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In this week's episode, we offer four tips for setting up a comfortable and productive home office space for writers. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: DRAGONTIARNA25 The coupon code is valid through January 26, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 286 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 16th, 2026 and today we are discussing office setups for writers in terms of computers and furniture and so forth and how do you do that in a way that is maximally comfortable and maximally beneficial to overall joint health. We will also talk about Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So first up, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store and that coupon code is DRAGONTIARNA25. And as always, links to my Payhip store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes to this episode. And this coupon code will be valid through January the 26th, 2026. So if you need some new ebooks to read as we head into the winter, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. The rough draft of Blade of Storms, the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, is now done at about 90,000 words. It's time to start editing. It might actually be a little longer once I'm done editing because I was thinking about it on the treadmill this morning and I think I may need to add some scenes to some of the chapters, but we'll see when we get there. I have also written a short story called Talon Depths. That is a tie into this book. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Talon Depths when Blade of Storms comes out. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter if you haven't already. I am hoping to get it out before the end of January, but we'll see how the next two weeks go; it might slip to the first week in February. I'm also 13,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the ... Yeah, it'll be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. It'll be my main project once Blade of Storms is published. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Shadows, the previous book in the series, and is about one third of the way through. So if all goes well, hopefully we'll get that out and available to everyone sometime in February or March, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at on my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:17 Main Topic: Home Office Setups for Writers and Remote Workers Now let's move on to our main topic, home office setups for writers and remote workers. This isn't as trendy of a topic now as it was six years ago during the peak COVID times, but I still want to talk about setting up a home office as a writer or a remote worker. Even people who don't work remotely can benefit from thinking about changing their writing environment to better suit their needs and having the right setup for you makes a huge difference in your productivity and comfort. The wrong setup can make you feel drained, stressed, and distracted, and can potentially contribute to carpal tunnel syndrome or shoulder troubles or other related joint or posture problems as people, for example, can find out if they spend all their time sitting on the couch working on their laptop. I have been a full-time writer for almost 10 years now, and during that time, my work from home setup has evolved quite a bit. I thought that I would discuss the specific things I've changed and why. Our transcriptionist for the podcast also thought this was a really interesting topic, and so she will also share her remote work setup, which is quite a bit different than mine. And then to close out the episode, I will give four general tips for writing and working from home, which is something I know a little bit about at this point since I've been doing it for 10 years. So the basics: what is my office set up? I work from a sort of ad hoc U-shaped desk that I've assembled myself out of bits and pieces. The center part, sort of the bottom of the U is a piece of a glass top wraparound desk that I originally bought at Shopko [(a now defunct Wisconsin-based big box store)] back in I think like 2006. I've carried it with me through every apartment and residence since. I lost half of it a while back, but I still have the other half and it's a glass top desk. My monitor is sitting on an Amazon Basics riser atop it. It has a keyboard tray for the keyboard and it is where I do most of my main writing and editing. And in fact, this month I've written 50,000 words of Blade of Storms on that setup. So it is working quite well for me. The sides of the U are two white plastic contractor tables I've picked up. The one on the right is the one I use for ... It has the keyboard and monitor and the mouse for my graphic design computer because I have two different computers, which we'll get to in a bit. And it has the keyboard, the mouse, and the monitor riser for that. The other side, the table on the left, I try to keep as empty as possible for when I need to do paperwork. It turns out when you're self-employed, there's a surprising lot of paperwork you have to do on a regular basis. So whenever I need to do paperwork or read documents or that kind of thing, I try to keep that side of the desk as empty and as clean as possible. And it also looks nice to have it empty, though at the moment it's not empty because I have a growing stack of tax paperwork since it is tax season. As I've mentioned before, I use two desktop computers. I have a Mac Mini that I use for writing and editing and the keyboard and mouse for that are on the central computer, sort of the bottom of the U. And I have a Dell XPS tower that I use for graphic design, 3D modeling, and other multimedia things such as podcasting. I am literally recording this podcast on that computer right now. Both of the computers are actually sitting next to the U on an old kitchen cart that I think I bought back in like 2005 and again, has been moving with me from a residence to residence over the past 20 years. The reason for that is I didn't want to put the desktop computers on the desktop because that takes up a lot of space and I didn't want to put them on the floor because that's a good way to get a lot of dust into a computer and pretty much truly shortens its life. So what I ended up doing was I put this kitchen cart next to the bottom of the U-shaped desk and I put the desktop Dell computer and the Mac Mini on the kitchen cart and that keeps them off the floor, keeps them off the desk, and it's worked pretty well. And that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years, keeping a computer on that. How has it changed over time? Originally I just had one Windows computer that I did everything on. I did writing, I did editing, which was fine in 2016 when I started doing this full time because back then I didn't do my own covers. Back then I didn't do any graphic design. I didn't have the podcast and so my computing needs were a bit more limited back then. However, as you know, since then I've started doing my own covers. I have this podcast; I occasionally do YouTube videos and so I found it helpful to have a separate computer to do that, partly because when I render 3D models into 2D images for cover images, that takes up a lot of processing power and depending on the size of the render, it can take like 20 minutes. And so you have 20 minutes where the computer's processor is maxed out, which is not a comfortable experience using Microsoft Word while that is happening. So I decided eventually it would be best to have a separate writing and graphic design computers. And that's worked pretty well for the last year for me. For my chair, I have a very basic office chair I got from Amazon Basics, which is because it gets kind of hot in here in summer, and so I didn't want a big office chair. And so instead I just have one with the basic cushion, basic armrest, and sort of a net back in a plastic frame. And that has the twofold benefits of not getting too hot and then because it's not got a great back, it's got an excellent way of forcing me to have good posture while I type, which is probably why I haven't developed any serious back or shoulder problems in the 10 years I have been a full-time writer. So I realized that my office setup might seem a little bit idiosyncratic, half a glass top desk from Shopko from 20 years [ago] to contractor folding tables and an old kitchen cart that holds the computers, but it's worked pretty well for me for the last 10 years. And honestly, it's preferable to buying like a really expensive heavy computer desk and paying twice as much for something that I'd like half as much. So that's what I do. And our transcriptionist thought this was an interesting idea for an episode. So she thought she'd share her setup since it's quite a bit different than mine. She does more traditional office type tasks such as working in spreadsheets, checking audio files against documents for things like this podcast transcript, and entering data into various websites. Her computing needs are far less intense than mine, but she has done a lot more specific things customized to her physical office space than I have, namely the setups of her desk. She does not have a dedicated office, but has found a way to carve out space in her living room for both a sitting and a standing desk. The sitting desk has dual monitors at a desktop computer, and this is used for the more data and writing intensive tasks like transcription work. She has a standing desk with a laptop and a second monitor for more reading-based work that doesn't require as much data entry or typing. She mentioned she also likes to watch webinars on that since it doesn't require her to do a lot of typing. How has this changed? The walking pad and standing desk setup took some trial and error to figure out. The adjustable laptop stand was a major part of getting the setup to feel comfortable since it could be positioned at a better angle than a monitor stand or a stack of books. Much of her setup was thrifted when people started returning to work in person in their offices, including the matching dual monitors and the stand for the second monitor. As you can see, there are a variety of approaches and budgets you can take. My transcriptionist's computing needs are simpler than mine, but she has spent funds on making a space that's flexible and encourages movement when possible. As different as our setups are, they're both based on an understanding of what works best for us. I tried to think of a few tips that would apply to anyone making a space for working or writing from home and came up with four. #1: Taking a gradual and sort of iteration-based approach to adding things made it easier to get the things that would help best instead of following lists of online "must haves". Everyone's work needs and work styles are so different that these type of lists might lead you to over buy or overspend. Additionally, the thing about working with anything is that the reality doesn't often match up with the idea in your head. Like you might have a tool or a chair or a desk that you think, this will be really great for my setup and you try it only to find out that it doesn't work. So it's really a good idea to sort of iterate and see what works best for you before committing to spending any money. #2: Make a space that's as far from the high traffic areas of your household as possible. Kitchens and living rooms are particularly tough spaces to concentrate [in] for many people because so much activity happens there. So the further away you can get from the high traffic areas of your home is probably a good idea since that will give you a better chance of concentrating. #3: Walking pads and standing desks are something people often buy with good intentions, but people find it distracts them or they just don't like them once they start using them. For myself, I knew for a fact that I didn't want a standing desk and never wanted to try one, so at no point have I ever used a standing desk while writing. If possible, try other people's setups first before investing a lot of money into it. Used standing desks are pretty cheap right now, so that's another option for lowering the cost of one if you really want one. A free option to get yourself moving during the day is to set a few reminders to walk around a bit or do a few body weight strength exercises such as pushups or squats. For myself, I've talked before about how I use the Pomodoro method of working in 25 minute bursts and I frequently get up and move around or maybe do a few exercises during the five minute gap between those 25 minute working bursts. #4: Let go of your idea of what an office has to be and focus on what works best for you. It doesn't have to be a dedicated room with a thousand dollar specialized office chair or even a desk in order to be a good workspace. What you need most is a space that's comfortable and helps you to focus. If that's working on a laptop from the chair in a corner or a stack of books piled on a ledge to make a standing desk, that's okay. One of the advantages of writing from home is that writing is an activity that doesn't need a specific configuration and you can try out a few different options to see what works best for you. I hope you got some ideas from your at-home working and writing setup from this episode. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Send us a textMany sellers struggle to understand how Amazon badges really work, especially bestseller rankings. This reaction video breaks down the ranking system, ad-driven placements, and confusing rules that leave both buyers and sellers frustrated. If you're wondering why high-volume products outrank better options, you're not alone, watch to see the full breakdown.Watch the full video of  @LeviHildebrandYT here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QgIj7eNYAMBreak out of the confusion, speak with an Amazon expert who's been through the chaos and knows how to win: https://bit.ly/4jMZtxuMake the most of your end-of-year sales, download this ecommerce playbook has everything you're missing: https://bit.ly/46Wqkm3#AmazonSelling #EcommerceStrategy #AmazonBadges #AmazonSellers #onlinebusinesstips Watch these videos next:What It's Really Like Starting a Brand on Amazon From Nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4JE5CoNK0AThis Is the Best Way to Start Amazon Ads for a New Product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnyErLXEDj4&t=13s-----------------------------------------------Tired of marketplace limits? Let's talk real growth with ecommerce strategy: https://bit.ly/4kOz6rrStop wasting ad spend. Grab the PPC guide that actually drives results: https://bit.ly/4lF0OYXRank higher and sell faster, get the SEO tools built for real growth: https://bit.ly/3JyMDGoBe ready before problems hit, download the kit every brand should have: https://bit.ly/4maWHn0Timestamps00:00 - Why Being #1 Is All That Matters00:21 - Levi's Amazon Seller Frustration Breakdown01:12 - Reacting to Levi's Take on Badges and Bias02:13 - Amazon Basics and Featured Placements Explained03:30 - Sales Velocity vs Ranking vs Buyer Confusion05:12 - The Badge System's Real Impact on Sellers06:47 - Conversions, Volume, and Amazon's True Focus08:16 - Ranking Favors Behavior, Not Quality09:35 - Price Beats Product in Amazon's Algorithm10:31 - The “Board Game” of Selling on Amazon11:27 - Why Agencies Exist: Leveling the Playing Field12:17 - Final Thoughts on Levi's Video and the Bigger Picture----------------------------------------------Follow us:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/28605816/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenpopemag/Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/myamazonguys/Twitter: https://twitter.com/myamazonguySubscribe to the My Amazon Guy podcast: https://podcast.myamazonguy.comApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-amazon-guy/id1501974229Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4A5ASHGGfr6s4wWNQIqyVwSupport the show

Meer dan een drivingrangesessie was het deze week niet voor ons. Paul heeft een memorabel weekend in Parijs gehad, Peter was in zijn favoriete MonkeyTown, Rogier en Martijn hebben nog een beetje sport gekeken en Martijn heeft nog even 'houtjes' gefit. We zijn ook met de competitieteams bijeen gekomen voor de ´kick off´.Geen DP World of PGA Tour deze week. Het voorgerecht was de second stage van qualifying school. Mike Toorop, Kiet van der Weele en Wouter de Vries zijn door. Lars van Meijel via de Hotel Planner tour is ook door, maar hij had nog een kansje om te stunten voor een DP World tour kaart in het hoofdgerecht van deze week, de Rolex Grand Final op Mallorca. Wat hem niet lukte, lukte bijv. Bergstrom wel. Verder won James Morisson, verrassend vond hij zelf want hij had gepland dat dit zijn laatste professionele wedstrijd zou zijn.In de korte ronde: International Series in HongKong, major venues in 2026, nieuwe Oddyssey Tri-Hot zero torque putters, Yamashita, Gmac, voorspellingen voor ons Jaarspel, Lowry en Aberg in Abu Dhabi, de slechtste hole, miskopen clubs en waar kan je mee wegkomen op de golfbaan?De Raad de Speler is een sleeve Amazon Basics ballen waard deze week.0:00 - 12:15 Eigen golf8:53 - 28:29 Professioneel golf28:29 - 1:08:35 Korte ronde1:08:35 - 1:09:15 Raad de Speler

Rogier heeft het weer nog wel getrotseerd met een driestokken wedstrijd op Anderstein, Martijn heeft op de Trackman Abu Dhabi voorgespeeld en Peter heeft goede voornemens.Door een late fout van Elvira won de Koreaan Lee in eigen land op de DP World Tour, Luiten werd weer netjes T14. Het was het laatste event om je tourkaart veilig te stellen, voor redelijk wat spelers een behoorlijke stressweek. De qualifying school staat nu op het programma, ook voor 8 Nederlanders.Op de PGA werd gespeeld op de Black Desert baan in Utah. Net als vorig jaar een nieuwe winnaar. Brennan kreeg een sponsor invite en won.In de korte ronde: DJ, Yani Tseng, Amazon Basics golf bal, de slechtste hole, waar horen de top LIV'ers op de OWGR te staan, TGL, Scottie, rectificatie van AI-nieuws over de Sentry, Good Good, Peter Finch, winnaars van majors met laagste winstverwachting, hole in ones en Chapparal De Raad de Speler een winnaar van een major met een lage winstverwachting.0:00 - 8:53 Eigen golf8:53 - 33:38 Professioneel golf33:38 - 1:03:32 Korte ronde1:03:32 - 1:04:06 Raad de Speler

The 23andMe saga continues, the Trump Organization announces phones and cell plans, and beloved Anker has a recall. After Apple's WWDC and our special episode last week, there's plenty of tech news to get caught up on this week. Time to tech better! Watch on YouTube! - Notnerd.com and Notpicks.com INTRO (00:00) Dave Plays Games - iPhone can be used as a Nintendo Switch 2 webcam (05:00) WWDC Followup (08:55) MAIN TOPIC: 23andWho (15:05) 23andMe's founder Anne Wojcicki wins bid for bankrupt DNA testing firm Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to buy 23andMe and its data for $256 million 23andMe says 15% of customers asked to delete their genetic data since bankruptcy DAVE'S PRO-TIP OF THE WEEK:  Sort by recently added in photos plus more. (19:20) JUST THE HEADLINES: (26:25) An experimental new dating site matches singles based on their browser histories Barbie goes AI as Mattel teams with OpenAI to reinvent playtime with artificial intelligence China shuts down AI tools during nationwide college exams Volvo debuts new Internet of Things seatbelt design Amazon doubles Prime Video ads to 6 minutes per hour The IRS tax filing software TurboTax is trying to kill just got open sourced Scientists in Japan develop plastic that dissolves in seawater within hours TAKES: Trump Mobile launches: What to know about the T1 Phone, 47 calling and data plan (29:50) Disney, NBCU sue Midjourney over copyright infringement (35:20) Microsoft Patch Tuesday, June 2025 Edition (37:00) Anker is recalling over 1.1 million power banks due to fire and burn risks (40:45) Meta found a new way to track android users covertly via Facebook & Instagram (44:05) BONUS ODD TAKE: Old iPhone Simulator (50:25) PICKS OF THE WEEK: Dave: Nintendo Switch 2 (52:50) Nate: Re-pick Amazon Basics 50-inch Lightweight Portable Camera Mount Tripod Stand with Bag, for Travel Photography, Champagne - https://www.notnerd.com/episode-124-stealing-the-spotlight/ (54:50) RAMAZON PURCHASE - Giveaway! (59:25)

Gareth and Ted are back for another run of Tech Addicts Podcasts. This week ChatGPT round your neck, A portable Hi-Fi, the iPhone Fold, Anker earbuds that power your phone, Acer's dazzling array of new devices, Redmagic making a 9 inch tablet and the MSI Claw portable gaming system. With Gareth Myles and Ted Salmon Join us on Mewe RSS Link: https://techaddicts.libsyn.com/rss  iTunes | YouTube Music | Stitcher | Tunein | Spotify  Amazon | Pocket Casts | Castbox | PodHubUK Feedback, Fallout and Contributions The MeWe Group member cry in unison “it has been too long”

Katie Rogers, Gonzalo Mon Last week, consumers in four states filed a proposed class action against Amazon, accusing the company of greenwashing by misleading consumers about the sustainability of the company's Amazon Basics line of paper products. The 123-page complaint covers a lot of ground, but here are some of the key allegations

Jake and Anthony talk about the Moon lander mania this week has been—Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 and Intuitive Machines' IM-2 missions.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 187 - Amazon Basics Lunar Lander - YouTubeBlue Ghost Mission 1 - Firefly AerospaceAstroForge | Earning the Learnings: The Launch of OdinNASA still working to restore contact with Lunar Trailblazer - SpaceNewsIM-2 lunar lander on its side after touchdown - SpaceNewsVirgin Galactic to start assembly of first new spaceplane in March - SpaceNewsFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@offnom@spacey.space) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit@spacey.space) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@meco@spacey.space) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo@jawns.club) - jawns.club

AWS Morning Brief for the week of October 15, with Corey Quinn. Links:Announcing Amazon ElastiCache for ValkeyAmazon WorkSpaces now supports file transfer between WorkSpaces sessions and local devicesAWS Application Composer is now AWS Infrastructure ComposerAWS CodePipeline introduces new general purpose compute actionAWS Lambda now detects and stops recursive loops between Lambda and Amazon S3Convert AWS console actions to reusable code with AWS Console-to-Code, now generally availableHow to identify inactive users of Amazon Q DeveloperTransitioning off Amazon Lookout for MetricsSign-in to AWS Console Mobile Application with an AWS Access Portal or third-party IdP URLHow AWS uses active defense to help protect customers from security threats

One of the biggest components of mental clutter is our to-do's - causes the “thought swirl” that keeps us up at night and makes us feel distracted during the day. In today's episode, I'm sharing the 3 critical steps you may be missing when managing your never-ending to-do list! Resources Mentioned (affiliate links may be included, which means I get a small commission if you use my link - thanks): Order From Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD by Jaclyn Paul This is similar to the stackable inbox paper tray I use in my kitchen Eisenhower matrix as described by James Clear I like the ScanSnap scanners and I use an Amazon Basics shredder. For electronic tasks, I use Apple Notes (using tags for easy reference), shared Google Calendars, and using tags/labels in Gmail I also use MeisterTask for work task management   Related Episodes: Episode 40: Too Tired to Tackle Your To-Do List? You're Probably Not Doing These 3 Things Episode 28: Are You Constantly Shuffling Around Piles of Papers? Steal my No-Fail Paper Processing Routine Episode 117: Declutter the Mental Load of Motherhood by Following My 5-Step System Episode 124: The Rise of ADHD in Women and How to Be More Productive When Focus is a Challenge - with Alicia Cohen *** I help moms declutter their homes, heads, and hearts. Contact - > info@simplebyemmy.com  Podcast -＞ www.simplebyemmy.com/podcast Learn -＞ www.simplebyemmy.com/resources  Connect -＞ Join our free Facebook group Decluttering Tips and Support for Overwhelmed Moms Instagram -＞ @simplebyemmy and @momsovercomingoverwhelm   *** Don't Know Where to Start? *** 5 Steps to Overcome Overwhelm -＞ https://simplebyemmy.com/5steps/ 5 Mindset Shifts for Decluttering -＞ https://simplebyemmy.com/mindset/   Wanna work with me to kick overwhelm to the curb, mama? There are three options for you! Step 1: Join a supportive community of moms plus decluttering challenges to keep you on track at the free Facebook group Decluttering Tips and Support for Overwhelmed Moms Step 2: Sign up for the weekly Decluttering Tips and Resources for Overwhelmed Moms Newsletter and see samples here: https://pages.simplebyemmy.com/profile Step 3: Get more personalized support with in-person or virtual decluttering coaching! www.simplebyemmy.com/coaching

With Prime Day over and Amazon's Q2 earnings report revealed, Dave recaps how his Prime Day went and what does means for the future of third party sellers on Amazon.    Today's episode is sponsored by Clearco, a company that provides ecommerce businesses with working capital to fund inventory, marketing, shipping and logistics, and more! Check them out today!    Prime Day 2024 was touted as the biggest shopping event ever, with record sales and more items sold than any previous Prime Day.   But who were the real winners of Prime Day?    Today, Dave talks about his personal Prime Day experience, how Amazon missed their estimates for Q2, and what that means for third party sellers.    The Big Takeaway Amazon's Q2 earnings showed sluggish growth in online store revenue and missed estimates for the "third-party seller services and advertising revenue" section. This might mean more fees in Q3.  Prime Day 2024 was the biggest shopping event ever, but its impact on overall sales is questionable as consumers may be delaying their purchases. Buy Now, Pay Later options are gaining popularity, accounting for 7.6% of all orders during Prime Day. Amazon Basics was the most searched for brand during Prime Day, indicating consumers' demand for low priced products.  Apparel is emerging as a strong category on Amazon, potentially due to Amazon's response to Temu and Shein.  Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction: Amazon's Q2 Earnings and Prime Day 2024 03:06 - Sluggish Growth and Missed Estimates 09:47 - Prime Day 2024: The Biggest Shopping Event Ever? 13:02 - The Rise of Buy Now, Pay Later 17:42 - Amazon Basics: The Most Searched for Brand on Prime Day 21:24 - Apparel: A Strong Category on Amazon   As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested.    Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can.    Thanks for listening! Until next time, happy selling!

