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This week on the blog, a podcast interview with screenwriter and author Neal Marshall Stevens about his new book on horror, “A Sense of Dread (Getting Under The Skin of Horror Screenwriting).”LINKSA Free Film Book for You: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/cq23xyyt12Another Free Film Book: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/x3jn3emga6Fast, Cheap Film Website: https://www.fastcheapfilm.com/Neal's book at Michael Wiese Productions: https://mwp.com/product-author/neal-marshall-stevens/Neal on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0139605/Brian Forrest's Blog: https://toothpickings.medium.com/Eli Marks Website: https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/Albert's Bridge Books Website: https://www.albertsbridgebooks.com/YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BehindthePageTheEliMarksPodcastNeal Stevens Transcript JOHN: Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you? NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.) But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart. The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure. JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story. NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones. They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn't have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me. BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “ NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in. And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement. BRIAN: Do you still have some of them? NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore. BRIAN: I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work? NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows. JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling. NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far. JOHN: Did you make it that far? NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then. JOHN: That's brutal. NEAL: Yeah. JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you? NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room. And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters. And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monstersand our other projects?” And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters. And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror. BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't? NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand. Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well. BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you? NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror. Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked. JOHN: Why do you think that is with you? NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal. It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through the ringer, watching that opening. And after that opening, the movie was never that violent again. He never showed anything like that again.And you didn't have to, because you—having seen that opening scene, you were—you were so blown out of your seats. You said, “I'm watching a movie where anything could happen to anyone.” And that was a kind of really intelligent and that kind of thoughtful use of violence is what George Romero was always able to do. It was understanding how graphic images can affect the psychology of the viewer. JOHN: Do you think it's also that with Romero's films, they're actually about something, whereas a slasher film is really just about a body count, but with Romero, he always had another thing going. NEAL: Well, of course, I mean, no movie that isn't about anything is ever going to really, from my perspective, be worth watching. But I mean, even a movie like Hostel, which is exceptionally violent and harrowing, is certainly about something. And I think Eli Roth's movies, which get a really bad rap, are very much about something. He's got something to say with his depictions of violence and his images. Not necessarily to my taste. I certainly wouldn't say that he's not, he's making movies that are certainly about something. He's not a dumb filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination. JOHN: So, you work on Monsters, and then what happens? NEAL: I worked on Monsters. I worked there for around six years, and then they were acquired by a big studio, and they were shut down. And so, I was out of work. I'd known a woman named Debbie Dion from Full Moon. I figured, well, I'll give that a shot. I'll call her up and see, maybe I could write for a Full Moon. And so, I gave her a shot. I, you know, reintroduced myself and said, you know, “I'm looking to see if I could get some job, maybe writing features for Full Moon Entertainment, Charlie Band's company.” And they said, “Well, we pay around $3,000 for a feature.” And I said, “Well, I got paid more than that for writing an episode of Monsters. That doesn't seem like such a good deal.” And then my unemployment insurance ran out. BRIAN: Suddenly it's a very good deal. NEAL: Sounds like suddenly a very good deal. But, you know, I made it very clear that money buys one draft, and if you want to rewrite, you got to pay me again, because I knew what development was like, where they just expect draft after draft after draft, and I'd say, “I can't do that, that doesn't make any sense.” And also, having worked for Monsters, I had learned to write really fast. I could write a pass on a Monsters episode in two days, so I knew that I could write fast, because these were 80-page scripts. And so, I started writing for Full Moon, and over the course of like the next few years, I wrote something like... 50 or 60 features for Charlie Band. And a lot of them got made, because they're not wasting money on movies that don't get made. Tons of them got made. And in the midst of doing that, I was, you know, whenever I got a break writing a full movie, I would write spec scripts, you know, in the hopes I could sell something of my own that wasn't for $3,000. I didn't have an agent at that point. I didn't have a manager at that point. And so, I'm not really good making cold calls to people. It's not my thing. I just like to sit, write my scripts. I'd come home one day, and I saw my wife was on the phone having this long conversation with someone. When she was done, I said, “Well, who was that?” “Oh yeah. I called up to order something.” I said, “So she's really good at getting on the phone and talking to people and calling them.” And so, I convinced her to be my manager. So, she agreed. She changed, you know, she went out under her maiden name. She managed to get an option on a science fiction script that I'd written that, I mean, it was ultimately bought. It was never made. And then I decided, you know what? Horror is really my bread and butter writing for Charlie Band. But I don't really have a horror spec. And most of what was out those days in horror didn't really scare me that much. I should really write a script that would scare me. So, I wrote a script called Deader, which I thought had all the stuff in it that I thought was really scary. And Judy went out with that script, sent it to a bunch of people, sent it to some folks at Stan Winston's company, as they had a development deal. The producer that she talked to really liked it, asked if he could sort of slip it to some people. He did, he sent it to someone, a producer at Dimension, it's based in New York, and he really liked it. And they showed it to Bob Weinstein. Bob Weinstein called us on Sunday. Am I half awake? Talk to Judy. Because they didn't know that Judy was my wife. He said, “This is the best goddamn script I've read. I'm like three quarters away. Come in on Monday and we'll talk about it.” So, we came in on Monday and they bought the script. And of course, at that point, it sort of went all over town. And for a very short period of time, it was like the flavor of the month and everyone loved me. And I got myself an agent and got myself like three pictures. And as I was a really big, big to-do. From that, I also got 13 Ghosts. I had like a really big opinion of myself after, after that sale. JOHN: Has that been tempered since then? NEAL: I kind of got the opinion that like, wow, selling scripts is easy. People wanted to hire me because that script was super hot and was all over town. I learned subsequently there are flavors in writers, and I was like that flavor of the month. That fades and then you have to really do a lot more work to get things sold. That was a hard lesson to learn. But I've managed to keep working over the years. I've written many scripts, sold some, and it's been a decent career. BRIAN: I was just wondering, you were having all the success writing screenplays, when did you decide to make a jump to writing a book? NEAL: Over the last five or six years, I've been teaching. A woman that I knew from NYU, actually, Dorothy Rumpolsky had been instrumental in starting a screenwriting program at David Lynch Institute for Cinematic Studies. And she realized at one point that she had a number of students who wanted to work in a horror. She remembered me back from NYU many years ago. So, she got in touch with me and wanted to know if I was interested in mentoring those students. And I said, absolutely. I done some other online teaching at other places. And so, the way it works is, you fly out for an opening few days where you meet the students. And then you fly back to where you come from. They go back to where they come from. And it's all done remotely, the mentoring. And so, I've been doing that now for five or six years. And during that kind of get together, you meet a bunch of guest lecturers and other teachers, other mentors. And a number of those people had written books for Michael Wiese productions. And, in the course of chatting, they suggested, well, you, you know, “You have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of horror and horror cinema. That might be a good book for Michael Wiese. Give them a call and see if you can come up with a pitch and an interesting take on it.” And so I did, and I called them and they responded. And so we were off to the races. JOHN: The book is really, maybe delightful is the wrong word, but it's a captivating book because as you read through it—you have outlined breaking down our different types of fears—you can immediately in your mind go, “Oh, that's what that movie was doing. Oh, that was that. That's what was happening there.” What was your research process like? NEAL: I think that the research kind of developed over the decades as I studied what made movies scary and what was working, not only in the movies that I was watching, but in the movies that I was writing. I mean, in the same way that when you work as a screenwriter, it becomes almost second nature to try to figure out what was working and what wasn't. Talking to fellow filmmakers and screenwriters, you have to say, “How many times do you watch a movie?” And a lot of times I will watch a movie 8, 10, 20 times. And there's a process that works when you watch a movie that many times, where you say “Certain things will work every time you watch a movie.”In the same way that you can watch a comedy and you can laugh every single time as certain things comes up. And other times, you start seeing the nuts and bolts and say, “Well, this is always working and here they're just connecting stuff.” And you start saying, “Ah, I get it. I see what they're doing. I see how they're taking this piece that works and this other piece that works and they couldn't quite, they kind of, they found some connective tissue to stick it together. I see exactly what they're doing.” And you start understanding—whether you're watching a comedy or you're watching a drama or you're watching a scary movie—they knew exactly how to make this thing scary. And this is how they're doing it. And they understood exactly how to make this thing scary. And it's like, ah, this is what they're using. Whether it is a spider crawling on someone, that's always going to work. Or, “Oh, I see, this is just a jump scare.” And the jump scare is, I understand, that's just, because a big bang, a loud noise, a hand reaching in from, that's just, that's always going to work. It's going to work no matter what. It's just a kind of placeholder scare, because they couldn't think of anything better. And there are movies where it's just jump scares. And you can always use a jump scare. You can sneak up on a cat and jab it and it'll jump. It's an instinctive response. And if a movie is just relying on jump scares, you know it's because they don't have anything better. They haven't got any deeper than just having the phone ring and they turn up the soundtrack. You can always get an audience to jump by putting a loud sound on the soundtrack. JOHN: Is there an example you can think of though, where there is a jump scare that you think is a genuinely good, effective jump scare? NEAL: I can think of a movie that has two really excellent jump scares. John Carpenter's The Thing. When the doctor's giving the electric shock to the guy's chest, and the chest opens and slams shut on his hand. Didn't expect it.That's a super great jump scare. It is perfectly integrated into that scene. Everyone jumps, but it's also a brilliant continuation of that scene. Second jump scare, when MacReady is testing everyone's blood. And saying, “We're going to do you next,” puts the needle in, and that thing jumps out of the Petri dish.Fantastic jump scare. We didn't see it coming. Everyone jumps. And it's again, it's perfectly integrated into that scene. So, two brilliant jump scares in what's already an incredibly brilliant movie. BRIAN: I remember watching the commentary on Jaws and Spielberg said he got greedy with his jump scares. He had the moment towards the end of the film, you remember that Jaws comes out of the water while it's being chummed. And he said he got this great reaction from the audience, and he wanted one more. And he went back, and he added in the scene earlier where the corpse face comes through the hole. And he said he never got the audience to react as well to the shark after he added in that corpse face coming through the hole of the ship. And I wondered, do you think there's a point of diminishing returns with jump scares in one movie? NEAL: I think there absolutely is. I mean—and I have no end of admiration for Jaws. I think it may be one of the most brilliant movies ever, and it certainly has stood the test of time. JOHN: So, we've each come armed with some movies here that I thought it would be fun to talk about them with you, so that you could sort of delve into the different types of fear that are outlined in the book and we'll just sort ofcheckerboard back and forth here. I'm going to start with one of my favorite sense of dread movies, and that's Don't Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, directed by Nick Roeg which I saw way too young. First R rated movie I saw. I remember I knew that it was supposed to be really scary, and I went with my older brother, and we were standing in line and the seven o'clock show was letting out. And I said to my brother, “Well, it can't be that scary. They're not saying anything.” Not realizing that they had all been stunned into silence about the last five minutes of that movie. So, what are your thoughts on Don't Look Now and where does that fit? NEAL: When I talk about the sense of dread, which is what my book is about, it's the notion of those aspects of our lives that we think of as safe and secure and dependable and sacred being suddenly or unexpectedly penetrated by the unknown or the unnatural, the unexpected. And you have to say, well, what are the things that we depend on? We depend on our homes. We depend on our families. And so that relationship of parent and child, what violates that? And the loss of a child, loss is already wrenching. And so, this sense of parents having lost a child, but then this notion that, well, maybe not, maybe the child is still out there somewhere, is so deeply disturbing. And so this weird, this quest, this pursuit in them. And meanwhile, in the background, you have the sense of a killer, of killings going on. This really disturbing notion of the woman's half decayed body being pulled out of the water is just as an image is—and again, the notion of