that. That's really what AI is doing. So if you have a bad data set, if you showed a young kid, many, many different images of things that weren't oranges, but you told them it was an orange, right?Alex:When that image would pop, they might not recognize it, they might not be able to tell what it was, or they might misrecognize something else and call it an orange. So the data under AI can inherently have bias by where we collect it from. So if we're trying to collect data to recognize a certain type of person, or a certain type of behavior, or a certain type of language, if we don't have a representative data set from the right populations, the AI is going to be biased, it's going to be biased based on that data set. Or if humans label that data, and those humans come from a certain one kind of homogenous background, they might label the data with their own biases. Again, that could be unintentional, but everyone brings their own unconscious biases with them.Alex:Or lastly, engineers, when they build AI models have their own biases, too. They think certain things are important and other things are unimportant. Simple kind of innocuous examples, if you're building a trading system, and you thought the weather really had an importance on stock prices, so that engineer would build weather as being a heavily weighted variable, that's a bias. So the key actually is recognizing all the ways that biases can creep in and creating some standards, and then really having the tools and process in your company to actually recognize those, and ask the question, and make sure that you're doing all the things that you need to do to eliminate that. That bias is what we've seen in some of these horror stories around AI.Alex:And it was kind of rushing headlong into it and not really thinking deeply about it. So there's actually some great organizations that... We actually took the EqualAI pledge as a company. So there's a nonprofit called EqualAI, that is working with industries to try to eliminate bias in AI. Or I should probably rephrase, not eliminate, but really try to mitigate. I don't know if we'll ever be able to fully mitigate-Stephanie:Or eliminate.Alex:Eliminate, sorry, yep. It's just super important, and it's actually the right thing. It's good for your business. It's good for your employees, it's just something we have to do, ethical use of any new powerful tool, no matter what it is, you have to actually consider those things. So I think that's the key challenge right now. And I think we're still in the early, early days of really grappling with it.Stephanie:Yeah, I mean, it seems like too, right now, a lot of models will have to be thrown away because they were all trained on a set of consumers that are still there, but now there's all these new consumers who's come on the market that were never shopping online before, never doing their grocery shopping online. And we had a really good guest from Stitch Fix, she was the VP of data science there. And she was like, the way that the older generation, who's now trying out Stitch Fix, wants to talk with us is very different than how we were talking with millennials. And so you have to start rethinking about, do I keep my model and adjust it? Do I just throw it out and start over? And it seems like a tricky point now, because you just had this big inflow of new consumers that you never really were talking with before last year.Alex:Yeah, I have a 14-year old. And it's been an interesting journey as most of his communication has really moved online, and the words and terminology and no cap and sus and all these funny terms. They need to be built in to model. So your VP at Stitch Fix is 100% correct. And we need to go and deal with that. And I don't know if it's about throwing away, I think it's more about augmenting and building on top of. The good news is the influx is a big number of people coming, and those large numbers can actually improve the models pretty quickly, if the number that you're starting with was smaller. But it's something we actually, because we live and breathe natural language, we actually have to stay on top of really, really regularly. And yeah, this is going to be the perennial challenge. This is where actually that, remember I talked about I'm transforming agent roles?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Alex:So one of the things that we've looked at and we've just actually released this, it's pretty cool, is the agents, as they're having conversations, can label the intents and they can actually improve intents, and they can actually retag intents and all this kind of stuff. And so we believe, and this is where I think we are changing roles, not eliminating, the agents know your products, they know your language, they know the markets you're operating in, they talk to your customers every day, and they're the ones that are going to be best positioned to kind of add and augment those models, so it's actually really important to have them as part of that process.Stephanie:Oh, that's really interesting, that they can do that now. And I could see it being really helpful too, because I have heard that oftentimes, models can also, like you said, train themselves and turn into a black box where it's like they keep ingesting the wrong data, wrong data, and then you build up maybe algorithms that, I remember at certain companies I used to work at, you kind of didn't know what was in there, at a certain point, you're like, "I don't know how it's working. I don't know why it's working this way." How much data do you need? Is there ever a point where you're like, "That's enough, let's stop. Only collect it this many times." Because right now, it feels like we're in a world of like, just get as much as you can and ingest as much as you can. Which seems like it could maybe have unintended consequences.Alex:Agreed. But explainability is still a big problem with AI. So there's a startup for folks out there listening, create some technology that offers introspection and explainability to large machine learn models. It's not a solved problem. And I don't have a good answer, actually, when do you have enough, when don't you have enough? I think you need to constantly benchmark, constantly look at your accuracy, and have all the protections in place that you are looking for that bias, you are looking for those negative consequences. And that's hard work. That's not like putting some technology gaps in place and a threshold, that's really having a dialogue internally, asking the questions, turning over rocks, what could be the negative consequences here? It's kind of active management right now, and it really needs to be baked into your kind of culture, that it's something that you focus on.Stephanie:Yeah, definitely agree there. So what kind of opportunities do you see? Where do you think conversational commerce should be in the next one to three years? Or what do you think is going to start happening?Alex:So I think the big opportunity right now is actually the topic of our chat is more commerce, like real shopping, real purchasing, real buying, I think conversational commerce, primarily over the last number of years, has been sort of sat in that care, support, follow up space. And now because digital is a necessity, not a convenience, we're starting to see, like I said before, all the little breakage and the flat experiences. So I think the big opportunities are around how can we really help people discover?Alex:So discovery is really hard. With Alexa, for example, you don't know what Alexa can do and can't do, and those kinds of [inaudible]. Discovery is that still a big challenge. Huge opportunity there. It's how do you stitch conversations together with discovery? And to me, that's all about actually modeling the behaviors that we would have in real life. So we're going to go back to stores, we're going to go back to malls, they're going to be changed up, they're going to be very different. I think we're going to see conversations in the digital world follow us in and try to fill in the gaps and start to really help us in a much more kind of blended way. So there's something called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, if you really want to geek out. It's this-Stephanie:Oh, yeah, we've talked about this before-Alex:Oh, cool. Yeah.Stephanie:... on a lot of our other podcasts.Alex:It's this blending of the virtual and physical. Yeah. So I think the big opportunities are in real commerce, and how do we start to blend the physical and the virtual? So we see, for example, especially during COVID, blending conversations with curbside pickup, I'm ready, I'm here, are you here? I want to add this, can you get me... So really trying to fill in all those gaps in those interactions and exchanges. So I think that's where a lot of the kind of next stage plays, is we're going to see conversations start to power a lot more of our transactions and commercial activities, and starting to blend together that physical and virtual, that's where we're spending a lot of our time.Stephanie:That's cool. I mean, so what kind of tech advancements are needed, because I'm even thinking about that Fourth Industrial Revolution and blending that, and okay, if you're walking to a store, I mean, I know there was a while there where store owners were hesitant to even install the beacons so that you would know who's coming in your store. And there was a lot of hangups when it came to retail that didn't allow the digital world to interact with them, because you had to have hardware infrastructure changes, there was a lot needed there. So what kind of things are needed for that advancement to take place?Alex:Yeah, well, a bunch of things. I mean, these things have basically become supercomputers, right? These are more powerful than even the biggest machines 10, 15 years ago. So they're going to take on more and more of the processing. I think image recognition, big space. And then I think a lot of that starts to wrap together the privacy concerns, so giving control back to the consumer about what data I share and when based on my needs and what I want to do. So that's where I think you're going to see a lot of technology advancement is, yes, beacons. Yes, image recognition. Yes, the kind of blending of conversations and in person and then live and all these kinds of things and trying to, like I said, stitch that experience together.Alex:But if I were, again, entrepreneurs out there and technology companies, I would look at those for sure, but I think we also have this kind of renewed interest in privacy and what targeting is. And we can do a whole soapbox, if you want, on the evils of free social media and the hyper targeting, I think there needs to be legislation to almost eliminate some of that, because what we've allowed companies to do is extreme content and extreme information can find audiences now, because the audience is basically free, they just [inaudible]. So I think trying to really understand who I share my data with, why I share my data with, and I'm sharing it only for the purpose that I want, is another whole area of technology that we need to focus on. These are the things at least we're working on, that we feel pretty passionate about.Alex:And then in terms of very specific technologies, I think the combination of conversations with location and image recognition, are going to start to be really interesting, right? Because I'm going to be looking at something, I want to verify something, I want to validate something with a conversation and a dialogue. And a lot of it's going to be dependent about where I am. So we're trying to figure out how those intersect in the right way.Stephanie:Yeah. How do you approach it in a way that garners trust from the consumer? Because I feel like there's been a lot of times, even me personally, if I know I'm talking to a computer, I'm like, "Nope, I'm good." Because I've had so many bad experiences, or I've mentioned it a couple times, you call in to like Verizon, it's like... Pretending to type, like... And you're like, "This is so fake, and I don't like this." And then they can't even help me either. So how do you go about it in a way that informs the person that you're not really talking to a person right now, but still keeps them incentivized to want to try and work that method, if they've kind of been burned in the past?Alex:I think there's two topics there. One, both of them, we have pretty strong opinions about. First, an AI should always identify itself as AI and not try to pretend it's a human. I actually think we'll see legislation on that. Because I think it's bad. And I think a couple of things, even their practical issues with it too, you speak differently than you do to human than you do to an AI or a bot. And it's better if you know for everybody, it's actually better even for the AI builder to know that you know because the model is going to be different, interestingly. So there's actually a real practical reason. But I think there's a lot of ethical reasons, is I should know who I'm speaking to, and what I'm speaking to. That's one.Alex:Two, I think that the gatekeepers, the Facebooks of the world, that want to kind of screen everyone and operate as these Uber, Uber marketplaces that they control the traffic flow, I think we as consumers are going to start to have very negative... I mean, we've started in terms of perception. But I think there's going to be a continued backlash on that. And I think you want to know that if you're into dealing with Verizon, you want to deal with Verizon, you want to deal with this company, you want to deal directly with that company. So, again, we feel really strongly about that, we don't sell data, we work on behalf of the brand, there's no targeting, there's no selling data, there's no advertising.Alex:So I think we're going to see a return to kind of truer commercial relationships. Now, we've benefited, we've gotten all this free stuff by selling our behaviors, we don't sell our data, by the way, we sell our behaviors, right? We sell behavioral changes to Facebooks and Googles of the world. And I think we're going to stop doing that. And I think we have to stop, we have to pay for the things that would give us value, and then we know what we're paying for and we understand how our data is going to be used. And I think that's really, really important. And I think we're going to see a shift over the next year or two, for sure. For sure, in terms of what people want.Stephanie:Yeah, so a lot of brands are probably hearing this and are nervous because of all the changes that are happening with Facebook and privacy rules. And many of them have been very reliant on search ads and Facebook. So what do you see customer acquisition looking like if you kind of can't rely or maybe shouldn't rely on those channels, and now people are maybe opting out of sharing all their data, even though it's still pretty hard to opt out. It's like, you either accept it or [crosstalk] look at a website. Like, "Okay, I guess I'll just accept." But how do you see it working for brands where it's like, "Well, most of my traffic was coming from Facebook. And now that's not really the world we're going to be living in." Is that kind of targeting and traffic and customer acquisition?Alex:Yeah, I mean, there's still going to be these aggregate places, I think they're not going to be eliminated. So our view is moving from a stream and target the stuff at me to enabling people to express their desires, their intents. And then businesses honestly, basically, applying for, "Hey, here's something that based on what you've asked for, we may have." And so I think the user acquisition, I don't have the answer to, if I did, I'd probably start that company, or we would be doing it here at LivePerson, but I think that there will be kind of a flipping the model on its head a bit, right?Alex:So rather than this idea of, I can have some type of content, because I think the ills that we've seen have come from this model, I can have some kind of content, I want to get 50,000 people for a very, very, very low cost, I can go and target those 50,000 people, who don't know about me and who I think have a proclivity to me, and I can go get them. So that was good for small business in some ways, right?Stephanie:Yeah.Alex:You can actually build businesses online. It's bad for lots of other reasons. It's also as a consumer, that you're being introduced to something that... Like the whole serendipity introduction is neat when you're on Etsy, because you know what it is [inaudible], it's not neat when it could be anything. So I think we're going to start to ask consumers to express their needs, and like, what do you want? What are you looking for? Can you define kind of your ecosystem of things that you like and appreciate? And then we're going to ask your permission to actually bring others too. And you're going to set standards, like, "I really only want to hear from companies that have certain social stances, or I only want to hear from companies that have certain environmental stances."Alex:So I think it's really all about empowering the consumer to kind of define, it's a little more work, and I think that's the thing that's going to be interesting to see. Because I think we as consumers have gotten very lazy, it's just like, "I want to scroll and you're going to send me stuff." I think we're going to have to be asking consumers for a little bit more work to define those things and tell us more, so that we can give them things that are much more open, honest and transparent.n again, I don't know what the format it's going to look like, right now-Stephanie:I'm thinking of a whole new browser right now. Just need a whole new browser that operates in that way, because right now it's like, where do you get all those ads and everything? It's from your own Chrome, you're on Safari. But it seems like you need a whole new world for it to operate in that way.Alex:So we're actually experimenting with, call it a messenger, but I wouldn't kind of categorize it that way, that it is intent driven. So you define, I'm looking for X, Y and Z, almost think of the kind of anti Alexa in some ways where it's not just this transactional thing, I want to play this music and turn this thing on, it's much more, I'm looking for this, I need this. And you understand the ecosystem of services and providers that actually can come together, all permission based, all about transparency. Early days, kind of experimenting and thinking it through, and talking to a lot of partners and companies also, because I don't think we're alone. I think many, many folks think there needs to be a change here, and we need to figure it out together.Stephanie:Yep. So we've had a debate on the show a couple of times about this whole trend of shopping on the edge, which to me seems like kind of where you guys are headed up, like being able to have conversations kind of wherever you are. How are you thinking about where people are shopping now? Do you see it moving to being on Instagram, being within Facebook Messenger, being on Tik Tok and being able to have those conversations there from the brand and selling on those platforms, and less about driving directly to one single website, or just on Amazon?Alex:So I do think this idea of the destination starts to fade. I do think that brands will be able to speak to you wherever you are, right? Again, I think it needs to be permission based. I think it needs to be based on your intent. But I do think brand... It's funny. I mean, the idea that you don't have a website sounds insane, right? If you're a company, but what was a website 20 years ago? Nobody had a website really. The brand found you where you were, you saw the store, you looked in different magazines, you saw them on different television channels advertise. It was a much more organic process.Alex:And these gatekeepers have become very, very dominant. And again, I think if that changes where we're not willing to give away our behaviors anymore, or sell our behaviors anymore, then I do think you'll start to see brands engage in ways across all the places you live and breathe. Again, should be permission based, for sure. So I do think this shopping on the edge is kind of funny because isn't that where we all did years ago?Stephanie:Yeah, but now we're back. In the digital world though.Alex:Exactly. But that's where we're going to... The Fourth Industrial Revolution kind of back again is like, I think all these things start to blend together and we don't want, we don't want these kind of singular locations and gatekeepers, I think we're going to start to see different properties have different purposes based on what we're in the mood for, what we need. It's interesting, I think the biggest thing that I would leave you with, and leave listeners to, is digital was convenient. It is now a necessity. There's not more meaningful things that can shape change in terms of the format of an experience and the business models. And I don't think we're going to go back, I don't think we're going to go back to what was before, there's going to be something new, and that [inaudible] is what's really going to drive a lot of it. So I think you're going to have to as a brand be where people are.Stephanie:Yeah, which sounds chaotic for me.Alex:And this idea that people are... It sounds chaotic, but I actually think it democratizes things, I actually think it means that we can eliminate some of these gatekeepers who make billions and billions of dollars on our behaviors, which I think would be a good thing in the world.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. 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 a question and you have 30 seconds or less to answer. Are you ready, Alex?Alex:Sure.Stephanie:All right. First one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Alex:So I'm sorry to repeat, but the fact that digital is now a necessity, I think is going to have one of the biggest impacts, for sure.Stephanie:That's all right. You're allowed to repeat on this show. You can do whatever you want. Let's see, what is something that you believe that many people don't agree with you on?Alex:I'm hopeful. I do a lot of these podcasts, I get a lot of scary questions. I don't go there, you're not going to get me there. I think-Stephanie:[crosstalk]Alex:No. No, you didn't. You didn't. This has been fun and positive, which is great. I really enjoyed it. I'm hopeful about the future, I actually think AI is going to be a powerful tool of change, positive change. I don't think it's going to kill everyone's jobs. I actually think we're going to find new ways to make it augment and enhance us in ways we don't even expect. So I guess in the AI space, in Big Tech space, I spend a lot of time talking, I hear a lot of fear and the sky is falling. And I guess I don't think that way. I think I'm pretty uplifted and positive about what the future is to come.Stephanie:I love that. I'm on the same page. Normally-Alex:Good, yeah, I can get that.Stephanie:... [crosstalk] all that stuff. Yeah, you can get us on a space. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Alex:I don't understand, and I think about it all the time and debate it all the time, and I'm not going to go all political on you, I don't understand the device of this right now, that we can't find ways to communicate and talk and debate real issues to find solutions. We like to divide. And I'm kind of confused by it, to be honest.Stephanie:Do you ever just look back at your news and media days and be like, "That's the stem of it, a lot of it." Like the targeting and the way articles are written. Oh, man.Alex:Yeah, I don't know. I think it's easy to go blame the media. I'm not saying you're doing that. I don't know. I don't know. Are we at peak Western civilization and there's always a crest in your fall? Maybe, that could be it. And I'm part of that problem, probably. I don't know. But I'm confused by it. It's something- [crosstalk]Stephanie:I'd like to see that change. That would be nice to see, [inaudible] everyone just come together in love, like the yellow debate, in a friendly manner. That would be nice.Alex:Yeah. And I think we'll get through it. So I am still positive about the future, I think. But I'm confused by the current state of it.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. Same. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about? And who would your first guest be?Alex:If I were to have a podcast, it would probably be a little bit far from tech. It would be about how we bring magic back into our lives.Stephanie:Oh, I like that.Alex:Yes.Stephanie:You need the Alex Spinelli show.Alex:A little journey I'm on. Yeah, the little journey I'm on. I started going to Burning Man a number of years ago, and there's just an infectiousness of [inaudible] in wonder and magic and art, and dancing in the desert, into your life. And I think more people need to dance in the desert at sunrise.Stephanie:I love that. That's great. All right. And then the last thing, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Alex:The nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. I have a pretty amazing group of friends and family, so I got a lot of nice things done for me.Stephanie:You're a lucky dude.Alex:I am lucky. I really do appreciate it. I think my wife marrying me is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. It changed my life and it's been wonderful.Stephanie:Go her.Alex:She's amazing.Stephanie:We've had a couple of guys say that on the show, which is so sweet. I'm always like, "I hope your wife listens to this then."Alex:I'm lucky. She's amazing.Stephanie:That's awesome. Well, Alex, it's been such a pleasure having you on. Yeah, I love the conversation. Where can people find out more about you and LivePerson?Alex:Yeah, I think you start on liveperson.com. And there's plenty on me on LinkedIn and our various social media. So I look forward to it.Stephanie:That sounds great. Thanks so much.Alex:Yeah. You got it. Thank you.

Things got really hectic in 2 Man Land this week and we realized that if we didn't record an episode Wednesday Evening, we wouldn't be able to before release day. I hadn't yet had a chance to read the Flashpoint comics we were going to cover, so instead of making our loyal listeners wait another week to hear our "beautiful" voices, we opted to do a freestyle episode. (Disclaimer, this episode is only available in audio form)  In this episode we talk about what we've been reading like always, but then we talk Spider-man movie news, a little Wandavision, A little about the Reverse Flash, My neighbors car that sounds like a spaceship every time it turns on, a surprise unboxing from Alex (You'll never guess what he got), and we close out the episode talking about our "Desert Island Superhero Picks"  What are your Desert Island Superhero Picks? You get to pick one thing in each category.         1 run of Comic Books (That you could find assembled in one paperback compendium/omnibus)         1 full series of a superhero TV show (We're assuming this island has a decent tv and dvd/blu-ray player setup....don't ask me where the power comes from...it's magic)          & 1 superhero movie. (Yes just one film. We want you to make the hard choice!)         But don't worry, your island also comes with your choice of one of the following tv series to help balance you out.          The Office, Parks and Rec, Friends, Frasier, Scrubs, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, or The IT Crowd.  (We know we're leaving off a bunch of potential comedies that you might want to have on your island, so feel free to float us some ideas that you would add)       Subscribe to our new YouTube Channel.  2 Man Comic Book Club YouTube Channel   Is there a comic series you would like us to cover on the show, or a topic you would like us to discuss? We would love to hear from you! Find us on Twitter @2mancomicbook,  Instagram @2mancomicbookclub, Facebook @2mancomicbookclub, or email us at 2mancomicbookclub@gmail.com.  Read more comics!

In this episode of Can't Find My Way Home, I was joined by Alex Montyro and Caolan O'Neill-Forde. Together, they are Bookie Baker. Bookie Baker's creative and musical journey, punctuated by an arrest and interrogation in China, is just part of the alt-folk duo's story. Their journey from the beginning has been fuelled by a sense of adventure, entrepreneurial spirit and wanderlust. Since their rather hurried exit from China, the duo have been living and working in Prague, and it's from there where they've really been able to flourish creatively. The lads tell us about their diverse and sometimes surreal experiences of playing to crowds in China. The different locations, the quirky guys who run the sound, and why it's important to at least look the part. We also get into how difficult it is to set up in a new city...well, a new continent from scratch. As well as extolling the virtues of Prague as a creative hub, Alex and Caolan describe how they dealt with the first lockdown and have utilized their film-making background into the band. You have to check out their videos! There's talk of Westerns, sticking to a budget, 5000 piece jigsaw puzzles, Eleanor Rigby and just where the band name originates from. The duo also tell us about new songs that are in the pipeline and the conundrum of how to release them. Are albums really what people want any more? The Top 5 features Justin Beiber, Dua Lipa, Sangwich Sessions, Alex's Dad, Steve and a host of local talent that we should be listening to. All this and singing barbershop quartets in the most unlikely of places! Let's get right to...Caolan and first, Alex… You can follow Bookie Baker www.bookiebaker.com https://www.instagram.com/bookiebakermusic/ https://www.facebook.com/BookieBakerMusic/ https://www.youtube.com/c/BookieBaker/videos Spotify http://spoti.fi/3dcDxgz Can't find My Way Home Can't Find My Way Home https://linktr.ee/cantfindmywayhome --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/craig-branch/message