To find out what exactly happens to these returns and where they go, Dave stuck an Apple Airtag in it and tracked it over the next 3 months. Today's episode is sponsored by Clearco, a company that provides ecommerce businesses with working capital to fund inventory, marketing, shipping and logistics, and more! Check them out today!  Have you ever wondered what happens to your Amazon returns? Earlier in the year, Dave bought an Amazon Basics gym bag that he needed to return. To find out what exactly happens to these returns and where they go, he stuck an Apple Airtag in it and tracked it over the next 3 months. Here's exactly where it went and how I found it. The Big Takeaway Amazon inspects returns for their condition and might resell them to liquidators if they're not "like new".  80% of customers mark items as "wrong item sent" to avoid return shipping charges. There is a huge reseller market for Amazon returns. Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction: Tracking an Amazon Return 08:05 - The Reseller Market for Amazon Returns 13:17 - Buying Back the Returned Item 17:05 - The Environmental Consequences of Returns As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested.  Don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can.  Thanks for listening! Until next time, happy selling!

AWS Morning Brief for the week of Monday, July 29th, with Mike Julian.Links:Amazon VPC IPAM now supports BYOIP for IPs registered with any Internet RegistryAWS Cost Categories now supports “Billing Entity” dimension Enhance database performance with Amazon RDS dedicated log volumesQLDB deprecation--more on the way?