human body being reduced to mere flesh—it's deeply disturbing. And nakedness, coupled with decay, it's deeply disturbing. And all of this sort of happening in the background. We don't quite know how these pieces connect. The notion that the search for the child and the notion that there's a killer on the loose. We know, because the nature of cinematic storytelling is telling us that somehow these things are going to connect, because, I mean, in the real world, there are countless thousands of things drifting around that don't necessarily hook up. But we know that one thing is going to collide with another. And so, there's this growing sense of profound unease, because we know, somehow, this child in this Red Riding Hood cape is wandering around, it's like, is this the child? Is the child going to become embroiled in this? But what we don't, certainly don't expect is the ending that confronts us in the finale, which is so incredibly, the reversal is so terrifying and so hits us in the face of that sense of innocence—revealed in such a terrifying way—is the essence of dread. Where we expect to find innocence, we find a nightmare. JOHN: What's great about what Nick Roeg did there was—if you read Daphne du Maurier's short story—he basically shot the last paragraph of that short story. Cinematically, he figured out the way that she's laying out what's going on with Donald Sutherland's character at that moment. He figured out a way to make it cinematic. So, like you say, all the pieces suddenly fall into place in those last few seconds. And, like you said, we've been brought to this place, we had no idea that that's where it was going to turn. Neal, tell me about Enemy from Space, and what you like about that. NEAL: Enemy from Space is the second of the three Quatermass movie, adaptations of the serial. It's in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and all these other movies about human beings who are being invaded and infested by alien forces. In this case, over the past few years—but in the context of the story—there have been rains of these tiny little meteorites. Anyone who finds them, they crack open and what's inside infests human beings. And you can find these tiny little burn marks, these V shaped marks on them. And the parasites take them over and make them into these kind of human slaves. And the premise is they serve this larger being, this kind of group entity, and they proceed to start building these atmosphere plants, with the goal ultimately to turn the earth into a colony for these beings that come from outer space. But the notion of these human beings, they have infiltrated our government, infiltrated our community, and they gradually take people over, scary enough. And they have built this enormous plant that looks, he says, this looks just like this proposed lunar base with these giant atmospheric domes. A group of people managed to infiltrate one of these bases and he looks inside, manages to get close enough to look inside one of these domes and inside are the parasites. When they're released, they grow together into this thing that looks like a giant blob. That's what it looks like outside of the human hosts. And a bunch of these guys are trapped inside of the atmosphere of plant. And they realize this thing, they can't survive outside the human body. They need methane to breathe, because that's what their home planet is like. “What we need to do is we need to pump oxygen into this dome to kill this thing. That'll destroy it.” And voices come over to say, “Look, this guy's crazy. There's nothing inside this dome. You send some representatives over, we'll show you anything you want.” And Quatermass says, “You're crazy if you go over there, you're going to be infected. You're going to be taken over.” But they managed to divide, they send the guys over and Quatermass is pleading with them, “Listen, they're going to get on this speaker. They're going to tell you that everything is fine, but you can't listen. Don't listen to them, whatever you say.” And then they hear this sound. This hideous sound of screaming coming down the pipes, the pipes that they've been sending oxygen down to the dome. They say, “What the hell is that? What's going on?” And then they look, they see the pressure has gone way up. There's something wrong. And the pipe is burst, the pipe that's sending oxygen to this dome. And they say, “What is it? What's happened?” And they look and something is dripping down through the pipe. And they say, “What is it?” It's blood. They took the guys that they sent, and they pushed them into the pipe. They say those pipes have been blocked with human pulp in order to keep the oxygen from coming into the dome. That is one of the most, again, all you see is just these drops of blood coming out of the cracked pipe, but that has resonated as one of the most terrifying moments from any movie that I saw, again, as a little kid. I've seen the movie recently and it's still incredibly terrifying. And again, the architecture of this web of pipes, the cold black and white architecture, is horrifyingly chilling. And the notion of human beings being reduced to mere flesh, being used as material for blocking a pipe. And the pipe's only like, it's like this big. So, you can imagine this person shoved into a pipe is hideous. JOHN: It is available on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it after that. Brian, do you want to ask about folk horror? BRIAN: Actually, I was going to jump ahead just because of what Neal was just talking about. I thought this would dovetail nicely into a question I had about a fear of contagion. And you can wrap body horror into this. Movies like The Thing or 28 Days Later, or probably The Quatermas Experiment as well. How does that fear of our own bodies being infected or watching another body change or be infected in unnatural ways? How does that—I don't want to use the word appeal—but how does that appeal to our sense of dread? NEAL: Well, I think you also have to run back to one of the most common— whether it's psychological or physiological—which is obsessive compulsive disorder. You say, well, what exactly is obsessive compulsive disorder? We have built in grooming behaviors, whether it's cleaning our hands, we clean our skin. That's wired into us. And when you turn the dial up too far, that turns into obsessive compulsive, obsessive hand cleaning or scratching, itching, hair pulling, all that stuff. It's wired in behavior, in the same way that dogs will scratch, we will scratch. And so, all of that, we react to it in the same way that if you see a spot of dirt on someone's forehead, it's almost impossible to “Clean that thing off. Get rid of that thing.” I mean, we're built in a certain way to respond to distortions, infections, invasions, in the same way that if someone's eye is cocked to one side, we react to it. Someone's face is distorted. We react to it negatively. We have to work not to respond to it. It may be a bug, but it may be a feature, because we are built to respond to a diseased or distorted members of our community. It's a survival trait. And so, in some ways, horror movies respond to that. Distorted human beings, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Igor or anyone else who are distorted, deformed, limbless creatures—Freaks—are employed in horror movies in a variety of different ways. BRIAN: And it's a very different thing from seeing an arm chopped off versus seeing an arm with three hands that are all operating. Both of them is something happening to your body that you might revolt towards, but it's a very different reaction though, right? NEAL: It is, but it's—in a sense—it's all variations of the same thing. There's a central human norm, and that which varies from the human norm beyond a certain point triggers a reaction that says, “That's not the way it's supposed to be.” And it's just, eyes are too close together, eyes are too far apart, eyes are too big, or there's an extra one. There's one missing. We recoil from it. We recoil from something that is too different, too far off the norm. And of course, in strictly social terms, you can say, but why, why should we? We shouldn't really respond in that way to others who are too different. But we do respond that way, and it comes with the programming in a very real degree. JOHN: How does that connect, then, to another movie on your list, The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932? NEAL: I think it's central to that list. The notion of the difference between that which is human and that which is animal. And Moreau, who experiments with making animals into human beings, but not really. And the sort of terrifying revelation when our hero and the woman—who we know to be an animal woman, but she looks fundamentally human—escape out into the woods and come across the animal person village. And the realization to what extent Moreau has been experimenting. It's not just tens or dozens. The animal people just come flooding out of the woods. And it's just hundreds. And the extent and the depth and the kind of nightmarish quality, they're all different. They're all horrible. And it's just like, what has Moreau been doing? He experiments with these animals, gets them to a certain state, and then he just discards them and moves on to something else. This utterly careless, sadistic god of this army of nightmares. And you sort of see when they do their, you know, “Are we not men?” And you just see row upon row upon row of these hideous nightmare faces. And you just say, “My God, what has this guy been doing for years? Just making these monsters.” JOHN: It's a classically creepy movie. I do want to ask you about the classic ghost story movie, The Haunting, and what that says about our fears. If you can, maybe tie that into Ghostwatch, because there's a similar sort of thing going on there. NEAL: They're both intriguing. They both are opening us up to this notion of unseen nightmare forces, especially the original Haunting, which shows us nothing. All you ever see: Doorknob turning. A face that may or may not be in the wall. This horribly loud banging on the door. A moment where someone thinks that her hand is being held, but there's no one there. It is simply this notion of a house that is born bad, but never really fully explained. Again, you have this idea of the world itself that should be well behaved, that should be governed by comprehensible natural laws. But there's something deeper and darker and incapable of truly being understood, nevermind being controlled. And if you just prod it a little bit too much, you're going to open it up to forces that are utterly destructive and utterly malevolent. And in both of these cases, you have this man of science and his team that are going to find out. “We're going to find out for sure whether there really are ghosts, whether there really is a supernatural, whether it really is life after death. We're going to nail this down for science.” Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. These are things that are, that are not meant to be explored, not meant to be examined. Go back. BRIAN: I'm reminded of Van Helsing's sign off on the original Dracula, where he said, “Just remember, there really are such things in this world.” NEAL: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the same thing is true in some ways on a much more terrifying scale with Ghostwatch, where it's just, it's this kind of, “It's all just fun and Halloween, we're going to explore this. It's the most haunted house in Britain.” And it's broadcasters whose faces everyone knew at the time, and they were playing themselves. Going to this haunted house where you had these poltergeist phenomena. And we're all going to, “We're going to do it live and call in with your own experiences about being haunted.” And it all just goes so horribly wrong. JOHN: Now, Neal, I just watched that for the first time this week. Heard about it for years. I had no idea that those were real broadcasters. I thought they were really good actors. But to someone in Britain watching that, those are faces they saw all the time? NEAL: Yeah. Those are real broadcasters. They had their own shows. They were real, the real deal. JOHN: Wow. I highly recommend renting it because—it'll test your patience a little tiny bit, because it is quite banal for quite a while, as they lead you into it. But now this new bit of information that these are all faces that that audience who saw it, quote unquote, live that night, it's as terrifying as I imagined the Orson Welles' War the Worlds would have been. Because it seems very real. NEAL: And apparently the way they did it, is that there was a number you could call in. And if you called in that number, they would tell you, it's like, “Don't worry, this is all just a show.” But so many people were calling in, they couldn't get through. BRIAN: This really is War of the Worlds. NEAL: So, they never were able to get to that message that would tell them, don't worry, it's all just a show. So apparently it panicked the nation, because part of the premise was at a certain point, the ghost that was haunting the house got into the show. And so, the studio itself became haunted. It was really spectacularly well done. JOHN: It is. It's great. Let's just sort of wrap up here real quick with Neal, if you have any advice for beginning screenwriter about how to best create a really powerful and effective horror screenplay, any little tips. NEAL: Well, first of all, and I touched on this before, jump scares don't work on the page. You need the loud bang. You need the hand reaching in from the side. You describe that and it doesn't work. So, you have to rely on creating that sense of dread. And while writing screenplays, you have to keep things tight. The concept, the idea—in the same way comedy screenplays have to be funny—scary screenplays have to be scary. It has to be scary on the page. If it's not scary on the page, you're not going to sell the screenplay. And that's the fundamental trick. You got to make it scary on the page. JOHN: Excellent advice. All right, let's just quickly, each one of us, tell our listeners a recent favorite horror film that you've seen in the last couple years.I'll start with you, Brian. BRIAN: Just last night, I saw Haunting in Venice. And it worked because I had seen the other Kenneth Branagh/Agatha Christie adaptations, and I was very familiar with, and you know, you already know generally that kind of detective whodunit story: it's going to be very, you know, using logic and rationality.And when they had this episode that was sort of a one off—sort of a departure from that usual way that mysteries are solved—it was very effective. I think if I'd seen it without having already watched a bunch of Agatha Christie adaptations, I would have said, “Oh, that's an okay Halloween movie.” But having seen those other ones, it was an excellent Halloween movie. JOHN: Excellent. That's on my list. The movie I would recommend, which really surprised me, my wife literally dragged me to it because it was a French film called Final Cut, which is a French remake of a Japanese film called One Cut of the Dead. At about the 30-minute mark, I was ready to walk out, and I thought, why are we watching this? And then they took us on a ride for the next hour that, it's a really good ride. It's called Final Cut. BRIAN: And this is not to be confused with the Robin Williams Final Cut from... ? JOHN: Not to be confused with that, no. Or if you can go back to the original and watch the Japanese version. But what's great about the French version is they are literally remaking the Japanese version, to the point where they've made all the characters have Japanese names. Which the French people struggle with enormously. It's a highly effective film. Neal, how about you? Take us home. NEAL: Okay. It's not a new movie, but I just saw it very recently. It is a Chilean stop motion animated film called The Wolf House. It describes the adventures of a young Chilean woman who escapes from a repressive German colony and ends up in this bizarre house in which she blends into the walls. She's escaped with two pigs who grow up with her in this house, but again, nothing, no way in which I describe it is going to convey to you how deeply disturbing and chilling this movie is. It really is quite indescribably bizarre and disturbing and just well worth your time to watch. It's not quite like any other movie I've ever seen.