GEORGE:   All right, guys. Welcome back to another episode of the did George show, where I make up intros off the top of my head, because people are amazing and I'm stoked to have them. And today's guest is somebody that I've wanted to interview for probably five years, except I didn't have a podcast nor reason to talk to him.And then we became best friends overnight. And so I'm excited beyond belief to have somebody that I look up to. I've considered a mentor through his teachings and what he's done. He stands for absolutely everything that is ethical entrepreneurship, caring about human beings, making a difference, building legacy businesses, and tolerance absolute zero bullshit will doing any of it. Well, Also leading by example, you know, that magic thing that we don't see a lot of on the internet where it's do, as I say, not as I do, because I don't want you to see what I do. Well, Alex Charfen is here today, CEO Charfen. He has built massively successful companies, navigated some of the biggest downturns of our world and my lifetime, and always come out on top with a smile on his face, grounded in the values that are important to him, his family, and leads by example.And so without further ado, Alex, welcome to the show. ALEX:   Thanks George. That was one of the best intros I've ever gotten. And that was awesome. GEORGE:   I feel like M and M and eight mile on Sunday mornings at 8:00 AM before I have my coffeeALEX:  I want that on my phone so I can play it each morning. Before I start workingGEORGE:   We'll send you the audio clip and then we can do it like the rock used to do as alarm codes, right? Like get up. And he yells at you. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm super, super excited to have you, man. I'm honored. This has been a long time coming and before we get into the deep, deep, deep stuff for the show, whatever, you know, navigating turns, we're going to end up in today. The first question that I always ask everybody to set context, the humanizes, and you have a lot of these, so feel free to take creative freedom with this one.What is the biggest mistake that you've ever made in business? And what was the lesson that you took away from  it?ALEX: That's like trying to like walk into an Amazon warehouse and say, which is the best box. Cause there's so many options. You know, George when I consider mistakes in business, so many of them, I don't look at them as mistakes anymore because. I've learned from them to find where I am now.I feel like almost every mistake, every huge challenge that I created has, has actually taught me something and moved me forward. And I think the one place where I would say that. That there were actual mistakes that I regret. And, and, and here's why I regret them. I don't regret the learning from them, but the mistakes that I made were with people when I was younger, especially there was a tremendous amount of collateral damage and the businesses that I ran. I was one of those people, not any more or not at all anymore, but I was one of those people that if I was going to separate with somebody, I actually had to break them, break the relations.I had to make it okay with me.  I had to make it so that it was so horrible that like we can never talk again. And when I look back at some of the separations that I had where people were either terminated or left, the companies that I ran, I feel like those are some of the biggest, the mistakes I made.And, and, you know, if I could go back and do it over again? I would, I would, you know, I would tell my younger self that you don't have to completely destroy a relationship to put it on pause. And you don't know, I have to completely demonize somebody to have them leave your company. Like those are all natural things that happened in the world.And  today with contrast,when somebody leaves our organization now, or when somebody decides to go to another opportunity, doesn't happen often anymore. But when it does. It's totally different. You know, I've actually, I've, I've led several several employess because of COVID and some other reasons we've actually let a few people go.And it's interesting cause I've remained connected with them. We connect every once in a while, you know, we talk. And so having that experience of being able to work with somebody and then continue the relationship, even though it's no longer a working relationship, it has been extraordinary. And when I was young, I did not even allow space for that. And I think that was, this longterm mistake, honestly, that comes from a childhood of trauma and a childhood of bullying and a childhood of really challenging relationships where I didn't understand how to navigate them. And I brought that forward into my business career. That's the biggest reason.GEORGE: And there's so much gold in there. This is why we get along. So for some context guys, when Alex and I reconnected, we got on zoom for a half an hour and then were like, we need an hour that we need three hours. Now let's just keep talking all day every day because I was like, I was like, sorry, Katie, you can have them back now. I'm like, I'm getting my very much dopamine hit and I'm not gonna deny this, that I wanted this. Like, this was very much my drug today. And I'm okay with this one, right? This is one of those, like, I can go seek it as I need, you know, Alex, one of the things that I think is so imperative and we talked about this, but you and I have so many similarities in this.Is that in the beginning, right? Is this collateral damage? Right? I got feedback that there were trails of dead bodies behind every success. And there were two sides of it for me that were tough. Number one is I never celebrated, right. There was no space because it was never good enough. Right. And so that took from everybody and made it.And then really, I think, as an entrepreneur and a self-aware entrepreneur, and you talk about this as like evolutionary hunters and the way that you do this, I think it was your EPT, your entrepreneurial personality types. You know, one of the things that I think is so amazing as entrepreneurs is that  we're driven for change.We want things to be better, but I think what the razors edges or the tight rope that we like to ride a unicycle down from is to come from when we go down the middle. And there's that part of us as entrepreneurs we're down there, the middle, all the one side was insecurity ego. It doesn't matter.It's never enough I'll sacrifice anything and then we've spent our life at this point, working towards self-awareness. You love, compassion, empathy, relationship, even you just said.I didn't think this was possible a couple of years ago. Like, wait, somebody can leave my organization and be better than when they got there.And we still have a relationship, like can still text. We can talk, right? Like this isn't, you know, purgatory exile, like we're going back in Mayan culture. So, what are some of the things? Cause you have like five core values at your company. You guys stand for humans. Like you stand for change, you stand for being, but I know that this is prevalent everywhere.And I had one of my mentors at a very young age Allen out.  Alex told me that and I learned this as a Marine, too. Like my job wasn't to keep people underneath me. My job was to get myself fired and get them better than me. And there's a point where. You know, they have to leave the coop and they have to grow.But I think the biggest distinction is it was talked about in there world, but really it's our, our growth as a human, like on our side, like the self-awareness side. So what are some of the things that you do that you focus on? Like you help companies with operations, with culture, with flow, with team and people like, how do you go about that?And what are some of the things that you keep to keep your keel in the water as you navigate that? ALEX: Oh, man. There's that question, George.GEORGE: So that's the point. Now I can drink my coffee over here and go to town. Yeah. Where did you go? ALEX: George, I think in order to answer that question, I kind of have to take a step back and, and talk about where, where, like, I've come from.If you want to know how things are kept in motion now, I think we have to first draw, contrast as to how things were before. Yes, sir. When I look at when I was younger and well into my twenties I experienced a tremendous amount of trauma and I had the same, like this is, this came up in our, we just had a three day event with 200 companies around the world and it came up this week.I started, I taught, I talk openly about trauma and how it drives us in the present. And I often tell our clients until you are ready to work through your trauma, you are destined to create, or, and you will only continue to create trauma. Cause it's a pattern for people, hurt people. And that's really how it works.You know, when I look at somebody who's causing havoc in the world, what I see as somebody who's severely traumatizedand acting through those things. And so for me, when I was 26 years old, I went through a really severe breakup. I'm 47 now and at the time to do okay. I actually was, um, I was uncomfortable enough that the only time I felt comfortable in it was when I was drinking.The only time I really fell asleep and stayed asleep was when I was. Kind of loaded and I wasn't used to having those feelings like I had when I was younger. I had definitely I,  was no lack of time in bars or drinking and entertaining and doing those things. But I hit this period where it almost became a necessity and not almost it became a necessity and it was severely challenging to go through that.And. My mom was a therapist in California and I was talking to her about it. I had tried cognitive behavioral therapy. I don't know if you've tried this too. You go in like, I don't, I don't want to demonize all cognitive behavioral therapy, but for me, CBT was so hard because you go in, you spill your guts and the person across the room.I see. How does that make you feel? And then you spill your guts more and then they say, I see, how does that make you feel? And then you spend more. And by the third time they say, I see you, how does that make you feel? I actually responded one time to a therapist. It makes me feel like I want to get up, knock you out because you're not helping me.I feel like you're just, this is frustrating. , I feel agitated and yeah. Triggered and all that stuff. And so I stopped doing that. And I remember calling my mom and she said, there'd be called EMDR. And, it's eye movement, desensitization and reprogramming. It'sa very weird sounding therapy, but it's actually amazing.I, you know, George, it's interesting that you were in the military and we, we talked so much about trauma because even back then, when I was 26, I had some friends that had been in the teams. And, they were VR for Navy seals. Yep. It was actually this huge experiment in the military to see if EMDR would help with the offloading of  trauma and return to service.And they were getting incredible results with it. So for me that growth process has been understanding my trauma. Understanding where so much of my reactivity and almost automatic behaviors came from. And, and so much of a processing, what had happened to me has now allowed me to become more present and aware and you know, it's interesting, George.I used to think that I was so present and so aware when I was in my twenties and now I look back and it's like the funniest thing in the world because I was so detached and , not even feeling my feelings and understanding what was going on. I didn't even know how to interpret what was happening.And then I thought I did so much better in my thirties and I'm like, you know, nailed it. And then I look back and I'm like, no, I just had a better understanding, but I was still working through so much of it. And finally, I feel like in about the past 10 years in years, I've gone into another year of really being able to release things and process things and, and work through things.And that's been a combination of a ton of breath  work. Breath work, I think has been one of the most effective things that I've done a tremendous amount of EMDR therapy and, and going back to then as needed, not like just when it's acute, but when I feel stuck or when I feel like I have writing blocks or anything like that.And then, really a lot of self exploration and a lot of and if you wanted to put a layer on all of that, It's process, structure and routine. And it's you say that this is what a day is like the process structure and routine that allows you to grow a business, grow your life, have what you want in your life.But for most of my life, I fought process, structure and routine more than anything else. Oh yeah. I had that, that, that impression that like, as an entrepreneur, What makes you successful is being whatever you want, anytime that you want. And so I held onto that myth, that illusion, that totally illusory place, it does not exist where you can be a successful entrepreneur and just wake up and do whatever the heck you want every day.It doesn't really work. I mean, you might be able to be a yeah, no, , there's not a situation where it works. And so. Um, I think the biggest shift for me has been committing to process, structure and routine, like up to and including even on a Sunday this morning, I got up, did my morning planning, went through my morning routine.Like I do every other day, sat down in a line with my family. It's like now it's an edict. It's not an option anymore. Cause I know that's where my strength. And really that's where my be present and productive and persuasive and influential. That's what it comes from.GEORGE: Totally. There's so much in that And I want to, I want to nail some, so people have heard me talk about EMDR before. Um, but I glance over it.  Cause very rarely am I across from somebody who I'm like, Oh, you too. Right. Like, Oh, I, I remember, like I remember we did CBT and my wife actually walked us out. She was with me cause I was trying to process childhood trauma stacked on military trauma, stacked on battle entrepreneurial trauma.And she's like, this is not going to help you this like ALEX: 70 creative relationshipGEORGE: Oh yeah. Oh you, Oh, you, you re like, I mean, it's like a trauma definition, right? Like you open the book and the generic and it was a picture of every instance of my life. How they all exacerbated each other in different scenes.Yeah, right. Like, yeah. It was like, it was like almost like a storyboard for a movie at this point. AndI remember one EMDR appointment and I came out my wife's like, you're a different person, like one appointment, one appointment. And I think you nailed something too. And I think what's so important, Alex.And this is like the undertone of what you're talking about. And if anybody hasn't caught this yet, this success as an entrepreneur on the outside, comes from the commitment to the work on the inside. A hundred percent and it is a daily and I mean, daily committed practice to come in. And like EMDR for me was two years of, I think once or twice a week.And then it was like a once a year if needed. And now I just texted him and like just texting him, like gets me back into like where I need to go but I think, I think it's so important, like to reach the levels. When we talk about this, the two things that being number one is this commitment to self.Right. And like, it's what you teach now. It's the discipline, the intentionality, the process, the structure, everything that you're doing, but also the awareness of what it really means to be an entrepreneur and what we're doing.  And you hit this and we live in a world right now where it's like, Oh, laptop, lifestyle, and boom, boom, boom.And yeah, you do whatever you want. I'm like, that's not what it's like. That Instagram life is not real. And entrepreneurship is amazing. It is the most freeing, powerful job, you know, whatever business opportunity on the planet. But within that, we also have to create our own containers and structure to make it that efficient.If not, it's just a new form of addiction to hide from the traumas and the pain that we've never worked on. no question. And I think, I think, and for you, like you say, yo, you're in your forties, I'm like, I became aware yesterday of things I was doing that I wasn't aware of. , I think it's this process and awareness, but I think it was like last year, maybe after the birth of my son, where I was like looking at it and I was like, Oh, you mean that?Like my name can't carry everything. And I say something and magically a million dollars appears like, why? Like, I don't understand, like, why didn't my launch crush? Like why don't my Facebook ads work? And nobody else's does, like, why don't they just work? Cause I deserve them to work. Right? Like there was this.There was this thing that like I had to be aware of and process through and eat some humble pie. And so there's so many golden nuggets that you said. Um, and, and the first question I asked you was like, how do you know, operate forward and this point, and you nailed it. But I think one more thing I want to unpack before we even get there is in the very beginning, when I asked you what was the biggest mistake or lesson, you said something so subtle, but so empowering statement to where you are. And you said the challenges I created. Not the challenges that happen to me, not the challenges that somehow magically fell on my plate, like the challenges I created and there's this level of ownership that we do in breath, in work, in life, in modalities that puts us in this situation of awareness and the ability to shift something.But I see a whole lot of time and we both coach entrepreneurs a whole lot of like, I don't know why this happened and this happened and they did this to me and they did this to me and it's like an advocation of responsibility and it was so subtle when you said it, but it's so powerful to hear you talk about it.Can you unpack that a little bit of like the difference between, you know, my business partner failed and walked away versus like I created this challenge.ALEX:   Yeah, no question George. So. Years ago. I read this book. I think I can't remember who it was by, but I think it might've been Mark Victor Hansen. I think it was called the millionaire messenger.And it was a book that you read in two directions. So very interesting book where it had kind of a nonfiction and a fiction book together. I don't remember a ton about that book. I remember on one page, they had this graphic and it was the word responsibility with a line and underneath it blame and then underneath it said live above the line.And I remember that I actually have that on my well now with a couple of other equations that we've created as a company. But that responsibility over blame. I remember when I read it, I saw it and it was so 19. I'm like, no, you can blame. You can still like, yeah, you don't have to take responsibility for everything.And that was a journey that was probably a few years of like really working through that and understanding it. And then I remember one day it just clicked, you know, as honorable the faster we realized that we are for everything and we can take responsibility for everything. The faster we start to actually control our lives, create our destiny and be able to go in the direction that we want.I used to be the same as most people when I was younger and I had my business. You know, 911 happened for about eight weeks before. One of our biggest events when I owned a huge events company in Latin America. And I remember it happening and having the feelings of like, how could this happen to us?How insanely selfish and egotistical was the statement. 911 happened to us. Like, as I say it right now, I actually get kind of sick feeling in my stomach that I ever thought that way. But I remember actually saying it out loud and not even feeling like not feeling the. Body reactions and negative feelings, you should feel of making a statement that egotistical, which in retrospect shows me just how separated I was from my true self, just how detached I was.And as entrepreneurs what we work with our members on is responsibility over blame. Like how do you live in a world where you take responsibility for everything that's going on? And I have people, especially in today's timeframe, say things like, Oh, well, you can't be responsible for COVID.Sure you can be responsible for your reactions. You can be responsible for how you show up. You can be responsible for what you're going to allow and not allow into your mind. You can be responsible for how you lived through this situation. And, you know, I always tell people the bigger, the crisis, the bigger, the opportunity there's going to be more self billionaires made in this timeframe that at any other timeframe in the human history, And anyone who wants to argue that?Just go look, it's all ready. Oh, ready? We're all. We're only six or seven months in and look at the hundreds of billions of dollars of company value that has been added to the companies that we're well positioned and ready to go forward. And I think for us that's one of the things that are not for us, for me.That's one of the things that's really shifted for me is that now, regardless of what it is, I take responsibility and I put this on Facebook the other day. One of the observations that finally got through I've learned so much of what I understand in business and so much of what I know about relationships and how to create momentum as an entrepreneur has been observational.And one of the observations that has become crystal clear over time is that the more successful and entrepreneur. The more quickly, they turn every obstacle into an opportunity. The more quickly they turn every crisis into an opportunity. I've been around people that regardless of what's going on, they're just constantly shifting to housing and opportunity.How is this an opportunity? Most negative thing in their entire life. How can I create something better out of this? How do I grow from this? How do I move from this and that? You know, not that I'm a hundred percent there. I don't think, I don't know that I ever will be, but I'm so much closer to seeing everything as an opportunity.Than I ever was before. And so when Covid hit, I actually had somebody text me after one of my lives. And they're like, Hey man, it sounds like you're hearing the crisis sign. I'm like, Oh dude, that is not the impression I want to give. I'm not sharing it on. But I am fully conscious that this is the biggest opportunity a lot of us have had, and we should admit that to ourselves and get ready for it and go out and change the world because the world needs us now more than it ever  has.GEORGE:   totally.I think too, and you nailed this and, Oh man, there's so much here and you, and I think we might've been separated at birth at this point, which is so. Yeah, no, no, it was, it was like, and for those of you wondering like only like 32 people or so have my phone number and Alex doesn't give his out connected years ago.Never really talked to him. We both realized we both had our numbers in our phones,  totally.I think too, and you nailed this and, Oh man, there's so much here and you, and I think we might've been separated at birth at this point, which is so. Yeah, no, no, it was, it was like, and for those of you wondering like only like 32 people or so have my phone number and Alex doesn't give his out connected years ago.and we were like, okay, there's a reason. And the timing and everything. And what you said, Alex, Uh, it's about the pursuit of turning things into opportunities, not the perfection of what it looks like.And I think as an entrepreneur for me, you know, cause my ego needs some love at this point in this moment. So I'm going to make a statement, you know, because I'm learning so much in this time. But when I think about it, for me, one of the things that I really fell in love with after processing the belief around it was that there is no finish line, but it's what I choose to do every day about it.And. You know, there were parts of COVID like I lost over a million dollars under contract. I lost two companies and 70 grand a month in MRR in basically like 60 days. And I'm like still on paper. I'm in financially. One of the hardest places I've ever been in. And I'm the happiest and clearest I've ever been.And it wasn't an overnight, it was a, I feel like, crap, what am I going to do today? I feel like crap, what am I going to focus on today? And instead of it taking six months or three years, eight years of depression, it took like a week and it was, I feel this way. I acknowledge how I feel. That's not going to change.What am I going to do about it then that created the opportunity for opportunity. Like it created the ability to see the opportunity. Yes. It's like when we sit in these rooms as entrepreneurs, consider it a virtual room of made of Rome, a metaphorical room, whatever you want to call it. I say this all the time, you know, from breath work and the therapy trauma that I've done in the work that I've done in personal defense.And it's like the worst thing you can stay as stock. We are evolutionary creatures. We are supposed to evolve. We are supposed to move forward. And you know, I heard this the other day and it's like, you want to know what anxiety is? It's unused energy move. Yeah. And I was like, Whoa, like I've been doing it for years, but it was this simple thing.But then when I think about the compartment of entrepreneurship, what is anxiety, I'm like it's stagnation in our biggest enemy, which is our brain. It knows our fears. It knows our insecurities. It knows our habits. It knows our addictions. And yet we think we can out convince it that somehow we're going to feel better about it.Where, what you talk about this is how I feel. I'm aware. This is how I feel. Breath gets you there. Cold therapy gets you there. Movement gets you there. Okay. If this is how I feel, I have two choices. I can either succumb to this feeling and surrender and die, or I can acknowledge it, which that this feeling is here.And I can take a step in a different direction. And it's something that like I've been obsessing about, like on a different level of obsession. And it's probably had one of the most profound effects on everything in my life. And, you know, financially to gain will come and it has already, but even outside of that, like the happiness, the joy, and go back to deployments.Like I remember like I'll never forget. I hit some, all I'm about to cry. I hit Somalia. When I was 19 years old, I just turned 20 and I spent 13 months in my life and probably one of the worst places on this planet. And I'll never forget, like, seeing people wrapped in carpets on the side of the road, cause they couldn't afford to throw them out of them, burning dead by.And I was like, I was like, I'm not a tough guy. I want to go home. I didn't have a home to go to, like I left trauma to get there. And like I remember for 13 months I was like, get me out of here. Like I can't be here. I don't know habit. I didn't have that choice. So luckily I found a few people that mentored me and I found waits and I found, you know, certain therapies and things that I could do, but I'm just, I just remembered, like if I say came to any of that, I would have died.Like I would have just died. I would have just stopped moving the whole world crashed and crushed on me and it wouldn't have gotten me anywhere. And it took me a long time to be able to talk about it, some of these things and to process them in for me, what I struggle with sometimes is that like, what I saw is like 1% of what some of my friends saw.Like 1% and I can't even imagine, you know, what that was there, but I think the biggest thing that I always took away from everything, and I thank the Marine Corps for this is like, I wasn't given the chance to stop. I wasn't. It was like, Hey, and like we say this, like, Oh, they don't want you to feel, no, they do.They don't really totally do, but they don't want you to stop. And it's this thing of like this pursuit for full word and growth and movement as we go. And so, you know, with what you're saying, The one thing that I wanted to hit and this is a really big one and this is so subtle, but when I did personal film, I was getting coached and they were teaching the distinction versus responsibility.Victim versus responsible victim versus responsible, right. They really push the boundary on the belief of this, right? Like a hundred percent responsible, a hundred percent of the time. And it was this interesting thing because we would get in trouble for saying, I take responsibility. And I was like, I don't get it.I'm taking they're like, you can't take it. You never didn't eat. There was no point in which you never had it. ALEX:   There's no point in what you gave it up. And so you can't take it backGEORGE: You just feel like it did. And this distinction, like, it probably took me 10 years to understand, because there's so many times in business, right.Or as a consultant or with a student, or even in my own business, I like, Oh, I'll take it. And then I have to be like, Oh wait, no way. That was mine. The whole time. Yeah. And it's like this embodiment of it that is powerful. Like when we think about it. And so I didn't, I've never, I've never talked about a lot of the stuff that I, I experienced, like from a mindset perspective, they don't think I've ever been in the point to like really, um, process us.But you know what I love about you, Alex, and what I, you, you have this childlike curiosity and excitement mast with this tight container of structure that basically guaranteed success. ALEX: Thank you, but I appreciate thatGEORGE: Like, um, yeah, like I'm surprised I'm not walking around in diapers is my son's out of them. Like at that level of management. Cause there's times I feel like that, but you know, with that, I think what's so important and so powerful from like what I noticed with you. It's like when you get self-aware right.So you were talking about basically being, self-aware identifying what's here, understanding that we're responsible understanding that, you know, results equals opportunity depending on how we choose to see it. What I also love about that is that as you do this work on yourself, that awareness gives you a tool to see possibility versus resistance, right?And again, gives you the ability to react or not to react, to respond on a diamond pivot. Because there's no insecurity ridden. And I think about the times as an entrepreneur or where I was stuck and it was stocked because I had a belief that I was supposed to look a certain way, or it was supposed to be a certain way.And here's the news, flash entrepreneurship is basically a guaranteed. It's not going to look like you think it is every day of every moment for the rest of your life. Right. It's a commitment to chaos and it, and it's navigating that. And so in your, in your journey, and, and you've been in this game a long time, I mean, you, I don't even remember this specific you got, but like single-handedly denting the real estate crash market recovery and, you know, building like half a billion dollar businesses and I'm over here doing it for everybody else, but myself.And I'm a self jab on that one, but Oh, well, George, I've done some of that  myself too.ALEX:  I've you know, and, and I just, I don't want to, I don't want to like leave you on the hook there as a coach, as a consultant. One of the things that I'm now dealing with at 47 is that I've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs build businesses bigger than I have.And, and I, you know, I really like year before last, I sat down with Katie and I'm like, you know, Katie. I've done this too many times for other people this time, the business plan has to include us doing it for  ourself.and this is, this is like my realization really in just like the past 24 to 30 months.And when the reason we restarted this company from scratch was energetic, not legal or anything else. It was, we wanted to shut everything down and start over. Cause this is going to be different. Yeah. And so July of 2017, Katie and I hit the reset button, shut everything down, went down to no team members started from zero, and this is the business that we're going to create the success out of that. just like, we help other peopleGEORGE:  I'm  for those of you listening, if you can't tell, like I've been an Alex fan boy for a long time, but like out of, out of respect, like out of like genuine, pure. Respect because there's these things like we, Alex, and I joke a lot.We talk about the state of the industry that we're in. We're probably going to unpack that in a little while, but yeah. You know, like people don't even pretend to be like snakes in the grass anymore. They're like, no, no, no, no. I don't care if the grass is there not, I want you to see me. And like, there's these people that walk it and they talk it and they believe it and they do it.And it's congruency. And Alex is one of those people, which I hide, we admire and respect. And I think it's an important point. Alex is an entrepreneur. I don't know about you, but you know, for me, I needed to build it for other people. To get those lessons, to have the awareness and understand why I was doing it to then be able to come in and be like, Oh, I still get to do it.And I think healed that part of me that didn't think I was good enough that I could only do it for other people. And also give myself a back door out of those daily routines and commitments and structure that would prove my core trauma wrong as a child. That I'm not good enough because that's really what it is like for me.If for me, it was like, Oh, it's so easy. I'll go, I'll diagnose your problems. I'll give you the things. I'll help you do it. I'll pour all my energy into you. Then you'll like me, and then I'll be good enough. And then at the same time I'm living on that dopamine and validation will also deny my own sovereignty of that.I can do this and I know this. And then the belief system there, and the pain that I had to experience was you do deserve this. You can have a bigger impact this way, but you're good enough. And, and that had to happen in silence. Yeah. You're worth it. Right. Like for me, my core wound is I'm not good enough.ALEX:  I'm having like so many different, like first, I just want you to know this is a very validating conversation. And when you operate at the level that you and I operate as entrepreneurs, they're not maybe not the level, but when you operate at the level of awareness that we operate up.You often become, you often get invalidated because the other people around you don't even understand the conversation. Right. You know, I think what you just said, that is so true for so much of my career. Now, in retrospect, it's only, you see this in retrospect, I was not in the pursuit of success for myself, cause I didn't feel worthy.And I actually felt like the people around me were so much better than I was. That I put all my energy into helping those people all my time in it.  Other people get become far more successful than I was because in so many ways I still felt like I was, you know, the, the short, you know, Mex, lat, Latin American accent, chubby kid in school.Cool. That everybody made fun of it. And I really, you know, when I was at, I did not have a lot of friends. I had a really challenging childhood. I wasn't good at relationships and all of that carried forward to the business world to the point where. But, it made me an incredible consultant because I wanted to help everybody so bad so that I would get validation and be okay and be worthy and not be that kid that I was running away from.And dude, Oh man, now I'm going to get emotional. And, um,as time went on, what I realized was, and what I am realizing is that I could honor that kid. And that I could actually love that child,and be okay with who I used to be and understand why I was the way I was and understand everything that I went through. And the more that I was able to process it and be aware of it.And the more I was able to let go of the common entrepreneurial belief that  other people had it worse than I was. You kind of said it earlier. It's like a habit for us. As soon as we claim any type of trauma, we almost, I have to let out this relief valve. Oh well, but it wasn't as bad for me. You know, there was other people who had them and it wasn't that bad for me and it, but I I'm just going to claim a little bit of it.Yep. And the reality is every entrepreneur I've ever worked with has trauma that needs to be explored and validated and understood so that they can show up in the world the way that they want to, and the excessive reactivity that we carry around with us and the feelings we carry around with us, you know, George's, it's, it's one of the things that drives us into pursuit because.Here. Here's where I am today in my career. I understand that the goal is not the goal. The goal is the journey. Yes, it really is. It's the process it's going through it because here's what I know as an entrepreneur, as I have this analogy or theory that we are evolutionary hunters and I call it an analogy.But to me, I really do think this is evolutionary fact. We are that small percentage of the population that gets up every morning. Can't turn the motor off. It's always running we can't relax. We don't sit right. And we have this innate motivation to go into the future, create a new reality, come back to the present and then demand.It becomes real, no matter what we put up with. But the reality is, is no matter what goal or outcome or whatever it is that we put out there, as we are crossing the finish line, it loses all importance to us. As we're approaching the finish line, we start going, does this really matter? And it's because if you think about, if we're evolutionary hunters, The goal was never  the hunt just keeps the tribe alive.The goal is you go back on the hunt. Yeah. The goal is you stay hunting. The goal is keep doing it over and over again. And there's food for everybody for the whole time that we needed. And so, you know, I look at it, I, I feel like we are programmed to be in pursuit, but not really finished. And so the whole goal is entrepreneurs is how do you keep.How do you keep creating that future? That is compelling enough and bright enough and exciting enough and engaging enough that you do what it takes to put yourself through the crucible. GEORGE: Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. When you said, and by the way, thank you for the accountability on the, uh, I had it way worse or they had it.ALEX: it twice this week in my own event. I said, and then, and I even pointed out like, Hey, I just use the release valve. I want everyone to know that that's like an unhealthy behavior of invalidating yourselfGEORGE: And it's basically saying, I don't believe in myself enough, or I'm not in my space or power enough to own the fact that this was my truth.Yeah. And, and what I'm looking for. And quite frankly, as everybody wants to get into the monitor, George, what I'm looking for is for you too, without realizing and liked me a little bit  more because I experienced that while also add vacating it and doing it in a very subtle manipulative way and not in a bad manipulative way at heart bins in our subconscious all the time.Um, but this is why I love having friends like Alex, we get to talk about these things. Um, And the real, the real stuff. Well, I think what's so important about the real stuff. Alex is like, we talk about this, right? And we were talking about like, why we did what we did and why we consult them, why we still consult.And what I love is looking back. Cause I love my process through all of it. Like I had to do that. I had to learn that I had to be there. I had to not get that check. They had to not pay me that million dollars. Like I had to have all that happen. And now looking at it too the other side of it for me is I never understood the consequences of doing it for everybody else.The amount of sacrifices and collateral damage I caused because I wanted everybody else to like me versus everybody else respect me. And it was like, I'll go to a dinner. I didn't need to be at that dinner. I'll go to an event. I didn't need to be at that event. I'll go to that meeting. That was not a meeting.Like there were all these like ego fests that were. You know, validation collection, dopamine collection causing collateral damage and the ones I think that we swore as entrepreneurs, that we were doing it  "right". Like I'm doing it for my family. I'm like, well now pretty sure. My three year old son, isn't going to be like, daddy, don't go to them zoo with me, or don't see me for three days because you go to this meeting because you want these people to like you versus do the work that it's there.And I think, you know, if I could give a gift to any entrepreneur, uh, it's the gift of awareness of the. The impact and the consequences, both positive and negative. That happened when we do advocate that sovereignty as entrepreneurs. And we, and we get into that because it took me a long time. And I think it's still a practice, but it's a practice that I've, I love at this point.Like I kind of love saying no at this point. Sure. Can you do now? Why we don't need to, like, we have a dinner meeting. I'm like, no, we can have a zoom meeting. I'm not leaving. Right. ALEX: Well, you get to the point where it's saying no, actually becomes the dopamine hit because you have, I mean, and this takes a while, so I don't want anyone listening, not to think that it's going to happen by Monday, but what happens is.When you stop abdicating the responsibility, you have to create the life you want. And you start actually, cause man, George, when you were just talking about going to the meeting and doing this and doing that you just described like most of my thirties,  if there's, if there was an attention, getting the opportunity, I was in that attention, getting an opportunity with a whole line of justification for it.If there was a time and I got tons of opportunities, if I could get up on it. Really important stage with famous people. Like I was there no matter what. And a lot of the time it was for nothing else than the ego hit. Like really, it didn't even really build our business and build notoriety, but it was just building an ego hit. And I, when I look back at so much of that need for approval that need for validation that need for confirmation as an entrepreneur, when you finally realized that is so much of the, almost the automatic programming that's running, the decisions you're making, when you can start backing out of that and rising to a level of intention, everything changes.I had this really confronting Meaning with a coach of mine. I had this coach a while ago named Kirk Dando, super talented two guy and, um, Kirk and I became friends. That's why he was working with me. Most of the work that he did was with privately funded companies where he took a percentage and he was like a non named board member in dozens of companies.And we became friends. So he, he started working with me and we did a few, one days and he did a 360 for me and came in and interviewed my team. And he was doing the delivery of the 360. And we were in the middle of like, what about my team and what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. And he said, you know what, Alex.You don't have investors behind you. Let's just cut the BS, man. What's the most important thing in your world. And the reason he said you didn't have investors behind you is cause I had options. Most of his CEOs didn't have options. He said that he was like, you have options. Let's talk about this. I said, well, George, that's not George.I said, Kirk, that's easy. The most important thing in my world is Katie and my kids. And he goes, great. Let's take five minutes, get your calendar out and get your bank account out. And let's look at your spending time and spending money on Katie and your kids. And that way we can see if you're growing and you're the most important thing in your world.And I know he could see the blood drain out of my face. Cause at that point it was like getting called to the principal's office. I remember immediately thinking, Oh, there's no way my calendar or my bank account are going to show any type  of like allegiance or affiliation to my family. Because up to, and including in the time I was with Kirk, I had been pushing them aside to get all this stuff done.And here's, what's interesting that meaning changed things. I actually went back to my room and sat down with Katie and I'm like, Katie, Kirk asked me this question that kind of knocked me backwards and I shared it with her and we talked about it for a long time. And from that point forward, I started shifting and I started saying, I need to assign responsibility to the things that are important to me.I needed to put more time to things that are important to me. You know, and, and I, I started building process, structure and routine around what was important to me. It's structured have spend time with family structure to make sure I was connected with my daughters structure to make sure that Katie and I had the time that we needed, otherwise, everything else just competes and wins.And here's, what's interesting, George by demand. Yeah. Ending the space and time for myselfby making that the most important thing. Suddenly my decision making in business got infinitely better. And almost overnight, we started moving in the right direction rather than spinning our wheels and not having things happen.And this is the thing that always like for most people feels like an oxymoron. When you first started doing this, I was putting less time in, but getting more results because when you start throwing up the constraints that are important, you look at time differently and you spend it differently. When you start allocating time to where you should be, not what you know to where you actually, when I say should be when you started actually allocating time around.What you want your life to look like your business will shift in a way that it actually gets to be the business that you want. You start building an organization that you really want. You start doing the things that you want. And it's interesting today at 47, you know, we, we, like I said, we reset a few years ago.We're around a little, little over 2.1 or 2.2 million in recurring revenue, right? Yeah. Now we're building this company completely differently. I'm, I'm absolutely not responsible for delivering. I built myself out of a lot of the responsibilities. And today I have a  business that I love working with people that are like incredibly fun people to work with.And I'm more focused on people development than anything else right now. Cause that's where we're going to grow the nexttime in our business. But what's most important is I wake up every morning. I align with my kids. They hang out with me, they know what we do. We talk openly. There's a completely different dialogue in our house.And all of that, I think makes me not think all of that I know. Makes me the entrepreneur I actually want to be, and it actually allows me to start making decisions for the person I'm becoming instead of the person I'm running away from. Yeah. And I think for entrepreneurs, you know, I think that the same, I've heard the same, say, you know, make the decisions for the person you're becoming, not the person you are.And I'm like, that's not how it works for entrepreneurs. We either make decisions for the person we're becoming or the person we're running away from. We don't make decisions for the person. We never get to the place where you're making decisions in the moment because we don't live in the present. Nope.What that small percentage of the population that doesn't really even deal well with the no.GEORGE: That's why we have to practice breathALEX: That's what I, you know, what was I did it this morning. I did like, like three huge empty breath holds this morning and just like feeling the experience of whether my body was calling for oxygen or my mind.And where was it coming from and how does this make me react during the day? And, you know, I get up from breathwork sessions now I laid down on my floor and do a breathwork session. I actually feel like I'm in the present moment for a period of time. Yeah. It's interesting. You like get up and you're like, Whoa, the world is really intense if you're here, you know?GEORGE: Yeah. That's why I get up so early in the morning, like I used to get up at four 30 for my ego to show everybody I got up at four 30. Now I get up at three 30 now I get up at three 30, so nobody knows. And like, people think I'm nuts, but I was like, I wake up with my kids at six and when I was getting before 35, like my, I would get home, my son will be awake. My wife wanted to sleep in, but she'll be up. And I was like, am I doing this? And I was like, I'm doing this for the wrong reasons. Like if I get up at three 30, I get. Two and a half hours of alone time I'm home before my son wakes up, I'm done with my writing. I'm completely present for the day. I'm supporting my wife with what she wants based on her job and like her responsibilities.And I was like, yeah, that feels better. Like, and that's like, and like, by the way, I don't listen to music. I don't listen to podcasts. I work out in silence and I'd say five out of six times a week, I'm crying, I'm yelling, I'm looking at myself in the mirror. Like I'm a silver back gorilla and patting my chest and then crying two minutes later.Like I'm processing whatever's coming up in that moment you know, one of the things, yeah, ALEX:   Let's not run past that because that, what you just said is so crucial. So let me, let me tell you how I used to work out. Yeah. So what I would do is, and this is during my four 30 in the morning taking a picture, so I could prove to everybody that I did it.So when I was doing the four 30 in the morning, prove to everybody that you did it, it was get up at four 30 in the morning, drink coffee, then wait about 20 or 30 minutes, drink a pre-workout because the coffee wasn't enough. You need to back it up with a pre-workout. Then go into the gym, close the doors.And we had a gym in our home. We close the doors, put towels under the doors. And then put on like limp biscuit or something ridiculous where it's just screaming and raging and yelling, and then get myself into a state where I could lift weights and not feel it. So I would get myself into fight or flight and then fight for an hour and a half with my gym.And it was like going, you know, and, and I don't mean to use this term in a way that indicates that I don't understand what it is really like to go to war because I don't want to minimize anything. Guys. What guys like you and the people that you were around, did George. But I feel like I went to my own little private one in the gym every morning.Totally. And, and it was cause it was instead of feeling the feelings and moving through them, it was creating so much noise and so much pain that I could push the feelings away. Yep. And, you know, I, I remember at my biggest, I looked back, it was probably like seven or eight years ago. I was about 240 pounds and going on Fox news.And I remember like seeing myself in the suit, my shoulders didn't fit in the screen. I looked completely inflamed. My neck and my head were kind of one thing. And recently a person on my team found an old Wistia video on me on Fox. And she's like, man, I saw Alex on Fox news from a while ago. I'm so glad I worked for this Alex and not that guy. Just watching the videos. He could tell, like how, how accelerated and how angry and , how detached I was. And I think, yeah. So many entrepreneurs think that they're, they're doing this incredible thing, working out and getting themselves in shape. And then I watched the workouts on not online and I'm like, man, why that might not be going in the right direction.GEORGE: Workouts for me are a tool like breath and they didn't use to be, they used to be an escapism for me. Right. And trust me, I was doing three days. I taught a world record for standing box shop. I was a competitive CrossFit athlete. Like my numbers are stupid. Stupid right. I'm five, seven. I can dunk. There's like, it's not mind blowing.And I was also dead lifting like six, 15 squatting, like five 85. I weighed 170 pounds. Like it was gnarly. Nowhere does that help me be a better human to my family? Right. But my ego loved it. ALEX: Standing there practicing the jump box jumper.Oh yeah. At one point I went not being a runner to actually going out and winning races in Austin, winning five Ks, 10 Ks, like going out and getting first, second or third place. And if there was a Clydesdale division, I always wanted it. 7,000 person race. I was first placed in Clydesdale. I was 240 pounds and I was the first place in Clydesdale.Because I was willing to do whatever it took. I finished that race and threw up about seven or eight times. Cause I pushed my body so hard. I still got first place. That was all I cared about. But I look back now and I'm like, dude not only will you, not in your body, you weren't in Austin during that?GEORGE:  and then given more trauma and then came out without doing any of the work.And I remember my wife's like, you know, you should do personal development. Like I read books. That was my answer. Yeah. That didn't go well fast forward, eight years. And there we go. And now we're here we are now. Um, but yeah, I was, and then I had this like really big shift after my son was born where I realized like, wow, I can be in shape if I want, I can look, however I want, I can function however I want, but it's also a tool like it's an hour and a half a day or two hours a day that if I utilize it correctly, I can do it.I'll never forget. I was in the jungle with a shaman and, you know, lots of wise wisdom come from shamans to me.  You know, one of them was like talking about relationships happening for a reason season or lifetime. And then you know, then a personal development teacher looked at me one day scrolling, and I said, what are you pretending not to know?Which hit me like a ton of bricksand then somebody else is like, what are you trying to avoid feeling? And that was the one that got me and it was the feeling part. Right. And so then I like looked at my day and I was challenged by Shaman said, I want you to eliminate. Any music with lyrics for 30 days, just get rid of it, get rid of it.Okay, cool. And I would listen to like music, like upbeat music, like I wasn't into like bitches and hoes, like all that stuff. And you know, but I would listen to music, but I would listen to music that allowed me to be romantic about who I used to be, or pretend that something was going to shift for me by doing nothing.And it was programming my brain into like the stagnation. And I was like, okay, cool. And I remember it was one of the hardest things ever to not have the radio on, in the car because what did I have to be present? I had to be with whatever was coming up and then going to the gym. I was like, okay. Right.And I'm like, don't lift. And all of a sudden I lost a hundred pounds on lift because I didn't have anything to like put me into that sympathetic state. And it was crazy, crazy what happened. And then for a wild, like this adoption period, I started to fall in love with it. And then I realized that. When I was there, the days that I was present and grounded, I felt like in my body and like emotionally good, I was lifting like crazy.And then there were days that like, It hurt to do a warmup and then I would scream or I would cry or I would laugh or I be like, I don't want to be here today. And then I could never walk out the door, but I was literally in the moment experiencing my experience and my feelings and it kind of became therapy for me.I rank it out? Can I yank it out? And then, or where can I go plug into somebody else's world to avoid mine? Right. Right.And then it was like, I have more work to do. I have more work to do. I have more work to enlist and entrepreneurs, your list will never end. And that's why it's so important. Like when you talk about structure, Alex structure gives us the container because no matter what we do, we're going to fill it. So if you give yourself a 24 hour container, you're going to find ways to fill it.But if you give yourself a two hour container, you'll fill it, but you also have to fill it with the stuff that moves the needles, move the levers and eliminates the bullshit. And that's been one of those things for me that I think in what you do and there's this belief like this paradigm around entrepreneurship, right?Like I can do whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. And I was like, yes. And you have to realize that the moment you start being that is you lose the thing that built it and you end up right back where you started. ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. I love Maxwell's. You know, John, there's a lot of stuff that John Maxwell's put out that I just, that is so true.It's just truth. And he has this chart of  the more leadership responsibility you have, the less freedom you have. And it's this very confronting belief system that the more responsibility I take on as a leader the less freedom that you actually have. And what you're doing is you're exchanging that freedom for making a massive contribution.And I think that. People want to argue. I have entrepreneurs all the time. Like one argue that and debate it. Yeah. And I always like at the end of the day, if you'd want to debate it, you can. But the fact is right only going to slow you down over time. And man George, that was intense. What you just shared because I think it's probably seven or eight years ago.It's definitely living in this house. I know, because in my gym here, I have a huge sound system and I built it so that I could go down into the gym. So I didn't hear anything in the world. I didn't even hear the weights clanking together because that sound was so high. I probably haven't turned that on in six or seven years, because now I look at my workouts, totally different.My workouts used to be an escape. It used to be like, go in, check out, get all this stuff done, working out with your body and then come out. But really not a lot of recall or recollection of what happened. And I, and a lot of like feeling here, like I did something, but not really connecting to everything that happened in the gym.Yeah. Yeah. I love Maxwell's. You know, John, there's a lot of stuff that John Maxwell's put out that I just, that is so true.It's just truth. And he has this chart of  the more leadership responsibility you have, the less freedom you have. And it's this very confronting belief system that the more responsibility I take on as a leader the less freedom that you actually have. And what you're doing is you're exchanging that freedom for making a massive contribution.And I think that. People want to argue. I have entrepreneurs all the time. Like one argue that and debate it. Yeah. And I always like at the end of the day, if you'd want to debate it, you can. But the fact is right only going to slow you down over time. And man George, that was intense. What you just shared because I think it's probably seven or eight years ago.It's definitely living in this house. I know, because in my gym here, I have a huge sound system and I built it so that I could go down into the gym. So I didn't hear anything in the world. I didn't even hear the weights clanking together because that sound was so high. I probably haven't turned that on in six or seven years, because now I look at my workouts, totally different.My workouts used to be an escape. It used to be like, go in, check out, get all this stuff done, working out with your body and then come out. But really not a lot of recall or recollection of what happened. And I, and a lot of like feeling here, like I did something, but not really connecting to everything that happened in the gym.GEORGE: Like the guy over here covered in tattoos that had a blue Mohawk. When you met him, Right. Like that guyALEX:  Something like that. You know, it was like, I'm never going to be in a place of being traumatized again by a room I'm gonna walk in and have everyone back at, you know, take a step back and.Now, you know, when I go work out, one of the, I have for a workout is a dry erase pen. My whole gym is surrounded in mirrors and there are so often I will be in the middle of a set. And this is like the Cardinal sin of working out. You're like almost to the place where you're done and I'll just drop the weight it's and go write down everything that just came to me.Yeah. Because yeah. Now it's more important. The realization is more important than finishing this app. And the belief system, you know, the beliefs that I can work through and the processing that I do is so much more important than the weight that I'm lifting. And I remember there was a point in my life where if I had a workout where the next workout, I didn't do more. I couldn't deal. It was demoralized thousand percent out. I don't even feel it. I'm like, wow, that was a great workout. I lifted half the weights, but look at the whiteboardGEORGE:  Well, even, even the point of like stopping a set, like way to diminish seven reps of progress. RightALEX: It's like, man, I just threw it all away. Yeah. And you know, the, the, like the beliefs that we built when we're in the gym, the last set is where you earn over the last rep is where you earn it. So you're always chasing the last rep. Now I'm like, man, I don't want to lose this thought. GEORGE: Well, and then like really looking at what sets us apart as leaders.Right? Cause we're, we're when we say entrepreneurial, we're talking about leaders, we're talking about the small percentage of the world, right. That's willing to stand in a new belief system and I love the way that you described, like going into the future, but really. You know, when I wrote my personal mission statement for my life it's to stand with structure in the face of resistance to create possibility.Like, that's it. That's, that's what we do. And it's like, it's actually, the wind was when you made a commitment and you kept your word with integrity to get to the gym. You've already won. Everything at that point is bonus. Right? It's strengthening it's fortification it's reflection. It's you know, and like, yeah, if you have 30 pounds to lose and you do one wrap, like don't expect a result, but be aware of like, what's there, but it's really the intention that we put behind everything.And when you say it, right, you got up, yes. You create the structure and you commit to the routine and that's, it's the combination of those things. That is the wind. And you, I mean, I'm the same way, except for me right now, I realized. You know, in the last couple of years, I fell out of love with myself again, like at a deep, deep, deep level.And I was looking at it and I was working out crazy before lockdown. And I was like, okay, cool. And I was like, I'm posting videos every day. And I was like, looking back when it locked down and I didn't have a gym, we went up to the mountains and I was like, man, I really don't want to do anything. I don't want to do anything.I don't want to do anything. And I literally was like, why. And I was like, because I can't, because I don't like why I'm doing it. And I don't know why I want to. And I gained a lot of weight again, and I fell in love with my dad bod, but I gained a dad bought first.  And then I looked at it and then I was playing with my son and I'm up here and I'm like, You know, this isn't what I want.And I was like, why? And I was like, I somehow fell out of love with myself, or this was an opportunity where I hadn't fully loved myself yet. Like, I hadn't loved where I was versus the guy with the big muscles or the tattoos, or could do this. Wait. So it was really interest because I started working out again and it feels different.It feels different. And then all of a sudden I wanted to get up here and it felt different and my workouts are very different. It felt different and I'm not humble, bragging. Like I just enjoy the process, but what's really interesting, Alex is I went through this point and I always wear like cutoff shirts.I won't take my shirt off. I still was struggling with self-consciousness and everything else. And then this, then I'm going to cry. But like 35 days ago, I went to the gym one morning and I was like, I'm not working out with a shirt on. I get to look at myself. Every moment of every rep every day. And every time I look in the mirror, I just get to tell myself I love myself.And it's a really interesting, because I started this challenge with my, with my business partner to lose weight, right. Like I was like, okay, I'm two 10, my fighting weights, like one 75. I want to be back there. 55 days of eating ma