In this week's episode, we take a look at some ergonomics and health tips for writers and other sedentary workers. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGFURY The coupon code is valid through May 25th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 199 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 3rd 2024 and today we are talking about ergonomics for writers. Before we get to our main topic, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on current writing projects, and then Question of the Week. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGFURY. As always, that will be in the show notes with a link to the Payhip store. This coupon code will be valid through May the 25th, 2024, so if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Next up, updates on my current writing projects. I am almost done with Cloak of Titans. I'm currently at 98,000 words. I am hoping to wrap it up after I finish recording this episode (either this afternoon or tomorrow), and so we are well on track to having the book out before the end of May, if all goes well. I am also 8,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which will be the sequel to Wizard-Thief and Half-Elven Thief, and the third book in the Rivah series. That will probably be out towards the end of July because once Cloak of Titans is done, I want to go full speed ahead on Shield of Darkness (the sequel to Shield of Storms from earlier in the year and the second book in the Shield War series). If all goes well, the next couple of books I publish will be Cloak of Titans, Shield of Darkness, and Half-Orc Paladin. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is recording the anthology of Tales of the Shield Knight for me. We're about 1/3 of the way through it, I think and making good progress. I'm looking forward to sharing that with you all. I just got the notification that the files for the audiobook of Ghost in the Veils (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) were uploaded, so just a little more proofing and then that should hopefully be available to you as well. So lots of good things to look forward to. 00:02:07 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is the board game that you've been playing the longest? Board games have many advantages in the modern age. They don't require electricity, they don't need to be charged, and they also have a pleasingly tactile feel that you just don't get from tapping a screen. Sometimes you learn a game when you're a kid and sticks with you ever since. We have some interesting answers this week. Our first answer is from Jesse, who says: I have to say Labyrinth. Played it as a kid a lot with siblings. A year or two ago, my kids got it randomly from a relative, and now it's back. The real precursor to Mario Kart in terms of learning to hate your friends and discovering life is unfair. For myself, I only started playing Mario Kart with my siblings when I was already well into middle age, so we thankfully avoided squabbling over that. If we had played Mario Kart when we were kids, we definitely would have squabbled. Back to Question of the Week. Michael says: I don't really play them anymore, alas. I played chess in school but only so I didn't have to do physical education class. I used to look at the board and immediately resign and then just sit and read a book instead until the teacher wandered over. It used to annoy my opponents who took the game seriously. So congratulations to Michael for devising a chess stratagem that did, in fact get him what he wanted. MacKenzie says: hands down, chess. I may be awful at it, but it's definitely the record holder. Mark says: checkers, because my mum is good at it. Adelaide says: Scrabble for me. Venus says: backgammon. My mother taught me to play. I don't know how old I was. She never let me win. Every time I beat her it was because I had a better game that day. David says it's probably Shoots and Ladders, followed closely by checkers. Grace says: I no longer play the same board games I did as a kid so the ones that I play now with friends. I've played I think Arkham Horror and Quacks of Quedlinburg the most. Both are fun, though Arkham Horror, we've won all of two times. For myself, I think the board game I've been playing the longest is chess. I first learned to play when I think was I was ten and I've been playing on and off ever since. Amusingly for a post about tactile board games, I recently discovered chess.com and I like its large supply of chess puzzles, which are kind of like bite sized chess when I don't have time to play a full game, which is most of the time. However, last night I did have a bit more time to play and so I was able to play six games against actual human opponents on chess.com in about 40 minutes and I lost six times in a row. So it's a good thing I enjoy the game because there's definitely room for improvement. 00:04:45 Main Topic: Ergonomics for Writers Now on to this week's main topic, ergonomics for writers. And let's start this with a disclaimer. I am not a health professional. I am not a doctor. I'm not a nurse. I'm not an ergonomics specialist. For medical questions, you should seek medical advice and verify anything I say with the opinion of actual medical professionals. When starting a new movement or exercise routine, it's a good idea to start gradually, both for reasons of health and to prevent burnout or getting overwhelmed. So that is your disclaimer. I am not a medical professional. But I don't think you have to be a medical professional to notice that desk jobs have a serious problem, and that includes writing. If you're sitting for a long period of time, that can cause a host of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, potentially diabetes, etc. Sitting for long periods reduces your energy levels and can be detrimental to your mental health. Sitting for long periods in the wrong position can make joint, wrist, and back problems worse and cause pain. As an example, back in the old days when I did IT support, I was talking to a coworker who said that he was having back problems and so I made, you know, sympathetic noises and told him I hope he felt better. Then about an hour later I was walking down the hall and I happened to walk past his desk and I saw that he was using his laptop by sitting at the very edge of his chair, and his back was bent at like 45° angle to type on the keyboard. And I was like dude, this explains your back problems. So thankfully he improved his posture a bit after that. If you do have a job such as being a writer where you are sitting for long periods of time, how can you sit in the most healthy way? Changing how you sit is a relatively quick thing to do that will reap long term rewards in terms of potentially avoiding back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain and so forth. Make sure that your chair and desk are set in the correct positions. There are lot of diagrams available to show you, that demonstrate how to have an ergonomic desk set up. You want your elbows to be at a 90° angle. You want your wrist to be neutral or supported. You don't want them to be bent like T Rex hands. Your back and neck should not be leaning forward. The top of the monitor should be around eye level for neck health and in fact I have my main desktop monitor on this monitor stand I got off Amazon Basics just for the purpose of raising it to proper eye level. You want your knees so your legs are not pulled underneath your chair or resting on your chair casters, since this stresses knee joints. If your legs aren't long enough to go comfortably to a flat position when sitting normally, footrests work well and aren't very expensive or a large book will work, too. For your eye health, you want to look away from your monitor occasionally to reduce eye strain. Another good solution for the health problems that sitting too much causes is moving. You can have walking breaks where you get up and move for at least a minute every hour. This is an excellent time to get some water to drink or to use the bathroom. Fitness and smart watches or a cheap kitchen timer can be used to remind you to get up or stand. It might be a good idea to pace while taking a phone call, since you're going to be on the phone anyway and if it's not a video call, there's no reason not to stand up and walk around a little bit, so long as you're not irritating your officemates. Sometimes it's a good idea to take a brief walk daily. Some people who work from home use a walk around the block at the beginning of the day and the end of the day to mentally transition away from the workday in the absence of a work commute. Some people have the kind of work where they can do it while on a walking pad (like a low power treadmill) and an adjustable standing desk combination. This setup is a bit more expensive and can cost about like $350 USD for a basic setup and just like standing desks, they don't work for everyone. If you already have a treadmill, you can get a desk attachment for it for around sixty U.S. dollars. The transcriptionist of this podcast has used a walking pad/standing desk combination for about six months now and finds that it helps with afternoon energy crashes. She usually uses it for webinars, Zoom meetings where she don't need to be on camera, and tasks that involve more reading than typing, such as research for these podcast episodes. She can type while she walks, so long as she keeps her pace to under about two mph. She says the key is to think of walking as a supplement to working and not expect it to be the same as walking on a treadmill at the gym. For myself, I've mentioned before that pretty frequently that I use the Pomodoro technique while I'm writing where I'll write intensely for 25 minutes and then take a 5 or 10 minute break. That's also an excellent time to stand up and move around or if you're me, drop and do some push-ups to help keep carpal tunnel syndrome at bay. Another potential thing to think about is strength training/mobility. People tend to be scared of strength training because they're afraid of injuring themselves, but they really shouldn't be so long as they, you know, do the forms correctly. Strength training, as the name implies, strengthens muscles that support your joints and becomes even more important as we get older, since the human body tends to lose muscle mass as we get older. As little as two sessions of strength training a week have been shown to lead to fewer injuries and greater longevity. Strength training is important in the sedentary job like writing since we don't have tasks to build muscles already built into the workday. Writing is a lot of things, but it's not particularly great for building physical strength. Having a consistent strength routine also means that your body can instantly adapt to challenges like shoveling heavy snow or helping to carry a person in an emergency or getting the bag into the overhead bin on the plane without having to ask for help. As people get older, that kind of thing gets harder to do otherwise. In the case of shoveling, it can put a lot of strain on your heart, so it's best to prepare for these kind of life challenges with consistent strength training. There's a lot of strength training that doesn't require a lot of money or a gym membership. Body weight and resistance band strength training are beginner friendly and free or inexpensive. And as I mentioned earlier, you can totally do push-ups for free with no equipment. Another potential strength training exercise that may work for you is resistance band training. That's great for those who travel often or live in a very small space, such as a typical modern urban apartment. Latex or cloth bands that provide resistance for body weight movements can be found quite cheaply on most major retailers. Some are in the shape of a loop, while others have attached handles. Resistance band training includes exercises for those who are unable to stand at all or for long periods of time. Another good technique is dumbbell only strength training. Dumbbells can actually be used for lower body exercises like squats as well as well as upper body exercises. They are relatively inexpensive compared to a full barbell or strength machines and they don't take up a lot of space, which again is useful if you're living in a small space or place where space is constrained. Sample routines with video demonstrations abound on YouTube, if you're not sure where to start. Otherwise, you can find online training programs from companies like Street Parking or CrossFit Linchpin for about $20.00 USD per month, and they have structured training routines that have been scaled down to work with just dumbbells. Sitting correctly and moving often sounds like things that shouldn't matter to someone in a job that relies on the mind but physical health and a strong mind are strongly intertwined. People in intellectual jobs, I've noticed, tend to think of themselves as a mind that happens to have a body attached, especially people who are very often heavily into the sciences and engineering. But it's really, I found, the opposite. We are essentially a physical body that happens to have a mind attached to it and the better shape you can get your physical body and physical health into, the clearer your mind will be. I mean, just think about how hard it is to think clearly when you have chronic pain or chronic illness or some kind of medication you have to take to manage those things that interferes with your thinking, gives you cloudy thoughts. Truth is, this has been known for centuries and still confirmed by endless research studies. The Romans had a Latin phrase, “mens sana in corpore sano”:  a healthy mind in a healthy body. That sums up how interconnected the goal of both are. Ideally, when you're a writer, you want to prolong your career and increase your energy levels by spending at least a small time each week moving and strengthening the body. Sitting correctly also goes a long way towards preventing back and joint pain, which can definitely hurt your productivity and cause problems in other areas of your life as well. Finally, the most important thing with any exercise program is consistency is more important than perfection here. Start small and keep going. I've often said in this podcast, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible, and this is definitely true with exercise as well as writing. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. Once again, a word of thanks for my transcriptionist for helping me pull together the research for this episode. As you might have guessed, she has a strong interest in physical fitness for people who sit at a desk and work a lot. A reminder you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven popular movies about writing & writers and take a look at what they got wrong. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGORCS The coupon code is valid through May 20th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 198 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 26th, 2024 and today we were talking about seven of the most inaccurate movies about writers. Before we do that, we will have writing updates, Coupon of the Week, and a Question of the Week. So let's start with Coupon of the Week. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orc (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGORCS and that's SPRINGORCS. As always, that coupon code will be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through May 20th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing projects and audiobook projects. I'm currently on Chapter 16 of Cloak of Titans. I'm not sure how many chapters it's going to end up being. My number keeps changing, but I think right now it's 25. I am over halfway through the book and I'm hoping to be past the 70,000 word point by the end of the day, if all goes well. I'm hoping to still have that out before the end of May. I am also 5,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which should come out this summer. After Cloak of Titans is out, my next main project will be Shield of Darkness, which I know many people have been asking about, so hopefully it will not be too much longer until I start on Shield of Darkness. In audiobook news, Hollis McCarthy is almost done recording Ghost in the Veils, and we should hopefully have that available to listen to sometime in May. Brad Wills is currently recording the anthology Tales of the Shield Knight, which will contain over 15 of the Shield Knight short stories that I wrote for the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna series, and that should also hopefully be out sometimes toward the end of May or possibly June. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:01:58 Question of the Week/Update on Starfield from Previous Question of the Week Next up is Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is the first fantasy novel you remember reading? After all, if you're hanging around the website of Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, there's a non-zero chance that you enjoy fantasy books. So it seems like a reasonable question, and it was indeed a reasonable question because we got a lot of responses. Our first response is from Justin, who says: believe it or not, the first fantasy novel I read was The Hobbit. My older sisters had pooled their money to buy the paper version of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I saw them reading it, and since my sisters were for once not being nasty to each other and reading together, it had to be good. After they finished The Hobbit, I asked to borrow it. It was allowed to read it as long as I didn't leave the room and wash my hands first. I was eight. Our next response is from Mary, who says: I remember my first reading of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It was by no stretch of the imagination my first fantasy novel. Our next comment is from Stuart, who says: Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. When I was younger/preteens, I loved adventure books like Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators. I didn't really read much in the coming years, until one day it was raining outside and being bored, I made a nuisance of myself when my older brother was trying to watch TV. He finally snapped, told me to shut up, threw Pawn of Prophecy at me, and told me to read that. The rest, as they say, is history. I went from adding Eddings to Feist and Gemmel and then on to Jordan, etcetera. I will always have a soft spot for David Eddings books, though. So it seems the common themes here will be a sibling rivalry inspiring love of fantasy literature. Our next response is from Grace, who says: does the Magic Treehouse series count? If not, Chronicles of Narnia. Leanne says Dragonriders of Pern. Boy, did I want a dragon! Melinda says Piers Anthony's Night Mare. I was in 6th grade and my friend gave it to me for my birthday. Cheryl says: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. From then on, it was full steam ahead, Feist, Eddings, Tolkien, Irvine, and now most of the fantasy/sci-fi authors that are currently publishing on Kindle. David says: probably The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Kevin says: many, many moons ago it was the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula Le Guin. Then I wandered into TV and films in the sci-fi genre for a number of years, forsaking the written word. My imagination was recaptured more recently, about a decade ago, a decade ago, when a friend lent me a copy of Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. Alan says: I've been through most of these mentioned so far though the years but my first introduction to once he was Edgar Rice Burroughs, like Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar, etcetera. Then on to Tolkien. Randy says: for me it was The Hobbit.  Went on a family vacation with my uncle and his family. I was introduced to The Hobbit. My uncle will read just about every night to my cousins, and as we're all sharing the same room, my sister and I began hearing the story. We got home. I asked my dad if I could read his copy. 50 some odd years later, I'm still devouring as many books as I can. Mike says: I am not sure which one it was, but I believe it was either The Hobbit or The Sword of Shannara. Diana says: The Gunslinger. I said what I said. Venus says: A Wrinkle in Time or Dragonsong. I know that the Pern books are actually science fiction, but I don't recall any of the science stuff that first time I read it. It was the first Pern book I read. The first epic fantasy I recall reading was Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Gary says: I couldn't give you a title or author, but I definitely remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books in the fantasy genre as a young reader. Tom said: Not 100% sure, but this is my best guess. It would be The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Ah, the Chronicles of Narnia. What a series. Juana says: I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Catriona says: The Hobbit after listening to the BBC Radio play adaptation in the ‘70s. Pippa says: Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I've reread them lots too and I've never tired of them. Perry says: Do the Iliad, Odyssey, and Beowulf count? For modern fantasy, would be a toss-up between The Hobbit and The Belgariad. Joy says: the Thomas Covenant series. My boyfriend at the time was into sci-fi and fantasy novels, so I borrowed it and was hooked. A different Glenn says: either Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey or the Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip. I love them both in the same summer while visiting my dad and cannot remember which one came first, but I got hooked on fantasy fiction that summer. Mandy says: The first time I remember reading the left an impression was the Dragonlance Legends series. My favorite fantasy series is Discworld. Gary (a different Gary) says: First one I remember is the Elfstones of Shannara. Also, the Dragonriders of Pern and Crystal Singer series. John says: Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. I was nine years old. It created a lifelong love of fantasy for me. Darla says: A Wrinkle in Time, The Faraway Lurs, and The Runaway Robot were some of the books I read as a kid. Later it was Lord of the Rings and The Dragonriders of Pern and I continue reading to this day. Andy says first ever was the Deverry series by Katherine Kerr. It was a very intense read for 14 year old on an 8 hour drive on a family trip. Sue says David Eddings- all his series, and Anne McCaffrey, Dragonrider series. Brock says Lord of the Rings. Susan says: probably Lord of the Rings, but it's over 50 years ago. I can't really remember. Edward says The Legend of Huma by Richard A. Knaak. Michael says. Now there's a question! Probably The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or one of the other Narnia books, all of which are obviously epic. And finally, Judy says the White Mountains by John Christopher or anything by Dr. Seuss. So I think we can see it's safe to say that if you have a small children between the ages of eight and 10 and you want to get them into fantasy literature, the best places to start would be either The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or perhaps the Dragonriders of Pern. For myself, the very first fantasy novel I ever read was Magician Master by Raymond E. Feist. What got me into that book was The Betrayal at Krondor computer game, which of course was a classic. After I finished the game, I did some reading. Remember this was way before the Internet, so you couldn't find out anything you wanted whenever you wanted and I was astonished to realize that Krondor was in fact based off an actual novel series. So I got Magician Master and started reading it. Fun fact, years later I realized that Magician Master was in fact the sequel to Magician Apprentice and went back to read the first book. So that was this week's Question of the Week. You may remember that last week's Question of the Week was what new Xbox game I should try. Many people had excellent suggestions. I think I'm going to go with Starfield from all the suggestions last week. The reason for this is that Starfield reminds me a great deal of Wing Commander Privateer from the ‘90s. If you remember, the Wing Commander series of PC games, they're basically Top Gun but in space. Privateer took the basic flight gameplay mechanic but changed it so you're an independent privateer captain and you had to make your way through the Gemini sector as a mercenary, a merchant, a pirate, a bounty hunter, or some combination of them. You had to buy your own equipment and weapons and find a way to turn a profit in your jobs, since you had to pay for everything. If you played the main plots, you got involved in conspiracy involving a lost alien relic, but you don't have to do any main plot at all. You just fly around the galaxy making credits, fighting pirates, and trading. Starfield basically feels like someone took Wing Commander Privateer, and then added on a Skyrim-esque role-playing experience for when your character is on the ground. I know it got middling reviews, but I'm enjoying the game so far. Perhaps because, at least to my eye, it feels like a massively updated version of Wing Commander Privateer. 00:09:43 Main Topic: Seven of the Most Inaccurate Movies About Writers Now we're 10 minutes into the show and still haven't gotten to our main topic, so I think it's time we should finally do that, which is Seven of the Most Inaccurate Movies About Writers. I decided to do this because I noticed that whenever a novelist or a writer of fiction turns up in a movie, the depiction of it tends to be grossly inaccurate. That's hardly unique to writers. The joke among the military officers, former military officers, and law enforcement officers is that whenever the military or law enforcement turns up on TV, you can have a good drinking game by counting all the inaccuracies and things that they get wrong. So why should writing be any different? I think the difference might be that writing is kind of a more aspirational career, where it's the sort of career that people tend to daydream about, like going off and becoming a writer and so they tend to get a lot of things wrong about that. So with the help of my transcriptionist, we pulled together a list of seven of the most inaccurate movies about writing. There's actually a couple of Hallmark movies on here, and this isn't to bash on Hallmark movies. I think Hallmark movies tend to be about the fantasy of romance in the way that a show like Law and Order is about the fantasy of law enforcement and criminal justice, or a movie like John Wick is about the fantasy of violence or a game like SimCity is about the fantasy of managing a large city. The reality is of none of these things are nothing like the way they're portrayed in fiction, but instead, Law and Order is about the fantasy of what we would like the criminal justice system to be like and John Wick is kind of like, you know, a revenge fantasy of what we imagine we would do if someone actually shot our dog. So with that in mind, let's look at seven of the most inaccurate movies we found about writing. The first one is called Winter Love Story from Hallmark in 2019. It kind of deserves the 22% it got in the Rotten Tomatometer. The plot is a debut writer who wrote a memoir is appearing on a book tour of a famous fantasy author in order to boost her sales. They travel around visiting charming bed and breakfasts with plenty of time to talk about their feelings. The fantasy writer has a dog that he really loves a lot. The movie really revolves more around the dog more than the books. Now, why is this a bad movie about writing? For one thing, it has an unrealistic view of book tours, namely that a debut writer who is writing a memoir (which is a notoriously hard to sell genre) would be given such a lavish book tour paired with an author outside her genre. Cross-genre of sales promotions here in the real world tend not to work terribly well, because someone who wants to buy an 800 page fantasy novel about dragons is probably not going to be super interested in picking up a new writer's memoir are about her failed dating life. The movie also has an unrealistic view of book marketing and the involvement level and commitment of traditional publishing staff. If traditional publishing marketing staff is marketing 50 plus other writers, they're not going to follow your whimsical book tour and give tons of advice and coaching along the way. Book tours really don't sell very many books in general, to the point where Brandon Sanderson, who is probably the top selling fantasy author in the world right now, stopped doing book tours in 2020 when COVID came along (because you know, everyone had to stop doing book tours). But after all the various restrictions lifted, he found that he really wasn't interested in resuming it because of the physical drain of traveling and it turned out it had no impact on sales whatsoever. Finally, the movie touts the very false belief that the skill of giving heartfelt, heavily autobiographical speeches is the essential skill in marketing your work. Honestly, if you want to sell books, you would have better luck learning how to use Amazon ads or Facebook ads effectively, but I expect that would not make for a very good Hallmark movie. The second movie we're going to talk about is Lost City from 2022, which I actually saw shortly after it came out because it turned up on streaming (I think it was on Prime). I thought it was actually pretty funny, but it was not terribly accurate about the business of writing. The plot is that a romance author is struggling to finish her book. While she's on tour with her famous cover model, she gets kidnapped and the cover model must turn into an action hero and rescue her. The plot very heavily borrows from the 1980s movie Romancing the Stone, which is also about a writer. The scenery in the movie is fantastic and Daniel Radcliffe plays the villain, this insane billionaire who kidnapped Sandra Bullock's character to help find lost treasure and their reactions were pretty funny. It's not a great movie about writing. Even the romance and romantasy (which is a combination of romance and fantasy) authors topping the best seller list right now (as of April 2024) do not have press tours that are more like a fan convention with a budget for sparkly jumpsuits and lighting effects, etcetera. Cover models do not get a lot (or even any) of promotion, attention, or respect from publishers. The cover model is given top billing on the tour along with the author, which just doesn't happen. One side note, what is probably realistic is the publisher trying to discourage tangents in full academic jargon by the author on her history related research interests. You will often find if you're reading a book that involved a lot of research on the part of the author, that the author is going to put that research into the book (whether the reader likes it or not). Our third movie is called Alex and Emma, which came out in 2003. The plot of this movie is that an author with writer's block has debts to a loan shark he must pay in 30 days or else the loan shark is going to get nasty. He hires a stenographer to help him church out a book and since it's a romantic comedy, you can probably guess what happens next. This movie was apparently very loosely inspired by the story of Dostoyevsky writing The Gambler/meeting his wife but is also apparently heavily inspired by the movie Paris When it Sizzles. Even with multiple sources of inspiration, it still received terrible reviews for an incoherent, unsatisfying plot. And why is this a bad movie about writing? For one thing, it treats writing a book draft in 30 days as a near impossible feat. Not to toot my own horn, so to speak, but I'm going to write the rough draft of Cloak of Titans in under 30 days. If all goes well, it will be well over 100,000 words. There's also once again the cliche that writing already must be autobiographical and reflect what's currently happening in your life in order to be good. If that were true, all my books would be about the adventures of a middle-aged IT guy, which would be kind of boring compared to epic fantasy novels. And another thing that's unrealistic is that the struggling writer gets a $125,000 advance from the publisher, but the publisher won't help him replace a computer when it gets destroyed by a loan shark's posse. Computers were, of course, quite a bit more expensive in 2003 than they are now, but still they cost a lot less than $125,000. So that part definitely didn't make sense. Our 4th movie is Not Another Happy Ending, which came out in 2013. A writer becomes successful but has writer's block when she's happy. Her publisher has to figure out how to make her unhappy so she can write again but falls in love with her in the process. And why is this a bad movie about writing? If following around most the successful writers in order to inspire them was the actual job of publishers, a few certain well known fantasy series might have at least one more book by now than they actually do. So we'll just move on from there. The fifth one is a movie that gets made fun of a lot and rather deservedly so: Eat, Pray, Love, which came out in 2010. The plot of this, obviously, is that a reader gets divorced and goes on a journey to Italy, India, and Bali in order to “find herself” and gain writing inspiration. Why is this a bad movie about writing? So many reasons! First, there's a sort of a cliche in poor taste that writers can't be great unless they leave their spouses, that their marriage is preventing someone from devoting themselves to great writing. Although the one thing you say for Eat, Pray, Love is that it's a gender flip as opposed to the way these things usually are in movies where it's the male writer who is being held back by his wife. The reality is that people with stable home lives are more likely to be productive than people without them, and this is true across all fields of endeavor, and not just writing. Another bad cliche is the idea that you need to bankroll a year of travel to luxury destinations in order to find inspiration to write isn't realistic or accurate, and in truth very, very, very, very, very few writers can actually afford this luxury. This type of thinking leads people to believe they need to go on expensive retreats in order to be a “real writer”, when in reality many famous writers rarely traveled. Examples: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, I think J.R.R. Tolkien spent most of his post-war life entirely in England, etcetera. For myself, I do most of my writing either on my couch or while sitting in a $40 office chair I bought off Amazon Basics. That is definitely a cliche that you do not need to travel in order to write. In fact, travel can get in the way of getting writing done, which was one of the Brandon Sanderson's stated reasons for why he doesn't go on book tours too often anymore. Our 6th movie is As Good as It Gets, which came out in 1997. The premise of this movie is that a crabby, ill-behaved writer with some mental health challenges has a series of unexpected interactions that inspire him to become a better person. And why is this an inaccurate move about writing? First, there's a cliche that writers need to use a typewriter because a computer isn't as artistic or special. I know there are writers who insist on writing things longhand and or insist on using the typewriter and they have their reasons, but it's my belief that that is in fact very inefficient, and you should probably write on whatever method is most efficient or easy for you. And if you are writing for publication and profit, that means writing on a computer. If you don't like to type, you can dictate. There's also the idea I don't like that the idea that the reading public/critics will forgive terrible behavior or prejudice because of how brilliant you are. This is a fallacy you see across many professions where a brilliant doctor, a brilliant scientist, a brilliant politician, a brilliant writer, or whatever feels they have a license to act like a total jerk because they're so good at what they do. In reality, that often causes a lot of problems and ends up destroying the person's career. So that is a bad cliche, and one that if you're listening to this, I urge you not to put into practice in your daily life. Our seventh and final movie is another Hallmark one called A Novel Romance, which came out in 2015. In this story, a male romance writer who uses a pen name meets a female book reviewer who is unaware of his true identity even as they grow closer. Will pressure from his publisher to reveal his true identity hurt their budding romance? What did this movie get wrong about writing? First, there's the idea that pen names are somehow deceptive or shocking, especially in the romance genre where it's very common for a single writer to have multiple pen names. A professional book critic would consider it a very strong possibility that someone is writing under a pen name, which makes you wonder how competent the book critic is as a book critic. Publishers do not send limos to the airport for writers traveling to their personal vacation homes. If a writer is rich enough to have a limo and a personal vacation home, the writer is probably paying for it him or herself. The publisher is not. Most writing is not done on a legal pad while staring out onto the water next to your very expensive boat. Your agent, even a very nice agent (if such a thing exists) will not fly across the country multiple times in order to give you romantic advice. And finally, an author's pen name reveal would not be front page tabloid news. So those are just some of the things that movie got wrong about writing. So there those are 7 movies that are very inaccurate about what being a writer is like, and the point of that was not to pick on those movies (with the possible exception of Eat, Pray, Love, which deserves to be picked on) but to point out that the way they referenced what being a writer was like was often quite inaccurate, even if the movies themselves may or may not have been enjoyable for their intended audience. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found it useful and a word of thanks to my transcriptionist help me to pull this list together because she's definitely seen more Hallmark movies than I have. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Robyn Johnson, CEO and founder of Marketplace Blueprint, is with us on this episode of Confessions of a Marketer. She has been heralded as one of the country's foremost leaders on the topic of selling and marketing products on Amazon.com. And she has the distinction of being on the episode that kept this podcast going even while we were on hiatus, with hundreds of downloads and listens every month since we went on ice about three years ago. TRANSCRIPT Mark Reed-Edwards: Thanks for joining me today. Robyn Johnson: It's my pleasure, and I think it's awesome that I can help you be here as we reopen things. And Amazon has changed so much. Dog years are, you know, one year is every seven years. I feel like Amazon every one year is 10 years. Mark Reed-Edwards: That's for sure. I mean, think back three years ago, we were in the middle of the pandemic still. And the world was kind of getting used to using more and more technology. So Amazon had a huge boom as a result of that, along with the other tools that we all use every day. So the world is definitely different from when you and I talked three years ago. I'm sure things have happened in your life that are make you different. Can you share a bit of your background and what you do at Marketplace Blueprint? Robyn Johnson: Yeah, so I've been eating, sleeping, breathing Amazon for about 13 years now. We started as sellers, took a hundred dollars, grew our business to a million dollars in just a couple of years and primarily on Amazon. And after that, we coached a lot of other high volume Amazon sellers. This was when it was the wild wild west. You could do anything. People were taking apart food and repackaging it in very unsafe ways. We didn't do that, but there were a lot of people who were. And then about seven years ago, eight years ago, we started the agency called Marketplace Blueprint. And in that agency, we specialize only on Amazon. So we don't do Facebook, no Meta, no Google. We only do Amazon. And the reason for that is because everything in Amazon is integrated. So to work on your SEO for Amazon, you have to coordinate with ads, compliance, inventory management, and negative customer experiences. All of those need to be integrated to make sure that you get the best mileage out of your ad dollar on Amazon. And also that you don't get stuck with a bunch of fees or being unable to sell at all. Mark Reed-Edwards: So every company that makes a product, pretty much, thinks they need to be on Amazon. How do you decide on whether Amazon is in fact the right forum for your products? Robyn Johnson: So I will say that there are some products that Amazon is not a good fit for. Amazon works best on repeatable products, products that are going to be consistent. There is a space for custom products. We have a custom dog tag company that we've been working with for a long time that was on Shark Tank. They do very, very well. You can do custom items, but one of a kind things that are not repeatable, those don't do as well because Amazon's algorithm is really designed for is you have to really be able to repeat that sale over and over again. Now, the things that have changed is it used to be, you know, field of dreams. If you build it, they will come, you know, you just put a garlic press. press on there and you stick a label on it and it would sell. Those days are dying if they're not already dead. You really need something that will bring some unique value, so it fixes a problem or it solves a need in some way that's unique to others. Or you need to have very, very deep pockets. You can still launch a garlic press, but to get it to where you're going to get those significant organic sales, you're going to need to invest a ton of money in ads and be willing to go into the negative for a period of time if it's a really competitive or commoditized product. And then the other thing is we need to balance how much search volume is there for your product. So if Lego launches. anything, Lego will immediately get sales because Lego has such a loyal brand following. Now, if I launch a new product with a new brand, I will not get those immediate sales because people aren't already looking. So there's several tools that can help you look at that. And then the other thing we want to look at is-- especially with D to C. Sometimes D to C companies will come to us and want to take their product on Amazon. They've been very successful with D to C. One thing I want you to think about, if that's you, is when you're driving traffic from Meta to your website people are only seeing your product. So if you have a higher than average price for your industry, the difference is when you come to Amazon, your competitors are going to be centimeters away from your product. And so that means if you have poor reviews, if you have a much higher price and you can't really isolate and crystallize why your product is so much more expensive, it can be difficult for you to be successful on Amazon because the lower cost, higher reviewed items are going to be right side by side with you. I don't know if that helps. Mark Reed-Edwards: Yeah, it's kind of interesting. All this direct consumer stuff, like Flex Tape or something that you see the ads for, they kind of existed in their own universe. And often when you see an ad like that you might Google it or go on to Amazon and search for that type of product. And then, if that direct to consumer is playing in Amazon, you're going to see the alternatives. So maybe you know, a box of FlexTape is $12.99, but the competitor, or the Amazon Basics version is $9.50. You know, you go for the cheaper version. That's pretty much what you're saying, right? Robyn Johnson: Yeah. And on the converse of that, so, it can be good to have your product on Amazon, even if you don't plan to focus on that channel and just do some branded search, make sure your product comes up for your brand. I have this little ADHD timer that I use and I saw an ad on Twitter or X and I went to go to Amazon to buy it. But it wasn't on Amazon so I bought a competitor. Sometimes you can lose that, but if I had gone and the one that they were trying to sell me was 27 and the other one was 999 and I could see they were the same, they still would have lost that conversion. So if you're close, it can be good to have a presence. If you are going to be sold in retail stores , it can be even more important to make sure you're the one that creates the listing on Amazon so that you have control, that your brand registered. So that if you do decide you want to make Amazon a primary channel going forward, you don't have a lot of cleanup from resellers creating listings with any false information that could also potentially get you into compliance or legal issues. Mark Reed-Edwards: I think one of the big evolutions in the three years since you and I chatted last is how big Amazon has gotten as an advertising medium. Can you speak to that? How big are they? They obviously have a massive reach. And how do they determine where those ads show up? Is it contextual? Are they driven by keywords? How does it work? Robyn Johnson: Well, and you know, ads on Amazon used to be very simple, with keyword targeting, there really was only one placement, there really was no creative. But now Amazon has been adding more and more advertising product types. So this means there is more room for creative, there is a lot more granularity. And before, you know, I'll be honest, six, seven years ago, you could have been very successful just with an automatic campaign. And there are some select instances where you still can, but you're not going to get the same lift as if you have a really strategic thought out ad strategy. You know, and the biggest mistake that people make on Amazon when it comes to ads is, let's say you have a clothing line and you're trying to get some more traction on your Amazon sales. If you have a finite amount, let's say you only have. 3, 000, 2, 000, you know, you can be successful with a small amount but you, let's say you have 5, 000 a month for, you know, 20 SKUs, a lot of times people will spread that budget out equally, and really what we want to do is we want to target that ad spend on a small number of SKUs, a small number of targets, whether that be keyword, demographic, category, competitor targeting, and really focus on trying to get those ads to cause conversions for that specific product. And the reason we want to do that is we want to try to cause enough conversions where the product starts to rank organically in the first five to ten positions because the best place to hide a dead body is still page two of Amazon search. Mark Reed-Edwards: Ha, ha, ha. Robyn Johnson: Before I would usually say like 25 results could fit on a page. Now on a competitive search term, you know, above the fold, you you might only see two or three organic ones. So there might be only 10 organic spots on the entire front page. That means that you really do need to cause those conversions. And when you're looking at your ads, Amazon provides an advertising cost of sale, which is kind of like the inverse of ROAS. But what we want to do is we want to really look at the equivalent of TROAS, which is TACoS. And you know you've been doing Amazon too much when you see an ad for tacos and you immediately think ads and you have to recorrect yourself for the delicious snack. But TACoS will really tell you how your ads are impacting organic because that's really more than incremental sales. To maximize your profitability on Amazon we need to, of course, be looking at return on investment for each of those ads, but we want to see how that return on investment is increasing organic ranking because that was where you can start to bring back in some of that cost and increase profitability overall. So when it comes to Amazon, it's kind of like disciplining children, pick your battles, but win your battles at all costs. Mark Reed-Edwards: So for the uninitiated, can you tell me what TACoS is? Because I'm uninitiated on that. Robyn Johnson: So it's Total Advertising Cost of Sale. ACOS looks at, you know kind of what percentage of your ad revenue. TACoS looks at all of the revenue and the reason it's helpful is it tells us, you know, not just, you know, because sometimes what was we had a company where a specific campaign had like a 43 percent top ACoS, which is not good. You know, we really want to keep that 20 to 30. But when we looked at the TACoS, because even though that conversion rate was a little bit more expensive, the conversions that were happening took them on a very important primary keyword from page three or four to being the second organic result. So those ads were helping kind of feed the engine that kept them at the top of the page, if that made sense. Mark Reed-Edwards: One of the other pieces of news is that Amazon is now selling ads on Prime Video, and I'm wondering is there a connection between those ads and advertising on Amazon itself? Robyn Johnson: Yes, Amazon's offering a lot of sponsored TV, sponsored display, and they're beginning to test these. And a lot of times they even have no minimum budget. So, there's a lot of availability to kind of test and play. The negative is if you have a stakeholder or you as a stakeholder are very focused on direct ROI, we really have to remember that ad campaigns are going to be more brand awareness and you're not going to get the same numbers and direct ROI. Our agency is really focused on profitability for our clients. So if somebody has got a very tight ROI or they're in a tight cash position, we usually will not recommend these because we're still trying to figure out --Amazon is still trying to figure out --how to get the best conversion off of these. But Amazon has really been expanding the advertising capabilities for brands, and even services that don't sell on Amazon. And the really cool thing is while a lot of first party signals have been taken away from Meta and Google -- that's been a shifting ground for a long time. Amazon has a pretty robust set of first party signals that you can target just the right shopper. And they've been growing and developing this thing called Amazon Marketing Cloud where they can measure impact of year over year campaigns. And so there are a lot of really cool, fun, new to market things to be testing. There's a lot of new ad types, ad placements that are available for brands of all different sizes of budgets. It's just, you know, really understanding where those ads are, going to be surfacing. So like some of the Amazon DSP, which is kind of the, the managed used to be called kind of the managed services part, but now there's some self managed stuff in there as well. Some of those videos will show on Twitch, which if you're selling a video game accessory is awesome. If you're selling, you know, Bengay ointment cream to 60 year olds, probably not going to convert well. So, you know, it is about making sure whoever you partner with really kind of understands where those will show and understands how to limit and adjust and kind of guide you in a way that those ads are going to get the best possible engagement. Mark Reed-Edwards: So big question to close out. And maybe this is the theme for today's discussion. And , I think it's a rather big question, but if anyone's going to answer it, it's going to be you. What does it take to succeed on Amazon in 2024? Robyn Johnson: So, you know, this answer is very different than what I would have given you even a year ago. Amazon right now is very focused on compliance. Courts have found that they're liable for unsafe products that are sold on their marketplace. So before it really was just a question of marketing. Amazon has always been very concerned about the customer experience. This makes it a really complicated marketplace. And it makes it so that if you don't have experience with Amazon, let's say you are a guru when it comes to Google or Meta, Amazon can be different and difficult because a lot of things are labeled the same as they are in other ecosystems but they work differently. The other thing is that you're really going to have to have your compliance documentation in order, especially in the area of food supplements, anything child and baby, you're going to need to make sure you have to have a CPSC, you're going to have to have any safety testing that's required. You also need to be partnered with somebody to know the right words to say or you need to do that research on your own. So one of the things that Amazon a long time ago I'm guessing they got in trouble with the EPA or something along those lines. That's usually what causes this. But Amazon got really, really committed to verifying that pesticides were safe, which is great. But now, you know, all of a sudden, overnight, your anti bacterial sock is now considered a pesticide. So there are a lot of trigger words. So if you say let's say, let's say, for example, if you put the word doll in your bobblehead, that might now trigger you to to provide all of the CPSC documentation as a toy, even though your bobblehead was really not a toy. And then you have to really be watching your voice of the customer in Account Health, there's a tab called Under Performance, there's one that says Voice of the Customer. You should be checking that twice weekly. Anything with more than two of the same negative experiences-- So let's say two people, three people all say the shirt was too small or three people say they got the wrong item. If we see it more than three times in a row, even if it's a slow velocity item, then we want to make sure: What do we need to change in the listing? What do we need to change in the way that the pictures are located? So, you might say, well, I can't help it if people buy the wrong size. Yes, you can. You can put a size chart in there. You can put measurements. You can put that item on different sized bodies, so people can see it's tighter in the waist. And the reason that is important is if Amazon sees that your product is causing a negative experience, they will remove your product from the platform. Even if you're Lego. So don't think, well, my product is selling a lot. They won't do that. There are rare cases, but for the most part, if something's a negative experience, they will remove it from the platform. So you have to have all of that. Mark Reed-Edwards: Sorry to interrupt you, but is that done through sentiment analysis? Is it AI that drives that or are there people looking at these listings and looking at these ratings and investigating why they're low for a certain item? Robyn Johnson: You know, I think anybody that could tell you the answer for sure probably wouldn't be able to say because Mark Reed-Edwards: Mm hmm. Robyn Johnson: Amazon has really great NDAs. But my guess is that it's primarily driven by AI and then reviewed by people under certain circumstances. Because there are times where we have a product that has a 20 percent negative customer experience rate, but it's because one person out of five said something and those don't flag, which makes it more difficult because there's not like a hard and fast rule. I can't say, well, as long as you're getting this many and your, your NCX is below this, but basically, you know, keep everything out of those bottom two, the, the poor and very poor, and you should be hypothetically okay. But we want to keep everything good as much as possible. Mark Reed-Edwards: So the upshot with Amazon is that it's really, it's not a simple marketplace to do business with. Robyn Johnson: No, but it can be really, really powerful. You know, we have brands that were, you know, really struggling D to C. They weren't getting the brick and mortar spots, or they did get the brick and mortar spots that they wanted, and it caused more problems. They were dealing with returns and all sorts of different things. Now, Amazon has its own sets of problems. It has not sunshine and rainbows. We do have some good TACoS. We have some brands that have been able to completely turn around negative things. We have some really large brands that are in every Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot, and for the last several years, Amazon has been able to sustain growth for them even though every other channel has been significantly down. So it has allowed them to have avoid layoffs. So it is definitely something that you want to consider. It can be a very powerful channel and you can use it to feed your other channels in some ways as well, because Amazon is so bottom of funnel. When you look at your ad conversions and you see what's converting there, that can really be sent back to your SEO, to your SEM agencies or if you're doing that yourself and really making sure that your product pages are using those keywords because those keywords that work on Amazon are all going to be very much the buyer intent. So it can be helpful there as well. It can also be really great for customer acquisition. Now, if you don't get any customer information, but especially if you have a consumable product, Amazon Subscribe and Save Now offers this ability to add a coupon on the initial purchase. I'm a marketer. I know all the tricks, but I will tell you the number of times that I have signed up for a subscribe and save, even though I wasn't even sure if I really was gonna like this product, and I ended up on the auto ship because I was like, "Ooh, I'm cheap and I can get 25% off my first purchase and then, you know, 5% off everywhere after-- Yeah, of course I'll sign up for a subscribe and save. I'll just cancel it later." And so usually two or three times later, then I, you know, go back. Yeah. You know, so. If you have a consumable, make sure that you are really utilizing Subscribe and Save. Amazon is now providing a lot more data. Their brand analytics that they've been providing has been really amazing to help determine whether or not: is the category down or is my listing down? We have two full time people that just handle Amazon compliance and then three people that just do Amazon seller support tickets. We call it being professionally persistent. There can be really good opportunities there. You do need to make sure that you have the margin in order to sustain on Amazon and really make sure you're looking at apples to apples. So the Amazon FBA fee, make sure when you're comparing that to your self fulfillment, you're including the cost, the tape, the labor to pack up everything. Cause all of that is included in FBA, but then you also want to make sure you're thinking about Amazon's return fee. Return policies are probably a little bit more generous. So that margin is really your access to being successful on Amazon because you do need enough margin in order to at least launch with advertising and some deals, maybe a coupon or Prime exclusive deal. And to be able to have that ability to discount on the big tent full days, like Prime Day and I think they're calling it T11 now, which is kind of ridiculous. It went from Black Friday to 11 days. I don't know when that happened. Mark Reed-Edwards: That's great. What a crazy world. Well, Robyn, I, I hope we catch up sooner than three years next time. I really appreciate your insight and thanks for joining me. Robyn Johnson: I hope it was helpful. And you know, if you're struggling with Amazon, no, it's not you. Amazon is, can be kind of a bear, but it can definitely be worth it. And keep listening to this podcast. You can hear more amazing, different confessions from different marketers. And thank you very much for having me back on the show.