Things discussed: The boys are back in town: Michigan recruiting Ohio. The Draft: A Jim Harbaugh tight end is getting drafted, don't care where he was ranked. Michigan's player development: look no further than DJ Turner (didn't mean to rhyme that). Herbert fixed a glute problem that plagued DJ into his 2nd year of college. MSU Exodus: It's a bad sign when your starters are transferring after practice. Why? They're seeing how bad they are: Nobody's a better scout than your own team. Coach BT (Brandon Jordan) was the reason recruits were coming, because the NFL guys were coming to train here too. Spartan media are going to try to spin it as Kim/Houser but the question they should be asking is if money is the reason somebody's there, you can lose them for money as well. Lotta players married the mistress. Keon Coleman is from "OppahLOOsuh" Louisiana. AKA "The Slop." Also Deion Sanders looked at the Mel Tucker guys on his roster and got rid of them all. Lions Draft: Campbell was the most Lions guy in the draft. Sam likes the picks, not the order. Hunter Dickinson: There are more important things, like $3 million of them if you believe lying numbers, than having your name in the rafters. Seth/Brian disagree whether the flowers and candy for Michigan is necessary. Brian: Just go. Seth: Appreciate the gifts, never expect them. Losing Muck: He got passed over, so it's understandable. Bacon: if the report says you can't have him here, don't have him here; if it doesn't then that's not a reason not to hire him. Seth: Red did well to set up the hierarchy, but you don't have to follow it.

