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Peter van Hardenberg talks about Industrialists vs. Academics, Ink&Switch's evolution over time, the Hollywood Model, internal lab infrastructure, and more! Peter is the lab director and CEO of Ink&Switch, a private, creator oriented, computing research lab.  References Ink&Switch (and their many publications) The Hollywood Model in R&D Idea Machines Episode with Adam Wiggins Paul Erdós Transcript Peter Van Hardenberg [00:01:21] Ben: Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Peter van Hardenbergh. Peter is the lab director and CEO of Inkin switch. Private creator oriented, competing research lab. I talked to Adam Wiggins, one of inkind switches founders, [00:01:35] way back in episode number four. It's amazing to see the progress they've made as an organization. They've built up an incredible community of fellow travelers and consistently released research reports that gesture at possibilities for competing that are orthogonal to the current hype cycles. Peter frequently destroys my complacency with his ability to step outside the way that research has normally done and ask, how should we be operating, given our constraints and goals. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Peter. Would you break down your distinction between academics and industrialists [00:02:08] Peter: Okay. Academics are people whose incentive structure is connected to the institutional rewards of the publishing industry, right? You, you publish papers. And you get tenure and like, it's a, it's, it's not so cynical or reductive, but like fundamentally the time cycles are long, right? Like you have to finish work according to when, you know, submission deadlines for a conference are, you know, you're [00:02:35] working on something now. You might come back to it next quarter or next year or in five years, right? Whereas when you're in industry, you're connected to users, you're connected to people at the end of the day who need to touch and hold and use the thing. And you know, you have to get money from them to keep going. And so you have a very different perspective on like time and money and space and what's possible. And the real challenge in terms of connecting these two, you know, I didn't invent the idea of pace layers, right? They, they operate at different pace layers. Academia is often intergenerational, right? Whereas industry is like, you have to make enough money every quarter. To keep the bank account from going below zero or everybody goes home, [00:03:17] Ben: Right. Did. Was it Stuart Brand who invented pace [00:03:22] Peter: believe it was Stewart Brand. Pace layers. Yeah. [00:03:25] Ben: That actually I, I'd never put these two them together, but the, the idea I, I, I think about impedance mismatches between [00:03:35] organizations a lot. And that really sort of like clicks with pace layers Exactly. Right. Where it's like [00:03:39] Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think in a big way what we're doing at, Ink& Switch on some level is trying to provide like synchro mesh between academia and industry, right? Because they, the academics are moving on a time scale and with an ambition that's hard for industry to match, right? But also, Academics. Often I think in computer science are like, have a shortage of good understanding about what the real problems people are facing in the world today are. They're not disinterested. [00:04:07] Ben: just computer [00:04:08] Peter: Those communication channels don't exist cuz they don't speak the same language, they don't use the same terminology, they don't go to the same conferences, they don't read the same publications. Right. [00:04:18] Ben: Yeah. [00:04:18] Peter: so vice versa, you know, we find things in industry that are problems and then it's like you go read the papers and talk to some scientists. I was like, oh dang. Like. We know how to solve this. It's just nobody's built it. [00:04:31] Ben: Yeah. [00:04:32] Peter: Or more accurately it would be to say [00:04:35] there's a pretty good hunch here about something that might work, and maybe we can connect the two ends of this together. [00:04:42] Ben: Yeah. Often, I, I think of it as someone, someone has, it is a quote unquote solved problem, but there are a lot of quote unquote, implementation details and those implementation details require a year of work. [00:04:56] Peter: yeah, a year or many years? Or an entire startup, or a whole career or two? Yeah. And, and speaking of, Ink&Switch, I don't know if we've ever talked about, so a switch has been around for more than half a decade, right? [00:05:14] Peter: Yeah, seven or eight years now, I think I could probably get the exact number, but yeah, about that. [00:05:19] Ben: And. I think I don't have a good idea in my head over that time. What, what has changed about in, can switches, conception of itself and like how you do things. Like what is, what are some of the biggest things that have have changed over that time?[00:05:35] [00:05:35] Peter: So I think a lot of it could be summarized as professionalization. But I, I'll give a little brief history and can switch began because the. You know, original members of the lab wanted to do a startup that was Adam James and Orion, but they recognized that they didn't, they weren't happy with computing and where computers were, and they knew that they wanted to make something that would be a tool that would help people who were solving the world's problems work better. That's kinda a vague one, but You know, they were like, well, we're not physicists, we're not social scientists. You know, we can't solve climate change or radicalization directly, or you know, the journalism crisis or whatever, but maybe we can build tools, right? We know how to make software tools. Let's build tools for the people who are solving the problems. Because right now a lot of those systems they rely on are getting like steadily worse every day. And I think they still are like the move to the cloud disempowerment of the individual, like, you [00:06:35] know, surveillance technology, distraction technology. And Tristan Harris is out there now. Like hammering on some of these points. But there's just a lot of things that are like slow and fragile and bad and not fun to work with and lose your, you know, lose your work product. You know, [00:06:51] Ben: Yeah, software as a service more generally. [00:06:54] Peter: Yeah. And like, there's definitely advantages. It's not like, you know, people are rational actors, but something was lost. And so the idea was well go do a bit of research, figure out what the shape of the company is, and then just start a company and, you know, get it all solved and move on. And I think the biggest difference, at least, you know, aside from scale and like actual knowledge is just kind of the dawning realization at some point that like there won't really be an end state to this problem. Like this isn't a thing that's transitional where you kind of come in and you do some research for a bit, and then we figure out the answer and like fold up the card table and move on to the next thing. It's like, oh no, this, this thing's gotta stick around because these problems aren't gonna [00:07:35] go away. And when we get through this round of problems, we already see what the next round are. And that's probably gonna go on for longer than any of us will be working. And so the vision now, at least from my perspective as the current lab director, is much more like, how can I get this thing to a place where it can sustain for 10 years, for 50 years, however long it takes, and you know, to become a place that. Has a culture that can sustain, you know, grow and change as new people come in. But that can sustain operations indefinitely. [00:08:07] Ben: Yeah. And, and so to circle back to the. The, the jumping off point for this, which is sort of since, since it began, what have been some of the biggest changes of how you operate? How you, or just like the, the model more generally or, or things that you were [00:08:30] Peter: Yeah, so the beginning was very informal, but, so maybe I'll skip over the first like [00:08:35] little period where it was just sort of like, Finding our footing. But around the time when I joined, we were just four or five people. And we did one project, all of us together at a time, and we just sort of like, someone would write a proposal for what we should do next, and then we would argue about like whether it was the right next thing. And, you know, eventually we would pick a thing and then we would go and do that project and we would bring in some contractors and we called it the Hollywood model. We still call it the Hollywood model. Because it was sort of structured like a movie production. We would bring in, you know, to our little core team, we'd bring in a couple specialists, you know, the equivalent of a director of photography or like a, you know, a casting director or whatever, and you bring in the people that you need to accomplish the task. Oh, we don't know how to do Bluetooth on the web. Okay. Find a Bluetooth person. Oh, there's a bunch of crypto stuff, cryptography stuff. Just be clear on this upcoming project, we better find somebody who knows, you know, the ins and outs of like, which cryptography algorithms to use or [00:09:35] what, how to build stuff in C Sharp for Windows platform or Surface, whatever the, the project was over time. You know, we got pretty good at that and I think one of the biggest changes, sort of after we kind of figured out how to actually do work was the realization that. Writing about the work not only gave us a lot of leverage in terms of our sort of visibility in the community and our ability to attract talent, but also the more we put into the writing, the more we learned about the research and that the process of, you know, we would do something and then write a little internal report and then move on. But the process of taking the work that we do, And making it legible to the outside world and explaining why we did it and what it means and how it fits into the bigger picture. That actually like being very diligent and thorough in documenting all of that greatly increases our own understanding of what we did.[00:10:35] And that was like a really pleasant and interesting surprise. I think one of my sort of concerns as lab director is that we got really good at that and we write all these like, Obscenely long essays that people claim to read. You know, hacker News comments on extensively without reading. But I think a lot about, you know, I always worry about the orthodoxy of doing the same thing too much and whether we're sort of falling into patterns, so we're always tinkering with new kind of project systems or new ways of working or new kinds of collaborations. And so yeah, that's ongoing. But this, this. The key elements of our system are we bring together a team that has both longer term people with domain contexts about the research, any required specialists who understand like interesting or important technical aspects of the work. And then we have a specific set of goals to accomplish [00:11:35] with a very strict time box. And then when it's done, we write and we put it down. And I think this avoids number of the real pitfalls in more open-ended research. It has its own shortcomings, right? But one of the big pitfalls that avoids is the kind of like meandering off and losing sight of what you're doing. And you can get great results from that in kind of a general research context. But we're very much an industrial research context. We're trying to connect real problems to specific directions to solve them. And so the time box kind of creates the fear of death. You're like, well, I don't wanna run outta time and not have anything to show for it. So you really get focused on trying to deliver things. Now sometimes that's at the cost, like the breadth or ambition of a solution to a particular thing, but I think it helps us really keep moving forward. [00:12:21] Ben: Yeah, and, and you no longer have everybody in the lab working on the same projects, right. [00:12:28] Peter: Yeah. So today, at any given time, The sort of population of the lab fluctuates between sort of [00:12:35] like eight and 15 people, depending on, you know, whether we have a bunch of projects in full swing or you know, how you count contractors. But we usually, at the moment we have sort of three tracks of research that we're doing. And those are local first software Programmable Inc. And Malleable software. [00:12:54] Ben: Nice. And so I, I actually have questions both about the, the write-ups that you do and the Hollywood model and so on, on the Hollywood model. Do you think that I, I, and this is like, do you think that the, the Hollywood model working in, in a. Industrial Research lab is particular to software in the sense that I feel like the software industry, people change jobs fairly frequently. Contracting is really common. Contractors are fairly fluid and. [00:13:32] Peter: You mean in terms of being able to staff and source people?[00:13:35] [00:13:35] Ben: Yeah, and people take, like, take these long sabbaticals, right? Where it's like, it's not uncommon in the software industry for someone to, to take six months between jobs. [00:13:45] Peter: I think it's very hard for me to generalize about the properties of other fields, so I want to try and be cautious in my evaluation here. What I would say is that, I think the general principle of having a smaller core of longer term people who think and gain a lot of context about a problem and pairing them up with people who have fresh ideas and relevant expertise, does not require you to have any particular industry structure. Right. There are lots of ways of solving this problem. Go to a research, another research organization and write a paper with someone from [00:14:35] an adjacent field. If you're in academia, right? If you're in a company, you can do a partnership you know, hire, you know, I think a lot of fields of science have much longer cycles, right? If you're doing material science, you know, takes a long time to build test apparatus and to formulate chemistries. Like [00:14:52] Ben: Yeah. [00:14:52] Peter: someone for several years, right? Like, That's fine. Get a detach detachment from another part of the company and bring someone as a secondment. Like I think that the general principle though, of putting together a mixture of longer and shorter term people with the right set of skills, yes, we solve it a particular way in our domain. But I don't think that that's software u unique to software. [00:15:17] Ben: Would, would it be overreaching to map that onto professors and postdocs and grad students where you have the professor who is the, the person who's been working on the, the program for a long time has all the context and then you have postdocs and grad students [00:15:35] coming through the lab. [00:15:38] Peter: Again, I need to be thoughtful about. How I evaluate fields that I'm less experienced with, but both my parents went through grad school and I've certainly gotten to know a number of academics. My sense of the relationship between professors and or sort of PhD, yeah, I guess professors and their PhD students, is that it's much more likely that the PhD students are given sort of a piece of the professor's vision to execute. [00:16:08] Ben: Yeah. [00:16:09] Peter: And that that is more about scaling the research interests of the professor. And I don't mean this in like a negative way but I think it's quite different [00:16:21] Ben: different. [00:16:22] Peter: than like how DARPA works or how I can switch works with our research tracks in that it's, I it's a bit more prescriptive and it's a bit more of like a mentor-mentee kind of relationship as [00:16:33] Ben: Yeah. More training.[00:16:35] [00:16:35] Peter: Yeah. And you know, that's, that's great. I mean, postdocs are a little different again, but I think, I think that's different than say how DARPA works or like other institutional research groups. [00:16:49] Ben: Yeah. Okay. I, I wanted to see how, how far I could stretch the, stretch [00:16:55] Peter: in academia there's famous stories about Adosh who would. Turn up on your doorstep you know, with a suitcase and a bottle of amphetamines and say, my, my brain is open, or something to that effect. And then you'd co-author a paper and pay his room and board until you found someone else to send him to.   I think that's closer in the sense that, right, like, here's this like, great problem solver with a lot of like domain skills and he would parachute into a place where someone was working on something interesting and help them make a breakthrough with it. [00:17:25] Ben: Yeah. I think the, the thing that I want to figure out, just, you know, long, longer term is how to. Make those [00:17:35] short term collaborations happen when with, with like, I, I I think it's like, like there's some, there's some coy intention like in, in the sense of like Robert Kos around like organizational boundaries when you have people coming in and doing things in a temporary sense. [00:17:55] Peter: Yeah, academia is actually pretty good at this, right? With like paper co-authors. I mean, again, this is like the, the pace layers thing. When you have a whole bunch of people organized in an industry and a company around a particular outcome, You tend to have like very specific goals and commitments and you're, you're trying to execute against those and it's much harder to get that kind of like more fluid movement between domains. [00:18:18] Ben: Yeah, and [00:18:21] Peter: That's why I left working in companies, right? Cause like I have run engineering processes and built products and teams and it's like someone comes to me with a really good idea and I'm like, oh, it's potentially very interesting, but like, [00:18:33] Ben: but We [00:18:34] Peter: We got [00:18:35] customers who have outages who are gonna leave if we don't fix the thing, we've got users falling out of our funnel. Cause we don't do basic stuff like you just, you really have a lot of work to do to make the thing go [00:18:49] Ben: Yeah. [00:18:49] Peter: business. And you know, my experience of research labs within businesses is that they're almost universally unsuccessful. There are exceptions, but I think they're more coincidental than, than designed. [00:19:03] Ben: Yeah. And I, I think less and less successful over time is, is my observation that. [00:19:11] Peter: Interesting. [00:19:12] Ben: Yeah, there's a, there's a great paper that I will send you called like, what is the name? Oh, the the Changing Structure of American Innovation by She Aurora. I actually did a podcast with him because I like the paper so much. that that I, I think, yeah, exactly. And so going back to your, your amazing [00:19:35] write-ups, you all have clearly invested quite a chunk of, of time and resources into some amount of like internal infrastructure for making those really good. And I wanted to get a sense of like, how do you decide when it's worth investing in internal infrastructure for a lab? [00:19:58] Peter: Ooh. Ah, that's a fun question. Least at In and Switch. It's always been like sort of demand driven. I wish I could claim to be more strategic about it, but like we had all these essays, they were actually all hand coded HTML at one point. You know, real, real indie cred there. But it was a real pain when you needed to fix something or change something. Cause you had to go and, you know, edit all this H T M L. So at some point we were doing a smaller project and I built like a Hugo Templating thing [00:20:35] just to do some lab notes and I faked it. And I guess this is actually a, maybe a somewhat common thing, which is you do one in a one-off way. And then if it's promising, you invest more in it. [00:20:46] Ben: Yeah. [00:20:46] Peter: And it ended up being a bigger project to build a full-on. I mean, it's not really a cms, it's sort of a cms, it's a, it's a templating system that produces static HT m l. It's what all our essays come out of. But there's also a lot of work in a big investment in just like design and styling. And frankly, I think that one of the things that in can switch apart from other. People who do similar work in the space is that we really put a lot of work into the presentation of our work. You know, going beyond, like we write very carefully, but we also care a lot about like, picking good colors, making sure that text hyphenates well, that it, you know, that the the screencast has the right dimensions and, you know, all that little detail work and. It's expensive [00:21:35] in time and money to do, but I think it's, I think the results speak for themselves. I think it's worth it. [00:21:47] Ben: Yeah. I, and I mean, if, if the ultimate goal is to influence what people do and what they think, which I suspect is, is at least some amount of the goal then communicating it. [00:22:00] Peter: It's much easier to change somebody's mind than to build an entire company. [00:22:05] Ben: Yes. Well, [00:22:06] Peter: you wanna, if you wanna max, it depends. Well, you don't have to change everybody's mind, right? Like changing an individual person's mind might be impossible. But if you can put the right ideas out there in the right way to make them legible, then you'll change the right. Hopefully you'll change somebody's mind and it will be the right somebody. [00:22:23] Ben: yeah. No, that is, that is definitely true. And another thing that I am. Always obscenely obsessed, exceedingly impressed by that. In Switch. [00:22:35] Does is your sort of thoughtfulness around how you structure your community and sort of tap into it. Would you be willing to sort of like, walk me through how you think about that and like how you have sort of the, the different layers of, of kind of involvement? [00:22:53] Peter: Okay. I mean, sort of the, maybe I'll work from, from the inside out cuz that's sort of the history of it. So in the beginning there was just sort of the people who started the lab. And over time they recruited me and, and Mark Mcg again and you know, some of our other folk to come and, and sign on for this crazy thing. And we started working with these wonderful, like contractors off and on and and so the initial sort of group was quite small and quite insular and we didn't publish anything. And what we found was that. Once we started, you know, just that alone, the act of bringing people in and working with them started to create the beginning of a [00:23:35] community because people would come into a project with us, they'd infect us with some of their ideas, we'd infect them with some of ours. And so you started to have this little bit of shared context with your past collaborators. And because we have this mix of like longer term people who stick with the lab and other people who come and go, You start to start to build up this, this pool of people who you share ideas and language with. And over time we started publishing our work and we began having what we call workshops where we just invite people to come and talk about their work at Ink and Switch. And by at, I mean like now it's on a discord. Back in the day it was a Skype or a Zoom call or whatever. And the rule back then in the early days was like, if you want to come to the talk. You have to have given a talk or have worked at the lab. And so it was like very good signal to noise ratio in attendance cuz the only people who would be on the zoom call would be [00:24:35] people who you knew were grappling with those problems. For real, no looky lose, no, no audience, right? And over time it just, there were too many really good, interesting people who are doing the work. To fit in all those workshops and actually scheduling workshops is quite tiring and takes a lot of energy. And so over time we sort of started to expand this community a little further. And sort of now our principle is you know, if you're doing the work, you're welcome to come to the workshops. And we invite some people to do workshops sometimes, but that's now we have this sort of like small private chat group of like really interesting folk. And it's not open to the public generally because again, we, I don't want to have an audience, right? I want it to practitioner's space. And so over time, those people have been really influential on us as well. And having that little inner [00:25:35] circle, and it's a few hundred people now of people who, you know, like if you have a question to ask about something tricky. There's probably somebody in there who has tried it, but more significantly, like the answer will come from somebody who has tried it, not from somebody who will call you an idiot for trying or who will, right, like you, you avoid all the, don't read the comments problems because the sort of like, if anybody was like that, I would probably ask them to leave, but we've been fortunate that we haven't had any of that kind of stuff in the community. I will say though, I think I struggle a lot because I think. It's hard to be both exclusive and inclusive. Right, but exclusive community deliberately in the sense that I want it to be a practitioner's space and one where people can be wrong and it's not too performative, like there's not investors watching or your, your user base or whatever. [00:26:32] Ben: Yeah. [00:26:32] Peter: at the same time, [00:26:33] Ben: strangers. [00:26:34] Peter: [00:26:35] inclusive space where we have people who are earlier in their career or. From non-traditional backgrounds, you know, either academically or culturally or so on and so forth. And it takes constant work to be like networking out and meeting new people and like inviting them into this space. So it's always an area to, to keep working on. At some point, I think we will want to open the aperture further, but yeah, it's, it's, it's a delicate thing to build a community. [00:27:07] Ben: Yeah, I mean the, the, frankly, the reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to figure out the same things and you have done it better than basically anybody else that I've seen. This is, this is maybe getting too down into the weeds. But why did you decide that discourse or discord was the right tool for it? And the, the reason that I ask is that I personally hate sort of [00:27:35] streaming walls of texts, and I find it very hard to, to seriously discuss ideas in, in that format. [00:27:43] Peter: Yeah, I think async, I mean, I'm an old school like mailing list guy. On some level I think it's just a pragmatic thing. We use Discord for our internal like day-to-day operations like. Hey, did you see the pr? You know, oh, we gotta call in an hour with so-and-so, whatever. And then we had a bunch of people in that community and then, you know, we started having the workshops and inviting more people. So we created a space in that same discord where. You know, people didn't have to get pinged when we had a lab call and we didn't want 'em turning up on the zoom anyway. And so it wasn't so much like a deliberate decision to be that space. I think there's a huge opportunity to do better and you know, frankly, what's there is [00:28:35] not as designed or as deliberate as I would like. It's more consequence of Organic growth over time and just like continuing to do a little bit here and there than like sort of an optimum outcome. And it could, there, there's a lot of opportunity to do better. Like we should have newsletters, there should be more, you know, artifacts of past conversations with better organizations. But like all of that stuff takes time and energy. And we are about a small little research lab. So many people you know, [00:29:06] Ben: I, I absolutely hear you on that. I think the, the, the tension that I, I see is that people, I think like texting, like sort of stream of texts. Slack and, and discord type things. And, and so there's, there's the question of like, what can you get people to do versus like, what creates the, the right conversation environment?[00:29:35] And, and maybe that's just like a matter of curation and like standard setting. [00:29:42] Peter: Yeah, I don't know. We've had our, our rabbit trails and like derailed conversations over the years, but I think, you know, if you had a forum, nobody would go there. [00:29:51] Ben: Yeah. [00:29:52] Peter: like, and you could do a mailing list, but I don't know, maybe we could do a mailing list. That would be a nice a nice form, I think. But people have to get something out of a community to put things into it and you know, you have to make, if you want to have a forum or, or an asynchronous posting place, you know, the thing is people are already in Discord or slack. [00:30:12] Ben: exactly. [00:30:13] Peter: something else, you have to push against the stream. Now, actually, maybe one interesting anecdote is I did experiment for a while with, like, discord has sort of a forum post feature. They added a while back [00:30:25] Ben: Oh [00:30:25] Peter: added it. Nobody used it. So eventually I, I turned it off again. Maybe, maybe it just needs revisiting, but it surprised me that it wasn't adopted, I guess is what [00:30:35] I would say. [00:30:36] Ben: Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think the problem is it takes more work. It's very easy to just dash off a thought. [00:30:45] Peter: Yeah, but I think if you have the right community, then. Those thoughts are likely to have been considered and the people who reply will speak from knowledge [00:30:55] Ben: Yeah. [00:30:56] Peter: and then it's not so bad, right? [00:30:59] Ben: it's [00:30:59] Peter: The problem is with Hacker News or whatever where like, or Reddit or any of these open communities like you, you know, the person who's most likely to reply is not the person who's most helpful to apply. [00:31:11] Ben: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And sort of switching tracks yet again, how so one, remind me how long your, your projects are, like how long, how big are the, is the time box. [00:31:28] Peter: the implementation phase for a standard income switch Hollywood project, which I can now call them standard, I think, cuz we've done like, [00:31:35] Ooh, let me look. 25 or so over the years. Let's see, what's my project count number at? I have a little. Tracker. Yeah, I think it's 25 today. So we've done about 20 some non-trivial number of these 10 to 12 weeks of implementation is sort of the core of the project, and the idea is that when you hit that start date, at the beginning of that, you should have the team assembled. You should know what you're building, you should know why you're building it, and you should know what done looks like. Now it's research, so inevitably. You know, you get two weeks in and then you take a hard left and like, you know, but that, that we write what's called the brief upfront, which is like, what is the research question we are trying to answer by funding this work and how do we think this project will answer it? Now, your actual implementation might change, or you might discover targets of opportunity along the way. But the idea is that by like having a, a narrow time box, like a, a team [00:32:35] that has a clear understanding of what you're trying to accomplish. And like the right set of people on board who already have all the like necessary skills. You can execute really hard for like that 10 to 12 weeks and get quite far in that time. Now, that's not the whole project though. There's usually a month or two upfront of what we call pre-infusion, kind of coming from the espresso idea that like you make better espresso if you take a little time at low pressure first to get ready with the shot, and so we'll do. You know, and duration varies here, but there's a period before that where we're making technical choices. Are we building this for the web or is this going on iPad? Are we gonna do this with rust and web assembly, or is this type script is this, are we buying Microsoft Surface tablets for this as we're like the ink behavior, right? So all those decisions we try and make up front. So when you hit the execution phase, you're ready to go. Do we need, what kind of designer do we want to include in this project? And who's available, you know? All of that stuff. We [00:33:35] try and square away before we get to the execution phase. [00:33:38] Ben: right. [00:33:38] Peter: when the end of the execution phase, it's like we try to be very strict with like last day pencils down and try to also reserve like the last week or two for like polish and cleanup and sort of getting things. So it's really two to two and a half, sometimes three months is like actually the time you have to do the work. And then after that, essays can take between like two months and a year or two. To produce finally. But we try to have a dr. We try to have a good first draft within a month after the end of the project. And again, this isn't a process that's like probably not optimal, but basically someone on the team winds up being the lead writer and we should be more deliberate about that. But usually the project lead for a given project ends up being the essay writer. And they write a first draft with input and collaboration from the rest of the group. And then people around [00:34:35] the lab read it and go, this doesn't make any sense at all. Like, what? What do you do? And you know, to, to varying degrees. And then it's sort of okay, right? Once you've got that kind of feedback, then you go back and you restructured and go, oh, I need to explain this part more. You know, oh, these findings don't actually cover the stuff that other people at the lab thought was interesting from the work or whatever. And then that goes through, you know, an increasing sort of, you know, standard of writing stuff, right? You send it out to some more people and then you send it to a bigger group. And you know, we send it to people who are in the field that whose input we respect. And then we take their edits and we debate which ones to take. And then eventually it goes in the HTML template. And then there's a long process of like hiring an external copy editor and building nice quality figures and re-recording all your crappy screencasts to be like, Really crisp with nice lighting and good, you know, pacing and, you know, then finally at the end of all of that, we publish. [00:35:33] Ben: Nice. And [00:35:35] how did you settle on the, the 10 to 12 weeks as the right size, time box? [00:35:42] Peter: Oh, it's it's it's, it's clearly rationally optimal. [00:35:46] Ben: Ah, of course, [00:35:47] Peter: No, I'm kidding. It's totally just, it became a habit. I mean, I think. Like I, I can give an intuitive argument and we've, we've experimented a bit. You know, two weeks is not long enough to really get into anything, [00:36:02] Ben: right. [00:36:02] Peter: and the year is too long. There's too much, too much opportunity to get lost along the way. There's no, you go too long with no real deadline pressure. It's very easy to kind of wander off into the woods. And bear in mind that like the total project duration is really more like six months, right? And so where we kind of landed is also that we often have like grad students or you know, people who are between other contracts or things. It's much easier to get people for three months than for eight months. And if I feel like [00:36:35] just intuitively, if I, if someone came to you with an eight month project, I'd be, I'm almost positive that I would be able to split it into two, three month projects and we'd be able to like find a good break point somewhere in the middle. And then write about that and do another one. And it's like, this is sort of a like bigger or smaller than a bread box argument, but like, you know, a month is too little and six months feels too long. So two to four months feels about right. In terms of letting you really get into, yeah, you can really get into the meat of a problem. You can try a few different approaches. You can pick your favorite and then spend a bit of time like analyzing it and like working out the kinks. And then you can like write it up. [00:37:17] Ben: Thanks. [00:37:18] Peter: But you know, there have been things that are not, that haven't fit in that, and we're doing some stuff right now that has, you know, we've had a, like six month long pre-infusion going this year already on some ink stuff. So it's not a universal rule, but like that's the, that's the [00:37:33] Ben: Yeah. No, I [00:37:35] appreciate that intuition [00:37:36] Peter: and I think it also, it ties into being software again, right? Like again, if you have to go and weld things and like [00:37:43] Ben: yeah, exactly. [00:37:44] Peter: You know, [00:37:44] Ben: let let some bacteria grow. [00:37:46] Peter: or like, you know, the, it's very much a domain specific answer. [00:37:51] Ben: Yeah. Something that I wish people talked about more was like, like characteristic time scales of different domains. And I, I think that's software, I mean, software is obviously shorter, but it'd be interesting to, to sort of dig down and be like, okay, like what, what actually is it? So the, the, the last question I'd love to ask is, To what extent does everybody in the lab know what's, what everybody else is working on? Like. [00:38:23] Peter: So we use two tools for that. We could do a better job of this. Every Monday the whole lab gets together for half an hour only. [00:38:35] And basically says what they're doing. Like, what are you up to this week? Oh, we're trying to like, you know, figure out what's going on with that you know, stylist shaped problem we were talking about at the last demo, or, oh, we're, you know, we're in essay writing mode. We've got a, we're hoping to get the first draft done this week, or, you know, just whatever high level kind of objectives the team has. And then I was asked the question like, well, Do you expect to have anything for show and tell on Friday and every week on Friday we have show and tell or every other week. Talk a bit more about that and at show and tell. It's like whatever you've got that you want input on or just a deadline for you can share. Made some benchmark showing that this code is now a hundred times faster. Great. Like bring it to show and tell. Got that like tricky you know, user interaction, running real smooth. Bring it to show and tell, built a whole new prototype of a new kind of [00:39:35] like notetaking app. Awesome. Like come and see. And different folks and different projects have taken different approaches to this. What has been most effective, I'm told by a bunch of people in their opinion now is like, kind of approaching it. Like a little mini conference talk. I personally actually air more on the side of like a more casual and informal thing. And, and those can be good too. Just from like a personal alignment like getting things done. Perspective. What I've heard from people doing research who want to get useful feedback is that when they go in having sort of like rehearsed how to explain what they're doing, then how to show what they've done and then what kind of feedback they want. That not only do they get really good feedback, but also that process of making sure that the demo you're gonna do will actually run smoothly and be legible to the rest of the group [00:40:35] forces you. Again, just like the writing, it forces you to think about what you're doing and why you made certain choices and think about which ones people are gonna find dubious and tell them to either ignore that cuz it was a stand-in or let's talk about that cuz it's interesting. And like that, that that little cycle is really good. And that tends to be, people often come every two weeks for that [00:40:59] Ben: Yeah. [00:41:01] Peter: within when they're in active sort of mode. And so not always, but like two weeks feels about like the right cadence to, to have something. And sometimes people will come and say like, I got nothing this week. Like, let's do it next week. It's fine. And the other thing we do with that time is we alternate what we call zoom outs because they're on Zoom and I have no, no sense of humor I guess. But they're based on, they're based on the old you and your research hamming paper with where the idea is that like, at least for a little while, every week [00:41:35] we all get together and talk about something. Bigger picture that's not tied to any of our individual projects. Sometimes we read a paper together, sometimes we talk about like an interesting project somebody saw, you know, in the world. Sometimes it's skills sharing. Sometimes it's you know, just like, here's how I make coffee or something, right? Like, You know, just anything that is bigger picture or out of the day-to-day philosophical stuff. We've read Illich and, and Ursula Franklin. People love. [00:42:10] Ben: I like that a lot. And I, I think one thing that, that didn't, that, that I'm still wondering about is like, On, on sort of a technical level are, are there things that some peop some parts of the lab that are working on that other parts of the lab don't get, like they, they know, oh, like this person's working on [00:42:35] inks, but they kind of have no idea how inks actually work? Or is it something where like everybody in the lab can have a fairly detailed technical discussion with, with anybody else [00:42:45] Peter: Oh no. I mean, okay, so there are interesting interdependencies. So some projects will consume the output of past projects or build on past projects. And that's interesting cuz it can create almost like a. Industry style production dependencies where like one team wants to go be doing some research. The local first people are trying to work on a project. Somebody else is using auto merge and they have bugs and it's like, oh but again, this is why we have those Monday sort of like conversations. Right? But I think the teams are all quite independent. Like they have their own GitHub repositories. They make their own technology decisions. They use different programming languages. They, they build on different stacks, right? Like the Ink team is often building for iPad because that's the only place we can compile like [00:43:35] ink rendering code to get low enough latency to get the experiences we want. We've given up on the browser, we can't do it, but like, The local first group for various reasons has abandoned electron and all of these like run times and mostly just build stuff for the web now because it actually works and you spend all, spend way less calories trying to make the damn thing go if you don't have to fight xcode and all that kind of stuff. And again, so it really varies, but, and people choose different things at different times, but no, it's not like we are doing code review for each other or like. Getting into the guts. It's much more high level. Like, you know, why did you make that, you know, what is your programming model for this canvas you're working on? How does you know, how does this thing relate to that thing? Why is, you know, why does that layout horizontally? It feels hard to, to parse the way you've shown that to, you know, whatever. [00:44:30] Ben: Okay, cool. That, that makes sense. I just, I, the, the, the reason I ask [00:44:35] is I am just always thinking about how how related do projects inside of a single organization need to be for, like, is, is there sort of like an optimum amount of relatedness? [00:44:50] Peter: I view them all as the aspects of the same thing, and I think that that's, that's an important. Thing we didn't talk about. The goal of income switch is to give rise to a new kind of computing that is more user-centric, that's more productive, that's more creative in like a very raw sense that we want people to be able to think better thoughts, to produce better ideas, to make better art, and that computers can help them with that in ways that they aren't and in fact are [00:45:21] Ben: Yeah. [00:45:25] Peter: whether you're working on ink, Or local first software or malleable software media canvases or whatever domain you are working in. It [00:45:35] is the same thing. It is an ingredient. It is an aspect, it is a dimension of one problem. And so some, in some sense, all of this adds together to make something, whether it's one thing or a hundred things, whether it takes five years or 50 years, you know, that's, we're all going to the same place together. But on many different paths and at different speeds and with different confidence, right? And so in the small, the these things can be totally unrelated, but in the large, they all are part of one mission. And so when you say, how do you bring these things under one roof, when should they be under different roofs? It's like, well, when someone comes to me with a project idea, I ask, do we need this to get to where we're going? [00:46:23] Ben: Yeah, [00:46:24] Peter: And if we don't need it, then we probably don't have time to work on it because there's so much to do. And you know, there's a certain openness to experimentation and, [00:46:35] and uncertainty there. But that, that's the rubric that I use as the lab director is this, is this on the critical path of the revolution?  

In this “Spotlight on…” episode, host Gautam Bhattacharyya welcomes arbitrator and SVAMC AI Task Force chair Benjamin Malek (FCIARB) to discuss what led him to a career in international arbitration. The pair discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by new technologies like AI, and how to maintain and improve the effectiveness of arbitration in an ever-changing legal landscape.----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello and welcome to Arbitral Insights, a podcast series brought to you by our International Arbitration practice lawyers here at Reed Smith. I'm Peter Rosher, global head of Reed Smith's International Arbitration Practice. I hope you enjoy the industry commentary, insights and anecdotes we share with you in the course of this series, wherever in the world you are. If you have any questions about any of the topics discussed, please do contact our speakers. With that, let's get started. Gautam: Hello everyone and welcome back to our Arbitral Insights podcast series, and thank you for joining us. I am delighted to have with us as our guest today,  Ben Malek. Uh Hello, Ben. Ben: Hi Gautam, thank you for having me. Gautam: It's great to have you with us. Now, I'm gonna introduce Ben, but I'm gonna preface this by saying I love to see new arbitrator talent emerge and I'm unashamed about that. I love to see it. And Ben epitomizes this new number of arbitrators that I just love to see. Ben has got a very interesting background. Uh he's based in New York, but he – I'm gonna share some interesting stuff about him with you all. He's obviously a practitioner of arbitration. He's also an arbitrator and he has great experience of being in private practice and also working for institutions who deal with arbitration. And we'll come to that in the course of our discussion. He also speaks an incredible number of languages, which would, which certainly is something worth noting. So, so obviously, not only apart from English, but he also speaks fluent German, Romanian, Spanish and French, and he can also turn his hand very ably to Italian, Hebrew, Mandarin and Korean. And I'm just in awe of that, Ben. But so obviously, you can see we're talking uh to, to someone who's truly international. We'll talk a little bit about what you do Ben in the course of this podcast but for our listeners, Ben is with T.H.E Chambers in New York. And as I said, prior to his current role, he has worked in private practice at some major law firms and also with arbitral institutions. So, on that note, a huge welcome again to you, Ben and I'm much looking forward to our discussion. So let me ask you the first thing a little bit about your background because you, you do have a very interesting background just based purely on your geographic origins, your languages and how the world has just seen so much of you. But could you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you found the law and arbitration or conversely how law and arbitration found you. Ben: Thank you so much Gautam for inviting me such an honor to be on your podcast. I always look forward to the new episodes you have so it's uh it's truly a pleasure. Thank you. So I grew up in Germany. I was born and raised in Germany to Romanian parents and my maternal grandparents wanted to talk German to us because that's what first generation immigrants do. However, they spoke a very broken German because they're German just wasn't that good. So my mother had the idea of them talking to me in Romanian, which was their maternal language. And this way, I would have two languages once I hit kindergarten, which is exactly what happened. I talked Romanian at home until I started kindergarten, which is where I learned German. So that was the beginning of my duality, I guess. Later on my parents decided that an international school would be best for my brother and I, I have a twin brother by the way. So we went to an international school where languages was really emphasized. I was taught everything in English. English was my maternal language, German was my first foreign language. And that's when I started to really learn my other languages. French became my second foreign language, Spanish became my third foreign language. So by the time I graduated high school I was fluent in five languages. So that was uh extremely helpful at that time, and, uh, that's when I knew that I needed to do something with languages. Unfortunately, and just to give a little more background, I decided to pursue dentistry. I'm not sure if you knew that Gautam.  Gautam: No, I didn't know this. You're a man of many, many hidden talents. Ben, I had no idea. I I know now. Ben: So I went to dental school and because, because I grew up in, in Germany to Romanian parents, I always wanted to, to understand my origins and see where I'm from. So I went and studied uh dentistry in Romania. So while in Romania, I graduated dentistry, I came back to Germany and actually started practicing dentistry. At which point I realized that that might really not be the best career. And I'll explain why. I loved the attention to detail. I loved the artistry of it. But the one thing that I really couldn't deal with was talking to the walls. And what do we, what do I mean by that? When patients sit in the chair before you and you talk and their mouth is open, they cannot respond. And I never realized how much that would impact me psychologically. I felt like I was in isolation, I was talking to them and I talked to them in so many languages, but nothing was coming back. So at that point, I realized with my first year of practice that even though I like what I do, I don't think I could do that for the rest of my life. So I decided to go back and study law. And during my last year of law school, I got a job at BDO in Romania. And because of my languages, I was on-boarded on an arbitration which was held in English with a German party and a French party. And because they had somebody that spoke German and French, they decided to save some costs and have me translate. So that was my introduction to arbitration. And I thought it was wonderful. It was absolutely delightful, especially in a country where the judicial system is sometimes questionable in the sense that you may win for your clients, but you win such a small insignificant amount that you can't really consider it to be a win. I realized that arbitration is a true fairness out there and it is accessible. So it was that moment during that arbitration that I realized and decided to pursue a master's in arbitration, which I ultimately did. I went to the University of Miami where I pursued my LLM. I had the privilege to study under Jan Paulsson, Marike Paulsson, Carolyn Lamm, Jonathan Hamilton. And I really did have the privilege to study under Martin Hunter who has passed away just a few years ago. So it was, it was an amazing masters and that really gave me the basis to start my career in arbitration. Gautam: Well, now that's an incredible journey and a truly uh a diverse background, a truly a diverse professional background you've had and you know, thank you for sharing those great thoughts. Now figures while you're in international arbitration, because you truly are international Ben, in the truest sense of the word. Now you've mentioned some amazing teachers that you had in the law who are truly not just first class, they're world class in terms of names. But um I'm most interested to hear from our guests as to who they would say have been their biggest mentors and inspirations in their career. So if you were to look at your legal career, and it's not often that I do a podcast with someone who's a qualified dentist as well as a qualified lawyer. But there's always a first for these things. But in your career as a lawyer, I wonder if you could share with us some of those names who have been your great mentors and inspirations. Ben: Absolutely. I think all of us owe our entry especially in arbitration to someone as the saying goes, we we need somebody to open the door, we gotta walk through it ourselves, but somebody is always there to open the door. For me I really had, John Fellas was an amazing mentor. I got to know John during my masters and we've kept in touch ever since. What struck me about John was his humbleness and his absolutely striking kindness. I mean, I was a mere student who just got my feet wet and he always made the time, always respected my time, always trying to see how and where he can help me or brainstorm what to do or where to do. It was a true mentorship. And I value that, especially after so many years, I, I wouldn't be here without him. One more mentor that I can think of is Crenguța Leaua. She's um with LDDP in Romania. Over the years, we've got to know each other. She's just such an amazing practitioner who has truly shown me what there is to do and has helped me or help me guide my way into arbitration. So uh without those two, I wouldn't be where I am. But I would also say I really, I consider that every, every person I worked for in the past, every boss I had potentially got me into where I am. So that being said when I worked at the American Arbitration Association or the ICDR to be more, more precise, Tom Ventrone was an amazing mentor. I mean, I learned so much from that and it was interesting because I only got to know him once I was at the ICDR. I did, I quite frankly and uh I don't know if I should say this out loud, but I've never heard of him before. Um However, when I was there, I realized that I don't think the ICDR would be where it is without Tom Ventrone and his team. So that was absolutely outstanding. Gautam: Thank you very much. And you know, some really great names there, Ben that you've given, who've been your real guiding lights in your career so far and you, you're very fortunate to have had all of those people. Now, you've alluded to it in your answer that you just gave and I mentioned it in the introduction that you've worked at major law firms and you've worked for arbitral institutions. I wonder if you could share with us a few things that you've learned by having had the benefit of working on both sides of the fence, so to speak. Ben: I would say at first when I started off at institutions and in all disclosure, I didn't start my career at the American Arbitration Association, I actually started at CPR Institute in New York. I filled in this case manager after which shortly after I got the opportunity at the ICDR. The one thing I learned was really what an impact an institution can make and what a driving force it is in arbitration. Of course, I've learned and I've been part of adhoc arbitrations and that's when you really start to appreciate institutions and what they can do. So I really do value institutions for what they are. I believe the work is truly in vain. And during my time at the ICDR, I mean, it was high volume, in the sense that we administered many cases. And when COVID hit, it felt like those cases doubled even though they didn't. It was just that the traffic of email because nobody had any, any place to be. There was no traveling, there were no dinners, there were no vacations. Everybody was on their email all the time. But it was uh truly valuable. You learn how to manage your time, you learn how to manage other people's time and you learn how to truly value time and deadlines and how to set them fairly. During my time at the American Arbitration Association, I was truly privileged to be part of what they call IARC which on the international part is the International Administrative Review Committee. Where different challenges are being discussed and decided upon. So having been part of that and having seen many cases come in and out and the decisions thereof have really helped me to make better decisions as counsel. Once I, I left the institution. Gautam: I think that amazing kaleidoscope of experience that you had in private practice and with institutions brings us nicely to the next question I wanted to ask you. And this and again, I'll preface it with, again saying how much I love to see new arbitrator talent coming through. I love to see it because we need new talent, fresh blood coming in and you are certainly one of that group. And so I was mentioning that you are with T.H.E Chambers in New York. And I'd love you to tell us a little bit about the work of T.H.E Chambers where you are an arbitrator and including, first of all, if you wouldn't mind what T.H.E stands for a Ben. Ben: Thank you, Gautam. Absolutely. So, as a young arbitrator, I think it's interesting to see that there are not many out there and if they are, it is always combined with some sort of additional workload, whether that is tribunal secretary or they still work as an associate somewhere else or consultant. It, it it is self explanatory why that happens. Uh But I am privileged, I believe to be part of a small group of young arbitrators. And I, I think it's, it's highly important to understand that even young arbitrators do have a specific know-how that we would not have had 20-25 years ago whenever I'm approached or I'm asked about my expertise, I do unfortunately get the answer oftentimes that people didn't realize that a young practitioner could have so much experience or could have the pertinent know-how. And I think that's where arbitration really expanded and advanced in the last decade or two. We have master degrees at, at so many universities throughout the world. We have so many courses and we have so many practitioners willing to talk and mentor people that it is truly possible at a younger age to become an arbitrator. Gautam: I completely agree and if I'm not mistaken, the, you know, the, T.H.E Chambers stands for Tribunals, Hearings and Enforcement, is that correct Ben? Ben: That is correct. Absolutely. Yes, thank you. So, when I started off sitting as an arbitrator, I was approached and, and I happily work with Arbitra International out of London as a transitional member as they call it. And when thinking about it, I had two options. I could either say this is Benjamin Malek arbitration or I could start something bigger. And that was my goal. So when starting T.H.E Chambers, which as you said, stands for Tribal Hearings and Enforcements, the big challenge was what I call it. And despite the fact that T.H.E, it, it looks very nice together as ‘the', um it does stand for tribunal hearings and enforcements. And that is because I believe that those are the core points that any practitioner will always look for. Uh you need to have a tribunal for an arbitration, you need to have a hearing, any sort of hearing un unless it's a paper arbitration. Um And then the, either the arbitrator or the parties waive the hearing and you gotta make sure that any award is enforceable. So from my council of work that I started off with at the beginning of T.H.E Chambers, that was my expertise, the enforcement part of it. Uh that was also one of the most important aspects that I dealt with while at the ICDR when a case comes in that was the first question. How does the case look and will the award be enforceable? So that is one thing that I definitely learned at the institutions and that I carried with me to always look at the arbitration from the end rather than from the beginning, which is the enforcement stage. T.H.E Chambers -  that's what it stands for. Currently it is set up to on board more younger arbitrators worldwide because of COVID and then changes in COVID, we haven't gotten there yet but I hope we'll get there very soon. Gautam: I've got no doubt you will. And you know, and as the saying goes, if anyone's good enough, they're old enough. And there's no doubt that you and the team bring a lot of great energy and insight into arbitration and it's certainly not something that should be homogenous. So it's fantastic to know that you can bring all your talents to bear. I want to turn next to another aspect of what you do because I know that you are a member of the Silicon Valley Arbitration and Mediation Center and particularly its Artificial Intelligence task force. Now, one of the things that all of us will be very well aware of is that artificial intelligence, AI, is an incredibly happening concept. It's developing and it'll develop more and more and it has its role and will have its role in arbitration. I know that you've been part of the team that's been looking at guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in international arbitration. And I wonder if you could just share some of your thoughts as to what the potential usage of artificial intelligence might be in international arbitration and some of the risks and issues that we should be aware of. Ben: Yes, thank you. So I have been a part of the Silicon Valley Arbitration Mediation Center for quite some time and um when the New York case versus Avianca came out where the claimants council used chatGPT to come up with cases and, and I use that word deliberately, ‘come up' with cases to use against Avianca. It turned out that all of those were in fact made up by chatGPT as uh what we would call hallucinations. The judge dismissed the case and uh actually sanctioned the attorneys. To that point, I realized that it is only a matter of time until this issue flows into arbitration, especially arbitration. We work in so many jurisdictions with so many different parties. And specifically, since COVID, most arbitrations have been online, some have stayed online, some still have a hearing component in person, but most of it is online. And the big question was, do we need guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence in arbitration? So I had discussed that with the leadership at the Silicon Valley Arbitration Mediation Center and they gave me carte blanche to see what we can come up with so I was privileged to have a team of experts help me draft the guidelines for the use of  AI in arbitration. My team was composed of Elizabeth Chan in Hong Kong, Orlando Cabrera in Mexico, Sofia Klot in New York, Dmitri Evseev in London, Marta Garcia Bel, which now is in New York, Soham Panchamiya and Duncan Pickard in New York. I was truly blessed, I would say to have these colleagues. It became a true adventure that we all went on when we started discovering what AI could potentially do and what could potentially be prevented. So we took around nine months to draft guidelines. We had no timeline, but we did come up with what I would say good guidelines or a good basis of guidelines in October, we have put it out for the public to comment on. Uh the commenting period is still open until December and institutions can comment until February. And the goal is not to come up with guidelines that people can use, but to get a full consensus of the arbitration community on how they would like to use these guidelines and what they believe is relevant. If something is not relevant, then there's no reason for us to have it in there. So that was the whole idea behind it. The other aspect we were looking at was when it came to cybersecurity, each institution came up with their own guidelines and quite frankly, they use different words, but they're saying the same thing. And we are hoping to avoid having several guidelines on AI and to comprise it all into one. I think it's gonna be a very difficult task. I'm not sure we will succeed, but we are giving all institutions the opportunity to give their input or it submits their commentary to the guidelines so that every practitioner could look into the commentary for the respective institution when the case goes to arbitration. We were looking at several aspects regarding the use of artificial intelligence in arbitration. Two main aspects are disclosure and confidentiality. With regards to disclosure, we actually have an open option for the community to vote on. And that is whether a two prong test should be used to decide whether a party or the arbitrator should disclose the use of artificial intelligence or whether it should always be up to the parties to decide or to as the tribunal for opposing party to disclose the use of artificial intelligence. We weren't sure internally, we debated heavily and we came to the conclusion to leave that question up for the public to decide on. Um it did come back or as of now, the results are interesting, which is that in Europe, there is a more libertarian approach. Whereas uh the US and some common law jurisdictions voted for a two prong test, which I believe to be quite interesting, uh quite frankly. Um if this continues to be open ended, we might leave it up to the parties to decide which option they would ever put in. But ultimately, the goal is to draw awareness of the use of AI to let parties and arbitrators as well as council understand that artificial intelligence is not open ended. That if it's used outside a closed circuit information can be leaked or can be disclosed one way or another and to just draw attention to the fact that A I can only be used to disclose information, but also to create other sorts of the information that would otherwise not be there. Whether that is good or bad will be up to the parties to decide, but it is important to understand what AI can do and what the consequences are. Gautam: I agree with you and it's something that's gonna develop and develop. There's no doubt about that and we've not seen the last of it. I mean, it's gonna be happening for sure. And we just have to see what does transpire, but look, thank you for your great work on everything you're doing. You're not just, you know, doing arbitrations, you're doing thought leadership, you're driving all of these things and it's really great. And uh I'm just, you know, and I look forward to talking to you more about these things as these things progress. Now with these podcasts, we, we always end our podcast with a little bit of lighthearted conversation because I think our listeners will have got a really good handle on your incredible talent in the course of this podcast, your thoughtfulness and your experience. What I want them to also get a feel of is some of the more fun side of things. Now, I know Ben that you are a very proud daddy to a couple of daughters, one of whom is really a newborn. And uh, and I've, and I'm just so ecstatic for you and Rebeca on your two daughters. But let me ask you this when you do have some spare time from not being a, a very busy daddy as well as a very busy arbitrator. What sort of music do you particularly enjoy listening to? Have you got any favorite bands or groups or singers or even a favorite album that you love to play? Ben: Regarding music that's an interesting topic. Before I went on my dentistry career I actually worked in music management. Gautam: you are so multitalented. It's unbelievable. Go on. Sorry. I just could not resist saying that. Ben: Yeah. No, thank you. It's uh I, I just like life. I like life. Life is important. It's what drives us. I will say this and, and you know, thank you for the question. But we all live to work, but we also work to primarily live. And I think it's really important to, to, to know that I always believe that one of the most important things in life is to live and to know how to live. So, uh I did get into music management very early in my life. We were host to several big names, but to answer your question, my favorite music, as I always said is good music. I especially nowadays where the charts are filled with explicit lyrics. I actually like to go back to the Beatles. The Beatles are one of the foundations I believe of modern music. Now, given the fact that a new song was actually just released with the help of AI, I think that it's, it's worth to go back and, um, and really understand the changes that as Sir Paul McCartney, um and his colleagues have made. Yeah, I would definitely call The Beatles my favorite music. Gautam: Oh, fantastic. Well, it's, you know, that's a great choice. And, uh, you know, again, as a first, I've never done a podcast with someone who worked in music management, then who, who became a dentist and then became a lawyer and who can speak about 10 languages. So this is a complete first for me. So let me just ask you one last question in this podcast. So, you know, you are a very international person and we ascertain that just from speaking to you in the course of this podcast and you've no doubt traveled very widely because you've worked around the world in many places. Is there one place apart from where you grew up, okay, so excluding that, is there one place in the world - and excluding New York where you live - ok, Is there one place that you just love traveling to? Ben: Oh. That's a difficult question. I would have to say, I've always enjoyed traveling to London. My brother is actually a physicist and he did his PhD in Cambridge. I thought those were the most fun trips I've ever had. To fly to London Cambridge is, is amazing. Uh Whoever hasn't been uh it is really missing out. London is just stunning. I mean, the amount of history and just the culture and the multiculture you have. It's, it's just, it's great. Um I guess uh deep down I am a European so London is always there. Paris is absolutely yeah, romantic. I mean, I am married with two kids so Paris is always, it is always a good idea. Gautam: Yes. Ben: Yeah. The only thing I would add is I love, I would love to see more of the world. I do want to travel and see places. I I've never been, I haven't been to Australia yet, but in general, I would love to go see, I hope to go to Hong Kong maybe during ICA, maybe not, but just to see Hong Kong and see uh see more than I have seen yet. Gautam: Fantastic. Well, look, Ben. Thank you. It's been an absolute delight to speak to you in this podcast. Thank you for being such a superb guest and for sharing all of your stories and your background, your thoughts. And uh I look forward to seeing you very soon. You know, I hope you'll because we're recording this podcast on a Friday. So I hope that you will have a great weekend and I look forward to seeing you in person soon. Thank you. Ben: Thank you so much Gautam, Likewise. And if I may just end on one note, I do wanna thank my wife. I don't think I would be the person I am without her. And she inspires me to be a better person every day. Gautam: You know that I, I think that's so fitting Ben. And I'm gonna say this in response, I'm going to say two quick things in response to that. One, you're absolutely correct because I have the great honor and privilege of knowing Rebeca. And I know that she's a wonderful, wonderful lady and you are indeed very lucky to have her. And I also will say the second thing I will say is that many years ago, a judge got sworn in as a Supreme court judge here and one of the former Supreme court judges who was giving a speech when he became a judge said that behind every successful man, there's a surprised woman and Rebeca shouldn't be surprised at how successful you've been. But you know, you are very fortunate to have her. So thank you for mentioning her. Ben: Thank you. And thank you for having me, Gautam. It was an absolute pleasure looking forward to meeting you in person. Gautam: Looking forward to that. Outro: Arbitral Insights is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. For more information about Reed Smith's Global International Arbitration practice, email arbitralinsights@reedsmith.com. To learn about the Reed Smith Arbitration Pricing Calculator, a first of its kind mobile app that forecasts the cost of arbitration around the world, search arbitration pricing calculator on reedsmith.com or download for free through the Apple and Google Play app stores. You can find our podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google Play, Stitcher, reedsmith.com and our social media accounts at Reed Smith LLP on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney client relationship nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome, any views, opinions or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers. All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

Ed shares his fondest memories of a recent weekend with Bob's family. The NFL Monday night doubleheader action plays during the recording, which is vaguely commented on throughout the episode.

In a small coastal town in the 1600s, a priest is terrified for his life and confides a riddle to the Doctor that will reveal the secret to Pirate Avery's lost treasure. Soon, the Doctor is kidnapped, Ben and Polly are charged with murder, and smugglers, pretend-witches, and pirates all collide!AKA Doctor Who and PIRATES!_____BEN: Oh great! The way things are going there probably won't be a navy when I get back.POLLY: Look, Ben, for the moment we're in the seventeenth century, somehow. We'll just have to like it and lump it. Here you are.________________________DOCTOR: Well, I'm afraid, my boy, we can't leave at the moment.POLLY: What? But why not?DOCTOR: Yes, well I know it's really difficult for both you to understand, but I'm under moral obligation.BEN: Well, about what? We've got no ties here.DOCTOR: No, but it's this village. I feel that I might be responsible for it's destruction, and therefore I must at least try and avoid this danger until Blake comes back.BEN: Yeah, but you heard what Blake said. We wouldn't stand a chance against Pike's mob. They're a right bunch of yobbos.POLLY: We wouldn't stand a chance.DOCTOR: Ah, wouldn't we, my dear?BEN: Well, what does that mean?DOCTOR: Well, you seem to forget, young man, that I've already met Pike, and I know something that he doesn't. The clue to the treasure.__________________________________________________________Upcoming:Top Ten Non-Monster Villains of the First Doctor EraWe are going to celebrate the great one-off villains of the First Doctor's era by counting down some of the best! No monsters or faceless hordes (so leaving off the Daleks--they got their own episode:-) but rather we are looking at the megalomaniacs, the schemers, and the scoundrels. Some are funny, some are scary, some are down-right devious, but all are unforgettable.  Special thanks to Cathlyn "Happigal" Driscoll for providing the beautiful artwork for this podcast. You can view her work at https://www.happigal.com/ Do feel free to get in touch to share the love of all things Doctor Who: throughthevortexpodcast@gmail.comThank you so much for listening!!