Can you really look and feel younger? Yes! In this episode, I'm sharing six of my favorite science-backed anti-aging habits—and they go way beyond fighting wrinkles. These practices will get you feeling healthy, energized, and strong. They can improve your quality of life and even your health. But the glowing skin is a great perk. If you want to unlock a more youthful you and discover what it means to age powerfully, this episode is the perfect place to start.    FULL show notes: jjvirgin.com/antiaginghabits   Subscribe to my podcast: http://subscribetojj.com   Watch the FULL VIDEO on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/jjvirginvideos   Download Inner Wellness, Outer Beauty: Your Anti-Aging Cheat Sheet: http://jjvirgin.com/antiaging   Read my book, Sugar Impact Diet: https://store.jjvirgin.com/collections/books/products/sugar-impact-diet-paperback-book   Learn how foods cause leaky gut in The Virgin Diet: https://store.jjvirgin.com/products/the-virgin-diet-paperback   Manta Sleep light-blocking eye mask: https://amzn.to/47p3ce8   Joovv red light therapy: https://joovv.com/products/joovv-go-2-0   Sunlighten Sauna: https://get.sunlighten.com/JJVirgin use promo code JJVIRGIN when requesting pricing information for $600 off   Amazon Basics lavender Epsom salts: https://amzn.to/48EgN2d   Kooru Cold Plunge: Go to https://www.koorucoldplunges.com/ and use code JJVIP500 for $500 off   Listen to Is Muscle the Key to Longevity? with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: https://jjvirgin.com/main-podcast/is-muscle-the-key-to-longevity-with-dr-gabrielle-lyon-ep-597/   TRX Training: Free Shipping on all orders $99+: https://www.avantlink.com/click.php?tt=ml&ti=931205&pw=347877   Download my free Resistance Training Cheat Sheet: http://jjvirgin.com/power   Reignite Wellness™ All-In-One Shakes: https://store.jjvirgin.com/collections/shakes   Reignite Wellness™ Amino Power Powder: https://store.jjvirgin.com/products/amino-power-powder   Dr. Joe Dispenza meditations: https://drjoedispenza.com/?rfsn=6914154.37386a&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=6914154.37386a Watch Nine Anti-Aging Foods You Should Be Eating Every Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dnw5Fj9bSs

Does self-care feel out of reach? Maybe you feel like you don't have the time, the energy, or the money. I get it. But self-care comes in many forms, including little upgrades that provide a big boost to your well-being. In this episode, I'm sharing six of my favorite finds that have enhanced my sleep, skin, mood, and more. And because I know convenience is key, you can get them all on Amazon. Check them out, then bump taking care of yourself up to the top of your to-do list.    FULL show notes: jjvirgin.com/selfcare   Subscribe to my podcast: http://subscribetojj.com   Watch the FULL VIDEO on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/jjvirginvideos   Download my FREE Best Rest Sleep Cheat Sheet: jjvirgin.com/bestrest   Read my book, Sugar Impact Diet: https://store.jjvirgin.com/collections/books/products/sugar-impact-diet-paperback-book   Learn how foods cause leaky gut in The Virgin Diet: https://store.jjvirgin.com/products/the-virgin-diet-paperback   Amazon Basics lavender Epsom salts: https://amzn.to/48EgN2d   Manta Sleep light-blocking eye mask: https://amzn.to/47p3ce8   Dr. Joe Dispenza meditations: https://drjoedispenza.com/?rfsn=6914154.37386a&utm_source=refersion&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=6914154.37386a   Buensueno silicone earplugs: https://amzn.to/3tvDRBG   Philips Hue Smart Play Light Bar Base Kit: https://amzn.to/3TIYR2o   Philips Hue Go Portable Dimmable LED Smart Light: https://amzn.to/4aHv7cd   Zenagen Revolve hair thickening shampoo: https://amzn.to/3vqbDJ5 Video: Do 3 Things as Soon as You Wake Up for Peak Energy All Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQn3myTrju0

Hurruah! It's 2024 and Ted and Gareth are back for another year of dribbling over tech. On this show an investigation into the sexy streamings on Twitch, Google's and Apples app store action, the Incognito mode judgment, Nuclear container ships, a tough tablet from Samung, a little ebook reader from Onyx, Samsung AI, Motorola AI, Microsoft AI, Google AI and the Retroid Pocket 4. With Gareth Myles and Ted Salmon Join us on Mewe RSS Link: https://techaddicts.libsyn.com/rss Direct Download iTunes | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Tunein | Spotify  Amazon | Pocket Casts | Castbox | PodHubUK Feedback, Fallout and Contributions Logitech G Yeti Orb Microphone - HardwareZone Review SoundCore AeroFit Pro Earphones - Ted's Review - (with free SoundCore Motion 100) …but no Marshall Acton III which I begged Santa for - the mean, petty-minded bag'o'shyte Swan Stainless Steel Bean to Cup Coffee to Go Machine News, Mews and Views Google and Apple might have to play nice with external app stores in Japan China's Nuclear-Powered Container Ship: A Fluke Or The Future Of Shipping? Game Over: The Tech That Died in 2023 Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders Portable, non-invasive, mind-reading AI turns thoughts into text 2023 vs 2022 – UK Broadband and Mobile Speeds vs the World Google agrees to settle $5 billion lawsuit accusing it of tracking Incognito users Cleavage but no underbust, please for those who present as women: Twitch bans "implied nudity" among streamers Hardline on the hardware Sony dips toes into VR, publishes patent for trackball foot controller Onyx Boox Palma review: The bite-sized e-reader Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 5 images and specs leak featuring S Pen The Wearables Watch This awesome [absurd-looking] watch lets you play your favourite classic games on your wrist The retro gaming watch The original Pixel Watch's long-awaited notification sync feature finally arrives Phone Zone Motorola Razr: next-gen edition slated to launch as first-gen AI-powered foldable smartphone You won't need a Samsung phone to benefit from Galaxy S24's AI call translation The Name of the Game Don't throw your Stadia controller away - Google extends its Bluetooth support to the end of 2024 Retroid announces the Pocket 4 and Pocket 4 Pro, but you'll have to wait to get oneKeep an eye on Retro Game Corps for a review before purchasing. Flap your trap about an App Dell shows demos of an enhanced Copilot that automatically manages your system Microsoft Copilot launches as a standalone Android app Windows 11 will let you reinstall your OS through Windows Update without wiping your files Google Gallows & Chrome Coroner Chrome now defaults to desktop mode on ‘premium' Android tablets Google Clock's weather forecasts get a big redesign for alarms Google is preparing a paid version of Bard Hark Back (Ideas down below if needed/wanted) The Long Telephone cable Bargain Basement: Best UK deals and tech on sale we have spotted Amazon Basics 48-Count AA & AAA High-Performance Batteries Value Pack - 24 Double AA Batteries and 24 Triple AAA Batteries (48-Count) - £11.61 (sub  & save option too) Sanodesk Electric Standing Desk £76 from £90 HONOR X6a - £93.97 RRP: £129.99 Elgato Stream Deck XL £190 from £230 Sony WH-1000XM5 Noise Cancelling Wireless Headphones - £239.00 RRP: £316.67 (and £47.80 x 5 months for me) Dell Inspiron 14 5435 Laptop 16:10 FHD+ (1920 x 1200) Display | AMD Ryzen 7 7730U | 16 GB 4266MHz LPDDR4x RAM | 1TB SSD | AMD Radeon Graphics | UK/Irish Qwerty Backlit Keyboard | Platinum Silver £549 from £679 INIU USB C Charger Cable £9.99 Was: £12.99 + 35% off Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic 43mm Bluetooth £294 from £369 Main Show URL: http://www.techaddicts.uk | PodHubUK Contact:: gareth@techaddicts.uk | @techaddictsuk Gareth - @garethmyles | Mastodon | garethmyles.com | Gareth's Ko-Fi Ted - tedsalmon.com | Ted's PayPal | Mastodon | Ted's Amazon YouTube: Tech Addicts

Welcome to our final podcast of 2023. How is that even possible? We begin by sharing about Kim's Christmas present from Chris; the Soundcore Frames Bluetooth glasses by Anker. We discuss pairing and connecting, and Kim plays some music and shares how to use the touch controls. You also get to hear the phone call quality when using the glasses. Activate this link to purchase a pair of Soundcore Frames for yourself or someone you love. This is our affiliate link, and we receive a small commission when you purchase via this link. Next, Kim discusses a great Audible alternative, Chirp. This site regularly has sales in which you can purchase books for under $10 each. Kim loves Chirp for its ease of use, variety, and, of course, awesome prices during sales. Learn about the service, go on a tour of the home page, walk through the checkout process with Kim, and discover how to play books from your Chirp library both on a PC and via iOS. And yes, we use the Soundcore Frames during the iOS portion. Visit this link to check out Chirp and their vast selection of books. Our final demo of the year is for this great Amazon Basics shredder. Note that if you purchase from the above link we'll receive a small commission. We thought we needed a second shredder in the house, and while this one isn't quite as powerful as our old one, it doesn't need to be. IT shreds CDs, credit cards, and all that junk mail or those sensitive documents you no longer need. We definitely recommend it. We hope your holidays are happy and filled with lots of love and laughter. Looking forward to sharing 2024 with you! Thanks for being a listener! We appreciate you! Happy Merry everything!

Join us in this power-packed episode as Aaron Cordovez shares the insights he learned from Amazon TITANS after attending AMZ Innovate 2023. Learn tips and tricks from top sellers such as Jabran Niaz (Utopia Deals), David Ghiyam (MaryRuth's Organics), Mike Beckham (Simple Organics), and Steven Borrelli (Cuts). _____________

In der heutigen Folge unseres Tech-Podcasts decken wir die neuesten Gerüchte und Nachrichten aus der Welt der Technologie ab. Packt das iPad Mini bald einen großen Punch mit einem faltbaren Display? Wir diskutieren die Möglichkeit des iPad Mini Fold und was dies für den Tablet-Markt bedeuten könnte. Samsung macht Schlagzeilen mit dem Galaxy SmartTag2 – einem Tracker mit vielseitigerem Design für 40€, aber haben sie sich zu viel bei Apples AirTag abgeschaut? Wir beleuchten die Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten. Dann sprechen wir über die Burn-In-Probleme beim iPhone 15 Pro Max. Trotz eines Updates scheint das Hitzeproblem bei allen iPhone 15 Modellen noch nicht behoben zu sein – Nutzerberichte häufen sich. Die Satelliten-Internetrevolution wird erschwinglicher: Starlink bietet jetzt Dienste ab 50 Euro im Monat an. Wie wird das den Internetmarkt verändern? Apple-Produkte stehen oft für Qualität und Innovation, aber ist das den Preis wert? Ein CT-Scan vergleicht Apples 149 Euro Thunderbolt 4 Pro Kabel mit einem USB-C-Kabel von Amazon Basics – das Ergebnis könnte euch überraschen.

044 - November 4, 2023Rich DeMuro talks tech news, tips, gadget reviews and conducts interviews in this weekly show. Airs 11 AM - 2 PM PT on KFI AM 640 and syndicated on stations nationwide through Premiere Networks. Stream live on the iHeartRadio App or subscribe to the podcast.Follow Rich on X, Instagram, Facebook and Threads.Call 1-888-RICH-101 (1-888-742-4101) to join in!RichOnTech.tvRich talked about how he noticed his Halloween low light photos are getting better over the years as smartphone cameras and sensors continue to improve.He also explained how he books flights using Google Flights and loves the website Point.me, which helps you make the most of your rewards points. Use code RICHONTECH to get your first month for $1.Rich shared his road test thoughts on the Rivian R1S SUV. Overall, he loved the rugged good looks and creature comforts, but charging it fast and on the road proved to be a challenge.Consumer Reports tested USB-C and Lightning cables to find the most durable. The winners? Apple's and Amazon Basics.John in Los Angeles asks if there's a service provider that can forward emails from his domain to his Gmail inbox. Rich says he uses Hover for this purpose and it's only $5 a year. Use this referral link and it might save you a few bucks. Michael emailed to say Cloudflare does something similar.There's a new Beatles song called Now and Then and it was made possible thanks to AI.Chuck in Laguna Nigel asks about plug in hybrid vehicles.HBO Max is downgrading features for longtime subscribers on the grandfathered $15.99 plan.Terry in Temecula is having issues accessing ChatGPT. He keeps getting error messages. Rich says to clear the cookies and cache for the website and that should help. Rich also recommended checking out other AI options including Claude AI and Google's Bard.You can now move the URL/Address bar on Chrome for iOS to the bottom of the screen to match what Safari did in iOS 16.Mickey in Camarillo wants to know if gift cards can be used online or in store. Rich says it depends, so be sure to check the gift card redemption details before you buy. Also, check out Raise for discounted gift cards.The cashback shopping app Ibotta is giving away free Thanksgiving dinners.Steven in San Diego is wondering what to do now that Mint is shutting down. Rich says there are two types of alternatives: those that help you budget and those that help you see all of your financial accounts in one place. At the end of the day it will come down to which app you like best and if you want to pay for the service. Check out CoPilot, Monarch, PocketGuard, YNAB, EveryDollar and Empower. For budgeting, Rich says he uses a simple Excel spreadsheet.Page emailed to say they like Quicken Simplifi for finances.Rich has been checking out CoPilot. Use my referral code QXCTP4 to get 2 months free.Stephanie shared a story about how she got scammed by trying to sell something on Facebook Marketplace. She ended up calling a phony Zelle number she quickly found on Google.Elsa in Playa Del Rey asks if she should do the free trial for NETGEAR Armor. Also, Elsa mentioned the free privacy email service from DuckDuckGo.Louis in Riverside is trying to set up a passed down iPhone but it has an activation lock enabled.Larissa May is a digital wellness activist and the founder of #HalfTheStory, a non-profit focused on educating, advocating and mitigating the harms associated with social media and tech use.Helpful apps Larissa mentioned: OneSec and Opal App.Apple is quietly discontinuing it's voice based $5 Apple Music plan.Apple has new M3 chips, new laptops and a new iMac.If you're looking for more free streaming options, check out Xumo Play.Samsung might launch the S24 even earlier next year.Apple Arcade is getting new games for the holiday season. Rich downloaded Knotwords+ and it's a fun twist on a word puzzler.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Fall is the time to prepare for a potentially harsh winter ahead.  So, we are in Northern California and with the exception of our mountainous areas, we don't see exceptionally harsh winters.  But that doesn't mean that we do not prepare our rental properties located here for the winter months.  We still get pretty big storms with high winds and last year, quite a bit of unexpected rainfall.  The point is inspections are always a good idea.  Even more so just before the cold winter months set it.In this episode we give you suggestions on what fall seasonal maintenance items you should be doing for your rental properties, especially if they will experience freezing temperatures this coming winter season.We time this preventative maintenance along with our semi-annual property inspections.  This way we can lessen the amount of disruption to our tenants and keep our time on property to a minimum, which also helps us remain efficient in our business.Where we touch on the things you should focus on inside the unit, most of the tasks are for the exterior of your rental property.  We discuss what to do and why it is important.  The rest is up to you. LINKS

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 3, 2023 with Corey Quinn. Links: AWS Lambda simplifies copying environment variables in the console code editor What is a spam trap and why you should care? How we learned to program with atoms in 24 hours flat  Running an SSH server on AWS RoboMaker New training series: Starting your Career with AWS Cloud AWS to remove 62,000-message Simple Email Service 'always free' tier from August 2023 AWS continues to invest in Ohio  The INFORM Consumers Act takes effect on June 27. Here's how Amazon is protecting our customers and sellers from bad actors.