Things are going off the rails for some of our couples. Chandra uninvites Naeem for Panana Thanksgiving, Brian JUST learns Danna's age, bun man goes in for his TV time with Gurleen and Shayras and more! Patreon: patreon.com/constantrealitycheckAcast+: https://plus.acast.com/s/6300e430d253ad001248a1a5Follow us on Constant Reality Check on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok/YouTube at Constant Reality Check. Twitter at ConstantRC_PodMerch: https://www.bonfire.com/store/constant-reality-check/Rate and Review us on Apple! Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/constantrealitycheck. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode SummaryWelcome to The Dr. Brian's Health Show, a weekly podcast where Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler uses his decades of experience in medicine and ability as an expert researcher to provide a light-hearted approach and share health trends popular on TikTok. In this episode, Dr. Brian provides his analysis on today's topic: Can Ice Be Used as a Distraction for Pain Attacks & Anxiety?Can touching something cold, like an ice tray, disrupt our body's panic response? What is acupressure and can it help distract from pain? What can trigger anxiety or panic attacks and what can we do to stop them? Find out in today's episode!If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you leave the show a Rating & Review at RateThisPodcast.com/NoCapKey Takeaways01:04 – Dr. Brian takes a moment to talk about the reception of his book INFLUENCED; learn more at https://www.influencedsocialmedia.com03:18 – Dr. Brian introduces today's topic: Can Ice Be Used as a Distraction for Pain Attacks & Other Ailments?07:28 – An interesting study on children using distraction with and without ice08:24 – Women in labor and acupressure11:37 – Other ways to help to stop panic attacks14:09 – Triggers that can set off anxiety and panic attacks14:53 – Dr. Brian teases next week's topic, reminds listeners about his recent released book, and encourages them to Subscribe, Rate and Review this podcast on RateThisPodcast.com/NoCapTweetable Quotes“I'm a Beverly Hills doctor. I have a very successful practice. I have millions of followers. And I have a flaw. I was easily addicted to social media, and I mean it in the true sense of addiction where it was really interfering with my relationships with my family.” (01:56) (Dr. Brian)“Just like that, you can give somebody anything - anything at all - that's basically distracting them from what they're experiencing, and that has been shown to be very effective at reducing anxiety and panic attacks.” (05:02) (Dr. Brian)“A lot of times when people are anxious about a situation, if you think about it, it's just in somebody's head. It's how they are perceiving, or reacting to, a situation.” (06:37) (Dr. Brian)“Acupressure, they concluded, was more effective for patients that are in the hospital - inpatients - or people getting ready for surgery compared to just finger massage.” (10:09) (Dr. Brian)“The second thing is just having insight to recognize that you are potentially having a panic attack. Then you can use some of these things we're talking about. And I don't think it's even beyond trying to distract yourself about something, because we know distraction is really effective. So, if you can focus on something else that you have to deal with, that can be a form of self-distraction. That's also worth a consideration.” (12:26) (Dr. Brian)“Number one, top of the list, is exercise. Regular exercise is so critical for stress and anxiety.” (14:25) (Dr. Brian)Resources MentionedChildren's Study Using Distraction with and without Ice – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29687673/Women'a Labor Study Using Acupressue with and without Ice – https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01443615.2020.1747412?Meta-Analysis of Studies Using Acupressure for Anxiety & Pain –

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3lrbi018n1nnpk1/NCHS065%20-%20Does%20Eating%20Cooled%20then%20Reheated%20Rice%20Lower%20Blood%20Sugar_%20Part%20Two.pdf?dl=0 (Click here) to download the full transcription as a formatted PDF. Episode SummaryWelcome to The No Cap Health Show, a weekly podcast where Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler uses his decades of experience in medicine and ability as an expert researcher to provide a light-hearted approach and share health trends popular on TikTok. In this episode, Dr. Brian provides his Cap/No Cap analysis on Part Two of today's topic: Does Eating Cooled then Reheated Rice Lower Blood Sugar? What are some of the health risks associated with blood sugar spikes? What does the immune system have to do with cancer? Find out in today's episode! If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you leave the show a Rating & Review at https://ratethispodcast.com/NoCap (RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap). Key Takeaways01:07 – Dr. Brian continues his discussion on all things Blood Sugar 04:00 – The risks associated with having your blood sugar spike 06:02 – Cancer and the immune system 08:15 – Dr. Brian provides the Cap/No Cap Recap of today's episode, teases next week's topic, and reminds listeners to Rate and Review this podcast on https://ratethispodcast.com/NoCap (RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap). Tweetable Quotes“I'm laughing because I love to mispronounce this word. I always grew up mispronouncing it and I still do kind of on purpose because it's the way I used to pronounce it. ‘Quinoa,' but I like to call it ‘KEN-O-WAH'.”(02:28) (Dr. Brian) “So one of the main issues why high sugar - unintended, so to speak - is that it causes something called AGES, or Advanced Glycation End Products. Now, these are fairly toxic. They're caused by reactions between sugar and other types of proteins in your body and they are really high on the suspect list for causing some of these problems.”(04:48) (Dr. Brian) “I do want to make one comment about cancer. A lot of people aren't aware of this. Cancer is also regulated by the immune system.”(06:09) (Dr. Brian) “Just to recap about the rice. If you cool the rice overnight and heat it up the next day and you're concerned about your blood sugar, then that does help blunt the spike in your blood sugar.”(08:15) (Dr. Brian) Resources MentionedDr. Brian's amazing new book on social media, INFLUENCED, featuring his incredible insights and experiences along with many of your favorite influencers. Endorsed by many influencers including Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski - https://www.influencedsocialmedia.com/ (https://www.influencedsocialmedia.com/) DM Dr. Brian your questions and we will respond back with answers - https://v.cameo.com/F5MH0Hglnmb (https://v.cameo.com/F5MH0Hglnmb) https://www.boxerwachler.com/ (Dr. Brian's Website) https://www.tiktok.com/@brianboxerwachlermd? (Dr. Brian's TikTok) https://www.instagram.com/drboxerwachler/ (Dr. Brian's Instagram) Please remember, Dr. Brian is a doctor, but he is not your doctor. He is here to provide general information, not medical advice, so you should always check with your doctor before relying on any information. Podcast Production & Marketing provided by FullCast Copyright. Advanced Vision Education, LLC See https://omnystudio.com/listener (omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.

Join Rachel and Joel as they discuss their top 3 romances from season one of Highway to Heaven. SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited CONTACT THE SHOW Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE Instagram: www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: www.fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: @ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Rachel Mayer: www.instagram.com/rachaelmayerart Host: Joel Lueders: www.instagram.com/joelmakesthings Moderator & Editor: Sam Heyn: www.vimeo.com/samheyn Title Theme by Brian Just: www.brianjust.com Recorded in a hotel for cats in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2021.

Lace-up your sneakers, cause we're walking a mile in someone else's shoes as we revisit "The Banker and the Bum." This week we get a switchies swapsies episode as Jonathon displays some of the most impressive angel magic to date. We also get a chance to talk about karaoke and MacGyver, and we round things out with an imposing Landon factor. SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited CONTACT THE SHOW Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE Instagram: www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: www.fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: @ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Rachel Mayer: www.instagram.com/rachaelmayerart Host: Joel Lueders: www.instagram.com/joelmakesthings Moderator & Editor: Sam Heyn: www.vimeo.com/samheyn Title Theme by Brian Just: www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.

Wedding bells are in the air once again as we revisit "A Match Made in Heaven." This week our all-time favorite recurring character Scotty (played by James Troesch) is back! Scotty is now working as a lawyer, and he's making a case for dating Mark's niece. There are some capers with chopsticks, a little kissing and we get a super special guest appearance by Sam's cat Sybil. SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited CONTACT THE SHOW Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE Instagram: www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: @ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Rachel Mayer: www.instagram.com/rachaelmayerart Host: Joel Lueders: www.instagram.com/joelmakesthings Moderator & Editor: Sam Heyn: www.vimeo.com/samheyn Title Theme by Brian Just: www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.

Put on your Sunday best cause we're going to church as we revisit "A Child of God." This week Jonathon helps a dying woman seek acceptance from her disapproving dad and Mark has to wear another suit. We discuss our spin-off idea, "Joel's Incredible Schemes," as well as John Tesch and motion sickness. Skip your regular service and sleep in, you can come to church with us this week! SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited CONTACT THE SHOW Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE Instagram: www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: @ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Rachel Mayer: www.instagram.com/rachaelmayerart Host: Joel Lueders: www.instagram.com/joelmakesthings Moderator & Editor: Sam Heyn: vimeo.com/samheyn Title Theme by Brian Just: www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.

Ready for some poorly aged Highway to Heaven? Then join us this week as we grapple with young African American men who can’t read, do drugs, end up dead and get sent to jail for life on drug charges. Whew! Clearly, this episode does not hold up well 35 years down the road. While we do our best to tackle this episode, we also discuss Arthur Ashe, stolen catalytic converters and living in Minneapolis during the protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder. Also, Sam tells us a really long story about his neighbor Jim. SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited CONTACT THE SHOW Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE Instagram: www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: @ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Rachel Mayer: www.instagram.com/rachaelmayerart Host: Joel Lueders: www.instagram.com/joelmakesthings Moderator & Editor: Sam Heyn: vimeo.com/samheyn Title Theme by Brian Just: www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.

Strap on your seatbelt cause there’s a bumpy road ahead! This week Mark gets a head injury and a chance to go back in time! Jonathan shows off some excellent divining skills and we learn that Mark’s really just a chip off the old block. If that isn’t enough, Sam introduces us to the classic TV show “Run Joe Run,” and we discuss talking to dead people in dreams. SUPPORT THE SHOW Patreon: www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited CONTACT THE SHOW Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE Instagram: www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: @ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Rachel Mayer: www.instagram.com/rachaelmayerart Host: Joel Lueders: www.instagram.com/joelmakesthings Moderator & Editor: Sam Heyn: vimeo.com/samheyn Title Theme by Brian Just: www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020.

Blast off into the turbulent lives of a former astronaut’s family as we revisit “To Touch The Moon” written and directed by Michael Landon. Join us as we dig into astronaut ice-cream, childhood alien abduction, and the origins of Angels. Bonus, this episode stars Bastian (Barrett Oliver) from The Neverending Story! SUPPORT US ON PATREON ------------------------- https://www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited QUESTIONS AND OPINIONS ------------------------- Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: https://www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE ------------------------- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: https://fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS ------------------------- Rachel Mayer: https://www.instagram.com/rachelmayerart Joel Lueders: https://www.joellueders.com Sam Heyn: https://vimeo.com/samheyn Theme Song by Brian Just https://www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020.

Stick out your thumb and hitch a ride to the Havencrest Retirement Community! This week, we're revisiting the Pilot episode of Highway to Heaven, written and directed by Michael Landon. Along the way, we'll encounter a spirited group of senior citizens, a suspicious ex-cop, and a mysterious, handsome stranger with a pretty big secret. Join us on this inaugural episode of Highway to Heaven Revisited! SUPPORT US ON PATREON ------------------------- https://www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited QUESTIONS AND OPINIONS ------------------------- Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: https://www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE ------------------------- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: https://fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS ------------------------- Rachel Mayer: https://www.instagram.com/rachelmayerart Joel Lueders: https://www.joellueders.com Sam Heyn: https://vimeo.com/samheyn Theme Song by Brian Just https://www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020.

Celebrate Christmas in July with this extended season one preview! Join spouses Joel and Rachel as they walk filmmaker and actor Sam through the classic 1980’s television show Highway to Heaven. Sam doesn’t watch the show, so he’s going to have a lot of questions along the way. Season one starts October 11, 2020. SUPPORT US ON PATREON ------------------------- https://www.patreon.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited QUESTIONS AND OPINIONS ------------------------- Call the Hotline to Heaven: 612-356-2495 Email: highwaytoheavenrevisited@gmail.com Website: https://www.highwaytoheavenrevisited.com FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE ------------------------- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/highwaytoheavenrevisited Facebook: https://fb.me/HighwayToHeavenRevisited YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX33CQUcYBFpY2x193g_Miw SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ch3tv PRODUCTION CREDITS ------------------------- Rachel Mayer: https://www.instagram.com/rachelmayerart Joel Lueders: https://www.joellueders.com Sam Heyn: https://vimeo.com/samheyn Theme Song by Brian Just https://www.brianjust.com Recorded at CH3TV Studios in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020.