Leasing is one of the hardest aspects of property management. What if you had a way to offload some or all of your tasks related to leasing? Today, property management growth expert Jason Hull chats with Ben from Sunroom. This service allows property managers to offload leasing to leasing professionals who care about property managers, owners, and tenants. You'll Learn… [01:26] Offloading Leasing: What is Sunroom? [09:01] ShowMojo, Tenant Turner, vs. Sunroom, oh my! [016:35] Better ways to do Property Showings [020:23] How Sunroom Vets Tenants Better [24:21] Integrating with Other PM Software  [31:30] Net Promoter Scores for Property Management and Leasing [37:12] Learning to LET GO as a PM Entrepreneur Tweetables “Some of y'all entrepreneurs are control freaks. Let's be real, and you need to let go of some of this stuff and let somebody else do it a little bit better.” “We have a lot of egos as entrepreneurs. We think our way is the best way all the time, and we need to see that maybe somebody else could do this better.” “Property managers tend to do best if they just convince owners to do pets. You're going to get more tenants, you're going to get more money.” “One of the biggest time sucks for a property management company is dealing with prospective tenants.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Ben: So what we do is we partner with property management companies and become their leasing arm. So if you're a newer property management company, you're focused on growing doors and you just mainly want to focus on that, right? One of the most important things is you got to get leasing. If you don't get leasing, you're not going to lease the doors quickly, which then your owner investors are not going to be happy about that.   [00:00:22] Jason Hull: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the # DoorGrowShow. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not bebecause you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.    [00:01:19] Jason Hull: All right. Ben, welcome to the #DoorGrowShow.    [00:01:24] Ben: Thanks for having me, Jason.    [00:01:26] Jason Hull: Good to have you. So Ben, why don't we start by you giving us a little bit of your background, qualify yourself. You've done some cool stuff and I'm in the market where you did some of this cool stuff. We just realized in the green room that we're practically neighbors in Austin, market downtown, and I'm up in Round Rock. Ben, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the, I guess technology space.   [00:01:49] Ben: Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely. First of all, I mean we-- me and my co-founder Zach, we started working on Sunroom in right around 2017. And, the way that we had originally had the idea was, just being a renter for a decade and having a lot of interesting experiences trying to look for a place to lease. But prior to starting Sunroom, Zach and I had started a company called Favor Delivery, which is a small little delivery company here in Texas that grew to become the market leader in delivery. And we sold to H-E-B in early 2018.    [00:02:27] Jason Hull: And for people that aren't familiar with H-E-B, because I moved from California just before the pandemic because I wanted to get away from California and the taxes and it's poor political culture. But anyway, so I moved here, Austin and H-E-B was all over the place. I'm like, what a weird name. What is this place? But it's one of the, like America's top grocery chains. It's consistently rated as like one of the biggest and the best. So for those that are not in Texas, they are probably not familiar with H-E-B, but H-E-B is the, like one of the leading grocery stores, and it dominates everything.    [00:03:05] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:03:06] Jason Hull: I'm sure in grocery sales, it beats out Walmart, like it beats out any of the stuff that I'd heard about before and I'd never heard of H-E-B. And they offer delivery service.    [00:03:15] Ben: Yeah. H-E-B is an impressive company. And the crazy thing is they've been around for 115 years.   [00:03:21] Ben: Wow.    [00:03:21] Ben: They are the top employer in Texas. And when they acquired us, it was the only acquisition they've ever had in their history as a company. And even crazier than that, when we combined workforces at the time, we had the largest workforce of independent contractors. We grew to, now they're at a hundred thousand delivery drivers in Texas.    [00:03:44] Ben: Oh, wow.    [00:03:44] Ben: And H-E-B had a similar amount of employees. So when we combined workforces, it just became this really massive workforce supporting grocery and delivery of all foods. So yeah, it was a cool marriage that we had there.   [00:04:00] Jason Hull: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. That's interesting history. So I've seen the Favor name when I'm doing delivery from H-E-B, so I was like what's this relationship?    [00:04:11] Ben: Yeah. So I can elaborate a little bit more too about, how we picked Sunroom. We had, like I said, I mean my co-founder Zach and I, we're actually best friends from high school and so we go way back. I think what you were saying about you wanting to support property manager entrepreneurs, I think that's a good mission because I just tip my hat off to any entrepreneurs who get any businesses working because we definitely know how hard that is. But anyways, our journey towards Sunroom was just having a lot of, I would call interesting experiences as a renter. And then we started calling-- once we were interested in the rental space-- we started making a lot of phone calls to, different rental listings. And we started asking the agents and property managers, "Hey, why are you doing this?" "why are you doing these leases?" And, we kept hearing the same thing, which was like, "oh, we don't-- I don't really want to be doing this lease. I'm just doing this lease. I'm helping this investor client buy more homes and so now I'm looped into to renting this place." And every once in a while you'd come across a property manager who really loved leasing, but a lot of the property managers we talked to too would be like, "yeah, I'm really focused on growing my door count. And these things are just something we have to do to get more properties in the door." And Zach and I saw that as an opportunity of: wow. No wonder why the experience is not that great for renters. A lot of the folks who are doing these leasing are not that excited about doing it. And so then that's how we started working on Sunroom.    [00:05:29] Jason Hull: Cool. So let's talk about then what-- you talked about the problem that you saw in the marketplace and experience wasn't super good, but a lot of owners and maybe even property managers aren't even super excited about taking care of the tenant experience. So it's not like their highest priority. Like, "I want to get more doors, I want to have more properties managed," so they're like, "what's my competitive advantage?" So when they're picking tools and software, they're usually-- they're trying to figure out: "how do I get some sort of leg up on the competition," so to speak, or "how can this lower my operational cost?" and these kind of things. One of the biggest time sucks for a property management company is dealing with prospective tenants.    [00:06:13] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:06:14] Jason Hull: These are not people that are paying them and they call them the most, and--   [00:06:17] Jason Hull: yeah.   [00:06:18] Jason Hull: --This is like the "garbage of phone calls," I've heard one of my guests call it.   [00:06:21] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:06:22] Jason Hull: So tell me about what does Sunroom do and how does it do it, and what's the benefit.    [00:06:27] Ben: Yeah, sure. So what we do is we partner with property management companies and become their leasing arm. So if you're a newer property management company, you're focused on growing doors and you just mainly want to focus on that, right? One of the most important things is you got to get leasing. If you don't get leasing, you're not going to lease the doors quickly, which then your owner investors are not going to be happy about that. And also I would argue equally as important is that renter does have a great experience because, that is really the beginning of your relationship with them, and what we've noticed of working with a lot of different property managers is that, when the renter goes into the home and they're really happy with their experience that led up to that point, they're a lot more-- how do I put this? They're a lot more quiet when they get into the home, right? They're just happy overall, which is going to reduce your maintenance requests and honestly going to make it more likely that they renew the next year, right? because that is just really first, and I would just say first impressions are, everything in life a lot of times.    [00:07:27] Ben: And so I think, leasing really is that first impression for that property manager. To come back around to what we do, yeah, we partner with the property management companies and make it so that they don't even need to have any leasing agents on staff. And we can really do the entire process of getting the home leased. But at the same time, we give the property manager the power over key decisions, right? Things like actually approving the applications, that's still going to be up to the property manager to make sure they choose the right applicant. And obviously if they want to use their lease that they prefer, there's all different ways that we allow them to customize what they want their leasing experience to be like. But at the end of the day, we're really doing the legwork for them and we have a combination of people and tech to do that.    [00:08:12] Ben: Got it. So    [00:08:14] Jason Hull: this combination of people and tech... are you able to do this in every market or is this like a local thing that needs to be done    [00:08:21] Ben: locally?    [00:08:23] Ben: Yeah, great question.   [00:08:24] Ben: So we started out just doing this in Austin and have partnered with several different property managers here. In town. But now we're expanding across the us. And I believe we're up to seven different markets at the moment. But pretty rapidly expanding to cover more markets.   [00:08:41] Ben: Got it. What's    [00:08:42] Jason Hull: the biggest limitation in expansion for those that you don't cover yet?    [00:08:46] Ben: We call ourselves a leasing only brokerage, so we're actually-- we're a real estate brokerage in each of these states. And so that's a blocker to getting set up in a lot of these places is actually establishing our brokerage in each one of these states.   [00:08:59] Ben: Got it.    [00:09:00] Jason Hull: Okay. Cool. I think a lot of property managers, they're aware of certain pools like ShowMojo and Tenant Turner and Rently and Knock Rentals and Turbo Tenant, so how does Sunroom differentiate from all these tools and these systems are already out there?   [00:09:20] Ben: Yeah, so some of those systems and tools you mentioned, I do think those-- they do improve the renter experience and at the same time. They do make it so that it's a little less work for the property manager to lease those properties. But at the end of the day, if you're a property management owner you're still going to need a leasing agent on your team. Or you're going to have to overextend the property manager that you have in order to use those, utilize those tools. Sunroom just takes it the next step where we have similar tools and systems. Obviously I'm biased, but I would argue they're better than those, but--   [00:09:55] Ben: You should argue that.    [00:09:57] Ben: We take it a step further. You don't even really need to have a leasing agent on staff in order to really execute everything you need to do for leasing. Whereas all these other tools or systems they're definitely completely reliant on still having somebody there behind the scenes catching the errors or all all the holes in those systems. And, if anybody has tried to. Integrate those different systems and tools, what they'll find is that they were built in a way that they had a focused goal. And there's a lot of different holes in that system. And I'm sure as operators see that, I think that's a big difference with what we're building, is that what we build, we actually use to operate. And so we're able to see all the different gaps and holes that those systems leave. And really between our systems and our team, we're able to fill in the gaps that those systems leave out.   [00:10:46] Jason Hull: All right. So I think people listening by now are like, "the wheels are turning a little bit," and they're like, "okay, how's this actually play out?" So could you walk us through step by step what-- how this process works with the property manager and the tenant from beginning to    [00:11:01] Ben: finish? Yeah, sure. So it usually starts within one of the property managers, property management softwares, right?   [00:11:09] Ben: We see commonly property managers are using App Folio or Buildium, so let's use App Folio for example. You have a property manager on your team that you have a home where the renter didn't renew. And it's a property that you're going to need to get leased. At that moment, if you were partnered with us, you would open up the Sunroom portal. We would already essentially have that home synced within our system. Because we're able to really pull data from App Folio and the Buildiums of the world. From there, they just really submit the property to us and say, "Hey, this home's coming up for lease." we would normally already have all of their settings. As a part of our onboarding, we're going to get them all set up in our system. So things like knowing what their tenant criteria is. Things like knowing when is this home actually available? When would you like us to touch the property? And then as soon as they submit the property to us, we actually will go out and touch the property. So we have boots on the ground. Those boots on the ground are going to get professional photography. They're going to set up a self showing lock system if that's what the property manager would like to. And then we're going to actually install a yard sign as well. And, we take pictures to really document everything that we do there. And then, we'll take it a step further, we'll get the marketing description written and then we'll get it listed online, and we do that entire process in an average about 48 hours.    [00:12:28] Ben: Nice.    [00:12:29] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah, that's very cool. So you actually have people come out-- swarm of people, and they get all this stuff done, right? In the description, getting it listed, doing all this stuff. Okay.    [00:12:39] Jason Hull: Yeah,    [00:12:40] Ben: and that's where our background in Favor obviously comes into play is that, I think if you think about Favor, there's a great consumer experience where the customer can order food, but then there's all these boots on the ground that actually go get the food and make sure that all happens in a timely manner. Leasing is similar in the sense that you need to have a great consumer experience for the renter to be able to see what they're shopping for and do the things they they need to do to see if they want to, lease that property. But then you're going to need boots on the ground to actually, handle the listing side of things.   [00:13:09] Ben: Very cool.    [00:13:10] Jason Hull: So is this totally Uber-like in that you're just pulling anybody in, or I'm sure you have criteria for the photographers and for all these different people that you're bringing in to do these    [00:13:22] Ben: little pieces.    [00:13:23] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. We don't just hire any random person. I'd say it's definitely not Uber-like in that I think, we use-- it's technology enabled so that we can do those things quickly and can measure how fast we do them, right? I think just the fact that we know we get those properties set up in an average of 48 hours, I think is...    [00:13:42] Ben: Yeah.   [00:13:42] Ben: ...more than your average property manager would know, but we know that the tasks we're doing are tech enabled, but no we care a lot about those people that we choose and we try to find folks that have a lot of experience with real estate photography and then we teach them the other aspects of what we're trying to get done at that property.   [00:14:00] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah. Very cool. When a property is going to become vacant, are they able to leverage a system or does it have to be totally empty and rent ready and everything    [00:14:11] Ben: else?    [00:14:12] Ben: No. So yeah, no, they're able to use the system. It sounds like you're asking about pre-leasing.    [00:14:19] Ben: Yeah.   [00:14:20] Ben: Okay. Yes, pre-leasing can be really important I think in some markets. Yeah, that's definitely something we support. And let's say it's tenant occupied and we need to act and do an escorted showing, we have different agents on the ground that we partner with that are some of the most active in the area touring homes and renters. And so we'll tap into that network to do some.   [00:14:40] Jason Hull: Got it. Okay. Now what if they want get the property listed, they want to get photos, but there's a bunch of ugly furniture in there and ugly stuff. Do you guys let maybe-- BoxBrownie I've had on the show before-- digital editors and they're like, removing all this    [00:14:55] Ben: stuff?   [00:14:55] Ben: Yeah.    [00:14:56] Ben: Take the photos.   [00:14:56] Ben: Yeah, we do have digital editing in that regard, but depending on the degree of how much that home is messed up. That's also something that we do is that if we go out to a home and we think it's not show ready we'll document that and share it back with the property manager. And I think we've seen property managers really love that aspect of what we do because oftentimes they have a tough time holding the make ready folks accountable or let's say they're doing a renovation on the property. In particular, I can't tell you how many times that a property manager said, "Oh yeah, this was supposed to be done. And then when we went out there we were able to collect evidence that it wasn't right. That's also part of our system is that if the home is not actually ready to be marketed, and then, we're going to gather that information, share it back with the property manager, and then essentially remind them until that's resolved and as soon as it's resolved, then we can make the listing active. But it's a pretty valuable system and checks and balances that we have in place there.    [00:15:55] Jason Hull: Got it. So you'll communicate with them. Then the property manager can send out maintenance, get things taken care of, dealt with, and then report back to you and you're checking in with them, "Hey, is this ready yet? Is this ready yet?" And then they're like, "we got it ready." And then...    [00:16:08] Jason Hull: exactly.    [00:16:08] Jason Hull: Proceed.    [00:16:10] Jason Hull: Exactly.    [00:16:10] Jason Hull: So you've sent up the people, you've got the photos, you got like maybe a lockbox on, you got the yard sign, you've got the description. It's posted online. It's probably pushed out to multiple channels.   [00:16:19] Jason Hull: That's right.    [00:16:20] Jason Hull: Then next come the showings, right? And scheduling and all this. So how does that work and are you doing one-off showings? Are you doing open house model? What would it be found to be the most efficient? What comes next?    [00:16:35] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So what we do is we usually set these properties up with a self showing system, and then renters are able to go tour the properties seven days a week from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and, we also have, a support team available those same hours, so 84 hours, we're ready to quickly text back any renters or answer any phone calls if, folks are having a tough time actually, accessing the home for any particular reason. Our system is really good. I'd say renters have a really good experience touring homes. Like any system, we're dealing with real world stuff. Sometimes maybe it could be a really humid day and maybe the maybe the door frame swells a bit or something, right? So maybe the door gets a little stuck. So the renter needs a little help to understand how to get in. Those are all things that I think us, having support team there available to talk to them and actually pick up the phone. I think is a really important thing. So that's just one of the many ways that we support tours. But I'd say one of the most important pieces of tours is actually collecting that tour feedback and sharing it with the owner after the fact. And so we have a really great system in place for that as well where a lot of renters will leave feedback just right within the place that they tour. And then we're actually able to take that feedback and then give it to display it on a webpage where then the property manager is able to share that webpage directly with their owner so they can actually watch the tours that are coming in and the tour feedback in real time. And we white label that for them. So you can imagine as a property manager, you just share this white label page with your logo and the owner's able to get a bird's eye view of how their home is performing on the market.    [00:18:21] Ben: Got it.    [00:18:22] Jason Hull: So could this be a scenario that the owner says, "I don't need to do this," and like the property manager says, "you need to do this. Like it'll get you more rent. People will have an issue with this place if you don't fix this or change this," and the owner's like, "no." And then they say, "look at the page, here's the white label page. It's got our brand, our logo, XYZ property management, and it says like, consistently feedback. Like the floor is too gross, or whatever."   [00:18:47] Ben: Yeah, "I would rent this home, but does it come with a fridge?" Just one way I've seen owners trying to cut some costs is like not putting refrigerators in the home. And then they see, three out of the five renters that tour the home mentioned "Hey, there's no fridge."    [00:19:00] Ben: "have to buy a fridge and I'll go somewhere else."   [00:19:03] Ben: Yeah, exactly. And that page really helps the property manager make their case to the owner and also show to them like, "Hey, we really are showing this property and this really is what the renters are saying.   [00:19:14] Ben: Cool.    [00:19:15] Jason Hull: Yeah, that's really cool. I like the feedback loops. So then, what's the next steps? You're doing showings, you're doing tours. Then I guess people are being pushed to apply when they're doing these tours by the system?    [00:19:27] Ben: Yeah, so we have a system, both to pre-qualify renters and to actually have them apply. As soon as they apply we're able to display those applications to the property manager. And we use the same page that we use to display tour feedback and also tracking the tours and the leads and everything. We use that same page then to actually show the applications to the property managers and to their owners. Because I know every property manager seems to have a different deal with each owner, right? Some of 'em, they want to run the application past their owner beforehand, or sometimes they're just the ones reviewing it. But either way, we display that information there so that both the property manager and the owner, are able to review the application before they decide to approve or not.   [00:20:14] Ben: Got it. So    [00:20:14] Jason Hull: they can either show this white label page that has the list of all the applicants or could they just say, "here's the one we recommend," and show that person's information?   [00:20:22] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:20:23] Ben: Yeah. It's usually the latter. Because it's trying to make it simpler. Yeah. It's usually just showing the one that they recommend. And at that point, we would've already done all of the vetting for that application. Even the manual steps of doing a verification of rental history, for example or a verification of employment. And we've actually seen just our application processing service. We've seen that to be so popular that we actually broke that out as something that a property manager could partner with us just on application processing, and that's also cool because we have a lot of tech to catch fraudulent renters. I'm sure you've probably heard about how fraud is on the rise especially with us entering recession. And I think it's just more likely that renters are going to try to fake pay stubs. Even some go as far as trying to fake their identity in different ways to try to get approved for a home that really are beyond their means. And so we've really, we've invested a lot into our application processing system. Doing things like being able to get their pay stubs directly from their payroll provider instead of having a way for them to upload their pay stubs, which could be photoshopped or something like that.    [00:21:35] Ben: Yeah.    [00:21:35] Ben: And then let's say a renter doesn't even have a job, or let's say a renter's, a self-employed or something, we have a way of actually pulling bank statements directly from their bank, instead of just receiving those bank statements and getting it uploaded. All that tech helps to really reduce the amount of fraud. And as for property managers as well, it's less work to actually investigate all those documents.   [00:21:59] Jason Hull: That's just technology and stuff a property manager can't do directly. They don't have the ability to pull directly from the bank their pay stubs, and it's not going to say, "here, let me give you my login to my bank account," and to pull directly from the employer. They don't usually have that ability really effectively either. There needs to be technology involved.   [00:22:18] Ben: Yeah.    [00:22:19] Ben: So we--   [00:22:20] Ben: --so what    [00:22:20] Jason Hull: about--    [00:22:20] Ben: oh, go ahead.    [00:22:20] Ben: I was just going to say, yeah, we recognize that you know most of what we've been talking about here is called our full service leasing, right? Where we actually become the leasing arm. But let's say, you've got leasing agents on your team and you think they're rock stars. You're happy with what's going on with your leasing. We could plug in and just do the application processing. We call that service, we call that Sunscreen, is what we call it. The idea is the quirky tagline that I came up with is, "Don't get burned by bad renters."   [00:22:47] Jason Hull: I like it. Little bit of sunscreen.    [00:22:51] Ben: Yeah, exactly.   [00:22:52] Ben: Okay.    [00:22:53] Jason Hull: So one of the questions I think some people will be asking is, what about pets? It's like a whole nother beast. Outside, inside pets and running pets and having pets, all this kind of stuff. Property managers tend to do best if they just convince owners to do pets. You're going to get more tenants, you're going to get more money. How do you deal with the pet side of    [00:23:11] Ben: things?    [00:23:12] Ben: Yeah, so at this point I'm sure most property managers have heard of pet screening.com. I think they're a great company. And so we actually integrate their data into our system. So if you're already signed up for pet screening.com. You can provide the pet screening.com login, and then we're able to pull that information into the application packet. So it's something that the owner and the property manager can consider as a part of the overall application. And, obviously pet screening.com does a really good job verifying things like our emotional support animal documentation. Is that legit? There's fraud around ESA documents. And that's just one of the pieces that they do. But yeah, that's something that we recommend whenever anyone is accepting pets.   [00:23:57] Ben: Very    [00:23:58] Jason Hull: cool. I like pet screening.com that I've had them on the show. I had another company that may be interesting to integrate with too on the show called our pet policy.com and they take things a step further on the protection side of things after the screening. So they go step beyond. So that might be interesting for you to take a look at integrating with as well.    [00:24:20] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:24:20] Jason Hull: Ourpetpolicy.com, they seem like a good group of people over there as well. So real quick, going back, you had mentioned AppFolio, Buildium, do you integrate with Rent Manager? Do you integrate with I don't know, there's some other things and some of these tools    [00:24:35] that    [00:24:35] Ben: people are using?   [00:24:37] Ben: Yeah. Great question. So it's pretty easy for us to get key information plugged into these softwares. And the reason is when someone partners with us, if you think about it, we really need to touch that property management software right when the home is when the home's coming up for lease, right? It needs to be listed. And then once the home gets leased, that's when that information needs to get back in the property management software again. So usually the way that our structure is, it doesn't really matter too much, which property management software you're. The system would be the same, where you would essentially create a user for us.   [00:25:15] Ben: So then once the home is getting leased, we know who's signing the lease. We're going to get their information set up within whatever property management software you use and make sure that it's set up for ongoing rent payments and things like that. It essentially, if you're using a property management software, but then you're going to use someone for leasing. But then once the home gets leased, it's going to be as if you had leased it through those other systems. And it's seamless in that way.    [00:25:39] Ben: Yeah. Very cool. So    [00:25:40] Jason Hull: you're PM    [00:25:41] Ben: software agnostic.    [00:25:42] Ben: Exactly. Yes. That's a much more succinct way of saying it. Thanks.   [00:25:47] Jason Hull: So that just means I've been doing this probably a long time. All right. So you've, you mentioned your solution. You've got the sunscreen that can be, pulled out just separately or if they're using the full leasing service. You've done the pre-qualification, you've got the applicant they can send over the white label thing to the owner. If the owner's like, "I really need to see what info you got." And you've tested out their pay stubs and their bank--   [00:26:11] Jason Hull: right    [00:26:12] Jason Hull: --stuff, and you've maybe connected the pet screening.com. What happens next? You've got    [00:26:17] Ben: a good applic--    [00:26:18] Ben: Yes. Yeah, so the property manager, the owner accepts the application. And at that point, we're going to reach out to the renter, say, "congrats, you've been accepted. Please now pay the security deposit." And as soon as they pay security deposit, then the owner or the property manager is able to connect their bank account, and that money will just automatically get deposited in whatever account that you specify. And then from a lease perspective, from really from the beginning of the process, we would've asked that you provide the preferred lease that you would like for us to use. We're going to get that lease drafted up and we're going to send it over to both the renter and the property manager. For some property managers, they like to review one last time before it gets sent to the renter. So we can fulfill that ask. And then the lease is going to get signed. And as soon as the lease gets signed, we will then dispatch our people back out to the property, do one final walkthrough, and also remove our yard sign and remove any other things that we had, any lock boxes or things like that we got setup. But we do one thing where we will leave a combo lockbox out at the property so that we can facilitate the renter actually moving in. So that's really the final and last step for our system, is facilitating to the renter actually getting the keys so that they have a smooth move in. And then the last step after all of that is we're going to survey the renter and make sure they had a great experience through the whole the whole leasing process.   [00:27:51] Jason Hull: And what's-- before we move on, because I'm curious like what difference you're noticing with these surveys, but let's say they don't accept somebody. What's the process? What happens to the rejects, so to speak? The tenants that didn't pass because a lot of times they're following up and bugging the property manager, "Hey, did you accept me? What's going on?" This sort of thing. What do you do?    [00:28:11] Ben: Yeah. So first of all, we shield the property manager from having to deal with all of that stuff. And I think for the position we're in, I think the natural thing is I think we would do what any other good property manager would do. We'd see if there's any other listings within that property manager that the renter would qualify for. First and foremost, we're going to recommend that of " There are these other listings for the same property manager" or, " do you like that?" And if the renter is not interested in any of those homes, then I think we would look broader to other listings that that are amongst our partners and say, "Hey, renter, maybe it would be better if you lease this property."   [00:28:48] Jason Hull: Yeah. That helps get the other properties filled. That's great.    [00:28:53] Ben: Yeah.    [00:28:53] Ben: Okay.    [00:28:53] Ben: And the renter's really happy too, because they don't have to pay an application fee again, so they're able to reuse their application.    [00:29:00] Jason Hull: Nice. Now what if you have two property managers in the same market and you get an applicant for one, are they completely segregated from being able to apply it to the other, or if they're in the Sunroom system,    [00:29:13] Ben: they can...   [00:29:14] Ben: Great question. Yeah. So we don't want to restrict where renters can apply, right? because that just doesn't make sense. But we have come across the scenario, it's been rare where renters have applied to multiple properties. And so what's really cool about our system is that we have a little disclaimer for the property manager where they can see, "hey, this renter's actually applied for multiple properties," and that way it's clear to them of " Hey, look, this renter is serious about your property, they are, they're hedging their bets," which, that's a common scenario especially in a hot market is if property managers are collecting multiple applicants on a single property, you can bet that the renters-- they know that. And so they're also applying to multiple properties. So I think we do our best to try to mitigate those scenarios. And I think one of the best ways to mitigate those scenarios is really just processing applications quickly and then, and working to get the renter and answer quickly around if they're accepted or denied. And, in most cases, I think renters are willing to tell you which one's their first choice. And so if you're able to process the application really quickly and drive it to decision, it doesn't happen too often where the owner comes back and wants to accept the renter and they've already decided to go somewhere else. It does occasionally, we try to mitigate that.    [00:30:28] Ben: Got it.    [00:30:28] Jason Hull: Okay, cool. So going back to the other path, I'm actually drawing this all out. I've got like a flow    [00:30:34] Ben: chart going on here.    [00:30:36] Ben: Sounds good. Keep    [00:30:37] Jason Hull: track.    [00:30:38] Jason Hull: So you surveyed the renter at the end, like you've got somebody in the property.    [00:30:43] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:30:43] Jason Hull: They've got a lockbox there. I think that's very cool. They can just go and "Can I move in on this day?" "Yep, here's the lockbox. You've got a code or however it works." And they can go get in.    [00:30:52] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:30:52] Jason Hull: And you don't have to show up. They can be there with their new U-Haul when they need to be there. That's super annoying, I think for property managers sometimes. And then afterwards you survey the renter. So I'm curious about the results of this. What's been the shift that people have noticed in the experience? This is why you started this in the beginning. You weren't having a great experience. Some people probably were like, "Drive to our office and you might get a key." Some people are like, "we can meet you maybe this day." It was like a mess. So what sort of feedback are you seeing on these surveys and what sort of shift are property management companies that are working with you noticing with your process versus trying to do this on their    [00:31:30] Ben: own?   [00:31:30] Ben: Yeah, great question. We collect what I would I consider a very important metric and I'm curious if it's come up before in this podcast. It's something called a net promoter score. Yeah. Have you discussed that before? I'm happy to--   [00:31:44] Ben: we    [00:31:44] Jason Hull: haven't really focused on that. But yeah, I think a lot of people are familiar. So net promoter score is when it says "on a scale of maybe zero to 10 or one to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company?" So a lot of people see this, the quick survey on software, different things like this.    [00:32:00] Ben: Yeah, that's right. And so when the net promoter score rank actually comes out, the scale is actually a minus a hundred to a plus 100. You could Google about how that works, but you're right. As a renter, what we would be asking them is, "how likely are you to recommend leasing a property to a friend through Sunroom or through x property management company?" And what we found is we just have a really good net promoter score. So if you could google this around, but the average net promoter score amongst property managers is a seven. And that's not on the zero to 10 scale. That's on the minus a hundred to the plus 100 scale, and. For the renters who lease a property through us, we have a 52 net promoter score.    [00:32:42] Ben: Nice.    [00:32:43] Ben: Yeah. So it's like what I said at the very beginning these renters are just a lot happier when they get in the home. For the property managers, they're seeing less really noisy renters when they first move in. I think that's a common thing that property managers are used to is that when a renter first moves in, that can be when they're talking the most or they're the noisiest. And so I think just anecdotally, property managers have said that, "Hey, these renters are just happier. They're just not causing as much commotion when they first move. And some of that has to do with our process too, right? Allowing renters to even self tour homes, it's a no pressure thing where they're able to really understand what they're buying before they move in. So I believe that helps as well.    [00:33:24] Jason Hull: This is the nerd in me coming out. So there's this really book called _Innovating Analytics_. And they put out this idea, basically the idea of the next generation of net promoter. They have used a lot of data to showcase and it's a little dry, but there's a lot of data to showcase the fundamental flaws of net promoter score, which is, has advantages over doing nothing, right? But then they talk about a new sort of score, which is the word of mouth index. And so we've incorporated that a bit into our business. It basically asks a second question, "how likely are you to discourage others from utilizing that?" Because what they found, just because somebody is not a true promoter, as they categorize them on the high end, like they choose like maybe a seven, eight, or nine or something, does not mean they're actually going to go hurt your business. And so a lot of big companies, they found were spending a lot of money to try and mitigate the people and pay attention to people and help the people they thought were detractors or people that would hurt their business when most of them really wouldn't. Just because it was a two or a three. They found that does not necessarily mean they're actually going to go actively try and destroy your business or hurt you. They just aren't going to tell people about it, because some people just don't want to talk about other businesses. Right? . So then asking a secondary question, how likely are you to tell others not to use this business or whatever. Then it gives you the true people to focus on mitigating or solving challenges for. Really interesting idea, but then they talk about the challenge of mainlining, where if they answer one question one way, first question, they'll answer it the same way, but it's backwards. Because they're just in the mode of answering questions like a zombie and they'll do it the wrong way or read it the wrong way. We've even seen this, so you have to put some questions in between and so it just complicates. But it's a really interesting book. You and I can geek out sometime and show you how I built this out so that it would work effectively, but it helps us identify which people are actually detractors that we need to take care of and focus on, and which people, they never rate anything positively and they're just, but they're quiet, which is fine.    [00:35:25] Jason Hull: Oh that's    [00:35:25] Ben: fascinating. I'll have to check that out.   [00:35:28] Jason Hull: I know, it's pretty nerdy. So_ Innovating Analytics_ is by Larry Freed F R E E D which is an interesting book. Cool. We've asked a lot of questions. You've explained the process. I think we've covered how it works unless we missed anything. But what else do people, property managers coming to you, what other concerns or things could we address here on the podcast before we wrap that they might have? Or what are the big FAQ questions that they ask before they're willing to explore giving up the leasing arm their business?    [00:36:00] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of the questions just evolve around how they can still control the process. And so we've invested an incredible amount into giving them those controls, right? Like I think the key is, the way we look at it is look like we're going to be the best at doing this leasing legwork. It's all we do. And we've built technology to really hold ourselves accountable to really high standards. But at the end of the day, like we still want you to have control over who's the right tenant for this property? Or, "how would you like the that application process to go?" For example. And I think we've worked hard to streamline the areas and that, we just realized, hey, this is the best way to do this. But also we recognize that hey, these property managers, they have pride to process for a reason, right, for their particular market that might be the right thing to do. And so we've invested a lot in creating different settings and things like that, that can make it so that they get to use it the way they would like.    [00:37:03] Ben: Cool. So it's    [00:37:04] Jason Hull: really a lot of the big concerns are just about the flexibility. "Do I have to go all in and use everything that you offer?"   [00:37:10] Jason Hull: Right.   [00:37:11] Jason Hull: "Or can I do, some of this and maybe I'll give up pieces later--" because some of y'all entrepreneurs are control freaks. Let's be real.    [00:37:18] Jason Hull: Yes.    [00:37:18] Jason Hull: And you need to let go of some of this stuff and let somebody else do it a little bit better. We have a lot of egos, entrepreneurs. We think our way is the best way all the time and we need to see that maybe somebody else could do this    [00:37:31] Ben: better.    [00:37:31] Ben: But we've also, from    [00:37:32] Jason Hull: experience--   [00:37:33] Jason Hull: I'm guessing you're going to say that Sunroom probably does it better than what most property managers are doing.    [00:37:39] Ben: Better NPS scores?    [00:37:41] Ben: Yeah. I would just say that, some of the property managers that we've seen are the most excited to partner with us are definitely probably the ones listening to your podcast or it's the ones that want to grow. And, we have some great examples of that, right? There's one property manager that we started working with in Austin a couple years ago, and they started with 300 doors. And now I believe they're up to 800 doors. And so by them being able to just, focus on other things, they were able to grow pretty quickly. And because we recognize this and we're starting to set up in these new markets, we actually just this week launched a new program specifically for trying to find these property management companies that are really focused on growth. And so we actually launched this new growth program. That we just put on our website where property managers can apply for the program. And essentially this program if we accept them will actually give them-- and they partner with us-- we'll give them $10,000 to grow their business. And they can, they could use that money for-- or I'd say up to 10,000-- they can use that money for helping them grow. And really the only terms of it is that you're willing to partner with us on leasing to do that. And so we have different ideas of really how to use that money to grow. I know a lot of entrepreneurs already have those ideas and so that's why we yeah, we set up this new program.   [00:39:02] Jason Hull: Awesome. We should chat because we're really good at growing property management companies and yeah, I think there would be a good-- there. We'll chat later. We've also negotiated with most of the top vendors where we've got a hit list, but a lot of the top vendors we're negotiating best in class discounts just for our mastermind members.   [00:39:21] Ben: There you go.    [00:39:21] Jason Hull: So maybe that's something you and I can do with the Sunroom as well. So    [00:39:25] Jason Hull: Yeah .   [00:39:26] Jason Hull: If you're open, that's--   [00:39:27] Jason Hull: yeah. Cool.    [00:39:28] Jason Hull: We've got some big players on board already for some of these things, but I think it'd be really cool to see this is something new and I think it's innovative and it seems really exciting. So we'll we'll chat afterwards, cool. Is there anything else you want people to know before we go and if The last thing maybe is how do they find you? And how do they get in touch and how do they start working with Sunroom?    [00:39:49] Ben: Yeah. Just go to our website, Sunroomleasing.com. Fill out a little form. Be happy to have, someone from our sales team reach out and have a conversation and kind of explain more of these details about what we do. I'm an engineer at heart, so I think for some people, maybe I went into too much detail. But at the same time, knowing I've talked to a lot of property managers they love the details. If you want even more details yeah, go to our website, sunroomleasing.com. Reach out to us and someone from our sales team would love to dig into those details with you.    [00:40:18] Jason Hull: Perfect. I think the last big question everybody would have is be, is going to be what does it cost? Is this affordable? Can we do this? That sort of question. So--   [00:40:29] Jason Hull: yeah.   [00:40:29] Jason Hull: Anything to say about that?    [00:40:31] Ben: Yeah, so we're going to charge, similar to what I would say like other leasing agents would. So we're going to charge like a percentage of first month's rent. That percentage of first month's rent that we charge. It's going to be different depending on the market and depending on what kind of volume that you have. Normally, the way we are setting this up is that we usually make it so that the property manager can still make good money on leasing while still utilizing us for all of it. Property managers can charge a percentage of first month's rent to their owners. That could be different by market. We're usually going to charge, call it 10- 20% less than that so that they're able to still make money on the leasing, but still know that they have a best in class service for that happening. And so that's just for full service. For Sunscreen, that's actually free for property managers to use. And we just charge the renter an application fee. And so that's really the easiest way. If we said a lot of stuff today, people are like, "wow that's a little scary to adopt that big of a, have a company owning leasing." a great way to start to just build a relationship with us and start seeing what we could do would be to start utilizing our application processing system, which, really, it's going to be a really a low risk thing. Even if want to test out having us do one application on one listing or something, we'd be happy to do that.   [00:41:48] Ben: That's the    [00:41:49] Jason Hull: gateway drug. A little bit of Sunscreen, and then you're going to be like, "I want a whole room. I want the Sunroom now."   [00:41:54] Jason Hull: There you go. There you go.    [00:41:55] Jason Hull: "I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm tired of putting the Sunscreen on. Yeah. Okay.    [00:41:59] Jason Hull: There you go.    [00:42:00] Jason Hull: Cool.    [00:42:01] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:42:01] Jason Hull: All right. Ben, it's been great having you on the show. Check out Sunroomleasing.com and then if you come up with some major developments or big shifts or changes, we'd love to have you back on the show. So thanks for being    [00:42:12] Ben: here.    [00:42:13] Ben: Thanks so much, Jason. And yeah, we'll have to meet up in Austin sometime.    [00:42:16] Ben: All right.    [00:42:18] Jason Hull: All right. Cool. Thanks, Ben.    [00:42:20] Jason Hull: Alright. Everybody, if you've been listening to this, we appreciate you listening to our podcast. We would really appreciate it if you left us a review in exchange. If you got value from this, that would mean a lot to us at DoorGrow and my team. We have been innovating and creating a lot of new stuff at DoorGrow. We've got some really cool stuff coming out. So if you have not been familiar with DoorGrow for a while, we've got some really cool things coming down that we are working on. You should get connected to do a sales call. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Reach out to us. You can reach out to us on any social media. And we would love to connect with you and share with you. We just released the DoorGrow Code, which is the first roadmap that really showcases how to go from zero to a thousand doors in as short of time period as possible. It shows you which things you need to do at which stage, at which door levels, and what questions you have, what major problems you have at each stage, and what you need to do in order to do things in the right order to get to the next level.   [00:43:22] Jason Hull: So if you've been at a similar door count for the last year or maybe two years or three years, maybe even kind feeling stuck or maybe even backsliding a little bit because of property selling off or whatever. We have clients that are adding a lot of doors. Andrew Rocha just chimed in on one of our mastermind calls. He's one of our clients. He added like 50 doors in the last month. We've got clients. One of our clients added 310 doors in a year. We've got another client that added a hundred in gosh, they've doubled their doors. Like we've got clients that are growing really rapidly and they're not spending any money on advertising. I want you to be clear, like our methods are not focused on SEO, pay per click, content marketing, pay-per-lead lead services, social media marketing. Our methods are what really work in the marketplace, and most of them are zero cost, like they cost nothing. It just costs time and effort, and it actually takes less time and less effort than doing cold lead marketing like seo, pay per click, content marketing, social media marketing, or pay per lead services that exist in the property management space. So I highly recommend you check this out if you're wanting to grow. And we are now helping really significantly. We've built out the best systems and processes and we've been stacking the best coaches in the industry. If you've heard of certain coaches in the industry, we might have them on as experts in our program. We'll be announcing more of that later, but we've got some of the best in the industry that we've brought on as coaches. So it's not the Jason Show. I've got an amazing team of people coaching and we have systems for operations. We have systems for process. We have systems for sales, and our clients are crushing it. Nobody in the marketplace is doing all that DoorGrow's doing or can compete with us. And so if you think you know DoorGrow and you've looked at us or judged us in the past, it might be time to take a new look because your competitors might be working with us or they might work with us, and you're going to wish that it had been you.   [00:45:33] Jason Hull: So until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.    [00:45:37] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!    [00:46:05] Jason Hull: At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Ben and Mia, young zombies in love, search for the perfect xmas present in a world of the walking dead.    Cast List Mia - Brenda Dau Ben - Derek M. Koch                 of Mail Order Zombie Geek - Glen Hallstrom Tick - Frankenvox Chuck - Bob Noble Andy - Reynaud LeBoeuf Doris - Julie Hoverson Sheri - Crystal Thomson Ted - J. Spyder Isaacson Voicebox - Beverly Poole Fred & Bob - Big Anklevich           & Rish Outfield           of Dunesteef Audio Magazine Ben's Double - Danar Hoverson Mia's Double - Julie Hoverson Other zombies:  Al Aseoche, Jacquie Duckworth, Reynaud LeBoeuf, Jack Hosley, Sidney Williams, Glen Hallstrom, Bob Noble, Brian Weingartner, Ferguson and family, Robyn Keyes, Kim Poole, Michael Hudson. Music by Jason Shaw (Audionautix.com) Show theme:  Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Brett Coulstock "What kind of a place is it? Why it's an apartment on the wrong side of town, can't you tell?" ******************************************************************************************** GIFT OF THE ZOMBI   Cast: [Opening credits - Olivia] Mia, zombie (20s) dating Ben Ben, zombie (20s) dating Mia Ted, zombie (30s), Mia's horny neighbor Andy, henpecked zombie (40s) Doris, Andy's wife (40s) Geek, a broker (30s) Sheri, a lovelorn friend (20s) Tick, an unscrupulous intact (human, 30s) Fred, a zombie (any) Bob, another zombie (any) Chuck, overseer zombie (any) Voicebox - mechanical translator   ALL ZOMBIES (unless noted as exceptions, below) have dual vocal tracks - the "zombie-voice" track, which is unintelligible, but vaguely mirrors the normal voice and events, and the "mind voice" (sounds like a voiceover), which is how they sound to each other.  /n = normal"mind voice" /z = "zombie voice" There are places where we only hear the zoombie voice.   Exceptions:  DORIS has no "mind voice", just incoherent shrieks GEEK only has a zombie voice, but he is clearly understandable, if still zombie-like TICK is human, and has no zombie-voice.   NOTE:  The zombie apocalypse has come and been dealt with more or less.  Zombies might still attack humans, if they see them, but humans tend to live in the walled cities and have become somewhat mythological to the zombies outside.  Zombies still are self-aware, but they think and speak so very slowly that they are difficult for humans to understand.  Conversely, to a zombie, humans seem to speak incredibly fast - almost incomprehensibly so.  That's why humans developed the voicebox to take what they say and slow it down enough for a zombie to understand. OLIVIA      Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's a crumbling apartment building, can't you tell?  MUSIC SCENE 1.     MIA'S APARTMENT SOUND      WIND-UP ALARM GOES OFF SOUND     FLIES IN THE B/G THROUGHOUT MIA/Z     [distant moan of awakening, which continues, sporadically,  punctuating the narrative] MIA/n     I hate Mondays.  SOUND     ALARM SLAPPED OFF TABLE, STOPS RINGING SOUND     STUMBLING FOOTSTEPS MUSIC     VAGUE WARPED CHRISTMAS CAROL PLAYS SOMEWHERE MIA/n     It doesn't help that it's two days til Christmas and I haven't got Ben his present. MIA/z     [roar of anger] SOUND      SOMETHING CRASHES TO FLOOR, GLASS BREAKS. MIA/N     The holidays just bring out the worst in me. SOUND     DOOR OPENS, FOOTSTEPS CONTINUE MIA/N     [sigh] Checking my stitches in the mirror - nice to see nothing weird happened in the night.  I love the hot pink against my pale skin.  [beat] I know I'm swimming against the tide, but I still like to look nice, even when no one else gives a hang.  They're welcome to run around unwashed, in raggedy-ass clothes, just leaves more Prada for me. SOUND     SPRAY CAN PSSHT, FLIES STOP, TINY DROPPING NOISES MIA/n     A little spray - no water, that's just asking for mold - and I'm ready to face the day. SOUND     [under the next] SHAMBLING FOOTSTEPS OUT OF BATHROOM AGAIN, STRUGGLES FEET INTO SHOES, NOW SHAMBLING FEET ARE IN HEELS.  MIA/n     Ben's gift is the big problem.  I know what I want to get him, but it won't come cheap.  There just aren't that many floating around out there. MUSIC       SCENE 2.     OUTSIDE SOUND     NO TRAFFIC. JUST BIRDS, SHAMBLING FOOTSTEPS, OR OCCASIONAL BREAKING THINGS. SOUND     STRUGGLE WITH OBJECTS, THINGS FALL AWAY BEN/z     [moans, fighting his way to his feet] BEN/n     [hungover sounding] Wow, what did I do last night?  BEN/z     [shake head noise] BEN/n     Oh, crap - Mia'll be expecting me-- SOUND     SHAMBLING FEET SPEED UP BEN/n     For all her persnickityness, Mia is totally the greatest babe around, and I am sooo lucky that I'm the one she's into.  I figured for the longest time that she was just slumming with a grot like me - right up until we really did it.  Went whole hog and did the handfast.  It's like always having a piece of her with me.  [note:  in this case, the handfast was actually trading hands.  zombies can buy and sell body parts and trade them with one another] ANDY/z     [morning] BEN/z     [yo!  How's it going?] ANDY/z     [falling moan, ending in a squeal] BEN/n     Don't I know it!  Man, if ever a guy was whipped, Andy is the poster boy.  He's gonna catch hell for not getting home to Doris last night.  Almost tempting to stay and see the fray, but meeting Mia is the only thing on my maggoty little mind right now. MUSIC   SCENE 3.     MIA'S STAIRCASE SOUND     BODY FALLS DOWN STAIRS, FOLLOWED BY THE CLATTER OF A SHOE. MIA/z     [distraught moan] MIA/n     Darn stair carpet.  Darn heels.  SOUND     FEELING AROUND FOR THE SHOE AND PUTTING IT BACK ON MIA/n     Alas, vanity doesn't come cheap.  Ben loves my little foibles.  He understands why it matters so much to me, to be beautiful for him.  Looking back at my pink stitches, almost tripping as I crane my neck to see, I wonder whether he will like them as much as I do. SOUND     SHAMBLING FEET IN HEELS AGAIN, ANOTHER SET OF FEET COMES ON TED/z     [moan approaches, vaguely suggestive] MIA/z     [dismissive moan] MIA/n     Not today, Ted.  I don't have time for any of your nonsense. TED/z     [moan ending in a squeak/question] MIA/n     I'm with Ben, Ted.  You know that.  I'm not giving up what I have with him.  He has my hand, and my promise.  He even has my heart ... just in the old-fashioned way. TED/z     [mournful and pissed moan] MIA/n     Yeah, yeah, yeah - if you were the last one on earth, maybe. MIA/z     [roar/moan as she brushes him aside] SOUND     STUMBLING FEET QUICKLY TO DOOR, SLAMS OPEN, TUMBLES THROUGH MIA/z     [roar of triumph] MIA/N     First time!! [made it on the first try!]  This is gonna be a great day! MUSIC   SCENE 4.     OUTSIDE, NEAR BEN ANDY/z     [cursing groan] ANDY/n     Come on, Ben.  Doris likes you!  If I say you needed my help, she'll buy it! BEN/z     [dismissive groan] SOUND     SHAMBLING FEET MOVING AWAY, STUMBLING AFTER ANDY/z     [dude] ANDY/N     Dude!  Come on-- DORIS/z     [distant strident squeal] ANDY/n     Oh, crap! SOUND     SOMETHING WET SPLATS ON PAVEMENT, THEN DISTANT FEET APPROACHING ANDY/z     [strange gurgling warble] ANDY/n     [sigh] I lose more tongues that way. DORIS/z     [strident squeal, closer] MUSIC   SCENE 5.     OUTSIDE NEAR MIA'S BUILDING SOUND     HIGH HEEL SHAMBLE MIA/z     [low moan] GEEK/z     [he speaks clear enough to understand, but still zombie-like] [hey, fingers!] MIA/z     [quizzical] MIA/n     Yeah, what's it to you? GEEK/z     [you got any to spare?] MIA/n     No!  I like mine right where they are. GEEK/z     [get you a good price.  Fingers are always top value.] MIA/z     [sharp moan of anger] MIA/n     Look - these five are my boyfriend's, and this one says-- MIA/z     [fuck you] GEEK/z     [you'll be back [louder] they always come back!!] MIA/n     Damn parts brokers - [jealous] always have the best tongues. MUSIC   SCENE 6.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE [note:  throughout the rest of the show, unless otherwise noted, appropriate zombie noises play under] MIA     [calling]  Hey babycakes! BEN     [off]  Yo sweet thang! SOUND     PLODDING FOOTSTEPS COME TOGETHER MIA     Mm.  Missed you! BEN     Double that. SOUND     DISGUSTING SLOPPY LICKY KISSY NOISES MIA     [mild slurp, then hot]  You are such a good kisser.  BEN     Don't know how I'd get up each day without you to look forward to. MIA     [giggles]  BEN     Let's walk.  Want to show you something. MIA     Oh?  Well, I've got a little time before hitting the old treadmill. BEN     You know I'd support you if I could-- MIA     I like looking after my own needs.  [flirting] Leaves you to look after my wants. BEN     Ooh! MUSIC   SCENE 7.     OUTSIDE, NEAR STORE SOUND     PLODDING FEET MIA     I should have worn more convenient shoes. BEN     Sorry!  Almost there. MIA     What is...it...?  [awe]  Oh! BEN     I thought you might say that.  Just saw them.  Of course, they're not cheap. MIA     [drooling -- zombie noises under get really slobbery] Patent leather, thigh high - oh, I'd never have to take them off! BEN     The heels aren't too high, are they? MIA     [sigh of ecstasy]  I love stacks... MUSIC   SCENE 8.     OUTSIDE, Later BEN     [bummed] I was right, she loved the boots. ANDY     And how much did you say they were? BEN     More than I've had in living memory. ANDY     At any one time? BEN     EVER.  ANDY     Woah.  Well, suppose you can hit the mills like the rest of us schmoes - if you're truly that desperate. BEN     [scoff noise]  The mills?  It'd take me ten years - and they'd probably sell by then. ANDY     What, then?  Go out snatching?  That's pretty much your only other option. BEN     [sighs]  I thought I might ask around, see what I could borrow-- ANDY     Woah, there!  You know Doris holds the purse strings! BEN     If I was going to snatch anyone, I'd snatch her - she's got enough body for three. ANDY     [musing] You know...  That's not a bad idea. BEN     [disturbed] Serious? ANDY     Nah.  I'd fall apart without her keeping me moving.  I guess that's love. BEN     [agreeing hmph] MUSIC   SCENE 9.     TREADMILLS SOUND     HEAVY WHIRRING NOISE UNDER.  DISTANT NORMAL STREET SOUNDS MIA     Hey! OTHER ZOMBIES     [Morning!] [nice to see you!] [Mia!  Looking good!] SOUND     MANY PLODDING FEET MIA     Hey Chuck!  Got a space? CHUCK     For you?  Always, babe.  Wanna lose the heels first? MIA     Brought my work shoes.  Just need a moment at the bench. CHUCK     I'd offer to help, but...[chuckles]  Thank god for velcro, eh? MIA     Hah!  I have all my fingers. CHUCK     [chuckles] Coulda fooled me - [teasing] That looks like your fellow's hand...? MIA     [chuckles]  Jealous? MUSIC   SCENE 10.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE [note - Ben has zombie noises under, geek does not - he always sounds like a zombie trying to talk] GEEK     [Psst.] BEN     What? GEEK     [heard you were having some money troubles.] BEN     What's it to you? GEEK     [I might be able to help you with that.] BEN     I don't think so.  I don't have anything I feel like selling. GEEK     [You got some extra fingers.  An entire hand that looks... spare] BEN     No way. Man!  That's - that's Mia's hand!  I should smack you with it just for suggesting that! GEEK     [Hey!  I don't want no trouble!  I'm just a businessman!] BEN     [spits out the word] Businessman.  You're a parts broker.  GEEK     [Yeah, and we both know you come to me when you need something, then you spit on me when I try to help you out.] SOUND     SHUFFLING FEET START TO LEAVE BEN     Wait. GEEK     [what?] BEN     What - what's in high demand? GEEK     [What?] BEN     I mean, if I was... going to sell something ...just if... what would you be [reluctant, forcing the words out] paying the best prices for? GEEK     [[chuckles] See?  When you need me--] BEN     Cut the crap and tell me. GEEK     [Appendages are always good.  Fingers, noses, ears.  And soft parts, like tongues and, uh.... [suggestive] you know.]  BEN     [gulp] GEEK     [Toes not so much - most just get by without - unless you have a complete foot somewhere - those are collectible, but only in pristine condition.  Eyes are pretty good, and you hardly need two.]  BEN     What about parts that - aren't mine? GEEK     [Stolen parts?  What makes you think I trade dirty?] BEN     Your type always does. GEEK     [[pissed again] My type?  My type?  I think you just talked yourself out of a good deal, pal.] BEN     Shit, I-- GEEK     [incoherent roar, as he leaves] MUSIC   SCENE 11.     TREADMILL AMB - underlying zombies moans, many many plodding feet MIA     [no specific moaning for this speech] Being on the treadmill gives you plenty of time to think.  You stare at the back of the guy in front of you and wonder what's going through his head.  Ben doesn't like the nine to five, but I figure - heck, you gotta do something, and if you feel the urge to walk, might as well get paid for it, right? SOUND     SOMEONE CLIMBS ON THE TREADMILL [vocals have zombie noises under again] TED     Hey Mia! MIA     [sigh] Hi Ted. TED     Funny running into you here.  Shove over? MIA     Right.  Like I don't do this every day.  No room. SHERI     Hey Mia! [warm] Hey Ted. TED     [dismissive] Sheri. [wheedling] Come on, Mia, squeeze in a little.  There's space next to you if you make room. MIA     Sorry, Ted [she's not].  Been saving that for... Sheri. SHERI     Huh? TED     Sheri won't mind - will you? SHERI     I - I guess not... MIA     Oh, no Ted.  We have girl talking to do.  Bye-bye.  Hop up Sheri. TED     Fine.  See you at end of shift? MIA     [muttered] Not if I see you first.  SOUND     TED FLOPS OFF MIA     [up]  I don't know what you see in him, Sher. SHERI     Neither do I.  Pheromones I guess. MIA     Well, he does smell. SHERI     [on an ecstatic sigh] Yes. MIA     [ugh]  Hey, Sher, I gotta problem. SHERI     Oh?  [horrified] You didn't... break up with Ben? MIA     No!  Why would you say that? SHERI     Nothing. MIA     Did you hear something, or are you just worried that Ted might somehow luck out and catch me on the rebound? SHERI     Um.  The second one. MIA     Kinda thought so.  O-K, passing over your insecurity, can we discuss my problem? SHERI     [relieved] Sure! MIA     I found the perfect present for Ben, and I don't know how I'm gonna afford it.  SHERI     You mean...um...what you said he's missing? MIA     Yeah.  All his fleshy parts haven't lasted so well - I keep telling him that sleeping rough isn't good for him, but he hates being cooped up.  Says being nibbled on by rats is preferable to a cage. SHERI     You live in a cage? MIA     He means an apartment.  SHERI     Oh.  Well, I'm sure he looks fine without one.  You see plenty of missing ones out there every day. [NOTE:  they're discussing noses, but it makes it sound like something more suggestive] MIA     I know, but he would - well, from things he's said, he would actually LIKE one.  Make him feel like a new man.  I thought I might get him one of those artificial ones - you know, cast in plastic?  In a skin tone, though - not one of those weird colored ones. SHERI     They're all the rage with the trendoids these days, the neon ones.  I guess they figure if it's gonna look fakey, might as well make a statement.  And some of them get freakishly big. MIA     Well, I found a place to get something real high quality.  Won't look fake at all.  They'll even tint it to match his skin.  And it won't rot or fall off.  Guaranteed to last.  Not even a nibble. SHERI     It won't make him smell any better. MIA     No, but I get the feeling he would be more secure in our relationship if he - well - if he fit more the image he thinks I'd go for. SHERI     Someone with all their parts? MIA     Oh, heck.  I'd love Ben with or without any number of parts, but he seems to think I'd like him better if he actually had a nose. SHERI     [hmm]  I could maybe loan you a little-- MIA     No, this guy charges a bunch.  I'm actually tempted to sell a part or two - something I don't use, or not so much, you know? SHERI     Don't go there.  Starts out simple, a finger here, an ear there, and then - voila!  You end up checking people in at work like "Chuck, the torso" - stuck in admin cuz you got no limbs left.  Or worse - that guy who talks out his neck since he woke up one morning and his head was gone. MIA     [sigh] You're probably right.  MUSIC   SCENE 12.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE AMB     SLIGHT ECHO - AND A DRIP SOMEWHERE SOUND     FLOPPY STEPS IN WATER [note     Tick speaks slowly and has no zombie echo, Ben sounds completely zombie - no voice over - for this scene TICK     You looking for me? BEN     [gasp] [what?] SOUND     STUMBLE FLOPPY STEPS IN WATER TICK     Don't bother - just stand still. BEN     [you're a - an intact?] TICK     And you're a dead lump of shit, but maybe we can help each other. BEN     [moan of acceptance] TICK     Good.  Now stay quiet while I tell you what we're doing here. BEN     [slurpy gasp] TICK     That's disgusting.  But I need a heap like you to front for me.  I have some... parts... to be disposed of, but I can't just wander into maggotville myself.  BEN     [Why me?] TICK     My source says you're tough and desperate.  And stupid. BEN     [stifled annoyed noise] TICK     So maybe he's wrong.  BEN     [I am desperate] TICK     [snort]  Fine.  Here's the deal - I don't give a flying fluck about your crappy corpse cash.  On the other hand, I like having folks - dead or alive - who owe me. BEN     [What you need from me?] TICK     I'll tell you when it comes up.  Right now, I just need this bag of ... parts to vanish.  BEN     [It's illegal.] TICK     [cajoling] They're nice and fresh.  [impatient] Fine.  Clock is ticking.  Tick tock.  Tick tock.  You even remember what "time" is, maggot? BEN     [It's almost Christmas.  [beat] I'll do it.] MUSIC   SCENE 13.     TREADMILL SOUND     TREADMILL, FEET PLODDING SHERI     You ever wonder what they do over there? MIA     [lost in a daze] Hmm?  Over the wall? SHERI      Yeah.  The [awed whisper] In-tacts? MIA     Don't know.  Don't care.  Except for when they come over here and drag off my friends, I say leave them alone.  SHERI     But you do believe in them, don't you? MIA     Believe in them?  What's to believe - we see them marching on the wall, and they're the ones who shell out for us to walk on this damn treadmill day and night.  They're as real as ... as... shoes.  SHERI     Some say we all came from in-tacts, way back when. MIA     [lightly sarcastic] Yes, and a wasp nest in your head is a sign of good luck and not just poor hygiene.  I swear Sheri, you'll believe anything. SHERI     You believe they carry people off, though? MIA     Well, yeah - we've all seen that.  They appear from nowhere, in those dark helmets and suits, and by the time you catch your breath, someone's vanished. SHERI     [awed] I saw one once. MIA     A kidnapping? SHERI     An in-tact. MIA     [half-teasing, half worried] You know, they say if you mentioned them three times, they'll appear out of thin air. SHERI     [agreeing, distant] They are really fast. MIA     [exasperated] Sheri!  Don't-- SHERI     I did, though!  I really saw one.  Not just in a suit and helmet like they usually are, but one right... up... close. MIA     [sighs, feels her pain]  Tell me about it? SHERI     It was a guy, I think, and the funny part is he looked so much like a regular person.  Just that he was so fast and he was - well - he had everything.  His skin was perfect, no holes or anything, and it was this warm rosy color.  I... yearned to touch him, but when I reached out, he turned and ran away.  MIA     [uncertain] That...must have been ....weird. SHERI     [almost teary] It was like I saw an angel, and it saw something horrible in me. MIA     Oh, Sheri-- SHERI     Maybe that's why Ted won't love me?  Because I'm horrible inside? MIA     Aw, Sheri.  [reassuring] We're all horrible inside.  And if anyone's seen an angel here and not realized it, Ted's the one.  He sees you every day and misses out every time he turns his back. SHERI     [sniff sniff] MUSIC   SCENE 14.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE SOUND     BAG PASSED WITH A SQUISH GEEK     [you sure you don't want any of them?] BEN     [upset] I... don't need any girl parts, thanks. GEEK     [Squeamish?  All you had to do was lug a bunch of fresh merchandise here to my humble workshop.] BEN     I've never.... felt... they were so [disgusted] warm. GEEK     [Fresher just means it'll last longer.  Nothing more.  You want your pay or not?] BEN     [down] Yeah. MUSIC   SCENE 15.     TREADMILL SHERI     --you know that guy Sam I was dating? MIA     [worn down] Yeah? SHERI     And how he was always mouthing off about-- SOUND     WHISTLE, END OF SHIFT MIA     [heartfelt] Oh yesss!  What a relief! SHERI     [not getting it] Yeah!  Let's go somewhere - I was in the middle of telling you about Sam. MIA     [almost panicky] Nah, save it for next time - I have to meet up with Ben. SHERI     It's so great to have someone to talk to while we walk - Tomorrow, same time? MIA     [transparently lying] Sure!  Oh, no - wait - I promised I would do this thing with Ben tomorrow. SHERI     What thing? MIA     [panicky, trying to cover] You mean I didn't mention the thing? I--uh-- SOUND     DISTANT ZOMBIE NOISES AND SCREAMS SHERI     What the--? MIA     Come on! SOUND     SLOW PLODDING.  LARGE GROUP OF ZOMBIES GATHERING MUSIC   SCENE 16.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE SOUND      SLOW PLODDING, ONE SET OF FEET ANDY     [distant] Ben!  Ben! BEN     [sigh] SOUND     PLODDING STOPS BEN     Yeah? SOUND     ANDY'S FEET APPROACH ANDY     [panicky] Ben, man, am I glad to see you - it's Doris!  Jeez, she slipped and I think something's broken! BEN     [muttered] Lucky you. [up] What do you mean? ANDY     Her leg - it snapped and now she can't get up!  What am I gonna do, Ben? BEN     Andy, Doris is such a-- ANDY     I know I know.  She gives me hell and treats me like a dog, but what can I do, Ben, I love her!  You gotta help me.  I'll do anything! BEN     Let me take a look. MUSIC   SCENE 17.     ALTERCATION SOUND     LOTS OF SHAMBLING FEET, MOANS MIA     What happened? SHERI     Where's everyone going? FRED     It's one of the overseers! MIA     An in-tact?  What happened? BOB     I seen the whole thing!  He fell off the wall and someone made a grab fer him! SHERI     Oh no! FRED     Oh, yeah!  He's somewhere in the middle of the dogpile there. MIA     Isn't anyone helping? BOB     What are you, some kind of pervert?  This is an [spits out the word] In-tact.  [excited] They're tearing him apart! MIA     We should get out of here! SHERI     B-but - They're gonna kill him! MIA     [sad] I know, and there's nothing we can do about it.  And we want to be out of here before they bring out the big guns. SOUND     DRAGGING, SHUFFLING AWAY FROM THE FRACAS SHERI     But what if he's that same one I saw before? MIA     By now - you probably wouldn't know him.  MUSIC   SCENE 18.     ANDY'S PLACE DORIS     [squeals piteously] BEN     Yep, that's a bad one.  Twisted all up like this. ANDY     Can't we do anything? BEN     I'm no reconstructor.  Maybe some duct tape and a stick? DORIS      [Squeals angrily] ANDY     He's just trying to help, honeybuunny. BEN     Yeah, chill honeybunny. DORIS     [squeals again, sort, sharp, warning.] ANDY     [quiet] You gotta help me, Ben - you're the only one I can turn to! BEN     Jeez Andy... [sigh]  You'll pay me back? ANDY     You know I'm good for it!  Soon as that leg's on, we'll both hit the treads every day til we cover it. BEN     [down] Sure.  I-- ANDY     Yes? BEN     [muttered] I didn't like the way it felt anyway.  [up] Here.  SOUND     PACKAGE CHANGES SLOPPY HANDS ANDY     What - is it? BEN     Enough to get her fixed up - you might go ahead and get her a new tongue while you're at it. ANDY     [very quiet] Oh.  No.  Let's not go completely overboard... MUSIC   SCENE 19.     OUTSIDE, LATER, TOGETHER SOUND     OUTSIDE. SHUFFLING FEET APPROACH MIA     There you are - I was beginning to worry. SOUND     BODY FALLS TO THE GROUND "ben relaxes" BEN     [oof, then] It's been a really... weird day. SOUND     BODY FALLS TO THE GROUND "mia relaxes" MIA     [oof, then agreeing] Tell me about it. BEN     [muttered] I would if I could. MIA     Hmm? BEN     Nah.  Doris broke her leg and Andy needed help with getting her fixed up. MIA     They better get her a good big leg.  She goes through so darn many. BEN     Really? It's happened before? MIA     Every couple of years.  I think the last time was before you showed up here. BEN     I am such a sucker. MIA     Whenever you start thinking like that, just look at Andy.  That'd make anyone feel superior. BEN     You always know just the right thing to say. MIA     Can't help it.  We're in tune.  BEN     Yeah, I guess we are.  About Christmas-- MIA     Don't worry - I love the boots! BEN     Oh, the boots... MIA     But only if you can afford them.  If you can't, I might be able to get them myself.  [sexy] You still get to enjoy them, though. BEN     [grim] I'll get them-- MIA     [sorry] I was just teasing. BEN     Don't worry.  [softening]  Like I said, it's been a really strange day. MUSIC   SCENE 20.     SEWER AGAIN TICK     [really fast] Yeah what? BEN     [slow gasp] TICK     [fast] crap. [deliberately going slower, down to normal speed]  What do you want? BEN     Geek said you have another job? TICK     Not so much a job as a favor. BEN     Need money. TICK     What happened to the packet I gave you before?  Never mind - don't want to know.  [speeding up a bit] Look.  I'm not some magic money tree. BEN     Oh. TICK     [slowing again]  See right now, you owe me a favor - but I can be gracious about it.  You give me what I need, and I will advance you what you need against the next job I give you.  Sound good? BEN     [carefully articulating] You pay now for next job if I do favor? TICK     There you go.  [quick] not so damn stupid after all. MUSIC   SCENE 21.     MIA'S APARTMENT SOUND     ALARM CLOCK SOUND      KNOCKED OFF TABLE MIA     [just like at beginning]  I hate Mondays. SOUND     DOORBELL RINGS MIA     Huh? MIA/Z     coming! SOUND     BAREFOOT SHUFFLE SOUND      DOORBELL RINGS AGAIN, QUICKLY AND REPEATEDLY MIA/Z     Hold your damn horses! SOUND      DOORKNOB FUMBLES, DOOR IS SLAMMED OPEN. SOUND     BODY FALLS MIA/Z     [annoyed] hey! SOUND     FEET MOVE QUICKLY INTO APARTMENT, SLAM DOOR MIA/Z     [scared] Who are you--? SOUND     SUPER-QUICK WHISPERED VOICES IN BACKGROUND VOICEBOX     [mechanical voice]  You were at the altercation near the wall yesterday. MIA/z     uhhh VOICEBOX     Yes or no.  We ask yes or no questions.  Answer yes or no. MIA/z     yesss. VOICEBOX     Did you take part-- MIA/z     NO! VOICEBOX     Did you see any of those who did? MIA/z     [uncertain] no. VOICEBOX     There was another female with you.  Did it see anything? MIA     Sheri? MIA/z     No. VOICEBOX     Please identify this female. MIA/z     No. VOICEBOX     That was not a question.  Identify the female that was with you. MIA     Yeah, right. MIA/z     [incoherent moan] VOICEBOX     Speak clearly. MIA/z     Naaame isss [incoherent moan] VOICEBOX     We are prepared to remove parts if you do not cooperate.  SOUND     STRUGGLE, KNIFE SNICKS OPEN MIA/z     ohh! MIA     No!  that's Ben's! [the hand they're threatening] VOICEBOX     Last chance.  The name. MIA/z     Naaame isss shhh-jerry  VOICEBOX     Jerry? MIA/z     [reluctantly agreeing] Uh-huh. VOICEBOX     Good.  [commanding, disgusted] Let it go. SOUND     BODY FLUNG TO FLOOR MIA/z     [moans unhappily] SOUND     FEET MARCH CRISPLY AWAY MUSIC   SCENE 22.     SEWER BEN     You want WHAT? TICK     Not like you'll miss it. BEN     I-I don't-- TICK     Hey, take it or leave it.  You owe me, but not like I'm gonna wrestle you down and steal it from you.  I got people - and your kind - who can do that for me. BEN     When you need? TICK     [irritated, speeding up] What do you mean when?  You think I don't mean now? [like the crack of doom, slowly and clearly] Now! BEN     Now... TICK     Tick-tock. BEN     [moans uncertainly, then glumly] yeah... MUSIC   SCENE 23.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE MIA/z      [muffled whispered moans] MIA      Psst! SHERI     Mia?  What's with the getup? MIA      Get over here! SOUND     SHUFFLING SHERI/z     [whiny querulous moan] SHERI     What? MIA      Ok, no one can see us-- SHERI     You look like a clown. MIA      Shh!  Sheri, have any of the overseers [gulps] "talked" to you? SHERI     In-tacts?  No! MIA      They found me.  They'll find you.  They want to know who killed that - in-tact - yesterday in the riot. SHERI     Gary?  Why? MIA      No-no-no-no!  I don't WANT to know who did it!  They're asking, and they threatened to cut... off-- [sob] Th-they threatened me!  SHERI     [still not understanding it] Why? MIA      They want to get the one who did it, I suppose!  They'll come after you! SHERI     How will they know to come for me? MIA      [evasive] Well - how did - how did they know to come for me? SHERI     Oh! MIA      So now you're warned - stay away from the treadmill! SHERI     [annoyed moan] MIA     Well, I wanted to warn you.  SOUND     MIA STARTS TO WALK AWAY, STRANGELY LIMPING SHERI     What's wrong?  Mia?  You're limping. MIA     Nothing.  Figured if I can't make the treadmill for a while, I'd need something to live on. SOUND     STUMBLING FEET APPROACH SHERI and MIA     [gasping moans] FRED     [gasp]  Oh, hey!  Don't tell anyone I'm here. MIA      They found you too? FRED     I - I heard they're coming - how'd you know? SHERI     We saw it happen. FRED     Woah!  You better hide.  Least for a while.  They're taking folks again. MUSIC   SCENE 24.     MIA'S APARTMENT  BEN     Mia? SOUND     TAPPING ON DOOR, DOOR CREAKS OPEN BEN     [worried now]  Mia? TED     [off, questioning moan] BEN     You Ted? TED     yeah [affirmative moan, voice getting clearer] BEN     Where the hell's Mia? TED     She took some stuff and left.  What's it to you? SOUND     SHUFFLE TURN BEN     I'm Ben. TED     Ugh!  What the hell does she see in you? MUSIC   SCENE 25.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE MIA     [off a bit]  Ben? BEN     [phantom of the opera cringing noise] What? MIA     Ben - I'm over here. BEN     Mia - don't look. MIA     [almost laughing] What? BEN     Please. MIA     All right.  I'll close my eyes. BEN     Thanks.  SOUND     SHUFFLING STEPS TO MIA BEN     Why are you hiding? MIA     I saw something - there are in-tacts maybe looking for me.  I don't know. BEN     They're just full of surprises, aren't they? MIA     Are they? SOUND     MOMENT OF JUST PLODDING ALONG TOGETHER BEN     Helluva way to spend the holidays. MIA     It is Christmas, isn't it?  [beat]  Can I look now? BEN     No!  [short barking laugh]  I - I know it's silly for me to be vain, but, uh - I lost something. MIA     I got you something! BEN     Don't turn around-- Ohhhh. [disappointed] MIA     [concerned] What happened? BEN     Some guy named Gary needed a new face.  MIA     [concerned for him] I hope you got something good for it. BEN     Actually I did.  Take off your shoes. MIA     [more panicked than should be] No! BEN     Don't worry - I'll carry them for you. MIA     No - I...  I kind of needed to make a trade too.  BEN     Your leg--? MIA     I guess feet with toes are sort of collectable. BEN     Oh.  I hope ... [chuckles]  I hope you got something good for it. MIA     [laughs a bit]  SOUND     STICKY SOUND AS SHE STROKES HIS RAW FLESH MIA     At least you kept your lips.  BEN     Are you kidding?  Had to keep those - they're my best feature. MIA     Well, here's a new one, but I don't know how it will go on - you might have to wait until you have a place to hang it again. SOUND     PACKAGE UNWRAPS, OPENS BEN     It's beautiful. MIA     It's latex.  It won't rot or get chewed on by rats.  I think I got the right color, but now - BEN     It's a fine nose. MIA     Not too big?  I mean, I never saw you with-- BEN     It's perfect. MIA     We should get going.  If they're still after me, we'll have to ... find some place else to-- BEN     Waitaminute.  Now you have to open yours. MIA     Oh, you--! SOUND     UNWRAPPING OF PAPER MIA     The patent leather! BEN     Yeah.  You know, maybe you could brace and stuff them-- MIA     It's just the one foot. BEN     Ok, stuff the one, and still walk on it. MIA     Not if we're going a long way - I don't want these puppies to get worn out on any stupid road trip.  [ecstatic intake of breath]  This is the best Christmas ever! BEN     You know?  I think you're right...  Here, take my hand. MIA     [teasing sweetly] That's my hand. BEN     Come on.  [grunt to help her up] MIA     Which way? [their voices, along with their moaning and plodding footsteps, begin to slowly fade out] BEN     A wise man once said "the sun never sets on those who ride into it".  [the quote is from the end of Shock Treatment] MIA     Which wise man was that? BEN     Um.... MIA     Are we talking like "three wise men" kind of wise man? BEN     Um - no.  I think it was... Richard O'Brien. MIA     Who? BEN     You know, the time warp guy. MIA     Oh, man - I haven't been to THAT movie in months. CLOSER  "The Gift of the Magi" is a famous story by O. Henry where a newlywed couple (around 1900) each sell something to buy the other a present - He sells his watch to get her a fancy hair comb and she sells her long hair to get him a new watch fob.  The entire story is inspired by this.    