Sales events are great!But...don't enjoy them so much that you rob yourself of success the following day."If you are going to hoot with the owls at night, you better be prepared to soar with the Eagles in the morning."Do what you have to do but bring that same energy to your day after an event that you did at the event. Your future self and your future clients will thank you!To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'Kelly

Sales has the opportunity to give each and every one of you opportunities of a lifetime.Unlike some industries that will cap compensation or have very few mechanisms for economic growth, sales potential is limitless.I can sell 1000 products this year and make $25,000 or 1 million products this year and make 25 million dollars. The result is the effort of how good I am at doing my job.I want to do everything I can to save sales pros from leaving the industry and give them hope that they can change their lives forever, with the right situation. To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'Kelly

6 Sales Process tips to help with being prepared for a sales meeting.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'Kelly

Do you want to elevate your skills, or are you content to where you are today?If you said you are good, well...I have bad news for you. There is a giant world out there changing faster than some may be able to keep up.Adapt or die isn't a new slogan, but it will become the everyday manta in the future.How much are you willing to endure that makes you uncomfortable to get to wheere you want to be?To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'Kelly

Went to the Social Media Marketing World Conference in San Diego last week.Listen to hear my 3 biggest takeaways.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'Kelly

 Having a mentor and/or being a mentor to someone else is a great way to grow your skillset, unlock new opportunities and create a better sales market.Reach up to those who are where you want to be and reach back to give a hand to those who are where you used to be.If you have the chance to do both, amazing! If not, try to do at least one for now.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales 

Do you have piles of paper that are constantly shuffled around from place to place?   Do you lack a system around all the paper coming into your home?   Today I'm sharing my no-fail paper processing routine around the three main categories of paper that my mamas struggle with the most - mail, kids' school papers, and kids' artwork.   Resources Mentioned (may include affiliate links):   The paper tray/inbox I use in my kitchen looks like this one I use the ScanSnap scanner. Mine works with Evernote but they make other models as well. Amazon Basics 12-sheet paper shredder   For mail:   To unsubscribe: For catalogs you don't want, use Catalog Choice. Dmachoice.org to unsubscribe from mailing lists Optoutprescreen.com for credit card solicitations yellowpagesoptout.com for phone books Magazines - depends on the magazine but the company needs to be contacted directly in most cases. If you don't want the physical copy, your local library may have access to magazines through Libby or Overdrive. Mine has 3,900 magazines available!    For kids' school papers:   I use Evernote (especially the Evernote app) to easily capture kids' school work and artwork I want to keep. Here's a short Reel showing you how I use it.   For kids' artwork and crafts:   If artwork doesn't go on my kids' corkboards in their rooms, I leave it in art purgatory for a few months. Then I go through it and will either take a photo using Evernote or throw it away.   I will keep a limited number of items (especially with handprints, etc.) in a physical file folder after I have taken a photo or scanned it.   Other ways to keep your kids artwork is using a system like Artkive and Keepy. They are apps that have paid and free versions that can take your kids' artwork and make art books or framed mosaics out of them.    ***   Have a question about decluttering, simplifying, systems, or anything else we talk about on the podcast? You can now leave me a voice message here. Look for the microphone that says START RECORDING. Who knows, your question may be answered on an upcoming episode!   Episodes Mentioned:    Episode 27: What Does Your Home Say About You? The Secret to Decorating Intentionally with Dani Watson from fig & farm at home   Episode 26: Loathe Laundry? Learn to Love it with my 20-Minute System    Episode 6: The EASIEST Way to Declutter Any Space in Your Home!   ***   I help moms declutter their homes, heads, and hearts.   Hey there, mama. Are you tired of all the STUFF crowding your home, calendar, and mind? Do you wish you could say goodbye to the endless to-do list running around in your head, while you're running around in the middle of the mess? Want to declutter but don't know where to start? Are your dreams buried under piles of toys and laundry?   Welcome to Moms Overcoming Overwhelm, where you will find proven and practical solutions to declutter your home, head, and heart.  If you're ready to reclaim your precious resources of time, energy, attention, and focus and create the motherhood and life you want on YOUR terms - this podcast is for you.   Hi, I'm Emily - a wife, #boymom, and simplicity seeker. I struggled to get pregnant and felt completely overwhelmed - until I discovered decluttering could create the physical and emotional space I needed to become a mom.   Now, two kids later, I've transformed my life and motherhood by developing simple systems around decluttering, capsule wardrobes, kids stuff, cleaning and tidying, meal planning, time management, and more- and I can't wait to share them with you!   If you're ready to reclaim the time and energy you crave, be present with your kids, and finally enjoy the life and motherhood you SO deserve - let's kick overwhelm to the curb, shall we? Grab your lukewarm coffee, your notebook and pen, and clear off some counter space! Let's do this.   Podcast -＞ www.simplebyemmy.com/podcast   Learn -＞ www.simplebyemmy.com/resources    Connect -＞ Join our free Facebook group Decluttering Tips and Support for Overwhelmed Moms   Instagram -＞ @simplebyemmy and @momsovercomingoverwhelm   *** Don't Know Where to Start? ***   5 Steps to Overcome Overwhelm -＞ https://simplebyemmy.com/5steps/    5 Mindset Shifts for Decluttering -＞ https://simplebyemmy.com/mindset/    Wanna work with me to kick overwhelm to the curb, mama? There are three options for you!   Step 1: Join a supportive community of moms plus decluttering challenges to keep you on track at the free Facebook group Decluttering Tips and Support for Overwhelmed Moms   Step 2: Grab a free 20-minute discovery call at https://calendly.com/simplebyemmy/discovery Step 3: Get more personalized support with one-on-one coaching! www.simplebyemmy.com/coaching   iSjhVyeYBrXwwCmEHC53

Technology has made it so much easier to grow your market than ever before.Leveraged properly, you will separate yourself from your competition and open yourself up to new opportunities.Having a great "Tech Stack" will help you get to where you want to go in your business.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

If you shoot for the moon, you may fall short, but if you are content to where you are today, you have already failed.Growth only happens when you push yourself out of your comfort zone and into new skills and opportunities.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

Your value in sales is based on what you can provide for an organization in the future, not paid on your past performance.Now, your past performance will dictate the ballpark your compensation will land, but you are not owed any money for past results.The Lamar Jackson saga won't end well for anyone involved in the long run.  Lamar and the Ravens will both lose on this deal in the future.There are things that you can learn from this.Learning points:- You don't get paid future money for past results- Don't obsess over what someone else is making, focus on your business only- Be loyal to those who have built around you and seek to understand their situtation, not just yours.In a, "I have to get mine culture" money is way too high on the level of things professionals obsess over, not once focusing on the long-term vision yet to come.To learn more about making long term goals or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

If you are content to where you are in business & life, you have failed.You have to continually be growing, evolving and working on your skills.The sales world and world in general doesn't slow down or stay the same, so why should your process or skill set?If you make average plans, have an average mindset and take the average amount of effort, you will at best get average results.Why settle for average when you have the ability to do so much more? To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

If you are "rinsing & repeating" your sales message from a few years back, you are missing the boat.Yes, i said it. You are falling behind.The market is moving at lightning speed, and you will need to at least keep up or fall behind.How do I know so many people are still falling behind, I get tons of DMs, emails and messages still telling me they are "following up, circling back, putting it at the top of my inbox, etc."Your goal is to stay ahead of the market and keep your messaging and approach fresh. As I reminder, process isn't your sales system, it is the bones or the structure while the sales system is the organs and the muscle and everything else.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

If it's easy, you need to find a new path.Growth only comes from being challenged. Never from comfort.If you think you can rinse and repeat what you have done in the past, you will unfortunately be sorely mistaken.Adopt or die. To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

To be your best, you need to know what you are great at and what your strengths are.Lean into those strengths and leverage those skills when building your business.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

You can only control what happens in your business, not what happens in someone else's.So why are you allowing that energy to seep into your daily plan?Every day, all you can do and should do is focus on your process, your business and working your plan to the optimal level.If you do that, you are a success, whether your company recognizes it or not.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

To grow in business, you need allies.It is crucial for your LONG term success to build a strong network and become a giver, not just a taker when you need to close a deal or find a job.Givers will have many more opportunities to progress than takers.You To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

Process takes time.Remember the phrase, Rome wasn't built in a day, neither was your sales territory.Scaling a business takes consistent action set in a specific order with certain underlying beliefs, a.k.a. a process.Some of the results of that process take time and you will reap the benefits of those actions in the future, but you have to start today and be patient.You To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

Taking over a failing territory or business is hard and time consuming.Here are 3 steps you can take to grow very quickly:1. PPF Method2. Look for inefficiencies3. Make the business your ownIn this episode, I share a few examples of situations that popped up in my career and how you can apply those learnings to your business.To learn more or if you want help with your Sales Plan, reach out for a FREE strategy session.If you want to have a conversation about:- Scheduling a strategy call for your next move- Help building your business or territory- Starting your own sales podcast.Reach out to me:mike@survivingoutsidesales.comIf you want to support the show, click the link and get a shout out in a future episode:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1837367/supportTo start your own podcast and host on Buzzsprout, click link below to get going:https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1818120Microphone link- Amazon Basics: https://amzn.to/3fpizi1To connect with the show: Follow, Subscribe, like, 5 stars & DownloadConnect with Mike:Mike@survivingoutsidesales.comLinkedIn: Mike O'Kelly | LinkedInIG: Mike_OKellyLinktree: Mike O'KellySponsored By:Rithm AI-Website: GetRithm.comProspecting,Targeting&Routing,SimplifiedIt's time to Optimize. Not all calls are equal, Rithm puts the focus on the “right” keys to success.Go checkout & subscribe to the following YouTube channels & Websites:Connect with Surviving Outside Sales-YouTube: Surviving Outside Sales - YouTubeWebsite: SurvivingOutsideSales.comIG: SurvivingOutsideSales

DIGITAL EXPERT - OPERATIONS LEADER - BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT - INNOVATIVE ENTREPRENEURHighly experienced digital business and successful management professional recognized for consistently growing revenues and profitability. Confident, highly energized, effective, and persuasive communicator with strong interpersonal and entrepreneurial acumen. Skilled in global, scalable operations and sales development for start-ups and established Fortune 500 environments.Leadership - Transformed culture across multiple departments while growing revenue over 100% without decreasing services to internal and external constituentsStrategy - Created scalable models for operations and revenue generation for start-ups  and Fortune 100 environmentsTechnology - Experienced in all earned and paid digital media, PR, and marketing, along  with CRM and marketing automation software (Infusionsoft/SalesForce/HubSpot)Collaborator - Consistently increased revenue and decreased costs by negotiating distribution,  sales, and strategic alliances with external partners and service providersAmazon Product Research & Product Launch Q&A00:00 Introduction02:44 There are tons of opportunities on Amazon02:46 It's always a good time to launch a product on Amazon03:36 Success rate on selling on Amazon07:56 Product ideas always start with keywords08;46 Greenlight for Products ideas criteria are desirable (search volume), feasibility (can you actually make the thing), and viability (can you make money out of these products)11:03 Do multiple design filings patents for different aspects of the products12:40 If the product is selling really well in the first 48 weeks, defend it a little bit with a patent14:16 The importance of Brand names16:26 How to select your brand name and its corresponding domain from godaddy.com27:19 Branding is very important on Amazon27:25 Shorter and relevant brand titles stand out. There is instinct credibility28:24 To reach the target customer and get the number one spot, your Brand should look legit; the seller looks legit the copywriting should be professionally written.28:51 Have you ever competed with Amazon Basics yet30:18 Difference between store name and brand name30:27 Under one Amazon account set up as LLC, and within that, you can get brand registered for multiple brands, and once you have a brand registry, you can get multiple storefronts for each brand.32:35 You can change your seller central display name as long as it is not yet taken; you can make it more relevant to your store33:19 Troubleshooting issues on variation themes36:25 Amazon splits the reviews to child variations when it reaches 10,000 reviews based on Dan's experience43:43 Have your seller name be generic if you are selling multiple brands45:11 Any video is better than no video unless it is a bad video; make sure your copy is great on your videos48:39 How to know if the parent is suppressed?49:22 To check, go to the parent and click edit and if it should error or “the SKU has an inconsistent classification with the parent,” then it is52:54 One piece of advice for sellers of handgun accessories is to be careful with IP infringement on models and weapons and as well as trigger keywords for Amazon-like weapons.55:01 On the initial launch of your products, what is the process of deciding to add variations specifically for color variations56:02 Pick the number of variations you want first and recognize the benefit of having 4 or 5 over 2 or 3 and then use PICKFU to rank colors and look at people's feedbackSupport the show