My guest today is Gadi Oren, the VP of Product for LogicMonitor. Gadi is responsible for the company’s strategic vision and product initiatives. Previously, Gadi was the CEO and Co-Founder of ITculate, where he was responsible for developing world-class technology and product that created contextual monitoring by discovering and leveraging application topology. Gadi previously served as the CTO and Co-founder of Cloudscope and he has a management degree from Sloan MIT. Today we are going to talk with Gadi about analytics in the context of monitoring applications. This was a fun chat as Gadi and I have both worked on several applications in this space, and it was great to hear how Gadi is habitually integrating customers into his product development process. You’re also going to hear Gadi’s interesting way of framing declarative analytics as casting “opinions,” which I thought was really interesting from a UX standpoint. We also discussed: How to define what is “normal” for an environment being monitored and when to be concerned about variations. Gadi’s KPI for his team regarding customer interaction and why it is important. What kind of data is needed for effective prototypes How to approach design/prototyping for new vs. existing products Mistakes that product owners make falling in love with early prototypes Interpreting common customer signals that may identify a latent problem needing to be solved in the application Resources and Links: LogicMonitor Twitter: @gadioren LinkedIn: Gadi Oren Quotes from Today’s Episode “The barrier of replacing software goes down. Bad software will go out and better software will come in. If it’s easier to use, you will actually win in the marketplace because of that. It’s not a secondary aspect.” – Gadi Oren “…ultimately, [not talking to customers] is going to take you away from understanding what’s going on and you’ll be operating on interpolating from information you know instead of listening to the customer.” – Gadi Oren “Providing the data or the evidence for the conclusion is a way not to black box everything. You’re providing the human with the relevant analysis and evidence that went into the conclusion and hope if that was modeled on their behavior, then you’re modeling the system around what they would have done. You’re basically just replacing human work with computer work.” — Brian O’Neill “What I found in my career and experience with clients is that sometimes if they can’t get it perfect, they’re worried about doing anything at all. I like this idea of [software analytics] casting an opinion.” — Brian O’Neill “LogicMonitor’s mission is to provide a monitoring solution that just works, that’s simple enough to just go in, install it quickly, and get coverage on everything you need so that you as a company can focus on what you really care about, which is your business.” — Gadi Oren Episode Transcript Brian: Alright, welcome back to Experiencing Data. I’m excited to have Gadi Oren on the line from LogicMonitor. How is it going Gadi? Gadi: It’s going great. Thank you for having me. Brian: Yeah. I’m happy to have you on the show to talk about not just monitoring, but you’ve done a lot of work on SaaS, analytics products in the monitoring space, software for IT departments in particular. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what you’re doing at LogicMonitor these days? Gadi: Too many years in different industries, I actually spent multiple industries starting from medical imaging. Let’s say in the recent 18 years mostly, some sort of monitoring solutions. I dabbled also a little bit with marketing data analytics. That was not a successful company but I might draw some examples from there. Right now, I’ve recently joined LogicMonitor for an acquisition. I was the founder and CEO of a company called ITculate here in Boston. That company was acquired in April by LogicMonitor and I’m now the VP of Product Management. What LogicMonitor is doing is solving a fairly old problem that still remains, which is monitoring is really difficult. Many companies, as they go, they reach the point where they realize how important it is for them to monitor what’s going on in order to be successful. Then they realize that it’s such a complex domain that they need to develop expertise. It’s just all around difficult. LogicMonitor’s mission is to provide a monitoring solution that just works, that’s simple enough to just go in, install it quickly, and get coverage on everything you need, so that you as a company can focus on what you really care about, which is your business. Brian: Obviously that’s a hard problem to solve and I’m curious for people that are listening to the show. I imagine a lot what this product is doing is looking for exceptions, looking for things that are out of bounds from what some assemblance of normal is, and then providing that insight back to the customer. Is that a fair evaluation? Gadi: It’s a fair evaluation. There is obviously the question of what is normal, but in general, providing that there’s many ways to define what normal is, then the answer is yes. It’s the ability to give you visibility into what’s going on, first of all, to just see that things work in general and work okay, and then when something goes out of what you define normal, to notify you on that and help you with getting things better. Brian: From your experience in this space, since in a lot of companies that are doing analytics, it may be difficult to define the boundaries of what normal is, such that you could do something like, “Oh, we’ve detected an abnormal trend in sales.” I can’t think of something off the top of my head but I like the idea that the focus of the product is on declaring a conclusion or driving an insight that’s probably derived from analytics that are happening in the background. I would put that in the camp of declarative analytics as opposed to exploratory where it’s like, “Here’s all these data. Now you go and find out some interesting signal in it.” Most customers and users don’t want the latter, they want the tool to go do that job. Do you have any suggestions for how companies that maybe aren’t quite in a domain where it’s black and white, like a binary thing, like this core is either connected or not—if it’s not connected, that’s bad and if it is, it’s good—is there a way, a kind of approach putting guard rails on things or what normalcy is? Do you follow what I’m saying? How do you move into that declarative space? Gadi: The answer is obviously, it depends. The problem is so difficult that you are even having a hard time defining the question. It is very, very difficult. By the way, you called it declarative, I like that. I actually call it in a different way that usually creates a lively discussion. I call it opinionated. Opinionated system. The reason is there’s some evolution, especially with regards to monitoring. But I think it’s the same for other type of systems that are analytic-based. Ten, fifteen years ago, it was so difficult to just gather all the data, that being non-opinionated or nondeclarative for your definition, was pretty good, because people just needed the data and they bought the context themselves. But there’s been a lot of changes since that time. First is the availability of computing. But the other is also the need is much greater now for giving the opinion, giving the bottom line. The system needs to be opinionated and then it can be a variety of things. It’s really multiple types of algorithms that can be used here. A small set of that is what people define today as machine learning and AI. But actually the domain is much larger than just AI. It’s the ability to look at multiple signals and develop in a certain degree of confidence, a conclusion that is derived from those multiple signals. To put it in the most generic way that I can, some of them can be discreet or binary, and some of them can be continuous. How do you look at all that stuff and say, “I think that this is what’s going on”? And even more than that, here is what we think is going on, here’s what you can do about it, or here are a few options for you to act on it. That is the ideal solution that we would like to have. Obviously, we have very, very little of that right now. I think it’s a journey that will take us years to get. Brian: I love that idea of opinionated because I think it softens the expectation around the technology and it also reminds people that it’s never different than when your plumber comes to house and you’re like, “Well, the shower hot water isn’t quite as hot as the sink water.” Maybe he tighten some things, he turns on some faucets, and he gives you an opinion about what might be wrong without actually tearing apart the whole system. We would tend to trust that. He might say, “Well, what I really need to do is X.” Then you make a decision whether you want to pay for that or not. But it’s not like, “If you can’t give me a 100% decision, then I’m unsatisfied.” We accept that opinion. What I found in my career and experience with clients is that sometimes if they can’t get it perfect, they’re worried about doing anything at all. I like this idea of casting an opinion. On that thought then, especially for example, you’re putting a data model in place or something like this is which is going to learn from the information, there may be insights gleaned from some type of computer-based analysis which may be unseen or unexpected by the business. That could be positive or negative. But there also might be some context of what normal or expected is from the end-users. For example, I expect the range to be between 32 and 41 most of the time. I know sometimes it goes up and I have this feeling about X, Y and Z. They have something in their head, you go and do all these technology and it says, “Well, the normal range should be 14 and so we flag the 16 here,” and he’s like, “I don’t care about that. It’s not high enough for me to care.” How do you balance that sense that maybe an end-user has, like, “I track sales,” or, “I’m doing forecasting,” and they have all these experience in their head? Gadi: A couple of things. It depends a little bit about the domain. In some situations where the end result is what’s really important, you can use black box-y type of things like newer networks or things like that, not always but most cases, they tend to be more like black box. It’s like, “Here’s the result. I can tell you why that happen. It’s based on all these training I did before.” In some situations, the result cannot be a black box. It needs to be explained. In those situations, you really need to give people an explanation on why things happen like they are. Monitoring, in many cases, tends to be the latter which is, I want to see the signal and the signal core strength on what was the shape and I want to see how it looked yesterday. If it looks the same, maybe it’s okay. In certain situations, maybe if you have a database and it has a latency of half millisecond which is very small, and then this morning it moved to one millisecond, is that normal? It’s not normal but I don’t care about it because before it gets to five milliseconds, I don’t need to know about it. In those situations, I don’t know if that’s what you refer to by cobwebs or things like that. While the system is learning and can automatically detect what’s abnormal, there is a range to what I care about. I’m going to put a threshold and say, “Only if you cause five millisecond and this is not normal behavior, then I want to see an alert.” Normal could be defined like the signal is two sigmas away from the same day last week. Something like that. There is a different level of approaches, both in terms of how consistent the data processing is and in what type of knobs you should provide to the user in order for the user to develop the right confidence level to use that solution. Brian: I would agree with that. I think there’s a balance there. Actually when we talk about our screening call, you made a comment. It was a good quote. It was something like, “The cutting edge UI is English,” if I recall. Gadi: Or any other language, yes. Brian: Exactly, whatever your interface is. But I would agree with that sentiment that I think the customers and from user experience standpoint, deriving that conclusion first or opinion as you said, then backing out from there, and providing the data or the evidence for the conclusion is a way not to black box everything. You’re providing the human with the relevant analysis and evidence that went into the conclusion and hope if that was modeled on their behavior, then you’re modeling the system around what they would have done. You’re basically just replacing human work with computer work. What I found over time was, some of these systems, with just watching customers, is they’re very curious about the beginning and if you can build that trust, they start to understand how to trust your opinions. They tend to not hold you responsible as much if an opinion is wrong because they know what went into the math and to the analytics and also what didn’t go into it, steps that they can fill the holes in themselves. Of course, this means you have to know your customer, you need to have some kind of interaction with them. Can you tell me about some of your customer interactions? You’d mention one of your KPIs for your team. Tell us about one of your KPIs for your team. Gadi: Over the years, obviously, you develop professionally and you change the way you approach to do what you do. I’ve been doing different ways of product management. I was a CTO at some point. But my basic attitude is doing product management and building the product from that understanding of what it is we want to build. What I’ve realized over the years is that there is a couple of really important points. One is the more you talk to customers, the more you understand the problem you’re trying to work on. A couple of years into working on a certain problem, you get to a point where you’re so familiar with it that you can pretty much, without talking to customers, generate a lot of really good product for some time. The problem is that this might diverge at some point or you’re going to miss something important. I think that talking to customers all the time is what grounds you to what’s going on. I’ve made my team of about 10 people. We are monitoring how many times they have interaction with customers. I’m going to chart it monthly. I started recently as one of the KPIs and I’m going to just check if certain part of the team is talking less to customers, then why is that okay or not. And then if you have a spike, some of these stopped talking to customers, then we’re going to have a discussion on why that happened because I think ultimately, it’s going to take you away from understanding what’s going on and you’ll be operating on interpolating from information you know instead of listening to the customer. Brian: Is it safe to say your team is comprised of primarily other product managers on certain portions of the product and then see up some design user experience reporting to you? Gadi: Yes. I have, let’s say, about 10 people. We’re hiring now all the time. The company’s growing very quickly. Let’s say around 10 people. Most of them are product managers and some are design people. We also have a variety of previous experience in the team, which is really something I liked. Some of them are from the industry and they have built-in knowledge. Some were in engineering before, which I think has also an interesting experience. One or two came from being sales engineers or sales, which has a different aspect of benefit to it. I don’t think I have someone that was a customer before, and if you can have that, that’s really advantageous. I might be able to do that at some point. Brian: I think that’s great. Do you involve your engineers or your technical people, data scientists, whatever with any of these interviews that you do and your customer outreach? Gadi: As much a possible, we will look at the multiple sides and a lot of engineers I work with right now are located in China. In terms of language, we might have sometimes barriers, but absolutely when possible, I know that when I transitioned from engineering to product management, the exposure to customers was very educational for me. Whenever I am able to expose people to customers, I take that opportunity. Brian: You have an interesting position. Maybe this is super common, I don’t know, but you’ve started out in a technical capacity, you have an engineering background, you were CTO, and now you’re in product. I’m curious. As someone that’s looking at holistic product both a business and also some kind of experience you need to do, you need to facilitate in order to have a relevant business. Are there biases that you need to keep in check from your technical background where the engineer in you says, “I want to do X,” and you’re like, “No, no, no”? What are some of those things to watch out for to make sure that you’re focused on that customer experience and not how it’s implemented? Gadi: The question of biases is a wide one. It’s not just about engineering. It’s bias in general. At some point, you obviously get excited about what you’re building and you see all the possibilities. “We can do something a little here, we could solve that problem or this problem,” and then you start developing a preference. It’s very natural. When you realize that this is the case, sometimes you try to just not have a bias, but you can’t. Everybody has one. The problem is, how do you make sure that this bias does not impact when you talk to a customer? It’s very easy to have a customer tell you what you want to hear. Probably the easiest person to deceive is you if you don’t pay attention. This is one of those things. With regards to engineering bias, it’s not very different than any other type of bias. Engineers and makers just really care about working on interesting things and new technologies. Sometimes, there’s a problem and I think the more advanced engineers start to think about, “How would I generalize that problem?” It might be a runaway process where they want to build more than required and that more may or may not be pointing at the right direction. That’s another type of bias. Again, definitely something to watch for. Brian: I want to move on to some other topics only because I can totally spend an hour talking about how important it is to do customer research. I love that you’re doing that and I think the theme here is you’ve actually turned that into a KPI for your particular reports and the product management division at your company, which says that it’s important to develop that habit. I would totally champion that. Gadi: It’s not that I would like it to be. I can tell you I would love it to be. Since you’re opening this, I’ll tell you what could be ideal. But it’s a lot to ask for so I’m not implementing that right now. I do check that people interact with customers and they have written down notes. Written down notes should not only be two lines. It should be telling something. Ideally, somebody can transcribe what the meeting was, but that’s almost impossible. I try but it’s very difficult. What I would have loved to do that we don’t do right now because it’s a lot to ask for, I’d love to have people repeat in their heads and in the notes the meeting and try and extract problem statements. In the past I’ve implemented that in some situations and it was successful. But you have to do it in a continuous fashion over a long time and then you see those problem statements. How many references do you have to every problem statement? It’s really giving you a good visibility into what’s going on. Now, asking that is difficult but clear notes is a good start. Brian: Just to tack onto that, it can be very hard to listen attentively and to draft notes. When I’m facilitating research sessions with a client, is you’ll have one person facilitating and one person taking notes, and then you debrief at the end. Sometimes, it does mean it’s a two-on-one instead of a one-on-one. It doesn’t need to be perfect. You can get better at this over time. That’s one way to get a little bit of a higher quality data. You can also just use something like an audio recorder on your phone instead of handwriting the notes. When that meeting’s over, you grab a phone booth or type room and just talk into a phone. Then you can just have the audio converted to text very simply and quickly with a machine. That way, you’ve got a nice dump of what the conclusions were from the sessions. Traditionally in the usability field and the human factors field, they came out of science background, so they would write these very long reports. Typically, what happens is, guess what, nobody reads the reports. So, you have to watch out for that. We’re doing all the stuff but we’re not taking any action on the information there. I like to highlight real concept, however you go about doing that, but that’s great. Can you talk to me a little bit about engagement with these data products? This is probably a little bit truer