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

If you think back to just a few years ago, when someone asked you to name a company that delivered food, you’d probably only be able to name a few pizza joints or the local Chinese food place. But today, the world has shifted and online food delivery is a booming business. Last year alone, Grubhub sold $6 billion worth of food, and the company delivers more than 500,000 meals per day. So how did Grubhub enable this massive shift to digital meal purchasing? On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we welcomed Alex Weinstein, the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, and he explained to us exactly how the company has been able to become a market mover. From the initial education process to then focusing on customer retention, Alex and his team have been deep in the weeds of it all, and they have built a culture of experimentation, data analytics and a focus on ROI to stay ahead of the curve. Alex explains it all here.    3 Takeaways: Measurement and incrementality are important. You have to understand whether or not where you’re putting your dollars is making a difference, and sometimes the answer will surprise you True experimentation is necessary to create new methods of measurement, marketing strategies and growth opportunities. So the question you have to ask as a leader is how can you create incentives to allow people to take risks and learn? The time is now to learn about the newly-online customers that have trickled into your business due to COVID-19. In understanding their needs, you will be able to ensure retention and set yourself up for the new reality we live in 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, co-founder of mission.org. Today, my stomach is rumbling, because we're talking all things Grubhub. Alex, welcome. Alex: Thank you for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. I just pulled up the app earlier to be like, "What should I have for lunch today?" Because it's 12:00, and it's time to order something. Alex: What did you end up ordering? Stephanie: I'm looking at pad Thai right now, we have a really good Thai place down the street. That's usually my go-to, but I started to get influenced by sushi, so if you have any advice, let me know. Alex: I don't know the restaurants in the area, but look for those that are well-rated, and look for deals. We have a ton of deals going on right now. Stephanie: Ooh, nice, that's perfect. You are the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, correct? Alex: That's right. Stephanie: I'd love to hear a little bit about your role there, and what brought you to Grubhub. Alex: Sure, sure, thank you. I've been at Grubhub for a little bit over three years. My responsibility is for the consumer business. That is, how do we get more new customers to try us out for the first time, and how do we get existing ones to order with us a little more often? And hopefully they'll return. Alex: This spans all aspects of marketing. We do a whole bunch of stuff in-house. I'd love to explore that a little bit later. But it also involves a lot of work cross-functionally, across the product. When I say product, I don't just mean our apps, but the totality of the experience that the customer has, from our apps to the delivery, to customer care, if that's ever necessary. Stephanie: Very cool. Previously, were you at, I think I saw Microsoft and eBay, or what did your past life before Grubhub look like? Alex: That's right, that's right. I actually am a very strange Head of Marketing. I'm a software engineer by training. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: I've written a bunch of code. I switched over to product management, and then darkness had me, and I somehow ended up in marketing. I indeed was at eBay before this, also for around about three years. Similar role, maybe a slightly more narrow role, focused on customer retention, marketing technologies. Stephanie: Very cool. I'm sure that was great help working at a marketplace, albeit not maybe a three-sided one, but still maybe a really helpful to transition to Grubhub with as your background? Alex: It very much was. I have to admit, I thought I knew marketplaces after eBay, then when I started Grubhub, I discovered so much complexity. Our business, exactly as you said, is a three side marketplace. Restaurants, food delivery drivers, and consumers. It is a hyper local business. People who live in Palo Alto whole heartedly don't care how many restaurants we have in San Jose, and how good our delivery network is in San Francisco, right? Alex: It has to be block by block, and we have to make sure that we have good restaurant selection there, good demand, and good supply of drivers. Otherwise, if the three sides aren't in alignment, bad things happen. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like it would be really tricky to keep all that balanced. How have you found success keeping everything balanced? Like you said, it's so hyper local, I'm thinking there could be a driver over in Sunnyvale, and they're definitely not going to go to my local Thai place to pick up the order that I'm looking at. Alex: Yeah, this is where a lot of fun in this business comes from, and a lot of complexity in this business comes from. We have to be really good at predicting things, and predicting demand. And we have to be really good at engaging all sides of our marketplace so that drivers actually want to be online at the time when we want them to be online. Alex: Consumers end up placing additional orders if perhaps we have a little bit too much supply. Restaurateurs want to create deals. Basically, being able to influence three sides of the marketplace in a automated, personalized, hyper local way, is really the only way we can survive, right? This, to me, is super joyful, and super complicated, and where a lot of learning, personally, for me, has come from. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm sure every day it's adjusting a little bit more, and you keep have to kind of changing things up and experimenting a bit. How do I think about where Grubhub is at right now? To me, it seems like it's the market leader. How many meals are being delivered? How much is that in dollar-wise of food that's being sold? How do I think about that? Alex: We're a public company, all of those numbers are public. Quick summary for you. We deliver more than half a million meals a day. Last year, we delivered more than six billion dollars worth of food. Of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, the demand for food delivery has also increased. The expectation of all of our constituents, and of our community, all of us, have risen tremendously. Because, from something that restaurateurs really on for a portion of their revenue, they now rely on delivery as the majority of it. Alex: For consumers, where they would perhaps order delivery occasionally, now is the only way for them to order restaurant food. A lot of expectations on us have increased throughout these past couple of months, even though we already started from being quite a large company with high expectations. Stephanie: Yeah, have you had to adjust quickly with everything going on with COVID-19? What have you seen, other than increasing orders, and how have you had to pivot to meet the customers and meet the drivers in where they're at today? Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Well, most definitely, yes. First and foremost, we began by focusing on safety of all the participants of our marketplace, right? This began with our work on personal protective equipment for our drivers. We distributed hundreds of thousands of PPE sets for free for our drivers. We invested a bunch of work into enabling contactless delivery within our apps. Which, of course, is something that makes the entirety of the marketplace safer. Alex: We basically have to take our product roadmap, and, in many ways, revisit it fully, and focus on things our community demanded of us in that moment. Similarly, we had to do something like that with marketing, as well, because we had a certain strategy. You of course know that a lot of our effort is in making sure that consumers can get the best value on Grubhub. If you spend money on food delivery, your dollars will go the furthest on Grubhub. This really is our brand positioning. Alex: When COVID came, we had to take a pause, because this rewards positioning, or this value positioning, really had to take a step back, because consumer's interest... Sure, they were looking for deals, but they were looking to be safe, first and foremost. Secondly, they were looking to support their community. So we had to reposition a lot of our marketing work to make it so. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm thinking that could be a trend that stays around, even after everything's over, keeping that contactless delivery at least as an option, and thinking about how to actually prove you have the safety measures implemented, and you're tracking that every month. Are you all thinking about how to scale that and keep that for the long term, or is it more just a short term play until the pandemic's over? Alex: Couple thoughts for you. One is, I don't think that we're going to be looking at a pandemic being over and everything coming back to normal. I think we need to get used to the new normal, at least until the vaccine is here. Which means that people's lifestyles, their habits, will be fully adjusted by then. Alex: As such, it's not like we were developing a set of patches for three months, and then after that, we just turned those patches off. But also, there's meaningful, positives coming from this change, right? Like any crisis, it is both a danger and an opportunity. What we've discovered is this contactless delivery, for example, besides making everyone safe, it is actually making our network a tiny bit more efficient. The delivery driver does not need to engage with the consumer in-person. They can just drop it off, take a photo, and keep going, and keep working. Which shaves off a small amount, but in the grand scheme of more than half a million deliveries a day, this starts adding up. It helps our drivers earn more, and it helps our overall network be more efficient, which means food comes to consumers faster. Stephanie: Yep, yeah, that's definitely a good change. There's a lot of food delivery players in the market right now. How do you create an experience that's completely unique to Grubhub? Where people, they're like, "That's where I want to order through." Alex: All of this, in our minds, has to do with differentiation. And you're exactly right, maybe two or three years ago, where consumers didn't really know much about the food delivery category. A lot of what we had to do was to educate them about our existence, which is why a lot of our marketing, a lot of our product, was geared towards a first-time experience of someone who's never gotten anything delivered other than a pizza. Because really, that was the state of the world, right? You would ask an average consumer on the street, "Name a couple companies that deliver food," and they would name pizza brands. Stephanie: That would've been me a couple years ago, too. Alex: Totally. Stephanie: I'd be like, "Domino's." Alex: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Maybe Chinese food, if you've ever tried it. An average consumer didn't know that there's hundreds of restaurants that deliver to them, and that they can find them on Grubhub. So that was the focus of our messaging. Alex: Three months ago, even before COVID, if you asked an average consumer to name food delivery brands, they would name us, and maybe a handful of our competitors. In that environment, I'm prompted, right? This is unaided awareness. Not, "Have you ever heard of Grubhub?" But, "Name a food delivery brand." Alex: Our work switched from creating awareness to driving consideration. Helping consumers understand, what is it that they get if they buy from us versus perhaps one of our competitors? Last year, a lot of our focus has been on stating this extremely clearly and delivering on that experience quite precisely. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, it is all about value for us. Alex: Now that we're entering a bit of a new normal with COVID-19, we're beginning to come back to some of this foundational brand positioning. Talking about rewards and value. We have a TV spot that's actually launching today and tomorrow on national TV. We're one of the biggest spenders on TV in both the category. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: Generally we're one of top 200 brands advertising on U.S. television that talks about rewards and value. You might be scratching your head and wondering, "Why in the hell is a digital first brand spending so much money on TV?" Stephanie: Yes, I was wondering. Tell me. Alex: It actually is kind of counterintuitive. We, maybe about three years back, we started scratching our heads and thinking, "Okay, if an average consumer doesn't really know what food delivery options are out there, how do we create that awareness? And how do we do that in a way that can confidently map the efficacy of our spend?" Because creation of awareness, let's face it, is the most expensive thing a company can do. Stephanie: Yep. Everyone wants it, but then actually implementing it, tracking it, and seeing how it did, seems a little tricky. Alex: It is so very tricky. Most mechanisms for doing this are actually kind of arcane, right? You do media consumption patterns, which, frankly is a large-scale survey that perhaps an agency would run and say, "Okay, New Yorkers, they absolutely do not watch any TV. They spend a bunch of time in the subway, true. And then they're all very much on digital." Alex: So, a brand that's trying to advertise in New York then would say, "Okay, television in New York, totally worthless. And our consumers are probably just like the average consumer in New York." That's kind of how the line of thinking typically goes. We, despite having a general applicability product, right? Everybody wants food delivery, right? Everybody from 18 to my mom, most definitely could benefit from food delivery. Alex: And yet, what we discover, is that the media consumption patterns of an average New Yorker are not the average media consumption patterns of our consumer. Moreover, what we discovered three years back was even though our intuition was that someone who orders food delivery online is most likely an early adopter of technology, and most likely a cord cutter, right? I mean, if you're about to order food online, you of course are ordering your socks from Amazon. You of course are watching shows on Hulu Plus without any commercials, as opposed to on cable TV, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: Of course that intuitively made sense, which is why we've been spending a lot of money through digital video channels. That intuitively made sense. We stumbled upon a set of techniques that allowed us to, with confidence, compare the efficacy of our awareness spent between digital video and the digital awareness darlings of Hulu and YouTube and Facebook for some of the dimensions, here. What we've discovered is that the bull drought of digital first is actually not as efficient, not at all as efficient per dollar spent, comparing to the- Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: ... boring, stodgy, nobody watches it, cable television. Stephanie: Is it because of the audience that's there, where the digital, like you were talking about, advertising to them, they may already know about you and it's an easier conversion, whereas the people who are keeping the TV running in the background all day, maybe actually need the ad right then and there where it can put a little inception on them and they can hear about it a couple times while they have the news on? Alex: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons. Other reasons are that, just on a per impression basis, your digital video is dramatically more expensive. Even though I'm a nerd of machine learning, and I love personalization, I don't believe that personalization can cover a five X price difference. It can make something 50% better, but not five steps better. Stephanie: So how do you think about creating that culture of experimentation like you're talking about, where most companies right now are probably not focusing on TV campaigns? How do you think about putting a budget behind that and actually empowering a team to do that, where when I think about teams who are running with marketing budgets, or just budgets in general, it's very scary to not show a great ROI, because you either aren't going to get that budget again. It's a use it or lose it type of culture, it seems like every company operates that way. Maybe Grubhub doesn't, but how do you think about creating good incentives and a culture of experimentation to come up with some of those projects? Alex: I think a culture where you ask for confidence in measurement for your spend is a good culture. Where you ask for feedback loops is a helpful culture. Now, you can take this too far, and you can start trying to map everything to revenue or [inaudible 00:16:56], and that doesn't particularly help with upper funnel marketing campaigns. But, the other extreme isn't particularly better. I see a lot of marketing organizations end up in that spot, where we say, "We demand perfect measurement," from what they call performance marketing. Alex: And the brand marketing side, the one where vast majority of dollars actually have to be spent to create awareness, is not working to the same level of rigor, and the same level of intellectual honesty with measurement. To your question about how to actually create those frameworks for the team, a couple things come to mind. Alex: The first one is, trying to pursue incentive alignment. If people on your team genuinely believe that learning and optimality of investment for the entire team is how they get promoted, is what the company actually values, they will pursue exactly that. Let me give you- Stephanie: Let me hear an example. Alex: Yeah, let me give you a counter example. A counter example is what happens if you hire an agency to manage your Facebook spend. Have you ever heard an agency that managers Facebook spend come back to you and say, "Your Facebook spend is terribly inefficient. You should spend less on Facebook." Stephanie: Definitely never. Alex: Right? That's what their incentives are, they get a portion of your Facebook spend. The same exact thing happens for your TV agency. The same exact thing happens for someone who's managing your Google spend, right? If you have a bunch of outsourced agencies, each of which is responsible for one of your channels, their survival, their ability to feed their children, depends on you being able to spend more money on the channel that they're managing for you. Alex: Of course, they don't have an incentive to try to tell you, "Hey, take money from Google and put it into Facebook." They will personally suffer. A setup like this creates a true misalignment of incentives. Let me contrast that with, let's say, an in-source structure, or perhaps a structure where you have a larger performance agency that is able to reallocate dollars between Google and Facebook without personalty suffering. Alex: In a structure where you in-source, which is how we operate, you're able to create a shared destiny, and you're able to say, "Hey, person running Facebook. Your incentives are all about learning." So if you have a current level of performance, which is a certain level of incremental CAC, and a certain level of incremental LTV. Your goal is to improve that by this percentage over the course of next quarter. Alex: Find some way to do so through whatever experiments that you're able to run. One of the potential outcomes is an improvement in efficiency by reduction in spend. They're able to raise their hand and say, "Hey, I actually want to spend your dollars. Take away some of my budget, and reallocate it over to TV, because they can spend it better. I hear they have a way to spend at a lower incremental CAC than I can." Stephanie: Have you seen that in your culture so far, of people actually being like, "Hey, you can have this budget, move it over here"? It seems like a lot of times, people are personally tied to their budgets, and whoever has the bigger budget is the more powerful one, and I haven't often, at least in my previous days at other companies, I haven't seen people say, "Hey, you can have this budget and move it here." Alex: You are exactly right. A lot of our, I guess, legacy from many of our previous jobs, associates the size of the budget with the influence in the organization, most definitely. This is where the job of a leader really is to create the right incentives and to catch people doing something right. Alex: If you hire somebody off of a company that had that culture, of course, their initial inclination will not be to raise their hand and say, "Hey, my area isn't working so hot." You need to indoctrinate them, if that makes any sense, into a world where it's okay to raise their hand and do it. The way you do it is by upholding folks who do this, and pointing at them and saying, "This person is doing it right," and celebrating their successes. And celebrating their experiments, where, perhaps, they didn't see the immediate success, but they learned something. Alex: So, as a leader, I think you have a lot of power to create these incentives. As such, structure what your team actually holds as valuable versus not. If you point to enough examples like this, you'll actually end up transforming the culture, even for someone who comes in from an organization that wasn't like that. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it would also allow someone to wear multiple hats, and kind of become a polymath when it's like, "I don't just focus on Facebook ads, or I don't just focus on this kind of marketing." They get to experiment with a bunch of different areas. Have you seen that happen in your organization? Alex: Oh, most definitely. My paid social folks, just like everyone's, they were super focused on Facebook. What we discovered is them raising their hands and being very creative, and being some of the first folks who ever tried TikTok, for example. This was a little while back now, but we were one of the first handful of brands to invest a lot of money into TikTok, and do large scale experimentation with them. What we've discovered is if you're one of the first ones, there's very meaningful... Effectively, arbitrages to be had, where you're able to not only get a great deal, but shape the product to your liking. As such, get a temporary advantage over the rest of the market. Stephanie: That's fun. How did you think about creating your first campaign on TikTok? When your team presented this idea to you, were you like, "Yeah, let's do it," or were you a little hesitant? What was the first campaign you had go out there, versus what does that look like today? Are you still utilizing it? Alex: Oh my God, this is quite a story, to be honest with you. The team came to me and said, "So, we're thinking about doing TikTok." My reaction at the time was, "TikWhat?" They explained this to me and I read up a little bit about it. My immediate reaction is, "Okay, you are attempting to sell a luxury product." Let's face it, ordering delivery, you're still buying food from restaurants. It is a luxury product in many of the cases, right? To, "You're trying to sell that to people who have no disposable income of their own. The average customer of TikTok at the time just could not have their own credit card." Stephanie: Yeah, they have allowances, maybe. Alex: Right? Exactly. "Why in the world could this possibly work, you guys? Our average consumer is fairly affluent, and you're now trying to go into a different demo. How is that even remotely possible?" But, luckily, at that point, I had already observed that my team knows better than me, and that they have much, much better ideas than I do. Essentially, we just did a test. We did a small test, and we experimented in earnest. Surprise, surprise, they came back and they showed me the numbers, and they were meaningfully better than Facebook at the time. Stephanie: Wow. Alex: We ended up investing more. That was genuine, true learning. Not just for the organization, but frankly, for me. There's multiple possible explanations for why it ended up being so efficient, and I can go into some of them, but the thing that matters to me most is that the crew felt inspired to pursue something new. They felt passionate enough about it to structure a test when there was no framework, really, out there. And they were unafraid enough to basically tell me that I'm wrong, and that my intuition is off. Alex: That made me feel like the culture is actually right. The culture is exactly what I want it to be. The opposite of that, where you're going with the highest paid person's opinion, if that makes sense. Stephanie: Doesn't work. Alex: It doesn't work, because all of our intuitions, no matter how successful we've been previously, we are sometimes wrong. Why hire smart people if you don't trust them to try things? Stephanie: I think there's a good mix between trust your gut, but also don't trust it, because you could be wrong. Yeah, go with other people's ideas, as well. How do you think about those efficiencies that you're mentioning when you're exploring new channels like TikTok? Alex: Sure. To me, it's indeed about being open-minded and experimenting with new types of media, and being unafraid to try things that aren't immediately, obviously, going to work. A similar type of experiment happened with Snapchat a little bit earlier, where I also was convinced that this can't possibly work for the same reason. Luckily, I, again, was wrong. Alex: I guess a pattern of learning is what inspired me to basically create this incentive structure for the team, where they're unafraid to raise their hand and say, "Hey, the way we've been doing this before is really off." If you want, I'll tell you a story of a channel that's not really a channel that I guess formed my opinion on that topic. Stephanie: Yeah, let's hear it. Alex: This is a story of a couple marketers that were attempting to turn a specific city around. Alex: As we talked a little bit earlier, we can be doing super well in one city, and not well at all in another city, or in a corner of a city. A lot of what we do has to do with how do we turn a specific city or neighborhood around? This couple folks, their job was to turn a specific city around, and I was expecting them to come to me and say, "Hey, I'm going to take the budget that you've given me, and I'm going to buy some Google ads, and I'm going to buy some billboards, and maybe I'm going to buy some Facebook ads." Alex: What they did instead, these were two marketers. What they did instead was actually really curious. They experienced the product for themselves. They placed a couple of food delivery orders, and they came to me and they said, "Hey, I don't want to buy any ads," they said. "Instead, whenever I was placing the order for food, there really weren't enough food photos. I was ordering from restaurants that I hadn't ordered from before, and I don't really know if their pad thai looks good. I don't really know if their sushi is something that I want to try." Alex: They were in your position. They said, "Screw it, I'm not going to buy any ads. I'm instead going to hire some photographers to come into those restaurants and take the photos. Then after that, I'm going to measure the incremental impact of the added photography, and see if the efficacy of that is actually comparable or high enough, comparing to the efficacy of ad spend." Effectively saying, "I'm going to open a brand new marketing channel, and that marketing channel is going to be photos." Stephanie: Photography. Alex: I'm like, "Okay, let's just do it." Stephanie: A whole brand new, the vision, of Grubhub, just photography. Alex: Exactly, exactly. These two folks get on the phones, start calling photographers, start calling restaurant owners and scheduling appointments to have the photographers come in there. That becomes basically their job for the next two months. Alex: Then they organize a really [inaudible] visitors for these specific menu pages see the photos, and others don't. They do some serious math to try to say, "Hey, here's the incrementality in here, and here's the efficacy of the spend comparing to what Google ads would be, or Facebook ads would be." They discover that those photos are actually a better way to spend marketing dollars, than any actual marketing. Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: I, at that point, am kind of floored. I come to them, I'm like, "Okay, you guys are on fire, this is amazing. Let's take your thing and give it to operations and scale up this thing." They say, "No, no, you don't understand, you don't understand. This whole project sucked. We spent our entire days on the phone with restaurant owners, trying to schedule appointments. We are going to make it better." Alex: I'm like, "Wait, what's going on?" They say, "No, no, instead of scheduling appointments with the restaurant owners to take photos, we are going to rent Airbnbs and photo studios around town, then order food from the restaurants, bring it to those Airbnbs. Our food stylist is going to make it look good, and we're going to take photos." Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Alex: I'm like, "Wait, wait, what? What?" Stephanie: That's another level. Alex: Yeah. My immediate reaction from this is, "Have you ever seen delivered food? It does not look good." They obviously told me to go pound sand, as they should have, and they showed me the first photos from these experiments. Oh my God, those first photos look much better than anything taken in a restaurant, because food stylists are really good at their jobs. If you were able to control the lighting, you're able to take much better pictures. Alex: When they actually tried it, they discovered that instead of doing two photo shoots a day, the photographer, who's the most scarce and expensive part of the whole operation, is able to do 20 photos shoot a day. Stephanie: Wow, that's efficient, that's amazing. Alex: As you can imagine, at that point, my mind was completely blown. We indeed operationalized this with folks whose day job was operations, as opposed to marketing. This was the example of really learning what learning means. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You kind of picked the markets to do that in, or you kind of see a market not doing so well, and those are the ones that you focus on getting the good imagery for, versus allowing that... UGC content to work well in other markets, or how do you think approaching that? Because it seems like something that would be really hard to scale, ordering a bunch of things all the time from every market in the U.S. How do you think about creating those campaigns? Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With hundreds of thousands of restaurants on the platform, we indeed have constrained resources to do these photo shoots when we can. We can't do all of them next month. We had to be somewhat thoughtful on prioritizing things. A few things came to mind for being able to select the right restaurants to do this in sort of the right markets. Alex: First is, conversion. If consumers land on the menu, and end up buying stuff anyway. Well, that's cool, I guess they don't need the photos. If on the other hand, conversion isn't amazing, but the number of visitors to the menu page is super high, hey, this might be an opportunity to actually add some photos and improve that conversion. Alex: By digging into the data, and looking at where the majority of the incremental impact can be, we develop this framework for allocating this constrained resource, which ended up effectively being an investment of marketing dollars into a channel that's sort of marketing, but sort of not. Is it product? Is it operations? I have no idea. Stephanie: It's something, all the above. Alex: Right? Stephanie: How do you think about, you mentioned incrementality quite a bit. How do you think about that throughout your organization, when developing these experiments and seeing what works and what doesn't work? Alex: Sure. First, if you don't mind, allow me to define it as- Stephanie: Yes, please. Alex: Because I think that's super important. Incrementality, to me, is what would have happened anyway? If you didn't do your glorious marketing campaign, or this amazing product improvement that you just rolled out. This is a difficult question, because it's really attempting to attribute the entirety of this success, or entirety of what's happening during a campaign, to the campaign. Alex: Let me give you some intuition behind this, right? Let's say you go to, I don't know, gap.com or something like that. You see a banner in there that says, "10% off." Well, obvious, a lot of people are going to click that banner, and a lot of people are going to use that coupon to get 10% off of their transaction. The key question, though, is, what portion of those people would have transacted anyway? Stephanie: Yeah, they went there directly. They probably would have. Alex: Exactly, it's clearly not zero, because before you launched that awesome 10% off coupon, some people were buying jeans yesterday. Being able to, with confidence, judge what that incremental behavior is, and what is the incremental CAC, and incremental LTV, is super important. Simple back of the napkin as to how you judge this is, let's say yesterday, a hundred people bought those jeans. Today, 110 people bought those jeans. It's not a real AB test, obviously. But all 110 people used your 10% off coupon. You can wrongly suggest that all 110 converted because of your coupon, or you can look at the truth in the eye and realized 110 used the coupon, but 10 really only needed it. Stephanie: Do you think a lot of brands are missing this when they offer these discounts, and maybe unintended consequences that could come from it? I could see a lot of consumers, if they get used to you always having discounts, then they just wait. They're like, "I'm going to wait for that next 10% off coupon," then they don't have a buyer at all. Alex: Yeah, it is super dangerous. I do think that in some industries, there's exactly that happening, right? We know of the right times during the year to buy a TV, so we don't buy a TV until then. We know when the right time of the year to buy home improvement equipment, and we don't buy it until then. Exactly what you're describing is a real danger. Alex: It's not just a danger of delaying the purchase, it's a danger of create a permanently less profitable business. Imagine is, every Friday, Grubhub was to, let's say, give all our consumers three or five dollars off. Not only are Thursday orders going to be delayed, because our consumers are going to be like, "Hey, I don't really care when I get takeout. I'll cook one night and I'll get takeout the other night." They'll delay it until Friday, but those Friday orders are going to be less profitable. Alex: So we permanently teach our consumer base, if we take that route, to not only delay their orders, but to make them less profitable. That is a real issue and something you got to be super careful with, which is why you must measure incrementality. Stephanie: Yeah, especially right now. You see so many people discounting everything, it's kind of scary to think. How are you going to come back when your entire, everything on your store online, is 80% off? How do you come back from that? Alex: Most definitely. Now, if you have physical inventory, the opportunity cost is not zero. Right? Let's say if you're selling digital goods, for example, right? Let's say you're selling access to, let's say a song, or a book, right? Your fixed costs in that situation, your cost of an action, is terribly low, right? As opposed to if you have goods in the warehouse, and you aren't able to sell them, there's very meaningful fixed costs for you that you need to deal with. Alex: It might be, actually, quite reasonable to be running these high promotions, but if you are, you better be running it as a real AB test. You better be able to confidently say that this is the true incrementality of this 80% off coupon, and that's the true value that I'm getting out of it from both not needing to keep these products in the warehouse, but also from just sheer revenue from the consumer. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a good platform or way that you've set up metrics and things like that to measure that incrementality in a way that's not really manual, and then you can just kind of see how the campaigns and what they're doing is performing against each other? Alex: Yeah. In lower funnel channels, it is actually fairly easy to set up a platform for this, and we have. There are tools that you can use for it, right? Google Optimize, for example, or Optimizely, right? We have a combination of in-house and these third party tools to do product experimentation, for example. Alex: For things like CRM, couponing in the apps, or issuing emails with coupons, or push notifications, really good experimentation platforms don't exist off the shelf. We had to do some math ourselves. Some of that math turned out to be fairly fine tuned to Grubhub's needs. Here's what I mean by this. We're an LTV business. It's not just about the immediate transaction, it's about what happens after that transaction. Stephanie: Yep. Alex: For example, if a consumer ends up converting at a higher rate, and then afterwards has a poor experience and doesn't come back, that actually is terrible, terrible, terrible. Your typical, immediate conversion optimization tool, would just look at the first part of this. Oh my God, they converted at a better rate, great, awesome, keep it. Stephanie: Yay. Yep. Alex: We had to build tools specifically designed to capture these long-term effects. We typically look at the results of these long-term activities over the context of a month, right? So we need to see what happens to consumers for a meaningful amount of time to have high confidence that it indeed is net beneficial or not. Alex: Of course, we're able to look at things fairly early, and if something's a terrible idea, we're able to kill it early. But, in order to be able to confidently say what is the impact on the LTVs, we had to build tools. These in-house tools for many CRM things that we do today. Stephanie: Got it. Alex: Even then, it's just for lower funnel. It's just for CRM and product. How do you judge the incrementality of TV versus billboards? That is a whole other, super complicated story. Stephanie: How do you think about the intersection between your CRM and your content management system and your actual commerce platform? How do you create a good environment where they all interact together, and people can see a holistic view of everything that's going on? Alex: Great question. I don't think I have a perfect answer for you, other than enabling as many work streams for experimentation as are possible. That is, allowing the CRM team to run experiments on their own, without involving a bunch of product people, without involving a bunch of finance and analytics people. Similarly, allowing the front end or pricing optimization team to run experiments on their own, and do very specific price optimization experiments just by themselves. Alex: The more work streams like this you have running in parallel, the more you're going to be able to learn, as an organization, per unit of time. Stephanie: That seems like a great answer to me. It also seems like you would get a lot of, you could have a customer with a negative experience, but it would be because of maybe the restaurant. It seems like you guys would have a lot of insights into maybe how to help restaurants improve, where it's like, hey, every time someone orders this thing of sushi, you always forget the wasabi, and man is that making people upset. Do you ever send that data back to restaurants to improve the products as in their food, or the customer experience, or anything like that? Alex: Most definitely, you hit the nail on the head. We are in a really unique position of knowing not just who the people were, or when they placed the orders at your restaurant, but knowing exactly what they ordered. We can see exactly that pattern, right? We can tell you that on Tuesday night, the reviews for people ordering sushi, are actually worse than on any other night. We can help you see that, so that you can train the person that's working on Tuesday night. Stephanie: [crosstalk 00:43:21]. Alex: These kind of insights... Yeah, totally. These kind of insights are exactly what we believe is what is something that we can uniquely provide to our restaurant partners, besides demand. Of course they come to us because they're interested in demand, particularly now. But we can do more, and we've been building a lot of systems specifically about that, that are effectively... you can think of this as recommendation systems in the grand scheme of the word of giving recommendations to the restaurants about how they can lend the totality of their business more efficiently. For example- Stephanie: It seems like that could be a whole different business for you guys to also operate. Alex: It's quite synergistic in our minds, right? If we're able to make our restaurants more successful, it actually makes us more successful, in turn. Because, those consumers who are placing orders and are not getting any wasabi with their sushi, they are ultimately not happy with Grubhub. We want them to have an amazing experience. Alex: Whether the restaurant wins just on Grubhub, or throughout the totality of their experience, because, let's face it, that restaurant might be serving other delivery platforms, and soon enough, hopefully, dine-in, as well. That retraining is going to help the restaurant across the board. We actually very much welcome that. That means that we're able to create the value not just for our platform, but for the restaurant, and increase the chance that this restaurant will, ultimately, be successful. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that's a really good point, especially as a lot of brands right now are shifting quickly to the world of Ecommerce and trying to figure out how to sell online. There's going to be a lot of new touch points that they maybe aren't anticipating that could actually hurt the consumer experience. If you've got the UPS guy throwing your box over the fence, and it's getting crush, there's a lot of things that actually, you maybe wouldn't even think of, as a brand, of, "That's not my job," when really, everything form start to finish to delivery and afterwards, and the follow-up, all of that's your job. And how do you think about controlling that experience with so many touch points? Alex: You are so right. The totality of this is their job. From the first ads that they see on TV, to what shows up when they look on SEM or on paid social and discover your brand there, too. The first purchase experience to the interaction with the UPS guy, to the interaction with customer service. All of that, in totality, is what the brand relationship really is, what the product really is. Alex: As marketers, we can't just care about that ads. As product people, we can't just care about the bits installed on the phone. They, in their separation, they don't particularly matter. As you saw from my story with the photos, that really was quite profound to me, right? We kept looking for a solve to get more customers and more sales through marketing, and that solve wasn't there at all. The most efficient solve was far outside. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, such a good reminder for all brands to think about that, like you said, totality of the process. Because you have a software engineering background, I feel like I'm allowed to ask you tech questions. I saw on your, you guys have a blog on Medium, or your engineering staff does. They were talking about how they were creating discount codes using crypto. It made me wonder, what other kind of technologies are y'all experimenting with, or seeing success, or how did you think about running the platform that Grubhub's built on now? Alex: Sure. A few things are super important. One is having a scalable platform that can withstand demand, and that can withstand massive spikes in demand. As luck would have it, most people in Chicago, want to get dinner approximately at the same time. Stephanie: Yes, who knew? Alex: Right. What a pain in the butt. We've been trying to convince them to maybe come a different... No. Stephanie: Come on, 3:00's your time, come on. Alex: Exactly, exactly. Your dinner delivery window. Which, of course, creates formidable demand. Not just on the services in the backend of our systems, but a formidable demand on our logistics network. A lot of our work goes into being able to spike in response to customer demand. Let me give you one intuitive example of this. Outside of COVID, before COVID, when rain would start during dinner hours, demand would massively spike. Alex: At that moment, we're supposed to magically materialize a lot of drivers on the road doing deliveries. Being able to do so, technically, and when I say magically materialize, I'm of course referring to creating incentives and creating appropriate communication channels with our drivers so that they actually want to get on the road. A lot of our engineering work has to do with how we were talking about in the beginning, balancing the three sites of the network, and being able to respond to either a massive spike in demand, or response to a set of orders that were placed in the specific part of the city on the logistics side. Alex: Or, respond to an onboarding of an enormous partner, like Shake Shack, or Sweet Green, or Taco Bell, with their own unique needs. Remember, we work with such a variety of restaurants, right? We do point of sale integrations with a variety of our enterprise customers, which of course means that we have to have nimble systems that are able to onboard those same customers. They have to be resilient, as well. So, a lot of our work has to do with both scale and being able to deal with these spikes. Stephanie: Got it. Any favorite pieces of tech that you guys are implementing or trying out right now to help with those large spikes in demand? Or where you guys think the future is headed that you're kind of preparing for? Alex: Favorite pieces of tech. Huh. Huh. I'm going to think marketing tech. Braze has been an outstanding tool for our marketing teams. What we've discovered is it effectively enabled a whole work stream of experimentation for our CRM teams. They're able to run pretty sophisticated experiments completely independently from engineering, which increase our velocity of experimentation. Stephanie: Hmm, that's awesome. I'll have to check that out. Cool. So to zoom out a little bit, 30,000 foot level, what kind of disruptions do you see coming in the world of Ecommerce? What's on your radar right now? It doesn't have to be for Grubhub, it can just be in general. Alex: I think that the disruption is already here, where over these past couple of months, we've seen the portion of online transactions, and portion of consumers who have tried buying things online just catapult through the roof. All of those new consumers, let's face it, my 90 year old grandmother is using Zoom now. All of those consumers are a new opportunity. They have very different expectations. They don't yet know much about your brand. Alex: Being able to understand this newly online wave, and heightened expectations of the consumers that already happen online, but perhaps not as active with your service, right? Those, I think, are super important. This to me takes us back to velocity of experimentation, being more important now than ever. That is, truly learning from your customers. Observing them, creating experiments, measuring, and getting a feedback loop from them, so that you're able to focus and find the one thing that you can improve to make the whole story better. Maybe photos. Maybe it's something else. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I love that. It definitely seems like with these new people coming online, you have to have a bunch of different tactics to meet them wherever they are. The ones that have been working for the past year, might only work for a subset of the people because you have 50% more people that you need to market to, or develop a platform for, and it's going to be very different with how you approach those new consumers than what you've been used to. Alex: Exactly. Stephanie: All right, so, we're about to jump into the lightning round. Any higher level thoughts, Alex, that you want to share before we do so? Alex: If you're able to structure your organizational incentives to focus on learning and feedback loops, I think now you're going to see an even bigger reward for it in the form of market share, in the form of growth, in the form of being able to adapt to the world around you and leapfrogging the competition. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. All right, so the lightning round, brought to you by our friends at Sales Force Commerce Cloud. It's a fun and easy, quick round of questions where you have a minute or less to answer. Are you excited and ready, Alex? Alex: Very scared. Stephanie: Dun dun. All right, first one. If you are starting a podcast, what would it be about, and who would be your first guest? Alex: Whoa, what a fascinating question. What a fascinating question. I am obsessed with all things culture, and how do you actually create the right incentives for a technology/marketing organization? I love Simon Sinek. He is outright amazing. I learned a ton from reading him. I would probably to get him and if I can't, I'd get one of my former mentors in there, as a consolation prize. Stephanie: Oh, that sounds good. I would listen. I would be your first listener, and I would give you a five start review. Alex: Oh my gosh, thank you. Stephanie: You got me at least. What's up next on your reading list? Alex: Hmm, next on my reading list? I am reading Russian sci-fi novels these days, as a means of escaping from a tiny, one bedroom apartment. Stephanie: Any good ones that we should check out? Alex: I'm actually reading them in Russian, so I don't know- Stephanie: I was going to say, unless they're in Russian, then I don't know if I'll be able to read Russian quick enough to read it. Alex: Oopsie, oopsie, I do have a few people at my work who've been reading Tolstoy before the whole COVID situation started. I don't know if I'd recommend it now, Tolstoy does darkness extremely well. We have enough darkness around us now. Stephanie: That is true. Yeah, maybe not. Alright, well, what thing do you normally buy at a store that now you're just going to buy online after everything with COVID? Alex: What a great question. Only online now. Hmm. Stephanie: Tricky, tricky. Alex: I used to, actually a lot of my electronics. I used to come to the store and look at them and experiment with them. I have a feeling that I'm never doing that again. I used to come to a Best Buy and just try to look at different mice and monitors and all that. I got a new laptop and a new mouse online. I really like them, and I really like the experience. I was unafraid of returning them. That's it, online I go. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree, especially as a lot of these companies are making the return experience a lot more seamless. Yeah, I could completely see the same thing happening. Buy things, test it out, and send it back if you don't like it. Alex: I was just chatting with a colleague about this exact same thing with returns around fashion. I think there's a lot of innovation to be had with moving the fear in fashion through that. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree, except I could see them having to now to figure out a way to resell those items in a way that proves that they've been quarantined, disinfected, and yeah. I was just thinking about that the other day. Man, that's tricky, especially for second hand market places to try and prove to the customer that these items are clean and good to go, and you can buy them. Alex: I agree. Solvable, I think, but I agree. Stephanie: It is solvable. All right, so the last final question. What's up next for Ecommerce professionals? Alex: I think we're going through a time when from being on the early adopter, early majority demand for most of the brands. We've become the critical source of revenue for every single brand. If you think that your company was going through a digital transformation, and is now trying to make digital just a better channel, hold on to your seats, because it's not the only channel, and the majority channel. So, the demand for expertise in our area is increasing very rapidly, and the demand for learning in our area is also increasing rapidly. I think this is a wonderful time to be in Ecommerce. I think this is a wonderful time to be learning and doubling down on Ecommerce. I'm excited for all of us to be right at the center of this transformation. Stephanie: I love that, love the positivity, and yeah, it's definitely an exciting time to be alive and experiment and try new things. This has been a blast Alex, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is your second appearance on a Mission podcast, so yeah, we're so thankful that you came back and joined us again. Alex: Stephanie, thank you very much for inviting me. Stephanie: All right, talk to you later. Alex: Cheers.  