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey 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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this episode is another one of those real profiles in shitposting type of episodes. I am joined again from a few months ago by Amy Tobey, who is a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix, back for more. Amy, thank you so much for joining me.Amy: Welcome. To your show. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. So, one thing that we have been seeing a lot over the past year, and you struck me as one of the best people to talk about what you're seeing in the wilderness perspective, has been the idea of cloud repatriation. It started off with something that came out of Andreessen Horowitz toward the start of the year about the trillion-dollar paradox, how, at a certain point of scale, repatriating to a data center is the smart and right move. And oh, my stars that ruffle some feathers for people?Amy: Well, I spent all this money moving to the cloud. That was just mean.Corey: I know. Why would I want to leave the cloud? I mean, for God's sake, my account manager named his kid after me. Wait a minute, how much am I spending on that? Yeah—Amy: Good question.Corey: —there is that ever-growing problem. And there have been the examples that people have given of Dropbox classically did a cloud repatriation exercise, and a second example that no one can ever name. And it seems like okay, this might not necessarily be the direction that the industry is going. But I also tend to not be completely naive when it comes to these things. And I can see repatriation making sense on a workload-by-workload basis.What that implies is that yeah, but a lot of other workloads are not going to be going to a data center. They're going to stay in a cloud provider, who would like very much if you never read a word of this to anyone in public.Amy: Absolutely, yeah.Corey: So, if there are workloads repatriating, it would occur to me that there's a vested interest on the part of every major cloud provider to do their best to, I don't know if saying suppress the story is too strongly worded, but it is directionally what I mean.Amy: They aren't helping get the story out. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's like, “That's a great observation. Could you maybe shut the hell up and never make it ever again in public, or we will end you?” Yeah. Your Amazon. What are you going to do, launch a shitty Amazon Basics version of what my company does? Good luck. Have fun. You're probably doing it already.But the reason I want to talk to you on this is a confluence of a few things. One, as I mentioned back in May when you were on the show, I am incensed and annoyed that we've been talking for as long as we have, and somehow I never had you on the show. So, great. Come back, please. You're always welcome here. Secondly, you work at Equinix, which is, effectively—let's be relatively direct—it is functionally a data center as far as how people wind up contextualizing this. Yes, you have higher level—Amy: Yeah I guess people contextualize it that way. But we'll get into that.Corey: Yeah, from the outside. I don't work there, to be clear. My talking points don't exist for this. But I think of oh, Equinix. Oh, that means you basically have a colo or colo equivalent. The pricing dynamics have radically different; it looks a lot closer to a data center in my imagination than it does a traditional public cloud. I would also argue that if someone migrates from AWS to Equinix, that would be viewed—arguably correctly—as something of a repatriation. Is that directionally correct?Amy: I would argue incorrectly. For Metal, right?Corey: Ah.Amy: So, Equinix is a data center company, right? Like that's why everybody knows us as. Equinix Metal is a bare metal primitive service, right? So, it's a lot more of a cloud workflow, right, except that you're not getting the rich services that you get in a technically full cloud, right? Like, there's no RDS; there's no S3, even. What you get is bare metal primitives, right? With a really fast network that isn't going to—Corey: Are you really a cloud provider without some ridiculous machine-learning-powered service that's going to wind up taking pictures, perform incredibly expensive operations on it, and then return something that's more than a little racist? I mean, come on. That's not—you're not a cloud until you can do that, right?Amy: We can do that. We have customers that do that. Well, not specifically that, but um—Corey: Yeah, but they have to build it themselves. You don't have the high-level managed service that basically serves as, functionally, bias laundering.Amy: Yeah, you don't get it in a box, right? So, a lot of our customers are doing things that are unique, right, that are maybe not exactly fit into the cloud well. And it comes back down to a lot of Equinix's roots, which is—we talk but going into the cloud, and it's this kind of abstract environment we're reaching for, you know, up in the sky. And it's like, we don't know where it is, except we have regions that—okay, so it's in Virginia. But the rule of real estate applies to technology as often as not, which is location, location, location, right?When we're talking about a lot of applications, a challenge that we face, say in gaming, is that the latency from the customer, so that last mile to your data center, can often be extremely important, right, so a few milliseconds even. And a lot of, like, SaaS applications, the typical stuff that really the cloud was built on, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, nobody's really going to notice that, right? But in a gaming environment or some very low latency application that needs to run extremely close to the customer, it's hard to do that in the cloud. They're building this stuff out, right? Like, I see, you know, different ones [unintelligible 00:05:53] opening new regions but, you know, there's this other side of the cloud, which is, like, the edge computing thing that's coming alive, and that's more where I think about it.And again, location, location, location. The speed of light is really fast, but as most of us in tech know, if you want to go across from the East Coast to the West Coast, you're talking about 80 milliseconds, on average, right? I think that's what it is. I haven't checked in a while. Yeah, that's just basic fundamental speed of light. And so, if everything's in us-east-1—and this is why we do multi-region, sometimes—the latency from the West Coast isn't going to be great. And so, we run the application on both sides.Corey: It has improved though. If you want to talk old school things that are seared into my brain from over 20 years ago, every person who's worked in data centers—or in technology, as a general rule—has a few IP addresses seared. And the one that I've always had on my mind was 130.111.32.11. Kind of arbitrary and ridiculous, but it was one of the two recursive resolvers provided at the University of Maine where I had my first help desk job.And it lives on-prem, in Maine. And generally speaking, I tended to always accept that no matter where I was—unless I was in a data center somewhere—it was about 120 milliseconds. And I just checked now; it is 85 and change from where I am in San Francisco. So, the internet or the speed of light have improved. So, good for whichever one of those it was. But yeah, you've just updated my understanding of these things. All of this is, which is to say, yes, latency is very important.Amy: Right. Let's forget repatriation to really be really honest. Even the Dropbox case or any of them, right? Like, there's an economic story here that I think all of us that have been doing cloud work for a while see pretty clearly that maybe not everybody's seeing that—that's thinking from an on-prem kind of situation, which is that—you know, and I know you do this all the time, right, is, you don't just look at the cost of the data center and the servers and the network, the technical components, the bill of materials—Corey: Oh, lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses. Yeah.Amy: —but there's all these people on top of it, and the organizational complexity, and the contracts that you got to manage. And it's this big, huge operation that is incredibly complex to do well that is almost nobody's business. So the way I look at this, right, and the way I even talk to customers about it is, like, “What is your produ—” And I talk to people internally about this way? It's like, “What are you trying to build?” “Well, I want to build a SaaS.” “Okay. Do you need data center expertise to build a SaaS?” “No.” “Then why the hell are you putting it in a data center?” Like we—you know, and speaking for my employer, right, like, we have Equinix Metal right here. You can build on that and you don't have to do all the most complex part of this, at least in terms of, like, the physical plant, right? Like, right, getting a bare metal server available, we take care of all of that. Even at the primitive level, where we sit, it's higher level than, say, colo.Corey: There's also the question of economics as it ties into it. It's never just a raw cost-of-materials type of approach. Like, my original job in a data center was basically to walk around and replace hard drives, and apparently, to insult people. Now, the cloud has taken one of those two aspects away, and you can follow my Twitter account and figure out which one of those two it is, but what I keep seeing now is there is value to having that task done, but in a cloud environment—and Equinix Metal, let's be clear—that has slipped below the surface level of awareness. And well, what are the economic implications of that?Well, okay, you have a whole team of people at large companies whose job it is to do precisely that. Okay, we're going to upskill them and train them to use cloud. Okay. First, not everyone is going to be capable or willing to make that leap from hard drive replacement to, “Congratulations and welcome to JavaScript. You're about to hate everything that comes next.”And if they do make that leap, their baseline market value—by which I mean what the market is willing to pay for them—approximately will double. And whether they wind up being paid more by their current employer or they take a job somewhere else with those skills and get paid what they are worth, the company still has that economic problem. Like it or not, you will generally get what you pay for whether you want to or not; that is the reality of it. And as companies are thinking about this, well, what gets into the TCO analysis and what doesn't, I have yet to see one where the outcome was not predetermined. They're less, let's figure out in good faith whether it's going to be more expensive to move to the cloud, or move out of the cloud, or just burn the building down for insurance money. The outcome is generally the one that the person who commissioned the TCO analysis wants. So, when a vendor is trying to get you to switch to them, and they do one for you, yeah. And I'm not saying they're lying, but there's so much judgment that goes into this. And what do you include and what do you not include? That's hard.Amy: And there's so many hidden costs. And that's one of the things that I love about working at a cloud provider is that I still get to play with all that stuff, and like, I get to see those hidden costs, right? Like you were talking about the person who goes around and swaps out the hard drives. Or early in my career, right, I worked with someone whose job it was this every day, she would go into data center, she'd swap out the tapes, you know, and do a few things other around and, like, take care of the billing system. And that was a job where it was kind of going around and stewarding a whole bunch of things that kind of kept the whole machine running, but most people outside of being right next to the data center didn't have any idea that stuff even happen, right, that went into it.And so, like you were saying, like, when you go to do the TCO analysis, I mean, I've been through this a couple of times prior in my career, where people will look at it and go like, “Well, of course we're not going to list—we'll put, like, two headcount on there.” And it's always a lie because it's never just to headcount. It's never just the network person, or the SRE, or the person who's racking the servers. It's also, like, finance has to do all this extra work, and there's all the logistic work, and there is just so much stuff that just is really hard to include. Not only do people leave it out, but it's also just really hard for people to grapple with the complexity of all the things it takes to run a data center, which is, like, one of the most complex machines on the planet, any single data center.Corey: I've worked in small-scale environments, maybe a couple of mid-sized ones, but never the type of hyperscale facility that you folks have, which I would say is if it's not hyperscale, it's at least directionally close to it. We're talking thousands of servers, and hundreds of racks.Amy: Right.Corey: I've started getting into that, on some level. Now, I guess when we say ‘hyperscale,' we're talking about AWS-size things where, oh, that's a region and it's going to have three dozen data center facilities in it. Yeah, I don't work in places like that because honestly, have you met me? Would you trust me around something that's that critical infrastructure? No, you would not, unless you have terrible judgment, which means you should not be working in those environments to begin with.Amy: I mean, you're like a walking chaos exercise. Maybe I would let you in.Corey: Oh, I bring my hardware destruction aura near anything expensive and things are terrible. It's awful. But as I looked at the cloud, regardless of cloud, there is another economic element that I think is underappreciated, and to be fair, this does, I believe, apply as much to Equinix Metal as it does to the public hyperscale cloud providers that have problems with naming things well. And that is, when you are provisioning something as a customer of one of these places, you have an unbounded growth problem. When you're in a data center, you are not going to just absentmindedly sign an $8 million purchase order for new servers—you know, a second time—and then that means you're eventually run out of power, space, places to put things, and you have to go find it somewhere.Whereas in cloud, the only limit is basically your budget where there is no forcing function that reminds you to go and clean up that experiment from five years ago. You have people with three petabytes of data they were using for a project, but they haven't worked there in five years and nothing's touched it since. Because the failure mode of deleting things that are important, or disasters—Amy: That's why Glacier exists.Corey: Oh, exactly. But that failure mode of deleting things that should not be deleted are disastrous for a company, whereas if you've leave them there, well, it's only money. And there's no forcing function to do that, which means you have this infinite growth problem with no natural limit slash predator around it. And that is the economic analysis that I do not see playing out basically anywhere. Because oh, by the time that becomes a problem, we'll have good governance in place. Yeah, pull the other one. It has bells on it.Amy: That's the funny thing, right, is a lot of the early drive in the cloud was those of us who wanted to go faster and we were up against the limitations of our data centers. And then we go out and go, like, “Hey, we got this cloud thing. I'll just, you know, put the credit card in there and I'll spin up a few instances, and ‘hey, I delivered your product.'” And everybody goes, “Yeah, hey, happy.” And then like you mentioned, right, and then we get down the road here, and it's like, “Oh, my God, how much are we spending on this?”And then you're in that funny boat where you have both. But yeah, I mean, like, that's just typical engineering problem, where, you know, we have to deal with our constraints. And the cloud has constraints, right? Like when I was at Netflix, one of the things we would do frequently is bump up against instance limits. And then we go talk to our TAM and be like, “Hey, buddy. Can we have some more instance limit?” And then take care of that, right?But there are some bounds on that. Of course, in the cloud providers—you know, if I have my cloud provider shoes on, I don't necessarily want to put those limits to law because it's a business, the business wants to hoover up all the money. That's what businesses do. So, I guess it's just a different constraint that is maybe much too easy to knock down, right? Because as you mentioned, in a data center or in a colo space, I outgrow my cage and I filled up all that space I have, I have to either order more space from my colo provider, I expand to the cloud, right?Corey: The scale I was always at, the limit was not the space because I assure you with enough shoving all things are possible. Don't believe me? Look at what people are putting in the overhead bin on any airline. Enough shoving, you'll get a Volkswagen in there. But it was always power constrained is what I dealt with it. And it's like, “Eh, they're just being conservative.” And the whole building room dies.Amy: You want blade servers because that's how you get blade servers, right? That movement was about bringing the density up and putting more servers in a rack. You know, there were some management stuff and [unintelligible 00:16:08], but a lot of it was just about, like, you know, I remember I'm picturing it, right—Corey: Even without that, I was still power constrained because you have to remember, a lot of my experiences were not in, shall we say, data center facilities that you would call, you know, good.Amy: Well, that brings up a fun thing that's happening, which is that the power envelope of servers is still growing. The newest Intel chips, especially the ones they're shipping for hyperscale and stuff like that, with the really high core counts, and the faster clock speeds, you know, these things are pulling, like, 300 watts. And they also have to egress all that heat. And so, that's one of the places where we're doing some innovations—I think there's a couple of blog posts out about it around—like, liquid cooling or multimode cooling. And what's interesting about this from a cloud or data center perspective, is that the tools and skills and everything has to come together to run a, you know, this year's or next year's servers, where we're pushing thousands of kilowatts into a rack. Thousands; one rack right?The bar to actually bootstrap and run this stuff successfully is rising again, compared to I take my pizza box servers, right—and I worked at a gaming company a long time ago, right, and they would just, like, stack them on the floor. It was just a stack of servers. Like, they were in between the rails, but they weren't screwed down or anything, right? And they would network them all up. Because basically, like, the game would spin up on the servers and if they died, they would just unplug that one and leave it there and spin up another one.It was like you could just stack stuff up and, like, be slinging cables across the data center and stuff back then. I wouldn't do it that way now, but when you add, say liquid cooling and some of these, like, extremely high power situations into the mix, now you need to have, for example, if you're using liquid cooling, you don't want that stuff leaking, right? And so, it's good as the pressure fittings and blind mating and all this stuff that's coming around gets, you still have that element of additional training, and skill, and possibility for mistakes.Corey: The thing that I see as I look at this across the space is that, on some level, it's gotten harder to run a data center than it ever did before. Because again, another reason I wanted to have you on this show is that you do not carry a quota. Although you do often carry the conversation, when you have boring people around you, but quotas, no. You are not here selling things to people. You're not actively incentivized to get people to see things a certain way.You are very clearly an engineer in the right ways. I will further point out though, that you do not sound like an engineer, by which I mean, you're going to basically belittle people, in many cases, in the name of being technically correct. You're a human being with a frickin soul. And believe me, it is noticed.Amy: I really appreciate that. If somebody's just listening to hearing my voice and in my name, right, like, I have a low voice. And in most of my career, I was extremely technical, like, to the point where you know, if something was wrong technically, I would fight to the death to get the right technical solution and maybe not see the complexity around the decisions, and why things were the way they were in the way I can today. And that's changed how I sound. It's changed how I talk. It's changed how I look at and talk about technology as well, right? I'm just not that interested in Kubernetes. Because I've kind of started looking up the stack in this kind of pursuit.Corey: Yeah, when I say you don't sound like an engineer, I am in no way shape or form—Amy: I know.Corey: —alluding in any respect to your technical acumen. I feel the need to clarify that statement for people who might be listening, and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Is he being a shithead?” No.Amy: No, no, no.Corey: Well, not the kind you're worried I'm being anyway; I'm a different breed of shithead and that's fine.Amy: Yeah, I should remember that other people don't know we've had conversations that are deeply technical, that aren't on air, that aren't context anybody else has. And so, like, I bring that deep technical knowledge, you know, the ability to talk about PCI Express, and kilovolts [unintelligible 00:19:58] rack, and top-of-rack switches, and network topologies, all of that together now, but what's really fascinating is where the really big impact is, for reliability, for security, for quality, the things that me as a person, that I'm driven by—products are cool, but, like, I like them to be reliable; that's the part that I like—really come down to more leadership, and business acumen, and understanding the business constraints, and then being able to get heard by an audience that isn't necessarily technical, that doesn't necessarily understand the difference between PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. There's a difference between those. It doesn't mean anything to the business, right, so when we want to go and talk about why are we doing, for example, multi-region deployment of our application? If I come in and say, “Well, because we want to use Raft.” That's going to fall flat, right?The business is going to go, “I don't care about Raft. What does that have to do with my customers?” Which is the right question to always ask. Instead, when I show up and say, “Okay, what's going on here is we have this application sits in a single region—or in a single data center or whatever, right? I'm using region because that's probably what most of the people listening understand—you know, so I put my application in a single region and it goes down, our customers are going to be unhappy. We have the alternative to spend, okay, not a little bit more money, probably a lot more money to build a second region, and the benefit we will get is that our customers will be able to access the service 24x7, and it will always work and they'll have a wonderful experience. And maybe they'll keep coming back and buy more stuff from us.”And so, when I talk about it in those terms, right—and it's usually more nuanced than that—then I start to get the movement at the macro level, right, in the systemic level of the business in the direction I want it to go, which is for the product group to understand why reliability matters to the customer, you know? For the individual engineers to understand why it matters that we use secure coding practices.[midroll 00:21:56]Corey: Getting back to the reason I said that you are not quota-carrying and you are not incentivized to push things in a particular way is that often we'll meet zealots, and I've never known you to be one, you have always been a strong advocate for doing the right thing, even if it doesn't directly benefit any given random employer that you might have. And as a result, one of the things that you've said to me repeatedly is if you're building something from scratch, for God's sake, put it in cloud. What is wrong with you? Do that. The idea of building it yourself on low-lying, underlying primitives for almost every modern SaaS style workload, there's no reason to consider doing something else in almost any case. Is that a fair representation of your position on this?Amy: It is. I mean, the simpler version right, “Is why the hell are you doing undifferentiated lifting?” Right? Things that don't differentiate your product, why would you do it?Corey: The thing that this has empowered then is I can build an experiment tonight—I don't have to wait for provisioning and signed contracts and do all the rest. I can spend 25 cents and get the experiment up and running. If it takes off, though, it has changed how I move going forward as well because there's no difference in the way that there was back when we were in data centers. I'm going to try and experiment I'm going to run it in this, I don't know, crappy Raspberry Pi or my desktop or something under my desk somewhere. And if it takes off and I have to scale up, I got to do a giant migration to real enterprise-grade hardware. With cloud, you are getting all of that out of the box, even if all you're doing with it is something ridiculous and nonsensical.Amy: And you're often getting, like, ridiculously better service. So, 20 years ago, if you and I sat down to build a SaaS app, we would have spun up a Linux box somewhere in a colo, and we would have spun up Apache, MySQL, maybe some Perl or PHP if we were feeling frisky. And the availability of that would be one machine could do, what we could handle in terms of one MySQL instance. But today if I'm spinning up a new stack for some the same kind of SaaS, I'm going to probably deploy it into an ASG, I'm probably going to have some kind of high availability database be on it—and I'm going to use Aurora as an example—because, like, the availability of an Aurora instance, in terms of, like, if I'm building myself up with even the very best kit available in databases, it's going to be really hard to hit the same availability that Aurora does because Aurora is not just a software solution, it's also got a team around it that stewards that 24/7. And it continues to evolve on its own.And so, like, the base, when we start that little tiny startup, instead of being that one machine, we're actually starting at a much higher level of quality, and availability, and even security sometimes because of these primitives that were available. And I probably should go on to extend on the thought of undifferentiated lifting, right, and coming back to the colo or the edge story, which is that there are still some little edge cases, right? Like I think for SaaS, duh right? Like, go straight to. But there are still some really interesting things where there's, like, hardware innovations where they're doing things with GPUs and stuff like that.Where the colo experience may be better because you're trying to do, like, custom hardware, in which case you are in a colo. There are businesses doing some really interesting stuff with custom hardware that's behind an application stack. What's really cool about some of that, from my perspective, is that some of that might be sitting on, say, bare metal with us, and maybe the front-end is sitting somewhere else. Because the other thing Equinix does really well is this product we call a Fabric which lets us basically do peering with any of the cloud providers.Corey: Yeah, the reason, I guess I don't consider you as a quote-unquote, “Cloud,” is first and foremost, rooted in the fact that you don't have a bandwidth model that is free and grass and criminally expensive to send it anywhere that isn't to you folks. Like, are you really a cloud if you're not just gouging the living piss out of your customers every time they want to send data somewhere else?Amy: Well, I mean, we like to say we're part of the cloud. And really, that's actually my favorite feature of Metal is that you get, I think—Corey: Yeah, this was a compliment, to be very clear. I'm a big fan of not paying 1998 bandwidth pricing anymore.Amy: Yeah, but this is the part where I get to do a little bit of, like, showing off for Metal a little bit, in that, like, when you buy a Metal server, there's different configurations, right, but, like, I think the lowest one, you have dual 10 Gig ports to the server that you can get either in a bonded mode so that you have a single 20 Gig interface in your operating system, or you can actually do L3 and you can do BGP to your server. And so, this is a capability that you really can't get at all on the other clouds, right? This lets you do things with the network, not only the bandwidth, right, that you have available. Like, you want to stream out 25 gigs of bandwidth out of us, I think that's pretty doable. And the rates—I've only seen a couple of comparisons—are pretty good.So, this is like where some of the business opportunities, right—and I can't get too much into it, but, like, this is all public stuff I've talked about so far—which is, that's part of the opportunity there is sitting at the crossroads of the internet, we can give you a server that has really great networking, and you can do all the cool custom stuff with it, like, BGP, right? Like, so that you can do Anycast, right? You can build Anycast applications.Corey: I miss the days when that was a thing that made sense.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I mean that in the context of, you know, with the internet and networks. These days, it always feels like the network engineering as slipped away within the cloud because you have overlays on top of overlays and it's all abstractions that are living out there right until suddenly you really need to know what's going on. But it has abstracted so much of this away. And that, on some level, is the surprise people are often in for when they wind up outgrowing the cloud for a workload and wanting to move it someplace that doesn't, you know, ride them like naughty ponies for bandwidth. And they have to rediscover things that we've mostly forgotten about.I remember having to architect significantly around the context of hard drive failures. I know we've talked about that a fair bit as a thing, but yeah, it's spinning metal, it throws off heat and if you lose the wrong one, your data is gone and you now have serious business problems. In cloud, at least AWS-land, that's not really a thing anymore. The way EBS is provisioned, there's a slight tick in latency if you're looking at just the right time for what I think is a hard drive failure, but it's there. You don't have to think about this anymore.Migrate that workload to a pile of servers in a colo somewhere, guess what? Suddenly your reliability is going to decrease. Amazon, and the other cloud providers as well, have gotten to a point where they are better at operations than you are at your relatively small company with your nascent sysadmin team. I promise. There is an economy of scale here.Amy: And it doesn't have to be good or better, right? It's just simply better resourced—Corey: Yeah.Amy: Than most anybody else can hope. Amazon can throw a billion dollars at it and never miss it. In most organizations out there, you know, and most of the especially enterprise, people are scratching and trying to get resources wherever they can, right? They're all competing for people, for time, for engineering resources, and that's one of the things that gets freed up when you just basically bang an API and you get the thing you want. You don't have to go through that kind of old world internal process that is usually slow and often painful.Just because they're not resourced as well; they're not automated as well. Maybe they could be. I'm sure most of them could, in theory be, but we come back to undifferentiated lifting. None of this helps, say—let me think of another random business—Claire's, whatever, like, any of the shops in the mall, they all have some kind of enterprise behind them for cash processing and all that stuff, point of sale, none of this stuff is differentiating for them because it doesn't impact anything to do with where the money comes in. So again, we're back at why are you doing this?Corey: I think that's also the big challenge as well, when people start talking about repatriation and talking about this idea that they are going to, oh, that cloud is too expensive; we're going to move out. And they make the economics work. Again, I do firmly believe that, by and large, businesses do not intentionally go out and make poor decisions. I think when we see a company doing something inscrutable, there's always context that we're missing, and I think as a general rule of thumb, that at these companies do not hire people who are fools. And there are always constraints that they cannot talk about in public.My general position as a consultant, and ideally as someone who aspires to be a decent human being, is that when I see something I don't understand, I assume that there's simply a lack of context, not that everyone involved in this has been foolish enough to make giant blunders that I can pick out in the first five seconds of looking at it. I'm not quite that self-confident yet.Amy: I mean, that's a big part of, like, the career progression into above senior engineer, right, is, you don't get to sit in your chair and go, like, “Oh, those dummies,” right? You actually have—I don't know about ‘have to,' but, like, the way I operate now, right, is I remember in my youth, I used to be like, “Oh, those business people. They don't know, nothing. Like, what are they doing?” You know, it's goofy what they're doing.And then now I have a different mode, which is, “Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more?” The feeling is still there, right? Like, “Oh, my God, what is going on here?” But then I get curious, and I go, “So, how did we get here?” [laugh]. And you get that story, and the stories are always fascinating, and they always involve, like, constraints, immovable objects, people doing the best they can with what they have available.Corey: Always. And I want to be clear that very rarely is it the right answer to walk into a room and say, look at the architecture and, “All right, what moron built this?” Because always you're going to be asking that question to said moron. And it doesn't matter how right you are, they're never going to listen to another thing out of your mouth again. And have some respect for what came before even if it's potentially wrong answer, well, great. “Why didn't you just use this service to do this instead?” “Yeah, because this thing predates that by five years, jackass.”There are reasons things are the way they are, if you take any architecture in the world and tell people to rebuild it greenfield, almost none of them would look the same as they do today because we learn things by getting it wrong. That's a great teacher, and it hurts. But it's also true.Amy: And we got to build, right? Like, that's what we're here to do. If we just kind of cycle waiting for the perfect technology, the right choices—and again, to come back to the people who built it at the time used—you know, often we can fault people for this—used the things they know or the things that are nearby, and they make it work. And that's kind of amazing sometimes, right?Like, I'm sure you see architectures frequently, and I see them too, probably less frequently, where you just go, how does this even work in the first place? Like how did you get this to work? Because I'm looking at this diagram or whatever, and I don't understand how this works. Maybe that's a thing that's more a me thing, like, because usually, I can look at a—skim over an architecture document and be, like, be able to build the model up into, like, “Okay, I can see how that kind of works and how the data flows through it.” I get that pretty quickly.And comes back to that, like, just, again, asking, “How did we get here?” And then the cool part about asking how did we get here is it sets everybody up in the room, not just you as the person trying to drive change, but the people you're trying to bring along, the original architects, original engineers, when you ask, how did we get here, you've started them on the path to coming along with you in the future, which is kind of cool. But until—that storytelling mode, again, is so powerful at almost every level of the stack, right? And that's why I just, like, when we were talking about how technical I bring things in, again, like, I'm just not that interested in, like, are you Little Endian or Big Endian? How did we get here is kind of cool. You built a Big Endian architecture in 2022? Like, “Ohh. [laugh]. How do we do that?”Corey: Hey, leave me to my own devices, and I need to build something super quickly to get it up and running, well, what I'm going to do, for a lot of answers is going to look an awful lot like the traditional three-tier architecture that I was running back in 2008. Because I know it, it works well, and I can iterate rapidly on it. Is it a best practice? Absolutely not, but given the constraints, sometimes it's the fastest thing to grab? “Well, if you built this in serverless technologies, it would run at a fraction of the cost.” It's, “Yes, but if I run this thing, the way that I'm running it now, it'll be $20 a month, it'll take me two hours instead of 20. And what exactly is your time worth, again?” It comes down to the better economic model of all these things.Amy: Any time you're trying to make a case to the business, the economic model is going to always go further. Just general tip for tech people, right? Like if you can make the better economic case and you go to the business with an economic case that is clear. Businesses listen to that. They're not going to listen to us go on and on about distributed systems.Somebody in finance trying to make a decision about, like, do we go and spend a million bucks on this, that's not really the material thing. It's like, well, how is this going to move the business forward? And how much is it going to cost us to do it? And what other opportunities are we giving up to do that?Corey: I think that's probably a good place to leave it because there's no good answer. We can all think about that until the next episode. I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me again. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amy: Always Twitter for me, MissAmyTobey, and I'll see you there. Say hi.Corey: Thank you again for being as generous with your time as you are. It's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always fun.Corey: Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix Metal. 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 angry comment that tells me exactly what we got wrong in this episode in the best dialect you have of condescending engineer with zero people skills. I look forward to reading it.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.