in companies that are deploying internal analytics, like non-digital native companies, non-product companies, but they’re having trouble with engagement. Customers aren’t using the services. Do you have any broad ideas on how we can increase engagement from your perspective? How do you make the tools more useful, more usable? What do you have to say about that? Gadi: How do you make the tools more useful? I think it’s a somewhat related question to how do you make your products successful to begin with? I’m going to talk about the new concept other than incremental. If you learn something incremental, I’m assuming you have enough data to place your bets successfully. If you learn a fairly new concept, what I would usually recommend is don’t code it. Try new simulations, Exceling, and modeling, whatever it is that you can to build it without building it. Prototype it and then have a few lead users. Those are users that are excited about this domain and they really care about solving that specific issue enough to work with you effectively. You need two, three, or four of those and you just start working with them. As much as possible, use their data. In the data domain, when we’re doing analytics-related product, part of the user experience in the entire cycle. It’s not just, “Oh, the user interface is the biggest expense.” No. It’s how the data is getting into the system, how is it being acquired, how is it being processed, and how is it being used on the other side when it’s producing meaningful insights. You can test a lot of that cycle without a product or with a very light sort of a product, prototype of the product. I recommend that as much as possible. If you’re going the right way, you will know very quickly and if you’re going the wrong way, also you will know quickly and you can either course-correct or eliminate completely the project and save a lot of time and money. That’s usually something that works really well for a new concept. Now, for incremental, it’s slightly different. Usually, you can use a similar type of approach but you can code something that’s kind of a prototype into your product, show capability, and then usually, you would have a lot more customers that are willing to work with you because it’s a small increment. You can validate early. I guess that’s the bottom line here. Experiment, iterate, validate early. Brian: How is it necessary to code? I don’t mean to use the word code, we’re talking about Excel or whatever it may be. It is necessary to get even into that level of technical implementation in order to do a prototype? I love the idea of working with customer data because that removes some of the classic example I’ve experienced like financial products where I was working on a trading system portfolio management. You’d have a bunch of stock positions in a table and you’re trying to test the design of the table. You have funny prices for, “Why is Apple stock trading at $12? Oh my God, what is going on?” That has nothing to do with the study but you’ve now taken the user out of the— Gadi: You will not get a meaningful […]. Brian: I love that but do you need to necessarily get into modeling and all this kind of stuff if, for example, the goal is to see, would that downstream user take action or not, based on what they’re seeing in the tool if you’re using a paper prototype or something like that? What would you do if it says it’s predicted to between 41 and 44, what would you do next? And you happen to know that that’s a sensitive range. Do you even need to have actual Excel or math happening behind the scenes? Gadi: I can see where this question is coming from. Nine-tenths is just putting a […] and mock-up might really give people a good feeling about where you’re going with this. But I do think that in many cases, not working with real data and even customer data—customer data is not a must—is not going to give you the right answer. I’ll explain when this can happen. There is the case that you mentioned, which I wasn’t even about to mention it, but it’s too late, is the data that you see doesn’t make sense, you’re emotionally detached. You’re not getting good responses from this person. Now, assuming the data is good and if it’s yours, you’ll even connect it much better to what you see. But certain type of problems, you cannot understand, you cannot get a meaningful answer if the data is not real. I’ll give an example. Right now, we’re facing a very specific situation where LogicMonitor is actually now in the process of redoing the UI and fixing usability. I’m told that this is the fourth time we’re doing it and there is a very specific problem of how to do search. We’ve been going back and forth on how does the search results should really show up because the search results are coming back in multiple levels. There’s data with dependency. Results are coming from multiple levels of dependency and need to show up on the same screen in a way that the user can use it. We’ve got to the conclusion that the problem is hard enough to answer and we need to prototype maybe one, or even two or three types of result presentation and just show it to customers. Obviously, we want to code as minimum as possible to do that, that this is something we’re going to do. We usually do it with just wireframes but in that specific situation, we are not only needing real data but we’re actually coding something very minimal, three times, to get the right answer. Brian: I think the theme here is, whether it’s code or whatever material you’re using, there’s a theme of prototyping. I would add that in the spirit of a minimum viable product or what I would call a minimum valuable product—I like that better—is figuring out what is the minimum amount of design, which could include some technical implementation like a prototype, what’s the minimum amount that you need to put out in front of a customer to learn something? To figure it out if it’s on the right track? That’s really what it’s about. In your case, maybe it does take actually building a light prototype, maybe you don’t actually query 30 data sources, and you just have one database with a bunch of seed data in it. You control the test, but at least it simulates the experience of pulling data from many places or something like that, then you can tweak the UI as you evaluate. Gadi: I think it’s a bit of going specific. I think that, again, in many cases you can do wireframes and you’d be fine. But remember, if you’re trying to test a complete flow, you’re testing a flow which may include 10–15 steps of the user for the user interface, and if you can do that with just wireframes where every step that they did produces result to makes sense, and you don’t have to model it at the background, then that’s fine. It’s probably better. But when we are talking about 10–15 steps, sometimes, the amount of effort that goes into the wireframe is big enough to consider a very light background Excel implementation. When it becomes comparable, if doing wireframe is 80% of doing a very light implementation where the background is Excel, or even 70%, then I’ll say, “Hey, let’s do a little bit more of an effort,” and then our ability to test opens up to a lot of other possibilities that are not rigid within that wireframe. So, something to think about. Brian: I would agree if you can get a higher fidelity prototype like that, with the same amount of effort. Absolutely, you’re going to uncover probably exceptions. You’re going to uncover information and an evaluation with a customer that you didn’t probably asked about. There’s so much stuff going on and there’s so much more information to be gleaned from that. The main thing is not falling in love with it too early and not overinvesting in it, such that you’re not willing to really make any change to it going forward. I find that’s the challenge with especially with data products. I’m sure you’ve experienced, there’s a tremendous amount of investment, sometimes, just to get to the point where there’s a search box and there’s data coming back. At the point, you can fool yourself and say, “Oh, we’re doing design iterations,” but in reality, no one really wants to go back and change the plumbing at that point because it’s so hard just to get to that first thing. I think the goal is to not build too much and be aware of that bias to not want to go back and rework what maybe a difficult, “Oh, it’s just a search box.” It’s like, “Yes.” But if no one can get from A to B, then the entire value of the product is moot and it sounds like, “Oh, it’s just a search box.” There’s a lot of stuff going on with getting them from A to B in the right way in that particular case. Gadi: I totally agree. I’ve seen a lot of managers do that mistake. I bet that I did that mistake once or twice in my career. “This is awesome. It looks great. Package it and let’s ship it.” That is a big mistake because then people are telling you, “No, no, no. This is just a proof of concept.” Managers sometimes cannot understand the difference, so it’s a communication problem, it’s setting expectations, and you’re right. Sometimes, the way to avoid it is just not getting to the […] at all and I agree if you can. Brian: Traditionally, from my work and the domain that you’re in, the traditional enterprise tools is that quite frankly, they can suck. The tolerances for quality was quite low, and I think that’s been changing. It’s a slow growth that the expectation that these tools can be hard to use, they’re supposed to be really complicated, and they’re for the very technical user, that’s changing. The customer and end-user is more aware of design. I’m curious. Do you find that that expectation is going up? And do you find that new technology is making it easier to provide a better experience? Or is that being negated by the fact that, in your particular domain, you’ve got cloud and on-premise? I can see the challenge is going up. Just as well as some of the tools might get better, the challenge might get harder, too. Is it net out? No change? What are your thoughts? Gadi: No. It’s not the opposite vectors that are actually pointing to the same direction, I think. What you’re saying is, I believe, no longer the case. I don’t know. Maybe in some old banks somewhere in Europe where they’re old-fashioned. I still heard that some banks in Germany are based on paper, no computers. That’s why I made this comment. But in my mind, this is long gone. It’s multiple trends of really pointing to the same direction. First of all, people are educated by Apple that you can in fact have a product that’s pleasant to use. Some young people in their 20s and 30s, most of what they’ve seen is really a lot better that what you and I have seen, being slightly older than that. Expectation is to have good products. They’ve seen that hardware and software and combination of those things can be done well. That’s one. The second is that the technology is evolving, especially in my space, there’s been virtualization, then there’s cloud, then there’s containerization, and so many big waves that are changing everything, that you constantly have to refresh your software and the ability. The users inside the enterprises are now replacing stuff much faster. They’re replacing the infrastructure much faster, and then with that, they replace software and adopted much faster. The barrier of replacing software goes down. Bad software will go out and better software will come in. If it’s easier to use, you will actually win in the marketplace because of that. It’s not a secondary. It’s one of the things people care about. They don’t care about the user experience specifically. They care about being able to complete their tasks. They don’t care how that happen. If it was easier to achieve what they need and it left them with a good feeling, it’s a better tool. That derives better usability. Everything is pointing to the same direction because you have to refresh as a vendor. You have to create software faster to adjust to the new waves of technology that’s coming in because that’s part of being competitive. While you’re at it, you have to take care of creating really strong usability because then you will have another advantage in the marketplace. I think those trends are only enforcing the same direction. You have to have great usability. By the way, usability is not limited to user interface. It’s everything. User interface is just a part of it. Brian: I didn’t want to bias my question to you, but I would wholeheartedly agree that the tolerance levels for really difficult software or software that doesn’t really provide the value clearly or quickly, the tolerances for that have gone down quite a bit and I think you’re totally spot on that consumer products have created an expectation that it doesn’t need to be that complicated. A lot of times, there’s a service to language like, “Oh, it’s ugly,” or customers will comment sometimes on the paint and the surface interface because they don’t necessarily have the language to explain why. It actually may be a utility problem or just a value problem. I think the importance here is, as you said, usability is important, but it’s not just about that. Ultimately, it’s about whether value is created. So, if you write a decision support tool, like a declarative decision support tool in your case, it’s probably often about minimal time spent using the tool, maximum signal when I do have to use the tool, and the best case scenario is probably never needing to go into the tool to begin with. That’s actually the highest business value. You can focus all day on UI, maybe it’s a one-sentence text message is really the only interface that’s required and you might deliver a ton of value with just that. Gadi: To add on what you have said, I totally agree. I actually see in the marketplace LogicMonitor is winning deals that are based on ultimately better usability. I can give you an example. A lot of customers that we see, companies are growing and they start monitoring using a few open source tools—there are so many of them—and when you’re small, like, “This is awesome. I’m going to use this open source tool and I have the problem solved.” The company grows and at some point, the open source tool, you realize that you spent so much time maintaining it and so much time on making sure that the tool keeps on working when you add another resource to the network, I think the old expression was, ‘Tool Time versus Value Time,’ or something like that. Brian: Tool Time versus Goal Time. Gadi: Goal Time, exactly. This is much bigger than user interface. This is about the whole experience, which means that in those open source tools, you need to have a team of five people that are chasing all the changes that happen in the organization and you’re never there. You never actually up-to-date with what’s going on. From a very high-level perspective, this thing just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because of usability. So, we come in and as I’ve stated what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to do something that just works, what’s well and quickly, and you’re able to deploy quickly, automatically discover the changes, and follows what’s going on. People are amazed by that and it’s part of the rationale, depending on the problems that they have. But in many cases, it’s part of what makes them buy our product. At the same time, part of our product had older user interface. I think that the comment that you said before, where you said, “Oh, it’s an ugly UI,” or something, I think there are situations where products that are a bit older might have pieces of user interface that are not as great, but their overall experience is so good that it carries the product forward. I think in organizations that have a choice, they might actually opt for a product that, on a first glance, might look not as great from a UI perspective but overall their experience is good. I’m not saying that this is the situation with LogicMonitor because we actually have pretty good UI as well, but I think that our UI reached a point where it needs to be improved and that’s what we’re doing now. Brian: May I ask a question on that just as we get towards the end here. If you’re able to share, what are the outcomes that you want to get from the new UI? There’s some business or customer impact you’re probably looking for, right? A business justification. Gadi: There is. It’s fairly complicated because it’s also a very expensive process. There are very qualitative things that you start hearing like, “Oh, your user interface looks old,” or people tell you things like, “Your customer X is much easier to do a certain task.” I like that better because it’s a lot more specific and they can explain why and all that. But in many cases, you just get like, “Oh, this other company has a new UI and it’s so much more pretty and cool.” That’s very hard to measure and very hard to act on. We have some of that but more specifically, I think, LogicMonitor’s also moving from the mid markets to more and more enterprise. As that happens, certain things that used to be okay are no longer okay. The amount of data that we’re dealing with on the screen, how we process and present it, when you have a couple of hundreds of items, you can think about a tree or a table. When you have hundreds of thousands, then the entire thinking process is different and you need a complete different method. Doesn’t mean all those changes like trends we’re moving upmarket in terms of size, we expect a lot more data in the user interface. People are telling us that the UI looks a little bit old. We want to refresh also the technology. We can do other things. If you’re doing things that are mostly server-based, then UI tends to be more static. It doesn’t have to be that way but it’s an engineering challenge. But if you’re moving to the more new frameworks like React, Redux or things like that, you can do a lot more dynamic. Every component can take care of itself, its data, its model, and update asynchronously. It opens up the product to do things that are a lot more responsive, like a one-page application, for example. A large part of the light business logic is actually done on the client side rather than on the server side, so it makes a much better user experience. All those multiple causes, multiple trends that lead us to the conclusion that we need to refresh. Brian: Was there a particular business outcome, though? For example, are you having some attrition and you’re looking to stop that? Or do you think this is the way to start facilitating sales, to close more easily with a better UI or anything like that? Or is it mostly qualitative? Gadi: No. Obviously, we try and quantitatively justify stuff, so we look at all the requests from the last two years and how many of them are related to UI and certain things in the UI that are very hard to do today. Yes, we do think that this will encourage sales for certain reasons that we will improve in the UI. I think that over the years, because there are so many people changing things in the product, I think that some of the consistency have dissolved along the way. In most cases, you do things the same way but in other cases, you do it a little bit differently. That is both in concept and the UI. That’s confusing for new users. Old users don’t care. They’ve got used to it but I think there’s some issues of consistency. Back to your question, we do expect that to increase sales. We expect that to increase customer satisfaction. We’re actually improving a lot of the flows that we went through and we realized that simple things are missing in the UI. Those are the gold nuggets that you find on the way. Really simple things that you could add or modify in certain places that would make flows a lot better. And I mean reducing 5–10 clicks in a certain flow. My favorite one is I look at a user, he ends up working on a product, and they have six or seven open tabs. I was like, “Why do you have so many tabs?” and he explains, “It makes total sense.” It shows that you’re missing something in the product. There’s a couple of things that are easy telltales if multiple tabs are open, or you have a sticky note on the side with text, or you have Excel on the side where people copy-paste. All those things are signs to problems with the product. We have a few of those and our product is going to come up the other side much more pleasant for the users and help them achieve things faster. Brian: Great. I wish you good fortune and good luck with that redesign that you guys are going through at LogicMonitor. On that note, where can people find LogicMonitor and where can they find you if they wanted to follow you? Gadi: You can find me on Twitter. The handle is @gadioren. I have a LinkedIn page. You can look me up and find me there. You can get to our website, it’s www.logicmonitor.com and that will get you started in you’re interested with that. Brian: Awesome. Thanks, Gadi. This has been really fun to talk to you and hear about your experience here. Thanks for coming on Experiencing Data. Gadi: Thank you very much for having me.