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So Alex, now we talked about what I would like to do in the future, what about you? Career-wise, let's start with that.Alex: I actually have absolutely no idea what I want to do as a career. I know I want to do something interesting and I want to do something fun. I've certainly, I think that I as a person am most suited to a service style industry or a hospitality something like that where I would be, I've had sort of dalliancesor ideas about cafes, cafe chains, certainly, I'd always wanted to I think maybe rival Starbucks would be lovely. I looked at restaurants. Restaurants didn't really appeal to me because you've got weird hours and when everyone is having fun you're not. What else? For me it's, I just like to be able to have something that was constantly enjoyable. I think, you know, what you said, dynamic you know.Maria: Exactly.Alex: You can have something that will be enjoyable and you can change it up every day and so on and so forth but as to what I specifically would do, I can't put a name to it. I'm not the only one in my family. My father has a CV that's four, sorry ten pages long. It's ten pages long. He's changed jobs I think twenty-six times, twenty-seven now, and he's just so I don't know. For me, I'd like to travel but I'd certainly want to have a home base. I can't go too far away from home.Maria: When you say home, would it be your present home-like Australia or would you...?Alex: Yeah, I've got to say I'm an Aussie, true blue Aussie. I've got a love of the country. It's my home. I have spent time overseas. I've lived a year and a half in Canada, a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in Asia sorry it's not a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in America, so I've done a couple of other things and I've always come back and been why did I leave? What caused me to leave? So, yeah, I'm torn between doing things that are altruistic and selfish. Do I want to just work for me and get the money, the moolah, the cash, the green, or do I want to do something a bit more for everyone else and I don't know it's difficult to decide. How do I do both?Maria: So the future is open?Alex: It is open isn't it?

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So Alex, now we talked about what I would like to do in the future, what about you? Career-wise, let's start with that.Alex: I actually have absolutely no idea what I want to do as a career. I know I want to do something interesting and I want to do something fun. I've certainly, I think that I as a person am most suited to a service style industry or a hospitality something like that where I would be, I've had sort of dalliancesor ideas about cafes, cafe chains, certainly, I'd always wanted to I think maybe rival Starbucks would be lovely. I looked at restaurants. Restaurants didn't really appeal to me because you've got weird hours and when everyone is having fun you're not. What else? For me it's, I just like to be able to have something that was constantly enjoyable. I think, you know, what you said, dynamic you know.Maria: Exactly.Alex: You can have something that will be enjoyable and you can change it up every day and so on and so forth but as to what I specifically would do, I can't put a name to it. I'm not the only one in my family. My father has a CV that's four, sorry ten pages long. It's ten pages long. He's changed jobs I think twenty-six times, twenty-seven now, and he's just so I don't know. For me, I'd like to travel but I'd certainly want to have a home base. I can't go too far away from home.Maria: When you say home, would it be your present home-like Australia or would you...?Alex: Yeah, I've got to say I'm an Aussie, true blue Aussie. I've got a love of the country. It's my home. I have spent time overseas. I've lived a year and a half in Canada, a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in Asia sorry it's not a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in America, so I've done a couple of other things and I've always come back and been why did I leave? What caused me to leave? So, yeah, I'm torn between doing things that are altruistic and selfish. Do I want to just work for me and get the money, the moolah, the cash, the green, or do I want to do something a bit more for everyone else and I don't know it's difficult to decide. How do I do both?Maria: So the future is open?Alex: It is open isn't it?

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So Alex, now we talked about what I would like to do in the future, what about you? Career-wise, let's start with that.Alex: I actually have absolutely no idea what I want to do as a career. I know I want to do something interesting and I want to do something fun. I've certainly, I think that I as a person am most suited to a service style industry or a hospitality something like that where I would be, I've had sort of dalliancesor ideas about cafes, cafe chains, certainly, I'd always wanted to I think maybe rival Starbucks would be lovely. I looked at restaurants. Restaurants didn't really appeal to me because you've got weird hours and when everyone is having fun you're not. What else? For me it's, I just like to be able to have something that was constantly enjoyable. I think, you know, what you said, dynamic you know.Maria: Exactly.Alex: You can have something that will be enjoyable and you can change it up every day and so on and so forth but as to what I specifically would do, I can't put a name to it. I'm not the only one in my family. My father has a CV that's four, sorry ten pages long. It's ten pages long. He's changed jobs I think twenty-six times, twenty-seven now, and he's just so I don't know. For me, I'd like to travel but I'd certainly want to have a home base. I can't go too far away from home.Maria: When you say home, would it be your present home-like Australia or would you...?Alex: Yeah, I've got to say I'm an Aussie, true blue Aussie. I've got a love of the country. It's my home. I have spent time overseas. I've lived a year and a half in Canada, a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in Asia sorry it's not a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in America, so I've done a couple of other things and I've always come back and been why did I leave? What caused me to leave? So, yeah, I'm torn between doing things that are altruistic and selfish. Do I want to just work for me and get the money, the moolah, the cash, the green, or do I want to do something a bit more for everyone else and I don't know it's difficult to decide. How do I do both?Maria: So the future is open?Alex: It is open isn't it?

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.

Ross and online teacher trainer Alex Li talk about some of the biggest differences between teaching offline and online, common mistakes teachers make teaching online and their favorite online teaching activities.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. Again, this week, we are doing something coronavirus‑related. We're talking about teaching language online. We've got dos and don'ts for those of you who are now making the transition from teaching offline to teaching online.To help us with that this week we have my friend and former colleague, Alex Li. Alex, for the last year‑and‑a‑half or so, has been a trainer, training teachers to teach online.In this episode, Alex and I will go through some of the differences between teaching English online compared to offline, some of the opportunities and a lot of common mistakes that teachers tend to make.More and more schools, it seems like, across the world are switching their classes to online for the time being. If that's you, listen on. We've got some great tips for you. Enjoy the interview.Ross: All right, let's start. Alex, thanks for joining us and doing this.Alex Li: Yeah.Ross: This is also the first podcast I've ever done while wearing a face mask.Alex: [laughs]Ross: We're obviously doing this because lots of teachers now are making the transition, we don't know for how long, from teaching offline to online. You did that yourself, obviously. You used to be a teacher offline, and then you started working in an online company.Maybe we can start off by talking about some of the differences. What first struck you as being some of the differences between teaching online and teaching offline?Alex: That would be personalization. Personally, I didn't do that when I was an offline teacher for young learners. Frankly, I don't know 80 percent of my students that much, while the rest of 20 percent I've probably talked to them after class. For one‑on‑one class, that gives teachers those opportunities to know their students more.Ross: When we are teaching kids offline, you're right. Usually, as a teacher, you don't learn that much about them. As soon as you're teaching students in their own homes, the setting gives you the opportunity to talk about so much more, doesn't it?Alex: Yeah. As you said, in a brick‑and‑mortar classroom where everybody's in the same place and the same city, if you ask how's the weather that would be pretty dull, because everybody knows that. After five students, they will be like, "Oh teacher, I know..."Ross: [laughs]Alex: ..."it's sunny."Ross: Or you have to pretend and make up like it's snowing...Alex: You show your flash cards.Ross: ...maybe when you're living in Africa and it snows. Online, there's all these natural information gaps. The teacher and the student are always going to be in different places...Alex: That's true.Ross: ...often in different cities or different countries, there's so many opportunities there to contrast and compare what's going on in the two locations.Alex: That can happen throughout the class. You can do it at the beginning as we talk about weather. You can also talk about certain target language.Ross: I remember when I was an offline teacher, and I used to teach kids. I remember sometimes trying to get kids to bring in something into the class, to do a show‑and‑tell type thing.One time it was like, "Bring in a photo of somewhere that you've been on holiday." Always, like two students would remember and the other 14 wouldn't. It would never work very well.I feel this is one of the other huge opportunities for teaching online. Students have all this stuff around them, especially for low levels. For example, if you're teaching clothes, the student can open their wardrobe and, for example, bring out their favorite clothes.You can show the students your favorite clothes as well. There's so many opportunities for personalization that you would never get if you were doing it offline.Alex: Yeah. I think you mentioned one good thing or one good model, is that the teacher gets to show the student if we are talking about clothes, his or her clothes first if it's a lower level. That's something I noticed some teachers are not doing online.Teachers have got to keep in mind that you're teaching one‑on‑one. You're still teaching, and giving appropriate model is important and essential.Ross: Offline, if you've got a class of 15 students, you might pick the strongest student to come to the front and demo that for the rest of the class. If you've only got one student, there's no opportunity to do that. What do you have to do instead? As the teacher, you have to model both parts.That's one of the biggest differences maybe, between teaching groups offline and teaching one‑to‑one online. The teacher has to take on so many different roles compared to teaching offline. For example, if you're doing group work or pair work or something offline.You put the students in pairs, and the students are conversation partners to each other. The teacher, you're still kind of in this teachery role where you're going around and monitoring. As soon as you go online, you've got to switch into a different role of being this...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...conversation partner. That's quite difficult to actually do.Alex: Yeah, that's true. Some teachers ignore that part. There's no other kids in this classroom, so they ask their student to read both parts if we are having a dialogue.Ross: I wonder why that happens if the teacher just thinks like, "Oh, I'm going to get my student to talk as much as possible?"Alex: Or they just think that those students need to read before anything.Ross: Another thing that teachers are influenced by is increasing the amount of student's talking time in the class. That's one way to do that, is to get students to play both parts of a dialogue. I feel you're losing so much in terms of it being a natural or authentic conversation. It's much better for the teacher to assume one of the roles in the dialogue.Alex: Exactly. As a teacher, if you're talking about a lower‑level student, you can select the part that is easier for him or her to read. After he or she turns into an intermediate student, you can have him or her pick the role he or she wants. That's the way personalization occurs.Ross: You could do the same role‑play twice. You guys could just switch roles halfway through. Like if it's someone asking for directions first of all, the teacher provides the answers. Then you can switch it around and give the student in the more challenging role after they've seen a model.Those are all things that teachers would do naturally offline, giving a stronger student the more challenging role in a role play. I guess you have to be the strong student if you're the teacher during those activities. [laughs]Another common problem we see a lot online is teachers getting students to read whatever is on the screen out loud. Often, it's just a page of a course book, or something. I've seen teachers that even ask the students to read the title of the page. [laughs]Alex: And the instructions.Ross: And the instructions, right. What are some of the problems with that?Alex: It's not effective. The instruction is not the target language. I get it why they would do that. They probably think that they read it. They probably can't understand the instructions. The more they read it, the more they will get to know what's going on, but actually no.Ross: It doesn't work like that. If I'm asked to read something out loud, I always find I don't know what I've just read. I'm so focused on getting the science right that I don't actually process the meaning. With those, it's better to get the student to read it silently, which is also just much more natural.You don't see people [laughs] walking around with their phones or reading things out loud. We read in our heads most of the time. Or the teacher reads it out loud for their student to listen, and they can follow along.We started talking about the materials. Another issue with teaching online that doesn't happen so much offline is that teachers will tend to use every page, if we can call it that, of a lesson of the course book. We often online call it the "courseware." They'll go through it in order rather than jump around.It's interesting, because I noticed myself doing this with having the same book on my Kindle versus having the paper copy. I find that on the paper copy, it's so much easier to flick through and read chapters out of order. On a Kindle, I find I don't do that as much. I go through it in order.Teachers teaching online will tend to do the same thing of follow every page rather than what you might do in a course book, which is skip some activities or you might do the last activity first, that kind of thing.Alex: I don't know. Maybe somebody told them that, "You've got to finish the courseware." They just feel like, "Oh, by finish, you probably mean I need to complete each page."I once had a survey with some teachers, some call‑ins. They were like, "I didn't finish those activities. I didn't finish all those pages. Is that OK?"Ross: [laughs]Alex: I actually observed this teacher's class. She was doing fine. You can see that she's got some preparation. First and foremost, she identified what to teach, what the teaching objectives are. She did that, but she didn't complete the pages. Some teachers who are listening might not notice that.Ross: It's like offline teaching where the main thing is, "Teach the students. Don't teach the plan." You're totally right. A lot of teachers feel like, "My job here is to get to the end of these pages on this PowerPoint," rather than to help the students learn something or achieve something.Up until now we've mainly been talking about speaking, but I wanted to touch on writing for a moment. This is definitely one of my pet hates online, is teachers asking students to write something using the mouse. It's not a useful skill to practice.Alex: [laughs]Ross: Writing using a mouse and writing using a pen ‑‑ I mean, just try it ‑‑ they're very, very different. I can write quite well with a pen. I cannot write well with a mouse.Alex: I really show my respect for those teachers who can write perfectly with a mouse.Ross: [laughs] Perfectly with a mouse.Alex: If your student has this learning need which is to practice their handwriting, you can ask them to prepare a notepad. They can write there, and they can show you.Ross: Something else that I rarely see online is teachers or students actually moving the camera. Most people, when they're teaching online, they're using a laptop.Usually, the screen, it's on a hinge. It's pretty easy for the teacher or the student move the screen down. You could write, and the other person would be able to see what you're doing. I feel for teaching writing online, it's pretty challenging.Alex: We can agree that the priority of teaching online would be speaking and listening.Ross: Maybe we could talk about some activities that we think work particularly well. I can start out. One of the activities I've seen that works really well is a creative activity where you get the student to make something. The teacher has to do the typing, and the student has to do the telling.You've almost got the student describing the creative thing that they want, and the teacher drawing and filling things in. One of the examples I've seen work quite well is a shopping mall. Here's a floor plan of a shopping mall. The teacher asks the student, "What shops do you want in the shopping mall? What do you want them to be called?"The student has to say them, and the teacher types them in. You got a lot of communication happening in that activity, but also the student ends up being quite motivated.Alex: You're creating something.Ross: Absolutely. The teacher has to understand what the student is saying. If the teacher doesn't and makes a mistake with writing something, often the student's very quick to correct their teacher...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...which is great because you're getting a lot of real communication happening there.Alex: I have two personal favorites kind of related to teaching texts. After you go through all those comprehension questions the courseware offers you, if you still have time, if we're talking about Bloom's Taxonomy, higher audio thinking skills at the level of evaluation, you can ask your student what are their perspective of the character?How do they think of this character? Ask why afterwards. You don't want to sound so much like what the courseware would offer. You can start with your own model. There is a stereotype going on, which is Chinese students, they are reluctant to express their opinions. This can be something to model.You can have different views on something, on somebody. It's OK. We're not judging somebody.Ross: [laughs]Alex: We're just expressing our opinions. Another one is for those classes there are texts about different cultures. Some students might be unfamiliar with those. After going through the text, say the setting is in Brazil and it's about carnival, then you can change it to the setting of Chinese New Year.That would be something that they can relate to. Back to Bloom's Taxonomy, you're creating something different with your student.Ross: With that second example there you're also taking advantage of that real information gap. If you're a teacher and you've not been to the same country as your student, you're probably not going to know very much about the culture. It's a real motivation for the teacher to be genuinely listening to what the student's saying and for the student to genuinely communicate with the teacher.Again there, we've got that thing of the teacher taking on another role, being the conversation partner and not just prompting the student to try out some target language but actually communicate something that the teacher wants to listen to.Alex: A suggestion for teachers would be to ask questions that they don't have answers to.Ross: Again everyone, that was Alex Li. If you enjoyed that, go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com for more podcasts. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

Alex: You mean there are no justice molecules? Mark: No, if science, then not social. If social, then not science  Please SUBSCRIBE  and SPONSOR @    https://patron.podbean.com/AlexMarkPodcasts   Thank You!  

Welcome to the Mini-Break, your daily podcast for the biggest storylines, results, and controversies from the tennis world. On today’s episode, host Alex Gruskin is joined by Cracked Racquets contributor Matt Stachowiak to discuss the ATP 500 events and the WTA Premier Mandatory in Beijing, preview the action in Shanghai, and end with another game of "Possible or Alex You're F$%&ing Crazy?".  Don’t forget to give a 5 star review with your twitter/instagram handle for a chance to win some FREE CR gear!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Mini-Break, your daily podcast for the biggest storylines, results, and controversies from the tennis world. On this episode, host Alex Gruskin is joined by CR contributor Matt Stachowiak to discuss the biggest results and headlines going into Day 2 of the 2019 US Open. They also play another game of "Possible, or Alex You're F'ing Crazy?". Don’t forget to give a 5 star review with your twitter/instagram handle for a chance to win some FREE CR gear!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does Alex Berman consistently get sales appointments and land deals with billion dollar brands? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Experiment27 Chairman Alex Berman pulls back the curtain on the email strategy he uses to close deals with Fortune 500 companies. From identifying your target audience, to developing an offer and writing cold emails, Alex goes into detail on his campaign blueprint and shares how both he and his clients have used it to win business. Highlights from my conversation with Alex include: If you want to get in front of big brands, Alex recommends that you start by identifying industries where you've had strong performance or a great track record. Then develop a "no brainer offer" for other businesses in that industry. Alex says that enterprise level companies want to see that you've done work with other companies of their size and in their industry. If you can nail those two things, then cracking into big companies becomes much easier. If you don't have a relevant track record, he suggests going after a smaller company in that industry and then gradually working your way up in company size.  Once you have identified the industry you are targeting and you have your no brainer offer, the next step is to build a landing page for it. Alex recommends creating four different variations of the landing page and testing to see which performs best. When it comes time to email the target audience, use a short subject line. Alex says "Quick question" performs best for him. The first sentence of the email is then a custom compliment aimed at the recipient (the emails are one-to-one). Alex has found that adding this in produces 10X the responses. That is then followed by a one sentence case study highlighting work you've done for a similar company in the same industry, and a pitch to meet with the recipient. Start by testing different subject lines with small audiences of 50 to 100 people to see which ones work best. The goal is to get a subject line that has an open rate of 80% or greater. Alex generally strives for a 4% meeting book rate (so, four meetings or every 100 emails sent). Alex likes to test different times for sending emails, but has found in general that Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday at 10 am works best. The strategy that Alex uses works best for companies that sell a product or service valued at $1,000 or more. Below that, Alex says that a company is better off using Facebook ads. The biggest mistakes that companies make when implementing this strategy are outsourcing it, not customizing the emails correctly, and giving up too soon. It can take several tries at testing to land on a really powerful subject line and offer, and the best marketers are the ones that stick with it. Resources from this episode: Visit the Experiment27 website Subscribe to Alex Berman's YouTube channel Check out Alex's Email 10k course Listen to the podcast to get the details on Alex's email campaign blueprint and learn how to use it to close deals with your target prospects. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Alex Berman who is the chairman of Experiment27. Welcome, Alex. Alex Berman (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Alex and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yeah you know, I was intrigued to read your background and your profile. It talks about how you help clients get meetings with billion dollar brands. So like, land the big whales, if you will, and I'm really excited to talk to you about that, but before we dig into it, will you just give my listeners a little bit of background on who you are, what you do, and what Experiment27 is? About Alex Berman and Experiment27 Alex: Sure. So Experiment27 is part of a bigger holding company that I run. X27 does "done for you" lead generation. So we help companies match with billion dollar brands, but then we also have Email 10K which is of course where people it for it, or they can do it themselves following the course, and there's also consulting for advanced entrepreneurs, but we just kind of help them with lead generation. So basically, if it has something to do with lead generation in the business to business space, that is my specialty. We've been doing this for almost a decade now, and also I run a YouTube channel where we have I think over 28,000 subs, and all we do is post about free business to business sales training. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. And how did you get to be such an expert in lead gen? Alex: A lot of trial and error. It's the same thing that we talk about ... I mean, it's like any marketing channel where the first time you try lead gen, the first I tried it I tried it all wrong. I was spamming a lot of people. I didn't have the offer down, and what I learned is by sending in small batches and by customizing the messages, it allows you to get a lot more feedback quicker, and if you're able to get feedback quicker, you're able to improve the emails constantly. So the main thing that I teach is it's an iterative process of testing a campaign, sending it out there, seeing what the results are, improving it, and then getting a new list of leads that hasn't seen the previous campaign and testing that optimized campaign with email, and then continuing to improve that over and over again. And what that allows you to do is, one, you can get a bunch of sales with cold email which is really cool, but the other thing it does is it really strengthens your offer. So when you do use inbound, you use social media, you use YouTube like we do, it makes the offer that much more likely to convert. Designing Marketing Campaigns That Target Billion Dollar Brands Kathleen: Hm. So walk me through this. If I am a marketer, and I come to you, and I say, "I'm looking to reach people at these huge companies," the billion dollar brands that you talk about, those can be hard target markets to crack into. Walk me through your process from beginning to end if you're going to do this for me. Alex: Sure. So if you're an established company, the first thing I'm going to do is ask what case studies you have and what sort of companies you've worked with in the past. And from there, what I want to do is try to find patterns. So for instance, a lot of our clients are software as a service businesses or services businesses where, let's say, you had a good case study with a potato chip company like a consumer packaged goods company. Then what we're going to do is create an offer just around that company. I call it a no-brainer offer, and what we want to do is come up with an offer that is so good that people can't say no. For instance, for lead generation which is what I sell, it might be something like we're gonna book ten meetings in the next week with people in your ideal customer base, or we're going to give you the money back. Something like that is what we really want to nail down in an ideal situation, and you could do it across ditches like video production we help some people. Usually it's coming up with either a video idea that they like or their money back or coming up with a list of what the video is going to be like bullet points, an outline. From there, once you have the no-brainer offer, it's writing that in a way that highlights the case study, and we could talk about this in a second what to actually put in that email because it's very similar to what we put in Facebook ads when we do that too. But once you have that no-brainer offer and you frame it in a way that is extremely niche specific, then you test it in the market and see what they say. What I've found is with enterprise companies, what they want to see is ... they want to see you've done work with the companies of their size, and they want to see that you've done work with companies that are very similar, as similar as possible, to them. If you can nail those two things, then you're all set to scale the enterprise. If not, I would not approach someone like a Fortune 500 but instead go after people that are $5+ million in revenue, and then try to get one of those smaller case studies that you can then leverage to get these large enterprises. How To Get Started Kathleen: Okay, so that was going to be my question which is, obviously everybody's got to start somewhere. So, it sounds like what you're saying is you start within the same industry or product service, vertical, but you just start with a smaller firm. Correct? Alex: Exactly. So one mistake that a lot of companies make, even big enterprises, is they don't have marketing that's specific for one vertical. So for instance, let's say you're running a software as a service business and you're crushing it with live events, and you're also crushing it with CPG, or you're also crushing it with retail. They will be sending all three of those customers to the exact same funnel, they exact same website. So one of the things that we focus on is not only separating the marketing, so we'll have three different websites for each of those, or one different website for each one of those verticals. Kathleen: A full website, not just a landing page? Alex: Well, a landing page is basically a website. Kathleen: Or a microsite, a microsite. Okay. Alex: It's like a microsite, it's a one or two page site. Usually it's just a headline, some kind of testimonial, some case studies, and then the contact form. Maybe a breakdown of the services. But yeah, and then it's not just coming up with that, but it's coming up with three or four of those options and then testing all four in the market, seeing which one gets the best response, and then only at that point doubling and tripling down on the marketing. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they have a theory for what their customer looks like, or they have a theory, even if they've been running a business 10-15 years, they kind of know who their customers are, but they actually haven't done a real analysis and figured out one, who are the customers that will be most successful when using this, and then two, who are the customers that I actually make the most money from? And it's cool to do that analysis and then also compare it to which one of these offers actually gets people to buy most often, and then hopefully you find an overlap there. If not, you need to do more research. Developing An Email Outreach Strategy Kathleen: Okay, so you craft the offer, you develop your case study, and then you're sending ... it sounds like you're starting with an initial email. Is that right? Alex: Yeah. It's normally a short email. We can breakdown what the email says if you want. Kathleen: Yeah, let's do it. I love to get as specific as possible. Alex: Okay. So the first thing that I like to test is the subject line. Normally I'll just say if people are writing their first email from scratch, I would say just go with "quick question" because I've sent over 2 million emails now, and that one still outperforms cross niche. So the highest chance to get an open rate is with "quick question." So sending that as a subject line's good. Then what we do is the first sentence of the email is a custom compliment towards the person's business, and this is not something you can outsource, this is not something that you can kind of fake, especially at the enterprise level. It needs to be a custom compliment, and it sounds something like, "Hey Kathleen, really love your Inbound Success Podcast. Long time listener. Love the interview you did with Alex Berman." Just something like that. Or if it's someone at Sony like, "Hey," director of marketing name, "congrats on the Q4 growth. Loved the latest earnings report." You know, just something that's very specific to their business, and what that does is it gets them to keep reading the next part which is the one sentence case study which usually goes like ... Let's say you are talking to Sony, and you worked with ... Who's a competitor to Sony? Like Hitachi. So that custom compliment. So, "Hey, I really love what you're doing with Sony. Love the Q4 growth. We just wrapped a project with Hitachi where we optimized their entire backend, and we were able to generate a 14% increase in," I don't know like new user engagement or whatever you guys did. "We'd love to do the same for Sony. Are you around for a quick call later this week? Let me know, and I can send over a couple times." Kathleen: You know, and I can serve as a testimonial to the fact that this approach works because all right, I'm going to actually read the email that you sent pitching me for the podcast which totally follows your formula. So the subject line was "Huge fan," and you said, "Hey, Kathleen. Just listened to your interview with Sangram Vajre from Terminus, and I was really impressed with the idea of using AI to fit data and automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for prospects." That was the initial compliment line, and then you said, "It would be incredible to come on your show as a guest. I run a YouTube channel with over 23,000 subscribers and have been on more than 100 podcasts including," and then you listed some out. So totally following the format you just described which is awesome. I love that you practice what you preach, and it worked, and I got back to you and said, "Yes!" So there you have it. Alex: Yeah. We practice what we preach because every other way is inefficient. Like okay, what I found is when we started doing the personal lines, when we started doing that we got a ten times increase. I know it takes more time. That might have taken four or five minutes. Like I had to look up that podcast episode, we had to listen to part of the episode and figure out what it was, and then after we booked, I did check out the actual episode so I wasn't lying. That all takes time, for sure, but the response boost is worth it, and the conversion rate increase which you might not even see when you send the emails out, but you'll see it like three, four months later. The number of people that work with you or get you on their podcast or whatever from an email like that is much higher than one of these generic cold emails that people are sending out. Kathleen: Absolutely. Now, you mentioned ... I love that you have this formulaic approach. I mean, it's formulaic, but it's like customized formulaic I would say. It's a blueprint more so than a copy and paste. So you apply this blueprint to the email, and you mentioned sending it out to a smaller group in the beginning. So define small. Alex: Small would be anywhere from ... So you want to make sure you get enough data. I would say a minimum of 50 people, a maximum of 100 people with a pitch like this. And what you want to test is a few things. So for instance, what was the subject line that you just read? Kathleen: Huge fan. Alex: Huge fan, okay. So huge fan might have been iteration number four or five, and the first thing that we're looking for is, and by the way this is all broken down in our course, Email 10K, email10k.com. What we want to do is you want to find the subject line that gets over an 80% open rate. So for instance, for podcasts if you open that, that's amazing. Quick question might have gotten under 80% so that was optimized out. When we were sending to breweries, actually the one that won when we were doing ... It was digital marketing for breweries in the United States, it was a beer emoji, and when we were sending to the entertainment companies like Netflix and TV Land and stuff like that, what was booking meetings was, "I was born to work with HBO," or "I was born to work with your company." Benchmarking Success Alex: So that is found through ... Yeah, just hardcore testing. 100 at a time. That's the first thing you're looking for is ... Well two things you're looking for, one is are people opening the email? You want at least an 80% open rate before you even touch anything else, and then two, are the emails any good? Meaning if you get a super high bounce rate then you're going to want to change the way you're finding leads. Kathleen: Now quick clarifying question on that. So you're testing these subject lines. Are you testing simultaneously different subject lines with different small audiences, or are you testing sequentially? Like, you send one, it doesn't work, you send another one? Alex: Sequentially's usually enough. Because the numbers that we're talking about ... So what you want is an 80% open rate. You want at least a 4% meeting book rate. So every 100 emails, you're getting 4 people signed up. So when you're dealing with numbers like that, it's a little easier to see when things are failing or they're succeeding. You'll be able to see pretty quick because you're either going to get a 14% open rate or like a 30%, or it's going to be 90. Right? And that's ... You're really going for those major win emails. Kathleen: All right. So it sounds like shorter subject lines work really well also. Alex: It completely depends on the niche. What I've found is in some niches, yeah, "quick question" works really well, shorter subject lines work really well, and that's because your custom compliment can be seen. If you look at Gmail or even Outlook, you'll see the subject line, and then you'll see that first line of the email. So if you have even just "Quick Q," which also works pretty well, they see that subject line, but then they also see the first line of the email before they open. So a good first line also will improve open rates. Testing Email Copy Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. So all right, you test this out, you land on a good subject line. You already have the body copy within the email written. Are you testing that as well? Alex: Yeah. So the main thing I want to make sure first is the subject line gets over 80% before we touch anything to do with the body. I would stick to the exact template that we talked about earlier. That's the baseline template, and then from there if 80% of the people are opening, and you're getting ... Usually it's about 20% reply or less, then we're rewriting the body of the email. Usually it's messing around with the case studies or messing around with the personalized compliments. A lot of people when they first start the compliments, they either go too far in one direction. So for instance, if I was sending this email to you and I had pointed out something specific about the Terminus podcast and written this long paragraph to you, the chances that that would work, especially to an enterprise level company, would be very level. But what people are trying to find and what we're trying to find is you want a compliment that's short enough but it's not super creepy. Like, you don't want it to look like you did a crazy amount of research. Kathleen: Yeah, you're stalking them. Alex: Yeah, exactly. But you also don't want it to be too generic. So part of it is finding that balance. How Long To Run Email Tests Kathleen: Now how long do you wait after you send those initial emails out to kind of close the test? Because obviously, I don't know, in my experience I find that some people look at their email right away, and then for other people it could be a day or two, and they might still open it. What's the right amount of time for that? Alex: After seeing hundreds of these campaigns, it's kind of evolved a little bit because I don't want it to say ... Like, the gut feeling is we should wait a couple days on our tests. What I've found is when a campaign works, it works so well that you can tell after like three or four hours. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: Especially if you're sending at the right times. For instance, the best time I've found actually is a couple hours before this. It's like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10:00AM Eastern time is usually the best because it overlaps early morning Pacific, and then the other best time is later in the afternoon. So like 3:00 Pacific so you hit like 3:00-4:00PM Pacific. Kathleen: Okay. Alex: But if you're sending on those times, you should be able to see opens and engages. And then the other thing I'll do sometimes with replies is, and this is a little bit of an advanced tactic, but if someone does reply to your email and you're trying to follow up, you can see when they reply and then queue your followups to go out whenever they're checking their emails. Kathleen: Yeah, there's actually a great platform that we've used called Seventh Sense that does that for you which is pretty cool. It just tracks email open times, and then it develops a personal send time for everybody in your database. It's like magic. Alex: Yeah no, it's sick. Because I just sent 50 followups the other day, and it was crazy. Some people only do emails at like 3:00AM Pacific, or maybe they'll do emails at like midnight. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. Alex: You just can't tell. Kathleen: So if you have such a short amount of turnaround time that's necessary to conclude a test, it sounds like you can go through this entire process within a week. Alex: You can, and one of the things that I talk to new entrepreneurs about is especially when you're starting your business or if you have a business for a while and you're trying to find what market is worth investing in for your inbound, I would run 10-20 tests. Just even test different offers and different positions within that. Like before you even deal with optimizing or making sure the subject line works or whatever, stick to that basic template of "quick question" and write an email, and then write 10 different emails for 10 different offers. Like maybe one is selling your company like you only work with chip manufacturers. Or only work with software as a service startups, whatever. Just doing what we talked about with the case studies. Because what I've found is one of those ten, or even two of those ten, are going to blow away all the other tests, and then you only focus on those two. Kathleen: And then you just slightly change the contents to adjust for different industries and roll it out? Alex: The ... Yeah, you change the one sentence case study. So we just worked with this company, and we did this thing. Following Up On The Initial Email Send Kathleen: Okay, great. So I love this format. So is there something that comes after the email iterations, or is that it? That brings in the meetings? Alex: That brings in the ... So there are followups on top of it. One, and I broke all of these down in the course, but one is just like, "Hey, I'm sure you're busy and wanted to make sure this didn't get buried." That's a couple days later. Then the third one is, I call it like the big win. So something like, "Hey, we just had a big win working with this solar manufacturer we did that ..." like basically a second one sentence case study, and then asking them for another call like, "Hey, we'd love to talk. If you're around ..." I always try to end emails with question marks, too. Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: "Would you mind if I sent over a few times for a quick call?" is how I'll usually end them. Or I'll just say, "Let's talk?" Alex's Results Kathleen: Great. You teach this method, you've done this with different clients. Talk me through what kinds of results you've seen, and is it specific to a certain type of business or industry or company size? Alex: Is it specific ... So anyone that sells to people that check their emails. That's ... This is what I like to think about, so- Kathleen: A narrow target audience. Alex: It's narrow ... Well so if you think about it though like some businesses aren't good for this. So for instance what I found is loans or mortgages aren't really good because with those you just have to hit so many people that Facebook ads is a better thing. Used cars is also not a good niche for this. But most of the B2B. Anyone that's selling to manufacturers or anyone that works in an office. Things like that are best for this sort of thing. Revenue size I've found does not matter. We've met with most of the Fortune 500 for our clients and for ourselves, and we've met with smaller ... Like everyone from local businesses up to billion dollar brands this is good for. I try to avoid companies under $5 million in revenue because I mean, I like dealing with people that can actually afford this service. I don't like dealing with local businesses. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. But I guess a local business could presumably take your class or if they heard this they could test out executing it for themselves. They could DIY. Alex: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so what businesses are benefiting from this? Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: I thought you were talking about what businesses are worth selling to. Kathleen: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yes. Okay, got you. Yes. Alex: So what businesses are benefiting from this? It's usually any sort of business that has a higher ticket. Because this sort of thing like we're talking about, we're personalizing the emails. Every single email, it takes a decent amount of time. So I would say if your cost is under $1,000 per user, it's probably not worth doing this. You should probably do like Facebook ads or something. But if you're selling a service, like my background is selling mobile apps to the enterprise so we're used to selling $100,000 apps, or like $200,000 applications, websites, that sort of stuff, or even a lot of our clients will sell like $25,000 packages, $30,000 packages. Cold email is perfect for those. Kathleen: Great. Okay. So considered purchases, if you will. High dollar value sales. Alex: High dollar value sales, and sometimes they're not considered. I mean, you get the right no-brainer offer. Our initial marketing reviews were $8,500, and we would sell those after a couple weeks, and then that would just go into the retainers. It all depends on the type of client you're going after. Right? Because like for Sony, or for Home Depot or whoever, like $8,500 is very small. Kathleen: Yeah, that is not a considered purchase for them. Very good point. So talk me through the results that your clients are seeing with this, and how long does it take to see those results? Alex: So if you get an email right off the bat ... I actually just saw something in our private Facebook group this morning, some guy sold ... his name was Mark O, he sold $4,500 and then $4,000 off a month like two days after starting, but that's when everything goes perfectly if you get the offer right. If you're willing to put in the time and you're willing to test and you're willing to be wrong 9, 10, 11 times and just keep going back and iterating, I mean it could work pretty quick. It 100% depends on how fast you are, how intuitive you are with the data, and then how much you're willing to actually put into it because a lot of people, they find cold emailing extremely boring, and I did too until ... I had to purposely reframe each email as, "Okay, this email's worth $3. This email's worth $5," like whatever, like I had to reframe it just to get myself to actually work because it is super tedious work. Kathleen: Yeah, but it sounds like it gets easier over time. Alex: It does, and it gets faster. And once you have an offer, it's much better. The hardest part and the thing where you can get stuck for months at a time is trying to find the way that your business should be positioned to get massive amounts of money, and I know it sounds kind of weird, but it's like there is a way to frame any business where it becomes a no-brainer for clients, and then everything else becomes easy. And if you're not at that point where it feels easy and things are like going, until you've been there it's hard to describe it, but there's ... And you'll see it once you get it. There's such a difference between a business that works and a business that just kind of works. Kathleen: Hm. Interesting. Well I love it. 10x improvements like you were talking about are certainly attractive, and the fact that you can do all of this in a week is also very attractive. It's just it sounds like it's really just a matter of time and elbow grease. Alex: Yeah, and if you compare it to something like Facebook ads, like we run Facebook ads as well, and it's a similar strategy where you're filming 10-20 ads and putting budget behind all of them. Those actually take time to get the data in, and it costs money. Right, if you compare it to something like cold email, all that costs is time which for some people is money, but if you're a new entrepreneur and you're not charging like $700 an hour, it's not that much money. Common Mistakes Businesses Make When Targeting Big Brands Kathleen: Yeah. Now what do you see as the most common mistakes that people make when trying to do this? Alex: First most common mistake is they think they can outsource it all, and they don't want to do the customization. I recommend against that, especially in this initial ... the hardest phase, the research phase. Once you have something that works, you can scale pretty easy. They try to outsource too early, too. They customize in the wrong way. A lot of our clients are ... well actually, not a lot of our clients. Some of our clients are international. And so English isn't the greatest for them. Even if they come from like Germany or some Western country. So framing that compliment in a way that doesn't come off as like too crazy is actually something that I struggle with a lot with our coaching clients. That's number two. And then number three would be giving up too soon. And actually giving up too soon/settling too soon. Because you might try three tests, and like test one and test two book zero meetings, and then test three books two meetings. Then you might be like, "oh, I'm going to put my entire business onto test three," when really if you had tested like four or five more times, you might have sent an email that got eight meetings. Kathleen: Yeah. How do you know when to stop testing? Alex: So I would never stop testing. I know even with our ... so with the course part of our business, we spend 30% of our revenue on research and development. So just testing new ads and doing all that stuff outside of scale. I would never stop testing. It's always surprising. What we saw our add to cart cost go from $100 to $6 this week just by testing a new series of ads. Kathleen: Wow. That's crazy. Alex: Right? You can only get those improvements by constantly throwing stuff out there and seeing what works. Kathleen: Yeah. Very cool. And I love how specific you've been just in terms of sharing guidance on the actual wording of subject lines that works and the wording of some of the emails. It's really helpful. If somebody wants to try this, how do you recommend narrowing down your list? Because a lot of the people I know ... You said send it to 50 or 100 people. A lot of the people I know have lists that are much larger than that. Is it just literally a matter of, "All right, I'm going to export this list of 10,000 people, and I'm just going to take the first 100," or is there some other way ... Do you start with like a certain subpopulation? Alex: So what I would do is if you have an inbound list, I would actually ignore it for now. So you have marketing that works for your inbound list, right? Keep that going. What I would actually do is go over to Upwork or go over to LinkedIn and just start making lists of your ideal clients. I would send 100 cold. I would make a list of these people cold instead of going through the people that are subscribed. Because what you want is you test with the cold traffic where you can quickly iterate, and then once you have something that's working with those cold people, then you can take it back to your main list, and you know it'll work versus burning your main list on an offer that may or may not be okay. Kathleen: Do you have any concerns around if somebody does that, jeopardizing their sender score just because people hitting spam or what have you? Alex: Yeah, so normally ... And actually if you "Alex Berman how to avoid the spam box," on YouTube, I broke it down. But normally I'll recommend starting with a brand new domain for cold email, and then you warm it up over like two weeks. You subscribe to some newsletters, you make it seem like a normal email, and actually I would have a different domain for your cold emails, a different domain for your inbound like your email list emails, and a third domain ... actually even a third and fourth domain. Like third domain for cold ad traffic lists, right just in case, because spam is an issue there. And even a fourth domain for just customer communication. That way you protect everything. You keep it all super segmented. Kathleen: Does that get really confusing? Alex: Not for me. I mean, for our ads we've got like alex@X27.io, like alex@X27Marketing.com is our other list. alex@Experiment27.com. It's all pretty easy. Kathleen: And I'm assuming they all redirect at some point to...? Alex: They all redirect ... Yeah they all go to my normal inbox. Kathleen: Okay, got you. Very helpful. All right. Alex: It's a good way to protect your sender score there. Because what you'll also do is a lot of times if you want to test a bunch of different cold email campaigns also, you might, and what I make people consider a lot is you might want to buy a domain for each one of these different niches as well, and then that domain will just redirect to a website that's specific for that niche. The Impact of GDPR Kathleen: Do you worry at all with European like GDPR rules and the increasing focus on doing something similar in the US, do you worry at all that that approach is going to get tougher to use because cold emailing will begin to become disallowed essentially under regulations? Alex: If it's illegal, I recommend not doing it. What I've found is there's always a place for a personalized compliment. The personalizing the emails thing is ... that's what increases our response rate, and it's also what takes it out of the spammy territory. We're not sending messages to 10,000 people. We're not robocalling. It's nothing crazy like that. But I would ... Yeah, if you're in like ... Especially if you're in Europe or the UK or Canada or Australia, definitely consult a lawyer before working with someone like us or doing anything related to this. Kathleen: Yeah, it is getting- Alex: As far as I know, in America it's totally good so far except for maybe California is a little iffy right now. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But it's interesting the direction everything's heading. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. Okay. Well- Alex: It will be, but it's not like these go away. You can use these same strategies ... Once you get this testing strategy down, you can use it for Facebook ads, you can use it for cold LinkedIn messages. You can use it for text messages. You can use it at events just like testing your elevator pitch at events. It's all the same kind of thing. Just taking words and trying to test the way that you're phrasing things to find ... it's almost unlocking a lock. You want to find a way of wording your business that gets people to buy. How To Learn More About Alex's Strategy Kathleen: Yeah. I love all of this. You've mentioned a couple things like you have a course and you have a YouTube channel. Can you say a few words about if somebody's intrigued and wants to learn more, where they can go to find more information? Alex: Sure. If you want us to do this for you, I would actually just start at the YouTube channel, AlexBerman.com will go right to the YouTube channel, and if you do want to learn this kind of stuff, it's Email10K.com, that's the course. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Okay, love it. Now, we can't finish up this interview without me asking you the two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one being we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular person or company that you think is really just killing it right now with inbound? Alex: Really killing it with inbound. I'm actually not ... I haven't been impressed with very many people when it comes to inbound. Even the greats, I don't know if they're testing or what they're doing, but I see a lot of weird stuff. Kathleen: Oh yeah? Alex: Who have I really ... I actually like Russell Brunson, what he's been doing with his ad strategies, and he runs a SaaS. It doesn't even seem like it. He's selling a software as a service, but he's selling it like an info product. There's some real next level stuff that Russell Brunson's doing. Kathleen: Oh, I'll have to check him out, and I will share his name and the link to his stuff in the show notes. Alex: He does a two week free trial, and then it's only like $150 a month for his software, and somehow he's been able to frame his thing in a way where it appeals to B2B, it appeals to entrepreneurs, and it appeals to ... He's going after like people that are selling multilevel marketing. He's got everything down in terms of how he's framing his thing. Kathleen: Interesting. I can't wait to check that one out. Second question, the biggest kind of complaint I hear from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly. There's so much to keep up with. It's like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated on latest developments? Alex: So this sounds kind of counterintuitive, but what I've found is if you stick to the basics and you just try to get like those fundamentals right, everything comes into play. So for instance, when I was getting into Facebook ads, all I had to do was take the offer that I knew worked and put it in general targeting, and then the Facebook AI figured out what it was because we knew the offer worked. Same with YouTube videos. We just have to create content, and it'll find an audience because our offer system. So I think if you create a product that people want, and you phrase it in a way that is very hard to say no to, you'll win, and it doesn't matter if you're at an event or if cold emails get banned, or like cold calling doesn't work anymore. None of that will matter if you can crack that, and then number two is just go where your customers are. I've gotten a surprising amount of work off of Instagram recently. Like to the point where I barely even use LinkedIn anymore. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: But that just comes down to who my target audience is, right? I'm going after younger people now, especially for this course offer, and they're mostly on Instagram versus when I was going after office workers ... Actually, all the office workers are on email versus any of the other social media channels. So I honestly, I don't worry about that at all. Kathleen: That's great. You have figured something out, then, because the vast majority of the other folks I talk to stress about it a lot, so there's definitely a lesson to be learned on the approach that you're taking. Alex: Ooo, okay. So I actually did figure this out. So if you want to figure out where your clients are, write a super targeted Facebook ad and put like $100 in it, and what'll happen is you put no targeting in. The way that Facebook works now is they'll find buyers, and what I've found there is not only will they find out who your ideal buyer is, for instance one of our ads is targeting ... it's converting really good with women between ages 25-65+ which is crazy, and then one of our other ads is only for men which is great, but the main thing that I've found was if you go to placements, it'll tell you exactly where your ads are converting. So for instance, some of our ads do really well on Facebook. Actually, one of my consulting clients was only selling on Instagram. Like hard pitching Instagram, and when we did this ad test we found out a bunch of his people were on Facebook, and he went out and did the same cold pitching on Facebook, and it was like 10-20 minutes, and he already had a bunch of leads coming in. So that's another easy way to find it out. Kathleen: Yeah, you know it's interesting you bring that up because I found that too that paid ads in general are the fastest way to test messaging because you instantly can see what's working and what's not. Alex: Yeah, exactly. You can test messaging there, you can test placements, and then the way that Facebook ... Facebook's getting so smart in terms of their machine learning. So it'll give you data you didn't even know you had. The ad that I wrote, I had no idea it would appeal ... The one that hits women, I think it was getting add to carts for like $10 for $1,000 course which is crazy, but for men it was $16 with the same ad. So I had no idea. Kathleen: Which is still reasonable, but $10's better than $16 every day. Alex: Exactly. Especially when you're comparing it to ... I was at $100 before. Kathleen: Oh, that's great. Alex: But no, you have no idea. It's only the machine learning that taught me that this type of ad works for this market. Kathleen: Yeah, it's crazy what Facebook can do now. It's a little scary sometimes, but it's also really cool. Alex: Yeah. How To Connect With Alex Kathleen: Great. Well if somebody wants to connect with you, has a question, wants to learn more, how can they reach out to you? Alex: Best way to talk to me is to grab the course, Email10K.com. I'm in the Facebook group right now. It's unlimited consulting. If you do just want to like, talk for free, I would go to the YouTube channel. AlexBerman.com will go there. And just leave a comment. I'm usually in there. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Okay. Great. I'll put those links in the show notes, and if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, of course I would really appreciate it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That goes a long way to getting the podcast in front of other listeners like yourself who could find value, and if you know somebody doing kickass Inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, Alex. Alex: Thanks.