About IanIan Smith is Field CTO at Chronosphere where he works across sales, marketing, engineering and product to deliver better insights and outcomes to observability teams supporting high-scale cloud-native environments. Previously, he worked with observability teams across the software industry in pre-sales roles at New Relic, Wavefront, PagerDuty and Lightstep.Links Referenced: Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io Last Tweet in AWS: lasttweetinaws.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: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I find that something I'm working on aligns perfectly with a person that I wind up basically convincing to appear on this show. Today's promoted guest is Ian Smith, who's Field CTO at Chronosphere. Ian, thank you for joining me.Ian: Thanks, Corey. Great to be here.Corey: So, the coincidental aspect of what I'm referring to is that Chronosphere is, despite the name, not something that works on bending time, but rather an observability company. Is that directionally accurate?Ian: That's true. Although you could argue it probably bend a little bit of engineering time. But we can talk about that later.Corey: [laugh]. So, observability is one of those areas that I think is suffering from too many definitions, if that makes sense. And at first, I couldn't make sense of what it was that people actually meant when they said observability, this sort of clarified to me at least when I realized that there were an awful lot of, well, let's be direct and call them ‘legacy monitoring companies' that just chose to take what they were already doing and define that as, “Oh, this is observability.” I don't know that I necessarily agree with that. I know a lot of folks in the industry vehemently disagree.You've been in a lot of places that have positioned you reasonably well to have opinions on this sort of question. To my understanding, you were at interesting places, such as LightStep, New Relic, Wavefront, and PagerDuty, which I guess technically might count as observability in a very strange way. How do you view observability and what it is?Ian: Yeah. Well, a lot of definitions, as you said, common ones, they talk about the three pillars, they talk really about data types. For me, it's about outcomes. I think observability is really this transition from the yesteryear of monitoring where things were much simpler and you, sort of, knew all of the questions, you were able to define your dashboards, you were able to define your alerts and that was really the gist of it. And going into this brave new world where there's a lot of unknown things, you're having to ask a lot of sort of unique questions, particularly during a particular instance, and so being able to ask those questions in an ad hoc fashion layers on top of what we've traditionally done with monitoring. So, observability is sort of that more flexible, more dynamic kind of environment that you have to deal with.Corey: This has always been something that, for me, has been relatively academic. Back when I was running production environments, things tended to be a lot more static, where, “Oh, there's a problem with the database. I will SSH into the database server.” Or, “Hmm, we're having a weird problem with the web tier. Well, there are ten or 20 or 200 web servers. Great, I can aggregate all of their logs to Syslog, and worst case, I can log in and poke around.”Now, with a more ephemeral style of environment where you have Kubernetes or whatnot scheduling containers into place that have problems you can't attach to a running container very easily, and by the time you see an error, that container hasn't existed for three hours. And that becomes a problem. Then you've got the Lambda universe, which is a whole ‘nother world pain, where it becomes very challenging, at least for me, in order to reason using the old style approaches about what's actually going on in your environment.Ian: Yeah, I think there's that and there's also the added complexity of oftentimes you'll see performance or behavioral changes based on even more narrow pathways, right? One particular user is having a problem and the traffic is spread across many containers. Is it making all of these containers perform badly? Not necessarily, but their user experience is being affected. It's very common in say, like, B2B scenarios for you to want to understand the experience of one particular user or the aggregate experience of users at a particular company, particular customer, for example.There's just more complexity. There's more complexity of the infrastructure and just the technical layer that you're talking about, but there's also more complexity in just the way that we're handling use cases and trying to provide value with all of this software to the myriad of customers in different industries that software now serves.Corey: For where I sit, I tend to have a little bit of trouble disambiguating, I guess, the three baseline data types that I see talked about again and again in observability. You have logs, which I think I've mostly I can wrap my head around. That seems to be the baseline story of, “Oh, great. Your application puts out logs. Of course, it's in its own unique, beautiful format. Why wouldn't it be?” In an ideal scenario, they're structured. Things are never ideal, so great. You're basically tailing log files in some cases. Great. I can reason about those.Metrics always seem to be a little bit of a step beyond that. It's okay, I have a whole bunch of log lines that are spitting out every 500 error that my app is throwing—and given my terrible code, it throws a lot—but I can then ideally count the number of times that appears and then that winds up incrementing counter, similar to the way that we used to see with StatsD, for example, and Collectd. Is that directionally correct? As far as the way I reason about, well so far, logs and metrics?Ian: I think at a really basic level, yes. I think that, as we've been talking about, sort of greater complexity starts coming in when you have—particularly metrics in today's world of containers—Prometheus—you mentioned StatsD—Prometheus has become sort of like the standard for expressing those things, so you get situations where you have incredibly high cardinality, so cardinality being the interplay between all the different dimensions. So, you might have, my container is a label, but also the type of endpoint is running on that container as a label, then maybe I want to track my customer organizations and maybe I have 5000 of those. I have 3000 containers, and so on and so forth. And you get this massive explosion, almost multiplicatively.For those in the audience who really live and read cardinality, there's probably someone screaming about well, it's not truly multiplicative in every sense of the word, but, you know, it's close enough from an approximation standpoint. As you get this massive explosion of data, which obviously has a cost implication but also has, I think, a really big implication on the core reason why you have metrics in the first place you alluded to, which is, so a human being can reason about it, right? You don't want to go and look at 5000 log lines; you want to know, out of those 5000 log lines of 4000 errors and I have 1000, OKs. It's very easy for human beings to reason about that from a numbers perspective. When your metrics start to re-explode out into thousands, millions of data points, and unique sort of time series more numbers for you to track, then you're sort of losing that original goal of metrics.Corey: I think I mostly have wrapped my head around the concept. But then that brings us to traces, and that tends to be I think one of the hardest things for me to grasp, just because most of the apps I build, for obvious reasons—namely, I'm bad at programming and most of these are proof of concept type of things rather than anything that's large scale running in production—the difference between a trace and logs tends to get very muddled for me. But the idea being that as you have a customer session or a request that talks to different microservices, how do you collate across different systems all of the outputs of that request into a single place so you can see timing information, understand the flow that user took through your application? Is that again, directionally correct? Have I completely missed the plot here? Which is again, eminently possible. You are the expert.Ian: No, I think that's sort of the fundamental premise or expected value of tracing, for sure. We have something that's akin to a set of logs; they have a common identifier, a trace ID, that tells us that all of these logs essentially belong to the same request. But importantly, there's relationship information. And this is the difference between just having traces—sorry, logs—with just a trace ID attached to them. So, for example, if you have Service A calling Service B and Service C, the relatively simple thing, you could use time to try to figure this out.But what if there are things happening in Service B at the same time there are things happening in Service C and D, and so on and so forth? So, one of the things that tracing brings to the table is it tells you what is currently happening, what called that. So oh, I know that I'm Service D. I was actually called by Service B and I'm not just relying on timestamps to try and figure out that connection. So, you have that information and ultimately, the data model allows you to fully sort of reflect what's happening with the request, particularly in complex environments.And I think this is where, you know, tracing needs to be sort of looked at as not a tool for—just because I'm operating in a modern environment, I'm using some Kubernetes, or I'm using Lambda, is it needs to be used in a scenario where you really have troubles grasping, from a conceptual standpoint, what is happening with the request because you need to actually fully document it. As opposed to, I have a few—let's say three Lambda functions. I maybe have some key metrics about them; I have a little bit of logging. You probably do not need to use tracing to solve, sort of, basic performance problems with those. So, you can get yourself into a place where you're over-engineering, you're spending a lot of time with tracing instrumentation and tracing tooling, and I think that's the core of observability is, like, using the right tool, the right data for the job.But that's also what makes it really difficult because you essentially need to have this, you know, huge set of experience or knowledge about the different data, the different tooling, and what influential architecture and the data you have available to be able to reason about that and make confident decisions, particularly when you're under a time crunch which everyone is familiar with a, sort of like, you know, PagerDuty-style experience of my phone is going off and I have a customer-facing incident. Where is my problem? What do I need to do? Which dashboard do I need to look at? Which tool do I need to investigate? And that's where I think the observability industry has become not serving the outcomes of the customers.Corey: I had a, well, I wouldn't say it's a genius plan, but it was a passing fancy that I've built this online, freely available Twitter client for authoring Twitter threads—because that's what I do is that of having a social life—and it's available at lasttweetinaws.com. I've used that as a testbed for a few things. It's now deployed to roughly 20 AWS regions simultaneously, and this means that I have a bit of a problem as far as how to figure out not even what's wrong or what's broken with this, but who's even using it?Because I know people are. I see invocations all over the planet that are not me. And sometimes it appears to just be random things crawling the internet—fine, whatever—but then I see people logging in and doing stuff with it. I'd kind of like to log and see who's using it just so I can get information like, is there anyone I should talk to about what it could be doing differently? I love getting user experience reports on this stuff.And I figured, ah, this is a perfect little toy application. It runs in a single Lambda function so it's not that complicated. I could instrument this with OpenTelemetry, which then, at least according to the instructions on the tin, I could then send different types of data to different observability tools without having to re-instrument this thing every time I want to kick the tires on something else. That was the promise.And this led to three weeks of pain because it appears that for all of the promise that it has, OpenTelemetry, particularly in a Lambda environment, is nowhere near ready for being able to carry a workload like this. Am I just foolish on this? Am I stating an unfortunate reality that you've noticed in the OpenTelemetry space? Or, let's be clear here, you do work for a company with opinions on these things. Is OpenTelemetry the wrong approach?Ian: I think OpenTelemetry is absolutely the right approach. To me, the promise of OpenTelemetry for the individual is, “Hey, I can go and instrument this thing, as you said and I can go and send the data, wherever I want.” The sort of larger view of that is, “Well, I'm no longer beholden to a vendor,”—including the ones that I've worked for, including the one that I work for now—“For the definition of the data. I am able to control that, I'm able to choose that, I'm able to enhance that, and any effort I put into it, it's mine. I own that.”Whereas previously, if you picked, say, for example, an APM vendor, you said, “Oh, I want to have some additional aspects of my information provider, I want to track my customer, or I want to track a particular new metric of how much dollars am I transacting,” that effort really going to support the value of that individual solution, it's not going to support your outcomes. Which is I want to be able to use this data wherever I want, wherever it's most valuable. So, the core premise of OpenTelemetry, I think, is great. I think it's a massive undertaking to be able to do this for at least three different data types, right? Defining an API across a whole bunch of different languages, across three different data types, and then creating implementations for those.Because the implementations are the thing that people want, right? You are hoping for the ability to, say, drop in something. Maybe one line of code or preferably just, like, attach a dependency, let's say in Java-land at runtime, and be able to have the information flow through and have it complete. And this is the premise of, you know, vendors I've worked with in the past, like New Relic. That was what New Relic built on: the ability to drop in an agent and get visibility immediately.So, having that out-of-the-box visibility is obviously a goal of OpenTelemetry where it makes sense—Go, it's very difficult to attach things at runtime, for example—but then saying, well, whatever is provided—let's say your gRPC connections, database, all these things—well, now I want to go and instrument; I want to add some additional value. As you said, maybe you want to track something like I want to have in my traces the email address of whoever it is or the Twitter handle of whoever is so I can then go and analyze that stuff later. You want to be able to inject that piece of information or that instrumentation and then decide, well, where is the best utilized? Is it best utilized in some tooling from AWS? Is it best utilized in something that you've built yourself? Is it best of utilized an open-source project? Is it best utilized in one of the many observability vendors, or is even becoming more common, I want to shove everything in a data lake and run, sort of, analysis asynchronously, overlay observability data for essentially business purposes.All of those things are served by having a very robust, open-source standard, and simple-to-implement way of collecting a really good baseline of data and then make it easy for you to then enhance that while still owning—essentially, it's your IP right? It's like, the instrumentation is your IP, whereas in the old world of proprietary agents, proprietary APIs, that IP was basically building it, but it was tied to that other vendor that you were investing in.Corey: One thing that I was consistently annoyed by in my days of running production infrastructures at places, like, you know, large banks, for example, one of the problems I kept running into is that this, there's this idea that, “Oh, you want to use our tool. Just instrument your applications with our libraries or our instrumentation standards.” And it felt like I was constantly doing and redoing a lot of instrumentation for different aspects. It's not that we were replacing one vendor with another; it's that in an observability, toolchain, there are remarkably few, one-size-fits-all stories. It feels increasingly like everyone's trying to sell me a multifunction printer, which does one thing well, and a few other things just well enough to technically say they do them, but badly enough that I get irritated every single time.And having 15 different instrumentation packages in an application, that's either got security ramifications, for one, see large bank, and for another it became this increasingly irritating and obnoxious process where it felt like I was spending more time seeing the care and feeding of the instrumentation then I was the application itself. That's the gold—that's I guess the ideal light at the end of the tunnel for me in what OpenTelemetry is promising. Instrument once, and then you're just adjusting configuration as far as where to send it.Ian: That's correct. The organization's, and you know, I keep in touch with a lot of companies that I've worked with, companies that have in the last two years really invested heavily in OpenTelemetry, they're definitely getting to the point now where they're generating the data once, they're using, say, pieces of the OpenTelemetry pipeline, they're extending it themselves, and then they're able to shove that data in a bunch of different places. Maybe they're putting in a data lake for, as I said, business analysis purposes or forecasting. They may be putting the data into two different systems, even for incident and analysis purposes, but you're not having that duplication effort. Also, potentially that performance impact, right, of having two different instrumentation packages lined up with each other.Corey: There is a recurring theme that I've noticed in the observability space that annoys me to no end. And that is—I don't know if it's coming from investor pressure, from folks never being satisfied with what they have, or what it is, but there are so many startups that I have seen and worked with in varying aspects of the observability space that I think, “This is awesome. I love the thing that they do.” And invariably, every time they start getting more and more features bolted onto them, where, hey, you love this whole thing that winds up just basically doing a tail-F on a log file, so it just streams your logs in the application and you can look for certain patterns. I love this thing. It's great.Oh, what's this? Now, it's trying to also be the thing that alerts me and wakes me up in the middle of the night. No. That's what PagerDuty does. I want PagerDuty to do that thing, and I want other things—I want you just to be the log analysis thing and the way that I contextualize logs. And it feels like they keep bolting things on and bolting things on, where everything is more or less trying to evolve into becoming its own version of Datadog. What's up with that?Ian: Yeah, the sort of, dreaded platform play. I—[laugh] I was at New Relic when there were essentially two products that they sold. And then by the time I left, I think there was seven different products that were being sold, which is kind of a crazy, crazy thing when you think about it. And I think Datadog has definitely exceeded that now. And I definitely see many, many vendors in the market—and even open-source solutions—sort of presenting themselves as, like, this integrated experience.But to your point, even before about your experience of these banks it oftentimes become sort of a tick-a-box feature approach of, “Hey, I can do this thing, so buy more. And here's a shared navigation panel.” But are they really integrated? Like, are you getting real value out of it? One of the things that I do in my role is I get to work with our internal product teams very closely, particularly around new initiatives like tracing functionality, and the constant sort of conversation is like, “What is the outcome? What is the value?”It's not about the feature; it's not about having a list of 19 different features. It's like, “What is the user able to do with this?” And so, for example, there are lots of platforms that have metrics, logs, and tracing. The new one-upmanship is saying, “Well, we have events as well. And we have incident response. And we have security. And all these things sort of tie together, so it's one invoice.”And constantly I talk to customers, and I ask them, like, “Hey, what are the outcomes that you're getting when you've invested so heavily in one vendor?” And oftentimes, the response is, “Well, I only need to deal with one vendor.” Okay, but that's not an outcome. [laugh]. And it's like the business having a single invoice.Corey: Yeah, that is something that's already attainable today. If you want to just have one vendor with a whole bunch of crappy offerings, that's what AWS is for. They have AmazonBasics versions of everything you might want to use in production. Oh, you want to go ahead and use MongoDB? Well, use AmazonBasics MongoDB, but they call it DocumentDB because of course they do. And so, on and so forth.There are a bunch of examples of this, but those companies are still in business and doing very well because people often want the genuine article. If everyone was trying to do just everything to check a box for procurement, great. AWS has already beaten you at that game, it seems.Ian: I do think that, you know, people are hoping for that greater value and those greater outcomes, so being able to actually provide differentiation in that market I don't think is terribly difficult, right? There are still huge gaps in let's say, root cause analysis during an investigation time. There are huge issues with vendors who don't think beyond sort of just the one individual who's looking at a particular dashboard or looking at whatever analysis tool there is. So, getting those things actually tied together, it's not just, “Oh, we have metrics, and logs, and traces together,” but even if you say we have metrics and tracing, how do you move between metrics and tracing? One of the goals in the way that we're developing product at Chronosphere is that if you are alerted to an incident—you as an engineer; doesn't matter whether you are massively sophisticated, you're a lead architect who has been with the company forever and you know everything or you're someone who's just come out of onboarding and is your first time on call—you should not have to think, “Is this a tracing problem, or a metrics problem, or a logging problem?”And this is one of those things that I mentioned before of requiring that really heavy level of knowledge and understanding about the observability space and your data and your architecture to be effective. And so, with the, you know, particularly observability teams and all of the engineers that I speak with on a regular basis, you get this sort of circumstance where well, I guess, let's talk about a real outcome and a real pain point because people are like, okay, yeah, this is all fine; it's all coming from a vendor who has a particular agenda, but the thing that constantly resonates is for large organizations that are moving fast, you know, big startups, unicorns, or even more traditional enterprises that are trying to undergo, like, a rapid transformation and go really cloud-native and make sure their engineers are moving quickly, a common question I will talk about with them is, who are the three people in your organization who always get escalated to? And it's usually, you know, between two and five people—Corey: And you can almost pick those perso—you say that and you can—at least anyone who's worked in environments or through incidents like this more than a few times, already have thought of specific people in specific companies. And they almost always fall into some very predictable archetypes. But please, continue.Ian: Yeah. And people think about these people, they always jump to mind. And one of the things I asked about is, “Okay, so when you did your last innovation around observably”—it's not necessarily buying a new thing, but it maybe it was like introducing a new data type or it was you're doing some big investment in improving instrumentation—“What changed about their experience?” And oftentimes, the most that can come out is, “Oh, they have access to more data.” Okay, that's not great.It's like, “What changed about their experience? Are they still getting woken up at 3 am? Are they constantly getting pinged all the time?” One of the vendors that I worked at, when they would go down, there were three engineers in the company who were capable of generating list of customers who are actually impacted by damage. And so, every single incident, one of those three engineers got paged into the incident.And it became borderline intolerable for them because nothing changed. And it got worse, you know? The platform got bigger and more complicated, and so there were more incidents and they were the ones having to generate that. But from a business level, from an observability outcomes perspective, if you zoom all the way up, it's like, “Oh, were we able to generate the list of customers?” “Yes.”And this is where I think the observability industry has sort of gotten stuck—you know, at least one of the ways—is that, “Oh, can you do it?” “Yes.” “But is it effective?” “No.” And by effective, I mean those three engineers become the focal point for an organization.And when I say three—you know, two to five—it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a team of a hundred or you're talking about a team of a thousand. It's always the same number of people. And as you get bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more of a problem. So, does the tooling actually make a difference to them? And you might ask, “Well, what do you expect from the tooling? What do you expect to do for them?” Is it you give them deeper analysis tools? Is it, you know, you do AI Ops? No.The answer is, how do you take the capabilities that those people have and how do you spread it across a larger population of engineers? And that, I think, is one of those key outcomes of observability that no one, whether it be in open-source or the vendor side is really paying a lot of attention to. It's always about, like, “Oh, we can just shove more data in. By the way, we've got petabyte scale and we can deal with, you know, 2 billion active time series, and all these other sorts of vanity measures.” But we've gotten really far away from the outcomes. It's like, “Am I getting return on investment of my observability tooling?”And I think tracing is this—as you've said, it can be difficult to reason about right? And people are not sure. They're feeling, “Well, I'm in a microservices environment; I'm in cloud-native; I need tracing because my older APM tools appear to be failing me. I'm just going to go and wriggle my way through implementing OpenTelemetry.” Which has significant engineering costs. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but there is a significant engineering cost—and then I don't know what to expect, so I'm going to go on through my data somewhere and see whether we can achieve those outcomes.And I do a pilot and my most sophisticated engineers are in the pilot. And they're able to solve the problems. Okay, I'm going to go buy that thing. But I've just transferred my problems. My engineers have gone from solving problems in maybe logs and grepping through petabytes worth of logs to using some sort of complex proprietary query language to go through your tens of petabytes of trace data but actually haven't solved any problem. I've just moved it around and probably just cost myself a lot, both in terms of engineering time and real dollars spent as well.Corey: One of the challenges that I'm seeing across the board is that observability, for certain use cases, once you start to see what it is and its potential for certain applications—certainly not all; I want to hedge that a little bit—but it's clear that there is definite and distinct value versus other ways of doing things. The problem is, is that value often becomes apparent only after you've already done it and can see what that other side looks like. But let's be honest here. Instrumenting an application is going to take some significant level of investment, in many cases. How do you wind up viewing any return on investment that it takes for the very real cost, if only in people's time, to go ahead instrumenting for observability in complex environments?Ian: So, I think that you have to look at the fundamentals, right? You have to look at—pretend we knew nothing about tracing. Pretend that we had just invented logging, and you needed to start small. It's like, I'm not going to go and log everything about every application that I've had forever. What I need to do is I need to find the points where that logging is going to be the most useful, most impactful, across the broadest audience possible.And one of the useful things about tracing is because it's built in distributed environments, primarily for distributed environments, you can look at, for example, the biggest intersection of requests. A lot of people have things like API Gateways, or they have parts of a monolith which is still handling a lot of requests routing; those tend to be areas to start digging into. And I would say that, just like for anyone who's used Prometheus or decided to move away from Prometheus, no one's ever gone and evaluated Prometheus solution without having some sort of Prometheus data, right? You don't go, “Hey, I'm going to evaluate a replacement for Prometheus or my StatsD without having any data, and I'm simultaneously going to generate my data and evaluate the solution at the same time.” It doesn't make any sense.With tracing, you have decent open-source projects out there that allow you to visualize individual traces and understand sort of the basic value you should be getting out of this data. So, it's a good starting point to go, “Okay, can I reason about a single request? Can I go and look at my request end-to-end, even in a relatively small slice of my environment, and can I see the potential for this? And can I think about the things that I need to be able to solve with many traces?” Once you start developing these ideas, then you can have a better idea of, “Well, where do I go and invest more in instrumentation? Look, databases never appear to be a problem, so I'm not going to focus on database instrumentation. What's the real problem is my external dependencies. Facebook API is the one that everyone loves to use. I need to go instrument that.”And then you start to get more clarity. Tracing has this interesting network effect. You can basically just follow the breadcrumbs. Where is my biggest problem here? Where are my errors coming from? Is there anything else further down the call chain? And you can sort of take that exploratory approach rather than doing everything up front.But it is important to do something before you start trying to evaluate what is my end state. End state obviously being sort of nebulous term in today's world, but where do I want to be in two years' time? I would like to have a solution. Maybe it's open-source solution, maybe it's a vendor solution, maybe it's one of those platform solutions we talked about, but how do I get there? It's really going to be I need to take an iterative approach and I need to be very clear about the value and outcomes.There's no point in doing a whole bunch of instrumentation effort in things that are just working fine, right? You want to go and focus your time and attention on that. And also you don't want to go and burn just singular engineers. The observability team's purpose in life is probably not to just write instrumentation or just deploy OpenTelemetry. Because then we get back into the land where engineers themselves know nothing about the monitoring or observability they're doing and it just becomes a checkbox of, “I dropped in an agent. Oh, when it comes time for me to actually deal with an incident, I don't know anything about the data and the data is insufficient.”So, a level of ownership supported by the observability team is really important. On that return on investment, sort of, though it's not just the instrumentation effort. There's product training and there are some very hard costs. People think oftentimes, “Well, I have the ability to pay a vendor; that's really the only cost that I have.” There's things like egress costs, particularly volumes of data. There's the infrastructure costs. A lot of the times there will be elements you need to run in your own environment; those can be very costly as well, and ultimately, they're sort of icebergs in this overall ROI conversation.The other side of it—you know, return and investment—return, there's a lot of difficulty in reasoning about, as you said, what is the value of this going to be if I go through all this effort? Everyone knows a sort of, you know, meme or archetype of, “Hey, here are three options; pick two because there's always going to be a trade off.” Particularly for observability, it's become an element of, I need to pick between performance, data fidelity, or cost. Pick two. And when data fidelity—particularly in tracing—I'm talking about the ability to not sample, right?If you have edge cases, if you have narrow use cases and ways you need to look at your data, if you heavily sample, you lose data fidelity. But oftentimes, cost is a reason why you do that. And then obviously, performance as you start to get bigger and bigger datasets. So, there's a lot of different things you need to balance on that return. As you said, oftentimes you don't get to understand the magnitude of those until you've got the full data set in and you're trying to do this, sort of, for real. But being prepared and iterative as you go through this effort and not saying, “Okay, well, I'm just going to buy everything from one vendor because I'm going to assume that's going to solve my problem,” is probably that undercurrent there.Corey: As I take a look across the entire ecosystem, I can't shake the feeling—and my apologies in advance if this is an observation, I guess, that winds up throwing a stone directly at you folks—Ian: Oh, please.Corey: But I see that there's a strong observability community out there that is absolutely aligned with the things I care about and things I want to do, and then there's a bunch of SaaS vendors, where it seems that they are, in many cases, yes, advancing the state of the art, I am not suggesting for a second that money is making observability worse. But I do think that when the tool you sell is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail—or in my case, like my thumb. Do you think that there's a chance that SaaS vendors are in some ways making this entire space worse?Ian: As we've sort of gone into more cloud-native scenarios and people are building things specifically to take advantage of cloud from a complexity standpoint, from a scaling standpoint, you start to get, like, vertical issues happening. So, you have things like we're going to charge on a per-container basis; we're going to charge on a per-host basis; we're going to charge based off the amount of gigabytes that you send us. These are sort of like more horizontal pricing models, and the way the SaaS vendors have delivered this is they've made it pretty opaque, right? Everyone has experiences, or has jerks about overages from observability vendors' massive spikes. I've worked with customers who have used—accidentally used some features and they've been billed a quarter million dollars on a monthly basis for accidental overages from a SaaS vendor.And these are all terrible things. Like, but we've gotten used to this. Like, we've just accepted it, right, because everyone is operating this way. And I really do believe that the move to SaaS was one of those things. Like, “Oh, well, you're throwing us more data, and we're charging you more for it.” As a vendor—Corey: Which sort of erodes your own value proposition that you're bringing to the table. I mean, I don't mean to be sitting over here shaking my fist yelling, “Oh, I could build a better version in a weekend,” except that I absolutely know how to build a highly available Rsyslog cluster. I've done it a handful of times already and the technology is still there. Compare and contrast that with, at scale, the fact that I'm paying 50 cents per gigabyte ingested to CloudWatch logs, or a multiple of that for a lot of other vendors, it's not that much harder for me to scale that fleet out and pay a much smaller marginal cost.Ian: And so, I think the reaction that we're seeing in the market and we're starting to see—we're starting to see the rise of, sort of, a secondary class of vendor. And by secondary, I don't mean that they're lesser; I mean that they're, sort of like, specifically trying to address problems of the primary vendors, right? Everyone's aware of vendors who are attempting to reduce—well, let's take the example you gave on logs, right? There are vendors out there whose express purpose is to reduce the cost of your logging observability. They just sit in the middle; they are a middleman, right?Essentially, hey, use our tool and even though you're going to pay us a whole bunch of money, it's going to generate an overall return that is greater than if you had just continued pumping all of your logs over to your existing vendor. So, that's great. What we think really needs to happen, and one of the things we're doing at Chronosphere—unfortunate plug—is we're actually building those capabilities into the solution so it's actually end-to-end. And by end-to-end, I mean, a solution where I can ingest my data, I can preprocess my data, I can store it, query it, visualize it, all those things, aligned with open-source standards, but I have control over that data, and I understand what's going on with particularly my cost and my usage. I don't just get a bill at the end of the month going, “Hey, guess what? You've spent an additional $200,000.”Instead, I can know in real time, well, what is happening with my usage. And I can attribute it. It's this team over here. And it's because they added this particular label. And here's a way for you, right now, to address that and cap it so it doesn't cost you anything and it doesn't have a blast radius of, you know, maybe degraded performance or degraded fidelity of the data.That though is diametrically opposed to the way that most vendors are set up. And unfortunately, the open-source projects tend to take a lot of their cues, at least recently, from what's happening in the vendor space. One of the ways that you can think about it is a sort of like a speed of light problem. Everyone knows that, you know, there's basic fundamental latency; everyone knows how fast disk is; everyone knows the, sort of like, you can't just make your computations happen magically, there's a cost of running things horizontally. But a lot of the way that the vendors have presented efficiency to the market is, “Oh, we're just going to incrementally get faster as AWS gets faster. We're going to incrementally get better as compression gets better.”And of course, you can't go and fit a petabyte worth of data into a kilobyte, unless you're really just doing some sort of weird dictionary stuff, so you feel—you're dealing with some fundamental constraints. And the vendors just go, “I'm sorry, you know, we can't violate the speed of light.” But what you can do is you can start taking a look at, well, how is the data valuable, and start giving the people controls on how to make it more valuable. So, one of the things that we do with Chronosphere is we allow you to reshape Prometheus metrics, right? You go and express Prometheus metrics—let's say it's a business metric about how many transactions you're doing as a business—you don't need that on a per-container basis, particularly if you're running 100,000 containers globally.When you go and take a look at that number on a dashboard, or you alert on it, what is it? It's one number, one time series. Maybe you break it out per region. You have five regions, you don't need 100,000 data points every minute behind that. It's very expensive, it's not very performant, and as we talked about earlier, it's very hard to reason about as a human being.So, giving the tools to be able to go and condense that data down and make it more actionable and more valuable, you get performance, you get cost reduction, and you get the value that you ultimately need out of the data. And it's one of the reasons why, I guess, I work at Chronosphere. Which I'm hoping is the last observability [laugh] venture I ever work for.Corey: Yeah, for me a lot of the data that I see in my logs, which is where a lot of this stuff starts and how I still contextualize these things, is nonsense that I don't care about and will never care about. I don't care about load balance or health checks. I don't particularly care about 200 results for the favicon when people visit the site. I care about other things, but just weed out the crap, especially when I'm paying by the pound—or at least by the gigabyte—in order to get that data into something. Yeah. It becomes obnoxious and difficult to filter out.Ian: Yeah. And the vendors just haven't done any of that because why would they, right? If you went and reduced the amount of log—Corey: Put engineering effort into something that reduces how much I can charge you? That sounds like lunacy. Yeah.Ian: Exactly. They're business models entirely based off it. So, if you went and reduced every one's logging bill by 30%, or everyone's logging volume by 30% and reduced the bills by 30%, it's not going to be a great time if you're a publicly traded company who has built your entire business model on essentially a very SaaS volume-driven—and in my eyes—relatively exploitative pricing and billing model.Corey: Ian, I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to talk to me about this. If people want to learn more, where can they find you? I mean, you are a Field CTO, so clearly you're outstanding in your field. But if, assuming that people don't want to go to farm country, where's the best place to find you?Ian: Yeah. Well, it'll be a bunch of different conferences. I'll be at KubeCon this year. But chronosphere.io is the company website. I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different customers, not from a hard sell perspective, but you know, conversations like this about what are the real problems you're having and what are the things that you sort of wish that you could do?One of the favorite things that I get to ask people is, “If you could wave a magic wand, what would you love to be able to do with your observability solution?” That's, A, a really great part, but oftentimes be being able to say, “Well, actually, that thing you want to do, I think I have a way to accomplish that,” is a really rewarding part of this particular role.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Ian: Thanks, Corey. It's great to be here.Corey: Ian Smith, Field CTO at Chronosphere on this promoted guest episode. 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 angry comment, which going to be super easy in your case, because it's just one of the things that the omnibus observability platform that your company sells offers as part of its full suite of things you've never used.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.