Dr. Bob's patient, Bill Andrews had ALS and was terminally ill. Before Bill decided to exercise his right to die in California, he agreed to do this interview to help others understand the importance of the law and his decision.     Transcript Dr. Bob:  Hi everybody. I'm here today on the phone with a gentleman who I'm really interested in having everybody hear from and meet. It's kind of a unique opportunity on all counts to hear from a gentleman who has lived life very fully, really did a lot of things that many people only dream about doing in his life and before he was able to really see that life through, was afflicted by a disease that has no cure and is universally debilitating and in many cases fatal. He's become a patient and a friend and I've had an opportunity to really be amazed by his story and by his outlook and approach, both himself and his family. We only have a brief opportunity to hear from and learn from Bill because, well, you'll find out why in just a bit. I'd love to introduce William Bill Andrews. Bill, say hello to our listeners. Bill Andrews: Hello listeners. Dr. Bob: Thanks. Bill Andrews: This is Bill Andrews reporting in. Dr. Bob: Thank you, Bill. Thank you so much for being here. Bill, who's with you? You have a couple of your sons with you as well. Can we introduce them? Bill Andrews: Yes. I'm with my oldest son, Brian, and my youngest son, Chris. Dr. Bob: All right, and thank you guys for Bill Andrews: They can say hello, I guess. Brian: Hello. Dr. Bob: All righty. Sounds good. As I mentioned, Bill is a 73-year-old gentleman with ALS. Bill, how long have you had ALS? Bill Andrews: I'm going to say probably about—I'm going to guess about two years. Dr. Bob: Okay. Bill Andrews: I was diagnosed about what, a year and a half ago, Brian? Brian: One year ago. Bill Andrews: One year ago. Then it was very obvious that there was something seriously wrong. The precursor to this is I had broken my back. I used to motocross and do a lot of surfing and stuff and I had many, many ... I brought injuries into the ALS experience. Broken back. Oh, just all kinds of stuff, so when I finally couldn't deal with the kind of the day-to-day life of my current injuries and stuff, that's when I really got [inaudible 00:02:51 ALS because I couldn't stand up. I could barely walk. I was still trying to surf, like an idiot, but it became very difficult. Just a year and a half ago I was in Peru surfing. Dr. Bob: Wow, but you knew something was going on? You had already Bill Andrews: I knew something was going on. Dr. Bob: Okay. Bill Andrews: I knew something serious was going on. Dr. Bob: Then a year ago it was officially diagnosed and then what's Bill Andrews: Correct. Dr. Bob: What are things like today? Bill Andrews: Horrible. I'm in bed. I get fed. I wear diapers. I'm kind of confined to my bed. We have a Hurley lift, I'm going to guess that thing is called. Dr. Bob: A Hoyer lift. Bill Andrews: Hoyer lift, and I just get into that and I have an electric wheelchair. Last weekend I was able to get out and see my kids play some sports and stuff, but that's about it. This is where I live now. At Silvergate, room 1-1-3 in my hospital bed. Dr. Bob: Wow, and a year and a half ago you were surfing in Peru? Bill Andrews: When was it? Brian: Yeah. It was a year and a half ago. Yeah. Yeah. Bill was surfing in Peru. Bill Andrews: But I knew there was something wrong, you know? I was struggling. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bill Andrews: Really mightily. Dr. Bob: Yeah. As far as you are aware, and you've been dealing with this and obviously researching being treated. You've been in the system. Bill Andrews: Correct. Dr. Bob: Everybody, the best that medical care has to offer has been offered to you, I'm assuming. Bill Andrews: Correct. Dr. Bob: Here you are in this situation. What is your understanding of what will happen if things just are allowed to go on as they would normally? Bill Andrews: Well, as I understand it, I will not be able to swallow my food chew my food, swallow my food. Nor be able to breathe on my own, as I understand it. Dr. Bob: Right. Which is correct. I mean, the timeframe for those things is unclear. Bill Andrews: Right. Dr. Bob: Have the doctors given you any estimates? Bill Andrews: No. That's a moving target. No, they haven't. No. Uh-uh (negative). Dr. Bob: Okay, but that's inevitable for every person who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Bill Andrews: I haven't heard of anything yet. I tell people, you know, I'd guess ... Because I have some friends that say, “Well, look, Bill, a cure may be right around the corner. You know, just stay in bed and they'll invent a cure and you're going to be fine." Well, that ain't going to happen. In my lifetime anyway. I don't want to go out with the tube in me and all that stuff. I feel at least now I'm reasonably good mentally and this is kind of where  I'm at a good point right now. Spiritually, emotionally, physically. Dr. Bob: Great. Bill Andrews: That's where I am. Dr. Bob: That's where you are. Bill Andrews: Yep. Dr. Bob: What's your game plan? You want to talk about the strategy and what's been happening? Bill Andrews: Well, my game plan is—well, for the last couple of weeks I've been trying to wrap up a lot of little-unfinished tasks and chores that I wanted to complete, little projects, but I think they're doing just fine. I think my family ... I guess the big thing for me is that my family, that we're all on the same page. That to me was crucial. That we all understood what I was doing and why I was doing it and that this was all my choice. Looking at what the options are and for me, an option is not being confined to my bed the rest of my life and being kept alive. I don't want to be a Stephen Hawking, and another thing that I wanted to really pass on to my kids is that I'm not fighting the battle, I'm just kind of lying here. I'm getting taken care of. This ain't a bad ... You know, if you like getting taken care of, this ain't bad. I get my diapers changed, get fed, get dessert. People run errands for me, but the warriors are like my kids and the caregivers and the doctors like you are. You guys are the warriors. I'm just a ... You know, you're the warriors and right now I'm just kind of a settler. I just got to lie here but you guys are out there doing the battle. Dr. Bob: What an incredibly refreshing perspective to have. You know? You're not feeling like a victim like so many people justifiably do. You know, you're seeing it from so many different angles, not just your own. Not only through your own eyes, which is remarkable, I think. Bill Andrews: Oh, thank you. Well, yeah. About 30-something years ago I was diagnosed with a real, pretty bad case of malignant melanoma and I was only given a few months to live at that time. That was about 30-something years ago. My kids were there when I was diagnosed and everything, so I've already fought that battle. I had the tumor taken out of my arm. Had my lymph nodes excised. I fought that battle because I could see there's was a way to win that one, so there I kind of feel like I was a warrior, but here, ah, you guys are. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That battle, the melanoma battle, I've seen how that turns out in most cases, which is not the way it turned out for you. It was, at least back then - Bill Andrews: No, I was bad with the - Dr. Bob: You were well aware of that. I know. Bill Andrews: I was very, very lucky. Yeah, I was very lucky. In fact, kind of going a little off track, at the time I had it they were experimenting with BCG injections. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bill Andrews: Up at UCLA. They were going to inject BCG in the initial site of the tumor for melanoma. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bill Andrews: I sent my path report up to them and they rejected me because the path report looked so bad, that I probably was going to die. They didn't want that on the report. Dr. Bob: Wow. Bill Andrews: I kind of fought that one out anyway. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Bill Andrews: Flipped a little bit. Dr. Bob: You faced your mortality, right? You had no choice but to face your mortality at that point. Bill Andrews: Correct. Dr. Bob: You were what? Bill Andrews: Oh, there is no choice. Dr. Bob: Yeah. You were in your 40's? Bill Andrews: Yeah. Absolutely. Dr. Bob: With children that were young. Right? Bill Andrews: Right. Correct. Dr. Bob: Certainly not grown adults. Bill Andrews: They were there in the doctor's office with me, yeah. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Bill Andrews: Right. Dr. Bob: I think you were sort of alluding to this and assuming that, maybe assuming that some of the people out there who are listening know what we're talking about.  But I don't think we actually discussed what the option is that you are taking to handle things the way that you feel best. Can you share a bit, share that? Bill Andrews: Sure. I, you know, kind of put a box on the board. I'll kind of equate this back to my melanoma. With the melanoma, I was given ... The doctors said, "Well, you kind of have three choices. 1: You do nothing because it appears to be fairly advanced melanoma and just see what happens. 2: You look for some miracle cure somewhere. Go to Haiti or somewhere and find a miracle cure. Or 3: Let conventional medicine dig in, and I took the third choice and I'm still here. With the ALS the choices seem to be kind of the same. I can just sit back here and wait until I can no longer breathe or eat. Or I can be kept alive by breathing tubes and feeding tubes and stuff. Or I can do with this choice that I'm making now, which is to go through the end of life in a peaceful happy way with ... I mean, I feel good about this, doctor, I really do. As long as my family's on board with me it's spectacular. I really don't think there's ... The choice for me, and this is easy, you know. This is the time and I'm not going to be kept alive. I watched a Stephen Hawking film on TV years ago and there was a lot of recrimination and stuff about, anger and stuff, by keeping him alive and I don't want that to happen with my family. Nor do I want it to cost eight trillion dollars to keep me alive. There're  factors that went into my decision. Dr. Bob: Many factors and the decision is still being made every day. Bill Andrews: Every day. Every single day, Doctor. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Bill Andrews: Yeah. Dr. Bob: For clarification, Bill is exercising his legal right in California to go through the end of life option act. To receive Aid in Dying, which means that he's made requests of his physician, who's me in this case, to prescribe a medication that will allow him to end his life if he chooses to take it on his terms at the time and place of his choosing. A second doctor who knows him well has concurred that Bill is of sound mind and has a condition that's terminal. Bill has submitted a written request saying basically the same thing. Four days from the date of this recording, Bill's plan is to get this prescription filled and take this medication with his family around him, his loved ones, and he will peacefully, quickly, and in a very dignified way, stop breathing and die. As I said, Bill's making this choice each day because there's no requirement. He doesn't need to take the medication. He can choose at any time not to, and it's just fascinating to be having a conversation with a man who has the presence of mind, the courage, the support from his family, and knows that there's a very good chance and in his mind an absolute chance, that his life will be ending in four days. I am completely honored and awed to be able to have this really frank conversation with you about what you're thinking and feeling and I remember our last conversation you just kind of blew me away when you told me that you're excited. This whole thing is in some way exciting to you. Are you still feeling that way? Bill Andrews: Oh, absolutely. No, this is a ... No. We're, you know we're ... You, I mean… It's great talking. Let me just kind of preface. You have this really kind way of speaking that most of my other doctors haven't had quite the effect on me that you have. Yeah, I'm enjoying this. I've kind of been a pioneer in a lot of things and this is just ... I'm really enjoying this and let me tell you, Doctor, the thing that's the most incredible thing to me, and this is more of a, really a spiritual and emotional thing, is being able to choose when you're going to die. I've always thought if I were to die the most noble way, for me, would be to be protecting my family, my loved ones, or even a dog in the street or something. If I were going to die, would be doing, I guess maybe doing good, but you never know when it's going to hit, but with this, I get to say the goodbyes. I get to do whatever unfinished business. I get to finish any unfinished business and it's unreal, kind of. Very interesting. I think this can do a lot of good. I was telling somebody this morning that if one were suicidal, the worst way to end one's life would be by suicide by cop or something. Where you actually in one's selfishness at ending your life, you end others. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bill Andrews: Where I think that's horrible and I have friends who have done that, but for this, you know, I'm choosing the time. I'm choosing the place. I'm choosing the environment. I'm choosing the company and for me, this is by far, I can't think of anything better. I've almost drowned a couple of times. I've been in car accidents and all that but this is almost soothing. I hope it really works in the way that it's been intended to work and doesn't get prostituted or something in some way that it goes off track. Dr. Bob: You mean the whole idea of the ability to support people in this way with terminal illnesses and the physician aid in dying? You're worried that it could somehow get off track? Bill Andrews: I hope it doesn't is what I'm saying. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of protections in there and if I have anything to say about it, it won't. There's enough. You know? Bill Andrews: Yep. Yeah. Well, I know. That's why you know, you guys at the beginning are the ones that are going to chart the course and that's I think, really, really important. Dr. Bob: Yeah, and I think it's important for people to consider, to understand that this is so far away from suicide. When I hear the word physician-assisted suicide I understand Bill Andrews: Yeah. Dr. Bob: It irks me because I think that there's nothing remotely like the suicide that most people think about, which is to end, you know, your life because of some emotional suffering or situation that you're in. People who are using this option, like you, are dying. I mean, you would choose. I'm sure that you would give anything, anything, to be able to not be in that position. Right? In which case you would be— the furthest thing from your mind would be taking a medication and ending your life. Bill Andrews: Absolutely. That's absolutely true and I know sometimes I throw the word suicide out and that's only because maybe because it's simple to say that word but I certainly like your definition a heck of a lot better than mine. Dr. Bob: I guess I took that opportunity just to insert my bias on that. Bill Andrews: Well, I agree. I think you're absolutely not. Dr. Bob: This is your experience and you can think about it or talk about it Bill Andrews: Right. Dr. Bob: Any way you want. Bill Andrews: Yeah. Dr. Bob: Bill, I have the advantage of having a little bit more knowledge of your background and who you are and I think this whole conversation becomes more poignant when people have a sense of what you've done. Could you share a little bit about your background? Bill Andrews: Oh boy. How much time do we have? Dr. Bob: Let's do the Reader's Digest version. Bill Andrews: Well, we'll do a real quick one, yeah. My grandfather's a general in the army. The Air Force. My father was in the military. I was born in Chicago. We moved to California in the '50s and eventually, my family ended up in La Jolla. I grew up right across the street surfing and enjoying the ocean at La Jolla Shores. Graduated from La Jolla High School. Got a scholarship to the University of New Mexico as the United States was preparing for Vietnam. I didn't do real well with that experience with the military side of my education. Anyway, I kind of did an odd thing. I just worked. I have a very broad, broad work history. Not very deep. I know a little bit about a lot of stuff. I've done engineering. I've done clothing manufacturing. I've made garments overseas. I did some advertising programs for Pepsi-Cola. I was on the cover of Surfer magazine if that makes any big deal. I used to motocross motorcycles. I used to race motorcycles. An avid sportsman, fishing. Loved education so this is why this program that you're doing is so fascinating to me. I'm absolutely enjoying every second of watching this go through the process. Raised three beautiful children. Actually, their mother did a much better job at raising them than I did. I just love learning about this and I am so thankful that we've progressed to a state where we can talk about these things. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Bill Andrews: You know, maybe my kids have a one- sentence thing they can say. Not something too bad. Dr. Bob: I would love to get a little bit of the insight from them if they're willing. No pressure though. Brian: Hello, this is Brian and just—my dad's always been a real go-getter in life and wants us to be the very best we can be and always wanting us to be improving and really to be exceptional. Of course, it's been very difficult to watch him go from a very active person and suffering through the loss of being able to use his body. Back on that comment about the suicide, I'm finding a lot of comfort from knowing that you know the cause of death is ALS and that we're able to make this choice. The aid in dying is just fabulous for us that this was passed in California and we're getting the help to do this and your guidance. It's either, you know, going to be that path or watching him really suffer and go through a long and much more difficult process, having a result in a very short time from now that we get to avoid with this. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Brian: Feeling very fortunate and very proud of my dad and very thankful we have this choice. Dr. Bob: Wonderful and I have to tell you, you know, that giving him the gift of supporting him is incredibly powerful. I've had the opportunity to be with many of the family members. The children, the spouses, parents of people who have done the end- of- life option and they are all so at peace knowing that they gave that gift and it didn't always start out— they didn't start out feeling supportive or comfortable with it by any stretch of the imagination but having come through that together, recognizing how desperately important it is to the person who's dying to have that support and to have people with them at the time, you get to go on the rest of your life knowing that you gave that ultimate and last gift. Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Bob: Good for you and thank you. This might be helpful for people. When your dad first—and Chris, if you want to chime in too—When your dad first approached this with you, what was your initial reaction? Do you remember? Brian: Well we actually brought this forward ourselves in working with him. We were looking at researching ALS and talking about what we wanted to do in the time ahead from diagnosis and we decided we were going to really come together as a family and we took a great trip together, a road trip, and we spent a lot of time together and had a lot of great conversations. Dad's friends from surfing—he's got hundreds of friends— threw him an amazing party. It was a celebration of life while he was here and that's the way Dad wanted to do that versus waiting until he was gone and having a big service and paddle out after he was gone, so that was an amazing day. We had a band, amazing food. It was a beautiful day at the beach. Dr. Bob: Wow. Brian: His friends made this happen down in La Jolla. We've really just taken this time to come closer together and have these great experiences. We were thinking about how this was all going to come to an end and we were going to ALS meetings and just really learning about it and part of that was just researching. I remember reading about it online and then we talked about it as a family and then, you know, it kind of went from there. Dr. Bob: Okay. Brian: Yeah, just exploring the options. We all have felt really good about it from day one. Dr. Bob: Great, so it kind of happened organically and a lot of times it's the individual who finds out about it or comes to that kind of decision, sometimes having been thinking about it for quite a while and it does take some finesse sometimes and time to get families onboard, so I'm glad that you didn't have to go through that. You were able to just, from day one, be united and working together, which is great. Bill Andrews: Yeah, I think in general we were 90 to 95% onboard in total from day one. My decision was I did not want to be kept alive and if it came down to not eating, not drinking or whatever, that was my chosen course. I wasn't going to put my family—I didn't want to put my family through a whole bunch of torture but a torture for me would be breathing help and eating help. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bill Andrews: And selfishly watching my bank account go from a very small amount to negative numbers. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bill Andrews: A lot's played into my decision, selfishly, on what I was going to do. Dr. Bob: I hear you. Bill Andrews: I appreciate them that they're going along with this. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Chris: This is Chris. I have one more thing to add to that. Dr. Bob: Great. Chris: I think in the beginning we were very curious about the disease and that curiosity led us to read a lot and also like Brian said, they started going to meetings. I was living in New York and I was pretty far away, so for me, it was more of like an academic research. Like what can I read and what can I understand more of? Once you start to dive into that space and you get like ... If you don't have a disease you need proximity to it to understand it and once you do, it sort of is like "this is awful" and you want to do everything you can to help. I think that for other families that might be going through this, I imagine there's a lot of avoidance of kind of really want to think about the end or "I don't really want to know too much about it”.  But for us I think having, throwing ourselves into it, it gave us a lot more strength, I guess, to just keep moving through this process with him. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chris: Because we know what's on the other side of it. We don't know how he's feeling but we're able to paint a picture of it by seeing how other people, what it's done to other people. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Now other people will be able to look and have, hopefully, hear this conversation, and the conversation can continue in various forms, but to see how powerful it can be to plan. Right? Not to avoid but to see what's coming, what are the alternatives, how do you make sure that at the end you feel like you have the control you need, that you always would want. The disease takes pretty much all control, at least physical control, away. I imagine knowing that you're going to be able to make this last decision for yourself, Bill, gives you a real sense of control back that's been missing. Bill Andrews: Oh, it absolutely does. I just want to add one more thing too. When I first was diagnosed I wanted to learn more and more about the disease. I'm reading, reading, voraciously and you know, it's all over the place of what it is, what causes it, what doesn't cause it and on and on and on.   So I kind of, I started writing originally about my experiences on my blog and then I thought, eh, if people want to learn about the disease they can go to Wikipedia or something. People had asked and they go, “Well, how are you feeling today? You're moving your toes.", or something. I go, “Well, you know, maybe you ought to learn more about the disease yourselves and then maybe you'd understand where I'm coming from a little easier." Because it's all kind of basically the same, so rather than explaining to the same people every other day how I'm feeling, just, you know, make your own calendar and chart it yourself and they can make their own timeline or something. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). Brian: Yeah, my dad's real quick as well. Dad would always say, "Hey, if this is where it would stop, I could be okay. Where I still can stand up and take a few steps with my walker or be able to feed myself and go to the bathroom. Yeah, okay, I'm okay." Then every day we'd get progressively worse and you hit a new level and it'd be like "Wow, I didn't think I'd keep going with this but now that I'm here I could keep going a little more.", and it was just like, and I'm going where is the line? You know? Where is the final level where it's not going to be okay anymore and then it becomes a— there is a point where ... Because as Chris said, "Dad, we're researching." In the end Dad, he was consistent from day one. "I will not be in a feeding tube. I will not be in on a respirator. I don't want to be kept alive. If I have to be fully cared for and bedridden, that's not the quality of life I want to have and that's when I'm ready to go." So always trying to think about, well, at some point we're going to hit a point where you can't move your arms at all. Today he can't move his legs and he doesn't have the strength to do anything with his arms other than lift something that weighs just a few ounces. Pretty soon he won't have the ability to use his arms at all and that's very close so we're trying to stay ahead. We know that there're only a few decisions left. You know, at the very end he's going to starve to death and go through a [inaudible 00:33:26. A difficult process or take this option, so it's been just always trying to stay ahead, but as the years evolved, choices and the days and the weeks and the equipment we need and choices to make has been—it's all in Dad's own journey. Dr. Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Brian: But here we are and now we're all feeling really good about this choice. You know, given where we are. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Thank you. That was really awesome to hear and it's Dad's journey but you're a team and the obvious connection and bond that you guys share in his knowing that this isn't—it's not going to tear you apart, it's not going to destroy you. That you are so together on it and seeing this is the compassionate option. I mean that's going to allow him to slip away so peacefully with that feeling of I don't know, completion or this ultimate sense of connection so that's really powerful that you've been able to create that for him together, all of you. Bill Andrews: Yeah, it's the compassion I think that is so important. You know, everybody can have sympathy or they can have empathy, but all I ask from people is you don't even have to understand it, just accept it as it is and when I tell you how it is, that's what it is. If you need any more information, go to Wikipedia. Go to WebMD or something, I don't know. That's the way I feel. Dr. Bob: All right. Hey, I have two more questions if that's okay and then I'm going to let you go. Bill Andrews: Okay. Dr. Bob: One of them is do you have any fear at this point? Is there anything about this that is causing fear or anxiety for you? Bill Andrews: Absolutely not. Not a drop of fear. Dr. Bob: Awesome. Great. Bill Andrews: No. This is like, you know— Dr. Bob: Oh, go ahead. Bill Andrews: Just a new adventure. A new adventure. Dr. Bob: Okay. That's beautiful. Bill Andrews: Anticipation, not fear. Dr. Bob: Great. I guess the last one is what would you like to share? I know it's not like you're out shouting from the mountaintops to the masses here but Bill Andrews: Right. Dr. Bob: Can you distill down your message? Bill Andrews, Big Pink. Bill Andrews: Surfing. Surfing nickname, no less. Dr. Bob: It's a surfing nickname. Bill Andrews: I guess now that I'm looking back, obviously you can't make every move the right move and just a couple of things. I think if you kind of put your life on autopilot— this may be a little weird but, kind of set a course if you can. You know, get a point A to point B and of course, then obviously by judgment is the right course. You know, a good course. Like a righteous course, and try to stay to that and every once in a while get, but because of your autopilot and that comes internally or God or your friends or whatever, kind of knocks you back into ... Excuse me. Back on course so you're not out there one month, two months, three months. You know, kind of lost out there and then you're looking at time bandits and everything. I think it's very important to make as much effective use of your time as you possibly can, and there again, you know I'm preaching to the choir and all that stuff, but I look back at my life. You know, you only have so many minutes in your life and, gosh, if you could just make 60% of those minutes effective and doing good again, all by definition, that would be my—that's my message to my kids. Kind of pick that course, stay on that course, and you'll look back and go, "Gosh, I've lived a good life and I'm proud of what I've done." Dr. Bob: That's beautiful. Thank you. That's really phenomenal. You guys, Brian, Chris, do you have anything you'd like to say about your dad or anything regarding this before we close out? Brian: Just that we love Dad very much and we're proud of him and proud to be your son, Dad. Bill Andrews: Thank you. Dr. Bob: All right, guys. Bill Andrews: Okay. Dr. Bob: Hey, thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for all you know, Bill, all you've brought to the world. I will be seeing you soon and looking forward to every moment that we have together.