RHONY 304  Alex wants to confront Jill about the kid climbing up the leg comment Bethenny and Jill had a confrontation at fashion week, it did not go well.  ACT ONE JASON AND BETHENNY TALK Jason comes home. This is the same day as the Jill Stuart show allegedly. Bethenny tells him that this fight with Jill which wasnt a big deal apparently was. Bethenny can’t believe Jill played the message for people. Jason: You can’t let it bother you. WORST advice ever.  Jason wants to talk about figuring out the living situation. Jason basically says he will be proposing soon.  LUANN AND KELLY AT PAMELA ROWLAND SHOW Kelly and luann walk up to the tent and pose for cameras. There’s a really funny moment in the future when Luann poses for the paparazzi and the guy tells her to mix up her poses. KELLY asks Luann want to call her; countess? Luann says just call her luann. Kelly insists on calling her countess; Kelly is such a kissass.  Bethenny shows up. Luann amkes what Bethenny considers a dig about how normally Bethenny doesn’t come to many shows. Bethenny walks away.  Luann poses with Rinna! Bethenny greets Rinna as well. Luann tells Bethenny while they’re posing that that wasn’t a dig, she really thinks Bethenny looks great. Bethenny said I told you I would be up front. Luann doesn’t want to do this here; Bethenny does. Luann says that Bethenny really hurt Jill’s feelings; Bethenny says how is she your good friend when Jill has been talking about how you sleep around with everyone for the past year? BURNNN!  Bethenny calls Luann a snake. Luann calls Bethenny nasty. I mean if these two had ANY idea what was to come down the line. Kelly sits between Luann and Bethenny. Bethenny over Kelly goes “You’re talking about me and I’m right here!” a photographer approaches and they immediately smile for it. ITS SO GOOD.  Luann says: I didn’t call you a skank darling. Bethenny says I didn’t use that word, I said snake. ...but oh just wait, because in a few years, Bethenny will call you a slut!  Kelly leaves Bethenny and Luann to go sit with her friend Lisa who I assume is Lisa Rinna. So now Bethenny and Kelly have to switch places so Bethenny sits next to Luann so Kelly can sit next to Rinna.  Bethenny has regrets for everything she yelled at Luann, specifically that she told Luan that Jill wasn’t her friend.  ACT TWO RAMONA AND AVERY AT A FASHION SHOW More fashion shows! I wish they would go back to fashion week.  Avery still hates Ramona.  Kelly sits down next to Ramona. I don’t believe they’ve seen each other (or maybe they haven’t had a chance to chat) since Kelly wasn’t invited to Ramona’s house for labor day episode 2.  Kelly: You didn’t invite me to your party, that’s not very nice! Ramona: Oh I’m so sorry! (but not meaning it) Ramona makes up some bullshit about how she didn’t want to have an altercation between Kelly and Bethenny. KEEP THIS PARTY CONVO IN MIND!!  Kelly doesn’t buy any of it.  After the show, Kelly says she has to go to something else after this. Kelly says she’s taking Jill to Perez Hilton’s party after this downtown. Ramona goes oh, and you didnt invite me after you just gave me crap for not inviting you?! That’s not how that works Ramona!! Kelly shouldn’t invite you BECAUSE you didn’t invite her!  Ramona: this is my chance to bust her ass. WHATEVER she just wants to go to the party! Rmana: I said that just to tease her, and I didn’t expect her just to invite me and she did, so I thought that’s nice of her, so I should be nice and go. LIARRR you just want to go to perez hilton’s party.  THENNNN ramona puts avery in a cab for the first time ever in her life and sends her away. Avery: I’m going by myself…! Like she can’t believe it. Avery screeches away into the night. Kelly in bite is bothered that Avery left in a cab alone. That may be the first empathetic normal thing Kelly has ever said.  PEREZ HILTON’S PARTY  Ew. Perez is so so gross. Perez peeks into Jill’s dress to see her boobs.  Kelly fills in Ramona about the pamela roland show about Bethenny and Luann’s argument. Jill butts in and tells the story as if she was there.  Jill goes on about her confrontation with Bethenny. Ramona is determined not to take sides and she wants to get better about it.  ACT THREE ROBERT VERDI LOUNGE Bethenny is serving skinnygirl cocktails at the lounge. Alex can tell Bethenny needs to talk. Alex and Bethenny have this very confidante relationship but nothing beyond that. It helps to open up to a people pleaser because they’ll give you the nurturing that you need at that moment.  Alex brings up the thing at Ungaro about Jill saying did the boys crawl up your leg? Alex is going to take Jill out and talk to her about it. Bethenny thinks Jill made that dig because Alex seems like she’s bonding with Bethenny.  Kelly shows up. Bethenny has her try a skinnygirl. Kelly is so weird about trying it, like she is about trying on clothes.  Bethenny makes a joke about taking prozac and valium, and kelly says why would you do that?! Bethenny says she’s kidding. In bite, bethenny says: I don’t think Kelly is a moron… I don’t think she’s quick.  Kelly tells Bethenny she feels bad about their drama and wants to clear the air. Bethenny thinks its genuine, refreshing, and nice. You would really believe listening to this that they would be good now. But scary island is just around the corner.  Kelly says she will be nice to bethenny because there’s no reason not to, but she will never ever trust her. I don’t know that I could be nice to someone I couldn’t trust.  SECRETS OF A JEWISH MOTHER COVER SHOOT Jill’s mother looks like someone playing Judy Garland. They’re posing on the couch. Gloria is smiling and through the smile says, “Not happy, i’m not happy!!” The photographer says, “It’s just for options, we’re just getting options!” Gloria: that’s not a good option.  It’s a lot of eye rolling and complaining. Jill is sprawled out on the couch and posing. Gloria says of the three of them Jill is too sexy. Jill’s sister tells the stylist, we should all be going to the same place. The stylist looks like she wants to murder her  This scene annoys me so much but also I can’t look away because everyone is hamming it up SO much for the camera. It’s all performance.  RAMONA AND BETHENNY AT DINNER Ramona asks Bethenny for the situation with Bethenny and Jill. Bethenny says Luann interfered and that Bethenny was like, who are you? And ramona says, “Right, the empire.” She meant umpire. Ramona still refuses to take a side.  Ramona asks Bethenny if she’s coming to the Saks event tomorrow, but Bethenny had no idea about it. I love when they say ‘a lot of people we know will be there’ but what ramona really wanted to say what, oh well its a cast event.  Ramona says she alluded to the fact that she was goign to see Bethenny to Jill today, and Ramona says Jill will want information and will be on her like ‘white rice.’  ACT FOUR JILL HOSTING SAKS EVENT Jill is getting her HMU done for the saks event she’s hosting. Luann enters and demands a double kiss from the makeup man. Luann and Gloria talk. Luann tells her the divorce is finalized today.  Luann: I have this sadness and finALITTTY about it. Why does she say that?  Jill comes out and says: I don’t care if you married a count, you were born a countess. Luann: THATS THE NICEST THING YOU’VE EVER SAID TO ME!!!  SAKS PARTY Jill is so obnoxious in this. Ramona is shocked this event is happening, because she heard that Jill was blackballed for returning so many outfits. Ramona says that Jill’s outfit was too metallic and she could’ve looked more chic.  Jill yells at people: This is Sak’s private club for only the best of the best clients, of course I have my own private gold key.  Alex and Simon arrive. Luann thinks that Simon loves fashion. Simon is talking to Luann and references Mario’s countless joke. Ramona interrupts and this is when she goes BANANAS. She tells Simon that when she and Luann were planning some sort of get together, Luann didn’t want to do it because she didn’t want simon and alex to be there.  Luann claims Ramona is lying. Alex: “You said you didnt want to invite us over?” Luann (fakely) Never… Luann is SO caught red handed. Ramona walks away and is just on her own playing with her hair and staring, her eyes are popping out of her head. It’s INSANE how out of it she is.  Alex pulls Ramona aside and said she has to talk to Jill, about the kid thing. Alex to Ramona: You know what you can do? You can get me a drink. Ramona leaves, Alex asks Jill about the kid comment. Jill immediately says it was Luann’s story. Alex starts crying.  Alex says sometimes Jill really pisses her off, and she makes digs are her. Here’s the thing… I truly don’t know what else Jill did to really piss her off that much. Simon and Alex always refer to confrontations as whatever event it was. Alex: “I’ve been holding it in since Ungaro!”  Luann approaches. Alex: Who saw francois crawling up someones leg? Luann: without missing a beat… me. Luann: Well that was simple. I like you so much better than Ramona. Alex is STILL upset and says that both Jill and Luann are bugging her at this point. WHY?! I think Alex just wants prolonged drama and wants to be mad.  Everyone sits down…  Ramona screams I love youuu I love youuu to Jill. Jill tells Ramona that Kelly has to leave early. Ramona gets on Kelly, why do you always leave early? Why bother coming at all? Ramona and Kelly end up on the other side of the table. Luann tells Ramona that her divorce is finalized. Ramona is very sympathetic. Luann is surprised because Ramona just came at her 5 minutes ago about the simon and alex thing. Ramona apologizes for coming at Luann. Ramona: I’d still say it all over again…  Ramona then turns to Kelly: “Did you get your breasts redone again?” Kelly is SHOCKED. Isn’t this what everyone talks about all the time? Is it just the year this is in?  ACT FIVE Ramona leaves the table. Kelly says she’s so jealous. I hate when people say other people are jealous. It’s so childish.  Kelly calls Ramona out for being inappropriate. Ramona: WHO CARES?! Alex marches over to be a part of the conversation and just watch. Kelly is pissed and storms off.  NEXT EPISODE…  Alli Zarin does a photoshoot.  Jill picks up a reporter.  The women audition designers for Brooklyn fashion week.  Jill released an article trashing bethenny in the paper. Kelly and Bethenny fight over it.  The awful phone call where Bethenny calls Jill in the street and Jill hangs up on her. 