Amazon tried to grow the sales of its private label brands, like AmazonBasics, by adding more products. But rather than juice sales, it's created new headaches — especially with regulators. WSJ's Dana Mattioli explains why Amazon is starting to scale back. Further Reading: - Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products  - Amazon Has Been Slashing Private-Label Selection Amid Weak Sales  Further Listening: - ​​How Amazon Employees Used Sellers' Data Against Them  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First, we discuss Bolt's declining customer base and struggles with The Information's Malique Morris (02:50). In addition, we discuss Fast, Amazon's "Buy with Prime," ShopPay (25:35) and all the other developments in online checkout. Next, we cover a massive spike in Ethereum gas prices from Yuga Labs and Solana's bot attack (55:12). We wrap with our Startup of the Day: Gravity Sketch, a 3D design platform (1:11:35). (00:00) Jason and Molly introduce today's show (02:50) Last Thursday, The Information's Malique Morris published an article on Bolt's declining customer base and struggles, he joins us to discuss (12:19) Ourcrowd - Check out the deal of the week at https://ourcrowd.com/twist (13:26) Speaking to Domm Holland and Ryan Breslow, how are they different? (24:19) Fiverr - Sign up for https://Fiverr.com/Business free for the first year and save 10% on your purchase with promo code JASON (25:35) Amazon's “Buy with Prime” and their Amazon Basics monopoly (32:12) First Republic Bank - Discover what a long-term financial relationship can do for you. Visit https://firstrepublic.com/startup today to learn more. (33:08) Stripe doing their own Fast checkout, competing against their own investment? (46:20) Wrapping up with Malique Morris (48:50) Spring energy in New York (55:12) WEB 3 is going great update (1:11:35) We Live in the Future with our Startup of the Day: Gravity Sketch, a 3D design platform Read Malique's Article: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/bolt-a-checkout-startup-worth-11-billion-has-been-losing-customers-as-revenue-stalls FOLLOW Malique: https://twitter.com/luxeoflique FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

The Amanda Palmer Method; Truth Social stumbles; Heardle through the grapevine; wings in the metaverse; Amazon Basics tied to forced labor; Twitter launches Tor service; Limewire is back... with NFTs; Musk is a free speech absolutist; executive order on crypto; Star Trek; After Yang; the Cure & Eddie Izzard; Upload is back; Dekalog & Three Colours; Dropbox drops update for macOS; Clash Royale anniversary; A.G. Riddle; more iOT rants; Samsung hack; RadioShack; Obi-Wan and Star Wars Galatic Starcruiser; Things Dave Likes; disco number twos.Show notes at https://gog.show/544/FOLLOW UPI quit my dream job in TV to become a TikToker, and it was the best decision I've ever madeDonald Trump is furious about the stumbling launch of his social media app Truth Social, report says'Heardle' is like 'Wordle' for the musically inclinedIN THE NEWSWingstop has filed a trademark to sell chicken wings in the metaverseAmazon suppliers reportedly have ties to forced labor camps in ChinaHBO hit with class action lawsuit for allegedly sharing subscriber data with FacebookTwitter Launches Tor Onion Service Making Site Easier to Access in RussiaLimeWire is back... as an NFT marketplaceMusk says Starlink won't block Russian media outlets ‘unless at gunpoint'Tesla violated labor laws by blocking union organizing, judge rulesBiden's executive order on cryptocurrencies zeros in on 6 priorities and 'urgency' in exploring the creation of a US digital dollarCryptocurrency Is No Fix for Russia's Sanctions WoesCoinbase blocks over 25,000 Russian-linked crypto addressesMEDIA CANDYStar Trek: DiscoveryStar Trek: PicardA Small-Scale Sci-Fi Film That Asks the Genre's Biggest QuestionAfter YangBitTorrent is Still the King of Upstream Internet Traffic, But for How Long?Robert Smith just told us The Cure's new album title at the BandLab NME Awards 2022Eddie Izzard - WunderbarEddie Izzard - Dress to KillUpload Season 2YouTube offers popular podcasts $50K in cash to pivot to videoCommon Sense 323 – Gas Up the Cold WarDekalogThree Colours trilogyAPPS & DOODADSDropbox releases official update for its macOS app with M1 supportGoogle says the latest Chrome on Mac outperforms SafariJason's Character in Clash RoyaleA Book of Secrets: Finding Solace in a Stubborn World by Derren BrownAT THE LIBRARYThe Extinction Trials by A.G. RiddleSECURITY HAH!The CyberWireDave BittnerHacking HumansCaveatDave's iOT update - Kind advice via Twitter from Kyle CorreaHomebridgeHOOBSStacey on IoT PodcastSamsung confirms hackers compromised its systems and stole Galaxy source codeDon't celebrate RadioShack's crypto pivot — it's just a Tai Lopez schemeGrippy Textured Non-Slip Microfiber Cleaning Cloth Wipes (6"x7") Premium for Glasses, Camera Lens, Cellphone, Phone Screen, Glass, Eyeglasses, 3-PackPluto PillowLumiLux Toilet Light with Motion Detection Sensor - 16-Color LED Bathroom Toilet Bowl Light (White)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.