Everyone has a story, but few people take the time to tell it. My guest today started a podcast to tell his story, despite having little experience with podcasting. As a result, he’s growing an audience, making new friends, and learning a lot along the way.Brian Sanders is a project manager and app designer who formed a startup to build a new podcast app and platform called Nexcast. He’s joining me today to share what he’s learned in his startup and podcasting journey so far, and how podcasting is helping him learn more about his target audience and his product.Key Takeaways:People will reach out to you if you take the time to share your story.People relate to struggles. Don’t be afraid to share yours.It’s important to go make things happen—don’t wait for good things to happen to you.If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing.Podcasting, videos, and blogging all come back to opening up, sharing your experiences, and telling your story—that’s how you build community.You don’t always have to have the best equipment—use what you have and start telling your story today.Aaron: Joining us today is Brian Sanders from Nexcast. Brian, you’re trying to build a podcast app and maybe a platform. What’s your backstory?Brian: I grew up in Hawaii and I got into UCLA for mechanical engineering, so I came to LA and I’ve been here ever since. I started in the engineering world where I actually got to design some rides for Universal Studios and Disneyland. So I was doing engineering, but I didn’t like it that much. The company I was working for went out of business during the recession and I went to another similar company.That’s actually when I found podcasts, when I was sitting at a computer working on 3D models all day. It was kind of boring, so I was listening to podcasts eight hours a day. I would be laughing in my cubical and none of my coworkers even knew what podcasts were. I realized I wanted to be more entrepreneurial—I liked to design and be creative—so I started doing that on the side.I started doing design for other people and getting paid for it. I joined up with a developer and we started building whole products for people in LA, New York, and Chicago for a couple of years. It took a while to figure it out because I was learning on my own, but eventually I got a job. One of my clients hired me on and we started working at a tech company in Santa Monica where I got to learn a lot more about the processes of building technology and managing an engineering team.I still had projects on the side. I had an app that was like Instagram for writing, where you could post a photo with stories and you add chapters. People could comment and follow you. I decided to sell it to a private company, quit my job, and started working on a podcast app idea that had been in the back of my mind for awhile.Overlapping & Taking Your Side Project Full TimeAaron: So you worked your day job for a few years and saved up money and stripped back your expenses so that when you quit, you could support yourself doing your own thing.Brian: Exactly. The biggest thing is to start pretending you’re not making a lot of money (even if you’re working a good job), and save as much money as you can.Aaron: That’s very long-term focused. I think a lot of people struggle with that.Brian: It takes a lot of discipline. I pretended like I was making minimum wage, but I was really happy. I had a couple of roommates from Hawaii that I grew up with and we still had a great time. You can get a lot out of life even if you aren’t spending much money.Aaron: If you’re trying to go freelance or do anything that doesn’t guarantee you a steady paycheck, it’s important to practice for that while you’re working a day job. I know that’s not related to podcasting, but it’s important. Living cheaply is why I’m able to do what I do—podcast editing and helping people make podcasts. I learned in my twenties to save money and to really think about what was important for me to spend money on.There are a lot of things that you can spend money on, but sometimes it’s better to not spend money so that later you can pursue your dreams. For example, you quit your job and you had this idea to work on a podcast app, maybe even a platform. Was that your plan when you quit your job, or was that a more recent development?Brian: I didn’t pursue it fully until I put that platform bigger picture together. I wondered if we could listen to podcasts in a more interactive way or have more features. Why isn’t anyone building a better podcast app? The problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to make it a business and it seems like not many other people have either. The podcast industry is weird, but it’s growing. It’s hard to put together the business model. The day I figured out the business model, I started focusing on it for real and I put everything else to the side.Your Life is a Story – Document ItAaron: When did you start your own podcast to tell the story of what you’re doing?Brian: It started about five months after I got the idea for the app. Now that it’s happening, it’s like, “Of course we should be doing a podcast. We have to tell our story and get people involved.”Aaron: There are so many people who have stories, but they don’t document or share them. If you’re not writing, publishing blog posts, or even journaling, you’re going to regret that in the future. Brian, you’re going through a period in your life where you’re trying to start a company and you’re documenting the process so anyone who’s interested can hear it.12:43 Aaron: You’re seven episodes into your podcast so far. Do you have a background in working with audio?Brian: No, but in high school I worked a little bit with video. That really helped. I haven’t done anything with video since then, but I always think I can teach myself anything, and anyone can learn. It’s easy these days with all the tools and resources online. You just have to start.Getting a Team TogetherAaron: You’re trying to build a team to help you create this podcast app. How’s that going so far? I know you’ve been struggling to find a new CTO.Brian: We had an interesting process of getting a team together. As a non-developer, it’s always really hard to get developers on your team. It’s the #1 goal of your life. You don’t want to hire people from other countries because that never really works out well, and great developers always have jobs and are very expensive. Sometimes it seems like there are no options.Aaron: Do you have funding or enough money to pay a full-time developer’s salary?Brian: Well, Troy has a good job, so he’s busy all day and he has some money, but we’re not paying anyone. We have to find people who are in it for equity. Our next episode is about this crazy battle with some teens in the Philipines that have my Twitter handle (we’ve been in this crazy journey for nine months trying to get it back from them). After that, there’s going to be an episode about getting our new CTO.Aaron: I usually want to be paid for work I do, but at the same time, when I started editing podcasts, I was working for free. I started a podcast with some people I knew online and they needed someone to edit the show, and because I was interested in becoming a podcaster and podcast editor, I was willing to do the editing without getting paid. I’m glad you found someone though, because that can be really hard. Did he listen to your podcast?Brian: He didn’t initially, but the fact that we had a podcast helped. I could point him to it so he could see we were legit. But other people who listen have been getting in touch. There’s another developer who wants to join who happens to be in LA who found us by listening. That guy just wants to be part of the journey. It’s huge, having a podcast has been great.Share Your MistakesAaron: It’s one thing to be a stranger randomly emailing people on the internet saying, “Hey, help me with my project.” It’s a whole different thing if you open up and you share your journey, what you’re struggling with, who you are, and where you’re planning to go—sharing your story rallies people around you. This is not just for startups or businesses. You will make connections and people will find you. You’ll build a community.People will reach out to you if you take the time to share your story.Brian: Looking back, I can’t imagine not doing a podcast. There were different routes to go down and it was important to us to share the shortcomings and the mistakes. We didn’t want to be startup bros saying, “We’re killing it! This is going awesome! Everything we’re doing is cool!” I edited the first episode and people don’t realize I left all the bad parts of the pitch. I made it sound worse than it probably was.Aaron: So you went to pitch an investor. You recorded the conversation and included it in the first episode of your podcast. You left the rough parts in because people relate to struggles—winning all the time isn’t interesting to most people. The first episode really grabbed me and I’m pretty picky about podcasts. I’m choosy about what I listen to and I really enjoyed your show.Brian: I’ve only had one bad podcasting experience. All the other podcasters I’ve talked to have been amazing. This one guy thought I was the worst sales guy ever because he listened to that first episode and he heard me stumbling my way through that pitch. When I was interviewed on show, he said, “So, you’re the worst salesman ever. What do you do? You don’t build the technology and you couldn’t even get through a simple sales pitch.” I guess he didn’t realize that I edited that episode and chose to put that stuff in.Aaron: Did you find it hard to put out those imperfections and mistakes?Brian: Yeah, I regret it sometimes. I worry that it makes us look like idiots. There could be VC’s listening and they might be discounting us now. It might make a better story, but I might be losing my chances at investment. Sometimes I wonder if I can pull the episode, re-edit it, and put it back.Get UncomfortableAaron: You told me on the phone the other day that you’re trying to get on Planet of the Apps. Can you explain why and give a brief overview of what that is?Brian: Apple hasn’t released all the details yet, but they’re producing a show with some big names like Will.i.am, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gary Vaynerchuck. They haven’t told us the exact format of the show, but it sounds a little bit like Shark Tank, or a reality show about app developers. The developers who are accepted to the show get access to mentoring, funding, and marketing and promotions.Aaron: It sounds like a great opportunity for you. So you drove across town to audition?Brian: Yeah, there was an event. Will.i.am was there and he talked about what he wanted to see. There were a bunch of casting agents there. There was this one casting area that no one was paying attention to. Everyone was wanting to talk to Will.i.am or nervously milling around, and I told my partner we needed to just charge these casting guys. We needed to sound like we had something really cool, and eventually we did that.We found the lead casting agent and got him to sit down with us. We said, “We’re building something cool. Podcasts are awesome.” He didn’t listen to podcasts, so we had to make sure he knew how big podcasts are. We told him, “They change peoples’ lives, and we’re going up against Apple, who has their own podcast app already. This is good tv! We’re taking on Apple and we’re already doing a podcast about us building this app.”He said, “I’m going to skip you ahead of the casting process. Make me a 10-minute video.” So we made the video and they emailed us the next day and wanted headshots. They wanted to see the app, but I had to tell them it wasn’t ready yet. We’re hoping to hear back from them soon.Aaron: The takeaway here is that you could have just said, “Our app isn’t ready yet. We’re probably not going to win this,” and you could have stayed home, but you drove across town and you showed up. You tried to talk to people and make stuff happen. I just wanted to highlight that.It’s important to go make things happen. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you.Brian: There was as a specific moment where we were nervous and it could have gone either way. We had a choice; either just turn in our 1-minute audition video like everyone else and hope we’d get noticed, or go talk to the casting guy and try to make something happen. I’m happy we chose the latter.Aaron: It’s scary, but if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not growing.What’s Next for You?Aaron: What do you see in the future for yourself and your startup?Brian: We had a few hiccups, but now we’re finally moving and things are back on track. Our overarching goal is to make podcasting better for everyone. We’re working on an app that brings the content right into the app. For example, you’ve got show notes and you send people to your site, but not everyone is going to do that, so we want to put that stuff right in the app.It will show the visual content, photos of guests, promotions, links to your products, etc. It’s all right in the app. We’re also working on discussions and comment threads.There are different comment areas on the internet that aren’t so great, but podcasts audiences are passionate and enthusiastic. It seems to me like the best place to have discussions.Aaron: Having the ability to have a discussion about a podcast episode and go back and forth with other people inside the app would be really interesting. It sounds like you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, though.Brian: It’s just the beginning, but I think we’re positioned in a good way. All of my team members have their own jobs, which could be seen as a down side, like they’re not focused or it’s not a career, but that’s what’s going to help us last a long time without investment. We’re going to see what happens and get advice from the community we’re in to see what features they want. It could take years, but I’m ready for that.Aaron: It make take even longer than that, but you’re learning in the process. You’ll make some mistakes but you’ll document them for others to learn from, which is great.Q&A:Alex Castro asks: “Should I document the development of my brand, maybe on YouTube or a blog instead of podcasting? Sharing the journey as I go seems super scary.”Brian: It is scary. YouTube might fit better if you’re doing a lot of visual things or if you’re already good at doing video. Why not? It will be scary, but you’ll realize that it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had 99.9% positive feedback, except for one weird guy on a podcast. He was just a hater who hasn’t really built anything of his own.Aaron: Alex is a phenomenal visual designer, and I think sharing your story in a video format or blogging with pictures is fine. The lines between blogging, podcasting, and video are all starting to blur for me.I’m starting to think of these just as sharing a message or telling a story, instead of separate things. They are separate things, but if you start off by writing a blog post, you’ve got words that can be recorded and that’s a podcast. Or you could record a video of yourself saying those words. There’s different formatting and editing you can do, but it’s really all the same thing.Podcasting, producing video, and blogging all come back to opening up, sharing your experiences, and telling your story.That’s how you build community. That’s how you attract like-minded people and make friends. Opportunities will come from it. Even if you don’t think you have an interesting story yet, start telling it. You’ll find your story if you dig.Brian: Just start doing it. It took us a few months to put everything together before we even went live with it. You figure it out as you go and you write ahead. No one has ever regretted putting their story out there.Links:Podcast: https://podcastingwithaaron.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/aaronpodcastingYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/aarondowdBlog: https://www.aarondowd.comRecommended Gear: https://kit.co/podcastingwithaaron

Brian Just rants