Nadia Asparouhova talks about idea machines on idea machines! Idea machines, of course, being her framework around societal organisms that turn ideas into outcomes. We also talk about  the relationship between philanthropy and status, public goods and more.  Nadia is a hard-to-categorize doer of many things: In the past, she spent many years exploring the funding, governance, and social dynamics of open source software, both writing a book about it called “Working in Public” and putting those ideas into practice at GitHub, where she worked to improve the developer experience. She explored parasocial communities and reputation-based economies as an independent researcher at Protocol Labs and put those ideas into practice as employee number two at Substack, focusing on the writer experience. She's currently researching what the new tech elite will look like, which forms the base of a lot of our conversation.  Completely independently, the two of us came up with the term “idea machines” to describe same thing — in her words: “self-sustaining organisms that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes.” I hope you enjoy my conversation with Nadia Asparouhova.  Links Nadia's Idea Machines Piece Nadia's Website Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Transcript [00:01:59] Ben: I really like your way of, of defining things and sort of bringing clarity to a lot of these very fuzzy words that get thrown around. So, so I'd love to sort of just get your take on how we should think about so a few definitions to start off with. So I, in your mind, what, what is tech, when we talk about like tech and philanthropy what, what is that, what is that entity. [00:02:23] Nadia: Yeah, tech is definitely a fuzzy term. I think it's best to find as a culture, more than a business industry. And I think, yeah, I mean, tech has been [00:02:35] associated with startups historically, but But like, I think it's transitioning from being this like pure software industry to being more like, more like a, a way of thinking. But personally, I don't think I've come across a good definition for tech anywhere. It's kind, you know? [00:02:52] Ben: Yeah. Do, do you think you could point to some like very sort of like characteristic mindsets of tech that you think really sort of set it. [00:03:06] Nadia: Yeah. I think the probably best known would be, you know, failing fast and moving fast and breaking things. I think like the interest in the sort of like David and gly model of an individual that is going up against an institution or some sort of. Complex bureaucracy that needs to be broken apart. Like the notion of disrupting, I think, is a very tech sort of mindset of looking at a problem and saying like, how can we do this better? So it, in a [00:03:35] weird way, tech is, I feel like it's sort of like, especially in relation, in contrast to crypto, I feel like it's often about iterating upon the way things are or improving things, even though I don't know that tech would like to be defined that way necessarily, but when I, yeah. Sort of compare it to like the crypto mindset, I feel like tech is kind of more about breaking apart institutions or, or doing yeah. Trying to do things better. [00:04:00] Ben: A a as opposed. So, so could you then dig into the, the crypto mindset by, by contrast? That's a, I think that's a, a subtle difference that a lot of people don't go into. [00:04:10] Nadia: Yeah. Like I think the crypto mindset is a little bit more about building a parallel universe entirely. It's about, I mean, well, one, I don't see the same drive towards creating monopolies in the way that and I don't know if that was like always a, you know, core value of tech, but I think in practice, that's kind of what it's been of. You try to be like the one thing that is like dominating a market. Whereas with crypto, I think people are [00:04:35] because they have sort of like decentralization as a core value, at least at this stage of their maturity. It's more about building lots of different experiments or trying lots of different things and enabling people to sort of like have their own little corner of the universe where they can, they have all the tools that they need to sort of like build their own world. Whereas the tech mindset seems to imply that there is only one world the world is sort of like dominated by these legacy institutions and it's Tech's job to fix. Those problems. So it's like very much engaged with what it sees as kind of like that, that legacy world or [00:05:10] Ben: Yeah, I, I hadn't really thought about it that way. But that, that totally makes sense. And I'm sure other people have, have talked about this, but do, do you feel that is an artifact of sort of the nature of the, the technology that they're predicated on? Like the difference between, I guess sort of. The internet and the, the internet of, of like SAS and servers and then the [00:05:35] internet of like blockchains and distributed things. [00:05:38] Nadia: I mean, it's weird. Cause if you think about sort of like early computing days, I don't really get that feeling at all. I'm not a computer historian or a technology historian, so I'm sure someone else has a much more nuanced answer to this than I do, but yeah. I mean, like when I think of like sixties, computer or whatever, it, it feels really intertwined with like creating new worlds. And that's why like, I mean, because crypto is so new, it's maybe. It, we can only really observe what's happening right now. I don't know that crypto will always look exactly like this in the future. In fact, it almost certainly will not. So it's hard to know like, what are, it's like core distinct values, but I, I just sort of noticed the contrast right now, at least, but probably, yeah, if you picked a different point in, in text history, sort of like pre startups, I guess and, and pre, or like that commercialization phase or that wealth accumulation phase it was also much more, I guess, like pie this guy. Right. But yeah, it feel, it feels like at least the startup mindset, or like whenever that point of [00:06:35] history started all this sort of like big successes were really about like overturning legacy industries, the, yeah. The term disruption was like such a buzzword. It's about, yeah. Taking something that's not working and making it better, which I think is like very intertwined with like programmer mindset. [00:06:51] Ben: It's yeah, it's true. And I'm just thinking about sort of like my impression of, of the early internet and it, and it did not have that same flavor. So, so perhaps it's a. Artifact of like the stage of a culture or ecosystem then like the technology underlying it. I guess [00:07:10] Nadia: And it's strange. Cause I, I feel like, I mean, there are people today who still sort of maybe fetishizes too strong, a word, but just like embracing that sort of early computing mindset. But it almost feels like a subculture now or something. It doesn't feel. yeah. I don't know. I don't, I don't find that that's like sort of the prevalent mindset in, in tech. [00:07:33] Ben: Well, it, it feels like the, the sort of [00:07:35] like mechanisms that drive tech really do sort of center. I mean, this is my bias, but like, I feel like the, the way that that tech is funded is primarily through venture capital, which only works if you're shooting for a truly massive Result and the way that you get a truly massive result is not to build like a little niche thing, but to try to take over an industry. [00:08:03] Nadia: It's about arbitrage [00:08:05] Ben: yeah. Or, or like, or even not even quite arbitrage, but just like the, the, to like, that's, that's where the massive amount of money is. And, and like, [00:08:14] Nadia: This means her like financially. I feel like when I think about the way that venture capital works, it's it's. [00:08:19] Ben: yeah, [00:08:20] Nadia: ex sort of exploiting, I guess, the, the low margin like cost models. [00:08:25] Ben: yeah, yeah, definitely. And like then using that to like, take over an industry, whereas if maybe like, you're, you're not being funded in a way [00:08:35] that demands, that sort of returns you don't need to take as, as much of a, like take over the world mindset. [00:08:41] Nadia: Yeah. Although I don't think like those two things have to be at odds with each other. I think it's just like, you know, there's like the R and D phase that is much more academic in nature and much more exploratory and then venture capital is better suited for the point in which some of those ideas can be commercialized or have a commercial opportunity. But I don't think, yeah, I don't, I don't think they're like fighting with each other either. [00:09:07] Ben: Really? I, I guess I, I don't know. It's like, so can I, can I, can I disagree and, and sort of say, like, it feels like the, the, the stance that venture type funding comes with, like forces on people is a stance of like, we are, we might fail, but we're, we're setting out to capture a huge, huge amount of value and like, [00:09:35] And, and, and just like in order for venture portfolios to work, that needs to be the mindset. And like there, there are other, I mean, there are just like other funding, ways of funding, things that sort of like ask for more modest returns. And they can't, I mean, they can't take as many risks. They come with other constraints, but, but like the, the need for those, those power law returns does drive a, the need to be like very ambitious in terms of scale. [00:10:10] Nadia: I guess, like what's an example of something that has modest financial returns, but massive social impact that can't be funded through philanthropy and academia or through through venture capital [00:10:29] Ben: Well, I mean, like are, I mean, like, I think that there's, [00:10:35] I think that, that, that, [00:10:38] Nadia: or I guess it [00:10:39] Ben: yeah, I think the philanthropy piece is really important. Sorry, go ahead. [00:10:42] Nadia: Yeah. I guess always just like, I feel like it was like different types of funding for different, like, I, I sort of visualized this pipeline of like, yeah. When you're in the R and D phase. Venture capital is not for you. There's other types of funding that are available. And then like, you know, when you get to the point where there are commercial opportunities, then you switch over to a different kind of funding. [00:11:01] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, no, I, I definitely agree with that. I, I, I think, I think what we're like where, where, where I was at least talking about is like that, that venture capital is sort of in the tech world is, is like the, the, the thing, the go to funding mechanism. [00:11:16] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. Which is partly why I'm interested in, I guess, idea machines and other sources of funding that feel like they're at least starting to emerge now. Which I think gets back to those kinds of routes that, I mean, it's actually surprising to me that you can talk to people in tech who don't always make the connection that tech started as an, [00:11:35] you know, academically and government funded enterprise. And not venture venture capital came along later. Right then and so, yeah, maybe we, we're kind of at that point where there's been enough wealth generated that can kind of start that cycle again. [00:11:47] Ben: yeah. And, and speaking of that another distinction that, that you've made in your writing that I think is really important is the difference between charity and philanthropy. Do you mind unpacking how you think about that? [00:12:00] Nadia: Yeah. Charity is, is more like direct services. So you're not, there's sort of like a one to one, you put something in, you get sort of similar equal measure back out of it. And there's, I mean, charity is, you know, you can have like emergency relief or disasters or yeah, just like charitable services for people that need that kind of support. And to me, it's, it's just sort of strange that it always gets lumped in with philanthropy, which is a. Enterprise entirely philanthropy is more of the early stage pipeline [00:12:35] for it it's, it's more like venture capital, but for public goods in the same way that venture capital is very early stage financing for private goods. Philanthropy is very early stage financing for public goods. And if those public goods show promise or yeah, one need to be scaled, then you can go to government to get to get more funding to sustain it. Or maybe there are commercial opportunities or, you know, there are multiple paths that can, they can branch out from there. But yeah, philanthropy at its heart is about experimenting with really wild and crazy ideas that benefit public society that that could have massive social returns if successful. Whereas charity is not really about risk taking charity is really about providing a stable source of financing for those who really need it in the moment. [00:13:21] Ben: And, and the there's, there's two things I, I, I want to poke at there is like, do so. So you describe philanthropy as like crazy risk taking do, do you think that most [00:13:35] philanthropists see it, that. [00:13:37] Nadia: Today? No. And yeah, philanthropy has had this very varied history over the last, like let's say like modern philanthropy in its current form has only really existed since the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds. So we've got whatever, like a hundred, hundred 50 years. Most of what we think about in philanthropy today for, you know, most let's say adults that have really only grown up in the phase of philanthropy that you might call like late stage modern philanthropy to be a little cynical about it where it has. And, and part of that has just come from, I mean, just a bridge history of philanthropy, but you know, early on or. Premodern philanthropy. We had the the church was kind of maybe more played more of that, that role or that that force in both like philanthropic experiments and direct services. And then like when, in the age of sort of like, yeah, post gilded, age, post industrial revolution you had people who made a lot of, lot of self-made wealth. And you had people that were experimenting with new ideas [00:14:35] to provide public goods and services to society. And government at the time was not really playing a role in that. And so all that was coming from private citizens and private capital. And so those are, yeah, there was a time in which philanthropy was much more experimental in that way. But then as government sort of stepped in around you know, mid 19 hundreds to become sort of like that primary provider and funder of public services that diminished the role of philanthropy. And then in the late 1960s, Foundations just became much more heavily regulated. And I think that was sort of like the turning point where philanthropy went from being this like highly experimental and, and just sort of like aggressive risk taking sort of enterprise to much more like safe because it was just sort of like hampered by all these like accountability requirements. So yeah, I think like philanthropy today is not representative of what philanthropy has been historically or what it could be. [00:15:31] Ben: A and what are, what are some of your favorite, like weird, [00:15:35] risky pre regulation, philanthropic things. [00:15:40] Nadia: Oh, I don't do favorites, but [00:15:42] Ben: Oh, okay. Well what, what are, what are some, some amusing examples of, of risky philanthropic cakes. [00:15:51] Nadia: one I mean, [00:15:52] Ben: Take a couple. [00:15:54] Nadia: Probably like the most famous example would be like Carnegie public libraries. So like our public library system started as a privately funded experiment. And for each library that was created Andrew Carnegie would ask the government, the, the local government or the local community to find he would help fund the creation of the libraries. And then the government would have to find a way to like continue to sustain it and support it over the years. So it was this nice sort of like, I guess, public private type partnership. But then you have, I mean, also scientific research and public health initiatives that were philanthropically supported and funded. So Rockefeller's eradication of worm as a yeah. Public health initiative finding care for yellow fever. Those are some [00:16:35] examples. Yeah. I mean the public school education system in the south did not exist until there was sort of like an initiative to say, why aren't there public schools in the south and how do we just create them and, and fund. So and then also like the state of American private universities, which were sort of modeled after European universities at the time. But also came about after private philanthropists were funding research into understanding, like why is our American higher education? Not very good, you know, at the time it was like, not that good compared to the German university models. And so there was a bunch of research that was produced from that. And then they kind of like set out to yeah. Reform American universities and, yeah. So, I mean, there, there're just like so many examples of people just sort of saying, and, and I think like, I, I, one thing I do wanna caveat is like, I'm not regressive in the sense of. Wow. This thing, you know, worked really well a hundred years ago. And why don't we just do the exact same thing again? I feel like that's like a common pitfall in history. It's not that I think, you know, [00:17:35] everything about the world is completely different today versus let's say 19 years, but [00:17:39] Ben: in the past. And so it could be different to her in the [00:17:41] Nadia: exactly that that's sort of, the takeaway is like, where we're at right now is not a terminal state or it doesn't have to be a terminal state. Like philanthropy has been through many different phases and it can continue to have other phases in the future. They're not gonna look exactly like they did historically, but yeah. [00:17:56] Ben: That, that's that such a good distinction. And it goes for, for so many things where like, like when you point to historical examples I don't know. Like, I, I think that I, I suffer the same thing where I, you know, it's like you point to, to historical examples and it's like, not, it's not bringing up the historical examples to say, like, we should go back to this it's to say, like, it has been different and it could be different. [00:18:18] Nadia: Something I think about, and this is a little, it just, I don't know. I, I just think of like any, any adult today in, like, let's say like the, the who's like active in the workforce. We're talking about the span of like a, you know, like 30 year institutional memory or something. Like, and so [00:18:35] like anything that we think about, like, what is like possible or not possible is just like limited by like our biological lifespans. Like anyone you're talking, like, all we ever know is like, what we've grown up with in like, let's say the last 30 ish years for anyone. And so it's like, the reason why it's important to study history is to remind yourself that like everything that you know about, you know, what I think about philanthropy right now, based on the inputs I've been given in my lifetime is very different from if I study history and go, oh, actually it's only been that way for like pretty short amount of time. Only a few decades. [00:19:06] Ben: Yeah, totally. And I, I, I guess this is, this might be a, a slightly people might disagree with this, but from, from my perspective there's been sort of less institutional change within. The lifetime of most people in, in the workforce and especially most people in tech, which tends to skew younger than there was in the past, [00:19:30] Nadia: Yeah. [00:19:32] Ben: like, or, or like to put, put more fine on a point of it. [00:19:35] Like there's, there seems to have been less institutional change in the like latter half of the, the 20th century than in the first, like two thirds of it. [00:19:44] Nadia: Yeah. I think that's right. It feels much more much more stagnant. [00:19:49] Ben: Yeah. And I, I think the, the last thing like pull, pull us back to, to, to definitions real quick. So how, how do you like to describe idea of machines to people? Like if, if someone was like, Nadia, what, what is an idea machine besides this podcast? How would you, how would you describe that? [00:20:05] Nadia: I would point them to my blog post. So I don't have to explain it. [00:20:08] Ben: Okay. Excellent. Perfect. Everybody. [00:20:14] Nadia: If I had to, I mean, if I had to sort of explain in short version, I would say it's kind of like the modern successor to philanthropic foundations, maybe depending who I'm talking to, I might say that or yeah, it's just, it's sort of like a, a framework for understanding the interaction between funders and communities and that are like [00:20:35] centered around to similar ideology and how they turn ideas into outcomes is like there's a whole bunch of soft social infrastructure that, that. To take someone who says, Hey, I have an NDO. Why don't we do X? And like, how does that actually happen in the world? There's so many different inputs that like come together to make that happen. And that was just sort of my attempt at creating a framework for. [00:20:54] Ben: Yeah, no, I think it's a really good framework. And, and the, the, one of the, the powerful things I think in it is that you say there's like these like five components where there's like an ideology, a community ideas, an agenda, and people who capitalize the agenda. And then and I guess I'll, I'll like caveat this for, for the listeners, like in, in the piece you use effective altruism or EA for short as, as a, kind of like a case study in, in idea machines. And so it is, is sort of very topical right now. And I, I think what we will try to avoid is like the, the topical topics about it, but use it as a, an object of study. I think it's actually a very good object of study. [00:21:35] For thinking about these things. And, and actually one of the things that I thought was, was sort of stood out to me about it about EA a as opposed to many other philanthropies is that EA feels like one of the few places where the people who are capitalizing the agenda are, are willing to capitalize other people's other people's agendas as opposed to, to like sort of imposing their own on that. Do you, do you get a sense of that? [00:22:03] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. It feels, it feels like there's. Mm, yeah. Some sort of shift there. So, I mean, if you think about. You know, someone got super wealthy in the let's call, Haiti of, of the five, one C three foundation. Like, I don't know, let's say like the fifties or something. Yeah, someone, someone makes a ton of money and like the next step is at some point they end up setting up a charitable foundation, they appoint a committee of people to help them figure out like, what should my agenda? And they, but it's all kind of like flowing from the donor and saying like, I want to [00:22:35] create this thing in the world. I wanna fund this thing in the world because it's sort of like my personal interest. Whereas I feel like we're starting to see some examples today of sure. Like, you know, there has to be alignment between a funder's interest and maybe like a community's interest. But in some ways the agenda is being driven, not just by the funder or like foundation staff but by a community of people that are sort of all like talking to each other and saying like, here's what we think is the most important agenda. And so it feels in some ways, like much. Yeah, much more organic. And it's not to say that, you know, the funder is not influencing that or doesn't have an influence in that. But but I, I sort of like seeing now that there, if, if it feels like it's like much more yeah. Intertwined or like it could go in a lot of different directions. So yeah, you see that with EA, which was the example I had used of like the agenda is very strongly driven by its community. It's not like there's like one foundation of, of people that are just like sitting in an ivory tower and saying, here's what we think we should fund. And then they just like go off and do it. And I think that just creates a lot more [00:23:35] possibilities for serendipity around, like what kinds of ideas end up getting funded? [00:23:38] Ben: Yeah. And it also, it also feels like at least to me I'd be interested if you agree with this, it feels like it makes for situations where you can actually like pool capital more easily for for, for sort of like larger projects. Where, when it's, it's like individual. When there's not sort of like a, a broader agenda you have sort of like the, the funding gets very dispersed, but whereas like, if there's, there's a way for like multiple funders to say like, okay, like this is an important thing, then it makes it much easier to like pull capital for, for bigger ideas. [00:24:19] Nadia: Yeah, I think that's right. Like I think within the world of philanthropy, there's it is just sort of more naturally. Towards zero sum games and competitiveness of funding because there's just less funding available. And because there is always this sort of like [00:24:35] reputation or status aspect intertwined with it, where like you wanna be, you know, the funder that made something happen in the world. But I agree that when it, the, the, the, the boundaries feel a little bit more porous when it's not just like, you know, two distinct foundations that are competing with each other or two distinct funders, but it's like, we're, there are multiple funders, you know, that are existing, bigger fish, smaller fish, or whatever that are like, sort of amplifying the agenda of, of a separate community that is not, you know, is not even formally affiliated with any of, any of these funders. [00:25:08] Ben: Yeah. And do, do you have a sense of how, like, almost like what, what are the, the necessary preconditions for that? Level of community to, to come about. Right. Like EA I think maybe is it's under talked about how, like it has, you know, a hundred years of like thinking behind it, of, of before [00:25:35] people really, you know, it's like sort of like different utilitarian and consequentialist philosophers, really sort of like working out, like thinking about how do we prioritize things. And, and so it's just, I guess it's like, if for, for like creating new, powerful, useful idea machines, like what, what are sort of like the, the like bricks that need to be created to lay the groundwork for them? [00:26:01] Nadia: Yeah. I mean, you've seen it come out in different sorts of ways. So like for EA, as you said it, I mean, it already existed before any major funders came in. It was for, I mean, first you have sort of its historical roots in utilitarianism, which go way back, but then even just effective altruism itself was, you know, started in Oxford and like was an academic discipline right at, at its outset. So there was already a seed of something there before they had major funders coming in, but then there are other, other types of idea machines, I think that are where like that community has to be actively nurtured. And it's weird cause [00:26:35] yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Or I think people tend to. Underestimate, how many communities had a lot of elbow grace put in to get them going, right. So it's like, you need to create some initial momentum to build a scene. It's not like it's not always just, you know, a handful of people got together and decided to make a thing. I think that's sort of like the historical story that guest glorified, like we like thinking about a bunch of artists and creatives that are just sort of like hanging out at the same cafe and then like, you know, this scene starts to organically form. That's definitely a thing, but right, right. But you know, there's also, yeah. In, in many cases there are funders behind the scenes who are helping make these things happen. They're, you know, convenings that are organized, there are you know, individual academics or or creatives or writers that are being funded in order to help you. Bring these sorts of ideas to to the, [00:27:35] the forefront of, of people's minds. So yeah, I think there's a lot of work that can go, it's just like, you know, start anything, but there's a lot of work that can go on behind the scenes to help these communities even start to exist. But then they start to have these compounding returns for funders, I think, where it's like, okay, now, instead of, you know, instead of hiring a couple of program officers to my foundation I am starting this like community of people that is now a beacon for attracting other people I might not have even even heard of that are sort of like flocking to this cause. And it's sort of like a, a talent, well, in itself, [00:28:08] Ben: Yeah. To change tracks a little bit. So with, with these sort of like new waves of like sort of potential philanthropists in, in both like the tech world or the crypto world do you have any sense of like risky, philanthropic experiments that you would want to see people do? Like just sort of like any, any kind of wishlist. [00:28:32] Nadia: I don't know. I don't know if that's like the role that I am trying to play [00:28:35] necessarily. I mean, I think like personally one area that still feels the way I think about it is I just think about, you know, what are the different components of, of, of the public sector and sort of like what areas are being more or less. Covered right now. And so we see funders that are getting more involved in politics and policy. We see funders that are you know, replicating or trying to, to field build in, in academia. I feel like media is still strangely kind of overlooked or just this big enigma to me, at least when I think about, yeah. How do, how do funders influence different aspects of the public sector? And so, yeah, there's, there's sort of, well, I don't think it's even necessarily a lack of interest because I, I see a lot of. You know, again, that sort of tech mindset and yeah, I guess I'm more specific thinking about tech right now, but going back to, you know, tech wanting to break apart institutions or tech, sort of like being this ancy teenager that is like railing against the institution you see a lot [00:29:35] of that and there's, you know, a lot of tension between tech industry and media right now. So you see that sort of like champing up bit. But then it's not clear to me, like what, like what they're doing to replace that. Is it, and, and, and some of that is just maybe more existential questions about like, what is the future of media? Like, what should that be? Is it this sort of focus on individual media creators instead of, you know, going to like the mainstream newspaper or the mainstream TV network or whatever you're going to Joe Rogan, let's say that's relevant today, cuz I just saw. Mark Zuckerberg did an interview on, on Joe Rogan so like, you know, is, is it like, is that what the future looks like? Is that the vision of what tech wants media to look like? It's not totally clear to me what the answer is yet, but, and I also feel like I'm seeing sort of like a lack of interest in and funding towards that. So that that's sort of like one area where, and it's sort of unsurprising to me, I guess that like, you know, tech is gonna be interested in like science or [00:30:35] politics. And maybe just sort of tech is not great at thinking about cultural artifacts. But you know, in terms of like my personal wishlist or just areas where I think their deficiencies on the sort of public sector checklists that, that one of them. [00:30:49] Ben: yeah, no, that's that's and I think the important thing is, is to, to flag these things. Right. Cuz it's like, it's, it's sort of hard to know what counterfactuals are, but it's like, yeah, like like media media as public goods. Does seem like kind of underrated as an idea, right. It's like would, would, I don't know. It's like, I think Sesame Street's really important and that was, that was publicly funded, right? [00:31:17] Nadia: mm-hmm and even education is sort of like a, a weird, like, I mean, there's talk about homeschooling. There's talk about how universities aren't, you know, really adequate today. I mean, you have like the, you know, one effort to, to [00:31:35] build a new university, but it feels. I don't know, I'm still sort of like waiting for like, what are like the really big, ambitious efforts that we're gonna see in terms of like tech people that are trying to rebuild either, you know, primary, secondary education or higher education. I just, yeah, I don't know. [00:31:53] Ben: Yeah, no, that, that that's in a great, a great place. Like it does not feel like there have been a lot of ambitious experiments there. In terms of right. Like anything along the lines of, of like building all the, the public schools in the south. Right.  [00:32:06] Nadia: Right. Like at that level and this actually, I mean, this is like, and I think you, and I may not agree on this topic, but like I do genuinely wonder, you know, at the same time, we're also iterating at the same time you have these, you know, cycles of wealth that come in and, and shape public society in different ways, on like a broader scale. You also have the, you know, a hundred year institutional cycle where like, Institutions are built and then they kind of mature and then they, they start to stagnate and, and die down. What have we learned from like the last a hundred [00:32:35] years of institution building? Like maybe we learned that institutions are not as great as they seem, or they inevitably decline. And like, maybe people are interested in ways to avoid that in, in other words, like, you know, do we need to build another CNN in, in the realm of media? Or do we need to build another Harvard or is maybe the takeaway that like institutions themselves are falling out of favor and the philanthropically funded experiments might not look like the next Harvard, but they're gonna look like some, yeah, some, some sort of more broken down version of that. [00:33:05] Ben: Ooh, [00:33:06] Nadia: I don't know. And yeah. Yeah. I don't know. [00:33:10] Ben: sorry. Go, go ahead. [00:33:11] Nadia: Oh, I was just gonna say, I mean, like, this is, this is where I feel like history only has limited things to teach us. Right. Because yeah, the sort of copy paste answer would be. There used to be better institutions. Let's just build new institutions. But I think, and I think this is actually where crypto is thinking more critically about this than tech where crypto says like, yeah, like, why are we [00:33:35] just gonna repeat the same mistakes over and over again? Let's just do something completely different. Right. And I think that is maybe part of the source of their disinterest in what legacy institutions are doing, where they're just like, we're not even trying to do that. We're not trying to replicate that. We wanna just re rethink that concept entirely. I, I feel like, yeah, in tech, there's still a bit of LARPing around like, like around like, you know, without sort of the critical question of like, what did we, what did we take away from that? Maybe that wasn't so good. What we did in the past. [00:34:04] Ben: Yeah, well, I, I guess my response just is, is I think definitely that. That institutions are not functioning as well as they have. I think the, the question is like, what is the conclusion to draw from that? And, and maybe the, the conclusion I draw is that we need like different, like newer, different [00:34:35] institutions. And I feel like there's different levels of implicitness or explicitness of an institution, but broadly, it is some way of coordinating people that last through time. Right. And so, even what people are doing in crypto is I would argue building institutions. They just are organized wildly differently than ones we've seen before. [00:35:00] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's like, so the history is so short in crypto. It's hard to say what exactly anyone is trying to do until maybe we can understand that in retrospect. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I, I think like there is just like some. Like, I feel like there's probably some learning from, from open source where I spent a lot of my brain space in the past around like, it was just like an entirely different type of coordination model from, from like centralized cozy firms. [00:35:34] Ben: Yeah. [00:35:34] Nadia: [00:35:35] And like there's some learning there and, and crypto is modeling itself much more after like open source projects than it is after like KO's theory of the firm. And, and so I, so I, I think there's probably some learnings there of like, yes, they're building things. I don't know. I mean, like in the world of opensource, like a lot of these projects don't last very, like you don't sort of like iterate upon existing projects. A lot of times you just build a new project and then eventually try to get people to like switch over to that project. So it's like these much shorter lifespans And so I don't, I don't know what that looks like in terms of institutional design for like the public sector or social institutions, but I just, yeah, I don't know. I think I just sort of wonder what that looks like. And yeah, I do see, like, there are some experiments within sort of like non crypto tech world as well. Like I was just thinking about Institute for progress and they're a, a policy think tank in, in DC. And I think like one of the things that they're doing well is trying to iterate [00:36:35] upon the sort of, you know, existing think tech tank model. And like one of the things that they acknowledge better than maybe, you know, you go to ano you go to a sort of like one of the stodgy older think tanks, and you're like, your brand is the think tank, right? You are like an employee of that place and you are representing their brand. Whereas I think my sense, at least with Institute for progress is they've been a little bit more like you are someone who is an expert already in your. domain. You, you already have your own audience. You're, you're someone who's already widely known and we're kind of like the infrastructure that is supporting you. I don't wanna speak on their behalf. That's sort of like the way I've been understanding it. And yeah, I mean, so, you know, even outside of crypto, I think people are still contending with that whole atomization of the firm, cetera, etcetera of like how do you balance or like individual reputation versus firm reputation. And maybe that is where it plays out. Like to my question about, you know, are you trying to build another media institution or is it just about supporting like lots of in individual influencers? But yeah, [00:37:35] just, I wonder like, are we sitting here waiting for new institutions to be built and like, actually there are no more, maybe we're just like institutions period are dying and like that's the future. Or yeah, at the same time, like they do provide this sort of like history and memory that is useful. So I don't know. [00:37:51] Ben: yeah, I mean, like, it sounds to me like, there's, there's, I mean, from what you're saying, there's like a much more sort of subtle way to look at it where there's, there's like a number of different sort of like sliders or spectra, right. Where it's like, how. I don't know, like internalized versus externalized, the institution is right where it's like, you think of like your like 1950s company and it's like, people are like subsume themselves to it. Right. And that's like on some end of the spectrum. And then on the other end of the spectrum, it's like like, I don't know, like YouTube, right. Where it's like, yeah. Like all like YouTube YouTubers are like technically all YouTubers, but like beyond that [00:38:35] they have no like coordination or, or real like connection. And like, and like that's one access. And then like new institutions could like come in and, and maybe we're like moving towards an era of history where like the, like just there is more externalization, but then like, sort of like explicitly acknowledging that and then figuring out how to. Do a lot of good and like have that, that sort of like institutional memory, given the, a world where, where like everybody's a brand [00:39:09] Nadia: Yeah. [00:39:10] Ben: that it, it seems like it's, that's not necessarily like institutions are dead. It's just like institutions live in a different like, like are, are just like structurally different [00:39:23] Nadia: Yeah. Yeah. Like, I, I, I wondered, like if we just sort of embrace the fact that maybe we are moving towards having much shorter memories like what does a short term memory [00:39:35] institution look like? I dunno, like maybe that's just sort where, right. You know, like I try to sort of like observe what is happening versus kind of being like, it should be different. And so like, if that just is what it is then, like, how do we design for that? I have an idea and I think that actually get to like part of what crypto is trying to do differently is saying, okay, like, this is where we have sort like trustless and where we have the rules that are encoded into a protocol where like, you don't need to remember anything like the, the network is remembering for you. [00:40:03] Ben: Yeah, I'm just thinking, I, I haven't actually watched it, but do you know the movie memento, which I [00:40:09] Nadia: Yes, [00:40:10] Ben: a guy who has yeah, exactly is short term memory loss and just like tattoos all over his body. So it's like, what, what is the institutional version of that? I guess, I guess like, yeah, exactly. That's that's where the, the note taking goes.  [00:40:25] Nadia: Your. [00:40:27] Ben: yeah, exactly. So sort of down another separate track is, is something that I've noticed is like, [00:40:35] I guess, how do you think about what is and is not a public good? And I, and I asked this because I think my experience talking to many people in, in tech there's, there's sort of this attitude that sort of everything can be made like that, that almost like public goods don't exist. That it's like every, like everything can, can sort of be done by a, for profit company. And if like you can't capture the value of what you're doing it might not be valuable. [00:41:06] Nadia: Yeah, that's a frustrating one. Yeah, I mean like public goods have a very literal and simple economic definition of being a, a good that is non rivals and non-excludable so non excludable, meaning that you can't prevent anyone from accessing it and non rivals, meaning that if someone uses the public good, it doesn't diminish someone else's ability to use that, that public good. And that sort of stands in contrast to private goods and other types of goods. So, you know, there's that definition to start with, but then of course in [00:41:35] real life, real life is much more complex than that. Right. And so I, I noticed there was like a lot of, yeah, just like assumptions. I get rolled up in that. So like one of the things. Open source code, for example in the book that I wrote I tried to sort of like break apart, like people think of open source code as a public. Good. And that's it. Right. And, and with that carries a bunch of implications around, well, if open source is, you know, freely accessible, it's not excludable. That means that we should not prevent anyone from contributing to it. And that's like, you know, then, then that leads to all these sort of like management problems. And so I kind of try to break that apart and say the consumption of open source code. Like the, the actual code itself can be a public good that is freely accessible, but then the production of open source, like who actually contributes to an open source community could be, you know, like more like a membership style community where you do exclude people. That's just, you know, one example that comes to mind of like how public goods are not as black and white as they seem. I think another, like assumption that I see is that public goods have to be funded by government. And government has again, [00:42:35] like, you know, Especially since mid 19 hundreds, like been kinda like primary provider of public goods, but there are also public goods that are privately funded. Like, you know like roads can be funded through public private partnerships or privately funded. So it's not just because something is a public good. Doesn't say anything about how it has to be funded. So yeah, there, there is just sort of like, and then, yeah, as you're saying within tech, I think there's just because the vehicle of change in the world that is sort of like the defining vehicle for the tech industry is startups. Right. And so it's both like understandable why like everything gets filtered through that lens of like, why is it not a startup? But then, you know, as, as we both know, kind of minimizes the text history, the reason that we even, you know, got to the commercial era of startups and the startup. Era is because of the years and years of academic and government funded research that, that led up to that. So and, and then, and same with sort of like the open source work that I [00:43:35] was doing was to say, okay, all these companies that are developing their software products, every single one of these private companies is using open source code. They're relying on this public digital infrastructure to build their software. So like, it's, it's not quite as clean cut as especially, I mean, by some estimates, like a vast majority of let's say, yeah, any, any private company, any private software company, like, you know, let's say like 70% of their, their code or, you know, it's, it varies so much between companies, but like certainly a majority of the code that is quote unquote written is actually just like shared public code. So it's, you know it's, it's not quite as simple as saying like public goods have no place in, in tech. I think they, they still have a very, very strong place. [00:44:16] Ben: Yeah, no, and it it's, it's also just, just thinking about like, sort of like the, the publicness of different things, right? Cuz it's like, there are for profit, there, there are profitable private schools. Right. And yet, [00:44:35] like I think most people would agree that. If all schools were, were for profit and private I mean, yeah, I guess separating out like the, the, like, even if schools were for profit and private you would prob like, it would probably still be a good thing to have government getting money into those schools. Right. Like even like, I, I think people who don't like public schooling still think that it is worthwhile for the government to give money towards schools. Right. [00:45:12] Nadia: Mm-hmm [00:45:13] Ben: Is that [00:45:14] Nadia: Yeah. And, and this is a distinction between, for the example of education, it's like, you know, the concept of education might be a public. Good. But then how is education funded might, you know, get funded in different ways, including private. [00:45:27] Ben: yeah, exactly. And, and, and I. Yeah. So, so the, the, the concept of education [00:45:35] as, as a public good. Yeah, that's a, that's a good way of putting it and there's like, but I, and I think, I guess there, there are, there are more I guess think fuzzier places where it's like, it's less clear whe like, to what extent it's to public good, like like I think infrastructure maybe one where it's like, you, you could imagine a system where like, everybody just like, who uses, say like a sewer line buys into it versus having it be, be publicly funded. And I think like research might be another one. [00:46:11] Nadia: I mean, even education is if you go far back enough, right? Like not everyone went to public schools before. Not everyone got an education. It was not seen as necessarily something that it was something for like privileged people to get. It was not something that was just like part of the public sector. So yeah, our, our notions of what the public sector even is, or what's in and out of it is definitely evolved over the years. [00:46:32] Ben: Yeah, no, that's a really good point. So it's, [00:46:35] it's like that again is like, that's, that's where it's complicated where it's like, it's not just some like attribute of the world. Right. It's like our, like some kind of social consensus, [00:46:45] Nadia: Great. [00:46:46] Ben: around public goods. And, and something I also wanted to, to talk about is like, I know you've been thinking a lot about like the, sort of the relationship between philanthropy and status and I guess like, do, do you have, like, what's like. Do do you have a sense of like, why? Like, and it's different for everybody, but like why do people do philanthropy now? Like when you, when you don't have like a, a sort of like a, a reli, excuse me, a religious mandate to do it. [00:47:21] Nadia: I actually think, yeah, I think this question is more complicated than it seems. Because there's so many different types of philanthropists you know, The old adage of, if you've met one philanthropist, you've met one philanthropist. And so motivations [00:47:35] are, I mean, there are a lot of different motivations and also just sort of like, there's some spectrum here that I am still kind of lack and vocabulary on, but like a lot of philanthropy, if you just look by the numbers, like a lot of philanthropy is done at the local level, right. Or it's done within a philanthropy sort of local sphere. Like we forget about, you know, when you think about philanthropy, you think about the biggest billionaires in the world. You think about bill gates or Warren buffet or whatever. But like, we forget that, you know, there are a lot of people that are wealthy that are just kind of like that, that aren't part of the quote unquote global elite. Right? So like I, yeah, one example I have to think about is like the, the Koch family. And and so we all know the Koch brothers, but then like, They were, they were not the original philanthropist in their family. Their father was, and their father was originally, I mean, they had a family foundation and they just kind of focused on their local area doing local philanthropy. And it was only with the next generation that they ended up sort of like expanding into this like more global focus. But like, yeah, I mean, there's so much philanthropy. That is, so when we say, you know, like, what are the motivations of someone of a philanthropist? Like, it, it really [00:48:35] depends on like who you're talking about. But I do think like one aspect that just gets really under discussed or underappreciated philanthropy is the kind of like cohort nature of at least philanthropy that operates on a more like global, global skill. And I don't mean literally global in the sense of like international, I just mean like, I don't know what the right term is for this, but like outside of your yeah, like nonlocal right. [00:48:59] Ben: Yeah. [00:49:00] Nadia: And yeah, I don't know. That feels unsatisfying too. I don't really know what, what, what the term is, but there is a distinction there, right. But yeah, I think like, well, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the right term is. But like I, the, the ways in which, so like, you know, why does a, why does a philanthropist? I, I think I have one open question of like, why, what makes a philanthropist convert from kinda like the more local focus to some expanded quote unquote global focus is one question. I think like when people talk about the motivations of philanthropists, they tend to focus on individual motivations of that person. So, you [00:49:35] know, the classic answer to like, why do, why do people give philanthropically? It's always like something like about altruism and wanting to give back or it's, or it's like the, you know, the, the edgy self-interested model of like, you know, people that are motivated by, by status and wanting to look good. I don't, I feel like those answers, they don't, they're not like they're just not fully satisfying to me. I think there's. This aspect of maybe like, like a more like power relational theory that is maybe under, under discussed or underappreciated of if you think about like like these wealth generations, rather than just like individuals who are wealthy you can see these sort of like cohorts of people that all became wealthy in similar sorts of ways. So you have wall street wealth, you have tech wealth, you have crypto wealth. And and you know, these are very large buckets, but you can sort of group people together based on like, they got wealthy because they had some unique insight that the previous paradigm did not have. And I think like, [00:50:35] there's sort of like, yeah, there are these cycles that like wealth is moving in where first you're sort of like the outcast you're working outta your garage, you know, let's use the startup example. No one really cares about you. You're very counterculture. Then you become sort of like more popular you're you're like a, but you're still like a counterculture for people that are like in the know, right. You're showing traction, you're showing promise whatever, and then there's some explosion to the mean stream. There's sort of this like frenzied period where everyone wants to, you know, do startups or join a startup or start a startup. And then there's sort of like the crash, right? And this is this mirrors Carla press's technological revolutions and, and financial capital where she talks about how technological innovations influence financial markets. But you know, she talks about these sort like cycles that we move in. And then like, after the sort of like crash, there's like a backlash, right? There's like a reckoning where the public says, you know, how, how could we have been misled by this, these crazy new people or whatever. But that moment is actually the moment in which the, the new paradigm starts to like cement its power and starts to become sort of like, you know, the dominant force in the field. It needs to start. [00:51:35] Switching over and thinking about their public legacy. But I think like one learnings we can have from looking at startup wealth now and sort of like how interesting it is that in the last couple years, like suddenly a lot of people in tech are starting to think about culture building and institution building and, and their public legacies that wasn't true. Like, you know, 10 years ago, what is actually changed. And I think a lot of that really was influenced by the, the tech backlash that was experienced in, in 2016 or so. And so you look at these initiatives now, like there are multiple examples of like philanthropic initiatives that are happening now. And I don't find it satisfying to just say, oh, it's because these individuals want to have a second act in their career. Or because they're motivated by status. Like, I think those are certainly all components of it, but it doesn't really answer the question of why are so many people doing it together right now? Not literally coordinated together, but like it's happening independently in a lot of different places. And so I feel like we need some kind of. Cohort analysis or cohort explanation to say, okay, I actually think this is kind of like a defense mechanism because you have this [00:52:35] clash between like a rising new paradigm against the incumbents and the new paradigm needs to find ways to, you know, like wield its influence in the public sector or else it's just gonna be, you know, regulated out of existence or they're gonna, you know, be facing this sort of like hostile media landscape. They need to learn how to actually like put their fingers into that and and, and grapple with the role. But it it's this sort of like coming of age for our counterculture where they're used to, like tech is used to sort of being in this like safe enclave in Silicon valley and is now being forced or like reckoned with the outside world. So like that, that, that is one answer for me of like, why do philanthropists do these things? It's we can talk about sort of like individual motivations for any one person. In, in my sort of like particular area of interest in trying to understand, like, why is tech wealth doing this? Or like, what will crypto wealth be doing in the future? I, I find that kind of explanation. Helpful. [00:53:25] Ben: Yeah. That's I feel like it has a very like Peter Turin vibe like in, in the good way, in the sense of like, like identifying. [00:53:35] like, I, I, I don't think that history is predictive, but I do think that there are patterns that repeat and like that, like, I've never heard anybody point out that pattern, but it feels really truthy to me. I think the, the, the really cool thing to do would be to like, sort of, as you dig into this, like, sort of like set up some kind of like bet with yourself on like, what are the conditions under which like crypto people will become like start heavily going into philanthropy. Right. Like, [00:54:09] Nadia: Yes, totally. I think about this now. That's why I'm like, I'm weirdly, like, to me, crypto wealth is the specter in the future, but they're not actually in the same boat as what tech wealth is in right now. So I'm almost in a, like, they're, they're not yet really motivated to deal with this stuff, because I think like that moment, if I had to like, make a bet on it is like, it's gonna be the moment where like crypto, when, when crypto really faces like a public [00:54:35] backlash. Because right now I think they're still in the like we're counterculture, but we're cool kind of moment. And then they had a little bit of this frenzy in the crash, but like, yeah, I think it's still. [00:54:44] Ben: for tech, right? Or 2000. [00:54:46] Nadia: Yeah. And even despite exactly. And, and, and despite the, you know, same as in 2001 where people were like, ah, pets.com, you know, it was all a scam. This was all bullshit. Oh, sorry. I dunno if I could say that.  [00:54:57] Ben: Say that. [00:54:57] Nadia: But then, you know, like did not even, like startups had a whole other Renaissance after that was like not, you know, far from being over. But like people still by and large, like love crypto. And like, there are the, you know, loud, negative people that are criticizing it in the same way that people criticize startups in 2001. But like by and large, a lot of people are still engaging with it and are interested in it. And so, like, I don't feel like it's hit that public backlash moment yet the way that startups did in 2016. So I feel like once it gets to that point and then like, kind of the reckoning after that is kind of the point where crypto wealth will be motivated to act philanthropically in kind of like this larger cohort [00:55:35] kind of way. [00:55:36] Ben: Yeah. And I don't think that the time scales will be the same, but I mean the time scale for, for that in tech, if we sort of like map it on to the, the 2000 crash is like, you know, so you have like 15 years. So like, that'd be like 20 37 is when we need to like Peck back in and see like, okay, is this right? [00:55:56] Nadia: It's gonna be faster. So I'm gonna cut that in half or something. I feel like the cycles are getting shorter and moving faster.  [00:56:01] Ben: That, that, that definitely feels true. Looking to the future is, is a a good place for us to, to wrap up. I really appreciate this. 