Welcome to the Mini-Break, your daily podcast for the biggest storylines, results, and controversies from the tennis world. On today’s episode, host Alex Gruskin is joined by Cracked Racquets contributor Matt Stachowiak to discuss all the latest news from the tennis world. Today's topics include day one results at the Rogers Cup, discussion about the draw for the Aptos Challenger, the USC men's tennis coaching vacancies, and another game of "Possible or Alex You're F*ing Crazy". Don’t forget to give a 5 star review with your twitter/instagram handle for a chance to win some FREE CR gear!! This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Charfen is one of the very select few coaches I continually plug into...    I have wanted to get this individual on here for quite some time, and Alex Charfen has been one of the reasons why my stuff is blowing up so much.    I have learned that I need to listen to less people, and I'm very, very picky on those that I choose to dive deeply with…   So for marketing and sales, I've really dove deep with Russell, (obviously) and you all know that.    For systems and business systems, I've dove very deeply with Alex Charfen... he's the other coach that I pay a lot to and listen to as well.    ...and I have other various ones that are very carefully selected... and I don't listen to ANYBODY else!    I'm extremely careful about the content that I consume - so that I can spend most of my time just moving, rather than gathering MORE information…   ... which I don't think many of us need more of.    So anyway, I'm excited for you guys to understand more of why Alex Charfen, for me, has been so key…   So I asked him to come on the show and to teach a little bit more about the systems that all businesses need, regardless of whatever you're in.    A lot of these are the systems that a brand new entrepreneur needs when they finally get that revenue coming in.    ...and then there are systems that he creates for those who have an existing business and are ready to scale.    Alex answers the questions…     How do you know if you should be scaling or not?        What are the five reasons why most companies fail to scale?     If you guys like this interview, please reach out to him, (he did not need to do this) and say “Thank You!”    At the very end, we have a special little thing for you, and so we're excited!    Boom, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, welcome back to Sales Funnel Radio - we're really excited to have you guys here.    I'm with one of my good friends, who's become an amazing friend and definitely a mentor... I would call and consider him a brother as well.    I want to introduce everybody to Alex Charfen.   Before I really bring Alex on, I just want you all to understand, Alex Charfen was one of the guys that helped me understand why I am who I am... and that, it’s okay… and helped me lean into that.    I talk to you a lot about leaning into your obstacles, leaning into those things that have been crappy in your life…    … because they end up becoming your superpower.    You all know my story of going to the first Funnel Hacking Live, Alex Charfen was one of the first speakers, and I took so many notes…    I ran back home, I showed my wife and she goes "That's why you act the way you do?" And I was like "YES, it's because of this guy!”    He had a crazy deep gravelly voice and I loved it. He was the man!" ...and I'm so excited to bring him on the show here:   Guys, please welcome Alex Charfen, “How you doing, man?”   ALEX: Steve, it is so good to be here with you, man. Thank you, and I echo your sentiments completely, and I consider you a brother as well, man.   STEVE: Oh thank you so much, thank you so much.    You know it was like two weeks ago;  me and my wife were chatting about your material and going on through it, and she goes "Oh yeah, I have to remember this is how your brain kind of works."    I was like, "Really naturally, yeah! You should really know that" so we'll go back through your stuff.   You know, I've got that Capitalist Pig shirt that I wear all the time, but I really want one that just says, "Charfen will explain," or something like that, you know what I mean?    That should be the next shirt…   So much of what I do in this world just is NOT explainable without you.   ALEX: Yeah, it's unique, you know, Stephen…    I think when you characterize it that way, so much of what you do is different than what anybody in the world would ever expect... and that's what I've found from the day I met you.    I think I walked up to you and said something like:    "Hey man, I think we should talk. You're a really unique entrepreneur and I don't think you understand just how unique."   STEVE: I remember you said that.   ALEX: Or something like that.   STEVE: Yeah I remember, and I felt like, you know in the Matrix when he's talking to that lady with the spoon bend... I felt like I was talking to her, and I was like:    "What does he see in me? What are you looking at?" You know, and "Please dissect me!"    So anyway, I really am pumped for you to be here and just massive incredible love.    You have to understand, your name; it's NOT just a noun, it’s a verb in my vocabulary.    People are like "How did you do that?” "I just Charfenized it, baby!"    I say ‘Charfenation’ all the time.    I was hanging out with the other ‘Charfenites.’    I'm going over the ‘Charfenation.’    "How did you do that?" “Oh, I ‘Charfenized’ it, baby!”   Anyways, you're very much a verb in my vocabulary, and with my family... so it's really quite an honor to have you on, it really is.   ALEX: Thank you Stephen, it's an honor to be here man, this is awesome.   STEVE: This is really cool. Well hey, I wanna just start right out and just, I wanted to ask…    My audience has heard a lot about you. I've talked about you a lot because there’s so much that ‘veI learned.   Just recently, I was going through some of my old notes, from two years ago, from one of your events, and I was like "Gosh, you're so right, this is so cool!"    It really has created additional leverage for what I'm trying to do.   It works, it's real, and I want everyone to listen to this and listen to what Alex has to say here.   Understand that *this* is how I've been doing what I’m doing.   I learned marketing and a lot of sales from Russell... but how to have a life, systemize, and make my business an asset from Alex Charfen.    So, anyway, could you just tell us how you got into this? 'Cause I know you weren't always…   I mean I call  it entrepreneurial optimization, I mean it's really what you do - it's not just the systems, but like:    I'm wearing glasses now   I'm drinking more water than I ever have in my life    I'm doing all sorts of stuff I never would do, because of you    How did you get into this?   ALEX: - You know Stephen, I think if the question is, "How did I become an entrepreneur?”    I didn't find entrepreneurship, it found me.    This was really the only thing I ever felt comfortable doing in my life.    Ever since I was a little kid, I was always the kid that was different than everybody else, crazy socially awkward, like what you see today…    I don't try to be socially awkward, it's just natural.    I was always different than the other kids   I didn't really get along   I had trouble in school   All the systems in the world told me I was broken.    … and then, when I was eight years old, my family went through kind of a financial downturn; my father lost a company.    He didn't go bankrupt, but he went really close, and to make money for the family we were selling stuff in a swap meet on the weekends.    I remember going to the swap meet for the first time and standing behind a folding card table, and a woman walked up, and I sold her a pen that had an LCD clock in it…    (Like that was big time for 1981 or whatever or '78 or '79, or whatever it was).   Stephen I can remember thinking at that moment, "Holy crap, I'm good at this. This is something I'm NOT terrible at."    … because up until that point, I really hadn't found anything where it was like, "Hey, that was good."  It was always’ "Almost got it, kid. You don't suck as bad as you did yesterday."    I was the kid who consistently got *MOST IMPROVED* all the time, 'cause it's the award you give to ‘the kid who sucked the worst!’   And when that woman walked up, it was like "Hey, this is something I can do over and over again."    And the more that I worked with my Dad, and the more that I experienced business, I loved it.   The world is so random, but when you get into the world of business there are rules.   …. there's an outcome.    People are in it together, and you actually have to work together to accomplish and achieve.   …  if everybody cares about the outcome, it'll happen.    And so *this* is where I feel comfortable.    You know, it's funny, when I was a kid I used to create businesses, create business plans,  write out time cards and all this other stuff, and as an adult, I thought that was like ‘the weirdest thing.’    I would reflect back and think like, "Man, I was such a weird kid."    Now, that's exactly what my daughters do.    My daughter this morning was at the kitchen table for three hours writing out a schematic for a water park she wants to build one day.   STEVE: Wow!   ALEX: And you are who you are, and I think, from the very beginning, this is who I've been.   STEVE: That's amazing, and when did you decide to make a business around this and go actually help other entrepreneurs, like myself, who need these systems?   ALEX: Well, the business that I have today, we started…    So let me give you a little brief history.   So in my twenties, I was a consultant, and you know, a lot of people ask about that.    I did some consulting at a very high level at the Fortune 500 level...    I built a very large business that almost killed me.    And so I can tell the story really good...    I can give you all the highlights and make it sound great:   $250,000,000 company   I've worked with Fuji and TDK and Memorex and Logitech, and all international business.    Or I can tell you the other side of that coin…    I had a $250,000,000 company   I made less than $2,000,000 a year    my margins were razor thin   I had a bleeding ulcer   I was probably over 300 pounds    STEVE: Wow.   ALEX: And so when I got out of that business, I wanted to do something completely different.    So in my early thirties, I got into real estate, and we were taken out by the real estate market in 2007.    Cadey and I introduced our first information product, and that's how we got into this world.   We created a product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert Designation.    In 2007 we were bankrupt, we introduced our product at the end of the year:  In 2008 we did $500,000 in sales   The next year we did $7,000,000   The next year we did $10,000,000   Over the course of the life of that product, we did about $70,000,000    We went from bankruptcy to liquid millionaires in a year.    In 2013, the US Treasury came to our office and did a broadcast with us, where they said that, according to their research…    Our company had pulled forward the foreclosure crisis five to seven years   ….so it was intense.   STEVE: Oh, yeah...   ALEX: Really intense!   And what happened was, right around 2011…    A lot of our clients who were buying our product wanted help growing their business; so I took all of the stuff that I used to use as a consultant; the systems and structure Cadey and I used to run our business, and we started training it.    And so since 2011, we've been training it in classes/ courses.   In 2017, we started the products that we have today. So now we have :   An entry-level coaching program called Billionaire Code Accelerator - for people who are doing over 300k a year   A high-level coaching program called The Billionaire Code Grow and Scale - for people doing over 3,000,000 a year.    STEVE: That's awesome! That's so cool.   ALEX: Yeah it is the most fun I've ever had, Stephen…   It's like every day, I wake up and here's what I get to do:    I get to play in this playground with game-changing entrepreneurs that are starting businesses that are doing things that are just unreal.    ...and our systems, our structures are kind of the backbone for how they're doing things.    So on a daily basis, me and everyone on my team, wake up knowing that we are helping the game-changers change the world, and we recruit people who want to do that…    We recruit for people who are passionate about our mission…   Everyone on my team feels like their life's mission is being fulfilled through being in this business right now.    It's the greatest thing I've ever done.   STEVE: That's incredible, and I can tell everyone else who's listening and watching this now, it's exactly as he says it.    I think I've been to three of your events now, and they have just been life-changing.    I go through and it gives structure to the idea, but then, also, how I behave against the idea. So I can actually go in and breathe; I can live.    I watched my Dad create this awesome company when I was a young boy, but it took him too.   But everyone does that, it's super natural - so you to go in and…    Remove the entrepreneur   Create systems    Create processes and procedures, and people that actually push forward their vision even further.   ... it's incredible.    I know it's not magical, but it feels magical, to me! I'm like "Oh my gosh!"    I've actually had a tab open with your course open for like the last month and I'll just dive into another video, and I'm like "Oh my gosh! Back to the drawing board, that was so good!"    And I go back to it again and again and again... it's just always up, everybody who's listening to me, it's always up.    That's really what's teaching me how to run a company, rather than ‘me’ being the company, and I've loved that.    *Just so powerful*    I wanted to ask you kind of a key question here, and it's a question that I get asked a lot...    People come through my programs, I'll help them make money. They go and make a lot of cash, and it's awesome... but then after that, like what do you do?   What are the first systems that you find that new entrepreneurs with a sizeable amount of cash should actually go create first?    What are those first few moves?   ALEX: You know I think I definitely want to share a couple of systems Stephen, but first, I want to just share a thought process. ..and this is a tough thought process for most entrepreneurs to take on, and it's interesting 'cause I've watched you go through this shift too, right? '   Cause at the beginning, (and I just want everyone to know)...    When I met Stephen Larsen, he was ready to take on the entire world solo!   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Like all alone, right?    And here's the thought process…    After you start making money, the next thing to ask yourself is:    How do I sustain this?    How do I make it real?    How do I make it last a long time?   How do I make it so that I'm not the only driver here?   when you get to the point where the momentum you're creating on your own isn't enough, and believe me, we all get there...    Like I know that if you're watching me, watching Stephen, you're one of those entrepreneurs... and in the back of your mind, you have this crazy voice that has always told you:    You're meant for more   You're gonna do more   You're gonna change the world   You're gonna make a massive impact   ... and if you've always felt that, then there's a shift you have to make in your thinking.    Because here's the issue for people like us; I call it the Entrepreneurs Dilemma.    For people like us…    We need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination, but any request for help or support that we have to make, leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed.    Stephen, you with me?   STEVE: Yes, yes, yes, yes, 100%!   ALEX: And so here's the shift…   We have to realize that if we're gonna change the world, that is a group activity, and leadership's a contact sport.    So we have to wake up to the fact that when we start to:    Build a team   Create a structure   Pour into the people around us    Invest in those people   Make them important   Build relationships with them   …. we will build the company that we have always wanted.    That's the only way it's ever been done.  The myth of the solopreneur who's changed the world is a myth - it's a joke.   STEVE: So true   ALEX: It's one of the most damaging things out there in the entrepreneurial world today.    Because the fact is…    Show me anyone that looks like they changed the world on their own, and I will show you a massive team behind them.   STEVE: So true!    There's this idea that gets pushed around now, and it's like, “I'm gonna go and be this person that does all this stuff. I'm the gift to the world...”   ...and it's like “Okay….” but you can't do that on your own.    In the last six months, I have begun to experience and feel burn-out.   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: I have never in my life experienced that, and it's been hard.  The only way I've been able to create leverage is by listening to what you say and create those teams.   ALEX: Yeah. Well then, Stephen, that's the thing…    Here's the deal I want everybody to understand this:   If you're an entrepreneur, you have a job, and that job is to…    Stay out of burn-out   Lower pressure and noise in your life   Increase the protection and support that you have around you.    Because if you don't work with that equation to constantly lower the noise and increase the support, lower the noise, increase the support…    Here's what ends up happening…     You are in an equation that doesn't work.    … and it's not like anyone can come and argue against me here because this is like gravity.    This is like you know the facts of life, this is like taxes. We're all gonna pay 'em. There's no way to argue against this, you're going to lose.    And so in that situation, as an entrepreneur, you have to be really cautious about doing too much yourself, and about loading yourself up, because here's our instinct…    (You know you have this, I have this, we all have it.)    If there's something to be done, the first thought we have is, “How do I just get it done without telling anyone else,” right? Oh yeah!   STEVE: Yeah   ALEX: And it's like "I'm gonna conquer!"   STEVE: Freedom baby!   ALEX: We forget that humans are tribal animals, man.    We are all terrible at most things. Let's get real…    If you're good at a lot of things then you have a liability because you're not gonna be able to choose what you shouldn't do.    I'm very fortunate, I suck at most everything, and that's like an honest reality.    Anyone on my team will tell you like "Oh man, don't let Alex fill out a form, use the calendar, "send emails. We keep him out of all of our systems."    Seriously my team actually knows when I have a password for a system and they monitor me using it, 'cause I'm so bad at that stuff.    But on that same token, I know what I'm good at.    I'm good at vision    I'm good at where we're gonna go   I'm good at putting the frameworks together    I'm good at assembling a team   … and by doing those things, we can grow a massive organization and have a massive impact.   So for every entrepreneur, the key is to figure out what you're good at and do that to the exception of everything else   ... and it's the hardest thing you'll ever do as an entrepreneur.    Here's why…   The second you start doing that you feel like you're being egotistical. You feel like you're being self-serving.    But here's the fact:    When you drive your business to get easier for you it will grow like crazy.   But driving your business to get easier for you will feel like you're doing the wrong thing.    It happens all the time.   There's a discussion right now on our Facebook group, one of the CEOs in our group made a post, and I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like :   "As I offload and reduce discomfort and get a team around me, I'm feeling less and less significant, am I doing this right?"   And my answer was "Yes! You're absolutely doing this right. That's exactly how it's gonna feel!"    Because we need to attach significance to the total contribution, NOT to your day-to-day activities.   STEVE: Mmmm, that's powerful.    You know it's funny I was It reminds me of …   You know when I first got to ClickFunnels, it was just he and I. There wasn't like a copywriter, a videographer... it was just he and I!    So we did every single role in getting these funnels out, occasionally there was an exception where he'd go "Oh someone's really good at X, Y, and Z,"  but then, by the time I left...   ALEX: - Probably design or something… but everything else was you guys?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right! I knew enough Indesign and Photoshop, I was the one doing it most of the time... and doing first copy rounds, and it like, it was nuts!    But by the time I left, it was funny because he had started implementing these types of things.    I remember watching him during these funnel launches just laying on the floor, bored out of his mind.    I've never seen him like that in my life, and he was almost going to a state of depression. He was like "I'm not needed in my own thing now. Ah no-one needs me anymore."    It's a funny thing to realize, we're just the orchestrators. We don't play all the instruments.   ALEX: We shouldn't, we shouldn't.    And so, you know, back to your question about what systems should an entrepreneur start looking at?   Now, I'm gonna talk high level, and I wanna share...    You and I are really close friends, and I wanna share the most critical content we have for entrepreneurs with your group.   STEVE: I appreciate that.   ALEX: This is what we normally share internally once somebody joins our program…    We share the five things that keep companies from scaling.    The reality is, there are really five things that keep companies that should scale, from scaling.    And here's what I mean ‘companies that should scale…’    You know, if you go talk to most consultants, venture capitalists, investment bankers, accountants, lawyers, whatever, they'll give you this laundry list of why companies don't scale:    They didn't have enough money   They didn't have the right people   They didn't do all of these things   The reality is, if you look at most companies that should scale, there are five clear reasons why they don't…    So let me share them with you, but let me give you this caveat…    Here's what I mean by "should scale..."    If you've got a market    If you're capable of selling   If you could do more    If you know you're leaving money on the table   …. you should be scaling.   If those things aren't there for you right now, go resolve that and then start scaling.  Far too many people try and scale before they actually have all the steps in place.    Then you just build infrastructure that does nothing.   So let me tell you what the five things are...    #1: So number one, first and foremost, absolutely most crucial, is…      Most businesses don't have any type of strategic plan.     So as a result, there's no go-forward strategy, and here's what happens in a business when you don't have a go-forward strategy.    If you don't know where you're going, neither does your team   ... neither does anybody around you   And so you will, by virtue of math, become the biggest bottleneck in the company.    Here's why…    If there's no forward plan where all of us can point at and go get it and help you chase it down, every time we want to know what to do we have to ask you, and we have to go to you... and it's a death of a thousand paper cuts.    You're literally in a place where you're:    Telling people what to do   Checking that it got done   Telling them what to do again.    And if you've ever been in that situation as an entrepreneur, you know that somebody only has to ask you twice before you're ready to flip out and lose it.    Am I right Stephen?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, usually once.   ALEX: Once, right, right, but by the second time you're like "Are you kidding me?"    And so the way we get past that is we create a clear strategic plan, we share it with our entire team…   ... and if the team knows where they're going, here's what happens.    I want you to understand something about the people coming to work for you.  If you're in a small business, you're hiring entrepreneurs.   I know that there's this saying in the market, "You're either an entrepreneur or you work for one."    I call complete and total BS - don't even bring that crap around me.   STEVE: Yeah!   ALEX:    Every person on my team is an incredibly talented, hyper-motivated, world-changing entrepreneur, they just choose to be part of a team.   And so you're gonna hire entrepreneurs, and the way you keep entrepreneurs absolutely and totally focused and excited, is you show them what they're hunting, you give them the kill.    You say:    Here's our plan   This is what we're doing   This is how you win.    And if you hire the right people, they will walk over hot glass to get to that destination for you.   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: But if they don't know where it is, you're gonna demotivate them and completely de-leverage them.    So number one, you have to have a strategic plan.    In my experience, less than 1% of businesses do. Also, less than 1% of businesses ever hit $100,000,000. In fact only 3% ever hit 1,000,000.   STEVE: Jesus. ALEX: So when you look at that, it's not 1% of businesses that hit 100,000,000, 0.01% of businesses ever hit 100,000,000,  and the reason is...    Most businesses don't know where they're going.    And Stephen, by you having the tools to build a strategic plan in your business, hasn't it changed how you approach things?   STEVE: Oh gosh, you guys remember when I tell you those stories of I left my job...    I created 200 grand of revenue really quick but there were no systems   I was the…    Support guy    Fulfillment guy   Sales guy.    I did every role, and I voluntarily, very painfully, had to turn down revenue to go build these structures.    And I want you all to know, it was Alex Charfen's stuff that helped me go in and actually set those systems in place... and so, please understand my affinity for this man and what he does.   About halfway through the year, I was only at like 300 - 400 grand, which is pretty good, but that last huge sprint came in because of the things that Alex Charfen and his team were teaching me.    All those planning things that I use, and all the things that I've just lightly mentioned, they've all come from Alex Charfen, and it helped scale me.   ALEX: That's awesome Stephen... Man, that makes me so proud.   This is so cool! Like there's only one Stephen Larsen in the world, and I told you that the first day I met you…    I'm like, "Dude you are completely and totally unique and I think I can help you build the company you really want."   STEVE: Yeah, you said   ALEX: And for us to be sitting here, and for you to say that, I got chills Stephen, that's so awesome. Thank you, man!   STEVE: Oh man, I'm so jazzed about what we do, but it's because of what you teach I'm like "I can do it... "    The first time I ever saw Stephen at an event, I did not leave the event until I'd cornered him and told him what I needed to tell him... because I knew you were gonna be exactly that type of person.    ...and here's why it's so important to me, Stephen.    I could tell the first time I saw you,  that you were gonna have a massive effect on the world.    But here's what I know about entrepreneurs; you're gonna have the biggest effect on the people closest to you - the people who are most proximal, your team.   And when I see an entrepreneur like you Stephen, I'm like:    "Man, if that guy builds a team he's gonna change hundreds of lives internally in his company. They're gonna change millions of lives externally, and I know those hundreds of people will build your legacy."    And when I see somebody like you, I'm like, “Man! That is the path, let me show you how to do this.”    The fact that it's working, is like, “Ah, it makes me so excited every day.”    This is why I get up out of bed every morning and do what I do.     STEVE: Ah, it's so fun man, feeling's mutual. You walked up, it was from that FHAT event that you were at.   ALEX: Ah ha.   STEVE: And you walked up and said, "There's a huge company in you and I don't think you know it, and I'm gonna help you pull it out of you."    I remember when you said that, I was so scared. I was like, "There's no way that this is real! I know who you are, are you kidding me?"    It freaked me out, and I had to own my own vision for a while. It actually took me a while to practice that.    Anyway, so much has gone on in mental clarity and development from what you've taught, not just these systems and things around, it's really cool.   ALEX: - So let's give the second one, Stephen   STEVE: Yeah, sorry, sorry.    ALEX: oh don't apologize, shit I love this part.    So first you have a strategic plan…    #2: Second, the thing that you need to have is      A system to communicate that plan.        Let me tell you something about us as entrepreneurs…    We think we're good communicators, but we're lying to ourselves.    The fact is, we are haphazard and emotional, and we're pumped one second and we're not the next, and we're all over the place…    Here's what happens…    When we have a team that has to deal with a personality like ours, and there's NOT a system for communication, it's random and haphazard and overwhelming... and it comes from all angles, and they're waiting for word from on high. Here's the fact, if you're the entrepreneur in charge, you're the MOST important person in the building all the time.    You're the most important person on the team, in the tribe, in the group, and they're all waiting to see what you say.    And if they're waiting for days and nothing's happened, they start thinking:    Is something wrong?    Did something go bad?    Did we do something wrong?    So you need a system.   As an example:    My team knows every Monday at 4:00, we're all gonna be on a weekly meeting together.  They also know every day at 9:27 a.m. we're gonna be on a daily huddle, and I'll be there.    They know that once a month we're gonna have a meeting where we show our strategic plan.    They know once a month we're gonna have a meeting where they all get the results.    So they all know when they're gonna communicate with me and how.    From the first day you're on our team there's a system that  controls how you hear from me.    Not just me pumping stuff out there haphazardly.    As a result, my team knows they're gonna hear from me, they trust it and here's what happens.    I set the expectations, I meet the expectations, we create trust. I create trust with my team every time I do that.    And here's the fact:   If your team trusts you, you get way more out of them.   If your team trusts you, they will do more for you.    If your team trusts you, you'll get discretionary effort   ... which means when they're driving, when they're showering, when they're doing something else, they're gonna be thinking about your business.  Why?    ...because it gives them momentum.    So if you have a strategic plan and a system to communicate it, you're ahead of 99% of companies out there.   And Stephen, same thing for you with the system, the structure?    Like…    We all fight structure, but once you put it in place, isn't it incredible?   STEVE: Oh, it's amazing! Stuff's getting done right now, that we set in place once. and then, I'll be like "Oh, podcast episode just launched,!Oh, what day is it? Oh, that's sweet! Everyone just put it out, all right, cool!"   ALEX: Right, I remember when I started getting messages like, "Hey, I love the new podcast!" And I'm like "Oh, we put a podcast out? Nice!"       STEVE: I didn't do that, what are you talking about?   ALEX: So you have  #1: a strategic plan, then #2: a system to communicate.    #3: Here's the third one, now this is BIG, really big, and most business owners just, they don't look at this ever and it's the biggest struggle is, or one of the biggest struggles is;      You have to have a system to consistently document the right processes in your business.     And by documentation, I mean having:    A flowchart   A process document   A checklist   Something that shows you how the important things in your business are done over and over again.    For example:    If you walk into a McDonald's, and you look above the fry cooker, there is a process to cook fries above that fry cooker.    Anything that happens in that McDonald's, there's a process for literally every single thing, including:    Unlocking the door   Turning off the alarm   Sweeping the floor   That's why there's a consistent experience at McDonald's; I'm not saying it's a good experience, I'm saying it's consistent.   In most businesses, in most entrepreneurial businesses, there's no process.    In fact, it's even scarier than that...    The process lives either in the owner's head or in an individual's head - so you lose a person, you lose the company.    You lose a person, you lose a big chunk of what you're doing.   STEVE: Hmm.   ALEX: So you have to have a system in a business to consistently evaluate what processes are in the company, and then on a monthly and weekly basis document the right ones.    The way that I would suggest you start, is you look at your customer experience:    What is the customer experience in your company?   What process documentation do you have to back it up to make sure that is completely consistent?    If you do that, you're gonna beat most people out there...   99% of entrepreneurial companies have little to nothing documented in any type of process.   STEVE: They're just shooting in random spots 24/7.   ALEX: Or they're doing stuff like, "Here's how we do our customer on-boarding…”    I trained Suzy   Suzy trained Annie   Annie trained Bob     John does it now   ...and you're like "Oh, cool! Let's go and see what John's doing?"    Well, John's doing nothing close to what Suzy and Bob and everybody else was originally doing, and so you have these degrading processes in your business.    And here's what happens…    When you look at entrepreneurial businesses, they tend to…    Go up in revenue   Come back down in revenue   Go up in revenue   Come back down.    If you're inside those companies, hundreds of times like I have been, here's what I can tell you…    Revenue goes up as the process is working, and then when it breaks, it comes back down.    *PERIOD*    That's why businesses don't continue to go forward - there are processes breaking in the business.    Whether it's marketing, sales, delivery, whatever it is there's a process breaking.    When you document your proceses, you make them bulletproof.    So in our business, we actually use:    Lucidchart Flowcharts   Sheets in Google Sheets    A new product called Process Street  -  a distributed, automated process document system, which is incredible.    So we have all of our processes in Process Street, and we have a distributed team around the world.   We have somebody in Ireland who can do their part of the process, as soon as they hit the last button it transfers to somebody here in the US who can do their part of the process.   STEVE: That's awesome.   ALEX:    Documenting your processes + Putting them in place = Game-changing   STEVE: Holy cow, okay I wrote that down.    I'm taking tons of notes so everyone knows, I hope they are as well…. And I'm not sharing! ;-) Process.st is the company, and we are so happy with it because... Stephen, here's what I want everyone to know,...   Cadey and I have had five businesses get over $10,000,000 a year, and all five of them ran them with paper checklists.   This is the first time we have automated checklists in Process Street.    The last information products business that we had, we literally had three-ring binders that we would carry around the office and check stuff off.    Having a three-ring binder with a process was so much better than having somebody trying to do it from memory.    Now with Process Street, we can distribute that three-ring binder, and I can get reporting on who's doing what.   STEVE: That's amazing.    Yeah, I've actually seen the three-ring binder and I've thought, "Holy crap, that really is how he's doing it.”    You would teach it and then I watched you actually do it.. 'cause you would record your stand up meeting calls in the morning   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: And I was, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool! I'm NOT doing that, interesting."    Then I’d go back and take notes and start it.   ALEX: And then implement.    Well, and you know, there's this phrase in the entrepreneurial world. Ah... I kind of get a little triggered, right!   STEVE: Let it out, baby!   ALEX: You know the thing that people say from stage:   "Here's what I want all of you to know. All you have to do is stop working in your business and start working on your business."    And I'm always like:    "Oh, good, thanks. Thanks for solving it all for us dude, that was awesome. You just solved all my problems with that really cliched BS thing that everybody tells entrepreneurs."     When I was in my twenties, my instant thought was like, "How do I get on stage to punch that guy in the face?"    And my then my second thought was like, "What a load of crap!  If I don't work in the business nobody's answering the phones, sucker."    Like, what's going on here? I don't know how to make that change.    And so the way you make that change is…    Working on the business means documenting processes.    By making it:    Clear   Repeatable   Real   And so you have…    A strategic plan that everyone understands   A communication system everyone knows is gonna happen    A system for documenting processes so everyone can repeat what's going on with your clients   #4: The next step,(and this is BIG), is..    A consistent system for identifying, documenting, and then prioritizing the right project in the business.   STEVE: Ah, this changed my life. *HARDCORE*   ALEX: Whoa, Stephen, you know how game-changing this is because, here's the problem in most businesses…    Projects are selected emotionally.    Period, I can't tell you that they're done any other way - they're emotional.    You go to an event and somebody says "I'm doing this thing," and then, the next day, you're doing that thing.    You listen to a podcast or you hear a webinar, and the person says "Hey, I added this thing to my business," and the next day, you're trying to do that thing.    In our business, if I have a really great idea that I want to implement today…    If I'm like, "Man, this is a really high sense of urgency, we should get this implemented."    It'll probably be somewhere around 45 days, and I'm totally okay with that.    That's the timing it should be in my business.    Now if there's an emergency we're gonna fix it that day, but if I'm like, "Hey, I see an opportunity here with something," it's probably a 45-day event…    Why?    I have a team and a structure, and a plan, and we have a system that's moving forward. We're already hitting our numbers, why would I mess with anything?    I actually protect what's going on in the business   I add things gently   I add things carefully   I make sure my team's into it too    I make sure we have consensus    In just in the last 60 days, we've gone from two million recurring to two point three million recurring,   STEVE: That's awesome!   ALEX: So why would I mess with what we're doing?   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Yeah, so when somebody's like "Hey Alex, I got this "great idea for your business." I'm like "Awesome, get in line."    And we'll put it into our system to see if we want to actually do this…   Because the fact is…    If you're getting sold as an entrepreneur on what your next project should be, you're probably in the wrong place.    STEVE: Yeah, that's fascinating. I really agree with that.    It was your planning system for figuring out which projects, I still do it.    Top of every three months and it has guided everything we do.    And while I do follow a few rabbits and I'm practicing bringing it back in, we still largely follow the plan as to what the business needs, and that's ‘grow and scale’ rather than this impulse of like:    "Yeah, oh shiny object, shiny object, "that looks good, that looks good!"    And it's been that discipline, that's the other thing that's always up is my waterfall...   ALEX: Yeah, yeah, always! I mean mine's up right now. I mean I could share it right now.   And the reason is I always have my strategic plan pulled up in front of me, I'm looking at it every single day.    I'm asking myself:   Is the team doing what we need to do here?   How do I support people more?    How do I help them do this more?   Because when you look at our strategic plan, here's what it's made up of.    Our one-year outcomes   Our client-centric mission - which is our Superbowl, our hall of fame, the long term   The 90-day projects we're focusing on right now    What we're doing this month to hit those targets . So that waterfall of long term, to one year, to 90 days, to 30 days, I can see it all on one document and it tells me EXACTLY where I should be supporting the team and what we're getting done.    And so here's what happens…   I went to an event a couple of weeks ago, and I had an idea that was like "Oh man, we have to do this."    Then I come back to the office, I look at the waterfall and I'm like "What do I want to kill in order to do this thing over here?"    And you know what the evaluation was? *NOTHING* I'm not going to take anything off this, that would be crazy.   There's no way I'm gonna go to my team and say, "Hey guys, in addition to all the other stuff you're committed to, here's a hot potato."    I just backed down and I waited till the next time we had a planning meeting and I said, "Hey, there's this thing I think we should do."    We evaluated it   It went into the system   It went into the plan    There is very little knee-jerk reaction in our company because we are going so fast in a forward direction, that for me to challenge that in any way it has to be game-changing at a different level - so it rarely even happens.   STEVE: Yeah, black-ops right? Call them black-ops?   ALEX: Black-ops.   STEVE: No black-ops!   ALEX: No black-ops, baby!  If it's NOT on the plan, you don't do it... or it's black-ops.    And usually, the biggest creators of black-ops are guys like Stephen and I.    So my team has an open license to tell me if I'm doing black-ops.    They will actually call me out in a huddle, in a meeting, they'll be like "Ah, this sounds like black-ops," and then we'll make a note, we'll put it in a parking lot and do it later.    STEVE: Oh, that's so cool, okay.   ALEX: Yeah,  that's one of the most important things you can do when you have a team Stephen…    You train your team to criticize you and then you congratulate them when they do.   STEVE: That's really cool, then they have a license to actually flex their brain instead of feeling like they're in a box.   ALEX: Absolutely. You know I heard a story once about Larry Page, who runs Google,   He was in a meeting and he really strongly stated a point. and one of the team members got emotional about it and started yelling at him.    She was like, "I think you're wrong and this is why you're wrong," and Page was smiling…   Afterward, she asked somebody "Hey why was he smiling?"    ‘Cause she backed him down, and he actually said "You know what, I think this deserves more investigation. Let's do this."    She walked out and she was shaking and all adrenalized up, she had just yelled at the CEO of Google, like, “What the heck's gonna happen to me?”   She turned to somebody next to her, and was like "He was smiling, is that because he's gonna come down hard on me?"    And the person was like, "No, he was smiling because you confronted him, he loves it, he wants it.”    He knows that if people aren't confronting him, he's in a bad place.   So I look at it in my team and I'm like, "Hey, if my team's not challenging me a little bit, then we're all just marching behind a duck."    You know, I don't wanna have ducklings behind me. I want people who are saying:    Hey, this might work   This might not work   We might have a better idea   So you give your team license to criticize and license to call you on stuff.   STEVE:  Gosh, I love that.   #5: So here's the fifth one...    So we have:    Strategic plan   Communication system   Selecting and documenting the right processes   Selecting and achieving the right projects,   ….and then, this is *BIG*   Finding the right people     It's NOT just finding the right people, its…    Evaluating the company   Understanding what the company needs right now    What can you offload that is going to create the most momentum, not just for you, but for the team, for everything that you're doing together?    What is the position that you need to put in place next - so that the company moves forward the fastest?    And unfortunately, just like everything else I've named, planning, projects, process, all of those... people also become emotional.    An entrepreneur wakes up one morning and says, "I'm doing too much, I'm gonna hire an assistant."    Then they have the assistant sit next to them for three weeks, and they wonder why this doesn't work out?    It's because you had the thought to get help, (which by the way I congratulate you on), but there was no process there to actually make it work.    And so here's the process you need…   Evaluate what's going on in the company   Understand what the company needs   Turn it into a job description    Then you use it to recruit   You do tons of interviewing   You drive it until you have three people that you can select from    You hire one of them and then you do at least a 90-day onboarding, high-intensity onboarding.    When I'm onboarding an executive team member, I meet with them every day for the first month, three times a week for the second month, and two times a week for the third month.    People tell me, "Hey man, doesn't that "feel like overkill?"    I'm like:    You don't understand what it means to have an executive team. Your job is to build relationships with those people.    You want to know how you build relationships?    There's one commodity that builds relationships. One!    *TIME* - that's it.    And so when I'm onboarding, when I'm bringing somebody on, (whether it's on my executive team or anywhere in the business), somebody is doing that high-intensity onboarding with them…    Up close and personal every single day for the first 30 days making sure we have no drift.    And so, when you have a system to select the right people, bring them on and then onboard them the right way…    Here's what you avoid, (and Stephen this is like, Ah, this statistic drives me crazy)...    In corporate America, I know because I used to be a consultant there.    In corporate America, they would say things like, "Well we just hired so-and-so in that position so they'll probably be productive in four to six months."   The first time I heard that I was like "Did he just say four to six months? Does he mean four to six days, or does he really mean four to six months?"    Because in my business, even way back then), if I had to wait four months for somebody to be productive I would have been, “They're gone”!   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, they're gone!   ALEX: And so in our business, we actually have this experience right now.    We recently brought on somebody else, a new person to help us in marketing, and with our onboarding process, he was actually achieving products within the first five days of his first week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: And that's how it should be.    You want somebody to come in, be effective and start contributing and creating momentum.    Because here's what will happen…    As an entrepreneur, if you're wired anything like I am, (and I know Stephen is), if you have somebody on your team that starts to feel like they're not carrying their own weight, you won't sleep.    You won't sleep, it will rip you apart, Stephen am I right?   STEVE: Yeah! ALEX: It will destroy you…    And so here's the question though…   Are they not carrying their own weight because:   They're lazy? They don't want to?   They aren't the right person?    Or is it because it's not clear what they’re doing?   STEVE: They have no idea what they're doing. They don't have confidence...I didn't help them!    ALEX: Right, 'cause here's the thing.    Your team needs three things in order to ultimately be effective and to be the type of team you want.    And here's what I mean by that…    As an entrepreneur here's what you want, you want a team that just does stuff and asks permission later.    You want a team that achieves and lets you know how things worked out.    That's it!  I just know this is how entrepreneurs work.    You want people who make really good decisions.    You want people who move things forward.    You want people who don't stand around waiting for stuff.    And if you want to have a team that actually moves things forward as an entrepreneur…    You gotta spend the time with them and let 'em know what your ethos is, and let 'em know how you make decisions…   That's how you duplicate decision making.   STEVE: Hm, gosh I love that. Okay, so…   Strategic plan   System to communicate   System to document processes that can be shared inside the whole biz    Documenting projects and the ones you're gonna work on   Finding the right people   ...and I actually personally just went through your onboarding training and it's so awesome!    'Cause it goes through and it's like this, you basically create a runway for 'em, right?   And if they don't land, don't worry you've got parachutes and there are jumpy cords all over the place...   - you're doing everything you can to help 'em win fast and lots of small tiny wins that build that confidence, and I was like:    "That is brilliant. 'Cause that is not the way you're taught anywhere else.”   ALEX: So Stephen, check this out, man.    We recently fell out of the lucky tree on recruiting and we hired this guy named Greg Duby and he is, ah, amazing.    He's like, he's just one of the most exciting guys I've ever worked with because he's so solid and so centered, and just so good at what he does.    Greg is a former nuclear propulsion tech in the Navy, so you know what that is, that's the guy who rides the bomb around in the submarine, okay?   STEVE: Yeah, that's amazing!   ALEX: Yeah, you have to have advanced degrees in Physics, advanced degrees in Math.   He's literally a rocket scientist.    So he worked in the Navy, then he worked at NASA, then he worked for some of the larger consulting firms out there…    I mean, he's done incredible stuff in his career.    He's just one of the most solid people I've ever worked with, and within about two or three weeks into our company, in one of our daily huddles, we said, "Who got caught being awesome?"    It's where we call each other out, and he said:    You know, I just wanna call this company out for being awesome.   “ I've been here for three weeks, I've never had an experience like this getting on-boarded anywhere...    I'm up and running, I'm excited. I feel like I'm really part of the team. I feel like I've worked here forever and I'm three weeks in."    And this is somebody who worked at some of the best consulting firms in the world, NASA and the Navy!    And our little tiny company has impressed him so much because we did onboarding because he knew what he was supposed to do.    And as a result, Greg, I think we're about three months in with him, and dude, there are projects that I thought were gonna take a year or two that are getting done this week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: It's crazy.   STEVE: It's just a completely different way to do it. One thing I hated in the military, I love the military, but you know, some things that are rough and that is that there are no clear guidelines on how to win ahead of time.   The way you're instructed is by hitting barriers and then you get punished for it, and you're like:    "Just tell me ahead of time and I wouldn't do it! But all right, let's do more push-ups."    Anyway...   ALEX: Something tells me you did a lot of push-ups, Steve!   STEVE: I just want to say thank you so much for being on here.    I asked for 30 minutes and you just completely over-delivered, and I just really want to say thank you to you.    My audience already knows very well of you.    Where can people go to learn more about you but specifically also get your help inside the business?   ALEX: So the best place to learn more about us is to go to our podcast.    I publish a podcast four days a week, which is essentially a one-on-one conversation with an entrepreneur growing a business.    And the way that I create each one of those episodes is when a question or issue comes up in our coaching groups, I create an episode around it, we distribute it to the group.    But then also we distribute it to anybody who's listening, so you can get the same coaching that I'm giving my high-level clients right on our podcast…    It's called Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, and you can check it out at momentumpodcast.com.    And then, if you want to understand more about our products, about our coaching groups you can go to our website charfen.com, but better is to just reach out to me or to one of my team members through Facebook.    The easiest thing, is just reach out to me, and I'll connect you with the right person in our company, and we'll go through a process with you to help you understand if we can help you.    You know Stephen, we're pretty neat, we don't sell everybody. We actually get on the phone with a lot of people who we sell later, but we won't sell you unless it's time.    We know exactly what solutions we provide, and if you have those issues and they link up, then we'll work together... but we go through a personal inventory in order to help you do that.    So if anybody's interested in getting on a call with a member of my team, you can also shortcut the entire process by going to billionairecode.com…    Answer a few questions and you can just set up a call link and you'll be on a call with one of my team members and they'll help you qualify and understand where you are.    And just so you know, we don't do sales calls, they are all consulting calls.    When you get on a call with my team, you won't ever feel like you're being sold, you'll feel like you're being helped.   STEVE: Which is exactly what I have felt when I started doing that as well.    Just so you all know he's very serious about that - that's very real.    I always feel like I'm being helped by anyone on his team.    ...and come to find out later, "Oh that was the sales guy!"    ...You know what I mean?    They dare to go in and actually they want to change the world and they're very serious about it.    So thank you so much, appreciate it.    Check out Billionaire Code.    The Momentum podcast is a goldmine, it is one of those gems on the internet that is actually worth all of your time and attention.    Thanks so much for being on here, Alex, I really appreciate you and love you, and thank you for being on here.   ALEX: Stephen, dude, this has been an honor.    I hope to be able to get invited back again, and as a Sales Funnel Radio listener, this is really cool. I appreciate you, man!   STEVE: Thanks, I appreciate it!    Hey, awesome episode right?    Hey, once I figured out the simple patterns and formulas that make this game work, I had a new problem…    Back when I eventually left my job and launched my personal business, I sold about $200,000 of product in around three months-ish…    And while I thought I was King Kong, a new problem started.    I was the business, there weren't any systems...   I was support   I was fulfillment    I was the one in charge of getting the ads around   I was the sales department    I was the marketing department    And I knew I wouldn't survive it alone…    Better yet, I knew I'd never seen a rich solopreneur.    This game takes a team.    Contrast that to now, and my company does tons of stuff that I don't know how to do...    What changed?    His name is Alex Charfen, check him out at charfenrocks.com.     So I usually don't bring tons of people on Sales Funnel Radio, but you should know that his programs, combined with my marketing skills, are why my business is killing it in revenue today, and NOT killing me personally.    Alex Charfen's programs and training have been life-changing for me and my family... and taught me who I really am and what I'm meant to be.    So when you're ready to build an actual business, an actual asset and NOT just make this another job…    When you're ready to keep the role of entrepreneur but learn the role of CEO, go get started with Alex Charfen at charfenrocks.com. That's C-H-A-R-F-E-N rocks.com.

I brought back in Johnnie Black from The Scorecrow, and this time, he brought in Joey Ricotta, DFS and Scorecrow writer! Also, a Cub Fan! We break down each division and ask "Is this where we thought we'd be?". (Warning- more than one F Bomb used by Ricotta) Shoutouts to Jess Blaylock, Kelly Crull, Len Kasper, Jim Deshaies, Guerin Austin and Alex Corddry (Chappell). Did you know that Johnnie knew Alex? You know now!