Seemay Chou talks about the process of building a new research organization, ticks, hiring and managing entrepreneurial scientists, non-model organisms, institutional experiments and a lot more! Seemay is the co-founder and CEO of Arcadia Science —  a research and development company focusing on underesearched areas in biology and specifically new organisms that haven't been traditionally studied in the lab.  She's also the co-founder of Trove Biolabs — a startup focused on harnessing molecules in tick saliva for skin therapies and was previously an assistant professor at UCSF.  She has thought deeply not just about scientific problems themselves, but the meta questions of how we can build better processes and institutions for discovery and invention. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Seemay Chou   Links Seemay on Twitter (@seemaychou) Arcadia's Research Trove Biolabs Seemay's essay about building Arcadia  Transcript [00:02:02] Ben: So since a lot of our conversation is going to be about it how do you describe Arcadia to a smart well-read person who has never actually heard of it before? [00:02:12] Seemay: Okay. I, I actually don't have a singular answer to this smart and educated in what realm. [00:02:19] Ben: oh, good question. Let's assume they have taken some undergraduate science classes, but perhaps are not deeply enmeshed in, in academia. So, so like, [00:02:31] Seemay: enmeshed in the meta science community.[00:02:35]  [00:02:35] Ben: No, no, no, no, but they've, they, they, they, they they're aware that it's a thing, but [00:02:40] Seemay: Yeah. Okay. So for that person, I would say we're a research and development company that is interested in thinking about how we explore under researched areas in biology, new organisms that haven't been traditionally studied in the lab. And we're thinking from first principal polls about all the different ways we can structure the organization around this to also yield outcomes around innovation and commercialization. [00:03:07] Ben: Nice. And how would you describe it to someone who is enmeshed in the, the meta science community? [00:03:13] Seemay: In the meta science community, I would, I would say Arcadias are meta science experiment on how we enable more science in the realm of discovery, exploration and innovation. And it's, you know, that that's where I would start. And then there's so much more that we could click into on that. Right. [00:03:31] Ben: And we will, we will absolutely do that. But before we get there I'm actually really [00:03:35] interested in, in Arcadia's backstory. Cuz cuz when we met, I feel like you were already , well down the, the path of spinning it up. So what's, there's, there's always a good story there. What made you wanna go do this crazy thing? [00:03:47] Seemay: So, so the backstory of Arcadia is actually trove. Soro was my first startup that I spun out together with my co-founder of Kira post. started from a point of frustration around a set of scientific questions that I found challenging to answer in my own lab in academia. So we were very interested in my lab in thinking about all the different molecules and tick saliva that manipulate the skin barrier when a tick is feeding, but basically the, the ideal form of a team around this was, you know, like a very collaborative, highly skilled team that was, you know, strike team for like biochemical, fractionation, math spec, developing itch assays to get this done. It was [00:04:35] not a PhD style project of like one person sort of open-endedly exploring a question. So I was struggling to figure out how to get funding for this, but that wasn't even the right question because even with the right money, like it's still very challenging to set up the right team for this in academia. And so it was during this frustration that I started exploring with Kira about like, what is even the right way to solve this problem, because it's not gonna be through writing more grants. There's a much bigger problem here. Right? And so we started actually talking to people outside of academia. Like here's what we're trying to achieve. And actually the outcome we're really excited about is whether it could yield information that could be acted on for an actually commercializable product, right. There's like skin diseases galore that this could potentially be helpful for. So I think that transition was really important because it went from sort of like a passive idea to, oh, wait, how do we act as agents to figure out how to set this up correctly? [00:05:35] We started talking to angel investors, VCs people in industry. And that's how we learned that, you know, like itch is a huge area. That's an unmet need. And we had tools at our disposal to potentially explore that. So that's how tr started. And that I think was. The beginning of the end or the, the start of the beginning. However you wanna think about it. Because what it did, was it the process of starting trove? It was so fun and it was not at all in conflict with the way I was thinking about my science, the science that was happening on the team was extremely rigorous. And I experienced like a different structure. And that was like the light bulb in my head that not all science should be structured the same way. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. And then I went down this rabbit hole of trying to study the history of what you might call meta science. Like what are the different structures and iterations of this that have happened over, over the history of even the United States. And it's, hasn't always been the same. Right? And then I think [00:06:35] like, as a scientist, like once you grapple with that, that the way things are now is not how they always have been. Suddenly you have an experiment in front of you. And so that is how Arcadia became born, because I realize. Couched within this trove experiment is so many things that I've been frustrated about that I, I, I don't feel like I've been maximized as the type of scientist that I am. And I really want to think in my career now about not how I fit into the current infrastructure, but like what other infrastructures are available to us. Right? [00:07:08] Ben: Nice. [00:07:09] Seemay: Yeah. So that, that was the beginning. [00:07:11] Ben: and, and so you, you then, I, I, I'm just gonna extrapolate one more, more step. And so you sort of like looked at the, the real, the type of work that you really wanted to do and determined that, that the, the structure of Arcadia that you've built is, is like perhaps the right way to go about enabling that. [00:07:30] Seemay: Okay. So a couple things I, I don't even know yet if Arcadia is the right way to do it. So I [00:07:35] feel like it's important for me to start this conversation there that I actually don't know. But also, yeah, it's a hypothesis and I would also say that, like, that is a beautiful summary, but it's still, it was still a little clunkier than the way you described it and the way I described it. So there's this gap there then of like, okay, what is the optimal place for me to do my science? How do we experiment with this? And I was still acting in a pretty passive way. You know, I was around people in the bay area thinking about like new orgs. And I had heard about this from like ju and Patrick Collison and others, like people very interested in funding and experimenting with new structures. So I thought, oh, if I could find someone else to create an organization. That I could maybe like help advise them on and be a part of, and, and so I started writing up this proposal that I was trying to actually pitch to other people like, oh, would you be interested in leading something like this? [00:08:35] Like, and the more that went on and I, I had like lots and lots and lots of conversations with other scientists in academia, trying to find who would lead this, that it took probably about six months for me to realize like, oh, in the process of doing this, I'm actually leading this. I think and like trying to find someone to hand the keys over to when actually, like, I seem to be the most invested so far. And so I wrote up this whole proposal trying to find someone to lead it and. It came down to that like, oh, I've already done this legwork. Like maybe I should consider myself leading it. And I've, I've definitely asked myself a bunch of times, like, was that like some weird internalized sexism on my part? Cause I was like looking for like someone, some other dude or something to like actually be in charge here. So that's actually how it started. And, and I think a couple people started suggesting to this to me, like if you feel so strongly about this, why aren't you doing this? And I know [00:09:35] it's always an important question for a founder to ask themselves. [00:09:38] Ben: Yeah, yeah, no, that's, that's really clutch. I appreciate you sort of going into the, the, the, the, the, the, like, not straight paths of it. Because, because I guess when we, we put these things into stories, we always like to, to make it like nice and, and linear and like, okay, then this happened and this happened, and here we are. But in reality, it was it's, it's always that ambiguity. Can, can I actually ask two, two questions based on, on that story? One is you, you mentioned that. In academia, even if you had the money, you wouldn't be able to put together that strike team that you thought was necessary. Like why can, can you, can you unpack that a little bit? [00:10:22] Seemay: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of reasons why one of the important reasons, which is absolutely not a criticism of academia, in fact, it's maybe like my support of the [00:10:35] mission in academia is around training and education. That like part of our job as PIs and the research projects we set up is to provide an opportunity for a scientist to learn how to ask questions. How to answer those, how to go through the whole scientific process. And that requires a level of sort of like openness and willingness to allow the person to take the reigns on that. That I think is very difficult if you're trying to hit like very concrete, aggressive milestones with a team of people, right. Another challenge of that is, you know, the way we set up incentive structures around, you know, publishing, like we also don't set up the way we, you know, publish articles in journals to be like very collaborative or as collaborative as you would want in this scenario. Right. At the end of the day, there's a first author, there's the last author. And that is just a reality. We all struggle with despite everyone's best intentions. And so that inherently now sets up yeah. [00:11:35] Another situation where you're trying to figure out how you, we, this collaborative effort with this reality and. Even in the best case scenario, it doesn't always feel great. Right? Like it just like makes it harder to do the thing. And then finally, like it just, you know, for the way we fund projects in, in academia, you know, this wasn't a very hypothesis driven project. Like it's very hard to lay out specific aims for it. Beyond just the things we're gonna be trying to like, what, what, what is our process that we can lay [00:12:08] Ben: Yeah, it's a  [00:12:09] Seemay: I can't tell you yeah. What the outcomes are gonna be. So I did write grants on that and that was repeatedly the feedback. And then finally, there's, you know, this other thing, which is that, like, we didn't want to accidentally land on an opportunity for invi innovation. We explicitly wanted to find molecules that could be, you know, engineered for products. Like that was [00:12:35] our hypothesis. If there is any that like. By borrowing the innovation from ticks who have evolved to feed for days to sometimes over a week that we are skipping steps to figure out the right natural product for manipulating processes in the skin that have been so challenging to, you know, solve. So we didn't want it to be an accident. We wanted to be explicitly translational quote unquote. So that again, poses another challenge within an academic lab where you, you have a different responsibility, right? [00:13:05] Ben: Yeah. And, and you it's there there's like that tension there between setting out to do that and then setting out to do something that is publishable, right? [00:13:14] Seemay: Mm-hmm mm-hmm . Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the, the hard things that I'm always trying to think about is like, what are things that have out of the things that I just listed? What are things that are appropriately different about academia and what are the things that maybe are worth a second? [00:13:31] Ben: mm. [00:13:32] Seemay: they might actually be holding us back even [00:13:35] within academia. So the first thing I would say is non-negotiable that there's a training responsibility. So that is has to be true, but that's not necessarily mutually exclusive with also having the opportunity for this other kind of team. For example, we don't really have great ways in academia to properly, you know, support staff scientists at a, at a high level. Like there's a very limited opportunity for that. And I, you know, I'm not arguing with people about like the millions of reasons why that might be. That's just a fact, you know, so that's not my problem to solve. I just, I just see that as like a challenge also like of course publishing, right? Like I think [00:14:13] Ben: yeah, [00:14:14] Seemay: in a best case scenario publishing should be science should be in the driver's seat and publishing should be supporting those activities. I think we do see, you know, and I know there's a spectrum of opinions on this, but there are definitely more and more cases now where publishing seems to be in the [00:14:35] driver's seat, [00:14:36] Ben: yeah, [00:14:36] Seemay: dictating how the science goes on many levels. And, you know, I can only speak for myself that I, I felt that to be increasingly true as I advanced my career. [00:14:47] Ben: yeah. And just, just to, to make it, make it really explicit that it's like the, the publishing is driving because that's how you like, make your tenure case. That's how you make any sort of credibility. Everybody's gonna be judging you based on what you're publishing as opposed to any other. [00:15:08] Seemay: right. And more, I think the reason it felt increasingly heavy as I advanced my career was not even for those reasons, to be honest, it was because of my trainees,  [00:15:19] Ben: Hmm.  [00:15:20] Seemay: if I wanna be out. Doing my crazy thing. I have a huge responsibility now to my students, and that is something I'm not willing to like take a risk on. And so now my hands are tied in this like other way, and their [00:15:35] careers are important to me. And if they wanna go into academia, I have to safeguard that. [00:15:40] Ben: Yeah. I mean, it suggests. Sort of a, a distinction between sort of, regardless of academia or not academia between like training labs and maybe focused labs. And, and you could say like, yes, you, you want trainees in focus. Like you want trainees to be exposed to focused research. But like at least sort of like thinking about those differences seems really important. [00:16:11] Seemay: Yes. Yeah. And in fact, like, you know, because I don't like to, I don't like to spend too much time, like. Criticizing people in academia, like we even grapple with this internally at Arcadia,  [00:16:25] Ben: Yeah.  [00:16:25] Seemay: like there is a fundamentally different phase of a project that we're talking about sort of like new, creating new ideas, [00:16:35] exploring de-risking and then some transition that happens where it is a sort of strike team effort of like, how do you expand on this? How do you make sure it's executed well? And there's probably many more buckets than the, just the two I said, but it it's worthy of like a little more thought around the way we set up like approvals and budgets and management, because they're too fundamentally different things, you know? [00:17:01] Ben: Yeah, that's actually something I, I wanted to ask about more explicitly. And this is a great segue is, is sort of like where, where do ideas come from at Arcadia? Like how, you know, it's like, there's, there's some spectrum where everybody's from, like everybody's working on, you know, their own thing to like you dictating everything. Everything in between. So like, yeah. Can you, can you go more into like, sort of how that, that flow works almost? [00:17:29] Seemay: So I might even reframe the question a little bit to [00:17:35] not where do ideas come from, but how do ideas evolve? Because it's  [00:17:39] Ben: please. Yeah. That's a much better reframing. [00:17:41] Seemay: because it's rarely the case, regardless of who the idea is coming from at Arcadia, that it ends where it starts. and I think that that like fluidity is I the magic sauce. Right. And so by and large, the ideas tend to come from the scientists themselves. Occasionally of course, like I will have a thought or Che will have a thought, but I see our roles as much more being there to like shepherd ideas in the most strategic and productive direction. And so we like, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about like, well, what kind of resources would this take? And, you know, Che definitely thinks about that piece as well as, you know, like what it, what would actually be the impact of this if it worked in terms of like both our innovation, as well as the knowledge base outside of Arcadia Practically speaking, something we've started doing, that's been really helpful because we've gone. We've already gone through different iterations of this too. Like we [00:18:35] started out of like, oh, let's put out a Google survey. People can fill out where they pitch a project to us. And that like fell really flat because there's no conversation to be had there. And now they're basically writing a proposal. Yeah. More streamlined, but it's not that qualitatively different of a process. So then we started doing these things called sandboxes, which I'm actually really enjoying right now. These are every Friday we have like an hour long session. The entire company goes and someone's up at the dry erase board. We call it, throwing them in the sandbox and they present some idea or set of ideas or even something they're really struggling. For everybody to like, basically converse with them about it. And this has actually been a much more productive way for us to source ideas. And also for me to think collaboratively with them about like the right level of like resources, the right sort of inflection points for like, when we decide go or no, go on things. And so that's how we're currently doing it. I mean, we're [00:19:35] like just shy of about 30 people. I, this process will probably break again. once we hit like 50 people or something, cuz it's actually just like logistically a lot of people to cram into a room and there is a level of sort of like, yeah, and then there's a level of formality that starts to happen when there's like that many people in the room. So we'll see how it goes, but that's how it's currently working today. [00:20:00] Ben: that's that's really cool. And, and, and so then, then like, let's, let's keep following the, the evolutionary path, right. So an idea gets sandboxed and you collectively come to some conclusion that it's like, okay, like this idea is, is like, well worth pursuing then what happens. [00:20:16] Seemay: So then and actually we're like very much still under construction right now around this. We're trying to figure out like, how do, how do we think about budget and stuff for this type of step? But then presumably, okay, the person starts working on it. I can tell you where we're trying to go. I, I'm not sure where there yet, where we're trying to go is turning our [00:20:35] publications into a way to like actually integrate into this process. Like, ideally I would love it as CEO, if I can be updated on what people in the order are doing through our pub site. [00:20:49] Ben: Oh [00:20:50] Seemay: And that, like, I'm not saying they publish every single thing they do every day. Of course, that's crazy, crazy talk, but like that it's somewhat in line with what's happening in real time. That that is an appropriate place for me to catch up on what they're doing and think about like high level decisions and get feedback and see the feedback from the community as well, because that matters, right? Like if, if our goal is to either generate products in the form of actual products in the world that we commercialize versus knowledge products that are useful to others and can stimulate either more thought or be used by others directly. Like I need to actually see that data in the form of like the outside world interacting with their releases. Right. [00:21:35] So that's what we're trying to move towards, but there's a lot of challenges associated with that. Like if a, if a scientist is like needing to publish very frequently, How do we make sure we have the right resources in place to help them with that? There may be some aspects of that, that like anyone can help with like formatting or website issues or, you know, even like schematic illustrations to try and just like reduce the amount of friction around this process as much as possible. [00:22:00] Ben: And I guess almost just like my, my concern with the like publishing everything openly very early. And this is, this is almost where, where I disagree with with some people is that there's what, what I believe Sahi Baca called like the, the like Wardy baby problem, where ideas, when you're first sort of like poking at them are just like really ugly and you like, can't even, you can't even, like, you can barely justify it to [00:22:35] anybody on your team who like, trust you let alone people who like don't have any insight into the process. And so. Do do you, do you worry at all about like, almost just being like completely demoralized, right? Like it's just, it's so much easier to point out why something won't work early on than why it will. [00:22:56] Seemay: Yeah, totally. Yeah. [00:22:59] Ben: how do you [00:22:59] Seemay: Well, I mean, yeah, no, I think that's a hard, hard challenge. I mean, and, and people, and I would say at a metal level, I get, I get a lot of that too. Like people pointing out all the ways Arcadia [00:23:09] Ben: Yeah, I'm [00:23:10] Seemay: or potentially going to fail. So a couple things, I mean, I think one is that just, of course I'm not asking our scientists to. They have a random thought in the shower, like put that out into the world. right. Like there's of course some balance, like, you know, go through some amount of like thinking and like, you know, feedback with, with their most local peers on it. More, more in terms more than anything, like [00:23:35] just to like make sure by the time it goes out into the world that you're capturing precious bandwidth strategically. Right. [00:23:41] Ben: Yeah, [00:23:41] Seemay: On the other hand though, like, you know, while we don't want like that totally raw thing, we are so far on the, under the spectrum right now in terms of like forgiveness of some wards. And, and it also ignores the fact that like, it's the process, right? Like ugly baby. Great. That's that's like, like the uglier the better, like put it out there because like you want that feedback. You're not trying to be. trying to get to some ground truth here. And rigor happens through lots of like feedback throughout the entire process, especially at the beginning. And it's not even like that, that rigor doesn't happen in our current system. It's just that it doesn't make it out into the public space. People do share their thoughts with others. They do it at the dry erase board. They share proposals with each other. There's a lot of this happening. It's just not visible. So I mean, the other thing just like culturally, what I've been trying to like emphasize at [00:24:35] Arcadia is like process, not outcomes that like, you know, talking about it directly, as well as we have like an exercise in the beginning of thinking about like, what is the correct level of like failure rate quote unquote, and like what's productive failure. And just like, if we are actually doing like high risk, interesting science that's worth doing fundamentally, there's gotta be some inherent level of failure built in that we expect. Otherwise, we are answering questions. We already know the answer to, and then what's the fucking point. Right? [00:25:05] Ben: Yeah, [00:25:06] Seemay: So it almost doesn't matter what the answer to that question is. Like people said like 20%, some people said 80%, there's a very wide range in people's heads. Cuz there's this, isn't not a precise question. Right. So there's not gonna be precise answers, but the point is like the acceptance of that fact. Right? [00:25:24] Ben: Yeah. And also, I, I think I'm not sure if you would agree with this, but like, I, I feel like even like failure is a very fuzzy concept. In this, in this context, [00:25:35] right? [00:25:35] Seemay: totally. I actually really hate that word. We, we are trying to rebrand it internally to pivots. [00:25:42] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I also, I also hate in this context, the idea of like risk, right? Like risk makes sense when it's like, you're getting like cash on cash returns, but [00:25:54] Seemay: right. [00:25:54] Ben: when [00:25:55] Seemay: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can redefine that word in this case to say like, it's extremely risky for you to go down this safe path because you will be very likely, you know, uncovering boring things. That's a risk, right? [00:26:13] Ben: Yeah. And then just in terms of process, I wanna go one, one step further into the, sort of like the, the like strike teams around an idea. Is it like something like where, where people just volunteer do do they get, like how, how, how do you actually like form those teams? [00:26:30] Seemay: Yeah. So far there has not been like sort of top down forcing of people into things. I [00:26:35] mean, we are a small org at this point, but like, I think like personally, my philosophy is that like, people do their best work when they're, they feel agency and like sort of their own deep, inner inspiration to do it. And so I try to make things more ground up because of that. Not, not just because of like some fuzzy feeling, but actually I think you'll get the best work from people, if you'd set it up that way. Having said that, you know, there are starting to be situations where we see an opportunity for a strike team project where we can, like, we need to hire someone to come. [00:27:11] Ben: Mm-hmm [00:27:12] Seemay: because no one existing has that skill set. So that that's a level of like flexibility that like not everybody has in other organizations, right. That you have an idea now you can hire more people onto it. So I mean, that's like obviously a huge privilege. We have to be able to do that where now we can just like transparently be like, here's the thing who wants to do it? You know? [00:27:32] Ben: yeah, yeah. [00:27:35] That's, that's very cool.  [00:27:36] Seemay: One more thing else. Can I just say one more thing about that [00:27:39] Ben: of course you can see as many things as you [00:27:40] Seemay: yeah. Actually the fact that that's possible, I feel like really liberates people at Arcadia to think more creatively because something very different happens when I ask people in the room. What other directions do you think you could go in versus what other directions do you think this project should go, could go in that we could hire someone from the outside to come do. Because now they like, oh, it doesn't have to be me. Or maybe they're maybe it's because they don't have the skillset or maybe they're attached to something else that they're working on. So making sure that in their mind, it's not framed as like an either or, but in if, and, and that they can stay in their lane with what they most wanna do. If we decide to move forward on that, you know? Cause I, I think that's often something that like in academia, we don't get to think about things that way. [00:28:30] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And then the, the people that you would hire onto a [00:28:35] project, would they, like, so say, say, say the, the project then ends it, it reaches some endpoint. Do they like then sort of go back into the, the pool of people who are, are sandboxing? How do, how does that [00:28:49] Seemay: So we, So we haven't had that challenge on a large scale yet. I would say from a human perspective, I would really like to avoid a situation where like standard biotech companies, you know, if an area gets closed out, there's a bunch of layoffs. Like it would be nice to figure out how we can like, sort of reshuffle everybody. One of the ways this has happened, but it's not a problem yet is like we have these positions called arcade scientists, which is kind of meant for this to allow people to kind of like move around. So there's actually a couple of scientists that Arcadia that are quote unquote arcade it's meant to be like a playful term for someone who's a, a generalist in some area like biochemistry, [00:29:35] generalist computational generalist, something like that, where their job is literally to just work on like the first few months of any project. [00:29:44] Ben: oh, [00:29:45] Seemay: And help kind of like, de-risk like, they're really tolerant of that process. They like it. They like trying to get something brand new off the ground. And then once it becomes like more mature with like clear milestones, then we can hire someone else and then they move on to like the next thing, I think this is a skill in itself that doesn't really get highlighted in other places. And I think it's a skillset that actually resonates with me very much personally, because if I were applying to Arcadia, that is the position that I would want. [00:30:14] Ben: I, I think I'm in the same boat. Yeah, that, and that's, that's critical is like, there aren't a lot of organizations where you sort of like get to like come in for a stage of a project. In research, like there, it it's generally like you're, you're on this project.  [00:30:29] Seemay: And how often do you hear people complain about that in science of like, oh, so and so they're, they're [00:30:35] really great at starting things, but not finishing things. It's like, well, like how do we capitalize on that then? [00:30:39] Ben: yeah. Make it a feature and not a bug. Yeah, no, it's like, it it's sort of like having, I I'm imagining like sort of just different positions on a, a sports team, for example. And, and I feel like I, I was thinking the other day that that analogies between like research organizations and sports teams are, are sort of underrated right. Like you don't expect like the goal to be going and like, like scoring. Right. And you don't, you don't say like, oh, you're underperforming goalie. You didn't score any goals.  [00:31:08] Seemay: Right. That's so funny. I like literally just had a call with Sam Aman before this, where, where we were talking about this a little bit, we were talking about in a slightly different context about a role that I feel like is important in our organization of someone to help connect the dots across the different projects. What we were sort of like conceptualizing in my call with him as like the cross pollinators, like the bees in the organization that like, know what get in the [00:31:35] mix, know what everyone's doing and help everybody connect the dots. And like, I feel like this is some sort of a supportive role. That's better understood on sports teams. Like there's always someone that's like the glue, right? Maybe they're not the MVP, but they're the, the other guy that's like, or, you know, girl, whatever, UN gendered, but very important. Everybody understands that. And like, it's like celebrated, you know, [00:31:58] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and, and the trick is, is really seeing it more like a team. Right. So that's like the, the overarching thing. [00:32:07] Seemay: And then I'll just like, I don't know, just to highlight again though, how like these realities that you and I are talking about that I think is actually very well accepted across scientists. We all understand these different roles. Those don't come out in the very hierarchical authorship, byline of publications, which is the main currency of the system. And so, yeah, that's been fascinating to like, sort of like relearn because when we started this publishing experiment, [00:32:35] I was primarily thinking about the main benefit being our ability to do different formats and in a very open way. But now I see that this there's this whole other thing that's probably had the most immediate impact on Arcadia science, which is the removal of the authorship byline. [00:32:52] Ben: Mm. So, so you don't, you don't say who wrote the thing at all. [00:32:57] Seemay: We do it's at the bottom of the article, first of all. And then it's listed in a more descriptive way of who did what, it's not this like line that's like hierarchical, whether implicitly or explicitly and for my conversations with the scientists at Arcadia, like that has been really like a, a wonderful release for them in terms of like, thinking about how do they contribute to projects and interact with each other, because it's like, it doesn't matter anymore that that currency is like off the table. [00:33:27] Ben: Yeah. That that's very cool. And can, can I, can I change tracks a little bit and ask you about model organisms? [00:33:34] Seemay: sure  [00:33:34] Ben: [00:33:35] so like, and this is, this is coming really from my, my naivete, but like, like what, what are model organisms? And like, why is having more of them important? [00:33:47] Seemay: So there's, this is super, super important for me to clarify there's model organisms and there's non-model organisms, but there's actually two different ways of thinking about non-model organisms. Okay. So let me start with model organisms. A model organism is some organism that provides an extremely useful proxy for studying typically like either human biology or some conserved element of biology. So, you know, the fact that like we have. Very similar genetic makeup to mice or flies. Like there's some shortcuts you can take in these systems that allow you to like quickly ask experimental questions that would not be easy to do in a human being. Right. Like we obviously can't do those kinds of experiments there.[00:34:35]  And so, and so, so the same is true for like ASIS, which can be a model for plants or for like biology more generally. And so these are really, really useful tools, especially if you think about historically how challenging it's been to set up new organisms, like, think about in the fifties before we could like sequence genomes as quickly or something, you know, like you really have to band together to like build some tools in a few systems that give you useful shortcuts in general, as proxies for biology now.  [00:35:11] Ben: can I, can I, can I just double click right there? What does it mean to like set it up? Like, like what, what does it mean? Like to like, yeah. [00:35:18] Seemay: Yeah. I mean, there's basic anything from like Turing, right? Like you have to learn how to like cultivate the organism, grow it, proliferate it. Yeah. You gotta learn how to do like basic processing of it. Like whether it's like dissections or [00:35:35] isolating cell types or something, usually some form of genetics is very useful. So you can perturb the system in some controlled way and then ask precise questions. So those are kinda like the range of things that are typically challenging to set up and different organisms. Like, I, you can think of them as like video game characters, they have like different strengths, right? Like different bars. Some are [00:35:56] Ben: Yeah. [00:35:59] Seemay: fantastic for some other reason. You know, whether it's cultivation or maybe something related to their biology. And so that's that's model organisms and. I am very much pro model organisms. Like our interest in non-model organisms is in no way in conflict with my desire to see model organisms flourish, right. That fulfills an important purpose. And we need more, I would say, non-model organisms. Now. This is where it gets a little murky with the semantics. There's two ways you could think about it. At least one is that these are organisms that haven't quite risen to the level of this, the [00:36:35] canonical model organisms in terms of like tooling and sort of community effort around it. And so they're on their way to becoming model, but they're just kinda like hipster, you know, model or model organisms. Maybe you could think about it like that. There's a totally different way to think about it, which is actually how Arcadia's thinking about it, is to not use them as proxy for shared biology at all. But focus on the biology that is unique about that organism that signals some unique biological innovation that happened for that organism or plate of organisms or something. So for example, ticks releasing a bunch of like crap in their saliva, into your skin. That's not a proxy for us, like feeding on other, you know, vertebrates that is an innovation that happened because ticks have this like enormous job they've had to evolve to learn, to do well, which is to manipulate everything about your [00:37:35] circulation, your skin barrier, to make sure it's one blood meal at each of its life stages happen successfully and can happen for days to over a week. It's extremely prolonged. It can't be detected. So that is a very cool facet about tech biology that we could now leverage to learn something different. That could be useful for human biology, but that's, it's not a proxy, right? [00:37:58] Ben: Yeah. And so, so I was gonna ask you why ticks are cool, but I think that that's sort of self explanatory. [00:38:05] Seemay: Oh, they're wild. Like they, like, they have this like one job to do, which is to drink your blood and not get found out. [00:38:15] Ben: and, and I guess like, is there, so, so like with ticks, I I'm trying to, to frame this, like, is there something useful in like comparing like ticks and mosquitoes? Do they like work by the same mechanisms? Are they like completely different [00:38:30] Seemay: yeah. There's no, there's definitely something interesting here to explore because blood [00:38:35] feeding as a behavior in some ways is a very risky behavior. Right. Any sort of parasitism like that. And actually blood [00:38:42] Ben: That's trying to drink my blood. [00:38:44] Seemay: Yes. That's the appropriate response. Blood feeding actually emerged multiple times over the course of evolution in different lineages and mosquitoes, leeches ticks are in very different clouds of organisms and they have like different strategies for solving the same problem that they've evolved independently. So there's some convergence there, but there's a lot of divergence there as well. So for example, mosquitoes, and if you think about mosquitoes, leaches, and tick, this is a great spectrum because what's critically different about them is the duration of the blood  [00:39:18] Ben: Mm,  [00:39:19] Seemay: feed for a few seconds. If they're lucky, maybe in the range of minutes, leaches are like minutes to hours. Ticks are dazed to over a week. Okay. So like temporally, like they have to deal with very different. For, for mosquitoes, they tend to focus on [00:39:35] like immediately numbing of the local area to getting it out. Right. Undetected, Lees. They they're there for a little bit longer, so they have very cool molecules around blood flow like that there's a dilation, like speeding up the amount of blood that they can intake during that period. And then ticks have to deal with not just the like immediate response, but also longer term response, inflammation, wound healing, all these other sensations that happen. If, imagine if you stuck a needle in yourself for a week, like a lot more is going on, right? [00:40:08] Ben: Yeah. Okay. That, that makes a lot of sense. And so, so they really are sort of unique in that temporal sense, which is actually important. [00:40:17] Seemay: Yeah. And whether it's positive or not, it does seem to track that duration of that blood meal at least correlates with sort of the molecular complexity in terms of Sliva composition from each of these different sets of organisms. I just list. So there's way more proteins in other molecules that [00:40:35] have been detected int saliva as opposed to mosquito saliva. [00:40:39] Ben: And, and so what you're sort of like one of your, your high level things is, is like figuring out which of those are important, what mixture of them are important and like how to replicate that for youthful purposes? [00:40:51] Seemay: Yeah. Right, exactly. Yeah. [00:40:54] Ben: and, and, and are there other, like, I mean, I, I guess we can imagine like farther into Arcadia's future and, and think about like, what do you have, like, almost like a, like a wishlist or roadmap of like, what other really weird organisms you want to start poking at? [00:41:13] Seemay: So actually, so that, that is originally how we were thinking about this problem for non-model organisms like which organisms, which opportunities and that itself has evolved in the last year. Well, we realized in part, because of our, just like total paralysis around this decision, because [00:41:35] what we didn't wanna do is say, okay, now Arcadia's basically decided to double down on these other five organisms. We've increased the Canon by five now. Great. Okay. But actually that's not what we're trying to do. Right. We're trying to highlight the like totally different way. You could think about capitalizing on interesting biology and our impact will be felt more strongly if it happens, not just in Arcadia, but beyond Arcadia for this to be a more common way. And, and I think like Symbio is really pushing for this as a field in general. So we've gone from sort of like which organisms to thinking about. Maybe one of our most important contributions is to ask the question, how do you decide which organism, like, what is even the right set of experiments to help you understand that? What is the right set of data? That you might wanna collect, that would help you decide, let's say for example, cuz this is an actual example. We're very interested in produce diatoms, algae, other things, which, [00:42:35] which species should you settle on? I don't know. Like there's so many, right? Like, so then we started collecting like as many we could get our hands on through publicly available databases or culture collections. And now we are asking the meta question of like, okay, we have these, what experiments should we be doing in a high throughput way across all of these to help us decide. And that itself, that process, that engine is something that I think could be really useful for us to share with the worlds that is like hard for an individual academic lab to think about. That is not aligned with realities of like grants and journal publications and stuff. And so, yeah. Is it like RNA seek data sets? What kind of like pheno assays might you want, you want to collect? And we now call this broadly organismal onboarding process. Like what do you need in the profile of the different organisms and like, is it, phenomics now there's structural [00:43:35] prediction pipelines that we could be running across these different genomes depending on your question, it also may be a different set of things, but wouldn't it be nice to sort of just slightly turn the ES serendipity around, like, you know, what was around you versus like, can we go in and actually systematically ask this question and get a little closer to something that is useful? You know, [00:43:59] Ben: Yeah. [00:43:59] Seemay: and I think the amazing thing about this is. You know, I, and I don't wanna ignore the fact that there's been like tons of work on this front from like the field of like integrative biology and evolutionary biologists. Like there's so much cool stuff that they have found. What I wanna do is like couple their thinking in their efforts with like the latest and greatest technologies to amplify it and just like broaden the reach of the way they ask those questions. And the thing that's awesome about biology is even if you didn't do any of this and you grabbed like a random butterfly, you would still find extremely cool stuff. So that's the [00:44:34] Ben: [00:44:35] Right. Yeah. [00:44:36] Seemay: like, where can we go from here now that we have all these different technologies at our disposal? [00:44:41] Ben: Yeah. No, that's, that's extremely cool. And I wanted to ask a few questions about Arcadia's business model. And so sort of like it's, it's a public fact, unlike a lot of research organizations, Arcadia is, is a for-profit organization now, of course, that's that's a, you and I know that that's a legal designation. And there's like, I, I almost think of there as being like some multidimensional space where it's like, on the one hand you have like, like the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, which is like, is nominally a for-profit right. In the sense of [00:45:12] Seemay: Yeah. [00:45:13] Ben: not a, it's not a non-profit organization. And then on the other hand, under the spectrum, you have maybe like something like a hedge fund where it's like, what is like the only purpose of this organization in the world is to turn money into more money. Right. And so like, I, I guess I'd love to know like how you, how you think about sort of like where in that domain you [00:45:34] Seemay: [00:45:35] Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. This [00:45:38] Ben: and like how you sort of came to that, that [00:45:41] Seemay: Yeah. This was not a straightforward decision because actually I originally conceived of the Arcadia as a, a non-profit entity. And I think there were a lot of assumptions and also some ignorance on my part going into that. So, okay. Lemme try and think about the succinct way to tell all this. So I [00:45:58] Ben: take, take, take your time. [00:46:00] Seemay: okay. I started talking to a lot of other people at organizations. Like new science type of organizations. And I'll sort of like refrain from naming names here out of respect for people. But like they ran into a lot of issues around being a nonprofit, you know, for one, it, it impacted sort of like just sort of like operational aspects, maintaining a nonprofit, which if, if you haven't done it before, and I learned like, by reading about all this and learning about all this, like it maintaining that status is in and [00:46:35] of itself and effort, it requires legal counsel. It requires boards, it requires oversight. It requires reporting. There's like a whole level of operations [00:46:45] Ben: Yeah. And you always sort of have the government looking over your shoulder, being [00:46:49] Seemay: Yep. And you have to go into it prepared for that. So it also introduces some friction around like how quickly you can iterate as an organization on different things. The other thing is that like Let's say we started as a nonprofit and we realized, oh, there's a bunch of like for-profit type activities. We wanna be doing the transition of converting a nonprofit to a for-profit is actually much harder than the other way around. [00:47:16] Ben: Mm. [00:47:17] Seemay: And so that sort of like reversibility was also important to me given that, like, I didn't know exactly what Arcadia would ultimately look like, and I still dunno [00:47:27] Ben: Yeah. So it's just more optionality. [00:47:29] Seemay: Yeah. And another point is that like I do have explicit for profit interests for [00:47:35] Arcadia. This is not like, oh, I like maybe no. Like we like really want to commercialize some of our products one day. And it's, it's not because we're trying to optimize revenue it's because it's very central to our financial experiment that we're trying to think about, like new structures. Basic scientists and basic science can be, can capture its own value in society a little bit more efficiently. And so if we believe the hypothesis that discovering new biology across a wide range of organisms could yield actionable lessons that could then be translated into real products. Then we have to make a play for figuring out how this, how to make all this work. And I like also see an opportunity to figure out how I can make it work, such that if we do have revenue, I make sure our basic scientists get to participate in that. You know, because that is like a huge frustration for me as a basic scientist that like we haven't solved this problem. [00:48:35] Like basic science. It's a bedrock for all downstream science. Yet we some have to have, yeah, we have to be like siloed away from it. Like we don't get to play a part in it. And also the scientists at our Katy, I would say are not like traditional academic scientists. Like I would, I, my estimate would be like, at least a third of them have an intentional explicit interest in being part of a company one day that they helped found or spin out. And so that's great. We have a lot of like very entrepreneurial scientists at Arcadia. And so I I'm, I'm not shying away from the fact that like, we are interested in a, for profit mission. Having said all of that, I think it's important to remember that like mission and values don't stem from tax structure, right? Like you, there are nonprofit organizations that have like rotten values. And there are also for-profit organizations that have rotten values, like that is not the [00:49:35] dividing line for this. And so I think it puts the onus on us at Arcadia though, to continuously be rigorous with ourselves accountable to ourselves, to like define our values and mission. But I don't think that they are like necessarily reliant on the tax structure, especially in a for-profit organization where there's only two people at the cap table and their original motivating reason to do doing this was to conduct a meta science experiment. So we have like a unique alignment with our funders on this that I think also makes us different from other for-profit orgs. We're not a C Corp, we're an LC. And actually we're going through the process right now of exploring like B Corp status, which means that you have a, a fundamental, like mix of mission and for profit. [00:50:21] Ben: Yeah. That was actually something that I was going to ask about just in, in terms of, I think, what sort of like implicitly. One of the reasons that people wonder about [00:50:35] the, the mixture of like research and for profit status is that like the, the, the time scales of research is just, are just long, right? Like, like re, re research research takes a long time and is expensive. And if, if you're like, sort of answering to investors who are like really like, primarily looking for a return on their investment I feel like that, I, I mean, at least just in, in my experience and like my, my thinking about this like that, that, that's, that's my worry about it is, is that like so, so what, like having like, really like a small number of really aligned investors seems like pretty critical to being able to like, stick to your values. [00:51:18] Seemay: Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, there were actually other people interested in funding, our Arcadian every once in a while I get reached out to still, but like me Jud and Sam and Che, like we went through the ringer together. Like we went on this journey together to get here, to [00:51:35] decide on this. And I think there is, I think built in an understanding that like, there's a chance this will fail financially and otherwise. Um, but, but I think the important case to consider is like that we discussed is like, what would happen if we are a scientific success, but a financial failure. What are each of you interested in doing. and that that's such an important answer. A question, right? So for both of them, the answer was we would consider the option of endowing this into a nonprofit, but only if the science is interesting. Okay. If that is, and I'm not saying that we're gonna target that end goal, like I'm gonna fight with all my might to figure out another way, but that is a super informative answer, right? Because [00:52:27] Ben: yeah, [00:52:27] Seemay: delineating what the priorities are. The priority is the science, the revenue is [00:52:35] subservient to that. And if it doesn't work fine, we will still iterate on that like top priority. [00:52:42] Ben: Yeah, it would also be, I mean, like that would be cool. It would also be cool if, if you, I mean, it's just like, everybody thinks about like growing forever, but I think it would be incredibly cool if you all just managed to make enough revenue that you can just like, keep the cycle going right.  [00:52:58] Seemay: Yeah. It also opens us up to a whole new pocket of investments that is difficult in like more standard sort of like LP funded situations. So, you know, given that our goal is sustainability now, like things that are like two to five X ROI are totally on the table. [00:53:22] Ben: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. [00:53:24] Seemay: actually that opens up a huge competitive edge for us in an area of like tools or products that like are not really that interesting to [00:53:35] LPs that are looking to achieve something else. [00:53:38] Ben: yeah, with like a normal startup. And I think that I, I, that that's, I think really important. Like I, I think that is a big deal because there's, there's so many things that I see And, and it's like the two to five X on the amount of money that you could capture. Right. But like the, the, the amount of value that you create could be much, much larger than that. Right. Like, and this is the whole problem. Like, I, I, I mean, it's just like the, the thing that I always run into is you look at just like the ability of people to capture the value of research. And it just is very hard to, to like capture the whole thing. And often when people try to do that, it ends up sort of like constraining it. And so you're, you're just like, okay, with getting a reasonable return then it just lets you do so many other cool things. [00:54:27] Seemay: yeah. I'm yeah. I think that's the vibe. [00:54:32] Ben: that is an excellent vibe. And, and speaking [00:54:35] with the vibe and, and you mentioned this I'm, I. Interested in both, like how you like find, and then convince people to, to join Arcadia. Right. Because it's, it's like, you are, you are to some extent asking people to like play a completely different game. Right? Like you're asking people who have been in this, this like you know, like citations and, and paper game to say like, okay, you're gonna like, stop playing that and play this other thing. And so like, yeah. [00:55:04] Seemay: yeah. It's funny. Like I get asked this all the time, like, how do you protect the careers or whatever of people that come to Arcadia? And the solution is actually pretty simple, even though people don't think of it, which is you Don. You don't try and convince people to come. Like we are not trying to grow into an infinitely large organization. I don't even know if we'll ever reach that number 150. Like I was just talking to Sam about like, we may break before that point. Like, that's just sort of like my cap. We may find that [00:55:35] 50 people is like the perfect number 75 is. And you know, we're actually just trying to figure out like, what is, what are the right ingredients for the thing we're trying to do? And so therefore we don't need everybody to join. We need the right people to join and we can't absorb the risk of people who ultimately see a career path that is not well supported by Arcadia. If we absorb that, it will pull us back to the means. because we don't want anyone at Arcadia to be miserable. We want scientists to succeed. So actually the easiest way to do that is to not try and convince people to do something they're not comfortable with and find the people for whom it feels like a natural fit. So actually think, I think I saw on Twitter, someone ask this question in your thread about what's like the, oh, an important question you asked during your interviews. And like one of the most important questions I ask someone is where else have you applied for jobs? [00:56:35] And if they literally haven't applied anywhere outside of academia, like that's an opportunity for me to push [00:56:43] Ben: Mm. [00:56:44] Seemay: I'm very worried about that. Like, I, I don't want them to be quote unquote, making a sacrifice that doesn't resonate with where they're trying to go in their career. Cuz I can't help them AF like once they come. Arcadia has to evolve like its own organism. And like, sometimes that means things that are not great for people who wanna be in academia, including like the publishing and journal bit. And so yeah, what I tell them is like, look, you have two jobs at Arcadia and both have to be equally exciting to you. And you have to fully understand that there both your responsibility, your job is to be a scientist and a meta scientist. And that those two things have to be. You understand what that second thing is that your job is to evolve with me, provide me with feedback on like, what is working and not working [00:57:35] for you and actively participate in all the meta science experiments that we're doing around publishing translation, technology, all these things, right? Like it can't be passive. It has to be active. If that sounds exciting to you, this is a great place for you. If you're trying to figure out how you're going to do that, have your cake and eat it too, and still have a CV that's competitive for academia in case like in a year, you know, like you go back, I, this is not the place for you. And I, I can't as a human being, like, that's, I, I can't absorb that because like, I like, I can't help, but have some empathy for you once you're here as an individual, like, I don't want you to suffer. Right. And so we need to have those hard conversations early before they join. And there's been a few times where like, yeah, I think like I sufficiently scared someone away. So I think it was better for them. Right? Like it's better for [00:58:25] Ben: Yeah, totally. [00:58:25] Seemay: if that happens. Yeah, it's harder once they're here. [00:58:29] Ben: and, and so, so the like, The, they tend to be people who are sort of like already [00:58:35] thinking, like already have like one foot out the door of, of academia in the sense of like, they're, they're already sort of like exploring that possibility. So they've so you don't have to like get them to that point. [00:58:48] Seemay: Right. Yes. Because like, like that's a whole journey they need to go on in, on their own, because there's so many reasons why someone might be excited to leave academia and go to another organization like this. I mean, there's push and pull. Right. So I think that's a challenge, like separating out, like, like what is just like push, because they're like upset with how things are going there versus like, do they actually understand what joining us will entail? And are they, do they have the like optimism and the agency to like, help me do this experiment. It does require optimism. Right. [00:59:25] Ben: absolutely. [00:59:25] Seemay: So like sometimes like, you know, I push people, like what, where else have you applied for jobs? And they, if they can't seem to answer that very well I say, okay, let me change [00:59:35] this question. You come to Arcadia and I die. Arcadia dissolves. It's, it's an easier way of like, it's like, I can own it. Okay. Like I died and like me and Che and Jed die. Okay. Like now what are you gonna do with your career? And like, I is a silly question, but it's kind of a serious question. Like, you know, just like, what is, how does this fit into your context of how you think about your career and is it actually going to move you towards where you're trying to go? Because, I mean, I think like that's yeah. Another problem we're trying to solve is like scientists need to feel more agency and they won't feel agency by just jumping to another thing that they think is going to solve problems for them. [01:00:15] Ben: Yeah, that's a really good point. And so, so this is almost a selfish question, but like where do you find these people? Right? Like you seem to, you seem to be very good at it. [01:00:26] Seemay: Yeah. I actually don't I don't, I, I don't know the answer to that question fully because we [01:00:35] only just recently said, oh my God, we need to start collecting some data through like voluntary surveys from applicants of like, how do they know about us? You know? It seems to be a lot of like word of mouth, social media, maybe they read something that I wrote or that Che wrote or something. And while that's been fine so far, we also like wanna think about how we like broaden that reach further. It's definitely not through their, for the most part, not through their institutes or PIs that I know. [01:01:03] Ben: Yeah, I, but, but it is, it is like, it sounds like it does tend to be inbounds, right? Like it tends to be people like reaching out to you as opposed to the other way around. [01:01:16] Seemay: Yeah. You know, and that's not for lack of effort. I mean, there have been definitely times where. We have like proactively gone out and tried to scout people, but it does run into that problem that I just described before of like, [01:01:29] Ben: Yeah. [01:01:30] Seemay: if you find them yourself, are you trying to pull them in and have they gone through their own [01:01:35] journey yet? And so in some of those cases, while it seemed like, like we entertain like conversations for a while with a couple of candidates, we tried to scout, but ultimately that's where it ended was like, oh, they like, they need to go on their own. And like, sort of like fully explore for a bit, you know, this would be a bit risky. But it hasn't, you know, it hasn't been all, you know a failure like that, but it, it happens a lot. [01:01:58] Ben: Yeah, no, I mean that, that, frankly, that, that squares with my, my experience sort of like roughly, roughly trying to find people who, who fit a similar mold. So that that's, I mean, and that, that suggests a strategy, right. Is like, be like, be good at setting up some kind of lighthouse, which you, you seem to have done. [01:02:17] Seemay: The only challenge with this, I would say, and, and we are still grappling with this is that sort of approach does make it hard to reach candidates that are sort of like historically underrepresented, because they may not see themselves as like strong candidates for such and such. And [01:02:35] so now we're, now we have this other challenge to solve of like, how do we make sure people have gone through their own process on their own, but also make sure that the opportunity is getting communicated to the right people and that they like all, everybody understands that they're a candidate, you know, [01:02:53] Ben: Yeah. And I guess so , as long as we're recording this podcast, like what, what is that like, like if you were talking to someone who was like, what does that process even look like? Like what would I start doing? Like what would you, what would you tell someone? [01:03:08] Seemay: Oh, to like explore a role at Arcadia. [01:03:11] Ben: yeah. Or just like to like, go through that, like, like to, to start going through that [01:03:16] Seemay: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess like, there's probably a couple of different things. Like, I mean, one is just some deep introspection on like, what are your priorities in your life, right? Like what are you trying to achieve in your career? Beyond just like the sort of ladder thing, like what's the, what are the most important, like north stars for you? And I think [01:03:35] like for a place like Arcadia or any of the other sort of like meta science experiments, That has to be part of it somehow. Right. Like being really interested and passionate about being part of finding a solution and being one of the risk takers for them. I think the other thing is like very pragmatic, just like literally go out there and like explore other jobs, please. Like, I feel like, you know, like, like what is your market value? You know? Like what  [01:04:05] Ben: don't don't  [01:04:05] Seemay: Yeah. Like, and like go get that information for yourself. And then you will also feel a sense of like security, because like, even if I die and Arcadia dissolves, you will realize through that process that you have a lot of other opportunities and your skillset is highly valuable. And so there is like solid ground underneath you, regardless of what happens here, that they need to absorb that. Right. And then also just. Like, trust me, your negotiations with me will go way better. If you come in [01:04:35] armed with information, like one of my goals with like compensation for example, is to be really accurate about making sure we're hitting the right market val

Ben Orenstein joins me to talk all about before being “known on the internet”"Being next to a person who cares a lot about the craft of programming was really what turns me into a software engineer like someone who can make it a happen for real" -  Ben OrensteinWatch this episode on YouTubeBen Orenstein:Ben's Company, TupleBen on Twitter: @r00kBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 01:Ben: My dad was also in sales in the high-tech industry. He worked for AMD the chip maker for most of his career. And so that was actually really nice because he was in the tech industry, I got into computers at a young age, like we had a computer at our house before. A lot of people did, I think.And yes, I discovered at a quite early age that I was obsessed with this particular thing and wanted to play with it all the time.Brian: That's cool. Yeah. I mean, my dad wasn't in the tech industry, but he was sort of like, you know, one of the like the early like early adopters of computers getting really excited about it. So, you know, like the old school, like Prodigy Service and.Ben: Oh, yeah, yeah. Prodigy, yeah. Yeah. I forget sometimes that, that was like - really that was lucky. I had a lucky break there was exposed to this thing early on.Quote 02:Ben: College is really fun. I think you should probably go. There are not a lot of times where you're going to get to do what you get to do in college, and it's an amazing life experience, so you should probably do it from that perspective. Try not to go into a ton of debt to do it because it's probably not worth that unless you're in a... I mean, if you're a major in computer science, you can probably pay off your loans to probably be successful there.But I think you should mostly like my opinion of college is like it's mostly a boondoggle financed by your parents slash the government. And so you should like go and have that incredible experience because it is really fun and like living by yourself for the first time, it's great. So I think there's a lot of lessons and like enjoyment to be had there, but if you're not that into that idea and you're just like, I want to know how to like make it make things like I would, I would say like a computer science degree is probably the slowest path to that And like a boot camp is going to be a much betterthe choice for you. Brian: Yeah, for sure. I agree with that.Quote 03:Ben: In terms of like workflows or skill sets that kind of unlocked super powers that lasted the rest of your career like that. Like, for me, that's one of them was like the ability to, figure out how to build something, you know? Hmm. It's hard to break it down I mean, I learned so many. I feel like I basically went from programming because it's like I touched on there really was not that much programming in my computer science degree.There was some, but not a lot Um, I was doing some programming at Meditech, but not like, not any sort of modern programming. And so when I joined this place, it's called Dana-Farber. It's a cancer research institute, but I joined Dana-Farber. I was actually writing Ruby-on-Rails app next to somebody kind of all day long, and we would like like a program like, like, I would plug a keyboard into his computer and we would sit next to each other, and we were like, tackle things together.And he would review all my play requests and gave me a ton of feedback and, um, being right next to a like person that cared a lot about the craft of programming and knew a lot about it was really what actually turned me into. Like a software engineer, like someone who could make something happen for real because there's like, there's, there's like 5000 things around programming that are involved to like, actually like get a product out the door.And so it's not just like, do you understand Ruby syntax? Do you know what the object hierarchy looks like? It's like, yeah, sure. That's part of it. But there's like a million other things along that goes with it. This is around when I started learning them, for example, which became a pretty core part of my toolkit.I'm still a VIM user today, like years later. More than a decade later.Brian: Yeah.

Show notes:Links:Snohomish Centennial trailIndie Hackers AMAIntro CRMFull transcript:Starr:All right. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. So we took a little break. We're going to have her hot vax summer, but that-Josh:Hot vax summer.Starr:It turns out that was the mirage. It turns out that was a mirage.Josh:Well, it did reach 112 degrees in Portland. So it was hot.Starr:There you go. Yeah. The summer never existed. It was just an illusion caused by our overwhelming thirst for lots of things.Josh:Mirage.Ben:Well, there were a couple of weeks there that I thought, "Yeah. This is going to work out. And then Delta.Starr:Yeah. It was a couple of nice weeks, wouldn't it?Ben:Yeah. It was. It was.Starr:Except for the panic about, "Oh, crap. I need to learn how to deal with people again."Josh:Wouldn't it be wonderful when we can just look back on those two weeks and just remember those last good two weeks?Ben:Yeah. Went 112 in Portland. That's pretty bad. It got to 116 in my garage.Starr:Yeah.Ben:It's pretty warm.Josh:Yeah. That's like melt some things if you're not careful.Ben:I did not know this until well, at the beginning of the pandemic, that there was actually a special class of freezer called the garage freezer because at the beginning of the pandemic I wanted to have a freezer in my garage. I'm like, "Okay. I'm just going to go to Home Depot and buy a freezer." Oh, no, no, no, no. You can't just buy a freezer to put in your garage. You have to have a garage freezer to put it in your garage. So we have a garage freezer and even with 116 in the garage, the stuff stayed frozen. So I guess it actually works.Josh:Nice. Yeah. My freezer survived as well.Starr:I mean, not having a garage freezer in your garage is almost as bad as wearing white after labor day, or is it before labor day? I forget.Josh:I don't know. I never wear white.Starr:I just don't wear white.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah.Starr:Stains too easily.Josh:I just always dress like I'm going to a funeral.Starr:All right. So today's going to be a little bit of a short episode. So we should probably get to the content.Ben:I thought we were already in the content.Starr:I know our reader.Josh:Yeah. It might be short. I don't know.Starr:Oh, we are?Josh:Our podcasts tend to have a mind of their own.Ben:That's true.Starr:Well, that's true. But we've got this Ask Me Anything schedule.Josh:Oh, yeah.Starr:20 minutes from now.Josh:Well, the great thing about asynchronous ask me anything is that they're asynchronous so you can post them even while you're on a podcast and answer the questions whenever you want.Starr:Yeah. Maybe you can, but my brain does not work that way.Josh:Oh, I've got it all queued up.Starr:I've got a one track mind.Josh:It's just a button press. We're locked and loaded.Starr:Oh, you're like Kramer. You've got the button.Josh:No. I'm ready to go.Starr:Sell sell sell!Josh:So yeah. At 10:30, we're recording this podcast. It's 10:08 right now. Pacific. And we're going to be doing an ask me anything AMA on the indie hackers forums.Starr:Yes. And it's a last minute affair as of 20 minutes ago. I didn't have an indie hackers invite code. We're running around scrambling.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah. Ben wanted to try a new podcast recording software, and I'm just like, "No. I can't handle this amount of change in my life right now."Josh:We need to title this episode, live from the indie hackers backstage, by the way.Josh:[crosstalk]Starr:Oh, yeah. I don't know if you like a live album.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Okay.Josh:We're doing it live.Starr:Well, so Ben suggested, when you talk about one work thing and one vacation thing we did. And I guess, I'll start because I didn't actually have a vacation. I just got sick a lot, which I didn't get COVID, but there was some sort of bug that was going around and I got it and I was out for a couple of weeks. And so I guess that was my vacation. I don't know. I just played a lot of Diablo III.Josh:That's cool.Starr:Yeah.Ben:We got our worst vacations in Diablo III.Josh:Yeah. We got away for a few days. We went to this lake up north of Spokane in Washington and just five nights or something. But on the trip there, we're looking at our friends who were already up there, sent us the fire map of Washington. And we are traveling, literally our destination is in the middle of six fires.Starr:Oh no.Josh:We're like, "Should we be turning around?" I don't know. But it turned out all right. We breathe too much smoke the first couple of days, but it cleared up and-Starr:Yeah. After the first couple of days you hardly notice it.Josh:I only got a minor headache.Starr:Your nerves just die. The nerves in your lungs.Josh:Yeah.Ben:It's okay. We have good health insurance.Josh:I'm an ex smoker. So I'll just tack it on, it's just like adding a couple of days.Ben:It's like getting that upgrade package when you're buying a $30,000 car. And it's like, "What's another thousand dollars?Josh:Yeah. I've already got the risk.Ben:Yeah. I stayed closer to home. I read a bunch of books and I got out for a nice bike ride, went to the Snohomish Centennial trail. So it starts in Snohomish and it goes up through Arlington and it's rails to trail conversion. So there used to be railroad tracks there, but now it's a paved trail. And the thing that's neat though, they have a bunch of trail heads and a few of them have the recreations of the old train stations. So it's like, you can act like you're getting on board that train and actually getting on-Josh:Oh, that's nice. Really nice.Ben:Yeah.Josh:That's cool.Ben:That's a lot of fun. Let's see, a work thing that I did. It's a blur.Josh:Yeah.Ben:I probably migrated something somewhere at some point. And back-filled something-Josh:You were busy.Ben:Yeah.Josh:Yeah. You did a lot.Ben:Yeah. I can't remember what I did.Starr:Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of things, right? We're working with that sales consultancy, what is it? Intro CRM people?Ben:Yeah. Did do that.Starr:Have you done some outreach? You got some replies even?Ben:Yeah. Yeah. It's been kind of a mixed bag. So I've gotten some replies, but also the outbound stuff has not really been all that productive. So I'm questioning my life choices at this point.Starr:Have you had any overt hostility though?Ben:No overt hostility.Starr:Oh, you're not pushing hard enough then. You want your OH metric to be at least 10%. At least 10%, you want death threats.Ben:I will take that under advisement.Starr:Okay. That's how you know you're really-Josh:Really selling it.Starr:Yeah. I would say coffee's for closers, but you don't drink coffee. So there you go. Oh, cool. On my end, I don't know. We published our first batch of Honeybadger intelligence reports and I don't know. Loyal listeners might remember from last time, I mean, if you don't remember how loyal are you and how much should I even trust you, but yeah. You might remember that we were working on these things. Basically, they are quarterly reports for a certain programming language where if you kind of need to keep an eye on, I don't know. Front-end JavaScript, but you don't want to just inhale the feed of news that's constantly coming out, you can just look at this beautiful quarterly report. And we are publishing them quarterly now on our blog. And the first batch went out three weeks late, maybe a month late, I don't know. I didn't give myself enough time to get them ready for publication. And then I got sick for two weeks and just could barely crawl to the computer. So I'm sorry. I'll do better next time.Josh:If that's you're going to say, if you don't want to inhale the whatever weekly newsfeed, you can inhale it once a month or once a quarter. Just all.Starr:Well, no. We're not just collating everything together.Starr:[crosstalk].Starr:We're concatenating together.Josh:It's like a curation of curation.Starr:Yeah. We're not just a pending three months worth of Hacker News together. We're going in and applying some real intelligence to it. We have real domain experts.Josh:Editorial.Starr:Curating.Josh:Occasionally?Starr:Yes. Providing you the choicest morsels.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:Hand crafted morsels of information.Starr:Yeah. Maybe I should be doing these outreach emails.Ben:Yeah. I think so.Ben:I've got the wrong person writing this stuff.Starr:Yeah. They'd be like, "Are these people even professionals?"Josh:Well, that should be obvious from our website.Starr:Yes.Josh:I'll let you decide which way that goes.Ben:Wow. I've been sitting here while you're talking, thinking, what did I do? I'm like, "This is not good. If I can't remember doing anything useful for the past three months, that's probably a sign that I'm doing the wrong things."Starr:I mean, it could just be, you did a lot, Ben. I can remember things you've done. Can we got set up in a new compliance automated thing?Ben:Oh, yeah. Then the compliance-Starr:Yeah. An automated compliance thing. So you don't have to juggle all that stuff manually.Ben:Yeah. We got our SOC 2 type two report done. So we're legit now. We're officially doing the things that we said we would do.Starr:We're enterprise.Ben:Yeah. Full on enterprise.Josh:That's amazing.Ben:Yeah. And it wasn't a particularly painful process. I mean, it wasn't pleasant, but yeah. We survived.Starr:My favorite part of that was that, so as part of this automated security, your automated SOC 2 compliance stuff, all of the employees I guess, have to do mandatory security training once a year now. And it's this automated quiz where you have to read something and then it asks you questions. So it was a really weird big business moment, where I just felt, okay. I'm watching this training video. It should have 50s music in the background of it. And I hate to admit that I got stuck on the first question for 10 minutes. For 10 minutes. Because it was an easy question, but it was one of those things where it's like, "What's the correct answer? Choose one or more." And the correct answer was all of them. But for some reason, I had selected them all with my keyboard and that wasn't good enough. I had to click on them to show I really meant it because hackers generally use keyboards. So they're not really trustworthy devices.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Starr it was like a JavaScript bug.Starr:So eventually, I literally tried every combination. Eventually, I was just like, "Okay. I'm just going to try the first one again," and it worked. So there you are. There you are.Ben:I can't believe you're giving away the answers to our security questions on the podcast. That's a breach of security.Starr:Yeah. I mean, I think our security questions have some security vulnerabilities if, you can manually brute force them. You have four binary options. That's what? Four factorial combinations? You can knock that out in an hour.Ben:Starr is hacking the mainframe.Starr:I am hacking the planet.Josh:That's how Starr passed the security test.Starr:Yeah. That's also how I got such a great score on the SAT, by the way. You just take it, I don't know. 128 factorial times and then you just brute force it.Josh:Nice. How long did that take you?Starr:I don't know. I still haven't graduated from high school.Josh:I sort of graduated from high school.Starr:Well, you can tell you've been away for a while. Because I just have all this bullshit that I've saved up for you all, and it's just all coming out now.Ben:So I was surprised to learn. I don't know why this surprised me, but it surprised me nonetheless, when we had our all hands meeting recently that we have three Honeybadger employees that have children starting kindergarten this year.Starr:Oh, my God. Yes.Ben:That's pretty wild.Starr:It's pretty terrifying. It's pretty terrifying. I'm glad that I live in Seattle. You guys don't. Josh and Kevin don't, but I mean, you all live in fairly reasonable places where governors aren't banning masks in school.Josh:Yeah.Ben:As they themselves are going to get advanced treatments for their COVID infections. Yeah.Starr:Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's okay. We love you Texas. We just don't love your governor.Ben:Speaking of Texas. So this random tidbit I saw the other day, Austin, Texas of course, you know the housing market has been crazy. As far as prices go over the past several months, people have been overbidding regularly on how to just be able to-Josh:Oh, I read that.Josh:A hundred grand?Ben:Yeah. So Austin, Texas.Josh:That's what I'm asking.Ben:A hundred grand over asking price. So you have a $400,000 list price, but you actually got to pay $500,000 to get the house. That's crazy.Starr:That is wild.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah. I had to drop off my car at the mechanic to get its normal service and I was walking by, and this was this morning and there's this kind of older condo building. It's not great looking or anything. And it's two bedroom condo, 900 square feet is now selling for the same price that I bought my single-family house with big yard and everything three blocks away. And that was five or six years ago? Six years ago?Ben:Crazy stuff.Starr:It's bizarre. Totally. I don't know. It's the sort of thing like it feels kind of gross even. Just because I was able to scrape together a down payment for a house, suddenly I get, I don't know. A hundred grand a year extra just in appreciation.Josh:You just hit a jackpot.Starr:Yeah. But it's just like, okay. I literally did nothing to deserve that. And meanwhile, people who could use that or I mean, I could use it, but I'm not in dire straits. I don't know. It's just like, "Wow, this whole system is just kind of backwards and weird."Ben:Yeah. It's to the point I'm getting unsolicited offers to buy my house, right?Starr:Oh, me too.Ben:I'm getting these letters in the mail like, "Hi, I'm Bob and my wife is Alice and we'd like to buy your house." And I'm like looking at the letters, "Is this is really an automated thing or do they really write this by the hand?"Starr:I've had people call me on the phone, in person.Ben:They called you?Starr:Yeah. They called me. Three houses on my block have been demolished in the past two months, three older houses, one of them was just really messed up. But two of them were these small houses on big lots. And essentially what happened is a developer bought almost every house on the opposite side of the street from me and is now basically filling up the lots with as many units as they can. So I think they're going to end up with like 18 units out of these five or six houses, which is fine. I guess. I don't mind density and everything, but it's just so wild because it's like, "Oh, it finally caught up with us." Because for a long time we were just over the edge where things were nice, we were just one block over from the nice stuff. And it finally caught up with us. So we're going to have to move now because we're not fancy enough for the neighborhood anymore.Josh:Yeah. Just cash out.Ben:Yeah. Move to Kansas.Starr:Yeah. I mean, that's the problem though. It's like, "Okay. Great." I get all this appreciation, but if I ever want to get a new house, it's like, "Okay. I've got to pay those new prices."Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Yeah. We've looked at that too, or you could sell and rent for a few years and see if anything happens. That would probably be a gamble.Starr:That would be a really bad gamble I think. I mean, I don't know.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Considering no markets decline anymore.Starr:I mean, they, they could decline, but you're trying to time it.Josh:Time the housing the market?Starr:Yeah.Starr:Maybe it'll decline, but yeah.Ben:This got me thinking, real estate agents, they want you to trade up, right? You buy your starter house and then you buy your bigger house and then eventually you downsize again because hey, why not have another transaction that a real estate agent can take a commission on, right? And it just got me thinking, why don't we have that for businesses? Why can't you trade up your business, right?Josh:Like trade it?Ben:Yeah. It's like, "Honeybadger, that's a nice little business. Why don't you trade it on up to a bigger business?Starr:So we sell Honeybadger and then by a larger business.Ben:Right. Right. Like that. Rolled into a down payment for a bigger business, yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:I'm not sure if you're very good at that.Josh:I love it.Starr:I don't know.Ben:Maybe this is a new marketing thing we can try. We can figure out new business models.Josh:Because we're getting trade-in program like the private equity firms.Ben:You're slapping the top of your business. You can fit so many customers in here.Josh:Might be our best bit yet.Ben:Well, I guess, we better get ready for our ask me anything session. Got a crack the knuckles and get ready to type.Starr:Crack the old knuckles.Josh:Almost time.Starr:All right. Okay. I will sign us off. All right. So this has been FounderQuest back from hot vax summer, back from vacation or being sick or whatever we call it these days. If you want to give us a review on Apple podcasts, whatever they call it, go for it. If you want to look up this AMA we're about to do on Indie Hackers, we recommend that and yeah. Otherwise, just stay cool, stay safe, and we will see you next week.Ben:Catch you later.Josh:See you.Starr:Bye.

Show notes:Links:TwistHook RelayBen Orenstein TupleWrite for HoneybadgerFull transcript:Starr:So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.Ben:Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going on. I'm like, "Oh, I think probably the car is a better place to record today."Josh:Well at least you'll have some new friends soon.Ben:True, true.Starr:Yeah. Well I'm glad you made it, at least. And so what's up? I missed a week of the podcast and you guys invested our entire Honeybadger savings account into Bitcoin.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And I'm not sure that was the most prudent investment decision, y'all. I just wanted to say that.Ben:Yeah, the timing could have been better.Josh:Yeah, we really pulled a Roam Research on that one.Starr:Oh yeah. What do you mean by that?Josh:They invest in Bitcoin, apparently.Starr:Oh, they do? Okay.Ben:Of course they do.Starr:Of course. It's just a dip. You're supposed to buy the dips, Josh. It's just what, like a 30% dip? 40% dip?Josh:I wasn't watching it, but I read that it had recovered pretty quickly too.Starr:Oh. I have no idea. I didn't even follow it.Josh:As it does.Starr:I don't even follow it.Josh:Yeah. I just read random people's opinions.Starr:There you go.Josh:I forget where we left it last week, but I just wanted to state for record that I think I mentioned I made some accidental money in Bitcoin back when I was learning about block chain technology, but I have not bought any Bitcoin since, nor do I intend to, and I do not really view it as an investment asset.Starr:This is not investment advice.Josh:I just need to state my opinions for the future so I can look back on them with regret. If I don't say what I actually think, I'm never going to have anything to regret.Starr:There you go.Josh:I'm just going to commit.Starr:So you've decided to die on this no intrinsic value hill.Josh:Right. I'll let you know if I change my mind.Starr:Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, I don't really check. Last week y'all did the interview with Mike, right?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Yeah, it was a good conversation.Starr:Yeah. I don't really pay attention to it, except occasionally I'll look at the chart. It's the same with GameStop. Occasionally I'll look at the GameStop chart and then just see what wild stuff people are saying about it. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, GameStop was hovering at about 150 for a while, but now it's up to like 170-ish, 180. Something like that. Yeah. I peek at it every now... it's on my watch list when I log into my brokerage account, so I just see it. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Cool." And then I move on and check out my real actual stock portfolio.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah. I'm not going to buy it. It's like a TV show for me.Ben:Yeah, totally.Josh:Yeah. To be fair, I really don't have much of an opinion either way. I still don't understand it, so I don't know. I just feel like I probably shouldn't be buying it.Starr:That's really good advice. I don't understand anything though, so what am I supposed to do, Josh? Huh? Huh?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Just buy the index fund.Starr:Yeah. I don't even understand that.Josh:I don't understand that either though, if you really think about it.Ben:That's actually, there was a good thread or so on Twitter. I don't know if it was this week or last week, but basically the idea was if you feel really confident in your own ability, in your own business, given that, you're probably spending most of your time in that business, right? We spend most of our creative time in Honeybadger because that's where we feel the most potential is. So you're investing basically all of your personal capital in this one business. How do you diversify that risk? Or do you diversify the risk? Do you double down? Maybe do you take investment to diversify, and so you buy out? Let someone do a secondary and so you take some cash off the table? If you did that, then where would you put the money? Do you just go, "Okay, I'm going to go buy Bitcoin. I'm going to go buy an index fund," or whatever. And if you do that, is that a better use of your money than having just kept the equity and just plowing more time into your business? Right?Josh:Yeah.Ben:It's an interesting thought exercise. It's like, "Hm." The whole investment mindset of your business is interesting to me.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, that was interesting. I think I saw that conversation, or maybe I saw a similar conversation where they were talking about even just 401Ks and for founders who are already fairly... have at least made it in whatever sense that means. Is it the best financial move to keep maxing out your 401K versus investing in your ability to generate revenue in your business?Starr:So a little bit of real talk here. If you are a founder who's made it, maxing out your 401K isn't really a blip on your financial radar.Josh:It's not a big... yeah. That was kind of the same thought I had. It's not like you're putting 50% of your income into it.Starr:Yeah. What is it, like 20 grand? Something like that?Josh:Yeah.Starr:It's a good chunk of change, but still. It's not like...Josh:Yeah. I don't know.Starr:Yeah, that's interesting. I think I'm just going to go all in on Pogs. I think they're due for a comeback. I think that's going to be how I diversify.Josh:But I think it's probably a good move to invest in yourself if you have the ability to build businesses. That definitely seems like a good investment, in any case. Probably still have a 401K. I tend to do everything, except Bitcoin.Ben:A 401K is a nice backstop. Just keep stocking money away, and later it will be there, hopefully. But in the meantime, really, really spend your time and your energy on making your business even more profitable. Speaking of making your business more profitable, so this past week or two weeks, I've been working on our SOC 2 type two audit, so I'm doing the evidence collection.Starr:Oh yeah?Ben:So that in this case means I take a bunch of screenshots of settings, like the AWS console and G-suite console to show yeah, we have users, and yes, we have login restrictions, et cetera. All the 150 different things that you're supposed to check off the list when you do the audit. And as I've been going through this process taking all these screenshots, honestly it's getting a bit tedious, and it's surprisingly time consuming. And so I'm like, "You know, there are services for this sort of thing. Let me check them out." And so in the past three days, I've had conversations with Vanta, Secureframe, and Drata. These are three providers that what they do is they provide almost SOC 2 in a box. Basically they help you connect all of your systems and get the evidence that you need for an auditor in a more automated fashion. So for example, they'll plug into your AWS account and they'll pull out information about your security groups, your application firewall, your AIM, all the access permissions, all that kind of stuff, and pack that up into a nice little format that the auditor can then look at and like, "Yeah, they're good on all these different requirements." So you don't have to take screenshots of security groups.Ben:And I hadn't really looked at them before because I was like, "I don't know if I just want to spend that kind of money," but actually sitting back and looking at it, looking at the time that I'm spending on this and the amount of time I'm paying our auditors to audit all these screenshots that I'm taking, actually I think it would be cheaper to go with one of these services, because your audit is a bit more streamlined because the auditor knows how that data is going to come in and it's an easy format to digest, et cetera. But the thing is that after having gone through some of the sales pitches from these vendors, I'm thinking I really wish I would have started with these back the first time, because I think it would have been much easier just from the get go. So I think I've been doing the SOC compliance on hard mode, unfortunately, but lessons learned.Starr:With my experience, that just seems to be how projects are. You do it one time and you don't really know what you're doing, and you just push your way through it, and then eventually you figure out how to do it better and easier and all that. Because when something is new to you, you don't know what you can safely ignore. You know?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well plus you're pumping up the value of FounderQuest.Starr:Oh, that's true. We got a lot of content out of that.Ben:That's true.Starr:At least $100 worth.Josh:That's useful knowledge. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, so I think the short version is if you are interested in doing SOC2 compliance and you have no idea what you're doing, talk to these vendors first and maybe just start with them. They will help you, because they have customer success people like SaaS does. They have people on staff who are there to help you have success with their product. And if you don't get compliant, then you're going to stop using their product, so they're going to help you try and get there. And it's still pricey. It's still going to be five figures a year, but it will definitely save you some time and maybe even save you some money.Josh:Nice.Ben:Yeah. So next year, our audit should just be smooth as silk.Starr:Just butter.Josh:Love it.Starr:So if we-Josh:What are you going to do with all that extra free time?Ben:I made an executive decision.Starr:Oh really? What's that?Ben:Yes. The executive decision is we're going to have more teamwork at Honeybadger.Starr:That's ironic.Josh:Instead of what? What we have now, which is anarchy?Ben:We pretty much do have anarchy, I think. We are coordinated, we do make our plans, and we do have things we want to get done, but yeah, we are very independent at Honeybadger. We work independently. You might even say we're kind of siloed. We go off in the corner and do our own thing for most of the time. And I was chatting with Kevin about this, and I think we're going to try an experiment. So I think we're going to try to actually work together.Starr:Kevin is our developer.Starr:Yeah, so you all are going to be developing features together. Are you going to pair program? Are you going to use Tuple?Ben:Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there.Starr:Are you going to mob program?Ben:Pair programming, that's maybe too advanced for us, I think. Maybe actually we'll chat in Slack a little bit here and there and maybe have a Zoom call.Josh:Yeah, so you're talking about you're both going to work on the same project at the same time.Ben:Right. Right.Josh:Mostly independently, but coordinating.Ben:Right. Yeah.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think that still can fit into our anarchy model.Starr:Yeah. It still seems a little bit independent.Josh:It's more like mutual aid or something.Starr:There you go. We should make a conference talk about mutual aid development.Josh:Right.Starr:That would go over well.Ben:Using NATO as a model for your development process. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. I'm looking forward to it. I think I've been feeling a little lonely. I don't know if it's the right word, but maybe just off doing my own thing. I was like, "Oh, I think it will be nice to have some collaboration, some coordination." Maybe we'll even get to a level of synergies.Starr:Synergies.Starr:That's a blast from the past.Josh:Yeah, I think it's a good idea.Ben:Yeah, so more to come on that. We'll keep you posted. It's a bigger project. May not have results for a couple months. Don't really want to spill the beans on what it is right now. Competitive information. Don't want to leak it to all of our competitors.Starr:I like that. I like that. It's going to keep people on the hook for the next episodes.Josh:Totally.Ben:But yeah. That was my week.Josh:Yeah. Well my week, I took some time off, had some family stuff going on, so I was not very productive this week, but what I did work on was I've been working on this little guide for Hook Relay. I'd love to get the marketing machine, the fly wheel going on that at least, so we can be moving that along with everything else. And so yeah, working on some content and such.Starr:What is Hook Relay?Josh:Well you tell us what Hook Relay is, Ben. It's your baby.Ben:It's my baby. Yeah. So Hook Relay is a tool for managing web hooks. So you can record web hooks as they go out. In our case, to Honeybadger, we send a lot of web hooks, and so we built Hook Relay to help track all that web hook action. So we logged as pay loads that can go and diagnose issues that are happening, or maybe replay them as necessary, and of course it also handles inbound web hooks. So if you were handling, let's say, a post pay load request from GitHub about some activity that happens in your GitHub account, you handle that web hook and we can give you a place to store that, and then you can replay that, send it, forward it onto somewhere if you want, or just store it.Josh:Yeah. I think one of my favorite things about Hook Relay is just the visibility that it gives us into what's happening with the hooks, because otherwise we never had a dashboard. I guess we could have built one internally to see what the activity was and what's failing, what's actually... what requests are... because you're connecting to thousands of different people's random domain URLs, basically. It's really nice even for debugging and things like troubleshooting to be able to see what's going on, in addition to all the other cool things that it gives you out of the box.Starr:So you might say it's even like turnkey reliability and visibility for web hooks. For all your web hook needs.Ben:Yeah. Yeah, we modeled it on Stripes web hooks because we loved-Starr:I'm holding up a box up. I'm holding the TurboLinks box up and gesturing at it with my hand.Ben:Vanna White style.Josh:We should do our own channel, do our own infomercials.Ben:Yeah, I really wanted experience of Stripe. If you set up web hooks in Stripe, you can go and you can see all the web hooks they've sent you. You can see the pay loads, you can see whether they were successfully delivered or not, and I wanted that experience for our own web hooks, and also I thought it would be cool if developers could just have that without having to build the infrastructure. And so if you're building an app that send a bunch of web hooks on behalf of your customers, well now you can give your customers visibility into that web hook activity without having to build that tracking yourself.Josh:Yeah. That's pretty cool. So basically this content guide I'm working on is how to build web hooks into your application, including all the reliability and stuff that Hook Relay gives you for free. And the idea is that if that's what you're doing and you just want to save some time, Hook Relay will be a large chunk of that. You've just got to sign up. So I think it will be useful to everyone, even if they don't become a customer. If you're going to build your own back end and handle all the retries, build dashboards, and all that. But if you want it all turnkey, then Hook Relay is a big chunk of that work just done of you.Starr:So is this live? So can people go and sign up now?Ben:Yeah.Josh:Hook Relay, yes. It is.Josh:Hookrelay.dev.Ben:Yeah. In fact, we have enough customers now that it's actually paying for itself.Starr:What?Ben:Yes. So sweet.Josh:It's wild. That's wild.Starr:That's amazing.Ben:So Josh, is your guide going to have... are you going to dive deep into the architecture of here's how you build a whole web hook system, and so we're going to show you all the stuff behind the curtain so you can build your own? And then, "Oh, by the way, if you want it just done for you, here it is." Or are you going to just keep it more high level?Josh:I'm starting more high level. Yeah, I was planning on it being more high level. More like a high level architecture thing, or specification. Like these are the parts that you'll need to build, but you're going to have to solve some things, because it's not going to be specific to one system. It's not going to be like, "This is how you build web hooks for Ruby and Sidekick, or if you're going serverless." It will have suggestions on stacks or technologies to use for the back end, for instance, but yeah. I was thinking of leaving that to the user to figure out, but just showing the things you need to think about that a lot of people don't think about until they encounter the problems that might arise, like retrying and all the error handling that you add later, and validation for security reasons and things.Ben:Yeah. Yeah.Starr:This is giving me flashbacks to a whole two or three year process after we first launched.Josh:Yeah.Starr:It was just like, "Oh, crap. There's an edge case here that we didn't think of because we're not used to doing web hooks at this scale." And that just went on for like three years.Josh:Yeah. And it's nice having the two products because Hook Relay came out of Honeybadger and it's basically part of our web hook system. This is basically just documenting Honeybadger's web hook system for other people who might want to replicate that or whatever.Ben:Totally. I think that will be cool. A great piece of content, a great piece of SEO juice. And if you did decide to go deep into the technical side, like if you explain the entire infrastructure that we're building, that would actually be kind of cool too because you could maintain your technical documentation for the system internally and use it as a piece of content for marketing.Josh:That could be cool. Yeah. That's not a bad idea. Yeah, I was thinking just because I want to get something out there. I'm thinking it will help with both, having a resource for people who are already on the site to see this is basically how you will implement this. It's kind of like an implementation guide, really. But then also SEO. It should help get us in more search results.Ben:Yeah.Josh:And I also want to credit Ben Orenstein and and Tuple. They have a great pair programming guide which was an inspiration for this idea. I just really liked the format that they used, and I just think it's a great idea if you have a product that's highly targeted or focused on one specific thing and doing it really well. I think it's maybe even a great alternative to a blog, for instance. You can get some of the same benefits of having a blog, but without actually having to create a blog with a lot of different variety of topics and things.Ben:Speaking of the blog, I was talking to Harris, our sales guru, about our blog strategy, and I said, "Yeah, it's basically like a flypaper strategy. We want it to attract developers that come and see the content and they love it and they're like, 'Oh, let me check out this Honeybadger thing.'" Not particularly novel, but I like the flypaper idea.Starr:That's a good metaphor. And also for a long time, I poo-pooed SEO because in my mind, SEO was very scammy. I don't know. I learned about SEO in the days of link farming and all that, and I just didn't want to be involved in that. So I'm just like, "We're just going to put out good content and that will be enough." And it is, yes, but also I've looked at some metrics since then that make it clear that the majority of good things that happen because of our blog actually are people entering through search queries. That really outweighs people sharing articles and doing stuff like that, which I guess is obvious that it would be that way, but my own bias against search just made me not see that for a while. So maybe trying to pick some possible low hanging fruit. We've tried to make our site search engine friendly, but we having really done any explicit SEO type activities.Josh:Yeah. I went through recently through our documentation and just tweaked just small things on a bunch of pages, like headlines and some of the meta tags and stuff, but mostly headlines and content on page was what I was focusing on. And I wasn't using any particular tool to measure before and after results, but it does seem like it bumped us up in some of the results for people searching for more general terms like Ruby error tracking, for example, which are typically pretty competitive terms. But I think we rank pretty well for some of those terms these days. I think we've been around enough and we're one of the options that come up. So it does seem like if you already target the terms, it actually does what they say it does, which is good to know. You've just got to pay attention to it.Ben:So the moral of story is there is some value in SEO.Starr:I guess so.Josh:Yeah. Well and I think documentation sites. Your documentation, I think it's a great place to optimize SEO because a lot of times, especially for those... maybe not for the long tail searches. A blog is great for that, like what you were talking about with the flypaper, Ben. But for people who are actually searching for what you do, I think a lot of times documentation pops up first in a lot of cases when I'm searching for things, so don't overlook it like we did.Starr:Yeah. Well this week, I guess the main thing I did was I got our authors lined up for the next quarter of intelligence briefings. So if you haven't been playing along at home, we're having some intelligence briefings created. Basically everything that's going on in a certain language community for the quarter, and this grew out of Josh's need because he's basically in charge of our client libraries. And we have libraries in a variety of languages, so keeping up with those languages and what's going on is a real pain in the ass, so we were going to make these guides originally for him, but then also we were like, "This would be really great content to publish."Starr:And I've already got this system with authors who want to write about programming languages, and so let's see if we can make some authors make these summaries. And so far, yeah, I'm pretty happy. We had four or five of them created, and we're not publishing them because they were for a previous quarter, and this is just a trial run to see if the results are okay, and I think they were. I think the results were pretty good. We go some feedback from you two, and I updated my process and updated the template that all the authors are using, and so we should be getting round two done. I'm setting the deadline a week after the end of the quarter. My hope is if they get them to me then, then I'll have a week to get them up on our blog or wherever, and then they won't be too out of date by the time people see them.Josh:Yeah. That's cool. I'm excited to see the next batch. My favorite thing from the reports were the ones where they wrote some original content summarizing things or sections or whatever. That was super useful because there's a little bit of a story element to it that's specific to the quarter or whatever that you don't really get from just... if you just aggregate everything, all the weekly newsletters and what happened on Reddit and what happened on Twitter. If you just dump that all in a document, it's a bit of overload, so it's nice to have the summary the story of what the community was interested in.Starr:Oh yeah. Definitely.Josh:Here are some articles that they talked about.Starr:That's the whole idea, is to have somebody who knows the community explain to you what's going on, as opposed to... if I wanted a bunch of links, I could just write a little script to scrape links from places.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And it wouldn't be very useful. What's useful is having people who know the environment being like, "Hey, this is what's going on. This is why it's important." And yeah, so that's going to be something I guess I need to look for explicitly when I get this round of things of reports back.Josh:Start calling them secret agents or something instead of authors.Starr:Oh yeah.Josh:Or detectives.Starr:Operatives. Yeah. Assets.Josh:As our detective service investigators.Ben:I think having that analysis of why this news is important or why these things are important that they've collected is really handy, because the links are great. Like you said, I could just write a script to collect them, but having someone with that context in the community saying, "Okay, and it's important because, and this is why you should pay attention," I think that's really helpful to someone who's maybe not as deep into that every day.Starr:Oh yeah.Josh:Yeah. And also knowing what to surface, because there was one report that it really seemed to just dump every single link or article that was discussed or was in a newsletter or whatever, and I think it's more helpful if it's on a quarterly level, if you know what is actually the important things that you really want to know about.Starr:Yeah, that's true. I just made a note for myself to go back and explicitly just mention that to people, because I realized I didn't put it in the instructions anywhere. I put like, "Here's where a description of the content goes," but I didn't really put what I want inside that description, I realized.Josh:Yeah.Starr:So I'm going to do that.Ben:We're iterating in real time here.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah. This is where the work gets done.Josh:Yeah. Well and pretty soon, we'll have hopefully some good examples that we can show future authors, or detectives, or whatever we're calling them.Starr:Oh, definitely. Definitely. I'm going to call them authors because they're already in the blog system as authors and it just seems like-Josh:Agents?Starr:I don't know. I've got to be able to talk to these people with a straight face.Ben:You could call them research specialists, but then you might have to pay them more.Starr:There you go.Josh:Research. Yeah. Yeah.Starr:I don't know. I think I'm paying pretty well. Honestly, I think I'm paying pretty well for looking at... I don't know. How many weeks is a quarter? 12? 12 weeks of newsletters and just telling me what's going on. I think I'm paying pretty well.Josh:Yeah. You don't need to talk to them with a straight face though. You need to talk to them with sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette in a diner.Starr:Oh that's right. Yeah.Josh:Or a dive bar somewhere.Starr:Those people aren't smiling. Those people aren't smiling. Oh, that's right. I can do that. I just realized that it's two weeks since my second vaccine, so I'm ready to go out and recruit secret agents.Josh:Ready to party.Starr:Yeah. I'm very anxious talking with people in public now, but that's not a topic for this conversation.Josh:Yeah. We'll ease back into it.Starr:Oh yeah. Yeah, we're going to have dinner with my sister in law on Saturday, and I'm just like, "Okay Starr, you can do this. You can do this."Josh:Cool.Starr:Yeah, and I guess the other thing that we did this week is we are doing a trial run of Twist as a replacement for Basecamp messages, the message board on Basecamp. And yeah, so basically the long and short of it is the whole Basecamp BS just left a bad taste in my mouth in particular. I think you all's a little bit, or maybe you're neutral. I don't care. That sounded really harsh.Ben:You can be honest with us. We can take it.Starr:No, I didn't mean to sound that harsh. I just mean I'm not trying to put my opinions onto you, is what I'm saying. I just felt gross using Basecamp. Also if I'm being honest, I never really enjoyed Basecamp as a product. It's got a couple things that just really rubbed me the wrong way.Josh:We were having some vague conversations in the past. We have posed do we really want to keep this part of what we're using Basecamp for? And we were already using a subset of it, so yeah. It wasn't totally out of the blue.Starr:Yeah. And we were using maybe 20% of Basecamp, just the message boards feature.Josh:And the check ins, which apparently we all disliked.Starr:And the check ins, which nobody liked but we all kept using for some reason. Ben is like, "Can I turn off the check ins?" And I'm like, "I thought you were the only reason we were doing the check ins, it's because I thought you liked them."Ben:I think I was the only reason we were doing the check ins.Josh:It's because... yeah.Ben:Yeah, because I remember when I started it I was like, "Yeah, I really don't know what's going on," because back to that siloed, independent, off in the corner thing, I was like, "It would be nice to know what people are doing." But yeah, lately I've been like, "This is just a drag." So I'm like, "Would anybody be upset if this went away?" And everyone is like, "Please take it away."Josh:Everyone is just passively aggressively answering them.Ben:Everyone hated it.Josh:It wasn't that bad, but-Ben:I get it.Josh:Kevin used them too, but yeah.Ben:So I finally gave everyone permission to tell me that it was not okay, and now we no longer do it.Starr:There you go. And we're just like, "While we're at it, just ditch Basecamp." So yeah, so we've been trying a new system called Twist. Twist is, essential it's... I don't know, it's like threaded discussions. I figured this out on my own. I'm very proud of myself. So you have lots of threads, and you twist them together to make yarn or something or some sort of textile, so I bet you that's why it's called Twist.Josh:Beautiful sweater.Starr:Yeah. A beautiful sweater. The tapestry that is Honeybadger. And so far, I've really been enjoying it. I find the UI to be a lot better. There was one bug that we found that I reported, so hopefully that will get fixed. It doesn't really bother me that much. Yeah, it's amazing sometimes how the UI of an application can just be like, "Oh, ah. I'm having to parse less information just to do my task."Josh:It's much nicer.Starr:Yeah.Ben:It does feel like a lot less friction for our use case.Josh:Yeah. Well we talked about that, just the structure. The way that you structure conversation and organization things in a management tool like that makes a big difference. In Basecamp, we would create Basecamps for whatever. They call them Basecamps, right? They're the projects.Starr:They're like projects. I don't know.Josh:We'd create different ones, different projects for each project, but then there's five of us, so we'd basically just add everyone to every single project that is in there. But all the conversation is siloed off in each project, and with Twist, it's just much more of a fluid... it uses what, like channels? But yeah, it just seems like it's all together. It's kind of like a combination of Slack and a threaded message board or something, to me.Starr:Yeah, or like Slack and email or something.Josh:Slack and email. Yeah. It's a nice combo.Starr:Yeah. It has inbox, which I like, where it shows you any unread messages, and so you can just easily just go and scan through them, and it's all in the same page. It's a single page application, so you don't have to click out to a completely new page and then come back to the inbox and do all that. Basecamp had a similar feature, but it's like a timeline and it had a line down the middle of the screen and then branches coming off of either side of it. And for some reason, I started using the inbox in Twist and it was just like, "Oh, this is so much better." For some reason I think having things on different sides of the screen just doubled the amount of background processing my brain had to do to put it all together. And yeah, so I don't know. I do like it. Also, it's got mark down. It's got mark down.Josh:The mark down editor is so nice. It reminds me a lot of just using GitHub, the editor on GitHub, with the mark down mode and preview. And you can drag and drop images into the... I don't know if you knew that, into the mark down editor, like you can on GitHub, and it automatically inserts the image tag and uploads it for you.Starr:Yeah, it's all really slick. So I don't know. I imagine in maybe another... I've got vacation next week, so maybe after that we'll get together and compare notes. But I don't know, it seems like people like it so far.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah, it's been good. It's interesting-Josh:If I had to decide today, it's a keeper for me.Ben:Yeah, I would go ahead and switch.Starr:Oh yeah, me too.Ben:It's interesting to me, you alluded to this, Starr, as you were talking about comparing it to your products and how they approach... it's interesting to me the UI, even if it's the same kind of functionality, how much different takes on the user experience can make a different experience for the user. How it just feels different. Like, "Oh yeah, it's basically doing the same thing, but it just feels better for whatever. My mentality or our business." Fill in the blank there, but I thought about that many times. Honeybadger versus competitors. It's like, "Yeah, they're doing basically the same thing, but we do have differences in how we approach the UI and different use patterns that we think are more emphasized by our UI versus the others." And sometimes it's just a matter of personal preference. It's like, "Oh, this just feels better to me." One night I tried Python before I tried Ruby, and Python is like, "Oh, that's interesting," but then Ruby really clicked my brain. It's like, "Oh, it just feels better." And I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but I don't know. It's weird to me and fun to think about the human part of these products. Josh:Yeah. And it's surprising, the strong opinions that people pick up just based on those experience things when they're basically the same, if they're doing the same thing. Some people, they either love it or hate it based on that.Starr:Yeah, that's true. Maybe it all goes back to whatever business apps you used in childhood. It's just whatever your mom made you for lunch, you're always going to love that.Josh:Yeah. It's like a nurture thing, nature versus nurture. You were exposed to these apps when you were young, and so it's just what you're drawn to.Starr:Yeah. I remember putting my little friend's contact details into Lotus Notes.Josh:Right. I had to program Lotus Notes.Ben:I got my first dev job because I knew Lotus Notes.Starr:Oh, nice.Josh:Lotus Notes was an important precedent at the time, I think.Starr:Yeah.Ben:Yeah. Yeah. It was the bomb. You could do some pretty serious stuff.Starr:Yeah. I kept having these jobs that weren't technically dev jobs, but ended up being dev jobs just because I knew how to write V basic macros for Excel. I'm sure a lot of people had that experience.Josh:The thing I remember doing in Lotus Notes was setting it up to ingest email from the outside world into whatever, the system. And thinking about it now, that project I've done over and over and over since then.Starr:It's Basecamp.Josh:And I'm still doing that project.Starr:It's Basecamp all over again. Oh no.Ben:If only there was a service that took in emails for you, and then you could just bring them into your app data.Josh:Yeah. I bet in 20 years, we'll be writing programs to accept email.Ben:Process emails, yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah. When is this stuff going away? Technology changes all the time. When is email going away? They've been killing it for years. It's like fricking Rasputin. When is it going away?Ben:It's the cockroach of protocols.Starr:There you go.Josh:After the singularity, they'll still have to have a way to import it directly into your consciousness, and yeah, I don't know.Starr:Yeah. I hope the spam filtering is really good then.Starr:All right, well it was great talking with y'all.Ben:Likewise.Starr:Yeah. So this has been FounderQuest. Go to the Apple podcast and review us if you want. If you're interested in writing for us, we are always looking for fresh, new talent. Young authors looking to make their mark on the world of technical blog posts for SAS companies. And yeah, just go to our blog and look for the write for us page. I don't currently have any openings, but who knows? People flake out. So if you're interested in writing these reports for us too, get in touch. These quarterly intelligence briefings, if you want to be an agent for our intelligence service. All right, so I'll see y'all later.

Show notes:Links:Threads.comBlueyVogmaskTwistIt’s a Southern ThingIf I had a front porchFull transcript:Josh:How y'all doing?Ben:I'm doing.Starr:Yeah, about the same.Ben:I've been riding my scooter to work all week.Starr:Oh, how's that?Ben:It's a lot of fun. Got a little electric kick scooter and top speed about 25 miles per hour. I was concerned about it being able to get up the hill that I have to go back up on my way home. It does drag a bit on that hill. I only got a single motor. Guess I should have gone with the dual motor. Otherwise it's fun. It's nice to be out in nature, I guess, air quotes, because you're still on the road and you're still a victim of cars and stuff. Being able to see the sun coming up over the hills and down to the valley and while you're just feeling the wind on your face, it's all good.Josh:It sounds nice.Ben:Yeah.Starr:Yeah, sounds awesome. I don't know. It seems terrifying to me, but I'm sure it's a lot of fun.Ben:It helped that I have done a lot of bike riding on roads for the past several years, so I'm already comfortable with the idea of mixing it up with cars and weaving in and out of traffic and realizing that people aren't going to see me and things like that. I think if I had just gone from driving a car straight to riding a scooter in the bike lane, that would be a little more terrifying.Starr:Yeah, that makes sense.Josh:Next you're going to have to upgrade to one of the electric skateboards or a Onewheel or something, just remove the handle bars.Ben:Right, right, right. Get one of those Onewheel things.Josh:This is leading up to-Ben:Totally.Starr:We're just working up to hoverboards. I mean I commute to my backyard office, so maybe I should get a zip-line or something from the main house.Ben:I like that, yeah.Starr:... then I could be extreme.Josh:We want a zip-line at our place out into the forest.Starr:That would be fun.Ben:You could do a zip-line from your deck to the sandbox, send the kids out to play.Josh:The kids would love it. Well, I was thinking more for myself though. Screw the kids. They don't need a zip-line.Starr:There you go. That's actually not a bad idea. We're going to get-Josh:That would be cool though.Starr:... a deck in the fall.Josh:Oh, nice.Starr:I had thought it would be fun to put a fireman pole on one side or something so kids could slide down it. It's raised up a little bit but not that much. It's like a kid's sliding size.Ben:That would be totally awesome. That would-Josh:We have been loving our new deck that we have had for a month and a half or something now. It's a new deck. If you have a really old, rickety deck, a new one is a big upgrade. Also ours is a little bit larger, too, so it's like a bigger house almost.Starr:Oh, that's great. We don't even have a deck it's just like a little stairway.Josh:I think you're going to like it, Starr.Starr:I think so, too. I know, deck life. It's going to be covered. I was just like-Josh:It's just the small things.Starr:I know. All I want is to be able to go out on a nice evening or something and sit and drink a cup of tea and be outside.Ben:And think about all-Josh:I was going to say, where do you drink the sweet tea in the summer if you don't have a front porch?Starr:Yeah, that's the main problem with houses up here in the Northwest is there's not real front porches. We have one that's like a weird nod at a front porch. It's like somebody maybe had seen a front porch once when they were... They were like, "Oh, maybe I'll try and do that from memory," without really knowing what it's supposed to be like.Josh:Some of the ones in Portland have them, but they're boxed in usually, and they're the older houses-Josh:... like the old Craftsmans or whatever.Starr:The stately grand dames.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben:Well, here in Kirkland we're destroying all those old houses and putting in-Starr:Thank God.Ben:... townhouses.Josh:Hell, yeah.Ben:I drove by one this morning. This morning was the first morning since I got my scooter that I actually didn't ride the scooter because it was raining and the ground was wet. I was like, "Ah, I don't want to deal with that this morning." So I just drove. I drove past this house that... Well, yesterday it was a house. Today, it's a pile of sticks because they sold the lot, and they're going to split it into probably, I don't know, four lots and put in some townhouses. It's always a sad thing, but people got to have a place to live.Starr:Yeah, it's a shame. They tore down a house on my block, too, except it was a condemned house. It looked like a gingerbread fairy house that you'd find on just a random stroll in the woods where you'd go inside and you'd find just a delicious meal laid out on the table just waiting for you. So I'm a little sad it's gone just for, I guess, the storytelling aspects, the mythology of it. I guess it's probably best not to just have a condemned structure hanging out.Josh:I still do feel like Ida's is missing out with your telling of that story. I feel a little sad for you all.Starr:I know. I know.Ben:You're totally missing the threat possibility there. Like, "Don't misbehave or I'll send you over to the gingerbread house."Starr:Oh my god, yeah. Yeah, lots of great ways to traumatize my child.Ben:Speaking of traumatizing children, I was going through Twitter the other day, and the Washington State Department of Health had a tweet. I don't remember what the tweet was, but they had a GIF embedded in it. It was Stimpy from Ren & Stimpy as a scene from the show. I was like, "That's from the Department of Health? My generation is now in charge."Starr:With the Twitter account at least.Ben:We're now putting in-Josh:Yeah, exactly.Ben:That was the weirdest... It's like, "I'm an adult." That was a weird, weird experience.Josh:It is kind of strange when the people in charge start looking more and more like you until you realize they're just like-Ben:They're just little kids, just like I am.Josh:Then you wonder why the hell they're in charge.Starr:I'm getting like Paul Ryan listening to a Rage Against the Machine vibe from this.Josh:That's what I'd be playing if I was in charge of the Department of Health's-Starr:There we go.Josh:... Twitter account.Starr:I think this week has all been a little bit... I don't know. We're all maybe a little bit having a hard time focusing. I know I have a little bit just. It seems like that happens every spring as soon as the weather gets nice and it stops being nice, then it gets nice and it stops being nice. You're waiting by the door with your kayak. You just got to get the jump on it before everybody else gets to the lake.Josh:Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Also allergies have been kicking in lately.Starr:Oh my god, yeah.Josh:I was really on top of it this year, but then I ran out of my Zyrtec or whatever. It was on the list to replenish the supply or whatever, but I procrastinated and missed a few days. That's a huge mistake.Starr:Oh, yeah.Josh:That was this week. Now I switched to Claritin, so we'll see how... That's the big news of my week.Starr:Oh my gosh. I'm getting vaccinated later today, my second dose.Josh:Nice.Starr:Yeah.Josh:Congrats.Starr:I think I'm still going to keep wearing the KN95 respirators outside, though, just for the allergies.Josh:It's probably a good call.Ben:I was helping a neighbor with some yard work and doing a bunch of weeding and had the weed whacker out, and there's just dirt flying everywhere. I'm like, "Man, I should really wear a mask." Like, how ironic. I've got like, I don't know, a thousand masks in my house, and I'm not wearing one as I'm doing all this dusty stuff.Josh:That's a good thing to do.Starr:Oh, this is reminding me, I need to stock up before fire season.Ben:A few years ago when we had the really bad fire season, we got some Vogmasks. This was before the world knew that you were supposed to wear masks. Vogmasks are fantastic. They're a fabric mask that have the filtering stuff on the inside and highly recommend. I'll put a link in the show notes.Starr:Cool.Ben:Good stuff. When the pandemic hit, of course, they were out of stock immediately because everybody and their brother wanted one, but they've been back in stock. They're nice masks. They're really nice.Starr:Well, one thing that we have been doing is casually just checking out alternatives to Basecamp for our internal company's message board. I don't know. I feel like we're just perusing the alternatives. Honestly, it's been a little bit difficult finding just a system out there that's just a simple thread and message board without a million complex adjustments for running a forum that has thousands of people. Somebody on Twitter yesterday recommended Threads. I don't know. I think we're currently evaluating that one but no decisions yet.Josh:Is that like Twitter threads? You just-Starr:Oh, yeah, just Twitter threads.Josh:We do all of our communicating but just public threads.Starr:No, we're just going to use Twitter stories. We're just going to take some pics of ourselves in different-Josh:If we're trying to go to the opposite direction of Basecamp, we could just... Well, I guess this is like Basecamp, just do all of our communication via thought leadership.Starr:There you go.Ben:What if we did all of internal communication via TikTok?Starr:Okay, I'm getting this. I'm on board with this. We're just going to be influencers. Whoever's the most influential is going to-Josh:You know what? If our employees don't like it, too bad. You're getting a Twitter account, and it's getting verified.Starr:Yeah, they can interpret our really random TikTok video and try and figure out what it means. That's how they'll discover our disapproval.Ben:On the Basecamp thing, though, it was interesting as I was looking at it this week and realizing that the only thing that we use in Basecamp is messages along with the files. We sometimes attach files to our messages.Josh:Or email forwards.Ben:Yeah, occasionally we do an email forward. But we don't-Starr:Usually we do calendars, but we also have Google calendar.Ben:And Slack.Josh:And Notion.Ben:And notion. So we don't do to-dos. We don't do hill charts. We don't really use the project management side of the project management software that we're using. As I was looking at alternatives this week, I looked at monday.com and ClickUp and, I don't know, a few different ones. They're all these project management things. It's like, well, we don't really manage projects. We do that via chat or via a Zoom call every once in a while or via Notion. We don't use a project management tool for that. So it's like, yeah, all we really need are threads, conversations.Starr:It's the sort of thing where you could just do it in email, but it's nice having that archival ability, the ability to go back and check things out and not have it dependent on, "Oh, maybe I deleted that message by accident or whatever."Josh:Well, you could do it in Slack, but then you end up with the weird history aspect of it, and you'd have to have some sort of... You have to create a channel for it with the rules so it doesn't end up being just a chat. You have to say, "The rule of this channel is every message is a thread or a post or whatever."Starr:You kind of have to do it manually.Josh:Yeah.Ben:I did look at Twist. That was pretty cool, pretty close, but it also has chat. It's like, "well, I don't want a second chat since we already use Slack." We're not going to ditch Slack.Starr:Basecamp has chat, too.Ben:Right, and we don't use that. I guess you could use Twist. Twist is pretty nice.Starr:I think we need threaded messages, we need everything to be archived, and we need some way to see what people have been writing on lately, see what the latest activity is. That's basically it. I don't even use notifications. I get them, but I don't really... Usually by the time I see them... That's not my process. I don't look at my notifications and be like, "Oh, I'd better check this out." I check out the messages at a set set time basically.Ben:Then, like you said, the forum software, like the discourse, and it's just way, way too much. It's like, "Yeah, we get it." We just need a message board. We don't need all the dials and knobs. It's totally a dials and knobs application. I saw it in the settings, and I was like, "Whoa, okay. I'm just going to back away slowly."Starr:It could be fun, I don't know, if we want to be passive aggressive, we could shadow ban people. We could just do all sorts of fun things.Ben:But I suppose we don't have the hard requirements supporting BBCode.Starr:Isn't that a negative requirement? Supporting BBCode, I think that's a detriment. But we do have a chance to maybe, I don't know, maybe... One thing that I've always really... This really annoyed me about Basecamp is that it doesn't support Markdown, and everything we use supports Markdown, so everything I have is in Markdown. So if I write something in my personal notes, it's going to be in Markdown. If I want to transfer that to Basecamp, I got to manually format it, which is just like, "What am I? What is this? Who do you think I am?"Josh:That's my number one gripe with Basecamp, like the editor, is just a WYSIWYG editor that... I constantly... even just when I'm writing and I want to make a list and I just type a dash like I normally... in most things these days, and it just doesn't do anything in Basecamp. Then I remember, "Oh, I have to get my mouse and click on the bullet." It's a huge hassle.Ben:I can imagine your quality of life being dramatically affected by that.Josh:Yeah.Starr:You know we're developers when we're complaining about things like that.Josh:This is why I'm wearing wrist braces.Starr:Or dual wrist braces.Ben:I totally get what you're saying. I want to be able to type star, space, stuff, stuff, stuff and I get a list. Yeah, totally.Starr:It looks like threads.com, it does support Markdown, which is nice. I don't know. I haven't really played around with it a ton. Some aspects of its design, I'm not super happy. I wish the column widths were a little wider and stuff, but also I don't like certain aspects of Basecamp's design. So it's kind of a toss up for me.Ben:I did an export of our Basecamp content, and I got to say their export is fantastic. They give you an HTML page that links to a bunch of other pages per topic or project or team, whatever they call it, and the files are there. It's really well done. So I think if anyone's looking for inspiration on doing exports in their app, they should totally look at Basecamp. They nailed it. It's actually usable. You get this zip file. You open it up and bam, you can just browse through all your stuff.Starr:That's pretty great. I guess I should declare, I think maybe I started this casual looking for alternatives just because I've seen a lot of stuff online about people are angry at Basecamp. It's like, I'm not really angry at them. Well, this isn't really the point. I'm sad and disappointed in them. But also a lot of the reason why I think they have had our business and they had my business, I've stored personal stuff in a personal Basecamp account, it's just because they're trustworthy. That feeling of trustworthiness has gone down a few pegs for me.Starr:Also, I just kind of felt gross logging in there. If you haven't been keeping up with this, part of the deal is they were making fun of people's names and stuff. I don't know. Are they making fun of my name? I've got a weird name. Are they going through my stuff making fun of it? I know they have access to pretty much everything that I put into Basecamp. I don't know. Even if they're not doing that now, are they going to do that in the future? Because it seems like they're going in that direction. I don't know. It seems like they're shutting down people trying to hold them internally accountable for that sort of thing. I don't know. It's just like a gross feeling. I'm just sad about the whole thing.Josh:I personally I kind of doubt that that's like... I got the feeling that the list was more of an artifact from the past, and it had stuck around for too long. I didn't get the feeling that they're condoning that sort of activity really, but I get what you're saying. Also for me, a big factor of it, it's not even just that I'm mad at them or something, they did lose 30% of their company, and they're supporting two products now, one of which is a major infrastructure product but basically is like email. So they have operation overhead and stuff. They did just lose 30% of their company including their, what, head of strategy but basically head of product. So I just wonder, where is the product going from here? It was already, I felt, a little bit stagnating. I don't know. I think they've been working on the next version of it is what I heard. I don't know. It just seems like there are questions about just the stability from that nature, too.Ben:I'm probably in a third place from you two and I probably care the least. I'm like, "Eh, it's a message board. They can make fun of my name." Okay. I had that happen when I was 10. People do that. It's like, "Oh, get on." I have a hard time getting up the energy to care, I guess.Starr:Don't mistake me. I'm not like up in arms about it. This is more like a passive viewing. It's like, "Oh, I got to go on Basecamp and check my things. Uh, I just feel kind of crummy about it." This is-Ben:It's one of those friction things in your life you just don't need. Yeah, absolutely.Starr:Yeah, yeah.Josh:Absolutely.Starr:I'm like, this is a message board. Like, should I be having to deal with this just to go check some messages? It's ridiculous.Josh:I think all of us are really just talking these are passing thoughts we have using the product in light of the drama of the past few weeks.Starr:If we end up staying on it, I'm not going to be super upset. I'll probably get over it. I don't know. It just seems like it might be nice to try something different especially if we can get that sweet Markdown.Ben:I've been surprised that there are so few products that are just about this one use case of the simple messages. I expected there to be tons of things to try and no.Starr:Of course, in our company Notion, there's now a design document-Ben:Of course.Starr:... for a simple-Josh:Because we're going to build our own.Ben:We're going to build our own, of course. What does any good tech team do when they're frustrated with the 20 solutions on the market? They build solution number 21.Starr:Of course.Ben:Maybe we'll build that. The code name for that project is Budgie. I named it Budgie because I went to do the Google search, I'm like, "What's a communicative type of animal? What's a social animal?" I can't remember the search I did, but the first thing that got turned up was like, the most social birds. I don't know. So there's this list of birds, and budgie was the number one bird. So I'm like, "Okay, cool." Then I was like, "Well, what kind of domains are available?" Because of course when you start a project, you have to buy the domain. Before you do anything else, you got to buy that domain. Surprisingly, and perhaps not surprisingly in retrospect, every variant of budgie is taken, of course, budgie.com but also budgie.app and budgieapp.com. I'm like, "Wow. How many...?" And they're all for sale. None of them are actual products. They're all parked, and they're for sale. I'm like, so a bunch of people have had this idea about what's a social animal. I guess budgies are really popular for pets, and so they're looking for the ad opportunities with people looking for, "How do I take care of my budgie?" Anyway, just kind of a diversion.Starr:That's interesting. The first thing that pops into mind when I heard that... I like the name. It's a cute name. There's this really good Australian kids' cartoon called Bluey, and there's an episode where they find a little budgie that's injured, and it dies. So the kids have to come to terms with that. I don't know. It's just like, "Little budgie died."Josh:Bluey is one of the best cartoons ever, by the way.Starr:Yeah, Bluey. Oh, I'm glad you like it, too.Josh:It's so good.Starr:It's super good. It's super good. Basically the whole cartoon is just these kids... They're dogs but they're kids. They're just making up games to play with each other. How it works is the kids watching the show see it and that makes them want to play that game, too. So it's just not dumb TV. It gets them doing stuff outside of the TV, which is kind of nice.Josh:That's a really good analysis of the show. I hadn't thought about that aspect of it, but come to think of it, my kids totally imitate them.Starr:Oh, yeah.Josh:Climbing all over us.Starr:I now have to play every game in that show, and I've got to know them by name and what the rules are.Josh:One of the things we like about it is just they really got the sibling dynamic down. It is like our kids to a tee. It's pretty funny. Now that I think about it, maybe it's like our kids have now become the characters in the show.Ben:It's a good thing I watch the Simpsons.Josh:Oh, no. Actually we do watch the Simpsons.Starr:Is the Simpsons still on?Josh:It's on Disney+.Starr:Oh my gosh.Ben:Yeah, it is still a thing.Josh:They're still making it, too, right?Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.Starr:Wow. I don't know. I don't even know about that.Josh:We don't watch much of the Simpsons with them yet, a three and four-year-old.Josh:I don't know if I'm quite ready for a couple little Bart and Lisas.Ben:You put that off as long as you can. Well, I actually did a little bit of work this week. I was working on something, I don't know what. I noticed one of the tests was running kind of long like it was just stuck. I don't usually watch tests. I don't usually run the tests actually. I just let our CICB run the tests. I don't even worry about it. But this morning for some reason, I don't know, I was working on something, and I happened to be running the tests. I noticed one of the tests was just stuck. Like, that's weird. So I did a little investigation.Ben:It turns out that a number of our tests do some domain name server resolution because, for webhooks, when someone puts in their webhook, we want to verify that the destination is not like a private thing. They're not trying to fetch our EC2 credentials and stuff like that. So it does some checks like, is this is a private IP address? Does this domain name actually resolve, blah, blah, blah? Also for our uptime checks. Obviously, people are putting in domains for that, too. It turns out that, I don't know, maybe it was my machine, maybe it was the internet being dumb, whatever, but the domain name resolution was what was holding up the test. This happens, as you can imagine, in a variety of ways in our tests. This one test that I was running, which was only, I don't know, seven or eight tests, it was taking a minute or two minutes to run. Then I fixed this so that it stopped doing the domain name resolution, and it took two seconds.Josh:Wow.Ben:So a slight improvement to our test suite there. A quality of life improvement.Josh:Did you benchmark overall? Because that's got to be a huge improvement if it's doing that everywhere.Ben:Well, it's not doing that everywhere. I did do a push, so I have to go and check and see what GitHub... see if it dropped that time.Josh:Well, it might have been whatever was wrong with your DNS resolution in the first place that was causing it to be extra slow. Would it be faster if DNS was fast?Ben:Yeah, it could have been. I actually did some tests on my laptop at the time. I'm like, "Is my DNS resolution slow?" No.Josh:So it's-Ben:The test... I don't know what the deal was.Josh:It was just resolving a bunch of actual URLs in the test.Ben:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Yeah, that's bad. So nice work. You reminded me that I did some work this week, too.Ben:OhJosh:Very important work, I must say. I added a yak to our Slack bot to where-Josh:... if you mention the word "yak" when you're interacting with the Slack bot now it will return... You should do it in Slack, just whatever Badger bot. Say Badger bot yak me, it-Starr:Okay, I'm doing it.Josh:Okay, do it.Starr:Oh, sorry. It was the wrong channel. Hold on.Josh:You got to do it in general, I think.Starr:Come on Badger bot. Oh my god. It's a little text space yak.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Awesome.Josh:This came about because earlier this week I was just passively mentioning in chat that I'm just yak shaving. My entire life is yak shaving. That just got us talking about, why don't we have some representation of that in our chat, in our Slack? Obviously, I had to stop everything I was doing and build that right away. Of course, there were some escaping issues that came up as a result of that, so obviously I had to deploy a few hot fixes.Ben:The whole episode amuses me. I love it. I would do exactly the same thing. But also what amuses me is that we already have, as part of Slack, GIPHY, and you could just dump a picture of a yak in there. But you're like, "No, that's good enough. I must have an ASCII yak.Josh:It's got to be an ASCII yak, yeah.Ben:This is great. I love technology.Josh:I kind of miss Hubot where it would just automatically... if you just mention it. Maybe I should change our Slack bot so that it does that. So if you say "yak," a wild yak appears. By the way, that's what the text at the bottom of the ASCII yak says, a wild yak appears. I just wish it would pop up if someone just mentions it in a chat, like if they're talking about it just because-Josh:It's listening to everything, right?Starr:That would be fine.Ben:We used to have Hubot, and every time you said "ship," it would show the ship-Josh:The ship, the squirrel. But I definitely would like... annoying at times, but overall I'd say it was worth it.Ben:Totally worth it.Starr:Yeah, definitely. I do remember sometimes where things were on fire, and it's just popping up funny GIFs, and it's like, "Not now. Not now Hubot, not now.Ben:Sit in the corner. Should have had that command. Like, "Go away for a while."Josh:Or just make it a separate... Maybe we should just make this a separate bot that you don't have to have any ops channel. Maybe this'll be our next product.Starr:Oh, there you go. It's like when you mention yak, it turns into an Oregon trail-type hunting scene, and you have to shoot the very slow pixel at it.Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). I do love this aspect of our business of being... I assume it's like a side effect of being small. I don't know. I'm sure large teams also do this, I didn't spend a day on this, but spend a day just doing something completely useless. I like that we can do that-Ben:Yes, it is.Josh:... and the total lack of responsibility, to be honest.Starr:Is there a total lack of responsibility? I don't know. I don't know.Ben:I think you could argue that there is a total lack of responsibility.Josh:Maybe relatively.Starr:Maybe.Josh:I think we're speaking relatively.Starr:Relatively? Well, there's responsibility to customers. I don't know. Do they count? Nah.Ben:Speaking of being a small company, just because of a recent acquisition of one of our competitors, I had gone to look at what some of our other competitors, what status they were, and I was just blown away with how many employees our competitors have. It's really amazing.Starr:What are they doing with all those people? Are they paying...? Do they have a professional volleyball team or something?Josh:Not in the past year.Starr:Well, they play over Zoom.Josh:It's a professional pong league now.Starr:There you go.Ben:We have five employees. The competitor that has the closest number of employees comes in at a hefty 71. Then the largest number that I found was 147 employees. That's impressive.Josh:With the competitor, the first one that you mentioned with the 70 something employees, and I assume over $100 million in funding, were they the ones that were recently bragging on Twitter about how much more usage they have than everyone else?Ben:I don't know because I don't remember seeing that bragging.Josh:They were. It was kind of funny. Yeah, you would probably be the major player.Starr:That's something I definitely learned throughout the course of running this business is that a company that has tens or, I don't know, hundreds of, did you say $100 million, that's a lot-Josh:It's a lot.Starr:... of funding can do more work than three people even if those three people are very, very good. It's-Ben:That's right.Starr:They can do more work, and that's all right. We're just going to have our little garden patch over here. It doesn't matter if ConAgra is a mile down the road. They can do their thing. We can do our thing.Ben:As long as they don't let their seeds blow into our farmland, right?Starr:Oh, yeah, definitely. Let me just ask you a question. When it comes to buying your strawberries for your traditional summer strawberry shortcake, are you going to go to that wonderfully, just delightful artisanal farm down the road, or are you just going to slide over to ConAgra and, I don't know, get some of their strawberry-shaped objects?Ben:I got to say, I love roadside fruit stands. Those are the best. When cherry season happens here in Washington, going and grabbing a whole mess of cherries from some random person that's propped on the side of a road, I mean it's awesome.Starr:My favorite ones are the ones have no... if you stop and think about it... I used to live in Arkansas. One time I was walking by and there was this roadside fruit stand just with oranges. It was like, "Hold up. Hold up. Oranges don't grow in Arkansas. What is this?" I don't know if he just went to Costco and just got a bunch of oranges or maybe he did the Cannonball Run from Florida straight up-Josh:Road trip.Starr:... and was selling oranges all the way up. There was some explaining to do.Ben:I didn't realize until I was saying it, but it really does sound ridiculous that you're going to go and get some fruit items from some random person on the side of the road. But I love roadside fruit stands. They're great.Starr:Oh, yeah.Josh:I don't know. In this day and age probably, yeah.Josh:Maybe things should be more like that. Maybe that would solve some problems.Ben:Well, coming back to the front porch thing, do you know that country song, If the World Had a Front Porch?"Starr:No, I don't.Ben:Definitely have to link it up in the show notes. It's all about if the world had a front porch like we did back then, then things would be different. People would be more friendly. We'd be chatting with our neighbors. Things would just be overall good.Starr:Yeah, totally.Josh:We'd all know each other.Starr:Is that true? Is that true?Ben:I got to say, I grew up in the Deep South. I did not have a front porch and none of my friends had a front porch because we all lived in the same neighborhood and all the houses were the same, but we were all still pretty friendly-Starr:Oh, there you go.Ben:... even though we didn't have front porches.Starr:Well, I had a front porch and people were assholes, so I think the correlation between front porches and nice people is weak.Ben:The song If I had a front porchJosh:.Isn't it more like a metaphor? I don't know.Starr:You could say the internet's the world's front porch and look how great that's worked out.Josh:If you just build a front porch-Starr:I'm sure it's a nice song. I don't mean to make fun of the song. I'm sure it's a good song.Josh:You build a front porch that the entire population of the world could fit on, just see how that goes. That's what we-Starr:It's like, "Oh, shit. We deforested the Amazon to get the wood for this."Ben:We should name our little message board product Front Porch.Starr:Front porch, ah, that's nice. You could have add-ons to that. Like for upgrades, you could get the rocking chair or the whittling knife.Ben:Yeah, and the sweet tea-Starr:The sweet tea, yeah.Ben:... or the mint julep.Starr:Can I ask you a question? Was sweet tea a thing when you were a kid?Ben:Yes.Starr:Do people refer to it as like, "Oo, sweet tea," as a saying?Ben:No.Starr:Okay, that-Ben:They'd just refer to is as tea.Starr:Okay, thank you.Ben:There was no other tea. It was just that.Josh:But it was sweet.Ben:Yeah, it was sweet, of course.Starr:Yeah, of course. It's-Ben:That's the only tea that existed. None of this Earl Grey hot business, no, no, no.Starr:I just noticed, I don't know, around 2007 everybody started talking about sweet tea. It's like, "What? What's this?" Ben:Yeah, totally. It's a Southern Thing, on YouTube, their channel, is pretty funny. They go into the sweet tea thing quite a bit. If you want some additional context, do some research on that whole aspect. You can go and watch that YouTube channel. I'll have to link it up in the show notes.Starr:Yeah, I'll check that out. Well, would you gentlemen like to wrap it up? I think I've got to start... I'm going to be Southern here. I'm fixing to get ready to think about going to my vaccine appointment.Ben:Jeet yet? You know that joke? Have you heard that?Starr:I haven't heard that joke. What?Ben:It's like, oh man, two southern guys, one's like, "Jeet yet?"Starr:Ah, did you eat yet? Okay, yeah.Ben:"No. Y'want to?"Starr:I haven't been back in a while.Josh:Did you eat yet?Starr:I haven't been back in a while.Ben:Oh, good times. Sometimes I miss the South but not during the summer.Starr:One of my favorite words, I think it might be a local Arkansas word, is tump. It's a verb, tump. It's the action of tipping something over and dumping out its contents. The perfect use case is a wheelbarrow. Like, you tump out the wheelbarrow. I'm sorry. Tump out the wheelbarrow.Ben:Totally.Josh:I am learning so much on this episode, by the way-Starr:There you go.Josh:... about the South.Josh:It's great. I'm learning more about-Josh:This is your second vaccine appointment, right?Starr:Yeah, it's the second one.Josh:Second and final. Well, for now.Starr:So I'm ready for it to hit me. I'm like, "Bring the storm.Josh:Yes, it hit me.Starr:Bring it on."Josh:Mine was like a 48-hour ordeal, but back to normal now. I feel great.Starr:That's good. You got your super powers.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Well, good luck with that.Starr:Thank you. Maybe one day we'll be able to have a conclave in person again, although I might need the support of a therapist or something because just like... I mean I like y'all, but I don't know if I'm over the droplets yet.Ben:You can still wear masks.Starr:Okay, that's good. Thank God, okay. All right, I will talk to y'all later.