An untold story from Sydney's Fish Market and the Sydney's Fish Market Restaurants in Pyrmont Connect with us in an untold story just a few blocks from one of our favourite nautical bars, the Peg Leg Pyrmont. View the full images for this podcast https://eattmag.com/podcasts/sydneys-fish-market-restaurants/ Alex from the Sydney Fish Market, a local fisher himself, shares a few secrets beneath the glisten and gleam of the Sydney Fish Market Restaurants. Join us in our latest Sydney podcast on a stroll through the Sydney Fish Market. We join Alex one of the fish market tour guides whom we meet excitedly admiring a fish as the sun rises across Blackwattle Bay. Alex, who has been recently featured in Time out explains The Sydney Fish Market is open every day, except Christmas day. The Sydney Fish Market is also one of the most diverse markets on the globe and could be just second after Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market famous for its astounding display of seafood and the pre-dawn tuna auctions A touch on the Dutch Auction system In the first part one of our podcast interview with Alex, he explains how now the selling and buying of fish runs of a Dutch Auction. Also that technically for auction fans it's an open descending price auction. Auction prices even start at the three-to Five dollar price range above the data price per kilo. Buyers come from across the Asia-Pacific region who sometimes have less than a few seconds to make a decision. The auction floor can have over 100-plus varieties of shellfish and fish on any given day. Cullen made his way carefully onto the auction floor with his guide carefully steering him through the hundreds of new crates of fish and seafood among the ice and the excited sounds of constant clicks made during the bidding on the keypads of all of the bidders. Chilled somewhat by the early morning thaw after Cullen's extensive tour we join Alex again where he shares his love of fishing and some of his “pretty much foolproof tips on cooking fish”. A standing roast recipe for a fabulous fish dish He then shares his perfect standing roast recipe for a fabulous fish dish, so the fins go crispy a great secret straight from the marketplace. His gives us great tips on what to try to around this time of the year and shares with us a cheeky story about the best part of any fish. Alex also advises Cullen to dig deep and to trust our instincts when choosing fish and seafood by “getting something that appeals to you”. And he shares his most valuable insight into the best lunch at the fish market as one of the ultimate foodie meals in Sydney and perhaps fact across the country. SFM is the largest market of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere Sydney's fish market restaurants features a range of restaurants and cafés, a bakery, butcher, gourmet deli, greengrocer, bottle shop, fishing supplies store and gift shop. Retail stores at Sydney Fish Market include : BLACKWATTLE DELI GREGORY'S BREAD FISHERMAN'S FINE WINES FISH MARKET CAFE CHRISTIE'S SEAFOODS WATERSIDE FRUIT CONNECTION FISHERMAN'S WHARF SEAFOOD RESTAURANT NICHOLAS SEAFOODS SUSHI BAR PETER'S FISH MARKET DOYLE'S AT THE FISH MARKET DE COSTI SEAFOODS SALTY SQUID SEA EMPEROR SEAFOOD RESTAURANT & OYSTER BAR VIC'S MEAT MARKET MUSUMECI SEAFOOD CLAUDIO'S QUALITY SEAFOODS KIOSK ICECREAM & COFFEE Find out more about Sydney's fish market restaurants Boutique Brunch Tour behind the Scenes at the Market Hi, it's Cullen here from the EATT Magazine Podcast, and I'm very lucky to be joined by Alex Cullen Thank you. You're the tour guide here at the Sydney Fish Market, and I wanted to ask you a few questions. As I was really lucky enough to be able to come in and have a look at the, I guess I would call it the auction floor, the floor where people bid for fish, and that happens every day of the week, is that right? Alex Every weekday. So not on weekends, just Monday through to Friday. (referring to the behind the scene tours) Cullen Okay, brilliant. And when we were looking at that, there's three; I guess what I would call huge clocks when I'm not quite sure if they were clocks or not? Cullen They had timers on them, and they had lots of numbers whizzing around, and there were a lot of people sitting down beneath them looking at the boards very carefully to see what was happening there. Alex So that's our Dutch or reverse auction system. Cullen Okay. So, I think I know something about the Dutch option, but I'm sure some of our listeners might not be 100% clear about that. How would you describe it? Alex Technically for auction fans, it's an open descending price auction. So it was the system designed by the Dutch for their Tulip craze. And it was the system designed from the very beginning to sell perishable goods as quickly as possible. Cullen Okay. How does it work? Alex We've got historical sales data that goes back a decade, and that tells us in that week of the year for the last ten years, this certain species in that size and condition and we are quite specific, is worth x dollars per kilo. So if it should sell for $10 a kilo, yeah, we'll start that particular box. Three to $5 per kilo above its expected sales price. Cullen So if we were talking about a fish like Barramundi for example and so let's say that might come in at $10 a kilo. How, how would that work then? Cullen You'd go back over all that data over the last ten years and say this week, the 14th-weekend March or the 14th week of the year, it was worth $12 or would you take all of that down, and then you work out on an average, I guess? Alex Yeah, it gives us an average in a predicted, and then we started, I mean, 30% or 20% above what it should sell for sure. Cullen So let's say you might go higher and say, put it out at $14 a kilo. How does the bidding work and how does the pricing work? Alex Okay, so we started at $14 a kilo. The auction begins, and it starts counting down every revolution of that stock clock. It takes $1 per kilo off the sales price and the first buyer, the guys you could see in the stands, the first buyer to stop the auction with a press of a button has committed to buying at least one box at the price they stopped the auction house. Cullen Okay, so let's say the prices spiralling down, is that right? Cullen It goes down and let's say somebody says, ‘okay', I'm buying it at $12, and then I guess it's competitive in the sense that people say, oh well look like you know, I better get a name because I didn't know how many boxes there. Cullen Is that how it works? Alex You don't know what your competitor is prepared to pay. That keeps the prices high. That's a very important aspect of this doctrine otherwise if the price plummets, that seafood will go elsewhere next week. Alex So we don't know what their profit margins are, and they can still make a living, but those guys do pretty much to the dollar. Alex So the second it becomes profitable to someone and the harder working businesses tend to be more profitable. Alex The second it becomes profitable to someone it's sold, and we move on to the next one. Cullen Fantastic. And it looked like it was a big market today? Alex Yeah, you can safely say you saw a big market, we would have got 80 to 85 tons today. Alex I'm a fisherman, so I don't want to overestimate these things. But at least 3000 boxes over a hundred different species is a bustling day. Cullen And what makes today a big market compared to other days when it's not a big market. What affects the size of the market. Alex Sure Alex Fridays are traditionally the biggest day of the week for the auction because we don't hold an auction on the weekends and people tend to buy seafood on the weekends. It's a Friday evening, Saturday morning, Sunday morning thing. Cullen Additionally, I noticed, we met down on the floor it was a real bustle going on there. There was a tour down there? Were you giving a tour? Alex Yeah, we had a large school group from New South Wales from the central West. They had a four and a half hour, five-hour drive for them to get here. Fortunately, they got in yesterday evening. Otherwise, we would have had 30 increasingly disinterested schoolchildren staring me down. Cullen But they looked pretty interested. Alex They were fascinated. Considering they are 300 kilometres from the sea, they were all really switched on about  that. They asked a lot of good questions. Obviously, they wanted to try more seafood. We had a very engaged group out here which was fantastic to see. Alex If I'm in the kayak at two in the morning and it's in the middle of winter, and I'm getting rained on, I might begin to have moments of doubt. But then on quickly I hook up, and I'm in love again. Alex I like to fish in my kayak. I like to go camping for a few days at a time. I really would like to just get stuck in and after doing this job for a week, not talk for three days straight. But yeah, just come back all salty and happy. Cullen And so what sort of fish are you catching? Alex At the moment there's a lot around, particularly in the Pittwater in Hawkesbury, but there's always big Flathead and Whiting. Alex Caught about a 73-centimetre Flathead the other day. There is also plenty of Squid. Cullen Also, what's a favourite fish for you to cook?  What do you love cooking? Alex That's like picking a favourite child. Alex If I had to pick a fish, it would be the Pearl Perch. It's a part of the Glaucosoma family, and there's only three in it. They're scientifically known for this sweetness. Their a beautiful, bright white flesh, and you can cook it a million different ways. Pretty much foolproof. Cullen So do you cook that differently quite often? Alex Whenever I see one, I buy one. We don't get that many. It's a very small volume species. It's why you haven't heard of it. And so how would you, how would you normally cook with are? Alex Because it's a special fish, I like to make it a little bit special. I'd probably do a standing roast. We get a large lemon, cut it flat side down, and then the gut cavity will sit on top of the lemon. So score the skin, pad it dry, rub it with some olive oil and salt and then as hot as you're up and we'll go upright, the scheme goes crispy, the fins go crispy. Thus, you can eat them like chips, and then you get creamy, wobbly curds of flesh that flake off the bone and it's an upright-looking fish. It's quite impressive! Cullen How are we keeping the fish upright in the oven? Alex By plunking it on top of the lemon. If it's sliding off cause it all, it's got that gut cavity that it wants to sort of flatten down all that. But you can put chopsticks and sort of like antennas into the top of the lemon, and that rests in the gill breaks.  Alex Therefore, it just sits nice and upright, and both sides are exposed to the hot air, so it cooks evenly, and then you get to serve it upright. You can also get some wilted greens or some asparagus. Cullen Moreover, for people who are coming in the market and obviously, that's their first port of call, and then they make their way through the rest of the market. What do you think that they should be looking out for at different times that that might just appear now and again that isn't here every day that's a bit special. Cullen So to buy seafood, to take home or to have to say, here? Cullen I think both. Alex To have to take home the strength of Australian fisheries is its diversity. So everyone's heard of Snapper and Whiting and Flathead, and we've got 60,000 species in this country. Try something you've never seen before! Alex Try something like a Crimson Snapper, $10 a kilo for the whole fish. They are cousins' of the Red Emperor. They are sweet; they're meaty. You can steam them, and they'll go curdy and creamy. You can then barbecue them, and they get firm and meaty, and they cost the same as sausages. They shouldn't have to be that cheap. Alex But get something, pick it, pick it well and get it cooked to order. That's the best way to have hot food. Alex Cooked prawns – just visit all the shops because it varies from piece to piece in shop to shop. No one is the best. Use your instincts and get something that appeals to you. You can go from shop to shop, get pieces and pieces, eat it down on the boardwalk, get a bottle of wine. It's not a bad way to spend the morning. Cullen Fantastic. Just wrapping up because I know you've got to go, you have on tour coming in. I wanted to ask you, what are you having here for lunch today? Alex I'm getting mushrooms in Oberon tonight, so I'm probably going to try and keep it light. Cullen Okay, so when are you going to have that's nice and light. Alex Oh, just a half a kilo of prawns on the way out. Cullen Thank you very much for taking the time to really enjoyed being with you. Alex Thanks a lot, Cullen. My pleasure  

Welcome back to our weekend Cabral HouseCall shows! This is where we answer our community's wellness, weight loss, and anti-aging questions to help people get back on track! Check out today's questions:  Rachel: I ordered your organic acids test. A western dr diagnosed me with SIBO without doing any tests and prescribed me xifaxan for 3 months. My question is, if i do the organic acids test now after being on xifaxan for 1 month, will results be a bad reflection ? Do i have to wait to take the organic acids test? Elaine: Hi, I recently had a Organic Acids Test done and was wondering if I sent you the results could you interpret it for me and what this would cost? Kind Regards, Elaine Tori: What are the benefits of salt caves? What should you look for when deciding between salt caves or rooms? Is there research that supports halotherapy (dry salt therapy) as a treatment for the conditions/ailments the salt caves claim? E.g., COPD, asthma, allergies, skin conditions like eczema and acne? Linda: In June I started itching first my head and earlobes it seem to go away and then it started on my hands and feet . The strange thing is that it would be gone for almost sometimes 2 to 3 weeks and then come back . Then I broke out in hives . My doctor suggested Sarna and histamine and Prednisones . The hives would come and go right now they seem to be gone but my hands, feet and head are itching again any suggestions . I must say the sarna has saved my craziness of the itching it does help some what. Anthony: I'd like to get more information on getting test(s) to discover the root of my health issues. How do I get started Alex: You were on the Mindpump podcast and great info. I wanted to see if you could send me some additional tips on Psoriasis and the website to remove metal from teeth. Thanks. again, great show. Elizabeth: Hey Dr Cabral, it doesn't seem as if you have spoken about chicory root before. I was wondering if it's a good alternative to those who drink coffee? Given the prebiotic (inulin) factor presumably it may not do well with some people? I know you've mentioned inulin before on your show but wondered your thoughts on drinking chicory root? Thanks for all and all the best. Tiffany: You have said on your podcasts that you don't have to wait the 6 weeks that your emails are behind to find out which tests you would recommend taking but I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask you the questions? It is about my daughter. She is 5 years old. We recently moved from US to Costa Rica, it's been around 6 weeks. Previously her diet has been great, not a picker eater. Everyone is impressed at how she will eat whole foods, salads and even whole fish (eyeballs and all!) along with Cole's Portuguese sardines... she loves them. We avoid over gluten-ing ourselves as well as avoid white sugar, and sugar in general (we use stevia). I always buy organic and even soak any nuts and grains that we will be consuming. We don't have access to the same food here and recently, everytime she eats (very little at that) she claims her belly hurts. She did recently battle with an inner ear infection and I have been excluding eggs and dairy from her diet for the past 2 weeks. She started at a new school and the bathroom is "dirty" and "the door doesn't close" so she has been struggling with holding "it" until she absolutely can't anymore and then having an accident. Luckily, her daily poops are around 4pm so we are home for them. My thoughts about what could be wrong are all over the place! Parasites, bladder infection, SIBO?!? We are returning to the states in 2 weeks so I can order a test and send it in but I'm not positive what test I should order. Hopefully this can get answered before our trip back as I don't think we will be back in the state for almost 1 year. Thank You in advance for your time! Valerie: Hello Dr. Cabral! First off, thank you for the Rain Barrel Effect. Really enjoyed the book. It was packed full of easy to read information. I've been telling everyone I can about it. I'm 57 years old and since my 30's I've not followed a very good diet and drank a lot of wine (1.75L in one week period) and excess coffee (700 mg/day) In March (2018) I went on a Whole Foods, Plant-Based Diet, I gave up drinking, zero coffee and work out, as per your protocol. I suffer from Adrenal Fatigue. I'm working with a FMD and waiting for my results from my Organic Acids Test and a stool test. My Mother had Breast Cancer at 54 (she's now 91) and my Sister has been recently diagnosed (age 60). My Sister is a heavy drinker and a junk food Vegan (a bag of chips for dinner). I was tested several years ago, for the BRACA1 and tested very low. My question is, with my years of drinking and poor lifestyle, does this increase my chances of developing dis-ease later in my life? Have I done to much damage over the years? Thank you and I always look forward to your Podcasts. Vivienne: Hi there, My name is Viv, I currently have multiple food sensitivities, which include histamine and salicylates and amines (these are recent in the past year). I've done multiple hair tests over the years and hormone blood tests, I'm on DHEA as this hormone is very low after being in birth control for 20 years (and coming off 3 years ago). I don't metabolise copper well and have low levels of copper/estrogen. I'm struggling mainly with brain fog and fatigue and also generally still unsure of what to eat and when (eating around 25 foods on rotation following the failsafe diet approach). What I want: Someone to help guide me out of a state of intolerance (I've been told many times I'm stuck with them but I don't buy into that) Someone to help guide me on what food to eat and when so that I have energy to get through the day (without resorting to using chocolate and modafinil which is the only way I feel I can function). Someone to help me heal my gut when most of the traditional supplements and healing methods are off limits because I can't tolerate them. Can you help and how would we get things started? I've sent a few messages before but no reply so I'm hoping you get this and can back in contact! Thanks, Viv John: Dear Dr. Cabral, I’ve been diagnosed with BPH and am getting up 3-4 times a night. I don't believe I’ve slept more than 4 hours straight in 3 years. I’m 57 years old and the doctors all say it’s a normal part of aging which I wholeheartedly disagree with. My wife and I eat clean, take supplements and workout 4-5 times a week (crossfit) and are in good health. What is your recommendation for shrinking the prostate. There’s got to be something that causes this condition. God Bless   Thank you for tuning into today's Cabral HouseCall and be sure to check back tomorrow where we answer more of our community’s questions! - - - Show Notes & Resources: http://StephenCabral.com/1065 - - - Get Your Question Answered: http://StephenCabral.com/askcabral   - - - Dr. Cabral's New Book, The Rain Barrel Effect https://amzn.to/2H0W7Ge - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: http://CabralSupportGroup.com - - -   Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular Supplements: > “The Dr. Cabral Daily Protocol” (This is what Dr. Cabral does every day!) - - - > Dr. Cabral Detox  (The fastest way to get well, lose weight, and feel great!) - - - > Daily Nutritional Support Shake  (#1 “All-in-One recommendation in my practice) - - - > Daily Fruit & Vegetables Blend  (22 organic fruit & vegetables “greens powder”) - - - > CBD Oil  (Full-spectrum, 3rd part-tested & organically grown) - - - > Candida/Bacterial Overgrowth, Leaky Gut, Parasite & Speciality Supplement Packages - - - > See All Supplements: https://equilibriumnutrition.com/collections/supplements  - - -   Dr. Cabral’s Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Organic Acids Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Thyroid + Adrenal + Hormone Test  (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Adrenal + Hormone Test (Run your adrenal & hormone levels) - - - > Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Omega-3 Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels) - - - > Stool Test (Use this test to uncover any bacterial, h. 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It's no secret that physical appearance is important for gay men. When you're a dad and have so many other responsibilities maintaining your own body can feel impossible. In this episode we tackle the 'Dad Bod' question with our guest Tommy Woelfel, a certified spin instructor. Put your gym clothes on, because you'll be motivated to start your journey today to looking like daddy Chris Hemsworth! Scroll down for tips and advice discussed in this episode. The pressure to look good and be fit when walking around at the grocery store permeates the gay community. Whether it's self-imposed or you feel it from the "community" there are a lot of people who say it's a bad thing. Some disagree, saying that it motivates them to stay healthy and work out. Our guest, Tommy Woelfel, says that "goes hand in hand: if you work on the outside you're benefitting the inside." 'Dad Bod' is a pop-culture term referring to a masculine body type that is a unique cross between muscular and overweight physiques. The term's been used loosely since 2008 but brought to the 'mainstream' in 2015 after an article written by Mackenzie Pearson went viral. In 2016 'Us Weekly' created confusion in publishing an article on Chris Hemsworth's physique, "giving a whole new meaning to dad bod."   View this post on Instagram   Father-son bonding! #ChrisHemsworth went surfing in Byron Bay, Australia with his dad Craig

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.

Alex Matchneer: @machty | FutureProof Retail Show Notes: 01:07 - The Introduction of ember-concurrency 02:15 - What is ember-concurrency? What are the problems it solves? 05:37 - Why not use observables or other alternatives? 09:49 - Could observables be used in conjunction with ember-concurrency? 12:16 - Simple Made Easy 14:23 - Coming Soon to ember-concurrency 16:04 - Communicating Changes in State; Glimmer Reference Primitives 23:09 - Using References 29:31 - Submitting RFCs; Adding Pipelines 32:10 - Pipeline Use Cases Resources: ember-concurrency The Frontside Podcast Episode 007: The Ember Router with Alex Matchneer The Frontside Podcast Episode 019: Origin Stories with Tom Dale and Alex Matchneer Introduction to ember-concurrency by Alex Matchneer from Global Ember Meetup RxJS Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy Glimmer.js redux-saga Lauren Tan's RFC: Cancellable task pipelines Railway Oriented Programming Apache Kafka Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 67. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and podcast host-in-training. With me today also is Elrick Ryan, a developer here at The Frontside. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on, Charles. CHARLES: Now, we have with us today someone who we love to have on the show. Everybody probably already know him. I know the first time I actually heard about him was when we had him on the podcast the first time, I was like, "Who the hell is this guy?" But since then, he's become one of my favorite developers, just with all of the things that he's done, from Router.js to more recently ember-concurrency. We have Alex Matchneer on the program. ALEX: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. CHARLES: Hey, Alex and you know what? I pronounced your name right this time. First time out of the gate. Boom! ALEX: Nice. Which one did you go with? Matchnear? Matchner? [Laughter] ALEX: I really actually don't even know which ones correct anymore. CHARLES: Was it about a year ago that you first introduced ember-concurrency? ALEX: Yeah, I had a really embarrassing introduction of it at an Ember Meetup in January before it was really done and I just kind of botched it and didn't really introduce why it was even solving problems. Then a month later, I had some time to refine it, driven by the feel of that embarrassment. I guess around February of last year, it's been pretty much in its present state. CHARLES: I remember when it came out. I must've seen the non-botched version because I remember hitting the ground running with it and being able to refactor all of this code. I definitely know that I got the honed version because you provided in that initial blog post a whole host of examples like what are the symptoms, what are the cases where it solves and then before presenting the solution. I think that was great because I didn't even realize that I had a lot of pain. I didn't realize that at all. I didn't realize I had a problem but then you were very, very elegantly packaged the problem with the solution which is always great because otherwise, it's just complaining. Maybe we should talk a little bit about -- I don't think we've officially talked about -- ember-concurrency. Even though it's been out for quite a while, the way that you model these concurrent processes using the stack is just pretty incredible. Do you want to just very briefly touch on what the problem is and what have lead you to this solution? ALEX: Sure. It's a little bit difficult to sort of succinctly say what ember-concurrency is because it kind of hits them like five different separate but kind of related but not really pain points. At its core, it's just like a task primitive and it's definitely not the first library to ever introduce that the JavaScript, I think particularly when the generator function syntax was introduced into the spec, I think a few years back. Dave Herman who's also known as, I think a Little Calculist. I think he works on the TC39. I always get those groups a little confused in my head but he introduced a task.js library that let you use the generator function syntax and then lets you yield Promises to sort of pause where you were in that task and then continue when it resolved. It had some support for cancellation. It played well with Promises and I brought that to Ember in a way that fit really nicely with Ember more than it probably does or will with other frameworks like React or Vue. By bringing it to Ember, basically if you're implementing any feature that involves async, if it's a button that needs to show that it's been clicked while you're waiting for some response to come back from the server, instead of using Promises, instead of using actions, here's an ember-concurrency task. It makes it easier to express that operation you're trying to do and it makes it really easy to drive your UI with state that comes from the state of that operation -- Is the test still running? Is your form still submitting? -- Rather than having to manage a bunch of mutable flags and properties on a component or state yourself and likely get it wrong. CHARLES: Right. Essentially asynchronous processes is like a state machine and before, we were kind of managing that state machine by hand but I think what's so brilliant about this task-oriented programming, I guess is maybe a way to put it because I really think that some of these ideas are universal and not specific to ember-concurrency. But it almost like it uses the stack, just your normal programming stack to track where you are inside of a process, rather than what it felt like what we were doing before, which was managing this state machine by hand, if that makes any sense. ALEX: It does make sense a lot of sense. A lot of people ask me, if you're going to go into sort of async territory, why aren't you using something like RxJS? Rx is observables and kind of popularized by the Netflix crowd who did a bunch of presentations on them. It's super popular these days. But one of the things I really like about RxJS or at least one of the realizations I had is that I think you're still building a state machine. You're just expressing it using different primitives. In Rx, you're still building a state machine but in Rx, they make you think about it in terms of streams and events firing over time. In ember-concurrency, also you're still building a state machine but you're using the generator function syntax and the call stack like you mentioned as another way of expressing that state machine but with a lot less code. CHARLES: Right. I was actually talking to someone about ember-concurrency just a few days ago and they were saying the same thing, "Why not use observables," and at least from my perspective, maybe I didn't quite understand the question because I feel like observables are kind of only one of the concerns that ember-concurrency addresses. I'm curious when people talk about alternatives to ember-concurrency and put observables forward, maybe I don't understand it because I usually think you might be able to use observables to register the currently executing task state and every time it changes, emit a new state and is then observed by your observable subscribers. But modeling the actual process using observables does seem weird to me because with observables, they seem like very purely functional and not heavily stateful. I don't really have that much experience with it. What's meant by using observables as an alternative? Maybe we can get more into those like how you would construct a stream or something like that? ALEX: I think the canonical Rx example of something that's elegantly expressed in Rx that would be really hard to do in just normal JavaScript, if you weren't able to use observables, is that typeahead search where as you type characters into a text field, it's already beginning to hit the server and see what you might be searching for so it can drive the state of some drop down menu. That's probably the most popular example out there because one of the things it demonstrates is that if you want to debounce, you want to allow for the user to stop typing for like 200 milliseconds before it actually hits the servers so you don't overwhelm your server, then just add a debounce operator. You've basically transformed a stream of keyboard events into that text field into something that only kicks off after it hasn't gotten an event for 200 milliseconds. If you already had a working prototype in vanilla JS and you had to debounce it, you've got to move a bunch of stuff around, you've got extract something into a function, you've got to deal with cancellation. But all those things are kind of pretty elegantly built into Rx and if you can train yourself to think in terms of streams of events, that inspires you to think about where else you could apply that in your app. I think a lot of people have felt that it's like winning, most powerful abstraction that you could think about. That's why things like cycle.js are a thing or redux-observable or just anybody working with observables in the Netflix territory. I personally find [inaudible]. If you're going to express certain processes, Rx is the way to go but it has drawbacks which is it is really hard to learn. It took me a very long time and I'm pretty good at it but if you're going to adopt Rx in your code base, then a new developer comes on, it's going to be a pretty long time. In my experience, sharing some of the Rx code I've written with fellow very talented developer, it takes a really long time to explain how to invert your thinking and think of things in terms of events. If you can get to that point, more power to you but what I found with ember-concurrency stuff is you don't have to completely invert your thinking and think of everything in terms of events and streams of events. You can use this task primitive which feels really pretty close to the code you're already writing but gives you a lot of the safety guarantees and just makes it really easy to use this derived state to drive templates. Rx is a powerful paradigm and sometimes you need that sort of event-driven push based model but I think when people wonder why aren't you just using observables, they haven't really grasped how easy and familiar it is to use task and get it right on the first try and with a lot less code. CHARLES: Right. You're able to leverage the fact that I understand what a JavaScript function looks like and the sequencing is implicit by just the order in which you were numerate the steps, right? ALEX: Right. Because I think that Rich Hickey of Clojure popularized the divide between simple versus easy and Simple Made Easy is one of his popular talks that everyone should probably -- CHARLES: It's a great talk. Yeah. ELRICK: Do you see an area where observables could be used in conjunction with ember-concurrency? ALEX: It's kind of. It's been hard for me to find that use case. Probably, there's a handful of use cases where maybe it's a little awkward to think about to have something that would be elegantly handled in Rx would be model using tasks but it really hasn't struck me enough in some of the apps that I'm building, to really try and flesh that out. CHARLES: I would be curious to see a side by side comparisons. I build a lot of auto completes using ember-concurrency. I built a lot of asynchronous processes using ember-concurrency. What would that look like using nothing but Rx and just be able to have it on the left-hand side of the paper, then Rx on the right hand side of the paper are easy. ALEX: I'd be very surprised if you could find an Rx example that is less code than the task equivalent because as much as I think the autocomplete example is the best canonical example of Rx, once you actually start making something that's production-ready, you want to start driving the button state while it's running or to show a loading indicator. When you start deriving other observables off of the source observable which is the user typing into the text field, you start having to worry about, "I'm dealing with a cold observable. If I create another stream based on it, it might double subscribe and I might kick off two things. I actually want to use a published.ref version of the stuff." To actually get away from a toy example into something that's actually production-ready, requires a lot of code. From my own conversations with the people working on Rx, there's a lot of people that are working on it and they're pragmatic about it and don't think that you have to be just purist functional all the way. But when they actually ship production code, they usually resort to using like the do operator. With Rx observables, which is basically an escape hatch to let you do mutations and side effects in what is supposed to be this monadic functional thing. If the paradigm is breaking that quickly to do production code, I'd wonder if maybe there is something better out there. I just kind of keep that in mind but I'd definitely think there should be a bake-off or comparison of how you do things in both the task paradigm and observable paradigm but I think you'd find that in most cases, just do a lot more with a task, with a lot less code. CHARLES: I want to go back to the point you were about to make about Simple Made Easy. ALEX: On the divide, ember-concurrency is very easy. I still choose easy. In the case of reservable, I'm constantly choosing easy over simple and then it always helps me out because I've made that decision. I think most people inspired by Rich Hickey from the Clojure community, would look at ember-concurrency and be like, "At a task that combines derive state and does five different things seems kind of gross. Why don't you just use observables," and the result of that if you follow it through is that you end up writing a bunch of observable code that is a mess in streams and going in different directions and you've written something that's really hard to understand, even if it's seasons Rx developers looking at the code. It's just very easy to write things that are tangled. CHARLES: It's always good to have simplicity but also a system that simple without ease, I think is far less useful because like I said, it's always going to be a tradeoff between simple and easy but the problem is if your system is too simple, then it means that you're shouldering your day-to-day programming task or shouldering the complexity and you have this emergent complexity that you just can't shake because your primitives are just too simple. You could be programming in assembly language or something like that. That's really simple. You need to be able to construct simple primitives on top of simple primitives so for your immediate need, you have something that is both simple and easy, if that's ever possible. Certainly, ember-concurrency is easy and I think it just means there's maybe work to do in trying to tease apart the different concerns because like you said, there are five. But in real complex systems, there are five bajillions, maybe teasing apart those individual concerns that is composed out of simple primitives. I'm sure you've thought about that a little bit of how do I separate this and make these tasks compose a little bit better and things like that. ALEX: This is a nice segue because it might tie into some of the work that's going to be going into ember-concurrency in the next few months. A big theme of EmberConf is actually, a lot of people are joking that it should just be called GlimmerConf because a lot of it was talking about how Glimmer is going to be this composable subset of Ember, like Glimmer is going to be the rendering layer and then there might be a Glimmer router and a bunch of these Glimmer components that once you npm install them, you get Ember. Glimmers is a chance to think about Ember as a bunch of components working together under a really nice rendering layer. There's definitely some interest in bringing ember-concurrency in thinking what is so-called Glimmer-concurrency going to look like. Part of thinking about that is going to mean teasing apart some of these details as you were just saying. I don't have a lot of specifics to give right now, just that there is a lot of interest in making sure at the very early on, there is some sort of Glimmer-concurrency equivalent. Generally speaking, as part of that process is the question of how do we bring these magical ember-concurrency parameters to just Node or just vanilla JavaScript in general. Perhaps you could use these kinds of tasks on a server and in other environments. I think there's some questions of the way the ember-concurrency bundles together derived state with the actual tasks runner, are you actually going to use that derived state in the server setting? I think some of these pieces are going to have to come apart a little bit. I don't have very concrete ideas for how that's all going to look in the end. Just that I have faith that it will happen pretty easily and the result of it is going to be something that fits pretty nicely into Glimmer as well. CHARLES: Yeah, I hope so. It certainly seems like one of the core issues right because Glimmer-concurrency really should be universal. It should be some -- I don't want to prescribe your work for you -- ALEX: I don't mind. CHARLES: That wouldn't be cool. I mean, Glimmer is very stripped down. You have a very little bit on top of a raw JavaScript environment so if you're going to go there, it'll makes sense. What is this concurrent process builder look like using nothing but JavaScript? It seems like one of the hardest problems is to disentangle it from Ember object because the way that it currently computes that derive state is very intertwined with Ember object. You know the details of this more than I do but it seems like that's one of the biggest challenges is how do you communicate those changes in state without using that? That what I was thinking, it would be a good case for using observable for ember-concurrency, although not for probably the reason that people are thinking, which is for task composition and stuff but I'm very curious. ALEX: Likely the first stab at that direction would probably be using something similar, if not exactly these Glimmer reference primitives. Maybe it is worth talking about that. References are one of the core primitives that's used by Glimmer and it represents a value that might change over time and it's a value that can be lazily gotten, whereas observables, you have something that's firing events every time something changes and it makes the whole pipeline process it right then and there. With references, when something changes, you just tell the world like something's dirty. Then at a later time, maybe when in a request animation frame or some point where it actually makes sense to get the latest values, then it goes through and finds out everything that changes, does a single rerender. What it means is that you don't have the observe recode that's firing every time some value has changed. It's one of the guiding abstractions in Glimmer that makes it possible for it to be so fast and performant. It is very likely that a vanilla version of what ember-concurrency does uses references because those are already separate from the Ember object model and actually are used today in conjunction with Ember object model with the Glimmer that works with Ember today. I think that's probably, to me a first step. Clearly the reference attraction has worked wonders for Glimmer. I prefer to probably use that than observables and the push-based. CHARLES: Observables or something else. That is really, really interesting because there's nothing like vanilla JavaScript programming these days, like the equivalent of a Haskell thunk where you're just passing these things around but you're not actually using them until you actually want to pull a value. At that point, you kick off the whole chain of computation required to get that one value that you need. But it immediately brings to mind and I don't know if this is of concern to you but I was very, very enamored of Ember objects back in the day, in 2012. I was like, "Wow, this is amazing. This solves every problem that I've had." It has been a great companion and I've built some really great stuff on top of it. But now it's definitely turned into baggage. I think it's baggage for libraries that I've written and we're talking about it in the context of it being baggage here and being making it more available to the JavaScript community so I worry a little bit about Glimmer references. Would they possibly turn into something like that and could you counteract that by maybe trying to evangelize them to the wider JavaScript community like, "Here's a new reactive primitive," so that we don't end up in an eddy of the JavaScript community, do you think there's value in trying to say, "There should be some standard in the same way of observable, which is an emerging standard is for eager reactivity, have some lazy reactivity standard," or maybe it's too early for that. That might be a way of future-proofing or getting insurance for the future so you can say, "We can confidently build systems on top of this primitive." ALEX: If the worry is something based on Glimmer reference as it's going to turn into the same baggage or [inaudible] or whatever, that maybe Ember object has turned into some apps, some applications, some libraries. I'm not sure. I guess I don't really see that happening and I know that it's already gotten some validation from some of the people that have worked on Rx. In fact, a very useful primitives for certain kinds of workloads. As much as evangelism certainly helps. It's already off to a much better start than this all-powerful, god object that you can only interact with if you're using .get and .set functions. It's very lightweight. What I'm trying to say here is that there's UI workloads and then there's server-driven workloads and using Rx for both cases means that Rx suffers as a library because in the UI workload, you want something like references where you want to let a bunch of things change and then update stuff in one pass just a tick later or later in the micro task queue. But in Rx, they make you think about things in event-driven way, which might make sense for servers and stream processing but it's ugly when you want to actually build UIs with it. I think if we pay due respect to the fact these workloads are pretty different, I think the reference is way better of an abstraction for things that are UI-centric. They're simple and their performant and I think it's often much better foot than Ember object which is kind of bloated and huge and very hard to optimize. CHARLES: Right. I like that because you have to be precise with the server side things but ironically, with the references, you only care about the state at the point at which you observe it -- when the user observes it, not when the code observes it. The user observes stuff with every animation frame and there can be any number of intermediate states that you can just throw away and you don't care about. You don't need to compute them. I think what you're saying is Rx forces you to compute them. ALEX: Right and you wouldn't use a Glimmer reference for something if you're trying to batch. But in the end, keep all of the events that were fired on all the change events. You wouldn't use references because you're losing all that information until you do that poll and you get the latest value. But 99% of the time, when you're building UIs, that's what you want to use. CHARLES: Are Glimmer reference is their own standalone library or do they currently bundled with Glimmer? ALEX: I'm not sure. If they are not now, I believe the intention is for them to be at their separate repo. I was talking to Kris Selden at EmberConf and I got the impression that the intent, it might not be there now and if I want to start extracting ember-concurrency stuff into vanilla JS, I'd probably want to use a reference-ish thing, if not the official one from Glimmer. CHARLES: I know we talked about this so then, how will you able to use these lazy references to compute tasks state? How that might work or play out? ALEX: The fundamental problem right now is that everything in ember-concurrency is so glued to the Ember object model. What that means is that all ember-concurrency has to do is broadcast so the changes has happened to the state of a certain task so that you can, maybe put a loading spinner up on your template. All it has to do is use object.set and then the built in computed property observer change detection that is in Ember object model. It's going to sort of propagate these changes but that's a bunch of heavy Ember stuff that is going to exist and a lighter weight Glimmer or vanilla JS context. Instead of using .sets and expecting that the thing you're setting it on is a big, heavy Ember object model, you could just use references. Then whoever wants to get a reference to whether a task is running or not, it is running reference. Then just using the standard Glimmer abstractions. At the Glimmer-concurrency task runner, it would just basically kick those references and anyone who has one of those references can flush and get the latest value at some later point in time and then update the UI based on that. Already, as a maintainer at ember-concurrency, I see all the pieces work with that and I could probably just start working on that today. But there's just a handful of other things that I want to align with the vision of Glimmer and Glimmer-concurrency before I start working on that. ELRICK: What would be the referency equivalent in just plain JavaScript outside of Glimmer that you would use to build this on top of --? CHARLES: Like what would the API look like? If you're like, "I don't have a Glimmer. I don't have anything. I'm just --?" ELRICK: Yeah, you just have plain JavaScript. What would be the primitive that you will build this on top of? ALEX: Whether we use a standalone Glimmer references library or this separate reference thing, then I would use the term based on something Kris Selden said. In the end, the APIs is going to be pretty similar between those two but if one thing is requires, as far as I understand it, you've got to set up where in an event loop, your response is something that's changed and then you schedule at a later request animation frame, to actually do the rendering based on that. In order to use something like references, it implies that you've got to flush at a later tick or flush at a later call back. If you've got that in whatever app you're working on, it should be pretty easy to figure out where references fit in. CHARLES: I see, so you would basically say like new task, give it your task class or whatever -- I'm just making stuff up -- then you would just schedule, do a request animation frame and then just pull the task state or something like that? Or a new task reference or something like that? ALEX: You might have some function that's schedule render pass, if not yet scheduled. Then if it hasn't been scheduled, then use requests animation frame. If you call that function again, it's going to no op until that requests animation frame happened. CHARLES: Could you explain that again? ALEX: Sure. If you're actually thinking of a really low level vanilla JavaScript to your app, in the browser or something and you were just using references, then you probably have something where the thing that kicks off the reference or dirties the reference in some way, also run some function called 'schedule rerender', if one hasn't already been scheduled or something less verbose. That would just make sure that some request animation frame has been scheduled. When it flushes, then it will get all the changes but if more references are dirty at that mean time, it won't schedule additional request animation frames. I don't know, that's kind of blue-skying but that's when -- CHARLES: Right. Here's the other things, you see like being able to integrated with a third-party state management solution like Redux or something. Basically, I've got my ember-concurrency tasks and their state is then reflected inside a Redux store. How might that work, if at all? Or was that a crazy idea? ALEX: I don't know. I played around with Redux toy examples and Redux community and Ember is only stronger by the day. I'm not entirely sure how all those pieces fit together because in Redux, they really want you to propagate all of your state changes using the reducer in that single global atom. A lot of people asked me about redux-sagas, which is another generator function-driven way of firing these state mutating actions over some async operation and this is hugely popular but I don't think they have any concept of the derived state that I've been trying to do with ember-concurrency of just being able to ask a task if it's running. You can't just do that. You've got to reflect that into the global atom -- the global store --somehow and to be honest, I don't really know if that's fundamentally at odds with the Redux model, to take something like Ember or Glimmer-concurrency and make it work that way. But ideally, you wouldn't have to forward all that state into the global atom. You just be able to reference that task object. CHARLES: If the task object itself is immutable, it would have seemed like fairly trivial, like you could generate programmatically the reducer required to do that. If you had the state encapsulated, you could come and say, "Now, there's a new state here." It seems like you would be able to adapt that but you would need to be able to react to any time if that state changed to fire and action in the Redux store or fire the Redux action. ALEX: Actually, this will be an easier question to answer because in the Ember community Slack, there's a Redux channel and I know everyone there is already starting to talk about how are references, how is Glimmer is going to, how can we kind of tie these things to Redux and I think when they have some solutions lined up, a lot of the stuff that will be in so-called glimmer-concurrency will just fit in nicely. If they've got nice models for tying references to the state atom, if you will, then it's going to work with the new way. CHARLES: Okay, cool. One of the things that I wanted to talk about was a proposal that Lauren Tan, who put on to the ember-concurrency issues list, although it's an RFC. Are you accepting RFCs now for ember-concurrency? ALEX: I'm not pompous enough to have a separate RFCs repo. Issue approaches perfectly humble for me. CHARLES: But is this the first RFC or have there been a bunch of ember-concurrency RFCs? ALEX: There's been a few. It's definitely great that Ember have standardize on this boilerplate RFC model that everyone can fit their proposal into because it means that all the add-ons that people really like and really want to invest in, they get these high-quality RFCs versus like, "Hey man. It kind of nice if you can just like, have a pipeline." [Laughter] ALEX: Just because Ember invested in that process, the whole add-on community benefits from it and it's great. There's been a few RFCs that are like that. I'm not sure how many of them have made it but I've seen a few that are in that format but this one's definitely one of the nicer ones and a lot of effort was put into it and it looks really nice. ELRICK: I'm not familiar with the RFC. What was the brief overview of what was proposed? ALEX: Lauren was basically proposing that we add concept of pipelines, which is if you have a series of tasks that are stepping the pipeline of operations, then we should standardize that and then define all the steps in the pipeline so rather than having each step in the pipeline, call the next step in the pipeline. They just return some their portion of that work and then the pipeline infrastructure will automatically run the next step in that pipeline. CHARLES: It seems like also then you can derive state about the entire pipeline, rather than just the individual task. You have to manage that a little bit by hand. But the other thing, I guess I would add is it seems like if you're going to go with pipelines, rather than being a simple list, you might want to think about it as being a tree because can you have pipelines that are composed of sub-pipelines, so to speak? ALEX: Yeah. I believe the answer is yes. I'm not sure if it's spelled out in this RFC but really a pipeline just fits the task interface so if there's a task-ish thing or taskable object that you declare as a step of a pipeline or sub-pipeline, it should just work. I'm not sure if there's more work that needs to be done in spelling that out but that seems baked into it. There's a lot of due consideration for making sure these things compose really well and it's already in a really good state. CHARLES: Yeah. What are some of the use cases where you might want to use a pipeline? I'm sure, everyone who's been writing concurrent tasks has probably been maintaining their own pipeline so what is it that you're doing and how is this going to save your time and money? ALEX: Let's use the example that I've actually used in EmberConf, which is something based on my own app, which is in my app, you have to geolocate and find nearby stores that you could walk into and that process is four async steps in a row. One is getting your geolocation coordinates and then the next step is passing those the store, getting values and the third step is maybe some additional validation or just setting a timer so that your animations or any of these little async things that you have to do. But it's really a sequential operation where each time, fetch your geolocation or get it out of a cache and then step to the next thing, then the next thing. It looks okay as I have it in my production app code but it still feels a little gross that you can just look at this thing and be like, "What is the sequence of steps here?" You have to actually get the implementation of each task to see what happens next and where will it go after that. Basically, with ember-concurrency in general, there's a lot of opportunities for finding more conventions for building apps. I don't even know if we really talk about this so far but derived state is part of it. But generally speaking before ember-concurrency, there wasn't as much opportunity, I guess for some of these conventions for building these pretty standard UI flows without feeling that you're just building your own thing every single time, with chains of Promises and your own improvise cancellation scheme and all these things. I see pipelines as a next step. Well, we're pre-building lots of pipelines in our apps. We have these processes that go through these multiple steps and right now, the best we can do is set a bunch of Boolean variables and the derived state that comes with ember-concurrency helps but with pipelines, there's even more and it also structures your thinking so that if something like pipelines catches on, hopefully as an Ember developer, you'll see them in a few different places and already have that tool in how to visualize a problem, visualize a component, visualize the async flow. CHARLES: If I spent my entire morning reading the talk that Lauren referenced in RFC, which was the Railway Oriented Programming, which I think, maybe not quite but basically a visual explanation of a Maybe monad or the Either monad or whatever it's called. One of the greatest explanations of why monads are helpful and through explanation using like the Maybe, where you can have a computation that could have more than one result, either success or failure and how do I take these functions and compose them with functions that might always succeed or might not have a return value or whatever and show the tracks that move through a computation and be able to normalize every function to have the same number of tracks. I realized, I'm getting into the description of it without actually having the visuals in front of it so I'm just going to stop myself and say everybody go read it. It'll take you 35 minutes but it will eliminate so much like the chatter that you've been hearing in the background for a couple years. ALEX: I used to tell people that they should learn Rx because regardless of me liking the task primitive a little bit better, it's great. It just scrambles your brain and reorganize your thought processes and it's such an interesting library to learn. CHARLES: All right. I like it. I'm going to go learn Rx. ALEX: I've been getting, on the server side, the sort of Kafka-based architecture, Apache Kafka. Particularly, they've released some libraries in maybe the last year or so. It's a very Rx-familiar feeling library for composing new data and new aggregates and joins between different topics and streams of events. It just seems like they're at the forefront of solving these really hard problems in a very conventional way. You get into some of that stuff and you'll find that you're doing a lot of server side processing with step that just feels a lot like Rx and I find it very interesting. I haven't actually build anything with it yet but it is likely in my future and anybody that's into the event-driven model should definitely know what people are working on in this Kafka-streams world. CHARLES: That is cool. It's so interesting to see how all the problems that you encounter on working on the server side, you will encounter on the client and vice versa. You can build up a huge corpus of knowledge on one side of the API divide and you'd be surprised that if you were to go work on the other side for a time, you'll be able to leverage 99% of that knowledge. That's fantastic. I would love to get into Kafka but unfortunately, I think we're going to have to save that for another time. That's another one of those words like... I don't know. Is Kafka descended from Storm or something like that? Is it a similar concept? I remember everybody was big on Storm. ALEX: I think Storm process the events and decides what to do with them. Kafka is really just a giant storage that plugs into something, I think like Storm or [inaudible] or any of these things that actually process the events. CHARLES: Yeah, it's all Kubernetes to me. ALEX: Yeah. CHARLES: All righty. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you so much, Alex for coming to talk to us. It's always enlightening. I love your approach to programming. I love how deeply you think about problems and how humble you are in approaching them because they are big. ALEX: Well, thank you. It's great to be on here. It's fun. CHARLES: All right, everybody. Take care. Bye Elrick, bye Alex.