Ben: Hey let's talk about some like celebrities you like, or someone you know.Hana: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. My favorite singer is Taylor Swift.Ben: Really?Hana: Mm-hmm.Ben: Wow, why do you like Taylor Swift?Hana: First I like her songs, but mainly I like her look you know. That red lips and white skin and blonde hair. Kind of typical American.Ben: Albino, yeah.Hana: When I saw her for the first time I was like, "Wow, she's gorgeous."Ben: Wait you mean, you saw her picture on the internet or in the news or you saw her in concert?Hana: No, I think it was on YouTube. Again, YouTube.Ben: YouTube, okay.Hana: Yes she was, at that time she was still singing like country music but yeah I thought she's amazing.Ben: I have an interesting fact about her actually.Hana: What?Ben: So apparently, she is from right outside of my hometown actually.Hana: Oh wow.Ben: Yeah that's where she was born and then she was doing music around there first and she got kind of big somehow. I don't know how. I'm not really interested in her.Hana: Okay.Ben: She's cute but I don't really like her music. But yeah that's where she got started somewhereby my hometown apparently.Hana: I mean she's like the typical woman figure you know? Girly style and nice skin and her movement and her songs is like girl, all American girl.Ben: That's true.Hana: So that's why I like her. How about you?Ben: I have a lot of bands that I like but I recently saw this movie that I really like. Do you know the actor, Edward Norton.Hana: No.Ben: He's getting really popular. He's been popular for awhile. He does all different types of movies like crime dramas, like action, thrillers, science fiction. He's very, how would you say, he can do many different types of roles.Hana: Right.Ben: So I recently saw, it's an old movie of his but it's called Fight Club. It's him and Brad Pitt. Have you heard of it?Hana: Maybe.Ben: Fight Club, yeah.Hana: I think I've seen it. I don't really remember.Ben: It's old. It's from like 1998, 1999 but it's still a really good film I think. I think if I was to talk about a celebrity that I liked definitely Edward Norton. His acting is really good I think.Hana: Is he English or is he American? Where's he from?Ben: He's from the U.S. Yeah he's American for sure. Yeah what about you? Do you have any actors or actresses that you like?Hana: Yes, my favorite actor is, oh gosh, I can't remember his name. You know the guy from-Ben: Maybe I can help you.Hana: Notting Hill. The guy from the Love Actually.Ben: Oh, he's that British guy.Hana: The British guy with you know the eyes.Ben: Hugh Grant.Hana: Hugh Grant yes. That's the guy. Yeah, I like him.Ben: Why? Can I ask? He's kind of like a romantic comedy star but why do you like his acting?Hana: He looks sweet.Ben: Okay so he looks sweet.Hana: I'm like Brad Pitt or other celebrity male celebrities, he's not like super handsome. He looks kind of ordinary guy and kind of makes me feel like nice.Ben: Okay.Hana: The clothes I guess.Ben: Yeah, yeah that's true. I don't think I've ever seen a movie with him.Hana: Have you ever seen? No?Ben: No, I'm just not like a ... You said he's in Love Actually, he's like a romantic comedy guy, right?Hana: Yes, yeah. I like-Ben: Romantic comedies. Oh really? What's your favorite romantic comedy?Hana: I can't think of any now. Probably romantic, yeah, Love Actually. Okay I can't think of anything now but how about you?Ben: How about me what?Hana: Do you like romantic comedies?Ben: No, not really. But there is one I do like it's called My Best Friend's Wedding.Hana: Okay.Ben: I believe Julia Roberts is in that one.Hana: Yeah.Ben: Do you know who she is?Hana: Yeah. She is famous, yeah.Ben: Yeah that's kind of a good ... That's like a 90's classic romantic comedy I think. Have you seen it?Hana: I think I have.Ben: Okay.Hana: Yeah, yeah I think so.

Ben: Hey let's talk about some like celebrities you like, or someone you know.Hana: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. My favorite singer is Taylor Swift.Ben: Really?Hana: Mm-hmm.Ben: Wow, why do you like Taylor Swift?Hana: First I like her songs, but mainly I like her look you know. That red lips and white skin and blonde hair. Kind of typical American.Ben: Albino, yeah.Hana: When I saw her for the first time I was like, "Wow, she's gorgeous."Ben: Wait you mean, you saw her picture on the internet or in the news or you saw her in concert?Hana: No, I think it was on YouTube. Again, YouTube.Ben: YouTube, okay.Hana: Yes she was, at that time she was still singing like country music but yeah I thought she's amazing.Ben: I have an interesting fact about her actually.Hana: What?Ben: So apparently, she is from right outside of my hometown actually.Hana: Oh wow.Ben: Yeah that's where she was born and then she was doing music around there first and she got kind of big somehow. I don't know how. I'm not really interested in her.Hana: Okay.Ben: She's cute but I don't really like her music. But yeah that's where she got started somewhereby my hometown apparently.Hana: I mean she's like the typical woman figure you know? Girly style and nice skin and her movement and her songs is like girl, all American girl.Ben: That's true.Hana: So that's why I like her. How about you?Ben: I have a lot of bands that I like but I recently saw this movie that I really like. Do you know the actor, Edward Norton.Hana: No.Ben: He's getting really popular. He's been popular for awhile. He does all different types of movies like crime dramas, like action, thrillers, science fiction. He's very, how would you say, he can do many different types of roles.Hana: Right.Ben: So I recently saw, it's an old movie of his but it's called Fight Club. It's him and Brad Pitt. Have you heard of it?Hana: Maybe.Ben: Fight Club, yeah.Hana: I think I've seen it. I don't really remember.Ben: It's old. It's from like 1998, 1999 but it's still a really good film I think. I think if I was to talk about a celebrity that I liked definitely Edward Norton. His acting is really good I think.Hana: Is he English or is he American? Where's he from?Ben: He's from the U.S. Yeah he's American for sure. Yeah what about you? Do you have any actors or actresses that you like?Hana: Yes, my favorite actor is, oh gosh, I can't remember his name. You know the guy from-Ben: Maybe I can help you.Hana: Notting Hill. The guy from the Love Actually.Ben: Oh, he's that British guy.Hana: The British guy with you know the eyes.Ben: Hugh Grant.Hana: Hugh Grant yes. That's the guy. Yeah, I like him.Ben: Why? Can I ask? He's kind of like a romantic comedy star but why do you like his acting?Hana: He looks sweet.Ben: Okay so he looks sweet.Hana: I'm like Brad Pitt or other celebrity male celebrities, he's not like super handsome. He looks kind of ordinary guy and kind of makes me feel like nice.Ben: Okay.Hana: The clothes I guess.Ben: Yeah, yeah that's true. I don't think I've ever seen a movie with him.Hana: Have you ever seen? No?Ben: No, I'm just not like a ... You said he's in Love Actually, he's like a romantic comedy guy, right?Hana: Yes, yeah. I like-Ben: Romantic comedies. Oh really? What's your favorite romantic comedy?Hana: I can't think of any now. Probably romantic, yeah, Love Actually. Okay I can't think of anything now but how about you?Ben: How about me what?Hana: Do you like romantic comedies?Ben: No, not really. But there is one I do like it's called My Best Friend's Wedding.Hana: Okay.Ben: I believe Julia Roberts is in that one.Hana: Yeah.Ben: Do you know who she is?Hana: Yeah. She is famous, yeah.Ben: Yeah that's kind of a good ... That's like a 90's classic romantic comedy I think. Have you seen it?Hana: I think I have.Ben: Okay.Hana: Yeah, yeah I think so.

Ben: Hey let's talk about some like celebrities you like, or someone you know.Hana: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. My favorite singer is Taylor Swift.Ben: Really?Hana: Mm-hmm.Ben: Wow, why do you like Taylor Swift?Hana: First I like her songs, but mainly I like her look you know. That red lips and white skin and blonde hair. Kind of typical American.Ben: Albino, yeah.Hana: When I saw her for the first time I was like, "Wow, she's gorgeous."Ben: Wait you mean, you saw her picture on the internet or in the news or you saw her in concert?Hana: No, I think it was on YouTube. Again, YouTube.Ben: YouTube, okay.Hana: Yes she was, at that time she was still singing like country music but yeah I thought she's amazing.Ben: I have an interesting fact about her actually.Hana: What?Ben: So apparently, she is from right outside of my hometown actually.Hana: Oh wow.Ben: Yeah that's where she was born and then she was doing music around there first and she got kind of big somehow. I don't know how. I'm not really interested in her.Hana: Okay.Ben: She's cute but I don't really like her music. But yeah that's where she got started somewhereby my hometown apparently.Hana: I mean she's like the typical woman figure you know? Girly style and nice skin and her movement and her songs is like girl, all American girl.Ben: That's true.Hana: So that's why I like her. How about you?Ben: I have a lot of bands that I like but I recently saw this movie that I really like. Do you know the actor, Edward Norton.Hana: No.Ben: He's getting really popular. He's been popular for awhile. He does all different types of movies like crime dramas, like action, thrillers, science fiction. He's very, how would you say, he can do many different types of roles.Hana: Right.Ben: So I recently saw, it's an old movie of his but it's called Fight Club. It's him and Brad Pitt. Have you heard of it?Hana: Maybe.Ben: Fight Club, yeah.Hana: I think I've seen it. I don't really remember.Ben: It's old. It's from like 1998, 1999 but it's still a really good film I think. I think if I was to talk about a celebrity that I liked definitely Edward Norton. His acting is really good I think.Hana: Is he English or is he American? Where's he from?Ben: He's from the U.S. Yeah he's American for sure. Yeah what about you? Do you have any actors or actresses that you like?Hana: Yes, my favorite actor is, oh gosh, I can't remember his name. You know the guy from-Ben: Maybe I can help you.Hana: Notting Hill. The guy from the Love Actually.Ben: Oh, he's that British guy.Hana: The British guy with you know the eyes.Ben: Hugh Grant.Hana: Hugh Grant yes. That's the guy. Yeah, I like him.Ben: Why? Can I ask? He's kind of like a romantic comedy star but why do you like his acting?Hana: He looks sweet.Ben: Okay so he looks sweet.Hana: I'm like Brad Pitt or other celebrity male celebrities, he's not like super handsome. He looks kind of ordinary guy and kind of makes me feel like nice.Ben: Okay.Hana: The clothes I guess.Ben: Yeah, yeah that's true. I don't think I've ever seen a movie with him.Hana: Have you ever seen? No?Ben: No, I'm just not like a ... You said he's in Love Actually, he's like a romantic comedy guy, right?Hana: Yes, yeah. I like-Ben: Romantic comedies. Oh really? What's your favorite romantic comedy?Hana: I can't think of any now. Probably romantic, yeah, Love Actually. Okay I can't think of anything now but how about you?Ben: How about me what?Hana: Do you like romantic comedies?Ben: No, not really. But there is one I do like it's called My Best Friend's Wedding.Hana: Okay.Ben: I believe Julia Roberts is in that one.Hana: Yeah.Ben: Do you know who she is?Hana: Yeah. She is famous, yeah.Ben: Yeah that's kind of a good ... That's like a 90's classic romantic comedy I think. Have you seen it?Hana: I think I have.Ben: Okay.Hana: Yeah, yeah I think so.

Ben: Hana, you just told me that one way to help with listening and practicing and understanding idioms is through American television dramas. Right? So, TV shows.Hana: Yes.Ben: Yeah. While you were learning English, what are some shows you watched? Something I wanna tell my students they can watch.Hana: My favorite all time is the TV drama called Friends.Ben: Oh, yeah! Yeah.Hana: Have yous seen it before?Ben: Friends is super popular in the U.S. Yeah, yeah.Hana: It is, yes. I mean, first of all, I just love the story.Ben: Okay.Hana: Other than just learning English, it's second purpose, I guess. There was an Italian or there is a character who is playboy and he used to say like, "How you doin'?" Yeah? And, it's interesting is, first, I watched the drama with my first language subtitled.Ben: Oh, right.Hana: Yeah.Ben: So you're watching in English with your language in the subtitles?Hana: Yes.Ben: Okay.Hana: So that I can understand the main concept first.Ben: Right.Hana: And then, gradually, I changed to English subtitles.Ben: Oh, okay. That's a great idea! So, first, to understand the meaning of what's being said, subtitles. Then, to maybe watch it again a second time or even a third time to understand exactly how the English is used in context of the show.Hana: True, yeah.Ben: Okay, that's a great strategy.Hana: That way you can enjoy just watching the movies or dramas and that way you can spend a lot more time, rather than just trying to study English.Ben: Right, so it's more ... a way to enjoy learning English and studying.Hana: Yes.Ben: Actually, you know ... You said Friends, right?Hana: Yep, yep.Ben: So I think Friends is on ... It's so popular, right? And it's all over the internet. I believe it's on YouTube, you can watch it on YouTube and Netflix.Hana: Netflix, yeah.Ben: Yeah, Netflix. One thing that's great about YouTube, I think, is that they have a closed captioning or a subtitling option, so if you can't exactly catch what they're saying while you're listening the first time, you can put the subtitles on like you said.Hana: Yeah, yeah, exactly.Ben: That's a great-Hana: And there are so many websites that shows the transcripts of the ...Ben: That's true. You can read the scripts from the show to follow along, as well.Hana: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben: That's great. So you said you watch Friends, right?Hana: I do.Ben: Are there any others that you've heard of? Friends, I know is popular. Many people know Friends.Hana: Full House.Ben: Full House, yeah!Hana: Full House, yes.Ben: Okay, you know they recently did a revamp, a newer version it.Hana: Yeah, they did. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet but, yeah, it's good. Good, good.Ben: I haven't either. Well, you recommend either Friends or Full House.Hana: One of my friends, he liked a drama called Prison Break.Ben: Oh, that's on Netflix, as well.Hana: Have you ever heard it? Yeah.Ben: Yeah, I have.Hana: He watched like 60 hours or more than that and I asked him, "How's it going? Is it good?" He did understand without subtitles, which is good. And so, I asked him, "So you can speak English now, yeah? Can you use those phrases from the drama?" And he said, "Actually, not." I said, "Why?" It's because the words that they use from the drama. There's a bombing or escaping or something that's not daily life conversations, so that way Friends or Full House that people in daily life.Ben: That's daily English. Yeah, daily life English.Hana: Yeah, so I found it easier to use.Ben: Okay, so you recommend-Hana: Yeah, yeah.Ben: Okay, yeah. That's great. Thank you so much. I think my students would love to watch that kind of drama and learn daily-Hana: Daily, yes.Ben: ... actual phrases you can use. Thanks so much for the tips. Thanks, Hana.Hana: You're welcome.

Ben: Hana, you just told me that one way to help with listening and practicing and understanding idioms is through American television dramas. Right? So, TV shows.Hana: Yes.Ben: Yeah. While you were learning English, what are some shows you watched? Something I wanna tell my students they can watch.Hana: My favorite all time is the TV drama called Friends.Ben: Oh, yeah! Yeah.Hana: Have yous seen it before?Ben: Friends is super popular in the U.S. Yeah, yeah.Hana: It is, yes. I mean, first of all, I just love the story.Ben: Okay.Hana: Other than just learning English, it's second purpose, I guess. There was an Italian or there is a character who is playboy and he used to say like, "How you doin'?" Yeah? And, it's interesting is, first, I watched the drama with my first language subtitled.Ben: Oh, right.Hana: Yeah.Ben: So you're watching in English with your language in the subtitles?Hana: Yes.Ben: Okay.Hana: So that I can understand the main concept first.Ben: Right.Hana: And then, gradually, I changed to English subtitles.Ben: Oh, okay. That's a great idea! So, first, to understand the meaning of what's being said, subtitles. Then, to maybe watch it again a second time or even a third time to understand exactly how the English is used in context of the show.Hana: True, yeah.Ben: Okay, that's a great strategy.Hana: That way you can enjoy just watching the movies or dramas and that way you can spend a lot more time, rather than just trying to study English.Ben: Right, so it's more ... a way to enjoy learning English and studying.Hana: Yes.Ben: Actually, you know ... You said Friends, right?Hana: Yep, yep.Ben: So I think Friends is on ... It's so popular, right? And it's all over the internet. I believe it's on YouTube, you can watch it on YouTube and Netflix.Hana: Netflix, yeah.Ben: Yeah, Netflix. One thing that's great about YouTube, I think, is that they have a closed captioning or a subtitling option, so if you can't exactly catch what they're saying while you're listening the first time, you can put the subtitles on like you said.Hana: Yeah, yeah, exactly.Ben: That's a great-Hana: And there are so many websites that shows the transcripts of the ...Ben: That's true. You can read the scripts from the show to follow along, as well.Hana: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben: That's great. So you said you watch Friends, right?Hana: I do.Ben: Are there any others that you've heard of? Friends, I know is popular. Many people know Friends.Hana: Full House.Ben: Full House, yeah!Hana: Full House, yes.Ben: Okay, you know they recently did a revamp, a newer version it.Hana: Yeah, they did. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet but, yeah, it's good. Good, good.Ben: I haven't either. Well, you recommend either Friends or Full House.Hana: One of my friends, he liked a drama called Prison Break.Ben: Oh, that's on Netflix, as well.Hana: Have you ever heard it? Yeah.Ben: Yeah, I have.Hana: He watched like 60 hours or more than that and I asked him, "How's it going? Is it good?" He did understand without subtitles, which is good. And so, I asked him, "So you can speak English now, yeah? Can you use those phrases from the drama?" And he said, "Actually, not." I said, "Why?" It's because the words that they use from the drama. There's a bombing or escaping or something that's not daily life conversations, so that way Friends or Full House that people in daily life.Ben: That's daily English. Yeah, daily life English.Hana: Yeah, so I found it easier to use.Ben: Okay, so you recommend-Hana: Yeah, yeah.Ben: Okay, yeah. That's great. Thank you so much. I think my students would love to watch that kind of drama and learn daily-Hana: Daily, yes.Ben: ... actual phrases you can use. Thanks so much for the tips. Thanks, Hana.Hana: You're welcome.

Ben: Hana, you just told me that one way to help with listening and practicing and understanding idioms is through American television dramas. Right? So, TV shows.Hana: Yes.Ben: Yeah. While you were learning English, what are some shows you watched? Something I wanna tell my students they can watch.Hana: My favorite all time is the TV drama called Friends.Ben: Oh, yeah! Yeah.Hana: Have yous seen it before?Ben: Friends is super popular in the U.S. Yeah, yeah.Hana: It is, yes. I mean, first of all, I just love the story.Ben: Okay.Hana: Other than just learning English, it's second purpose, I guess. There was an Italian or there is a character who is playboy and he used to say like, "How you doin'?" Yeah? And, it's interesting is, first, I watched the drama with my first language subtitled.Ben: Oh, right.Hana: Yeah.Ben: So you're watching in English with your language in the subtitles?Hana: Yes.Ben: Okay.Hana: So that I can understand the main concept first.Ben: Right.Hana: And then, gradually, I changed to English subtitles.Ben: Oh, okay. That's a great idea! So, first, to understand the meaning of what's being said, subtitles. Then, to maybe watch it again a second time or even a third time to understand exactly how the English is used in context of the show.Hana: True, yeah.Ben: Okay, that's a great strategy.Hana: That way you can enjoy just watching the movies or dramas and that way you can spend a lot more time, rather than just trying to study English.Ben: Right, so it's more ... a way to enjoy learning English and studying.Hana: Yes.Ben: Actually, you know ... You said Friends, right?Hana: Yep, yep.Ben: So I think Friends is on ... It's so popular, right? And it's all over the internet. I believe it's on YouTube, you can watch it on YouTube and Netflix.Hana: Netflix, yeah.Ben: Yeah, Netflix. One thing that's great about YouTube, I think, is that they have a closed captioning or a subtitling option, so if you can't exactly catch what they're saying while you're listening the first time, you can put the subtitles on like you said.Hana: Yeah, yeah, exactly.Ben: That's a great-Hana: And there are so many websites that shows the transcripts of the ...Ben: That's true. You can read the scripts from the show to follow along, as well.Hana: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Ben: That's great. So you said you watch Friends, right?Hana: I do.Ben: Are there any others that you've heard of? Friends, I know is popular. Many people know Friends.Hana: Full House.Ben: Full House, yeah!Hana: Full House, yes.Ben: Okay, you know they recently did a revamp, a newer version it.Hana: Yeah, they did. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet but, yeah, it's good. Good, good.Ben: I haven't either. Well, you recommend either Friends or Full House.Hana: One of my friends, he liked a drama called Prison Break.Ben: Oh, that's on Netflix, as well.Hana: Have you ever heard it? Yeah.Ben: Yeah, I have.Hana: He watched like 60 hours or more than that and I asked him, "How's it going? Is it good?" He did understand without subtitles, which is good. And so, I asked him, "So you can speak English now, yeah? Can you use those phrases from the drama?" And he said, "Actually, not." I said, "Why?" It's because the words that they use from the drama. There's a bombing or escaping or something that's not daily life conversations, so that way Friends or Full House that people in daily life.Ben: That's daily English. Yeah, daily life English.Hana: Yeah, so I found it easier to use.Ben: Okay, so you recommend-Hana: Yeah, yeah.Ben: Okay, yeah. That's great. Thank you so much. I think my students would love to watch that kind of drama and learn daily-Hana: Daily, yes.Ben: ... actual phrases you can use. Thanks so much for the tips. Thanks, Hana.Hana: You're welcome.

Ben: Hana, I'm currently teaching English as a Second Language, and I love for my students to get confident in producing English or increasing their listening ability. I know that you speak English as a second language, but you do such an amazing job and it's inspiring to me, so I love my students to improve and like it, and so because you're a perfect example, what are some strategies you have for my students so I could tell them?Hana: Firstly, I worked on listening, and there are so many websites that are designed for English learners, like here you're listening to, and YouTube or any, you know, so many sites that you can check on. Yeah, like that. I'll probably start with the listening first.Ben: You said, firstly, listening. Why is listening so important?Hana: It's because when you want to communicate, of course, the English as a tool, communication tool, first, you have to understand what the speaker say, so first, I worked on listening. By listening to audio, or the sound, then you can learn vocab and also spelling, and you know the meaning, of course. Eventually, you can move on to the next English skill. That's why I start working on listening first.Ben: What about anything else that you ... have any other strategies?Hana: Personally, I found that learning vocab, and especially idioms, help me a lot.Ben: Yeah, idioms are tough.Hana: Yes, because often I found it difficult to understand what the speaker say. I could hear, I could understand what the single words they say. But sometimes it was hard to sort of grasp the meaning what they're actually saying, so learning idioms or vocab helped me a lot, yeah.Ben: When you learn the idioms, you can understand them. Did you ever use them yourself, when you, like, tried it out in the wild, so to speak, using the idioms you learned.Hana: Yes, I did it gradually. I mean, when I was in high school, I started speaking ... I started studying English when I was in high school. First thing I did was visiting those websites that, like, designed for English speakers, English learners. At the same time, I start watching like American TV dramas and, in that sense, you can sort of understand in what situation you can use those particular phrases or idioms. By learning the idioms and vocab and the settings or the environment, the situation you can use, then you can sort of actually try to use them. At the beginning I was so nervous, but ...Ben: I'm sure. Yeah. I mean it's really difficult to use idioms in any language, but English has so many, I think. Another thing I wanted to ask you about production skills in English is writing. I try to give my students opportunities to write it in class, but in order to be a proficient and excellent English speaker, you need to practice outside of class. What do you recommend to improve student's writing abilities, besides just taking it for a test or for an assignment? What do you recommend?Hana: Yes. They are difficult. I myself have trouble still writing because I'm not a good writer in my native language.Ben: Oh, no.Hana: But I guess just reading will help you, at the start. Reading something, reading text or some passages will help you.Ben: So if you know how to read, it can help you write.Hana: Yes, definitely.Ben: All right.Hana: To learn sort of the template, how will things go and how you make paragraph and stuff. Probably if you want to get better at writing, I would start reading first, reading lots of passages, different kinds of materials first.Ben: That's true, and I agree with that. One thing I wanted to have my students do is actually do like a journal, actually.Hana: Yes,.Ben: Did you ever keep an English journal to help with your writing?Hana: Yes, I did.Ben: Oh, you did?Hana: I did, yeah.Ben: How do you feel that helped you? Was that good, a good idea?Hana: Yes. Because, first, when you write, unlike speaking or talking to somebody, it gives you time to really think about what you want to do, what you want to write, and you can focus on grammar more. That helps to actually talk to somebody maybe a day, right, next day, or you have to write something else in the class, that would help you. So keeping the journal will help you definitely, I think.Ben: Okay. Thank you very much for the tips. I really appreciate it.Hana: You're welcome.

Ben: Hana, I'm currently teaching English as a Second Language, and I love for my students to get confident in producing English or increasing their listening ability. I know that you speak English as a second language, but you do such an amazing job and it's inspiring to me, so I love my students to improve and like it, and so because you're a perfect example, what are some strategies you have for my students so I could tell them?Hana: Firstly, I worked on listening, and there are so many websites that are designed for English learners, like here you're listening to, and YouTube or any, you know, so many sites that you can check on. Yeah, like that. I'll probably start with the listening first.Ben: You said, firstly, listening. Why is listening so important?Hana: It's because when you want to communicate, of course, the English as a tool, communication tool, first, you have to understand what the speaker say, so first, I worked on listening. By listening to audio, or the sound, then you can learn vocab and also spelling, and you know the meaning, of course. Eventually, you can move on to the next English skill. That's why I start working on listening first.Ben: What about anything else that you ... have any other strategies?Hana: Personally, I found that learning vocab, and especially idioms, help me a lot.Ben: Yeah, idioms are tough.Hana: Yes, because often I found it difficult to understand what the speaker say. I could hear, I could understand what the single words they say. But sometimes it was hard to sort of grasp the meaning what they're actually saying, so learning idioms or vocab helped me a lot, yeah.Ben: When you learn the idioms, you can understand them. Did you ever use them yourself, when you, like, tried it out in the wild, so to speak, using the idioms you learned.Hana: Yes, I did it gradually. I mean, when I was in high school, I started speaking ... I started studying English when I was in high school. First thing I did was visiting those websites that, like, designed for English speakers, English learners. At the same time, I start watching like American TV dramas and, in that sense, you can sort of understand in what situation you can use those particular phrases or idioms. By learning the idioms and vocab and the settings or the environment, the situation you can use, then you can sort of actually try to use them. At the beginning I was so nervous, but ...Ben: I'm sure. Yeah. I mean it's really difficult to use idioms in any language, but English has so many, I think. Another thing I wanted to ask you about production skills in English is writing. I try to give my students opportunities to write it in class, but in order to be a proficient and excellent English speaker, you need to practice outside of class. What do you recommend to improve student's writing abilities, besides just taking it for a test or for an assignment? What do you recommend?Hana: Yes. They are difficult. I myself have trouble still writing because I'm not a good writer in my native language.Ben: Oh, no.Hana: But I guess just reading will help you, at the start. Reading something, reading text or some passages will help you.Ben: So if you know how to read, it can help you write.Hana: Yes, definitely.Ben: All right.Hana: To learn sort of the template, how will things go and how you make paragraph and stuff. Probably if you want to get better at writing, I would start reading first, reading lots of passages, different kinds of materials first.Ben: That's true, and I agree with that. One thing I wanted to have my students do is actually do like a journal, actually.Hana: Yes,.Ben: Did you ever keep an English journal to help with your writing?Hana: Yes, I did.Ben: Oh, you did?Hana: I did, yeah.Ben: How do you feel that helped you? Was that good, a good idea?Hana: Yes. Because, first, when you write, unlike speaking or talking to somebody, it gives you time to really think about what you want to do, what you want to write, and you can focus on grammar more. That helps to actually talk to somebody maybe a day, right, next day, or you have to write something else in the class, that would help you. So keeping the journal will help you definitely, I think.Ben: Okay. Thank you very much for the tips. I really appreciate it.Hana: You're welcome.

Ben: Hana, I'm currently teaching English as a Second Language, and I love for my students to get confident in producing English or increasing their listening ability. I know that you speak English as a second language, but you do such an amazing job and it's inspiring to me, so I love my students to improve and like it, and so because you're a perfect example, what are some strategies you have for my students so I could tell them?Hana: Firstly, I worked on listening, and there are so many websites that are designed for English learners, like here you're listening to, and YouTube or any, you know, so many sites that you can check on. Yeah, like that. I'll probably start with the listening first.Ben: You said, firstly, listening. Why is listening so important?Hana: It's because when you want to communicate, of course, the English as a tool, communication tool, first, you have to understand what the speaker say, so first, I worked on listening. By listening to audio, or the sound, then you can learn vocab and also spelling, and you know the meaning, of course. Eventually, you can move on to the next English skill. That's why I start working on listening first.Ben: What about anything else that you ... have any other strategies?Hana: Personally, I found that learning vocab, and especially idioms, help me a lot.Ben: Yeah, idioms are tough.Hana: Yes, because often I found it difficult to understand what the speaker say. I could hear, I could understand what the single words they say. But sometimes it was hard to sort of grasp the meaning what they're actually saying, so learning idioms or vocab helped me a lot, yeah.Ben: When you learn the idioms, you can understand them. Did you ever use them yourself, when you, like, tried it out in the wild, so to speak, using the idioms you learned.Hana: Yes, I did it gradually. I mean, when I was in high school, I started speaking ... I started studying English when I was in high school. First thing I did was visiting those websites that, like, designed for English speakers, English learners. At the same time, I start watching like American TV dramas and, in that sense, you can sort of understand in what situation you can use those particular phrases or idioms. By learning the idioms and vocab and the settings or the environment, the situation you can use, then you can sort of actually try to use them. At the beginning I was so nervous, but ...Ben: I'm sure. Yeah. I mean it's really difficult to use idioms in any language, but English has so many, I think. Another thing I wanted to ask you about production skills in English is writing. I try to give my students opportunities to write it in class, but in order to be a proficient and excellent English speaker, you need to practice outside of class. What do you recommend to improve student's writing abilities, besides just taking it for a test or for an assignment? What do you recommend?Hana: Yes. They are difficult. I myself have trouble still writing because I'm not a good writer in my native language.Ben: Oh, no.Hana: But I guess just reading will help you, at the start. Reading something, reading text or some passages will help you.Ben: So if you know how to read, it can help you write.Hana: Yes, definitely.Ben: All right.Hana: To learn sort of the template, how will things go and how you make paragraph and stuff. Probably if you want to get better at writing, I would start reading first, reading lots of passages, different kinds of materials first.Ben: That's true, and I agree with that. One thing I wanted to have my students do is actually do like a journal, actually.Hana: Yes,.Ben: Did you ever keep an English journal to help with your writing?Hana: Yes, I did.Ben: Oh, you did?Hana: I did, yeah.Ben: How do you feel that helped you? Was that good, a good idea?Hana: Yes. Because, first, when you write, unlike speaking or talking to somebody, it gives you time to really think about what you want to do, what you want to write, and you can focus on grammar more. That helps to actually talk to somebody maybe a day, right, next day, or you have to write something else in the class, that would help you. So keeping the journal will help you definitely, I think.Ben: Okay. Thank you very much for the tips. I really appreciate it.Hana: You're welcome.

Sam, Josh, and Mark look back on the Bengals massive upset of the Steelers, look ahead at the upcoming tilt vs Texans, and preview the Cincinnati Bearcats vs Georgia Bulldogs in the Peach Bowl tailgate style! Christmas music, fantasy football and gambling locks of the week, and we take a look around at the AFC North and the NFL's best games of the week. Plus, predictions and much more! Merry Christmas and Who Dey!Go to manscaped.com and get 20% off of your order + free shipping by using promo code BRAWL at checkout!Go to dkng.co/BrawlPod create a Draft Kings DFS account and make a minimum $5 deposit. Draft Kings will credit FREE entries to play for millions with your first deposit!Music rights compensated through ASCAP digital license by the Bengals Brawl Podcast.

Should You Only Trade The Major Forex Pairs?Podcast: #388: Should You Only Trade The Major Forex Pairs?In this video:00:22 – Joined by Ben Clay at Blueberry Markets01:05 – How safe are your funds?02:13 – Order types and hedging03:30 – Can EU traders work with Blueberry?03:56 – Can we get our money back if the broker goes bankrupt?05:18 – What happens when you get sudden fluctuations in the market?07:06 – Can some trades missed being filled?08:19 – What makes Blueberry Markets different?10:08 – Email me if you’d like to ask Blueberry Markets another questionAndrew Mitchem:Today, we're going to be answering your questions and the number one question that you want to ask a Forex broker. Let's get into it right now.Andrew Mitchem:Hey, traders, it's Andrew Mitchem here at the Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 389.Joined by Ben Clay at Blueberry MarketsNow, something a little bit different today. We're joined by Ben Clay at Blueberry Markets over in Australia. Hi there, Ben.Ben:Good day, Andrew. How are you?Andrew Mitchem:I'm fantastic and hope you are well too.Ben:Thanks, mate.Andrew Mitchem:Good. We've got something different. And last week, I asked a lot of questions to people and said, look, I want to know from you what's your most important thing that if you could ask a Forex broker directly and we had a lot of questions come through. What I've done, Ben, I've just listed the main important topics. And if we can, I'd like to ask you those questions and just get your feedback on that so we can help people when deciding who to look for for a Forex broker.Ben:Absolutely. Absolutely, mate.How safe are your funds?Andrew Mitchem:We'll start with this one is from a guy called Percy over in the United Arab Emirates. And Percy said, and this is a very common question. How safe is my money if the broker goes bankrupt, even if they're regulated?Ben:Very good question, Percy. It's one that I get asked very often as well, and is a question that you should be asking your broker, in my opinion. When it comes to any financial institution, there's risks no matter where you hold your funds. Even if it's in with the bank, there's always risks holding funds at any financial institution.Ben:However, in Australia, we're regulated by ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which enforced the Australian Client Money Laws. This is something that's been in place over the last 10 years or so, I believe, and very strict and diligent. Basically, it states that client's funds are segregated and kept separate from our daily operating funds, can't pay for staff wages, company losses, anything along those lines. But having said that, again, I cannot say the funds are 100% safe, but we are overly compliance here at Blueberry and follow these laws very closely to ensure that client funds are as safe as they possibly can be.Order types and hedgingAndrew Mitchem:Perfect. Thank you, Ben. Second question from Antonio over in Barcelona in Spain. Do you allow pending audit trading with expert advisors, robots? And do you also allow hedging?Ben:Oh, okay. We allow any expert advisors. That's no issues at all and they can place pending orders. We have the four basic types of buy limit, sell limit, buy stop, sell stop, and we do allow hedging. I actually would like to touch on that a little bit because hedging is something I think there's a little bit of misconception around where clients can hedge a trade and it's used as protection.Ben:

This conversation covers: The advantages of using a distributed data storage model. How Storj is creating new revenue models for open-source projects, and how the open-source community is responding. The business and engineering reasons why users decide to opt for cloud-native, according to Ben. Viewing cloud-native as a journey, instead of a destination — and some of the top mistakes that people tend to make on the journey. Ben also talks about the top pitfalls people make with storage and management. Why businesses are often caught off guard with high storage costs, and how Storj is working to make it easier for customers.  Avoiding vendor lock-in with storage. Advice for people who are just getting started on their cloud journey. The person who should be responsible for making a cloud journey successful. Links: Storj Labs: https://storj.io/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/golubbe GitHub: https://github.com/golubbe TranscriptEmily: Hi everyone. I'm Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product's value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn't talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I'm hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you'll join me.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, my name is Emily Omier. I'm your host, and today I'm chatting with Ben Golub. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.Ben: Oh, Thank you for having me.Emily: And I always like to just start off with having you introduce yourself. So, not only where you work and what your job title is, but what you actually spend your day doing.Ben: [laughs]. Okay. I'm Ben Golub. I'm currently the executive chair and CEO of Storj Labs, which is a decentralized storage service. We kind of like to think of it as the Airbnb of disk drives, But probably most of the people on your podcast who, if they're familiar with the, sort of, cloud-native space would have known me as the former CEO of Docker from when it was released up until a few years ago. But yeah, I tend to spend my days doing a lot of stuff, in addition to family and dealing with COVID, running startups. This is now my seventh startup, fourth is a CEO.Emily: Tell me a little bit, like, you know, when you stumble into your home office—just kidding—nobody is going to the office, I know. But when you start your day, what sort of tasks are on your todo list? So, what do you actually spend your time doing?Ben: Sure. We've got a great team of people who are running a decentralized storage company. But of course, we are decentralized in more ways than one. We are 45 people spread across 15 different countries, trying to build a network that provides enterprise-grade storage on disk drives that we don't own, that are spread across 85 different countries. So, there's a lot of coordination, a lot of making sure that everybody has the context to do the right thing, and that we stay focused on doing the right thing for our users, doing the right thing for our suppliers, doing the right thing for each other, as well.Emily: One of the reasons I thought it'd be really interesting to talk with you is that I know your goal is to, sort of, revolutionize some of the business models related to managing storage. Can you talk about that a little bit more?Ben: Sure. Sure. I mean, obviously, there's been a big trend over the past several years towards the Cloud in general, and a big part of the [laughs] Cloud is storage. Actually, AWS started with S3, and it's a $90 billion market that's growing. The world's going to create enough data this year to fill a stack of CD-ROMs, to the orbit of Mars and back. And yet prices haven't come down, really, in about five years, and the whole market is controlled by essentially three players, Microsoft, Google, in the largest, Amazon, who also happen to be three of the five largest companies on the planet. And we think that data is so critical to everything that we do that we want to make sure that it doesn't stay centralized in the hands of a few, but that we, sort of, create a more, sort of, democratic—if you will—way of handling data that also addresses some of the serious privacy, data mining, and security concerns that happen when all the data is held by only a few people.Emily: With this, I'm sure you've heard about digital vegans. So, people who try to avoid all of the big tech giants—Ben: Right, right.Emily: Does this make it possible to do that?Ben: Well, so we're more of a back end. So, we're a service that people who produce-consumer-facing services use. But absolutely, if somebody—and we actually have people who want to create a more secure way of providing data backup, more secure way of enabling data communications, video sharing, all these sorts of things, and they can use us and service those [laughs] digital vegans, if you will.Emily: So, if I'm creating a SaaS product for digital vegans, I would go with you?Ben: I would hope you'd consider us, yeah. And by the way, I mean, also people who have mainstream applications use us as well. I mean, so we have people who are working with us who may have sensitive medical data on people, or people who are doing advanced research into areas like COVID, and they're using us partially because we're more secure and more private, but also because we are less likely to be hacked. And also because frankly faster, cheaper, more resilient.Emily: I was just going to ask, what are the advantages of distributed storage?Ben: Yeah. We benefit from all the same things that the move towards cloud-native in general benefits from, right? When you take workloads, and you take data, and you spread them across large numbers of devices that are operated independently, you get more resilience, you get more security, you can get better performance because things are closer to the edge. And all of these are benefits that are, sort of, inherent to doing things in a decentralized way as opposed to a centralized way. And then, quite frankly we're cheaper. I mean, because of the economics and doing this this way, we can price anywhere from a half to a third of what the large cloud providers offer, and do so profitably for ourselves.Emily: You also offer some new revenue models for open-source projects. Can you talk about that a little bit more?Ben: Sure, I mean, obviously I come from an open-source background, and one of the big stories of open-source for the past several years is the challenges for open-source companies in monetizing, and in particular, in a cloud world, a large number of open-source companies are now facing the situation where their products, completely legally but nonetheless, not in a fiscally sustainable way, are run by the large cloud companies and essentially given away as a loss leader. So, that a large cloud company might take a great product from Mongo or Redis, or Elastic, and run it essentially for free, give it away for free, not pay Mongo, Elastic, or Redis. And the cloud companies monetize that by charging customers for compute, and storage, and bandwidth. But unfortunately, the people who've done all the work to build this great product don't have the opportunity to share in the monetization. And it makes it really very hard to adopt a SaaS model for the cloud companies, which for many of them is really the best way that they would normally have for monetizing their efforts. So, what we have done is we've launched a program that basically turns it on its head and says, “Hey, if you are an open-source project, and you integrate with us in a way that your users send data to us, we'll share the revenue back with you. And as more of your users share more data with us, we'll send more money back to you.” And we think that that's the way it should be. If people are building great open-source projects that generate usage and revolutionize computing, they should be rewarded as well.Emily: How important is this to the open-source community? How challenging is it to find a way to support an open-source project?Ben: It's critical. I mean, if you look at the most—I'd start by saying two-thirds of all cloud workloads are open-source, and yet in the $180 billion cloud market, less than $5 billion [unintelligible] going back to the open-source projects that have built these things. And it's not easy to build an open-source project, and it takes resources. And even if you have a large community, you have developers who have families, or [laughs] need to eat, right? And so, as an open-source company, what you really want to be able to do is become self-sustaining. And while having contributions is great, ultimately, if open-source projects don't become self-sustaining, they die. Emily: A question just, sort of, about the open-source ethos: I mean, how does the community about open-source feel about this? It is obvious developers have to eat just like everybody else, and it seems like it should be obvious that they should also be rewarded when they have a project that's successful. But sometimes you hear that not everybody is comfortable with open-source being monetized in any way. It's like a dirty word.Ben: Yeah. I mean, I think [unintelligible] some people who object to open-source being monetized, and that tends to be a fringe, but I think there's a larger percentage that don't like the notion that you have to come up with a more restrictive license in order to monetize. And I think unfortunately a lot of open-source companies have felt the need to adopt more restrictive licenses in order to prevent their product being taken and used as a loss leader by the large cloud companies. And I guess our view is, “Hey, what the world doesn't need is a different kind of license. It needs a different kind of cloud.” And that's, and that's what we've been doing. And I think our approach has, frankly, gotten a lot of enthusiasm and support because it feels fair. It's not, it's not trying to block people from doing what they want to do with open-source and saying, “This usage is good, this is bad.” It's just saying, “Hey, here's a new viable model for monetizing open-source that is fair to the open-source companies.”Emily: So, does Storj just manage storage? Or, where's the compute coming from?Ben: It's a good question. And so, generally speaking, the compute can either be done on-premise, it can be done at the end. And we're, sort of, working with both kinds. We ourselves don't offer a compute service, but because the world is getting more decentralized, and because, frankly, the rise of cloud-native approaches, people are able to have the compute and the storage happening in different places.Emily: How challenging is it to work with storage, and how similar of an experience is it to working with something like AWS for an end-user? I just want to get my app up.Ben: Sure, sure. If you have an S3 compatible application, we're also S3 compatible. So, if you've written your application to run on AWS S3, or frankly, these days most people use the S3 API for Google and Microsoft as well, it's really not a big effort to transition. You change a few lines of code, and suddenly, the data is being stored in one place versus the other. We also have native libraries in a lot of different languages and bindings, so for people who want to take full advantage of everything that we have to offer, it's a little bit more work, but for the most part, our aim is to say, “You don't have to change the way that you do storage in order to get a much better way of doing storage.”Emily: So, let me ask a couple questions just related to the topic of our podcast, the business of cloud-native. What do you think are the reasons that end users decide to go for cloud-native?Ben: Oh, I think there are huge advantages across the board. There are certainly a lot of infrastructural advantages: the fact that you can scale much more quickly, the fact that you can operate much more efficiently, the fact that you are able to be far more resilient, these are all benefits that seemed to come with adopting more cloud-native approaches on the infrastructure side if you will. But for many users, the bigger advantages come from running your applications in a more cloud-native way. Rather than having a big monolithic application that's tied tightly to a big monolithic piece of hardware, and both are hard to change, and both are at risk, if you write applications composed of smaller pieces that can be modified quickly and independently by small teams and scale independently, that's just a much more scalable, faster way to build, frankly, better applications. You couldn't have a Zoom, or a Facebook, or Google search, or any of these massive-scale, rapidly changing applications being written in the traditional way.Emily: Those sound kind of like engineering reasons for cloud-native. What about business reasons?Ben: Right. So, the business reasons [unintelligible], sort of, come alongside. I mean, so when you're able to write applications faster, modify them faster, adapt to a changing environment faster, do it with fewer people, all of those end up having real big business benefits. Being able to scale flexibly, these give huge economic benefits, but I think the economic benefits on the infrastructure side are probably outweighed by the business flexibility: the fact that you can build things quickly and modify them quickly, and react quickly to changing environment, that's [unintelligible]. Obviously, again, you use Zoom as an example. There's this two-week period, back in March, where suddenly almost every classroom and every business started using Zoom, and Zoom was able to scale rapidly, adapt rapidly, and suddenly support that. And that's because it was done in a more—in a cloud-native way.Emily: I mean, it's interesting, one of the tensions that I've seen in this space is that some people like to talk a lot about cost benefits. So, we're going to move to cloud-native because it's cheap, we're going to reduce costs. And then there's other people that say, well, this isn't really a cost story. It's a flexibility and agility, a speed story.Ben: Yeah, yeah. And I think the answer is it can be both. What I always say, though, is cloud-native is not really a destination, it's a journey. And how far we go along with that path, and whether you emphasize the operational side versus—or the infrastructural side versus the development side, it sort of depends on who you are, and what your application is, and how much it needs to scale. And it's absolutely the case that for many companies and applications if they try to look like Google from day one, they're going to fail. And they don't need to because it's—the way you build an application that's going to be servicing hundreds of million people is different than the way you build an application, there's going to be servicing 50,000 people.Emily: What do you see is that some of the biggest misconceptions or mistakes that people make on this journey?Ben: So, I think one is clearly that they knew it as an all or nothing proposition, and they don't think about why they're going on the journey. I think a second mistake that they often make is that they underestimate the organizational change that it takes to build things in the cloud-native way. And obviously, the people, and how they work together, and how you organize, is as big transition for many people as the tech stack that you'd use. And I think the third is that they don't take full advantage of what it takes to move a traditional application to run it in a cloud-native infrastructure. And you can get a lot of benefits, frankly, just by containerizing or Docker-izing a traditional app and moving it online.Emily: What about specifically related to storage and data management? What do you think are some misconceptions or pitfalls?Ben: Right. So, I think that the challenge that many people have when they deal with storage is that they don't think about the data at rest. They don't think about the security issues that are inherent in having data that can be attacked in a single place, or needs to be retrieved from a single place. And part of why we built Storj, frankly, is a belief that if you take data and you encrypt it, and you break it up into pieces, and you distribute those pieces, you actually are doing things in a much better way that's inherent, that you're not dependent on any one data center being up, or any one administrator doing their job correctly, or any password being strong. By reducing the susceptibility to single points of failure, you can create an environment that's more secure, much faster, much more reliable. And that's math. And it gets kind of shocking to see that people who make the journey to cloud-native, while they're changing lots of other aspects of their infrastructure and their applications, repeating the same mistakes that people have been making for 30 years in terms of data access, security, and distribution.Emily: Do you think that that is partially a skills gap?Ben: It may be a skills gap, but it's also, frankly, there's been a dearth of viable other options. And I think that—we frequently when I'm talking with customers, they all say, “Hey, we've been thinking about being decentralized for a while, but it just has been too difficult to do.” Or there have been decentralized options, but they're, sort of, toys. And so, what we've aimed to do is create a decentralized storage solution that is enterprise-grade, is S3 compatible, so it's easy to adopt, but that brings all the benefits of decentralization.Emily: I'm also just curious because of the sort of organizational changes that need to happen. I mean, everybody, particularly in a large organization, is going to have these super-specific areas of expertise, and to a certain extent, you have to bring them all together.Ben: You do. Right. You do have to. And so I'm a big believer in you pick pilot projects that you do with a small team, and you get some wins, and nothing helps evangelize change better than wins. And it's hard to get people to change if they don't see success, and a better world at the end of the tunnel. And so, what we've tried to do, and what I think people doing in the cloud-native journey often do, is you say, “Let's take a small low-risk application or small, low-risk dataset, handle it in a different way, and show the world that it can be done better,” right? Or, “Show our organization that it can be better.” And then build up not only muscle memory around how you do this, but you build up natural advocates in the organization.Emily: Going back to this idea of costs, you mentioned that Storj can reduce costs substantially. Do you think a lot of organizations are surprised at how much cloud storage costs?Ben: Yes. And unfortunately, it's a surprise that comes over time. I mean, you… I think the typical story if you get started with Cloud. And there's not a lot of large upfront costs when your usage is low. So, yeah, so you start with somebody pulling out their credit card and building their pilot project, and just charging themselves directly to charging themselves directly to—you know, charging their Amazon, or their Google, or their Microsoft directly to their credit card, then they move to paying through a centralized organization. But then as they grow, suddenly, this thing that seemed really low price becomes very, very expensive, and they feel trapped. And data, in particular, has this—in some ways, it grows a lot faster than compute. Because, generally speaking, you're keeping around the data that you've created. So, you have this base of data that grows so slowly that you're creating more data every day, but you're also storing all the data that you've had in the past. So, it grows a lot more exponentially than compute, often. And because data at rest is somewhat expensive to move around, people often find themselves regretting their decisions a few months into the project, if they're stuck with one centralized provider. And the providers make it very difficult and expensive to move data out.Emily: What advice would you have to somebody who's at that stage, at the just getting started, whipping out my credit card stage? What do you do to avoid that sinking feeling in your stomach five months from now?Ben: Right. I mean, I guess what I would say is that don't make yourself dependent on any one provider or any one person. And that's because things have gotten so much more compatible, and that's on the storage side by the things that we do, on the compute side by the use of containers and Docker. You don't need to lock yourself in, as long as you're thoughtful at the outset.Emily: And who's the right person to be thinking about these things?Ben: That's a good question. So, you know, I'd like to say the individual developer, except developers for the most part, they have something that they want to build, [laughs] they want to get it built as fast as possible and they don't want to worry about infrastructure. But I really think it's probably that set of people that we call DevOps people that really should be thinking about this, to be thinking not only how can we enable people to build and deploy and secure faster, but how can we build and secure and deploy in a way that doesn't make us dependent on centralized services?Emily: Do you have other pieces of advice for somebody setting out on the “Cloud journey,” in quotes, too basically avoid the feeling, midway through, that they messed up.Ben: So, I think that part of it is being thoughtful about how you set off on this cloud journey. I mean, know where you want to end up, I think this [unintelligible]. You want to set off on a journey across the country, it's good to know that you want to end up in Oregon versus you want to end up in Utah, or Arizona. [unintelligible] from east to west, and making sure your whole organization has a view of where you want to get. And then along the way, you can say, “You know what? Let's course-correct.” But if you are going down on the cloud journey because you want to save money, you want to have flexibility, you don't want to be locked in, you want to be able to move stuff to the edge, then thinking really seriously about whether your approach towards the Cloud is helping you achieve those ends. And, again, my view is that if you are going off on a journey to the Cloud, and you are locking yourself into a large provider that is highly centralized, you're probably not going to achieve those aims in the long run.Emily: And then again, who is the persona who needs to be thinking this? And ultimately, whose responsibility is it to make a cloud journey successful?Ben: So, I think that generally speaking, a cloud journey past these initial pilots where I think pilots are often, it's a small team that are proving that things can be done in a cloud-native way, they should do whatever it takes to prove that something can be done, and get some successes. But then I think that the head of engineering, the Vice President of Operations, the person who's heading up DevOps should be thoughtful, and should be thinking about where the organization is going, from that initial pilot into developing the long-term strategy.Emily: Anything else that you'd like to add?Ben: Well, these are a lot of really good questions, so I appreciate all your questions and the topic in general. I guess I would just add, maybe my own personal bias, that data is important. The cloud is important, but data is really important. And as, you know, look at the world creating enough data this year to fill a stack of CD-ROMs, to the orbit of Mars and back, some of that is cat videos, but also buried in there is probably the cure to COVID, and the cure for cancer, and a new form of energy. And so, making it possible for people to create, and store, and retrieve, and use data in a way that's cost-effective, where they don't have to throw out data, that is secure and private, that's a really noble goal. And that's a really important thing, I think, for all of us to embrace.Emily: Just a couple of final questions. The first one, I just like to ask everybody, what is your favorite can't-live-without software engineering tool?Ben: Honestly, I think that collaboration tools, writ large, are important. And whether that's things like GitHub, or things like video conferencing, or things like shared meeting spaces, it's really the tools enable groups of people to work together that I think are the most important.Emily: Where can people connect with you or follow you?Ben: Oh, so I'm on Twitter, @golubbe, G-O-L-U-B-B-E. And that's probably the best place to initially reach out to me, but then I [blog], and I'm on GitHub as well. I'm not that great [unintelligible].Emily: Well, thank you so much for joining us. This was a great conversation.Ben: Oh, thank you, Emily. I had a great conversation as well.Emily: Thanks for listening. I hope you've learned just a little bit more about The Business of Cloud Native. If you'd like to connect with me or learn more about my positioning services, look me up on LinkedIn: I'm Emily Omier—that's O-M-I-E-R—or visit my website which is emilyomier.com. Thank you, and until next time.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

"What should our description be?" - Ben "Oh you just go crazy Ben" - Shawn A journey into the minds of three roommates. Along the way, we talk about the best fast food, what to do during quarantine, and mom titties. Oh god, what have we gotten ourselves into?

In this episode, we are Frankly Speaking with the co-authors of Our Happy Divorce, Nikki and Ben.   Nikki knows how being supported by a strong, loving family can influence the way a person navigates life, love, marriage, and motherhood. Having grown up as a member of the iconic San Francisco 49ers football family, she was thrown into the limelight at a young age. The values her family instilled in her have helped shape who she is today, and she continues to live by them.coparents Ben intimately understands the detriment divorce can cause in the lives of children. The example of his parents’ divorce instilled in him a deep commitment "to do" better by his own kids. Ben is an investor, board member, philanthropist, golfer, and sports enthusiast. But above all, he is a dedicated father and family man who understands the importance of putting his ego aside and his children first. IT  WAS  NOT  PERFECT ... Nikki and Ben define their own personal story with us and discuss what happy looks like today. Inspired by their son, they developed ways to co-parent, step-parent with an emphasis on putting the children first. As they say, “If we can do it, anyone can do it”. As Catherine says, "DIVORCE does not mess your kids up, it is how both parents BEHAVE before, during, and after divorce that can mess your children up." There is a different way to get Divorced. Let’s talk about it… Getting to the “Happy” … We chat about cleaning up the wreckage of the past and forgiveness. How can we stop pointing the finger at our spouse and get honest with ourselves? Do not fool yourself, your children know what is going on. Open discussions about financial settlements and joint custody. Using the Divorce Process to redefine what your life, your finances, and relationship will be like post-divorce. Co-Parenting and Step-parenting survival tips during the pandemic. Want to learn more about Our Happy Divorce? Visit their website at https://ourhappydivorce.com/ Whether you are thinking of divorce/separation, are in the midst of a divorce, or embarking on your new life after divorce, this episode has something to help you. If you have questions for us or a topic you’d like us to cover, contact us at hello@mydivorcesolution.com or visit MyDivorceSolution.com ----more---- Karen Chellew: Welcome to We Chat Divorce. Hello, I'm Karen Chellew, legal liaison, here with Catherine Shanahan, CDFA. We're the co-founders of My Divorce Solution. We're a company whose mission is to change the way people get divorced by providing a different approach, financial clarity, and an online course to help couples develop a transparent plan that will optimize the outcome of their divorce. Karen Chellew: Each podcast we sit down with professionals who provide insight and frank discussion on real people, real situations, and real divorce. Today we welcome Nikki and Ben, co-authors of Our Happy Divorce: How Ending Our Marriage Brought Us Together. That's fantastic. Co-founders Ben Heldfond and Nikki DeBartolo understand that no divorce is ever easy, especially for those involved. Karen Chellew: After nearly a decade together the couple decided to split, and inspired by their son, Asher, to find ways to happily navigate a divorce. Ben and Nikki created Our Happy Divorce, a service empowering and inspiring people to think differently about divorce, co-parenting, stepparenting, and what it means to put kids first. Nikki and Ben describe themselves as ordinary people who have accomplished something extraordinary. They have sidestepped a lot of the booby traps that make most divorces acrimonious. Nikki and Ben say, "If we can do it, you can do it." Thank you. Ben: No truer words have ever been spoken. Karen Chellew: I love that. So first and foremost, I want to say thank you for the beautiful gift you sent of your book, your bookmark. It was awesome. Beautiful gift. And for people who receive that, it's just so inspiring just to open the box and feel the book, so you guys have done a great job. Catherine Shanahan: Aren't you supposed to send that over to me, Karen? Karen Chellew: What, the chocolate? Catherine Shanahan: Yeah. Where'd that go, Karen? Karen Chellew: Everything but the chocolate's on its way. Ben: Everything. Catherine Shanahan: I'll give you my address so I can get one of those. Ben: There you go. That's a deal. We'll get that off to you. Karen Chellew: Oh, that's good. So a service inspiring people to think a different way about divorce. How do you do that? Ben: Well, I think we do it through our story. All this book is is our experience. We're not lawyers, we're not therapists. We just happen to figure out a way to have an acrimonious divorce. We didn't have a roadmap. Collaborative divorce was sort of in the beginning stages, but you know, it was just the two of us. We say if we can do it, anybody can do it because we are two Type A personalities who somehow came to a point of putting the past behind us and not making anybody a villain, and putting our son first. And then everything sort of fell into place. Nikki: Right. It wasn't perfect in the beginning. I think people need to realize that, that we went through some rocky months. Ben: Right. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah, yeah. So that's a really good point, Nikki. Let's talk about that a little bit because if you read anything I write, or if you ever talk to me, or if anyone has gone through our process, they'll hear me say not once, but probably a thousand times because I am a stepmom. I have been divorced and I have raised five children in a blended family, so I am a firm believer that divorce does not mess your kids up. It's how the parents behave before divorce, during divorce, and after divorce that can mess your children up. Catherine Shanahan: However, you call your company or your book The Happy Divorce and I think everybody has to define happy. What is happy, and that can mean something different to everyone, and that's okay. Nikki: Right. Catherine Shanahan: So happy for somebody could be that... as a stepmom I can remember, happy for me sometimes was that my stepchildren went home on Sunday night, and that's okay. Nikki: That's okay. Catherine Shanahan: Because it's exhausting, right? Ben: Yeah, yeah. Nikki: That's totally normal. Ben: Yeah, and Nikki said it took time. I think if you had asked us 13 years ago what happy meant, what our definition of a happy divorce was, it would have been that we could just be in the same room together. Catherine Shanahan: Exactly. Nikki: Or at like an event together or a birthday party together. Ben: And not make everybody feel uncomfortable, but most importantly our son. Catherine Shanahan: Right. Ben: So even today, we know people who have happy divorces, they might not be to the extreme that Nikki and mine are, or they might be better, it's just that you put the kids first. You don't hand the kids the emotional bill to pay for something that they had absolutely no choice in. Catherine Shanahan: Exactly. I think your son said it so cute, and he is... Asher, right? Nikki: Yes. Karen Chellew: Adorable. Catherine Shanahan: Oh, my God. He is so cute. I watched your video clip and he said, "You know, I always wanted siblings. Well, maybe not so much." Ben: After it came, right, yeah. Nikki: And he was like, "Oh, can't they go back?" No. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah, yeah. I thought that was so cute, and it's so true. So his happy was, "I got them." Well, maybe today I don't want them. Ben: Right. Catherine Shanahan: You know, it was so cute, it kind of ties it all up. And so in divorce we say that with our couples when we're negotiating a settlement where we're going through their financial portrait with them, which it's kids and your finances. So what would your happy be? Is your happy keeping the house? Is your happy having the retirement monies? Is your happy having your children three days a week? Every other weekend so you can have your career? Define what your happy is. So I love the title of your book, and it's okay to define that, and to define your co-parenting, because your co-parenting is not the same as my co-parenting. Nikki: No. It's different for everybody. Karen Chellew: And it's okay. Nikki: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: So how did you come to your happy, the two of you? Nikki: Well... I think it took less work on my part than it did on his. Karen Chellew: Oh, why is that? Nikki: I sort of set out thinking, "How am I going to do this?" My parents are still married after 52 years, so I kind of had the mindset of, "Okay, what am I going to do to make my son's life as close to the way I grew up as possible, but being divorced?" So that was always something that was in my head, and it was sort of ingrained to try to figure out a way to make him... have what I had growing up and not feel slighted. Ben: Yeah. Nikki: [crosstalk 00:07:40] not so much. Ben: And I on the other hand grew up in the complete opposite household of a family of parents who didn't have a happy divorce. So part of it was ingrained in me, being a child of the '80s, well, actually I was born in early '70s, but parents were divorced in the '80s. It was the way it was, right? People got divorced, and it wasn't, "How are we going to get along? How are we going to co-parent?" It's like, "We're going to go to war. I'm going to get my lawyer. You're going to get yours and it's going to be battle." Ben: I also was in a completely different place in my life emotionally. I wasn't a very happy person when I left our marriage. For me, that manifest itself at pointing the finger at Nikki. It was all her fault. It was all her... you know, if only she hadn't done this. If only she should have done... you know. And 'shoulding' all over myself. That's S-H-O-U-L-D, not the other one. Ben: But you know, and then what it took was a realization or clarity to find out what my part was in the relationship. So in order to get to happy, I had to, we had to clean up the wreckage of the past, and we had to get honest about what our part is and understand that it takes two to make a relationship, it takes two to ruin a relationship. Ben: And just like our happy divorce it works that way too. Now it takes four to make it, because we're both remarried. In our book, it doesn't go into what happened, who did what, who didn't do what, because at the end of the day, what we realize is all that stuff doesn't matter. What matters is that we both came to a place of forgiveness, but also admitted what we had done wrong. Karen Chellew: How did you come to a place of forgiveness? What started turning the tide from the anger and resentment, or whatever the negative emotions were? What happened on both of your parts to just start to turn that tide a little bit. Ben: Well, yeah, for me, again, Nikki wasn't as scorned I guess you could say, which is weird for her. Nikki: That's really weird for me. Ben: But you know, I left the house- Nikki: You [crosstalk 00:09:54] the one out for blood. Ben: Right, exactly. I left the house in a way that I look back and I almost cringe, a very dramatic way. I took off my ring. I put it on the bathroom counter with a picture of us torn out and I left. Nikki: Very dramatic. Ben: Very dramatic. Nikki: Like something I would have done. Ben: And I went and I did my research, and I looked for the best shark lawyer, the one who had all the biggest cases in Tampa. Definitely did my research. I called him and explained to him what I wanted, and I wanted to destroy Nikki, and I wanted to embarrass her, and I wanted to show our son what a fraud she was, at least how I saw her. Ben: So he took a very hefty retainer from me, and then he wrote up a manual on how we were going to go about doing what I wanted to accomplish. And I didn't read it for a little bit, and it was in my backpack that I carry everywhere, and I was on a plane back from LA to Tampa, and I pulled it out and I decided to read it. I got two pages into it, and this thing was like 30 pages long. Nikki: That's probably the same thing he gives everybody else. Ben: Right, just different boiler plate. Nikki: Names are just changed. Ben: Exactly. And then all of a sudden I had a moment of clarity, and I saw for the first time in a long time that if I went down this path, continuing to read this War and Peace destruction manual what it was going to lead to, because I knew where it was going to lead to, because I had been down that road. I had been part of my parents divorce down the road. Ben: Or I could try to find a different way and a different path. So I called Nikki when I landed and I said, "I need some time. I need some space." Because I knew I couldn't deal with the divorce in the head space I was in. Karen Chellew: Right. Ben: And probably Nikki too. We weren't ready to start talking about the end until we cleared up the past and found our part. So I called the lawyer and said, "I'm going to find a different way, if you could send back the balance of the retainer," and conveniently there wasn't much left. But it was the best money I ever spent. So then I started working with somebody that I knew, and just went through and found out what my in the relationship was, and my part in the ending of the relationship. And realized about halfway through that I wouldn't want to be married to me either at that time. Ben: I was not in a good place. I was not the father I thought I was, but more importantly I wasn't the husband I thought I was. So then I called Nikki to coffee, and she probably had no idea why I was calling her. Nikki: No. Because I kind of knew this was going on with him, so I mean- Ben: She knew. It was that black sedan that was following me everywhere. Nikki: And I knew that this was the mindset he was in. And I just knew I hadn't gotten to that place. I mean, yes, I was angry and I was sad and I was upset, but I wasn't in the place that he was at. Where I sort of was like, "Let's just get this over with. Let's just fix this... fix it to a point where it's just done." To me, I went at this a totally different way. Nikki: I did hire a lawyer, but it was kind of more like, "What do I do? Here's this divorce, what am I going to do with this?" So mine wasn't, "Let's attack him and let's kill him." Ben: Well, your hardest thing also was that you said it too, it was a, "Fix it." Nikki's a fixer. She wants to get in there and fix everything and not call her a control freak, but control freak. Nikki: I am a control freak. 100% Catherine Shanahan: Were you living together at the time or were you separated in different homes? Nikki: We were in different homes, but not really. At that time- Ben: Somewhere in between there... I was staying in a hotel for about six months, and then I'd come home and- Nikki: Did you really stay in a hotel for six months? Ben: Six months. The biggest most exciting time of my life during that time was when they released a new movie on the On Demand thing at the hotel. Catherine Shanahan: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Ben: Because I'd watched them all. And then I eventually got a place. So we weren't officially divorced yet when I had my own place, but it was when we told our son. He forced our hand to tell him because... Why don't you tell the story about us thinking we were getting over on him. Nikki: Oh yeah. So Ben would come over every morning before Asher would go to school. And you know, he would make sure he was there before he woke up. One morning- Catherine Shanahan: How old was he at the time? Ben: Four? Karen Chellew: Yeah? Ben: Four. Yeah. Nikki: So he comes in my room. Ben is already there. And he looks at me and says, "Hey mom, where did Daddy sleep last night?" And I always thought I did a really good job of messing up the bed thinking like, "Oh, okay." Ben: Yeah. Nikki: And I was like, "What do you mean? Right here." And he's like, "Where did Daddy sleep last night?" And I was like, "Oh, boy. This kid is way smarter than we're giving him credit for, so we need to do something, and it's time for us to sit him down as best we can with someone that young and just say, "Hey, this is what's happening. We love you." That's probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Ben: Oh yeah. It was hard. But we framed it in a way and were open with him. If anything from our experience, again, not lawyers, not therapists, but through my experience with my parents, my experience with my son and our divorce is the idea that kids are resilient and they'll get over it, or they don't see things... is nonsense. It is absolute nonsense and I can say that from experience on both sides of it, right? "Oh, our kids will get over it. They're resilient. They don't know what's going on." Here a four-year-old who knew- Nikki: Exactly what was going on. Ben: Right. Playing Inspector Clouseau. Knew that I hadn't slept there because my bed wasn't made, my pillows weren't ruffled or whatever he did. So that's another message we try to get across is that, "Don't fool yourself." To me, and staying on my soapbox too much here, but to me, that's justification for behaviors." Karen Chellew: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nikki: And too, to this day he still claims that he saw boxes, which we never let a box- Ben: At least we thought we didn't. Nikki: But he still says he saw boxes. Catherine Shanahan: You know, I think sometimes even if he didn't see boxes, he probably heard you talk about boxes. Nikki: Right. And in his head, he's like, "Oh yeah." Catherine Shanahan: You can probably remember talking about something in your childhood, but you don't really remember going to Disney World when you were two, but you remember seeing pictures that you went to Disney World when you were two. Nikki: Right. Catherine Shanahan: So you think you remember you were in Disney World when you were two, right? Ben: Yeah. Nikki: It's true. Catherine Shanahan: I'm sure he heard about that or saw that. So he's a smart kid. Like I said, I feel like I know him a little bit from watching the video. Nikki: Yes. Ben: Yeah, he wraps up the book too. He's got a chapter at the end of the book that just puts a bow on it perfectly, because our happy... Your answer, "How does your happy look?" We didn't know it was going to be happy at the time, but you know, I called her to coffee after I'd done this work on myself. The first thing I told her was I was sorry, that I'd done some work myself and I realized that it's no one's fault, it's not her fault, it's not my fault. We equal parts of this and I'm sorry for my part. Ben: I went through some of the things. I wasn't a very good husband. I ignored you, I didn't... blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to apologize again, I already did that. Karen Chellew: Yeah. Ben: You're only getting it once. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah, she's sitting here smiling and she's like [crosstalk 00:17:45]. Ben: She loves it. And so we went through it and then she apologized to me, which was- Nikki: Which was probably the first and only time I've ever apologized. Catherine Shanahan: And you're lucky because we have this recorded [crosstalk 00:17:59]- Ben: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: You can both listen on repeat. Nikki: Yeah. Ben: And then from that moment on it didn't just all of a sudden become happy, but there was room to move, because then we both genuinely accept each other's apologies, and we told each other we loved each other, and that we committed at that meeting to putting our son first with every decision we made. So our happy looked like not what was in Nikki's bank account or Nikki's family's bank account or what I thought I deserved. Our happy was what was best for our son. Nikki: Right. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah. So you know we like to get real with everyone, and a lot of our viewers come from a wide range, and we deal with a lot of affluent people, but we also deal with people who aren't affluent, or they don't know that they're affluent. Ben: Right. Catherine Shanahan: We do a lot of budgeting and we hone in on financials with everyone. And as a CDFA, I sit down and Karen does a lot of the budgeting with our clients, pre-divorce and post-divorce. So we listen to your story and it sounds great. You afforded him the ability to go through the mucky waters of what he needed to figure out for himself, which is a luxury, because he had that time to do that. Catherine Shanahan: And you blamed her in the beginning and you had all that anger, and you went and hired the bulldog, which oh, my God, we hear so many times people go and hire the bulldog, and only 10% of divorce cases need whatever everybody wants to refer to as the bulldog, and Karen loves to jump in and really get the definition of what a bulldog actually means, because you don't really need a bulldog. But anyway, that's a whole other podcast. Catherine Shanahan: But what did you do with your finances, because a lot of people who have money there, they can't access it during that time. How do you stay in a hotel room if you can't get the money? Did you two have your separate bank accounts, because people can't be happy if they can't get their financials, right? So if somebody out there wants to have a happy divorce, they come to us. Catherine Shanahan: So for example, for us we start with your finances. So we can afford them that time to work through the financials so they don't run to attorneys. You don't need two attorneys gathering your financial data. It's the same data you're collecting. You're paying thousands and thousands... We save people hundreds of thousands of dollars because why are you paying them to gather the same information and go through the packet of information you were asked to gather. Ben: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nikki: Right. Catherine Shanahan: Why would you both have to do that. So we do that so that they can work through their stuff, right? Ben: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: So during that time- Ben: I think what's important at least is yes from my experience, and also from this process of writing this book with Nikki and talking with people, it doesn't matter if there are a thousand dollars in the bank or there's a hundred million dollars in the bank, you know for the most part, because what it comes down to is financial insecurity. Ben: And what I think the problem with divorce and why sometimes it goes sideways is because it deals with two of the biggest trigger buttons, I could use a different word, but trigger buttons of our human condition and that's romance and finance, and both those speak directly to ego, right? Catherine Shanahan: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Ben: And so our financial settlement was the same as our custody agreement is that we try to as much as possible take ego out of it, and to try to put Asher first. So when it came time to discussing finances, it was, "Okay, what's best for Asher?" Nikki or myself had to make sacrifices, or give more or take less or whatever it was, but it was... Look, it wasn't simple, right? It was easier though when we looked at it through a pair of glasses of what's best for Asher, and you take the ego out of it as much as possible. Nikki: Right. I mean, I think too for him it was about his life. Ben: Right. Nikki: And the way we wanted him to be raised. We wanted him to be raised at both houses as basically as much the same- Ben: As possible. Nikki: Even with rules. With four parents, there's a lot of rules too. Ben: Right. Well, there's a lot of communication. Nikki: Right. Ben: The other thing we did, which... We both had lawyers, so I don't want to say that we did this willy nilly. But we did what's called collaborative and it wasn't- Nikki: We did through. Ben: We did. Nikki: We sort of brought it to our lawyers and said, "Hey, this is what we think we want to do." Ben: Right. So what we've tried, and agreed to try is, "Let's figure out what we can do on our own, and let's go through it with this pair of glasses that we now have of what's best for Asher, try to take ego out of it and see where we go." Nikki: And I think for us too, I mean, I guess couples... One of his biggest things with me was, "Do you have a problem with joint custody of our son?" And obviously if he was not a good guy or had some sort of issues that would be a different story, but I mean obviously I had no problem with that. So that was one of the first things that kind of softened him a little bit. Ben: That was the first question I asked was, "Do you have any problem with doing 50/50 everything with our son from the left shoe to the right shoe?" Nikki: Right. Ben: And she said, "Of course not. You're his dad." So I said with the other stuff we can work it out. And so then we started with that foundation, and then we were on the same page with that. Then we went to some other things like the businesses that we had together. Nikki had a jewelry company that she had started that I owned half of. I had a record label that I had started with her sister, which is kind of weird, but you know, so it wasn't necessarily about how much each one was worth at the time or the balance sheet of the jewelry company versus the record label. Nikki: It was things that he could have been like, "Oh, I'm going to get her because I want my half of that." Ben: Yeah, and I had no desire to be in the jewelry business. But if I was looking at it- Nikki: Why should you be? Ben: Yeah, right. Right, but if I'd been looking at it from a scorned ego standpoint, I was like, "I'm going to take the jewelry business because I know how much it means to her." Nikki: Right. Catherine Shanahan: Well I think it's really great that because you work through... Well, let me back up first. It's because I always say two people, you come together and you get married, it takes two people to get married, and it takes two people to get divorced, you know? Ben: Yup. Catherine Shanahan: And none of it has to do with your children. So you took the time to heal first, and then you made the important decision, so Karen, you know and you can pick up from this, the process that we developed because we're both divorced before we started... We saw how people got divorced, and when I went through my divorce eight years ago I just thought, "Hell, people have to get divorced different. This is just ridiculous." Ben: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: The way we work is you do your financials first, and then you take your agreement, and we do a lot of negotiated agreements, and when we get to them take this to your attorney, pretty much what you're saying and have them draw up this agreement. You don't need them to talk to each other to tell you what you should do for yourselves, right? Nikki: Yup. Ben: Right. Karen Chellew: You just need to know what you want, and they don't necessarily spend a lot of time helping you figure that out. Catherine Shanahan: And you don't need a judge how to set up visitation for your lifestyle and your child. Ben: Control your own destiny. Nikki: I do all our calendar, well, because I'm that person. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah. Ben: Literally, she prints out... We used to- Nikki: I still use paper. Ben: In the beginning we used to meet at the same coffee shop, the same table, with Nikki's calendars, which are legendary, you know, not an iPhone calendar, not a computer, like the actual calendar printed out and we'd go through the month and you know, "What days are you traveling?" And I'd tell her- Catherine Shanahan: I love that. Ben: And we would do the schedule. And then over time this is sort of how the evolution of our divorce happened. Then now, she just does it. I entrust in her, not that I didn't entrust in her before, well maybe not. Catherine Shanahan: But it works. Ben: But it works. But now she does it, and it's in our shared calendar with Asher. Nikki: He knows where he is. He knows where to go. Ben: And it's 15 days, and if- Nikki: Sports is on there. Anything. Everything's on that calendar. Dinners, everybody can see it. Ben: But the thing that we went to too is again, we tried to see where we agreed or what we could do by ourselves and ended up doing the whole thing, and hashing out the whole settlement over many coffee meetings. It didn't just happen at that one coffee, but same table, same coffee shop, and then we handed it to the lawyers. Catherine Shanahan: I love that. Ben: We said, "Add your 'whereas' and run on sentences and you can get it as [crosstalk 00:27:06] as possible, so you can get paid $450 an hour for somebody to then reread it to try to find a way out of that run-on." Anyways... no offense. Karen Chellew: So I'm going to observe here that during all of those coffee shop meetings and all of those different interactions that the end result that you redefined your relationship as parents of Asher, and as your future. So I think that is fantastic, and I think that's what we try to help our client understand that use the divorce the process, and use that time to redefine what you're going to be like post-divorce, because your kids need to be able to depend on that and rely on that. Karen Chellew: And it's a very important time, and the time you spend fighting and arguing with each other, the less time you spend on creating that new relationship. So I think that's key what you did. Ben: Nobody's ever been happy or survived feeding their kids poison hoping the other one dies. Karen Chellew: Right. Ben: I think that happens a lot in divorces is that... And again, one beautiful thing about this process is when I left that house I was angry, I was going to go to war, I was going to go down the same path as my parents had gone done. But now I realize my parents didn't sit around the table when they got divorced and premeditate how they were going to not get along and how they were going to get us in the middle of that and all that awkwardness, it was just they were so blinded by the things we talked about earlier, the romance, the finance, and egos were hurt so they were blind to it. Ben: I was blind to it. When I left that house and I hired the lawyer and I wasn't talking to Nikki, I wasn't purposely sitting there going, "Hm, how am I going to screw up my kid?" But it's hard. It's hard on them. It was hard on me growing up. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah, well you know, nobody gets married thinking they're going to get divorced. Nikki: No. Ben: No. Catherine Shanahan: And you know, truth be told, myself included, there are times that you sit back and you say you wish your kid didn't have to go between one home and the other. Ben: And he does too. Catherine Shanahan: Nobody wants their child to do that or spend half their Christmas. Then you have more children and you don't want them to have to leave their siblings and all of that. It's not an easy process, and you can't be normal and wonder, "Is my child okay?" Even though they're happy and healthy. We know they are. I mean, my children are thriving, and I'm happy for them. They're doing so well. Catherine Shanahan: I'm remarried. I got married in June. I feel like I have the love of my life and I'm so blessed, and my children love him, so all of that, but we do wonder sometimes. But I think that's okay, and I think that's part of just being healthy human beings. But sometimes, you know, we deal with so many people's emotions they can't see past that. Catherine Shanahan: I think what your son has learned most importantly is the respect, and the reason why you let Nikki take over this whole calendar issue is because you respect her, and she respects you and that's why she does it. For your son to learn how a couple can respect each other is probably the best gift, because that's the best love you can give a partner. Ben: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: Because you can't fully love someone if you don't respect them. Ben: And you brought up just a good point about co-parents too. And our spouses currently are... Just the other thing, I'm sure you see clients and people who are divorced miserable, but remarried and happy, and yet they still have this hatred towards the other one, and it's just like if you could just take a step back and realize that if you hadn't gotten divorced, and you hadn't gone down that, you wouldn't have met the other person. Ben: And our spouses, Chad and Nadia, there's no question who we were meant to be with. Nikki and Chad, I still... I'm like, "She never looked at me that way. She never grabbed my hand like that." It's like I never think, "What if." And then on the flip side, Nadia- Nikki: It's the same way though. I tell her too. I look at her sometimes and I'm like, "I couldn't be married to him," but she just smiles and loves him. Ben: She loves me, the unconditional love, which means you love the good and the bad just as much. And then Asher gets to see this, and he gets to see healthy relationships, and he gets to see that even though his parents are divorced, and this is the most sobering part about it. A couple years ago we were on a fishing trip and out of nowhere he said, "This divorce is hard on me." And this is like three years ago. Ben: I felt like saying, "You little SOB. You have no idea what a bad divorce is or how hard divorce is." And then it hit me. Even as good as Nikki and I have it, and I don't think... Maybe it could get better if we lived together, but besides that- Nikki: No, it would definitely not get better if we lived together. Karen Chellew: He doesn't know that. He doesn't know that. Ben: So but just the idea of being displaced every couple days, and even though we live seven houses down, I've seen him go, "Oh, I forgot my math book at Mom's. I've got to go down and get it." Nikki: But he even says too, sometimes he'll look at me and go, "You and Dad get along so well. Sometimes I don't understand why you're not married anymore." And I'm like, "We get along really well right now. We were meant to be best friends. We weren't meant to be husband and wife." I go, "You were meant to be here, so that's why we..." 100%. Karen Chellew: That's beautiful. Ben: Yeah, so a lot of kids read Dr. Seuss books as a kid, he was always an animal junkie, so we would read him animal encyclopedias, and he knew every single animal, where they came from, where they lived. And we always knew that we wanted to take him to Africa on a safari. But with the shots and everything... So if anything was going to send our divorce south, and it was if one of the other ones had taken Asher to Africa without the other one. Ben: So this past summer, Nikki and Asher and I went to Africa, just the three of us together on a safari. Nikki: I didn't feed him to any animals. Ben: And I didn't die. There were no lion accidents. Nikki: No accidents. Ben: But it was a great opportunity for our son. Nikki: Yes. Ben: Our spouses, when we told them- Nikki: I mean, we asked them if they wanted. Ben: Right. Nikki: It was this open invitation trip. Ben: But her husband just has this small responsibility of being a sheriff of Hillsborough County, and my wife was raising our two sons and starting a practice of her own, so it just wasn't possible. Nikki: Raising your what? Ben: What? Nikki: Your two sons. Ben: Oh, no, two kids. Well, two sons and daughter. But she has two young kids at home, it just wasn't possible for them to go, but the response, and this is where it really just comes full circle, wasn't, "Are you crazy that you think it's okay for you to go to Africa in the middle of the bush with your ex-wife? Are you nuts?" It was, "Asher will love that. What a great opportunity he has to go to Africa with his parents, and have that experience." Nikki: And day two of our trip he looked at me and he said, "Thank you so much. This is the best trip I could have ever gone on." Karen Chellew: That's awesome. That's awesome. Catherine Shanahan: That's really rare. There's not very many... I don't know anyone... That's really rare and really special. Ben: Yeah, and again- Nikki: And I mean, there are people that still think we're crazy. Ben: Right. And it didn't happen overnight. Nikki: Our families thought we were crazy in the beginning. Ben: I still think they might. Nikki: I think they might too. Ben: But the important thing is, I think we started this conversation with this, and that it didn't happen overnight. Nikki: Right. Ben: And a small example of that is when Nikki married Chad, Nikki called me and said, "I don't think that I feel comfortable with inviting you to the wedding. It's because I don't want people to worry about how Ben's feeling, take away from 'this is my day.'" And I was, "Completely understandable." It wasn't ready. It wasn't the right time. It wasn't about me. It was about Nikki and her day and her second day, her and Chad. Ben: And she's right, all the guests saying, "Oh, the ex-husband's here? This is weird." But again, fast forward about three or four years later, I get married and Nikki and Chad and her whole family are at my wedding, and not like, "Gotcha," like, "Hey, you didn't invite me to yours, I'm going to show everybody I'm a bigger person." Sorry- Nikki: There's something in my ear. Ben: My phone is... So that she came to my wedding. So it's been progress, not perfection. Nikki: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Ben: But it's been progress and it's getting there, and it didn't happen overnight. We've been doing this for 13 years. Catherine Shanahan: That's awesome. Karen Chellew: Yeah. Ben: It's just become more natural. Catherine Shanahan: Yeah, that's really good. Karen Chellew: That is great. So let's pivot to the topic of the day because I think a lot of people will benefit from your perspective on the pandemic and COVID and parenting children through... or co-parenting children who are traveling back and forth, and a lot of what we're hearing is, "I don't know if my son or my daughter or my children are safe at the other parent's house because they're not sheltering in place and they're not making sure everything's taken care of." So we're hearing a lot of that. Karen Chellew: And everybody's just cooped up together, so what can you offer the parents and the kids going through this right now to offer some kind of support? Nikki: I think for us, I mean, obviously we have it a little differently than most divorced couples, but I think in the beginning we sort of sat down and had a conversation, an open conversation. We weren't going to keep anything from Asher. We wanted him to know what was going on in the world, but we were on the same page about what Asher was... You know, in the beginning it was kind of a little bit slower process, "Oh, they can do this. They can do this. They can't do this." Then all of a sudden it was like, "No, you can't do anything." Nikki: So I think it took both of us to try to explain to him too in the beginning like, "Listen, you really can't leave the house. You're not going anywhere. You can get in your car and you can go for a drive, but you can't stop anywhere. You can't talk to your friends. You can't see your friends. You can't do anything." And I think the same went for the two of us. We kind of said, "Listen, what's going on at your house? Where are you going to go? Where am I going?" We kind of got on the same page where we were like, "You have to shut it down." Nikki: I mean, other than the fact that my husband has to go to work, he even tries to shut it down where he goes into work, goes in his office, he sees all of about two people when he goes into work, and that's it, because he doesn't have a choice. Ben: Right. Nikki: But we just decided in the beginning, "Let's shut this down." And so Asher's obviously homeschooled now, or whatever that's called, virtual school, whatever. Ben: It's the new homeschool, yeah. Nikki: That kind of even made a decision too that the days Asher is at Ben and Nadia's house, he comes over to our house by 9:30 in the morning to start school, unless he's got a Zoom class that starts before that, and he does all of his schoolwork at our house until he's done, because- Ben: Otherwise it'd be mayhem with the two young... his brothers and sisters going into- Nikki: Them trying to do their school, and then him trying, you know, conflicts. All they want to do, when he's there they just want to be with him. Ben: Right. Catherine Shanahan: What's the age different? Ben: Four and seven, so- Nikki: And Asher's 16. Ben: Yeah, so [crosstalk 00:39:14]. The other thing is that I think that the way we handle this pandemic and sort of a microcosm of how we handle life in our divorce. We had a conversation. We both agreed upon the rules at both houses that we were going to social distance, we were going to be responsible, we were going to shelter in place. We were going to do all the same things at both houses. And once we did that, all of a sudden, now our sphere of quarantine has widened. Ben: That's why Nikki and I are sitting next to each other right now and not because- Nikki: Because we quarantined together. I see the kids almost every day. Ben: Right. We can go down to her house because Asher's been going back and forth, being the outbreak monkey, so if it was going to be in one house, it was going to be in the other house anyway. Nikki: We're all getting it. If it's in one house, we're all getting it. Catherine Shanahan: What do you do, Ben, if Nadia doesn't agree with Nikki? Ben: About... Catherine Shanahan: Parenting, rules, or where you go? Ben: I think one of the greatest things about Nadia and Chad is we all co-parent together. Nadia's a therapist specializing in kids, so she brings a different perspective. She doesn't try to step on Nikki's shoes. She disagrees with some things we do with Asher, but she says it, and I'm sure Chad does too. She says it, and they say it, but at the end of the day, we're his parents. At the end of the day, we're going to make the ultimate decision, but for the most part, since it's evolved, the four of us usually sit down on the big ticket items. Ben: Nikki and I have different parenting styles. Nadia and I have different parenting styles. Nikki: Chad and I have different parenting styles. Ben: Right, and Nikki and I would have different parenting styles whether we were married or divorced. So it's just about finding the- Nikki: Some sort of common ground with all of us. Ben: Picking your battles. I learned to pick my battles with her. It's not worth the... Catherine Shanahan: Yeah. Ben: So the COVID thing, we ran out of paper towels for just a small example, but you know, I called Nikki, I knew that she probably had 25 cases, and even if she didn't I knew that she would give us one. Nikki: I did give you some. Ben: That's just the way- Catherine Shanahan: Are you hoarding? Ben: She's always been. There is no difference. She's- Nikki: I do not hoard toilet paper. I don't understand the toilet paper thing. I barely have enough toilet paper in the house. Ben: She's been preparing for this thing for what, 45 years? Karen Chellew: So you didn't say, "Asher, when you're at mom's house, just grab toilet paper, throw it in your bag and just run out"? Ben: No, and I go over there and I got caught robbing her pantry. Nikki: Yes, for snacks. And then if you notice my hair is pink. It is not normally pink. This has been a quarantine thing. And his daughter is convinced that her hair is going to be pink too, so I tried once, her hair's darker than mine, so didn't work. So now I've just instead of asking for permission, I'm like, "Okay, well I'm dyeing your daughter's hair pink." Ben: Yeah, I found out after I got home from work yesterday. This is, again, what our life is like today. It truly is. You talk about the byline on the book, but it's also the other one we talk about is finding a different kind of love. That's what we've done over the past 14 years, or however long it's been. I love this woman. I've always loved this woman. I think we kind of got confused with being in love and love. But luckily enough we never lost... We might have lost it for a little bit there, but we got back to it. Ben: Then it's evolved into this thing, you know, that is beyond us, beyond our wildest imagination. Again, if we can do it, and this might sound like French or Latin to some of your listeners right now, it's real, but it was a process. Karen Chellew: That's awesome. Ben: You know, if you're starting out, I don't know what you tell your clients, but take small steps, and that's what we had to do in the beginning is get the small wins, get the softball game where there wasn't an awkward feeling or event at your kid's school where you didn't walk away feeling awkward. That's a win. Nikki: Yup. Ben: That's a small win, and then the wins start piling up. Before you know it you're in Africa and no one's dying. Catherine Shanahan: I love that. We tell our clients you know, "You do not have to tell your children that their mom's an alcoholic, or their dad's an idiot. If they're an idiot or an alcoholic they'll see it for themselves." Ben: Right. Nikki: They will. Catherine Shanahan: Just be the dad or the mom that you want to be because that's what they're going [crosstalk 00:44:09]. Ben: Love that. Catherine Shanahan: Like I said it brings tears to my eyes. Literally I had chills when I watched your video because, you know, I do what I do and Karen can speak for herself, but I know that she does it also, but we do what we do because we're advocates for the children of the parents that we helped, and we've helped over 400 couples already. One day I'm hoping that the children of the parents will stand up and say, "Those women helped my parents divorce a better way," you know? Catherine Shanahan: We don't need attorneys fighting for parents to set a parenting schedule or to help divide assets. That's what you have professionals to do. So we're doing what we're doing to help people divorce a better way. We just need the attorneys to tie it up and put the 'as is' or 'as set forth' or whatever those words are. We don't really care. We just want them to have financial clarity and to help them to set up a co-parenting plan that works for their family. Catherine Shanahan: I'm like Nikki, I like to write paper agendas and put stickers on everything and all that stuff. Nikki: Me too. I love it. Catherine Shanahan: That's how I like it too. Nikki: I just won't get rid of it. Catherine Shanahan: I love hearing your story because I think that's how it should be. Ben: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: I hope you can come to our Mrs2Me Summit and maybe speak and talk to our attendees. Ben: Oh, we'd love to because that's why we wrote the book. It's not... This is truly an altruism. Nobody wants to spill their... And in the book we talk about our shortcomings. We talk about our failures. We're imperfect, but what we have is real and just for it to be inspirational. We're so happy to do this thing, and then run into people like you guys and others who... Ben: We kind of kept our head down. As silly as it sounds, when we got divorced there was no Facebook or Instagram. There's Myspace, but not a lot of divorced, co-parenting- Catherine Shanahan: Myspace, is that even around? Karen Chellew: I don't remember that. Ben: Right, so we didn't have support groups online to go to. Then even writing the book, it took us four years to write this book because we'd get in a fight, this was my idea and I was- Nikki: [crosstalk 00:46:16] say, "No, I'm not doing your book." Ben: I'm not doing your effing book, blah, blah, blah. Nikki: Yeah. Ben: So then all of a sudden we get the book out and we're starting to do some research, and we see this huge community online. It's not like, "Oh, no, we just launched a book and there's so many other..." It was like, "This is great." Nikki: Like, "This is awesome." Catherine Shanahan: Yeah. Ben: Because these people have the same goal as us and it's to let people know- Nikki: There's a different way. Ben: There's a different way going into it. Not even after they're divorced and it's yucky and all that, but I think I went into it thinking if I get divorced, it's War of the Roses. It's on. This is the only way to go. Nikki: That's the only kind of divorce I ever knew though. Catherine Shanahan: I tell people, "No." They come to us sometimes when they've been the process and we're like, "Oh, my gosh, I wish you would have came here first because you just wait..." I mean, they spent 20, 40,000, and they come with bags of papers. They don't even know what they have. I look at Karen, because the legal process to me is such a crock sometimes. It's not logical thinking, and as a financial I'm like, "What?" So she's like, "It's the process. This is the process." Look at her, she's laughing because I get so annoyed that people spend money for that. Catherine Shanahan: So we're digital. We work nationally, so I just crack up at the process. So I just wish people come here first because it would save them so much angst. It starts couples fighting when they don't even have to fight. Ben: Right. Catherine Shanahan: I said, "Oh, my God," because they get served this nasty language and they say, "Oh, my God, he's going after this," or, "She's going after this." And the couple will say, "I didn't mean that. I didn't mean to do that." So now a war began where the person didn't even mean it. Catherine Shanahan: So when you said you got to work out your stuff first, I was like, "Thank God he came to his senses," because he didn't really want to attack you, but that's how it would have started because like you said, Nikki said, "Yeah, he probably sends that to everybody." That's exactly what that attorney does. And unfortunately they have to send it like that because that's the process. I'm glad you [crosstalk 00:48:28]. Ben: For us, at least for me it was really thin ice. I think that that's the thing is one misstep... I don't know if you guys saw The Marriage Story, but that is a perfect example of one... If she just maybe read that letter in that first meeting, it might have turned out the way it seemed like the movie had ended. And for me, if I hadn't just had that moment of clarity right then or pull it out at the particular time, whatever it was and whenever it happened, who knows, but it's in the beginning, it's just so... It's a powder keg. Ben: To go to people who are aligned with a better outcome will help you, guide you down that path of the right way. We didn't have that, but luckily we got there. Karen Chellew: Kudos. Ben: Someone tell that woman, Scarlet Johansson, "Read the letter." Nikki: Yeah. Catherine Shanahan: Yes, yes. Karen Chellew: Well you guys are great, and I think one of my takeaways from today is first and foremost have the conversation. Try to have as many conversations as you can as rugged as they are, but also what I've noticed from hearing you today is whenever something happens today or yesterday that kind of is a trigger, I see that you assign it to that person, not to your relationship that broke apart years ago. And I think a lot of couples haven't developed the ability to do that whenever the other person does something that's irritating or that creates that trigger, "That's why I divorced him. I hate him. He's a terrible person blah, blah, blah." Karen Chellew: But I see you just saying, "That's Ben." or, "That's Nikki." And we're different and you move on. I think that's key in the ongoing relationship. Nikki: Give it a day [crosstalk 00:50:23] we'll come back to that. Ben: Yeah, I mean, I think Nikki [crosstalk 00:50:26] the same thing is that some of the same buttons that I pushed when we married, I still pushes. She still pushes the same. Like you said about parenting, our parenting skills would be different, our styles would be different if we were divorced or married, same as the personality. Nikki: Right. Ben: But it's a lot easier to accept Nikki today being her best friend than it is being her husband. But it's still, I'll also give it a day when she tells me she's not doing the effing book. I'll let her Italian hot head cool off a little bit. Nikki: Cool off for a minute. Ben: Then I'll come back. Catherine Shanahan: I'll take your roll of paper towels and I'll go home and talk to her tomorrow. Ben: Exactly. Karen Chellew: I love that. Well, thank you both for being with us today and to our listeners, the book is Our Happy Divorce. And your website is ourhappydivorce.com. You're on Instagram. You're on Facebook I believe as well. Ben: Facebook, Twitter, everything @ourhappydivorce. Yeah. Karen Chellew: All right. We're happy to meet you. Nikki: Nice to meet you. Karen Chellew: And we hope to see you soon at Mrs2Me. We'll talk with you a little bit more about that. Nikki: Thank you. Karen Chellew: Thank you again. Have a nice and safe and healthy day. Ben: Yeah, thank you. And thank you for everything you guys do. Thank you. Karen Chellew: Thank you. Have a great day. Bye. Ben: All right, thank you guys so much, and let us know about that whatever... the summit or whatever- Karen Chellew: Yeah, we will. We'll reach out to you. Ben: However you want to use us to help spread the message because it sounds like we're very much aligned. Karen Chellew: Great. Yeah, we'll stay in touch. Ben: Okay. Thank you guys. Karen Chellew: Bye. Catherine Shanahan: Be well. Bye.  

Daniel Keene talks with Ben Oh about his play Curtain at Forty Five Downstairs http://media.rawvoice.com/joy_sundayartsmagazine/p/joy.org.au/sundayarts/wp-content/uploads/sites/276/2020/02/Curtain-.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:47 — 11.7MB) Subscribe or Follow Us: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS The post Daniel Keene – Curtain at Forty-Five Downstairs appeared first on Sunday Arts Magazine.

You pursued your dream job, got hired, and you’ve been there a few years. But, what if you feel the pull to pursue a new career direction? On this bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job, Ben Oh and I talk about deciding to leave a dream job behind. Ben shares how trusting his instincts and fighting unrealistic expectations led him to a job he loves. Ben also breaks down how he stayed confident that making a career change was the right decision.

In our 4th season 2 episode, we discuss the latest installment of The Conners, “Lanford…Lanford,” in which Darlene’s precarious love triangle with our beloved David Healy (Johnny Galecki) and sexy, hirsute newcomer Ben…something (Jay R. Ferguson) finally falls apart. In this emotional and well-paced episode of The Conners, Darlene and David finally share some real … Continue reading S2 E4: Darlene & David & Ben, Oh My!

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Benjamin Hong This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Benjamin Hong who is a Senior UI Developer at Politico where he lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He has worked with other companies including Treehouse, Element 84, and Udacity. Charles and Benjamin talk about his past and current projects, and how it’s different working for the government vs. working for a business. Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 1:06 – Chuck: Tell us a brief introduction, please. 1:23 – Ben: I am a lead frontend developer at Politico. 1:43 – Chuck: It’s an area that can affect everyone. How did you get into developing? 1:52: Ben: I had everything you can think of to develop at first. 2:10 – Chuck: For me it was a TI90 calculator! 2:18 – Chuck: Was it somebody or something that pushed you towards this area? 2:32 – Ben: I wanted to change something with the theme, Googled it, and it went from there, and the Marquis Tag. 2:51 – Chuck: And the Blink Tag! The goodies. So you got the he HTML book – and what website did you build that was your first big project? 3:07 – Ben: It was fiddling around, but it was fortune cookie universe. 3:20 – Chuck: You will have to recreate it! 3:27 – Ben: I think this was 1993/1995 timeframe. 3:40 – Chuck: Yep, me too same time frame. If you had something move on your website it was so cool. You went to building... 4:02 – Ben: JavaScript was a roadblock for me. There was nobody to correct me. I had a JavaScript book and it was a massive failure. 4:33 – Chuck: You took a break and you came back? 4:40 – Ben: Oh – people will PAY you to do this?! 4:54 – Chuck: Did you go to college? 5:01 – Ben: Yes, I have a Master’s in a different field. I was always a tech junkie. I just wanted to put things together. 5:20 – Chuck: Take us through your journey through JS? 5:30 – Ben: I started off with the jQuery piece of it. I needed Java, and it took me awhile to wrap my head around it at first. Through the trial and process of trying to get into Angular and React, too. 6:19 – Chuck: Did you play with Backbone, Knockout, or Ember? 6:32 – Ben: I did do SOME Ember and some Knockout. Those were my first interactions. 6:49 – Chuck: What got you into the profession? How did you get from your Master’s to being a tech guy? 7:14 – Ben: From the Master’s field I learned a lot about human experience, and anted to breed the two together. Also, consulting and helping to build things, too. 7:44 – Charles: What was the career change like? 7:53 – Ben: I went to the federal government at first around the recession – it was good having a stable job. I was bored, though. While I was working for the government I was trying to get my foot in the door. From there I have been building my way up. 8:30 – Ben: I was working on Medicare.gov and then later... 8:46 – Charles: We won’t use the word “disaster”! What is it like to work for the government? 9:20 – Ben: Yep. The federal government is a different area because they are stake holders. They were about WHO owned the content, and who do we have to talk to get something approved. It was not product oriented like a business. I made my transition to Politico, because I wanted to find solutions and diversify the problems I was having. 10:31 – Chuck: Have you been there from the beginning? 10:39 – Ben answers the question. Ben: They were looking for frontend developers 10:54 – Chuck: You are the lead there now. What was that like with the transition? 11:08 – Ben talks about the beginnings stages of his time with Politico and the current situation. He talks about the different problems, challenges, and etc. 11:36 – Chuck: Do you consider yourself a news organization or? 11:47 – Ben: We have Politico Pro, too. I have been working with this site more so. There are updates about campaign and voting data. People will pay a fee. 12:25 – Chuck: Do they pain themselves as leaning one way or another or nonpartisan? 12:38 – Ben: We are objective and nonpartisan. 12:51 – Chuck: I know, I was hesitant to ask. What’s the mission of the company and into what you do? 13:09 – Ben: The projects get dumped to us and we are about solving the problems. What is the best route for solving it? I had to help pioneer the new framework into the tech staff is one of my roles. 13:48 – Chuck: What’s your tech stack? 13:55 – Ben: JavaScript and Vue.js. We are experimenting with other software, too. 14:16 – Chuck: We should get you talking about Vue on the other show! Are you working at home? 14:32 – Ben answers the question. Ben: One thing I am helping with Meetup. Community outreach is important and I’m apart of that. 15:09 – Chuck: Yep, it’s interesting to see various fields into the tech world. I am not one of those liberal arts majors, I do have a computer science degree. It’s interesting to see the different perspectives. How little it is for someone to be able to dive-in right away. What are you working on? 16:09 – Ben: Meetup population and helping with the work at Politico. 16:27 – Chuck: Reusable components. Are those opensource or only internal? 16:41 – Ben: They are now opensource but we are seeing which portions can be opensource or not. 17:01 – Chuck: Different companies have come out and offered their opensource. Where do they find you? 17:20 – BenCodeZen! They are more than welcome to message me. 17:36 – Chuck: Any advice on newbies to this field? 17:46 – Ben: Attending those meetings and making those connections. 18:18 – Chuck: I have been writing a book on HOW to get a job as a coder. That’s the same advice that I am giving, too. 18:46 – Chuck: Picks! 18:51 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! Links: React Angular Vue.js JavaScript Ember Elm jQuery BenCodeZen Ben’s LinkedIn Ben’s Crunch Base Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: Charles Framework Summit – UT (Ember, Elm, and tons more!) Microsoft Ignite Code Badge Ben Conference in Toronto Conference in Atlanta, GA (Connect Tech) Conference in London – Vue

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Benjamin Hong This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Benjamin Hong who is a Senior UI Developer at Politico where he lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He has worked with other companies including Treehouse, Element 84, and Udacity. Charles and Benjamin talk about his past and current projects, and how it’s different working for the government vs. working for a business. Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 1:06 – Chuck: Tell us a brief introduction, please. 1:23 – Ben: I am a lead frontend developer at Politico. 1:43 – Chuck: It’s an area that can affect everyone. How did you get into developing? 1:52: Ben: I had everything you can think of to develop at first. 2:10 – Chuck: For me it was a TI90 calculator! 2:18 – Chuck: Was it somebody or something that pushed you towards this area? 2:32 – Ben: I wanted to change something with the theme, Googled it, and it went from there, and the Marquis Tag. 2:51 – Chuck: And the Blink Tag! The goodies. So you got the he HTML book – and what website did you build that was your first big project? 3:07 – Ben: It was fiddling around, but it was fortune cookie universe. 3:20 – Chuck: You will have to recreate it! 3:27 – Ben: I think this was 1993/1995 timeframe. 3:40 – Chuck: Yep, me too same time frame. If you had something move on your website it was so cool. You went to building... 4:02 – Ben: JavaScript was a roadblock for me. There was nobody to correct me. I had a JavaScript book and it was a massive failure. 4:33 – Chuck: You took a break and you came back? 4:40 – Ben: Oh – people will PAY you to do this?! 4:54 – Chuck: Did you go to college? 5:01 – Ben: Yes, I have a Master’s in a different field. I was always a tech junkie. I just wanted to put things together. 5:20 – Chuck: Take us through your journey through JS? 5:30 – Ben: I started off with the jQuery piece of it. I needed Java, and it took me awhile to wrap my head around it at first. Through the trial and process of trying to get into Angular and React, too. 6:19 – Chuck: Did you play with Backbone, Knockout, or Ember? 6:32 – Ben: I did do SOME Ember and some Knockout. Those were my first interactions. 6:49 – Chuck: What got you into the profession? How did you get from your Master’s to being a tech guy? 7:14 – Ben: From the Master’s field I learned a lot about human experience, and anted to breed the two together. Also, consulting and helping to build things, too. 7:44 – Charles: What was the career change like? 7:53 – Ben: I went to the federal government at first around the recession – it was good having a stable job. I was bored, though. While I was working for the government I was trying to get my foot in the door. From there I have been building my way up. 8:30 – Ben: I was working on Medicare.gov and then later... 8:46 – Charles: We won’t use the word “disaster”! What is it like to work for the government? 9:20 – Ben: Yep. The federal government is a different area because they are stake holders. They were about WHO owned the content, and who do we have to talk to get something approved. It was not product oriented like a business. I made my transition to Politico, because I wanted to find solutions and diversify the problems I was having. 10:31 – Chuck: Have you been there from the beginning? 10:39 – Ben answers the question. Ben: They were looking for frontend developers 10:54 – Chuck: You are the lead there now. What was that like with the transition? 11:08 – Ben talks about the beginnings stages of his time with Politico and the current situation. He talks about the different problems, challenges, and etc. 11:36 – Chuck: Do you consider yourself a news organization or? 11:47 – Ben: We have Politico Pro, too. I have been working with this site more so. There are updates about campaign and voting data. People will pay a fee. 12:25 – Chuck: Do they pain themselves as leaning one way or another or nonpartisan? 12:38 – Ben: We are objective and nonpartisan. 12:51 – Chuck: I know, I was hesitant to ask. What’s the mission of the company and into what you do? 13:09 – Ben: The projects get dumped to us and we are about solving the problems. What is the best route for solving it? I had to help pioneer the new framework into the tech staff is one of my roles. 13:48 – Chuck: What’s your tech stack? 13:55 – Ben: JavaScript and Vue.js. We are experimenting with other software, too. 14:16 – Chuck: We should get you talking about Vue on the other show! Are you working at home? 14:32 – Ben answers the question. Ben: One thing I am helping with Meetup. Community outreach is important and I’m apart of that. 15:09 – Chuck: Yep, it’s interesting to see various fields into the tech world. I am not one of those liberal arts majors, I do have a computer science degree. It’s interesting to see the different perspectives. How little it is for someone to be able to dive-in right away. What are you working on? 16:09 – Ben: Meetup population and helping with the work at Politico. 16:27 – Chuck: Reusable components. Are those opensource or only internal? 16:41 – Ben: They are now opensource but we are seeing which portions can be opensource or not. 17:01 – Chuck: Different companies have come out and offered their opensource. Where do they find you? 17:20 – BenCodeZen! They are more than welcome to message me. 17:36 – Chuck: Any advice on newbies to this field? 17:46 – Ben: Attending those meetings and making those connections. 18:18 – Chuck: I have been writing a book on HOW to get a job as a coder. That’s the same advice that I am giving, too. 18:46 – Chuck: Picks! 18:51 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! Links: React Angular Vue.js JavaScript Ember Elm jQuery BenCodeZen Ben’s LinkedIn Ben’s Crunch Base Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: Charles Framework Summit – UT (Ember, Elm, and tons more!) Microsoft Ignite Code Badge Ben Conference in Toronto Conference in Atlanta, GA (Connect Tech) Conference in London – Vue

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Benjamin Hong This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles speaks with Benjamin Hong who is a Senior UI Developer at Politico where he lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He has worked with other companies including Treehouse, Element 84, and Udacity. Charles and Benjamin talk about his past and current projects, and how it’s different working for the government vs. working for a business. Check it out! In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 1:06 – Chuck: Tell us a brief introduction, please. 1:23 – Ben: I am a lead frontend developer at Politico. 1:43 – Chuck: It’s an area that can affect everyone. How did you get into developing? 1:52: Ben: I had everything you can think of to develop at first. 2:10 – Chuck: For me it was a TI90 calculator! 2:18 – Chuck: Was it somebody or something that pushed you towards this area? 2:32 – Ben: I wanted to change something with the theme, Googled it, and it went from there, and the Marquis Tag. 2:51 – Chuck: And the Blink Tag! The goodies. So you got the he HTML book – and what website did you build that was your first big project? 3:07 – Ben: It was fiddling around, but it was fortune cookie universe. 3:20 – Chuck: You will have to recreate it! 3:27 – Ben: I think this was 1993/1995 timeframe. 3:40 – Chuck: Yep, me too same time frame. If you had something move on your website it was so cool. You went to building... 4:02 – Ben: JavaScript was a roadblock for me. There was nobody to correct me. I had a JavaScript book and it was a massive failure. 4:33 – Chuck: You took a break and you came back? 4:40 – Ben: Oh – people will PAY you to do this?! 4:54 – Chuck: Did you go to college? 5:01 – Ben: Yes, I have a Master’s in a different field. I was always a tech junkie. I just wanted to put things together. 5:20 – Chuck: Take us through your journey through JS? 5:30 – Ben: I started off with the jQuery piece of it. I needed Java, and it took me awhile to wrap my head around it at first. Through the trial and process of trying to get into Angular and React, too. 6:19 – Chuck: Did you play with Backbone, Knockout, or Ember? 6:32 – Ben: I did do SOME Ember and some Knockout. Those were my first interactions. 6:49 – Chuck: What got you into the profession? How did you get from your Master’s to being a tech guy? 7:14 – Ben: From the Master’s field I learned a lot about human experience, and anted to breed the two together. Also, consulting and helping to build things, too. 7:44 – Charles: What was the career change like? 7:53 – Ben: I went to the federal government at first around the recession – it was good having a stable job. I was bored, though. While I was working for the government I was trying to get my foot in the door. From there I have been building my way up. 8:30 – Ben: I was working on Medicare.gov and then later... 8:46 – Charles: We won’t use the word “disaster”! What is it like to work for the government? 9:20 – Ben: Yep. The federal government is a different area because they are stake holders. They were about WHO owned the content, and who do we have to talk to get something approved. It was not product oriented like a business. I made my transition to Politico, because I wanted to find solutions and diversify the problems I was having. 10:31 – Chuck: Have you been there from the beginning? 10:39 – Ben answers the question. Ben: They were looking for frontend developers 10:54 – Chuck: You are the lead there now. What was that like with the transition? 11:08 – Ben talks about the beginnings stages of his time with Politico and the current situation. He talks about the different problems, challenges, and etc. 11:36 – Chuck: Do you consider yourself a news organization or? 11:47 – Ben: We have Politico Pro, too. I have been working with this site more so. There are updates about campaign and voting data. People will pay a fee. 12:25 – Chuck: Do they pain themselves as leaning one way or another or nonpartisan? 12:38 – Ben: We are objective and nonpartisan. 12:51 – Chuck: I know, I was hesitant to ask. What’s the mission of the company and into what you do? 13:09 – Ben: The projects get dumped to us and we are about solving the problems. What is the best route for solving it? I had to help pioneer the new framework into the tech staff is one of my roles. 13:48 – Chuck: What’s your tech stack? 13:55 – Ben: JavaScript and Vue.js. We are experimenting with other software, too. 14:16 – Chuck: We should get you talking about Vue on the other show! Are you working at home? 14:32 – Ben answers the question. Ben: One thing I am helping with Meetup. Community outreach is important and I’m apart of that. 15:09 – Chuck: Yep, it’s interesting to see various fields into the tech world. I am not one of those liberal arts majors, I do have a computer science degree. It’s interesting to see the different perspectives. How little it is for someone to be able to dive-in right away. What are you working on? 16:09 – Ben: Meetup population and helping with the work at Politico. 16:27 – Chuck: Reusable components. Are those opensource or only internal? 16:41 – Ben: They are now opensource but we are seeing which portions can be opensource or not. 17:01 – Chuck: Different companies have come out and offered their opensource. Where do they find you? 17:20 – BenCodeZen! They are more than welcome to message me. 17:36 – Chuck: Any advice on newbies to this field? 17:46 – Ben: Attending those meetings and making those connections. 18:18 – Chuck: I have been writing a book on HOW to get a job as a coder. That’s the same advice that I am giving, too. 18:46 – Chuck: Picks! 18:51 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! Links: React Angular Vue.js JavaScript Ember Elm jQuery BenCodeZen Ben’s LinkedIn Ben’s Crunch Base Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: Charles Framework Summit – UT (Ember, Elm, and tons more!) Microsoft Ignite Code Badge Ben Conference in Toronto Conference in Atlanta, GA (Connect Tech) Conference in London – Vue

On October 16th, Gruff Rhys joined our broadcast of Eclectic Kettle. We abridged the interview for airtime, but here's the full version, along with a transcript. Remember, you can win tickets for Gruff's October 23rd show at The Chapel in San Francisco here. Enjoy! Thank you to Leslie Hampton at The Owl Magazine for co-ordinating this interview with us.Ben Ward: Hi everyone, this is Ben Ward of BFF.fm's Eclectic Kettle. You're listening to a special extra release that we're putting out this week, which is my full interview with Gruff Rhys. Lead singer of Super Furry Animals and currently on tour promoting his new album “Babelsberg”.He'll be playing here in San Francisco on October 23rd; this coming Tuesday. We played parts of this interview on Eclectic Kettle on October 16th. This is the fuller version where we discuss his tour, the recording of the album and the efforts that went into the product that really defines the sound. We reminisce about his previous appearance at The Chapel which he remembers well. We also discuss his recent more politically pointed songs about Brexit and the National Health Service in the UK, touching on his songwriting philosophy and motivations, and inevitably get a bit stuck in on Brexit as we despair.I want to say a huge thank you to Leslie Hampton, who's guest -DJ'd on Eclectic Kettle before with me. She's over at The Owl Magazine and was instrumental in helping us put this interview together. Check out theowlmag.com for their show previews and other coverage.Finally, BFF.fm has two pairs of tickets for Gruff's October 23rd show to give away. Check out BFF.fm for giveaway details. It's trivially easy for you to enter! I hope you enjoy the interview, I hope you enjoy his show. Remember, the album is Babelsberg it's out now.And you can listen to listen to more great community radio here from the heart of San Francisco at BFF.fm.[Sample of Oh Dear! by Gruff Rhys, from Babelsberg.][Phone ringing…]Gruff Rhys: Hello?Ben: Er hello, Gruff?Gruff: Hello!Ben: Hi! It's Ben Ward from BFF.fm here. Is now still a good time to talk?Gruff: Yes! Sorry, I completely forgot but it's great!Ben: Oh, good! [laughs]. I'm British, obviously, but I'm calling you from San Francisco. Because you're playing here on the 23rd, I think that's right.Gruff: Yeah, yeah. Ah, great!Ben: And you're in DC now?Gruff: Yeah, we're on the way to DC. We've just driven past Baltimore, and I'm sat in the van and we're headed down the road to Washington. And we were just discussing the Washington antique grid system.Ben: How long have you been on tour now? About a week over here?Gruff: Yeah, we've been in North America, but we did a couple of Canadian shows and we're just heading down the east coast, and then we're going to start to go west after tonight.It was particularly memorable at The Chapel. It was so much fun, people really got involved. I think there were quite a few people on stage by the end.Ben: Wonderful. I was looking at the dates and you've got the San Francisco show and then LA and then that's the end of the tour. Are you even thinking about that much at this point? Or do you just take every date as it comes?Gruff: No, it's very exciting to hit the west coast, and y'know the set will be… I can't wait to see how the set will have developed. We've been rehearsing some new material on the road and it's quite exciting and it's changing every night.Ben: Ah, that's great.Gruff: Yeah, we're looking forward to bringing it to The Chapel.Ben: Yeah, and you played The Chapel last time you played solo. The Super Furries were in town a couple of years ago. Actually, Super Furries played on my birthday two years ago, which I appreciate very much…Gruff: Oh wow! Amazing.Ben: That was a nice present for me. But you toured American Interior two years before that, also at The Chapel. Do you have particular memories of the venue?Gruff: Yeah, it was my favourite show of that tour. I started introducing historical re-enactments into my shows and I think that was the high point of that endeavour. It was particularly memorable at The Chapel. It was so much fun, people really got involved. I think there were quite a few people on stage by the end.Ben: Yes, there were the two people performing with …the puppet, I remember.Gruff: Yeah. They were taking the role of various historical characters from the 1790s.Ben: [laughs] Is there anything… because I guess you're only going to be in town for a day is there anything you're looking forward to seeing in San Francisco when you make it here?Gruff: Yeah, I usually, in the Mission, err, I'll be trying out probably lots of good galleries and stuff. [inaudible] is up there. And erm, I'll go see if they've got something on. And err, yeah, there's lots of interesting things in that area. I've never been to the LSD Museum, I might do that.Ben: I wanted to chat to you a little about the new record, which obviously is why you're here. I've listened to it a lot, I really love it. One of the things that really struck me is that you've got a very recognisable voice and songwriting style. Something I really admire is that each of your solo records over the years has a pretty unique vibe. They really seem to stand out from one-another. This one's been really widely praised for the string arrangements and evocative sounds of the 60s like Serge Gainsbourg, Scott Walker and Lee Hazlewood, all wrapped up in that production. Do you approach each project with an intention to find something that's so new and different?I'm worried about writing the same song over and over again. I want every album to have a distinct character. I try to find a way of keeping it new, for myself at least.Gruff: Um, yeah inevitably. It's something I, I want every album to have a distinct character. I suppose my ambition with this record is to try and make a whole album out of the same structured palette and try to stick to that, and try not to go off on too many tangents in a way. That's my downside in the studio; I get overexcited! By the end it was very disciplined… I mean… I suppose songwriting's quite a slow-moving medium. I'm worried about writing the same song over and over again. I try to find a way of keeping it new, for myself at least. It's not a particularly experimental record but I hope lyrically it engages a bit with the present day so there is some relevancy to exist today [laughs].Ben: Yeah. It has these darker, bleaker lyrical themes throughout it than have jumped out of your previous records. I was actually back home in the UK a few weeks ago and I caught a little of your interview on the BBC [BBC 6Music] with Mark Radcliffe.Gruff: Ah yeah…Ben: And he, um… You remarked there, talking a little bit about how he sort-of said it's a darker record. And you pointed out that actually with the arrangements — with the strings — it comes out sounding actually quite uplifting and optimistic.When you started, did you have any idea you wanted it to end up like that? Was it working with Stephen McNeff that revealed that to you? Did you have to be persuaded to go in that direction?Gruff: Yeah, I mean when I was recording it I didn't have… err… I just got a call from a producer called Ali Chant in Bristol, who I'd recorded with previously, he said “if I wanted to make any records, the studio's being knocked down in a few weeks”. So I'd played some of this material with Kliph and Steve who play on the record and the previous tour. Osian has played piano on my previous two albums now and I, we rehearsed a bunch of songs we'd been putting together and went into the studio for a few days and it was always my intention to add a certain amount of arrangement but, coincidentally I was working with a composer called Stephen McNeff. I was writing some lyrics for him for a different project and I sat in on one of the recording sessions which was incredible. So I immediately passed him on the files of the sounds I was working on.But anyway, because there was no studio pressure I just kinda pursued the record until it was finished rather than rush it. It took a couple of years.Ben: So it gave you space to explore that bigger sound?Gruff: Yeah. The songs are intimate, but they're pretty much live takes for the most part. I spent time on vocal, but not to an extreme. And then Stephen arranged the orchestral element and they played live to the previous recordings.Ben: Oh, interesting…Gruff: So, although there's a lot going on it was fairly simply recorded in a way and not particularly polished. There's still some damage there!Ben: That's really interesting because I was going to ask, erm, and this might not be much of a question now, but given that you're back on tour and you're not going to fit a 72 piece orchestra into The Chapel — although I would like to see that — whether there's been any change to the music or evolution of what you're doing scaling it back down to tour. Because you're touring with a band this time, right?Gruff: Yeah, it's the same band who played on the record. It's Kliph Scurlock on drums, Osian Gwynedd on piano, Steve Black on bass, and that's the core of the album and they've allowed this thing to remix. And I suppose the challenge with mixing the album was fitting a symphony orchestra into what are very intimate songs, intimately recorded songs. So we had to kinda tone down the scale of it. So, it sounds remarkably full. Osian's piano parts kind of fill the space to the point where we don't need any kinda “canned” orchestral stuff. And it's continuing to evolve. We're stretching out different bits.I've rarely been able to play my studio albums live immediately after recording them. But because of the live nature of the recording, [this one] really lends itself to playing live. There wasn't much studio trickery on this particular record, as opposed to my other records that have a lot of studio experiments.Ben: That makes sense. So do you feel that the live sound goes back to more resemble some of those original sessions or is this something altogether new?Gruff: No, they're very similar to the original sessions. I think we're going to try and release those early versions at some point in the future. They sound great and completely different.And now and again we're able to do some orchestral shows. We have the scores and whenever and orchestra is interested we can do an orchestral version.Ben: Right, because you played it in Manchester no long ago, right?Gruff: Yeah, we're done a version in Cardiff with the full symphonic orchestra and then we've played with some smaller orchestras in London and Manchester. We have the manuscripts now, so if anyone's got an orchestra, call us up! [laughs]Ben: [laughs] We'll put out the call.I wanted to ask you about a couple of other pieces of music you've put out fairly recently. One of the things that over your career and history with the Super Furries as well you've grown into writing songs with clearer and clearer social commentaries. I've been thinking a lot about Presidential Suite [from Super Furry Animals album “Rings Around The World”] recently, with Brett Kavanaugh and Ken Starr in the news. But in the last couple of years you've written I Love EU and recently you put out No Profit in Pain which strike me as being a step into writing songs with a really overt political message. Was there something that drew you into that specifically, or artists that inspired you to be more direct? Did that just happen?Gruff: Erm, with I Love EU, I just happened to write the song. I mean, it's a really bad play on words. But I felt there was a song there. Sometimes when you have a simple lyrical idea the song almost writes itself in a very short amount of time if you run with an idea. It's just one of those stupid songs that I was able to write in a few minutes and then… I kinda had no intention of writing it. Y'know, there's a lot of downsides to streaming services, obviously, but one of the more interesting aspects of it is that you're able to release music almost immediately. There was a referendum going on and very little engagement in the referendum from my peers, I think. Because it was a kind of referendum whose agenda was being set by conservative politicians and right wing politicians and understandably a lot of sane people didn't want to touch it! So I was also worried that there was very little engagement…I felt there was nobody making a cultural argument [for the EU].Ben: The thing I really appreciated about you recording that song… Because, I watched the referendum living over here in the US. I went and registered to vote, I voted in it, my constituency is back in Cambridge.Gruff: YeahBen: But, it was really brutal watching that happen from so far away and feeling even more disconnected from… y'know… trying to stand up for, y'know… standing up for the principal of being in Europe and for all of its… it has some flaws as an institution and so on and so on but…Gruff: Absolutely, yeahBen: …Actually being closer to our continental neighbours is actually a good thing. Watching the campaign, the thing which really upset me was you had all these voices who were anti-Europe and angry and active and then you had a whole load of voices that were just, sort of passive. And there were very few people standing up to actually say: “Europe is good.” It was this idea of “we should leave” or “we should just shrug our shoulders”. There were very few people saying let's actually be proactive about this.Gruff: Yeah. I felt there was nobody making a cultural argument and that the set tone by people leading the remain campaign was playing alone with the kind-of anti-European xenophobia to the point that the song seems almost confrontational to say something as daft as “I love EU!” [laughs] Pathetically confrontational. When I've sung it live I've been singing “I love EU …with caveats.”Ben: [laughs]Gruff: You know, everyone has different views on what the EU should be. It needs to be democratised. It could become a socialist EU, it depends on what scale your ambitions are. I've got a lot of time for the left-wing argument for leaving the EU but I don't think the tone or the terms of the referendum were set by the left. They were kind-of led by the hostile right-wing media, in a time of crisis in Europe. With a big crisis in movement of people from war-zones in the Middle East and northern Africa that were partly caused by European intervention in the first place.Ben: Yeah…Gruff: I kinda feel it's a really bad time to be leaving the EU.I don't think I'm a protest song writer in particular. I'm motivated by melody and rhythm and word-play.Ben: Yeah, I agree completely. With that song and with the NHS song, was it cathartic to put together those songs? Is it more motivated by trying to spread that message? Do you think of them as protest songs in that classical sense?Gruff: I mean, I don't think I'm a protest song writer in particular. I'm motivated by melody and rhythm and word-play. And occasionally politics affects my daily life and they'll creep into song.I was commissioned to write a song to celebrate the 75th [anniversary] of the NHS and, you know, it's had a profound impact on my life. It's a kind of commission request that would be impossible to turn down. Y'know, to not agree to help celebrate it would be… it wasn't an option for me. But having said that I only wanted to do it if a decent idea came of it. I played around with some ideas and something came quite naturally. So I was happy to do it and I thought the song was valid, in fact I think I would have written it anyway. It would have been slightly less explicit maybe but it felt justified… just some kind of justification of existing.Ben: Yeah…Gruff: But again I like these kind of flippant songs that I can release.Ben: In “No Profit in Pain”, I love the little set of lyrics that calls out Richard Branson and Virgin Health. Because there's something in… the lyrics jump with recognisable words so you're like “wait, what?”. But it's the fact you're referring to this nuanced and not very well known, not well publicised threat to the NHS with the shadow privatisation, and the fact that you managed to highlight that there in a lyrically playful way, I admire that a lot.Gruff: [laughs] Weirdly we've just passed an ambulance here in DC that's broken down. And it's been picked up by one of those — what do you call them pick-up trucks? — by a tow-truck. Kliph to my left is just commenting that I hope there's no-one in the ambulance. The sirens were still flashing…Ben: Oh…Gruff: I hope they're OK.Ben: Yeah. That's calamitous.I'm conscious that I don't want to take up too much more of your time but if I could just ask a couple more things just to sign off. Going back to Babelsberg, is there a particular favourite track on the album that you'd like us to play on the radio show on Tuesday night?Gruff: Yeah, I dunno… I haven't heard “Oh Dear!” on the radio. I'd be intrigued to hear what the third track “Oh Dear!” sounds like.Ben: All right. Would you be kind enough to introduce it?Gruff: OK. My name is Gruff, and I'm going to introduce you to this song from the LP “Babelsberg”. It's called “Oh Dear!”.Ben: That's great, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you.Gruff: Thank you.Ben: Thank you so much for taking the time.Gruff: No! Thank you.Ben: I wanted to… it means a lot to me. Super Furry Animals was the very first live show I ever went to in my life. I was sixteen. My Dad took me.Gruff: Oh wow. Wow.Ben: It would have been the Guerrilla tour at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. And, um, one it was a really good first show, but I feel like I owe a great deal of my love of music to you and your band.Gruff: Wow.Ben: So to get to talk to you is a real honour for me. So, thank you so much.Gruff: Ah, thank you very much. Ah, that's mind blowing. Thank you very much. And yeah, I love the Corn Exchange in Cambridge.Ben: Yeah. For a small city I saw so many good shows there growing up.Gruff: Yeah.Ben: It punched above its weight.Gruff: Yeah, I think we played there three or four times.Ben: Well, thank you again. I hope you have a great show in D.C.Gruff: Thank you.Ben: I will try to come and say hi when you're here in SF; try and catch you at the merch table.Gruff: Ah, thanks so much. I'll check out the show if it's on the internet. Amazing.Ben: Well, great to talk to you. Have a great day. Have a great show.Gruff: And you, ta. Thanks so much. OK, take care.Ben: Thank you, bye now.Gruff: Bye!Ben: That was Gruff Rhys in conversation with me, Ben Ward from BFF.fm's Eclectic Kettle. His record “Babelsberg” is out now, his show at The Chapel here in San Francisco is on October 23rd. You can check out BFF.fm to win one of two pairs of tickets that we're giving away for that show.Thank you again to Leslie Hampton at The Owl Magazine for helping set this up. And you can tune in to more episodes of Eclectic Kettle by swinging by BFF.fm/shows/eclectic-kettle to listen to the archives, or we're broadcasting live at 8pm every Tuesday night.Tune into BFF.fm, streaming online any time for great, local community music radio here from the heart of San Francisco. Thank you very much for listening, have a great day. Enjoying the show? Please support BFF.FM with a donation. Check out the full archives on the website.