Katie Gengler @katiegengler | GitHub | Code All Day Show Notes: 01:23 - Testing 06:20 - ember-try 14:11 - Add-ons; Ember Observer 17:43 - Scoring and Rating Add-ons 25:25 - Contribution and Funding 27:41 - Code Search 30:59 - Data Visualization 32:27 - Change in the Ember Ecosystem Since Last EmberConf? 34:35 - Code All Day 35:39 - What's Next? Resources: ember-qunit liquid-fire capybara Selenium appraisal emberCLI Bower Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast Episode 54. I am your host, Charles Lowell, with me is Alex Ford. Today, we're going to be interviewing Katie Gengler. I remember very distinctly the first time that I met Katie, it was actually at the same dinner, I think that I met Godfrey at EmberConf in 2014. That was just a fantastic conversation that was had around the table and I did not realize how important the people that I was meeting were going to be in my life over the next couple of years. But Katie has gone on to do things like identify a hole in Ember add-on ecosystem so she created Ember Observer. There's a huge piece missing from being able to test this framework that spans multiple years and multiple versions and being able to make sure that your tests, especially for add-on authors, run against multiple versions so she created and maintains Ember-try. She's a part of the EmberCLI core team. She's a principal at Code All Day, which is a software consultancy and just an all-around fantastic woman. Thank you, Katie for coming on to the show and talking with us. KATIE: Thanks for having me. CHARLES: One of the things I wanted to start out the conversation with is something that's always struck me about you is there's a lot of people when it comes to testing, they talk the talk but you have always struck me as someone who walks the walk. Not just in terms of you make sure that your apps have tests in them, where your add-ons have tests in them but talking to people about testing patterns, making sure that when there are huge pieces of the ecosystem missing like Ember-try. I remember this as something that I struggled with. I was running up against this problem and all of the sudden, here comes Ember-try and you've been such a huge part of that. I want to know more about kind of your walk with testing and how that permeates so much of what you do because I think it's very important for people to hear that. KATIE: I got really lucky right out of college. My first job was at a place that where people think of mythical themes, XP-focused developers so the first thing I was told is everything is test first, everything is test-driven. I was primarily doing Ruby in Rails at the time but also JavaScript. At the beginning, we didn't have a way to test JavaScripts and there was a lot of missteps in the way of testing JavaScript until we came right around to QUnit. I was QUnit long before Ember even came along. It's kind of bit ingrained in my whole career. Michelle as well. Michelle is my partner in Code All Day. We're both very test focused. I think that's what drew us to start a company together and working together. Every project we're on, we try to write encompassing tests: test drive everything, if we're on it, projects upgrade or any project to fix. We try to write tests as a framework for everything that we're doing so we know whether we're doing something right or not. When it comes to Ember-try, that wasn't entirely my own idea. That was something that Robert Jackson and Edward Faulkner were looking for something right. I remembered that appraisals gem from Ruby. I really enjoyed being [inaudible] gems that I had written Rails so I wanted it to exists for Ember so I just kind of took a promise of to do it. It was extracted from Liquid Fire. I had some scripts that would sort of test multiple versions but it was rough. It wasn't as easy as it is today. CHARLES: Yeah, it does speak to a certain philosophy because if you're coming to a problem and it's difficult to test, you often come to a crossroads where you say, "You know what? I have a choice to make here. I can either give up and not write a test or trying and test some subset of it," Or, "I can write the thing that will let me write the test." It seems like you fall more into that second category. What would you say to people who are either, new to this idea or new in their careers and they butt up against this problem of not knowing when to give up and when to write the thing to write the test. KATIE: I almost never don't write the test so if you're suspicions are true, I will write something to be able to write the test. But there are times that I'm [inaudible] and sometimes I'm just like, "This is not going to be tested. This is not going to happen." Finding that line is pretty hard but it should be extremely rare. It's not when people come to me, I work with a client and they're telling me, "No, it's too hard to write the tests." A lot of times, it's not only how you write the test, spreading the test and learning how to write a test. It's the code you're trying to test that could be a problem. If you have a very complicated code, very side-effect driven code, it's very hard to write the easier sell, which might Ember acceptance tests. What you're really kind of on a level of integration because you do have a little bit of knowledge of what's going on and you have to be within the framework of what Ember tests wanted you to do, which is async is all completed by the time you want to have this assertions and test. That means to look different tools like going back to something like Capybara or Selenium and have some sort of test around on what you're doing in order to replace the code that makes it hard to test it at a lower level to begin with. I think a lot of people are just missing the framework for knowing what to do when their code is intractable or not, necessarily that the testing and the guides that have you tested. I think most people could go through tutorial and do tests for a little to do MVC app perfectly fine. But that's easy when you [inaudible] size of the equation so if you're already struggling with code and you're not quite sure, either in Ember, it can seem very, very hard to write tests for that. I think that's true with Rails as well. I think people that begin in Rails don't understand what they're going to testing, especially if they have an existing app that trying to add test to but unfortunately, Rails not a long ago, kind of got into everybody's heads that your tests go with what you're doing. It's just ingrained part of the Rails community. Hopefully, that will become how it is with Ember. But a lot of people are kind of slowly bring their apps Ember so they really have a lot of JavaScript and they don't necessarily know what to do or they're write in JavaScript have always are written with jQuery and a little bit [inaudible]. They don't understand how to test that. ALEX: How does Ember-try help with that? Actually I want to roll back and talk about what is Ember-try and how does it fit into testing? You mentioned the appraisal gem which I'm not familiar with. I haven't done much Rails in my life or Ruby. But can we talk about what Ember-try is? KATIE: Sure. Ember-try, at the basis, let's you run different scenarios with your test. At some point, I would've said, let's run different scenarios of dependencies for your tests so primarily changing your Ember version and that's pretty much what add-ons do but a lot of people are using it for scenarios that are completely outside of dependencies so different environment variables, different browsers. They're just having one place to have all these scenarios, where if you just put it in travis.yml like your CI configuration, you want it as easily be able to run that locally. But with Ember-try, you can do that locally. I found that it's kind of beyond my intentions, expanded beyond dependencies. Primarily, it lets you run your test in your application with different configurations. I could see running it with different feature flags, it would be what something to be interesting to do, if that's something you use. Primarily, it just lets you try the conversions and appraisal gems let you run test with different gem sets so you have a different gem file for each scenario you possibly had. That was definitely dependency-focus. CHARLES: That sounds really cool. It's almost sounds like you could even get into some sort of generative testing, where you're kind of not specifying the scenarios upfront but having some sort of mechanism to generate those scenarios so you can try and surface bugs that would only occur outside of what you're explicitly testing for, which is kind of randomly choosing different versions of environment, variables, feature flags, dependencies and stuff like that. They didn't thought of that? KATIE: Randomization [inaudible] but Ember-try really does have a kind of general route way of working on and that's we're leading to that. If you wanted to, especially for add-ons, you can specify this version compatibility keyword and your packet at JSON and give Ember and give an Ember string a version and it will generate the scenarios for you and test all those versions. These Ember strings are pretty powerful so you can say specifically versions you want. You can do a range of versions and it will take the latest patch release and a reminder, at least you don't want to be too crazy and test each of those for that add-on. But I can definitely see something random, they're really cool. Some testing thing that's like just tries to do random input into all of your inputs on a page. I've really been meaning to try that out. Sounds like [inaudible]. CHARLES: Yeah, just like to try and break it. I remember a world before Ember-try and I can't speak highly enough about it and the fact that how many bugs it has caught in the add-ons that we maintain because you're always working on the latest, hottest, greatest version of Ember and you're not thinking what about two-point releases back. They're might be not a deal breaker but some subtle bug that surfaces and break your tests and the coverage has just gotten so much better. In fact, I think that they're as brilliant as it is bundled with EmberCLI when you are building an add-on. It's like you now you get it for free. It's one of those things where it's hard to imagine what it was like, even though we lived it. KATIE: And it was less than a year ago. [Laughter] KATIE: Ember-try existed for more than 15 bundle with EmberCLI so since last EmberConf or so. CHARLES: Yeah, but it's absolutely a critical piece of the infrastructure now. KATIE: I'm glad it caught bugs for you. I don't think I've actually caught a bug with it. CHARLES: Really? KATIE: Yeah, but I don't do a lot of Ember re-add-ons. I do a lot of EmberCLI-ish add-ons. It can't change versions of EmberCLI. Not yet, we're working on that. I get some weird npm errors when I tried it but I haven't dug into it much yet. CHARLES: I don't want to dig too much into the mechanics but even when I first heard about it, I was like, "How does that even work?" Just replacing all the dependencies and having a separate node modules directory and bower and I'm like, "Man, there's so many moving parts." It was one of those things where we're so ambitious. I didn't even think it was possible. Or I didn't even think about writing it myself or whatever. It's one of those like, "Wow, okay. It can be done." ALEX: This exists now. CHARLES: Yeah. ALEX: Add-on authors are accountable now for making their add-ons work with revisions or versions a few points back like you said but it makes it so easy. The accountability is hardly accountability, turning Ember-try. It's really amazing. KATIE: What I'm laughing about is that what it actually does is not very sophisticated or crazy at all. For instance, for bower, it moves your existing bower components structure. It's a placeholder. It changes the bower.json run install. Then after the scenario, it put's everything back. CHARLES: But I don't know, it sounds so hard. It's intimidating. You got all this state and you got to make sure you put it all back. What do you do with if something hit you and abort midway. I'm sure you had to think about and deal with all that stuff at some point. ALEX: I kill my tests all the time in Ember-try and I was like, "Oops." I forgot I shouldn't do that just like for this. KATIE: Yeah, it doesn't recover so well. It's pretty hard to do things on process exit in node correctly, at least and I don't think I gotten it quite right. But there is a clean up command. Unfortunately, with the way it interacts with EmberCLIs dependency tracker so when you run an Ember command, Ember checks them to make sure all your dependencies are installed. If you still have the different bower.json and install haven't run, you have to run install before you can run the cleanup command which is kind of a drag. CHARLES: I have one final question about Ember-try. Have you given any thought to how this might be extracted and more generally applicable to the greater JavaScript ecosystem because I see this is something that Ember certainly was a trailblazer in this area. Some of these ideas came from Rails and other places. This is going to be more generally applicable and had you given thought to extracting that? KATIE: Yeah, some of [inaudible] since we first did it because we realized very early on that it doesn't depend on EmberCLI. I didn't even using it as a command line arguments parser which doesn't seem too important. But there are some assumptions we get to make. For it being an Ember app, we know how EmberCLI was structured. Some of those assumptions, I wouldn't really know with the greater node community and I gotten those assumption might not be possible at all because they don't have the standards we have on EmberCLI. It generated EmberCLI. There's generally certain things that are in place in Ember [inaudible] works for [inaudible] so there's no part of it that could be extracted. But I worry about some assumptions about no modules always being in the directory that they are in because then can be link the node modules above it. In EmberCLI, it usually doesn't support that. But other places, obviously have to. I realized that it could definitely happen but I'm not so sure that I'd want to personally support that because it's a little bit time commitment. CHARLES: Right. Maybe if someone from the outside want to step in involuntarily, you might work with it but not to personally champion that cause. KATIE: Definitely. I think it would be really cool and I do think it will end up having its own [inaudible] parser eventually, just to be able to do things like different EmberCLI versions. As long as it's not part of EmberCLI, I think that would be less confusing, though. In theory, that can be done with an EmberCLI still but I'm not clear on that. I've had people talk to me about that and I haven't fully process it yet. CHARLES: Right. Alex you mentioned something earlier I had not thought about but that was the technologies like Ember-try keep the add-on community accountable and keep them healthy by making sure that add-ons are working across a multiplicity of Ember versions and working in conjunction with other add-ons that might have version ranges. Katie, you've been a critical part of that effort. But there's also something else that you've been critical part of that you built from the ground up and that is Ember Observer. That is a different way of keeping add-ons accountable. But I think perhaps, even in a more valuable way, more of a social engineering way and that's through the creation of Ember Observer. Maybe we can talk about Ember Observer a little bit. What it is and what gave you the insight that this is something that needs to be built so I'm going to step forward and I'm going to build it? KATIE: I'm definitely going to refer again back to the Rails community. I'm a big fan of Ruby Toolbox. Whenever I needed to jam, I would go there and try to see what was available in that category kind of way. There's variables that have on there. It will have something like the popularity in the number of GitHub stars and the last time it was updated. You can see a lot of inspiration for Ember Observer in there so maybe I should step back and explain the Ember Observer. Ember Observer is a listing of all of the add-ons for the Ember community. Anything that has the Ember add-on keyword will show up there. We pull it off from npm and it all show you all that kind of information: the last updated, the number of GitHub commits, the number of stars, the number of contributors and we put all of that information and a manual view together to put a score on each add-on. You can look at it and we categorized them as well. If you look at a category, say, you're looking at a category for doing models. You would see all of a different model add-ons and be able to look between them and compare them, decide which ones to use. Or if you're thinking of building something, you can go in there and be like, "This already exists. Maybe I should just contribute to an existing thing." What gave me the idea for is I was looking at Ember add-ons, which just shows you the most recently published add-ons for that Ember add-on keyword everyday and every time I was clicking on these add-ons I go, "They did the same thing," and it just seemed like such a waste in [inaudible]. People were creating the same things and then they started clicking into and I was like, "Why they bother clicking into this. It doesn't have anything. It's just an empty add-on." We're pushing add-ons just to try that out so I thought I'd be nice if something filtered that out and I happened to have some time so I got started and dragged my husband, Phil into it. He's also an Ember and Rails developers so that's pretty convenient and my friend, Lew. Now, Michelle works on it a little bit as well. That's what drove us to build it and it's been pretty cool. I like looking all the add-ons when they come up anyway. I feel like it's not any actual work for me. It's quicker than my email each day to look at the new add-ons. ALEX: How many new add-ons are published every day on average? KATIE: On average, it's probably four to six maybe but it varies widely. If you get a holiday, you'll get like 20 add-ons because people have time off. You know, if somebody just feeling the grind at two and you'll notice that the add-on struck commeasurably too. It would be else that come on the same kind of week. ALEX: You mentioned that an add-on gets a score. Can you explain that score and how you rate at add-ons? KATIE: Sure. The score is most driven by details about the add-ons. There's Ember factors that go into it and it's out of 10 points. Five of them are from purely mechanical things, whether or not there's been more than two Git commits in the last three months, whether or not there's been a release in the last three months, whether or not they're in the top 10% of add-ons, top 10% of npm downloads for add-ons, whether they're in the top 10% of GitHub stars for add-ons. ALEX: I know that I'm a very competitive person but it also applies to software. Not just on sports or other types of competition. But I remember a moment and I'm an add-on author and my add-on had a 9 out of 10. I was just about to push some code and just about to get a release. Even before that happened, it went to a ten. The amount of satisfaction I got is kind of ridiculous. But I like it. I like the scoring system, not just for myself but also for helping me discover add-ons and picking the ones that might be right for me. I'll check out any add-on basically that might fit the description. As long as there's a readme, I'll go check it out. But it still helps along with the categorization. CHARLES: Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you can achieve an 8 out of 10 without it being a popularity contest. By saying there's a certain concrete steps that you can take to make sure that you have test and you have a readme, that's a thing of substance. I don't remember what all the criteria are but you can get a high score without getting into the how many stars or if you're in the top 10%. I think that's awesome. But it does mean that if I see an add-on with a five or something like that, it means that they're not taking my concrete steps or it might not be as well-maintained. You know, that's definitely something to take into account. I'm curious if there are any different parameters you've thought, tweaks you thought of making to the system. Because this gets to second part of that, what things had you considered just throughout out of hand, as maybe not good ways to rate add-ons. KATIE: We haven't thought about everything. I don't particularly like the popularity aspect of it. It did feel necessary to include it in some way. The stars and theory are representative of interest, not as much as popularity but it probably gets into popularity as well then downloads are inferior for popularity. But the problem downloads and I found this happening more and more frequently is that if large companies start publishing their own add-ons, then they have a lot of developers, they are going through the roof on those downloads so they're getting that to a point that just from their own developers and I have no way of knowing if anybody else is using this. CHARLES: Probably their continuous integration with containers, right? Like if it's running on Travis or Circle, it's just sitting there spinning like pumping the download numbers. KATIE: Yeah and that frustrates me quite a bit. But I haven't found another thing that really representative popularity. Unfortunately, with npm you can get the download counts but you can't tell where they came from. There's no way to do that. I simply would like to see the things that are popular, they rate higher than the they currently do, like you said either, it's 10 points go without the popularity coming to affect it. But you do need a collaboration with at least one of the person to get eight points. If you give seven by yourself, you need to have another contributor. If you only have one contributor, you don't get that point because that's trying to be representative of sort of a bust factor but it's not truly there. You can just have one commit from somebody else to get that. CHARLES: Of all the pieces, I think that's totally fair. KATIE: Yeah, there's definitely a few other things I have in mind to bring in to the metrics but we're not quite there yet. I need to entirely refactor how the score is given so it's not exactly out of 10. The idea is to have some questions and some points that are relevant only to certain categories about us. Whether or not in add-ons testing its different versions of Ember, it might have matters for add-on but it's only adding 10 for CLI or whether or not they have a recent release. Might not matter if it's kind of a one-off with the sass plugin or something more of the build tool that doesn't change for everyone. CHARLES: Yeah, I've noticed we have that happened a couple times where we've got a component that just wraps a type of input. Until the HTML is back changes or a major API changes happens in Ember, there's no need to change it. I can definitely see that. How do you market it is like something that changes infrequently. Is it just that add-on author says it's done? You give them a bigger window or something like that? KATIE: There are probably some sort of categories that fall under that. For the input, I think if it's doing something that Ember producing components, it probably want to be upgrading every CLI, at least every three months. I think in that case, it's probably fair to require an update within that period of time. But some of the things that are more close to Broccoli like as they are in Ember add-ons, that make sense to not have that requirement. Maybe not that's the [inaudible] exact example of the kind of questions that [inaudible]. ALEX: In Ember add-on was the first time that I gave back to the open source community. It was my first open source project and Ember Observer really helped me along the way to say what is an open source best practice and I thought that was really cool. Now, it sounds like with some of the point totals, you're leaning towards Ember best practices to help Ember add-on authors along that way. I think that's really awesome and very, very useful. I would not like to see what the Ember add-on ecosystem would look like without Katie. It would be a very different place. KATIE: Thanks. I'm glad it had some help on that and I'm affecting add-on authors. I actually didn't originally think about it when I was first building it and I was really hoping to help consuming of add-ons but it really has kind of driven out people finding add-ons to not build because they contribute to existing ones. Also, driving them for the score because as you said, people get very competitive. I really didn't realize what kind of drive the score to be because to me I'm like, "Somebody else's score me. How dare you?" [Laughter] KATIE: I have had people say that to me, "How dare you score me? How dare you score my add-ons?" Well, it's mostly computerized. Even the review was manual but only thing about it has any sort of leeway is are there meaningful tests. That's really the only thing when I go through an add-on is whether or not that has any sort of leeway for the judgment of the person that's doing the reading. If there's a readme and we're kind of a rubric so that goes if you have anything in there that's other than the default Ember [inaudible] readme. Whether or not there's a build that is based entirely whether or not there's a CI tag in readme, these are for the owner to go look for them [inaudible]. We hope to automate that so I don't have to keep looking for those. A lot of add-ons turned out have to have builds when they didn't have any meaningful tests. They just had tests so that's kind of confusing. CHARLES: What do you do in that situation? You actually manually review it so that add-on would not get the point for tests. KATIE: No, they don't get the point for test and if they don't get the point for test, I put 'N/A' for whether or not, they have built so it doesn't apply. It doesn't mean anything to me if they haven't build their own test. CHARLES: Right, that makes sense. A lot of it is automated but it still sounds like consume some of your time, some of Phil's time, some of Michelle's time. I guess, my question is do you accept donations or a way that people can contribute because I see this as kind of part of the critical infrastructure of the community at this point. There might be some people out there who think, "Maybe, I could help in some way." Is there a way that people can help? If so, I'd love to hear about it. KATIE: We don't have any sort of donation or anything like that. I mean, we should. We consider it primarily just part of our open source works, part of our contributions to the community because we also make a great deal of use out of the community. Fortunately, it's not very expensive to run. It's only $20 a month VPS. Other than time, it's not really consuming very many resources. That may change over time. The number of hits is increasing and we're doing some more resource-intensive things like Code Search and we're running Ember-try scenarios from the top 100 add-ons to generate compatibility tables. It hasn't been the most reliable. Think about if you're trying to do nvm-installed times 100 add-ons, times every day, times the different Ember dependency settings so it's been very much like a game of whack-a-mole but for now, it's not bad. But we probably should think about some sort of donation by then. Maybe something that writes out the exact numerical cost of something like Ember Observer. The API is getting about 130,000 hits a month but that's the API so that's some number of quests per person. [inaudible] tells me something about 12,000 visitors each month. CHARLES: Does Ember Observer has an API? Are there any the third-party apps that you know about, that people built on top of the Ember Observer? KATIE: None that have been kind of public. I know a couple of private companies seem to be hitting the API but it's not a public API. It's really not public yet. I'm literally process of switching over to JSON API and at some point, I'll make some portion of that -- a public API -- but it's pretty hard to support that at the same time. It change Ember server pretty frequently and do any kind of migrations we need to do. Ember add-ons does all the scores from us from API end point. CHARLES: I actually wasn't aware. I remember the announcement of Code Search but how do you kind of see the usage of that? What's the primary use case when you would use Code Search on Ember add-on or Ember Observers? KATIE: I think the primary use case is if you're looking for how to use a feature. If you're creating an add-on and you want to know how to use certain hooks like [inaudible] or something like that. You can do the Code Search for that and see what other add-ons are doing. It's only searching Ember add-ons that have the repository are all set so you'll only find Ember results. That will be nicer compared to searching GitHub. Then I find another use case is more by the core team to see who is using what APIs and whether or not they can deprecate something or change something or something has become widely used since we're pretty excited about that possibility, we've never ever been searching. ALEX: That is brilliant. CHARLES: Yeah, that's fantastic. The other question that I had was this running Ember-try scenarios on the top 100 add-ons and that's something that you're doing now. Are you actually reflecting that in the Ember Observer interface? Is that an information or is that an experimental feature? Or is that reflected all the way through so if I go to Ember Observer today, I'll see that information based on those computations? KATIE: I start playing in the Ember Observer interface. It's only for the top 100 add-ons currently but hopefully expanding that to all add-ons. Especially, for few months but maybe it's not easy to notice. The only on top 100 add-ons would be on the right side bar and there will be a list of the scenarios we ran it with and whether or not it pass or not. There's add-on information there. The top 100, I'll link to right on the main page of Ember Observer so you can see in the front. CHARLES: How do you get that information back to the author of that top add-on? KATIE: We haven't actually done that. It's just on Ember Observer. It's more meant for consumers to be able to see that this add-on is compatible with all these version. We're not using their scenarios. We're using our own scenarios saying Ember from this version to this version, unless they have specified that version compatibility thing and then we'll use those auto-generated scenarios. This might get harder for add-ons that have complex scenarios so it need something else to vary along with the versions like Ember Data or maybe they're using Liquid Fire and Liquid Fire have these three different version and for each versions, it's being used. For those, we'll just have things which are unable to test this. But hopefully, this is still providing some useful information for some add-ons. A lot of add-ons, their build won't run unless they commit. In this case, this is running every night so new Ember versions released will see if that fails. On other side of it, we have a dashboard where we can see which add-ons failed and maybe see if a new commit to something broke a bunch of add-ons. It commits to something like Ember and for CLI Ember-Gate, one of the main things. CHARLES: I know that certainly that right after we get over this podcast, I'm going and running or checking up all add-ons that we maintain and making sure everything is copacetic. If you guys see me take off my headphones and dash out the door, you know where I'm going. KATIE: Got you. ALEX: I just have a further comment that I'm excited for the public API of Ember Observer just because I've been thinking a lot about data visualization lately. I think it would be really cool tool to do a deprecated API, like one of those bubble charts where like the area that's covered by this deprecated API -- I'm doing a bad job of explaining this -- just like the most use deprecated API methods and visualizing that, I think they'll be really interesting to see it. CHARLES: Right, seeing how they spread across the add-on. ALEX: Yeah, or just all add-ons in general. KATIE: I am most nervous about a public API for Code Search, though because it's a little bit resource-intensive so just freaking out a little bit about the potential of a public API for it. But an Ember Observer client is open source. If you want to add anything to the app, that I consider as public think it is. Adding to that, I really do want to figure out some way to have like a performance budget for when people add to the client because sometimes I'll get people who want to add features and I'm like, "That's just going to screw all of it. It's going to be a problem for all Ember Observer and it's going to make everything slower and it's really little slow. But JSON API fortunately, I have kind of a beta version that running and it's going to be much faster, thank God. I probably shouldn't said that either. CHARLES: Definitely we want to get that donation bin set up before the API goes public. Okay, let's turn to the internet now and we'll answer some of the questions that got twitted in. we've got a question from Jonathan Jackson and he wanted to ask you, "Where have you seen the most change in the Ember ecosystem since last EmberConf?" which was March of 2016. KATIE: There was definitely fewer add-ons being published but the add-ons that are being published are kind of, say more grown up things. We've got... I don't know if engines was before or after March. I have no idea. Time has one of those things that engines and then people doing things related to Fastfood so things are coming from more collaborative efforts, I think. This is just my gut-feeling. I have no data on this. Isn't a gut-feeling from looking at add-ons and then there's a lot of add-ons that are coming out that are specific to a particular company. I think that maybe, I hope representative of more companies getting it to Ember but hopefully, they'll make things more generic and share them back. The other problem with the popularity is like about before, where big company is getting itself into the top 100 list, probably with just its own employees only appear over the summer. I tried a few different ways to mutate the algorithm to try to get them out of there but there was no solution there. It's much fewer, novel things. Very rarely do I look at Ember add-ons and I'd be like, "Oh, that's great," but when I do, it's something very exciting. CHARLES: Right so there's a level of maturity that we're starting to see. Then I actually think that there is something in the story too, of there are now larger companies with big, big code bases that have lots of fan out on their dependency tree that just weren't there before. KATIE: Definitely. I don't think some of the large companies were there before but I think some of the largest companies are probably keeping most of their add-ons private so there's kind of mid-range of company that's big enough to donate things or willing to put things open source. A few of these companies that can have a lot of add-ons now and a lot of them are very similar to things that have already existed so you're going to be like, "I don't know why I use this," but they obviously make changes for some reason. CHARLES: The other thing that I want to talk to you about, before we wrap up, is you actually are in partnership in Code All Day. What kind of business is that? What is it you guys do? What's it like running your company, while on the same time, you're kind of managing these large pieces of the Ember ecosystem? KATIE: Code All Day is very small. It's just me and Michelle. It's a consulting company, we kind of partnered together after we left to startup and decided to do consulting together. We primarily do Ember projects, also some Rails and we try to work together and we love test-driven things. It's pretty kind of loose end. We ended up running it since it's just a partnership. We don't have any employees. But Ember Observer will take up a lot of our time and we really had an idea that it might help us get clients that way so I suppose it kind of helps our credibility but it hasn't really been great for leads so much. But fortunately, there hasn't been a big problem for us. We really enjoys spending our time. We enjoy the flexibility that consulting gives us and while that flexibility is what's going to making these things keep running. CHARLES: All right-y. Well, are there any kind of skunkworks, stealth, secret things you've got brewing in the lab, crazy ideas that you might be ready to give us a sneak preview about for inquiring minds that may want to know? KATIE: Some of them are really [inaudible] which is redoing Ember Observer with JSON API instead of currently, it's using ActiveModel serializers, which is a kind of custom API to Rails and [inaudible] fortunately, it's an API now. They're removing something called JSON API Resources so that will get the performance of Ember Observer much better and that's pretty much my primary focus at the moment. I don't really have any big skunkworks, exciting projects. I have far off ideas that hopefully will materialize into some sort of skunkworks projects. CHARLES: All right. Well, fantastic. I want to say thank you, Katie for coming on the show. I know that you are kind of a hero of mine. I think a lot of people come to our community and they see like, "Where's the value in being a member of this community, in terms of the things that I can take out of it? What does it provide for me?" And you demonstrate on a day-to-day basis, asking what you can do for your community, rather than what your community can do for you, to paraphrase JFK. I think you live that every day so I look up to you very much in that. Thank you for being such a [inaudible] of the community which I'm a part of and thank you for coming on the show. KATIE: I'm very happy that I've been here and thank you. I use a lot of your guys add-ons and it's really the community has given so much to me, which is why I ever want to participate in it. It's really great group of people. CHARLES: Yep, all right-y. Well, bye everybody. ALEX: Bye.

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.