Tracy Lee: @ladyleet | ladyleet.com Ben Lesh: @benlesh | medium.com/@benlesh Show Notes: 00:50 - What is This Dot? 03:26 - The RxJS 5.5.4 Release and Characterizing RxJS 05:14 - Observable 07:06 - Operators 09:52 - Learning RxJS 11:10 - Making RxJS Functional Programming Friendly 12:52 - Lettable Operators 15:14 - Pipeline Operators 21:33 - The Concept of Mappable 23:58 - Struggles While Learning RxJS 33:09 - Documentation 36:52 - Surprising Uses of Observables 40:27 - Weird Uses of RxJS 45:25 - Announcements: WHATWG to Include Observables and RxJS 6 Resources: this.media RxJS RX Workshop Ben Lesh: Hot vs Cold Observables learnrxjs.io RxMarbles Jewelbots Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 91. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and your podcast host-in-training. Joining me today on the podcast is Elrick Ryan. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's up? CHARLES: Not much. How are you doing? ELRICK: I'm great. Very excited to have these two folks on the podcast today. I feel like I know them… CHARLES: [Laughs] ELRICK: Very well, from Twitter. CHARLES: I feel like I know them well from Twitter, too. ELRICK: [Laughs] CHARLES: But I also feel like this is a fantastic company that is doing a lot of great stuff. ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: Also not in Twitter. It should be pointed out. We have with us Tracy Lee and Ben Lesh from This Dot company. TRACY: Hey. CHARLES: So first of all, why don't we start, for those who don't know, what exactly is This Dot? What is it that you all do and what are you hoping to accomplish? TRACY: This Dot was created about a year ago. And it was founded by myself and Taras who work on it full-time. And we have amazing people like Ben, who's also one of our co-founders, and really amazing mentors. A lot of our friends, when they refer to what we actually do, they like to call it celebrity consulting. [Laughter] TRACY: Which I think is hilarious. But it's basically core contributors of different frameworks and libraries who work with us and lend their time to mentor and consult with different companies. So, I think the beautiful part about what we're trying to do is bring together the web. And we sort of do that as well not only through consulting and trying to help people succeed, but also through This Dot Media where it's basically a big playground of JavaScripting all the things. Ben and I do Modern Web podcast together. We do RX Workshop which is RxJS training together. And Ben also has a full-time job at Google. CHARLES: What do they got you doing over there at Google? BEN: Well, I work on a project called Alkali which is an internal platform as a service built on top of Angular. That's my day job. CHARLES: So, you've been actually involved in all the major front-end frameworks, right, at some point? BEN: Yeah, yes. I got my start with Angular 1 or AngularJS now, when I was working as a web developer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at a company called Aesynt which was formerly McKesson Automation. And then I was noticed by Netflix who was starting to do some Angular 1 work and they hired me to come help them. And then they decided to do Ember which is fine. And I worked on a large Ember app there. Then I worked on a couple of large React apps at Netflix. And now I'm at Google building Angular apps. CHARLES: Alright. BEN: Which is Angular 5 now, I believe. CHARLES: So, you've come the full circle. BEN: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. CHARLES: [Chuckles] I have to imagine Angular's changed a lot since you were working on it the first time. BEN: Yeah. It was completely rewritten. TRACY: I feel like Angular's the new Ember. CHARLES: Angular is the new Ember? TRACY: [Laughs] BEN: You think? TRACY: Angular is the new Ember and Vue is the new AngularJS, is basically. [Laughs] CHARLES: Okay. [Laughter] CHARLES: What's the new React then? BEN: Preact would be the React. CHARLES: Preact? Okay, or is Glimmer… BEN: [Laughs] I'm just… CHARLES: Is Glimmer the new React? BEN: Oh, sure. [Laughs] CHARLES: It's important to keep these things straight in your head. BEN: Yeah, yeah. CHARLES: Saves on confusion. TRACY: Which came first? [Chuckles] BEN: Too late. I'm already confused. CHARLES: So now, before the show you were saying that you had just, literally just released RxJS, was it 5.5.4? BEN: That's right. That's right. The patch release, yeah. CHARLES: Okay. Am I also correct in understanding that RxJS has kind of come to very front and center position in Angular? Like they've built large portions of framework around it? BEN: Yeah, it's the only dependency for Angular. It is being used in a lot of official space for Angular. For example, Angular Material's Data Table uses observables which are coming from RxJS. They've got reactive forms. The router makes use of Observable. So, the integration started kind of small which HTTPClient being written around Observable. And it's grown from there as people seem to be grabbing on and enjoying more the React programming side of things. So, it's definitely the one framework that's really embraced reactive programming outside of say, Cycle.js or something like that. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, just to give a general background, how would you characterize RxJS? BEN: It's a library built around Observable. And Observable is a push-based primitive that gives you sets of events, really. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: So, that's like Lodash for events would be a good way to put it. You can take anything that you can get pushed at you, which is pretty much value type you can imagine, and wrap it in an observable and have it pushed out of the observable. And from there, you have a set of things that you can combine. And you can concatenate them, you can filter them, you can transform them, you can combine them with other sets, and so on. So, you've got this ability to query and manipulate in a declarative way, events. CHARLES: Now, Observable is also… So, when Jay was on the podcast we were talking about Redux observable. But there was outside of the context of RxJS, it was just observables were this standalone entity. But I understand that they actually came from the RxJS project. That was the progenitor of observables even though there's talk of maybe making them part of the JavaScript spec. BEN: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, RxJS as it stands is a reference implementation for what could land in JavaScript or what could even land in the DOM as far as an observable type. Observable itself is very primitive but RxJS has a lot of operators and optimizations and things written around Observable. That's the entire purpose of the library. CHARLES: Mmhmm. So, what kind of value-adds does it provide on top of Observable? If Observable was the primitive, what are the combinators, so to speak? BEN: Oh, right. So, similar to what Lodash would add on top of say, an iterable or arrays, you would have the same sorts of things and more inside of RxJS. So, you've got zip which you would maybe have seen in Lodash or different means of combines. Of course, map and ‘merge map' which is like a flattening sort of operation. You can concatenate them together. But you also have these time-based things. You can do debouncing or throttling of events as they're coming over in observable and you create a new observable of that. So, the value-add is the ability to compose these primitive actions. You can take on an observable and make a new observable. We call it operators. And you can use those operators to build pretty much anything you can imagine as far as an app would go. CHARLES: So, do you find that most of the time all of the operators are contained right there inside RxJS? Or if you're going to be doing reactive programming, one of your tasks is going to be defining your own operators? BEN: No, pretty much everything you'd need will be defined within RxJS. There's 60 operators or so. CHARLES: Whoa, that's a lot. BEN: It's unlikely that someone's going to come up with one. And in fact, I would say the majority of those, probably 75% of those, you can create from the other 25%. So, some of the much more primitive operators could be used… TRACY: Which is sort of what Ben did in this last release, RxJS 5…. I don't know remember when you introduced the lettable operators but you… BEN: Yeah, 5.5. TRACY: Implemented [inaudible] operators. BEN: Yeah, so a good portion of them I started implementing in terms of other operators. CHARLES: Right. So, what was that? I didn't quite catch that, Tracy. You said that, what was the operator that was introduced? TRACY: So, in one of the latest releases of RxJS, one of the more significant releases where pipeable operators were introduced, what Ben did was he went ahead and implemented a lot of operators that were currently in the library in terms of other operators, which was able to give way to reduce the size of the library from, I think it was what, 30KB bundled, gzipped, and minified, to about 30KB, which was about 60 to 70% of the operators. Right, Ben? BEN: Yeah. So, the size reduction was in part that there's a lot of factors that went into the size reduction. It would be kind of hard to pin it down to a specific operator. But I know that some of the operators like the individual operators themselves, by reimplementing reduce which is the same as doing as scan and then take last, implementing it in terms of that is going to reduce the size of it probably 90% of that one particular file. So, there's a variety of things like that that have already started and that we're going to continue to do. We didn't do it with every operator that we could have. Some operators are very, very common and consequently we want them to be as optimized as possible. For example, map. You can implement map in terms of ‘merge map' but it would be very slow to do so. It might be smaller but it would be slower. We don't want that. So, there are certain areas we're always going to try to keep fairly a hot path to optimize them as much as possible. But in other spots like reduce which is less common and isn't usually considered to be a performance bottleneck, we can cut some corners. Or ‘to array' or other things like that. CHARLES: Mmhmm. TRACY: And I think another really interesting thing is a lot of people when learning RxJS, they… it's funny because we just gave an RX Workshop course this past weekend and the people that were there just were like, “Oh, we've heard of RxJS. We think it's a cool new thing. We have no plans to implement it in real life but let's just play around with it and let me learn it.” I think as people are starting to learn RxJS, one of the things that gets them really overwhelmed is this whole idea that they're having to learn a completely new language on top of JavaScript or what operators to use. And one of our friends, Brian Troncone who is on the Learning Team, the RxJS Learning Team, he pulled up the top 15 operators that were most commonly searched on his site. And some of them were ‘switch map', ‘merge map', ‘fork join', merge, et cetera. So, you can sort of tell that even though the library has quite a few… it's funny because Ben, I think the last RX Workshop you were using pairs and you had never used it before. BEN: Yeah. TRACY: So, it's always amusing for me how many people can be on the core team but have never implemented RxJS… CHARLES: [Laughs] TRACY: A certain way. BEN: Right. Right, right, right. CHARLES: You had said one of the recent releases was about making it more friendly for functional programming. Is that a subject that we can explore? Because using observables is already pretty FP-like. BEN: What it was before is we had dot chaining. So, you would do ‘dot map' and then call a method and then you get an observable back. And then you'd say ‘dot merge' and then you'd call a method on that, and so on and so forth. Now what you have is kind of a Ramda JS style pipe function that just takes a comma-separated list of other functions that are going to act upon the observable. So, it reads pretty much the same with a little more ceremony around it I guess. But the upside is that you can develop your operators as just higher-order functions. CHARLES: Right. And you don't have to do any monkey-patching of prototypes. BEN: Exactly, exactly. CHARLES: Because actually, okay, I see. This is actually pretty exciting, I think. Because we actually ran into this problem when we were using Redux Observable where we wanted to use some operators that were used by some library but we had to basically make a pull request upstream, or fork the upstream library to include the operators so that we could use them in our application. It was really weird. BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: The reason was because it was extending the observable prototype. BEN: Yeah. And there's so many… and that's one way to add that, is you extend the observable prototype and then you override lift so you return the same type of observable everywhere. And there are so many things that lettable operators solved for us. For example… CHARLES: So, lettable operators. So, that's the word that Tracy used and you just used it. What are lettable operators? BEN: Well, I've been trying to say pipeable and get that going instead of lettable. But basically there's an operator on RxJS that's been there forever called let. And let is an operator and what you do is you give it a function. And the function gives you the source observable and you're expected to return a new observable. And the idea is that you can then write a function elsewhere that you can then compose in as though it were an operator, anywhere you want, along with your other dot-chained operators. And the realization I had a few months ago was, “Well, why don't we just make all operators like this?” And then we can use functional programming to compose them with like a reduce or whatever. And that's exactly what the lettable operators are. And that's why I started calling them lettable operators. And I kind of regret it now, because so many people are saying it and it confuses new people. Because what in the world does lettable even mean? CHARLES: Right. [Laughs] BEN: So, they are pipeable operators or functional operators. But the point is that you have a higher-order function that returns a function of a specific shape. And that function shape is, it's a function that receives an observable and returns an observable, and that's it. So, basically it's a function that transforms an observable into a new observable. That's all an operator. That's all an operator's ever been. It's just this is in a different flavor. CHARLES: Now, I'm curious. Why does it do an observable into an observable and not a stream item into an observable? Because when you're actually chaining these things together, like with a map or with a ‘flat map' or all these things, you're actually getting an individual item and then returning an observable. Well, I guess in this case of a map you're getting an item and returning an item. But like… BEN: Right, but that's not what the entire operation is. So, you've got an operation you're performing whenever you say, if you're to just even dot-chain it, you'd say ‘observable dot map'. And when you say ‘dot map', it returns a new observable. And then you say ‘dot filter' and it returns another new observable. CHARLES: Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. BEN: So, this function just embodies that step. CHARLES: I see, I see. And isn't there some special… I feel like there's some proposal for some special JavaScript syntax to make this type of chaining? BEN: Yeah, yeah, the pipeline operator. CHARLES: Okay. BEN: I don't know. I think that's still at stage one. I don't know that it's got a lot of headway. My sources and friends that are in the TC39 seem to think that it doesn't have a lot of headway. But I really think it's important. Because if you look at… the problem is we're using a language where the most common use case is you have to build it, get the size as small as possible because you need to send it over the wire to the browser. And understandably, browsers don't want to implement every possible method they could on say, Array, right? CHARLES: Mmhmm, right. BEN: There's a proposal in for ‘flat map'. They could add zip to Array. They could add all sorts of interesting things to Array just by itself. And that's why Lodash exists, right? CHARLES: Right. BEN: Is because not everything is on Array. And then so, the onus is then put on the community to come up with these solutions and the community has to build libraries that have these constraints in size. And what stinks about that is then you have say, an older version of Lodash where you'd be like, “Okay, well it has 36 different functions in it and I'm only using 3 of them. And I have to ship them all to the browser.” CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And that's not what you want. So, then we have these other solutions around tree-shaking and this and that. And the real thing is what you want is you want to be able to compose things left to right and you want to be able to have these functions that you can use on a particular type in an ad hoc way. And there's been two proposals to try to address this. One was the ‘function bind' operator, CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: Which is colon colon. And what that did is it said, “You can use this function as a method, as though it were a method on an object. And we'll make sure that the ‘this' inside that function comes from the instance that's on the left-hand side of colon colon.” CHARLES: Right. BEN: That had a bunch of other problems. Like there's some real debate I guess on how they would tie that down to a specific type. So, that kind of fell dead in the water even though it had made some traction. And then the pipeline operator is different. And then what it says is, “Okay, whatever is on the…” And what it looks like is a pipe and a greater than right next to each other. And whatever's on the left-hand side of that operand gets passed as the first argument to the function on the right-hand side of that operand. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And so, what that means is for the pipeable operators, instead of having to use a pipe method on observable, you can just say, “instance of observable, pipeline operator and an operator, and then pipeline operator, and then the Rx operator, and then pipeline operator and the Rx operator, and so on.” And it would just be built-in. And the reason I think that JavaScript really needs it is that means that libraries like Lodash can be written in terms of simple functions and shipped piece-meal to the browser exactly as you need them. And people would just use the pipeline operator to use them, instead of having to wrap something in a big object so you can dot-chain things together or come up with your own functional pipe thing like RxJS had to. CHARLES: Right. Because it seems it happens again and again, right? Lodash, RxJS, jQuery. You just see this pattern of chaining, which is, you know… BEN: Yeah, yeah. People want chaining. People want left to right composition. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And it's problematic in a world where you want to shake off as much unused garbage as possible. And the only way to get dot chaining is by augmenting a prototype. There's all sorts of weird problems that can come with that. And so, the functional programming approach is one method. But then people look at it and they say, “Ooh, yuck. I've got to wrap things in a function named pipe. Wouldn't it be nicer if there was just some syntax to do this?” And yeah, it would be nicer. But I have less control over that. CHARLES: Right. But the other alternative is to have right to left function composition. BEN: Right, yeah. CHARLES: But there's not any special syntax for that, either. BEN: Not very readable. CHARLES: Yeah. BEN: So, you just wrap everything. And the innermost call is the first one and then you wrap it in another function and you wrap that in another function, and so on. Yeah, that's not [inaudible]. But I will say that the pipe function itself is pretty simple. It's basically a function that takes a rest of arguments that are all functions. CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: And so, you have this array of functions and you just reduce over it and call them. Well, you return a function. So, it's a higher function. You return a function that takes an argument then you reduce over the functions that came in as arguments and you call each one of them with whatever result was from the previous. CHARLES: Right. Like Tracy mentioned in the pre-show, I'm an aspiring student of functional programming. So, would this be kind of like a monoid here where you're mashing all these functions together? Is your empty value? I'm just going to throw it out there. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's my conjecture. BEN: Yes. Technically, it's a monoid because it wouldn't work unless it was a monoid. Because monoids, I believe the category theory I think for monoid is that monoids can be concatenated because they definitely have an end. CHARLES: Right. BEN: So, you would not be able to reduce over all those functions and build something with that, like that, unless it was a monoid. So yeah, the fact that there's reduction involved is a cue that it's a monoid. CHARLES: Woohoo! Alright. [Laughter] CHARLES: Have you found yourself wanting to apply some of these more “rigorous” formalisms that you find out there in the development of RxJS or is that just really a secondary concern? BEN: It's a secondary concern. It's not something that I like. It's something I think about from time to time, when really, debating any kind of heavy issue, sometimes it's helpful. But when it comes to teaching anybody anything, honestly the Haskell-isms and category theory names, all they do is just confuse people. And if you tell somebody something is a functor, they're like, “What?” And if you just say it's mappable, they're like, “Oh, okay. I can map that.” CHARLES: [Laughs] Right, right. BEN: And then the purists would be like, “But they're not the same thing.” And I would be like, “But the world doesn't care. I'm sorry.” CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of experiencing this debate myself. I'm not quite sure which side I fall on, because on the one hand it is arbitrary. Functor is a weird name. But I wish the concept of mappable existed. It does, but I feel like it would be handy if people… because there's literally five things that are super handy, right? Like mappable, if we could have a name for monoid. But it's like, really, you just need to think in terms of these five constructs for 99% of the stuff that you do. And so, I always wonder, where does that line lie? And how… mappable, is that really more accessible than functor? Or is that only because I was exposed to the concept of mapping for 10 years before I ever heard the F word. BEN: Yes, and yes. I mean, that's… CHARLES: [Laughs] BEN: Things that are more accessible are usually more accessible because of some pre-given knowledge, right? What works in JavaScript probably isn't going to work in Haskell or Scala or something, right? CHARLES: Mmhmm. BEN: If someone's a Java developer, certain idioms might not make sense to them that come from the JavaScript world. CHARLES: Right. But if I was learning like a student, I would think mappable, I'd be thinking like, I would literally be thinking like Google Maps or something like that. I don't know. BEN: Right, right. I mean, look at C#. C#, a mapping function is always going to be called select, right, because that's C#. That's their idiom for the same thing. CHARLES: Select? BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: Really? BEN: Yeah, select. So, they'll… CHARLES: Which in Ruby is like find. BEN: Yeah. there's select and then, what's the other one, ‘select many' or something like that. [Chuckles] BEN: So, that's C#. CHARLES: Oh, like it's select from SQL. Okay. BEN: Yeah, I think that's kind of where it came from because people had link and then they had link to SQL and then they're like, well I want to do this with regular code, with just using some more… less nuanced expressions. So, I want to be able to do method calls and chain those together. And so, you end up with select functions. And I think that that exists even in Rx.NET, although I haven't used Rx.NET. CHARLES: Hmm, okay. ELRICK: So, I know you do a lot of training with Rx. What are some of the concepts that people struggle with initially? TRACY: I think when we're teaching RX Workshop, a lot of the people sort of… I'll even see senior level people struggle with explaining it, is the difference between observables and observers and then wrapping their head around the idea that, “Hey, observables are just functions in JavaScript.” So, they're always thinking observables are going to do something for you. Actually, it's not just in Angular but also in React, but whenever someone's having issues with their Rx applications, it's usually something that they're like nesting observables or they're not subscribing to something or they've sort of hot-messed themselves into a tangle. And I'm sure you've debugged a bunch of this stuff before. The first thing I always ask people is, “Have you subscribed?” Or maybe they're using an Angular… they're using pipes async but they're also calling ‘dot subscribe' on their observable. BEN: Yeah. So, like in Angular they'll do both. Yeah. There's that. I think that, yeah, that relates to the problem of people not understanding that observables are really just functions. I keep saying that over and over again and people really don't seem to take it to heart for whatever reason. [Chuckles] BEN: But you get an observable and when you're chaining all those operators together, you're making another observable or whatever, observables don't do anything until you subscribe to them. They do nothing. CHARLES: Shouldn't they be called like subscribable? BEN: Yes. [Chuckles] BEN: They probably should. But we do hand them an observer. So, you are observing something. But the point being is that they don't do anything at all until you subscribe to them. And in that regard, they're like functions, where functions don't do anything unless you call them. So, what ends up happening with an observable is you subscribe to it. You give it an observer, three callbacks which are then coerced into an observer. And it takes that observer and it hands it to the body of this observable definition and literally has an observer inside of there. And then you basically execute that function synchronously and do things, whatever those things are, to set up some sort of observation. Maybe you spin up a WebSocket and tie into some events on it and call next on the observer to get values out of your observable. The point being that if you subscribe to an observable twice, it's the same thing as calling a function twice. And for some reason, people have a hard time with that. They think, if I subscribe to the observable twice, I've only called the function once. CHARLES: I experienced this confusion. And I remember the first time that that… like, I was playing with observables and the first time I actually discovered that, that it was actually calling my… now what do you call the function that you pass to the constructor that actually does, that calls next or that gets passed the observer? TRACY: [Inaudible] BEN: I like to call it an initialization function or something. But the official name from the TC39 proposal is subscriber function. CHARLES: Subscriber function. So, like… BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: I definitely remember it was one of those [makes explosion sound] mind-blowing moments when I realized when I call my subscribe method, the entire observable got run from the very beginning. But my intuition was that this is an object. It's got some shared state, like it's this quasar that I'm now observing and I'm seeing the flashes of light coming off of it. But it's still the same object. You think of it as having yeah, not as a function. Okay. No one ever described it to me as just a function. But I think I can see it now. ELRICK: Yeah, me neither. CHARLES: But yeah, you think of it in the same way that most people think of objects, as like, “I have this object. I have a reference to it.” Let observable equal new observable. It's a single thing. It's a single identity. And so, that's the thing that I'm observing. It's not that I'm invoking this observable to observe things. And I think that's, yeah, that's a subtle nuance there. I wish I had taken y'all's course, I guess is what I'm saying. ELRICK: Yeah. BEN: Yeah. Well, I've done a few talks on it. CHARLES: [Laughs] BEN: I always try to tell people, “It's just a function. It's just a function.” I think what happens to a lot of people too is there's the fact that it's an object. But I think what it is, is people's familiarity with promises does this. Because promises are always multicast. They are always “hot”. And the reason for this is because they're eager. So, by the time you have a promise, whatever is producing value to the promise has already started. And that means that they're inherently a multicast. CHARLES: Right. BEN: So, people are used to that behavior of, I can ‘then' off of this promise and it always means one thing. And it's like, yeah, because the one thing has nothing to do with the promise. It wasn't [Chuckles] CHARLES: Right. BEN: This promise is just an interface for you to view something that happened in the past, where an observable is more low-level than that and more simple than that. It just states, “I'm a function that you call. I'm going to be able to do anything a function can do. And by the way, you're giving me an observer and I'm going to do some stuff with that too and notify you via this observer that you handed me.” Because of that you could take an observable and close over something that had already started. Say you had a WebSocket that was already running. You could create a new observable and just like any function, close over that, externally create a WebSocket. And then everyone that subscribes to that observable is tying an observer to that same WebSocket. Then you're multicast. Then you're “hot”. ELRICK: [Inaudible] CHARLES: Right. So, I was going to say that's the distinction that Jay was talking about. He was talking about we're going to just talk about… he said at the very beginning, “We're just going to talk about hot observable.” ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: But even a hot observable is still theoretically evaluating every single time you subscribe. You're getting a new observable. You're evaluating that observable afresh each time. It just so happens that in the lexical scope of that observable subscriber function, there is this WebSocket? BEN: Yeah. So, it's the same thing. Imagine you wrote a function that when you called it created a new WebSocket and then… say, you wrote a new function that you gave an observer object to, right? An observer object has next, error, and complete. And in that function, when you called it, it created a new WebSocket and then it tied the ‘on message' and ‘on close' and whatever to your observer's next method and your observer's error message and so on. When you call that function, you would expect a new WebSocket to be created every single time. Now, let's just say alternately you create a WebSocket and then you write a new function that that function closes over that WebSocket. So, you reference the WebSocket that you externally created inside of your function. When you call that function, it's not going to create a new WebSocket every time. It's just closing over it, right? So, even though they both are basically doing the same thing, now the latter one of those two things is basically a hot observable and the former is a cold observable. Because one is multicast which is, “I'm sharing this one WebSocket with everybody,” and the other one is unicast which is, “I am going to create a new WebSocket for each person that calls me.” And that's the [inaudible] people have a hard time with. CHARLES: Right. But really, it's just a matter of scope. BEN: Yeah. The thing people have a hard time with, with observables, is not realizing that they're actually just functions. CHARLES: Yeah. I just think that maybe… see, when I hear things like multicast and unicast, that makes me think of shared state, whereas when you say it's just a matter of scope, well then I'm thinking more in terms of it being just a function. It just happens that this WebSocket was already [scoped]. BEN: Well, shared state is a matter of scope, right? CHARLES: Yes, it is. It is. Oh, sorry. Shared state associated with some object identity, right? BEN: Right. CHARLES: But again, again, it's just preconceptions, really. It's just me thinking that I've had to manage lists of listeners and have multicast observers and single-cast observers and having to manage those lists and call notify on all of them. And that's really not what's happening at all. BEN: Yeah. Well, I guess the real point is observables can have shared state or they could not have shared state. I think the most common version and the most composable version of them, they do not have any shared state. It's just one of those things where just like a function can have shared state or it could be pure, right? There's nothing wrong with either one of those two uses of a function. And there's nothing wrong with either one of those two uses of Observable. So, honest to god, that is the biggest stumbling block I think that I see people have. That and if I had to characterize it I would say fear and loathing over the number of operators. People are like… CHARLES: [Chuckles] BEN: And they really think because everyone's used to dealing with these frameworks where there's an idiomatic way to do everything, they think there's going to be an RxJS idiomatic way to do things. And that's just patently false. That's like saying there's an idiomatic way to use functions. There's not. Use it however it works. The end. It's not… CHARLES: Mmhmm, mmhmm. BEN: You don't have to use every operator in a specific way. You can use it however works for you and it's fine. ELRICK: I see that you guys are doing some fantastic work with your documentation. Was that part of RxJS 2.0 docs? TRACY: I was trying to inspire people to take on the docs initiative because I think when I was starting to learn RxJS I would get really frustrated with the docs. BEN: Yeah. TRACY: I think the docs are greatly documented but at the same time if you're not a senior developer who understands Rx already, then it's not really helpful. Because it provides more of a reference point that the guys can go back and look at, or girls. So anyways, after many attempts of trying to get somebody to lead the project I just decided to lead the project myself. [Laughter] TRACY: And try to get… the community is interesting because I think because the docs can be sometimes confusing… Brian Troncone created LearnRxJS.io. There's these other visualization projects like RxMarbles, RxViz, et cetera. And we just needed to stick everybody together. So, it's been a project that I think has been going on for the past two months or so. We have… it's just an Angular app so it's probably one of the most easiest projects to contribute to. I remember the first time I tried to contribute to the Ember docs. It literally took me an hour to sit there with a learning team, Ember Learning Team member and… actually, maybe it was two hours, just to figure out how the heck… like all the things I had to download to get my environment set up so that I could actually even contribute to the darn documentation. But with the Rx, the current RxJS docs right now is just an Angular app. You can pull it down. It's really easy. We even have people who are just working on accessibility, which is super cool, right? So, it's a very friendly place for beginners. BEN: I'm super pleased with all the people that have been working on that. Brian and everybody, especially on the accessibility front. Jen Luker [inaudible] came in and voluntarily… she's like the stopgap for all accessibility to make sure everything is accessible before we release. So, that's pretty exciting. TRACY: Yeah. ELRICK: Mmhmm. TRACY: So funny because when me and Jen started talking, she was talking about something and then I was like, “Oh my god, I'm so excited about the docs.” She's like, “I'm so excited, too! But I don't really know why I'm excited. But you're excited, so I'm excited. Why are you excited?” [Laughter] TRACY: I was like, “I don't know. But I'm excited, too!” [Chuckles] TRACY: And then all of a sudden we have accessibility. [Laughs] ELRICK: Mmhmm. Yeah, I saw some amazing screenshots. Has the new docs, have they been pushed up to the URL yet? TRACY: Nah, they are about to. We were… we want to do one more accessibility run-through before we publish it. And then we're going to document. We want to document the top 15 most viewed operators. But we should probably see that in the next two weeks or so, that the new docs will be… I mean, it'll say “Beta, beta, beta” all over everything. But actually also, some of our friends, [Dmitri] from [Valas] Software, he is working on the translation portion to make it really easy for people to translate the docs. CHARLES: Ah. TRACY: So, a lot of that came from the inspiration from the Vue.js docs. we're taking the versioning examples that Ember has done with their docs as inspiration to make sure that our versioning is really great. So, it's great that we can lend upon all the other amazing ideas in the industry. ELRICK: Oh, yeah. CHARLES: Yeah, it's fantastic. I can't wait to see them. ELRICK: Yeah, me neither. The screenshots look amazing. I was like, “Wow. These are some fabulous documentation that's going to be coming out.” I can't wait. TRACY: Yeah. Thank you. CHARLES: Setting the bar. ELRICK: Really high. [Laughter] CHARLES: Actually, I'm curious. Because observables are so low-level, is there some use of them that… what's the use of them that you found most surprising? Or, “Whoa, this was a crazy hack.” BEN: The weirdest use of observables, there's been quite a few odd ones. One of the ones that I did one time that is maybe in RxJS's wheelhouse, it was just that RxJS already existed. So, I didn't want to pull in another transducer library, was using RxJS as a transducer. Basically… in Netflix we had a situation where we had these huge, huge arrays of very large objects. And if you try to take something like that and then map it and then filter it and then map it and then filter it, we're using Array map and filter, what ends up happening is you create all sorts of intermediary arrays in-memory. And then garbage collection has to come through and clean that up. And that locks your thread. And over time, we were experiencing slowness with this app. And it would just build up until eventually it ground to a halt. And I used RxJS because it was an available tool there to wrap these arrays in an observable and then perform operations on them step-by-step, the same map, filter, and so on. But when you do that, it doesn't create intermediary arrays because it passes each value along step to step instead of producing an entire array and then doing another step and producing an entire array, and so on. So… CHARLES: So, will you just… BEN: It saved garbage collection and it increased the performance of the app. But that's just in an extreme case. I would never do that with just regular arrays. If anything, it was because it was huge, huge arrays of very large objects. CHARLES: So, you would create an observable our of the array and then just feed each element into the observable one at a time? BEN: Well, no. If you say ‘observable from' and you give it an array, that's basically what it does. CHARLES: Okay. BEN: It loops over the array and nexts those values out of the array synchronously. CHARLES: I see, I see. BEN: So, it's like having a for loop and then inside of that for loop saying, “Apply the map. Apply the filter,” whatever, to each value as they're going through. But when you look at it, if you had array map, filter, reduce, it's literally just taking the first step and saying ‘observable from' and wrapping that array and then the rest of it's still the same. CHARLES: Right. Yeah. No, that's really cool. BEN: That was a weirder use of it. I've heard tell of other things where people used observables to do audio synchronization, which is pretty interesting. Because you have to be very precise with audio synchronization. So, hooking into some of the Web Audio APIs and that sort of thing. That's pretty interesting. The WebSocket multiplexing is something I did at Netflix that's a little bit avant-garde for observable use because you essentially have an observable that is your WebSocket. And then you create another observable that closes over that observable and sends messages over the WebSocket for what you're subscribed to and not subscribed to. And it enables you to very easily retry connections and these sorts of things. I did a whole talk on that. That one's pretty weird. CHARLES: Yeah. Man, I [inaudible] to see that. BEN: But in the general use case, you click a button, you make an AJAX request, and then you get that back and maybe you make another AJAX request. Or like drag and drop and these sorts of things where you're coordinating multiple events together, is the general use case. The non-weird use case for RxJS. Tracy does weird stuff with RxJS though. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah, what's some weird uses of RxJS? TRACY: I think my favorite thing to do right now is to figure out how many different IoT-related things I can make work with RxJS. So, how many random things can I connect to an application using that? BEN: Tracy's projects are the best. They're so good. [Laughter] TRACY: Well, Ben and I created an application where you can take pictures of things using the Google Image API and it'll spit back a set of puns for you. So, you take a picture of a banana, it'll give you banana puns. Or you can talk to it using the speech recognition API. My latest thing is I really want to figure out how to… I haven't figured out if Bluetooth Low Energy is actually enabled on Google Home Minis. But I want to get my Google Home Mini to say ‘booty'. [Inaudible] [Laughter] CHARLES: RxJS to the rescue. [Laughter] BEN: Oh, there was, you remember Ng-Cruise. We did Ng-Cruise and on there, Alex Castillo brought… TRACY: Oh, that was so cool. BEN: All sorts of interesting… you could read your brain waves. Or there was another one that was, what is it, the Microsoft, that band put around your wrist that would sense what direction your arm was in and whether or not your hand was flexed. And people… TRACY: Yeah, so you could flip through things. BEN: Yeah. And people were using reactive programming with that to do things like grab a ball on the screen. Or you could concentrate on an image and see if it went blurry or not. ELRICK: Well, for like, Minority Report. BEN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Literally, watching a machine read your mind with observables. That was pretty cool. That's got to be the weirdest. TRACY: Yeah, or we had somebody play the piano while they were wearing one of the brainwave… it's called the OpenBCI project is what it is. And what you can do is you can actually get the instructions to 3D print out your own headset and then buy the technology that allows you to read brain waves. And so with that, it's like… I mean, it was really awesome to watch her play the piano and just see how her brain waves were going super crazy. But there's also these really cool… I don't know if you guys have heard of Jewelbots, but they're these programmable friendship bracelets that are just little Arduino devices that light up. I have two of them. I haven't even opened them. CHARLES: [Laughs] TRACY: I've been waiting to play with them with you. I don't know what we're going to do, but I just want to send you lights. Flashing lights. [Laughter] TRACY: Morse code ask you questions about RxJS while you're working. [Laughter] CHARLES: Yeah. Critical bug. Toot-toot-toot-too-too-too-too-toot-toot. [Laughter] CHARLES: RxJS Justice League. TRACY: That would actually be really fun. [Laughter] TRACY: That would be really fun. I actually really want to do that. But… CHARLES: I'm sure the next time we talk, you will have. TRACY: [Laughs] Yes. Yes, yes, yes, I know. I know. we'll do it soon. We just need to find some time while we're not going crazy with conferences and stuff like that. CHARLES: So, before we head out, is there any upcoming events, talks, releases, anything that we ought to be, we or the listeners, ought to be aware of? TRACY: Yeah, so one of the things is that Ben and I this weekend actually just recorded the latest version of RX Workshop. So, if you want to learn all about the latest, latest, newest new, you can go ahead and take that course. We go through a lot of different things like multiplex WebSockets, building an application. Everywhere from the fundamentals to the more real world implementations of RxJS. BEN: Yeah. Even in the fundamentals area, we've had friends of ours that are definitely seasoned Rx veterans come to the workshop. And most of them ask the most questions while talking about the fundamentals. Because I tend to dig into, either deep into the internals or into the why's and how's thing. Why and how things work. Even when it comes to how to subscribe to an observable. Deep detailed information about what happens if you don't provide an error handler and certain cases and how that's going to change in upcoming versions, and why that's changing in upcoming versions, and what the TC39's thoughts are on that, and so on and so forth. So, I try to get into some deeper stuff and we have a lot of fun. And we tend to be a little goofier at the workshops from time to time than we were in this podcast. Tracy and I get silly when we're together. TRACY: It's very true. [Laughter] TRACY: But I think also, soon I think there are people that are going to be championing an Observable proposal on what [inaudible]. So, aside from the TC39 Observable proposal that's currently still at stage one, I don't know Ben if you want to talk a little bit about that. BEN: Oh, yeah. So, I've been involved in conversations with folks from Netflix and Google as well, Chrome team and TC39 members, about getting the WHATWG, the ‘what wig', they're a standards body similar to W3C, to include observables as part of the DOM. The post has not been made yet. But the post is going to be made soon as long as everybody's okay with it. And what it boils down to is the idea of using observables as part of event targets. An event target is the API we're all familiar with for ‘add event listener', ‘remove event listener'. So, pretty much anywhere you'd see those methods, there might also someday be an on method that would return an observable of events. So, it's really, really interesting thing because it would bring at least the primitives of reactive programming to the browser. And at the very least it would provide maybe a nicer API for people to subscribe to events coming from different DOM elements. Because ‘add event listener' and ‘remove event listener' are a little unergonomic at times, right? CHARLES: Yeah. They're the worst. BEN: Yeah. CHARLES: That's a very polite way of putting it. BEN: [Chuckles] So, that's one thing that's coming down the pipe. Other things, RxJS 6 is in the works. We recently tied off 5.5 in a stable branch. And master is now our alpha that we're working on. So, there's going to be a lot of refactoring and changes there, trying to make the library smaller and smaller. And trying to eliminate some of the footprints that maybe people had in previous versions. So, moving things around so people aren't importing stuff that were meant to be implementation details, reducing the size of the library, trying to eliminate some bloat, that sort of thing. I'm pretty excited about that. But that's going to be in alpha ongoing for a while. And then hopefully we'll be able to move into beta mid first quarter next year. And then when that'll be out of beta, who knows? It all depends on how well people like the beta and the alpha, right? CHARLES: Alright. Well, so if folks do want to follow up with y'all either in regards to the course or to upcoming releases or any of the other great stuff that's coming along, how would they get in touch with y'all? TRACY: You can find me on Twitter @ladyleet. But Ben is @BenLesh. RX Workshop is RXWorkshop.com. I think in January we're going to be doing state of JavaScript under This Dot Media again. So, that's where all the core contributors of different frameworks and libraries come together. So, we'll definitely be giving a state of RxJS at that time. And next year also Contributor Days will be happening. So, if you go to ContributorDays.com you can see the previous RxJS Contributor Days and figure out how to get involved. So, we're always open and happy and willing to teach everybody. And again, if you want to get involved it doesn't matter whether you have little experience or lots of experience. We are always willing to show you how you can play. BEN: Yeah. You can always find us on Twitter. And don't forget that if you don't find Tracy or I on Twitter, you can always message Jay Phelps on Twitter. That's important. @_JayPhelps. Really. TRACY: Yeah. [Laughter] BEN: You'll find us. CHARLES: [Chuckles] Look for Jay in the show notes. [Laughter] CHARLES: Alright. Well, thank you so much for all the stuff that y'all do, code and otherwise. And thank you so much Ben, thank you so much Tracy, for coming on the show. BEN: Thank you. CHARLES: Bye Elrick and bye everybody. If you want to reach out to us, you can always get in touch with us at @TheFrontside or send us an email at contact@frontside.io. Alright everybody, we'll see you next week.

Ben joins us once again for some trailer reviews and gives his synopsis on the film mother!. SPOILERS and shenanigans ahead! All of our music was made by Jeremy L. Follow him at soundcloud.com/izmejeremy Follow Us: facebook.com/TheRobotPancake/ twitter.com/TheRobotPancake

Panel Kyle Richter (twitter) Nathan Eror (twitter github) Ben Scheirman (twitter github blog NSSreencast) Andrew Madsen (twitter github blog) Jaim Zuber (twitter Sharp Five Software) Rod Schmidt (twitter github infiniteNIL) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:01 - Kyle Richter & Nathan Eror Introduction Empirical Development 01:18 - The Future of iOS Devices (Speculations) Hardware Controllers Apple TV Latency 04:33 - Building Games on the iOS Platform Sprite Kit Unity Cocos2d UIKit 08:08 - Creative Assets (Art, Sound, Etc.) Infinity Blade II Letterpress Doodle Jump Slender 13:45 - Challenges of Building a Game Artist/Developer Relationships Production Art Tileable Art 22:29 - Tools 26:42 - Optimizations Pre-Allocating Only Rendering What’s Necessary 33:48 - Shaders 36:51 - GameCenter 40:04 - Getting into Game Development Picks Trainyard (Ben) Space Team (Ben) Duolingo (Ben) Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry (Ben) Physics of Light - John Carmack (Ben) Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (Ben) Overcoming iOS Game Memory Limits (Jaim) Big Nerd Ranch Blog (Andrew) Code Signing and Mavericks (Andrew) CocoaColor (Andrew) NinjaHit (Rod) Joybox (Rod) OpenGameArt (Chuck) 080 JSJ Impact.js with Dominic Szablewski JavaScript Jabber #081: Testing Promises for Async JavaScript with Pete Hodgson (Chuck) Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1 (Nathan) Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 2 (Nathan) Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 3 (Nathan) 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development by Fletcher Dunn and Ian Parberry (Nathan) #AltDevBlog (Nathan) Sleep Cycle (Kyle) Pivvot (Kyle) Hungry Shark Evolution (Kyle) Next Week New iOS APIs Transcript CHUCK: Alright, Nathan, how do you say your last name? NATHAN: Eror, just like – CHUCK: Eror, okay. NATHAN: Yeah, just like NSError, except that it spelled differently. KYLE: Your middle initial is “S”, right? BEN: [Laughter] NATHAN: I wish. I’ve considered getting it legally changed. CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 27 of the iPhreaks Show! This week on our panel, we have Ben Scheirman. BEN: Hello from Houston, eagerly awaiting the iPad event. CHUCK: Andrew Madsen. ANDREW: Hi from Salt Lake City and I don’t get to buy anything today. CHUCK: Jaim Zuber. JAIM: Hello from Minneapolis! CHUCK: Rod Schmidt. ROD: Merry Christmas from Salt Lake City! CHUCK: I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. This week, we have 2 special guests. We have Kyle Richter. KYLE: Good morning from Key West! CHUCK: And, do you prefer Nate or Nathan? NATHAN: Either one, it’s up to you. CHUCK: Nathan Eror. NATHAN: Hello! I’m also in Houston. CHUCK: Alright. Do you guys want to do a brief introduction since you haven’t been on the show before? KYLE: Sure, we can do that! My name is Kyle Richter. I’m the co-founder of Empirical Development. NATHAN: And I’m Nathan Eror. I am the game and development lead for Empirical Development. CHUCK: Awesome. Nobody plays games on their iOS device, so I’m not quite sure why we have you here. KYLE: No, it’s the passage fad for sure. I suspect that they’ll just be over in the next couple of weeks. CHUCK: Yeah. BEN: Once I get hardware, controllers are really going to ruin it. CHUCK: [Laughs] Do you think that’s going to be a thing? BEN: Yeah, they announced it at dub dub, that you’ll be able to get like sort of a Nintendo like shrink wrapped controller on top of the iPhone. I’m still waiting for one of those to come out. I want to play with one. KYLE: Logitech just released their print ad a couple of weeks ago for their first one. Mysteriously, it shows empty hand is holding a knife saying something’s missing [sound]. BEN: Oh! Awesome. CHUCK: [Laughs]

Panel Kyle Richter (twitter) Nathan Eror (twitter github) Ben Scheirman (twitter github blog NSSreencast) Andrew Madsen (twitter github blog) Jaim Zuber (twitter Sharp Five Software) Rod Schmidt (twitter github infiniteNIL) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:01 - Kyle Richter & Nathan Eror Introduction Empirical Development 01:18 - The Future of iOS Devices (Speculations) Hardware Controllers Apple TV Latency 04:33 - Building Games on the iOS Platform Sprite Kit Unity Cocos2d UIKit 08:08 - Creative Assets (Art, Sound, Etc.) Infinity Blade II Letterpress Doodle Jump Slender 13:45 - Challenges of Building a Game Artist/Developer Relationships Production Art Tileable Art 22:29 - Tools 26:42 - Optimizations Pre-Allocating Only Rendering What's Necessary 33:48 - Shaders 36:51 - GameCenter 40:04 - Getting into Game Development Picks Trainyard (Ben) Space Team (Ben) Duolingo (Ben) Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry (Ben) Physics of Light - John Carmack (Ben) Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (Ben) Overcoming iOS Game Memory Limits (Jaim) Big Nerd Ranch Blog (Andrew) Code Signing and Mavericks (Andrew) CocoaColor (Andrew) NinjaHit (Rod) Joybox (Rod) OpenGameArt (Chuck) 080 JSJ Impact.js with Dominic Szablewski JavaScript Jabber #081: Testing Promises for Async JavaScript with Pete Hodgson (Chuck) Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 1 (Nathan) Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 2 (Nathan) Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 3 (Nathan) 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development by Fletcher Dunn and Ian Parberry (Nathan) #AltDevBlog (Nathan) Sleep Cycle (Kyle) Pivvot (Kyle) Hungry Shark Evolution (Kyle) Next Week New iOS APIs Transcript CHUCK: Alright, Nathan, how do you say your last name? NATHAN: Eror, just like – CHUCK: Eror, okay. NATHAN: Yeah, just like NSError, except that it spelled differently. KYLE: Your middle initial is “S”, right? BEN: [Laughter] NATHAN: I wish. I've considered getting it legally changed. CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 27 of the iPhreaks Show! This week on our panel, we have Ben Scheirman. BEN: Hello from Houston, eagerly awaiting the iPad event. CHUCK: Andrew Madsen. ANDREW: Hi from Salt Lake City and I don't get to buy anything today. CHUCK: Jaim Zuber. JAIM: Hello from Minneapolis! CHUCK: Rod Schmidt. ROD: Merry Christmas from Salt Lake City! CHUCK: I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. This week, we have 2 special guests. We have Kyle Richter. KYLE: Good morning from Key West! CHUCK: And, do you prefer Nate or Nathan? NATHAN: Either one, it's up to you. CHUCK: Nathan Eror. NATHAN: Hello! I'm also in Houston. CHUCK: Alright. Do you guys want to do a brief introduction since you haven't been on the show before? KYLE: Sure, we can do that! My name is Kyle Richter. I'm the co-founder of Empirical Development. NATHAN: And I'm Nathan Eror. I am the game and development lead for Empirical Development. CHUCK: Awesome. Nobody plays games on their iOS device, so I'm not quite sure why we have you here. KYLE: No, it's the passage fad for sure. I suspect that they'll just be over in the next couple of weeks. CHUCK: Yeah. BEN: Once I get hardware, controllers are really going to ruin it. CHUCK: [Laughs] Do you think that's going to be a thing? BEN: Yeah, they announced it at dub dub, that you'll be able to get like sort of a Nintendo like shrink wrapped controller on top of the iPhone. I'm still waiting for one of those to come out. I want to play with one. KYLE: Logitech just released their print ad a couple of weeks ago for their first one. Mysteriously, it shows empty hand is holding a knife saying something's missing [sound]. BEN: Oh! Awesome. CHUCK: [Laughs]

I live 11 miles from Ben Quayle's campaign HQ. Apparently someone called the police on us when we were shooting this. A cop parked and stared at us for the last 10 minutes or so of shooting, then followed our car for a few miles after we left.Ben Quayle and Barack Obama actually do talk exactly like this.Kevin: Hi, I'm Kevin R. Breen from FAILocracy.com.Victoria: And I'm Victoria Andrews.Kevin: We're here today in front of Ben Quayle's campaign headquarters, about to do an interview with not only Ben, who is running for election in Arizona's 3rd congressional district, but also his father, former Vice President Dan Quayle.Victoria: Now they were supposed to meet us here, but I don't seem to see them anywhere...Kevin: Yeah, that is weird. Tell you what, we'll split up. You stay here in case they come by while I go look for them.Victoria: All right, sounds good.KEVIN WALKS OFF SCREENVictoria: Oh, there they are!CAMERA PANS OVER JUST SLIGHTLY, REVEALING KEVIN'S HAND IN A SOCK PUPPETVictoria: Mr. Quayle, Mr. Quayle, so glad you could make it.Ben: So glad to be here!Victoria: Now first, Ben, now that you've been caught writing explicit material and lying about it on dirtyscottsdale.com You said "my moral compass is so broken I can barely find the parking lot." A lot of people are saying that you don't really believe in the conservative Republican platform on which you're running, and that you're just a puppet for your dad. What do you say to that?Ben: Well, frankly, I think that's ridiculous!Victoria: Could we pan the camera over to get Dan in the shot with Ben?Dan (from offscreen) No! Pretend I'm not here.Ben: Sorry, my dad can't be in the shot because he run my teleprompter. Quit going off script Ben. No, don't say that part. Or this part. That's it, no ice cream. But dad! (Continues rambling)Victoria: Ben. Ben!Ben: Oh yeah, sorry. Anyways, as I was saying, my dad really has nothing to do with this campaign. I have a lot of respect for my dad, but my platform is mine alone. We aren't the same, but we complement each other. It's like he's the meat and I'm the potataueeDan: That's potato!Ben: Well then why did you put the E at the en--Dan: Shhh!Victoria: Well, your campaign commercial has a lot of people talking because you say that "Barack Obama is the worst president in history," even implying that you're going to go to Washington to "knock the hell out of it." PLAY COMMERCIAL Now first, I have got to say that your voice sounds much more masculine in person!Ben: Yeah, I was tearing up in that video because I was chopping an onion before filming.Victoria: Seriously? Your excuse is that you were chopping an onion?Ben: Yeah, I was making a potatauee salad. Just a minute.BEN POPS OFF SCREEN AND WHISPERS ARE HEARD, THEN HE COMES BACKBen: My dad can't believe you're making that joke.Victoria: Okay, so you say you're going to go against Obama and "knock the hell" out of Washington. What's you're strategy?Ben: Oh, yeah, well, Obama must be stopped, so first I need to have a chat with him. We're going to get together a team of elite Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger, then we're going to go in to the West Wing to overthrow the Obama, who is practically a dictator. Now, along the way, we'll probably discover a plot far-more sinister than we were led to believe when we were first hired, and innocent lives will be in the balance-Victoria: Okay, okay. Did you come up with this strategy while watching The Expendables?Ben: uhh... no! No! That's ridiculous. What, are you suggesting that a legitimate political candidate would take tactical strategy from a Sylvestor Stallone movie? Come on, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard!CUT TO REAGAN QUOTE: "Boy, I saw RAMBO last night. I know what to do the next time this happens."Former US President Ronald Reagan -following the release of 39 American hostages by Lebanese terrorists in 1985Ben: Oh. Huh. Well, this is awkward.Victoria: Well, once you get close enough to knock the hell out of Obama, what will you do?Ben: Oh, easy. I'm going to look him in the eyes, and I'm going to be like, "Go ahead punk! You make my day."Victoria: It still sounds like you're getting your strategy from movies.Ben: Let me finish. I'll get all up in his grill! I'll be like, you are screwing up America! You are ruining our freaking country, and I'm going to beat the crap out of you cuz I'm freakin Ben Quayle, bitch!Victoria: Well you're in luck! You don't have to wait!Ben: What?A BLACK SOCK PUPPET WALKS ON SCREENObama: Hey Victoria, hey Ben. Whatcha talking about?Ben: Oh, uhh...Victoria: You're just in time, Obama, Ben is about to set you straight! You aren't even going to know what hit you!Ben: Oh, well, Victoria, I, uhh...Victoria: Go ahead, give it to him, Ben.Obama: Uhh... what's going on?

* TEAM of Experts and Guests: o Your Host, Robert Helms o Co-Host and Financial Strategist, Russell Gray o Ron Black, Texas Investor Homes * On this week's show we'll discuss: o Understanding the players in the U.S. Finance World o Do Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Need a Lifeline? o The Indymac Seizure and the FDIC o Load Modification Realities o Investor Niche: The Model Home Leaseback * Please give us some feedback - write a review and rate us on our itunes page!